Every Visible Thing, page 21
When I got back to the party, I couldn’t find my father. Owen had been bullied by an older boy and was now wheezing, clinging to my side and asking to go home. I asked Father Brian, who once came regularly to our house for dinner, if he knew where my father was.
“Probably in his office, Pet,” Father Brian said. “He’s never been one for the parties. Come, I’ve the key to upstairs.”
I left Owen with a professor’s wife and followed Father Brian up a set of gloomy stone stairs. My father’s office was at the end of a long hall lined with stained-glass windows. We could see his light shining through the frosted-glass transom. Father Brian put a finger to his lips and tried to make me laugh by tiptoeing down the hall. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I’d outgrown this game years ago.
When we opened the door, my first impression was that there were too many limbs. My father, his tweed back to the door, was sprouting extra milky arms and legs like some sort of monster. Then I saw the long, white stockings and how my father was pressed between them, and the womanly arms, which clung to his back in a hug that was way too tight, the kind you gave when you were upset or excited. By the time I distinguished two heads they had moved apart.
It was the woman from the bathroom, a section of her hair yanked from its bun, her eyes having a hard time catching up to the interruption. Her plum lipstick was almost gone, only a light smear outlined her mouth. The majority of the color was on my father’s mouth now, which looked like a bruise, hanging open, with nothing to say. Father Brian closed the door and walked me back down to the party, holding my arm with the same gentle pressure I had seen him use to guide people through funerals.
My father got fired. The plum woman turned out to be a theology student, one of his research assistants for the abandoned angel book. They had been letting him slide for a while, since Hugh’s disappearance, out of charity. He hadn’t published anything in years, and there were complaints from students about unprepared lectures and incomplete office hours. I overheard all this when Father Brian came by the house to talk to him. My father cried and begged, and Father Brian said he’d pray for him.
Later that night, my mother put on a robe and slippers and went downstairs to his office. She was down there for two hours, and only twice did I hear the pitch of her voice rise above a whisper. She came back up and, passing by my room, opened the door abruptly.
“Are you getting a divorce?” I said.
She reached out a thin pale arm and turned the switch on my clip-on lamp, dropping me into darkness.
“It’s time you went to sleep,” she said.
It takes almost an hour for Sebastian and I to trudge through the snow to a strip mall where we find a motel. I have to pay the guy at the desk $39.95 for the room. He gives us a key and we look for room 285 down a hallway of identical blue doors. Inside is a stale-smelling room with a huge bed covered in a floral polyester spread, a TV, and a tiny bathroom in the corner.
Sebastian decides I need a shower, though I am cleaner than he is. He takes my clothes off while I stand on the bathroom mat. This could be sexy except for the fact that I’m still crying and he’s not looking as he does it, so it’s more like babysitting. He turns on the water and slides open the frosted-glass door, holding my arm while I step over the tub lip. He sits on the toilet and smokes while I’m in there, as if he thinks I might drown. I hold my face under the stream of water that is stronger than my crying, hoping to wash it away. There is no soap or shampoo, so I just stand there for a while, letting the water pressure beat the gel and grease from my hair. When there’s nothing left to do, I turn off the shower and Sebastian hands me a tiny towel before leaving the bathroom. Apparently he trusts me to dry off by myself. I put my T-shirt back on, which smells like Lionel’s car, and abandon my underwear. I wish there was a razor to shave my legs.
When I come out Sebastian gives me a blue pill. He opens the bed for me and pulls the stiff covers up over my shoulders when I lie down.
“Aren’t you getting in?” I say.
“I thought I’d sleep on the floor,” he says.
“Why?” I say. “I’m not crying anymore.”
“I don’t want to confuse you,” he says.
“You’ll confuse me if you don’t,” I say.
