Back Talk

by Danielle Lazarin

  As her sandaled feet break into a run closer to the house, the boy curses. Nick leans into him and says, “Shut the fuck up.”

  Nick can tell there is something in his pocket, could be a knife. He puts more pressure on the boy’s back, even though he hasn’t moved.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Nothing, man, nothing.”

  This is the response Nick hears every day. It is rarely the truth.

  Alison comes out of the house gripping her daughters’ wrists, one in each hand, their skinny arms dangling out of their tank tops. Magnolia was asleep when Alison found her in a closet upstairs. She touched her to wake her, feeling for the warmth of her body, her finger instinctually wiping the bit of drool in the corner of her mouth. The sweat beads at her brow. In the yard, Magnolia’s eyes adjust to the light. Sunny is still ashen faced, her summer tan drained. Neither of the girls makes a sound.

  “Alison, I have cuffs in my car. In my duffel. In the trunk.”

  “Do you want your holster?”

  She is trying to scare the boy, a tactic she used on Nick in their childhood, that cold, convincing tone—he had always believed she would do anything.

  “Just go get the cuffs, please.”

  Alison pulls the girls back toward the house before dropping their wrists and walking to the car.

  “Who knows how to dial 911?” Nick asks the girls.

  “I do!” exclaims Magnolia, her round face breaking into a proud smile.

  “Mag, go do that for your uncle. Tell them you have an intruder. Answer their questions. Go.”

  The boy starts to curse again, his protests muffled by the grass. Nick digs his knee into pressure points on the boy’s back. Sunny walks from the spot where her mother released her into the thick summer grass and watches the boy twist uselessly on the ground.

  “He said he knows my father,” she says.

  “He’s lying,” Nick says, although he doesn’t know for sure. It wouldn’t be unlike one of Michael’s friends to show up here, looking for something. Michael took his friends where he could find them.

  “He said.”

  “It’s not true.”

  “How do you know? You don’t know my dad.”

  “Your father’s dead,” Alison says, handing Nick the cuffs.

  “No, he’s not.” Sunny begins to cry.

  “Yes, he is. Go inside,” Alison says, a hand, neither soft nor hard, against her daughter’s back, turning her toward the house.

  • • •

  The local cops were not pleased to find a teenage boy in handcuffs in the Lymans’ backyard. As Nick retold the story to an officer, he could see the youngest cop playing with the girls out of the corner of his eye. It annoyed him, more than it would have if he had just flirted with Alison. There were no charges to press, except on Nick for pouncing on the kid, but the boy, who sat sulking in the back of the squad car in the driveway, declined. Alison didn’t recognize him, but the cops did, and while his record of petty theft and the contents of his pockets—more sets of keys than an unemployed nineteen-year-old should reasonably possess—didn’t prove anything about his intentions, it was enough to end things there.

  Nick restores order in the kitchen, returning the defrosted meat to the fridge, rinsing the beer bottles, while Alison puts the girls to bed. It takes longer than usual to do so. The girls share a room, a habit they will grow out of; one day, she knows, they will use the empty rooms, expand. One day, the house won’t be big enough to keep enough space between the three of them.

  Sunshine turned to face the wall after Alison read them a few chapters of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz from Magnolia’s bed, but Magnolia, who talks when she’s tired, kept asking questions, even in the dark. Who was that boy? Why was he here? Can I have more water? Will you get Sunny a new necklace? What will I wear when I die? She could hear Sunshine, still awake, breathing as Magnolia ran through these questions, but Sunshine, usually the first to tell her sister to shut up, didn’t say anything, didn’t even mumble when Alison told them to sleep tight, promising to check on Magnolia in ten minutes, by which time she knew the girl would have fallen asleep.

  “You’re staying?” Alison asks when she comes downstairs to find her brother leaning against the beautiful French doors Aunt Arlene had put in, the ones the girls have covered in fingerprints.

  “Sure, I can stay,” Nick says, as though he doesn’t keep a bag in the trunk for just this reason—a fresh pair of underwear and a shirt, an extra toothbrush.

