Bottled Up (10 page)

Mikey and I were both out of breath. He was shaking. I was sweating.

I heard the front door slam. I double-checked the garage door lock.

Behind me, boxes were knocked over and some of the nail jars were smashed. My father isn't a bar-brawling, get-pulled-over-for-a-DWI kind of drunk. He's just the throw-shit-around-the-house and make-your-family-scared-to-death-of-you kind.

The lock handle jiggled. Then he started banging on the door. Mikey ran to the back of the garage.

“What are you doing in there? Having a tea party?” He kicked the door. “Unlock this.”

“What for?” I yelled back. My hands were shaking. My eye hurt like hell. “So you can hit me upside the head again?”

“Fine. Stay in there all night then. Sleep on the damn concrete. Just don't come out until that garage is clean.”

I heard him walk away. The front door opened and slammed shut again.

I turned around and looked at the mess. How the hell was I ever going to clean it? It was like telling a man with no tools to build a house—in one night.

I felt like I was going to throw up. I tried to push it away by taking a deep breath. My eye was stinging, and even though I was sweating, I was cold.

I looked for my brother but didn't see him anywhere. “Mikey? Bugs?”

I saw his foot. He was hiding under the counter in the back of the garage.

I bent down and pulled him out from behind the lawn mower. He had snot on his lip, and there was a puddle on the ground where he'd been.

“He's in the house, Bugs,” I said.

He stood up—shaking and crying. “What's going to happen now?”

Another one of his crazy questions I couldn't answer.

I pulled down the toboggan that was hanging on the wall. I wiped the dust off of it with my hand and put Mikey's pillow on one end.

“I'm going to clean the garage,” I told him. “And
you
are going to sleep.”

“I don't want to.”

“We're going to be in here all night, Bugs. So you should just go to sleep.”

“I can help you clean.”

“Come here.” I pushed the sled against the wall and sat on it. He sat next to me.

“I got to do this thing in here. I want you to sleep so I don't have to carry you to school tomorrow.”

He stared at me real hard. I wasn't sure what he was looking at. Then he touched my eye where I'd been hit.

“Does it hurt?” he asked.

“Not too bad,” I said, and stood up. “Lie down.”

He put his head on the pillow and shoved his thumb in his mouth. I grabbed a handful of plastic bags out of the box on the counter. The only way I was going to clean the garage was by throwing out a lot of stuff. And I needed to move fast so I could get some sleep too.

I filled a couple of garbage bags with junk. I didn't care what I was tossing or whose it was. It wasn't my problem anymore. The garbagemen could take it all, just like they took my bike when I was a kid.

“Pip?”

“What?”

“You still keep kryptonite in your pocket?”

Hiding in the garage, I figured I wasn't looking too tough to him.

“Go to sleep, Bugs.”

“Pip. Come here.”

I went over to where he was lying. He waved his hand for me to bend over, then took the cape off his neck and shoved it in the back of my T-shirt.

It was like he was thinking I was some kind of hero.

Poor kid.

I took it off and put it on the end of the sled.

“Pip?”

“Try to go to sleep, Mikey.”

“What about the beasties?” he asked me.

I was going to tell him again that there was no such thing as beasties.

But I didn't want to lie to the kid.

“They're sleeping,” I told him. “Now you go to sleep too.”

I didn't look back at him while I was cleaning. I tried not to hear him either. I tried not to hear how hard he was sucking on his thumb. I tried not to hear him crying. I just kept throwing stuff in bags. Everything that didn't look like anything I'd ever care about went: my father's tools, Christmas decorations, papers, magazines, shelves. It all went.

I didn't have a watch on. I had no idea what time it was or how long I'd been throwing stuff out. Before I knew it I'd used the whole box of garbage bags. There had to be twenty-five of them stuffed and piled up next to the door.

There were some boxes I'd left in the back. They looked like stuff my mother had packed and was saving. I didn't want to trash anything that might mean something to her.

I was tired. I was dog-ass tired.

I sat down next to the sled and caught a look at my brother. He was sleeping with his thumb in his mouth. He can be sort of cute when he's not shooting his mouth off.

I took the cape off the sled and put it over him like a blanket.

Poor little guy—sleeping in the garage on top of a sled wearing wet pajamas. He had nothing to hold on to but his thumb and the thought that someday he'd fly like Superman.

At least I could get high.

I pulled up my sock to see if I had a joint.

Nothin'.

I'd left the kryptonite in my bedroom.

The tapping on the garage door woke me up.

I was on the floor, leaning against the toboggan with my head on Mikey's leg. I stood up, walked over to the door, and listened.

“What?” I asked.

“It's Mom. Open up.”

I looked over at Bugs. I didn't want to wake him by pulling the door open.

“What time is it?”

“Five-thirty,” she said.

I rubbed my eyes like I always do when I wake up. My right eye stung.

