When everyone started to drift off, Dad called me from his room. Mom was with Gramps in the kitchen, murmuring together and drying the dishes. It was ten fifteen and I was getting nervous. I sat on the bed next to Dad and tried to look interested while I jerked one foot up and down.
“There’s something I want you to have, Joan.”
When he went to the closet and started moving things out of the way, I was sure he’d go in the desk next and find out the notebook was missing. He was after something else, though, a little wooden crate with six square holes, made for bottles.
“They used to keep soda-water siphons in here,” he said, “back in the day. My father got it from the old bar car.”
He lifted out something wrapped in tissue and uncovered it. It was a glass the color of blood. No, rubies. People say rubies are the color of blood but they’re not. People are unobservant and then they’re innacurate. Rubies are purpler, blood is more orange. He held the glass up and looked at the lamp through it, then handed it to me.
“They were my grandmother’s,” he said. They must have been made around 1900. There used to be twelve, but things get broken over the years.”
I held the glass up and looked through it at the ruby world. It was so thin, it could have been a soap bubble.
“What do you drink out of them?” I didn’t know what else to say.
“Punch, I guess, originally. Or whatever you want. They’re yours now.”
“Dad! I can’t keep these. I can’t even keep my sneakers clean. I’ll break ’em.”
“Everything in this house is your mother’s. I only have a few family things, and you’re the only girl. Woman, now.” He actually put his arm around me. I got distracted trying to remember the last time that had happened. “They should be yours.”
“Tell me about Nana.” My dad grew up in a house with a regular mother in it. I was trying to imagine that.
“She was happy enough. And just good. Listen, Joan. You know, sometimes it seems like you’re . . . supposed to be with someone.”
Oh, crap. Now he wanted to have the talk? Really?
“It’s so good when it seems like someone understands you. Being around someone, you get comfortable.”
“Don’t worry, Dad. Nobody makes me feel comfortable. I don’t really like people. Except Daisy, and he doesn’t count.”
“Well, what I’m saying is, we take things—people—for granted. We don’t always see the whole situation. People tend to assume everyone sees things the way they do.”
“You lost me, Dad.”
It was ten thirty. I needed to be out my window in twenty minutes. All I could think was, why couldn’t this meaning-of-life shit come tomorrow or the next day? I already had more truth inside than I could keep down. It was making me sick.
“I’m saying the way you feel about someone isn’t always the way they’re gonna feel about you.”
Then it hit me. He was talking about Daisy. He thought I was dreaming some kind of white-picket-fence dreams about Daisy McNamara.
“Dad, seriously. I don’t feel any kind of way about anybody. I promise.”
“It can sneak up on you, Joan. You could always talk to me. Or your mother.”
My mother? Was he serious?
Then I looked over at him. His eyes were wandering around the room while he rustled some of the packing paper from the box with one hand. Right then I realized he was broken. Someone had ripped the guts out of him a long time ago. Just the weight of the everyday air was so much he could hardly hold himself up. I watched him sitting there, and even his breath looked painful.
I held up a ruby glass and looked at him through it. The glass was lighter than those jellyfish at the Natural History. You could imagine it as liquid too hot to touch, blossoming out of the glass-blowing rod. You could see the frozen movement in it. Those jellyfish makers should have studied my great-grandmother’s glasses. Dad leaned forward through the red world, put his elbows on his knees, and sighed.
Both of us had spent the past few minutes thinking he was talking about me. I think we realized together that he was talking about himself. That night I figured out my dad was invisible. He was the one nobody noticed. I should have thrown myself onto him right then, crawled inside his arms and knocked all those glasses onto the floor. I should have acted like I was his daughter.
I just stood up and said, “Thanks, Dad. They’re really beautiful.”
He shook his head and smiled at me.
“Try to keep them safe. It’ll be good for you to take care of something that’s been around longer than you.”
