Memories flash in my head: playing marbles with my brother before he got older and started to drift; my father working in the shed at the back of the lot; my mother hanging laundry on the clothesline; my brother and I screaming down the street on our bikes.
Before I can answer the woman, I look out the window. My mother has pulled up in our car. Relieved to see her, I run outside.
“What are you doing here?” my mother asks, getting out of the car. She looks at the woman who has come outside too and is standing behind me. “Thank you for taking care of them.”
The woman nods. “I hear you used to live here.”
My mother gives a confused look to the woman and then sees my brother crumpled on the ground. Inspecting his knuckles she says, “We need to go to the hospital.”
* * *
During the twenty-minute drive to the hospital my mother rolls down her window and shakes her head to stay awake. Though it’s the middle of the afternoon, her medication to cope with the nausea from chemo exhausts her. By the time she parks in the emergency room parking lot, she can barely keep her eyes open.
At the check-in desk, the receptionist hands my mother a form to fill out. She sits next to my brother and struggles to write down his name. She presses her fingertips hard against her forehead.
“Here,” I say, taking the clipboard from her. My brother winces as he holds his swollen hand. “Tell me what to write.” It’s never been my role to take care of anyone, but I can feel the ground shifting out from under all of us. “Social security number?” I ask.
My mother closes her eyes and leans back in her chair. She slowly recites the numbers one at a time, and I scrawl them inside the boxes on the form.
“Date of birth?” I ask, though I know my brother’s birthdate. I’m taking pleasure in playing the part.
My mother peeks through an eyelid and says, “Don’t get cute.”
“Emergency contact?”
She tells me to put her name and our phone number. I can tell by the sound of her voice that I shouldn’t play this game, but I can’t help myself.
“Gender?” I ask in a bored voice. “Girl. Absolutely a girl.”
“Fuck off,” my brother says. He’s in too much pain to whisper and my mother’s too tired to yell at us. A middle-aged man in plaid golf pants slides a few seats away from us. He holds an icepack to his wrist.
My mother opens her eyes and glares at my brother and me. “Do it right,” she say to me, “or I’ll have to do it myself.” She closes her eyes and leans her head back against the wall. She looks old, but she’s only thirty-six. More patches of her scalp are showing now as her hair continues to thin from the chemo. Under the fluorescent waiting room lights, the purple half-moons beneath her eyes glow. By this time during all the summers of my life, her skin is tanned a deep brown from being outside in her garden or reading on the back porch. But this summer, her skin is bleached a pale gray by her sickness.
“Finish the form,” my brother mouths through the pain.
I look down at clipboard, and, unable to stop myself, I say, “Marital status?”
He glares at me.
“Single. Very single,” I joke. “A virgin, in fact.”
My brother stands and raises his broken fist as if to punch me. Our mother opens her eyes and snaps, “Stop it.” She stands and grabs my brother by his forearm and sits him down. He’s taller than her, but she still possesses a power beyond us. She takes the clipboard from my lap and frowns. “I thought you’d be able to handle this.”
Before I can apologize, she takes the paperwork to the receptionist’s desk and has the blond-haired woman with the dark brown roots help her finish the intake form. Guilt and shame rise inside me. Why is it so hard to be in control of what I do? The man in the plaid golf pants makes a tsk sound over his magazine.
When my mother is done, she sits back down and closes her eyes. A teenage girl across the waiting room lifts a towel off her thigh, exposing a deep red gash. Her father tells her to leave it alone.
“The woman at the desk said it could be up to a half hour,” my mother says without opening her eyes. “Apparently today’s a good day for accidents.”
“It hurts,” my brother says, but my mother doesn’t respond. In this new world we live in, a broken hand garners no pity.
I grab an old sports magazine from the coffee table and flip through the pages. My brother moans over and over.
“Pussy,” I whisper.
He’s in too much pain to respond.
Our mother opens her eyes at the sound of my muffled voice. “What did I tell you?” she says. She holds a glare at us, but then her face softens and, for a moment, she looks calm, like a saint in one of the books my father brought home for us to study for confirmation. She’s the angelic Teresa of Avila, Saint Cecelia, Maria Goretti. My brother and I stare at this saint, confused. The calmness is washed away by a look of fear, before our mother collapses from her chair, smacking her forehead against the waiting room coffee table. The girl with the gash on her thigh screams. The man in the golf pants jumps from his seat and squats over our mother. He yells for help.
Blood droplets sprout on her forehead. A nurse covers her wound with gauze. Our mother appears unconscious, but then she opens her eyes and says, “My son has a broken hand.”
The nurse looks at my brother who raises his lame fist.
With the help of a security guard, they lift my mother into a wheelchair. The nurse says to my brother, “Looks like you’re being moved to the front of the line.”
My mother is taken to a patient room, while my brother is led to get X-rays. The nurse tells me to take a seat in the waiting area. All the magazines on the small end table are geared toward middle-aged women. I flip through the bent pages looking for bra advertisements. Though I tell myself not to, the animal urge overrides the shame. But I don’t find any photos that send the electric pulse through my skin—it’s mostly full of articles on menopause and weight loss.
