by Jen Brooks
“I know,” she says, and I swallow a response to her nonanswer with as much loathing as possible. Dad gets up from the table, and for the most irrational second I hope he takes my side and sends Tess to her room. But, alas.
I’m struck by how short he is. Not that he’s actually short so much as he’s not three feet taller than I am. We are the same height, something just shy of six feet, and his hair is peppered with gray. Dad has gotten old.
What would ten years’ worth of changes have done to Dad had he lived?
Tess motions for me to follow him down the hall. As we do, she says, “Pick something in the house to bring back with you.” The hallway, as short as it is, is lined with school photos of Tess and me—the earliest ones I recognize from the bins in Uncle Joey’s house.
My mom and dad fuss back and forth between their bedroom and the bathroom, brushing teeth, combing hair, finding shoes. I watch them, what they touch, what they pass. If I’m taking an object back with me, I’d like it to be as impersonal as possible. I don’t want to look at it and think about how my family lived for ten minutes in a made-up world. I consider a nickel on the edge of the dresser. I could see if it passes for legal tender in the real world. Then I could make a world of money, carry it back to the real world, and be as rich as a computer geek.
Actually, my mom is a computer geek, and she’s clearly not rich. But that’s not the point.
“What do you think his coach will say?” my father asks. He’s tying on shoes while sitting on the bed in front of me.
“No idea,” Mom calls from the bathroom.
“I don’t want to repeat something.”
“If it’s a good thing, it bears repeating.”
“But what if he says it better than I do?”
“Then he says it better. Jonathan will know how much you mean every word, however it comes out.”
“Will he, though?”
Mom emerges from the bathroom sliding an earring into place. Dad watches her cross the room and put on her watch. “I know we haven’t seen much of him lately,” Mom says, “but it’s the nature of his time in life. Graduation is filled with proms and parties and apprehension about college. He spends so much time with his friends because they’re all going through it together.”
“I know this.”
“Then stop worrying. Times like tonight, one tends to remember one’s parents.”
“And then he’ll be gone.”
“It’s only an airplane trip away.”
“It’s a six-hour airplane trip away.”
“Still the same country.”
Dad goes over to the dresser and grabs his keys. “We’ll leave here no later than six.” There is a note of warning in his voice.
“I’ll be home in time. Don’t worry.”
My mother kisses my father on the lips. It’s the quick kiss of two people hurrying off to their separate days, but repeated 365 days a year times ten years, it’s a substantial amount of love passing between them.
Mom and Dad leave the house, and I’m left with Tess telling me to pick something already.
I have no better idea than the nickel, so I grab it before I remember there might be something better. “Wait here,” I tell Tess. I go back to the kitchen. Dad’s notepad is still on the table, his pen casually lying across it. I pick the pad up and read.
Dear Ladies and Gentlemen (or some other intro),
Like any parent, I have always been extremely proud of my son. I remember that on the day he was born, his pediatrician came in to do the usual health check. The doctor raised Jonathan’s torso by pulling on his hands. “He’s strong,” the doctor said, because Jonathan had some ability to hold up his newborn head.
At the time I swelled with pride because I took this as a sign Jonathan would have athletic ability. It wasn’t long before he showed just how strong and quick his little body was. From the first time he rolled over in his crib to today, he’s enjoyed being active.
As a teacher, I was even more excited the first time Jonathan recited his ABCs, the first time he added two plus two, the first time he realized water and ice were the same thing. Only months ago he topped all that when he burst into the kitchen dying to show me his letter from Stanford.
I’ve never once had to chase after Jonathan to get his homework done. I’ve never once had to prod him out of bed for a Saturday morning track practice. He has an inner motivation to succeed that pleases me very much.
But what I love most about my son isn’t how he compares against others for class rank or state titles. It’s the part of him that, for example, when he was eight, made him use his entire piggy bank to buy his mother a necklace for her birthday. That same part of him that stayed all night in a hospital chair when his sister had her appendix out. The part that leads him to do a dozen thoughtful things each day, especially when he does them for me.
Jonathan, I stand here today to say you deserve this student-athlete award, but I don’t know what I did to deserve such a wonderful boy.
Thank you.
There’s a knot in my chest. Tighter and tighter it grows as I scan back over my dad’s speech. It doesn’t matter that the me in this world is exceptional in ways the real me is not. It doesn’t matter that the speech isn’t real, that this student-athlete award doesn’t exist and could never be won by me.
The knot in my chest is for knowing, for finally seeing on paper, something that I’ll never have but always wanted. Something I know I would have had if things had been different. What kind of person would I have turned out to be if I’d had this much love from a father, and a mother, my entire life?
I want this love. I want it so deeply, I ache in my core. To want and want and not to have! My soul screams with all my wanting. I was only eight years old, waking all disfigured from a coma to find everyone gone, begging for them to come back, floundering in the dark unable to adjust to my new life.
