Everything You Came to See

by Elizabeth Schulte Martin

  “What?”

  “Kissing her,” says Henry.

  “Go find out,” says Andre. “Have you even looked at her?”

  “No,” says Henry and crouches beside him.

  “Go away,” his brother says.

  Henry ignores him. He has more questions now than good sense. “Did Dad kill that guy?”

  Andre snorts again. “I don’t think so. I wish he did, though. He’d be in jail.”

  “You want him in jail?”

  “Not exactly,” says Andre. He drags on his cigarette. “But I’d settle for jail.”

  “Don’t they put us up for adoption, then?”

  Andre smiles and his eyes wander toward the top of the fir tree. He throws his cigarette into the snow. “We belong to the state of Indiana, then.”

  Henry stands back up. He wanted to ask about the agent, warn Andre of his suspicions. But this seems dumb, suddenly. And his brother makes him angry, walking around in his near-man’s body and acting like a baby.

  “Well, I don’t want him in jail. I don’t want to belong to Indiana. What does that even mean? It sounds retarded,” Henry says.

  “You sound retarded. He murdered your mother. And you don’t want her to have any justice. You don’t even want to see her.”

  “She had a heart attack,” says Henry. He tenses, feeling his pulse quicken, and not just because he knows that any moment Andre is going to beat him to a pulp, but because he doesn’t want to believe whatever Andre believes.

  “Yeah, that’s what happens when you get scared to death. You know how when you get scared, your heart beats real hard, like this.” Andre demonstrates by jumping to his feet and thumping Henry on the chest three times.

  “Yes,” says Henry.

  “Well, your heart can only take so much of that, right? He scared her. And being scared, that’s what gave her a heart attack, him almost killing you.”

  “But he didn’t almost kill me. I’m alive. I’m not even hurt.”

  Andre grabs him by the hair. “You’re not? Then what is this?” His voice cracks when he says it. Henry squeals and pulls away. Beneath the hair is a long tender wound dividing his scalp, which burns when Andre pulls the hair around it. Their father’s “warning shot” had grazed the top of his head, a fact that no one realized in the chaos of the moment, not even Henry. It didn’t turn out to be that deep, and so it was easily concealed. There was a lot of blood the night he got it, though, so when he realized he was hurt, he rinsed his hair, and put a skull cap on before the ambulance arrived for his mother.

  “That was an accident,” says Henry.

  “Yeah, it’s always an accident. Listen, you little shit, if he’d aimed a quarter inch lower, you’d be dead.”

  Henry feels the choking sensation of tears and turns, stalking back toward the funeral home. Andre follows him.

  “I’m going to make you look at her,” he says.

  “Fuck you, Andre!”

  “I’m going to make you. I’m going to stick you right in there with her.”

  Henry is shoved, hard, and lands facedown into the snow. For a moment, everything is dark and silent and smothering. He pushes himself up with his hands and knees, but Andre already has him by the shirt and is lifting him up. He flips him over so he is lying on his back, staring up into his brother’s face. Henry guards his head with his forearms.

  “Don’t!” he says.

  Andre picks Henry up under his arms and then tosses him over his shoulder. “You’re a little traitor. I’m going to put you in with her body and shut the lid before anyone can stop me. I don’t know how long it’ll take to get you out. I hope they never do. I hope they give up and just bury you with her.”

  Terror shoots through Henry. It seems entirely realistic that Andre could shut him in the coffin with his mother, and no one would notice he was buried alive with her. Just the idea of being underground, pressed against his mother, makes it hard to breathe. He has to get out of Andre’s grip—or die.

  He brings two fists down on Andre’s back, one on either side of his spine. He kicks. He makes his body into a clothespin and snaps it shut on his brother’s.

  Andre grunts. His hold loosens, and then, to Henry’s surprise, he sinks. Andre is suddenly on the ground, beneath him, looking confused. Henry is as confused as he is. Andre is so much bigger than him. Their fights are no contest—Andre hits Henry, and Henry doesn’t even bother hitting back. He knows his efforts are better spent shielding himself from blows to the softer parts of his body. But here he is, and here is Andre, knocked to the ground by the force of Henry’s fists and feet.

