Friendswood (14 page)

“Don't say anything.” Willa stood up. “I'll see you in the bathroom after fifth period.” It was their usual meeting place.

In the last bit of locker clatter and rush before people got to their classes, she felt dizzy, and when she turned, at the periphery of her vision, strange lights flashed like signals.

In English class, Ms. Marlowe wore red. She was talking about Faulkner and the natural metaphors in “The Bear” when a student aide came to the door with a note. Willa watched Ms. Marlowe's flat, wide hips move from one side of the room to the other.

Just before class ended, Ms. Marlowe quietly called Willa over to her desk. “The guidance counselor would like to see you before sixth period.
Here's a pass.” Did the counselor know, or was it just that her forged note about her absence had been found out?

She passed the auditorium doorway and heard voices singing in unison. Inside, on the lighted stage, people stared up at the choir director. And there, as she turned, at the edge of her sight line, was a blurry flash of fur. She rushed down the hallway to the counselor's office.

“Hi, honey, will you have a seat?” Ms. Ryan said. “That's a pretty necklace.” She had long hair that draped against her face and large, empathetic eyes.

The office light was dimmed, not fluorescent, lit by lamps and a window with a latticed blind.

“Thanks.”

Ryan said, “You're on the honor roll again. Which classes do you like best?” They talked about oil painting and Emily Dickinson. Willa's hand trembled as she moved it from the arm of the chair to her leg.

Finally, Ryan clicked her tongue. “Well, I have to tell you, there was a call to the Christian hotline yesterday about an incident.” The last time Willa had heard about the hotline was in the spring, when Beth Ambroy told someone she was going to drink bleach. “You know I've been at this school for years, and one thing that always makes me sit up and take notice is when a girl starts acting not like herself. It looks to me like you're headed for a good college, right? It's not like you to skip your classes.” She stopped, seemed to be listening to the muffled sound of a male teacher shouting instructions in the next room. “Willa, I'm not here to judge. Do you want to talk?” Her patience was unnerving, the kind Willa remembered from a dream of a fire, someone shrugging their shoulders in the middle of the flames, saying, “What's the matter?”

“Not really.” She looked away at the shelves of books, the test prep manuals and career guides. The career counselor had just given a lecture about their futures. Willa's father thought she should be a pharmacist because she got an
A
in chemistry, and whenever she chose “poet” as a
career path on the questionnaires, the chances of making a living at it came up as something like ten thousand to one.

“Okay.” Ms. Ryan looked disappointed. “You know I've seen a lot of things here—nothing would surprise me much.” Willa studied her face, and wondered what she might already know. She gripped the sides of her chair, pressed down so hard that the pads of her fingers stung. On the carpeting, in the green and blue fibers, a red thread on the floor made a
C
.

“A lot of times I see girls who drink alcohol and lose track of themselves. And then they think whatever happened was their fault.”

“I don't even like the taste of it,” she said.

“So you weren't drinking, that's good.” Ryan folded her hands and brought them in to the tip of her chin. “Honey, I can't help you if you won't talk.” Her voice was throaty and gentle. “I don't know what happened over there, but I sure would like to help, Willa.”

“I don't remember.”

Ms. Ryan covered her lips with the tips of her fingers. “You don't remember leaving school with Cully Holbrook, or you don't remember what happened after?”

Willa looked away, and felt her face grow grotesque and giant, as if it took up half the room.

“Well, I'll tell you what. We may not know exactly what happened, but there was drunkenness, and when incidents like this one occur, the rumors . . .” She paused, seemed to catch herself. “I mean, well, to be safe, for your own good, we think you should go home for now, take a couple of days. How does that sound? That way, you'll have some time to think about things away from all this. And if you want to come see me, you can.”

Willa couldn't focus on what she was saying. “I don't really know what you're talking about.”

“Do you need some water?” Ryan stood up, nodded gently to Willa. “Let me get you some.” She went out the door.

