Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes (14 page)

I told her I thought she should watch out.

“For what?”

“For Mr. Mautz. He was asking me all kinds of questions about CAT class today. Like he was trying to get something on you.”

She looked at me strangely. “Like what?”

I said I didn't know, but that's how it felt. Then I told her about Mautz's and my conversation concerning Brittain.

She listened carefully, looking a bit puzzled, and annoyed. “Tell you what,” she said when I finished. “You go on doing what you're doing and don't worry about it. I do agree with Mr. Mautz on one thing. It would be good for you guys to give Mark a little room. He doesn't have much of a sense of humor, and that
makes things doubly tough on him. Breakups are hard under any circumstances. Everybody hurts, Mobe. Remember that.”

I said I had decided to leave him alone.

“You might see if the Very Reverend Mr. Ellerby would join you in that decision.”

I said I would. Then, “I might have some information about Sarah Byrnes's mother.”

“Really? What kind of information?”

“Well, I talked to an old friend of hers who said her mom used to talk about going to Reno to be a card dealer and maybe learn to dance. You know, like in those shows they have.”

“How reliable is that?”

I told her about Dale and how he and Sarah Byrnes became friends.

“Sounds like you believe him.”

“He's not the kind of guy with a reason to lie,” I said. “He doesn't have much to lose.”

Lemry put her fingers to the bridge of her nose. “That would have been at least fourteen years ago.”

I nodded.

“We'd be lucky to find her. That's a long time to hold a job as a dealer. Or as a dancer.”

I shrugged. “All I know is what Dale said.”

“Do you think Sarah Byrnes would talk to me?” she asked. “If I went to the hospital with you, do you think she'd trust me?”

Boy, who knew. Sarah Byrnes is full of surprises. I can never tell when she's going to go along with something and when she's going to take my head off. I said that.

“Well, find out.”

I said I'd try, then Lemry told me to have a seat. I dropped my towel onto the cushion to keep the chair from getting wet and planted myself.

“Listen, Mobe, Sarah Byrnes has had a big impact on you, and her name comes up so often lately that I feel I know her. Sometimes the hardest thing about being a schoolteacher is having to leave the tough cases behind so you can cater to the masses. Most good teachers hate that. This girl seems to have worked her way into the part of me that doesn't let go. I really do want to help, and it seems as if the
only
help is to get her mom back here to tell the true facts. But I'm going to have to follow your lead. She trusts you if she trusts anybody. You're going to have to make the decisions about when to tell her what. I'm willing to put some energy and even some money into helping, but she has to want that for it to make a difference. It might be that we should find her mother first, before we say anything, to see if she will have
anything to do with her daughter. I don't know.”

I thought of all Sarah Byrnes's and my time together, tried to picture her reactions. “I know one thing,” I said finally. “Sarah Byrnes hates not knowing worse than anything. She has to okay anything we do. And the first thing I'll have to do is make it okay that I've told you everything.”

“Get to it.”

 

“You son of a bitch,” Sarah Byrnes spits through gritted teeth. “She's a teacher, you dickhead. She has to tell Child Protection Services, at least.”

“She said she wouldn't do that,” I say, “and I believe her.”

“She's a
teacher,”
Sarah Byrnes says again. “There's a fine if you don't tell. Jail, you asshole.”

I know Lemry wouldn't lie. “Look, I want to bring her here. We can go out into the courtyard, and you can see for yourself.”

Sarah Byrnes looks at me through those slits in her scarred face as if she's going to clean my clock on the spot. “I thought I could trust you,” she spits. “Shit, Eric, you of all people.” She turns to walk away.

But I grab her arm. She pulls away, but I don't let go. “Look, you're starting to piss me off. You tell me all
this shit, and then expect me to stand by and let whatever happens happen. Well, bullshit. Ellerby was right. Once I know something, I can't unknow it or pretend it isn't so. I'm responsible for anything I know. I was careful who I told. Lemry is safe. She is. And there are no other good choices. Shit, all you do is present me with impossibilities. You can't stay here forever, and you can't go home. Anything else I come up with won't work for some reason you think of….”

She jerks hard from my grasp. “What do you know?” she screams, and the attendants look up. “What the hell do you know? You went off and got yourself okay. Lemry is a big deal hero to you because she's your goddamn swim coach. She's the one that helped you be okay. Well, look at me, Eric. Look at me! I'm never going to be okay! Never!”

