Damage (12 page)

“Let me make this clean and clear. Don’t even think you’re going to walk me to the door. And don’t try to call me later. Don’t try to call me ever. You are
sick,
and this is over. O-V-E-R.”

She flings the words at you, looking at you from wide, frightened doll’s eyes. Then,
slam!
—she’s scurrying the sidewalk.

You watch her through the window. At first she hurries as if something’s chasing her, but by the time she gets to the porch steps her back is straight, her shoulders squared. In that instant you want to run after her, you want to crawl after a girl who just made a major point not wanting you.

You keep both hands at your sides. Your head turns, your eyes follow her up onto the porch—but otherwise you don’t move. You do not open your mouth. You just sit there and watch her leave.

She disappears inside; the front door shuts.

It’s o-v-e-r.

You look at the window that is Heather’s bedroom The blinds are closed, but in a moment you see them give a little shudder—you can almost see her, stalking into her room, slamming the door so hard it shakes the blinds. can almost see her at this moment, checking hers in the mirror. Calming herself down by taking out brush, maybe fluffing her hair. Thinking she doesn’t look so bad, for someone who just got so freaked out. Telling herself there’s nothing in that mirror that looks wounded or damaged.

Heather Mackenzie is completely capable of keeping everything shining and perfect around her. And she doesn’t need you.

You start the engine. Put the truck in gear and drive away from her house.

The next thing you know, you’re passing through the middle of town. Already? You don’t remember getting here; time must have stopped keeping pace somehow. It’ like driving through a doll’s town, with little wooden people walking on the streets—this town seems to have been deserted of real people years ago. All the cars moving like robots, the changing of lights from red to green to yellow—it all seems hollow, like a not very good copy of real life.

It isn’t until you’re forced to stop for a red light
171 that you finally see another real live human being. An old guy, wrinkled and windblown in a thin jacket. He’s on the median, selling Tyler roses.

You’ve got some money in your pocket. You could buy flowers, drive back. Surprise Heather with some roses.

You could act like there’s nothing wrong with you at all. Act like there’s nothing wrong with her, either. See if you can get back on the same road the two of you were on before this weekend.

The old guy’s got a thin bundle in his hand; in the unreal glow of the dying daylight you see red roses wrapped in clear cellophane. You could pay him a few bucks, take the roses and lay them carefully on the seat beside you so they wouldn’t get bent. You could make a U-turn, nice and easy so the roses wouldn’t slide off onto the floorboard. You could drive slow and careful back to Heather’s house and try to make everything all right.

You take another look at the roses. They’re just buds, actually. Tied up with a cheap, shiny ribbon already unraveled a little on one end.

Heather wouldn’t like flowers from some guy off the street. She’s probably used to florist flowers, done up in a vase with a card, delivered by a van with lettering on the side.

Of course, she might not be able to tell where they came from.

But you have a feeling that she would.

The light is already green. There’s nobody behind you telling you to move on. Or even to turn back.

You ease off on the clutch at the same moment slowly begin to press the accelerator. And in a moment you’re heading down the highway toward home.

When you finally get home, you pull up the gravel driveway past the house, and head around to the back. You park in your usual spot by the back porch and cut the engine.

There is only one thing left.

You sit perfectly still and you shut your eyes, and listen to yourself breathe.

The truck seat is firm under you. The air is cool; hugs your shirt to your skin. It’s peaceful in here. It’s like being on the bottom of a pool, in the stillness and the silence, while up above you the ripples are still spreading.

In the quiet a sound begins; a sound that you can’t identify; rhythmic, muffled through the window.

You open the door, and the noise gets louder. It is coming from across the front yard. From the Hightowers’ house? It’s harsher now, regular—almost a sound.

It must be Curtis. Nobody else would be over there this time of day.

Curtis will be pretty torn up when he finds out you’re gone. Maybe you ought to go over, give him one last moment. A good-bye, whether he knows it or not. Something, because you owe him, for what you’re about to do.

Although the truth is, talking to Curtis isn’t going any of this easier for him. Probably you should just go inside. It’s going to be getting dark soon. You should walk inside and go stand in front of the sink and let that razor blade do its job. Sure, some people are going to be hurt. Curtis. Mom. Becky. But eventually they’ll heal. They’ll all get over it, with time.

Of course, Heather’s dad probably thought the same thing.

The thought ruffles your sense of peace. You try to smooth it back down, try to breathe deep and recapture the silence of a moment ago, but that sound from outside is scraping the air around you. So you sit there for you don’t know how long, breathing too fast, staring at what’s left of the vine-covered old fence that lies along the property line between your house and Curtis’s; a few weathered old posts in varying degrees of decay and uprightness, held in their positions by a couple of rusted coils of wire, the whole thing covered with blackberry vines.

You and Curtis used to set empty cans on those posts,
throwing rocks at them for target practice. That was long time ago, but now you’re remembering how, when all the cans were knocked off, you and Curtis would walk over to reset them and end up taking a break every time, filling up with blackberries, talking and laughing about nothing in particular while the afternoon shadows grew longer and longer.

You and Curtis always tried to stretch the days out, because no day was ever long enough, back then.

You get out of the cab. Everything had stopped, inside your truck—but now that you’re out, you’ve got make choices.

Choices, it seems, have fingers reaching out in every direction. To the future. And the past.

That’s why you follow the sound over to the Hightowers’ house. And find Curtis scraping paint off the front porch railing as if this is a day like any other.

