Mysterious Skin (26 page)

Mrs. McCormick pointed. On the kitchen table, two pies lounged beneath a divinity snowman, its raisin eyes and cinnamon stick arms guarding them. “But you can still stay. I’ve baked a peanut butter-peach, and a good old-fashioned apple.”

Brian seemed lost. He eased into a chair, I took another, and Mrs. McCormick searched a drawer for a knife. Her searching knocked a wine bottle cork to the floor, and it bounced into a corner. I hunted for something to say. My gaze was preoccupied with pie number one’s mosaic of peaches, peanut butter dollops, and crumbled graham crackers, and I didn’t notice when the shadowy figure shuffled into the room.

“You’re awake,” his mom said.

Neil stood in the kitchen’s doorway. His eyes looked drugged, slightly incongruous, and I saw that it wasn’t a shadow beneath his right eye, but the gray crescent of a developing bruise. Another bruise curled across his cheekbone. His mouth wore a raspberryish sore. His earring was missing, the lobe swollen, infected. Below it, a cut had been Mercurochromed so thickly it glowed orange.

“Stop staring, Preston,” Neil said. Then he stepped
toward Brian. “So you’re the man.” On “you’re,” his mouth widened to display his newly chipped tooth.

“Little League teammates,” Mrs. McCormick said. She aimed the knife at a pie. “Neil never would have remembered a friend from that long ago. How neat that you managed to. How long since you two last saw each other?”

Neil touched the cut on his neck. “Not as long as it seems, I guess.”

“Ten years,” Brian said. “And five months, seven days.”

I assisted Neil’s mom by ordering the table with a quartet of forks and plates. “I’ll have peanut butter-peach,” she said. “How about you guys?” I chose the same, and Brian picked apple.

“One of both,” Neil said. The bruise made his eye appear locked in a perpetual wink. I still loved him.

We ate, barely speaking beyond the standard “Mmm”s and “this is really great”s. Mrs. McCormick was the first to ease the tension. “This isn’t the way Neil normally looks, Brian. He’s a tough one, all right, but he’s learning the hard way not to assert that toughness in just any old place. Hutchinson is one thing, New York is another.” I saw him roll his eyes, mouth a silent, Oh, Mom. “By chance you ever go there, god forbid, take warning. If toughs on the street want something of yours, by all means give it to them, or else expect a scuffle.” Brian nodded, but I didn’t believe that’s what had happened to Neil. I doubted Mrs. McCormick believed it, either.

After we finished, Neil gathered plates and forks, deposited them in the sink, and rubbed his mom’s shoulders. “We’re going to cruise around for a while,” he told her. “There’s something I need to show Brian.”

“I imagine so,” she said. “I guess you have some catching up to do.” She saw us to the door; as we stepped out she gave us each a pat on the back. Then she stood there, waving.

Brian drove. Neil stammered directions. I sat in the back, but by then I could have sat on another continent and it wouldn’t have mattered. They had crossed to another place. I floated away, inessential.

The Toyota turned onto Main. Ahead, beside the street, were the Kansas State Fairgrounds, the wreckage from the previous autumn’s twelve-day carnival still remaining. Briefly I thought Neil would steer Brian there, but he indicated the opposite way. Brian swerved to a narrow street. “This is it up here,” Neil said. “But you probably know that.” Brian parked alongside the curb, shut the ignition, and folded his arms.

They got out, neither speaking. Brian fished the baseball photograph from between the seats. He stepped around the car and leaned against the passenger side door. Neil took his place beside him, wincing as he pushed himself onto the hood, and both he and Brian stared at the boxy, completely mundane house where we’d parked. When I joined them, the glassiness in their eyes looked foreign to me. I understood this as the place their coach had lived. The house sat back from a row of knee-high shrubs, a gravel path leading toward it. A two-door garage linked to the house’s east side, its doors closed, a green garden hose snaking from its wall to the shrubs. Neighbors’ homes were lit up, flashing their greetings and noels to the night street, but here, in this home from their memories, there was only darkness. No Christmas lights braceleted its exterior, no tree blinked its varicolored eyes from the front window. The only beacons were the illuminated doorbell’s tiny rectangular beam and the porch light, the globe of which shone a curious blue instead of white.

“Blue,” Brian said, seeing it.

Down the block, a group of carolers trudged through the cold, pausing before each house to warble their songs to neighborhood families. I listened awhile, not knowing what to do or say. No matter what the carolers sang about—the infant Jesus, enchanted snowmen, nightfall over an ancient village—their words seemed the same. A security underlied their voices, a knowledge that they’d soon be home in bed, a log snapping sparks in the fireplace, mom and dad snoozing in the next room.

“Merry Christmas,” the carolers yelled at a doorstep.

