Donutheart (5 page)

CHAPTER SIX

Filling in the Blanks

That evening, as I sat alone on my bed, tape measure in hand, I made a shocking discovery. My logbook, in which I’d recorded the varying lengths of my arms and legs on their mismatched journey to adulthood, was missing two entries. I had forgotten to measure for two straight days in a row! I needed no one to remind me that those days were gone forever.

Measuring my arms and legs was just a normal part of my day. I’d been doing it for years, ever since I noticed the different rates at which they grew. You see, despite an exhaustive search on the Internet, I had discovered no journal articles devoted to this subject. What if I had a rare and previously undiscovered growth deficiency? Could I be ushering in an age when asymmetrical children struggled with balance? Was all this due to my mother’s sinister love of the game “Airplane,” in which children are swung around and around by their developing limbs until their predisposition to motion sickness causes them to empty their stomachs?

It was up to me to collect the data. I had three leather-bound journals in which I’d faithfully recorded my measurements over the last five years. The only other entry I’d failed to make was during the influenza outbreak in my ninth year, when I’d been wracked by a 104-degree fever for three days.

I stared at the blank spaces as if they could tell me where I’d gone wrong.

“Franklin!” My mother broke into my thoughts. “I’ve been calling you for ages. Gloria’s on the phone.”

Gloria? Calling me? At this hour of the night?

Me: Gloria? This is a surprise.

Gloria: So, how did it work? My advice about the faucets?

Me: Oh. Fine.

Gloria: Good. You know, I was about your age when I got that trick with the faucet from William. Worked every time.

Me: William?

Gloria: My brother, Franklin.

Me: I didn’t know you had a brother, Gloria.

Gloria: That’s because we rarely stray from your morbid preoccupations. I had four brothers, Franklin. William was the oldest.

Me: You
had
…

Gloria: But…to the reason I called. Your mother and I have been discussing Sarah, and I wanted your opinion.

Me: Uh, okay.

Gloria: How are things going at school? Is she keeping up? You know, sixth grade is a pivotal year in terms of retention. Students can slip through the cracks when they begin middle school.

Me: Well, her grades aren’t what they could be if she just tried—

Gloria: Speak up, Franklin.

Me: She’s keeping up, barely, but…well…I think there is something bothering her. Just today she was asking about that story you told me to read to her last year. She was asking what happened to Hope.

Gloria: Really?

Me: And there’s something else going on. At the rink. She won’t wear a skirt in practice anymore.

Gloria: I know. Your mother told me. (
big sigh
) I’m going to tell you something personal, Franklin. Is that okay?

Me: Of course, Gloria.

Gloria: I’m thinking about Sarah tonight because she reminds me so much of William. My brother. They shared the same single-minded passion for sport. Only for William, it was football.

Me: Why do you keep talking about him like he’s in the past, Gloria? You keep saying
was.

Gloria: Because William is from the past, Franklin. He died.

Me: Died?

Gloria: Yes. In Vietnam. Today is the anniversary—

Me: He died in Vietnam? Your brother was in combat?

Gloria: It creeps up on me every year. I’d almost forgotten today was the twelfth…. (
long, snuffly pause…Gloria was blowing her nose.
) All right, then. The security people are shooing me out. Can’t work late these days. So you’ll watch over Sarah for me?

Me: Sure, Gloria. (
though I was not at all sure what this entailed
)

Gloria: Because she has to skate, Franklin. It’s her passion. When William didn’t get a football scholarship, he seemed to lose all hope. And we can’t let that happen to Sarah.

Me: Gloria?

Gloria: Yes, Franklin?

Me: I’m sorry about your brother…about William.

Gloria: I thought you might understand what I was feeling tonight, Franklin. Every once in a while, you stretch out and touch the world. It gives me hope. (
another long Gloria sigh
) Well, let’s call it a day, shall we? My voice gets a little hoarse when I put in so many hours. Don’t forget, Franklin, I’m expecting pictures of the big day. A video would be even better. I know you won’t let me down.

Me: Bernie’s bringing his camera.

Gloria: As for Sarah, she needs you more than ever. As I said, this could be a critical year. I don’t like to think of it, but Sarah could be in danger.

