Exley (7 page)

HER NAME WAS K.
She was a student in my dad's class, which I was teaching for my dad until he got back from Iraq. Every Tuesday night I took attendance, gave the students an A for attending or an F for not, and then let them go. K.'s was one of the names I'd called. Apparently, she liked the way I called it. She lived going out of town toward JCCC. About three miles from where I'd left Exley. It was getting cold; by the time I
biked there, my nose was running, and I wiped it with my sleeve, just like Mother always told me not to. Funny. I never could stop thinking about Mother whenever I was with K., maybe because they were about the same age.

I climbed off my bike and leaned it against the side of K.'s house. K.'s house was made of limestone, big blocks of it. It was three full stories, with a cupola on top. It had been a rich person's house once. Now it was divided into apartments for poorer people. K. lived in one of the two first-floor apartments. She called it a garden apartment, even though there was no garden. There were no plants inside, either, except for a potted impatiens in the kitchen that always looked like something was wrong with it. Maybe it had been mispotted. I knocked on the white storm door. It rattled in its frame. The front light came on, and then the door opened and a hand reached out, grabbed mine — the hand felt leathery and warm, like a saddle that had just been vacated — pulled me inside, then closed the door behind me.

“Oh, honey,” K. said. She put her arms around me; I put mine around her. We stood there like that, in the front hallway. Not talking, just hugging until a kettle whistled in the kitchen. It worked like a referee's whistle; once we heard it, we stopped what we were doing. K. went into the kitchen and I followed. She was wearing a red terry cloth bathrobe and her hair was wet. She had just come out of the shower, obviously. The house smelled like Australia (her shampoo was from there) and also like butterscotch cookies, which were my favorite. Sure enough, in the kitchen, there was a plate of them, still warm from the oven. K. always had butterscotch cookies waiting for me, ever since the first time I'd walked into her house and we'd just looked at each other for a long time, each of us clearly wondering what was supposed to happen next, until K. had said, “Do you like cookies?” and I'd said, “Butterscotch?” Anyway, I ate a cookie while she turned off the kettle, got herself a mug and a tea bag, poured the water in, and turned to face me. She lowered the bag into the hot water, raised it, then lowered it, raised it, then lowered it.

“Good cookie,” I said through my mouthful.

“I was thinking of you when I made them,” she said, leaning back against the counter, her bare knee peeking through the gap in her robe.

“Can I have another one?” I asked after I'd finished the first.

“Oh, honey,” K. said, “are you sure?”

I said, “Yes, I'm sure,” because this was what she always asked when I wanted more than one cookie, and because this was what I always answered, and because I thought I was.

USUALLY, AFTER I'D
eaten all K.'s cookies, I felt good. Weirdly light, despite my full stomach. I felt not like myself. Like I didn't have a mother or a dad. Like I had forgotten every bad thing that I had ever done, every bad thing that had ever been done to me. But not this time. This time I felt full and dead. It is different forgetting about having a dad when he's hurt and in the hospital. It's different forgetting about having a mother when she's all alone, waiting for you, wondering where you are.

“Are you crying?” K. asked.

“No,” I said, even though the tears were rolling down my cheeks, into my mouth. My nose was running, too. I pulled up the neck of my shirt to wipe my nose, but there were cookie crumbs on my shirt, and it seemed less gross to have a runny nose than to have the crumbs mixed up with the snot. So I left my nose unwiped.

“Oh, honey,” K. said, “you should go home to Carrie.” Every time, after I ate her cookies, K. would suggest I go home to Carrie. And every time, I would show her how I didn't want to go home by eating more of them. But now I didn't want to show her. That, I guess, was different, too.

“My dad is home,” I told her. She, of course, knew all about my dad — because she was his student, but also because I'd talked all the time about him going to Iraq. K. smiled at me hopefully. She knew how much I'd missed him and I felt almost as bad for K. as I did for myself — like I was disappointing her or something — when I said, “Not
home
home. He's in the VA hospital.” And then I told her how his head and face were shaved, how he was hooked up to the tubes and to the machines, how he'd said a few words to me and how good that had felt, but also how he'd been in a coma for two weeks and how me reading to him didn't keep him awake like I wanted it to. “He might be in a coma again or something,” I said.

