Away We Go (9 page)

“You said before—here's the point, Marty. A story is your chance for things to make sense.”

“Noah?” he says.

“Yeah?”

“Can I have a hug?”

That kills me.

I reach out, and hug him, and he hugs me back.

Act 1: Scene 3

[
Peter and Wendy are perusing magazines in Peter's room. They are scared by the magazines that discuss current affairs. Peter picks up the latest edition of
Game Informer,
flips through it. They ignore the guards outside in the corridor, the children being wheeled out, the empty stretchers.
]

PETER

                   
The thing is, I don't understand sports games. You have a choice between saving the universe from an alien race bent on the total annihilation of all sentient life but choose to shoot a ball through a hoop instead?

WENDY

[
shrugging
]:

                   
Boys have a hero complex.

PETER

                   
Oh yeah? And what about girls, then?

WENDY

                   
Girls have been socialized by millennia of patriarchal oppression to accept how disappointing reality is. We know not to expect more from a world run by men. We know not to
expect to be heroes. Shooting a ball through a hoop is like icing on the cake. Of gender oppression.

PETER

[
casts a meaningful look at Wendy
]:

                   
I thought we liked games because we didn't have to talk about this shit.

WENDY

                   
I like games because, in those moments when I can get around the stylized depiction of a woman's form, by which I mean boobs so big they have boys locked into gravitational orbit around them—

PETER

                   
You say that like it's a bad thing.

WENDY

                   
I sometimes feel like a kid again. With my brother, I used to play this game where we would hide under the blanket and pretend we were space explorers, or pilots of armored suits.

PETER

[hesitant]:

                   
Want to try?

THERE'S NO PLACE LIKE HOME

It takes Marty and me a few minutes of fumbling before we work the door open and stumble back into the apartment, Marty going on about something Tolstoy once said. In the kitchen, I pour us a glass of water each. My largely untouched plate of hot dogs and potatoes glares at me with accusation. Marty collapses at the kitchen table.

He squints at something to the right of my plate, picks up the key I left on the table. “Is
this
—this is the one we stole.”

“It was in my mouth,” I confess.

“Oh.” He frowns in concentration. “I keep my keys in my wallet, because—” He breaks off mid-sentence to rush for the bathroom, dropping the key with a clack. I laugh. What a lightweight. I follow, bringing his glass of water with me. He's hunched over the toilet. He lifts his head up long enough to give me a scathing look, before turning back to the pressing matter of throwing up his dinner.

“Better?”

His response is to retch more. Once I'm pretty sure he's done, I try again. “Better?”

“Yeah.” He gets up, a little unsteadily, and rinses out his mouth. I hand him his glass of water.

“Noah—”

“Drink. You'll want to kiss me thank you in the morning.”

He hands the glass back to me when he's done with a
Happy now?
sort of gesture. I walk him up the stairs to his room, set a trash can by his bed. I can't help noticing there's a crumpled old F.L.Y. newsletter inside.

“Peter. Hey—hey—” Marty grabs my arm. “Can you tell Wendy—can you tell her—” His voice trails off.

“What, buddy?”

But he grows confused, closes his eyes. “Tell her—”

He doesn't finish the thought.

In my room, I strip down to my underwear, leaving my clothes strewn across the floor. Sometime in the night, I will wake, I will reach for my phone, I will dial my old house number, and press the cell to my ear, and listen for the sound of Mom's voice, prepared to thank her for her florins.

I will hear: “Welcome to AwayWeCall Wireless. We are sorry, but your number cannot be completed as dialed. Please check the number and dial again.”

DREAMS OF HOME

Noah is a boy made of raindrops.

He reaches inside himself, and picks one raindrop out.

It looks like this: o

Inside the raindrop are shadows lingering in a familiar doorway late at night. But the raindrop is small and slippery. It falls through his fingers, so he reaches inside himself again, and picks out a second raindrop.

It looks like this: o

Inside the raindrop is the creak of floorboards under the weight of woolen slippers.

Again, the raindrop slips away.

Again, he reaches inside himself.

