The Broken Places

by Susan Perabo

  “Hey,” Paul said.

  Ian didn’t stir.

  “Hey . . .” Paul nudged him in the side and he opened his eyes.

  “We crashing?”

  “Why’d you do it?” Paul asked. “Why’d you lie for him? Why’d you let him take all the credit?”

  It was the question he’d wanted to ask all along, but he didn’t know how. What and who and where, those were pretty simple. But why was a bitch, always the last question on the lips of the devastated. Why was the thing that kept you up nights, the thing that made you cry when you’d sworn to yourself there’d be no more crying, the thing that took root in your gut and stayed there, maybe until the end of you.

  Ian shrugged sleepily. “I dunno.”

  “Did he give you money or something?”

  Ian stared blankly at him for several moments, then shook his head in amazement. “Fuck you,” he said.

  “What? I —”

  “Fuck you, Paul. ”

  “I just don’t understand why —”

  “Maybe I did it ’cause it was a better story this way,” Ian said bitterly. “You ever think of that? Maybe I was sitting down there hacking off my foot and thinking, shit, I bet this’d make a hell of a movie if Sonny and me pretend he did the deed. Maybe I thought it was my only way out of town. It worked, didn’t it?”

  Paul was quiet for a moment. “Is that really why?” he finally asked.

  Ian closed his eyes. “Why else?”

  Laura was smiling as bright and false as neon when Paul stepped into the sterile terminal at Harrisburg International Airport. She hugged him tightly, didn’t even notice that he wasn’t traveling alone until he wriggled free from her embrace and she caught sight of Ian hovering a safe distance away, his brown duffel bag thrown over his shoulder, an unlit cigarette in his hand.

  “I’m surprised to see you here,” she said curtly.

  Ian shrugged. “I was homesick.”

  She put her arm protectively around Paul’s shoulders, eyed Ian as if he were a bowl of month-old leftovers just discovered in the back of the refrigerator. There was no fear in her eyes, only distaste, disgust. “I guess you need a ride home,” she said after a moment.

  “Nah,” Ian said. “Just seventy miles. I can hoof it.”

  She considered this in silence for so long that Paul finally felt compelled to step in.

  “We’ll take you,” he said. “We practically go right by your place. Right, Mom?”

  Ian chain-smoked in the backseat as they sped west along the turnpike toward Casey. Paul suspected this blatant lack of consideration was actually a relief to his mother — it gave her reason to open all four windows of the Honda, filling the car with a blast of wind so deafening that anything resembling conversation was impossible. An hour later — ears ringing, faces chilled by the February air — Laura swung to the curb along D Street at Ian’s direction, idled in front of a squat yellow house with an unmowed lawn. She tapped her fingers on the steering wheel impatiently as Ian wrestled his duffel bag out of the backseat. Then he leaned back into the car.

  “See you around, jocko,” he said, winking his bruised eye.

  “Yeah,” Paul said. “See ya.”

  The door swung closed and Paul felt a pang of grief.

  “If he thinks he’ll see you around he’s crazy,” Laura said, peeling away from the curb so quickly that the tires screeched.

  “He’s all right,” Paul said, looking over his shoulder out the back window to where Ian stood on the edge of the lawn, watching them speed away.

  “Honey,” she said, aghast. “He’s not all right. He’s not all right at all. Your father told me what happened. You can’t think there’s anything all right about that.”

  Paul looked at his lap. “I know. It’s just . . . he’s not always that way.”

  She scowled, shook her head. “Honey, I know all about kids like Ian. I know that once they reach a certain point they don’t change, they can’t change. It’s not their fault always. But it’s the way it is.”

  “It’s just . . .” Paul said. But what could he say? Just what? Just, he chopped off his own foot, then dragged Dad across the basement? Just, he lied about the whole thing for four months, piled lie on top of lie on top of lie, just so Dad could be a hero?

  “Listen, I don’t want to talk about Ian,” his mother said cheerfully, depositing her scowl back into its standby position. “I want to talk about you. Tell me everything. Start with the day you got there and tell me all the exciting things that happened.”

