If You Lived Here You'd Already be Home

by John Jodzio

  I am still standing there when the front door opens and Todd comes inside. He is wearing tattered jeans and a torn t-shirt. He has painted his face with gray makeup. There is a scar running over the bridge of his nose and down his cheek.

  “Hold on,” I tell him. “We don’t have to do it now.”

  Todd lurches up the stairs and across the living room. There is stiffness in his limbs and his feet drag across on the carpet.

  “Todd,” I yell, “It’s okay now.”

  He is moaning so loudly that he cannot hear me. A line of drool slides from the corner of his mouth. I wave my hands in front of my face, try to get him to stop. He does not stop. He drags himself toward me, slowly, patiently, like this is the only thing in the world that matters.

  INVENTORY

  Our baby swallowed a ninja star and then it swallowed a Bakelite button. It seemed fine. Breathing and everything. We checked. We are fine parents.

  We weren’t too upset about the button, but the ninja star was one of my husband’s favorites, really light and made from this tungsten polymer that was said to be “space-age.” He used it in the league that he was in on Thursdays nights.

  “I’ll never ever find another one like that again,” he told me privately.

  The same thing happened with our toenail clippers.

  One night, I found the baby (who knows how babies do this) standing on top of our bathroom sink, rifling through the medicine cabinet.

  “The nail clippers are gone,” my husband told me after taking stock. “They were right here on this shelf and now they are not.”

  “Maybe you left them downstairs,” I offered. “Maybe you’re mistaken. Maybe you left them somewhere where you forgot. Maybe you were the one.”

  My husband had just gotten out of bed and his hair was all matted down. It looked like when a helicopter comes down suddenly in high grass, pushed out in spots, flattened down in others.

  “Whose side are you on here?” he asked me.

  “No one’s,” I told him. “And everyone’s.”

  Soon, my husband and the baby were eyeing each other in a manner I did not like. You see it all the time nowadays, this raising of eyebrows, a puffing out of chests, hands flexing from open to closed.

  One night, my husband searched the baby’s bassinet.

  “This is a random search,” he told the baby. “It could occur at any time. That’s what random means, okay?”

  The baby took its revenge for the search by swallowing my husband’s wristwatch.

  “It’s on,” my husband told our marriage counselor. “That was an heirloom. Handed down from generation to generation. Game fucking on.”

  “Maybe the baby will pass all this stuff,” I offered.

  Pass it? That was one thing we knew the baby would not do. Things disappeared inside this baby, pellets of rock salt, packs of post-it notes, diamond solitaire necklaces, whatever. Gone. Finito. Seeya.

  Sometimes I put my head right up to the baby’s stomach, my ears to its skin, listened to its innards to see if I could hear something moving along.

  Passing these things?

  “Good one,” my husband said. “Hardy-har.”

  - - - - - - - -

  Finally, I started leaving things out for the baby to swallow. A puzzle piece with no matching puzzle. A broken half of a letter opener. A combination lock to which we’d forgotten the combination.

  I put these things in plain view.

  I left out sheets of paper too. Words written on them in big black marker. Phrases like “Crying Over Nothing.” Phrases like “Taking All This For Granted.”

  I motioned to the baby.

  “Here,” I said.

  I gave the baby one of those sudden hey, hey over here moves you give with your hands when you think someone can help.

  One morning, I woke up to find my hand duct taped to my husband’s hand, this big silver cocoon running up to both our elbows like a shiny cast.

  I knew right away.

  No note, no word of thanks, not one iota of goodwill for the time that we’d put in. Just the duct tape around our arms.

  “Call everyone we know,” I said to my husband.

  He picked up the phone in his free hand, held it out to me. With my free hand, I dialed. After I punched in the numbers, he held the phone up to his ear.

  “Hello,” he said to our people, “the baby’s gone.”

  “Not our fault,” I called from the background.

  “Not our fault,” he repeated.

