by E. R. Frank
I stand up.
“It’s not a criticism,” Jack says. “It’s a constructive observation.”
He bounces for a while, facing me. The hang glider is circling over us. I’m thinking about a lot of different things all at once.
“Will you ever stop being sad?” I ask him. He doesn’t stop bouncing, and his face flashes to that half-crying-half-smiling mask and then back to normal, and then he shoves some of the dark, damp hair out of his face.
“No,” he says. “I don’t see how.”
Back on the beach Ellen says, “Sea-rene.”
“What?” I squeeze my hair to get the water out and lie down on my towel.
Jack’s spreading his at my feet.
“Everything looked so serene,” Ellen says. “You guys out there on the trampoline. That ship way off on the horizon. That hang glider. It was like watching a silent movie.”
“Do you like silent movies?” Jack asks her.
“Jack says I’m superficial,” I interrupt, “and I only skim the surface of things because of my father.”
“She’s not superficial exactly,” Ellen tells Jack.
“Oh, thanks,” I say.
“She’s just scared.”
“I know.” Jack squirts sunblock onto his hand and starts to rub his arms and chest with it.
“I’m not scared,” I say. They’re pissing me off. I don’t even know what they’re talking about. Besides, Ellen is supposed to defend me. “I’m dumping you for the Ashleys,” I tell her.
“That’s what I mean.” Now Jack’s rubbing his legs.
“What?” I say.
“You’re the only one who calls them the Ashleys,” Jack tells me.
“That’s not true.” I look at Ellen through my sunglasses. “Everyone calls them the Ashleys.”
Ellen rolls her eyes.
“What?” I say. “You call them that.”
She shakes her head. “You came up with it.”
“Maybe, but you use it.”
“Actually,” she says very carefully, “I don’t.”
I stop to think about it. I’m sure I’ve heard her say “the Ashleys” before. I’m sure of it. I watch Jack get rid of the excess sunblock by wiping the webs of every two fingers onto his chin.
“Do you know that Ashley Jasper has a little brother who’s retarded?” Ellen asks me.
“Is that Ashley One or Ashley Two?”
“See?” Jack says to Ellen.
She won’t look at me.
“I’m not superficial,” I argue at them. They don’t argue back. “I’m not scared, either,” I say. “The Ashleys are bitchy snobs.
What would I be scared of?”
“It’s more complicated than that.” Jack lies back on his towel.
“Like you know so much,” I tell him.
“I just see more of the big picture,” Jack says.
“So you’re better than I am,” I say.
“Could you guys stop it?” Ellen asks. Her voice is off Raggedy somehow.
Jack and I both squint at her. She’s staring up at that hang glider, biting her lip.
“Sorry,” I mutter.
“It doesn’t matter what you were scared of before,” Ellen says. “You’re scared now, and it’s messing you up.”
“I’m okay,” I tell her.
“No, you’re not.” Ellen’s still gazing at the sky. “My mother was right. Shell shock. I think she’s right about all three of us. But especially about you.”
“What do you mean?” I say. “You were in the car too. You got hurt way worse than I did. And you’re tired constantly, even when it has nothing to do with your leg or your ribs, so don’t even say that’s it, and you space out and get bored all the time. And Jack.” I look at him, lying on his back with his eyes closed. “Jack’s going to be sad for the rest of his life.”
Ellen answers in this really gentle voice that’s not like her at all. “Jack and I can sleep, and—”
“You sleep too much,” I interrupt.
She waits for more than a second before she speaks again, and when she does, her voice stays soft, careful. “And we can drive. Well, I’ll be able to as soon as my leg heals. Plus, we can concentrate usually.”
“It’s all of us,” I argue. “It’s bad for all of us. Jack cries all the time. I see him.” He doesn’t move. On his back, with his eyes closed, tanned skin glistening in the sun, anybody who didn’t know would think he was dozing. “I see you,” I tell him. He starts to hum.
“What are you humming?” Ellen asks him.
“Guid Merge.”
“I see you crying sometimes, Jack, when you don’t think anybody is looking or can tell. And I hear you in your room at home. I heard you two nights in a row last week.” He keeps humming, eyes closed.
