We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (11 page)

M
EANWHILE,
Lowell clawed his way to high school. High school Lowell was easier to live with
than middle school Lowell. He stopped demanding that we go see Fern and joined the
rest of us in seldom mentioning her. He was chilly but polite; peace settled over
the house like a thin mantle of snow. One Mother’s Day, he gave Mom a music box that
played the theme from
Swan Lake
. She cried for days over it.

Marco was still Lowell’s best buddy, though Marco’s mom liked Lowell less than she
had before they’d shoplifted Twizzlers from the Sahara Mart on Third Street, been
picked up and made an example of.

He had an on-again, off-again relationship with a girl. Her name was Katherine Chalmers,
but everyone called her Kitch. Kitch was Mormon. Her parents were strict and overwhelmed—they
had nine children—so policing her had fallen to her two oldest brothers. Each rose
to the challenge in his own special way. One showed up at our door and marched her
home whenever she’d missed her curfew. The other bought bottles of Boone’s Farm wine
for her so she wouldn’t have to shoulder-tap strangers. This mix, as our father’s
studies would tell you, was a poor model for behavior modification. Kitch was a girl
with a reputation.

At the Chalmers house, Lowell wasn’t allowed anywhere near Kitch’s bedroom, but our
parents had what Mom called an Open Door Policy, which is to say that Kitch could
be in Lowell’s room, but only if the door was fully open. Sometimes I was sent to
check on this and the door was always as demanded. But sometimes Lowell and Kitch
were on the bed together, fully clothed, but vigorously trying to occupy the same
space anyway. Mom never asked about that part, so I never said. Somewhere along the
way, I’d learned not to tattle.

In fact, at some point, I’d mostly stopped talking altogether. I can’t tell you exactly
when that happened. Years before, I’d figured out that school went best when I didn’t
draw attention to myself, but knowing this and accomplishing it were two different
things. So it happened gradually, over time, by dint of constant effort. First I eliminated
the big words. They were getting me nowhere. Then I quit correcting other people when
they used the wrong words. I raised the ratio of things I thought to things I said
from three to one, to four to one, to five, to six, to seven.

I still thought as much as ever, and sometimes I imagined the responses I would have
gotten if I had spoken up and what I would have then said next, and so on and so on.
Without the release of talking, these thoughts crowded my brain. The inside of my
head turned clamorous and outlandish, like the Mos Eisley spaceport bar in
Star Wars
.

Teachers began to complain of my inattentiveness. In the old days, even when I talked
nonstop, I was still able to pay attention. I had become distractible, Mom said.

Unfocused, said Dad.

Lowell said nothing. Probably he hadn’t noticed.

In his senior year, he was the point guard on the South High School basketball team.
This was a position of such power and prestige that even my life was made easier by
it. I went to all the games. The bouncing echoes of a high school gym, the bells,
the smells, the slap of the ball on the wood—these are things I still respond to with
a profound sense of well-being. Indiana basketball. Everyone was nice to me when my
brother was on the court directing traffic.

Marion, Indiana, had a powerhouse team that year and we had a game with them coming
up; I was so excited I buzzed. I’d made a poster of a snake wrapped around a basketball
so that it turned into Lowell’s number—9—and put it in the living room window. And
then, one day, when Lowell was absolutely supposed to be at practice, leading his
team through their drills, I heard him come in. I recognized the sound the door made
when it was Lowell closing it.

I was upstairs, reading something or other—
Bridge to Terabithia
or
Where the Red Fern Grows
—one of those books where someone dies, because I was already soppy with tears. Mom
was out, I don’t remember where, but I don’t think she could have changed a thing
and I’m just as glad she didn’t try and have that failure to reproach herself with
later.

I went down to see what was what. The door to his bedroom was shut. I opened it. Lowell
was lying facedown on his bed, feet on his pillow, head at the foot. He looked up,
but not so much that I could see his face. “Get the fuck out of my room,” he said.
Voice full of nails. I didn’t move.

