Mom and Dad were in the kitchen. They’d been in there forever. After I’d come to on the couch, Dad had sat there for a while in the pretty flowered chair. Then, while I went to the bathroom to throw up, he’d gone into the kitchen with Mom. It hadn’t been his idea. Mom had approached him, trying to keep her voice low so we wouldn’t hear what she said. But she was so angry that it was like her words had ultrasound. They weren’t loud, but we felt them vibrate in our bones.
“Go to the kitchen,” she’d hissed, the words sharp and brittle in the silence of the living room. It was the kind of tone we’d used on the dog we had when we were really little. We’d sent him to the kitchen too when he’d peed on the rug or chewed on the furniture. But I never, not in my most psychedelic nightmares, ever thought I’d hear Mom speak to my dad that way.
They’d been in the kitchen for several minutes now, and all we could hear was the occasional word.
“You want me to go put my ear to the door?” I asked Trey.
“Only if you want to.”
“My wrist hurts too much.”
“Okay.”
That’s when Mom yelled. She yelled so loudly that both Trey and I sat up like someone had set firecrackers off under our backs.
“Get out!” she yelled. “Get out of the house and don’t come back!”
I had never heard Mom yell that way before. Never. Not even when her brakes had given out when she was biking down a hill during a camping trip. Even then, she’d just kinda kept quiet and aimed her bike at the pond off to the right instead of at the trees to the left. She hadn’t even screamed when the bike had gone off the road, across a
bumpy patch of grass, then right into the water. She’d just put her feet down when the bike sank in the silt and walked out of the knee-deep water, leaving the blue Schwinn standing there in the pond all by itself.
We heard Dad go upstairs and rummage around for a while. Then he came through the living room on his way to the door, a garbage bag full of stuff slung over his shoulder, left the house, started up his Chevy, and just kinda poofed out of our lives.
Mom told us over lasagna that night that Dad was going to be staying at his other house for a while.
“He has another house?”
She got that look like she’d said something she hadn’t meant to say. “He’s got a place to stay.”
“Is he coming back?”
“I don’t know.”
I looked at Trey.
“You shouldn’t let him come back,” he said to Mom. I liked it when he said things in that tone of voice. Strong. Like he knew more than Mom did.
Mom had been spending a lot of time moving the lasagna around on her plate with her fork, so I knew she wasn’t feeling too good. She let a long silence pass, the kind of silence that feels like smooth water. Like if you say anything or breathe or move, there will be a ripple and the smoothness will be gone. I don’t think any of us were in the mood for ripples. We’d had enough. So we all ate in silence for a few more minutes, enjoying the smooth surface while we could.
“I want you to know that what your dad did this afternoon was . . .” She paused.
“Bad?” I offered the word, but I knew it fell short.
“Reprehensible.” Better word. Score one for Mom. “And I need you to know that I never would have let it happen if I’d been home.” Like
she’d never let him cuss at us or yell at us or shove us around? But her intentions were good. I knew that.
“Why didn’t you call the police?” Trust Trey to jump right in.
“They would have . . .” She put her fork down and rubbed at her eyes like she was sleepy. “They might have . . .”
“They might have given him what he deserves,” said the boy with the purple-red bruises around his neck.
Mom got teary, but she kept the drops from falling off the edges of her eyes. She’d always had a gift for that. “I don’t want you to think your father hates you,” she said.
Trey and I exchanged eye rolls. Right. He loved us. He’d nearly loved us into oblivion, the pig. I didn’t say the word out loud because part of me still thought he was with us, listening to us, waiting to pounce on his kids’ major sins—like not eating zucchini or, you know, calling him a pig.
“He’s got some problems,” Mom continued. “In his head. And he knows he’s hurt you really badly this time.”
“I’m not going to forgive him.” I looked around to see who had spoken and realized it was me. “I mean—not for a very long time.” I knew in my head that it would be never.
“If he comes back, I’m moving out.” This from Trey. I guess having the life choked out of you makes you see things in a more definite light. He had that look about him—like he meant it—and it scared me. If Trey left, I’d have to leave too, and I wasn’t quite ready for that.
