How Will I Know You?

by Jessica Treadway

  The room was completely dark. She reached for a switch and found it, but no light came on. “Get out,” someone said, and even though the words had been hissed, Harper recognized Joy’s voice.

  “Sorry, sorry,” Harper whispered. Could Joy be hiding, too? But why? She retreated, but not before her eyes had adjusted enough to let her see Joy standing in the corner with a guy whose long hair was tucked halfway into his collar. He looked far older than high school age. He slipped something hurriedly into his pocket, then brushed by Harper saying Watch yourself on his way out of the room.

  She felt the hair on her arms prickle, a warning sign. “Having fun?” Joy asked, though clearly she was not invested in whatever the answer would be.

  “Not really.” This party is sub-optimal, she wanted to say, but didn’t. “Who was that?” She tried to sound casual.

  “Nobody. I borrowed some money from that guy once, I was just giving it back.” Joy walked out of the bedroom and closed the door behind her. Harper followed her to the beer cooler, where Joy popped open a Genesee Cream Ale and took a long gulp. Joy asked, “You going to stalk me all night?”

  Harper could tell that they were both taken aback by the measure of hostility in Joy’s voice. Hoping to dilute it, she gestured at herself and said, “Delaney told me this was a costume party.”

  “Yeah, well.” Joy shrugged as if to say What did you expect? “You gotta stop believing everything people say.” She looked around the room, and Harper tried not to understand that she was seeking somebody to save her.

  “Why’s it so cold in here?” she asked.

  “You wouldn’t be cold if you weren’t wearing that stupid dress.” But then even Joy seemed to be bothered by her own meanness, and in a slightly nicer voice she said, “Nobody lives here, so nobody’s paying electric.”

  “Then how did you guys get in?”

  “My father was working here until they went bankrupt. I have a key.”

  “You mean he has a key.”

  Joy shrugged again. “Same thing.”

  “Aren’t you afraid somebody will find out?”

  “No.” Joy leaned in to peer at her. “Why? You going to tattle?” She spoke the word in a baby voice. “Then you’d be in trouble, too.” For a moment, feeling how close Joy stood, Harper was tempted to hope that they might make up. But then Delaney Stowell came over and whistled as she threw her arm around Harper’s bare shoulder.

  “Don’t get me wrong, you look good,” she said, “but were they all out of Betty Crocker when you got to the costume store?” She laughed, indicating that Tessa and Lin and Joy should do the same. Tessa and Lin did, but after they walked away with Delaney, Joy reached up and pulled a napkin from behind Harper’s dress strap.

  “You gotta get a clue, Harp,” Joy told her, sounding angry. “I won’t always be there to save you from yourself.” She tried to crumple the napkin, but Harper demanded to see what Delaney had scrawled on it: Free to good home, in the black Sharpie people were using to mark their beer cups.

  “What does that even mean?” Harper said, relieved it hadn’t been crueler and that no one had seen it but Joy. She tried to say thank you, but Joy had already moved away.

  Most of the party had gravitated to one corner of the condo’s main room. Harper set out toward the group and hoped Joy wouldn’t accuse her of stalking again. Drawing closer, she saw people warming their hands in front of a glowing-orange space heater plugged into the extension cord Harper had almost tripped over on the way in. Zach Tully lifted the cord up as Harper approached. “Wanna try again?” he said, and she was prepared to see malice in it but then it occurred to her that he might be joking; she thought she detected instead a glint of apology in his eyes.

  Or was that only the beer putting the wish into her head? It wasn’t her first time—Truman had introduced her to it years ago, though he only let Harper have a few sips from what he stole out of the fridge, not because he was being protective but because he wanted it for himself—so she wasn’t surprised at the bitterness, or the bite at the back of her throat. She kept swallowing, each one coming easier, until she finished the first can and then another, observing the Would You Rather game that grew more and more raucous as the number of cans in the cooler went down. Would you rather have no arms or no legs? Be rich and fugly or poor and hot? Eat a bowl of puke or a bowl of shit? The questions got grosser and grosser with each round.

