If You Lived Here You'd Already be Home

by John Jodzio

  I’d asked Carl a couple times if he was okay as we rode off down the hill, if there was anything he needed, but he just shook his head. He wasn’t talking to me. He was staring straight ahead, pedaling his bike, breathing through his mouth. When we got home, he tromped up the stairs and went into our room and shut the door.

  On the kitchen table was the day’s mail and I saw that our postcards from Turnbull had finally come. They were addressed to our old apartment. They had come with yellow forwarding stickers on them.

  “Ricky,” mine read, “I am gone now. What does that feel like, you may ask? It doesn’t feel any different yet (since I am not totally dead at this moment when I am writing this). Still, it feels strange to be on one side of something and know that you will be entering the other side soon. Can you know? Probably you cannot. You are fifteen years old. You guys never knew shit.”

  It was signed “Coach Turnbull.” I held the postcard in my hands. Read it over again. I looked at the naked girl on the postcard. She looked scared to be there. She looked like the camera had surprised her. She looked like someone had talked her into being there and now she had realized that this was a big mistake.

  I went into our bedroom and sat down next to Carl on the bed. I handed him his postcard.

  “Here,” I said. “It’s from Turnbull. It says, ‘Carl, be good.’”

  Carl sat there for a long time holding his postcard, rotating it from the words to the picture. After a while, he hit his chest two times and pointed to the sky and quietly mouthed Turnbull’s name.

  I sat with him for a while, watching him, and then I went into the living room and ripped open a moving box on top of the pile.

  First I unpacked the silverware and put it into the drawer. Then I unpacked the glasses from their newspaper, washed them and put them into the cabinets. I unloaded a box of books, slid them away onto the bookshelf.

  I was flying around the room for the next few hours, throwing things into cabinets and closets. Carl got up and came over to me and asked me if he could help.

  “Sure,” I told him.

  And we worked for a long time, arranging our new place, putting everything on shelves and into drawers. By the time my mother got home that night, there was not much left for her to do.

  THE GIRL WITH THE GAMBLING MOTHER

  The girl with the gambling mother comes back from Christmas break missing a pinky. Her mother brings her back to school in a conversion van with a picture of Tom Brady spray painted on the side. The gambling mother is a big Patriots fan and we, the staff of Middleton Primary, can only think the worst. That the gambling mother lost. That instead of giving up the van, the gambling mother gave up the girl.

  The girl comes back wearing the same hooded Patriots sweatshirt she always wears—heather grey with a chocolate stain that looks like a coiled-up snake. Her hand is wrapped in gauze and over the gauze she wears a thick wool mitten. I thought the other kids would be scared of her, but they are not. Instead of shying away, they crowd around her and ask to see. Show us, they plead, show us what isn’t.

  “I was cutting bread,” the girl tells them as she spins off the gauze, “and the knife slipped. Then my pinky was on the floor and my dog scooped it up and ran outside. We think it’s buried somewhere in our backyard, but we aren’t totally sure.”

  Mr. Reylindo, the school’s social worker, pulls the girl from gym class every morning to discuss her missing finger. He gives her a sock puppet to act out what happened. She sticks to her story about the bread knife and the golden retriever. She never tells us that it is her mother’s fault even though this is the thing we want her to tell us most.

  “Sooner or later,” Mr. Reylindo tells me. “Sooner or later I always get the truth.”

  I have a short but checkered history with Mr. Reylindo. We went on a couple of dates last fall. Once we did some poppers and went dancing. One night we smoked some weed and went for sushi. The last time we went on a date, we took acid and drove to the tide pools and his wife found us and hit the hood of my car with a machete over and over until Mr. Reylindo got out and told her I was a whore who meant nothing to him.

  These days I only speak with Mr. Reylindo out of professional courtesy. I only talk to him when a student of mine has trouble at home. I am done hoping that one night he and I will get into his car and barrel down the highway at top speed, screaming and pounding our fists on the roof of the car because we are full of boundless joy.

