Would You (8 page)

When I look down the hall and through the glass door,
it's like seeing Dad through a spyglass, this hunched-over man, waiting for the next blow to fall.

I slide down next to him on the nasty brown tweed and bump shoulders, letting him know I'm there.

He doesn't say anything. But then he shudders and spits out this deep, gargling sob. His face squints up and his eyes are squeezed shut, so only the tiniest trickle leaks out. It's as if his tears have never been called on and there's nothing in there. It looks painful, and he's making this bleating noise.

I twist around and try to hug him. He grabs on and throws his whole shaking weight against me, like I'm the only hope. The
only
hope. My shirt rides up in back and the scratchy upholstery is scraping my skin. Tears swamp my eyes. Dad's clinging to me, and it's the most wretched thing that has ever happened.

Since the … accident… I haven't really …
looked
at him. I haven't ignored him, exactly, but he's been busy looking up cures online and hovering over Mom and figuring out who to blame and if there's anybody to sue and I just haven't paid attention.

But now he's not letting go; he's heaving and holding me tighter and tighter so I can't breathe. I've stopped crying, but how am I supposed to pull away? If a boy did this to me I'd scream, Get the hell off me, you freaking skeeze, but it's my dad and it's getting scary.

He's lost his mind. Bawling, out of control.

What if he actually
has
lost his mind? What if this is it? I'm witnessing the total collapse of a normal man.

The door opens and the nurse, Florence, comes in. She notices us and tips her head. But what is she actually seeing? Maybe nothing is a surprise in the distressed families lounge.

“Help.” It's just a croak, but she hears me. She calls to someone in the hallway and then slides in, quiet on those heinous puffy white shoes.

“Honey,” she says, touching my head.

And then she settles her nurse's hands on Dad's shoulders, reminders of civilization, of how fathers are supposed to be no matter what. Dad gulps, pulling in breaths like a little kid recovering. My mind repeats that word,
recovering.
Like a little kid
recovering
from a bike bump or a stubbed toe—and then I hear another thought.

There will be no recovery.

We are broken. Even fathers break.

It started with you, Claire, the one broken person. But there is never only one broken person.

“Natalie!” Aunt Jeanie hurls herself at me, squeezing my breath away.

“Un Jee,” I say, my greeting muffled with my mouth crammed into her burgundy shoulder pad, bugging my eyes at Mom.

“How
are
you, baby?” Jeanie cups my face in her hands, trying to peer into my soul. “This is a big, hard punch, Natalie. There's no hiding from this one.”

“Uh—”

“Jeanie, don't start,” says Mom. Her little sister can drive her from mild to exasperated to insane in seconds.

“What we have to do is to share our strength and punch back! If we visualize Claire standing on her feet again, we can make it happen! Am I right?”

“ Uh-huh,” I say. Aunt Jeanie's voice is way too loud. She's bigger and rounder than my mother, even though she's younger. She's jollier too, except right now jolly is so wrong.

“Mom? Dad's in there.” I point to the lounge, where he's sipping a Coke and gripping an ice cube in his fist.

“You take me to see Claire,” says Aunt Jeanie, propelling me along the corridor. “We'll tell her that we're all pulling for her, eh?”

I'm not sure what Aunt Jeanie was expecting, but it wasn't anything like this. I can only see her eyes above the mask, but they go wet and afraid as all her positive thinking melts into the humming quiet of Claire's room. I notice I have a stomachache from hoping she was right all along.

You don't look quite so bad today, actually.

It's scary how a person adjusts to being able to say that. To being able to
see
that. Because you're lying in a hospital with tubes crawling in and out of your body like garter snakes, but you don't look quite as…
bad
as you did yesterday. The bruises on your face are fading, sort of. To yellow.

It makes me think about that time we went tobogganing with Leah and Ben Skipton before they moved to Texas. When we had that colossal smash-up at the bottom of Kill Hill. We didn't tell Mom and Dad about it because it was hard enough getting permission to go with those older kids. And your whole arm was purple with bruises from being slammed underneath. You wore long sleeves for the first couple of days and it was winter, so no big deal.

