Jesus Land

by Julia Scheeres

  When I hear the shuffle of his boots on the roof ledge, I open my window and he steps into my bedroom, tracking in cold as he peels off his layers, one by one, until he’s standing there naked and brown and grinning and already hard.

  We listen to The Police while we do it, and if the tape ends, Scott stops whatever we’re doing to flip it over, and afterward he drums his fingers on my back to the music as we fade into sleep. And that’s the moment I cherish most, when I’m stretched onto his warmth, my head on the soft pillow of his chest, his heart throbbing in my ear, his arms around me.

  We don’t talk much—partly because my parents are right down the hall, partly because we don’t really know each other all that well—and when the alarm rings at 5:30, he dresses and slips back out the window into the rising dawn. I watch him cross the back field, a running shadow, then reset the alarm for 6:30.

  At school, I’m so stupid with sleep that I cram myself full of No-Doz and Jolt Cola, but this only makes me jumpy and tired and I pinch myself to stay awake in class.

  After a few weeks of practicing sex, I’m starting to feel something. Not the eyeballs-rolled-toward-heaven suck-in-your-breath immensity that Scott gets out of it, but a swelling pleasure that builds as he seesaws on top of me and ends all too quickly when he suddenly stops and says “fuck” in a small voice before rolling off me.

  But it’s enough of a something to make Scott clamp his hand over my mouth so I don’t make noise and enough of a something to make me want to practice alone, rubbing the swelling place with a nail polish bottle and pretending it’s Scott until my body trembles and a brightness like heat lightning flashes through me and I whisper “fuck” as well.

  The first time it happened, I laid there marveling at the beauty of it, wondering why God would forbid such bliss when He makes us endure so much misery.

  A slammed door wakes me and I slide guiltily into my desk chair. It’s dark outside, and I don’t even remember lying down.

  I hear Mother yell for David, her voice thin and agitated, and then walk across the great room toward the hallway. I switch on my clunky yellow desk lamp a moment before she opens my door.

  “Where’s David?” she asks, lifting a clear rain bonnet from her head. “I told him to bring in the dumpsters after school and they’re still out there.”

  The stink of ammonia wafts over to me; she got her hair permed in town, disciplined into tight brown coils. I frown down at my hastily opened French dictionary, not wanting her to notice my sleep-creased face. My final is tomorrow, and I’m going to fail it.

  “How should I know where David’s at?” I raise the dictionary to my face, blocking out her presence with neat rows of print.

  “Come get the groceries in then.” She lingers in the doorway. “And if you can’t find your brother, you’ll have to get the dumpsters yourself.”

  I jerk my head up to protest, but she’s already gone.

  Ice scratches the window; the last thing I want to do right now is drag the garbage bins a quarter mile over the slush-covered lane in the dark. I push back my chair, and for the millionth time in my life set out to go find David.

  He’s downstairs in the rocking chair, as always. But he’s got the lights off for once, and is just sitting there, rocking, looking out the window at the silhouettes of gray trees against the grayer sky.

  “Didn’t you hear Mother?” I ask angrily. “Go fetch in the dumpsters.”

  He doesn’t answer, he just keeps rocking. I go to the wall panel and swipe on all the overhead lights. The room blooms into color.

  “Are you deaf or dumb or both?” I shout.

  I turn toward him and see the wall-mounted pencil sharpener in pieces at his feet. I take a step closer and see his right arm lying across his lap, slashed red. In his hand, he holds the razor from the pencil sharpener—he’s sliced a bloody ladder into his brown flesh, and there’s blood smeared on the cast of his broken arm. He continues rocking, now staring at his ghostly reflection. His eyes are wide open, unflinching.

  I sprint back upstairs and Mother hushes me as I throw open the basement door. She’s watching a news update about the Beirut embassy bombing on television.

  “David cut himself,” I say over the TV report, gripping the counter with both hands; the words are hard to say.

  She walks around me to the stove, where corned beef hash fries in a skillet.

