Everybody Sees the Ants (16 page)

In the shower, I think back to last night. Did I really go out with five girls? Five older girls? I retrieve their names. Ginny, of course. Shannon. And I remember Annie now, because of the story Ginny told me. The other two will have to be called Crew Cut in my head until further notice. The ants, who are lined up on the shower rail, say:
Your memory sucks, Linderman
.

When I come out of the bathroom, I check my watch. It’s eleven thirty. This has got to be the latest I’ve slept in months. My muscles are still stiff, but it feels good to be stiff. I get dressed and stop at the mirror to apply more aloe, and I slowly flake off the edges of scab that seem to want to come off. When I’m done, it’s the shape of Michigan. The mitten-shaped part, anyway.

I decide I should move my clothing to where Jodi wanted it—to get the good energy flowing in the room. I feel pretty positive today. I feel like a kid who has a friend. A kid who has a life.

And then I walk into the living room to find three people I’ve never seen before sitting next to Mom and Aunt Jodi, whose eyebrows form a concerned frown, staring at me.

I try to convince myself that these people are just visiting friends. But I learn through Jodi’s introductions that they are professionals Jodi has called in to help me. With that look on her face like someone peed on her granola, Mom makes the motion for me to sit down in the only chair left empty.

After a week of forced fake-smiling, I let my face fall into its natural scowl. I feel like going animal on these people—picking more of the scab and eating it, and then blowing my nose into my sleeve. I feel like squatting on the coffee table and taking a shit on the latest
People
magazine just to give them the show they came for.
Crazy Boy Saved by Local Woman. Future School Shooting Averted
.

“Do you always wear baggy clothes?” one asks.

“Do you always sleep this late?”

“Do you have trouble sleeping?”

“Do you eat three meals a day?”

“Are you bullied?”

“When was the last time you remember being happy?”

“Have you ever thought about suicide?”

“Didn’t you get in trouble at school last year?”

“What activities do you enjoy?”

“Do you have a job? What chores do you do around your house?”

“Why are you wearing that shirt? Do you support the POW/MIA cause?”

I am a shitstorm of sniper fire. “I
am
the POW/MIA cause,” I say.

“There’s no need to be hostile,” one of them says.

I think Mom is smiling a little bit. She’s always known me as the gutless boy who said yes to everything. (Son of gutless woman who says yes to everything.)

Jodi piles the last question onto the heap. “And where were you last night?”

I almost tell them about Ginny, Shannon, Annie and the two crew cuts—about the word
vagina
—but I don’t want to get the girls in trouble. So I lie.

“I walked to the playground and was looking at the stars, but I fell asleep. If you want, I can tell you what I dreamed about,” I say.

Right when Jodi is about to answer, Mom says, “Lucky has a habit of falling asleep like that. He’s just a daydreamer. It happens all the time back home.”

“Have you ever taken him to a doctor for it?”

Mom holds her face in a relaxed smile, even though I know she’s dying to burst out in peals of laughter. “For what?”

“For this sleep disorder.”

“Disorder?” she says, and then swats it away with her hand and a smirk. “I don’t think so. I think he’s a perfectly normal teenager.”

“I can check him out if you’d like,” the only man present says. I assume he’s a doctor. I hope so. I’ve never had a complete stranger offer to “check me out” before.

“No, really. He’s fine,” Mom says.

“He’s not fine if he’s staying out all hours of the night!” Jodi says. “I think Elsa’s right. I think he has a disorder!”

I sit forward and say, “I may be weird, but at least I’m not a drug addict, like you are.”

The adults are stunned. The ants give me a standing ovation.

“Is he always this rude?” Elsa asks Aunt Jodi.

Mom says, “Lucky’s never been rude. Not even when he should be.”

Jodi sucks her teeth.

“What?” Mom asks.

“I got all these people here to help him, and you don’t even care!” Jodi throws her hands up in the air.

“Who asked you to? And who said he needs help? He’s a good kid! And what do you know about kids, anyway?”

Jodi turns purple. Like, beet-purple. “How
dare
you!”

Mom rolls her eyes.

“If this is the kind of treatment I get for opening my home to you in your time of need, then—”

Mom interrupts and smiles at the three bystanders. “I had to
beg
my brother to get her to say yes.” She turns to Jodi. “And you’ve treated us like nothing but a burden since we got here.”

I am already in the guest room, packing. It’s some sort of reflex. I know I can’t go anywhere, but I’m packing anyway. The door is open, so the conversation trickles in… just without me.

“I suppose trying to do the right thing isn’t enough for some people,” Jodi says, and then she bursts into a quiet sob.

After a few seconds Mom says, “You shouldn’t have sprung this on us without asking. Lucky’s fine. And you’ll be fine, too, once your friends leave and you can go and pop all those pills you need.”

When Mom and I are in the guest room with the door closed, I hear Jodi defending her pill use to her friends. “It’s not like I’m freebasing cocaine, you know. My doctor told me I need them for my nerves.” She adds, “What my sister-in-law didn’t tell you is that she’s probably half the problem. Spends more time in my pool than with her own son.” I smile at Mom, who is not smiling. She’s sitting on the bed, wringing her hands.

“You shouldn’t feel bad,” I say.

“And yet I do.”

“We can just go to a hotel.”

“Dave won’t let us stay at a hotel.”

I sit next to her. “Dave isn’t our boss.”