  He knows he has to keep going or he’ll be back on Andre’s shoulder again, getting thrust into a coffin, so he punches him. He hits him in the nose and the cheek before Andre can raise his arms to defend himself.

  “Stop, Henry! I was only kidding,” Andre yells, and reaches to grab Henry’s shirt again.

  But Henry hits him twice more, in the chest, in the belly. The belly punch is the one that gets him. Andre curls into a ball and rolls on his side. Henry wins it here, for the first time ever, but he has forgotten his objective, so he doesn’t know he’s won. He keeps kicking Andre, the tips of his good shoes smashing into his ribs. This is all, all, all there is for a moment. No one is dead. No one needs him. No one is there to be afraid of.

  CHAPTER 8

  St. Louis

  June 1990

  ONE WEEK BEFORE THE CIRCUS was slated to leave for Galesburg, Adrienne had her MRI done. There was no question in her mind anymore that the tumor had grown back. What she wanted to know was how bad it was, how tightly it clung to her pituitary gland, how dangerous it would be this time to carve it out. In a few days, they’d tell her the answer to this, and, regardless of what the answer was, she would be saying good-bye to Caleb, and to Henry, her strange but welcome house guest. For the next six weeks, the circus would hit the road.

  Adrienne could feel the effects of the tumor now, not just in her bones, but in her whole body. The surge of hormones made her ache. She got migraines that lasted for whole days and then, when they finally went away, the tips of her toe bones started hurting. If it wasn’t an ache in her head or her toes, it was another type of ache—she would become aroused out of nowhere, would swear she felt the walls of her vagina sticking to each other, and believe only filling herself with something would relieve the pain this caused.

  What an unexpected side effect of dying, she thought, to want to screw like a teenager. It was the opposite of what was supposed to happen to people with her disease, but it made sense to Adrienne, who knew her pituitary was being squeezed, flooding her body with the chemical desire to grow, grow, grow, just as it did when people went through puberty. She knew it confused Caleb, too, the way she’d spend her day in the bathtub holding her head, too depressed to speak, and then suddenly pounce on him, kissing him until he struggled for breath.

  The night before Henry came to stay with them, she had her husband pinned beneath her, and it was the first time in ten hours that she had not been in pain. It was a good moment, but he kept ruining it by looking uncomfortable. She moved her hips, splaying her palms on his chest. She tried to play with him, to bring him back to her.

  “I love you, Caleb,” she said. She dipped her head down and let her hair fall around his face. “This is what you’d look like as a blond.”

  “Adie.”

  “I think I prefer you bald. Maybe if it were a darker blond. And maybe if it were a little shorter.”

  “Jesus, Adrienne.”

  “Am I freaking you out?”

  “No, I just feel terrible,” he said.

  At this rate, she would never get his pants off. She rolled away from him.

  “You know I would never leave unless it was really important, right?” he said. His voice was soft and hoarse, and she could see his thoughts on his face: Poor baby. Poor Adrienne.

  “Please, Caleb. Just let me be happy for a minute, will you?”

  �
�Well, do you understand or not?”

  “Not really. Give the reins to Azi. He knows exactly how things go.”

  Caleb sat up. “I can’t. I know it seems like I could, but I can’t.”

  Adrienne didn’t understand, not at all, but when she saw Caleb looking so miserable, she couldn’t send him on the guilt trip that (in her less charitable moments) she thought he deserved.

  “If you say you can’t, then you can’t.” She reached out to touch the dark black hair on his chest, one of her favorite parts of him, but he intercepted the touch, caught her hand and kissed it.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  That night, Caleb sketched her on a piece of canvas. She posed seated on the couch with Richard on the perch next to her. She didn’t think the proportions were right. Caleb said that was just the style he wanted to paint in, but she still felt self-conscious. The lips, the hands, the arms—they were all too big.