  Later that night, after we’d broken the news to everyone, we got up and walked around the house. Looked at what was left.

  Garlic press, we said. Recordable DVD. Alarm clock.

  We touched these things, ran our free hands over them.

  After a while, we found a notebook.

  This was a lucky thing.

  In it, we started to take inventory.

  All it boiled down to was this: one person telling the other one what they saw, then the other person, the one with the pen and the free hand, writing it all down.

  THE BARNACLE

  My brother’s girlfriend came home with a barnacle stuck to her butt cheek.

  “Rory,” Jill said to me, pointing to her butt. “It happened again.”

  Jill was my age. My brother, Phillip, was older. We all lived together in Phillip’s place across the highway from the ocean.

  “Again?” I said.

  Jill said she’d fallen asleep at the beach and then it was there under her bikini bottom, the barnacle, all misshapen and hard and about the size of a fist.

  Jill was at the beach getting tan for a bikini contest. She’d won one at a local hot rod show, which qualified her for the state meet. The state meet was tomorrow. Jill was taking it all serious, even though everyone kept telling her she wasn’t curvy enough to win.

  “Again,” she said to me.

  Yes, this had happened before. One other time. Right when Jill had started going out with Phillip. Right at the beginning, when everything was still new and exciting for them. It was all a joke then. Something funny they told people at their beach parties.

  A barnacle.

  Can you believe it?

  I was still in broadcasting school the first time it happened. I had just broken up with Corrine. I was ready to quit everything. Corrine was telling me that she didn’t love me anymore, that we weren’t meant to be together. Everyone else was telling me that my voice was too nasally, that I’d never make it in radio.

  Not even in public radio, my teachers said.

  I was in my dorm room when I got Phillip’s phone call about the first barnacle. We hardly ever talked on the phone. The only other time he’d called me at school he’d told me that our mother had died. I was sitting there, waiting for him to tell me some other horrible news, but instead he told me about Jill.

  “Other than the barnacle, she’s great,” Phillip said. “I can’t keep my hands off her.”

  Now though, two times, it was way less funny, maybe even ominous. Maybe there was something about Jill that just attracted things from the briny deep.

  Last time it was on her calf. She’d forgotten about high tide that time too, woke up to water skidding up her legs. This one on her butt cheek was way bigger. It looked medieval, looked like it had seen a lot of shit in its day.

  “Just get the damn salt,” Jill told me. “I can feel it really attaching itself, thinking this is its new home.”

  Salt worked the last time. Even though Jill told Phillip that was what you did for leeches, not barnacles, for some reason it worked, the barnacle slid right off her leg.

  I walked into the pantry now, lifted up the salt container. It was empty.

  “We’re out,” I yelled back to her.

  - - - - - - - -

  We lived in a tiny house across the highway from the ocean. You could yell anywhere in there and be heard from anywhere else. And that is what Jill and I us
ually did. In different rooms, yelling through the walls—back and forth at each other. We weren’t much on politeness or decency. Jill and I battled and yes, sometimes things escalated. Once she stuck a fork into my shoulder. I still had the scar—the three tine marks. It looked like some messed-up vampire had bitten me.

  The reasons I didn’t like Jill were numerous, but the worst thing Jill had done was to sort of resemble Corrine. I’ll admit that ultimately they didn’t look all that much alike, but sometimes looking at her lounging on the couch, her blond hair in braids, the freckles that lightly dotted her cheeks—it dug up all the bad feelings between Corrine and me. The only way I knew how to deal with these feelings was to toss some ill will her way.

  Usually Phillip let the jawing between Jill and me play out, like it was a rite of passage that we needed to work through to become a family. When it escalated into something more, when we stood up and starting moving at each other, Phillip planted himself between us, his arms extended and unmovable, his hands ready for action.

  “Settle the hell down,” he’d tell us.

