The Vast Fields of Ordinary (20 page)

A few feet away my phone vibrated again. I didn’t get up to check it.

An especially forceful gust of wind woke me up. It was still nighttime. I didn’t remember falling asleep. I didn’t know how long I’d been out or what time it was. I tried to stand up, but when I did I grew so light-headed that I fell back onto the chair. I realized I was drunk. I remembered drinking the vodka and drinking it fast, and I wondered if maybe I’d had more than I realized. I clumsily reached for the bottle beside the chair. There was less than half left. I tried to remember how full it had been when I took it out of the cupboard.

It was then that I noticed a flash of movement in the corner of our yard, some little person scurrying away from the pool and toward the bushes.

Is that a kid?
I thought.

It was. She was wearing a pink shirt and denim shorts. She looked over her shoulder at me as she got on her hands and knees and crawled into the bushes. For a split second I saw her face in the moonlight, young and scared and chillingly familiar.

It was Jenny Moore.

And she was gone.

I jumped up to go after her, but the light-headedness came back and I realized that my leg had fallen asleep, turned into a pillar of pinpricks and dead muscles. I stumbled over to the spot where she’d vanished. I kneeled down and tried to peer into the bushes, but it was too dense and dark to see anything.

“Jenny?” I said.

The word came out a garbled mess. My stomach made a noise that seemed distantly related to the sound her name had made, and before I knew it I was vomiting into the mulch.

“Don’t be scared,” I said, wiping my mouth. “I’m not gonna hurt you. I wanna help you. I wanna help them find you.”

I collapsed onto the lawn. The sharp branches of the bush scraped my head. There was a loud chirping noise, and one of the last things I thought before passing out was that it wasn’t coming from a cricket. It was coming from her. She was curled into a ball, farther back in the bushes where I couldn’t see. She was making the noise in her throat and glowing from the inside.

It was my father who found me. He was kicking my leg. Hard.

“Dade Patrick Hamilton, get your ass up.”

I could smell liquor and vomit and soil and spices from my mother’s herb garden. I lifted my head and put a hand to my cheek. A thick stickiness mixed with pieces of mulch.

“That’s right,” my father said. “Wake up, kid. You and I are gonna have a long talk.”

I slid backward out of the narrow space under the bushes where I’d passed out. The sun was so fucking bright. It seemed to be as much to blame for my pounding headache as the previous night’s booze. The blades of grass were cool and sharp on my feet. My shoes were gone. When had that happened?

“Jesus Christ,” my father said when I stood. “Look at you.”

“Yeah,” I mumbled. “Look at me.”

“Who told you that you could shave your head?”

“Well, I would’ve asked you, but you haven’t been home. You’ve been out. And about. Out and about, as they say.” I was swaying back and forth a bit and my words felt misshapen. I think I was technically still drunk. He gave me a firm palm to the shoulder, a weird sort of frat boy shove.

“Get your ass upstairs, young man, and clean yourself up. Then I want you downstairs in the kitchen, and your mother and I are going to have a very long, very severe talk with you.” He went back inside and left me there in the yard, basically lobotomized and in a heavy amount of physical pain. My head. My fucking head.

I showered and went down to the kitchen. My mother and father were at the table, each with cups of coffee, which somehow made the whole thing seem like an intervention.

“Food World called,” my mother said. “You were supposed to be there this morning at eight?”

“Oh. Shit. Yeah.”

“I told them you were sick.” She leaned closer to me.

“What the hell has been going on?” my father blurted. “I leave the house for a few days and suddenly my kid is acting like he needs to go into AA.”

“I’ve been under a lot of stress.”

“What kind of stress?” he cried. “How can you be under any stress? What in the hell do you have to be unhappy about? I’ll tell you what
I
have to be unhappy about—”

“Tell me what you have to be unhappy about, Dad.”

“I’m unhappy about the fact that you’re obviously making terrible life decisions, that you’re obviously drinking too much, that you’re probably using drugs—”

“I know he’s using drugs, Ned. His room smells like a rap video.”

“What does that even mean?” I asked.

“It means that there are going to be some big changes around here,” my father said. “And I don’t care if you’re only going to be here for another month. I have no qualms about making this month the worst of your entire life.”

“Obviously, Dad. We all know you have no problems making anyone miserable.”

“Dade, don’t talk to your father like that.”

“Why not?”

“Because. It’s disrespectful.”

“Who cares. You have to earn respect. Isn’t that what you always say, Dad?”

My father’s jaw dropped and the look in his eyes suggested that his anger level had reached new heights.

“What is that supposed to mean?” he finally said.

My mother said, “Ned, I don’t think—”

“No. I want to hear what this little smart-ass has to say.”

“You’ve sucked all summer, Dad,” I said. “Admit it. You’ve started seeing this woman, and you’re expecting Mom and me to just be okay with it, and it’s not fair. I don’t know how you’ve convinced yourself that you can just be gone all the time with
Vicki
and think that everything will just go on like normal. I’m not the fuckup, Dad. You are.
I’m
fine.”

“Dade,” my mother said. “
Fine
is not the word I would use to describe you, considering the state you were in forty minutes ago. Do you know how scared I was when I looked outside and saw you lying on the ground? I thought you’d been killed or attacked by something.”

