by Laura McNeal
“Yeah! Positive. I’ll just, you know, get a ride back.”
“You call me if she can’t give you a ride, okay? I’ll come get you. Maybe buy you a donut.”
While my uncle watched, I climbed onto Amiel’s bicycle. I waved goodbye. I rode over the freeway and up Mission with cars swishing past me every two seconds, and then I peeled away to coast down into river world, where I was about to break my promise to Amiel about not bothering him.
The oak trees along the road were black-limbed and the air was cold. Now and then a squirrel streaked across my path or a crow pecked at a walnut on the blacktop, flapping away just before my tires reached the bits of broken shell. It was so quiet I could hear their feathers like a woman’s taffeta dress.
I knew the trail by now, and riding was much faster than walking, so when I found myself at his bend of the river, I was panting. I walked the bike through the current and then pushed it over sand that breaded the tires like white cornmeal.
Now what? I wondered. Call out to him?
There’s something about trespassing that makes you feel larger than everything else, and clumsier. I pushed Amiel’s bicycle to the lattice of gray branches and considered just leaning it there for him to find, but I couldn’t leave his only expensive possession in plain sight.
“Amiel?” I half whispered. “I’ve brought your bike.”
I touched the wall with my fingers and listened to my loud heartbeat. He didn’t answer, and I stood very still. I stared at the branches under my fingertips, where tiny white cobwebs pillowed all the crevices and an orange speckled orb weaver ascended a line he’d just made.
“Amiel?” I called softly, and then I made myself look around the corner.
He sat with his knees up on the blankets that formed his bed. The fatness of the white bandages on his hand glowed in the shadowy room, but I couldn’t see if his eyes were open or closed. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I was worried. I know I said I wouldn’t bother you.”
At that he turned his head, but he didn’t answer.
I stepped forward and opened my backpack. I set the water, the tube of antibiotics, and the roll of bandages on the ground. “I brought your bike back. That way my uncle didn’t have to know. Where you live, I mean.”
All that was left to show him was the Luden’s cough drops. My mouth was so dry that I unwrapped one and popped it in. I held one out to him and he took it, but you can’t unwrap a cough drop with one hand. I sat down and took it back, and after I had untwisted the wrapper, I gave it to him.
“Do you want me to go?” I asked.
He didn’t shake his head, and he didn’t nod. He put the cough drop in his mouth.
I waited, and as I waited, I kept my eyes averted, as if I would only be invading his privacy if I looked at his things. I studied the trees and wondered if the bird that was singing was a finch or a phoebe, the dark sugar dissolving on my tongue. Finally, I felt so awful about the silence that I looked him full in the face and saw that he’d closed his eyes. That seemed peculiar. He was resting the bandaged hand on his knees, which were pulled up, and it seemed like a position you might sit in if you felt sick or hopeless. “Does it hurt?” I asked.
He shook his head, but he didn’t open his eyes.
Maybe it was because I was sitting there in his camp, instead of seeing him at my uncle’s ranch, that I realized, for the first time, the loneliness of his life. To me, the river was a romantic place where you could live like Thoreau or Laura Ingalls Wilder. But when I tried to imagine going off on my own to a foreign country and making a house out of scraps and looking for work and eating ramen noodles for every meal, the canyon seemed dirty and hard and cold. I reached out my hand to touch one of his fingers, but I was just grazing the skin when he opened his eyes and pulled it back.
He studied me with his face tensed. “Imposible,” he said, a more beautiful word in Spanish but just as final.
“Right,” I said. “You don’t feel that way about me.”
He closed his eyes again, then opened them. “Go away,” he said pleadingly. “Por favor.”
“Okay,” I said.
I stood up and blundered out into the sunlight, which reminded me of the problem his bike presented. I pointed to the bicycle, and he nodded. Holding his cut hand unnaturally still and stiff, he wheeled the bicycle to a place in the willows where it could hardly be seen. Then he turned to me, and I stood awkwardly for a few seconds, waiting to feel less horrible. He just stared at me with his solemn, narrow, beautiful face all sunken with pain and something else.
“Goodbye,” I said.
