Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self (15 page)

I took the puzzle home and told Liddie about it. I said the robbers were to blame, Liddie picked the queen. The next day, the teacher told our class that who you blamed showed what you valued: justice, duty, faith, love, or family. I thought it was bullshit, and when I got home I lied and told Liddie that the teacher had said she was wrong, that only the robbers were at fault, because only they acted with intent. Liddie shook her head and said that was stupid, the queen probably knew the road was dangerous and anyway the robbers were the only people who didn’t owe anybody anything to begin with.

To me the accident is something like that, blame for everyone and no one. A stupid puzzle, not worth solving. My parents never saw it that way. It was a difficult fall and a worse winter. Once Liddie spoke again, my mother began talking to her nonstop, about everything but the accident. Mid-conversation my father would get up and disappear. My mother first threw herself into Christmas with an enthusiasm as profound and suspect as that of department stores. Then she began to yell at us, mostly at me, since everyone else had chosen not to listen. We got used to yelling, and when Becky from the electric company called the morning of Christmas Eve to complain about the bill being late, not because we didn’t have the money but because my parents had stopped thinking about that sort of thing, my mother yelled at her too. The difference between being Becky and being anyone else my mother yelled at was that Becky turned off our electricity.

Christmas Day my parents left the dark house early in the morning. They didn’t tell us they were leaving, they just walked out and shut the door, and Liddie and I weren’t sure whether we had been left on purpose or forgotten. The lights had been out all night, and the food in the refrigerator was starting to go bad. Liddie and I sat in our pajamas, alone, staring at the tree that wouldn’t light up. When our parents returned hours later with pizza and Chinese food and flashlights and candles, we exhaled breath we didn’t know we’d been holding and ate cold food in the dark silence.

 

 

The next summer
we moved, hoping for redemption through change of location. My father accepted an offer from Georgetown, where so far as anyone knew he’d always been quiet and eccentric and prone to drinking, not unforgivable traits in a law professor. My mother devoted herself to the kind of ostentatious suburban pursuits that let her pretend we were the ideal family, without actually having to talk to us. She chauffeured us to sport and dance lessons until we were old enough to refuse, she won three homeowner’s association bake-offs in a row, and she made such a show of ceremonial occasions that Liddie and I tried to skip our own birthday parties. Even when we had good days, at night it was clear that we had run away from everything except ourselves. Most nights my father was locked in his study, and my mother was knocked out on sleeping pills. Liddie brought her nightmares to me; I did what I could to comfort her. She slept in my bed more often than not until she was twelve and I was fifteen. When I woke one night and found my hand cupped over her breast I shook her awake.

“Liddie,” I told her, “you can’t sleep here anymore.” If my mother, who already looked at us like slightly dangerous strangers, walked in on us curled up in bed together, she’d throw herself off the nearest bridge. Liddie looked at me like I had slapped her. It had never occurred to her that we could be anything but kids together and I had shattered something by the very suggestion, forced her into premature adulthood. She went back to her bed and slept there for the rest of our adolescence, though her nightmares continued; I could hear them through the wall.

At fifteen, she started bringing her boyfriend over and having sex with him in her bedroom. No one stopped her. My father was passed out in his study, and my mother, when she was awake, knew Liddie had more control over the house than she did. I listened to the frantic panting for a few nights, then bought a Walkman with headphones.

 

 

Sometimes I thought
she’d never forgiven me for not taking some action to save us. For never taking action when I should. She was pleasant enough tonight though, singing “As Time Goes By” off-key all the way back to her dorm room. My mother had refused to pay for a hotel room, on the grounds that if we each had our own spaces we’d probably ruin the point of the visit by confining ourselves to them. It was a rare insight on her part. I dropped my stuff in Liddie’s wood-paneled common area and tried to think of something brotherly to say about the formality of her living quarters, but all I could think of to say was, “It’s very clean in here.”

