by Pete Hautman
A sick pit of guilt and shame opens up in my gut. I’ve hardly been thinking about Mom at all, telling myself she was probably glad I was gone.
“I guess I should have left a note or something,” I mumble.
“You think?”
The last time I saw my mom, the morning I left, she had made me pancakes for breakfast. She was getting ready for her Zumba class. She looked so tired, like she was forcing her body to go through the motions, and all I could think about was whether she would notice that her Visa card was missing from her purse.
I can’t stand to think about it, so I blurt out the question I came to ask.
“How come you ghosted me?” I ask, and then hold my breath.
Gaia doesn’t answer right away. She doesn’t answer until I’m about to die of asphyxiation. The kid in the boat has hooked on to a fish; his dad scoops it up with a net. It’s about six inches long.
“I missed my period,” Gaia says.
I let out my breath, and for a fraction of a second, I think she’s referring to a class period. Then I think she means “missed” like missing somebody. Then I realize what she is saying.
“When?” I ask, which is sort of irrelevant. Or maybe not.
“In July,” she says.
It takes a second for me to get what she said. It’s a very long second.
“You’re pregnant?”
“I thought I was pregnant.”
“You’re not pregnant?”
“No.”
“Did you—”
“Have an abortion? No. My period was late, is all. That happens sometimes. I think I was stressed out. But for a whole month I thought I was pregnant.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t tell anybody. Not even Maeve. I was trying to figure out what to do. And I was thinking about us. I mean, you said you didn’t want to be a dad, and I’m only sixteen, and what were we doing, anyway? Why did you want to go out with me? I mean, at first?”
I think back to the first time we spoke, at the McDonald’s across from school.
“I think it was your shirt.”
“Life Sucks and Then You Die? I only wore it that once.”
“Yeah, but you were wearing it that day.”
“So you decided you wanted to go out with me because I was wearing a depressing, nihilistic T-shirt?”
“Nihilistic fashions turn me on.” That was supposed to be funny. She is not amused. I guess I don’t know what “nihilistic” means.
“So you just thought it would be a good idea to hang out with another depressive?”
“I’m not depressed,” I say.
“Really? Your dad committed suicide nine months ago. How are you not depressed?”
“I’m not like my dad.”
“I’m not like my mom, either, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t mess me up when she left.”
“Wasn’t that, like, a year ago?”
“It was, like, yesterday!” Her eyes flash. “It will always be yesterday. Do you think you’ll forget about your dad in a year from now?”
“I guess not.” Life sucks and then you die.
“I don’t think we’re good for each other. I mean, getting fake-pregnant, that made me realize, you know?”
“You decided to dump me because you got fake-pregnant?”
“No! I mean, it made me think. It’s not just you and me and everything sucks. We were tied up in a miserable, painful little knot: you lost your dad, I lost my mom, and everything sucked.”
“Everything?” My voice cracks, and my face and hands feel all prickly. I can’t seem to breathe right.
Her face softens. I feel a kernel of hope growing in my chest; then her eyes go crisp.
“I got my period up at the lake, when I was there with my dad and Derek. I’d been thinking I was pregnant, and then all of a sudden I wasn’t. The weird thing was, I was kind of disappointed, you know?”
I don’t know.
“Not because I wanted to be pregnant, but because it took away my choice. You know?”
I still don’t know.
“I’d been thinking about it so hard—harder than I’ve ever thought about anything else. Do I have a kid and be this teen mom? Do I give it away? Do I have an abortion? I still don’t know what I’d have done. I’ll never know. And that pissed me off. Because that choice was taken away from me.”
“I guess, in a way, it was lucky,” I say.
“Lucky?” She slams her palms into my chest, nearly knocking me over. “You are stupid, stupid, stupid! Lucky? You don’t get it at all.”
“I know, but . . .” But what? I’m floundering.
“That’s why I had to go,” she says in a flat voice, then looks away.
“Because I don’t get it?”
“Because I don’t get it, and I just couldn’t go back to the way we were. I had to leave. You know?”
I know about leaving.
“And Maeve was down here, and her uncle said I could move in, and I thought if I just left, I could find some space. I could figure out what I wanted, you know? Like Michael is trying to do. Like Maeve.”
Like Stiggy, I think.
“So your dad just said you could leave?”
“He knew I was having a hard time. He didn’t know why, but he’s cool that way. He thought it might be good for me. He drove me down here and talked to Maeve’s uncle—you know, just to make sure it wasn’t some weirdo cult compound or something. It’s not. It’s nice. I’m going to finish the school year here. Next year I don’t know. I might graduate early and go to college someplace where nobody knows me. I’ve been talking to my mom. I might go to Santa Fe and stay with her.”
“I thought you were mad at her.”
“She’s my mom.”
Seconds tick by.
“Are you seeing somebody else?” I ask.
“You are such an asshole,” she says, without much heat in it.
“I know,” I say.
She shakes her head, takes out her phone, looks at it. “I have to get back to work.”
“I’ll walk you.”
