Chasing Forgiveness (3 page)

So I close my eyes, trying to forget, and trying to remember. I feel the cotton of the bedspread billowing around me. Dim dark colors flow around the insides of my eyes. A spot of red where I had been looking at the light dims, then fades. For a moment I feel dizzy and the bed seems to be sailing around the room.

I start to dream before I actually fall asleep. I dream about school and about track practice, but mostly I dream about being five years old and disappearing in a place that's safe and warm.

Mom is off somewhere, and Dad is off somewhere else.

But Grandma Lorraine and Grandpa Wes make everything seem okay for an afternoon. Maybe it's because they believe everything
is
okay—and when they believe it, it makes me want to believe it, too.

I spend half the afternoon watching basketball with Grandpa in the den. Grandpa coaches the players on the screen as if he's coaching one of his high-school teams—but his wisdom is wasted on the Lakers, and the game is a lost cause by the end of the third quarter. Giving up on the game, I follow the soft sound of piano music into the living room.

Grandma sits at her
Family Feud
piano—a big white grand that fills up half the living room. She uses it to teach
piano to neighborhood kids and to play sacred music. Today she sits alone at the keys, playing a hymn I recognize.

“That was your mother's favorite when she was a little girl,” Grandma tells me, but I already know because she always tells me that.

On the wall above the piano is a portrait of Mom, Uncle Steve, and Aunt Jackie that was painted before I was born. They've all changed so much since then. Aunt Jackie was thin and pale, just coming through her kidney troubles. Uncle Steve was just a kid, without his thick mustache and all those muscles he got from being on the wrestling team in high school. Mom's face seemed free of any troubles. “Did Mom know Dad then?” I ask Grandma, pointing at the portrait.

“I'm sure she did,” says Grandma. “She was sixteen when that portrait was painted.”

I can't imagine my mom being sixteen—much less fourteen, which is how old she was when she met my dad. I know all about that—Grandma loves to talk about it because it's a beautiful fairy-tale romance, the type she could put in a little storybook on her knickknack shelf.

It goes something like this:

Once upon a time, there was a fair maiden named Megan Pearson, with huge brown eyes and long locks of golden hair. When she was fourteen she was swept off her feet by a dashing young prince named Danny Scott. They were
each other's first and only true loves. They were married on Megan's eighteenth birthday and lived happily ever after.

Grandma was always wise enough to end the story and put the book on the shelf before the fighting began.

On the wall, Mom's smile seems to be the very center of the portrait. Aunt Jackie is beautiful, but Mom seems to be a step above beauty. Grandpa always says she's radiant in that portrait. Mom's smile is still radiant, but these days that same smile seems to be covering up the stuff going on inside her head. Dad says Mom's much too negative lately. “Why do you have to be so negative, Megan?” Dad says to Mom all the time. “With you, everything has to be perfect one hundred percent of the time, or it's no good at all.”

Mom gets her perfectionism from Grandma, only with Grandma it's different. Grandma wants things to be perfect, sees them as if they already are, and feels wonderful about it. On the other hand, Mom wants things to be perfect, wonders why they're not, and feels lousy about it.

Dad calls it negative, but Grandma calls it moody.

“Both your mom and dad were always so moody!” she once told me. “When they first met they would sit holding hands for hours, being moody together.” And then she had added, “They were made for each other.”

Lately I've been feeling moody myself. I probably get that from both Mom and Dad.

Grandma looks at me as I sit on the couch, watching her play her music. She can tell that I'm feeling moody.

“You should learn to play the piano,” she offers. “I could teach you.” But I just shake my head. Music's not something I have in me. “Don't waste it on me, Grandma,” I tell her. “Save it for Tyler.”

Grandma just smiles and keeps on playing her sacred music, as if reliving that first time she was touched by God. She told me all about how that happened—how she moved to California as a little girl after her grandfather killed himself when the stock market crashed in 1929—how her father would beat her older brother and how she would escape by playing piano. She discovered music when she was ten. Her family was never religious, but one day she walked into a church where a woman was sitting all alone playing the piano. “It was the most beautiful sound I ever heard,” she would tell me, and to this day Grandma swears that the Lord entered her heart on that day and never left.

