Chapter 4
4
FIFTH GRADE
ON THE DAY WE RETURN from Cradle Island—exactly one day after I find Dad wailing on the floor surrounded by the broken pieces of Henry’s errrn —Mom walks straight through the front door of our home and up to her bedroom without saying a word. Doesn’t touch her suitcase. Leaves it in the trunk and carries only herself up the stairs, as if the weight of her body is the only thing she can handle.
Mom kept a strong chin during our time up north, throwing herself into “improving our diet” as a way of distracting from her grief. But now, back in Winnetka, in a huge house with an excruciatingly empty bedroom where her youngest son should have been, she shuts down. Shuts the door to her bedroom. Climbs into bed.
We won’t see her for a month.
—
IN THE WEEKS FOLLOWING MOM’S disappearance, my family deteriorates. Karma stops inviting friends over. Dad stops playing Bob Dylan records in his office. Taz stops drawing. Clarence and Caleb, who have their own apartments downtown, no longer come for family dinner on Sundays.
It’s August. The days are long and hot and suffocatingly humid, a quintessential Chicago summer. Cicadas drone. Fireflies twinkle at night. Our house sits right on Lake Michigan, the back door looking out over the private beach that we share with our neighbors. I spend the mornings reading on a towel in the sand or in our backyard, a long grassy hill surrounded by towering oak trees. In the afternoon, I curl up with my laptop in our upstairs library and log into the online games that Taz taught me how to play. At night, I sometimes bike to the ice cream shop in downtown Winnetka, eating Moose Tracks alone on a bench just for an excuse to leave the house.
It’s quiet at home. Far too quiet. The only real activity comes from the kitchen, where Karma bakes her feelings into more batches of pastries than our house can handle. She keeps every tray that comes out of the oven. Even the failed attempts. Cloud-dolloped vanilla cupcakes sparkle next to beige bricks topped with oozing grey puss. She swaddles each batch in Cling Wrap and stores them throughout the kitchen. Anywhere—the counter, the windowsill, the breakfast table, the cabinets—just as long as they remain in plain sight. One lumpy, Saran-wrapped bundle atop another. Stacks turn into mountains. The kitchen grows thick with new aromas: charred chocolate, melted butter, biting sweetness. And, as the days pass, the subtle, ominous hint of mold.
Taz says, “Mom might spontaneously combust when she sees this.”
Karma says, “Mom would have to leave her bedroom for that to happen.”
For a week Karma makes nothing but brioche. Each batch comes out lighter, puffier, floating with air and yeast. The kitchen overflows with them. The loaves grow so large she stores them in garbage bags, not Ziplocs. Black ones, the Hefty kind. She fills every cabinet and the countertop, too. With nowhere else to go, she drops the bags onto the floor. They pile up in the corner. The kitchen becomes confusing; it looks like a landfill but smells like a bakery.
Nobody stops her. Not even Dad. It’s not like we need the kitchen for cooking; our fridge is stuffed with more sympathy food than we can handle. Every night, we choose whatever Saran-wrapped casserole looks best and stick a slice in the microwave. Sometimes, we skip dinner altogether, eating Karma’s desserts instead.
Anyway, Speedy doesn’t have the bandwidth to care about the fact that it has become virtually impossible to move about the kitchen. For the first time in twenty years of marriage, Dad has to manage all four of us—sorry, all three of us—alone.
It’s not that he can’t do it. He can. It’s just that it’s completely foreign territory for him. The arrangement between my parents has always been the same: Mom manages the kids, Dad manages everything else. You’d be surprised at how much admin it takes to be this rich—the bills, the banks, the taxes, the travel. But they handle it, they’ve always handled it. Until now. Until Wendy Beck disappeared into her bedroom, leaving her husband to deal with all of it: every last bill, every last dinner, every last child.
—
“I BET IT’S PAYBACK,” KARMA says one afternoon. We’re standing in the kitchen. Karma is teaching me how to pound dough. I feel guilty saying it, but part of me is glad she stopped bringing friends around; she finally has time to pay attention to me.
