Hurt People Page 4

  My mother turns away. She grabs the rag off the kitchen floor. She runs water over it and, at first, holds it against her forehead. After a moment, she looks at my dad. “Come here,” she says. My dad looks at his arm like he doesn’t understand what it’s doing there, flexed and floating in the air. He drops it and steps toward my mother, close enough their hips can touch. My mother holds my dad’s arm and wipes at the marker. The rag is now a beach towel.

  “This tree is really stuck,” she says. She laughs, though without a smile. She scrunches her face and scrubs the arm harder. “I don’t know if we’ll ever get it out.”

  She laughs some more and my dad starts laughing too. Their laughter grows louder and louder, until I realized it was not their laughter anymore. The TV had finished its spell of dead air. The happy family was back, and I was awake.

  I opened my eyes and remembered where I was, what I was doing. My dad was still asleep on the couch, his back now facing me. So far in my life, I had never seen any markings on either of his arms, but I wondered if I looked now, when the world was asleep, if I might see something different. If his skin might be indented where he once etched a tree.

  I waited for the TV people to laugh before I took each step. When I was finally standing over the couch, I paused and stared at my dad, sleeping in the television’s glow. I studied his dirty blond hair, darker than Chris’s and shaggy around the ears; his tan body, thin with muscle all over. He looked like a taller, thicker version of my brother, but with a mustache.

  I waited for more laughter from the TV, but it didn’t come. The sitcom was having its serious moment. A family was healing itself, a rift was resolved. I reached out anyway and touched my dad’s naked chest. It was warm like a golf cart seat in the sun. He turned over on his back, but his eyes remained shut. I stepped back. When his breathing settled, I closed in and peered at his other arm. Near the shoulder was a small circle of pockmarks. I ran my finger over his skin. I smiled.

  “What are you still doing here?” my dad said.

  I didn’t know what he was talking about, but I felt like he was waiting for an answer, for me to say something. “What is that?” I said, pointing to his arm.

  My dad rubbed his eyes, put a hand down his pants and scratched. “What is what?”

  I touched the pocked spot. It was weirdly soft. “That. Is that a tree?”

  “A what?” he said. “No, it’s a scar. From a shot I got when I was a kid. Never went away.”

  “Oh,” I said, and we both went silent. My dad squinted his eyes open. I didn’t know what he was expecting, but he seemed surprised, or confused, seeing me, his youngest son, in the living room with him, up when I shouldn’t have been. His brow furrowed.

  “You should be in bed,” he said. He grabbed my wrist and pulled me near him. He smelled of beer and other things I didn’t know. “Why aren’t you sleeping?”

  “I…”

  “Explain yourself.”

  “I wanted to watch the rest of the movie?”

  “The movie’s in my room. You’re not allowed in my room. You know that. Try again.”

  Afterward, when I was back in bed with my brother, I thought of a million different lies I could have told my dad. I had to use the bathroom. I was thirsty. You looked cold. But with his hand tight around me, I panicked, and told a truth.

  “We made a new friend,” I said. “At the pool.”

  Behind me, the TV went to a loud commercial, something about knives that could cut through marble. My dad sat up, releasing my wrist, and turned the TV down.

  “What did you say? Who?” He rubbed his forehead like he had Chris’s brain pain, pinching the gulf between his brows.

  “His name is Chris,” I said.

  My dad sank back into the couch. “Oh,” he said. “Great. That’s great. And that’s why you’re up?”

  I thought of the dream, pictured myself explaining about the tree, my theory about the world’s secrets. “I don’t know,” I said. “I guess.”

  “OK,” my dad said, “but you can tell me more tomorrow. Go back to bed.” He pulled me down to him and kissed me on the head.

  Something familiar caught my nose. “You smell like strawberries,” I said.

  He laughed. “Thank you. Now I’ll see you in the morning.”

  I said good night, and my dad closed his eyes. A few seconds later he was breathing heavily.

