She had made me wear a tie, and I didn’t mind. Feeling uncomfortable suited me that day.
She didn’t want to see the wine list, but wanted water, and since there was still officially a drought, a little sign by the ashtray said you had to ask. The water came in very tall glasses like wine glasses, and the ice cubes were flat and small.
She said that we should share a Caesar salad.
“It’s fun, coming over here,” she said.
It was, although I knew what she was doing—or thought I did. It was a different world, men and women looking like extras in a television show, dressed up and delighted, but quiet, too, knowing not to speak up or spill coffee.
“I don’t have to tell you,” she said after she had handed our menus to the white-haired waiter. “You know.”
My mother has her silences, too. Her silences are tense and dramatic, and make a point.
“You and Dad,” I began.
Then her nostrils flared and she had to look away, like someone swallowing a yawn, except it wasn’t a yawn.
The tablecloth was coral-pink, and there was a white carnation in the tall, thin vase.
Her voice was steady. “I hope it’s okay I brought you over here. I didn’t want to talk about it at home.”
She had never used exactly that tone of voice with me before—asking if something was okay, one adult to another. “If it makes you feel better,” I said, and then I hated myself for sounding so offhand.
She flinched the tiniest bit, and her face was just a little less pretty, the makeup a little too heavy around the eyes. But she recovered very quickly. “You blame me.”
I don’t know why, but I had to look away and blink back tears. I really couldn’t believe what I heard myself saying. “I want everything to be different. I remember when you were happy.”
I said this with a twisted voice, with a feeling of sadness so strong it hurt my chest. I stuffed the linen napkin between my teeth, and really hated myself then for losing all control right there in a restaurant, and with zero warning.
I bit the napkin hard.
“Jesus,” she said, and leaned on the table with her hands flat.
I imagined what she might be thinking, her silence working on me as it always did.
But she said, “It was unfair to bring you here. I wanted to be in a situation I could control.”
I blotted my eyes, wishing I could turn invisible.
“I’m sorry, Stan,” she said, and this was new, too, this honest-sounding apology.
I nodded.
When my father stepped heavily up the stairs, I closed my eyes. I knew it all—the long phone call, the long wait before this almost-bedtime visit while he paced downstairs, silently passing from room to room, stalling and facing what was happening at the same time.
I nearly wanted to get put of bed and call down the stairs that he didn’t have to talk to me, that he could forget all about it. I knew, I understood, and now I just wanted to pretend it wasn’t happening.
But I waited.
When he knocked on the door, and I said, “Come in,” I felt that there wasn’t enough air. We weren’t people, we were cut-outs, cartoons you could pin to a bulletin board.
I saw that my father was dry-eyed. He looked at the room as though deciding it needed to be painted soon.
“She told me she rented an apartment.” After I said that, I thought about the words. It sounded simple.
Only when he sat on the bed did he look weary, but weariness was not what I wanted.
He began to say what he had decided to say.
I listened. I saw him being proud, and using his intelligence to reassure me and calm himself, and I felt pity for him.
He loved me, and I felt sorry for him.
24
I could sense her in the classroom. I didn’t have to turn to look at her. I knew her. I could close my eyes and see.
Mr. Milliken drew a pistol on the board. He took his time scratching in a snub-nosed cap-and-ball. He stood back and nodded once at his work.
“One shot. A lead ball like a nice-sized olive. Right into the back of his head.”
Saying such a bad thing made him pause. “It would have made a noise like a balloon popping. A little puff of blue smoke. Just a little puff.” Mr. Milliken dusted the chalk from his hands, running his fingers up through the white hair on his arms. “He lived a few hours. But there was no hope. His pillow was soaked with blood.”
The bell doesn’t sound all at once, simultaneously all over the campus. You hear it down a hall, buzzing in the clock, then trilling outside somewhere.
Sky nudged me on the way by, a swing with her hip that rocked me, and I followed in her wake.
But Mr. Milliken stopped me, a freckled hand closing around my arm. “Are you all right?”
I looked up at his beefy, red face. And for some reason I stayed with him for a moment.
Mr. Milliken hovered, waiting for me to respond.
“Perfect,” I said.
“You look old before your time, Stanley. The weight of the world on your shoulders or something.” He kept his tone light, so that if I rebuffed him he could act unoffended. “I heard about the baseball team.”
I made a little laugh. “That’s okay. History,” I said, aware just a beat too late that this was not the best word to use.
“I might be able to talk to Mr. O’Brien,” said Mr. Milliken. “Put in a good word.” His voice went up as he said this, making it sound like a half-question.
I smiled, one corner of my mouth higher than the other: thanks but no thanks. I knew Mr. Milliken was a man who wanted to do good, but I also knew that he lived, basically, in another universe.
“We need to have a nice talk,” he said.
“Anytime,” I said, in that manner that means “never.”
“Before you dig yourself a hole,” he said.
Tina ran over a trash can on Park Boulevard. It was very easy, and looked deliberate.