“We don’t shake,” Ellen tells me quietly. “We don’t have fake heart attacks every second and nightmares.”
“I have nightmares,” Jack says. No more humming.
“Okay,” Ellen agrees. “So do I. But we don’t wake up screaming and freaked out. We wake up sad.”
“I’m sad,” I say, and it sounds ridiculous.
“I know, Anna,” Ellen says as nicely as she’s ever said anything to me. “But also you’re really messed up.”
16
THREE HOURS AFTER I GET HOME, SETH IS ON OUR DOORSTEP.
“Anna!” Jack yells, even though I’m right there behind him.
“Hi,” I say to Seth.
Jack steps aside.
“Hi,” Seth says to me. “I like your shades.” He holds out his hand, palm up. M&M’s.
I don’t take any. My brother takes a few. “Are you going to invite him in?” Jack asks.
“Would you like to leave now?” I ask Jack back.
“Delighted,” Jack goes, and he nods his head at Seth and disappears up the stairs.
“Okay,” I tell Seth. “Come in.”
I lead him to the family room and plop myself down on the L of the couch. I keep my sunglasses on, even though I don’t need them indoors.
He stays standing. “Anna, I’m sorry I was such an idiot that night.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I go, even though it does matter.
He sits down, but as far away as possible. “I’d been wanting to say a lot of stuff to you about the accident for a long time,” Seth goes. “But … it’s … you know … I guess the way it came out was … well, stupid.”
“The truth is,” I tell him, “we don’t even really know each other.”
“We were starting to,” Seth says. “All of us, I mean. Jason and Lisa and Ellen.”
“Who did you used to hang out with?” I ask Seth.
He digs into his pocket and then feeds some M&M’s into his mouth. “Leo Feld and Rimi and Justin and that crowd,” Seth says, crunching. “We still hang out sometimes.”
“Ellen and my brother tell me I’m all messed up,” I say. “I don’t think I’m such great girlfriend material right now.”
“Maybe that’s just a way of saying you’re not into me,” Seth goes.
“Maybe.”
He looks bummed, and then he starts to smile a little. “You’re sort of a bitch,” he tells me.
“Screw you,” I tell him back.
“Okay,” he goes, and he scoots over next to me. Then he lifts the sunglasses off my face and holds my cheeks in his hands. He doesn’t kiss me. We just look at each other for a while.
“You got tan,” he goes.
It’s hard not to smile. His hands are big and warm.
“And your hair is the color of fire now.”
He has pretty eyes. Brown with black rings around the outside.
“You’ve got a cat’s eye,” he tells me. He pulls his head back and squints. “Your pupil is vertical.”
“I know,” I say. “It might never get round again.”
“Supreme.” He smiles.
He doesn’t let go of my face. My heart starts to beat fast. “My brother told me no girl
can resist this move,” he says finally, his face inches away from mine.
I knock his hands away. “Your brother doesn’t know anything,” I lie. But I keep hold of one of his index fingers, between us.
“So, what’s going on?” I ask. He pulls a curl with his free hand. Then he pulls another one. I shake him off “What’s all this stuff you’ve wanted to say to me since the accident?”
“I really, really love your curls.”
“I’m serious,” I tell him. “What did you want to say?”
He sits up straight and scoots back a little. Shoves his free hand into his pocket and pulls out two M&M’s. A green and an orange. “I just … um …” He slips the M&M’s back into his pocket, and we listen to them click against each other. “I just feel … bad for you. Really, really bad.”
“Oh,” I say.
My uncle Buck is a gourmet cook. My aunt Jerry takes in foster dogs. Besides a Great Dane named Mamie they’ve had forever, there’s always a few greyhounds and a mutt or two.
We hear barking even before we’re out of the car.
“Welcome to the zoo,” my father mumbles. Which is what he says every year. My mom and I carry two pumpkin pies and a bowl of stuffing, but still the dogs jump all over my father. Dogs love him for some reason.
“Off, Cyrus!” Aunt Jerry yells. “Off, Nixon! Off, Lucifer! Off! Off!”
