Jane Two (28 page)

“Charlotte's wise like Grandaddy, and a slut like me, fuckin' DNA; figures, right? But her daughter ain't a slut, case you're wonderin', Mickey. My granddaughter's out front, she's as good as Goldie. A swimmer, too, Mickey.”

“Mom, will you fucking stop already with the oversharing!” Charlotte's edge sparked against my sister's.

“Oh, darlin' it's
fahn
, he's ma' dumbass lil' brother,” Lilyth slashed back at her.

“Be
nice
, Mom.”

There they were again, the
F
and
N
words.

“I am
nice
, Charlotte. You know, Mickey, Genie's even got Totter this year. Can you believe that shit? He's probably still talkin' about my bra, that fuckin' perv! Miss Flinch left him for Coach Randall, boy can she swim now, looks hot as him. Hey, you dickhead, you're setting my shag on fire!”

I turned around to detect where the smell of smoke was coming from, and for the first time noticed a man lying on the couch in front of the TV flicking a cigarette into the shag carpet. He must've been there the entire time, but hadn't spoken a word. And I immediately wanted to drag him straight into the front yard and kick the fuck out of that piece of shit. But Lilyth smacked him and poured his Budweiser on the smoldering hole in her old white shag carpet.

“That's Genie's father,” said Lilyth indifferently. “Piece'a crap, but at least he sticks around and pays rent.”

Genie had a chance, and I didn't want it ruined by garbage that should have been collected yesterday. But I realized that some children, the few survivors, have the uncanny ability to self-parent, and Genie was one of them. This idiot would not stop her. She was already an alien in that house. Some parents show you exactly what to be, and others show you exactly what to flee. Genie had plans. I could see them.

I asked my sister why she was selling the car in the driveway and tried to convince her to keep it. But I knew she wouldn't. She just wanted it gone. I told her I would pay her whatever she wanted and take it with me so it wouldn't be scrapped for junk or left somewhere for dead. Then that slimy fuck on the couch sat up and started to tell me what the car was worth. My fingers and cheek both twitched and I left the window, but my sister saw my eyes and Lilyth jumped up and told him to, “Shut up and sit the fuck back down!” He opened his mouth to protest, and then Charlotte shouted, “My uncle will smear your face on the fucking driveway if you don't shut the fuck up and sit back down right now!” My God, they were exactly alike. But Charlotte was right. In that moment, I would have. And he slumped back into the couch.

My sister drove me to an ATM and I paid her for the car. She then loaned me her tiny little rusted-out Geo Metro to run back and forth to the auto parts store as I collected the parts to get the car running. I couldn't fit the wheels and tires in the little Metro, so I had them delivered. From the porch, together Porter and Little Genie watched me work until the sun went down. Then I drove the boy home about two miles away. Not once had anyone called to look for him, nor did he have a bike. I asked him how he had gotten to the house, and without missing a beat he said he had run and that it only takes him eighteen minutes when the crosswalks hurry, and could he come over again tomorrow? I knew I would be gone tomorrow, but I told him that I hoped he would. Like Genie, he would be okay, despite everything else being anything but fine and nice. He was a climber. When I got back to Lilyth's driveway, I got the car to fire after fluids, plugs, and a battery, but it still would not idle. So, I spent about two hours adjusting the floats and cleaning the carburetor. But when I was done, it shook the driveway just like I remembered.

I slammed the hood and saw that the relic text ghosted through an off-shade of red spray paint:
I was based on a true story.
A rotting piece of wood, much smaller than I remembered, was peeking through the cracked grille.

