Stay Up With Me (15 page)

With a burst of speed, we weave around a bend and my mom says, “Really, Russell. Slow down.”

Russell says, “I am,” and he whips his head back at me. “Am I going too fast for you, Dex?”

I say, “Yes,” but he laughs like I'm joking, and he reaches over to his breast pocket. He somehow pulls out a cigarette with his right hand, sticks it in his mouth, lights it, and while he's looking down we hit a sinkhole and my head hits hard against the roll bar. There's a high drift in the road ahead and we swerve out of its way toward a utility pole. Russell slams on the brake, sending us past the pole into a spin, and I fall forward into the back of my mom's seat.

“Jeezus,” Russell says. He has lost control. His mouth is open and empty.

“Jeeezus,” he says again, and he's winging the wheel back and forth as though he's bringing a ship in during a storm. I've got my arms around the top of my mother's seat and she's holding her hands straight out into the dash. We are sliding fast toward a culvert. Russell is panicked. It's scary, but part of me is happy because Russell is fucking up.

We wash off the road, through mounds of snow pushed off by the blowers, and as we smack the bottom of the culvert, I bang my head in the same spot as last time. It's like a kick from a metal boot. I run my hand through my hair and I touch blood. The skin around the gash is puffed and sticky and my temples are throbbing.

Russell lets out a deep breath from his lower lip, which blows his hair up, and he takes his glasses off. His eyes are startling. They are gray and deep set, surrounded by white skin, where the sun's been blocked.

“Jeezus, you all right, babe?” he asks my mom.

She says nothing. Her face is ashen. She breathes hard and fast and the music is blaring now. I've still got my arms frozen around my mom's headrest.

“I'm sorry, Dex. You got the worst of that, didn't you?” Russell says. He breathes onto his blue glasses and wipes them clear with the bottom of his sweater. He turns the CD player off, then leans back to look at my head.

“It's okay, Russell,” I say and pull away.

“You know we're really lucky,” he says. “Really lucky.”

And I guess he would think that, but I don't put much stock in that kind of luck. You could always say we could have died there and feel lucky until you die, but that's an idiotic way to go through life.

“Let's go home,” my mom says, and there's an edge now to her voice. “Let's get this thing on the road and drive home.” Russell reaches his hand around her shoulders and my mom tilts away, her eyes trained across the lake.

Russell's cigarette is burning on the carpet before him and he stomps it out, pounding his foot hard into the floor. My mom glares at him and then out the window again and Russell says, “Can you give me a break here?”

 

For a while
my vision is blurred—glassy and dim, like film shot underwater. Then it is clear, but framed by moments of blackness like a slide show. I sit for a while in the snow, particles melting into my jeans, and I watch Russell and my mom moving around the Jeep, talking, plotting, their bodies appearing near me, then a few yards away.

The lake and the sky are the same white now and it is as if we are caught in a cloud. I look out over the ice and let the whiteness spread through my brain, the wind now a steady moan around my ears. I feel Russell's hand on my shoulder. “Come on, Dex. Get up and help us out,” he says, and he reaches under my arms to lift me.

The motor is idling. My mom is in the driver's seat, and Russell and I stand behind to push. He has graded a wall of snow and dirt with his boots to keep us from sliding back.

“When I say ‘Go,' move this thing into gear,” he yells to my mom.

We count to three and then Russell yells, “Go! Go! Go!” and the wheels sound like buzz saws ripping through the ground. The Jeep climbs two feet and then falls, like a house, pushing us aside. The air around us is filled with fumes that seep inside my lungs and splotch the snow black.

“Let's try it again,” he says. My head feels feathery and I am of no use here. I want to take a bath and go to sleep. The light is beginning to fade and the temperature has dropped a few degrees. The wind is snapping at our faces.

The two of us rock the Jeep up and back, up and back, and then, like we're charging a castle, we lower our heads and surge.

