Imperfect Spiral (4 page)

“Perhaps if we'd focused on that,” Mr. Danker says. “On self-control.”

“You can't do that, Tom,” my mother says. “You can't second-guess.”

Mr. Danker looks at her directly for the first time since we walked in. “I can,” he says. “It's very hard not to.”

Mom's face turns slightly, but noticeably, red.

“We can't help but second-guess,” Mrs. Danker says. “What if this? What if that?”

“What if someone had trained him never to run into the street?” Mr. Danker says. “What if we'd trained Humphrey to stay with the adult, or—whomever”—gesturing toward me—“when walking on Quarry Road?”

What if the stupid babysitter had held on to the boy's hand?

“Well, it's understandable,” my father says. “Of course it's understandable that you wonder ‘what if.'”

After a few more minutes of this agony, we leave. We leave
Mrs. Danker swallowed up by her enormous comfy sofa. We leave Mr. Danker sitting next to her, his straight back and neck resisting the sofa's embrace, his hair relentlessly at attention, a tiny army of soldiers on guard all over his rectangle of a head.

“Those were his children from his first marriage,” Mom explains to Dad on the walk home. “The son looks just like him, doesn't he? And the daughter—the one who answered the door—she has his face, too. The shape of his head. They both live out of town, isn't that right, Danny?”

I don't know. I don't know about Mr. and Mrs. Danker's lives as
people
. They're just the parents of the boy I babysat. I know that they're older than usual for parents of a five-year-old, and Mr. Danker is even older than older than usual. I guess it doesn't really surprise me that he had a family before Humphrey.

“Was she married before, too?” Dad asks.

“I don't think so,” Mom said. “I think she had a career
in—something scientific. They moved here a few years before she got pregnant with Humphrey. Is that about right, Danny?”

I don't know that, either. I know that Mrs. Danker wasn't going out to work on the weekdays when I babysat; she was going for cancer treatments. Breast cancer treatments, and then, usually, a couple of hours of rest at home. Other than the time she spent resting in her bedroom, she didn't act sick. She didn't talk about being sick. She was matter-of-fact about her appointments.

Mom knows all that, too, so I don't bother to bring it up.

“Tom really jumped down your throat, Jan,” Dad says to my mother.

“I was only saying that second-guessing is—well, what's the point of it. But I shouldn't have said anything. I don't know him well enough.”

To me, it's interesting that someone who is as particular about words as Thomas Danker must be—he used the word “whomever” when a regular person would have said “whoever”—referred to a failure to “train” Humphrey. Didn't he mean to say there was a failure to “teach” Humphrey? You train a puppy. You teach a kid. I suppose you do train a kid to use the potty and graduate from his diaper. But still, it sounded odd to me.

On the other hand, there is the possibility that Mr. Danker was a tad preoccupied and not thinking about using the most appropriate words in the context at hand.

“It's tough,” Dad says. “It's the toughest thing.”

Mom doesn't say anything to that, but stops walking for a beat so that I can catch up to her. “It was brave and kind of you to make this condolence call,” she says, putting her arm around my shoulders.

Wait, you gave me a choice?

“I don't know what good it did,” I say.

“It was just the right thing to do,” Mom says. “I'm sure the Dankers appreciated it.”

I'm sure they neither appreciated nor didn't appreciate my visit. I'm sure that Mr. Danker doesn't know my name. I'm sure that Mrs. Danker is trying very hard not to blame me.

At home, Adrian is on the porch fiddling with his laptop.

“Can you stay over tonight again?” Dad asks.

He can't. Adrian lives in a rented room way farther out in the suburbs—the exurbs—where rents are cheap. He has worked a bunch of jobs—busboy at a steakhouse, detailer at a car wash, hauler of junk for one of those companies that will clean out your basement. Most recently he's signed on as a plumber's apprentice. This is not the dream career path of anyone I know. I can't imagine it's the career path of Adrian's dreams, either. And yet—whenever I see Adrian these days, he seems happier than he's ever been.

He isn't staying for dinner tonight. Sunday nights Adrian still works at the steakhouse. He's kept that job a few nights a week. The plumbing apprenticeship is a Monday-through-Friday daytime gig.

Mom and Dad go inside. I stay on the porch with Adrian.

“How'd it go?” he asks.

“It went.”

My phone buzzes. I glance at the text.

So sorry about what happened.

“It's Marissa,” I tell Adrian.

“Good old Marissa,” Adrian says, smiling. “Marissa and her seven brothers.”

“Her five brothers,” I correct him.

“I thought maybe she got a couple more since I saw her last.”

“She's sorry about what happened,” I say.

Adrian nods. “What else is there to say?”

I haven't talked to Marissa in—I have to stop to count—seven months. More than half a year.

“Actually, there's plenty else to say,” I tell Adrian.

“O-
kay
,” he says, drawing the word out. “Start saying it.”

I don't, and he doesn't press except to add, after a minute, “And are you going to answer her?”

I text back:

Thanks, Marissa.

I'm here if you need to talk.

She's a good listener, but seven months is seven months.

Hanging out with my brother just now.
Maybe later.

OK. Take care.

“Hey, Danny-boy,” Adrian says. His nickname for me. Sometimes, for variety's sake, Danny-girl. “Look at this.”

“I can't see,” I say. We're next to each other in rocking chairs; the angle isn't right for looking at his screen.

“This is how messed up people are: there are websites selling roadside memorial signs. You customize them with a photo of—the deceased.” He slides the computer onto my lap.

“Shut up,” I say in disbelief.

“I know,” Adrian says. “See where the ad brags about the sturdy hardware they include so the sign will withstand the elements?”

