Thanks for the Trouble

  I swallowed a mouthful of seawater.

  DRINK #8: A TAP-WATER CHASER

  NOBODY COULD SURVIVE IN THAT water for long. One by one, we lugged our frozen bodies back to shore, dried ourselves off with our own dry clothes, and sat in a circle around the bonfire. It was the quiet time that I’ve learned comes at the end of every party, when tomorrow starts to rear its ugly head in the imagination. The wood crackled. People smoked and stared into the dying flames. When there was nothing left but embers, Zelda and I tramped back to the parking lot, where the limo was still waiting. We kissed again, and we didn’t stop until the car pulled up in front of my house.

  “Home sweet home,” Zelda said. “This is where we say adieu.”

  I pointed at her, then at the house.

  “You want me to come in? How modern! But won’t your parents mind?”

  I shook my head, then mimed drinking followed by sleep. Zelda still seemed uncertain, so I took her hand and pulled her out of the car with me.

  “Fine, fine, fine,” she said. “I’ll come of my own free will, thank you.”

  She paid the limo driver (and how many of those hundreds had she spent to keep the guy there all night?), and then we went inside, padding as quietly as possible through the narrow kitchen and up the stairs. The ladder to the attic groaned as I lowered it, but I knew my mom wouldn’t wake up.

  It was weird, having a girl I liked in my room. Suddenly everything embarrassed me: Irrelephant the stuffed elephant, who sat on top of my bed against the pillows; the PlayStation 4 under the television; the science-fiction and fantasy novels prominently displayed on the bookshelf. Luckily, it was dark, and Zelda was drunk. We both changed out of our costumes. I gave her a T-shirt and boxers to wear, and she almost fell over trying to get them on. We slipped under the covers together.

  “Parker?” I waited for her to remember that I couldn’t answer her in words. “I’m not going to have sex with you tonight. You’re very sweet and all, with your giant bouquet of sunflowers, and I really do like you, but it wouldn’t be right. Even if it would be fun. And I’m very fun, by the way. Very fun.” I watched as she struggled to catch back up with her train of thought. “But that isn’t relevant. I still can’t sleep with you. It’s not about the sex, you see, but about everything that comes with it. Do you understand?” Though Zelda had asked me the question, I got the feeling she was actually arguing with herself. Her voice was getting more and more frantic. “I can’t just start all over again, Parker. I’m burned out. I’m a shell! It wouldn’t be remotely fair to you, or to him, or even to me.” She took hold of my head with both of her hands, stared hard into my eyes. “Not fair at all, Parker Santé.”

  I had no idea what she was talking about, or who she’d been referring to when she said “him.” Did that mean she had a boyfriend?

  Suddenly she let go of my cheeks and fell onto her back, laughing. “I keep expecting you to answer. But you can’t, can you?” She sat up on an elbow. “You know, some people would say you’re every woman’s fantasy. A man who can only listen.” It was the first time anyone other than my mom had ever referred to me as a man (and when my mom said it, it was always “young man,” with the ironic implication that I wasn’t doing justice to the title). Weirdly, just the word kinda made me feel like one.

  “I’m sure it’ll all make sense in the morning,” she said, calm now. She rested her head against my chest, and a few seconds later, she was asleep. I let her lie there for a while, trying my best not to move. But pretty soon my arm turned numb and prickly, and there was still a bad taste in the back of my throat from all that alcohol. Zelda snorted a little when I rolled her off me.

  I was downstairs drinking a big glass of tap water when I heard it. Distant music, like one of those ice cream trucks that are always chugging around the city during the summer. I thought it was coming from outside, but as I walked back up the stairs, the sound only got louder. It wasn’t until I was back in the attic that I understood what I was hearing.

  Zelda’s phone was ringing.

  I opened up her purse and pulled it out. The ringing finally stopped. I looked over at Zelda, to see if she’d heard anything, but she was dead to the world. A second later the phone dinged. Voice mail.

  I pressed the button before I had time to think about it.

