Wrecked (7 page)

My father placed his fork on his plate, wiped his mouth with his napkin, and glared at me. “Why are you repeating the same incorrect information?” He had that irritated tone of voice. The tone that comes right before the mad one, and the yelling.

“That’s what we learned,” I insisted, only now I wasn’t so certain, and the fuzziness got fuzzier.

“Harvey,” my mom said.

“Think about it again, Anna,” he ordered. “Put down your glass, straighten yourself up in your seat, and take a minute to think.”

So I put down my glass without drinking, and then I couldn’t think at all. I was sure I had it right. I remembered learning it and practicing it and planning that it was what I would say if he asked the question that night. Only, now it wasn’t right.

“I’m thinking,” I said. Was it a trick question? “But that’s what I learned.”

“She meant denominator,” Jack mumbled.

“Why?” my father asked him. Jack looked down at his plate. The vein in my father’s temple pulsed. “Why do you do it?”

Jack kept looking at his plate. I was so thirsty.

“You could see that I was trying to help Anna figure something out for herself, couldn’t you?” my dad asked, only it wasn’t a question. Jack looked up at him and then back down again. “Why did you interfere?” With my dad looking at Jack, I figured it was safe to pick up my glass. I did. I drank.

“Is this really necessary?” my mom tried. But Dad never listens to her.

“Well, what did you learn today?” my father asked Jack. “Since you’re eager to share what you know.”

I took another drink, glad he wasn’t on me anymore.

“I learned that sometimes a script is better if there’s not very much dialogue in it.”

My father stared at Jack. “What?”

“Did you ever see
The Four Hundred Blows
?” Jack asked. “I learned that less dialogue is better from watching
The Four Hundred Blows
today, plus from watching some other films this week and thinking about it a lot.”

“You watched another movie?” my dad said. “What have I told you about watching all that TV?”

“It wasn’t TV,” Jack said. “And I did my homework first.”

“Did you watch it on a TV screen?” my father asked him. Jack nodded. “Then, it’s TV”

“No,” Jack said quietly. “It’s not.”

“Don’t argue with me,” my dad said. So Jack shut up.

I don’t recognize the number on my cell caller ID. But I answer it anyway.

“A million dollars?” Her voice is soft, and the edges of it don’t quite meet.

“Ellen!” I yell. I’m sitting in front of the TV on the L-shaped couch in the family room, not doing my SAT prep handbook.

“The problem with a million dollars,” she tells me in that voice, “is that after taxes it’s really only half a million.” She still sounds like her, only way, way tired.

“Ellen!” I yell again. I picture her, sitting up maybe, in her hospital bed, a tan phone pressed to her ear.

“And half a million dollars really isn’t that much money these days.”

“How are you? How’s your lung? How are your ribs? How’s your leg?”

“My leg is really heavy. My ribs and the place where they had the chest tube is brutal if I laugh. I made this funny nurse leave this morning.”

“Does everything hurt that much all the time?”

“Not so much. Painkillers.”

“You drug addict.”

“Yeah.”

“You sound dreamy,” I tell her.

“That’s about right,” she says.

“Everybody’s asking about you all the time. Have you seen all the cards and stuff?”

“Yeah,” she says.

“The bear is from Jason.”

“Isn’t it weird how much like Whitey it looks, only bigger?”

“Totally.”

“Isn’t Jason so cool?”

“Totally,” I say again.

“I wish he wasn’t gay.”

“I know.”

“How are you?”

“I don’t know.”

“How’s Jack?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did your father have a conniption?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “You’re fading.”

“Yeah,” she says. There’s this silence. I can hear her breathe. Then she goes, “Ten million. Ten million would be a different story.”

“Ten million?” I ask.

“I’d probably do just about anything for ten,” she says, and suddenly I know for sure what Jason was talking about earlier. She’s got this thinking tone of voice. This tone where she’s taking an idea seriously, turning it over in her mind. Paying attention. “Yeah,” she goes. “Anything. Except kill, injure, or molest somebody.”

“I did that for free,” I go, before I even realize what we’ve just said.

And then I start crying. So hard I don’t make a sound. There’s this long silence while I lose it. My SAT book slips off my lap and thunks onto the floor. “Are you still there?” I finally manage to choke out.