So he gets into bed. I can’t help feeling a little awful about it, like I begged him. Like maybe he’s here because he feels sorry for me and he’d rather be back at the party with Anorexia. This makes me kiss him a little harder and faster than I really want to. And when he kisses back, when his breath gets ragged and he starts to look sort of distant and intensely focused at the same time, and a little mean, kind of like he doesn’t recognize me even as he presses into me, at the same point at Lionel’s where I got really scared and lonely and went limp so he would stop, this time I don’t. This time I kiss him harder and make my own little demanding whimpers and press my hips up. Even though I don’t mean any of it and want to stop and wish his eyes would go back to normal, still I let him take off my T-shirt and even help him undo his pants as though I’m proving something by doing this. Even at the last second, when his arms are shaking as he holds himself above me and he says You sure?, which is my chance to get out of it, I nod and even act like I’m a little impatient for him to hurry up. It’s not until he pushes inside me and the pain makes me gasp out loud that I know I could have stopped him any time tonight, any time in the last few days, that I could still stop him now. But I didn’t. I don’t. I let him keep having sex with me even as I lie there wondering why I am letting him.
16. underoos
The door to Lena’s room is wide open now, the walls lit starkly by a bare overhead bulb, a skeleton of hardware where there was once a milk-glass globe, broken in a game of indoor basketball when the room was still Hugh’s. The contents of the room have been combed for evidence and tidied in the process, leaving behind an unnatural neatness that makes it look even more abandoned. As if, now that it has been cleaned up, Lena is never coming back. Like Hugh’s room after he was gone, which Owen can’t remember as anything but tidy and waiting, the bed made up, top sheet folded down in expectation.
She has only been missing for two days, but there are rumors sprouting like mushrooms in the neighborhood. Owen overhears the theories of her disappearance from nine-year-old Jason Lank two houses down. A black van with tinted windows has been cruising the neighborhood, a former child molester out on parole moved next door to Mr. and Mrs. Stein, the elderly Holocaust survivors local children are afraid to speak to. Owen doesn’t bother to correct Jason or tell him the things he hears reported in his own kitchen. The chief informing his parents, with the gravity of a man reporting the discovery of a body, how they have checked Lena’s bank account. She has emptied the cash from her savings.
Owen’s parents go back to making phone calls to every parent in the sophomore class. His mother has not retreated to bed this time, but Owen is sure she will. He stops Chief Brody on his way out.
“Someone could have made her take that money out,” Owen says. The chief sighs.
“Possible, kiddo,” he says. “But unlikely.” He puts a hand on Owen’s shoulder, heavy with pity, and looks as if he is about to let him in on something. Tell him that his sister has run away. And that this is different—not as deserving of his time as a real missing child.
“Aren’t you the one who never found my brother?” Owen says.
The chief, like everyone else these days, seems more baffled than hurt by Owen’s meanness. This makes Owen furious. No one takes him seriously.
On Friday, his parents are gone by the time he wakes up. No one has told him anything, so Owen hangs around for the morning. By noon, he is bored, so he sneaks out the back door to avoid the police car he assumes is still out front. He doesn’t bother to leave a note. They are too worried about Lena to think about him. He learned this yesterday after wandering off to the corner store for a Snickers bar, then running back without even buying it, terrified that he had caused them worry. No one noticed him gone. No one has offered him a meal in days; he grazes in the refrigerator when he’s hungry, like the rest of them.
He walks for twenty minutes up and then down St. Paul Street, turns right onto Aspinwall, then left into Brookline Village. St. Mary’s Church commands a whole corner, the statue of the Virgin looking a bit more battered than he remembers her. The blue of her gown is chipped and mildew grows like eczema over her cheeks. It is a weekday, masses are long over, but the heavy carved doors at the top of the stone stairway are unlocked. Owen steps in and stops to let his eyes adjust. Though the hanging lantern fixtures are fitted with bulbs, the sanctuary is never more than dimly lit. He walks around to the left aisle because the center looks imposing and official, as if he needs more of a Catholic education to be allowed to stroll up it. There is something he is supposed to do before getting in a pew, something like a dip or a curtsy he remembers his parents performing, but he’s not sure how it’s done, so he merely hunches as he slides into a bench just before the altar.
