by Gail Giles
Coach Redmon gave me a clipped half nod. The worst part was that he looked relieved, not embarrassed. Not the littlest bit sad to lose me. He shoved his chair back and left without offering to shake my hand.
“Let me cut this short,” I said to the rest of the group. “Nobody wants me here. You’ve gotten calls from the McMansion parents and that makes you uncomfortable. You’re about to put pressure on my mom and dad to take me anywhere else but here. The Suit is here to cover your ass.” The only eye contact I got was from the Suit.
“Done. Consider me homeschooled. Print out the papers.” I looked back at my parents. “Dad, I’d appreciate your signing them.”
It got worse. The newspapers got the story. I’m sure I had a civil rights case, but since I gave out the information in the first place, maybe not. Jay, Brandon, Brendan, and even AC were interviewed. Leads ran in huge print about the CHILD MURDERER IN OUR TOWN, over stories about me coming to Whitestone straight from a mental facility. Every gruesome detail was rehashed. I was the subject of sermons. Everyone had an opinion about me. Only the bad ones made print.
Dad was an operator at a chemical plant. His coworkers filed complaints stating that they didn’t trust him around flammable products. They asked that for their own safety they not work on his shifts. He couldn’t be fired for cause. None of it was legal, but Dad had been through this before. When a place doesn’t want you, there are ways to make you leave. You get a better recommendation if you make it easy.
Carrie taught third grade. The parents of her students went to the school board. She was put on leave. Our house was vandalized. Egged, tagged, trash dumped on the lawn and burned. There were death threats on the phone and in the mail.
“We’re moving to Texas,” Carrie said. “To my beach house. I found a job at a bookstore in Lake Jackson. They hired me over the phone. And there are chemical plants in Freeport. Your dad can probably get a job there. Why stay here? I love that house. I love the beach. You’ll love it, too.”
I doubted I’d love it. I didn’t care where we went. It didn’t matter. As long as it wasn’t here.
I had a final session with The Grasshopper. I needed a reference for a shrink in Freeport.
“So you finally did it, didn’t you? Set yourself on fire?” she said as she handed me a slip of paper.
“Pretty much.”
“Why? Were things going too well?”
I got a little hostile. “Do I have to hide forever? All I did was tell my friends who I am and what I did, and they turned out not to be friends at all. They don’t want anything to do with me. And the whole narrow-minded town turned against my parents, too. Is there no forgiveness anywhere?”
“There’s forgiveness. But you have to ask for it. And first you have to ask yourself for it.”
“I hate that crap. That’s TV psychobabble. I shouldn’t even have to pay for this session.”
“You shouldn’t have had to pay for any of them. You didn’t get much from them.” She tucked her elbows close to her sides like she was folding her insect wings. I walked out.
We left with no good-byes. We lost our security deposit for breaking our lease. Like the landlord would have wanted us to stay and have his house repeatedly van-dalized.
We filled Dad’s truck and a U-Haul, and I alternated riding with Dad and Carrie. Carrie kept talking about how glad she was to go live at the beach, and never once mentioned that working in retail would be a step down from teaching, which she loved. Dad kept talking about new starts and how he’d never liked Indiana much anyway. “From religion to sports, it’s too darn organized,” he’d said.
But I knew the truth. He was tired of being uprooted. Tired of worrying about me. Tired of being tired, I think. Always waiting for the other shoe to drop. And knowing that I was going to drop it.
Hell, throw it.
PART III
Texas
Chapter 19
DéJà VU WITH A TWIST
Carrie considered any driver ahead of her an affront. She crowded his bumper, then swung out into the next lane, pedal to the metal, swerved back to “her” lane, all the while carrying on casual conversation. Dad and I were used to this and had packed the back of her Honda with household linens. The only fragile things in her car were the Homo sapiens. I buckled in because I knew Carrie expected it. I didn’t much care about my own physical safety.
Carrie alternately gunned and braked the car as she chatted up beach life.
