The Lemonade Year

by Amy Willoughby-Burle

  At times, I hated that she was there. She made my legs ache. Sadness rose up in my throat like bright acid. The squawk and stick of sneakers on the gym floor, the rush of the ball through the air, through the net, the crowd thumping in applause was a sick symphony, an ode to the little girl in the neon-green leg warmers who could not run up the court, could not climb the bleachers without help, and could not stop calling my name and waving frantically to me whenever I looked her way. The girl who barely knew who any of us were, but knew we were her world.

  Ray didn’t watch the games. He’d wait for the two of us in the parking lot, drive home without speaking, drop us off in the driveway, then drive away and not come back until after curfew, long after Mom gave up and went to bed and left Dad awake and worried and me hiding in the hallway making sure that the world didn’t come to an end while Lola slept.

  The morning after those nights, Mom would ask Lola if she had a good time at the game. Lola would tell Mom about every basket I scored, every foul shot I made, every time I looked at her and waved.

  “Sounds like you had a good time,” Mom would say to Lola.

  “Make sure your sweaty clothes aren’t on the floor,” Mom would say to me.

  During our last game that year, I broke a school record. I hadn’t told anyone how close I had been to it, but Lola must have been keeping track. That night, after the game, she hobbled into our room with celebratory Little Debbie snack cakes and soda, and we stayed up late enough for Ray to come home. He had to walk past our door on the way to his room. Lola waited for him in our doorway.

  “Nina has scored more baskets in one season than any player in the history of our school. We’re celebrating.”

  She gave him a cake, and he stood in the doorway to our room and ate it. He nodded at me. He smelled like beer, even from across the room. There was a store in town that would sell to underage kids for an extra ten dollars. Lola waited for him to finish the cake and then hugged him around the waist. He put his arms across her back and turned his face to stone. She let go of him, and for a second, they stood looking at each other. When she gimped back across the room to the bed, he closed his eyes.

  He couldn’t forgive himself for what he’d done, and he’s worked his whole life to get the punishment he thinks he deserves.

  On Ray’s thirty-ninth birthday he went to jail. Not for the weekend or overnight. Jail.

  “I did it,” he had said on Lola’s voice mail. “I won’t get off easy this time. I’ll get a year, maybe eighteen months, maybe two years total.”

  He sounded drunk and happy with himself.

  “What am I supposed to do?” Lola said to him through the phone when she and I went to visit Ray in county lockup that preceded his court date and future incarceration.

  “Call Dad,” I said. “Like Ray should have done. Dad will call a lawyer.”

  “Don’t you dare call Dad,” Ray yelled at the protective window, pointing at me where I stood behind Lola. “I’m a grown man. I don’t need you calling my daddy.”

  Lola’s face was puffy, and her eyes were fat from crying. I probably just looked put out, like Ray was keeping me from some pressing engagement. That was my way even then, to shut out what was happening—to not deal with it.

  “Don’t look sad,” Ray said to Lola. “I’m happy now.”

  “Please stop, Ray,” Lola said, seeing through him even then, seeing through his stupid attempts to make himself believe that he wanted to hurt.

  “I can’t stop till I’ve made it up.”

  “What is there to make up? It’s not your fault.”

  “But it is,” Ray said, looking intensely at her.

  Over the years, Lola’s memory of certain things had come back to her, but the events just before the accident were still a blur. She knew Ray blamed himself, but she never asked him why and he never told her.

  “Don’t feel sorry for me,” she said into the prison phone. “I like who I am now. I’m this person because of that day.”

  “I’m this person,” Ray said, pointing to himself in jail, “because of that day. You limped around and missed out and got picked on and hurt because of me. You turned out to be someone else. You missed out on who you could have been.”

  “I’m the one who stepped in front of the car,” she said. “You’re not the one who hit me.”

  She had been told she was hit by a car. Whether she actually remembers the series of events, we don’t know. She never said—and still hasn’t.

  Ray didn’t accept that and after that day, he wouldn’t take visitors. Mom and Dad and I went a few times, but gave up when he refused to see us. Even though he wouldn’t see her, Lola went every day until the trial was done and Ray was moved to another facility. Lola went there, too, but he still wouldn’t see her.

  She picked up Ray when his time was over. He slept on her couch for a few weeks, but the way she circled jobs for him in the paper and talked about him getting back on track and pretending like nothing had happened must have been too much pressure.

  I never would have guessed in all that chaos that Nicole was pregnant and abandoned. I wish that she had told us. Given us a chance to help her. She’s younger than Ray, but more mature by far. Feisty and determined to make it on her own. I guess you have to be that way if you love someone like Ray.

  I return to the kitchen and sit down on a barstool to watch the werewolf cook. In a bit, Lola comes through the living room. We can’t seem to stay out of Mom’s house now that Dad is gone. It feels like we’re trying to force time backwards. Lola doesn’t miss a beat and chooses a mask before she’s even said hello.

  “Well, Nina,” the gray-skinned goblin says, “Picked any fresh oranges lately?”

  “They’re a little harder to peel than I expected,” I say and shrug. “Maybe I’m not cut out for citrus.”

