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by Jesse Lee Kercheval


  “Shhh,” I said to Rafe, “it’s my father.”

  Rafe slumped down in the car seat, trying to become invisible, but his knee hit the eight-track player, pushed the tape in, and suddenly “Stairway to Heaven” was blasting out of the speakers mounted under the rear window. Rafe jerked the tape out and threw it in the backseat.

  “Come on, Bertie girl,” I heard my father say in the silence that followed. Bertha sniffed at the Boggses’ grass and moved on, my father in tow. I couldn’t tell whether he had noticed us but had pretended not to or whether he was really and truly blind.

  “Oh, God,” Rafe said, his eyes closed as if this were a prayer.

  “It’s okay,” I said, “really,” and kissed him again.

  I HAD HAD a luckier life than Rafe, even if I hadn’t been anybody’s homecoming queen. On our second date, Rafe said he wanted to take me by the house, maybe meet his mom. Rafe lived in Titusville, the town just north of Cocoa, with his mother, sister, stepfather, two stepbrothers, and two stepsisters. All eight were squeezed in a small three-bedroom house in a run-down subdivision, Hamlet Hills. Once a swamp, it was almost drained now. The streets were named after characters in Shakespeare’s tragedy: Claudius Way, Laertes Lane, Hamlet Terrace. As we drove to Rafe’s house, I couldn’t help noticing there wasn’t a street named after Horatio, the play’s sole significant survivor. Rafe lived at 22 Ophelia Court, a dead end with a murky pond behind it. Were the street names meant ironically? Probably not. In Cocoa there was a subdivision, even more run-down and depressing, whose streets were named after Ivy League colleges. The paper was always full of arrests made on Harvard, Princeton, and Yale.

  That first visit, we parked at the curb, crossed the brown yard, and entered through a jalousied front door that had so many panes missing it seemed silly that it had a knob and lock. Inside, the house smelled of mold, damp, and mildew. The only furniture in the living room was a couch with the legs broken off and an old TV missing its knobs. A girl about my age was asleep on the couch in a plaid pajama top and bikini underwear, though it was late afternoon. A boy about fourteen was changing channels with a pair of pliers.

  “That’s Lisa,” Rafe said, pointing at the couch. Lisa was his sister. She opened one eye and waved. She had blue eyes and long dark hair like Rafe’s. “And this is Lonnie.” The boy with the pliers smiled. He was razor thin with short blond hair and looked nothing like Rafe. I figured he was either a stepbrother or a neighbor.

  “I’ll get us something to drink,” Rafe said. I followed him into the kitchen. Lonnie was his youngest stepbrother and—Rafe lowered his voice—Lonnie was a bit slow. Rafe opened the refrigerator. Inside was a nearly empty bottle of catsup and a large jar of grape jam. I’d never seen a refrigerator that empty unless it was being defrosted, but Rafe did not seem surprised. “There’s always water,” he said. He got down two jelly-jar glasses with Flintstones cartoons on them and turned on the tap. The pipes knocked loudly, but not a drop of water came out.

  “I’m running a bath,” Lisa called from the living-room sofa.

  “Low water pressure,” Rafe explained. He set the jelly jars on the counter. “Come on, I’ll show you around.” He led me down the short central hall. The door to the bathroom was open, rusty water trickling from the faucet into the tub. At that rate, I thought, Lisa might be clean by dinner. I couldn’t imagine how eight people got bathed and showered and shaved in that house in a month, let alone every day.

  Rafe showed me his room, where all three boys slept, two in a bunk bed, one on a foldaway. Rafe had painted the walls red, white, and blue with stars and stripes, like an American flag. The three girls slept in a second, smaller bedroom. At the end of the hall was the door to his parents’ room. It had a large dead bolt. Rafe knocked and said, “It’s me, Mom.”

  “Just a minute.” The lock went clunk, and Rafe opened the door. In the light of a large color TV, I caught my first glimpse of Mrs. Rivard, standing by the side of a king-size bed in a bright purple pants suit, putting on a pair of fluffy mules. She waved us in. I knew from what Rafe had said that his mother was forty, almost young enough to be my mother’s daughter. What struck me was how much they looked alike. Soft, blank eyes, as if they had just woken up from a bad dream, gray hair overdue for a permanent. “Oh, honey,” Mrs. Rivard kissed me, her lips soft and warm. “I’m so happy to meet you. Welcome to the family.”

