All of a sudden, though, he snapped. “What the hell are you looking at?” he said. “Do you have a problem or something?”
I realized I’d been staring at him instead of the television like we’re supposed to. He looked at me for a few seconds, but the longer he looked the more his eyes turned away from one another: the opposite of crossing. One went to the left and one went to the right. And my dad sat there, saying nothing, while his eyes turned their backs on each other. He finally shook his head, and his eyes went back into place. Then he slammed the footrest of his recliner down and left, mumbling under his breath.
I thought about telling Dr. Phelps about this, but in the end I didn’t need his answers. I just remembered something my grandma always said. She said if a person can’t look you in the eye, they’re either lying to you, or else they’re not able to see the person you are. “Don’t be friends with these sorts,” she told me. “They’ll either hurt you, not understand you or both.”
Andy was coming home every day with reports of what everyone at school was saying about me, but mostly I pretended not to listen. One night, though, a few days before I had to go back, he started in and wouldn’t let up.
I was in the kitchen with my mom and Lucy, playing the normal boy, avoiding my father so he wouldn’t have to avoid me, when Andy said, “Boy, you think what they said about Gracie Highsmith was something else, Adam? Ha! Ha! Ha!” He shook his head with this stupid grin on his face.
My mother shushed him from her wheelchair. Lucy scowled and said, “Andrew, don’t talk to your brother like that. It’s not nice.”
“Ha! Ha! Ha!” Andy continued, and left the dining room before the paralyzer could scold him further.
“What a little dickhead,” Lucy said as he left. I waited for my mother to say something, but she didn’t.
So I said, “Hey, you can’t talk about my brother like that. Andy’s a dickhead, sure, but it’s not your place to say so.”
“Adam!” my mother scolded. “What on earth are you talking about?”
“You heard her!” I said. “Why do you just let her say anything she wants?”
“She was defending you!”
“She called him a little dickhead! That’s line crossing! You can call Andy a little dickhead. Dad can call Andy a little dickhead. I can call Andy a little dickhead. But no way should Lucy have that right.”
“Did you call me a little dickhead?” Andy said, coming back into the dining room. “Whoa. That is so uncool, Lucy. I thought you were on the up and up.”
“I certainly did not call you a little dickhead,” said Lucy. Her hand fluttered near her heart, bracelets clinking. She turned to me and said, “Adam, I have no idea what this is all about. I understand you don’t like me for reasons which your mother has forgiven me, but please respect our friendship and do not make up things about me like that. I’d never! Never in a million years would I say such a thing!”
I was about to call her a liar when I realized Lucy was telling the truth. Out of nowhere I heard it. I heard Lucy’s voice say, “Bastard. Little bastard.” But her mouth never moved, not even a twitch. Her red lips rested firmly against each other. Her nostrils flared instead.
That was when I saw it for the first time. On the wall behind her—her shadow thrown against it. “Why won’t you let me live here in peace, you little bastard?” said Lucy’s shadow. I saw the mouth move on it instead. It raised one hand to flip its hair over its shoulder, but Lucy herself never moved an inch.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought…I must have misheard you.”
“Well, now,” she said. “Thank you. I’m so upset you’d think I’d say such a thing. You’re family. I love you all.” She grabbed hold of her purse and pulled out her cigarettes. Her hands shook and it took several tries before she could conjure a flame from her lighter. “Must need fluid,” she muttered, not looking up.
I started to leave the room when her shadow spoke again. “That’s right,” it said. “Move it on, brat. Get your ass going before I get it gone for you.”
I looked back as I turned the corner and found Lucy exhaling a cloud of smoke.
Jamie was playing Solitaire on the computer in my room. My bed was unmade again and my clothes were still strewn across the floor, and even though I thought I was okay with that, I really wasn’t. Only when nothing was going on with my family could I stand his mess. “What are you doing?” I said. “Why don’t you ever clean up?”