  The next morning, Henry moved in with a prop trunk and a military-issue backpack. Richard eyed him with suspicion, once landing on his shoulder and tasting his hair. Henry slept in their guest room. The pack and all the clothes inside smelled like mildew, so on Monday morning, when Henry went to rehearsal and Caleb went to meet with Seamus, Adrienne dumped them into the washing machine. Hot water, extra soap. She even folded it all and did her best to pair each sock with its closest match. When he returned that afternoon, she handed it all to him in a neat pile.

  He balanced the pile in one hand. “Thank you,” he said. “You didn’t have to do that.”

  “I thought it might be nice for you to have clean pants. And you all put in so many hours in the spring and summer. I remember. It’s hard to find time,” she said.

  Having a guest in the house gave her energy. She still ached and felt sharp pains in the back of her skull to remind her, now and then, that everything was not quite well. But at least she was not in the bathtub crying.

  Tuesday afternoon, Henry came back early from rehearsal. She heard him clamoring around in the guest room like he was rearranging furniture. She figured whatever he was doing was his prerogative, though Caleb had warned her to “watch him.” He was a little nuts, Caleb said. But Adrienne saw nothing in Henry that made him seem like the bad kind of crazy. He blushed nearly every time she spoke to him, and she found this disarming. It was true that she was sometimes wrong about people, but if there was any meanness in his nature, he hid it well. And if his eyes darted from thing to thing a little fast, and if he never felt completely comfortable in his own skin, well, she could identify with that.

  She turned on the radio and started boiling water for noodles. The phone rang just as she dumped the noodles into her hot water. She picked up the receiver and tucked it between her chin and shoulder.

  “Hellooo?”

  “Adie? It’s me. How ya doin’, girl?”

  “Hi, Nancy. I’m doing great. How’re you?” said Adrienne. She grazed her fingers ever so lightly over the little plastic nubs on the phone’s cradle, as she entertained the idea of simply hanging up. Nancy had called twice recently to “warn” her about her ex-husband, but it didn’t seem like a warning. It seemed like Adrienne was the butt of some kind of inside joke that only Nancy was in on.

  “Oh, peachy-keen right now. Got a big party comin’ up. Real rich girls at this one. We’ll see how that goes. I’m making quiches,” she said. Adrienne could picture Nancy right now, sashaying around the kitchen with her French manicure and big Kentucky hair. “Anyway, your man around? I got something to tell you. Personal stuff. I want you to be able to talk openly.”

  “He’s at work,” she said, peering into the guest room. Henry had left the door open a crack. She could see him inside, doing some sort of weird dance or something. Or maybe it was karate. Either way, he was totally absorbed, probably didn’t even care what she had to say.

  “He’s leaving town, isn’t he? If he hasn’t already. I bet you get so lonely.”

  “I don’t mind,” she said. She could tell Nancy was fishing for information, but she wasn’t sure why.

  “Well,” Nancy said. “Talked to Curtis again. He’s looking into transferring to the St. Louis Southern Blue warehouse, so he’s still planning to be in your neck of the woods. You won’t be around, will you?”

  “I won’t,” said Adrienne, gripping the phone so tight that her fingernails dug into her palms. She’d known Nancy since high school, and never liked her. She felt sorry for her, because nobody else liked Nancy either, and Nancy was unaware of this fact. She went right about her business, being obnoxious, while everyone talked about her behind her back and rolled their eyes when she called out to them in the hall. But now Adrienne was tired of feeling sorry for her.

  “So you’re not, deep down, hoping he’ll drop by for a rendezvous?”

  “You didn’t tell him where I live, did you?” Adrienne whispered.

  “Huh? No, I didn’t tell him where you live.”

  But Adrienne could tell by the lift in her voice that she had. Adrienne was almost sure of it.

  “Well, listen, I’m not gonna be here even if he did show up. I’m going to be on tour with Caleb,” Adrienne lied.

  Nancy said nothing for a moment. Adrienne wondered if she’d seen through her deception.

  “Well, that sounds nice—” she said.

  “It will be. Talk later, Nancy.”