  “Tell him to put a Band-Aid on it,” she says. “Your father’s going to be home any minute and . . .”

  “He cut his wrist!” I yell, cupping my hands around my mouth as if she were half a mile away. She exhales, exasperated.

  “Why can’t I just have one day of peace?” she grumbles, handing me the spatula.

  She walks downstairs braying his name.

  “A White Christmas, just what everyone wanted!” the bleached blond TV reporter says. I push the pink and white paste around the skillet and wonder if I should call an ambulance or if Mother will take him to the hospital herself.

  Next thing, she’s beside me, snatching the spatula from my hand.

  “It’s burning!”

  I wipe my hand on my jeans to erase her touch and watch her spoon four craters in the hash and crack an egg into each one. She says nothing.

  “Well, are you taking him to the hospital?” I ask.

  She snorts and jerks the salt shaker over the skillet.

  “They’re just surface cuts,” she says. “If you want to kill yourself, you slice down, not sideways.”

  She illustrates with her index finger before bending to pull a metal lid from the tangle of pans in the cupboard below the counter.

  “But doesn’t he need . . .”

  “He’s just trying to get attention. Ignore him.”

  She drops the lid on the skillet and turns to open the refrigerator.

  “Julia, the groceries!”

  In the cold garage, three brown Marsh sacks poke from the Audi’s open trunk. I jostle them onto my knee and then into my arms. As I walk back into the mudroom, the garage door opens and Dad’s Porsche glides in. When I turn to nudge the door closed with my foot, I see him sitting in his silver car with the engine off, his head back, his eyes shut. Lacy flute music seeps from the closed windows. Mozart? Vivaldi? I didn’t even know he liked classical music. I shut my eyes too and let the faint notes wash over me like a whispered prayer. If only we could live as peacefully as this.

  “Julia, the milk!” Mother yells from the kitchen, and I jolt to consciousness and shut the door.

  As we sit at the supper table—Mother in her apron, Father in his suit, David with his two damaged arms—I think about how I’ll stretch myself into Scott’s warmth in a few hours, and my cheeks flush with my secret.

  I have a life apart from this.

  They announce David’s departure the day after Christmas. They’re sending him to a Christian school, on an island in the Caribbean.

  “He’ll be better off there,” Dad says, as if David were already gone, and not sitting on the sofa next to me. I recall how Elaine said David would be better off in Chicago, and now Dad’s saying he’ll be better off in the Caribbean, and wonder why he can’t just be better off here, at home. His home.

  Mother leans forward to take a Christmas cookie from a platter she’s set on the coffee table. Dad unfolds a map and points to the island, the Dominican Republic, next to Cuba. They found the school in an advertisement at the back of Christianity Today, Mother explains. Mother hands one brochure to David, who reaches out awkwardly with his cast to take it, and one to me.

  I look at David, but he’s taking this news with the same dim eyes he’s had ever since Dad fractured his arm. He twists his nail ring round and round on his finger, the one he made to protect himself from harm.

  On the top of the brochure is a cross surrounded by a circle with the words “New Horizons Youth Ministries, Inc.” inside it.

  Do you have an adolescent who . . .

  Rejects your family’s Christian values?

>   Is out of control?

  Has a low self-image?

  Is irresponsible, showing lack of character?

  Runs with a negative crowd or has no friends?

  Is unmotivated and failing in school?

  Is disrespectful, rejecting your love and others?

  New Horizons Youth Ministries can help.

  I look up at Dad.

  “Is this some kind of punishment or something?”

  He takes a drink of his coffee before responding.

  “David needs help, and these people can help him,” he says flatly.

  He takes another sip of coffee.

  “He’ll leave after New Year’s.”

  “How long will he be there?” I ask, looking at David, who is staring blankly at his brochure.

  “He’ll be there until the staff feel he’s ready to come back,” Dad says, rising from his chair. “Everything’s explained right there in the informational packet.”

