Dive (6 page)

So?

And you don’t have a car.

Dogger says I can buy his car, cheap. I’m making real dollars at Pete’s Pizza.

Lyle’ll never let you go.

Lyle. Lyle
’ll never let me go. Shheeez.

He won’t.

There’s this expression, Ben? About how some people can’t tell their ass from their elbow? Every time I think of that expression, it reminds me of you.

Up till that minute, it had been a regular you-and-me conversation, a bopping talk that wasn’t exactly right and not exactly wrong, either, but instant and easy like playing tennis against the wall with me as the wall but I was used to it.

Except sometimes you hit too hard—you did then—and my wall fell down and there was no way to bounce back.

I stared at you, then lifted my juice to my mouth and drank it down in one long slow sip to the end.

It didn’t matter what you planned, I decided. Just as long as Lyle and me didn’t have to be part of it.

L
YLE WANTS TO GET
going to see you, and we’re out of the motel so fast it’s like we spun through a revolving door. Someplace between my run up and down the gravel hill I guess I lost my sweater, but Lyle doesn’t notice and Mallory doesn’t notice, and since it’s warm enough outside that I don’t realize I forgot it, there’s nothing to protect me from the hospital. I start to shiver as soon as we walk into the lobby.

“Where’s your sweater, Bennett?” Mallory asks.

“Forgot it,” I answer, looking around for a place to reheat. The top-down drive had been quick but liquefying hot, and I feel like I got hauled off the beach and stashed into a giant refrigerator full of sick people. They are everywhere, bumping their walkers or partnered up with nurses or sitting raggedy as missing socks in their wheelchairs.

“Third floor,” Lyle says, coming back from the information desk. “Gina’s up there already. Elevator or stairs?”

“Elevator,” Mallory says, and we head to it.

A cold hospital layer is starting to cling over the heat in my skin. I’m hot/cold/hot in rings moving out and out from the pit of me, like a radar. The rings stretch out and out and blip to the third floor. I’m sweating and shivering, so I start to jog in place, trying to even out my temperature.

“You okay?” Mallory asks. “Bennett?”

And Lyle goes, “Ben? Ben?”

Whatever they say next I don’t know because it’s lipped-over-me words and I’m listening to the squeak-tap of my sneakers on the hard hospital floor. I’m shivering but there’s sweat-prickers in my scalp.

Then Mallory has my hand and we’re walking together, through the automatic doors, back into the sun.

“It’s too cold in there,” I tell her. “I’m not ready to go in there.”

“We need to pause,” she says. “You know, I haven’t dashed around this much since I was a newsroom assistant. How about lunch? How about a cheeseburger or chicken nuggets, sound good, hey, Bennett?”

“Yeah, okay.”

Lyle stays behind, so it’s just her and me moving outside the radar range. Mallory’s heels tick over the pavement and she jingles her keys in one hand, but her other hand snaps mine palm to palm, firm fingers through my fingers. Her sparkly nails scratch over my knuckles like I’m her pet Chihuahua, but it is enough, holding her hand and loosening up in the heat.

Once we’re in the car, I feel better, and I ask if I can get a milk shake along with my cheeseburger.

M
E AND MALLORY GOT
off to a bad start, and we’re still making up for it. The fact of us both trying to smooth things over I take as a sign that we’ll come through all right. Lyle’d taken Mallory out a few times before, so when he invited her over for dinner, I knew it was a tester for Lyle to find out my opinion. Since Lyle works at home, he can spend the whole day fixing up a meal, which means a home-cooked dinner is not a bad idea, datewise. When I got home from school, good smells were thick in the air. I figured the night was kind of Mal’s tester of me, too, and I even took a shower and changed into a button-down without being asked.

I’d already seen Mallory on TV, so her clicks and sparkles weren’t a surprise. She was livelier than I’d counted on from a semifamous person, and her questions were easy lobs about school and friends; no curve balls to sneak me into talking about Mom.

Mallory’s own stories took longer, and I switched on and off paying attention. The main facts are that she ran away from home when she was sixteen to live in Paris, France, where she was a clothes model for magazines. She ran into some bad luck when she married a creepy French guy who used up her model money. She divorced the creep and she finished high school by mail, and then she took newspaper-reporting classes at some Frenchy school. She moved here when she got a job to be the weather lady on a cable channel I never heard of. She did such an awesome job that the big cheeses at Channel Five wanted her do their Sunday Consumer Edition. She landed the weekend spot after Craig Calhoon went to another TV station out west.

