Finding Joy

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Finding Joy Page 18

by Laurie Woodward


  But he’d never gone after all of us like that.

  When the sounds woke me around midnight, I knew right away what they were. I’d heard crashes like that ever since Mom had married Ronny. I used to cover my ears, waiting for it to be over so I could steal into the hall bathroom to soak a washcloth with cold water. Then, when Mom came in and closed the door behind her, I could dab at her face or shoulder.

  “A call at my office? Why can’t you do your fucking job?” Ronny’s voice came through the door.

  “She’s just confused.”

  “No, she’s a drugged-out whore!”

  The office school called Ronny about the rally? Shit. Why did I trip at school?

  “Shut-up, asshole!

  “Don’t tell me what to do, you fucking bitch.”

  I heard muffled rumbling and a slam. Mom’s cry. “Fuck you!”

  I started to cover my ears, but then a thump and another slam jolted me out of bed. I peeked through the door crack at the darkened hallway. At the end, something was shaking.

  I knew what it was. But still headed toward it. Cocked a futile ear. It didn’t stop.

  My insides turned to water. Swallowing hard, I clutched my gut and inched forward.

  Kyle was already in the hallway by the time I got to the master bedroom. With his door right across from theirs, it must have sounded even louder to him. His eyes were Night of the Living Dead dark circles, begging me to do something.

  “Bitch!” Another crash.

  I pushed Kyle behind me and knocked on their door.

  Another thud. Followed by a muffled cry. Mom’s voice.

  Knocked louder.

  The door stayed closed.

  I glanced back at my baby brother, who was clenching and unclenching his fists. He looked even smaller than he had a moment before. I blinked, wondering if fourteen-year-olds could shrink.

  Work, brain!

  Setting my jaw, I pounded. Still no response. Kicked at the door. Kyle came up by my side and joined me. We hammered so hard, I was sure we’d soon splinter wood, a desperate rhythm that no composer would ever use.

  Another whimper came from inside.

  I jiggled the knob. Locked. Yanked harder. Pushed Kyle out of the way and ran for the door.

  And fell into Ronnie’s gut.

  He only stared for a moment before grabbing me by the hair. As he swung me in an arc, he screeched, “Go the fuck to bed!”

  My back hit the wall and I fell to my knees.

  A screaming Kyle leapt at Ronnie and wrapped both arms and legs around his torso like one of those sad monkeys in science experiments. “Leave-them-alone!” he said, through clenched teeth.

  Ronny backed up, smashing Kyle into the wall. My baby brother unclenched his jaw and released his grip.

  When he slid down to the floor, I thought Ronnie would stop for sure. He never went after Kyle. It was like Kyle had this special glow to him—heavenly angel or superstar spotlight or something. And he did stop for a sec. Kind of stared confused at his son.

  Then his eyes went red. I knew what was coming next and started to crawl forward.

  But was too late.

  By the time I reached Kyle, Ronnie had already lifted him over his head and tossed him back toward his room. Kyle bounced off the bed, a weird circus act. He landed on the floor with a sickening crunch. And did not move.

  “Kyle?” I croaked, pushing past Ronnie toward the crumpled heap that was my brother.

  His arm was twisted in a weird position and his breath came in short gasps. It sounded like his lungs had shriveled and now could barely hold air. I reached out and stroked his hair.

  “Joy?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It hurts.”

  I swallowed a big lump in my throat. “Sorry.”

  “Look at what you did,” Ronnie growled. “Should have left well enough alone.” He kneeled and reached out, but Kyle shrank from his grasp.

  Mom appeared, loose bathrobe belt dragging on the ground. I didn’t dare look at her face. “Baby?”

  “Mom.” Kyle stretched his good hand toward her.

  She squeezed it, then ran her fingers over his forearm. He cried out. “It’s broken,” she said in a distant voice. “But it’ll be okay. We’ll get you to the doctor.”

  Only now did I look at her. Disheveled hair. Split lip. Right eye almost swollen shut. She couldn’t go out like that.