Mom stood after Trey’s statement and took her full plate to the counter. “We’ll see,” she said, her back to us, and we knew that meant she wanted him to come back. She reminded me, sometimes, of the fish we used to catch in the inland lake near the cottage we rented in the summer. It’s not like we were subtle about it. We didn’t have real fishing rods, so we’d wade in up to our thighs, fishing line and hook tied to the end of a stick. And we’d just walk around dangling the baited
hook in the water, kind of like human trawlers, waiting for something to be dumb enough to bite. And there was this one sunfish—we called him Ringo—who kept coming back for more. He’d bite, we’d tear his mouth off the hook and throw him back in. Then, the next minute, while we waded around the edges of the pond and talked loudly and did everything you’re not supposed to do if you’re fishing, Ringo would come back. He’d bite again, get hooked again, we’d tear him off again and let him go again. After about an hour of this, we’d have to give up and go home. Neither of us could stand the sight of Ringo, his mouth and cheeks all torn up, coming back to bite our icky worms for the umpteenth time.
Mom was like Ringo.
THE SILENCE
in the auditorium was burdened with emotion. The rehearsal had been going well—so well, in fact, that I’d begun to design play posters in my head as it looked like the whole project wasn’t going to be declared dead on arrival after all. I’d instructed Seth to run through his final monologue, just so we could get a sense of it, and I’d asked him to make sure he put some feeling into it—which sounded like good advice from a play director, but this play director had no idea what she was talking about.
Seth, however, apparently did. He walked through an imaginary curtain from the back of the stage and began his speech. “God creates us free, free to be selfish, but he adds a mechanism that will penetrate our selfishness and wake us up to the presence of others in the world, and that mechanism is called suffering. To put it another way, pain is God’s megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”
The other actors scattered around the room quieted and turned toward the stage, where Seth was taking a deep breath, eyes closed, before going on.
Meagan said, “He’s doing good,” from the chair beside mine and I nodded. He certainly was.
“Why must it be pain? Why can’t he wake us more gently, with violins or laughter? Because the dream from which we must be awakened is the dream that all is well. All is not well. Believe me, all is not well.” He took another breath, and there was something ragged in the sound this time. A muscle contracted in his jaw as he seemed to brace himself before continuing, his eyes at once haunted and luminous. “Suffering . . . by suffering . . . through suffering, we release our hold on the toys of this world, and know that our true good lies in another world. But after we have suffered so much, must we still suffer more? And more? And more?”
I was entranced. A herd of tutu-wearing elephants could have pranced through the auditorium just then, and I don’t think any of us would have paid them much attention. Because Seth—Seth who couldn’t hold Kate’s hand without turning five shades of red, Seth who never joined the other guys in stress-relieving rumbles during breaks between scenes, Seth who avoided looking me in the eye at all costs out of excessive timidity or guilt or who-knew-what—that same Seth was standing on the stage reciting his lines with tears dripping off his chin onto his chest. Much like the day I’d first met Shayla, I realized at that moment how deeply I loved him. Mind you, I wasn’t planning on officially adding him to my already-complex pseudo-family, but oh, how I loved this giant man-boy whose sensitivity and talent were so far beyond his years.
Shayla was with me at rehearsal that night because Bev had a commitment elsewhere, so I didn’t have much time afterward to debrief with my young actor. But Seth and I did sit for a few
minutes in the last row of the auditorium after the others had gone outside.
“Tell me about the monologue, Seth.”
He shrugged and looked away, apparently enthralled by the white wall off to his right. He’d been a little shaken for the rest of the rehearsal, probably as much because of his emotional display as because of the reaction of his peers. They had walked around the auditorium for the remainder of the evening like pilgrims in a holy place—speaking in whispers, their eyes a little wide, their faces serene. And since it had seemed we’d reached something of a pinnacle, I’d called off the rehearsal a half hour early. Now the other actors were outside engaged in some rip-roarin’ game that had the boys screaming, the girls squealing, and the neighbors probably calling the police to complain about the noise. But I could hear Shayla’s high voice among all the others—I’d developed mom ears somewhere along the way—and I knew it meant she’d be tired early tonight, so I didn’t do anything to intervene.
“Was it the text you were saying?” I asked Seth. “Or is there something going on in your life that makes it hard for you to be a part of the play?”
“I . . . I used to have this . . . this thing,” he said. “And the lines I have to say are . . . Well, they mean a lot to me, I guess.”
I wasn’t sure how to proceed. He was clearly still in a vulnerable state of mind, and I didn’t know whether further questions would help or harm him. “What do you mean by ‘this thing’?” I asked, giving him the chance to elaborate or be succinct.
“It’s called pectus excavatum,” he said. He might as well have said it to me in Uzbek. I wasn’t familiar with the condition, whatever it was. While my mind tried to piece it together from the Latin terminology, he shifted in his chair and extended his impossibly long legs in front of him, still looking slightly away from me.
