“Right, Jase,” Mom says, buttering her toast.
“And what else … what else will I learn?” Jason asks.
“Oh, a lot of interesting things,” Mom says.
I stand in front of the open refrigerator, but nothing inside tempts me. Part of me is hungry, another part can’t get the food down.
“What’d you learn in second grade, Davey?” Jason asks, his mouth full of Grape-nut Flakes.
“More of what I learned in first grade,” I tell him. I close the refrigerator door. “You’re not going to wear that cape to school, I hope.”
“Why not? I like it.”
“It makes you look like Dracula,” I say.
“It’s supposed to.”
“Mom … do you think he should? I mean …”
“Oh, I think it’s all right,” Mom says. “If it makes Jason feel comfortable …”
“Comfortable,” Jason repeats. He eats a piece of toast, then says, “What about the store, Mom? Are you going to open the store today?”
“Not today,” Mom answers.
“When?” Jason asks.
“I don’t know,” Mom tells him.
My mother hasn’t set foot in the store since that night. None of us has. I don’t know what we’re going to do.
I
meet Lenaya at the bus stop and when the bus comes we find two seats together. It is crowded, with some kids standing in the aisle by the time
we reach the next stop. I begin to get a closed-in feeling. It starts with my hands getting cold and clammy, then there is a queasiness in my stomach, and finally, I begin to feel dizzy, as if I might pass out. I put my head down to the floor.
“Are you okay?” Lenaya asks.
I can’t answer.
She bends over, her mouth close to my ear. “Did you eat any breakfast?” she asks softly.
I shake my head.
“Here,” she says, going through her lunch bag. “Eat this.” She hands me an orange that has already been peeled.
I shove a piece into my mouth and bite into it, tasting the sweetness of its juice.
I feel better.
I make it through assembly, where the principal welcomes our class to the school, through a short homeroom session and through English, where Lenaya and I sit next to each other. She keeps looking at me, offering half smiles and once, she reaches over and touches my hand, which is trembling. But I hadn’t known it until then.
After English, I am on my own, trying to find Room 314, where my geometry class is scheduled to meet. But I can’t find it and I begin to feel frightened. I can hear each thump of my heart. I can’t seem to catch my breath, so I breathe harder and faster, trying to get some air into my lungs, but it doesn’t work. Nothing
works. Groups of kids are coming toward me in the hall, laughing and talking. One of them could be the junkie who killed my father, I think. There is no evidence that the killer was a junkie, or even a kid, but that is what I believe.
I want to run. I want to run as far from school as I can. But I can’t move. Can’t get my feet going. Can’t breathe. And then I pass out, hearing the thud of my head as it hits the floor.
Later, I am told that two girls and a boy helped me to the nurse’s room.
The nurse assumes that I am having First-Day-in-High-School-Panic.
“It’s not that,” I try to explain from the cot where I am resting. I notice that my belt has been loosened and that my Adidas are arranged neatly under the cot.
“Then what?” the nurse asks. She is very pretty with dark hair, tied back, and gray eyes. She has an accent I can’t place at first, but after a while I recognize it as Oklahoma, because my mother has a friend, Audrey, from Tulsa, and that’s how she sounds.
“Growing up isn’t easy,” the nurse says, and I feel like laughing because she is so naïve. “A lot of us don’t feel ready to leave the nest.”
“No,” I say. “You don’t understand.”
She smiles. “Oh, I think I do.” She looks over my medical form, which our doctor had filled out the end of June, and reads, “No heart problems, no diabetes, no history of severe pain, or
fainting spells, and normal periods. Well … no medical disorders at all.” She smiles at me again and closes the folder. She walks across the room, puts the folder back in a filing cabinet and returns with a cup of water and two white pills. She hands them to me and says, “Down the hatch.”
“What are they?” I ask, suspiciously.
“Aspirin.”
“I don’t have a headache.”
“With that bump on your noggin?”
“It doesn’t hurt,” I say. “Unless I touch it.”
“Even so …” she says, “let’s go.”
She is going to stand over me until I swallow the aspirin. I can tell. I might as well get it over with. So I sit up and take the pills.
“That’s a good girl,” she says, pulling a chair up to my cot. She sits down, adjusts her uniform over her knees, leans close and says, “Is it that time of the month, Davey?”
“No.”
She looks at me for a while. I wish she would go away. Doesn’t she have anything better to do on the first day of school? I wonder. Then she says, “Do you do drugs?”
