Down City

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by Leah Carroll


  Dad has some paper plates in his cabinet and a bottle of Jameson. The silverware drawer is stuffed with the little plastic packets of soy sauce and spicy mustard from the Chinese restaurant. There’s a lemon in the fridge and some more moldering condiments. On the wall by the front door a brand-new mountain bike is suspended by two hooks. I can’t imagine Dad riding through the city on it and it doesn’t look as if it has ever been used. He’d used the stationary bike all the time back at home, but this fancy chrome-and-fluorescent thing seems like an impulse purchase that didn’t pan out. I scan the books in his small bookcase, pulling out Kay Redfield Jamison’s Touched with Fire, and curl up under the comforter with it, falling asleep after a few pages detailing Sylvia Plath’s madness and urge to create. I prefer Anne Sexton’s poetry, but Plath’s mental illness feels so much more urgent and real. I wonder if she might be my favorite poet after all.

  Over the next week Dad and I develop a routine. We go to the coffee shop in Providence where he has recently taken me for my first espresso, and we buy cappuccinos, drinking them as he drives me to school in the mornings. I feel very sophisticated. At night I take the city bus into Providence and Dad picks me up on Thayer Street. We eat pizza and Thai food. We eat Chinese from the restaurant around the corner where Dad places all his orders under the name Mr. White, an homage to the character from Reservoir Dogs, and where the woman who rings us up laughs and points at his hair. “Mr. White!” she says.

  One night Dad takes me into a small green bar, like the ones he’d taken me to as a kid, called Blake’s. He promises the burgers are the best. When we walk in everyone swivels around and greets him, clapping him on the back. Dad acknowledges them all with a nod and walks silently back to a corner table. I notice that he leaves most of his food on the plate every time we eat.

  He talks about looking for a two-bedroom apartment so that I can have a room. We talk some more about going to school for photography. I don’t tell him about my conversation with the guidance counselor. There are moments when I think maybe it can work, when I wonder why I’d gone with Ann-Marie in the first place, like the afternoon we speed around Providence from one florist shop to another trying to find a perfect red rose to photograph before we lose the light of sunset. But there are other moments, like the time he doesn’t pick me up from Thayer Street, and I have to make my way through the unfamiliar streets of Providence to his house, that I feel sick with dread. When I finally get there I find him asleep on the couch, the TV muted. He stares at me in the doorway, his eyes blank.

  “I’m starving,” I tell him. “Can we order a pizza?”

  “Jesus Christ, Leah,” he says. “I can’t afford for us to eat out every fucking night, you know.”

  That night, playing around with the remote control, I accidentally eject a video from the VCR. It’s a porno called Summer Camp Sluts.

  A few nights later Dad picks me up and drops me off in front of his building telling me he’ll be back later on. I watch TV and talk on the phone to Alex, telling her how much I’m dying for a cigarette even though I’m not really. I go on the computer in Dad’s room, dialing up his modem to connect to the Internet, but I can’t find anything interesting to read. I don’t really get what’s so exciting about the whole Internet thing. Unless you know what site you want to get to it’s mostly just the same thing over and over. I won’t have an email account for another two years. Finally, I turn off the light and watch TV in the darkness. I turn the volume up loud enough so I can’t hear the rush of cars on the highway near the apartment. The sound unnerves me.

  From downstairs there’s a large bang. I jump up terrified, thinking someone has broken into the house. Then I hear Dad calling my name. I freeze, too afraid of what I might see if I open the door, but he keeps calling for me and I’m afraid the neighbors will come out or call the police on him. I walk out onto the back stairway.

  “Dad?” I call.

  “Leah,” he says. “Leah, Leah…” I walk down a flight of stairs and find him sprawled across the landing. He has a gash on his forehead and has peed his pants. I’m sure everyone in the building will be able to smell the urine and whiskey emanating from his body in waves, and I want to save him from the embarrassment, but I stand there, afraid to get any closer.

  “Leah,” he says, “I need your help.”