I wake to my brother saying, “It’s broken in three places. I’m getting a cast.” He eyes the open women’s magazine on my lap. I toss it on a side table and sit up.
Before I can say anything he’s led away by a male nurse to get fitted for his cast. When he’s gone, I watch footage of the war in the desert playing soundlessly on the waiting room television. I think of all that sand and Saudi Arabian sheiks in gingham headdresses and the tanks my father worked on for the past fifteen years launching missiles through the clear blue sky killing people because our president wants it that way. I wonder how war can be good and if at night I should pray for the war to stop or for the fighting to continue. When the news goes to commercial, I drift back to the trailer park and my skin prickles with the idea that if my father gets laid off like the other men at his plant we’ll be back in a cramped mobile home where the air is chalky with dust from the gravel pit. I shake my head before images of Larry Anderson can invade my thoughts.
The door to my mother’s room opens. The nurse comes out and says, “Your mother was dangerously dehydrated. I wasn’t aware that she has cancer.”
She leads me into the room. My mother is asleep on one of the beds.
“You can watch television while she rests. She should be okay to go home in about an hour.” She gives me that smile I’ve come to know this summer. It’s a half smile, half frown that says, You’re in a world of shit and there’s nothing I can do to help you. I look away.
When she leaves the room I climb into the empty hospital bed and click on the television with the remote. I flip around until I find a baseball game in the top of the sixth inning. My brother comes into the room with a white cast covering his left wrist and forearm. He doesn’t look as happy as he did after his X-rays.
“Push over,” he says and gets into the hospital bed next to me. I don’t protest. He lays his head back on the pillow. Our shoulders are touc
hing, and I remember when we were little and still shared a room in the trailer, I used to crawl into his bed late at night when I woke to a sound of something outside. He’d move over and tell me not to worry, rubbing my back.
Within a few minutes, he falls asleep next to me, exhausted from the bike ride, the fistfight and the fear of trailer parks. My mother breathes deeply from her bed, an IV feeding her arm. Somewhere around the bottom of the eighth, with a man on third and two outs, I drift off to sleep.
XIII
The meeting at the church is only for adults. Our father is vague about the details, but I want to tell him he doesn’t have to be. All the altar boys know that Father Brian is leaving the parish, though we’ve only heard rumors about a girlfriend. After mass last Sunday, we had tossed around other possible transgressions as we sneaked swigs from the bottle of Carlo Rossi table wine used for the blood of Christ.
“I heard he was gay,” one kid had claimed.
“I heard drugs,” said another.
“He’s dying,” my brother had said definitively, “of AIDS.”
We’d all laughed, but there was despair behind the joking. Father Brian was the only priest any of us ever connected with. He was young. He smiled a lot and spoke to kids like we were people. His absence means we’ll get another old, humorless priest whose sour breath will make us cringe during confession.
“I’ll need you and your brother to add a coat of lacquer to the table,” my father says, standing at the front door before he leaves for the meeting. It almost seems like he’s relieved to have the problems at church to distract him from my mother and his issues at work. He has a new bandage on the cut on his hand that won’t seem to heal. My mother is in the car. Despite her sickness, she wants to be part of these emergency meetings. “I’ve made a list of instructions,” my father says, holding up a piece of lined paper. “Be careful to follow them.”
“I will,” I say.
He eyes me, hesitating. He doesn’t want to leave this work for us, afraid it won’t be done right, but he also knows that if he wants the table in the house before fall, the schedule for applying the polyurethane can’t be stopped. Since he assembled the tabletop, he’s been carefully applying the polyurethane for the past week. He spreads a thick layer carefully across the wood and waits a few days for it to dry, longer if it’s humid. When the coat of lacquer dries, he sands the surface with fine grit paper and applies another coat.
“You helped me with the last coat,” he finally says. He holds out the instructions. “Get a coat done and I’ll inspect it when I get back.” I take the piece of paper covered in my father’s script of all capital letters in red ink.
When he pulls out of the driveway with my mother next to him in the front seat, I walk down the hall and knock on my brother’s door. He doesn’t answer. I knock again. Nothing. I open the door, and he’s sitting on his bed with foam headphones over his ears. His music is loud enough for me to make out the bass and drums. His eyes are closed, and his head rests on his bed frame.
I slap his foot. He opens his eyes, pulling the headphones down around his neck.
“Get out,” he says.
“Dad wants us to work on the table,” I say. I hold out the instructions.
He snatches them from me with his good hand and reads my father’s writing. The music still plays on his headphones. He has a new drawing of a plant leaf on the white cast covering his forearm.
“What are you listening to?” I ask, but he doesn’t answer. It must be a cassette he keeps hidden from our parents. If they find music that wasn’t purchased at the Christian bookstore next to the dusty Chinese restaurant, they confiscate the cassette and throw it away. It’s to protect our souls, they say.
He giggles in an odd way as he reads the directions. I pick up the case to the cassette he’s listening to. Six black men stare down at the camera. None of them smile. One man points a gun at the camera lens. A sticker in the lower corner reads, Parental Advisory Explicit Content.
“Where’d you get this?” I say, holding up the cassette case.
