The Wild Truth (7 page)

“
Totally,
” I answered, trying to sound like a high schooler. It didn’t work; Shelly gave me a small smile and reached for the buttons on her Walkman. Desperate not to lose her attention, I thought quickly of another subject. “So,” I began.

“So?”

“So . . . we’re doing a sex ed unit in school.”

“Okaaayyyy.” Shelly looked at me quizzically. She probably thought I wanted her to explain the birds and the bees or something, which I didn’t. Not really. Mainly I wanted to ask her—had wanted to ask her for a while, actually—to explain what the deal was with Quinn. When Quinn and Shannon had last visited, I’d heard them whispering with Chris about something, and I had a pretty good idea what it was. But the boys shut down as soon as they saw me. Maybe my big sister would answer, girl to girl.

“So . . . how is it that Quinn’s older than me and younger than Chris?” I ventured. “I mean, how is that even possible?” The pieces of my parents’ history were starting to become clearer, but the edges were still blurred and I had yet to grasp how they all fit together.

“You’re just figuring that out now?” Shelly’s eyes widened as she paused and waited for me to solve the puzzle. After a minute, she looked at me intently. “What about Shannon?” she pressed. “Haven’t you ever noticed that Shannon’s birthday is only three months before Chris’s? They’re the same age, Carine. Did you ever think about that one?” She waited again as I tried to comprehend how the multiple explanations I had heard could still make any sense. “Never mind,” she finally sighed. “Tell you what. We’ll talk about it when you’re older.”

Feeling thwarted by my youth, I sniped at her, “Don’t you think you might do better in school if you didn’t study with that music blaring in your ears?” I’d gone for a sore point, and I’d hit it. Shelly was undoubtedly smart, but she struggled to meet expectations, while I easily brought home the mandatory straight As.

Shelly’s striking green eyes flared, then narrowed. Then her freckles melded as her nose crinkled up and her lips curled. “Shut up, you little shit!” I successfully dodged the large white pillow she threw toward my head. But as I walked up to my room, I was only mad at myself. I really wished I’d pressed harder instead of teasing her. I still wanted to know the truth.

SHELLY WAS A GOOD STUDENT
but not a great one. As long as she brought home Bs and Cs, my parents would not allow her to join any extra-curricular activities or student-organized outings. When the senior ski trip plans began and again they told her she couldn’t go, she decided she’d had enough and went on the trip anyway. But she had an accident on the mountain and had to return to our house with injured pride and a blown-out knee, wearing a full cast up to her hip. Dad was doing extended work in Germany and Mom grudgingly helped her recover.

On the night Dad got back, a vicious fight started up between Mom and Dad. Shelly immediately took Chris and me out to dinner to keep us all out of the way. By the time we returned, the house was silent. When Shelly got home from school the next day, Mom greeted her. “You need to leave tonight,” she said. “And you are not welcome back in this house.” Mom then left for the evening.

Though Dad might have favored Shelly, he did not stand up for her against the woman he’d begun an affair with before Shelly had even been born. When he got home that evening, he helped Shelly pack.

Shelly moved in with her friend Kathy’s family for a short while before finding an apartment to share with some college kids, where she slept on the floor of their walk-in closet. She worked nights as a cocktail waitress to get by until she would graduate. I didn’t see Shelly again until she was invited by Mom and Dad to stop by to say hello and take pictures on her way to prom. When I asked Shelly why she had come back for such a farce, she replied, “I guess I was just wanting to feel some sense of normalcy.” She’d see Chris in the hallways at Woodson High, and he’d tell her that Mom sometimes checked with the high school to make sure Shelly was there and not cutting. He let her know he had her back.

Although my father did nothing to stop Mom from kicking Shelly out, late on that evening Shelly left I heard him cry for the first and only time. I was upstairs and heard a howl like an animal caught in a trap. I followed the wailing down to the basement and was shocked to see my father sitting at his desk, his face completely covered by his hands, his fingers stretched from ear to ear. It looked like he was trying to disappear.

CHRIS AND I, INSPIRED BY SHELLY
’
S DEFIANCE,
took on the role of detectives when it came to the reasons for our mom and dad’s arguments. We stayed aware, listened carefully, gathered evidence, and met to discuss whatever was the case at hand. Our investigative skills improved with age and experience.

In school, we were both learning about the negative effects of drugs and alcohol and the signs of substance abuse. Our parents reinforced the lessons with their own threats of what would happen to us if we were ever caught using. We were conscious of the Jekyll and Hyde effect we witnessed on a regular basis within our own parents, relative to the daily intake of his gin or her wine. Then one day we found a questionable plastic bag in one of Dad’s coat pockets. We took it down to the basement office in search of a confession.

“What is this?” Chris inquired with eyebrows raised, his right hand holding the evidence in the air, the other resting confidently on his belt, feet at the ready.

“What?” Dad looked up, annoyed with the interruption. The surprise in his eyes turned into a scowl. “That’s tobacco.”

“Doesn’t look like tobacco” was Chris’s retort.

“It just looks different. Give it to me!”

“
Why
does it look different?” Chris didn’t back down as Dad snatched the proof out of his hand.

“I bought it on my last business trip to Europe, and it’s none of your goddamned business! Why are you two going through my things anyway!” he yelled. “Tell them it’s tobacco, Billie!”

“It’s tobacco,” she obeyed, but the daggers she shot at him with her eyes said something else. A titanic fight ensued, up through every level of the house until we were all in their master bedroom.

“Fine! It’s marijuana!” Dad finally admitted after pushing us away and throwing Mom around the room a few more times. “It’s for my glaucoma!”

“I’m calling the police!” Mom screamed and moved toward the phone.