  On the way to the basement door, I stopped by the TV. A man was taking turns slicing through sheet metal and tomatoes. A pretty blond woman stood at his side, her face amazed. She was blown away by the man, his knives, and kept shaking her head in disbelief. But the man played it cool. He didn’t glance up to smile or wink at the camera. He cut through one thing after another, only pausing to hold up the halved material. To show the whole world what he had done.

  three

  A SECRET, CHRIS SAID, is worth keeping. A secret has the potential to hurt. That’s why you can’t tell everyone everything. That’s why some things must be locked up inside you, he said, touching my brother over his heart. Right here, the only place that is truly safe.

  We learned the secret to secrets after our mother picked us up the next morning. After my dad made us eggs and burned us stacks of toast with jelly and apple butter. My brother and I had already been up for hours watching cartoons, waiting for my dad to wake and take the stairs slowly to the kitchen. When he came down, he still wasn’t wearing a shirt. Some days I think my dad tried to see how long he could go without a shirt. I think this was a game he played. Today was Sunday, though, and I knew that by the time my mother knocked on the front door, my dad would be wearing his favorite yellow softball tank top, faded and full of holes.

  After eggs and between shows my brother and I changed into our church clothes. I wore blue corduroy pants and a striped polo given to my mother by a military wife who golfed at my mother’s work, and who pitied her. It was a terrible outfit. So was my brother’s. But I paid attention to his, because I knew I would be wearing the same thing in twenty-two months, when the clothes were handed down. Thus, on Sundays, more than any other day, I looked at my brother like he was the future me. The compliments he got from strangers I got, and I felt bad when he said something mean to my mother, or when he was slapped on his knee for not paying attention in church. Every moment, I hoped for him to do great things.

  When my mother rang the doorbell, my brother ran to get his bag from the basement. My dad did not get off the couch. And when I opened the door with a smile, my mother did not step inside. She looked down at where a doormat should have been.

  “Do you want to come in for a second, Ag?” my dad called from the couch. Ag was for Aggie, which was for Agatha. “Made some eggs. I ran out of milk, so they’re kind of bush league.”

  “No thanks,” my mother said. She took a few steps and stood awkwardly in the entryway. “Already late for church. What’s that smell?”

  She smells the strawberries, I thought. I could still smell them too.

  “Apple butter,” my dad said.

  My mother looked unconvinced, but she came into the living room anyway. She looked around at the blank walls, the low lighting. “How’s the Chief?”

  “Still at it,” my dad said.

  “Of course he is.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  My mother’s nose was still at work, wiggling at the smell. She seemed to realize something and she blinked a long disappointed blink. “It means some people don’t know how to quit.”

  My dad coated his eggs with ketchup, pushed them around with his fork. “I think he’s almost ready.”

  “You’ve been saying that for years.”

  “Aggie…,” my dad started. The rhythm of their speech reminded me of my dream, except here my dad wasn’t as quick with his answers.

  My brother returned from the basement and turned off the television. My dad stood up. “Same thing next weekend, then?”

  “Mm-hm,” my mother said. We hugged our dad
.

  “Bye, Dad,” my brother said.

  “Bye, sons.”

  Our mother pushed us out the door.

  * * *

  We were quiet the drive home. My brother rode up front in our minivan, a purple-and-gray Ford Aerostar. It was the last big purchase we made as a family. I sat in back in silence, staring out the window, imagining myself a serious thinker, but really I just watched the city pass by with no deep thoughts.

  We cut through the heart of downtown, which was designed to echo a time no one I knew could remember. The streets were narrow, built out of brick, and had names like Delaware and Cherokee, in honor of the people the settlers had captured and killed. They were dotted with the same old lights that first lit the city when it wasn’t a city, when it was just a nice town growing fat with hope. On each side there were small-time shops and the occasional bank, and when the streets were empty, like they were this morning, I liked to imagine them as the site of a showdown, an old western gunfight. I could almost see the old-time outlaws terrorizing the town until my dad rode in, the new sheriff, and put every trouble to bed.

