by Jessica Raya
Now, Dad bounced the Rolex lightly in his hand. “Come on, champ. Humour your old man. Whad’ya say, sport?”
Watching us from the dining room, Mom gave me an encouraging smile. We both knew he was trying to hand me an olive branch, but it felt more like someone was tossing me an old bone.
“No thanks,” I said and went to my room.
I’d had enough of counting the seconds to disaster, enough of holding my breath. I’d been doing it my whole life.
If he thought fourteen years was a long time, try being me.
—
That night I dreamed I was running down my street in my swimsuit. People lined the sidewalk to watch, faceless blobs and snorkelling masks. I didn’t see Dad in the crowd, but Mom was on our front step, waving at me, her arm hinged at the elbow like a beauty queen. I called to her, but only sudsy water came out. I was drowning on the inside. When I woke up gasping, I tasted chlorine in my mouth.
I couldn’t get back to sleep after that. Eventually I gave up and went to the backyard. Korea had made Dad an early riser. I thought he might want some help finishing off that list.
The day was crisp and bright, the sky so clear there was nothing for warmth to hold on to, the swimming pool as flat and shiny as glass. I found the checklist on a lounge chair, the paper warped with dew. I shivered and hurried across the lawn.
The pool house was shut up tight. Pool house is misleading. It was just a large shed, really, with a built-in bench, a small skylight that didn’t open, air that tasted like dust. My dad had put it together years before from a kit he’d picked up at the hardware store. He’d said it would come in handy. He said it was on sale. Mom had eyed the plans suspiciously, then him. “Handy for what?” she’d said.
I listened for Dad’s staccato snore. When I heard only the sound of birds in the trees, my dream slid over me cold as a wet sheet. I shivered again as I reached out to knock.
“Dad?”
All I heard was birds. I touched my fingers to the doorknob and turned slowly, holding my breath until the latch released.
“Daddy?”
Whenever I hear the phrase clean getaway on the evening news, I think of this moment, how the half-dozen paperbacks were lined up on the bench with a year’s worth of Life magazines stacked neatly beside them, how for once his bathrobe hung on a hook. The pile of dirty shirts was gone, along with his contraband Cubans and the ashtray I’d made. He’d tidied up before he’d left. He’d even stripped the cot bare and bundled the sheets at the foot of the mattress, like a polite houseguest at the end of his stay.
3
Also gone: his Rolex, his shaving kit, his gold-plated pen. His golf clubs still leaned in the front closet, but his brown overcoat was missing. The maimed shoes were nowhere to be found, though they might have been in the garbage, or wherever tasselled loafers were laid to final rest. Natural Disasters for Insurance Sellers, taken. Morbidity & Mortality, not. Of course his favourite grey hat, of course his beloved ‘68 DeVille. These and other items are forever catalogued in my mind as Things Men Take When They Leave.
Mom didn’t want to hear my list. “Your father and I had a disagreement, that’s all,” she said. “Sometimes married people need space from each other. It’s not as though it’s the first time.”
“It’s not?”
“Oh, now, let’s not get dramatic.”
She stood at the kitchen sink, staring out the window at the dark driveway, tapping cigarette ash into a souvenir mug from Reno I’d seen a million times but never thought about. Who had gone to Reno and when? What else didn’t I know? Monday morning she was there again, or still there, in the same yellow nightgown, Reno mug now filled with coffee.
“Can I help you with something?” she said when she saw me, like I was next in line at the DMV. I went to school.
There, I discovered a bottomless mug of things I didn’t know. When teachers called on me, I drew a blank. I answered math questions in gym class and history questions in biology. I was feeling pretty sorry for myself and miserable about humanity in general until I saw Carol coming down the same hallway where she’d run, half-naked, just days before. It was assumed Allen Wendell had been exiled, at last, to the special school on the other side of town. We never saw him again. But Carol Closter had come back.