I held out my left hand as if to shake his left hand, and at first he didn’t move. Then he took my hand and held it as if we were going to shake like normal strangers, moving our arms up and down politely, but instead we were still. We stood like that, hand in hand, and it reminded me of what happens when you join circuits on a circuit board. The current travels and the bulb of light begins to glow.
Then he disconnected us, and the light went out.
Twenty-five
This was the day that I discovered a very useful thing: the river is a huge crack in the landscape of Fallbrook. There is the civilized world of groves and corrals and houses and yards, all of them on hilltops because people like views, but far below those hilltops and streets, in a dark, winding cut, lay the river world. You could hike straight into that world through marked gates, like the one on Willow Glen, or you could just climb down into it from the yards on the hilltops. And I learned this by climbing out of river world into the backyard of the house where Greenie lived with her brother and her parents and a dog named Poochie that fortunately remembered me.
Greenie and Hickey were sitting on her back deck when I came trespassing out of the peach trees. It was almost fully dark by then, and the evening mist coated leaves and grass. I had scratched both forearms, my shoes were full of dirt, and my hair felt like a dried plant sculpture.
“What the le feck?” Greenie said. She’d learned a little Franglish from Robby and me.
“Hello le bonjour,” I said. Poochie was a lapdog trapped in a Doberman’s body, so after barking briefly, she tucked her nose into my hand and lifted it impatiently, as if to say, “The hand is for petting me.”
Hickey stood up, too, and came lazily to the rail of the deck. He was wearing a ski cap that pressed his bangs into his eyelashes, and he casually hooked one finger in Greenie’s nearest belt loop. “Are you a werewolf or an amateur cat burglar?” he asked. He sounded hopeful about both, so I didn’t answer.
“If you want to come over and visit me, we still have a front door,” Greenie said.
I said that I was hiking and got tired, so I found a shortcut.
“Hiking?” Greenie said. “Again? What’s with you and the river these days?”
“Can I have one of those?” I asked. She and Hickey were sipping from brown bottles that I was relieved to see contained root beer, not real beer, probably because Greenie’s parents were home. Once I’d climbed the steps onto the deck, I could see the backs of their heads silhouetted by the television screen and hear sweeping orchestral music.
Greenie went inside and got me a root beer. I stayed where I was so that Mr. and Mrs. Coombs wouldn’t pose their usual questions about how my mother was getting along.
“So how’re you lovebirds?” I asked with false cheer. Since only old people use the word lovebirds, I immediately went quiet. Hickey and Greenie re-entwined themselves on the wooden swing, and I perched on the edge of a ratty lounge chair. I wondered if the Barbie wedding lodge was still in Greenie’s basement. We’d glued the Lincoln Logs together on a piece of particleboard so the building wouldn’t fall down if there were an earthquake during the reception. The Barbie health and safety code was pretty rigorous.
“Hickey wants to go to some club in Oceanside,” Greenie said, “but I told him my curfew’s too early.” She tossed her head in the direction of her parents, and I wondered if what made her look so different tonight was the
back-from-the-dead eye shadow or her new Hickey-length bangs. “I think we should just go to that Paddy O’Whatsit’s pub downtown and eat fried chips or whatever they call them. Wanna be our chaperon?”
I didn’t. I wanted to go down to the basement and be nine years old. I wanted to make some miniature wedding cakes out of Sculpey clay, eat popcorn with real melted butter, drink Swiss Miss hot chocolate in Greenie’s kitchen, and then fall asleep in a plaid sleeping bag that smelled like cedar chips.
“Nah,” I said. “I don’t want to ruin your date.”
“You wouldn’t,” Greenie said. I sort of believed her, and I think she sort of meant it.
Hickey just took a long drink of soda. In the yellow light of the porch his freckles disappeared. He was a pale, angular sign that everything in my life had changed. “Maybe we could find a le dude for you,” he said. “One who’s into stealth-hiking.”
“Come on,” Greenie said. “Celebrate the end of your house arrest.”
