Sex & Violence (3 page)

I thought I heard Collette crying. People were over me, putting things on my body, moving quickly, touching me everywhere.

Everything hurt. Far away Collette was saying
No, no, no, no,
please
, her voice so sad in a way I’d never heard it. Desperate and begging. I didn’t know if I was dreaming or awake.

***

When I woke up I felt like I was padded in cotton, like a layer of air separated me from the world. My father appeared. Nurses appeared. A police officer appeared. It was easier to shut my eyes, because it took too much energy to open them and I couldn’t see that well.

Soon I became accustomed to my father looking down at me, his usually shaved head sprouting golden blond fringe, like he’d been unable to shave it down as had been his practice since his twenties, when he’d started balding. And I became accustomed to two nurses. A woman with a daisy-chain tattoo on her wrist who smelled like caramel. And a male nurse with hair as red as Collette’s. Every time he came in, my eyes filled with tears. He probably thought I hated him. Maybe that’s why they brought in the shrink a few days later. But I wouldn’t talk to the shrink or anyone else. There were stitches on my tongue, and it hurt to talk. It hurt to do anything with my mouth—even eat Jell-O. Once the male nurse brought me tater tots—maybe he was trying to be nice because I love tater tots—but they hurt my mouth, and I threw them up, which hurt worse.

The police officer came back; I could hear him arguing with my father.

“Just do what you have to and let us alone,” my father said.

“We’ll come back for court. But we’re moving out of state when he gets out of the hospital. Whatever that girl’s family does is their business.”

I tried to sit up, to ask if Collette was okay, but my chest ached, and that was when I realized that it was covered in a huge plane of a bandage. That I’d had surgery. My father said they’d removed my spleen. A little while later, the daisy-chain tattoo nurse came in to get me out of bed for a walk. I got up and walked with her, because I didn’t want to be accused of being weak, but I hated it. It was embarrassing having a tiny lady who was at least a foot shorter than I was lift me out of bed. But I could barely lift my head and my chest burned. That was the incision, and also, the nurse said, broken ribs.

The daisy-chain tattoo nurse made me walk the ugly, beige hospital hallway, every day, wearing these horrible socks with sticky dots on the bottoms. A little farther each time. To the waiting lounge. To the nurse’s station. To the drinking fountain. The drinking fountain day I didn’t want to get up at all because I was so tired and my chest hurt—and I had won the 3000 just a week earlier. The drinking fountain day, I itched my nose and the plastic ID band on my wrist ripped open the cuts in the corner of my mouth and blood poured out all over my hospital gown, but the daisy-chain tattoo nurse didn’t notice right away until I was crying. Crying like a fucking baby and then she said, “Oh, honey,” and that made me cry more until she got me back to my room and re-bandaged my face.

It felt like I would spend the rest of my life in the hospital. That I would never go home. I didn’t know where we lived, anyway. I had never been to the place, because my father rented it after moving me into the dorm. I thought about what I’d left behind at Remington Chase. My backpack and some books and clothes. My track bag. I thought of the circle necklace my mother gave me when I was eleven. I sat up then, and my chest hurt.

“Where is my necklace,” I croaked out to my father. He tried to take my hand, but the right one was covered in a bunch of smaller bandages, the left was wrapped up in an Ace bandage. He said, “Shh. They took it off during surgery. I have it in my pocket. Shhh, Evan. Shh.”

I didn’t fucking
shh
until he pulled the necklace from his pocket. Then I laid back and closed my eyes.

The last day in the hospital, I took a shower sitting on a stool because I was so wiped out from walking up and down the hallway plus the actual process of undressing that I couldn’t stand up. I locked the bathroom door, though the nurse told me not to, but there was no way I would have taken off the gown if just anyone could walk in. I had to be careful with my incision.

It was about ten inches long and stapled together. The first time I saw it in the bathroom mirror I threw up in the sink.

When your spleen is ruptured, it has to be removed. That was what the surgeon told me. A ruptured spleen will hemor-rhage, and you will die of internal blood loss. It is better to have a spleen, of course. But if it is ruptured, say, while you are assaulted in a gang shower while wearing nothing but a towel and flip-flops, then living without this organ is the way to go. The doctor showed me a picture of a human spleen in a book that he said I could keep. It was large and purple and seemed too big and important to be dismissed so quickly.

