For the past three years, since Essex County Board of Supervisors banned kids thirteen and older from trick-or-treating, the Petrianos have let Mack have a party on Halloween. That was before the basement redo, so the party was in their garage or their backyard. Last year Leonard and Mack and I dressed up like characters from Young Frankenstein, the movie. I was the hunchback since I didn’t want to be burdened with more lines. I was in training for Captain Von Trapp. “Walk this way” was all I had to say. Mindless, but funny. Anyway, last year we invited girls, too…for the first time. The party was outside because it was like eighty degrees. Mack disappeared about the same time Marissa Bennett, my costar-to-be, disappeared. That single fact made me wonder for a long time whether that was the night he had sex. Although he continually said no, he’d smirk like he meant yes. Finally months later he told me the truth. So at least that image can be purged from my imagination. It wasn’t Marissa Bennett getting it on with a green monster.
In the grocery checkout line, where there are a dozen people who know Mom, I ask her about going by Meredith’s house. Not surprisingly with all those witnesses and her boulder-size guilt, she says yes. No dead brain cells yet in this kid.
“So this girl Meredith, you like her?” she asks.
I swallow and let my smile come and go. The question cannot be answered in front of people who live in Essex County. It will spread like a thunderstorm on the river.
At the Rilkes’ house the van is parked on the lawn and the girls are in their shorts, sudsing it up like a dog.
“Can I—” I motion to where Juliann mans the hose.
“Don’t get soaked. You’ll have pneumonia by tonight.” But Mom’s smiling. Normal’s good for her, too.
Meredith gives me a half hug and I come away damp already. Luckily Mrs. Rilke motions for Mom to come inside.
Meredith hands me the hose. “Just hold it, okay?” She and Juliann are on opposite sides of the van, stretching to soap the roof and having trouble covering the whole area.
“Do you have a ladder somewhere?” I ask.
“Behind the garage,” Juliann says.
“I’ll get it.” I walk backward so I can get a better look at Meredith’s legs when she doesn’t know I’m looking.
Mrs. Rilke’s face appears at the window and she shakes her head, eyebrows raised. How can she know what I’m thinking?
After I drag the ladder around to the front yard, being careful to keep the ends from scarring the lawn, I snap it open by the driver’s-side door. Meredith climbs up and grins back at me.
“Can you stay for lunch? We’re having homemade pizza.”
“Mom won’t…” I shrug my shoulders. “We’re headed out on the boat, actually.” I wish I could ask her to come with us, but that is hardly what Dad had in mind. If he’s going to keep up this chumminess for long, it’s going to get old. It’s already old when I think of how much more fun it would be to show Meredith the river than play cards with Nick.
As she leans to the right, the ladder quivers. Foot out as a prop, I grab the sides to steady it.
“Easy, easy. No more injuries. Your mom will think I’m accident-prone.”
“She already does.” But she laughs again and flips her hair back. Does she have any idea what that does to me?
Mom and Mrs. Rilke come out on the front stoop in serious conversation.
“Hey, look who’s getting to be buddies.” Meredith waves the soapy sponge and sprays all of us.
“Could be dangerous,” I say. “They’ll want to hang around whenever we get together.”
“More like they’ll keep each other busy.”
Juliann flips her sponge over the roof in our direction. “Daniel, you’re distracting the help. We need to get this job done and move on.”
“Oh, listen to that.” Meredith makes an exaggerated frown. “She has a hot date with Mack tonight and suddenly she doesn’t have time to hang around with us.”
The question I want to ask beats a drum roll in my head. If Juliann is going to Mack’s, what is Meredith going to do?
Mom’s jingling the keys. “Okay, Daniel. Time to go.”
Mrs. Rilke hands her a paper bag curled over at the top. “Nice to see you, Daniel. Bet you don’t miss that ankle cast.”
“No, ma’am.” No point in mentioning it was only a brace. With my eyes averted, I wait at the bottom of the ladder for Meredith to climb down. “Hey, I wanted to ask you if you’d go out on Halloween with me—us—Mack and me. He does a great party, costumes and stuff.”
