Trapped (2 page)

the state of New York, and also very stupid and dangerous,

but that seems to be the whole point of motorcycles, right?

Something about the girl reminds me of Kelly. Similar

stylish mop of short dark hair, frizzed by the wind. Similar

petite, gymnast-type figure in tight, hip-hugging jeans. Kelly

has jeans like that, but not the tattoo just above the cleft of her

buttocks. What Kelly calls a “coin slot.” Not the tattoo, but the

cleft, you know? Anyhow, Kelly doesn’t have a tattoo of angel

wings spanning the small of her back, because her totally square

mom has forbidden tattoos until the age of eighteen at least.

And then the girl on the crotch rocket, the wild and crazy

girl on the crotch rocket, the girl who is undoubtedly destined

to die in some horrible wreck, or from tattoo-induced blood

poisoning, that girl turns her pretty head and looks directly

at me as the bike careens back onto the highway.

Looking a bit startled actually, the girl on the bike. A bit

surprised as she makes unintentional eye contact.

I scream. Can’t help it, I open my astonished mouth and

scream like a girl.

It’s Kelly. My daughter Kelly. No doubt about it.

2. Sleep With The Poodles

My friend Fern, who knows most of my secrets—not all,

but most—she says the only way to win an argument with a

teenage girl is to shoot her in the head. That’s just how Fern

talks, like she’s related to the Sopranos, very tough in the

mouth but soft in the heart. Even looks a little bit like that

crazy sister on the show, the one who shot her boyfriend. Not

that Fern’s ever shot anybody, certainly not her own daughter,

Jessica, who finally went off to college upstate and is doing

great. A sweet kid, basically, even though she and Fern can’t

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discuss the weather without arguing. Jess had her moments—

I’m thinking specifically of an all-night prom party in Garden

City—and at times managed to put Fern over the edge, into

psycho-mom territory. You know, threatening to chain her

daughter to the radiator, things like that. My favorite was her

plan to put a special collar on Jess, the kind for invisible

fences. She wants to go Goth, wear those stupid spikes

around her neck? Fine! She can sleep with the poodles!

Sleep with the poodles.
That’s my Fern. Always funny, even

when she’s anxious or angry. Even so, she thinks I’m too hard

on Kelly, that I am, in her words, projecting. Fern watches a

lot of Dr. Phil. You’re projecting your own teen time on Kelly,

Fern says, your bad old days.You gotta wrap your brain around

the idea she’s not the same as you. She’s her own person and

this isn’t the 1980s, this is a whole new century out there.

Yadda, yadda. I know. Really, I know. But still I worry.

Every day kids get in really bad trouble in this world. They

do stupid things with their stupid boyfriends and ruin their

lives. They take drugs, wreck cars, have unprotected sex, fall

from speeding motorcycles. They think they’ll live forever

and throw away the miracle that gave them life.

Kelly got her miracle at age nine—actually on her ninth

birthday—when all her tests finally came back clear. No

more chemo, no more radiation, no more needles in her spine.

After four years of pure hell, she was cancer-free. Unlike

some of the less fortunate kids in her clinic, kids who never

came back for the remission parties. Empty pillows, Kelly

called them, or fivers, because one out of five didn’t make it.

Is this why she survived and others didn’t, so she can risk

her life showing off on Hempstead Turnpike? Riding without

a helmet? One-handed?

As you might guess, we’ve argued about risk taking a few

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times. More than a few. Last time she actually had the nerve

to tell me I was being ironic. Ironic. What did that have to do

with snowboarding at night, or hitchhiking? What did ironic

have to do with deliberately disobeying my orders? Was ironic

what made her roll her eyes, treat me with such withering

contempt?

No, Mom, ironic isn’t what you
are,
it’s what you’re
afraid

of. Sixteen-year-old cancer survivor killed crossing the street.

That’s
ironic.

Stopped me cold, that one. Of course she’s right.

But I do feel that she’s been given a gift and should treat

it reverently. But Kelly doesn’t do reverence. Not for herself,

not for me, not even for the dead grandmother—my own

semi-sainted mom—she used to worship as a kid. Reverence

would be so uncool, and for a sixteen-year-old being uncool

is way worse than death.

Despite being trapped in traffic for another twenty un-

bearable minutes, I still manage to get home long before she

does, and I’m in the kitchen, waiting. Boy, am I waiting.

Arms crossed, feet tapping, blood pressure spiking. I’m so

anxious and angry at her out-of-control behavior that I don’t

even dare leave a message on her cell. Can’t trust myself not

to wig out and say something that can’t be taken back, some-

thing that will drive her further away.

I’m working over all of this stuff, rehearsing, ready to let

loose with major mom artillery. As soon as she gets her

skinny, tattooed butt inside the door, there will be massive

inflictions of guilt. There will be bomb craters of guilt.

It isn’t just the boy or the motorcycle or the tattoo. That,

unfortunately, has become typical Kelly behavior in the past

year or so. What really whacks me is that my daughter is

morphing into someone I don’t know. Someone who has no

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respect for me, who all too often doesn’t even seem to like

me very much.

It’s scary when that happens. Scary enough to make me

want to cry, mourning my beautiful little girl. The one who

was so strong for me when she was ill. The one who looked

up from her hospital bed—she was so sick that night, so

sick!—and said,
Don’t worry, Mommy, I’m not going to die.

I checked with God and he said not to worry, I’ll be fine.

And she was. From that day on Kelly got better. Little by

little, day by day, every test showed she was going into remis-

sion. Eventually, on that marvelous ninth birthday, that won-

derful wonderful birthday, all the blood work, all the scans

showed her cancer-free. I thanked God, I thanked the doctors

and the nurses, but mostly I thanked Kelly, because she’s the

one who never gave up, who never let the disease take over.

