Stay Up With Me (7 page)

“That's it. Now like someone's dropped a box on your foot. Oowwww! Wooooooooooo. Put them together.”

“Jeez. We know what a howl sounds like,” Tim said. I swung my fist down hard on his foot and he elbowed me harder in the arm. “Oowwww,” we both yelled.

And my mother answered, “Wooooooooooo.”

Long after my mother went to sleep, we didn't let up. We howled for hours until our throats were hoarse and our eyes burned for want of sleep. Tim's howl was loudest and sounded like a moose call. Our joke was that there were moose heading across the lake from Canada because of Tim's howl.

After Tim died, I had a dream we were camping, the three of us crammed into our tent along the lake. We'd zip the sleeping bags together, and our heads lay in a line, like bowling balls on a rack. We glanced over at one another or stared straight up at the roof of the tent, listening for bears or moose or a wolf. We heard them and saw their shadows run along the outside of the tent. They whined and growled and they poked shapes into the pea green fabric. But we kept them out with our voices. When I awoke once from that dream, I walked the house for signs of him. I stepped into his room and saw my mother there and we looked at each other with the same face of disappointment and I knew that she'd heard him in my steps, or seen him in the shadows I threw on the walls before I walked through the door.

 

Two winters after the
accident,
my mother took cross-country ski lessons. She saved her money and went for a ski weekend in Stowe, Vermont, with four of her classmates. They stayed at the von Trapp family lodge, the place the
Sound of Music
family moved to, and it was there that she met Norman.

He came to our house six or seven times after that for weekends or short vacations, but he never seemed at ease. Ours is a depressed area even by upstate standards. He made promises to us when he walked through the living and dining room—about couches and tables he'd buy for us, and trips he'd take us on. He praised the simplicity of our town but he meant something else. He meant it was no place to live.

The day we arrived in Maine, my mother and Norman disappeared into what they called the adult house, really just a separate wing with its own entryway. I saw them for short snatches in the mornings or before I went to sleep, but during the first two weeks I think I had only one meal with my mother. She and Norman took long trips on Norman's boat and went out for dinner. Sometimes I'd run into my mother in the morning on a walk and we'd look at each other surprised, like former neighbors glancing at each other across a restaurant floor, friends that had neglected to call each other or stay in touch. She would say, “I'm sorry, but Norman and I need this time together, to get to know each other. It's very important.”

 

Everyone had a routine.
Charles set his easel up in the living room at sunrise and painted watercolors of schooners, yachts, and lobster skiffs. He blasted the Beastie Boys while he worked, and by one he'd finished. Walt squalled sax for hours in his room, but never before noon. His eyes were vein red and his room smelled like cigarettes. He taught me how to play a few notes but his mouthpiece tasted ashy, and my stomach pitched. Around sunset, Deborah read scripts in the big back bedroom with the light violet walls. I could hear her alter her voice, crying, laughing, or rattling in anger. Twice I read parts with her and watched her forget for a while who I was. Nan stripped furniture on the porch in those late hours and sometimes when I helped her we could hear Deborah soliloquizing through the window.

If I was ever noticeably alone for too long, someone would sit beside me. They took turns taking me for walks.

One morning, when I'd been watching him paint, helping him mix colors and clean his brushes, Charles told me I was on an island and I needed a pair of big shorts. The ones I was wearing were too tight. He ran with me down the upstairs hall to a closet piled high with old clothes. He dug his head in like a wino leaning into a Dumpster and he handed me two pairs of shorts.

“Try these on,” he said.

I squeezed out of the shorts I had on and into the baggy pair he'd handed me. The legs were down almost to my knees and spread out like sails. The waist was loose, but Charles pulled a strap on the side and it contracted. He smiled. They were just like his.

“We've got tons more where that came from,” he said, and I could see it was true. There were old jerseys, lacrosse shirts, rugby sweaters, clothes I'd seen in a picture on Lauren's walls.