I don’t answer. I am offended by her question.
“Strictly off the record,” she says. “Just between the two of us.”
“No,” I tell her. “I don’t do drugs.”
“You didn’t get stoned last night?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Booze?”
“No.”
“Is there a chance you might be pregnant?”
“No.”
“Not even a teensy-weensy chance?”
“Not even that,” I say.
A boy comes into the room then and calls, “Nurse … I’ve got this incredible earache.”
The nurse pulls the white curtains around my cot, giving me privacy. I hear her telling the boy that two aspirin will probably help. I close my eyes and drift off to sleep.
O
n the second day of school I pass out on my way to lunch. I am with Lenaya and she gets me to the nurse’s room.
“Again?” the nurse says, clucking her tongue at me. “What are we going to do with you?”
When it happens on the third day of school, the nurse says, “You know what, Davey? I think it’s time for you to see a doctor.”
So Mom takes me to Dr. Foster’s office. He listens to me as I explain what’s been happening, gives me a quick examination, and tells me to get dressed and come into his office.
My mother and Dr. Foster are waiting for me there. On the doctor’s desk is a picture of his wife and two sons, when they were small. They’re older than I am now. He writes something on my chart, then he looks up and says,
“You’re hyperventilating, Davey. Do you understand what that means?”
“I thought I’ve been fainting.”
“It’s different than fainting,” Dr. Foster explains. “This is caused by the way you’re breathing.”
“I breathe that way because I feel like I
can’t
breathe. I feel like I can’t get any air at all.”
“Yes, well …” Dr. Foster says, “we can all make ourselves hyperventilate. Divers do it … sprinters, before a race. You get a rush of oxygen to the brain. It can make you feel lightheaded.”
“Why am I doing that?”
“Anxiety. You’ve been through a lot.” He looks over at my mother, who is fastening and unfastening the clasp on her purse. Each time she does, it makes a clicking sound. Other than that the room is very quiet. “A new school … a tragedy in the family,” Dr. Foster continues. “It’s a lot to contend with at once.”
I think it is interesting that he puts the new school before the tragedy.
“Of course, facing up to it is the best way of dealing with it.” He rubs his eye. “Tell you what,” he says, “let’s give it another week. If you feel that you’re beginning to hyperventilate, talk to yourself. Tell yourself that you’re feeling anxious. That you have a right to feel anxious. Tell yourself to relax. Try to breathe slowly, regularly.” He scribbles something on his prescription pad, rips it off, and hands it to me. “And I
want you to take this high-potency vitamin, with minerals.” He stands up. “A change of scene might do her good,” he says to Mom. “It might do all of you some good … if it’s possible.”
“Thank you, Dr. Foster,” Mom says. She always thanks him when we are leaving, as if he’s doing us a favor by being our doctor.
“Anytime, Gwen,” he says. “And I mean that.”
“Yes, I know,” Mom says.
He pats me on the shoulder. “You’ll be all right, Davey. It takes time … that’s all.”
T
hat night Mom phones Bitsy and Walter in New Mexico. “I’d like to take you up on your offer,” she says. “Davey’s been having some …” She pauses, trying to find the right word. “Some trouble,” she says. “And the doctor has recommended a change of scenery.”
When Mom gets off the phone she tells us that Bitsy and Walter are very glad that we’re coming to visit.
“Do they have an ocean?” Jason asks.
“No, but they have mountains.”
“How high?”
“Very high,” Mom tells him.
“Can you fall off?”
“No.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
Walter and Bitsy make all the arrangements
for our flight from Philadelphia to Albuquerque. They even arrange to have Minka travel in the cabin with me, instead of underneath, in the baggage compartment.
I worry about paying for the tickets because I know we don’t have any extra money. Then Mom tells me that they have been pre-paid, by Walter and Bitsy. “Of course I’m going to pay them back,” Mom says. “As soon as I get things organized.”
We are going to leave in three days. I don’t go back to school. It doesn’t make any sense, when we’ll be gone for more than two weeks. And Mom doesn’t give me an argument about it so I guess that she agrees with me. I don’t hyperventilate once in those three days. Instead, I think about the trip. About getting away. I try to picture New Mexico. I try to keep my mind from wandering back to that night.
Every morning Mom reminds me to take my vitamin. It is huge and hard to swallow. It also turns my pee green.