Mostly I went because I didn’t want to call my uncle, and Hickey said he’d take me home at ten if I didn’t go AWOL on them again. Greenie tried to get me to put a pound of eye shadow on my eyelids, but I just brushed the twigs out of my ugly hair and stopped looking in the mirror at the face that of course Amiel didn’t love, and we rode in semi-silence to the quiet center of our quiet town, where the new streetlights were those ochre-yellow kind that suck the color out of things. As we were walking by a gnarled pepper tree that grows right in the center of the mostly empty parking lot, I saw a familiar car. It wasn’t red in this light—the light bled the color out of it—but it was definitely the Honda Fabricationist.
“That’s Robby’s birthday present,” I said to Greenie.
“No kidding?” she said. “I thought you said his birthday was kind of a downer.”
“It was,” I said. “It definitely was.”
Paddy O’Hara’s used to be the Packinghouse, a steak-and-salad place where the booths were covered in red vinyl. When you were sitting in the booth drinking a root beer with lemon in it (and sometimes also a maraschino cherry), you could read all the framed orange crate labels from when Fallbrook was the home of Lofty Lemons and Red Ball Oranges. When you went to the bathroom, it was like you were going to a museum, there were so many enlarged gray photographs of the real packinghouse and the people who worked there in the 1930s and ’40s, and you could get really close to their faces and wonder if they were truly happy or just looked that way for the camera. The ceilings were low and cozy then, made of that fancy tin that looks like metal doilies, and the tables were packed close together except for the big round booths in the corners where I liked to sit. The main waitress was this woman named Maureen that my father knew from Fallbrook High School, where they’d apparently had typing class together, and she would say that I was looking more like my father all the time, even though most people don’t say that. I always picked the Packinghouse for my birthday dinner, and Maureen always put extra whipped cream on my hot fudge brownie sundae and my mother told me to wish for something that couldn’t be bought or sold.
The ceilings of the new restaurant were at least twenty feet high and the crate labels were gone and one side of the restaurant was filled with a giant mahogany Irish-style bar. The biggest television I’d ever seen was broadcasting a basketball game, and when Greenie turned her head and saw who was playing, she groaned. “Let’s go somewhere else,” she said, pulling on Hickey’s arm. “It’s the Rockets,” she told me. “Hickey’s true love.”
But Hickey was leading her to a table, so we followed him. I didn’t see Robby anywhere, but I remembered there used to be a long, narrow dining room on the other side of the Packinghouse, through the doorway beside the bar that was still labeled RESTROOMS. Greenie stared gloomily at the menu and Hickey watched the Rockets. “I think I’ll have the stew,” I said finally. “I’m going to the bathroom.”
An odd thing happened on my way. There was still a dining nook tucked on the other side of the wall, but those tables were empty. No TV, no Rockets, no eaters, no Robby or his date. What I remember next was a passageway that looked exactly the same as it had when I was little. Same old pictures of smiling lemon packers, same old conveyor belts of tumbling fruit, same old Lofty Lemons crate label in a cheap wooden frame. The door to the kitchen was open, like those doors usually are, and I felt hungry and sick at the same time, as if my head were filling up with noble gases. My left temple started to ache, and I pressed my hand over that eye to make it stop. I thought I might faint, the way I did one time in fourth grade after I ran all the way to Mrs. Gilliland’s class from the kickball field. I leaned against the wall with my hand over one eye and remembered what I told Hickey about my prophetic eyeballs.
“Blue sees you here, brown sees where you’re going to wind up.”
It was fry-grease hot in the hallway, and the kitchen workers, all Hispanic, sweated as they carried and chopped. The eye I’d covered was the blue one, and I tried to see, with my brown eye, something other than moving bodies in white aprons, stained tin pots, brown rubber doily mats, and giant tubs of grease. The passageway felt darker and longer, tilted crazily on its side, and then I couldn’t see the kitchen anymore. My mind filled with the sound of rushing water and the next thing I felt was the wall. I had steered myself smack into it, I guess. Fortunately, no one saw me. I just stood up and felt my way to the door that said LASSES. It took me a while to feel normal again—I splashed my face at the dingy sink, ate a Luden’s I found in my pocket, tried looking one-eyed into the mirror for someone other than myself—but I finally had nowhere to go but back to Greenie and Hickey and the big television set.
