We All Fall Down (5 page)

Leaning against the workbench, resisting another swallow of gin, he tried to bring back her expression, the way she had looked at him a moment before abandoning the garage. That look. Not only disgust at his drinking but something else.

In the downstairs bathroom, he brushed his teeth with Crest, gulped Scope, gargled, hoping that the smell of gin had been obliterated. He went upstairs, listened at the landing, heard nothing. In the second-floor hallway, he saw that her bedroom door was closed. Not unusual. Neither was the absence of sound. Addy hated the radio, couldn’t stand rock music or anything resembling contemporary stuff while studying. Buddy could not face homework or a
theme paper without Bruce Springsteen or somebody to help him along.

He knocked at her door, softly.
What am I doing?
Knocked again.
I should be glad she’s in there and I’m out here.

“What do you want?” she asked, voice muffled.

“I don’t know,” he said. Which was exactly right.

“Stupid,” she called out. Her voice sounded funny. Not funny, but broken.

He stood there. Waited. What was he waiting for?

She opened the door, slowly, letting it swing wide open before appearing. Her face, when he finally saw it, was red and shining. Eyes wet. She sniffed, blew her nose with a Kleenex.

She’d been crying, for crissakes.

“You’ve been crying?” he said.

“You’re so observant,” she replied. Sarcastically, of course.

And suddenly he, too, felt like crying.

Because he saw himself and Addy for what they were: two kids whose parents were divorcing, living in a house where nobody loved anybody else anymore.

While a bruised and battered girl lay in a hospital somewhere.

“Come in,” she said.

But he could not go in. He stared at her for a long moment and then turned away, dashed down the stairs, through the front hallway and out of the house, not realizing he was running until he found himself a block away on Oak Avenue heading nowhere.

While Karen slept.

Deep in her dreams—or did she dream? Or even sleep?

Jane wondered about the strange place Karen now occupied, between life and death: alive but not alive, sleeping but not sleeping.

Karen was seldom alone in that hospital room. Someone in the family remained with her almost all the time, except the late nighttime hours. Jane’s mother kept vigil in the morning and Jane often joined her in the afternoon after school. Her father and mother sat beside Karen’s bed in the evenings, sometimes together, sometimes alternating with each other. Jane dropped in at the hospital at odd hours, not only after school but on her way home from the Mall or from a movie and sometimes found her father, sometimes Artie, there. The family had no formal visiting plan. The ceaseless routine of visiting had developed naturally, became a habit around which the rest of their lives centered.

One day, Jane found herself alone in the hospital room and it seemed to her that Karen was sinking, deeper and deeper into that strange terrible sleep, her body slight and slender under the sheet. Occasionally, she moved, twitched, sudden involuntary movements that, for one split second, brought a flash of hope. Then, nothing, the stillness again.

The doctor had encouraged the family to talk to Karen but Jane found it hard to do that. Just as she had found it hard to communicate with Karen at home. Although Karen was two years younger, Jane did not feel like her older sister. Karen glided easily through life, popular at school, adjusting quickly to Burnside, the telephone ringing constantly for her only a few days after the family had moved from Monument. Secretly, Jane regarded Karen as a snob, immersed in her social life at school, ignoring her parents as well as Artie and Jane herself, acknowledging Jane’s existence only when she invaded her room to borrow,
without asking, her clothes, her cologne, her jewelry. Which provided arguments and accusations.

“Why does she act like I don’t even exist and then borrows my things?” Jane had asked her mother.

“Maybe she envies you.”

“Me? She’s the one with a million friends, has such a flair for style …”

“Yes, but you have taste, Jane,” her mother said. “Remember, she’s younger, she looks up to you. That’s why she borrows your things.…”

“Then why doesn’t she just ask me? Instead of going behind my back …”

“She’s shy …”

Karen shy?

“People are not always what they seem to be,” her mother said, using one of those mysterious sayings parents rely on to end conversations at a convenient moment.

