My eyes found items on the entryway table. Yesterday’s junk mail stacked for trashing. A half-full coffee mug, probably Mom’s because Martin took a stainless tumbler with him like a toddler does a blankie. Mom’s phone.
I make my way down the short hall, going straight to Mom and Martin’s bedroom, bypassing Johnny’s closed door. I flip on the hall light because though the sun is up now, this hall is dark. Way darker than it should be at eight on a weekday. Usually the house is an absolute hive of commotion; Mom’s hairdryer whining last-minute, me and Johnny quickly pulling on clothes, brushing teeth, scarfing down something passing for breakfast, news radio on.
I could hear the clock radio through the bedroom door. Probably the fall pledge drive woman on public radio, talking gravely into the microphone. Nothing about making their fundraising goal for the eight o’clock hour. I stood outside the door and welled up, thinking about Mrs. Fleming laying in her yard across the street. Would Mom be sprawled on the bathroom floor under the glare of its lights?
I knuckled the door open. A wedge of bathroom light fell into the room, against the unmade queen size. The radio woman saying she didn’t know what to say ladies and gentlemen it’s beyond words. A snatch of curled black electrical cord lay on the floor in the bathroom doorway. The hairdryer cord.
I gulped and dashed to the bathroom. Empty. I checked the space between the bed and the far wall. I sighed short-lived relief as I remembered that her car was still in the driveway. Panicked, I hurried out to the car to see if she was sitting inside having gotten farther than Mrs. Fleming. But it, too, sat empty.
I quickly went back to Johnny’s room. I envisioned him curled up and snug in bed under his red Manchester United bedspread, his life-sized precision-cut vinyl poster of Wayne Rooney looming over him. Wayne’s eyes are closed and he strikes the messianic pose he executed after his famous (in football circles) 2011 bicycle kick goal against Manchester City.
I opened the door and flipped on the light, my heart absolutely pounding to where I almost couldn’t catch my breath. He wasn’t there. The room exuded the afterburn of exhausted energy.
I swallowed hard, yearning to have a reason to say a version of what I always did: It’s five ‘til, dude. Forget breakfast. Gotta shit and get, go get Nose Gold. His Mom’ll wig if we’re late.
On the floor at the foot of his bed stood a pile of athletic balls: a base of three basketballs and a few flat soccer balls, a found cherry ball, a couple of volleyballs, a bunch of tennis balls grayed with age and weather, a few of Martin’s yard-putter golf balls on top, the whole thing forming a pyramidal shape two to three feet high. I didn’t give it any thought. Just some silly thing he’d constructed out of boredom.
Not weird at all for him, really, with all the sleepwalking he’d been doing over the summer, coming into my room with his hands behind his back and mumbling. My head would hurt each time, a pounding above my right eye. Sometimes I could make out what he was saying: coming coming… close, close, close. His somnambulism eerily coincided with the vivid, recurring dreams I’d been having. One time I woke up suddenly to Johnny standing, seeming to hover, over my bed. I was so startled that I cried out. In glassy-eyed response he’d said, “It’s only me, brother. No other.” When I told him to get out, he peed down his leg. This scenario repeated itself several times last summer. One stretch in June it was every night for a week. Every night: It’s only me, brother. No other, in this mellifluous voice.
Though at that moment I felt pulled in several directions, the urge to find my brother tugged hardest.
Through the window I could see Mrs. Fleming’s skirt flapping in the increasing wind. It looked like she’d keeled over from a heart attack. We felt well-versed in sudden heart attacks as Martin’s father had died of one on Martin’s forty-sixth birthday. The candles had been lit and the song had been sung and then the phone rang and Martin had said, “Ignore it, I’m blowing out my candles here.” Then came the hectic message on the machine. Martin had a glittery conical birthday hat on. Smoke rose from the wicks.
Vehicular emergency sirens wax and wane, the day brightening into full morning now out the window.
Johnny gone, Martin gone, Mom gone, and out the window the trashman staggering down the street, his bald head a cap of blood, the edges of it looking like melted wax oozing down. The radio woman’s voice muffled and caught.
I tried the TV but the cable was out. Mom’s phone at the entry table, I decided to try her at work. Sad to say that at that moment I didn’t even think to call Dad. Dad was too far away to help and it was in that moment when I fully realized that physical proximity may be the most powerful relationship element of all. Just how simple it all is.
My room was neat as always. Stacks of paperback pulps and dreadfuls I’d digested stood along the far wall like columns. Bed as I’d left it, made and taut, if not to military hospital standards.
For a burgeoning pothead with extracurricular activity attendance issues whose de rigueur look was rakish longish hair and post-ironic T-shirts from Goodwill and whose public posture and gait was meant to suggest slack casualness, in other words, cool, my room, my school lockers (my jacket on the locker room floor really chapped my ass because that sort of disorder was not me), all my spaces, are tidy and organized. My phone sat on the desk next to an SAT prep book. It’s here and not on me because I’m not one of these people who needs to be tethered to the device jacking us into the matrix all the damned time. Or maybe I’m just aping Mr. E. I had started ostentatiously leaving it on my desk for Mom to see should she lean in to glance around, as all Moms do, every day, we know.
Wind busts on the window, a low-hanging tree branch dips down to scrape the glass. I stiffen, rub my sweaty hands together. I pick up my phone. The messages are from Kodie and Bastian. Kodie’s text from twenty minutes ago—where are you? meet me at DT asap. Bastian’s—we’ve got to get out meet me at terrapin station. My throat flushed with adrenalized blood.
She’s out there stumbling around with something going wrong with her mouth or there’s nothing wrong with her mouth because she’s smiling and… I couldn’t believe I had those thoughts. Especially about my own mother, but I guess that’s the thing about the survival instinct; you start distancing yourself quickly. No time to cry, knowing that the time for that had to be later if the now was to be survived. Like, I guess, if you’re a soldier at a battle line and in the concussions all around, you fail to notice that the guy next to you is still, and when you turn him over he’s got no face, you don’t break down right there and weep. The urge just isn’t there because you want to keep your face.
Urgent texts from Bastian and Kodie were not what I needed right now. I needed to know that Mom was at the hospital where she worked as an administrator, that she was about to sit down and do some administrating after blowing the heat off the top of her coffee, glancing at the desk photos of her life, then the blinking cursor and somewhere deep inside smiling that she had this job in this place she knew so well and maybe even she believed she was doing some good in the world. I’d only heard from friends. I needed to know that the grown-ups were in charge, and, though Mrs. Fleming lay face down in her yard, emergency vehicles yet to arrive, the adults would take care of things. The shit had hit the fan and hit it hard, but, eventually, the grown-ups were out there Working On It. That they were Taking Care of Things.