Stay Awake (17 page)

You can be rude if you want—no one will blame you. You can skip the gathering afterward, where the women will bring covered dishes as if for a picnic and the men will sit in the yard near the beer keg your dad has bought, and maybe one of your friends—Jerry, probably, the quiet, sensitive one—will be sent out to scout for you. What you’re doing is acceptable. You can drive the interstate with all the windows down, the music so loud it’s distorted in the speakers, going twenty miles over the speed limit, and no one will say you’re wrong. Everyone is thinking of you in your time of sorrow, everyone’s heart goes out to you.

Where to now? People always say you have your whole life in front of you, but then again, doesn’t everybody? You know what they mean, of course: that now you are free, you can get out of town like everyone else your age with any brains, you’re not
stuck anymore. That’s what they’re really saying, and you can appreciate it, though it takes some adjustment. For a while now, you’ve been getting used to another sort of life in your mind. In your imagination, you’ve been building houses, buying baby stuff, finding some sort of trade, like carpentry or plumbing. It was even beginning to seem like something you might even grow to like, though you know it wouldn’t have worked out. Take a look around: The town is full of dumb clods who got their high school sweethearts pregnant. See how happy they are?

You haven’t talked to Meg in a while. You risk seeming like an asshole in that regard, but what is there to say? The last time you saw each other, really, was when she was still in the hospital, right before the baby died.

The baby was born with a severely malformed heart, and there was nothing they could do except make it comfortable for its brief time in the world. It was a boy, who had to be given a name for the birth certificate, and death certificate. While Meg was still sedated, you chose “Caleb,” because you thought it sounded cool, and sturdy, like a cowboy who could survive anyway when they told him he was going to die. But when you told Meg she looked at you with her high verbal SAT stare and said, “I wish you would have waited to ask me.” Caleb meant “dog” in Hebrew, she said, and you felt awful. The baby was in a little plastic case; you couldn’t even see what it looked like, really, with all the machinery and the white papery tube taped over its mouth.

Meg wouldn’t go to see it. Him. She just stayed in her hospital bed with her face turned toward the wall, an IV dripping fluid into her arm, which was very gross, you thought. Her mother sat
with her day and night, though when you would come in her mother left the room, trailing icy silence that echoed with a deeply godful prayer for you to die and suffer for a long time beforehand.

Meg said nothing. “Hey, baby,” you said softly, and then were sorry. You should erase the word “baby” from your vocabulary, you dick, right along with “Caleb.” When you touched her, she flinched. She knew that you were the one who put this deformed child inside of her. Everything inside both of you was separating and pulling apart, and already you were both calculating ways to get away from each other as quickly as possible. The two of you stood there, side by side, and the tectonic plates of your lives began to shift and resettle, continents separating. This is one of your younger brother’s fascinations. Dooley is thirteen, and he likes to think about such stuff—he can tell you about the great landmass, Pangaea, which existed before the continents broke apart, and he can tell you the names of the insects and bacteria that will live long after mankind is extinct, and he can tell you of a time in the future when the sun will grow so hot that the earth will burn into a piece of charcoal. It puts things in perspective, Dooley says sometimes.

When you come home the night of the funeral, Dooley is still waiting up. He sits on the sofa, watching a Saturday night horror movie in which some old actor is running through the future, screaming. “Soylent Green is people!” he cries.

Dooley looks up, glazed, when you walk in. He stares at you, full of aching.

“What are you watching,” you say quietly, and Dooley shrugs.

“Nothing interesting,” he says, and stands awkwardly. “Everybody was wondering what happened to you,” he says, and gives you his grim eyes. He believes in propriety.

