Every Visible Thing, page 6
He checked the dryer but found it empty. He opened the washer door and stood on tiptoes to reach down; his hand plunged into water and sopping clothes. Suddenly, Owen realized his cleats were also wet, and that beyond the normal damp sweat of the basement floor there was the glimmer of a puddle. The washer had overflowed before, and Owen felt a surge of temper that his mother was not there to deal with it.
Owen turned around so fast he bumped into the lamp, which stood on the same platform as the washer. In a slow-motion trip and tumble that he would re-create over and over in the weeks to come, both the lamp and Owen fell to the floor, the lamp first and Owen on top, right into the puddle of soapy water.
Owen would never know how long the next part took. Though there was pain, pain unlike any he had ever experienced, pulsing and massive, and paralysis, he lived through it all like he was in a dream, floating above and watching it happen. Watching his half-naked body convulse on the floor, watching his legs not move even though he was making every effort to stand up, watching himself open his mouth to scream and nothing coming out except the dull hum of deadly voltage. Though his asthma made him wheeze, this was the first time he had ever been completely unable to breathe. He even saw the realization come over his face, the moment where it occurred to him that he could die. Then, with nothing but a ripple in the air above him, a slight change in the angle of shadows in the room, he was lifted from the charged floor and catapulted out into the small hallway, where his shoulder smashed against the cement wall. It was only then, after he was released from the current, that he was able to scream.
Later, there were different stories. The story of how Lena woke to his screaming, and when their father came bursting into her room and asked where her brother was, she said the laundry room, with no idea how she knew. The story of his father running downstairs and pulling him away from the still popping electricity, so that he felt the shock slice briefly through his own body. The story from the emergency team, two fire trucks and an ambulance that crowded the whole of their dead-end street, who insisted that Owen saved himself, vaulting with superhuman strength far enough away that he was able to regain his voice and scream for help.
Owen’s story he kept to himself. He formed it during the never-dark nights of his three days of observation at Children’s Hospital, his thoughts repeating in time to the beeping of his heart monitor. During morning rounds, he was quiet and cooperative while the doctors showed his mother’s classmates the entry and exit wounds left by the electricity, a black charred spot on his chest opposite his heart and another on the palm of one hand. He pretended not to hear while they told one another in the hallway that another thirty seconds on that floor would have killed him. His father pulled him off just in time; this is the story the doctors had heard. Lucky for the kid he could scream, they said. Owen never corrected them, letting his father, who had so little to be happy about in those days, be the hero. He enjoyed his mother’s guilt, exaggerating his need for the inhaler whenever she stopped by his hospital room. He told no one about that moment where he was lifted into the air, hurled from danger, tossed a little too forcefully into the cement wall. There was a distinct feeling of actual hands yanking him from the pull of electricity. He didn’t tell them that it wasn’t until after he was saved that he began to scream.
The first time Danny comes in front of him, Owen is supposed to be asleep. They are in Danny’s bed, and Owen hears the shuddery breath before he feels the quickening of Danny’s hand as it catches the comforter. Owen is still facing the wall, so he doesn’t see the moment where Danny’s face seizes in near-pain, doesn’t witness, though he will later, the release, which he had always assumed would make a noise, and is disappointed to discover occurs in pure silence. He’s not even sure what has happened until Danny is done, and, as if he knows or hopes Owen has been listening, he whispers: “Do you spurt yet?”
Owen shakes his head without turning around. “Uh-uh.”
“Wanna see?”
Owen rolls over, and before he can look, Danny takes his hand and places it against the smooth, taut skin below his belly button, where there is a little pool. There is both more and less of it than Owen imagined. It clings like snot, and Owen would like to let go, but he can’t get over the sight of his own hand on that skin, and the little throb in Danny’s groin is just like the one in his own, and most of all, Danny seems to want him to stay like that, so he leaves his hand until the cum begins to cool, and he must wipe between his fingers with Danny’s Empire Strikes Back sheets, gently, so as not to wake his friend.
When they next sleep over at Owen’s, Owen’s mother meets Danny for the first time. For once she is not on call on a Saturday, and she makes spaghetti and veal sauce. Lena refuses to join them, claiming a newly acquired moral objection to veal, and Owen’s father, who has gone into the office for some emergency deadline, doesn’t make it home, so Owen must suffer twenty minutes at the table in between his mother and his best friend. His mother asks Danny inane questions about school, his hobbies, his ethnic heritage. Owen is mortified; his mother—whom he had gotten used to during the years she rarely changed out of flannel pajamas, when she looked old, witchlike, her eyes shot through with bloody veins, dandruff gathered at her part—is suddenly beautiful. Her hair has bounce, she is bright-eyed, she appears to be wearing lipstick. This must be what she looks like at the hospital. Owen is jolted by the difference, and the realization that it happened a while ago, he just hasn’t noticed until now. Danny answers all her questions, using full sentences instead of the grunts and nods he uses with his own mother. He nudges Owen under the table, and once opens his mouth to reveal masticated spaghetti and baby cow swimming in milk. Owen’s mother listens to Danny’s answers with her eyebrows raised. Danny is known for his charm around mothers, but she doesn’t seem that impressed. Near the end of dinner, when Danny offers to load the dishwasher, Owen’s mother smiles and cocks her head.