Some said Allen and the Jesus Freak had been going at it in the shower when someone walked in. They said Bible-thumpers were all like that deep down. Some said the janitor had found her beneath the bleachers, praying on her knees among the cigarette butts and gum wrappers. Others claimed she’d thrown herself in the canal. Deer wandered down from the hills and fell in sometimes. Once, the waters had carried the lifeless body of a little boy to the next town. But I’d never heard anything about suicides, and Carol didn’t seem like a girl who’d try to drown herself.
She walked quickly with her eyes fixed straight ahead, her arms wrapped so tightly around her purple binder that her knuckles were white, but there she was—either the bravest person I’d ever known or the craziest. Maybe there wasn’t much difference between the two. Her hat that day was cotton-candy pink. Embroidered white butterflies fluttered around its rim.
One by one, kids saw her and froze. A teacher speared us with warning glances, but not a single whisper or snicker was heard. The silence was louder than any noise we could have made. She was a wraith haunting our halls, and nobody wants to see their sins illuminated by fluorescent lights. One by one, they turned their backs to her until only Carol and I faced each other. As she passed me she lowered her eyes, just as I had days before, as if there was something there she, too, would rather not see. I hugged my books and hurried the other way. I told myself I was lucky to be rid of her, that I should have listened to Melanie from the start. If I fanned through all my textbooks that day, searching for notes secreted in their pages, it was only out of habit. Carol Closter was not the sort of girl you wanted as a friend.
If Melanie had an opinion on Carol Closter’s return she did not express it to me. Much as I tried to, I couldn’t take it personally. Like Carol, Melanie didn’t talk to anyone for days, not even Joyce. She kept her head down and her mouth full of hair. On Friday, she was waiting at my locker after school. I wasn’t sure if this was a good thing, but I was still happy to see her.
“Do you want to go to the swings?” she said.
Carol had slipped and fallen a few feet from where we stood, but Melanie wouldn’t know that. She hadn’t stuck around to see how things ended. Maybe they hadn’t yet. I nodded yes.
We walked to our old junior high without talking, got all the way to the field without a single word. Melanie chewed her hair while I tried not to think about my mom smoking at the kitchen sink, waiting for Dad’s DeVille to pull into the driveway. The house was so quiet I could hear every dry suck of cigarette, the long sigh of each exhale. Silence wasn’t so bad compared to that.
Up ahead I could see the playground, the familiar topography of logs and ropes and slides on an island of grey sand. It was empty except for a couple of little kids climbing on top of the jungle gym. There was nobody on the swings. I grinned at Melanie.
“What’s so funny?” she said.
“You eating my dust,” I said and shot off across the grass.
Running was another thing that high school kids didn’t do, unless it was for gym class, and even then you could make a mile last an hour if you really put in the effort. It had been so long since I’d made my legs do more than shuffle, the ability to do so was a revelation. I’d forgotten how good it felt to know that you are strong and fast. Suddenly, Melanie was running beside me. We smiled at each other knowingly, then really kicked into gear. As I neared the sand, I held up my arms and aimed for the wide white ribbon in my mind.
We tagged the swings and threw ourselves at the sand, panting and laughing. It was hard to say who got there first, but it didn’t really matter. The little kids sat on the rope ladder, clapping for both of us.
“You’re crazy,” Melanie said
, smiling up at the sky.
The sun caught her gold cross. It glinted prettily at her throat. I’d asked for one for my twelfth birthday, but Mom said there was no way. Where she came from, those crosses hung from the necks of girls who got knocked up senior year and were married off before they could buy their own beer.
“Do you ever talk to God?” I said.
“You don’t talk to God, Robin. You talk to a priest.” She touched her fingers to the gold cross for a moment, then the tips of her collarbone, lips, and heart.
“What about when you pray?”
“Why are we talking about God?” she said and tucked the cross back inside her blouse. For her, religion was something you did in private, preferably behind a curtain.
I took a deep breath.
“I think my dad left.”
“Left left?” Melanie said.
The weight of the word sunk in. I held my breath and waited for it to pass right through me. Somewhere inside me was a Dad-shaped hole.
