Lake Overturn (32 page)

Having not seen him approach, she jumped. “Hey,” she said.

“I need a partner for the State Science Fair. Do you want to be my partner?”

“Are you insane?” she asked.

He said nothing, but continued to look at her intently. He hadn’t fully worked out the effect he wanted to achieve, but
insane
was good.

“We haven’t spoken a word to each other in, like, weeks,” Miriam said.

“I know,” Enrique said. “I’m tired of not being friends.”

Miriam gave him a hard look, then dropped her shoulders. “Me, too.”

“So, friends?”

“Yeah.” They shook on it, but still Miriam didn’t smile. They strolled together toward the stairway that led up to the school entrance. Seventh-graders had their lockers in this subterranean hallway. Pale light flooded in through the building’s glass front and shone in rippled reflection on the painted concrete floor like a pool of water. “Still,” Miriam said, “I don’t know why you’d want me to be your partner.”

“Well, it’s like, at the science fair, you presented evidence on the other side. It was the scientific method. You proved my project wrong. So I was thinking you could help me fix it.” Enrique knew that he would have to change his presentation, given that Lake Overlook was only twenty-five feet deep, so the idea had occurred to him to see how an appeal to Miriam’s vanity worked, to ambush her with the surrender and the spoils all at once. He was getting lonely anyway, and, as Abby had pointed out, he needed a partner. “That is,” he added when Miriam was slow to respond, “unless you hate my project so much you can’t even stand to look at it.”

“Actually, Enrique, I think your project is really neat. I just think you did the wrong thing by telling people they could all be killed, when it totally couldn’t happen here.”

“I know. That was Gene’s idea anyway.”

“I figured,” Miriam said. Then she laughed suddenly. “I had been feeling pretty stupid about my project. But it looks like you actually listened.”

“Totally.” Then Enrique told the lie that he had planned to use only if Miriam was resistant and required hardcore convincing: “I wish you would have stayed for the award presentation. I was going to invite you up with me and share the prize with you.”

Miriam gave him an incredulous look.

“Like, I hadn’t decided
one hundred percent
to do it, but if you stayed I think I would have.”

“If I help you, Enrique, you’re going to have to change it. It can’t be the same project all over again.”

“I know.”

“Well, should I come over and look at it?”

“How about Monday?”

“Neat.”

“I’m glad we’re friends again, Miriam. I think you’re my best friend.”

Miriam smiled and nudged Enrique with the wrist that held her textbooks. Then she ran up the stairs and outside.

Sometimes, in order to avoid riding the bus with Gene, Enrique stayed and did his homework in the high school library until Jay had finished basketball practice. There was a tacit agreement that if Enrique waited by the car and didn’t bother him with attempts at conversation, Jay would drive him home. Often he dropped Enrique off, then headed to some other, unnamed destination. Today, though, Enrique was excited again about his model and wanted to spend some time with it before dinner. So he boarded the bus and went to the back, far from where Gene would sit when he boarded. Sitting back here over the past weeks had afforded Enrique a view of how the grade-school kids scrunched up their faces in an imitation of Gene as they walked down the aisle, sometimes putting a finger to their foreheads to indicate the tuft of hair between his eyebrows.

Coop had noticed the rift between the boys. On one hand, he was saddened. Who would pick up Gene now that Enrique had dropped him? Gene seemed one of those kids who could drown in himself, unnoticed. Louis, Coop’s youngest brother, had been that way, although Louis had splashed around and groped for wreckage before he went down.

On the other hand, Enrique, a well-behaved seventh-grader, unintentionally served as a kind of hall monitor in the back of the bus; the rowdy kids had quieted down significantly since Enrique and Gene had parted ways.

Enrique and Gene both got off at the same stop, but now Enrique used the main entrance to the trailer park while Gene went through the hole in the fence.

Dinner that night was Wednesday’s chili, reheated, with some scrambled eggs thrown in to liven it up. It had gotten spicier in the intervening days, an effect Enrique liked—he enjoyed the sweat on his scalp and the burn on his tongue that he smothered with a soft, cool, folded piece of white bread.

“I don’ see how you could want her to be your partner,
cariño
, after what she did,” Lina said.

The two hunched over their bowls and didn’t look up as they spoke. “I need a partner, Ma, and Miriam’s one of the smartest kids at school. It’s not a big deal, what she did. She made a mistake. She’s my friend. You’re supposed to forgive and forget, right?”