  Panicked again that somebody might call the police on us, I reach out my hand. He grabs it and, trying to pull himself up, all six foot two and two hundred pounds of him, he pulls me down instead. I fall hard on my knee on the landing, missing two steps.

  “Dad!” I hiss. “Dad, get the fuck up. Get up!” I don’t know where it comes from. I’ve never talked to him like that. Something about it registers with him too, because he hauls himself into a standing position and sways back and forth up the stairs. I stand behind him trying to make sure that he doesn’t fall, and that I don’t get crushed if he does. When we get into the apartment he walks into his room and throws himself down on the bed. I go to the opposite side of the apartment, underneath the suspended mountain bike, and sit in the corner trying to figure out what to do. Should I leave? Should I make sure his head is okay?

  Then he calls my name again. I ignore it, sure he will just pass out if I sit there long enough and make myself small enough in the corner. But he doesn’t stop.

  “Leah,” he yells, “come in here.”

  I stand up and yell back. “No,” I say. “I’m not coming in there. Go to sleep.” I pace around the kitchen, looking out the casement windows, absolutely unsure of what to do. I can’t call Ann-Marie. I can’t retreat to my room. I think about locking myself in the bathroom. Dad yells for me again. “Leah,” he says. “I’m your dad.” His voice breaks and he sobs like a child.

  I put on my fake-fur coat, grab my backpack, and flee out the front door. Outside the night has turned frigid and I don’t have gloves or a hat. I run down Atwells Avenue trying to keep from crying, so I can look tough on the city streets. In front of me are the blinking triple X’s of the Columbus Theatre. I know from there it isn’t far to Kennedy Plaza, the bus depot. I’m not sure what I will do when I get there but I know I can never, ever go back to Dad’s apartment. I take the bus to Barrington and when I get there I call Reba from a pay phone. She and her mom pick me up at the bus stop in their blue mini van. We’re silent during the short drive to Reba’s house. I try to stifle tears and I can tell they feel embarrassed for me. Reba gets out the passenger-side door, and when it closes her mom turns to me and says, “You can stay here as long as you need to.”

  REBA IS DOING her senior year at Phillips Exeter, which means that I can stay in her big drafty room while she’s away in New Hampshire after the winter break ends. Her family has books lining the walls and strewn over every surface. I try mostly to stay out of their way and read constantly. I read an illustrated biography of Frida Kahlo, marveling at her life and her vivid paintings. I read The Great Gatsby and Jane Eyre. I read The Virgin Suicides because I’m intrigued by the name and cover, and am blown away by its style and voice.

  Reba’s little sister is in Israel so I have the top floor—two bedrooms and a little bathroom with a stand-up shower—to myself. I creep quietly into Reba’s sister’s room and help myself to the clothes that hang there. I tell myself it’s fine if I wear them just once and then hang them back up. But soon I’ve raided nearly all of her closet, filled with things from the mall that I’d never have been able to make or afford.

  When Reba comes home one weekend she confronts me about it. “My mom says you’re stealing Debbie’s clothes.” I’m mortified, both because it’s true, and because I thought I had been getting away with it. I wonder how long her mom had noticed without saying anything, and how strange I must have seemed skulking around upstairs walking between bedrooms on the ancient squeaking hardwood floors. My thievery combined with the fact that at Reba’s house I have a curfew causes me to slink back to Ann-Marie. She takes me back. She doesn’t ask what happened at Dad’s house, and I
don’t tell her.

  Back in the apartment in Barrington, I fret endlessly about what will happen when high school is over and everyone leaves. One day, driving around in Alex’s car, another friend tells me that his mother, who works in a bank, had come across an account in my name, but couldn’t tell him anything more about it. She’d asked him to mention it to me. We drive to his house, where his mom tells me there is a trust fund set up in my name by the Rhode Island victims defense fund. If that’s the case, and I have a little money, I can get emancipated. What would happen next, I’m not sure. Maybe I’ll get a job at the library. Or at a fancy coffee shop like the one Dad took me to in Providence. The next morning I ask Ann-Marie about the trust fund. She’s at the table eating a buttered English muffin and sipping from a lipstick-stained mug of coffee.