  Next to the bed was a small refrigerator and on top of it a horde of stacked boxes of cookies and chips. Such a wealth of snack food was shocking after the bare kitchen outside. I thought of my mother, her perpetually closed door. Was this any different? It seemed to me it was, but I wasn’t sure how. I stepped back, not wanting Mrs. Rivard to kiss me again. She opened her refrigerator. “Here, honey,” she said, handing me a Coke. “You look thirsty.”

  All the kids had jobs, Rafe told me later, and were expected to buy food and clothes out of their earnings. Everyone worked. His mother was a secretary, his stepfather a county mosquito control officer during the day and a convenience store clerk at night. To Rafe, it wasn’t odd that his mother kept her food and TV behind a locked door. If she didn’t, someone would take them.

  I found out what he meant. After we had been dating a month, I started to send Rafe home with packed lunches for his night job, raiding leftovers from my mother’s cooking that none of us had much heart for. If he put his lunch in the refrigerator, one of his siblings would eat everything but the napkin, no matter how dire the threats he Magic Markered on the brown bag.

  I felt rich sending food home with him, like I was from a better planet or a home where things really worked. That was part of Rafe’s appeal. His family was so messed up and so open about it that I could pretend mine was just fine. In the time I knew him, both his stepsisters got pregnant. His stepfather threw the oldest one out in the yard with all her stuff in the middle of the night. Then her boyfriend retaliated by shooting out what was left of the jaulosies in the front door. Rafe’s oldest brother got caught in bed by his girlfriend’s father and so managed to get married and join the navy in a single day. The youngest brother, sweet, slow Lonnie, failed the test to join the army and went to live on the beach with an older man. Then he disappeared. He was never seen or heard from again. Rising above this chaos was Rafe—attending college, headed for seminary—the family’s great hope, his mother’s proof that life was worth living in spite of everything. I was added evidence. Since Rafe thought I was superior to him, his mother thought I was a princess. My choosing Rafe only proved her vision was true. Rafe was God’s anointed, a true prince.

  I was working, too. I had a job in the junior college’s bookstore. I thought I’d gotten the job on my own, that no one—not the manager of the bookstore, Mrs. Janish, nor any of my teachers—knew who my father was. This in spite of the fact that he was now provost of the Cocoa campus, the biggest part of a junior college that had expanded to have campuses in Melbourne and Titusville as well. The bookstore employed five students, and except for the long lines of students waiting to buy textbooks at the beginning of the semester, we were never busy. The bookstore was in the student union, so we took turns running across the hall to buy Cokes and onion rings at the snack bar and to bring back reports on the Watergate hearings, which played day after day on the TV in the student lounge.

  One morning I was working on the display case under the cash register, dusting the new electronic calculators for sale, each the size of a small typewriter, when I looked up to see Mrs. Janish pop out of her office. Something was wrong. She had both hands pressed to her lips. She looked like she might be sick. “What?” I started.

  “Sit down,” she said to me. She waited until I was perched on the high wooden stool we kept behind the counter. “The provost is in the hospital,” she said. “He had a heart attack this morning in his office.” At first I thought she was telling me this without knowing the provost was my father. Then she put her hand on my shoulder. “Your sister is at the hospital with him.” Carol wa
s home for spring break. “She wants you to stay here for now. She’ll call.” I had just gotten my driver’s license, but I didn’t have a car. I guessed I would stay where I was. Where was my mother?

  “Did she say how my father is?” I couldn’t imagine my father in the hospital. He had high blood pressure, I knew, but he didn’t smoke or drink or even, as he had told so many waitresses over the years, drink coffee.

  “She said they were running tests.”

