Sunday's on the Phone to Monday (7 page)

The man had spoken first, hadn't he? Laughed messily, asking Claudio if he could ask his sister a question. Claudio
remembered how he'd asked permission. He remembered how Jane opened her eyes. Claudio also remembered secretly hoping for something dangerous but not too dangerous.

That man looked funny walking in the water, mannequin-posture, sending symphonies of scrambled water to the pool's surface. But what had he done? Whispered in his sister's ear? Did he even ask her his question? His back obstructed Claudio from seeing what was going on, like his body was a vanishing point. Claudio, treading water, waiting for the moment to be over.

What happened next was easier to recall: the man, wrapping a motel towel around his waist, striding up the pool's steps. The lifeguard laughing at something the boy on vacation with no hair on his chest said.

What happened?
Now Claudio felt allowed to be brave. There was nothing dangerous around.

Jane weeping. What was she saying? Claudio couldn't hear her, just remembered her shoulders popping in and out of the water. Shoulders cushy as scallops.

Claudio's nipples stood up. He didn't like his body, thought it too skinny.
What did he do?

Jane said something, and his ears were clogged with chlorine. Claudio, whose eyes seared when he opened them underwater. Jane, who'd been wearing a bikini for the first time.

Claudio and Jane shared an eye color, a well of dark blue. Eyes that vitrified over. Borealis-eyes. Claudio suddenly saw two holes in her face. Jane had a mouth, and she had teeth, and she had a nose and skin, and she had holes that held her eyes, and she was crying. The eyeholes were leaking. Jane had a face and she had a body. She had a brain and a face and a soul and an embarrassing body. Claudio had eyes, and he was seeing her body. That bikini she was wearing was terrible.
Why didn't you help me?
she asked.

I couldn't see,
said Claudio. He thought about his blind spot:
really just a collection of nerves and optic traffic. His father always griped about his own while driving.
He was in my blind spot. It wasn't my fault I did what I did,
he would say.

I'm so sorry. What can I do?

What can you do?
Jane asked her brother.
Now?
Shit.

Claudio thought about the Led Zeppelin song, -
hey hey, what can I do? -
He thought about the song by Neil Young, -
hey hey, my my, rock and roll will never die. -
He thought about the Bob Seger song, -
I like that old time rock and roll. The kinda music just soothes the soul. -
He thought about the Sam & Dave song, -
I'm a soul man. -
He thought of the Bob Dylan song, -
hey Mr. Tambourine Man play a song for me, I'm not sleepy and there is no place I'm going to. -
He thought of the Monkees song, -
cheer up Sleepy Jean, oh what can it mean to a daydream believer and a homecoming queen. -
He could keep asking her questions. That was something he could do, he guessed, after not having even gone through the mechanical semblance of pretending to save her.

What did he say to you?

Jane teared more quietly. She looked soft and babyish, like a toy. -
Dolly, -
Claudio thought.

They headed back to the motel room, as muffled as the dead. When they got back to the room, Jane sat on the cold floor. She placed her elbows on her thighs and her head facedown on her wrists, facing outward, as though they were about to accept a gift. Her horrible hands were in the shape of caves with small openings. She shifted her upper-body weight through her face, one hand to the next.

I want us to be happy,
said Claudio.
We're on vacation.

An hour later, their parents came back, a tangled nexus of unnerving smells: shrimp cocktail and gin and construction debris. They'd brought back leftover buffet rolls, which her mother had snuck into her purse.
For you,
she told her children. Claudio couldn't decide if the slippery rolls were better or worse than not getting anything at all.

Their father kept asking them the same questions, so Claudio knew he was hammered. Jane's awful body made a figure eight in bed, sideways, facing the wall.

What's wrong with your sister?
Jane's father was speaking about her instead of to her. The word -
invalidation -
for some reason arrived in Claudio's brain.
Did you say something to hurt her? Look at how you've made her unhappy!

She's resting her eyes,
said Claudio. He made a shush noise, hustling air through his teeth.

How was the pool?

Fine. Fine and fun.

How deep did you go?

Twelve feet.
Claudio spoke for Jane.

His father lit a cigarette. He always smoked Frenchly and ergo uncharacteristically with the rest of his cloudy-dowdy motions.

Did you win any money?
Claudio asked. The smoke highlighted his father's doughy head

Claudio's father laughed.
I did, and now it isn't here anymore. But we didn't lose any either. We'll go back home the exact same as we came here. Nothing lost, nothing gained.
He turned on the TV. Twenty minutes later, he asked Claudio,
how was the pool?

That night Claudio dreamed the afternoon in the pool. Only he was wearing a shirt and used it to strangle the psychopath. He once heard somewhere that nightmares prepare the brain for potential, but not very likely, situations of menace. Deplorably so, Claudio couldn't even console himself with thinking that the nightmare would never come true because it already had come true.

F
or the rest of his life, Claudio would refer to himself as
the shirtless criminal.
He'd repeat his new name, this blueprint of a lie, in his head.
The shirtless criminal is never unhappy. He is tireless. He is never useless.
Sure, nothing bad had ever directly happened
to him,
but this said nothing about everything around him. He would be lucky to escape. He threw himself into his schoolwork, convincing himself that one day, he'd leave. He'd forget about his failure to be a hero. His failure to be a brother. His failure to be decent. -
I'll get older. I'll find money. I'll find love. Trouble won't follow me anymore, not even on vacation. -

Later in the year, Jane entered the neighborhood beauty pageant and won, becoming Miss Teen Detroit. Their mother encouraged her, having heard of this privilege from one of their neighbors.
You can get a scholarship to college.

I don't want to go to college,
said Jane. She hadn't changed much outwardly since the incident. Except her body became more like plasma or a slug, the way she dragged it around.

What's wrong with you?

