Virgin Territory (13 page)

“Okay,” I say, trying to steady my voice. “This is whacked. I’m not doing this.”

But I don’t remove my hands from the glider.

“Whose mother are you?” Angela asks.

Slowly, very slowly, the glider spells out my name.

D. Y. L. A. N
.

Angela and Crispy raise their eyes from the board and give me a look that falls on me like a ton of bricks. I shrug it off and say, “This is weird. You guys are totally moving it.”

They, of course, deny it. Repeatedly.

“Is there something you want to ask her?” Crispy asks me.

“Me?” I reply, stupidly.

I have so many questions for Kat. But I just sit there with my mouth hanging open. The glider begins to pivot back and forth, stuck in a rut. But then, as if the thing itself has taken pity on my inability to speak, it begins to creep up, up, upward toward the alphabet, and, in a painstaking process of psychic hunt-and-peck, it spells out entire words. Desirée continues to write down each letter. But even before the glider comes to rest at the center of the board, even before Des has figured out what the glider has spelled, there’s no mistaking that this message is for me.

A dead parent isn’t something you can keep secret. The fact sticks to you like a house on fire. Even your friends, who weren’t there to witness the actual moment of destruction, can smell the smoke. And everything you do, every action, is slightly singed around the edges, because you’ve been burned.

As we’re walking away from the house on Sweet Bay Circle, Angela breaks the news to me that it’s time to stop hiding the
past. Like the Ouija board said—go on. Above us, the sky is turning a deeper shade of blue with every step we’re taking, but closer to the horizon the sky gets dipped in apricot and peach. All the houses are lined up along the street, silent and still as tombstones—the candy-colored kind.

“It’s time to be yourself,” Angela announces. “Your true self.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I ask her.

“Like, for instance, we knew that first house was yours,” says Crispy. He takes out a packet of fancy gum and offers everybody a slab. It’s got a kind of apple taste, which seems wrong for gum of any kind, but we all go for it without comment.

“But not right away,” Des offers. “Not that day. We figured it out later on.”

“How much later on?” I ask.

“I recognized the guy in the bed,” Angela says. “But, under the circumstances, I didn’t feel like breaking the news.”

This is what it feels like to have friends, I think. This is what it feels like to be seen, known.

At home, I do time with Doug at the dinner table (Chinese takeout again). I can tell that something’s on his mind, because he’s chewing extra loud. He always does that when he’s concentrating extra hard.

“What?” I ask as I put down my fork.

“What do you mean
what?”
he counters. But I’m not about to fall for that old trick. I’m smarter than that. I haven’t lived these fifteen years with him for nothing.

“Out with it,” I say.

“I got a call today,” he begins. “At work.”

It’s the way he says “at work” that makes me understand that he wasn’t expecting the call, and that it wasn’t a fun call. It was a call about me, and it wasn’t good news.

“Really?” I ask.

“I landscaped a yard over on Seaspray Lane about a year ago. Nice woman. Retired. Home all day. Basically a busybody, but who can blame her? See something, say something. Everybody and his brother’s got an eye out for everybody else these days.”

Okay, now he’s torturing me, giving me way too much information and trying to break me down so that I’ll either stab him in the hand with my fork or shout,
“What the hell happened?”
But I don’t do either of these things. Instead, I calmly continue shoving moo shu around my plate.

“She saw you inside the house next door to hers,” Doug says in a flat tone that’s meant to imply nothing more than just the plain facts. And then for his big finish, he adds, “In the company of some other kids.”

Here he waits to see how I’ll respond. I don’t. I look up at the ceiling and adopt a distracted expression, as though I’m trying to recall where I was earlier in the day. I pretend I can’t remember.

“Really?” I ask, which is a signal that I don’t know what he’s talking about, and he’ll have to provide more information before I say another word.

“Really,” he says with certainty. “She saw you break into the house. Well, not actually break in, because apparently the key wasn’t hard to find. But she knew you didn’t belong in there. So she called me. Did you take anything?”

“What?” I ask, stalling.

“Did you
steal
anything?”

“Whoa. Who do you think I
am?”
I ask, adding as much indignation to my voice as I can find on short notice. This seems to cover the issue without having to flatly deny the fact that I have, indeed, been inside that house.

“No. That’s not the question,” Doug says, placing his elbows on the table and leaning toward me. “The question is not, Who do
I
think you are. The question is, Who do
you
think you are? That’s what I want you to tell me.”

We look at each other and wait. Neither of us wants to be the first to blink, so we just sit there, staring. I never noticed that his eyes have the same thin blue nimbus edging around the pupils as mine. Genetics. What else have I inherited from him, I wonder?

Finally, he looks down at his plate and says, “I told her that she must’ve mistaken you for some other kid. But just to shut her up, I drove over there. That’s when I saw you coming out the house.”

As punishment, I’m forbidden, until further notice, to hang out with the members of the Virgin Club. And I’m being forced to stick by Doug’s side day and night until he figures out what to do. This could take forever. He says that he’s mulling things over. He’s not about to ground me, he says, because he knows from previous experience that if he leaves me at home alone I’ll just end up sitting in my room all day, strumming my guitar and not washing my hair. With the summer winding down, he also knows I’m not about to find another job. Then presto, he gets an idea: why not take matters into his own hands and make my life miserable all by himself? Having your son lug equipment around behind you and then clean up after you does not make you a professional documentary filmmaker. But for Doug it will do for now. I’m now busy trailing him as he stalks after various people whom he feels are perfect for his reel.

One of my jobs is to attach the microphone to those people.
I have to lean in close, fiddle with their blouse or buttons or shirt collar or jacket.