“Lucifer?” Jack asks her. Aunt Jerry grabs me and Jack at the same time. She’s the only one so far not too careful about my eye.
“I’m sorry, you guys,” she whispers to us. “I’m so, so sorry.”
“Get away!” my dad’s yelling at the dogs. “Get away!”
“You have to say ‘off,’ Dad,” Jack tells him, pulling free of Aunt Jerry, his face that half-and-half mask.
Mamie is too old to be a jumper. She lies right in the doorway between the kitchen and dining room, so you sort of have to leap over her. She’s almost the size of a small pony.
“God damn it,” my dad mutters when he spills some of his beer, stumbling over her. Mamie licks it up and then goes for his hand. He spills more beer trying to avoid her big head.
We sit down to eat almost right away. The table is covered with soups and salads and pumpkin breads and cranberry dishes and sweet-potato purees and two bowls of rice with flower petals garnishing the tops. We’ll never finish it all, and Aunt Jerry will take the leftover main courses and half the fresh desserts to a soup kitchen later tonight. She’ll make Jack and me come with her. She does that every year.
“There won’t be any lawsuits?” Uncle Buck asks while he carves the turkey.
“No,” my father says, shoving Nixon’s head out of his crotch. I hadn’t even thought about that.
“It wasn’t Anna’s fault,” my mother says. “It wasn’t anybody’s fault. It was an accident.”
“Not even a civil suit?” Uncle Buck asks. He puts the dark meat on one platter and the white meat on another. I pick up two big serving forks, waiting to add them when my uncle is done carving.
“No, Buck,” my mother says. She sounds mad. “There won’t be any lawsuits.”
“Lucky,” Buck says. “That’s lucky.”
“Stop that, Anna,” my father tells me.
“Stop what?” I ask him. Everybody looks at me. I don’t get it at first. Then I notice: The two forks are clacking together in my hand, making a fast, metallic rhythm, like a pair of castanets. I drop them onto the table and shove both hands in my lap. “Sorry,” I say.
I’m refilling the water pitchers in the kitchen halfway through the meal. Aunt Jerry and my mother are pulling more bread out of the oven. It’s infused with some sort of garlic pumpkin flavor, and Uncle Buck won’t allow us to eat any that’s not warm.
“It’s called EMDR,” Aunt Jerry’s saying. “It’s a kind of therapy for trauma survivors. I really think you should try it for her.”
“For me?” I ask. “Are you talking about me?” Am I a trauma survivor?
“Get away!” I hear my father yelling.
“Off, Lucifer!” Uncle Buck and Jack yell right after that. If I hadn’t just been called a trauma survivor, I’d laugh.
“Dad doesn’t want me in therapy,” I tell them.
“Your father is clueless,” Aunt Jerry says, annoyed.
“Jerry,” my mom goes. “You don’t have to—”
“Just look at her,” Aunt Jerry tells my mother. “Look at her!”
My mother looks at me. Aunt Jerry looks at me. I wonder if this is how the dogs feel when Jerry goes to pick one out.
What do they see?
Lucifer comes with us in the car. Everybody else stays home. Uncle Buck will get the desserts ready—the ones we haven’t taken along with the leftovers—while my parents moan about how sick they feel from eating so much.
“So, how have you been really?” Aunt Jerry asks Jack.
He shakes his head. “I don’t know. You should ask how Anna’s been.”
“It’s obvious how Anna is,” Jerry says. “You. You’re less obvious.”
“He’s sad,” I say.
“Shut up,” he tells me, but not mean.
Lucifer is a mutt. He’s small and energetic. He keeps trying to lick our faces. He wiggles from the front to the backseat, back and forth, first to me, then to Jack, then to me. If I’d been prepared for Lucifer, I’d have dug up my eye shield.
“And how have the two of you been together?” Jerry asks. She’s my mom’s older sister, but she’s different from my mother. She gets right to the point. She doesn’t let things go. She reminds me a little bit of Ellen’s mom, actually, only not so stylish. To be honest, with her short hair and boxy body and something about her skin, she sort of looks like a man.
