Dive (7 page)

I swear you must have read my thoughts when you turned and smiled, a goofy, tooth-filled clown smile. We were a pair, a pair of adventurers and close as real brothers, in spite of what you’d said before.

Hey, Ben, what’s brown and sticky? You waved the stick in the air. Get it?

I laughed too hard and gave you some jawbreakers for the long ride home.

M
ALLORY KEEPS ASKING IF
I’m feeling okay now, and I keep answering yeah, although I guess the day is starting to wear on me. I can’t stop yawning.

“Wait here,” she says as we drive up to the hospital. She ducks in and after a long time she comes back with Lyle and Mom. I’m glad I didn’t have to be around for the Mallory-to-Mom introductions.

“Ben!” Mom yells. “Come here and give me a hug!” She holds out her arms.

I put my fingers on the door handle and then decide on second thought that I’ll just stay put and let the hug come to me. Some of my shivering’s back, and I’m not even in the lobby.

Mom looks different; her face is tan and her hair is lawn-mowed short. She’s wearing a pink sleeveless shirt and pink globe earrings, and I realize you’re right, her ears do stick out.

When I lean out of the car to hug her, I smell the mint off her chewing gum.

“What’s on your arm?” I ask.

“Smoker’s patch. I’m quitting. Well, I’m trying.”

“That’s great. Lyle says cigarettes’ll destroy you.”

“The Surgeon General said it first.” The look in Mom’s eye tells me that Lyle’s warning wasn’t the exactly right thing to come out of my mouth.

“Look.” I stick out my wrist. “I’ve got on my watch.”

She nods but her eyes barely move to it, and I think maybe I should have got out of the car and hugged her when I’d had the chance. We’ve started off on the wrong foot, Lyle would say.

“Your mother’s coming by the motel later, to take you out to dinner,” Lyle tells me. “If that’s all right by you, Ben.”

“All right,” I say.

“I’ve got a nice place picked out.” Mom smiles. “Reservations at eight.”

“That’s awfully late for dinner,” Lyle says.

“It’s all right,” I say, and Mom says, “No, it’s not,” both of us answering Lyle, but it sounds like Mom’s answering me, and then we kind of laugh and Lyle says, “Hey, do what you want,” in a voice that doesn’t really mean it.

Mallory slips into the driver’s seat and uses too much engine noise revving up.

“Let’s get going,” she calls. She glosses on some glimmery lipstick and checks her sunglasses in the rearview, being Very Special, but I know she’s just edgy, tripped up in the tangle of all these wrong-footed starts.

I try to climb into the backseat, but Lyle stops me. He squeezes in the front and pulls me over his lap.

I’m way too big to sit in people’s laps, but I figure since we’re so far away from school and nobody will see me, I’ll let him.

Mom crosses her arms to her chest and steps up on the curb and looks at us in the car. “Wow, regular little family,” she says, and she sounds so all alone, I half-wish somebody would say something to make her feel more included. Nobody does.

Mallory vrooms the engine again. “Nice to meet you, Gina,” she says in her anchorwoman’s voice.

“I’ll pick you up at seven-thirty,” Mom says with eyes on me only. “We’re going someplace really special, my favorite restaurant just for you, Ben. So wear a coat and tie.”

W
HEN MOM WAS READY
for a move, I knew her symptoms. I had a head start on you and Lyle, since it was all the same stuff as Before. The afternoon naps and long walks, the waking up or coming home at dinnertime with eyes red-simmered from tears. Or she’d go out shopping for hours and return with a foot massager or new wineglasses or an atlas. Weird stuff. Same patterns that made me mad and careful both. I didn’t want to topple her mood by asking her about it, but I didn’t want her to think I couldn’t tell she was restless and straining to go someplace new, someplace where her old problems wouldn’t find her.

One afternoon, I’d caught her staring out the kitchen window with eyes more hopeless than they should have been from a view of recycling bags and tomato vines.

It’s so difficult, she sniffled when I made myself ask her what was wrong. I guess I’m just a difficult woman. I guess there’s just no pleasing me some days. …

You used to say that Before, I reminded her. Every time, before a move, you would say that to Dad.

Maybe you’re right and maybe you’re wrong, she answered, kind of absent-minded, like right or wrong didn’t even matter.

And Dad followed you wherever you went.

