5

Mom had a tropical garden at one end of the living room, coffee bushes and sensitive plants, a mimosa that folds a leaf when you touch it. I knew this small, happy jungle was her territory, even though she would be happy to see me among the glossy coffee plants, enjoying them. My family had long since sectioned the house into private domains. No one would ever go into my room looking for a pencil.

So I hesitated. Anita’s door swung open silently, but I didn’t hurry in. I was about to break an unspoken promise.

Her room was very neat that evening, and this surprised me a little. It was never this well ordered. High on a shelf perched old toys, an old teddy bear worn free of fur everywhere except deep in his ears and under his arms. One button eye dangled. In two weeks Anita would be eighteen, and she had graduated from high school just a few weeks earlier.

It struck me how adult her room was, the refuge of a grown woman, with a few relics of childhood and high school years kept around fondly, for historic reasons. Her plan was to take a year before she went to college, save up some money. The clutter of paperbacks and clothes I remembered from earlier years was gone. Kyle smiled from the top of her dresser, his graduation photo, blankly handsome like one of those pictures you see in barbershops, the kinds of hairstyles you can choose.

She still had her Ping-Pong paddles right where she could find them, the set with leather handles I had given her last summer. She had a filing cabinet on wheels, white, with a white handle. The blue plastic tabs on the folders were labeled—Resumes, Letters/Senate, Letters/Congress—but the files hung nearly empty. I was trespassing in her room, all the way across to her desk. Right beside the American Shelf and Filing Employee Handbook was my mother’s report, with a yellow Post-it folded and stuck together as a bookmark. The yellow bookmark was between the last page and the cover, not really marking a place at all.

Arranged along one side of the desk was a series of five snapshots, pictures I had taken, Anita as she ran from the surf at Santa Cruz the summer before. I had snapped the camera as quickly as I could. She ran from the ocean, her light brown hair looking darker because it was wet, her T-shirt and cutoff jeans soaked through, a bra strap showing at her shoulder. She ran toward the camera, and you could tell she was laughing at having her picture taken, getting closer and closer. In the last picture she posed a little, one hand on her hip. Anita wasn’t someone who needed makeup. She had color, in her cheeks, her smile.

Something smelled new, fresh-from-the-factory. I found the source of the scent, a new pair of jeans, still stiff, folded neatly on a chair. I almost wanted Anita to come home early. I wanted her to burst into the room tugging off her sweater or hopping on one foot to peel off a shoe. I wanted to ask her how her job was going, and then I would tell her about mine.

Even that night, when he came home with his shirt-tail hanging out and his hair sticking up in wild spikes all over his head, he kept up a running patter, asking Mom how everything was, telling her the timber all got unloaded, telling her there was a fire in the hopper.

Mom didn’t answer. She watched him, following him with her eyes, not trusting talk to tell her that he was all right.

“Lasagna,” Dad was saying. “Two minutes on high,” he said, poking the numbers on the face of the microwave. “Or, wait a minute; I don’t want to nuke it crisp. Maybe medium high.”

“How did it start?” asked my mother.

My dad was getting utensils out of the drawer. “Fork, spoon, I don’t need a knife.” Sometimes I sneak up on him while he’s in another room getting dressed or waiting for his cinnamon oatmeal to cook, and he’s talking, quietly. Being around people makes him keep up a running stream, as though we were blind and wouldn’t know what he’s doing unless he tells us. But even when he’s alone, he says things, patting himself, asking the empty room, “Where are the keys? What did I do with my belt?”

He sat across from Mom and peeled the Saran Wrap off the lasagna, and told her all about the saws, how they hit gnarls in the lumber and sometimes send up a tiny spark of hot steel. She knew all this, but she was brooding over the factory and looking at my dad, really seeing him. It made me look at him, too, seeing a man who was very thin, with gray in his hair, his glasses slipping down his nose a little as he ate. He pushed them back up with his finger.

“Jesse had nothing but praise about Cray today,” said Dad, telling Mom as though I was in another part of the house and couldn’t hear. “I’m not surprised,” he said, and then he looked at me, smiling crookedly as he chewed.

