by Chris White
“Just . . . why are you looking at me like that?”
His father shook his head, hitched up his pants, and turned toward the house.
“Leave her alone!” screamed Adrian.
Adrian’s father stalked along the path Adrian had just cleared. “You think she’s so fucking innocent?” he called back. “You got no idea!”
“She doesn’t want to see you! I know that much.”
As his father knocked on the front door, Adrian loosened his feet from the snow, shouting, “She’s blending spaghetti sauce! She won’t be able to hear you!”
His father slowly turned the knob on the door, peered in, and stepped across the threshold of Adrian’s new life.
Adrian ran.
He ran down the block and took an immediate left on Walnut Street. Ran two more blocks and turned onto Abruyn, slipping and sliding. The pain in his lungs and legs was already killing him, from crying and gasping and running.
Another long block more and he turned left again. Forgot to look at the street. Lost track of the blocks and turns. His mom and Suzanne would be home in less than an hour. Would his father wait that long?
At the front door of a random brick house, Adrian knocked. Waited four seconds, knocked again. Scrambled back down the steps, skipped a house, and went to the next. Knocked. Waited, peering back and forth from one end of the street to the other, fearing his father’s brown car. Was it brown? Or dark blue. Pounded six more times.
“God, who is it?” A timid human voice inside.
“Please,” Adrian gasped, “help me. I’m . . . I have to call the police.”
There was a pause. “Are you a little boy?”
“No. Yes. Someone might be following me!”
The lock in the door tumbled open and a girl’s face appeared between Adrian and safety. She frowned at him and stepped aside. “Come in, hurry up.”
He scrambled inside and fell back against the door, slamming it, his breaths coming so fast and out of control he thought he might throw up.
“Calm down, okay?” she said, no more than a teenager herself, maybe sixteen, seventeen. “What’s wrong?”
Adrian scanned the room. “I’ve gotta use your phone.”
She stepped back and motioned to a phone by the couch.
Adrian ran to the phone, picked it up, and sputtered, on the brink of tears, “I don’t know the number. I have to call the police.”
The girl trotted from the room and quickly returned flipping the pages of a phone book—“Hold on a second”—and gave him the number.
He dialed, spoke into the mouthpiece. “Hello, yes, a man’s in my house. He’s a monster. He already went in . . . No, I . . . ran away, but my mom will be home soon.” He glanced quickly up at the girl. “Six twenty-nine Lindsley Avenue . . . Adrian Mandrick . . . Well, I’m not calling from . . . Just a minute.” He put his hand over the receiver, quietly pleading, “Can I have the number here? They can’t file the—”
Ellen Rason gave him her name, her number, her address.
When he’d given the police the information, Adrian hung up, sat heavily down upon the couch, and dropped his head into his hands. “They said they’d check it out.”
She didn’t speak then, just sat gently beside him. Adrian heard her swallow and the air puffing from her nose, the beautiful creature.
• • •
Thirty-five minutes later—Ellen watching through the curtains in the front window, Adrian drinking a Dr Pepper, his socks drying over his boots by the door—the phone rang. She bolted to it, then handed it over to him like they were in this thing together.
“Hello?” his heartbeat speeding up anew. “Mom. Are you okay?” He looked at Ellen’s soft white hands with the tiny blue veins. “Is he gone?”
Ellen stood waiting, her mouth slightly ajar, her light hair gathered into one of her hands.
“Divorce papers?” Adrian didn’t understand. “Oh. I didn’t— Huh? I just . . . ran. Some girl . . . I mean, Ellen Rason’s house. She let me—” He looked at her, sheepish. “It’s five twenty-seven Ponckhockie.”
Ellen gave him a little half smile and released her hair. Then she held out her hand for the phone and, when he gave it to her, placed it on the cradle, like a period at the end of a baffling run-on sentence.
“So, everything’s good, then,” she said.
He knew he should feel relieved, but he felt tiny on that couch. Like a very young child whose feet barely touched the floor. His father hadn’t done anything wrong.
“I guess he just left some divorce papers on the kitchen table. Nobody got hurt or anything.”
