How to Say Goodbye in Robot

by Natalie Standiford

  “Okay. After Dawn Davenport has a meltdown on Christmas, she runs away, rapes herself, and gets pregnant. She has the baby alone in the woods. She doesn’t have a knife or anything so she bites off the umbilical cord herself!”

  “Ew!” I said. “Wait—what do you mean, she rapes herself?”

  “Oh. Well, Dawn Davenport is played by a man—a cross-dresser named Divine. So in the scene where she gets raped, Divine plays Dawn and the scary hick rapist. Dawn Davenport ends up becoming a serial killer.”

  “I’ve got to see this movie,” I said.

  “You really do,” Jonah said.

  We drove past the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen, a marble monolith lit up like Cinderella’s castle. The more austere Canton campus nestled up to it, right next door.

  “Make a left here,” I said. The turn for my street, St. Dunstan’s Road, was across from the Canton entrance. Jonah turned left and drove the three blocks to my house.

  “This is it?” he said.

  “This is it,” I said. “Not much to it, is there?”

  He shrugged. “It’s a house. They’re all just houses.”

  “Yeah. Well, see you at school on Monday.” I got out of the car.

  “See you.”

  The house was dark and quiet. I went upstairs, giving my parents’ door a knock to let them know I was home. Then I went into my room and turned on the radio, as I had so many nights before. It felt different this time, though. This time I knew someone else who was out there listening too.

  CHAPTER 6

  The next night I felt restless. It had been a summery Saturday but by evening the wind shifted and a dry chill blew in from the north. There was no party to go to, not even a dull party from which my future self would need to be rescued.

  Mom and Dad went out to a “Welcome New Faculty” dinner at the Hopkins Club. First they had a big fight over whether Mom should wear a blouse she’d made out of the kitchen-chicken curtain material. Dad thought it might make a bad impression on his new colleagues. Mom said she didn’t care how silly it looked—she was meeting these people for the first time and needed the chickens for moral support.

  “Bea, what do you think?” Dad turned to me to break the stalemate. My usual role.

  “I say no chicken blouse,” I said. “Sorry, Mom.”

  Dad smiled triumphantly while Mom did the Pinch. But she changed her blouse—thank God, because Anne Sweeney’s mother would probably be at the dinner, and I didn’t need Anne going all Fashion Police on my mother at Assembly on Monday morning.

  “You win,” Mom said to Dad. “But I’m not going to be friendly to anyone.”

  After they left, I sat on the front porch and read until it got too dark to see. Then I watched night come to the neighborhood. Dressed-up couples drove off for Saturday-night dates. A group of kids—eighth or ninth graders—clustered in the alley across the street, then wandered off to loiter somewhere else. Three boys rolled by on skateboards, wheels clacking on the uneven sidewalk.

  I was just about to go inside when a big old Pontiac chugged down the street and paused in front of my house. Jonah stuck his head out the window and squinted at the porch, as if he was trying to figure out if anyone was home.

  “Hey.” I waved. “What’s up?” I half ran down the steps to the car and peered in.

  “Get in,” he said. “We’re going downtown.”

  “What for?” I said.

  “To celebrate!” he said.

  “To celebrate what?”

  “I’ll tell you in the car.”

  “Is it something good?”

  “Celebrations usually are,” he said. “This one’s kind of mixed, though.”

  I hesitated. Would Mom and Dad get mad if they got home and found me gone? I could call Dad on his cell and ask, but what if he said no? That would be inconvenient, since I really felt like going out. “I’ll be right back,” I said. I ran inside and jotted a quick note. Went out for a little while with—I paused—a friend from school. Dad would like that. Back soon.

  I changed out of my shorts into jeans and stuffed some money and lip gloss in a small bag. My cell phone glared at me from my desk. I reached for it, then stopped. Mom and Dad could reach me on my cell if they were worried, but I hated that. Just when you were away from them and having fun, the portable babysitter rang and interrupted everything. Lately I’d been “forgetting” to take it with me, and I saw no reason to change my policy that night, so I left the phone on my desk and went back out to meet Jonah.

