Hurricane Season, page 10
“Yeah, yeah,” he said, waving her off.
“I’ll pick you two up later.”
Fig waved goodbye to Danny’s mom and walked next to him up the driveway toward the Washingtons’ front door. “What are the rules?” Fig asked.
“No drinking, no drugs, and if there are either of those things or no parents, I better call her back here, or she’ll kill me.”
Fig laughed but then thought about what he said. “Is there usually drinking or drugs?”
Danny shrugged. “Depends who shows up, but I wouldn’t touch it anyway.” He reached for his fake gun holster. “I’m a cop.” They both laughed at that.
Everyone liked Ava’s parties the best. Her house had a finished basement with soundproof walls because Ava’s brother played the drums, and that’s where she had the parties. Her parents were home, but they didn’t come down, and the kids never went up, so it was like having no parents there at all. Ava’s mom answered the door and directed Fig and Danny to the basement. As they made their way down the stairs (the bannister was also covered with cotton webbing), they were immediately welcomed by Ed Sheeran singing loudly through the speakers, and the sounds of laughter and gossip and drums. The room itself was huge: carpeted, with couches, a wide-screen TV on one wall, and a foosball table that was being used as an actual table, with red plastic cups and chip bowls placed between and on top of the rows of little soccer players. The room was dark; the only light came from more orange fairy lights hanging from the ceiling. Kids were scattered throughout, in separate clumps based on age and friendships. Ava’s sister, an eighth grader, had her own friends at the party. With the older kids in the mix, Ava’s parties were supposed to be much cooler than anyone else’s, although Fig noticed the eighth graders seemed to be keeping to themselves.
Fig felt out of her element and stood a little closer to Danny. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea.
But then Madison, wearing all black and cat ears, her nose painted black and with whiskers extending across her cheeks, was tugging on Fig’s shirtsleeve. “Come get in our picture,” she said. Haley (also a cop, like Danny, except a much prettier—although less practical—one in a skirt and heels) was holding her phone up trying to fit everyone in the camera screen. Fig found herself a little dazed as she let Madison pull her over, and she smiled into Haley’s phone, and Lorde took over for Ed Sheeran on the speakers, and Haley was asking her what her Snapchat name was.
“I don’t have—” Fig paused, then lied instead. “I dropped my phone and it shattered, so I’ve just got this stupid flip phone right now.”
Haley laughed. “Well, once you get a new phone, add me on Snapchat.”
Fig said that she would.
Once she settled in, Fig actually enjoyed the party. She talked with Madison about their art projects and complained about Mrs. Beckett with Haley, Ava, and a few of the boys. Some of the older boys snuck in cans of Bud Light, and Ava’s older sister told them that they’d better not leave any behind when they left. When the music turned to a slow song, half the kids groaned, even as the other half paired off and pulled each other close to kiss and dance. “You should ask Danny Carter to dance,” Madison said.
“What?” Fig asked.
Ava laughed. “You’ve been hanging out with him a lot lately. He’s always following you around. He definitely likes you.”
“Definitely,” Madison agreed.
“He’s my friend,” Fig said, adjusting her tool belt to try and get more comfortable. “That’s all.”
“Oh, just ask him,” Ava said, shrugging. “He’s kind of cute, even if he’s pretty weird.”
Her words made Fig’s stomach hurt. They had called her dad weird, too.
And Fig had agreed with them.
“Hey!” Danny said, making his way over to the group, and the other girls all immediately started giggling. “What?” he said.
Madison bumped Fig’s shoulder, and she stumbled closer to Danny and found herself saying, “Do you want to dance with me?”
Danny’s face lit up, his gap-toothed smile big and bright.
But just as he reached to take her hand, the basement door opened. “Fig?” Ava’s mom called down.
“Fig! Fig, are you here?” Another voice rang out, panicked and recognizable, and Fig felt the music pounding in her ears, felt all the eyes in that basement seeking her out as she watched her dad take the basement stairs two at a time. Someone turned the music off.