But then we were supposed to be having a bath and your arm was yellow. Mom called out, “Get ready, spit-spot,” the way Mary Poppins does. I dove into the art box and pulled out the finger paints and we slathered ourselves with green, yellow, blue, pink. And then we climbed into the bath. Mom had a complete fit. But with all the muck in the tub and on our skin, well, she never saw the bruising at all. Remember that?

I guess not.

I depended on you…. You're older, you're supposed
to be my … my
archive.
That's what sisters do, remember for each other.

But the cold, hard, horrible truth is that I don't feel you here.

“You'll have some tough choices in the years ahead— whether to continue your education, whether to travel, whether to join the workforce, start a family, buy a house…. But you will face some even harder choices— whether to socialize with people who drink and smoke cigarettes and marijuana; whether to stand up for someone who is being mistreated, at the risk of your own comfort; whether to tell a difficult truth or to rest with a simple untruth; whether to accept who you are or to change who you are….

“Each of these dilemmas presents a challenge that I feel confident this class is prepared to meet. It is with great pride that I send you forth into the world….”

The exact nanosecond her eyes will find mine when Mom starts to sing.

That she hooked up with Kate's cousin when she went to Kate's cottage even though she was with Joe-boy and even though Kate would kill her if she knew.

The day I got my first period, which I didn't tell Mom about till three months later.

How I really feel about Zack. Something Audrey may never, ever know.

I tell Shannon to go ahead, I'll close the pool by myself. She sticks around long enough to help drag out the lane dividers, but I do the rest.

I top up the chlorine tank and test the water chemical levels, which makes me feel like a scientist. I collect stray foam noodles, kickboards and life jackets and stash them away. I swab the decks with the squishy foam mop, muttering pirate curses the way I always do.

By the time I'm done the water's still again. There are always a few diving toys on the bottom of the pool, and those are my excuse.

I turn off the main lights, leaving the emergency pin
spots. I peel off my LIFEGUARD tank and shorts. I dive in, quick and sleek, being a penguin. It's my trick, getting in without moving the water. I go deep and roll over, gazing up at the surface. Is it called the surface when you're under it?

The lights gleam like stars through oil-slick shimmer; my breath bubbles upward in dancing crystal balls. Only underwater is a person so aware of the beauty of breathing.

“I know the guy,” says Leila. “The driver.”

“You do?” I say.

“You do not.” Carson thinks she's full of it, the way she always knows everybody.

“Yes, actually. He's a young guy, Ted something, only a few years older than us, like, mid-twenties.”

“That was in the paper,” says Carson.

“Ted Scott,” says Leila. “And he works at that place out on Carlisle Street, where they rent equipment like back-hoes and chain saws, for fixer-uppers.”

“How the hell would you know a guy like that, Leila? Your addiction to heavy machinery?”

“Carson, eff off,” says Leila, which is pretty strong language for her. “His wife works for my mother at the bank. I'm just telling you. Maybe Natalie needs to know he was a person too.”

“I don't think I need to know that,” I say.

“Yeah, right,” says Carson. “A person who was wack enough to destroy her life in a split second.”

“He wasn't wack,” says Leila. “If anything, he was happy. His wife—”

“I really don't think I want to know this.” He's the villain.

“His wife had a baby,” she tells us. “On Saturday. She's still in the hospital. It's a little girl. Brianna Marie.”

“No.” I plug my ears.

Audrey is folding the paper napkins, making rabbits with stiff little ears.

“Thing is,” she says, “we're in this whirlpool. Since nine-eleven we've been churning around, waiting for the world to collapse.”

We all glance at Leila and observe a moment's silence because her father's cousin's new wife died on the ninety-second floor. Even though Leila had only met her at the wedding and no one was sure the cousin had made a good choice, this was the closest we came.

“But now,” says Audrey, “to continue the whirlpool metaphor, we've been sucked against the drain with a crash. We thought the world would end but that we'd get off easy. Like, we'd be immolated in a fraction of a second,
and it was sad and scary, thinking about it ahead of time, but the actual event would just, you know, be the end.”

