Before My Eyes (10 page)

My father scans my bedroom. King rustles under the bed. “Your father probably just lost count of the pills. How many pills do you have left, Glenn?”

“Who the hell knows how many? That's not the point, Deb. You think I'm an idiot, don't you? It doesn't matter to you that I'm a state senator, that I don't need a scandal with my son popping pills? I already have enough problems.”

“Like what?” I ask.

“Don't worry about my problems. Don't you have enough to think about? How's that college essay going? I want to see that revised opening paragraph.”

“I'm working on it.”

“I've had enough of this,” my mother says, as if this has all been resolved. “I'm going to make dinner now. Is that okay, Max? Okay, Glenn? We have a lot of good things coming up for this family. Max, you have your birthday party coming up.”

“I don't want a party.”

“What's this? You always have a birthday party over Labor Day weekend.”

“Mom—”

She snaps back to my father. “And Glenn, you have your Labor Day rally at the community park. Max, you're going to be there and help your father win reelection?”

This isn't really a question. I have no choice but to be there. Always the negotiator. The family's true politician.

“Good,” she says, without waiting for an answer. “Wonderful. Glenn, let's not make this a bigger thing than it is. We have bigger things to worry about, don't we?”

She hurries down the hall with a furious clicking of heels. I pick up my musty, dog-haired comforter from the floor and spread it back on my bed. His eyes bore into me. My back tightens. I want to crawl under the bed with King.

“Why'd you take them, Max?”

“I didn't take them.”

He raises his chin. I raise mine.

“You're lying to me. Don't lie.”

“I won't.” But, of course, I am lying and he knows it, and I know it.

“You know I'm hurting, too, Max. I may not win the election.”

“Would it be so bad not to win?”

“I want to win. I have things I want to do, that people sent me to Albany to do.”

“Like what?”

“I don't like to lose, Max. I'm someone who's won, who's always won. It's us versus them out there. But for the first time in a long time, the ‘us' is hurting.”

“Who's the ‘them'? Aren't they hurting, too?”

He scrutinizes me as if I've asked the stupidest question in the world. I don't understand why it has to be us versus them, why the world has to be divided into winners and losers.

“The whole world is hurting,
Pop.
” I grab King's leash. “Excuse me, I have to walk my dog before dinner,” I say. “I don't want him pissing in my room again, right?”

King growls like a wolf in a cage. But he won't come out unless I lead him with my hand. I've got to admit that he's smart, maybe smarter than me.

“Only a kid like you would pick out a blind mutt and then want to keep it.”

“Excuse me,” I say, standing in front of him.

He shakes the orange pill container in front of me.

I remember when I was small and sick with the flu or something and had to take a pill. He crushed it into a cup of warm milk. He stayed up with me. He fell asleep at the end of this bed—him, not my mother. She always said she needed her sleep or she couldn't function. He was up with me, stroking my legs, making sure that whatever was wrong with me would soon be fixed. I don't know what he wants from me. One minute he wants me to grow up, get a summer job, help with the campaign, and in another, he won't let me have a lock on the door and I'm under interrogation.

“I'm going to flush this down the toilet. You got me? I expect this to be the end of it. We love you, Max, your mother and I love you.”

“Flushing prescription drugs down the toilet, that isn't good for the environment. The drugs enter the water system.”

“So you do think you're smarter than me?” he says. “Let me be very clear about this. These—and all the others—are going down the toilet. Call the EPA.”

I'm not smart at all, I want to say, only his son. He blocks me from leaving.

“Dinner smells good, doesn't it?” he says. “You're going to be at the Labor Day event, Max? We need to show a united front as a family.”

I lock eyes with him.

He takes that as a yes and says, “Smart boy,” and shifts away as if he hates looking at me. I don't care what he says. I see it in his eyes that he wishes he had another son, one that wins.

In a moment, he is in the main bathroom. The toilet flushes, and a shudder runs through the house as the pills are driven into the ecosystem.