  “Ms. Toth, this is Gabby Greene at the UCSF Medical Center. I’m calling about Nathaniel. Please contact us as soon as you can. It’s urgent.”

  Fucked up, I know, to listen to someone’s voice mail. But you know what’s even more fucked up? Deleting that voice mail, then going into the missed call log and deleting the record that the call ever came in, then going into the phone’s settings and putting the phone on “Do Not Disturb” mode, so no other calls would come in.

  And sure, it was likely that she’d been bullshitting me all along (though the voice mail did bear out two things she’d told me—that her last name was Toth, and that she had some sort of connection to a man named Nathaniel), and that whatever the message was about, it would not result in her jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. But there was also a tiny sliver of a chance that by doing what I’d just done, I’d saved her life. And maybe my own, too.

  I crawled back into bed and passed out.

  SATURDAY,

  NOVEMBER

  1

  WHAT’S IN THE BOX?

  I WOKE UP WITH A head full of cotton balls spiked with broken glass. Every thud of my heartbeat felt like a monkey smacking my brain with a Ping-Pong paddle. Then I remembered the girl in my bed, and the monkey calmed down a bit. Her eyes opened: Pacific Ocean in one, Atlantic in the other. I was afraid she would freak out when she realized she’d spent the night with me.

  “Good morning.” She smiled sleepily, then winced. “Oh my. I can’t remember the last time I had a hangover. We must have coffee, and quickly.”

  We groaned our way out of bed. Zelda didn’t have any other clothes with her, so she ended up in my T-shirt and hoodie, along with the skinny black jeans she’d bought for me at the mall (which fit her surprisingly well). She was getting one of her socks out from under the bed when she found the box.

  “What’s this?”

  I’d almost forgotten it was there. A couple of years ago, my dad’s publisher had sent back a whole bunch of his unpublished work. I guess they’d been thinking about doing some kind of omnibus or something (final verdict: no thanks). My mom said she couldn’t bear to read any of it, so she’d just given it all to me.

  D-a-d, I finger spelled.

  Zelda looked confused. “Bab?”

  D-a-d, I signed again, mouthing the word at the same time.

  “Oh! Your dad! This is his work?”

  I nodded.

  She knelt down next to the box and pulled off the lid, revealing a chaos of papers and file folders and notebooks. Some pages were written in a dense, incomprehensible cursive. Others had been typed on a typewriter. There were pieces in Spanish and pieces in English. There were newspaper clippings and old photographs and a few bound journals labeled Diario.

  “His diaries,” Zelda said, holding one up. “Have you read these?”

  I shook my head. I’d tried once, back when the box first arrived, but the time it took to decipher the scrawl of his handwriting wasn’t worth the boring adult problems he’d written about. Zelda flipped through one of the journals and stopped at a random page.

  “June fifteenth, 2005,” she read. “It’s the same old fight. She says there needs to be more money, I say there will be soon. She says she doesn’t mind working, I say I do mind.” I had no idea Zelda knew Spanish; to be translating on the fly like this was impressive. “And then one of us is shouting, then the other is shouting, then I break something that I can’t afford to break. Then I go for a walk to clear my head, only my head doesn’t clear.” She stopped reading, then set the diary back in the box and replaced the lid. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that.”

  I grabbed my journal and a pen from my desk.
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  It’s nothing I don’t already know, I wrote. He was pretty unhappy.

  “So I see. Why do you think that was?”

  I guess he wasn’t as successful as he wanted to be. His last book sold about two hundred copies.

  “Wasn’t he good?”

  I don’t know. But maybe he didn’t work as hard as he could have. I remember my mom and I came home this one day, and I closed the front door too loudly, and he came running out of his office. This was in the house we used to have, which was way bigger. And he got all angry about how he needed quiet to work. But a while later, I looked through the keyhole, and he was just sitting there playing solitaire and drinking a beer.

  “Maybe that was part of his process.”

  I gave Zelda a yeah right look, so I didn’t have to write it.

