More Than Enough (2 page)

“Hey,” a kid said from behind us, “it says no trespassing.” I heard someone kick the sign that had been stuck out front in the mud. The pack of kids followed us into the house anyway. We could see them through the walls of two-by-fours in front of us and to the sides of us, dirty snowballs in their gloved hands. “Can't you read?” the same voice asked.

Someone threw a snowball that hit my sister in the back. “Ouch,” she said. I could tell she wanted to run. But I squeezed her hand tightly to let her know that she couldn't show fear.

“Sure,” I said then, turning around and facing the chubby kid with glasses. He was the one talking. “We can read.” I looked around for Noir, who had disappeared. I wanted him close by. I thought he might seem threatening, though I knew he wouldn't hurt anyone.

“Then why are you trespassing?”

“You're trespassing, too,” I said.

“That's not what I asked you.” He threw the baseball again, this time so close to my head that I had to dodge it.

“Don't do that,” I told him. Someone behind me threw a snowball that hit my side. I didn't budge despite the fact that it stung like hell.

“What're your names?” the kid with the glasses asked.

I told him.

“You don't go to the ward,” he said.

“No.”

“What ward do you go to?” some kid behind us asked. Jenny wanted to turn around, but I didn't let her.

“Tell them to stop throwing snowballs,” she said to me. Another came flying at us then, though we dodged it. “Stop throwing snowballs!” she shouted at them.

“Shush,” I said.

“What ward do you go to?” the kid with the glasses asked again.

“None,” I said.

One of the smaller kids had picked up a board from the ground and was smacking it against something.

“What do you believe, then?” he asked.

“Nothing.” I took my glasses off and zipped them into my coat. They were unattractive and had thick black frames. But I knew that we could not afford to replace them. Things went a little blurry, and I had to squint at the kid to keep his features in focus.

“How can you believe nothing?”

“We're Catholic,” Jenny said.

“No we're not,” I said, not sure why my sister would tell this lie.

“We go to the Catholic church,” she said.

“We don't,” I said. “We don't believe in God.”

The kid with the fat face was tossing the baseball up and down in one hand. “You are,” he said. “You're Catholic. You believe in the pope.”

“No,” I said. “We aren't. We don't.” The fact that we believed in nothing, no God, no pope, nothing, had just become important to me. It was the only thing that I could own at that moment.

“You're lying,” he said.

Two more snowballs hit me—one in the side and one in the back of the head. Jenny ducked down and held her hands out. I bent down and picked up a board. There were boards and discarded nails all over the cement floor. The kids around us also picked up boards, though not the one who was talking. He was still tossing the baseball up and down in his hand.

“Don't do that,” Jenny said, looking at me and the other kids. She wanted us to put the boards down. I saw Noir sprinting toward us along the muddy road, happy in that stupid, excessive way of dogs.

“You're lying,” the kid with the glasses said again. Then, without blinking, he hurled the ball into my gut. For an instant, bent over and wheezing, I went blind. The board dropped from my hand.

“Catholic shit,” one kid said.

“Steven,” my sister said, though I no longer knew where she was. I felt the ice-cold concrete beneath my hands and knew that I was on my knees. Noir yelped with pain and then began to bark. I opened my eyes, reached for the baseball, and hurled it at the fat-faced kid, missing him. Something hit me from behind and I went down, tasting blood, warm and sudden, on my lips. Two or three drops hit a patch of snow in front of me, and I heard Jenny scream. The fat kid was straddling me, his knees pressing into my back. He put his hand on the top of my head, took a fist of my hair, and pulled until I felt a clump come lose. I screamed and he pushed my cheek into the concrete until I was silent again. In front of me, I saw multiple pairs of new, expensive sports shoes walking over the ground. “Beg for mercy,” the kid on top of me said. He turned my head and pushed my other cheek into the concrete.

“It's cold,” I said.

“Mercy,” he said. “Say it.”

“Mercy,” I said. But he didn't stop whatever terrible thing he was doing to me with his knee.

“Your sister ran home,” some other kid said.

“Louder,” the kid on top of me said. “Say, ‘I beg for mercy.'”

“Fuck you.”

