Here So Far Away

by Hadley Dyer

  “Because her father is in law enforcement?”

  “It’s a hockey term. Means the heavy. The tough guy. But enforcers don’t pick fights on the ice for fun. They’re usually protecting someone.”

  “Who were you protecting, Georgie?”

  I had nothing. The easy lies, the quick comebacks—gone.

  “I’m trying to help you,” said Mr. Humphreys.

  “Thank you, sir. But I just want to go home.”

  He sighed another Nat-like sigh, so drawn out that he seemed to be emptying his lungs entirely. “Two weeks. You’ll apologize to Christina in this office on the day you return.”

  “You will not leave the house,” Mum said in the car.

  “Fine.”

  “You will not make phone calls. You will not have guests.”

  “No problem.”

  Mum was a nervous driver, terrified of taking her eyes off the road, and her furtive, machine-gun glances at me were almost comical.

  “I’m glad you’re taking this so seriously.”

  “Whatever you want to do is okay by me. I’m not going to start drinking the Listerine as soon as your back is turned.”

  “Why would you drink the Listerine?”

  “For the alcohol.”

  “How would you know that?!”

  “I said I wouldn’t drink the . . . Never mind. God, I get into one fight and suddenly I’m a delinquent.”

  She pulled over. “Not suddenly. Not suddenly at all. You’ve been acting strangely for months. Out all the time. Your grades up and down and up again. Look at your clothes falling off you! I would say you were in knots about your father’s situation except you don’t show any compassion for him, not anymore. Nothing seems to affect you—except that pig. And don’t think I haven’t noticed that we never see Lisa anymore.”

  “Did it occur to you to ask me what’s wrong, if this is all such suspicious behavior?”

  “What’s wrong? What is it? Is it drugs?”

  “I’m probably the only person who gets peer-pressured not to do drugs.”

  “Then what? What?”

  “I’m just . . . tired. Tired of being here. School. The valley. Dad. All of it.”

  She turned on her signal light to pull back onto the road. “I’ll tell you what,” she said. “For someone so hell-bent on getting away, you’re doing a very good job of jeopardizing your future.”

  There was nothing harder than Dad’s anger. Hard like a slab of thick, cold glass. You could see in, but you couldn’t get past it; you didn’t even try. You watched him talking with Matthew at the dinner table and gesturing to Mum with his bandaged finger to pass the scalloped potatoes as though you were watching a TV show about a place you’d like to travel to but couldn’t afford. You dug your socked toes into the shag area rug and told yourself that you’d had a good run, but sooner or later the law catches up to everyone. Like Al Capone getting sent up for tax evasion, the suspension was just the thing that helped the Sergeant bring you in. It sucked, but you couldn’t do anything about it. You told yourself that, though you didn’t quite feel it in your bones.

  A chore list was posted on the refrigerator: scrub toilets and garbage bins, pull hair out of drain, and so on. All of it nasty, none of it for Matthew. But Dad quickly lost interest in monitoring the prisoner, which put me in his sight line too often and required him to get up to check my work. It was disturbing, how he hardly moved from his recliner at all. He wasn’t pretending to do his rehab exercises anymore.

  On the third afternoon, I placed a pack of cigarettes beside him and slipped upstairs to my bed, staying there for the rest of the day and the next. And the next. And the next. I spread my textbooks and notebooks around so it would look like I’d been studying, which I did, but also to make it less obvious if I drifted off, which I did.

  I wasn’t allowed to talk to anyone, including Rupert. My mother had told his daughter, Sarah, and the heritage society that I had mono or something and would be out for a couple of weeks, and Sarah said that she might have him into a nursing home by then. The thought of it made my chest burn hotter.

  My eighteenth birthday passed without the cards or gifts that were put away until after my suspension, though Matty did smuggle me one from Sid that had a picture of Charlie Chaplin wearing an old-timey prisoner’s uniform (I bet Joshua Spring would pay you a conjugal visit.). Soon, I was no longer coming out of my room to push food around on my plate. Every time I crept back into my warm, safe cocoon after being forced out to use the bathroom, I was nearly giddy with gratitude. I would lie in bed for hours with my hand resting on the mattress in the space where Francis never was but I always wished he could be, and I would fall asleep that way.