  I finished dusting and rearranging the display case. Then, at Mrs. Janish’s insistence, I went across the hall to get some lunch. My English professor, who was busy convincing an entire generation of Brevard County kids that Shakespeare was really Christopher Marlowe, stopped me. “I was so shocked and sorry to hear about your dad,” he said. The woman at the grill who made the onion rings, each hand-sliced and dipped in fresh batter, said, “Such terrible news about your father.” So much for anonymity.

  After lunch, Carol called. “The doctors say the next twenty hours are the most important,” she said. He had been feeling pain in his chest and left arm for several days but had ignored it. My father had brought home Kentucky Fried Chicken for dinner last night, something I couldn’t remember him ever doing before, and we’d eaten the whole bucket. Even my mother had a nice, juicy breast. It was hard to believe that instead of licking our fingers, we should have been dialing my father an ambulance, racing to the hospital.

  “Listen, Carol,” I said, “where’s Mom? I can’t stay here.”

  I heard her hesitate. “She’s in with Dad, but I’m sending her home. She’s not doing so well.”

  “Are you going home with her?” We both knew someone should stay with her. I knew neither of us wanted to.

  “No,” Carol said, “I’m staying with Dad.” She was choosing sides. I would have to as well.

  “I’ll get a ride to the hospital,” I said. “Rafe will be out of class in an hour. Or I’ll get one of the other kids at the bookstore to take me.”

  “Come straight to intensive care,” Carol said. “It’s on the second floor.”

  In the end, Mrs. Janish volunteered to drive me to the hospital. We got there a little before two. “I hope your father’s okay,” she said, dropping me off outside the main lobby. “The college wouldn’t be the same without him.”

  A sign to the right of the double doors that lead into Intensive Care read: IMMEDIATE FAMILY ONLY!!! FIVE-MINUTE LIMIT ON VISITS. CHECK-IN REQUIRED. STOP AT THE NURSING DESK. It wasn’t a good sign that my father was in a place where such strict rules were necessary.

  The nursing desk was just inside the double doors. I stopped to check in as required, but the nurse held a finger to her lips. I mouthed my father’s name. She nodded and pointed to one of the glass cubicles. He was resting, his eyes closed, breathing through a tube. Carol was sitting on a hard plastic chair by his side. She got up, her five minutes over, and let me have her place.

  I leaned forward and took his hand in mine. It was very warm, the small bones moving slightly under a soft cushion of flesh. He didn’t move. He was hooked up to a monitor, one of those machines that made each heartbeat into a game of follow the bouncing ball. The rhythm was insistent, hypnotic. His lips were purplish blue. After a while, I started to cry.

  The nurse appeared at the cubicle door. She touched her watch with one finger. My five minutes were up. “He’ll probably be livelier tomorrow,” she said, and I couldn’t help wondering if livelier was an intensive-care euphemism for still alive. She walked with me back to the double doors. “Right now, he’s on some pretty heavy meds.”

  Carol was waiting for me in the lobby, sitting hunched on one of the bright orange plastic couches, her arms wrapped around her waist as if her stomach hurt. I sat beside her. She looked almost as bad as Dad.

  Carol looked over at me. “I’m the reason for all this.”

  “What in the world are you talking about?”

  “They had to get married because of me,” Carol said, hugging her stomach even harder. “Mom told me last year. She was pregnant. The WACs offered her an abortion, but she wouldn’t do it. She said Dad proposed by saying, ‘Well, then I guess I’ll have to marry you.’” Carol started crying. “It’s all my fault. My fault, they had to get married, and now they’re both sick and unhappy. I tried my best, but it wasn’t enough.”

  “That’s crazy,” I told her. “We’re the kids. We’re not supposed to be in charge.”

  She looked up at me, one eyebrow raised, as if to say, If not us, who? Then she wiped her eyes with an already damp, wadded Kleenex and sighed. “Did I tell you Sanders broke up with me?” she said. Sanders was her latest boyfriend. He’d transferred to Cocoa High as a senior and taken Carol to the prom. I didn’t like him much. When I’d represented Israel at the mock United Nations during my junior and final year in high school, Sanders had been the chief delegate from the Soviet Union. In the middle of a crucial debate about the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian observer had tried to abduct me from the women’s rest room. I had barely escaped, after spending the better part of an hour locked in a stall. I had no doubt that the kidnapping stunt had been Sanders’s idea. He was that kind of guy.