Frank’s a follower by nature. I wish Lyle—

Lyle’s lived here a long time. He won’t go anywhere else, I said. And me neither, almost tacked on, except for I couldn’t. Instead I asked her if she wanted to get back with Dad.

No, no, Mom answered. What’s past is final. It’s only lately I wonder how right I am for here. There’s got to be more than some little nothing nowhere town, some little nothing nowhere life.

Well, count me out, I almost said, trying again. But the words were too Aquaman soft for the power of the feeling trapped inside me. What I said was, Guess I’ll go up and do my homework.

In chapter five, “Relax, Recall, Respond,” of Lyle’s book, there’s a diagram of a person with arrows labeling the abdominal muscles and diaphragm and trachea. If you want to get your words out right, Lyle’s book explains, then all these parts of your body have to be unrestricted.

In the bathroom mirror or on the bus, I practiced unrestricting myself, preparing for Mom.

Lyle’s house has a backyard and a waffle maker. My room is the exact right color blue, I told my reflection. I watched my teeth and tongue and the movements of my lips and I practiced saying whatever came to mind. I’m in my third year at the same school. My fort’s here, in the branches of the same tree where I carved BEN. It’s my secret fort, where I stash my compass and the naked lady coasters I took from King Plaza.

Besides, Lyle’s not going anywhere. Not. Going. Anywhere.

Relax, recall, respond. It’s all about keeping yourself in charge of your thoughts and throat when the tension turns high. Lyle’s main point is that you can’t squeeze up or you’ll run out of air. That breathing is everything.

So I was ready for her, that night when she came into my bedroom to give me her piece. She sat at the foot of my bed and rested a heavy hand on my leg and began to talk like she was telling me some baby bedtime story, a story about leaving for a while, just her and me, getting out of this little town to see the world. I kept my palms flat over my abdomen and measured the slow fill and drain of my breath.

When she was through, I sat up.

Mom, you’ll have to go alone. The words growled deep from the cave inside me. Because I’m staying with Lyle. I’ve lived here longer than I’ve lived anyplace else, and now it’s my home. It’s where I’m from.

Ben, please. There’s not a chance I’d ever leave without you. You’re my own son. We’re on the same team, right?

She was restricting, though. I could hear it perfectly, nasal pressure. That’s a warning in Lyle’s book. Nose talking means nervousness.

If you want to be with me, you’ll have to stay here, I said. My throat was as unrestricted as a python about to swallow a mouse.

Watch your rudeness, Mom told me back, clenched and sharp. Don’t you talk to me like that. But then she kind of sagged, as if a lead ball had rolled to the pit of her stomach, and I knew she was feeling unfixed on everything—her plan, me, and who was really on her team.

She sat there on my bed until I told her, Okay, good night.

Still she sat, trying to think up what to answer. Except for all there was to say was good night, which she finally did, quiet and through her nose.

I knew there’d be more, and there was, but not that night. That night, all she could do was stand up and walk out, scared off by the sound of the voice Lyle gave me.

“I
T WON’T MAKE A DIFFERENCE
if I wear one or not,” I tell Lyle, but he grumbles.

“She does this for attention. Gina sets up these silly obstacles,” Lyle says to Mallory once we’ve pulled onto the highway.

Mallory doesn’t answer.

Back at the motel, he keeps jawing. “I never knew Gina to walk into a coat-and-tie restaurant. Fast food, that’s what she loves. Fried chicken, fried fish, French fries, fried—”

“Okay, enough.” Mallory shakes her head. “Let’s put an angle on the positive. For one thing, there are shopping malls everywhere.”

Lyle frowns and slaps open the side locks of his suitcase, pushing through everything in it. “She knows we wouldn’t pack a tie, let alone a … a dinner jacket!”

Mallory looks over at me and winks. “You sound like you could use a nap,” she says to Lyle. “Bennett and I are going to check out that pool.”

“No, no,” says Lyle but then he puts his hands on his eyes, like he’s testing out how a nap might feel.

“We’ll wake you if we need you,” Mallory says. “You’re exhausted.”

“She’s right,” I say. Lyle looks yellow, the last-week-of-a-bruise color. He thinks on it and then agrees, but only if we wake him up in an hour.

“We’re out of here,” Mallory whispers as soon as we’re both walking outside. She takes the car keys out of her pocketbook and clinks them together. “If I had to hear that man go on one more second, I swear I’d have popped him a knuckle sandwich.”

“Where are we going?”

