Daisy
I DIDN’T FINISH Joan’s birthday present until about a week after she turned sixteen. I put it in a box on the dining room table, and it sat there for another two weeks. By January she was out all the time and telling her grandfather she was with me. If I called, she’d get in trouble.
I talked to Anne from the train a few times, but I didn’t go to meet her and Kevin at My Father’s Place. I didn’t go out at all unless I had to. What if Mom or Robbie came home and I wasn’t there? When everyone else was turning sixteen and going to concerts, me and Joan were busy hiding from each other, each wrapped in our own cocoon of lies. I did see Kevin, but that was much later. When it was all over, it was Kevin who taught me to breathe again.
One night it snowed two feet before it got too cold to snow anymore. The harbor had been frozen for a week already. Most years that didn’t happen at all, but last winter it froze from Christmas until after my birthday. That morning I’d had to pour boiling water along the bottom of the screen door to unfreeze it before I could get it open.
The night I saw Joan in the road at three in the morning, the Big Dipper was sitting up over Carter’s Bay. I tried to use it to find the North Star, but when I moved my eyes over that way, all the stars disappeared into the lights over Jensen Road. That glare took me back to childhood and summer and days when the only deaths between us were creatures out of the water and mosquitoes on the wall.
My childhood memories are made of light so bright they wash together and flash back into me every time my eyes get caught in headlights or flashbulbs. In all my early memories, me and Joan are wearing shorts. It’s always warm and it never rains. Just before Joan came down the road that night, I was remembering the first time she ever gutted a fish in front of me.
The day was bright and burning and we rowed out to the very edge of our permission. We were maybe twelve, and we weren’t allowed to take the boat out of sight of Joan’s house. We went as far as we could and looked around the bend. From there, we could see the moorings at the end of Main Street, the sailboats coming and going from the Sound, and the chartered fishing trips carrying tourists out in search of imaginary marlin. I sat in the boat and pictured me and Joan, grown-up and living a life full of oysters and champagne and ship radios. We could live right there, maybe fix up the abandoned house. We’d have a magic laboratory and people would come to consult with us about all our special knowledge. When Joan threw the sea bass in the boat and it started thumping around, I jumped and we almost capsized.
“Hit it!” she shouted at me.
“What? Why?”
“It’s suffocating, Daisy. You’re supposed to club it.”
“You club it. God damn!” I was only twelve; I still cursed like my father.
She hit it with her shoe, but it kept thrashing. I just stared at its weird pouty mouth and all the extra fins. Its jaw kept opening on big gulps of nothing.
“Calm down, Daisy. It’s not even a big one.”
“Put it back, Joan. Please?”
“No. This is fishing. People do it all the time.”
The sea bass went still, and Joan looked at the net in her hand. She put it down under the seat and picked up her oar.
“Let’s go back. I need a knife.”
She left me and the sea bass on the floating dock and went back to her kitchen for the knife. The fish was still glistening. I reached out to feel its skin, then pulled back with slime on my fingertip.
“You slice along the belly, right here.” She drew a line with her finger, then put the knife in below the gills. There was a small ripping sound, like someone tearing wet canvas. The guts came out all in one package, organs joined together by transparent sinews. Joan spread them out on the dock and started naming them. I jerked my head away and looked up into the sky, just trying not to see for a minute. My gaze fell right on the sun and everything else disappeared like stars in street light.
The sound of footsteps brought me back to the middle of the January night. Someone was walking fast along the wall on Jensen Road, steps echoing out over the water and up into the trees. I swung the round window on its hinges and looked out. There was Joan in Andre’s duffle coat with her knees sticking out through the ripped-up jeans that made her grandfather mad.
I thought about calling her but everyone would hear, so I ran out to catch her before she hit the Harrises’ stairs. I didn’t realize I wasn’t wearing shoes until I felt the ice sticking to my socks.
“Joan!” I used a shouty whisper, but it still seemed like the loudest thing I ever heard. I thought Arthur would come out and grab us by our collars any minute.
She looked up at me and didn’t even seem surprised.
“Joan, where were you? It’s three o’clock in the morning.”
She put a finger to her lips and looked over toward her house.
“Come in.” I whispered.
When we got to my porch she said, “Jesus, Daisy, you left the front door open.”
I put the teakettle on the stove and got out some cups, then leaned against the counter to take my wet socks off. I was waiting for Joan to say, What the hell is wrong with you? Your feet are frozen. Christ, Daisy, make a fire and get warm, but she didn’t say any of that. When I looked back at her, she was staring at the stove light with four hundred miles in her eyes.
“Joan. It’s dark and the roads are icy. You shouldn’t be walking on the road. Where the hell were you?”
“Leave it. Seriously. Is there oatmeal?”
I made Quaker Oats and we sat across the table from each other in just the light from the stove, not saying anything. I don’t know about her, but I was trying to think of something besides, Who were you with? I wasn’t sure I wanted the answer to that.
I guess we talked about cuttlefish and telephones and how life on Mars would evolve if there was any. I don’t remember. By the time I remembered her birthday present, it was almost six o’clock.
