Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance, page 10
“Why do I need to be worried about what will help Billy?” Dad said. “Cry me a river. We’ve got enough to deal with.”
“Maybe it would be good for us,” Mom said. “It could be healing.”
“No,” Dad said. “There’s no healing from this, Susan.”
Dad rubbed his chin, which was stubbled with the beginnings of a beard now. Ever since you died, he stopped shaving and going to work. He stopped putting Metamucil in his cup—didn’t seem to care when or how often he took a shit. He had started to look strange to me, like a wild animal who was always growing hair around his mouth, always angry.
“That woman just wants to parade him around our house so we feel bad for him,” Dad said. “So we don’t sue them for all they have. We could, you know. We could sue them for all they have.”
“It was an accident, Richard,” Mom said. “You of all people should understand that.”
“Yes, it was an accident,” Dad said. “But do you know why accidents happen? Because people are careless. Because people aren’t paying attention to what they’re doing. And, I’m sorry, but people need to be punished for that.”
But I didn’t want to punish Billy. I felt no anger toward Billy. All I wanted in those months after you died was to talk to Billy. While Mom and Dad fought about Billy’s fate in the kitchen, I talked to Billy in secret, online. The angrier Dad got at Billy in the kitchen, the quicker I typed.
I don’t hate you, I wrote. I know it was an accident. I know you were speeding because she told you to. And you were just trying not to kill the deer.
That stupid fucking deer, Billy wrote. I should have just killed it.
He couldn’t stop seeing that deer. He saw the deer in his nightmares. In his dreams. And there, even in his dreams, he couldn’t kill it. The deer always got away. The deer was too fast in the woods for Billy to catch.
Because it’s a deer, I wrote. Because you didn’t know what was going to happen. You couldn’t see the future. You weren’t a prophet.
Well, that’s definitely true, Billy wrote. Now we know that for sure. Billy Barnes: definitely not a prophet.
* * *
Nearly every night that February, Billy had questions for me. Can you talk? How are you? How was the funeral anyway? Is that a weird question to ask?
Maybe.
But I was glad he asked.
Nobody had yet asked me this, because everybody I knew was at the funeral. And I liked talking about the funeral. I wish I could have stayed at the funeral forever. At the funeral, you were still with us, right there in the middle of the church. And everybody else we knew was there, too. Priscilla. Valerie. Our cousins. People who did sit-ups with you during gym. Old elementary school teachers. Geno from down the street. The old lady who gave us whole Snickers bars on Halloween. Even Shelby and Lisa the Lifeguard came. They wore tight black dresses, Lisa’s with two tiny triangle holes cut out of the sides. I stared at the holes, as she hugged me and told me about her fondest memory of you: that time you guys had to do a scavenger hunt in bio, how the teacher made you collect the weirdest things in your bags, like caterpillars and deer scat, which is just a fancy word for poop, Lisa said, and it was really weird, but really funny.
“Anyway,” Lisa said. “I’m so sorry.”
Everybody had a story about you I hadn’t heard before. Everybody but me, it seemed, had something to say about your death, and how was this possible since I was the only person there who witnessed it? Yet they went up to the pulpit and declared you an angel, a shining star, and then Priscilla leaned in real close to the mic and said, “I know Kathy is now the light of the sun and in the songs of the birds,” and I didn’t even realize how much this all bothered me until I described it to Billy online.
It just makes no sense, I wrote to Billy. I mean, you can’t be an angel and a shining star and a bird all at the same time.
That’s true, he wrote. Three completely different things.
And I forgot what I was supposed to say when the priest said, The Body of Christ, I wrote. It had been so long since my Communion, and I forgot if it was Amen or Thank you, if I was supposed to be holy or polite, and it seemed strange to have to choose between the two.
What’d you end up saying? Billy asked.
I said thank you.
But then walking back to the pew, I didn’t know if I was supposed to chew it or let it absorb into my tongue. Because if it really was the body of Jesus Christ, it seemed wrong to chew it. So I looked to see what Dad was doing but his mouth was a straight line. I looked at Mom, but she had her face in her hands. And then I looked at you, but you were in your box, completely unknowable. I couldn’t tell what you were doing.
So I just chewed it.
I don’t think you’re supposed to chew it, Billy said.
Well, too late, I wrote.
After, we walked out of the church to Celine Dion’s “Because You Loved Me,” which was a little embarrassing, because it was an embarrassing song, and you’d think it’d be impossible to be embarrassed on the day of your own sister’s funeral, but it turns out, I can literally be embarrassed anywhere.
In your defense, Kathy didn’t even like that song, Billy wrote.
That’s what I just kept wanting to tell people, I wrote. I wanted to go up to the microphone and say, Actually, Kathy preferred Ace of Base.
Haha, Billy wrote. Not to mention, Janet Jackson.
But I guess you can’t play those songs at a funeral.
No, Billy wrote. It probably wouldn’t be appropriate, no.
So we all filed out of the church to Celine Dion, and then there was the burial, and did you know that they don’t actually bury the person while the family is still there? I didn’t know that.
I only knew what I knew from people dying in Dad’s movies, and in movies they always lower the body dramatically as the family weeps.
