The Accidentals(4)

Dropping my pencil, I run from the room. The stairs are carpeted in a shade of brown which tries and fails to hide the dirt of many thousands of feet over several dozen years.

Outside, there’s a familiar blue beater at the curb. When I emerge, Haze climbs out from behind the driver’s seat. I sit down on the grimy stoop, and he sits down next to me. Haze wraps his tattooed arms around his knees and rests his chin on his biceps. “Evening,” he says.

“Hi.”

“You didn’t call me after. I’ve been waiting to hear how it was.”

“My phone stopped working.” And even if it hadn’t, I wouldn’t have known what to say.

“Did you like him?” He gives me a sidelong glance.

I shrug. I’ve always liked him. “It was really hard. We were both terrified.”

“What’s he got to be scared of? Except me.”

“Haze,” I warn. We’d been close since I was in the second grade, when I pinched Adam Lewis on the backside so that he’d leave Haze alone. Haze has been my loyal friend ever since, though he no longer needs my protection. The Adam Lewises of the world do not want to run afoul of the nineteen-year-old edition of Haze.

These days, I’m the one receiving all the protection. When my mother was hospitalized, Haze sat there next to me. While I held her hand, he held my other one. Together we’d watched my mother’s body slip deeper into illness, with new tubes each day, and a hissing ventilator at the end. During the three-week ordeal, he had ferried me to the hospital and back home. When I was too tired and too afraid to be alone, he had slept on my sofa and cut school.

Haze is stuck in summer school now too, which is basically my fault.

And then, after the end came, as I sat numbly in his car before the funeral, he pulled me into his arms and kissed me for the first time. Even now, it rests here on the grimy stoop between us, this unacknowledged thing that has shifted. Haze has always been quick to throw an arm around my shoulders or pat me on the back. But now I sense a kind of heat rising off him whenever I’m nearby.

At this very moment I’m aware of his fingertips sliding onto my bare knee. And I really don’t know what to think about that.

“I don’t see how Daddy thinks he can help,” Haze is saying. “The man is seventeen years too late.”

I know! Angry Rachel privately agrees. Of course I’m mad at Frederick. Still, Haze shouldn’t make me defend my decision to meet him.

As I watch, Haze’s fingers rub my kneecap gently. There’s love in his touch, which I sorely appreciate. But there’s also expectation. I reach for his hand, squeezing his fingers to occupy them. And then I change the subject. “Did you hear any news from Mickey Mouse?” Haze is applying for jobs at all the theme parks, hoping to start after we finally graduate.

“Not yet. I’ve been wondering—what do you think is the worst job there?”

“Is Mickey potty trained? What about Goofy?”

A slow grin overtakes his face. “Did you know the custodial guys have a code for all the bad shit? ‘Code V’ is for vomit. They clean it up with ‘pixie dust,’ which is really sawdust cut with charcoal.”

“Gross. Don’t get stationed by Space Mountain.”

“I know, right? Rachel, your curfew is in two minutes.”

“True.”

“We can hang out after school tomorrow.”

I shake my head. “Frederick is coming to see me again.” His name sounds funny on my tongue. Formal. But I can’t call him “my father” out loud when, as far as I know, he’s never called me his daughter.

Haze’s face falls. “Why, Rae? You don’t need his bullshit. What would your mother say?”

Haze and my mother had always gotten on beautifully together—even after Haze stopped being a cute grade-schooler, and got tattoos, and got left back a grade. “That’s just Haze,” she’d sigh, after the news of his latest mess. “He’s been through a lot.” To me, Jenny Kress was a militant taskmaster. But she had a blind spot for Haze. It was one of the enduring mysteries of my life.

“Jenny would say that man is nothing to you,” Haze presses.

I stare down at the cracks in the concrete walkway. The truth is that my mother said that very thing many times. Until the night that all changed.

“It was her idea,” I say slowly.

“What was?”

My stomach is already cramping. I’m still too raw to think about my mother’s final week. Getting through each day requires that I forget those frantic hours, as doctors scrambled to halt her decline, and nurses—my mother’s coworkers—came and went with anxious faces.

“It was that night you went out to buy milkshakes, because she said she would eat something.” Just the memory of her hospital room pushes me back under the surface of the deep pool of fear I’d been swimming through. “Out of nowhere, she said ‘We need to call your father.’”

At the time, I’d tried to brush the idea aside. “Now is not the time,” I’d told her.

But she’d said, “Now is well past the time.” And then she’d let out the saddest sigh I’d ever heard.

That had been the exact moment when I’d really understood how bad things were. Somehow I’d managed to stay positive until right then, even though I’d never seen her so sick. Even though she slept nearly all the time, and her skin felt like hot paper. Even though Hannah the social worker had begun to make regular appearances in my mother’s hospital room.