Every Visible Thing, page 12
“What are you doing here?” I say to Jonah, moving over to the sinks to start adding chemicals.
“Looking for you,” Jonah says. Sebastian giggles at this, and we both glare at him.
“You’ve missed a lot of class,” Jonah says. “Mr. Allen’s pretty pissed.” I turn my back to him and start pouring chemicals into the canisters, swishing them in circles.
“I’ve been sick,” I say. Sebastian giggles again. Jonah is blushing fiercely but still standing his ground.
“What’s wrong with you?” he says. Sebastian finishes rolling the joint and lights it with his Zippo. He inhales deeply and blows the ash away from the glowing tip, causing black specks to rain to the floor.
“Brain tumor,” I say. Sebastian laughs again while inhaling and starts to cough. Jonah glares at him, but his eyes linger for a second on the joint.
“You must have a brain tumor to be hanging out with this loser,” he says.
“Now, Jonah,” Sebastian says, loping over to him. Jonah stiffens when Sebastian puts a hand on his shoulder. “You used to be more fun than this.” He takes a deep hit off the joint and turns it, ember in toward his palm, offering it to Jonah. Jonah frowns and takes a step away. Sebastian, mute from holding the smoke in until his eyes bulge, shrugs at me as if to say he told me so.
Suddenly I’m furious, though it’s not really clear who is making me feel this way. I look at Jonah.
“You don’t know anything about me,” I say to Jonah. There is an uncomfortable pause.
“That’s obvious,” Jonah says. “See you around.”
He leaves us alone. Sebastian finishes the joint with small, sharp sucks of his lips.
“You know him?” I say, when I’m sure Jonah is gone for good. Sebastian shrugs.
“Sure. He used to be a customer. I hear he went nuts, though.”
“He tried to kill himself,” I say.
“Loser,” Sebastian says, shaking his head. This makes me uncomfortable, even though I’ve thought the same thing myself. I would never say it out loud. I turn away from him.
I stand over the sink with a canister in each hand, turning them upside down and right side up again, making sure that they don’t stand still, not even for an instant. Photos can be ruined by the same solution that develops them.
I hang the negatives to dry just before it’s time for me to head home. I pull the first roll straight and try to guess at the images by holding them against the light. They are of Christmas, multiple shots of the tree, Owen surrounded by wads of wrapping paper, my parents with bed heads, laughing in their bathrobes. One of me, still in my pajamas, posing on my new red BMX bike. I had asked for the boy’s version, with a crossbar. Then more pictures of Emily Twickler, her black hair showing up white, her smile a dark slash across her face. I drop the end, letting the negative spring back into a spiral. I have no desire to see Emily again.
Sebastian has fallen asleep on the couch in Mr. Allen’s office. I’m not sure how to wake him, so for a second I just watch him breathing. He doesn’t look very peaceful, his forehead screwed up from some dream dilemma. Finally, I lean forward and put a hand on his shoulder, shaking gently. To do this I have to lean pretty close, and our faces are only inches apart when he snaps open his eyes, as if he’s only been pretending to sleep all along.
“Hey, handsome,” he says. He smells like tobacco and wet leather and someone in desperate need of a change of clothing. I can’t remember when this turned into such a good smell.
During April vacation that year, Hugh went away with Emily Twickler’s family. It was the longest I had ever been away from him. It rained the whole week, and I spent it sneaking into Hugh’s room to read on his bed, which felt oily and smelled of dirty socks. I was avoiding Owen, who wanted to play Candy Land until I was brain-dead.
The first sunny day was Saturday, and I went out with my new BMX bike. I met up with three older boys from the Catholic school who dared me to do stunts with them. I traded bikes with the leader, a boy with a red crewcut, because he accused me of being a snob when I hesitated. After that, it was like being kidnapped. I had to stay with them and they made me do dangerous things on the bike, like dart across the trolley tracks just as the train was picking up speed. They refused to give me my bike back at sundown and told me to meet them in the morning. I went home and hid the Crewcut’s bike behind Hugh’s ten-speed. I couldn’t tell my parents, they wouldn’t have understood. They’d be mad I’d given my bike to a strange kid. I waited for Hugh, who was due to be dropped off by Emily’s parents in time for dinner.