With more droplets come more visions.

o: A soft voice that recounts fairy tales—“Three Little Pigs,” “Cinderella,” and so on.

o: Fingers callused from years of gardening work, callused but warm.

o: A beard going gray.

o: Lipstick the color of fire, a kiss the color of fire, on a cheek flushed pink with winter and embarrassment.

o: The tide of the ocean on summer days, rising and receding with the laughter of beautiful not-quite-adults playing volleyball on a long-ago holiday.

o: The feel of hair being tousled by—
brother
?

o: Dry turkey and canned cranberry sauce on Thanksgiving Day, giving thanks to God for family.

o: His older brother was Jonathan?—until Jonathan got sick, went away. His mother is still Sarah and his father is still Jacob. They will still be Sarah and Jacob, Jacob and Sarah, though maybe not Sarah and Jacob together, on the hour and the minute and the second that not-Jonathan and not-Noah are reunited, the hour and the minute and the second when they are not on a beach again, with the tide and the teenagers playing volleyball, and Jonathan doesn't reach over to stroke his brother's hair, the summer before college, doesn't cough, doesn't pull his hand away to cover his mouth, doesn't say, through teary eyes, “Damn.”

o: A reflection of a nine-year-old boy left behind in the mirror of a second-floor bathroom in a nineteenth-century colonial. A real mirror, in a real bathroom, in a real house, far beyond the walls of Westing.

Droplet by droplet, let Noah forget the shadows and the lipstick, the summer holidays and ever believing in God. Let Noah forget Noah. The reflections he leaves behind are more real than he is, anyway. He is never more present than to those for whom he is absent.

So let Noah empty himself, little by little. It is whispered that the virus attacks the brain last, the memories last. There are rumors that memories are downloaded onto chips and sold to adults who want to remember their first loves and homework handed in two minutes before a deadline.

It would be terrible if the rumors were true and terrible if they weren't.

But Noah still has some raindrops left inside himself.

He holds the remaining drops in a pool in his hand, and for now, they do not slip through his fingers.

In the pool, he sees himself waking up with a raging hangover, his seventeenth birthday six days away. Nobody at Westing publicizes or celebrates their birthday.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN BAD LIARS AND GOOD PEOPLE

It isn't even dawn yet, but I am already waiting for the day to be over.

I can never seem to have both a good night of drinking and a good night of sleep. Always have to choose between the two, and my priorities have accustomed me to this pre-morning quiet, where I sit picking at my chapped lips, the dried, cracked skin on my forearms. Through the blinds on the kitchen window—a familiar sight—the sun rises over the lake, the sky turns orange, our twig of an apple tree leans precariously. I am too tired to care about the beauty of such things. I light a cigarette to keep me company while time passes, until someone descends from on high to go to the bathroom, and in one magnificent toilet flush, brings the world into being.

I exhale, the smoke curls, and I'm taken back to the curl of smoke on the porch of a house the moment before it disperses into the air of a distant summer, a house without a wall, without so much as a fence, a father cloaked in shadow, features indistinguishable, but his voice is gruff, harsh, it scares me and yet I do not want to stop listening to it, he is telling me something, he is telling me about his work, I am too young to understand, the smell of pie drifts through the open window, and Dad is telling me he stays late at work to finish graduate school assignments, he is telling me his boss comes into the office to check up on him at 7 p.m. smelling of alcohol,
harasses him for doing homework at the workplace. I try to pick the memory apart. I suspect it's a dream. The only way to know would be to answer my parents' letters, to call and ask.

Fifteen minutes to seven—footsteps on the stairs. Alice peeks into the kitchen, her hair disheveled. She scrunches her nose at my cigarette, but says nothing. It is too early for argument. We sit together, sipping coffee at the table. She sets her cup down with a soft clack and leans in toward me. She kisses me on the neck, soft. Into my ear, she says, “I missed you last night. I don't sleep well when you're not there. Did you know that?”

“I, on the other hand, sleep better. You always hog the pillows. And kick me when I pry one from you. I swear, when you're asleep I see a whole 'nother side to you.”

She nudges me with her elbow. “‘Hog' is a strong word. I prefer ‘take into protective custody.'”

“Well we need to hash out a better joint-custody agreement.”

“I prefer the current arrangement,” she says.

“You would.”

She kisses my ear, my throat. “Come to bed with me?”

I laugh.

