“You have a nice night now,” Sheri coos when she finally slides herself out the door. “Good to meet you, Cole.”
The prospect of having to drive home with Dad talking about Sheri is worse than actually driving with Sheri.
“Have a good time?” I ask sarcastically.
“Guess I got a little carried away,” he says.
Maybe he doesn’t want to talk about it either because he flops his head back and closes his eyes as soon as we pull out of Sheri’s driveway. And by the time we’re halfway home, he’s snoring. I have to help him into the house when we get there. I dump him on his bed and take off his shoes, but that’s it. There’s no way I’m undressing him. If he hurls on the carpet, he can clean it up himself.
• • •
“Everything go okay last night, bud?” Greg asks as we slide into the booth at Burger Barn.
I’m filming the scene around us, ketchup smears and all. If I’d had my camera ready during last night’s scene with Lauren, I would have had the perfect start to a documentary about messy breakups. So I’ve decided to film everything—even things as universally uninteresting as Burger Barn—until drama erupts again.
“I dropped her off,” I say, turning the lens on Greg. “Then I hauled my dad into bed. He probably won’t even remember. He was still sleeping when I left.”
Maybe no one else will remember either. Maybe Dad and the bar wench managed to stagger downtown without a single person driving by. Maybe no one noticed me and Hannah at the party last night, and maybe no one will ask what’s going on between us. Maybe she won’t call me today wanting to “hang out” as if we’re suddenly boyfriend and girlfriend. Maybe no one heard Lauren and me arguing on the back porch and no one cared. And maybe hell will freeze over, pigs will fly, and Webster will turn out not to be a pit of incestuous gossip.
Lauren used to tell me that gossip was a sign of a tight community. She said women talk about people so they know each other’s needs.
I’m pretty sure that’s messed up.
“Could you turn the camera off? Why are you looking at me like that?” Greg asks as he dips a handful of fries in ketchup and stuffs them in his mouth. I realize I’m scowling.
“Sorry. I was just thinking that this place sucks.”
“Yeah, the food stinks.” He finishes the last of his fries. “Hey, I gotta go to Sanford today. My dad needs a part for the shop, and my mom’s driving me crazy. She threatened to ground me for leaving the milk on the counter.”
“Ground you?”
“I know. Like I’m eight. Anyway, I’m getting out of here. You wanna come?”
Sanford. That’s exactly what I need. I mean, Sanford’s only an hour away and it’s a piss hole of a city, if it can even be called a city, but it’s somewhere other than here.
Half an hour later, we’re ripping up the highway with the windows open and the stereo pounding. As we pass the last fruit stand, evergreens replace the orchards along the side of the road. I start thinking about Greg’s messed-up family again. His mom is a little . . . odd. As in Welcome to the Dollhouse odd.
“Remember how your mom used to give us those homemade fruit leathers?”
Greg shudders. “Like purple tarpaper.”
She made us other snacks too, back when we used to hang out in the yard, climbing the willow tree to get away from Greg’s little sister. We were fed cookies made with applesauce instead of sugar. Green smoothies. Pizza pockets with whole-wheat dough and vegetarian soybean filling. We called those “poison pockets.” Greg’s mom is the dietician at a seniors’ home, which probably affects the town’s death rate.
I feel a stab of guilt. It’s kind of against the rules to disrespect someone else’s mom. Besides, I have enough problems with my own family, what’s left of it. Dad’s going to wake up to an empty house and I didn’t leave a message or a note behind. There’s no cell service on the highway. I didn’t even stop at home after our burgers. I just wanted out of town.
“This is stupid,” I mutter.
“What?” Greg yells over the music.
“I’m feeling guilty about leaving my dad on his own. It’s stupid! He’s an adult.”
“Yeah, man. And he was out of it last night. He’ll probably sleep for the whole day. What’ve you got to feel guilty about?”
“Good question.”