“You're making me do this.” He cocked my arm behind my back and slowly pushed it up toward my shoulder. “Say it,” he said, cranking my arm up another notch. I yelped and tried to ask for mercy, though no words came out. Tears streaked down my face. “He's crying,” some kid said.

“I'm not,” I managed to say.

“You will be soon.” The fat kid repositioned his knee, stood up a little on his other leg, and fell on me with all his weight. “One more time,” he said. But instead of falling on me again, he grabbed my arm and slowly, with what must have been all his strength, lifted my bent arm, elbow first, upward over the back of my head until my shoulder quivered with pain from a place deep inside the socket where I'd never felt pain before. “Say it,” he said fiercely into my ear. I felt the muscle begin to tear, slowly, then more quickly. “Jesus,” someone said. I heard a distinct pop of bones and then my own voice screaming, long and sharp. My arm went slack and my chest collapsed. “Oh,” he said, standing up.

“What did you do to him?” another kid asked. I rolled over and saw the weird frame of the house above me seeming to lean into the air and hover there, bend and quiver the way something reflected on water might. The fat face of the kid who had hurt me floated into this picture. His stupid open eyes told me that he was afraid before he turned and ran off with the other kids.

Lying on the concrete foundation, I felt waves of pain roll over me and cold air move through my throat and into my lungs. Noir whimpered above me and licked my face. “No,” I said. Speaking hurt. Half of me was abuzz with hot pain. I struggled to my knees, pushing myself up with the arm that seemed to work. My other arm was bent in a strange way so that the palm of my hand pointed away from me. I tried not to look at it. Looking at it made it hurt more. The first steps were nearly unbearable. When I concentrated and breathed and walked slowly, the pain eased a little. Whimpering, Noir walked at my side. “No. No,” I said for some reason. I heard a car rush by, and then another. The air was gray and I thought maybe it was snowing lightly, though I only half registered this fact. At one point, I looked around and knew from the cars and houses that I had gone too far down the hill and had passed our duplex. Finally, at my front door, I could not work the key into the lock, and so, like a stranger, I rang the doorbell.

“Steven,” my father said. Usually when I arrived home, my father would not lift his face from his math textbook to look at me. He often tried to seem busy with his schoolwork when my mother and I were at home. That afternoon, he dropped his notepad on the entryway table and let me in. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “What happened to you?” He touched my shoulder and I screamed. “Oh, God,” my father said. “I'm sorry. I didn't mean to do that.”

“I got lost,” I said. “I didn't know where I was.”

My mother was running for the phone. “I'm calling an ambulance.”

“We can't call an ambulance,” my father said. “We can't afford a bill like that.”

“Look at him, for God's sake,” my mother said. She held the phone in her hand but wasn't dialing. They were both looking at me now.

“We'll drive him ourselves,” my father said.

“How did this happen?” my mother asked me. She came at me with a washcloth she'd just run under the water. “Stand up straight,” she said. “Stand up so that I can take care of this cut.”

“I can't,” I said, trying to stand straight. “It hurts too much.”

“Jesus.” I saw the fear in her face. She bent down and wiped at my mouth. Her perfume was almost acidic and turned my stomach. Because she had to wear the scents she sold at work, she often smelled harsh and floral.

“Ouch!” I yelled. The blood on the cloth scared me. I hadn't thought I was bleeding that much.

“Your arm,” she said, “what happened to your arm? What happened to his arm?”

My father bent down, gently lifted my red parka, and looked inside. “I think he's dislocated his shoulder,” he said.

“It was an accident,” I said, knowing I could not become a snitch. “I fell.”

“Who did this to you, Steven?” my mother asked. “Your sister already told us you were having an argument with someone. Who were you arguing with?”

“No one did anything to me,” I said. “Where's Jenny? What happened to Jenny?”

“Let's get him in the car,” my father said.

“I want to come,” Jenny said. She was crying and curled up in the fat green TV chair that we had bought from Deseret Industries and that smelled faintly of cat piss, so faintly that we had all decided to believe it wasn't cat piss and never mentioned it to one another.

I yelped. My father had touched my injured arm again. “I'm sorry,” he said. He was trying to stand me up and turn me toward the door.