“Fig!” His eyes were wild, and Fig could barely breathe as she had flashbacks to art class, to the way her classmates stared, to the moment CP&P showed up later. And now—just as everyone was starting to forget and no longer asking questions, just as things were feeling sort of normal at school—she heard snickers and accusations as the kids all pulled apart from one another, hiding beer cans under the couches and in pockets. Ava’s parents stood at the top of the stairs, watching, as Fig’s dad stood in the basement, in the private sanctuary of her classmates, in tears.
Fig wanted to scream at him. How could he do this to her again?
“Whoa, what’s wrong with him?” one of the older boys said, and a few others laughed, and Fig realized this time was even worse. This was clearly not okay, and everyone could see now the difference between weird and crazy, and it hurt her to think it, because he was sick—but he was also ruining everything.
“It’s okay, Fig,” Danny was saying, reaching to grasp her shoulder, but she shrugged him off. She quickly crossed to her dad, pushing him back toward the stairs, hard, and Ava’s mom and dad were both there, helping her get him up them. His hand got tangled in webbing, and he ripped it off the bannister while repeating her name, and Fig started yelling, “Just go, Dad! Get out of here!”
Fig closed the basement door behind them once they reached the top, shutting out the sounds of her friends and classmates and the party, but she continued pushing at him. “Why are you here?” she shouted. “How could you do this?”
Her dad was shaking and clinging to her, and Ava’s parents were trying to calm him down and asking what they should do. (Was he okay? Should they call someone to come help? Did he usually get like this?) And Fig felt sick because the police were one phone call away, CP&P was one phone call away. How can he keep doing this to me?
“Let’s go home, Fig,” her dad was saying. “Please, come home now.”
He doesn’t mean it, she tried to tell herself. He can’t help it, he can’t help it, he can’t help it. She kept shoving him away from her anyway.
He reached for the goggles still on her face.
“Maybe we should call the police,” Ava’s mom was saying, and Fig thought she might throw up.
“No!” she shouted, yanking off the goggles. “No,” she repeated more calmly. “I know who to call.”
Mark came almost immediately. He thanked Ava’s parents, promised them he would take care of things from here, and led Fig’s dad out the front door. Fig followed them.
She waited, holding her dad’s sweaty hand tightly as Mark moved her dad’s car from where it was haphazardly parked in the street. She tried not to think about that—about what it meant to have him be this dazed and still driving.
“We’ll get it tomorrow,” Mark said as he took her dad by the shoulders to lead him to Mark’s truck. Fig felt forgotten, her hand cold without her dad’s to hold, until Mark opened the backseat door and motioned for her to hop in.
Mark drove them home, her dad up front in the passenger side of the truck with his head pressed against the window, eyes closed. His occasional murmurings and the way he kept lightly banging his head against the door let them know he was still awake, just not fully there. Fig sat behind Mark, trying to keep her gaze out her own window and away from her dad, though she kept meeting Mark’s eyes as he watched her in the rearview mirror.
They hit a pothole in the road, and her dad banged his head against the window. Mark placed a hand on her dad’s shoulder. “We’re almost home, buddy,” he said, and then looked back again at Fig. “You okay?”
“What did the doctor say?” Fig asked.
Mark focused back on the road. “Your dad wants to talk to you about that, Fig.”
“Look at him!” Fig shouted, which startled Mark but didn’t affect her dad. “He can’t talk to me about it! He can show up and embarrass me and ruin Ava’s party and ruin my life, but he can’t explain to me why!”
Fig kicked at the back of her dad’s seat.
“Don’t do that,” Mark said.
“Did he tell you that the lady from CP and P showed up at our door because my teacher called them after he did this, exactly this, to me at school? That when she came inside, he was just like this and could barely get off the couch to talk to her, so she mostly talked to me, and I didn’t know what to say, and I must have said something wrong because she said she’d have to come back, and she’s going to come back and she’ll come back sooner if he keeps doing this to me!” She kicked the back of her dad’s seat again.
