Every Visible Thing, page 16
“Does he look like Hugh?” The question escapes before he can think about it. His mother stiffens, the ease and friendly demeanor of their recent conversations is gone in an instant. She stands up from where she’s been sitting on his bed, looking around for something, some chore that she can do. But the room is already straightened. She backs against the nearest wall.
“Why would you say that?” she says. He wants to get out of bed and hug her in apology, but she is looking at him with too much disgust. “Of course he doesn’t look like…why would you say such a thing?”
“I don’t know,” Owen mumbles. “Sorry.” But he is angry again, as instantly as she is cold. Hugh! he wants to yell. Hugh Hugh Hugh Hugh! Why should I pretend I never think that name?
As punishment, she takes his temperature, sitting on his bed so he cannot replace the thermometer, her eyes flitting around so they rest everywhere but on his own.
That Sunday, his mother is on call at the hospital, and Owen and his father can’t find anything to eat for breakfast. No one has been to the grocery store, the milk carton is empty, the cereal boxes, when shaken, reveal nothing. There are no eggs, no butter, even the peanut butter jar is scraped clean, and the bread box reveals only one moldy English muffin. Owen’s father leans on the open refrigerator door, looking exhausted, staring for an interminable few minutes during which Owen begins to wonder if he is waiting for a miracle. Finally, he closes the door with a plastic kiss.
“Let’s go out for brunch,” he says. He wakes Lena and threatens to ground her if she doesn’t join them. She climbs into the backseat of the station wagon, her hair in her eyes, wearing a green army jacket and boots, grumbling about free countries and child abuse.
“Pancakes are not child abuse,” her father says with false cheer.
They go to IHOP, a blue cement building with a brown shingled roof in the same lot as the Stop & Shop. A sign on the door boasts that it is the only business in Brookline open twenty-four hours a day. The hostess seats them in a booth and leaves them with menus the size of their torsos. At the inner edge of the booth are six syrup dispensers, the flavors in raised print stickers from a label gun. There are families who have clearly come from church, the children in dress clothes, printed bulletins folded and sticking out of fathers’ coat pockets. One of these families, Owen realizes with a lurch of nausea, belongs to Brian Dowd. He is three booths down, in a light blue suit jacket and clip-on tie, grinning at Owen as if he’s just made his day. Owen hunches down, propping up his menu and hiding behind it. When the waitress, who has a chipped front tooth and red-black welt like a leech under one eye, comes over for their order, Owen tries to delay her taking the menu away by being indecisive, but his father nudges him under the table. He orders blueberry pancakes and gives up his shield. Brian Dowd appears to have a family made up entirely of beefy men and boys with crew cuts. When he catches Owen looking, he winks at him.
“Dad, I don’t feel so good,” Owen says quietly. Lena rolls her eyes.
“What’s the matter?” his father says. He has brought the Sunday paper and looks like he’d prefer to be left alone with it.
“It’s my stomach,” Owen says. This is not a lie. His innards have become as slippery as the vinyl bench.
“Do you want me to take you to the bathroom?” his father says.
“I want to go home.”
“Owen.” His father sighs. “We just ordered.”
Owen starts to wheeze. He knows it is a single bathroom and doesn’t want his father following him in while he has diarrhea. But if he goes alone, Brian Dowd will surely take the opportunity to follow. He tries to hold himself still, willing his intestines to be calm, but when the waitress thumps an oversized stack of pancakes topped with a wedge of melting butter in front of him, he can’t wait any longer. He slides out and half runs, half waddles toward the back.
He stays on the toilet for a long time, reading the notice about employees washing their hands over and over until it repeats in his head like a commandment. He thinks he remembers his mother saying something about AIDS patients getting a lot of intestinal infections. It’s possible his diarrhea isn’t nerves at all. He wills Brian’s family to leave and his father not to come looking for him. There is an innocuous knock on the door, followed by a more insistent one a minute later. Owen flushes, washes his shaking hands, and opens the heavy door. The bathroom entrances are set in a small alcove, so when Brian Dowd pulls him out and slams him against the dark wood wall, shoving a meaty forearm under his neck, they can’t be seen by anyone in the restaurant.
