What Happened to Lani Garver (29 page)

"I can't. I'm gonna put his head through the wall next! He started all this ... It has to be his fault. He made me feel ... all this stuff! I just want to be me again..."

"Sometimes? Life has to feel worse before it feels better. Did you eat today?"

I remembered Lani had quoted her on that feel-worse thing before. Not that it mattered. My sanity was sub-zero. "Just a bagel. After that, I forgot." I looked at my radio alarm:
3:20. You can remember to hit Macy, but not eat, jerk-off.

"Just go. Get away from your mother. You won't hit him. You'll be fine."

"How do you know?" I sniffed, shaking worse now than ever.

"I'll call him. I'll tell him you're feeling whacked out and to give you food. Maybe he knows some of Erdman's tricks. He seems to know a little about everything."

"Ellen?"

She waited real patiently while I thought of what I wanted to say. "I'm not crazy. Not really ... Right?"

"No. You are not crazy."

"I mean, I'm not seeing and hearing things." I drummed up an example, wiping snot off my face. "You really did say, in Erdman's office, that you had to explain to Lani about flipping sign language."

"I absolutely said it. He didn't know what the bird meant. You're not hallucinating. He's so innocent in certain ways, it's disgusting. Problem is? People put together
effeminate
with
perverse,
like they automatically go together. In reality? There's no correlation." She was laughing, too loudly. It was not that funny.

"Ellen?"

She waited again.

"Thanks."

I climbed out the bedroom window to avoid my mom. I don't remember anything about going to Lani's except that I walked between houses, dodging in and out of bushes, lest I see anyone who might by chance piss me off. I also had his nightgowns shoved under my cheerleading jacket, and the last thing I needed was for them to fall into enemy hands. I looked pregnant.

He opened the door when I was in the middle of the street, like he had been waiting for me. I walked straight into his chest, buried my face there, and started bawling all over again. He kicked the door shut behind us with his foot, his arms wrapped around me, and we walked up the stairs. Fortunately, his too-sweet mother seemed to be out and didn't accost me.

I stood in the middle of his room like a zombie, tried to suck off his calmness as he strolled over to the bed.

"Ellen called you?" I asked.

"Yeah. I saved you something."

He held the cell phone out to me, stuck it right in front of my face.
CLEMENTI, JOSEPHINE
stared back at me. He arrowed back, back, back, back, through about fifteen of those.

"What's the date on these?" he quizzed me.

I could barely remember my own name, so it surprised me when today's date floated through my head. "Two days ago..."

"Okay? You're not having convenient recollections of how things happened. It's not
you.
"

I fell on his bed, totally tired, not feeling anything anymore.

"I made you a sandwich. Stay here; I'll be right back."

"Don't leave me alone!" I shot up, and he let me trail him downstairs, like all this was perfectly normal. I even followed on his heels up the stairs again.

"Looks like you're gaining weight. Cool." He pointed to my stomach as I chewed a mouthful of food. I put the plate beside me on his bed, getting my first hint of a smile together.

"I totally forgot." I pulled the nightgowns out—one, two, three.

His laugh sounded a little relieved. "Where?"

"You don't want to know."

We sat there in silence as I finished my sandwich.

Then I asked, "What do I do when I want to hit people? I could have broken Macy's neck. Ellen tell you?"

He tried not to laugh more but couldn't help it. "Claire, I am so tempted to tell you, go ahead, keep swinging. For one thing, you're mad about real things and real people. It's not like you're swinging at people who are trying to, like, abduct you to Saturn."

My laugh came out, "FWWWOUT." I asked for another sandwich and sat there this time, staring at the three nightgowns tossed on his bed, while he went and made it. Peanut butter and jelly ... my favorite sandwich
from the old days, the better days.
I almost asked for a third but lost my nerve.

And he distracted me during the second sandwich, talking about Erdman-type stuff. "I'm not a shrink, so I don't know too many anger exercises, but I've heard of one that works, according to some people."

