I shake my head.
“What’s your problem, man? You’re not his mom. Let the kid do it if he wants. Donnie, do you want some?”
They are both looking at me. Do I want to get high? The answer is yes. Yes, I do want to get high. I want to get high enough to float up out of here and far, far away. Apparently I’ve said this out loud.
“You can’t get that high,” Amanda says.
“I could get you that high,” Bobby says.
“And what happens when he comes down?” Amanda asks.
Bobby shrugs and laughs. “Who says he has to come down? He can just go right back up again.”
They both look at me. Apparently I’m supposed to make a choice. Take the joint from Bobby’s fingers and pull the smoke deep inside my lungs, while he laughs and says, “Oh shit!” and Amanda goes inside, kicking the soda can and locking us both out. Or call Bobby an asshole and let Amanda lead me back inside to the room of snacks and hugs. I weigh my options, and walk away from both of them.
39
I hurt. All the time. I can’t believe how much it actually hurts. I look in the mirror and try to make a face that shows how surprised I am at the pain. I think to Karen, Can you believe how much this hurts? If she were here, she would ask me what it felt like. I’d have to think about that. Then I’d tell her it feels like a punch in the throat and a hand ripping through your chest and squeezing your heart till it pops. The sort of thing that would happen if I was a spy and I was captured by the enemy and tortured. They’d have to take out what was left of my heart, and I’d survive. The first person ever to survive without a heart. Then I’d quit the spy business and say, “I don’t know, boss, my heart’s just not in it anymore.” Karen would laugh at that and throw something at me.
• • •
I can always tell when someone else in the house is with Karen in their mind, remembering something. They get perfectly still, except for their face. Their face makes whatever expressions they are making in their memory. So I’ll see Aunt Janice or Uncle Dan or Amanda or Dad or Mom, and they’ll look like they’ve lost a game of freeze tag, standing or sitting completely frozen except they are smiling or frowning or furrowing their brows or mouthing angry words or happy words or looking at her in awe and in love. I do the same thing. When we’re in our memories, Karen is very, very alive. It’s always a disappointment to come out of it.
I can’t stop thinking about the way Karen’s neck looked when she left for the hospital the second time. I know how to get the picture out of my head. I’ll take a tour of the house. I’ve done this a bunch of times in the past few days. It passes the time. I imagine that Karen’s listening to my silent narration when I do it, that she’s learning what life is like here without her.
Let’s start upstairs. This is the door to Mom’s room. Dad would say it’s his door too, but we won’t get into that now. The snuffling you hear is Mom. She just finished crying. She’ll start again soon. It’s how I know she’s still alive in there. The other way I know she’s still alive is that Janice makes her open the door five times a day and tries to make her eat. Aunt Janice should have been a nurse. She has the voice down pat. “Diane, it’s time to eat your dinner. I know you’re not asleep. Sit up. Do you want tea or coffee? I brought you both. No, you have to have one of them.” She loses the nurse’s voice when she talks to Mom about Karen. I can’t listen when they talk about that. Mom’s pain is the same as mine but so different I can’t listen to it.
This open door goes to my room. Only half the crap on the floor is mine. The other half is Bobby’s. That’s his sleeping bag wrinkled up in the middle of the floor. Aunt Janice finally made him take a shower because the smell in my room was starting to waft into the hall. “That’s what music smells like, Ma!” He smiled when he said it, and she swatted him on the butt.
This closed door is to Karen’s room. We all pretend like we don’t go in there. Dad’s in there now. He talks to Karen all night long. I can hear him through my bedroom wall. I try not to listen, but I can hear him tell her about what she was like when she was a kid, what he was like when he was a kid, and how he’s really, really sorry. Everyone else just opens the door, steps in for a second, and then goes out and closes the door behind them. I do that.