He swung his legs to the floor, stood, and turned toward me. His face was red, wet,
and puffy as a cloud. He took me by the shoulders, shoved me out. “Don’t you ever
fucking come in here again,” he said. “Fucking ever.” He closed the door.

By dinner he seemed normal. He ate and talked to Dad about the upcoming game. He didn’t
say he’d missed practice and I didn’t say so, either. We watched an episode of
The Cosby Show
. I remember him laughing. It was the last thing we all did together.

That night he took all his money—his bank was a Groucho Marx sock puppet Grandma Donna
made for him back when he’d had chicken pox—and put it in his gym bag along with some
clothes. He’d always had a gift for making money and he never spent a dime, so I expect
he had a goodly sum. He took our father’s keys, walked to the lab, and let himself
in. He consolidated the rats into a few large cages, which he then took outside. He
let the rats go. Then he caught a bus to Chicago and he never came back.

Once again our father’s grad students lost data they’d spent years collecting. It
was no kindness to the rats, Dad said, not with the weather we were having. It was
certainly no kindness to our father, who stayed on at the university but never again
had a grad student that any other professor wanted to work with. I’ll just say that
Mom took Lowell’s disappearance hard, worse even than when we lost Fern, and leave
it at that. I don’t have the words for what it did to her. She’s never even managed
to pretend to recover.

At first we all thought he’d come back. I had a birthday looming; I was certain he
wouldn’t miss that. He’d often taken off for a few days, as many as four on one occasion,
and then returned without us ever learning where he’d slept. So in spite of the Great
Rat Release, it took our parents a while to figure out that this time was different.
Two weeks in, they decided the police, who saw him as a habitual runaway and also
an adult, since he’d just turned eighteen, were insufficiently concerned. They hired
their own investigator, a no-nonsense woman named K. T. Payne, to track him down.
At first, Payne called us regularly at home. She hadn’t caught up to Lowell, but she
was on the scent. There’d been sightings. There’d been reports. There’d been mischief,
or so I gathered by the exact way no one was telling me much. “Hey, kiddo,” she’d
say to me, if I was the one to answer, “how’s it sparking?” and I’d hang around to
hear what I could hear, but our parents’ side of things would be carefully brief and
noninformative.

Then Lowell disappeared entirely. With each new phone call, Mom circled the drain,
and eventually Dad asked K.T. to use his office phone instead.

A second investigator was hired.

Weeks became months and still we believed he’d be back. I never moved into his room,
though I often slept in his bed, which made me feel closer to him and got me away
from that shared wall and Mom’s crying. One day I found a note he’d left for me inside
The
Fellowship of the Ring
. He knew I reread that trilogy often; he knew that the day would soon come when I’d
need the consolation of the Shire, which was as much like Bloomington, Indiana, as
any place else in the world. “Fern is not on a fucking farm,” the note said.

I kept this to myself as Mom was in no condition to be told. I assumed Fern
had
been on the farm and then sent away again, probably for bad behavior. Besides, Lowell
was dealing with it. Lowell would take care of Fern and then he would come back and
take care of me.

It never once occurred to me that our father had been lying all along.

•   •   •

W
HEN
I
WAS EIGHT OR NINE,
I used to spend the time before I went to sleep at night imagining that Fern and
I lived on her farm together. There were no adults and no other humans, only young
chimps, chimps with a great need for someone to teach them songs, read them books.
The bedtime story I used to tell myself was that I was telling the baby chimps a bedtime
story. My fantasy was drawn in part from
Peter Pan
.

A second inspiration was the Swiss Family Robinson, Disney version. When we’d gone
to Disneyland, the tree house had been my favorite thing in the whole park. If only
I’d had no parents watching my every move, if only I’d been a happy, carefree orphan,
I’d have hidden under the player piano until everything closed, and then taken up
residence there.

I transplanted the whole thing, root, trunk, and branch, to Fern’s farm, where my
nighttime ruminations focused on the pulleys and wires, how we’d get running water
and grow vegetables—in my fantasy life, I liked vegetables—all without leaving the
tree. I’d fall asleep with visions of gadgetry and logistical challenges dancing in
my head.