“Oh,” K. said. She looked up at the ceiling and closed her eyes and I could tell she was trying not to cry.

“I'm OK,” I told her, but when she opened her eyes again, they were more determined than teary. She walked past me and opened the door. The cold air blew in and blew out, taking the good butterscotch smell with it.

“You're not OK,” K. said. “You should go home. Carrie needs you.”

“I miss my dad,” I said, crying again and harder now, just because I'd said his name. “How can I miss him? He's
back
. He's
here
. I can go see him. He woke up today. He's going to be fine. It's so stupid.” I waited for a second for K. to tell me she understood what I was saying and everything would be all right. But she didn't say anything. And I didn't know how to explain what I was feeling, exactly. Because when I said I missed my dad, what I really meant was that I was so scared that he was going to die. And I was also scared that even if he didn't die, then he wouldn't be the way he was before he went to Iraq. And if that happened, it would be my fault, because that would mean that I hadn't found Exley. And so when I said I missed my dad, I also meant that I missed the way I was before he went to Iraq, that I missed the way I was before I didn't save him, that I missed the way I was before I was afraid that I wouldn't be able to save him. Because when you say you miss someone, you also mean you miss the way you were before you started missing someone. But I couldn't tell K. all that and make her understand, so I just said, “It's so stupid, isn't it?”

“I don't know,” K. said. Her voice was harder than before. Her face looked harder, too. I liked K. because, unlike Mother, there wasn't anything hard about her. Except now, when I needed her to be soft, she was hard. And how could this happen? How could she be kicking me out of her apartment when just a few minutes earlier she couldn't wait to let me in? How could everything have gone so wrong so fast? If being with K. was normally like a dream, then this was like a dream gone bad. A dream that turned against the dreamer. “All I know is you're not going to stop missing him here. Go home.”

I was so mad at her, and I didn't know what to say. Apparently, when you're mad at someone and you don't know what to say, you say something you don't mean and you hope you're not made to regret it. “If I go home,” I said, “I'm not coming back.”

“That's the general idea,” K. said. And she stood there, holding the door open until I did what she told me to do.

 

 

B
ut before I did what K. told me to do, I went to see Dr. Horatio Pahnee. I'd been to two doctors since my dad had gone to Iraq and Mother had decided I was acting funny because of it. The first doctor didn't work out, so that doctor referred me to Dr. Pahnee. I'd been seeing him once a week for a couple of months. My regular appointment was on Wednesday, after school, but Dr. Pahnee told me that I could come see him at home anytime I needed to. Even six at night on a Sunday. I assumed he was home. Luckily, I knew where home was: it was on the second floor of his white vinyl-sided house, right above his office, right on the way from K.'s house to my own.

There were lights on in the front upstairs windows of his house, so I leaned my bike against the front hedge, walked up the steps. There were two doors: the door to his office on the left, and the door to his home on the right. But there was only one doorbell. I rang it, then waited. It had gotten cold and windy and the fallen maple and oak leaves on Dr. Pahnee's side lawn were swirling around. He had to be the last person in the neighborhood, in the city, not to have raked his yard. I had the feeling Dr. Pahnee wasn't much for yard work. His hands were soft and white and marshmallowy. I knew this because when I talked to him every Wednesday, he clasped his hands together, his two index fingers extended, their tips touching his lips. It was like he was kissing the barrel of a gun or holding his lips hostage. Anyway, this was how Dr. Pahnee listened.

“Miller,” he said. I turned away from his lawn and toward the door on the right, where he was standing. I'd never seen him outside of our hour on Wednesdays, but he looked exactly the same: he was wearing faded jeans and a button-down blue corduroy shirt. His hair was brown with some gray in it, just over the collar, and his beard was brown with some gray in it, too. As usual, he seemed happy to see me. Or at least amused.
His face was round and always gave the impression that he was smiling, although I'm not sure I ever really saw him smile. “Would you like to come in?” This was what he always said to me on Wednesdays, too, in his office, when he greeted me in his waiting room.