But I do. With just the two of us now, it feels as if I’m part of a mandatory group project, like in health class. Create a mural-size collage about body image or something equally stupid. Normally, you’d skip the whole assignment. Who cares about grades in health class? But every minute of work you miss is a minute that your partner is handling without you, and soon the guilt is so crippling that you’re cutting and gluing as if body image issues are your own personal passion.
I scratch a hand through my hair. I don’t need to be thinking about mandatory teamwork right now.
“You’re right. Dad can take care of himself today.”
“True.”
“And he has friends, right?”
“Last night he sure did.” Greg smirks.
“Shut up. My point is, he doesn’t need me hanging out with him every second of the weekend.”
“Exactly.”
Minutes later, Greg’s singing—badly—to the stereo. I join in, letting the noise of it fill me, blank out the space between my ears. Dangling an arm out the window, I can almost catch the wind. It feels good. Temptingly good.
Unsnapping my seat belt, I reach outside to grab the roof of the car and pull myself out until I’m sitting on the window’s edge, the wind whipping my hair, making my eyes water, and tearing every unwanted thought from my head.
Greg hollers in approbation. Nothing but trees and patches of marsh line the road. Filling my lungs with the rushing air, I yell. Not words, just sound. And it feels like a total release. If this were a movie, we would keep driving until we flew over the edge of the world.
As the song ends and another begins, Greg’s head pops out of the other window.
“What are you doing?” I yell. But I’m laughing.
“I can steer with my toes!” he screams.
We’re on a long straight stretch, so he can steer, but he can’t hold down the gas pedal. It doesn’t take long before we’re coasting more and more slowly down the road. We ripple our way back through the windows and into our seats as a semi truck rounds the corner just ahead.
“Too late!” I yell. “Show’s over!”
We snap our seat belts back in place, glowing with our own ridiculousness. The semi blows by us, rocking our car in its backwash. Greg hits the gas. Leaning my head back, I close my eyes, letting the bass vibrate my sternum.
The brakes screech loud and long.
I’m thrown hard against the seat belt, my arms flinging forward like scarecrow limbs, out of my control. Swearing, Greg wrenches the wheel. Our back end slides, but not fast enough. There’s a deer frozen in front of us, a tableau painting in frail browns, wide eyes. There’s a crunch—a snap?—and all I can see in the windshield is speckled fur, a close-up of surprising detail. I swear I see each hair, etched in relief. Then it’s gone as the animal slides back down the hood. There’s another crunch, the splinter of cracking glass, and silence. The car rocks to a stop.
“Shit.” Greg is the first to speak.
I check to see if I’m breathing and make sure I haven’t pissed my own pants. The radio is still blaring. I flick the music off.
“You okay?”
Greg nods. The inside of the car looks exactly the same, but the windshield is a spiderweb of cracks.
Slowly, reluctantly, we both open our doors and climb out. The deer is lying on the road in front of the car and even from where I’m standing, I can see its side heaving. It’s alive.
Greg and I walk toward it, peer at it. It’s sprawled out the way dogs sometimes laze on hot asphalt, soaking in sun, though one of its legs is bent at an unnatural angle. There’s no blood. The creature tries to stand and fails. It can’t lift m
ore than its head. It stares up at us with huge, panic-filled eyes.
“We’re scaring it,” I say.
We both step backward.
“I don’t think it’s going to live,” Greg says.
“No way it’s going to live. We hit it like a freight train.”
Greg takes another step away, as if the deer might hear us. “Do you think it knows it’s dying?” he asks. “I mean . . . do you think animals can understand that, or do you think it just knows it’s in pain?”
“I think maybe just the pain.” I have no freaking idea.
“I don’t have anything to kill it with,” Greg says.
I guess I’ve been existing in the present tense, like the deer, because it hasn’t occurred to me that we’re going to have to kill it. My stomach turns at the thought. I’ve never been one to load up the gun rack and head into the woods. There’s a lot of that around Webster, but I always figured the meat at the grocery store was fresh enough for me.
