The Center of Everything (28 page)

“Thank you for telling me you want chocolate, not vanilla,” my mother says, the words loud and slow, like someone is standing behind us, holding a cue card for her to read. She slides the bowl of chocolate toward him and clasps his hand around his spoon. Eileen says I should have the bowl of vanilla. But I don’t want it, and neither does my mother, so Eileen takes it for herself.

“Honestly, Tina,” she says, waving her spoon at my mother. “You’re doing such an amazing job with him. Really.”

“Thanks, Mom. I’m trying hard.” I see the ends of my mother’s mouth twitch, almost a smile. She is hearing things like this more and more. Last week, Verranna Hinckle brought two other women from the university over with her, and they watched Samuel feed himself and point at what he wanted. They used the same word—“amazing”—as if he and my mother had performed a magic trick, pulled a rabbit out of an empty hat. I don’t think my mother knows what to do with these compliments when she gets them, especially from Eileen. She’s like a person without any hands getting flowers.

“So you think you might come?” Eileen asks. “To the party?”

My mother sits down in the chair next to Samuel. “No. I’m sorry, Mom. But no.”

Eileen takes a small swallow of ice cream and sets the bowl back on the table. “It’s his birthday, Tina. Just a couple of hours. It wouldn’t kill you.”

“It might,” my mother says. She reaches over and dabs a napkin at Samuel’s mouth. “I wish you’d leave this alone. If he wants to come out here and try to talk to me, he can. He knows how to get here, and he’s a grown man.”

“But maybe it’s difficult for him to tell you how he feels, Tina!”

My mother laughs. “Actually, Mom, I think he’s always been pretty good at that.”

Eileen leans back in her chair, her arms crossed in front of her. She is finally starting to look older, like a real grandmother, the lines around her mouth growing deeper. My mother says it’s from the cigarettes. “You know, Tina, you are a real puzzle to me. I find it hard to believe that you can be so kind to your little boy and have absolutely no compassion whatsoever for your own father.” She points her spoon at my mother again. “He’s going to be sixty, you know. His heart is bad.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” my mother says. “Look, I’ll tell you how it is. I just can’t. Not with Samuel. Okay? I know how he’ll look at him.” She shakes her head, wincing as if she can actually see all of this in front of her, like a movie projected on the wall behind Eileen’s head.

Eileen sighs, reaching over and pulling her fingers through Samuel’s hair. “What about when he dies, Tina? How are you going to feel about you being so petty—”

“I’m not being petty. If he wants to call me and talk to me about it, he can. But it’s a little hard to make peace with someone who doesn’t actually think of you as a person. And you can’t forgive someone who isn’t even sorry in the first place.” She shrugs, looking back at Eileen. “If he dies, he dies. I’ll be okay.”

Eileen makes a face like the kind you might make if you accidentally drank soured milk, or found a dead mouse behind the refrigerator. “That’s a terrible thing to say, Tina. A terrible thing.”

“It’s the truth.”

“No. You’ll look back and you’ll be full of regret. And it’ll be too late.”

I try to imagine the scene in Eileen’s head, what she’s imagining—my mother, dressed in black, reaching for her father’s casket as they lower it into the ground, pounding her fists against the metal, crying,
I’m so sorry. You were right. I’m not a person. I was a horse all along
.

“You will, Tina,” Eileen says, reaching into her back pocket for the cigarettes that are no longer there. “You’ll feel awful. But when death comes, it comes. And then it’ll be too late.”

My mother pulls Samuel out of his chair and onto her lap, pecking him lightly on the top of his head. “Well,” she says, carefully. “I guess we’ll have to wait and see.”

Traci Carmichael is dead.

I am sitting in Mrs. Geldof’s bright room, looking at Mrs. Geldof’s watery eyes and the map of the world on the bulletin board behind her, the United States in the middle, Kansas in the middle of that. Traci’s desk is empty, and so is Libby’s.

There has been a car accident, Mrs. Geldof says. Yesterday, on the way home from school. Adele Peterson was driving, and she’s dead too. They were going too fast, not wearing seat belts. Libby is alive, but badly hurt.

“What?” Ray Watley asks. There is a ripple in his voice, and although I think it’s just because he doesn’t believe what Mrs. Geldof is saying, it comes out as a laugh. “Are you kidding?”

“No,” Mrs. Geldof says. She blinks, and there are tears. “No, honey, I’m not kidding.”

