It’s nothing. It’s everything.
I don’t remember what I said to my mom before I hung up the phone. The pink and brown walls in the Dunkin’ Donuts blurred together and I felt like I was walking through a tunnel that just got narrower and darker the farther you walked in it and the Dunkin’ Donuts lady had to yell at me three times before I heard her and went over to the counter to collect the breakfast I could no longer eat.
I stepped out into the drizzle, which continued to fall like a hangover from the previous night’s storm, and walked across the parking lot. I climbed into my mom’s car, turned on the ignition, and just sat there, not exactly crying, but breathing in this uneven, gasping way.
I’d gotten home last night just before the credits of Teen Mom 2, which ended at 10:00.
Alexis had been killed by the 9:45 freight train.
I was the last person to see Alexis alive.
Or was I? After all, I didn’t know the exact time I had run into her on the sidewalk. Probably 9:30 or 9:35. But what if it was 9:46? Or 9:50? Or 9:55? What had Aunt Kathy once said? That you can believe in God and ghosts at the same time? Alexis had been walking alone down that dark street, and when we had stopped in the middle of the sidewalk to talk, there was nobody else around. The cold spots—I’d shivered—the cold spots. Maybe, when she’d looked at me with those wide, true brown eyes of hers and said, I know it was you, maybe the train had already struck and she was now crossing to the other side, her waving hand a final sign of farewell before she vanished forever into the company of all the rest of our invisible saints.
PART THREE
WHALE WATCHING
27
I DON’T EVEN WANT TO TALK ABOUT Alexis’s wake.
I don’t want to talk about her little sister, slumped on a chair in the back of the funeral home, twisting Alexis’s violin bow between her shuddering hands, twelve years old and three days into her new life as an only child.
I don’t want to talk about her dad, who stood in the receiving line, dutifully shaking hand after hand, but whose legs were trembling so hard it was like he was willing himself not to run out the door and keep running forever.
I don’t want to talk about her mom, the wet circle her tears left on my shoulder after she hugged me; how she thanked me for the violin money; how even in her grief she was kind enough to pretend that I had always been good to her daughter, that the past three years I’d abandoned her had never happened.
I don’t want to talk about the line that snaked out the door of the funeral home into the parking lot, and all the kids from elementary school who were there, kids who’d gone nine years sitting alongside Alexis in class without ever exchanging a word with her and who now would never get the chance.
I don’t want to talk about the twenty retired Sacred Heart nuns, the ones who made the long journey by Greyhound bus all the way from the mother house in Kentucky, some with walkers, some in wheelchairs, to pray over a girl they’d never met simply because she was an ASH girl, and one of their own.
I don’t want to talk about how beautiful a day it was when they buried her, the sunshine so tastelessly bright, the flowers rudely blooming, the mockery of the chirping birds. Or the park we passed on the way to the cemetery, where mothers pushed their young children on swings and the children laughed, throwing their heads back and drinking in the sun. How dare they laugh? Didn’t they know what had happened? Didn’t they care?
And I don’t want to talk about how much it all hurt, because even an honors English girl like me doesn’t have the language.
A couple days after the funeral, I came home from school to find my mom sitting at the kitchen table with her hands around a mug of coffee.
“Honey?” she said. “Can we talk?”
I sat down.
“It’s been a hard week for you,” she said, putting a mug-warmed hand on top of mine. “A hard couple years.”
“It is what it is.” In the days since I’d heard the awful news, stupid little clichés like these—the enemy of journalism, Ms. Lee had taught us—were all I could think of to say. It was like, the darker and wilder my thoughts grew, the emptier my spoken words became.
“I was thinking,” my mom continued. “I don’t want to make anything harder for you than it already is. But, well, did you know Dad’s birthday is next Wednesday? He’s going to be forty-five.”
“I know.”
“I’m going to go to Nebraska for a few days. It’s a long drive. I could use some company. And it’s been almost three years now since you’ve seen him. He misses you like crazy, Wendy. No matter what he did, he is still your dad.”
“As far as I’m concerned,” I said, echoing the words of the email I had sent him back in December, “I don’t have a father.”