“Hey, faggot,” Brian hisses at him. His chin looks sticky, his breath reeks of strawberry syrup. “Long time no see.” Owen tries to struggle away and is punched in the stomach for it.
“I hear you’re dying of fag cancer, that true?” Brian says.
Owen shakes his head no.
“Good. Because Danny wants to kill you himself.”
That’s when a hand grabs onto Brian’s ear and pulls, hard.
“Ow!” Brian whimpers, backing up to relieve the pressure and revealing Lena holding on to him, her hand in a fingerless glove.
“This is no way to treat people in a pancake house,” his sister says in a low voice, twisting harder. “Let’s hear an apology.”
“I’m sorry,” Brian whines. He looks furious. Owen is angry, too. Was his sister never eleven? Doesn’t she know she’s making things worse?
“Stay away from him,” Lena growls. “I know people who will set you on fire with a Zippo if I ask. Got it?”
“Yeah, dude, let go.” It takes Owen a second to register this. Brian thinks his sister is a boy.
“Nice suit,” she says sarcastically.
She lets go, and Brian trips away, not looking back. Owen is impressed, despite himself. Before this moment, he never would have used the word tough to describe any member of his family.
His sister looks him up and down, shoving a hand through her hair in a perfect imitation of a delinquent boy.
“Your pancakes are getting cold,” she says. Then she struts into the ladies’ room.
Though it is pretty much assumed he won’t be going to school, Owen wakes every morning to tell his father he isn’t feeling up to it. But now he goes back to bed as soon as the door closes behind the rest of them. He sleeps until afternoon, when the better television shows are on. He has almost filled his sketchbook with drawings of angels, their different anatomies gleaned from the pictures he finds in his father’s research. He goes down to his father’s office every week for more material. He finds a collection of blank notebooks, longer and thinner than the ones Owen uses for school, with hard covers and pages sewn into the seam. He uses one to keep track of signs from Hugh. He read in a book stolen from his father’s bookshelf that guardian angels are mischievous about signs, that they have a sense of humor about the doubt over their existence, and so they are constantly leaving clues in everyday life. Owen keeps track of every time an angel is mentioned on a television sitcom, in pop songs on the radio, on the clues and answers in his father’s daily crossword puzzles that he keeps in a basket in the bathroom. He notes any time he feels as if he is being followed from behind, any objects out of place in his room he knows his parents wouldn’t bother to touch. He often finds his toothbrush in the wrong hole of the porcelain wall rack, the hole that has been empty as long as he can remember and always assumed was Hugh’s. Sometimes a heaviness bleeds into his shoulder, just as if someone has pressed their palm there. There is a crow who, four times in two weeks, wakes Owen in the morning by pecking at his window. Owen lists these clues using a multicolored Bic pen that has four different nibs he releases by thumbing the tiny lever of corresponding color. He color-codes each sign, according to how strong he believes they are. Red clues are irrefutable, black are questionable and possibly explained away by human influence, blue and green lie somewhere in between.
He also keeps a list of suspicious symptoms that may be from AIDS. The fluttery feeling he gets in his stomach and chest, like there are birds trapped in there, and the heaviness of his lungs at night, that could be asthma or Pneumocystis. The small bruises that he can’t remember getting, which could be cancerous lesions. Night sweats. Glands that are sore, and that he prods all day to see if they’ve changed. A small, angry red spot on the head of his penis.
He is not sure how Hugh will manage to save him from AIDS. Maybe he will reveal a cure to their mother. Or, Owen thinks sometimes, Hugh won’t save him at all. Maybe Owen will die and join Hugh and all the other angels. This doesn’t seem so bad to him, the dying part. It’s the getting sick, going back to the hospital, having his brain drained, and his parents and Lena having to wear masks all the time that he is worried about.
