thirty–six
I’m free, big deal. I’m still a liar. I feel like a liar; I feel like it’s written all over me—and it probably is. If Brady were here, he’d see it—and he’d launch into his give-the-people-what-they-want theory for the millionth time. People hear what they want to hear anyway, so you might as well do them the favor of telling them what they want to hear. Why not make their lives a little less painful?
“Not a moral issue, Jax,” he used to say. “Don’t sweat the small stuff.”
But I never could get the hang of it. God, I was doomed by the time I was four. Mom swears that for weeks after she took me to see Pinocchio, she nailed me every single time I lied to her because the second the false words came out of my mouth, my hand would move—as if to reach for my nose, to see if it had gotten longer. Now, having lied to Steph about Dad, the fact that he does get out of the hospital within the week and all my time and energy is taken up helping Kim get the house ready and settle him in seems like visible proof of my dishonesty.
It keeps me from writing the letter I promised Amanda I’d write, too. See. I’m lying even to myself. It gives me the excuse not to write it. I didn’t tell her about Steph that night on the phone because I wanted to feel good for a change. So now I’m back to writing and rewriting letters in my head, trying to figure out how to tell her what I did so that the way she feels about me won’t change.
I dream about her, always the same dream. We’re in Jamaica, building a sand castle. Amanda shows Kristin how to dig down to the wet sand and fill our Coke cups with it to make turrets. “Sugar sand” is what she calls the hot white sand on the top. It’s Amy’s job to sprinkle that onto the turrets Kristin makes. I make the fortress wall. Carefully, Amanda presses shells and pebbles all along the outside of it. With her fingernail, she carves out a door, and in the dream, we enter it, leaving the girls behind.
Inside, the castle is whitewashed, with thick wood beams and tapestries. Amanda is dressed in blue, the same color as the ocean: an old-fashioned gown with gold lacing up the front. She wears one of those tall, pointed hats, with a long gold scarf floating from it. She leads me up winding stairs, around and around to the roof of the castle, so high that we’re caught in the clouds.
Then I’m in bed with her in my old room. Our old house. We’re sleeping at first, side by side, just our hands touching, like two figures on a medieval tomb. But the sun coming through the window is so hot that we begin to melt into each other. My hands are her hands, my legs are her legs, my heart is her heart. The whole world seems to be singing.
And suddenly we’re on the beach again, ablaze, burning, our bodies human bodies again, aching, wanting, and this time I don’t stop touching her.
I jolt awake every time, breathing hard, terrified by what we’ve done—then just plain disgusted at myself when I get my bearings, reach down, and feel the stickiness at my groin. Is that all I can think about anymore? I want to call her up and say I’m sorry. For dreaming unworthy dreams, for breaking my promise to her. I want to say, “That night on the beach I wasn’t lying.”
Once I actually pick up the phone and dial her number. Then when she answers, I hold the receiver to my ear, speechless as a newt.
“Hello? Hello?” she says.
Click. She hangs up.
“Jackson!” my dad yells.
“Yo. Coming,” I yell back.
It’s just as well I didn’t say anything to Amanda, I think. I couldn’t have talked to her long anyhow, not with Dad needing me every ten seconds the way he does. Taking care of him is turning out to be a lot harder than I thought it would be, a real grind.
I go straight to his house after school, so Kim can get to work by four. Mom would laugh if she knew that it drives me crazy how messy Kim is. The first thing I do every day is clean. I wash the dirty dishes piled in the sink, scrub the bathroom basin, tidy the stuff around Dad’s hospital bed. It wouldn’t fit in his bedroom along with the huge water bed. It’s in the living room, where it takes up so much space that any little thing out of place seems like clutter.
“Leave some of that for Kim,” Dad always says. Like she’s actually going to come home and suddenly notice the house is a disaster when she didn’t notice it all day.
I say that I don’t mind. It’s my problem if a messy house gets on my nerves.
“Well, I mind,” he says. “Besides, if she’s cleaning the toilet she’s not screwing with my sanity, you know? She’s not in here treating me like I’m a goddamn brain-dead cripple.”
