Hurt People Page 7

  They moved to the deep end, leaving me to throw away the popsicle wrappers.

  “OK, show me what you got,” he said. My brother stepped to the edge of the diving board, tested its spring with his toes. I felt nervous for him, like the few times I remembered watching my dad’s favorite football team on TV. He wanted his team to win so badly, and I did too, because the day’s mood depended on how the game went. It decided if Dad might finish our swing set, or just sit in the grass, in a circle of empty cans and unused parts, clueless or careless about what went with what.

  “Let’s go, big brother,” Chris said. “The world won’t wait.”

  My brother jumped, and if I had let my mind think for a second about anything else, I would have missed the dive. It was that fast. And it produced little splash. In my mind Chris was already giving my brother a variety of high fives. In real life my brother came out of the water wearing his humble face. He swam over to the ladder and stepped out like an Olympic swimmer, so far in first he couldn’t care less about the judge’s score. Chris watched my brother wipe the water dripping off his body, pull the trunks away from his waist, so they didn’t stick.

  “You, sir, nailed it,” Chris said. “You really nailed it, didn’t you?” My brother looked up, but didn’t even give a thank-you smile. Chris turned to me, still in the shallow water. “Hey, little man, look at this guy: Joe Cool.”

  I acted unimpressed.

  “All right, Mr. Cool, let’s step it up.”

  They moved on to the front flip, and Chris taught my brother all he needed to know to master the move. How before you jump, you have to tell yourself I won’t jump until I’m committed. How after you jump, you have to throw your arms forward like you’re inbounding a basketball. You have to let your arms take your body where your body wants to go, Chris said. Do that, and the rest will follow.

  Just before my brother was about to flip, however, a car door slid shut. My brother jumped off the board, but not into the pool.

  “Mom?” I said.

  “No,” my brother said, tilting his head toward the sound. “Just someone with a van, I think.”

  Chris swung his legs out of the water and ran over to the front fence. “Mom?” he said. “Who’s this Mom character?”

  The closeness of our apartment hit me in the head. I looked away from the pool to see if I could see the window from where we were.

  “Is this Mom person someone we need to worry about?” Chris asked. “She’s not a spy, is she?”

  “No,” my brother said, staring at the water. “She’s not here. She doesn’t matter.”

  He stepped on the board again, ready to get back to the flip, but Chris held his hands up. “Whoa. Pump the brakes, sir. What do you mean she doesn’t matter? All moms matter.”

  My brother’s face said he wanted to change the subject. “She doesn’t know anything,” he said. “That’s all I meant.”

  He tried to step to the edge of the board, but Chris grabbed him by the trunks.

  “Hey, not so fast. I want to hear more about your mom. I mean, we’re friends, right?”

  My brother looked down at Chris’s hand, holding the butt of his trunks. I knew for a fact he didn’t like when other people touched him. He hated shaking strangers’ hands, didn’t even like hugs from the people he was supposed to love.

  “So tell me what’s she like. Is she awesome? I bet she’s awesome.”

  My brother tried to pull away from Chris. He twisted around, but Chris had a Rick-like grip. “She’s OK. Please let me go.”

  “Just OK?” Chris said. He pulled him closer, and my brother almost fell off the board, but Chris steadied him, his hand on my brother’s naked side. “No way, this is your mom we’re taking about. She’s what made you, and you’re something special, right?”

  My brother grabbed Chris’s wrist. “Let me go. I want to get in the pool.”

  “Hold on,” Chris said. He scratched at the bites below his waist, spreading the red around. “So you live with your mom?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about your dad?”

  “No.”

  “No dad?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t have a dad?”

  “No, I do. He just … he—”

  “Left?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is he coming back?”

  “No. I don’t know—”

  “So she’s by herself? What about suitors?” Chris said. A coy smile wiggled across his face. “Any love interests?”

  My brother opened his mouth, stopped, and for a second, nothing came out. “I’m cold,” he said. “Let me in the pool.”