“Merry Christmas,” I said to Neil and Brian. They still stared at the house, stared beyond its glass and wood and aluminum siding, stared at what had happened inside, years ago. Neil’s face was anxious, heartbreaking in its bruised and swollen state. Brian’s face had leached of color.

I wasn’t part of this. Where else did I have to go but away?

I could have said “I have to leave now,” could have explained “it’s better if you two are alone,” but I didn’t say a word. I raised my hand, fingers scratching the air in good-bye, and spun around. I stood there, my back to them, these two people I’d united at last. Then I began walking. The air made brittle stabs at my face, and I swallowed icy mouthfuls.

I tried telepathy one final time. I didn’t care about its foolishness. I zeroed my mind on theirs, hoping Neil and Brian would hear, just this once.
I love you both.

A long-haired boy bent over the sidewalk at a neighboring house, his zebra-striped mittens sprinkling salt pebbles onto the cement in rhythm with the Christmas carol down the block. The boy seemed around my age. Neil’s age. Brian’s age. I wondered if he’d lived on this street ten years ago; if he’d known Coach. And then I wondered how many
others there had been—where they lived now, the diversity of ways they’d chosen to remember. The boy stopped shaking the salt and hurried toward his house. I kept my head down, staring at the gravel lane, as if immersed in a book, a series of soothing and beautiful words spelled out across the roadside to lead me home.

The nervousness subsided, and my limbs grew numb. For the first time, Neil and I were alone, and we stood beside the house’s battered garage to watch Eric’s shadow trail farther away, each successive streetlight flashing him in and out of vision until his grandpa’s white sweater was nothing but a speck.

I turned and stared at the house. “Blue,” I said again.

There it was, the precise blue from countless nightmares, flooding the air around us as we moved toward the front door. The color came from the porch light, and it radiated a fuzzy semicircle over the yard. That same blue had shone through the windows on that long-ago evening, the rainy night Neil and I had been together inside this house.

Neil followed the gravel walkway toward the cement porch. He paused under the blue light, poised one knuckle against the door, and rapped gently. He waited, then moved his bruised eye to the door’s rectangular window to peer inside. Breath steamed the glass. “No one’s home.” He rattled the doorknob. Locked. “Let’s try the back,” he said, jumping from the porch.

We skulked around the garage, and Neil lifted the latch on a chain-link fence. The backyard was a jungle of tangled, skeletal weeds; their frozen vines and stems crackled
beneath our shoes as we walked. Stabbed into the earth were plastic sunflowers, the kind that pinwheel in the wind. Neil kicked one, splintering three of its petals. A cardinal regarded him from a circle of dirt, a female, her feathers a rustic caramel color. Instead of flying south, she had chosen to remain here, in this overgrown garden where I imagined marigolds and morning glories and bachelor’s buttons would bloom in a warmer season.

Neil tried the back door; it was locked as well. He spied an overturned lawn chair, brushed away its layer of sand, and unfolded it under a window. He stepped onto it carefully, his body clutched by pain; still, there was a certain level of fused skill and grace in the way he moved. “You were a great baseball player, weren’t you,” I said. It was the first reference I’d made to the conversation I knew we’d imminently have. “I used to watch you from the bench.”

“I was the best,” Neil said. “He told me so.”

Neil cupped a hand over his brow and peered into the window. “It’s changed, but it’s the same place.” He stepped down, one foot on the ground, one on the chair. “What do you think? I say we go in.”

Down the block, closer now, the carolers segued from “The First Noel” to another song I didn’t recognize. Their voices wavered, as if each kid were shivering. The cardinal lifted into the air, flitting back and forth between two trees as deftly as a badminton birdie. Neil scanned the ground, and I followed his gaze. Beside a beehive-shaped snarl of weeds were glass shards, broken bricks, a rusting tin top from a cat food can, and children’s toys: rubber pony, plastic shovel, foot-size fire engine. Neil kicked a brick. “Should I do the honors, or should you?”

“You’d better,” I said. I bent to pick up a square brick chunk, then changed my mind. My hand closed around the
fire engine. I relayed it to Neil, and he remounted the lawn chair.

He made a curious sound in his throat, a noise like a microphone’s static. “Bottom of the ninth inning, and the score is tied,” he said. “Bases loaded, two outs, the count full. McCormick rares back.” Neil swung the fire engine behind him. “And here’s the pitch.” I held my breath, and he hurled the toy at the window. The glass shattered, the crash surprisingly quiet. “Strike three,” Neil said.

Three more bashes of the fire engine’s front end knocked the rest of the glass away. Neil tossed the toy back to the ground, and it clattered against a brick. He positioned his hands on the window frame and squirmed into the gaping wound. I hurried forward, gripped his shoes, and nudged him farther. The house swallowed him.