That’s when Mal got spooked and started going to Lyle. She figured everybody would think she couldn’t do the real news since she’d been a model and a weather lady. She needed help getting the quivers out of her voice, she told me, and to learn not to bust up crying when she got angry, or if her boss got angry, or if people wrote in that they liked Craig Calhoon better. Which they did, at first, because nobody likes changes.

But she included too many extra mini-stories about big shots she knew in Paris, which of course Lyle thought was so, so great. He kept saying, You were friends with
her
? You went to a party at
his
house? Once, when he was in the Air Force stationed in Hawaii, Lyle saw Jack Nicholson in a gift shop. That was almost twenty years ago, and Lyle still talks about it. I guess to him, movie stars are like the super-confident polar opposites of the people he has to shake the shyness out of all day.

From Paris to Lyle, I said at the end of the dinner, right before my favorite Lyle specialty, homemade peanut-butter brownies. And I don’t know, maybe I said it because it sounded like something you’d say, a crooked insult you might have flipped me from when I first came to your house. Then I felt bad, because Lyle’s face turned red and he started twirling his fork in his hand.

Ha ha ha, Lyle embarrass-laughed. From Paris to me. What’s my special charm, Mal? I keep asking you, and see? Now Ben wants to know too.

Dessert didn’t taste good after he said that. That’s one of the ways you and me are different: you stand guard by your smart-mouth remarks, but I want to turn them around and march them right back up inside me.

Guess you never read a single chapter of
Speaking to Save Yourself
, Mallory said to me, hard-voiced. Otherwise you wouldn’t poke fun.

Dustin calls that book the Bible for Babies, I said.

Lyle had cracked up when he’d heard Dustin call it that, but Mallory was wrong for the joke. She leaned forward, the points of her elbows pressed on the table and, with her chin socketed to her fist, checked me out long and hard, like it was the first real look at me she’d ever got.

Ignorant, she said finally. And I wouldn’t have thought so, from a first impression.

The silence tingled my cheeks and sucked out my appetite. I pushed my brownie over to Lyle and then, turning a shoulder against Mallory, I told him how Mrs. Adams, our recess monitor, just came back from her honeymoon in Paris, and she said that the sidewalks were full of dog poop.

“H
OW ARE YOU DOING
? Better, Bennett?”

“Better, Bennett,” I answer, and because it sounds funny I repeat it a couple more times in an outer-space voice until I see it’s kind of getting on Mal’s nerves and she tells me don’t talk with my mouth full.

“Thinking about seeing your mom … maybe it gave you a jitter jump?” she asks.

I plug in the last bite of cheeseburger before I tell Mallory that I don’t care if I ever saw my mom again for the rest of my life.

“Liar,” she answers. “Come on, finish chewing. You’re a sorry listener, I swear, Bennett.”

“I’m serious.” Except for I can’t tell if I believe it myself, since it closes up my throat to say.

Mallory sips her water and quietly says some words about Mom that Lyle might have cut her off from saying if he’d been here at burger place too.

“You never met my mom,” I remind her. “You don’t know what she’s like.”

“I know enough to form opinions,” Mallory answers. “And however nicely you cut it, she’s never been much of a mom to you.”

Mal’s right, I guess, but in a small way I think I should speak up for Mom. It’s hard to catch up with all the different ways I think about her, even after so much time away.

“However nice you cut it,” I say slow, “Mom couldn’t have stopped Dustin from doing what he did.”

“What are you talking about, stopped him? It was a mistake, what he did. An accident, Bennett.” Mallory spreads her hands wide to heaven, showing me, I guess, how nobody could have caught you, how you’d fallen through everybody’s helpless fingers.

“If you say so,” I tell her.

Mallory’s sunglasses are off and her eyes hold me to a better answer. Pretty eyes she’s got, so dark that the white parts look like glow-in-the-dark decals. She leans her face in close, serious.

“What makes you think that Dustin would want to hurt himself?”