“It’s sweet you were so worried about your mom like that.”
“She’s coming to pick me up.”
“Cool.”
“I should probably just wait outside.”
“If you want,” she said, and gathered up his soda can and the phone book.
Adrian stood. “I guess you thought some crazy man was screamin’ through your door.”
“If you ever need a place to hide out again . . . ,” she said. Adrian thought she’d just walk into the kitchen with the can and the book, but she tucked the phone book under her arm and opened the door for him.
As he stepped out onto the icy landing, he remembered the caramel in his pocket and thought to offer it to Ellen. He twisted around toward her again, but he slipped and skidded on his knees, and as he tried to right himself with his other foot, the first nonexistent step seemed to disappear from underneath it, and his boot, ankle, and knee followed it down into a jagged heap.
He let out a muffled, startled scream.
There she was, in only her skirt and tee shirt in the cold, kneeling beside him, knuckles blanching white, palms down on the frigid concrete. “Is it your ankle?”
Grimacing into the shimmering air, his breath coming in rasping bursts.
“Can you walk?” She forced her forearms under his padded armpits as Adrian pried off his boot in a firestorm of pain.
“Is that my . . . bone?”
• • •
It was his tibia. It was fractured.
His mother rushed him to the hospital, where everyone came to his rescue with haste and few words, gesturing like in a silent film. The pain was way beyond anything he’d experienced before, but his doctor was unfailingly kind, with his cool, dry hands and perfect fingernails, all of which made Adrian feel safe. Adrian was “so brave,” the doctor said, he wasn’t even going to put him to sleep when they screwed him back together. Instead, he gave him a “nerve block” so he wouldn’t feel anything and a pill to make him sleepy. (Adrian hoped he’d be able to watch, but no such luck.) After the procedure, the doctor prescribed Tylenol #3 and put a brace on his leg, which would be replaced by a cast once the wounds had begun to heal. As Adrian was being wheeled out, the doctor patted him on the shoulder and said, “Nice work, little man.”
Adrian’s mom drove him home spread across the back seat, helped him into the house on his crutches, then laid him out in his bed. She and Suzanne debated hotly about whether they’d go to the gallery opening they’d planned to attend as they tore apart pieces of bread for the next day’s stuffing, and finally Adrian broke in and said, “Just go, okay? I’ll fall asleep as soon as I eat anyway.”
He meant it, and they finally drove off and left him in peace, though with no spaghetti on the stove, only a bed tray with Campbell’s tomato soup and a rat cheese and Miracle Whip sandwich.
He’d been given a Tylenol with codeine pill when he got home from the hospital. Now, lying in the privacy of his own sheets, he experienced the sweet, numbing relaxation of the drugs tilting through his body like a cruise on a breezy sea, and he, a bit of cocoa butter on a hot deck chair. He was thinking of Ellen.
As he was summoning the image of her tongue moistening her own lips and taking another sip of his ginger ale, he noticed something alien on his bedside table. It was an envelope with his name scrawled on it, tucked between his lamp and his globe.
He pick
ed it up, feeling as though he were about to be a part of some espionage—thinking for a moment, nonsensically, that it might have been from the girl. He felt its dry, smooth face, ran his finger along the almost-sharp edge, then ripped it open, all at once placing the familiar handwriting.
I know your mother talks shit about me to you but you don’t know. When you were little she had you naked in the bathroom doing something to you. You understand what I’m talking about? Don’t ever forget it. Stay as far away from her as you can. Never trust her.
Adrian reread the message.
Naked in the bathroom. Doing something.
He flinched unconsciously with the weightless note in his hand. The light in the room shifted, as though a shadow were passing over the sun, and a high whine lodged itself behind his temples. He was alone.
When he bowed his head, images began amassing in a heap in his mind like rubble—out of context—
A steamy bathroom. Round, brown nipples dotted with swollen bumps. The fear of discovery. His mother’s face flushed. The sickening humiliation of something running uncontrollably down his leg.
He shot up in bed.
