The Wishing Box: A Novel, page 27
“I guess things didn’t work out too well with me and your mother or your sister, but I’m glad I’ve gotten to know you and Steven. I always thought you and I were alike in some way.”
“We could almost be related,” I said to deflect the little swell of joy that rose up at those words.
The sidewalk had fallen away and we were walking in the street now, stepping over railroad tracks and around the ruts in the decaying asphalt. We had come into the scabby warehouse district that tapers off from downtown. The street was clumped with weeds and trash and soggy cardboard boxes. Beside me, my father seemed to be turning out the pockets of his mind, looking for a story to tell.
“Hey, I didn’t tell you what happened on my way over to your office. I’m standing right in front of your building and a man comes over to me and he asks if I want to buy a pair of pants. I shake my head without really looking at him, because the man had a bit of a perfume to him and it wasn’t Chanel number 5. But then I look down and I catch sight of two bony little knees. And when I look up a little higher, I see that Mr. Pants Salesman is standing there in his skivvies. The man was trying to sell me the pants off his ass! Now, that’s entrepreneurship!”
I had to laugh. My father was standing with his knees half bent, imitating the bare-legged pants vendor. “That was James, I’ll bet you anything,” I told him. “He’s completely nuts. He comes into the resource center sometimes and starts screaming that he’s the head librarian and Monique and I have to leave.”
“I’m glad you like your job, Princess. You can keep it.”
“Thank you, I think I will.”
My father rubbed his head, and I could see that there was something he wanted to talk about but wasn’t sure how to raise. “Listen, your mother left before I could make things straight with her the way I meant. Financially I mean. I have a little money saved, and I wanted to give some to all of you, but I didn’t want it to seem as if . . .” He trailed off and stuck his hands in his pockets. “You know. As if that would make it up.”
I stared at him. I had spent November in the worst financial panic of my life and he hadn’t said a word about this. I could have killed him, and myself for being so accommodating that I hadn’t even asked him for help paying the rent.
“How much money are we talking about here?”
“Don’t get your hopes up, I’m not a millionaire. But I thought with fifteen thousand you might be able to do something you couldn’t do before.” He had his eyes fastened on the pockmarked ground. I tried to think about all the things I could do with my windfall, but I kept suspecting that there was about to be a quid pro quo.
My father quickened his step and I lengthened my stride to match him. We were almost racing. “Look,” he finally blurted. “If I leave, am I leaving again? You know, even fathers who stuck around go on a trip once in a while.”
So that was it. We came to the edge of Jack London Square and began walking across the cobblestones toward the water. I couldn’t speak. The Bay was the color of pale pea soup and flecked with whitecaps. I imagined a crowd of runners digging up the surface of the water with their heels. They came at us in briny gusts, spattering us with their sweat, and it seemed that they howled something in my ears as they hurtled past.
Say it, I told myself. After all this time, you can say it.
“Don’t go.”
The wind was making my father’s eyes tear. He squinted them and hunched his shoulders. “Aw, don’t say that. Come on, Julia. You’re a big girl now.”
“So?” We stood at the railing, with the antsy sea below us. I looked out at the tankers at the edge of the channel and the ugly little pleasure boats moored in the marina on the other side. I didn’t feel like a big girl at all. I felt like I was seven years old and one of those ungainly container ships was pulling itself out of the harbor of my chest. “I don’t want to do this again. Why did you come back if you were just going to leave again?”
He leaned his elbows on the railing and wedged his head between his hands. I could see his miserable posture from the corner of my eye, but I wouldn’t look at him. Who was he, anyway? A phantom, who had missed all the years that bridged this moment to the one twenty-two years before, when I had woken up to find him gone.
“Oh Christ, don’t cry. It would just be a little trip. I’ll be back.”
So I was crying. I stood looking out at the port, with the wind slicing past my cheeks, murmuring in my ears, making the tears hot against its cold.
After a moment my father put his arms around me and drew me to him. I sobbed into his jacket collar, all the sobs that had nothing to do with now and everything to do with then. They rolled out of my throat, round and hard and bruising as hard-boiled eggs. I hunkered down into his chest and let the wails erupt one after another like years passing, until I felt myself coming back to the present and I sniffled.
