“Everyone’s too good to me,” says Dad, drying his eyes. I go over to him and he gives me an awkward hug. I don’t feel anywhere near as emotional as Dad does now, and I feel a bit weird about how he’s acting. I can’t see what the big deal is.
“I made an oath when I was in prison, you know,” he says. “I swore that when I got out—and if you still wanted me—I would spend my life making sure that I was the best dad I could ever be. I’m going to take you places, I’ll buy you whatever you want. I know things can’t be the way they used to be, but . . .”
“But they’re going to be better,” I say.
He smiles and hugs me tightly, and no matter how old I am, when my dad hugs me, I can believe anything’s possible.
• • •
But Tyler still doesn’t quite get it.
And sometimes it makes me mad.
Not long after Dad moves in with us, we get a call from Tyler’s teacher. I’m at track practice, so I don’t know a thing about it until I get home. By then, things are in a sorry state. Grandpa’s pacing back and forth in the living room. Grandma’s gone off to speak with Tyler’s teacher, and Tyler is in his room with the door closed.
The only bit of good luck about this situation is that Dad isn’t home from work yet.
I ask Grandpa what happened, but all Grandpa says is, “Maybe you ought to talk to him. Your grandma and I talked to him, but I don’t know if we’re getting through.”
I know what they mean. Tyler is still Smiling Tyler. Even when he’s not smiling he has this kind of glazed look in his eyes, and you don’t know whether he’s listening to you or thinking about yesterday’s sports scores.
I go into his room. Tyler is lying on his bed, calmly throwing a ball into the air and catching it.
“You get into trouble at school?” I ask him. “You cheat on a test or something?”
“I just asked a question,” he says, never breaking the rhythm of the game of catch he’s having with himself.
“What did you ask?”
“Just a question.”
“What kind of question makes Grandma have to run off to speak with your teacher?”
“Beats me,” says Tyler. “It was just a question.”
The ball goes up; the ball comes down. I’m losing my patience. “Why don’t you tell me what you asked?”
“It was just a question,” he says, “that’s all.” He hurls the ball harder. It hits the ceiling and comes back down hard against his chest. He grabs it and smashes it against the ceiling again.
I take the ball away from him, feeling my temper, which always hangs by a thread, begin to fray.
“Do I have to punch you out to get you to talk?”
“It was just a question!” he screams, already in tears at the thought of being punched out. He’s such a basket case sometimes. “Just leave me alone.”
Tyler rolls over and sobs, with no sign of stopping. I’ll get nothing out of him, so I go ask Grandpa again.
Grandpa, who is still wandering aimlessly in the kitchen, seems not to want to tell me either, but finally he gives in.
“He asked his teacher,” says Grandpa, “if it’s all right to kill someone.”
Just hearing the words, and knowing the fact that Tyler asked them, makes me furious, and afraid. What did he mean by asking that?
“Now they’ll probably want him to go into therapy,” says Grandpa.
“He doesn’t need therapy,” I tell him. “He needs to be straightened out.” And I head back off into his room to do just that.
“Preston!” says Grandpa, concerned that I might hurt him or something.
“I’m just gonna talk to him,” I tell Grandpa as I push my way back into Tyler’s room.
Tyler is still sobbing on the bed, rolled halfway into a ball, facing the wall.
“It was just a question,” says Tyler, between his sobs. I grab him, sit him up, and shake him.
“Where the heck do you get off asking a question like that?” But doing this only makes him sob harder, so I stop shaking him, and hold him firm. I know what I want to say to him. Maybe it’s not what Grandpa wants to say, but it’s what I want to say. And if Grandpa were one of Danny Scott’s sons, he would understand.
“Tyler,” I say, “look at me. Stop crying and look at me now!” Tyler listens. He holds down his sobs; his face fades from scarlet to pink.
“You are never to ask anything like that ever again to anyone, do you understand me? Do you understand?”
“Yes,” he mutters.
“You don’t talk about Mom, and you don’t talk about death, to your teachers or to Dad or to anyone. And what happened to Mom, now that Dad’s back, you have to pretend like it never happened.”
“But it did happen.”
“I don’t care!” I tell him. “You pretend like it didn’t. You want to think about Mom, fine. You think about her when you’re in your room. You cry by yourself, but you never let Dad see it. And any other time, you do like I do; you push it way, way down inside you until you can’t feel it anymore. You be a man.”
He’s crying harder again; yet through his tears, I hear him whisper, “I miss her.”
I loosen my grip on Tyler’s arms, and I slip my hands around his back, hugging him tightly. He needs this hug. He needs this hug like I needed Grandma’s hand on the witness stand. “I do too, Tyler,” I whisper back.
“But I won’t tell anyone,” he says. “I won’t tell.”
19
INTERFERENCE
March—Three Years After
Tyler and I are a team in no time at all. We learn all the ins and outs of life with Dad as quickly as we can: the knowledge of things to talk about and not talk about, the art of steering conversations away from certain topics. We run interference for my dad, because he needs protection. I know this. He needs protection from people and things around him.
• • •
We protect Dad from the television.