That gets him going on how she’s driving him crazy. “Women,” he says. “Stay away from them, pal.”
That’s when the depression hits me. It’s like an elevator falling, thudding into place at the bottom of my heart. Amanda. She’s sent me a few cards since we talked. Funny cards. Inside she writes things like “Hope your dad is getting better” or “Thinking of you.” I know why she doesn’t write more. She’s trying not to make a fool of herself. She’s waiting to hear from me before she says anything that really matters. I carry her letter folded up inside my wallet. I keep her cards in my school folder and take them out and look at them sometimes in class. I tell myself I’ll write to her. But I’m too tired, too stupid, too sick at heart. I just can’t.
Every time I see Mom, she says, “Honey, are you sure this isn’t too much for you?”
Laying a guilt trip on her is my best defense. Like, somebody’s got to do it. Or, I want to have this one last chance to live with Dad before I go to college. When she tries to talk me into spending some time with Kristin and Amy when they come visit, I say, “Don’t you think I have enough to deal with right now?” Like it’s my devotion to Dad that keeps me from seeing them rather than the fact that I can’t face Kristin, who’s probably written a dozen letters to Amanda by now and is bound to ask me why I didn’t write to her when I said I would. Or Amy, who’ll throw her arms around me and say, “Hey, Jackson, want to play?”
I can’t play. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to play again. Every evening I fix Dad dinner. We watch a movie together. Sometimes, if it’s nice outside, we take a walk up and down the block, him hobbling on his crutches. Kim comes home around eleven; that’s when I start on my homework.
I don’t know why it seems so weird doing calculus in that room with the faded Star Wars bedspreads. Maybe because when I’m in there I keep forgetting I’m not the kid I was when they were new. I never did homework in that room. It was a place I lived in on Saturdays—it was as if the room only existed on Saturdays. All the other days, when I was with Mom, it might as well have been as distant as the planets where Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader battled.
I try, but I can’t do homework there now. The calculus formulas blur, and I drift back to that other time. I fall asleep, dream Mom and Dad’s angry voices, and when I wake up I realize that it’s Kim and Dad I hear.
“Oz, you can’t. Let me help you.”
“Goddamn it, I don’t need help,” he says.
One night I hear her crying. I knock on the bedroom door. “Kim,” I say. “Don’t you see it’s important for Dad to do what he can for himself?”
“He can’t do the things he wants to do,” she says. “If he’d just calm down and let me help. If he weren’t so macho, he’d get better faster. It’s stupid. Can’t he see that?”
“He’s stubborn,” I say.
“Oh, really?” She closes her eyes for a long moment, presses her fingers to her temples. “Oh, I’m sorry, Jackson. What am I getting mad at you for? We’re in this together, aren’t we? We both love him, and he’s making both our lives miserable.” She gives a kind of feeble laugh. “You’re right. Make it easy on ourselves. Do it his way.”
Things get a little better when the cast comes off his arm and he can do an upper-body workout again. He says to hell with physical therapy; he’s going back to the gym where he ca
n get serious—which may be crazy, but it gives him the feeling he’s in charge. Now the first thing I do when I get to his house after school is to load him into the bus and drive him to The Peak. There, Kim and I help him maneuver into the few machines he’s able to use with both legs still in casts. I look away as he struggles to move the weights that are set sometimes at half or less than they were before the accident. I can’t keep myself from watching him in the mirror, though. Sweat forms in beads on his forehead. He grows pale. Sometimes his eyes blink with tears.
His pain exhausts me. I fall asleep on the bench at The Peak between sets, at school, in the kitchen waiting for water to boil, on the couch folding laundry, over my homework. It seems like the only time I don’t fall asleep is in bed. Dad’s taken to sleeping most of the day, napping for an hour or so around eleven when Kim comes home. About one in the morning, he’s ready to boogie.
