Exley (34 page)

“For Christ's sake, what's this all about, friend?” Exley finally asked.

I told him. I told him about my dad and how he was Exley's biggest fan and how he was in the VA hospital and how I thought he'd get better if I took Exley to see him. Exley nodded like all that made sense. When I was done talking, Exley sat up, drank some vodka straight out of the bottle, put the bottle on the end table, put his feet on the floor, put his hands on his knees, and pushed himself up. Or most of the way up. He rocked back on his heels, toward the davenport, and I caught his hand and pulled him toward me with both of my hands. But I pulled too hard and Exley pitched forward too fast and I couldn't stop him: I could barely get out of his way in time for him to miss me and hit the floor headfirst. His head made a big, loud
crack
when it hit the wood, and then Exley said, “Ooooh.”

“Are you all right?”

“Oh, I'm terrific,” Exley moaned as he rolled over on his back. There was a red mark on his forehead so big you could have just gone ahead and called the whole forehead a red mark. “Terrific and, indeed . . .” And then he caught my eye, stopped talking for some reason, and said, “Why doncha help me up and then we'll go see your old man.”

“I don't think that's such a good idea,” I said.

“Cha talking about?” Exley said. “Why not? Isn't that what all this is about, friend?”

He called me “friend.” That was why not. So far Exley had called me “friend.” He said “for Christ's sake” and “Jesus H. Keeriiisst.” He could say “cha” when most people would just say “you.” He'd called me “goofy.” All that was good. All that was the way he talked in the book. It was a good start. But there were plenty of other things he said in the book that he hadn't said yet. Things that were beautiful. Things that were complicated, that made your head hurt. I guessed that those were the things my dad would really love to hear him say. Until he could talk like he used to all the time, and not just part of it, I didn't want him to meet my dad. I had this idea that if Exley met my dad now, my dad wouldn't wake up. I had this idea that my dad would lie there and think,
Is that it
? I
can say “Christ's sake,” for Christ's sake. Can't he say anything else
? But I couldn't tell Exley that. So I said, “It's after visiting hours.”

“Oh,” Exley said. “Whacha say we get somethin' to eat, then?”

“I already ate,” I told him.

“Oh,” Exley said again. He got up. I thought he was going to leave, but he wobbled over to the couch, plopped down on it, lit another cigarette, took another drink from the bottle of vodka, and then rubbed his forehead, but almost lovingly, like he'd really enjoyed smashing it against the floor. He pointed at the TV with his cigarette. “That thing work?” he asked.

Then I finally got it. Exley wanted to
hang out
. With me. At night. Like he was my friend. I suddenly felt bad about thinking bad things about Exley's limited vocabulary. But I was still really happy. I smiled at him. It was a big smile, and I didn't even try to hide it. I couldn't wait to tell my dad about this. Exley wanted to hang out with me. My dad wouldn't even believe it.

“It does work,” I said. But before I could even turn on the TV, Exley said, “Hey, where's your old lady?”

“She's giving a talk at the YWCA,” I said.

“Really
?” Exley said, like it was the most interesting thing he'd ever heard. Maybe because everyone is curious about the YWCA, about what goes on there, exactly. “What's your mom do?”

“You know what she does,” I said, until I realized he probably didn't. Why would he have known? “She's a lawyer.”

“A lawyer,” he said, like that was the second-most-interesting thing he'd ever heard. “And your folks are split up, right?”

“No,” I said. “Not exactly.”

“Single lady lawyer,” he said.

“No!” I said. “It's not like that.”

But Exley didn't seem to be listening to me. He stood up, looked down at himself, and brushed the cigarette ash off the front of both his shirts; then he bent over and did the same thing with his pants. The shirts looked fine, but the pants must have been wet, because he smeared the ash instead of brushing it off, and managed to make the pants look worse than before. Exley must have thought the same thing. He frowned at his pants, looked up, and saw me looking at him. He licked his index finger and smoothed his mustache with it, then his eyebrows, then looked at his watch. “C'mon, c'mon,” he said. “We're missing your old lady's . . .” He raised his eyebrows.