Dad rushed through the room again; we all flinched, but he passed by us and ran into his closet, screaming the usual threats. “Go ahead, Billie! You’ll see where that gets you and the kids!”

I gasped at the size of the marijuana bag he resurfaced with. He held it high in the air and announced, “I’ve done nothing wrong! My doctor gave me this for my eyes! It’s perfectly legal!” He continued his rant as he stomped into the bathroom, red-faced and furious, and began to flush the contents of the bag down the toilet. “Fuck all of you!” he shouted between flushes. “I’ll just go blind and you will all be left out on the street to starve to death!”

“If it was really from your doctor then you wouldn’t care if Mom called the cops!” Chris insisted as he looked back at Mom. She wasn’t dialing the police, or anyone else for that matter. She never did. Chris walked out of the room and I followed, satisfied we had made our point. The fight died down after that.

When we told Shelly about it a while later, she laughed hysterically at the ridiculousness of the entire incident. For my part, I focused on my mortification that my dad was a drug abuser, destined for prison one day, I was sure. Chris’s reaction was different. He was incensed by our parents’ hypocrisy, and that never went away.

A
T THE END OF MY FRESHMAN YEAR
of high school, I sat on the driveway brushing out Buck’s thick coat—a task Mom had deemed critical to save our vacuum from an early demise.

“Hey, Carine!” our next-door neighbor Laura called out, walking across the yard.

Laura was in the same class as Chris, another cool senior. She was a bit heavyset, eternally tan, and very pretty. Her thick blue eyeliner was always perfect, and she’d recently cut her long blond feathered locks into a shorter style. Though most girls were trying to duplicate Farrah Fawcett’s look, Laura was not one to conform to the masses at Woodson. I respected her.

“So”—she sat down next to me and welcomed Buck’s request for attention—“I drove your brother to school today. His car wouldn’t start.”

“Oh! I was wondering what the Datsun was still doing here. How’s he getting home from track practice?” I asked, as if she were his secretary.

“How would I know? Andy, probably,” she said. Andy Horwitz was Chris’s best friend and constant companion on the track.

“So . . . listen,” Laura continued cautiously. “So . . . we’re driving to school and talking about graduation, summer plans. I’m telling him how much I’m going to miss my boyfriend and about all this stuff we want to do before I leave for college.” She took the brush from me and started in on Buck’s stomach as he rolled over in delight. “And Chris is all quiet,” she said, finally. “Weird. Because all he’s ever talking about is how much he wants to travel. So, I ask him where he’s going to go before heading to Emory. And he’s still quiet and looking out the window.”

“Okay?” I wondered where she was going with this.

“Well, he finally looks back at me, and he’s crying! And all he can say is that he feels guilty about leaving you behind . . . leaving you alone with
them.
What’s that all about? Who’s ‘them’?” She stopped brushing Buck and waited for my reply.

“I don’t know,” I answered softly.

“He was crying,” she repeated.

“Well, you know how much he loves that car,” I offered. “Maybe he was just extra emotional because it broke down? Or maybe he and Julie had a fight?”

Laura’s eyes narrowed. “Julie? As in his girlfriend? Are you kidding? They never fight. That’s not it.”

I gathered up Buck’s leash and collar. “I’ve got to get inside and study for finals,” I said and retreated from the inquisition.

CHRIS DIDN
’
T SHARE HIS CONCERNS
about leaving with me. But he also didn’t need to—the thing about me and Chris was that we could give each other a look or a squeeze on the shoulder and know exactly what the other was thinking.

The awareness that he’d be leaving soon was all around us. The family buzzed around him. With the end of the school year came a steady flow of carbohydrates across the dinner table to prepare Chris for his final cross-country track meets. He was determined to perform well at districts and move on to the regional championship. To keep things interesting, our mom pulled
The Joy of Cooking
from the shelf to improvise on her standards, inventing tasty new versions of lasagna, manicotti, ravioli—she was never one to shortcut in the kitchen with Hamburger Helper. During the meets themselves, Mom and I would rush to stand along different parts of the route to hand Chris cups of water while Dad stood, stopwatch in hand, calling out his times to him. To onlookers, we were a close, supportive family. And on those days, we were.

These track-meet weekends had replaced family hiking trips to the Shenandoah. But as Chris ran past me, flush faced and sweat soaked, I saw the same mix of determination and peace come over him that I’d often seen when we’d walked together on the trail. “Everything in my head gets organized when I run,” Chris told me. “I think about all the stuff that gets me so angry, and it drives me to keep on pushing forward. I don’t get tired. I always need more time to figure it all out. Even at the end of a long race, I just want to keep on running.”

I joined the track team, too, only I wasn’t a distance runner. I wasn’t much of a runner at all, actually. The coaches had been wide-eyed and hopeful when the name of Chris McCandless’s little sister had appeared on the sign-up sheet. It quickly became apparent that I did not share his speed or his endurance, and track was not going to be added to the list of school activities in which I made a reputable name for myself. The coaches remained polite in their disenchantment. For my part, honors in track didn’t matter. It was another activity to keep me away from home. I never felt the need to compete with Chris. I just wanted to be like him.

Although we really had no sibling rivalry, I couldn’t help but tease Chris a bit when I surpassed him in the one and only skill of playing the French horn, akin to the mellophone in my favorite musical division, marching band. Chris had rejected the band’s regimented, militarized culture even before I came to Woodson to compete. The environment rankled him, whereas I excelled in both the instrument and the ethos. I liked how structured and predictable it was: march here, then move three steps there, then play these three measures. I loved to see the successful communication between us play out in patterns on the field. It took discipline and hard work, and I thrived, making section leader in short order, then first chair when we traded the field for the stage in symphonic band. I reveled in bringing trophies and accolades home—they were proof of my success, proof that my parents should be proud.