Total Constant Order (14 page)

W
e sped along Biscayne Boulevard. At the end of the road was the bus station. Not really a station, more like a shack, with concrete benches splattered with bird droppings. Mama parked by the curb, even though there was no parking space, and we got out.

The light from the street lamps shone onto the row of buses. I felt my pulse beating in my ears. Graffiti trickled across the bumpers. Had Thayer ever tagged a bus?

Mama followed, huffing as I raced around the lot. By the time we returned to our car, I was out of breath. Nearby, a bunch of kids were shrieking, “Boys come from Jupiter because they're stupider. Girls come from Mars because they're superstars.”

Still no Thayer. I could see panic in Mama's face.

“You don't think he did something foolish?” she said.

I searched the parking lot for his dreadlocked hair. It was like he never existed.

“He's not here,” I said.

“I think we should call his parents,” she said.

“He lives with his mom,” I said.

“Well, do you have the phone number?”

I glanced at my hand. “No.”

I did, but I didn't want to get Thayer into any more trouble.

“Where else would he go?”

I thought about the canal near our school.

The next thing I knew, Mama and I were in the car again.

“Show me,” she said.

We drove past school and slowed when we got to the canal, the one Thayer had shown me. Mama parked near the power plant and we got out.

And there he was, walking toward the canal, smoking, his dreads pulled back like a sphinx. He was whistling something, a cartoon theme song.

I wanted to move, but Mama grabbed my hand so tight, I could hear things popping inside it.

“That's your friend?” she said. The worried tone was back. Her voice made a cramp shoot through my stomach.

“Yeah.” I could hear Thayer, his whistling shrill and loud. I nodded and Mama tugged me along.

“Walk quickly,” she said. “Don't run.”

At first I was frozen. I didn't move. Staring was all I could do. It was dark outside, and all I saw was a thin shadow of Thayer, just the edges. But slowly he took shape, from the dime-sized holes in his floppy jeans, to the half-buttoned plaid shirt and pale hair, to his chin pointed at the water.

I led Mama through the path near the power plant. A rusty sign warned,
DANGER! HIGH VOLTAGE!
with a scowling lightning bolt. The gate was open, as usual, and we eased through it.

We heard the hiss coming from the plant. Overhead, a plume of smoke bubbled on the horizon. Mama tugged my sleeve.

There was Thayer, waist-deep in the mucky canal.

“Fin?” he called. “How did you get here?”

“I thought you had run away. Like, on a bus.”

“Came out here to think,” he said. He looked down into the canal. “They drift up here because it's warm.”

Thayer was hunched over an oval ring in the water. A manatee.

The beast's spatula-shaped tail made a swirl as she dove. She looked about ten feet long, as old as the dinosaurs, so out of place in that canal near the smoke-belching power plant. Yet this was her home. We were the ones who didn't belong. Still, at that moment, I felt as if I belonged there with her. I wanted to know what she was thinking and if she felt alone, like me.

I made my way toward the canal, sinking up to my knees in mud. I didn't like the look of the brownish tide, or the thought of what was wiggling in it—mosquito larvae, bloodsucking leeches. I could hear Mama calling my name but I didn't listen. I stepped into the water, which was warmer than I imagined. As I shuffled forward, the bottom sloped to a drop. I pushed off and doggy-paddled,
my T-shirt ballooning.

I looked over my shoulder to find Mama, but I couldn't trace her in the trees. I got within inches of Thayer when the manatee poked her lumpy snout at me. The aquatic mammal looked like a boulder. I paddled closer, hoping I could coax Thayer out of this mess before we ended up in jail.

I treaded around the canal and again the manatee blocked me. I reached out to touch her, to confirm she wasn't a mirage. She rolled over. Her back was crusted with barnacles and powerboat scars.

As I moved close enough to grab Thayer, he threw his arms around the putty-faced beast. She must've weighed a thousand pounds. I thought she might drag us down, sinking into the tangle of weeds, holding us there until we drowned. But she didn't.

The manatee swerved in my direction. Ducking down, I spied another manatee, a calf, gliding out of the foggy water like a ghost. I rose up, heaving.

I was startled by a splash and turned around. Mama inched into the water. Thayer didn't seem aware of her, not even when she called his name. He was drifting away from all of us.

Thayer started coughing and spitting up mucus. His throat made a whistling sound when he breathed. One, two, three, gasp. We all heard him panting. Up close, his lips and fingernails were a bluish color.

“My lungs,” he said. “Burning.” His voice was raspy.

Mama twitched, shin-deep in the canal. She wouldn't go any closer.

When Thayer tried to talk, his words were chopped up. “Hurts,” he said. “I can't breathe.”

