“And you’re actually worried about David? Really?”
In my mind, I could practically see him as he was that very minute, in the middle of a summer morning, with all of the rest of us going on with our lives: him in a hospital gown, maybe sedated, looking like he did on 4/21, with his eyes staring inward, pacing the hospital floor. He once told me that he stayed in the city with his sister a few nights the summer before junior year, and that everyone there was rolling on ecstasy, having this relaxed, intimate time, when one of his sister’s friends curls up next to him and tells him that she’s all into tigers, that she wanted to be an animal trainer, and that he reminded her of one of them. When he asked what she meant, she said that she didn’t think that he could ever be tamed, not really. So now I pictured Burn reaching out from whatever cage he was in and telling me I am as dangerous as you think. And, one day, there will be no bars between us and your luck will run out and I will devour you. I hear all this in my mind, and it’s coming to me in Burn’s voice, loud and clear. I also know that I am not smart enough to deal with Burn a second time.
“Aren’t you?” I asked.
“Not really. After all he is locked away, and I’m sure there’s adequate security,” she said, confidently.
“Yeah, but what if they don’t understand how brilliant he really is? Can they possibly know for sure?”
“Did you ever think of contacting him?” she asked casually, as I followed the GPS, turning off the highway onto Route 28.
“Are you fucking nuts?” I almost yelled. “Or did you simply forget that this guy came within a hair of killing us all?”
“Pishposh,” she said, one of those expressions she used from time to time, in her actressy voice. “And could you please refrain from cursing when we’re alone? I find it offensive.”
“OK, he had practically the whole school wired with explosives. He left a list of people, and both of our names were on it. And now we’re on our way to your uncle’s place in the middle of the woods. And somehow I have this feeling that David Burnett knows we’re together. Maybe from Franklin; I heard he keeps in touch with Franklin. Maybe he watches the news and sees me on it, and he calls or emails or whatever you can do from wherever he is. So pishposh you.”
“Steven, you can’t use pishposh that way,” she scolded. “I was using it to denote sarcasm, or rather to denote that you were overstating the obvious. Clearly, I was teasing you when I asked if you thought of contacting him, and yet you failed to appreciate how flippant I was, because you seem to be too wrapped up in this sudden paranoia over David’s very unanticipated and unlikely release.”
“Meaning?” Me, not getting her point.
“I was being playful,” she said, as she placed her hand on my thigh and stretched her fingers upward, but not quite touching me.
“Pishposh,” I answered. “Pish FUCKING posh.” This, as my hand crept up her skirt thing until it touched too high and she slapped it away.
“Yeah, pish fucking posh, Crash.” She laughed, and I felt that I finally got her down to my level. After all, she almost never cursed, and she certainly had never called me Crash before. Plus she was displaying genuine laughter, and her real laughter was amazingly musical and infectious. So now I had a pocketful of Jacob’s Gold and Christina cursing and calling me Crash and making jokes and laughing. Good times. I reached into my pocket and pulled out the canister of prerolled joints, flicking one directly into my mouth and lighting up.
“What are you doing?” All the casualness drained from her voice in an instant.
“What? You promised.” I took my first hit.
“Not now, Steven, and not while you are driving,” she barked. “Put that away.”
“We had a deal.” I did not fail to notice that she returned to my actual name. I took another hit.
“A deal that I would smoke when we got to my uncle’s. Not while we’re driving.” Sounding again like a mom and not a kid.
One last deep hit and I snubbed it and leaned back, and soon we were driving down Tinker Street, the main road in Woodstock. As I stared out the window, there was nothing particularly special about this town; normal people dressed in jeans and khakis walking around like it was some Westchester village with clothing shops and restaurants.
Only as I slowed to turn into the municipal parking lot, Jacob’s Gold hit me full on, and suddenly the town appeared more colorful than I previously recognized, mountains surrounding us and vibrant flowers dotting the side street, decaying art sculptures along the back of a building where a heavy woman in a crinkled blue dress was lifting paintings out of an old VW van that was not only old, it was rusted-out old and painted in psychedelic colors and for me it was like peering into the past. And in perfect synchronicity, like Dark Side of the Moon/The Wizard of Oz synchronicity, the Grateful Dead channel saw fit to broadcast “Saint Stephen,” maybe the Dead’s trippiest song (this according to Newman, who was into the Dead more than any other kid my age).
“Steven.” Her voice from a distance. I had almost forgotten she was there. “Do you want me to try it or not?”
Me thinking, they always come around, almost laughing a genuine laugh, I relight the joint and pass it to her. I am stardust. I am golden.
“You are what?” said Christina with a practiced inhale (more experienced than she let on), apparently pointing out that I had been talking out loud and not knowing it. I made a mental note to be more careful.
So we got lit together, listening to a few Dead songs, before getting out of the car. And because even walking was no longer automatic, we headed into the first restaurant we passed.
So lunch was a pretty incredible lunch experience, with her giggling at practically everything I said and mimicking the waitress, like almost exactly duplicating her every mannerism, Christina was that good as an actress, and I started thinking about how the rest of the trip was going to go, with me and Christina getting along so well and how was I going to get a refill of Jacob’s stuff, being as he had stopped talking to me, which of course made me think about Felicia, and I was instantly saddened by the thought that she wasn’t talking to me either.
