Every Visible Thing, page 23
“Why?” I say. I’m wondering if I look really pale or deadly or something. She smiles, avoiding my eyes.
“You’re so tall,” she says.
Then I feel stupid. She means I look like Hugh.
The first thing my mother did when she got out of bed was clean the house. She vacuumed up the hamsters of dust and skin and hair that crouched in every corner and wound themselves around the feet of tables and chairs. She attacked the crevices of the stove with a Brillo pad. She did load after load of laundry, piling the kitchen table with fluffy stacks of towels, sheets, and Tshirts, and single socks that had been missing for years. She took the blankets down from her windows, revealing nicotine stains on the lamp shades and the wall behind the bed. She threw out her cigarettes and chewed nicotine gum all day. She took phone calls from her friends again, stretching the phone cord to the stove while cooking dinner. Sometimes her friends made her laugh, in a croaking, unpracticed way I was jealous of. She still wasn’t laughing with us.
I’d wanted my mother to get out of bed for three years, but once she was out, she annoyed me. She nagged at me to pick up after myself, asked about homework, restricted TV to half an hour a day. I was afraid arguing might send her back to bed, so I fumed silently. Owen rebelled for both of us.
He refused to do anything she told him to and sometimes did the exact opposite. He wouldn’t eat what she cooked, wear what she washed, or answer when she asked him a question. This confused everyone, since Owen had always been the easy one. He stopped listening to me, too. For two weeks he survived on crackers and cereal and dirty underwear. Then my father, who had been hiding in his office, drinking Scotch and reading the Help Wanted section but never calling any of the numbers he circled, took over. He made Owen an egg and cheese sandwich and poured him a glass of milk and sat by while Owen wolfed it all down. He started driving Owen to baseball practice, washing his uniform, making the two of them a separate dinner of sandwiches and pickles. I thought about telling Owen the truth about my father’s affair. I could tell that their bonding pissed off my mother, too. Owen had always been her baby. At night, I did my homework in the kitchen while my mother cleaned up, and Owen sat in the living room with my father. We had switched teams.
One night while I was reading in bed beneath the clip-on lamp, Owen snoring on the other side of the room, my father, on his way to the bathroom, pushed open the door.
“It’s after eleven,” he said. “Lights out.”
I ignored him. I gripped the edges of my book hard, wishing I had the nerve to throw it at him.
“Lena,” my father said in his warning voice. I said nothing, not even looking at him.
He turned off the light himself, leaning over me to do it. He paused a second, like he was thinking of kissing me good night or saying something else, then left and shut the door.
He didn’t come back when I turned the lamp back on, and read until I could barely see the words, daring him, over and over in my mind, to try to tell me what to do ever again.
My father got a job at a publishing house downtown, where he was the editor of books on theology and religion. These were books for regular people, self-help books with titles like Find God in Grief and What Heaven Is Like: Interviews with Children. The publisher also made angel-themed greeting cards and tchotchkes. Their newest product was inspirational cards the size of fortune cookie slips, with cartoon angels and one word on each, like Serenity, Doubt, or Abundance. There were instructions about how to use them to guide you every day. My father brought a set home for me, because they were popular with teenagers. I never opened them.
Then my mother decided to go to medical school. She said she’d planned to do so out of college but was stopped by something she wouldn’t name. I figured this was getting pregnant with Hugh, but didn’t ask. I was kind of annoyed I had never heard about this before. I had sort of assumed that my mother had no career ambitions. The thing was, it also made me feel guilty, like I’d held her back or something. My father made this little speech about how we’d all have to pitch in around the house now that Mom wouldn’t be there to do everything for us. Who are you kidding? I wanted to say.
“Can I have my own key?” Owen said, excited.
Then they gave me Hugh’s room. I came home from shopping for back-to-school clothes with Owen and all of Hugh’s stuff was cleaned out and replaced by mine. My books in the bookcase, my desk, Hugh’s double mattress made up with new red flannel sheets and a purple comforter.