Greenie jumped out of her chair when I came back. “There you are!” she said semi-hysterically. “We were just about to move to another table. On the non-television side!”
Hickey was standing but not enthused. Greenie put her hands on my shoulders to steer me, as if I might resist, but I stepped on something I thought was a foot and turned to apologize. That’s when I saw what Greenie was trying to protect me from seeing.
My father was standing at the bar. He’d just finished saying something to the bartender, who nodded, and then my father turned and saw me standing like the last pin on a bowling lane.
It’s funny how his smile seemed completely sincere. “There you are!” he said, just like Greenie had. For a second, his face was the old face. Maureen the waitress was gone and the booths were gone, but it was the old him and the old me, the one that loved him more than all the world.
“Your mom called Greenie’s,” he said, working his way over to us, “and they said you were here.”
I didn’t answer. He kissed my cheek. I kissed his cheek, too.
Already Greenie and Hickey were fading away from us, melting back from a parent they didn’t have to listen to.
“My car’s out back,” my father said. “You guys need a ride somewhere?”
“No, we’re good,” Hickey said.
I hadn’t ordered anything, but I didn’t like how my dad just assumed I was leaving with him now.
“What about the food?” I asked Greenie.
“The waitress hasn’t taken our order yet,” she said. “It’s taking a zillion years.”
“You’re hungry?” my dad asked, which I have to say was a silly question. Why else does a person go to a restaurant? “We can eat here, if you want. Remember the Packinghouse? I can’t believe how much nicer it is in here now. What a change.”
“Never mind,” I said. “I’m not that hungry.”
We walked out into the parking lot together, and I eyed Robby’s Honda under the murky pepper tree—still there, still dark—but I didn’t point it out. My father led me well beyond the cars clustered near the back door of Paddy O’Hara’s and the neighboring Café Chartreuse to a solitary Mercedes parked diagonally across two spaces about ten leagues from everyone else. I’d never seen the car before.
“A rental?” I asked.
“Lease to ow
n,” he said.
I absorbed this information as he pushed a button on his key and the car lit itself up inside.
“Like it?” he said.
I didn’t speak.
He opened the door for me and I got in. The car already smelled like the black licorice I knew would be in the glove compartment if I opened it. He started showing off the features—GPS, surround sound—but I said, “I get it. It’s a nice car. A lot nicer than our health insurance.”
“Ah,” he said, easing himself back in the driver’s seat. “That’s what you’re mad about?”
I didn’t say anything because it was hard to talk to my father as if he were an idiot. He couldn’t be both my father and an idiot. I wouldn’t allow it.
“The resentment you seem to feel is not fair,” my father said in his controlled angry voice, the voice that when I was very little made me curl up behind the clothes in my closet instead of in my bed, where I felt I didn’t deserve to sleep. “This car is a tool. A tool that shows clients I know what good investments are. This car says, ‘Trust me.’ ”
I never could fall asleep in the closet, but I stayed there for hours, until long after the television laugh tracks and the rattling sound of my mother’s vitamins tumbling into her hand.
“As for health insurance, when your mother and I were together,” he went on, “I did more than my fair share of everything. For fifteen years, I worked ten hours a day. I did work I hated because that was my role: to earn the money that paid for everything everyone wanted. It was her job to—well, I wouldn’t really call it a job. It was more like a lot of hobbies that she treated as if they were jobs, even though none of them earned a dime. And that meant there was never time for me to do anything that made me feel happy. I realized, finally, that I couldn’t go on living like that. I don’t think anyone should. If your mother now has to comprehend what it takes to stay solvent month to month, how to pay for the boring things like doctor bills and car insurance as well as heirloom hollyhocks and hand-spun yarn from the women’s cooperatives of Boola Boola, East Africa, well—better late than never. We all have to grow up sometime. Life isn’t just doing whatever you want to do because you find it meaningful and sincere, while someone else does the mind-blowingly repetitive, corporate sellout work that pays for things like health insurance and also, yes, this car.”