Sliding On The Edge (24 page)

I take my time and ease back against
the pillows that Kay props behind me.

My head wobbles like one of those
plates on a stick that jugglers twirl around, but with her hand to
steady me, I manage to gulp down a glass of water before I fall
asleep again.

The next time I open my eyes, the sun
is shining on the back of the house. The porch, which I can see
from the couch, is shaded. That means it’s late
afternoon.

My head isn’t pounding and I don’t
feel like I’m about to hurl anymore, so I decide to test my legs.
They don’t buckle under me, and I can walk. Good thing, too,
because I have to pee. I shuffle across the room and down the
hall.

The bathroom mirror’s afternoon
feature is a horror show: matted hair, puffy eyes, skin that
wintered under a rock. If I had died last night, I wouldn’t be
pretty on the slab today. And I always thought I’d make a very
pretty dead person.

I splash water on my face and run my
wet hands through my hair.

“
Tell me again about the
picture I had in my mind last night,” I say to the face that looks
more like Monster’s than Shawna’s. I was a sleeping beauty
surrounded by pink satin. Marta, huge tears draining to her chin,
leaned over to say goodbye. Deirdre, her bumpy nose red from
crying, stared down at me, and Deanna of the two N’s stood next to
her, apologizing, too late, for being such a bitch. Casey stayed
the longest and kissed me so softly that his lips were like moth
wings on my forehead. The last to lean over me was Kay, with Kenny
beside her.
“I’m so sorry, Shawna,”
they said together, like one person
speaking.
Wasn’t there more? I just can’t
remember.

I squeeze a glob of toothpaste onto my
brush and attack the fur on my teeth, but I need to sit on the
toilet while I brush. My legs are not ready to hold me upright for
long.

What else don’t I remember
about last night? It was important. But not important enough, I
guess.

When I come out of the bathroom, Kay
is leaning against the wall, like she’s waiting for her turn in a
ladies’ room line in a theater.

“
You going to guard me
twenty-four seven?” I ask.

“
For a while. Until we can
arrange to see Dr. Lubell again. But we have some decisions to
make. Both of us.” She takes my arm. “Come on. I’ve got soup on the
table.”

The soup’s hot and good, and I’m
hungry, even if my stomach is still sour. “I’m not going to school
on Monday, right?”

“
We’ll talk to the therapist
first. The appointment’s at ten.” She clears the table and sits
down again across from me.

“
So, what in the h—” Kay
shakes her head like she has to erase that line and start again.
“What were you thinking, taking those pills?”

I want to explain, but how do I
explain Monster? I don’t understand him. Monster used to hang out
with me. He left after the lady with the single red braid came to
stay and feed me ice cream, and laugh with me when Mom was gone and
I was scared. About a year ago, when I was fifteen, Monster came
back. Only he wasn’t little and fun like before.

I was almost asleep when he swam up
through the sheets, wrapped long wormy fingers around both my
ankles and pulled until I was sure I’d disappear under the bed. At
the moment my head was about to go under, he let go of me, and I
curled myself into a tight fist, holding onto my knees.

The next time Monster came, he
promised to help me if only I’d do one thing for him.

“
What?”

“
You know. It’ll be our
secret.” And he whispered in my ear.

“
No. It’ll hurt.”

“
Only a little,” he said.
“And then you’ll feel good.”

He promised to help and I believed
him. So I found one of Dylan’s razor blades in the bathroom. At
first I didn’t like the feeling of the blade slicing across my
ankle, but I grew to appreciate its cold thinness. It took me away
from Mom and her Dylans, Randys and Jakes, from Tuan’s snaky looks,
and the greasy takeout boxes piled in the sink. For that moment of
cutting, I didn’t feel anything except the icy red line.

From then on, whenever I got the
shakes and felt the touch of Monster’s fingers, I’d slip Mr. Sharp
from under my mattress and draw him across my skin—in places only I
would see. And never too deep, just enough to stop being scared for
a while. At least for that moment, I could control
something.

“
If I tell you, you’ll think
I’m nuts,” I say to Kay, who never backs down from
anything.

“
Try me.”

“
Can I wait until my stomach
isn’t up here?” I point to my chest. I’m thinking I shouldn’t have
eaten.

“
No.”

See? She’s stubborn. So I tell her
about Monster, about the cutting, and how, as weird as it sounds to
say so, it helps. “The shakes leave when I draw the line across my
ankle. For just that minute, I’m in charge of my life. Jackie’s
gone. Tuan’s apartment fades. Even Las Vegas goes dark and
quiet.”

“
But here?” Her voice is
just above a whisper.

I have to think, so I close my eyes
and focus on her question. I see the house and barn, Kenny, Casey
with the gray, Magic waiting at the fence, Kay with her mug of
coffee Sunday mornings. Then there’s Marta and school and—I open my
eyes and look up at her.

“
I don’t know. Maybe it’s
what I brought with me. Monsters travel, I guess.” When I finish
she doesn’t say anything for a while, so my stomach has some time
to go back to its normal business.

“
So why the pills this time?
Are you ratcheting up to really destroy yourself? You really want
to leave me with your suicide as your good-bye?”

I know better than to shrug, so I
answer her straight. “Yes. You never wanted me here in the first
place.”

Her knuckles, laced into a single
tight fist, turn white. Her eyes stay fixed on me as she speaks in
that slow way she has when she’s had it with me.

“
And you came to that
conclusion all by yourself, did you?”

“
No. Not all by myself.
Jackie said so.” I shouldn’t have mentioned Jackie. Kay’s face goes
into a spasm, but the rest of her doesn’t move and she’s
silent.

“
You were the one who wanted
to flush me. You wanted me gone a long time before I landed on your
porch two months ago. You didn’t want me, and my dad didn’t
either.”

