All These Lives (12 page)

Dad starts to introduce the man. “Dani, this is Brod—,” but I cut him off.

I grab his arm and clutch it. The words are poison. They come up with blood and guts and acid and, “I think Jena’s dead.”

19

If you want to see your father flip out: an exercise in self-expression, honesty and “psychological unlocking”

by Danielle Bailey

If you want to see your father flip out, then borrow his car and take it for a ride late at night, all without telling him. Oh, and spill blue smoothie on his leather passenger seat.

Things you might hear include: “What the hell, Fallen Child! This smoothie isn’t even blueberry. It’s blue for nothing.”

Or “If I had known you were the one driving it, I’d have called the police sooner.”

But if you want to see your father’s face crumble and see him dizzy (but standing tall, strong, taking it like a man), if you want to prick every one of his molecules and make them bleed, then just tell him your fraternal twin is dead.

He might not have much to say for a minute, but when he gets it together, he gets it together. Let him lead you outside and calmly call your mother. She won’t pick up her damn cell phone or the house phone, and you will curse her. Curse her curse her curse her because where the hell is she?

Your father drives drives drives down the slippery highway and doesn’t say one word. Not one. Well, he says a few. He asks how you know and you tell him you just do. You felt it. Then hug yourself and let noisy tears fall, detouring to the tip of your nose before suicide-jumping off it.

Every time he starts to say something about how things will be okay and how he loves you and he’s sure it’s nothing, he stops. He doesn’t know things will be okay. It doesn’t matter that he loves you. It is not nothing.

You know this and have known this for many years, but today, right now, he’s just figured it out. He knows nothing.

Maybe he thought he would save your sister, your mother, and you.

Today he knows he is, for lack of a better, more dad-friendly word, a fool. He cannot. And God willnot.

Five minutes away from your house, your mother calls. You hear her voice through the cell phone, falsely cheery, weak, and so guilty. She was just in the shower. Jena is asleep.

Everything is still the same.

Your father apologizes to you after he hangs up, even though you both know that it is really you who ought to apologize. You accept it anyway.

Somewhere deep inside he is very, very angry with you. Why did you pull the rug out from under him?

He tap tap taps all the way home.

Instead of coming in with you, he goes around the outside of the house and has his first cigarette in many, many months.

Feel proud.

This is how to see your father flip out.

There are other ways, of course, but this is the easiest.

On Monday after school, I refuse to answer a single one of Harry-with-an-
i
’s questions. For the first fifteen minutes, she prods and pokes, trying to wring words of any kind out of me. But when I’m confident she’s ready to give up, she just starts rambling on about personal release and the freedom in
documenting
one’s thoughts, and then she pushes a pen and notebook in front of me. Finally, when I hand this in at the end of the session, she has only one thing to say: “Why is psychological unlocking in quotation marks? Sure you don’t need me to explain it to you again?”

“I just want my M&M’s.”

They are all peanut this time.

*   *   *

“What if I cut my hair?”

I am sitting on the carpet in Jena’s room, running my fingers through my bangs. I should be doing homework and she should be napping, but since Saturday’s freak-out, the hallway between our rooms feels like the English Channel. All the corners in this house are too far away.

“How short?” she asks.

“Short.” I hold my fingers about an inch apart.

She is lying on her side facing me, and she cringes. “It takes a certain bone structure to pull that off. You don’t have it.”

I kick the foot of her bed. “Then I’ll dye it, go lighter.”
We’ll look like twins
.

There’s a family portrait in the dining room where we are wearing all white, a “natural” moment of familial bliss that was totally choreographed by Mom. Jena and I are seven and I am missing a front tooth, and she’s been caught mid-blink, but it’s the one picture that always makes people ask if we are identical.

“Please God, don’t. The Baileys have endured enough hair catastrophes.”
Namely hers,
she doesn’t say, and we laugh.

“Keep your hair, Backup.” And when she says that, I stop laughing, and I’m suddenly sure I don’t want to keep my hair.