“Hotels are expensive.”

“Not as expensive as living with Frau Nutcase on Planet Moody.”

She laughs a little.

“Seriously,” I say. “I’m considering getting hooked on her pills just to survive two more weeks of this. I’ll pay the hotel out of my lawn-mowing money if you want. I have two thousand dollars.”

She sighs. “We can’t. Dave’s my brother. We’ll just have to work it out once those weirdos leave.”

“Creepy.”

“Yeah,” she agrees. Then she turns to me and says, “Lucky?”

“Yeah?”

“What did you mean when you said you
are
the POW/MIA cause?”

I think about it. “I dunno.”

“No, really. You can tell me.”

“Really. I don’t know what I meant,” I say. “I guess I meant—uh—I was born with a POW/MIA patch on my skin or something, you know?”

“Do you want me to get Dad to…”

“No,” I answer before she can finish the thought. “I like it. I believe in it. I know in my gut that Granddad Harry is still there.”

“You do?”

“Don’t you?” I ask.

She thinks and nibbles on her lower lip. “I’m not as sure as you are,” she says. “How can you be so sure, anyway?”

“I just am.”

“I worry about you,” she stutters. “Those nightmares you have. The things I find in your room.” I can’t believe she has finally said something about this. It’s like she’s been a silent accomplice to me all this time, without a word. Still, I can’t tell her.

“No need to worry about me. I’m fine. Promise.”

“Good,” she says.

After a few seconds of silence, I say, “Can I ask you something?”

She nods.

“Why didn’t Dad pick up Granddad’s case when Granny Janice died? Doesn’t he care what happened? Doesn’t he want to find out?”

Mom sighs. “You don’t know what it did to him, watching his mother beat her head against a wall for thirty years. He just burned out,” she says.

“I don’t get it. He burned out not doing anything?”

“Just watching was exhausting. Broke his heart,” she says. “And when she died, she
still
didn’t have any answers. He just couldn’t bring that with him.”

I make a halfhearted nod, as though I understand. I guess I do. But I still don’t understand why, if he left all that behind, he’s still so messed up.

The conversation in the living room is getting louder. I think I hear Jodi say, “I am not a drug addict!” and it breaks our serious mood. It’s like Jodi threw her own intervention. Mom and I snicker a little.

“So, seriously—did you really fall asleep at the playground last night?”

“Uh—yeah.” This means no. She knows this.

She looks into my eyes. “Just be careful, okay?” Then she strokes my cheek—the healing one—and she says, “Damn. You’re bleeding a little,” and hands me a tissue.

The ants say:
Aren’t we all bleeding a little?

We
leave for the Grand Canyon at five in the morning. Dave drives while Aunt Jodi stays particularly quiet in the passenger seat, aside from yelling at other drivers.

“Jesus! Take it easy!”

“Why are you in such a hurry?”

“How about a turn signal? It’s the thing that happens when you use that stick on your steering column!”

Mom and I are in the backseat, and though I brought my music and my book, I’m not plugged in to either. I’m just looking out the windows, taking in the terrain. For a while it looks a lot like driving through Pennsylvania. I expected deserts and cacti, but it’s fir trees and tall grass, only the grass is browner.

My mind wanders to Ginny. Last night I leafed through a few of Jodi’s magazines and found one of Ginny’s shampoo
ads. She does the
Favors from Nature
line. She looks even more amazing in the pictures, where the motto,
IT’S ONLY NATURAL
, floats in bold type above her beautiful head. If you look at that picture, it’s hard to imagine she’s hanging out with a bunch of crew-cut feminists who chant “vagina.” But maybe that’s just a weird thing for anyone to imagine, no matter who’s in the picture. I wonder what they’re doing today.

“I didn’t expect so many trees,” Mom says after we pass through Flagstaff and continue northwest. Only ten minutes after she says it, everything flattens, and we hit a desert-looking place with mountains in the distance. “Maybe I spoke too soon,” she says.

Finally, after four hours in the car making occasional small talk, we pass a sign that reads
GRAND CANYON NATIONAL PARK
.

We have to drive another ten minutes to see the canyon for real. It really is the most mind-blowing thing I’ve ever seen. Mom even cries a little, it’s so amazing. All we can say is “wow.”

Mom says, “Wow.”

I say, “Wow, wow, wow.”

The first look is overwhelming—an audible gasp sort of overwhelming. I can’t really process what I’m seeing. It’s almost like being underwater—at one of those underwater paradises, like the Great Barrier Reef, that you see on TV documentaries. Everything’s enormous and a blur, a beautiful blur, and I feel weightless, unattached, or floating or something. As if the Grand Canyon is making me drunk.

The ants say:
What did you expect? It’s the Grand-freaking-Canyon!

Dave stands on Mom’s right, and Jodi stands on my left. They don’t say anything, but when I look at Jodi, she smiles at me and nods back toward the view and pats me on the shoulder.

We turn back on the road we came in on and follow it to a small village where our hotel is. It’s the oldest hotel around, and it has a view of the canyon, which seems to be rare or something, because Dave says it was hard to get a room here on short notice, but he has connections. He checks us in, and we make our way to our rooms.

Only outside the two doors is there an awkward moment when we suddenly don’t know who’s rooming with whom. Dave gravitates toward me and says, “I think we should room together, Lucky,” but then Jodi pulls him back and makes him open their door, and Mom and I do the same.