Breakdown Lane, The

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

  “Why would you fucking do this to me when you know you have a driver’s license?” Luke asked. “It’s spring break. We could go to…Lake Geneva!”

  “Why would you fucking act like everyone but your fucking jock tribe of hairy beasts didn’t exist for four months and then expect me to be your chauffeur? You let me finish the musical alone. I had to pay Kelly Patricia to sing the songs, like, fifteen bucks….”

  “You finished it? You—”

  “I made a cover. I turned it in.”

  “You are my hero, mon. I totally owe you my life.”

  “I’ll bring you a key chain from goddamned Nantucket or wherever. I haven’t been to my aunt’s since I was, like, twelve.”

  “You sick?” he asked idly. I didn’t think you could tell.

  “No.”

  “Something’s fucked up with you.”

  I was holding the gun in my hand. The cell phone and the charger I put outside Caro’s bedroom door. The gun went in the bottom of the backpack, all of it in one of the fancy dust bags my mother used to get purses in. I’d researched the gun on the Net and found it was old, a 1937 Colt police revolver, .38 caliber. I had no goddamned bullets for it, and I wouldn’t have known how to put them in if I had had them. I had no idea whether they screened your backpacks to get on buses. I knew I would have to throw it in the trash if we had to take a plane. I had no idea why my dad had it. There was the skeet-shooting lady. Maybe he was trying to learn shooting as an art form. Maybe he had it for protection. Maybe he’d planned to kill us all in our sleep. Maybe we’d started to look like sheep to him.

  I also had no idea why I was taking it with me. The worst I could do to anybody was throw it at them. The weight of it in my hand felt sneaky and dead. “I’m fine,” I told Luke. “Hasta la bye-bye.”

  “Dude,” Luke said.

  “Yeah.”

  “My mom says Julieanne is really sick. Sucks.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Julieanne is a decent unit.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Even my dad says fucking Leo should come back.”

  “He doesn’t know. He’s, like, in the wilderness….”

  “Fuck. That’s not fucking okay.”

  “Yeah. Well. Cathy’s here.”

  “I’ll…uh…mow the lawn or something while you’re gone. I owe you for the English project.”

  “It’s April. The snow just melted. There’s nothing to mow.”

  “Okay, I’ll pick some shit up off the ground and put it in garbage bags. I’ll take Aury to the arcade with one of my many fraternal units. I’ll have my mom drive us. Since you’re fucking leaving and you’re the only freshman in the whole school who can use a car.”

  “Good,” I said, my voice box hurting, whether because I was sick or lying I couldn’t tell. I put the phone down and wrote him a note. Luke, if I don’t come back from here, write Tian and give her the earrings I got her for her birthday. It’s in July. They’re in my nightstand in a gold box. You can have my Hawaiian shirts and my boombox. It’s only minimally busted. Dude. It sounded lame, but I didn’t want Luke to think I liked him overly much, even if I happened to be dead. Still, I wrote, You were a good friend unit. Out, Gabe. I left the note taped under the May page, figuring they’d see it when they turned over to April. It took me a couple of days to realize that, if we really did die or shit, no one would ever bother to turn over my room calendar again.

  As it happened, I didn’t myself turn over the calendar page until June.

  EIGHTEEN

  Proverbs 24

  EXCESS BAGGAGE

  By J. A. Gillis

  The Sheboygan News-Clarion

  Dear J.,

  In the past few months, the spark has gone out of our marriage. I’m starting to think my husband is tired of me. He’s making critical comments about me, comparing my cooking to his mother’s cooking, going out with his friends on Friday nights. I’m starting to think we need a baby to be more of a family. I think having a baby would give us some common ground, and it would help me feel more like an adult. We are both nineteen.