“I’ll teach you to sail if the Hobie cat is still in the shed.”
“What’s a Hobie cat?”
“Great little catamaran with no dagger boards. You can launch it right off on the beach, sail it right back onto the sand. It’s a real rush. I wonder how you’ll feel flying over the water instead of through it?”
She looked at me. I pointed her back to the highway. I’d told Dad and Carrie that I’d never swim competitively again. No pools, no lanes, no teams. No water the color of forget-me-nots.
“Sounds good,” I said. Nothing sounded good anymore. I was phoning in a little enthusiasm because Carrie was so pumped.
“Still sure you want to study at home?”
“Carrie, I might be able to put myself through another try at school, but if it went wrong . . . I’d be putting you and Dad through it again.”
“Wade, we —”
“Dad says I owe him my happiness,” I interrupted, not wanting to hear another reassurance of Dad and Carrie’s unconditional support. Unconditional support was too much of a burden. I just wanted to be left alone. “Staying away from people, high school, is the only way I could even get close to happy.”
“What about therapy?”
“If you guys want me to, I’ll go.”
I slumped down in the seat. “But I’m out of chances.”
I’d burned through any luck I might have had in Indiana. The local rags ran my story, but dropped it with a suddenness that was mystifying. Nothing about me appeared in the national papers or on television. The American Civil Liberties Union seemed to have been waiting for something like this to happen. Doc Lyman had them on alert. I was still a minor when I talked. I was a minor when I committed the crime. My records were sealed. If the national news released my name, there was a civil suit waiting to happen. We could go to Freeport with little chance of discovery.
“Wade, I think you still have chances. Options for a good life. A happy life. But you do have to continue therapy so you won’t self-destruct again.”
Carrie let that sink in for a minute. Her voice wasn’t optimistic when she continued. She had a take-no-prisoners tone. “Your dad can’t do this anymore, though. Keep moving. Losing jobs. Feeling all that hatred. And I don’t want to lose this house. It’s something that’s mine.”
Something that’s mine. Would I ever feel a sense of possession? Is that what was missing in me? The only thing I had was guilt, and I didn’t want it.
“Like I said. I won’t be in school, I won’t be drinking, and I learned my lesson. You can relax, Carrie.”
I turned on the radio and closed my eyes, but Carrie’s speed-and-brake school of driving wasn’t conducive to sleep. I sat back up. She snapped the radio off.
“There’s something I was always curious about,” Carrie said.
“I never like the way that sentence ends,” I said.
“Why you never wanted to drive.”
I frowned. “I thought you’d get that. You’re pretty perceptive. Dad gets it.”
“Sorry, missed the clues,” Carrie said.
“I was afraid.”
“Afraid? It’s not that hard.”
I shot her an incredulous glance. “Carrie. Think. Me, behind the wheel of a powerful machine. A machine that can kill easily. Me. Known to make bad choices. Now, think about me getting pissed off at someone while driving a car.”
“Oh,” Carrie said.
“I’d rather ride the bus or bum rides than add that to my list of things to worry about.”
“That makes sense. I
’m sorry I didn’t understand,” Carrie said.
I flopped my head over to look at her. “Road rage. It’s almost funny now. I don’t have the energy anymore to ‘rage.’ I hardly have the energy to put one foot in front of the other. I can’t get stirred up enough to give a huge wallopin’ shit about anything.”
I sounded so whiney that I expected tears to form in my eyes, but I guess I didn’t have the energy to produce them.
We drove for more than an hour in silence. I watched the scenery flicker by like when the bored Loon Platoon used to punch the remote, endlessly seeking something to reconnect them to the world.
Finally Carrie said, “I think you would like sailing.” I guess she sensed I was drifting too far away and wanted to reel me back close to her. “It’s a good way to learn about physics and math. The geometry of waves, the anatomy of shells, sea life in tide pools, clouds, weather patterns; it will all be fun with it right there in front of you.” She raced up on a car bumper, while gesturing with one hand toward the windshield.