We are silent, except for her breath, always so loud. My soundless breath is a betrayal.

Then she says, quietly, “I need you to look like Dani. Please don’t touch your hair.”

And I know I won’t.

20

I wake up thinking about the time I broke my arm, when I was ten.

It was Jena’s idea for us to build a tree house because, even then, Mom’s constant hovering was cramping her style. Although, of course, back then my mother hovered for different reasons. Or a different brand of the same reason, since she’s always been afraid. I think that week she’d read about some kid who was stolen while his mother was waiting in line at the bank. In the weeks that followed, she barely let us out of her sight. Mom quizzed us on emergency phone numbers, pulled the plug on sleepovers, and checked on us multiple times during the night. It was good practice, I guess, but sometimes we just wanted to be left alone.

From all the way across the hall that summer morning, I could hear the muffled sounds of drawers opening and shutting, and Jena’s window sliding up and down.
Up and down.
When I went into her room, Jena’s first words to me were an order. “Shut the door.” Her eyes followed my hands as they wrapped around the knob and the door snapped back into place. My sister had always been bossy, and if you didn’t know much about us, you probably assumed Jena was older.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“I’m building a tree house,” she said matter-of-factly.

I stood there, staring at her. She’d spoken about a tree house before, but I hadn’t expected her to
build one
. The last I knew of it, we were trying to convince Dad to help us make one. Maybe in the fall, when he had some time off work, he’d said.

Jena didn’t like to wait. A small pile of resources was building up in front of her closet door now. Books, old crosswords and Archie comics, and the small radio that used to be Grandpa’s.

“So where will the tree house be?”

“I’ll show you,” she said, and walked toward her window, slid it up, and then motioned for me to come on. It was the huge oak tree just outside her bedroom, the one Dad sometimes frowned up at and mentioned something about hiring people to trim or remove it altogether. He told Mom he didn’t like the way one branch was leaning, and she mostly just acted uninterested and said there was a lot that needed taking care of, when he had time.

My sister had draped a bedsheet from a branch above the leaning one, so the cloth hung down like a curtain, forming the “walls” of the tree house. The leaning branch itself was the floor, where Jena planned to sit.

“I’m taking stuff up there now,” she said, starting to fill an enormous tote bag with the radio and books that had been in front of her closet door. “Wanna come?”

At first, I just watched her. Her hair had been pulled back into a messy ponytail, and it went down just past her shoulders, frizzy and thick, the color of hazelnuts. Then, slowly, she went through the window, holding the frame around the glass for support, and cautiously stepped onto the tree’s nearest branch. It was a sturdy branch, in no danger of breaking. And Jena had excellent balance. If Mom had been willing to take her to gymnastics—Jena wanted to do gymnastics, but Mom wanted her to compromise and take dance, so my sister decided on soccer—she might have had a promising competitive career.

By the time she’d come and gone twice both ways, I was starting to get into the idea of a tree house. Sure, it wasn’t at all like the one I’d imagined Dad building for us, but it could be fun.

From our spot in the tree, we could hear Mom’s mournful opera music travel throughout the house. We could hide up there with our crossword puzzles and leftover candy from our birthday, and watch the neighbors come and go without realizing that we saw every picked wedgie and nose, every cigarette smothered and mouth sprayed before going in to kiss a spouse. And Jena’s tote bag, filled with the books and stuff from inside, hung down from the branch above us so we had basically everything we needed. This was going to be fun.

I didn’t fall going up the first time. I was going back inside the house to get the half-pack of grape bubblegum on my nightstand. We could share it and compare bubbles as we enjoyed an afternoon of understated delinquency. But as I was walking along that branch, the branch that Dad complained leaned too close to the house, my ankle rolled a little to the right, and I fell.

I only twisted my ankle, but I broke my right arm, the one that
isn’t
in a cast right now.

Jena cried as Mom drove us to the hospital. She told my mother in one rapid-breathed confession that it was all her fault and that she’d made me do it. I don’t know if she thought she was protecting me, or why she felt she needed to.