You think she’s so innocent, his father had called out as they stood in the driveway, staring at Adrian like something terrible was inside him he couldn’t let out. His mother? Impossible. But the obsessions, the scenes, of two hours before—his father’s brown (or blue) car, the mad rampage through the frozen neighborhood, the senseless police call, and the mortifying fall onto Ellen Rason’s icy welcome mat—were nothing now, hollowed out by those few words on a page.
He pulled himself from bed, his ankle stitched and fat, and hobbled into his mother’s bedroom on his too-tall crutches. He stood queasy, helpless; then he approached her dresser and began rummaging through the drawers—cautiously, then recklessly, through stockings and slips and bras and socks, through nightgowns and buttons and ticket stubs and safety pins. He didn’t know what he was looking for, but in the bottom drawer was the family photo album.
Blood pooling in his ankle and foot, head spinning, he flipped from page to page. Her face and body language in the pictures seemed strange, grotesque: her blank expression as she lit the candles on a birthday cake while Adrian sat in giddy anticipation; her guilty turn from the camera, holding a hand in front of her face at their spring garage sale; her lopsided grin as she draped an arm around Evan’s shoulder by the balloon man who made animals into party tricks at the Kingston city park. Even the smell of perfume that hung in the room, the amber that had always comforted him, was suspect, past sweet, like flowers left too long in a vase.
He called out, “Mom,” his voice not yet changed, his chin hairless and soft. She was his mother, his life raft, his home. How can this be turned upside down, flooded, and ruined?
He knew his parents hated each other. Who could know what was true and what was false, where there was so much loathing? But no person would lie about such a thing, and those bathroom images had come into his mind with such insistence, images he’d never before recalled. He shook his head to try and clear them. His throat grew tight and hot, but then his eyes lit on a fat red book—the Physicians’ Desk Reference—lying open on the bedside table.
Within those unfamiliar pages, there was a pharmacological solution for every disease, a tonic for every ailment. There were photographs of thousands of pharmaceutical drugs in exquisite Technicolor, beautiful and diverse: tiny pills—delicate and powerful; huge pills—jellied and thick; tablets and capsules; octagonal, oval, circular, triangular. Resting on the armchair beside the bed, Adrian lost himself in contraindications, dosage, and administration. He read adverse reactions, even waded through a bit of clinical pharmacology. Then he looked up Tylenol #3 to determine how much more he could take. Here, he instinctively knew, was the antidote to his father’s letter. It was both science, he thought, and magic.
He unfolded and read the note again.
Don’t ever forget it . . . Never trust her.
Adrian should tear it up. If his mother saw it, she would be devastated, wouldn’t she? He should save her from even being on the edges of an accusation so perverse. But he couldn’t tear it up, because what if it was evidence? What if it was the truth? So he hid it underneath her mattress, urging it along the rough ticking, pushing it back, as far as his arm would reach.
He hopped on his wooden crutches into the kitchen and pulled a Yoo-hoo out of the fridge, teetering dizzily at the counter. He washed down a second tablet of Tylenol #3, the drug’s chalky aftertaste pleasant in his mouth (or was it the Yoo-hoo?), then made his way to the bathroom medicine cabinet to see what else he could find.
• • •
“Adrian. Adrian . . . Adrian!” It was pitch-black outside as Suzanne crouched over him.
“Honey, are you all right?” Adrian’s mother trotted across the room and dropped onto the couch against him.
“Get away . . . ,” he said, his mouth full of cotton wool, and pushed at her hip with his knees.
“You scared us to death!” she said. “When we got home, we thought we’d let you sleep. But we’ve been trying to wake you for the last ten minutes, and you have been dead to the world. We were this close to calling an ambulance.”
Her thumb and her forefinger almost touched, as her face twisted just outside his eye slits.
She tried to take his head in her hands but he pulled out of her grasp. “Look at his eyes, Suzie. We’re going to the hospital!”
“Stop. I’m not going to the hospital. I . . . bet you I shouldn’t have taken two of those Tylenol pills. My ankle was killing me.” (The Seconal hadn’t helped matters.)