The spleen protects the immune system, is the body’s defensive army, the doctor explained. But it’s not very combat ready, I wanted to tell him, if a few punches from two pissed-off guys could demolish it. Later, flipping through the book from the surgeon, I learned that in ancient times, the spleen was thought to be the source of melancholy, that the bile it produced was believed to cause depression.

This was funny to me in a fucked-up way. Because by Aristotle’s definition, without my spleen, I should now be happier than shit. Which might have made me laugh, but when I laughed my entire chest hurt; when I smiled the cuts on the corners of my mouth split open.

***

Home was a condominium in Charlotte. My father loved to live in condos, because he didn’t have to mow or fix stuff or do anything but interface with his laptop. The Charlotte condo was like all the others: boring and beige. A couch. A kitchen table. A giant television that only I watched. In the kitchen there was nothing but takeout menus and clusters of power strips for all my dad’s computer gear. My dad said one of the bedrooms was mine, but I camped out on the couch in front of the television instead. Spent my days napping. Taking pain meds. Noting the different shades of beige and tan and taupe in the condo. Imagining inventive suicide methods. Going to follow-up appointments at the clinic. Avoiding the shower and reeking like hell, until one day my father told me we were moving. And so, with my dad’s Mercedes dragging a U-Haul trailer behind us, we left Charlotte and drove to Minnesota, where my father had grown up. I had been there when I was little but could barely remember it.

The whole drive, my father talked. I knew that before I would have given anything if he’d just open his goddamn mouth and say something interesting that was not about Unix, Linux, the Conficker virus, algorithms, or Google’s market cap. But now the whole trip he wouldn’t stop jabbering about himself, and I couldn’t stand that, either. He talked about Pearl Lake, where he had spent his summers growing up. About Marchant Falls, the town nearby, where his family lived the rest of the year. About the Kiwanis Camp and swimming until dark and their dog Rusty who chased cars and got hit by a bus. About his older brother, Soren, who had made his own canoe out of a tree at age twelve.

“Pearl Lake was Soren’s church,” my father said. “He loved it there. He hunted and set animal traps. He could stick his fishing pole in a goddamn puddle and catch something. He never came back from fishing without a full string. He camped and canoed and fished and swam—all of it. Lived like a savage all summer long.”

I nodded. I didn’t know much about my family. Or my Uncle Soren. I had supposedly met him once, at my mother’s funeral, which was also in Minnesota because that’s where her family wanted her ashes spread. I don’t remember Soren much; except after the funeral, he climbed up into a tree with me and we talked about bugs. I was into bugs when I was eleven. After that, Soren left Minnesota, my dad said. He’d been in the military, but they didn’t talk. Soren traveled a lot, and no one had heard from him in years. He didn’t even come to his own mother’s funeral, my grandma, a lady I remember very little except that she made me cry once so I didn’t like her.

My father had to talk loud, and with the radio off, because I couldn’t hear in my left ear anymore. The doctors didn’t know if my hearing would come back or if it was permanent. Also, it hurt my incision to sit up for long periods of time. Though the staples were removed, I still felt them, like phantoms. And the rest of me was similarly broken: the healing raw bit on my left ear where the cartilage was torn, my left hand sprained, my right hand covered in scabbed cuts that itched. Defensive wounds, the doctor called them. Though it seemed that I had put up very little defense.

We arrived in Pearl Lake, Minnesota, on the first of April.

I hadn’t slept well the whole trip. My father stopped at decent motels, but they all felt creepy to me because either the bathroom tile was that same industrial orange of the Connison gang shower or the doors didn’t have locks, so I continued my shower boycott and just wiped myself down with a washcloth. But still I reeked, which bugged my dad, who was the kind of guy who had his shirts dry-cleaned and cleaned out his fingernails with a Swiss Army knife while sitting in traffic.

My father drove down a long gravel drive, checking the rearview often to make sure the trailer was holding up okay. He parked and we got out.

“Here it is, son,” he said. “The ancestral family lake home.

In all its glory.”

