What We Keep Is Not Always What Will Stay

by Amanda Cockrell

  Finally Mom came. She slid into the driver’s seat and put her head down on the wheel for a minute. Then she looked at me.

  “Oh, baby. You’re grieving, aren’t you? And I haven’t been paying any attention to you.” Her hair looked wilder than ever, corkscrewing out in all kinds of strange directions, and her eyes were red.

  I wanted to say she sure hadn’t, but I didn’t have the heart to. It is entirely possible that I am not the center of the universe. I thought about what Felix said about them all being her kids.

  I said, “It’s okay.”

  Mom sniffled. “It’s not. I’ve made a mess of everything. It’s wonderful how a funeral focuses your attention on things like that.”

  I didn’t know if she meant the divorce, but I thought it might not be a good idea to ask her right now, and anyway I have enough messes of my own to worry about. And I keep thinking about how he used to call me Punkin.

  Jesse was waiting for me when Mom dropped me off at Ben’s—sitting on the front steps, patting his foot and looking at his watch. Mom didn’t say anything when she saw him, but I could see Ben through the living room window and it was crystal clear that Ben had him on his radar screen. I guess Mom decided to leave it to Ben, because she just sniffled and said, “Take care of yourself, sweetie,” and drove off.

  Jesse said, “Where have you been?”

  That was just about too much. I said, “I’ve been at a funeral,” and started to push past him.

  He stood up fast and grabbed my arm.

  Before I could say anything, Ben was through the front door. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  Jesse let go of me. I said, “Ben, go away.”

  “Like hell I will!”

  Jesse said, “I have to talk to Angela.”

  Ben gave him a really evil look. “No one manhandles my daughter.”

  “I was just trying to talk to her, sir.”

  Neither one of them was paying any attention to me.

  “Hey!” I said. They quit glaring at each other and looked at me. I glared at them. “You might notice that I can actually speak for myself. Ben, back off.”

  Ben calmed down. A little. “You sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll be inside. Where I can see you.” He stalked into the house and closed the door just this side of slamming it.

  Jesse looked sulky. “I’m sorry.”

  “If you grab me again, ever, I will feed you to my dog,” I said.

  “I wanted to talk to you.”

  “Jesse, you’re practically stalking me. Quit it.”

  “Where have you been?”

  “It’s not your business where I’ve been, but if you must know, I went to Darren Hardison’s funeral.”

  “We were supposed to go to Rose Valley today.”

  “Jesse, we were not. I told you my parents wouldn’t let me. And the way you acted, I wouldn’t go even if they would.”

  “Aren’t you my girl?”

  Oh, God. I let my breath out in a long sigh and sat down on the steps. I patted the concrete next to me. “Jesse, sit down.” He sat beside me, looking like he was waiting for the next bad thing to happen.

  “Jesse, I love you. I do. But I can’t handle this. You can’t expect me to. I’m not even sixteen yet.”

  “Lots of women marry men who are older than them.”

  “Marry? Jesse, I can’t think that far ahead. You can’t ask me to. We have to slow down.”

  Jesse looked at me earnestly. “When you’re twenty, I’ll be twenty-four. That’s not too old, that’s just normal.”

  “It’s not normal now,” I said.

  “Why not? Do you have another boyfriend?”

  “What?”

  “It’s that Michalski kid, isn’t it?”

  “Jesse, quit it!”

  “Is it because of my leg?”

  “No!”

  “Then what is it?” He leaned really close to me, so close I could smell his cologne. He’d put on cologne before he came to see me. That made me want to cry.

  “You need to get well. You need to figure out why you get so mad all the time, and why you got rough with me. You made me afraid of you. I can’t deal with that.” I scooted a little ways away from him.

  “I’ll wait for you,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I’ll wait for you to finish high school. College too, if you want to.”

  And follow me around and go ballistic if you see me with a boy. I knew this had to stop. I said, “Jesse, you have to go now. I can’t go out with you anymore. Not for a while, anyway. I’m sorry.” I wanted to cry.