We drifted, not even going over the speed limit, and then a trash can lid flung itself at the windshield. It bounced away, and then vanished. There was a clattering, a chuffing, a metallic hammering. The car pounded up and down, wrestling, despite its size, with what was trapped beneath it.
Mr. Milliken rose up in his seat, standing on the brake.
When we got out of the car, Tina laughed and leaned against the fender. “I thought I would have a heart attack.”
Dung did not laugh. She was chagrined at her friend’s driving, and at having to be there on a city street with a squashed trash can.
“I never ran into anything before,” said Tina. “My heart is pounding. I thought I was going to die.”
Mr. Milliken wrote on his clipboard, and no one came forth to claim the trash can, which was not on the sidewalk anymore, but out in the street.
“We can sue them, right?” said Tina. “We can sue them for leaving their trash can all over the place.”
Mr. Milliken finished writing and stuck a Post-it on the can.
Then, looking completely satisfied with life, he said, “Let’s go run over something else.”
Jared saw me at my locker. He didn’t say anything. He just looked at me and made his silent laugh.
I dropped my eyes, and felt myself blush, and it wasn’t until then that I knew how much I had wanted to avoid him.
“I’ll call you tonight,” I shouted through the metallic din.
His eyes brightened, and he turned away.
Jared likes me, I told myself. He likes me and he needs me.
I had let him down, and he had been waiting for me. I reflected on what I had just called to him. Those were not the words I wanted to say, but the words had uttered themselves.
The air conditioning broke down just after school. The halls were hot and stuffy. An air-quality study had reported the school to have the lowest possible quality of breathable air, and that was when everything was humming. Now, with the air stagnant, we began to drag ourselves through the thicke
ning atmosphere. There had been a fight during sixth period, but I had not heard the complete story. There was a handful of hair across from Mr. Milliken’s door, torn out of someone’s head, even though you couldn’t see any blood.
I knocked. There was no answer. I tried the door, but the knob would not turn. He might be in there, I reasoned, correcting papers, ignoring the din from the hall, or even unable to hear.
The teachers all locked their doors, even during class, ever since the year before, when a French teacher had been attacked by someone with a knife. Her throat had been cut, but not very badly. You couldn’t even see a scar.
I knocked again, but by then it was too hot.
I stopped by Sky’s house, and as always she was not home. Tu had jacked the big white car up onto four wooden blocks. The car had no tires, and only ugly black steel stumps where the wheels should be. He was under the car, looking up into it.
“All kinds of trouble,” he said cheerfully.
25
I didn’t call Jared that night. It wasn’t because I forgot—I deliberately did not.
I made my father and myself microwave-toastable fish and chips—Iceland cod. My mother called, and she sounded cautious and rested, a combination that left me guessing how she really felt about my father and myself. She had a view of the Golden Gate Bridge, and a little patio. There were tennis courts. She was going to buy a geranium.
“And you come over and visit,” she said, and I was wondering if she meant: and start moving in, and get away from your father.
Because despite what she had said, I knew she felt I belonged with her. Even though she would be gone most of the time. Even though she would wait for me to ask her how was Honolulu or how was Tahoe all the time.
It was another one of those things you could see without talking about it. This was going to change. My father knew, and I knew.
He overheard the conversation. When it was over, he looked up from the manual to the new computer he had just bought and said, “She’s okay?”
I said she was, but it was like two people talking about bad weather. It was terrible, but beyond us, out of our power.
And then we looked at each other, and he smiled. It was almost a joke. His silence glowed in him, making him sweat and reflect the light from the television. It was terrible, and we couldn’t really say anything about it.
So I didn’t call Jared, on purpose, every moment that passed a moment in which Jared was waiting, a moment in which he would know I wanted out of the game and that I was leaving whether he wanted me to or not.
I woke during the night after very broken sleep. I heard that whisper in the air I associate with falling rain. I sat holding my breath.
Wrong. There is something wrong.
Almost like one of those times I must have heard my parents making love and woke up, almost crying out. Maybe I had cried out in the middle of it, I thought. Maybe my little baby self had bawled and interrupted them.
My father used to pretend to be a bear. He used to make her happy. I crippled their marriage.
When I slipped from the bed and looked out the window, there was nothing.
I called his name in a low voice, the two syllables not like a name at all, but a magical incantation, a word intended to break a spell.
Jared was here, somewhere. Somewhere in the house, and that whisper, that fine, high noise, had been his step.
He needs you, said the fanged voice in me. He needs you, and he won’t let you go.
26
Jared was sitting up very high, at the last level of the nearly empty football stands. And he was talking to Sky.
It was morning, the stands blistered with dew. I was warm inside, almost happy, to see the two of them together, and bounded up the flat, flaking seats of the stands, but as I leaped upward I felt the tiniest hook inside me, in my chest.
I didn’t like it. I didn’t like the way he was turned to look at her, and the way she was studying his face, calm and entirely focused on him.