I put the crate of glasses on top of my dresser, closed my bedroom door, and forgot about my father’s pain. I’m not proud of it, but at the time all I could think about was where I was going next.
Arthur had gone out, and I could hear The Selecter coming from behind Andre’s door. From my window you could hang down over the back stairs, and the drop was only a few inches. Maybe my uncle used to do it too, in some 1940s world of big band and roll-your-own cigarettes. I still don’t know which room was his. One of us must sleep in his bed.
The tide was out, and I went across the mud to the Narragansett parking lot. All I’d worn was a sweater because I couldn’t jump out the window in Andre’s duffle coat. There were only four cars in the lot, and none of them was Nick’s. I sat on the steps behind the deck and lit a cigarette. There were patches of ice on the planks and icicles hanging from the railings, but somehow the cold didn’t touch me. I sat in a shadow, hoping Daisy wouldn’t see me if he looked out the attic window. I’d told him I had to spend the whole night with my family. I didn’t want to face him after what I’d seen. I thought I could keep it to myself and he’d never have to know.
Nick pulled up twenty minutes late and shined his headlights on me. I looked straight into them and blinded myself, then squinted my way around to the passenger door.
“Guess where I was today?” Nick said.
I shut the door and took my mittens off. “Model airplane club? Weight Watchers?”
“No.”
“Home watching Jeopardy!? Moral Majority fundraiser?”
“Yes, you are very witty, Ms. Harris. I was at a science teacher’s conference.”
“Be still my heart. Were there a ton of pocket protectors?”
“Ha, ha. I got something for you.”
Nick drove until we got halfway down Herman Road, to a sign that said, “Liberty Diner, twenty-four hours.” Someplace no one from Highbone High School was going to be at midnight. He reached in the back seat and grabbed some catalogs, then slammed his door. I locked mine; he didn’t.
“If anyone really needs it more than me, they’re welcome to it,” he said. “I have insurance.”
The walls of the diner were aluminum with red-and-green neon chevrons down them and pointy milk-glass sconces. The waitress looked at us like we were criminals. Nick ordered souvlaki and made me get something big, too. I went for a Spanish omelet and a strawberry shake, then thought about my grandmother’s glasses and asked for red Jell-O, too. When it came, it was the wrong color. Everything was wrong under those lights.
The catalogs were from UC San Diego and the summer program at Woods Hole. Nick thought I should go to Woods Hole before I started eleventh grade.
“People don’t talk about science like it’s a talent, but it is, and you have it, Joan.”
“Yeah, yeah, ‘a mind is a terrible thing to waste.’ I heard it already.”
“Joke about it all you want. It’s still true. Don’t you want to get off Long Island?”
“Not really. Why? My family’s been here so long I’m pretty sure I’d get sick and die if I drank the water anywhere else. And there’s no lack of sea life. Why can’t I just stay here?”
“Because the programs you need are in other places. If you don’t do it, you’ll regret it later.”
“There would be people. I really don’t like people.”
“People like you, though. You’re
very personable, Joan. That’s a talent, too.”
Personable. Think about that for a minute. What the hell does that mean? Available to be made into a person?
“People are crazy and violent and selfish. I don’t care what psychologists say; there’s no science that can tell you why.”
“Some people aren’t any of those things. I promise.”
“Mr. Tomaszewski, you have no idea.”
He really didn’t. From where he was sitting, people like Robbie McNamara were invisible. The topless bars and the angel dust and the pointless junkie violence didn’t touch him. At least not until the next thing happened. The next thing touched us all.
“I don’t have to go to San Diego. I could just go to the South Shore. It’s a whole other world down there. Open ocean stuff. I haven’t seen enough of Long Island yet.”
“The whole world is trying to get you to think small, Joan. Don’t buy into that.”
“Please don’t be one of those people who wants to dump your experience on me. I have plenty of that, trust me. I’m all good for the when-I-was-your-age crap.”
“How about the ‘you’re special’ crap? Because you are.”
