Soul Catcher (6 page)

I couldn’t wait to get home to try calling him again.

It was just past eleven when we drove up to the house. We always left one downstairs lamp and the upstairs hall light on when we went out. Now, the windows of Mom and Dad’s
bedroom were bright yellow and you could see the flickering blue t.v. shadows inside.

Dad was home.

Mom slammed the brakes and we lurched forward. Without saying a word to us, she marched inside the house.

We slipped in quietly after her. Gwen turned on the tube in the living room and pretended to watch an old Claudette Colbert movie, but I don’t think she was really paying attention. She was upset by what was happening. So was I.

I never knew I could feel so lonely in my own house. I dialed Patrick again,
wishing wishing wishing...
but he wasn’t home.

Very late, after I’d been in bed awhile but still couldn’t sleep, Dad crept into my room. Gwen was on the floor in a sleeping bag, snoring away. Dad stepped over her, and stood by the bed, looking at me. I pretended to be asleep. He bent down and kissed my forehead. It was not a normal goodnight kiss, but
a goodbye
kiss: long and heavy and sad. He left the room like a shadow, vanished.

There was no way I could sleep now. My room was full of an electric charge, a white sizzle of questions.
Where was Dad going? Why didn ‘t he talk to me about it? Was Mom leaving, too?

I couldn’t stay in bed, so I put on my yellow robe and moccasin slippers, and went to their room to see if they were there. I thought maybe it had been a bad dream, maybe they were snuggled up in bed together. They didn’t even have to be snuggled, they just had to be there.

But they weren’t; the bed hadn’t even been turned down. Their old green and blue bedspread was a little rumpled, that was all. Lights were on. It was too quiet. Until, outside, a motor revved. I looked out the window and saw Dad’s blue Audi roll away.

‘Mom?
Mom?
’ I called.

There was no answer, no sound. So I went looking.

The attic door was open. The old wooden stairs glowed from the light of a weak overhead bulb. I’d always hated the
sour smell of the attic, and now it seemed suffocating. But I went up anyway; I had to see who was there.

Mom was bent over a trunk. It looked like she was searching for something inside. I felt a surge of hatred for this woman I’d always loved, and my thought was:
she has driven him away.

‘What happened?’ I said.

She didn’t turn around. I could see by the way her back moved that she was breathing in spasms.

‘What are you doing?’

Where she knelt over the trunk, there was no light, only shadows swimming with suspended dust. I watched her, and my anger cooled. It was as if she emitted some kind of force that changed my anger into shame. The soft curve of her back, the wave of her hair as it fell into the trunk, struck me as the saddest thing I had ever seen. I didn’t hate Mom. I couldn’t. I was so confused.

I knelt down next to her. ‘Mom?’ I whispered. ‘Are you okay?’ Her head moved but I couldn’t tell whether it was a nod or a shake.

I looked into the trunk. When I was younger, this was my treasure chest, full of intriguing mysteries. I would come up here and study the articles of my parents’ pasts. Now, to my surprise, I saw some of my own things. Someone must have put them there — Mom, probably — since I’d gone away to Grove. It was eerie seeing traces of myself mixed with the things of their histories. A converging of our lives, a time capsule. The trunk struck me now as too much a thing of memory, something static, dead.

‘What are you looking for?’

Finally, she raised her face. Her expression was hard, detached from the past. Or maybe it wasn’t her face that looked that way, maybe it was her eyes. I stared into a darkness and depth, a hollowness that echoed pain. She tried to smile but all she could manage was a vague shifting of the muscles around her mouth.

The trunk was lined with white paper printed with tiny
blue flowers. Orange stains, probably from rain and rusty hinges, formed scalloped patterns around the edges and in the corners. All the things in the trunk were neatly folded and stacked. A small-waisted red dress with white stripes. A pair of red shoes with pointed toes and thin high heels. Dad’s fraternity pennant. A book they’d shared in college. Their letters of acceptance into the same law school. The lease of their first apartment. A tiny silver cup with my name engraved on both sides. A bundle of my report cards. Photographs of the family. Pieces of ribbon and string. The brochure of a ski lodge in Vermont where we’d spent a long weekend nine years ago. My eyes stopped at an envelope with my handwriting, addressed to Mom and Dad. It was a letter I’d written only recently from Grove.