He was dodging and paddling, elbows flaring, around the muddy shapes in the water. I tried to reach him, one, two, three times. He went left. I went right. He dodged again and then clenched his arms around me. My heart almost stopped. We were sinking into the murk.

“Kryptonite,” he said.

Thayer was still wheezing, all blue.

Grabbing his wrists, I tugged. Then Thayer gasped, “Let go.”

We bobbed in the water, soaking wet, our T-shirts floating. The instant I let go, the manatee bumped
me. I thought about what Thayer had said. They were trapped in the modern world. But they were surviving, coping in their own way, as Thayer had taught me to do.

A siren grew closer, red lights spinning. Thayer dangled in the water, trapped, and I kept thinking how this should be embarrassing, me in my wet clothes and he paddling there like a wild animal. I saw that he wasn't struggling. We were calm, both of us there, not saying anything, just hanging below the surface.

The silence washed over me like a wave. I didn't have to think anymore. I just drifted, weightless, in the underwater quiet. I could've stayed in that silence forever, coasting in a place where nothing pulled at me, not even gravity.

Then a man grabbed me from behind, invisible, hauling me into light and noise. As I was hoisted up, I sputtered, trying to stand, my legs scissoring under me, searching for something solid.

The ambulance siren cut off.

Lying in the damp grass, I watched the paramedics surround Thayer. I hadn't seen them pull
him out. I could barely see his tangled limbs, bent like the number seven. His hands were slightly open, as if cupped to hold water.

A paramedic with Buddha arms tilted Thayer's head back and leaned in. He pinched Thayer's nose, covered his mouth with his own, and blew. One, two breaths. Thayer still wasn't moving. The man pushed down on Thayer's chest, pumping once per second. Two breaths. Fifteen pumps.

The odd-numberness bothered me. My mind latched on to it and conjured a list of things I hated: the smell of chalk, shag carpet, insurance commercials. I counted forward and backward. It wasn't working anymore.

Mama was leaning into the ambulance. We stood against it, watching each other. Across the canal, the water was still.

Mama pulled off her sweatshirt and wrapped it around me like a towel. She was kneeling in the grass, trying to wipe my face. Her hands circled around and around. She held on to me, her entire body shaking.

T
he night before Dad moved out, I watched him drag his homemade telescope on the back porch and look for planets in the sky. Dad had built the telescope out of a cardboard tube. He painted it black to make it look more realistic, but it embarrassed me anyway.

Hunching down, I saw the stubble ringing his head, the neck rolls at the base of his hair. Then his jaw went tight and he unscrewed the lens.

“No good,” he said. “Too cloudy. Give it a try later, if you like.”

He went inside. Gave up, just like that.

Lights hovered around the block. I looked at the rows of houses lined up by number. I swiveled the telescope, watching, and turned toward the stars
swirling in their sockets. Lightning strobed, bright as streamers. If I counted between rumbles and flashes, I could figure out the storm's distance. One hippopotamus, two hippopotamus. Ten seconds was two miles away.

I tried hunting for the moon. People had walked on it, long ago. The moon, a dead place. It looked primitive, the craters reminding me of chalk scribble. I couldn't picture spacemen bouncing across its canyons. Somewhere on its glowing surface, they left a flag, a bunch of souped-up space buggies, and their footprints. When Dad was little, he saw it on TV. I used to laugh when I thumbed through his outdated astronomy books.
Someday,
read the last page,
we will go to the moon
.

In lunar time, everybody would age more slowly. When we stared at the night sky, and happened to spot the moon, its bruised edges, the shadowy oceans, I knew this much: The moon was always there, even when I couldn't see it.

 

A second ambulance whisked Mama and me away. We rode with the paramedics. Mama told them not
to take us to the hospital where a doctor had left a sponge in a patient's leg. She started jabbering about Dad leaving us.

“Do you want me to call him?” I asked.

“No,” she said.

I sat in the waiting room, shivering for three hours. One hundred and eighty minutes. I didn't talk to anyone. I thought about Thayer, the teapot whistling in his chest, the incredible weight of him in the canal.

I looked at the photographs in
Sky and Telescope
magazine—Martian volcanoes, sombrero-shaped asteroids, cartwheeling galaxies, and the Hubble's broken gyroscopes. In some way, I tried to bind them together, even the telescope with its busted discs. They were like my invisible army of numbers. Although I couldn't see them, they were always there, like the daytime moon or the tennis ball hidden in our classroom. My OCD had left me feeling out of control. Now I was taking control of it.

I got hold of Dad and told him what was going on. He tried to take my mind off of it by telling me about Yara's family.

“They're really looking forward to meeting you, grasshopper. You're going to love the Ortiz familia. On Sundays the old guys, all the grandfathers, get together and smoke cigars and play dominoes. It gets really intense, you know? And you should see the amount of food they make. It's all about fresh fish. They'll take you out on the boat…,” he said, his voice trailing off. He didn't finish his sentence. I suppose he forgot that water wasn't exactly my friend.

