The Unthinkable Thoughts of Jacob Green (12 page)

“Turn around,” my father says, flinging his hand at him. “Just leave. The voice of reason. Doesn’t even knock. Go on, get outta here.”

“Enough. Okay? No more.”

My father blinks and folds his arms. “I said get out.”

Asher steps toward him with his own churning jaw and looks so geared to pounce that I reach for his arm. “Asher,” I say. “Stop . . . wait.”

My father broadens his rounded shoulders and actually smirks. “You seem angry,” my father says in a softened tone we know well—a voice laced with practiced condescension. “Can you tell me why that is, Asher? Can you tell why you’re so very angry?”

“Bedtime, Dara,” says Megan, glancing inside my room. “Let’s brush those teeth.”

Asher looks over his shoulder as my sister runs by. He then turns and reaches to switch my desk light off before walking from the room. As he leaves he swings my door wide open and it bangs against the wall. I want to tell him to stay, to wait, but I’m afraid to make things worse. When he’s gone, my father sits on the edge of my bed with his face in his hands. Megan’s out of his view but still stands just outside. “You okay?” she says without sound, her face pinched, even frightened. And it’s
so strange, but as I stare back at her, my instinct is to defend my father, to protect him, to list every kindness and every altruistic breath he’s ever taken. I look away from her and begin to lift the crumpled thank-yous off the carpet. My father claps loud, twice, and I flinch and face him.

“Get some sleep now,” he says. And I wait. Just wait. For my door to click closed.

Tantrums make the morning feel like the dead of night—always. I shower in steaming water and let the stream beam down on the back of my neck. Megan stands behind me in my mind. She wants to know what happened the night before and she will not let it go. I tell her we disagreed is all, and that I’m fine, everything’s fine. She says she doesn’t believe me and I feel her fingertips against the ridges of my spine. I turn the shower off and step out of the tub. I grab a towel and cover my head and face. If she asks, she asks. It’s all in how you present yourself. If you’re fine she’ll think you’re fine. I smear the steam off the mirror above the sink and press my chin to the glass. “I’m fine. See me? I’m fine.”

Meg’s in the kitchen, sitting, waiting, tapping her foot. I smile
and say, “Hi.” She’s got no makeup on and wears her silver-framed glasses and a ponytail. She says she’s driving me to school before she even says hello and hands me Asher’s jacket like she thinks it’s mine. I throw it on the table and follow her to the driveway. It doesn’t look good. What happened in there? Are you hurt, what’d you do, did he touch you, can I help, what
was
that, who
is
he, where’s your mom, does she know, I can help, let me in, blah, blah, blah, blee, blee, blee . . . “Put your seat belt on,” she says, for the first time ever, and reaches over me to loosen it.

“I can do it,” I tell her. “I’m not an idiot.”

She waits a second, and sits back in her chair. “I know you’re not,” she says. “Sometimes it sticks.”

The car is an elderly blue Dodge with a red cap-and-gown tassel holding the glove box closed. There’s also a Popsicle stick somehow “clogging” the heating system and a hole the size of a baseball between my feet. I warm my hands under my armpits and lean forward to see the driveway through the floor.

“How’d ya . . . sleep?” she says, as she starts the car.

I nod but keep my eyes from her. I look for something to cram through the hole while we’re moving.

“Look a little out of it this morning,” she says, and waits for a reaction. “A little sad. Am I wrong?”

I choose to ignore this as she pulls out of the driveway. There’s a penny in the front pouch of my book bag and I drop it through the floor. The road swallows it up and I turn to see it tinkling around in the street. Megan rolls her eyes, trying not to grin. “No more.” she says. “It’s not funny.”

“It’s not?”

“No.”

“Then why are you smiling?”

“This isn’t smiling.”

“It looks like it.”

“It’s not. Trust me.”

“Wow. Serious today.”

“That’s right,” she says facing me. “I’m not in the mood.”

“Guess not.”

“Yeah. Guess not.”