  When I woke up, that’s when it came rushing at me in waves. Had he died instantly? Or had he survived that long drop into the icy ravine and waited for help that didn’t come? Had he called out? For me? The thought of it was so intensely and ruthlessly and relentlessly painful that it felt like a long, silent howl.

  In between were the dreams, some of them joyful and full of touch and scent, caresses and sweat and callused fingertips, but there were also the bed-like toboggans careening around trees and skirting crevices, and the recurring image of the lake stone lying among the debris at the bottom of the bay. I was so afraid Francis’s face would stop visiting me in my sleep and start slipping away. I didn’t have a single photograph of him, no letters, no ticket stubs or playbills or locks of hair or old T-shirts or any of those things that you were supposed to have and hold on to when you were in love.

  Then one night, I couldn’t sleep anymore. We were having one of those surprise mid-April snowfalls, and as the hours passed and the snow piled up, the darkness pressing against my window grew blacker, scarier. I slipped down onto the floor to crawl under the bed, like I did when I was little, but it was crammed with all my kid things. Even if I pulled it all out, I wouldn’t be able to squeeze between the frame and the floor. Curled up on the rug, I began to panic. What was the point of being clever, or at least quick, if I couldn’t wriggle out of this one? Couldn’t talk my way out of it, couldn’t outrun it, and I no longer fit under the bed.

  I heard Matthew’s slippered feet padding down the hallway, followed by the shooft of a piece of yellow construction paper sliding under my door. He’d scrawled: “Something for you on the front stoop.”

  “Matty?”

  The soft click of his bedroom latch.

  My legs, once I got them under me, were like a newborn calf’s. Just walking down the hallway felt precarious, never mind the stairs. Matthew had turned out the lights behind him and I left them off. I didn’t want to wake up Mum, who was snoring in the guest room with the door half open, or alert Dad, watching TV in the family room, that I was up and available to fetch him things.

  I eased the front door open, stepped lightly across the creaky porch, and opened that door too. On the stoop, nestled in a clump of snow, was a single rose in a glass bud vase. The yard was marked by two trails, one a deep track where the snow had been kicked up and tramped down, the other made of enormous footprints, spaced well apart and pointing toward the road, as though a giant had taken off at a run.

  Thirty-Three

  “Good morning, sunshine.” My mother was standing at the foot of my bed, wearing a forced-looking smile. “You know what would be fun, Georgie?” she said. “Let’s get you washed up right here!”

  What? No. Weird.

  I shook my head and it began to throb. I could feel my pulse in my face.

  “Like a spa! Wouldn’t that be a—”

  I’m thinking she said hoot, but she was already down the hallway.

  I closed my eyes, drifting off for a moment, and when I opened them again she was sitting beside me on the bed, gently wiping my face with a warm washcloth. She’d placed a second one on the bedside table along with the water cup from the bathroom. “Your father would be so jealous if he knew you’re getting the royal treatment.”

  Her expr
ession turned grim as she swabbed my nose and chin, grimmer when she got to my lips. They seemed stuck to my teeth. “I’ll do it,” I tried to say, but my mouth was full of goo and crust.

  “Shush-shush,” Mum said. “Spa, hospital, tomayto, tomahto.”

  Slowly, she worked her way to the inside of my lips, ignoring my flinches and whimpers, and started wiping my teeth and gums. “Done,” she said, handing me the cup. “Swish some water around. You can spit it right back in.”

  I filled the cup with brown flakes and a stream of red then reached for the makeup mirror on my bedside table. Mum said, “Just don’t . . .”

  She didn’t finish the thought. Because there’s no point in telling someone don’t get upset when they’re about to be confronted with what happens when you hit the floor without breaking your fall.

  A brick-red carpet burn seared the skin over purple-brown bruises from my nose to my chin. My bottom lip was gaping where a tooth had sliced into it. “Oh my god,” I said, and I started laughing. My face was raw from the wiping and it was pounding, pounding, but I couldn’t stop.