I can feel my arms turning cold, someone running a feather lightly across my skin. I saw them yesterday, all three of them. Adele honked twice when they pulled up alongside the bus in the next lane. Traci’s arm was hanging out the window, fingers snapping to the radio, three pink plastic bracelets around her wrist.

But I remember now. There were sirens only a few minutes later. Travis and I were still on the bus, laughing about something. Not about Traci. Something else. When we got to the street where the accident was, there was already a detour set up. We had to take another route, and it took longer. We got home late.

“They’re dead?” Ray Watley asks again. Mrs. Geldof nods.

No one says anything. The truth of it, what this really means, starts to settle in slowly, moving into us through our open mouths, seeping in through our eyes when we look at the empty desks.

Ray Watley is quiet, not laughing now, his hands still on his desk in front of him. Deena turns around to look at me. She is already crying. Other girls are crying too, and I understand that I should be crying, that this is the appropriate response. But I am still just sitting and blinking, doing nothing, like a cartoon character hit on the head with something large. Even when people start to get up and move toward one another, clasping hands, I just sit there, still and dumb.

Mrs. Geldof comes over to me and pushes her wet cheek against mine, her arms tight around my rigid back.

“I know, honey,” she says, still crying. “I know.”

There is a picture of Adele’s crumpled Honda in the newspaper. The front end is completely smashed in, the windows shattered. My mother moves around me quietly, making lunch for Sam. We’ve been given the rest of the week off from school.

“Evelyn, sweetie, don’t look at that anymore,” she says. “Put it away.” She tugs on a corner of the paper, but I hold tight. According to the article, Adele was making a left turn after the light had already turned red, and the Honda slammed into an oncoming car, head-on. Traci actually survived the wreck, and was airlifted by helicopter to a hospital in Kansas City. Adele died on impact. The driver of the other car broke her foot in two places, but that was all. Libby Masterson was, of course, in the backseat, and is still in the hospital, in stable condition.

Libby had not been wearing a seat belt either, and Mrs. Geldof told us that the only reason she was alive was physics, a question of who was sitting where. The rest of us should not count on such luck and should wear our seat belts. Libby, Mrs. Geldof said, again and again, was very lucky.

“Yeah right,” my mother says. “Tell that to the shrink she’s going to need.”

On Monday, we are supposed to go back to school, but I don’t want to. I tell my mother I’m not feeling well. She holds her hand against my forehead only for a moment, biting her bottom lip.

“Evelyn, I can see you’re upset.”

I roll my eyes. “I’m just sick. I wasn’t friends with any of them.”

“I know. I know. But still, honey. I can see you’re upset.”

I go back to my room and lie down, and she brings me a 7-UP, plugs her tape player in next to my bed. But I don’t play it. I know I am not really sick, but it is all I can do to just lie here and look up at the star chart on my ceiling with no sound around me at all.

I am trying to figure out whether or not I’m a bad person. There are some points that argue that I’m not: One, I did not make Traci and Adele die. They were in a car, going too fast, and I was on the bus. Two, just because Traci is dead now does not mean that she was a nice person before she died. Just because she is dead now does not mean she was never phony. All it means now is that she’s dead.

I stare up at the star chart. I cannot go to sleep.

In driver’s ed last year, Mr. Leubbe rigged up what he called a Seat Belt Convincer to the back of his truck. He made us all try it, one at a time, buckling each of us into an old car seat that slid quickly down a two-foot ramp. I had been amazed by how much it hurt, the strap holding me back as the rest of my body went forward. I had a red welt across my neck that stayed there for two days.

“You kids think you’re immortal,” Mr. Leubbe had told us. “You think you’re going to be able to put out your hands and save yourself,” he said. “But it happens too fast. That was only eight miles an hour. Try it at fifty, and your arms will break like twigs!” He had clapped his hands together, loud and sudden. “Your teeth will hit the pavement before you can think to shut your mouth. You’ll bite off your own tongue!”

It is difficult to imagine Traci Carmichael like this, her blue-gray eyes hurled into the pavement and ended, just like that.

I lie there, still and silent for hours, until I hear my mother tell me good night, wheeling Samuel into their room. Only when the light in the hallway goes out do I get up and move across my room to my dresser. The clothes are still there, in the bottom drawer, underneath my own sweaters and shirts. The white jeans are still smooth and new-looking, creased where I folded them years ago, but the palm trees ironed onto the sweatshirt are cracked, starting to peel. And I am amazed by how small everything looks. The red shoes are so tiny, just half the size of my foot now.

