Zipped

by Laura McNeal

  Back home, Mick untied the English laurels that circled the foundation of the house. In October he and Nora had gathered up the loose-hanging laurel limbs and bound them into what she called sheaves in order to prevent breakage from winter snowload, but the snows were probably—hopefully—past. He checked, too, to see if the forsythias were budding. Nora always brought armloads in and waited while the house worked as an incubator and the buds popped into blossoms. Mick fingered some branches and found some swelling but no real buds yet. He went inside, practiced the piano, then decided to finish revising the second draft of his U.S. History paper (due tomorrow) so he could watch TV with Nora and his father later on.

  The family computer was set up in a nook near the head of the stairs. Mick checked for e-mail, but got only a disappointing no-mail quack. Mick double-clicked first on his U.S. History file, and then on Dem Muckrakers, which is what he called the file containing drafts of his essay on the early-twentieth-century journalists who became famous for exposing corruption by corporations. But there was something wrong. His first draft was there, but not the second. It should’ve been the other way around. He’d meant to trash only the first. He looked everywhere for the second draft, but it was gone.

  Mick tried to fend off his rising panic. He leaned back from the computer, gave Foolish a scratch, and said, “Okay, what’re the possibilities here?”

  He suddenly remembered that he’d e-mailed the second draft to his mother in San Francisco in hopes she would proofread it, but after five days she’d sent a two-sentence return message: Well done! I’ll bet no 14-year-old has ever made muck so interesting! Mick had read it and said to the screen in a low voice, “In two months I’ll be sixteen, Mom.” Then, in a quick fit of spite, he’d deleted it.

  He kept coming back to Nora. He’d taught his stepmother how to use the computer for e-mails and research, but she was, as she herself put it, technologically impaired. Mick wondered if maybe she’d somehow stashed his draft somewhere without really knowing it. He went through her files quickly—there was nothing resembling muckrakers—then pulled the cursor lower right to the trash icon, and double-clicked.

  There were twenty-one items in the unemptied trash. Most of them were Nora’s—letters, recipes, something called the Dead File—and a few were Mick’s. One by one, he dragged his own out of the trash and opened them. Nothing but the discarded first draft. So, a little guiltily, he started on Nora’s. The first was a boring letter to an aunt in Iowa, in which she described Mick and his father as “the lights of her life.” The second was the address of a wool shop in Ithaca. The third file that he removed from the trash was the Dead File.

  It was a series of e-mails.

  The first one said, Dear Miz Schoolmarm, let me tell you last night you taught me a thing or two I never even dreamed of knowing. —a.

  From Nora came this reply: And vice versa. Ready for the next lesson? —Miz S

  Affirmative on that. When & where?

  Nora: Same time, same station. Park a ways off and make sure nobody sees you.

  Mick felt himself closing up. It was as if he’d been an open hand and was now a tight fist. The nook felt closed in and hot. His heartbeat seemed to throb in his ears.

  Round 4 of wild & woolly tomorrow same time same station? —Miz S

  Yes mam, miss Schoolmarm. I could go there and do that depending if you promise to wear that certain something. Did I mention that you, Miss Marmschool, are strangely vivifying. —a.s.

  Mick was both repulsed and transfixed. Why had she saved this stuff into a regular file, and why had she then thrown it away? Why would anyone do that?

  He scrolled down.

  A.S. you outdid even you. Those were the mustiest dustiest lusti est doings i ever done did. When’s next?

  And: Hey A.S. i’ve got a hankerin to take you down from the naughty shelf. tomorrow same time same station?

  And: Tomorrow i wear a dress with sixteen buttons all of which will need undoing. —Miz s.

  And: Want to know something? 15 seconds after I saw you I knew my poor life wouldn’t be complete till I’d been done and double-done by one alexander selkirk.

  Mick felt the first hint of sour bile surge into his throat. He closed the file and hurried down the hall to the bathroom, where he bent over the toilet and vomited up a combination of Hostess Twinkie, cafeteria nachos, and Mr. Pibb. His whole body felt wet with sweat. His hand, when he stared at it, was trembling. He took off his jacket, washed and dried his face, put his jacket back on. He stared in the mirror. The more he stared, the less he seemed to look like himself.