Liddie ignored me. She’d grabbed a book from out of her bedroom and sat across from me on a beanbag chair, reading furiously and applying yellow Post-it notes to pages. She was sitting between the radiator and the open window, and occasionally a breeze made the pages flutter. Watching her, it seemed even sillier to me that my mother had sent me here to advise Liddie. I had no business telling her anything about how to be a student. When I was in college, I’d lived in an off-campus pigsty and spent most of my free time playing video games. I’d been an OK student, but I did more reading working at the bookstore now than I had back then. I picked up a newspaper and pretended to care about things for a while, then I switched to her suitemate’s copy of
Entertainment Weekly
and stared at Beyoncé instead. Liddie muttered to herself about vertebrate bone structure. After about an hour she slammed the book shut.

“Let’s find him,” she said.

“Who?”

“That guy who wants to be you. Let’s confront our curiosity.”

There were many reasons why this was a bad idea. I wasn’t supposed to take the rental car out of Massachusetts. Even if we left now, it would probably be early tomorrow morning before we arrived in Maryland. When we got there we’d be twenty minutes away from our parents. If we didn’t show up, we’d get caught or feel guilty about not getting caught. If we did, there’d be explanations to give; neither of our parents would believe we’d driven nine hours because we missed them. Our curiosity about Carlos was probably not the best motivation for a trip like this. Right then, though, it seemed so easy not to disappoint my sister, and such opportunities were rare.

“You know it’s not him, right?” I said.

“Of course,” Liddie said. “But I want to know who it
is
. I mean, who wants our lives?”

I hadn’t unpacked anything, and Liddie hadn’t bothered to pack at all, so it was only an hour later that we found ourselves headed south on the interstate. It was already after midnight, and the roads were emptier than I had expected. People had either done their leaving already or they were waiting until the last possible minute. The weather was clear, and you could even see stars, which felt like a good omen. Liddie fiddled with the radio until she found a jazz station and then continued reading her textbook with a flashlight. We were just outside of Hartford when she finally shut it.

“So, Gabi,” said Liddie.

“She left me.”

“Obviously.”

“I could have left her.”

“No,” Liddie said, not obnoxiously. “No, you couldn’t have.”

“I
could
have,” I said. “I just wouldn’t have.”

Liddie didn’t respond.

“So,” I said finally. “The elephants. What’s so amazing about them that they need my sister as their shrink?”

“Lots of things. They’re so much like us. Elephant society has been breaking down just like ours has. Increased violence. Pack violence, even. They experience shock. They’ve got elaborate grieving rituals, like humans. I guess that’s why they always seemed sad to me.”

“Always?”

“I used to go to the zoo sometimes in high school. It was calming.” A minute later she said softly, “Let’s go see them. The elephants. Before we look for Carlos, I mean.”

She turned to look at me with very big eyes, and very lightly brushed her hair off her forehead. I knew what she was doing, but it was working anyway.

“Liddie,” I said, “it’s Thanksgiving.”

“The National Zoo is open every day of the year except Christmas.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I said.

“We’re in a car going back where you just came from to find a guy who’s improving your credit by using your name illegally because we think somehow he might be a guy we didn’t kill, and he might be as obsessed with us as we are with him, just because he’s got like the second most common name in the world.
That’s
ridiculous.”

“Hey, that was your idea too,” I said.

“It was your idea first. You just wouldn’t have gone through with it.”

As usual, I caved. Content, Liddie fell asleep for a while. Outside of Maryland I pulled over for a second, and she woke up and took over driving, which was maybe the fourth thing in the car rental contract that I’d violated. It was a little after nine when we pulled into the zoo’s parking lot. I’d been trying for an hour to stay asleep in spite of the sun prying at my eyes. I was surprised the zoo was open that early, but Liddie seemed confident it would be, which was the first thing that convinced me she wasn’t bullshitting me about hanging out here in high school.