When he got home he stormed straight to his room, turned his stereo up to full volume, and refused to open his door, even when my parents shouted threats at the peeling panels. Dinner was just the four of us again, one of my parents rising every few minutes to knock on Hugh’s door and offer to make a plate for him. After dinner, my mother called Emily’s mom and had a quick conversation, then hung up without saying goodbye.
“They broke up,” she said to my father. I was beaming from my spying place behind the door. I gave Owen the thumbs-up. He’d missed Hugh, too. Hugh lasted at Candy Land longer than the rest of us.
“I’ll try ice cream,” my father said. He was let inside Hugh’s room with the entire quart of Brigham’s, and I got stuck giving Owen a bath. My father came out after Owen was already in bed. He smiled wearily at me and gave my mother the look I knew meant they’d postpone discussion until after my bedtime. Hugh still didn’t appear, and I started to worry. If he spent the rest of the weekend in there, I’d never get my bike back.
After I’d lain awake for hours, listening to Owen’s slight, wheezy snore, and my parents finally switched off all the lights and went to bed, I snuck down the hall and rapped lightly on my brother’s door.
“What?” Hugh called out, somewhere between annoyed and whiny. I opened the door slowly, careful of the squeak that grew higher in pitch the faster I pushed against it.
The room smelled like cigarette smoke and damp spring air. Hugh was on his double bed, still dressed, clean sweat socks looking like bandages around his enormous feet, leaning against the headboard that was painted the same glossy black as his new hair. The Brigham’s carton was on the floor, filled to the rim with balled-up tissues. I wondered briefly if he had a cold and then realized, horrified, that he’d been crying. His eyes were puffed up and raw, his voice, when he finally spoke, clogged and halting, as if it might break on the wrong word.
“Leave me alone,” he said, not looking up, raising a cigarette he’d been holding out of sight to his lips and inhaling. Though the cigarette, or at least the casual way he smoked it, surprised me, the phrase did not. We had been saying this to each other all our lives. Naturally I ignored it.
“Hugh,” I whispered, wanting to tell him every detail of my awful day, to admit how terrified and thrilled I’d been, to tell him I wanted those boys to feel as small and threatened as I had felt on that old rusty bike, performing tricks like a circus monkey. But all I got out was his name.
“I said leave me alone!” he yelled, picking something up off his bed and whipping it at me. I ducked and it hit Hugh’s framed chess championship certificate, then clattered to the floor. I looked down, stunned, at the weapon. It was a spoon.
I wanted to laugh at first. A spoon was less serious than some of the things I’d thrown. But Hugh wasn’t supposed to be the one with the temper. He had never tried to hurt me before; the closest he’d come were headlocks to hold me still when I was in a rage. Between the black hair, his swollen eyes, and the fury that made him whip utensils at me, I was beginning to wonder what had happened to my real brother. I backed out and closed the door. Once I was gone, I was too embarrassed to go back in.
In the morning I waited as long as I could, lingering over the pancakes my father made to lure Hugh from his room. It got too late, and I left for the park with a heavy, roiling stomach, pumping the Crewcut’s pedals with weak knees.
The boys led me to a construction site and dared me to ride on steel girders set across a ditch. I wasn’t afraid anymore, so mad at Hugh I didn’t care about anything else. I fell, with the bike, down into the ditch and landed on my arm. I felt strange, like I didn’t care enough to get up. The boys ran away when they saw I was actually hurt, leaving my bike behind. When I finally got tired of lying there, I got up and pushed it home with my good arm.
My mother took me to the emergency room where I got an X-ray, a cast, a sling, and a Jawa figure from the gift shop. I got a lot of attention at school and at home for my broken bone. I told no one how it had really happened, not even Hugh, who felt guilty for being mean to me and drew on my cast—an entire comic strip of imaginary BMX adventures starring the two of us.
I didn’t ride my bike much that summer. I told my parents my arm was bothering me, but really I couldn’t stand to look at it, with its bright red crossbar. It just made me too mad.
