“Sorry,” he mumbles. He tastes copper, just the tiniest hint of blood. But like all tastes and smells from the past, this one grips a memory, yanks it out by the roots and tosses it into the forefront of his mind. He remembers chomping down on her tongue when they were little. The blood reminds him of her body as it was. Her poor bare pubic bone, her hair that clumped and smelled of mildew. He realizes something, then—she doesn’t want this. She doesn’t want sex.
They know too many of each other’s secrets but they don’t know the right ones.
He stops touching her, and she looks relieved. “Your lip is hurt. You want me to get you a washcloth?”
There is a reason she has come to school in tears, and the reason wasn’t beside the point. Someone has been hurting Cassie. And he is complicit in it, because he has never taken the time to ask her, Why are you crying? Because he has not taken the time to ask why she relaxes when he pulls away. All along he has been afraid he would hurt her the way he hurt Lee, by succumbing to his impulses to push, to punch, to choke. Instead he has hurt her with negligence and willful ignorance.
He brings Cassie a rag, damp with warm water, and she holds it to her mouth. “It’s really not that big a deal,” she says. “Thanks, though.”
He sits down on his bed. “Well. You’re my girl.”
TWO WEEKS LATER, BEFORE HENRY leaves for school, his father accuses him of having shoplifted the pair of tennis shoes he’s wearing. They are black-and-white Converse All-Stars, stiff canvas and rubber. He knows better than to wear them because of course they would make his father suspicious. They aren’t something Henry would buy for himself. But not only does he wear them, he threads them with red laces. He keeps them in the box they came in, trying to keep the store smell on them for as long as possible.
He tells his father they are a present from Cassie.
He believes this, because why wouldn’t he? But Henry finds himself wanting to bait his father by telling him how he really got them. If his father knocks him out, he won’t be able to leave, and it won’t be his fault that he didn’t follow Christiakov’s instructions. He wants to stay to protect Frankie and because this is his home. He doesn’t bait him, though. And in this moment, his decision is made. Henry believes that his father will try harder with Frankie. Perhaps he will see him as he once saw Henry: as a clean slate, another chance.
He checks Frankie’s backpack to make sure he has his homework and the sheet Henry signs their father’s name to whenever Frankie reads for the requisite amount of minutes in the evening. Inside the backpack, there are the potholders that he made himself with a plastic loom and colored loops that look like they are cut out of women’s stockings. Presents for girls. Henry had given him a hard time about it: “Because girls have to handle so many pots,” he said.
Frankie had glared at him. “Dickhead,” he’d said.
His father should be leaving for work now, but he stays a little longer and watches Henry as he fixes Frankie’s lunch.
“Do you want a sandwich, Dad?”
“No,” he says.
His father watches him cut the sandwich into two triangles. “You’re a good kid,” he says. It’s the first time that his father has said this to Henry.
His father looks embarrassed then and Henry realizes it’s because he’s staring at him.
The shoes came with an envelope full of twenty dollar bills and a note: Time to rise, Phenom. Be safe, and write your acts down. What if I want to see them some day? Stop being so selfish.
Henry’s father leaves for work. As soon as the door shuts behind him, Frankie charges into the kitchen, and Henry walks him to school. He’s eleven and doesn’t need an escort anymore, but Henry likes to walk with his brother. Frankie lines up with his classmates and Henry stands there, watching, until all the children file in. He never even considers telling Frankie his plan, because he doesn’t want Frankie to try and stop him. But as Frankie walks into the building, Henry wishes that he would look back at him. If he turns, it will mean good-bye. If he turns, it means it’s okay to go.
Frankie doesn’t turn, though. Frankie walks, with his funny little gait, with potholders in his backpack. Henry’s backpack is full of clothes and food today, rather than books.
