by Nick Burd
I let out a little noise of disgust that was a bit more forceful than I’d intended, but any guilt associated with it on my part faded as fast as the sound itself. The thought of my father in his dark den writing bad love poems for a woman named Vicki while my mother did her Peace Pilates in her meditation room made me wish I’d asked Cindy for another drink.
“I care deeply for Vicki,” he went on. “I really do. She’s nice. And not too . . . serious. She’s fun. You’ll like her.”
“What do you mean I’ll like her?” I said. “Is she here?”
“No,” he said. He turned his scotch glass in little circles and chuckled to himself. “No, she’s not here. But you’ll meet her someday. She’s very nice.”
I stared at the key lime pie. It was a bright artificial green. I thought I could feel other club members looking at us. I wondered if this sort of thing happened all the time, if every few weeks some father sat his kid down and told him that he was having an affair. He leaned across the table.
“Listen, kiddo,” he said.
“Why are you calling me kiddo?”
He brought his chin down and gave me a disappointed look. “Dade. I’m not going anywhere. I’m not divorcing Peggy. Hell, she’s known about Vicki for months now.”
“I don’t believe that.”
I crossed my arms and looked back over the golf course. People were heading back to the clubhouse, probably to drink cocktails and slap each other on the back over some fantastic putt on the nineteenth hole or some other bunch of bullshit. I knew my parents’ relationship hadn’t been in the best shape for the past few years, but that didn’t make this any easier. I thought of every divorce I’d ever known, the divorces of neighbors, distant family members, and celebrities. I wondered if it came to that, which one of them would leave the house and which one would stay, if the ghost of the one that left would always haunt the halls, leave toothpaste spit on the bathroom mirror, forget to completely close the refrigerator door.
“I just wanted to tell you,” he said with a helpless shrug. “These nights out are meant to bring us closer. I want to feel close to you, Dade.”
I thought about saying that this was a pretty messed up way to bring us closer together, but there was the sense that the comment would be wasted on him, so I didn’t say anything. Cindy was standing at the table next to ours explaining what wasabi was to a pair of very old women, one of whom was holding her menu upside down. Somewhere someone laughed a laugh that morphed into a series of snorts, and inside the club the piano player was playing “Moon River,” a staple in his set. I tried to focus my attention on these small things, but my eyes kept going to my father’s hands. He was turning his glass in counterclockwise circles on the tablecloth, and something about this made me put my hand on my glass. I thought about turning my tumbler to prove some point, but I didn’t.
“Are you going to tell Mom?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said quietly. He kept turning his glass. “I’m going to tell her in the next couple of days. Tell her what she already knows, I suppose.”
I started nodding slowly for no reason at all, and then my dad started nodding, and we did this for a while, nodding and affirming nothing at all as the evening settled around us.
Chapter 3
Three days later we got our first thunderstorm of the summer. I watched through our rear sliding glass door as the rain clouds blackened the sky and burst open and sent down huge, hard drops. My dad was at the dealership and my mother was at school teaching summer art classes, and I spent the day home alone playing video games, downloading Lube Jobs 1-5 on my computer, and finally getting around to using the bottle of hair dye I’d had under my sink since March. I took my hair from my natural dirty blond to a deep chocolate color and then stood staring at my reflection in my bathroom mirror in nothing but my towel. The new color brought out the brown in my hazel eyes instead of the green, which I liked because it was different from before. I tried to see myself as a stranger might, to find the things about my boyish face and skinny body that might make them think I was worth talking to. Pablo had once told me that my chest looked the way Jesus’ did in paintings, but he was drunk and stoned when he said it, and I don’t think it meant anything. I was stuck in this trance when my phone rang. Like magic, it was Pablo.
“Come over,” he said.
“I can’t,” I said. “I have stuff to do.”
“Like what?” he asked. “I know you don’t work today. I saw on the schedule that you have it off.”
“Why are you calling?” I asked.
“Come on,” he said. “Why you gotta be like this? You don’t have to complicate everything, Hamilton.”
I stood there trying to find a way to tell him that there was no way I was going over to his house, but I couldn’t. I wanted to go over there. I wondered if maybe he was right. Maybe I did complicate everything.
“What will we do if I come over?” I asked.
“What do you think?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “You tell me.”
“Use your imagination.”
I thought for a moment. “Let me get dressed. I’ll be over soon.”
I kept my face buried in Pablo’s pillow the entire time. When it was over, he stood by the bed and frowned at me. “I think I liked you better blond.”
I wondered if he actually meant that or was just trying to make me feel bad. I got off the bed and crossed his basement bedroom to where I’d left my clothes in a pile on the floor. I dressed slowly, trying to ignore my wobbly knees and the hollow feeling in my stomach. His cell phone rang. He let out a wet cough and picked it up. I could tell by his answers that it was his girlfriend Judy.
“Whatever,” he said into the receiver as he picked at his chest hair. “Sure. . . . No. . . . No, I was just taking a nap. . . . Well, obviously. . . . Okay. Whatever.”
