“I’m not playing,” he said.
I just nodded and then looked back over the cliff. There was nothing in the air and no one on the sand.
We got back in the car and cruised down to Fiddler’s Cove in neutral. Patrick Jervis was in Matt McBride’s truck. You could just make him out through the steam on the windows. The water was churned up with foam, and smoke was coming out of all three LILCO stacks.
“Go on,” Arthur said. “I’ll be here.”
He kept the engine running and turned the volume down on “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.” Crossing that parking lot was like that dream you have where you’re running as fast as you can and not getting anywhere. A whole crowd of people is watching you and you realize you’re naked. It isn’t funny, it’s terrifying. I knocked on the window of Matt’s truck with one red knuckle. He rolled it down and a waft of air came out, smelling like cleaning chemicals. He flicked a finger at my forehead.
“What?”
“Patrick said he was looking for my brother.”
Patrick laughed out a cloud of smoke. “Yeah, like months ago.”
“Just wondering if you’ve seen him. He, uh—” It occurred to me at the last minute that I didn’t want those guys to know my house was empty. “He moved out and my mom is worried.”
“Your brother made himself scarce, McNamara,” Matt said. “Caused some shit and took off.”
“Yeah, maybe look under a rock.”
“I just wanted to make sure he’s okay. You know, Robbie doesn’t take care of himself so good.”
They both laughed together then.
“Forget it, man. People have worse things to worry about.”
Matt rolled the window up, wiped clear so I could see them perfectly for a minute. I just stood there thinking in two directions at once, watching them and their chamber pipe disappear as the window misted up again. My brain was putting all the pieces together even though I was asking it not to. There was some circuit of violence connecting everything around us. All the disappearing people were joined up like lights in a series, blinking out one after the other.
Arthur honked his horn and swung the car around. When I got in he didn’t say anything or even look at me. He just drove out onto Seaview Road and up the hill to the traffic light. We stopped behind a Cadillac and he finally looked at me.
“You hungry?”
“McDonald’s?”
“I don’t eat that shit anymore, but I’ll drive you through if you want some fries. Coffee’d be a good idea, maybe.”
I got both and we headed down Main Street. Arthur pulled over on Baywater Avenue, where we could see down into the park.
Behind the bandstand were three guys I didn’t know. Definitely not from school, maybe not from Highbone at all. One of them had something down the leg of his jeans that Arthur said was a shotgun. From where I was sitting I could see him standing like he couldn’t bend his knee.
“They’ll know,” I said.
“Absolutely not.” Arthur shook his head. “Seat belt. Time to go.”
“Arthur, he’s my brother. I need to know.”
“No disrespect, kid, but your brother is a liability. You have a brain and you need to start using it.”
Arthur was right. In families like mine, you just drift into things. Every time a shiny thing falls into your lap you forget who you wanted to be. And then you drift away. Nothing sticks to us McNamaras, like we have no gravity. You have to concentrate just to stand still.
“He tried to take care of me, Arthur. He did.”
“His methodology was a little unsound. Sorry, man. This stops here, right?”
“Okay. Arthur? Can I tell you something else?”
“Only if it’s unrelated.” He almost smiled then. It was almost like we weren’t trying to figure out whether my brother was really dead and if it was his own fault anyway.
“Stuff is going on with Joan.”
“Joan just turned sixteen. It’d be kind of weird if stuff wasn’t going on with her.”
“No, I mean she’s pissed off and maybe worried about something, and people are taking advantage of her, Arthur. Maybe you should talk to her?”
“Well, Joan . . . you know. Girl likes to find her own answers. She was always like that. You try to talk to her, she just clams up.”
“Yeah, I noticed.”
“You want some advice?”
“I guess.”
“If you want to do something to help my sister, just hang in there. That’s what she needs. And take care of your own shit, so it’s doesn’t come back on her.”
It was dark when we pulled over on Jensen Road. Arthur told me one more time to stay away from people who knew Robbie.
My house was cold, so I went out back and brought an old picnic bench into the garage. After I’d spent an hour smashing it to pieces with a hammer, I felt emptier, but not exactly better. I left the lights off and lit a fire so I could make toast with a barbecue fork and boil some water. I was only using the electricity for important stuff.
After the fire died down, I went up to my mother’s room and hit the switch. The mechanical voice welcomed me, and I turned the bathroom lights on, too. Lying on the floor in that multicolored light, I thought, This. My whole life will always come back to this. These are the years that make people. Wherever we go from here, I will be the kid who stayed all alone with his toasting fork and his Electric Kool-Aid Bathroom Mirror. The kid with wires for veins and a heart that won’t fit in his scrawny chest. The kid who grew up next to Joan.
The next time I saw Patrick and Matt, I knew they were talking about Ray. I can’t deny or it or even find an excuse. I didn’t care. I didn’t pay attention or tell anybody or wonder about the details. I was only thinking about Robbie, which was why I went back without telling Arthur.
Everything smelled wet and dirty when I came into the park from the bottom of Main Street. I stepped off the path and my sneakers sank into the grass and squelched. The sky behind the pier was pink and there were lights on the boats, people after work, putting back in and checking their tackle. Summer was still far away, but we all felt it coming. I wondered if I’d be grateful when the light came back.
