Everything Must Go

by Elizabeth Flock

  When he enters the room he sees Cathy is no longer trying to humor Henry’s mother, who is laughing quite hard. Cathy looks defeated, as though she has already seen their relationship play out start to finish and it’s the finished part she’s on right now.

  “What’s so funny?” Henry asks his mother. But the question is to both of them, hoping to increase his odds of an answer by putting it to two people instead of one.

  Cathy stands. “Um, I’ve got to go.”

  He looks from her to his mother and back at her. “Let’s go upstairs.” He holds his hand out for her, to lead her away. But they only make it as far as the hall.

  “Actually I’m just going to take off,” she says, pulling her jacket off the coatrack.

  “Okay, okay,” Henry says. “Let me grab my car keys.” He knows they’re in his pocket but uses this as an excuse to go back into the den.

  He squats in front of his mother, now collapsed back into the couch, back into her haze as if the five minutes she spent socializing with Cathy had wrung her out.

  “What did you say to her?” he hisses at his mother, inches from her face.

  “Henry, I’m going to walk,” Cathy calls from the front hall. “You don’t need to drive me. I’m going to take off now.”

  “Wait,” he says.

  She is halfway down the front walk when he reaches her.

  “Cathy, wait up,” he says, getting in front of her, blocking her path. “Can you just—can you just hold on a second?”

  She shifts her weight from one leg to another. “Yeah?”

  “Look, I don’t know what my mother said to you back there,” Henry says. He is hoping she will just come out with it so he knows what to refute, where to begin, but she is silent. So he continues, “But, you know, um, my mom’s like psycho kind of. I mean, not psycho like she’s going to kill someone in a shower or something. Just, you know, not, like, normal. So if she said…”

  He trails off with the instant realization that what he most feared has actually come to pass. The thought quickens his heartbeat and his panic reaches fox-limb-gnawing proportions.

  Cathy says, “I just have to go home, that’s all.”

  “Cathy, wait,” Henry says, his breathing shallow. He is walking backward step for step with her forward movement. “Seriously, can we just talk? Can you just tell me what’s wrong?”

  “Henry, move,” Cathy says, trying to step around him. “I’ve got to get going.”

  “But…”

  “Seriously,” she says. “I just have to go. Take it easy.”

  She darts around him and speed-walks away, hugging her purse to her side like a nervous American tourist on a cobble-stoned Italian street.

  He watches her until she has turned the corner and then he stalks up his front walk into the den.

  His mother is still on the couch, still clutching her glass, but now her head is tilted back, mouth ajar.

  Henry pries the glass from her hand and sets it on the side table. He is so furious he purposely does not put it on a coaster.

  She does not stir when he forklifts her up into his arms. Her head—mouth still wide open—falls back. Dead weight.

  “You told her,” Henry says. The impulse to cry folds into anger like a coal mine caving in. “You told her.” He is speaking to her but really just to himself since she is unconscious. “I swear to God, Mom. Jesus.”

  She’s lost weight, he thinks to himself, noting that carrying her isn’t as difficult tonight as it’s been in the past. She must have lost weight.

  He lays her on the bed alongside his father but shakes the bed when he stumbles into it while extricating himself.

  “David?” His father’s voice is hoarse with sleep.

  And just like that Henry belly flops. It takes a moment for the air to reenter his lungs.

  “No, Dad,” he manages, “it’s me, Henry.”

  His father, though, has slipped back into sleep. He won’t remember, Henry thinks. He won’t remember his mistake. It wouldn’t matter if he did, though. It’s not like he’d say anything about it, anyway, Henry thinks. He is reassured by the fact that it does not happen that much anymore, anyhow, being confused for his dead brother.

  But oh how it hurt at first. Hearing the name was bad enough, but seeing the wave of disappointment and grief when he entered a room—living proof that he was not in fact David Powell but Henry Powell—to know that the mere sight of him brought this tidal wave of nausea…that was excruciating.

