Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self (11 page)

Kenny’s car outside of Lanae’s duplex did not surprise him, nor did it deter him. He parked in one of the visitor spaces and walked up to ring the bell.

“Son of a bitch! What’s good?” Kenny asked when he answered the door, as if Georgie had been gone for a year on a beer run.

“I’m back,” he said, unnecessarily. “How you been, man?”

Kenny looked like he’d been Kenny. He’d always been a big guy, but he was getting soft around the middle. His hair was freshly cut in a fade, and he was already in uniform, wearing a shiny gold name tag that said KENNETH, and beneath that, MANAGER, which had not been true when Georgie left. Georgie could smell the apartment through the door, Lanae’s perfume and floral air freshener not masking that something had been cooked with grease that morning.

“Not, bad,” he said. “I’ve been holding it down over here while you been holding it down over there. Glad you came back in one piece.”

Kenny gave him a one-armed hug, and for a minute Georgie felt like an asshole for wanting to say,
Holding it down? You’ve been serving people KFC.

“Look, man, I was on my way to work, but we’ll catch up later, all right?” Kenny said, moving out of the doorway to reveal Lanae standing there, still in the T-shirt she’d slept in. Her hair was pulled back in a head scarf, and it made her eyes look huge. Kenny was out the door with a nod and a shoulder clasp, not so much as a backward glance at Lanae standing there. The casual way he left them alone together bothered Georgie. He wasn’t sure if Kenny didn’t consider him a threat or simply didn’t care what Lanae did; either way he was annoyed.

“Hey,” said Lanae, her voice soft, and he realized he hadn’t thought this visit through any further than that.

“Hi,” he said, and looked at the clock on the wall, which was an hour behind schedule. He thought to mention this, then thought against it.

“Georgie!” Esther yelled through the silence, running out of the kitchen, her face sticky with pancake syrup. He was relieved she remembered his name. Her hair was done in pigtails with little pink barrettes on them; they matched her socks and skirt. Lanae could win a prize for coordinating things.

“Look at you, little ma,” he said, scooping her up and kissing her cheek. “Look how big you got.”

“Look how bad she got, you mean,” Lanae said. “Tell Georgie how you got kicked out of day care.”

“I got kicked out of day care,” Esther said matter-of-factly. Georgie tried not to laugh. Lanae rolled her eyes.

“She hides too much,” she said. “Every time they take the kids somewhere, this one hides, and they gotta hold everyone up looking for her. Last time they found her, she scratched the teacher who tried to get her back on the bus. She can’t pull this kind of stuff when she starts kindergarten.”

Lanae sighed, and reached up to put her fingers in her hair, but all it did was push the scarf back. Take it off, he wanted to say. Take it off, and put clothes on. He wanted it to feel like real life again, like their life again, and with him dressed and wearing cologne for the first time in months, and her standing there in a scarf and T-shirt, all shiny Vaselined thighs and gold toenails, they looked mismatched.

“Look, have some breakfast if you want it,” she said. “I’ll be out in a second. I need to take a shower, and then I gotta work on finding this one a babysitter before my shift starts.”

“When does it start?”

“Two.”

“I can watch her. I’m free.”

Lanae gave him an appraising look. “What
are
you doing these days?”

“Today, nothing.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Don’t know yet.”

“I talked to your mom a little while ago,” Lanae said, which was her way of telling him she knew. Of course she knew. How could Lanae not know, gossipy mother or no gossipy mother?

“I’m fine,” he said. “I’ll take good care of her.”

“If Dee doesn’t get back to me, you might have to,” said Lanae. She walked off and Georgie made himself at home in her kitchen, grabbing a plate from the dish rack and taking the last of the eggs and bacon from the pans on the stove. Esther sat beside him and colored as he poured syrup over his breakfast.

“So, what do you keep hiding from?” he asked.

“Nothing.” Esther shrugged. “I just like the trip places better. Day care smells funny and the kids are dumb.”

