Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes

  “Reno.”

  I think I feel the blade cut.

  “The truth,” he rasps.

  “Reno,” I say again.

  His free hand goes to my hair as he pulls my head back so hard I feel whiplash. “How’d she get there?”

  “Lemry.” In this state I would do anything: turn on my friend, murder innocent babies, anything. Later I will feel shame, but now I feel only terror in its purest form.

  “Who’s that?”

  “Teacher.”

  His grip relaxes, and I roll away hard, actually hearing hair tear out of the front of my scalp, and I’m up and screaming down the block fast and loud, seconds before searing pain bursts into my left shoulder blade. My shrieks increase as I storm toward the lights. Behind me a car starts and I leap a back fence, cutting across another lawn for a lighted street, screaming, screaming, screaming.

  I’m back in an alley, and the pain in my shoulder blade is dulling a bit, but the terror is not. I rumble across two more streets, two more alleys, toward the heart of the Edison district, until something looks familiar in the dim light. I think it’s Dale’s street. I cut across another yard, unsure whether to turn right or left, and now the pain in my shoulder returns with such intensity I think I’ll vomit. I reach for the source with my right hand but I can’t get to it. It has to be his knife, but I can’t reach it. My left arm is completely numb. I have to stay conscious.

  It’s late. After midnight. Anything I see moving will be him. Liquid warmth trickles down my back, and I’m suddenly glad I couldn’t get to the knife. I’m like a punctured tire: Don’t take the nail out until you get to a service station.

  I have to take a chance on the direction. Without landmarks, I’m geographically dyslexic. It is absolute fact that in unfamiliar surroundings, I have a better than fifty percent chance of going the wrong way by following my instincts. I’ve seen Dale’s house, but only from the front street, and from here I recognize little. My instincts say go right. I turn left and begin to jog, praying my disability will be true to me.

  “Jesus Christ, Fat Boy, what’re you doin’ here? What the hell time is it? Shit, you’re lucky you didn’t wake my old man! He’d think nothin’ of kickin’ your ass all the way back to your house. What the hell you doin’ here? Man, I wouldn’ be runnin’ around this neighborhood at night. Someone’ll kick your ass an’ take your stuff. Hey, what happened to your face? Jesus. Here, follow me out to the garage. Man, you’re lucky you didn’t wake up my old man. You know what time it is? What’d you do to your face?”

  Dale leads me down the dirt driveway to the garage, unlocks the monster Master padlock and steps in, feeling for the light switch. I haven’t spoken and I’m fighting to stay with him. The overhead fluorescents flicker, and I turn my back to him.

  “Jesus Christ. What’s that? What the hell is that? Shit, you got a knife stickin’ outta ya. Oh, Jesus Christ. How the hell you get a knife stuck in you?”

  “Byrnes,” I say, and suddenly I’m struggling for air, dropping to my knees.

  “Oh, shit,” Dale says. “Want me to take it out? Want me to pull that sucker outta there?”

  For the first time, I know I might really be in trouble, that I could die. I shake my head weakly. “911.” I pitch forward onto my good arm and ease myself to the cold concrete floor. Dale is screaming for his dad.

  I don’t know whether I passed out or fell asleep, but reflections of red and blue lights chase each other around the garage walls when my eyes open again, and I’m being hustled into the back of a blue-and-white van. I’m on my back; the knife must be out. Prickly pain dances in my left hand, and I watch with strange detachment as the medic inserts a needle attached to a tube into my forearm. Everything is fuzzy. Gauzy. A policeman’s lips are moving just above me, but I can’t hear a word. Hey, man, these guys have this all under control. I’m outta here.

  CHAPTER 17

  You know, actually this isn’t so bad. The last time I got this much media attention I won the sixteen-and-under fifteen-hundred-meter freestyle at the Spokane Summer Games two summers ago. ORCA SWAMPS COMPETITION, the headline read. They didn’t know I already had my marine moniker. The radio and TV stations also did the story from the “weight angle.” Summer is slow for sports coverage.