  “Did he ever hurt you?”

  Not like that. He wasn’t a bad guy. I think I’m making it sound like he was.

  “There are no bad guys,” Zelda said, putting her hand on mine. “Only in bad movies.”

  I slid the box back under the bed. We finished getting dressed and climbed down from the attic. I could hear my mom banging around in the kitchen below us. We’d have to find some way around her.

  “This is your mom and dad?” Zelda asked, gesturing to the half-dozen framed photos mounted along the wall. I nodded.

  “My God, it’s like a graveyard in here. Is that her bedroom?” Before I could say anything, Zelda had pushed open the door. My mom’s bed was unmade, the pillow still cratered. Her drugs were on the bedside table—Prozac and Tylenol PM—alongside an empty bottle of wine. Zelda seemed more interested in all the photographs. One over the television. Another on the wall next to the windows. A couple propped up on her vanity. Zelda picked up the one right behind the Prozac. Inside a little flowered frame, my dad was sitting at a picnic table, smoking a cigarette. “How long ago did he die?”

  I held up five fingers.

  “And your mom never remarried?” I shook my head. “I shouldn’t be surprised, I suppose. What man would want to make love in a house full of ghosts?”

  It felt deeply weird discussing my mom’s personal life with a near stranger. Actually, it felt weird discussing my mom’s personal life at all. I took Zelda’s hand and pulled her back out into the hallway.

  Stay here, I mouthed, once we reached the top of the stairs.

  “Yes, sir,” Zelda said with mock seriousness.

  In the kitchen, my mom was standing at the stove. The impossibly delicious smell of bacon went to work on my nostrils, momentarily distracting me from my task of getting Zelda out of the house unseen.

  “Morning, sunshine,” my mom said. I tried to sidle past her into the living room. “Hold on a second.” She put one hand on the back of my head and used the other to pull my eyelid down, staring at the crackly redness under my pupil. “You’re hungover!” she announced.

  Like I said, it’s really hard to lie when you can’t speak. I was composing my explanation when both of us were distracted by the telltale creak of something on the stairs. I looked at my mom. She looked at the stairs. I looked at the stairs. My mom looked at me. I looked at her. We both looked at the stairs.

  “Good morning, Ms. Santé,” Zelda said. “I’m Zelda.”

  There is a kind of shock that paralyzes your usual response systems, like when someone says something so totally dickish to you that you can’t think of a coherent comeback until hours later. I could see that my mom was experiencing exactly that kind of shock. Most kids would get in serious trouble for getting drunk and bringing home some random girl; but for me, it represented such a giant leap toward normal teenage behavior, I knew that my mom wouldn’t be able to condemn it. She was stuck between two impossible reactions. The moment stretched out, on and on, underscored by the sizzle of bacon.

  “I guess I’ll have to scramble more eggs,” my mom said.

  “Thank you, Ms. Santé.”

  Zelda and I went into the living room and sat down. I left a whole couch cushion between us—a pretty empty gesture toward modesty, given what my mom must have assumed had already happened last night (but which, tragically, had not). Breakfast was served a few minutes later, along with life-giving coffee.

  “We need anything else?” my mom asked.

  “This all looks wonderful,” Zelda said.

  “Oh, good.”

  There would be no avoiding it now. It was inevitable, like death and taxes and Law & Order being on television at any given point in the day. My mom sat down in the easy chair across from us, took a deep breath, and then . . .

  THE INTERROGATION, PART 1

  “SO, ZELDA, TELL ME ALL about yourself. Where are you from?”

  “Omaha,” Zelda said, without hesitation. And was it just me, or had she just taken on a shade of a Nebraskan accent? “Have you ever been?”

  “I have, actually. I’m a flight attendant for Delta Airlines, so I’ve been all over.”

  “That must be fun. I’ve always found flying so romantic.”

  My mom laughed. “Romantic? Maybe fifty years ago, back when air travel was just for rich people. But those days are long gone.”