  “What’s going on?” Matty called from his bedroom.

  “Don’t come in!” Mum said. “Georgie had a little accident.”

  “I fell on the way back from the bathroom last night,” I said, calming down. “Or fainted?”

  I remembered the scratchy rug against my cheek, my fingers digging into the fibers, the long crawl back to my room. I hadn’t wondered at the time how exactly I’d ended up there. It was just, Excuse me, floor. I’ll be going now.

  I touched the oozing space between my nose and upper lip. “Oh, that’s bad.”

  “You’re lucky you didn’t knock your teeth out,” Mum said. She felt my forehead. “No temperature. Do you feel sick?”

  “I feel like I face-planted.”

  “Were you sick last night?”

  “I don’t think so. I got up to pee.”

  “Is it your monthlies?”

  The heat under my sternum radiated upward. “Yeah, maybe that’s it. Or maybe I got up from the toilet too fast.”

  “Well, this is the first chance I’ve had to take care of you for a long, long time.”

  She looked over at the rose on my dresser.

  “Someone left it on the front step last night,” I said. “It might not even be for me.”

  “Must be a birthday gift. Are you feeling grown-up?”

  “Not this second.” I stretched until my blanketed toes touched the fading Disney stickers plastered across the footboard of my bed.

  “When you started nursery school you were so small, doll-sized, and here you are, eighteen, a half foot taller than average. Force of will, I say. Always trying to push yourself out of the nest.”

  “Sorry I’ve been such a jerk. I didn’t mean what I said.”

  “I knew something was wrong. I said to myself, ‘Marlene, she’s at that age where kids start to have a drink and get into trouble. But you were always so responsible. And now you’re drinking the Listerine.” Her eyes were glistening. “Do you think this is funny?”

  I tried to stop smiling. “I don’t drink the Listerine, I promise. Wouldn’t Dad of all people have known if I was an addict?”

  “You have always managed to work around him when you wanted to—don’t think I am completely unaware. Although he could have been too loaded up with Benadryl to notice.”

  She laughed, and, oh god, what a relief. When Mum let herself get mad at us, it was awful. When she blamed herself, it was the worst.

  “I won’t say I haven’t tried anything, but honestly, it’s true what I said about getting peer pressure in reverse. No one wants me to get high.”

  “What happened with Lisa, dear?”

  “I hurt her feelings. And some other stuff.”

  “Is that all that’s been bothering you? I know you can’t be friends with your kids, but I always wished . . . well, I wish you would at least let me mother you.”

  There were so many words that wanted out of my crusty mouth.

  It hurts to eat.

  It hurts to breathe.

  It hurts to wake up in the morning.

  I don’t know how to break my fall.

  She touched my face so tenderly, and it seemed impossible that I could ever tell her about Francis. Her heart couldn’t take it.

  “That’s all, Mum.”

  “Alright, I’ve got to go to work. Did I tell you that Miriam is convinced I waited on Rod Stewart the other day? At first she thought it was just some fella impersonifying him, but . . . Never mind, I’ll bore you with that later.”

  “Doesn’t sound boring.”

  “It’s a long story. When you feel up to it, put my mind at ease and eat some breakfast.”

  I hadn’t really thought about telling people what it meant to me that Francis was gone. I guess somewhere in the back of my mind I assumed I would when I was ready, whenever that was. He no longer had anything to lose and neither did I, and I didn’t believe he was up in the clouds watching to see if I’d break my promise. But after talking to Mum, I could see all too easily what would happen if I told my parents. About 10 percent of the conversation would be spent trying to reassure her that she wasn’t a bad mother for not intuiting my moral failings, and reckon another 15 percent on the logistics of getting around Dad, the hows and wheres and whens. The rest would be spent defending Francis. I’d have to defend him to anyone I told, even Bill, if we were still speaking. Especially Bill, who thought only bad people did bad things. I couldn’t see how that would make anyone feel better, least of all me. It was easier to stay in the habit of the secret, though when I put on my jacket to go to school, I kept reaching into the pocket for the stone that was no longer there.

