The world had flattened out for her then, until it seemed as if it wasn’t just the towers that had been leveled and the space around it turned to rubble, but the entire landscape for as far as she could see or ever hope to travel—a flatness you couldn’t escape on a bicycle or a car even, because the faster you pedaled or drove, the more the flatness extended, farther in all directions, oozing out, eating up whatever lay in its path, so that as far as you could see, and beyond even, lay nothing but more of the same.
For Wendy, that September, colors had faded till there was only gray. Smells disappeared except for the one terrible lingering scent she had breathed in that night she traveled to lower Manhattan to see the wreckage for herself, a smell she couldn’t get out of her lungs after that, whether she inhaled or not. Maybe somewhere, someone was playing instruments, but music also seemed to have left the planet—the only note remaining being the sound of one long, low, wailing siren.
In September, everything she loved—songs on the radio and clothes and flavors of ice cream and types of dogs, leaf piles and roller coasters and skating, and Japanese animation movies and sushi and shopping and the clarinet and splashing in the waves at Nantucket with her brother—had melted away, not gone maybe, but this was almost worse: still there, but robbed of any capacity to give pleasure, like a soup with so many ingredients that, in the end, it tastes of nothing, like what happens when you mix all the wonderful colors of paint and it turns out that together what they add up to is brown.
Reading that section of The Member of the Wedding, Wendy understood how Frankie felt that night. She also knew that she herself didn’t feel that way anymore. That like small green spikes pushing through the black of a burned-out mountainside on the way to Harvey’s Cactus World—or maybe not even spikes of green yet, just the barest blush of color—something had begun to grow back in her. The earth was taking shape again; color was returning. She wasn’t any less sad. In fact, maybe she was more so. But she was alive again.
Wendy took another sip of her Coke and unwrapped the chocolate. She was only one page further in the story, but all of a sudden it was a year later, and Frankie was thirteen. She had a friend now. They were planning to travel around the world when they were older.
Wendy was just starting to feel happy about how much better things seemed for Frankie now, almost as if Frankie getting a friend and planning her big trip meant that a hopeful future might be waiting for Wendy, too.
One thing was disturbing her, though, as she read through the final pages of her book. Where had the little boy gone? Where was John Henry, the one who reminded her of Louie? A thirteen-year-old girl definitely wouldn’t want to be hanging around with a little boy, playing card games all the time, the way she had when she was younger, any more than Wendy felt like playing Candyland with Louie anymore, but something in the way the final pages of the story were unfolding gave her a certain sense of dread.
Then she knew why they weren’t hearing about John Henry anymore. One minute, she was reading how John Henry had gotten a headache the year before. Four sentences later, it turned out he was dead.
Wendy was stunned. She didn’t know that anything she read in a book could hurt that much. She reread the words, in case she’d got them wrong. It was as if someone she actually knew had died and, just as she would for someone she had known, she felt herself begin to cry.
It was past eleven, but she wasn’t tired. She got out of bed. There were a few cashews and raspberries left, but she wasn’t hungry. She reached into her overnight bag and took out her clothes—jeans, a T-shirt, and, because the weather was cooler in San Francisco, a sweater and socks. She laced up her sneakers, stuck her room key in her pocket, and went out into the long hallway, heading toward the elevator.
She imagined what her mother would say if she could see Wendy now—alone in a hotel, heading out into the night. She could almost hear her mother’s voice. Not safe, not safe. Never mind. Nothing was. Once the worst had happened, a person could do anything.
There was nobody else around, just a few other room-service trays like hers lying on the floor next to the rooms where they’d been left. One had a rose on it in a silver vase and a bottle of champagne. There was still some left in the glass. She bent down and took a sip, then gulped down the rest.
Wendy considered the possibility that someone might stop her, but nobody did. One of the men in uniforms in the lobby opened the door for her even. Then she was outside in the night air, with the whole of the city sparkling below.
Except for their trip in the taxi to the park, and then going to the ballet with her grandmother, she didn’t have a clue where anything was in San Francisco. She just started walking.
You could tell this was a fancy neighborhood, but within a few blocks, the buildings changed. There were bars and clubs with signs that had pictures of naked women on them. She passed a man with a shopping cart that had all his stuff in it, and a woman who had two different shoes on and not a whole lot of teeth.
Hey there, Cookie, a man said. Got any change for cigarettes?
I’m sorry, she said.
Late as it was, a lot of people were up, though there were some sleeping, too, wrapped up in blankets on the sidewalk, and others had just a piece of cardboard box laid over them.
She walked some more—a person in a dream. She was using the other bridge she’d seen as her marker, heading toward it. In a few minutes she’d reached the bay.
There was a long, wide street running along the water’s edge and a bunch of low warehouse-type buildings, closed up. In one place where the sidewalk widened out, a group of boys were skateboarding. Not like the boys she saw in New York, who mostly just skated to get around. These boys were doing fancy moves and tricks. She stopped, not right where they were but a little ways back to not get in the way.
