All This Life (5 page)

Balloon Boy and his dad walk down the dune, across the dirt to the edge of the curb. “Your girlfriend really did it this time,” Larry says, guzzling from the whiskey bottle.

“Be,” Balloon Boy calls to Uncle Felix, knowing the rest of his thought but waiting for his mouth to catch up, “nice.”

“Huh?” his uncle asks.

“Be. Nice.”

“Stay out of this,” says Felix.

The music blares from Sara's car, a rock and roll song with the singer rapping over the electric guitars. Balloon Boy wants to hear the whole song, wants to soak up the way the rapper deflects all those quick syllables off of one another. That's what he wants for his birthday: words coming fast and agile from his mouth.

“Don't hurt my car,” Sara says to Felix while flinging her door open and standing up like she wants to fight. Balloon Boy used to joke that she's so small because someone shoved her in the dryer without reading the tag first.

“You almost killed me,” Uncle Felix says. “Why can't you drive like a normal person?”

“What do you know about normal?” she says. “You're fishing in the road! Hank's going to kick your ass for busting up my car.” She hops back in the driver's seat, tearing up the street something jugular.

Uncle Felix picks up her side mirror, shaking his head, and says, “She sure made some choppy waves on our calm waters, right boys?” and Larry agrees, tilting the bottle again. They go back to what these three remaining members of the Curtis clan had been doing in the first place, two enjoying some time practicing their fly fishing, while one imagines a life outside the concrete river of Traurig.

Before long, Sara's car comes screeching back toward them, bolting from the cul-de-sac and barreling their way. Past a yard
with an aboveground pool out front, surrounded by an army of tricycles. Past the house with all the wind chimes hanging out front. Past the cactus decorated to look like the Incredible Hulk. No one else is outside their house, late morning, too hot, too stifling, and yet this is the specific time that Rodney's dad and uncle like to road fish: They've told Balloon Boy many times that they thrive in extreme conditions, drawing a comparison between their noon sessions and boxers who train in the mountains, at extreme elevations, so when they go back and fight at sea level, they're in superior cardiovascular shape. Does the analogy hold up? Not really, but Rodney would nod at them,
Yup, you guys are like professional boxers, uh-huh, no doubt.

Once he sees the car coming, Uncle Felix steps into the middle of the road again. Pulls his arm back for another cast when the car hits the brakes and Sara's brother, Hank, rockets out. He's gowned in muscles like an old-fashioned gladiator.

“You kick her car, Felix?”

“Ease up now, Hank.”

“Did you?”

“I did.”

“It was me,” says Larry.

“Me,” Balloon Boy says for the sake of solidarity. He doesn't want to get involved, but that's what the remaining members of the Curtis clan do, stick together no matter what. Unlike some other Curtises, a gone mom who fled to California after the thump-splat ouch.

Hank points a paw right at Rodney and says, “Stay out of this, Balloon Boy.” Then he snaps at Uncle Felix, “She's only eighteen. What kind of man scares a little girl?”

Felix throws his fishing pole down on the grass, saying, “The kind who almost gets made road kill.”

“Give me her mirror,” Hank says.

“That's my mirror now,” says Uncle Felix.

“It's mine,” Larry says.

“Mine,” Balloon Boy says, fearing the worst.

The Curtis boys and their skyscraping loyalty, unlike some Curtises who need fair weather all the time. Whenever Rodney asks where his mom went, Larry says, “It never rains in California so she went there,” and Balloon Boy wants so badly to ask more questions—why in California, why not here with me, is she still at that old return address? But it would take him too long to gut out those inquiries and he knows his dad won't tell him much.

Hank spots Sara's side mirror lying snapped and jagged on the lawn and moves toward it.

“Don't touch that,” Uncle Felix says.

But Hank picks it up and threatens each witness from the Curtis clan: “Don't treat my sister like that again or else.” He goes back across the lawn and steps on and cracks in two Felix's fishing pole.

“Three of us against one of you!” Uncle Felix says, incensed.

“You've gotta be kidding,” Hank says.

Felix lunges toward Hank, who cocks his fist, the one holding Sara's side mirror, and hits Uncle Felix with it. Felix falls, bleeding from the temple. Larry tries to tackle Hank but gets fixed in some vicious headlock and tumbles down after one hit in the kidney.

Hank looks at Balloon Boy. “You wanna dance, too?”

He doesn't, of course. Doesn't even want to be outside, in this sweltering pointless situation. Doesn't want to road fish or watch them drink whiskey anymore. Doesn't want to be here in this disconnected head, the muscles in his mouth not responding to any cues from his brain. Rodney doesn't want to be stuck away from all the good stuff, the real stuff, doesn't want to feel this cruel division between himself and all the other humans, those people with their own baggage and yet solely because his words are slow, he's ostracized.

He doesn't want to watch anything bad happen to Sara, and especially doesn't want to fight Hank, who will no doubt beat him into a coma.

These are all the things he doesn't want, things he never asked
for, and yet he possesses all of them. These are his birthday gifts. These are his future.

He yearns to be back in bed, where there are fantasies and possibilities that today will turn out to be the one he's been waiting for, the one to launch him on a splendid adventure, his hopes taking flight.

And that word—
flight
—is what lured him onto the weather balloon that day. The idea of an effortless voyage. At the time he wanted Sara to get on the balloon with him, but thankfully she refused, watched him drift up until he crashed back down, thump-splat ouch.

The importance of flight has only flown higher itself, gaining more altitude over the years. Back on the day of his accident, Rodney was merely a boy showing off for his girl, being silly, with no concept of anything like consequences or injuries. But since his mom left and his talking left and Sara left, Rodney's yearning for flight has been profound. If there is a quest awaiting his arrival, it has to be soon.