10. envelope
There are days when his father barely fights him, is too busy to check his temperature, says nothing when Owen stays in his pajamas long after the time he should be dressed and ready. Even his mother sometimes forgets to ask, when she returns home after a thirty-six-hour shift at the hospital, whether or not he made it to school. Owen keeps up appearances just in case, complains of stomach upset and head pain, keeps spiked thermometers ready at all times, either refuses to eat or loudly vomits up his dinner. He waits for a knowing look to pass between them, some evidence that they are on to his charade. But they are rarely in the same room, and when they are they move around each other in a complicated swirl of chores. They unpack groceries, do dishes, fold laundry, and collect new loads for the machine, swerving or bending to give each other room, passing baskets and dishes and wrapped stacks of cold cuts, moving at the last second out of the other’s vision, their faces never lingering on the same plane.
After the battery of tests comes back with negative results, Dr. Cloherty decides that Owen has a stubborn, mysterious virus which can only be battled with rest and time. After this announcement, he asks Owen to wait outside while he confers in hushed tones with his father. Owen’s father comes out looking sad but preoccupied, and says nothing. Owen is sure he has been revealed, that his father is simply waiting for his mother so they can confront him together, but nothing ever comes of it. Whether they believe him or not, they all seem to have decided to let him stay home.
His parents always call at the same times—his father at eleven after morning meetings, his mother at three when the hospital shifts change—so Owen has a safety zone of four hours. On clear days, he packs up his supplies and walks to the graveyard. The weak winter sun makes his eyes hurt, and he is grateful when clouds move over his work area. He has chosen a group of lichen-spotted stones around his original boy. He rubs his charcoal methodically, pleased by the slow revelation of eye sockets and wings, letters spelling out the names one by one. Gabriel and Sarah Ash. Their children, Gabriel, Michael, Seraphina, and Grace, their ages recorded in years, months, and days, none of whom made it to eighteen. Epitaphs in old-fashioned spelling promise their eternal happiness in heaven. The same skull with feathered wings decorates the top of each headstone except for Grace, who was only two, whose headstone is carved from white granite and is a third the size of the others. A sleeping lamb curls above her name. At home, when his parents and sister are asleep or gone, he tacks the rubbings on the wall next to his bed, in the order they are arranged in the graveyard, shoved edge to edge, the three-letter last name repeated until it looks like a word of instruction. The remains of an entire family.
At the end of January there is a nor’easter. Even though the radio announces that school is canceled, Owen spiked his fever the night before, so sick-day rules apply. The T is still running, and both of his parents go in to work. Lena goes back to bed after hearing the forecast and appears to intend to sleep all day. Owen is trapped inside.
After three bowls of Frosted Flakes (his parents will think it was Lena) and The Price Is Right, Owen is bored. He sneaks past Lena’s doorway and, hearing no evidence of life, opens the back door and goes down two flights of narrow, curved stairs. The basement is split in two by the cement hallway. On the left is a dank storage space and the dreaded laundry room, on the right his father’s office. No one comes down here anymore; his father reads in the living room with news programs droning in the background, his mother studies in her bedroom or at the kitchen table. Junk has started to accumulate in the office entrance, thrown hastily in as though space has run out across the hall: large plastic bins holding their summer clothes, Owen’s bike and skateboard, twenty-four packs of toilet tissue and paper towels. When Owen tries the light switch, the ceiling bulb illuminates briefly then extinguishes with a pop. Snow has drifted over the small windows near the ceiling, blocking the daylight. Owen makes his way across the room, weaving around dark shapes, banging his shin on a low table, reaching for the lamp he knows is on his father’s desk. The lamp is bright yellow, with a bendable metal arm and a long fluorescent bulb. When Owen holds the button down, the bulb flickers, hums, and comes to life. His father once let him play with this lamp, which, with its dimming feature, seemed so modern, but now seems old and slow to respond compared to the sleek black model Owen has upstairs. Owen sits back in his father’s oak desk chair, surveying the room.