I couldn't stand to hurt his feelings. So I asked, “What kind of food do they make? Yara's family, I mean?”

“Oh, it's to die for,” he said, perking up again. “You've got paella, which is a rice casserole with all kinds of yummy seafood in it. You can eat it right out of the pan with a spoon.”

“Sounds good,” I said.

After we hung up, I made a pact to try a little harder with Yara. If she was going to be around, I might as well get to know her better.

I sat in a hard, plastic chair until someone tapped my arm. It was Thayer's mom, Mrs. Pinsky,
a tall woman, thin as a chopstick. Her pale hair was tugged back with a sequined barrette.

“You're Thayer's friend.” Her face was puffy from crying.

She said he was in intensive care, hooked up to machines to help him breathe. But he was going to be fine.

“Machines?” I said. My eyelashes were damp.

Mrs. Pinsky tugged her barrette. “He's had severe asthma his whole life,” she said. “I've yanked out the carpets in my house. In Thayer's case, that's not the problem. It's the weather. Especially if there's haze.”

I rubbed my eyes.

“He was looking for manatees,” I said.

Mrs. Pinsky wasn't listening. “If I don't have an inhaler handy, a cup of black coffee does the trick.”

“Thayer hates coffee,” I said.

I could hear her breathing. On the TV strapped to the wall, a police siren wailed.

“He asked me to find you,” she said.

“That's cool,” I said.

I stared at the floor. The linoleum, along with
every gleaming surface, was white.

Mrs. Pinsky coughed and said, “I'll tell Thayer hello for you.”

She touched me again, on the arm. Usually, my numbers would've been glowing, getting ready to guide my hand, touch the opposite side and balance things out. But this time, I kept still. All of me did.

O
ver the weekend, Mama took care of me. She said the afterlife would come sooner than later if I didn't get something to eat, so we nuked a plate of eggs in the microwave. While the flabby yolks popped and sizzled, Mrs. Pinsky called to say Thayer was feeling better and wouldn't I like to visit him in the hospital? I imagined his room. White tiles. Sick people on stretchers.

I looked at my plate and pushed it away. We still had three eggs left in the carton. Mama said we could bake a cake with them.

“From scratch?” I asked.

“Why not?” Mama was already bustling in the cupboard.

“I didn't think you knew how,” I said.

“Your grandmother taught me when I was your age. Now it's my turn to teach you,” she said, inspecting a dusty bottle of vanilla extract. “Are you ready for this?”

I wasn't sure.

Mama showed me how to crack an egg with one hand. “Tap on a flat surface instead of an edge,” she said, thumping it on my head.

We added leftover Halloween candy, Milky Ways and M&Ms, to the mix. Mama said cooking was like painting with flavors instead of colors. She didn't care when I cranked up the radio, not even when I turned the dial from smooth jazz to a screamy college radio station.

She let me lick the bowl, just like when I was little. Mama traced her finger along the rim and smeared chocolate on my face. I chased her around the kitchen, giggling as she wiggled away from me. We were so busy jumping around, we forgot about the cake.

Mama opened her eyes wide. I figured she was upset about the mess. Then she glanced at me and said, “Uh-oh.”

When we cracked open the oven, I saw a rectangular lump in the bottom of the pan. The cake came out like a flat brick, but we frosted it anyway.

“Do we have to eat it?” I asked.

“Let's just look at it for a while,” she said, smiling.

 

In the hospital's waiting room, a TV played
The Price Is Right
, all those spangled numbers blurring down the Big Wheel.

Mama steered me into the hallway, which stank of Pine-Sol. The wallpaper was crawling with palm trees and pink flamingos, someone's half-baked idea of a tropical landscape.

“Let's go back,” I said, earning a freezing look from Mama.

The elevator arrived with an electric ding. The walls withdrew. A nurse stepped out. She wore a glittery Santa pin on her collar.

Mama and I got in. I pushed the
UP
arrow. The seven was just a seven, no magic power. I was still noticing numbers, but they did nothing for me. And though I wanted to wash my hands really bad, I knew it could wait. The control-freak section of
my brain was like the tennis ball hidden in our classroom, there but not there, the way a song got stuck in my head. I was learning to ignore the song without mood-altering drugs. No more Paxil. But I didn't want to stop talking to Dr. Calaban, not when I had so much more to say.

The elevator squeaked and clattered. Through the door, a sliver of light flickered like a malfunctioning slide show. I imagined that by pressing a button, I had caused the entire hospital to sink into the ground while we stayed still. We landed on the top floor with a thunk.

