The Great Jeff

by Tony Abbott

  CHAPTER 46

  THE HOUSE ON HARRISON STREET

  A few afternoons later, I was in the backyard again, looking at the black trees. The backyard was my place, separate from inside. Tom mostly respected that I needed a space, and outside was it. Night was coming. It was frigid, with the smell of mid-December snow inside the clouds.

  Tom was doing something in our room. I didn’t know what until he came out and sat in one of the plastic chairs on the edge of the patio stones, kicked his feet onto the gray lawn, and gave out a breath that hung over his head like a cloud.

  “Jessica called,” he said. “I told her what’s going on, what we’ve been up to.”

  I couldn’t sit. I couldn’t do anything but stand there. “About me?”

  “Yeah. She said good. That it was good. She meant it.”

  I nodded. “Tell me next time she calls, or you call her. I should…”

  “Sure.” He looked up into the dark. “Gah. It’s freezing out here! Don’t you want a coat? I’m going inside. Here, take—”

  “Don’t start giving me stuff. More stuff.”

  The sound of the parkway was a high white noise behind everything. Crows, a few of them, came winging out of the night, black patches skimming the dark air. We tried to watch them, but the sky was already too black and deep to trace their flight.

  “They stay,” he said. “So many other birds get out of here in the winter. But these crows stay. They’re called resident crows, did you know that?”

  Inside, Tom’s mother and father finished chopping vegetables and in my mind I heard a hiss from the stove as they dropped them into a pot of hot water. Mr. B was doing a lot more cooking since Mrs. B had found a job. I think he liked it. Sometimes he wore an apron.

  “Speaking of money,” Tom said, as usual, completely out of nowhere, “I told my parents I’ll switch to public school, if they want. Plus, you can introduce me to this Hannah person.”

  “Never gonna happen.”

  I was actually planning to buy her lunch the next day. I saw her face in my mind and heard her voice, reciting the last chapter like she did in the library. I turned to him.

  “What if I never find a place?”

  His words were out before I could stop them. “You already have a—”

  “Please don’t tell me it’s here. I’ll kick you.” His face was half in the shadow of the kitchen light. “We all know this is just a stop. Just a… bump.”

  “You can stay as long as you want.”

  “Your parents don’t want that. I don’t want it.”

  I was going to say something, repeat myself maybe, but my words caught in my throat. I didn’t want to lie to him. I wouldn’t stay here long and I couldn’t. If I wasn’t stuck here, then I was the opposite, a boat adrift, wondering where I might end up.

  Tom could imagine next summer, four years from next summer, college, all that would come then, and this would still be home for him. I wasn’t in any of those imaginings. Where would I be?

  “It’s good enough for now, right?” he said. “It’s pretty cool, isn’t it? Our room. The bunk beds?”

  I didn’t answer, looking off to the dark mesh of trees. A single white flake wandered down, then another, then a few.

  “Your place will be wherever you are,” he said finally.

  I nearly snorted on him. “Does that even make sense?”

  “I could probably figure a way that it would,” he said.

  “Don’t strain your brain.”

  “Yeah, I should save it.”

  I won’t tell you that Christmas came and the weather broke and the sun shone all January and Mr. Maroni gave me an A and Hannah became my girlfriend and Tom went back to being my sidekick and Mom was hired by the rehab clinic because she was so awesome. No. It actually snowed every other week through the end of February, totaling over three feet. There were nasty car accidents on the parkway because of it. One guy died on Christmas Day. Mom’s problems didn’t clear up right away either. It turns out you can’t shake alcohol so easily. I never saw Hannah again after eighth grade, believe it or not, because Mom and I moved upstate where it was cheaper to live. Tom visited once and plans to again. Mom works at a walk-in emergency clinic now and once saved a little girl’s life. It balances out.

  But all that’s another story, nowhere near its end.

  And that night on the patio when those lazy snowflakes fell? The night Tom and I were shivering out there together?

  The whole sky opened and snow burst down heavy and thick and sudden.

  We stood outside the house I belong but do not belong to and watched the flakes for a while, when a ladle or something clattered suddenly to the floor, and Tom’s dad banged on the window with his palms, said something with a high laugh we didn’t quite get, and Tom ran up the back steps.

  “You coming?” he asked.

  “In a bit,” I said, and he went in.

  I like snow. Now I do. I can choose to stay out in it or not. No one’s forcing me to decide. It’s up to me what I do. I make my own junk. The day I stood outside Mom’s hospital room, choosing when to go in, I understood that. I understand it more each day.

  Looking up into the heavily falling flakes I wondered if I would go anywhere. Be different enough from what I am now that I would be better. I didn’t hate everything about myself, not really. I liked that I was quieter, which was new, maybe thinking a little more before I opened my mouth. That seemed a good start.