From the look on Kay’s face, I expect
she’s going to explode and I’ll be wearing bits of her. I’ve hit
dead center on a sore spot. I consider backing away, leaving while
I can before she blows. Instead, I stay put and keep my eyes locked
on hers, waiting for her next move.

When Kay suddenly scrapes her chair
back and stands up, I hold onto the table to keep from jumping out
of reach. But she doesn’t come at me like Jackie would. Instead,
she goes to her office and returns holding a large leather
book.

“
You need to know about your
father.” She opens the book and drops it on the table in front of
me.

“
His name was Nicholas
Stone, and he was a good son. He would have been a good father, but
the service took him, so he was a good soldier instead. He died
trying to save other people.”

She’s at my side and I can feel the
heat of her, can almost feel her breath with each rise and fall of
her chest. I clear my throat and take a chance on saying something
else.

“
Why do I need to know about
him now?” I’m still half expecting my stomach to pop out of my
mouth, with the way it’s hopping around inside me.

“
Because he was a lot braver
than your mother or you, or . . . even I ever thought of being. He
valued life. He didn’t try to throw it away.” Kay’s voice has
settled into a low and dangerous current. “And he never walked out
on anybody . . . unless they forced him to go.”

I know better than to open my mouth to
tell her my mom’s version of that story. Besides, I’m too tired to
say much. So I look down at the album only to see a face so much
like my own that I jerk back, letting the book fall flat onto the
table.

“
No question you’re his
daughter. I knew that at the bus station, or you’d never be living
here now.”

Chapter 46

Shawna

Kay gets up from the table. “When
you’re done going through the album, we’ll talk. I’ll tell you all
about what happened, and you’ll have to decide which version of the
story to believe, Jackie’s or mine.”

She grabs her straw hat from the rack
by the back door. “Can I trust you not to do anything else stupid
for a while?”

“
I’m out of
pills.”

“
That’s a dumb answer,
Shawna. I want one that sounds intelligent, all right?”

“
I’m too sick to kill myself
today. Is that good enough?”

Kay turns and stomps down the
steps.

I’m alone now, with my father looking
up at me with dark, scolding eyes. Nicholas, age seventeen. The
flat cap is pushed back on his head, its tassel dangles near his
ear. He clutches a diploma in his hand.

I flip the pages backward. Nicholas,
age twelve. He sits on a white horse, his smile spreading across
his face; he squints at the lens. Nicholas, age ten. Tall, dark
from the summer sun, he poses with a fishing pole and a string of
fish he holds up for the camera—same smile, same squint.

Another page and another, going
backward in time. Nicholas, Day One, 1970. Then Kay and Peter
before Nicholas, 1968. Kay, her black hair pulled back gleaming
under the sun, leaning over the porch of this same rough red house.
A lean blond man sits beside her, his arm around her
waist.

The yellow newspaper clipping is
wedged between two empty pages. I open it and read:

April 10, 1991. Sweet
River Native Lost in Desert Storm. Sergeant Nicholas Stone, Tank
Commander of the Third Armored Division was killed this week while
on patrol in the vicinity of the Safwan, Iraq refugee camp when he
stepped on a land mine.He is survived by a wife and baby
daughter—

“
Baby daughter!” I inhale
the words and hold them inside, not wanting them to vanish. I
reread that line and run my finger underneath it, like I might lose
my place.

—
as well as his mother and
father, long time Sweet River residents. Sergeant Stone attended
Sweet River High School, where a memorial service is planned to
honor his memory.

Mom told me my dad left because of me.
She said he ran off the week I was born and didn’t tell her where
he was going. She said he didn’t want to see me. The clipping
quivers in my hand and I have to put it down. I have to stop the
shakes. I slam my hands onto the tabletop until my palms
burn.

She lied! Damn her. Why?

I’m not shaking anymore. I
place the heels of my hands over my eyes and press hard, until the
shadows dance behind my lids. I know why she lied. I wrote two
reasons that first day in Mrs. Heady’s English class.
There are times when a lie works a lot better
than the truth.
And like Mark Twain
wrote:
I would rather tell seven lies than
make one explanation.

Maybe my dad didn’t run off because of
me. Maybe he died thinking he’d return, make a family with Jackie
and me. Or, here’s an idea, he left her. She wouldn’t want to
explain that, would she? So now I have to sort out her fiction from
the facts, and piece together what really happened before I was old
enough to remember my own history. She couldn’t invent it anymore.
I turn back to the picture of my seventeen-year-old father. “Would
you have come back to me?”

I tuck the clipping back into its
space, where it’s been pressed all these years. After that, I find
only empty pages. Kay’s family ended that April day, someplace in a
country I hear about all the time, without ever knowing its
significance in my life.

I go back to the first pages of the
photo album. These have the color and the feel of old newspapers
left in the sun. When I let them fall page by page, they fan back
the stale smell of used clothing stores or Tuan’s back room full of
poor people’s discards.

Staring up at me are the faces of
people who didn’t find anything funny at that moment when they were
photographed, or maybe never: Great-grandmother Stone, 1920.
Grandfather Wescott, 1938.

My family tree is sprouting relatives
faster than Buster sprouts fleas.

“
Wonder what they’d say
about old Jackie and me?” I close the book. “Who cares,
anyway?”

“
I do.” Kay is at the door.
“I’d hope they’d have good things to say.”

“
About Jackie,
too?”

She sighs her way into her same chair.
“Yes. Even about Jackie.”

Kay studies her hands, like they might
help her say what she needs to, then she looks at me. It’s hard to
read her, to see what’s in her face. There are too many feelings
stirred together, and I can tell she’s sorting them out, deciding
what and how to say what’s in her head.