  Brad wasn’t there when it happened. He was at his baseball game. Or somewhere, Henry couldn’t remember that part. His father was working late. His mother was in the kitchen making meat loaf. Show late 1960s, early 1970s house, the screenwriter jots down in the margin. Mother with the apron on, a cigarette perched on the edge of an ashtray on the kitchen table. Raw meat on the counter, he scribbles, adding a note to look up other ingredients so he can set the scene.

  But I only remember what was happening upstairs, in the bathroom, Henry tells the screenwriter. That’s why we’re such a good team, the screenwriter says. You say what you saw and I’ll take care of the rest. Just trust me, he tells Henry. Don’t worry about it. Go on.

  Where was I? Henry thinks. Oh, yeah. The bathtub.

  He stops. The image shrivels up.

  Oh, no. Not this again. The screenwriter is shaking his head and leans in toward Henry. Hey, kid, he is saying. Hey, listen to me: it happens all the time. Kids taking baths…you look away for just a second—

  Stop. Henry says this out loud. Stop. Just stop, okay? I don’t want to think about it.

  Okay, okay. I’ll take over, the screenwriter says. Just relax and let me tell it.

  Seven-year-old Henry had wanted to make up for the fact that he had helped Brad put firecrackers in Mr. and Mrs. Rockton’s mailbox. The box was knocked clear off the wooden stake to which it had been nailed. Mr. and Mrs. Rockton demanded an apology—and got one—but it was their mother’s anger that concerned Henry. She shook her head and grimaced all the way back into their house.

  He thought cleaning his younger brother up would make their mother happy. Get him back into her good graces.

  Little David is always getting into something. That is what Henry heard his mother telling neighbors time and again. Just trying to keep up with his brothers, she’d say. They’d all chuckle and marvel at the adventures of the Powell boys. David the fearless and dirty one.

  Especially that day. May 13. It was a warm day and the boys were outside for most of it. Henry had not wanted to blow up the Rocktons’ mailbox but Brad had ratcheted his arm up high behind his back and told him if he didn’t do it he’d die. Plus Henry had nothing better to do, really. So the firecrackers were fetched from the shoe box under Brad’s bed and matches were swiped from their mother’s purse.

  The explosion was not as gratifying as they had hoped. Mostly smoke snaked out of the opening. All in all a bust if you asked Henry. But Brad liked it. “Cool,” he said before running off to God knows where. Leaving Henry to face their mother and angry Rocktons.

  David’s being dirty only added to her misery. So Henry saw his way of making amends in the way all middle children try to apologize for their too-troublesome older siblings and their too-trouble-free younger ones.

  He had taken care to get the temperature right, cool enough for his little brother, not hot like he himself liked it. David allowed him to soap his little body up, splashing and laughing at the attention. But Henry had not counted on the fact that David would not want to stay put in the water for very long. To keep him there long enough to get the suds off his head, Henry went to fetch a toy from his brother’s room, one that might create enough of a distraction.

  On television Henry had seen amazing feats: an average-size man lifting a whole car up with his own two hands; a kung-fu chop breaking a cement block in two. He had always imagined that in a real emergency he, too, would have superhuman strength. But David’s sodden, upside-down body was so heavy, it took some
doing to pull him up and over the edge of the tub. When Henry flipped David right-side up on the bath mat, he knew his brother was dead because even though David’s eyes were open, he wasn’t blinking.

  The last thing Henry remembers from that day is choking back vomit long enough to call out for his mother. Neighbors later spoke of hearing her scream but Henry never could conjure up the sound. Nor did he recall the ambulance, the people rushing in and out, his mother’s wailing. He had heard about it later but could not picture any of it.

  The days and weeks that followed were snapshots in his mind. Cluttered night tables, filled with pill bottles on his mother’s side. Doors opening and closing. Food appearing and disappearing.

  And Henry being called David.

  Chapter eleven

  1978

  “I must say I was surprised to get your phone call,” Mr. Beardsley says. “Not that I wasn’t thrilled, mind you. Once people hear you’re back we’ll have a steady stream of customers. Why don’t you take this long locker? It’s over here so there’ll be a bit more privacy. And I’ve had a new lock installed on the bathroom door, just so you know. I got your call and you know the first thing I did? I made a copy of my key. See, otherwise you’d have to go out and get the communal key I keep under the register. But this way you have your own key to the restroom. The executive washroom, ha. I’ll leave you to get settled in. Take your time coming out onto the floor.