“Hmm, Anna,” she says, and then I think she falls asleep.

WEDNESDAY NIGHT. ELEVEN DAYS SINCE I KILLED CAMERON.

I sit on the L of the couch and try to study. I have a biology quiz tomorrow, and I need to get a good grade on it. It’s hard to focus. I mean, my right eye can’t focus, obviously, because of the drops to keep my pupil dilated, but my brain has no excuse.
The key to speciation is reproductive isolation
. I’ve written it in my spiral, circled it, and starred it, so it must be important. I open up the textbook and try to find
speciation. The key to speciation is reproductive isolation
. Ms. Riffing gives us rhymes to help us remember. She puts tunes to them to help us more. She’s a great teacher, and even though I don’t like biology, I love her class.
The key to speciation is reproductive isolation. The key to speciation is reproductive isolation
. I hear my mother’s footsteps on the thirdfloor stairs, heading down. I look at the clock. Twenty minutes have passed, and I don’t know what the hell I’m reading.

“I can’t concentrate,” I tell my mom when she walks in. She sits on the edge of the couch.

“You’re not worried about it, are you?” she asks. I don’t know what she means by “it.” Failing the quiz? My eye? What?

“A little,” I say anyway

“There’s nothing to worry about!” That’s my father, yelling from his spot at the kitchen table. It’s where he likes to play poker online. He sets up his laptop and plays for hours. His favorite game is called Texas Hold ’Em. He plays for real money. He has a rule for himself that he’s not allowed to keep playing if he loses more than a thousand dollars in one year. I don’t know what he does with the money he wins. I don’t even know if he ever wins. I just hear him cursing a lot and yelling at the screen.

“You’re worried about Ellen, too, I guess,” my mom goes.

“And other stuff.” Things I can’t say out loud to her because I don’t have any practice saying anything important out loud to her. Like,
I killed somebody. How do you make the fact of something like that go away? How do you make the fact of something like that not nag and poke at you) like some kind of virus that’s stuck in your blood, stuck in your cells, stuck in who you are and who you will be forever?

“Would you leave her alone, please?” my father shouts from the kitchen again.

“I’m not bothering her,” my mother calls back. “We’re talking, Harvey.” She says
talking
as if it’s a word my father doesn’t know the meaning of. Then she looks at me. “I’m not bothering you, am I?”

“Amanda!” my father yells while I shake my head. She’s not bothering me exactly, but then again, I’m not used to
her trying to talk to me so much either. We both hear my father stand up and start walking toward the family room.

“Well,” she says, “come upstairs if you want. I’ll be in my study.” I never go up to the third floor. I think the last time must have been when I was about ten.

I hear her pass my father in the hall on her way to the stairs. She hisses something at him, and he snaps something right back, and when I can tell he’s resettled himself with poker, I get off the couch and go up to my room.

I sit cross-legged on my bed, staring at a sheet of white stationery edged in silver. I’m trying to think of what to write to Cameron’s family. I can’t think of anything beyond
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Polk
. After that I just start to hear screaming, stopped, and I’m shaking so hard I don’t think I could write a word anyway.

So I stand up and cross my arms tight and pace the room. I make three laps back and forth before the shaking slows down. I land in front of my mirror.

“Listen, Jack,” I say to my reflection. My curls are tied back in a mass of metallic spirals, and my skin is so pale it’s almost the same shade as the stationery. I don’t have to wear the spaghetti strainer at home unless I’m sleeping, so I can see that my eye is almost back to normal except for a greenish tint to the skin around it and my enlarged pupil. “I can’t believe that…” I stop. That sounds too fake or something. Plus, I never knew the left side of my mouth twitches when I talk. Ugh. “Jack,” I say again, trying to keep my mouth moving evenly. “When I was driving home that night, I had no idea …”

I shut up and watch my reflection give me the finger. “Try it again, and come up with something decent,” she tells me.

“Look. Jack,” I try again. “You must be feeling …”

But it’s too hard. How are you supposed to put into words something so awful there are no words for it at all?