It’s not like he keeps me awake. I’m lying on my bed, bug-eyed, anyhow. I hear the television playing low or the whisper of his earphones when he has the stereo turned on full blast. Sometimes I hear his crutches tapping from the living room to the bathroom to the kitchen. Sometimes they tap into the bedroom where Kim is sleeping and then not sleeping. I hear their voices, their laughter when he thunks down on the bed beside her. They may be driving each other insane, but it’s pretty clear from the noise coming out of the bedroom that it hasn’t ruined their sex life. God knows how they do it, but they manage. It’s embarrassing. When Dad taps out again, sometimes he’ll stand at my door. It’s closed, but I can feel him there, and I make myself curl into a sleeping position in case he opens it. I make myself breathe evenly.
I get up sometimes, and we talk or play cards. Maybe it’s the dead of night that makes him talk the way he does. About the way things were with Mom at the end, how he felt trapped, how he had to leave. About the way he’ll always feel about her, how there can never be another person like her—that’s why he’s always with flaky women, like Kim. Women who drive him so crazy that he’s glad when, finally, they leave.
I’ve known all Dad’s girlfriends, but since I’ve never lived with him, I’ve never lived through a whole cycle the way I have with Kim. She’s leaving. She knows; Dad knows. But the thing has to be played out. Most days now, she meets me halfway up the front walk near tears and gives me a blow-by-blow account of Dad’s latest harassment before she hurries off to work. I go in, and there’s Dad waiting to tell me his side of the story. It’s all stupid, petty crap for the most part. I don’t know what to do but listen. I’d talk to Mom about it, but I’m afraid she’d worry more than she’s already worrying about my living there. Dad seems to sense this, too, because when she comes by to bring us a casserole for dinner, which she does at least a couple of times a week, he’s on his best behavior. When I go over to her house, I make jokes about Kim and Dad. It’s like living in a soap opera, I tell her. The Young and the Injured.
It’s not until my report card arrives in the middle of March that she figures out what’s going on. Every grade has gone down at least one letter. “This is just not acceptable, Jackson,” she says when I stop by Saturday morning. “We need to talk. Though, to be fair, I have to take some of the blame myself. I let you take on too much responsibility for your dad. It’s got to stop.”
“I have not taken on too much responsibility,” I say. “Mom, I’m doing exactly what I need to do to take care of him.”
“You’re seventeen years old, Jackson. You’re not supposed to be taking care of anybody, let alone your parents.”
“Fine,” I say. “I’m seventeen. So what? Who’s going to do it if I don’t? You?”
It was a lousy thing to say. I should feel bad when she gives me a hurt look and turns away, but I don’t. I don’t feel bad about my grades either. I’ve already been accepted at IU. It doesn’t make a damn bit of difference what I do between now and August. I leave, slamming the door behind me.
Back at Dad’s house, Kim is crying. Dad’s hobbling around in the backyard. “Look at him,” she says. “I told him, ‘Oz, don’t go out there. It’s all muddy, the ground’s all slick and lumpy. You’re going to fall.’”
“He seems okay,” I say, peering out the window. Dad’s standing by the fence, yanking the chokeweed off it and throwing it in a heap on the grass.
“He hates yard work,” Kim says, crying harder. “He doesn’t care about those goddamn vines on the fence. He just wants to be out there because I think he shouldn’t be.” Her face is red and splotchy, her hair a mess. “Goddamn it, Oz,” she screams out of the open window. “I said, get in here before you fall.
“I swear, I hope he does fall,” she says to me. “This time I hope it knocks some sense into him. Look at him out there, Jackson,” she says. “That asshole.”
Dad sees me look out of the window this time. He grins, leans on one crutch, and waves. Both casts are muddy up to the shin.
“I’ve had it,” he says when I go out to talk to him. “Over and out. I told her I’m not going back inside until she’s out of here, and I mean it. Jesus, I told her I wanted her out just before I had the accident, when I was still in my right mind. I never should have let her talk me into letting her stay.” He whacks at a bush with some clippers he’s gotten from who knows where. I didn’t even know he owned yard equipment. He says, “I want her out of here, Jackson. Now.”
“Dad,” I say, “what do you want me to do?”