  She was beginning to have fun. Was it fun? Whatever it was, she wasn’t as cold as when she’d walked in, and she found herself feeling amused rather than embarrassed by her own getup and by the paint on Eric’s face. She could feel him sending her warning signals as he watched her pop open her third beer, but she didn’t care; she felt warm, she felt good, she felt as if she had discovered the secret of life.

  Behind her a voice asked quietly, “How many of those have you had, anyway?” Harper hadn’t realized that Joy had circled back to find her. Her bangs shaded her eyes.

  “I don’t know, but not enough,” Harper said, her own voice buzzing in her ears. “I’m gonna drink my ten bucks’ worth.”

  “Five bucks.” Joy held up the fingers on one hand and spread them, as if counting for a retard. “It cost five bucks to get in.”

  “He told us ten,” Harper said, nodding at Zach, who shrugged and said Whatever before walking away.

  Delaney, overhearing, laughed and made a twirling motion at the side of her head. Harper froze and Delaney added, “Would you rather have a batshit-crazy mother or be batshit crazy yourself?”

  Harper’s throat clutched. She waited for her old best friend to defend her. Instead, Joy laughed, too.

  Harper was so stunned she thought she might have hallucinated. Had Joy really just joined in a joke about her mother? Joy, who’d been the one to listen to Harper for so many years and who’d so many times told her she wished Harper could have a mother like her own? She made a face at Joy to say How could you? but Joy avoided looking back at her.

  Harper said, “At least my mother isn’t fucking a black guy,” only realizing she had spoken the words once she heard them in the air outside her mouth. She must have spit on fucking because a few flecks of saliva fell on her chin and she lifted a hand to wipe them off, hearing wider laughter now at the same time Joy made a noise that sounded like one of their cats when it got stepped on.

  “Whoa,” Delaney said, raising her fingers to her mouth as if she knew she should cover the smile that leapt to her lips. But she couldn’t hide what was obvious to Harper and everyone else who’d paused Would You Rather to listen: she wanted to hear more of what Harper had to say.

  Eric put a hand on Harper’s shoulder, but it was too late. She turned and puked all over the Joker. Exclamations of disgust followed, and someone yelled “Barf alert!” as Eric stalked off to find something to clean himself with.

  Delaney was backing up, holding a hand over her nose. “That is so gross.”

  Even through her remaining nausea, and despite the spinning room, Harper could feel Joy’s astonishment in the space between them. And her contempt. Her own stomach curled further. “I can’t believe you did that,” Joy said. She sounded breathless, as if the wind had been knocked out of her.

  Harper groaned. She didn’t mean to do it, but another stream of beer seemed to be coming up. She turned and retched, but nothing came out. Her blue wig had fallen off in the violence of the first wave, and she bent with the thought of picking it up, then decided it was too much trouble and wobbled to a stand.

  She and Joy were alone together in the corner Harper had defiled. “Why are you like this now?” she asked, her throat feeling abraded more by the question than from throwing up. “What happened to you?” But Joy only turned on the soft heels of her scuffed boots and receded into the dark.

  I Am Your Father

  Alison tried, he could tell, but she couldn’t quite hide her disappointment at finding out that Tom hadn’t observed anything at the high school Halloween party to offer to her father
by way of proving that he, Tom, wasn’t a douche. Of course that’s not how she said it, but he knew. Though he hadn’t planned to go to the shack on Saturday morning, which was Halloween itself—Estelle was scheduled to be on with the new guy, and Tom trusted her to train him right—he also didn’t relish the idea of hanging around the house with Alison and feeling like a failure. So he told her he’d be back around lunchtime and headed out.

  He knew it would be wrong to admit, even to himself, that he felt more at home at the shack than in the side of the duplex he shared with his wife. Yet these days, it was true. He’d spent as many hours of his childhood at the Elbow Room as in the house he grew up in, “helping” his father while his mother kept books at the Tent Pole; the shack was really all he had left now of his parents, aside from a notebook he’d never known his mother to keep until after she died (it was filled with descriptions of the people she came across at the bar and the stories she wanted to write about them someday) and a set of beer mugs they’d won on their honeymoon.