I could back down; would have a couple months ago, but I've seen Sarah Byrnes's dad for what he is now, and I've seen what that might do to her, and I'm simply not willing to let it be anymore. I'm just not. If you just wait around and let things happen, then they'll happen, and likely as not you'll eat shit. “No, Sarah Byrnes, you're wrong. You're just never going to be pretty. That part's right. But that's old news. Since right after the day your dad burned you. But you are going to be okay.
Goddamn it, you are! You were right. Being fat was a choice, even though I didn't know it at the time. But when I did know it I was still willing to stay that way so you wouldn't think I'd get all svelte and leave. That's how much your friendship meant. I hated being fat, but it was worth it not to lose you. And that has to make you
something,
at least to me.” I stop for a breath and realize tears are streaming down both our faces. I grab her and hold her, and though she doesn't grab me back, once again she doesn't push away.

 

Home. My room. My bed. Simon and Garfunkle on my CD player, barely audible over the wind whistling through the trees and the hard flecks of snow snapping against the glass. So these are the best years of my life. I'm scared. I promised Sarah Byrnes I'd help—promised Lemry would, too—and I don't even know what help is. I love her, but sometimes I wish I never knew her. That doesn't make me too good a friend, but when I think of just training hard to make it to State and going out with Jody and studying the nature of the cosmos with Ellerby over a six-pack of burgers—well, that's what I long for right now. I just want it to be simple. But it won't be.

For the past three days, Sarah Byrnes has been living in the apartment above Lemry's garage. She bolted from the psych ward within twenty-four hours after the attendants heard her speak. I went up to the ward to tell Laurel, her counselor, that Sarah Byrnes was okay, but that there were good reasons for her not wanting anyone to know where she was.

“It's her father, isn't it?” Laurel asked.

Sarah Byrnes had told me not to tell Laurel anything about her dad because she'd be required to report to Child Protection Services. If they started questioning her dad, he'd get cranked up and come looking for her, which he'll do anyway, but maybe with a little less zeal. I said, “I stand on the Fifth.”

She smiled. “I'm just glad to know she's safe, Eric. Thanks.”

Getting Sarah Byrnes to stay at Lemry's place was easier than I thought it would be—she left the psych ward still majorly pissed at me for telling Lemry about her dad. She kicked me out of the hospital right after she blew her cover but met me in the parking lot the next afternoon, less than half an hour after she called demanding that I get my ass down there, because she wasn't going to take the chance of the staff getting worried about liability and telling her father she had talked. She slammed down the phone before I could tell her my mom's car wasn't there, so I called Ellerby, but his phone was busy. I ran the mile and a half from my house to Sacred Heart, worried Sarah Byrnes would get to the parking lot, find no one waiting, and take off in a huff.

Sarah Byrnes had no sweat getting out—she simply stuffed her things into a bag, waited until no one was looking, and walked out a back way to the parking lot. I was waiting at the corner telephone booth, where I'd finally contacted Ellerby only seconds earlier. I told him to
hurry.

“Call you a cab, ma'am?” I said.

She said, “Don't mess with me, Eric. Just get me out
of here. My dad will be here in a few minutes.”

“Be pissed at me if you want,” I said. “I did the only thing I could do. Lemry's still in on this, and she hasn't called Child Protection. If you can't trust that, then I don't know what.”

“She can just stay the hell away from me,” she said. “I've had all the help I need to last me for the next five years.”

“Yeah, well, it ain't all the help you're gonna get,” I said as the Cruiser rounded the corner, Ellerby sitting low in the front seat in dark glasses and a broad-brimmed hat. He pulled up beside us, glanced stealthily both ways before leaping out to open the back door. He said, “In.”

Sarah Byrnes looked at him like he was crazy, then back at me. I shrugged and said, “In.”

A dark car—an older model Oldsmobile with tinted windows—approached from the direction Ellerby had come, and Sarah Byrnes glanced up in panic, jumped into the back seat, and lay flat. “Drive,” she said, and it didn't take an astrophysicist to know the ominous form at the wheel was Virgil Byrnes. He must not have seen me, or known Ellerby's Cruiser, because he coasted slowly, seemingly looking for a parking spot.

Ellerby dropped into the driver's seat as I slid into shotgun. “So where will I be dropping you, miss?” he
asked. “The Sheraton? Marriott? Maybe the Hilton? Excuse me, what was I thinking of, we have no Hilton. Knock five dollars off my tip.”

“Drive!” Sarah Byrnes said through gritted teeth.

Ellerby pulled slowly onto the street, passing within three feet of Mr. Byrnes's dark blue monstrosity. “That's an
ugly
car,” he said, and gave a short honk as we passed. I turned my head away as Mr. Byrnes glanced up.

“You'll think that's real funny,” Sarah Byrnes said, “when he finds out you drove the getaway car.”

