“I have to do a lot of running and dancing and horsing around to stay that way. If I kept it all in…I’d be like the sin eater. That’s what my mother calls it. The person at the…well, this is gross.”
“Go on.”
“When my mother was little in Ireland, poor people would find an even poorer person to come to the wake when someone died—”
“Is that generally when they hold a wake?”
“Shut up,” Cathy said, grinning and opening the computer’s lid. “They’d set out this big meal right on the poor dead person’s coffin. What’s her password?”
“‘Atticus.’ So, about the sin eater…”
“The sin eater would devour this big meal, which was supposed to cause him to take all the sins of the dead into himself, so the loved soul could go right to heaven.”
“What happened to the sin eater?”
“Well, he lived longer, as a result of not starving.”
“Did he go nuts?”
“Well, if he was, like, a superstitious Catholic, yeah, sometimes. Some were just shrewd businesspeople, who asked for a few shillings along with the meal. But all of them arranged for a sin eater to be on hand when they kicked the bucket, for certain.”
“Liability insurance.”
“Yeah.”
“So all these doctors—”
“First things first. All these doctors haven’t come to any consensus about Julie yet. But her column is due tomorrow, and she hasn’t been in any shape to do them ahead of time, and she’s in no shape to write one now. I can think of the answer, if you give me a problem, but I can’t write it. I’m not a writer.”
“Well, call the editor. I’m not a writer.”
“You’re a good writer.”
“But you can’t read what I write, Cathy.”
“Ever hear of a spell-checker?”
“Yeah, and I can use it until the end of time, but stuff is still going to come out backward and sideways in the sense of organization.”
“I can fix all that.”
“Isn’t this, like, illegal?”
“Probably.”
“Because they could probably get someone else to do it for a while.”
“Gabe,” Cathy told me, pressing her lips together before she continued, “if your mom loses her job now, she loses more than money.”
“I would think the last thing you would want to do if you felt lousy is listen to other people’s lousy problems which they caused themselves.”
“On the other hand, they don’t always cause them themselves. Sometimes, they’re just caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. And helping someone when you feel useless and down can make you feel…powerful. Can restore your—”
“Don’t say it. Self-esteem. If I hear that word once more, and then never again for the rest of my life, I’ll be happy.”
“But really. If you get dumped on, you need to know you’re still a really important, worthwhile human being.”
“Is that how you felt?” I asked.
“About Saren?”
“Yeah.”
“I felt like I wanted to eat butter-brickle ice cream and watch X-Files reruns until I died from diabetes. But your mother, your mother bullied me into being in that show with her, ummmm…”
“Carousel.”
“Yeah…”
“I remember because they let me run the follow spot in rehearsal. What a crap show. I mean, I’m not exactly a musical-theater fan, but that was stone crap. Not as bad as Oklahoma!, though. That’s the top.”
“And what a message! I mean, Carousel,” Cathy agreed. “A slap can feel just like a kiss! But working on it with her, being with her, and growing to love your mom, as a friend—she’d always been my friend, but she became my best friend—it made me want to go on. It made me have the courage to adopt Abby. I can never repay her.”
“So you want to do this for her. The column. Until she’s better.”
“Well, that should be only this week. She’ll be up and around pretty quick, if I know Julie. If we can get away with it. I think we can. I think people ghostwrite stuff all the time.”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Why don’t you call your dad and ask?”
“Why don’t you?”
“Because I’ve called him fifty times since he left, and I’ve left fifty messages, and he’s never returned my calls.”
“Has he sent letters…?”
“And Caroline has kept them, and she’s given me the addresses and I’ve written to him, and I’ve never heard back from him.”
I took a long breath. “He probably thinks she’s faking it.”
“I’ve called him, too, Gabe. And you know what I think? He’s probably just a total bastard.”
“Whoa! You’re talking about my father, Cathy.”
“Yeah, Gabe, I’m talking about your father. And if you have an honest bone in your body, and I know that you do, you realize that sending a few letters from Illinois and New Hampshire and Massachusetts over the course of five months isn’t being a father….”
“He’s still my father.” I didn’t know whether to shit or go blind. I felt the same way she did but also this blistering need to defend Leo, almost like if I didn’t, what she said would be true because of me. Like, I wouldn’t be the sin eater.
“Yeah, he’s still your father. But he should be calling back. He should be calling you. He should be calling little Aury, every night, not sending her a box with a fucking acorn in it! How many times has he called?” I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t remember whether it had been three times or two times; but one of the times, I’d been out with Tian, who had only a few weeks left before she left for good. Frankly, if I wanted to talk to anyone, it was her, not Leo. Leo would be back soon enough, smelling of miso and burning anisette incense in the bathroom. Maybe trying to talk us all into moving to a happy land, far, far away. But I didn’t want to move away. I didn’t want to be away from Grandma and Grandpa Steiner for one thing, who now felt like the only fixed point in the galaxy. But more importantly, for the first time in my life, I felt like a normal teenager, like if my mother had noticed, she’d have said the things about me parents say about normal teenagers: I never see him. He’s hardly ever home. You don’t know what it’s like to feel average if you’ve never felt up to average. Tian understood that I had special study halls and all, but it didn’t affect her at all; she just thought they were like her English-as-a-Second-Language program after school. When I couldn’t get the words to go along with my thoughts the first time, she laughed like a little bell because the same thing was happening to her. Like me, English wasn’t her first language, either. To her, my head-wiring problem didn’t make me an edge-feeder if not a downright geek. She didn’t notice it.
