23

Day of My Death

Cold is seeping around my window, but the room is filling with the tang of warm mud and wet moss, with the promise of a summer-evening breeze. When I close my eyes, there’s Red and the little frog at the edge of that night pond.

I try to go further back, but my mind’s not having it. Even my heart won’t budge. I’m trying to discover when I broke, when something cracked in me. And that night at the pond sure as hell wasn’t it. If anything, for one blissful moment I felt healed. And maybe that’s reason enough to follow this lead. So I listen, and soon I hear Red’s breath beneath a chorus of crickets.

We let the frog go and walked back to the truck. I felt okay. I know that sounds like a small thing, but it wasn’t. I’d never felt okay with a girl before. Not sure I’d felt normal with anyone since Dad died. Maybe never. So being all right with a girl—I don’t mean brilliant or good-looking or funny, just okay—was the biggest, most freeing sensation in the world. As we pressed through the tall grasses, her leg swishing against mine, I wasn’t worried about my wimpy chest or what I should say. I didn’t beat myself up for being weird. I was truly okay.

When we were back in the truck, I drove out the gravel road. At the street, I pulled over, not knowing where to head. We were in my neighborhood. If she looked a little to the left, she’d have seen my house. It was like most others on the block, a small one-story on a decent-size lot. Nells’s bike lay abandoned on the lawn, but at least our yard wasn’t cluttered with plastic kid toys like most of our neighbors’. Mom had cut next winter’s wood and stacked it under the eaves, and for some reason that made me proud. I guess there wasn’t much to be proud of. It wasn’t a poor-trash neighborhood, but it wasn’t far off either, especially with the hoarder down the block and the place with the moss-swayed roof, the one that had new tenants every couple of months.

It would’ve seemed like any other block if it wasn’t for Mr. Balch’s house. That big old Victorian sat proud on those acres like royalty sneering down on the peons, making everything else look cheap and sad. With the tall firs, you couldn’t see much, but Red was curious, twisting around, trying to get a fix on it. Kitchen lights shone through the trees, and parts of its chimneys were visible between the branches.

“Who lives there?”

“You remember Daniel? The guy with me the other night?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s where he lives.”

“Shit.”

“They’re not rich. It was abandoned when they bought it. Kind of a mess, really.”

“Rich enough.”

She sounded impressed, and bam, like that I wasn’t okay. I was stupid and scrawny and poor and glad she didn’t ask where I lived, because now I noticed how terrible our lawn looked, the grass rangy and full of dandelions gone to seed. The boy who lived there was obviously one lazy piece of shit.

“I better take you home,” I said.

“The park’s okay.”

“Don’t your parents worry?”

She shrugged. “Don’t have a dad, and my mom, she doesn’t much care where I am.”

“I’m sure she cares. It’s no problem to get you home, seriously.”

She stiffened. “This really isn’t your business. Just drop me at the park. Can you do that?”

I said sure, I could do that. We didn’t talk much as we drove back, just awkward stuff about how strange it was that it was dark already. I couldn’t believe how quickly everything had changed.

At the park, she didn’t jump out like I expected. She sat there leaning away from me, staring out the passenger window. There was nothing to see. Just the empty lot and dark trees shielding the entrance.

After a couple minutes, I said, “I don’t have a dad either.”

She turned to me. “No?”

“Died a year ago.”

She said she was sorry, and I think she meant it, but then she said, “That sucks, really sucks, but at least you had a dad. That’s something, right?”

“You mean you never had a dad?”

“My mother said he died in some tragic accident before I was born, but that’s bullshit. He was probably her pimp or a john.”

“Your mom’s a prostitute?”

She started laughing so hard my face got hot. She’d get herself calmed down, then start up again, smirking and giggling. “Sorry, sorry,” she said, catching her breath. “It’s just so funny to think about that, since my mom’s a hard-core Jesus freak. I can so see her as a dominatrix, though, whipping some poor guy, condemning him to hell.”

“Didn’t you say—”

“You’re right, you’re right. The deal is she had me in her teens. I’ve seen pictures of her, and I can tell you she was no Jesus freak back then. Short shorts and low-cut tanks, these ridiculous five-inch platform sandals. Anyway, my mom must have been tricking. Her mother threw her out at fourteen. She had to eat somehow.” She hesitated. “I wouldn’t blame her or anything. If she was . . . you know, tricking. I mean, would you?”