Me: Sarah…in danger?

Gloria: Yes. Good night, Franklin.

Me: Gloria…

I was about to ask her to specify the danger when she disconnected. Certainly, I wanted to ask her how in the world a girl like Sarah Kervick could be in danger when she didn’t even acknowledge that such a thing existed. But then I was distracted by thoughts of William. My own experiences of war were limited to old newsreels on the History Channel and the novels from the Accelerated Reader lists I’d gleaned off the Internet, like
All Quiet on the Western Front
and
For Whom the Bell Tolls
.

It was when I started to comb these books for the database Bernie and I had created on characters most likely to die in preventable accidents that I realized just how dangerous—statistically—it is to be a character in a book. Characters in books are more likely to be injured or killed or just plain die at a far greater rate than the general population.

I should have gone to bed directly, for it was a full twenty minutes past my bedtime. But as I was laying out my clothes for the following morning, I thought about what FDR said during the Second World War: “As a nation, we may take pride in the fact that we are soft-hearted, but we cannot afford to be soft-headed.”

Was that why Gloria was working late on such a sad night? Shouldn’t she be surrounded by brothers, going through scrapbooks and dabbing at her eyes? Who was comforting her now? If I knew Gloria, she was going home to microwave a Healthy Choice (probably Cajun shrimp), watch the news, and read work-related papers in bed. How would that ease her feelings of sadness?

I went over to my computer and put “William Nelots” into my search engine. I was surprised to find it was quite a common name. I added today’s date and found my way to a Web site called thewall-usa.com. I’d stumbled onto a Web site for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which listed the soldiers—more than fifty-eight thousand of them—who died in the war. Because the number was so large, soldiers were featured only if it was the anniversary of the day they died, or their birthday.

William Nelots was a single Marine Corps regular from Roanoke, Virginia. He arrived in Vietnam on April 10, 1967, on a nine-month tour of duty. He died two weeks before his twentieth birthday in Quang Nam, South Vietnam, in a hostile conflict using guns and small-arms fire. His body was recovered. He was Protestant.

Statistics have never felt so cold.

At the bottom of the page, there was a button labeled
PERSONAL COMMENTS
. I clicked on it and discovered several messages had been posted since the Web site went online in 2002.

“I met Willie in September ’68 in Okinawa. Willie, or ‘Judge,’ as we called him, had been with the unit in Khe Sanh, so he tended to take us ‘new guys’ under his wing and help us get ready for what was to come. Him and another vet stopped me from writing to Mom about how helpless and scared I felt on the eve of our first operation. Judge said, ‘They don’t need to hear that back home.’”—Manny Singleton, Langley, Washington “Here’s to you, Judge. It’s a bit belated but I want to thank you. You have been missed probably more than you ever expected.”—fellow marine Rex Trammer, Two Rivers, Wisconsin

“As a vet, I visit the Wall each day through this Web site. If you are here, it is because you have loved and lost. I am always very gratified to see that a man who made the ultimate sacrifice lives on in the memories of his loved ones. God bless Willie and those who served with him.”—Robert Roth, Bountiful, Utah

All sorts of people put comments on William “Judge” Nelots’ personal-comments page. Some didn’t even know him. There were notes from his fellow marines, his football buddies, and his family. I scrolled through the pages until I saw this:

“William, I never called you different. Your shoes were too big. In fact, growing up I swore your feet were on the ground even as your hand was being kissed by the angel Gabriel. I am bitten by sadness every day I wake up and realize my big brother isn’t here to take care of me anymore. Langston said it best in ‘Poem’:

I loved my friend.

He went away from me.

There’s nothing more to say.

The poem ends,

Soft as it began—

I loved my friend.

“Rest easy, William. You were a true hero, not just in ’Nam but for Mama, Duane, Paul, David, and me every day you walked this earth. Love, your dearest little Go Go.”

Go Go?

I went to bed thinking about all the parts of Gloria that I had never known.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Feeling Faint at Fiona’s Fashions

The following morning, I observed that Miss Mathews’ ruffled lavender blouse was missing a button. I did my best
not
to focus on the mole on her collarbone and took my assigned seat next to Sarah Kervick. She appeared to be getting a few extra winks, her head on her desk, her eyes closed.