When I look at her and talk to her, I know that it's true—there's something about her that glows. She's radiant, but in a different way from Mom. Sometimes I feel it so strongly, I think if I touch Grandma's fluffy blond hair, I'll get a shock.

I think about Grandpa, too, as I sit there trying to get lost in Grandma's music. Grandpa believes in God just as strongly as Grandma does—that's how they raised my mom, and that's how Mom and Dad raised us—but it all sort of gets washed
out by the time it gets down to me. I don't feel half as godly as Grandma and Grandpa probably do. And now, as I sit here trying to get wrapped up in Grandma's music, I find myself getting bored. Music is not my salvation. I begin to wonder if God could possible touch me some other way. Through football maybe.

Actually, it's my parents he should touch, and make them stop fighting over idiotic things. Somebody ought to stop them, because I don't know what will happen if they keep it up.

Yes, I do know.

And I can just see Russ Talbert's mug smiling at me with that I-told-you-so sort of smile and him telling me what a good thing divorce is.

I swallow hard and ask Grandma a question that I kind of know the answer to, but I have to hear someone tell me. “Grandma,” I ask, “what does
escrow
mean?”

Grandma doesn't miss a note. “It's a waiting period,” she says. “Before you can buy or sell a house, you have to wait a month or two. That's called escrow.”

That's what I figured. Nobody tells me anything, but I figured things out.

“So I guess Mom and Dad are selling our house, then.”

Grandma hums her soft melody. This is no surprise to her. “Yes, they are, Preston.” She has no problem with it, but I do.

“Where will we all live?” I ask.

Grandma takes her time in answering. She finishes her song first, and when the last note has faded away, she says, “Everything always works out, Preston.”

Just hearing her say that makes me feel a little bit better. When I sit here with Grandma, I can see things the way she does. Everything needs to be perfect, but everything already is. Her home. Her family. All is right with the world. As right as a piano chord and the harmonies of a hymn.

•  •  •

“You don't
get
separated,” Russ tells me as we hurl a football across a bleak, windy sky, “you just
are
separated. You
get
divorced. You don't have to have lawyers and stuff if you're separated. Separated is the easy way to be.” I suppose he must be right, because Russ is the authority on such things.

I wish Russ didn't know about my parents' separation. But he can't help but know all about it, because when my dad moved out, he spent his first two nights over with Russ's parents, who are separated but are sort of still living in the same house. Now Dad's staying with Grandma Lorraine and Grandpa Wes. Russ thinks it's kind of funny that my dad ended up moving in with my
mom's
parents, but that's just how our family is. We're close.

I throw the football long—a perfect pass that falls right into Russ's fingers.

“Touchdown!” screams Russ. He imitates the roar of a stadium crowd and spikes the ball, doing a little dance that
is a perfect copy of the way “Weavin' ” Warren Sharp of the Raiders does it. Weavin' Warren Sharp made that little dance famous.

Seeing Russ do the dance makes me a little sick to my stomach, and I wonder whether he did it to be cruel or he just doesn't know.

Yes, he does know. He has to know, because he knows every stupid little thing about me. He stops his Warren Sharp dance and looks down, filled with guilt that might be real or might be for show.

“Sorry,” he says. “Didn't mean to remind you.”

“No problem,” I say. “Warren Sharp's great.” He tosses me the football halfheartedly, and I idly wonder if anyone in the world would blame me if I shoved the entire ball down his throat.

Instead, I just toss it back to him. “I'm going out long,” I warn him as I turn to head out for a pass.

I like Warren Sharp. I really do. After all, he single- handedly brought the Raiders to the play-offs last year. He's got these huge hands that must have their own gravity or something because they seem to suck a spinning football right out of the sky—and once a football has touched the tips of his fingers it'll never touch the ground. Not until he makes it into the end zone and spikes it down.

I used to wonder what guys like him did when the season was over. I don't wonder anymore.