“What did I tell you about stupid people?” Georgie asked.

“I forget.” Esther squinted. “You were gone a long time.”

“Well, I’m back now, and you’re not going to let stupid people bother you anymore,” Georgie said, even though neither of these promises was his to make.

 

 

Honestly, watching Esther
was good for him. His mother was perplexed, Kenny was amused, Lanae was skeptical. But Esther could not go back to her old day care, and Dee, the woman down the street who ran an unlicensed day care in her living room, plopped the kids in front of the downstairs television all afternoon, and could only be torn away from her soaps upstairs if one of them hit someone or broke something. It wasn’t hard for Georgie to be the best alternative. He became adequate as a caretaker. He took Esther on trips. They read and reread her favorite books. He learned to cut the crusts off of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Over and above her protests that the old sitter had let the kids stay up to watch late-night comedy, he made sure she was washed and in bed and wearing matching pajamas by the time Lanae and Kenny got home from their evening shifts.

“Are you sure it doesn’t remind you...” his mother started once, after gently suggesting he look for a real job, but she let the thought trail off unfinished.

“I wasn’t
babysitting
over there, Ma.”

“I know,” she said, but she didn’t, or she wouldn’t have thought to put Esther and those other kids in the same sentence.

The truth was Esther was the opposite of a reminder. In his old life, his job had been to knock on strangers’ doors in the middle of the night, hold them at gunpoint, and convince them to trust him. That was the easiest part of it. They went at night because during daytime the snipers had a clear shot at them and anyone who opened the door, but even in the dark, a bullet or an IED could take you out like that. Sometimes when they got to a house there were already bodies. Other times there was nothing: a thin film of dust over whatever was left, things too heavy for the family to carry and too worthless for anyone to steal.

The sisters were sitting in the dark, huddled on the floor with their parents, when Georgie’s unit pushed through the door. Pretty girls, big black eyes and sleepy baby-doll faces. The little one cried when they first came through the door, and the older one, maybe nine, clamped her hand tightly over the younger girl’s mouth, like they’d been ordered not to make any noise. The father was softspoken—angry but reasonable. Usually, Georgie stood back and kept an eye out for trouble, let the lieutenant do the talking, but this time he went over to the girls himself, reached out his hand and shook their tiny ones, moist with heat and fear. He handed them each a piece of the candy they were supposed to give to children in cooperative families, and stepped back awkwardly. The older one smiled back at him, her missing two front teeth somehow reminding him of home.

They were not, in the grand scheme of things, anyone special. There were kids dying all over the place. Still, when they went back the next day, to see if the father would answer some more questions about his neighbors, and the girls were lying there, throats slit, bullets to the head, blood everywhere but parents nowhere to be found, he stepped outside of the house to vomit.

 

 

When Georgie was twelve,
a station wagon skidded on the ice and swerved into his father’s Tercel, crushing the car and half of his father, who bled into an irreversible coma before Georgie and his mother got to the hospital to see him. Because his mother had to be sedated at the news, he’d stood at his father’s bedside alone, staring at the body, the way the part beneath the sheet was unnaturally crumpled, the way his face began to look like melted wax, the way his lips remained slightly parted.

Georgie hadn’t known, at first, that the sisters would stick with him like that.

“What’s fucked up,” Georgie said to Jones two days after, “is that I wished for a minute it was our guys who did it, some psycho who lost it. The way that kid looked at me, like she really thought I came to save her. I don’t want to think about them coming for her family because we made them talk. I don’t want to be the reason they did her like that.”

“What’s the difference between you and some other asshole?” Jones said. “Either nobody’s responsible for nothing, or every last motherfucker on this planet is going to hell someday.”

 

 

After that,
he’d turn around in the shower, the girls would be there. He’d be sleeping, and he’d open his eyes to see the little one hiding in the corner of his room. He was jumpy and too spooked to sleep. He told Ramirez about it, and Ramirez said you didn’t get to pick your ghosts, your ghosts picked you.