  But this is better, because lying in a hospital bed, my size is not an issue. Hell, that could be anything under those covers. For all they know I’m in a body cast. And I’m the victim of a major crime; headlines for the Regional section. Ellerby said he’d consider letting someone stick a knife in him for the kind of attention I’ve been getting. I suggested he let that someone be me.

  I’ve told my story probably seven hundred times so far, and it gets better with age. I need to work on the part where I karate-kicked the knife out of his hand and it landed in my shoulder, but the rest stands up pretty well. Dale Thornton is getting a kick out of his supporting role, and his dad has told several reporters he’s camping out near the main entrance and will personally see Virgil Byrnes die a slow death before he gets within a mile of my room. The Thorntons like me a lot better as a two-bit TV star than they did as a one-bit smartass.

  That’s all very clever, and as long as my mom and Carver and the media and the police and medical folk keep parading through the room, I’m feeling pretty cocky. But when I’m alone, what I feel is lucky to be alive and pretty scared. Old man Byrnes has disappeared, and that makes me plenty nervous. But the real danger is to Sarah Byrnes. The cops are hunting her and Lemry down in Reno, but the hotel they were supposed to stay at hasn’t heard of them. Lemry was supposed to call her husband when they arrived in Reno, but he missed her call, so the city cops have their place staked out, and highway patrols in three states have been notified to be on the lookout. I just don’t want them driving into town not knowing old man Byrnes is on the loose.

  And hey, I’m thinking of becoming a drug addict. Whatever they’re giving me for the pain in my shoulder is not bad.

  “Hey, man.”

  Mark Brittain stands in my doorway. I’ll be gone to hell.

  “Hey, man,” I say back.

  “You’re kind of famous.”

  “Guess so.” I reach down to the side of the bed to find the button that raises my head. “So, how you feelin’?”

  “Okay, I guess,” he says. “Kind of stupid.”

  I don’t know what to say. I can feel that he wants to explain himself, and I don’t have it in me to hold him in contempt. I’ve had time to think: The wound I have is just a hole; his wound is humiliation. I’ve felt both, and they don’t compare. I think all this—feel some connection—without Mark having said but one sentence. Feeling kind of stupid.

  I say, “We keep this up, there won’t be much of a team for Regionals.”

  He nods toward my shoulder. “You out of it?”

  “Looks that way. Doctor says it’ll take awhile to repair the muscle damage. Needs time, mostly.”

  Mark looks at the floor. “I’ve been watching the news. I heard what Mr. Byrnes did to his daughter. He must be a pretty scary guy.”

  “Off the charts scary.”

  “What I said in class…”

  I raise my good hand. “Don’t worry about…”

  “All that stuff about responsibility.” He shakes his head. “I’ve been working with a guy up here. A counselor.” He laughs. “A therapist. He’s not a counselor. I need a therapist. Anyway, I’ve been thinking wrong.” His lower lip quivers, but he smiles through it. “I’ve got a lot of work to do…. My dad…Listen, tell Jody…” and he closes his eyes. “Just tell her I’m sorry, okay? About the abortion and all. I lied, Mobe. You know, right before I took the pills…” He stops. “Jesus, I lied.”

  I start to tell him I understand, though I probably don’t completely, but he’s gone.

  When my eyes open again, a shadowy figure fills the doorway, but I can’t focus. These painkillers kill more than pain. I smile and wave and close my eyes. Either a couple of minutes or thre
e days later when I open them again, the shadowy figure ain’t shadowy and has moved to the side of my bed. Lemry says, “Rough weekend?”

  “Worst on record.”

  Lemry puts her hand on my bad arm. “This doesn’t bode well for your swimming career.”

  “Yeah, I don’t think I can qualify for the relay. You guys have any luck?”

  “We found her.”

  “No shit?” I say. “You found Sarah Byrnes’s mom?”

  My excitement isn’t matched. “We found her within the first twenty-four hours,” she says. “Only had to walk through the casinos looking. She didn’t look much different from the picture Sarah Byrnes had.”

  My enthusiasm crashed. They found her, but…“So what happened?”

