Ask Again, Yes (19 page)

“What were my parents like before I was born?”

George shook his head. “I don’t know, Pete. It’s all ancient history now anyway. They had that stillborn baby a couple of years before you were born. Sometimes I forget about that. I was at the hospital when it came. They knew the baby was dead but for some reason the doctor made your mom deliver it. It was healthier for her or something, and being a nurse she understood that. I remember that she held the baby after. Your dad—no way. He didn’t go near the room. He called me to come up and wait with him, and then when it was over we had a drink. But what did I know? I’d come straight from baseball practice, I remember that
much. Our mother was still alive but she didn’t know nothing about it. She didn’t like your mom too much. Anyway, Brian had this little flask he used to keep in his boot. He couldn’t see how your mom would want to hold a dead child and she couldn’t see how he didn’t want to. I was so young that I didn’t think about any of this until a lot later, you know? I was only . . .” George calculated back. “Fourteen, maybe? God, younger than you are now. I remember feeling like he was way, way older than me. When we sipped from the flask, we didn’t hide it away or anything. That felt grown up to me.”

After it was quiet in the car for a while, he added, “That baby dying made everything worse, but things were bad between them before that.”

They approached a traffic light.

“You didn’t know that? About the baby?” George asked, taking quick glances at Peter as the light turned yellow, and then red.

“No,” Peter said. He thought of the single baby picture he’d seen of himself, and then imagined himself dead, his skin ashy and cold.

“Was it the reason they got married?” Peter asked.

“I think they would have gotten married anyway. They’re both totally nuts when I really think about it.”

Despite the meet schedule, despite his homework, which had gotten more intense over the years of high school, Peter still tried to see his mother at least twice a month. When he saw her, he said nothing about his job with the ironworkers or the recruiters who were calling or really anything that was going on with him. She’d started a new medication that left her in sort of a trance, and she seemed completely indifferent to the things he said. If anything, it appeared to annoy her to see him coming down the hall on a Sunday afternoon with his headphones around his neck and his backpack slung over his shoulder.

“Why are you here?” she asked one Sunday at the end of the summer.
It was Labor Day weekend. Sitting in that family meeting room chair, he felt the heat coming off his skin. He was browner that summer than he’d ever been, and stronger: all the lifting at work had changed his body, he could feel it. He’d let his hair grow longer and the sun had kissed it with gold lights. She sat in an identical chair to his with her cardigan wrapped tightly around her shoulders and her legs crossed at both the knee and the ankle, one twisted around the other like a vine twists around a post. School, his senior year, would start that coming Tuesday. He’d taken one box of questions from the Trivial Pursuit box—she liked to go through the questions but hated actually playing the game—but she refused to play. She only squinted toward the corner of the room and turned her face away from him. “Don’t you have things to do? Aren’t you busy enough? I asked you why you’re here. You don’t have an answer?” She loved him, he told himself. This was just the way she acted sometimes. That was the way she acted when she was afraid.

“Because I wanted to see you.”

She turned away and pressed her cheek into the chair cushion. If he didn’t come to see her, who would? How would she feel if not a single person in the world cared enough about her to go see her for an hour or two? So for fifty minutes he sat there and read the questions out loud that he thought she might be interested in, then, after a few seconds, flipped the card and read the answer. When it was time to go, she stood by the window and refused to say goodbye. “I’m leaving now,” he said and waited. He didn’t mind, exactly, when she got like this; it was more that he felt embarrassed, like he didn’t know what to do with his hands or what to say. He knew it didn’t quite have anything to do with him, but some days, often when he least expected it, he removed his sympathy from her and took it back to wrap around himself. Sometimes it all seemed temporary, a thing they had to get through, and sometimes it seemed like this was always the way things would be, that he’d stay silent and do his work and be a good boy all in hopes of a change that would never come.

On his way out that afternoon, a woman with a hospital ID stopped
him, told him she was the chief administrator, asked if his father was picking him up. He told her he was taking the train, and the woman asked if he could pass along the message that the director of the hospital needed to speak with him as soon as possible.

