Hole in the Middle

by Kendra Fortmeyer

  I remember, belatedly, that she knows exactly what it’s like: she spent years raising a child just like me. But she doesn’t correct me. Just wipes her mouth on a cloth napkin and waits.

  “Um,” I say, and it comes out like a question. “Howie said you didn’t come with him to the appointment because he wanted to do it on his own.”

  Her forehead wrinkles, wary. “That’s right.”

  “But you guys seem so . . . I don’t know.” Warm. Nice. Familial. “Don’t you want to be involved?”

  She lifts her eyes to mine. “Sometimes stepping back is the best way to be involved.”

  I stab my finger into the crust of my sandwich. “Try telling that to my mother.”

  She takes another bite of her sandwich, chews.

  “It’s not about what your mother wants,” she says, wiping her fingers on a paper towel. “What do you want?”

  I look down at my plate, turning it around and around.

  “For my life to finally be ordinary,” I say. My voice cracks on the word.

  Her hand covers my own, and I look up, surprised. Warmth and pity shine through her exasperation.

  “Honey,” she says. “That’s never going to happen. So you should quit worrying about it.”

  She squeezes my hand.

  “Besides,” Rachel says, “what fun would that be?”

  Howie’s grilled cheese has gone cold by the time he returns to the kitchen with his father, who greets me with a handshake and a tentative smile. He is a small, slight man, with sunburned ears and nimble hands. He has Howie’s drooping slant of the eyes.

  “Morgan Stone,” he says. “You’re quite the celebrity in our house.”

  “Richard,” his wife says warningly.

  “‘Here come the freaks!’” he quotes, chuckling.

  A sandwich crust twists in my throat, dry. Richard claps me on the back.

  “That’s all right,” he says. “In this house, we’re all freaks. Some of us are just more subtle about it than you flashy celebrity types.”

  “So,” I say weakly, “you’re not going to make a Hole big deal about it?”

  Laughter bubbles up from Richard’s stomach, crinkling his eyes. “She’s great,” he tells his wife. “Isn’t she great?” He turns back to me. “Howie tells me you’re an artist.”

  My impulse is to deny it, so I surprise myself by saying yes. He sits down next to me. “That’s great,” he says, grabbing a bite of Howie’s sandwich. “What is it you do?”

  I glance at Howie. He says, “Actually, I’d like to show Morgan something upstairs real quick.” He looks at me, eyebrow perked like a question mark. I hesitate, then nod.

  “You kids behave,” his dad calls up the stairs after us. Howie’s mother says something, and both his dad and Riley start laughing, the sounds of their merriment fading as we disappear upward into the house.

  “See?” Howie says. “I knew my mom would love you.”

  “I don’t know if I’d go that far,” I say.

  “She’s a mom,” he says. “And you’re a poor lost chickadee. She can’t help herself.”

  “My mother completely lacks that maternal instinct,” I say.

  “I’m sure she’s got one. It’s probably just buried really deep down.” We round a landing and he pushes open a door. “Et voilà: my secret abode.”

  His attic bedroom room is small and pine-walled with twin skylights in the pitched roof. There’s a small bed in the corner with a blue quilt. The walls are entirely covered with bookcases. I look around for the typical boy things—band posters, trophies, battered guitars—and find none. Just sky and books, and a small woven rug on the floor in shades of cornflower and sea.

  “It’s great,” I say.

  “My room was off the living room when I was a kid,” he says, flopping on the bed. “It was more convenient to have me on the ground floor—I was always on some nauseating drug, or recovering from surgery. But for my fourteenth birthday, Mom and Dad refurbished the attic and gave it to me. I love it up here.”

  I drift over to his bookshelves, studying titles. “I thought you said you never had to recover from surgeries.”

  He curls himself into a ball, rocks to a seated position. “Healing isn’t the same as recovering. It takes a lot of energy to regrow a minor body mass in one night.” He lifts his T-shirt and addresses the Lump. “Especially one as resplendent as this guy here.”

  “Ugh,” I say, fighting a mixture of amusement and revulsion. “You talk to it?”

