Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance, page 16
“Sally, oh my goodness, so nice to see you!” Priscilla said.
She hugged us, as if we were her long-lost relatives.
“Come with us,” Priscilla said. “We’re going to go on the Hurricane. It’s the best ride here.”
* * *
At the Hurricane, the girls started to pair off, which was a problem, because there were seven of us. We all knew a person was going to be shaved off, left to stand and wait alone, and I knew it was going to be Valerie, because nobody knew Valerie. So, I said, Valerie, why don’t you go on the ride with Priscilla, and for some reason, I was surprised when she did. I was left just standing there on the grass, and that’s when I heard him.
“Hey, Sally.”
I didn’t have to turn around to know it was Billy. But I turned around and I saw him, sitting in the ride’s operating booth. He was wearing a baseball hat, so I couldn’t really see his scars. All I could see was a giant lip ring, a silver band on the left side of his mouth. It looked odd, not at all like something Billy would want on his face. But there it was, shining in the sun.
“You work here?” I asked.
“Volunteering,” he said.
“But you’re not on the basketball team anymore,” I said.
“Oh,” he said. “Sometimes, I think I’ll always be on the basketball team.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“Why don’t you come in here,” he said. “Sit with me for a second.”
It was quiet in the booth, but Billy didn’t seem to notice.
“So, how’s the job?” I asked.
The question felt wrong and made Billy smile for some reason.
“Pretty riveting,” he said. He told me that the most exciting part about the job was hearing the metal hit against metal. “Cah-lick-ah.”
I could see inside his mouth when he did this.
“The rest of the job,” he said, “is me moving my fingers on this thing right here.”
“Oh,” I said. I imagined what I’d say to someone else. To Dad. “That’s very interesting.”
“Is it?” he said. “I was really just joking.”
I wish I hadn’t come in there, in this tiny booth, where there wasn’t really enough room for both of us. It was hard to talk to any boy, let alone Billy in sunglasses. I didn’t have access to his eyes. He was completely unknowable. I made a mental note to start wearing sunglasses more.
“Want to do it?” he asked.
I stopped breathing for a moment. “Do what?”
“Run the ride,” he said.
“Oh,” I said. I didn’t want to run the ride. Could he really be asking me this question? If we were on the ride, I wouldn’t want me running it, either. What do I know about running a carnival ride? “It doesn’t feel right. I mean, I don’t know how.”
“Suit yourself,” he said.
The light left his face. I made a mistake. I suddenly felt awkward, the way I used to feel in our kitchen before school when there was nothing for Billy and me to say. I should have said yes. I should be more open to things now, ready for anything. Like a Green Person.
“Well, is it safe?” I asked.
He smiled.
“Yeah,” he said. “A baby could do it.”
I put my hand on the stick. Billy smiled, like he was proud of me.
“Yeah, like that,” he said. “But don’t start the ride until the doors are locked.”
He put his hand over mine. This was a first of many. The first time I ever broke the law. The first time Billy had ever touched my hand. I breathed my first deep breath of the afternoon. Of maybe my entire life.
“All right, now,” he said. “Here we go.”
He gave the guy the thumbs-up from afar. He hit a button that said On.
“I’ll get them in the air for you,” he said, “but once they’re there, it’s all yours.”
I watched as he lifted the cages in the air and that’s when the screaming started. Or the laughing. From far away, it was hard to tell if the people on the ride were terrified or having the time of their lives or both.
“Are they okay?” I asked.
“They’re just laughing,” he said. “That’s what laughing looks like from far away.”
“It looks kind of weird. Sort of demonic.”
I started noticing specific people on the ride, people we knew. Mr. Beers, the high school principal. The librarian. Valerie and Priscilla. But soon, everyone else was just whirls of ponytails. A red Slurpee flew out. The ride went faster and faster, and I couldn’t believe I was the one running it.
“This is fun!” I said, and laughed.
I was in charge of all these lives. I don’t think I had ever been in charge of anything before that moment. And it was an amazing feeling.
“You really don’t even have to move it much,” he said. “Just go around in little circles like this and don’t stop.”
“Okay.”
“Now, we’ve got to lower it,” Billy said. “Slowly get them all to the ground.”
I watched as the cages descended until they hit the grass. Billy and I, we had accomplished something together. And your friends looked so small on the other side of the ride, suddenly seemed so irrelevant to me and Billy.
Me and Billy.
But then people got off the ride, and Priscilla and the girls started running back to us in the booth. That’s when I recognized her: the girl from the mini-mart—the girl with the brown triangle of hair. Karen. She looked at me, and then at Billy, and then back at me.
“Who are you?” Karen asked, like I had taken her place.
“Oh,” Billy said. “This is Sally. Kathy Holt’s sister.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry about what happened to your sister, Sally,” Karen said. “We all really miss her.”
“Yeah,” I said.
Billy rested back in the seat, and I watched as he put his hands behind his head. Jealousy was dark, made everything look like night instead of day, the view became narrow and finite and so focused on one particular thing: your boyfriend’s face. His arms. His chin.
“Did you show her the trick?” Karen asked.
