Teach Me (15 page)

hearts on mars

A miracle.

That can only be what it is—instead of drifting into another car, nailing a telephone pole head-on, flinging us from an overpass, Wilkie has brought me here.

The car skids to a bouncing stop. Someone is still honking as they fly on down the road. Wilkie rocks on his ancient suspension; the engine cuts out and starts ticking. I close my eyes and lay my head on the steering wheel.

My heart is a hunk of Martian hematite, bloodless, frozen, pitted.

I nearly died. Nearly killed other people too. But somehow I’ve been saved.

After a time I lift my head and gradually my vision clears. I become aware I’m in a broad, empty parking lot surrounded by power poles with yellow guy wires. Nearby stands a group of low buildings. One has a sign in the window:

I’m not stupid enough to believe it’s a message for me. It’s some kind of sale that ran a very long time ago. But I’m certain about one thing:

I’ve entered a new country I never thought I would see. My second life.

Why here? Why now? There has to be a reason.

I think about this awhile. Crank Wilkie’s ignition. Slowly pull out on the road heading back the way I came.

Looking for the address on the bottom of the billboard.

lizard killer

Get out.

My legs are shaking.

I haven’t eaten since yesterday. The sun is blinding. Wilkie’s hood is warm. I lean against it to try to clear the dizziness. My brain is coated with a fuzz; everything around me has a dreamlike quality. Maybe this is what an aneurysm feels like in the last microsecond before the blood vessel bursts.

Life number two.

I’m trying to figure out what I’m supposed to do with it.

Mom’s cell phone buzzes in my pocket. I slowly punch in a trembly text message:
I’m okay home soon
.

Mr. Sprunk’s office is last in a row of cookie-cutter brick cubes. Architectural style: Hand It Over. Plastic curtains are drawn across the big front window. Something tells me they are never opened. I walk toward them in a dream-fog, grip the handle as firmly as I can, step inside.

There is no bell. This does not feel like entering heaven. The interior is dark and smells of paper.

My eyes adjust. The paneling is thumbtacked with dozens of square topographic maps. Dad taught me how to read them when I was a kid. The swirling contour lines are hills, mountains, flood-plains. Each map bears the name of a particular quadrangle of land: MOONTOWN, VALHERMOSA, RED BOILING SPRINGS.

Four leather chairs sit against the walls. I’m desperate to sit again, but I resist the urge. At the far end is a counter covered with office flotsam. A subdivision plat hangs above it: WALDEN PONDS. Photographs alongside the plat show tiny lakes molded around a golf course, sterile as new underwear. Not exactly Thoreau’s
Life in the Woods
, I tell myself dully.

A partially opened door behind the counter leaks white-green fluorescent. Is anyone here?

Yes. Some large and energetic creature is rustling around in there.

I approach the sound carefully, conscious I’m making myself quiet. I peer through the gap in the door: a powerful back squeezed into a dark suit coat hunkers across my field of view.

If I slip out now, he’ll never know I was here. I make myself wait, heart drumming.

The door suddenly opens all the way.

“Hey.”

Mr. Sprunk comes in, rolling his massive shoulders. He’s even bigger than I remembered. His brow is furrowed, making him look permanently suspicious. His upper lip juts out to meet the tip of his nose, reptilian.

“I didn’t know anybody was out here,” he says. “Can I help you?”

He’s got a bad case of Elevator Eyes—they jump between my face and my barely existent boobs, settling somewhere in between. I realize I don’t know what I’m going to say.

“Um. I need to speak to you, Mr. Sprunk.”

He scowls curiously. “I’m really busy right at the moment, young lady. I’m on my way to a closing.”

“A closing?”

“Could you come back another time?”

I think about it. Will there ever be another time like this?

“No, I don’t think so.”

He steps up to the counter as if he hasn’t heard me, runs his thick fingers over a bristling pile of legal documents. For the first time I see it, the gun. It’s a small pistol sitting on top of a black leather holster in the middle of all the paper. I don’t know anything about guns. I wonder what it’s doing there, what he could possibly use it for.

“I carry it for copperheads when I show land,” Mr. Sprunk says, following my gaze. He straightens and his eyes dart to his watch. “Okay. You’ve got two minutes.”

“I’ve got something to ask you.”

“Well.”

“It’s about your daughter.”

This gets his attention. The elevator goes back up. “Alicia? What about her?” He squints. “Do I know you?”