One of the best skaters was a boy a few years older than her probably, in big pants you’d think wouldn’t stay up and no jacket, even though the night was not just cool now but cold. He was skinny, but surprisingly muscular under his T-shirt, and his thin face had a haunted look. He had the kind of dark beauty guys like the Backstreet Boys tried to have on the pictures on their trading cards, only with this boy the look had seemed to have come from someplace real.
He was doing amazing things—sliding his skateboard down a railing, flipping it, and landing so smoothly, you wouldn’t know his board had ever left the ground. She watched him tear along a smooth stretch of concrete at the top of a bunch of steps, not even slowing down when he got to them, just sailing out over the air, crouching down, touching the tip of his board before making contact with the concrete at the bottom and then moving off like a leaf in a stream—that smooth, but faster.
Sweet, one of the older skaters called out to him. I saw somebody land that one in San Jose. Kid’s probably sponsored by now.
When they took off, their wheels made a whirring sound. She thought of Disney on Ice, the show she went to with her mother and Josh and Louie last winter. The part at the end where Mickey and Goofy and the Seven Dwarfs all came out at once, whizzing past one another and jumping over things.
She stood in the shadows for a long time, watching the skateboarding boys. She imagined what it would feel like if she could skate like that. She could ice-skate, and she and her mother used to Rollerblade on Sunday mornings, but all she ever did was go along the path with all the other skaters. The thing about these boys was how they broke out on their own, the way they defied fear and common sense, and gravity.
She thought about the ballet performance she’d seen that night, the perfectly choreographed snowflake dancers, the Sugar Plum Fairies, the totally unsurprising moment when the giant Christmas tree had risen up to fill the stage as the audience applauded, perfectly on time, almost as if they, too, were part of the choreography. And later, in the lobby as they filed out, the audience members, in their holiday clothes—even a few teenagers the age of this boy and herself, in their blue blazers and velvet dresses, carrying on as if
this were just one more holiday season like all the others they’d celebrated, with the identical clothes and music and dance steps.
As if the worst thing that could happen to a girl was having her nutcracker break. As if the idea of somebody sleeping under a piece of cardboard on the street or a seventeen-year-old girl getting hit by her boyfriend and having a baby all by herself, or an airplane crashing into a skyscraper—somebody’s mother going to work and never coming home, or a hundred people’s mothers never coming home, a thousand fathers, or sisters, or brothers—was just some other fairy tale, the kind nobody made ballets about.
There was a time when Wendy was one of those people who believed the world was a safe place, where the bad things only happened far away. She had supposed she knew, more or less, how life was going to go, and that even the hard parts would be things like having to convince her mother to get a puppy or let her go to California, or getting into the High School of Music and Art.
In the old days, Wendy had believed that there was a set of rules your life followed, the main one being that certain things, like your family and the world you inhabited, were never going to change. Her parents had stood as fixed on the landscape as the lions on either side of the steps to the New York Public Library, or—she might actually have thought about it this way once—the Twin Towers at the base of Manhattan. Your mother simply disappearing, and your father, your original father that you barely knew, taking you someplace three thousand miles away to live this whole other life with him, was as impossible as putting the rain back in the sky.
From the looks of them, the skateboarding boys had stopped buying into the rules a long time ago, if they ever had. From what she could tell, they almost certainly had not spent the afternoon eating turkey from a silver platter, or their evening at a place like the San Francisco Ballet, in the sixty-five-dollar seats.
At this very moment, in fact, one of them—a kid they were calling Crash—had evidently spotted a police car, and now they were scattering in all directions, tearing down the pavement, past the ABSOLUTELY NO SKATEBOARDING sign.
The picture came to her again of Disney on Ice.
Admit it, Janet, Josh had said to her mother, putting an arm around her as they were making their way out of Madison Square Garden after. All through that last number, you were wishing you had one of those Cinderella getups.
Just the wand maybe, her mother said. I already have a tiara.
If it was me, I’d want to be Mickey, Louie said. He wanted to know where the characters went after the show was over. If they got on the subway, same as him.
It’s really just a man in a Mickey Mouse suit, Louie, Wendy told him. All afternoon, she’d been feeling irritable, starting with noticing that her jeans were too tight, and wondering why she ever said yes to joining her parents and Louie at the ice show. It was one of those moments she hated herself, when she could feel herself becoming mean and angry for reasons that probably had nothing to do with her family, they were just the only ones around to blame.
Didn’t you notice how Mickey’s eyes never moved? she told her brother. That’s because it’s a man in a mask. He probably goes out after the show and drinks a whole bunch of beer. He probably goes home and yells at his kids.
I’m not sure your brother needed to hear that theory, her mother said. She and Josh had been holding Louie’s hands, one on each side, so he could jump up in the air and swing.
If that’s what you want, she said, to have my brother growing up believing that some stupid cartoon characters are real, go for it. Just don’t blame me if he gets totally depressed later when he finds out the truth about life.
