Joey remembers me from the days of my criminal life pretty well. He said I seemed like a normal kid, but I wasn’t. Joey hated Reid Schmidt and Ben Carpenter, my only friends back then. “Those dudes were shit. Reid shoved me into a corner over at Kwik Trip back when I was still in school. Bastard held me there and burped in my face. What a damn pig.”
I wrote this for Joey in my green notebook. It’s about my first life.
When Isaiah was a kid, he was the anti-Hannah. Hannah was a neat freak. She was sparky and funny. He was not funny. He was grubby and he broke stuff and he got in fistfights at the swimming pool and he didn’t like school, so he did terribly, and so some of the same middle school teachers who had loved Tammy Bertram (his mom) when she was a perfect seventh grader laid into her about her terrible, gross kid. Mom sent him to his room when she got home from parent-teacher conferences because she couldn’t bear to look at him. Hannah was so easy to brag about, so clearly her mother’s child. But the dirty little caveman, Isaiah? What a pain in the ass.
That’s what Mom called him before Hannah died, the caveman. It was sort of a pet name. Until it wasn’t.
Isaiah did something at Hannah’s visitation. It was a closed casket visitation because Hannah was crushed to pieces and badly burnt and so the “restorative” work that needed to be done to make her presentable was too much for the mortician in town.
But the casket was out there on some kind of podium, right at chest level for Isaiah. There were no flowers on it. Nothing. Just the door. Not good.
Before all the people—the high school kids, and teachers, and his mom’s law clients and his dad’s colleagues, the staff and professors from the college—showed up to stand in line, to come forward and grimly shake Grandma Gin’s hand and Mom’s hand and Dad’s hand, to tell the family how much they would miss Hannah, Isaiah fixated on the casket, on the fact that his dead sister, who he loved so much because she was hilarious and her eyes sparkled with glee when she chased him around the house, was inside it, and he couldn’t control himself. He could never control himself. He wanted to say sorry, to say goodbye to her. He stood up from the folding chair and went to it and lifted the casket door and looked in.
He began to shake. He began to cry. What was that thing inside?
Why didn’t they have the box locked shut? Why was the box even out there at the visitation? Why didn’t anybody pay attention to the thirteen-year-old kid who constantly did stupid things? Who was skin and bone and vibrating energy all the damn time? Who would miss Hannah more than everyone else combined? Who had impulse control problems in the first place?
He screamed.
Grandma Gin grabbed for Isaiah. The casket door slammed. He fought Grandma off. Dad grabbed for him. Isaiah fought him, too. He couldn’t say why he fought. He couldn’t say anything. He was blind with fear and rage.
And then Mom lost her mind. She started screaming, shrieking. “Get him out of here! Get that piece of shit out of here!”
Isaiah ran. He found his way to Pine Street and then down to the grocery store, a half mile away. He hid behind piles of flattened cardboard boxes by a dumpster filled with rotting vegetables. He crouched down, dropped his head between his knees. He sobbed and sobbed and sobbed.
A grocery store worker found him when it was dark. The cops came to pick him up. No one spoke to him at home. He didn’t go to the funeral the next day.
A year later, Isaiah had grown physically, and things were off the rails. The cops picked him up many times. He smoked pot at school in the eighth-grade hall bathrooms. He got wasted repeatedly with two young dickheads, Reid Schmidt and Ben Carpenter. He was arrested for shoplifting at Walmart (box of Combos pretzel snacks—not that big a deal, one would think). Later, after he drank a half bottle of vodka by himself and vandalized his own house, he was sent to live in a group home in Muscoda, Wisconsin, for two months (where he learned to smoke menthol cigarettes and to fight with kids much bigger and older and then also to breathe through his nose, to calm himself, to talk in group therapy, to write about his feelings). But when he got back from Muscoda, after promising to never drink again (he’d meant it), he followed that messed-up Grace again—because he couldn’t help it—to a massive party in a cornfield, which got busted, and he got hauled to jail again, and he received the ultimatum.
“Go out for football or go to Muscoda for good,” Dad said.
What would his life have been like if he had gone to Muscoda?
Where would he be?
“Maybe he’d be happier?” Joey asked.
“No. I love football,” I said.
“Life is more than football, bro,” Joey said.
“No,” Isaiah said. “Not really. It really isn’t.”