  Jesse took my hand. He wasn’t grabby this time, and he looked so sad that I let him. “Angie,” he said, “I will do anything for you. If you’ll be my girl, I’ll always take care of you. I promise.”

  “Jesse, the person you need to take care of is you. What you need to do now is go have that scan and make sure you don’t have a head injury.” I’d been reading. One of the signs of head injury is that the person doesn’t have any impulse control—what Felix said about not having good brakes. That would be Jesse.

  He said, “Maybe.”

  “Good.”

  “If you want me to.”

  “No. Because you need to. Do not make this about me.”

  “It is about you, don’t you understand? I need you.”

  I took my hand back. “Ben’s going to be back out here in a minute if I don’t go in.”

  Jesse glared at the window. “Is he okay with you?”

  “What do you mean, okay?”

  “He doesn’t, like, get weird with you? I mean, I know he’s not your real dad. You know, if anybody hurts you, you should tell me about it.”

  Oh, good. Someone else who wants to protect me from things that aren’t happening. Of course, I’m clear on the fact that I haven’t told anybody about what I may need protecting from, which is Jesse.

  “Your mom leaves you here with him?” Jesse added.

  “Ben has raised me since I was eight,” I said. “He and Mom are having some problems right now, like I told you.”

  He nodded solemnly. “I just want you to know that I will always be here when you need me.”

  “I don’t need you!” I snapped. I was crying now. “And you were right—you don’t need me. You need you.” Need is a hell of a bad basis for love. Felix is right about that.

  “Yes, you do,” Jesse said. “I need you, and you’ll need me sooner or later. We need each other. That’s how it is. You’ll see.”

  I stood up. “I have to go in.” He started to say something and I said, “No, you can’t come with me. Ben will have a fit. Let him cool down awhile, okay?”

  I thought he wasn’t going to go, but he finally did. I watched him till I was sure he wasn’t coming back. When he turned the corner across from St. Thomas’s, I went inside.

  Ben wasn’t even pretending he hadn’t been watching the whole time. “I did not like that,” he said.

  “I’ll handle it.”

  “I’m not sure that’s the best idea.”

  “Can I just eat dinner?” I asked. “He’s not coming back tonight, and Wuffie will have me up early tomorrow for church. I just want to think some, please?”

  Ben let it go at that, but I know I’m going to have to figure out what to do about Jesse, or let Ben and Mom take over, and I can’t bear to get him in trouble. He’s right—I do love him. And he’s not a monster and they’ll try to make him look like one, even though he’s just a kid who got sent off to shoot people and got his leg blown off. If anyone is surprised he’s a little crazy, I can’t imagine why. There’s got to be a way to persuade him to have that scan. I feel like I’m watching that cat in the road again.

  The trees were on fire. It was so hot I could feel it on my face, and it looked as if the whole sky was boiling in an orange-red bloom. The gunship stitched back and forth like a black wicked bird in front of the fire. Someone was calling, “Doc!” />
  I said, “I’m not Doc,” trying really hard not to be this time, like Helen had said. One part of me remembered that, and I felt as if I could almost slide out of the mud and the stinking clothes I was wearing into my real body. But the body I was in was already crawling toward the wounded kid.

  Be in the movie, Helen said. Tell yourself you’re dreaming.

  “Doc!” The boy was trying to crawl too, pushing himself along with his right arm. White bone stuck out of the red wreck of his other one. I pulled a tourniquet out of my bag.

  I’m dreaming. I thought it hard.

  “It’s okay, kid, I got him.”

  I heard the voice in my head, and the body I had been in just crawled out from under me, and I was standing there in my pajamas. He looked back over his shoulder at me, and it was Felix. He was younger, but it was him. He wrapped the tourniquet around the stump of that torn-off arm, then pulled out a morphine Syrette and said, “Call in the dust-off chopper for me.”