“Okay, sweetheart?” I felt him kiss the top of my head. Then one of the hands around me drew back and he rummaged in his pocket. He tilted my head back and began dabbing at my face with a handkerchief.
It was such an old-fashioned, old-man thing to do that I had to smile. And it was so like my father to want to mop up my face right away, to end the embarrassing moment and wipe away all traces of it. It was enough to start me crying again.
“I’m sorry.” I took the handkerchief from him and blew my nose.
My father met my eyes, and his face, for once, was still. I could see the groove on the side of his face that his smile had etched, but he didn’t smile. I wanted him to explain himself to me, but maybe there was nothing more to explain.
“I’ll stay in touch,” he said. “I’ll call.” Then he turned back to the gray-green channel of the port and let the wind whip his face as if meting out some tiny punishment.
The night after my father left, Steven woke up crying. I was sitting in the kitchen paying bills and listening to the radio. I didn’t hear him at first. Thanks to my father’s gift, we had money in the bank and it was a pleasure to be able to write the long-delayed checks to the phone company and Pacific Gas & Electric and make the first payment on the used Honda I bought to replace the one that had been stolen. I sang along with the radio’s sappy soul ballads and wrote the checks out in my most extravagant handwriting. My life. Maybe at last I was getting a handle on it.
“Mom?”
Steven’s voice was sleep-drenched and quavery, a low moan that sounded like it still had bits of dreams stuck to it.
“Mom?”
When I went into his bedroom, he was sitting up in his bed with his arms wrapped around himself.
“What is it?”
“I dreamed you were gone again. I dreamed you went back to that room.” He blinked hard, fighting off the pictures.
I sat down beside him and leaned against the headboard so he could climb into my lap. “It’s okay. I’m here. I’m not going anywhere.” I pulled the blankets over both of us and rocked him. He smelled crumbly and sweet, like cookies. My love for him was too big to fit inside my body. It was stretching me, hollowing me out. And just under the taut balloon-skin of my chest was the nubby, rankling memory of having left him. It was always going to be there, a piece of glass, a sharp shell. Maybe it would dull with time, but I thought that the best I could hope for is that I would learn to go around it. Memory would take the long way home, bypassing those weeks when I failed at the only thing I ever tried to be good at.
“Do you want to tell me your dream?” I whispered into Steven’s hair.
“I got out of bed and the house was empty. You weren’t in your room or anything. I looked for you, but I couldn’t find you, and I knew you were in that house, but I didn’t know how to get there.”
“What house?” I held him tighter, feeling his warmth soak through my wool sweater.
“The house you went to when you were gone. The one with the purple tree.” He struggled against me a little, impatient. How could I be so slow?
“So what did you do?”
“I walked outside, but I didn’t know where to go, so I was crying.” He sighed an airy sob.
“And then I came, didn’t I? I heard you crying and I came.” I stroked his forehead. It was gripped with worry.
“How come I’ve never met the man who lives there?”
“You mean the man that I stayed with when I was sick?”
He nodded, and burrowed closer into the hollow of my chest.
“Well, I haven’t seen him since I got better. I haven’t needed to see him.”
“What if you get sick again?”
“I won’t get sick like that again.” I made my voice resolute, determined that this time he would believe me.
“But what if you do? How will I find you?” He rubbed his eyes. “I wish I knew that man. Then I could find you if you were there.”
When would the repercussions end? No matter how many times we talked about what had happened, I couldn’t seem to win his trust back. We were fine during the day, but at night the fear kept slipping into bed with him.
“Oh, honey, I’m sorry I didn’t call you when I was there. That was wrong. But you don’t have to worry, I’m not going anywhere now, and if I did go somewhere, I would call you. Remember how we talked about this?”
He nodded.
“And remember how I promised that I would never go anywhere again without talking to you first?”
I felt him folding himself into a tight ball. When I squeezed him, my arms met knees and elbows, no softness.
“I don’t see why you don’t want me to meet that man. It’s not fair. Why can’t I meet him?”
Because I want it to be over, I could have said. Because I’m tired of everything leading into something else. Because every reason has a reason. Scarves tied together, pulled out of a magician’s hat. Paper dolls linked at the wrist.