At first, Henry is stuck to the sidewalk. But then his mind makes allowances for what his body decides to do, and he walks, one foot, heel to toe, until he’s rolling along, not thinking, riding his own stride. It’s cold enough to freeze a speckle of spit on his lip but not windy, so not even the sound of air disturbs the silence of his walk. He makes his way up the highway, fields dusted with snow on either side of him, until he gets to the train tracks, where he waits. The trains inch through Edgefield. He will jump an empty car when it comes and ride it to Garrett, where he can catch a passenger train to Chicago.
He hears the whistle of the train, and he can see the engine, a yellow smudge in the distance. He is not sure where he will end up, but he knows where he will not be. He will not be in his father’s house with Frankie. He will not be with Cassie Littrell. The wind nicks his dry face. He thinks, This is lonely, staring at this train. Still, he feels a sudden comfort. His mother would be proud of him, and the dead can travel.
Clown Car Skit
It’s a Volvo.
The trunk opens and out pops the first clown, looking dazed, like he just woke up or got sober or something. In his hand, he is surprised to find a flower.
He staggers across the ring, trying to retrace his steps. How did he get in that car? Then, he is distracted by a pretty girl in the audience. He makes eyes at her. Kissy faces. He hands her the flower.
While the first clown flirts, the second clown pulls himself out of the car. He looks just as confused as the first clown and just as surprised about the two flowers in his hand. He sees the first clown and walks up to him, hoping he’ll have some answers about what has gone on. Then, he sees the pretty audience member that the first clown was talking to. He is stricken stupid, just as the first clown, and hands her his two flowers.
This irritates the first clown.
And then the third clown emerges. Dazed. Three flowers. Dumped in love’s lap, just like the two before him.
This goes on until … How many clowns did the girl in the motel say she saw come out of a car? Seventeen? Sure. Make it seventeen.
In the end, they will all try to pile back in the car, and fail, scratching their heads. How did they get in there?
There’s something cute for you, Seamus Feely, you old fuck.
All I will need is a Volvo. And 142 flowers to cover a girl in.
CHAPTER 14
St. Louis
June 1990
HENRY DROVE SUE’S VAN CAUTIOUSLY, just a hair over the speed limit. He’d found the cassette that Kylie had given him in his back pocket (he hadn’t washed his jeans since) and he’d had it in the tape player the whole ride.
The song playing right now was heavy and angsty and all about dying young, though he wasn’t paying as much attention to the lyrics as the music, the eerie-sweet harmonies and the guitar that sounded like a revving engine. He listened to the song over and over, and the more he listened to it, the more certain he became that he was doing the right thing, that Adrienne needed him, that he needed Adrienne.
He had no idea what he would say to her when he saw her, but he had brought with him the makeup bag he’d accidentally taken, and figured that if she was angry or if things were awkward, he could say that he only came to switch them out.
When he arrived, it was 11:30 p.m. according to the clock in Sue’s van. Standing outside the Baratuccis’ house, Henry had a moment of panic wondering what he would do if she did not answer the door. But then he saw the flash of her eye at the peephole, and she undid the chain and let him inside. Richard was immediately at his feet, pecking at him. Adrienne put the bird in his cage.
“What are you doing here? Is everything okay? Is Caleb okay?” she asked. She was still waking up, her eyes watery, the folds of her p
illow still carved into her cheek. She was wearing what was probably a man’s big-and-tall T-shirt, though it was too short to cover anything below her ass. He could see the faint outline of her nipple beneath the dark fabric.
“Don’t worry about Caleb,” he said, and the words sounded sleazy to him.
On the coffee table, amid the clutter of half-empty water glasses and beauty magazines, there was a syringe and a square of gauze, polka-dotted with blood.
Adrienne arched an eyebrow. “Alright, then. Are you okay?”
“Yes,” he said.
She sat down on the couch, her big thighs flattened against the cushions and joined together, obscuring his view of her underwear. She patted the seat next to her. He shook his head. There was a sour taste in his mouth from puking earlier, and his legs were cramped from driving. The audience in his head was still jeering, still telling him in moans and shouts that he could not do anything right.
