Words and Their Meanings (18 page)

42

E
xcuse me?” I half-whisper, half-mouse squeak to the soda pop nurse who is now actually working on charts and doesn't notice when I first walk up.

I rubbed my eyes for a full three minutes before leaving the room. Irritated eyes cry easier, and also are red and puffy, which people associate with being emotional. That's a Nat trick I picked up along the way. I bite my thumbnail, look up at the ceiling.

“Oh, I'm sorry! What can I do for you, dear?” asks the nurse, who looks too young to call me dear. Her eyelids droop with black liquid liner. I can't help feeling a little bit guilty for the part—I can't read her scrubs—Angel? No … Angela is about to play in this plan.

“I'm, um, I'm just having a really hard—”

Cue choked sobs.

“A really hard—”

Bite lip, sniffle.

“ … A really hard time sitting with my Gramps when all those awful beeps keep going off. I jump out of my skin every single time one of the machines makes a noise, and I promised my mom I would stay with him but I'm really getting—I don't know—I, I can't sit there and listen much longer. It's making me crazy … ”

I wait, head in my hands, leaning against the desk. Ignore the desire to check if she's seeing through me.

“Oh, honey.” She rushes to my side of the desk and gives me a not-even-awkward stranger hug. “I understand completely. Those noises are unnerving, even for me, and your mom mentioned the loss your family already suffered, so I can only imagine how difficult this is for you. How bra
ve.”

I feel sick. But I nod.

She places her hand on my back as we walk to Gramps's room. I break away and sit beside his bed as the nurse fiddles around with the five machines surrounding us.

Once, when we were on vacation up north and Bea was fussy and Mom was stressed because she couldn't reach Dad on his cell, she made Joe and me go walk to the nature preserve near our cabin. It wound through a hemlock forest and swamp. It was springtime, too early for beach visits and lake swims. All of a sudden, this crazy symphony of high-pitched alarms echoed out from the swamp. It rattled our ears and bounced off the trees and I couldn't stop laughing even though it scared me.

“Spring peepers!” Joe exclaimed. “Can you believe frogs are making that noise?”

I could not believe it a bit until one hopped right up on the boardwalk and blew his throat up bubblegum style. He did this just once, and then, died on the spot. We watched him deflate. No joke. Like all that time being a blowhard got reversed in death. Slick skin crumpled in on itself, as if breath and bone were one and the same.

I wanted to kick the empty frog off the wood planks, onto the mud and moss below us, but Joe just took my hand and led me back up the path.

My Gramps's skin, it reminds me of a deflated spring peeper.

The nurse squeezes my shoulder and glides out of the room.

I look around at the wires, screens, rolling tan boxes on sterile, cold poles. All the scripts of every pull-the-plug movie I've seen are lining up to run a marathon inside my brain, waiting for the shotgun start.

“Once we flip the switch to off, the machines will stop breathing for him.”

“His respiration will begin to slow.”

“All the forms need to be signed, and then, whenever you are ready … ”

“He will not be able to stay breathing on his own.”

“We have no way of knowing how long it will take.”

“Eventually, he'll simply slip away.”

“It's not easy. Letting go never is.”

I'm committing murder. Again.

I can't stay.

He'll die.

He'll die alone.

Outside, the sky is gray and heavy. I get up and pace to the window, back to the bed. It's now or never. Mom won't be gone long. It might not even work. She might get back before it is over. And no matter what, she'll know. They'll all know.

“Gramps. Please wake up.”

The clock above us ticks, ticks, ticks. His face is peaceful. His faded gray eyes will not open.

When Joe stopped breathing, I watched Gramps crumple on a bench with splinters and grass climbing up its legs. Five days later, when they released me from the psych ward, I walked out of the hospital and found Gramps sitting on the same bench. I crawled up on his lap, and he held me while his whole body sobbed. “In the end,” he said, “we all die alone. But we shouldn't have to live that way too.”

I walk over.

Flip the switch.

I half-expect an alarm loud enough to shatter glass, or a car crash, metal twisting, skidding across pavement. Some noise—any noise—to acknowledge death is coming.

But nothing happens. A switch gets flipped. Not a single thing distinguishes the before and the after.

In the doorway, the nurses' station is empty. The hallway is empty. Turning, I begin to walk toward the stairs. The ceiling intercom clicks. A lullaby begins to play. Every soft note sweeps through me with the yellow chill of a ghost.

I break into a run.

43

B
etween short gasps for breath I take quick peeks back at the hospital. Blaring noises. Ambulances I'm sure are actually police cars. My head fuzzes and statics and blips and all I can think about is when Bea was little and Gramps would babysit. He'd watch
Masterpiece Theatre
on mute because reading lips was better than waking a tiny tornado. I wish life had a mute button.