Instead I said, “All right.”
Steven was silent, scrunched into a hard ball in my lap.
“You can meet him. We’ll go to his house. Okay?”
The ball unfolded, loosening like crumpled paper, and I felt him nod. “I’m thirsty,” he announced. “Can I have something to drink?”
I led him into the kitchen and he sat down at the table, squinting in the light and swiveling his shoulders to the music on the radio. “Juice or milk?” I asked him.
“Juice.”
I poured us each a glass of cranberry juice, with ice. As he gulped his, he looked over the envelopes on the table and began humming along with Whitney Houston. He was waking up. I could see him throwing off the layers of sleep.
“I’m going to be a little shy.” He slapped his fingers on the edge of the table, tapping out the rhythm of the song.
“When you meet Gabriel? Well, he’s shy, too, so you can stare at each other for a while and not say anything.”
“I don’t want to do that. I think I’ll talk to him about baseball. Does he like baseball?”
“I don’t think so.” It was hard to remember many details about Gabriel, but I knew that he hadn’t shown any interest in the World Series.
A hip-hop song came on the radio and Steven got up and began dancing around the kitchen. He rocked back and forth from foot to foot, looking cooler than he knew in his baggy pajamas. I leaned against the sink. The window behind me was open halfway and I could smell the night seeping in. It smelled of plants surrendering their last green stench as they crumbled into earth.
“Let’s go now,” I said. “Do you want to?”
Steven glided over to the table to finish his drink. He watched me over the rim of his glass, appraising. “Okay,” he said, sucking the last ice cube. “Let’s go now.”
Not preparing was part of it. I didn’t want to spend the next day thinking about what to say and what to wear. I wanted to dress simply, like a penitent. While Steven changed from his pj’s into jeans and a sweatshirt, I looked at myself in the mirror. I had on a pair of black jeans and an oversized men’s Shetland sweater that I’d bought to replace the blue-green one I’d lost. I thought the big sweater–small jeans combination made me look like a marshmallow on toothpicks or pregnant, or both, but there was nothing to be done about it, so I stuffed my hair inside a gray beret and rattled my car keys so Steven would know I was ready to go.
The sleepy plaintiveness had left him, and he was back to being a light-footed little boy with eyes so big and green you wondered if he had special sight. We drove with the windows rolled down and the radio blasting. After a while I snapped off the radio so I could hear the sound of the engine parting the wind.
I tried to imagine how it would be to see Gabriel. I remembered his skin, smooth and penny-colored, and his way of looking at me from under his dark eyebrows. I ran my tongue over my palate, thinking of his mouth with its taste of tea and chiles and his inquiring hands. His stomach, hairless except for a small tuft below the naval, just behind the top button of his pants. But it wouldn’t be like that. He would be angry at me for disappearing, or hurt, or indifferent. He would have forgotten about me, or concluded that I was just a stray lunatic. At best he would be wary, at worst furious.
“I don’t know if he’ll be glad to see us,” I warned Steven. “It’s late at night and I haven’t seen him for a long time.”
“Okay.”
“Will you be upset if he isn’t friendly?”
Steven thought about that. He shook his head. “I just want to see him.”
“We’ll see him.”
I parked under the purple bougainvillea. When we got out of the car, faded purple blossoms were scattered under our feet. I looked up at Gabriel’s window and saw the disk-shaped glow of his reading light. He was awake. He was up there on his rattan couch, seeking. I had to smile.
The future was so close to me, I could touch it with my fingers. It was the color of night, blank as a blackboard. It felt like air, cold on my face, reeking of nature and the changeful sea. It was coming toward me, ready or not. The story after the story after the story.
“Let’s go knock,” I said and took Steven’s hand.
Text copyright © 2000 by Dashka Slater.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people, places, or events is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Slater, Dashka.
The wishing box : a novel / Dashka Slater
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-8118-7744-2
I. Title.
PS3569.L2618W5
813’.54—dc21
2000
99-13147
CIP
Chronicle Books LLC
680 Second Street
San Francisco, CA 94107
www.chroniclebooks.com
Dashka Slater, The Wishing Box: A Novel
