Jesus Land (19 page)

Beyond the flashing tree, Mother and Dad sit on the sofa, reading the newspaper. I creep to the basement door in sock feet, the tree between us, and open it, lifting the doorknob to ease the stress on the hinges.

The lights are off downstairs, but the boys’ door is open. I walk in and find David lying faceup on his bed, shaking. It’s too dark to see his face.

“David?” I whisper.

He doesn’t respond, so I turn on the lamp next to his bed and crouch beside him. Tears are drying on his cheeks, and his eyes are vacant as he stares at the ceiling.

“Are you okay?” I ask, although it’s obvious that he’s not. “Do you want some water or something?”

He begins to murmur.

“So sick of it, sick of all of it.”

My heart contracts. He’s giving up, and we’re almost there.

“Don’t do this now,” I say. “A year and a half and we’re eighteen. Remember Florida!”

He laughs bitterly—we haven’t mentioned Florida in months, not since we started living our separate lives—and starts to sit up before gasping and putting a hand on his left
arm. I notice, for the first time, the weird bend in the middle of his forearm.

“What’s happened?” I ask him.

He turns his head to look at the carpet next to where I’m crouched and I follow his eyes. A 2x4 lays on the floor, one of the pieces from the pile beside the woodstove.

“Dad hit you with that?”

He nods.

“I think it’s broken,” he says.

My throat constricts and it’s hard to breathe. What kind of father would do this to his own son? Unless it’s true what Jerome said. That Dad doesn’t consider the boys his sons.

“I’m so sick of it . . .” David murmurs again, and then he starts to cry in silence, tears dripping down his cheeks.

“Shh . . . I’ll take care of you,” I say, fighting tears myself.

I pull the bedspread off Jerome’s bed and cover him, then go upstairs.

They’re sipping coffee; Pat Boone’s now singing “God Rest You Merry Gentlemen.”

I walk over to them.

“I think something’s wrong with David,” I say, giving them each a knifing look. “I think somebody busted his arm.”

I glare directly into Father’s eyes after I say this, defying him to say something, then stride to my room and lock the door. Half an hour later, the garage door creaks open and I look out my window to see the Porsche disappear down the lane.

Jerome was the last person to break David’s bones, in 1980. Jerome was being his typical bullying self, chucking pieces of asphalt at David in front of our old house as David sat on the curb with his legs stretched out in front of him, bouncing a
basketball between them. I sat in the yard behind him, playing with my hamsters.

After a while, David got tired of dodging the rocks and lobbed a piece back at Jerome, hitting him in the head. Jerome yelped in pain, then ran over to him and jack-hammered his size-14 feet onto David’s leg. I heard it snap from where I was sitting.

“That’ll teach you to respect your elders,” Jerome said as David screamed and twisted in the street.

The official story after church the next morning is that he fell off the bus and broke his arm. That’s what David tells people when they crowd around him in the foyer. Mrs. De Jong clucks her tongue and asks me if I saw it happen. I look at David and he looks at the ground.

“No, I got off before he did,” I say, my cheeks burning with the lie.

“I bet you heard him, though,” Rick Hoolsema laughs. “I bet he yelled real good.”

David manages a weak smile, and my eyes sting as I watch him.

Dad must have arranged to have David “taken care of” by one of his partners at the clinic or reset David’s arm himself, so there was no need to fill out a police report on suspicious injuries.

“You kids are blessed with medical parents, they take good care of you,” says Mr. Needam, an elder.

At this, I turn to David.

“Time to go,” I say. “We’re late.”

David follows me mutely, his noninjured arm flung out for balance as he walks down the icy steps in front of church.

“Do you want to hold on to me?” I ask him.

He shakes his head no.

“I’m quitting the swim team,” I tell Mother on Monday afternoon.

