“I won’t just abandon him. I’m not going to be like Mom.”
“You aren’t abandoning him.”
I sniffled again. “I really care about him. But now he scares me. I hate that.”
“Go ahead and feel bad for him. I feel bad for him, too. You can even care about him. But pay attention to your gut instincts, okay? They’re probably more reliable than your emotions.”
“I really wanted to help him.”
“Fix him up?” I could hear Felix smiling in the dark.
“He seemed better when he was with me,” I said.
“Until he wasn’t,” Felix said. “Ange, if anyone is going to fix Jesse, it will have to be Jesse.”
“I’m afraid he’ll be worse after this. That I made him worse.”
“He may be worse, but it won’t be your fault. Or your responsibility.”
I felt a little better, even if I’m getting counseling from a crazy homeless guy who lives in a basement. I think the only person Felix can’t figure out is himself.
Then we heard voices and people bumbling around at the top of the stairs. Felix started to get up. “Better fix that fuse.”
Before I could move to let him stand up, someone shone a flashlight down the stairs right in our eyes. I heard a kind of shriek and a gasp.
“It’s okay,” I said. “It’s just us.”
Felix stood and felt his way to the fuse box and the lights came on in a minute. He must have to do it all the time if he runs that heater much.
It was Altar Society ladies at the top of the stairs, Mrs. Beale and Mrs. Rausch. They’re friends of Wuffie’s.
“Angela!” Mrs. Beale said. She kept the flashlight trained on Felix as if it was a gun. “Call the police!” she said over her shoulder to Mrs. Rausch.
17
I finally persuaded them not to call the police, but I don’t think I really convinced them that Felix wasn’t molesting me or doing something else awful. I told them that Father Weatherford knew he was living here, that Felix was doing the gardening. Felix just stood there in his bathrobe, looking sad.
It’s not fair. Now they want to throw him out. They’ve all seen him in the garden, and at the Posadas parade, and even said how nice everything is looking, but now they’ve decided he’s dangerous. I know it’s because of me, and nobody will listen to me. I went to talk to Father Weatherford, and he acted like he was going to pat me on the head and gave me some story about insurance liabilities that is totally smoke and mirrors. I guess the church is pretty sensitive about people molesting people, but that was priests. I didn’t say that to Father Weatherford. I said it to Ben, and he laughed and said, “ ‘Whatever a man prays for, he prays for a miracle. Every prayer reduces itself to this: Great God, grant that twice two be not four.’ ”
I said, “What?” and he said that’s what Ivan Turgenev, who was some Russian writer, had to say about prayer. Helpful.
I thought maybe Wuffie could do something, but she says the Altar Society won’t listen to her and maybe it’s a better idea if Felix sleeps at the Rescue Mission or some shelter. And this is the man who bathes her dog when it has fits! And he doesn’t want to sleep at the Rescue Mission, where they try to convert him. He likes the church.
So now he’s sleeping under a tree in the park.
I took him a better sleeping bag and one of Ben’s sweaters and some socks. Ben’s socks. I didn’t ask and it serves him right.
Felix says he asked Father Weatherford if it was still okay if he came around and took care of the garden during the day. I think Felix needs that garden.
My whole life is like one of those tables with a wobbly leg. You prop up one side and the other side gets off kilter and slides your soup into your lap. Jesse wasn’t in school today, which was a relief, but I keep wondering what he’s doing, if he’s sitting in his room drawing mazes again. I just want everybody back where they belong: Felix in his basement and Mom home with Ben. Really home, not hooking up with him, which I don’t think she would do if she intended to come back and live with him.
She called before I went to school this morning to say she wanted to have a little chat with me after school. She probably wants to tell me the divorce is final and she’s enrolled me in a convent while she goes to Paris to write poetry.
Oh God. The world sucks. The world totally sucks. Wuffie picked me up after school instead of Mom and took me to her house. I don’t know whether Mom had planned to explain New Year’s Eve or yell at me some more about Jesse, but now she’s forgotten all about it. She’s in bed at four in the afternoon, crying. Darren Hardison, who was in her English class when I was little and always called me Punkin, is dead.