“Hey,” he greets you, not pausing in his scraping.

“Hey.” Then, “Getting ready to paint?”

Stupid question. Curtis, of course, doesn’t bother to answer.

You walk over, sit on the front steps. These are same steps you and Curtis used to leap off when you were little, seeing who could jump the farthest. Only problem was, neither of you ever marked where you landed, so neither ever knew who won.

The scraping stops. Curtis brushes paint flakes away,
smoothing the wood with his hand. After a few moments you remember today’s football practice.

“Where’d you go?” you ask him.

Curtis just shrugs.

You already know, anyway. He didn’t want to there anymore—so he undid his chin strap, dropped helmet on the ground, and walked away.

Now, sitting here, you realize something else, because of Curtis and his dad; because Curtis has never gone visit his father in the whole five years since his dad left. Never called him, even. And he never will.

When you think about that, you understand that Curtis made a decision when he walked off the field this afternoon. He’ll never go back—not to sit on the bench, not to play, not even to watch a game from the stands. That’s the way Curtis is. For him, this football season is over.

All because of you.

Curtis is scraping again, pressing the razor’s edge along the wood in rhythmic strokes.

“I’m sorry, man,” you tell him.

“Why?”

“If I’d been able to hold on to the ball—”

“Forget it. Couldn’t stand one more second of that beer-bellied Nazi asshole.”

“Yeah, but if—”

“Doesn’t matter. Whole thing gave me a bad taste in
my mouth.” He frowns a little, then scrapes harder.

A large flake of paint has landed on your knee. You pick it up and break it in half. Then you break it in half again. And again. Finally, when it’s so small it’s disappeared on the end of your finger, you clear your throat. “Heather and I broke up,” you tell Curtis.

The thought of what that means—aimless hours, nobody to get out of bed for, nobody who can make you real—leaves one big unshed ache in your chest.

“You okay?” Curtis is asking.

You start to shrug, but your eyes sting with sudden and somehow you’re shaking your head no.

Curtis rasps steadily away at the railing. Just when you think he’s not going to comment, he says, “I Hurts like hell.”

You’re remembering how you wanted to leave, that morning in the tack room long ago, but didn’t. Curtis won’t leave either—whatever you choose to tell him.

“Actually,” you hear yourself say, “I’ve been kind thinking about killing myself lately.”

The scraping stops.

“How?” Curtis asks, after a moment, and even though you can hear a little worry hovering at the edge that one-word question, for one crazy split second actually think you might laugh.

Anybody else would have asked
why.

You should have known Curtis is too practical
that. Curtis always starts at the outside of a problem and works his way in—like peeling an onion.

Sitting there in his presence, a bare possibility stirs; the possibility that letting go of the cliff’s edge may not mean that you have to fall.

The words are more than ready. They rise through the catch in your throat and tumble out into raw, jumbled piles: Heather and her father; heaviness, football, and razors. After a few minutes, Curtis quits pretending to scrape paint; he comes around with the still in his hand and sits beside you on the steps.

And you sit there talking: Curtis, flicking the button on the scraper, clicking the razor in, then out, then again, thinking hard, interrupting with a question once in a while; you, picking up flakes of paint, splitting them smaller and smaller, feeling your way into the future that you hadn’t been able to see.

Millions of people suffer from depression or know someone who does. If you want to know more about depression and what you can do to get help, contact the following organizations for information:

American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP)

3615 Wisconsin Avenue, NW

Washington, DC 20016–3007

(202) 966–7300

(800) 333–7636

www.aacap.org

American Psychiatric Association

1400 K Street, NW

Washington, DC 20005

(888) 357–7924

www.psych.org

American Psychological Association

750 First Street NE

Washington, DC 20002–4242

(202) 336–5500

(800) 374–2721

www.apa.org/psychnet

Center for Mental Health Services-Knowledge Exchange Network (KEN)

P.O. Box 42490

Washington, DC 20015

(800) 789–2647

www.mentalhealth.org

National Institute of Mental Health

NIMH Public Inquiries

6001 Executive Boulevard, Rm 8184, MSC 9663

Bethesda, MD 20892–9663

(301) 443–4513

www.nimh.nih.gov

If you or someone you know is having suicidal thoughts, seek help immediately. The following hotlines are answered twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week:

National Hope Line Network: (800) 784–2433

Girls and Boys Town National Hotline: (800) 448–3000

Thanks to Jeff Jenkins for sharing his knowledge of football (any errors or exaggerations regarding that sport lie solely at the feet of the author) and to Rachel Safko for her help in preparing this manuscript. Also, many thanks to the members of the Four Star Coffee Bar critique group and the YAWRITER list, for putting up with my writerly angst; I’m especially grateful to Cathy Atkins, Lisa Firke, Adrianne Fitzpatrick, Judy Gregerson, Shirley Harazin, Denise Johns, Kathy Lay, Ann Manheimer, Melissa Russell, Andrea Schulz, Shelley Sykes, Melissa Wyatt, and Lidia Zenida, and would like to thank them for their insights. I owe a tremendous debt to Martha Moore, Jan Peck, and Laura Wiess, for opening their hearts and helping me to write as honestly and deeply as could. And finally, this book would not be here without Steve Malk, who took an enormous burden from my shoulders and offered to carry it for me, and Alix Reid, who believed in and cared for Austin from the moment she met him.