He lives during the night now. His parents are both in bed by eleven P.M., and it is during the hours between then and dawn that Owen prefers to write his lists and draw, to hang his grave rubbings and sketches of Hugh on his wall and lie underneath them. He prefers the stillness of the world at night, likes the idea that he is awake while his entire neighborhood is comatose. The physical fear that plagues him during the day is absent in the hours before dawn, when it is neither morning nor night, but a stretch of time absent of definition. During the day he can’t help but think, along with key moments he notices on the clock, of Danny doing math time tests, buying his lunch, being let out to smoke on the playground. About his mother on grand rounds, or taking a break to play Scrabble in her gloves and mask and paper gown. His father hunched in his cubicle. His sister disguised as someone else. At night, he has no one to keep track of. Until the night he catches his sister sneaking in.
He doesn’t hear her leave as her room is at the other end of the house, off the kitchen. But at four A.M., an hour before his mother’s alarm goes off and his freedom ends, Owen goes to the kitchen for a snack. He is unwrapping cheese slices and folding them into his mouth when he hears the telltale creak of the back door. He steps into the hall in time to see his sister, fully dressed, latching the chain. She turns around and sighs at him, glaring at the cellophane wrappers clutched in his fist. Her cheeks and the tips of her ears are bright red from the cold. She stomps her feet gently, knocking the snow from her huge boots. She sits down on the storage bench by the door, which holds all their snow boots, ice skates, hats, and gloves in a jumble of mismatched pairs. She begins to unlace her boots, picking at the frozen laces with the raw, bitten remains of her fingernails.
“Are you going to tell?” she says. With one boot off, she massages her toes through thin socks.
“Are you?” Owen retorts.
“I haven’t yet, have I?”
“Where were you?” Owen asks. He checks her eyes. She looks tired, but sober.
“Why does your best friend want to kill you?” she snaps back. Owen looks away, shrugging.
“I thought so,” Lena says. “Let’s have hot chocolate.”
“Okay,” Owen says.
Lena makes a paste of unsweetened cocoa, sugar, and water on the bottom of a saucepan, then pours milk in and heats the whole thing over the stove.
“Why don’t you just use the Swiss Miss?” Owen asks.
“Don’t you like it better this way?” she says, pouring the steaming cocoa into pottery mugs with animals glazed onto the sides. Lena’s is a porcupine, Owen’s a giraffe.
“I don’t know,” Owen says. She looks at him strangely.
“This is the way Mom makes it,” she says.
“Not for me,” Owen says.
“She used to,” Lena says. “When you were little.”
They take the cocoa, marshmallow fluff blanketing the top, into Lena’s room. Owen is stunned by the mess. There is hardly any bare floor space, the carpet piled with rejected clothing, dishes, notebooks, tapes, and records. Lena turns the overhead light on just long enough to find and light half a dozen candles, then flicks it off again. By candlelight, the grunge fades into the background. There is nowhere to sit but her bed. Gone are the rainbow quilt and throw pillows she had when they shared a room. Now she has a double bed with no frame, low to the ground and pushed into a corner, her desk turned the long way and pushed up against the other side, so the bed is almost completely hidden from the doorway. The mattress is covered with ratty paisley throws, her red flannel sheets wrinkled and stained in places with what looks like coffee. She has about a dozen pillows, and Owen props himself against two by the foot. It is more like an animal’s den than a girl’s bed.
Lena settles herself at the head, removing a carved wooden box from the top drawer of her desk. She takes out an orange packet of rolling papers and a large bud of marijuana, which she begins to separate into leaf and seed. She glances up to see if Owen is going to object.
“Can I have some?” Owen asks, when the joint is ready.
Lena laughs. “No way,” she says.
“I’ve had it before,” Owen whines.
“Jeez, you’re starting early. I didn’t even know what pot was when I was ten.”
“I’m eleven,” Owen reminds her.
“Well, in that case.” She smiles, blowing ash off the lit end of the joint. She hands it to him.
After a few drags and a superhuman effort to hold them in without coughing, Owen sinks into the cave of her bed and sighs. It seems to him that he has been hasty hiding at home. Everything at school has surely already been forgotten. When he looks up, Lena is smiling at him.
