Well, if you’d asked me that question twelve months ago, my answer would have been different than it is now.
I looked over to ask Daisy for a pen and he wasn’t there. Then I heard him. When I turned all the way around he was standing with one hand on a birch tree, chucking up his breakfast.
I like to know things and Daisy doesn’t, basically. The truth makes Daisy cover his eyes and puke. Me, I want to know how the bones inside my own arms work.
So: scalpel, microscope, wall on the curve of Jensen Road with a car crumpled into it. Robbie’s bloody hands. Now the props are all in place. Enter my mother, upstage left.
“What’s the matter with you, honey? You seem distracted.” By which she meant, Why aren’t you paying attention to me? Why aren’t I the center of attention?
“Nothing’s the matter with me.”
It was the end of summer, a couple of days after Robbie showed up bleeding on our front stairs. Me and my mother were on the back porch looking out over the water, watching the shadows move across the lawns in Carter’s Bay. The darkness was rising up and blotting out all the detail. I was trying to memorize the order everything disappeared in. Watching the world go away.
“Well, you could talk to me is all I’m saying.”
She was right; I could. I could talk to her all day long. It wouldn’t make the slightest bit of difference. Watch.
“It’s just that something . . . kind of weird happened. And I haven’t seen Daisy in two days.”
“Maybe it’s time to make new friends. You can’t play in the water with Daisy McNamara your whole life.” Then the first streak of purple hit the sky and she stood up. “Well, I’ll have to drive back now. I’ve got Morgan’s car, and we start rehearsals tomorrow.”
My mother manages a theater in the city. None of us can compete with that.
So here is another beginning. To get to it I have to take you two years back. Picture us all at the table: me, my mother, and the house full of men we live with. Gramps was there, and even my dad. It was his day off. Both my brothers were there, too. I guess they made sure Arthur was home for dinner on the night of the big announcement. My mother looked around the table until we all fell silent.
“Something wonderful has happened,” she said.
“Your mother has something to tell you.” My father smiled at her. The smile was adoring and sad, like when people look at a crucifix.
“I’m going to manage a theater company!”
Arthur was reading Ralph Ellison under the table, so Gramps wouldn’t see the book and tell him off for reading at dinner. He looked up and said, “Mom, that’s great.”
“Isn’t it? We have rented space and a budget for two years. If it works, we’ll be able to extend the grant.”
Everyone was looking at my mother. That’s why they didn’t notice the difference between the look on her face and the look on my father’s. I was the only one who saw it, but I didn’t know what it meant. He looked like there was a lot more inside him than usual.
“It means I’ll be away sometimes.”
There it was. I’m leaving you is what my mother was really saying. It took a couple of months for me to realize what was happening, but after that night she was gone all the time. That was the meaning of my father’s sad smile. She didn’t love him enough to hang around, not even until we were all the way grown-up.
What I learned that night when my family fell apart is that silence isn’t just the lack of sound. It’s distance. It’s weight. When things get heavy, people back away. The more something matters, the less people want to talk about it.
So two years later I was on the back porch, and my mother was walking away again. I was trying to figure why Robbie McNamara had come and dripped blood in the middle of my life. I thought maybe Daisy was in trouble, and she couldn’t even hang around long enough to talk to me about it.
“Can I go with you?”
“Of course not.”
“Why?”
“Because of school, as you know perfectly well.”
“School doesn’t start for another week, Mom. What’s the real reason?”
“I have work to do, Joan.”
“When is everything going to go back to normal, Mom? When are you gonna be done?”
She lifted her shoulders and let out a breath while she brought them down again, looking me straight in the eye. Her dramatic training never switches off.
“I’m going now, Joanie. I’ll see you soon.”
Then she kissed the top of my head and walked up the stairs, through the kitchen, and away. I heard her friend Morgan’s car start about half a minute later.