“Let me walk myself,” I yelled, even though talking hurt. Each word seemed to push against a tightness in my chest. There were two spots of blood on my white tennis shoes. “Am I bleeding a lot?”

“Not a whole lot,” my father said.

“He is,” my mother said. “Look at him. Somebody did that to him.”

“You're not helping,” I heard my father whisper to her. He looked at me. “It's just your lip. It looks like you cut your lip a little.”

We were outside now. The air was gray and the snow had begun falling in heavy sideways sheets. My parents walked on both sides of me, their arms out to catch me if I fell. “It hurts to talk,” I said.

“It hurts him to talk,” Jenny said, her voice panicky.

“I'm not injured too badly, am I?” I had to whisper. If I whispered, the pain wasn't as bad.

“No,” my father said. “No, you're not.”

I didn't remember getting in the car. I remember only opening my eyes and seeing that I was in the backseat with Jenny's hand in my good hand. “I'm sorry for running,” she whispered.

“Running from what?” my mother asked. My father was outside brushing a thin dust of snow away from the windows. “You tell me what happened,” she said. I squeezed Jenny's hand as tightly as I could to let her know that she'd better not say anything, and she didn't. When my father sat down in the car, my mother looked at him and said, “He needs an ambulance, Billy. We need to call an ambulance.”

“He's fine,” my father said.

“He is not fine,” she said.

“You're scaring him,” he said. Then he whispered in her ear. “He might be in shock. The best thing to do is to keep him talking.”

“I hate this,” my mother said.

“I can hear you,” I said. It hurt less to talk now that I was sitting and speaking in a very soft voice. “I'm not in shock.”

“Good,” my father said. “That's what we want to hear.” He was driving now and trying to look at me in the rearview mirror while he kept an eye on the road. “I want you to keep talking to me. I want you to tell me how you are. How are you?”

“Okay, I guess.” If I concentrated, I could keep the pain at a distance, like a sound you hear at night in your bed that grows farther and farther away. When I looked down at my injured arm, it didn't seem to be my arm. It felt unnaturally attached to me, awkward and foreign.

“He's staring at his arm,” Jenny said to my parents.

“Look at me,” my father said, by which he meant that I should address him in the rearview mirror. I did. “Good boy. Now speak to me, Steven. Tell me something. Anything.”

“Where's Noir?” I asked. I couldn't remember at that point whether he had followed me home or not. I remembered only hearing him yelp soon after I had hit the concrete.

“He's fine. He's back home. What else would you like to talk about?”

“Could we talk about our house?” I asked. “Could we talk about moving up the hill?”

“Of course we could,” he said. In fact, the house was one of his favorite topics of conversation.

“When are we moving up the hill?” Jenny asked.

“Soon,” he said. “The times are pretty good just now. There's a lot of activity going on, and we'll be able to take advantage of that. As soon as I'm a certified accountant, we should make our move. No more than a year, a year and a half maybe.”

“Please,” my mother said, “let's not go through this. Steven is hurt, for God's sake.”

“We're not going through anything,” my father said.

“No more about the house,” she said.

“It will have three stories, right?” I asked. My father nodded. “It will be up on Green Hill or Lemon Circle?” I asked, referring to two of the nicest streets above our duplex, streets where the kids who had hurt me that day probably lived.

“Sure,” my father said. “Those are both possibilities. Or we'll take one of the new ones they're building now. Those look promising.”

“And it will have a trampoline and swimming pool in the backyard?” Jenny added.

“No,” my father said, surprising me because we had always planned to have a swimming pool and trampoline and because I had assumed that great plans—at least in the realm of dream—never had to change. “The trampoline can stay. But the swimming pool is inside the house now … just off the living room. What's the use of an outside pool in a place where it snows five months of the year?” He gestured to the world outside our car, where the snowfall had become so thick that you could barely see the ghostly outlines of the mountains in the distance. “It will be enclosed and climate-controlled so that you kids can swim in the middle of a blizzard if you want. We'll be able to enter it from the living room or kitchen through sliding glass doors. A deck will lead from the pool out onto the backyard where you can sun yourselves in the summer or just sit and drink Cokes and listen to music with friends.”