“What is?” I ask.
“Mom staying in their room and making Dad do everything. I bet it’s some messed-up version of payback.”
“Payback for what?”
Karma looks up. “You don’t know about Dad?”
“Know what about Dad?”
“He’s sober.”
“What’s sober ?”
“It means he doesn’t drink alcohol or anything.”
I absentmindedly tear chunks of brioche from the warm loaf on the counter. Huh. Now that I think about it, Mom does get red wine when we go out to eat, while Dad gets Shirley Temples. But I didn’t think that was because he couldn’t drink; I thought it was because red wine is gross and Shirley Temples are delicious.
“Why not?” I ask.
“Because.” Karma looks down at the ball of dough and presses the heel of her hand to its soft belly, kneading gently. “Dad was a drug addict.”
I know about drug addiction. I saw a documentary about it on TV. Hideous women with stringy hair and sunken eye sockets stared out from the flatscreen and talked about how their families don’t love them anymore.
“What drugs did he do?”
“Cocaine, mostly.” Her hand speeds up. “But there were other things, too. Alcohol. Marijuana. Cigarettes. But cocaine was the main thing. Cocaine was the ‘problem.’?” She sighs. “It wasn’t his fault, really. It was the way he grew up. Everything pushed Dad toward addiction—his friends, his parents, his money. Even his genetics, for God’s sake.”
I try to keep up with what my sister is saying. I recognize that the story she’s telling me is important. Very important. But I can’t make the pieces fit. I can’t reconcile the images of needles and scars and hideous, disfigured faces with my harmless, well-kept father.
“He was able to keep it secret for a long time, but when Mom finally found out about it, they’d already had Taz and me. The way Dad tells it, when she caught him…” Karma trails off. She looks up from the ball of dough. Her face is horrified, as if she only just realized she’s talking about drug addiction to a ten-year-old. I’m not sure what my face looks like. She finishes briskly, saying, “He told me about it a few years ago. I’m sure he’ll do the same for you one day.”
I leave the kitchen in shock. I believed I already knew our family tree, with all its many branches and blossoms and bark. I believed I saw the whole story. But in fact, I saw only a small portion. None of its roots. None of its rings.
—
I WAKE ON THE LAST day of summer with strange red bumps on my legs.
“Geez, Boose,” says Karma at breakfast. “You leave your legs out on a rotisserie last night? Those are some ghoulish bugbites.”
In bed that night, I wait for sleep to take me, trying desperately not to scratch my legs. Out in the hallway, Taz and Speedy whisper to each other. I don’t hear everything they say, but they seem to be discussing bees; I catch the word hives .
I think back to my parents’ conversation on Cradle Island. You really aren’t worried? I swear, I haven’t seen her cry once.
Could Mom be right? Am I not grieving for my brother? Am I even sad he’s gone?
Don’t be ridiculous , I tell myself. Of course you’re sad your brother died.
Then again, it’s true that I hardly cried. But that’s just me. I’m not a crier. And it’s not like I haven’t cried at all, right? Surely I cried at the funeral. Surely.
But…did I?
As I sat next to my second cousin on that sofa, did I?
As I sat under the weight of Karma’s trembling arm while the minister gave his speech, did I?
I can’t remember. How can I not remember?
I scratch my legs harder.
If I don’t remember crying at Henry’s funeral, then how can I be certain that I’m sad he’s gone? What if I’m not sad? What if I’m secretly happy about it?
That’s crazy , I think. You’re not happy your closest brother is dead. You miss him so much.
But what if I don’t?
That’s it. That’s all it takes.
My mind picks up speed, running in endless circles. I tell myself that it’s crazy to think I’d be glad my brother is gone, then in the same breath, I circle back to the fact that I didn’t cry at his funeral. Didn’t cry. At my own brother’s funeral. Crying is the way your body tells you you’re sad. If I didn’t cry, I must not have been sad.
Then, as soon as I finish that thought, I circle back. Tell myself not to be ridiculous.
