Not That I Care (4 page)

“What a ludicrous excuse,” Mom said, poking her head out from the kitchen. “For their sake, I’m trying to keep my thoughts to myself, but come on, Eddie. Movie actor? You never acted in a single . . . you wouldn’t come see me in the high school play! You said it was for zips, acting!”

Dad sighed. “Jo? You don’t have an ambition, you don’t have a gift—so you don’t have any access to what I’m going through. Right?”

Mom stormed back into the kitchen. We heard cabinet doors slamming.

I tried desperately to think of something to say to ease Dad’s pain. “Maybe we should talk to Father Connolly,” I suggested. It honestly never occurred to me that this was anything more or less than my father having a mental meltdown.

Dad reached over and touched my cheek lightly. “I need to go,” he said in his gravelly voice. He licked his lower lip.

“When?” asked Ned.

“I’ll get my things together tonight, leave for Los Angeles first thing tomorrow morning.”

Ned shrugged. “Go.”

I don’t remember the rest of that night so clearly, except I know I made a royal pain of myself, crying, begging, yelling at Mom not to let him go, hanging on his legs, screaming at Ned that it was his fault Daddy was leaving. I was pretty awful. Ned locked himself in his room, so I locked myself in mine but sat against the door listening to Mom and Dad. I fell asleep sitting there and woke up with a jolt at four the next morning. I raced to the living room—Dad was snoring on the couch, his feet hanging off the armrest. His two suitcases were by the front door.

I tiptoed over to my father and watched his beautiful, stubbly face as he slept. I resisted the temptation to snuggle under the blanket with him. His Saint Christopher medal lay inside the circle of his watch, its chain gathered in loops beneath it. I picked it up, knelt beside the coffee table, and began praying:
Saint Christopher, protect us. Don’t let my daddy fall apart and have to go find himself in California. I love him so much. Give him the strength to stay with us, or give me the power to make him stay
.

And then Saint Christopher answered, “You have the power.”

“What?” I whispered. I opened my eyes like, no way. I didn’t really believe in stuff like that. I checked around to see if it was Ned, messing with me, but his door was still closed, so I looked down at the medal in my palm. It was warm, suddenly—not hot like I’d burn myself but warm like my father’s hand.

OK, I thought, feeling excited but foolish. Dad never leaves the house without this thing. I closed my hands around the medal.
Thank you, Saint Christopher
, I whispered, getting up off my knees and tiptoeing back to my room.
Good, Morgan
, I whispered to myself on the way.
Talking to a necklace. You’re losing it just like your father
.

I first put my father’s necklace under my pillow, but then realized, no, he could find it there too easily, so I took my pillow out of the case and unzipped it. Inside were down feathers. I shoved my hand in with the Saint Christopher medal gripped tight and let go. I zipped the pillow back up and wiggled it back into my Minnie Mouse pillowcase. I fell asleep so soundly I didn’t hear the commotion when my father woke up and searched.

From what Ned told me after, Dad tore the house apart looking for it, even accused Ned of stealing it, which led to a fight between Mom and Dad and then Mom and Ned, during which Dad took off. Mom says my father kissed me good-bye while I was sleeping; Ned says he didn’t. Not that I care.

The Saint Christopher medal was cold when I dug it out of my pillow this weekend to put in my Bring Yourself in a Sack.

seven

L
ou Hochstetter is explaining the
differences between two miniature World War II guns. At least my stuff isn’t as boring as his.

I let go of the Saint Christopher medal, let it drop into the bottom of my bag. It clanks into the envelope with the broken thermometer inside. I feel the thermometer, quick, to make sure it’s OK, and then I look around to see if anybody is watching me hunt around inside my Sack. No. Everybody actually seems pretty wrapped up in Lou’s speech about World War II artillery. I guess I’m just shallow.

eight

I
went over to CJ’s house for the
first time in the fall of fourth grade. She seemed a little creepy, hardly ever talking, and so skinny her joints stuck out, but she invited me for a sleepover and since things were pretty grim at my house around then, I was happy to be anywhere else.

We played a few board games in the basement, and I showed her a card trick Ned had taught me.

“How did you do that?” she asked when her card appeared time after time.

“Magic,” I said. That’s what Ned told me a magician always says: Magic. You never give away the trick or you ruin it for the audience and it’s not magic anymore.