One of the annoying things about my dad is that he will not clean his glasses even when they are dirty, and you have to look into his eyes through a snow of sawdust. People will do anything for him. The cabinet workers voted against striking a few months before out of loyalty to Dad, not wanting to hurt his chances with the nightstand contract. Maybe I inherited some leadership quality from him, but I knew I was imperfect inside. I didn’t always say what I was thinking. Like now, I knew it was better to not mention football. I was even wondering if I could forge their signatures on the permission slip.

I could fake my dad’s kangaroo scrawl, I was sure. But my mother has surprisingly delicate handwriting, very neat. I don’t think my father would ever think like this—how to lie on a legal piece of paper. My dad is someone you can hear in a distant room, laughing. When he is in the kitchen alone reading the newspaper he makes sounds of surprise or annoyance.

My mother tugged his glasses from his face without saying anything. She washed them off at the sink while he blinked, gazing around, trying to make something out of what he saw. He looked at where he knew I was and said, “We’ll have to have the ducts checked tomorrow.”

She wiped the glasses very carefully with a paper towel. When she gave them back to him, she had a little smile, as though something private had passed between them.

I called Merriman from my room. I had picked out a red portable phone. I had figured a red phone would be easier to find. Now I wished I had a squat black one, like the ones detectives use in black-and-white movies. His sister answered, Kentia, a suave, cool freshman at Stanford. Kentia is a beauty. Even her name is special: Ken-tee-yah. When I told her who I was, she said, “Who?” Not because there was anything wrong with my voice or my name. She was too elegant to hear things the first time.

My room has pictures of stars and planets, posters that came in The National Geographic and others I bought at the Nature Company, novas, craters. Anita had once pointed out that it wasn’t the infinite horizons of space I found intriguing, it was the residue of explosions. There was a silence, and muffled shuffling sounds, and I pictured Merriman on crutches, hunching his way to the phone.

Sometimes I have trouble with words. It’s like coming right out and saying it makes it all worse. I felt myself wanting to blurt, I’m sorry you shot yourself in the foot. “Shelly moved to L.A.,” I said, as though that was the reason I had called, not mentioning handguns.

“Do you know what pain is?” Merriman asked, not bothering to comment on a criminal like Shelly.

I wasn’t really very interested in galaxies anymore. A picture I had put on my wall more recently was a picture of the last man to play in the National Football League without a helmet. The photo was one I had blown up at Copymat out of a book on the history of the sport. He was being led off the field with a grimace on his face. It was the last time he ever took the field without headgear.

“Sure,” I said—my family’s word. But it was a reflex. I knew he was talking about the kind of pain you see on the news and in movies, gunshot wounds.

“I mean pain,” he said.

“I think so.” Guys do this to each other, challenge each other, and you end up claiming that you know all about something you don’t.

“I mean pain in your bones, Buchanan. Bone pain.”

“I’m sorry about what happened,” I said. But I wanted to know: was he loading the gun when it happened? Was he showing off how cool he was, holding a gun like an accessory, what the well-dressed man of today is wearing?

“It’s not so bad,” he said, after a moment of silence.

I was a little confused. Did he want pity, or did he want respect for being tough? Or was he just being truthful? I realized that while I knew Merriman well, I had never really had much of a conversation with him. I had almost never called him on the phone.

Even that time we changed a tire beside the freeway, our talk had been swear words and complaints about how you couldn’t find anything in a new car, not even the manual in the glove compartment. Now, voice to voice, I knew what it must be like to be Merriman, scouts driving down from the University of Oregon to watch him play in his junior year, and now all of it gone.

“You’re going to be a fine quarterback,” he said.

I wasn’t happy with the way the conversation went after that. We talked to each other like strangers, nice people, but embarrassed to be on the same planet. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him I found it very difficult to talk to my parents.

Afterward I sat there on the bed, wondering if Merriman must hate me. It would be the kind of envy that would wear off, but maybe it wouldn’t. Maybe Merriman would have to use a cane the rest of his life, walk with a limp.

It’s brave when you have to bear a burden, and one of my favorite kinds of nonfiction stories is about athletes who crash off cliffs in cars or wake up one morning in an iron lung, and they don’t get back into the gym and run the marathon six months later. They stay handicapped and they inspire children. There’s always a picture in this kind of book, the athlete as he is today, beaming from a wheelchair with smiling kids around him, or still blind, an open Braille book in his lap.

I admire handicapped people, but I wondered, sitting there on my bed, if that kind of story might be a kind of small lie, to make everyone feel better.