My climb was more difficult. I rolled up the Little League photograph, wedged it into my pocket, and stretched myself from the lawn chair. I would have to chance accident by stepping onto the chair’s back and quickly thrusting my head and shoulders through the window. “Three, two, one, BLAST OFF,” Neil said. It worked. I leaned into the house, and Neil’s hands coupled with mine. I stared as our fingers intertwined; saw a triangular scar on Neil’s knuckle. Neil pulled me through, and I tumbled to the floor.

Neil and I scanned our surroundings. My eyes adjusted to the drapery of shadows, and the room asserted itself: lamp carved from driftwood, mirrored dresser scattered with paperback gothic romances and makeup, paintings of a stormy beach scene and a cabin in a forest clearing. It must have been the family’s master bedroom, considering the unmade double bed, the walk-in closet with sliding glass doors. “Not much for interior decoration, are they?” Neil asked.

I turned to him then, and for the first time that night I truly stared. Neil was my approximate height. His hair and eyes were pitch black, his eyebrows so thick they seemed mascaraed across his forehead. He had hardly changed from the boy in my pocket’s photograph, that Little Leaguer’s face a bud that had blossomed into the face before me. He was Neil McCormick, number ninety-nine. Seeing him after all these months, all these years, dried me up. I felt like a shell, with a mouthful of grist and an ice cube heart.

A pair of cats puttered forth from the hallway’s darkness, noses in the air. The first was stocky and gray, white fur like a bib beneath her chin. The second had long, almost silvery hair, which pieced onto the floor as she rubbed against Neil’s foot. “Awww,” Neil said, and the jaw he’d been clenching for the past half hour instantly relaxed. He bent to scratch her head, and the cat’s topaz eyes examined him. She begged for food, making a feeble and wee noise, more a wounded crackle than a meow, the sound of a dollhouse door, creaking open.

“Coach didn’t use this room much,” Neil said. “He kept baseball equipment here, other crap, odds and ends.” He moved into the hall, and the cats and I followed.

We gave ourselves a tour. The house oozed a baby odor, a sugary combination of perfumy talcums and lotions and diapers, a smell surprisingly like roasted sweet potatoes. But something else lurked beneath that, and when I inhaled I got a whiff of the house itself, the smell that had attended its rooms for years, a smell as familiar as the blue light.

“Here’s the hallway, the bathroom, the linen closet. And this”—Neil slapped a half-open door—“was his bedroom.”

Neil went in, but I stayed in the doorway. He flicked the light switch, and I squinted. “They’ve made it a nursery,” he said. On the wallpaper, elephants and clowns juggled polka-dotted balls. Figureheads decorated the bassinet’s posts.
Cornflower blue jumpers, bibs, and socks had been layered across the floor, awaiting use. Neil switched off the light and stretched beside the baby’s clothes, the movement causing him obvious pain. He stared upward. “He’s here no longer, and the bed’s here no longer. But that’s the same ceiling.” I looked. “All the little ridges and whirls and speckly-sparkly things. I used to get lost in its pictures, after we’d finished.” He sat up. “You know what I mean by that, don’t you.”

“I know what you mean,” I said.

Back to the hallway. There were two more rooms: a spacious kitchen to our left, the living room to our right. Neil tiptoed into the kitchen; the cats scampered about his ankles, expecting dinner. But I began walking slowly into the main room, my skin gradually translating, deepening to the translucent blue with each step as I moved toward the picture window, into the glow of the outside porch light. The world’s silence swelled until I could hear my heartbeat. I stopped in the room’s center. Here I was, at last, in the room from my dreams.

Behind me, Neil opened and slammed the kitchen’s cupboard doors. “What’s up with these He used to keep these things
stocked.
” I turned to watch him prop a cookie jar between elbow and ribs like a football. He opened the lid, reached inside, and gobbled something I couldn’t see. “That’s better.”

He noticed me staring. Whatever face I was making, its horror or solemnity stopped Neil in his tracks. He moved toward me and posted his hand on my shoulder. “Yes,” he said. “This was the place, wasn’t it?”

I reached up, grabbed his hand, and led him to a couch. Purple lilacs filigreed its upholstery. I sat on one flower, and he took another. The silvery white cat wandered in, upturned her implacable face, and creaked at us.

“Why now?” Neil asked. “Why do you need this now? Why did you search me out?”

“I’m tired of it,” I said. “I want to dream about something else for a change.”

Neil leaned against the cushions. Blue outlined his cheeks and chin, sapphiring his pupils, lending the medicine stain an eerie fluorescence. I was still holding his hand. The numbness persisted, and I waited for it to melt, waited to feel something new. Neil watched the frozen world outside the room’s window for what seemed hours. Finally he turned his head to look at me.

“It’s time,” I said. “Speak.” The forbidden moment had come; Neil would have to tell his story. Before he even opened his wounded mouth I knew what he would say. I knew it as conclusively as I knew my family, my self, and as he spoke it seemed as though his story had already ended, I was already tucked away in some warm and secure place, I was already remembering his words.