  “Ready?” he asked, revving the engine.

  “Ready.”

  “Let’s go.”

  He drove downtown. “So what are we celebrating?” I asked.

  “Wait till we get there,” he said.

  “Get where?”

  “You’ll see.”

  We turned onto St. Paul Street, rounding past Johns Hopkins. The brick rowhouses gave way to skyscrapers and the flash of downtown: the newspaper offices, the hospitals and hotels, the Washington Monument lit up on its hill. Traffic was light. Jonah turned onto Charles Street and parked on an ornate but faded block of stores and apartments. We walked up a few stairs to a storefront. Printed on the glass in chipped gold letters: CARMICHAEL’S BOOK SHOP AND BEER STUBE.

  “They never card here.” Jonah opened the door. “They’re too busy being insane.”

  We walked into a used bookshop. I kicked a dust bunny across the splintered wooden floor. A potbellied, gray man—gray hair, gray skin, gray ash hanging off the end of his cigarette—sat reading behind an old cash register. He glanced up at us, nodded, and went back to his book. From below I heard voices and the rolling swell of a blues piano.

  Jonah led me downstairs to a dark bar filled with rickety mismatched furniture. The walls were covered with dusty memorabilia: old photos, framed newspaper stories from the 1940s and 50s, taxidermied animal heads, hats, machine parts. A poster advertised an upcoming show:

  Monday nights at Carmichael’s—The Amazing Loudini.

  He knew Houdini! And he does card tricks.

  A wizened blue-black man in a suit and fedora pounded on the piano, accompanied by a glass of whiskey and a large tip jar.

  We took a table by the piano. The other tables were occupied by college students, young couples on dates, and a smartly dressed older couple on a nostalgia trip. A skinny, sweaty, bug-eyed man and woman twitched in the corner. The woman was missing one of her front teeth.

  The waiter, rumpled and gray like his upstairs counterpart, took our order.

  “Two bottles of Boh,” Jonah ordered. The waiter wiped his nose and shuffled away.

  “It’s best to stick with bottles,” Jonah told me. “The glasses here are filthy. I think they wash them with spit.”

  “Ew,” I said.

  “But this place is cheap,” Jonah said. “Beer’s only a dollar.”

  The customers talked right over the music, clapping when the piano player finished his song. He nodded and picked up the tip jar, teetering around the room and shaking it suggestively. Everyone tipped him except for the junkies in the corner, who pretended not to see him. Maybe they really didn’t see him. They were arguing in a heated whisper.

  Jonah stuffed two dollars in the tip jar. The waiter brought our beers. I wiped the mouth of my bottle with a napkin, just in case.

  “Taking a break,” the piano player announced. He sat at his piano bench and polished off his whiskey.

  “My parents used to come here on dates,” Jonah said. “When they were in college, and just after. Everybody’s parents did. The place was different then. Not as scuzzy.”

  We sipped our beers. I waited a polite amount of time for him to tell me his news. I counted to five. He said nothing.

  “So—” I said. “We’re here. Now can you please tell me what we’re celebrating?”

  “Okay.” He took a long swig of beer. “But it’s kind of a long story.” He swigged again. “Here goes. I just found out that someone I thought was dead is alive.�
��

  I gasped. “Your mother?”

  He narrowed his eyes at me. “How do you know about my mother? Oh, right. Bigmouth Sweeney.”

  “Is she alive?”

  “No.” He scowled. “Now you’re spoiling my mood.”

  “I’m sorry. Who’s alive?”

  “My twin brother, Matthew.” He paused. “Do you know all about him too?”

  I picked at the damp, sticky label on my bottle. “Only a little bit.”

  “Good,” he said. “Then I’ll tell you the rest.”

  I nodded. He continued.

  “I answered the phone this afternoon and some woman said, ‘Mr. Tate? This is Mrs. Trevanian. I thought I should let you know that Matthew has had a seizure.’”

  “That’s very weird,” I said.