I’d just finished dressing when he hung up the phone.
“I have to go to this thing with Judy tonight,” he said.
“Jessica’s party?” I said.
“Yeah.”
“Well, maybe I’ll see you there,” I said.
“You were invited?”
“I think so,” I said. “I mean, they put an invitation on the board at work. I assumed that meant anyone could come.”
“Yeah. Well, I don’t know if that actually means you’re invited. But whatever.”
“So I’ll see you there?”
“You may see me. But you know the rules.”
I wiped my sweaty palms on my jeans. My mouth was dry and sticky. Pablo’s room was a mess. There were soda cans scattered around the room. Nearly every surface—the metal drafting table he used for a computer desk, the ledge under the picture window, the white wooden nightstand—was covered with a layer of dust. One of his favorite hobbies was using his mother’s credit card to buy designer jeans off the Internet, and now they formed a miniature denim mountain range that stretched from the foot of his bed to his closet door. He pulled a pair of yellow plaid boxers out of a pair of discarded jeans and slipped them on before doing a few pull-ups on the bar he’d put up across the doorframe of his closet. His back muscles surged under his skin as he rose and fell.
“Did you watch the news this morning?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
I sat at his computer and moved his mouse until the screen came to life. He had two windows open: SportsZone.com and some page that gave step-by-step instructions on how to make a bong out of an apple.
“They haven’t found that girl who disappeared, but they did find these awesome crop circles at some farm in the western part of the state,” he said. He did one last pull-up and then lowered himself to the floor. He flung himself back onto the bed. “People on the Internet are saying they’re related.”
“Like aliens?”
“Yeah, I guess. They’re theorizing that she was kidnapped by space aliens or some shit.” Pablo shook his head. “It’s probably just some redneck with too much time on his ha
nds. Crop circles are so eighties.”
I considered telling him about the time I’d mowed circular shapes into my backyard when I was eleven. My father came home from work and yelled at me to get rid of them, that people in the air would think the farm was some occult compound.
“I think it’s great he’s expressing himself through these complex visual forms at such a young age,” my mother said. My father shook his head and went out to the garage and mowed the lawn himself in his suit.
I watched Pablo scratch his belly and examine his fingernails. The spicy smell of his mother’s cooking came drifting from upstairs, and right then I wanted nothing more than for him to look over at me with warmth in his eyes and ask me to stay for dinner. We hadn’t really talked about what was going to happen to us after the summer. I was going to Fairmont. He and Judy were both planning on going to the University of Western Iowa. We had once talked about visiting each other, but I got the feeling that all that was off now. Ever since the Bert episode in the lunchroom, things seemed redefined, plans had changed.
“Can I talk to you about something?” I asked.
“God,” he said. “What now?”
“I feel like we’re not friends anymore,” I said.
He screwed up his face like he didn’t know what I was talking about. “Why do you say that?”
“I mean, ever since graduation we just haven’t seen that much of each other.”
“Well, what’s so wrong with that?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s just not what I want.”
“You’re doing it again, Hamilton,” he said.
“Doing what?”
“Complicating things.”
“You keep saying that, but I don’t know what it means,” I said.
He let out a sigh. “It means that you need to stop asking so many questions. I mean, we’re different. I’m thinking about the future, dude, and there’s no place for this there.”
“So what does that mean?” I said. “Is that it? Do we never see each other again after we leave for school?”
“I just feel like if we take it any further, it will mean something that I don’t want it to mean.”
“And what’s that?”
He shot me a look. “Like what you want this to mean. Like when you said whatever about love. I want a normal life.”
He’d crushed me dozens of times before, but this time the pain felt new. It stunned me and sent a cold wave through my body. I told myself not to tear up, that crying wasn’t an option. For a long time we stayed like that, me at his desk and him on the bed, without speaking. Finally, he turned on his stereo and put on some hip-hop track that started out with a series of gunshots and a woman screaming.
Pretty soon his mother called us up from the top of the basement stairs in her thick accent. I silently followed him upstairs and took a seat at the kitchen table. It was just the three of us in their 1960s kitchen. Paisley wallpaper, sparkling Formica countertop, and sea green everything, even Mrs. Soto’s hospital scrubs. She gave me the same cautious smile as always. Pablo glanced over at me and gave me a look like he’d forgotten I was there.
“How are you, Dade?” Mrs. Soto asked.
“I’m fine,” I lied.
I was sitting in the spot where Mr. Soto had probably sat when he was still alive, back when this table was still in their old house in Arizona and before the illness that Pablo only spoke of in the most vague terms. Pablo and his mother started speaking to each other in Spanish. I filled myself with enchiladas and spaced out while they spoke, their unfamiliar language buzzing around my head like a swarm of tiny insects.
When I got home I found my mother on the living room sofa with a cigarette and a glass of red wine. She was wearing the red flannel nightgown she always wore when she was sick. The lights were off except for four candles on the coffee table arranged in a square around a giant bottle of wine. Chet Baker was coming from the walls, and under his voice the central air rumbled in the guts of the house. I watched her from the foyer, watched as she stared vacantly across the room, her lips moving slowly, and I knew that my father had told her.
