Retribution (18 page)

“I don't know,” Rachel said, still feeling him, his slimy, wet eyes inside her shirt.

“You like music? The Clash?” he said. “Nirvana? The Stones?” He turned on the radio then. “How 'bout this new guy, Kid Rock?”

“No,” Rachel said, watching the driver of the Cadillac bob his head to the music. “I don't like that stuff much.” And this was the truth: All that distortion and screaming had never done anything for her.

He turned the radio off. “Oh,” he said. He moved in his seat. Something was strange, something was wrong, and all Rachel could do was look at the road, watch the light change from red to green, and think, Please, please just let him go away, as she accelerated through the intersection.

“You're a quiet girl,” Mr. Bobs said. “You're a loner, aren't you?” Rachel glanced over at him and saw that he was tapping his fingers on the dash and that one of his knees was motoring up and down, up and down. He was nervous. “Could I tell you something?” he asked. Rachel didn't say anything. She just drove. “I'd like to tell you that I think I understand how difficult it must be for you right now.”

“Nothing's difficult,” Rachel said.

“With your mother's illness,” Mr. Bobs said. He cleared his throat, a terrible, snotty racket. “My mother died some two years ago.”

“My mother,” Rachel said, “is not ill.” This was her secret and she had told no one at Our Lady about it.

“She died of cancer, too,” Mr. Bobs said. “My mother did.”

“My mother is not dying,” she nearly shouted.

“I'm sorry,” Mr. Bobs said. “I just wanted you to know that if you needed to … to talk…” He touched her shoulder then, softly, and Rachel turned and saw herself doubled in the bright silver plates of Mr. Bobs's glasses where she gripped at the steering wheel with both hands. “Okay?” Mr. Bobs's mouth said. She did it then—slammed the brake pedal to the floor with all her might. Mr. Bobs screamed. His glasses flew off and hit the windshield. Cars roared by, honking, and a huge Tucson Transit Authority bus screeched to a stop right behind them. The bus driver shook his fist at her. “Jesus God,” Mr. Bobs yelled. Rachel started to drive again, while her teacher took deep, steadying breaths. “Why'd you do that?” he asked.

“I confused the brake with the gas, I guess,” Rachel said.

His face looked naked and smaller without the glasses. “We almost died,” he said. “Do you realize that we almost died? For crying out loud, kid, why are you smiling?”

She couldn't help it. It was a combination of his fear, his panic, his smallness, and the fact that he was right—they had almost died. They'd come within a hair's width, as her mother would say. “But we didn't,” she said.

“Didn't what?” Mr. Bobs seemed to be shaking.

“We didn't die,” she said.

II

No one liked her pictures. It was true: Their vision was dark and they seemed to record a large ratio of accidents and mishaps at the school sporting events. But Rachel could hardly be blamed. She'd simply and consistently found herself at the wrong place at the wrong time. At the first practice of the varsity basketball team, James Wood, the center, went up for a dunk and came down funny on his ankle. Rachel had been there behind the camera, so she snapped the picture of him cradling his right arm and hopping on one leg for the sideline. Then Blake Reems on the tennis team had been swatted so hard on the head by his doubles partner's aluminum graphite Prince racket that he'd hobbled to the fence and gripped the little chain links in order to stay on his feet. And finally, Linda Rose, a swimmer, had begun to climb out of the pool after winning the two-hundred-meter freestyle event, when she blacked out and oozed back into the water, her eyes closed and her face in utter and eerie peace.

“Interesting,” Mr. Marcosian said, looking at her photographs at the quarter-year meeting of the photography staff. “Hmm.” Mr. Marcosian was a short man with thinning ashy gray hair and small, quick eyes of a freakish, bunny rabbit blue. He wore brown corduroys and a brown cloth necktie almost every day, and said “interesting” and “hmm” a lot in his history classes, digging his fingers into his slight beard. “Aren't we winning?” he said. “Aren't there pictures of cheering and victory and such to take?”

And such?
Rachel hated words at times. “I didn't make these things happen,” Rachel said.

“Of course not,” Mr. Marcosian said. “But isn't photography about selection, about finding what we want to see and recording it?”

“I didn't select these things. They were just there. They found me. They selected me.” These words scared her. They seemed true.

