In Some Other World, Maybe: A Novel (11 page)

You told him to do a back flip because you could do it better, and you needed to be superior at something.

Fisting your hands so tight your knuckles turned to white knobs, you held your breath and hoped Braden wouldn’t be able to complete the dive. Still, you were utterly amazed when he twisted awkwardly around and crashed, almost completely prone, into the water. You were even more surprised when he didn’t come up.

The lifeguard—a senior at your high school who constantly bragged about bedding the girl guards—stared on from his chair in disbelief, paralyzed by what to do in the face of an actual emergency. So you were the one who dove in. As you reached out for him, Braden’s head bobbed up and broke the surface of the water. Gasping and thrashing, he looked at you and went under again. You grabbed his shoulders, broader and more filled out than yours.

Instead of pulling him up, you held him under. In your hands, his body jerked, and you felt a rush of excitement that you were really doing it. Chemically treated water filled your nose, your mouth, your ears.

One, maybe two seconds.

The pool was on an approach pattern to O’Hare, and a plane flew overhead—a stiff white bird in the blue, blue sky.

Just like that, and it was over. Once again you were Oliver Ryan, the boy the Washingtons referred to as their “other son.” Yanking Braden up, you swam with his body to the side while he sputtered and choked. With help from the gathered crowd, you pulled him out of the water. His arm slung over your back, you took him to the locker room, where he sank into one of the toilet stalls and threw up pool water and snack-bar nachos. “Brade?” you asked, kneeling next to him.

He nodded. “Thanks, Ollie, I owe you.”

“Any time,” you said, feeling sick from the smell of chlorine and vomit and thoughts of what you’d been doing. If there was a hell, you were pretty sure you were going there—and it was probably that moment right before takeoff, when the plane picks up speed.

Braden looked at you for a long time. And then you felt his mouth on your own, lips soft and warmer than you would have expected.

Shoving him away, you asked why, even though it wasn’t really all that earth-shattering. And then you didn’t hate him at all but felt inconsolably sorry for him.

“I’m not—” you started.

But he shook his head. “Don’t say it, please.”

And both of you sat there, hands between your knees, until the locker room door swung open and three boys—towels flung over their shoulders like capes—clomped in complaining about adult swim.

The two of you never talked about it again, which made you feel even sorrier for him and the girls he dated. But senior year, when Phoebe Fisher transferred to ETHS, all of those things didn’t seem to matter much anymore.

Braden played QB at the University of Colorado for a few losing seasons but injured his shoulder junior year in a skiing accident. As soon as Alicia Washington called you from the hospital, you flew out from Chicago, even though you had finals the next week.

“All these girls and his teammates, they all wanted to come, but you were the only one he wanted.” Alicia hugged you in the waiting area while surgeons tried to put Braden back together again. Even though she hadn’t been in catalogs for quite some time and her hair was probably only mahogany from dye, she still smelled so good. “He’s so lucky to have you, Oliver.”

Remembering the slick feel of Braden’s hair when you tried to drown him, you looked away.

That whole first week you stayed at his off-campus apartment. You went to his classes, took notes for him when he couldn’t go, lugged his backpack for him when he could. A part of you thought he would shatter, break down completely, but the closest he ever came was six days after surgery when the two of you were carrying groceries home.

Most of the bags were in your hands, but Braden insisted on taking a few. “I’ve got a gimpy arm; I’m not an invalid.”

At his front door, Braden tried to balance the bags on his bad arm while searching for his keys. The thin plastic straps slipped from his grasp, and a jar of Prego tumbled out, cracking on the chipped tile. Marinara sauce oozed out, and you felt it, all of it—your obsession with Alicia, the jealousy in high school, the undiscussed kiss—in the expanding red puddle on the floor.

“This isn’t right,” you said, bending down to clean up the mess. “You … this shouldn’t…”

“Don’t worry about it; it’s spaghetti sauce.” Braden adjusted his elbow in the sling.

Shaking your head, you said that wasn’t what you meant. Braden blinked and nodded.