  “Get your keys, Ronnie. We gotta go to the hospital.” The words didn’t seem to come from my mouth but from some stranger wearing my face as a mask.

  While Mom wrapped Kyle’s shoulders in the baby blanket he’d had since he was little, I ran to my room and threw on some jeans and a tee.

  Cradling his arm, Mom led my sobbing little brother toward the car and onto the velvet back seat. Then she just stood there, hands extended.

  “I’ll take care of him. I got this, okay?” I gently unclenched Mom’s hand from under Kyle’s arm and got in beside him.

  Mom’s good eye was a hollow socket as she closed the door.

  Ronny said nothing, but turned the ignition and pulled out of the garage slower than coagulating blood.

  During the silent ride to the hospital, Kyle kept his eyes closed against the pain while I stared at the little trucks and cars on the faded blankie. They dipped and bobbed with each hollow in the road as if trying to drive off the blanket. I watched one and imagined that it escaped the fabric and rolled out the window.

  Toward the twinkling lights of some distant and empty street.

  Forty-Eight

  Joy

  Kyle’s changed. Not like his hair or anything. More like who he is. I mean, he used to race around from sports to school and then home, doing a million things, a life joined together like one of the trippy little puzzles he loves to do. I don’t know how he ever was able to put the pieces together and keep going. If I tried to do half the shit he usually did in a week, I’d be so confused, I wouldn’t know which way was up. But he somehow finds the subtle shades, matches them, and locks them all together. Until it’s one whole picture.

  But now the pieces are all mixed up. More like how I do a puzzle, a few pieces here, a few there, but most of it stays in the box.

  His cast has been on for three weeks now and all his buds signed it. Grandma even came to visit; brought him this thousand-piece jigsaw of a winding road twisting off toward a farm. It had pretty trees and looked like a real challenge.

  He didn’t even open it.

  Not that I blame him. I mean, one thousand pieces? That’d take forever. And with so many autumn colors, I don’t know how you could ever find the ones that fit together. I wouldn’t want to try, but Kyle had been into all kinds of puzzles forever. Rubik’s Cube. Those metal twisty ones. Jump the Peg I.Q. tester. And he usually won. He never gave up until he conquered them.

  He did look at that box sometimes. Stared at the winding road as if dreaming he was there. Maybe he was in his mind. I can relate. I go to places, too. Catalina. The ocean. Tripping into music. My writing.

  Yesterday, he was holding the box in his lap when I glanced over his shoulder. “Gonna give it a try?”

  He ran a finger up the road toward the farmhouse. “What would it be like to live there?”

  I leaned in. “Probably boring, no TV or anything. But maybe they’d have animals in the barn.”

  “A hay loft you could sit in. Up away from everything,” Kyle said.

  “That might be cool.” I knew what he really meant, but I didn’t say. If you don’t talk about It, It’s not so real. It becomes the story you tell the doctors. The story for Grandma. The story for school.

  “These damn kids were fighting,” Ronnie had told the nurse who’d filled in the paperwork. “Wrestling on the bed. Joy got out of hand. Kyle fell.”

  The nurse had glared at me like I was some kind of monster. She shook her head. “You are so much bigger than him.”

  I’d wanted to open my mouth in protest. Tell her it wasn’t me, it was
Ronnie. But I did what Mom always did; I put on a mask and lied.

  I met her gaze with an open stare. “Sorry,” I said, before remembering to lower my head in shame.

  Of course, everyone believed him. And I became the-girl-who-broke-her-brother’s-arm. Somehow it got out. Kids at school started to give me a wide berth. Mrs. Plante pulled me aside and asked if I needed to talk to the school counselor.

  Sure, I’ll tell her all about MY anger issues. How I have such a terrible temper that I have to beat up my brother in the middle of the night.

  Still, if I hadn’t fucked up so high on Valium that I jumped on stage, the school wouldn’t have called Ronny’s office. I was always doing stupid stuff like that. What was wrong with me?

  “I got two more signatures,” Kyle said, changing the subject. He held up his arm and sure enough, the blank space near his elbow now had two more ninth grade scrawls on it. Two more puzzle pieces over an arm that was trying to knit back together.