  “You don’t talk to the Hole?”

  A terrible shrill giggle escapes my lips. “No, I don’t talk to the Hole. Why would I talk to the Hole?”

  “I can’t believe you never—I mean, the poor thing. It’s definitely suffering from low self-esteem.” He cranes his neck and looks down at the Lump. “Have you ever heard anything that awful, Rupert?”

  “You call it Rupert?”

  “Sometimes,” he says. “Today it looks like a Rupert. Don’t you think?”

  “Please put that thing away,” I protest, laughing. I can feel my face going hot.

  “What?” he asks. “It’s just a harmless genetic mutation.”

  “I’m going to talk about this on Oprah,” I say. “He invited me up to his room, and then he showed me his Lump!”

  He drops his T-shirt, waving his hands in mock surrender. “My reputation!” he says. “It will be ruthlessly besmirched. I take it back, I take it all back.” He turns to the shelf over the bed and pulls out a black plastic three-ring binder. “Well, since you’ve killed the mood, I may as well show you this.”

  A faded piece of notebook paper taped to the front reads BOOK OF FREAKS in careful, childish writing.

  I open the cover. A black-and-white photo stares up at me, a photocopy of two serious-looking Siamese twins, and beside it a handwritten caption: CHANG AND ENG. Most famous Siamese conjoined twins in history.

  “I started this journal when I was ten,” Howie explains. “I guess I needed to know that I wasn’t the only freak in the world. It became sort of an obsession. More than anything, I wanted to find somebody else like me.”

  I turn the pages. The Snake Woman. Howler the Monkey Man. Beautiful Regina. The One and Only Human Sawhorse.

  “And did you ever?”

  “Find someone like me? No,” he says. “But even if they weren’t different in exactly the same way, it was enough just knowing there were others out there. It made it better somehow.”

  Each page features at least one photo, pasted into place, with a name and description and sometimes birth and death dates. I’ve just finished reading about Vladimir Ironikov, the Giant of St. Petersburg, when I turn the page to find what looks like a screenplay:

  Vladimir: What would you like to get for lunch today, Howard?

  Me: I think some soup and also a cheeseburger, with some juice and a cookie. What about you, Vlad?

  Vlad: HA HA HA! I WILL EAT FOR LUNCH FIFTY CHEESEBURGERS BECAUSE I AM SO GIANT!

  Me: Wow!

  “What is this?”

  “I used to imagine what I would say to each person in this book if I met them,” he says. He keeps his eyes on the script, speaking steadily, but his ears have pinked. I can’t help but laugh.

  “Yeah, okay,” Howie says. “Again, I was ten.”

  “Are they all like this?”

  He fiddles with a stray thread. “It depends on what I needed to hear when I wrote them. You know. Sometimes funny, sometimes wise.” His eyes jump up to my face and away as he speaks. “I wouldn’t look at Svetlana the Snake Empress if I were you. I wrote her when I was thirteen. It’s, um, spicy.”

  I turn a page to the Lost Angel of Appalachia. She’s beautiful in the 1940s style: my age but somehow older, with thin lips and thick kohl around the eyes. A pair of white feathered wings peek out
from her gauzy white gown. A Beauteous Angel Fallen from Heaven with Real Wings Growing Out of Her Body! the photocopied advert proclaims. Now in a Limited Time Engagement with Wiley and Person’s World Famous Three-Ring Circus Extravaganza!

  There are more than fifty pages: people with flippers, with tails, with fur, scales, extra heads; strong men, damsels, seductresses, children, midgets, giants. I flip through, idly searching for Holes. A familiar expression haunts the faces of the pages: wearied, patient, looking out at the camera with a sort of bored indulgence that I recognize. Yes, this is my body. Can we move on, please?

  I am looking at the faces of my people.

  “Did you ever meet any of them?” I ask.

  He shakes his head. “I was always tied up in hospitals. By the time I was old enough and healthy enough to try, I’d kind of outgrown it, I guess. I went to New York and made some actual friends instead.” He shuts the book, running his finger along the edge.