Mother had left one of the flyers for her talk on the dining room table. I didn't want to go to her lecture. I did not want to go, not with Exley. I had a bad feeling about it, about what Mother would do. Would she recognize Exley? And if so, what would she do if she saw me with him? But I was already getting the idea that Exley would do whatever he wanted to do, whether anyone else wanted him to or not. That was what it meant to be Exley. My only chance was that maybe the title of Mother's talk would scare Exley off better than I could. So I went over, grabbed the flyer, and read it: “Her lecture on ‘The Problem of Domestic Abuse in the All-Volunteer Army.'”

“Sheesh,” Exley said.
“That
sounds like fun.” But then he walked out
the door anyway and I followed him. Because I felt like I had to. Because I felt like it would be worse if I didn't.

THE YWCA WAS
right across the Square from the Crystal. The building to the left of the YWCA had been the Palace Restaurant. The sign was still up, but the building was empty. Taped to the window was a sign that said
PERMIT
. But the rest of the writing was so faded you couldn't tell who wanted permission for what. The building to the right of the YWCA had only a sticker on the window. The sticker was purple, and it said,
STUDS AND EAR PIERCING
over the silhouette of a woman's head with a white sparkly star on the lobe. That building was empty, too. Both buildings had big
FOR SALE
signs draped on the brick wall above the front windows. The windows were dusty, and people had written illegible things in the dust. They were like a lot of buildings in Watertown. They had stopped being one thing and were waiting for someone to make them into something else.

But the YWCA was still a YWCA. Exley and I walked in. The room we walked into was huge. It was maybe the biggest room I'd ever been in that wasn't a church or a school gym. The walls were painted bright yellow. There was an enormous chandelier hanging from the ceiling. The chandelier was lit and made the yellow walls look even more yellow. It was like being inside the sun or in the stomach of the world's yellowest bird. There was an easel in the middle of the room. On the easel there was a poster that said
LECTURE TONIGHT
: and underneath was an arrow that pointed to the left. That easel and the poster were the only things in the room besides the chandelier and us. The floor was marble and shiny and slick. The room made me want to take off my shoes and slide around in my socks.

Instead we followed the arrow. It led us through a door into a much smaller room. It was like a living room. There were a bunch of couches with flowery covers and footstools and a bunch of chairs that matched the couches. There were a lot of tiny tables where you could put your drink or whatever, and lamps on the floor next to the tables. The chairs and couches were all full. They were full of women, which I guess made
sense. Exley and I were standing behind them and we couldn't see what the women looked like, except their hair. That's how I knew they were women.

“Where is she?” Exley whispered. It was the kind of place where you whispered. Even the women were whispering, and this was their place.

“Right there,” I said, and pointed. Mother was standing toward the front, off to the right. Her back was to us and so I wasn't worried about her seeing me pointing at her. It was Wednesday, and she was wearing corduroy: a dark brown corduroy skirt and a matching jacket. Her hair was pulled back and she was talking to a much older woman who was also wearing brown corduroy, except that woman was wearing pants and her brown was much darker and her corduroy had much deeper ridges. Mother was nodding at whatever the woman was saying.

“Oh
my lord
” Exley whispered. The way he said it made me realize how pretty Mother was. I felt proud and then embarrassed. I was afraid Exley was going to whistle at her or something. But that was ridiculous: Exley would never whistle at Mother, in the YWCA, with me standing right next to him. And then he did it! One short whistle in, then a longer, lower whistle out. Some of the women heard, too. Not Mother, but a couple of women sitting right in front of us, who turned to look. One of them was older and looked like she'd had her hair done for the lecture. The other might have been her daughter. Her hair was limp and pulled back and her eyes were tired. I had the feeling the older woman had brought the younger woman, who didn't want to be there. Maybe because the older woman had her arm looped through the younger one's and was gripping her biceps. They both glared at me, not at Exley, like I was the one who had whistled. I could feel my face turn red.
It wasn't me
! I wanted to tell them. I hadn't even learned to whistle
in
yet; I could only whistle
out
.