  “That wasn’t—” she begins and stops. She reaches to turn the lock on the patio doors, but he’s already done it. “The kid’s not coming back,” she says over her shoulder, moving into the kitchen.

  “You bet he’s not,” Nick says.

  “Beer?” she asks him, looking at the neat rows of them in the fridge. “There is certainly enough.”

  “I’m good,” he says, and finally moves from his post at the doors.

  She closes the fridge. “I’m going to bed.”

  “I’ll be here.”

  “I know,” she sings as she walks past him on her way upstairs.

  “I can go, if you need—”

  “No, stay,” she says. Her moving to this house was just a matter of geography. Wherever you go, there you are, their father likes to say.

  As she moves up the stairs, Alison feels in her shorts pocket for the necklace Sunny handed over to her without a word. Fixing it would just be a matter of replacing the chain. She can buy one during her lunch break on Monday, while the girls are in camp. She forgets to check on Magnolia.

  Nick sits in the living room on the one couch, in the far corner, with the television tuned to a baseball game he isn’t paying any attention to. An hour later, he checks the many doors in the house: the front and the side doors, the garage entrance, the basement, the French doors off the dining room, once more. He needs something stronger than a beer. He leaves his car in the driveway and walks to a neighborhood bar that Alison took him to last winter, an Irish pub that is loud enough that he can drink at the bar in peace. After a couple of drinks he starts talking to a woman who has been smiling at him from her circle of friends since he sat down. She takes him back to her apartment, a tiny studio that is air-conditioned like a freezer. He leaves before the woman has fallen asleep, although she pretends she has. He nods to the overnight doorman before walking into the summer air, which feels thick and comforting after the cold apartment. The night is quiet, the crickets silent, the streets so empty he walks the final blocks to his sister’s house on the yellow lines.

  Before Nick can find the right key for the side door in the kitchen, it opens from the other side. “Yo,” his sister says.

  “Yo,” he says back.

  She is wearing a T-shirt she’s had since high school, her skin visible through the worn shoulders. Her dark hair is in a knot on top of her head. Nick pours himself a glass of water and brings one for Alison, who has sat back down at the banquette by the side door. The time on the oven reads 3:30 A.M.

  “I thought you were asleep.” He had stood outside her bedroom door before he left for the bar, contemplating telling her he was leaving, but had decided against waking her up.

  “I was. Now I’m not.” She takes a sip of the water. “Look, can you do me a favor?” she asks as Nick sits down across from her. “Don’t tell Mom and Dad, okay?”

  “About Michael?”

  “About today, the kid.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Thanks.”

  The girls will tell her parents about the cops coming by, and Nick will tell them about Michael, another thing he thinks is a favor. She can no more control her brother’s overprotectiveness than she could have stopped Michael from choosing the life he did.

  “How is Sunny’s neck?”

  “I put some cream on it. She barel
y let me touch her; I couldn’t get a good look at it.”

  “Maybe take her in to the doctor on Monday.”

  “She doesn’t like it when we make a big deal out of things like that. She will be fine.”

  Alison still isn’t used to the absolute quiet of the house, the way it settles, the sound of animals skittering across branches outside, acorns bouncing off the roof in fall, how loud a single car can be on a street that’s not well trafficked. The refrigerator here is newer than the one in the apartment they lived in just before, and it doesn’t hum. It is okay to have her brother there across the table at the hour she usually feels most alone.

  “You think he did?” Nick asks her.

  She knows immediately that he is talking about the boy from earlier.

  “Know Michael?” Alison shakes her head again. “No. God, who did?”

  When Nick stood over his former brother-in-law’s body hours earlier, he searched for the cool teenager he used to be, the one who, for a few years before Nick knew any better, he wanted to be like. The deformed and bloated mess in a bag was unrecognizable to him.

  “That tattoo—”

  “The one on his calf?” She had always hated it.

  “No, the one on his chest.”

  She doesn’t ask him what it was. She doesn’t want to imagine Michael’s body anymore.