Pulling out of the parking lot, I hit the gas. Run three stop signs. Weave through the back roads. My purse is in the passenger seat. I fumble around to grab my phone. Open my contacts and scroll through for Nat. I hear my heart. It's strong, alive, not giving up.

“Well, if it isn't my long lost best fried Anna O'Mally. I wondered when you'd finally call me back.”

The phone falls between the gas pedal and the brake.

I can't talk to her.

I can't talk to anyone.

I squeeze and squeeze and squeeze the steering wheel, my foot pressing harder and harder toward the floor.

Rows of houses like mine rush by in a giant streak of tan siding and brick. I don't slow down until I find a horizon of fields, giant checkerboards of corn/beans/corn/beans.

I flipped the switch.

When I finally pull over, I get out and stand in a cloud of dirt-road dust. Cough and choke some. Slump against the gravel and sit long enough for pebbles and rocks to stick to my skin.

My phone scoots across the floor of my car, vibrates its way under the brake. I pick it up and hold it away from me, as if it might explode.

Twenty-seven missed calls from my mother. Twenty from my father. Forty-nine from Nat. Only one from Mateo. I give thanks for my ringer being off, and flop back into the driver's seat.

It must be over already.

Everything around me contracts. Gray sky pushes down, junkyard-press style. The weight crushes my chest, pressures me back into the dirt.

I can't ignore who I need right now. I can't pretend it isn't his voice, his hush, all of him. I dial Mateo's number.

“Hello? Hello? Hell-o?!?”

A girl's voice on his line. I pause and double-check that Mateo's face, the contact picture he put on my phone a few weeks ago, is smiling back at me.

“Anna, it's America.”

I can't.

“Um, ah, hey, America, it's Anna.” I hear myself talking. It sounds like someone else. Like I'm watching a movie where I know the star is about to train wreck but still can't tear away from the screen.

“Obviously.”

“Is Mateo right there?”

Silence. Followed by a light little laugh.

“Ah, no,” she says. I can tell she's smiling. “He's indisposed at the moment. It's like a Gomez tribunal going on downstairs. Or a celebration. I don't know, the tone changes every few minutes—”

“I'm sorry … I'm … I don't understand. What are you talking about?”

My other line beeps, beeps, beeps. A merry-go-round of Dad, Mom, Nat.

“He didn't tell you. Well. Tía will be glad to know she isn't the only one he lied to.”

“Lied to?” I hear myself ask.

“Pick up tomorrow's paper,” America laughs. “Because that's how we all found out. A reporter called here after the school guidance counselor alerted the press. Mateo got into this super schmancy art school in New York City, all expenses paid. For his entire senior year. And he never even told any of us he was applying. I thought his folks were
going to stroke out, but then Tía just started sobbing about how Mateo hadn't felt he could be honest with them and his dad started stuttering about his incredible talent, and Val decided he'd better start crying and Mateo sat on the couch staring into space like none of this is happening to him.”

“I … I—”

“Listen,” America cuts in. “From what I've pieced together, you're kind of a hot mess. You didn't score points wearing his St. Dismas necklace to the table. Tía bought that for him when he got fired because she thought it might keep him out of trouble.

“And getting up and leaving in the middle of dinner? Without saying goodbye or thank you or anything? Yeah. Tía went crazy on Mat about how rude you are and then he let the truth slip—that he only started dating you to piss her off and to maybe get in trouble 'cause he wanted to get fired and stop having so much pressure put on him. It was an epic family dinner, let me tell you. And look, apparently, they are gonna send him to New York, which means he's leaving in a week. He didn't really like you, and he's busy, so maybe just let him go.”

The phone is a bomb. I can't hold it any longer. I throw it in the passenger seat. Get in the car. Drive. Just drive.

I drive until I reach the end of our side of the river. There's a parking lot here, a half-empty strip mall.

He's leaving. He never even told me he might be going. All those conversations. All those secrets. I trusted him.

The sky is heavier than ever and it's like my windshield is buckling, and I have to get out but I don't know where to go. Not to Mateo. Not to Nat. Not back home. Not before. Only after. Clouds shift, rays of light hit the river. It sparkles like a thousand pieces of shattered mirrors. I walk that way.

The concrete underside of the bridge slants to the river bank. A mural of a giant carp, mouth open and looking like it might swallow me whole, stretches across it.

My phone will not. stop. ringing. The Mom-Dad-Nat triangle has become a square with the added insult of Mateo, as if America didn't get enough vindication the first time around. I stand with my toes on the edge of the bank, peering over at the swirly, flat brown river.