Let’s go downstairs and into the kitchen. Oh, look, here’s Amanda and Aunt Janice in the kitchen, “taking care of things.” That means calling the church and telling them to bring the flowers from the service to a nursing home, freezing half the food the neighbors bring over, and telling everyone who calls that Mom isn’t talking to anyone but she thanks them for calling. They make a really good team. Amanda told Aunt Janice about how her mom left when she was a kid, and Aunt Janice made those cooing noises we used to make fun of her for, but Amanda totally eats it up. They’re like best friends now. As soon as they see me, one of them puts a plate of food in the microwave for me. I always wander off before it’s done. There’s lots of time to eat. There’s just lots of time in general.
Let’s follow the horrible screeching noise that’s coming from the basement. There’s Bobby, playing what appears to be a ninety-eight-minute-long song on the guitar he carted in his parents’ trunk all the way from Illinois. If he’s not down here, he’s out back getting high or in the den playing Dad’s old records and making me and Amanda mix CDs of what he thinks we should listen to. Let’s leave before he starts jumping on the old baby furniture and doing scissor kicks in the air. Don’t worry, it won’t hurt his feelings. He knows I’ll come back down soon.
Ready for some air? In the car pulling out of the driveway are Dad and Uncle Dan. Dad must be taking a break from Karen’s room. They are always pulling out of the driveway or pulling back in. When they get back from one of their trips, Dad wanders up to Karen’s room and Aunt Janice asks Uncle Dan in a low voice where they went. He says they just drive around and stop a lot for hamburgers and ice cream. Aunt Janice rubs Uncle Dan’s belly, and he kisses her. He’s got a sensitive stomach.
Bobby finds me standing on the front steps. He hands me my jacket and says, “Let’s go for a ride.” He has good timing. He can always tell when I’m about to jump out of my skin. We go for rides about as much as I give myself tours of the house. Sometimes Amanda comes, sometimes not. Bobby drives and talks about his band and college and politics. He’s smart. The pot hasn’t made him dumber, it just takes longer for the smart to come out. He teaches me how to drive in an office parking lot. I’m bad at it, but neither of us cares. There’s a lot of squealing tires. We go home to get Amanda to show her what I’ve learned. She yells at Bobby and then teaches me to drive all over again.
40
Mom says the phone is for me and leaves it on the counter. She watches me pick it up and say, “Hello.”
“Hello? Donnie?”
English accents. The twins.
“Yeah. It’s me.”
“It’s Sheila, from . . . from the bus. And Rodney . . .”
“Hi, Donnie.”
I can picture them, their heads pressed together, talking into the same phone.
“We wanted to say,” Sheila says in her quick-clip voice, “that we’re sorry about your sister. We would be . . . We would be so sad if something happened to one of us.”
I have no idea what to say to that, so I say, “Oh.”
Rodney asks, “When do you come back to school, then?”
I’m glad to know the answer to that one.
“Monday.”
“Well, we’ll see you Monday, then,” he says.
“Yes, Donnie, we’ll see you Monday.”
41
“Amanda, why did you stop calling my sister?” I’ve got Karen’s tone, the one that makes any question sound like a blunt object hitting you in the face.
Amanda looks up from her coffee. “She told me to.”
Bobby tips his chair back so it’s propped against the kitchen counter and asks, “She told you to?”
Amanda nods. I can see she’s tired. None of us ha
s really slept. The family goes to bed, and the three of us end up in the kitchen, eating the casseroles and cakes the neighbors brought over. I let them play at being my parents. Bobby gives me bad advice about how to deal with the kids at school and Amanda makes me take my medicine. Better than my parents, though, we spend a lot of time behind the house throwing rocks at the shed.
“Bullshit,” I say. “You were her best friend. Why would she tell you not to call her?”
“When I came to visit that time, when I left early, we had a fight. I was begging her to get help, and she told me I had to let her go.”
I don’t believe this.
“Why would she say that?”
“Because it was harder for her to stay sick when she knew how much I cared about her.”
“We all still cared about her. Fat lot of good that did.”
