Cracking the Bell

by Geoff Herbach

  “Slept in?” she said. “That’s not like you.”

  I wasn’t sure what to say. Seeing her filled me with burning hatred I couldn’t let loose if I expected to get out of the house. “Uh” is what I landed on.

  “You don’t respond to texts anymore?” she asked.

  I’d spent years accommodating her mourning, trying to make up for Hannah by being a good mama’s boy. “No,” I said. “No more responses to texts.”

  “Why should I pay for your phone, then?” she asked, her face going red.

  I had my phone in my hand. I reached out with it. “Then take it. I don’t need your phone.”

  She stared at me for a moment without moving. She scanned my eyes. “Why are you so angry at me? Is this about football?”

  I stuffed the phone back in my pocket. “Nope. No worries. I don’t give a shit about football.”

  “I said you can’t play because it could kill you. That’s me protecting you, Isaiah. I know it hurts, but you’re smart enough to see I’m not punishing you, right? You’re smart enough to know I’m keeping you out of harm’s way, not just being an asshole.”

  “You should take my driver’s license,” I said.

  “Why would I do that?”

  She thinks I’m so dumb. She thinks I’m incapable. You don’t need to be a reference librarian or a lawyer to find out simple facts. I could do it with my phone while sitting on the back stoop in the cold. “Depending on the source, between six and nine teenagers are killed every damn day in car accidents,” I said.

  “That’s . . . there are teens in cars constantly, all the time. You’re not suggesting it’s more dangerous for you to drive a car than it is to play a sport where you will crash into someone, that has caused you to lose consciousness and hear screaming in your ears?”

  “You know how many deaths from cars that is every year? Anywhere from like twenty-three hundred to thirty-two hundred. Teens, Mom. Little sons, daughters, sister, brothers, all ripped up, bloody and gone.”

  Mom breathed deeply. She nodded. “Just stop, Isaiah. I wanted to talk to you about my behavior, not about . . .”

  “Hannah is part of a giant parade. She’s not special.”

  “Stop!” Mom shouted.

  I stood, quiet, except for my heart that pounded so hard I could hear it.

  “I’ve had a conversation with your dad,” she said softly. “I don’t think I’ve handled things very well lately. I forget you’re growing up, Isaiah. I think of you as my little boy.”

  “I’m not your little boy,” I said.

  “I know. You’ll be eighteen on Tuesday. You’re two years older than Hannah will ever be.”

  “I’m not your anything. I’m not yours,” I spat. “I am mine, do you understand?”

  Mom’s red face turned pale. “Yes. I get it, Isaiah. I’ve been overstepping boundaries lately, but only because I want you to be safe. This thing with football. You have every right to be involved in that decision. I can’t tell an eighteen-year-old what to do. . . .”

  “Too late. You can’t tell me anything,” I said. “I’m not a piece of shit.”

  “I was just angry. Surprised. I said that because I was surprised.”

  “You said that because you’re a piece of shit, Mom.”

  I walked out of the house. It was the wrong way to go. I should’ve gone into the garage to get my bike. The garage door was down. I walked around back. The back door was locked. I considered kicking it down. Felt the strength in my body to kick it down. I reared back and kicked with all my force. The doorframe exploded in, ripping wood and taking the whole lock mechanism off with it. The door bounced in on its hinges, crashed, then slammed shut. I shoved it open and went in and grabbed my bike.

  As I pulled it out, Mom flung open the interior door. “Isaiah!” she shouted. “What in the hell are you doing?”

  “Shut up,” I said.

  I pedaled away.

  For years, there had been two of me. Isaiah who learned to hold it together and practiced the monoculture of football, stayed quiet after all the assaults and insults: the deaths, the divorce, the manipulation and control, and the other Isaiah who was tuned in, filled with rage, and ready to act on it if the cage he’d agreed to climb into ever broke.

  That Isaiah wanted nothing more than to fight.

  Good Isaiah was still trying, though. Good Isaiah hoped to find Joey Derossi.