Miss Mathews cleared her throat to gain the attention of the class. As she began to speak, I noticed one of Mr. Herman’s dollies—loaded with a stack of cardboard boxes—up against the whiteboard.

“Due to an unfortunate infestation of miller moths in the kitchen, I was asked this morning to rearrange our health units.” At this point, Miss Mathews paged furiously through her class notebook, raising it up until her face was hidden from view. “Adolescent attraction and sexual reproduction will now follow teen pregnancy.”

“Hey, isn’t that backward?” Tommy Williams asked.

Miss Mathews lowered her notebook to reveal a face that was, well, slightly flushed. Could it be that even college graduates fell victim to undesired social attention? Ignoring Tommy’s comment, our teacher produced a dagger-shaped letter opener and sliced through the tape on the topmost box. With admirable speed, Miss Mathews piled its contents on the top of her desk.

Marvin Howerton was the only member of our health class willing to give voice to what we saw in front of us.

“Flour?”

They did indeed appear to be five-pound sacks of Gold Medal flour.

“I’m afraid I…I haven’t had time to review this lesson,” Miss Mathews told us. “So I will have to read from Mr. Teegarten’s notes.”

Mr. Teegarten, we learned at the beginning of the year, had taken an unexpected early retirement last fall after breaking his nose in a tumble down the bleachers at the big football game between Pelican View and our archrivals, Wing Rock Middle.

“You will work in pairs. I’ve got the list right here….” As Miss Mathews sifted through the papers on her desk, I wondered if her embarrassment had more to do with being unprepared than with the subject matter we were discussing. Clearly, these arrangements had just been made this morning. She probably had a whole lesson plan carefully prepared on “first crushes,” a subject that definitely held my interest, and then arrived at school only to find many kilos of flour stacked in her room, and a sticky note from Mr. London, our assistant principal in charge of curriculum.

“To make it easy, I just used the seating chart, so Joseph-Howerton, Frost-Mirandette, Grandolt-Sprool, Powell-Williams…” Unable to locate her list of partners, Miss Mathews was simply pointing pronged fingers at the students as she went up and down the rows. It was gratifying to see that Marvin Howerton had been paired with Brenda Joseph, the only girl to make the Pelican View Middle Boys’ Hockey Team. Ha!

I knew long before she got to us that Sarah Kervick would be my partner. Glancing at the sack of flour that now lay between us, I determined that, for the sake of the child, it would probably be best if I was granted full physical custody.

I swiveled in my seat to see how Glynnis would react to being paired with Tommy Williams. She sat upright, looking modestly at the floor, as he reached forward and grabbed his sack of flour, swinging it the way an orangutan might carry a bunch of bananas.

“Look here,” he said. “It’s the Gingerbread Boy.”

“Franklin!” Sarah tugged on my arm. “I don’t get it.”

“You and I will share this sack of flour and treat it like a baby,” I replied, waving the form that was being passed around. “We have to keep track of when we feed it, when we put it down for a nap…. Basically,” I continued, scanning the assignment, “we have to keep it with us at all times for two weeks.”

“You gotta be kidding me. I got cousins that don’t get this kind of treatment.”

“It’s supposed to teach us how hard it is to be a parent so we…you know…think twice,” I answered her in a low voice.

Sarah Kervick processed what I said for just a moment before making a sour face.

“I feel the very same way about you,” I informed her, taking one from a stack of oversized paper lunch bags being handed around.

“You need to think of this as a real baby,” Miss Mathews read from her notebook, “so draw a face on the bag and slip the flour inside it. Remember to keep it with you at all times. No, you may not set it down to jiggle the handle on your locker. If you wouldn’t do it to a real infant, then you can’t do it to your flour baby.

“You’ll have to have one of your parents review your log at the end of the day and give your baby a ‘well check.’ They have to initial each daily log. I’ve got the forms here.”

Sarah Kervick was tapping her pencil on the top of the desk in a most annoying manner.

“Why don’t you think up a name?” I suggested, handing her the “birth certificate.” “I’ll handle the face.”

Her hand shot up.

“Yes, Sarah?”

“What if you know you’re not gonna have any kids? Ever. Do you still have to do it?”