Regarding Karen in the bed, looking vulnerable and, yes, shy and unguarded, Jane said, “I’m sorry,” her voice too loud in the quiet room where the small
beep
of the monitor was the only other sound.

“If you envied me, maybe I was jealous of you,” Jane admitted, hoping that Karen
could
hear her words. “Please come out of this, Karen, so we can talk about it, do something about it …”

The echo of her voice died out, along with the odd but somehow comforting words she had spoken to her silent sister.

While Karen slept in that high hospital bed, the house underwent repairs. A sophisticated alarm system, connected with police headquarters, was installed. New furniture was purchased plus three television sets, a CD set, and two VCRs. Her mother also bought new bedding—sheets and blankets to replace those that had been torn to shreds
by the invaders. Her mother, in fact, went on a sad kind of shopping spree, replacing things that she thought the trashers had even
touched.
Particularly clothes. She and Jane went to the Mall and bought tops and skirts—and she brought home new shirts and underwear for Jane’s father. Meanwhile, the repairs were completed in record time as the workmen performed with urgency, working overtime willingly, as if they knew it was important to obliterate all evidence of mischief as soon as possible.
Mischief.
That was the word used by a man named Stoddard, a friend of Jane’s father who was boss of the work crew. He kept muttering the word under his breath as he directed the repairs and performed along with the crew as they scrubbed and painted and replaced.

Within a week, the house was restored to what passed for normal. Everything bright and new. The old wallpaper had been removed from Jane’s room and she decided to have the walls painted, choosing white instead of her favorite blue. Blue was spoiled for her forever and so, in a way, was pink. She did not replace her posters but allowed the walls to remain uncluttered, untouched, pure. She wasn’t quite sure that
pure
was the right word but it suited the room somehow.

The smell of paint lingered in the air after the workmen’s departure, along with other smells Jane could not identify, probably turpentine or the liquid wax on the floors. But something else, too.

“The smell of newness,” her mother said, sniffing the air, making her voice light and bright.

“That’s right,” Jane said, forcing brightness into her own voice, wondering if her mother also was playacting, whether her mother could detect that other smell, the smell that persisted, rising to her nostrils on occasion, lurking under all the new smells. She was aware of the smell
when she entered her bedroom, a soiled scent just barely there, making her pause and sniff tentatively, wrinkling her nose. The smell of something spoiled and decayed, an under-the-surface odor, hinting of vomit and things gone bad. Faint, yes, but unmistakable, not always there but coming and going, elusive sometimes, but other times strong, overpowering. She avoided looking at the spot near the door where she had encountered that puddle of vomit. To her surprise—and horror—she began to detect that elusive smell elsewhere, catching a drifting whiff when she was on the bus going to school, on the sidewalk in front of the Mall, in the classroom once, the smell suddenly stronger than schoolroom chalk. She would sniff cautiously and sometimes the smell evaporated, disappeared at once or lingered for a while, tantalizing in a horrible way. She wondered, a bit panicky, if the odor came from herself, if somehow it was being manufactured by her body, created out of her own horror at what had happened. She began to douse herself with cologne, applied creams and salves, sought out the strongest deodorants to rub into her armpits. She began to hold herself aloof from people, not letting anyone come too close, leaning over awkwardly when she kissed her mother and father good night. Sometimes, she caught her mother looking at her peculiarly and quickly turned away or left the room or began to jabber like a madwoman. And sometimes she caught her mother’s own face lost in deep thought or sadness and wanted to reach out to her, cry out, touch her or fling herself in her arms. But could not, could not, always holding back.

And all the while Karen slept.

It wasn’t only that foul odor, that terrible smell, but the house itself that began to bother Jane. She started fleeing the place, finding excuses not to be there. After visiting the hospital, she sometimes took the bus to downtown
Wickburg and wandered the Mall, killing time, going in and out of the stores, trying on jackets and skirts, drinking a 7-Up. She did not stay too long in the stores or linger on the plastic benches near the fountain, did not want to give the appearance of being a stray, homeless. At home, she quickly changed and roamed the neighborhood or simply hung out in the backyard. She didn’t seek out the company of the other girls on the street because she wasn’t in a mood for polite conversation or talk about clothes or makeup or movies and television. She wished she were a writer or a painter or a musician so that she could lose herself in some form of creativity, express the emotions that stirred inside her. What emotions? She felt as though she were fooling herself because she felt no emotions, really. Felt dead inside. Empty. Like a vessel waiting to be filled. Filled with what? She didn’t know.