“What trick?” I asked.
A gnat stuck to her sweaty cheek like fly paper. “If you hold the stick just right,” Karen said, “if you jam it at the right time, you can make all the girls’ tits fall out.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Karen,” Billy said. He looked horrified. “She’s little. Don’t teach her that.”
But I wasn’t little, I wanted to scream. I was fourteen!
“Let me try this now,” Karen said, and scooted me out of the booth so she could sit down and Billy didn’t stop her.
I got out of the booth. I didn’t look back to see Karen sit on Billy’s lap. I walked away fast, passed the American Diabetes booth, where a woman was licking cotton candy. The Breast Cancer Association, where they were selling lollipops. I stopped in front of a booth that sold hamsters for ninety-nine cents.
“What’s wrong?” Valerie asked, catching up.
“Ninety-nine cents?” I asked. “Hamsters are only ninety-nine cents?”
“We could get a hundred!”
I had no idea hamsters were this cheap. Why this should surprise me, I’m not sure, why this should affect me, I did not know. Ninety-nine cents.
“A fish, yeah, a hermit crab, okay, but a hamster?” I said.
The more I said it, the sadder it sounded.
“It’s less than a hamburger at McDonald’s,” Valerie said.
“Cheaper than a pack of gum,” I said.
“A pencil costs more.”
I wanted to keel over and cry on the street. But I peered through the cages. The hamsters looked at me through the wires, sniffing, woodchips dotting their fur. They were not even trying to escape. It’s like they knew they were worth nothing. Like they agreed to this price.
“Come on,” Priscilla said, when she found me. “We’re meeting some boys in the field.”
* * *
Notice how I didn’t even ask, “What boys?” I just went. Because that was how you became a Girl Who Meets Boys in the Field.
That’s how you go from one thing to another thing. I don’t know why I thought it was going to be so hard. I don’t know why it seemed so magical when you did it. In reality, when you’re actually on the field, there wasn’t much to it at all. It was as easy as breathing.
The boys were all around us, in different T-shirts, but the same exact T-shirt. T-shirts proudly proclaiming where they last went on vacation (St. John’s), and what they wanted to drink (Sprite) or wherever their dad worked (Lenny’s Landscaping).
“I’ve got booze,” Priscilla said.
The bottle was clear, majestic, like something brewed under the sea. Exactly what her mother would drink. Parrot Bay. Coconut Rum. It was sickening. It was sweet. But I held on to the bottle like it was some kind of elixir.
“Is Karen Billy’s new girlfriend?” I said to Priscilla.
“Yeah,” Priscilla said. “They’ve been dating all summer.”
Priscilla must have seen the sadness come over me, so she said, “Here. Drink this. Forget about them.”
And I did. The rum made the night a little less everything. The heat was not so hot and the people seemed less like people, or more like the watercolor people, like I was in one of our dentist’s paintings. The red and green people having the time of their lives on a field. The red and green people, dancing in circles under the stars.
“What’s your name?” Sprite finally asked me. He caught me by the arm, mid-twirl.
“Sally,” I said.
“Nice,” Sprite said. Like, solid choice. He took my hand and twirled me around and around until I got dizzy and crashed into him. He put his arms around my waist. “So, what’s your deal, Sally?”
“I don’t have a deal,” I said.
And then he turned his face to me, and I opened my mouth, tilted my head up, and took in his tongue.
“He used so much tongue,” I told Valerie on the way back.
“Mine, too,” Valerie said. “Like he was cleaning my mouth.”
We laughed on the walk back to Valerie’s, laughed about how kissing actually was not a big deal at all. We pressed our fingers to our lips all the way home. I kept trying to feel it, because I couldn’t feel it. Maybe I was drunk. Or maybe it just didn’t feel the way you had always made it out to feel. In all of your talk about kissing, you had never mentioned that it might feel like nothing. You had never described the sadness that would follow me, all the way into the bright lights of Valerie’s bedroom.
Thankfully, Valerie turned on a tape recording of her dishwasher before bed.
“I hope you don’t mind,” Valerie said. “I’m addicted.”
Valerie had recorded the sound of her own dishwasher before she went to Disney, so she could listen to it in the hotel. And I’ll admit, it was nice. Easy falling asleep like that, right next to Valerie, knowing that all her mother’s dishes would be clean by morning.
WATCH HILL
That winter before I graduated high school, you started haunting us.
It began in the living room, where we were gathered to watch the State of the Union.
“We last met in an hour of shock and suffering,” President Bush began, and then the TV shut off.
“That was weird,” Mom said, and looked at me.
It was—all the other lights in the room were still on.
“I’ll go check the fuse box,” Dad said, and went down to the basement.
In his absence, Mom whispered, “Do you think that was Kathy?”
“I think that was just a fuse,” I said.
And it must have been. Because Dad emerged from the basement and the TV turned back on and he sat back down in the Man Chair and said, “There. It’s back on.”
But then, as we tried to listen to the president, a bird—a cardinal—started flying into the window. Each time, the bird hit it with such a loud smack that it startled Mom. She finally spilled her drink into her lap, and said, “Okay, that’s Kathy! Kathy is trying to get back into the house.”