CJ’s green eyes opened wide. “Wow,” she whispered.

I only knew the one trick so after a few times, when it was getting a little boring, I tried to teach CJ to play gin rummy. She couldn’t hold ten cards in her tiny hands, though, and although we were only in fourth grade I had already outgrown seven-card gin. Anyway, I don’t think CJ was too into cards. We put them away in their cardboard box on her playroom shelf and went out into her garden where her father was planting tulips. We stood at the edge of the flower bed for a few minutes, watching him press the dirt gently around the tulip bulbs. He looked up after a few, smiled at us, and asked if we wanted to help. CJ shrugged and looked at me. I wanted to. “I don’t care,” I said. “I guess.”

Mr. Hurley let us each choose a bulb. I chose red, CJ chose yellow, though that was just predictions, on their boxes, of what color they’d turn out; right then they just looked like knobby onions. I held mine in my cupped palm, trying to imitate the way CJ was cradling hers, and forced myself not to brush the dirt off.

We placed them gently in holes next to each other, and Mr. Hurley checked to make sure enough soil was packed around each. We’d done a great job, he said, and told me I should remember where I planted mine so in the spring when I came back I could check on it. He said it could be mine. I shrugged, OK, like it was no big deal having my own red tulip in somebody else’s garden. It was the third one in, second row.

I sort of wanted to keep pressing dirt around my tulip’s roots, but Mr. Hurley said he’d give us a ride around the yard in the wheelbarrow, and CJ jumped up, clapping. “Don’t tell Mommy,” Mr. Hurley whispered to CJ. “She’d kill me.” We climbed in quietly and carefully, but when Mr. Hurley lifted the handle, CJ and I tumbled onto our backs. He ran around the yard making quick turns, toppling us over until we were covered with dirt and scrambled up in each other’s arms and legs, which made me laugh but also almost cry at the same time.

Her dad is sort of scrawny and has a thick mustache, the kind of man my own father would call a zip—as in “zero.” Mr. Hurley made screeching noises while he charged around the yard with us screaming in the wheelbarrow, and also he did this thing with CJ where he’d grab her head in the crook of his elbow and look away from her at the same time, then when she was snuggled in against him, his arm encircling her head, he’d kiss her on the hair. He did it twice in that one afternoon, once in the flower bed and once after. Mrs. Hurley yelled out the window for us to get out of the wheelbarrow, we could get hurt.

I kept thinking maybe he would do it to me, too, but he didn’t, even though I was standing right next to CJ when he did it the second time, and he easily could’ve grabbed me up, too. It would’ve felt weird anyway, probably, so it’s good he didn’t. I’m not the cuddly type. Even when I was a baby, I couldn’t stand to be cuddled, my mother says; when my brother was a baby she never put him down, but I would scream whenever she held me until she left me alone with a toy in my bouncy seat. That’s what she says, anyway. I don’t remember that. I guess Mr. Hurley could tell I’m not the cuddly type. That’s why he didn’t cuddle me when he could’ve. Also it’s not like we really knew each other well or anything.

After that, while Mr. Hurley, breathing heavy and sweating, set up the sprinklers, CJ and I went in her house to wash up. Mrs. Hurley was in the living room with CJ’s little brother, Paul, who had a virus. She was spooning soup out of a bowl into his mouth. She suggested, after she made sure we hadn’t gotten hurt with all that wildness outside, that we should play upstairs or in the basement again so we wouldn’t bother Paul. His cheeks were rosy like they’d been slapped; he looked healthier than anybody else in the family, but I wasn’t saying anything. It’s not like I was part of their family. I followed CJ upstairs.

We washed our hands, then CJ showed me around. Her parents’ room was peach-colored: peach wallpaper, peach wall-to-wall carpet, peach bedspread on a bed as big as my whole room. Below the window was a peach couch.

“A couch in the bedroom?” I asked CJ.

“It’s a love seat,” she said.

I shrugged like yeah, so what, I know that.

I’d never heard of a love seat before. It sounded like something private between a husband and wife, something maybe everybody knew about except stupid me. A love seat—the more I tried the words out in my head, love seat, love seat, the more it sounded like something kids shouldn’t be allowed to see. My parents were separated but even before, they didn’t have a love seat, or at least they didn’t ever let me see their love seat.