Dooley is a homosexual. He hasn’t really admitted it, but you know that he will become a gay person: It is already in the cards. There has always been a hint of it in his demeanor, but now you are more or less certain. A few months ago, you happened to come into the bedroom the two of you shared. He thought he’d locked it, but you’d given an irritable shove and it opened; there he was, kneeling by the bed, with pictures of half-dressed men taped to the wall in front of him. “Get out! I’m getting dressed!” he’d cried, trying to move quickly, but it was too late. “Sorry,” you said, trying to pretend you’d seen nothing—though really you’d been noticing stuff for a while, so this came as no surprise. You’ve noticed the secret looks he gives your friends, the way he stiffened and backed away, panicked, when Jerry tried to wrestle playfully with him. You understood what Dooley’s stricken, frightened look meant: He had a hard-on, and he was afraid that someone would notice. You can’t help but think that life will be tough on him, unfairly tough, and that makes you sad. He’s got a better heart than most people.

Like now. He feels the grief you should be feeling more keenly than you do, with the kind of dignity and self-possession you’ve never been able to manage. “You probably got out at about the right time,” he says. “It got ugly.”

You nod thoughtfully. “How bad?” you ask, and he shrugs.

“About medium,” he says. “They got into a fight and everybody left. Mom’s really pissed, though. She’s going to nail you bad when she sees you.”

“Asleep?”

“So far. Dad’s passed out in the garage on a lawn chair. He’s not going to wake up until morning. Did Jerry find you?”

“No,” you say. “I was just out driving around.”

“Well,” Dooley says, and purses his lips diplomatically, “he was out looking for you, so maybe you should call him or something. I don’t know, maybe you should stay over at his place, because Mom is … you know.” He clears his throat. “Did you go see Meg?” he says hopefully, and when you shake your head his mouth grows smaller, more judicious. “Well,” he says. Then his eyes widen in warning.

And you turn. Your mother is standing in the doorway, observing the two of you, her nightgown spectrally pale and billowy in the dark.

She’s taken something, some pill, and she puts her hand on the door frame for support. “Look who’s home,” she says.

Brace yourself.

She is an angry woman, your mother. There are reasons for that, reasons that you might feel more or less sympathetic toward, if you had time to think about it. But there isn’t time. There is only space enough to dodge what she is throwing at you—a cake of soap, which bounces harmlessly onto the sofa.

“Do you think of anybody but yourself?” she says, as if it is a real question, as if she just wonders. “I don’t think I’ve ever met a person like you,” she says, and she’s gritting her teeth like she does when she’s trying to keep calm. “Do you realize that people were out hunting you? There were fifty people at this house and they came to pay their respects to that baby and to give you their
condolences. But you didn’t even have the common decency to show up. You don’t think about others. All you think about is me, me, me.”

“Listen,” you say. “I’m sorry! I was upset, that’s all.” Which is true—but her words get under your skin, and your face feels flushed. You can’t think of how to explain. “I just needed to get away,” you tell her. “I didn’t think it would matter that much. Why should anybody care what I do? I mean, my God, it was my baby, not theirs!”

“Your baby!” she says, and you see that she will snap this up like a weapon, the way she is prone to do. “Let me tell you something, mister. That wasn’t
your
baby. That was Meg’s baby. All you did was have sex with a girl. That doesn’t make you a father by a long shot, I’ll tell you that right now. It doesn’t give you the right to play the prima donna. What do you suppose people think of a person who decides a baby’s funeral is a good time to put on a big show? How do you think they feel about such a person?”

“They think such a person is an asshole,” you say. Why not? It’s true.

“Exactly right,” she says. “I couldn’t have said it better myself.”

“I’m sorry,” you say, and she looks at you with such disdain that you lower your eyes. “I thought …” you say.

“No you didn’t,” she says. “You didn’t think about anything. You just acted on a shitty little whim. That’s your problem, sweetheart—you don’t know what thinking
is
.”

“I deserve that,” you say, hoping to disarm her, but you don’t.

“Yes you do,” she said. “And probably worse than I can give you.”

And then she is quiet, glaring at you, waiting for you to answer, though she knows she’s won. You are speechless. You are a big boy—six-one, 210 pounds—so you know that bawling won’t help, but it comes out of you anyway, a thin line of tears and snot, not sorrow, but frustration and hate and shame. “I can leave,” you say to her, and Dooley says, “Come on, come on,” placing himself between the two of you, because it can get worse—much worse. It has before.

“I’ll be so glad when I can get out of this place,” you whisper.

