Stay Awake (11 page)

Now, on the other hand, as they lingered and lingered in the airport, Jeffrey seemed perfectly content. He was still as a potted plant, and had a little transcendent smile as they sat there in the uncomfortable plastic chairs. A few rows away, a young mother was struggling to keep her toddler from running amok; she had him strapped into his stroller and he was flailing and arching his back like a torture victim, letting out low, guttural, straining cries as the mother attempted to calm him with that gently therapeutic voice they all used these days.

“She’s
reasoning
with him,” January remarked to Jeffrey as they observed the unfolding drama. “It’s so stupid. It’s like trying to explain something to a cat.”

“Hmm,” Jeffrey said. “Cats don’t really understand human language.”

“Do you remember that time when Robin was about four and she would have those terrible fits of rage? Pulling her own hair and throwing herself around like something out of
The Exorcist?
God, that was awful.”

“I don’t remember that,” Jeffrey said.

“You were very good with her, actually,” January said. “Very matter-of-fact. I thought you were a good father.”

“I don’t really remember anything about what Robin was like as a little girl,” Jeffrey said. He was still observing the mother and toddler a few rows over, who were in the midst of a great contest of wills. “I remember when I look at pictures,” Jeffrey said. “I remember taking the pictures.”

“Hm,” she said. The photographs had begun to taper off precipitously not long after Robin turned five. Whatever urge there had been in the beginning to document every “first” they experienced had faded, and soon the photo albums were only bare outlines of their years together: a few posed portraits on birthdays, or in front of some vacation landmark, or a Christmas tree. She wasn’t sure how much she herself could recall of those last years of their family life, so distracted had she been by unhappiness. It was kind of chilling, in a way.

“Well,” she said at last. “Memory’s not all it’s cracked up to be, anyway.”

“Probably not,” Jeffrey said, and after a moment he leaned into her, tilting his head so that it rested lightly on her shoulder. He was capable of such gestures every once in a while, and sometimes she thought that, even without his memories intact, some residue must still remain. It was weird to think that she had known him for longer than she had known anyone else in the world.

Across the way, she saw that the toddler had calmed. Freed from his stroller, he now rested comfortably and quietly in his mother’s lap, his head leaned against her shoulder, his blanket clutched to his mouth.

She looked back at Jeffrey.

Oh, she thought, and absently reached up and put her fingers
through Jeffrey’s thick, shaggy, beautiful hair, and he nuzzled a little, comfortably. Jeffrey had his fist pressed to his mouth, as if he were holding an imaginary blanket.

Oh
.

But she tried not to think any further. She arranged a calm look on her face. She would not step even a tiny bit more into the future that seemed to be settling over her.

The buzzer for another baggage conveyor began to bleat, and luggage began to emerge from another mysterious cave, but neither the toddler nor Jeffrey lifted his head. Above, on the screen that listed arrivals and departures, she saw that Robin’s flight had been changed from delayed to cancelled.

She would just sit there a while longer, she thought. He was resting so peacefully.

Outside, the sleet had gotten thicker. You could hear it pebbling against the large glass windows, you could see it swirling wildly through the spotlights of street lamps. It was the kind of night when you might expect to see a skeleton flying through the air, its ragged black shroud flapping in the wind.

Twenty years passed. Then one summer my sister Cassie began to call me on the phone. She’d call me up every week or so, just to chat, and it was a kind of weird situation. I hadn’t known anything about her whereabouts since I was very small, and at first I didn’t really know what to say to her.

But Cassie acted as if it was the most natural thing in the world. “Hey, babe!” she said. “What’s up?” She had the kind of voice that made her sound as if she was smiling affectionately as she talked, and I found that I enjoyed hearing from her. “What’s been going on, sweetie?” she’d ask me, and we’d end up talking
for hours, talking until her voice began to blank out and get static as her cellphone ran out of power. She would go on about some movie she’d seen, or tell a story about some eccentric person she used to know; she would ask me to describe my friends and my job and my daily life, and when I said something she thought was funny she would laugh in this great way that made me actually feel a kind of glow.

Sometimes she would call very late or extremely early in the morning, and she would be in a strange mood. She would want to talk about our other brothers and sisters, who she was also in contact with; or she would go into very inappropriate subjects, like her sex life; or a few times she even wanted to talk about our mother, who she referred to as “Karen.”

“What do you think Karen’s doing right now?” she asked me once, and for a minute I didn’t even know who she was talking about. It was about five in the morning, and I was in my apartment above Mrs. Dowty’s garage, sitting in my narrow twin bed with the covers wrapped around my middle.

“Who’s Karen?” I said groggily, and Cassie was silent for a moment.

“Our
mother
,” she said. Outside the window, some branches were moving in the darkness when I looked out. I noticed how the spaces between boughs cut the sky into shapes.

“Don’t you ever feel sorry for Karen?” she asked me. “I mean just a little?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I never really thought about it.”

To be honest, until Cassie started calling, there were a lot of things that I hadn’t thought much about. I knew the basic facts,
of course. I knew, for example, that my mother was thirty-two years old when she was sent to prison. She had given birth by that time to eight children. They were:

We all had different dads. All of us were living with her when LaChandra and Nicholas were killed. Then our mother’s parental rights were terminated, of course, and we all went to different foster homes, and she was sentenced to life without parole.

So we had been sent on various separate paths away from her, and from one another. I guess I had always assumed that this was for the best, but Cassie didn’t see things that way. She told me that she had been gathering information for years, tracking each of us down, one by one. She was the oldest—she was almost fifteen when our mother got sent away—and she said she’d always felt like it was her responsibility to keep an eye on all of us. “They can tear us apart, but they can’t make us stop loving one another,” she had told me the first time she called, and I soon came to recognize this phrase as one of her mottoes. “Only connect, Robbie,” she said to me from time to time. “That’s what I firmly believe.
Only connect
.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, though to be honest I wasn’t totally sure what she was talking about. I guess what she meant was that we were all still connected, even though we were scattered, even though so much time had passed. I guess it was a legitimate way to feel about things.