“Do you like it?” my mother said. I couldn’t answer. I felt like I was going to throw up. Finally I managed to squeak out a complaint about the purple.
“You’ve always wanted your own room,” my mother said, defending herself.
No one talked about Hugh. No one mentioned my father’s girlfriend, or my mother’s time in bed. It was like we had all been stuck in the same horrible nightmare, but now that we’d woken up, I was the only one who remembered it.
In Emily’s dorm room, where she has a refrigerator and microwave and a sink like a tiny kitchen, she pours me a glass of water, saying I look dehydrated. Just hearing this makes me thirsty so I try to drink it, but it’s too hard. It feels like someone is pressing a thumb into my throat. I keep pulling my T-shirt collar away, thinking it’s choking me, but really it’s so stretched it barely touches my neck.
Emily chats as she boils a small electric kettle and makes tea that smells suspiciously herbal. She asks about my parents, about Owen, a few of Hugh’s friends who have gone off to college. She asks if we still live in Brookline and says her parents moved to New York so she’s never been back.
“I was so jealous of you,” she says, setting a mug of strong-smelling tea on the desk in front of me.
“What?” I say, trying to turn my nose from the tea. “Why?”
“It was more like I was jealous of your family. I wanted to be in it. You guys seemed so normal. My house was so fucked up in comparison.”
“We’re not normal,” I say. She nods. She thinks I mean now, or since Hugh. But I can’t remember us ever being normal.
Emily jumps up then, her largish bottom jiggling freely in her gauzy skirt. “Are you hungry? I can make you something in the microwave. Tofu stir-fry. I’m a vegetarian. Or my roommate has Pop-Tarts if you want something sweet, but you look like you could use something wholesome.”
“That’s okay,” I say. I yank at the neck of my T-shirt again. The fluorescent light bulb above us is making everything look sort of green.
She sits on one of the beds. “I was a drug addict, you know,” she says. I shake my head. “Hugh tried to get me to stop, but I was out of control. I’d try anything, and never knew my limits. My parents had to send me away, I know that now. But after what happened to Hugh…well, I wish I hadn’t let it go that far. I hated myself after that.”
“What are you talking about?” I say. My head is going so fast I’m sure everything else about me is speeded up, too.
“I don’t know.” She shrugs, looking uncomfortable. “It wasn’t easy being the last person who ever saw him.”
At first I think she’s saying this to me. Like she’s known my secret all along. Then I hear her again, like an echo in my head, and I realize she’s talking about herself.
I have to run in the hall to find the bathroom because the thumb at my throat finally pushes me to the point of gagging.
Hugh went after her. She was at that rehab boarding school in western Mass, and wasn’t allowed any phone calls or letters. She had written once to tell him to forget her. But he came anyway. Hitchhiked all night in a snowstorm to show up the morning of Valentine’s Day. The staff tried to turn him away, but he made some sort of scene. She was pulled from jewelry-making class to calm him down. They spoke in the social worker’s office, while the social worker and two security guards waited outside.
She was cold. Cruel. She told him she had a new boyfriend, which was only half true. She was trying to make him get over her, but she was also mad at him. For not running away with her when she asked. Because she had cold, distrusting parents and he didn’t. Because she’d never really felt good enough for him. She said things she didn’t mean. He brought her every picture he’d ever taken, but she refused to look at them. This made him cry and then she cried herself. She let him take her into one of their old hugs, where she tucked her arms in against his chest and he folded himself around her. And then she wrestled her way out of it and told him not to come back and left him in that office and went back to class to finish her earrings.
For a while she thought she’d succeeded in driving him away. Until she found out he never made it home.
“You have to tell someone,” I say when she’s done with this story. “We have to call my parents, the police. They were searching in all the wrong places.”
Emily looks at me strangely. My eye has that blind spot again and my head and stomach hurt so bad it’s actually difficult to talk. I never realized how many muscles you used just to form a sentence. She’s already asked me if I want to lie down at least twice.