“Did you say you’re in Owen’s class?” she asks. Danny nods. “The fifth grade.” She adds this like a test, the way she gives Owen one last chance to tell the truth before she calls him on a lie.
“Yes.”
“You’re not ten, though,” she says. Danny grins with the same smile he reserves for their female teachers—Madame Cecile in French, Mrs. Wrinkle who leads the chorus.
“I’m almost twelve,” he says. “They kept me back when my dad left and we moved here.”
Owen’s mother expresses her sympathy, and excuses them from doing the dishes. But later, when they’re propped on their elbows watching Nightmare on Elm Street and she brings them bowls of chocolate M&M’s ice cream, she glances back in a way that makes Owen feel as if he’s been found out. Though his mouth waters for it, he lets his ice cream melt into soup. He spends the rest of the film guiltily imagining his mother slashed clean out of his life by a bad guy with knives for fingers.
In bed later, separated by the expanse of Owen’s red shag rug, Danny says good night without hesitation, no hint that the darkness and ample covers might promise more. Within minutes he is breathing with the regular oblivion of sleep. Owen lies awake and furious, convinced that this return to innocence is somehow his mother’s fault. He wants to live with his father, who leaves him alone, and not with a woman who suddenly, after three years of crying in her bedroom and two years of medical school, seems to think she has a right to be suspicious of his friends.
Tonight, as he often does, he lulls himself to sleep with prayer. He can’t remember the words to official prayers, except for one, taught to him by his grandmother, that he interprets mainly as a plea to live through the night, and which once made him too terrified to sleep if he repeated it. Owen’s prayers usually involve the repetition of a single phrase, an incantation. Make them divorce, Make them divorce. Occasionally, for good manners, he interjects a please, but generally he doesn’t bother with formalities. It’s not as though he’s speaking to God.
Owen believes in angels now. He is sure that his brother—who was never declared dead, but whose search was abandoned anyway—is now a winged, half-naked creature guarding the leftovers of his family. He has no further evidence to support this theory, no visions of Hugh lit from behind by a divine bulb. He doesn’t actually remember the feeling of hands pulling him from danger, only the ruminating he did about it later on. He believes in the idea that his brother saved his life so devoutly, his occasional bouts of labored breathing don’t worry him. If the need should arise, his brother will save him again.
When Owen wants something, he prays directly to Hugh for it. When he feels shame, or the urge to confess things he suspects are some category of sin, he does not imagine kneeling in penance before a priest or God or a Jesus with an exposed, thorny heart. He imagines a painting that once hung in his father’s office, an angel with six wings folded in toward his body like the petals of a flower. Wings that look strong enough, even in repose, to lift someone from mortal danger. In the middle of these wings Owen imagines the face of a ninth-grade boy, set against the photographer’s background of blue sky. The creature hovers somewhere above his right shoulder, not judging or cajoling like parents or peers, but simply smiling, as if he has already seen it all, and nothing Owen decides to do will surprise him.
Not even his hands on another boy.
5. scissors
I can tell it’s my mother by the knock—hard, official, trying to be brave. My father’s knuckles are tentative, embarrassed, they barely make contact. He started using this knock when I was twelve, like he was afraid of catching me naked. Owen just kicks the base of the door with his sneaker when he’s told to call me to dinner. Last year, I made a sign with a red Sharpie marker saying that no one is allowed in my room.
I turn the music down and go to the door, opening it a crack, feeling the scowl form around my mouth before it even has a reason to.
“What,” I say to my mother, whose mouth is also set, expecting me to be rude.
“I’d like to talk to you,” she says.
“I’m doing my homework.” I slouch against the wall and hold the door barely open with my thigh.
My mother sighs. She still has her white hospital jacket on, a stethoscope around her neck, as if this will give her some sort of authority.
“I hear you’re spending time in Harvard Square.”
I look at her with perfect blankness.
“Jeremy Lispet saw you there,” my mother prompts. I blink at her.
“So? I was waiting for Tracy by the T. I told you we were going to the movies.”
“I thought you were going in Brookline. I don’t want you in Harvard Square alone,” she says. “It’s easier than you think to fall into trouble.”
I roll my eyes at this. Since when do you care? I want to say, but I have rules about what I will say to my mother. Nothing that might make her think of Hugh. This is harder to accomplish than you’d think. My mom’s new life is not solid, it’s a thin layer that could crumble at any minute, sending her back to bed. I go back and forth between trying to protect her and wanting to devastate her.
“Whatever, Mom. I’m not hanging out anywhere. Relax.”
“What’s that smell?” she says, peering over my shoulder.
I’ve been smoking cloves, wide, brown cigarettes with gold filters that leave the sticky taste of apple cider on my lips.
“Incense,” I say. My mother looks me in the eye.