She’s sitting on a stool at the kitchen counter, signing a large stack of Christmas cards. “Jesus is the Reason for the Season!” is printed in shiny green letters on the front of each card, and Luke 2:11 is printed inside: “For unto us a child is born, for unto us, a son is given.”

“I thought you liked swimming,” she says in an absent voice, signing “In HIS name, Dr. and Mrs. Jacob Scheeres” inside the card.

“I do, but I’m having problems with some classes and I can’t do everything,” I say, walking past her. I fill a mug with morning coffee, yawning loudly, and stick it in the microwave.

She looks over at me.

“Maybe you have that chronic fatigue syndrome,” she says. “I’m calling Dr. Walters.”

I shrug. The microwave dings and I stir milk into the stale coffee, clouding it gray, and yawn again.

She’s threatened to drag me to the doctor for weeks because I’m always yawning and taking naps, but she never makes an appointment.

“That’s high school for you,” I say as I turn to go back to my room. “Exhausting.”

What I don’t tell her is that I already quit the team last week—I skipped so many practices that Coach Shultz was about to kick me off anyway, so I decided to beat him to the punch.

What I don’t tell her is that I’m flunking half my classes.

What I don’t tell her is that these things are happening because I’m up all night having sex while she and Dad sleep two doors down the hallway.

I wait for Scott each night dressed in a summer teddy, perfumed and painted and shivering under the blankets because Mother lowers the thermostat to 55 at night.

He walks forty minutes from his house to mine, down County Road 650 through unplowed snow. As I wait for him, I imagine myself his prize, one he must battle cold, dark, and distance to claim.

When I hear the shuffle of his boots on the roof ledge, I open my window and he steps into my bedroom, tracking in cold as he peels off his layers, one by one, until he’s standing there naked and brown and grinning and already hard.

We listen to The Police while we do it, and if the tape ends, Scott stops whatever we’re doing to flip it over, and afterward he drums his fingers on my back to the music as we fade into sleep. And that’s the moment I cherish most, when I’m stretched onto his warmth, my head on the soft pillow of his chest, his heart throbbing in my ear, his arms around me.

We don’t talk much—partly because my parents are right down the hall, partly because we don’t really know each other all that well—and when the alarm rings at 5:30, he dresses and slips back out the window into the rising dawn. I watch him cross the back field, a running shadow, then reset the alarm for 6:30.

At school, I’m so stupid with sleep that I cram myself full of No-Doz and Jolt Cola, but this only makes me jumpy
and
tired and I pinch myself to stay awake in class.

After a few weeks of practicing sex, I’m starting to feel something. Not the eyeballs-rolled-toward-heaven suck-in-your-breath immensity that Scott gets out of it, but a swelling pleasure that builds as he seesaws on top of me and ends all too quickly when he suddenly stops and says “fuck” in a small voice before rolling off me.

But it’s enough of a something to make Scott clamp his hand over my mouth so I don’t make noise and enough of a something to make me want to practice alone, rubbing the swelling place with a nail polish bottle and pretending it’s Scott until my body
trembles and a brightness like heat lightning flashes through me and I whisper “fuck” as well.

The first time it happened, I laid there marveling at the beauty of it, wondering why God would forbid such bliss when He makes us endure so much misery.

A slammed door wakes me and I slide guiltily into my desk chair. It’s dark outside, and I don’t even remember lying down.

I hear Mother yell for David, her voice thin and agitated, and then walk across the great room toward the hallway. I switch on my clunky yellow desk lamp a moment before she opens my door.

“Where’s David?” she asks, lifting a clear rain bonnet from her head. “I told him to bring in the dumpsters after school and they’re still out there.”

The stink of ammonia wafts over to me; she got her hair permed in town, disciplined into tight brown coils. I frown down at my hastily opened French dictionary, not wanting her to notice my sleep-creased face. My final is tomorrow, and I’m going to fail it.

“How should I know where David’s at?” I raise the dictionary to my face, blocking out her presence with neat rows of print.