A news show comes on one night while Dad and I are stretched out on the couch in the den—a grisly story about a man who axed his family. Nothing like Dad, but still it’s about murder, and it’s about a family. If Dad sees it, he’ll think about what happened to Mom—but the problem is I can’t just change the channel, because if I change it, he’ll know why I did, and that would be just as bad as him seeing it. I look at the TV guide. There’s nothing much else to watch, so changing the channel now would be a really suspicious thing to do.
I casually get up and find Tyler in the kitchen, trying without luck to spoon out some rock-hard ice cream that has been in the back of our freezer.
“You need help with math now,” I tell him quietly.
“Okay,” he says. He leaves the ice cream to thaw and goes up to Dad in the den. “Dad, I need help with my math,” he says. Dad is so eager to be of help that he jumps up and follows Tyler into his room.
“Math is easy, Tyler,” says Dad. “It’s just a matter of patience.” Tyler finds his workbook and turns to a page in a unit they probably haven’t even started on in school. He keeps Dad away from the TV for at least half an hour.
• • •
We protect Dad from kids at school.
Dad picks me up after track practice one day. I can see him waiting by the edge of the field watching me finish up my last few laps. I think about my friends. Jason likes my dad—the three of us always play basketball in my driveway.
“If they let him out of prison,” Jason once told me, “then they must have had a good reason to, so it doesn’t bother me.” Most of my friends think that way. But not everyone in school is my friend—and as I look around, I can see that all the other sports are letting out at the same time. Some of these kids know, or might figure out, that this man is my father. I know some kids who would keep their distance and yell nasty things at him and snicker—like they used to do to me.
So I leave practice straight from the field, without changing in the locker room.
“You should shower, P
reston,” Dad says.
“Showers are broken,” I tell him. “I’ll shower at home.”
“How about your books?”
“No homework.”
We get into the car and get away from that school as quickly as we can.
• • •
We protect Dad from women in church—the single or divorced women who see Dad as an attractive man all alone with two boys and think he’s “available.” He needs protection from them, too—no doubt about that. Dad’s polite when he talks to them, but we make sure it ends there. He knows Tyler and I never want another mom.
He’s not available. Period.
At one church gathering, a woman with skinny legs and hair that’s too short slithers through the crowd toward my father. I spot her coming a mile away. Dad stands nearby, alone and vulnerable.
Next to me Grandma talks with one of her friends who is complaining about back pains. Thinking quickly I turn to Grandma’s friend and say, “My dad knows exercises that would be good for your back.”
Dad turns to me and chuckles. “I do?”
“Sure,” I say. “You lift weights, right? You know all about exercises and stuff.”
Dad seems baffled, but Grandma’s friend looks toward him for some serious advice, so he fakes his way through it.
Meanwhile the skinny-legged woman lingers on the sidelines, patiently sipping a Coke, waiting to pounce as soon as Dad stops talking.
I “accidentally” brush past her, and her Coke spills all over her too-skinny dress.
“Excuse me,” I say, then turn back to see her heading toward the ladies’ room and away from Dad.
• • •
We protect Dad from family get-togethers—and that’s the hardest interference play to run.
On Easter Sunday, Tyler and I conspire to play a game called “Where’s Uncle Steve?” It’s a game I think we’ll have to play for a very, very long time.
The game goes like this: the whole family comes over to Grandma and Grandpa’s. We must know where Dad is at all times. We make sure that no one is talking about Mom in any room that my dad might enter. We make sure our younger cousins—who don’t know any better—don’t say anything stupid.
And we keep Dad away from Uncle Steve any way we can—because I know that if Uncle Steve and my dad as much as looked each other in the eye, there’d be a nuclear explosion that would obliterate our entire town, lake and all.
“You took him into your home?” I remember Uncle Steve screaming when he heard about Dad moving in with us. Uncle Steve never screams. He’s the quietest guy I know. “You took that killer into your home and let him live with you—eat your food?”
Grandma and Grandpa both had to talk him down. This is the same man Dad used to take fishing when Uncle Steve was “Piggy Poodle” and only ten years old. Dad was like a big brother to him. But none of that seems to matter anymore.
“How can I forgive him?” yells Uncle Steve. “He stole my sister from me—your daughter. And how did he pay? He spends a couple of years in jail, and now he’s out, and life’s wonderful? Is that it? Everything can be the way it was before—is that what he thinks? Well, it can’t be. He has no right to think it will be, and you have no business trying to make it like it never happened.”
I have nightmares when I think of what might happen if Uncle Steve actually ever spoke to my dad.
For the first part of the long Easter afternoon, Uncle Steve sits in the living room, making conversation, so I challenge Dad to a game of one-on-one on our driveway basketball court. When Uncle Steve comes out front to have a look at Aunt Jackie’s new car, Tyler lures Dad into the backyard to watch him do flips off the diving board. When it’s time for dinner, and Dad may actually have to pass the potatoes to Uncle Steve, I insist on eating at the big table—because I know there’s not enough room.
“Daddy, can you eat with us?” asks Tyler, clinging onto Dad’s arm and pointing at the kitchen table that is reserved for all the kids, and the problem is solved. Dad agrees, and eats in a different room from Uncle Steve.