“I've got T-shirts,” I said. “I don't need any more.” I had one of Lauren's on that said
CALIFORNIA
with a picture of a wave.

“Well, they're here if you want them. They're right in the closet there and you can take whatever you want.”

When he left, I picked out an old gray shirt that said
PROPERTY OF DARTMOUTH ATHLETIC DEPARTMENT
. I liked the idea of belonging to an athletic department. It seemed like an honor, a sign you'd caught the passes or done the required push-ups. I carried the shirt and shorts to Lauren's room and slipped them into my bag.

 

I was in the
bathroom
washing my face when I heard muffled voices from Nan and Deborah's room, then laughs, a room full of laughs. Everyone was in that room. I walked to the doorway.

Walt and Deborah were under the covers in one bed, Nan was in the other fixing a cassette tape with a pencil. There were bags of Oreos and bottles of pop strewn about and serious books, opened on their spines, then abandoned. A music box sat on the nightstand surrounded by tapes separated from their cases. Charles was flitting about the room imitating someone.

I watched this scene for a while and for a moment I imagined Tim telling the story. He would be near Charles's age and I would be sitting there listening.

The woman Charles mimicked was someone he'd waited on the night before, someone he spilled wine on. She wanted Charles fired. She told him she would write a letter to the owner of the restaurant about Charles's ineptitude.

“Oh, there's
nothing
you can do now. Not
now
,” he said in a mock falsetto.

Charles said he offered to buy a new shirt and to give the couple their meal on the house. The woman said that wasn't the point. The shirt was from Indonesia and it was irreplaceable.

He told the woman to try cold water and salt. “Oh, what's the use?” she said. “What the hell is the use?”

I saw Nan glance at me. I felt I was peering through someone's window.

“How long have you been there, Lou?” she said. Then everyone looked at me.

“Just a couple of seconds.”

“Well, get your butt in here,” Walt said. “We need some new discourse. The air's getting stale in here.” He nodded his head toward Charles.

I felt this was a cue for me to speak, to say something interesting or fresh, but I couldn't think of anything to say. I felt disconnected. The fog outside was so thick I could imagine it rolling into the house, filling it completely like cotton in a bottle.

“Crummy day out, huh?” I said.

“I love days like this,” Nan said. “These are my favorite days.”

“I'm with you, Lou,” Walt said. “I hate this shit. Look out there. You can't see ten feet.”

“Why do you need to?” Nan asked. “For a few days the world is a ten-foot bubble in front of you.”

I thought about walking around the island in a bubble, passing cars for a moment, then horses and dogs. I'd walk to the other side to the beach, seeing the sand only when it sprung from between my bare toes.

“Are you worried about what's going to happen to you?” Deborah asked.

I said, “Yes, I am worried.”

Deborah laughed and then hushed herself. “I'm sorry, Lou,” she said. “I was asking Charles.”

 

That night I sat
up late
reading Lauren's diary, the white quilt covering me in the cool damp room. I was beyond the sex scene to the day after and Lauren was filled with regret and angst. The boy had called her three times and she wouldn't come to the phone. Everyone was to tell the guy she was out, or sleeping or gone for a run. She was confused by her feelings. She said she wanted to die or curl away for a month or so. She lay for hours in bed—this bed, under these covers, and sipped from a bottle of Bénédictine. I felt as though she was confessing to me, that it was just the two of us up late talking in her room and no one else could hear. I would tell her things. I would tell her about the accident. About Tim and my mother.

He was in eighth grade when he died. I was in fourth. To this day I do not remember resenting him, or envying him, or whispering beneath my breath or to anyone else that I wanted him killed. I believed I kicked the balls to spite my mother although I cannot remember why. That she would slip harder onto the accelerator and lose her steering, that she would brake too hard so the car would whir, like a loosed top, off the road into a tree, were not things I could have imagined. That I would see my brother twisted ghastly, suspended like a night-blinded bird in broken glass, was something I could not have dreamed.

