But then something changed. The guys didn’t come by so often and they didn’t stay so long. We had a barbecue. There were sausages and wings and two kinds of pasta salad, but the talk was strained and the eyes kept checking in with me. Tom was the exception; Tom still showed up regularly to sit on the porch and drink beer, to tell us about the new thing he was fixing and complain about the disposable culture, to laugh about who was doing what and who’d got themselves caught. I could leave Tom with Jimmy. I trusted him like that.
It was a porch night like that, maybe late August, early September. I was doing up the dishes and listening to the Tom and Jimmy talk, thinking how their voices were so different from the women at the office: lower, slower, more evenly paced. Comforting.
Then came the crash of glass, a short sharp yelp. Tom’s voice, “Chrissakes, Jimmy.” He burst through the screen door and grabbed the roll of paper towel off the counter. Prentiss came slinking in behind him, and Tom knelt, dabbing at his paws. The paper towel came away bloody.
Jimmy was gone when I got outside. The porch sparkled with shards of glass, and sheets of crumpled paper were everywhere.
Tom brushed past me. “I’ll talk to him, get him home.”
“What the hell, Tom?”
He blew out his breath. “Yeah. You know, you should call the doctor. Maybe get him seen again.”
I said nothing. Truth was, I was a little pissed. Jimmy was my business and I didn’t need to be told.
“Aw, Jesus, Gwendolyn, don’t look at me like that. I didn’t do nothing. It was him that brought it up. Looks like he’s been on the internet, got himself a goddamn collection.” He kicked at one of the papers, a printed out page.
“Yeah? You got nothing to do with it, you just sit here and let him talk?” I let my eyes set on him, pointed-like. “You fix your printer yet, Tom?”
“I don’t have time for this, Gwendolyn. I need to find Jimmy.”
I remembered that Tom could be shifty sometimes.
I read the stories when I was sweeping up. The open door, the engine still running. There were dozens of them, some from place names I didn’t recognise. Many were written in broken English and had spelling mistakes, some had bizarre details. A half bitten hamburger, a shih-tzu sleeping in the back seat, a set of clothes strewn all over the road, a voice calling for Michael on a dropped cell phone. There was one from Jimmy’s street. Open door, engine running, no trace. No name for the lost boy and the date given was one that hadn’t happened yet.
I held that paper and it felt like my head was floating, and I remembered the time Jimmy nailed his shoes to the floor with his feet still in them. He’d missed all his toes except the little one on the left. He told me that the pain was okay, it reminded him of the point.
“And what is the point?” I’d asked him.
“I dunno, I saw this thing in a magazine, this ad for old lady face cream,” he’d said. “Tissue degeneration and cellular loss, rapid acceleration. The words got into my head and I started feeling them, feeling lighter, feeling my cells drifting from me like ash in the wind. I thought if I held my hand up to the light, I could see through it, so I kept my hand down. See, I knew I was losing substance, floating apart. I knew I was disappearing. I had this crazy idea that the nails would hold me down.”
I’d wanted to ask him about the pigeons, why he did it, if it was something like that.
But I didn’t. I guess I didn’t want to know that bad.
When Tom returned with Jimmy in tow, I gave him the lost boys articles in a black garbage bag and told them both to go home.
I phoned Dr. Pederson the next morning.
Jimmy has stopped crying. He sits perfectly still, so quiet I can hear the distant hum of a night plane somewhere above us. No moonlight now; the clouds must have come in.
“Tell me what to do. Just say it, Jimmy.”
It’s so long before he says something that I don’t think he’s going to.
“I keep seeing those lost boys. Standing there, the engine running, the driver’s door wide open. Yelling, waving their arms at all the passing cars. No one stopping for them. No one seeing them. It’s the not seeing, yeah? By the time the cops come, there’s nothing left. There’s nobody there.”
“What do you want me to do, Jimmy?”
The dark settles between us. I can hear Jimmy shift in his chair, take in a breath.
“Talk to me. Tell me about this, about where we are right now. Tell me everything you can see in front of you.”
So I tell him about the airplane, how it’s probably on a flight path to Hawaii, Honolulu, Tokyo maybe. I tell him about the rhododendrons that are white but look almost red in this light, and how they never smell of much. I tell him about the apple tree and how, if you stand underneath it and look up, you can still see the frayed rope from the tire we swung on as kids. I begin to describe the lawn, green and clean seeing how Prentiss only uses the neighbour’s yard for his dumps.
“Jesus, Jimmy. We should go in. I’m talking about nothing.”
Jimmy’s voice in the dark. “Can you see me?”
“Of course I can.” I squint at his shadowy shape, searching my memory. “You’re wearing your blue shirt, the one with funny collar, and your hair needs cutting. I can see you. You’re right here next to me.”
“It was green. My shirt. But blue’s good, I like blue.”
Funny thing is I can see the shirt, the green one he’s talking about it, I can see it clearly in my mind. I can see him wearing it earlier and slopping ketchup on the front and dabbing it off with a serviette. Pat pat pat. I squint at him again. The shirt looks blue now. “Jesus, Jimmy. Can we go in now? We got an early start tomorrow.”
“Keep talking.”
So I talk until Jimmy’s head nods and bumps a notch, until my voice frays. The sounds and syllables slip into the night, weighting down the dark, shaping it into something. I talk and my brother sits beside me, unseen and unheard, but he’s there, he really is, because who the hell else would I be talking to? On a dark night like this?
Lost Boys Page 18