“No.” She looks straight at me, and I get this chilling sensation like I’m looking into the eyes of a stranger, seeing her for the first time. “Go home, Stiggy. Let your mom know you’re okay. Make up with Garf. Make some friends. Be nice.” She takes my hand, squeezes it, lets go. “Maybe I’ll see you around sometime. Okay?”
I watch her walk away. Black boots, black jeans, green shirt, red hair. It’s as if she’s turning into somebody else from the top down.
“I like your hair!” I call after her. She doesn’t look back.
Wolverine
“Sometimes I think he’s still alive,” Garf said. That was way back in April, before Gaia. We were hanging out in Garf’s room reading his vintage X-Men comics. “I think the door will crash open and Jimmy will be yelling at me to get my mitts off his precious comics.” Garf laughed. “He could be a pain sometimes. These were my dad’s comics. He gave them to Jimmy, and when Jimmy died, I got them.”
Garf didn’t mention his brother very often.
“I know what you mean,” I said. “When I wake up in the morning, I’m always kind of startled when I realize my dad isn’t there.”
“It happens less and less often. To me, I mean. For a while, every day, I’d have to face that he was gone all over again, and it was painful. Now it only happens every now and then. Dr. Missou said that’s normal.”
“Dr. Missou?”
“This counselor my parents made me go to. Actually, she kind of helped. After Jimmy died, I was pretty messed up. She told me about the stages of grief. The first one is denial—like, you just can’t believe what happened, so you pretend it didn’t. Then you get mad, then sad, then depressed, and eventually you’re okay.”
“So are you okay now?”
Garf shrugged. “I’m not as mad as I used to be.”
“What stage do you think I’m at?”
“Everybody has
different stages. Dr. Missou says some people skip stages, and they don’t always go in the same order.”
“I think I’m at the Wolverine stage,” I said. “Except without the Adamantium claws.” I flip forward in the comic I’m reading to the part where Magneto rips the Adamantium out of Wolverine.
Garf said, “The pissed-off stage. Sounds about right.”
“Do you think about why they did it? My dad? And your brother?”
“All the time.”
I took a gulp from my bottle of Coke, but I did it too fast, and some of it bubbled up out of the neck and spilled all over the comic I was reading.
“Oh, crap! I’m sorry!”
Garf took the comic from me and tried to soak up the Coke with his sleeve. It didn’t help much.
“I’m really sorry,” I said.
“It’s okay.” He looked sadly at the soggy comic and set it aside. “It’s just a comic book. I’ll get over it.”
“Through It All”
Leftover Cuties
3:51
Looking out over the river, I hear the echoes of Gaia’s voice.
Go home, Stiggy.
The father and son have drifted downstream; I can still see them. I think about my dad floating down the river with my uncle Donny. They never made it this far south.
Let your mom know you’re okay.
I look to my right. Gaia is out of sight. I imagine my mother standing there, looking at me. I clench the steel railing, and every bone in my body aches. I wish she was yelling at me, right now. Or anything.
I close my eyes, breathe in, and let go of the railing. I follow it along the pier until it opens onto a narrow beach. I shuffle to the water’s edge and let the little waves lap against the toes of my Walmart shoes. I’ve driven more than a thousand miles, most of it on the Great River Road, and this is the closest I’ve been to the water.
Make some friends. Be nice.
In other words, don’t be a dick.
I toe off my shoes and pull off my socks and roll up my jeans. The water is warmer than I expected. I move deeper, until I’m up to my knees, soaking the rolled-up bottoms of my jeans. Sandy muck oozes up between my toes. I think about the water swirling around my calves, how it got there, how some of those molecules came from the beginning of the river in northern Minnesota, some flowed in from the Saint Croix and other rivers, some of it flowed past the steel benches in East River Park.
“Whoa,” I say under my breath.
• • •
I drive north on the Great River Road. The sun is pounding on my left shoulder. The trees on my right are raining leaves—in another week their limbs will be bare. In another month the river will be frozen.
I never made it to the Gulf of Mexico, but neither did my dad. What did I think I’d find there? Shrimp boats and alligators? More Brans, more Knobs, more Allies? More smiley Daves, more tweakers and strippers, more friendly salesmen who want to brag about their perfect sons?
What I would never find there is my dad.
Go home, Stiggy.
Is that what Dad would say?
Let your mom know you’re okay.
Is she okay? Dad would want to know. He would want me to know.
Make some friends.
Dad never had a lot of friends. He had his brother and sister, Donny and Roni, who would listen to him gripe. He had me and Mom. He was friendly with our neighbor Devon—they’d help each other out with things like putting up a shed or fixing a broken lawn mower. Was that it? There was Kenny Oldes, a guy he knew from high school. He’d stop by once a year or so and they’d sit in the backyard and have a beer and talk. Afterward Dad would complain that Kenny, who was a loan officer at Wells Fargo, had gotten boring. “We did some crazy stuff back in the day, me and Kenny. But now all he wants to do is talk about his kids.”
They were all at his funeral, along with a few people from his work, my grandmother, a bunch of cousins, and some people I didn’t know. Maybe he did have a few friends. Maybe if he’d had more friends, he would still be here.
