Chapter 15
— Chapter 15 —
I hear myself shout and work to pull my brain away from a dream about Step throwing rotten bananas over the deer fence. Without opening my eyes, I play my wake-up game, trying to remember how messy I left my apartment last night to calibrate my dread.
But then footsteps shake the floor and Jam says, “—the fuck are you wearing?” And I realize the banana deer fence dream is closer to reality than my old apartment.
Aubrey snorts and it sounds like her little kid laugh. I’m stuck in a swirl of time and space, dreaming and real. I open my eyes to teenage Aubrey and thirty-something Jam standing over me, shoulders shaking, eyes tearing.
“Freya, be honest,” Jam says, his voice brimming with unhinged amusement. “Did birds dress you?”
Drool has pooled on the pillow under my cheek. My mouth is slow. “Go away,” I shout, trying to pretend I’m kidding, while my face burns. I pull Steena’s comforter over my head. I know that a twenty-nine-year-old woman asleep on the couch in a prom dress is an objectively funny situation, but I am too dizzy and disoriented to laugh.
“If I’d known this was a black-tie event, I would have worn my tux.”
“I’m wearing it ironically,” I say, as flatly as I can. If I were really joking, I’d come out from under the blanket, but I feel twitchy and defensive and scared that they’ll understand the global nature of my panic if they see any of it at all.
“We brought baked ziti,” Aubrey says, a hint of shyness in her voice. “Deli special today. It’s usually pretty good.”
“I wanted to get you lasagna,” Jam says. “To go with your Garfield hair.”
“Thank you, Aubrey. Fuck off, Jam,” I say into the recycled blanket air, then Aubrey laughs and I feel awful for cursing. I was good about not saying bad words around her when she was a little kid. I was so careful with her.
“I’ll go fuck off and heat up the oven,” Jam says, and I’m relieved to hear him walk away.
I pull the blanket to my shoulders.
Aubrey is standing next to me holding a plastic Gristedes bag, something in it, I can’t tell what.
“Hey,” I say.
“Hey.” She shifts her weight from one boot to the other.
“How was school?”
She stares at me. “It’s school.”
“Yeah.”
Aubrey looks up at the ceiling, blinks a few times. I watch her dig her short fingernails into the palm of her other hand, pressing hard into the fleshy part. I wonder if she got that from watching me or if it’s coded into our genes. Maybe it’s a natural way to seek distraction, like biting a hangnail or picking a scab, and lots of people do it. But her hands look like my hands, and it’s odd to see them do what mine do.
There’s a crash in the kitchen. Metal hitting metal.
“No! Jam!” Aubrey shouts, running down the hall. “You can’t pull out the oven rack! Did you burn yourself?”
I hear him tell her he’s fine. The oven wasn’t hot yet. He didn’t drop the ziti.
Aubrey talks him through the choreography of sliding the rack back in the oven. They need two sets of hands, or the other rack will fall. She tells him like it’s a procedure she’s memorized—possibly something my mother told her. I try to picture my mother baking cookies with Aubrey. Maybe she had patience for things like that when doing them made her an excellent grandma instead of just a regular mom.
“Wait! Let me get some foil!” Aubrey shouts at Jam. “Careful! Don’t make a mess!”
“No one’s ever called me careful,” Jam says, in a purposely dopey voice.
Aubrey laughs. “Well, try!”
I hear the oven door close.
“ Excellent! ” Jam says.
“Excellent!”
My prom dress is sweaty and wrinkled, the satin lining sticking to my body as I stand. I snagged the chiffon at some point, and there’s a puckered stripe of pulled thread at knee level that makes me feel sad. I don’t care and then when I’m careless I feel sorry for the result. It’s like the theme of me. I always wished I could be more like Jam, who truly does not care what he leaves for ruin, or have Steena’s ability to be effortlessly careful with material things.
I go down to the laundry. The seams of my jeans are still damp. I pull on the pair that’s closest to dry and throw the rest in for another round. The blood stain didn’t quite come out of Jam’s undershirt, but it looks more like spilled coffee than carnage. I wear his flannel again. It won’t bother him, and I like it, even though now it smells like detergent, not his bedroom.
The rise and fall of Jam’s banter seeps down from the kitchen. Aubrey does her best to keep up, but her laugh sounds like it could get away from her and turn to tears. I remember feeling that way with anyone who was nice to me—so desperate to keep them nice, terrified that whatever made my mother and Step and Steena hate me might leak out in front of everyone else.
