What Happened to Lani Garver

by Carol Plum-Ucci

  I hurled her to the lawn, probably because she had a point, and there was no way to argue it. I drove my knee into her chest, blindly. She started screaming.

  "I don't care if I have to lay on you all day! You are going to tell the truth about what happened at the Rod 'N' Reel. What did you really hear?"

  She was crying, but she spit out, "He told Tony ... not ... to blow smoke rings—"

  I slapped her across the face. "Tell the truth!"

  "That is the truth!"

  I slapped her again.

  "Claire, Jesus Christ! Myra, get her off of me!"

  I could hear Myra on Macy's cell, to Phil I supposed, and didn't care. "Tell the goddamn truth, Macy!"

  She went on wailing, and I realized there was no other truth in her brain. Lani had told Tony not to blow smoke rings on a street corner if he wasn't gay and didn't want sex. She looked really and truly scared. I was a loon, and she was telling the truth, and I was trying to force a lie out of her. That's how she saw it, how she would always see it, until she died. I had never hoped before for a Judgment Day, but I did now.

  I got off her, snatched up the costume, and trudged off. She was crying the soul-filled cries of a hurt person, somebody who had sincerely lost their best friend, who had been dumped, without cause, whose best friend had turned lunatic, and there was not a blessed thing she could do about it.

  24

  "I just hit Macy. Twice..."

  "Okay, stop crying and try to chill out." It was a huge relief to hear Ellen's real voice instead of her voice mail, despite my mom banging on my door, demanding that I come out and explain my weekend to her. Before I could think, I hurled a can full of pens and put a big dent in the floor. Pens flew everywhere, and she hollered some shocked moan.

  "Ellen, what the fuck am I doing? I'm losing it! Somebody's gotta come lock me up."

  Her voice was intentionally calm, and I tried to focus on it instead of my mom's cursing. "Claire, are you, like, not used to being mad?"

  "I'm the type who just never gets mad! All of a sudden—" I broke off because I started sniffing up tears.

  "Never been mad? That's not what Erdman would say."

  "What would Erdman say? Tell me!"

  "Granted, stuff like this always happens on Sunday, when he ceases to exist. She sighed. "I'm not him. I can only tell you what he told me. You know how I'm always laughing these days?"

  "Yeah..."

  "That's so not how I usually am. I'm usually the opposite, stone-cold serious. When I started this thing with finding the world so funny, he said it was something I was allowing myself to feel for the first time. He said it would dominate for a while, and then eventually it would gel with my whole personality. I'd be more balanced after that."

  I had my finger in one ear and the phone smacked up against my head, trying to focus on her over my mom. I slid down into a curled-up ball between my dresser and the wall, but pulled the phone away, screaming, "Shut up! And get away from my door! Fucking moron!"

  Ellen's voice came through. "Claire, Erdman can show you some stuff like how to take your anger out on, like, beanbag chairs until you balance out—"

  "Well, he's not here! And if she doesn't get the fuck away from me—" I could hear my mother backing away finally. "Now she's crying. She's gonna call Macy ... I swear, they've been gossiping all weekend. She's like an overgrown child ... She's gonna get drunk..." I broke into pretty big sobs.

  "Okay, you can't calm down in there. Just get out of the house."

  "And go where?"

  "Go over to Lani's."

  "I can't. I'm gonna put his head through the wall next! He started all this ... It has to be his fault. He made me feel ... all this stuff! I just want to be me again..."

  "Sometimes? Life has to feel worse before it feels better. Did you eat today?"

  I remembered Lani had quoted her on that feel-worse thing before. Not that it mattered. My sanity was sub-zero. "Just a bagel. After that, I forgot." I looked at my radio alarm: 3:20. You can remember to hit Macy, but not eat, jerk-off.

  "Just go. Get away from your mother. You won't hit him. You'll be fine."

  "How do you know?" I sniffed, shaking worse now than ever.

  "I'll call him. I'll tell him you're feeling whacked out and to give you food. Maybe he knows some of Erdman's tricks. He seems to know a little about everything."