Her feet are on the ground, the ladder behind her, and I’m in front so she can’t go anywhere. I can smell lotion and soap and damp hair. A quick glance at the mothers and even though they’re halfway to our car, they’re head to head, back into something serious again.
Meredith kisses me so quickly it feels like a puff of wind on my face. I kiss her back harder but all in a flash because I’m not sure whether she wants her mother to know she does that kind of thing.
“Yes,” Meredith says and I don’t know if she means yes to the party or yes to the kiss or yes to something more. As much as I’d like to kiss her again, I can’t because my mother is stationed by the car and staring over the hood at the two of us.
“I’ll call you,” Meredith whispers as I walk across the squishy grass to the car.
It’s only on the way home, once the Rilkes’ yard is out of sight, that I remember we’ll be away on the family cruise all weekend and I still have no idea what Meredith’s doing during Juliann’s hot date.
Once we’re home and the anchor’s up, Mom starts in all over again, listing potential disasters and pouting. Dad nods, silent. He must have decided she needs to get it all out. When I offer to make the sandwiches, she looks surprised.
“Nick can do it.”
Nick swallows the mouthful of leftover milk he’s just slurped from his cereal bowl. “Me? I’m barely thirteen. I can’t make sandwiches.”
“I’ll help you.” Not that I’m such a nice guy, but the constant debate is wearying. Every little thing has to work itself around to me and The Disease and how useless I am.
Mom gets up, even though she just sat down with the newspaper out of the wind. “No, you rest. I’ll help Nick.”
“Nick.” Dad’s commander voice erupts from out on the deck. “Make the sandwiches.” He signals Mom to come with him up to the bridge. When he pinches her rear on the way up the ladder, she bats his hand away, but at least he’s gotten her to laugh. Together they stand by the steering wheel, Dad’s arm around her waist, his baseball cap on backward, a little boy on an adventure with his buddies. You gotta like my dad.
Although he’s lowered his voice, they’re shoulder to shoulder. I stand in the cabin’s shadow, next to the ladder where they can’t see me. Their words drop down like rainwater in a gutter spout.
“Let the boys work it out,” Dad says.
“But Daniel needs to rest before Monday. Maybe I should tell him so he knows why it’s important for him to save his energy.”
“He’ll just worry, maybe not sleep well. Let’s wait.”
“It’s going to be a shock either way.”
My brain is whirring, that famous imagination going crazy. What the hell are they talking about? What’s the big secret? What news could be worse?
Mom lowers her voice. “At least until then I can make this easier for him. I can make the sandwiches.”
“You can’t do everything.”
“I’m not doing everything. If I were, I’d take the damn chemo instead of letting them drag him off against his will.”
So that’s the big secret. Chemo on Monday, countdown forty-eight hours. I ought to be shocked, scared, but it’s actually a relief. Something’s being done. The debate is over. All the doctors think it’s the right thing to do, the judge agrees, even the Great Wizard himself, Attorney Walker.
The little bit about leukemia I’ve managed to read always lists chemotherapy as the remedy of first resort. I mean, I like
Miss T. Undertaker, I love my parents, but what can they really know from their little corner of Essex County, Virginia? They’ve never lived through chemotherapy. How bad can it be? I’m already puking up my guts and banned from school and stuck on this moving island. Plus Meredith thinks chemo is a good idea, and she’s lived other places besides this hole-in-the-wall.
As Mom is backing down the ladder, I’m scrambling to get myself back into the cabin and into a chair. Lucky for me, she doesn’t come in, only looks in the window and then turns. I watch her grab the rail, though the water is as seamless as ribbon. Never letting go of the railing, she follows it to their cabin until she disappears, her head bowed. Under the weight of a dying son.
A minute later, music blasts out. One of the old tapes of their favorites. The songs take her back to an easier time, I guess. Before kids, before bills and a houseboat without a dryer, and before the constant possibility that her son won’t get the full twelve months they promised if she doesn’t let them poison him in the meantime.
