We Contain Multitudes

by Sarah Henstra

  And the very first thought in my head, looking at my pathetic pile of crap sitting there like some sad suburban garage sale and knowing exactly what it meant, was finally. I mean I guess I’ve been waiting for this for a while.

  That’s pretty much all I had time to think—finally—because one second later Uncle Vik and my mom are standing in the doorway together like they’ve both been watching from the living room window waiting for me to walk up the sidewalk. Uncle Vik comes out onto the driveway, and surprise: He’s sober for a change. Completely calm and relaxed. He says that he never wants to see my face again. That this isn’t my home anymore, from this day forth. He uses those exact words: “From this day forth, this is not your home.” Like he’s trying to be official about it or something. Like it’s binding now.

  I can see my mom has definitely been crying, but she isn’t at the moment. She’s just standing quietly beside Viktor looking at her arms, which are folded across herself as if she’s worried I might do something to her. Uncle Vik hands me a piece of paper. Because of all the formality in his speech I’m half expecting it to be a restraining order or something. But it’s just a letter. One of my letters to you, one I hadn’t finished writing and had left in my desk drawer.

  I’m embarrassed to admit this, but it was a poem I was working on. A love poem to you actually. I guess it’s sort of funny, now that I’m thinking back on the whole thing. It’s funny because I’d addressed your full name on the back of the page like Khang taught us to do for the box at school. Jonathan Hopkirk. I mean if I hadn’t addressed it like that, they might have assumed “Jo” was some girl. But it was a fairly erotic sort of poem, and I might have mentioned some gender-specific body parts.

  I can’t go back and check, because Uncle Vik took the poem out of my hand again. He gave me just long enough to recognize it as mine and then snatched it back quickly, like it was evidence he had to protect. Which is also pretty funny, I mean in a twisted, vomit-inducing sort of way, to imagine Viktor Kurlansky reading something like that. It’s funny to think that of everything, it’s the fact that I was writing a poem in the first place that probably horrified him the most.

  I called Bron. I mean at least she knows the truth about me and you, and about me and Uncle Viktor, so I didn’t have to explain everything from scratch. She brought the Escalade and helped load all my stuff into the back. Viktor stood there not helping, and Bron somehow miraculously didn’t try to talk to him.

  My mom went back in the house, but she came outside halfway through and put this box on the back seat. It had some textbooks but also all your letters, Jo. I’d hidden them in a shoebox in the bottom of that other box and kept the whole thing in the bottom of my closet. By bringing that box out separately, my mom was telling me she’d found your letters and read enough of them to know exactly what they meant. Also that she hadn’t shown them to my uncle, but that she knew everything Viktor knew, plus more. And most of all that she agreed with his decision to disown me from the family.

  By the way I am really sorry about your letters. About letting them be discovered. I mean I thought they were hidden safely enough. To be honest I didn’t think my mom cared enough to snoop through my boxes, let alone read anything. But she’d probably spent all day packing up my stuff so nothing would break when he tossed it onto the lawn. Maybe she had some last-minute curiosity, or something.

  It stung a bit when Uncle Vik looked at me like something stuck to the tire of his truck. I’m aware this makes me extremely pathetic, but it’s the truth. I’m used to getting rage from him. To seeing him red-faced and out-of-his-mind angry. It might not be kindness but it’s something, some passion. Like he cares enough to get that angry with me, at least. But today I could see in his eyes that he’d realized I was never worth his time in the first place. He’d written me off.

  It stung a bit, but I have to say it stung more with my mom. She didn’t meet my eyes once, not even when she put that box on the back seat. And all she said was, “It’s better this way.”

  I said, “Mom.”

  But she only repeated that one statement: “It’s better this way.”

  The second we pulled out of the driveway, Bron started bawling so hard she could barely even get the Escalade out of reverse. I had to make her stop at the end of the street so she could pull herself together. I checked inside the shoebox, and guess what the top letter was? It was that one you mailed directly to my house that time, just before Christmas. I never received that letter, Jo, so I assumed it got lost in the mail, but the envelope was open, so Mom obviously read it. For all I know she found my hiding place way back then and has been reading every single letter you’ve written.

