Chasing Forgiveness

  Mom is always talking about how Weavin’ Warren picks her up in his Ferrari and drives really fast on the freeway. I’ve never actually met him, but Mom says I will. I really want to meet him just as much as I really don’t want to meet him.

  Russ throws the ball, and it slips through my fingers, bouncing wildly on the grass. It makes me mad, because I never miss a good pass. I throw the ball back to him. “Try it again,” I say. Russ mumbles about how perfect a pass it was, and I go out a third time.

  It’s this escrow business that’s making me feel so lousy. It’s not just our house but our whole lives that are in escrow. It’s like we’re all floating in this stupid place where everything is maybe here and maybe there. The only thing I can count on for sure is math quizzes on Friday, and that’s not too thrilling.

  Maybe when escrow’s over and the house is sold, everything will be okay. Maybe I’ll get used to the idea of me, Mom, and Tyler spending our days with Weavin’ Warren Sharp.

  But even as I think about it, I get chills running up and down my spine, and my skin shrinks away from the air around it, as if I’ve received the full potential of a severe gross-out. I don’t know. Does this mean I’m prejudiced?

  The spinning football cuts through the windy gray sky, out of my reach, but I dive for the thing. I won’t miss this one—this pass is mine. I skin my elbows against the ground, but the ball lands in my arms, and I pull it close to me so it doesn’t have a chance to escape.

  “Touchdown!” yells Russ, but I will not spike the ball like Weavin’ Warren Sharp. I will not do his little dance—not now, not ever. No matter how fast he drives me in his Ferrari.

  • • •

  It would be easy, I say to myself, to just hang around and wait until everything works out, like Grandma says it will. I could just go to school and play ball and go to track practice and come home and eat and watch TV and go to bed, letting everyone else make my decisions for me. They’ll do that if I let them. Maybe that’s okay for Tyler—he’s only six—but it’s not okay for me. I’ll be making my own decision today.

  Alone in my room, I close my shutters, jump onto my bed, and cry a little into the pillow when I think about how quickly everything seems to have fallen apart. I don’t cry a lot, just enough to get some of the lousiness out of me. Kind of like letting a drop of air out of a bicycle tire so it doesn’t blow up. I cry just a little—the air gets out, and the sadness turns itself into anger, which is fine. I like being angry a whole lot more than being sad.

  Tyler comes in, turns on the television, and flicks the stations until he finds some old cartoon. Tyler is not sad or angry. He’s just there.

  I can’t stand the way he sits there, so calm and quiet—so I turn off the TV, and Tyler turns it back on, and I turn it off again.

  “Preston!” he whines.

  “Keep it off, or get out,” I tell him in a really mean tone of voice. The kind of tone that Mom hates for me to use on him.

  Smiling Tyler doesn’t smile at this.

  Tears form in his eyes. Good. It’s about time he cried about something that went on in this house.

  He lies on the floor and sobs. I let him. I lie on my back looking up at the rough gritty texture of the ceiling. It’s like looking at clouds. If you look long enough you can see shapes up there. Circles. Animals. You can find whatever you’re looking for. I’ve seen lots of things. I’ve seen an elephant . . . a house . . . Jesus . . . Weavin’ Warren’s Ferrari. Only thing is, once you blink, it’s gone, and you can never find the same thing again.

  I begin to wonder if the house we move into after escrow will have the same rough-textured ceilings—or if they’ll be flat and empty.

  I get up and leave the room to tell Mom what I have decided to tell her.

  In the kitchen, Mom has just gotten off the phone.

  “That was Aunt Jackie,” she says. “I think we’ll all be moving in with her for a while, when we move out of here.” And then she adds, “You, me, and Tyler,” just in case I might have thought Dad was included in the package.

  I watch Mom as she sets some water boiling. Even doing something as simple as boiling water, she is beautiful. Her long bouncy blond hair is the kind you see on shampoo commercials. The soft curves of her face and her smile could win the Miss America contest—and her face doesn’t show a single sign of age, like some of my friends’ moms.

