How Lucky: A Novel Page 12

  ( . . . )

  Also . . . there is this man. And this girl. And he knows I saw him take her. And he wears these boots. And there were boot prints on my porch. And what is going on in my kitchen? There is just so much happening, Mom.

  ( . . . )

  Can I tell you this? Should I tell you this? I do not want to ruin your vacation. It looks beautiful there, and your friend from work looks ready for his tennis.

  ( . . . )

  “Daniel? Daniel, you still there, buddy?”

  ( . . . )

  ( . . . )

  ( . . . )

  Yes, Mom. I am just tired. Have a wonderful time. We will talk when you are back. I love you.

  “I love you too, honey. Take good care of Travis. And yourself.”

  I’m gonna do my best, Mom. I always do.

  29.

  Marjani seems to notice I’m a bit off, and understandably she credits it to today’s near-death experience. Her assessment of the situation is correct, but only partially, in a way I still haven’t entirely figured out myself. Either way: I need to get some sleep.

  “You all good here?” Travis says. “Jennifer and I are gonna go hit the Manhattan bar downtown, maybe get a nightcap.”

  “You call a drink at ten p.m. a nightcap?” Jennifer says, tugging on the bottom lapel of his shirt. “You are old.”

  She walks over to me. I am in my pajamas, lying in bed, under an extra blanket tonight. It’s not cold outside, but it sure feels cold. It feels cold everywhere. Jennifer is not fazed by my vulnerable appearance, or that we’ve just met, or that she almost saw me die tonight. She puts her hand on my chest. “You kick ass, dude,” she says, and leans over and kisses my forehead. “We need more like you.”

  Marjani smiles and puts another pillow under my head after they leave.

  “Are you OK?” she asks. She sits down next to me and starts lightly stroking my left leg. This question is much more for her than it is for me. And frankly, I’m more worried about her. I am certain following me around from campus to the hospital to here has forced her to call in to one of her other jobs. I cannot be her lone responsibility. She is going above and beyond here.

  I am fine. Are you fine?

  I am better. I was just so scared.

  Me too. I still am. But not about this. Not exactly.

  “I am going to stay here tonight, Daniel, if that is OK with you,” she says. “I have to get to the tailgate early tomorrow morning, and it will be easier if I just sleep here.”

  I am relieved.

  I am relieved. I want you here. I know you have other places to be. I am grateful.

  What a day, Daniel.

  I bet there is an email from him waiting for me. But I cannot deal with that right now. I must sleep. I must rest. Marjani shuts down my computer and grabs the remote to turn off the television. A high school football game has just ended, and the evening news, the same Atlanta NBC affiliate with all my morning friends, is beginning its opening segment.

  “Students in Athens held a vigil tonight for a missing student,” says the perky lady at the desk, “and the football team, on the eve of game day, is getting involved. Our own Jimmy Daulerio has the story.”

  A ten-year-old child holding a microphone wider than his torso comes on-screen. Television reporters are going to be infants in a decade, I tell you.

  “Thanks, Marianne. On Friday, a Chinese national studying veterinary medicine here at the University of Georgia named Ai-Chin Liao was on her way to her morning classes when she disappeared, somewhere in the campus area. And now a student group is trying to find her.”

  We see footage of the rally, and then of the students gathering, and candles, and vigils. Then our friend Rebecca is on the screen, talking to ten-year-old Jimmy. She’s identified as REBECCA LEE, CONCERNED ASIAN, which, uh, is maybe not the best chyron I’ve ever seen.

  “Her parents are here, and we’re just trying to make them feel comfortable and welcome,” Rebecca says. “It’s obviously a terrible situation.”

  Jimmy again. “I had the opportunity to talk to Georgia head football coach Kirby Smart, whose Bulldogs play Middle Tennessee State on Saturday at Sanford Stadium. He told me he’s just trying to help out a community searching for answers.”