It is so hushed he can hear his own breathing. Dust is everywhere, tickling his throat and eyes and threatening an attack of allergies. A long bulletin board covers one wall, Hugh’s Missing posters tacked across it like repetitive, desperate wallpaper. A toll-free number is listed under his photo. At one point there was a hotline, Owen remembers, a room full of volunteers at the local TV station manning the same phones you saw during fund-raising shows. When Owen went there, he was left in the care of a young female caller, who let him drink from her soda, slipped him bull’s-eyes, and held his hand so tightly while walking him to the bathroom he cried and demanded she let go. She apologized and gripped him even tighter.
Owen gets up from behind his father’s desk and walks over to the wall. Stacked beneath it are the boxes from Copy Cop, and to the right of these, shoved in the corner, a tower of banker’s boxes his family uses for storage. Owen opens the first one. More paper, bundles of it wrapped in rubber bands. He removes the top stack. Every Visible Thing: A History of Angels in Religious Thought, by Dr. Henry Furey. His father’s book. The manuscript is battered at the edges, with red margin notes throughout in his father’s miniscule writing. Underneath are notebooks, each one labeled with raised lettering on bright green plastic strips. ANGELS IN JUDAISM, one says. ISLAM, ORTHO-DOXY, ZOROASTRIANISM, SERAPHIM, ARCHANGELS, MICHAEL AND GABRIEL. There is a folded poster that Owen opens to reveal a chart of concentric rings, each one labeled, the title at the bottom THE CELESTIAL HIERARCHY. Owen closes the box, sets it aside. Behind the sofa, the arms of which were shredded by a cat Owen can’t remember, he finds half a dozen framed prints and a cardboard art tube. He remembers some of the prints that used to hang on the walls, and can re-create their positioning by the picture hangers still in the plaster, and the squares of slightly whiter white that have not yet faded into the surrounding wall. Owen pulls them out, one by one, into the light. In the largest one, an angel with long curly hair stands on top of a writhing serpent, pressing a sword to the serpent’s neck. In another, two bright yellow angels climb up a ladder while a bearded man sleeps, smiling, beneath them. The print Owen is looking for is the last in the collection, the size of a notebook, set in a delicate, gold-leaf frame. Owen sits back against the couch with it cradled in his lap. An angel with a grave, manly face, dark curls, and six powerful wings—two wings at his shoulders, two rising like a crown above his head, and two folded like a cloak in front of him, with only his feet peeking out at the bottom. Tucked in the bronze and amber feathers of each wing are dozens of black eyes. They cluster in some spots and are missing in others, like hives. Owen doesn’t remember this detail, and wonders if this is the wrong painting. Surely he’d remember a rash of creepy eyes? The label along the mat reads: SERAPH, BYZANTINE MOSAIC, 13TH CENTURY.
Owen leans over the couch again and picks up the artist’s tube. Looking for more angels, he is surprised when he pulls out two sheets of rice paper. He unrolls them, revealing the familiar skull and wings on one, and what looks like a weeping willow on the other. His sister’s and brother’s names and fifth-grade class sections are written along the bottom in charcoal.
Owen rerolls the rubbings, stacks the print, one Copy Cop box, and the tube on top of the banker’s box, and hefts the pile with difficulty. He has to stop and rest every few stairs, setting the box above him so it is pressing into his chest. The seraph stares at him. He looks bored and contemptuous, as if his thoughts are far too serious and world-altering to interrupt for the bother of a child. It is the way his father’s divinity students once looked at him, mostly the men, when Owen sat coloring in the university office on the rare days his mother and sister were not around to attend to him.
In his room, Owen tacks up the new rubbings next to his own. Lena’s gravestone belonged to a girl barely ten. Hugh went the traditional route, choosing an elderly man. He had no reason to dwell upon the death of children.
The crank calls begin on Friday. Lena answers the first one on the extension in her room.
“Owen!” she barks, mouth at the crack in her door. “It’s for you!” Owen, stomach already gripped with fear, goes to the kitchen wall phone that hangs beside the corkboard. He lifts the receiver slowly, listening for the click of Lena hanging up before he dares to begin.
