Chapter 8
8
FIFTH GRADE
NOBODY EXPLAINS DAD’S ILLNESS TO me. Much like after Henry’s death, there are whispered conversations and furtive glances in my direction when my family thinks I’m not looking. But I am. I’m looking and I’m listening. The last thing I want is for this to be a repeat of the week following the first funeral, a time in which I had to become a low-grade detective, leafing through hospital bills on Speedy’s desk and searching the internet for news stories on the accident. Not this time , I think. This time I’ll just ask.
I go to Mom first. She smiles sadly and says, “The doctors don’t know, sweetie. They think it has to do with his brain.”
His brain? I think. But that doesn’t make any sense. His legs are what gave out, not his brain.
Unsatisfied, I seek another opinion, this time from the least intimidating member of the family. Taz furrows his eyebrows and asks, “Have you ever heard the term psychosomatic ?”—an answer that makes even less sense than my mother’s.
Out of options, I go to my sister. Karma stares at me for a long moment after I ask, eyes thin, as if my face were a billboard in the distance. She reaches out with one hand. “Some things just can’t be explained by science, Boose.” In a rare display of affection, she smooths my hair onto the side of my head. Tenderly, she says, “Some things are just a sick joke.”
—
DESPITE MY BEST EFFORTS, THE bugbites on my legs only get worse. Each morning, I hose my body down with Off! spray. It makes me self-conscious; I’m keenly aware of the fact that I arrive to school smelling of aerosol and DEET, whatever that is.
Normally, I wouldn’t care. I have no use for the opinions of my classmates—the ones I grew up with—who have seen my house and my basement and my sprawling backyard, with its private access to the beach. Whose siblings know my siblings, whose mothers know my mother. Who might like me not for who I am but what I have.
When Dad first sat Karma, Taz, Henry, and me down to talk about money, he said, “Be careful who you let into your life. There will always be those who want to take advantage of you. Don’t run around making friends willy-nilly.”
At the time, Karma was fourteen. I was six.
We nodded emphatically.
But now—here is a boy who knows nothing of my house or my inheritance. A wonderful, mysterious boy who mumbles wonderful, mysterious words. Close enough to hear but too far to understand. Someone to whom I can speak freely, even if he doesn’t want to hear what I have to say. And I find that, for the first time ever, I care. I care about my appearance and the fact that I probably smell like mosquito repellant.
Every day after the last bell rings, I follow Manuel outside. I prattle away, continuing whatever story I left off at the end of class. He walks studiously forward, never telling me to shut up or go away, but never acknowledging my existence, either.
I follow him all the way to the carpool lane. A sleek black sedan waits for him. The windows are tinted. I can’t see who’s driving. He climbs in the back door and slams it shut, but the back window is open, so I keep talking. He rolls it up slowly. I keep talking, keep telling my story, right up until the glass meets the ceiling.
The next morning, I pick up right where I left off.
—
FOR ANY OTHER MARRIAGE, THIS would probably be the end. Losing your son to the Great Beyond and your husband to a wheelchair in just a few months? Nail in coffin; signatures on stiff legal paper. But not Wendy Beck.
Not only does Dad’s illness not push him and Mom to divorce—it saves them.
Mom quits all her side hustles: resigns from boards, tastefully turns down invitations, pulls her name from the ballot for the Board of Education. Nobody faults her; they see us around town, our strange, grieving clan—three children, one beautiful wife, one aging husband. A man whose face, upon further inspection, isn’t actually old but whose skin bears early wrinkles, as if sagging beneath the weight of something immense—a man on the cusp of age, drawing closer every day. We move through life together, our clan, and the community watches. At Christmas Eve service. In line at the grocery store. In the aisles of Barnes she runs behind it like a child, Speedy clutching a six-pack of black cherry soda in his lap, hollering, “Faster!” The rest of us pant close behind. Everyone on the sidewalk—mothers carrying plastic bags, crotchety old men instructing boys in blue aprons on how to carry plastic bags—stares like they’re watching a clutch of chickens flapping across the lot.
You wouldn’t know it from his gruff exterior, but Speedy is fiercely devoted to my mom. Fiercely. As if she’s his first love, not his third. As if she’s the only thing keeping him alive.
And maybe she is.
