Hole in the Middle

by Kendra Fortmeyer

I say, “You don’t sound like you grew up here.”

  He grins. “It’s amazing what you learn your first year of school,” he says. “I done been learned to hitch a stick up my britches and talk like one of them city boys,” he drawls.

  The vowels are so spot-on that I laugh, half amused and half surprised. Howie beams, unabashed. He bobs his head with a theatrical flourish.

  “Merci, merci,” he murmurs. “Mademoiselle est très belle.”

  “You mean gentile, not belle.”

  “Of course,” he says. “My mistake.”

  I wrinkle my brow. “Are you flirting with me?”

  “What?” he says. “Never.”

  “Look,” I say. “This Hole-Lump thing—”

  “Is science,” he says. “Is about the cure. Is about Parker’s thirst for fame and power. Is nonsense. Doesn’t mean we have to be friends. All of the above. Right?” He slows, pulls into the parking lot of a gas station. There is nothing around us but loblolly pine trees, farms and sky.

  “Don’t get me wrong, but didn’t you tell me yesterday that you bought into it?”

  “No.” He pulls on the emergency brake, turns to face me. “You asked me if I believed in it. I had to think about it.”

  And then I fell on my own ass jumping to conclusions. Great.

  “Well?” I ask.

  He tilts his head back against his seat, studying the fields beyond.

  “I’m still thinking,” he says, and flushes slightly. “Not about the epic romance. That’s stupid. But I don’t know. I’ve been given the opportunity to meet someone with the exact equal and opposite problem I’ve had my entire life. Like I’ve been Yin this entire time, and then you walk up, and you’re like, Hey, I’m Yang. How’s it going?”

  “I think you flipped the genders there.”

  “This is just a rare opportunity for cultural exchange. We small-town boys have to take what we can get, you know.”

  I crack a grin. “New York is small-town?”

  “You know, it’s strange,” he says. “There’s actually not culture there? It’s a common misconception.”

  “Wow,” I say. “Those poor deluded tourists.”

  He nods, seriously. “They ran out in 1997. All they have now is knockoff culture. People sell it on street corners. You can’t tell it from the real thing, if you don’t look too closely.”

  The car idles in the lot. The wink mart sign looms over our heads. I know Howie’s waiting for me to give him directions: to say turn around, take me home. I study him in glances, little sips of water. His brown eyes are quick. His smile comfortable. The Lump a distant memory on the far side of his body.

  “Where to?” I ask.

  “You tell me,” he says.

  “Anywhere?” I ask.

  He checks his gas gauge. “Well, I can’t cross oceans.”

  “How about time?” I ask.

  Conversation with him feels so natural. Words tumbling from our lips like sweaters dropping to so many floors.

  “Anywhere but the 1980s,” he says. “I can’t do the big hair thing.”

  “When you found me last night—” I say suddenly.

  I can feel his attention focus on me. The lines of my face feel sharp, clear.

  “You don’t have to talk about it,” he says.

  I shake my head. The words come, and I bite them back again. My mind in pieces: mascara, the club, my shirt unstringing on the floor.

  Last night, I made a mistake—

  I mean, I didn’t think it was going to be a mistake—

  I look at him, helplessly, but he’s not looking at me. Letting me have my space, again, the car grumbling amiably beneath us.

  “I just really wanted to be normal,” I say at last. “Just. Ordinary. To have a basic, normal person experience. But then, once I had it, I realized normal kind of sucks.”

  He nods, gazing out at the highway.

  “I know,” he says quietly.

  Warm simplicity suffuses my veins. I am suddenly, painfully aware of how precious and fragile this moment is, the first time in my life I’ve felt perfect understanding.

  We sit in silence for a moment. Howie seems to be weighing something.

  “How do you feel about wise women?” he asks at last.

  “As a cultural construct or in reality?”

  “The latter,” he says. “Well, both. Eventually. But right now, the latter.”

  I wonder about that eventually. I say, “Pro.”

  “Good,” he says, shifting the car into reverse. “Then there’s someone I think you should meet.”

  “Who?”