  “Never seen it. Must’ve gotten it after we split.” Alison yawns.

  She catches her little brother’s eyes fill with tears as he takes a sip of water. When he was eleven, old enough for his looks to interest girls, to take pride in that interest, she had the whole neighborhood calling him Babyface, till she decided, a few years later, he’d had enough. She can still picture the quiver in his lower lip when he got mad at her about it, how he tried and failed to hide his weakness from her. It had always been easy for her to break him. She no longer took pleasure in it. Nor can she take this sadness from him now; there is no act of reversal, no protection against it in her power.

  “I don’t remember it either,” he says, putting his glass back on the table.

  In the morgue, Nick focused there, instead of on Michael’s busted face, or his lacerated waist, where a knife had gouged over and over. The tattoo was a sunburst above his heart, as if goodness were pouring out from it, or trying to get in.

  • • •

  Upstairs, Sunshine is making her way across the dark room back to her own bed from Magnolia’s, which she fell asleep in hours earlier. After their mother had left the room, Mag told Sunny she felt sick. Sunny was so tired, but she didn’t want to call their mother back upstairs.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “My stomach.”

  “Go to the bathroom.”

  “Okay.”

  Magnolia pushed off the covers her mother had carefully arranged around her and went.

  “Better?” Sunny asked when she came back, suddenly feeling more awake.

  “A little.”

  Sunshine went over to Magnolia’s bed without being asked, as they did every so often, a fact they hid from their mother without knowing why. “Scootch,” she ordered her sister. She’d stopped whispering by now, their mother so far away in the house she couldn’t possibly hear them.

  “She’s really mad at us,” Magnolia said once they’d both settled their heads onto the single pillow.

  “We’re not in trouble.”

  The look on their mother’s face for the remaining hours of the night, after Mag had been found and the boy had been taken away, was new, she thought, strange, but there hadn’t been, and there wouldn’t be, any punishment.

  “Not yet,” Mag insisted.

  Sunny knew there was nothing she could say to change her sister’s mind, and she didn’t want to argue. Mag would feel better in the morning. They’d not play that game again.

  Back Talk

  When the boy who barely speaks says to you, It’s too bad, who you are, into your ear at a party, you know better than to turn your head. You know who he is. It’s when he whispers, Too bad, who you belong to—this word, belong—that your body responds, a shiver he can’t detect but that makes you step back toward him. Because damn, he says then, what I wouldn’t do to you. Next he says it dirty, in detail, so quietly no one else knows it’s happening. Is it? Do you, after listening, still as a statue while he leans into your ear from behind but doesn’t touch you, yet, go with him to a stairway outside the party, slipping out that side door in the kitchen, knowing you’ll have to come back for your jacket later, alone? The boy you are dating is his friend. Not his best friend. This boy is dating a freshman on your track team, but you don’t hang out with her. Her first boyfriend. Her first heartbreak.

  You don’t answer him. You don’t even look at him, but he knows to leave his beer behind on the counter, to sit down on the steps a flight up from where the party continues, everyone you know in that packed, parent-free apartment, neither one of you remembering to care. Has it happened? Have you unzipped his pants, plunged your hand in before you’ve even kissed, your name falling from his mouth like a plea, a spell? In your memory, the stairwell is bright, too bright. And your hand, your mouth around him, a reward for him even speaking to you, for saying what you didn’t know you wanted to hear. Your boyfriend doesn’t talk either. He doesn’t talk about your body or your friends or his friends or his family who you have seen from a distance of fifty feet but never met, the family he is away with right now. Has it happened, you kneeling on the landing, his zipper against your chin, his head thrown back in surprise, how goddamned loud he is all of a sudden, the shock of what he asked for, how much more he received? When you stop, he asks for a tissue.

  Has it happened? Of course it has. The boy who does not speak has told everyone by Tuesday. You, though, choose to stay silent: to your boyfriend, to that asshole, to his girlfriend, who believes him, because it’s easy to believe what you hear when there is no back talk.

