The Freak Observer (7 page)

The boot says nothing. A chunk of shit falls off it, but it says nothing.

It is now safe for the brain to look out the window.

. . .

That Friday that Esther died, I was standing outside, waiting for the bus when she yelled out the truck window and asked if I wanted to ride home with her and Abel.

I wonder, if I had ridden the bus like I was supposed to, would I be working the graveyard shift with Mom at Cozy Pines? Would Esther still be dead?

It doesn't matter if the answer is yes or no. This is not a thought experiment. She can't be alive and dead at the same time like Schrödinger's imaginary cat. Esther is dead—and I know it.

. . .

If you are in a hurry, a school bus is the worst possible travel option. It moves slowly down its route, stopping at trailer parks, gravel roads, private drives, and railroad tracks. It doesn't matter if there is no train. A bus stops and flaps its doors. It doesn't matter if there is no one waiting to go to school. The bus stops and flaps its doors.

One day while I was riding the school bus, I made a rough estimate of all the time I've spent being hauled around. It made me sad, that number. Should I count the time waiting for the school bus in the dark? Should I count the time spent walking through the snow to get to the bus stop?

It's not like I have any place better to be.

Mostly, I read while I'm on the bus. If you need proof that I have no friends, you have it now: I read on the bus. Sometimes I try to write, even though it's impossible to write without scribbling and making a mess. When I don't have a book, I just stare out the window at things I have seen so many times before. We are at the animal shelter corner. We turn north. We pass the university, and then we go over the bridge. We take the ramp onto the interstate and zoom through the canyon, past the truck stops and trailer courts with no interstate access. You can't get there from here or here from there. We lose the interstate, and we are on the two-lane winding road that follows the river. Here is the lumber mill where my dad used to work. Here is the curve where Esther died. Here is another bridge, the river winds around, and another bridge. And here is the road home. All I have to do is get out, cross the railroad tracks, go up the hill, through another trailer court, past the cliff, past a place that frightens me in my dreams, up a hill, through a barbwire fence, down a hill, and I'm home. Yahoo!

Home. It's overrated.

. . .

My dad is very big on Home. He grew up in this house. When he was born here, they had electricity, but no running water. A flush toilet is a very big deal when you compare it to an outhouse. No more going out in the cold and the dark. No more being afraid that a bear will eat you while you are out there. No more being afraid that you might fall in the hole, which is a serious fear when your butt is so much smaller than the hole. No more using a stick to break the poopsicles that grow up and up in the winter. When they got a toilet, he ran outside after he flushed. He ran as fast as he could to the big hole in the backyard.

“Bye-bye, turdie!” he would yell when the water poured into the hole.

He was kind of sad when they put railroad ties and dirt over the top of the cesspit and covered it up. It wasn't the same—waving when he flushed. It was sort of a nonevent.

That's progress. Disappointing.

My dad used to tell me lots of stories about when he was a kid. Now he doesn't. He hardly talks at all. We walk past each other like ghosts. Sometimes I wonder if I died when Asta died, but I didn't notice.

. . .

If I am a ghost, then I chose a strange house to haunt. There are no mysterious cold places that can't be explained by lack of insulation. There are no rustling sounds in the middle of the night that aren't caused by mice or squirrels or bats in the eaves. When doors swing open, it's because they don't fit in the doorjambs and the house is settling. I don't have a nifty EMF meter or other gadgets like the ghost hunters on TV have, but I think the readings would be inconclusive at best. If those ghost-hunter guys came, they would be pretty disappointed, but that doesn't mean we aren't troubled by the dead.

The thing about ghosts is that they haunt your head. My dad can't pour a cup of coffee without remembering his mother—she used the same blue enamel mug for her own coffee. My grandfather used to sit in that chair by the window, so we leave that chair by the window. It's been more than a year, but Mom still has to remind herself not to buy diapers for Asta when she goes to town.

Ghosts are mostly habits of memory. In an old house like this, everything you touch is connected to another moment. The cupboard is full of ghosts. The bookmarks between pages are ghosts. The photographs of my unattractive ancestors on the wall are most certainly ghosts. Even the morning glories that grow by the back porch are ghosts. My mom plants them every year. She soaks the little black seeds and nicks them with a nail file so they will be able to crack open and grow. She plants them because there were morning glories blooming the day she came to the house.

. . .

It could almost pass as some great romance, if my parents weren't involved.

My mom landed in Montana by accident. She was in a car full of people who had pooled their food and gas money and were going to Seattle on a road trip. She got sick of them, or they got sick of her. The car pulled away, and she was standing there with a blue nylon backpack that held everything she owned in the world. They didn't leave her any of the collective food and gas money, but they did give her a lovely parting gift, a joint of not really good weed. She smoked it. It didn't change things much. It wasn't very good stuff.

When a truck came by, she stuck her thumb out. It was my dad. He was wearing a red plaid shirt, and he smelled like sweat and chainsaw fuel. They were both alone. She either didn't have a home or didn't want to go back there. He had a home and a job and didn't want to wake up in fifty years to find himself sitting on the edge of a single bed in pee-stained underwear. Like I said, some great romance.

Once I found a little stationery box on a shelf in a closet. On the outside, there was a pink My Little Pony with silvery wings and silver stars on its butt. Inside the box, there were some pieces of paper. They were probably letters, but I couldn't read cursive yet. There was a birthday card with a picture of a wiener dog eating the frosting off a cake. There were some photos too. An old black-and-white one of some people standing in a street by a car. A color snapshot of a boy, but someone had cut his face out of the picture so all there was left was a round hole. I stuck my finger through the hole and was wiggling it around. When Mom found me with the paper and photos all scattered on the floor, she was not happy. She took the box and the rest of it away, and I have never seen any of it again.