Which made no sense to me. How Mom could believe the bird was you, and then just sit there, wiping the drink off her lap? I looked to Dad, but he was plopping peanuts into his mouth. Dad was just doing what Mom had always asked—he was just watching the show.
“If it’s Kathy trying to get back into the house, then maybe we should open the window?” I said.
“Sally, what would we do with a bird in the house?” Mom said.
Mom stood up to make herself another cocktail. Mom drank vodka, too, now. She poured cranberry juice and seltzer in it and the ice jingled loudly every time she took a sip. Dad turned up the TV.
The state of the union was not good.
The twin towers had been attacked.
Our nation was on the brink of war.
The economy was in a recession.
Not to mention, Mom hadn’t gone to the bathroom in a week and Dad had lost his job.
But Dad wasn’t worried. It’d be fine, he had decreed from the depths of the Man Chair. He was going to start his own business.
* * *
In the weeks after the State of the Union, Mom went to see a psychic. She confessed this to me as we drove to the mall to get a prom dress. Prom wasn’t for months, but Mom was worried about finding a dress that would fit me. So, she started the car, drove down our street, and with no shame at all, said, “Sally, I’ve been seeing this woman who talks to Kathy.”
“You’re seeing a psychic?” I asked.
“She actually doesn’t prefer to be called a psychic,” Mom said.
“What does she want to be called then?”
“Jan,” Mom said.
“Jan? Why Jan?”
“Because that’s her name.”
She was already in our Rolodex, Mom said, the first entry under J. But I was confused.
“Her name is Jan?”
“What’s wrong with Jan?” Mom said. Mom turned the corner onto Main Street. Mom drove all the way down without stopping. She no longer stopped at the site of your death anymore to say a prayer. “It’s a perfectly nice name.”
“I guess,” I said. “Just kind of a normal name for a psychic.”
It was the name of a very normal girl from The Brady Bunch. The name of the librarian at school.
“Well, Jan is a very normal woman.”
“She doesn’t sound like it.”
“She has a gift,” Mom said.
Jan was just a normal woman with a gift, according to Mom. Jan didn’t even charge. Why charge? She had too much money already, Mom said. She and her husband were extremely wealthy—both of them lawyers who lived on the beach in Watch Hill.
“Wait, Jan lives in Watch Hill?” I asked.
“Yes,” Mom said. “Her house is beautiful. Just beautiful. Right on the beach. Remember how Kathy used to love it there?”
Mom was telling me all this about Jan like it was some kind of proof. Proof that Jan really did see the dead, because why would a lawyer from Watch Hill with two honors-student daughters and a blond bob and a minivan pretend to see the dead when she obviously had so many other things to do?
“Jan knows there is a child missing,” Mom said. “That’s the first thing she said when I walked in. She said, There’s a child missing.”
I felt the hairs rise on my arm. Mom pulled into the mall parking lot.
“Of course, Jan knows,” I said. “Kathy’s death was in the paper for weeks!”
“Jan doesn’t know our last name,” Mom said. “And Kathy died five years ago, Sally. Those articles were from so long ago. And apparently she just sees Kathy, standing right next to her.”
“Doesn’t that scare her?” I asked.
“Why would that scare her?” Mom asked. “It’s just Kathy.”
Yes. But whenever I saw you in my dreams—whenever I walked into our room and found you lying on your bed, your eyes stitched shut—I woke in a panic. Ever since the State of the Union, that’s what my nightmares had been like: Your dead body was always surfacing in places I didn’t expect. One time, your casket was even lying in the middle of the kitchen floor.
But when I woke, in the middle of the night, there was no one to tell. You were gone. And who knows where Billy was. I hadn’t talked to Billy since I saw him at the Aldan Day Carnival. He left for Villanova, and I began high school, and I never saw him again. I kept thinking I would run into him somewhere—at the carnival each summer, on the basketball court next to the town pool where the guys always played, or maybe at a party at Rick Stevenson’s house, because that’s where we were always partying senior year. That’s where the basketball team drank their fathers’ beers. And each time I went, each time I leaned against Rick’s fence, took a sip of my beer, a drag of my cigarette, I looked around, as if Billy might walk in at any moment.
But he didn’t come. And I didn’t really smoke. Smoking was stupid—that’s what I told the entire auditorium of people during the annual assemblies when I wheeled out the black lung in the glass case. I was president of Students Against Smoking senior year. Member of the school newspaper. Secretary of the Key Club. President of Latin Club, not like there was much competition for that role. Not many people in high school were interested in learning Latin, except Peter, who wanted to learn all the medical terminology for when he was a doctor. Most people didn’t see the point. “Why learn a language you can never use in real life?” Valerie asked me, which is exactly what I liked about it. Finally. A language I’d never have to speak aloud. “A language that, in some sense, allows you to speak with the dead,” Mr. Prim said on the first day of class, which actually did sound practical to me. You were the only person I wanted to talk to then. And the sentences we had to translate for homework became increasingly archaic over the years; they were funny to me and Peter.
