Then my nap amnesia wears off. Dylan. Casey and Mallory at home with the girls.
“Where are we?” I ask Dad.
Now I understand what woke me up. We’ve slowed dramatically, and can see little through the windshield but taillights and snow so thick it’s like a wall.
My father is tense on the wheel, his mustache twitching, eyes narrow as he searches for passage.
The appeal of a big vehicle has never been clearer.
“We’re only to Ann Arbor,” he says.
He was right to drive me. I never could have been alert enough to manage this alone. I’d have caused a hundred-car pileup by now.
I consider telling him this, but he knows he’s right. It must be nice to have such confidence.
My cell phone rings, and I snatch it up, visions of disaster at home flicking to life.
It’s Evelyn. My boss.
“Hello, Evelyn. Sorry I didn’t come in today.”
“That’s fine, Michael, we understand. Any news?”
“Yes, he’s in Cleveland and we’re going to get him now. He’s fine.”
“Thank God,” she says, but she says it without emotion. I know her mind is already on the very next thing she has to say. “Look, I hate to talk to you about this over the phone, but rumors are swirling, and as we always tell our readers, it’s best to get the truth at times like this.”
“Yes” is all I can manage.
“We will be offering you a severance package, Michael. Please know it is not in any way personal or a reflection on the work you’ve done for us. There were any number of factors involved, and the decision making was an arduous, complicated process.”
“I’m sure it was. So who else got the ax?”
“Michael—”
“Evelyn. Just tell me.”
She rattles off the list. I notice Kate’s not on it. I would like to be glad for her, but she has no children to support, she’s beautiful and charismatic. She’d bounce back, probably higher than she is now.
“When’s my last day?” I ask.
“We’re keeping everyone on through the end of the year.”
“December 31?”
She pauses. “Yes.”
Happy goddamn New Year.
I become aware of my father sneaking looks at me.
Evelyn and I exchange businesslike pleasantries, and she thanks me for my years of service, but I’m not really listening as the conversation winds down and I hang up, still wondering why I didn’t make the cut.
Kate must be the rising star of the Herald, what there is left of it, anyway. She’s been using Twitter and has gathered quite a following of loyal readers who hang on her every post.
I never could figure out that damn Twitter, and it made me want to gnaw off my own hand every day when I read the comments posted beneath each of my stories on the newspaper’s Web site, from such insightful pundits as “Tigerrrfan32” and “Gdawg.” They picked apart the content of my stories, the syntax, even what I did at council meetings, reading hidden agendas into my every action: when I looked bored, when I was taking notes, whom I interviewed first after a meeting.
My dad begins to pull off the road.
“What are you doing?”
He nods toward the signs advertising places to eat. “Can’t see anything anyway. We might as well stop to eat and hope the snow lets up. Anyway, I want to talk to you, and I can’t do that very well while I’m driving.”
“We need to get to Dylan, and we’ve got sandwiches in the car.”
“I can’t see anything, Mike. We’ve got to stop. So we’ll eat.”
Minutes later we’re at a Wendy’s. My dad orders a baked potato and a salad and a glass of water.
I order the biggest, most cheese-drenched sandwich I see and a large fries. Plus a Diet Coke.
My dad raises his eyebrows at me, and I ignore him.
Dad leads the way and chooses a seat in the far reaches of the restaurant away from the counter, where the employees are joking around now that we’ve walked away. Except for a couple other storm refugees, we’re the only ones in here.
I drench my salty fries with more salt.
I have to acknowledge I might be doing this just to bug him.
Dad spreads his napkin carefully over his lap and picks at his plain potato. Not even butter.
“I’ve been meaning to talk to you anyway,” he says, squeezing his packet of fat-free Italian dressing.
“What about?” I ask, as if I don’t know, and take a giant bite of burger.
“So you’ll go to grad school.”
I chew the burger carefully, and decide not to reply. I’m just too tired.
“I’m not supporting you forever.”
I swallow hard. “You’re not supporting me now.”
“I could get much more in rent for that house than I do from you, and you haven’t purchased your own car in years. And I know you need the help, but the time has come to face facts, Mike.”
“Do tell.” I gaze out the window, but there’s nothing to see. Just bright dots piercing the white: headlights, taillights, gas station signs.
“Your career is a dead end. Journalism is dying, especially print journalism. You can’t make a living as a blogger; that’s a joke. What are you going to do, teach? I’m sure all the local colleges will be buried in ex-journalist résumés first thing Monday. It’s time you got a serious education.”
I swipe fries through a pool of salt on my paper placemat and dunk them in ketchup.
He goes on. “I will loan you the money for grad school provided you choose a field with some promise, something that can support three children and however many more you’ll have with your new girlfriend, in the proper fashion.”
“Ha. Proper fashion?”
“So you don’t have to ask me for money so that you can pay for the fancy jeans Angel wants to wear so she can fit in, for Dylan’s band trips. So you can save for their college educations and your own retirement. So you can own a real house.” Dad points at me with his plastic fork. “The way I raised you. The way your kids deserve to be raised.”
“I work hard.”
“Of course you do. But you also married an unstable woman who couldn’t hold down a job and kept having kids with her while she ran up debt.”