“There’s plenty of other nice kids for you to be friends with.”

“There aren’t, Ma. That’s not how it works.”

Lina was quiet. Of course that wasn’t how it worked—she remembered—but she wanted it to work that way for him. After a moment, she said, “Is Miriam, kind of, your girlfriend?”

“Ma!”

“Just asking, baby. You can talk to me about that stuff, you know.”

Enrique returned to eating. Lina watched the muscles of his jaw lurch as a blush rose from his neck to his face like the red of a thermometer. It was the first time she had raised the possibility that Enrique should have a girlfriend. And it was the arrival of a doubt with which she would wrestle for years before calling a truce: the doubt that he ever would. She turned quickly away from it now. There was another explanation for Enrique’s loneliness, his inability to fit like a puzzle piece into the world the way other kids seemed to. It was Jay’s fault. Enrique had been happy before Jay came.

As if summoned, there was the rev of the Maverick outside, and headlights illuminated the curtain. Lina went to the cupboard, got a bowl, and ladled in some chili.

Jay burst through the door and marched straight into his bedroom.

“Jay? Are you going to eat?”

He came to the table and, without sitting, took a spoonful of chili. Lina knew by his eyes, black with rage, that he had spoken to Janet Van Beke. Jay put the spoon down and said, “Tastes like shit.”

“Jay? Jay?” said Lina, her voice elevating as he went back into his room. “Excuse me, Jesús!”

“What!” he yelled.

“If you’re not going to eat, could you please clear your bowl?”

He marched back in, took his bowl, and threw it into the sink, where it crashed against the other dishes and sent a spray of chili across the wall.

Lina sprang to her feet. “How dare you!” she cried. “Who tol’ you you can act like that?”

“Fuck off,” he said.

She turned him by his shoulder. “Don’ you walk away from me, Jesús. Apologize. Apologize and clean that up.”

“Or else?”

“Or else you can just get the hell out of here.”

Jay laughed in her face. He dropped to his knees and pressed his palms together in prayer. “Please, please, kick me out. I want you to.
Por favor, Madre
. Save me! Save my soul!”

Lina pushed him, and he caught himself from falling.
“Desgraciado,”
she cried. “Stop that! You want to go to hell? Get up.”

He rose to tower over his mother. He took the flesh of her upper arm just under the shoulder, and squeezed until she whimpered. “You pushed me,” he said through his teeth.

“Don’t you touch her!” Enrique screamed, shoving himself between them. “I’ll kill you!”

“Faggot.” With a move so quick and effortless it was hardly visible, Jay pushed Enrique, sending him stumbling across the room to hit the wall. The dishes jumped on the table, and a pan fell from a peg in the kitchen. Then Jay turned and stormed out of the house.

“Enrique!” said Lina, and ran to him.

Jay stormed back in, grabbed his basketball, which was wedged under a chair in the corner, then left again.

Lina held Enrique. “Are you all right, baby?”

Enrique sobbed and held his arm where he had hit the wall. “I hate him so much!” he cried.

Jay returned yet again and went into his room. He cared so little what Lina and Enrique thought of him that he didn’t mind diminishing the drama of his exit through repetition. He threw some clothes into his gym bag, took his school books from his desk, and left the room, drawers agape and papers littering the floor.

“You’ve ruined my home!” yelled Lina. “You don’ belong here!”

“That’s right, I don’t,” Jay said emotionlessly. This time he sped off in his car.

Enrique suddenly saw that the last thing Jay had seen was Lina cradling him like a baby. He pushed her away and sat up. She gasped. For a moment their eyes locked, and Enrique teetered on the verge of apologizing, kissing her, and helping her to her feet. He had a choice, to melt or to freeze. He froze.

Lina heaved herself up and began cleaning and muttering Spanish words to herself.

There came a voice from the porch. “Lina?”

Lina threw down her rag and went to the door.

“Is everything all right?” Connie half-whispered.

The ruckus had roused her from that spot deep inside herself from which she had been operating, turning her head and seeing out of her eyes like a periscope, since her meeting with Reverend McNally that morning. “Should I go over?” she had asked Gene, who had considered, then answered: “Yes.”

Lina’s face remained fixed in its stony scowl. “Yes, everything’s all right.”

