Father's Day (14 page)

Jason could already envision his brother's diploma, framed on the wall of a split-level home with two cars in the driveway. A wife who spent Sunday in the garden, and folded his clothes at night; who planned surprise birthday parties, and made albums of the places they went, the things they saw.

Jason gripped the chains that suspended the plastic seat, then pushed off—letting his body swing through the air, as though he weighed nothing at all and could have gone on forever, with only his mind for company.

He imagined the applause, the podium where each graduate would be officially recognized. Then his brother in a satin gown, shaking hands with the principal, who leans in to give words of encouragement before finally presenting the diploma. Like the others, Steve is supposed to walk off the stage, but instead, stands for a moment, lingers in the midst of their shared victory—perhaps even unraveling the scroll and raising it to a surge of applause.

In Jason's mind, it's like the end of a movie, with music and wide shots as people in the crowd leap to their feet, whistle with two fingers, and toss the flat, rented graduation hats high in the air, screaming and holding on to each other's bodies. Then the camera freezes on a single
moment; fades to black, but you can still hear voices as the mottled lockers and empty classrooms, uneaten sandwiches and scribbled yearbooks, nicknames and first kisses, begin their retreat to that flickering, unattainable country of childhood.

W
HEN THEY WOKE
up next morning, the electricity was back on and their dinners lay half-eaten from the night before.

After wiping Harvey's mouth and hands with a cool cloth, Jason reset the air conditioner and cleared the table for breakfast. Harvey watched him spread a wave of butter over her toast and asked if there was going to be another power cut.

With time to go before school, Harvey carried a glass of milk to the front step. The flowers from last summer were in full bloom, and she wondered if they would ever be taller than the house. When her glass was empty she went back inside. Jason was vacuuming crumbs off the couch. Then he went out to the patio and smoked a cigarette.

Harvey was curious to see how Long Island would look after a night without power, but nothing had changed, and the faces of other drivers showed no sign of having gone to bed blind.

When Jason got back from dropping her off, he spent several hours writing descriptions on his computer and listing items for sale on his eBay site. When he added up the approximate value of everything, he was still a little short for the month, so he sat on the front steps with a mug of coffee, and searched in his mind for anything he could sell at a quick profit.

After a second cup on the couch, he decided to look in the
attic. It was another warm day, and the moment he stepped off the ladder could feel his shirt begin to stick. Near the opening, Jason discovered a pair of silver-handled salad servers, some Mickey Mouse comics from the 1950s, a Donald Duck telephone, ten Brooklyn Dodgers baseball cards that smelled like mothballs, and a brass candlestick. There was also a vintage Snoopy doll still in the box with the original price sticker. Jason had bought most of the items at a Catholic thrift store in Commack, at a time when he was flush with profitable inventory.

Wondering what other treasures lay undiscovered, he went in deeper, opening boxes, and making small tears to see inside plastic bags. In a far corner of the attic, near some exposed insulation, was a plastic container of semi-valuable items that Wanda had stuffed into boxes before his brother's house was repossessed following the accident. There were watches, a pearl necklace, pocketbooks, letters, books, and photographs in manila envelopes with dates written on the outside. Jason sat on a rafter, and raised each picture to his face the way a jeweler looks at rare stones.

His eyes stinging with sweat, he came downstairs with his eBay finds and a dozen photographs, which he looked at again in the light, over an egg salad sandwich and glass of orange soda.

He tried to imagine the sounds and the voices when each picture was taken. How unlikely their fate would have seemed to them.

I
N THE CAR
on the way home from school, Jason told Harvey she had a surprise waiting—but all she cared about was
a boy who had borrowed her pencil and then lost it. When they got home, she kicked her shoes off at the door and went to watch TV.

“Harvey!” Jason called after her. “Put your shoes away.”

As she slid over to the hall cupboard in her socks, Jason waited for her to notice. But she just slid back to the couch, scooping up the remote on her way.

“I was in the attic today,” he said. “I found some pictures of you and your parents.”

Harvey was flicking through the channels. It was so hot outside, she said. And were there ice pops in the freezer? Was that the surprise he'd told her about in the car? Or was it McDonald's?

O
VER DINNER,
J
ASON
decided he couldn't wait any longer for her to notice, and told her that he'd framed and hung some old photos, at a height where Harvey could see them.
That
was her surprise.

“Oh,” she said, shoveling refried beans onto a tortilla. “So it's not a toy or anything?”

“I got some nice frames at Marshalls. I'm surprised you didn't notice, Harvey. They're all around the house.”

Harvey looked at the tortilla in her hand. “It's parent-teacher night next week.”

“Oh, cool,” Jason said, imagining himself in her little orange chair, listening to the teacher go on about drawings and macaroni art.

“Didn't you get a letter or something, Harvey? Usually, they send a letter or something, don't they?”

“It's in my backpack.”

“When did you get it?”

“You don't have to go. I can just tell them you're working.”

“But I'm not working.”

“But we can tell them that.”

“Don't you want me to go?”

J
ASON WENT OVER
their conversation as he washed dishes.

Harvey was watching television. Jason could hear the voices of cartoon children, laughing and finding things out.

After making coffee, he sat on the couch, but his presence did not distract Harvey from the flickering screen.

When the cartoon was over, Jason got up. “Come and look at the pictures,” he said. “I spent the whole frickin' day putting them up, Harv.”

Harvey melted reluctantly off the couch, then followed Jason into the hall. When she stopped in front of the first picture, all she could do was grimace. “You can't even see my face,” she said, touching the image of herself in a green snowsuit. “Are you sure it's me?”