  "Ellen?"

  She waited real patiently while I thought of what I wanted to say. "I'm not crazy. Not really ... Right?"

  "No. You are not crazy."

  "I mean, I'm not seeing and hearing things." I drummed up an example, wiping snot off my face. "You really did say, in Erdman's office, that you had to explain to Lani about flipping sign language."

  "I absolutely said it. He didn't know what the bird meant. You're not hallucinating. He's so innocent in certain ways, it's disgusting. Problem is? People put together effeminate with perverse, like they automatically go together. In reality? There's no correlation." She was laughing, too loudly. It was not that funny.

  "Ellen?"

  She waited again.

  "Thanks."

  I climbed out the bedroom window to avoid my mom. I don't remember anything about going to Lani's except that I walked between houses, dodging in and out of bushes, lest I see anyone who might by chance piss me off. I also had his nightgowns shoved under my cheerleading jacket, and the last thing I needed was for them to fall into enemy hands. I looked pregnant.

  He opened the door when I was in the middle of the street, like he had been waiting for me. I walked straight into his chest, buried my face there, and started bawling all over again. He kicked the door shut behind us with his foot, his arms wrapped around me, and we walked up the stairs. Fortunately, his too-sweet mother seemed to be out and didn't accost me.

  I stood in the middle of his room like a zombie, tried to suck off his calmness as he strolled over to the bed.

  "Ellen called you?" I asked.

  "Yeah. I saved you something."

  He held the cell phone out to me, stuck it right in front of my face. CLEMENTI, JOSEPHINE stared back at me. He arrowed back, back, back, back, through about fifteen of those.

  "What's the date on these?" he quizzed me.

  I could barely remember my own name, so it surprised me when today's date floated through my head. "Two days ago..."

  "Okay? You're not having convenient recollections of how things happened. It's not you."

  I fell on his bed, totally tired, not feeling anything anymore.

  "I made you a sandwich. Stay here; I'll be right back."

  "Don't leave me alone!" I shot up, and he let me trail him downstairs, like all this was perfectly normal. I even followed on his heels up the stairs again.

  "Looks like you're gaining weight. Cool." He pointed to my stomach as I chewed a mouthful of food. I put the plate beside me on his bed, getting my first hint of a smile together.

  "I totally forgot." I pulled the nightgowns out—one, two, three.

  His laugh sounded a little relieved. "Where?"

  "You don't want to know."

  We sat there in silence as I finished my sandwich.

  Then I asked, "What do I do when I want to hit people? I could have broken Macy's neck. Ellen tell you?"

  He tried not to laugh more but couldn't help it. "Claire, I am so tempted to tell you, go ahead, keep swinging. For one thing, you're mad about real things and real people. It's not like you're swinging at people who are trying to, like, abduct you to Saturn."

  My laugh came out, "FWWWOUT." I asked for another sandwich and sat there this time, staring at the three nightgowns tossed on his bed, while he went and made it. Peanut butter and jelly ... my favorite sandwich from the old days, the better days. I almost asked for a third but lost my nerve.

  And he distracted me during the second sandwich, talking about Erdman-type stuff. "I'm not a shrink, so I don't know too many anger exercises, but I've heard of one that works, according to some people."r />
  He took a pillow and balled it up and held it out in front of him. "Whose face do you see in the front of it?"

  I guess he wanted me to imagine something on this soft pillowcase. "Macy's."

  "What do you want to say to her? Anything at all."

  "You ... want me to hit this thing? I'll end up putting a hole through it and breaking your nose."

  "No, that's made-for-TV psychology. The point isn't to get you to hit but to say things in a normal voice ... find the middle ground. Just say the truth, and nothing but the truth, in a normal voice."

  I explained to Macy, "Don't tell people you care about them when all you really care about is getting your own way." I called her a control freak. I apologized for hitting her, and described to her how she was too powerful, how she believed her own shit and antagonized people into believing it, too. I told her she didn't love me, she loved having a shithead for a friend who was too naive to argue with her. I told her Larry Ivanosky didn't pick his boogers.

