You'd Be Home Now (10)

    Joey tacked his drawings everywhere. The edges fluttered when he cracked the window for a breeze. If I was walking Fuzzy and Joey was home, I could look up from Aster Avenue and see him there, head bent over his table, shoulders at his ears, drawing. Sometimes he would glance down, noticing me on the street.

Pot smoke drizzled from his mouth as he smiled at me, a finger to his lips.

Shhhh.

It was just pot. Lots of kids smoked pot. Even my dad said so once. “A little rebellion, a little experimentation. That’s a teenager. It’s to be expected.”

“Actually,” I say to Sue, “he was always pretty quiet.”

Except when he wasn’t.

Only all that’s done now. Things will be different, right? That’s the plan. Like the Blue Spruce handbook says, Family should be prepared to provide a stable, consistent environment.

But Sue isn’t paying attention. She’s watching SpongeBob argue with Squidward. “I wish I lived in a pineapple under the sea, I tell you what,” she chuckles. “Be better under the water. Like you and that pool.”



* * *



—

    Before Sue leaves, I give her twenty dollars to go up the attic stairs for me and bring down Joey’s clothes and art supplies. Maddie took care of cleaning it up when she was here, but she didn’t bring down everything. I’m hoping when he sees his pencils and sketchbooks that maybe, just maybe, he’ll want to draw again. That it might help him.

Sue shrugs. “You really need to see Cooper about that leg. I don’t think your progress is progressing if you can’t even make some stairs, yeah?”

“I’m tired.”

She goes up twice and comes back down with milk crates full of his stuff. She plunks the crates on the bed in Maddie’s room, which will now be Joey’s room.

“That’s a real nice space up there. Lot of light,” she says.

I could probably have gone up the stairs myself, slowly, maybe, since I can now make it up to the second floor and sleep in my own room, but the truth is, I didn’t want to. The attic room was Joey’s disappearing place and I don’t want to go up there.

Sue pauses by Maddie’s desk, looking at the pile of Joey’s drawings Maddie brought down from the attic. “Nice stuff. I was always happy drawing, when I was a kid.” She looks through the papers, touches the edge of one of Joey’s dragon illustrations. “That kinda got lost in life, you know?” She seems like she might say something more, but she shakes her head. “You got my check? I have another appointment over on Jefferson.”

I hand her the check. Listen to her thump down the stairs and out the front door, past Goldie puttering around in the den.

    I’m transferring Maddie’s clothes from her dresser drawers to a giant plastic tub when she texts.


You okay?



Sure, I type back.

I sit down on the bed, relieved to be off my knee. It’s hard to imagine Joey in this room, sleeping in this explosion of weirdness that was Maddie before she left for Brown last year: tie-dyed bedspread. Batik-covered pillows. A hanging hammock chair in the corner. My mother hates Maddie’s room. She prefers solid colors and things that match.

If only we could match what my mother wants.

I don’t believe you, Maddie writes.


I didn’t think you would

Mom texted me. She’s on her way to Blue Spruce now.

She left a list of stuff for me to do.

Her lists! Well, you don’t have to do everything in one day, ok?

Yeah

Does anything involve leaving the house?

Yeah. School clothes. The mall.

It’ll be good for you to get out.

I guess

You have to face people sometime

Right

Emmy

What

     Everything that happened, it’s not your fault



My chest squeezes. I don’t want to cry.


It’s NOT your fault, ok?

Have to go



I turn the phone facedown on the bed. Ignore the buzzing, go back to emptying my sister’s drawers.



* * *



—

It’s past nine o’clock when my father comes home. He seems surprised to see me in the kitchen, or maybe he’s just surprised to see anyone at all. My mother is always asleep by now, zonked on sleep meds in their room upstairs, surrounded by her notepads and pens and laptop, preparing for her cases. I’m normally in my room down the hall, on my side in my bed in the dark, watching the window across from mine in the house next door, waiting for a flicker of life.

If Joey’s attic was where he kept his secrets, mine live next door, just a window away.

“Hey,” my dad says, setting his bag on the island. This sort of thing makes Mom wince. She doesn’t like clutter.

“I have hooks for a reason,” she likes to say, pointing to the row of nickel-plated hooks by the door in the mudroom.

“When do they get back?” he asks. “Mommy’s sent me so many texts, but I can hardly make sense of them all.”

“I think tomorrow afternoon.”

He sighs and looks at his phone. “She says he looks good.”

He smells like cigarettes. That’s when my dad smokes: in the car, on the way home from the hospital. He keeps packs in the glove box. I imagine him reaching for them right away, in the parking garage, grimacing at his aching fingers, stiff from a night of pumping stomachs, suturing, stapling, staving off pools of blood. It’s what he does: tries to save the messes that get wheeled into his ER. Sew people back into versions of themselves. And then he gets in the car and fills his own lungs with smoke.