Read What We Keep Is Not Always What Will Stay Online
Authors: Amanda Cockrell
“Oh God, Mom.”
“Brian tried to talk to me once after I got back, but I wouldn’t let him get near me. I think maybe he was sorry. But then his family moved and I never saw him again. I’ve always cringed inside every time I even thought about sitting in front of that motel with that man calling me a whore and people staring at me. After I went to college, I always felt different from the other girls because I’d been married, even if they didn’t know about it. I never told anyone, and I don’t think Brian did either.”
You don’t expect to hear stuff like that from your mother. I guess we’re more alike than I thought. She fell in love without thinking it through, like me, and when she fell in love again, the second time, she thought she could change my dad like I thought I could fix Jesse.
“And Ben wanted to put that in a script?” No wonder she was mad. She married Ben and thought she’d finally gotten love right, and then he was so totally clueless he couldn’t see what this meant to her. I said, “I love Ben, but he’s a moron.”
Mom smiled. She even looked kind of affectionate. “You know writers.”
“You were going to go back to him even if he hadn’t taken it out, weren’t you?” I could tell by her expression.
“I told you, after everything that’s happened, that memory just doesn’t seem to make me sick anymore. It doesn’t seem so poisonous, you know?”
“So why did he take it out?”
“I think he finally figured out that I wasn’t mad because it embarrassed me, I was mad because I felt betrayed all over again, this time by him, when he wanted to use it and wouldn’t listen to me.”
“Okay,” I said. “Maybe Ben isn’t a moron, he’s just slow on the uptake.”
“What he is,” Mom said, “is someone who really loves me. I’ll have to settle for that.”
I didn’t say,
well, duh
, or anything else I might have said last week. I said, “I’m not ever going to understand Jesse, am I?”
“No, probably not,” Mom said. “Jesse was way too complicated. That’s what I was scared of. But at least you had some sense.” She sighed. “If it had been me, I’d probably have run off with him just because someone told me I couldn’t.”
“Are you saying I have more sense than you do?” Not that I haven’t thought so from time to time. Now, though, I’m not sure.
“Did. Past tense. But yes.” Then she said, “But don’t quote me on that some night when you come in after curfew and expect it to get you anywhere.”
“Got it.”
We sat on the wall for a while watching the sprinkler shoot little water diamonds in a circle. Then Grandpa Joe and Felix came out with three beers and an Orangina. They handed Mom a beer and me the Orangina and we all watched the sprinkler until Wuffie said lunch was ready.
24
Mom came home this morning with her suitcases, and the Todal went nuts. He knows what suitcases mean. Mommy’s home! Bless us all here at the Untied Church of Dog.
Grandma Alice is so pleased to have Mom back that when we left for Mass she was fixing a roast chicken to celebrate, even though we aren’t usually Sunday-dinner-in-the-middle-of-the-day people.
St. Thomas’s won’t be ready until Easter, so we went to Our Lady of Good Counsel and Noah and his mother were there too. The bandages are off his left hand. It looks really red, and the skin is tight—he’s going to have scars—but the doctor says it’s healing just fine. The right hand is worse. He still has a dressing on that one, so I fixed his punch for him afterward. He can hold a cookie though, so I refused to feed him.
“Some nurse you are,” he said.
“It’s all about therapy,” I told him. “Force the patient to be as independent as possible.” I almost cried then, since I’d been reading up on that because of Jesse. I told Noah, “It’s for the sake of your self-esteem,” which is actually probably not a problem for Noah.
Noah said, “You look depressed, Ange.”
“I keep thinking about Jesse,” I said. “And Felix took off.” Nobody’s seen him since lunch yesterday.
“The old dude?”
“Yeah.” I looked at Noah like I dared him to say something smart-ass, but he didn’t.
“He was cool, the way he got the hoses going at the fire.” Noah picked at the bandage on his hand. “It was rough, what happened to Jesse. I’ve been feeling weird, too. Jesse was scary. He was, like, so hungry. He wanted stuff, you know, and he didn’t know how to get it.”
“I know.”
“It’s that—what do they call it when someone isn’t mature?”
“Nobody ever told you?”
“Very funny. I’m
supposed
to act like I’m fifteen. Arrested development—that’s what I mean. He went into the army when he was seventeen, and he never got to be a kid and fart around.”
I looked at Noah sideways so he wouldn’t see I was impressed. He’s actually grown up a lot since last fall. I wonder if watching what happened to Jesse had something to do with it. Before Jesse, I’d have pegged Noah as someone likely to join the army at seventeen just to shoot at people.
I’m doing better too, sort of. Sometimes now I’m halfway okay, and then I remember and it’s like my heart will stop. Helen says you can’t rush the dance.
25
It’s been two months since Felix left, but I’d still been half hoping he’d be there when we went back to St. Thomas’s. He wasn’t. On the other hand, Father Weatherford was right about the altarpiece. It’s so lovely, it just glows. There are vines and stars in rose and deep blue and soft green on the arch over the altar, and new gilding on the sunburst at the center, and the faux marble on the columns is rose-gold now and three shades lighter than it was. There are details I never saw before—in the painting of Our Lady of Sorrows, for instance, her hands are full of roses even though there is a sword stuck through her heart.