Ironic then that many years later, the Swiss Family Robinson were forcibly moved out
of the Disney tree house so that Tarzan and his saintly ape mother, Kala, could move
in.

•   •   •

M
ARION CRUSHED
Bloomington South and went on to win the state championship—the first year in a three-year
streak known as the Purple Reign. I don’t think Lowell could have altered that outcome.
Even so, his disappearance didn’t help my social standing. The morning after the game,
there was toilet paper dripping like tinsel from the branches of our mulberry tree,
and three bags of shit, probably dog but who really knows, by the front door. That
day we played dodgeball at school and I came home one large walking bruise. No one
had tried to stop it. I suspect some of the teachers might have liked to join in.

Months became years.

On my first day of seventh grade, someone taped a page from
National Geographic
to the back of my jacket. It was a glossy view of a fertile female chimp butt, pink
and swollen and target-like. For the next two hours, whenever I was in the hall, kids
poked at my back as I went past, in a fucking motion, until, finally, in French class,
my teacher noticed the picture and removed it.

I figured the rest of my time at middle school would be more of the same. Add gum
and ink and water from the toilet bowl. Stir vigorously. I came home that first day,
locked myself in the bathroom, took a shower to cover the noise, and cried and cried
for Lowell, who I still thought would someday be back. When he came home, Lowell would
make them stop. Lowell would make them sorry. I just had to keep going until then,
keep sitting in those classes and walking in those hallways.

I never told my parents. My mother wasn’t strong enough to hear it; she would never
come out of her room again if I told. The only thing I could do for her now was to
be okay. I worked at that as if it were my job. No complaints to management about
worker conditions.

There was no point in telling my father. He’d never let me quit after only one day.
He couldn’t help me and he’d make some terrible blunder if he tried. Parents are too
innocent for the Boschian landscapes of middle school.

So I kept my mouth shut. I was always keeping my mouth shut by then.

Fortunately for me, that first day turned out to be as bad as it got. There were other
students, kids even more offensively weird than I, who took the full weight of middle
school in my place. Occasionally, someone would ask, in tones of great concern, if
I was in estrus, which was my own fault; no one would have even known the word if
I hadn’t used it once, apparently memorably, back in the fourth grade. But mostly
no one spoke to me at all.

In their bedroom, in the dark, Mom and Dad worried about how quiet I’d become. It
was bound to happen, they assured each other. Typical teenage sullenness; they’d been
much the same themselves. I’d grow out of it. Hit some reasonable midpoint between
the constant talking I’d done before and my current silence.

Occasionally, we heard from Lowell. A postcard would come, sometimes with a message,
sometimes without, always unsigned. I remember one with a picture of the Nashville
Parthenon and a St. Louis postmark. “I hope you’re happy,” he’d written on the back,
which is a hard thing to parse, and you have to work to take it at face value, but
it could mean just exactly what it said. Lowell could have been hoping we were happy.

•   •   •

W
E STOPPED LOOKING
for him one day in 1987, early June. Lowell had been gone more than a year. I was
out on the driveway, throwing a tennis ball against the garage door and catching it,
which is how you play catch when there’s only one of you. I was thirteen years old,
had a whole hot summer stretching ahead of me before I went back to school. The sun
was shining and the air was wet and still. I’d been to the library that morning and
had seven books waiting in my room, three of which I’d never read before. Across the
street, Mrs. Byard waved at me. She was mowing their lawn and the motor of the mower
had a sleepy distant hum, like bees. I wasn’t happy, exactly, but I was remembering
how happiness felt.

Two men parked a black car in front of the house and came up the walk. “We need to
talk to your brother,” one of the men said to me. He was dark-skinned, but not black.
Hair shaved so short he was almost bald, and sweating in the heat. He took a handkerchief
out, wiped the top of his head with it. I would have liked to do that, too, run my
hand over his hair. I would probably have liked the way that stubble felt in my palm.