This kitchen is filled with evidence of what might have been. Magnets bought at Disney World and New York City hold up papers, pictures, notes, the text of life. In one frame Tess and I stand at the bow of a sailing ship with our arms over each other’s shoulders, best friends devoid of hostility, smiles as wide as latitude lines, sunglass lenses winking in the sun, wind whipping Tess’s hair across both our faces. In another picture the four of us pose in dressy outfits in a banquet hall, and Mom and Dad are acting like the kids with their fingers in Vs behind Tess’s head and my head. There’s a note on the chalkboard reminding Tess and me we’re leaving tonight for the student-athlete ceremony at six, signed with an “XOXOX Mom.” Over the table hang two framed artworks, one featuring a mountain and one a rainbow, both clearly created by the hands of much younger versions of me and my sister.
I have made art in my years at school, and was told, in that thoughtless, general way that teachers announce directions to the class, to “bring it home so your mom and dad can see.” All that art I put in the trash as soon as I got home. My mom and dad would never see anything I ever made again, not even the flower bouquet card or the necktie card my school forced me to make every Mother’s Day and Father’s Day.
My grief is too heavy to support, so I pull out the chair Dad was sitting in a few moments ago and collapse. My head falls into my hands, palms rubbing into my eyes. All my joints ache as if tumors of pure agony will prevent me from ever moving past this moment.
And all along I could have had this world! Ten lost years are found here. All along I could have made The-crash-never-happened, without the other Jonathan, and lived here myself. I could have been the subject of my father’s speech. I could have made someone proud.
Instead I am the subject of a truancy complaint dogging my uncle. I will never go to Stanford. Until recent days all my thoughts have been consumed with how I could spend more time with Kylie Simms, not what I could be doing to help anyone other than myself. Now all I want to
do is help Kylie, but that’s because what’s happening to her is my fault.
I was right not to have made The-crash-never-happened before this. If I had, I surely would have been lost to the real world. Or I might have messed it up as badly as Kylie-Simms-is-my-girlfriend, and I never could have lived with myself if after ten stolen years I caused my family’s second death.
My life is not a life. It has no meaning or direction. Its only sustenance is a made-up girlfriend’s love, real or compelled, and merging that love with real Kylie’s strange feelings will change everything, could leave both Kylie and me with nothing at all.
Why have I let it come to this? Why didn’t I just join a sports team or make school a priority in the real world? Why did I let my stupid scars, no matter how deep, ruin everything?
A tear drops onto the notepad and blurs the words “wonderful boy.” I don’t wipe it, for fear I will ruin more words. I look out the half-open curtain into a backyard of trees and grass and a beautiful morning sky. There is a world out there.
Tess’s hand appears on my shoulder. It’s meant, I’m sure, to be a comforting gesture, but it makes the hairs stand up on my neck. I don’t turn to face her, because I need to know, and she won’t tell me. “Are Mom and Dad alive, Tess? Is that where you go when you leave me?”
Her fingers clutch and unclutch my shoulder like a mini massage. That strange heat shoots into my arm at her touch, warming the muscle, unsettling me to the bone. “You can have whatever you want, Jonathan. All you have to do is decide what that is.”
It’s killing me not to know. “That’s a crap answer.”
She doesn’t quip a comeback, just keeps clutching and unclutching my shoulder. I swat her hand away. “You made me open this world to torture me.”
“I made you open this world because you want to help Kylie. I think it’s time to finish our lesson.” She crosses the kitchen to stand in front of the sink. From her new position she sees the photo of another Tess and Jonathan happily sailing. Her posture and her tone soften out of their normal assault-rifle settings. She lets out the tiniest of sighs. “What are you taking back?”
I hold up the notepad and don’t tell her I already know how to do this. I have moved small objects between worlds before. Never a person, though, like I’ll have to move Kylie, so I listen to what Tess has to say. She purses her lips as if considering the notepad a bad idea, but does not deny me.
“You can bring anything you want from one world to another, but you must be touching whatever it is. Just like there has to be an element of need to make a world, there has to be need to move objects from world to world. Why would you need this speech?”
To create a new and better life for myself, an improved Jonathan Aubrey. I will use my father’s words to fix those parts of myself that have been broken for so many years. Even though she’s gentle for the moment, I can’t bring myself to say that to Tess.
“That’s for me to know,” I say instead.
She sighs her disapproval of my keeping a secret of my own.
“Fine. Concentrate on your need and touch the notepad. You don’t have to actually hold it. Any touch will do. Then switch worlds like normal.”
I do as she says, concentrate on my need to make everything different, and the next thing I know, I’m back in my bedroom with the notepad on the floor at my feet. Tess appears beside me and picks it up. I snatch it away. It’s not like she doesn’t already know what it says, but still. It’s mine.
“I think you’d better start being nicer to me,” she says.
“As soon as you start being nice first.”
“I’m giving you everything you’ll need to know to help Kylie.”
“But not everything I need to know.”
She hesitates and doesn’t respond. For a second I think I might have hurt her feelings. Maybe she’s not being coy or sly. Maybe she really can’t tell me what I want to know.
“Put that down,” she orders, pointing to the notepad.
I set it carefully in a drawer of my desk, with the intent that as soon as Tess leaves, I’ll move it somewhere else.
“Now I’m going to tell you how to close the world.”
“Okay.”