He took a pillow and balled it up and held it out in front of him. "Whose face do you see in the front of it?"

I guess he wanted me to imagine something on this soft pillowcase. "Macy's."

"What do you want to say to her? Anything at all."

"You ... want me to hit this thing? I'll end up putting a hole through it and breaking your nose."

"No, that's made-for-TV psychology. The point isn't to get you to hit but to say things in a normal voice ... find the middle ground. Just say the truth, and nothing but the truth, in a normal voice."

I explained to Macy, "Don't tell people you care about them when all you really care about is getting your own way." I called her a control freak. I apologized for hitting her, and described to her how she was too powerful, how she believed her own shit and antagonized people into believing it, too. I told her she didn't love me, she loved having a shithead for a friend who was too naive to argue with her. I told her Larry Ivanosky didn't pick his boogers.

I got pretty loud when I got to Larry Ivanosky, because I felt he had suffered a fucked-up injustice. But I didn't hit the pillow.

I told my mother she was a drunk, to get a life, and to quit trying to live through mine. I felt things about my dad I had not even been aware of before. I told him he was horny, and if Suhar didn't look so beautiful, he would have not been a distracted dad. I told Suhar to quit sucking up to me by getting me fedoras and expensive shoes; I would get to know her when I felt like it and not before. I told Lani I wanted another glass of milk, and did he have any junk food?

He went downstairs and left me alone again. I knew when he came back I should ask to see this alleged nine-hundred-dollar book and tell him that I wanted to read about angels. I wanted to tell him I thought
he
was one again, because my life was somehow getting better. Because I could feel myself getting slightly smarter, and despite how bad it hurt, I wanted to be smart. I wanted to look through that book and tell him I believed whatever it said, not because I had any proof but because that's what I wanted to believe, and if that's just convenient thinking, well then, screw everyone.

There was one problem with all of that. I didn't want to face the thought that he might say, "
I'm just an overly smart street kid, and that's the truth.
"

I felt dizzy, almost rolling into a huge whirlwind—full of the souls of sad people, sick people, poor people, who were ready to believe in miracles, because what we knew with our senses just wasn't good enough. I could almost hear their wailing, and it was charged up, strangely, with hope.
First are last, and the last, first ...
I took his pillow out of my lap, flopped my head onto it, and fell dead asleep. I didn't wake up until after dark. There was a glass of milk on the nightstand, a plate of chocolate-chip cookies beside them, and all the candles in his room were lit. My first thought was that I hadn't dreamed a single damn thing.

My second thought was the room looked funny ... a little too clean. I saw two backpacks, stuffed in the middle of the floor. I sat up. Lani was awake, lying beside me. That's when he told me that he needed to get off Hackett, fast.

"When Tony did all that phone calling to me, there was one thing he didn't count on. It didn't occur to him that I would make a friend that quickly." Lani flopped down beside me on the bed.

I sat up straight and froze, remembering his prediction about Tony after those phone calls.
He thinks I'm over here alone, shaking in my little pink bedroom slippers.

"When you and I showed up together at the bus station, that was ... monumental." He went on. "It gets kind of twisted, how things probably went around here after we got on that bus. I'm sure Tony found out we were together, and he probably got scared you were a witness to his phone calls over here. You're a little more credible than me."

"What happened that would make you think you have to leave?" My brain rebelled against it ... a kid feeling "run out of town" by Hackett Island. He walked me step by step through Friday night, because it would not have made entire sense otherwise.

"I only took the magazine with us because I was thinking of how mad Macy was when she left your house. I figured there was a good chance we might meet her somewhere along the way. I thought maybe I could dangle some solid evidence in front of her, threaten to have the magazine fingerprinted. Sometimes solid evidence will snap somebody out of convenient thinking."

He shrugged, looking very tired, but went on. "It wasn't just Macy we met. It was those huge guys, too. I knew they could snatch it and destroy any evidence, no contest. I only thought to plant it on Vince about ten seconds before I did it. It's an old street trick. You can do just about anything to anyone while they're shoving you, and they'll never know. It was dangerous ... but my gut instinct was banking on the idea that Vince would recognize the magazine as something of Tony's and would start acting funny before anyone would think to accuse me."