  After graduation, he’d been one of the few kids in our class to go to college out of state, to Duke. “You remember how I asked him to look up Deena Quinn, because she was at UNC and I thought she’d be lonely?” Deena had been the treasurer of the high school French Club, a position that guaranteed negative social stature. She was a smart, sweet girl with thick, black-framed glasses. “Well, he did, and now they’re planning on moving out of their dorms next year and living together.”

  None of Carol’s plans for the people she loved, who all should have loved her more, were working out. “Come on,” I said, putting my arm around her. “Let’s go get a Coke or something. Then I need to call Rafe.”

  21

  We decided to take shifts. Carol would stay with Dad until dinnertime, then I would take a turn, bringing Mom with me if she was up to it. Rafe picked me up outside the hospital. I slid into the passenger seat of his car and almost sat on a half-dozen red roses. “For my dad?” I said, wondering if I should tell Rafe they didn’t allow flowers in intensive care.

  “For you,” he said. “Come on. There’s somewhere special—” he hesitated, “somewhere sacred, I want to take you.” I didn’t know what to say. I shut the door. I thought maybe we were going to see his minister, Dr. Bingen, to talk about my father. I’d met him the one Sunday I had gone to a service with Rafe. Rafe’s Methodist church had been a congregation of United Brethren, a small, historically German-speaking denomination that had recently joined the much larger Methodists to form the United Methodist Church. I didn’t know how a group of German Protestants had ended up in Titusville, but the members of Rafe’s church were mostly elderly people with names like Wipperfurth and Schattschneider. They loved Rafe. Even though he wasn’t in the least bit German, he was their future, proof that the generation to come was not wholly lost, wicked, or mad. The Sunday I’d gone to church, they’d smiled at me as if Rafe and I were the new Adam and Eve.

  Rafe didn’t head for the church, which was near Hamlet Hills. Instead he parked in downtown Titusville, in front of one of the many empty storefronts. “Where are we going?” I asked him, as we got out of the car. “I have to be back at the hospital by five.”

  “Don’t worry, we will be,” he said. “Now close your eyes.” He put his hands over my eyes and steered me down a short flight of stairs. I heard a door open, a shop bell ring. I smelled damp and sawdust and something stronger, leather. “Okay,” Rafe said, and lifted his hands. We were in a leather goods shop. Purses and bags made out of stiff, stitched cowhide hung on the walls. The back was curtained off by an Indian print bedspread, maybe to make space for a dressing room, maybe because someone lived back there. An old-fashioned pedal sewing machine took up the center of the room. Rafe picked up a sheet of paper and a thick carpenter’s pencil from the counter.

  “
Here,” he said and motioned me to a short stool. “Sit down and take off your shoes. I need to trace your foot.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “So your sandals will fit, silly,” Rafe said. Then I understood, at least partly, why we were there. I’d said I liked Rafe’s sandals. With their flat, thick soles and complicated leather laces, they looked like something the Roman legions or maybe Christ himself might have worn. Now I was about to be fitted for my own pair.

  I sat down, slipped off my white plastic sandals. A short, bald man with a thick, black beard appeared from behind the curtain. “Joseph,” Rafe announced, smiling. Joseph, the sandal-maker, wore blue-and-white-striped overalls but no shirt. A nail cross, identical to Rafe’s, hung from a leather bootlace around his neck. Rafe nodded toward a display on the counter: a row of crosses swung from a wooden stand made of dowels. “Joseph’s wife, Patience, makes the crosses.” I tried to imagine someone named Patience who spent her days welding spikes into symbols of her Lord’s martyrdom. Patience. Would I be a better person if my name were Harmony or Charity?

  “Here,” Joseph said to Rafe, taking the paper and pencil from him. “I’ll do it.” Joseph knelt beside me, lifted my slightly dirty bare foot onto the paper. His fingers were calloused, so hard they felt like bare bones. I watched as he carefully traced my left foot. Hanging half-tangled in his dark, curling chest hair, the sharp ends of his cross looked painful and dangerous.

 

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