Every Visible Thing, page 18
The crash happened so fast it was like the mirror had cracked just from my grandmother’s words. It took me a minute to connect my mother kneeling upright in bed, her hair wild with electricity, with the tea mug that lay chipped and leaking on the carpet in front of the bureau.
“Get out of my house,” my mother said. My grandmother, her face changing from confusion to fear to anger, opened her mouth to say something else. But I spoke up first.
“Leave her alone,” I said loudly, causing both of them to stare at me. And though I’d never seen my grandmother take a suggestion let alone an order from anyone, she nodded stiffly and left the room. “Just leave her alone,” I added, after she’d gone. When I turned to look at her, my mother had already reburied herself under the covers.
My grandmother moved out the next day, taking her makeup bag and suitcase, her mouth still tight from the talk she’d had with my father in his office. I figured her leaving would cause some big melodramatic change, that my family would band together. This is what would have happened in a book. But nothing changed, except our house got dirty again, my mother stayed in bed, my father in his office or at search headquarters, and I went back to listening to Owen breathe.
The next September, no one sent the check in for school pictures, so Owen and I were only allowed to pose with our classes. I didn’t like the idea of missing a year. I took Owen to Woolworth’s, paid with quarters, and drew the curtain across the booth. We got one strip of the two of us together. You always saw kids goofing off in those photo booth pictures, but Owen and I just sat still and forgot to smile.
Lionel is really pissed to find me in his room. He actually grabs me by my jacket and pulls me off the bed, slamming me against the wall. My neck snaps back and I hit my head hard. The look on his face makes me wonder why I never noticed in all those pictures that he was crazy. That sparkle I thought was mischievousness is now a flash of something else. He looks like he is enjoying how angry he is.
Sebastian stops him. “C’mon, Lionel, lay off,” he says. This isn’t his normal voice, but the whiny, powerless voice of a little brother getting picked on. “She’s just a girl,” he adds.
Lionel blinks, then lets go of me like I’m burning his hands. I don’t realize he’s holding me up until my feet land on the floor.
“A girl?” he says doubtfully, looking at my chest. “What are you, a dyke?”
I shake my head.
“Well, whatever you are, it still doesn’t explain why you’re in my room. Looking for something?”
It suddenly occurs to me that Lionel thinks I’m stealing drugs. I might laugh, if my head didn’t feel like it might explode with the effort.
“My brother,” I say softly.
“What the fuck is she talking about?” Lionel asks Sebastian. Sebastian looks confused, like he’s missed something because he’s so stoned.
“Beats me, her brother’s like ten years old.”
“My other brother,” I say, louder now. “Hugh Furey.”
Lionel runs his hands through his hair, rearranging the stiff spikes. I’ve looked at this face so much, it’s odd to see it close up and moving. Recognition passes over it. I wait for anger or panic or guilt or fear, but he just shakes his head, baffled.
“Wasn’t he that kid who disappeared?” he says.
“Yes,” I say. Sebastian looks from me to Lionel, waiting for someone to explain.
“That was like five years ago. The police interviewed everyone about it. What, you think I’ve had him in the closet all this time?”
“No,” I say stupidly. I am confused. He said the police interviewed him, but I thought they’d never seen the pictures. I was sure only I knew about Lionel.
“Didn’t you,” I start. I’m blushing now. “Weren’t you his friend?”
“I sold his girlfriend weed. We weren’t exactly buddies. He was pretty straight and narrow.”
“But he took pictures of you,” I say. Lionel is bored with me. He turns around, takes his T-shirt all the way off with one pull at the back collar. His back is smooth, with sharp clean bones rising like wings behind his shoulders. He is much taller than Sebastian, almost as tall as Hugh. I think he is the best-looking guy I’ve ever seen in person. He sits on the bed and lights a cigarette with his Zippo, swiping it across the thigh of his jeans like Sebastian.
“He took pictures of everyone,” Lionel says. “I can’t help it if I’m photogenic.” He bats his eyelashes at me and tells me to get out of his room.