I reach into the pocket of the jeans, and feel it there, the locket, a heart-shaped coldness between my finger and thumb, still hanging on its golden chain.

seventeen

F
OR A WHILE
, I
AVOID
Travis. A lot of our jokes aren’t funny, now that Traci is dead. I feel a pain in me all the time now, a dull rock in my stomach. I don’t want to feel bad about anything else.

The Saturday before Easter, I wake to the sound of a gentle rain hitting the roof, and then yelling, repeated knocks. Samuel is crying in my mother’s room, but it’s a woman yelling, not my mother. It’s coming from outside. I move the sheet away from my window and see it’s Deena’s grandmother, already up and wearing the dress with the zipper, banging on the Rowleys’ front door.

My mother peeks inside my room. “Evelyn? You awake?”

I nod, yawning.

“What’s going on out there? Is Travis even home?”

“I don’t know.” I really don’t.

“Is Deena over there?”

“I don’t know.”

She reties the belt on her robe and sits down on my bed, ducking so she can see out my window. Two of the cats stay just outside my door, eyeing the doorway with interest. My room is the one room they are not allowed to come into, and so this is the room they want to come into the most. I wave my foot at them. “Shoo, kitties,” I say. “Shoo.”

Deena’s grandmother continues to knock, steady and strong. We realize she is not using her hand, but something metal and sharp, a large cooking spoon.

“I don’t know what this is about, but she woke up Sam an hour early,” my mother says. “I’m going over to her house tomorrow with a skillet.”

The Rowleys’ door opens, and we can see Mrs. Rowley standing in her doorway, holding Jackie O. Jackie O is old now, blind, her eyes clouded with cataracts. She barks at Deena’s grandmother, her head turned in the wrong direction.

“No again!” Deena’s grandmother yells, pointing as Mrs. Rowley’s chest with the spoon. “No again!”

My mother and I look at each other, and then back out the window. Deena’s grandmother does most of the talking, the rain falling on the shoulders of her zipper dress. When Mrs. Rowley opens her mouth to say something, Deena’s grandmother raises her voice and keeps talking, so Mrs. Rowley has to just stand there and listen, her hand over Jackie O’s muzzle. The cats creep slowly into my room, sniffing the carpet carefully. Just this once, I let it go.

“Huh,” my mother says, squinting out the window, nodding, as if she can hear what they’re saying. “Huh.”

Deena’s grandmother turns suddenly and hobbles down the steps, crossing the parking lot back to Unit A. The Rowleys’ front door slams shut. There are loud thuds, more yelling. Travis yelling. We can hear Mrs. Rowley crying when she crescendos up, so shrill it makes the cats tilt their heads up to the window, searching the sky for birds.

The Rowleys’ front door opens again, and Travis sort of falls out onto the balcony, wearing only shorts, no shirt, no shoes, the door closing behind him. He runs back and tries to open the door. He bangs and kicks, rain rolling down his naked back. The door opens again, and Mrs. Rowley throws a shirt and a pair of shoes down the steps to the parking lot. She slams the door shut, and he throws himself against it, kicking at it so hard we can hear the glass in their windows rattle.

Sam wheels into my room, bell ringing. He is wearing his red flannel pajamas, pointing in my direction, looking at the floor. The cats watch him, their eyes large with interest. “Glad you could join us, babe,” my mother says, hooking her foot around his, pulling him the rest of the way.

Travis moves slowly down the steps, picking up the shirt his mother threw, already wet from the rain.

“Can he come inside?” I ask.

My mother frowns. “If he’s all done kicking things.”

I follow her out of my room. We are like a parade. Samuel jingling behind me, the cats bringing up the rear. I stop in the bathroom to brush my teeth and hair, keeping the door open to listen.

“Hey, Tex,” my mother calls out, opening the door. I don’t know why she calls him this. I don’t think Travis has even been to Texas. “Why don’t you come in here and warm up for a while? You can dry off. I’ll make you some pancakes.”

From the bathroom, I hear him say no.

“Why not?” she asks.

“I don’t want to bother you.”

“Oh, honey,” she says, laughing now. “It’s a little late for that.”

“Is Evelyn awake?”

“She is. Come inside. I’ll make you some breakfast. Whatever it is, it’s not the end of the world.”

