Looking for Jack Kerouac

by Barbara Shoup

  TWENTY-FOUR

  As I drove through silent streets, back to the main part of town, my whole life ran through my mind. Everything. I’d heard people say that happened when your life was in imminent danger. But what I felt was the sudden absence of danger, the world righting itself inside me. The sad memories were still sad; they always would be. But the happy memories weren’t so freighted with loss—and, for the first time since Mom had died, I began to imagine the kind of family Dad and Bobby and I might become.

  I hadn’t mentioned Thanksgiving when I talked to Dad. I still wasn’t ready to feel what I knew I would feel seeing him and Bobby again. But I would ask him to come down and visit soon. Christmas, maybe. I could see the two of them stretched out on the lounge chairs at The Palms: Dad in the awful plaid Bermuda shorts he broke out maybe twice a year, under duress; Bobby in his football jersey and ratty White Sox cap. Lo fussing over them, bringing Dad high balls, Bobby bottles of freezing cold Coke. Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, and Sammy Davis, Jr. records dropping, one by one, on the hi-fi.

  It was after midnight now. I was pretty sure Chuck would let me into the Y, but I wasn’t ready to go in yet. I needed some time just to be alone. So I drove over to the parking lot across from the pier where Ginny always parked. I turned off the engine, reclined the seat as far back as it would go, lay back, and closed my eyes. My body ached with exhaustion. I could hear the ocean, and I breathed the rhythm of tide moving wave by wave toward the shore. Half-asleep, half-awake, I felt the presence of my mom in the endless motion of the water; the salty air on my face felt like her fingers brushing my hair back from my forehead like she used to do when I was little, just after she’d kissed me goodnight.

  I guess I fell asleep, because the next thing I heard was Ginny’s voice. “Paul? Paul!” She rocked my shoulder until I stirred and opened my eyes.

  For a moment, I didn’t know where I was. I rubbed my eyes with the heels of my hands and opened them again.

  I was in the driver’s seat of Ginny’s car; she was in the seat beside me. It was still dark, with a sprinkling of stars in the sky.

  “What time is it?” I asked.

  “Two-thirty. Chuck was worried when you didn’t come in, so he called me. I thought you might come here and just wait for Jimmy to come in, so I borrowed my mom’s car and drove over.”

  “Oh, shit,” I said. “Listen, I’m really—”

  “I know, I know. But would you just tell me why you didn’t go back to the Y? Did you call your dad? Did something happen?”

  “I called him,” I said. “We talked. And then, I don’t know, I just really missed him. And my brother. I got this weird idea that I needed to go sit by Jack Kerouac’s house for a while, like it would help me think and—”

  Suddenly, I was crying. The whole story tumbled out of me: the voices, the catfight, the warmed-up chicken and noodles, Jack and his mother drunk and wrecked, him saying to me, And you’ll never get over it—and how that was such a comfort to me, the only comfort anyone had given.

  Ginny listened. At some point, she put her hand on mine, and, instinctively, my palm turned up, grasped it, and I held on hard. Maybe too hard, I realized. But when I loosened my grip for fear I might be hurting her, she held on tight.

  We sat like that, for a long time after I finished talking. I wasn’t crying anymore, but my body was shuddering, my breathing was jagged. What I wanted to do was go back to sleep, pretend I hadn’t just totally lost it in front of Ginny.

  Of course, she knew what I was thinking; sometimes I thought she knew everything. “It’s okay,” she said. “It’s good. You needed to get all that crap out.

  “Breathe!” she ordered.

  I breathed. I could. I felt space opening up inside me, my heart expanding into it.

  “Good,” she said again.

  I looked at her. She looked at me.

  She smiled and gave me that familiar little punch on my arm.

  “Come on,” she said. “We need to call Chuck.”

  And heading for the Crab Shack, still holding Ginny’s hand, I felt grounded in a way I’d never felt before, not even when I was a little kid, happy, safe inside my family, no idea whatsoever about how much life could change me or who I might turn out to be. Not that I knew all that much now. But I knew that staying grounded, making a good life for myself, required the opposite of forgetting Mom’s illness and her death. It wasn’t about forgetting Kathy, either, or how I’d hurt her. It wasn’t even about forgetting how I’d just taken off with Duke without saying goodbye.

  Sadness and grief and recklessness had brought me to this moment. But so had the happy times when Mom was alive, and those nights by the river with Kathy, and Duke and I, ravenous, running for the diner that first morning on the road. The kindness of strangers along the way, and even the trouble. The tender touch of a mermaid in the quiet of her room. Everything, everyone would live inside me forever. I would carry them with me, one foot in the present world and one in the past. Breathing in the cool salty air in a place I was just starting to know, I was instantly carried back to a summer day in Indiana, playing baseball with my brother in our neighbor’s backyard: the crack of the bat, the ball rising against the blue sky, and me already running, arm raised and reaching, so sure where it would land that I could already feel it slap against my glove.

  Acknowledgments

  First and foremost, thanks to Skip Berry who kindly gave me the idea for this book after he decided he didn’t want to use it himself.

  Thanks to the Indiana Arts Commission for a grant that allowed me to take the road trip Duke and Paul took, and to Joan Warrick for coming along for the ride.

  Thanks to the Ragdale Foundation for time to work on this book in a lovely, peaceful place.

  Thanks to Dan Wakefield for his encouragement.

  Thanks to Victoria Barrett and Andrew Scott, publisher and editor extraordinaire. I can’t imagine two better stewards for a book.

  Thanks to my family: Steve, Kate, Jenny, Heidi, Jake, Jim, and Olivier.

  And to my sisters’ families: Diny, Hud, Dan, Sam, David, Chris, Ben, Katie, Christine, Kylie, and the first of the new batch of babies, Jack.

  As Sam once said in the worst of times, “We are a kickass family.”

  In memory of Jackie Weitz (1952–2003).

  We miss you so much.

  About the Author

  Barbara Shoup is the author of seven previous novels. Her short fiction, poetry, essays, and interviews have appeared in numerous outlets, including The Writer and the New York Times. Wish You Were Here and Stranded in Harmony were selected as American Library Association Best Books for Young Adults. Vermeer’s Daughter was a School Library Journal Best Adult Book for Young Adults. Shoup was the 2006 recipient of the PEN/Phyllis Naylor Working Writer Fellowship, and her books have received numerous awards. She is the Executive Director of the Indiana Writers Center and lives in Indianapolis.