  “I’ve missed you,” Mr. Reylindo says as we watch the girl through the two-way glass. “I miss the fun we used to have.”

  I do not answer Mr. Reylindo. I stand there and press my back teeth together so my mouth will not open. I watch the girl pull the sock puppet over her good hand. I watch her play with the sock puppet like it is actually a sock puppet and not some mouthpiece to say all of the things that her real mouth wouldn’t dare to say.

  I come back from Christmas break straight out of a fourteen-day rehab at Echo Mountain Ranch. I come back to my first graders with a small laminated card that is salmon-colored and says that I am strong and that I can make positive choices about alcohol, drugs, and men. At points in my life I’ve wholeheartedly believed this statement, but at points my body has bullied my brain aside. It is nice to finally have these words written down for me, wallet-sized, near.

  I come back from Christmas break excited to teach, but no more able than I ever was. When you work with small children it is hard not to feel like when the children fail that their failure is also yours. It is hard not to extrapolate things into the future, to guess at what dumbass decisions these kids will make when they are fifteen, twenty-seven, or fifty-six. You wonder whether all the bad choices they make can be traced directly back to you, back to the life lessons you could not drill into their heads when they were young and pliable.

  When I come back to my classroom, I build a new reading area with beanbags and throw pillows. I take a gift card that my mother gave me for Christmas and I purchase glue and construction paper. I bring bags of old clothes from my closet so the children can play dress-up. I have tried to make my room a sanctuary, and while it seems to calm the kids, unfortunately, there is no calming me.

  “Perhaps you shouldn’t go back to school right away,” my sponsor, Jillian, warned. “Maybe you want to take a sabbatical. Or maybe you should wait until you find a job at a different school.”

  I like Jillian, but she’s not the sponsor for me. She’s too excited about life’s possibilities right now. We meet at a coffee shop once a week before our AA meetings and all she does is show me photos of her and her new man, William Bryant. She only refers to him by both his first and last names. William Bryant this, William Bryant that. It’s early love, something that I remember fondly. I love early love, but hate late love. I hate love that has already passed by all the fun parts and is fully formed and found to be lacking.

  Outside my classroom window, I see the buses pull into the turnaround by the main entrance. I watch kids run out when the doors of the bus accordion open. I get up and pick up a piece of chalk and write the words “Time Capsule” on the blackboard. I stare at these words on the blackboard for a minute before I add an exclamation point behind them. I add the exclamation point to help energize the children; I add the exclamation point because I want them to understand that our next class project will be an exciting one.

  After Christmas break, one of the fathers in my class, Steve Senior, starts asking me out. Steve Senior is a nice man with a thick head of wavy hair and hazel eyes. He brings grocery bags brimming with soup labels in for the class. You collect all the soup labels and the school gets something. I have yet to see what we get. In the end it is probably just more soup in bigger cans.

  “We should have coffee,” he tells me when he comes to pick up Steve Junior. “Get to know each other better.”

  Steve Senior is not bad looking, but I am not ready for anything right now. I know that this fact does not matter to Steve Senior, tha
t no matter what I tell him he will keep trying. I’ve sworn off men before, for months at a time, but they are always unfazed by my rejection and continue to operate like they have not heard the word “no” come from my mouth.

  “Maybe we can date after Steve Junior isn’t in my class,” I tell Steve Senior. “Maybe then.”

  “I trust you to be fair now,” Steve Senior says. “I trust that you wouldn’t hold anything against my boy.”

  Steve Junior is a nice kid. Steve Junior is a kid who knows how to share, someone who will give half of his turkey sandwich to anyone who forgets theirs. It doesn’t always work this way, but I’ve found that usually nice kids have nice parents and that sooner or later bad and bad go hand in hand.

  “I might hold something against him,” I tell Steve Senior. “Or I might hold something back from you. It wouldn’t be fair to any of us, right?”

