“It’s not stupid to me! Just—come on, let’s go.” I step forward and shove his chest with both my hands. He steps back with one foot to right himself but doesn’t lift his hands. “Oh my God, you’re fucking kidding me. Let’s go!”
“I’m not punching you in the face.”
“You won’t be able to! That’s my point! Just try. I’ll block it, I’ll dodge it, I’ll counterattack. I just want a real fight. To show what I can do.”
“I don’t want to punch my girlfriend, okay?” he cries.
“Oh my God.” I realize. “This is because we kissed, isn’t it?”
“No, of course not.”
“It is! I knew we shouldn’t have gone there,” I say. “What we had was better; it was more important, and now it’s ruined.”
“It has nothing to do with that. Even if we’d never kissed, I’d be saying the same thing.”
“You didn’t mind punching me in the arm,” I point out. “That first week of lessons.”
“You tricked me into doing that!”
“How did I trick you? That doesn’t even make sense.”
We look at each other, chests heaving, but this time I don’t think it’s sexy. This time I don’t want to touch him except to hit him, or to get him to hit me.
“You have some weird ideas about relationships,” he says.
“So now I’m weird, too. Great.”
“That’s not what I meant.” He sighs. “Can we drop it?”
I’m begging now, shifting my weight from foot to foot, holding my fists up like we’re about to spar any second. “Try me. Just let me try.”
“I’m gonna go,” he says after a long pause. “Call me if you ever calm down.”
“Don’t talk to me like that.”
He chuckles angrily and shakes his head. “Oh man, I should have known when you punched me in the hallway. I should’ve known you were a nutcase.”
“And you’re a condescending asshole.”
If a girl punches someone, she’s crazy. If a guy punches someone, he’s dealing with his feelings. He’s normal.
“Leave if you’re gonna leave,” I shout.
I kick the punching bag so hard the chains rattle and threaten to fall off their hinges.
After he yanks the door shut behind him, there’s another long pause and then his car horn blares for, like, thirty seconds straight, followed by a series of sporadic blares. I think he’s slamming his hand on the horn, open-palmed.
I fling the door open and race outside, hoping to catch up with him, but when I get to the street, his car’s gone.
Dizzy, dazed, and out of it, I stumble back inside the garage gym. My body and brain and voice are hostile strangers; they’re still not my own.
If I hadn’t given in to feeling good with him before, if I hadn’t let myself feel comfort and pleasure in his arms, I’d be getting what I wanted right now. Stupid Imogen, you wrecked your one chance for a fight. You had to be a girlie girl, and now that’s all he sees you as.
I want to punch myself in the face, bust open my lip, teach it to know better. Screw kissing and gentle caresses. That’s not what I need right now.
I stare at my face in the mirror and I start punching. I punch until I shatter the glass, and then I punch until I hit the concrete behind it. I punch and punch and punch, and I cry out, but there’s no pain, just shock and elation and the sound of fist hitting wall, thunk-thunk-thunk, because that’s what I told my hand to do, and it’s goddamn going to do WHAT I TELL IT TO DO, until I stop for a split second and see that the limb that used to be my hand is a shredded mess of pulp and flapping skin and glass, a bloody, smashed apricot impaled on exposed bone.
And then I start to scream.
WHEN WE GET BACK FROM THE ER, I’M FLOATING LIKE A buoy on a vast, empty sea of painkillers, too far away from shore to register what I’ve done. It feels like it happened to someone else’s hand and that I’ll wake up any second and my skin and bones will be restored.
But when I really look, I see it isn’t true. I have to wear a plaster splint until my follow-up appointment in a month. Doctors actually have a term for this kind of break: a brawler’s fracture. They knew immediately how it happened. I had to get stitches and a tetanus shot, too.
Not the Thanksgiving my dad was expecting.
He cried when the doctor brought me out. “I don’t know how to help you. Tell me how to help you,” he said.
“Be the way you used to be,” I slurred.