  I didn’t know how to, in my pajamas. I tried to tell him that but then I saw the chopper coming in, dark gray with a big red cross on its side. It was zig-zagging through the smoke to avoid the incoming fire and I thought it was going to crash. Then it settled with a lurch on the edge of the rice field. Felix picked up the wounded kid and ran for the chopper, splashing through the water. He ducked down under the rotors to hand him up. I could feel their wind but not the ground I was standing on, like I was only half in that place now.

  I could hear, though. Shells were whining in, making an ear-shattering scream just before they exploded. The fire roared in the trees.

  Felix ran back to me from the chopper as it lifted off. His face was covered in mud and his hands were bloody. He looked right at me. “Get out of here!” he said. “I’ve got it covered.”

  I opened my eyes and I was back in my bed. But I could still smell smoke, even stronger now.

  20

  I stumbled into the dawn half-light in the living room just as Ben and Grandma Alice came out of their rooms, their hair all sticking up on end, Ben in his boxer shorts and Grandma Alice in a long flannel nightie.

  When I opened the front door, we could smell the smoke even more, enough to make your eyes water. It wasn’t quite all the way light yet, but we could see black clouds boiling up into the sky over Ayala Avenue. The flames lit them up from underneath, and it was way too much like my dream.

  “Oh, no!” Grandma Alice said. “What is it?”

  And Ben said, “It looks like the church.”

  I ran across the yard in my bare feet and pajamas while Ben shouted at me to come back. I didn’t listen. It did look like the smoke was coming from St. Thomas’s, and what if Father Weatherford had let Felix go back and he was in the basement?

  It was cold and there were lots of prickly leaves under the live oaks by the library, but I didn’t pay any attention to them. I could hear sirens in the distance now, like the noises in my dream, but they were way far away. I ran past the library and across Ayala Avenue, and Felix was there, but he was all right. He was dragging a hose out of the shed and trying to screw it on the faucet in the garden. I held it for him while he got it on. He didn’t even ask me what I was doing there.

  We hauled the hose across Felix’s herb beds and turned it on the church. Flames were shooting out of the basement window and it was so hot my face burned. The glass had broken and the wooden window frame was charred. All that black smoke we’d seen was coming out of the window and boiling up through the beams of the pergola above it, blackening the bougainvillea. You could see the leaves curling as they caught fire. Felix had the garden hose on full blast, but it wasn’t doing much good.

  More people had come running up, most of them just standing there watching. Ben came panting up beside me and grabbed me by the arm. I was glad to see he’d stopped to put on clothes.

  “Get back and leave it to the fire department!” He dragged me to the far end of the garden, away from anything that might fall on us.

  The fire truck was parking on the street and the guys were reeling out the hose, but I could see flames coming out of the first floor windows now, at the back where the acolytes get dressed.

  “Anybody know how it started?” one of the fire guys yelled as he ran past with his hose. I thought about that hot plate in the basement, but I didn’t say anything. Father Weatherford’s car screeched up and parked behind the fire truck. Father Weatherford came flying out, in pajamas too. He tried to go in the front door and the fire crew wouldn’t let him.

  “Is anyone inside?” one of them shouted at him.

  He shook his head, but I know he was thinking about the statues of St. Thomas and Our Lady, plus the stained glass windows and the murals and all the other beautiful, holy things in there.

  Half the town was crowding around now, getting in the way and giving the fire crew advice. Noah Michalski, who lives a few blocks away like me, was there, but he actually had some sense. He dragged another hose through the hedge from the hotel next door and started squirting it on the pergola. The pergola is big and heavy, with huge old beams in its roof. The beams near the basement window were starting to smoke, and the bougainvillea was on fire. Felix had turned his garden hose on the shed roof, which is shingle, not tile like the rest of the church. The fire in the basement was still belching smoke but no flames now, and the fire crew was working on the first floor.

  Then I saw Jesse. I don’t know what he was doing there. He lives at the other end of town. He ran up to me, coughing, and said, “I told you I’d be there for you.” He was carrying two big buckets, and before I could say anything, he started running back and forth through the hedge, lurching on his artificial leg, dipping water out of the hotel swimming pool next door and coming back to fling it at the basement window.

