by Nick Burd
“They could find her,” Alex said.
“She’s artistic, right?” Louie said. “My step-cousin is artistic. She wanders off all the time.”
“It’s autistic, moron,” Dingo said.
“Oh.”
“They’ll never find her,” Thomas mumbled.
“People on TV keep talking about her in the present tense like that’s what’s gonna keep her alive,” I said. “So weird.”
Everyone looked over at me as if it was the smartest thing they’d heard all day. Dingo nodded slowly in resigned agreement, the others kept quiet. The topic had dimmed everyone into themselves. The joint had burned down to a roach. Dingo tossed it onto the floor and grinded it with the sole of his boot. He then opened the cigar box that was still sitting on top of the crate.
“How much do you want?” he asked.
“Just like an ounce,” Alex said. “All I need for now.”
Dingo flipped through the bags.
“There’s exactly an ounce in this box,” he said.
Alex jokingly asked if he took checks, but nobody laughed. He reached into his pocket and tossed him a wad of cash. Dingo handed the cigar box to Alex.
“Don’t smoke it all in one place,” he said, flipping through the money.
I was ready to leave. The house was depressing, and the mere thought of all the lonesome farmland just outside was depressing as well. Strangely enough, I found myself longing for the sterile safety of my subdivision, for the brightness of our foyer and the way every room in our house was perfumed with a candle that my mother had bought at the Crafty Candle Company at the Cedarville Mall.
“You ready to go?” Alex asked. “We should be getting back.”
I nodded slowly and stood, and we all headed upstairs. My body felt so tired and wobbly that for a moment I was scared I wouldn’t make it up. Alex was in front of me, and without thinking I put my hand on his back to steady myself.
“Whoa, partner,” Alex said. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” I said, quickly pulling my hand back. “Sorry. Dizzy spell.”
Up in the kitchen I stood off to the side as the four of them said their good-byes. I was trying to make myself less high by breathing in and out, but it wasn’t working. I stared out the window over the kitchen sink to where the corn waved under the night sky like a jagged black ocean. I tried to imagine what it would be like to dive into an ink-black body of water, and then I thought to myself, All you do is look for places to get lost.
“You ready?” Alex asked.
I snapped out of my trance and brought myself back into the house.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m ready.”
“Nice meeting you, Dade,” Dingo said.
Louie and Thomas were back in the living room watching TV.
“Nice meeting you too, man,” I said. The words fell from my mouth like lumps of wet clay. The two of them looked at each other and laughed.
“Okay, kiddo,” Alex said, slapping me on the back. “Let’s get you back home to Mommy and Daddy.”
I was too messed up to find his comment patronizing. In fact, going home was exactly what I wanted. We stepped out of the house and into the warm night. The yard was dotted with fireflies, nothing like we’d seen on the way out, but enough to make me smile dumbly to myself at the beauty of summer, of the world in general. Alex and I walked silently into the cornfield. The night teetered in my vision. Alex took my hand as if he could sense this.
“You okay there, partner?” he asked. “You’re kind of wobbling back and forth.”
“I am?” I asked. “I didn’t notice.”
He laughed. “You are.”
“I’m stoned,” I said in an apologetic tone.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll take care of you.”
It’s hard to imagine a more perfect thing for him to say. We ambled through the field, not in any sort of rush. I suddenly felt so happy and relaxed and free that I began laughing out loud. I hooted and hollered at the night sky. I let out an especially severe yell and a flock of birds sprang from where they were roosting and spread out in a black swarm over our heads. Alex just laughed and shook his head.
“Captain Crazy Person over there,” he said. He was walking down the row next to me, a companion so shadowy, he may as well have been imaginary.
“I’m sorry,” I said. Little bits of laughter kept tumbling from my mouth. “I’ll be quiet now.”
“No, no,” he said quickly. “By all means, let it out. It’d be a shame to let all this space go to waste.”
We came out on the other side of the field and he suggested we sit on the roof of his car and share a cigarette before going anywhere. We sat there sharing a smoke in silence. I kept looking over at him. I wanted to kiss him. Pablo was the only guy I’d ever kissed, and those kisses only came about in the heat of the moment when he was so messed up that he forgot to push me away.
“We should hang out again,” he said. “Unless you’re scared of me.”
I wasn’t expecting him to say that. But he was right. I was scared of him. Just a little bit. But I wasn’t scared of what he would do to me; I was scared of what being around someone like him could make me do. I felt different around him, unpredictable to even myself.
“No,” I said. “I’d like that.”
We each pulled out our cell phones and exchanged numbers. My hands shook as I typed out his name. A-L-E-X. A magic word.
Chapter 7
The next day I came downstairs in my boxer shorts and found my mother drinking a cup of coffee and reading the newspaper at the kitchen table.
“Good morning,” she said. “Do you want coffee?”
She never offered me coffee. Juice or milk, but never coffee. Ever since I could remember, she’d told me that coffee would stunt my growth and there was no way she would allow me to drink it, not in her house. I looked around the kitchen. Everything was immaculately clean. The television on the fridge was playing some morning news show on mute. The scent of the coffee mingled with a warm floral scent that was probably coming from some new electric air-freshener.
