“What are you doing here?” Kat asks, not trying to be rude, but of course it is. Mom says, “Kat,” but doesn’t look at her, just stands staring at Gabe as she uses a towel to dry her hands.
“Your mom had these,” Gabe starts, lifting the bundle weakly. He blinks long and heavy and starts again. “They were for Christmas, for you for Christmas.” He pauses, as if unsure if this is true, or if Christmas is even a thing. “And Charles,” he adds, glancing toward the stairs.
Rick steps forward to take the bundle, and right then Nenny notices Tiny and Bubbles on the landing at the top of the stairs. Everyone’s staring, waiting for the show to begin.
But it doesn’t, really, or anyway it’s not much of a show. If they’ve come to expect wild, drunken antics from movies and TV—the widower raging in his grief, smashing things and throwing punches, howling, collapsing on the floor—that’s not what this is at all. Gabe, unkempt and unwashed and thin and probably recently very, very drunk in a way that he will be again and again, stands frozen in the dining room, looking for all the world like he doesn’t know where he’ll go to next or what in God’s name he’ll do when he arrives.
“Thank you, Gabe,” Mom says, and for a brief second Nenny wonders if she’ll invite him to dinner. It’s the kind of thing Mom would do—extend a branch and all that. But strangely she doesn’t, and neither does Rick, and in their silence, everyone—all of them—becomes suddenly aware of where their loyalties lie, and it’s not with Gabe. Probably someone, Rick maybe, should see him out to his car, touch his shoulder or his arm if not in a loving way then at least in a human way, acknowledge somehow that the death of Windsor was his loss too—but no one does. Once he goes, they’ll never see him again. He could be dead or living still, who knows. It’s hard to say if anyone cares.
* * *
The bundle, in fact, consists of just two things. The first is a dream catcher, likely not authentically made, but still, it’s beautiful. The hoop is woven with gold and black thread and adorned with turquoise beads. Three delicate blue feathers hang from the bottom. Clearly, it’s intended for Kat. Mom hands it to her without a word, and everyone watches as she turns it over in her hands, marveling as if it’s the only thing of its kind ever made, though you could probably find one just like it at the gas station down the road. There’s a little manufacturer’s card tied to it.
“What does it say?” Mom quietly asks. Kat is having a moment, and there’s not a single one of them who doesn’t appreciate her letting them watch.
“It says, ‘Hang this dream catcher above your bed and it will capture all your bad dreams.’” She hiccups, a small, emotional breath, as though Windsor had written the words herself, though obviously she didn’t. They all watch quietly as she cries. It takes Rick a good minute to embrace her in a hug, and that’s only after Mom gives him a nudge.
The second gift in the bundle would surprise, if only because you would never associate it with Charles. It’s a blanket. Sometimes when you’re driving you’ll see men in sun hats selling blankets out of their vans. They’ll take over some empty lot and drape blankets along the surrounding fence—wolves and horses and eagles and a big green plant with five leaves. This one is a sunset, cast in yellow and blue and orange. The sun is a bare round bulb glowing in the center.
But no one gets to see Charles’s reaction, because he won’t come out of his room. Rick calls, “Charles! He’s gone!” but nothing. Even when Rick gently knocks on the door—“There’s a present here from your mom”—Charles doesn’t make a sound.
* * *
Here is a story that is true, a story told only after many years have passed, when Charles and Nenny are grown and friends, sitting around a fire pit in the Santa Cruz Mountains somewhere: the summer before Windsor died, Gabe took everyone camping—Windsor, Charles, Kat, his daughter, Becca. He wanted to go to Joshua Tree, which is known as a beautiful but spooky place, filled with massive boulders and epic views of the stars, but also it’s the site of strange midnight rituals, and once a guy got his head bashed in while he was sleeping in his tent.