  “Rad.” I looked around his room. Books were strewn about and his blue plaid comforter was all wrinkled, halfway falling on the floor. Since he’d broken his arm, Mom hadn’t been so strict about making the bed.

  Up on the shelf, the Hulk, Batman and some other superheroes stood guard. They looked so strong, all ready to come to the rescue. I wanted to yell at them, “Where were your superpowers THAT night?”

  “Come on, let’s do this. Then you can show off, make me look like a dork,” I suggested, taking the box from his lap and dumping the contents on the floor.

  We both stared at all those pieces strewn over the blue carpet. A thousand cuts in a peaceful sky.

  And started to put them together.

  Forty-Nine

  Kyle

  What’s up with Joy being so nice to me? I’m not a baby. Or crippled. Just got a broken arm. And that’s almost better. Going to get my cast off in two weeks.

  I hope.

  Yeah, she asks me if I want to do something all the time. Along with Mom, who seems to think that Chips Ahoy knit bones.

  Although they do taste pretty good dipped in milk.

  “Not hungry,” I told Mom this afternoon when she shook the cookie bag again.

  Then I felt bad because she got that look. You know, the one like a dog gets when you stop playing catch? I almost grabbed one to eat right there in the family room, but Dad walked in and I pulled my hand back.

  Dad likes strong boys. Not softies that eat cookies all day.

  Dad cleared his throat, ruffled my hair. “Hey, kiddo, almost ready to get back on the court?”

  I nodded; told him I was. Waited to answer the next question. Dad cleared his throat again. His eyes fell on Joy, who was on the couch, nose in a book. “What the hell are you wearing?”

  “Tube top.”

  “Iris, what sort of a mother buys slutty clothes for her daughter? Are you trying to turn her into a whore?”

  “I-uh, got it for camp. For the beach… it… I mean…”

  Ronny turned to Joy. “Change. Now.”

  “Why? It’s not like I have anything to cover up.”

  Kind of agreed with Joy there. She almost looked like a boy up top.

  “I don’t care if you have the tiniest titties in town. No one in my family is going to go out of this house dressed like that.”

  “Try and stop me.” She crossed her arms.

  Standing over her, Ronny pulled his fist back and held it there. I swallowed hard. Started shaking.

  Joy looked like she was ready to fight. But then her eyes landed on my cast. She dropped her book and ran into her room.

  Dad turned to Mom. “See what some fucking discipline does? You might try it some time with your kid.”

  Mom nodded super-fast while I reached for the cookie bag. And ate two.

  They tasted stale.

  Fifty

  Joy

  Lisa plopped down next to me on the grass. “Got a cig?” she asked.

  I tapped a Marlboro out of the package and handed it to her. She pulled out her steel Zippo, flipped it open, and raised her eyebrows twice, signaling that the trick she’d been working on for months was coming. Next, Lisa raised her hand dramatically and brought it down while snapping her fingers to strike the flint wheel with her middle one. When the wick burst into flame, she grinned like a Kindergartner whose coloring page had just been put up on the fridge.

  “You got it,” I said. “Props.”

  “It’s nothing.” She blew a long column of smoke.

  Not to be outdone, I raised my own lit cigarette to my lips and pulled in a long draught. Then I blew a series of smoke rings and am stoked to say I even managed to get two inside another.

  “So, seen Janice?” I asked, flicking some ash onto the grass.

  “I have and I know what you’re going to ask next, so don’t even go there because she hasn’t said anything to me about getting her ticket.”

  “Why don’t you go, then? It’s going to be the most rad concert ever. Like Woodstock.”

  “You know I can’t. That weekend is my parents’ twentieth anniversary. Big party. Remember I invited you?”

  “Yeah, but this is like a once in a lifetime chance. When else will you be a senior rocking out to the coolest bands of your generation?”

  “And this is also the last year I’ll be at home and able to spend time with the folks for their special day.”

  “Just because you’re in college doesn’t mean that you can’t come home.”

  “But it’ll be different. If you had a plan, you’d know.”

  “I have a plan.”