I manage to clean up our takeout feast with just my left hand, cramming the paper boxes clumsily into the trash while Dad makes a choked phone call to Mom in DC.
She doesn’t ask to speak to me. Maybe she thinks I’m asleep.
Strangely, I feel better about my chances for sleep tonight: (a) my room’s superclean and (b) I’ve done something to make amends. I’ve marked what happened at the diner on my body now; it doesn’t just exist in my head as a guilty memory. It’s real, and it has a form and a shape, so maybe God or whoever will see I’m sorry and I won’t have nightmares anymore.
“Do you want to sleep down here again?” Dad says when I’m halfway up the stairs. “Not the floor—we can make up the couch. That way I’m close by if you need me for anything.”
“No, I’m okay. I want my own bed. Thanks, though.”
“I’d like to hold on to those pills for you,” he says carefully, opening his hand.
“Why?”
“I just think it would be better if I hold on to them. I’ll give you one every few hours.”
“I’m not gonna kill myself,” I scoff. “I’d like to hold on to them.”
“Oh my God, I’m not gonna swallow them.”
“Imogen, give me the pills.”
“Maybe I should be worried about you taking them.”
He gapes at me. “What?”
“Here.” I dart down the stairs and veer off to the bathroom before he can stop me (like he could stop me), wrench open the child-safety lid, and pour the pills into the toilet. “Happy now?”
I flush.
“Why did you do that?” he asks sadly once I emerge from the bathroom. “You’re going to be in a lot of pain.”
Doesn’t he know by now that I don’t want anyone to save me—I want to suffer. If I’m dead, that defeats the purpose. This is not a cry for help: it’s a means unto itself.
I fall asleep, no dreams, just as I’d hoped: total blankness. But then I wake up a few hours later with my hand on fire, throbbing like it’s got its own heart. It steals the circulation from the rest of my body, until I don’t have a body; I only have a hand. It’s the rest of me that needs to be removed.
I bite my other fist and moan as tears pour down my face.
A couple of minutes go by, and the intercom next to my head crackles to life.
“Are you okay?” Dad says, his words a soft, momentary balm.
“It hurts,” I gasp.
“Come down here and get some Tylenol,” he says. “Come downstairs.”
“I don’t want to get out of bed.”
“I can’t bring anything to you up there.”
“I know.”
This is the way it should be. Daryl died because of me. It’s right that I should feel pain.
A long pause from the intercom, but he’s got the button secured somehow, maybe pressed down by a mug or a book, because I hear rustling and then a moment later I hear the plucking of guitar strings. A simple melody starts up, one of his favorite Beatles songs, about a blackbird who’s broken and needs to learn how to fly.
Dad’s voice emerges, trembling and unsure, but growing stronger with each line.
DAD SANG FOR AN HOUR, GOING THROUGH HIS OLD REPertoire: some Simon and Garfunkel, another Beatles, a couple of lullabies, and I know this sounds impossible, but while he was singing, I was transported. I closed my eyes, and I could pretend I was ten years old again, and none of this had ever happened, and nothing else bad would ever happen to me again.
In the
morning I accept an over-the-counter pill with breakfast. I kind of miss the prescription stuff from last night, but the floaty feeling hadn’t seemed fair; it took away too much, and I’m determined to feel as much of my hand’s pain as possible without passing out or being unable to function.
Homework’s out of the question, since I can’t write, but then Dad offers to type if I dictate. We sit down in front of the computer together like we’re playing a duet.
A few hours later I’m dying to check my e-mail, so I make Dad turn his back while I slowly type in my password with my left hand.
There’s a message from Ricky, with no subject line. I stop breathing.
I don’t want to read it in Dad’s office, so I print it, not allowing my eyes to focus on any of the words. It’s a long one, and I’m scared of what it says. I tell Dad I need to go lie down, and I take the printout with me upstairs.