“Still,” he said. “Lieutenant sends you to talk to someone, don’t say that shit. White people don’t believe in ghosts.”

But he told the doctors everything, and then some. He didn’t care anymore what his file said, as long as it got him the fuck out of that place. And the truth is, right before the army let him go, sent him packing with a prescription and a once-a-month check-in with the shrink at the VA hospital, it had gotten really bad. One night he was sure the older girl had come to him in a dream and told him Peterson had come back and killed her, skinny Peterson who didn’t even like to kill the beetles that slipped into their blankets every night, but nonetheless he’d held Peterson at gunpoint until Ramirez came in and snapped him out of it. Another time, he got convinced Jones really was going to kill him one day, and ran up to him outside of mess hall, grabbing for his pistol; three or four guys had to pull him off. Once, in the daytime, he thought he saw one of the dead girls, bold as brass, standing outside on the street they were patrolling. He went to shake her by the shoulders, ask her what she’d been playing at, pretending to be dead all this time, but he’d only just grabbed her when Ramirez pulled him off of her, shaking his head, and when he looked back at the girl’s tear-streaked face before she ran for it like there was no tomorrow, he realized she was someone else entirely. Ramirez put an arm around him and started to say something, then seemed to think better of it. He looked down the road at the place that girl had just been.

“The fuck you think she’s running to so fast, anyway? Someone ought to tell her there’s nowhere to go.”

 

 

Sometimes Esther
called him
Daddy
. When it started out, it seemed harmless enough. They were always going places that encouraged fantasy. Chuck E. Cheese’s, where the giant rat sang and served pizza. The movies, where princesses lived happily ever after. The zoo, where animals that could have killed you in their natural state looked bored and docile behind high fences. Glitter Girl, Esther’s favorite store in the mall, where girls three and up could get manicures, and any girl of any age could buy a crown or a pink T-shirt that said ROCK STAR. What was a pretend family relationship, compared to all that? Besides, it made people less nervous. When she’d introduced him to strangers as her babysitter, all six feet and two hundred and five pounds of him, they’d raised their eyebrows and looked at him as though he might be some kind of predator. Now people thought it was sweet when they went places together.

“This is my daddy,” Esther told the manicurist at Glitter Girl, where Georgie had just let Esther get her nails painted fuchsia. She smiled at him conspiratorially. He had reminded her, gently, that Mommy might not understand about their make-believe family, and they should keep it to themselves for now.

“Day off, huh?” said the manicurist. She looked like a college kid, a cute redhead with dangly pom-pom earrings. Judging by the pocketbook she’d draped over the chair beside her, she was working there for kicks: if the logo on the bag was real, it was worth three of Georgie’s old army paychecks.

“I’m on leave,” he said. “Army. I was in Iraq for a year. Just trying to spend as much time with her as I can before I head back.” He sat up straighter, afraid somehow she’d see through the lie and refuse to believe he’d been a soldier at all. When they’d walked in, she’d looked at him with polite skepticism, as if in one glance she could tell that Esther’s coordinated clothes came from Target, that he was out of real work and his gold watch was a knockoff that sometimes turned his wrist green, like perhaps the pity in her smile would show them they were in the wrong store, without the humiliation of price tags.

“Wow,” she murmured now, almost deferentially. She looked up and swept an arc of red hair away from her face so she could look at him directly. “A year in Iraq. I can’t imagine. Of course you’ll spend all the time you can with her. They grow up so fast.” She shook her head with a sincerity he found oddly charming in a woman who worked in a store that sold halter tops for girls with no breasts.

“Tell you what, sweetheart,” she said to Esther. “Since your daddy’s such a brave man, and you’re such a good girl for letting him go off and protect us, I’m going to do a little something extra for you. Do you want some nail gems?”

Esther nodded, and Georgie turned his head away so the manicurist wouldn’t see him smirk. Nail gems. Cherry blossoms. The things people offered him by way of consolation.