My father had been gone since I was three, dead of a heart attack. But my mother said the sadness that she felt then was nothing like what she felt when Tim died.

For a few months we both saw counselors but we did not talk about that day or my brother. It was as though we had lost our history, as if time started the day after the crash. The counselor said we should have had a mourning period together, a time in which we could just sit and think of Tim and be sad. It was absolutely the healthiest thing to do, he said, to vocalize, to mourn out loud. It never came about.

Instead my mother joined a support group of people who lost sons or daughters and she began having friends from the group over for dinners and small parties that would end long after I'd gone to bed. One night, when she'd had a good deal to drink, she crawled next to me in my bed and smiling, I could see this in the half-light, told me I was her whole life, “kit and kaboodle,” and though she'd meant it as a gesture of intimacy, there was something false in that moment that made her seem distant as the stars from me and altogether unknowable.

 

I read more of
the diary.
There were other boys. One Lauren slept with at his house. His parents were away in California, so they set up a tent with sleeping bags on the front lawn. He chewed tobacco and kept a cup for spitting in the tent. Another one she danced with until six in a dorm room at his college.

I looked again at Lauren's picture. I walked to the closet. I tried on one of her skirts and then I put her red sweater on over that. I was twelve then and knew this was the most intimate I would get with a girl six years older. I stood in front of the mirror and turned side to side. I ran my hands up the front of the sweater and down my sides, over my ribs and hips. I looked ridiculous. I ran to check the door, to see if it was locked. I flipped the radio on and I danced, the skirt swirling around me. Then I lifted the sweater off slowly, dangling it over the bed. The shades on my window were open, so I turned the lamp off and let the moonlight stream in. I slid the skirt down to my ankles and then kicked it high into the air. It floated like a parachute to the floor across the room. I danced on top of the quilt and the bedsprings shrieked. When my legs gave out, I sank exhausted into the bed and let the music spin the room.

 

The things my mother
did
alone before, she did now with Norman. They ran together. She taught him tai chi. He taught her to drink scotch and champagne—rather than the fruity rum drinks she drank before—although he said she taught him to moderate. They'd begun to gesture alike, share expressions, finish each other's sentences.

“You know what it is about your mother?” Norman would say. And my mother would answer that with something different each day. Norman said he lost thirty pounds and twenty years being around my mother. They talked with and around me for ten minutes or so, asking me how I liked it on the island, whether I could get used to that kind of life, and then they'd disappear somewhere, carrying a blanket, a checkered tablecloth, a wicker picnic basket with wine bottles peeking out.

 

One time I was
on my way over to visit and through their living room window I saw my mother walking on Norman's back. He was agonized. His balding head was bright pink. He was completely naked, his flesh tanned and bundled at the base of his spine. She was in shorts and a T-shirt walking on top of him. She is a tall, strong woman, and, on top of Norman, she filled the room. I stared, fascinated, and then I saw my mother look over for a second. She caught my eye and smiled, a sly and heartless grin that scared the hell out of me. I tore from the window to the gravel road to the grass that ran down the coastline. I ran over wet rocks and seaweed and a long grass field until my face poured sweat and my lungs hurt.

After that I avoided her. I stopped my visits. When I heard her voice in the kids' house, I locked myself in Lauren's room or I escaped out the kitchen door. She left me notes and I didn't respond. If Norman came by alone, to change a lightbulb or check the flower beds, I'd talk to him and try to act normal. I tried to forget my image of him, naked on the floor, grimacing in pain.

They kept to their routines, though. I still saw them in low crouches in the white light of morning. They still took boat trips in the afternoons.

 

In our last week,
the fog had begun to scatter. At noon one morning I woke late and heard Walt playing a sad, dreamy song on the saxophone. I pressed my ear on the wall to hear. My ear vibrated. It surged warmth. I walked that morning to the general store with Charles and Nan. Norman had a charge account at Percy's, and when we walked through the door, Percy jumped to attention as if we were something important.