  So I’m at Bron’s house. For now. Her parents are gone until Wednesday next week. Her brothers are throwing a big Friday the 13th party tonight, and a bunch of Lincoln people are coming too.

  I’ve had a couple of beers with Bron already. She has now decided that getting kicked out of the house is the best thing that ever happened to me. “This is going to be your freedom party,” she says. “The first-day-of-the-rest-of-your-life party. You’re out, Kurl, in every sense of the word. Call Jo; get him over here! You’re free. You can both be free!”

  But I’m not calling you, Jo, obviously. It’s not just because we’ve broken up. It’s that I can’t see it like Bron sees it. I don’t feel anything like freedom. When she said “You’re out, Kurl,” I felt sick. I actually left the den and went to the bathroom because I thought I might vomit. She meant out as in openly gay, no more secrets, live your best life et cetera. But I just heard out as in out in the cold. Homeless.

  Ironic isn’t it? I’m finally out of that hellhole and now I’m homesick for it.

  Sincerely,

  AK

  Friday, May 13, 7 p.m.

  Dear Kurl,

  As I told you, I can’t write about this sort of thing anymore. I can no longer narrate my own humiliation as though I’m the lovable antihero of some TV series. So why am I propped here on my elbow making attempt after pathetic attempt, and crossing everything out and crumpling up the pages and throwing them under the sofa? Why do I feel such an urgent need to record what happened to me after school?

  I was riding Nelly home, and Liam VanSyke’s car came up and tried to sideswipe me. To be clear, Liam did it, using his car as his instrument of destruction (no point blaming the car itself). The back window was open, and Dowell was hanging out with both arms extended, and I could hear Maya from the front passenger seat saying, “Closer.”

  Dowell got hold of my hair and spat on my cheek.

  “Pull him right into the car,” Maya ordered. But Liam swerved, and Dowell lost his grip. I nearly went down against the curb but managed to veer up onto the sidewalk in front of China King.

  “You little rat!” Maya screamed. “You’re dead! You’re dead!” Liam pulled the car into the driveway next to the restaurant, and all three of them jumped out. I remembered that the chain-link fence was peeled back at the far end of the parking lot, so I headed toward the gap. But I should have thought of the fact that if anyone knew all the secret ways into Cherry Valley, it would be these three. They’re probably the ones who cut the fence in the first place.

  They were right behind me, running along the lip of the ravine behind my bike. And they were furious. I deduced from the appellation “little rat” that one of the locker-incident bystanders—possibly the girl whose voice I’d heard telling them to stop—had actually followed through and told a teacher about what she’d witnessed. Maya was keeping up with Dowell and Liam—she is fast for someone so short—and calling me a variety of colorful names. No worries about going too far in choice of homophobic terminology, here in the wilderness. No worries about going too far with physical retribution, either. The only cogent thought that penetrated my fog of panic at being trapped like that was, You have wheels; they don’t. And so I turned my bike and headed straight down the ravine wall.

  There was a bit of loose dirt and leaf stuff
at the top, so my wheels slid a few feet before they started to roll. And then I just shot straight down. I must have swerved around trees. I must have been searching ahead for an open route. I must have stood on my pedals and taken the jolts with my knees. I must have done these things, or I would have fallen long before I did, finally, fall. I am no mountain biker, and as you know Nelly is no trail bike. But for a few dozen seconds I must have been doing all the things mountain bikers do.

  Inevitably, a tree intercepted me. I think it was just a small one, a storm-blown sapling arched diagonally across my way. But it caught my right handlebar and turned me perpendicular to the slope, and I flipped over and slid with Nelly for what felt like the same distance I’d coasted. I could still hear them above me, whooping at one another. I thought they must be coming down. Maybe there was a path I hadn’t seen, or even stairs somewhere nearby. I’d landed across Nelly chest-first, and I could hardly breathe, but I pulled the bike upright and jumped onto the seat and steered downhill again.