In the side-view mirror, I watched Mr. Byrnes walk across the parking lot toward the hospital. In a few minutes the stakes to this game would go up.

“So where to?” Ellerby asked again.

I glanced over the seat at Sarah Byrnes and said, “To Lemry's house.”

I expected a protest—like maybe she'd kick the windows out—but she stared straight ahead.

“She's expecting us,” I told Ellerby.

Sarah Byrnes just shook her head in disgust, holding onto her tough act, but seeing her father had rattled her.

Shortly after we arrived, Lemry sent Ellerby and me packing. “Why don't you guys go do whatever it is guys do for a few hours? We'll call if we need you.”

Sarah Byrnes appeared unsure, like a cornered
animal, but said nothing. I was just glad to get away from her before she got a chance to get me alone and separate my body parts.

 

So here we sit in the middle of Lemry's class on the first day Sarah Byrnes has been with us, which is hard to figure because I would think school is the first place her dad will look—I'm surprised he hasn't already. I've had very little chance to talk with Sarah Byrnes, because Lemry told me to leave her alone until she got her bearings.

Mautz is sitting in today, uninvolved, but leaning against the wall near Lemry's desk like a sentry. I'm thinking this might be a good day to go light on my usual form of class participation. We're into the last installment of the abortion issue—Lemry gave it a few weeks' enforced rest to let people calm down—and Mark Brittain is well into the same old happy horseshit he uses to scold the world. Ellerby is following my lead of restraint because, even though he wouldn't agree to follow Mautz's edict to stay off Brittain's case, Lemry told him that when a fool and a wise man argue it's sometimes hard for those of us on the outside to tell the difference. That shut Ellerby's trap right quick.

We sit in a circle, and I'm watching Jody stare at the
flat surface of her desk while Brittain rambles. Sarah Byrnes is directly across from us, shifting nervously in her seat in a way I recognize, and if Mark Brittain recognized it too, he'd shut the hell up. But Brittain's four-point-oh grade average includes no A's for insight, and he forges on like a runaway gospel train without Ellerby and me there to throw objects onto his tracks to derail him. “It's God's law,” he says, “that every human must step up and take responsibility for his actions. All life is sacred, and if a woman makes the mistake of fornication and she gets pregnant, she has the moral obligation to bring that child to term.”

Bring that child to term. Jesus, Brittain, you've been watching too many doctor shows.

“Not everything is about Christianity, Mr. Brittain,” Lemry says. “We've heard that argument about enough, I think. Let's go on.”

“With all respect,” Brittain says, “everything
is
about Christianity. It's when we believe it
isn't
that we get into trouble.”

Lemry sighs. “Okay, everything is about Christianity for you, Mark. But there are other perspectives, and I want to hear them.”

“Let's stay with this view just one more minute,” says a soft voice, and the class looks up in unison to see
that it's coming from Sarah Byrnes. Sarah Byrnes scoots her desk an inch or so forward, staring directly across the circle at Brittain. “Are you telling us
all
life is sacred? That it's all equal?”

Sarah Byrnes's intensity visibly pushes Brittain back in his seat, but he holds his ground. “That's right.”

“You think my life is as sacred as Ms. Lemry's? Or Mr. Mautz's, over there? Or yours?”

“Of course it is,” Brittain says, and I detect a note of patronization.
That
is a big mistake.

Sarah Byrnes slides out of her seat and walks across the room, her Nikes as silent as moccasins on a hard dirt trail, and kneels in front of Brittain. Mark looks at the desk. Very softly she says, “Look at me.”

Brittain looks up, but his sight drops immediately back to his desk top. The rest of the class, me included, fidgets.

“No,” Sarah Byrnes says, as softly as before, “
keep
looking at me.”

Brittain lifts his gaze, and I think I see a drop of sweat form on his forehead. Mautz looks at Lemry, but Lemry doesn't move a muscle.

“Are you saying,” Sarah Byrnes continues, “that if you knew you were married to someone who would do this to your baby,” and she touches her face, “you
should have that baby anyway?”

Brittain looks confused; he doesn't know the real story behind Sarah Byrnes's condition.

She pushes. “Is that what you're saying?”

“I think…Yeah, that's what I'm saying.”

Sarah Byrnes sits back on her haunches and sort of smiles, looking across the room at Mr. Mautz. Then she leans forward again and puts her hands on Mark's desk. “I'll give you one more chance,” she says. “Are you telling me that a woman who's married to a man she
knows
will disfigure or kill her baby, and who knows she doesn't have the guts to get away from him, should have that baby anyway?”

