Every Visible Thing, page 15
“All yours,” Lionel mumbles and leaves by the other door, the one that leads to the hallway, scratching one white buttock as he goes.
I sit on the toilet until I can see details of the bathroom—a sea horse shower curtain stained by mildew, the sink top cluttered with razor blades, prescription bottles, and a curling iron—and I know dawn isn’t far off. I go back into the bedroom. Sebastian’s backpack is propped against the wall. I take two joints, sliding them into the empty space in my cigarette pack. I leave Sebastian sleeping with a girl he doesn’t know, go home, and sneak in the back door. I smoke a whole joint alone in my room, looking at photos of when I was still a little girl and Hugh was the delinquent teenager.
One of the last rolls Hugh took was of me and Owen when we had the chicken pox. Owen is usually the one who gets the sickest, but that time I had it worse, with sores in my throat that kept me from eating anything but soup and ice cream. After ten days, my pox transformed into greasy, dark red scabs that I peeled away whole from my skin, leaving craters my mother warned would be with me for life. So I limited myself to picking at the ones on my scalp, where my mother wouldn’t see the damage, which was less satisfying, because I couldn’t see it, either.
I fell into a routine of sleeping late and napping in front of daytime television, which meant I was often up in the middle of the night scrounging for snacks. This was how I caught Hugh, his combat boots and a heavy wool overcoat making him look like a story-book giant. He had his hand on the back doorknob when I came into the kitchen, wearing a pair of Spider-Man pajamas that used to be his. It was after midnight.
“Shit,” Hugh said, when I asked where he was going. He sat down with me at the kitchen table, talking in the secret-pal whisper I had been missing. He had been using it only on Emily and his friends. I knew he was trying to keep me from telling, but I liked the attention, so I let him go on for a while, growing warm and drowsy inside the magic winter light of our kitchen. Outside the window snow was falling quietly, the kind of snow that promised to go on for hours.
“I’m just meeting the guys,” Hugh said. “We’re going to see this band. I’ll be back before Mom and Dad get up.”
I wondered what sort of band played in the middle of the night, but thought he would laugh at me if I asked. Maybe it happened all the time and I was too young and naïve to know about it.
“You’ll get caught and they’ll ground you,” I said.
“They’d never ground me,” Hugh said. “Anyway, I won’t get caught unless you tell on me.”
“Can I come?” I said, suddenly excited. I’d been in the house for two weeks, and the idea of roaming the white streets of our neighborhood, the reflection of snow lighting the sky, Hugh beside me while the rest of the world was asleep, suddenly seemed like the best idea in the world.
“Not this time,” Hugh said. I scowled at him.
“Tell you what,” he said. “If tomorrow’s a snow day, I’ll build a fort with you.”
Until he was twelve, Hugh built elaborate forts in the snow in our backyard, with tunnels leading to different rooms, shelves carved into the walls for treasure. He let me help with the digging and gave me my own royal igloo. I had been begging him to do it again for three winters; every time I tried it by myself the walls collapsed on me.
“Promise.”
“I promise. Just don’t tell.”
“Deal,” I said. Hugh smiled like the old days, when we were a team. He had the chicken pox before I was born and still had an oblong white crater above his eyebrow that winked when he smiled.
“Go back to bed before they wake up and catch us both,” he said. He loped toward the back door. I waited, then as he closed the door I thought of something. I ran over and turned the knob.
“Hugh!” I called down in a loud whisper.
“What?” he said, annoyed. The stairwell was dark, and I could barely see the shadow of his spiky black hair against the lighter wall.
“Don’t get in any black vans,” I said. A rumor was going around my school that a black van with tinted windows was cruising Brookline neighborhoods, picking up children stupid enough to give directions to strangers. It was said to be driven by a clown, who kidnapped kids, molested and killed them, and buried them in the outer suburbs.
“I’ll see what I can do,” Hugh said.
“I’m not kidding. You’ll never come back.” I knew he was barely listening. I used to think Hugh took me more seriously. But lately, especially when I was annoyed at Owen, I wondered if Hugh had been pretending. If I was an irritating little sister he had placated all along.