  “You didn’t answer me,” Chris said.

  “Yes I did. Let me go.”

  “Why won’t you tell me? Is it a secret?”

  “No,” my brother said, raising his voice and squirming more violently. “Let go of me!”

  For a flash, faster than my brother’s dive, I saw Chris’s face go angry. His eyes spiked down in a way we hadn’t seen before. But like the dive’s splash, the anger quickly disappeared, and Chris’s face returned to its calm.

  “Oh yeah,” he said, releasing my brother’s trunks. “Of course. Sorry.”

  My brother stepped off the diving board. He grabbed his towel from the pool chair and went to the shallow end to dry off.

  “Get out of the pool,” he said to me.

  “What’s wrong?” Chris said. “All right, all right. So you don’t want to talk about your parents. I get it. But what about what I want? I’ve got a mom and dad too. C’mon, we can swap war stories.”

  “Hurry up,” my brother told me. “Get your flip-flops.”

  “Oh, where are you going?” Chris said. “Don’t be a couple of babies. The baby bros, everyone!” It was something Rick would have said.

  “We have to go,” my brother said, and pushed me toward the gate. “There’s a lady watching us. We shouldn’t be out here.”

  Chris ran ahead of us and blocked the entrance. “Guys, I apologize. I get it now. I went too far too fast.” He stood with his arms crossed. “But I can’t let you leave until you forgive me. It wouldn’t be right.”

  “It’s fine,” my brother said, looking past Chris, to where we wanted to be. “We need to go.”

  Chris’s face twitched, like a bug flew in his ear. He slapped at the side of his head. “I don’t know. That didn’t feel right to me. That seem real to you, little man?”

  “Don’t ask him,” my brother said. “He doesn’t know what’s going on.”

  “And what is going on?” Chris said.

  “You were showing us pool moves.”

  “But then I ruined it, didn’t I? I’m sorry.” Chris put his head down. “What about this? What if next time we see each other, I share another secret? It can be anything you want. Another pool move. Something about my mom. Anything. I’ll even take you somewhere, if that’s what you want. Some cool place you’ve never been.”

  My brother draped his towel over his head, so I couldn’t see his face, so I couldn’t tell if he was thinking this last offer through.

  “It’s fine,” he eventually said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. You said sorry.”

  “So we’re square?” Chris said. We nodded. “Good.”

  He stepped aside and I followed my brother out the gate. Chris stayed behind the fence, and I was glad that he did. Though as we made our way around the corner to our building, we heard him call from the pool.

  “Think about my offer, Mr. Cool!” Then, “I like that you stood up for yourself. You’re on your way!”

  I thought that my brother might smile at this, but he didn’t. On his face I could still see a hint of blue.

  five

  THE QUEEN WAS almost late to her own party. The register at work broke and our mother was the only one who knew how to fix it. Ten minutes before people were supposed to show, she burst in the door, ink smudged on her fingers and face. Here she is, I th
ought, our majesty. Except she didn’t look like any of the royal people I’d seen in books or on TV. Her work shirt was untucked and dirty, and instead of a crown, there was the large mound of her yellow hair, frizzled from the summer’s humidity. She quickly surveyed the apartment, chewing nervously on a greasy lock. This was our queen.

  “Good job, guys,” she said. “The place looks good. Now let me go change.”

  She rushed back to her room and slammed the door, leaving my brother and me bored on the couch. We got on the floor and had a foot war. I placed the bottoms of my feet against his and we pushed our feet back and forth like they were glued together. When our legs grew tired, my brother drew up a peace treaty that we signed with an imaginary feather pen. Our mother still hadn’t come out of her room.

  There was a knock at the door and the first thing I thought was Chris. My brother could read my mind. “It’s not him,” he said. “He wouldn’t come up here.”

  Whoever it was knocked again.

  “Maybe he wants to say sorry,” I said. “Or maybe we forgot something.”

  “Maybe,” my brother said, with his thinking face on. I could tell he didn’t buy my idea, but like me, I think he was picturing what it would look like if Chris were in our apartment.