I knew I was going to lose her; I knew that my life after she left would go back to being its customary empty plate with a hole in it. But right then, I had Tian. I, Gabe Steiner, Special Ed goon, had the girl everybody in the school wanted, the girl who looked like a goddamned movie star, and was also smart and really sweet and so small I could pick her up and hold her. I was in love. You can be, even at that age. And I knew that having loved Tian would change my life, that I would have lasting respect of some variety, that I would think about her forever—how perfect her skin was, how she let me slide my hands almost up to her breasts, how humble it made me feel that some creature so exquisite let my hands make contact with her.
I had actually stopped wishing I could become comatose until I turned twenty-five.
It was not a good time in my life for me to grow big shoulders and take on my mother’s problems. This is a shitty thing to say, but true.
However, Cathy’s face convinced me I had no choice. She looked like some kind of warrior goddess, with that look that says they’d be glad to kill you with a knife if you don’t listen. I knew I was beat.
“She edits stuff out of them, too,” I told Cathy wearily. “The letters. She has to. Some of the peo
ple write seven pages, both sides. Or e-mails that have three parts. She has to boil them way down, but she never changes their real words unless they have really crummy grammar. And she has to protect their identity. Like, if they say they teach at the middle school, she’ll say they teach at a church preschool or whatever if that has to be in there. Usually, she leaves all that identifying junk out completely unless the woman’s husband is a cop who sells drugs or whatever. She makes him a judge then, or she makes him from way somewhere like Illinois.” Cathy was writing this down. “She tries to pick different topics every week. Like, she doesn’t want a string of columns about, when should you have sex in a new relationship, or how can I tell if he’s cheating on me? She mixes them up. Aging parents. Fights with your sister where she won’t speak to you for a year. You know.”
“We’ll have to tell her we’re going to do it,” Cathy said, tapping her teeth with Aury’s Scooby-Doo pencil. When we did, my mother turned her face to the wall and rolled herself up in Leo’s yellow blanket.
“If you don’t want us to, we’ll stop right now, honey,” Cathy soothed her.
“I can’t,” my mom said, and I could hear that she was crying. “I can’t do it, and I can’t not do it. I don’t want to lose my job. What if I lose my job and Caro gets a ruptured appendix? When Justine had a ruptured appendix, her parents had thirty thousand bucks in unpaid coveralls to pay for. I’m too stupid. I can’t think. I start to think of one thing and something else comes barreling along like a train and whams it right out of my mind….”
“I feel like that all the time,” I said. “I feel like I’m listening to fifty different conversations all at the same time and I can’t understand any of them, particularly if I get bored….”
“I do, too,” my mother said. “But this is worse. It’s like my head is talking to me. I hear funny little noises. Like pipers piping or little kids talking…that aren’t there. Aurora asks me for a glass of milk, and I have to think about what ‘milk’ means. It takes me a minute. More. And when I try to talk, it comes out up in the wind. I mean, upside down. And if I concentrate on it, it gets more bad.”
Cathy and I exchanged glances. Whatever else she did, my mother never made a mistake in grammar. Even Aury knew the difference between “lie” and “lay.”
“And what else?” Cathy asked.
“I don’t want to…talk it,” my mother said. “Just pick out a sweater that has nothing to do with love.” And we knew that she meant “letter” and not “sweater.” I felt a cold line of sweat under my chest.
She was asleep before we left the room.
Naturally, I picked the one that interested me most, since at LaFollette, a gun rack is about as common an accessory on a car as a CD player. At this time, the governor had suggested it might not be a bad idea if there were not just armed guards in high schools but armed faculty. Which would have meant that Mrs. Erikson might have been able to shoot my sister during their little pep-rally grapple.
“Do you think this kid has a problem?” I asked Cathy.
“I think this kid’s family will be a headline in about five years if something doesn’t change fast.”
“So it’s a good one.”
“The American Association of Pediatrics says that having a loaded gun in a house where there are children is so dangerous it’s like…well, a loaded gun.”
What I didn’t tell Cathy was that I owned a gun, though I hadn’t known that I did.
I’d been going through my father’s drawers, looking for one of those strap T-shirts they call wife beaters, though my mom always made him call them “muscle tees,” so I could wear it under a sort of see-through shirt that also was Leo’s, when I found a handgun. It was in its box. It was a .38 special. There were no bullets. I could have shit a brick.
Now, my father had been a conscientious objector. He’d been willing to go to prison rather than to Vietnam, although being married and in law school got him out of that anyhow. He told me all the time that if a little kid with a bomb strapped to his clothes walked up to him, he’d rather be blown up than shoot the kid. This was before he got into yoga and stuff. He was always like that. He said that guys who hunted were afraid their dicks were too small, and in those words.
