by Darlene Ryan
“He wouldn’t do something like that,” I scream at her. “Maybe, maybe...” I’m shaking. “Maybe he didn’t love you enough, but he loved me and he wouldn’t...he wouldn’t just leave me!”
Her body sags. “He was sick,” she says softly. She reaches out as if she’s going to touch me, but she doesn’t. Her hand hovers in the air for a moment and then drops. “He wasn’t—,” she begins.
I press both hands over my ears and start to hum the way I did last time she tried to say things I didn’t want to hear. Finally she turns and goes out, closing my door behind her. I lie on the bed with my palms tight against my head and keep on humming.
fourteen
When I wake up, it’s dark except for a rectangle of light reaching across the floor from the bedroom window. I’m clammy with sweat, and my shirt is sticking to the middle of my back. For a moment I can’t figure out what time it is and why I woke up. Then I remember. My father killed himself. It can’t be true, but it is.
I’m shaking so hard it feels like the bed is moving. I don’t want to go back to sleep. I grab the quilt, wrap it around me and drop into my rocking chair.
Dad found the chair, mostly in pieces, in a corner of the basement. My mother thought it was junk, but he said it had potential. He sanded all the pieces, glued them back together and then painted it a pale, creamy yellow, the color of butter. Only he called it the color of “a heart-healthy, polyunsaturated, trans-fat–free margarine.” Even Mom laughed at that.
I don’t want to think about that. I don’t want to think about my dad at all.
The two little beanbags Seth gave me are on my dresser. I pick one up and toss it from one hand to another. My left hand hurts and there’s dried blood on the gauze bandage, but I throw the bag again, and again. I concentrate on throwing the bag in a smooth arc about as high as my eyebrows. And I don’t think about anything else.
At all.
One by one I type the letters, all in caps, into the search engine: A, L, S. I click on Search and look away quickly. I want to know, and I don’t. It’s late. The house is dark and silent. Through the window I can see the moon, a thin sliver hanging high in the night sky.
I have to look. Four hundred and nineteen thousand, one hundred and eighty-one hits. I click on the first link and watch the site load.
I don’t even know what I’m looking for. An explanation? A reason? Some way of figuring out what was in my father’s head, maybe?
...when a person has ALS something goes wrong with the nerves that carry instructions from the brain to the muscles... muscles in the legs, arms and throat....difficulty walking...may need a cane...a wheelchair...difficulty holding things...
It’s everything my mother said. His legs would have stopped working. His arms. How could he have taken pictures? How could he have crossed a glacier in a wheel-chair? Or bargained in a market with no voice? How could he have pointed a camera? Or even picked it up? How could he have been himself anymore? Is that what he thought? Is that why he...?
I can’t see the screen anymore. I hear someone crying, and I realize it’s me.
fifteen
I’m late and my stupid-ass locker won’t open. It’s Monday and I’m back at school. If I stay away too long, people will start asking questions I don’t want to answer right now.
I do the combination again and pull at the lock. It won’t open.
I start yanking at it, harder and harder, my fist smashing back against the door. It won’t open. It still won’t open.
A hand comes over my shoulder and grabs my hand. “What’s the combination?”
Seth.
I can feel the heat of his warm hand sinking into my icy one. I pull my hand away and tell him the numbers. He turns the dial slowly, and when he pulls the lock, it lets go.
I start grabbing books.
Seth holds out a bunch of paper. “Here. I hope you’re feeling better. This is everything you missed. If it doesn’t make sense, let me know.” He sets the lock inside my locker and walks away.
“Thanks,” I say quietly.
He lifts one arm so I know he heard me, but he doesn’t look back.
I’m running on a gravel path that’s hard and lumpy underneath my feet. I stumble over a hollow spot and almost fall. My legs ache and the cold bites my chest with each breath. Silence wraps around me as though I’m the only person in the world.
