16
WHEN NATE GOT HOME THAT NIGHT, IT WAS EARLIER THAN the night before so I was still awake, but he hadn’t given me fair warning.
“I’m cleaning up now,” I said, mouth full of pretzels. “Do you want one? I mean not from the floor, but—”
“Luce,” he said slowly, as though he’d been up for days, “I really need you to pitch in.”
He opened the refrigerator to pull out the requisite beer. “Have you noticed how little substantial food we have?”
“I got oatmeal.”
He looked at me. “Really?”
“The unsweetened kind, because it’s healthier, and it was on sale. And milk. That’s a staple, right?”
“It is.”
“Plus, there are more pretzels.”
“I guess I’m not hungry.”
“Did you have a rough day or something? Because mine was pretty decent.”
He got down on the floor to pick up a couple of flyers and a magazine I was flipping through earlier while searching for the remote control.
“This is from two years ago,” he said. “How did it get here?”
“After you left, I went to this coffee shop, and I met these people, and I searched for jobs.”
He stood up. “Did you find one?”
“Well, not exactly, but—”
“It doesn’t belong on the floor,” he said, moving back to the kitchen.
“Sorry,” I said, but he couldn’t hear me over the water running past the dishes.
I followed him and raised my voice. I watched him pop a pill, Advil or Excedrin, I guessed.
“Do you have a headache?” I said. “Can I help?”
He turned off the faucet. “Did you say something?”
I wanted to tell him all about my day, about Frank and the pug. It was the type of day Dad would’ve eaten up, but I could see it wasn’t the right time.
“I’ll clean up the magazines.”
SOMETIME IN the middle of the night, long after I’d gone to bed, I woke up, stumbled toward the kitchen, and found Nate on a cushion gazing into nothingness. His mail sat unopened on his lap; a couple of beer bottles surrounded him; an ashtray filled with short cigarettes sat beside him. Were those joints? He didn’t look like himself. He looked like another Nate—disheveled, lackadaisical, unaware.
He drank milk straight from a bowl of cereal.
“Are those Lucky Charms?” I said. “Where’d you get those?”
“Get what?” He wiped his mouth. “Guess you caught me. They had them in the dining hall.”
“You still go there?”
“I wish. I used to bring in a giant container every day, fill it with cereal, and stuff it into my gym bag when no one was looking. I just remembered I still had the container I filled before I left. You want some?”
“No,” I said, examining his stash. “It’s yours.”
But the marshmallows were so bright and enticing, the oats so hearty and friendly. The perfect accompaniment to Saturday-morning cartoons. I could taste them.
“I mean, maybe just a handful if you have any left. . . .”
He poured a pile into my hands, and I popped the pieces straight into my mouth.
“Like candy,” I said.
“The ideal balance of sweetness,” he said.
“Yeah, but isn’t it late for cereal? Why are you up?”
“It’s never too late for cereal,” he said.
I grabbed more.
He moved the container away from me. His eyes were bloodshot, and he smelled like herbs.
“They’re addictive,” I said. “You ate this every day?”
“Oh man, all the time. Nothing better to satisfy the cravings. There were so many late nights, so much reading and studying all the time.”
“Sounds hard.”
“Sometimes, but it was worth it. It was like you would sit in this giant space in the library surrounded by all of these great minds, hundreds of years of great minds before you, and just take in knowledge. Like you could feel your brain expanding with all these new insights at every turn, all these smart people making you think. Like their only job was to make you think. Then we’d take these study breaks in the lounge where we’d eat cereal and argue over cartoons or have paper-airplane contests, and it was all bullshit, and it was all perfect. That’s how it was on the best nights. When my only job was to study.”
“You’ll go back.”
He hesitated before answering. “One day.”
“What was your major again? Philosophy?”
“That was last year.”
“Do you still want to be a doctor?”
“Maybe. But I was heading in a different direction this year. Political science.”
“Law school?”
“Or policy.”
“Save the world,” I said. “You could totally do that.”
He fished out a bag of pot from the inside of his backpack and began rolling joints like a professional, his fingers two-stepping. How much had he already had?
“You want some?” he said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “You do this a lot?”
“I wouldn’t say a lot,” he said, holding it out to me. “Only at night. You ever try it?”