“Come in here,” she said when she noticed me. I approached her slowly, putting my hands in my back pockets as I went. She leaned forward and looked up at me. “He said he told you.” A feeling of guilt came over me, cold and heavy like a bag of ice placed on my shoulders.
“Yeah,” I said. “He did.”
My words had made their sound and now I just wanted to walk away and pretend they weren’t mine, like they were pennies that had fallen through a hole in my pocket. She nodded to herself. She seemed strangely satisfied, like some old theory had finally been proven correct. Her face contorted into a sob, but in a flash it was gone, and though her lip still quivered, there was a disturbing calm to her face, like she had just made some vow to never be sad again.
She said, “Dade, I don’t understand why you didn’t tell me.”
“Mom,” I said. “I’m sorry. I mean, I didn’t exactly want this information.”
“Then give it away.” She huffed out a sarcastic laugh. “Give it to me, for God’s sake. You kept this from me for days, and you would have kept it from me forever had I not just asked you whether or not you knew.”
Something in her face made me wonder if she’d known for a while—if she was psychic and her mind was tattooed with things I didn’t want her to know about me.
“Your father didn’t carry you in his womb for nine months,” she went on. “I did. Your loyalties ought to lie with me.”
“But Mom—”
“Don’t ‘but Mom’ me,” she said. She was staring at the candles, putting herself somewhere else. “Go away. Go to your room.” I went upstairs and left her alone. I didn’t want to stay at the house with things the way they were, but I had a feeling that the party wouldn’t be much better. Pablo would be there with Judy, and none of the jocks would talk to me. I’d just move from room to room like a ghost, the way I did at every party. Sure, a few random people might say hey when they passed me by, but no one would stop to talk to me. I’d basically be scenery.
I got in the shower and scrubbed my entire body with mint shower gel, then rinsed myself and did it all over again. After the shower I stretched out on the bed and let myself cry for a few minutes in the soft flash of the purple Christmas lights that ran along the edges of the ceiling around my room. I told myself that it was okay that I was crying, that it was a necessary part of mourning, because that’s what I was doing. I was mourning the end of everything that had defined my life up to this point: Pablo, my parents’ marriage, this house and Cedarville and the very idea of home. My new home was in the life that was waiting somewhere on the other side of the summer. It was college and Fairmont and the great tower of adulthood that loomed before me. I stared at the lights and thought of these things until I wasn’t crying anymore, until their mild flickering had coated me with a numbness that I was able to confuse with acceptance.
Chapter 4
Jessica and Fessica lived on the outskirts of Cedarville on a residential street that had somehow been built in the industrial area of town. The recycling plant loomed at the south end of the block, and the massive cereal factory was at the north. Train tracks zigzagged across the blocks, and the trains seemed to come every five minutes, black capsule-shaped cars moving to and from unknown destinations, from what I imagined as dark, lifeless warehouses. The house itself was painted golf green and had a perfect square shape capped off with a similarly geometric triangular roof. It looked like a child’s drawing of what a house should be.
People were crammed into every room on the first floor, and between the dense cloud of cigarette smoke and the din of noise, it was hard to even think. Everyone was holding red plastic cups full of beer, and some insane hip-hop track that mainly consisted of guys barking was blaring from the stereo. I didn’t see Judy or Jessica anywhere, but I imagined them watching this all on closed-circuit televisions upstairs, talking
about which ones of us they wanted to sleep with and which ones of us they wished would take a spill down a flight of stairs. Someone let out a meaningless scream, a wild-child howl from the highest peak of Party Island.
“Hey, Dade!” said some pimply kid I didn’t recognize.
I waved awkwardly.
It was all too chaotic and there was no chance of finding Pablo in all of the insanity, so I pushed my way through to the crowded staircase and made my way upstairs. I went to the end of the hall and stood by an open window that looked out onto the street. The air from outside was warm and carried the smell of the burnt rubber from the recycling plant at the end of the block.
The next thing I knew Fessica was standing beside me. She put her hand on my shoulder, wavered back and forth like a stop sign in heavy wind. We stood there for a few moments, her looking down at the darkened yard while I watched her out of the corner of my eyes.
“I shouldn’t be drinking with my medication,” she said, a lazy grin spreading across her face.
I gently moved her hand off my shoulder and guided her to the wall. She leaned against it and slid slowly down to a seated position on the floor. A few people standing at the end of the hall glanced over at us. They spoke in low voices, laughed, and motioned toward Fessica and me. I knelt down in front of her.
“What kind of medication are you on?” I asked.
“Xanax.” She said it dreamily, like it was the name of a boy she liked. “It’s good. It relaxes me. I get kinda tense in social situations.”
“Do you want me to get you some water?” I asked.
She smiled and looked into my eyes in a way that made me regret offering to do something nice for her. It was the same look she’d worn in English class when doing a presentation on Wuthering Heights, the face of a girl lost in a close-range haze of romanticism.