  Estelle, who’d been hired by Tom’s father back in the Jimmy Carter days (Tom recalled his father telling him how she insisted on tying yellow ribbons around everything in the store, including the meat slicer), was alone behind the counter. “Cliff call in?” Tom asked, congratulating himself on remembering to say Cliff instead of Pete. Based on the guy’s work ethic so far, he wasn’t surprised when Estelle shook her head and said it didn’t matter, she was fine by herself. Tom helped her out through the rush, went into the back room to check some accounts that didn’t need checking, and when he said maybe he’d stick around a little longer, Estelle called him on it, teasing, until he confessed things were tense at home. “Make her laugh,” Estelle told him. She’d been advising Tom on his relationship with Alison since before their first date. “I can never stay mad at Ronny when he makes me laugh.”

  So he picked up a Darth Vader mask out of the impulse bin by the register and, driving back home, imagined what he would find: Alison sitting in front of the TV with a stack of student papers on the couch beside her. She’d read a paragraph, scribble something in the margins, watch a few minutes of her movie, then turn back to the paper. When she first started teaching, she sat at the desk he’d built her, in a corner of the living room, and asked him to mute the TV while she graded essays. Though he acted put out, secretly he was proud to be married to a teacher. Tom Carbone, the dumb jock, married to a teacher.

  He used to love seeing the neat pile she made of the essays when she finished. She placed them on the desk (instead of tucking them away in a folder or the fancy leather messenger bag her parents gave her when she got hired) where she left them to remind herself of the good job she’d done—the time she’d spent evaluating her students’ literary skills. Back then, the papers had been covered with her notes in all different colors of ink; she used a variety of pens to make it more fun for herself and, she believed, for the students. Good point! she might write with her orange felt-tip, followed by Example, please? in green. These days, when Tom looked through her sloppy stacks while she was taking a shower or in bed before him, he saw that the few comments she made with a stark black ballpoint, while watching the Lifetime channel, were not even readable. It was as if she hadn’t been able to summon the energy to think or write something that might be comprehended.

  He worried that she was depressed. Well, why shouldn’t she be? How many miscarriages or false alarms could they expect her to bounce back from?

  It was too much to ask, he saw suddenly (and why was it sudden? Why hadn’t it occurred to him before?). He was so accustomed to Alison’s strength—her energy in pursuing everything she wanted, including a child—that he’d been blinded to the decline in that energy, to the possibility that she could be set back, discouraged. She’d always been the cheerful one when things went wrong; she was the one who picked him back up. Not to mention what she did for “her” kids. How had he not seen this before now? It was up to him to be the strong one for a change. To lift his wife’s spirits. Or, if they couldn’t be lifted at the moment, to at least keep her company in the low ground where they lay.

  His vision: Alison would look up from her papers when he came in, see him wearing the Darth Vader mask, and smile. It might be only a small smile, but since a smile was what he was after, he’d consider it a victory. “Luke, I am your father,” he’d say, and maybe he could get her to put the papers down and join him in the bedroom for some Star Wars sex.

  The idea of “Star Wars sex,” and whatever that might mean, made him smile as he turned onto his street. A further vision: he’d propose that they drive over to Lake Ontario for dinner that night. It wouldn’t be like making the trip in the summer, when you could sit outside and watch the boats go by. But they had a favorite restaurant with a fireplace and wood beams, where he’d taken her after the last miscarriage. Well, maybe that wouldn’t be the best idea, then. But somewhere.

  Halfway down the street, he saw that Alison’s car was gone. Inside, he found the stack of student papers—unmarked—on the coffee table. He called her cell, but she didn’t answer. “Come home,” he said to the voicemail. “I have a surprise.” After hanging up, he worried that his idea of going out to dinner wasn’t enough—that she’d come into the house expecting more.

  When his own phone rang a half hour later, he picked it up and said, “Where are you?” regretting the harshness in his tone even as the words came out.

  His mother-in-law was on the other end, though he didn’t know her voice right away, and for a moment when she said, “Come to Mercy, Tom,” he thought it was some wacko trying to drum up a religious donation. But then she added, “There’s been an accident,” and as he understood, his blood went cold.