“Isn’t it bad for you?”
“Healthier than pharmaceuticals.” He took a drag and released some smoke in my face. “More natural than those pills you take.”
How much more harm could I do?
I tried to inhale the way he did.
“Now, hold it there,” he said. “Don’t let go.”
I didn’t, until the coughing gripped me. Then I waited to feel something other than the deep burn in my throat, for the colors to change and the room to shift, for my perception to alter into enlightenment. Wasn’t that how it was supposed to go?
“I don’t feel anything.”
“It takes time.” He took another drag. “It might not work at all this round.”
“So what am I supposed to do now?”
“Relax,” he said, holding it out to me again. “Try again if you want.”
I did, and I coughed again, and still, nothing. “It doesn’t work.”
“More for me then,” he said. “I wish I had this more often.”
“Drugs?”
“Time,” he whispered. “It’s the time that counts. Time to sit back and slow down. You know what I’m saying? I don’t have time for anything these days.”
He inhaled.
“What would you do?” I said.
He exhaled.
“Play my guitar. All day.” He closed his eyes and smiled, as if imagining himself in another world, maybe even another body. “Eat Lucky Charms.”
“You’d probably get really fat.”
“Then no one would recognize me.”
He looked at me, hard for a second, and then away. “You really think you saw her?”
“Who?”
“Mom,” he said.
“Yeah, but I was probably dreaming or something.”
“Tell me about it,” he said.
“I had just hit my head on the faucet when I drifted off—I think, unless I was awake and it really was her. It could have been a concussion.”
“So weird,” he said, taking another drag.
“I know. You already told me you think I need help.”
“No, I mean you probably do, but you’d think you’d see Dad.”
“I know,” I said. “I was thinking that too, at first. But I’ve seen Mom before.”
“Seriously?”
“At home. A few times, actually. Who knows for sure. It wasn’t like her, her. It was like the mist of her, the essence. But I’m pretty sure it was her.”
“Not Dad?”
“I don’t think Dad had that side of him, the spiritual side. I think maybe that’s why he was more religious than the rest of us. Because he was searching for that thing Mom already had. I think I have it too. The sense, or whatever you call it. Do you have it?”
He put down the joint. “I don’t know.”
“I think you might,” I said. “I think we both do. You remember the pinky story.”
Once, when I was in school, I lost my fingertip in the slam of auditorium doors, and Mom said that she knew something was wrong the moment it happened because Nate doubled over in his highchair with some mysterious pain in his hand. He was hysterically crying until she got the call about me, and by the time she hung up, he was fine. She believed he could feel me. She believed we were linked.
“I was two,” he said. “Who knows if that was true.”
“And remember when you fell off your bike and I knew? Dad didn’t take me seriously at first, but I called out that you were in trouble, that we had to go find you. Then we opened the screen door, and there you were, in the middle of the cul-de-sac, just sitting there holding your ankle. Dad looked at me then. How did you know, he said? I just knew, I said. I could feel you.”
“Yeah, I guess I do remember that.”
“What if she never left?” I said. “I mean, it makes sense in a way that she’d want to stick around, for us. That’s how she was.”
He didn’t respond, but I could tell he was listening.
“If Dad had died first, she would have known we’d be taken care of. She would’ve planned for that and gone in peace, right? But Dad took it all as it came, whatever seemed right at the time.”
He stared ahead for another minute before speaking again. “Huh.”
“What?”
“That does kind of make sense. I’m not sure it will tomorrow, but . . . huh.”
“I’ve had a lot of time to think.”
“You think she’ll come back?” he said.
“Right,” he said. “But you are pretty nuts.”
I threw a marshmallow horseshoe at him.
He hit me with a rainbow.
“It’s late,” he said. “You should sleep.”
My mouth was dry. “I think I wanted water.”
I tried to get up directly from my crossed-leg position, but I wobbled back down. He let me use his shoulder to balance myself.
“Did you want some too?” I said. “Didn’t you want to play some music before you went to bed?”
He didn’t answer, but I poured him a glass anyway. This was the first time he seemed calm enough to talk. I had to seize the moment.
I rushed to fill our glasses in the kitchen, but by the time I made it back to the living room, half of the water had sloshed to the floor, and the lights were out.