“You out here looking for a miracle like the rest of us?” asks a big pink woman from Kansas who has a determined smile and two of the saddest eyes I’ve ever seen in my life. I’m fiddling with the mic, and I can see her bra peeking through the opening in her cotton blouse. I try not to look.

“I’m not,” I tell her. “I’m out here because of my dad. He’s the one who needs a miracle.”

She nods her head, and the fluff of her hair bobs in time. Her little crablike fingers reach out, and she gives my forearm a quick understanding squeeze. Her fingernails are painted hot pink, and there’s something about the color of the polish and the paleness of her flesh smack up against my own brownish arm that makes me realize for the first time all summer that I must look like a kid who lives in Florida full-time. Somewhere along the way I’ve lost my ghostly, New York pallor and have adopted the sun-kissed patina of a golden boy on permanent holiday. Although still a denizen of my own private darkness, I am now a full-fledged citizen of the Sunshine State.

“I know,” she says, and then bites her lips to keep herself from brimming over with emotion. Her eyes are welling with tears. “That’s how it was with me. I came out here for my son. I thought he was the one who needed a miracle. Turns out, I was the one.”

I don’t bother to tell her that she’s got it all wrong.

“Guess every one of us is in need of some kind of a miracle,” is how she sums it up. And then she turns her attention to the inside of her purse, rummaging for a tissue that will wipe the single tear that’s rolled down her cherry cheek.

“What happened to him?” I ask. “I mean, your son.”

“He developed Lou Gehrig’s disease,” she said as evenly as she could manage. “Do you know what that is?”

“It’s ALS, isn’t it?”

“You’re a very smart young man,” she said, narrowing her eyes and smiling at me. “That’s exactly what it is. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Thanks to the BVM, we got two extra years together. But of course, our Gary isn’t with me anymore. He’s gone on.”

Shadowing Doug is no picnic. I have to wake up at the crack of dawn, and I’m so tired throughout the day that I sometimes literally fall asleep on my feet. I wake with a jerk when my head flops forward. I make the mistake of asking Doug how long I’m going to have to endure this punishment, and he looks at me long and hard, as though
he
is the one who is being punished. He delivers a speech about how this whole situation is my own damn fault and could have been avoided and how I am not to play the victim if I know what’s good for me. I am learning to keep my mouth shut and trying to burn a hole through Doug’s head by concentrating all of my anger through my eyeballs.

Yesterday, we ran into Angela, Des, and Crispy by the parking field, and Doug went ballistic. He started yelling at them from
a distance of about twenty feet, telling them to back off or he’d be forced to call the police and get a restraining order against them. He told them they were a bad influence. I was mortified. Almost immediately, I received a flurry of text messages telling me not to worry and to just give a shout when Doug was acting human again.

It’s been a couple of days of this routine, and today I’m not even putting up a fight—which I guess was Doug’s plan all along. He’s managed to wear me down, and now I just go with whatever is happening, drift from thing to thing as if I’m in a dream. But somewhere along the way, something changed. I guess I actually started to listen to what people were saying when Doug asked them if they believed in the Blessed Virgin or what had inspired them to get in the car and travel several hundred miles from home. Each person has an amazing story, full of reversals and plenty of tragic detail. But no matter how much heartbreak they’ve endured, how much loss or sickness they’ve survived, every person is possessed with a crazy kind of hope.

There was this one woman from Idaho whose name was Tami. We interviewed her earlier today. She drove all the way to Jupiter because her husband was suffering from some incurable disease, and she had a problem with her hand, though what the problem was I wasn’t sure. She wore a Bon Jovi T-shirt and big round glasses. Her face was wide open and friendly, and her skin looked as though it had been worn thin, pinched, the result of many generations of wind and worry.

“To a lot of folks, we’re just a big joke,” she said into the camera as she fussed with her hedge of hair. “Bunch of women and children and cripples who got nothing much better to do than run around from state to state in hopes of getting themselves a miracle. But I think it’s more the energy that gets us out. It’s like a good-luck zone that we can step into. For free! And you can feel it. Everyone can. It’s all forward motion. Maybe it’s ‘hope’ charging the air particles and making things move and heal. I dunno. I ain’t no scientist. But I seen stuff happen. I have.”

That’s when she held up her hand. Even without looking over my shoulder, I knew Doug was zooming in for a close-up of the hand. To me, it looked as regular as any hand I’d ever seen on any middle-aged woman. But Tami offered it as though it was made of diamonds.

“Look,” she said, her voice filled with wonder. “Just look at that hand. Will ya?”

Even though I don’t believe in the Blessed Virgin Mary, I have to admit that there’s something happening in the hearts and minds of the believers out here, something as plain as the back of Tami’s bum hand.

I’ve just finished dinner, and Doug has left the house without a word. I figure he’s meeting up with Mary Jo, but as usual we
don’t talk about what he’s up to after hours. He just slips out. I’m thinking that since he never mentioned the fact that I’m grounded, maybe the whole thing has finally blown over. For a while, I just sit at the table listening to the house settle. I briefly consider checking in with the Wedding Archives or maybe listening to Bob Dylan, but somehow I can’t see the point.

I send Angela a text telling her to come over because Doug has left me alone and I don’t know when he’s coming back. I have so much to tell her … so much has happened. It’s a short text, but I try to communicate that something’s changed without spelling it all out. Not that long ago, this was my place, my safety zone, and the survival of the whole world depended on my ability to refuse visitors. Now I’m standing by the sliding-glass doors, waiting for Angela and hoping that we will lie down together on the seafoam-colored carpet and kiss.