  CHAPTER 28

  OCTOBER 6: TO GRACE

  I rode my bike around the block. I was scared. I’d broken the door to my house. What else would bad Isaiah, lizard-brain Isaiah, “do it” Isaiah break? I needed to be far enough away that I couldn’t hear Mom if she shouted for me. I didn’t want to hear her.

  I called Joey. His tape answering machine in his little trailer picked up my call. I left a shaky-voiced message. “Hey, bro. Looking to work. Could use some activity. Please call me back.” I waited for a moment but didn’t hang up. “Really, really. I could use a cold dose of Derossi, okay?” I said. Then I hung up.

  I rode away. Something made me turn back. I saw Mom race around the corner in her Subaru, going in the opposite direction from me. Where would she be going so fast?

  Where would I be going? Try to find Joey’s Saturday work site? If I rode all the streets of Bluffton, would I spot his truck? Unfortunately, he did about half his gutter and painting work in little towns around southwest Wisconsin. He could be anywhere. Where would I go if I followed my lizard brain?

  Grace smoked a cigarette in Grandma’s backyard after 3 a.m.

  Why wouldn’t I go to Grace? Because Dad told me not to?

  I rode my bike around the corner to the next block, then climbed a small hill (my heart pumped harder than it should because I hadn’t been working out enough). There were no cars at Grandma’s house. Not Grace’s. Not Grandma’s. On a Saturday? Grace was at Dairy Queen according to the calendar on Grandma’s wall.

  It only took me ten minutes to make it across Bluffton to the Dairy Queen. Small towns are strange. Places feel far apart in your head. Dairy Queen is really on the other side of town. They are not far apart in truth. I’d biked probably two miles in ten minutes.

  Grandma’s car was not at Dairy Queen. Grace’s was.

  I pulled my bike up to the drive-through ordering menu.

  “Welcome to Dairy Queen. How can I help you?” a squeaky, pubescent male voice asked.

  I paused for a moment, then said, “Could you get your manager, please? I found mouse shit in my blizzard.”

  There was silence for a beat. “Um, okay? Are you sure they aren’t chocolate sprinkles? Those get in stuff sometimes because we have a lot of chocolate sprinkles in here right by the window.”

  “I know goddamn mouse shit when I see it,” I shouted. “Have the manager meet me out front.”

  I rode away from the drive-through. A car pulled in behind me.

  I parked at the corner of the store and peered around to the front door. It took a minute or so, but Grace came out. She looked around, took a few steps forward, and shaded her eyes, surveying the parking lot. She held that position for maybe five seconds, then turned to go back inside. I had to say something. My heart pounded.

  “Hey!” I said, using all my breath.

  Grace turned and looked at me.

  “Oh,” she said. “It’s you.”

  “It’s me. Come here?”

  She didn’t move right away, but then took one step, then another. She got to me, slid around the corner so no one could see her from the windows in the front. “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Visiting,” I said.

  “You said that about the mouse poop in the drive-through?” she asked.

  I nodded.

  “We don’t have mice in the store,” she said. “Not anymore.”

  “Good. Did you see me?” I asked.

  “Depends on what you mean,” she said.

  “Not when I was behind the store, but when I was in the kitchen and you were t
here?”

  She nodded. “Two times,” she said. “Once in the day, once in the middle of the night last night.”

  “I saw you, too,” I said.

  She nodded. “So?” she asked. “So what?”

  “So?” I said.

  “So you’re a little messed up or something,” she said. “That’s what Gin thinks. Got injured. Got your footballs in a bundle. Something like that.”

  “Not really that, but yeah. Maybe. I’d like to talk to you about this. About what’s been going on.”

  “Going on with who? With you?”

  “With both of us, I guess. You know, you with my grandma and my dad and with the ACT and everything.”

  Grace turned a dark shade of red. “I don’t know why you would know about my ACT score.”

  “I don’t know why you spent the night at my grandma’s house.”

  Grace took a breath. “At two p.m. I’ve got three on staff. I could leave the store for a while. But I have to come back to close later.”

  “Where’s Grandma?”

  “Up in Madison. She and Delores have tickets to the Badgers game.”

