All the Things We Never Knew

by Liara Tamani

  All Up in It

  REX

  In the car my father asks, “So, what’s going on with Carli?”

  I turn my head and eye him like, Why you all up in mine? but he’s too focused on the road to notice. I’m really not used to him being in my business like this. All week he’s been coming into my room, asking me about this or wanting to know that, I guess trying to have more of a relationship. I mean, in theory it’s what I want, too, but dude, can we ease into it?

  “Not much,” I answer. I really don’t want to talk about Carli. I already think about her enough. Every time I see a girl with big hair or a girl wearing jean shorts or leggings or Nikes or a thin gold chain. Don’t even let me walk by a hedge of jasmine (nothing on Earth smells as good as Carli’s hair). I can’t even get a T-shirt out my drawer without thinking about her. Or go outside in the woods behind the house. Or blow my own nose. Basically, I can’t do shit. It’s like my mind isn’t even mine anymore.

  “You talked to her since last Saturday?” My father is exiting at Old Spanish Trail off Highway 288. To the right is the Houston Zoo and the Texas Medical Center and to the left is our old neighborhood. Where is this man taking me?

  I asked him this morning when he came into my room talking about going somewhere, but all he said was “Just come on.” Normally, I wouldn’t let that fly. I mean, you gotta tell me something. But this morning I was happy to roll out. You see, I usually hoop Saturday mornings, but I haven’t been able to bring myself to touch a basketball since the championship. I’m not ready to face the game without my dream of going to the league.

  “Yeah, briefly. We broke up,” I reply.

  He puts on his left turn signal and looks in his left-wing mirror. My father is about as careful as careful gets when it comes to driving. Every move so precise, like he’s performing surgery or something. He finally takes a left on OST. Now we’re passing the corner store I used to ride my bike to for chips and soda. “I thought you said you really loved her.”

  Where the hell did that come from? It’s like he’s speaking on her behalf. Like she’s somehow managed to possess his mouth like she’s possessed my mind. “I do . . . I did,” I say, all worked up. “But I’m trying not to.”

  “Okay, okay. Sorry, wasn’t trying to pry,” he says.

  If that’s not a lie, I think, but stay quiet, satisfied with him dropping it.

  He takes a right on Scott Street, past a big, new stucco house under construction. The streets are poppin’. So many people out and about. We ride by three old men sitting on the porch of a pale-green, wooden house on blocks. Two little girls with pigtails trying to share a scooter on the sidewalk. Four dudes in a grassy driveway—two crouched down looking at something on a motorcycle and the other two eyeballing us as we roll by.

  I’d forgotten how much my old neighborhood feels like a real community. How neighbors actually come out of their houses and talk to each other . . . even rely on one another. Man, the woman next door used to drop her little girl off with Angie all the time when her babysitter was running late and she had to be at work. And I don’t know how many times the old man on the other side of the house asked us to help jump-start his pickup. And this one time when my father forgot to pay the water bill, the dude who lived behind us let me hook up a hose to his house for a couple days. I always talk about missing my old house, but I’ve missed this neighborhood, too.

  My father takes a left on Luca and parks.

  I might be glad to be back in the old hood and all, but I don’t know why he would he bring me back to our old house. Did he see me sign up for the TV show where you knock on some stranger’s door, tell them you used to live there, and ask if you can take a look around? No, I don’t think so.

  “Come on,” he says, and gets out of the car.

  I stay put.

  A few moments later, he’s standing in the middle of these people’s freshly cut yard, waving for me to follow.

  Nah, dude. You can have that. I keep my seat belt on. The house still looks the same: dark blue-gray paint with white trim. White mailbox near the front door hanging crooked, like it always has. I tried to straighten it out once, but my dad stopped me. He didn’t say why, but Angie told me later that my mom had put it up.

  Now my father’s standing at the front door, looking back at me.

  I look back at him but still don’t take off my seat belt.

  He turns away from me and slides a key into the lock.