  I got pretty loud when I got to Larry Ivanosky, because I felt he had suffered a fucked-up injustice. But I didn't hit the pillow.

  I told my mother she was a drunk, to get a life, and to quit trying to live through mine. I felt things about my dad I had not even been aware of before. I told him he was horny, and if Suhar didn't look so beautiful, he would have not been a distracted dad. I told Suhar to quit sucking up to me by getting me fedoras and expensive shoes; I would get to know her when I felt like it and not before. I told Lani I wanted another glass of milk, and did he have any junk food?

  He went downstairs and left me alone again. I knew when he came back I should ask to see this alleged nine-hundred-dollar book and tell him that I wanted to read about angels. I wanted to tell him I thought he was one again, because my life was somehow getting better. Because I could feel myself getting slightly smarter, and despite how bad it hurt, I wanted to be smart. I wanted to look through that book and tell him I believed whatever it said, not because I had any proof but because that's what I wanted to believe, and if that's just convenient thinking, well then, screw everyone.

  There was one problem with all of that. I didn't want to face the thought that he might say, "I'm just an overly smart street kid, and that's the truth."

  I felt dizzy, almost rolling into a huge whirlwind—full of the souls of sad people, sick people, poor people, who were ready to believe in miracles, because what we knew with our senses just wasn't good enough. I could almost hear their wailing, and it was charged up, strangely, with hope. First are last, and the last, first ... I took his pillow out of my lap, flopped my head onto it, and fell dead asleep. I didn't wake up until after dark. There was a glass of milk on the nightstand, a plate of chocolate-chip cookies beside them, and all the candles in his room were lit. My first thought was that I hadn't dreamed a single damn thing.

  My second thought was the room looked funny ... a little too clean. I saw two backpacks, stuffed in the middle of the floor. I sat up. Lani was awake, lying beside me. That's when he told me that he needed to get off Hackett, fast.

  25

  "When Tony did all that phone calling to me, there was one thing he didn't count on. It didn't occur to him that I would make a friend that quickly." Lani flopped down beside me on the bed.

  I sat up straight and froze, remembering his prediction about Tony after those phone calls. He thinks I'm over here alone, shaking in my little pink bedroom slippers.

  "When you and I showed up together at the bus station, that was ... monumental." He went on. "It gets kind of twisted, how things probably went around here after we got on that bus. I'm sure Tony found out we were together, and he probably got scared you were a witness to his phone calls over here. You're a little more credible than me."

  "What happened that would make you think you have to leave?" My brain rebelled against it ... a kid feeling "run out of town" by Hackett Island. He walked me step by step through Friday night, because it would not have made entire sense otherwise.

  "I only took the magazine with us because I was thinking of how mad Macy was when she left your house. I figured there was a good chance we might meet her somewhere along the way. I thought maybe I could dangle some solid evidence in front of her, threaten to have the magazine fingerprinted. Sometimes solid evidence will snap somebody out of convenient thinking."

  He shrugged, looking very tired, but went on. "It wasn't just Macy we met. It was those huge guys, too. I knew they could snatch it and destroy any evidence, no contest. I only thought to plant it on Vince about ten seconds before I did it. It's an old street trick. You can do just about anything to anyone while they're shoving you, and they'll never know. It was dangerous ... but my gut instinct was banking on the idea that Vince would recognize the magazine as something of Tony's and would start acting funny before anyone would think to accuse me."

  I remembered Vince repocketing the magazine like he didn't want anyone to see it.

  "I figured all this already." I breathed. "It sure did feel good to torture Vince for a few minutes, trying to call the cops and have the thing fingerprinted. But your fingerprints were on it, too," I reminded him.

  "Yeah, but that would have fit my true story. All that needed to be found were Tony's. Truth? The cops probably would have had no interest in fingerprinting it. I'm not even certain they can do something like that on a small island, where nothing usually happens. But I think we scared the living crap out of Vince. He thought for sure if I got a cop on the phone, the dirty little family secret would come flying out. He probably gave Tony hell when he got home. Wish I'd been there to hear that." He let out a sad laugh.