I can’t move. After the party winds down, and people either leave or find a corner to sleep off their hangovers, after I explain myself to Sebastian, and he grows tired halfway through and falls asleep with his head in my lap, I still don’t get up. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but for some reason I want to wait. I wait for dawn to arrive and the T to start running and my parents to wake up. I wait until I know that it’s too late, until I’m sure I’ve done the worst thing of my life. Then I fall asleep.
14. hammer
Owen’s father always wakes him gently. He raises the shades first, then sits on the bed and pulls the covers slowly away from where Owen burrows his head. He repeats his name in a soft, coaxing voice. If he has found this more difficult lately, since Owen started going to bed an hour and a half before he’s due to get up, he has yet to lose his patience and change the routine.
His mother’s technique is more direct. She throws open the door, letting the knob knock against the perpendicular wall. She flicks the overhead switch and calls his name the first time as though she has already been calling him for an hour. He doesn’t mind that she is rarely around to do this anymore.
They never wake him together. This is how he knows, immediately, that something is wrong. The room is dark, and he opens one eye to his father’s soft but anxious voice, then both eyes with his mother’s bark. His first thought is that he has told the truth in his sleep. He snakes a hand down to check and see if his pajamas are wet.
“Owen,” his mother says urgently, so he looks up. They are backlit by the hallway, which means it’s too early for the sun to be up.
“Where’s your sister?” she says.
He wonders why are they looking for Lena in his room when she moved out of it years ago. Then his mind gels and he remembers.
“She must be late,” Owen says.
“Owen!” his mother grabs his shoulders, shaking him. “Are you awake? What do you mean, late?”
“Nothing,” Owen says, rubbing his shoulder. He feigns confusion though he is now fully awake. “I mean, did you look in her room?”
His mother, frustrated, turns around and marches away. Owen looks at his father.
“Your sister isn’t in her bed,” he says. Then, ridiculously: “Go back to sleep.”
Owen swings his feet out of bed and toes into his slippers, following his father out of the room.
The hall clock reads 5:30. Owen must have fallen asleep earlier than usual; he has no memory after two A.M. He assumes Lena left the house when his parents went to bed, but he was sketching in his room and doesn’t really know.
His mother is on the kitchen phone, responding to someone’s questions with clipped, angry answers.
“Fifteen,” she says, then pauses. “Yes. No. I don’t think so. Nine o’clock. Yes, last night. No. No. Not that I know of. Of course not.”
“Listen to me,” she says after a pause, quiet and fierce. “I will not wait twenty-four hours. I won’t wait twenty-four minutes. Send someone now.”
Owen’s father steps forward and takes the phone from her hand. She gives it up more easily than Owen expects her to, but doesn’t move away, so they are standing closer together than they normally do. If one of them curled an arm out, they’d be hugging.
“This is Henry Furey. I want to speak to Chief Brody,” Owen’s father says. “That’s fine. I’ll wait while you call him at home.”
Owen’s mother stares directly ahead at her husband’s chest, as if she is contemplating resting her forehead there. Owen peeks out into the hall, at the unlatched back door. When Lena walks in, there will be quite a scene.
Three hours later the kitchen is bright, and a tall, lanky man his father’s age, wearing a suit with a gun strapped underneath, stands on their linoleum and writes short answers in a little spiral flip book. This is Brookline’s chief of police, whom his father seems to know well enough to call “John.” He has gray hair cropped to his head in a buzz cut, and a tiny piece of toilet paper bull’s-eyed with blood on the edge of his jaw. He smiles and says hello to Owen, calling him by name though no one has introduced them. His parents haven’t looked at Owen in hours; he sits at the inner corner of the breakfast table, hoping not to be sent away. The chief turns down his mother’s offer of coffee.
“Please sit down, Elizabeth,” he says. She doesn’t. “Take a breath. Tell me what’s going on.”
“What’s going on is the same thing all over again. She’s gone from her bed. She was there last night and this morning she was gone.”
“All right,” the chief says, noting something in his book. “Has she been acting out lately? Fighting with you, talking back?”
“She’s a teenager,” Owen’s father says. “Of course she has.”
“Any reason she would run away?”