I guess things got a little uncomfortable right then. He didn’t stare into my eyes or anything. There was just a weird silence and some kind of extra weight in the air. When I say uncomfortable, I don’t mean it in a bad way. Just that something shifted and suddenly I was in a situation I didn’t recognize. No, that’s not true. I’d never seen it before, but I knew what it was.
Then I thought I had imagined it. It was so far-fetched.
“Anyway, I’m not gonna stop bugging you about it,” he said. “Get used to it.”
He dropped me off back at the Narragansett. I didn’t tell him it was my birthday until I got out of the car.
“Sixteen?” he said. “Wow, I didn’t even get you anything.”
“I don’t want anything. I got enough weird things from people in the past twenty-four hours to keep me weighed down for a while. I’m not good at opening presents. I never know what to say.”
“That’s okay. You’re good at pretty much everything else.”
The tide was coming in, so I walked around by the road and down the steps. Andre’s window was shut but his light was on. I climbed around the house and stood on the railing so I could reach my window and pull myself back in.
That night, I dreamed about red jellyfish and Nick’s hands. The jellyfish looked like my grandmother’s ruby glasses, and the underwater current was made out of my father’s voice. I was with Nick inside blue sunlight, breathing water.
But when I opened my eyes in the morning, I was thinking of Robbie. It was seven thirty, not even light yet. I took the bike out, but I had to walk it through town because there was so much ice on the roads. The middle of Seaview Road was clear, so I went down the yellow line and around the corner into the wind whipping around the Stella Maris Chapel. The smokestacks were blinking at the big empty pit of the Sound. No light and nothing moving. No one in the chapel. There never was in the winter.
Nothing in the parking lot. No cars.
I stood there feeling grains of cold sand in the wind and watching the sky turn orange behind the LILCO plant. I watched the sun rise on empty asphalt and resurrected Robbie in my mind.
It was a little more than forty-eight hours since I’d seen him right here, trying to turn his life into a gangster movie with an existentialist ending. There hadn’t been enough time for the car to get reported and picked up by the county. The obvious explanation was Robbie himself, slouching his shoulders and sliding sideways out of consequences. That was his specialty, wasn’t it? Robbie limping back the next day, beat-up but breathing, popping Steve Miller in the tape deck and driving off to the Lagoon, leaving Daisy alone to deal with his mother’s disconnected smiles.
I dropped the bike and sat down on the cold asphalt. My shoulders let go and I exhaled the breath I’d been holding for two days, but the wind shoved it back down my throat.
Last winter was cold. The kind of cold that burns your lungs and makes your bones feel like they’re going to crack. There was ice everywhere, people slipping and falling in parking lots and skidding around the curve on our road. In that kind of weather, all you can do is pull into yourself and try to keep your blood moving. I felt like even my nerves were frozen. I couldn’t tell how I felt about Robbie surviving, but I believed it. I swear.
Joan
THREE WEEKS AFTER my birthday, I was staring at the ceiling in Nick Tomaszewski’s apartment thinking, This is it? No one knew where I was, not even Daisy. I want to say I felt different, but I didn’t really feel anything. Maybe that was different. The parts of me were suddenly cut off from each other, failing to communicate.
I tried to focus on the inside of myself. How much was just glands and nerves and how much was my brain, complicating everything? We were smoking and I was still wearing my T-shirt, because now my life was a gritty movie.
Whatever teachers got paid, Nick wasn’t spending it on his apartment. Maybe he had a sick grandma. Thinking back, he told me pretty much nothing about his family or his life. The mattress was on the floor, and everything in the apartment was really neat. Mostly because there was hardly any of it. I listened to my breath slowing down and my heart falling back into my chest while my brain made two kinds of calculations at once.
You could count all the examples of each class of object on your fingers.
Five dishes: various types.
So that was it. People write poetry and kill each other over that?
Eight books: five biology, two Hermann Hesse, one Emma Goldman.