“I just . . . I’m sorry . . .”

Connie began to turn away, and Lina reached out and squeezed her arm with a hand still wet from cleaning. Connie said nothing, but expressed her solidarity with a nod. When Lina went back inside, Enrique had disappeared into his room.

Chapter 16

T
he following Monday, in distant Portland, Wanda sat against the sticker-festooned bumper of Melissa’s jeep, waiting. Five-thirty; Melissa would have to come out soon. Unless she worked late, that was. Wanda drew her coat more snugly around her and tightened the cross of her legs. The cold here was different than in Eula—wetter and more invasive—and Wanda’s clothes weren’t up to the task of fending it off. Every so often the mottled gray sky released a few fat snowflakes, which caught in her hair and melted.

“Ma’am?”

Wanda looked up. It was the guard from the booth of the parking lot. His beige uniform with its official-looking patches on the breast and shoulder was a little tight around the middle.

“Is that your car?” he asked.

“My friend’s. I’m supposed to meet her here.”

“When?”

“Um, now.”

“You’ve been here over an hour. Nearly two, actually.”

“Well, she’s late.”

“I’m going to have to ask you to move along.”

Wanda paused. For the first time in over a month, she wanted a cigarette, only because this moment required one—to be flicked away angrily before she rose. The guard followed her to the lot entrance, then returned to his little booth. Wanda walked slowly up the sidewalk to Melissa’s office building. She pushed through the heavy revolving door and sat down on a vinyl-upholstered bench behind a planter. She watched the bank of elevators, scanning each group of businessmen that filed out for Melissa’s glazed curls. Before long, however, another guard, this one wearing a gray suit and red tie, approached. “Ma’am?”

Wanda went and waited outside on the street. The sun fell behind the buildings and she was chilled to the bone by the time Melissa emerged from the building. She wore a black coat with shoulder pads, a fluffy pink scarf and matching beret, and held a folded newspaper under her arm. She looked up at the sky. Wanda gently approached. Melissa looked at her and froze.

“Melissa,” Wanda said.

Melissa turned and walked down the street.

“Just let me walk you to your car. I just need a minute. I came all the way here on my own money, from babysitting.”

Wanda said this not only to prove to Melissa that she had earned a moment of her time, but also to fully disclose everything. No more lies. She didn’t have a job at K-mart. Before, she hadn’t had a job at all. Now, for the first time since she was a teenager, she was babysitting.

It seemed to work; Melissa slowed a little.

“Remember when you first saw me? When you cried? That was
real
, Melissa, for me, too. I never believed in this stuff, but I was
meant
to have your baby. If there’s a God, He wants it. I really, really mean it, Melissa, and I think you know it’s true. Maybe there’s no reason for me to be here, in the world, you know? But if there is, this is it. This is my job. I know I should act all calm and cool about this and try to convince you with some smart argument, but I can’t. It’s about this feeling, Melissa. It’s not about reasons, and it’s not about the money.”

Melissa still walked ahead; Wanda could not see her face. “I know it’s not about the money,” Melissa said.

“I lied to you and that was wrong. But no more lies. No more surprises. I swear on everything—on my mom and dad’s graves. Just forgive me, and we can pick up where we left off. We can have this baby.”

They had reached the parking lot entrance. Melissa turned to face Wanda. With her fuzzy pink-gloved hand she pointed to her face, which was wet with tears. “I never cry,” she said with a desperate hiccup of laughter.

Wanda moved to touch Melissa’s shoulder, but Melissa stopped her with a severe look. They stood for several seconds, Melissa searching Wanda’s face skeptically. Then her shoulders dropped and she turned slightly. “I’ll talk to Randy,” she said. She walked away a few steps, then turned to Wanda again. “I’ll talk to Randy,” she said with a trace of humor, “and he’ll agree.”

T
HAT NIGHT, AS
planned, Miriam came over to Enrique’s house. “Why don’t you give me the presentation how you did at the science fair,” she said, “just so we have it fresh in our minds.” She sat on the sofa’s armrest and folded her arms.

Enrique propped the posters against the wall behind the model in the order they had been hung on the wall. “Well, how I started out was—” It felt awkward to give the presentation standing with the model at his feet, let alone give it to the very person who had shot it down. Enrique knelt, to be at the same level he had been, relative to the model, at the fair, and began: “On August 21 of this year over seventeen hundred people died in the middle of the night.”