My mother pulled away, and I ran up into the woods. I pushed through the trees, tripped on a root in the dark and cursed, then pulled myself up onto the landing in front. Daisy had left a ziplock baggie under the bench. Inside was a picture of a pod of whales, taken by a diver looking up from below. It looked like it was torn out of a library book. The dick.
In the picture, sunlight speared through the water like the voice of God, making the whales into silhouettes. A baby whale was tucked in between all the grown-ups. On it, Daisy had written, “You don’t have to breathe water to live like this. They’re mammals!” I looked at that picture and thought of whaling factory boats and the blood on Robbie’s hands. I thought of the North Sea turning red and that woman’s bone sticking out of her arm while she moaned in the car on Jensen Road. The whole world was full of blood, and I was the only one who wanted to look at it.
I guess Daisy meant the picture to make me feel calm and safe, like my dreams were real. But I just felt suffocated by the blanket people had thrown over my life. I wanted to push it off and start yelling about what was underneath. Right then, standing on our front stairs, I just got mad. I turned 180 degrees, switched from off to on (or vice versa, however you want to see it). Parting of the Red Sea and the Red Sea was me. I wanted to take Eugene’s rusty scalpel and open up the world.
The thing is, once your questions stop being the “why is the sky blue?” kind and start to really matter, people panic. You might break the silence everybody’s using to glue their lives together. People either gave me a load of pointless advice or tried to make me shut up. Like the truth was just some problem I had. Some phase I was going through. They were all trying to calm me down and shush me. Even Daisy.
I took the whale picture and climbed up to the road through the McNamaras’ side yard. That’s why no one saw me when Robbie pulled up in his yellow Charger and my brother Andre got out of the back seat. It was the first time I’d seen Robbie since the day he shook his bloody hands at me. He looked normal, except for the part where he had my brother in the car. They weren’t exactly best friends. There was some third guy in the front passenger seat, a white guy with stubble and a jean jacket.
“Thanks, Robbie.” Andre waved and turned away.
Robbie said something from inside the car that made Andre turn around and go back to the driver’s-side window. He gestured at him and Andre leaned into the sound of the car stereo, blasting “Because the Night.” I strained my ears, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying.
After a minute, Andre straightened up and raised both of his hands. He waved them and shook his head, turned, and walked down our front steps.
Robbie pulled in to his driveway and put the car in park. He left it running while he talked fast and sort of slapped his hands on the steering wheel, nodding at the guy in the passenger seat. I moved into the shadow of one of the McNamaras’ pine trees and watched. The other guy took out a wad of cash and passed it over.
Robbie sat right there in his own mother’s driveway, counting out those bills on his dashboard where the whole world could see. He didn’t even lean down and lay them out on the seat. Daisy’s big brother had no sense of caution. He wouldn’t have lasted five minutes on a nature documentary. It’s a wonder he didn’t get himself locked up or killed before he was thirteen.
He folded up the piles of bills
and put them inside his jacket, then turned the car off and got out. I took another step back into the shadow and watched Mr. Jean Jacket light a 100. He rolled down the passenger window and let his weird air of thickheaded menace out into the night. I was sure he’d look over and see me, but he just sat there picking at the vinyl on Robbie’s dashboard and flicking his ash onto the driveway. We were so close and the night was so still, I wound up inside his cloud of menthol smoke. If I’d whispered, he would have heard me.
Robbie came back and swung his Charger out the end of the driveway onto Jensen Road without stopping to look. His headlights swept the bushes and then disappeared behind the wall, heading out of Highbone toward mid-island.
I moved around to the other side of the pine tree and stayed there, thinking. The bills Robbie had were mostly fives and ones, the kind of cash kids like me and Daisy pay for joints and nickel bags. It was pretty obvious Robbie was trying to run his own business, and he was doing it right in the McNamaras’ driveway. That was his idea of taking care of his family. So what did it have to do with Andre?