“Nice way to talk about your grandchildren.”
“I love my grandchildren. That’s why I’m doing this.”
“Threatening me?”
“Telling you that I’m charging you the market rate for rent in that house, and letting you buy your own car, and letting you figure out yourself how to pay for your own life. Unless you go to grad school for a decent job. In which case you’ll have all the help in the world.”
“Blackmail, now. With my children in the middle.”
“It’s your children I’m thinking of. I’m not going to subsidize your fantasy world any longer. I always said reporters don’t make enough money, and if you ever could, you certainly can’t now.”
“Unbelievable.”
“I’d think you’d jump at the chance.”
“So I just found out I got fired, and we’re going to fetch my runaway son, and this is when you decide to dump this on me?”
“Giving you time to think about it. You know, you could be an engineer. Your math grades were always excellent.”
“Fuck you.”
His mustache twitches. I think he might actually be smiling.
I throw down the burger. It slides apart, spilling condiments all over the tray. “Fine. Raise my rent. I’ll drop off the Honda this weekend. We’ll figure it out ourselves. I am done.”
If only I could storm off and slam a door.
Instead I reassemble my sandwich, and then discover I have no appetite for it anymore. In fact, I feel ill.
Dad is still eating his salad, so I’m forced to sit there, listening to the tinny speakers in Wendy’s play “White Christmas.”
A young couple comes in then, hanging on each other and laughing.
The boy is thin and tall, with piercings. The girl’s cheeks are pink with cold, and her dark blond hair trails out from under a funny-looking knit hat. She’s got her arms wrapped around the boy underneath his unzipped jacket. They’re both white on one side of them with wind-whipped snow.
They gaze at each other as their giggles subside, then their faces meet and they plunge into a romantic kiss, the kind that happens in movies over a violin crescendo.
The fast food workers hoot their approval.
My dad snorts his disgust.
I stare down at my half-eaten meal and think about how much that girl looks like Casey, and wonder what she’s doing right this minute.
Chapter 27
Casey
It’s like we’re sister-wives!” giggles Mallory, as she chops up some vegetables.
I’m dropping spaghetti into a pot while the girls set the table, and try to laugh gamely because the girls are here.
I imagine having Michael to myself. The freedom and money to dash out for dinner just because we feel like it, having sex whenever we want, loudly if we want. Sleeping in until noon on Saturday, eating bagels in bed. Choosing a home together that would be ours, and always just ours. Starting fresh with our baby. Growing into a family gradually, and with care.
It’s impossible; Michael and his kids are a package deal. It’s like my daydreams as a kid where I could fly. My mom tells me I once thought I could grow into flying, like it was something grown-ups got like breasts or a beard. I was just little, but I do remember the crushing sensation of a collapsing dream when my mom told me, having to stifle her laughter when she realized I was in earnest, that I would never fly.
I steal a glance at Mallory and allow myself to savor the resentment I usually choke down and ignore. If she were a normal, stable person, she could have the kids, which is the natural order of things, and we’d get them every other weekend and the rest of the time be a normal couple.
But it’s not her fault, Michael says. With her history. She’s unwell.
At the table, Jewel giggles over a joke Angel has just told, and I remember my journal and then I’m swimming in shame. How could I wish them away, even part of the time?
My mother could be right. Maybe I’m not up to the challenge.
We manage to cook spaghetti together without incident, and as we go to sit down at the kitchen table, I notice that Mallory has chosen my usual seat. I move to Michael’s chair without comment.
I look at the clock and imagine Michael and his father might be as far as the Ohio border. Well, in good weather, they would be. I’m grateful for his dad’s four-wheel-drive monstrosity, today.
“Casey keeps a journal, don’t you, Casey?”
It takes me a moment to realize it is Angel speaking. She sounds like her mother, too.
“I’m sorry, what? I was distracted.” I heard her; I’m stalling. My heart throbs in my ears.
Jewel pipes up. “We were talking about journals in school. We write in them every day. I was writing about alligators yesterday. Did you know they’re as old as dinosaurs? But not extinct.” She says it “ess-tink.”
Angel twirls her spaghetti around her fork. She’s only playing at eating, making stage business out of it. She turns to me, her face placid. “Yes, and I was saying that I just learned you write in a journal, too.”
I reach out for my glass of water, my hand just on the edge of shaking, and take a sip. “Yes, I do.”
“Really?” Mallory says, leaning forward over her plate. “I had this shrink once who told me to do that, but I could never find the time, what with Mike always working at the paper, and I had three little kids to deal with at home.”
“It can be therapeutic,” I say, settling my glass down with extra care. I turn to Angel and add, “You can vent things you don’t really mean. You know, get things out when you’re frustrated.”
Angel shifts in her chair to face me. “But you must mean it, at least partly, or you wouldn’t feel it. It’s not like you write lies in your own journal.”
“But sometimes you’re overreacting to a situation, and then you settle down and realize what you were feeling wasn’t real.”
Angel shrugs. “That doesn’t feel like a very honest way to live, if you ask me. I’m up-front about my feelings.”
“You could say that.”