She slowed down so they’d be ahead of her. She was going to pretend she was by herself. Looking at the three of them up ahead, her mother and Josh, with Louie swinging between them, she had this urge to disappear. Slip into a doorway, round a corner, get on a train. It might be another ten minutes before they’d even notice she was gone. She could be on her way to the East Village by then. Or anywhere, just away from the rest of them. Without her, they were a perfect little unit, singing “Heigh-ho, Heigh-ho” off into the sunset.
She had not run away. She had ridden the same train they had back to Brooklyn—just in a different car, though even then she had to ask Josh for fare money. When they got back to the apartment, she had gone into her room and slammed the door without saying anything. She didn’t even know why she was feeling so miserable. She put on Tori Amos, took out her drawing pad, and made a picture of her mother with a ridiculous grin on her face. Then she scribbled all over it. Then she ripped it into pieces without feeling any better.
She didn’t even say good night to her parents that night, though Louie had knocked at her door to say, Sweet dreams, the way he always did. When he asked if she’d come snuggle with him, she said, Another time, Louie. Later, her mother must have slipped a note under her door, because it was there in the morning when she got up.
Precious Wendy—
I know it doesn’t seem as if we understand a single thing about how you’re feeling these days. I don’t expect I can make you feel any better. I just wanted you to know that I’m not so old I can’t still remember a few things about being thirteen years old. The best I can tell you is, nobody stays thirteen forever. Though I’ll just add, I have loved you madly, every single age you’ve ever been, and expect the trend to continue.
Like it or not, your mom (the only one you’ll ever have!)
The night was chilly now, much cooler than in Davis. Wendy had found herself a spot along the pier a little ways down from where she’d watched the skaters. She sat on the wall, looking out at the lights across the bay.
Hey, he said. It was the skinny skateboarder. You’re the one that was watching us before, right?
You’re really good, she told him.
You skate?
Just Rollerblades.
We don’t use that word around here, he told her. But I’ll excuse you this time.
He sat down next to her. Some nights I feel that way, too, he said. Like crying.
You live here? she asked him.
I don’t live anywhere, he said. I’m on the road. How about you?
I used to live in New York, but now I don’t.
New York, he said. Bad scene there, man.
I know, she said. My mom was in one of the towers.
His name was Todd. She told him hers, the real one. Also about Josh and Louie and Garrett.
So now all of a sudden this guy comes along wanting to be all fatherly, huh? he said. Making up for lost time?
It’s not like that exactly. My father’s a kind of hands-off type, but he’s doing his best. I call him Garrett, not Dad.
It’s got to feel weird for you, coming to a whole new place, Todd said. It would be different for someone like me, who’s used to their family being screwed up.
I didn’t want to come out here with him at first, she said. Then I figured there wasn’t anything else so great back home, either, so I might as well.
If it was me, man, I’d miss my brother the most. I’ve got a brother four years older. As far as my family goes, he’s the one good thing.
Todd liked the part about Wendy not going to school. He called it the bomb, which turned out to be good.
Here, they tell you they’re doing all this stuff like checking up on whether you’re doing drugs and if you turned in your homework on time, but they don’t even notice when you don’t show up for a month.
I wrote the principal a letter, she told him. I forged my dad’s signature.
What do you figure will happen when this Garrett dude finally finds out? When there’s supposed to be high school graduation and you have to break the news you stopped going to school in eighth grade?
I don’t think about the future much, she said.
Join the club.
They sat on some wood pilings, looking out at the bay. The moon was up, just a thin slice, but it was reflected in the water. They could see the lights of
another city, across the bay. Oakland, he told her.
Where’s your family now? she asked him.
I have a dad in Pennsylvania. My real dad lives in Texas, but I never met him, he said. My mom’s in Cleveland, but before that, we lived in Rhode Island and Delaware and South Carolina. It’s been two years since I saw my brother.
My best friend, Amelia, and I always used to have this plan of moving to Pennsylvania when we grew up, she said. We were going to live in Pittsburgh.
You might want to rethink that plan, said Todd.
Your mom must be upset about you taking off, Wendy said. Did you call and wish her a happy Thanksgiving?
Not exactly, he said.
I bet she’s always getting after you to wear a helmet when you skate, right? asked Wendy. That would be my mom.
I don’t have one of those type of moms, he said. My mom’s the type, if I was wearing a helmet, she’d tell me to take it off.
Twenty-Four
You shouldn’t be out alone at night, Todd told Wendy. Particularly in this neighborhood. I’ll walk you home.
She pointed up the hill. I’m staying at a kind of fancy hotel at the moment, she said.
He stepped on his board, but not to ride. He kept one foot on the sidewalk, pushing himself along. When they got to the hill, he put the board under his arm.
When my parents split up, the idea was that my mom would get Kevin and I’d live with my dad, he told her. She must’ve gotten first pick. I was really little then. Second grade. Kevin was in sixth. We used to call ourselves the Ultra-bros.
My little brother and I have this song we sing in the car, “Side by Side,” she said. It’s kind of corny but he’s only four.
The Usual Rules Page 24