“No. I mean—I know your son-in-law, Mr. Mann.” Matt the Jesus Phreak’s definition of the word
know
rings in my ears.

“Mr. Mann. You mean Ricky?” The elevator drops a couple of floors.

“Yes.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Um—how did they meet?”

“What?”

“Mr. Mann—Ricky and Alicia, how did they meet? How long have they known each other?”

“How old are you?”

I shift on my feet, uncomfortably aware of my sneakers. Mr. Sprunk stalks around to my side of the counter, moving with a dangerous muscularity. One of those men who can be accommodating only so long before his cerebral cortex starts to itch.

“Why are you asking me this?” he says.

“Do you know?” I say. “How they met? I need to know.”

“Why don’t you just ask Ricky?”

“I did. He won’t tell me.”

His face goes slack. “I think I’m beginning to get the picture. Look, I—”

“Please. This is really important to me.”

“Why?”

“I can’t tell you.”

It feels strangely unfair to say the same thing Mr. Mann has been saying to me.

“Then I guess we’re both out of luck, honey,” Mr. Sprunk says. “Now I really do need to be going.”

I stand my ground. “It’s a simple question. Why is everybody so mysterious about it?”

“I’m sorry, but you’ll have to excuse me, sweetie. Damn it.” He turns on his heel as if he’s forgotten something in the back.

I’m going to do this. I am. “He’s my teacher,” I say. “I was sleeping with him.”

Mr. Sprunk stops, pulled up short. “Who?”

“Mr. Mann. I was sleeping with him when he married your daughter.”

Even in my dreamy state, my courage amazes me; I’ve somehow found it, inside, of all places, my fear. Mr. Sprunk makes a kind of proto-laugh, bites it off. He turns his head slightly, blinking slowly, a crocodile considering its options.

“Why are you telling me this, darling?” He’s using those words,
honey
,
sweetie
,
darling
, like curses.

“I—I just thought you’d like to know.”

“Bullshit. There’s a reason for everything. You made this up; you’re trying to get something out of me, trying to get me to do something for you.”

Am I?

What do I want him to do, break Mr. Mann in half? Take his body to Red Boiling Springs and throw it down a sinkhole?

The arrogance, both of ours, is breathtaking.

“You’re one of those people.” I hardly believe the audacity of my own words. “Everything’s about you, isn’t it?”

I’ve never talked to a grown-up this way. I think he’s getting off on it. He licks the corner of his mouth, studying me more closely, a loose kind of awareness dawning.

“Wait a minute. I thought I recognized you. You’re that gal who crashed the wedding, aren’t you?”

I hover between the truth and a lie and decide on neither.

“Yeah. The one with the purple dress and the hat. That was quite a package you gave my daughter.” His teeth are clenched, but he’s smiling. I realize this is his closest approximation for happiness: he’s pleased with himself.

I ache to slap him. I do the next-best thing.

“So you don’t care that I was sleeping with him? That he doesn’t really love Alicia? That all the times he’s with her, he’s really thinking about me?”

Suddenly he’s leaning into my face, crushing my wrist in his big hand.

He cares.

“Listen to me, girl.” His pores are ugly and huge. His breath smells of coffee and hamburger onions. I feel faint again. “Don’t you ever come around me or my family again. Do you hear me?”

I nod, glancing at the pistol on the counter. So close. This is how things happen, I realize. All you have to do is be willing to go just a little bit further than most people. And your life changes in a moment.

He gives my arm a final devastating pinch before letting it go.

“Now get out of my office.”

He turns and goes into the back room, begins digging through a stack of papers.

Go.

I’m in the parking lot before I truly realize I’ve done it.

Slipped the copperhead pistol into the back of my jeans.

shovel of fire

Supper.

Chili cheese fries at the mall.

I throw them up ten minutes later.

All I can think about is Mr. Sprunk’s pistol in Wilkie’s glove box. How I’ve always hated guns. How I’m terrified of going back to my car.

“Oh, thank God, thank God,” Mom says over and over when I call from the food court. I tell her I’m sorry. She pleads with me to come home. I promise.

I put the phone away. It immediately starts to buzz in my pants. I shut it off.

I limp from one end of the mall and back. My hip still hurts from falling off Mr. Mann’s balcony. My mouth is sour. My fingers tingle as if they aren’t getting enough blood. Calm down. Find a quiet place. The bookstore. But isn’t there anyplace I can sit? It’s criminal to have to stand and read.