  Huh?

  Now he’s inside. And he left the door open.

  The house has all the old furniture that my father said he donated to the Salvation Army. Plus, there are side tables and pillows and chairs and paintings and photographs and masks and jars and bowls and platters and pretty pencils and matches and things . . . lots of things I’ve never seen before. The living room has a whole new wall of records and books. A Love Supreme is sitting in an old record player, same as the one in my room.

  I walk over to the breakfast room, which looks like someone’s been working in it. There’s an unfinished painting of a blue bird hanging on an easel and a mug full of paintbrushes sitting on the table next to a palette.

  “There was a whole storage unit full of stuff I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of,” my father says, standing in the kitchen. I can only see the middle section of his body. The rest of him is hidden behind upper and lower rows of pale teal-painted cabinets.

  I walk around the breakfast room and into the kitchen. “Is this all of Mom’s old stuff?”

  “Yeah,” he says, his hope for my approval tangled in his voice.

  As much as I love the idea of being surrounded by Mom’s old things, him saving and arranging it all as if she’s still living here isn’t right. I walk toward him. “Dad,” I say, feeling the newness of the word on my tongue. “Dad,” I repeat, mostly because I like the way it feels.

  He must see that I don’t approve because his eyes tear up and his face flattens into what I recognize as shame—familiar in the most terrible way.

  “Dad,” and I wrap my arms around him. It feels weird at first, but I force myself to hold him and keep holding him until it doesn’t feel weird anymore. Hold him and keep holding him until I can feel my anger for the ways he’s wronged me start to seep out. “I think we should sell the house.”

  CARLI

  It’s Saturday afternoon and I’m lying on the sofa in the living room, trying not to feel the ghost of Rex (his arms around me, my face sunk into his neck) or the nothingness of my walls (its weight like concrete on my chest) by slipping further down into the YouTube abyss.

  I’m home alone. Better than being at work with Mom. She tried to get me to go with her this morning, to get me out of the house, but I’m tired of looking into her sympathetic eyes. And I swear to god I’ll go apeshit if I hear Are you okay? one more time.

  Better than playing basketball with Jordan, too. After I told her about Shannon, she forgave me. But now all she wants to do is ball. Says she needs to step up her game since I’m not playing next year.

  And definitely better than being at Daddy’s. He’s supposed to have the talk with Cole. No need for me to go through all that again.

  I’ve been watching random videos for over three hours. So long I swear I can hear my brain yelling, Help! Get me out of here! And I’m trying, but “The World’s Funniest Family Feud Fails” is putting all ladders and ropes out of my reach.

  Steve Harvey is standing between two women, both with one hand behind their backs and the other hand flat on their respective red buzzers. He says, “Name a number that all men exaggerate.”

  Not the number of extramarital kids they have, I think before the lady in the purple dress presses the button and answers, “One hundred!” A red X flashes on the screen and Steve Harvey confusedly points to the other lady, who says, “Sixty-nine?”

  I mean, how stupid can they be. I swear these women are even more clueless than me. I seriously didn’t think that was possible. No, I take that back. Daddy
is definitely more lost than I am. He’s like a five-year-old trying to read a road map.

  I go off hunting for the boost, the boost I thought judging Daddy would give me, but there isn’t one. There’s only his history—of being an eight-year-old boy whose mom died and whose dad never came back, of being a man who had a family and lost it—and the path stretched out before him.

  I try to imagine my path, but all I see is a large stretch of earth covered with green, untrampled grass.

  That does it. Phone down. I’m up. Stretching my long arms out to both sides and arching my back. Rex’s strong hands around my waist. His thumbs gently rubbing my ribs. And I pull my arms in, look for another distraction, something that might stop me from remembering the feeling of his long body lying next to mine under the tall pines.

  Magazines. A stack of them in the brass tray on the ottoman in the middle of the room. Don’t even think about it, I tell myself. I’d be trying to cut out stuff for my walls in no time.