Except that couldn’t last, could it? I was still the guy’s son.
“Steven.”
“Yeah?”
“The check,” Christina said, going through her purse for some cash. I told her, no way, your cash is no good here, I had it, and produced my debit card, dropping it onto the bill.
And the waitress picked it up and came back.
“Your card has been declined.”
I was suddenly not so stoned anymore. “Can’t be,” I said.
“I tried it twice. No go.”
There should have been like three hundred on the card.
I anted up the cash, which pretty much tapped me out. I anticipated getting more from the ATM. We found one a few blocks away. And I tried twice to withdraw a hundred and both times it said “insufficient funds.” I checked the balance and it was down to like five dollars, which meant that my account, which would replenish every Sunday, apparently had not been replenished.
Or rather Jacob forgot to put the funds in, as was our deal from the beginning of the summer. Me writing, and him dropping two hundred a week into the account as my spending money. Jacob, so purposeful in everything he did, would not have forgotten.
Now I was faced with a dilemma. Call him and pretend like everything is fine and find out what’s going on, or tell him about my card being tapped out.
In the meantime, we needed to go shopping for food and other things to bring with us to the cabin, and Christina said that she could cover whatever we would buy. So while she bought supplies, I stayed in the car, sitting in the parking lot, because Christina assured me that once we left town there would be no way to get a phone signal, as we were going deeper into the Catskill Forest.
And I reluctantly called him.
“Hi Maria,” I said casually to his assistant. “Can I speak to my dad?”
“Hold on,”
she answered curtly. Something was up, because she was usually so bubbly and inquisitive, like “Steven, how’s your summer?” or “How are your sisters?” or whatever. I tried not to read too much into it, remembering that I was still high, even though I no longer felt so high at the moment.
“Hello, Steefin.”
It was Her. My mind raced; my heart pounded. Act normal. She was away last week, maybe she knew nothing. Or if she did, it had to have blown over by now. Except she called me Steefin, not Cresh, which meant that something was up. Except she did that sometimes too. But always when she was being serious.
“Hi, Felicia. How was your trip?” I asked, trying to be as casual as possible.
“Complitly rueened, if you vont to know.”
“Sorry,” I said, thinking maybe she had other things on her mind besides my interview, and maybe the way she sounded had nothing to do with me at all. Maybe she knew what I knew, that the whole thing was blown totally out of proportion.
“You shoot be,” she responded angrily. “Do you know vot ve are dealing veet because of vot you said on television?”
“I was set up. Totally ambushed.” Me, quickly taking the defensive. Of course, I had no idea what they could be dealing with.
“How coot you, Steefin? How coot you betray my confeedince like that? I trusted you.”
OK, I thought, so it was out in the open. So let’s get past it, I remember thinking, let’s move on. Except, I couldn’t think of anything to say, so there was silence instead and then she said:
“I thought you were better than that.”
Then she was gone and Jacob was on the phone, and I couldn’t even tell you what he was saying, because he was rambling on about not calling him again, and all the time he was talking, all I could think of was what his wife had just said to me.
No question. We were done. Seriously, every word echoed into my still-stoned brain and I heard it over and over again and there wasn’t even a trace of her usual accent in the words.
“I thought you were better than that.” With almost no accent at all.
Like she was the one who made the mistake, not me. Only her mistake was in believing in me, and now she found out that I was not the person she thought I was.
Bear in mind that in my past I had heard some pretty vile things directed toward me from teachers, and prior to 4/21, my guidance counselor wasn’t exactly a huge fan, and sometimes other kids’ parents used me as an example of someone their kids shouldn’t be like. And all that time, throughout high school, none of that mattered, because there was one single adult who knew better. Only now that one single adult who knew better was finally admitting that she was wrong, which made everyone else right.
If it had been anyone else on the other end of the phone, I would have come up with any number of excuses. But now I racked my brain for a way to rationalize what I said during the interview, how I divulged a secret that she shared with me, which she did only because she loved me and didn’t want to see me hurt by the man who she made her life with. She trusted me, and I stabbed her in the back.
I was suddenly overwhelmed with remorse.
Remorse, when you are stoned, is not something that you want to feel, trust me on this.
But that didn’t stop me from screaming at her husband, who was a douchebag anyways and who never shut the fuck up for a guy who didn’t want to say anything to me.
My turn.
“We had a deal. It’s my money, and I need you to put it into my account now.”
“Grow up, Steven.” I detected a distinct pleasure in his voice.
“If you don’t put it into my account, I will stop writing.”
“Do what you have to do.”
“What I have to do is get my money since I earned it and you are just holding it for me as my manager. You know what? You’re fired.” This is actually, word for word, what I told my own father, like who the fuck was I?
“Fine. I resign.” He laughed that laugh-thing he did, and I could tell he was gloating. “Do me one more favor,” he said before hanging up on me. “Lose my number.”