“I had it blown up, Harvey. It looks like you're building a snowman in the yard of your old house. Don't you remember that?”

Harvey thought for a moment. “I broke a mug of hot chocolate and got in trouble,” she said. “Snow is soft, but the mug still broke.”

Standing before the largest image—a grainy candid photograph of her parents leaving church on their wedding day—Harvey asked Jason if he knew who the people in the picture were, because she couldn't tell.

He tried to disguise his anger with a laugh, but the words
came out quickly. “That's your dad and your mom, Harvey. Can't you see that?”

“Yeah, but I wasn't born then,” she said. “So we were strangers.”

The last one, at the end of the hall near Jason's bedroom, was a baby picture. “Look how little you were,” Jason said. “Look how tiny.”

But Harvey just looked past Jason toward the sound of the TV. “I think
SpongeBob
is on. Wanna watch it with me?”

W
HEN
S
PONGE
B
OB HAD
finished, Harvey got up and went to her room.

After an hour flicking through the channels, Jason heard banging on the drum set and listened at her door. Then he went to the freezer, took a joint from a Ziploc bag, and sucked down a few hits on the patio.

She was trying to beat out the rhythm he'd taught her last week, but kept stopping to rest her arms.

Jason poured grape juice into a tall glass inscribed with the logo of the Hard Rock Café New York, then carried it to Harvey's door and knocked. “Want some juice?”

As she was gulping it down, Jason told her not to use the drumsticks until she got the rhythm going with her foot. “Try it,” he said. “One, two, three, four . . . one, two, three, four . . . one, two . . .” He took the glass away, then counted and watched her foot flap on the steel pedal.

“Now bang the drum on the count of three, like this,” he said, doing it in the air. “When you have that down, use the other drumstick to hit this one.” He pointed. “But don't do the third one until— Harvey, are you listening?”

“Just let me do it my way.”

Jason had told her all this before, but she kept forgetting. He wondered if memory needed to grow and strengthen, like the other muscles.

But then suddenly, Harvey was doing it on all three drums. Jason made guitar noises that he thought went along with the beat.

When Harvey lost the rhythm and stopped drumming, Jason clapped and told her to take a bow. Harvey said she didn't care, but was blushing. Jason could feel the buoyancy of the marijuana inside him, thoughts unraveling too quickly to remember.

He told Harvey he'd be right back, then returned with a portable CD player and some cookies. Harvey stopped drumming and watched him plug it into the wall.

“I'm going to put on some Nirvana,” he said. “Try and play along as best you can.”

For a while he watched her arms flail as she tried in vain to keep rhythm. But after listening to the same song a few times, she got some good beats going, and Jason sang along as the words came back to him.

When Harvey got tired, she put her drumsticks in the empty juice glass and just sat there until the song ended. Night had fallen, and cool air was pouring in through an open window.

“That man in the song is like me,” she pointed out. “He said he tried to have a father, but instead he got a dad.”

“Yeah,” Jason said. “I guess so.”

“Maybe he got adopted too?” Harvey went on. “Wanda said once you get adopted, that's it.”

“What do you mean, that's it?”

“Like, you have parents once you get adopted. You're no longer like Annie.”

“Annie?”

“You know, that kids' movie I hate.”

“Oh yeah. Daddy Warbucks, right? I hate that movie too.”

T
HE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON,
while Harvey was in school, Jason dug out some old tapes of British punk bands, then played them for her in the car on the way home. “This is the original grunge,” he told her. “These guys didn't give a shit.”

Harvey said it sounded like people having a fight. When they got back, Jason showed her pictures of 1980s punks in old music magazines. “That could be you someday,” he said, pointing to a woman with an orange Mohawk and a spike through her nose.

“But I want to work at Jiffy Lube,” Harvey said. “Or rescue animals on TV.”

After she'd brushed her teeth and put on pajamas, Jason told Harvey there was a shortage of girl drummers in the music world, and she definitely had something.

Late that night, Jason woke up and saw Harvey standing in his bedroom doorway. His window blinds were open, and the falling moon made her look porcelain.

“You okay, Harv?”

“I had to pee, and I wanted to see if you were up.”

“I was sleeping. Did you have an accident?”

“No. I just wanted to see if you were awake.”

“How long have you been standing there? Did you have a bad dream?”

“No, I had to pee.”

“Want me to tuck you in again?”

“No, it's okay. Just don't forget that parent-teacher night is coming up.”

“I thought you didn't want me to go.”

After she went back to bed, Jason tried to fall asleep, but a car brushed the wall with its headlights, and he sat up and looked at the alarm clock. For a few moments, he wondered if he'd dreamed the whole thing, then got up and went to make sure Harvey was back in her bed.

As he passed the hall closet going back to his room, Jason remembered what Harvey had told him as she stood in the doorway about parent-teacher night.

He flicked on the closet light, then found her backpack and sifted through its contents—empty chip bags, bits of wool, a rubber ball, a torn comic, shoelaces, Pokémon cards—until seeing the note sent home from school. Parent-teacher night for Harvey's grade was to take place in her classroom in a few days' time. Harvey's time slot was seven
P.M.
As Jason returned the letter, he noticed a colorful piece of card stuffed into a side pocket.

He took it out and looked for a long time at what Harvey had drawn, and at what she had written. Then he went to the bathroom and stared at his face in the mirror, saying the word that had stood out to him most, saying it over and over, as if hearing it for the first time.