The illness does take its toll on my parents’ marriage, as all illnesses do. It’s not as if they’re so deeply, deeply in love that divorce is unthinkable. No—they stay together for the Family, that strange concept created as much by the collective belief in a thing’s existence as by the thing itself.
—
MY MOMENT ARRIVES A MONTH after Manuel does. It’s recess. He is doing what he always does: roaming around the edge of the field, muttering to himself, and hitting things with a stick. I’m doing what I always do, monopolizing the swing set and spying on Manuel.
Some of the kids nearby must hear him. As I watch, the boys—three of them, large, round like overripe pears—approach Manuel and start to circle.
“Hoe-la, Juan.”
“Whatcha doin’ this far away from Mexico?”
Manuel ignores them.
“Where’re your tacos? Mama didn’t pack none?”
Nothing scares a bully more than something they don’t understand.
“Not gonna say hi back?”
“What’s the matter, no speak-o English?”
“Nah. Look at his face. Juan here doesn’t understand a goddamn word.”
As they speak, my temperature rises. It doesn’t feel like anger; it feels like foresight. The more they say to Manuel—the more abusive and hateful their words become—the more clearly I see my future. I see why I spent the last month browsing Spanish slang websites, why I listened so carefully to the things Manuel whispered during class. I see the things I have gathered, and I see what to do with them.
At the height of the swing’s arc, I leap. I soar through the air and land with both feet in the woodchips, a wild splash of shaved earth. I don’t even use my hands to steady myself. I straighten up and march toward the bullies. They’re still circling Manuel, drawing closer, growling with their juvenile ignorance. I bend low as I approach the edge of the field. Just before the woodchips turn to grass, I scoop two handfuls into my fists. Don’t even pause in my strides, just dig both hands into the ground midstep and keep walking, the movement smooth as an outfielder.
“ ?Oye! ” I yell, winding up both fists. “ ?Hijos de puta! ”
All three boys turn. As they do, I release my fists and launch two jets of wood straight into their faces.
“ ?Cabrones! ?Hijos de puta! ” I yell every phrase I remember reading online. “ ?ándate a la mierda! ?Cago en tu leche! ”
They turn and flee, all of them, three overripe pears waddling in terror across the field.
I keep hollering, recycling phrases I already used and sprinkling in a few more. “ ?Chúpame la pe?a! ?Béisbol! ?Mariposa! ” I don’t really know what I’m saying. I don’t care. It feels so good to yell.
When they retreat far enough, I turn to Manuel.
I’m not sure what I expect to see on his face. Gratitude? Anger? I find neither. Instead, I see the same thing I always do: that blank wall. That portrait of incomprehension. The one I’ve seen every day for a month. Eyes squinted, lips slightly ajar. A face of mahogany concrete.
Then it cracks, all of it, and his face spreads into a grin wide enough to hold every drop of water in Lake Michigan.
—
ONCE THE SEAL OF OUR friendship breaks, we become inseparable. At recess, rather than partake in the twisted Lord of the Flies –style politics of the rest of the kids, we walk. We carve massive circles around the playground, and as we walk, we talk. It’s no longer just me talking. Manuel joins, too. And once he does, he has a lot to say—both in English and in his native language.
Our voices run at a dead sprint. He calls me Beck, and I call him Valde. We make jokes, tell stories. The stories never reach their conclusions, because some detail in them reminds us of another story and another and another, until we veer so far off track we can barely see the place we began. But we circle back, always saying, Now, what were we talking about? And we laugh at ourselves—breathless, mystified chuckles—baffled by our inability to stay on subject, awed by the great distance we traveled in doing so.
We have so much to tell each other. Two childhoods spent on different continents. Ten years of stories and details. We speak with this frantic energy, as if we’re both keenly aware of the finite nature of new friendship. As if desperate to cram as much of ourselves into each other’s ears as possible. This is who I am! we seem to say. Can you see me? Can you see?
—
WE START RIDING THE BUS together. It picks me up first. When I get on, I run straight to the last seat. At Manuel’s stop, I stand. I catch his eye the minute he gets on. It isn’t necessary, of course; he knows where to find me. But I do it anyway. I like the way his eyes expand and brighten when he sees me, just a little, just around the edges. It’s the best part of my morning.
He runs to the back, and I step out to let him scoot in. The bus rumbles toward school, its wheels catching every bump, every crevice. With each bounce, our stomachs plummet in that terrifying way that tells us we’re alive.