He was killed in Afghanistan last night. She just found out. He used to come back to see her after high school, and when he was at college, he’d send her funny cards and strange news clippings. Once he sent her one about a man who drove all the way to San Diego on a riding lawnmower.
Mom couldn’t stop crying. She was crying so hard she was choking. Her face was red and she sounded like a dog howling. I’ve never heard anyone cry like that.
Finally she stopped. She sniffled and wiped her face with the sheet and held her arms out to me. I hugged her, remembering Darren, how he used to slip me candy bars. She sniffed again and I handed her a tissue from the dresser. She blew her nose and leaned her head against my shoulder.
“But why are you in bed?” All her old stuffed animals were piled around her, including First Husband’s rabbit.
“I don’t know what else to do. I just want to pull the covers over my head and stay here.” Her voice sounded like somebody else. I’ve never seen Mom like this. The Mom I’m used to would organize an anti-war march and call her congressman.
“Why don’t you come home?”
She didn’t answer that. She said, “I’ve been trying to say a rosary for him, but I keep ending up just crying.”
I told her I thought the Virgin could figure out what she meant, and she said, “Yeah,” kind of sadly.
I thought about the time Darren sent Mom flowers when he got an A on his college Shakespeare final because he remembered something she’d taught him, and I felt sad to my bones. He was her favorite and he was always nice to me. He recognized I was there. Usually big kids don’t recognize little kids are there.
“When is the funeral?” I asked her.
“I don’t know,” she said. She closed her fist around the rabbit’s ears and shut her eyes. “It doesn’t matter. Funerals don’t bring them back.”
Now all I can think about is what the Chumash thought about the dead going away over the water and how you can hear the doors of the underworld bang shut after them. I keep seeing all the dead boys—and girls too—walking across the water like Jesus to the Underworld. The door sounds like it’s metal, like prison doors closing. I wonder if Jesse knew Darren. I’m scared to ask. Jesse came to school today and when I opened my locker, about a hundred little drawings fell out. They were all mazes. Some of them had his face in the middle and some of them had mine. I scooped them up and stuffed them in the trash, and then pulled them out again for fear someone would see them.
Darren’s obituary was in the paper this morning and everybody at school is talking about it.
In English, Mrs. Larsen told us to write what we felt about loss and death, so I wrote a poem for Darren.
The Path to the Underworld
leads across grey swells.
Beyond the seal rocks off Anacapa Island
the dead travel light of foot.
You can hear the doors bang shut
behind them, stone on stone
reverberating inside what is left:
feathers, bones, flame, sand.
It’s like something Mom would do. Mom, on the other hand, called in sick this morning and is still in bed. I talked to Wuffie on the phone and Wuffie says she won’t get up. I told Ben before I left for school, thinking maybe he’d go over there, and he just said, “She’ll get up when sh
e wants to.”
I saw Jesse at lunch. He was hunched over his tray, by himself. He didn’t look up and I was kind of relieved. I sat down with Lily at a different table.
“Don’t go near Jesse,” she said.
“Huh?” I wasn’t going to if I could help it, but still.
“I asked him if he knew Darren Hardison and he said to go fuck myself.” She didn’t look insulted. I guess you understand things when your mom’s a shrink. Sometimes I think I could tell Lily I fantasize I’m a blue baboon and she would just say “uh huh” and go on eating her sprout sandwich. I wish I was like that.
“I’m scared,” I said. “Wuffie says to pray, but I don’t know what to pray for. Comfort, I guess. Wars to stop. But I don’t think God’s even listening.”
“My dad says, give a man a fish and you’ll feed him for a day. Give him a religion and he’ll starve to death while praying for a fish,” Lily said. Considering that her folks lived in a monastery, they’re pretty cynical about organized religion. Lily says the monastery wasn’t organized.
I don’t want a fish. I want two and two to be not four, and Darren Hardison not to be dead. I want Jesse to be okay.