The scent of frying hamburgers wafts down the hall. I used to love my mother's hamburgers, juicy and slick with onions on the side. Tonight the smell makes me angry. During the last two years, she stopped cooking. She was always taking the train up to Albany to meet my father for some event. I was left with money for takeout. I don't need to sit down with them for dinner now. I can't look at them now.

King rubs against my legs. I clutch at his collar. Even blind, he finds my face and licks it.

Claire

Friday, 7:00
P.M
.

We stay as long as we can, after most of the families leave, tugging their wagons off the beach, the wagons now piled with wet, sandy towels and half-asleep children seemingly more of the sea than the land. In their wake, upturned plastic sand buckets remain. Fresh-dug holes spill over with seawater. Sea gulls forage the garbage. And the oceanfront reverts into the empty place it should be.

I hurry a sleepy Izzy toward the minivan. I think that we'll miss getting home before my father. We'll end up getting caught in traffic, our hair knotted with sand and seaweed, our skin scaly with too much sun, our mouths singing: we are mermaids.

Yet in less than a half hour, our minivan slips into the driveway, the lone car. I call my father on his cell phone and leave a message. I thank him for the wonderful day at the movies. I warm up leftover macaroni and cheese, add a few raw carrots to each of our plates. I don't know how my mother grocery shopped. I can't seem to figure out how much to buy, or what to buy, or when to buy. Izzy loves bananas. But somehow the ones I purchase turn instantly brown and soft, and then what do you do with them? We have piles of brown bananas and I don't know what to do with them. We've lived on macaroni and cheese for weeks, but I have it all under control. However, tonight neither of us is very hungry. I make sure Izzy has her bath, using the last of our mother's bubble bath, and change her into one of her princess nightgowns. I don't remember ever having a princess nightgown. I fluff out her blond hair. Next to me she is fair, adorably freckled. She slips her skinny arms around me and kisses me for the tenth time or more today. She's easier with her kisses than I ever was.

Curling up in her bed, she smells like a mix of sea and lavender. All the lights must be on. All the teddy bears must be lined around her. Blond curls and valentine lips, I think again for the tenth or twentieth time, she's going to be gorgeous. I sigh. “Go to sleep.”

She pops her head up. “When is Daddy coming home?”

“Soon.”

“Can I stay awake for him?”

“Sure,” I say, knowing she'll be asleep in ten minutes. “Just close your eyes.”

She lays her head back down with her eyes wide open. “Sometimes I can't remember her before, can you?”

“It's time for sleep now.”

She studies my face so hard I have to turn away. “I know who she used to look like.”

I pick up her soggy bathing suit from the floor.

“You. She looks like you, Claire.”

“No. She doesn't look like me.” In her bedroom mirror, a glimpse of my face, burned brown from the sun with its chapped lips and peeling nose, almost confirms this for me. I don't easily remember what she looked like before.

“You do. You look exactly like her.”

I have to get her to sleep. I don't want to have this conversation. Not now. I don't want to think that to Izzy I look like our mother. I'm not her. I don't want to be her.

Izzy flops back on her bed and slips her hands behind her head. “Where do you go when you die, Claire?”

“I told you.”

“I forgot.”

“You don't have to worry about dying.”

“But I want to know. When I die, will I go to heaven? Will Mommy be there when I get there? Will she be all better?”

I can't do this tonight. I just can't. My father should be home. He should be the one answering these questions, or not answering them, as is usually the case. I'll make us dinner. Do the laundry, even. But not this.

“Mommy isn't dying so soon, and neither am I, and neither are you.”

“What's heaven like, Claire?”

“Why are you asking so many questions?”

“I like asking questions. You do, too.”

“Let's talk about something else. Did you have fun today?”

“I always have fun at the beach. But I am going to have more fun tomorrow.”

“Why?”

“Every day I try to have more fun,” she says, as if I'm the six-year-old.

“We're both going to have more fun tomorrow.”