St. Thomas is pleased, I think. At least his statue is smiling, and I have to sort of smile back even if he did say that women are defective and misbegotten. I give him the benefit of the doubt for living in the thirteenth century when no one was exactly enlightened. He also said that poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder, which sounds like something Felix would say. I miss Felix like mad.
It’s Easter, but it’s cold out. There was a late frost last night and you could hear the wind machines going all over the valley to keep the oranges from freezing. They set up funny echoes sometimes, tricks of the sound waves. I kept thinking I could hear the Underworld doors banging shut behind someone, Jesse maybe.
Or maybe just behind all our mistakes. I’d rather think of it that way. Mom and Ben are acting like they never split up, only even more cheerful. I don’t think Mom’s problem really is that she can’t settle down—she just tried to settle down too early with Brian Reilly, and then my dad was kind of a catch-up for her. I can’t imagine Mom thinking no one else would want to marry her. She gave me her poetry journal this morning and told me I could read it if I wanted to. She said this one was about the Las Vegas thing:
What I Haven’t Lost Yet
More than you would think. The owner’s manual
for a car that always had a demon in it
and the radio the cat peed in,
making it likely to burst out
with polka music on its own, or
a Sunday preacher promising damnation
to girls who like to mess around with girls.
Toasters missing a part, and formulas
no longer describing the circumference of a circle,
or the square of the hypotenuse.
These truncated remains keep stubborn
residence in my brain, with the Ipana toothpaste song,
and faces of boys who once betrayed me.
What we keep is not always what will stay.
I asked her if she really remembered the Ipana song, which is apparently an ancient brand of toothpaste, and she said that was actually Wuffie’s memory. She said poetry is about truth, not facts. Then she sang it for me. Good God.
What I’m going to save of Jesse is the otter. And the way he said nobody was going to use him as a poster boy for their causes. I kept some of Jesse’s drawings, too, but I gave most of them to his mother. I had so many. I expect his face will stay, too, whether I want it to or not. But that’s okay.
What I have of Felix is the little statue. I keep it on my nightstand and I do talk to it. It looks like it’s listening. When I was little, I thought that people were solid all the way through, like potatoes. When I learned about skeletons it scared me to death. Now I think that maybe your soul or whatever it is has all kinds of layers, too. Maybe Felix is just an extreme example of that.
He was right. You can only watch. I couldn’t make Jesse okay by loving him. Or Felix either. And I’m going to have to live with that, because that’s what grown-ups do. That’s what Ben and Mom do, and it’s no wonder it gives them trouble and they freak out. In a movie, Felix would have turned out to be a long-lost uncle and moved in with us. In a movie,
I
would have been burned in the fire and Mom and Ben would have reconciled over my hospital bed. In a movie, I would have helped Jesse get well because only I understood him. He would have run a marathon on his C-Leg and given hope to other injured soldiers, instead of trying to burn down a church to impress me.
As it is, maybe Mom and Ben will stay together and maybe they won’t, and I won’t be able to do a thing about it. That’s kind of freeing, actually.
Grandma Alice made Sunday dinner for us again. It was eggplant lasagna this time. I fed the eggplant to the Todal. Thanks be to Dog.
Acknowledgments
As always, I owe thanks to the people who have shepherded this book on its way. Particularly I have to thank Han Nolan, who read it in multiple drafts and encouraged me to get going on it; my wonderful agent Sarah Davies; my equally wonderful editors Brian Farrey and Sandy Sullivan; the art department at Flux for the coolest cover ever; my endlessly patient husband Tony Neuron; my brother-in-law Michael Neuron, for putting me on to Char Man; and Robert Campbell, who vetted the Vietnam scenes for me—any mistakes there are my own and not his.
My gratitude also goes to the students and faculty in the Graduate Program in Children’s Literature at Hollins University, who heard me read bits and pieces of it at faculty readings and kindly indicated that they’d like to hear the rest of the story.
The names of four of the characters in this book belong to my son Felix and his friends Noah, Jesse, and Darren, who quite a long time ago, when they were about twelve, once said to me, “You write books? Cool! Put our names in one.” So I have.
And finally, a general acknowledgement to a beloved town: Ojai, California, where I grew up and which provided the template for Ayala; and to the Ojai boys who went to war and didn’t come back, or came back someone else.
About the Author
Amanda Cockrell is a native of California, daughter of a screenwriter and a novelist. She is the founding director of Hollins University’s graduate program in children’s literature and managing editor of the university’s literary journal,
The Hollins Critic
. She has received fiction fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Virginia Commission for the Arts. At varying times she has also been a newspaper reporter and a copywriter for a rock radio station. When not otherwise occupied, she makes found-object collages, most often santos and shrines for imaginary deities.
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