Is it better for other people?
Three shirts on three hangers, hanging from a coat hook.
Is it better the second time?
One ashtray, actually an abalone shell: thirty-seven Marlboro butts.
Will there be a second time?
Two windows, one street lamp, no moon.
“How will you get home?”
“I didn’t think about it.” I’d just assumed he’d take me back to the Narragansett, like before.
“I don’t think it’s a good idea if I drive you. I mean, we could get in trouble now, you know? I don’t think people should see us together. You get that, right?”
“Yeah, sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”
Ray Velker had been missing for months. His absence was seeping into the air of Highbone and people were getting jumpy. Nick stood in his downstairs doorway and said, “Be careful. Be safe.”
The road was covered with a sheet of ice and the leaves crunched in the ditch at the side. Every sound I made rang back at me like I was trapped in a metal room. I walked down to 25A and then cut through behind the library. Every time a car passed, my heartbeat bubbled up into my throat and choked me. A couple of times I heard one coming and ducked off the road into the bushes.
Snow melted into my shoes and my face started to hurt. I came down onto Jensen Road and wondered where the fish were, which ones could do that carp thing where they go into stasis in the ice. It made me think of the Arctic, what lived under the ice floes, what the temperature and the light were like down there.
There was one dead car left in the Narragansett parking lot. I felt bare and hollowed out. The cold peels everything back and turns it brittle. Winter takes the skin off the world.
I’ve only told two people about that night, and they both judged me for it. Not for sleeping with Nick, for walking home after. Like that was the fatal mistake. Like I’m stupid and worthless for not making him drive me home. The first person was Daisy.
I heard him call me from his driveway and felt relieved and pissed off at the same time. Now there were two things I couldn’t tell him. I knew I couldn’t tell him that his brother was trying to be a gangster and royally fucking it up. Daisy was always trying to save his family. Robbie was beyond saving and beyond caring who he pulled down with him. I thought I could protect Daisy from that.
&nb
sp; The other thing I couldn’t explain was how my body felt, or that I was starting to understand why people used metaphors involving hearts, or that I couldn’t tell whether mine was full or broken. I couldn’t even tell him the bare facts.
His voice gave me a lump in my throat. I pretended not to hear it. The next thing, there he was, sliding all over the ice in his socks and shouting at me.
“Shhhh! You want someone to come out here and ground me for the rest of my life?”
“What the hell are you doing walking home in the middle of the night?” He grabbed on to my arm to steady himself.
“Never mind. Are you gonna make me some oatmeal or what?”
When we got inside Daisy made me run my hands under the cold water in the kitchen sink and change my socks. He asked me three times where I’d been, but I didn’t tell him.
We went back out and climbed our beech tree before it got light. The cold branches cracked into the silence and the air prickled into our lungs like broken glass.
“Joan, why won’t you look at me?”
“Shut up. What are you talking about?”
I looked into his eyes and tried to remember the color of Robbie’s. Things flashed in my mind, those headlights on the water and the street light coming through the Indian bedspread that covered Nick’s window. I had to look away, and then he knew he was right and it was pointless pretending. I still tried, though.
“I’m talking about why you’re being weird, Joan. You can’t hide from me, you know. Something’s the matter.”
“No, it isn’t. Where’s Robbie?”
“I don’t know. Around. He stays away a lot.”
“When was the last time you saw him?”
“I don’t know, Joan. Stop changing the subject.”
But there was no subject. There was no shared language anymore, no reference point. We couldn’t even hide our lies from each other, but we were still telling them.
The tracks at Jamaica are always freezing, even in the summer. And my head is still wet from the ocean. My skin is covered in salt and the feeling of Daisy’s long, translucent fingers in my hand. If I close my eyes, I can see the rushing water full of little bubbles and grains of sand. I can feel the ocean pulling us under. I have to shake my head and remember to breathe so I can think what happened next.
How We Learned to Lie Page 16