“Fig, stop.”
“You weren’t there the first time he went out in a storm! I was! I had to call the cops and they came and that’s why CP and P started a file on us! Ava’s parents were going to call them again and they can’t see him like this!”
“I know that!” Mark shouted, which stunned Fig into silence for a moment. Mark took a deep breath.
Mark’s radio wasn’t on, and their shouts echoed throughout the truck. The only other sounds were the wind as it hit the windows, the other cars on the road, and Fig’s heavy breathing. Mark’s grip on the steering wheel was strong, his knuckles turning white. “I know,” he said more gently, and some of the tension eased from his shoulders. “You’d have been proud of him today.”
Fig exhaled deeply, leaning back against the seat and wiping angrily at the tears that fell down her cheeks.
Mark looked over at Fig’s dad, even as he spoke to Fig. “He didn’t panic or shut down. He was honest with the doc, and she was real good with him. She isn’t a specialist, but she obviously knew how to deal with someone who was having a tough time being there.”
“But can they make him stop being like this?” Fig asked. “Can they help him?”
Mark adjusted his hands on the steering wheel, stretching out his fingers. “She thinks so. We’ll talk about it more with your dad when he can, okay? But she thinks it sounds like some kind of bipolar disorder.”
Fig slumped back in the seat. Vincent van Gogh, people thought, might have been bipolar, too.
“Are you okay, Fig?” Mark asked once more.
She nodded out of habit, but Mark’s gaze met hers again in the mirror and she stopped. Mark gave her a smile. It didn’t quite reach his eyes.
“Thank you,” Fig all but whispered. It was a relief to have someone to depend on, to have someone to call besides the police. “For coming to get us.”
“I’m glad you called,” he said as her dad shifted in his seat, blinking at Mark as if he had just woken up from a long night’s sleep.
Mark put a hand on her dad’s shoulder and squeezed. “We’re almost home,” he said again, but whether to her or her dad, Fig wasn’t sure.
Fig found her dad the next morning, awake and sitting on the living room couch, waiting for her. “Come sit down, Fig,” he said, but she opted to stay where she was standing. “Mark told me you two talked.”
Fig slowly nodded. “What does it mean, exactly?” she asked. “To be bipolar.”
He ran his hands over his unshaven face. “It’s like . . . Look, this is all new to me, too, sweetheart. But it’s like how I’m all everything or nothing, you know? Two extremes. That’s all it means.” He held out his hand for her to hold, but she ignored it. “My brain doesn’t do in between, and it’s not healthy to be bouncing to and fro.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Sometimes I’m depressed. And sometimes I’m manic. Do you know what that means?”
“Sometimes you stay in bed all day, and sometimes you . . .” Fig paused to take a deep breath. “Sometimes you ruin Ava’s party.”
He patted the spot on the couch next to him. “Come sit with me.”
She wanted to. She wanted to curl into his lap and force him to make promises she knew he might never keep. Still, she didn’t move.
“You know,” he said, “you really shouldn’t have left last night without talking to me first. I didn’t know where you were. You can’t just . . . leave a note.”
“You weren’t waking up!” she said, raising her voice. “You never wake up. You just fall asleep and leave me alone and I wanted to go to the party!”
He sank back a bit into the couch, looking down at where his fingers were folded in his lap. Fig gave in and went to him, sitting down beside him, leg to leg. He wrapped an arm around her, and she resisted the urge to rest her head against him. “I don’t want to do that to you anymore,” he said. “I want to be wide awake for you.”
She was quiet for a moment, trying to fight back the urge to cry. “Can they . . .” she finally managed. “Can they treat it? The bipolar.”
“Might take a while to figure out. But . . . yeah,” he said. “They can treat it.”
“Please don’t do that to me again,” Fig said.