  “I’ll be here at two. See you then,” I said.

  Grace nodded. She went back into the store.

  I had to kill an hour and twenty minutes. My phone had been blowing up. Mom, Dad, and random texts from Riley and Twiggs about what the hell I meant when I said I wasn’t playing anymore. No calls from Joey.

  I pulled my bike up the hill behind the store and hid it underneath the bush where I sat earlier in the week. I lowered myself down next to it. My phone buzzed again. Text indication. Not Joey. I shut my phone off and lay down. White clouds crossed the blue sky. It was chilly. I pulled the hood of my Bluffton football sweatshirt over my head and shut my eyes.

  When I opened my eyes, Grace was standing over me.

  “Is it two already?” I asked.

  “No. Your parents are looking for you. They just called.”

  “Did you tell them I was here?” I asked.

  “No,” Grace said. “What’s going on?”

  “I broke the garage door. It’s no big deal. Can we please get out of here for a little bit?”

  “Yeah. Okay. It’s cold. Nels and Molly can hold up until Caitlin gets in.”

  “Nels?” I asked.

  “Yeah. That’s his name. Get over it, Isaiah.”

  Five minutes later we were in Grace’s car. It wasn’t the same car she drove before. It was just as crappy, though. This one was an old Chevy Aveo that sputtered when Grace pressed the accelerator. The interior of the car felt like home, though. It smelled like Grace (cigarettes, shampoo, and ChapStick). That’s where I wanted to be.

  She got onto 151 heading east. “I don’t know where I’m supposed to go,” she said.

  “Go anywhere. Go to Belmont Tower.”

  She shook her head slightly. “I’m not into some kind of booty call, okay? We haven’t talked for two years, so whatever you’re dealing with must be rough.” She swallowed hard. “And I care about you. What can I do for you that won’t cost me my dignity, Isaiah?”

  It just popped out. “Dad said that you said that I saved you from committing suicide. What does that mean? How did I do good back then?”

  “Huh,” Grace said. “Remind me not to tell your dad anything.”

  “I should know about that shit, okay? I should’ve known before now. We talked for hours and hours back then. And now I need to know. I should be told if I’ve had any value at all in the world.”

  “You don’t know you have value? Are you kidding?” Grace asked. “Why is that?”

  “Because,” I said.

  “You’re you. Everybody knows you. You’re the football player and the teen of the month on the shopper over at the grocery store. Why would you ever think you have no value?”

  “Because I thought I was a piece of shit back then, when we were together, but find out maybe I’m a piece of shit now and maybe I was just fine then.”

  “No,” Grace said. “You were definitely a piece of shit back then, except you were nice and you liked me even when I was an asshole, which I really, really needed.”

  “I didn’t like you. I loved you. Let’s go to Belmont Tower.”

  “No, Isaiah.” Grace turned the car to the left, onto one of the last streets before Bluffton becomes the open country. “I’m not interested in doing you. Not remotely.”

  “I don’t want sex. That’s just where we used to go. I want to be me and you from before all this.”

  “From before you got your shit together? From back when you cried all the time?”

  “My shit together is fraudulent. Completely. I pretend to have my shit together so my mom doesn’t die of sadness.”

  “So you don’t really like playing football and doing well in school and not being drunk and broken all the time,” Grace said. She was blushing. Tears were rising in her eyes.

  “No. I don’t know if that’s true.”

  “What is true?” Grace asked. “Because you’re kind of my hero for not being what you were. If it’s all bullshit, I would really like to know.”

  “I’m having doubts and . . . I guess I want to be with my old self and with you.”

  “I don’t want to be that Grace,” she said quietly. “I hate that Grace.”

  “Okay.” I thought about the ghost town with the crooked gravestones. “Can we go to Hannah, then?” I said.

  “She’s dead.”

  “Out to where the accident happened. I haven’t ever gone.”

  Grace didn’t say anything for a second. Then she nodded.

  “Do you know where it is?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Sort of.”