  Smart, like all football coaches a little too intense and a little too certain of himself, but otherwise essentially decent, says, “We just hope they find the girl. We have faith in local law enforcement and pray that girl can be found. I just wanted to be here to show the campus that we’re behind them.” I half expected him to go sprinting onto the field right then and there.

  Then we get our montage of Concerned Students, and Worried Onlookers, and a brief interview with the Clarke County sheriff, who says they are “exploring all possible leads” and not much else. Then more montage, and more sad students, and then a long line of Asian students with their arms linked together in solidarity and then—

  HOLY SHIT HOLY SHIT HOLY SHIT HOLY SHIT

  I spasm so hard I almost fall out of bed. Marjani leaps over to me and grabs me like I’m going to jump out the window.

  “Daniel, what is it, what is happening?” she says, real panic in her eyes.

  I stare at the television.

  “Mmmmph. Mmmmmph. Mmmmmmphhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!”

  In the long chain of mostly female Asian students locking arms to show their support for Ai-Chin, there is a man. The chain is filmed from a distance, so you cannot see anyone’s face, but he’s a white man. He is well-dressed, like a teaching assistant or a graduate student, and he is wearing a hat. They appear to all be singing a song, and he is singing along with them, part of the vigil, one of the devastated students of the University of Georgia trying to come to terms with this tragedy on this campus. He has his left arm around one young Chinese American student, and his right arm around another. He is part of the chain.

  His hat is Thrashers blue. I have seen this man before.

  HOLY SHIT HOLY SHIT HOLY SHIT.

  I look, surely crazy-eyed, at Marjani, then back at the television, then back at her, then back again.

  “Mmmmph. Mmmmmph. Mmmmmmphhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!”

  Friday

  30.

  Here is a story about Travis:

  About ten years ago, when I was in high school, my mom picked me up from school in her old van, the one that didn’t have the hydraulics in it yet, so that she always had to get one of the janitors and gym teachers to help carry me and my chair through the back door, like an old unwieldy couch or something. No matter what else she had going on, she always picked me up from school, and never a minute late. A lot of kids with SMA go to special schools, where there are no “regular” kids, but Mom wanted as normal a life as I could have. My SMA hadn’t progressed as much in high school as it has now. You could just wheel me to the back of class and let me be as bored as everybody else.

  Anyway, this day she was several minutes late. She showed up as frazzled as I’d seen her, with hair mussed and makeup running down her cheek and two buttons on her blouse in the wrong order. My mother is organized and structured and always, always composed, so my presumption was that she’d been in a car crash on the way over, or maybe attacked by a bear.

  Halfway to the house, she turned off I-45 onto a sad, freezing stretch of country road and drove, silently, until you couldn’t see a car for miles in any direction. She pulled over, shut the car off, and sat there, her head in her hands. Her shoulders heaved, and her breath blew heavy clouds through her hair. I had no idea what was going on. I tried to help. “Mom, are you going to kill and bury me out here, or do you just have to pee?” She snorted a half ton of snot through both nostrils in a laugh, and I realized she was sobbing.

  “Shut up,” she said, and then she unbuckled her safety belt and crawled through the bed of the van to sit next to me. She touched my hand. She always makes sure to touch me. Another deep breath, an exhale so deep that I briefly couldn’t see her face. “Daniel,” she said, and right then I kn
ew—I had no idea how, I just knew. She didn’t even need to tell me that she’d just gotten back from the doctor, and that the lump she’d told me not to worry about was cancer, and that she would lose her hair and her breast and God knows what else.

  I knew, and she knew that I knew, so she stopped talking and just grabbed me and squeezed me like I was able-bodied, like I was strong. There I was, a lump of flesh and bones in a chair, in the back of a frigid van in the middle of nowhere Central Illinois, and I was keeping her upright. She squeezed me until finally I grunted, and she let go, wiped her nose, said sorry, and lightly clenched my face.

  “We’re a couple of pieces of work, aren’t we?”

  I smiled. “Let’s go home, Mom.”