“I won’t. I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”
He reached for her hand, but she moved it out of reach. “They’ll take you away, Dad. And I’ll . . .” I’ll let them was on the tip of her tongue, and the thought made her feel sick.
She swallowed the words back down. “I just want everything to be better,” she said.
“Me too, darling,” he replied. “And I swear to you I’m trying.”
Later that day, Fig found herself back at the library, approaching the front desk, trying to contain the heat that spread over her cheeks as Hannah stopped clicking away at the desktop keyboard in front of her and looked up to smile at Fig.
“Hey, it’s the Van Gogh girl again,” she said. “You have my money yet?”
Fig shook her head, cringing. “I’m working on it. I promise,” she said.
Hannah didn’t miss a beat, leaning in conspiratorially in a way that made Fig wish she could tell Hannah all her secrets, that Hannah would one day want to confide all hers in Fig. “So,” she said, “are we going to illegally check you out another book about Van Gogh today?”
Fig tried to be brave.
“I was hoping you could help me find books on mental illness,” Fig said. “About being bipolar.”
Hannah’s fingers now rested on the keyboard. “Is this still about Van Gogh?”
Fig hesitated. Sometimes she went to sleep dreaming about going to the library and Hannah waiting for her with a tower of Van Gogh books on the table. Sometimes she dreamed that Hannah would come to the Fall Festival, and that Hannah would see Fig’s painting and wink at her with that wink Fig loved and say, “Guess all my help at the library was worth it.”
Fig did not picture her dad in any of these dreams, even if she wanted him at the festival, too. There was no stress in the ones Hannah turned up in. There was too much stress when she thought about her dad.
So she lied. She didn’t want Hannah to know anything about him. “Yes. It’s about Van Gogh.”
“All right,” Hannah said, already typing. “Let me see if we can find you something that’s not too bogged down in science and academics.”
“No, don’t do that,” Fig said. “I want the truest and best book you can find.”
11
The Sower
The first time Fig ever experienced déjà vu was that Monday, when she walked into class and every student stopped talking and turned to stare at her in silence. She had experienced this very same thing before.
So—like she had in September—Fig did her best to pretend it was coincidence as she took a seat at her desk. It almost worked. The others almost started talking among themselves again, Fig forgotten, again, but then Jeremy leaned over to loudly ask, “Hey Fig! How’s your dad?”
Another hush fell over the room, and Fig wished Miss Williams would walk through the door. The silence was followed by a couple of gasps and giggles that her classmates could not stifle. Fig looked over at Ava because it was her party Fig’s dad had ruined, but Ava would not look at Fig, would not make eye contact with anything but the phone in her lap.
No. This wasn’t déjà vu. This was worse.
“Don’t be a jerk, Jeremy,” Danny said, diverting the eyes in the classroom to him. “Her dad’s sick.”
Jeremy shrugged. “I was just asking.”
“No you weren’t,” Danny said.
Fig thought she might burst into flames and melt into her desk. She reached for Danny’s arm, pulling him to sit down. “Don’t. It’s fine,” she said.
Danny looked like he might argue, but Miss Williams finally walked into the room, and all the other students in the class shut their mouths and turned forward in their seats, as if they were good students, as if everything were fine.
Miss Williams noticed. “You’re all unusually quiet today. Let’s see if we can keep this up. Come get your papers and let’s get to work.”
Just like that, the moment was gone, and the class moved on. Fig didn’t know what was worse. She wished she knew how to explain. She wished she knew how to apologize to Ava. But most of all, she wished one of them would say, Hey, Fig, that sucks about your dad, but do you want to come to the next party anyway?
No one did. They moved on with art class like normal, and Fig, instead of focusing on them, focused on the artwork. Next to her, Danny was working on a very bright rendition of what he was calling Sunny Day, which was his reverse version of Van Gogh’s Starry Night. It wasn’t a view of Saint-Rémy but a view of Danny’s own backyard, with bright skies and colorful swirls of clouds and sunlight.