“All right, fine. Go to bed now, Lee,” he said.
And then he was gone, giving me a glimpse of the sparkling white world before he closed the door. The stairwell filled with a cold, biting swirl of air. I shivered and thought—what if I never see him again? But it was the anxious, melodramatic kind of thing I thought too much when I was ten, and my parents and teachers were always telling me to stop. So I did.
When the police asked me if I knew anything about Hugh’s disappearance, almost twenty-four hours later, I had already denied it so many times to my parents that to change to the truth seemed more dangerous than sticking to my story. I wanted to be on his side. By the time it was obvious, even to me, that something had gone very wrong, after there were Missing posters lining the walk to school, and the kids who usually teased me pretended instead that I was their friend, after my mother fell to pieces and my father turned his whole life over to the search, I couldn’t bring myself to admit the truth. That I was the one who had let him go.
12. toothbrush
Owen stops going to the graveyard in February. He is out of rice paper and can’t bring himself to return to the art supply store. Coolidge Corner seems a world away to him now, and the thought of weaving in and out of mothers with carriages and men on their lunch hour makes him paranoid. It is only a matter of time before he bumps into someone he knows.
He has gotten to the point where he’d rather not leave the house at all. If his father orders a pizza, usually on the nights his mother is on call, he brings Owen along to run in and pay. The pizza place is the one that the fifth-graders sometimes hang out at after school, and though by nighttime it is mostly families and older teenagers, just walking across the linoleum and stating the name Furey to the man behind the high counter causes odd physical reactions Owen can’t explain. His throat closes up, leaving barely enough room for his saliva, so he has to swallow repeatedly to keep himself from drooling. He needs to shade his eyes from the fluorescent lighting, as harsh as a lamp switched on in the middle of the night. People’s faces are ugly and disturbing; he has trouble looking them in the eye. He focuses instead on some faulty detail—the razor burn on the pizza guy’s neck, the ripe pimple on the nostril of the boy who rings him up. By the time he returns to his father double-parked outside, the pizza box seeming as large and unwieldy as a wooden door, he is gasping with fear. This makes no sense to him, feeling terror over nothing. At first he thinks it is some sort of pre-cognition, that he is sensing the danger that Hugh will ultimately save him from. But nothing happens. It seems all it takes are strangers’ faces, bright lights, and the air outside his house to liquefy his bowels and leave him weak, shaking, and reluctant to venture out from the safety of his bathroom. Now, just the mention of school is enough to squeeze his lungs and drain the color from his face, so that one close look at him and his parents abandon the suggestion.
Mr. Gabriel doesn’t come back to Owen’s house. Instead, he recruits Tom Fisher to bring Owen his homework. Tom comes by on Monday afternoons to drop off assignment sheets and collect Owen’s work from the preceding week. Tom seems even more awkward than Owen remembers, he won’t meet Owen’s eyes, is careful not to brush against any part of him while folders exchange hands. The packets come with instructive, impersonal notes from Mr. Gabriel. Occasionally Tom must give him verbal instructions as well and he does this in a monotone, looking somewhere above Owen’s right shoulder, as if he is practicing an oral report. He has a prominent Adam’s apple, like a Super Ball bouncing in his neck. His fingers are long and tapered and starkly pale. He has been teased for having girly hands, but to Owen they look otherworldly. He tries to memorize them for sketching later, but never gets them right. Tom’s eyes behind clear plastic-framed glasses are blue on sunny days and green when it’s cloudy.
On a rare day off, his mother is home when Tom rings the bell. To Owen’s horror, she invites him in, offers chocolate milk, asks him where he is from (Atlanta), and what his hobbies are (he’s in the school musical), all of which he answers with polite, unenthusiastic sentences. When her beeper goes off, she uses the living room phone to call the hospital, leaving Owen and Tom alone in the kitchen with a plate of cookies. She spent the morning making them as a treat, but got caught up studying while they were in the oven and burned the bottoms. Owen picks at his, crumbling the cakey bits and eating only the chocolate chips. Tom has put the napkin Owen’s mother offered in his lap and uses it to wipe prissily at his lips. Like a fag, Owen imagines Danny saying.