“I would,” I said. “Thank you.” He moved to the side and gestured with his right hand, and I knew this meant,
After you
. I walked past him, up the carpeted stairs, and into his living room, which looked exactly like Dr. Pahnee's office. There were the matching brown leather couch that I sat on and brown leather chair that he sat on. There was the desk with the blotter and scattered papers and pens and pencils, the rolling chair behind it. On one end of the couch was the end table with the globe on it, and on the other end was a table with a green table lamp. On the other side of the chair was the green floor lamp that had obviously come with the green table lamp. Dr. Pahnee's home, like his office, was like a Noah's ark for furniture. But in any case, his office and his home looked pretty much the same. Funny: whenever I tried to imagine Dr. Pahnee outside his office, I couldn't quite do it. It seemed that Dr. Pahnee couldn't quite do it, either.

“Are you waiting for an invitation?” Dr. Pahnee said, settling into his chair. This was his usual invitation to sit on the couch. I did that. We looked at each other. “So, tell me what you've been up to,” he said. So I did. I told him everything that had happened that day. This was also normal. I talked and Dr. Pahnee listened. Because this was what he was there for. I told him about my feeling that my dad was home, and Mother crying, and finding my dad in the VA hospital and how terrible he looked, and me going to the New Parrot and thinking I'd found Exley until the Indian whose parents were from Pakistan told me I hadn't, and then going to see K. and how she kicked me out of her apartment. The entire time Dr. Pahnee sat there with his hands clasped and his fingers touching his lips, waiting for me to get to my question. I always had one.

“Do you think I should tell Mother?”

“About?”

“About my dad being in the hospital and about finding Exley,” I said. “You'd better not,” he said.

“Why?”

“Why do you think?”

“Because she won't believe me,” I said. Because Mother wouldn't have believed me. She would have thought I'd made the whole thing up. Making things up was a problem of mine, according to Mother. This was why I was seeing Dr. Pahnee in the first place. I never bothered asking Dr. Pahnee whether he believed me, though, because I knew he did. Because that's also why he was there. Mother thought she was paying him to help me stop making up the things she thought I was making up. But I knew Dr. Pahnee was there to listen to me talk and then to believe everything I said. “Because she'll think I made the whole thing up.”

Dr. Pahnee nodded, unclasped his hands, reclasped them around the back of his neck in a satisfied way. “Better not tell her,” he said. This was the only advice Dr. Pahnee ever gave me. Before Dr. Pahnee, Mother had sent me to another doctor. The only advice
he
ever gave me was “Crying doesn't do anyone any good” and “Stay positive.” It was too hard to listen to that first doctor's advice, and much easier to pay attention to Dr. Pahnee when he advised me, “Better not tell her.” I got up from my couch, and Dr. Pahnee got up from his chair. “Thanks,” I said. “You were a big help,” I said, which was the truth.

“ ‘I've got human life — do you understand that?
Human life!
—in my hands!' ” This was what Dr. Pahnee always said after I thanked him. It think it was his way of saying,
That's what I do. I help people. But anyway, you're welcome
.

“OK,” I said. “See you on Wednesday.” And then I turned and headed for the stairs.

“Miller,” Dr. Pahnee said. I turned and looked at him. Whatever was in his face that made me think he was happy, or amused, was gone. He looked serious. There were worried grooves in his forehead. “Maybe you should write all this down.”

This was something new. I always told Dr. Pahnee something and asked him a question based on what I'd told him and then he answered it. The first doctor had asked me to write down things I'd learned from my dad. But Dr. Pahnee had never told me to write anything down. He was sitting on his desk now, his feet stretched out in front of him and crossed at the ankles. In his office, he always wore clunky brown shoes:
they looked like work boots, except lower. But I noticed now that he was barefoot. I couldn't help staring at his bare feet: they were normal human feet — there wasn't anything especially callused or yellowed or cracked or gross about them — but that they were bare seemed wrong,
off
, just like my dad being groomed in the hospital.