This is what my father actually told me.
And still the words of my stepmother echoed more sharply: I thought you were better than that.
When Christina returned from the store, she could not help but notice that I was visibly shaken.
“What did he say?” she asked.
“It’s not what he said,” I told her. I was about to explain, but really, there was nothing to explain. I would get over it, I thought. Eventually. Maybe.
But for now, the war was not over. I was not going to let Jacob win. After all, I had a weapon of last resort in my never-ending battle with him, one that I hadn’t used in a long time.
My next call would not be wasted.
“Mom? Dad cut me off. I’m stuck upstate without any money.”
Chapter Fifteen
Cabin Fever, or, Christina and the Really, Really Dark Night
A word or two about my mom.
Caroline Prescott Crashinsky, now back to just Caroline Prescott after the divorce, as I mentioned before, puts up with a lot of shit, but if you back her up against the corner, she too has tiger in her and is absolutely capable of pouncing, and, if necessary, going in for the kill.
She is funny. Like when some relative told her that she might be a distant blood relative to George Bush, she threatened to have her blood removed.
She has always been considered by my friends to be a milf, skinny and athletic (she never misses a spin class and now has her own full gym setup in the basement, which she uses every day before the rest of us are up, greeting us at breakfast covered in sweat), and even at like forty-five, she looks like a high school kid.
She never gets sick. Maybe once she was too tired to make dinner, but the next day she was back to full speed.
She will be your most loyal supporter, and if she likes you, she will never say anything bad about you, even though she knows you’re not perfect. Not only that, she will defend you relentlessly when others are on your case. I have seen her react to her own friends when these women started talking behind each other’s backs. Well, don’t do that in front of my mom, because she will come after you and then cut you to the bone. Then cut you off.
She has lost a number of friends that way. All seemingly without regret.
Also, fuck with her kids, whether you’re a teacher, a coach, or someone at work (for Lindsey, not me, as I never had an actual job), and Caroline Prescott will come to their defense like a true warrior. For example, whenever a teacher was not giving me the benefit of the doubt, I would mention to Caroline that I wasn’t getting the benefits of my special ed program, and she would immediately be on the phone with the guidance counselor or even the principal if necessary, and right away I would have the opportunity to make up a test, rewrite a paper, or get out of some kind of trouble.
She was either supertough to begin with, or supertough as a result of dealing for like fifteen years with a man who was like a military general, even to her. She took it most of the time, but when she had enough, even Jacob would run for the hills. And then, after she kicked Jacob out, there was no turning back for him, no second chances, no room for further discussion, and she never let on for even a second that she was hurt or anything. I once heard her on the phone saying to someone “you just live through it and move on . . .”
This seemed to be her philosophy about everything, which apparently got her through the days when we were sick and she was alone, or we were in trouble at school and she was alone, or one of us had soccer and the other had basketball at the same time and she had to be in two places at once and she was alone, or she had to deal with urgent calls from a teacher which resulted in morning meetings with the principal and she was alone.
And in spite of that, she would always ask how we were doing and always be concerned that we were not doing great, even Lindsey, who pretty much never had an issue with anything.
So on the rare occasion th
at she went into a rage, sometimes for no apparent reason, all three of us kids knew to totally back off and give her space.
Point is, even though I have (had?) a special relationship with my father’s second wife, his first wife is my true hero.
That said, I’m not going to lie to you, I’ve totally learned how to play her. That is what I do and she knows it, but it doesn’t matter, because in the end, she can’t deny me anything. There are certain rules that I follow: Say, if I’m too drunk or stoned, I will stay out so as to avoid the possibility of being caught by her, or wait until I know she’s asleep (sorry, Mom, but you are pretty clueless). And I call her a lot, just to tell her where I am, even though like 90 percent of the time I totally lie about it. As in Mom, I’m out playing basketball, when I’m actually rolling at a concert, you know the drill. Again, sorry, Mom.
Oh yeah, and I have never, not ever, let on that I have (had) a close relationship with my father’s new wife. Mostly, I tell my mom that Felicia is OK or some kind of easy compliment. This is because I truly believe that if she found out how much I confided in Felicia, she would be heartbroken, so I have been supercareful about this. Jamie does the same thing, I have noticed, even though we have never talked about it.
Which brings me to the point of getting my mom to go after my father now:
They have an arrangement. Jacob takes care of all of our financial needs; she does everything else. When he fails in this regard, she is immediately on the phone with him.
So I get off the phone with her, comforted by the fact that Caroline Prescott would restore order in the galaxy and by the next morning, my bank account would be properly replenished. She just about said as much during our brief conversation, which ended with her usual “Stay safe, Steven, stay smart.” And then always adding an emphatic “please” at the end, which was her way of telling me that she loved me but didn’t completely trust me.
So I should have been completely relaxed, totally psyched for the ultimate summer vacay, me and my “girlfriend,” alone in a cabin in the woods, no one to possibly get to us, and full confidence in Christina since she already delivered on the first promise she made to me, as in having gotten high with me and totally loosened up. Now, all I had to do was to concentrate on how to get promise number two accomplished.
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