Joan put out a cigarette and said, “Let’s go out to the tree. It’ll be light soon.”
We put on two of Robbie’s old hockey hats. I took Joan’s present off the dining room table and gave her a pair of Robbie’s socks so hers could dry.
While we were crossing the road, Joan looked at me and said, “What’s in the box?”
“I’m getting to that.”
I thought if I started with the present, we could work backward. She could tell me why she was avoiding me, where she kept going, and what she was going to do about her parents, and what the other the thing was. The invisible thing that was always shouting in her other ear while I was trying to talk to her, making her so scared and so mad all the time. I could explain about Robbie and why my mother left and why I didn’t tell her sooner. Right then, it all seemed possible.
I slipped on the frozen leaves when we went down off the road and slid all the way to the beech tree. When I shouted for Joan, the echoes banged into each other and came back jangling in the emptiness. It wasn’t daylight yet, but the moon was still up, and there was snow everywhere. It was so bright we could see our breath. Under the tree, you sank down into the snow up to your knees.
I reminded her about the sea bass. Then she told me where she’d been all night, and my visions disappeared like the light in my mother’s eyes.
“I don’t want to tell you what . . . I mean, I don’t . . . Shit, Joan. I just don’t think it’s okay that you had to walk home alone in the middle of the night.”
“I’m a big girl, Daisy. We’re not six anymore.”
I held my hands together so she could use them to get up to our branch.
“People are disappearing lately, Joan. It’s not safe. You’re the one that keeps telling me that.”
“It isn’t really strangers we have to worry about, though, is it?”
“When were you gonna tell me? You’re having a torrid affair with your biology teacher. What the hell?”
“Why would you care, anyway? You’re in love with some woman on the phone.”
She held the trunk of the tree and stretched out a hand to help me up.
“It isn’t love!” I swung up next to her. “She’s like my mother.”
“How do you know what she’s like?”
“Okay, maybe not exactly like my mother, but—”
“You have no idea who she is, Daisy. But you’d still rather talk to her than me.”
“Joan, you are pretty much the only person I ever want to talk to. You haven’t been around, remember? At least now I know why.”
But she was right. I was talking to invisible strangers so I didn’t have to look Joan in the eyes and say the things I knew.
“Anyway,” she said. “I don’t think torrid is really an accurate description of what me and Nick are doing.”
“Okay, maybe just good old nuts? Or we could always go with FUCKING ILLEGAL!”
“It is not illegal, Daisy. I’m sixteen. Of all the people on the planet, you should understand. You are supposed to get me.”
I’m not saying I wish she hadn’t told me. But it changed the shape of us. It was the kind of truth that shoves you out of one world and into another. I thought about the sea bass again and felt like all the blood and guts I’d ever seen had come back up out of me and stuck in my throat.
The things that came out of us that morning were sharp and cold and stayed visible on our breath. We could see our words becoming part of the frozen world. By the time we were halfway through that conversation, I was holding on to the branch while the weight of everything tried to push me backward into the snow. I kept Joan’s birthday present inside my coat. Nothing I could ever give her would be enough, anyway.
I didn’t tell her that my mother was gone. I didn’t tell her how long it had been since I’d seen Robbie or that I was going to have to sell the stereo to pay the electricity bill and buy food.
When the sun came up, everything was naked and empty. There were no leaves to hide us; we were exposed to the sky. Unless you’re a rabbit or an angel, it’s impossible to hide when the world is covered in snow.
I looked over at Joan and she said it again. “I expected you to understand.”
Daisy
IT WAS MAYBE February when Patrick Jervis came up to hassle me in metal shop. I was pouring plastic into a mold.
“Where’s your brother these days, McNamara?”
I was making a plastic handle for my screwdriver and thinking about Joan.
“Hey, Daisy! I said, where’s your brother hiding?”
I guess he was being scary, but I didn’t care. I wasn’t hearing any of the usual noise, the music or the bullshit jokes or whatever Mr. Kronenberg was saying to people while he walked around the room.
“He’s not hiding. He’s around.”
He wasn’t. I hadn’t seen him in at least a month.
“Well, he’s got shit to do. People are getting kinda tense, waiting for him. Tell him to stop snorting smack behind the bandstand and take care of business.”
I turned the heat off and waited for the mold to cool. When class got out I could find Joan in the commons. We could make snow angels on the football field, or cut afternoon classes and go eat cannoli in Huntington. Patrick shoved his shoulder into my back, and I burned my arm on the casing of the mold.
“I don’t feel like you’re paying attention to me, McNamara. Kinda pisses me off.”
I guess I was supposed to worry he might hit me, but I didn’t really care if Patrick hit me. The whole idea of physical pain seemed so far away.
It was while we were putting things back on the shelves that I heard them talking about Ray. I didn’t know it was about Ray at the time, though. I’ve gone over it a lot. There was no way I could have known.
“Seriously,” Patrick said. “He’ll take you up there and show you.”
“Shut up. That’s bullshit. If he was up there, the cops would know by now,” Matt McBride said. He sounded scared, not skeptical. His voice was low and shaking.