  Paul looked sadly out the window. He’d been gone only a week, but Casey looked bleaker than he’d remembered. The day was gray and muddy slush covered the streets. Solitary figures bundled in heavy coats traipsed heavily along the sidewalks. Mourning doves scuttled along the curbs, picking stupidly at bits of gravel, too dumb to recognize their own sustenance.

  “I pretty much told you everything,” he muttered.

  “Indulge me,” she said. “I’ve missed you, you know.” She paused. They were at the center of town, idling at the sole stoplight. She rubbed her thumbs on the steering wheel. “Did you miss me, honey? A little?”

  “Maybe a little,” he whispered.

  Paul returned to school the next morning and was for several exhausting and bewildering hours the most revered soul ever to grace the halls of Casey Junior High. The first question on every pair of lips: who did you meet? For a brief period Paul maintained relative honesty, but this tactic was clearly a disappointment to all. They didn’t want the truth, he realized — they wanted the fantasy. And who, he reasoned, would ever know the difference anyway? It was as Ian had said: majority rules. The lies began as exaggerations: first he told Brad Hogentogler that the boy who played him in the movie had a small role in Titanic. Then at lunch he let it slip to Jennie Weitzel that Luke Milo was actually best friends with Leonardo DiCaprio, which made several girls touch the sleeves of his shirt, mouths agape. Carson and Joe thought this was the greatest thing going; they became his handlers, clearing a path for him in the crowded hallways, stars in their own right as long as they were attached to him. As the afternoon wore on Paul’s lies grew larger; he had been swimming at Winona Ryder’s house, had shot hoops with Tom Cruise’s kids, had walked Brad Pitt’s German shepherd around the studio lot. He was amazed at how easily the lies — meticulously detailed, full-blown fabrications — came from his lips. Was this, he wondered briefly (only as long as he’d allow himself to wonder anything) how it had been for his father? Once the toads started spilling from your mouth, was there any way to stop them?

  That evening Ben came over for dinner. He went directly to the fridge and grabbed a bottle of beer, patted Laura familiarly on the small of the back as she stood at the stove stirring mashed potatoes, gave Paul the customary smack in the head. Laura had made pork chops, and they dined leisurely around the table while Paul told Ben a new version of his Hollywood story, a version somewhere in between the vague truth he’d told his mother and the outright lies he’d told the kids at school. Ben wasn’t nearly as impressed as Paul’s classmates had been. “DiCaprio?” he’d say. “That guy can’t act to save his life.” Or: “Winona Ryder? I’ll never understand what people see in her.”

  “You’re just jealous,” Laura teased him.

  “Oh no,” he said seriously. “If it’s one thing I’m not, it’s jealous. It’s all phony baloney out there. Ain’t that right, worm?”

  Paul sawed into his pork chop. “Not everything.”

  “Everything but Samuel L. Jackson,” Ben said, his mouth full. “That’s the one guy I can stand.”

  “He’s kind of a jerk,” Paul said.

  “You’re full of crap,” Ben said. But he said it cheerfully, like a compliment, and Paul grinned.

  “How’s your dad holdin’ up?”

  Paul looked at his plate, tried to think of a quick and reasonable answer that wasn’t more than half a lie. His mother hadn’t even asked about his father, not once, as if by not me
ntioning him the fact of his absence in the house was somehow less unsettling. Paul found this slightly alarming, but he also greatly appreciated it.

  “He’s all right,” Paul said. “Pretty busy with the movie.”

  “I guess so . . . lettin’ you run around with that —”

  “Ben,” Laura said softly. “Let’s not go there.”

  “No, let’s do go there,” Ben said sourly. He turned to Paul. “How many times did he leave you alone with Finch? Just the once?”

  Paul looked at him curiously. Ben had changed; the expression on his face was uncharacteristically sober. He looked worried, serious. He looked like a father.

  “Let him be, Ben,” Laura said. “Let him eat his food. He doesn’t need to —”

  “You never should have let him go in the first place,” Ben said. “I don’t want to say I told you so, but goddammit I told you so. If it was just Sonny out there, maybe . . . maybe. But not the Nazi.”