Patrick and Matt were behind the bandstand with some other guy who had a guitar. He was playing “Free Bird” and Matt was singing under his breath. I sat down just outside the circle they made on the grass.
“McNamara!” Patrick said. “Where’s your girlfriend?”
“She’s not my girlfriend. Smoke?” I pulled a joint out of my cigarette box and waved it.
“Is it the good kind?” They all laughed, and I kept quiet.
A cop cruised by on Baywater Avenue while I lit up and looked out over the water. I could just see his lights over the tops of the bushes. I passed the joint and waited. If I stayed quiet long enough, one of them would say something about Robbie. I was bound to make them think of him and whatever it was they were pissed about. Asking didn’t work, and I couldn’t do anything obvious. If Arthur knew I was still looking for answers, he’d tell Joan to stay away from me.
“You ever seen a dead person?” Patrick said.
I held the joint out to the guitar guy and thought about pool hopping. Once school ended, Joan wouldn’t see Mr. Tomaszewski anymore and we’d have all day to sit in the trees or lie around the abandoned house. All night to row out to the pit, walk barefoot across the sod, and slip into the empty water. I closed my eyes to look at the bright wash of security lights on the back of my lids, smelling the chlorophyll and the bleach.
“Daisy! You retard.”
“Huh?”
“I said, have you ever seen a dead person?”
“Uh, nah.”
I wanted to say, Yes. Every night. Every kind of death. Every state of decomposition. There is nothing I haven’t imagined.
He passed me the joint and I saw his hand shaking. “Not even at a funeral?”
“No. Why?”
“Would you? If someone could show you one,
would you look? Think you could handle it?”
“Joan would look,” I said. “Joan would look inside anything.”
I still thought the conversation was hypothetical. It was a little deep for Patrick, but we were all stoned by that point.
“You can’t bring a girl.”
I guess it was then. That was when I realized they were talking about something real. Physical. Actual and specific. And my brain slammed shut like a metal door. I didn’t want any more bodies in my head. I didn’t want any more deadly information. I felt like I wasn’t attached to the grass. I didn’t weigh anything. I couldn’t hold on or work my limbs, but I had to leave.
I took a few shallow breaths and said goodbye. When I pushed up onto my feet I fell forward, and they all laughed again. I turned my back on them and walked away through the soggy grass. The sky had gone dark, and most of the boats had disappeared. Someone was rowing toward Carter’s Bay, but I only knew that from the sound of the oars. There was a guy lying on the bench at the bottom of Main Street, talking to himself about highways and truck stops. I looked at him, trying to see through into whatever world he lived in. If he’d gone through some door into another reality, I wanted to follow him.
I did learn the truth about Robbie that night, but it wasn’t what I was looking for. It wasn’t a detail, but it was a fact. There were bodies everywhere and Robbie was just one of them. The whole of Long Island is a graveyard made of rocks and sand, from the body dumps in Queens to the murdered Shinnecocks on the North Fork.
After that night, I knew Ray Velker was lying somewhere in Highbone. That kids were lining up to look at him like he was an exhibit at the Museum of Natural History, and I turned away from that knowledge and shut my eyes. That makes me the same as every other kid in Highbone, just as twisted, just as damaged, just as evil. Doesn’t it?
I didn’t tell Joan because I didn’t want to make words out of it. I didn’t want those words in the air between us. All I wanted was nothing. I wanted things to stop happening, people to stop disappearing, the chasm between me and everything else to either close up or kill me.
Sometimes when a hurricane comes, it breaks through Fire Island and tries to clean us away. But we won’t let it. If we would just give in to the storm wave, we’d go under, with all our radioactive chemicals and our petty jealousies and our sharp objects. All the toasters and televisions and pathetic longings that count for reality in the suburbs would wash away into the sea. Crabs would eat our flesh but we wouldn’t feel them. We’d all be sleeping forever inside the blessed emptiness.
Daisy
THAT SATURDAY WE met in our tree and sat in between all the skinny branches full of closed buds. The tree seemed bigger than last time, older and more crooked. Nothing was green or growing yet. The world was still a blank, ready for us to write on it. But all we did was argue.
“I feel like you walked around a corner before me, and when I got there you’d disappeared,” I said.
“It just looks like that to you because you don’t understand. Girls grow up faster; everybody knows that.”
I looked down and saw the crocuses, poking up under the trees. Even after last winter the world was going to resurrect itself, without change or pity.
“So you’re grown-up now? You’re ready to start playing house with Mr. Tomaszewski? You’re gonna learn to make casseroles and use laundry starch?”
“Nick isn’t that kind of person and you know it. You’re just pissed off because someone paid attention to me.”
“Nick. You don’t think it’s a little creepy that Mr. Tomaszewski put the moves on you the minute you turned sixteen?”
“Come on, Daisy. This conversation is never going anywhere.”
It wasn’t raining, but everything was wet anyway. The melt was everywhere. The whole world was full of cold water. I looked around at the bare branches, feeling like a clam when Joan breaks open the shell with a screwdriver.