“Shopping, of course.”

It’s my second trip of the day with just Mallory, and I mention something about that.

“Yeah, we’re good together, you and I, Bennett,” she answers. “Although for the life of me, I don’t know what we have in common.”

I’d been thinking on that, too, and I have an answer ready. “We speak out of our stomachs and say what we mean,” I tell her.

First Mallory frowns like she doesn’t understand, but then her eyebrows push up over her sunglasses as she nods her head, and I know she gets it.

Lip twitch gives us directions to a department store, which we find easy. Soon as we walk through the sliding doors, Mallory’s got everybody snapped to attention. In ten minutes, I’ve sampled more shirts and jackets and dress pants than I ever wore in my entire life.

Mallory says my hair and eyes need a vibrant palette. She uses lots of Very Special words like that, and both of the sales guys eat it up.

Finally, we go with a tan sports coat and navy pants with a white shirt and a navy-and-red striped tie.

“You don’t have to do this, Mal,” I tell her as she hands her credit card to one of the sales guys.

“Bennett, have you ever owned a sports coat that wasn’t handed down from Dustin?”

I think on that, and the answer seems to be no. “See, I never had much use for one,” I begin. “Dustin’s ones always fit enough.”

“There’s this saying,” says Mallory, and then she tells me some scrambly French words that sound like
say-bluh-wuh-kwa-plyoo
or something, and I wish I knew French.

“Yeah?”

“It means, it’s only the first step that costs. Times like now, you’ve got to own yourself, Bennett. It’s my pleasure to help you feel like you’re not just anybody in somebody else’s jacket. But the rest is up to you. When you see your mom tonight, it’s up to you to know who you are. And I’d start by ordering the most expensive thing on the menu. It’ll give you some nerve, and nerve lives right next door to courage.”

None of her advice is from Lyle’s book, so I know I’m getting a free page out of the real Mallory. “I know another expression, in English,” I tell her. “It goes, the clothes make the man.”

“Ah, that’s a good one,” she says, but I have a feeling she heard it before.

She crumples the receipt into her purse so I won’t see it, which is nice of her. I know if I’d caught a look at the total, it would have made me feel weird.

Every good time I spend with Mallory feels like another handful of loose change dropped into a rainy-day water cooler. If hard times ever come up between her and me, there’s some genuine savings to fall back on.

“Is saying my whole name Bennett part of owning myself?” I ask her when we’re driving back to the motel.

“Mainly I like the sound of Bennett,” Mallory answers. “Especially when you consider that everyone and his brother is named after the guy on the hundred dollar bill.”

It takes me a minute, and then I tell her that’s a good one.

E
VEN BEFORE YOUR PERMIT
came through, you were driving Lyle crazy. Counting down calendar Xes to your permit and driving his car around the block without permission and saving your pizza money for Dogger’s half-wrecked car with the taped-up back window. All you could talk was car, car, car, and when you weren’t talking car, you were so quiet you seemed invisible.

How did that paper turn out? Lyle would ask you. The one you were writing on the French and Indian War?

Mmm. Your face bent over your dinner, your chin an inch from the table. As soon as you were done eating, you’d ask to be excused, polite enough so Lyle had to say yes, but quick enough to show how much you didn’t want to stick around.

More than once, Lyle got called in to talk to your teachers about your cutting school or, when you did show up, your bad behavior. Wild pranks like spray-painting your locker or deflating the basketballs in the gym with your black-T-shirt friends. And since there wasn’t a mom around, I got the bulk of Lyle’s worrying.

What should I do, Ben? he asked me more than once. He refuses to stay in counseling. Punishments, rewards, fear tactics—nothing fazes him, nothing interests him.

It’s probably a stage, I’d usually answer, which seemed to be the most settling explanation, the one I’d heard the most on television talk shows.

All you really wanted was to visit Mom. You wore Lyle down with the asking.

Gina can’t handle you, Lyle would say. She’s trying to work out her own life.

But Lyle couldn’t handle you either, and once you got your license and bought Dogger’s car, there wasn’t much anyone could do to stop you from leaving.

You took off on the Fourth of July, while Lyle and me were at the town fireworks, and you pulled up at Mom’s two days later. All the way across the country, nonstop except to refuel. When you phoned us from her place, it wasn’t any surprise. Lyle had figured where you’d gone, and he’d already wired Mom extra money to pay for your visiting expenses.