“But you can’t know that, Sarah. You’re too young.”

Sarah folded her arms and sunk down in her seat so that her nose was level with the writing surface. “If I said I’m not gonna have any,” she muttered, “I’m not gonna have any.”

“Well, if it helps, I believe you,” I told her. Sarah Kervick belonged with a gym bag, not a diaper bag.

“Franklin, I mean it.” Sarah sat up and grabbed my shoulder and shook it. It hurt! “I’m supposed to take this sack of flour home and tell my dad it’s a
baby
? And have him check on it? He’ll laugh me right out of the trailer!”

“Sarah, what is the matter?” I asked, trying not to cringe from the pain of her tightening grip. She let go and sat back down at her desk. As I watched her tap manically on her desktop, it occurred to me that something really was very wrong with her circuitry. Normally, she would just shrug her shoulders and do a haphazard job of the assignment. Why was she taking things so seriously all of a sudden?

I tried again. “Sarah?”

“Not now,” she whispered, grabbing the handout I passed to her and turning as far away from me as her desk would allow.

I tried to focus on the assignment and compose a reasonable facsimile of a human baby onto a paper bag with my #2 pencil. All this emotional upheaval with Sarah Kervick was drawing attention away from the real tragedy that had occurred in Room 401B that morning. Glynnis Powell was carrying another man’s sack of flour. Yes, the object of my affection was working out feeding schedules with a boy whose only claim to fame was making fart noises with his armpits.

Between sketching baby eyebrows, I stole glances at Glynnis as she took a straight edge from her pencil case and began to make a chart. Carefully, she placed the metal edge on her paper, biting her lip in concentration.

Sarah Kervick was absorbed in her shoes. I glanced over at the “birth certificate” she was supposed to be filling out. Only one item was complete. Next to Baby’s First Name, Sarah had written “Keds.” She sat there, her head in her hands, staring at her own handwriting.

She was upset. Some sort of response was called for on my part. What would William have done if this were “Go Go”? I put my hand on Sarah’s forearm.

“Are you okay?”

Sarah pressed the heels of both her hands into her eyes. When she looked up at me, they were wet with tears.

“I haven’t seen my dad for the last two nights.”

She followed this up by declaring through gritted teeth,

“And if you
ever
tell anyone what I just told you, I’ll tie your arms in a knot and throw you in the Grand River.”

“Where exactly are we going again?” I asked after school as my mother hustled me and Sarah into her work van.

“Her name is Fiona Foster, and the guys down at the rink say she makes the best dresses.” She looked over her shoulder and gazed meaningfully at Sarah in the backseat.

“Did you say ‘Foster’?” I asked. Was it possible we were about to visit the home of Rebecca Foster? Had she been referring to this meeting when she said Donuthead was on her calendar?

“You might want to prepare yourself mentally, Sarah,” my mother continued. “She’s going to measure you.”

“What for?”

I lowered my voice and turned to Sarah. “Can we just get this over with as quickly as possible? For my sake?”

Sarah looked at me. “You’re not supposed to let strangers touch you,” she said quietly.

Despite hours of listening to classic rock at dangerously high volume, my mother has excellent hearing.

“Fiona Foster is a seamstress, not a stranger. She’s had her hands on practically every girl at the skating rink and they survived. Come on, Sarah.”

But Sarah didn’t answer. She sat, hunched and silent, staring out the window. The tears from the morning were long gone, but the way she kept her lips pressed together and swallowed hard every so often made me realize they could come back. Anyone else staring at her at that moment might think she was mad as the dickens. But I knew a thing or two about Sarah Kervick.

I also knew a thing or two about my mother. Sarah’s stubbornness about this dress was getting on her last nerve. I sent a mental suggestion to Sarah to
tell my mother what’s going on
. Not that I had a complete picture myself. The dress was the least of my worries. A girl her age should not be left alone all night. Sarah had made me promise not to tell anyone, so all I could do with the information she’d given me was worry!

Also, I’m not very experienced at keeping secrets. The only other time I’d been asked was when my mother made me promise not to reveal to Rick, her last boyfriend, that she’d ordered prescription-strength Skintactix, the most popular adult acne medication, on the Home Shopping Network. As we sat in the van in silence, I tried to think of something—anything—to say besides
Sarah’s father has disappeared!