“Tell her I’m not kidding. Help her carry her stuff out to the car.”
Before I say a word to her, Kim says, “I know what you’re going to tell me. I can’t believe he hates me so much. God, after all I’ve done. I give him my whole life and what does he do? He throws it right back in my face.”
I try to talk to her, to apologize for how my dad has hurt her.
“It’s time you took a good look at your father, Jackson,” she says. “That friend of yours that ran away, for instance, that Brady—what would you think if I told you I came in and found his mom here that night you went out to eat with your mom and Ted? The two of them in the hospital bed, all tangled up, laughing like they were your age. This is their idea of something funny. She’s such a slut. All you have to do is look at her and you can see it—”
“Layla?” I say.
“Lay-la,” Kim says. “Is that her name? Oh, my God, that’s perfect. They’re perfect for each other. You know, Jackson, I’m sorry for you, having a father like that. I really am. I hope you survive him.”
With that, she walks into the bedroom and slams the door behind her. When she comes out about ten minutes later, she looks like herself again. She has on tight jeans and a bright red sweater. Her hair is combed and pulled back. Makeup has covered the splotches, camouflaged the puffiness under her eyes.
“I’m sorry if I hurt you, Jackson,” she says in a formal voice, a careful voice. “But I’m not sorry I told you the truth. I’d appreciate it if you’d take Oz somewhere tomorrow afternoon, so I can come by and get my things.”
She gets all the way to the front door and opens it. Then she rushes back and throws her arms around me. “I am sorry, Jackson,” she says, sobbing. “For everything. I really, really am.”
I pat her awkwardly. It’s not long before she pulls away. She walks to the door again and through it this time, closing it without looking back.
“Free at last,” Dad says, hobbling through the back door a few minutes later. “Thanks, pal, I owe you.” He looks at the long smear of makeup on my white shirt, sort of grins, and starts to say something—then thinks better of it.
I just look at him, not even trying hide my disgust. I swear to God, if he’d said one more word I would’ve decked him, crutches and all. Later that night, when he glances at his watch and says, “You know, Jax, you must be getting tired of being cooped up here all the time. You ought to go out this evening, do something wild,” I look at him the same
way again. Is he so stupid it never occurs to him that Kim would’ve told me about Layla? I don’t say anything though. Screw him. Right now I just want to get as far away from him as I can.
There’s a party at Tom Best’s house; the word went around yesterday. When I get there, Pink Floyd’s on the stereo, and there are coolers full of beer. I grab a can.
“Damn,” Best says. He grins at me, raising his beer in a toast.
I pop the tab and take a long drink. The beer is cold and bitter going down. I don’t like the taste of it, but that only makes me want to drink more. In an hour, I’m so shit-faced I have to go into Tom’s bedroom and lie down to keep from vomiting. It’s after midnight when I come to, naked and sticky in the dark room, Stephanie sleeping beside me. It all comes back to me, what we’ve done.
“Shit,” I whisper. “Shit.” And she stirs. She turns and puts her arms around me, and it’s like someone turned on her talk button.
“Oh, my God, I’ve missed you so much, Jax,” she says. “But I just knew everything would turn out okay. I just knew. It’s too weird. Like, I went to this psychic after you broke up with me, you know? I was so bummed. And guess what? She goes, ‘You are meant to be together; it is in the stars. Your souls must fly apart for a while, but in time they will come back and find each other.’ Is that bizarre, or what? She saw it in the tarot cards. And, like, here we are.”
Yeah, here we are—there’s no denying that. And, who knows, maybe the psychic was right. Maybe if I’d gone to see her, I could’ve saved myself a lot of pain. She’d have seen Amanda in the cards and known why I wasn’t writing to her. She’d have told me, “Forget the beautiful blond girl. She loves you, yes. But you do not deserve her.”
I take Steph home. I drive the dark streets home to Dad’s, the world spinning around me. Creeping to my room, I think, hey, for once, we’re normal. A drunk, sneaky teenage kid. A snoring, clueless father.
thirty–seven
Wish You Were Here Page 20