  My brother towered over both of us. He’d played defensive tackle at San Diego State and had a weight room set up in the garage to stay ripped. There had been a tryout a few years back for some Arena league, then one in Europe, but they all told him he wasn’t fast enough to make it in the pros.

  “Let’s take a walk down to where it all started,” Phillip would say to us, “calm ourselves down.”

  He’d lead us down the dirt path to the ocean. The path wasn’t anything really, just a trail that surfers had worn down over time. There was some sagebrush to grab onto so you didn’t fall.

  “This can work,” he offered, putting his arms around both of us and squeezing us together. “I like both of you, so both of you can like each other, right?”

  Once we got down to the ocean, Phillip waxed philosophical. Lately he had been watching a lot of documentaries about evolutionary sea life on the Discovery Channel. He’d just read this biography on Jacques Cousteau.

  “Shit crawled out of there,” he’d tell us as he pointed at the grey ocean water. “Shit that became you and me.”

  Here’s what I wanted to tell Phillip right now as I looked at the barnacle: “Shit’s crawling out of there again, bro. Shit that ended up on your girlfriend’s ass.”

  “I have a crowbar in my car,” I told Jill. “Just a couple pulls and you’d be back to normal.”

  She was lying on the couch, her face buried in throw pillows. She reared up into a yoga pose, legs on the ground, head arching to the ceiling. She was flexible enough for it; she was always exercising in front of the TV, throwing her leg behind her head or some other nonsense.

  “Flexibility is one of the key components to longevity,” she’d told me yesterday.

  “Not stretching makes me not hurt,” I responded.

  All this stuff she did was for that bikini contest—the videos, running the beach every morning, getting her nails done at the mall, reading women’s magazines—prep for this singular moment when she shimmied down the runway and shook her hips.

  “I have to be super-prepared,” she told me. “People only have a second to decide if they are going to woo-hoo for me. Just one second.”

  It was the same thing with radio. People had only a second or two to decide whether or not they liked your voice. If they didn’t, if they thought you were annoying, if they thought you talked too much, they switched the station. The consensus was that when people heard me talking to them on the radio, they would immediately be reaching for their dials.

  “I’ll wait for the salt,” she said. “Pick some up when you get Scratch and Dent.”

  That was her pet name for Phillip.

  Scratch and Dent.

  Like I said, he was older.

  I drove downtown to pick up Phillip. He worked as a phlebotomist at this blood bank—had a career as a phlebotomist, he emphasized. He’d taken the job after he quit playing football.

  “I needed a life skill,” he repeated ad nauseam. “Not a pipe dream.”

  As I drove downtown the sun was setting, cutting the smog into this wicked spectrum, reds and oranges and burnt umbers, all fighting to backlight the city skyline.

  Lately, Phillip had been bugging me about my future. Both of our parents had been dead for a few years and he seemed to think he needed to guide me along the career path. I thought that I had been on a good path, with Corrine, with broadcasting school, but then everything got derailed. Now I didn’t want to hear about it.

  “You can put up with a lot of no’s if you love something,” he told me. “That’s the thing. If you love something, you can sit there and hope forever.”

  I knew what he was saying, but I was wired in the exact opposite way. Once someone told me no, once someone got in my grill and said I didn’t have what it took, I backed the hell off. Right away, no problem. I’d gotten way too sick of hearing the word “no.”

  Phillip was waiting outside the clinic when I pulled up. He was still dressed in his scrubs. He hopped in the truck and then immediately started telling me a story. I tried to tell him about Jill and the barnacle, but he wouldn’t let me get in a word edgewise.

  “You should have seen this lady today—I couldn’t find a decent vein on her whole fucking body,” he said.

  He had these stories, you know? He was so much older than both Jill and me and he showed us things about the world we wouldn’t have seen otherwise. Maybe it was perspective, maybe experience, maybe both, but I looked at him for what was going to happen to me down the line, how I was going to age, some sort of clue about the future.