To camp is one thing. To camp with a mean drunk is another entirely. They spent the afternoon scrambling over rocks and eating sandwiches and chips, but everyone knew that the minute the sun dipped past the hills Gabe would switch from beer to whiskey, which he did. He told stories for a while that made Windsor laugh, and that was nice, her sweet bell-like laugh, but then the stories turned to loud boasts and the boasts to silence—hard, angry silence. If you’ve ever been out to Joshua Tree, then you know what it’s like—a breathtaking sky of infinite stars but everywhere the threat of misfits or snakes. Finally, Gabe kicked himself up from his camping chair and started lurching around the fire.
He stood over Charles first, his lips and eyes livid and wet, listing sloppily, whiskey clutched in one hand and the other curled into a fist.
“Call me an asshole,” Gabe said, drunkenly trying to meet Charles’s eyes.
“What?” Charles blinked. He was eight years old.
“I said, call me an asshole.” He swayed crudely over Charles like a ship in a storm.
Charles looked at Kat, who just looked back. “You’re an asshole?” he asked more than said and braced himself to be hit with that fist.
But Gabe didn’t hit him. Instead, he stumbled over to Kat and made the same demand—“Call me an asshole”—which she did, no problem, “You’re an asshole,” and Becca too, “You’re an asshole, Dad,” both girls looking right at him as they said it, right into his drunk asshole face.
But Windsor wouldn’t do it (“I’m not calling you that, Gabe”), not because she wasn’t scared—they all were; there was a hole in the wall at home and a gun somewhere in the truck, for Christ’s sake—but because, for whatever reason, she loved him. Or maybe love isn’t quite it. Maybe it’s that she was the kind of person who saw other things, things the rest of us cannot see. That perhaps if she could pry open the buttons on his filthy denim coat she’d discover something else, something glowing past his shame. And maybe that’s all she asked in return each time she knelt before her children or chatted with Mom and Rick or gave Nenny and the boys something stupid like a dumb mint—that, however briefly, they’d look through the tassels on her leather coat like peering through a curtain, gaze into her crystal necklace like gazing into a crystal ball, look past the turquoise rings and the shitty car, past the shouting and the abuse and the blame, past the excuses and the stories and the lies and her terrible, awful end, to something else, to whatever else was shining there beneath—shining then, shining still, whatever nugget of self remains.
Ten Amen Square
IN APRIL, fighting breaks out in Namibia—which is a country in Africa—and three hundred people are killed. (To give you a sense of this number, that’s every student at Sacred Heart school.) Doctors are still trying to find a cure for the disease called AIDS. Someone tries to take over the country of Haiti, but it doesn’t work—this is called a coup, not a coop. Demonstrators for democracy are killed by soldiers in Georgia, and, no, not that Georgia. Sister Mary pulls down the map to explain. On the 15th someone named Hu Yaobang (pronounced “Who Yow Bang”) dies in China, and this upsets many people. They begin a series of protests, and by the end of the month they fill the central plaza. It sounds like Ten Amen Square.
In May, Nenny gets a new pair of shoes with two sets of laces, one electric pink and the other neon blue. She goes with Boots and her mom to get library cards, and Bubbles falls from his bike and has to get three stitches in his chin. What else? Not much. Every week there are photos in the paper of the people protesting in China. They are still sleeping in the square.
Massacre
SOON IT is the last day of school. How this happened, where time has suddenly gone, is beyond comprehension. There’s a noticeable buzz in the air, like there always is on the last day of school. Boys shout more loudly and chase one another more fervently before the bell. Girls gather in small clusters, talking over one anoth
er, chattering about summer plans. When the bell rings, they fall into line, but belatedly, just a beat or two delayed. What need have they for bells anymore, or lines, even, or rules? This is all already last year’s dream.
Sister Mary, though, is quiet. She taps a pen on her desk as if keeping time, her face unmoving as they make their way into class. Sternness or solemnity, it’s hard to say, but there’s something hanging in the room like a bank of lights, a mood that’s impossible to ignore. Yes, they’re largely ignorant; yes, they’re willful morons. But even Sacred Heart’s third grade can sense a shift in the room.
“Thank you,” Mary says when they’ve finally settled down. She stands and comes around the side of her desk. She’s not a tall woman, but her presence is considerable. Nenny looks at her and realizes then that she will miss Sister Mary. She feels this as a dull, mid-body pang, like someone pressing a hand into her gut. Sure, next year Mary will still be here, teaching third grade right next door. But it won’t be the same.