“I can’t believe that,” I said, mad at the thought. Red looked like I’d slapped her, so I said real quick, “Not the stuff about your mom. Your grandma. I can’t believe her. How could a mother kick her kid out like that?”

I was screwing up. I could tell. She didn’t look as hurt now, but she’d checked out, bored with this whole thing.

“I suppose,” she said.

It pissed me off, that boredom, as if her mother being abandoned was no big deal. Reminded me of my sister after Dad died, dismissing everything—good or bad—with dull eyes and a shrug. The two of them were like heartless machines.

“You think it was ‘something’ that I had a dad?” I said it vicious, and she turned to me.

“Well, my dad blew his brains out in our kitchen with me and my mom and little sister watching. And we were just glad nothing worse happened. So. Yeah. It was something.”

I wanted to slap her with it, cut through all that nothing-and-nobody-can-hurt-me bullshit, wanted to shake her into feeling. Because it seems to me either you’re willing to feel or you’re not.

Her eyes watered like a piece of grit had gotten stuck in there, and I thought if she were a machine, her eyes wouldn’t tear up like that.

“Jesus,” she whispered.

“Yeah,” I said. “Jesus.” I knew I was being a jerk, but it felt good seeing some of my pain on her face, like maybe I didn’t have to be so alone with it.

There was more to the story about my dad, a lot more, but I’d already exceeded the family-sanctioned version: After a long battle with depression, our father ended his life. Nice and vague and neat-sounding, like he took some sweet-tasting pills and we found him all cuddled up in a comfy bed looking like an angel sleeping. Only the sheriff and the coroner knew how he’d done it. And they knew only the tail end. As for the necessary cleaning and painting, Mom and I did it ourselves. She didn’t make Nells help. Given what happened, that seemed fair. But we all agreed to secrecy. “It’s none of this town’s damn business what happened here,” Mom said.

Red studied me a long time, then said, “I could use that beer now.”

I thought she was serious. She saw it on my face and laughed, started speaking in a low whisper, escalating her voice as if witnessing in church. “Dear Lord in Heaven, Our Heavenly Savior, Blessed Jesus, we open our hearts to you in all your loving-kindness, knowing that no matter how much putrid shit you rain down on us, your love is sacred and pure, a love so magnificent it is beyond our puny understanding. We gratefully submit our lowly, wormlike selves to your benevolent will. Amen.”

She had thrown herself back in the seat, her arms spread wide as if God had descended on her, the back of her left hand touching my chest. I grabbed it, pulled her to me, and kissed her. I had kissed girls before, but never like this, not this type of disappearing, everything that hurt falling away and the rest falling together, one dark, warm aliveness between us. I’d never been lost like that. That’s probably why I jumped the way I did when her hand gripped my cock through my shorts, why I nearly went through the roof.

She jerked away, her face a mess of surprise and hurt. Why had I done that? She was beautiful, and I’d been dreaming of her hands on me. I tried to guide her back, but she was over it, every bit of heat in her snuffed out. My hard-on was pretty much done for anyway.

She wiped her hand on her shorts as if she’d fouled it by touching me. “Well, better go,” she said. “Thanks again for the frog.” Before I could stop her, she’d slipped out the door and darted through the trees toward the cliff.

I almost went after her, but what would I say? That I was an idiot? That she was the most stunning, sexy girl I’d ever seen? That she could be disfigured in a terrible accident and still my heart would feel as if it would explode, would send my shattered ribs flying like shrapnel if I couldn’t see her again, if I couldn’t slip back into that place with her where everything else fell away?

I slumped in my seat. No. If I wanted her to disappear forever, that’d be how to do it. Sappy, romantic stuff. Red wasn’t as tough as she acted, but she wanted me to believe she was. You don’t catch wild things by running after them. I waited ten minutes, then another ten and another, thinking she might find her way back to me, that if I were quiet and still and patient, she might light on me like a bird on a branch.

At ten thirty, I knew that my mother was worrying and guessed Red had left the park by a different route, so I started the engine and headed home. I thought I’d never see her again. I thought I would be missing her for years.