When we are on the plane, somewhere between Chicago and Albuquerque, I flush the rest of the vitamins down the toilet.
SEVEN
We climb into Walter’s Blazer. Mom sits in front with Bitsy and Walter. Jason and I sit in the back. He is wearing his Dracula cape. He never takes it off. I think he even sleeps in it. I hold Minka on my lap. Behind our seat is an open area, where Walter has piled our luggage. When I turn around to make sure that neither my bag nor my knapsack has been left behind, I notice the rifle, or something that looks like a rifle. It is long and sleek. My heart begins to pound. “Uncle Walter,” I say, “is that a gun in the back?”
“Yes,” he answers.
“Is it loaded?” I ask.
“You bet … so don’t go messing with it.”
“Is there a lot of crime here?” I feel myself breathing harder, faster.
“No,” Bitsy says. “And on The Hill …”
“The Hill?” I ask, interrupting.
“Yes,” Bitsy says, “we call Los Alamos, The Hill … and up there we have virtually no crime at all.”
“Then why do you carry a loaded gun?” I ask, telling myself to relax. Relax and try to breathe slowly, normally.
“You never can tell,” Walter says, “especially down here. It’s better to be safe than sorry.”
I don’t understand but decide not to pursue it because the whole subject is making me jumpy and every time I ask Walter a question, he turns and speaks to me over his shoulder, taking his eyes off the road.
I see my mother grab the back of her seat with one hand and hang onto the handle of her door, with the other.
“Walter!” Bitsy shrieks, as he swerves and just misses colliding with a passing car.
Jason crashes into me, laughing. “Daddy had a gun in the store. Right, Mom?”
“Right,” Mom says, easing her grip on the back of the seat.
“But he didn’t keep it loaded because he was afraid I’d want to play with it. Right, Mom?”
“Right, Jase. Now why don’t you look out the window at the beautiful scenery.”
“I
am
looking,” he says. “I can talk and look at the same time.”
The scenery
is
beautiful. We whisk by flat open spaces with mountains in the distance, rising out of nowhere, stark and black, looking as if
they’re made of papier-mâché. The land is brown, then yellow, then almost red.
After an hour on the road, Jason says, “I have to pee.”
There are no gas stations, no restaurants, nothing, as far as you can see, except the land and the sky.
Walter pulls off the road and takes Jason for a short walk. When they come back, and we are on our way again, Jason falls asleep, with his head on my lap. He wakes up suddenly, not knowing where he is and I can read the fear in his eyes.
“It’s all right,” I tell him, smoothing his hair away from his sweaty cheek, where it has stuck.
I close my eyes, too, and when I awaken, I can feel the pull of the Blazer as we climb higher and higher. I have to yawn to clear my ears. “How much longer?” I ask Walter.
“Another fifteen minutes or so,” Walter says, turning around to face me. I must remember not to talk to him while he is driving.
Minka jumps from one side of the Blazer to the other, chasing a little moth that has flown in the back window. I look at my watch: five-thirty. But I remember that that is New Jersey time. Here it is just three-thirty. I reset my watch.
We go around a series of S-curves, with a sheer drop of hundreds of feet to our right. Jason grabs my arm and squeezes so hard he leaves finger marks. Around and around, and I
understand why Bitsy calls Los Alamos, The Hill.
Halfway up, Walter pulls off at a scenic lookout and we get out of the Blazer to stretch our legs and take in the view. All there is, for miles and miles, is a sea of rocky cliffs, dropping away into deep canyons. I don’t know how I will ever describe this view to Lenaya and Hugh.
“You can understand why Oppenheimer chose Los Alamos as the site for Project Y,” Bitsy tells Mom.
“What’s Project Y?” Jason asks.
“The code name for building the atom bomb,” Bitsy says. “And Los Alamos is the secret place where the scientists lived while they were developing it.”
“Is it still a secret place?” Jason asks.
Bitsy laughs. “Not anymore.”
Jason is disappointed.
We get back into the Blazer and drive a few more miles, until we come to the town itself. After the two hour drive, after the spectacular scenery, after hearing about the town as a secret place, I am disappointed, too. Los Alamos looks ordinary. Flat and ordinary. I once went to visit a friend’s brother at Fort Dix, an army base in New Jersey, and Los Alamos reminds me of it. We could be anywhere, I think, as we drive past a shopping center, past the small library, past the post office. Anywhere at all.