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“I think you know what I mean,” she says. I glance at Jack. He’s staring out the window.
“You mean that I killed his girlfriend,” I tell Aunt Jerry.
“Shut up,” Jack tells the window.
“That’s not exactly what I mean,” she goes. “And that’s not exactly the truth of it either.” She glances at me in her rearview.
Lucifer leaps from Jack’s lap back to mine.
“Let me tell you what I wish for you,” Jerry says after Jack and I stay quiet. She pulls into the Salvation Army parking lot. “I wish that when you’re the ages of your mom and me, you see each other more than Thanksgiving and Christmas each year. I hope that you talk to each other a lot, about real things, the things that matter, and that you’re involved in the lives of each other’s children.” It’s embarrassing. How serious she’s being. How … I don’t know. Earnest.
Lucifer’s on her lap now, snuggling in, even though we’re all about to get out of the car. Jack glances back at me. His face is red.
“Siblings should be friends,” Aunt Jerry says. “The two of you, especially, should be friends.” Why us especially?
“Okay,” Jack says.
“Okay,” I say. I think we both just want her to stop.
“You didn’t kill Cameron,” Jack tells me suddenly, twisting all the way around from the front seat to see me.
“Yes, I did,” I tell him back.
“No, you didn’t,” he says.
“Yes, I did.”
“Stop it,” Aunt Jerry says. “We have to bring the food in.”
So we stop.
• • •
Back at the house, in front of the dessert spread, with steaming cups of coffee and cappuccino and exotic teas, Uncle Buck doesn’t let us dig in until we say what we’re thankful for. We do it that way every year. Nothing before the main meal. No prayers or toasts or anything. Thanks always come just before dessert. It’s mandatory. Uncle Buck tells my dad to begin. My father puts his palms on the table and looks around at all of us.
“Get away!” he yells when Lucifer tries to climb on his lap.
“Off!” Uncle Buck pulls Lucifer back by the collar. My dad takes a deep breath. The vein in his forehead s
tarts pulsing.
“Well,” he says. “We have a lot to be thankful for this …,” and then he stops talking. He looks at me and Jack, and he tries to say something, only instead his face crunches inward and goes pink. He turns to my mother and makes a snorting sound, and then he looks at me and Jack again, and he shakes his head, and he stares at the middle of the table, and he goes, in this awful, high-pitched voice, “I can’t.” And he just sits there, shaking and then crying, while we watch, frozen, and Mamie lurches to her feet from the foot of his chair and whines and starts to lick his face, and Uncle Buck yanks her away, and it’s almost as bad as the screaming, stopped.
17
“YOU HAVE SOMETHING CALLED POST-TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER,” the therapist tells me. Her name is Frances. She’s about my mom’s age, and she’s got a lot of freckles, which are sort of cute and funny-looking at the same time.
“Nightmares, startle response, panic attacks, inability to concentrate, avoidance behaviors.”
“Avoidance, like avoiding driving?”
She nods. “Those can all be symptoms of PTSD.”
“Did you buy that at Cinnamon Toast?” I ask her. She looks down at her flowing clothes in muted colors.
“Uh …,” she goes.
“My best friend’s mom owns that store,” I say. “Ellen. The one who was in the car with me.”
“Oh,” Frances says.
It’s the third time I’ve seen Frances in two weeks. My parents have seen her once, together.
“How come Ellen doesn’t have post-traumatic stress whatever?”
“Disorder,” Frances reminds me. “PTSD. She might have it. But I don’t know Ellen, so I couldn’t say.”
It’s not that I don’t like Frances. She’s okay. It’s that I’m embarrassed about being in therapy.
“It means I’m crazy, right?” I say. “Jack and Ellen think so. They think I’m completely and totally insane.”
“Do you think you’re insane?” Frances asks.
“I don’t think most sixteen-year-olds go around feeling like they’re going to die from heart attacks every time they get near a steering wheel,” I say. Not to mention shaking practically all the time and nightmares every single night.
“Actually,” Frances tells me, “in your case that’s a normal reaction to an abnormal life experience.”