Joe used to spit over the faded wood deck railing of this riverside restaurant my dad loved. We kids lined up to watch real muddy-colored carp come up and eat it.

I start hacking to see if I can catch a carp too. Because this is what I have left. Not my grandfather. Not my parents. Probably not my freedom, when all is said and done. I have spit. I have the river.

My pocket starts buzzing again. The screen flashes “Mateo.”

And suddenly, I'm watching the iPhone I begged my father to get me for no less than twelve months arc through the air before vanishing under the water.

The ripples caused by my sinking phone start to reach the bank. I take off my flip-flops. The ground is cool, mucky. I stick one toe in the water. It disappears inside the silt. I yank my foot out, slowly sink the whole of it back in the river.

Images line up behind me, nudging me forward. I see me leaning against the glass in the backseat of my dad's old Ford Mustang, watching slits of brown water and sunlight and empty space between slats on the bridge.

I see Joe and me standing on the side of the boat launch, stifling laughs as Dad tries unsuccessfully to dock the old wooden Chris-Craft he bought on a whim, my super pregnant mom waddling and waving her arms like a frantic duck.

I see Gramps, floating face down, his mildewed lifejacket making kissy sounds each time a little wave hits.

I see Mateo tossing pale stones into the water.

I'm thirsty. And sweating. And feeling like filth.

The water sparkles. It calls to me. Invites me to vanish, just for a moment.

My calves get lost. Then my knees. Thighs. Fingers. Wrists. Hips. Waist.

I go under and open my eyes. The water doesn't sting. No body parts float by. Zero three-eyed fish. There's only sunlight, yellow and full of dust or ashes or a mix of both, dancing deeper and deeper.

Toward the riverbed.

Toward the darker spaces below.

I

start

down.

There isn't time to be scared when an enormous shadow turns the river into a washing machine and I'm tumbling and getting
yanked and then
…

Gulping air.

44

A
re you outta your goddamn mind?”

The
man yelling this two inches from my face is panting and dripping. His words smell sour, like maybe a mouse is decomposing under his tongue. His patchy beard reminds me of a mangy dog. His camouflage T-shirt is dark with river water. Rip
ped jeans cling against his legs.

Huddled up in a puddle on the bank, I shiver like a not-drowned rat.

“I … I … I … ”

“You what?” the man screams, shaking my shoulders with two hands. I'm sure there are red imprints of his fingers now glowing hot on my skin. “You what? You think life is so awful you can't even throw yourself off the bridge? You just gotta walk in and sink?”

I try to focus on him. Scrub my face with my hands, dr
op my forehead to my knees, and wrap tight around myself. I rock a little, hoping this nutbag will leave me alone.

“I'm calling the police,” he says, gruff and impatient.

“No!” I shout this so loud it echoes off the giant carp before being swallowed by the river.

“No? No? So what? I sit here with you and then turn my back for two seconds and your lungs end up full of that sludge?” He gestures hard toward the river. “Or you leave and figure out some other way to off yourself because your boyfriend dumped you or you flunked calculus or your mommy and daddy won't take you to Paris this summer or whatever shit it is you think's so bad.”

His every word spews shrapnel into my skin. Instead of making me curl up tighter, though, it gets me mad. Really, really stark-raving-lunatic mad.

“I killed someone,” I say, trying to sound how a hardened criminal should.

“Actually,” I add with a semi-hysterical laugh, “I've killed two someones. That's what the shit it is. I. Am. A. Murderer. Or murderess. Or whatever.”

The guy with river water dripping out of his shaggy brown hair wipes his nose and rocks back on his heels. He stares at me like shrinks one and six did. I start feeling twitchy and nervous and naked even though my black leggings and black T-shirt are plastered to me.

“Me too,” he whispers. Even that comes out with a growling fury. “Me too,” he repeats.

I stare back at him.

This is the part in any movie script or thriller book where the heroine needs to get up and start screaming and running for her life. Except I don't, because I'm not a heroine. A big army-green duffle bag sits a few feet away.

“So … you were in Vietnam or something?” I ask, letting him know I'm capable of deductive reasoning.

The guy gut-laughs so hard he falls from squatting on his heels straight to his butt. A dirt cloud fireworks around him.

“Try Afghanistan,” he says. “I'm probably only five or six years older than you, kid.”

I'm not sure why this shocks me right down my spine, but it does. It isn't like the guy looks old. I mean, when I really take him in, he could have been one of Joe's older soccer buddies.

“Oh. Um, oh. Is that why you're—” I stop at the heavy wool blanket he's draping over me.

“Something like that.”