For a moment, it struck me as utterly amazing. Carrie was still trying so hard to salvage me.
“Carrie, you drive like a maniac, so I think I need to say something right out loud before you run us into that old man’s glove compartment.”
“What’s that, sissy?”
“I’m glad that Dad found you and had the good sense to grab you and hold on tight.”
Tears misted Carrie’s eyes and she cleared her throat. “Don’t practice your flirting skills on an old married lady. Find your own girlfriend.”
“Like that’s gonna happen,” I muttered.
But it did. It did happen.
He’s talking about me, I thought. This is where he comes to Freeport. And meets me.
I couldn’t read more right then. I stacked all the notebooks on the floor next to my bed and crawled under the covers. The rain was still coming dawn, pelting the windows and drumming on the roof.
Something Wade had written drummed in my head like the rain. That he was a thief who had stolen Dave’s friendship. Hadn’t he done the same to me? I had trusted him. I had told him my story. My shameful secrets.
On the other hand, I hadn’t offered up my past until I knew the gossip had gotten there first.
I crawled out of the covers and went to the window. I couldn’t see anything but the dark.
I had told him that I was through atoning. But how does someone stop atoning for killing a child? How could I ever look at Wade and not see him as a murderer? See him standing there while a child screamed, covered in flames? Dave couldn’t. I don’t think anyone could.
I needed to sleep. I needed to gather some courage to read the rest of the notebooks, to read what Wade thought of me.
Could I ever speak to him again? Ever?
And if I did, what would I say?
What could I possibly say?
I was riding with Dad, recapping my discussion with Carrie about driving.
“Like it or not, Wade, you’re going to have to handle your fears about driving. There’s no bus that comes out to the beach. You need to get mobile.”
“I can deal with it now. I won’t have high school or swim team. Or friends. I’ll be okay.”
Dad tried to smile, but his face was tight.
“Dad, there’s something else Carrie and I talked about.”
“What’s that?
“About me keeping my mouth shut.”
Dad clenched the wheel. “I don’t want you to think we’re ashamed of you. We’re not. It’s never been that. You were a child, Wade. You didn’t understand. Hell, it was as much my fault . . .”
“Dad, don’t. Seriously, I feel worse when you try to take the blame.”
“Wade . . .”
“The thing is, I understand that I can’t tell anyone. When I do that to hurt myself, I hurt you guys worse.”
“It’s important, Wade. We understand what happened to you all those years ago. We understand what you go through now. But other people don’t. They can’t, or they don’t want to try, or they’re just scared. But once they hear about it, they just see a problem they want gone.”
“And you’re tired of leaving.”
Dad’s face looked older than it should. Lined with pain and constant worry. “I am, Wade. I’m tired. It’s like there’s been all this loud noise on the radio and I want to turn it off for a while.”
I nodded and looked straight ahead. Then Dad realized what he had said. “Wade, you’re not the radio. That’s not what I meant.”
But I was. I was that loud radio, constantly blaring.
Carrie had taken the lead, and we were following, and when we hit the top of a tall arched bridge we saw the Gulf of Mexico.
“It’s not blue,” I said. “The water, it’s not blue.”
“Yeah,” Dad said, “more green. Not real clear either.”
He sounded disappointed.
Not me.
We turned left after the bridge and followed Carrie a good way down a road that paralleled the beach, then she turned right and into a driveway made of crushed shells.
The house stood on stilts, with the bottom part closed in by screens, one section completely boarded. I guessed that was the shed Carrie had mentioned. A long flight of stairs ran up to the white house with green shutters. The paint was in pretty bad shape, but there were baskets of bright flowers hanging from the eaves and planted in boxes on the rail of the wraparound porch that faced the Gulf.
“I wonder who did this?” Carrie said, pointing to the flowers.
“I can scrape and paint the house for you,” I said. Anything to keep me busy, away from other people. Something to punish my body so my mind stayed numb.