“Lena,” she says. “They know. The police came and interviewed me and the staff. Your father came, too. I thought he was going to strangle me. They figured Hugh hitchhiked back, and got picked up by…well, you know.”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t know any of this.” Emily looks away.
“They had a hard time accepting that he was gone. Maybe they were trying to protect you,” she says.
“Whatever,” I say. My blood is doing that rushing thing again.
“Or they just couldn’t mention my name. I don’t blame them. I hated myself for a long time. I wasn’t very nice to your brother. If it hadn’t been for me he never would have disappeared.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” I say.
“Oh, I know. I know it wasn’t really anybody’s fault.”
“Not exactly,” I say. “But it wasn’t yours.”
“Lena, you’re really pale.”
“I think I will lie down,” I say. “I can’t really see anymore.”
She gives me Tylenol and a cold washcloth for my head, and I lie down on her narrow dorm bed with the shades drawn, my mind moving so fast nothing stays in it long enough to be true.
When I finished grammar school, I had no friends. Hugh had been missing for almost four years, and at some point I must have stopped making them. It wasn’t like I could bring anybody to my house. I’d once only had boy friends. Girls didn’t really like me. I could’ve made friends at the high school, the way every other freshman seemed to be doing, but I didn’t really have the energy.
Once I got to high school I got kind of obnoxious at home. I talked back all the time, rolled my eyes, called everything annoying or stupid. Once, after my dad tried to help me pick out classes for my second semester and I said I didn’t care for the hundredth time, he threw down the paper and pencil in disgust.
“You didn’t use to be like this,” he said. He left the room, pretending not to hear me mumble after him.
“How would you know?”
I had secrets. No one knew that I came home every day after school and went straight to sleep, getting up long enough to eat my father’s latest attempt from The Joy of Cooking, then going back to bed until morning. I slept in classes, too, learning how to open my eyes and raise my head every few minutes to look like I was listening.
When I got behind in school, I’d stay up for days at a time, finishing papers I’d had months to do or cramming for tests. I took No-Doz at five times the recommended dose until I gagged if I moved too fast and my hands trembled. I stayed awake until I started to hear things—voices calling my name, television programs that hadn’t been on for years—until the world moved so fast and I moved so slow I started to think it was leaving me behind. Once, during an algebra midterm, I swore under my breath because I couldn’t get the variables to stay still on the page. When I saw the other kids and the teacher staring at me, I knew I’d said it really loud.
After my study binges I would sleep whole weekends away, leaving my radio tuned to the Top 40 countdown and candles burning to fool my parents into thinking I was awake. I told them they couldn’t come into my new room without knocking, and I was so obnoxious when they did, they generally avoided it.
I experimented with myself. I stopped eating for days, or made myself throw up by sticking the wrong end of a toothbrush down my throat. I drank half a bottle of vodka in one chug on the fire escape behind the Coolidge Corner Theater and spent the rest of the night talking to strangers who looked at me like I was nuts. I don’t remember anything I said, so they could’ve been right. I took a razor blade from my father’s drawer in the bathroom and sliced thin lines in the skin of my forearm. I saved the washcloth that I used to blot these cuts, including the time I carved too deep by accident, and had to use pressure to stop the blood. I smoked clove cigarettes I bought at the pipe store, though I didn’t know how to inhale them, and couldn’t finish a whole one without feeling sick to my stomach. I set little fires in my room, of shredded paper and rug lint, and let them get big enough to be dangerous before putting them out.
I didn’t feel better. I didn’t feel worse. Nothing made me feel anything but what I’d already known for years.
When I wake up my teeth are chattering and I’m sure I’ve just heard my mother call my name, in the aggravated tone she gets when I’ve overslept. It’s dark at the edges of Emily’s curtains. I don’t feel the slightest bit better. It’s possible I feel worse. When I sit up I’m sure my head has split down the middle and I’ve left half of it on the pillow.