“Did anyone see the newspaper this morning?” Sister asks. Everyone glances around. It’s the last day of school, there’s something in the air, and whatever they’ve been thinking, that is not what they expected her to say.
“Pardon, ma’am?” José asks, on everyone’s behalf.
“I asked if you had seen the newspaper today. The photos on the front page?” she repeats. A few students soberly nod their heads, and Nenny knows what Mary is talking about because, as a matter of fact, she did see the paper this morning before school. The photo was of a man, tall and lean and with grocery bags in each of his hands, staring down a line of tanks. For those who missed it, Mary explains: Over the weekend, the Chinese army snuck up on the plaza the class had discussed, stealthily advancing through the midnight streets, creeping up on the students and workers sleeping in their tents—and then opened fire, indiscriminately killing hundreds of people. In the morning, that man stood in front of the tanks, his act a simple one of bravery and defiance and rage.
Sister Mary stands at the front of the room, fixing the entirety of them with her gaze. If Mary’s behavior appears at all cruel, that’s because it is. Reminding soon-to-be fourth graders of the hard facts of the world, the sheer magnitude of it—especially on the last day of school—is seldom a subtle or gentle task. But each of them, in their own way (except maybe Jackie, who sometimes talks to her own hands), knows by now that the world is a sizeable place, where terrible things happen that are impossible to explain. “Let us keep them in our prayers,” Mary says and lets that thought stay in the room for a minute.
Then her voice softens. “All right,” she says. “Shall we have a party now? I’ve brought a cake.”
And the party, though it takes a minute to kick off, is pretty fun. Sister lets them pick songs on a stereo she’s brought, they play several rounds of charades, Matty and the boys do their standard “La Bamba” lip-sync show. Before the bell, Mary tells them it’s been a marvelous year and thanks them for being in her class. There is one thing that Nenny will miss the most, though impossible to articulate or even, at her age, fully know: that by being truthful and, yes, maybe cruel, but also gentle and rare, Sister Mary is now and always will be a beautiful, unparalleled model for how and why to love.
Retrieve
FRIDAY NIGHT and sleep just starting to creep in, Nenny hears Kat throw off her blankets and leave the room. Nenny remains quiet and still. She hears Kat knock on the big bedroom door, then hears muffled voices. First Kat and Mom, then Kat and Mom and Rick. This goes on for a long while, Nenny sitting up in bed, straining to hear, the blankets bunched around her knees—but their voices are too far and too low. It’s eleven o’clock on a Friday night in June.
Finally, Kat returns and gets back into bed. She doesn’t say a word. Then a series of sounds: the garage door opening downstairs, the engine of the van starting, the garage door closing again.
“Where are they going?” Nenny asks. She has to fight the urge to be terrified, straining against it like walking into a strong wind.
“To find Charles,” Kat says bluntly, as if this isn’t a majorly big deal.
“What?” What about the power of secrets? What about knowing what no one else knows? What about tyrannizing one another, hoarding one another’s infractions and mistakes? “You told them?”
“Yes, I told them,” Kat says, like Of course I did. As if it’s the obvious thing to do, as if she hasn’t been sitting on the information for months. “He can’t just wander around all night. It isn’t safe.”
This—Kat, protective and worried and genuinely concerned—falls around Nenny like settling silt. She lies back down, and they’re both silent in the dark. Eventually the sounds repeat themselves in reverse, only this time Nenny can hear Charles opening and closing his bedroom door.
It’s never really clear where he goes. No one mentions it, and it becomes one of their untouched, untalked-about things. Years later, when it finally does occur to Nenny to ask, she and Charles are at a pasta joint in Riverside, the kind of place where the breadsticks are free.
“Hey, where were you sneaking out to anyways?”
“What?”
“At night. When we were kids and you used to sneak out.”
“Oh,” he says, like he’s forgotten it was ever a thing. He twirls pasta around on his fork. “Nowhere, really. I just kind of walked around.”