  “Oh, and Henry? Welcome home.”

  Henry pulls out the folding metal chair from the tiny round table Mr. Beardsley has set up—another change since he left nearly five months ago. This table used to be folded up in the corner, he thinks. And then he remembers that it was used for his going-away party, for the sheet cake that read Good Luck, Henry! He sits down and leans forward, resting his elbows on the table. After a moment his forearms fold down and he lowers his head onto the pillow they create.

  The scene enters his mind and disappears, the way a shard of eggshell eludes a fingertip, pushing farther into the glop of raw egg as the intensity to retrieve it builds.

  Finally Henry lets it play from the beginning.

  “So this is effective starting the day winter break officially begins, which is the day after tomorrow,” the dean said. “I know I’m repeating myself but the devil’s in the details. We’ll need a good four weeks’ notice to reactivate the scholarship, remember. Let me just get you to sign there, on that line there, and then initial on the next page just confirming I told you about reactivation. There. Great.”

  “Thanks,” Henry said, sliding the paperwork back across the desk where the dean neatly stapled it all together.

  “No problem. This should be nice and smooth. I’m assuming you’ve taken care of things in the sports complex. I’m sure they’ll want you to turn in your lock and locker number and so forth? That’s frankly out of my area but I’m sure…”

  “I’m doing that after this,” Henry said.

  “Good, good. Now, you have a safe trip home, Henry. And you take care of yourself. Don’t be a stranger. And don’t forget about the notice we’ll need. We’ll be seeing you back here in no time.”

  The dean’s smile was matched by Henry’s but the difference in the two was marked on that cold December day. Henry’s mouth was turned up but his eyes were dead.

  The door to the dean’s office closed behind him and he exhaled and soldiered on to the sports complex. The wind nearly knocked him off balance, its gusts were so strong. And its direction annoyingly unpredictable, like a child playing a prank by tapping first one shoulder then the other. It pushed him from behind, a signal, he had thought—even then at that precise moment he thought—this is a good thing. The wind seemed to be encouraging him along the footpath: this is the right thing, Henry Powell. But then, after a momentary lull, it came full force from the front, assaulting him. You only think you’re going to get there, it said. Not on my watch. Sideways directions were harder for him to interpret. What did it mean? he wondered. He trudged along the shoveled footpath that snaked back and forth across the snow-covered quad. Henry always felt like a dolt walking on this path, so he usually walked on the grass, weather permitting. Why not just pour the concrete in a straight line from point A to point B? To Henry it is a “lions and tigers and bears, oh my” path. Dorothy finding her way across the poppy fields to the Emerald City. Which is exactly what the sports complex had represented to Henry only months earlier when he arrived as a freshman. Now it loomed. On that day, in the middle of finals, it sneered, the building did. “Quitter,” it said to him. As if the sports complex (the plex they’d called it, he and his fellow teammates), almost as if it had overheard his phone conversation the previous week.

  “I found a ride,” Henry had called his father to say. “The bulletin board at the campus post office has lots of notices on it for ride shares and I hooked up with this guy who lives in my dorm. He’s going farther south but he’s taking 95 so it’s perfect. He doesn’t mind dropping me.”

  “That’s good,” Edgar Powell said. “What kind of car does he drive?”

  “How should I know?” Henry says. There is silence on the other end of the phone. Breathing fills the air. Finally an intake of oxygen and this:

  “I wonder if he has enough room,” his father says. Henry waits for the thought to complete itself. The explanation to become clear.

  “I’m thinking you’d best pack up most of your things, son. Just to be on the safe side.”

  “What?”

  “Please don’t take a tone with me, young man,” his father says. After a moment he scales back on his sharpness. “This is not easy for me, Henry.”

  “What’s not easy? What’s going on?”

  “My asking you to come home.”