According to Cassie, most of us had done very well for ourselves, despite our rough beginnings. Cecilia Joy, for example, lived with her husband and two beautiful children on a sheep ranch in Montana and she’d had some of her poems published. Ashlee was taking acting classes while working as a receptionist for a movie studio in Los Angeles, and Piper had taken her first job as a mechanical engineer for a company in Houston. Jordan had come out of her coma, recovered completely, and now was attending medical school at Princeton University.

Sometimes, I have to admit, I wasn’t completely sure I believed everything Cassie told me. It seemed like she might be exaggerating certain things, maybe stretching the truth a bit. She claimed, for example, that her ex-husband was a rich construction contractor with mob connections, which was why she was always changing her cellphone number. She said that she had spent some time in law school, and that she was a certified public accountant, though now she worked as a home caregiver for the elderly in St. Augustine, Florida. Sometimes she would call and I’d think I could hear the background noise of what sounded like a bar or a party.

Once, I thought I could hear the boxy voice of some kind of official announcement being made in the distance—maybe the last call at an airport terminal:
All ticketed passengers must be on board
.

“Cassie,” I said, “Where are you right now? What are you doing?” And she made a shrugging sound in her throat.

“I’m at home,” she said innocently, though I could’ve sworn that I very clearly heard the murmur of people in the background, and a baby crying.

“I’m just sitting here at the kitchen table, having a cup of tea,” she said thoughtfully. “Just sitting here looking out at the moon shining over the ocean.”

My own life wasn’t as interesting as the stories that Cassie told about herself and our siblings. Perhaps that was the problem; perhaps that was why I didn’t always quite believe her. My foster parents, the Dowtys, were simple, kindly, middle-of-the-road people: a math teacher and his wife. I grew up with them in Cleveland, Ohio, and then I remained there afterward, mostly of my own free will, with one year of college to my credit and four years working as a housepainter for my foster cousin Rob Higgins. I lived in a little converted apartment above my foster mom’s garage, and I paid her a hundred dollars a month for rent. I was twenty-five years old, and I’d visited only three other states, and zero foreign countries. These were the bare numbers of my life, which I kept in my head. I had 7,891 dollars saved up in the bank. I had ten toes and nine fingers. I got up at six in the morning six days a week. Sometimes I worried, wondering what Cassie was telling the other siblings about me, because there was so little interesting to say.

It was funny, I suppose, that Cassie and the others had so quickly come to occupy such a large part of my daily thoughts. The truth was, I’d hardly considered them at all in those long
years since I’d last set eyes on them. They had almost completely faded out of my mind before that one day when Cassie called me for the first time.

“Happy birthday, Robert!” Cassie had said. Those were the first words out of her mouth when I answered the phone. “You’ll never guess who this is!” she said.

It was actually the day after my birthday, and I was still a little hungover. I was sitting in my recliner, watching TV, and I put the sound on mute with my remote. I sat there blankly for a bit.

“This is your sister Cassie,” she said at last. “You probably don’t even remember me, do you?”

I hesitated. What does a person say to a question like that? I thought I could feel a kind of glimmer of recognition, though I wasn’t sure if it would officially be considered “remembering.” For some reason, I pictured her with red hair and freckles, and I thought hard about it until I pulled up a momentary flash of recollection. Here was the kindly policeman who carried me on his shoulders; here were the tops of the heads of my siblings below me; here was the weeping voice of my mother, who was locked in the bathroom with the water running.
My babies!
my mother was crying.
Come help Mommy! Come save Mommy!
And from my perch on the kindly policeman’s shoulders I could see more policemen coming with crowbars, and a shiny puddle of water was emerging from under the crack of the door.

I sat there silently for a moment, considering this memory. Then I slid it slowly to the back of my mind again, and shifted the phone from one side of my face to the other.

“Cassie,” I said. “Sure I remember you.”

• • •

I opened my eyes.

The electricity had been off the night before, another power outage, but now it was back on. The bedside lamp bent brightly over me. The digital clock was blinking, the television over in the corner had come on and was sending a mist of static into the room. I noticed that there were some hard objects in the bed, and when I felt underneath me I discovered my flashlight and the cordless phone, and I sat up. It was morning, basically. Late August.

The night before, I’d fallen asleep while still talking to Cassie, and little scraps of our conversation floated back into my head.
Tell me
, she’d said.
What’s the first thing—

“—the first thing you remember,” she said.

“I’m thinking,” I said, and she let out a breath.

“Don’t blow a gasket,” she said. “Geez. It’s not such a difficult question.”

“Well,” I said. I considered again: nothing.

“Okay,” she said. “So just tell me about Cleveland—how about that? Tell me about the first time you came to your new—”

Your new family
, she said, and I shifted.

“Um,” I said. I considered. I tried to think of interesting anecdotes.

I was so boring, I thought.

I had become aware of it, more and more, as the summer wore on, as the first rush of enthusiasm and excitement began to grow cooler. I thought of Cassie a lot while I was at work. What kinds of things could I tell her next time we talked? What would I say?
I tried to save up little jokes I’d heard, articles from the newspaper. I moved through the days watchfully, waiting for a quirky little moment I could package up for Cassie.

I arrived in Cleveland the summer I turned twelve. A social worker put me on the train in St. Louis. I guess things had been explained to me in some fashion or another and I was aware that my new foster parents were going to meet me when I got to my destination. I was given some papers to carry with me and someone had packed me a lunch in a paper bag, a juice box and some baby carrots and a peanut butter sandwich.