When Gwen turns and sees me, she gives me a little wave. She looks sad. RJ looks puffy, and his face looks weird, a funny color. Gone are the Clash T-shirt, the string bracelet, and the glasses. He’s in a hospital gown. I look at Gwen, and then I look back at RJ. I’m sure of it. Gwen looks normal; RJ looks yellow.
There’s something else too. Something different.
His mop of hair is cut, shaved to a neat buzz.
“Hi, Gwen,” I force myself to say. “Hi, RJ.”
Gwen looks at me and then at the clock.
“I’ll give you guys some time to hang out,” she says. “I’m going to get something in the cafeteria.”
“I’ll go with you,” says Rabbi Harris. “They’re having a special on grilled cheese sandwiches. Will? Want anything?”
I shake my head. Gwen and Rabbi Harris leave, and rather than sit on my usual cake-chair, I sit where Gwen was sitting, in the rolling chair next to the bed. RJ hasn’t said anything since I came into the room.
“Nice haircut,” I say.
“Pff,” says RJ. “Denise made me do it. She said the ‘rock star’ do was getting too hard to keep clean.”
“I hate her,” I say.
“Don’t,” says RJ. “She’s no fun, but don’t hate her. See that container of baby wipes over there? I’m not going to tell you what she does with them.”
I get it. I nod.
“Gwen told me about the Back 40,” he says. He’s really breathy, and he pauses between phrases. “And how you guys…you found some kind of rare turtle.”
This is freaking me out. He can’t even finish a sentence without pausing to breathe.
“Yeah,” I say, trying to sound cheerful. “It was a close call. Actually, Gwen found the spot where they were hiding, and Max—”
RJ starts coughing, and I don’t finish the sentence. Once he’s done coughing, I decide to let the topic go. It doesn’t matter. The details don’t matter.
He doesn’t say anything after that.
Should I tell him how I’m thinking about doing the surgery? I really don’t want to bother him with any of that.
Drums. I could tell him that I want to take drum lessons. Real drum lessons.
But what’s the point?
Whatever the topic, it doesn’t feel right to bring it up.
And now I’ve missed my chance, because RJ has dozed off. His breathing is labored, like his lungs are wet sponges.
“Go on,” he then says suddenly.
“RJ?” I say. “You awake?”
“I’m awake,” he says.
We’re quiet for another minute.
The bucket list.
“RJ,” I say.
He waits a minute before he responds. “Yeah.”
“Tell me about the next thing on the list.”
He’s quiet for a minute.
“That’s it,” he finally says.
“What?” I say.
“That’s it.”
“What’s it?” I say. “What’s it, RJ?”
He turns his head a little to look in my direction, but it’s pretty clear that he can’t see me.
“The list is done,” he says. “No more.”
I feel a blow to the center of my chest, as if I’d been kicked by a horse. That cannot be it. There must be more to do. More I can do for him.
“No, there’s got to be something else,” I say. “RJ, it’s already December. I can…I can find you a Christmas tree. I can throw you a tree-trimming party.”
RJ is silent, just shakes his head a little, side to side.
“RJ!” I say. I don’t mean to yell at him, but I think I’m yelling. “Come on, RJ. One more thing!”
He takes another deep breath, enough to say a few more words.
“You did it,” he says.
I don’t say anything. I can’t say anything because a cold hand has closed around my vocal cords; I’m not crying because everything’s been frozen solid.
“It’s done,” he says. “The list is complete.”
He seems to relax into his pillow. The white softness cradles and enfolds his head from all sides.
Then he adds one more word.
“Thanks.”
When I get home, Mom is standing on the sofa. She’s hanging clear sheets of plastic over the windows to keep the cold air out. She usually does this around Thanksgiving. She’s late this year.
“Hi, honey,” she says as I walk in. “How was your visit?”
I push past her without a word and go up to my room. I stand in the middle, my arms wrapped tightly around myself. I feel like I want to scream. On the floor are the drumsticks. I pick them up, throw myself in front of my junk kit, and begin to play.