How many hours had Mom spent hunched over this trunk? And why?

I put my arm around her, and she jerked away. Her head swung down toward the trunk, and her back moved in waves that alternated with a choking sound. She vomited. It didn’t stop until she was empty, spent. I was repulsed by the sour smell, by the sight of Mom sick and helpless, by the vomit covering the remembrances in the trunk. But I couldn’t leave her there alone, I just couldn’t. The more she vomited the more I loved her. I felt that I loved her more deeply than ever before, as a woman, and as a woman who was my mother. My knees hurt from kneeling on the hard wood floor, but I didn’t move. I held her forehead with my hand, hoping that in some way I was helping her, if not as a friend then at least as her child.

There is an underlying truth to every story. When Dad left Mom, I felt that my whole childhood had been a lie. Or, at least my interpretation of it. But that’s the thing about childhood: the adults in your life present a smooth, easy picture, and then when you reach a certain age (depending on the family) they sock it to you.
The truth.
What their life together had really been like all along. The lies, the deceptions, the gaps in trust. How they held together for you, or
didn’t — they would say couldn’t — despite their better judgement. The bottom line, they say, is that they still and will always love you, which had been an understanding and now becomes a dubious, often repeated statement to bolster your troubled spirit. Because suddenly, starting on the day they are sucked off in different directions, their truth turns inside out into your truth. Their ending is your beginning.

I
t was late when we arrived back at school on Sunday night. I was tired and depressed and could have sat in that bus all night long, gone all the way to China, buried myself in the ocean, for all I cared. I hated the thought of being back at Grove, without Patrick, and without a home to look forward to anymore. How had Gwen known so fast — the day she met me — that this was going to happen to my life? Poor Gwen. It was sad to know so much, so soon, before you’ve had a chance to really live. She didn’t trust anyone, not really. Would I end up that way?

Gwen was asleep next to me, or I thought she was. As the bus’s weight leaned into the curving driveway to the parking lot, she bolted up in her seat and said, ‘Yo!’ Leaning over, she whispered in my ear: ‘It’s Patrick!’

She pointed to the lawn next to the concrete parking lot, and there he was, Patrick, springing up from the ground.

I pushed my way off the bus and ran to him. He opened his arms and caught me in a hug.

‘Surprise,’ he said. ‘I got back in!’

‘When? How long have you been here?’

‘Since yesterday. It took me fucking hours to convince the man to give me a chance. I missed you, Kate.’

‘I’ve got your suitcase!’ Gwen called out as she passed us.
She had one of the Little Kids lugging both our suitcases as well as his own enormous knapsack. She winked.

‘I missed you too,’ I said, ‘a lot.’

He put his arm around me, and we walked up to the dorms.

‘How was your weekend?’ he asked.

‘My parents are splitting up.’

Patrick stopped walking and looked down at me. He seemed so tall all of a sudden. Or maybe I just felt especially short.

‘Are you sure?’

I nodded. ‘I don’t know why they had to wait till I got home to do it. Dad left last night. Mom’s a real mess. Guess he’s had a girlfriend for a while.’

‘A girlfriend?’

‘Almost a whole year, Mom said. A secretary. I can’t believe it. Dad doesn’t do stuff like that.’

‘I guess he does.’

‘No, I don’t think so. I think there must be some kind of mistake.’

Patrick hugged me and I started to melt. I did feel pretty icy, almost cracked. I just couldn’t picture Dad with someone else; he wasn’t that sort of man; he
was good,
not
bad.
My dad wasn’t so greedy that he’d abandon his family for another woman. And if he was, then I didn’t know him, and he could just forget about me.

‘Come on, Kate,’ Pam called. ‘Get inside!’ Pam was an Upper Girls dorm parent who took her job way too seriously. ‘It’s past curfew! Get to your dorms!’

‘Can’t we have a few minutes together?’ Patrick said. ‘We haven’t seen each other —’

‘No.’ She gave us one of her ugly bug-eyed glares.

‘It won’t be so bad,’ Patrick whispered. ‘I’ll be here for you. Remember, I love you.’

So much for reunions. The machine of Grove had clicked on, and we were drawn into the routines of our respective dorms.

In the morning, as we walked down the hill toward lower campus and breakfast, Patrick told me as much as he could about what had happened to him.