I’m in the cemetery. Ahead I see what I’ve been looking for: a stake with a red cardboard tag, lifting on a wisp of wind I can’t even feel. It marks the place where the stone will be. I start across the grass to it and remember what my grandmother used to say when she had that goose-bumps-up-the-back, half-déjà vu, half-spooked feeling: Someone just walked over my grave. I veer to the right and try to stay between the markers.
There’s a large rectangle of dirt in front of the stake. I squat down and lay my hand on the rough ground. It’s so cold. What made me think I would find answers here?
Why didn’t he tell us he was sick? How could he not say anything? Did he think I wouldn’t love him if I knew? How could he just get in his car and—?
I feel like hitting someone, or smashing something. I want someone else to hurt as much as I do. I need to ask him why he thought that driving into the river was the only thing to do. I scrape frantically at the ground but my fingers can’t dig into the frozen dirt.
I don’t know why I came. My dad isn’t here.
He isn’t anywhere.
Mom is sitting at the kitchen table reading a magazine. She has one hand snaked around a cup of coffee. She doesn’t even pretend that she’s drinking herbal tea anymore. The packages are gone. There’s a box of coffee filters in their place. She looks up as I walk in and slides a folded piece of paper across the table at me.
“What’s this?” I say.
“A note for your teacher so you won’t have to spend the rest of the week in detention for cutting your last class yesterday,” Mom says. “They called. The school notices things like that.”
“It wasn’t a class. It was study hall,” I say. That much is true. “I felt crappy. I just came home.” Eventually.
She looks at me as though she’s trying to decide if I’m telling the truth. “D’Arcy, is everything all right?”
“Yeah, I’ve got cramps, that’s all.” I slide the note for Mr. Keating off the table and slip it into my pocket. Mom turns back to her magazine.
“D’Arcy, I’d like to see you for a minute, please,” Mr. Keating calls as the bell rings.
Marissa rolls her eyes at me. “Wait for me,” I mouth. She nods. I go up to the front while everyone else files out. What does he want? I already gave him the note this morning. My heart is pounding. He can’t hear it, can he? No.
I take a couple of deep breaths. Act normal, I tell myself. He doesn’t know anything.
Mr. Keating waits until only the two of us are left in the room. Then he leans forward with his elbows on the desk. His tie is pulled to one side, and he has chalk dust on his hands.
“D’Arcy, I just wanted to ask how you’re doing,” he says.
“All right,” I say. What does he want?
“You’re caught up on what you missed?”
“I am.” Where is this going?
“Good.” He tents his dusty fingers together. His long face makes me think of a horse in wire-rimmed glasses. A bald horse.
“I just wanted you to know that if you have any troubling thoughts, if you need to talk to someone, I’m here.” He clears his throat. “I know how difficult it must have been to lose your father.”
I have a silly urge to say, “But he’s not lost. We know exactly where he is.” What I do is say, “Thank you, sir. I will.”
I won’t.
He studies my face as though he’s trying to figure out if I’m being straight with him. I give him my half-serious, half-sad, holding-up-nobly face. Then he says, “You can go now.”
Out in the hallway, Marissa and Andie are waiting for me.
&nb
sp; “Well?” Marissa asks.
“He just wanted to make sure that I was all caught up.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.” I can fake them out too.
Andie leans against the locker beside mine while I sort my books. She’s more Marissa’s friend than mine, but she’s okay.
“I was at the mall last Friday night. I saw Mr. Keating,” she says, fake casual, inspecting the toe of one black lace-up boot.
“Big thrill.” Marissa crosses her arms.
“With his girlfriend.”
“Girlfriend?” Marissa pounces on the word. “Keating has a girlfriend? No way.” She shakes her head so hard her hair bounces.
“How do you know it was his girlfriend?” I ask.
“He had his arm around her, and he wasn’t acting like she was his sister.”
“So, what’s she like?” Marissa asks.
“Well, she had a lot of hair and she was wearing this T-shirt with Mickey Mouse on the front.” She holds out her hands, cupped, in front of her. “Mickey’s ears were big. Really big.”