He seated himself on the floor and began stretching as he normally did, by folding himself in half.
“Henry,” said Adrienne, “tell me why you’re here.”
Henry sat upright and twisted from side to side to stretch his lower back. It allowed him a few seconds not to face her when he asked what the doctor had said about her brain.
“It’s not something you need to worry about,” she said. “I’m going to have another surgery, and until then, there’s these drugs.”
“Will they work?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said, with certainty and softness in her voice. “They will work.”
He could not turn back to face her but saw her reflection in the black television screen, saw she was not as certain as she wanted him to believe she was.
“That’s good,” he said.
“You could have asked Caleb, if you were worried about that.”
“I don’t know why I came. I needed to get out of there. Those German girls. They keep giving me shit.”
“They give everyone shit. They’re crazy.”
“And I blew it tonight,” he said. “And nobody really noticed.”
“Well. That’s a good thing, isn’t it? You pulled it off.”
He twisted back to face her. “No. It means that all my work is basically for nothing. They don’t get it. I could get out there in baggy pants and do just about anything, and they’d laugh. As long as I looked like a jackass.”
“I don’t know if I’d go that far,” she said. He shrugged and rolled his neck. He pulled each arm with the other and held it flush against his chest to stretch his triceps.
“I can do stuff, Adrienne. I can do … just about anything. No joke. People always think I’m exaggerating. You want me to do six consecutive back flips? I can do it. You want me to do it with shoe boxes on my feet? I can.”
“I don’t think you’re exaggerating. I’ve never seen anybody do what you can do.”
His arms fell limp at his sides, and he felt a release in his shoulders that was not due to his stretching, but to what Adrienne said. He’d known she would say that.
“I don’t know why I fucked up tonight. I kept thinking about how I wanted to do something different,” he said, lying down on his belly and then pointing his chin up like a seal. “And I kept thinking I should have told my brother to come and see my show. Hell, he might be in Chicago right now, visiting from … I don’t know, some country. Some place in Europe.”
“How do you figure?”
“He wrote me a while back, telling me he wanted to come,” he said. “So he might have been here, if I just wrote him back.”
He hadn’t said anything to her about Andre before this, and he wasn’t sure why he decided to now. Except, Henry’s regret about Andre was not a ghost yet. It was immediate. And it animated all the other regrets he had about his brothers and made them immediate, too.
He stretched his feet, curling and uncurling his toes, rotating them at the ankles.
“I suppose you don’t have his phone number,” said Adrienne after a moment.
“Andre? No. He didn’t give any numbers. I don’t know if he even has a phone.”
Adrienne leaned forward, her brow furrowed. If he wanted her sympathy, he had it.
“There’s no one you could call who could get hold of him? Not your parents? Or friends?”
Henry shook his head. “I’m sure my dad has no idea where he is. Andre ran away when I was twelve. I thought he was dead for a long time.”
“Jesus,” she said.
His muscles relieved, he got up from the floor and sank into the couch next to Adrienne. He noticed that there was a pink indentation in the skin around her ring finger, instead of a ring.
Did she and Caleb fight? Was she not wearing his ring for a reason? He remembered the night Richard had begged him in his girl’s voice not to leave.
He explained that Andre had left in the night when he was barely seventeen. He told her how Andre had planned his flight for years, since the night their mother died. He said it just like that: “My mother died.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“And Dad was rough with Andre. He was rough with everyone, but especially Andre.”
He didn’t want to tell her that “rough” meant Andre and his father blackened each other’s eyes when Andre was fifteen, because they got into an argument over a Misfits decal Andre put on his bedroom door. He knew how these details sounded to people—to hear it like that forced them to see his father as a monster and Henry as a coward and Andre as a miserable little victim. And this wasn’t the truth, either.