  There’s something different about her now. It’s something good, yet somehow it scares me. It’s the way she moves as she cooks our spaghetti dinner—she cooks with confidence and control, as if she knows what she’s doing and she’s glad about it. Everything about her is like that nowadays. It’s as if being away from Dad has given Mom her life back. It’s as if she’s happy. I don’t know how she could be happy without Dad—I wouldn’t be.

  Mom turns to me and squints a little bit. She reads something on my face, but she doesn’t read it right. “Don’t you want to live with Aunt Jackie?” she asks. “It’ll be great, just like it used to be—remember?”

  “Yeah,” I say, but I really don’t remember much about when Aunt Jackie lived with us when I was little. I know she took care of me and that’s why we’re so close. It’s like she was my second mom. But it’ll be different now. She’s been married and divorced since then. She has two kids of her own to take care of, and even though she has a nice house, I can’t imagine the six of us all fitting into it.

  Mom tosses the spaghetti sauce into the microwave and nukes it on low, so it’ll be ready when the spaghetti is. Then she goes into the living room, clicks on the TV, and melts onto the couch, rolling the kink out of her neck and sighing. “It was a hard day at the bank,” she says, but it’s always a hard day at the bank.

  Dad thinks it’s her attitude and not the bank, but Mom has her own view of things. “I have no room to grow,” she says when she talks to people about the bank and about her life at home. Room to grow. When she says that, I picture one of her big potted plants in a tiny ceramic pot. It gets lots of sun and water, but it’s still dying because it’s choking on its own roots. Mom’s like that. But just because Mom needs to be transplanted doesn’t mean that I do.

  I stand off to the side of the TV and clear my throat.

  “I want to go to Grandma and Grandpa’s,” I tell her.

  “Dinner will be ready in five minutes,” she says.

  “After dinner, then.”

  She reads my face again, but once more she gets it wrong. “Don’t come home too late,” she tells me. “It’s a school night.”

  “No,” I say. “I mean I want to go there . . . to stay.” I clear my throat again. I can’t look her in the face. “I want to live with Dad.”

  There, I’ve said it. I figure she’ll probably cry and it’ll make me cry. She’ll think I hate her.

  “It’s up to you, Preston,” she says. “I know your dad wants you with him. If you want to move in with him, it’s okay with me.” And that’s all she has to say about it. I try to read Mom’s face, but the book is closed. I don’t know what she’s thinking or feeling. If she is angry or hurt she certainly isn’t showing it.

  I want to explain to her all the reasons. I want to tell her that I’m worried about Dad, because even though he’s with Grandma and Grandpa, he’s really all alone without us. Without me. Tyler’s always been sort of a mother’s boy, but Dad and I—well, we just have to be together now.

  I think it would be a tragedy if we weren’t together, and Dad’s had enough tragedies in his lifetime. When he was a kid, his sister drowned right in front of his eyes while he was trying to save her. His father—Grandpa Scott—had a nervous breakdown because if it, and Dad has had to live with the memory all his life. He’s always said that Mom and Tyler and me were the only good things to ever happen to him. If he loses us all it’ll be like his sister drowning all over again. I have to be with him.

  I want to tell Mom all this. I want to tell her that it doesn’t mean I don’t love her—I do—I love her more than anything .
. . but the microwave beeps before I can say anything, like the bell at the end of the round.

  Mom smiles warmly at me, as if to say it’s all right, and gets up to check the spaghetti. “Call your brother in for dinner,” she says. So I turn and do as I’m told. I don’t have to explain it to her now. When things settle down, there’ll be plenty of time for explaining.

  • • •

  Back in my room, Tyler still lies on his back on the floor, staring up at the pattern of the ceiling, his eyes darting back and forth like he’s watching a movie. I don’t tell him that I won’t be living in the same house with him anymore. I don’t even tell him that dinner’s ready. I need a moment to think. Just a moment to be in the world away from Mom and away from Dad. I jump onto my bed and join Tyler in surveying the ceiling.