Mom’s oldies tape competes with the lean pitch and moan of the engine as the houseboat chugs downstream. We’re passing houses I’ve only seen once or twice from a motorboat. In every half-moon bay little pockets of cottages huddle together. If I had a hammer, I’d hammer in the mor-or-ning croons from the back of the boat. Whole words hang on the wind and then fade as the boat plows forward.
Honestly, I’m not a snob about music, but it’s painful to hear most of those tapes. Outside of the guitar’s repetitive strumming, which is down, up, down in continuous threes, song after song after song, the tapes are ancient and they sound ancient, all scratchy. These are songs that only show up in Disney movies for first graders about the history of music. My parents do listen to Coltrane and some other more relevant stuff, but she’s punishing the three of us with Peter, Paul and Mary when what she really wants is to punish the judge and the Social Services witch for forcing chemo on me.
With the southeast breeze and new vistas, I tell myself it’s going to get better after lunch. Life goes on.
But it doesn’t get better. It gets worse. Mom refuses to eat. When Dad orders Nick to take over at the wheel so he can talk to her, she locks him out of the cabin. I put on my swim trunks and grab a towel from the stack in the closet. Where the sun is really hitting the deck, I’m dancing a little in my bare feet and perspiring like I’ve just taken a shower. The idea of that cool water sluicing over my body has me humming.
You might already know this about October water in Virginia. It’s never as cold as April water. It comes off the summer and holds on to those warm spots like a girl clings to her date on a roller coaster. Swimming in any kind of water has always meant freedom to me. You’re outside your skin. You’re a fish.
Mom bursts out of the cabin and starts up the ladder just after Dad has gone back to the upper deck. He must have given up. Headed downriver, he’s at the wheel.
“I’m looking for a place to pull in so we can all swim.” He waves at me.
With the rising breeze, Mom’s hair is all over her face and she has to claw it off in order to see. Climbing and yelling at the same time.
“Now do you get it?” She’s yelling at Dad but pointing down at me.
He obviously doesn’t get it. Neither do I.
“What’s the matter, Mom?” I call over the motor, “We’re just going to swim.”
“Red, tell him.”
“Tell him what?” I ask, my hands slick with the sunscreen I’m slathering on like we own the company. An inspired idea to try to appease her, to show her I’m being careful. If I’m not going to grow up to be the perfect son she always wanted, I might as well give her the satisfaction that I heard her advice about ultraviolet rays.
Confused too, Dad raises his eyebrows. He’s clueless. Or else he still thinks if we ignore the bigger issues, they’ll go away. Without waiting for him to pull himself together, Mom plunges ahead.
“No, Daniel, you can’t go swimming. Absolutely not. Misty says your body can’t take that kind of stress. If you swallow water, or go too deep…even just the shock of the temperature change.”
“I swam this summer.”
“That was different. In August the water’s closer to air temperature. You weren’t so far…” There’s no way she can finish that sentence. “In cold water your lungs have to work overtime and that stresses your heart. It means you’re at risk for a heart attack.”
“A heart attack from cancer?”
Mom’s eyes don’t leave my face. “That’s just the point. Misty says they don’t know where the bad cells are.”
“Dad?” My knees are buckling. “Is that true? They could be in my heart?”
He finally speaks, though his face is closed, as if he’s reciting multiplication tables. “Once it’s in your blood, it can go anywhere.”
You would think that would be enough to get them to stop picking at each other.
I wrap up in the biggest towel and leave my bathing suit on, not ready to give up on the possibility of swimming later. With the wrinkled copy of Catcher, which the librarian didn’t charge me for after all because she found three more copies in the box for the Friends of the Library book sale, I climb into Dad’s hammock on the sunny side of the deck. Maybe HC has some advice for someone about to have poisonous chemicals injected into his body.
Dad and Nick decide to fish. Back and forth they joke about catching dinner. Nick’s getting the gear organized while Dad swings the boat into the wind and drops anchor in an inlet lined with reeds. If I weren’t so wiped out, I’d fish with them. It would reinforce Dad’s view of his temporary remedy, one big happy family adventure. He’s not used to being the sad sack, but there’s no point in all of us being miserable. With the sun drilling into my bare skin like acupuncture needles, I keep reading and let the wash of their voices drift in the breeze around me.
