First & Then(28)

I didn’t notice Ezra staring at me. “So … do you … dance at all … anymore?”

“Excuse me,” I said, and walked off.

I went across the room, picked up a cup, put it down, circled the couch twice, and then hurried off as fast as I could to the bathroom.

Cold water. A little peace. I splashed my face with water from the tap and hung there over the sink for a moment, letting the beads roll down my cheeks and land in the basin.

“Are you drunk?” a voice said.

So it was only temporary peace.

I whipped around and ripped the shower curtain back. There sat Foster, fully clothed, in the empty bathtub.

“What the hell are you doing in here?”

There was a rubber duck balanced delicately on his head. It didn’t move as he spoke. “Just sitting.”

This was one of those moments. Those Foster moments. Early-morning smoothies and the like. I squeezed my eyes shut hard.

“Why is your face wet?” he asked.

I grabbed a towel.

“Did Cas make you cry? I’ll punch him.”

I wasn’t crying. “No one’s punching anyone.”

“I’m sure somewhere someone’s punching someone else. Like in a prison, or at a bar, or during a war, or something.”

“Foster.” I was weary of this. “Get out of the bathtub.”

“There was a guy and a girl in here earlier. They talked about condoms and stuff.”

This was too much. I turned back to the sink and flung the towel back onto its holder. “Foster, you shouldn’t be in here. You can’t just listen to people’s conversations like that.”

“They weren’t talking the whole time. I think they made out some, too.”

“You have to learn to keep your nose out of other people’s business and to keep your mouth shut. People don’t say stuff like that.”

I could see Foster’s expression in the bathroom mirror and it didn’t change at all. The rubber duck didn’t move a millimeter.

“I do.”

“Normal people don’t.”

“I’m just being honest.”

“Well, don’t be, Foster. Don’t be honest. Be normal.”

He and the rubber duck stared at me unwaveringly. “Are you drunk?”

I slammed the door shut on my way out.





13


My mom took Foster to therapy on Saturday mornings. The sessions were usually an hour, but they were late coming back the morning after the Hancock game. I found myself wondering if Foster had extra things to talk about in therapy. What were the chances of him coming through the front door with puffy eyes and pockets full of Kleenex? Maybe he was telling the therapist that I was kind of a jerk the night before. Maybe he had a breakthrough or something.

That word, breakthrough, conjured up images of a wall of suffering, a fortress of inner turmoil, being leveled by a bulldozer. Was that what it was like? Did Foster even have a wall to knock down in the first place? He didn’t seem depressed or scarred. No pent-up rage. No crying spells. What did they even talk about in there?

Before this summer, the last time I had seen Foster was five years ago, at his father’s funeral. Uncle Charlie and my dad were ten years apart—my dad was older—and we hadn’t seen him much since he moved to California with Elizabeth, right before Foster was born. They came to a couple of Christmases when I was little—I faintly remember Foster as a baby—and then they stopped coming. Uncle Charlie was too sick to travel, and anyway, I think they were too poor to afford the tickets. My dad flew out to be with him right before he died, and my mom and I joined him for the funeral.

Foster was nine, and I was twelve. We were the only kids there. Elizabeth’s only family was her mom, Foster’s grandmother, who I was told died a couple of years later.

I was old enough to know that this was a truly somber occasion; my dad had lost his brother, his only sibling. But I didn’t know enough about Uncle Charlie to miss him personally. They lived so far away and visited so infrequently that the only way I can really remember his face now is the way it looked in his coffin.

I don’t know what kind of person Elizabeth was before her husband died. I vaguely remember her from some of those early-on Christmases: stringy blond hair and watery eyes. That was the one thing that stuck in my mind—happy or sad, Elizabeth always looked close to crying.

We went back to California five years after Uncle Charlie died, and Elizabeth looked at us with those very same eyes, only now there was this vacancy to them. She clasped my dad in a hug, my mom, and then me, but it lacked warmth. Her arms were frail, and her face had these hollows in it.

My parents never said it outright: Elizabeth is on drugs. It was always “Elizabeth’s issues” or “Elizabeth’s addiction.” But I was old enough to know that Elizabeth certainly wasn’t hooked on phonics.

“Come say hello, Foster!” she had called into the depths of the house.

And Foster emerged—taller, thinner, and paler than when I had seen him at Uncle Charlie’s funeral. I thought maybe it was the result of adolescence—losing that childhood rosiness he used to have. But there was something else. His eyes looked a little like Elizabeth’s. They weren’t as vacant as hers, but there was some distance there that I didn’t remember from before.