Nothing to Lose (17 page)

“How old were you?” she asked.

“Twelve. I begged my mom to let me play—my friend Tristan already did. But she was afraid I’d get hurt. She always protected me. Even when she finally gave in, I think she told Coach Fernandez not to play me, because he didn’t put me in until there were about thirty seconds left.”

“Lots of pressure for a kid.”

“The score was 3-10, them, and the other side had possession, so our defense was in. Then they fumbled. I was already taking off my pads, and Coach put me in. I couldn’t believe it.”

Just telling Kirstie about it, I could feel the roughness of the ball against my hands. The grass and dirt beneath me smelled the same as that day, and the scent brought memories like some smells do.

I sat up, pointing. “We’re lined up on the twenty. There’s time for two plays, no more. The first, running, we gain maybe two yards. With nine seconds left, I knew I’d have to pass.

“But when we start again, I freeze. I’d thrown, like, a million passes in my head, memorized the passing tree like it was the multiplication table. But now this big kid’s bearing down on me, and I can’t move, can’t throw. I’m thinking about going home and having my mom make me a bowl of chicken-and-stars soup and telling her she was right.

“Then, the ball’s flying away over everyone’s head. I still don’t remember throwing it, but then everyone’s screaming, crushing into me.” I looked at Kirstie. “It was like nothing bad ever happened, and I knew the only thing I wanted to do—ever—was play ball.”

I was grinning. I still heard the cheers.

“Do you still play?” she asked.

“N-no… I…”

“Quit?”

I nodded, though she couldn’t see me in the dark.

Still, she said, “Stupid.”

“I didn’t have a choice. My mother—”

“You always have a choice.”

“Look, can we just…?”
Can we just make out? Can we just not talk about this?
I wanted to say. But I couldn’t, so I changed the subject. “You never told me about your family. I don’t know anything about you before here.”

“Maybe there isn’t anything before here.” She tilted her head back, looking at the sky. “Maybe I was born here. Sometimes I feel like I was.”

“But you weren’t.”

“No. No, I wasn’t.”

I sensed she was going to say more, so I waited.

We sat there until I thought maybe I was wrong. I started thinking maybe I should go home. I was okay as long as it was noisy with the lights and music and people. But when it got quiet, I’d start thinking about home.

Finally, I began to stand, but she reached out, tugged on my arm. When I looked at her, she said, “You want to know about me?”

“You don’t have to,” I said, backing off.

“You want to know?”

I nodded and sat back down. The ground was cold and a little wet. I started to pull her closer again, but she was busy, fumbling with the leather bracelets she wore. She unsnapped one, then held up her arm, turning it over so I could see it in the moonlight.

“That’s me,” she said.

I didn’t see what she meant at first. Then I saw the mottled skin and faded reddish scars on her wrist. She undid the second bracelet so I could see that it matched.

“Who did it to you?” I said, though I knew.

“I did. I did it the year my mother died.”

“Did it hurt?” I reached to take her arm. She pulled away at first, then she let me grasp and hold it. I felt the little ridges where the scars were, criss-crossing with the blue hills of her veins. “I mean … when you did it?”

“I wasn’t thinking about whether it hurt at the time. But later—after they found me—later it hurt.”

“Does it still?”

“No. Scars don’t hurt. They’re just … there.”

“Why’d you do it?”

She shrugged. “Didn’t want to be alive anymore.”

“But, I mean—”

“Because I’d failed. I wasn’t supposed to fail. It’s not how I was raised.”

I looked closer at her arm. “What’d you fail at, Kirstie?”

She pulled her arm away and stood, walked closer to the goalpost.

“When I was six, my father was vice president of the bank in town. He went to New York for a business trip and brought me back this parasol from Chinatown—a paper one, like they put in a drink, only life-size. I loved it. I carried it so much, the kids in the neighborhood used to make fun of me. But I was so proud, I didn’t care. My dad had bought it.

“Then, a month later, this man came over to visit—the
president
of the bank, I guess. He had a little girl, and I was supposed to play with her. But she scared my cat and broke my dolls, and when they were on the way out, she saw my parasol and said, ‘Daddy, I want it.’

“My father said, ‘I’m sure Kirsten would be happy to let you have it,’ all the time giving me a look that wouldn’t let me refuse. And, next thing I knew, that mean little girl was leaving with my Chinese parasol.

“I started to cry, watching them go. And my father slapped me and said, ‘Think of someone else for a change.’ He didn’t offer to buy me a new parasol next time he went. I wouldn’t have wanted it anyway, because it wouldn’t have been mine. Not really.”

“What an asshole,” I said.

“Yeah, but he was my father. He said I needed to think of others more, and I bought it.” She looked over her shoulder at me. “How long was that touchdown pass anyway?”

“Eleven yards,” I said.

“That’s really good for a little kid.”

I nodded. If I concentrated, I could still see the ball, spiraling over and over, like a nautilus shell.

“Really, really good.”

I said, “The thing with the parasol—where was your mother when it happened?”

Kirstie shrugged. “Could have been in the kitchen, hand-washing the dishes. Could have been out back, composting the strawberries to feed the roses. Or she could have been in bed, crying.”

“Crying?”

“My mother had … mood swings. One day she’d be great—baking five hundred sugar cookies for kids to decorate at the Police Benevolent Association Christmas party. The next day she’d be on the kitchen floor, crying, because the meat loaf didn’t turn out right. Or she’d go weeks without brushing her hair.”