“I didn’t stop caring, Donnie. She wanted me to, but I didn’t. I kept calling. Your mom would lie and say Karen was out. Then she would just say, “I’m sorry, Amanda, she doesn’t want to talk to you.” She and I would make small talk for a while, she’d give me some advice, and we’d hang up. I wrote Karen twenty letters from the time I moved. Your mom has them. By the time I visited, she’d stopped writing me back. I kept writing, even after the visit. Karen would throw the letters out and your mom would pull them out of the trash. Karen blocked my e-mails, they would just end up back in my in-box. I started writing just once every couple of weeks and then once a month, and it became like I was writing to myself, because I knew she wouldn’t read them.”
“You should have tried harder,” I say.
“I thought I was trying harder,” she says.
“Not hard enough,” I say.
“I know,” she answers. She closes her eyes for a long moment.
“You can go to bed,” I say. She shakes her head, hard.
“I’m up,” she says.
They’re both fading, I can see it. They jack themselves up full of coffee and try to stay up with me. They always make it till four A.M. and then come the long pauses in conversation. One of them will doze off, jerk awake, and say, “What’d you say?” and it will be too much of an effort for us to unglue our tongues to say, “Nothing.”
I stay quiet and let them both fall asleep in the kitchen chairs. I’m glad they’re here. And I’m glad they’re asleep. I can think about Karen and not be alone. That’s all I really want to do at night, think about Karen. I sit and stare at the darkness through the sliding glass door, and I watch our life flash before my eyes.
The first thing I see when I open my eyes is Amanda looking at me. We both slept with our heads on the table. Bobby’s stretched out, snoring, on the floor. I keep my head on the table and swallow back the lump in my throat. They’re leaving today. Everyone is. Leaving me with Mom and Dad and the Karen-shaped hole in the universe. Tears are running sideways out of Amanda’s eyes and dripping on the table.
“Stay,” I whisper. More tears slide down her face.
“Stay,” I say again, letting the lump rise up and out.
Amanda reaches out her arm, laying her palm face up, her wrist facing me. I sniff and move my arm so my fingers touch the blue green vein on the inside of her wrist.
“I can’t,” she says.
• • •
We say our good-byes in the driveway, in the same place we said hello four days ago. Mom and Dad walk Aunt Janice and Uncle Dan down to their car, leaving me at the top of the driveway with Amanda and Bobby.
“Well, kid. Here’s my number. Use it. Anytime. Come be a roadie when my band goes on tour.” Bobby presses a folded piece of paper into my hand and pulls me into a hug.
Then Amanda and I just stand there nodding at each other and giving sideways looks to Bobby till he says, “Oh. All right. I’ll wait in the car.” They are giving Amanda a ride back to Chicago.
“You already have my number,” Amanda says.
I nod.
“Okay, then,” she says, and hugs me. For old time’s sake I think, Kiss her kiss her kiss her kiss her kiss her kissherkissherkissher. I kiss her. It’s amazing. She pulls back and scowls at me, and then laughs and says, “Dude!”
“Ha.” I say.
“Your sister would have a cow.”
I shrug. “Moo,” I say.
“Bye, Donnie,” she says. And as she walks down the driveway, she keeps looking back at me and laughing and shaking her head. I know I’ll probably never kiss her again. I don’t care, because I also know that I’m going to know Amanda forever. And that she’s my sister, like Bobby’s my brother, and the way to get people to love you is to show them that you love them.
42
I try to calm myself down. They’re not here. They weren’t in homeroom or first or second period. It’s almost lunch now. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I shouldn’t have even thought about them. I should have come in ready to float through my first day back. I just thought . . . since they called . . .
I’ve successfully avoided most people by plowing through the halls with my head down. If I knock into someone, they don’t get mad, they just whisper in my wake. When I’m at my locker, a few people come up to tell me they’re sorry about what happened. They either try to look me in the face or avoid looking at me at all.