“We tried calling, but—”

“Yeah. Sure. I’ll tell him,” Peter said. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d spoken to his dad. It was before George put the air conditioner back in the window. Before summer set in.

That night, when George went out to pick up a few slices of pizza, Peter found the little phonebook in the drawer nearest the phone and flipped through pages of his uncle’s scrawl to find his father’s name and an 843 number beside it. He dialed. He let it ring and ring. He hung up and tried again. And again. Panic rose in his gut, followed by fury. He returned the phone to the cradle, then picked it up and tried again.

“What’s up?” George said when he returned, two grease-spotted bags in his hand. But Peter could only hang up the phone and pick it up again and start the cycle over.

“Peter. What are you doing?”

“I have to talk to my dad,” Peter said, and turned all his fury on himself when he realized that no matter how hard he clenched his teeth he was still crying. “We have to fix this fucking machine, George,” Peter said in a voice thickened with tears. “He’s probably calling all the time. He’s probably worried about me.”

George nodded, placed the bags on the counter. “You’re right. I’m going to do that tomorrow. Okay? You’re right about that. I’m sorry. I’m terrible for putting things off.”

And the next day, Peter’s first day of school, he woke to find both the phone and the answering machine had been disconnected, were thrown in the garbage. He pulled on the new pants and the new button-down he’d bought the week before with his summer money—George had insisted he keep his earnings and promised he’d ask him for money if he ever got caught up short—and slung his old backpack on his shoulder.
George was already long gone. At school, he met his new teachers for the year. He got his new locker in the senior wing. He signed out the textbooks he’d need, but it was difficult to concentrate until he figured out why the people at the hospital wanted to talk to his father. At practice, Coach had them run intervals until a couple of kids threw up. Two of the freshmen approached him, blushing, and told him they’d watched him run at states in the spring.

When he stepped into the apartment late that afternoon, he saw a new phone sitting where the old phone had been. Cordless. Updated. It gleamed like a new car, and George explained they wouldn’t need a tape anymore because the messages were all stored inside the phone, a thing called voicemail. He’d waited until Peter got home to set up the code so that Peter could pick something he’d remember easily. Peter felt the tension of the day slowly leave his body.

“But, Peter,” George said as he scratched his head and shifted his weight from foot to foot. “Your dad, he moved. He’s down in Georgia now, I think. I talked to him a while back and I figured I’d wait to tell you until I had his new number. But I never heard back, and that number in South Carolina doesn’t reach him.”

“But my mom’s doctors need to get hold of him. They need to tell him something.”

“Yeah, you said that. So I called up there today and they only wanted to tell him that she’s being moved to a different hospital upstate. There was a space issue.”

“Where upstate?”

“Albany.”

“How far is Albany?”

“Two hours.”

“Is there a train?”

“I’m sure there is. But I was thinking you could get your driver’s license, take my car if you want, you could—”

“When does she leave?”

George stepped toward him like he wanted to touch him but didn’t know where or how.

“She left today.”

Peter felt the information pass over him like a gust of air. “She knew yesterday. She knew she was going.”

“I’m not sure,” George said.

Peter nodded and nodded and hugged himself hard when he felt his body begin to tremble.

“I should have told you that your dad moved, Peter. I should have—”

“I don’t care about my dad.” As soon as he said it, it felt true. “I don’t care if I never see him again.”

Now it was George who was nodding, taking that in. “Okay. I can see that. He did a selfish thing. He was going through something, and he made a move that was all for himself. I’ve done selfish things. You’ll probably do a few selfish things before you’re through. But he loves you, Peter. I know he does. When you were little and we didn’t get to see each other that much, he used to call and tell me all the funny stuff you did, and how smart you were.”

“Why didn’t he help my mom? He knew there was something wrong with her. He knew. All this”—Peter gestured toward the couch that was his bed, his schoolbooks stacked on the floor, the little roll-away hang rack that served as Peter’s closet—“could have been avoided.”