“I'm serious,” she says, bumping my shoulder playfully with hers. “Let's spend the morning in bed. We can plan next week's picnic. I know how much you're looking forward to it.” She smiles a sad smile. “But please finish that
thing
”—she prefers not to dignify the cigarette by referring to it by name—“before you come up.”

“You want to stay in bed and skip chapel services? That's not like you.”

“It's a
Saturday,
silly goose,” she says.

This silly goose finishes his cigarette, lets Alice lead him
upstairs, where she pretends not to care about the lingering smell of ash.

I like the smell, but I wouldn't know how to explain why. Dad on the porch, Alex and me in the library beside a urinal. Commemorating these things would be worth the cancer even if I was outside the walls, if no one was going to come and take me away.

She unbuttons her gown. Takes my shirt off. Next my pants. My underwear. She pushes me down, onto the bed, her palms cold against my skin. I feel her lips, her hot breath, on my stomach, my belly button, my groin. . .

“Close your eyes,” she says.

“You're sure? You don't usually—”

“Please close your eyes.”

I close my eyes and moan quietly. I don't want her to stop, but I force myself to say, “Are you—” I leave the thought hanging. When she doesn't answer, I don't ask again.

When she's done, I do her. Then I roll out of the bed and say, “Don't move a goddamn inch.”

She moves her toe a goddamn inch, her eyes twinkling mischievously.

Downstairs I make blueberry pancakes, because Alice and her grandma would eat them on summer evenings, out on the porch. Grandma would sprinkle sugar on top. It would go dark and her grandma would teach her the constellations, Big Dippers and Little Dippers. Her grandma writes sometimes, and Alice writes back, of course she does; they reminisce about celestial silverware.

I kick open the door to Alice's room, struggling with the tray of food. Pancakes, jam, scrambled eggs, two glasses of milk. Three steps into the room I catch my foot on a pair of Alice's
shoes and everything that comes up must go down. I want to jest, to make light of the situation.

Instead, I begin to cry. She made these sucking noises, and I let her make them, the girl whose grandma taught her the constellations, the same constellations I told her I was uninterested in, and there is the lingering taste of her in my mouth. I tasted Alex, once. He tasted better—like salty-sweet potato chips. The truth is I didn't like returning the favor for Alice; the truth is it made my neck hurt.

She hugs me, I get a whiff of her strawberry shampoo, and I feel nauseous. She must've taken a shower while I was preparing this—
mess.

“Why did you—” I hesitate, can't get the words out. I look at Alice—Alice, who believes, who read an article on AwayWeGo about Coca Cola's alleged anti-union activities in Latin America and now wants to kick it off campus, she wants to save Latin American union workers, and she wants to save me, too, to have me counseled into happiness. I taste vomit in the back of my throat as we clean up the floor together.

“Noah?” she asks as I throw a wet paper towel in the trash and head for the door to grab another roll.

“If I'd known this would happen, I'd have made sandwiches,” I say, wiping at my eye with my arm.

“You still can,” she says, missing my joke. “When we do our picnic. If you can suspend your nothing-matters-everything-is-futile—”

“A tall order,” I say, to humor her.

“—you might actually have fun! I promise you will.”

I'm waiting for her to tell me that talking to someone about my feelings would help. To tell me that crying over a spilled breakfast is. Not. Normal.

“Love you,” is what she says. Her eyes flick away from my face.

“Love you, too,” I mumble back, and my heart cramps up. Good liars have stone hearts. I don't have a stone heart, but that doesn't make me a good person.

It does, however, make me a bad liar.

“Noah,” she says, her voice hesitant. “It's coming up, isn't it? It's very soon now?”

She means my birthday.

“Yes,” I admit. “Soon.”

I can still drink Pepsi though right?

In light of Coca Cola's history of human rights violations, we, the undersigned, are resolved to demand an immediate end to Westing's affiliation with Coca Cola. It is our duty, as citizens of a global community, to act in a manner that is commensurate with the well-being of all people, within our walls and outside of them, in America and abroad.

Feeling

L

         
O

                  
W

                             
?

Warning Signs of Depression Include:

                                                Â	Feelings of Hopelessness
                                                Â	Thoughts of Suicide
                                                Â	Mood Swings
                                                Â	Loss of Appetite
                                                Â	Fatigue
                                                Â	Irregular Sleep