  Now, your boyfriend is talking: Was it worth it? Did you like it? Did you think you could get away with it? And you, too, have questions: Was it worth it? Did you like it? Did you think you could get away with it? The questions are for the asshole, the one who, by the time you graduate fifteen months later, single, you realize you’ve never said a word to. In the stairwell, you just shook your head.

  Lovers’ Lookout

  Paul arrives on Thursday night and breaks up with Foley on Saturday evening. Afterward, she empties the dinner neither of them had the appetite to eat into the trash. From the kitchen, she listens to him moving in the bedroom they have shared for two years. She brings him a pile of objects to pack with his shirts and jeans: his Cal mug, a frying pan, a set of bookends from his parents’ house across the bay. “Please,” he says to her as she stands in the doorway, not about their breaking up, but about his things, which he does not want to take cross-country with him. “I’ll be back in June,” he says. “I can take it then.”

  He doesn’t let her give him anything else to pack in his small suitcase, but in her mind, she removes everything that belongs to him from their apartment, room by room.

  The next afternoon, as Foley is tying her running shoes, her mother calls from Saint Louis. When she asks if it’s safe for Foley to run alone in the darkening afternoon, Foley says Paul surprised her for the weekend, that he is going with her. She doesn’t tell the truth, how he claimed to have forgotten his running shoes, or how shortly after entering the apartment, he covered the coffee table with piles of his lab reports. How he only paused from his work on them to ask if she has been unfaithful to him, how he was disappointed in her answer that she has not. When Foley talks to her mother, she pretends all his ambitions are still hers, and when her mother asks her to send their love to him, Foley says she will.

  Though it has been months since Paul has run with her, she immediately feels the absence of his footsteps alongside hers. They had always been good
running partners. He’d insist she pick the route, falling in behind her. She liked the silence on their runs, that he was studying her body, her calves climbing hills, her ponytail sinking to the nape of her neck. Only once they were back at the apartment would he scold her for a burst in her pacing or steep hills. “Trying to lose me again, are you?” he would say, his hands resting on a cramp at his waist.

  Afterward they’d share a shower, talking till one of them got cold. It was never Paul, either because he could stand the water longer, or because Foley, relaxed by the run, was the most open with him then. It was in one of those showers that she insisted he take the fellowship in New York, though it meant he’d be gone for nine months. The morning he left she cried, a burst of tears that rose up to her throat as she handed him a cup of coffee for the taxi ride to the airport. Surprised and pleased, he kissed her wet cheekbones and whispered reassurances before bringing his bags downstairs to the waiting car. Last night, when he said, “I thought if we were apart you might begin to need me more,” she didn’t know which one of them was the bigger fool.

  When Foley reaches the mammoth steps of Buena Vista Park, she is grateful to have made it away from traffic-heavy streets, from the sidewalks littered with couples, their arms looped together. It’s a horrible day: overcast, damp, and chilly even before the fog makes its afternoon visit—but perfect for running. There’s a cool breeze on Foley’s back and no sun to squint at. But the persistent grayness of San Francisco, the fog that swallows bridges and the crests of streets, has ceased to be charming. She misses the seasons she knew growing up, the obvious signs of change.

  The hills of the park are filled with wooden planks pushed into the landscape. She takes a series of these steps toward the top of the park, listens to the branches creaking against each other in the wind. Some of the trees are run with thick veins of bark; they shed this skin like snakes onto the path, revealing smooth trunks.

  As Foley climbs, the city rises from all sides below her: houses and smaller splotches of green, and soon, water, the ocean and the bay, all from one point. She can see everything she knows from this park, out to Oakland and Marin, the skyline of downtown, the radio tower she uses to orient herself. The layering of fog over distant hills reminds Foley of an O’Keeffe they have in the museum where she works in the education department. When she’s with younger kids, the ones who still walk holding each other’s hands, she makes them stand before it with their eyes closed for a few giggle-filled seconds, tells them to imagine it as something they’d see out their windows as they are just starting to wake up. As their squinting eyes open, she watches the blurred blue horizon enter their focus.