“Go! Go! Go! Go! Go!” And we get the front wheels on the road and almost the back wheels too, but it isn't enough. The Jeep pins us back into the snow and I am sweating now. Russell is exasperated. I know he's thinking it's my fault somehow; if it had just been him and my mom, this wouldn't have happened, which is bullshit. These things happen, even to people like Russell.

He digs in. “We got it this time, Dex,” he says. “We got it licked.” We lower our heads together, dig our shoulders and bent arms into the rear corners of the Jeep, and like two friends we push through the mounds of snow and earth. Everything is giving beneath us, the ground is moving backward, and Russell is yelling, “Go! Go! Go! Go! Go!” screaming now until the Jeep, wheels spinning wildly, mounts the culvert onto 104. My mom's momentum carries her a hundred yards down the road. She is whooping and so is Russell. He makes a snowball and hurls it at her.

I am covered in snow now, some of which has melted through my coat to my chest, and my face stings from the cold of the spray and the wind.

“Hey, wait for us,” Russell yells to my mom, and he starts running for the Jeep, his legs churning like the athlete at the end of the race, and I'm floating now on a wave of dizziness.

I am running light-headed, first slow, but then hard, and as fast as I can. It's the way I used to feel in gym after a long basketball game, strained, but alive, very alive. I can't hear the wind anymore and I can't see the cars or houses, just the white road in front of me, and I can feel the warm flow of blood on my forehead. I can faintly make out the Jeep's honk and my mom yelling behind me, but I'm running and I'm on my own and it's all I can do to keep from falling down.

Stay Up with Me

H
enry is in the part
of the dream where his father carries him piggyback through the shoulder-high waves. His father's T-shirt is soaked through, and the salt water is making the cut on Henry's elbow sting, when a woman's voice calls out, “Henry . . .
Henry
.”

Before his eyes open he knows who it is. He can tell by the smell of her shampoo it's Alice. He'd been napping in the café around the corner from his apartment—the one open until midnight. “He just left,” Alice says, sitting down at Henry's table, which is by the corner window.

She does this fairly frequently, finds Henry, now a boy-faced thirty-one, somewhere in the neighborhood when she wants his advice. Once—when she needed to choose between two job offers, she searched the grocery store, three coffee shops, and two bars before discovering him seated with his eyes closed on the couch at the Laundromat. Henry has been escaping into dreams a lot lately, in movie theaters or on buses or subways, but mainly in cafés or coffee shops where he spends the bulk of his afternoons and evenings reading or working on one of his scripts.

“He
thanked
me,” she says with a pained smile. “Services rendered, I guess.”

He stares at her blankly, then glances at his watch.

“I'm sorry to bug you. But I really
need
you, Henry.”

She gives him the little-girl pout, the one that often convinces him to give her rides, or buy her dinner.

“All right, then. When did he come over?”

“Just after nine.”

Henry does the math. It is eleven now. “Now
that's
‘efficiency.' ”

“It's not like that. He works in the emergency room and he has this ridiculous schedule. Anyway, I think I was insensitive to him.”

“How so?”

“His dog died this morning . . . I guess that's a pretty big deal.”

“Yeah, I'd say so.”

“I told him I was sorry, really sorry,
many
times over. I just . . . I don't know. I mean how many times can you say, ‘My God, that's awful. That's so
sad
'
? I had a pretty traumatic run-in at work and I just kept it to myself.”

“Dogs are family members,” Henry says. He gazes down at his screenplay, which is about a spy mission in Tunisia during World War II. He considers letting Alice read some of it, and then remembers how badly that went last time.

“He said it had a heart attack. Since when did dogs start having heart attacks? I thought of a dog dressed like one of those overworked executives—eating too many bacon cheeseburgers and keeling over.”

Henry looks at the other tables to see if anyone else is hearing this.

“I'm going back to work here,” he says.

“Not just yet, Henry.”

“I've got a deadline.”

“But you were sleeping.”

“Napping.”

She bites her lower lip and sighs.

“Do you want to maybe go grab a drink?” she says.