  Luckily I was nearly at the bottom already. I came out suddenly at the creek and biked along the bank where the retaining wall is flat—you know that side with the chicken-wire blocks filled with gravel? I don’t know how you ever managed to fish Nelly out, Kurl. The wall on that side is high and flat, and the other side is sheer muck. Now that I’ve seen that creek again, recalling how you did that for me makes my chest start to ache even more savagely.

  It’s an utter mystery to me how I was able to bike so fast along that wall and not fall into the creek. Sheer adrenaline, perhaps? It felt good, Kurl. It felt like there was no room for mistakes. Looking back, of course, the whole thing was a mistake. I should have simply abandoned Nelly in the parking lot and headed into the China King. For that matter I could have wheeled Nelly into the restaurant with me. They wouldn’t have kicked me out if I told them the truth. One day I will stand at the top of that gully and look over its precipice and feel nauseated at the thought of the stunt I pulled this afternoon. But at that particular moment, racing alongside the creek, it felt good. I could just keep going, I thought. This creek will lead me right out of town.

  Somehow, eventually, I made it home. One whole side of my ribs had turned fantastically purple. I got a few handfuls of ice from the freezer and put them in a plastic bag and wrapped it in a dish towel and lay back on the couch with the bag on my chest.

  It’s an awkward writing position, but I wanted to get this down. For some reason having everything on paper seems more important than ever. Maybe it’s due to the fact that you tried to break up with me in that last letter. I told you that I refuse your breakup, but in the meantime—until we have an opportunity to work things out face-to-face—I feel a vital need to document everything, to keep the record straight.

  Yours,

  Jo

  Saturday, May 14

  Dear Kurl,

  I must have fallen asleep on the couch last night just after tucking that last letter in my pocket. When I woke up, my chest was throbbing harder than before. Lyle walked into the living room holding a glass of whiskey, and when he switched the light on and saw me lying there, he sloshed some of it out of the glass. “Jesus Christ, Jonathan!” he said.

  “Sorry. I fell asleep,” I said. I got up on one elbow. “What happened to your face?” There was a bruise on Lyle’s cheek, right next to his nose, with a bloody scratch in the middle of it. When he sat down in the chair opposite me, I saw that the knuckles of the hand he was holding the glass with were all red and scratched, too. I sat up. “Did you get in a fistfight?”

  “A brief one, yes,” Lyle said. “What? Is that funny or something?”

  I pulled my mouth out of its smile. “No. It’s just… sort of shocking. Who did you fight with?”

  “The owner of the Ace,” he said.

  “Axel?”

  Lyle made a noise in his throat. “Don’t tell me you’ve been going there, too?”

  “No, I just know who he is,” I said, and my heart started to pound at the possibility of betraying Shayna by accident. Just because Lyle knew my sister had been there didn’t mean he knew everything.

  But he did know everything, apparently. “Did you know that asswipe has been letting your sister perform?” Lyle said. “Putting her onstage! Giving her drinks, and God knows what else!”

  “How did you find out?”

  “Bronwyn called me,” he said. “She said she thought I should maybe go and ‘check in on her, sometime.’ Like it was no big deal. Like maybe one day I’d be like, ‘You know what, I think I’ll just go swing by the Ace today for a casual beer or two.’”

  “So did you bring Shayna home?” I said.

  “I should call the police, is what I should do.” Lyle took an enormous swig of his drink. His hand was shaking. “That son of a bitch.”

  “Lyle,” I said. I didn’t think I’d ever seen my father so upset.

  “That slimy, shit-sucking son of a bitch!”

  “Lyle!”

  He looked at me. “What? I’m sorry.”

  “Is Shayna here? Did you bring her home?”

  “She wanted to go to Bronwyn’s house; there’s some kind of party there tonight.” He sighed. “She was pretty upset with me.”

  “I can imagine,” I said.

  Lyle drained his whiskey and then just sat there, staring at the carpet and rattling his ice round and round in his glass.