He doesn’t answer, just keeps reading over the instructions to the table in my father’s handwriting and smiling. “Two hundred and twenty grit sandpaper,” he whispers and laughs so hard he has to hold his stomach.
“What’s wrong with you?” I ask.
He hands the paper back to me. “Grit,” he giggles.
In the garage, I read the instructions aloud as my brother bounces a tennis ball on the concrete floor and stares out at the neighborhood, his back to me. Neighborhood kids play a game of basketball a few houses down. Even before my brother broke his hand on Josh Roy’s skull, he wouldn’t have joined a game of pickup basketball like he did last summer. That part of him is gone. It’s been weeks since I’ve joined the neighborhood kids myself.
“Are you listening?” I ask.
He catches the ball with the fingers sticking out of his cast and turns around. “I got it. It’s simple work.”
“We need to do it right,” I say.
“Yeah,” he says, reaching into the hip pocket of his jean shorts and revealing a plastic sandwich bag, “we need to do it right.” Opening the bag, he pulls out a joint.
“Are you going to smoke that in here?” I say in a tone meant to convey disapproval, but my voice betrays my excitement.
“Get the polyurethane ready with the brushes,” he says, “and when it’s all set, I’ll light up and we’ll finish this fucking table.”
I want to protest and say we shouldn’t. This table is sacred. If there’s salvation, it’s in this table. I want to say this to my brother as he holds up a crooked joint that he bought with money from God knows where, a half-stoned smile on his face. But I don’t. Instead I say, “I’ll get everything ready.”
He goes back to staring out at the neighborhood, bouncing the tennis ball on the cement floor and catching it with the finger sticking out of his cast. I open the polyurethane can, mix it slowly with a piece of scrap wood, lay out the brushes and turn on the two clip-on spotlights my father positioned over the table to ensure that his work is perfect.
“Ready,” I say.
My brother leaps up on our father’s workbench, taking a lighter from his pocket. “Have you smoked before?” he asks.
The assumption that there’s a chance I live a secret deviant life he’s unaware of gives me pleasure. “No,” I say.
“Hold it in your lungs as long as you can. You might not get high the first time,” he says. “I didn’t.”
He puffs on the joint as he lights the end. The smoke is thicker than cigarette smoke. He takes a hard drag and the cherry on the end shines a bright orange. Behind him, a small wooden crucifix with a pewter mold of Jesus hangs next to a set of screwdrivers. The metallic rows of ribs have been depicted with careful reverence on Jesus’s gaunt frame.
“Here,” my brother says, still holding his breath. I look away from the crucifix to the joint outstretched in my direction.
Everything around me shimmers with possibility as I take the joint between my thumb and forefinger. A line of smoke rises off the tip. The sinning is becoming easier, and that frightens me more than the sins themselves. But not enough to stop.
My brother looks up at the spotlights above the table and blows creamy white smoke from his lungs. It rolls through the air, folding in on itself, slowly rising into the beams of light. “Well?” he says.
Feeling hinges creak open inside my chest, I place the joint to my lips and breathe in.
“That’s it,” my brother says. “Hold it.” When the smoke seems to be tearing my lungs, I cough. My brother laughs and reaches down from his perch on the workbench, seizing the joint. He takes another hit and exhales the smoke in slow serpentine patterns. My brother extends the joint in my direction. Smoke tumbles and rises and tumbles as I take another hit.
After a few more hits, my brot
her leaps down from the workbench and places the snuffed out joint into my father’s toolbox. “Don’t let me forget that,” he says. When I look at him, he winks at me. Or I think he winks at me. The ground beneath me tilts. The thought that I should take my father’s level and check the floor occurs to me, and that thought seems like the funniest thought I’ve ever had. So I laugh.
“What?” my brother says.
I can’t answer him—my tongue feels swollen in my mouth.
“You’re stoned,” he says. He looks up at the smoke roiling through the bright lights above the table. “Fuck. I’m lit, too.” He starts laughing, and we’re both bent over laughing our asses off.
My brother gets serious. He stands straight and says, “The table. We have a duty.”
Because he’s not laughing, I stop laughing and stand despite the unbalanced ground. I share a severe look with the dying pewter Jesus on the tiny cross. Looking down at the table, the grain begins to undulate like a river and I’m stoned again.
Without speaking, my brother opens the back door of the garage. He plugs in an old industrial-grade fan our father got from work and turns on whenever he uses chemicals. My brother twists the knob and the metal blades blur into a circle. The smoke around me vanishes.
“It’ll get rid of the smell,” he says. “Now, how do we do this?”
I struggle to read my father’s handwriting, but I manage, and we each pick up a brush, dip it in polyurethane, pull the bristles against the lip of the can to remove excess lacquer, then work the thick liquid onto the table.
When our brushes meet in the middle, pulling the last shimmering strokes over the surface, we stand back and admire our work. We lean in close and look for any spots that aren’t evenly covered. An ache develops in the back of my head from the weed and the polyurethane. I don’t feel stoned anymore, but I don’t feel normal.
“Damn,” my brother says, “look at our work.”
Soon the Light Will Be Perfect Page 10