Adrienne took his hand and enfolded it between hers, and the heat from her palms warmed his own. Her hands felt heavy over his, but she didn’t squeeze. When he first imagined being with Adrienne, he thought he would have no confusion about whether she wanted him or not, because she was too wise for him to manipulate, too big to accidentally hurt. When she held his hands, though, he felt uncertainty about everything except the fact that he loved her, in spite of all uncertainties, in spite of the fact that she was Caleb’s, and in spite of the fact that she might not feel for him the way he did for her. And so he was confused again. He had this love. He didn’t know what to do with it.
“I’m sorry. You don’t need to hear this. I need to shut up,” he said.
She shook her head. “No, I worry about my things all the time. I want to worry about your things. You should have picked up a phone instead of driving all the way here, and that’s a fact. Caleb is going to be livid. That’s a fact, too. But I’m not going to say I’m not glad to see you. I’ve run out of ice cream, and Richard keeps saying Caleb-things—and I’m glad to see you.”
Her false fingernails, which had been long and shellacked in red glossy paint when he met her, were all torn off now. Each nail was kinked in the middle, yellowed like old paper and just as thin. Her hands, always big, looked more swollen than usual.
What had she called this disease? Acro-magnolia? Flower of the brain. He wished there was a single useful thing he could do for her.
And then, as if she’d read his mind, she offered him something to do.
“Would you just give me one shot? I never used to be such a chicken,” she said, “but on the last few injections my hand’s been shaking. It’s hard to even look where I’m sticking.”
Henry hesitated. “I don’t want to do it wrong,” he said.
“You won’t, it’s easy. It doesn’t even hurt that bad,” she said. “I know that, logically, but it’s the anticipation that kills me. I’ll show you what to do. It goes just under the skin.”
He agreed. She showed him how to pinch the flesh between his fingers.
“Push the plunger steadily, but not too fast,” she explained. He kneeled next to her and poised the needle over the spot where he intended to give her the shot, mindful of the bruises where she had injected herself before this.
“Got it. You can turn your head,” he said.
She turned and he punctured the skin quickly. He pressed the plunger, a
nd it was easy enough to keep it steady, of course, because Henry’s sense of balance was in his hands, too. He had polished his mother’s nails with these even hands, perfect pink or red strokes of equal thickness, and she gave him compliments. Good boy. You’re a stick-in-the-mud, but you do fine work.
“Thanks. It didn’t hurt at all,” said Adrienne.
The medicine rushed through the tiny barrel of the needle to the other, even smaller spaces inside, fat cells and blood vessels. He wished his kinesthetic genius extended to these small places and to other people’s bodies so that he could show these cells how to move, how to wiggle free of guilt, and disease, and solitude. He would gladly rush through the barrel of the needle, climb the vascular vines to her brain, kick the tumor loose.
“What else can I do?” he asked.
“Nothing,” she said, taking his hand again. She pulled him to his feet with an ease that he found surprising. Her giant-strength.
He felt the charge of blood through her hands, pulsing up from her wrists into her fingers. She felt so close. He wanted to keep her close. It was rare for him to be able to tell anybody anything about himself without some measure of regret, and it had been so easy to tell her about his family and his mistakes. When she began to pull her hands away, he held on, afraid if he lost physical contact he might lose this feeling, too. He put his hand on the back of her neck, as Cassie had done when she gave him his first ugly kiss in the empty lot in Edgefield. Adrienne looked amused rather than excited by this touch, but Henry knew he wasn’t mistaken. It wasn’t just him that did not want to let go. He leaned in, closing his eyes just before his mouth met hers.
Her hands flew up to his chest and she pushed, but not hard enough to convince him that she did not want to be kissed. He pushed back. Her mouth was soft against his, and he felt that she loved him.
But even being certain of her love, he could not open his eyes, and the kiss was not what he expected. He’d thought it would set him on fire, would burn him to the absolute ground. Instead it came over him like a breeze, nostalgic and gentle.
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