  “Ian’s not a Nazi,” Paul said quietly.

  “What do you mean he’s not a Nazi? Did he tell you that?”

  “I mean —” Paul started.

  “You see?” Ben said, turning on Laura. “You see what’s happened to him? Brainwashed. Kids like Finch, they creep into other kids’ minds. Before long they —”

  “Don’t you dare lecture me about kids,” she said severely, her fork clattering to her plate. “You think I don’t know about the Ian Finches of the world? Let me tell you something: every year I have an Ian Finch, and every year I have to remind myself that the kids I have to concentrate on are the ones who aren’t Ian Finch, not yet, that the Ian Finches are always going to be there and we’re never going to be able to do anything about them but make sure they don’t ruin the good kids. So don’t you sit there and —”

  The telephone rang and they all jolted as if someone had fired a shotgun. On the second ring Laura threw her napkin on the table and went into the kitchen. Ben looked at Paul somberly. “We’re gonna have a talk,” he said.

  Paul glared at him. Who did he think he was anyway, sitting there as if he were the man of the house, acting like he could tell everyone what to do?

  “Honey,” Laura said, leaning into the dining room. “Your father’s on the phone.”

  “Surprised he remembered you were here,” Ben murmured.

  Paul got up from the table and went into the kitchen, picked up the phone. His mother hovered in the doorway for a moment and he looked at her, silently, until she went away.

  “Hi,” he said into the phone.

  “Hey.” A pause. To light a cigarette? Pour a drink? To wipe away tears or stifle a laugh or scratch his head or roll his eyes or turn down the TV or put a gun to his temple or take off his shoes or blow a kiss?

  “You okay, quarterback?”

  “Yeah. I’m okay.”

  Silence. Was that all he wanted to know? Paul tried to picture his father, sitting on the puffy leather couch with his feet on the coffee table and the phone in his lap, the glass doors opened behind him, the city sprawling and spiraling westward. He felt like he’d been gone from that place two years instead of two days, the images fluttering through his mind like a dimly recollected dream.

  “You’re better off with your mother,” Sonny said. “You know that, right?”

  Paul didn’t answer. He didn’t know anything. Why pretend otherwise?

  “Paul?”

  “What.”

  “You know that, right? Don’t be thinking bad thoughts about the old man, okay?”

  Paul felt the threat of tears in his throat. How could he explain to his father that it wasn’t anything bad that was the problem? That it was instead some good thing gone that made everything in his life blurry and unfamiliar? He could hear the hiss of Ben and his mother whispering heatedly in the dining room.

  “Come home,” Paul said quietly. “It’s okay to come home, you know.”

  He heard him drag off a cigarette. “Soon.”

  “You wanna talk to Mom again?”

  “No,” he said. “We’re done.”

  Done. Now there was a loaded word for you, full as a bloated whale. Done: when the doing is over, the business completed, the matter closed. It was a word that drove his mother crazy when used incorrectly. “I’m done,” Paul would say upon finishing his meal or his homework or cleaning his room, to which his mother would always reply: “What are you, a pot roast?” People, she insisted, could not be done. Things were done: people were finished.

  “Hey,” Sonny said. “You seen Ian at all?”

  Paul frowned into the receiver. Sonny and Laura: finished. Sonny and Ian: unfinished. “Why would I?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. You’re right. Forget it. I’ll talk to you later.”

  Now the line went dead. Paul stood there holding the phone for a minute, then replaced it. He went back into the dining room and sat down, looked at his half-eaten pork chop. He had lost his appetite.

  “How is he?” Laura asked.

  “You talked to him,” Paul snapped. “Didn’t you ask?”

  “Don’t be that way, honey. Don’t be so angry.”

  “I’m not angry.”

  Ben set his crumpled napkin on the table. “We’re a little worried about your father,” he said. “But mostly we’re worried about you. Now, I don’t know what exactly went on out there, but —”

  “I’m fine,” Paul said. “Nothing went on. And if you’re so worried about Dad why don’t you talk to him yourself ?”