I stayed there while the menthol smoke and car exhaust faded into the smell of low tide coming up the hill. My heart slowed down and the purple faded out of the sky.
My mother was speeding away down the Parkway, and my brother was popping out of the back seat of Robbie’s ridiculous boy-racer car. I couldn’t stop my mother, so I concentrated on my brother. Andre is different from me, and we’re not even that close, but that didn’t mean I was ready to sign him over to Robbie fucking McNamara.
I went inside Daisy’s house without knocking. It was nearly eight o’clock, and Mrs. McNamara was still on the living room couch. I said hello, but she looked right through me. One of her hands was hanging limp and the other one was tracing something invisible on the cushion next to her. She started on the wine at four o’clock, and the pills after dinner. Those dead eyes were supposed to be part of her glamour, I guess. She was supposed to be dreamy, but these days she never sharpened up at all, not even when Daisy needed her to. My mother was making me mad. Daisy’s was breaking his heart, and that pissed me off even more.
Daisy was in his room, cutting up some metal with a hacksaw. I took the whale picture out of my pocket and waved it at him.
“You cut this out of a library book, didn’t you? You idiot.”
He ignored me. “I’m making a blue box.”
“I didn’t ask what you’re making. I asked whether you cut up a library book.”
“You didn’t ask yet, but it’s cool. Wait till you see. It can talk to the phones.”
“You can talk to a phone without a box, too.”
“Yeah, but this will make the phones do stuff. It can make the signals that the switching stations make. I can call anywhere for free!”
“So, it’s illegal is what you’re saying?”
“You’re gonna think it’s cool. I promise.”
“Your dad’s already in jail, Daisy. Your brother is Robbie McNamara. Shouldn’t you maybe be the one who doesn’t get locked up?”
“I can do this, Joan. This is what I’m good at. Don’t worry.”
“What’s going on with Robbie?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean he’s getting in fights, and I think he’s dealing.”
“Why are you so interested in what my brother does all of a sudden?”
“Did you see him the other night? He showed up at my house looking for you. He was covered in blood, Daisy. Somebody else’s blood.”
Daisy went still for a minute and then went back to sawing. I looked at him, waiting it out until he paused again.
“I don’t know, Joan. He’s Robbie. You know.”
I backed away.
“You need a mask. You’re inhaling metal dust.”
“It’s fine. I opened the window.”
“That doesn’t—okay, never mind. So maybe you don’t want to deal with it, but I just saw Andre get out of Robbie’s car. What the hell is that about?”
“We’re neighbors, Joan. It’s not that weird.”
“You know those two don’t hang out. No one is acting normal lately.”
“You’re just worked up about school starting. This happens to you every year.”
“Daisy, Robbie was in your driveway counting up cash with some creepy guy. What if he gets you and your mom in trouble? More trouble.”
“That won’t happen.”
You could say that was a beginning, too. I’m pretty sure it was the first time Daisy McNamara ever lied to me. It was one of those lies that’s so obvious everybody has to either pretend it’s true or start fighting.
I went over to the window and leaned out so I could light a cigarette.
“I was thinking—I’m gonna call you Anthony this year, just when we’re in school.”
“What for?”
“Jesus, what is with the people in your family? Darwin would be amazed that any of you are still breathing. I’m not gonna call you Daisy because I don’t want people bursting in and sticking your head in a toilet bowl when you’re minding your own business trying to smoke a cigarette in a bathroom stall.”
My best friend was the weediest little shit in Highbone. And his mother nicknamed him Daisy. He only survived because two or three people loved him.
“You’re exaggerating. And I feel weird when you call me Anthony. Like you’re pretending we’re not friends.”
“That would probably help, too.”
Daisy put down his tools and looked up. “Fuck you,” he said. His voice had dropped and maybe his eyes were sparkling. I don’t know. It was hard to tell in that red-and-blue light.
I turned back around and waved a hand at him and his hacksaw. “All right, show me, then.”