“I have to go,” Tom says, after he has dutifully polished off two cookies.
“I’m not contagious,” Owen mutters. He winds his ankles around the chair legs, as if expecting to be knocked off.
“I didn’t say you were,” Tom says, looking at him for once.
“What is everyone else saying?” Owen asks, before he can look away. “At school. About why I’m not there.”
Tom shrugs, taking a sip of chocolate milk. Owen’s mother has given them swirly straws, as if they are in the first grade. Owen waits while the plastic tubing clouds with brown milk, then empties in reverse circles when Tom releases his lips.
“Some people think you’re dying,” Tom says. “Of AIDS. Like Ryan White. And that they won’t let you come to school.”
“You’re kidding,” Owen says, almost smiling. He had begun to think everyone knew he was lying, twenty-four hours a day, with every exaggerated swallow and hand to his abdomen, so this rumor of terminal illness is almost a relief. For about ten seconds. Until he remembers what people get AIDS from.
“What do you think?” Owen says.
Tom shrugs. “I don’t really care,” he says coldly.
Owen blushes. He remembers now, as if Tom had inserted it behind his eyes, a moment last September, Danny hissing He sucks cock! when Tom passed by them in the lunchroom. Owen had laughed out loud. He had done it automatically, without much thought to who Tom was. It doesn’t seem that the boy he laughed at and this boy are the same at all, and he wants to explain this to Tom—that he hadn’t meant it, he didn’t know him, it could have been anyone, the giggle was merely to impress Danny.
But there is no reason for Tom to believe him.
For the first time that Owen can remember, except for Thanksgiving and Christmas, which include other people so they don’t count, his family sits down for dinner together. It is his mother’s idea, and she insists they all participate. Owen clears the dining room table of months’ worth of newspapers and utility bills, setting four places with the plates they call the wedding china. The outer edges are rimmed with gold leaf that he remembers trying to scrape off and taste when he was little. The silverware in the velvet-lined box is crusted with green, so his mother tells him to use the stainless from the kitchen. Lena is given the job of chopping vegetables, which she does so slowly and inadequately she is dismissed with exasperation. Owen’s father stands in the narrow kitchen galley, reading Time magazine and handing his wife utensils and spices as she asks for them.
When dinner is ready, they sit in cross formation at the table, their parents at the head and foot, red candles left over from Christmas sputtering in the middle. Owen has been told to change out of his pajamas for the occasion. Lena’s hair is freshly washed and lies flat against her scalp without its normal glopping of gel. The heavy black eyeliner she usually wears has been washed off, making her look younger, vulnerable, as if she has just woken up from a night’s sleep. The whites of her eyes are bright, flawless, and bleached by Visine.
Dinner is roast beef baked with crispy potatoes and onions. Owen’s father carves while his mother doles out peas and salad. She is exuberant, talkative, seeming either not to notice or choosing to ignore the lethargic responses of the rest of them.
“I met my first AIDS case this week,” she says. “A twenty-year-old boy. He’s in isolation, no one can go in without gowns and mask and gloves, including visitors. Not that he has many. Lena,” she says, distracted. “Is that all you’re eating?”
Lena’s plate is mostly white space, dotted with a few peas and potatoes, roast beef rejected altogether. She seems fascinated by the process of moving her food around with her fork. She graces her mother with a blank smile.
“I’m saving room for dessert,” she says dreamily. Owen wonders if his parents are really this blind or just pretending to be. Can’t they see that she’s stoned?
“It’s sad, really,” his mother goes on. “No one visits him. I stopped by and talked to him this afternoon, just because he seemed so lonely. It’s such a shame, the stigma that’s developed around this disease. Even some of the doctors seem less than compassionate. The men, naturally. I don’t even know if he’s gay.”