Miriam nodded slowly as Enrique gave the presentation. The crease between her eyebrows grew though—a little valley of trouble—which made Enrique wonder, was she finding new faults with the project, or reliving the pain she had experienced at the science fair? When he came to the part (which had been his favorite) when he said, “
But
could lake overturn happen at Lake Overlook?” his voice lowered in pitch and increased in speed, and his gaze left Miriam to wander about the corners of the room.

When he finished, Miriam stood and chewed on a pen as she paced back and forth before the model. “So, the idea is we make it
just
about Lake Nyos, about what happened there. It’s like a mystery the scientists are trying to solve, and by suggesting that it might have been carbon dioxide and not some poison gas, we’re offering one possible answer.”

“Sure,” Enrique said. He stood up and rubbed his knees.

Miriam stopped pacing, removed the pen from her mouth, and held it in the air like a conductor poised to begin a symphony. “The trees have to go,” she said.

“What?”

“And the houses.”

“That’s the best part!”

“I know,” she said, shaking her head with a pity that seemed more for the trees than for Enrique.

“Why?”

“Enrique, it’s Africa. This is going to be a model of a lake in Africa. That village is cute, but it looks like—I don’t know—Hansel and Gretel.”

“What are we going to replace it with?”

“Palm trees. Huts.”

“And where do we get those?”

“Where’d you get this stuff?”

“Abby Hall gave it to me. It was her dad’s.”

Miriam nodded gravely. “We’ll have to construct them ourselves, then. Do you have scissors?”

They went to the kitchen table and Miriam tore a few sheets from the notebook in her backpack. She folded one into a square, then into a smaller square, then into a triangle. Enrique wondered if she was making an airplane. Then she took the scissors and wrestled a lightning bolt–shaped cut into the folded paper. A snowflake? “What’re you doing?” Enrique asked. Miriam ignored him. This is how she got when she was scrutinizing a blouse at the mall that she wanted to copy. She unfolded the paper and revealed an eight-sided star with tiny tufts of pulp showing at the jags in its spokes. She rolled another sheet into a tight cylinder, then balanced the hub of the star on top. “Palm tree,” she said before the star teetered and fell.

Enrique’s shoulders collapsed and an ugly look of resignation took over his face.

“I mean, this looks crappy. We’ll use construction paper and cardboard, even fabric if you want. It’ll be fun. The judges will like it better because we made it.
Oh my gosh!
” she said, looking at the kitchen clock. “I have to go. My mom’s picking me up at the Circle-K!” She quickly gathered her things. “You’re not worried, are you?”

“No.”

“Trust me, Enrique, it’ll be even better than before.”

Miriam left, and Enrique stayed at the table, leaning crookedly on his elbows, like an old barn on the verge of collapse. The only sound was the rustling of the blinds when the wind sucked at the window. Enrique felt a draft and assumed it was entering the house through the seam down its middle where the men had stuck it together last summer. A month ago Lina had set the thermostat’s dial at sixty-five, then covered it with an X of masking tape to keep Enrique and Jay from turning it up. So Enrique wore his hooded sweatshirt inside. He rolled the sheet of paper back into a cylinder, removed some of the chewed tabs of paper that hung from the snowflake-star, and balanced it on top again. A palm tree twice as tall as the church’s steeple? But, he supposed, they could make them a quarter this size. And for huts, they could cut toilet-paper rolls in half, coat them with glue, and obscure the cardboard behind rows of toothpicks, then make roofs out of dried grass.

The refrigerator ticked, then hummed. Enrique was about to get up and turn on the radio, when he heard his mother pull up.

It had been awfully quiet like this all weekend. Saturday night they went to the house at the edge of town—the spooky house with a crumbling chimney and dormers that looked like eyes—where every year they bought their Christmas tree. The floodlit forest had lost its magic for Enrique, and he had encouraged Lina to buy a modest, inexpensive tree. She had nodded sadly. In previous years, he had always pushed for the biggest one she could afford.

Jay had hurt them both, but it was the moment after he left that haunted them as they hung tinsel on the tree’s sparse branches.
I should take better care of her
, Enrique thought. He remembered Abby saying, of her father, “He needs happiness more than other people.”