  “Is she okay?” She told him yes but repeated that he needed to come, now, so he bolted out to the truck and made it to the hospital, which was twenty minutes across town, in less than ten.

  Both of her parents were with her, in a curtained-off part of a room outside Emergency. Alison sat with her legs hanging over the side of a gurney, her head hanging like a little girl who knows she’s in trouble. For a moment, as he approached, Tom sensed Doug and Helen forcing themselves to squelch their shared instinct to close in around their daughter, as if to protect her from him. He tried to ignore the rage this lit in his chest; it was all he could do to keep his voice from shaking with it.

  “What happened?”

  “I fucked up,” Alison said. She never used the word “fuck.” Hearing it made Tom flinch.

  “Darling.” Helen shook her head and raised a hand to Alison’s forehead, where blood soaked through a bandage. “You need to rest.”

  Doug told him, “Come with me,” and walked away from the women without turning to see if Tom would follow. That’s because he knows I will, Tom thought. He wished he had the balls to refuse and say he would remain with his wife, but he and Doug both knew he didn’t.

  Before Doug could fill him in, Hal Beemon came over to mutter something to Doug around the perpetual hard candy stuck inside his cheek. “What is it with you and those fucking lemon drops?” Tom asked irritably.

  “Blocked salivary gland,” Hal said, and Tom heard the word he wanted to add but didn’t: Asshole.

  Doug clapped Hal on the back and said, “Never mind him. Good job.” When he turned his face to Tom again, it was considerably brighter than it had been. “We’re okay,” he said. “There’s need for some discretion here. But we should be okay.”

  “What?” Tom had never felt a stronger urge to strike his father-in-law. Never mind him. His voice came out louder than he intended, but he’d be damned if he’d obey Doug’s hand motion to keep the volume down. “Discretion about what?”

  Doug pulled him over to a corner. “I mean it,” he hissed. “You keep it together or I swear, I’ll—”

  “You’ll what?” Tom shook himself out of Doug’s grasp, but managed to lower the question to a whisper. It was the only way, he saw, that he was going to find out what was goin
g on.

  Doug kneaded his forehead with two fingertips, as if trying to rub away the truth of what he had no choice but to say. “Ali went off the road. Into a guardrail, that bad curve on Reservoir. The hairpin? You know the one I mean.”

  “What was she doing out there?” It was on the other side of Elbow Pond, on the way out of town.

  Doug sighed. “We’re still trying to piece it together. But it seems like she was helping one of her students, Hugh Nance’s kid, he’s in her group there, you know, whose parents are—” Though he didn’t say it, they both heard him finish the sentence with the word “drunks.” Before Tom could respond, Doug rushed to get the rest out, like someone wanting to vomit and get it over with. “The tricky part, the part that may surprise you, it surprised us, it seems like she might have had a little something to drink herself.” He did not meet Tom’s eyes, covering his own as he rubbed his forehead again.

  “Alison? Had something to drink?” Even as he asked the question, he perceived the answer with a clarity he had not experienced for some time before now—how long, he couldn’t have said. But too long.

  “She’ll be all right,” Doug added. “The doctor checked her out, everything’s superficial, she’s okay. So’s the Nance kid. The baby, too, thank God.”

  “What baby?” His thoughts had trouble catching up to the words he heard. The image of an infant strapped inside its carrier, in the other car, streaked before his mind’s eye.

  Doug squinted at him. “What do you mean, what baby?”

  This second dawning felt like a description Tom had heard once of the pain that comes when you have frostbite and try to warm up too fast: it’s during the thawing that damage occurs. “Jesus,” he said, actually feeling himself sway on his feet. Doug put out a hand to steady him, but Tom waved it off and backed up against the wall. “Baby? That means…” It meant she’d lied when she came home from the doctor the week before, with all of them waiting, and said the pregnancy hadn’t taken—again. But at some point in the meantime, she’d told her parents something else—that the doctor had been wrong, maybe. Or that she’d mistaken what he said, the first time, with Tom the only one she’d neglected to inform.