Marissa gives a snort of laughter.
“And that’s not all he has.” Andie’s lips are twitching at the corners.
“What?” I ask.
“He has a toupee.”
“You lie!” Marissa exclaims.
“Swear.” Andie puts her hand over her heart. “Looked just like a little curly sheep butt sitting on his head.”
At that exact moment, Mr. Keating comes out of the classroom and starts down the hall toward us. Marissa jams her hand in her mouth and keeps her back turned. Andie’s face is instantly serious, as though a switch had flipped inside her head.
Mr. Keating nods at us as he passes. He disappears up the stairs and Marissa and Andie explode with laughter, shaking, sputtering, grabbing their stomachs. I make myself laugh too. I catch sight of our reflection in the glass front of a picture of the class of 1976 up on the wall. I look just like they do. I look normal even though I’m not.
sixteen
It was a mistake to come here. I’m standing in the front entrance of the seniors’ center. I guess if you’re not old, you’re pretty much invisible in here, because I’ve been standing around for about ten minutes and no one’s even noticed me.
This was a bad idea. I looked it up online: ALS Support Group. I carried the address around for four days and now it’s Wednesday, which is when they have their meeting. And I’m here, but I can’t seem to go any farther and I can’t seem to leave.
I don’t even know why I came except...except I want to see what it looks like when you have ALS. I want to know what about it made my father think being dead was better.
There’s a bulletin board on the wall in front of me with colored cardboard strips tacked to it that say what’s going on where. A purple strip says there’s seniors’ tai chi in room 4. There’s a conversational French class in room 12, according to a green strip. And in room 21, ALS Support Group.
I can’t do this. What was I thinking? That I could just go in and stare at them like they’re some kind of circus. What would I say? “Hi. My dad had what you have so he killed himself, and I just came here to see if it’s really that bad.”
I turn from the bulletin board and bang into the side of a wheelchair. I grab the back to keep from falling into the lap of the man in the chair. “I’m sorry,” I say.
“My fault,” he says, smiling up at me. He has blond hair pulled back in a ponytail and kind brown eyes. “I was over the posted speed limit for the hallway.” He glances at the bulletin board and then back at me. “Could I help you find something?”
“Umm...” Something catches in my throat and I have to cough before I can answer him. “Uh, no,” I say. “I...I’m in the wrong place.” I give him a quick smile and start to move past him.
“It’s okay to be scared,” he says.
“What?” I stop and look back over my shoulder at him.
He’s still smiling. “You came for the ALS meeting, the support group, didn’t you?”
How did he know?
He dips his head toward the bulletin board as though he knows what I’m thinking. “You had your finger on that strip. It was either the group or seniors’ tai chi, and you seem a little young for that.”
“I changed...I changed my mind,” I say, staring at my shoes because I’m too embarrassed to look at him.
“We don’t bite,” he says. “Some of us drool sometimes, but that’s about it.”
They drool? “That’s all right,” I say. I can feel my face burning.
“That was a joke,” he says, looking at me over the top of his glasses. “I guess that career in stand-up isn’t going to pan out.” He glances down at the wheelchair. “When you’re in a wheelchair, can you even be a stand-up comedian?” He shrugs and holds out his hand. “I’m Andrew.”
“I’m D’Arcy,” I say. We shake hands. Andrew’s wearing leather gloves without fingers, and he barely squeezes my hand. His left hand is in a brace.
“Look, why don’t you walk down with me,” he says. “And if you don’t want to stay, you don’t have to.”
I like his smile. Maybe I could go down the hall with him and—I don’t know—just look in the door. That wouldn’t be so bad. I nod. “Okay.”
Andrew leads the way, steering his chair with what looks like a little joystick. We follow the hall to the end and turn left. Andrew stops at the first door on the right. What looks like an elementary kid’s desk, stacked with brochures, is pushed against the door to keep it open.
“You want to come in?” he asks.