While I run water in the sink I hear it again. My name, like it’s being screamed across a playground, in Owen’s voice this time. It doesn’t sound like I’m imagining it, even though I know it must be in my head. But my head doesn’t feel in charge right now. Like it might be letting in things besides my thoughts to run around.
Emily has left me a note on the desk that says she’s gone to her evening class but I can stay as long as I want. I can’t stand the thought of waiting here for Emily. Eventually she’s going to think to ask me if my parents know I’m here. And I no longer have any urge left to call them.
It’s snowing outside again, heavy wet snow mixed with sleet. I go downtown to look for Sebastian, but it’s pretty deserted. When I’m passing by a coffee shop I see him through the window. He’s sitting at a table with Anorexia, and they’re kissing. I can’t seem to stop watching this even though it’s not exactly what I want to see right now. He looks up, spots me, and comes outside. His whole posture suggests a tiresome chore.
“Are you okay?” he says. I nod. I try to light a cigarette but the whole pack is wet and it breaks off at the filter. “I’m sorry about last night,” he adds. Anorexia is smoking impatiently inside, waiting for him to come back.
“Me, too.” I laugh. Sebastian looks angry.
“Everything isn’t always about you,” he says. He looks like he might cry, and I know that if I say the right thing, I can probably get him back. But it will only be for about five minutes.
“Clearly,” I say.
“Fine,” he spits. “Be that way.” He goes inside and I walk away knowing he won’t come after me.
I find a group of teenagers huddling on the small island of snow and trees in front of Town Hall. Someone offers me a can of Budweiser and a hit off of a joint. I am looking for the right girl. Not too pretty, but not so bad she’ll be easy. Someone in between, lonely, looking pissed off, smoking a cigarette like if she inhales deep enough it might change something. Someone who needs to be told the obvious, because she has ceased believing in it herself. A lost girl.
I kiss her against a wet, rough tree, deep and slow and long and like I have nothing else planned for the rest of my life. I kiss her like my head isn’t pounding, like my stomach feels just fine, like I hear nothing but her soft whimpering against my mouth. I press my bruised hips hard, bruising hers.
“You’re so pretty,” I whisper, when the truth is my head hurts so much I barely know what she looks like. “Where did you learn to kiss so great?” She’s an inexperienced kisser, no control, tongue all over the place.
“My boyfriend,” she says sharply. That’s when I realize I’ve miscalculated. She’s not lost or lonely. She’s just bored. And her boyfriend has seen us leave.
He punches me twice, hard in the face, holding on to me to make it hurt more or keep me steady, I’m not sure. The girl squeals and stomps away, saying she’s tired of his temper. He gives me one last kick before chasing after her. “Fucking punk,” he hisses. I laugh. I consider telling him I’m a girl. I wonder if it will make him apologize or hit me even harder. I lie there until I’m too uncomfortable to stand being still anymore and have no choice but to get up.
My head feels like it has small explosions going on inside of it, I’m doubled over with stomach pain, and if I look anywhere near a streetlight I go blind. Out of habit, I reach behind me to tap the camera bag, but it’s not there. It’s not on the ground nearby, either. Something rises in me. I try to remember if that guy took it, but I don’t think so. I’ve left it somewhere. But when I try to think back to when I last had it everything swells and pops in my head.
“Shit,” I say out loud. Hugh’s camera bag. The binder of negatives. Every picture I’ve developed. “Fuck!”
An older couple walking nearby look at me like I’m dangerous. I squat down and hold on to my knees and rock back and forth. I need to think. I reach for a cigarette, but the pack is soaked from slush and unsmokable. My head is killing me.
I get up. I’ll concentrate on a place to buy cigarettes. They will help me remember. I find a Cumberland Farms and buy two packs of Marlboros. I can’t even smoke one, it makes me gag and cough. Not being able to smoke seems almost worse than anything that’s happened so far. Like proof that nothing will ever be reliable. I decide to find a phone and call Emily. Maybe I left the camera bag there.