Criminal.

Will he call Mr. Mann? Try to find out who I am? Send the police to my house?

God.

I squat cross-legged in the back corner with the picture books. This is the only reasonably private place in the store. I flip through
Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel
. I like these pictures, comfort food for the mind. There’s Mike Mulligan, just as he always has been, sturdy, sure, competent. There’s his steam shovel, Mary Anne, joyful in her anticipation of work. They’re digging the same square hole they were digging when I was four. I like the color of the dirt as it flies out of the hole. It reminds me of clouds or the flanks of a friendly animal. I like the growing fury, Mary Anne’s eyes, the hell-bent focus, her bucket mouth biting into the earth.

Now the page that always scared me—Mary Anne sitting in the basement, all those pipes driven into her side, her caterpillar tracks gone. All that power, energy, drive, stopped forever. They’ve made it where she can’t run, can’t dig, can only sit, her body pierced with ductwork, immobile.

A fire burning her insides up.

the parent particle

Home.

“Nine,” Dad says when I come through the door.

Has Mr. Sprunk called? The police? This is what I’ve been dreading the most. Why I stayed away from the house as long as I could.

I try to gauge his face. His eyes are set, gray little circles, brows heavy. He seems more tired than usual. Here it comes—the shame, the great disappointment we’ve been building toward after so much promise. Ever since we started pulling away from each other after I got into high school. All ready to drop on my head.

“What can we do to help you?” he says.

I throw my arms around his neck and kiss his cheek and try not to cry. “You just did, Daddy. You just did.”

Not bad for a man who can calculate the value of pi to more than fifty thousand decimal places.

rosetta stone

Nothing.

For three days.

If Alicia’s father were going to have me arrested because of the stolen pistol, he would have done it by now. Maybe it’s not registered? Or is Mr. Mann lying for me? Or maybe Mr. Sprunk doesn’t want to ask him who I am? Maybe he doesn’t want there to be any contact between us, ever again.

All I know is, I’ve spent the last seventy-six hours in a heart-grinding terror. Every siren—

I’m desperately ready for a friend.

NAP.

That’s what Schuyler calls them:

Nine’s Access Procedures.

This means that before I can let you in to see all the strange, idiotic, important, ridiculous, scary, beautiful, sad, ecstatic stuff— before you can be my friend—you must pass a series of rigorous safety checks.

I don’t know what they are.

I only know if they’ve been satisfied.

Schuyler gets a free pass. I’ve known him, trusted him since he used to throw himself out of the playground swings and was inexplicably terrified of ventriloquist dummies.

If Schuyler knew, he would say Mr. Mann is the supreme violation of NAP.

That I’ve handed my personal Rosetta Stone to a man who— what exactly has he done? What did he do? I don’t know anymore. I don’t know.

Help me.

This is eating me alive. I can’t keep going this way. I can’t eat, can’t sleep; I’m barely able to function. I have to tell somebody. I have to tell Schuyler.

So why am I so scared?

I don’t know how he’ll react. He warned me. He tried to warn me again and again.

But do I want him to know he was so right?

To him it’s just a stupid game, another crush to be stamped out, stomped on, chewed up. Horny Howard, part two.

But how can he ever know this: that Mr. Mann is life, breathing, love, wonder, joy, pain, rage, murder? How can he understand? And does Schuyler deserve to know this? Is he ready? Can he handle the truth?

Okay, what’s the worst that could happen?

I will lose him too.

No. I can’t believe that. I know him too well. He will be hurt, sure.

But why? What right does he have to be hurt? He didn’t earn it; I did.

But best friends don’t keep secrets from each other. Not secrets like this. What about that kind of hurt?

I hate this. I hate not knowing what to do. I hate arguing with myself. I hate being confused, stuck, scared, smashed.

Alone.

That’s it, that’s what I hate worst of all. Going through this alone. That’s what I can’t be anymore. Alone. Not one more day.

Tell him. Tell him now. Tell him before you explode.

“Schuyler.”

He’s sitting on the seat beside me in Wilkie Collins. The sky is blue. The roads are clear. My eyes are itchy from crying.

“Are you okay?” he says.

“No.”

“So are you finally ready to tell me? What’s wrong? What is it?”

“It’s too—I don’t know.”

“Too what?”

“Too big, too awful. I should have told you.”

He raises one eyebrow, begins scratching an imaginary beard like a half-assed Sigmund Freud. “Okay. Schpill, fräulein.”