  Who was Alexander Selkirk?

  He walked back to the study. He didn’t reopen the dead file, but he moved it to a green floppy disk, which he ejected. He didn’t label it. He slid it into the interior pocket of his jacket, and zipped the pocket closed. Then he moved the cursor to the trash file, and emptied the trash properly, just as he had taught Nora to do.

  Downstairs, the opening of the front door was followed by his father’s muted whistling. Mick shut down the computer and tiptoed to his room. He could hear his father moving around downstairs and knew what he was doing: shuffling through the bills, checking the crockpot, and grabbing a Coors from the refrigerator before heading upstairs to shower.

  “Mick?” His father, calling up from below.

  “In my room,” Mick yelled. He felt so different that he was surprised his voice sounded so much like his own.

  He heard his father’s heavy footsteps on the stairs. Mick pulled the covers up around him. The door eased open and his father peered in. Mick’s room was dim, and the backlighting from the hall turned his father into a huge silhouette. “Jeez,” he said. “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing really,” Mick said. “I think it’s something I ate for lunch. I kind of threw it all up.”

  With a flip of the light switch the silhouette became his father. He looked worried. “Got a fever or anything?” He put down his unopened can of beer and lay his big hand across Mick’s forehead. He smelled pleasantly of grease and gasoline. “You don’t feel hot.”

  “I’m fine,” Mick said. “I think I just need to rest a little. Go ahead and take your shower.”

  But his father stayed. “You don’t want to take off your jacket?” he said.

  “No.”

  “You want some bread and soup? I could bring up some bread and soup.”

  Mick closed his eyes. “I think I just need to lie here for a while.” When he opened his eyes, his father had gone to stand by the window. He didn’t look like a loser. He wasn’t fat. His hair was still black and curly and kind of cool. For a middle-aged guy, he was pretty decent looking, like a friendly fireman in a kids’ book. But maybe that’s what got left out of kids’ books—that the decent-looking friendly firemen had good-looking wandering wives.

  For these few moments his father had been standing so still at the window that Mick was slightly surprised when he suddenly moved. “Okay,” his father said, taking up his unopened can of beer. “I’m going to take my shower. Yell if you want something.”

  Every night after work his father took his cold Coors into a hot shower, drank the beer, then washed his hair. He’d told Mick it wasn’t so much to get his hair clean as to get the grime from his fingernails. “Nora hates the greasy fingernails,” he’d said, grinning, and Nora, throwing an arm around Mick’s father, had said, “I’m a sucker for a just-scrubbed Mr. Goodwrench.”

  In the shower tonight, his father was whistling, but quietly, so Mick couldn’t get the tune. A few minutes after the water stopped, his father was again looking in on Mick, who pretended to be asleep. His father eased shut the door and went downstairs. He was whistling again. It was a happy song, the zip-a-dee-doo-dah song.

  Mick, after faking sleep, actually fell asleep and was awakened some time later by a faint tapping at the door. A soft voice said, “Mick?”

  It was Nora.

  Mick was lying on his side, turned toward the wall in the
darkness. He didn’t answer.

  “Mick?”

  He hardly breathed.

  She waited a few more seconds then went away. He switched on the bedside lamp, checked the clock—6:30 P.M.—then lay on his back and stared at the ceiling, which was painted with a Union Jack. One day last summer Nora had discovered him up on a ladder sketching it with a pencil, and she’d suggested blocking the lines out with masking tape instead. Instead of asking why in God’s name he wanted to paint a Union Jack on his ceiling, she’d helped him cover the furniture with sheets and mix up the paint. They worked on different sections and listened to oldies on the radio, and in three days they were done. He’d been sorry, in a way, to finish.

  Another light knock on the door. “Mick?” Nora said softly. “It’s me. I’ve brought some soup. May I come in?” She waited a few seconds. Then she said, “I see your light’s on.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  Nora waited a few seconds. “How about chamomile tea then? That always helps settle my stomach.”