  “Well you did have a trust fund,” she says. “But you don’t anymore. Your grandparents sued the state after the whole thing with your mom. That’s where the money came from.”

  “Where is it now?” I ask.

  “It went to pay off your dad’s credit cards.”

  I know that Dad has hundreds of thousands of dollars in credit card debt. He buys compulsively, things like that mountain bike, with no intention of ever paying it back.

  “How much was it for?” I ask.

  Ann-Marie puts down her coffee mug. “It was for ten thousand dollars, but it doesn’t really matter now because there is none of it left.”

  I’m shocked. Ten thousand dollars seems like an impossible amount of money to me. Enough I’m sure, to get my own apartment. Enough to buy a car for when Alex is in college and can no longer drive me around.

  “I’m not going to graduate,” I blurt out.

  “So what are you going to do?” She cups one hand beneath the table and sweeps some crumbs into it, sprinkling them onto her plate.

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  “Maybe you should call your Aunt Sandy,” she says. “Maybe she and your grandma will help you. You can’t stay here if you’re not in school.”

  I still see my grandparents and my Aunt Sandy on holidays and speak to them on the phone, but I can’t imagine how they will help me. I’ve been so distant from them the last few years. My purple hair and nose ring made them worried I was turning into someone like my mom. Someone who might get in trouble. I’m not able to explain to them that I really only want to look bad, not be bad. I want to be a famous poet someday and need to be sharp to accomplish that goal. Still, despite all the time that has gone by, when I call my aunt I’m only a few words into my explanation of the situation before she sorts it out.

  “You’ll live here,” she says. “Grammy can help us out with bills and stuff. You have to take the GED, I guess. And you can go to community college. It’s right up the street.”

  I burst into hysterical, hiccuping tears.

  I hadn’t realized how much I’ve wanted someone to step in and just make a decision for me.

  Because I’m only seventeen, I have to wait for the rest of my high school class to graduate before I can take the GED. I’m ashamed and keep it secret, still showing up to school but mostly just wandering the hallways once I’m there. I’m terrified everything about me will be exposed if I’m a high school dropout: I’m trash, an imposter in this quaint little town. I take and pass the GED in time for the fall semester of 1998. I’ll be seventeen, turning eighteen that October.

  That summer I move in with my aunt, uncle, and my sweet, hyperactive nine-year-old cousin. As much as I’d whined about having to babysit Taylor, I miss her like crazy. When I see a little girl on TV my heart aches. I apply for jobs all over the place and waiting to hear back I stay out all day on the back porch. I swim short, circular laps in the above-ground pool and read books from the Cranston Public Library.

  In the evenings Alex or Reba drive from Barrington to Cranston to pick me up. We know a boy whose parents have taken an extended vacation and left him in charge of the enormous house perched on the edge of the bay. A group of us take it over, sleeping on the couches and in his parents’ bedroom and sometimes on the back lawn by the water. We trip on mushrooms and drink grappa pilfered from the liquor cabinet out of juice glasses and talk about where we will all be in the fall. I spend long sweltering nights in a spare attic bedroom, a giant box fan propped up by the twin bed. Late at night, with no TV to distract me, and not wanting to wake anyone else in the house, I think about Dad and about my mom, and where my life is going and if I have any control over it at all.

  I call Dad for the first time since my stay with him in the winter to let him know I’ve gotten my GED. “I’ve got something I want to give you,” he says. We arrange for him to come by Aunty Sandy’s house. I hang his photos around the little basement room I have at my aunt’s. Anytime I hear about a drunk driving accident, on the news or in the paper, I pay special attention, worried it’s him.

  When Dad pulls into the driveway I go outside to meet him. He wears shorts and tennis shoes without socks and his ankles are red and swollen over the side of the sneakers. He carries his large camera bag and his tripod.

  “Here,” he says. “I want you to have these.” He rolls the tripod onto the grass and lifts the bag off his shoulder.