  There was another knock, this one louder, less patient. My brother ran to the door.

  It was Sandy and Cornbread. Sandy stood smiling with a cake. Carrot, she said. Your mother’s favorite. Cornbread towered behind Sandy, twice her size, holding four boxes of wine, two under each arm. Both of them were wearing what they always wore, jeans and a hunter-green polo shirt from work. They smelled of grease and grass.

  “How are my two favorite men?” Sandy said. She pushed her way past us, and Cornbread stooped his head to get in the door. We showed them to the kitchen, and Sandy set the cake on the empty table. She asked where our mother was and we pointed. “Oh, she must be getting pretty,” Sandy said, and went down the hall to help her put on the final touches.

  Cornbread put the wine on the counter and sat at the kitchen table, drumming his fingers. Like everything else he touched, the table now looked like it was made for a small kid, the size of the child with the chalk. He tried to make conversation, but we only gave him one-word answers. Yes. No. Fine. When he ran out of questions, my brother and I returned to the couch and listened for our mother coming down the hall. Instead, we heard Cornbread checking the cupboard for cups. A moment later, he came out drinking from a glass dark with wine.

  “That looks good,” my brother said.

  “It is good, but you can’t have any.” He came over to the couch and told us to scoot over. It was a tight squeeze. Even with his legs bent, Cornbread’s knees still came up to my head. He asked if the TV worked and we said no, not really. “Well, we need something to look at.”

  And like a magic trick, Sandy came out with our mother, the two holding each other at the elbow. Sandy looked the same, face plain, head shaped like a hairnet, but our mother was changed. Her work clothes were gone, and so were the ink smudges. She was wearing a loose summer dress, yellow and flowing, and her wild hair fell completely straight, teasing her bare shoulders. She stepped closer, into the light, and I saw that her eyes looked different too—larger, her lashes longer, like they wanted to reach out and touch me.

  “What do you think, boys?” she said.

  “You look new,” I said, and Cornbread laughed, causing the couch to shake. But I meant what I said. My mother was like a new mother. Bright, beautiful, she belonged to one of the royal families she liked to read about in history books. This was the queen she promised to be.

  There was another knock, and Sandy threw her hands up. “Ooh, here they come,” she said, and did a little dance to the door. My brother rolled his eyes and went to the kitchen to grab a glass of mixed milk. But I stayed where I was, marveling at our mother. Her newness. For some reason, it felt wrong to do so, to look for so long. It felt like I was looking at the lady in the encyclopedia, the one who was half naked, half insides—but I couldn’t help it.

  A few seconds later, Sandy came back with new people, a man and a woman I’d never seen before. The man had his shirt tucked in when he probably shouldn’t have. His belly ballooned over his belt like a waist floatie. The woman, less pretty than the witch lady, had brought party hats for everyone, and stuck close to the man until she saw how beautiful my mother was. Once the ladies were talking in a tight triangle, Cornbread got up and started talking to the man, leaving my brother and me alone.

  Several more partygoers arrived over the next half hour, all with small presents in hand. I didn’t recognize any of these people. They were not from my mother’s work, and I had no idea where she had met them, where they had come from. They all waved hello, went to the kitchen, and returned with red plastic cups. The party had begun.

  * * *

  No one was talking to my brother or me, including our mother, so we went to our room. We shut the door behind us and that made things better for a while. But the party’s murmur grew with each new guest. Someone brought speakers and a record player. The music went through our room’s thin walls like they were made of paper, and the bass rattled our door. My brother said it was like there were zombies out there, pounding for us to let them in. Brains, my brother said. Brains. We made a game out of this, lying there in the bottom bunk. We listed all the dumb things people did in the zombie films we’d seen with our dad. I said we should avoid shopping malls, which wasn’t a problem in our city, since there were none. My brother suggested we hole up in the old people’s home, because the zombies would probably come for the elderly last. Yes, I said, they would taste the worst. My brother laughed, said that wherever we go we should stick together. Of course, this was the first thing I thought of, but I didn’t say anything because I knew if I really thought about the zombie scenario, I would do what I always did and think about what would happen if only one of us was bitten. What would I do if my brother began to turn? What then?

