Tom and Kate and Beth fall asleep, too—one by one. At least they all stop talking. Eric pops in Pearl Jam, circa now, and sings along.
I sit in the back, my face against the window, my arm all tingly where Steph’s leaning on it, thinking about what she said. What if we do end up like our parents? I get this black hole feeling, imagining myself years from now losing Amanda, losing the children we’ve had together—which is crazy, I know, since I don’t have her in the first place; I’ve wrecked any chance I ever had of having her. It was all just a dream. But Mom and Dad dreamed, too, when they were young. Everyone dreams. And everyone grows up, grows into what life really is. It seems dense of me to have assumed that I’d be different, that I’d make all the right choices, that I’d never make myself or anyone else unhappy by something I believed I had to do. A dull ache settles inside me.
Eventually, it starts to get light. There was a dusting of snow on the ground at home, but in southern Georgia, the fields are green. The trees are bursting with color. Too strange, I think; we’ve driven right into spring. I remember watching a science movie in grade school—a flower opening—and wondering how they’d know exactly the moment it would happen, so that they could capture it.
“You moron,” Brady said. “They sit a camera in front of it for about a week and then speed up the film.”
Now the world itself speeds by. Florida is a long, straight road with billboards. Sea World. Busch Gardens. Weeki Wachee. Pathetic-looking trees hung with curtains of moss. Now and then, an orange grove. It’s midmorning by the time we get to Clearwater. It’s hot, in the eighties. We pull into the parking lot of Beth’s parents’ condominium complex, Steph’s Beach Boys tape blaring. The beach is maybe a hundred yards away; the ocean beyond it is as blue as the cloudless sky. For just a second, I think of Amanda again and miss her as if she were actually a part of my real life.
“Yes!” Tom shouts, the first one out of the bus. He strikes a pose like Columbus sighting the New World for the first time. The rest of us tumble out, stretching and bending.
“Can you believe it?” Steph puts her arm around my waist, slips her hand in the back pocket of my jeans, then presses herself against me like a book closing. “A whole week with no parents. No bullshit. Jax, let’s stay together. I’ll camp with you. Who’d know?”
I knew this was going to happen. Just like I knew Tom would end up staying in the condo with Kate; Eric with Beth. I knew Matt and Kevin would be ticked off because they’d planned on a big stag party, the five of us meeting new girls on the beach. And Tracy, Pam, and Carrie—best friends since first grade—would be ticked off because they’d feel like Kate and Beth had used them. But for once in my life, I don’t care.
Time goes by, one perfect, sunny day after another. Steph and I play Frisbee or zonk out on the beach, working on our suntans. We buy loose joints from guys cruising the beach and smoke them late into the night, talking about our lives. It’s mellow. I feel so close to her in the darkness, with the sound of the waves crashing on the beach beyond us. I guess that’s why I slip and mention Brady’s postcards.
“What?” she says. “You got two postcards from Brady and didn’t tell me?”
“I didn’t tell anyone,” I say. “Not even Layla. I still haven’t told her.”
“God, Jax. Why?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I suppose I didn’t tell because I didn’t know what to think about them. I mean, I get these two postcards. So what? They didn’t really say anything about how Brady was or even where he was. I mean, by the time they got to me, who knows how far away he was from where he’d mailed them? And they came right after Dad’s accident. To tell you the truth, getting them made me mad. I thought, Brady’s supposed to be my best friend, and he’s sending me some stupid postcard when he ought to be here, helping me. I didn’t really want to think about what that meant, you know? Like, is he really my friend? Was he ever really my friend, or have I been kidding myself all along? It was just one more thing to be freaked out about, when it seemed to me that being freaked out about Dad was enough to have to handle.”
“Your dad’s been fine for a long time, Jackson.”
“Yeah. Well, I didn’t tell anyone then because I’d have had to explain why I didn’t mention it before. And I didn’t hear from Brady again. So I figured, fuck him.”
“You still should’ve told. At least Layla.”
“I just didn’t, okay? So I’m not perfect.”
“You don’t need to get mad at me, Jax,” she says.