  “I don’t like it when you girls talk like that,” the werewolf says from behind the pantry door. “It makes it sound like you’re living an imaginary, nonsensical life.”

  Aren’t we?

  “Oh, that’s right, Mother,” the goblin says. “You’re the one grounded in reality.”

  “Very funny,” the werewolf says, coming out of the pantry and clawing her dainty hands at the goblin.

  The goblin looks at me with her white-blue eyes. She shakes her head and sighs.

  Ray comes back into the house through the kitchen door.

  “Sorry,” he says. “Left my phone. Need to make some calls.”

  “Who you calling?” the goblin asks.

  Ray stops short and looks at the three of us. His face takes on a somber realization.

  “Is this for Dad?” he asks.

  The air around us is thick with knowledge of the date we have all watched coming on the calendar.The real reason we have all shown up here when there was not an invitation. It’s the reason Ray seems ready to jump out of his skin now.

  Dad would have been sixty-eight.

  Ray slips on a paper devil face with horns. Mom puts her hand on the devil’s shoulder, but he brushes it off. The goblin goes to him, and they stand together against the bright white kitchen and its flowered wallpaper and the efforts of the rest of the world to get in. The werewolf and I, a simple house cat, look at each other, and I wonder if one could eat the other whole.

  Lola brings the four of us together in an embrace in the center of the kitchen. It’s easy to cry to with a mask on. A little hard to dab away the tears though. Ray can’t stand it for long and pushes out of the circle.

  “Ray,” Mom calls to him.

  He’s already torn off the mask and tossed it on the counter by the kitchen door. I hear his car start up, and Mom nods at me.

  “He’ll be all right,” I say to Lola, both of us taking off our paper shields.

  When I get outside, Ray’s car hasn’t moved. He’s just sitting there in the dr
iveway with the engine spinning. I get in the passenger side.

  “I’m scaring Lola,” he says and looks out the window toward the house like maybe he can see through the bricks and mortar. “I wasn’t here,” he says. “I’m never here.”

  “Those choices were yours,” I say, and I know I’m not making things better between us.

  Ray kills the engine, and we sit for a minute in silence. I reach over and take his hand. The feel of his skin surprises me. Not barbed wire and electricity, but soft and unguarded.

  “Go make you calls.” I nod at the newspaper on the dashboard. “Don’t wear your devil mask when you go to the interviews.”

  “It’s hard to take it off sometimes,” he says.

  I squeeze his hand.

  “Do you think I’ve messed up too bad to make things right?” he asks.

  “There’s no use in asking a question like that,” I say. “What is there to do but go from here?”

  Those were Dad’s words. He had been talking about Lola and life and how you can’t ever go back and undo the thing that changed the world. You can only deal with things as they are and hope to find a way to change it again.

  Ray starts the engine, and I slip out to let him get on with it.

  The first family function that occurred once Lola was back home after the accident was Dad’s birthday. He thought we should just let it go by. Grown men don’t need parties, he had said, and he worried that it was too taxing on Lola’s brain to sort out the acceptable words and body language to accompany the birthday of one’s forgotten father. She was still trying to remember who we all were and where she fit in with this family of people who seemed to barely know each other themselves.

  But Lola read on the calendar that May tenth was Nate’s birthday.

  “Who’s Nate?” she asked, having forgotten her father’s name.

  “That’s Daddy,” I said.

  She laughed at herself. “Duh. Stupid cheese brain.”

  The doctor had called what she might deal with “Swiss cheese brain.” At the time, Lola didn’t know what Swiss cheese was. One of the nurses brought up a slice from the cafeteria to show her.

  “I get it,” Lola said. “Holes.”

  As soon as she’d seen the date of Dad’s birthday, she had determined that we would have a party. She planned it all out as best she could, and we followed it to the letter. She wrote it all down. What the cake would say. When we would eat it. What to sing. The lyrics to the birthday song.

  She was always a good speller. I remember that about her lists. The meaning lost, but the details spelled correctly.

  It was a lovely party. Dad had to excuse himself after the song. He told me later that the sight of Lola reading and singing and smiling was too much for a father and he needed a moment in private to put his face back together.

  For a while, none of us were sure what memories Lola would get back. Maybe she’d remember the birthday song, but forget Dad altogether. Or remember Aunt Rose but forget how to sing. We celebrated when she made a connection and remembered some lost family vacation. But all the while, we were terrified of the day she would remember the accident. Ray was hanging on by the thinnest of threads and having Lola remember that he was the one who had coaxed her into the street that night would likely cause him to let go.

  And if she remembered the accident, then she might remember Mom’s drinking. And if she remembered the accident and Mom’s drinking, then she might remember the times we walked to school because Mom was in no state to drive us. The stories we practiced on the way so our teachers wouldn’t suspect anything. The times we called Dad and told him Mom was sick and could he please go to McDonald’s and get dinner. He knew she wasn’t sick but he never let on. I figure he must have known we knew that too, but none of us wanted to burst the others’ flimsy little bubble.