You didn't go to college,
pointed out Jane.

I couldn't,
said their mother.
I wasn't lucky.

Jane and Claudio's father worked checkout in the supermarket. His favorite time of year was black cherry season. He'd bring them home by the bagful.
Those three slim weeks in
June. Come and gone so fast
was a common thing he said. With sentimental quips like that out of their father's mouth, it was easy to forget that he was an alcoholic. Their mother didn't work, claiming she wasn't able to. She got frequent headaches and stayed in bed for weeks at a time. She'd declare she once breathed in chemicals from the nearby cleaning product factory, which ruined part of her brain.
The front part,
she once clarified.
The part that solves problems.

You can go anywhere,
Jane's mother told her.
You've grown into a beautiful swan, you know. Just like the fairy tale.
Claudio found the idea mysterious, how their mother could pay attention to ideas like beauty, since she wore such tattered nightgowns in the daytime and often blew her nose into her hands.

Claudio can go anywhere,
said Jane.
Let him enter the stupid pageant. Claudio's free. He can walk wherever he pleases, and nobody says anything. Nobody laughs either.

I don't understand you, child,
said their mother.

So Jane competed for Miss Teen Detroit, staying after school for rehearsals, and three months later Claudio and their parents saw her compete. The pageant was held in the Rotary Club. Jane wore a red prom dress donated by somebody's older sister and spoke about saving the whales. She'd be living in the psychiatric hospital in twenty-seven days. The day she won, the prior year's Miss Teen Detroit told her to bend down for the pointy, glimmery crown. Jane's picture in the local newspaper was about the size of a thumb. It was the last memento she put in her room before she left home for good.

It was easier for Claudio to allow himself to be sad for the picture instead of for Jane—Jane's ruddy newspapered face. He wanted nothing but to erase what she'd endured. His sister, the queen for the day. She had no idea what was coming.

J
ane landed in New York. Before Jane's arrival, Claudio told Mathilde all he knew about his sister's recent life.
For the past six months, she's been living on her own, which I've only known for a few days.

Jesus Christ,
said Mathilde, who hadn't yet met her sister-in-law but whose reputation preceded her. By this point Claudio had filled her in on the basics (but not Vegas, never Vegas, nothing about Vegas. What happened in Vegas stayed in Vegas, and in Claudio's horrible, horrified Heart).

Claudio told his wife the details he'd unearthed: that Pine Rest Christian Mental Health Services deinstitutionalized Jane because they'd lost funding from the government. About how first Jane lived in a group home, and then the group home classified her as stable the same month they lost their endowment. Then how Jane needed to have a social worker who would speak to Jane's parents on the phone, but six months ago Jane convinced the social worker that she could do her own laundry and support herself and function the way the rest of society did. That every couple months, Jane called her parents but mostly to ask for money.

Claudio, sleuthy, dug for more of his sister's life that week. Jane made conversations a challenge and to serve as trajectories of her desperation. Claudio told Mathilde that the only thing
he knew about his sister's new life was that she had a boyfriend, whom Claudio had never met.

I know I'll hate him,
he told her.

How do you know?

From the way she talks about him.

How does she talk about him?

I know Jane. Something inside her is wrecked. It turned many years ago. Now she can never make the right decision to save her life.

Mathilde was a bit anxious about meeting Jane. Claudio told her,
my family is your family
.
And vice versa.
This was easy for him to say. The year before, Mathilde's brother, Sawyer, had met a man named Noah at a gay bar in the East Village called Eastern Bloc. He told everyone they had fallen in love. Noah was a venture capitalist. Sawyer was a translator, transforming texts from English to Portuguese and Portuguese to English (sometimes French to English or English to French—Sawyer was trilingual). Sawyer and Noah had recently moved in together to an apartment in Chelsea. The four of them were best friends.

Claudio had woken up early to meet Jane at the Port Authority. As he opened the door to their apartment when they returned, Mathilde leaned in to hug Jane after seeing her hand sticking out. She hoped this action faked a relaxation with the state of affairs.

This is Mathilde. My wife.
Mathilde discreetly gazed at her own posture in the mirror, discovering she was as stiff as a collectible figurine. She shook out her left leg, cracked her neck.

Hi, wife.
Then came the soft handshake. Jane was lanky, wearing a V-shaped halter top that dropped all the way down to her belly button. At first, it appeared as though Jane had drawn all over herself, but upon closer inspection, Mathilde discovered she had tiny, very thin tattoos. An ellipsis on Jane's rib cage and
the words
love me do
on her wrist. She could see some of Jane's veins, like chutes, big for her body. Right away, Mathilde knew what Claudio meant. Jane looked destroyed. It was the way she talked. Her voice was loaded, like she'd always be cognizant of the awful things happening in the world.

Long time, no see,
said Jane.
In fact: forever, no see. Until now.

How was the flight?
Why did people ask that? Time didn't really count on flights. When the stewardess had come around with the beverage cart, there'd been so many options Jane felt overwhelmed. But then Jane had said,
hot chocolate, please,
which the flight didn't carry. So Jane had said,
vodka please,
and the stewardess, blond with a squelchy voice, had told her it cost six dollars. And Jane hadn't remembered the last time she'd had six dollars for longer than an hour before spending it. So Jane had said,
nothing.
That was Jane's flight.

Easy.

Jane, the most passive of bedfellows, didn't want to do much for the weekend but eat and watch movies. Mathilde suggested they watch only funny things on TV, so they watched
Airplane!
and
Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
The few times Jane laughed, she sounded as though she was getting hurt. They ordered Chinese food, and Jane ate more than half of what they ordered for the three of them. She ate mostly with her lips, like they were diligent to grab and push the food past her teeth and inside her. She grabbed a six-pack of bananas from the refrigerator and ate all the cold fruit inside.