Hey Imogen,
I know I said all the wrong things yesterday and I’m sorry. I’m writing this in the middle of the night because I can’t sleep. Having my dad home for Thanksgiving is fucked up. He criticizes almost everything I do, so when I come to your place and your dad is so nice, I don’t understand why you don’t see it. But I’m not writing to talk about my dad.
The truth is I’m still kind of mad about the punch. This is probably sexist but it really pissed me off you got the jump on me like that. But at the same time I was impressed; I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and that’s why I wanted to learn from you. You’re really good at martial arts and you’re also a seriously badass teacher. I work on my sidekicks every night in the yard, pivoting so it’s almost a backward kick, where I look over my shoulder, just like you said.
The other reason I was mad about the punch that day in school was because I couldn’t fight back, because then it would look like I was wailing on someone half my size. So when you gave me a chance to get even yesterday, I should’ve been happy, but I wasn’t. First of all I never want to hurt you, but also, and this was what I couldn’t say, I didn’t want you to win again. Especially with my dad here.
It hurt that you called me an asshole because all I want to do is keep you safe. I know you don’t need me to, and I know this will probably make you even angrier, but it’s the truth. How can we get past this?
Ricky
I hunt and peck a reply: “Can’t type, hurt my hand,” but I don’t click Send. He’ll just call or text, all worried, and I don’t want to explain things to him right now or make him feel like he has to come over again, when really he should be spending time with his dad, even if his dad’s a jerk.
I don’t get much more homework done over break, except for statistics. It’s the only class I have that doesn’t drive me crazy, because it has verifiable right or wrong answers. It’s not open to interpretation.
Dad asks about continuing my homework but doesn’t push too hard. We watch TV and comment on the insanity of the Christmas ads. Before I know it, it’s Sunday night and the Volvo is pulling into the driveway, carrying Mom and Hunter back home.
I catch the tail end of their conversation as they tromp through the front hall, dropping their suitcases on the floor and hanging up their coats.
“If you still feel this way in six months, we’ll talk about it again,” Mom is saying.
That’s her fallback position on everything.
I get up to greet them, in time to hear Mom’s closing argument: “In the meantime, I think you should apply. What could it hurt?”
Hunter’s glum expression tells me it could hurt a lot. He fixes his features when he sees me, though—sunny-side up with a slice of bacon. For a second I think Mom is going to hug me, but she just clears her throat and takes off her hat.
“Let’s see that hand,” she says, and I show her. She blinks a lot and grimaces, like I’m a house cat showing her a rancid squirrel I found.
“What happened?” Hunter asks.
“The mirror fell on my hand,” I say.
“Repeatedly?” says Mom. Her voice cuts me. “Your father said you punched it.”
I’m completely uncomfortable with how that image must look to her. She’ll never understand why I did it, so it’s pointless to explain. “It’s over now. It’ll be okay.”
“You’re lucky I have such good insurance,” Mom says, passing by me on her way into the living room, pausing to drop a single kiss on my forehead, like a dirty penny falling into a well. What she doesn’t know is that the penny will never reach bottom, because there is no bottom; I am endless in my need for her and whatever she’s wishing about me will not be granted.
“Babe, we’re home,” she calls to Dad.
Her rapid blinking’s been transferred to me, and as I’m doing it, I realize it’s to prevent tears from forming.
“How’d it go?” I ask Hunter.
“Tell me you won’t do it again,” he says tiredly, placing a hand on my shoulder.
“I won’t do it again,” I promise.
Monday morning I let Hunter drive me to school, so no one will suspect me of ditching, and then right before the bell rings I walk back out and down the school steps, a quarter mile over to the train station.
Children’s Home Rule number three: Children will respect their parents and teachers.
I want to respect Mom, but how can you respect someone you know nothing about?
I ride the train to Chicago and spy on her all day. She leaves the Congress Plaza Hotel early for lunch and walks through Grant Park to the Art Institute. She doesn’t go to the Seurat exhibit, the Sundays in the Park with George one, like everyone else does; she goes straight for the Monet water lilies. It’s the happiest and most peaceful I’ve seen her in months.