Brittain has regained some composure. “We can't make predictions like that,” he says. “All life is sacred. Everyone deserves a chance.”

“Think you'd like to have my chance?” Sarah Byrnes asks, pointing to her face.

“It's not something I'd
choose,”
Brittain says, “but…”

“It's not something I'd choose, either,” Sarah Byrnes says quickly. She stands up to walk back to her seat, then turns in the middle of the room. “You and Mr. Mautz go to the same church, don't you?” she asks.

Brittain glances at Mautz, who nods imperceptibly.
“Yeah,” Brittain says. “What's that got to do with…”

“Do all the people in that church think all life is sacred?”

Brittain says, “They certainly do.”

“And do they treat people's lives as if they're sacred?”

Brittain feels safe here. “Of course they do.”

Sarah Byrnes moves a couple more steps toward her desk. I swear to God she's going to grow up to be a crispy version of Perry Mason. She whirls and faces Brittain. “Mark Brittain, I've been in the same class as you from first grade on, and I could count the number of times you've spoken to me on an amputee's fingers. I can't even get you to look me in the eye. Are you telling me my life is as sacred to you as Jody Mueller's? I mean, up until Eric the Great aced you out?”

Brittain opens his mouth, but Sarah Byrnes whirls, and all of a sudden she's running it down Mautz's throat. “And this man, who goes to the same church you go to, you know how many decent words—hell,
any
kind of words—he's uttered to me in the past six years? Zip. Zero. I have a three-point-six grade point average, for God's sake; had a straight four-oh in junior high, and the best he's been able to do in all that time is to chew out
my friend
for an underground newspaper that was so bizarre it didn't deserve a minute of his time.
He didn't even respect me enough to show me his disgust. He told
Eric
what to say to me.”

Mautz starts to speak, but she whirls back to Brittain. “How come you people care so much for the unborn when you don't give even a little bit of a shit for the born?”

Now Mautz breaks in. “Mrs. Lemry, don't you think this has gone far enough? I would expect you to have a little better control of your class.”

“She seems in control to me,” Lemry says. “You ought to be here on a bad day.”

But Brittain is wounded now, and I think we're about to have a bad day. His face is red, his neck pushing against his collar. “Crybabies,” he says. “Nobody wants to take on the tough stuff. You've been pulling all kinds of stuff since you were a little kid and hiding behind the fact that you were disfigured. I'm tired of all the excuses! Tired of them, you hear? You step up and take your medicine! You should be damn glad you're alive and that God loves you!”

“Jeez, Brittain,” Ellerby says, “get a grip. Tap your helmet, man.”

“Go to hell, Ellerby! Just go to hell! You're the perfect example of what's wrong. You're worse than she is. You're even worse than Calhoune! You are evil!”

Lemry looks over to Mautz. “
Now
it's out of hand,” she says quietly. “Okay, class, let's give it a rest….”

Brittain turns to fire on her, but Jody steps in as he opens his mouth and says, “Mark Brittain, shut your mouth.” Brittain stops in midsentence like somebody filled his mouth with a bomb. “I've heard your self-righteous BS for the last time. I really believed that you were special for a while there, but you just make me sick.”

“You better…”

“Shut up!” She turns to the rest of the class. “Man is known by his works. I've heard that out of Mark Brittain's mouth so many times I thought he made it up. Well, let me tell you about Mark Brittain's works. A little less than a year ago, I had a six-week-old fetus inside me. Mark Brittain's and my works.” Tears form at the edges of her eyes.

I move my chair close to Jody's, and she takes my hand. “I wanted to keep it. He said no. I said I'd go away to have it. That's how desperate I was, how awful I felt about what I'd done. And you know what he said? You
know
what he said? He said he could never do the work he needed to do in the world with an illegitimate child hanging over his head. He said I'd have to get rid of it.”

“That's a lie!” Brittain yells. “You…you bitch,
Mueller. I knew you'd try to slander me when I dumped you.”

Jody doesn't miss a beat. “I asked him about the church's stand on abortion, and he told me that what he had to say to the world was more important than one error in judgment. An error in judgment. That's what he called it. He said making love to someone who didn't have the common sense to protect herself was nothing more than that. He didn't call it fornication then, he called it an error in judgment.

“And you know what I did? I had the abortion. That's how screwed up I was. And I had it alone, because Mark Brittain couldn't be seen at the clinic. I had to cross lines
I'd marched in
to have an abortion
alone.”
She turns to Mark. “I don't know right or wrong about sacred life, Mark Brittain, but I know this. You don't talk to Sarah Byrnes that way. You just don't. And you don't talk to me that way, either. Not ever again.”