“It’s cool, I wasn’t gonna go pro anyway.” He shook his head. “Now it can be the thing I blame everything else on. I can blame my whole life on a wrong turn down the bunny hill.”

That wasn’t what you had meant either, but you thought about the plane with your father when you were seven, wondered if everyone had some origin story they used to justify and rationalize and validate.

Two days later you went back to school, took your makeup exams, and did fine without the hours of studying you normally would have put in. Braden, likewise, went on being Braden, even though he had six pins and limited mobility in his right shoulder.

*   *   *

Your stepmother:

You suspected it was going to happen with your stepmother years before it actually did. A senior at Northwestern, you were home for Christmas playing Mr. Potato Head with your two-year-old half sister, who kept chewing on the assortment of noses.

Behind the two of you, Maura collected crumpled red and gold foil paper from the living room carpet and menacingly shoved it into a drawstring garbage bag.

“Maura?” you asked, and she looked away.

“It’s not even noon yet.” Though not the albino your sister claimed, Maura did look as if she were painted in watercolor. Everything about her was nearly translucent, from her flaxen hair to her blue eyes, so light they almost appeared to have no color at all. “And Christmas Day, Christmas Day. I can’t believe he
had
to leave.”

No one in the world understood that better than you.

Setting aside the plastic potato Natasha had put you in charge of decorating, you touched Maura’s slender shoulder and offered a sympathetic half smile.

“You’re so good with Natasha.” Maura put her hand on yours.

And you knew what was going to happen even before she let her hand fall to the small of your back, even before you got the fellowship offer from Northwestern’s graduate program and Maura and your father suggested you live at home to cut down on expenses. And you thought it would be the thing that secured your place in hell, but you didn’t really care, because you never believed in hell, not even when you were a kid and your mother had made you go to Mass. You didn’t care because Phoebe Fisher still haunted your dreams, even though you hadn’t talked to her since freshman year.

It actually didn’t happen with Maura for three years. Not until you left your undergrad apartment on Sherman and Noyes and moved back into your father’s house. Not until you spent a bunch of nights on the couches (new couches, not the ones where your mother had waited to die) in the living room watching
The Late Show
and jotting down sketches for a generator while Maura folded laundry on the floor. It didn’t happen until you started bringing Giordano’s pizza home for dinner and picking Natasha up from the sitter’s house on days when Maura had to close the animal shelter where she volunteered.

Even on the night it actually happened, it wasn’t until after you went to a Cubs game with Braden, who was in town from Boulder, where he’d gotten a schmoozy consulting gig. It didn’t happen until after you chugged seven Styrofoam cups of Old Style because you could hardly find anything to talk about with Braden anymore, and you remembered how he used to be closer to you than any real members of your family. It didn’t happen until after you stumbled in from the game and found Maura, translucent and sad, drinking cabernet and watching a
M*A*S*H
rerun.

“There’s Leona’s leftovers in the fridge if you’re hungry.” She muted the volume.

You told her you’d had a hot dog at the game, but you’d take a glass of wine. The remote fell off the coffee table when she got up. Both of you knelt to retrieve it, and the back of your hand brushed her breast. She clasped it there and held it. That was how it finally happened, on an Oriental rug your father had brought back from China.

It wasn’t particularly good or bad, but you fucked like people who needed to. Pressing yourself into her was the same feeling you’d had when you’d almost drowned Braden—surprise you were actually doing something so dark and sticky, so tangibly wrong, you had to question if you were like other people in the world.

Afterward, Maura kissed your forehead, and you were close enough to see the blue veins under her see-through skin. Before she died, your mother had had a road map of lines crossing her body from the operations where they cut into her and took things out piece by piece. At forty-five Maura was older than your mother had ever gotten to be.

You thought it was going to be a one-time thing but weren’t surprised when Maura knocked on your bedroom door a few nights later. You let her in, and you kept letting her in. Though you never told anyone about it, you could almost hear your sister’s commentary:
“Ollie, you must realize that this is about Dad. About your need to be close to him … to connect.”
That may have been true, but you pushed the idea away, didn’t really think about it until five months later, when you were sitting at the kitchen table eating pancakes with Maura and Natasha, and under the table Maura tapped her knee to yours, the way Phoebe Fisher used to.