At home after dinner, I’m clearing the table when I drop a dirty dish on the floor, shattering it into pieces. I crouch to collect them and Mom cries, “Just leave it!” I look over at her and wonder if she basically hates me now.
Dad tells us to get out of Mom’s hair so she can tidy up. Hunter’s got a shift at Dairy Dump anyway, and on his way out the door he teases me: “This was all part of your plan, wasn’t it? To get out of washing the dishes?”
Dad gets a wooden bowl of nuts and the nutcracker and takes them to the living room. I follow. Our nutcracker isn’t one of those creepy soldier kinds with a face and teeth and a chopping-block mouth that might snap down on your fingers or come alive at night. It’s just a simple V-shaped squeezer with a palm grip that crunches, snaps, and pulls apart.
The easiest ones to crack are the hazelnuts, round and small, followed by Brazil nuts, curved and dark. Sometimes the effort’s not worth it. After breaking one of the nuts open and clearing out the debris, you discover it’s rotten inside.
Dad lounges in his wheelchair and I sit on the couch, pretending to read Bleak House. Without taking his eyes off the TV, he says, “Where were you all day? I know you didn’t go to school.”
“How—”
“The front office called right before you got home. I told them you were under the weather. But that’s the last time I’m going to do that.”
I glance toward the kitchen. “Does Mom know?”
He pauses the TV and turns to look at me. “No. So. Where were you all day?”
Before this weekend, I would have lied. But we understand each other now. At least, better than we used to. “Took the train to Chicago. Just wandered around.”
“You’re not trying to run away?”
He and Hunter are obsessed with me running away. Where would I possibly go?
“No, I’m not running away.”
Pecans are the hardest to crack open. Sometimes Dad uses an extra tool, a miniscraper, to pull out the hidden shelves that run down the center of the nut. The scraper looks like an instrument from an archaeological dig. You have to be careful cracking a pecan because the splinters could fly out, and everything inside the shell could break and crumble into bits of dust. To get an unbroken half pecan from the shell or, more amazingly, the whole piece, is a r
are treat so I can’t believe it when my dad’s successful. Hunched over his armrest, fingers working carefully, he spends twenty minutes on his project and then sets five whole, perfect pecans onto a small plate.
“Go give these to your mother,” he says.
Ever since he got diagnosed with diabetes, I stopped looking for things about him to respect and admire. His patience. His kindness.
I used to think Mom wasn’t getting anything out of her marriage, and maybe it’s still lopsided, but now I think there could be things going on in my parents’ life that are hidden to me and Hunter. There are things we see and things we pretend we don’t see, things we hear and things we pretend we don’t hear … and things, I guess, that we never see or hear at all.
ON WEDNESDAY I SHOW UP FOR COUNSELING, BUT MRS. Hamilton doesn’t let me in. She thinks it’s better if Ricky and I see her separately from now on. What the hell?
After school I catch up with him at his locker. I’m dying to throw my arms around him, but there’s like this force field between us.
“I got your e-mail,” I say, lifting my paw in greeting. “Sorry I couldn’t write back.”
“Why’d you do it?” He gently holds my wrist in both his hands.
“Because you wouldn’t.”
He winces. Direct hit.
He peers under the splint. I know from similar excursions my hand’s a purplish, sickly abomination.
“You’re bruised,” he says. “It means you’re alive. The body can’t bruise once the heart stops beating.”
“How do you know that?”
“CSI: Miami, I think.” We share a brief laugh. “All this, this hurt you’re going through—it means you’re alive and you have to stop wishing you weren’t.”
I swallow back my emotion. “It’s not the same for you. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Can you go for a drive?”
I shrug. “Okay. I just gotta tell Hunter.”
Ricky and I drive in silence for a while until I figure out where he’s taking me: his old neighborhood, Lake Bluff, so we can look out at the water. You need a permit to park at the beachfront, and sure enough, in the corner of his car window, there’s a sticker with the community logo. He pulls right up to the water, as close as he can get.
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