Mother walked to the front of the room, and I ducked behind Exley so she wouldn't see me. People in the room stopped whispering, and the two women who were glaring at me turned around. But my face still felt red. I'd never seen Mother speak in front of people before. I was already embarrassed. There was a big stuffed chair facing the rest of the chairs. It was there for Mother to sit in it. Even I could tell that. But she wasn't sitting in it. She wasn't even leaning on it. She was standing a few feet
away, like she had no clue the chair was even there. I don't know why this embarrassed me so much, but it did. It embarrassed me much more than Exley whistling at Mother. Mother wasn't talking or anything, either. She was just standing there at the front of the room, like she was all alone in it. It was like Mother didn't even know we were there. What did she think she was doing?
Sit in the chair! Say something
! I almost couldn't stand to look at her. Then the lights in the room went off and I didn't have to.

The lights went off, and then I heard a click. And suddenly there was a face. It was a big face on the wall behind where Mother had been standing before the lights went out. The face was turned to the right and you could only see the left cheek. It looked like a rotten tomato with a white nose sticking out of it. The cheek was really red and there was a hole in it and the edges of the hole were black. Inside the hole looked only a little less red than the cheek. Then there was another click and that face was gone and a body took its place. The body was a woman. I could tell that because it was naked. It was a naked woman's chest. But it wasn't something that Exley or anyone else would ever whistle at. The chest was white, and there was a hole in it, too. But the hole was much bigger, like it had been dug, and I couldn't see the bottom of it, and the skin around the hole was blacker, not like it was rotten, but like it had been burned. Someone groaned in the room, and I could hear footsteps running and the door opened and light blasted into the room, and then the door closed and it was dark again. Then another click. And another picture. This one of just a neck. The neck was black. I mean, it was a black person's neck. You couldn't see the person's face or the body. Just a neck that was cut open. The picture was from the side. Like I said, you couldn't see the head, but it looked like someone outside the picture had tipped the head back and opened the person's neck. I don't know how else to describe it. There was a V-shaped space in the neck, and there was dried blood all around it. “For Christ's sake,” I heard someone say. It had to be Exley. It was a man's voice. But it sounded so far away. Then another click, and another picture. Of a woman's arm with a bone sticking right out of the skin near the elbow. Of a woman's mouth with broken teeth and missing teeth. Of a woman with one eye completely shut and swollen over and the other wide open and blue and looking at the camera like the camera had done
it. Another of a woman whose ear was missing. I mean, it was totally gone and there was a hole in the woman's head where the ear had been. There were no names with the pictures. But I could tell these were all women because of their jewelry, or their haircuts, or their body parts. But I didn't know whether the women were alive or dead. I don't know how long this went on. Forever, it seemed like. When the lights finally came on, people blinked for a while and then looked around at one another, like they had no idea where they were or how they'd gotten there. I looked next to me, at where Exley had been standing before the lights went down, but he wasn't there anymore. I looked at the front of the room. Mother was still standing there. She was still standing a few feet away from the chair, not saying anything, but I wasn't embarrassed about that anymore. I needed Mother too much to be embarrassed. I needed her to tell me whether the women were dead or alive. Some people really can't stand waiting to find out what happens at the end of a book. I wasn't one of those people, maybe because I read the books so fast that I didn't have to wait very long. But I was like that now, with the women in the pictures. I wanted to know what had happened to them. Even the woman with the cut throat. She seemed like she had to be dead. But I wanted to know for sure. I don't know why. I don't know what I thought I would do with the information once I had it.

“Those were all pictures of women,” Mother said. Her voice was like an alarm clock. When she spoke, a couple of people shook their heads, like they'd just been woken up. “The pictures were all taken within the last three years. Some of the women were soldiers who were wounded or killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some of the women were civilians who were wounded or killed by their husbands or boyfriends or sons who were soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. And some of the women were soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan who were wounded or killed by their husbands or boyfriends or sons who were also soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, but they were wounded or killed back home.”