Jesse went home after lunch. He didn’t come to art class. After school I went to see Felix in the park. There’s a live oak with a huge low limb that sticks straight out, about four feet off the ground, at the place where the park runs into the scrub brush near the old railroad tracks. He’s made a little cave under it, out of a tarp. When the city notices him, they’ll probably make him move too. I keep telling him how sorry I am about the church throwing him out, and he keeps saying it’s not my fault. But I feel like it is.
“Sit down. Have a pomegranate. Your grandmother gave me some.” He handed me one and I dug my fingernails into the skin. He’s swept all the oak leaves away from in front of his tree, and he has a hibachi set up on the dirt, with a dishpan to wash things in.
“You’re like a mobile home,” I said, smiling. He even has art—there are pictures cut out of magazines pinned to the back wall of the tarp: a close-up of a red and green frog and a bouquet of poppies.
“It’s hard to find a good hobo jungle anymore,” he said. “Gotta make your own. I miss my nice coffeemaker, though.”
I picked seeds out of the pomegranate, watching my fingers turn purpley-red, and told him about Darren Hardison and Mom lying in bed crying.
“It’s tough on her, having all those kids,” he said.
“They aren’t hers,” I said.
“Yeah, they are.”
And he’s right. Darren Hardison might as well have been. “Is that how you felt about the soldiers you were with in the army?” I asked. “Like you wanted to save them all?”
“You can’t save people.”
“Sometimes you can. You did.”
“Never. You can help. But they save themselves or they don’t. I’ve told you that.”
That sentence made me feel like I couldn’t breathe. I put the pomegranate down. “You just … watch?” I said. “Everyone?”
“Yeah. You just watch.”
I don’t think I am going to be able to stand life if that’s true. I saw a cat get hit by a car once. I could see the car coming and the cat in the street, and I screamed at it to get out of the way but it didn’t. The car kept coming, and when it hit the cat, it spun it around on its back. They didn’t even stop. I picked up the cat and I made Mom drive us to the vet with it, but it was dead by the time we got there. I wouldn’t believe it was dead. I held it in my lap, wrapped up in a towel, all the way to the vet and I was sure he would save it.
I stared at the pomegranate juice on my fingers and remembered how the cat’s blood had soaked my jeans. Is it going to be like that with people? Does God really just let things randomly happen? Surely he can’t want some of the things that happen to be that way. Wars and little kids dying, and Darren being dead? Why would God want that? So it must be random.
It’s not as if that never occurred to me before. But I never thought about my life being random. About things happening to me being random. About somebody I love just dying. About somebody I love coming to pieces. How do people live with that? Once something like that happens to you, how do you go on living your normal life and not be paralyzed with terror that something else is going to drop out of the sky on you? That the next car that comes by will spin you around in the road like that cat?
18
Ben was waiting for me when I got home, with some more great news. Father Weatherford called him and said I have to see a counselor about “what happened in the basement.”
“What?” I said.
Ben looked uncomfortable. “He’s worried about Felix.”
“Well, he ought to be,” I said. “He hasn’t got any place to live, thanks to those busybodies.”
“He didn’t mean that, I’m afraid,” Ben said. “He means he’s concerned that Felix may have hurt you in some way.”
He was watching me carefully to see what I did. I could tell. I nearly lost it. “That is the stupidest thing I ever heard!” I was almost shrieking. “Do they think I’m a moron? Do they think he’s some kind of child molester? They don’t know shit!”
“And you do?”
I tried to get a grip. “I know Felix isn’t dangerous. To me or anybody else. You ask Mom!” I glared at him.
Ben sighed. “I did. She said the same thing.”
“Has she quit crying?”
“No.”
I started to cry again, too. “I hate this! I hate everything that’s happening! I hate people getting killed, and you and Mom splitting up, and I hate being scared of everything!”
“Oh, honey.” Ben looked really sad. “Maybe you can talk to the counselor about that, since Father Weatherford wants you to go see him.”
“Him? Him who?”
“I think you can pick. He said the parish would pay for it.”