Once even a fib was so obvious on my face that my family could tell even before I opened my mouth. Hugh never trusted me with secrets; teachers relied on me as an informant. Lying is easy now. I just let my face go limp, stare straight into my parents’ (or teachers’ or friends’) eyes and forget the truth. I even lie when I don’t have to, just for the thrill of being believed. Lies have boundaries that are easy to focus on, not like the truth, which can stretch in any direction, out of control. It is the truth now that makes me feel self-conscious and terrified, like I’m about to be found out.
Most of the time my parents don’t seem to notice my new talent. Only occasionally, when I am lying, will my father or mother look tired, defeated, like they know everything I’ve ever lied about, they just don’t have the energy to call me on it.
Now my mother looks relieved, enough to try to smile before I shut the door in her face. I go back to my bed and flip through my binder, looking at old pictures of her. Hugh loved to take pictures of my mother. There are whole rolls of just her, her face thinner and tighter, her hair long and occasionally in pigtails, which strikes me as kind of immature. She is always laughing, even when she’s trying to pose like a serious model. Her smiles used to be real.
I listen to the Beatles while I label the contact sheets I developed today, which are of the Furey family reunion at my father’s childhood home. They are from the summer after second grade, when Owen was diagnosed with asthma, and my parents sent my cat Mitsy to live with my grandparents. That year, I won the seven-year-olds’ race in their backyard and got to pick first from my grandmother’s table of plastic and balsawood toys. There is a picture of this, my grandmother in a minidress with Marimekko flowers, her dark hair sprayed in a perfect bun. Even old, she’s really pretty; everyone was always talking about her legs. She has a gin and tonic in one hand, a cigarette in the other. I’m standing next to her looking miserable, a balsa plane limp in my hand, my hair as short and ratty as a boy’s and my knees scarred from picking scabs. My grandmother had just told me, after I barreled into the prize table fresh from my victory, that I was not very ladylike. I was trying not to cry. Not that I cared about being ladylike, but she had beamed and given Hugh a huge hug when he’d won the egg toss.
I spent the rest of the reunion in the garden shed killing spiders. Hugh came to find me eventually, cheering me up with a few shrugs and careless insults, as if it hardly mattered what anyone else thought of me, since he thought I was great. Then he helped me look for my cat, but we found no evidence that she’d ever been there. I never asked my parents about this. I was afraid of finding out the truth.
In the morning I organize my backpack as if I’m really going to school. Biology lab book, geometry notes, even my gym clothes. If my parents searched my bag, my props would be convincing. But they don’t bother.
I only walk halfway, stopping in a small, diamond-shaped park by the old-age home. There are two old men at one end of the park, wearing large-brimmed dark hats, so similar they look like emaciated twins, feeding pigeons from a waxed Dunkin’ Donuts bag. I sit on a bench facing away from them, take out my cigarettes and smoke for twenty minutes straight, until my throat is dry and stinging. I want to buy a hot chocolate, but I’m afraid the clerks will wonder why I’m not in school. It starts to drizzle, half-frozen drops that pelt the shoulders of my Levi’s jean jacket. The old men make a big production of trying to hurry across the street and into the home, but their walkers block swift movements.
A guy in a white apron and Red Sox cap comes out and helps them over the lip of the sidewalk. Then he waves in my direction and starts across the street.
“Shit,” I mutter. It’s Jonah.
“Hello, Lena,” he says when he gets close enough, and sits down next to me on the bench like he’s welcome.
“Hey,” I say back, trying to fit all my annoyance into one syllable. He takes out a pack of Marlboros, offers me one, and lights his own after I shake my head.
“I’m a volunteer,” he says, as if I’d asked him, pointing back at the old-age home.
“Are you Catholic or something?” I say.
“No,” he says, amused. “Do I have to be?”
“Catholic kids have to work here as part of their Confirmation. My…um…cousin did it.” Actually, it was Hugh, but I wasn’t going there.
“Mine’s more like community service to avoid Juvenile Hall.” He shrugs. “It’s not so bad. They’re all so grateful and interested, it’s kind of nice. Different perspective, you know?”
Hugh had said something like that to my parents. Something about how easy it was to make people happy.
“Old people make me nervous,” I say. “I always think they’re going to have a stroke or a heart attack and I won’t know what to do.”
Jonah laughs. This is more than I’ve ever said to him in one sitting, and he looks surprised.
“Well, I’m not in charge of that part. I just turn the bingo wheel and hand out breakfast.”
“Sounds depressing,” I say.
“It’s better than study hall,” Jonah says. “I’m not allowed free blocks anymore.” He grins, and I look away. He says it all so nonchalantly, not looking for sympathy or bragging like the other reformed delinquents in the Quad. I wonder what he did to get community service. I doubt they give it to you for trying to kill yourself.
Jonah finishes his cigarette, puts it out on the bench edge, and sticks the butt in his pocket rather than throwing it on the ground. This makes me feel guilty for a second—I used to care about littering—then annoyed.
“See you in class,” he says. I shrug. I won’t be there, but I’m not about to tell Jonah that.