At home, she showed the photographs to her mother, who felt well enough that afternoon to sit up in one of the living room armchairs and watch through the window as the afternoon storm darkened the sky. “Oh,” her mother said, holding up two of Rachel's pictures. “What happened to this poor girl?” It was Linda Rose, the swimmer, her eyes closed, her face in that deep, strange peace.

“She passed out,” Rachel said. “It was kind of weird. She'd just won, and while everybody's cheering, she closes her eyes and sinks to the bottom of the pool. Her mother actually jumped in with her clothes on. It was scary. But Linda was okay afterward.”

Carol said “Hmm” at the picture, just as Mr. Marcosian had.

“I want you to like them,” Rachel said.

“I don't, I'm afraid,” she said, putting them down. “I like that you did them. But I don't much care for them.”

“Great,” Rachel said. “Thanks.”

“Why would anyone take pictures like these?” her mother asked.

“God,” Rachel said. “Please don't ask me that. That's exactly what Mr. Marcosian thought.” She felt herself hating Mr. Marcosian then, the small man digging in his little gray beard for insights. She pictured spraying the tear gas in his blue rabbit eyes, making him claw at his face and weep. He wouldn't be saying “interesting” then. “Mr. Marcosian wants pictures of victory and cheering.”

“Sure,” her mother said. “I can understand that.”

“Fatuous,” Rachel said, a word she'd recently learned from a novel she was reading in English class. “Empty high school rhetoric.”

“Nice word,” her mother said, putting her head down on the chair and looking out the window at the storm, where a streak of lightning illuminated the sky, followed by a delayed rumbling that seemed to get beneath the house and shake it. “I like a good thunderstorm.”

“You're avoiding me,” Rachel said. “You won't even have an argument with me.”

“I'm tired,” Carol said. She closed her eyes for a moment, then, too slowly, opened them again and turned to look at Rachel, who noticed the extreme thinness of her mother's neck, the cords pushing against the white, white skin. “I wish you'd wear nicer shirts.” She pulled on a loose fold of Rachel's T-shirt. “Don't you have nice blouses? Maybe your father needs to take you shopping.”

“I don't want to go shopping with Dad.”

“And a little makeup, too. You haven't forgotten where my lipstick is?”

“You're a broken record,” Rachel said. But her mother didn't seem to hear her or care to hear her. More lightning flashed and the rain started coming down, and Rachel's mother closed her eyes again and seemed about to fall asleep. “What if I told you,” Rachel said, considering every word carefully now, “that one of my teachers at Our Lady wanted to sleep with me, wanted to have sex with me?”

Her mother sat up in her chair and looked at her. The shadows in the room were riddled by the downpour and fell in dark streaks down Carol's face. “I'd say that either you're choosing the wrong way to get my attention, or that you'd better go get your father and set up an appointment with Father Kelsh right this minute.” Father Kelsh was the Our Lady principal.

Rachel looked out the window. “I'm making it up, I guess.”

“Rachel,” her mother said in a tone that meant she'd better look at her. Rachel did this. “Don't, please, do that. Don't say that sort of thing.”

“I'm rebelling now. You said I was allowed to.”

“Ridiculous,” her mother said in a harsh, disciplinarian voice that Rachel remembered from her childhood and had not heard in years.

“You don't think I'm pretty,” Rachel said.

Carol smiled. “Of course I do.” Then she said, “I'm tired, Rachel. I wonder if you'd give me some time.”

*   *   *

Rachel found her father in the kitchen. “Mom thinks I'm ugly,” she said.

“Your mother's tired, kiddo.”

“‘Kiddo'?” she said. “I'm not exactly a kid anymore.” She and her father hadn't seen each other much lately. Last year, between working and spending time with her mother at the hospital, he'd almost never been home. And now that he worked only part-time at his bank and was around the house again, he'd call her things like “kiddo,” though he mostly just sat in his large chair in the living room or in his study with the lights off and said nothing. All the same, she loved him, his round, soft face and mostly bald head, loved him so much that it had been hard for her, when she first went to high school, to find the skinny, bony-faced boys with all their hair at all attractive. “Daddy,” she said.

“Yes,” he said. His necktie was loosened and he'd just made himself a drink. But his eyes were red. He'd been crying in here, she knew, and he'd stopped for her and wouldn't mention it. Everyone in this house did their crying alone, and Rachel guessed that she liked it best that way.

“How's the bank?”

“The bank's the bank,” he said.