I woke up with the sun and Little Genie tapping me on my cheek as I had fallen asleep in the front seat of her Grandaddy's car. I told her that I'd return it to her, where it belonged, completely restored on her sixteenth birthday, and yes, I'd come inside for some Eggo waffles. All I could think of was what James would say to my own Grandaddy, every time we'd eat waffles for breakfast at The Piccadilly Cafeteria. James would pour about half the syrup bottle onto his plate before my Grandaddy would say, “Goddammit, save some for Seedlin' and me.” But James would just keep pouring with a big toothy grin and sing out, “Aunt Jemima…and I ain't ya daddy neither!” After breakfast, I said my good-byes in the driveway. I hugged Little Genie and whispered in her ear all the things I hoped she would remember. She asked me what was in the box on the passenger seat. I didn't know. She took a moment to really look at me and then asked me if I wanted to. She was a beautiful child, and really was based on a true story—Kevin's. Lilyth yelled something from the porch, laced with profanity that I did not quite understand, and then blew me a kiss, of all things.

“God, it's okay, Uncle Mickey, don't listen to Granny,” squealed Genie flipping her wild blond hair, the texture and color of Kevin's. Everyone else had gone inside as I drove her Grandaddy's red Firebird away, and Little Genie just got smaller and smaller—a colorful blossom on my horizon, still waving in that rearview mirror. My mom was right about Lilyth's house being only a block from our old house. For the last time, I pulled up alongside Steve McQueen's grave under the bean tree. I had wanted to see all the places of my youth, to pack up my memories to take with me, but they just didn't live there anymore. I pulled slowly into the driveway and brushed myself off as much as possible. But I was a greasy mess in a suit, with Gatorade slopped down my chest. You could still see the patchwork in that old garage door from when the Firebird's grille had plunged through. And this was where all the memories lived. I wanted that door to raise and see that gorgeous Schwinn Sting-Ray again. I wanted the “Free Bird” to fall out when I opened the car door. But mostly, I just wanted to see her again from my own backyard. I knocked on the front door and explained myself to a lady that appeared far too nice and understanding to have raised a child like her feral son. I told her that the tiny hands in the concrete under her feet were mine, and that where she lived was my vantage point of everything important in my life, and could I just sneak into her backyard for a moment and I'd be gone? “I can go 'round the back. I don't have to come inside, ma'am.”

“That's the crazy one, Mom, don't let him…” And then his protest suddenly stopped. He just gazed at me like there were things he recognized and questioned at the same time.

His mother smiled after a cautious look, and then opened her door to me. I ignored the boy as he followed me the whole time in watchful silence, and I stood just outside that sliding glass door through which I had first seen Jane bounce and I had the emotions of a shy, little eight-year-old all over again. But the fence was much closer than I remembered, and I imagined the few remaining rusted-out pieces of her trampoline where she had bounced could no longer propel her skyward. The bushes were gone from where I had first filmed a stunningly beautiful young girl floating gently above her rear fence. I stood impossibly close to what once seemed so far away, and it hurt. And I just wanted a fucking do-over. It's all I wanted. I felt a warmth touch my palm and I looked down. The foulmouthed boy that I couldn't fucking stand stood quietly beside me looking out at my horizon, holding my hand…and I could stand him. After an impossibly long moment, I patted his head and I let myself out the side, saying good-bye to a house I no longer recognized.

I had only ever ridden my bike to Jane's new house, cutting across fields and fairways, even when I dragged my mower bungee-corded to my sissy bar, so I had to guess at directions and navigate my way down streets I had never been on before to finally pull up in that Firebird. Jane's butter yellow house did not seem quite so fancy anymore after all the years, but seeing it made me want it, even the rusted trampoline crouching in the backyard by the sand trap that protected hole eighteen where I sold my first golf ball. The house had a Century 21 key lockbox on both doors, and looked completely desolate, so I took my box out back to the trampoline and sat. Wherever Lew Hoagie was, I knew his balls were out, because I could smell the rain coming. The clouds moved visibly, and a cleansing Texas drenching was near. But with 1,600 miles of I-10 between me and home, I couldn't wait.