And she grimaces with disgust. “Is that supposed to be a threat?” she says. “You need to learn a new trick, sonny boy.”

After that, you can’t go to sleep. You sit there with Dooley, who is silent in the waves of grimness you are emanating. The two of you sit side by side as Dooley flips slowly through the channels—music videos, home shopping networks, old black-and-white movies, static.

“So,” you say after a while, “do you think I’m an asshole?”

“No,” Dooley says. “Not really.” He looks at you sidelong, gauging your reaction. “You should call some people,” he says. “That’s what I would do. People will understand.” He stares at the screen thoughtfully, clicks forward. Women in sequined bathing suits are dancing. “I think you should call Meg, too.”

“Yeah,” you say. “I know.”

You wonder what is the worst thing that can happen to a person. How far from where you are is the very worst? You make some calls in the morning, sitting at the kitchen table where your mother can hear you apologize if she wants, though she pretends she isn’t paying attention. You go through the cards and call the
people—your relatives, your parents’ friends, your coach. Your own friends can wait.

“I just wanted to let you know,” you say. “I just wanted to say that I appreciated the card, and that I’m real sorry I wasn’t able to see you last night. I went out for a drive to clear my head and I kind of lost track of things and didn’t get back as soon as I should have. So I just wanted to apologize …”

Everyone is nice about it. Their voices are soft and considerate, and even their hard questions—How’s your family holding up? Have you spoken to Meg? What are your plans now?—you can gloss over pretty well.

Dooley is in the living room on the sofa, watching cartoons with his blanket over his legs like a little kid, though he is also reading from the book he’s been carrying around all summer, which is
A Brief History of Time
by that famous crippled scientist, and he’s also raising his head occasionally to listen to you. Dooley is a whiz in this regard. He can juggle three or four things in his mind, though he often can hardly walk without tripping over himself.

You keep talking to people, repeating some of the lines, until your mother mumbles, “Mr. Smooth,” under her breath, staring at you like you are a fake. And you have to wonder: Are you a fake? You don’t even know, do you? You can’t even hear yourself speaking anymore.

Jerry calls to cuss you out. He got the worst of it, not the rest of them, who sat around and drank beer and had pie and coffee and munched from a relish tray surrounded by funeral flowers. Jerry was out looking for you.

“What the hell, man?” Jerry says. He is the type of person who will always be your friend, for as long as you can stand to keep disappointing him. But the truth is, you’re already starting to imagine a world without Jerry, who, in his loyalty, has begun to seem like a moron. People like Jerry, or even Dooley, for that matter, seem to lose IQ points every time they turn their faithful eyes toward you. You feel ashamed for them.

“Why didn’t you call me, man?” Jerry says now, plaintively. “Everybody was, like, worried and freaked out for you. Like, who knew what could have happened to you? You should have just told me—I would have covered for you or whatever.” He is silent for a moment, waiting for your apology, your explanation. “I mean, where did you go, man? I drove up to Meg’s place, I drove down Union Ave., I drove down the interstate …” And he wants to hear that he was close, that he missed you by inches, by moments. That’s all he wants, but for some reason you can’t even bring yourself to give him that.

“I was just around,” you say, “just around and about,” you say, lightly enough that his quiet grows brittle with hurt. “Look,” you say, “I’m sorry. I apologize,” knowing that this probably wounds him more than anything. You can feel the edges of the friendship begin to crumble in the pause at the other end of the phone.

Burn, bridge, burn.

You have yet to call Meg. There are other people to call. The navy recruiter, for example. Imagine yourself aboard a ship, headed for other countries. Imagine yourself stupid and numb, yelled at by some abusive sarge, doing push-ups and marching
while chanting stupid call-and-response rhymes. Try to insert yourself in that situation. It might not be so bad.

There are college brochures to look at. There is a fishing boat in Alaska that you read about in the back of your father’s
Outdoorsman
magazine, six months and fifty thousand dollars, no healthy man turned away. There is your car and the open road, the fabled lure of random adventure. You stand at the verge, and you could become anything. Your future shifts and warps with your smallest step, your shitty little whims. The man you will become is at your mercy.