We eat dinner in the den, sitting on the floor like we’re having a picnic. I lean against the couch and it’s super uncomfortable, but I want to sit with them. Jam has gone deep into my parents’ VHS collection, and he’s playing tapes of Olympic figure skating from 1998. Elvis Stojko, dressed like a fairytale prince, spins and jumps while the audience claps out a beat. My mother would never have allowed us to eat baked ziti in here, so my brain stays clear on the fact that we’re in a different time, even though it’s the same space.
Aubrey is telling us a story about Mr. Gioletti, who was my science teacher too, farting in the middle of a lesson about bacteria.
“And like, no one else gets it!” Aubrey says, laughing so hard her face is red. “No one gets why it’s so funny! He doesn’t either.” She’s much more chatty than I expected her to be, given her goth tendencies.
Jam isn’t laughing, even though it’s exactly the kind of story he’d find amusing. I try to think of the last thing he said, and I can’t. He’s blank, pushing food around his plate without eating, like he powered down and we didn’t notice. His forehead is sweaty, but his face is pale.
“I would have been impressed if he made it part of the lesson,” Aubrey says, shrugging.
I laugh harder than I would otherwise because I want to keep her talking to me.
She looks to Jam for a reaction.
He doesn’t notice.
Her face falls.
“Does Mr. Gioletti still wear that sweater sweatshirt?” I ask, doing my bartender trick of making her feel like she has my full attention. Every time she looks at her plate, I snag a glance at Jam.
“Every Tuesday!” she says.
“The blue one with the argyle…”
“Yes!”
“Wow! That’s some good cost per use on a sweatshirt,” I say.
Jam has stopped pushing food around his plate. He’s staring at his fork. I don’t want Aubrey to see this.
“Hey, bro,” I say. “You look exhausted.”
He snaps to attention, flashes a weak smile. “Yeah, I should go.”
“No!” Aubrey says. “You haven’t even finished dinner.”
“We’ll do this again soon,” Jam says, and I can tell he feels bad about letting her down, which is something at least.
I walk Jam out, braving the steps to the driveway so Aubrey won’t hear us talking.
“Sorry I can’t stay.” He runs his hand through his hair.
I hug him hard. “You okay?”
He hugs me back like he’d hold on forever if he could.
“I’m me,” he says, resignation in his voice. He lets go, steps backward, hands out to his sides, like he’s showing me the full picture. I wish I couldn’t see it so clearly.
“Hey,” I call after him. “You ever drive her again when you’re high, I’ll fucking kill you.”
“I wouldn’t. I didn’t.” He walks toward me, like a dance we’re doing. He has tears in his eyes. “I let her drive.”
Even though I knew he was on something, his admission feels like it will crush every bone in my body. Jam has always liked drugs. In high school he had his “dirtbag friends” from Pleasantville who snuck out to the graffitied ruins of a Rockefeller mansion in the middle of the night to ingest questionable substances under the dense branches of a giant weeping beech tree. He took me there once in daylight, when he was sober, because he knew I’d think the tree was cool. Whenever Jam was MIA, I’d quiz myself to see if I remembered how to find that tree just in case he didn’t reappear. But that was high-school high. Saturday-night high. Every-couple-months high. And even though he’d talk about what he’d done, he kept that part of his life very far from me. Now he’s Wednesday-evening-snorted-something-in-the-bathroom-at-work high. It’s right in front of me. And Aubrey.
“She’s fifteen.”
“She’s a good driver,” he says, like it’s something, and maybe it is.
I think of her careful left turns on the way back from Dr. Singh’s condo. In the driver’s seat, she looked like the person she’s going to be. It would be easy to confuse that with who she is now. “She’s a kid, Jam.”
“I know.”
“You’re not a kid.”
“Ouch.”
“I didn’t mean it like that,” I say, even though I did.
“Yeah, whatever.”
I bet he’s used to passing. If it weren’t for Buck and bartending, I would have assumed Jam was just tired. It’s probably what Aubrey assumed.
“Let me get my keys,” I say. “I’ll drive you home.”
“It’s worn off—that’s why I’m… tired,” he says, shaking his head. “I’ve got it.”
He must be able to sense the calculations I have going in my mind because he kisses my cheek and says, “I’m fine, Frey. Really.” His voice is more warning than reassurance.
I kiss him back.
Jam gets in his car and drives away. And I let him. If he really is just going home, it’s only half a mile. I know better. But I worry if make a big deal now, he’ll hide from me when it gets worse.