The fragrance of Jane's Nag Champa exploded in my face when I used the Firebird's key to slit open the cardboard top and look inside. I think you know an important part of me fell out in Jane's backyard that day as I recognized the box's contents. My whole body became pressurized as I pulled out a familiar, but partially rusted Charles Chips container that I had last seen the morning of my parents' yard sale. When I was finally able to bring myself to open the tin, I felt a compression within my chest unlike anything I had ever felt, and a Grunt that would contain nothing. I slowly and carefully lifted the lid and stared into the can. I found inside it everything she had not already said. The box was what made me understand. My dad's silver stopwatch and its brittle leather thong. Jane's cobalt blue feather and a 45 of Simon and Garfunkel's “The Sounds of Silence” with
Mickey + Two = Us
written in the center in purple Crayola. I reached into the tin, and touched a reel with about a hundred feet of slightly yellowed Bolex-geared film that I immediately knew was of an eight-year-old Jane, intermittently rising above a six-foot wooden barrier—defying gravity just as long as she could—until gravity finally won and called her back down, her hair the last thing to disappear. The box contained all the looks and thoughts and gestures that Jane and I exchanged on the hospital bed. The box completely crushed me. I recognized all of its contents, all but two things: a purple upholstered book with a brass lock and a small canvas painting tucked underneath it. Beneath the Charles Chips can a postage stamp from Mom's butcher-block drawer in my old kitchen stared back at me, postmarked and condemned,
RETURN TO SENDER
faded to poltergeist gray. I flipped through the stack of letters I had written when no one was looking, unself-consciously real, recalling stamps I had pilfered from school that were intended for letters destined to some congressman with rallying adolescent cries against fur trapping or oil spills…or whatever. A few of Jane's letters I had mailed without a stamp. I'd forgotten that. And yet the postman had elected to
waste taxpayers' money
and return even those.

Not knowing what was coming out of each envelope, I paused, stepping back before stepping forward. I read my letters, with the bittersweet perspective that Jane's eyes had graced each and every one. Most of them I had written with a blue ballpoint Dad brought home from his job at GE, a pen I'd had to warm up by drawing circles over and over again, or it stuttered and globbed up. The Write Brothers' jingle echoed in my mind, “Write on brother, write on, with my nineteen-cent Write Brothers pen.” A few were written in a deeper navy blue, more of a blue-black, a liquid ink that seeped into the paper and, over the years, had bled to unreadable. For those, secretly I had borrowed dad's Montblanc fountain pen he had won from GE for his sales record. I remembered the heft of that pen; it felt expensive, important, fluid. The paper I had procured for Jane's letters ranged from the backs of torn envelopes, to a Shakey's Pizza placemat, to all kinds of random paper that still told me stories of her, but there was nothing ornate. It was whatever was there, whatever was necessary—perforated spiral ring, a report card edge, a Juicy Fruit wrapper. I had considered every inkable surface as a potential vehicle to communicate to Jane. The content of my letters to Jane, too, meandered to every conceivable topic. Some were like old friends, some mundane, and some tormented me. But I remembered the girl to whom I had written all of them. And she was exactly whom I'd thought she was.

I needed that box, and everything in it, only because Jane was gone. Mrs. Bradford was the one who had called to tell me that I was everything to Jane, and always had been, and then Mr. Troy Bradford got on the line with us, saying he had known from the moment he shook my hand on his doorstep on Sandpiper Drive that I was the right one for his daughter. And my soul collapsed on itself. And there was that painfully familiar Grunt from deep within my throat. That sentence from Mr. Bradford was probably the most painful thing I have ever heard. I don't know why, but hearing him speak of what he knew about his daughter and me hurt so much it made my ears stop working. I just wanted that feeling to go away.

My letters in that box were about
that
girl. The one that I was right about. The one whose plank I still carry. As I lifted them carefully from the box, the pages of my letters smelled of youth, that magic; sometimes they smelled of regret, like the residue of Baxter's vomit, that you just cannot shake. Some letters made me laugh aloud and some just really hurt. The child who wrote those letters was so pure, so unself-conscious. They were written to a girl I met long before I heard “I love you” in a small hospital room. And though it was killing me to read my letters, I discovered that I was a kid I liked a whole lot.