But then, as soon as I finish that thought, I circle back again , even though I don’t want to. Because I didn’t cry. I can’t ignore that fact. I’m not grieving. That means I’m not sad Henry is dead. And if I’m not, does that make me a bad person? It must, right? Only a bad person wouldn’t cry after the death of their brother.
I curl my legs into my chest.
My mind runs in circles, circles, circles. I don’t understand what’s happening. Soon, it isn’t even about whether I cried at Henry’s funeral anymore. Soon, I’m just worrying about how much I’m worrying. Then I start worrying about the fact that I’m worrying about worrying. Then I start worrying about worrying about worrying about worrying, and suddenly my mind feels so crowded, as if my thoughts aren’t filtering out in the way most thoughts do. As if something is blocking the exit. As if, rather than in and out of my mind in an orderly line, one thought replacing another, they linger. All of them. Half sound like me; they speak with the internal voice I’ve always recognized as my own. The other half do not. The other half—they have their own voice. They’re loud. So loud. They’re a living thing. They’re hundreds of blind moths in search of a flame, flying chaotically about my mind, crashing into each other, knocking things over. I cringe as glass shatters in places I can’t see.
I try every method I can think of to shut out the noise. I hum. I turn my head to the side and recite the Spanish alphabet, a list of strange and wonderful sounds we learned at school the year before. I recite the letters as loudly as I can, speaking into the fabric of my pillow. It doesn’t help. The moths keep beating their wings, keep knocking into precious artifacts in my mind, keep smashing them to pieces. I pick up both pillows and squeeze them over either side of my head. One for each ear. I assume it will muffle the noise. It doesn’t. How could it? This noise doesn’t come from outside my head. It comes from within.
—
I BURST OUT OF MY bedroom door, sprint down to the kitchen. “Dad!” I yell. “Dad!”
He’s there. Sitting at the kitchen counter, drinking black cherry soda. A normal activity. One I’ve seen him perform a thousand times. He jumps when the door slams open, jolted from his normalcy.
“What?” he asks, looking wildly about. “What? What?”
I stare at him, at the bewilderment on his face. I blink. Though the Worry isn’t gone—though I can still feel it turning and turning, a wheel in a track of wet mud—I recognize then that I’m the only one who can hear it.
“Never mind,” I say. Then I shut the kitchen door and run back upstairs.
—
I WAKE THE NEXT DAY with a clear conscience. It lasts about twenty seconds. Then I remember what happened the night before, and I fall right back to pieces.
From: Memory [email protected]
To : Conscious Mind [email protected]
Subject : A Beck family dinner (before Henry died)
Below is a brief press release detailing Past Beck Family Dinners, intended to provide you with a comparison for the Current State of Affairs. Read they’re brilliant. Their eyes sparkle. Their arms wave theatrically. Caleb tells the story of eight-year-old Karma beating up the unfortunate boy who tried to steal Taz’s Fruit by the Foot, and the whole table—down to the candles—shakes with laughter. Tears leak out of Mom’s eyes.
In my head, I’m eloquent, too. Insightful. Wise. I have a story to tell, the same way they do, but I exist in this strange in-between: too old for a high chair, too young to be taken seriously by the adults. A child perennially annoyed by her place in the world. Dinner conversation is an exclusive club to which I have not yet been granted access. Membership includes time with the talking stick, the right for your jokes to be laughed at, and consideration of your ideas as valid suggestions. I sit in my chair and gaze up as their words ping-pong across the table. I want desperately to join, but everything takes place just a few inches too high for me to reach.
Henry and I quickly become antsy. We ask to leave, but Mom says no, so we find other ways to pass the time: we do handstands against the wall, invent plays using forks and knives as actors, draw presentations on construction paper, then tape them to the wall and make the rest of the family listen.
Sometimes, we just run around and around and around the table until our parents tell us to settle the hell down. Henry always listens. Sometimes I do, too, but mostly I don’t. Mostly I keep going, arms cranking, blowing steam through my lips like a train’s horn.
“The Boose is loose!” the older kids yell. “The Boose is loose!”