Despite the Christmas music, the house seemed quiet. The crackling possibility of Jay’s arrival had been removed, and Enrique didn’t miss it, really, but he missed its power. It was Jay’s crashing about the house and the noise of his voice that had jarred Enrique into changing from a boy who played cat’s cradle at the mall to one who observed the workings of junior high from a comfortable distance, like a crow in the rafters. Jay’s long legs lying crossed on the coffee table, the stupid sports he watched on TV, his stinky shorts hanging in the shower—Enrique would no longer have these around to hate.

Little brother, Jay had called him once.

Now Enrique waited for his mother to come in the front door and break the silence. When she didn’t, he went to the window and lifted the blind. It was not Lina who had pulled up to the house, but Jay. He was unfastening a strap on the trunk of his Maverick and lifting something out. Enrique went out onto the porch.

“It’s my old bike,” Jay said, keeping his eyes on the handlebars as he guided the dirt bike up the walkway to the foot of the stairs. “It was at the Van Bekes’. You can have it if you want.”

Jay had spent the weekend doing chores—he had insisted on it. The Van Bekes’ children and grandchildren were about to descend for Christmas, so there was plenty to do. He had spent Saturday gathering all the sticks that had fallen from the globe willows onto the frosty lawn. Those bothersome trees seemed to grow by splitting in half, then recovering, and they shed more branches than they kept. The gardening gloves Jay wore had stiffened with cold, and his ears came to ache as if they had been boxed. “Jay! Put these on!” Janet had called from the front door, tossing him a hat and earmuffs. Sunday Jay had gone to church for the first time since moving to Lina’s. The members of Eula Lutheran had ruffled his hair and asked about basketball.

Underneath, Jay felt an ache of remorse. He tried to remember how hard he had squeezed Lina’s arm and pushed Enrique. He hoped he hadn’t really hurt them. It wasn’t their fault, really. They were poor, downtrodden; Liz would judge him harshly for being so cruel. Even now, it was only for Liz that he wanted to do good. What message could Jay send to Lina and Enrique to say he was sorry? Should he call? If he ended up staying here at the Van Bekes’ permanently, it would be nice to show there were no hard feelings.

Sunday afternoon Jay added a line of colored lights to the Van Bekes’ front fence, thinking it would be a nice sight for their kids to see when they turned onto the lane after the long drive from the Boise Airport. Then he cracked the sticks he had gathered the day before into kindling and put them in the garage to dry. There, under a tarp, he found his old bike.

Enrique swallowed an expression of excitement that would have sounded girlish and descended the stairs. His pocketed hands formed balls with knobbed ridges at the knuckle like little spines. Jay put down the kickstand and stepped back. Enrique ran his fingers over the handlebars. He squeezed the grip and saw that this caused two rubber pads to clamp onto the wheel. Brakes. On the bikes Enrique had ridden, you worked the pedals backward to brake. He indicated a pair of levers and asked, “Are those the gears?”

“Yeah.”

“How do they work?”

Jay shrugged. “Figure it out. It’s not hard.”

Enrique was grateful, and aware that he should thank Jay. But what would happen if Enrique said nothing, if he stood impassive and froze inside?

“Merry Christmas,” Jay said, with an unfamiliar, inquisitive look. Then he walked back to his car and said, “Tell Lina I’m sorry.”

Lina
—was that what Jay called her? Enrique had never heard Jay call her anything.

“T
HERE’S A
M
AN
here to see you,” one of the other aides said near the end of the day.

“At the desk?”

The aide smiled.

Connie finished dressing the bed. She tucked in the blanket with trembling hands, then walked down the hall past old folks dozing in wheelchairs, to the reception desk. Bill stood when he saw her. His brows were drawn low over his eyes, almost obscuring them.

“You weren’t in church yesterday,” he said.

“I wasn’t feeling well.”

“Sorry to hear that. I leave tomorrow. Just thought I’d come by and thank you. Here, I brought you something.” From a pocket inside his jacket he took a small wooden cross attached to a key ring. People in a village near his mission carved these. Connie had seen him give the same gift to pastors in the churches they visited.

“Thank you.”

“Well . . .” said Bill, shifting his weight from one foot to the other.

“Bill, in your presentation, why don’t you mention that one of your fellow missionaries is also your fiancée?”

Bill swallowed. “Because I don’t see how our romantic life is relevant to our work.”