I come out of the bathroom just as he walks in, his hair wet with rain. He doesn’t look at me. My mother makes him take off his wet shirt, and she wraps one of Sam’s blankets around his shoulders. He sits down on the couch, looking straight ahead, and with the blanket wrapped around his shoulders he looks like a man from the Bible, or a war refugee. The cats move around him cautiously, sniffing his toes.

I sit down next to him, tap him on the knee. “What? What happened?”

“Deena’s pregnant.”

I hear the pancake batter sizzle on the skillet. My mother shakes her head slowly, her eyes closed.

“What?” I laugh the way Ray Watley did.

He turns, looks right at me. He’s breathing hard, rain still dripping off his nose. “She’s pregnant.”

I am angry, maybe at him. I try to remember Deena the last time I saw her, just on Friday, sitting in English class. She did not look any different. She could have made this up, told her grandmother a lie. “I thought you-all were being careful.”

He closes his eyes, and now he laughs. “I thought so too.”

“I thought…” I stammer. I don’t know what I want to say, what it was I thought.

Through the window, I can see that Mrs. Rowley has come back outside. She stands on their balcony, looking around the way she did the night Travis threw pebbles on her roof, Jackie O licking the rain off her neck.

“Travis?” she says, her voice wavering. “Travis, honey? Where’d you go?”

My mother opens the door and tells her he’s with us, and that she can come over too.

“Oh great,” Travis says. “Great.”

By the time Mrs. Rowley gets to our door, she is crying, her skin a blotchy red, her eyes a brilliant shade of aqua green, bright with tears. The cats notice Jackie O, shivering from the rain in Mrs. Rowley’s skinny arms, and they form a circle, hissing, their hackles raised. Samuel makes a quick shrieking sound.

“Did he tell you?” she asks, looking at my mother. “About Deena?”

My mother nods, and new tears come to Mrs. Rowley’s eyes. She turns to Travis. “I’m sorry I yelled, honey,” she says. “I’m sorry. I’m just so damn sad for you.”

Travis looks down at his muddy feet, at the tracks he made on our carpet when he walked inside. My mother tells Mrs. Rowley to sit down and asks her if she wants some coffee. Mrs. Rowley strokes Jackie O’s head and keeps crying. “She tricked you, didn’t she? Tricked and trapped. That’s what it looks like to me.”

My mother’s face changes slightly, a weariness in her eyes as she pours the coffee, but Travis says nothing. If he would just look up at me, just once, I would nod. I agree with Mrs. Rowley. Tricked and trapped. She’s right. I shouldn’t have told Deena anything. Now it’s too late.

“Are you sure it’s yours?” she asks. “Can you even be sure of that?”

He winces and turns his whole body away from her. “I’m sure it’s mine, Mom. Don’t start that.”

My mother hands Mrs. Rowley the mug I gave her for Mother’s Day the year before. #1
MOM
it says. “Cream?” she asks. “Sugar?”

Mrs. Rowley shakes her head no and takes a sip. She does not say thank you.

“Look,” my mother says, pouring herself a cup. “Does Deena even know what she wants to do?”

There is a pause before anyone understands what she means.

“Oh, she’ll have it,” Mrs. Rowley says quickly, her hand shaking when she brings the coffee up to her mouth. “They’ve made up their little minds, her and that old German bitch. We’ve no say in the matter. No say at all.”

Samuel wheels himself over to where Mrs. Rowley is sitting, trying to touch Jackie O. She growls, her eyes hazy and unseeing. My mother pulls Samuel’s chair away.

“You don’t have to marry her, honey,” Mrs. Rowley says. “I know I said you did, but I was just mad. You don’t have to. I don’t care what she says about lawyers. We’ll move. You can go live with your dad for a while.”

My mother taps her fingers against her coffee cup. I know what she’s thinking. Still, I’m with Mrs. Rowley on this one. Deena did this on purpose, because she cares only about what she wants. She didn’t think about anyone else, what they might have wanted.

Travis does not even answer his mother when she says this. His face is still wet from the rain, so it is difficult to tell whether or not he is crying.

Again, Travis sits on the bumper of Mr. Goldman’s little gray car. I suspect Mr. Goldman has come out here to try to convince Travis that it would be better for everyone, in the long run, if he stayed in school just one more year.

But it won’t work, I know. Travis is going to marry Deena, and he has already told me what he would say to Mr. Goldman, to anyone, if they tried to talk him out of it. The baby is a sign, he said, his destiny, making him do what he’s supposed to do.