“This is about ‘insurance liabilities,’ isn’t it?” I asked.
“Probably. I expect the church is a little gun-shy, on the whole.”
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll go see Lily’s mom. But I cannot believe they want me to see a shrink. And I am not going to see someone who’s already decided Felix must have molested me and will try to make me remember stuff that didn’t happen! And I’ll run up a big bill. Their insurance company can pay that.”
I especially hate that they’re hounding someone who’s been a comfort to me, and telling me to be scared of him, too. I’m already scared of enough stuff.
I told Lily what they’re making me do and asked her if it would be weird for her, me seeing her mom, because it occurred to me later that it might be. It would have been an out. But she just said, “No, Mom has pretty good sense.” Which doesn’t sound like a testimonial, but is a lot more than I can say for my mom. So I have an appointment for Friday.
Jesse came to school again yesterday, but he’s still acting like there’s nobody else in the room with him most of the time. It’s freaky. There haven’t been any more pictures in my locker. He sits hunched over at lunch, eating his sandwich like somebody’s going to take it away from him. He didn’t even answer when Mr. Petrillo talked to him in art. Mr. Petrillo just went on to the next person, which was me. We have assigned tables, so I’m still next to Jesse. Jesse was acting like I wasn’t there, which was kind of a relief. We’re studying the Impressionists, and Mr. Petrillo has us painting a tub full of water lilies, trying to be Monet. Mr. Petrillo looked at my water lilies and said he liked the way I’m handling the light that reflects on the water from the studio skylight. When he went on to the next person, I snuck a look at Jesse.
He was painting a water lily petal, up close, with his nose practically in the paint. Just painting the same stroke over and over again.
He caught me looking at him and I thought he was going to get mad. But he shook his head, like someone trying to shake water out of his ears, and he suddenly smiled at me and said, “Hey, do you want to go up to Rose Val
ley tomorrow? We can take your silly dog and hike up to the waterfall.”
I stared at him. Rose Valley is a place up in the foothills where people go to camp. There’s a waterfall and picnic tables and nothing else. And he thought I’d go there with him? After what happened Saturday?
“Yeah,” he continued, like nothing had happened with us. “It’s so peaceful up there. I saw a roadrunner on the old fire trail once. I need to go someplace where there’s just birds and trees, you know. I need to go there with you.”
“Jesse—”
“You’re not still mad, are you? Just because we had a fight?”
A fight ? “That was more than a fight,” I hissed at him.
“I thought you loved me!” he snapped. “I love you.” He smacked his hand down on the edge of his easel, hard enough to rattle it on its legs, and people turned around to stare at us. I ought to get used to it.
“Anyway, my folks won’t let me,” I said in a hurry, because I was afraid he’d start yelling. “They think I’m too young to go in cars with boys.” Which wasn’t strictly true, but would be if they knew it was Jesse.
“You snuck off before, didn’t you?” Jesse said.
“I got caught. They grounded me.” Also not true, but there’s no way I’m going to go up to Rose Valley alone with Jesse.
He stared at me. “Are we going to let that matter?” He shook his head. “Angie, I need you.”
The bell rang and I started stuffing things back into my bag. “I’ve got to go. I’ve got a doctor’s appointment after school.”
“Call me when you get back. We need to talk about this.”
I took off before he could say anything else and got in Ben’s car like bears were after me. Ben must have thought I looked funny because he said, “Are you okay with this, Angelfish? You don’t have to go back if you don’t want to. Just the once, to keep the rector happy.”
“It’s okay.” I’m probably the only person in Ayala who’s never seen a shrink before, anyway. We know people who have a personal therapist, and a group therapist, and a couples therapist, and one for the dog. And in any case, I have to say that Lily’s mom is kind of cool. All Lily’s friends call her by her first name, Helen, and she has blond hair in a bowl cut and round glasses. She’s pretty like Lily but she never seems to pay any attention to what she looks like. Once she had on shoes that didn’t match.
What We Keep Is Not Always What Will Stay Page 14