  Once out of downtown, we drove past the city’s park. It was windy and gray, and there were no kids playing. There were men in orange jumpsuits, however, prisoners, spearing trash as armed guards looked on. This sort of sight wasn’t uncommon. Whenever we drove through the city, I couldn’t count to ten without seeing some sign of a prison: the big billboard at the end of the city that read, “Come Do Some Time in Leavenworth”; the guards in uniform who crawled out of their houses at all hours and unlocked their cars with countless keys attached to the hip, the teary-eyed out-of-towners who asked for directions to a given prison, where they would visit their locked-up loved ones. It was all part of where we lived. Still, common as it was, sometimes, if my brother and I had been bad that morning or the day before, our mother might slow the van down, point at the men in jumpsuits, and say something like, “See, that’s why you do what I tell you. You don’t want to end up like that, do you?” Today she drove by without a word.

  Past the park we turned onto Tenth Avenue, and from there to Limit Street, which stretched the entire city and had its west end at our apartment. When we first moved in, our complex was called Oak Valley. But a month later, before he left us for a different, safer city, the owner changed the name. He tried to spin the fact that we lived on a street called Limit at the limit of a sad city, and renamed the complex the Frontiers, as if the world around us were wide open and not surrounded by prisons.

  * * *

  At home we all took our after-church hangovers our separate ways. My mother went to her room and shut her door for a nap. She had to work that evening and tomorrow at noon, and wasn’t to be disturbed. Unless someone is bleeding, she said, let me be. My brother had a contest with himself to see how many push-ups he could do. I wasn’t sure why he did this, but guessed that a kid at school had teased him about being a taller, nearly as skinny version of me. My brother didn’t say it, but I think he had visions of showing up to school in the fall a newer, better version of his spring self.

  I lay in bed with a pillow over my head and fell asleep. It was a hard sleep but no dreams stuck around my brain. In the real world, a rustling sound found my ear. Something tickled. I felt my body start to wiggle. I opened my eyes and my brother was sitting over me, dangling my swim shorts.

  He was singing a jingle. “Let’s go to the pool. Let’s go to the pool.”

  “Mom?”

  “Mom,” he said, still singing, “Mom is gone.”

  * * *

  We had never gone to the pool while our mother was gone. We had never gone without her giving us the OK to go. I thought about mentioning this to my brother while we changed into our trunks, but was certain he would beat my point with his own better point that I could not predict. This was why I never could argue with him. The times I tried, when I thought my thoughts were good, he would put my point in some other light, and soon I would be on his side.

  I was able to stay quiet until we reached the bottom of the stairs, where the guilt caught up.

  “Does Mom know?” I said.

  “Does Mom know what?”

  “You know.”

  “Mom knows lots of things,” he said. He pulled out a sheet of paper he had folded in his trunks and pretended to read. I imagined the paper had a detailed drawing of a diver doing a Gainer, and wondered if he would ever let me see it.

  “The pool,” I said. “Did you ask her if we could go to the pool?”

  “I did ask her.”

  “You did?”

  “Yes.” He put the sheet back in his pocket and held open the pea-green door. “Can we go?”

  It took me until the pool gate before I realized my brother had not said whether my mother had said yes or no.

  “Of course she said no,” my brother said. He laughed at me, and opened the gate. It felt like we were breaking in, like we were sneaking into a prison, instead of escaping with everyone else. I stayed in the shallow end and watched my brother do move after move. Before each bounce off the board, he looked around to see if anyone was watching. A guard. A cop. Chris. The pool was silent. There was no one but us.

  “I guess I’ll work on my front flip,” my brother said. “You should work on it with me. That way, when Chris comes back, he’ll be like, ‘You guys have gotten good!’” That argument didn’t appeal to me, but I liked the idea of doing something with my brother, and him inviting me.