Jamie didn’t look at me. He kept clicking the mouse, flipping cards over, depositing them on other stacks. “I have top score now!” he said. A grin slid up one of his cheeks. He never smiled completely, only to one side. A lopsided sort of happiness.
“Hey!” I yelled. “I said, ‘Why don’t you ever clean up your mess?’”
He looked up. “What’s the matter?”
“Lucy’s shadow is threatening me, my parents are sending me to fucking Dr. Phelps and all you care about is fucking top score on Solitaire.” I started picking up clothes, putting them in the closet. “Just don’t throw shit around and leave it for me to clean up. And if you’re going to sleep in my bed, make it after you’re finished.”
“I don’t sleep,” said Jamie. His smile faded as he took his hand off the mouse.
“Then what do you do? Why would you even lie down if you can’t sleep? You don’t make any sense!”
He looked away and I felt about this big: Put your thumb and index finger almost together, with just a sliver of space between them. That’s how big I felt right then.
It was obvious, even though I didn’t want to admit these things about him, but now it all came out:
Jamie didn’t sleep. He didn’t eat either. He didn’t have to use the bathroom. He didn’t have to breathe. He said, “I can’t smell anything either, and sometimes I get so cold I have to burn memories to get warm again.”
“Burn memories?” I said, and he nodded, looking down into his lap. “What does that mean?”
He lay down on my bed and started tossing and turning, his arms crossed over his chest, his face pinched as if he were in pain. “Yes,” he said and, “I love you,” and, “Why? Why? Why?” and, “Anything, anything, just let go.”
I smelled something like hair burning. I couldn’t see any smoke, but the room filled with the scent. His face contorted, the muscles bunched beneath his skin, his hands clenched his shoulders, and then—bam!—it was over. The smell of burned hair fled the room, gone in an instant, and the gash near his temple began to change. His face smoothed over, his skin flushed pink with heat. It was like he was alive suddenly, which made me think maybe he didn’t have to be dead, that maybe we could find a way to make him live again.
“What memory did you burn?” I asked.
He shook his head. “I don’t know. It’s gone now. I couldn’t remember if I wanted.”
He cried then, quietly, no tears at all, and started to shake. “I have nothing left,” he said. “It’s all going away. It’s all ruined.”
I went to him and put my arms around him, holding him until he stopped shaking, like I’d made myself do that first night. I didn’t shudder when I touched him now. I thought if I held him long enough, maybe he wouldn’t hurt. But just like Gracie did at his grave, he kept sobbing.
He was right. He had nothing. Nothing at all. Hardly anyone could see him either, and after a while, when no one can see you, it can make you feel pretty bad about yourself. So far it had been only me and Gracie who had seen him, who had talked to him, and now Gracie was being such a freak.
In life, everyone at school had treated him like a loser. He was good at computers and didn’t dress normal. Everyone knew the Marks family didn’t have money, but I wished they would’ve at least tried to get him clothes that might have helped him fit better. Instead he wore tennis shoes with the tongues hanging out, shirts a size too small. And the Boy Scout uniform didn’t really help. And that’s when it hit me, making me feel stupid in one second flat. That Boy Scout uniform—i
t wasn’t what he wanted. It was just another outfit, and everyone had made fun of him for wearing it.
“I’m sorry,” I said. Right then, right there, in my messy room that he’d made a mess, I remembered what Gracie had said that day in her room: “He should have been loved, you know. He never got that.” She was right.
“It’s okay, Adam,” he said. He hugged me, his chin resting on my shoulder, his whole weight falling into my arms. I could feel his breath—his useless breath—cold on my neck, the heat from the burned memory already leaving his body. I patted his back and said I was sorry again and he said, “Forget about it.”
I tried. I tried to burn that memory of my regret. But I wasn’t dead yet, I was just on my way to dying, and it’s harder to burn memories when you’ve still got life left. When you’re alive, you have to learn how to live with things like regret.