Holden’s chapter about the elevator guy coming to collect the five dollars has always bugged me. Why does that girl Sunny let him do that to Holden? She ought to feel grateful. Holden wasn’t mean to her. She didn’t even have to do what she was supposedly paid to do.
That decision by Holden I understand completely. As badly as I want to have sex, I don’t like to think I would do it with a total stranger, totally cold like that, no buildup, no conversation, no relationship. She didn’t know him, didn’t care about him. It would be mechanical, unfeeling. Is he that desperate for company? Mack says none of that matters, it just happens. And that does make sense. Sometimes I can be standing next to a girl in line or watching a movie with a girl in a bathing suit, and I have to excuse myself. It’s embarrassing.
Plus, how awful would it be to not know who else she’s been with recently? Or even just kissed. I mean, you can’t ever be sure, but with someone you know beforehand, like from school or whatever, at least you kind of know who she bums around with. You have a pretty good idea of the last guy she hooked up with.
What’s worse is old Sunny in Holden’s hotel room doesn’t pay any attention at all to how Holden’s feeling. She’s just there angling for money. A lousy five dollars at that. Even as bad off as my parents are with the medical bills and the lawyer’s fees, I have trouble imagining how five dollars could be that important to anyone, even back in the last century or whenever Salinger wrote Catcher. Sunny and the elevator guy just stick it to Holden because they can. Because he’s alone and young. That truly stinks.
The question that keeps bugging me is, could Holden have done something to prevent the whole episode? Is that the reason he tells us every embarrassing detail? The hairy chest who corners him, and his crying when they take the money from his wallet. He didn’t have to tell that part. If he weren’t feeling so depressed about school and having trouble connecting with old friends, he wouldn’t say yes when the elevator guy suggests the girl in the first place. And he sure as hell wouldn’t open the door to her that second time.
Then after all that mess with them in his room he takes a bath. What kind o
f guy takes a bath? He fabricates the whole movie scene, which is totally silly and really out of character for someone as straight as he’s been before that. I totally understand that it’s meant to be a foil. I can hear Stepford-Hanes suggesting that. Something so off-the-wall he wouldn’t be able to go through with it, to show the real Holden, not the pretend brave king of the city. Reading it this time, the fifth or sixth time, the last three lines really hit me, though. You really worry that he’s serious, that he might be so depressed or scared of facing his parents that he would jump out the window. He totally misses the point about jumping, though. Once you jump, it doesn’t matter who the hell is looking.
From my spot in the hammock I can hear the whole conversation between Nick and Dad on the upper deck. Nick’s telling Dad about his friend Thomas Lynch, who’s failing fifth grade. As if anyone could actually fail fifth grade. It’s mostly book reports and art projects and spelling bees, how hard is that? But Nick has talked to me about Thomas before. A couple of times. His father drinks a lot and when he’s drinking, he hits. Nick’s trying to convince Dad to go and talk to Thomas’s father about AA. Dad says no.
Not “no” because he won’t talk to Mr. Lynch, but “no” because it won’t change anything. Dad’s big thing about AA and making a decision to change your life revolves around Step One of the AA philosophy. You have to acknowledge you have a problem that you can’t solve yourself. We Landons have heard the drill a hundred times.
Dad’s calm when he talks about the Lynches. “Nickie, no one can make that decision for Mr. Lynch.”
Nick argues, but his voice is soft and wavery like he’s about to cry. “What about Thomas? He has a problem he can’t solve himself. Who’s gonna protect him?”
“Maybe Thomas should tell someone who can help him. Like an adult.”
“They’ll take him away from his father and put him in foster care.”
From the dull repetitive thumps on the roof, it sounds like someone’s pacing. Even without seeing them, I can imagine Dad’s forehead, hard red ridges across it from worrying about whether Mom’s still mad, whether the chemo is going to mess me up, whether Nick’s rod will go flying into the river at the first bite because he won’t stay close enough to guard it. Dad’s footsteps continue back and forth above my head. It can’t be easy to have all of us to worry about and then Nick’s friends, too.
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