  Lonely in LaBurton

  Dear Lonely,

  Having a baby right now would definitely put ground between you—like a continent. A guy who’s having trouble staying home at night is telling you in big neon letters: HELLO! I DO NOT WANT TO BE RESPONSIBLE! And you’re thinking of presenting him with another human being. Unless you have always had the secret desire to be a single mother on welfare, try getting a hobby instead of getting pregnant. Become a marathoner. Paint in the nude. A sad but true fact of human nature is that people pay more attention to people who aren’t paying so much attention to their not paying attention. The real question is, are you sure you really want his attention?

  J.

  Dear J.,

  I am just 14, and the total love of my life is 19. You would think the age difference would matter, but it’s as if we were exactly the same age. When we’re together, we’re like two little kids playing in the sun. We love all the same things, from sunsets to anchovy olives! The thing is, he wants to have sex, and so do I, but I’m terrified of one thing. If my parents find out, I’ll be grounded for life, and I’ll never see him again. Help me, J. This is totally the perfect relationship, and my darling says only one thing could make it more perfect.

  Dreaming in Delavan

  Dear Dreaming,

  If your major concern about whether you’re old enough to have sex is that you’ll be grounded if you do, you aren’t even old enough to ask whether you’re old enough. I don’t care who you are, unless your boyfriend is very slow—and bless you if he is—there’s no way a guy who’s out of high school can “love all the same things” as someone in eighth grade. The only thing that can turn this delusion into a disaster is sex. And the total love of your life should be the first one to tell you that. Ten years from now, this age difference won’t be a big deal. But trust me, neither will this relationship.

  J.

  “When’s the closing on the house?” Cathy asked me some few weeks later. I’d just had my shot of Interferon, but the period of shakes and nausea that followed was lessening with each round. I’d learned to administer my own shots, practicing on an orange, and was feeling a backhanded competence. If I had to do this, at least I was going to do this. The shots would lay me down, but I’d be like one of those Bobo dolls we had as children; I’d take the blow and come up standing. I wanted to talk about the progress I’d been making, but Cathy was unusually upbeat and busy, skipping from topic to topic while making iced tea—but not eye contact. Cath was a big eye-contact person; I was feeling too woozy to get suspicious.

  “What do you think the kids will find to do with Janey for eight days?” I asked Cathy. “My sister wouldn’t know what to do with a kid for eight hours.”

  “Well, she’s probably got tickets to every Broadway show that’s playing, and she’ll probably buy them their whole summer wardrobe, which will be, ah, good….” Cathy said vaguely. It was not an incisive analysis.

  “I hope they won’t be too bored,” I said.

  “Oh, I think a break will be good for them, and you,” Cathy told me. She was now straightening my closet, rearranging shirts by color. “You can spend some real time with Aury. We’ll take them to, ah, the zoo and stuff. You know, Jules, speaking of which, I have to run. You’re sure you’re okay for now? I’ll give you a call later.”

  “Sure,” I said, puzzled. Cathy usually tried to hang around on my first, worst days.

  Cathy was a lousy liar.

  That night, as the inevitable sleep-and-crackers fog drew on, the kids were great. Extraordinarily great. They brought me ginger ale. They stayed in my room while I corpsed on the bed, too weak to hold up a book, covered in my thickness of blankets. Gabe gave Aury a bath and read to her.

  “What d’you want to do, Mom?” Caro asked. “Want to watch TV? Want us to go get you a movie?”

  “I couldn’t pay attention to a movie,”
I said. “Just…whatever. You guys have already done as much as I could expect. You can go see your friends if you want.”

  “No, we don’t want to leave you when you feel so crummy,” said Caro, and at that moment, I actually believed her. “Let’s…uh, play a game,” she said.

  I almost sat up, so great was my astonishment.

  Given permission to leave, and not even a halfhearted attempt at a curfew, Caro was electing…to play a game?

  “You know, like a car game,” Caro continued. “Like we used to do on the way to the cottage in Door County.”

  “Okaaayyy,” I said softly, wondering what wires were attached to the detonating device. Gabe returned, reporting that Aury was already snoring.

  “C’mon, Gabe, you start. It’ll tire you out, Mom, and you’ll be able to sleep,” Caroline said, and she lay down on the big bed next to me.