  “Then I hit the mother lode,” he said. “Lady shot out blood like a stuck pig. All over the exam room walls. Totally effed up.”

  Usually, my brother wasn’t an asshole; he worried about what kind of job he did with his clients. That’s what he called them, “clients.” Like he was selling them something valuable, not poking them in the arm and watching their blood fill up a plastic bag.

  I caught a whiff of his breath. “Are you drunk?” I asked him.

  “No way,” he said. “Never.”

  He waited a few seconds, then laughed.

  “Wasted,” he said.

  I drove off toward home. Traffic was horrible; we got stuck behind a jackknifed truck and sat for twenty minutes without moving an inch. My brother kept nodding off and then shaking himself back awake. I wasn’t going to ask him what happened, why he was drunk. I’d let him tell me when he was good and ready.

  “I got canned,” he said, breaking the silence. “Staffing cuts. I’ve been at the bar since noon.”

  He unzipped his backpack and pulled out a beer. He spun the top off, flicked the cap out the window. I was going to say something about the cops, the open bottle, the littering, but I held back.

  “I thought that I was going to do that job for a long time,” he said.

  I looked over at my brother in the passenger seat. He was hunched over, his arms were wrapped around his legs, his chin was resting on his knees. He was smushed together into this tiny package, sipping his bottle of beer.

  “Screw them,” I said. “You are way too good for their asses.”

  I thought this was a particularly positive thing to say, something that would reassure my brother that I was on his side, but he didn’t take it that way. He waved me off.

  “Don’t even start with that crap,” he said.

  Traffic started moving again. We drove about ten feet and then stopped again.

  “Jill’s got another barnacle,” I told him. “This one’s on her ass.”

  He sat there a minute, let it wash over him. He had talked to me lately about marrying her. He’d been saving up for a ring. I wondered if this would change any of that. That if in his eyes this made her unmarriable.

  “Christ,” he said. “Again?”

  When we got home Jill was lying face down on the couch, moaning.

&n
bsp; “I’m not going to urgent care,” she told us. “No way. I don’t want to explain this. I’ll be in that book of urban legends—the mouse up the guy’s ass, the vacuum cleaner stuck on the guy’s dick. No matter what you say happened, they don’t believe you.”

  Phillip went over and gently kissed her on the forehead. He slid her bikini out of the way and took a look at the barnacle. All of his anger about losing his job seemed to have lifted and I could tell that all he was concerned about now was Jill’s welfare.

  “Wow,” he said. “Big one.”

  He took the container of salt out of the grocery bag and opened it. He moved Jill’s bikini out of the way, poured a big pile of salt onto the barnacle.

  “Now we wait,” he told us.

  I set the timer on the stove for ten minutes. We sat and stared at the barnacle. The thing didn’t budge. Not a millimeter. The salt wasn’t doing anything to this one. It couldn’t have cared less. I picked up an In Shape magazine off the coffee table and started paging through it.

  “We’ve got a fighter,” Phillip said.

  The timer went off. Phillip walked over, brushed the salt away and tried to pull the barnacle off with his hands. All he ended up doing was lifting Jill off the couch by her butt.

  “Fine,” Jill said to me. “Get your damn crowbar.”

  I ran outside. The crowbar was sitting in the bed of the truck and it was pretty cold. On the way back into the house, I warmed the metal in my hands. Then I handed it to Phillip.

  “Don’t fuck up my skin,” Jill warned. “Be delicate.”

  Phillip tried to slide the crowbar under the barnacle. Jill twisted around to watch Phillip work the handle, try to get some leverage.

  It didn’t look like anything was happening at first, but then a few seconds later Phillip got underneath the barnacle and it spun loose. There was this high pitched sucking sound right before it let go—like the last of the water going down a tub drain.

  After it let go, there was an absolute mess of grey sludge left on Jill’s butt. After Phillip wiped the goo away, there was a dark purple mark that looked like a hickey.