“It’s a disease,” he said. “It means my chest was permanently caved in. My sternum and my ribs.” He shook his head and shifted again. “I couldn’t breathe normally or exercise because it was messing with my lungs and my heart. And I . . .” He trailed off.
“What, Seth?”
“I looked deformed. You know. When I took my shirt off.”
“Seth . . .” His vulnerability awakened my own. “Is it treatable?”
He swallowed hard and nodded. “I had surgery a year ago.”
“Well, that’s a step in the right direction.” I wanted to be encouraging.
“But then I got injured.” He took a deep breath and scooted down a little in his chair, aiming his eyes at the ceiling as he relived his pain. “Seven ribs got disconnected from the sternum. And it killed. I mean, the pain . . .” He blinked a few times to dispel the tears in his eyes. “But the doctors couldn’t see it. They didn’t do an MRI or anything and just kept telling me it was normal to feel bad after surgery, but . . . I knew it was worse than that. Anytime I moved . . . or breathed too deeply . . . or someone bumped into me . . . And the pain pills they gave me to try to deal with it made me moody . . . you know, mad and tired all the time, and . . .” He paused and bit the inside of his cheek to quell his emotions.
“Oh, Seth . . .”
“It lasted four months before anyone figured out that my bones were detached—and that whole time I just felt like someone was constantly sawing at my chest. Then a doctor in Munich did an MRI and they had to go back in and operate again.”
“After four months?”
He shook his head to dispel the memories, and his mouth pinched into a line. “It was . . . It was bleak,” he said. “Wanting-to-be-dead bleak.”
“Seth, I’m so sorry.”
“So when I get up and give that monologue about pain and death and stuff . . .”
“It hits close to home.”
“Yeah. Every time.”
“And is that okay? I mean—will it hurt you too much to relive it over and over?”
He shook his head again. “It’ll help me, I think. I’m still dealing with the whole God thing, and saying Lewis’s thoughts . . . it screws my head on straighter.”
“Well, I’m sure you know it’s a powerful scene from the audience’s perspective too.”
He looked genuinely surprised. “It is?”
“It’s . . .” I looked for the right word. “Redemptive.” Seth was one of the few students I knew who would understand the significance of the word. “You mentioned the ‘God thing.’ I think it’s a God thing that you’re part of this cast, Seth. That you’re C. S. Lewis.”
His hands were rolling and unrolling the script they held. He nodded.
“Please let me know if there’s anything—anything at all—you need help with.” I remembered some of the tough rehearsals we’d had recently. “How are you doing with Kate?”
He shrugged.
“Listen, I know it’s not always easy dealing with her. But I think she really respects your acting, and she clearly wants to get this right. So if you can just let Kate be Kate for a little while longer and not let her Joy-ness fluster you . . . She doesn’t mean any harm.”
“I know,” he said as a blush crept up his neck.
“All right.” I stood. “Time for me to get Shayla home.”
Seth rose too and pulled on his trademark trench coat before shouldering his backpack.
“I’m proud of you, Seth.”
He just ducked his head and exited the room.
Minutes later, Shayla and I were walking up three flights of stairs to the front of the school and Shayla was whining about being hungry. I wanted to tell her that she wouldn’t know what hungry was until she went on a no-carbs diet, but I informed her instead that we’d be home soon and could eat then.
“But I’m hungwy
now
, Shelby!”
It was the I’m-about-to-lose-it variety of Shayla’s whining. And it usually came right before the much less socially acceptable I’m-going-to-scream-until-I-get-what-I-want variety.
As always, knowing this left me with a dilemma. Should Shayla learn that sometimes you don’t get everything you want when you want it? Yes. Was it an important life lesson? Absolutely—as any number of her future boyfriends would probably attest. Was teaching her that lesson on this particular evening worth the drama of sweet Shayla turning into Cruella de Vil? Uh—no. Not really. So, as all good parents do (or so I chose to believe), I took a long look at her pre-explosion face and decided I needed to find some food, and pronto. It was not exactly a groundbreaking thought for me.
I rummaged through my briefcase and found nothing. I mentally rummaged through my classroom desk and concluded there’d be nothing there either. I could hear the sound of basketball practice coming from the gym, where I knew there’d be at least oranges for Shayla to dig her teeth into. But I was a closet sufferer of post-athletic stress disorder, so rather than spurring me forward, the thought of entering the gym for oranges made me redouble my efforts to coax Shayla home, where an assortment of not-yet-ready meals was waiting to be cooked. Maybe she could chew on a hard noodle while she waited.