Anyhow, so that’s my state of mind. We live in the house

in Valley Stream I inherited from my mom, the one she

bought after she and my dad divorced. A divorce I always

figured was partly my fault. All the stress I caused for them

when I was Kelly’s age. Guilt, guilt, guilt. The mortgage

happened when Mom needed money for a hospice. I told

her—promised her—I wouldn’t put a mortgage on the house,

that was her gift to me and Kelly, but what can you do?

My dad, a New York state trooper, he used to have a saying

when he was about to deal with something important:
I’m

loaded for bear.
Well, I thought I was loaded for bear, or at

least loaded for Kelly. But when she finally did come home

what did her mother do?

Mom burst into tears.

Because Kelly is smiling that impish smile, the one she

first learned moments after being born. That smile I hadn’t

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seen for a while, not directed at me. A smile that breaks my

heart because I miss it so.

“Mom? Why are you crying? Did something happen?”

I’m shaking my head. Can’t get the words out so I point

to my lips, and then to her.

“You want to talk,” Kelly says. “Sure, yeah. You saw me

on the bike. It was really dumb, me not wearing a helmet. I

know that and I’m sorry. Seth was wearing his helmet, did

you notice? He gave me a hard time, said it was so retarded,

not wearing protection for your brainpan. Isn’t it weird he’d

say ‘brainpan’? But that’s Seth. And the tattoo, Mom?”

Kelly swings around, lifts her little midi-blouse.

“It’s a fake. Body art. Got it at this place in Long Beach,

on the boardwalk.”

I wipe my eyes, blow my nose, very nearly speechless.

“Oh, Kelly.”

My daughter plunks herself on the stool next to me. With

her amazing eyes and her amazing smile, she looks five going

on twenty. “You’ve got to get over this worry thing, Mom.

I’m okay. Really. The helmet? Won’t happen again.”

“People get killed on motorcycles,” I respond, my voice

husky.

“Yeah, they do. They get killed by lightning, too. And by

worrying themselves to death.”

“Who’s Seth?”

Kelly looks at her fingernails. “You’re going to ground me,

right?”

“Absolutely.”

“Then I better go to my room,” she says, and flounces

away, as if it’s fun to be grounded. As if being grounded was

her idea.

She stops on the stairway, looking back at me in the kitchen.

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“Don’t worry, okay?” she says. “There’s just totally no

reason to worry about me.”

But there is. Big-time. And, as it turns out, for a much

bigger reason than I ever imagined.

3. Man Of Steel

The thing about a turkey buzzard is that it looks really ugly

perched on a branch or hopping around next to roadkill. Looks

less like a bird, more like feathered hyena with hunched shoul-

ders and a hooked nose. But let the ungainly critter soar and

it becomes unspeakably beautiful, rising on big and glorious

wings. What an amazing transformation, from a hideous bag

of cackling bones to an elegant dark angel, circling in the

noonday sun.

Ricky Lang envies the buzzard. He’s sprawled on the

trunk lid of his BMW 760i, the twelve-cylinder sedan, staring

up into the blinding blue sky. What he wants, what he really

and truly wants at this very moment is to be that buzzard.

Riding the updraft without effort, just the slightest wind-

ripple of white feathers marking the edge of his great black

wings. White feathers like daubs of ceremonial paint. Not as

valuable or potent as eagle feathers, he’ll grant you that, but

Ricky prefers the buzzard to the eagle because buzzards love

to fly for the sake of flying.

Oh, baby, how they love to soar on the blurry heat rising

from the vast casino parking lot. They soar over the malls and

highways, anywhere there’s an updraft. Of course buzzards

keep their eyes peeled for food, for something newly dead,

that’s what they do, how they survive. But it isn’t just hunger

that motivates the birds. Ricky has seen scores of turkey buz-

zards far out into the Florida Bay, circling miles from shore.

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Soaring like that, over water, a buzzard takes its chances. If

it has to rest in the water it will be unable to launch itself back

into the air. Feathers soaked, it will drown. Yet still it soars

in dangerous places.

There’s only one explanation for such behavior. The big

ugly bird soars in dangerous places because doing so makes

it beautiful.

When the heat on the trunk lid finally becomes unbear-

able, Ricky Lang heaves himself upright. Five feet ten

inches of hard muscle, small, fierce brown eyes flecked

with gold, and the rolling, pigeon-toed gait of a sailor. Not

that he’s ever been to sea, not really. Airboats don’t count—

an airboat is more like skidding a slick car around a soft,

watery track. Got the slightly bowed legs from his dad.

That and hands like ten-pound hammers. First time Ricky

ever saw the movie
Superman
he had to talk back to the

screen because white-bread Clark Kent wasn’t the Man of

Steel, no way. Tito Lang was the Man of Steel, everybody

knew that! Fists like steel, head like steel, nobody messed

with Tito, back in the day.

Ricky, five years old, assumed Superman was stealing

from his father. Thirty years later, the Tito of today—that

doesn’t bear thinking about, it makes his head hurt. More like

the Man of Mush than the Man of Steel. Brain gone soft,

pickled with swamp whiskey, and his trembling hands formed

into weak arthritic claws that can’t manage his own zipper.

Thinking about his dad, Ricky clenches his fists so hard

that his ragged fingernails draw blood. Feels good, the pain,

keeps him focused. Unlike his father, Ricky doesn’t drink

swamp whiskey, or any form of alcohol. He gets drunk on

other things, on liquors that form in his own brain.

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Fear of the dead, rage at the living. That’s what keeps his

heart beating. Lately he’s learned to sip at the rage, make it last.

For instance today he’s been enjoying a prolonged confronta-

tion with casino security. Started at, what, eight in the morning,