Russ lets the ball fly but makes excuses right away. “I can't throw that far—you know that,” he complains even before the ball hits the grass ten feet short of me. I get the ball and bring it back to him for a second try. This time I don't go out as far.

My mom's been seeing Weavin' Warren Sharp for a few weeks now. I can't picture him and my mom together, no matter how hard I try in my head. It's not the fact that he's so large and compared to him Mom's so small, or the fact that he's famous and Mom's not. It's not even the fact that he's black and we're white. I don't know what it is, but I just can't hold both of them in my brain at the same time.

Mom first met Warren Sharp with Aunt Jackie when they went to Palm Springs—it was sometime after the house went into escrow and Dad moved out. At first I was just impressed to have his autograph and didn't think much more of it, but then he started calling, and Mom started seeing him. Mom says they're just friends, but Dad seems to think they're going together, and who should I believe?

Mom is always talking about how Weavin' Warren picks her up in his Ferrari and drives really fast on the freeway. I've never actually met him, but Mom says I will. I really want to meet him just as much as I really
don't
want to meet him.

Russ throws the ball, and it slips through my fingers, bouncing wildly on the grass. It makes me mad, because I never miss a good pass. I throw the ball back to him. “Try it
again,” I say. Russ mumbles about how perfect a pass it was, and I go out a third time.

It's this escrow business that's making me feel so lousy. It's not just our house but our whole lives that are in escrow. It's like we're all floating in this stupid place where everything is maybe here and maybe there. The only thing I can count on for sure is math quizzes on Friday, and that's not too thrilling.

Maybe when escrow's over and the house is sold, everything will be okay. Maybe I'll get used to the idea of me, Mom, and Tyler spending our days with Weavin' Warren Sharp.

But even as I think about it, I get chills running up and down my spine, and my skin shrinks away from the air around it, as if I've received the full potential of a severe gross-out. I don't know. Does this mean I'm prejudiced?

The spinning football cuts through the windy gray sky, out of my reach, but I dive for the thing. I won't miss this one—this pass is mine. I skin my elbows against the ground, but the ball lands in my arms, and I pull it close to me so it doesn't have a chance to escape.

“Touchdown!” yells Russ, but I will not spike the ball like Weavin' Warren Sharp. I will not do his little dance—not now, not ever. No matter how fast he drives me in his Ferrari.

•  •  •

It would be easy, I say to myself, to just hang around and wait until everything works out, like Grandma says it will. I could just go to school and play ball and go to track practice
and come home and eat and watch TV and go to bed, letting everyone else make my decisions for me. They'll do that if I let them. Maybe that's okay for Tyler—he's only six—but it's not okay for me. I'll be making my own decision today.

Alone in my room, I close my shutters, jump onto my bed, and cry a little into the pillow when I think about how quickly everything seems to have fallen apart. I don't cry a lot, just enough to get some of the lousiness out of me. Kind of like letting a drop of air out of a bicycle tire so it doesn't blow up. I cry just a little—the air gets out, and the sadness turns itself into anger, which is fine. I like being angry a whole lot more than being sad.

Tyler comes in, turns on the television, and flicks the stations until he finds some old cartoon. Tyler is not sad or angry. He's just there.

I can't stand the way he sits there, so calm and quiet—so I turn off the TV, and Tyler turns it back on, and I turn it off again.

“Preston!” he whines.

“Keep it off, or get out,” I tell him in a really mean tone of voice. The kind of tone that Mom hates for me to use on him.

Smiling Tyler doesn't smile at this.

Tears form in his eyes. Good. It's about time he cried about something that went on in this house.

He lies on the floor and sobs. I let him. I lie on my back looking up at the rough gritty texture of the ceiling. It's like
looking at clouds. If you look long enough you can see shapes up there. Circles. Animals. You can find whatever you're looking for. I've seen lots of things. I've seen an elephant . . . a house . . . Jesus . . . Weavin' Warren's Ferrari. Only thing is, once you blink, it's gone, and you can never find the same thing again.