“Don’t let Mom and Dad see you so happy,” she says. “They’ll send you back to the fifth grade.” Owen shrugs.
“Is that punk guy your boyfriend?” he says. “The one you brought home that day?”
“No,” Lena says quickly. She presses the joint against the sides of the ashtray and extinguishes it with licked fingertips. “Sort of,” she says. “It’s complicated. I don’t really want to talk about that.”
“Are you in disguise or something?” Owen asks.
“I guess you could say that.”
“Aren’t you worried Mom and Dad are going to see you?”
“No. They don’t notice anything they don’t want to.”
“Were they always like this?” Owen asks. It is something he has written in his notebooks, a question in varying phrases, leaving space afterward sufficient for detail, as if someday he might open it to find the answer penned in a different hue.
“No,” Lena says. “Not always.”
“What were they like?”
“You know,” Lena says. But Owen shakes his head. “They were around more. They looked at each other. They laughed. Hugh made them laugh a lot. Especially Mom.”
“I can’t remember,” Owen says.
“You’re lucky,” Lena says.
“What was Hugh like?” Owen whispers. “Was he Mom’s favorite?”
Lena stares at him, then lights up a Marlboro the same way Danny does, cradling the flame within her hand.
“He was everyone’s favorite,” she says finally. “Even yours.”
13. casserole
Kissing girls gets easier. Now I do it at every party, in the bathrooms or closets of houses in Cambridge, against the cold stone buildings in the shadows of Harvard Square. I’ve made my own rules. No more bedrooms with Sebastian; I can’t risk going so far. I always kiss them standing up. I never try to get in their clothing or let them in mine. I kiss them till their knees are weak and then I stop. Some girls seem to take this as a challenge, and I have to be quick to knock away their diving hands. But I think a lot of girls like the idea of just being kissed, without wondering what they’ll have to deal with next. I know this feeling. I never kiss a girl more than once, because the first time is the one everyone remembers. Second times lead to bases I don’t want to go to. I’ve already developed a reputation. Sebastian says they call me the Kissing Bandit. I think he’s a little jealous. I’m the one all the girls talk about now, when it used to be him. One day, a girl he’s been flirting with drags me off instead.
“Don’t blame me,” I say later, when he scowls as I slide Chapstick over my swollen mouth. “It was your idea.”
“No one told you to make a career out of it,” he mutters.
“I’ll stop if you want,” I say, holding my breath.
“Free country,” he says, shrugging.
Only part of me wants to stop. The truth is, when I’m kissing girls I don’t feel awkward or ugly or dressed up like someone I’m not. It’s also the only time that my crazy questioning head gets to stop for a rest. Smoking pot isn’t as reliable as I thought it’d be. Sometimes it soothes me to the point of flat water, but other times, without warning, I end up with more in my head than I started with. Sebastian gives me Valium then, but that just makes me sleepy and not in a good way. So exhausted I don’t even want to crawl into bed because it seems like I’ll never be able to get up again.
I’ve been to three of Lionel’s parties. They’re actually the same party, which goes on all day and night, with people rotating in shifts. I’ve seen Lionel only once more; on the third night in the kitchen he was playing poker at the table. He interrupted the betting to stand up and slap Sebastian’s hand.
“Hey, baby brother,” he said, a cigarette stuck in the corner of his mouth, bouncing up and down like a conductor’s wand.
“This is Lee,” Sebastian said reluctantly. Lionel nodded, but he wasn’t looking anymore. He’d gone back to his cards.
“Lee Furey,” I said loudly. I thought I could startle or scare him into giving up a clue. But he threw a stack of chips into the center of the table, grabbed his cigarette with his thumb and forefinger, and took a deep drag before removing it from his mouth.
“Congratulations,” he said. “I’m not sure Sebastian knows his whole name.” The guys at the table chuckled automatically. “Why don’t you get your little friend a drink, Sebastian,” he said. And that was all, we’d been dismissed. He didn’t even flinch when I said Hugh’s last name.