Willa pressed her fingers to her eyelids. The pressure made her see
orange and red blobs, and she could suddenly smell something rotten in the trash. She opened her eyes, and a shadow slipped out of the corner. She didn't want a vision. She wanted to hang on to this room, to the flat carpet, the scratched metal desk, Ryan about to come back. Near the edge of the bookshelf, in the watery dimness, a shape emerged. She willed it back to the corner, but it kept coming, horns unfurled like waterways on maps, branching up to the ceiling in quick, silverish leaps.
“What does she want?”
The words weren't spoken exactly but flung out into the air, and she tasted the vodka again in her mouth. In a burst of dark fur, the breath went out of her, and the whole shape was gone.

Ms. Ryan came back in a rush, handed her a cup of water, and touched her shoulder in a practiced gesture of sympathy. Willa drank the water, but the vodka taste was still there. She couldn't stop shaking. It felt as if something was pressing open her heart—as if it was only the fake heart shape cut out of paper, and someone was holding it open with two hands, and anything might fall into it now.

“Willa, I'm here. I want you to know that. I'm just here.”

Willa glanced at the door. It wouldn't even matter if she ran.

“Oh, honey,” said Ms. Ryan. “You're really in a state, aren't you?” She clapped her hands on the desk. “Alright, then, you know what? I think why don't you just go on home now? We've called your mom.”

She couldn't understand why she'd had to see that thing, why it had thrown back those words. “Why did you call her?”

“Willa,” Ms. Ryan said, shaking her head. “Mothers need to know.”

H
AL DROVE HOME
down the back road, all that land still undeveloped outside of town, where the trees and grass were bright against the black asphalt, and if you had to pull over, it might be twenty or thirty minutes before you saw another car with someone in it liable to help you. He watched the yellow lines, the flat horizon of the road. The run-down Taft house Avery handed off to him yesterday would be difficult to sell, but maybe he could find a young person who'd like the old-timeyness of the place and want to fix it up, or someone with a vision for a tanning-bed business or lawyers' offices. Maybe he wouldn't get the asking price, but he couldn't think that way now. He needed to think that odder things had happened and there were gifts of the spirit beyond his imagining.

Just over the ridge, a flock of birds stirred and flew up in the air in a flapping tent across the sky. He drove under it, thinking his chances with Lee Knowles were even better than with the sale—he was good with people, knew how to listen and maintain eye contact, knew how to guess what someone was feeling by the way her mouth moved or by the way she touched her neck. All that time he'd spent at the cash register of his dad's hardware store had taught him to read faces. And who knew? Maybe he would get her saved too, in the end.

Hal turned into town, prosperity shining down in the sun, and drove
home to his ranch house on Edgewood—modest, with clean lines and a whole acre and a half of land next to it, a four-car garage big enough for both his SUV and Cully's truck. As he walked up the brick path, he was irritated by the green hose loose in the yard—though it just meant Darlene had done some gardening—and he went inside. He was thirsty and tired, warding off a headache.

Darlene was standing in the kitchen, chopping carrots.

“Hi.” He kissed her on the cheek from the back. “A good day. Even if I wasted the whole time on a couple of undeciders.”

“Oh, that's a shame.”

She'd bought ten orange pillows for the living room, and among her celebrity gossip magazines, they lay on the couches and chairs like giant pieces of fruit.

“I don't know why these fools can't tell when their wife is doing a number on them.”

She patted his arm. “Can you?”

She was flirting, but he was too tired to flirt back. She hugged him, but he kept his body stiff. He didn't know yet what he wanted from her, but he didn't want mothering.

He opened the fridge and saw a large piece of meat waiting in a pot. He grabbed a bottle of Coke. “I'm going out to the pasture.”

“Alright,” she said as if to cheer him on. Darlene said it didn't do any good to worry about what you couldn't control. It was as silly as wringing your hands over the weather.

The pasture was left over from the previous homeowner, who'd kept cows. The barn was empty now, and so was the acre of land, fenced in with barbed wire.