“We could whack it with something,” I say finally. Simultaneously, we look to the trees, but they’re on the other side of the ditch and the thought of marching across, finding a branch big enough to knock out a deer, and then actually hitting the creature—that’s enough to hold us both in place.
We’re standing there stupidly, arms crossed over our chests, when a pickup truck comes down the road. The driver pulls over and flicks on his hazard lights. Something we should have done, I suppose.
It’s an older guy, my dad’s age.
“You boys all right?” he asks. We both nod.
“The deer’s not looking so good,” Greg says.
“I can see that.” He turns back to his truck. For a brief moment, I think he’s leaving, and I fight the urge to throw myself at his ankles and beg him not to go. Stupid. We’re not in danger. We’re fine. We can handle a half-dead deer.
The man comes back with a rifle from behind his seat.
“Either of you boys want to do this?”
We both shake our heads.
We don’t turn away when he shoots, though. It wouldn’t be right. We stand and watch him raise the barrel, aim carefully, shoot with a blast that echoes against the trees and the mountains behind them. There’s a small spurt of blood from the deer’s head and I’m sure, absolutely sure, that I will be able to re-create that miniature red fountain in my mind for the rest of my life.
The deer’s chest stops heaving. I stare at the mottled fur on its side to make sure.
“We’ll just pull it to the shoulder and the highways department will pick it up,” the man says.
So we grab a leg each, in what seems like a sordid act, and we pull the deer onto the gravel. It’s surprisingly heavy for something that looks so delicate.
“You need a ride?” the man asks.
Greg shakes his head. “The car should still get us home. Thanks for your help.”
As the guy drives away, it strikes me: I asked for a disaster and one occurred. And I didn’t record any of it.
“Damn. I should have been filming.”
“Seriously?” Greg says.
I shrug. “I have to make a short to get into film school, remember?”
“About roadkill?”
“Hang on, I’m going to grab my camera.”
I admit, it feels wrong. It feels wrong to zoom in on a dead deer.
Instead of worrying about the ethics of the situation, I try to think like a filmmaker. Objectively. With distance. Maybe, by filming the deer, I’m fulfilling a sort of responsibility. I’m documenting the event, ensuring that its death will affect people, mean something.
But the objectivity/emotional distance plan doesn’t work. Already, I can tell that when I close my eyes tonight, I’m going to replay this creature’s death as if my eyelids were a theater screen.
I snap the camera shut. The whole idea was crazy, I suppose.
Greg certainly thinks so. He doesn’t say it. He just shakes his head, waits for me to climb into the car, and then makes a U-turn, pointing the crumpled hood back toward town.
“What if that had happened when we were leaning out the windows?” he says after a while.
I don’t answer.
He glances at me. “Do you think that deer was supposed to die at that exact moment, or do you think we could have avoided it?”
I had this exact conversation with Lauren, months ago. She thinks death happens randomly, but God creates something good from it. Which I think is a load of crap, and I told her so. Whether or not my mom was destined to die, it sucked. And nothing was going to make that better, not even God.
“What am I, an expert on death?” I ask Greg. “How the hell am I supposed to know?”
“Sorry,” he says after a minute.
But I am the expert. I know all sorts of things that Greg and Lauren have no way of understanding. I know that death sneaks up on you when you’re not paying attention. It doesn’t help to expect it or try to escape it. You can only insulate yourself so it hurts less when you get hit.
Greg tilts his head back and forth, trying to find an angle that allows him to actually see through the glass.
I find myself blinking fast and I turn away slightly, staring at the oozing body of a bug that’s squished at the end of the windshield’s longest crack.
“I don’t think roadkill’s a good choice for your film,” Greg says finally.
“No,” I agree.
I don’t want to make a film about roadkill.
chapter 7
what happens when mouth and brain disconnect
After explaining the smashed windshield to Greg’s dad, I bump into Hannah and head to Dallas’s house for a much needed drink. It’s well after midnight when I start walking along Canyon Street toward home.