I picked it up, like you would pick up a snake. It was heavier than its graceful shape would have indicated, with a long barrel. And clean. I could tell he’d never used it. I then went through all his drawers and didn’t find anything more interesting than an old package of rubbers and a hemostat, which at the time I had no idea what he would have done with, but which I now know meant he and my mother occasionally smoked a joint. Or they had when we were babies or something.
Why would he have a gun?
Was he secretly afraid he might run into some trouble out there, roaming among the real marginals? Did he have some psycho idea that he was going to protect us from foreign invaders? Was he suicidal? If he had it, why had he left it behind? Why had he taken his laptop but not his sidearm, partner?
That was when I knew that Leo really had lost his marbles…. I took the thing and threw it as far up onto his top shelf as I could, back behind the tuxedo shoes Leo had to wear every year to the Chancellor’s Ball. It made me sick to my stomach to think that Aury could have found it, although Aury could not have reached the top drawer of my dad’s chest.
Then I sat down on the floor of the closet and tried to think back hard, really concentrate, on the way he behaved the day he left. What he did. What he talked about. All of it had been sort of standard fare. All of it had been sort of Leo and sort of nuts.
We all got to go in late to school that day, because his plane didn’t leave until noon.
Leo sat us down on the couch. He held Aury on his lap. My mother was in the bedroom. She refused to come out. He explained his “sabbatical.” He explained to us about the people he’d been writing to, who were regular, educated people who just saw life as not having to be this big rat race, about the plot of clean land he wanted to buy, with a stream and maybe a prairie meadow. He explained that it was going to be like tearing out his heart to be away from us until the end of winter, but that this was something he felt he had to do and, when we were older, we would remember that he had done this, and that when people tried to discourage us from doing things that might seem unusual but that we felt we had to do, we’d have him as an example of why trusting your own instincts is always the right thing to do. No punctuation.
Then he started to cry. Not like you cry at a movie if you’re a guy. Like you cry if you’re a baby and you fall. “I love you so much, son,” he’d said, kissing my head.
“I love you, too,” I told him simply.
“Caroline, I remember the first moment I saw you,” he said.
“I don’t,” Caro replied, her face as still as unbroken water, not a flicker, not a ripple.
“Aurora,” Leo said then, and held Aury against his chest. He rocked her and kissed her. Caroline looked at him as though he stank.
“What if your instincts tell you to quit school?” she asked suddenly.
“Caroline, I know what you’re—”
“No, Dad, tell me,” Caro persisted, as Aury climbed down and wandered off into the room she shared with Caro. (She had slept in my parents’ room until she was eighteen months. And my dad insisted that the ‘guest’ bedroom should be a library or office, where he could read in peace. Natually, Caro went nuts about having to share her room with a closet full of Care Bears.)
“If your instincts tell you to quit school in the traditional sense, but find a way to get the credentials to make a living, then you should do that,” my father said.
“I have no idea what you mean,” Caroline said.
“I have no idea what he means, either,” said my mother, appearing in the doorway. Looking as though she’d drunk a quart of champagne and forgot to change out of her ball gown. She was wearing a satin nightgown and had on some kind of boots. “I know he means you can get a degree by being homeschoo
led instead of going to the public institution; but I have no idea what he means when he says it’s okay if his instincts tell him that he can justify leaving his kids for six months under any circumstances short of having a brother who’s dying and living in Saskatoon who needs his help to save the family wheat farm, and we already know he doesn’t have that.”
“Julie, this isn’t helpful,” Leo said.
“I’m not trying to be helpful. I’m trying to be rational.”
“Julie, what if I died?”
“Are you asking if I would object?”
“That was a shitty thing to say, Mom,” I put in.
“Don’t swear, Gabe,” she warned me.
“Julie,” my dad pleaded, “what if I died? You’d have everything you have now, and in exactly the same way. The plane tickets I’ve gotten are the cheapest possible fares; I have people to stay with who’ll help contribute to my room and board and so on in exchange for my helping them work out some legal issues they have. I have health insurance and so do you. This whole thing should cost me in the neighborhood of a thousand bucks. You spend that much in six months on clothes.”
“I do not,” my mother snapped.
“You do, too,” Leo said.
“I do not,” said my mother.
“I see the bills, Julie. You do, too,” my father said patiently, in his lawyer’s voice. “My point is, I’m not leaving you stranded. Aury is in day care part of every day, which is enough time for you to do your job, if you actually do it instead of spending half the time gossiping on the phone with Cathy.” Cathy, sitting at the kitchen table, sighed audibly. “Cathy, I’d appreciate some time alone with my family, and I don’t mean that unkindly,” Leo said.
“Julie asked me to be here with her, and so I’m staying, and I honestly don’t mean that unkindly, either, Leo,” Cathy said.
At that moment, Aury came back with my father’s old pajama pants, which she’d taken from his bottom drawer, and her Big Book of Childhood Poems. “Nighty?” she asked. “Dada reada story?” She thought that if she could get Leo to put her to bed, he would have to stay. That was when I started to bawl, and punched a hole in the drywall behind the window seat. I quickly covered it with one of the bolsters. The hole is probably still there, because my mom left the bolsters and made new ones when we moved.