  Though I had only been off the diving board once before. And I was real scared then. We had just moved into the apartment. Our mother was with us, but she had gone inside to get a book and never came back. To get me to jump, my brother had to narrate a long tale of the sea, starring himself as a famous pirate captain whose waters stretched the entire pool. I was the former best friend who had betrayed the captain by breaking the one rule obeyed by all of the sea’s wayward criminals: Thou shall not covet thy captain’s wife (a take on the commandments my brother was forced to memorize back when we still suffered Sunday school). The story ended with me, the first mate, having to walk the plank. My brother let me keep my eyes open then, which he said real pirates wouldn’t do. I think he felt the eyes of the few adults who were watching the entire performance from pool chairs.

  I felt that memory in my stomach when I stepped onto the board.

  “First, let’s try a dive,” my brother said. I could tell he was enjoying the role he was playing, the substitute Chris. I stepped to the edge of the board and looked out over the deep end. The sun hung low over the tops of the trees. My brother stood as close to me as he could without being on the diving board. So this is what it was like.

  “Put your arms up,” he said. “Hands together.”

  I did.

  “Squeeze your head.”

  What?

  “Pinch your head with your arms. Like this.”

  Oh.

  “Now jump.”

  Um.

  “Fall.”

  Well.

  “Do something!”

  His last shout pushed me off, though I didn’t jump. I just kind of fell, and as I fell I saw my brother’s face—surprised, but also smirking.

  There was a loud pop, a punch in the stomach. I didn’t go into the water right. The world around me became a blue dream. Water rushed up my nose and into my lungs, but I couldn’t make it stop, or tell my body to float to the top. I hung underwater, thinking of nothing, feeling the same.

  Chris was the one who pulled me to the pool ladder, after I don’t know how long. All I knew was that I was in a pool chair and Chris’s hands were all over me, pressing my chest, cupping my face.

  “Just checking for leaks, little man,” he said. “Nope, no holes. She’ll float.”

  He sat me up. My brother stood behind him, wearing his concerned face, the one that also said he was annoyed.

  “What were you doing down there?” he said. “Why didn’t you come up?”

  “I don’t know. I t
hought I would.”

  “You thought you would? What does that mean?”

  Chris stood up, put his hand to his chin. “Hmm,” he said, “I think I know what this is about.”

  “He’s an idiot,” my brother said. “That’s what it is. An idiot baby. A baby idiot.”

  “No,” Chris said. “It’s much worse than that.” He folded his arms and his face fell, almost into a scowl. “You told someone, didn’t you, little man? About me, about our secret?”

  I thought of my dad the night before, what I said.

  “No,” I said.

  “Are you sure? Are you sure you didn’t accidentally let our secret slip, then try to take your shame to a watery grave?”

  I looked at my brother, whose concerned face now widened with worry.

  “No,” I said. “I didn’t tell anyone. I promise.”

  Chris’s eyes narrowed, until the blue, the best part, disappeared. He laughed. “Just kidding, little man. I trust you. You and your bro, I know you wouldn’t tell a soul.” He took off his shirt and headed toward the diving board. “I know you know what makes a secret secret. And how to keep it.”

  He hopped on the board and stepped to the edge. My brother and I, confused as we were, expected him to do the Gainer. Instead, Chris twirled on one foot and fell backward, his hands behind his head like he was lounging on a couch. He seemed to hover there, parallel to the pool, his body floating like magic. Only at the last possible second did he throw his arms out and arch his body into a back dive. When he came up he said, “You two do know about secrets, don’t you?”

  My brother nodded.

  “You do? Then tell me.”

  “A secret,” my brother said, “a secret is something … is something you don’t tell anyone. Even if they beg.”

  “Go on,” Chris said.

  “And … you keep it to yourself. No matter what. Even if you’re tortured.”

  “Yes, of course,” Chris said, backstroking to the shallow end. “Everyone knows that. But there’s more.”