“Did someone take care of her?” I asked.

“I took care of her. My father said we couldn’t tell anyone. They’d use it to hurt us, use it to hurt
him.
My sister and I, we were already hurting. So he took her to this doctor out of town.”

She crossed her arms over her chest.

“But the doctor couldn’t get her medication right. It’s like when you’re trying to tune an old radio. You go one way and get country-western, the other way and get shock talk—when really, you’re trying to land on the Top 40 station. That’s how it was, first one extreme, then the other, and I had to stand over her to make sure she took her meds—then watch them not work. By the time I was eight, I was doing all the cooking, most of the cleaning, helping my little sister, Erica, with her homework, you name it. I had no friends, my grades were for shit, and every once in a while my mother had an episode when she’d think the house was on fire and run outside into the night. Or once, she got in the car and drove downtown, then sat perfectly still at a stop sign until the police called Daddy to take her home.”

“That must have been tough.”

She shrugged. “I always got in trouble when that happened. ‘Just don’t let anything upset her,’ my father said, like that was possible. So I was really careful what I said. I didn’t tell her if anyone was sick, stuff like that, even bad stuff on the news. ‘You’re in control,’ he told me.”

“Talk about pressure.”

“Yeah. Well, when I was fifteen, I gave in to pressure. I met this guy, Clay. He paid attention to me, and he told me I didn’t need to sit home with Mom all the time. And I believed him. I fell in love. We started partying together—smoking, having sex. It was amazing how after I took the pills he gave me I could just forget about home. We were together all the time, and for the first time I was thinking about myself. I told myself Erica should handle Mom for a change, but Erica was only eleven. She didn’t know all the things I knew. She wasn’t me.”

Kirstie leaned against the goalpost, burying her head in one hand. In the distance I could hear the swoosh-swoosh of traffic on Eighth Street, but I was listening for Kirstie’s voice.

When she didn’t speak, I walked toward her.

“You don’t have to tell me any more if you don’t want,” I said. But I wanted her to.

She raised her head. “We don’t talk about our pasts here. Everyone has one, and they’re all more or less horrible. But I want to tell you, Michael. You’re the only person I’ve ever wanted to tell.”

I touched her elbow, then thought better of it and drew away. She continued.

“The day before my sixteenth birthday. I had a fight with Mom. I’d been pretty good that day. At least, I’d done a load of laundry and cleaned up the kitchen a little bit. But later, I was on my way out, and Mom didn’t want me to go.

“‘Please, Kirsten,’ she was begging. ‘I just don’t know if I can handle it.’

“‘What’s to handle?” I said. ‘Just go to bed and lie there. That’s all you do anyway.’

“The words just sort of stayed there, like a piece of furniture in the room. I tried to say I was sorry, but it was too late. My mother sighed and said, ‘You’re right.’ And she went to bed.

“My birthday’s in February, and that February was one of the coldest I can remember. But we stayed warm, partying, getting trashed. I think I was trying to forget what I’d said to Mom. When I got home, I stumbled up the stairs. It was so dark, I couldn’t see anything.

“But the next morning I found her. She was slumped on a bench in the backyard, where our rose garden was. I don’t know if she was waiting for me or if she just forgot it was cold and wandered out there.”

“Aw, Kirstie, you couldn’t—”

“I’ll never know if I could’ve saved her if I’d been home. But a few weeks later, when I was upstairs cleaning out her things, I found about two weeks’ worth of pills, stuffed under her mattress.” Kirstie’s voice caught in her throat. “I hadn’t been there to give them to her, so she hadn’t taken them.”

“You don’t know that’s what happened.” I put my arm around her. “It could have been old pills. You said they didn’t work anyway.”

“Yeah, I told myself that. And I told myself she might as well be dead, as much as her life was worth. And then I picked up every one of those pills and shoved them under my own mattress. I was going to take them myself, all of them at once. But I didn’t because I didn’t know what they’d do to me. Like, maybe they wouldn’t kill me. Maybe they’d just make me crazy like Mom. When your mom’s nuts, you start thinking you might be too, you know? That was a big part of the problem.”

She pulled away and showed me her wrists again.

“But instead, I did this. I failed at that, too. My sister found me and called an ambulance. I remember her sitting beside me while she waited for them. I wasn’t totally conscious, but I remember her holding my arms, begging me, ‘Don’t leave. Don’t you leave too.’”

Kirstie walked away, over to where we’d been sitting, and picked up the leather bracelets. She started to put them back on.

“At the hospital they put me in, they told me it wasn’t my fault.
Everyone
told me that. I had individual therapy, group therapy, role playing—all to tell me I wasn’t responsible. I still didn’t believe them, but I decided not to think about it. I decided I wanted to live anyway, just not with my family. A few weeks after I came home, the carnival was in town. I went there with Erica, but I ditched her with some friends at the funnel-cake booth. I told her I was going on the Zipper, but really I went to the circus tent. I found a circus performer who told me how to get a job with them. I lied about my age. I’ve been here ever since.

“What I like about it here is you never have to apologize. You never have to live with your mistakes for more than a week or so.” She played with her bracelet, the one she hadn’t put on yet. “And no one needs you for anything more important than work.”

“So you never saw your father or sister again?”

She shook her head. “Didn’t want to.” Then she thought about it. “No, that’s not true. I want to see Erica. Some days I’ll see a kid who looks like her and I just about fall apart … but if I ever went back, she’d probably hate me for leaving.”