Her father called a family meeting one night. He did not issue special invitations but somehow let them all know that they should gather in the living room after supper. He faced them, standing self-consciously at the fireplace, frowning. Jane wondered whether he had a headache because he kept rubbing his forehead.

“I’m going to make a speech,” he said. “A short one. But your mother and I feel that certain things should be said.”

If her mother was in on the plan, then that meant the speech was really being made to an audience of two, her and her brother, Artie.

“We can’t pretend that the vandalism didn’t take place,” he said, voice strained as if he had been shouting against the wind all day. “But we have to go on living. Living here, in this house. We have to put it all behind us. Not as if it didn’t happen but looking ahead instead of behind us. We also can’t pretend that Karen isn’t in the
hospital. In a …” His voice faltered and he skipped the word
coma,
after pausing for a minute. “So we have to be concerned about her, think about her, pray for her, and visit her. Which we’ve all been doing and which we must and will continue to do. But we also have to get on with our own lives. We can’t afford to be bitter, to let what happened spoil our lives.”

He took a deep breath and paused. “Now let me talk about something we’ve all avoided talking about. The trashers themselves.

“We don’t know why they did what they did. Why they chose our house. Everybody, and that includes the police, thinks it was a random thing, that we shouldn’t feel as though we were special targets, that it was a personal attack on us as a family. The world is filled with weird people and some of those weird people came upon our house and did terrible things. We can’t deny that it happened but we have to get over it. The trashers would be the big winners if we let what they did change us, spoil our lives. Yes, Karen is in the hospital. But she’s alive and the doctors are optimistic about her chances of recovery. The police are convinced that she was what they call an unintended victim. That the trashers were attacking the house, not her, not us. We have to believe that and get on with our lives.”

Such a brave speech, delivered with such determination and resolution that Jane wanted to rush to him and embrace him.

After that, she and her family settled into a kind of a routine, caught up in busy days and evenings. Her father left for work every day as usual, spent long hours at the office and the rest of the time at the hospital. He did not play golf anymore on weekends. Her mother acted as if someone had cranked her up in the morning and dispatched her on her daily rounds. She was a whirlwind of
bustling activity, dashing between home and the hospital meanwhile doing the housework, cleaning, dusting, knitting, seldom pausing to catch her breath. All of which made Jane wonder: Was all of this normal? What was normal, anyway?

She developed her own routine in the neighborhood. Sometimes, she did not feel like taking the bus trip to Wickburg, and found the house lonely and forlorn. She’d put on her Nikes and shorts and jog the streets, dodging the bike brigade and the brats, ignoring them when they whistled and yelled or tried to sideswipe her. The kids were pests but she preferred them to that silent empty house.

“Hello, Jane.”

She paused in her jogging as Mickey Looney tipped his baseball hat.

Jane drew up, breathing heavily, glad for the respite. She was not the most athletic of persons, probably the least.

“Hi, Mickey,” she said. He blushed when anyone looked directly at him, deep crimson sweeping his face.

“Almost time to plant tomatoes?” she asked.

“Thirtieth of May,” Mickey said, seriously, suddenly, the professional planter. “Anytime before then is too early, New England being what it is.”

He seemed to hesitate, then kicked at something invisible on the ground. “How’s Karen?” he asked. “I’ve been meaning to inquire but don’t like to intrude.”

“She’s still in the coma,” Jane said. Observing how stricken he looked, she reassured him: “She’s not suffering, Mickey, and she’s not any worse.”

“I hope she’ll come out of it,” he said, still kicking at nothing.

Weird Amos Dalton came along, his arms loaded with books as usual. He did not look up as he trudged by.