  Looking back, I really think she was sad that night. I really think she understood the enormity of what they’d planned, and wanted her mommy’s protection. She wanted to be a regular kid again, just for that few hours. Maybe I’m wrong. But she nestled against me, rubbing glitter from her eye paste onto my arm.

  “Okay. Greatest name of a football player,” Gabe said.

  “N’fair,” I said, trying as hard as I could to enunciate. “I don’t follow the game.”

  “Living, playing, or all time?” asked Caroline, and Gabe teased her, telling her she couldn’t say “Brett Favre,” because it was the only name of a football player she knew; and right then, it hit me.

  “Johnny Unitas,” I said. I’d always thought that name sounded like a comic-book superhero. I couldn’t believe it belonged to an ordinary person.

  “I can’t beat that,” Gabe said. “You pick.”

  “Presidents who served more than one term,” I murmured, figuring they’d be unable to think of one.

  “Jefferson, Clinton, Johnson, Reagan,” began Caroline. We were stunned silent.

  I finally recovered. “What about Roosevelt?”

  “I thought you meant two, not four,” said my sister.

  “Three,” I said.

  “No, four,” Caro said placidly. “He died during the fourth term.”

  “You pick,” I told her.

  “Greatest name of a Triple Crown winner,” said Caro. “That’s a horse that won the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness—”

  “I know what a Triple Crown winner is,” Gabe said irritably. Through the slits of my eyes, I could measure him wondering how he could sidle back to the kitchen table, where my computer was, and do a quick search.

  “Secretariat,” Caro said quickly.

  “He was the fastest,” I said. “I know that. Still is, I think. But I wouldn’t say that was a great name.”

  Gabe said, “War Admiral.”

  Caro said, “Man O’ War.”

  I said, “Okay. You pick.”

  “Greatest name of a play.”

  “Now or all time?” I asked.

  “All time,” she answered.

  I thought so long I believed I’d fallen asleep and dreamed the names that paraded through my head: Suddenly, Last Summer, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, A Raisin in the Sun, but apparently what I actually said was, To Kill a Mockingbird.

  Gabe said, To Have and Have Not.

  I said, “ ’S a movie.”

  Caro trumped us all with A Streetcar Named Desire.

  “Best song that won an Oscar,” said Caro, and voted for “Under the Sea.” That was still her constellation: The Little Mermaid! She still thought Sleeping Beauty was a big romance. Panicked, I thought, I can’t do this. She’s still too young. I can’t put this poison in my body and leave her alone for days at a time. I’d almost come to believe in her ever-so-grown-up act. But it was an act. Leo, I thought. Leo, your dearest little girl needs her dad. But we were playing a game. All I could think of was my mother, taking every chance she got to say that, when she was a girl, “The Man That Got Away” should have won instead of “Three Coins in the Fountain.”

  Gabe said, “Maria.”

  I lifted one hand and made my index finger nod in assent.

  I saw them look at me. At last, they must have thought, Mom was blessedly asleep. I wondered what they would do. Caro covered my shoulder and kissed my cheek. A tear slid from under my lid, but she didn’t see it, absorbed in pulling the tasseled cord on the bed lamp. My aching back and neck nagged for a painkiller, but I listened as they left the room. Gabe asked, “How come you knew all that shit?”

  “Because I know all that shit, Gabe, that’s how,” Caro said.

  “I didn’t figure you for the two-term-presidents type,” Gabe said.

  “No, you think I’m a valley girl with shit for brains,” Caro said, unperturbed. “But I’m not. That makes me all the more dangerous.”

  I hadn’t told them to remember their acne cream or their thank-you cards for their birthday gifts. Not even kissed them good night—and I wouldn’t have ever thought I was kissing them good-bye, really good-bye. I hadn’t even asked them what they planned to do with Janey. Or reminded them to pack something other than jeans. But anything they did had to be better than this, no matter how gray and billowy the ocean at the summerhouse, no matter how greasy the air in Manhattan. They did need a break. I felt I saw a wave just then, rise up then, a great, gray glacier, and I dove into it and slept. When I woke, they were gone, and I didn’t see them again until Leo walked them in through that same door.