  Ben let a big breath out, exhaled dramatically for at least ten seconds. He was getting angry; his cheekbones were twitching. “You look different,” he finally said, pointing at Paul with his fork. “And you sound different. Everything about you is different. This attitude . . .” He paused. “Your mother and I —”

  “Stop talking like you’re my dad.”

  Ben blanched, lowered the fork.

  “Honey,” Laura said. “He’s just concerned. I’m concerned too. Frankly I’m glad Ian came home with you. Now your father can concentrate on the movie without having to deal with Ian.”

  “Ian’s not the problem,” Paul said.

  “That’s crap, mister,” Ben said, apparently unable to keep his mouth shut for more than five seconds at a stretch. He turned to Laura. “See what I mean? He’s —”

  “Wait,” Laura said. “Let him talk, will you? What is the problem, Paul? Is he drinking? Is that it? It’s okay for you to tell me.”

  “He’s fine,” Paul said. “I’m fine and he’s fine. Why don’t you just call him and tell him to come home?”

  “He’ll be home in two weeks,” she said. “When the movie’s done.”

  “No, now,” Paul said. “Tell him to come home now.”

  “Who wants him home like this?” Ben asked. “Acting like a freakin’ maniac.”

  “That’s enough,” Laura said. “Please, just . . .”

  Paul got up from the table.

  “Sit down, mister,” Ben demanded. “We’re not done here.”

  Paul scowled. “It’s finished, dimmo,” he said.

  Life, as it will, rapidly became a drag. The first few days at school were okay, but once Paul’s celebrity waned he became unbearably restless, perpetually distracted. Classes were insufferable: what did he need with fractions anyway? who gave a crap about the Emancipation Proclamation? so what if his book report didn’t have an introduction? Even his friends bored him, with their endless chatter about the upcoming soccer season, who was going with whom, who could kick whose ass. Sitting in class, he’d chew on the gritty pink eraser of his #2 pencil and look out the window at the drifting snow, wondering about his father. What was he doing? Was he at the set every day? Had he calmed down? Or was he still acting like a lunatic (I’m telling you, he did not fucking scream!)? Or had he perhaps given up on the movie altogether? What if he was just sitting in the hotel room, boozing it up and feeling sorry for himself? After that first night back they’d heard nothing from him, but still Paul op
ened the door to the house every afternoon with a faint glimmer of hope. And he was thinking about Ian, too. He’d look for him around town when he walked to and from school, or when he and his mother went shopping. He saw some of the goners huddled and smoking behind the Hess Station, but Ian wasn’t with them. He thought of calling, but he didn’t know what he would say.

  A week after his return, he was standing at his locker with Joe and Carson between second and third periods when Kally Finch walked by. She was alone, held her notebooks pressed to her chest, passed swiftly through the crowd of mingling students without averting her eyes from the hallway ahead.

  “She’s in a hurry,” Joe said, raising his eyebrows at Paul.

  “Must be on her way to the janitor’s closet,” Carson said, grinning. “Wonder who she’s got lined up for today.”

  Paul felt his cheeks flush. He was sick of Carson and Joe. When had they gotten so stupid? He slammed his locker shut. “Let’s go,” he said, starting toward their classroom.

  “Know what I heard?” Joe asked, stumbling to catch up. “Brad Hogentogler told me that his sister’s boyfriend heard from somebody that Kally Finch became a whore ’cause her brother sold her to his friends — like as a hooker or whatever — so he could get money to buy drugs.”

  Paul stopped, his head spinning. “What?” he asked tightly.

  “That’s what I heard.”

  He turned on Joe. “How stupid are you? You believe everything you hear?”

  “He didn’t say he believed it,” Carson said. “He just said he heard it.”

  “But it’s bullshit,” Paul said. “Why would you say something if —”

  “Chill out,” Joe said irately. “What’s your problem anyway? What do you care what people’re saying about Finch? Guy like that . . . shit, he brings it on himself.”

  “You gotta admit, Paul,” Carson said gently, “he’s kinda psycho.”