There was no glory, but it wasn’t an anonymous condo. It was an old A-frame with cedar shakes and a big blue door. It looked like the kind of place that would have little plaques that said Gone Fishin’ on the walls. Cutesy shit that never was a part of any place we lived in because a) we were guys b) we didn’t live anywhere long enough to decorate. There was a front deck and a balcony on the second floor, enclosing a little window.

The lawn was muddy and scrubby, and an old tire swing swayed from a yellow nylon rope hanging from a fat birch tree. The lake in front was choppy and gray. On a short dock, a green fishing boat banged along with the waves.

“That boat ours?” I asked.

“I had a guy pull it out of storage and clean it up for us,” he said. “We’ll go out on the lake once we get settled.”

“How come I’ve never been here?” I asked. “If this is the family cabin?”

“Melina didn’t like coming here,” he said.

My father didn’t say my mother’s name often. It was odd to hear it now. He started unpacking the car. I helped a little, but he waved me off.

“Go inside,” he said. “Get comfortable. We’re here all summer.”

That long? I almost said. But I was too tired to even be a smart-ass.

I took the room on the second floor, because the main floor bedroom didn’t face the morning sun and my father needed complete darkness when he slept. I didn’t mind, though my father worried about how I would get to the bathroom, which was on the first floor. I told him I could piss out the balcony window and then he laughed and so did I.

Which was a little strange, because he didn’t laugh very much and never with me.

I liked the second-floor room. It was huge and the bed was beside the window and I could crawl out on the tiny balcony and look at the lake. When it was windy, I didn’t stay out there long, but it was getting warmer each day, and the sun woke me up every morning.

The rest of the cabin was small but clean. There was a big front room with a fireplace and brand-new furniture, which was all black. As if my father couldn’t decide on a color. (Which was probably true. He basically wore the same thing all the time—white shirt and khaki pants. He didn’t like thinking about inconsequential decisions, he always said.) The walls were knotty pine paneling, and there was nothing on them.

There were built-in bookshelves full of yellowed paperbacks and jigsaw puzzles, which my father said he planned to throw out. There was a wooden pipe rack, with a brown glass canis-ter in the center for the tobacco ringed with a dozen different pipes. I asked him if he’d throw that out too, but he said no, because it had been hand carved by his brother. Which was cool—privately I thought they’d make good weed pipes.

***

Every day my father and I went out on the lake. I got good at driving the boat and liked the feel and sound of moving on the water, and I liked my dad smiling at me when I remembered to do something he had taught me. He showed me how to start the motor, how to add gas to it, how to steer and stop and uncrank the anchor and dock properly. We never stopped to fish, though he kept saying we would. We went all over the lake, looking at the crappy little trailers and the deluxe mansions. He pointed out a restaurant that he said was a good place for steak, noted the biggest house on the lake, a towering thing that looked like it should have a moat and drawbridge around it.

“That used to belong to Melina’s parents,” he said. “Up until a few years ago, actually.” I nodded. Talking about my mother wasn’t high on my list, either.

One day we approached a huge island that was ringed with boulders and surrounded with No Trespassing and Wildlife Sanctuary signs from the Department of Natural Resources.

We had skirted around it before but never approached it close.

“That’s Story Island,” he said. “People like to fish around it, but you can’t go on it, because it’s a protected habitat for loons.

Which are the state bird of Minnesota, by the way. When we were kids, it was a big dare to go out there. People said there was a haunted house on it. All the kids talked about going out there a lot. But the only one who ever did it was Soren.”

Story Island, covered with trees and brush, looked completely wild and intimidating, fringed with dead reeds and cattails and boulders covered in a slippery-looking green scum.

I’d done a little rock climbing in Tacoma, hiked around Mount Rainier a bit, but those boulders looked like a nightmare to scale. My Uncle Soren must have been a real badass kid to heave it up Story Island all by himself.

“So was there a house?” I asked.

“Soren said there was, but no one went with him, so no one believed him,” he said. “But my brother wasn’t a liar. He said we shouldn’t bother with it, though, because climbing up those rocks wasn’t easy and if we made it, we’d probably fall into quicksand and die. And that we’d just kill off all the loons if we messed around in their habitat. Obviously, he was kidding about the quicksand, but when you’re young you believe what your older brother says, you know.”