Wherever that box is, it is all that is left of my mom's life before Dad.

Most of the stuff in this house belonged to my ghost grandparents. The kitchen stove, the teakettle, the frying pan, the table and chairs. It isn't like they are precious heirlooms. They are beat-up pieces of junk, but they work. Until something is broken beyond repair, my dad doesn't see the point in making any kind of change.

That, right there, could be the formula of my parents' mysterious romance: random motion + the inertia of rest = True Love.

. . .

Fate has a mean streak. A girl gets in a car full of less-than-perfect strangers, crosses the mighty Mississippi, drives through the night past places where wagon trains stopped to bury people killed by fevers and stupid mistakes. She makes it past the first pile of mountains and, for no really good reason, decides she doesn't want to go to Seattle after all. She sticks out her thumb. A lonely guy in a pickup pulls over. She climbs in. Then, all of a sudden, two rotten, cracked little bits of DNA are just that close to each other. Two rotten, cracked little bits of DNA waiting for their chance.

I was lucky. Asta wasn't.

There was this little window of time after Asta died when things were going to be OK. Things were different, but it wasn't all bad. I went to grief counseling at the clinic. I had more free time after school.

Things weren't perfect. Dad stopped reading at night. Mom and Dad argued about how to get rid of the equipment we didn't need anymore like the wheelchair and the hospital crib. Sell it, throw it in the dump, keep it forever, give it away—I don't even know what they decided to do. I wasn't part of the conversation.

I was having this exciting new life as a normal person. Or trying to. I wasn't off to a flying start.

To be honest, I stumbled before I got started. I'm kind of bad at normal.

There were a couple of things holding me back. First, I wasn't exactly sure what kind of normal I wanted to be.

I could try to be normal like the other kids who ride Bus 32 are normal. I could just join the herd. It wouldn't be hard to blend in. I know the local customs. After all, I had years to learn them. I had been 33.33 percent of my class for nine years, counting kindergarten. Reba and Esther were the other 66.66 percent. But now I was a little less than 0.5 percent of my freshman class. It wasn't like the good old days in grade school where there was only one toilet and if the seat was warm when you sat down, it was a sure thing that you knew the name of the person whose rump warmed it up.

Nope. It was a big school. There were a lot of toilets and many ways of life to choose.

Reba, for example, chose a tech-ed track.

This was only partly because she likes to be around guys and there are a lot of guys who do tech-ed. Boys are not Reba's first love. Driving is her first love. She learned to drive while bumping around a field in an old truck when she was so little that she had to hang onto the steering wheel like a kitten while she stretched to reach the pedals with her tiptoes. The damn truck always stalled when she had to shift gears. I know this because she took me for rides when I spent the night at her house. She tried to teach me how to be her gear shifter, but I was hopeless. I picked up a lot of new vocabulary from Reba—the kind of words that are useful when dealing with trucks that stall and friends that can't shift gears.

She still likes driving as much as she did when she was five, and she has a talent for understanding engines. The summer after she graduates, she is going to Pit Crew U. Her mom has promised. Reba wants to be on a NASCAR pit crew, and you don't get there from here by wishing. That's why she is still riding the bus with the rest of us mouth breathers instead of driving herself to school. She and her mom are saving up so she can go to Pit Crew U, and every buck they don't spend on gas matters.

Reba had her life figured out at fourteen.

A part of me envies that.

I sure don't have life figured out.

On the other hand, nobody's figuring my life out for me, either.

Esther's life was figured out for her.

She didn't have any more to say about it than a heifer.

I feel ashamed for saying that.

It makes her seem lumpy and stupid. She wasn't. Her future just wasn't up to her.

To be honest, maybe nobody gets to pick their future. But her situation was a little more intense.

The list of subjects she couldn't learn about in school was pretty long. All books have to be preapproved by her father. He doesn't approve of much. Most of the time, the teacher has to come up with a suitable substitute. History books that cover anything “pre-Biblical” are forbidden, because there isn't anything pre-Biblical. Dinosaurs are OK as long you assume they could have strolled into town and helped build the pyramids. Health classes when the teacher does sex ed are not allowed. This includes dopey little booklets about your period and sample tampons.

Esther could take whatever math classes she wanted. Unfortunately, she wasn't especially good at math and she had no love for it.

All these rules meant Esther was going to be sitting in the hall or the office most of the time while “forbidden” subjects were covered in the core classes.

She could always take Family and Consumer Science. She could make chili or biscuits or macaroni and cheese in Culinary Arts. She could set the table and wash dishes and iron shirts—just like at home. She could take Textiles and Apparel as long as the teacher provided patterns for “modest” sewing projects. She could be busy and productive, churning out casseroles and pot holders like a maniac, as long as the teacher never mentioned anything that could be dangerous to her moral values, like women working outside the home.

To be fair, though, Esther never complained about her life—ever. In all the years I knew her, she never complained.

Then there was me. I have no idea what I want to do, not really. And nobody was making my choices for me. So when we had to register for classes, I signed up for all the classes I thought sounded like things people who go to a university need to know. People who go to a university don't make pot holders or rebuild transmissions—that's what I figured. They can speak French and program computers and do science in a laboratory—that's what I figured. Nobody told me any different.