  “Well,” Lemry says, “we got down there just before midnight, and got a room at Harrah’s, which is one of the big hotel casinos. I was beat, but your friend wanted to get on with it, so we spent the next few hours wandering through casinos. We asked around, showed some of the dealers and floor people the picture, but they weren’t helpful. I think a lot of people hide out there.

  “I finally talked Sarah Byrnes into crashing for all of forty-five minutes. We checked around in the same random way for a few hours before breakfast back at Harrah’s.

  “The hostess at the restaurant kind of started when she saw her, but of course, as Sarah Byrnes has told me a number of times, that’s not unusual. Then I noticed she couldn’t take her eyes off Sarah Byrnes, and she looked very distressed. So I asked to see the picture again, and I looked at it and I looked at the hostess and by God, except for the hairdo and a few wrinkles, they looked alarmingly alike. I told Sarah Byrnes to compare it, and before I knew it she was out of her seat headed toward her. The woman saw her coming and jumped up and walked toward the door. Sarah Byrnes hurried, but she walked faster and faster until she was almost running, and Sarah Byrnes yelled, ‘Mom!’ and the woman broke into a sprint and was through the main entrance and out into the street. By then I was running to catch them.

  “So now Sarah Byrnes’s mom has thrown off her high heels and is running full bore down the sidewalk, panicked and not about to be caught. So I kick it into high gear and shoot past Sarah Byrnes to get her mom before she can reach the end of the block, because I’m afraid she’ll run out right into the street.” She sighs and closes her eyes. “God, all the poor woman wanted to do was get away from us.”

  I’m so drawn into the story the pain is gone. “What happened? You caught her, right?”

  Lemry laughs. “Did I catch her? Was I or was I not the Iowa State eight hundred meter champion in high school?”

  I stare, surprised.

  “I was. You think swimming is the only sport I know?”

  “Not anymore,” I say. “What did she say?”

  “She screamed, ‘Let me go! Let me go!’ but I held on to her arm, trying to calm her and hoping I wasn’t going to spend the night in a Reno jail for attempted kidnapping. I told her it was all right, that we just needed to talk, and I called her by name and she didn’t dispute me, so I was certain who she was. Then a police car rounded the corner down the block, and she shut up like someone had pulled her plug.

  “By then Sarah Byrnes had caught up with us. Julie—that’s her mother’s name—didn’t want police involvement, so she agreed to go with us, and we took her back to our room, where she called down to the restaurant to say she’d become ill and had to get to an emergency room, and I guess someone covered for her.”

  “So it was really her?” I ask. “God, what are the chances of that?”

  “Not good,” Lemry says.

  “So what happened?”

  Lemry sighs. “It got ugly. First her mother tried to deny who she was, even after all we’d just been through. Then she said she’d split with her husband before Sarah Byrnes was injured, I think hoping Sarah Byrnes didn’t remember. Sarah Byrnes got steamed and called her a lying bitch, and they screamed at each other for close to fifteen minutes before Julie broke into sobs and Sarah Byrnes said she hoped she choked to death on her tears. I tried to get control, but it was like trying to stop a dogfight. Sarah Byrnes kept yelling, “Look at me! Look at me, Mother! How could you leave me? How could you do that?” while her mother just sobbed and said how sorry she was.”

  I can see Lemry is moved. She’s telling the story as if it’s still happening, and her chin quivers.

  “Finally I called a truce, and we agreed to meet that night back at our room. I was afraid Julie would skip out, but there was no way to get any further until they got apart and had time to think. We just had to take the chance, though I spent most of the time between preparing Sarah Byrnes for the possibility that she’d split. But seven o’clock rolled around, and sure enough, she knocked on the door. It was better this time because Sarah Byrnes had agreed to be civil long enough to find out what she needed to know.”

  “What did her mom say?”

  “She said she knew she’d burn in hell for leaving, but it couldn’t be worse than what she’d gone through for the past fourteen years. She said she had made a number of suicide attempts at first, but even messed those up; that leaving her daughter was bad enough, but not protecting her in the first place was unforgivable. She said she’d known Virgil was crazy since before they got married, but couldn’t break away from him.”

  “Jesus, if she knew he was crazy, why not?”

  “One of the eternal mysteries of men and women, Mobe. When a person feels worthless, nothing he or she does is surprising.”