“Well, if he’d known what was going to happen, he might have, Peter. But he didn’t know. You didn’t know. Even your mom, she didn’t know either.”

“He could have stopped her from taking the gun. He’d started hiding it after the thing at Food King—the little cabinet over the fridge that we never used. He used to hide the bullets somewhere else but at some point he stopped doing that. And if I figured it out pretty quickly, I’m sure she did, too. That night, after they’d been arguing for hours, he saw her push the chair over to reach the cabinet. And you know what he did? He just turned around and headed upstairs. What did he think she was going to
do? As soon as he left her there in the kitchen alone with his gun, I knew he was useless, so I went over to Kate’s house to call 911. I didn’t want to call from our house because I’d have had to walk right past her to get to the phone. I never thought that Mr. Gleeson would go over there.”

Saying to George what he’d never said to anyone brought back his house in Gillam so vividly he could see the old lamp in the corner of the living room, barely casting any light. He could look one by one at his stack of games, his shoes lined up along the bottom of his bedroom closet. He thought of the rocks out back, hopping from peak to peak while Kate looked on. He thought of how warm her hair had felt when he’d had his hand in it, sitting knee to knee on that abandoned swing set on Madison Street.

“I thought you told the police that he’d been upstairs most of the night, that he didn’t have any idea she’d gotten his gun.”

“That’s what I said, yes.”

“Did he tell you to say that?”

“No. I just knew that’s what I should say.”

From the street below came a car alarm, and then, just two seconds later, another. George leaned over and slammed the window shut.

“The thing is, Peter, grown-ups don’t know what they’re doing any better than kids do. That’s the truth.”

By October of senior year, there were four schools with strong running programs asking to set up an official visit. They were good schools, with tough academic standards. Coach Bell explained the visit would be Peter’s chance to check out their facilities, their programs, talk about what each respective coach had in mind. Peter had no idea what he should be looking for in a college, and so he followed Coach Bell around on these visits like he was a kindergartner. Coach made sure to give Peter time alone with the team, so he could ask them any questions he might
not like to ask in front of the coaches, but even then, out of earshot of the grown-ups, Peter wasn’t quite sure what to say.

“How much will tuition be?” Peter always asked on the way home from these visits, but Coach Bell didn’t know. As much as half his tuition might be covered. They had to wait and see. Only half? Peter wanted to say, but he had the sense he was one of the lucky ones, and should keep his mouth shut.

And then, just after Halloween of his senior year, he got a call from a coach at a small school in New Jersey, Division III. The school couldn’t even offer athletic scholarships. But this coach knew about Peter’s SATs, his AP classes, his class rank. He knew his PRs in the mile, the half mile, the quarter. What this school could offer was a combination of grants and scholarships based on merit and need that would cover his whole tuition, plus room and board. For his walking-around money, as Coach put it, they would set him up with a nice work-study that would be flexible about hours when he had out-of-town meets. Since he was no longer a dependent of his parents, he’d qualify for more. All he had to do was a bunch of paperwork.

Elliott College was not the best school, academically, and when he considered their offer he also thought about the pamphlet from Dartmouth that he’d been carrying around inside his American history textbook for a few months. History was his favorite subject, like a long, riveting story with plot twists and turns, and often, before tests, while the other students were cramming in every last minute to study, Peter would flip to that pamphlet and examine the photos one more time. Ms. Carcara had promised him that Dartmouth was not out of the question, that Coach Bell had already spoken to the coach up there and there was no doubt Peter would qualify for a partial academic scholarship, a need-based grant. They couldn’t offer him a full ride, but there were student loans available that would cover the balance. When Peter told Ms. Carcara about Elliott College, she seemed disappointed.

“They have a new president,” Ms. Carcara told him when she’d had
a chance to do more research. “Trying to become more competitive. So they’re willing to put themselves out for a kid like you.”