THE FACTS OF DEATH
GRACIE HIGHSMITH KEPT CALLING. ONCE, TWICE, a third time. Each time I told my mom to say I was sleeping. My mother didn’t like that. “I think you should talk to her,” she said. “She sounds like a nice girl.”
“Look,” I said. “Remember when Lucy used to call here?”
My mother nodded and went back to the phone. “I’m sorry, dear,” she said. “He’s sleeping. I’ll tell him you called.”
I thought I’d escaped her pestering, but then I was online a few nights before I had to go back to school and suddenly this box pops up with a message from someone calling themselves IgneousGirlinOhio and I open it to find this message:
“why wont u return my calls?”
So I write: “y do u care?”
And she writes: “come on! you know y!”
“no. i dont no y. i think u should be a bit clearer about your intentions.”
She sends an angry face symbol.
I send a tongue-out face back.
“fine, b that way,” she writes. Then IgneousGirlinOhio disappears, gone, just like that.
Good riddance. I was still mad at her for throwing me out of her house.
But then the thing I hadn’t expected happened. The night before I had to go back to school came around and suddenly I wanted to talk to her. I wanted a friend. I thought about calling and saying, “Hey, what’s up? How are your rocks?” pretending like nothing had happened. Like she hadn’t missed school for weeks because she’d found a dead body, and I hadn’t missed school for weeks because I’d found the same ghost she had, or that we’d kind of had sex but not really, or that I’d stolen her pink heart even if she hadn’t noticed.
I couldn’t, though. I’d stare at the phone, pick it up with an air of determination, dial each number like a major decision, and then—before the first ring sounded—I’d hang up. I told myself it didn’t matter, that it was too late to call anyway. And besides, I thought, who knew what she was really thinking? Those phone calls she’d made—they might have been to yell at me instead of make up.
I’d seen that happen with my parents. They hadn’t fought much after Lucy paralyzed my mother, but every once in a while the old spark flared up and my dad would say something utterly stupid. Earlier in the week it had been after they got home from an appointment with my mom’s doctor. The doctor tried to get her to keep doing physical therapy, but my mom said she was fine, that nothing was wrong, the world was a wonderful place to live in, didn’t he agree? She’d been going to therapy off and on, mostly at the insistence of my father, but now she wanted to stop being hopeful. “The damage is done,” she told the doctor again, and once more my father grimaced guiltily.
When they got home, my dad was upset with her for not trying more and said, “Why don’t you just fucking die already, Linda?”
“Oh yeah?” said my mom. “That’s what you want, isn’t it? Isn’t it?? You just wait, John McCormick. Maybe I will go to therapy! Maybe one day I’ll walk again, and when I do, I’ll kick your stinking ass!”
They went their own ways for a few hours. Then my mom came to the garage, where we were working on the van. Andy was handing my dad wrenches and rags like a surgical assistant, while I sat in the driver’s seat with my hand on the ignition, ready to turn the key whenever my father motioned for me to start it up. The door to the kitchen flung open and my mother sat there in her wheelchair, beer bottle in hand, her face looking sad and forgiving. “Hey,” she said. “Hey, John?” My dad looked up from the engine. He was probably thinking she was going to apologize, but what he got was:
“You son of a bitch!” She hurled the beer bottle at him like a tomahawk. It nearly hit my father’s head, but he raised his arm and it glanced off his elbow. Beer foamed out of the bottle onto the garage floor. “How dare you talk to me like that?” my mother shouted.
They screamed at each other until my mother’s voice gave out, which meant my father was the winner. Then my mom wheeled backward, popped a wheelie and sobbed all the way back to their bedroom. A moment later my father stumbled toward the door with the bottle she’d thrown clenched in his hand.
Before he followed, he paused in the door and looked at us. He focused his attention on Andy and said, “You boys remember this. Remember what your father’s telling you at this very moment. Don’t get married,” he said. “Don’t ever marry.”
Andy and I had heard this life lesson before. We just nodded. Then my dad headed back to their bedroom to either fight some more or maybe make up.