“I’m not mad at you,” I say, even though I am—a little. Annoyed, anyway. “It’s just over, that’s all. There’s no point in arguing about it. I didn’t tell before, and I’m not going to tell Layla now; it would only upset her. We’re not going to tell—”
“Just don’t be mad at me, Jax. Please. I won’t tell Layla if you don’t want me to. I only want to be with you. That’s the most important thing to me.”
“I said, I’m not mad, okay? Not at you, anyway. Maybe I’m going to be pissed off at Brady for the rest of my life. But that’s my problem. I just don’t see any point in us talking about him or anything that has to do with him anymore. He’s gone. Period. Wherever he is, I guess I hope he’s all right, but there’s nothing I can do if he’s not. I have to go on with my own life.”
“Yeah,” she says. “It’s sad, though. It’s so depressing. I mean, the way he’s just—gone.”
We’re quiet for a while. We pass a joint back and forth between us. A few hits and I’m feeling calm again. I think of Brady, imagine him on a beach somewhere himself, with the Dead, and I do hope he’s all right. I really do.
Beside me, Steph sighs. “Jax, do you think it means anything?” she asks. “All we go through? All we can’t change?”
“I don’t know,” I say.
“I used to think so. Maybe I still do sometimes.” She’s quiet again, then she says, “I mean, I still believe in love. That love matters.”
I lie still beside her, full of something; I don’t know what. It isn’t love. I don’t love her. I can’t make myself tell her that I do.
“I know,” she says. “I shouldn’t even say things like that. My mom’s always saying, ‘For God’s sake, Stephanie, why do you have to say every single thing that pops into your head? No wonder people think you’re strange.’ It’s true; I am strange. I know it. I mean, Kate and Beth and the others—they wouldn’t invite me anywhere anymore, except for the fact that we were once real friends, in grade school. They feel sorry for me. I’ve been such a wreck since the divorce.”
“You’ll be okay,” I say. “You’ll get it all worked out eventually. Everyone does.”
“I won’t,” Steph says. “Because no matter how I try I can’t quit loving people. That’s my real problem. Kate and Beth, all of them. You and Brady. My dad doesn’t give a damn about me. He pays for me, that’s all. He has his real family with Janeen. But I keep loving him. I even love my mom. I can’t tell her, though. She’d say, ‘If you really loved me, Stephanie, you’d get yourself together, you’d give Robert a chance, you’d want me to be happy.’”
She’s quiet then, waiting for me to say what she needs to hear, but I don’t say it. I hold her, though, and we fall asleep together under the stars. In the morning, she seems better, as if the words she’d released into the darkness were, in fact, the sorrows she had spoken of. She’s back to her old self, spouting a dozen theories about life, finding signs in sunsets, in the patterns the sand makes when the water recedes from the shore.
thirty–nine
My head is killing me. Since Florida, I haven’t been able to concentrate—maybe because now that I’m back at Mom’s it takes all the energy I have to fake being the person I used to be. With Steph, I don’t have to bother trying. We hang out, smoke a few joints, drink whatever we can get our hands on. We cut school a lot. On sunny d
ays, we drive out to the reservoir and pretend we’re back on the beach.
My grades the second six weeks are even worse than they were the first. Mrs. Blue stops me after class one day and says, “Jackson, are you all right?”
“Yeah, sure,” I say, and exit as fast as I can.
But I’m not all right at all. I can’t fall asleep until it’s almost morning. Then when I do sleep, I dream I’m walking in water, and I wake up, my whole body aching, as if I’ve really walked all night against the terrible pull of the tide. It takes all I have to sit up, to drag myself to the shower. I sit and stare at my breakfast. It seems like a whole lot of trouble to pick up the spoon. I’m pissed off all the time. I hate myself, but I can’t quit acting like an asshole to anyone who gets in my way.
Even Kristin and Amy. I’m sleeping, or trying to, when they arrive late one Friday afternoon. “Hey, Jackson!” they yell, clattering up the stairs to my bedroom.
“Haven’t you guys ever heard of knocking?” I say.