  “Uh-huh. Bye then.”

  Adrienne placed the receiver back in its cradle. She couldn’t believe Nancy. Sure, Nancy had done some mean things to her—when they were in high school, Nancy had chucked Adrienne’s diaphragm out the window of a moving car. But even that Adrienne could at least find some humor in. Telling Curtis where she lived, on the other hand, didn’t seem humorous.

  She drained the noodles and found herself getting angrier, even though she knew it was ridiculous to be angry. After all, she had a tumor, the size and removability of which were currently uncertain. Compared to this, Curtis was nothing—a drip of spaghetti sauce on the carpet, a pimple, a minor annoyance. Or he should have been.

  But Curtis had left her when she was down. Worse than down. She’d been going blind. Her tumor was growing, her drugs were not enough. One day, she was at the post office, and as she filled out the address on her package, the letters blurred, and for a moment, they disappeared. Later, the doctor, an old man with more liver spots than normal skin, said her tumor was strangling her optic nerve.

  They did an MRI, and the doctor told her that her best chance was an operation. It was death on one side, death on the other. He explained that most pituitary tumors were fairly safe to remove, but Adrienne’s was particularly large, and blood vessels had taken root around it, making its removal a greater risk for hemorrhage. It was even likelier that the surgery might blind her.

  On the other hand, if he did not take it out, the tumor itself would kill her if it kept growing, and if it didn’t, the hormones that the tumor squeezed into her body eventually would kill her, too. A young body responded to these hormones by growing large, as hers had when she was a girl. But an older body, already strained from sustaining its own size, would become deformed, eventually growing beyond what her heart could keep supplied with blood.

  She was the loneliest she ever had been in that hospital room, four white walls and two doctors and three MRIs, all saying the same thing. Take out the tumor or die. Or die from the taking of it.

  Curtis knew all this and asked for a divorce only days before her surgery. He didn’t move out, but he took her hands in his and told her he wasn’t digging this marriage thing. He wasn’t ready for it. He was sorry. Shouldn’t have signed on for this so young, he said, because he realized he couldn’t live with this pressure, this constant obligation to love her sick body. There was another girl. He was not obligated to this girl, and so when he was with her, he felt happy. And how could he justify denying himself happiness, when life was so short? Adrienne had taught him that. Life was so short.

  The worst part was that sh
e’d never seen this coming. They had matching blue ten-speed bikes that they rode all over town. They made everyone suffer their public displays of affection, kissing and clinging and petting. He had this soft blond hair and she liked to stroke it whenever she was tired or nervous, like children do with their blankets or teddy bears. She could not believe he would leave her, let alone days before her forehead was supposed to be cut out by a little buzz saw, days before her brain would be exposed and the tumor removed. It shocked her, not because she thought Curtis was such a good man—she knew he was not—but she had thought they were good together. She thought they made each other better.

  After the surgery, she had come home to find him sitting on their couch, as if nothing had happened between them, as if he had not had an affair and asked for a divorce. She set her small suitcase down, and he looked at her head, shaven an inch back from her hairline, with such genuine pity and remorse that she nearly went to him and begged him just to pretend to be a good husband—just to love her and not mention his affair. It was what she wanted, at the moment, more than anything. She wanted to forgive him, so that she could touch his hair and have some comfort.

  But he was wearing a blue T-shirt she did not recognize and was watching M*A*S*H, a show he did not normally watch. She interpreted these differences as being the influence of his mistress, and she asked him to leave before he could even say hello.

  He’d looked stunned, stuck to the couch with his mouth hanging open for a moment. When he found his voice, he said, “C’mon, Adrienne! I don’t have anywhere else to go. I mean, can’t we be adults about this? I want to remain friends, I really do.”

  “You are not my friend,” she’d said.

  And then he stood and pursed his lips and waved his hand and made a whole pantomime of not wanting to say something, but then said it anyway. “I am your friend, Adrienne. I’m the one that paid for all this surgery. I got you this house. I’ve taken care of you. We’ve had good times. I might not want to be married anymore but I am your friend.”