“Where’d he go?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you think he’ll come back?”
“I don’t know.”
A cloud floated by. Cumulus or stratocumulus, or altocumulus maybe. We’d had a test on cloud types the week before, but I’d failed it. My eyes were heavy with waiting tears. I didn’t know anything.
Melanie smiled encouragingly. “Joyce’s dad left. But he came back. Now she’s getting a car.”
A car honked in the distance, as if on cue. Melanie sat up to look. A convertible full of kids idled across the field. Joyce Peyton popped up in the back seat, as if our words had conjured her. “Come on, Smellanie! Let’s go!”
Melanie jumped up and ran her fingers through her hair, shaking out the sand. “Sorry,” she said, starting back across the field. “I told her I’d meet them here. And sorry about your dad. Sorry!”
But she didn’t look sorry as she climbed up beside Joyce on the top of the back seat and waved at me. She looked like she’d been voted homecoming queen. As the car peeled away, I tried to be happy for her. Melanie was living in a chewing gum commercial after all. I just wasn’t in it.
—
The next day I woke to the smell of burnt toast and fresh paint. Old sheets were draped over the living room furniture. It was nine o’clock and Mom had already spackled. She angled the can so I could see the colour. “It’s called chartreuse!”
She lost enthusiasm once she saw it on the wall.
“No problem! It’s just paint!”
A flurry of doomed projects followed. It was just a lampshade, just wallpaper, just a rug. She attempted to recover the dining chairs with a bolt of white vinyl she’d found on sale, only to realize halfway through that she knew nothing about upholstery. She relined half the drawers in the kitchen before she decided they’d look nicer stripped back to wood. “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well,” she said, but I guess nothing was. Projects were started and abandoned in hours, then minutes. But Mom was not discouraged. I could measure the days Dad had been gone by the miles of painter’s tape and empty glue gun sticks. Mom used the kitchen calendar, hanging from a nail inside a cupboard door. Every day there was another black X in another square so small you had to look for it. I did.
Halfway through April the X’s stopped, along with the projects.
I don’t know what Mom did while I was at school in the days that followed, but when I was home she slept a lot. Between naps, she took baths that seemed to last hours. I would hear the gurgle of water down the drain now and then, followed by more hot water rushing from the tap. Meals were increasingly unpredictable. She’d forget to turn the oven on or forget to turn it off, the buzzer ringing not three feet from where she stood at the sink, staring at the driveway. One night she gave up altogether and halved a can of unheated tomato soup into two bowls. You could still see the grooves from the can in the gelatinous orange blob. She got down two spoonfuls before it sent her running to the bathroom.
“It’s not that bad,” I said through the door, swallowing hard to purge the film of vegetable mucus from my throat.
“Just a flu,” she said on the other side, flushing the toilet again and again.
After that I made myself grilled cheese sandwiches while Mom nibbled Saltines and dry toast. She left money on the table so I could buy my lunch. If she forgot, I made peanut butter sandwiches and chewed them violently while I watched Melanie and Joyce giggle into each other’s ears. It felt like watching someone playing me in the movie version of my life and having no say in the casting.
On weekends, I drifted on the air mattress, making eddies in the water with my fingertips, trying not to draw comparisons with the dead bugs that floated around me, destined for the great bottom vent of life. There wasn’t anything else to do. If I played music or watched TV, Mom made me turn the volume so low it might as well have been off. She didn’t have to tell me she was waiting for the phone to ring. Now and then she’d lift the receiver to her ear to make sure it still worked.
One night I heard her behind her bedroom door, talking on the phone. I picked up the extension, certain it had to be my dad. I only wanted to hear his voice, steady and solid as California rock. But it was some old woman. “Lainey, Lainey,” she was saying. “What have you done now?”
It took me a few seconds to recognize the voice of my grandmother, a woman I spoke to only on holidays and birthdays. The one time my grandparents had come to California, they’d spent the week pointing out how fancy everything was. Pimento loaf, eh? Fancy! On their last night, Dad cancelled our reservation at the club and drove everyone to the new Howard Johnson’s. Mom had seemed both sad and relieved the morning they’d left, Gran with her grey ponytail and hand-rolled cigarettes, Grandpa in his ironed jeans.