“We should take Nat to see the tree lighting tonight,” she said.

You said Natasha was too young to like that, and traffic would be a nightmare.

“Nonsense, my father took me in Cincinnati when I was half Natasha’s age.” Maura put her hand on your thigh under the table. Natasha was concentrating on eating only the chips out of her chocolate chip pancakes, but it still made you uncomfortable. “We can take the ‘L.’”

The year before, Maura had redone the kitchen, and the light blue flowers of the wallpaper were the same washed-out shade as her eyes. The weight of her small hand became oppressive on your leg, and you felt crushed by the faded blue all around you. You wanted to tell Maura you weren’t Natasha’s father and had no desire to be.

“Is Dad going to be home tonight?” you asked, brushing her hand away.

Maura recoiled, and you looked out the window to avoid her eyes and the wallpaper and the hurt that you knew you were causing her.

“I think he’s going to be in Beijing until Tuesday,” she said.

*   *   *

Your first love:

Phoebe Fisher was assigned as your physics lab partner senior year. She broke a lot of bell jars, got a 39 percent on the kinetics test, and asked you to tutor her. Because her lips looked like satin, and she was nicer than you thought someone like her needed to be, you agreed. For weeks you sat with her in the cafeteria during lunch, trying to explain how to measure velocity. Though she stared at you intently, it became apparent she would never master distance and displacement, so you wrote big on the tests and let her look across the table at your answers.

You still had lunch with her, and one day she leaned across her tray of tuna salad to graze those satin lips against yours.

“I just wanted to do that.” She giggled afterward.

“I wanted you to do that, too,” you said, wishing you’d been the instigator, that you hadn’t made her make the first move.

After four months of snuggling, all-night phone calls, and slightly painful handjobs, she took you to her father’s house and laid you on your back under the white lace canopy over her bed. Lowering herself on top of you, she guided your cock between her thighs. It went fine until you heard the rumble of an airplane outside—your father, the Piper Saratoga when you were seven—and went limp before even entering her.

“No worries, sweetie,” she said, kissing your shoulder and stroking your red hair. “It’ll be better next time.”

It was.

Afterward, she put her mouth on your stomach and blew out air, lips vibrating against your skin.

And the two of you were happy ordering Thai food and watching classic movies on the couch. Happy going with Phoebe to her brother’s track meets and helping her stepmother set the table on nights you stayed for dinner. Happy watching her play Emily in the school production of
Our Town
and going on double dates with her friends, even though you’d gone to school with Evie and Nicole for years and never talked to them before Phoebe came along. You were happy until the third week of May, when your stomach started hurting.

“What’s wrong?” Phoebe asked when you twitched in pain on the couch, your arms and legs tangled with hers.

“Nothing,” you said.

You knew you should see a doctor, but you weren’t about to see a doctor, because that was how it started with your mother: First her stomach hurt, then she was waiting to die.

Though you didn’t die, the next day you did crumple over in the Nordstrom at Old Orchard while Phoebe was trying on bathing suits. She called her father, and they took you down the road to Northwestern Memorial (your mother’s hospital), where a perky brunette surgeon sawed into your abdomen and suctioned out the remains of your ruptured appendix.

Everyone knew Larry Fisher, so they let Phoebe stay past visiting hours. After Braden brought your homework assignments, Chase Fisher brought you magazines, and your own father finally arrived, guilty and groggy from Australia, Phoebe climbed into your elevated bed and squeezed your arm. For the first time, it hit you that she was really leaving, not just going down the road like you. Feeling the tingle in your nose and eyes, you turned away because you didn’t want her to see you cry.

“Do you want me to get that nurse for more pain stuff?” she asked nervously.

The only thing you could say was “Don’t go after graduation.”

She laughed, which would have seemed a lot funnier if something in your chest didn’t cave in every time you caught sight of the back of her head in the hall between classes.