Here So Far Away(42)

“You don’t like ballads,” he said. “You think ‘The Fish’ is cheesy.”

“I changed my mind about ‘The Fish.’ Anyway, I think it’s more that I don’t like cheap emotion. I don’t care if someone is enthusiastic about something.”

“So you wouldn’t mind if I got up and started dancing earnestly?”

“What does that even mean, ‘dancing earnestly’?”

He was up in an instant. There was some lip-biting, a lot of punching the air.

“Stop! Oh god, please stop. What was that?”

“I call it ‘Serbian disco.’”

He flopped down on the sofa again. Then he began to cry. He pressed his face into the crook of his arm and his whole body shuddered, and I didn’t know what to do. I let my hand drop to his head and stroked his hair. It had grown in a bit, and as it dried from his shower it was settling into soft black curls. If I reached a little farther, I could rest my hand on his neck, slide it down to the top of his back.

I said, “My dad says you have stupid courage.”

“That means I don’t think before I act.”

“You make it sound like it wasn’t brave.”

He sat up, stared at the last few drops of liquid in his glass. “He was screaming for his wife. In the water, in the ambulance, at the hospital. Kate, Kate, Kate . . .”

“We don’t have to talk about it.”

“Your voice is the only thing drowning it out. So to speak.”

I moved over to the green sofa, refilled his glass, and took a long sip from mine. The whiskey felt both sharp and warm going down. We leaned back and watched the fire. “Now I can’t think of anything to say,” I admitted. “I’m scared I’ll make it worse.”

“You don’t seem to be scared of much.”

“I’m a good faker.”

“What are you most afraid of?”

Of making a fool of myself. That some people are nice to me only because they’re intimidated by me. That I’ll never get out of here and I’ll turn into my parents.

“Bears.”

“Come on, Frances. . . .”

“What reasonable person isn’t scared of bears, Francis?”

“That’s not what you’re most afraid of.” He smiled. “Do you know that when you’re not sure how to answer a question, you look up at the top corner of the room? And if you’re really unsure, your eyes travel down to the bottom corner. And if you’re really, really unsure, they go all the way around the room and back up to that first corner.”

“I’m thinking. I can’t look at someone while I think.”

“And what are you thinking?”

That I’m afraid I’m not smart enough for you. That I’m okay at a bunch of things but not exceptional at any of them. And for a couple of hours there, and probably from now on, that something will happen to someone I care about.

“I’m thinking that I might be most afraid of hurting someone’s feelings,” I said. “Someone who can’t take it, and not being able to undo it.”

“Have you?”

“Yes. Oh, I heard it that time, the Elizabeth Bishop yes.”

“That’s from a poem called ‘The Moose.’ I reread it the other day.”

“How’s it go?”

“Life’s like that. We know it (also death).”

We were not lingering on that. “What about you?” I said. “What are you most afraid of?”

“Bears.”

I swatted him.

“Alright, my thing is I’m scared I’ll make a small mistake, the kind people make every day—forgetting to unplug the iron or to do a shoulder check before I switch lanes, hitting the brakes instead of steering out of a skid—and it’ll ruin someone’s life. That’s my biggest fear.”

“You don’t think you did that tonight, do you?”

“I’m not sure.”

I thought of what my father had said: That guy ain’t police. “Is this what you want to be when you grow up?”

“It has to be. I don’t want to fail at this. Too. I don’t want to fail at this too.”

“You’re not failing.”

“Would you tell me if I was?”

No. Maybe. I don’t know.

“Yes.”

I moved back to the red chesterfield and we stretched out under our afghans and talked into the night about the stupid-hard F chord, the different accents on the north mountain and south mountain (not different at all, to my ear, but I went along with it), where the fictional George and Francis would go on their third adventure after they’d conquered New York and the Serengeti, and other easy things. When I opened my eyes in the morning, Shaggy’s snout was rifling around my armpit, looking for who knows what, and the green sofa was empty.





Twenty


A couple of weeks later, I went to fetch Dad’s cigarettes from his bedroom and came back to find him missing from his recliner. He was on the floor, writhing in pain.

“Oh my god, what is it? What is it?” I started grabbing at him, lifting his arms, patting his legs, checking behind his shoulders.

“My foot,” he gasped. “I need you to massage my foot.”