Lemme at ’em Lemme at ’em Lemme at ’em Lemme at ’em Lemme at ’em Lemme at ’em Lemme at ’em Lemme at ’em Lemme at ’em Lemme at ’em Lemme at ’em Lemme at ’em Lemme at ’em
I play louder and faster and louder still, but it feels like something’s missing.
On the small table next to my bed are RJ’s headphones. I grab them. Then I start digging in the drawer next to my bed. Under packets of wax for my braces, some extra hoses for a turtle terrarium, and an extra bottle of Aquagel, I find a folded piece of paper. It’s my forty-hours form. I stare at it in disbelief. I stopped keeping track of my hours a long time ago, after the fourth or fifth visit. I can’t believe I ever thought of RJ as a chore I had to deal with, a way to get numbers on a sheet of paper.
I turn the form over, and it’s covered in RJ’s handwriting. His music list—ten songs by ten different bands. The first song: “Clash City Rockers” by the Clash.
I open my laptop, search for the song, and find it with no problem.
I hit play.
Ner! Ner-ner! Ner! Ner-ner!
Ner! Ner-ner! Ner! Ner-ner!
I sit down at my drum set, headphones on, and the music fills me. Anger. Frustration. Power.
Dum-chack!
Dum-dum chack!
Dum-chack!
Dum-dum chack!
The drums kick in, and my head starts to bang up and down with the music as I stomp the pedal and slam the metal pan, again and again. The music has taken complete control, and I’m not even here. It’s just the music.
When the song ends, it’s like being jerked out of a happy sleep. I can’t hit replay fast enough. I play with my full might.
I want to liquefy everybody gone dry
Or plug into the aerials that poke up in the sky
This is how I feel: caught between hating everyone around me who doesn’t know what it’s like to be filled with tears, and wishing I could connect to something far away, far up there. I play harder and harder, and then I hear a crack and see something whiz away, as if electrified. I pause the music. I’m in awe. Like the Dog Complex drummer, I broke a drumstick.
There’s banging on the door.
“WILL!”
“WHAT!”
“Knock it off—you’re driving me crazy!”
I feel a surge of anger, and when my bedroom door opens, I turn it on Mom as she comes in the room.
“I DON’T CARE!” I yell. “GET OUT!”
“Will!” she says. “You don’t talk to me like that!”
I throw the sticks down onto the floor and sit, glowering at her. I’m breathing hard.
“What’s the matter with you?” she asks. “Did something happen with RJ?”
“No!” I say.
“You’re sad about RJ.”
“I’m not sad!” I say.
“You’re angry,” she says.
“Would you stop telling me what I feel?” I say.
“But I know how you feel!” she says.
“No, you don’t!” I shout. “You don’t know. My
friend is dying in the hospital, and I’ve been watching him get worse and worse, and you have no idea what it’s like!”
“Yes, I do, Will,” she says sternly, her voice getting louder and louder. “I know what it’s like to lose someone. I went through it with your father!”
“Then why won’t you actually help me?” I yell back. “All you give me is your bullcrap, your ‘it’s hard to say goodbye’ bullcrap! I don’t need to be told this is hard! Obviously, it’s hard!”
“Then what do you need, Will?” she asks.
“Tell me about Dad,” I say, looking her in the eye.
At first, I see the tiniest little shake of her head. But I can tell—she isn’t saying no to me. She’s actually saying no to some part of herself, a part that she’s afraid of. She looks like she’s about to speak, but then her eyes fill with tears. She puts both hands up to her face and sobs.
Shame spreads across me, as if I’m the cause of her sadness, and then bam! Just like that, for the second time, I’m four years old.
I’m in the hospital with Dad.
Mom is here too.
She’s crying the same way she is now. I’m standing a few feet from the bed, clutching a stuffed penguin.