Thayer's room was around the corner. He didn't have a tube shoved down his throat or a machine breathing for him. He was humming along with the television.

Mama nudged me. “Go on,” she said. “I'll wait.”

He turned. His dreads were pulled back tight.

I forced a smile.

Thayer kept quiet.

“How's it going?” I asked.

He put his hand over mine, warming me up. Only then did I notice the scars on his wrists, pale
crescents where doctors had plunged needles.

“What are you doing here?” he said, coughing.

All the blood in my body rushed to my face.

But then he said, “I'm glad you came.”

A wave swelled inside my throat. I tried to swallow it.

“I brought your science homework. It's on gravity.”

“What goes up must come down,” Thayer said. “Yo, what else you need to know?” He stared at me, blinking, waiting.

“That's not all.” I reached into my pocket and pulled out the stone.

He grinned. “You go first.”

“I didn't realize,” I said. “I didn't realize your asthma was so bad.”

“It's cool,” he said.

“No, it's not,” I said.

A bubble of silence quivered around us.

“You're a good swimmer,” he said.

“Not good enough.” I thought for a moment. “I'm never going there again, ever. Not even to see the manatees.”

Thayer laughed a little. So did I. If the nurse knew we were laughing about almost running away and drowning in a canal, she would think we were crazy. It didn't matter what other people thought. I was learning not to worry about it.

When we finally stopped to catch our breath, I noticed this one lone freckle, splashed on his collarbone. I put my hand there and he kissed my fingers. Then he kissed up my arm, like they do in cartoons. Then he kissed me, really softly, on the lips.

“I like you,” he whispered. He wasn't holding the stone, but I knew he was telling the truth.

I got so nervous, I shoved my hand in my pocket. Folded inside was the rain-stained napkin I had been doodling on at the cafetine. And then it was all clear to me. Clear like the night sky in Dad's telescope, cold and bright. It was okay to feel nervous. Something was starting to happen, something beyond my control, and I liked it.

“Let's see,” said Thayer.

Thayer and I took turns sketching until the paper shimmered with ink.

“I'm keeping this for eternity,” he said.

“An eternity is a long time.” I smirked.

“Remember what I told you? There's no such thing as time,” he said.

I looked out the window. The parking lot glistened.

Thayer said that his mom had called a truce. She wasn't shipping him off to military school, but he would start fresh at a private Catholic academy, Columbus, after winter vacation. I couldn't picture Thayer in pleated khakis with a tie looped around his neck.

“I'm giving up weed,” he said. “I had to promise.”

I couldn't picture that, either.

“Know what else I promise?” he said, leaning closer. “I'm going to visit you every day at lunch.”

“You're going to skate ten miles so we can eat in the music room,” I said. “Right. I believe that.”

“Who said anything about skating?” He winked.

“So you're going to flap your arms and fly?”

“If that's what it takes,” he said. And this I could picture.

 

I didn't speak to Mama until we left the hospital.

“Want to take a walk?” I asked.

She smiled. “When you were a kid, we used to go for walks every afternoon.”

“Dad took me,” I said.

“I remember,” she said. “You got stung by a bee once.”

“It was a hornet.”

“No. A bee. You collected soda tabs for me. We made a necklace out of them. I still have it.”

I looked up. “Really? I didn't know that.”

I took Mama to the empty house. Maybe it was my last chance to see it before the new people moved in there. The hurricane shutters had finally come off. Everywhere we looked were concrete blocks. Some were painted Day-Glo colors, the kind you'd probably see on an island like Haiti. On the front lawn was something new: a tire swing.

“Looks like a family is almost ready to move in,” Mama said.

At first, she hadn't understood why I wanted to take her here. “It's just a quiet place to talk,” I had explained.

“Your quiet place,” she said.

“It was.”

Land crabs scuttled into mud holes, making dry clacking noises. I decided to trudge into the foliage around the side of the house, despite Mama shouting, “That's full of holly berries. You'll break out in a rash. Don't step on the leaves. If you do, wipe your feet on the grass.”

Usually, I'd be simmering, getting ready to shout back. Instead, I just let her be.

We headed back toward the empty house, our hair threaded with leaves. Cicadas droned overhead, a noise not unlike a power saw. They lived seventeen years underground and died after sprouting wings.

I squinted at the lava-colored sky. Miami had the coolest sunsets. That much I had to admit.

“There's a star. Two of them peeking out,” I said, wondering if the sunset really did contain lithium. Maybe Dr. Calaban knew the answer.

“I see,” Mama told me.

I watched her wade through a sea of saw grass. A hot breeze rippled the brush, making a noise
like my violin. We stood there, staring at the sky. What we saw I wasn't sure. Counting stars was like wishing on nothing. By now, they may have burned out, leaving their light behind like a signature in Magic Marker.

I could never count them all.