“Let’s go,” I said, desperate to get away from staring at it.

CJ showed me her brother’s room next. It was blue and white with a sports theme—the wallpaper border around the top had pictures of balls from every different sport. His comforter matched. In a big see-through hamper were real balls to match the pictures.

“Your brother must really like sports,” I said.

“No,” she answered. “He likes computers.”

I took a Nerf football out of his hamper and followed CJ to the bathroom.

“This is the bathroom,” she said.

“No kidding,” I said.

She blushed, which made me feel guilty. In the car on the way to CJ’s that morning, my mother had said,
Try to behave yourself, Morgan, and don’t be too obnoxious
.

“Sorry” I told CJ. “Just kidding.”

She smiled without showing her teeth and took me to her room. It was pink with a canopy bed and built-in shelves and a dressing table in the corner—the kind that has a long white skirt down to the floor, and you can sit on the thickly padded stool staring at your face in the heart-shaped mirror and swing the arms open so the see-through fabric brushes over your legs, and you can easily imagine you’re somebody. I closed my eyes.

“Let’s go back in your parents’ room,” I said.

“Why?”

“Have a catch.” I held up her brother’s football.

“We can’t, inside,” she said. “You want to go outside?”

I opened my eyes and saw her nervous face as pale as it could possibly ever get.
You spoiled brat
, I thought, hating her, wanting to punish her for showing off all her stuff like she thought she was so great just because she has a pink room with pink shelves holding more ceramic horses and Barbies on stands than any one girl could possibly need and a dressing table you could sit down at and be pretty.

“You scared?” I asked her, digging my fists into my hips.

She shook her head slightly. “No.”

I turned and stalked into her parents’ room and while I waited for her to follow me, I let myself check out the love seat again. It just looked like a small couch, no matter how I tried to squint and imagine.

When I felt CJ behind me, I turned, backed up, and tossed her the Nerf football. She lunged for it. In ballet class, I always felt jerky and abrupt beside her, because she moved so smoothly. Going for the ball, though, her body didn’t seem to know what it was doing. She bent her knees in a deep
plié
to catch it and pushed her chin way out front, I don’t know why. It made me like her again, seeing her so awkward, and her little relieved smile when she opened her eyes and discovered the football in her arms made me want to be gentle to her.

“Good catch,” I said.

CJ lifted her spindly arm high above her head to toss the ball back to me. She squeezed her eyes shut before flinging the ball. It wobbled sideways off her fingers. I rushed toward it, but before I could make a grab, the ball had smashed into the stuff on top of her parents’ dresser.

CJ gasped when she opened her eyes after the crashing sound. I was already in front of the dresser lifting the Nerf ball off the clutter of perfume bottles and cuff links.

“It’s OK,” I told her.

She stood behind me, panting, her long, skinny fingers pulling at her lips. “What’s that?” she whispered.

“Mercury,” I said and picked up a broken piece of glass, which had been part of a thermometer. “A thermometer broke.” When I turned to show it to her, I discovered I’d been wrong—she actually could get paler.

“My, my, brother’s, temperature. My mother doesn’t, trust, the el-el-electronic . . .”

“It’s OK,” I whispered again, worrying she might faint. “We’ll clean it up. They’ll never know.”

“I’m n-n-n-not, not, not . . .” She backed away from me until she bumped into the love seat and sat down on the edge of it, her posture erect except for her dropped head, which was clutched between her hands. I liked her for that, how guilty she felt even if I also thought she was being a little babyish. It just seemed to me like somebody who would feel all guilty and bad about herself for breaking a thermometer is someone you could trust not to be selfish. Selfish was a big word in my house that year.

I pulled a tissue out of the peach-colored ceramic tissue box holder. “I’ll just clean it,” I assured her. “See?”

She peeked up over her hands. I grabbed a big wad of mercury with the tissue and tried to hold it up to show her.

“See? I asked again, but as I asked, the mercury broke into two balls and escaped, jumping back down to the dresser. “Hey!” I said to it and heard CJ sort of giggle. It was more like a huff of air, actually, but I could tell it was the Cornelia-Jane-Hurley version of a giggle. “Get over here!” I whispered, grabbing again at the escaping blob. “Get! You! Get over here!”