“Coffee would be good,” I said.
I moved toward the coffeemaker, but she sprung up from her seat.
“Let me get it,” she said. She smiled at me when she passed by. “You sit down. Let’s talk.”
I sat at the kitchen table and watched as she prepared my coffee. She didn’t ask if I took cream or sugar. She just added liberal portions of each.
“Since when can I drink coffee?” I asked. “I usually have to sneak coffee to my room in the morning.”
“Well,” she said, coming back to the table. She placed the coffee in front of me and sat down. “I think it’s time that there were some changes around here.”
Great, I thought. More changes.
She smiled and watched as I sipped the coffee.
“So, you seem to be in a good mood,” I said. “Did you and Dad work things out?”
“No,” she said. “I actually haven’t seen your father since he left for work yesterday morning. He didn’t come home last night.”
“So where is he?”
She shrugged casually. “I really don’t know.”
“And that’s . . . okay?”
She furrowed her brow and squinted one eye toward the ceiling. She was one of those people who wanted you to know when her brain was working. I took this as my cue to wait.
“The reality of this is that you’re not going to be here in two months,” she finally said. “I don’t see any reason for your father and me to create some big mess out of your last weeks at home. Seems like a waste of time.”
“So you’re just not going to do anything?” I asked.
“I wouldn’t say nothing,” she said. “But I would say that I plan on doing as little as possible.”
“Why don’t you leave him?” I asked. “Why don’t you tell him to stop seeing that woman or else?”
“Or else what?” she said with a little laugh. “Da
de, your father is going to do whatever he wants to do. I’m not giving him any ultimatums. I think that’s best for everyone. And I’m not holding anything against you, Dade. Your father put you in a terrible, terrible position. I need to recognize it and place the blame in the appropriate box.”
The appropriate box? This was obviously crap she’d picked up from some self-help book.
“Aren’t you mad at him?” I asked. “Don’t you want to strangle him? I mean, he’s got a picture of her in his study. It’s in some book that she gave to him.”
A cloud passed over her face, not one strong enough to completely wipe away her happy façade, but enough to reveal that underneath it all she was still hurting.
“I hate this,” I said. “I hate the fact that he’s off doing whatever he wants and we’re here being miserable about it.”
“A picture?” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Up in his study. In some book for his dumb poetry.”
She looked away for a second, but then brought her eyes back to me, and the smile returned, as empty as ever.
“Like I said, your father is going to do whatever he wants to do. But that being said, so are we.” She paused. That mildly triumphant statement hung over our heads, a banner announcing the summer’s theme. “I know we’ve been talking about going out and getting you things for school. Should we do that today?”
“Um . . . sure. Like, what are we gonna get?”
“Well, you’ll need a new backpack. A refrigerator for your dorm room.”
“What about the backpack I have now? It’s fine.”
“Somebody wrote vas deferens on it.”
“I wrote that. The Vas Deferens are my favorite band.”
“Are you serious?” she said, making a face. It was like she’d never heard me mention them before. “That name makes me ill. Please. Let me buy you a new one.”
“Why does it make you ill?”
“Dade . . .”
“Seriously. Why?”
“You’re getting a new backpack.”
“Fine. New backpack. Whatever.”
“You’re going to need all sorts of things. Maybe we can even find a little dorm refrigerator with a built-in television. That would be fun, right?”
“That would be beyond ridiculous.”
She widened her smile. “Well, why don’t you go upstairs and shower and get dressed and we’ll go?”
She took me to the Cedarville Mall. We wandered from store to store in silence, me with my hands in my pockets and a look of boredom on my face, and her straight-backed and smiling sleepily at every salesgirl. We moved sluggishly from one store to the next until she’d bought me five pairs of jeans, two pairs of shoes, eight shirts, and all the socks and underwear in the world. In the end I wound up with this plus a toaster, a small refrigerator, a TV/DVD player, an electric toothbrush, a mini tape recorder for recording my lectures, an iron, a blow dryer, a coffeemaker, a coffee grinder, a microwave, a rice cooker, a set of silverware and plates, and a set of beer mugs.
“I think we did pretty well today,” my mother said on the drive home. The back of her SUV was loaded with stuff. It was impossible to see anything out the back window. “Of course, if there’s anything we forgot, we can go back and get it, but I think we got everything.”
She flashed me a smile that I couldn’t bear to respond to. I turned away and looked out the passenger window at the new Benny’s Burger Barn that had popped up overnight on the corner of First Avenue and Collins Road. The parking lot was full of SUVs and luxury sedans. Even from a distance I could spot the tiny Hamilton Luxury Motors decal on the trunks of a few of them. I thought of my father and the fact that all we really knew of his whereabouts was that they most likely involved another woman, a woman who was not my mother.
Screw him, I thought.
When we got home I put the stuff in a pile in the corner of my room. It occurred to me that these things made of plastic, glass, and metal would become the foundation for my new life. I thought of our house in Cedarview Estates and how at one point in time it was supposed to be the foundation for my parents and their new life. I wondered what it meant that people were so intent on building something better out of things, if I’d be able to make it work in a way that they hadn’t, or if all this new stuff would give way and become worthless under the weight of all that spread before me.