  I went into the kitchen and drank some water. My ribs were a volcano of pain. It didn’t seem like the right time to tell my father about my afternoon adventure, though.

  I lifted my shirt and marveled at the way the bruising had ripened to an Italian-eggplant purple. Then I fished around in the vitamin drawer until I found the bottle of Percocets from when Lyle threw his back out last winter. Take 1–2 tablets by mouth every 4–6 hours as needed, it said. I swallowed two pills and put the bottle in my pocket.

  “I think maybe I should go back and get her,” Lyle said, when I returned to the living room.

  “Crash Bron’s party, you mean? That doesn’t sound like the best plan to me,” I said. “Here”—I held out the baggie I’d filled with fresh ice—“put this on your face.”

  “Thanks,” he said. “It’s just… I said some things to Shayna in the car. I told her some things about your mother.”

  “What things?”

  “Well, she heard some things, when I was arguing with Axel, so I had to say something. I had to tell her the truth.” Lyle had lifted the ice pack to his damaged cheek for only the briefest of moments; now it sat forgotten on the arm of his chair.

  I could tell that he’d already decided to tell me whatever he’d told my sister, and I had the sudden impulse to yell, “No, wait!” When I asked myself what I wanted him to wait for, the answer was for my ribs to stop hurting. Please, Lyle, would you mind just holding off with your big confession until these pills kick in? Naturally I didn’t say anything, but I felt all the muscles in my body tighten a little, all at the same time, as if I were bracing for impact.

  “Jonathan.” Lyle looked me in the face a moment, but then his eyes skated sideways to the cushion next to me. “The truth is, Raphael had a drug problem. A very serious one.” He shot me a quick glance and looked away again. “And Axel Duncan was her dealer. He took a lot of her money—our money. He took… Well, he took everything. He took everything from her.”

  Lyle stood up abruptly and stalked toward the hall. “I have to go get Shayna.”

  “Dad!” It was the same part of me that had wanted to yell, “No, wait!” a moment ago.

  It stopped him. He turned around.

  I wanted to ask him more about Raphael, but instead I said, “How about if I go to the party instead? You drive me there, and I’ll make sure Shayna is okay.”

  Lyle rubbed a hand over his face and winced when his palm hit the bruised part.

  “Okay?” I said.

  “Okay,” he said, and sighed. “Okay, that’s a good idea. Are you sure?”

  “S
ure,” I said.

  Yours,

  Jo

  Saturday, May 14

  Dear Little Jo,

  You would think I’d have learned from Uncle Viktor that drinking doesn’t make anything better. You’d think that particular lesson would be deep in my bones by now, or at least scarred into my skin. Just because you’re wasted enough to forget what’s wrong doesn’t make you any less upset.

  We were half in the bag last night, Bron and me, by the time Shayna showed up. I mean we’d been drinking since way before the party started, and it was now, what—10 p.m.? 11?—when she came stomping into the house shouting for Bron.

  “You bitch. You bitch,” she kept saying. Yelling over the music. “I can’t believe you’d actually tell Lyle, you stupid bitch!” Shayna was slurring—pretty drunk herself, probably. She wore a lacy top that left her stomach bare and a pair of those super-short cutoffs, the kind where the front-pocket linings actually stick out lower than the fringe. Thick black eyeliner. Huge silver hoops in her ears.

  And Bron was trying to act all reasonable and calm. You know how she puts on that whole I’m-the-bigger-person-here act. “I did it for you, Shay. It was an intervention. You’ll thank me, I promise.” Et cetera. Which just made Shayna crazier.

  The angry base of disjointed friendship is what Walt calls it somewhere. I had no idea what they were arguing about. To tell you the truth I didn’t much care. I just sat back on the sofa. I lifted my half-empty beer bottle and looked at the two of them through the glass. It was one of those expensive beers the Otulah-Tierneys drink, a green bottle with the brand name etched on the glass instead of a label. I watched their fight through the glass. Bron and Shayna were stretched and blurry and smaller than in real life.