Everything is the same. Each thing he sees makes him remember it, as though these objects and smells have been there all along, locked in a cubby of his brain, and now that they’re out he can’t imagine not remembering them. It scares him, the fact that things can hide in your own mind. Fool you into believing you don’t remember them, then reappear and pretend they’ve been right in front of you all along.
The mahogany pews are the same: old scars trapped under new polish, slick with layers of polyurethane and the residue of countless gripping hands. The maroon cushions are worn to pink in places and smell musty. On the back of each pew, at two-foot intervals, are small brass clips to hold music sheets or missals. When they were still going to church, and his parents were up for communion or simply not paying attention, Lena and Owen competed to see who could hold their fingertip the longest beneath these clips. He does it now, automatically, the memory blooming along with his movements. The clip seems to grip harder the longer he holds his finger in there. He used to let his nail turn almost purple before giving up. Still, Lena was always tougher. Now he wonders if it was Hugh who taught her this game in the first place.
Owen looks up at the ceiling where fat babies with wings float on clouds in pockets of painted blue sky. Behind the altar is a complicated carving of white marble turrets he once imagined was the gate to an entire secret city. On either side of this centerpiece are two tall stained-glass windows. Two men in robes, strong wings rising from their backs. One is dark-haired and brooding, the other fair and innocent. They are labeled Saint Gabriel and Saint Michael. It is these angels he has come to see. After Hugh went missing, before his father took them out of church, Owen spent the long boring mass, much of which he barely understood, staring at these two. Lit by mid-morning sun, glowing in the rich purples and greens of stained glass, their faces amber, their wings folded behind them, they made him think, long before that fateful conversation with his CCD teacher, of his missing brother. Michael in his blond innocence and Gabriel with his dark suggestion of danger. Their features were similar, as though they were related, a good and a bad twin. They made Owen think of the transformation of his brother, from soft-haired ninth-grader to a punk he could barely remember. They reminded him that anyone, even someone you’d known your whole life, could become unrecognizable.
Even Owen’s prayers have an edge now. They have lost the sweet, easygoing quality he has begun to associate with a former version of himself.
“You’re the one who can find her,” he says to the image of his brother set in broken glass. “And you know it.”
When he leaves the church, the first thing he sees is the back of a green-and-white-striped rugby shirt, a boy hunched and shivering on the stone steps, who he assumes to be one of Danny’s friends staking him out. He is relieved, and then annoyed, when he sees that it is Tom Fisher.
“What are you doing here?” Owen says. Tom stands up. He looks silly in casual clothing, as if he is trying to disguise himself as a normal child. Owen has never seen him in anything but a white oxford shirt and khakis, occasionally accessorized with a pilled wool sweater. When he transferred last year from a private school it was rumored that his mother refused to believe there was no uniform. Owen wonders where his coat is, but doesn’t want Tom to think he cares.
“I need to talk to you,” Tom says.
“Are you following me?”
“Yes,” Tom says, as if this is completely reasonable. “As I just said, I need to talk to you.”
“Maybe I don’t want to talk to you,” Owen says. He takes the stairs two at a time, passing by Tom in a huff. But Tom follows, matching Owen’s quick pace.
“You had no right to treat me like that,” Tom says. His voice wobbles but he speaks carefully, as if he’s been practicing what to say. “I’ve never been anything but nice to you.”
There are so many things about this speech that infuriate Owen that, for a moment, he can’t respond. He’s still recovering from the indignity of being followed, and now, the straightforwardness, the maturity of Tom’s confrontation makes him so furious he accidentally bites down on the inside of his mouth. This is what has bothered him about Tom all along; this is why Tom has no friends. He speaks like a grownup, addresses things directly, does not play by a kid’s rules. He makes the normal comebacks of an eleven-year-old sound ridiculous.
Owen tries one anyway. “Queer,” he scoffs, under his breath, a dismissive snort in his throat.