“Closing a world means evoking desires and imagery for destruction, just as making a world uses desires and imagery of creation. You need to pretend like you’re going to move from this world to that one, except, in the split second before you do, fill yourself with the will to have the world destroyed. Any images you can think of—fire, flood, explosion. The world won’t actually burn, drown, or blow up, so don’t worry. It will just cease to exist in the same way you suddenly made it exist. Got it?”
I nod, understanding, thinking that the clearest imagery I can evoke of destruction is both fire and water, flight 4460 burning and then sinking into the ocean. But as I do what Tess says, as The-crash-never-happened is about to open and pull me through, the destructive imagery evoked isn’t of an airplane crash. It’s of Kylie merging. Two Kylies stand reaching hands out to each other, mirrorlike. When they touch, both lean back and let out a horrible sound of pain. They crumple to the floor and lie very still. Too still. The-crash-never-happened winks out of existence, and I feel like I wink out with it.
CHAPTER 19
NEEDLESS TO SAY I DON’T call real Kylie back right away. My emotions are a thick cloud of crows diving and pecking and tearing me open. The pain is so raw, I almost thrash away into the intoxication of Jonathan’s-smokin’-hot-dance-club to dull it, but the dancing girls would be there trying to make me feel good. I don’t want to feel good. I want to feel dead.
I consider that Uncle Joey has a liquor cabinet he hasn’t locked me out of. I’ve never touched it, and although I have all the right reasons to drown in a bottle, it’s a dangerous precedent to set, just another form of escaping what’s real instead of dealing with it. I’m learning that escape is not the answer. When you return to the real world, your problems haven’t solved themselves in your absence.
Instead I go downstairs and stupefy my mind with television, finding on every inane channel something that reminds me of my family. I can’t even watch the news because there’s been a plane crash somewhere in South America. Finally I settle on a rerun of a once-favorite kid’s movie and sink into the couch with a throw blanket. Childhood cradles me as the characters do their musical numbers and journey toward happily ever after.
When it’s very late, or more accurately, very early, I think it’s pretty safe that Kylie is asleep, so I give her cell a quick call, hoping the ringer is off and I’ll get credit for leaving a message. Unfortunately, she picks up.
“Jonathan?”
“It’s me.”
“What time is it?”
Movements crackle on the other end while she presumably tries to answer her own question.
“It’s two in the morning,” she says. “Are you okay?”
Her voice has that throaty quality of someone who’s, well, been roused from sleep by an idiot boy’s phone call in the middle of the night. At any rate, if she left her ringer on, she was hoping to be awakened.
“I’m going to bed. I just wanted to let you know I didn’t forget about you.”
“You don’t want to talk?”
“It’s late. I’m sorry I woke you. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Okay.” She sounds so disappointed, I almost change my mind. “Good night.”
“Night.”
I hope, like girlfriend Kylie, she’s the kind of person who can fall back to sleep pretty easily. Me, I hang up, go upstairs, and spend an hour or two tossing around before finding unconsciousness, and when the alarm goes off at six thirty a.m., my pillow, with my head under it, is at the foot of my bed.
School doesn’t stop session because Jonathan Aubrey is having a bad day, so I shower and dress and pack my bag, grab an orange, and perform my daily h
ike to Pennington High. When I reach my locker, Kylie is standing there.
“Hi,” she says. She’s blocking the door, so I can’t open up and trade books.
“Sorry again about last night,” I say.
She doesn’t push it by asking what I was doing up until that hour. Girlfriend Kylie wouldn’t have pushed it either. It’s one of the reasons I love her so much.
She says, “I just came by to make sure you’re okay. Are you okay?”
I nod. “You got practice off today?” In Kylie-Simms-is-my-girlfriend, the team has practice off because of the half day.
“Yeah.”
“I’d really like to do something with you, if you don’t have plans.”
She smiles shyly and pops off the locker so I can access my stuff. “Okay. Meet me at my car.”
I know a good place where we can be alone and talk. I want to know where her head is at.
* * *
I’m not used to Kylie being the driver, since in Kylie-Simms-is-my-girlfriend we always take the red car. Partly I think Kylie likes the sporty awesomeness of it, but mostly my car is more dependable than her two-hundred-thousand-mile hand-me-down.
I direct her street by street, not revealing our destination. I’ve decided to take her to the local bird sanctuary, a place I last visited with my mom and dad. In fact we have to drive by my old house to reach it, which is probably why I’m thinking of the sanctuary today of all days. As we pass the house, I don’t let on to Kylie that my insides rip open at the sight of a coat of brown paint smothering the time-honored green. An unfamiliar car sits in the driveway, and a tree that used to stand at the corner of the house, a tree I used to climb, is now a stump.
I already made her stop at the grocery store so I could run in and get the smallest bag of birdseed I could find and a carton of baggies. They sit concealed at my feet, part of the mystery for Kylie. I look down at them now to avoid noticing any more evidence of strangers living in the place that used to be my world, the place I revisited last night.
When my old house is safely behind us, I tell Kylie to turn up one street and then up another, and right before we reach the sanctuary’s driveway, she guesses where we’re going.