Once he started talking about multifrequency signals and A4 switching stations, his voice changed back. It went up an octave and his breath kept running out before his ideas were finished. The end of every sentence was a whisper.
It didn’t matter about inward operators and switching systems, but I guess it was comforting. Or maybe just easy. Daisy’s sentences all run on and have no borders. One thought just blends into another with him. He’s always derailing my logic. Maybe right then it was a relief.
My whole life, when I needed to figure something out, I just ran across the road and let my mind wander while I listened to Daisy.
The year we were ten we tried the thing with paper cups and strings. It only worked when Daisy lay down in the dormer window in his attic and I came all the way up to the bench in the outside stairs. From that distance we could practically hear each other anyway. But I could hear his voice in the cup, too. “Tedium. Telepathy. Transistor. Trunkfish.”
“Put away the dictionary, Daisy.”
“Come over. The Great Barrier Reef’s on TV in five minutes.”
Shouting from the window, running across the road to watch TV, seeing the same tide come and go from our bedroom windows. We were never farther away than that in our whole lives. What happens when he’s too far away to hear me?
Last year the cracks in our world got so big we couldn’t reach across them anymore.
Tonight, I took the subway, because Daisy lives all the way out over the water now. Different water. I went on the shuttle to Broad Channel and got on the A train back to Penn Station. It took an hour and a half. Now I have twenty minutes until the Huntington train, so I sit down with my back against a brick pillar on the concourse. Penn Station smells like dust trapped in fryer grease. Like hot dogs and rats and diesel. Businessmen keep looking for my crumpled coffee cup, and an old white lady asks me if I’m okay. I just look at her, because I can’t answer that.
Daisy
THERE ARE THIRTY seconds of my life I would keep. If I had to give everything up, if I was only allowed to hang on to one moment, I know exactly which one it would be. Me and Joan, floating on our backs with the tops of our heads together, breathing in the chemical burn of a stranger’s swimming pool. Our arms are stre
tched up so we can hold hands. We have to stay completely still and fill our lungs with air or we’ll start to sink and have to let go. The blinding security light on the back of the house goes out, the stars appear, and we don’t need to say anything.
It’s all there in that moment. My whole world.
We went pool hopping one last time before school started and everybody drained their pools. Soon we’d have to take our little boat in, scrub the bottom, and put it under Joan’s back porch for the winter.
We rowed into a little cove around behind the empty place in the pit where the firemen’s fair sets up. There was a field full of gravel between us and all the rich people’s houses. A few breeze blocks were still scattered around, and a torn piece of tarp was flapping in the wind from Connecticut. We went in and wedged the boat behind a rock so it wouldn’t get pulled out. A bird went fluttering up past us and I jumped.
“Shit! What was that?”
“Night heron,” Joan said. “Shh.”
We piled in the oars and put our loose change and cigarettes in the coffee tin Arthur had nailed to the crossbeam the year before. I turned out toward the Sound and looked into twenty miles of empty nothing. No boats and no moon, so I couldn’t see the waves. Sharp pieces of shale dug into our feet when we scrambled out of the water and up onto the fairground.
We crossed the empty field and slipped through some blue hydrangeas into a backyard on Marine Street. The security light caught us moving and lit up the pool like a baseball field for a night game, but the windows at the back of the house stayed dark. We stripped down to our bathing suits and slid into the blinding glare between us and the stars. The floodlight blotted out the sky, and the water was empty underneath us.
Joan rolled over and her feet slipped under the surface almost without a sound. I watched the ripples where the water closed over her toes and saw her outline blur into the pale blue light. When she touched bottom, I started counting. I got to a hundred and fifty but I didn’t panic. She’s Joan. I’m used to her doing things that make me hold my breath and pray. It’s the same with my mom. And Robbie. Everyone at the school bus stop. Sometimes I think I spent my whole childhood afraid to breathe out.
How We Learned to Lie Page 2