Angel’s eyes narrow at me, and I gulp. She goes on, a little smirk playing at her lips. “Anyway, I’d be afraid a journal would be discovered, and read. Then what?”
It’s drafty in here, but the air feels jungle-hot to me right now.
“Well, you hope people will have enough respect to leave your things alone.”
Mallory breaks in. “One thing you’ll realize, my dear young Casey, is that mothers don’t get any privacy. You give that up along with sleeping through the night. You can’t hide anything from them.”
Angel has not looked away from me yet. “And why would you want to?”
Jewel says, “Does your diary have a lock, Casey? I’ve seen them with locks on them.”
“No, it doesn’t,” I say, standing and taking my plate to the sink. “I’m going to eat later. I’m not feeling very well.”
I walk to the stairs, willing myself not to turn around. I can feel Angel’s eyes on my back the whole way.
I crawl under the covers of the unmade bed. The sheets are cold. I huddle into them, cocoonlike, trying to warm them with my body heat.
Angel says she’s up-front with her feelings, and she’s not kidding. But I can’t believe she doesn’t have secrets, thoughts so deep and scary she can’t post them to the Internet.
Maybe she senses what I know for sure, that exposure makes you weak. Maybe that’s why she won’t admit to having any at all.
I can see the allure in that.
When I was in middle school, I was dumb enough to take my diary to school. It was a real diary back then, with a purple cover that said “My Diary” in silver letters, and a little lock. Those little lockable diaries were the “in” thing at my school back then. Ashley, the popular girl on the student council, had one, so I heard. It had been a Christmas gift, and I remember excitedly waiting until January 1, so I could start writing on the first dated page.
I’d wanted to show my friend Tina. We were all showing off our Christmas gifts, after all. Backstreet Boys CDs and stuff like that.
I took it to fourth hour because lunch happened in the middle of fourth-hour class. I’d stuck it in my binder, and then because I got to class really early, I ran to the bathroom to check the cover-up on a super-ugly nose pimple.
As I walked back to the doorway I heard a bunch of laughing, and I still remember feeling excited, quickening my step so I could see what was so funny.
When I turned the corner, I saw Big Mike standing on a chair. We all called him that because he was big like a high schooler already. He had my diary open, and was holding it up and gesturing as he read out loud. The class stood around him, faces up like little birds waiting for food, laughing and laughing.
“ ‘I think I’m growing breasts!’ ” he read in a falsetto, overemoted voice. “ ‘There definitely seemed to be more roundness than before when I checked this morning, turning sideways in the mirror so I could get a good look. I can’t wait until I have a true woman’s body, then maybe I can get Tyler to look at me! Tyler is so handsome, I just want to melt every time he says hello to me . . .’ ”
At this point no one had yet seen me. I felt sick like on a ride at the fair, nauseous and out of control. In the time he was reading that paragraph I saw Tina, my friend, hopping pathetically up toward his thick arm as he leaned out of her grasp. I saw Tyler pull his shirt up and bury his head inside, turtle fashion. From inside his shirt he made retching noises.
Then someone saw me, and one by one they stifled their laughter, but their faces were still flushed and pink from the glee of my exposed secrets.
Big Mike looked not at all ashamed. He hopped down from the chair, my own chair I could see n
ow, and tossed my diary carelessly down on my desk, making kissy noises. Kids started shoving Tyler toward me, and he was backpedaling with his feet. Big Mike grabbed me, and he smushed me into Tyler, shouting, “Does she have a real woman’s body? Does she?”
“Enough,” shouted Mrs. Thomas from the doorway, walking in as the bell rang. “Everyone to your seats.”
Her stern demeanor was for everyone at once. She always regarded her class as one organism, behaving or misbehaving as a unit. It never occurred to me to tell her what had happened.
I slunk into my chair and glanced at the lock before I buried my diary back in my binder. The flimsy thing had simply been busted open.
I later heard from Tina that she’d mentioned my diary to Jenny, something about how she heard I had a cool purple one and I’d brought it to show her, and Big Mike had overheard and run right to my desk.
For weeks afterward it was the cool thing to do, to grab Tyler and shove him at me. Once Nick Allen smashed me up against a locker, feeling my chest for a woman’s body, declaring it not there yet.
If Tyler happened to glance my way, he always looked like he might vomit and he’d scurry away as fast as possible. All things considered, I couldn’t blame him.
I threw away the purple diary in a Dumpster at the grocery store. I eventually bought a plain notebook and hid it between the mattress and box spring in my room, publicly declaring that diaries were lame anyway.
Because if I learned nothing else in seventh grade, I learned that one flimsy lock is hardly enough to protect your secrets.
Chapter 28
Angel
It’s kind of nice doing dishes with my mom. It’s so . . . normal.
When my phone bleeps in my pocket, I dry my hands and reach for it. I have to hold the phone out of my mom’s view because she’s stretching her neck to see.
It’s Scott. I’ve been trying to get his attention for weeks now.
Ru OK? Found him?
I hadn’t told him about Dylan, but word gets around. And he’s concerned! It’s sweet. I feel a little guilty being happy about his concern, considering the reason.
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