“Only if she were the cruelest child in the world,” Owen’s mother says.
“Elizabeth.” The chief sighs. “My men have gone over the house. There is no sign of forced entry. I think it’s safe to assume she left on her own.”
“Your assumptions have been wrong before,” she snaps back.
“You said yourself you chained the back door,” the chief says softly. “The chain isn’t broken. It was unlatched from the inside.”
Owen’s mother plunks down then, hanging her face in her hands.
“Why would she do that?”
Chief Brody looks as if he has a suggestion, but seems to decide against it. “We’ll find her,” he says instead. “I’ll put the whole department on it. We’ll need a picture.”
Owen’s mother lets out a noise then, a horrible noise that sounds as if something small has just died in her throat. Chief Brody reaches into his inner suit pocket, pulling out a handkerchief, though his mother is not technically crying. A flash of silver catches Owen’s eye. He squints. On the policeman’s lapel is a tiny angel, pinned so tightly through the cloth it almost disappears, its wings slicing a cave into the fabric.
In the space of one sentence Owen goes from invisible to the object of the room’s attention.
“She sneaks out,” he says. His parents whip their heads around to look at him. “She sneaks out,” he repeats to the police chief, who is looking at him strangely. “And she dresses like a boy.”
It doesn’t occur to him until later, after he has given them every detail, that he has betrayed Lena. The angel is the reason he told. It was a sign. This is what Hugh wants him to do. He doesn’t think, despite the things she has said, that his sister would run away. Owen can’t believe that Lena would insert that noise into her mother’s throat, or the shake into his father’s voice. Not willingly. Not when she has heard them before.
Owen forgets that it’s Monday until he answers the door to Tom Fisher standing in the outer foyer, blue backpack hiked childishly on both shoulders. His mother hurries up behind him and looks annoyed when she sees who it is.
“Why don’t you take Owen outside to play?” she says to him. Tom looks alarmed.
“Mom,” Owen says. “It’s like ten degrees out.”
“Put a hat on,” she says, waving them away. She goes back to the kitchen where she is making coffee for a policewoman and Jeremy Lispet’s mother, passing the time as she waits for the phone to ring.
Owen asks Tom to wait. He dresses quickly, grabbing his folder of finished homework, and leads the way out into the frigid air.
“You don’t have to stay,” he says. Tom shrugs as if it doesn’t matter. They stand on the porch for a minute while King, the dog across the street, barks furiously from his perch on the stairs.
“C’mon,” Owen says. “Shut up, King!” Owen hates that dog. He never barks when you need him to.
He leads Tom down the driveway, under his own bedroom windows, then Lena’s, and around to the back of the house. In between the house and the small, overgrown backyard is an old garage his father keeps asking the landlord to tear down. Owen is not allowed inside because the roof is missing in places and the whole thing is threatening to collapse in on itself. There is an old orange Saab inside, its engine long gone, abandoned by a previous tenant. When he was little, Owen and his sister played “Dukes of Hazzard” in this car. He hasn’t thought of that in years.
“You drive,” he says to Tom. He creaks the passenger door open and gets inside, the leather seats like ice against the backside of his jeans. Tom gets in the driver’s side and, automatically, as any child too young to drive would, he jiggles the wheel, flicks the levers on either side, changes gears, and makes the small, happy noise of a sports car accelerating. He glances at Owen, embarrassed, and leans back in his seat.
“So how come the police are at your house?” he says after an uncomfortable silence.
“My sister is missing,” Owen says.
“Wow. Didn’t that happen to your brother, too?” Owen nods. “Interesting,” Tom says with his characteristic tone, far too old for an eleven-year-old. This voice is why the majority of the fifth grade makes fun of him. “Maybe your family’s cursed. Are you worried it will happen to you?”
“I wasn’t really,” Owen says. “Until you mentioned it.”
“Sorry,” Tom says. “Where do you think she is?”
“I think she snuck out and something’s keeping her from coming home,” Owen says. Tom nods at this, as if they are police detectives trading reasonable assumptions in their squad car.
“Are you ever coming back to school?” Tom says after a pause.