  Mother also stands.

  “We have adult Bible study at the Vanderkoys at seven,” she says. “There’s leftovers for supper, and you may watch The Waltons at eight.”

  I wait until they walk into the garage before turning to David.

  “What do you think about all this?” I ask him.

  “Does it matter?” he asks.

  He tosses his brochure on the coffee table with his good arm, and I continue to read mine, skimming down the page.

  Concept

  Why in the Dominican Republic? Three reasons: atmosphere, culture shock, and distance.

  Atmosphere

  Escuela Caribe is set far away from the pervasive influences of American society; the materialism, the social ills, the negative peers, and the struggles in one’s family . . .

  Culture Shock

  A change in climate, racial differences, geographic surroundings, friends, daily routine, and language all make adolescents remarkably more dependent upon others for direction. This also renders them more malleable . . .

  Distance

  Living in a structured environment, teens start to appreciate Mom and Dad and begin to share their parents’ dream of a united family again . . .

  “It’s a reform school,” David says quietly.

  “But why?” I ask. “What’d you do?”

  We both know there’s no answer to this. We sit in a tight silence as Rejoice Radio plays stale Christmas carols over the intercom, not knowing what to say. Out the great room windows, the sunset spills red across the snow-tossed landscape.

  After a long while, David stands.

  “I guess I’d best prepare myself,” he says, turning toward the basement.

  The night before David leaves, I sit on his bed as he packs, next to a pile of underwear with SCHEERES written in Marksalot on the inside back of the waistbands. We’ve tuned his radio to Rejoice and set it in front of the intercom so we can talk privately.

  “Don’t leave me here alone with them!” I plead as he slowly rolls a pair of jeans into a compact tube. They took his cast off early, and he’s being ginger with his arm.

  “Come with me,” he says, laughing darkly.

  “Uh . . . maybe I’ll come for a visit.”

  He and Mother trekked into town several times this past week to revamp his wardrobe—”no tight, torn, or revealing clothing, no T-shirts with logos”—and to get him a passport. In it, he glowers at the camera, dressed in a Sunday shirt.

  I pick up a piece of paper lying next to his suitcase, a list the school sent, and skim down to the DO NOT BRING section:

  No music

  No secular reading material

  No playing cards

  No medications, without previous approval

  Nothing that does not honor and glorify God

  As he wedges the jeans into a corner of the suitcase, my eyes fall on his right forearm. The razor cuts have scabbed over into a row of dark tracks except for the places where he’s picked them off, which are pink. He sees me staring at his arm and pulls it against his stomach.

  I stand and walk to the window. Outside it’s hailing, and there’s already a foot of snow on the ground.

  “Just think, you’ll be lying on the beach down there, while I’m freezing my butt off back here,” I say, watching his reflection in the glass. He straightens and looks at me, and I turn around.

  The intercom crackles.

  “Julia, David needs to finish packing and go to bed,” Mother says over the sound of the radio. “We leave for Indy at 5:30 tomorrow.”

  I ignore her and walk over to David.

  “Gonna be real lonely around here without you, Baby Boo Boo,” I say, calling him by the nickname I never use anymore.

  “You’d best write,” he says, pausing for a moment before adding “Ju-la-la.”

  “I will,” I say. “You too.”

  We stand there not looking at each other. We’ve never been separated for longer than a weekend since we were three. We take each other’s presence—sometimes annoying, sometimes gratifying, always constant—for granted. The intercom speaker crackles again—Mother listening, waiting—and I punch him in the biceps, and he covers his arm with his hand and pretends it hurts. We’ve always expressed our affection through playful aggression—we don’t come from a kissing and hugging family and it’s the best we can do.

  “I’ll miss you,” I say.

  “I’ll miss you, too,” he says, smiling, “but not your abuse.”

  “Soon you’ll be back for more,” I say, backing toward the door.

  “Julia,” he calls when I have the doorknob in my hand.