“Stop it. I can’t tell you if you’re going to act stupid like that. It’s too important.”

“Sorry. So don’t tell me if you think I’m like that.”

“It’s just—you know how you are.”

“What. What are you talking about?”

See. He’s hurt; I’ve hurt him already. But I have to keep going.

“You know how you are—you’ll say,
I told you so
. You’ll say you warned me. And you did, yeah, you did, over and over. And you know what? It pisses me off. It really pisses me off like crazy. Why do you always have to be right? Why do I always have to be stupid and wrong and fall flat on my face?”

“Who says that? I never say that.”

“Oh yes, you do. In so many ways—you just don’t know it.” I feel fresh tears burning the corners of my eyes. “That’s what hurts. It makes me feel like I get punished for anything I do, anything I try that isn’t what’s expected of me. It’s easy for you: you never try anything, you always hold back.”

“That’s not true.”

“It’s true. You just don’t know it. I’m the one who goes out and does things, who experiences things. You’re the one who warns me about it, tells me things will fall apart or somebody’s just after this or that, trying to hurt me.”

He looks away. “I’m not stupid, Nine.”

“I know you’re not. Who said you are? That’s the problem.”

“This is all about him, isn’t it?”

“Him?”

“Don’t act like you don’t know what I’m talking about. So why are you protecting him? What did he do, try to jump you? And you like the
Mustela nivalis
too much to turn him in?”

“Weasels! What? What are we talking about here? Weasels?”

“European common, to be exact.”

“Weasels, Schuyler! That’s what I mean! That’s just what I mean. I’m too tired for this.”

“Nope. You’re stalling. Come on. Just tell me straight out. If you don’t, I’ll just have to guess.”

“No.”

“Then say it.”

I’m quiet for half a mile, watching the road stretch, feeling my heart pound.

“Okay,” he says. “Mr. Mann yodels show tunes outside your window each night.”

“Shut up.”

“He stole your favorite pink-striped undies from PE and has them hanging from his rearview mirror.”

“Schuyler.”

“You read each other moldy poetry every day after lunch to aid your digestion.”

I elbow him in the mouth.

“God. God, Nine.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I see him probing his lip with the tips of his fingers. We don’t talk for a while.

“You really fell for him, didn’t you?” Schuyler says finally.

“Shut up.”

“Oh God. You did. You really did.”

I’m having trouble seeing the road. I pull over into a parking lot, trying not to cry. I’m sick of crying. Across the way a fifty-foot red fabric worm with arms is shimmying with compressed air. The worm is holding a cell phone in one hand, a sign in the other:

Schuyler leaves me alone, lets all of it pour out until at last I’m shaking with grief and rage and beating my hands on the steering wheel. He’s afraid to touch me, but I can tell he wants to.

“Oh, come here.” I put myself in his arms.

We hold for a long time; then I tell him everything. All of it. Right from the very start. Everything except the pistol.

The cell worm wiggles. Schuyler’s ears steadily droop. Finally he shifts away from me on the seat.

“Enough. I don’t want to hear any more about him. He’s a bastard, and I don’t want to hear any more. I hate him. I can’t believe it, Nine.”

“See why I didn’t want to tell you?”

“I hate him.”

“I knew you’d react this way.”

“What am I supposed to say? The bastard. If I had any guts, I’d turn him in myself. No. I’d kick his balls up past his Adam’s apple.”

“But you won’t. Because I don’t want you to.”

“No. I said if I had any guts. God.”

“Stop saying that.”

“I can’t help it. God. God!” He’s yelling out the window at the worm. I grab his arm, pull him back inside.

“Calm down.”

He lies back against the seat, staring at the visor. “You know what I hate almost most of all?”

“What?”

“God, you’re so much braver than me.”

“I’m not brave. Believe me.” I touch his hand. “You don’t know how good it feels to finally tell someone.”

Schuyler touches his face and frowns.

“I’m sorry about your lip,” I say.

“You should have told me,” he says.

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“At least it’s over now. Everything’s over.”

My throat tightens.

“What?” he says.

“It’s over when I say it’s over.”

Schuyler’s watching me. I have to find out now. Now that he has the power to stop me, to inject some sanity back into my life. Will he run to my parents? Try to keep me from my campaign against Mr. Mann? I’m holding my breath.

His ears go up. “Okay. So what do we do now? I’ve got ideas.”

We.

For the first time in days, I smile.