Bystander (5 page)

“She's away for a while . . . on a trip,” Griffin answered vaguely. “My older sisters moved out last year.
They don't even come visit anymore, not that I blame them. We've got the house to ourselves.”

“I should check in with my mom,” Eric said.

“Hey, don't let me stop you.”

“She's not going to like that your folks aren't here,” Eric warned.

“So lie,” Griffin suggested.

“Lie?”

Griffin held his thumb and index finger a hair's breadth apart. “A little white lie,” he said. “What are you? The good fairy?”

Eric made a face and dialed. “Hi, Mom.”

“Hey, sweetie. Do you need me to pick you up?”

“No, we, um, that's why I'm calling,” Eric explained. “We decided to hang out at Griffin's house.”

“What are you going to do over there?”

“Do?” Eric looked at Griffin, who made a few waves of his hand. Eric cracked a smile. “Ping-Pong.”

“Well, I don't have a problem with it. Are his parents home?”

“His parents?” Eric looked to Griffin, who signaled a thumbs-up. “Yes,” Eric said. “Mr. Connelly's here.”

“Great, may I speak with him?”

“You want to speak with him?” Eric echoed. He looked at Griffin, who tilted his head up, began scrubbing his armpits, pretended to wash his hair. “He's, um, I think he's in the—he's showering!” Eric said.

“Showering, huh?” Mrs. Hayes paused a beat, giving Eric's heart time to climb into his throat.

“I can ask him to call you later,” he offered.

“No, I have to run out,” Mrs. Hayes answered. “Rudy has been invited to a bowling party. Can you believe that kid? One month in town and he's already Mr. Popularity. Besides, you have my cell, remember? If you get home before me, I want you to do something constructive.”

“Mom—”

“I mean it. No TV, no electronics. Read a book, clean your room, practice your guitar. We'll be home around five.”

“You know, Mom,” Eric said, seizing the opening, “this is why I need my own cell phone.”

He heard her sigh. “Maybe you're right, I don't know. We'll talk about it later. Love you.”

Eric glanced at Griffin. “You, too.”

And that was that. In one quick call, Eric had lied
to his mother. He had to, he reasoned, or she would have never let him stay at Griffin's house. It wasn't like they were going to do anything bad.

“Your mother's old school, huh?” Griffin noted.

“I guess so, if that means super-strict.”

“Don't sweat it,” Griffin advised. “You did good. She'll never know the difference. No harm, no foul.”

Eric nodded, shrugged it off as no big deal. “I don't suppose you even
have
a Ping-Pong table, do you?”

Griffin laughed, held his wrists out in front of his body. “I confess, Officer. You caught me. Go ahead, slap on the 'cuffs, haul me off to the Big House.”

They climbed the stairs to Griffin's bedroom.

“Want to play video games?” Griffin offered. “I have a sick collection.”

He definitely did. It was another thing that Eric's mom was uptight about. Griffin had games that Eric wouldn't be allowed to play in a million years.

“This one is about an assassin from another galaxy,” Griffin said, holding up the box. “It's pretty wicked. He's got mad skills. Lots of splurting blood, gushing up like geysers, it's hysterical.”

“Do
you
want to play?” Eric cautiously asked.

Griffin threw the disk aside. “Nah, not really.” He looked around the room, gestured to a cage on his desk. “We could torture my gerbil?”

For a minute—a second, really, maybe less than that—Eric thought Griffin might be serious. They locked eyes and there was something there, a passing darkness, then it was gone, like a storm cloud drifting away. Griffin smiled, laughed out loud. He was only joking.

He reached for a dark wooden box, about the size of a thick dictionary. “Want to see a few of my souvenirs?”

Griffin asked it with obvious pride. But Eric had to hide his disappointment when he looked through the contents. It was a weird assortment of random stuff, some kind of baseball pin, old coins, a pocketknife, a tooth, a couple of keys, a mishmash of junk.

“There's a story behind every one of those pieces,” Griffin said.

“Oh yeah?” Eric pointed to the tooth. “What's the story with that?”