  And if Lola put all these things together, she might figure out that we were all guilty of baiting the hook. Trying to guide her to the memories that were good, and steer her away from the ones that weren’t. But the bigger picture was worth protecting. Mom was sober, and Ray would have burst into a million pieces back then if he knew Lola could remember the way it all happened.

  It was hard for Dad, though. I think, despite it all, he wanted things to be real. He wanted not to measure what he said or start a sentence that he couldn’t finish. He wanted everything back the way it had been, but he knew that was impossible.

  “This is a ridiculous game, Cecilia,” he had said to Mom once when he didn’t know anyone was listening. “I feel like we’re in a soap opera and this week the part of the mother is being played by a total stranger, and next week someone will come out of a coma and tell us we’ve all been brainwashed by the Evil Overlord, and then next month the whole darn thing will be canceled.”

  “This is a new beginning, Nate,” she’d whispered. “I get a chance to start over. I’m taking it.”

  Mom had stormed off, leaving Dad to sigh in resignation.

  “I guess there’s nothing to do but go from here,” Dad had said.

  Ray and I had been listening from the top of the stairs. We thought Lola was asleep in her room. Later that night, I went to check on her, but she wasn’t there. I found her on the front porch, sitting on the top step.

  “Are Mom and Dad talking about me?” she had asked.

  “Of course not,” I said.

  But my hands began to shake with the fear of what she might be understanding.

  “I won’t tell,” Lola said.

  “Tell what?”

  I remember she just looked at me and cocked her head, but didn’t say anything.

  “Go back to bed,” I said. “It’s cold out here.”

  “I move into my new place in a couple of weeks,” Ray says, bringing me back. “I need you to come with me and see where it is.”

  “Now?”

  “Now.”

  We don’t talk much in the car. Actually, we don’t talk at all. There had been a time when Ray and I stood at a fork in the road, one way was family dinners and long chats on the phone, cards at Christmas and photos of the kids on each other’s fridge. The other way was where we are now.

  He drives us to the park and shuts off the engine.

  “Ray,” I say, looking around, “this is a park. Are you pitching a tent?”

  “Man, you got touchy while I was away. Never mind, you were like that before.”

  “Away,” I repeat. “You make it sound like you were on vacation.”

  “I really don’t want to fight with you right now,” he says. “And I’m sorry, by the way. I know you and Jack lost that baby and were trying to have another one.”

  He looks over at me like he’s just figuring something out. Something harsh and hurtful that weighs a ton.

  Ray points out the window. I see Nicole, and then there’s the boy from the photo. He looks so much like Ray did at that age, though there’s something different in the face, maybe the set of the mouth. Looking at Ray’s face, I can see how badly he wants the little boy. All of Ray’s fight and fury has flown away. I understand now why Ray told me. We’re the same. We both want something we think we can’t have. Something we think we don’t deserve. I imagine there’s a lot of fast talking in Heaven being done on Ray’s account. I picture Dad up there, going to bat for Ray.

  Come on, Big Guy, let him have this one. The kid really needs one good thing. Just one good thing and I bet he’ll turn it all around. From one dad to the next, give him another shot.

  “This is quite a coincidence,” I say, but I know it isn’t. “That we stop at this park and there they are.”

  Ray rolls his eyes at me.

  “Tell me why we’re here,” I say.

  Over the dash and through the windshield, we watch people enjoy the lengthening days of warmth. Spring showers have given birth to grass and green and flowe
r.

  “Every Wednesday they come to the park,” Ray says. “There’s some women she hangs around with. I don’t recognize any of them. Which means they’re probably decent, respectable people.”

  “Are you going to say hello?”

  “No,” he says like I’ve asked the craziest question imaginable. “I don’t know how to do that yet.”

  “So we’re just going to stalk them from the car?”

  “For now,” Ray says.

  “Fair enough.” I know there’s no arguing the point right now.

  We watch Michael play. Maybe Ray and I have found a shortcut to that other path—the one with the family dinners and the Christmas cards. It’s like we hacked through the briars in just the right place, and with a little stooping down and peering through the weeds, we can see the other path.

  Look, one of us says, you can see it from here. If we can get over this thorny spot, I think we can make it.

  The other one of us agrees. I think you’re right. Looks like you’re cooking dinner over there. And Michael is playing in the pool. When did you get a pool?

  Yes, Dad is at bat for all of us, no doubt.

  Michael’s dark brown hair and freckled cheeks remind me of Ray before he began to blame himself for the faults of circumstance and chance, before he punished himself with alcohol and paid for his grief with time served.

  The kid just needs one good thing to turn it all around.

  After a few minutes, Ray starts the engine and pulls away from his son. He doesn’t speak again until we pull up in front of an apartment building four or five blocks away.

  “It’s in this one,” Ray says, and his voice is rushed and weird. “It’s near the school he attends and not far from where Nicole works. They like to eat at that pizza place just over there, and now that I see the park, I know I made the right choice.”

  I turn my head slowly, sneaking a look at him.

  “Ray,” I say carefully, speaking to him like he’s a child or a mental patient. “Do you miss prison this much?”

  “No,” he answers, confused.

  “Then I suggest you drive back over to the park and say hello.”