I’ve never forgotten how much my arm hurt—not because it was any worse than anything I’ve broken since, but because it was the first time. And let’s just say the discovery that humans are breakable was a monumental one for me.

I proudly displayed the X-ray on my wall for the next five years, the grays and whites and in-between colors shifting and twirling into one another. Mom took it down the week Jena was diagnosed. I suppose it would have been a little insensitive to leave it up, though I think the sight of my right arm, whole and normal and healthy while hers isn’t, is a greater injustice.

I haven’t thought about the time I broke my arm in years, not even after crashing Spencer’s bike and breaking my wrist. But since I woke up, it’s been all I can think about. And now, as I sit here in the library with Jack Penner, watching him work on our assignment, it
still
won’t leave me.

And he notices. “You seem a little distracted.”

“I know,” I sigh. “I’m sorry. I’m usually so
present
and, like, involved.”

Jack doesn’t comment on that. “What are you thinking about?” As I turn to face him, he looks away, seemingly embarrassed to have asked the question. I’m not sure why. Why he asked, or why he’s embarrassed.

“What are
you
thinking about?” I shuffle a little closer to him as he pulls the book on Great Mathematicians of the Past closer to himself.

“The assignment.”

I pretend to consider this for a second. “In general, what do you think about?”

“In general?” he shrugs. “Everything. School. My family. My dog. My friends.” He’s still not looking at me.

I decide to give him a minute to return to his natural coloring, but he surprises me by breaking the silence. “You think about your sister a lot, don’t you?”

“I can tell,” he adds, quickly, “because that’s when you’re the most distracted.”

I feel the back of my neck start to burn. I definitely liked Jack better when he was too afraid to talk to me. I
like
Jack better when he’s too afraid to talk to me.

“I don’t know, Jack,” I whisper, moving even closer to him, letting my hand hang limply from the wrist, brushing his knee. There, that ought to make him shut up. “Right now, she’s the furthest thing from my mind.” I’m so close to him that I suspect the heat on my face is my breath bouncing onto his face and jumping back at me. So close that I don’t remember his eyes ever being this gray or unflinching or cutting into mine as they are now. But I don’t fully comprehend how close that is. Not until Jack’s lips are brushing against mine and, behind the encyclopedias and the educational magazines nobody ever reads, he is kissing me. He’s kissing me and his lips are soft and I can hear him breathing and me breathing and I think my left hand just fell off.

Fifteen seconds. That’s how long I’d say it lasts, if I had to guesstimate. Then we’re pulling apart and my hand won’t stop shaking and Jack looks like someone painted him red. He stares at a spot in the carpet and begins to mumble something.

The words fall out of his mouth, still tainted by my breath. “I … didn’t … I’m sorry…” Or at least, I think that’s what he’s saying.

But I interrupt him, so I can’t be sure. “I’ve broken my arm before,” I say, and why am I still shaking? “When I was ten. And I can’t stop thinking about it.”

Then I get up and leave him sitting there, embarrassed and stunned and anxious.

And even now, it’s all I can think about. That time I broke my arm when I was ten. And not the fact that I just let Jack Penner kiss me. With his pant legs riding up, and his Star Wars socks exposed. And the possibility that I kissed him back.

21

But when I
do
allow myself to think about it, to
really think about it
, I want to kill myself. Which sounds better than it is.

He probably irons his jeans the night before school. And, God, his underwear. I bet he irons his underwear. Two days later, and this is all I can think about.

When the curiosity becomes too much, I tear a page from my empty math notebook and write:
Do you iron your jeans? And underwear?

I fold it into quarters, then into more quarters, and I should know how many quarters that makes total (we are in math class, after all), but I don’t. I slip my hand under the desk and hold it out to him. Then I watch him while he reads it. His face falls, because he was probably hoping it said something different. A romantic proposition about having his babies, or being his girlfriend at the very least.