“Oh,” I say. “You mean Claire's the drain.”

“Well…,” says Audrey, “… yeah. I guess.”

“There were plenty of times in history when they thought the world was going to end,” says Zack. “Like the Crusades, for instance. How about if you were sixteen in 1091 and this thundering cloud of horsemen pounded through the village wearing metal body suits and not having washed for maybe a decade. And they raped you and they stole your father's grain store and then they raped your mother and burned everything else. And they said they were doing God's business. Wouldn't that seem like the end of the world?”

“Or how about the Plague?” says Leila. “That was nasty.”

“It wasn't a healthy time in general,” says Zack. “Aside from the Plague, there was plenty of consumption going around, and grippe and dropsy and fevers and rickets and rotting teeth! No one died of old age.”

“I vote for the Nazis,” says Carson. “Best all-time world-enders. Thought-out evil. Kind of brilliant, really. Organized death camps all over Europe, nothing but horror from the first roundup to the cattle-car trains to the bug-infested dorms to the gas—”

“ Zyklon-B,” says Zack.

“Yeah,” says Carson, “With the gas gassing them in piles and then the pits full of bodies …”

“Did you know that Anne Frank has her own Dewey decimal number?” says Zack

“Please tell me you don't know what it is,” says Audrey.

“Nine four oh point five three four nine two,” says Zack.

“Weapons are worse now,” says Leila. “Push a button and blow up a whole city. Fly one airplane into a building and kill thousands of people.”

“Two airplanes,” says Carson.

“Are weapons worse,” I say, “or better? Would you rather die,
pfff
from a nuclear bomb? Or have your throat slit with a not-real-sharp sword? Or, god, like all those children in Africa, who had their hands cut off. How sick is that?”

“The thing that scares me the most,” says Leila, “is that the Plague will come back. Sores or pox all over your face. Or other, you know, private places.”

“The Plague has come back,” I point out. “It's called AIDS.”

“That's why sex is a bad idea.” This is Leila's mantra.

“You don't have to have sex to die from the West Nile virus,” says Zack. “Just get a mosquito bite. Or eat a burger and get E. coli. Or breathe and get SARS. Bird flu. Whatever. There are going to be about fifteen plagues that end the world, and every one of them will be really ugly.”

“What if the terrorists have biological weapons?” says Leila.

“Won't be long, Leila.” Zack loves to torment her. “If I were an evil genius, nothing would be more satisfying than infecting my enemies with smallpox or something that would cause festering boils, running pus and hideous pain.”

“Good thing you're not a genius,” says Carson.

Zack hits him. “But—Nat's question. Would you rather feel blinding, scorching pain and then die quickly? Or no pain, but prolonged, trembling decay instead?”

“My point,” says Audrey, “was Claire.”

“Oh yeah.” They're all nodding, being sensitive.

“Claire doesn't have a choice,” I say.

“Exactly,” says Audrey. “She got it both ways.”

“She's not dead,” I whisper.

But what if she dies?

And what if she doesn't?

This day is longer than a week. I'm on my bike in the dark; my light's busted. It's maybe midnight and I'm pedaling back and forth outside Joe-boy's house on George Crescent. It's too late to knock. But I want to know what happened.

Someone said he went to the hospital, but they're still not letting anyone in except family. Dad went over to his
house to talk to him, but I guess Joe was a mess; the police had been there. His parents let him stay in his room and gave Dad a whiskey. Dad was pissed off and told them he had a right to know what happened. But he still came home without seeing Joe.

I look in my phone and I've got his number.

I text him,
come down.

I see his head silhouetted upstairs, looking out.

I wave. He disappears, without a signal. Is he coming, or what?

Why did this happen only to Claire and not to Joe? Did he jump out of the way? Did he try to save her?

Did she break up with him?

I hear the side door open, so I ride up the driveway.

“Nat?”

“Hey, Joe.”

“How are you?”

“Oh, you know,” I say. “Bad. How about you?”