  Dad wouldn’t let me stay home the first day after my suspension, so I was slathered in foundation that I’d pinched from my mother. (Colors that match my Irish paleosity hadn’t been invented yet.) I wore a turtleneck to cover the place where the foundation and my skin parted ways. I could feel the makeup sliding south as I climbed the school steps and pooling in the collar of the formerly tight sweater that no longer hugged my frame.

  Matthew hopped out of Abe, couldn’t get away fast enough, leaving me to slouch inside on my own. Double takes, a snicker or two. The only person who approached me was Shelley-with-an-E. She put her hand on my shoulder, squinted at my face, then just sort of backed away.

  I searched for Bill in the hallway, but locked eyes with Joshua instead. I’d punched his girlfriend and he’d bought me a birthday gift. What did I owe him: thank you, sorry, or you’re welcome? I decided to lead with thank you, but before I could get all the words out, he fled like an impala that’s spotted a lion in the grass.

  So things were off to a good start.

  During homeroom I had to go to the principal’s office for my official smackdown. There was a little speech to give, which Mr. Humphreys had basically written for me.

  “Violence,” I began, “is not the solution—”

  “I’m sorry about your face,” Christina said.

  “You’re sorry about . . . my face?”

  The area under her eye still had a large greenish-brown bruise that must have been pretty gruesome two weeks earlier. Unlike me, she hadn’t tried to cover it up with makeup. I looked over at Mr. Humphreys, assuming he’d put her up to it, but he was as taken aback as I was. He gave me a go-on nod.

  “I’m sorry too,” I said. “Violence is not the solution to our problems and also not in the spirit of our school motto, ‘Courteousness, Cooperation and Consideration For All.’”

  Christina seemed rattled, staring down at her hands. For a second I thought maybe Joshua had dumped her. Hopefully not for me. Again. But then she met my eyes and had a look I’d never seen before on her ferrety face. She felt sorry for me.

  What did she know?

  “Matthew said . . .”

  Matthew!

  “He said . . .”

  Something told me that I should act
like I knew what she was trying to say, so I sat back in my chair and knitted my eyebrows together and swallowed a sour taste that was rising in my throat.

  “What about Matthew?” Mr. Humphreys said.

  “Nothing. I don’t want to cause any more trouble.”

  “Good. So now you two can put this behind you. Christina, you’re excused. George, I need you to sign this pledge form. The PTA believes students are less likely to re-offend if they promise not to.”

  The pledge was printed in a scroll font on top of a picture of a sunset. “‘I pledge to be honest and always true. To treat each day as bright and new. To honor my teachers and my classmates too . . .’ I feel less violent already,” I said as Christina fled the office.

  Mr. Humphreys handed me a pen. “I feel the opposite.”

  I tried to keep my head down in Modern World Problems, but could feel eyes on me. Maybe Nat’s. Maybe Lisa’s. I instinctively glanced up when Doug dropped his books onto the desk in front of mine, and I think he started laughing before his brain had computed what was so funny. Hey, it’s nice to make a person’s life in one nanosecond. Because while everyone else saw some kind of mysterious accident, all Doug took in was my half-cracked attempt to cover it up. I’m not sure he noticed the sharp look from Mr. Gifford, just got up, tipped his hat to me, and marched himself out of the classroom, still laughing.

  Mr. Gifford seemed to feel the same as me: like the day had already defeated him. He popped a tape into the VCR and babysat us with news reports about the Bombay Riots, leaning back in his chair with his fingers pinching the bridge of his nose. I slid down in my seat and cupped my hands around my temples, as though cutting off my peripheral vision could shut out the buzzing worry about what it was that my baby brother and the person who had told everyone about the East Riverview guys knew—basically asking the good people of India to distract me with their immense suffering.

  I’d watched a lot of horror movies, no problem, so it wasn’t the blood. Or the bodies lying in the streets, the shouting or the sirens. It was a woman in the corner of the screen, squatting, her hands reaching up in despair to God, one of her thin arms bent at an unnatural angle. What was her story? What had she lost?