“I used to think you were going into the sewers. Playing with rats.”
And he looks at her like she’s the one who’s wandered off, like she’s the one who’s far away. “I was definitely not playing with rats,” he says and signals to the waiter for more breadsticks.
* * *
In the morning, Mom says, “Maybe we should do something fun today.” She doesn’t mention the midnight run, and neither does anyone else. It’s like it never happened. Everyone looks at Rick. He’s the gatekeeper of fun things. He decides at what temperature things will heat up, at what temperature they cool. He doesn’t say anything, which Mom, almost expertly, takes for a yes.
“Where should we go?” she asks. She looks at them all around the table, but everyone just kind of shrugs.
But then Charles speaks up, and since he’s hardly spoken in months, everyone stops and stares.
“How about the tar pits?” he says, bent over his plate.
“The what?” someone asks.
“The tar pits. In La Brea.” He looks up then, that old look on his face, like he’s dealing with a bunch of morons.
There’s a pause while everyone lets this sink in—not the tar pits, but Charles, him, speaking, participating in what’s happening in the room. It’s like a strange wind has come in from some open door.
“I think that’s a great idea,” Rick finally says, and everyone nods, though who knows what they’re agreeing to anymore.
In the Pit
THE LA Brea Tar Pits are not exactly aptly named, because it’s really just one pit, singular, as far as Nenny can tell—a small lake of belching tar that smells as you’d expect it to smell, like a melty old road. Green bubbles burst through the rainbow oil surface, and the smell gets worse. At the far end is a sculpture of three woolly mammoths, one in the muck and two onshore, and the boys run down and twine their fingers through the fence, and Tiny whispers, “Coooool.”
The truth is, Nenny does not now, nor will she ever, give two farts about fossils or dinosaurs. She tries, she really does, because Rick grimaces deep when it comes time to pay—it’s almost sixty bucks—and Nenny knows how special this kind of thing is, this kind of treat. But when they go in and stand before the giant skeleton of a saber-toothed tiger, and everyone oohs and aahs, including Kat, all Nenny sees is a bunch of old bones. There’s an elaborate timeline of humanity, from fish to ape to man, and a history of the tar pits, photos of animals long extinct, maps of landmass movements throughout time, placards detailing how ancient people lived, what the world was like then—how inhospitable, how cold—and none of it, not a word, sinks in.
Everyone else, every single member of her family, is completely engrossed, this suddenly the most captivating place they’ve ever been. Mom runs her fingers along the placards, as if trying to absorb every word, and Rick rocks back and forth on his heels while he reads. Tiny and Bubbles have their faces pressed to the glass room with the paleontologists inside—like lab-coated animals at a zoo—and Kat, even Kat, is snapping pictures left and right. After a while Nenny realizes that Charles is not around.
She finds him outside, on a little footbridge at the edge of the pit. He doesn’t tell her to bug off, which must mean she can stay. The tar is as smooth as glass in some places, bubbling and puckered in others. She stands not far from Charles but not close either, and it occurs to her that maybe her disinterest arises in the face of such scale. What is a day, a month, next to a billion years? On the wall in the museum there’d been a painting of an astronaut, floating in space, among stars and then stars and then stars. In class they’d spent all that time on the size of the world, but not once had they stopped to consider the size of themselves.
Out of nowhere Charles says, “That’s us.”
Nenny turns. She’d nearly forgotten he was there. “What’s us?”
“That,” he says and points. “Buncha tar.”
Nenny looks at the pit and thinks, Maybe you, I’m not tar, but knows what he means. What he means is his own answer to scale: that one day we’ll return and return again, all of us bound for that same black soup. He leans over and, without ceremony or poetics, spits.
“Hey!” A security guard materializes out of nowhere, yelling. “No spitting!” He charges up the bridge’s incline and stops with his hands on his hips. He looks like the kind of guy who wanted to be a cop but had to settle for this—bulging at the waist, a face as red as raw meat. Nenny knows she should be afraid of his barking, but honestly, she feels nothing at all.
Every Other Weekend Page 16