Griffin studied Eric's face. He took the box,
snapped it shut, and returned it to the shelf. “Maybe another time,” he said.

“Sure, whatever,” Eric answered, not knowing what else to say.

They talked for a while. A long time had passed since Eric had a normal conversation with someone his own age. Griffin wanted to know all about Eric—he asked tons of questions, very curious—and Eric, to his surprise, answered all of them.

“So,” Griffin said. “Your dad isn't around at all?”

Eric touched on the major parts of the tale, leaving out a few key details. He told Griffin how his father took off one day, a spontaneous decision that was a long time coming. “It was like getting hit by a train,” Eric told Griff. “You can see it coming from miles down the track. You try to get ready for it. But when it hits you,
wham
, you're still all messed up.”

Eric added, “I guess my mom got tired of waiting for him to get his act together. So we moved here.”

There was something about Griffin, the way he listened. Eric told Griffin things that he hadn't said to anyone, ever. For his part, Griffin was really nice about
everything—he seemed to
understand
—like he'd already been there. Like he could see inside Eric, and knew how he felt, even when Eric himself wasn't so sure.

Griffin blew the hair out of his eyes. “I guess it sucks to be you.”

“Some days, yeah, it does.”

When it was time for Eric to go, the boys agreed to get together again, soon. Eric left the house with a sense of relief, like he'd just dropped off a heavy backpack. He kept so many things buried inside, it was good to finally say them out loud. Eric felt lighter.

Sure, Griffin was a different kind of guy, there was no question about that. He had his rough edges. He wasn't like Eric's old friends back in Ohio. But for one day, during those few hours, Griffin was what Eric needed.

He was, Eric believed, a friend.

ERIC PULLED THE ACOUSTIC GUITAR CLOSE TO HIS BELLY
, leaned back on his bed, and strummed. He wasn't practicing anything in particular, just running through some songs. It was his way of checking out. He closed the bedroom door, disappeared into himself, and tried not to think. The guitar was his shield, the hard outer shell he needed, like the exoskeleton of some soft-bellied bug.

Whenever Eric thought about his father, when he remembered things, it left him confused. He didn't want to remember, didn't want to feel this way, but the
memories flooded in like a rising river, ruining everything. There they were. He could picture it.

Rudy just a baby, probably asleep. It was dark out, his parents at the kitchen table, Eric spooning a bowl of vanilla ice cream, and his father's voice, loud and accusing.

“Clear the table?” his father screamed. “I'll clear the table, just watch me. I can be really helpful around the house.” He picked up plates and glasses and tossed them one by one in underhanded arcs toward the sink. There they crashed and shattered—his mother crying, pleading for Eric's father to stop, please stop, please—but the clatter continued until, finally, the dishes cleared and a life splintered, his father walked out the door.

Oh, the way his mother sagged to the floor. Eric could see it in his mind, as if a motion picture were projected against the inner walls of his skull. She leaned against the wall and her legs slid forward. She dropped down, slumped over, face splotchy with tears. Eric didn't dare to move. He sat watching her while a thousand small fish swam through his bloodstream. Then he finally climbed down to the floor and crawled
to her and whispered, “It's okay, Mom, it's okay, stop crying. I'll clean everything up.”

“He's sick,” she murmured in answer, staring at nothing. “He's so sick.”

And rather than clean anything up, Eric bent his head to her warm soft lap and crashed. Just fell asleep right then and there, instantly.

No, Eric hadn't told Griffin that story. Some stories you don't tell. You just keep them to yourself, locked away, and you run the guitar pick up and down across six strings and you strum.

Eric couldn't tell Griffin the whole truth about his father. So it was a day of white lies—first to his mother, then to Griffin Connelly. It wasn't like Eric
wanted
to lie, exactly. It was just that the truth was so . . . inconvenient. To Eric's way of thinking, a good fiction was better than a hard fact. Everybody breathed easier; nobody got hurt; and you moved on to the next thing.

Even if he wanted to, how could Eric tell Griffin about what really happened back in Ohio? The truth was a slippery bar of soap, something ungraspable, a
thing Eric himself could never understand, much less
tell
.