  I turn; he stands there with a serious face, eyebrows raised, eyes beseeching.

  “Don’t forget about me.”

  I shake my head.

  “Nope. Never.”

  I leave his door open and walk up the stairwell. Mother and Dad are reading on the sofa. When I reach the hallway, there’s the sharp crinkle of a newspaper hastily put down.

  “Julia, the draft!” Mother calls. “How many times do I have to tell you to keep that door closed?”

  I go back to it and gently nudge the door into its frame, so that it’s shut, but not quite closed.

  In preschool, color became a problem. There were kids who didn’t like David because he was black and there were kids who didn’t like me because I was his sister.

  Others were just curious and asked stupid questions.

  “How’d you get that color?” they’d ask. “If you scratch your skin, are you white underneath?”

  I’d thrust myself between David and his interrogators.

  “He was born that way, dummy!” I’d say. “If you scratch your skin are you black underneath?”

  But their questions never ended.

  “Is your blood green?”

  “How do people see you at night? Are you invisible?”

  “Is your hair plastic?”

  They regarded him as a fascinating freak, and David dutifully answered their questions, letting them poke and prod at him.

  But as we got older, this curiosity turned into rejection. Insults were hurled on the playground—”Jungle bunny,” “Poo boy,” “Velcro head.” They called us the “Oreo Twins,” and we were often left to play alone at recess.

  That was fine by us, because we were best friends anyway.

  CHAPTER 8

  FREEDOM

  A buzzer sounds and the cell door jerks open. I open my eyes, run them over the vomit-colored cement block walls, and close them again. The air con is still blasting down from the ceiling vent. I shiver and pull the stingy gray blanket around my shoulders, waiting for the next thing to happen.

  “The time is six A.M.,” a female voice announces. “Breakfast is served. You have fifteen minutes to eat breakfast, do your toilet, and return to your cell. Next meal, twelve noon.”

  Footsteps shuffle past my head on the other side of the bars. I swing my feet over the side of the metal shelf and stand, hiking up the waist of my XL orange jumpsuit before
bending to put on my sneakers—the only “personal effect” they allowed me to keep.

  In the common area, three girls in similar orange jumpsuits sit at a plastic yellow picnic table. There’s a number on each girl’s back and I wonder what mine is; I was too dazed last night to notice it.

  Across from the picnic table is a long window and two female guards sit behind it, sipping coffee and watching Donahue on a TV jutting from the wall.

  I sit down next to LJ452, a fat girl with short brown hair. She and the girl sitting opposite her are about my age, but the girl sitting directly across from me still has baby fat in her cheeks and looks to be about twelve or thirteen years old. What did she do? She catches me staring and scowls, so I look down at the plate in front of me, two chocolate-covered donuts and a cup of Tang. Juvenile food. Juvenile delinquent food.

  The last month has been strange.

  After David was sent to the Dominican Republic, things didn’t calm down at home.

  Mother read my diary and found out I’d snuck into Fast Times at Ridgemont High— “They showed some teats is all,” I’d written— and my parents started becoming suspicious of my whereabouts.

  One evening Father confronted me in the kitchen, demanding to know where I’d gone after a baby sitting job the night before. I knew he suspected me of seeing Scott, whom my parents officially disapproved of after learning his family weren’t church people and that a neighbor had spotted a porno magazine in their living room.

  That night I actually hadn’t seen Scott, but Dad kept insisting I tell him “the truth” and I kept insisting I had come straight home. His face grew redder, his voice fiercer, until something inside him popped and he threw me on the kitchen counter and came racing at my throat with his hands. I instinctively knocked them away, and then Mother—who was sitting on the sofa—stood up to say she’d found an Arby’s cup beside the driver’s seat of her Audi, which I’d borrowed because the Toyota was in the shop.

  I’d forgotten about the Jamocha shake. I’d gone by the Arby’s drive-through on my way home and had left the container in her car. Huge Mistake, apparently. Huger than I ever could have ever imagined.