  “What does that mean?” I ask. I interpret his gesture as a way to make me feel guilty for having spurned him. It’s like he wants me to think he’s giving me all the stuff that matters to him most because he won’t be around for long. I hate that he manipulates me so easily. I try to tell myself it isn’t my fault he is alone now. But inside I don’t really believe it. He’s my dad. I think of being small and riding on his shoulders through the grocery store. I think of being sick and how he’d hold my hair back while I vomited. I’d seen him at his worst and abandoned him. But I can’t make any of these thoughts into words.

  “Nothing. I’m just going to be leaving for a while. I thought you’d want this stuff.”

  Though leaving is something he’s threatened to do before—to Boston to work for the Globe, to Florida to go in with a buddy on a restaurant he’s starting—I still panic a little when he says it. What if I really never see him again? But somehow I worry more that he might not leave. That he’ll stay in Rhode Island and eventually I’ll have to go back to that apartment and when I get there he’ll be bleeding, or sick, or worse.

  “What did he want?” asks my aunt once he’s driven away.

  “He said he’s going away and he doesn’t need this stuff,” I say, lugging the heavy bag filled with lenses and filters and flashes into the house.

  “What does that mean?” she asks.

  “He said he got offered a job at the Globe, you know. He might take it,” I lie.

  THAT FALL I begin classes at the Community College of Rhode Island. I cash in ten years’ worth of premature savings bonds Ann-Marie’s parents have been giving me for my birthdays since childhood. A friend is driving across the country in a van, and so I pay her three hundred dollars for her 1987 Ford Escort. I’m obsessed with the car. It has vinyl seats and bald tires and no radio. I put a boom box in the passenger side and perfect my stick shift, driving around for hours singing at the top of my lungs.

  With the Escort, I have freedom. I can go wherever I want, whenever I want. The only real problem is that I don’t have anywhere to go. For the first time that I can remember I’m so lonely that it feels like I exist in a deep, dark spreading shadow. I miss Taylor. I miss my dad, whom I can almost never get on the phone and whom I’m worried about even more since he gave me his camera stuff. When I do get him, we only talk for just a few minutes before one of us makes an excuse to hang up.

  One night, driving around aimlessly, I decide to visit Dad at the bar. When I walk in he’s involved in what looks like a deep conversation with another patron, a man who looks remarkably like him. I tap him on the shoulder and register the surprise in his eyes when he sees me.

  “Leah, this is Billy Temple,” he says as he stands up. “Billy, this is my daughter.” The man shak
es my hand and smiles, like he knows me.

  I tell Dad about my car and we go out to the parking lot to have a look. Downtown Providence on a weekday night is ghostly quiet. The brick buildings around the lot still bear the fading painted signs of the factories and department stores they had once been. Someone nearby, but out of sight, smashes a glass bottle and the sound echoes.

  “Five-speed?” asks Dad.

  “Of course,” I say.

  “I taught you well,” he says, then squeezes my shoulder lightly and walks back into the bar.

  A few weeks later I try calling his apartment and find the number is disconnected. For the next three nights I call and call, getting the same operator’s message each time. Finally I call the bar.

  “He’s not in tonight,” says the bartender. I think I might have to explain what he looks like, but as soon as I say Kevin Carroll the man knows who I’m talking about. “But he was here last night. Have you tried Murphy’s?” I don’t call Murphy’s. It’s enough to know they’ve seen him recently.

  In my composition class at the Community College of Rhode Island, I write a free-write exercise about my dad. I write about how he was a Vietnam vet and the smartest person I know, but that sometimes I hate him. The teacher, a bearded, wild-haired man who insists we call him by his first name, Bob, hands back the papers, and then as everyone shuffles out of the room, he calls my name.

  “Your dad’s name isn’t Kevin, is it?” he asks.

  “It is,” I say. “How did you know?”

  “Your paper,” he says. “I used to work at the Journal. Still write for them sometimes. I read about a scary-smart guy, Vietnam vet, then saw your last name. Your dad is one of a kind. I was pretty sure it was him. So he’s not doing that great, I take it?”

 

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