How do you say that your father has a “mental illness”? How do you say “schizophrenia” and not open a can of fresh wounds and questions? Schizophrenia was like a word from a bad horror movie, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Dad. But it didn't work like that. His father didn't act like two people, a good guy and a bad guy. It was trickier than that. His father was once the greatest guy in the world, but then, slowly, over time, he wasn't anymore. He changed, got angry and confused. His own thoughts haunting him, hunting him down. His father fell into dark moods, made unfounded accusations, said crazy things. And worse: He dropped into long brooding silences, not speaking for days, a ghost walking around in Daddy's shoes. It was like he slowly vanished in front of Eric's eyes, from the inside out. A hollow man. A sunken-eyed scarecrow. In that way, his father
was
like two men, the good guy and the sick one. For Eric to ever live a full life, he knew that he would have to love both men. The well and the ill. He couldn't pick one or the other. It had to be both, for they were two sides of one man, his father.

How do you tell that story?

How do you describe the years of living with that? The best thing—the thing that worked for a while, anyway—was to pretend it wasn't happening. Repeat:
Dad's just fine.
Keep saying it, over and over, as if saying it enough might make it true. Eric was just a boy when things began to turn bad, soon after Rudy was born. On and off, in fits and spurts, the illness took hold, gripped his father like a snake in its coils and squeezed. But nobody talked about it for a long time, each trying to
not
know, figuring that if they ignored it, maybe it would go away. Maybe Eric's real father would reappear one morning, bright and chipper, “How ya doing, sport?” Except it never happened. Things only got worse. Until finally, they had to talk about it, Eric and his mom, had to say the words nobody wanted to hear.

“Your father is sick. He's been sick for a long time.”

Sick? “Sick” was a cold, an upset stomach, a fever you recovered from. This wasn't the body being sick, it was the brain being sick. This was, in his mother's words, “mental illness.”

There were doctors, yes, and stays at hospitals, an
ever-changing cocktail of little pills. The drugs helped in some ways, offered him some relief, but Eric could see the change in his father. The drugs drained him dry. His neck swelled up, his face twitched, he lost his spark. Eric's father complained about aches and sore parts. He once rubbed his chest and looked at Eric in wide-eyed alarm—“There's nothing there, there's nothing there”—rubbing his chest over and over, there where the heartbeat should be. “I can't
feel
anything,” he'd cried.

But mostly, his father's essence had changed until it was as if his father on medication had no personality left. That was why, his mother explained, Eric's father stopped taking the doctor's pills. “He felt like he was losing himself, slipping away,” she tried to explain. And it was true. Eric could see that it was true. On medicine, his father didn't act crazy anymore, but in some ways it was worse. A part of him had died. The part Eric loved.

His mother told Eric other things:

“He still loves you, he'll always love you.”

“He's suffering right now. He's confused. He's overwhelmed. There are voices in his head.”

She cried. She didn't want to cry in front of Eric, he could see that, his mother trying to be strong, but she couldn't be, not all the time. That was the other hard part. He couldn't lose her, too. And now there was Rudy to worry about.

It was scary. Because his father was still around, drifting aimlessly from room to room. When things were okay, when Eric didn't think about it too much, he could sit quietly in the same room with his father and feel . . .
good.
Pretend everything was okay. He still had a dad. Not just any dad, but
his
dad, his one and only. That guy over there, the innocent one with the gentle soul, who loved trees and music and laughter and his two sons, that swell guy whose thoughts were eating him alive.

Then some things happened—other memories now, the water of remembering rising ever higher—when Eric's father lost control, smashed a mirror and some lamps, ripped down the blinds off a bay window—and was gone the next morning before Eric awoke. And here was the truly shameful thing, the horror in Eric's heart: He was glad. Good riddance. Who needs to live with that?

People can lose a leg. People can get their hands stuck in machines and have their fingers torn off. Terrible car accidents robbed people of their sight, their ability to walk, their dreams and hopes of a healthy future. But there was nothing worse—nothing on this earth, of that Eric was sure—than losing your mind, your
peace
of mind, because that was like losing your self. It was losing everything.