“It’s only a few minutes from here to home,” I told her. “If you can wait that long, we can have the chicken casserole Bev taught
us to make!” I was becoming a regular Martha Stewart—hold the fancy aprons.
“But I’m hungwy now,” Shayla wailed, big old tears rising in her eyes. My mistake had been letting her think I had something in my briefcase. That had gotten her taste buds all fired up, and I knew from experience how painful it could be to dash their hopes.
“Honey, I don’t have anything with me.”
“Not even gum?”
“No. And you’re not allowed to chew gum anyway. You get it in your hair.” My mind flashed memory cards of Shayla screaming and me calling Bev and having to find sharp scissors.
“Not even gummy bears?”
“No, Shayla. I have no food, no candy, nada.” She looked at me askance. I think she thought I’d made
nada
up. “So . . . we’re going to walk home and get into our slippers.” The floor tile in the apartment was frigid. “And then we’re going to have
chicken casserole
.”
I’d tried to make the dish sound dramatic and enticing, but Shayla scrunched up her face and began what I now called the Crescendo Wail—the kind that starts soft and low, then grows steadily into an all-out fire siren. I couldn’t let that happen for two reasons. Firstly, her siren tended to push my buttons and I didn’t want to lose my patience. Losing my patience was a fear that obsessed me—always. And secondly, the acoustics were so good in that stairwell that I feared the Crescendo Wail would have the neighbors calling the police for the second time that night, and that just wouldn’t be good.
So, with a deep, calming breath, I picked Shayla up and carried her into the gym.
The first impressions that assailed me brought back memories I’d thought were safely deleted from my failure treasure trove. The smell of dirty sneakers reminded me of Johnny Dunbar, a boy
who had tormented me by sitting on my chest, for no apparent reason, and holding his sneaker over my nose until our second-grade teacher, Mrs. Dailey, had pulled him off. The sound of balls bouncing reminded me of the ridiculous habit I had of actually looking up when someone called, “Heads up!” to warn of incoming basketballs, volleyballs, and baseballs. It was a flaw that had earned me more bloody noses during gym class than I cared to remember. How was I to know that “heads up” actually meant “heads down”? The sight of two opposing teams reminded me of all the times I’d stood midcourt in junior high and high school waiting for the two captains selecting teammates to earn me by elimination. And the sight of Coach Taylor reminded me of countless conversations with Trey in which I’d promised—no, vowed—to never, ever risk getting attached, which would guarantee that I’d never pass on the Davis family genes.
Needless to say, our entrance into the gym was not a pleasant thing. Scott, whose radar was apparently functioning well, saw us almost immediately and came over with a surprised smile for us both.
“You’re two weeks late,” he said.
“We ran into traffic.”
“Rush hour in Kandern can be a mess.” He winked at Shayla and squeezed her foot. “How’re you doing, Lady Shay?”
“Gus calls me that.”
“I know. Do you mind?”
“Nuh-uh.”
“Then Lady Shay it is.” He turned his attention to me, which was helpful, as my mind had started to wander back down Memory Shame. “We’ll be through in a couple minutes.”
“Oh, we’re not here to see you,” I said breezily. “Shayla’s hungry.”
“No, I’m not.”
“What?”
“I’m not hungwy anymoh.” She tried to push out of my arms and it was all I could do to keep her from running out onto the court. “I want to
play
,” she protested.
I wasn’t amused. “We came in here to get you some oranges,” I whispered into her ear, loudly enough to be heard over the noise of shoes and dribbling.
“I want to play!”
Scott leaned in to say, “She’s welcome to go out there. The guys won’t hurt her.”
“They’ll trample her!”
“I promise they won’t.”
“Let me down!” This from Shayla, who was fighting me so hard that I was starting to sweat. If I was going to sweat, I was certainly standing in the right place, but sweat was my enemy anywhere.
Scott blew his whistle and Shayla snapped her head around, scared motionless by the sound. “Lady on the court, guys!” He took Shayla out of my arms and set her on the ground. Handing her a ball, he winked at her and said, “Go get ’em, tiger.”
She ran out onto the court, smiling at the faces around her, and the army of teenage boys parted like the Red Sea. One of them pointed toward the basket and told her to throw. The ball only went a couple of feet, but another player, a student I had in English class, snatched it up and rolled it back to her.