My mom sat back in her chair. The color rose in her cheeks as if she’d been slapped.
“He will always be your father, like it or not,” she said sharply. “That’s what a family is.”
“Can’t I just stay with Aunt Kathy while you’re gone? Or Aunt Col?”
My mom shook her head. “You know Aunt Kathy—she and Simon are swanning off to Palm Springs tomorrow for the rest of the week. And Aunt Col is working overnights. And before you even ask, I am not letting you stay home by yourself. I don’t want you to be alone after all that’s happened.”
I picked at a piece of egg that was crusted onto the tablecloth from breakfast.
“You’ll get to miss a couple days of school,” my mom said hopefully. “Might be good for you just to get away for a while, try to process everything that’s happened?”
I knew that she was right at least about that—I really could use a few days to get my head right. Someone had already placed a little white cross near the tracks at the place where Alexis had been killed. She was really gone, and soon enough, the people who had actually known her would grow older and move out of the neighborhood, and she would become just like Sandy DiSanto or Tiffany Maldonado, a ghost, a superstition, a cautionary tale instead of a real human being whose life had ended and who I had loved. Slumber parties would begin to buzz with new Alexis-related superstitions: If you listened to classical music during a rainstorm, little girls huddled beneath their sleeping bags would whisper, she would appear to you. Bored teenagers would dare one another to stand on the tracks and call her name. Parents would use her as a warning when their kids stepped out the door with their headphones stuffed over their ears. I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t stand the thought of any of it.
“Honey?” my mom said gently. “What do you think?”
“If I say yes,” I said finally, my eyes trained on the smear of egg, “I reserve the right not to talk to him or let him hug me.”
“Fair enough.” She swallowed the last of her coffee and stood up. “Does this anti-hugging policy also apply to your mother?”
“You’re different.”
Her arms around me were like putting a blanket over a fire—they smothered away the hot pain, at least for a little while.
28
THE SUMMER BEFORE MY DAD WAS arrested, we took a family vacation to the West Coast, driving up the 101 from Monterrey to Crescent City, California. I spent the whole week staring out the window of the rental car at craggy cliffs, dense forests, and the glinting sapphire ocean. It was my first time out of the Midwest and I felt like a foreigner in my own country, my head spinning with all this new, exotic beauty.
Of all the little hotels and motels we stayed at along the way, my favorite was a little inn on the Yurok Reservation in Klamath, California. One morning, while mom and Stevie Junior slept in, me and my dad went whale watching along the promenade behind our hotel. It was misty that morning, and the sky smelled like the sea. They didn’t make mornings like this in Chicago. Together we leaned over the fence at the top of the cliff, our faces damp with mist, and suddenly my dad cried out, pointing to a black speck out on the water, “I see one! I see one!” As I craned my neck to look, a member of the Yurok tribe who was
fishing with his kid nearby laughed.
“That’s just a big old rock!” he said, and handed us his binoculars.
“Shit, man! I could’ve sworn that was a whale!” Dad squinted through the binoculars at the waves that crashed against a black boulder.
The man told us that if we heard dogs howling at night it was probably because a bear or some other large mammal was lurking around, and Dad told him about the time when a cougar—“a fucking mountain lion—thing weighed almost two hundred pounds!”—wandered down into the city from somewhere in Northern Wisconsin and ended up strolling down the middle of Hoyne Avenue in the twenty-sixth district “like it owned the place,” and how the cops hadn’t known what to do with it, “so we just shot the fuckin’ thing. Gangbangers, we can handle. Drug dealers, child molesters, murderers—no problem. But a cougar?” He had laughed. “We shot first and asked questions later.”
The Yurok man shook his head.
“No wonder you can’t tell the difference between a whale and a rock,” he said, and turned back to the water.