“I’m sorry for you, Lainey. I really am. But I can’t say I’m surprised by it. You made your bed with that one, my girl.”
“I know, Ma. I know I did. It’s just that—” She sniffled back tears. “What am I supposed to do, Ma? I wake up and I get dressed. But then I don’t know what to do next.”
Gran cleared her throat. “How far along are you, Lainey?”
There was a long, scratchy nothing, then Mom’s voice sounding farther away than my grandmother’s at the other end of the line. “A few weeks?”
I looked around, wondering which project they meant. From the kitchen, I could see the bolt of white vinyl folded on the dining table, beside it the crystal flower vase half-concealed now by decoupage. None of her attempts had lasted more than a few days, never mind weeks. Then I spied the calendar hanging from its nail. All those black X’s. I lifted April, March, following the X’s back to February. February 14, to be exact.
“You can always come home, Lainey. If that’s what you need. Is that why you’re calling? Do you need to come home again?”
“No, Ma,” Mom said, her voice shrinking farther and farther away. “I don’t need to come home.”
“Well, all right, then.”
I held on to the phone long after they’d hung up. I didn’t know what to do next either. Eventually the phone beeped at me in protest. Fourteen, it seemed to count. Fourteen, fourteen, fourteen. Fourteen more years of this.
We’re all just one bad decision away from disaster. I hadn’t understood until that moment that, for my dad, I had been that one decision. Maybe Mom’s too.
On the upside, I was finally getting that baby brother, like the family in the brochure.
I got back into bed and pulled the blankets over my head. My radio was under my pillow, John Fogerty wondering who stopped the rain. I pressed it against my ear. But once you hear something, you can’t unhear it. Once you know something, it becomes part of who you are. I couldn’t drown this out with a hundred radios. What I would’ve given right then to be lying on a beer-stained mattress, letting Troy Gainer feel me up.
—
Mom spent the whole of the next week at the kitchen sink again, staring out the window through a clo
ud of smoke. She stayed that way for hours. She was a foot from the fridge, but I never saw her eat. Sometimes she stood behind me while I watched TV. Planes glided silently across the screen. Beneath them, a rice paddy exploded, throwing up fireworks of dirt and smoke. You didn’t need the volume up to know what it sounded like. Vietnam was the longest-running show on TV. “It’s so awful,” Mom said, looming over me. Suck, sigh, suck, sigh. Eventually she’d sit down and pull the afghan over her legs. When she tired of watching death and devastation, she’d go back to the kitchen window and stare at the empty driveway again. She did this all week, oscillating between the TV and the window, two channels that never ran any good news.
When I got home on Friday she was asleep on the sofa. I turned off the set and breathed in a moment of silence. No bombs, no cigarette.
Mom’s eyes flickered open. “What time is it?” she said, rubbing them, searching around for her Salems. “I was watching that.”
The phone rang. Her body jerked and stiffened, like an electric-shock patient. She leapt up and rushed at the phone. “Hello?” she shouted. “Hello? Hello?”
Her chest rose and fell. “One moment,” she said and held out the receiver to me. “Don’t be long.”
“Hey,” I said, hoping it was Melanie while trying to sound like I wasn’t.
“Robin? Hi. It’s Jamie.”
“Who?”
“Jamie Finley. Skinny guy, slow walker?”
“Oh, hi.”
Neither of us said anything for a few seconds. Mom waited in the middle of the kitchen, counting them out on the oven clock. I stretched the phone cord into the dining room.
“So anyway,” Jamie said. “We’re going to The Place tonight, me and some of the guys from the team. Gainer, Travis, Bowman…” He rattled off a list of names I didn’t know. “Everyone’ll be there. So, yeah, I thought you might want to come too.”
“Why?”
“I’ve seen your friends there—Melanie and Joan? They’re always hanging around.”