  He pulls us out onto the highway. “My mom.”

  29

  The town of Silver Creek nestles in a cupped palm of earth between golden tobacco fields and rustling hills. Howie guides the car off of the highway and onto a smaller one, then a smaller one still, the white lines of the road finally falling into forgetfulness and the crumbling red clay shoulder, and he tells me everything.

  The Lump manifested before he was born. When he was a baby, it was no larger than a knuckle, protruding over the waist of his diaper. Doctors ran scans, did biopsies. His parents thought too much about the word cancer. Two days after his first birthday, Howie had his first excision.

  “And then they change the bandage the next day, and boom,” he says, gesturing. “Right back where it started. No blood, no scars, no nothing. The bandage was perfectly clean, with a Lump in the middle. The nurses were certain they’d switched babies—that they’d done surgery on some other kid, and I’d somehow ended up in the recovery room by mistake. But the surgeon swore by it. The charts checked out. Besides, who else could it be? There were no other kids with a Lump.”

  They performed a second excision the following week, and the results were the same. The doctors were astounded. They called in specialists. The specialists called specialer specialists.

  “And you spent the rest of your life in and out of clinics,” I say.

  He smiles. “Lucky guess.”

  “And each new doctor was so optimistic. Like they were the one who was finally going to figure you out.”

  Howie nods and nods, watching the road. “Like when someone else has a Rubik’s Cube in their hands, and they’re fumbling around like a total idiot with it, and you’re like, ‘Give it to me; I know I can figure it out in, like, ten seconds.’ And then you get it and fumble around like an idiot.”

  I laugh. “I never spent much time with Rubik’s Cubes.”

  “Pardon me,” he says. “I didn’t realize I was in the presence of someone too cool for the art of the humble Rubik.”

  “Mother thinks toys make kids soft,” I say. “‘Play isn’t practical.’ Or whatever. Basically, once she realized I wasn’t healthy enough to follow in her fitness footsteps, I mostly just had books. And sketchpads. And life coaches. And goals.”

  “Ah,” he says. “An overachiever.”

  I snort, rolling my head against the headrest. “Nope. Just lonely. I never even went to school with other kids until—” Caro. “Until I was six. Mother was basically afraid to let me out of her sight when I was really little. Like she was convinced that some mad scientists in lab coats with Einstein hair would shove me into a van and do experiments on me if I wasn’t with her twenty-four/seven.”

  “What about your dad?” Howie asks.

  “He left when I was four.”

  “I’m sorry,” Howie says, quietly.

  “It’s okay,” I lie.

  “I’m sorry,” Howie says again.

  The car is nothing but wind and grains of asphalt. I turn to the window in time to see the rail run out, and the river disappear behind us. We’re stretching into cotton country now.

  “I don’t really remember him,” I say.

  “I’m sorr
y,” he says a third time, and I have no defenses left.

  Just when I am beginning to think that Howie doesn’t have the first clue where we are or where we’re heading, we pass a hand-painted sign: welcome to silver creek, the font of prosperity.

  “Is there actually a silver creek, or is this one of those towns named after the nature they bulldozed to build it? All ‘Whispering Pines’ or ‘Spring Valley’?” I ask.

  Howie raises a lecturing finger. “There is indeed a Silver Creek. Fun local fact: it smells like sulfur, and drinking the water is supposed to make you virile.”

  “Did you try it?”

  He makes a face. “No. But the whole high school football team got heavy metal poisoning on prom night, so that tradition’s obviously alive and kicking.”

  We creep through a minuscule downtown: a gas station and a Mexican restaurant, an old-fashioned drugstore. Starbucks doesn’t seem to have heard of the place, nor has McDonald’s. I breathe shallowly, afraid of infecting the town with the microbes from the modern world.

  “Are you sure the press won’t find us here?” I ask. “It seems like your house is the first place they’d look.”

  Howie shakes his head. “My family is one of my best-kept secrets,” he says. “Garrison is a pseudonym.”

  “What’s your real name?”

  He grins. “That’d be telling.”

  “Does that actually work?”