“Will, come tell your father you love him,” she says. She leads me forward to the bed. Dad’s eyes are closed, and the machines breathe in and out. I open my mouth, but no sound comes. No breath.
“Go ahead, Will,” she says. “Tell him you love him. Maybe he can hear you.”
I can’t. I can’t get the words out. I’m too scared.
I shake my head and push back, away from the bed, away from Dad.
I don’t say “I love you.”
Now the memory is gone. I’m here in my room.
“Whoo,” she says, wiping her eyes with the tip of her sleeve. She breathes deeply for a moment, the way I did the one single time I jumped off a diving board and resurfaced, disoriented from the plunge, the noise, the bubbles, but back in the world I’d come from. I have the feeling that another dive lies ahead of the two of us. A higher jump, a deeper plunge.
“It’s always been really, really hard for me to talk about your dad,” she says. “But I know I need to change that.”
She sniffles and looks around for something to blow her nose on. She digs in her jeans pocket and pulls out a crumpled piece of tissue.
“I didn’t tell Dad I loved him,” I say.
“What?” she asks. She blows her nose and looks at me. “When?”
“Before he died,” I say. Suddenly, I’m crying too. “I couldn’t do it.”
It’s my turn to cover my face with my hands.
“Oh, honey,” she says, pulling me over to sit beside her on the bed. “Please look at me. You were only four years old! It’s okay! He knew! Please trust me, he knew how you felt.”
We sit in silence a minute. My breathing gradually steadies. I feel tingly.
“Has that always bothered you?” she asks. “That you couldn’t tell your dad you loved him? Why didn’t you ever tell me about that?”
“I just remembered,” I say.
“You need to forgive yourself, Will,” she says. “Dad wouldn’t want you feeling bad about that eight years later.”
I nod.
“You know, hospitals can be really strong triggers for memory,” she says. “I wonder if what’s going on with RJ is bringing up old stuff about Dad.”
“Rabbi Harris said this might happen,” I say. “I didn’t believe him.”
“Rabbi Harris knows a lot more about life than he lets on,” she says. “Don’t let his hippie-dippie act fool you.”
She’s quiet for a second.
“Look, Will,” she continues. “After your father died, I gathered up some of his—not special things, just everyday things. I thought when you were a little older, you might want them. Are you ready to see them?”
I nod.
Without another word, she disappears from my room. I hear her footsteps on the stairs go down. A minute later, she comes in the door with the wicker hamper from the basement. The place I’ve been avoiding since the day Mom and Aunt Mo moved the boxes down there six years ago. The place where I went to excavate for a bass drum and found an old suitcase full of odds and ends.
“It looks like you got into this already,” she says. “I thought I recognized that suitcase.”
“That’s Dad’s stuff?” I say, horrified at how unceremoniously I dumped it into the hamper. “I—I didn’t know!”
“It’s okay, Will, relax.”
She sets it on the bed; then she takes a breath—not a big one. Anyone but me would have missed it. But I know what that breath means. I can see that what’s about to happen is big for her. Really big. Bigger than jumping into any pool, no matter how deep, or any pond, no matter how murky. I image it’s more like leaping into the ocean—endless blue below and crashing waves above.
“Everything in here has a little story attached,” she says gently, almost sweetly. “Nothing big, all little stuff. Some of it might help you feel more connected to Dad.”
I reach into the box and pull out the baseball hat.
“This was Dad’s?” I ask.
“Yeah,” Mom says. “He was a big Oakland A’s fan. He grew up in Oakland. Put it on.”
I hold it in my hands, but I don’t want to put it on. It doesn’t seem right to wear his hat.
“What’s the matter?” she presses. “You can wear it.”
This hat was once on Dad’s head. If I could run backward in time, one hand on the hat, eventually, I’d find my father there. Here. He’d be right here.
I go back to the hamper.
A Post-it note: Went to get grozeries. See you in 1 hr.
“What’s ‘grozeries’?” I say.
