HEADLIGHTS

For a few days, I try out plans in my head to go to see Luke again, with potions for nightmares and sleep and a bounding dog. Rosa and I hang out downtown on Sunday. We study in the library. I don’t want to go home. I want to stay in my world. We call my father and gossip with him about school. He says he’ll try to borrow his deckhand’s car and drive home on my birthday. Rosa teases him that the teachers all miss him. “They’re pining,” she says. “They’ve got it bad for you, Johnny.”

We hold the phone up between us, and I hear him laugh and that makes me sink down in my chair and grin like a kid. I say, “I’d drive all night.”

And he says, “You’re not calling from a Laundromat?”

“No, Dad.”

“What’s that about a Laundromat?” Rosa says after we scream “I LOVE YOU” into the phone and hang up.

“One time my mother forgot me at a Laundromat in Lowell. Someone had to call my father to come pick me up. She just forgot I was with her. She pulled away from the Laundromat. I remember her headlights pulling away and I raced after the headlights but I couldn’t catch her. I went back to the Laundromat. It was dark, and I thought the world had ended.”

“How old were you?”

“Four.”

“She forgot you? You were four?”

“Well, Dad drove from Portsmouth. Somebody called him. He took me to her and they had a long talk. That’s when I heard the letters PTSD.”

We are scuffing through snow. We’ve got to get to the homework, which has been sliding.

But I’m not thinking of homework. This story is one more thing I seem to be stockpiling. I have a stash—my tiger’s eye ring Luke keeps in his right chest pocket. One of Pilot’s puppy teeth. A whelk shell I found on the beach beneath the 95 bridge. My mother’s voice when she sang to me in Khmer, which I don’t want, but it’s coming.

“I didn’t know what PTSD spelled,” I tell Rosa. “It just meant your mother could vanish and you’d be alone.”

We scuff along. Rosa is quiet, and I hope I didn’t upset her. But all she says is, “I think I love Johnny. I want to marry him, after I’m a star.” And we howl.

“I had a stuffed rabbit,” I say. “I remember that rabbit. I was wheeling it around in one of those canvas baskets in the Laundromat and singing at the top of my voice to make her remember me.”