There's nothing else to say. Sorry or thanks for volunteering for our military, and I've read the vet hospitals are good with post-traumatic stress, or I'm sure someday the pain will fade…Yeah. It doesn't cut it.

“Look, I wasn't trying to kill myself. I just … I just wanted to be underwater for a second, that's all.”

“Don't think so,” he says. “And don't ask because you aren't going anywhere alone.”

“Can you please not call the police?” I beg. “I've had way too much go down in the last three hours and I'm not really operating at maximum reasoning at the moment, obviously, and I don't know if I can handle—”

“Do you have someone else I can call? Your mom? Your dad? A friend?”

“How are you homeless with a cell phone?”

“How are you potentially crazier than me?”

“I'm on a first-name basis with the Truth,” I say with a shrug.

“Aren't we all.”

We eye each other up. There will be no budging, so I fold my arms and grunt what-ev-er and stare at the river until everything is blurry.

“Who do you want me to call?” He's softer this time.

I lie back against uneven, anthill-clumped ground. A long line of clouds charges east and it reminds me of the Death Star, and also, of Joe. Every time we played the guess-the-cloud game his answer was always the same: the Death Star. Even when the cloud was clearly a white elephant.

I cluck my tongue against my teeth. Tap my heel against the ground. I think about making some smart-mouth comment about being a prisoner of war, but can't bring myself to do it.

“You can give me a name and number or I call 911. You have sixty seconds.”

He's calling my silence bluff.

“50, 49, 48, 47, 46, 45, 44—”

“Stop it!” I scream, hoarse and high-pitched as I run away from him and toward the stupid enormous carp. I punch it in the mouth over and over and over again until my knuckles bleed and my whole body aches.

He watches from a respectable distance, waiting until I'm hurt and bloody and all cried out before trusting it's safe to get close.

“Nat,” I choke out, staring at the red jelly that is my right knuckle. “Can you … can you please call my friend Nat?”

Once he dials and she picks up I can only make out his half of the conversation and the faint sounds of her frantic inflections. It goes something like, throat clearing, “Hello, Nat? My name is Adam, and I just fished your friend…” Pause, placing his hand over his phone to whisper, “What's your name?” before clearing his throat again and continuing, “ Ah, I just fished your friend Anna out of the Grey Iron River—no, no, miss, please! Calm down, she is just fine! Yes, she's right here—okay—okay.” To me: “Say something!”

To Nat, I yell, “I'm fine. Just wanted to take an afternoon swim.”

He says, “We're below Independence Bridge by the empty strip mall … I'll wait with her. Okay then. Thanks. I will. I promise.”

I'm beyond annoyed they are in cahoots, so I stomp to the water's edge. Adam barrels down, pile drives me into the ground. When I get the wind he knocked out of me back, I open my mouth to protest.

He holds up one hand to stop me. “Sorry.” I can tell he means it. “You can't … you don't get to die in front of me. I can't be responsible.”

Man. Everybody loves that line.

He puts his hand on the side of my arm again, but the grip is loose enough to let me break free if I want. My arm is streaked black, words dripping into words. I don't pull away.

“Did you grow up here?”

He shakes his head.

“Down the river,” he says. “Bay City.”

“Why aren't you there now? I mean, don't you have family or friends or someone you could stay with?”

“I haven't gone back.”

“What do you mean? Since you came back from … ” I blank on what to say—war? combat? “Your call of duty?”

“Fan of the video game?” he asks.

“Fake killing really isn't my thing,” I answer.

Adam ignores the comment.

“I have been close, but I can't,” he says. “I meant to go back. Got home a month early and was all set to surprise everyone. Then I got as far as Grey Iron. And I stopped. Just … stopped.”

“Did you ever know a guy named Joe O'Mally?” I ask out of nowhere. Joe's name stings my tongue a little.

Adam's brow furrows.

“No, sorry,” he says. “Was he a Marine?”

“Oh. No. He was in the Students for a Peaceful Future,” I say with a real smile.

Adam gives me a real smile back.

“Smart guy.”

“You have no idea.”

My eyes fog over, and when they clear I see Nat walking toward us. She isn't running. She isn't coming to bulldoze me over in a giant wave of relief either. She's walking like the grass leading to the riverbank is a minefield. And she's looking at me like I'm a hologram.

“Thanks for coming,” is all I can say.

She doesn't respond, but she does go up to Adam and give him a careful hug.

“Hey, Anna,” Adam says as I walk behind Nat toward the parking lot. I turn around, cup my hand over my eyes so I can see him without squinting. “Go home, okay?”

I want to nod and say “you too,” but for some reason, I just can't.