I lean my head back against the seat and look away from her. Saber Street is strewn with sidewalk trees that stand in line like rail-thin soldiers. My mother calls them “suburban
sick-
amores” and seems to believe they’re more fragile than they look. She says she can tell from their dry, pinched-up leaves that they’ve ingested more exhaust than any tree should. And whenever we drive by she threatens to uproot them and haul them all off to the woodsy slopes of Vernon Valley. I tell her I’ll help her. I’ll help her unchoke the trees on Saber Street. But, Asher, he can’t help but laugh. He knows she’s got no time for rescuing trees. And I think she knows it too. Not enough time, not enough strength. She doesn’t even own a shovel.

Last night I hear her come in my room. I can feel the cool of the night air on her clothes right through my blanket, and then a kiss to the skin below my eye. She was making her rounds. Before she stands I clutch her lapel in my fist, but it’s a dream—so weird—there’s really nothing there. And then I hear “Jacob,” real soft, “Jacob.” And when I open my eyes I see my father standing over me. Protected by the darkness, I squint to fake sleep, my blanket to my chin. He stares down at me but he’s blind in this much dark, believes I’m long gone. He calls my name again and then rests on his knees beside me—starving for penance, permission to sleep. He leans his forehead on the mattress and waits before he whispers.

“I cherish you more than you’ll ever know.” And as always,
the dramatic repeat. “More than you’ll ever know.” Another long pause and his head lifts. “We’ll get them done.” One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi. “We’ll get them done together.”

As he slowly climbs to his feet, jostling the mattress as he goes, he leans over me to kiss my cheek. He holds it there for five long seconds, breathing through his nose. “Sleep tight now, baby boy,” he says. “I love you . . . I do.”

Megan stops the car at the traffic light on Glendale. She takes a deep breath and I can tell she’s staring right at me. “Last night,” she says, “was hard for me.”

Here we go.

“But something tells me . . . it was harder on you.”

I keep my head turned from her.

“I had a friend, in high school. Myra Sloan. Her stepfather used to hit her when she—”

I stop her with a laugh. “Is that what you think you heard?”

“I know what I heard.”

“He didn’t touch me, Megan.”

“I heard it.”

“No . . . you
didn’t.
”

She runs her hand through the dust on the dash, shaking her head.

“It’s not like that,” I say.

“Then what’s it like?”

“I don’t really want to talk about it.”

“But I do. Okay? I was up all night, thinking. Just laying there.”

“Thinking about
what?
”

“Let’s see . . . about leaving. About staying. About blowin’ a whistle, about . . . living with myself if anything ever happened to you, or Gabe, or Dara.”

“You don’t get it.”

“I trust my ears, J.”

“You shouldn’t.”

“I heard what I heard.”

I stare out the window as the light turns green. The car doesn’t move. “You can go,” I say.

“What?”

I point at the green. “Go!”

“Oh.” She steps on the gas. We pass Cimeron Field and the frozen duck pond and turn left on Stanyon toward the junior high. Neither of us says a word. My father’s usually more careful around Megan. I guess the culmination of issues was just too much for him this time: First, there’s this “disability” of mine—a catalyst for all types of failures that remind my father of every crap report card and teacher conference he’s ever suffered through. Second, you got these adoring peers of his—people he loves to impress and one-up with the accomplishments of his amazing children. And then you got me—a less than amazing son who actually wowed all these friends on the day of my bar mitzvah but can’t seem to thank them for showing the fuck up. I have no idea why my brain is this way. A special ed teacher named Doris says I learn things “spatially” and that I’m actually very smart. But I heard her say the same thing to Ronald Freed, and he wears a helmet with a chin strap wherever he goes.

Megan sighs like a bad actress. “You’re not gonna talk to me about this.”

I can see my school through the windshield and all the kids out on the front lawn. Megan stops the car in the parking lot driveway and I reach for the door handle.

“Fine,” she says. “Swallow it.”

I open the squeaky door and keep it open with my foot. “Bye.”

“Hey. If I hear it again, I’m gonna say something.”

I take my foot off the door and it slams shut. “To who?”

“To him. Or your mother or the cops or anyone who’ll—”

“The
cops,
Megan? Are you kidding me?”

She reaches out and takes my elbow in her hand. “It was
vicious,
” she says. “Vicious.”

I pull my arm away from her and open the door.

“Wait,” she says.

“I’m gonna be late.” I shut the door and walk up on the grass.

She gets out of the car, comes toward me. “Just stop for a second,” she says.

“I’m late.”

“I don’t want you to think I’m mad at
you.
Because I’m not.”