“Come back and get us up in an hour,” I told her.

“You can't sleep in there all night.”

“Where've you been, Mom? We already did.”

“He knew I was going to come out for you. He wouldn't let me leave,” she said. “I waited for him to fall asleep, but I ended up falling asleep first.”

Big surprise.

“Come out of there,” she said. “Before your father wakes up.”

“Is that why you're here?” I banged the side of my head against the garage door and left it there. “You don't want Dad to wake up and remember what an asshole he was last night. You want us to come in and play make-believe with you—pretend we're all one big happy family.”

She's crazy.

“I don't want everything starting up again,” she said.

Unbelievable. “You think you can stop it?”

I was probably having the longest talk with my mother that I'd ever had, and she was standing on one side of a wall with me on the other.

Figures.

“Get your brother inside,” she said.

I picked my head up off the door. “He's okay right here,” I said.

I looked over at him. He wasn't okay. Neither of us was. But we didn't really have a choice.

I could hear Claire in my head saying,
You have nothing
but
choices.

Yeah. She was going to be a lot of help. She didn't know a thing about my life—about me.

“Come back in an hour,” I said again and walked to the other end of the garage. I knew I wouldn't be able to hear her tapping on the door or walking away from back there.

There was no way I was going to fall asleep again. I wasn't even going to try.

I sat on the counter in the back of the garage, banging my feet into the boxes I'd left there.

Something was digging into my butt. It was the Jekyll and Hyde book from English class. I read it for a little while.

“It seems scarcely a house. There is no other door, and nobody goes in or out of that one, but, once in a great while, the gentleman of my adventure.”

I stared at the garage door. Pictures of my father started going through my head. I thought about how he was one person at his job, never yelling at anybody—and somebody else at home who could scream so loud, the windows shook.

I thought about his potion bottles all lined up on top of the refrigerator. He drank his potion—his scotch—and most of the time when he did, he turned into his own kind of monster.

Dad. The Grinch. The Beastie.

Hyde.

I put the book down and jumped off the counter. My eye hurt. I was cold. I was hungry. I was tired. I was angry. I needed something to get the edge off. I was dying for a joint.

All I could think to do was look in the boxes by my feet. I knew I wouldn't find any food or pot in them. But it would kill time until my mother came back to get us up for school.

The first box had those statues of my mother's in it. The second box was full of photos. There were 4x7's, 3x5's, old school mug shots, and a ton of family pictures.

I grabbed a handful and looked through them. In some, Mom looked real young—not a single gray hair like the ones I'd been seeing lately. She was even smiling in a few of them. But I guess people are supposed to do that for pictures. There were pictures of Mom and me, Mikey and me, Mikey and me with Mom. There were pictures of my father with his father, with Mikey, with Mom, with both of them.

I kept pulling pictures out of the box. Searching. I was doing it so fast, I finally dumped the damn thing over and poured them all out on the floor. I couldn't find one. There wasn't even one picture of me with my father.

Not one.

Screw him.

I started to shove the pictures back into the box. I was going to put them away, wake Mikey, and get ready for another messed-up day.

Then I saw it.

It was a picture my mother had taken the first day I learned how to ride a two-wheeler without training wheels.

My father had his arm around my shoulder. He was pulling me into his side and smiling.

I remembered that day. I was psyched I'd ridden the bike, but I was pissed too. He'd promised he wouldn't let go of the back of the bike without telling me, but he did. He told me he had to let go—it was the only way I was going to learn. He said he knew I wasn't going to fall.

“Get up, Mikey.” I pulled open the garage door, hoping it was loud enough to wake my father—hoping he had a hangover and that I was making it worse.

“What's going on?” Mikey asked, sitting up and looking around.

“You're not dreaming, Bugs. You slept in the garage last night.”

I started dragging the bags to the end of the driveway. I wanted the garbagemen to get them before my father had a chance to go through them.

Mikey grabbed one with both hands and started dragging it.

“Go inside,” I told him. “I'll do this. Get dressed, eat breakfast, and we'll get out of here quick this morning.”

“Okay.”

He went into the garage, grabbed his pillow and his cape, and ran back to the house.

“Pip?” he said when he got to the door.

“What?”

“Don't tell anybody. Okay?”

“Tell anybody what?”

He rolled his eyes and kept his teeth together so he was just talking through his lips. “That I wet my pants.”

I dragged three bags at once down the driveway. “I don't know what you're talking about,” I said.

He ran inside, yelling out a “Thanks” on the way in.

After I got all the bags out, I went into the house and up to my room. I got my stash, rolled a joint, grabbed a book of matches, and went back outside.

I didn't go far, just down the street behind the house of some old people. I figured they'd never hear me out there.

I lit up.

My eye still hurt. I was still hungry and tired and pissed.

But after a few hits I just didn't care anymore.

Nothing mattered.