I reached under my bed and pulled out the pile of literature from Fairmont College. The catalogs and brochure featured pictures of smiling kids of various races. There was one picture of a bunch of kids sitting on the steps of some old distinguished-looking building. One of the kids in the photo had spiky blond hair and a show-choir grin. The token fag. He was sitting between an Asian girl and a black dude. They were all cutouts, walking smiles. For the first time I felt like I wasn’t ready for Fairmont. I thought of Alex and my time with him the previous night. Any wish to transport myself to the end of August was also a wish to leap over the unfolding story of us.
I shoved all the stuff back under my bed and changed into my swimming trunks and went down to the pool. My mother was working in the small vegetable garden in the backyard. She was wearing her yellow gardening gloves, a wide-brimmed hat, and ignoring me behind her large red-framed sunglasses. I took off my T-shirt and lay on one of the chaise longues and watched as she pulled weeds, hummed to herself, plucked cherry tomatoes from their vines and put them in her mouth. She dug holes with a miniature shovel and poured pouches of seeds into the earth.
I thought of Alex, of my hand on his back as we walked up the stairs, the world of skin under his shirt, and his words as we headed into the cornfield.
I’ll take care of you.
My mother was humming in the corner of the yard. I faded in and out of sleep in the warmth of the sun. The day glowed bright red on the other side of my eyelids, and I pictured my heartbeat as a fantastic throbbing lightbulb in my chest.
“Dade.”
I woke up to my mother standing over me. The sun was radiating over her shoulder. She was still wearing her sunglasses, and a light breeze tossed her hair gently about her head.
“Dade, wake up,” she said.
“What is it?” I mumbled, sitting up.
“We’re going to a barbeque at the Savages’. I just talked to your father and he’s coming with us. So you need to get up and shower. And if you could take out the trash, that’d be peachy.”
She turned and went inside. A cloud slid across the sky and blocked the sun. My body felt heavy with sleep, my chest and arms warm with sun. It felt like I’d only been asleep for a few minutes, but when I checked my watch I saw I’d been out for almost an hour.
My mother chose my outfit for the Savages’ barbeque by vetoing everything I came downstairs in. Everything was too casual, too dressy. Was that a stain? When did those jeans get so many holes? Didn’t I have something less edgy? We finally settled on a preppyish pair of blue and red striped shorts and a crisp white T-shirt, both purchases from that day. Either she didn’t notice my canvas slip-ons with the skulls and crossbones on them, or she didn’t care.
I waited on the living room sofa for my father to arrive home. I sat there with a pen and a notebook with the intention of writing a poem, but I couldn’t get a single line down. I just gazed out the picture window onto the neighborhood. I wondered if something similar had happened to our father when he tried writing in the book Vicki had given him. Maybe he got so stuck staring at his life that he forgot to write anything down.
Families from down the block were making their way to the Savages’. The parents held containers of food, their children’s hands. One father guided his young son by the shoulder around a small dead bird that had been flattened into a morbid pancake in the middle of the road. My mother hummed in the kitchen as she prepared the salad she was bringing over to the Savages’. A newscaster on the refrigerator television was going on about Jenny Moore, about abductions in America, about the kids who were found and the kids who were lost for
ever.
My father pulled into our driveway at around six, the Audi gleaming from a recent washing. He took his time pulling things from his car. His briefcase, a sweatshirt, a coffee mug I could tell was empty by the casual way he held the handle with his pinky. He moved slowly up the path to our door with these things. He raised his hand in greeting at some unseen person down the block, someone who probably thought his slow, plodding steps up the porch were due to a long day at work instead of a quiet dread of having to interact with the people inside.
When he walked in, our eyes met and there was a moment where it was like he was considering turning around and leaving, getting back in the car. Instead he walked over to me and squeezed my shoulder. His mouth was set in a sort of grimace of approval, like it was okay with him that I was here waiting for him. It was condescending and bumped my annoyance with him up another level.
“New clothes?” he asked.
I nodded.
“I heard,” he said. “The credit card company called me at work to make sure my card wasn’t stolen. You guys must have done some damage, as they say.”
My mother came into the room with a salad in a big plastic Tupperware bowl. She gave my father a look that acknowledged his presence but also warned him not to say a thing to her.
“Ready to go?” she said to me.
At the Savage residence, two lines of kids were playing a game of red rover in the front yard. The air was tainted with the smoky smell of the barbeque. We followed the sound of the Top 40 music into the backyard, where about eighty people were congregated. There were a few kids around my age there, but they were all a grade or two behind me. I didn’t know their names, and I was guessing that if they knew mine it was only because of some incident or rumor I’d rather not be known for.
Dana Savage peeled herself away from a crowd of women drinking pink wine out of clear plastic cups. She was wearing turquoise stretch pants and a flowery tank top. The skin sagging from her upper arm reminded me of pizza dough. She painted her nails terrible shades of orange, and my father once said she considered a foreign film anything that starred Hugh Grant. My mother told him that wasn’t funny, but she had to turn away to hide her laughter when she said it.