  Books. Rows and rows of them that stretch floor to high ceiling on the wall at the foot of the sofa. But reading truths about other people’s lives always makes me wonder about the truths of my own. And I’d only end up with some kind of quote I’d want to tack up on my walls.

  My bare walls.

  Just thinking about them makes this oversized burnt-orange sofa feel like my forever home. When I used to step into my room, a ton of images and poems and quotes and facts would greet me. Little bits of everything I loved. Little things that gave me a way to look at my life . . . at all the possible meanings for my feelings . . . at all the possible signs for which way to go.

  But when I’m in there now (which is only when I’m getting dressed in the morning . . . I’ve been sleeping on the sofa all week), there is nothing but me.

  But who am I, really? Without basketball. Without all the little things that I thought made up who I was. And if I don’t even know who I am, how am I supposed to know what to do with the rest of my life. Can somebody please tell me that?

  I’m so tired of trying to figure it all out. But even more tired of being out here, hiding. Hiding doesn’t do anything but make your problems worse. I guess Daddy’s mess taught me that.

  No more hiding, I decide, and take a step toward the hallway. And another one, my long bare feet marching off the thick, woven rug onto the wooden floor. One after the other after the other until I’m standing at my closed bedroom door, yellow light shining on the tips of my toes.

  I go in.

  Even though I know what to expect, seeing my bare walls still feels like death. I look back at the black box holding all of my old things, buried under magazines in the corner of my closet crammed full of clothes. Knowing that they’re there, that I can still visit them, is at least some kind of comfort.

  When I turn back around, I notice that the afternoon light flooding my room is creating shadows on my walls. The far wall has one of the whole window: sixteen slanted, golden squares. Something. Not nothing. I go sit across from it on the edge of my made-up bed.

  Jagged shadows running through a few of the glowing squares make me look outside of my window at a small tree. Its branches are covered with tiny green buds on their way to being leaves. So many buds. I count the ones on a single twig. Twenty-one. On another one. Seventeen. And another one. Twenty-four.

  Don’t ask me why, but it feels nice counting. Moving from one bud to the next with no thoughts in between. It’s making me feel more alive than I’ve felt all week. Until it brings me to thinking about Rex.

  It’s not horrible to think about Rex. Even after what he did, so many memories of him still feel good. But some literally make me sick. Like that look of hate on his face at the championship game, and how he never even listened to what I had to say. How could he— Wait, why am I even thinking about this?

  I grab my notebook and pencil off my desk and turn my attention back to the twigs outside the window. Make a mark for every green bud I count. Draw a leaf for every ten buds. A hundred buds and counting.

  But then I start to wonder why the buds are taking so long to become full-grown leaves (it’s already mid-March). And that leads me to thinking that maybe the buds are a sign. That maybe I’m like the buds, growing slowly. But into what? I need to know.

  But I don’t, so I go back to counting. Until all the buds begin to blur, and I feel like I should go outside and start tagging the twigs I’ve counted to keep track. But nobody’s doing all that. So I turn back to the glowing squares and think about how there are sixteen of them and sixteen years in me. How it could mean— No, not going down that road again.

  I start sketching the squares instead—eyeing the correct angle of their slant, erasing and smudging to create the glow effect. I sketch and sketch, until the weight of trying to figure out what everything means and what I’ll do with my life falls away. Until there is only the pencil, the paper, and the image I’m bringing into being.

  Maybe this is who I am, right here where this pencil meets the page, where my eyes meet these glowing squares. So basic, I know, but the lightness, the wholeness, I feel right now is telling me there’s something to it. Not the sketching itself, but me totally doing it, this one small thing. Giving all of my attention to it is letting me be.

  REX

  I’m in the living room, on the opposite end of the sofa from my dad, trading cool home design pictures via IG. I didn’t even have to sign him up. He already had an account. One of those zero posts, no profile pic accounts, but still. Who knew?

  “Look at this one,” he says from the other end of the sofa, his big feet in white socks almost reaching mine.