In front of Burger Barn, where I picked up Dad the other night, I stop.
Not because I’m thinking about Dad and Sheri—I am resolutely not thinking about Dad and Sheri—but because the image of Greg’s windshield has given me an idea for my film. The way the cracks spread out from the point of impact, the whole thing looked about to shatter. And yet, somehow, the shards were still attached to one another. That image, with some atmospheric lighting; flashed among images of spiderwebs, maybe, or nets; and spliced with interviews of people who live in Webster, each wrapped in a personal, complicated web . . .
I’m still sorting through ideas as I unlock the basement door to find Dad sitting downstairs waiting for me. He’s in the armchair by Mom’s bookshelves, the reading lamp casting a circle of light like an island around the chair. I stop well offshore.
“Little late, isn’t it, Cole?” he grumbles.
My first thought is that Greg’s dad has called him about the accident. But he doesn’t look concerned or mad. He’s just sitting there.
“Are you waiting up for me?”
I resist the urge to wipe any of Hannah’s remaining lipstick off my neck.
Before Mom died, we functioned on “trust” principles. I was supposed to call if I ended up doing something different from what I had told her I would be doing. For example, if I had said I was going to dinner with Greg but we ended up playing Monopoly with Lauren’s family (her family actually plays Monopoly), I was supposed to call. It was a good system. I called just enough that we could both pretend she always knew where I was.
Dad, on the other hand, has always operated on the don’t-ask-don’t-tell system, and we’ve been pretty religious about adhering to it. For example, when I was hauling Dad to bed last night and noticed that his fly was undone, I stayed quiet. Did I want to race to the bathroom and puke? Yes. Did I want to grab Dad by the neck and ask why he was whoring around with Mom’s memory? Maybe. The point is, I didn’t.
Now Dad’s sitting in my space and asking questions.
“Have a good time tonight?”
“Not bad,” I say.
Silence. I wonder if he even knows that I broke up with Lauren. Should I tell him? I hesitate. I can’t figure out how to start. And
I don’t really want to discuss relationships.
“What are you doing down here?” I say finally.
“Can’t a man sit in his own house?”
I’m not convinced. Probably because he’s sitting in Mom’s chair with an unopened book in his lap—Pride and Prejudice, of all things—and he’s never read a Victorian novel in his life. I’m pretty sure he’s never sat in that chair in his life.
“Why aren’t you upstairs watching TV?”
“Came down to check on you.”
“I’m good.”
I peer at him closely. It looks as if his eyes are red. Maybe he’s been drinking. Or taking Viagra. It occurs to me that Dad and I are not exactly close. Mom used to span the gap between us.
“How about you?” I ask. “Did you go out?”
“Not tonight.”
“So.”
“Yeah.”
There’s another silence. It’s probably short in reality, but it seems to stretch like the Golden Gate Bridge, strung with lights and potential suicide jumpers.
This is what should happen at this point: Dad should grunt, heave himself out of the chair, and head upstairs.
I might say something like: “Dad? Is there something you wanted to talk about?”
He’d say, “Nah.”
“Okay,” I’d reply. I wouldn’t believe him, but I’d be relieved. In a way, it’s good that we’re not too close. In another year, we’ll be splitting up. Moving on with separate lives.
“It’s late, Cole. Go to bed,” he’d finish.
“Same to you.”
That’s not what happens.
“You’re not keeping Sheri company tonight?” The question pops out of my mouth. I want to bite off my tongue as soon as I hear the words. I thought I’d just decided we wouldn’t discuss relationships. What do I care about Sheri? And if Dad’s not thinking about her right now, why am I reminding him?
“She’s working.”
“Now?” I need to stop asking about her. But it’s the middle of the night, and who works in the middle of the night? Sheri didn’t have that “nurse on night shift” look to me. And she definitely wasn’t the doctor on call.
“She works late,” Dad says.
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