Yet before any grandiose adventures can crack open, there is the issue of Hank, steroided Hank, standing and frothing in front of him. The last thing Rodney wants to do is lose a fight, but unfortunately that's what's going to happen. He's going to defend his stupid uncle and his liquored-up dad because they are his family. They stayed. They've taken care of him, as best they can, and he's going to get his ass kicked for solidarity.

4.

K
athleen is a caricaturist. One of those entertainers and hustlers and performers down by Fisherman's Wharf—the part of San Francisco reserved for tourists. It's all shops and restaurants and trinkets. All cioppino and cracked crabs. Clam chowder served in sourdough bread bowls. Ferries to Alcatraz. Carousel rides. Salt-water taffy stands. Sea lions barking on K-Dock, bellowing like drunkards. Gulls, those winged mercenaries, trailing children for lost pieces of corn dog bun. The whole bay can be seen from the end of Pier 39. Sailboats and tankers and the Golden Gate Bridge. The fog creeping in from the Pacific.

She sets up her easel on the Embarcadero, almost skipped work today because of what the brass band did earlier that morning. Traffic still hasn't recovered. News vans cluster at each end of the bridge, various channels' anchors hiking out into the middle to make their own melodramatic reporting. Helicopters hovering in the sky above, offering their viewers an aerial shot. A letter has surfaced, a kind of suicide note, found on the kitchen table of one of the jumpers' apartments: a manifesto, saying that they are all musical notes in a melody, a tune that would carry them away to
paradise. Now they'd live a life unburdened by human frailties. “A note in a melody,” said the letter, “doesn't have any concerns. A note is a note.”

So that created a whole new batch of talking points for the news hubs, gossiping with new guests and experts who spin context, analysis, condemnation. They demonize despite the fact they don't really know what happened. Or why.

But the way Kat figured it, if tourists have spent money to fly here, they aren't wallowing in hotel rooms, pondering the significance of this tragedy. If this is your vacation, you explore. So she sits next to her easel, waiting for her first customer.

There are other caricaturists out and about, too, though not as gifted as she. Kat can draw wonderfully, and for five dollars people go home with a solid souvenir. She was one of those kids always doodling on something or other and that habit carried her into the world. She didn't have to work when she was married. Her husband had a good union gig so she stayed home with her young son. Once he started kindergarten she'd watercolor and sometimes oil paint. But her first love was drawing portraits, headshots. There's something special about constructing your version of someone else.

And with caricatures, it should have a bit of funhouse mirror to it, which is a freedom she loves taking advantage of. You have buckteeth? Well, now they're going to jet out of your mouth looking like water slides. Eyes close together? She'll only draw one eye, right in the middle of your face. Big ears? See how they look like open car doors.

She does this with a smile on her face, which translates to her clientele, most of them taking her facial remixes in stride, giggling and shaking their heads. Sure, occasionally some sulk seeing their “worst” features exaggerated, branding them in idiosyncrasy. But to Kathleen that's the way life works: We are defined by our worst features. We are those mistakes. We are defined by the discrepancy between the life we think we have versus the one everyone else sees.

We have a collection of mistakes and failures, stacked up like those sea lions on the docks, a pile of all the things we've flubbed.

Our mistakes barking into the air.

She sets up her chair, another for her clients. Gets out her pens, pencils, and erasers. Sometimes, she'll simply sketch a bit, whatever's on her mind, let tourists walk close and inspect her talent before committing to a purchase. More often than not, in these instances, she'll draw her own caricature. Let the general public see that she can laugh at herself. She'll show Kathleen in the foreground, her son in the back. She'll show her walking away from him. Her face will be a trash can of self-sympathy, true torment in the eyes, mouth agape, mounds of brunette teased out and up, looking like an appalling hat, one of those Russian jobs, an ushanka. Sometimes she's armed with a suitcase, motion lines showing she's running away from the boy in the background. Or she'll sketch a large hot air balloon with teeth near the basket or snakes dropping to the ground in place of ropes. She knows the tourists can't tell the drawing's significance.

She's also been known to draw pictures of her boy. When she does this, these portraits are flawless, so lifelike. She exaggerates nothing. And he looks perfect and some day she hopes to have him model for her in person.

Kathleen does one of those now. Re-creating an old picture of the two of them, though Kat deletes herself in this rendition, lets the boy be the star. It's a photo she's drawn many times since leaving—it's the one she left by his bed before bolting: a shot of mother and son on a horse together, and the boy has dazzle and awe plastered on his face. It was his first time riding a horse.

“What will it cost us?” a couple asks, sneaking up behind her.

Kathleen crumples up the portrait of her son. “What did you say?”

They walk around her and sit on the chair. They are both young, in their mid-twenties. Younger even? Kathleen hopes not.

Because the girl has a black eye.

The guy does not.

And the girl is pregnant.

“What will it cost us?” the girl with the black eye says again.

Kathleen stares at the young man with her. Looks about the age when her husband turned violent—he was a good husband up until her son's accident, and after that every one of them had closed head injuries, not only the boy. Their beautiful boy who for whatever reason climbed on that weather balloon, floated thirty feet up in the air, and was dumped onto the concrete. He survived, which was a miracle, but his brain was never the same. It wasn't only him, though. Every one of them was rewired.

“Only five dollars,” Kathleen says.

“Can we do it, Tyler?” the girl with the black eye says.

“Fine.”

“Don't make me look fat,” the girl says to Kathleen.

“You're not at all fat, sweetie.”

“Dude, you should see her naked,” the guy says, nudging the girl and laughing. She hits him playfully on the arm and says, “Shut up, Tyler.”