“Don’t you realize everything that’s going on? Kids are missing and the cops are everywhere. Why did you have to pick now to have an affair with someone twice your age?”
“Your math sucks, Daisy. Nick is nowhere near thirty-two.”
“My point is, we’re under all kinds of scrutiny here. We’ve got targets on our backs right now. Someone could pounce on us any minute, some dealer or an FBI agent or someone from the phone company. Any minute, we could be dead.”
Or maybe that was just wishful thinking.
“You’re tripping.”
“Listen Joan, I did. I mean, I did angel dust.”
“You what?”
“I didn’t mean to.”
I told her about Patrick and Ray dosing me that day at Hatchet Mary’s. I was just trying to work my way through the lies and get back to her. I thought at least I could clear away the pointless ones. I was drowning in all the things I had to keep knowing, all by myself in secret.
“Jesus, Daisy, how are you so dumb?! If I wasn’t around, you’d be dead by now.”
“What, you never smoked up with someone in the park you didn’t know? Why are you freaking out on me?”
“Because, Daisy, you never protect yourself. You need to learn how to be careful. What if I’m not there one day?”
“Uh, you weren’t there then. That’s why I’m telling you about it now.”
“Yeah, and look what happened! And why the hell did you wait six months to tell me?”
“Five, I think. And I can’t really tell you why. It’s complicated.”
“Don’t you think you’ve lied enough this year, Daisy? I’m supposed to hang around until you need me, but I can’t ask questions? Your family deserted you and you didn’t think I should know?”
Someone came out to the back of the Narragansett with the garbage. I could see his breath on the air from where we were sitting. People were still moving through the world like nothing had happened. They clocked in and clocked out and rode the bus back and forth to school. People ate dinner and planted bulbs and paid the bills.
“They love me, Joan. You act like they don’t, but they do.”
“No, I get that. I do. But they took off and left you in the damn house to fend for yourself. You! With your hazardous electricity fetish and your fear of laundry soap.”
“See why I didn’t tell you?”
“Okay, sorry, but Jesus! How am I supposed to jump in and save you like the helpful sidekick from movies if you don’t tell me what’s going on?”
“You’re never gonna be anybody’s sidekick, Joan Harris. You’d suck at that.”
“Well, that’s my career in Hollywood fucked,”
We laughed, but it didn’t make anything better.
Once I’d told her about Patrick and the angel dust, I realized I still couldn’t tell her why it mattered. It was probably Robbie who sold it to him. Robbie and Ray had both been dealing, and now they were both missing. Well, Ray wasn’t exactly missing, was he? Some people knew where he was. And if the guy at Jamaica Bay wasn’t Robbie, if Robbie was still around somewhere, I didn’t want anyone making the connection. Not even Joan.
“I promised Arthur I wouldn’t talk to you about it.”
“Arthur? Oh, okay. Sorry, I got confused and thought I was the one that was your friend.”
The feeling came back then. The weightlessness and the way people’s voices kept fading away from me lately. I was still moving around the same world as everyone else, but I’d become a ghost, a reflection on the air. I moved up and down the staircase and haunted the woods, but I couldn’t touch anything. I couldn’t move things or make anything happen anymore.
“I’m sorry, Joan. I should have said something.”
Any minute I was going to lose my bones and my voice. I’d float up out of our beech tree and turn into smoke over the water. All the truths would come out of me and I’d be repeating them over and over forever, but Joan wouldn’t be able to hear me.
Joan
I GUESS I stayed mad at Daisy for a while. We did stuff, bu
t I spent a lot of time alone, too.
On a warm Saturday in March I walked all the way to Nick’s apartment. I spent most of last year traveling around looking for answers to questions that don’t have any. You can dissect a body and find out how it works. That’s no help when you’re living inside one. People can tell you all about your own glands, but that doesn’t help you control them.
I couldn’t hang around after school trying to talk to Nick. I had to go to his house before my insides made a complete mess of me. I had a big biology test. I needed to concentrate.
He was leaving when I got there, slinging a bag over his shoulder in the doorway.
“Joan. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I just wanted to tell you I finished my report.”
“You could have told me that at school. Is something the matter?”
I leaned against the door of his car, fumbling in my pockets. I was hoping for a cigarette, but I couldn’t remember if I had any or where I’d put them. I couldn’t remember anything.
“Nothing’s wrong. I—where are you going?”
“To a meeting. Well, let’s see it.” He put his hand out. Like that was the whole reason I was there. Like we were standing in the biology lab with his table between us.
“I don’t have it with me. I was going to talk to you about it, but you’re probably late, so—”
“Yeah, I am. That’s nothing new, though.” He smiled then, and I thought things might rewind. He leaned against the car and I relaxed. Then he said, “Joan, there’s a lot happening right now, isn’t there?”
“You mean Ray?”
“Did you know him?”
“Not really. He’s been around since fifth grade. We went to the same elementary, but he never talked to me.”
“The cops are still questioning his teachers. This isn’t really a good time for us to hang out. At least until they find him. You get that, right?”
“Yeah. Sorry, I wasn’t thinking.”
“No need to apologize. We’re friends, aren’t we?”
How We Learned to Lie Page 21