  “What do you see?” he asks.

  I squint and try to focus on the coarse grain of the ceiling. “Nothing,” I tell him.

  “I see a pony,” he says. “And I see a big shaggy dog.” He points up at them like he’s pointing to stars. “You see?”

  “No,” I tell him. As I lie on my bed, the ceiling shows me nothing today.

  4

  THE MYSTERY HOUSE

  Saturday, March 3—Five Days Left

  “I’m not gonna tell you,” says Dad, shifting into second gear.

  “Aw, c’mon!” The car smells of new rubber from the wetsuit that he surprised me with today. I know it’s just one of several surprises he has planned, and now I know that moving in with him was the right thing to do.

  “Nope, I won’t tell.” Dad’s got a smile on his face. He loves when he can string me along like this. I kind of love it, too, and I let him play, because it seems to be the most fun he’s had in a long, long time.

  “C’mon, Dad,” I ask. “How close to the beach is it?”

  “You’re just gonna have to wait and see.”

  If he bought me a wetsuit, that must be a hint that it’s pretty close to the beach. I can’t stand the suspense.

  We turn onto Pacific Coast Highway. It’s pretty warm for March; people in shorts walk along the sidewalk. Kids ride by on bicycles, steering with one hand and carrying boogie boards with the other. This is definitely a good day.

  Dad’s looking good, considering. Actually, he’s not looking very good at all, but he’s looking better than he did a few days ago. He’s thin. His face looks like it’s caving in on itself. He’s thirty-one, but he looks like he’s much older than that. And his eyes—that’s been the scary thing these past few weeks. They just keep sinking into his head, getting darker. He’s lost weight, too—twenty, maybe thirty, pounds. That’s a lot for a man as thin as he is. He doesn’t eat much at dinner, even though Grandma Lorraine is a great cook. He doesn’t eat much at all. Lately I’ve been afraid he’s gonna starve himself to death, but today I stop worrying. Today he had a Big Mac and fries, and he’s smiling. This is definitely a very good sign.

  He turns up a street that heads down toward the shore—one block, two blocks. Then the road dead-ends right at the sand ahead of us. Dad turns into a driveway. A two-story duplex house, three houses from the beach!

  “Aw, no way!” I say. “I can’t believe we did it. We bought a house by the ocean!”

  “Not bought it,” he tells me, “rented it.”

  He jiggles the keys in front of me. We go up to the front door, and I think, People live their whole lives hoping to one day get the chance to live in a place on the beach. And this house is ours.

  Inside, the walls are bright with a fresh coat of white paint. The beige carpet is new. Although from the front the house looks kind of dinky, it’s very long, and much larger than it seems.

  The kitchen is huge. “I made sure to get a place with a nice big kitchen,” says Dad. “For Mom.”

  “Look here.” Dad strides to the middle of the empty living room. “Our couch can go here,” he says, pointing to the wall beside the big brick fireplace. “And the TV there,” he says, pointing to the corner. Then he walks over to the hardwood floor of the dining room. “We’ll get a better dining set,” he says, and then we walk down the hall toward the bedrooms.

  I can picture it. I can see everything. I can smell chicken frying in the kitchen, I can hear the cartoons on TV, and I can see Tyler sitting in front of it and Mom complaining that he’s sitting too close. I can even see myself coming home after school and collapsing on our couch, right here in this living room.

  “This’ll be your room,” says Dad, swinging a bedroom door wide. “You’ll still have your own room. And the one across the hall will be Tyler’s. And this . . .”—he opens the door at the end of the hall into a huge bedroom—“this will be your mom’s and my bedroom. . . . And—get this, Preston—your school is three blocks away—and right on the beach! What do you think of that?”

  My head is spinning. It’s all coming at me so fast, I almost forget the one small detail that sort of screws everything up.

  “But . . . ,” I say. “But you and Mom . . . you’re separated.”

  Dad smiles, sure of himself. Very sure of himself. “Not anymore,” he says—and those were the words I’ve been praying to hear for a month now. “I mean,” he corrects, “once Mom sees this place, and sees that everything’s okay again, everything will be okay again, right?”