  NINETEEN

  Gabe’s Journal

  I slept practically the whole first two days on the bus. When I woke up, we were entering the town of Pitt, Vermont. I’d stumbled onto the bus carrying a plastic bag in case I hurled, still sick as a dog.

  Caro had fobbed Cathy off when she picked us up at six A.M., telling her I was “always like this in the morning.” But after sitting in the next seat for thirty hours, feeling as though she was sitting next to a toaster, even Caroline started to think we should stop in some big town, like Manchester, so I could go to a hospital.

  But when I woke up from feeling sick, I woke up completely well. Purged, like. I was desperate for food, and immediately ate everything in both our backpacks. The driver stopped, I washed as well as I was able in the lobby of some Holiday Inn with paper towels and liquid soap. Then, I bought six bottles of orange juice and three plain bagels in plastic wrap from a machine, ignoring the internal voice of my grandma Steiner about the slimy way the bagels looked (“Oy, gevalt!”). I found out that I’d been asleep for so long I’d forced my sister to finish reading Andersonville (“And,” she said scornfully, “I hate literature!”). She grabbed two of the bagels and one of the juices. “We’re practically there! You ate everything but our socks!” she said. “Have you figured out what you’re going to tell them? The people there? About us?”

  “I figure,” I told her calmly, “that if our father is there, he’s going to walk up to us and take us back to his little hut and we’ll figure it out from there, so there won’t be any problem.”

  “Have you figured out how we’re going to get to the Crystal Grove or Cave or whatever from”—she consulted the gazetteer, the other thing besides her cell phone that Cathy had forced us to bring along—“there? From Marshfield?”

  “Yes,” I said, “we are going to hitchhike.”

  “That’s suicide,” said Caro. “We’re going to end up raped in a ditch.”

  “Only in California,” I told her. “You can’t kill your hitchhiker in Vermont. It’s a state law.” I thought of the gun, wrapped in my sweatshirts. I could at least brandish it. No one was going to be tying us up and leaving us in a ditch.

  No one was apparently going to be picking us up, either, we soon learned.

  We sat for the next couple of hours in silence, watching minivans go past, the drivers doing the thing you do when you notice somebody who’s, like, handicapped, but you’re determined for them to think you didn’t see them. I grew considerably more conscious of how I’d sweate
d and dried in the throes of my virus or what have you. I longed for a hot shower and clean clothes, and pulled the parachute silk of my jacket hood more tightly around my face. I must have looked retarded or dangerous or both. I tried to read a Michael Crichton book, one of a couple of paperbacks I’d grabbed out of my mother’s donation box before we left, but I couldn’t concentrate. I didn’t really know what Dad would think of us being there, or what we’d say to him. Not that you should have to think over what you’ll say to your own father, but these were bizarre circumstances for a surprise visit. I kept trying to plan my sentences for maximum impact, the way I’d heard him do when he did one of his arguments. How do you beg your own father to come home and take care of you? It’s his job. He should have been the one trying to hitch a ride to get to us. The whole thing made me want to vomit, this time from nerves instead of flu. I didn’t know how I’d feel about talking to Leo again, after so long, but I knew it wouldn’t be good. I could see my mother lying there, her lips barely moving, as she said, To Kill…a…Mockingbird. I hoped to Christ the goddamned shots of cancer medicine worked for what she went through after taking them.

  After a while, we walked a little way.

  There was a store in Marshfield that looked like stores in old TV shows. It had a shelf of cereal, like, two kinds, Raisin Bran and not Raisin Bran. Oatmeal in a barrel. Six boxes of detergent.

  Caroline asked for pita bread. I wanted to clock her.

  I asked, “Pardon me. Can you tell us how to get to Crystal Grove?”

  The old man who ran the place asked, “Whose grove?”

  “It’s a…I don’t know, a place where everybody lives in the same place and they have little playhouses they live in.”