  “Just think about it,” Steve Senior says.

  And I do. A lot. I lie in bed and think about how Steve Senior could save me from myself. I think about how if I went out with a guy who wasn’t named Bandaid or Jayhole, maybe my luck with men would change. But maybe Steve Senior is just like the others, I think, maybe all these men are exactly the same, sitting in wait until I am at my weakest and only then showing me their fangs.

  All the other teachers come back from Christmas break bursting with gossip. So and so did this and so and so did that with so and so’s this and that. The teacher’s lounge is built with thick walls made of cement block and there’s a Coke machine in the corner that buzzes really loud. There is no smoking allowed here, but the other teachers cup cigarettes and hold them out the window, let the wind blow the spent ash from the end. Even though this room gives us protection from outsiders, everyone still speaks in hushed tones. They know they shouldn’t be talking about these kids, about their parents, but they always always do.

  “Did you hear about Greg Kittelson’s mother?” the Spanish teacher, Marge Greenwaldt, asks. “Her husband died and she married that butcher at the SaveRite. They shipped Greg off to Arizona to live with his grandparents for a while so they could fuck like bunnies.”

  Some days my new meds make my skin feel fuzzy like a peach. They make me feel like I can feel each individual hair growing out from each individual pore at an achingly slow rate. I know that if I get started talking about this I will readily admit it to everyone, so I keep my mouth shut unless I am addressed directly.

  “What did you do over break?” Jeanne Simoneau, the school’s gifted and talented teacher, asks me.

  “I went home to visit my mom,” I say.

  “Where’s home?” Jackie Penn, the school nurse asks.

  Jackie Penn loves penguins. She has her desk filled with them. Penguin coffee cups, penguin curios, penguin pens. I attempted to make nice with her at the beginning of the school year, brought her this notebook I found at Staples that had a bunch of penguins sliding into a hole on a patch of ice. It got me in her good graces for a while, but then one day I wore a t-shirt that had a polar bear on it. She informed me that polar bears are the natural enemy of the penguins. Now we rarely speak.

  “Champaign, Illinois,” I say. “I just ate and ate.”

  Maybe these women could become my confidantes. Maybe they could help me through dark times, help me make positive and fulfilling choices. Perhaps we could drink coffee together and laugh and laugh.

  Jeanne Simoneau lights another cigarette and then blows the smoke at me. It hovers around my head. She has never said anything specific about Mr. Reylindo and me, but there is enough disapproval behind her words to make me think she knows what happened.

  “Sounds like fun,” she sneers.

  The gambling mother comes to teacher conferences. She is wearing huge diamond earrings, but I can see that under her makeup, she’s got an eye that is far from healed.

  “How does this whole thing work?” she asks me.

  The gambling mother is wearing a Patriots World Champion t-shirt and a pair of jeans so tight they make my teeth hurt.

  “You sit here and I tell you how great your kid is,” I say.

  While I speak with her, I try not to sound judgmental or mean. I try to give her the benefit of the doubt. I try to put myself in her shoes even though the heels she has on are so high that if I took one step in them I would immediately topple over.

  “That’s it?” she says. “That’s all?”

  The gambling mother sits down and I tell her about her wonderful, sensitive daughter. I show her where the girl sits. I open the girl’s desk and we look inside. Everything is neat and sectioned off, the pencils lined up along one side, markers in one corner, a notebook laid right in the middle of it all. I guide her mother to the art wall to show her the self portrait that her child has made from kidney, navy, and lima beans.

  “She did this?” the gambling mother asks.

  “She did,” I say. “Your very own daughter.”

  The gambling mother walks around my room looking at all the pictures. I talk to another parent, Tina Koenig’s mother, but I am still looking at the gambling mother out of the corner of my eye. I do not say anything to her when I see one of her diamond earrings fall out of her ear and roll underneath my desk. She does not notice that the earring has fallen. When I am done talking to Sarah’s mom, I scoop the earring off the carpet and slide it into my pocket.