  “What?”

  “Par-tay!”

  “You can’t do that forever.”

  “Oh, stop being all Mom on me. One is enough.”

  “Well, you need to get a clue.” She paused. “I hadn’t mentioned it before, but since everyone is talking about it… your little brother?”

  My nose started to tingle, and my throat grew tight. I crushed my cigarette out and started rolling the butt between my fingers.

  “I know.”

  “I don’t get it. He’s cool. A dork, but cool.”

  I nodded quickly. Images of Kyle when he was little came to mind. Chubby little fingers snapping Legos into castles, ships, and houses, building a whole city by the time he was six. Kyle trying to climb trees as high as me, only to fall on his head. Kyle asking me to come home when I ran away. A tear rolled down my cheek.

  “Well?”

  “I always ruin things.”

  “No, you don’t.

  “Yes, I do. I’m such a fuck-up…”

  “You might be a little crazy with all of your hippie-peace-love-let’s-return-to-the-Sixties stuff, but your heart’s in the right place. That’s why this makes no sense to me. You told me that you never even hit your brother. That when you fight, all you do is hold him down and smother him with your hair because that’s, quote, unquote—” she curled her index and middle fingers into quotation marks, “—non-violent.”

  I twirled the cigarette butt between my fingers again and shrugged.

  “Talk to me, dammit!”

  I chewed on my lip and whispered, “It wasn’t me.”

  “What?”

  Louder this time. “I didn’t do it.”

  “But everyone says…”

  “I lied.”

  Lisa turned to face me fully. “I don’t get it. Why?”

  “He gets mad sometimes. When I fuck up. When he’s irritated at Mom. He—”

  “I know. Have for a long time.”

  “You have?’

  “The stories about your black eyes, then running away last year. It was obvious.”

  “I didn’t think anyone knew.” Tears welled up and I picked at a hangnail on my thumb. I lowered my voice. “They can’t.”

  “Hey, it’s okay. I won’t tell.” She put an arm around my shoulder.

  I tried to swallow. Couldn’t. Looked sideways. Didn’t want kids to see me crying. Then the rumor mill could
add ‘crybaby’ to ‘brother-beater’, ‘dog’, ‘pancake-chest’, ‘stage freak’, and all the other things I knew they said about me behind my back.

  “If I wasn’t such a-screw-up…”

  “Stop. It’s not your fault. Ronny is just a dick.”

  I opened my mouth to argue but then wondered, was Lisa right? I’d always thought there was something wrong with me that made Ronny the way he was. Lots of times I heard him yelling about what a pain in the ass I was before he went after Mom. I’d often thought that if I wasn’t there, it’d be better for everyone. He’d actually gone a couple of years without doing anything and only started up again when I got in trouble.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Bullshit. You do know. And it’s about time you started seeing how cool you are.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes, you, dumb-ass. Why do you think I’m your friend?”

  “Are you still? After the acid and the pep rally…” I trailed off.

  “Of course. You are like those psychedelic colors you’re always talking about. Intense, but cool to be around.”

  A sob got stuck in my throat. I sniffled and covered my face. Lisa hugged me and that just made it worse. I buried my face in her shoulder.

  She held me until the sobs subsided.

  I wiped my cheeks with the back of my hand. “That’s why I have to go. Don’t you see? To escape and be the colors. Just once.”

  “I get it and I wish I could go with you, girl. But I can’t.”

  I nodded, imagining that beautiful place where multihued music filled every ear.

  Fifty-One

  Joy

  I’ve felt different since I told Lisa about Ronny. Like a more ethereal and stronger version of myself. I know it seems weird because I sat there crying like a baby for a friggin’ half hour, not giving a shit if anyone saw. And I think a couple of tenth graders did notice. But afterwards, I was like a birthday balloon. You know? How the helium makes it bob in the air?

  It’s been over a week and it still hasn’t popped. In fact, that buoyancy gave me some cajones. Deciding I didn’t give a shit what she thought, I finally cornered Janice on the school quad and asked her what the fuck was up. Was she going with me to World Fest or not?

 

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