  “Hey man, get out from under there!” Noah yelled at him.

  Jesse didn’t pay any attention to him. He was coughing harder in the smoke and his face was black with soot and all scratched from the hedge. You could see the beams of the pergola glowing through the smoke.

  “Jesse!” I screamed at him. He just shook his head at me and went back to running back and forth, throwing water at the window.

  I’d never been so scared before. The fire looked just like a medieval picture of hell, and the air was so thick with ash and smoke that my throat burned. The fire guys were pushing through the front doors with their hoses, and they all had respirators on. The church is made out of adobe and the roof is tile, but whatever was on fire in the basement had obviously burned up through the floorboards or the wooden stairs. It would have had plenty to work on in the basement, with all the junk that’s stored down there, including the hay bales left over from the Posadas parade.

  Outside, Felix was still wetting down the shed. He looked just like the statue, in that awful old bathrobe all covered with soot. As I watched him, the bathrobe went away and the young guy from my dream was there, in army fatigues and combat boots, and the tree line behind him was boiling with fire. The air smelled like diesel fuel and burned meat. I blinked and it changed back again, and so did he.

  This fire smelled awful anyhow, like burning wool and electrical cords and wet ashes, and my eyes stung like anything. It was getting really hard to breathe in the smoke, and people were starting to back away. Noah was still wetting the pergola down, but the fire had charred nearly through the end by the basement window. I know that when fire gets inside of wood, water on the outside doesn’t put it out.

  When Noah saw Jesse under that end again, he dropped his hose and ran through the smoke after him. “Get out of there! That’s gonna come down!”

  Jesse pushed Noah away, hard. Jesse’s hands were all burned and his jeans were covered with ash.

  Someone on the fire crew saw Jesse now and grabbed him by the arm. “Stand back, please!” It was a woman’s voice, and even though I was so scared, my head stopped watching the fire long enough to think how weird it is that you can never tell who’s inside those sui
ts. And then as soon as she turned her back, Jesse picked up the buckets again.

  Ben had let go of me, and I ran close enough to the pergola to yell, “Jesse, come away from there!” For an instant I thought I saw the Virgin, crying, with her hands filled with roses, and then I thought I saw Char Man. I remembered Jesse’s sergeant in the Humvee, and I knew Jesse was afraid of the fire and also that it was why he wouldn’t leave it. “Jesse!”

  He stopped for a moment and looked at me again through the smoke. Then he ran back to the window, and the whole pergola came down on top of him.

  I just got back from the hospital. Jesse’s dead. I don’t know what else I can say but that. When I think about it, it all whirls around in my head like a horror movie until I throw up.

  And I can’t not think about it. All the fire crew and EMT guys were at the church. They got him out from under the beams as fast as they could, but a beam had come down right on his head, and another on his chest. Ben and Felix and Noah and I all followed the ambulance to the hospital, with Father Weatherford in his car, and waited for Jesse’s mother and father to come. Father Weatherford didn’t know the Francises, but I gave him their phone number and he called them.

  When something really bad is going on, the hospital puts you in a separate room to wait, and all I could think about was how many other people had sat in that room waiting to find out something awful. I couldn’t stand to think about Jesse except to keep praying he was okay, over and over. Let him be okay, let him be alive, let him be okay, please let him be okay. Let two and two not be four.

  Noah’s hands were burned, too, from when he tried to haul Jesse out before the fire guys did. Ben and Felix were half waiting for Jesse’s parents and half kind of hovering around both of us, making sure the kids were okay, I guess. When my stomach started to growl, Felix went and got us muffins from the hospital cafeteria, and Ben got Noah ice for his hands and some ibuprofen. The doctors were too busy with Jesse to even look at Noah. My muffin tasted like wood shavings. I couldn’t eat it. I feel like I’ll never want to eat anything again. I think this is why people take drugs.