  “Okay, give me a sec,” I say, eyeing the image of a black heart with a jagged line going down the middle that just popped up on my feed. Another post from Cole. I swear Cole has posted over twenty times today.

  Not his usual portraits, which always seem to reveal the unseen parts of people. Nah, it’s a whole bunch of I’m-going-through-some-shit-type posts like, Don’t trust anyone or I remember when life was good or How can one person tell so many lies or The saddest thing about betrayal is that it never comes from your enemies.

  That girl with the slick-back ponytail and the wide-open eyes must’ve done him real dirty. He’s been posting about her like crazy the last few weeks. And now this. I thought about texting him earlier, but I was scared he wouldn’t want to hear from me after what I did to Carli. But this public breakup stuff has been going on for way too long. I’m not only worried about him, I’m starting to feel embarrassed for him.

  You alright? I DM him on IG.

  He hits me right back. My dad is a fraud

  I look at my dad on the other end of the sofa. He’s nowhere near perfect, but he’s trying his best. I message back, He’s probably doing his best

  “Did you see the last one I sent?” my dad asks.

  I click on the chat with my dad and see a picture of an all-white living room with a long, gray sofa and sleek, dark wood furniture. “Nah, this is basically the same look we have now. Not comfortable enough. And not enough color,” I say, and look around.

  I pause on the wall of windows that extend all the way from the kitchen into the living room. Outside a darkening orange-pink sky hovers over the pines. I was trippin’ before. Our house is sick. It’s this cool modern house with these huge windows that bring all the trees it’s surrounded by in. But we still need help making it feel like a home.

  “The sofa looks way more cushiony than ours,” he says.

  “It’s still gray.”

  He laughs, says, “Okay, okay,” and returns to his phone.

  I click back on the conversation with Cole. He hasn’t written anything after my last message. I wonder what happened with his dad. Damn, I didn’t even ask.

  What’s going on with your dad? I text.

  U don’t know?

  No

  U haven’t talked to Carli?

  Not about your dad, I type, wondering if he even knows we’ve broken up.
<
br />   The three little bubbles telling me he’s typing appear then disappear, appear, then disappear.

  I hop over to Barbara A’s feed and shoot my dad a pic of a white, modern living room with colorful art and a sunken middle floor filled with bright blue velvet cushions. “Now this is what I’m talking about,” I tell him.

  “Let me see,” he says. And then, “Now that’s nice.”

  “Carli’s mom did it.”

  “Carli’s mom, huh?” he says, like he’s trying to sniff something out.

  I see what he’s getting at, but it’s not how it looks. “Carli’s mom’s design style is dope. Only showing you. This has nothing to do with me and Carli, okay,” I say, setting him straight.

  “Yeah, okay.”

  I check Cole’s conversation again and see, Shannon’s our sister. My dad cheated on my mom and kept Shannon a secret all these years

  WHAT??!!! I message back, not processing what I just read. It’s too much to take in. Dude, I’m so sorry. Are you okay? I want to ask who Shannon is but don’t. The name sounds familiar, but I can’t place it.

  I HATE MY DAD

  I know he doesn’t mean that, but I respond, Man I can’t even imagine, and look at my dad. Although I spent a good deal of my life thinking he hated me, I’ve never hated him. And trust me, I’ve tried. I don’t even know if it’s possible to really hate someone you came from.

  How do you look your wife in the face? Your kids? Like EVERY DAY for 15 YEARS knowing u have another child? Who does that?

  I don’t know man. That’s sooooo messed up. I’m so sorry

  And the crazy thing is that if Shannon hadn’t told Carli during the game we still wouldn’t know. He was trying to take it to the grave

  Shannon? Oh shit! Shannon! That’s what happened to Carli at the game! That’s why she was so upset. The night flashes back to me, and I can almost tell the exact moment she must’ve found out. When she went from draining everything, including threes, to letting Shannon take over. What! Are you serious?! I message back.