  I want to believe him. I want to believe that a big house and a nice car will make everything okay between them. But the way Mom talks it doesn’t seem like getting back together with Dad is part of her immediate plans. From what I can see she’s going on full-speed ahead without him, and as I look at this big beautiful home Dad rented, I think how weird it is that two people like my parents can be living in the same city and yet be on two completely different planets.

  I wonder which planet I should be on. Mom’s planet is flying out of orbit, heading off toward faraway stars, but Dad’s is big and warm and has welcome-home banners plastered all over the place—and I’m tired of being in escrow.

  “Do you like it?” Dad asks.

  “It’s great,” I tell him, and give him this giant hug. “I can’t wait till we move in. When can we move in?”

  “As soon as your mom and I square things away,” he tells me. “Maybe a week. Maybe two.”

  And it’s as easy as that. I never knew how easy it was to believe someone, I mean really believe them. And that night, for the first time in a long time, I feel comfortable and relaxed when I get into bed. In my dreams I can hear the soft hiss of the ocean pounding against the shore far below my new bedroom. Just another week. I know it will happen, because Dad promised, and my father’s not the kind of man to break his promises.

  5

  CHASING LIMOS

  Sunday, March 4—Four Days Left

  The moment we step up to the door of our old house, I know that something isn’t right—but I don’t say anything to Dad. Maybe if I don’t say anything it will be okay.

  Dad glances at me, then lifts his hand and knocks on the door. He has the keys—I know he has the keys; heck, it’s still his house—but still he knocks, and it only makes me feel worse.

  Neither Mom nor Tyler comes to the door, so Dad fumbles with his keys and opens it himself.

  Inside it is cold. Cold and still. It’s noon, and outside the day has turned sunny, but inside the curtains are drawn, and the nighttime chill has been trapped in. It even smells cold. I wonder how long it’s been since the heater has been on. It couldn’t be more than two days, but it feels like the place has been closed up all winter.

  “That’s odd,” mumbles Dad. “The plants are gone.”

  Now I realize what gave me that creepy feeling when we first walked up. Mom’s ferns—the ones that sat in big ceramic pots on either side of the front door—were not there. All that was left were brown dirt stains on the concrete.

  And the plants in the house—our living room’s always been like a jungle and our kitchen a rain forest, both filled with big leafy green things Mom had grown from tiny seedlings and c
uttings—they were gone, too.

  “Well,” said Dad, “she probably took them to Aunt Jackie’s.”

  But why take the plants? Was she afraid Dad and I wouldn’t water them when we came?

  Since Mom and Tyler are staying with Aunt Jackie, Dad thought it would be all right to move back in here until escrow was over and the new owners could move in.

  It’s been two weeks since I’ve seen either Mom or Tyler, and I was kind of hoping we’d bump into them as we moved back in . . . but who am I kidding? Mom has been out of here for days.

  She wasn’t going to risk bumping into Dad, I say to myself, but quickly shake the thought away. No, I correct my brain, she just wanted to make sure the place was ready for us.

  But why the plants? Why not wait until the movers came and moved everything into our new house by the beach?

  Dad and I walk slowly through the house, almost tiptoeing as if we were burglars, trying not to wake the sleeping people. In a way, it almost looks as if burglars have already been here. Some of the paintings have vanished off the walls. Some of the knickknacks have disappeared from the shelves—only Mom’s favorites. And the house is so very, very cold.

  Out back the pool is full of leaves and is turning cloudy green. Taking care of the pool was always one of my father’s chores. I guess Mom didn’t take it over when Dad left.

  The door to Dad and Mom’s room is ajar, and Dad slowly pushes it open.

  I am not ready for what I see in there. Not so much what I see, but what I don’t see—and in an instant, feelings I thought I had taken real good care of suddenly blow up out of nowhere, like an over-inflated tire. I can almost hear the explosion inside of me.

  This is not my parents’ room.

  Not anymore.