He set up a can with a curlicue of flowers on the label, on top of a post. Then he went into the barn and unlocked his gun from the cabinet where he kept it (Darlene wouldn't allow a gun in the house), and he stepped back away from the can about forty feet.

It was just a handgun, but it was heavy and old-fashioned, from the 1940s, he'd been told, and he liked the challenge of maneuvering it.

He cocked the gun; aimed at the frilly yellow, red, and blue design; and shot just to the right of the can, missed it.

His form wasn't good after a day of “Look at this” and “Can you see yourself living here?” Avery Taft's offer was an opportunity from God, and he didn't want to blow it; he needed to shoot the negative doodads out of his backyard. The devil was getting too damn close. He aimed again and shot the can off the fence post. Satisfied, he took a pull of Coke and trudged back to find the can, and put it back on its mark.

He'd never used a gun in any real situation, never used it to protect himself, and hated hunting, the boredom of long hours waiting around for something in the trees to move. But now that he didn't drink, shooting the gun was one thing that relaxed him. Pulling the trigger so the force backed up into his forearm, as if it were part of the gun too, the clean explosive feeling of hitting the mark, the smell of it.

He shot again, and the can had two holes, bent in on one side. When he was really on his game, he could shoot through the thin side of a playing card—he had a split jack of hearts and a split ace of spades, burn marks laced on their broken edges. He saved them in a little box up in his bedroom, along with his favorite wedding photo.

He felt hungry, but it would be at least an hour before they ate. He was about to go inside for some corn chips when a familiar dented blue truck pulled up on the street in front of the house. It belonged to Cully's friend, Trace, and Hal started walking toward the barbed-wire fence to call out that Cully wasn't there, he was still at practice, when he saw Cully pop out on the passenger side and the blue truck speed away. What was he doing here so early? Cully hobbled into the yard, his mouth slack, head hung down, his gait offbeat and off-balance in that pitiful way that Hal recognized in his bones.

“Hey!” he said, rushing to the fence.

Cully looked up at him, sheepish, his eyes lidded.

“I thought you had practice.”

“Coach sent me home.” Hal thought that he could smell it even from six feet—bourbon. Probably Jim Beam.

“He did, huh? Why's that? Where's your truck?”

Cully didn't answer and passed out of Hal's sight as he walked toward the front door.

Hal heard the door slam. He walked back to the barn, his head pounding, the gun heavy against his fingers. He'd promised himself not to handle the gun except when even tempered. Birds flapped out of the tree overhead, cawing in a way that sounded maniacal. Inside the barn, dim except for one clean slab of light in the corner where he stood, he unlocked the cabinet, took out the case, methodically put the gun back into the blue velvet indentations. He saw again his boy's sagging, clowning face, and felt his own blood roiling. He snapped the cover shut, placed the case on the shelf, and locked the cabinet.

He barged inside the back screen door and walked into the kitchen, where Darlene was now brushing the meat with a slick sauce. “Cully's home early, says he doesn't feel well,” she said.

“Bullshit,” said Hal. “He's dead drunk—can't you tell?”

She looked up at him, her blue eyes wide. “No. Is he?” She stopped brushing the meat. “You going to go talk to him?”

“Damn right.”

He set his Coke on the counter. “Goddamn teenagers.”

He was too angry to say anything else to her—how could she not notice? He watched her open the oven door, slide in the pan, crash the oven door shut again, his whole body filling with furious heat.

“Don't be too hard on him, Hal. And he's too old for the belt.”

“Hell if he is.”

“Hal!”

When Hal had fallen off track last year, Cully had been his lifeline
back to the family. Even when he couldn't bear to look at Darlene, he and Cully went out for tacos in Pasadena, drove to Houston to look at the new construction. His son seemed to understand even without words why Hal had felt pushed into a corner, and he knew how to bring Hal out of his funk. But in the summer, Cully had mysteriously distanced himself, left the house most afternoons and didn't come back until late, kept his conversation to one-word answers to questions, and the space between them turned barren. Hal felt his words float up in the air like moisture in clouds, dissolving even as they hung around.