“This isn’t about me passing out in the bushes.”

My father said, “Well, what is it about then?”

“It’s about a lot of things. It’s about your and mom’s problems and how they’re affecting me and how you don’t realize that. Or you don’t care. One or the other.”

“Dade, the issues with me and your father are between him and me. They have nothing to do with you.”

“They have everything to do with me!” I said loudly. “I can’t believe we’re spending my final days in this household like this. Mom, I know you’re miserable. And Dad, I don’t know about you. I have no idea what’s going on your head.”

There was a pause in the conversation. My mother gazed at the hydrangeas in the middle of the table, her lips slightly parted as if at any moment she was going to start telling the flowers what they were, explaining their function on the planet. My father stared out at the backyard, his body jiggling slightly from the way he was bouncing his leg under the table. It was a nervous habit of his, something that always made him look like a kid. It coupled well with his momentary speechlessness.

Then I said it.

“Mom and Dad, I’m gay.”

My mother sat up a little bit straighter. Her lips were moving, but she couldn’t find the words. My dad shook his head and looked at his lap. Of all the moments, this is the one where our house chose to be silent. No air conditioner kicking on. No ice tumbling in the freezer. No barking dog or Jehovah’s Witness ringing the bell. No telephone call or Food World commercial with its annoying jingle. Nobody said anything for a long time and then I said, “Tell me it’s okay. Tell me that it doesn’t matter.”

My dad kept bouncing his leg and shaking his head to himself.

“Tell me it’s okay. That’s been my biggest fear. That it won’t be okay. I need to know that it’ll be okay.”

My mom said to no one in particular, “I don’t know.”

“I knew,” my dad said. “I always knew. I hoped I was wrong, but apparently I wasn’t. I knew.”

“Tell me it’s okay,” I pleaded.

“It’s okay,” said my mother. She was trying to smile, trying to act like this wasn’t what it was. “It’s fine. I just wasn’t expecting it, that’s all. Do you have a special friend?”

“We talked about it, Peggy. Many times. Don’t act like this is a surprise.”

“A special friend?” I said. “Like a disabled kid I play baseball with?”

“Watch your tone with your mother, young man.”

“Talking about it is one thing,” she said, getting teary eyed. God, it sucks seeing your mom cry. It’s gotta be one of the worst things in the world.

I said, “Don’t be sad, Mom.”

She got up and stood beside me and held me against her chest. A whimper escaped her mouth. I wondered how present she was in the moment, if the significance of the moment had been blurred by any number of pills that she’d taken that morning. Or maybe she was far from the moment but could see it and feel how far away she was from it and that’s why she was crying. Or maybe she really cared.

“Peggy, let him go.”

“I love you, Dade,” she said softly. She was speaking into the top of my head. Her hair fell around me, touched my ears and the tip of my nose.

“Peggy, let him go.”

“Mom . . .”

I noticed my father had stopped bouncing his leg, and somehow the energy of the room had shifted. He wasn’t looking at either of us. He was just staring out at the yard. He was done with this conversation. But my mother and I stayed like that for a bit longer. It felt good to touch my mother, to be touched by her. It woke up something inside me that was linked to before I was born. It was like my body could remember being inside her and kept reminding itself that it didn’t have to be afraid.

After I saw Jenny, it was hard to think about anything else. I kept thinking I saw her everywhere. She was every little kid at Food World. Every late-night noise belonged to her. She was coming up the stairs, walking down the hall to hover at my bedroom door. I was tempted to blame it on the alcohol, but it was all too real.

You saw her
, I kept telling myself.
That was her.

I dreamt about her, but even in my dreams she didn’t want to be found. I’d be following her down some street that was my street but not my street, and I’d ask her where she was, what it all meant. But she kept her back to me and just moved forward. I could never catch up. It was useless to try. That Tuesday after I first saw her, I made Lucy go with me to the Riviera, the old theater on the south side of town where Alex had said someone had seen her. She hadn’t appeared again by my pool, and the Riviera seemed as good a place as any to find her.

We sat in the back row of the balcony. It was an older theater, gorgeous and grand, and from where we sat it seemed like we were floating above everything. When we walked in, the film had already started. It was some weird black-and-white French film with people sitting in a room and flinging nonsense dialogue back and forth. There were individuals scattered amongst seats down below, all slouched low and clearing their throats during the movie’s quieter moments. A few of them were even smoking, the clouds from their cigarettes climbing and twisting in the light from the projector. One of the girls in the film was a gorgeous black girl with heavy eye shadow.

“Why the sudden interest in foreign cinema?” Lucy said quietly as she opened the bag of gummy bears she’d bought at the front counter.

“Just because.” I kept looking around the balcony. There was a college-aged couple a few rows behind us making out, but that was it. It was a Tuesday afternoon and the theater was fairly empty. There was no ghostly girl anywhere.

“How are the ’rents?” Lucy asked.

“Good,” I said. “It felt good to finally tell them. My dad already suspected I was gay. Which is fine. It’s true, so who cares. It feels weird to have it out there, though. Like, where do we go from here? In some ways it’s like they have to get to know me all over again.”