“School's school,” she said, even though he hadn't asked. She dropped her photographs on the table in front of him. “Nobody likes my pictures.”

He tried to rescue her then. “I do,” he said.

“Not very convincing,” she said.

“They're art pictures, I'd say. Not easy to understand. Challenging to the viewer.”

“Wrong,” she said. “They're sports pictures. They're for the Our Lady yearbook. I'm the sports photographer.”

“Sports photographer?” he said. He'd obviously assumed she was joking.

“Yeah,” she said. “Sports is my big hobby. I love sports.” There was a long silence between them. More lightning flashed outside and the kitchen windows ran with gray water and the rain came down still harder, a thousand million tiny explosions pummeling the roof overhead, and they didn't know what to say to each other. “You told my teachers about Mom,” she said. “You told them and you didn't tell me you were going to. Why'd you do that?”

“We thought it might be easier on you that way. We knew you wouldn't want us to, but we thought it best.”

“Well,” Rachel said, “it's not easier.”

Her father took a sip of his drink and stared into it as he spoke. “We'd like you to see someone, Rachel.”

“A shrink?” she asked.

“Sort of.”

“Why doesn't Mom ask me?”

“Your mother's sick.” His voice became almost angry.

“What if I say no?”

“We'd rather you not say no.”

Rachel looked down at her feet, at her big, blue Nikes. “No,” she said.

*   *   *

When Rachel needed to cry, she retreated after school to the far stall in the basement girls' bathroom, which was almost always empty. Once locked into her stall, she cried out loud and heard her voice, mournful, hollow, angry, amplified in that strange, cold echo chamber. After blowing her nose and calming herself, she'd start again, this time louder, more ferociously, until she had exhausted herself. Sometimes she'd flush the toilet beneath her so that the roar of the water would muffle the moans of her own voice. Rachel hated public rest rooms, but they seemed like the right place for grief: dirty, semiprivate, shameful places, smelling of chemicals and urine.

Afterward she'd sit on the toilet and read the graffiti, which was especially graphic because, only three years ago, Our Lady had been an all-boys Jesuit school, and due to limited funding, many of the girls' rooms had been left as is, with the arcane and mostly disgusting signs of boys everywhere. Along the walls, a row of urinals, rusted and now dry, remained, the strange presence of which always summoned in Rachel's mind a line of boys facing the wall, legs spread execution-style, the seats of their pants baggy and hitched on their skinny hips as they held their penises like water pistols and aimed at the little silver-latticed drains, and maybe spit or pulled a pen from their crotch pocket to write, “Keep your eyes up here, hand master!”
Hand master.
She didn't know exactly what one was, but the dark suggestion of greedy and obsessive masturbation didn't escape her, and it made her giggle through her drying tears.

And looking at the scratched aqua-blue door of her stall and the dividers on both sides of her, she read dozens of other disgusting predatory markings naming girls who were either fictitious or had come from the old sister school, St. Mary's High, across the street from Our Lady, where Rachel's mother had been a student. “Linda Crotch likes it up the butt,” she read. She studied a small illustration of a jovial penis, a large grin drawn across its snakelike face. It thought to itself in a balloon drawn above, “Boy, would I like some pussy.” “Kindra lets me come in her cunt,” another message read, accompanied by a faded sketch of the cunt itself, an inky hole surrounded by curly hair. And as Rachel sat on the toilet urinating or as she stood, her panties pulled down around her knees, changing her pad, she felt a little sick to her stomach. Surrounded by pictures of erect penises and open vaginas, she'd wipe herself and pull her panties up with the tips of her fingers, not wanting to touch her own messy self and thinking of Mr. Bobs, his glasses, his thin, sucked-in cheeks, the fact that he had touched her, if only on the shoulder. Did he think of Rachel's vagina, her cunt, her hole? Even her mother, her dying body now shrunk to almost nothing, had smiled at her, remembering boyfriends, and said, “Sure. I had a few in my time.” Rand had a penis, a scrotum, and he must, behind his sweet smile, his funny and pure foreign accent, have felt this way. And Rachel herself, reading these strange messages, had wondered what it would be like to sit down on a cock and hold it deep inside her. She'd hurry to leave then, exit the stall, wash her hands thoroughly, at least twice, with too much pink soap from the dispensers, and rush outside, where, trying to forget her thoughts, she'd board a city bus home or, on Wednesdays, get into Mr. Bobs's car.