  It took us about fifteen minutes to get there. Even though I’d never been to the spot, I’d studied it on maps so many times I knew the route by heart. I could picture the curves in the road in my mind. I could picture the changes in elevation, the rise that would have made it impossible for the drunk guy, Steven Hartley, to see another car roaring down the perpendicular road, to hear fairy bells coming from the car. The only words Grace and I exchanged on the way there were directions.

  Grace pulled over onto the shoulder near the intersection. “This is it, huh?” We both stared at the dilapidated roadside shrine in front of us.

  “Yeah,” I said after a moment. “This is it.”

  We got out. Walked ten steps along the road.

  Someone had put up a cross there on the southwest corner where County Road G crossed Country Road E. That’s about where what was left of Ray Gatos’s car must’ve ended up after the collision. For a while, it seemed, kids came out and left things. But not recently. A couple of moth-eaten teddy bears remained, easily visible.

  I saw something shiny in the tall, dry grass off the shoulder. I bent down and picked up a blue polished stone, the kind Hannah collected when she was a little kid. “Oh shit,” I said. “Someone brought her rocks.”

  Grace bent down and pulled a small trophy caked in mud that Ray had won at a speech contest. I dug around in the grass more and found several dirty, damaged framed photographs of Hannah and other kids: Tessa Kaplin, Mara Hottenstein, Katie Digman. There were some empty frames with broken glass, too. I found an empty whiskey bottle. I picked it up.

  “What the hell? Would someone really leave this at the scene of a fatal drunk driving accident?”

  “A drunk would. That’s why it’s good you’re not a drunk.”

  “I was never a drunk.”

  “You were on your way. And I was. Am. Flat out. Self-medicating and addicted. My first thought at seeing an empty bottle is, ‘Too bad ’cause I’d like to drink some of that.’ I’m so messed up.”

  “I’m injured,” I said. “I’m messed up.”

  I threw the bottle out into a cornfield. It was cold. Wind rustled the tall grasses in the ditch below. I breathed, shut my eyes, pictured Ray and Hannah driving, the Sufjan Stevens fairy bell song jingling. The summer day. The sun go
ing down. Steven Hartley rises over the incline. He jets down the road in the giant pickup truck. He doesn’t slow. Here comes Hannah. Here comes Ray. They cross into the intersection just in time for Steven Hartley to . . .

  I opened my eyes but was blind from tears. “Oh shit, Hannah. Jesus, Grace. I can’t lose you, too. My mom took you away from me.”

  Grace stepped to me, put her arms around me. “We were like naughty little kids, man. We needed to be separated.”

  “No, you said I helped you. You told Dad.”

  “I did.”

  “You helped me want to live, too. That’s good. Mom just didn’t know.”

  “Isaiah,” Grace said. “I wanted to drag you back down to me when we started hooking up again. Your mom was totally right to step in. You’re lucky to have her.”

  “But I need you now. So I’m unlucky,” I said.

  Grace leaned into me. She whispered, “Okay. I don’t know what you’re going through, but I’m going to be steady. I’m steady, okay? Maybe I can help you get steady.”

  “You can,” I whispered back.

  I stood there clutching Grace. We couldn’t just stand there forever, though.

  A few minutes later we got back in her car. We left the spot where Hannah left her life. I wish we would’ve gone home. Maybe nothing bad would’ve happened. Really, if I think about it, something bad was still coming. Time bombs ticked. And I asked Grace to drive me to the Boulder Junction Tap. I wanted to drive the route Steven Hartley took to get to Hannah and Ray.

  “After that, I have to get back to work,” Grace said.

  It was about a five-minute drive to Stitzer from the site of the accident. Along the way, Grace told me that her stepfather had come back to Deb again for the thousandth time (Deb is what she calls her mom). Grace said she couldn’t be in the house when he was there. Deb maybe didn’t know what Richie had done to her, but both Grace and Richie knew, and it was bad. She feared Richie getting drunk. She feared sleeping in a house where Richie was drunk. He’d broken the lock on her door when she was sixteen.

  “You never told me.”

  “I couldn’t tell you. Thinking about it made me throw up.”