  “What a shame. You know, American Airlines used to have a piano bar in coach. Can you imagine? Now you’re lucky if you get a bag of peanuts. And even when you do, it’s impossible to open.”

  “Sounds like you’ve traveled a lot. You an army brat or something?”

  Zelda shook her head. “I suppose I have an incurable case of wanderlust. It’s like Kundera said: ‘In the mind of a woman for whom no place is home the thought of an end to all flight is unbearable.’ ”

  My mom looked bewildered, and I could sympathize—talking to Zelda could be a trippy experience. “So where do you go to school?”

  “The Lycée Français, downtown. Do you know it?”

  Last night, Zelda had told me that she didn’t go to school at all. So had she been lying then, or was she lying now?

  “Of course! How fancy!” My mom put on a terrible French accent. “Parlez-vous?”

  “Bien sûr! Et vous?”

  “Oh, uh, no. Not really. A bit of Spanish is all.”

  “Me gusta español tambien.”

  My mom reached over and smacked me on the kneecap. “What an accomplished young woman you’ve got here, Parky!”

  Don’t I know it, I signed.

  “And where are you planning to go to college, Zelda?”

  “Mostly the same places that Parker is applying, actually.”

  Shit! My mom was never supposed to know about the bargain Zelda and I had struck, mostly because I had no intention of carrying out my side of it. I stared laser-beam death eyes at Zelda, but she went blithely on. “Yeah, things are going so well between us, I figure why not try to stay together at university.”

  My mom had this look on her face like she’d just won the lottery. “This is news to me! Last I heard, he wasn’t applying at all.”

  “He didn’t want you to make some big deal about it,” Zelda said. “With his grades and all, he might not be accepted. But I thought you should know.”

  “Well—this—I—”

  At first I thought my mom was just at a loss for words, then I realized she had started to cry. “I’m sorry, Parker,” she blubbered, “but this is such huge news. And I just wish . . . I just wish Marco was here. He’d—”

  “No doom and gloom this morning, Ms. Santé,” Zelda said, managing to interrupt the sobfest before it could really get going. “We should be celebrating! Do you have any music in here?” She scanned the room until she found the stereo on the shelf below the television. “Perfect.”

  She switched it on and turned the station to some fast, old-timey jazz.

  “Come on,” she said, putting out a hand to me. “I spent all last night dancing to the music you like. Now it’s your turn.”

  I stood up, and she immediately pulled me close. We danced cheek to cheek, with one arm held straight out as if we were pulling back t
he string of a bow together.

  “I love this kind of music!” my mom said. She wiped at her eyes, then stood up and began bopping around the room in an adorable old-person sort of way. After thirty seconds or so, she collapsed back onto the couch. “I’m too old for dancing.”

  “Nonsense!” Zelda said. “You’re not even the oldest person in the room!”

  My mom laughed, mostly out of confusion, and before long started to dance again. The three of us kept on going like that for a good twenty minutes, and I realized this was maybe the purest, most uncomplicated joy there’d been inside the house for a long time.

  IN THE JAPANESE TEA GARDEN

  I KNOW THIS MIGHT BE hard to believe, but back in elementary school, before I became the famously speechless recluse I am today, I actually had a best friend. His name was John, and we spent every available minute playing together in Golden Gate Park. We would pretend to be wizards and warriors from our favorite video games, wielding dead branches as swords and lobbing pinecones as if they were fireballs. It didn’t take us long to colonize every area of the park, like some upstart imperial power planting its flag in an already inhabited land. I still have some of the maps we drew up, with all their tantalizing geographic inventions: Goblin’s Graveyard, the Terrortory, the Lake of Giant Piranha, Singed Mountain. Across these landscapes we waged an epic and unending war against a nameless evil, which is to say we ran around kicking and punching at the air for a few minutes at a time and then declaring victory. To everyone else in the park, it probably looked as if two kids were simultaneously having a twenty-minute epileptic seizure. But in our heads, we were nothing short of heroes.