I thought about the Yurok man’s words now as my mom and I drove west through the endless beige and cloudless blue of the American prairie. The drive from Chicago to Clay County, Nebraska, takes over nine hours, eleven when my mother and her pea-sized bladder are at the wheel. We’d left at sunrise on a cool morning near the end of May and had barely merged onto I-88 before I fell back asleep. I awoke again in the full light of the day when we stopped for gas in a little farm town near the Iowa border. My mom went inside to pee, and as I got out of the car to stretch, looking over the flat plains rising with new corn, what struck me as weird, as totally unbelievable, was not that my father was spending the next decade or two of his life in prison but that he lived in Clay County, Nebraska. After all, Steve Boychuck was Chicago: corrupt, brash, proud, thick-wristed and dark-mustached, full of quick anger and fierce love in equal measure. How could he survive out here in this quiet, polite, decent stretch of America? How could he even make sense?
It was dark by the time we arrived in Clay County, and the sky above the Roadside Inn parking lot was scattered with prairie stars. We checked in, dragged our bags up the metal staircase to our room on the second floor, and walked to the Cracker Barrel for dinner, our jackets whipping in the wind. We were close enough to the highway that we could hear the never-ending whoosh of cars driving back and forth across America. I ordered a grilled cheese; my mom got the meatloaf, but neither of us ate much. When we got back to the hotel, we changed into our pajamas, climbed into our side-by-side beds, and my mom clicked off the light on the nightstand.
“Good night, honey,” she murmured.
“Good night, Mom.”
“Tomorrow is going to be just fine, okay? It’s going to be good.”
“Okay.”
I lay there for a long time, blinking up into the darkness, pretending to sleep and knowing, by the tense stillness emanating from my mom’s bed just a few feet away that she was doing the same thing. Eventually, though, I must have fallen asleep, lulled by the soft moaning of the highway and the wind outside the window.
In the morning, I got dressed in the outfit I’d picked out as appropriate visiting-my-dad-in-jail attire: a plain black blouse, jeans, and a pair of black flats. I wanted him to see that I’d grown up—no pink, no florals, no glitter—but I didn’t want to wear anything too stylish or memorable—nothing that would reveal very much about the person I had become. After I finished getting ready, I lounged on the bed, flipping through the TV channels, while my mom took forever in the bathroom. When she finally emerged, reeking of the jasmine perfume that she barely ever wore anymore, I saw that there was a visiting-my-husband-in-jail outfit, too, and it consisted of tight pants, a bright red top with lipstick to match, and curled, teased hair.
“Are we going to a prison or a salsa dancing class?” I asked, looking her over skeptically.
“I try to dress happy when I visit Daddy,” she snapped, her carefully done-up face collapsing into a pile of hurt. “I think it helps.”
The first thing I learned about prison visits is that everything happens at least an hour after they say it’s going to happen. If you make your visiting appointment for ten a.m., for example, you probably won’t get through security until at least eleven. It was late morning before we got our visitors’ passes, and my mom’s curled hair was already starting to wilt. We had to lock up our purses in a metal cubby, then get patted down, sent through a metal detector, and branded with an invisible stamp on the underside of our wrists. Finally, we were escorted into a green-painted cinder-block room with shiny linoleum floors and a lingering odor of disinfectant and bad breath. We settled down at a table with our approved belongings in front of us: a clear plastic bag of quarters for the vending machines, our IDs, and a harmonica, which the CO had allowed my mom to bring in as Dad’s birthday present only after holding it in the air and shaking it, as if he expected a snowfall of contraband drugs to sift out of the chamber. As we waited quietly for my dad to come out, I passed the time by listening to the nervous chatter of the other inmates’ families and reading the signs posted all over the walls that said things like “KEEP HANDS IN PLAIN VIEW AT ALL TIMES” and “ALL VISITORS MUST REMAIN SEATED” and my personal favorite, “FEMALE VISITORS MUST WEAR BRA AND PANTIES.”
We sat there for about half an hour before Dad finally appeared in the doorway. He was freshly showered—his hair was still damp—and when he stepped toward us, I could smell the harsh detergent of prison soap.
“Wendy,” he said, and the sound of his voice saying my name summoned tears to my eyes. I was wiping them away when he hugged me, which is why I wasn’t able to properly stop him, though it was more of a letting-him-hug-me situation than a mutual hug, and I hoped he could tell the difference.