He considers the offer. Henry is in the parched badlands of a dry spell, and the thought of a couple of drinks with Alice followed by a trip to his apartment is like a sugar rush, apt to raise his spirits for an hour or so before dropping him into a prolonged crash.

“Maybe not.”

“All right,” she says. “Can I just sit here with you and read for a while. Remember when we used to do that?”

“Do you have something to read?”

“No.”

Henry hands her a book from his bag, then goes back to working on his screenplay.

Alice begins reading the book and twirling a strand of her straight brown hair around a pencil. After a while she tilts her head thoughtfully and asks him, “How's your
dad,
Henry?”

“He's good.”

“I think about him all the time.”

Henry raises his eyebrows dubiously.

“Let's go visit him this weekend. Like we did that time. Remember? When we went to the movies afterward.”

“Moulin Rouge.”

They'd arrived ten minutes late and had to sit in the front row. With all the jump cuts and pulsating lights, Henry felt as if he might go blind.

“I thought it would cheer you up.”

“You thought it would cheer
you
up.”

“You were the one who was being strange.”

“Water under the bridge,” he says.

 

But Henry remembers it
vividly. He was planning to ask Alice to move in with him that night after they made a lobby drop-off of some books at his father's. His father insisted they come up for a quick drink so he could finally meet Henry's
girl,
and his old-fashioned use of the word touched Henry enough to consent. He had assured Henry that his apartment was in “cocktail party shape,” and possibly in his eyes it was. He'd set out a full bar—dusty bottles of Tanqueray, Stolichnaya, and Maker's Mark—a few wedges of odd-tasting cheese, some hard salami, and what might have been pâté, and he'd clearly vacuumed, and straightened the furniture. But along the most cursory of investigations, Henry saw trouble: moth-eaten alligator sweaters thrown over piles of paper in his office, mold growing on the refrigerator shelves and in the corners of the bathroom.

Until that night it was possible for Henry to live in a state of suspended judgment about his father's circumstances, but now through Alice's eyes he saw every coffee stain in the carpet or stray clump of rice on the kitchen stove as proof of his father's alarming decline. His father had downed a martini or two before they arrived, giving him the jittery, gin-emboldened air of a nightclub emcee trying to earn the love of an unresponsive audience. He told a few reliable old stories, told them flawlessly and then, like a man who takes the wrong road on the way home and finds himself on a street very much like his but which doesn't contain his house, lost his bearings. When he recovered, he warmed to Alice and acted around her like a teenager with a crush. She flirted back. It irritated Henry, though he knew it was simply her way of making herself comfortable in a strange situation. When Alice leaned down to retrieve a fallen ice cube, Henry caught his father admiring her ass.

When his father retreated to the kitchen for a forgotten hors d'oeuvre, Henry apologized for the mess in the apartment.

“It's fine. He's been the perfect host,” Alice said, without knowing how true that had once been. In the old life, his parents' parties were legend: posh caterers, pianists and torch-song singers, and guests in black tie—all before the businesses tanked, and before his father fell asleep smoking a cigarette, burning two rooms of their brownstone—and before Henry's mother left, sending Henry plummeting into that blind alley of resentment where he both hated his father for making his mother leave and felt responsible for him in his fragile loneliness.

At the door, Henry's father pressed Alice's hand in his and told her, eyes moist, how much he loved his son and that Henry was all he had left in the world.

Then, perhaps losing his spot in time again, he apologized to them both about the fire and showed Alice the burn marks on his forearm and shin.

“How often do you see him?” Alice asked, when they were outside again on the street.

“Once a month maybe.” The truth was closer to once a week.

“I really like him,” she said, then added, “He's different from what I expected.”

“How so?” Henry asked, but he knew. Henry had gone to blue-blazer private schools and his father lived on a nice Upper East Side block. She'd been imagining luxury, or at least a semblance of order.

“You look like him, you know.”

Henry peered at his reflection in a shop window. He looked much more like his mother, he thought.