There are about a dozen people in the room. Most of them are in wheelchairs like Andrew. There’s a woman with a walker and a man with two canes. No one is old. I thought they’d be old.
A woman about my mom’s age squats next to a wheel-chair. The man in the chair is typing something on a laptop fastened to his chair. He can use only one finger, and it doesn’t always go where he wants it to. I can’t stop watching him. Andrew says something else to me, but I don’t know what it was. Is this what would have happened to my dad?
The man finishes typing. The woman looks at the screen and starts to laugh, shaking her head. The man’s face twists into a grin but no sound comes out of his open mouth. Still laughing, she pulls a Kleenex out of her pocket and wipes the drool off the side of his mouth. And all of a sudden I don’t see two strangers. I see my father in that chair and myself crouched on the floor, wiping his chin.
Did he think we wouldn’t love him like this? Or...or was it that he didn’t love us enough to face the wheelchair and the drooling?
I turn and run for the entrance. I hear Andrew calling my name, but I can’t even look at him. I push my way through the people coming up the front steps. Then I’m doubled over at the side of the building next to the sign that says Redborne Senior Citzens’ Center Parking, palms of my hands jammed against my eyes to shut out the image of the man in the chair, of Dad in that chair.
“I miss you,” Brendan says, his mouth on mine. His hand slides under my sweater, moves up my belly. His fingers slither beneath my bra. He makes a sound, almost like a growl in the back of his throat.
I want to squirm out of his arm, out from under his hand.
“I love you,” he whispers. “I just want you to feel good.”
But I don’t. I don’t start to breathe faster when he kisses down the curve of my jaw to my mouth. There’s no rush of blood thumping in my ears when his tongue tangles with mine. I don’t feel anything.
Maybe that doesn’t matter. I close my eyes, kiss the curve of his ear and start to slide my hand up his thigh.
But I don’t feel anything.
The movie’s already started, but I don’t care. I take a seat in the middle, one row from the back, and scrunch down until my knees are pressed against the back of the seat in front of me. There’s just enough space for my popcorn between my legs and my chest.
I love the Majestic. Even the name sounds
the way a movie theater should, as opposed to Megaplex—twelve theaters, a giant arcade, a food court and thirty-one different popcorn toppings. Stupid.
The Majestic has black velvet curtains that make a rustling sound as they open to show the screen. There are red velour seats with lots of padding that you can squish right down into. The Majestic has real movie food—no nachos with low-sodium salsa. No cruditiés with fat-free dip. At the Majestic they sell popcorn with real butter and salt, jujubes, cool mints and licorice whips. And the usher wears a drum major’s red jacket with lots of braid and a little red hat like an organ-grinder’s monkey.
The theater is about half full—mostly students from the university and old people. This is the fourth time I’ve been here in the middle of the day. I’ve been faking stomach pains to get out of gym class—I don’t want to play badminton or dodgeball. Getting pounded by a big, hard ball isn’t fun. It wasn’t fun in third grade, and it isn’t fun now.
The nurse says my “gastric upset” is caused by stress. She tips her head to one side and pats my arm. Then she gives me two plastic soup spoons of Maalox, reminds me to do the nose breathing she gave me a blue sheet of paper about and signs my library pass. I’m supposed to be studying in the library if I’m not in gym class, but it’s easy, I discovered, to sign in and then sneak out. No one ever checks.
The first time I left, I was walking up Duke Street. The whole time I kept expecting Mr. Connell’s hand to come from behind me and grab my shoulder. But nothing happened. Not then, not the next day.
That first day I left school I just wandered around the dollar store. The second time, I walked along the street instead of up the hill, and when I got here to the old theater, I bought a ticket and came in without really thinking about it.
The movies are mostly old ones or arty films that the Megaplex would never show because they don’t have any car chases or teenagers getting killed by the fat kid they picked on in kindergarten. I don’t care what the movies are anyway. In here, for six bucks plus the price of popcorn or some jujubes, I can get away from my life for a few hours.