Breaking the Fall (11 page)

“And you come over and visit,” she said, and I was wondering if she meant: and start moving in, and get away from your father.

Because despite what she had said, I knew she felt I belonged with her. Even though she would be gone most of the time. Even though she would wait for me to ask her how was Honolulu or how was Tahoe all the time.

It was another one of those things you could see without talking about it. This was going to change. My father knew, and I knew.

He overheard the conversation. When it was over, he looked up from the manual to the new computer he had just bought and said, “She's okay?”

I said she was, but it was like two people talking about bad weather. It was terrible, but beyond us, out of our power.

And then we looked at each other, and he smiled. It was almost a joke. His silence glowed in him, making him sweat and reflect the light from the television. It was terrible, and we couldn't really say anything about it.

So I didn't call Jared, on purpose, every moment that passed a moment in which Jared was waiting, a moment in which he would know I wanted out of the game and that I was leaving whether he wanted me to or not.

I woke during the night after very broken sleep. I heard that whisper in the air I associate with falling rain. I sat holding my breath.

Wrong. There is something wrong.

Almost like one of those times I must have heard my parents making love and woke up, almost crying out. Maybe I had cried out in the middle of it, I thought. Maybe my little baby self had bawled and interrupted them.

My father used to pretend to be a bear. He used to make her happy. I crippled their marriage.

When I slipped from the bed and looked out the window, there was nothing.

I called his name in a low voice, the two syllables not like a name at all, but a magical incantation, a word intended to break a spell.

Jared was here, somewhere. Somewhere in the house, and that whisper, that fine, high noise, had been his step.

He needs you, said the fanged voice in me. He needs you, and he won't let you go.

26

Jared was sitting up very high, at the last level of the nearly empty football stands. And he was talking to Sky.

It was morning, the stands blistered with dew. I was warm inside, almost happy, to see the two of them together, and bounded up the flat, flaking seats of the stands, but as I leaped upward I felt the tiniest hook inside me, in my chest.

I didn't like it. I didn't like the way he was turned to look at her, and the way she was studying his face, calm and entirely focused on him.

I made myself spring upward all the faster, my shoes squeaking on the wet yellow planks. I called to Jared, and he turned to look down with a smile.

When I joined them, I was winded for a moment and could not speak.

“I was just talking to Sky,” said Jared.

I looked from one to the other, breathing hard, with what I knew must be the wrong sort of smile.

“I was telling her,” Jared continued, in the tone he would use to tell a wonderful piece of news, “about our game.”

As I fought my way into being able to speak, Sky cut me off with her look.

Jared laughed that wonderful quiet laugh. “She doesn't believe me. I bare my soul and she turns the channel.”

“Stanley,” she said, slowly, carefully. “I know the kind of person you are.”

“Go ahead,” said Jared. “Believe whatever you want.”

I put my hands on my hips. Why shouldn't I, I told myself. Why not? I had always believed in the truth.

But I knew the next words would be important, and could change everything about the way Sky felt about me. Say the right thing, I told myself. Lie. You have nothing to hide, of course, not really.

Tell a lie. Deny it.

I could lie to anyone. My dad. My mom. I could tell a dressed-up version of the truth to Jared. He would see through it, of course, but the attempt was possible. But to Sky I could tell only the truth.

I took a deep breath. “We play a game,” I said.

“A game.” Her voice was low and serious, and her eyes were steady.

“I told her the plain truth,” said Jared, because he knew: I was hoping, for an instant, that he had told her an exaggeration that I could at least partly deny. “Just the truth.”

She stood. She put her hand on my arm as she stepped down, and I touched the place on my shirt where her hand had rested. I sensed her steps all the way down, communicated through the struts and timbers of the stands.

Jared narrowed his eyes and gave me a half-smile.

I sat slowly, the wet soaking into my seat.

“This is not your type of woman,” said Jared.

I was not looking at Jared. I was gazing down at the figures crossing the football field. One of them was Sky. My eyes followed her all the way to the building. “I like her a lot,” my numb voice said.

“She is beautiful,” he said, and I turned, ready to be offended even at Jared if he said anything obscene or crude about Sky. But Jared was sensitive, serious. He nodded reassurance. “She is. Big, slow, and serene.”

Maybe he liked her. Maybe he wanted her. The thoughts pricked me.

“Not my type,” he said, almost dreamily.

For a long moment, I could not ask the next question.

“Were you in my house last night, Jared?”

Jared made one of his gestures, both “I might have been” and “what difference does it make?” His cigarette made a wreath of smoke, and I could not bear to look at Jared anymore.

“You don't have any business going into my father's house.”

I was surprised at these words, but glad I had said them.

“Poor Stan. You're upset,” Jared said after a long while, and I could tell that he had been waiting for me to speak, and did not like having to make the first move. “I've been very generous with you, Stanley.”

I must have shaken my head, or hunched away from him. Somehow my body said no.

“I let you share my secret. I openly shared it with you. You were like a brother.”

Don't say anything, I told myself. Don't let him draw you into any sort of argument. He's smart—much smarter than you are.

His voice sounded gentle. “I don't really mind that you ran away and left me in the house. But you mind. You can't stand it.”

I must have shaken my head once again and looked away, because Jared's next words were the ugliest-sounding words I had ever heard him use. “I'm never going to let you forget how cowardly you were. I thought it was funny. But you didn't.”

He stubbed his cigarette out on one of the boltheads, and stood.

The bell rang, yet no one moved from the field below, preferring to talk to each other, laugh, thump a soccer ball back and forth.

“It's all, right,” he said. “I'm sorry.”

This was new. I glanced up at him. He was being clever, pretending to apologize.

He read my suspicion. He made a little smile. “Go on and be dead, Stanley. It doesn't matter to me.”