  “At first I thought it must be a wrong number, but she called me ‘Mr. Tate,’ right? So even though my head was spinning and I could hardly think, I just kind of said ‘Mm-hmm,’ and let her keep talking. She said that Matthew was in the infirmary, and they were going to try a new medication. So I said, ‘All right, fine,’ trying to sound like my father, and she hung up. Then I sat down and wondered what the hell she was talking about.”

  “But how could it be your Matthew? Couldn’t it be a mistake? There must be other Matthew Tates in the world.” I spoke as lightly as I could, hoping not to upset him.

  “I thought of that. I mean, he was dead.” Jonah stared across the room, his eyes unfocused. “I went to the funeral. I saw the two coffins. One for my mother and one for Matthew. I visited their graves. He was dead. They both were. But now he’s alive again. Like magic.”

  I nervously tore at my damp napkin. What if Jonah was delusional? It seemed more likely that there’d been some kind of mistake than that his twin brother had come back from the dead. But I didn’t dare say what I was thinking. “Did you ask your father about it?”

  “He was out at a hospital board meeting, so I had to wait hours for him to come home. I almost went crazy trying to figure out what was going on. Finally, he walked through the door and I pounced. I told him about the phone call and demanded to know what it meant.”

  “And—?”

  “He said, ‘You caught me by surprise,’ and sat down kind of hard.” Jonah gave a rueful laugh. “He’s not used to being greeted by me when he gets home. We try to avoid each other as much as possible. But I knew something was up because his hands were trembling. That’s not like him. He’s always in control. Almost always.”

  With every revelation I felt myself being drawn into Jonah’s world. And it was scary and thrilling. The mysterious Ghost Boy was telling me the disturbing details of his family life. Secrets no one else knew.

  “He told me everything,” Jonah said. “It’s true. He admitted it. Matthew is alive.”

  “But how can that be?”

  Jonah paused to gulp his beer. “My mother was killed in a car accident, and my father told me Matthew had died in that accident too. But it turns out Matthew wasn’t even badly hurt. It’s just that my father didn’t see how he could take care of Matthew without my mother around. And he thought Matthew and I were too close, that I was imitating Matthew and acting all brain damage-y when I’m supposed to be normal. This was the perfect chance to separate us—and I couldn’t protest. So he shipped Matthew off to an institution, secretly.”

  I just listened, fascinated. This was like a gothic novel, like Jane Eyre or Rebecca.

  “‘It’s a very good place,’ he told me. ‘The staff knows how to take care of people like Matthew, much better than I ever could.’ All so I could be free—that’s what he said, ‘free of that burden,’ as if I ever felt Matthew was a burden—and live a normal life and make friends and blah blah blah. He insists he did it for me. For my own good, and Matthew’s.”

  Jonah still stared in that unfocused way, and the look on his face was so bitter I was afraid to say a word.

  “He won’t tell me where Matthew is. He thinks I’m better off not knowing. ‘Just forget about this whole incident,’ he said. ‘Trust me.’” Jonah shook his head. “Trust him? How can I trust a man who told me such a terrible lie? He actually buried an empty coffin in a grave marked with my brother’s name! My own father! And I’m supposed to trust him?”

  Jonah picked up his beer bottle. It left a wet ring on the table. He put it down and picked it up again, leaving a circle of rings like a flower.

  “All this time I’ve had this weird feeling, like a phantom limb,” he said. “You know how, when they cut off your leg or something, they say you can still feel it even after it’s gone? Your foot itches, you go to scratch it…but there’s nothing to scratch. That’s how I’ve felt for ten years. Like something—or someone—is connected to me by an invisible cord, and it’s always tugging, tugging, tugging…but when I try to reel it in, there’s nothing on the other end.”

  He looked to me for a reaction then. I sighed, unsure what to say. It was such a wild, dramatic story, full of life and death, deceit and revelation. I felt dull and ordinary next to Jonah. Unworthy.

  “What are you going to do now?” I asked. “Are you going to look for Matthew?”