  Tom tapped on the steamy window and made a face. “Jeff. Get in here!”

  I went in. I did.

  But in that split second when you’re on the step between inside and out, half in the bright kitchen, half in the dark of the yard, it flashes through your mind how the cold can bite into your back, and icy flakes can sting your neck, and your fingers can tingle and stiffen on the door handle, and how it’s warm and dry inside the house and it’s pulling you into it, but you can linger as long as you want on the step, and if you go inside, you go inside because you decide to, you decide when and how to, and I chose to go in right then, at that moment, as clouds of steam surrounded me in room after room, every one of them smelling of soup.

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  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Some years ago I was in my town’s public library and saw a boy at a table, leaning back in his chair and reading a book. He was alone, concentrating, as still as a statue. A common enough scene. It was after school and there might have been twenty or forty other students doing the same. What was particular about this boy, his expression, his attitude in the chair, I can’t now recall, but in one of those strange moments that afflict (and bless) writers, I said, “That’s Jeff Hicks.”

  The story of Firegirl, years old at that point, hadn’t remotely been on my mind, but I suppose its characters Tom Bender and Jeff Hicks had never left the building. Whether this boy in the library stood up and returned the book to the shelf, or whether I later imagined he did, I no longer remember, but his reshelving of the book prompted a question: If he’s engaged in it, which he clearly seems to be, why doesn’t he just check it out? The answer came quickly: He can’t bring it with him.

  In that brief moment, The Great Jeff was born.

  I want to thank my editor Alvina Ling for her brilliant work here and in Firegirl, and for being open and even enthusiastic about a companion novel after more than a dozen years. I truly believe she loves these characters as much as I do. Many thanks also go to Nikki Garcia for her art in helping shape the narrative as an independent story with a heart all its own.

  I am supremely grateful to Carla Miklos, executive director of Operation Hope of Fair
field (operationhopect.org), whose selfless and invaluable work in that agency provides housing and access to services for men, women, and families in unstable living situations. Her efforts to locate permanent accommodations to end the cycle of homelessness in my community create hope for all young people like Jeff. Carla’s gracious generosity in discussing the center and in touring Operation Hope’s facilities with me have made this a better book. The shelter appearing in these pages is not their shelter, and any inaccuracies and fictional liberties taken in describing it are, of course, mine alone.

  I am thankful to Jeffrey McHugh for taking time out of his busy schedule as dean of students at fairfield Woods Middle School to talk with me about homeless students and about the safety net of awareness and services in his school, services available to anyone confronting issues surrounding unstable housing. I have known Jeff McHugh, man and boy, for nearly six decades, and it’s a great comfort knowing that an advocate of such sensitivity, eloquence, and grace has made the dignity and well-being of our young people his life’s work.

  My thanks must also go to Susan Costa, school counselor at Fairfield Woods, for describing the avenues of care offered to and provided for students in any kind of personal situation that affects their emotional health and happiness. Susan is another soul who helps maintain a system of response and aid with a single goal: the success of each student during his or her time in the school’s care.

  Conquering the fear and misplaced shame of using school or public aid services is something Jeff Hicks’s mother, and indeed Jeff himself, battle with. Certainly every community is different, but even a brief look into the network of social services suggests that armies of good people are out there waiting to help our young people achieve the best life possible. Simply finding out about the many types of physical and emotional help available is the true first step.

  My wife, Dolores, my daughters, Jane and Lucy, and my daughter-in-law, Sue, are inspirations every single day. Writing can often seem a detached activity, lonely and isolated, but having a loving family like mine is proof that the effort to create life on the page is a deeply emotional and spiritual business, wholly part of the continuum of family life.

  A word about Mr. Maroni’s book choices, his four short classics. Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse is as beautiful and heartbreaking and iconic as a photo by Walker Evans, and I have loved it for years. Of Mice and Men, well, John Steinbeck doesn’t need my praise, but he has it. Stark and brutal, deep as a river, and slim as a dagger. The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros is a poetic gem whose threads of language and whose moods and colors and vivacity come together in a perfect masterpiece, a touchstone for so much more than it is in this humble story. My hope, of course, is that readers will leap from here to Mango and devour it. Pobby and Dingan by Ben Rice. I bought this book years ago in a bookstore in Cape Cod mainly because it was short and I was completely shattered by its humanity and bright tragic humor, and by the fact that no one seems to know this brilliant miniature. This is Mr. Rice’s first and only novel and I might be persuaded to trade every one of my hundred to have written it. I love this book, and I will keep telling readers about it.

  Overall, I am deeply grateful to the many readers who have kept the characters of Firegirl alive for so many years. I hope this new installment will work its way into their hearts as well.