My dad couldn’t find his own foot in a pile like that. His brain is always going, but its connection to the real world works more like a hose with kinks in it. You get spurts or dribbles most of the time, once in a while a geyser.
Every summer for my whole life it seems like Mack and I messed around the empty marina building and the junked boats on the creek. When we were little kids, he would make up stories and we’d act them out. It’s where we started playing jungle war, only not when my dad was around.
If Dad overhears any mention of the Vietcong or ’Nam, he starts right in with his standard lecture about the liars in Washington and the power-hungry military. Another reason my parents have never taken us to our nation’s capitaclass="underline" it’s a bastion of corruption.
In grade school my friends loved overnights at our house, cramped as it was. They didn’t know anyone else whose parents let them stay up all night. My mom and dad hardly ever said no. So between Mack and my parents, my childhood memories are awesome. Pirate games and campfires at midnight and sleeping under the stars on the dock of the D-funct marina. Not a bad life. Sorry if I sound like someone’s grandfather about the good old days. The only reason I’m telling you about back then is so you can see the difference now.
Somewhere between grade school and high school, life slowed down big-time. Pure mud. I didn’t notice it until this summer, when life feels like quicksand most of the time. But looking back, it started before The Disease and it’s escalating. My parents argue more, about a lot of little things, but mostly about money. The boat is falling apart. Mom’s not sleeping well. She’s too tired to do all the things she used to like to do, like hanging laundry outside and baking bread. She wants a clothes dryer, which you can’t run on a houseboat battery or with kerosene.
Dad’s confused because Mom has never been an appliance freak. When she brings up this stuff, he calls her a traitor. She yelps at the gross unfairness of that, the years she slung the laundry basket outside and hung up clothes, rain or shine. I know she wants to say it’s the germs and my being sick that makes her so paranoid, but she can’t because it would sound like she’s blaming me and I didn’t ask for the stupid leukemia.
All of that makes it impossible for them to focus on what I want, a car of my own, even though I won’t be old enough to drive until April. Dead by June. Even I can see it wouldn’t be a great investment.
Earlier this summer I interrupted one of their fights, before they told me what the doctors had already told them, that I had this sucky disease.
“Forget the car,” I said. “We can move to the city and I’ll take cabs like Holden.”
“I didn’t know you had a friend named Holden.” Mom forgot all about their argument. She’d cooked homemade spaghetti sauce. She does stuff like that to avoid the pesticides and gunk that’s added to food to make it look perfect. Anyone can see that perfect is stupid. Things in the real world aren’t supposed to be perfect. Look at people. Start with Adam and Eve. Reality is the apple. Perfect doesn’t compute when you’re dealing with humans. How else can you explain things like teenage pregnancy and child abuse, and diseases like AIDS? Or leukemia?
Back to the day of the car argument. Mom had even peeled the tomatoes herself because she was on a no-salt kick. (Food with no salt is disgusting, actually, but you can’t tell that to my mother.) She’d read that the salt in canned vegetables can turn the arteries of a twenty-year-old into the arteries of a sixty-year-old.
“Overnight?” Dad joked, but she’d already given the canned tomatoes to the homeless shelter.
Nick was trying to eat like a real Italian by sucking up the individual noodles. Little red flicks sprayed everywhere. That totally distracted Mom, who forgot she’d asked me a question because she was so busy mopping up the blips of sauce with a dish towel.
“I’m not really hungry.” I had to change the subject. Explaining about Holden would have been tricky. Joe’s the only one that even knows I read the book ahead of the class.
Mom looked like she wanted to scream. “You have to eat.” Although she didn’t actually scream, she spoke so loudly that even Nick stopped fooling around.
Like we hadn’t been eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for breakfast and lunch for years at that point. Peanut butter is the world’s best food according to Mom, one thing we agree on. Or used to. Only at that point I’d lost ten pounds in three weeks, so even I was starting to suspect something wasn’t right.
“Holden, huh?” Dad said. “Leave it to someone in Essex County to name their kid after a storybook character.” He put his arm around Mom’s shoulders—chummy all of a sudden, the argument forgotten—and squeezed, the way grown-ups do when they’re trying to cheer each other up.
It made me sick that he could dismiss Holden’s whole deal as a storybook. Holden lived through that painful stuff. And he’s not the only kid who has. Why do grown-ups always think what kids feel is fluff and can’t possibly be significant?
Last year a boy at the middle school hanged himself. The semester before he’d forged his father’s name on his report card after his father insisted he get better grades. Then he failed a course. When the school scheduled a parent-teacher conference, he must have figured the truth would come out. All the parents and teachers walked around in a fog like they had no clue what had happened, but the kids understood how the boy could have felt like he’d never be what his father wanted, that kind of hopeless over nothing ever changing.
Same thing with Holden. It’s not like he’s being a baby. Or whining about not getting a candy bar. Hard enough to figure out the world, much less the crazy way the adults have screwed it up. Insisting things like grades are so important and not caring whether you’ve actually learned anything. It never crosses their minds how scary it is for us to think we’re going to have to work around their messes or might even have to fix the world.
If I hadn’t been so glad my parents weren’t arguing for a change, I would have called Dad on the storybook jab. I hate it when adults put down kids for being inexperienced. Like we can help that we haven’t lived as long as they have.
Anyway, after the Holden crack Dad was smiling and doing that massage thing to Mom’s shoulders. He didn’t even notice me. Snuggling is something they do less and less. I didn’t want to spoil that by starting an argument over Holden.
Dad leaned over her shoulder, their heads touching. “Remember when we read that book? In Mr. Nolan’s Humanities class. And your best friend, Rose, decided to run away to New York City.”
“I was so jealous of Rose Pelletier.”
My father pressed his lips into a pout of perplexity. “You wanted to go to New York?”
Mom shook her head. “Her uncle brought her that beaded vest from India and she always managed to get the seat next to Lewis Murray in the back row.”
“She was a cutie.”
Cutie? I groaned. Didn’t they hear themselves?
But to be honest I was glad they’d forgotten about me. It’s wearing to be the center of attention for every little thing you do or say. Nick took the opportunity to scrape his spaghetti into the trash. Before Mom and Dad could say anything or even notice, he was out kicking the soccer ball against the side of the cabin. I slid out from the table too, turned to clear my plate, and they were kissing. See what I mean about my dad?