It’s after dinner, during the final quarter of our “game,” that Tyler and I begin to get sloppy. We are full of food, and we’re lulled into a false sense of security as we listen to Aunt Jackie and her rich fiancé, Gary, talk about how well Jackie’s interior-decorating business is doing and how, when they get married, he’s going to build her a dream house that she can design and decorate. They talk about their dreams together, and I get all caught up in it because I think it’s the same fantasy Mom always had—a successful business of her own and a husband who loves her but is also rich. If Mom were still here, she and Aunt Jackie might have gone into business together, and then they would have finally gotten over their little jealousies. It was silly, but Mom always thought that Aunt Jackie was more successful than her, and Aunt Jackie always thought that Mom was prettier.
Then I suddenly come back to earth and realize that no one is keeping track of Dad and Uncle Steve.
It is now that Tyler and I realize that they didn’t need us to play the game for them—they play it fine all by themselves. When my dad walks into a room, Uncle Steve stops the conversation and walks out.
Then when Uncle Steve walks into a room, Dad disappears, silently dissolving into the woodwork.
Uncle Steve looks at Dad only once during the whole day—almost by accident, on his way out the door with his family. Dad happens to step into the foyer as they’re leaving, and Grandma takes his hand, as if to reassure him he’s still part of the family. That’s all fine and good, but now Dad’s stuck there in the same room as Uncle Steve. Uncle Steve says good-bye to everyone, except my father. Instead he throws my father a gaze that’s both burning hot and icy cold at the same time. Then he looks at Grandpa once and turns to follow his wife and kids out the door.
I know what he was thinking when he looked at Grandpa—it’s the same thing he was thinking the last time he was over.
“It’s an awful thing you’re doing, taking him in like this,” he told Grandma and Grandpa. “It’s awful.”
Once he is gone and the door is closed, I breathe a sigh of relief.
• • •
I can’t stay in that house after Easter dinner; I have to get out and away from all the bad feelings. I hurry down the street, my walk becoming a jog, and my jog becoming a sprint. I can feel dinner bouncing up and down in my stomach as I run. I get to my school as fast as I would have if I had been on my bike. And once I’m there I begin circling the track, trying to purge my mind of Dad and Uncle Steve.
It’s an awful thing you’re doing.
My lungs feel as if they’re going to burst, but I push harder, and harder. There are no hurdles out on the track, so I imagine them. I start to leap the imaginary hurdles, but all I can see are the hurdles falling as my foot bangs into them.
Your daughter is rolling over in her grave.
I leap higher and higher, but in my mind the hurdles continue to fall.
Life would be so much easier without people telling us what we’re supposed to feel—what we’re supposed to do. Life would be so much easier if everyone left us alone.
But now I am completely alone. There is nothing but the track, and that’s the way I like it. And I keep bounding over the hurdles until I clear them and they stop falling down.
20
DAD’S LOBOTOMY
March—Four Years After
The gunshot rings in my ears.
I explode from the starting blocks with controlled fury. I hold nothing back. Just because I am the favorite to win doesn’t mean I can’t be taken.
Nothing but the track. Forget the cheering crowds; forget everything but the hurdle looming up in front of me.
The runners—who all began staggered twenty feet ahead of each other to make up for yards lost or gained in the turns—are closing in behind me as I close in on the ones in front of me.
I throw my right leg out and leap. The hurdle sails beneath me and rocks slightly with the
wind of my passage. My foot makes contact with the ground once more. I pound through the dirt to the next hurdle and fly above that one as well, and the next, and the next.
Now we are in the straightaway. I am neck and neck with the star hurdler from the other team. It’s him or me.
So far today I’ve won both the 200-meter and 400-meter sprints. I won’t lose this one.
I turn on my second stage and blast in front of him, leaving him far enough behind so that I can’t even hear the pounding of his feet. Only my own.
I cross the finish line but don’t slow down even though I know I’ve already won.
• • •
Grandpa Wes, who has been my private coach and trainer this year, is already on the field to congratulate me.
“Fine run, Preston,” he says, patting me on my sweaty back.
“Thirty-nine point two seconds—that’s your best time this season.”
I shake my head. “Not good enough. It should be down to thirty-nine flat by now.”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” he says. “You’re only fifteen—you’ve got time.”
“You’re my coach, Grandpa—you’re supposed to push me,” I tell him.
He laughs. “Preston, you’re the fastest hurdler on the team and you’re only a freshman. What more do you want?”
I smile at him. “The hundred-meter dash.”
• • •
When the meet is over, the magic fades from the field, just as it does after a football game. The cheers of the crowd are replaced by thinning murmurs as everyone leaves. My stubborn single-mindedness is replaced with all those thoughts and feelings I can get away from when I’m running. Like the fourth anniversary of Mom’s death less than a month away. Thursdays in March hang over me each year like the blackest of clouds. That day never seems to get any farther away or any less painful.
My teammates’ families filter onto the field. Mothers hug their sons, and my teammates, feeling too old for that, squirm out of the embraces. They don’t know what they have.