  “No, thanks,” Mick said. He didn’t say it very loud. He didn’t really care if she heard him or not.

  She said, “What?”

  This time Mick spoke up in a hard voice. “I said I don’t want anything at all right now!”

  Nora stood outside the door for a few seconds without speaking, then went away.

  Nearly an hour passed before Mick heard the heavy ascending footsteps of his father. When he got to Mick’s room he simultaneously knocked and pushed open the door. “How’s the Mick doing?”

  “I’ve done better,” Mick said.

  His father laughed. “Yeah, I remember that cafeteria food.”

  Mick made a murmuring assent.

  “You okay though?” his father said.

  “I will be.”

  A silence followed, then his father said, “You made Nora feel a little bad there. Not letting her in.”

  Mick said, “I didn’t not let her in. I just didn’t want anything to eat.”

  His father waited a few seconds, seemed to want to say something, but didn’t. Finally he said, “Is this something about your mom?”

  Mick shook his head, though it did in some weird way seem connected to his mom, or at least to his mom’s leaving them. He said, “I’ll be okay. It’s just something I ate, is all.”

  A second or two passed and his father said, “I got food poisoning once. At a Country Kitchen in Casper, Wyoming. I lay in bed for two days thinking I was going to croak.” He laughed.

  Mick let out a little laugh, too. “I’m not planning on doing any croaking.”

  Another silence. “We’re all set to watch TV down there. Wanna come on down? You can have the whole sofa.”

  Mick shook his head. “I think I’ll just lay low.”

  His father took a step back. “You don’t want to take off your coat and put on pajamas or something?”

  “I might do that, yeah,” Mick said, but he didn’t.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Three Selkirks, No Alexanders

  When Mick awakened the next morning he was still wearing his Levi’s and bomber jacket. He’d slept a deep dreamless sleep, and for a second or two he felt normal. Then he remembered and felt his insides closing into itself like a fist. He put his hand to the inside pocket of his jacket and felt the green floppy disk zipped inside. And then the name slammed through his nervous system: Alexander Selkirk.

  Mick had more than once said he hated someone or something—a teacher, say, or TV show, and once he’d even told his mother he hated her—but that was just talk. The hatred he felt for Alexander Selkirk wasn’t talk. It was the actual way he felt, and what he felt was not just intense dislike—it was combined with malicious ideas. Whoever Alexander Selkirk was, Mick wanted him to go away forever and for good. Dropped by a massive heart attack would work, for example. Or maybe dissolved by a terrible flesh-eating disease.

  He didn’t see Nora that morning—when she knocked, he said he was still feeling bad and thought he’d better stay home. If he felt better, he said, he’d go to school later on. After both Nora and his dad left the house, Mick showered, dressed, and walked to school. It was a grim day. He’d forgotten to study for a vocabulary quiz. About an hour after lunch, it began to rain, which made Lisa Doyle’s field hockey iffy. Last period he had to tell Mr. Cruso that he’d lost the second draft of his muckraker paper and hadn’t had time to finish the final draft. Mr. Cruso was nice about it, giving him a week to finish, but Mick was dreading going anywhere near it again. And though it would turn out field hockey practice wasn’t canceled because of the rain, he assumed it was, so he didn’t sight Lisa Doyle all day.

  After school, he bypassed the art wing and took the bus home, sitting by himself in the back. There, as he had at private moments all through the day, he slid his hand inside his jacket and confirmed the presence of the green floppy disk. But this time, when he thought of Alexander Selkirk, he tried to use something he’d learned in journalism class. His teacher, Mr. Clucas, had said that to get to the bottom of any story you always start with The 5 W’s and an H—Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How.

  Okay, Mick thought. Who was Alexander Selkirk? What was he doing messing around with Nora? When and where was he messing around with Nora? Why was she letting him? And how had they kept it from his father?

  Mick stared out the trickly bus window. So he had the questions, he thought. That and a buck would buy you a Whopper. What he needed were the answers.