  “It wouldn’t matter anyway,” he said. “Those movies always end horribly. Just when you think they’re in the clear, another zombie appears and ruins everything. The undead mailman pops out of a dumpster.”

  I wished he would change the subject, but our door still thumped. The party was growing louder. Maybe I could call my dad and file a complaint. Or maybe the smoking lady would, unless she was out there too.

  “What if one got into a prison?” my brother said. “All those guys would be eaten alive.”

  Somebody rapped at the door, making me jump. Sandy poked her head in, and the music followed. “Hey, guys, it’s time for cake!” she said.

  “Ah!” my brother screamed. “Zombie! Breach! Breach!” He rolled off the bed and grabbed a balled-up sock. “Head shot! Head shot! Shoot to kill!” He threw the sock ball at Sandy, just missing her face.

  “Wow,” Sandy said. “Well, OK, more for me, I guess.”

  She shut the door, leaving me to sit in the dark and think about zombies, me getting bitten and my brother being the one who had to put me down.

  “I want some cake,” I said.

  “Are you crazy?” my brother said. “This place is crawling with brain-eaters.”

  “But I’m hungry,” I said, which was true. In our mother’s rush to get ready, she had forgotten to make us dinner.

  My brother picked up the sock ball. “All right, I’ll cover you. But watch out. If you see anybody you know, don’t trust them. They’re probably a zombie. They probably want your brains.”

  He opened the door to the loud music, and we pushed our way through a maze of adult legs, some attached to shaking hips. We didn’t see any cake, only ironed pants and smooth dresses. Finally, the crowd parted and we could see what was going on. Someone had dragged the square kitchen table into the tiny dining room we never used, along with one chair. A moment later our mother emerged from the living room and sat at the table’s only seat. The crowd closed around her. The music was muted and talk dwindled to a mu
rmur. We were waiting.

  The lights went off. But the room didn’t fall completely dark. A man whose face I couldn’t see, but who was wearing jeans, came from the kitchen holding Sandy’s carrot cake, now a ball of light. Through a tangle of arms I saw the light make its way to my mother, who sat straight in her chair, head held high, like a queen perched on her throne.

  The man set the cake in front of my mother, so that the spotlight was on her now. He started to sing in a low, even tone. I wanted to see who this person was, this man in jeans with his shirt tucked in, but no belt. We pushed our way closer to the front, fighting through the drone of all the zombies. We finally made it to the table as the song wound down, but the singing man was nowhere to be seen. He must have slinked off into the darkness. Our mother was visible, though, and when she saw her two boys she raised her cup and nodded, an empty gesture to her loyal subjects.

  The song ended, and someone said make a wish. My mother leaned over the cake. “I can’t do this all by myself,” she said. Sandy had used a candle for each year, instead of two wax numbers. “I need some help.”

  I felt my brother pulling away from me, drifting from the crowd to help my mother. Yes, I thought, it should be him. He’s the stronger one, the one better at blowing up balloons. But before he made it to her side, another figure stepped into the light. It was the singing man. I could see the waist of his jeans floating by the candlelight, flickering by my mother’s face. Though it wasn’t until he bent down, grinned in the orange light, that I saw who it really was. That tan face. Those big teeth. Rick.

  He put his hand on my mother’s shoulder. “Don’t worry, little lady, I’m real good at putting out fires.” He poked my mother in her ribs, and her arm flew out, hitting my brother.

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t see you there,” she said. “Would you like to help?”

  My brother didn’t answer. He was staring at the burning candles, watching their shape change with every breath. He put his hand over the fire, and slowly lowered it until the flame kissed his flesh.

  Rick slapped my brother’s hand away from the cake. “What are you doing, moron? Trying to kill yourself?”