“It’s called Deena,” I told him. “Not Destiny. She’s making you do what she wants you to do. There’s a difference.”

He got mad when I said this, acted like I was being dumb. “You’re not paying attention to the big picture, Evelyn,” he said, looking at his hands and not at me.

I don’t see this big picture. And if there really is a big picture, I guess I’m not in it. I don’t see what any of this has to do with destiny. If Travis could have been sitting in my room the night I told Deena he might leave her, he would know that destiny really was the moment she looked out my window and started making up her mind.

I think of Travis now as a silver ball in a pinball machine, rolling in whatever direction he’s pushed.

I have not seen Deena since we found out. She has not been to school. I am certain she is hiding from me, but I am watching for her, waiting for her to come outside. For days, I have been planning what I will say when I see her. I have made up long, sharp-worded speeches, and I imagine her face flinching when she hears them.

My mother says she feels sorry for both Deena and Travis. She thinks it’s a bad idea for them to get married right now. She told me she doesn’t think it’s right to tether people together before they’re ready. That was her word, “tether.” She feels sorry for Deena because she doesn’t know that Deena wanted to be tethered all along, whether Travis wanted to or not.

I move through my days, stunned, wide-eyed, as if someone has slapped me hard. I have dreams at night about different things being stolen—my favorite shirt, a ten-dollar bill. I set them down, turn away for just a moment, and they’re gone.

Deena stands outside our door, her face pale in the sunlight. “Why haven’t you come over?” She is already crying, her nose running. She wipes her face with her hand. I can’t help but look down at her belly, as if I would be able to see it already, the pregnancy. But except for the crying, she still just looks like a normal fifteen-year-old girl, wearing cut-offs and a T-shirt on a nice day in April.

Behind me, my mother pushes Samuel’s wheelchair by, bell ringing. When she sees Deena, she smiles. “Hi, honey,” she says, reaching forward to squeeze her hand. “It’s good to see you.”

“I’ll be outside,” I say. I step outside, shutting the door behind me. A wasp has built a nest in the crack between our door and the stairs. It emerges quickly, hovering over our heads.

“You know?” she asks. She has the look of someone who has not just started crying recently, but for a long time, days maybe, the skin around her eyes puckered and pink.

I nod. “Mrs. Rowley came over here when she found out. I thought you were on the pill, Deena.”

She looks confused for a moment, not saying anything. “I was. It just doesn’t work sometimes.”

I kick at the dirt on the concrete step. “When doesn’t it work?”

She waits until I look up. “Sometimes.” Her bottom lip is quivering, but I don’t care.

“You guys are getting married?”

She nods. “I think so. His mom is saying no, but that’s what everybody else wants.”

“Everybody?”

She grimaces, blinks, and then, unbelievably, there are even more tears. It is amazing, the amount she can produce. “Why are you so worried about what Travis wants?” She presses one hand to her chest. “What about me, Evelyn? How long have you known, and you haven’t come over to see me?”

I say nothing, watching her.

“You act like I did this all by myself. Well guess what? That’s impossible. Okay? You should know that.” She looks mad when she says this part, but then she just starts crying again, her shoulders shaking. “You’re supposed to be my friend.”

“I’m Travis’s friend too.” I look at her evenly. “You got pregnant on purpose, Deena. I told you he was going to end it. I’m the one who told you.”

She makes a whimpering sound and pulls her hair so it covers her face, and even crying, she is pretty, her dark eyes looking darker now that her skin is so pale. If this were a made-for-TV movie, Deena would be the star, especially now that she is tragic as well as beautiful, pregnant at fifteen.

I know I am supposed to hug her. I am the supporting actress, the supportive friend. But instead I go back inside, shutting the door behind me, leaving her out there with just the wasp.

On the last day of school, we make cards for Libby. She is out of the hospital now, but Mrs. Geldof says she is still in a world of hurt. She is trying to walk without a walker now, and this summer, for her, will be long and hard.

I make myself think of Libby trying to walk when I feel sorry for myself now, which is pretty much all the time. I imagine her holding onto two side railings in a hospital hallway, stumbling, having to get back up again. I’m lucky, I know. I can at least put one foot in front of the other. And at least I’m not dead in the ground like Adele and Traci.

But I feel like I’m dead sometimes, underground. And it doesn’t matter that I can put one foot in front of the other, because I have nowhere to go. When summer comes, I sit in my room in front of the fan, trying to read. I usually end up just sitting there, looking out the window.