I remembered Vince repocketing the magazine like he didn't want anyone to see it.

"I figured all this already." I breathed. "It sure did feel good to torture Vince for a few minutes, trying to call the cops and have the thing fingerprinted. But your fingerprints were on it, too," I reminded him.

"Yeah, but that would have fit my true story. All that needed to be found were Tony's. Truth? The cops probably would have had no interest in fingerprinting it. I'm not even certain they can do something like that on a small island, where nothing usually happens. But I think we scared the living crap out of Vince. He thought for sure if I got a cop on the phone, the dirty little family secret would come flying out. He probably gave Tony hell when he got home. Wish I'd been there to hear that." He let out a sad laugh.

"What do you think happened?"

"Hard to say. In families covering up a secret like that, things get very tricky. The family almost always knows about something like porn, abuse, sometimes even molestation. But they don't talk about it. Not even to each other."

"Is this based on more stuff you've read?" I asked.

"Some of it." He shrugged again. "And some Saturdays I used to hang out at the clinic until Erdman came down for his lunch burger. He'd buy me one, and we'd sit there and shoot the bull about stuff like this. He'd describe how, like, a mother and a sister can see a bunch of nine-hundred numbers on a phone bill and find out that number is for ... kids or incest or strangers phone-sexing each other. They might each find their guilty relative alone, call him a pig, tell him he has to pay that bill, and yet never talk about it with each other. Both Mrs. Clementi and Vince could have pulled the same magazine out from under Tony's mattress or something. They might just ... put it back or throw it out. Never say anything ... to him, or to each other. In some cases it's like the whole family 'knows' but they don't even know how much the others know. Sometimes the brother doesn't even know how much he
himself
knows. There's convenient recollection, and then there's convenient forgetfulness," he rambled on. "It's called repression."

I shuddered. I would say I believed Lani about all this stuff. We'd touched on some of this in my psych class, and I believed it, then. It just becomes harder to accept when you're putting familiar names and faces with behavior that is so ... screwed up. It makes you wonder.
Who could trust their own minds?

"Who knows what went on in the Clementi house, but I'm sure that Vince went home ready to kill Tony," he said. "Probably gave him hell: How did your blankety-blank magazine get in my blankety-blank jacket? Tony knew he had left it on
my
porch, with more than his fingerprints on it. He probably wondered for about five seconds where I got the nerve to send it back. Then Vince spilled it that you and I showed up at the bus station together, all buddy-buddy. Now Tony's scared. He's sure that you know about him. He's probably even wondering if you were there when he was calling."

I hadn't had the time and didn't have the brainpower to get scared. We were sitting there feeling safe, trying to figure out a psychology puzzle together. "I can't help but think that Macy won't eventually spill what I told her about Tony calling you. I told her at my house I had heard the whole thing. She said she wouldn't tell that part. She said no one would believe her. But she has trouble holding on to any secret. I guess the big question is..." I puzzled for only a couple of seconds. "What would somebody like Tony do to protect his reputation as a straight, tough guy? How far would he go?"

We both sat there in silence, and to ward off thoughts of the worst, I filled the air with words. "I don't care what he threatens to do. I'm telling the truth. I'll tell it to his face, and I don't care who hears it."

"I think we've told enough of the truth, Claire. Between me busting on Vince at the bus station, your little tirade today at Macy that Ellen told me about ... and then, there's what I added to it while you were sleeping."

"What did you do? Did you leave the house?"

He shook his head and held up the phone to me. I saw
CLEMENTI, JOSEPHINE
again. "What date is on this one?"

"Today...," I said. "About an hour ago."

He tossed the phone down between us. "He threatened my life."

"He threatened your life..." My first reaction was to half shrug. Despite everything I knew about Tony being a bully, I went with the my-version-of-reality routine, which was that things like that only happen in Wyoming.