“Don’t ever do that! Please don’t ever take any more medicine than you’re told to. You can overdose on those pills. Do you understand?”
“I understand.”
• • •
Adrian spent the next week in a carnival of medicated splendor. Suzanne, it seemed, had a lot of invisible ailments. (Surely she had been the one to bring the PDR into the house.) The peas left over from Thanksgiving dinner wouldn’t stay on his fork on the two-Dexedrine day; they kept jumping up and off with the twitching of his hand.
On the day of the two Valium, he stopped taking his Tylenol #3 to get a more pure reaction from his body and noted a deeply relaxed response. His limbs were draped across the pillows of the couch as he watched I Dream of Jeannie and Bewitched reruns. The old programs were uncharacteristically sad, but his best old favorite, Dragnet, sent him into an amused delirium.
Darvon was a challenge. He didn’t have any idea what to expect. According to the PDR, it was a painkiller, but Adrian took two Darvon at nine thirty in the morning and started hallucinating on the couch around ten fifteen.
All around him things were shimmering: the alabaster lamp, the TV Guide, the candy dish, the little brass teapot by the fake fireplace. His pajama pants took on the shimmer of satin and began to shake, right on his own body, and when he pulled out his elastic waistband to look inside, his penis was vibrating into a little mound of molten wax.
He screeched and stood up, pants dropping to his knees, and balanced precariously on one foot and a cast—waiting to become himself again, a part of a family. He imagined his mother standing over him, shaking her head, then kindly reaching down to rearrange the pillow under his ankle, as she had done a dozen times in the last days.
His father’s note seemed to make sense of a splinter of pain that had always been lodged in him. Gave it a reason, provided some semblance of proof. Even now, as he swore to forget it—to think, instead, of Ellen Rason’s sand-dollar-sized breasts—the words of the letter were reproducing in his subconscious like mutant cells, tapping tiny sharp nails into the house of his identity.
• • •
Stella speed-walks into the kitchen waving some kind of document, and Adrian startles, clicking off his phone, standing, escaping toward the stairs. Come home, his mother’s message said. We got disconnected.
“Adrian, wait,” Stella calls.
Now he remembers, that same night, under the tent of his rough sheets, during the time of his father’s letter, still high on Darvon, he began the first species list of his life. He wanted to keep the birds but separate them from his mother somehow, to define the birds for himself, to begin to unravel the seemingly inextricable braid that was his mother and the earth and sky.
“Hold on!” Stella says, yanking him back toward the kitchen by the shirt, a grin pulling at her lips for the first time in days. “You’ve got to read what I’m going to show you.” She holds the written side of the page of paper against her chest. “Ready?”
Adrian still holds the monolith of his phone in his hand.
The names on that early list . . . House Finch. Chickadee.
“Adrian.” Red-tailed Hawk, cardinal, turkey vulture, whippoor-will.
“Just read straight down the page,” Stella says. “You ready?”
Robin. Crow. Pigeon. Goose.
“This’ll take two minutes. Now, don’t examine it, just read it.”
She flashes the paper, but Adrian sees her only peripherally, like an extra in the background of a movie scene. Ibis, wood stork, ruby-throated hummingbird.
“What’d it say?” she asks.
(Pelican, sandpiper, swallow, sparrow.)
“Adrian?”
“Yeah.” He rubs the heels of his hands into his eyes. Ivory-billed Woodpecker.
“What did it say?”
“I didn’t see it,” he admits.
Stella laughs, heartily. “Fine. Are you really ready this time?”
He didn’t know whether to write the ivorybill down that night in his bed. He can’t remember if he did.
“Here we go . . .”
Stella flips the page into view. Adrian tries, now, to focus before she retracts it again.
“Okay,” he musters. “I see it. ‘A bird in the hand . . . ,’ ” smiling weakly, and turns again toward the stairs to get to a Xanax. “Funny,” he tosses back.
Then he’ll get out into the sunlight, drive, and take another one.
“ ’Fraid not.”
Or a Vicodin. “What?” he asks. He’ll take a Vicodin.