  The news devastated everyone who knew my mom, the way everyone is always devastated when they realize someone they had thought to be indestructible has turned out to be most definitely not. Nobody knows how to be around someone who is going through chemotherapy and fighting for their life, and they certainly don’t know what to say to them when their death will mean their son will likely be shuttled off to a home where he’ll surely die alone in the next fifteen years. (To be fair, neither Mom nor I was great about tackling that thorny little bean either.) I joked with Mom at the time that she now finally understood part of what it was like being me all the time; the oh-you-poor-dear look that I got all the time was now a part of her reality too.

  The one person my mom relied on during this time, other than me, was Travis’s mom. (Mom told me years later that she got an email from my dad three weeks into chemo that read, with no subject line, “You OK? I heard you were sick.—R,” which is as close as anyone got to actually saying “Fuck off and die.”) Travis’s mom was over at our house essentially every night, making dinner and putting me to bed so Mom could rest, before heading back home to Travis and her own family. She never made a big deal about helping us, or about Mom being sick, or any of it. I never saw her cry, or show any pity, or ask me how I was feeling. She just came in, took care of what needed to get done, bugged me about my homework, and generally acted like everything was perfectly fine and nothing unusual was happening at all. It was the nicest thing anyone has ever done for either one of us.

  The message filtered down to Travis, who never once asked me how my mom was doing, or if I were OK, or if I needed anything. He just did the same thing he always did: used every opportunity when his mom and my mom were away to go smoke weed behind our shed and then come inside and play video games with me. Teenage boys have their limitations, but they are uniquely skilled at dealing with pain. Just get stoned and play video games. It’s really ingenious. People should have Comfort Teens during tragic periods in their lives to help them deal with grief, just sixteen-year-old pimply-faced slack-jawed morons who follow them around and shrug a lot. Travis was perfect because I didn’t want to think about what was happening, let alone talk about it, and he gave me hours upon hours of not having to think or talk about it. He just never brought it up. He’d come by, knock on the side door, look around, make sure neither my mom nor his mom was home, smoke a joint, come inside, flip me a controller, and sit next to me while we played Call of Duty for hours. We wouldn’t say a word other than “Look out for that dude!” and “Yeah, EAT THIS YOU NAZI FUCK!” and it was the entire world. It got me through that whole time.

  One day a package arrived at our front door, delivered at night, late, way later than UPS usually came by. Mom and I had fallen asleep on the couch watching an old Larry Sanders rerun, and the doorbell woke her up. Groggy and weak, she opened the Amazon package. Inside was, simply, a button. It was like the beginning of a Twilight Zone episode. The button was just a big red plastic thing, like one of those Staples Easy Buttons. There was no packaging, no note, no clue as to what this was or where it had come from.

  She laid it on the coffee table in front of the couch. We looked at it, puzzled. What was this button? Why had it been sent to us? What would happen if you pushed it?

  Mom looked at me. She was fully bald then, wan, pale, empty. She had taken to calling herself “Skeletor.” She glanced at the button, then back at me, then back at the button.

  “Should I push it?”

  “I don’t know, Mom. I’m a little scared of it.”

  “Fuck it. I’m pushing it.”

  She took as deep a breath as she could, all raspy and rattling, and touched my upper arm. “Here goes.”

  The second she hit the button, a loud, wailing siren went off. “WOOOOO . . . WOOOOOO . . . WOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!” The button lit up and began flashing wildly. “WOOOOOO. . . . WOOOOOO. . . . WOOOOOOO!” Then:

  “FART DETECTED! FART DETECTED! CLEAR THE AREA! A FART HAS BEEN DETECTED!”

  Mom picked up the button and read the labeling on the bottom. It was, in fact, a fart detector. When a fart is detected, hit the button to warn the village! “FART DETECTED! FART DETECTED! CLEAR THE AREA!”

  I swear, Mom just about coughed up every cell in her body, she was laughing so hard. I don’t think either of us had smiled in weeks, and God, we laughed and laughed and laughed. At one point I actually fell out of my chair, and I fell on the floor, still heaving, and Mom looked at me and just laughed even harder. I rolled around, and then she got down there with me. We hit that button, over and over again, for an hour.