We parked next to a split-level with a sign out front that announced
FIONA’S FASHIONS
. My mother turned around in her seat. “Help us out here, Franklin,” she said.

As I may have mentioned, shopping under any circumstances is not my mother’s strong suit. I opened the van door for Sarah. Together, our mood could only be described as somber.

But Fiona Foster, who threw wide the door to her “lower-level fashion studio,” was determined to outcompete our gloom with her enthusiasm.

“Skaters!” she said, waving her free arm in a dramatic curlicue. “You are most welcome.”

Fiona Foster was, to quote my mother, “a piece of work.” She looked a bit like a Barbie doll that has spent too much time in the sun.

So
this
was Rebecca Foster’s gene pool.

My mother followed Fiona Foster down the stairs into the darkened basement.

I grabbed Sarah’s arm. “Shouldn’t we do something? I mean, about your dad. Maybe call the police?”

Sarah looked at me. She seemed disgusted by the suggestion. “Do something? Do what? He’s done it before, Franklin. Just drop it, okay? He’ll be back.” She let out a long sigh through her nose, and headed down.

I took a deep breath and followed her. In a clatter of steps, we entered a dimly lit room filled with that suffocating moldy-basement smell. Fiona plunged farther into the darkness.

“I want to turn on the lights all at once so you get the full effect,” she said. “We just finished the remodel. Ta da!”

The “remodel” seemed to consist of stringing white Christmas lights around the drop ceiling. Surely, the pink shag carpet could not be new since it was already stained in several places. A tall metal cabinet stood along the far wall next to a floor mirror, and a shower rod with a plastic floral curtain was rigged up over a corner of the room.

Sarah, my mother, and I lined up against the wall as Fiona rushed back toward us. We’d been herded into an alcove next to a wrought-iron café table piled with big books of skating costumes.

Between Sarah’s home life and Fiona’s home, my senses were so overloaded that I sank into one of the wrought-iron chairs against the wall without examining the seat first. As if on cue, a long-haired cat leapt into my lap and began to purr furiously, releasing clouds of hair and dander all over my carefully maintained khakis.

“Uh,” I said to Fiona’s mass of blond hair, for that was all we could see of her as she extracted ice cube trays from a mini fridge under the utility sink.

“Oh, that’s Chester,” she said, straightening. “He loves everybody. Anyone for a refreshing glass of Crystal Light?”

We shook our heads no. My mother sat down on the other side of the table and heaved a skating book onto her lap.

“Well, then,” Fiona said cheerfully, dropping the tray onto the plywood that spanned the utility sink, “you must be Sarah.” She picked up a pink clipboard and wound a measuring tape around her neck like a scarf.

Sarah nodded and looked at the floor.

Fiona began to read. “According to Julia here, you’re entered in the junior division of the GPVAFSA’s regional tournament, but that’s in”—here she paused to spread her fingers flat across her bony chest—“a little over two weeks…with the exhibition in”—more dramatic clutching—“a week and a half?

“You gals must think I’m a miracle worker.”

There was a long pause that we filled by examining the pile on the shag carpet. Not a one of us favored the term “gal.”

“
But…
I do have a secret weapon.”

Fiona trotted over to her metal cabinet and yanked open the doors. The rusted grating of its hinges startled Chester, who released another handful of hair into the atmosphere before digging his claws into my thighs and leaping.

I cried out, which seemed like the appropriate response to being impaled by a dozen needle-sharp objects. My mother took no action other than a quick glance in my direction, leaving me to sift through drifts of hair to search for puncture wounds on my own.

Sarah Kervick had withdrawn into herself. One glance at her face was enough to confirm she wasn’t daydreaming. But she wasn’t with us in the room, either. It took several seconds of disregarding my own pain and discomfort to realize that I had never seen this look before. It wasn’t bored (reserved for school), blissful (reserved for skating), hero-worshiping (reserved for my mother), or disgusted, impatient, or frustrated (all reserved for me). No. Sarah Kervick looked sad. Very sad. How could I know that the look on her face would unsettle me even more than the filthy feline lumbering toward a litter box with a funny hitch in his gait?