  “I’m coming home,” Henry says. His jaw relaxes on hearing that his father is simply worried he might decide to spend the holidays with friends, as he had threatened to do on a particularly stilted pre-Thanksgiving phone call. “I just told you, I arranged a ride and everything.”

  “That’s not what I mean, Henry,” his father says.

  “What do you mean, then?”

  “I mean I have to ask you to leave school and come home. For a while.”

  They are tiny specks, the holes in the phone receiver. It is hard to believe, Henry thinks, that they can suck all the oxygen out of a dormitory room. But that is exactly what they must have done because Henry gasps for air. One gasp but still.

  “Henry?” the voice is coming from his hand. Henry’s hand is still holding the phone but not up to his ear as it was doing only moments ago.

  “Henry, are you there?”

  He imagines his arm is mechanical. Bionic. A crank winding it up into place, adjusting for angle and comfort. Finally the phone is in place on the side of his face, matching nicely with the protruding of his ear. He pictures the Six Million Dollar Man running in slow motion because the naked eye would not be able to see him otherwise. And Jaime Sommers, who can squeeze and collapse a tennis ball with her bare hand. The two of them with those bionic hands. Just like Henry’s, now clutching a phone to his head.

  “Yeah, I’m here,” he says into the phone.

  “This isn’t easy, Henry,” his father is saying. “But your mother isn’t well and…”

  “She’s never been well,” Henry says, aware that his father is probably bristling at the increased volume. “She’s never been well, Dad. Since when is that anything new? Ever since…”

  “Stop,” his father says. “Don’t you dare talk about your mother that way. Stop that.”

  “Dad…”

  “I’m not saying it’s forever. But just to be on the safe side you’d best bring most of your things home this trip.”

  “Dad…”

  “That’s it, Henry. That’s all I will say on the topic.”

  “But…”

  After he’d replaced the phone into the receiver he realized neither of them had mentioned Brad. The very idea of Brad returning home—to this
unnamed and unappealing drama—was ludicrous. Brad’s name conjured up slamming doors, strewn trash and stereos at catastrophically high volumes. Anger. Pure, deep anger.

  The worst was years ago when Brad yelled out, “Why don’t you just say it? Huh? Just say it—you wish it was me that drowned, not him. Say it! See? I knew it. You can’t even look at me.” Henry looked at his parents and saw that Brad was right. They had both turned their heads. They hadn’t denied his accusations. They hadn’t told him to check your attitude, young man like they always said to Henry. They hadn’t even told him to be quiet. They just looked away. Until Brad, raging and squeezing his eyes against tears, stalked out of the living room. One by one they peeled away: his mother lurched out of the room. He heard the kitchen faucet come on and then off a few seconds later, just long enough to fill a glass with water to wash the pills down. His father heard it, too, but pretended he didn’t as he left through the other doorway that led from the living room into the front hall. Henry heard the door to the study seal itself shut. Henry climbed the stairs to his room and sat on the edge of the bed. He remembers staring at the poster of C-3P0 and R2-D2, admiring the shine on 3P0’s gold suit of armor, his robot arm draped—if that is possible for a robot arm to do—lovingly on top of R2-D2’s dome head. Brotherly, he thought. That arm looks brotherly.

  After that Henry and his parents tiptoed around Brad. None of the Powells could risk another explosion like that. No sirree.

  He raises his head from the edge of the table and sits up in the chair, stretching his back before standing. “Let’s do this,” he says out loud to himself before opening the door that leads back out to the store. The same thing he said to himself before games, on the trek out the tunnel to the field. As the door opens into the belly of Baxter’s he imagines the same roar of the crowd that always greeted the team as they hit the university field. That stadium, those cheers, the dial-tone roar that remained steady throughout games…all of it equaled adrenaline. Baxter’s is transformed: jackets chanting the fight cheer, pants echoing and clapping. Sportswear would most certainly start the wave. That’s sportswear for you, he thinks. Up ahead, the end zone. The doors to the outside world. His day will be spent trying to score a touchdown, the doors flying open, releasing him to a triumphant dance, spiking the ball on the pavement, arms raised in victory. The rush of the applause deafening.