“Who thinks up this stuff?” I say.

“Definitely not high school dropouts,” Adrian says. “Don't blame the dummies.”

Adrian is one of the least dumb people I know. I don't fully get why he dropped out with only a few months to go before graduating, except that maybe it was the worst thing he could do to Mom that was legal. It may have been the worst thing he could do to Dad, too, but Adrian would not have been thinking about hurting Dad.

He would not have been thinking about hurting me, either, but that doesn't stop the ache. When Adrian was still here, the
house felt full. We hung out, watched television, talked, played music together—he on drums and I on guitar. I went to his hockey games. When he had friends over, they usually played loud video games, followed by crazy bouts of touch football in our backyard, followed by more video games. I could keep up with the best of them in Rock Star. I wasn't bad at Madden NFL. I stayed out of the real football games—they could accidentally kill me. Because Adrian was nice to me, his friends were nice to me, too.

I have not always been as nice to my own friends, I'm afraid. There's the thing with Marissa—our seven months of silence. It began in January. Or, I should say, she probably thinks it began in January.

We'd made plans for her to come over with her guitar. Marissa, who's a grade ahead of me, goes to a small private school; we met when I was ten and she was eleven, in a guitar class at the community hall. After that first class ended, we kept taking classes together, all classical acoustic guitar. There are a lot of great Spanish songs written for two, and Marissa and I could play for hours. We stopped the classes in middle school, but we still played together sometimes.

Unfortunately, just at the moment Marissa arrived that day in January, I had taken the lead in a “Score Duel” match.

“This is historic,” I said when she came in.

“And yet fleeting,” said Sam, one of Adrian's friends.

“Or the start of a new and enduring Rock Star legend,” I countered.

“Marissa, give it one level,” Adrian said. “I admire my sister's skills, but I don't think that her lead is going to last.”

Only it did last. Really, who
cares
if you win at Rock Star's head-to-head competition, or any other video game—and yet I was obsessed. Marissa was not. Not obsessed and not amused. After about ten minutes, she made a point of not watching the action on the screen, which is what everyone else was doing. Ironically, the only person in the room who paid any attention to her was Adrian.

Ironically, that is, because lately Marissa had been making remarks about Adrian that I did not appreciate.

The remarks weren't insults, at least not outright. More like little questions, but they were questions wrapped around disapproval.
Isn't it too bad Adrian quit hockey? He hasn't applied to college? Why does he talk that way to your parents?

Marissa has her big family, with her five brothers, and they are all happily following the path that every parent craves. AP classes and sports teams in high school. Awards. College scholarships. Internships.

“Does it bug you what Adrian is doing?” she said last fall after she'd been over for dinner.

“What do you mean?”

“He's pretty negative,” she said. “Like when your mother was talking about Thanksgiving plans and doing something as a family and he shut down every single idea she and your dad had.”

True, he had. I hadn't thought he was negative, just honest.
No thanks, he didn't want to join them for a movie, a hike, Black Friday shopping, a jazz club.

“I mean, he was rejecting you, too, Danielle,” Marissa said.

“That's just Adrian. He's going through some stuff,” I said. “But he's the best.”

“Well, if you don't think it's hurtful …” Marissa just left that hanging there.

“I don't feel hurt,” I said. “And I think my parents can take care of themselves.”

She didn't say anything to that.

Marissa's parents, I know, wouldn't tolerate Adrian's brand of “honesty.” They run a “yes, sir” and “yes, ma'am” household. Our parents do not.

“We may not be everyone's idea of a perfect family,” I added. “But we get each other.”

“I didn't mean to sound judgmental,” Marissa said. “I just thought it might be hard for you. Since you have a decent relationship with your parents.”

“Everybody has a decent relationship with everybody,” I said. “We're just fine.”

“Every family is different,” Marissa said.

“Yup,” I said.

So maybe I was a little too into my Rock Star game last January precisely because I knew Marissa would disapprove.

“Hey, Danny,” Adrian said at one point. “We will concede victory. Go ahead with Marissa.”

No way. A conceded victory was not good enough. I wanted to win for real.

After about forty-five minutes, Marissa left. I didn't even pause the game. I know—very, very bad, abominable behavior. I called and texted afterward when I came to my senses. She didn't pick up or respond. I stopped after a week. She had every reason to be angry. But I had reasons of my own, so I wasn't going out of my way to fix things between us.

It was true that even last autumn Adrian had already started to feel caged at home; Marissa's observations about him weren't so wrong. But I didn't need to hear them from her, with her picture-perfect family. Everything Mom and Dad said to Adrian—about school, about hockey, about how he spent his free time, about the daily news, about, really, it could be the weather—grated. Especially Mom, from the moment he set foot in high school: Why aren't you signing up for AP history? So-and-so's mother says he's taking three AP courses this semester. Why isn't the coach starting you in the hockey games? So-and-so starts, and he hasn't been playing as long as you have. Why didn't you try out for the school's jazz band again? Why don't you go after an internship? It's never too early to build your résumé. To get a start on your career. And on and on.

Adrian didn't create noisy scenes. But the more she suggested, the less he did. He stopped playing hockey. He signed up for no AP classes that last, abbreviated semester of high
school. His drum set went untouched. Instead, he started to take jobs. He worked after school, nights, weekends.

Some parents would be happy about this. My father seemed kind of awed by Adrian's industriousness. Mom—she wasn't awed. She was annoyed. She knew it was a sort of push-back against her. She didn't seem capable, though, of backing off and seeing what might happen. It didn't occur to her that if she left Adrian alone, he just might stick to the path she thought kids in middle-class families like ours should follow. Higher education and careers. Careers, not jobs.