Kristin steps back, disappearing down the stairs as quickly as she climbed them. Amy says, “Jackson, don’t you like us anymore?” Then she’s gone, too.
I stomp out the back door, filch a six-pack of beer from the refrigerator in the garage, and drive out to the reservoir, where I can be alone. I don’t have my watch on, so I have no idea how much time goes. All I know is that it’s gotten dark. I vaguely remember that I told Steph I’d pick her up and take her somewhere. She won’t be mad; she never gets mad. She’ll just be sitting up in her room with her earphones on, listening to music, waiting for me. Still, I speed up, knowing how much she hates to be alone.
Oh, man, I’m blotto. I realize it when I see the red light flashing behind me. I stop the bus, sit there with my heart pounding, and seconds later, a tall black cop appears at my window. He shines his flashlight on my face, looks hard at me. “License, please,” he says. “Registration.”
I find the license in my wallet, fumble for the registration in the glove compartment. Shit, I think, glancing at the empty beer cans on the floor.
The cop reads the documents, then he opens the car door. “Step out. I want you to assume the position. That’s hands against the side of the van, spread your feet. Spread ’em,” he repeats, placing his hand just below my chest and pushing just enough to get me off balance. “Stand still,” he says. He pats me down; his big hands make me flinch when they come near the private places.
He pulls me away from the bus by the back of the shirt, turns me so he’s right in my face. “Son,” he says, “your breath smells like beer. You been drinking?”
I don’t answer; I’m too scared. I look down at the ground, listening to the cars whiz by on the busy street. I can feel people looking at me. What if Mom drives by, or Ted? Oh, God, what if Grandma were to see me?
“Close your eyes now,” the cop says. “Hold your hands out straight to the side, point your finger. Right one first, that’s it—swing it around and touch your nose.”
My finger falls somewhere around my collarbone.
He tells me to walk on back to the police car and follows, watching me as I do. He opens the back door, motions me in. It’s just like in the movies: the wire-grille partition between the front and the back, the rifle in its holder on the dashboard, the radio with its fuzzy voices. I blow up the balloon device he gives me.
“Yep, point one all right,” he says when it reads out. “I got to take you in.”
He reads me my rights, handcuffs me, and locks me into the back of the car. Then he walks back to my bus, gets the keys, and puts some kind of tag on the front windshield. He doesn’t say a word to me when he comes back. Just starts up the car and pulls into traffic.
The handcuffs hurt my wrists. I can’t keep my balance in the seat because without the use of my hands, I slide from side to side every time he turns. I start feeling sick; there’s no air, and there’s a weird smell in the car. What is it? Some other kid’s vomit, probably. Just the thought of that makes bile rise into my throat. I try to control it, but I can’t, and I puke all over myself, all over the seat of the police car. Then, Jesus, I start crying. When I make a choking noise, the cop looks back, but he doesn’t stop the car.
I must pass out, because the next thing I know, I’m lying on a steel bench in the holding tank. I sit up but lower myself again quickly when I feel light-headed, as if I might throw up again.
“You look like shit, man,” a black kid says to me. He’s tall, real dark-skinned, fierce looking. He’s pacing the length of the room, from the cement block wall on one end to the thick glass wall on the other. The guard in the hallway watches him. So do a couple of guys who are sitting in the far corner, the only other people in the room. They’re dressed in oxford shirts and jeans. Preppie types from North Central, maybe. Or Carmel. They look scared.
For the millionth time I think, where’s Brady when I need him? If he were here, he’d know what to do. In no time at all, he’d be holding court. Even the guard would be laughing. Then I think, yeah, if it weren’t for Brady, I wouldn’t be in this mess! If we’d been together tonight, he’d have talked the cop out of arresting me. Jeez. It’s amazing how, lately, I can get so mad at him for things he hasn’t even done.
Finally, I hear my name called over an intercom. The guard opens the iron door. The officer who takes my statement is decent to me, makes no more judgment than to shake his head at what a mess I am: soaked with sweat from the nausea, vomit caked on my clothes.
“You can call your parents now,” he says, nodding toward the phone on his desk when we’re through.