I made myself spring upward all the faster, my shoes squeaking on the wet yellow planks. I called to Jared, and he turned to look down with a smile.
When I joined them, I was winded for a moment and could not speak.
“I was just talking to Sky,” said Jared.
I looked from one to the other, breathing hard, with what I knew must be the wrong sort of smile.
“I was telling her,” Jared continued, in the tone he would use to tell a wonderful piece of news, “about our game.”
As I fought my way into being able to speak, Sky cut me off with her look.
Jared laughed that wonderful quiet laugh. “She doesn’t believe me. I bare my soul and she turns the channel.”
“Stanley,” she said, slowly, carefully. “I know the kind of person you are.”
“Go ahead,” said Jared. “Believe whatever you want.”
I put my hands on my hips. Why shouldn’t I, I told myself. Why not? I had always believed in the truth.
But I knew the next words would be important, and could change everything about the way Sky felt about me. Say the right thing, I told myself. Lie. You have nothing to hide, of course, not really.
Tell a lie. Deny it.
I could lie to anyone. My dad. My mom. I could tell a dressed-up version of the truth to Jared. He would see through it, of course, but the attempt was possible. But to Sky I could tell only the truth.
I took a deep breath. “We play a game,” I said.
“A game.” Her voice was low and serious, and her eyes were steady.
“I told her the plain truth,” said Jared, because he knew: I was hoping, for an instant, that he had told her an exaggeration that I could at least partly deny. “Just the truth.”
She stood. She put her hand on my arm as she stepped down, and I touched the place on my shirt where her hand had rested. I sensed her steps all the way down, communicated through the struts and timbers of the stands.
Jared narrowed his eyes and gave me a half-smile.
I sat slowly, the wet soaking into my seat.
“This is not your type of woman,” said Jared.
I was not looking at Jared. I was gazing down at the figures crossing the football field. One of them was Sky. My eyes followed her all the way to the building. “I like her a lot,” my numb voice said.
“She is beautiful,” he said, and I turned, ready to be offended even at Jared if he said anything obscene or crude about Sky. But Jared was sensitive, serious. He nodded reassurance. “She is. Big, slow, and serene.”
Maybe he liked her. Maybe he wanted her. The thoughts pricked me.
“Not my type,” he said, almost dreamily.
For a long moment, I could not ask the next question.
“Were you in my house last night, Jared?”
Jared made one of his gestures, both “I might have been” and “what difference does it make?” His cigarette made a wreath of smoke, and I could not bear to look at Jared anymore.
“You don’t have any business going into my father’s house.”
I was surprised at these words, but glad I had said them.
“Poor Stan. You’re upset,” Jared said after a long while, and I could tell that he had been waiting for me to speak, and did not like having to make the first move. “I’ve been very generous with you, Stanley.”
I must have shaken my head, or hunched away from him. Somehow my body said no.
“I let you share my secret. I openly shared it with you. You were like a brother.”
Don’t say anything, I told myself. Don’t let him draw you into any sort of argument. He’s smart—much smarter than you are.
His voice sounded gentle. “I don’t really mind that you ran away and left me in the house. But you mind. You can’t stand it.”
I must have shaken my head once again and looked away, because Jared’s next words were the ugliest-sounding words I had ever heard him use. “I’m never going to let you forget how cowardly you were. I thought it
was funny. But you didn’t.”
He stubbed his cigarette out on one of the boltheads, and stood.
The bell rang, yet no one moved from the field below, preferring to talk to each other, laugh, thump a soccer ball back and forth.
“It’s all, right,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
This was new. I glanced up at him. He was being clever, pretending to apologize.
He read my suspicion. He made a little smile. “Go on and be dead, Stanley. It doesn’t matter to me.”
And he left me. Just like that, striding down the bleachers in no special hurry.
I was rounded up in a hall sweep. Mr. Hawking, a strong former convict who ran our security, laughed when he saw me. It was not a mean laugh. He was a handsome black man, and liked the way I used to play baseball, and had always kidded me about throwing my face into the ball.
Now he just said, “Got to be quicker than this, Stanley,” and herded me along with a group of other students into the dean’s office, where we all sat until the dean called in to say that his car battery had been stolen and he wouldn’t be coming in.
We all got passes, and I cruised into French in time to take a test, one of those stretches of the French language in which you say things about the valise of Madame Duboise and the letter that was on the table having been removed by the young girl. I wondered who were these French people with their travel plans and their homes full of messages and servants.
Sky finished the test first. I could hear her cap her pen.
The test had pictures. I was supposed to write a commentary on the pictures in French. I leaned forward and did the best I could, but it was hard to concentrate.
I had a plan—a way out. It would silence Jared, and it would finish the game.
27
I watched the house with green shutters and three chimneys carefully.
I watched it in the early morning, taking a detour on the way to school. I watched it from the alley in the evening. I knew who lived there without knowing anything, just as I knew the characters in the French book, or the man whose leg was sheared off by a crocodile. I knew nothing. I knew enough.
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