“That’s how your dad and I used to say it,” Mom says with a smile. “Grozeries. I don’t even remember how that started.”
I go back to the hamper and pull out a thin strip of paper.
“That’s a sushi menu,” says Mom. “I’ve never met anyone who could eat as much sushi as your dad. He would have been horrified at what passes for sushi in Horicon.”
The menu has little Xs next to certain foods. A random dinner on a random night. I wonder if I was there, a toddler or a baby or not yet born. I dig a bit lower in the box and find something odd: a bundle of red pens, held together with a rubber band. Before I can ask what it is, Mom sighs and lifts the bundle from my hand, cradling it in two palms.
“You know how Dad and I met, right?” she says. “We were copy editors at a newspaper in Berkeley. This part I’ve never told you. We were both hired at the same time, and we liked each other, but neither of us had the nerve to ask the other one out. So after a while, your dad would steal all my red pens when I was away from my desk, and when I’d come back to my desk, I’d be like ‘Oh, shoot. I don’t have any red pens. I’ll have to go borrow some from the cute new guy.’ I would visit him for pens like five times a day, and finally, we went on a date!”
She looks at me. “Isn’t that soooo sweet?”
I shrug. “Dorky.”
“You think that’s dorky—our first Valentine’s Day, he gave me a big, cheesy bouquet of roses and a really sweet card, written in red pen. And the first red pen was stuck down in the flowers. And every Valentine’s Day, he’d give me another bouquet and card and another red pen.”
“That’s why you always write me notes in red pen,” I say, realizing.
She nods, reaches into the box, and pulls out a thick manila envelope.
I can guess what’s in it, and I know what she’s thinking: maybe soon she’ll be ready to open the envelope and read those cards. To face the feelings.
“Why didn’t you show me this stuff a long time ago?” I ask.
“I wasn’t ready,”
she says. “Maybe I waited too long.”
“Yes, you waited too long!” I say. “I can’t believe you just left all Dad’s stuff sitting in the basement!”
“Will, I need you to understand something,” she says. “Raising a kid alone…It’s really one of the hardest things in the world to do. Even with a great kid like you. For a long time after your dad died, the only way I could make it through the day was to keep my mind on the two of us. Focus on you and me. I couldn’t afford to think about Dad. I couldn’t afford to be sad all the time.”
This makes me feel bad, but it also makes sense.
“But maybe things are changing,” she says. “Your Bar Mitzvah is just around the corner. You’ve gotten up onstage alone; you’ve made friends besides Shirah; you’ve become a rock and roll drummer. You gotta admit, you’re not the same kid you were two years ago. Or even last summer.”
She’s right. I don’t feel different. But when I look back, I see that things have changed. I’ve changed. Maybe I’m ready to remember the past. Maybe I’m ready to try new things.
I put the hat on. It fits.
“Mom, I was thinking,” I say. “About the surgery. I think I’m ready. I want to go through with it.”
“Are you sure?”
I nod.
“I knew you’d come around,” she says quietly. “I never actually cancelled it.”
“Mom!” I say, as if I’m angry; she knows I hate it when she doesn’t listen to what I say. But I can’t be angry with her, not now.
She leans over and puts her arms around me, and she holds me for a minute, the way she used to do.
I’m in the hospital bed, waiting to be taken into surgery. My room has a view of the Milwaukee River and the snow that’s settling on the buildings and church spires and roads and little cars down below. I’m wearing a hospital gown—the kind that ties in the back, the kind that RJ was wearing the last few times I saw him. Also, I’m wearing Dad’s hat. It’s giving me courage. Mom is sitting here next to me, in a fold-up cake-chair, just like the one in RJ’s room. I’ve been here for about an hour, but it already feels like a day. Mom and I drove three hours to Milwaukee yesterday and spent the night at a motel down the street so we could be at the hospital for intake at seven a.m. Before bed, I called RJ to say I’d visit as soon as I could, but he was groggy and distant. It was a short call.
Turtle Boy Page 21