‘I locked myself in my room for three days. Jesus, my room got beat up! I was either jumping out of my skin or lying on my bed in convulsions. Three days and two nights. It was hell, it really was. Then, when it was over, my mother told my father about it right in front of me. He came over to see me, and she stood there and she said, “Your son is a heroin addict.” She said
your son,
like I wasn’t her son, too. My father said he couldn’t let me stay with him, so my mother said she’d keep me if she had to. I don’t know, Kate, I couldn’t help it, I went out and —’

We reached the dining room. It was just before eight and the whole school was huddled in front of the door. The chilly November air was pressing in on us. What would it be like waiting to be let in for meals in the dead of winter?

‘I couldn’t help it,’ Patrick whispered. ‘It was just like that, I couldn’t stop myself. I kept thinking about you, and it almost held me back.’ He kissed my ear.

‘But you stopped?’

‘I did. I signed up with a program at the hospital. It was great. They —’

The dining room door swung open and we were swept up by the inrushing tide.

‘Listen,’ Patrick managed to say, ‘I had to make a promise to Silvera when he let me back into school. Don’t be surprised.’

It was too soon for most people to know Patrick was back. Our old seats together were already taken by the time we got into the dining room, and we had to sit at different tables. All during breakfast, I was dying of curiosity about Patrick’s deal with the man.

Finally, after breakfast, Silvera said there was an announcement. Two tables over, Patrick stood up. The room broke into applause, welcoming him back. He hooked his thumbs into his belt loops, his shoulders sloped and his
head hung slightly forward. He looked at me and smiled nervously. He cleared his throat.

‘Well!’ His voice cracked. ‘Well, hi!’ There was more applause. ‘It’s good to be back. I’ve missed school a lot.’

I couldn’t believe it. Patrick wasn’t exactly a renegade, but he also wasn’t a Grover — one of those lackluster fools who played by the party-line without thinking. This speech must have been part of the bargain he made to get back into school.

‘After classes —’ Patrick’s voice cracked again and he looked at me. I smiled. ‘After classes this afternoon, there’s gonna be sign-up for activities for the new quarter. I’m announcing a new one that I’ll be running. It’s called Drug Group and I hope anyone who feels they need to talk about drugs will join.’ He glanced at me, then sat back down.

Drug Group. What was that? An assembly to
do
drugs, to
stop
doing drugs, or to trade war stories? I had heard kids talking: ‘Man, I was
wasted.’
‘It really fucked me up.’ ‘It blew my mind.’ I could just see a Grove Drug Group, run by Patrick: he could illustrate the discussions by showing the rash of tracks up his inner arms. Someone else could instruct as to alternate methods and territories: behind the knees, or under fingernails where the tracks wouldn’t show.

Later Patrick told me, ‘It was Silvera’s idea. He said if I get five kids to sign up for a group about drugs, I can stay at school. All we have to do is talk about drugs.’ He shrugged. No sweat. ‘If fewer than five kids sign up, then I have to leave.’

‘I’ll join,’ I said, ‘and I’ll ask Gwen. What about Eddie? That’s three right there.’

He shook his head. ‘You have to sign up for something else. Silvera specifically said so. Besides,’ he smiled coyly, ‘you’re straight as an arrow. What do you know about drugs?’

‘More than you think. Plus, I know
you.’

‘Ha ha. Cute. But Gwen can join if she wants to.’

‘And Eddie.’

‘Eddie can’t.’

“Why not?’

‘He’s on probation.’

That was the first I’d heard that Eddie was in trouble. I looked over at him: he was standing near us, with John, Troy and Janice. Janice had a long face, a barely developed chest and slightly bowed legs. She was very thin, and with her long dark hair and black leather skirt, she looked tough — or at least like she wanted to. She and Troy pretended they were a motorcycle gang. I couldn’t imagine them kissing. Troy was peeling bark off a stick, while Janice and Eddie threw stones at Peter Prentice. He was the one with the wacky idea to build a geodesic dome. Peter stood about ten feet away, board-straight, with his arms folded tightly over his chest. Every time a stone sailed past, he swayed in the other direction and then centered himself again, like one of those blow-up punch bags that bounce back after every hit. He was doing his Zen. And smiling.

‘Poor Peter Prentice,’ I said.

Patrick shrugged. ‘We all have our problems.’