We went straight for the elephants, but even they seemed to know that it was a holiday and they didn’t need to be awake yet. There were three of them, two adults and a baby. We watched them sleep for a while, and I tried to see something magical about it, but I didn’t. I looked at the other early-morning zoo weirdos and tried to imagine what we looked like to them. There was a wan-looking art student with long blond hair, sketching the sleeping elephants on a giant pad. There was a man in uniform with a little girl on his shoulders. There was a teenager who looked like he was either homeless or that was how he wanted to look; eventually his cell phone rang and I figured it was the latter. There was a middle-aged woman in a nice coat that was too thin for the November weather. She reminded me of Gabi, though she was older and less pretty. Something about the calculated vulnerability of her shivering when she didn’t have to.

None of the strangers seemed interested in me. The teenager checked out Liddie briefly but then went back to walking around in circles. One of the elephants got up eventually and wandered off where we couldn’t see her. The other two kept sleeping.

“You’re right,” I said to Liddie. “They’re fascinating.”

“They
are,
” Liddie insisted. “What do you think the sleeping one’s dreaming about?”

“Peanuts,” I said.

“Don’t be a dumb-ass,” said Liddie. “I bet he’s dreaming about his mother, who was killed by ivory poachers in front of him, and he’s wishing he’d been big enough to trample the men and save her.”

“I bet Mom and Dad are sorry they read you
Babar
when you were a kid,” I said.

“That wasn’t Mom and Dad, that was you,” she said. “I don’t know why you were reading me that colonialist bullshit anyway.”

“Is that what this is about?” I joked. “That I raised you badly?”

“No,” she said. “I think as long as you get raised, it can’t count as badly.”

I disagreed, but didn’t say so.

 

 

We spent a
few more hours at the zoo, just wandering around, looking at the stray people and occasional families. Around one we ate lunch at a downtown McDonald’s. It was sad how crowded it was. There were paper turkey cutouts stuck to the windows. I ate two Big Macs while Liddie picked at her french fries and neglected to say anything about any of the ways McDonald’s exploited people, which is how I knew she was getting antsy. Our mother called around two. I could hear the television in the background, the too-cheery voice of morning TV anchors. It was the Macy’s parade, I realized; my mother must have taped it and was watching it again. It made me a little bit sad and a little bit angry.

“How are you two doing?” she asked, in her voice straining to sound happy.

“Great,” I said, “just great. We’re cooking things now, in the common-room kitchen. The chicken smells wonderful.”

This seemed to me the biggest lie of all, since we were still in McDonald’s and everything smelled like grease and plastic.

“How are Liddie’s studies coming?” Mom asked.

“Fantastic,” I said. “Today she taught me about elephants.”

“You haven’t tried to talk her out of that nonsense?”

“I have never talked her out of anything. That’s why she talks to me.”

Liddie rolled her eyes at this and grabbed my cell phone.

“Mo-om,” she said. “It’s a holiday. We’re festive. Can’t we just stay festive?”

I could hear through the phone my mother trying to sound conciliatory, but I could see on Liddie’s face that she could hear the taped parade in the background too. Her tone got softer and sadder when she said good-bye.

After she hung up, I got a milk shake and Liddie ordered some pitiful-looking granola without the yogurt. When we’d wasted all the time we could, we got back in the car and headed for Maryland, to the address I’d confirmed and written down before we left Cam-bridge. We were quiet, and ashamed of ourselves on many counts.

We found where we were going quickly. It really was right over the bridge. It was a garden apartment complex, everything low to the ground and in the same shade of dull red brick. There were already Christmas lights strung across some of the balconies, and there was music coming from several different parked cars: Nas on one side, something with the same bass in a different language on the other. I parked right in front of the building and turned off the engine. Liddie and I sat in the car like criminals preparing for a heist. I couldn’t tell from the outside which of the apartments in the building might be Carlos’s. We watched people come and go for a while, many of them carrying aluminum-covered dishes. A harried woman in a uniform rushed in, almost tripping over two kids playing with toy cars on the steps. A few feet from the front stoop a teenage couple kissed a passionate good-bye, the boy’s hands inching slowly down the girl’s waist before she caught them with manicured pink fingertips and raised his grip back to safer territory.