  “I don’t know where to start.”

  “Find that woman, Mrs. Whatever, the one who called you,” I said. “Look her up on the internet.”

  “Even if I find her, she won’t tell me anything. If my father wants something kept quiet, he knows how to do it. He’s a lawyer. He majored in intimidation in law school. Look how he convinced everyone that Matthew was dead all these years.”

  My parents weren’t always honest with me—but this was deception on a whole different level.

  “So you know he’s alive but you can’t see him?” I said. “Or call him, or write him, or anything?”

  “You’re right. What am I celebrating?” He dug a fingernail into a scratch on the table. Then he smiled, just a little with his mouth but a lot around the eyes. “I do have something to celebrate. He’s alive!”

  He held up his bottle and I clinked it with mine. “Cheers,” I said. “To Matthew.”

  “To Matthew.”

  “We’ll find him,” I said. “I’ll help you.”

  Across the room the junkie woman screeched at the junkie man, “You’re a fucking liar! You fucking stole it, and you’re a liar!” She jumped up and knocked over the table, spilling beer and whiskey, the glasses crashing to the floor.

  I flinched. The boyfriend—or whatever he was—grabbed the woman, but she yanked her arm away and ran out. He kicked the fallen table, kicked a piece of broken glass. “Bitch!” he yelled. “Stupid bitch!”

  The other customers looked up at the commotion, but no one seemed too rattled.

  “Sorry, folks. She’s crazy.” The boyfriend held out his arms in a half shrug. “Can’t do nothing about it.” His mustache seemed to move instead of his lips. “Stupid crazy bitch.”

  He stalked out. The piano player muttered, “Goddamn junkies.” He played “Pennies from Heaven” while the tired gray waiter swept up the broken glass.

  The cashier thumped down the stairs, stopping halfway and peering over the banister at the waiter. The wooden steps creaked under his weight. “Did they pay for their drinks?”

  The waiter shook his head without looking up.

  “Goddammit!” the cashier said. “They’re never coming here again, you understand? You see them, you tell me, and I’ll kick them out myself.”

  The waiter asked if we wanted another beer. “Let’s get out of here,” I said. It was midnight, and by now my parents were probably dialing my cell and listening to it ring in my room.

  We left through the bookshop and stepped out onto the quiet street. Jonah started the car. Its engine purred beneath us as we drove up Charles Street.

  “I’ll be listening to the Night Lights tonight,” I said. “You going to call in?”

  He shrugged. “Who knows what the night will bring?”

  Since it was after midnight, the show was a
lready on the air. Luckily, my parents still weren’t home.

  Dottie:

  Hello, Herb. This is Dottie.

  Herb:

  Hi, Dottie. How’s life treating you?

  Dottie:

  Herb, you know, to be honest, I’ve got the blues. I’ve got ’em bad.

  Herb:

  I’m sorry to hear that, Dottie. What’s the matter?

  Dottie:

  Everything…I’m just blue. What I want to know is, what do I do? How do I get rid of ’em?

  Herb:

  Everybody gets the blues, Dottie. They’ll go away eventually.

  Dottie:

  You think so?

  Herb:

  Sure. You’ve just got to weather those hard times, and, before you know it, the sun is shining again. Maybe some of our listeners can help you out.

  Dottie:

  That would be nice. [fairy music] Guess I better go. Nighty-night, Herb.

  Herb:

  Nighty-night, Dottie. Cheer up! Next caller, you’re on the air.

  Kreplax:

  Herb, Kreplax here.

  Herb:

  Hello, Kreplax. Been to the future lately?

  Kreplax:

  Funny you should ask, Herb. You know that lady, Dottie, might try a little time travel. It’s like magic—you go to another time and leave your troubles behind. Poof! Works for me.

  Herb:

  That would be nice, but it doesn’t sound very practical.

  Kreplax:

  Practical, shmactical. Lighten up, Dottie! I called for another reason. I want to invite all the listeners to a party at my house in West Baltimore. Saturday, October 4. It’s a Party for People from the Future.