“But Claire, I still want to know. What happens when you die? What happens to your skin? Do your bones become like dinosaur bones?”

Everyone says that Izzy is one of the most verbal kids they've ever met. Sometimes, I wish she were a little less verbal. “You don't have to worry about that for a long, long time.”

“Sometimes I dream of her, and it's before she had the stroke.”

“Izzy, you have to go to sleep,” I say with desperation. I want to go into my room and be in the dark on my computer.

“When I die, will she be in heaven?”

“She's not dead. She's in the rehabilitation center.” My voice has an edge. I don't want to talk about anyone dying.

“I know that. But when I'm dead,” she persists, “will she be there? Will Daddy? Will you?”

“Yes. But no one is dying.”

“Everybody will be in heaven with me,” she says, happy and matter-of-fact in her logic. “Guess what I'm going to wear in heaven?”

“You're not going to heaven for a long time. You have time to plan your outfit.”

“Just guess. What am I going to wear in heaven?”

“Elizabeth.” She knows I use her full name when I've had enough.

“I'm going to wear my bathing suit in heaven—not the one with frogs that I wore today, the pink one. Are you allowed to do that? Is there an ocean in heaven?”

“Elizabeth, there's an ocean in heaven, okay? Now, I'm going to my room. Shout if you need anything,” I say, and what I think is: Please, please, go to sleep already. Please let me go. Please let me be for the rest of the night by myself, alone, without dreams of my mother, or dying, or even heaven.

Izzy scoots under her blanket, made up of alternating squares, berry purple and yellow, knitted by our mother in the last months of her pregnancy, the needles tapping and clacking every evening for weeks. She didn't have to look at each stitch. She didn't even have to stop and count her lines. She never knitted things with holes in them, never got frustrated, never had to unravel lines and start all over again. I don't know if she'll ever be able to knit like that again. I press my face into Izzy's blanket, baby-soft and lavender-scented, my mother's scent. Her knitting runs across my face in perfect, tight stitches.

Izzy tugs the blanket to her chin. I kiss her tonight on her forehead six times, one for each of her six years.

“I can't wait to be seven,” she says, and I almost scream in exasperation. “You know why, Claire?”

“Why?”

“Because then you'll give me seven kisses every night, won't you?”

I want to give her another kiss right now, but I know what it's like to wait and plan for things like that.

“Will Mommy be home for my birthday? Please say yes.”

“I can't,” I say. “Do you want another kiss?”

“No,” she says. “Just leave the light on. One more thing, Claire.”

“What?”

“Did you double-check the front door? Daddy is always saying to lock the door, that you never know,” she says, sounding like a grown-up. I don't ever want her to turn seven.

“Checked and double-checked.”

“What is it that ‘you never know'?” she says, drifting off.

“I don't know.”

“Maybe I'll dream of Mommy tonight,” she says in a sleepy, faraway voice.

I hurry out. Take five, six steps into the darkness of the hallway, before I hear, “Claire? Claire?”

I can't do this. I've been with her all day. I can't be mother and father to her. I don't say anything. I want to go—anywhere, or at least be alone to think and write.

“Claire?”

I suck in my breath. He should be here now. He should be dealing with her. What if he doesn't come home? What if it's only her and me? I push the fear down.

Her voice calls out, louder now. “I love you, Claire.”

I breathe. “I love you more, Izzy.”

Barkley

Friday, 8:00
P.M
.

In the pitch black in front of the computer screen, the brain filters information at full speed. I must connect with her. She is my vision, my creation. Filmmakers would label her the ingenue. The naive young girl. The one who must be taught. She is mine to teach.

Next to me, the super-sized bag of corn chips and jar of hot salsa are half-emptied. May have to venture out for more. Must feed the body.

I type with one hand and eat with the other. The body and mind are two entities, paralleling each other, an independent and dependent clause. The body needs food to keep it satiated, calm in front of the screen. The mind must roam free.

Words jump on the screen.