Me, I have ex-friends. And Garf, who might be an ex-friend too. The thought makes me jangly and queasy, so I turn up the music. Billie Holiday is singing about autumn in New York. Her voice is sweet and sticky, and it makes me sad even though she’s singing about things pretty and hopeful. When the song is over, I play it again.
La Crosse comes and goes. Onalaska, Holmen, Trempealeau, Fountain City. I’m back on the same stretch of road I took going south, but it looks different, more naked, harsher. Alma, Nelson, Pepin. Before, I thought of them like beads on a chain. Now they seem more like fraying knots on a rope. Stockholm, Maiden Rock, Bay City. The sun is barely visible; the river is dark.
• • •
I am at the SuperAmerica four blocks from home, standing under harsh fluorescent lamps, pumping gas. A chill wind cuts through the open front of my hoodie. I zip up and tug my cap down and watch the numbers tick over on the pump. A few hours ago I stood at the river with Gaia. It feels like weeks ago that I left town with a wallet full of cash, my mom’s credit card, and no destination, but it has only been a few days. I am imagining pulling into the driveway at home, walking up to the door . . . Do I just open it with my key? Or do I knock?
My father’s iPod says eight o’clock. I wonder what Garf is doing. Selling my junk on eBay? Did he sell Wonder Woman?
• • •
Garf’s mom answers the door. Like Garf, she’s incredibly skinny with the same pointy nose as her son.
“Hello, Steven,” she says.
“Hi, Mrs. Neff.” I maybe haven’t mentioned, but Garf’s mom teaches English at Saint Andrew.
“I haven’t seen you in school recently.” She looks at me closely. “Are you okay?”
People keep asking me that.
“I’m fine. Is Garf around?”
“I don’t know about around, but he’s in his room. Why don’t you see if you can extract him?”
Garf’s door is open. He is sprawled on his rumpled bed reading a textbook. He kind of jerks when I walk in, then gives me a half-lidded look to show how much he doesn’t care.
“Hey,” I say.
He grunts. “You’re back,” he says.
“I’m back.” I look around, and find Wonder Woman on the shelf next to BB-8. “You didn’t sell her.”
“Not yet. I suppose you want her back.”
I shake my head.
“What do you want?”
“Nothing.”
“I gave all your Vader stuff to Geoff.”
“Including the TIE fighter he broke?”
Garf nods warily.
“Good,” I say. “He’ll enjoy them.”
Garf sits up and sets his book aside. I can tell he isn’t deliriously happy to see me, but he’s curious.
“You look like crap,” he says.
I nod. I know it’s true.
“Your mom was over here looking for you last week. She thought I might know where you went. Guess what? Didn’t know; didn’t care.”
“I’m sorry if I was a dick,” I say.
“If?” His eyebrows go up.
“Okay. I’m sorry. I was a dick.”
“Have you seen your mom?”
“I wanted to see you first.” I want to see my mom so bad, it hurts, but I am also afraid. I thought it would be easier to talk to Garf, but he isn’t making it easy at all.
“She’s worried about you.”
“I know.”
Garf snorts and grabs a pair of Nike skate shoes. They look new. He slides his feet in without tying them and stands up.
“Let’s go outside. You kind of reek.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“Well, you do.”
I follow him down the hall and out the door and along the walkway to the street. He turns right.
“Where are we going?” I ask.
He keeps walking, laces flopping. I fall in beside him.
Big Ben
Dad liked to work in th
e garage. He would invent things to do there, such as sharpening the hundreds of tiny blades on the chain saw that I had never seen him use. One day last fall I went out there to see what he was doing, and he was doing nothing. Just sitting at his workbench.
“Dad?” I said.
He turned his head slowly and smiled. It was a sad smile. “Stiggy. Hey.”
“What are you working on?”
“Nothing. Some things you can’t fix. Some things are just broken.”
“Like what?”
“This clock.” He waved a hand at the old-fashioned windup alarm clock on the bench. It looked like a cartoon alarm clock, with a big dial and a sort of metal loop on top. “It was my father’s. It’s called a Big Ben. It was made back in the thirties. They still make them, but the new ones are battery operated. This one you had to wind up every night. The spring is broken. I can’t fix it.”
“I bet somebody could.”
“I like to fix things myself. Besides, it would cost more to have it repaired than it’s worth.”
“But it was your dad’s!”
He stood up and put the clock on a shelf above his bench.
“I thought I could fix it, but I can’t.”
“I Try”
Macy Gray
3:57
“I drove down the Great River Road,” I say to Garf. “Met some interesting people.”
He doesn’t say anything. He’s walking fast. The wind is behind us, and some leaves are keeping pace.
“I met a stripper in Iowa,” I say. “She called herself an ecdysiast.”
“Same thing,” Garf says. He knows words like that.
“I bought drugs for some meth addicts. I robbed a grocery store.”
He looks at me. I have his attention.
“Actually, I was the getaway driver. Oh, and my car got stolen in Saint Louis, but I found it in Kansas City.”
“That sounds like so much fun that I’m surprised you came back.”
“I ran out of money.”
We walk a block without talking. He stops and looks up. Thirty feet above us a pair of shoes hangs from a utility line.
“Oh,” I say.
Garf says nothing.
“You want me to get them down?”