“He wouldn’t want to,” I answer. “He just would.”

I
T MUST HAVE BEEN
some time right before or right after Mom left, that day we took bikes out to Pinewoods. Your bike actually belonged to Lyle and mine was the Hotrocks hand-me-down and neither of them fit us perfect, but they got us around.

The race was your suggestion. We’d biked into town for snacks, and you paid for everything. My mouth hurt in a good way from grape pop and two Eskimo Pies and handfuls of jawbreakers.

Let’s race, you said. Like a real race, like a marathon.

I said sure, why not? because even though you’d win, it was a day when your whipping me on a bike wouldn’t have made me mad. Not mad at all.

We shortcut behind the fire station and went off road. My bike frame was thick with knobby tires, better for the mud and long grass, and I couldn’t figure how you kept balance on those ruler-thin wheels and hanging over your handlebars like you were. I had to pedal fast to keep up, and my box of jawbreakers, fitted between my belt buckle and my stomach, rattled like voodoo.

Pinewoods is bike land, with good trails and just enough rocks and hills to make you feel like you’re Daniel Boone in the wilderness. Some of the trees along the trails are marked with red or blue or yellow dots. Blue is a good trail. Yellow cuts down a mountainside and is too steep. Red is for little kids.

You took yellow.

Dustin, I called. Hey, Dustin, your bike isn’t going to let you. Yellow takes you all the way down the mountain.

Go red trail, then, you said, without looking back. That’s the safest. I’ll meet you at home.

But I knew your challenge when I heard it. That inside-out, you kind of challenge. I switched gears and pumped strong, holding you in sight just barely, you were treading so fast and bouncing hard into the rhythm of every slope and bump.

Yellow tree dots blurred past. I tried to ignore them as I kept up speed. We were jagging sidelong down the mountain, which I knew only from Lyle’s saying so ended somewhere over by the bakery outlet on the other side of town. Even with my hands triggered over the front and back brake pulls, I was feeling not-so-sure that I could stop myself if I needed. You weren’t checking or warning me, tour-guide style, about the rocks and gutters ahead. But I kept up and stayed quiet, my back pressed low and both sneaker laces coming untied and nothing to hear except the cracking twigs and
rat-a-tat
of my candy.

Your back tire caught the stick as you were skidding away from one of the pricker bushes that stuck up everywhere through the woods.

Dustin, your tire’s caught, I called. Stop—watch it! You can’t shift gears.

All my voice seemed to do was jump your speed. My eyes were trained down on the stick clacking through the spokes, and so when I raised my head, the shock gusted through me. There’d been no warning on the clean drop of mountainside that fell before us, steep as a ski slope and just as bare.

Dustin! I shouted. The sound of my voice made you pause without stopping, more like a hiccup between slow motion and freeze frame, and the next thing I watched you tip yourself straight down the mountain and let go of the handlebars, then raise your arms high like victory.

I braked so fast my stomach heaved. I watched as you waterspouted over your bike, which kicked away from you like a wild pony before smashing onto its side. Your arms and legs churned the air as you punched up extra height before the spit of the next instant knocked you all the way back down to the ground. It happened so quick I had trouble processing that it happened at all.

I ditched my bike and ran to where you had rolled, flat on your back with your eyes on the sky.

Why’d you do that? I shouted, collapsing to my hands and knees beside you. Why’d you let go? The dusty gold sunlight and creaky pine needles closed too calm around my thumping heart and questions. Still I kept asking.

Why? Why, Dustin?

You scowled as you inched up on your elbows. Maybe the bike got away from me, you said. Then in an undertow of breath, you told me someone called your name.

That was me! I was saying to stop, to get the stick out of your back wheel.

You nodded, but your eyes fixed steady on the ultrablue sky. You held yourself to the same position for so long I began coughing just to jump-start your attention.

Slowly you brushed yourself up to your feet and went to collect your bike.

I watched as you straightened her out and pulled the stick from where it was still lodged in the back-wheel spokes.

You did that on purpose, didn’t you? I wanted to shout. You just wanted to test how it would feel to drop down. The only reason you did that was to see if you could, right? Right?

And jealousy itched at my skin, thinking of how good it must feel to fall so free, even while I could have punched you for it, for scaring me so bad.