  "What do you think happened?"

  "Hard to say. In families covering up a secret like that, things get very tricky. The family almost always knows about something like porn, abuse, sometimes even molestation. But they don't talk about it. Not even to each other."

  "Is this based on more stuff you've read?" I asked.

  "Some of it." He shrugged again. "And some Saturdays I used to hang out at the clinic until Erdman came down for his lunch burger. He'd buy me one, and we'd sit there and shoot the bull about stuff like this. He'd describe how, like, a mother and a sister can see a bunch of nine-hundred numbers on a phone bill and find out that number is for ... kids or incest or strangers phone-sexing each other. They might each find their guilty relative alone, call him a pig, tell him he has to pay that bill, and yet never talk about it with each other. Both Mrs. Clementi and Vince could have pulled the same magazine out from under Tony's mattress or something. They might just ... put it back or throw it out. Never say anything ... to him, or to each other. In some cases it's like the whole family 'knows' but they don't even know how much the others know. Sometimes the brother doesn't even know how much he himself knows. There's convenient recollection, and then there's convenient forgetfulness," he rambled on. "It's called repression."

  I shuddered. I would say I believed Lani about all this stuff. We'd touched on some of this in my psych class, and I believed it, then. It just becomes harder to accept when you're putting familiar names and faces with behavior that is so ... screwed up. It makes you wonder. Who could trust their own minds?

  "Who knows what went on in the Clementi house, but I'm sure that Vince went home ready to kill Tony," he said. "Probably gave him hell: How did your blankety-blank magazine get in my blankety-blank jacket? Tony knew he had left it on my porch, with more than his fingerprints on it. He probably wondered for about five seconds where I got the nerve to send it back. Then Vince spilled it that you and I showed up at the bus station together, all buddy-buddy. Now Tony's scared. He's sure that you know about him. He's probably even wondering if you were there when he was calling."

  I hadn't had the time and didn't have the brainpower to get scared. We were sitting there feeling safe, trying to figure out a psychology puzzle together. "I can't help but think that Macy won't eventually spill what I told her about Tony calling you. I told her at my house I had heard t
he whole thing. She said she wouldn't tell that part. She said no one would believe her. But she has trouble holding on to any secret. I guess the big question is..." I puzzled for only a couple of seconds. "What would somebody like Tony do to protect his reputation as a straight, tough guy? How far would he go?"

  We both sat there in silence, and to ward off thoughts of the worst, I filled the air with words. "I don't care what he threatens to do. I'm telling the truth. I'll tell it to his face, and I don't care who hears it."

  "I think we've told enough of the truth, Claire. Between me busting on Vince at the bus station, your little tirade today at Macy that Ellen told me about ... and then, there's what I added to it while you were sleeping."

  "What did you do? Did you leave the house?"

  He shook his head and held up the phone to me. I saw CLEMENTI, JOSEPHINE again. "What date is on this one?"

  "Today...," I said. "About an hour ago."

  He tossed the phone down between us. "He threatened my life."

  "He threatened your life..." My first reaction was to half shrug. Despite everything I knew about Tony being a bully, I went with the my-version-of-reality routine, which was that things like that only happen in Wyoming.

  "I had done something else the night we left for Philly. I had removed the inside spreads of that magazine. The thing is old and tattered enough—I figured he knew it by heart. I thought maybe if that magazine somehow managed to circle back to Tony, he would realize some part of it was still out there. And he might think of his fingerprints, or anything else, being on it. He might get scared. If he was stupid, he might just decide I liked pornography. But if he was really, really sharp, it might occur to him why I had it, that it could be used against him somehow ... taken to the cops ... something, anything."

  "God, you're too smart, Lani. You're too streetwise." I breathed, in shock.

  "Maybe too is the key word. Maybe I'm too smart."

  "That's what he wanted? When he called?"