Carrie walked out toward the beach. “There’s been a lot of erosion,” she said. “The beach is practically up to the porch.”
The day was windy, and all I saw and heard were the waves crashing against the sand. They made a savage kind of music. It filled my head and soothed something inside me. Had I been searching for that sound all my life?
I took a deep breath. The smell of salt and a whiff of fish, but still clean and full of life. Not the sterile smell of chlorine, but something that could nurture . . . growth? I thought I had loved the pool, but the pool had only been a prelude, a taste, training wheels. The Gulf — the unconfined, wild, fighting back power of it . . . This was the real thing.
“Well, look at that,” Carrie said. She pointed to the set of white sails heading for us. Carrie shaded her eyes and the boat caught a wave, spun on the crest, flapped the sails to the opposite side, and a figure appeared. The boat sped along the wave until it hit the sand in front of us a hundred yards away, screeching to a halt. The sails let out and spilled the harnessed air.
“Now that’s good,” Carrie murmured.
The girl who jumped off the boat wore a wet suit, and her long brown hair flew in the wind. She waved to us, then set about securing the boat. Carrie walked toward her and gestured for Dad and me to follow.
“Hey,” the girl said, pulling off a fingerless leather glove and offering her hand. “Are you Carrie? Grant’s step-daughter?”
Carrie shook the hand. “I am.”
“I’m Sam. I live next door. We were friends with Grant. He told me all about you.” She pointed her thumb over her shoulder. “He always let me use the boat. In fact, he taught me to sail it. It has new sails since you’ve seen it. I wanted one last ride before I turned it back over to you. It comes with the house.”
Carrie smiled. “No last ride. If Grant trusted you with his boat, I do, too. But . . .” I could hear Carrie’s head gears spinning. “It does come with a price. You’ll have to teach my stepson to sail it. I would, but I just won’t have the time.”
Sam hesitated, then looked back at the boat. “That’s a deal I’ll take.” She extended her hand. All business.
“I’m Wade,” I muttered while shaking the firm, rough hand. No nights of carefully applied hand lotion for this girl.
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br /> “You’ll need a wet suit if you want to start now. Or we can talk wave and wind theory until it warms up if you like,” Sam said.
“Why don’t you come for dinner in a day or two and we can discuss that,” Carrie said.
Why was Carrie doing this? She knew I wasn’t ready.
“Excuse me,” I said to Sam with an edge of irritation. “Carrie seems to have turned into a pimp. I need to fill her mouth with sand now.”
Sam stiffened. “Well, I have a boyfriend, so Carrie’s out of luck. But you’re stuck with the deal because I really want to keep sailing Elton.” While she had been so easy with Carrie, she seemed set off-kilter in my presence.
“Elton?”
“Grant loved this old Elton John song, ‘Rocket Man,’ and used to sing it a lot when we sailed. So we named the boat Elton.”
“Wouldn’t it make more sense to call the boat ‘Rocket Man?’ It came out more sarcastic than I’d intended. I sounded like one of the Loon Platoon.
“To you, maybe.” Sam turned to Carrie. “Go see the house. I have the extra key and I cleaned it up. I’ll wash the boat down, trailer it, put it in the shed, and bring you the keys later. I have a class soon or I’d help you with your stuff.”
“Class?” Dad asked.
“Local junior college.”
Not only did she have a boyfriend, but if she was taking classes at the junior college, she was too old for me. She didn’t look that old. She looked like . . . well, as Carrie would put it . . . a hunk o’ love.
The wind and waves and the green water were perfect. That boat surfing the crests — perfect. She was . . . beautiful, full of attitude, and . . . perfect.
And she didn’t seem to like me one bit.
Perfect.
Chapter 20
MAYBE, THE HAPPY
We clomped up the stairs. There was a screen door in front of the wooden door that Carrie opened with the key. The main floor was one big open room. Kitchen, dining room, living room, totally open with windows everywhere, making the Gulf seem part of the furniture. I’d never lived anyplace this nice.
I was getting more miserable by the second.