But in real life, they just suspend the body over the grave (that’s what they call it, the body) and then everyone throws in roses and walks away and gets in the limo and trusts that the two random employees standing nearby will bury it before dark.
And Billy was like, I actually knew that.
He went to a funeral last year. His grandmother. And it was surprising to me that Billy had a grandmother, but of course he did. Billy was a boy and his grandmother was Polish. A really impressive lady. Came to America at the age of fourteen, was smuggled through Canada in a giant trunk. She made very good pierogi, he said.
I’ve never had pierogi before, I wrote.
What? he wrote. How is this possible?
I’ve just never encountered it.
But it’s everywhere? he wrote. Oh my God. Sally. You need to have pierogi. Stop everything you are doing right now and go eat some pierogi.
But I couldn’t. I had to get ready for school in the morning.
“Sally, are you ready for school?” Mom had been asking me for the last hour.
No. I was not. School seemed absurd. How could people expect me to go to school at a time like this? But I had to. I had to, as Dad ordered, return to life.
Can we talk again? Billy asked. It’s been really nice talking to you.
Yeah, I wrote. I’ll be on tomorrow.
I only missed three weeks of school after you died, but in history, two thousand years had passed.
“After you left, the Holy Roman Empire fell,” Peter Heart told me. Peter had taken notes for me on everything I missed, and he sounded excited about it all. “Now, it’s 1806 and we are in France, just after the French Revolution. The king and queen are dead. The people have risen. And here comes Napoleon, swooping in from out of nowhere. From Corsica! Which wasn’t even really France, by the way.”
Then, he handed me a notebook. “Anyway, it’s all in here.”
“Thanks,” I said.
He looked unsatisfied by my response, as though he expected more than a thanks. But I had nothing else to say, and Mr. Klein clapped, said, “Take your seats,” and wrote NAPOLEON on the board. “Kids, the first thing you must know about Napoleon is that he was not as short as everybody believed.”
There was a misunderstanding, apparently. Something about the French measurement system. Something about Americans not understanding anything except for America.
After class, Mr. Klein said to me, “While you were gone, we all picked parts of the French Revolution out of my hat and everybody gave a report on their part.”
He cheated and saved me the best part. The part all the boys wanted.
“Can you guess what it is?”
I really couldn’t.
“The guillotine,” he said. “Now, take your time researching it. Whenever you’re ready to give your report, let me know.”
I went to health class, where I was also very behind. I had missed all the STDs, Valerie told me. Valerie had taken notes for me. Gave me a handout that our teacher had given us. An STD chart that Mrs. Klusspuss had drawn herself. The lines were so straight, it was actually impressive.
AIDS can happen to anyone. Even people in love! AIDS does not care if you’re in love. Neither does HIV.
“But wait,” I said. “What’s HIV?”
“It’s AIDS,” Valerie said.
“How is that different from AIDS?”
“It comes before AIDS,” Valerie said.
“Does something come after AIDS?”
“In all instances, death.”
In all of my classes, someone had taken notes for me and I couldn’t help but be touched. I hadn’t realized my classmates could be so nice. Before you died, people had been mostly indifferent to me, if not a little mean. But now, even Rick Stevenson was being kind. Actually apologized to me at the bus stop that first morning.
“I’m sorry about your sister,” he said.
At first, I didn’t know how to react. I wasn’t used to being looked at by people, or being pitied by teachers, or getting high-fived by Jelly Roll in the parking lot on my way out of school. I wasn’t used to the popular girls like Lia McGree tilting their heads during gym class to say, “I can’t believe you actually survived that accident. It looked so bad in the paper.”
I was famous now. Like Billy was after he jumped off the roof, so many years ago. I was a survivor—at least, according to Lia McGree and the Aldan Times. I had lived through a terrible car accident. I had seen the flesh and blood and bones. I had proof that we were all, in the end, exactly the same and that anybody who pretends differently is lying. When Lia McGree acted better than all of us just because she was in a commercial for the Olive Garden, I knew she was being a fool. Yes, Lia might have long flowing blond hair and a perfect face. But Lia was going to die one day, Lia was going to lose all that hair and all that beauty, and so was Rick Stevenson, and thinking of this—Rick in his coffin—made me feel like I could say or do anything to him at the bus stop.
“Fuck you, Rick,” I said.
But even that didn’t feel like enough. I wanted to punish Rick. That’s who I was angry at in those months after you died. Not Billy.
But Rick didn’t get it. Rick was like, Huh?
“What the hell, Sally?” Rick said. “I was just trying to be nice.”
But Rick would never be nice the way Billy was nice. Rick fed the fish in class like he was peppering them. Flirted with Valerie in computer class by trying to squeeze her and make her fart.
But Billy was different. Billy was in mourning. Billy was suddenly full of a love for you that was so deep, all he wanted to do at night was talk very earnestly about this love.
I don’t know what I am going to do, Billy wrote. I just love her so much, Sally.
These were the things Billy loved about you: Your face. Your hair. The way you laughed. The way you sang, sometimes, in the car. How you stroked the back of his neck and chewed gum. How excited you got when a song you liked came on the radio.