“Come get the groceries in then.” She lingers in the doorway. “And if you can’t find your brother, you’ll have to get the dumpsters yourself.”

I jerk my head up to protest, but she’s already gone.

Ice scratches the window; the last thing I want to do right now is drag the garbage bins a quarter mile over the slush-covered lane in the dark. I push back my chair, and for the millionth time in my life set out to go find David.

He’s downstairs in the rocking chair, as always. But he’s got the lights off for once, and is just sitting there, rocking, looking
out the window at the silhouettes of gray trees against the grayer sky.

“Didn’t you hear Mother?” I ask angrily. “Go fetch in the dumpsters.”

He doesn’t answer, he just keeps rocking. I go to the wall panel and swipe on all the overhead lights. The room blooms into color.

“Are you deaf or dumb or both?” I shout.

I turn toward him and see the wall-mounted pencil sharpener in pieces at his feet. I take a step closer and see his right arm lying across his lap, slashed red. In his hand, he holds the razor from the pencil sharpener—he’s sliced a bloody ladder into his brown flesh, and there’s blood smeared on the cast of his broken arm. He continues rocking, now staring at his ghostly reflection. His eyes are wide open, unflinching.

I sprint back upstairs and Mother hushes me as I throw open the basement door. She’s watching a news update about the Beirut embassy bombing on television.

“David cut himself,” I say over the TV report, gripping the counter with both hands; the words are hard to say.

She walks around me to the stove, where corned beef hash fries in a skillet.

“Tell him to put a Band-Aid on it,” she says. “Your father’s going to be home any minute and . . .”

“He cut his wrist!” I yell, cupping my hands around my mouth as if she were half a mile away. She exhales, exasperated.

“Why can’t I just have one day of peace?” she grumbles, handing me the spatula.

She walks downstairs braying his name.

“A White Christmas, just what everyone wanted!” the bleached blond TV reporter says. I push the pink and white paste
around the skillet and wonder if I should call an ambulance or if Mother will take him to the hospital herself.

Next thing, she’s beside me, snatching the spatula from my hand.

“It’s burning!”

I wipe my hand on my jeans to erase her touch and watch her spoon four craters in the hash and crack an egg into each one. She says nothing.

“Well, are you taking him to the hospital?” I ask.

She snorts and jerks the salt shaker over the skillet.

“They’re just surface cuts,” she says. “If you want to kill yourself, you slice down, not sideways.”

She illustrates with her index finger before bending to pull a metal lid from the tangle of pans in the cupboard below the counter.

“But doesn’t he need . . .”

“He’s just trying to get attention. Ignore him.”

She drops the lid on the skillet and turns to open the refrigerator.

“Julia, the groceries!”

In the cold garage, three brown Marsh sacks poke from the Audi’s open trunk. I jostle them onto my knee and then into my arms. As I walk back into the mudroom, the garage door opens and Dad’s Porsche glides in. When I turn to nudge the door closed with my foot, I see him sitting in his silver car with the engine off, his head back, his eyes shut. Lacy flute music seeps from the closed windows. Mozart? Vivaldi? I didn’t even know he liked classical music. I shut my eyes too and let the faint notes wash over me like a whispered prayer. If only we could live as peacefully as this.

“Julia, the milk!” Mother yells from the kitchen, and I jolt to consciousness and shut the door.

As we sit at the supper table—Mother in her apron, Father in his suit, David with his two damaged arms—I think about how I’ll stretch myself into Scott’s warmth in a few hours, and my cheeks flush with my secret.

I have a life apart from this.

They announce David’s departure the day after Christmas. They’re sending him to a Christian school, on an island in the Caribbean.

“He’ll be better off there,” Dad says, as if David were already gone, and not sitting on the sofa next to me. I recall how Elaine said David would be better off in Chicago, and now Dad’s saying he’ll be better off in the Caribbean, and wonder why he can’t just be better off
here,
at home. His home.