Third period ends with the lunch bell, and I decide to go to the nurse and call Mom to come get me. It’s my first day back, so they have to give me some slack. I cut through the cafeteria on the way to the nurse’s office, head down, ready to knock over anyone in my way. I tell myself it’s a shortcut, I don’t let myself feel the spark of hope that they will be there.
“Donnie! Over here!”
Sheila and Rodney are sitting by themselves at a round table, both waving wildly at me. Ha. When I walk up to the table, Rodney says, “We had to go to the dentist this morning. We’d forgotten. Sit down.”
I sit down.
“I’m Sheila and this Rodney. We’ve never properly met.”
“Hi,” I say, and open up my lunch bag. Sheila smiles and nods at me for a long time, then purses her lips and looks at Rodney, trying to tell him something with her eyes. He shrugs his shoulders at her, almost frantically. I see her mouth, Talk to him!
I let them off the hook. “So what’s it like to live in London? Do you miss it?”
“Yes and yes!” Rodney almost shouts with relief. A few people close by turn their heads. I smile at him. “We were born in India but lived in London with our mum and dad.”
“How long have you been here?” This is what it is to have a conversation.
“We’ve been in the states two years and in this town for one month.”
“Two years?” Their accents are so thick I thought they’d just moved here. Rodney leans forward conspiratorially.
“We watch a lot of British telly. Sheila doesn’t want us to lose our accents.”
“We’re not American, so why should we sound like Americans?” Sheila says. “Besides, when Mum has us go live with her, we want to blend. We’re going to live with our mum.”
Rodney rolls his eyes at Sheila and tells me, “We have dual citizenship. Dad’s American. And we’re not going to live with Mum in the UK anytime soon.” He looks at Sheila. “Where would she put us? Her suitcase?” He quotes someone, I’m guessing his mom, “‘The road is no place for a child.’”
Sheila thinks about that for a moment, and then says triumphantly, “Well, for university, then.”
She and Rodney are staring at something behind me.
“Donnie,” Sheila says in an accent that’s thicker than the one she had just a second ago, “there’s a strange looking boy standing behind you opening and closing his mouth like a guppy out of water.”
I turn around and there’s Chris, leaning awkwardly and trying to look unconcerned. He opens his mouth.
“Shut up,” I say before he can make a sound, and I turn back around to Sheila and Rodney. I hear Chris walk away.
“Well, then. No more guppy,” Sheila says.
After lunch I find a note from Chris and Bean in my locker.
“Sorry about your sister.”
I crumple it up and clench it in my fist. I turn to where Chris and Bean watch me from their lockers, and drop the note on the floor.
• • •
I eat lunch with Sheila and Rodney every day for two weeks, until it feels almost normal. Almost like a pattern. Almost like friends. I still go to lunch a few minutes late and walk almost straight through the cafeteria, planning every day to walk right on to the nurse’s office if I don’t see them, or if I do see them and they ignore me. They never do, though. They always smile when they see me. I smile back.
They don’t say anything about me walking home from school now. I pretend that it’s not strange that I opt to walk home every day. I just don’t want them to think that they have to be my friends. If we ride the bus together, there’ll be that awkward moment when I stand up to get off and they don’t want to invite me over to their house, so they don’t.
43
From the far end of the hall, a message comes rolling through the crowd. I keep my eyes on the books in my locker, pretending not to notice that people are saying my name. They are calling it to each other, person to person, till eventually a breathy tenth grader walking by me says, “Phone’s for you.”
I look up at the crowd of kids walking from the gym toward the lockers. A bunch of them point behind them to the open gym doors and the pay phone on the wall. Next to the phone stands one of those kids that’s built like a ruler. He holds the phone up with a long arm and yells, his voice bouncing down the hall, “You want me to take a message?”
I shake my head and try to shout, “No . . . I’ll get it,” but my voice doesn’t carry at all.
The breathy girl rolls her eyes and yells, “He’s coming!”
Skin Page 14