“I don’t really care.”

“Don’t say that. Why’d you say that?”

I stop and face her.

“I was up all night, J. Just thinking.”

“You already told me that.”

“I was . . . thinking about your bar mitzvah,” she says, swiping nothing off my shoulder. “That dance, the hora, right? Your father, he was . . . flying, I mean, so high with his head back and his arms in the air. In and out of all those friends of his. And I thought, my God, what pride this man has for his boy. Look at him.”

“Can I go now?”

She stares at me for a moment and nods her head. “You spoke so beautifully up there,” she says. “All that Hebrew. Those songs. Do you know how good you are? Did he tell you?”

I step back from her.

“Say something to me,” she pleads.

“Like what? There’s nothing to say.”

“You have to hate it that he talks to you like that?”

“It was a . . . disagreement.”

“Are you kidding? A disagreement?”

“He gets tired at night, Megan.”

“That’s tired?”

“My father . . . loves me . . . Megan. Okay? I have to go now. I have class.”

“Jacob?” she says with a wrinkling chin. “What?”

She folds and unfold her arms. “You call that love?”

Like a sucker punch, I feel these words in my gut. Tears rise in my eyes with my classmates ten feet away. I try to breathe it away, to erase the sound of it from my heart. I turn once again and face her. “Go home,” I say. “Go.”

J
ONNY’S SITTING ON
the floor with the back of his head against my locker. As always he’s gnawing on the leather laces of his Rawlings, ingesting the cowhide juice of our most beloved game. He doesn’t see me yet. I stop in the stairwell and lean my shoulder against the railing. When I run away in my mind I never come back. I catch a bus with my brother to Florida with all my bar mitzvah dough. We move into a motel near Disney World that has a pool with a slide and an ice machine outside every single room. In the mornings we walk barefooted across the soggy AstroTurf lawn and I head for the slide to wake myself up. My mother’s always crying when she learns we’re gone; some cop gives her coffee and asks to see my room. She doesn’t know we live in Orlando now. I think she thinks we’re dead.

When Jon looks up and sees me he rolls a brand-new baseball down the hall toward my feet. If I don’t stop it it’ll head through C wing and end up somewhere in Ms. Kerrigan’s
science lab. I scoop it up and roll it back to him. Heather Dyer and friends jump over it with a squeal like they think it’s a mouse, and Jon looks at me with a laugh, to see if I saw. He’s the only person I know besides me who finds it impossible to tire of baseball. When he was seven he stood alone on his driveway and pitched a full nine-inning bout against his garage with a tennis ball. Pop-ups and cleanly fielded grounders were outs, the strike zone a rectangle drawn with chalk. Somewhere around the fifth inning he had to decide whether to take a bathroom break or continue the game. He pissed in his pants and went on to beat the Bosox 8 to 3—squishy britches and all. Seconds after I stopped laughing from this story, I knew exactly why I’d found the perfect best friend for me. We’re both human [humanus
] versions of the canine [canis
] retriever: of or pertaining to a genetic necessity to chase after hurled spheres. And what is baseball if not a regimented excuse to retrieve balls all day long. Only the dark can stop us. And when it does, we thumb through nudie mags, watch
This Week in Baseball,
and lie to each other about how many girls we’ve Frenched. I give the bottom of his sneaker a kick and he pulls the gooey laces out of his mouth.

“Where ya been?” he says, getting to his feet. “I got good news.” Jon’s a smidge taller than he was in the fourth grade but still stands a foot shorter than me. He wears untied Timber-lands and white overalls a lot, and keeps his dark hair long, past his shoulders. I open my locker and throw my book bag in.

“Aren’t you curious?” he says.

“Go ahead. What is it?”

He walks in front of me and opens his mouth to speak but stops. “You been crying?” he says.

“Fuck you.”

“Sorry. You look like you were.”

“Fuck, no.”

“Okay, okay.”

I grab my gym shorts out of the locker. “So what’s the news?”

“The news. The news is Kara Brown. Remember her?”

“Yeah.”

“She wants to go out with you,” he says. “Fitsy says ‘guaranteed hand job.’”

“She . . . touched Fitsy’s dick?”

“No, no. He just knows that she’ll give you one.”

“How does
he
know?”

“I don’t know.”