“Find Scottie in the park and ask him. Fifty bucks I’m right.”
I am sure he said Scottie’s name. That’s why it came back to me later.
I didn’t notice at the time because I was thinking about the necklace I’d made Joan for her birthday. It took me three weeks to twist all those transistors together and then we got distracted that morning and I never gave it to her. She went in for breakfast and I went back to my house with the box still pressing into my ribs. In the end I wrapped it in a baggie and taped under the bench. I didn’t want to see her open it. I didn’t want her to have to pretend it mattered. Still, I kept hoping she’d say something.
I kept hoping she’d tell me she was only joking about Mr. Tomaszewski, about going away for the summer, about college and California. She would shove me and laugh and tell me how dumb I was, and I’d fall back onto the attic floorboards and let go of all the tension in my bones. The air in my lungs would stop fighting me, and I’d wait for her to tell me what was next.
My alarm went off that Saturday, because I’d set it out of habit. I was downstairs leaning against the kitchen counter drinking tea made out of yesterday’s used bag by the time I realized it wasn’t a school day.
I loaded the dishwasher and thought about what to sell. Whatever it was would have to be something small enough to carry on the bus and big enough to pay the LILCO bill. They were still delivering the Newsday, so I used the first few pages to wrap up the stereo speakers. Then I screwed the panel back on the amp and loaded it all onto a hand truck. The blank squares on the living room shelves made me realize how dusty everything was. Moving the stereo stirred up the flannel smell of settled time. Joan says dust is skin cells. The dust in people’s houses mostly comes off their bodies. We’re breathing each other in all the time. It felt kind of like company.
I’d already given up on the pawn shop up above Flannagan’s in Highbone after the guy sniffed out my desperation and refused to give me more than twelve dollars for my grandmother’s opal-and-emerald ring. I was ready to try the pawn shops in Huntington Station. I dragged the hand truck up the hill behind our house to make sure I didn’t run into Joan.
From the top I could see the water and half the sky. The Harrises’ roof had icicles hanging off it. I thought about them all underneath it, eating breakfast together and pretending to get on each other’s nerves. I thought about Arthur and Joan, busy making philosophies of life that didn’t have any room for all that love. About Andre and Mrs. Harris desperate to get away from it.
That swoop of air between the hill and the surface of the water was the size of the space that had opened out between our lives. It knocked the breath out of me. I was the only one who could see it and the only one who could cross it. If only I would just let go and speak the truth, throw myself onto the air and let her catch me. I turned my back on the harbor and dragged the hand truck over some tree roots onto Beltaire Road.
The bus cost me my last three quarters. If the pawn shop in Huntington Station was closed, I’d have to hitch home with the hand truck and the stereo.
But it was open. The guy asked where was my mother and told me please to go home and think about where my life was going. I felt bad and opened my mouth to try to explain, then realized it was impossible. Also, I’d already taken the tubes out of the amp so I needed to get out of there before he tested it. On the way home I spent $3.75 on tea bags and milk and eight boxes of macaroni and cheese.
The paper was still spread out on the table when I got back. By February they’d sent two red bills; I needed to call and tell them to stop delivering. I was looking for the crossword when I saw the thing I wasn’t looking for.
“Unidentified Man Found Dead near Jamaica Bay” the headline said. It was on page five, but I’d used the first couple pages so it was staring up at me when I sat down. It could have been anybody, but I knew before I read the details. They didn’t. They couldn’t tell who he was or who the car belonged to because somebody had stripped the VIN, but it was a yellow Charger. They’d burned it, with Robbie
inside. “Male in his early twenties,” it said.
I bet people think that when someone you love has been missing that long, you wouldn’t want to look at what was left of them. You wouldn’t want to think about how people come apart—literally, how their bodies start to fall apart the minute whatever electric charge animates them is gone.
It’s not like that. If something like that happens to you, you will want to know. Love means you know that body is it. All there is. You want to see where it’s resting, half peeled away and turning from rot into mulch. To see that body turned back into moths and trees and birdsong. You want to be able to picture that, just so you can fill that blinding emptiness with something. Anything.
My first thought was, She’ll come home now. I feel bad about that, but why lie? I pictured my mother’s fingers turning the pages of the paper and smudging black with ink. I pictured her eyeliner running and her hands shaking. I thought, She has to come back now. My second thought was, They must have taken pictures. Somewhere, there are pictures of what happened to Robbie.
Daisy’s Electric Map of America
Joan
MY MOTHER HAD a brother who died in a war. When she met my father she thought they were going to change the world. My father. Guess that didn’t work out. And that was the big revelation of her notebook. Except inside the back cover, across the calendar of 1955, she had written: Now everything is the future. Everything that happens will be after this . . . And that was all the information I was going to get.
I woke up one Sunday in February and looked out my window, trying to see her there. There was a cloud of smoky moisture over the harbor and puddles of water where the sun was shining on the ice. In the notebook she said she would lie on the floating dock with her friend Deborah. Deborah would sing and my mother would daydream. I stepped out back, and the air was cold and wet.
How We Learned to Lie Page 17