“Is he going to die?” Owen says. He speaks because it looks like no one else is going to. Lena is totally out of it, watching the reflection of the candle flame in her knife, and his father is eating with concentration. No one else is listening.
“I think so, sweetie,” his mother says. She’s looking at his father. She knows he’s not listening, and she’s getting angry.
“Will he go to heaven?” Owen adds, trying to get her to look at him instead.
“Of course he will.” His mother blinks and turns to him.
This is when his father lets out a sound, somewhere between an angry huff and a guffaw.
“Nice of you to join us,” his mother says. “Just in time to insert your expertise.”
“Is that what they’re teaching you in med school these days?” his father says. “How to reassure AIDS patients they’re going to heaven?”
“Henry,” his mother says. “Knock it off.”
“Why wouldn’t he go to heaven?” Owen says. His parents are staring at each other, gripping the arms of their chairs in a mirror reflection of each other, their knuckles white as bones.
“Because there isn’t one,” Owen’s father says. He doesn’t take his eyes from his wife.
“That’s it,” Owen’s mother says, standing so quickly she knocks her chair over.
“That’s what?” his father taunts.
“I’ve had enough. I try to do something nice, as a family, and all you can do is ruin it. You weren’t even listening to me. I’m trying to live, Henry. Live my life. I won’t be punished for it.”
Despite the fact that no one is finished, his mother begins tossing the plates together roughly, gathering them in a lumpy pile to bring to the kitchen.
“Maybe you should be spending your time by your own child’s bedside,” his father mutters.
“I don’t think,” his mother says calmly, “that you really want to get into a neglectful parenting contest with me, Henry.”
She hefts the plates onto one forearm, leans across Lena to pick up the Corning Ware bowl of peas with the other. Lena looks up and catches her eye.
“Why did you even bother?” Lena says softly. Owen wonders what she means. Having dinner, talking about work, fighting with their father?
“I have no idea,” her mother says.
Tom’s rumor embeds in his mind like a seed pushed into soil by a thumb. Then it sprouts. After his parents say good night, he sweats and struggles with deep breaths and thinks about his unexplained virus. He forgets at first that his diagnosis was based on fake symptoms. Even when he remembers, he cannot explain away his real symptoms—the ones that recur whenever he is forced to leave the house and sometimes now even when he’s not. He tries to remember what Mr. Gabriel told them about AIDS, but the lesson in his memory is full of holes; he was barely listening. In his sex book, published in 1981, the term does not exist. He steals an article he sees his mother reading, but it is highly technical and says little about transmission. All he knows for sure is that gay men get it, that they get it from sex, and that Danny did something to him that his book called oral sex. Once his illness is revealed even his family will know what he has done. He wonders how long it will take for him to die.
He considers asking his mother. Though he is almost always angry at her lately, the scene at the dinner table, with a vulnerable, storytelling version of his mother, made him want to protect her, and she has been easier on him ever since. She hasn’t taken his temperature in days, though Owen has gotten into the habit of taking it himself. It is always a degree below normal, and he is sure this means something.
Instead, he asks her about her patient. Every few days, when she is in his room putting laundry away, or fixing him a bland meal at dinnertime, he gets an update on the young man’s condition. The pneumonia is receding, but he’s developed a strange infection in his brain they cannot diagnose. He has sores lining his mouth and throat that make eating next to impossible. He plays Scrabble like a pro, knows all the obscure two-letter words, the uses of Q in the absence of a U. His name is David.
It doesn’t occur to Owen to be jealous of the time his mother spends with this boy. He wants her to spend time with him. He wants to know everything about how he feels and what the doctors think is going on. He is collecting symptoms, ones he will recognize if he develops them later on. He checks his glands all the time. Swollen glands, according to his mother, are the first sign of doom.
“What does he look like?” Owen asks his mother one night, after a long explanation of Pneumocystis and Kaposi’s sarcoma.
“Oh,” his mother says, squinting as she thinks about it. “Well, they had to shave his head for the drainage. He has blue eyes. He’s very thin. Looks more like fourteen than twenty.”