  “We should do it.”

  I didn’t even realize I was thinking it until I said it out loud. But it’s perfectly, perfectly right.

  “Do what?” he asks.

  I gesture to the binder. The book of strange but familiar faces. “Meet them.”

  He laughs. “When? Between appointments?”

  “Yes,” I say. “Why not? Until I met you, I’d never dreamed that there might be people in the world who would understand what it was like to live my everyday life. And now you show me this?” I stroke the surface of the book with one finger. “It’s just too tempting a thought to ignore.”

  Howie tugs at one ear.

  “It’s kind of crazy,” he says.

  “What better sane things do you have to do?” I ask.

  He starts to reply, then bites his lip, staring down at the binder. When he finally looks up at me, it is with something like wonder.

  “All right,” he says.

  Rachel’s started making dinner by the time we return and insists we stay, so we settle in for the evening. I follow the kids to the backyard and watch them do flips on the trampoline. Six o’clock comes and goes, and nobody suggests that we watch the news. Instead we traipse into the dining room and crowd around the table. Somewhere between passing the salad and tucking in, I forget to be a stranger. There is a seductive warmth to the noisy, bouncing energy of this family that feels inclusive. I dab pasta sauce off of Riley’s chin. The boys stick out food-covered tongues at me, and I shock them by sticking mine out right back.

  “Ew!” Tyler shouts.

  “Cool!” Kevin shouts.

  “Morgan,” Rachel says warningly.

  “Sorry,” I say. I do it again the second she looks away. Howie hides his face in his napkin.

  After dinner, Howie follows his dad into the kitchen with a stack of plates. Rachel lingers beside me as I gather my things for the drive home. “It was a pleasure meeting you,” she says.

  “I’m glad Howie brought me.”

  “That’s Howie, always bringing home strays.” Her smile fades a bit. “Not too many girls, though.” She holds me out at arm’s length, looking me up and down. “Take good care of my son,” she says as Howie emerges from the kitchen. “No more out-of-context stuff, okay? Or I’ll hang you by your toenails and flay you.” She says it with a smile, but there’s steel beneath. I nod.

  She kisses Howie, and the two of us head for the car, dogs joyfully flanking us. The kids cluster by the porch railing, waving frantically, backlit by the glowing lights of the house. The night has turned chilly, and wood smoke curls distantly in the air.

  I close the car door and turn to a tapping on the window. I crack the door carefully, and little Riley is standing by, a fistful of goldenrod in her hand.

  “Bye,” she says. She thrusts the wildflowers into my hand and then leans in quickly and gives me an awkward hug, her face smashing into my chest. Then she pounds back to the house, bare feet skipping over the cooling earth.

  Howie puts the car into reverse. We back away, waving until the house is out of sight.

  “I didn’t think she liked me,” I say.

  “She’s always been in a house full of brothers,” he says. “I think she feels left out. You’re basically her favorite person now, just for being female.”

  “She has excellent taste.”

  Howie pulls out onto the main road. “I can’t argue with that.”

  I pick at the stems of the wildflowers, staining my thumbnail green. “Sure you could.” He shakes his head and doesn’t look at me. We slide by blue-green floodlights in the dark yards of country houses.

  I say, “Howie, you have exactly zero reasons to be nice to me. I’ve been nothing but a raging bitch to you since the day we met.”

  The outline of him shrugs, dusted with dashboard lights. “Everyone deserves a second chance,” he says.

  “God, you’re so nice,” I say. “It’s unreal.”

  His face, in profile, slides across the night, eating stars.

  “I don’t see any reason not to be nice,” he says.

  “Because people are the worst. Because they’re out to hurt you or exploit you, and even if they aren’t, they’re going to disappoint you.”

  “Not all of them.”

  “Enough of them.”

  “But enough of them aren’t, so it’s worth trying,” he says. He turns toward me in the dark, starlight sliding over his teeth. “Even a raging bitch can turn out to be pretty okay if you give her three or four tries.”