“You look great, honey,” Mom said brightly, wrapping him in a hug brief enough not to violate prison policy. This was a chipper, well-meaning lie. He did not look great. His arms and shoulders were so bulked up with muscle they strained at the faded orange of his prison shirt, but his face was like one of my English papers after Ms. Lee finished marking it up—scribbles of purple veins across his cheeks, brackets springing out around his gray eyes, deep wrinkles of parentheses enclosing his mouth. How was it possible for him to have puffed up his muscles to the size of a bodybuilder’s, and yet still seem smaller and much, much older? And his hair: Could it really have turned gray like that in a couple years’ time? Could it really have receded that much, revealing a new strip of shiny skin across the crown of his head?
“I’m so sorry about Alexis, Wendy,” Dad began. “I really am. What a goddamn thing, huh?”
“It is what it is,” I said. I wouldn’t look at him.
“She was always a real nice girl.”
“May she rest in peace,” my mom nodded, making a quick sign of the cross.
“Now, see, Bernie,” he said, “I’ve always had an issue with that phrase: ‘Rest in peace.’”
“What are you talking about?” she demanded. “How could anyone have a problem with ‘rest in peace’?” I had to admit it: It was sort of nice to hear the two of them bickering. It reminded me of the before, when our lives were normal.
“Well, it’s fine if someone old dies. Like your mother. Or my mother. They both suffered from cancer for years. They had no peace. They were both almost eighty. But when a young person like Alexis dies? Think about it, Bernie. What sixteen-year-old ever wanted rest? Or peace, for that matter? Sixteen-year-olds want to grab the world by the balls. They want to dance in the goddamn rain. That’s what they want. Do you know what I’m saying, Wendy?”
I bit my lip and concentrated on the patterns in the Formica table. He was right, of course, though I would never give him the satisfaction of agreeing. Alexis had wanted to make her violin sing for the Vienna Philharmonic. She had wanted to see Carmen at the Royal Opera House in London. She had not wanted eternal rest. She had wanted Juilliard and New York and life and life a
nd life.
“I guess I see your point.” Mom pushed the harmonica toward him. “This is for you. Happy birthday, Steve.”
Dad picked up the harmonica and stared at it, wide-eyed, like Mom had just brought him the crown jewels of England or something.
“You always said you wanted to learn,” she said shyly. “And now you have the time.”
“There’s a guy I know in here used to play in a blues band,” he said, turning the instrument over in the palm of his hand. The meaty skin just under his fingers was white with calluses from all the weightlifting he’d been doing. “I wonder if he can teach me ‘Thunder Road.’” He held the harmonica to his lips, puffed out his cheeks, and blew into it, emitting an off-key bleat like a defective party horn.
“Inmate!” boomed a guard, who in two strides made it across the visiting room and hovered at our table, the brown fabric of his crotch level with our eyes.
Dad put down the harmonica and lifted his hands.
“Sorry, pal.”
The guard sauntered back to his position against the wall.
“Jagoff,” he muttered. He grinned at us, revealing his teeth, which were still strong and straight and white. “They don’t let you have much fun in here, these guys.”
I got up and bought us some treats from the vending machine: Oreos, Fritos, Starburst, and a couple cans of Dr Pepper. Dad tore open the Oreos and stuffed one in his mouth.
“I’m pretending that I’m sitting in our kitchen,” he said, spewing little bits of black cookie dust into the air, “and that this is your mother’s homemade Christmas stuffing.”
We don’t have that kitchen anymore, I thought. We lost it because of you. But I didn’t say anything. I just stared out the barred windows at the highway and the flat blue sky. Maybe, maybe, if I ever visited him again, I’d actually talk to him. But for now, my physical presence was all I was willing to give. If I talked, he might think I’d forgiven him. So I just sat there and pretended I wasn’t even listening while he and my mom chattered away about safe topics—registering me for my senior year at Lincoln, my mom’s job at the hospital, Stevie Junior’s shore leave in Cambodia—as if it really was just another family dinner at our kitchen table. Eventually, when they’d run out of things to say to each other, and an awkward silence had settled around the little table, Dad broke out the standard clueless-parent question.
Neighborhood Girls Page 23