He knew part of this was just boy stuff. How many bold-faced lies had he told his own dad so he could go out drinking beer at the Ice Haus pool hall? How many close calls? There was the time he'd crashed the family car against a tree and walked away, more scared of his father's reaction than the accident itself or the gash in his stomach bleeding through his shirt. And for the whole evening his mother thought he was dead—when he walked in the house after midnight and said hello, her cup turned over, china shattering on the floor. She didn't care what he'd done to the car—he was alive. And there was nothing his dad could do to him then. Nothing at all. It hadn't been intentional, but his dad thought it was a trick, and he'd maybe never quite forgiven him for it.

He took the stairs two at a time and knocked on the door of his son's room.

“It's open,” Cully said.

Hal walked in to find Cully lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling, a faint smell of vomit in the air, his shirt stained with it. On the table, the computer was on, a green light blinking against the black screen.

“Funny, you coming back early, isn't it?”

Cully turned his head, but didn't even sit up. The disrespect rankled Hal.

“You drunk?”

Cully shrugged.

“Coach Salem smelled it on you, huh?”

Cully didn't answer.

Seeing his son's head on the pillow, his dark hair mussed like that, Hal remembered the night when Cully was really little, maybe three, and his fever had spiked up to 105, his eyes rheumy and cheeks flushed. At first they'd debated, tried Tylenol and cool washcloths and said to each other, grabbing the thermometer, “What is it now?” He'd driven the boy to the hospital with Darlene in his old truck, speeding all the way, then carried him in his arms, running into the emergency room, screaming at whoever wore a white coat. They put Cully's little body on a huge gurney and a nurse stuck IVs into his fat thigh, while Hal held the tiny balled fist of his son inside his own fist, kept vigil over the tiny squinted shut eyes, and he murmured,
Please please please
until the fever finally pulled back. The doctor said Cully might have died that night, if they'd waited any longer. And now his son was taking his own life so lightly, so recklessly, and it brought back the rage he'd felt for those slow-moving night nurses, the hospital's impersonal fluorescent lights.

“You know what this means, right?”

“Yeah.”

There was a small smile on Cully's face, and this made Hal want to hit him, but he kept himself in the doorway.

“I'd hate to be in your shoes, come the next practice,” Hal said. “And by the way I'm taking the keys to your truck. It's still at school, isn't it?” He was hoarse.

Cully didn't say anything. Hal knew he was still drunk and might not even remember this conversation later.

“Your mother's real upset,” he said, and closed the door. His own father would have beat the hell out of him with a belt. But Darlene wouldn't let him do that. He guessed it was a good thing. If he were a better dad, he would have given Cully the right line of Scripture. Something from Judges. Something to make him think.

H
AL SLEPT FITFULLY,
a sticky film of sweat on his face and arms, the hairs on his legs catching on the sheets. A mosquito zinging from somewhere up on the ceiling kept landing in places near his neck. Still, Darlene slept soundly beside him and he put his hand on her back, her soothing breath gently rising and falling. And he worried, an endless shifting in his mind—he had a vision of sifting through a mess in his tool chest, in search of an elusive hammer.

The next morning the principal, Ida Johnson, called him at the office, and he picked up a bent paper clip, its thin metal end needling his thumb.

“Are you aware, Mr. Holbrook, what your son was up to yesterday?”

“I have a pretty good idea.”

“Well, we're just getting the reports.” Ida Johnson was an old gal with a bouffant hairdo and bowlegs, and she was tough in a way Hal liked and understood—she attended every game, every school play, wearing a pantsuit and horse brooch, her thin grin on her bony face. She did not suffer fools.

“There were fifteen boys, and they all missed afternoon classes. I don't know how many of them were intoxicated, but it's clear that your son was one of them. Looks like Cully fell down just walking out of the field house.”