  At home, out of habit, Mick grabbed a Twinkie twin pack from the pantry, but as he broke the seal its smell made him faintly nauseated, and he threw it into the trash. There was a break in the rain, so he took Foolish to Roosevelt Park and tossed him Frisbees zombielike, without really watching. He threw and he threw and he threw. Finally Foolish trotted back, stopped well short of Mick, dropped the Frisbee, and lay down in the wet grass panting, something Mick had never before seen him do. “Sorry,” he said. “I wasn’t counting.”

  No one was home when he returned. He went upstairs, flipped on the computer, and checked for e-mails. Nothing. He snooped in the trash—nothing there either. But that was the real why question. Why did Nora save the e-mails to begin with? And then why did she dump them in the trash?

  Mick pulled the phone book out of the drawer. There were three Selkirks, but no Alexanders. He dialed the first number and hung up when he got a machine. A woman answered at the second number. “Hi,” Mick said. “I’m a student reporter from the Jemison Tattler and I’m trying to get hold of Alexander Selkirk.”

  “Who?”

  Mick repeated the name.

  “Well,” the woman said, “this is the Selkirk residence, but I don’t know any Alexander.”

  An older man answered the final number. He said, “There is no Alexander Selkirk at this number. But as an alumnus of Jemison High School, may I ask why the student newspaper is after him?”

  Mick, flustered, said he wasn’t at liberty to say and hung up.

  When Mick’s father opened the front door an hour later, he brought with him the smell of pizza. Mick was on the sofa, half watching a “Simpsons” rerun, a good one, the one where Bart’s father eats a blowfish and thinks he has only twenty-four hours to live, but Mick’s mind kept wandering. “Pizza man,” his father announced and when Mick glanced up, his father said, “Vegetarian okay?”

  A joke. His father knew Mick hated vegetarian.

  Mick came over to the table, lifted the cardboard lid, and eyed the pizza—pepperoni and sausage. Mick said, “Guess they’re adding new foods to the veggie column all the time.”

  His father grinned, pulled out his can of beer, and brought out the milk for Mick. “Dive in,” he said.

  Mick was still on his first piece when he said, “Where’s Nora?”

  Through a mouthful of pizza his father said, “Third Friday. Teachers’ night out.”

  They ate for a while in silence. When Mick pushed aside his second slice of pizza only half eaten,
his father said, “Still feeling not quite right, huh?”

  Mick nodded. “Guess not.”

  His father stopped chewing for a second. “Might be flu.”

  The phone rang. It was evidently one of the Shammas brothers, because his father said sure, he could come in for a couple of hours in the morning, and then fell into listening.

  While his father stood with the phone to his ear, Mick found himself looking at him in that strange way again, not as his father but as a man Nora had first chosen and then, for some reason, lost interest in. He was wearing a T-shirt and jeans and work boots. Mick calculated his age: forty-four. He looked sturdy. Mick’s friends’ fathers looked fleshier, weaker, somehow. But they also, Mick realized, looked like they had more money. The way they dressed was part of it, but it was also the way they walked and talked and, he didn’t know, carried themselves. Tonight, when his father hung up the phone and reseated himself at the table, a sentence formed in Mick’s head. Have you heard of somebody named Alexander Selkirk? Mick even half opened his mouth.

  “What?” his father said, evidently sensing Mick had been about to speak.

  Mick blinked. “Oh,” he said. “I was just wondering when Nora would be home.”

  “Late,” his father said. He beamed Mick a big smile. “Which means we could go down to O’Doul’s and play some foosball.”

  Nora telephoned while his father was upstairs.

  “Dad’s in the shower,” Mick said.

  “What?” Nora said. She was almost shouting. Even through the telephone Mick could hear the din behind her. It sounded like a restaurant or bar or something.

  “Dad’s in the shower!” Mick said louder.

  “Wait a second,” Nora shouted. “I’ll call you right back.”

  Thirty seconds later she did. “That better?” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m outside on somebody’s cell phone.”

  “Whose cell phone?” He wondered if it was Alexander Selkirk’s.

  Nora laughed. “I’m not really sure. One of the teachers just handed it to me. So, where’s Mr. Goodwrench?”