“Nope,” Owen says. “Danny Gray wants to kill me.” He’s not sure why he’s talking about this so freely. This morning’s confession to the police has left him reckless.
“Why?” Tom says. He’s not a good liar; it’s clear he already knows the answer. One word and you can hear his heart beating with the fear of being found out.
“Don’t you know?” Owen says, glaring at him. Tom blushes.
“Danny told everyone you tried to give him a blow job while he was sleeping,” he admits.
“Yeah, well.” Owen fiddles with the button on the emergency brake. “That’s not what happened, but no one’s going to believe me.”
“What did happen?” Tom asks quietly. Owen looks up suspiciously. Tom seems too guileless to be trapping him. And he hardly cares anymore. He just wants to tell someone.
“We were fooling around. It wasn’t even my idea. Not originally. His mom caught us.”
Tom nods. “That happened to me,” he says. “At my old school. My best friend told everyone I tried to kiss him.”
Owen nods. He’s not sure he wants to have this in common with Tom Fisher. They sit for a moment, both looking out the windshield, as if they are checking for traffic on an imaginary road.
“Did you like it, though?” Tom says finally, gripping the wheel, ready to swerve if he has to.
“It scared me,” Owen says softly. “But yeah.” His thighs are shaking.
“Me, too,” Tom says. Then, without looking over, he reaches out and puts his hand on Owen’s, still fidgeting with the emergency brake. Owen looks at it for a moment and considers pulling away. Instead he turns his own hand up so their palms meet, curling his fingers in with Tom’s.
“I won’t tell anyone,” Tom says.
They sit there, holding hands, until his mother calls Owen’s name from the back door.
His father spends the whole day patrolling Brookline and Boston in his station wagon, his mother answers phone calls and fends off sympathetic neighbors. His sister’s picture appears on the local six o’clock news, along with a sketch done by a police artist based on Owen’s description of Lena in disguise. Anyone who sees her is instructed to call the police station. That night there is another visit from the chief, but Owen is sent to his room for the update. His parents’ voices through the closed door are shrill, panicked. The chief goes home around ten, but leaves an officer by the curb in a squad car to watch them for the night. Owen listens to his parents refusing calls that might tie up the phone, boiling the kettle, pacing the floors, rummaging in his sister’s room, not going to bed. At midnight, he wanders out in new pajamas and finds them sitting on the sofa, the television on with the volume knob turned down, staring straight ahead at the phone that has been pulled to the coffee table. There is a haze of smoke as thick as storm clouds over the upper half of the living room. His father, who has been trying to cut down, lights a new cigarette from the remains of the filter in his hand.
“Can I stay up?” Owen asks. He can’t stand the thought of being in his room, not with everyone else out here waiting. He moves toward the couch, aiming for the empty cushion between them.
“Go to bed,” his mother says harshly.
His father looks at her. “Elizabeth?” he says.
“You’re going to school tomorrow,” she explains. Owen feels himself growing hot.
“I can’t,” he says. His voice is small and not very convincing. I have AIDS, he thinks. He says: “I’m sick.”
“You’ll be fine,” she says. “It’s time you went back.” She’s looking at his father.
“I have a fever,” Owen whines. “Dad?” His father looks at his mother for a second, receiving some silent signal.
“Go to bed, Owen,” he says. “I’ll get you up in the morning. You can try one day and see how it goes.”
Owen turns and heads back to his room, nausea welling up as strong as though it has been summoned. Just before he closes the door, he hears his mother say something, though he cannot make out what comes before or after.
“I don’t want him around,” is all he hears.
His father drives him. He double-parks by the front entrance, which Owen never uses because the side door by the kindergarten is closer when he cuts through the park. Seeing his school from this angle—the swarm of dropped-off students shuffling in through double doors—makes it seem more ominous. He spent the morning making vomiting noises in the bathroom, while sitting on the toilet with real but silent diarrhea. He spiked his temperature to 103 degrees—emergency measures—but his mother shook it down and claimed it was normal. He considered fainting, but couldn’t muster the courage to let himself fall to the hardwood floor.