  “Has anyone seen my earring?” the gambling mother asks.

  “Has anyone seen an earring?” I yell out to the room. “Everyone stop moving and look around where they are standing and see if they see an earring on the floor.”

  Soon all of us are down on our hands and knees scouring the floor. I could stop this, but I do not.

  Later that night, Steve Senior comes into my room and I tell him how Steve Junior is doing. They look so much alike, Senior and Junior, and lately when I am in class I look at Junior and wonder what would happen if his father and I were in love.

  “Do you want to go for a drink after this is done?” Steve Senior asks. “You probably could use one, huh?”

  “Not a good idea,” I tell him.

  “Why not?” he asks.

  I lie to him. I tell him I need to begin work on our time capsule. I tell him that this is very important to the children right now. I tell him that this project will document who we are and what we did during this year. I tell him that this time capsule will be something that tells future people what was important to us in this particular part of the world at this particular time.

  “Not even just one drink?” he says.

  “I can’t disappoint the children,” I say.

  For the next few days, I find myself sighing more than before, bigger breaths than I ever thought were possible, expanding my lungs to their full potential. At recess now, I see more dust than air. I watch it float by, cut by the sun, and I wonder what it is that I am really opening my lungs up for. One of the ladies in the principal’s office, Alexis, wears a portable hepa-filter and while everyone disparages her in public, in private we bombard her with questions.

  “Where did you get it?” I ask. And then, “Will it save my life?”

  The girl with the gambling mother still seems unburdened. When we mold clay in art class, I wait for her to build something dire and menacing, something that is a testament to a missing finger. I wait for her to build something that means her mother has betrayed her, put a price on her time on this earth. I want the girl to build something like this, but she does not.

  “Is it a bean?” I ask her when she shows me the clay she’s molded. “Is it a box?”

  She waits a minute, takes a long look at me. The artist-in-residence who comes to the school has told me not to guess at the children’s work anymore. The artist-in-residence wants me to ask the children other questions, more open and less leading, questions like, “What would that be used for? Would it be something you could eat? Could it fly or does it walk?” I always forget these things. I get too excited—
I want to tell the children what they have made. I want to name it for them.

  “It’s a duck,” the girl says. “It’s just a duck.”

  Today when the children are at lunch, I take her mother’s earring out of my desk. I slip it into the hole in my ear. I go into the bathroom and stare at myself in the mirror. “Am I still youngish looking?” I ask myself. “How many decent years do I have left?”

  One night after school, instead of going home, I follow the girl with the gambling mother’s bus. She gets off the bus and skips up the front stairs of her house. She takes a key from under a flowerpot and opens the front door. I get out of my car and crouch in the bushes in front of her dining room window. I watch her move around inside her house. I stand in front of the window and press my face up against it. The glass fogs up but I wipe it away. I see the girl take a bag of chips from a cabinet and then sit down in front of the television. I stand there in the bushes for the next few hours, just watching. Finally she nods off, her face basking in the blue light of the TV.

  I follow her home the next night and the night after that too. On the third night, after she falls asleep, I take the key from under the flowerpot and I let myself inside.

  The house smells like cigarettes and maple syrup. A pile of empty dishes are sitting in the sink. I stand over her and listen to her short and insistent breaths. I stare at her flawless skin. I feel my heart filling itself with immediacy and dread, but I move closer to her. I crouch down next to her and I slide my arms underneath her body and lift her up off the couch. I carry her upstairs to bed.

  “Mom?” she moans.

  “Shhhhh,” I say.

  - - - - - - - -

  I could stop but I do not. I start going over there most nights, sometimes even on weekends. After I tuck her into bed, I sit in my car and listen to the oldies station and wait for her mother to arrive. It’s always after midnight when that van of hers pulls up, when she gets out of it and stumbles inside.