I figured what use would talking be if all Gracie wanted was to act like my parents, yelling and telling each other they weren’t worth anything?
So I put myself to bed instead of calling. But again I couldn’t sleep. I flipped my pillow from the warm side to the cool one, I tried making my mind a blank slate, I even tried counting stupid sheep. But whatever I tried didn’t help.
It wasn’t until four in the morning that my eyes started to flutter, and then I was off, off, off, running in the direction of darkness. And then suddenly I saw a point of light in the distance. A voice that seemed familiar called for me to come. So I went toward it, toward that light.
As I grew closer, the darkness broke around me and I found myself outside the house, running down our back road toward Highway 88. Someone ran beside me. I looked over and saw it was my grandma, her knees lifting under her floral nightgown. “What are you doing here?” I asked.
She looked over and smiled, her arms flaring like pistons. “Sugar,” she said. “I’m here to tell you one thing, and that’s to keep going and don’t look back.”
“I don’t know where I’m going, though.”
“You’ll have to make a plan,” she said.
“I’ve been trying, but I can’t think of anything. I have a list, though. I’m bringing a knife.”
She huffed and puffed before saying, “First thing: run in the right direction or else you’ll get lost. Second thing: ditch the ghost.”
“He needs me,” I said immediately.
“Nope,” she grunted, shaking her head. “Only thing he needs is to get his butt on to where he needs to go.”
“You don’t understand,” I said. “It isn’t fair what happened to him.”
“No, it’s not. But it’s a fact of life.”
“What is?”
“Death,” she said, and as soon as the word left her mouth she started to fall behind. I didn’t think to slow down for her either. I kept going, one foot in front of the other. Before she was too far behind, she shouted, “You go that way, boy, and you’ll learn those facts the hard way. You’ll be on your way to dying before you can blink twice.”
“Love you, Grandma!” I shouted. I blew her a kiss over my shoulder, then turned back to the dark road ahead.
The road stretched on without end before me, a gray strip of pavement thrown down in darkness. Treading the center line like a tightrope, I ran all night, watching my feet eat up the miles, one after the other. I ran until my legs began to ache and my side cramped. And even then I kept running. By the time I woke up, I was more tired than before I’d fallen asleep. And con
fused. Run, Grandma had said, and don’t look back. Go in the right direction. But whatever the right direction was, I wouldn’t figure it out before morning, when I’d have to go back to school again.
“Up, Adam! Get ready. Your brother’s outside warming up the car.”
I blinked my eyes to find my mother sitting in my doorway. After seeing my eyelids flicker, she backed the chair up and turned it around. One of her wheels squeaked against the floor, then she wheeled herself down the hall into the kitchen. I thought I smelled sausage, something greasy definitely, but that was all I could make out.
I pulled myself out of bed and my feet hit the hardwood floor with a thump. The floors looked all right, especially when morning light edged in and turned the wood a buttery color, but I missed the carpet we had before the accident. How soft it was and how in the morning you could set your feet down without the floor creaking.
Clothes. Nothing special. I put them on: jeans, a T-shirt, a flannel shirt unbuttoned, socks and shoes. Navigating these choices took up most of my thoughts. For some reason my zipper seemed unfamiliar, my shoelaces as problematic as an algebraic equation.
When I finally got everything zipped, buttoned and laced, I joined my mother in the kitchen. She was on the phone with my aunt Beth in California, where it was way early. My mother was nodding, saying, “Mmm-hmm. I know, Beth, I know! I don’t know what’s got into him.” I rolled my eyes. While they talked, she rolled over with the cordless phone propped between her ear and shoulder, handing me a plate of pancakes and bacon. Not sausage, but I’d guessed pretty close.
When she hung up the phone she said, “Aunt Beth said she loves you and that she’ll see you at Christmas. And that you better talk to her like you used to or she’ll give you a beating to remember.”
“Just broadcast everything, why don’t you?” I said.
“Your aunt loves you. She’s just worried. You know she doesn’t have any kids of her own. You and your brother are like her own children.”