And he left me. Just like that, striding down the bleachers in no special hurry.

I was rounded up in a hall sweep. Mr. Hawking, a strong former convict who ran our security, laughed when he saw me. It was not a mean laugh. He was a handsome black man, and liked the way I used to play baseball, and had always kidded me about throwing my face into the ball.

Now he just said, “Got to be quicker than this, Stanley,” and herded me along with a group of other students into the dean's office, where we all sat until the dean called in to say that his car battery had been stolen and he wouldn't be coming in.

We all got passes, and I cruised into French in time to take a test, one of those stretches of the French language in which you say things about the valise of Madame Duboise and the letter that was on the table having been removed by the young girl. I wondered who were these French people with their travel plans and their homes full of messages and servants.

Sky finished the test first. I could hear her cap her pen.

The test had pictures. I was supposed to write a commentary on the pictures in French. I leaned forward and did the best I could, but it was hard to concentrate.

I had a plan—a way out. It would silence Jared, and it would finish the game.

27

I watched the house with green shutters and three chimneys carefully.

I watched it in the early morning, taking a detour on the way to school. I watched it from the alley in the evening. I knew who lived there without knowing anything, just as I knew the characters in the French book, or the man whose leg was sheared off by a crocodile. I knew nothing. I knew enough.

The owner was a man, slightly out of shape, and his younger wife. Or at least, she was pretty and the man was not all that handsome. He waddled a little bit when he came down the walkway to pluck the newspaper off the lawn, but he often seemed to be whistling through his lower teeth, the sort of whistling I think means contentment. He was even a little smug. His life was complete.

She flounced as she walked. He drove an Audi, and she drove a Fiat, and there was a little girl who visited sometimes, a daughter, I decided, from an earlier marriage.

They probably saw intruders as a compliment: someone thinks we're rich enough to rob.

It took a week. Not more. I knew enough about them to write a research paper. They got a lot of bills, the kind with window envelopes that are green or sand-yellow so you have to give them a second look. They took the
Examiner
and the
Tribune
.

Once he saw me, looked right at me, as I wandered by across the street. His eyes caught mine. They were easy on me, dismissing me. He was probably the kind of man who would be reassured that I was a white kid, and harmless-looking. But then he looked at me just a beat too long, and my spine went cold.

I smiled. Just a little smile, a crinkling of the eyes, a casual I'm-on-my-way attitude.

After another beat, he smiled back.

They had a lot of friends. Tanned, square-jawed men dropped him off after tennis, and I wondered if he might be more fit than he looked, or perhaps very likeable. She jogged with friends, wearing a white terry-cloth visor, a visor so white I knew that she must replace it every week or two.

I had a plan, but I didn't know when the plan would begin to establish itself. I was an explorer not sure on what island he would build his fort. I felt uncertain but fresh, eager. I could not be sure of anything, and that made me begin to feel alive.

Sky saw me in class, but her smile was sad, and when I tried to speak to her, she only tilted her head, smiling but looking away.

I passed Jared in the hall, and he gazed through me. He looked pale and gaunt, and missed more school, showing up late to classes, looking both bored and triumphant. I knew that he was, in a way, pleased that I had quit.

He had won a contest I had not been aware we were playing. I had thought we were partners. But Jared had always been out to prove that I was inferior. The game had been called, in Jared's mind, Stanley the Loser. I had lived up to his expectations.

Now I had a surprise.

28

I didn't know which night it would be, but I knew that the night would come. I was more and more certain every time I hurried through the dark, and felt myself becoming more and more invisible, fading, growing transparent.

I was free of the world of clocks and history tests. But I intended no harm. I did not want to take anything of value. I only wanted to achieve that single, perfect moment of life, and then I could stop. Jared thought he had taught me all of this. Of course, in a way, he had. But I could master an aspect of the game he would never achieve.

It was just another evening. There was nothing to tell me that this was the night. I escaped out my bedroom window with the ease of someone going to work or school. I felt like one of those race car drivers who never open the car door, but always swing out the window.

My father was no threat. It was entirely safe. We lived like two men who liked each other but did not quite share the same language. The pidgin silence my father had always used had broken down into plain quiet. My father would never check on me.

I scrambled down the roof slope, and leaped to the damp lawn.

I didn't go directly to the house with green shutters. I went by the school, and saw the new buildings all lit up for the maintenance crews and the security, and I stayed wide of all the lights because of the school police car that was backed up to the cafeteria loading bay.

Computers were always getting stolen, and the cops were supposed to be cracking down, but everybody said that it was people on the inside, custodial or maintenance or cops, and that nobody could stop what was happening.

I remembered the night the school blew up. It had been a gas leak. An old main had fractured spontaneously, the result of minor earthquakes, and not so minor ones, over eighty or ninety years, and the result of something else, too, gravity and time—the way things are.

People still talked about it. The school blew up so badly the news was sure it was a bomb, and the cops had dropped by and were very polite to my father and went away almost at once when he called the company lawyer. But they had questioned everybody, and people from the federal government did, too, Tobacco and Firearm men measuring how far a doorknob had blown across MacArthur Boulevard.

The gas had trickled out into the corridors past the showers, and into the dance studio, all the old closets and storage rooms. It had been a school of spires and towers. No one had ever really looked at it. It was the kind of building you remembered more than saw even when it was there.

It had turned inside out.

We had all gone to see it, towel racks and clock faces and all the amazing debris blown all the way across the drug corner. Yellow police tape had trembled in the sunlight, but it couldn't protect the junk from being pawed through.

I jogged away from the glow of the school lights, and zigzagged across the street to avoid streetlights. I knew how to do it, that slow sprint, an easy lope, a way of hurrying without seeming to be traveling fast, a way of remaining secret without hiding.