I’ve never felt this way about anybody, Billy wrote. Never loved a girl like this before. Not really.
Not even Shelby? I asked. Or Lisa?
Shelby? Lisa? Oh. No. That was nothing.
Billy admitted that he had been a little in love with you ever since you sang the National Anthem at his game. Looking at you, with your hair, with your voice filling the gym, it made him feel like things were possible. You made him feel the way he felt when he was a kid and he used to draw pictures of his family so big, their faces hardly fit on the page.
You draw? I asked.
(Did you know this about your boyfriend?)
Yeah, he said. I used to be kind of good at it.
Why’d you stop? I asked.
I don’t really remember, he said. I think I just started playing basketball, and that was that.
Basketball took up all his time. And what a waste of time it all was, Billy said. All of those nights he spent running suicides, up and down the court. The family vacations he missed. The classes he slept through. The ankles he twisted and the knees he scraped by diving for the ball. Billy used to always dive for the ball. Billy gave it everything he had. That’s what people were always saying about Billy in the papers, that he was going to be a star. He was going to make some college very happy one day.
That’s all over now, Billy wrote.
Billy couldn’t play on the basketball team at Villanova anymore. He wasn’t ever going to run the way he used to run—now, he had two steel rods in his right leg. Now, he was just an ordinary person who was going to be in pain for the rest of his life.
Some nights, Billy wrote, I just sit in the dark, and I’m like, who the fuck was I?
Do you want me to answer that? I wrote.
Sure, he said. Go for it.
I stuck to the facts.
You were the president of Students Against Smoking, I wrote. You were the boy who worked the snack bar. You were a basketball player.
I was, he wrote.
You were very good.
I was the best in the state, he wrote.
That’s what he used to say about himself in the shower after practice. He’d sit there on the tile, his ankles blue at the base, and he would say, “I am the best basketball player in the state,” and it scared him that he did this, this compulsion to brag about himself to himself, and so he never did it again. He started taking shorter showers. He could hardly look at himself in the mirror some nights.
I understood what he meant. I was having a hard time looking at myself in the mirror after I talked to Billy.
* * *
Did you know that in the eighteenth century, kids used to play with tiny toy guillotines? They’d use them to chop off their dolls’ heads.
That’s pretty fucked up, Billy wrote.
And sometimes they’d use them on mice.
Can I ask how you know these things? Billy asked. And why would anybody give their kid a tiny toy guillotine?
Because I have to give a report, I wrote. Because life used to be terrible.
Yeah, well, life is pretty terrible now, too, Billy wrote. Try drinking a hamburger smoothie every night of your life and not killing yourself.
Billy could see why the guillotine would be considered humane. Most nights, Billy wished the accident had finished him. Wished it had sliced his head off his body. It took him two months to admit this to me.
I don’t deserve to live, he wrote. I feel like a monster.
He looked like one, too, he said; he had scars all over his body, and plastic surgery didn’t really help much. The surgeons tried; they took skin from different body parts and grafted them onto his face.
But all that means now is that my ass is on my face, he wrote. Because that’s a thing.
Wait, really?
Yes. They put my ass on my face. Apparently, the ass is good for that kind of thing. The ass can literally be applied anywhere.
So does your face look like an ass now?
Lol. That might be the first thing that has made me laugh in a long time. Thanks.
You’re welcome.
Would be kind of funny. But no. It doesn’t actually look like my ass.
Well that’s good.
It’s just normal skin. It’s just my face. Except not really. Because it looks nothing like my face.
I don’t get it.
You will, when you see.
* * *
But when would I see Billy again? That spring, this was the only question that mattered to me, which was not good, because it was still traitorous in our house to express concern or any kind of affection for Billy. Anytime Mom started to feel slightly bad for Billy, Dad was like, NO.
And Mom was like, Maybe?
And Dad was like, How could you?
And Mom was like, How could you not even?
And then Dad saw me enter the kitchen, and was like, What’s for dinner?
I got the silver tray from the bottom of the freezer. That’s what dinner was now. A silver tray, delivered by our neighbors or relatives or whoever else felt sorry for us. We got so many after you died, we just started putting them in the freezer, and now we were always pulling them out of the freezer, standing over the counter, eating directly from the silver trays, forks in hand, like barbarians, Dad said. We’re barbarians. But apparently, he didn’t mind this, because we continued being barbarians.
Mom opened the lid.
“What is it?” I asked.
“I think it’s fajitas,” Mom said.
“Fajitas?” Dad said.
Apparently, Dad didn’t know what fajitas were. He was like, I swear I never heard the word before, and Mom said, Richard, in the way that Mom does, don’t tell me I married a man who doesn’t know what a fajita is, and Dad said, I’m afraid you did. He repeated it twice, and by the second time, it sounded ominous, like we were all doomed because we knew him.
I explained how they’re basically like tacos, except you have to assemble them yourself, which Dad didn’t get because why would you want to assemble the meal yourself if you don’t have to? Wasn’t the whole point of the silver tray so that we didn’t have to do any work?
And Mom went, “Richard, I know we had fajitas before. I just know it. We went on our honeymoon to Mexico.”