I do a search on the Internet. There’s a lot of sites for if you’re dying. They give you links and medical information about what happens if you have this kind of cancer or that kind of heart condition, and what medications and operations you can have and your chances of getting any better. A bunch of other sites are for if someone you love dies. They’re about mourning and grief. I read some of them, and it seems like nobody really knows all that much about it, even though they all have a lot to say. If you’re mourning, it’s like there’s no rules about what you’re supposed to feel when, or for how long. Sometimes you feel better if you can talk to other people who are also mourning, and sometimes that makes you feel worse. All the postings seem really confident, like they’re the ones with the right answers, but then the next one will just as confidently say something totally different. I try to decide how much I’m mourning Cameron, and it’s hard to figure out. She wasn’t my sister, or even my friend really. I don’t think I miss her exactly. It’s more like I’m horrified every time I think of her, and I feel this dread and guilt that’s a part of that ink in my blood all the time.

I think about forwarding some of the grief sites to Jack where he would see them out in California, but then I’m not sure if I should. So I don’t. Instead I keep searching. These other sites come up about if you want to die. Some of them tell you all the reasons why you shouldn’t commit suicide. Because you’ll go to hell, which is worse than whatever you’re unhappy about here on Earth. Because other people will be hurt and will miss
you. Because it’s wrong. Because you don’t really want to die, but you just want help to feel happier. Then other sites tell you exactly all the different ways you can kill yourself They tell you about the best way to hang yourself, the most effective method to slash your wrists, which pills to take if you’re serious about dying. I don’t like those sites. They make me nervous. Besides, I don’t want to commit suicide.

Mostly I want to find out what you’re supposed to do when you’ve killed someone else. What you’re supposed to do for all the people who really loved her. And also what you’re supposed to feel.

But I can’t find any sites about that.

If I were Jack, I’d probably create one. Except I’m not him. I’m only me.

Somehow I fall asleep, and it feels like I’ve slept for hours, only when I wake up, on top of my comforter, the clock tells me it’s forty-five minutes later.

I can’t fall back asleep, and I can’t concentrate on anything that requires my brain, so I decide maybe I’ll clean. At least you don’t have to think when you clean.

My parents collect glass. Blown glass. They have vases and paperweights and sculptures all over the house. I’ll go around and dust them. When they’re totally clean, the pieces by our windows change colors with the light somehow. Most of the them have a lot of orange and red in them. But the newer ones have more blue and purple. They’re kind of cool.

I get myself downstairs and into the kitchen, rummage around underneath the kitchen sink, and find a relatively clean rag and some Windex.

My father doesn’t say anything, but he does start to shuffle
his real deck of cards while he stares at the laptop screen. He shuffles like a professional, making the cards whir and jump and fan without even looking at them.

“God damn it,” he mutters. Then he starts to hum.

I start in the living room, where the most fragile pieces are. Spray and wipe. Wipe and spray. They’re not so dusty to begin with, but I can tell they look better after I’ve gotten to them.

“What are you doing?” my dad finally calls to me.

“Cleaning,” I tell him. I notice that if I slow my hand to stop a rag over the glass, my hand buzzes just the littlest bit, as if it were resting on the sill of a moving bus or train.

“Cleaning the glass?” my father asks.

“Yeah,” I say. I imagine him cutting his deck of cards over and over and tapping at his mouse.

“Remember when Jack broke the bud vase?” he calls.

We were ten and eleven, and we were playing indoor baseball. That’s when you pull the pom-pom off the tip of a knit cap, you make chair cushions the bases, and the fireplace is home plate. You bat with your palm, and you use ghost men. It’s a good game when it’s raining out, or when you’re bored at night. We weren’t supposed to be playing it because of the glass.

I was up. I smacked the pom-pom over Jack’s head. He had to turn to chase it. I ran like mad to first and slid off it toward the blue armchair cushion for second. Rounding that, I slipped on the wood floor and grabbed at the window seat, trying to stop myself. The bud vase went down. And shattered.

“God damn it!” my father yelled from somewhere in the house. We heard his feet pounding the hallway above and then pounding the stairs. “That better not be glass!” He
charged into the living room and saw us stuck, frozen. His face was pink. He scanned the room, taking in the cushions, the pom-pom lying innocently in the corner, the fragments of glass, like a kaleidoscope exploded.