  I quietly shred goldenrod stems in my lap.

  I ask, “How often has that worked out for you?”

  He says, “Often enough.”

  The drive back to civilization seems to take half the time of the trip out. We talk about desultory things: our families, favorite teachers, bands, food. By the time we pull up beside my car at the now-deserted medical complex, it’s close to ten at night.

  “Morgan Stone,” Howie says, seriously, “I want to thank you for taking this opportunity to be my partner in crime. It was an honor to evade News Channel Eleven with you for the last nine hours and forty-three minutes.”

  He extends a hand. I shake it. Two formal pumps: one, two.

  “Do you want—can I get your number?” I ask, and because it sounds cheesy, like asking for his number, I blunder forward. “You know. For our epic Book of Freaks research adventure.” Which maybe makes it sound worse.

  But he just nods, seriously. “Of course. I look forward to furthering our professional relationship.”

  I think I catch a smile, but it’s hard to tell in the dark.

  “Howie,” I say softly, as he enters his number into my crappy old phone, “thanks for taking me to meet your family. And for giving me a second chance. Or third. Or fourth.”

  He beams so brightly I think he’ll light up the night.

  “Thanks for being worth it,” he says.

  I peer into the glowing windows of houses and shops as I drive groggily home, feeling a wave of warmth for the inhabitants in each one. Feeling that I could step through any door in the city and find a story I wasn’t expecting: entire lives rich with kindness and drama and strife that I could have missed out on entirely, just walking by.

  I am so glad I opened one today.

  30

  Back at the apartment, I’m haunted by the image of a quiet little boy painstakingly running a glue stick over a sheet of notebook paper, capturing the friends he is sure, somewhere, will understand him. It kills me that Howie and I grew up just an hour away from each other, each reaching silently out into the world and missing the other by inches.

  I go straight to the closet beneath the stairs and pull out my portfolio. I haven’t looked through it since the Loblolly gallery visit. It was just a month and a half ago, but it seems like another lifetime. The charcoal drawings are more raw and angular than I remember them, but
they aren’t as terrible as I convinced myself they were. Page after page, the images stare up at me—the incomplete people that I drew so I could surround myself with other broken things: the breastless mother, the lovers with no mouths, the artist with no vision. These lonely, empty images represent my past. What I want to give them now is life.

  I select a drawing—a theater of eyeless movie watchers—and smear my fingers across the charcoal. Absently, I lift my finger to my mouth and, blackening my teeth and tongue, suck away the bitter taste of the past. Then I pull it from the portfolio and clip it to an easel. One by one, the others follow, and when I run out of easels, I pin them to the walls. Once I’ve begun, I have trouble stopping, pages spilling onto the counter, the floor. A frenetic energy runs electric in my veins.

  I ready my palette. I breathe in, and breathe out something a decade old.

  Then I lift my brush.

  I tentatively pull color across one page, then another. Vibrant hues explode around the lonely charcoal figures. I pick up speed, the colors brighter, more primal, more elemental and pure; if my old self had built a wall between her and the rest of the world, I am attacking it with dazzling light, with china blue, with clover, with blood, with streetlight, with moss. I scrape at its mortar with night-breast navy, with lamplit yellow, with the fawn-colored brown of a stranger’s eyes. Chinks begin to appear in the darkness of my life, light falling through in crumbs.

  The sun has fully risen by the time I stop, bent and sore, the nausea of ignored hunger clawing at my insides. I drop the brushes into paint thinner to clean them and wash my hands quietly in the sink. I survey the damage as I scrub the colors away from my skin with a rough, flour-stiffened towel. My satisfaction is as deep and blue as the sea.

  I pull out my phone, ignoring the twenty-nine missed calls from unknown numbers, and dial Marcel.

  This should be one of the biggest moments of my life, I know: I have a project I finally believe in and an agent and a show and all of the tools I need to finally show it to the world. But the ring of the phone falls distantly in my ear. I’m imagining Howie’s face when he sees the work: a slow blush. An astonishment. And, behind his shaggy bangs, a recognition.