  He shrugs. “It has. The research team all signed nondisclosure agreements. And Parker wants to write the book on ICF-3, so she’s not going to tell anyone how to find me. Competition and all.”

  “And you put on a big shirt and hide in plain sight,” I murmur. We pass a roadside sign advertising PEACH’S, TOMATOE’S, RIPE WATERMELLONS and pull up to a four-way junction. Long grass grows through the stop sign. “I’m the opposite. Mother’s always been in the public eye, and I’m her Holey little secret.”

  “Well, it’s not that easy to hide me,” Howie says. We accelerate again, the air plucking at our clothes with undiscerning fingers. “I stick out, if you’ll pardon my saying so.”

  “I won’t,” I say.

  “Fair enough,” he says, and grins ruefully. “That’s why New York is such a dream. Nobody looks at you twice. And even if they did, the Lump isn’t anything there. I’ve got nothing on half the guys who walk down the street. It’s this great melting pot—bring me your weirdos, your crazies, your freaks. My parents love that I’m there. Not too many kids make it out of S-Creek.” We slow, signaling, and the sound of the wind drops away outside the windows, leaving nothing behind it but the cicada-rich silence of the country.

  “Wait,” I say, suddenly. “If your family lives so close by, how come they weren’t there with you at any of the appointments?”

  “They wanted to let me do it on my own.”

  I goggle a little. “What’s that like?”

  He laughs. “You’ll see.” He turns us past a rooster-shaped mailbox and onto a graveled driveway. “Brace yourself,” he adds. “My family is extremely normal.”

  The driveway is a long tunnel of pine. We emerge into a clearing with two old cars and a tin-roofed house. A pair of golden retrievers bound up to the car as we draw to a standstill, two excited splashes of fur and barking. Howie laughs as he climbs from the car, leaning down for a face full of doggie kisses. I tentatively follow, and the dogs flood toward me, barking furiously, all tails and slobbery teeth. One jumps up, punching me in the stomach with twin muddy paws.

  “Zoe! Max!” Howie shouts, running around to the passenger side. “I’m sorry. Are you okay with dogs?”

  “Yeah,” I gasp. I reach for a dog to prove how okay I am, but only get a glancing grasp of a tail.

  Three kids tumble out through the screen door and onto the porch, the medley of their voices circling the syllables of Howie’s name as they launch themselves down the stairs. They are followed by a slender woman in jeans and a sweatshirt, who watches as the two youngest wrap themselves gleefully around Howie’s legs. An older boy hangs back, trying to be cool until Howie reaches out for a fist-bump, and the boy dimples into a smile, eyeteeth piling up like a traffic jam.

  Howie wades up to the porch and wraps his mother in an embrace. They hold each other, rocking back and forth. The expression on her face is pure happiness. I fidget by the car, mopping at the paw prints on Howie’s T-shirt. I think about my own mother, and realize I’m not even sure where she is right now. LA, maybe, or Paris. I avert my eyes from Howie’s Happy Family Time, feeling stupid for thinking I was done being an outsider.

  One of the dogs barks sharply at my side, and I jolt. The woman looks up and catches a glimpse of me. Her smile fades. She pulls back, says something to Howie.

  A voice by my elbow says, “You’re the one who’s mean to my brother on TV.” A little girl in a pink T-shirt is squinting up at me through her bangs, nose wrinkled. The older boy flushes, ears bright red.

  “Riley, shut up,” he says in a low voice.

  “Why are you here?” the girl asks me.

  “Riley, Kevin, Tyler,” Howie says, coming to my rescue. “This is my friend Morgan.”

  The younger boy says. “If she’s your friend, then why did Mom call her—”

  “The TV people make everything look worse than it actually is, you know that,” Howie says. “Morgan’s really nice. Right, Morgan?”

  Riley’s eyebrows sit low and fuzzy over her brown eyes.

  “Are you his girlfriend?” she asks flatly.

  Howie pulls a tick off the dog’s ear, face averted.

  I tell her, “The TV people lie about a lot of stuff.”

  “I knew it!” the younger boy shouts. “I knew you weren’t his girlfriend! He only likes blondes.”