  It sat on our coffee table for months. But in the week after we received it, we still had no idea where it had come from. Why was it delivered to our house? Was it a mistake? Did one of us order it while sleepwalking? Was it a message from God? Nearly ten days went by before the mystery was solved. Travis came by for one of his visits, and after several hours of Call of Duty, he stood up, every bone and joint cracking and popping, to grab another Mountain Dew out of the fridge. On the way to the kitchen, he saw the fart detector and, like everyone else who ever saw it in our house, began to chuckle.

  He loped back into the study. “Aw, I see you got the package.”

  I looked over at him. “What?”

  “Yeah, I totally forgot I ordered that, man,” he said. “I was just home one night and thinking about how bummed out you and your mom looked, so I figured you all could use a laugh, see. So”—he paused dramatically here, as if about to reveal the solution to a particularly difficult algebra problem—“Fart detector!”

  “Why . . . why didn’t you bring it over yourself? Or let us know you were the one who sent it?”

  “Huh, I dunno,” he said. “I guess I just forgot, see. Well, I’m glad she liked it. You ready? Unpause the game, let’s go.”

  That’s Travis. That’s a guy you weld yourself to.

  31.

  There was an email the next morning, of course. This is that email:

  Tom—

  Thank you for the compliment about the car. I need to get it washed. It’s just . . . been a little busy lately. You know how it goes.

  I must say that the car has never helped much with girls. They are hard to talk to, no? These college girls are the worst. They’d rather stare at their phone than actually interact with the world. They’re always complaining about guys, how mean they are, but there are nice guys everywhere around them, if they’d just look. They never look. Some of us are right here, standing right in front of them. If only they’d look.

  One of the nice things about Ai-Chin is that she was friendly and smiling every time I saw her. I’d seen her walking down Southview for a couple of weeks too. (I really am surprised I’ve never seen you, by the way. I’ve never seen anybody out there. I am usually there quite early, to be fair.) It’s a nice neighborhood you live in—isolated, but still connected to everything you’d need. Someone like her can just walk down the street there and not worry about getting run over by a drunk college student or raped by some guy from the projects. She can just be a happy smiling person. It’s hard to find those places anymore, you know? That’s why I always liked her when I’d pass her on my morning drive. She just walked along like nothing bad existed in the world. She was innocent. I didn
’t have to swipe right to find her, and she didn’t have to swipe left to reject me. We could just meet like regular people, out in the world. No judgments.

  It’s the judging that’s the hardest.

  But she is fine. It is nice of you to ask. We are becoming closer. I think she is beginning to trust me. And I might someday be able to trust her.

  Best,

  Jonathan

  32.

  There isn’t much time to digest and recover from last night, because there is a large adult child wearing a police officer’s uniform in my kitchen.

  I really am feeling fine, by the way. Each one of these incidents takes a little bit out of you, no question. This is the thing about a progressive disease. You don’t so much heal as much as you just adjust to your new reality. There’s a tiny scratch, an irritating little nick, on the inside of my esophagus that wasn’t there yesterday that I woke up with today, and it’s going to be there the rest of my life. Is it from the phlegm that got stuck? Is it from when the guy dropped me? Is it just a general weakening of my lungs? Hey, maybe it’s all three! It doesn’t matter. It is just the way I am now. Every breath will now come with a small whistle in my chest, a pinprick of an oomph every time I draw air, until I die. That happened yesterday. Today is always different than yesterday.

  It would be nice if I could communicate all this to the massive police officer sitting in my kitchen this morning, drinking out of a too-hot mug of cheap mass-produced coffee that was surely sitting in the cabinet for months. No one ever makes coffee in this house, and it took Marjani twenty minutes to find it. But apparently Officer Anderson needs his coffee, and he is doing his honest best right now to choke down a brew made from beans harvested sometime during the Carter administration.