  “So how’d it end? She didn’t come back with you, did she?” I wasn’t asking. I knew.

  Lemry shakes her head. “She didn’t come back with us. Sarah Byrnes begged her to, told her she could make up for everything by coming back and telling what happened; how crazy her dad was getting and about the hospital. But her mother said no. She didn’t believe she could live through the humiliation of a court hearing—that she wanted to, but just couldn’t. She said the next thing Sarah Byrnes would have to deal with would be her suicide.”

  That pisses me off. “What a spineless…”

  “Not so fast. She was telling the truth. You have to give her credit for that. This is not a strong woman, Mobe. The courage to pull this off is nowhere in her.”

  “God, what did Sarah Byrnes do then?”

  “She got quiet. She was very polite, and we ended it. She climbed into bed and went to sleep.” Lemry laughed. “She went to sleep. I was dead sure she’d try to disappear or hurt herself, so I sat up all night, but she slept until morning, got up and said, ‘Let’s go,’ and we came home.”

  That scares me. I’ve seen Sarah Byrnes quiet like that. Lemry reads my mind. “It made me nervous, too, Mobe,” she says. “It was as if she gave up on the spot, and I was really afraid of what might happen when we got home. I still am. I just hope she’s able to put it together in a way that works for her. But I have to tell you, this kind of loss is out of my league.”

  I think she’s finished, but then she puts her hand on my arm again and gives me a look into her life. I wish adults could know how important that is to us sometimes. She said, “I grew up in a little town in Iowa called Cradle Rock. The big thing there was Little League. Boys and girls played on the same teams, not because the feminist movement was fifteen years ahead of its time, but because there weren’t enough boys in town to make up the eight teams.

  “My first team was the Phillips Junior Oilers. The local Phillips 66 station sponsored us. I remember picking up that green T-shirt with the gold lettering across the chest, and the cap with a golden P. I was so proud. I wore that cap everywhere. You couldn’t wear the shirt anywhere but to games, but you could wear the hat anytime.

  “I was a skinny little girl, not at all pretty, and I knew that. Kids told me all the time. All my life I hadn’t fit, couldn’t think of the clever things to say. I didn’t have any possessions anyone wanted, and it seemed I didn’t have anything inside me anyone wanted, either. Sometimes
I look at pictures of me back then, and I can’t believe the monumental sadness in those eyes. It’s as if that’s another little girl altogether.”

  Lemry gazes toward the side wall, and I see surface tension holding a tear.

  “We didn’t have much money,” she says. “Almost no one in town did. But my parents and my grandmother saved enough extra to buy a really nice glove. It was a Warren Spahn autograph model, so I suppose it was a glove for a pitcher, but I didn’t care. I only remember the cool leather against my face. And the smell. God, that smell meant baseball. I oiled it every day with neat’s-foot oil and tied a baseball into the webbing each night to break it in and create the pocket I dreamed would cradle a million fly balls, scoop up a million grounders, pluck a million screaming line drives out of the air. That mitt, even more than the hat, was the symbol of my belonging on the team.”

  Lemry strokes my arm lightly, and I am quiet, in the hands of a true storyteller telling a true story.

  “When I got to the field for our first game, I was so excited I thought I would throw up. I hadn’t slept a wink the night before and spent the entire day throwing my baseball against the side of the garage, grossly exaggerating the speed of the grounders dribbling back as I snapped them into the merciless trap of my glove and threw the runner out.

  “I didn’t catch one ball in warm-ups. They dropped to the right of me. They dropped to the left of me. They hit my arms and fell harmlessly to the grass. But I was just so happy to be there, to belong with these other kids with ‘Junior Oilers’ across their chests, that it didn’t matter.

  “When coach called us into a huddle before the umpire yelled, ‘Batter up!’ he went over our positions and the batting order one last time, but he didn’t need to for my sake because I had memorized those things from the first practice. I batted ninth. I played right field. I knew what that meant. I knew I was the very worst hitter on the team and the very worst fielder. But I didn’t care, because I had a new glove and a green-and-gold uniform and I belonged.