Mom freaks. Driving drunk, I could’ve killed myself or somebody else. Plus, she’s sure I’ve been terminally damaged by having to spend time in jail. Dad’s pissed. “For Chrissake, Jackson,” he says, “if you’re going to drink, don’t be so goddamn stupid about it.” Layla says, “Wouldn’t you think there’d be plenty of real criminals for them to hassle?” Stephanie feels guilty because I got arrested on the way to see her. Tom and Eric want to swap stories about what happened to them the night they got busted. Grandma’s sure I’m headed straight for hell.
Ted says the only thing that makes sense. “Face it, Jackson, you’re just not cut out to be an outlaw. You’ll get caught every time. You might as well quit trying.” He says it almost apologetically, as if he’s condemning me to be a boring person for the rest of my life, the kind of person he thinks he is. But it’s sort of a relief to consider the possibility that he might be right.
I think about Brady and how he loved being bad, how it energized him and made him larger than life. Brady Burton: the legend. He’d do anything. But being bad only makes me feel lost.
The problem is, if I can’t hack being bad, what then? There’s no way I can go back to being the way I once was. I’ve changed; I know more than I used to. But what I know doesn’t make me smarter, only scared. Everything scares me. I go to drunk driving school—my punishment since I was a first offender. I sit there with all the other losers, watching the gory movies—drunks careening across the highway into cars full of happy families or teenagers on their way to a prom. I watch body after bloody body being pulled from the twisted wreckage drunk drivers have caused. Then the drunks themselves come on the screen, hunched over, as if in prayer: “Sorry, sorry, sorry.”
I drive home slowly, peering into car windows, thinking are you going to die tonight? Am I? It scares me when someone passes me too close, when a car pulls up right next to me at a stoplight. I imagine gravity getting out of whack and all the cars in the world going every which way, crashing into each other, spinning right off the earth.
Steph scares me most of all. She loves me; she belongs to me somehow. I feel responsible for her. When I quit drinking, she quit. We’re done with weed. We don’t cut school anymore. We stay on the treadmill of good behavior right up until late at night, when we’re finished studying and sh
e says, “Jax, just hold me,” and I do and every time it’s like that first night. It’s the one thing I can’t make myself stop.
I dream of myself in mazes, in buildings with windows that won’t open. In one dream, I’m driving on a deserted interstate at night, and the accelerator gets stuck. Then I dream Steph and I are married. She’s dressed like Mom was when she married Dad: in a long white dress, a garland of flowers in her hair. I say, “Wait! No!” But it’s too late. Steph smiles and from the folds of the dress produces a child, a little boy who looks exactly like me. I can’t leave her now; I can’t leave this child. He looks at me with sad eyes. He needs me.
The next thing I know, Mom’s kneeling beside my bed, shaking me. “Jackson, Jackson,” she says. “Honey, what in the world is the matter? Why are you crying?”
“I can’t take care of a baby,” I sob, still tangled in the dream. “I can’t take care of Steph anymore. I can’t.”
“Oh, my God,” Mom says. “Jackson, Stephanie’s not—”
The urgent tone of her voice, the way she suddenly grips my arm, brings me back. It was a dream, a dream.
“Jackson,” Mom says again.
“No, no,” I say. “I was dreaming. A nightmare. I’m okay.” But I know I’m in for it. I might as well tell her everything and get it over with. So I do.
“She really could get pregnant, then,” Mom says when I’ve finished telling her about me and Steph. “Even if it was only a dream. I mean, the two of you have been—”
“Yeah,” I say. “She could. We have. Mom, I don’t love her. I never did, even at the beginning. But I don’t know what to do about it.”
“Oh, Jackson,” she says. She gathers me up, and for a long time she just holds me the way she used to when I was little, one hand cupping the back of my head. I feel her heart beating, feel her breathing, feel her tears soaking my shoulder. “Well,” she says finally. She takes a deep breath and lets it out. “What are we going to do? Oh, honey, I am so sorry I’ve let things go so far. I mean, I have to take some blame here, I know. I’ve been so wrapped up in Ted and the girls and the new house these past months. And you—”
Wish You Were Here Page 22