  “Okay, Kevin,” Howie says. “That’s awesome. Hey, I’ll bet you can’t beat me to the house.”

  Wordlessly, Kevin takes off running, and after a second, the older boy, Tyler, follows. Riley hovers by my side as we mount the porch steps, mouth curled down with distrust.

  Howie’s mother stands at the top of the stairs with her arms crossed. She is tiny in every sense of the word, but no less terrifying for it. Gray streaks through the long brown braid she wears down her back. Her sweatshirt is flecked with house paint.

  Finally, she extends a hand.

  “Rachel,” she says.

  “Morgan.”

  “I know,” she says.

  “Thanks for having me,” I say.

  She expels a long sigh through her nose and releases my hand from her grip.

  “Howie tells me that the news took your quotes out of context,” she says.

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “They must have been pretty far out of context,” she says.

  “Mom,” Howie says. She ignores him. I rub at the railing with a thumb. The wood is old and soft, and beneath it, my thumbnail reveals a line of hard, bright newness.

  “They wanted to tell a certain story,” I tell her. “And I deviated from it.”

  Something behind her eyes softens. Not much. But enough.

  “Well,” she says at last. “We do like deviants around here.” She steps back and reaches for the screen door handle. “You two must be hungry.”

  “We’re okay—” I start, and Howie squeezes my arm.

  “You’re at my mother’s house,” he whispers. “You’re definitely hungry.”

  Mrs. Garrison (no, not Garrison; it’s a pseudonym, which leaves me in the awkward calling-strange-adult-by-first-name zone with Rachel or with the equally awkward Howie’s mom) makes grilled cheese sandwiches in a cast-iron frying pan, standing on one leg like a stork as she casually butters slices of homemade bread. The boys run in and out, pouring careful glasses of red Kool-Aid before dashing back to the living room. Riley sits in the corner with an armload of Barbies, watching me sideways as
she aggressively yanks off their dresses. The lazy sound of video game violence filters through the sunny kitchen.

  “They get to play video games during the day now?” Howie asks.

  “They get an hour on weekends,” his mom says. “If their homework is done.”

  The pan murmurs to itself, a quiet conversation of heat and grease.

  “Is Dad around?” Howie asks.

  “He should be in his office,” his mother says. She glances up the stairs, calling, “Richard!”

  “He’s probably got his headphones on,” Howie says, rising. “I’ll pop in.”

  “Don’t be long,” she says. “Unless you want a congealed cheese sandwich.”

  Howie pops a salute. I shoot him a desperate glance, and he smiles, mouths, It’s okay. He disappears up the stairs, leaving me alone in the kitchen with his mother. I rest my elbows on the table, watching her chop apples and pile them on the plates. My mother has a chef and a nutritionist, maids, gardeners, a driver. She keeps the moons of her nails immaculate.

  “So Morgan,” Howie’s mom says, “tell me about yourself.”

  I chew my lip. “Well,” I say, “I have a hole in my middle.”

  “So I hear,” she says, dryly.

  “I’m not trying to be smart. It’s not information I volunteer very often.”

  She nods slowly, sits down across from me and passes a plate. Steam breathes from her sandwich, leaving a velvet halo on the blue clay dish.

  “We’ve been following you on the news,” she says quietly. “Seeing you here was the last thing I expected.”

  “I know,” I say. “I’m sorry.” She’s still waiting, and I add, defensively, “They distorted a lot of things.”

  “So you’re not just here”—the kitchen, the sandwich, her unreadable face—“to be cured.”

  “No. I mean, yes.” I straighten my spine. “I do want a cure. It’s not personal. I don’t know your son. I mean, I’m getting to know him, but in the beginning—”

  She takes a bite of her sandwich. Watches me. Chews.

  “You don’t understand what it’s like,” I say helplessly. “They ripped my life away, all so they can have a good story. Or get a Nobel Prize. Or whatever. Nobody actually cares about who I am, or what I want. But in the middle of it all, yeah. I want to be cured. I want to be able to decide what my body is and what it means, and honestly, I’m tired of people acting like that’s a crime.”