“I bet you can’t look at me and say that,” Tom says. Owen has no response to this. He has never, not for as long as he can remember, spoken his mind the way that Tom does. No one else he knows does so, either. People are cruel to one another and never say a word about it. Bad things happen and are never mentioned again. Why is Tom allowed to fight back when Owen is required to keep everything inside? And why does he refuse to be driven away?
Owen trudges on, barely watching where he’s going, hoping only that his pace and refusal to look will make Tom give up before he reaches home.
He doesn’t notice that he’s leading them by the shortcut he avoided on the way here, until they come upon the main gates of the graveyard. Owen pauses, scanning the landscape, and Tom, who has been trailing him with blind determination, almost runs into him.
“Is there a problem?” Tom asks, when Owen continues to stand there.
“Is there a problem? Owen mimics, his voice high-pitched and prissy. He can’t see the whole graveyard from this gate. If he continues by the road and goes around it, it will be far out of the way and obvious to Tom that he’s avoiding something.
“That was unnecessary,” Tom quips, and Owen stomps ahead into the graveyard without answering.
They are well inside the grounds and have turned left past the Civil War monument before he sees Danny. He is sitting up high, on top of a tomb, his long, stained jean legs swinging in boredom beneath him. He raises a brown-bagged bottle to his full lips. He appears to be alone. Danny spies them, lowers the bottle, and in the delay while he swallows, Owen dares to believe that it will be all right. He takes three more steps forward, large, enthusiastic steps, as if he is walking toward his best friend rather than his doom.
Danny swallows hard and lets out a delighted whoop.
“Hey, boys,” he bellows. “Look who’s decided to make this our lucky day.”
Owen stops walking when he sees Brian Dowd and Mark Flint stepping out from behind the monument. He looks behind him, calculating the chances of running for it. Tom Fisher stands there, hands on his hips, looking disapproving and powerless, like an old lady trying to reason with bank robbers. He’s not going to run, Owen realizes with a renewed surge of anger. He’s going to try to talk to them. And Owen, even if he summons his meanest self, cannot leave him there alone. He turns back around.
Danny jumps from his perch and the three of them glide into a predatory circle, enclosing Owen and Tom in a small cluster of white granite graves. Danny is smiling, his gaze flashy but unfocused, and Owen can tell he is either stoned or drunk, possibly both.
“What do we have here?” he drawls in an imitation of a television bad guy, which would be laughable if it weren’t for the glint of raw rage Owen can detect behind his toothy smile.
“You look a little pale, Furey,” Danny says. “I hear you’re pretty sick.” Owen opens his mouth to protest, then decides against it. It doesn’t matter what he says now.
“Who’s your boyfriend?” Danny asks. His cronies smile on cue.
“Haven’t you guys always wondered what fags do when they’re alone together?” Danny says. Brian takes the bait and guffaws, nodding in agreement. Mark, who seems to have taken the question literally, looks unsure.
“I bet Owen and Tommy will give us a little show, if we ask nice,” Danny adds. Brian laughs again, fidgeting with delight and grunting, like a dog about to be given a treat.
“You’ve never made sense to me, Danny Gray,” Tom says calmly.
“Oh, no?” Danny laughs, seeming delighted that Tom has decided to help things along.
“No. I thought you were too smart to be a thug. Apparently I was wrong.”
Danny’s smile evaporates. He nods, as if considering something, and steps forward, putting one hand on Tom’s shoulder. Tom looks quizzically at the hand while Danny brings his other fist slamming into his stomach. Tom drops to his knees in the terrified silent paralysis of someone who’s had the wind knocked out of him. His face grows red and desperate, and he looks up at Owen for help. Part of Owen wants to kneel down and explain the physics of it all, how his breath will come back if he waits, because Tom looks as though this has never happened to him before. But he doesn’t want to give Danny any more bait. Another part of him is annoyed. What did he expect, insulting Danny to his face? It’s not Owen’s job to hold Tom’s hand through this.
