For some reason, I wasn’t surprised.
I could tell he’d been shaken by what he’d seen in Mr. Simpson’s eyes the night prior, but I hadn’t the tools to assemble the connection between the men then. It wasn’t until a week had passed and I’d bothered my mother so much about Barry’s departure that she finally told me some things I didn’t know. The first was about the man who used to pull up in our driveway to talk to him about work. And what she told me was that Uncle Barry’s wife, Sharon, had been cheating on him, and that she’d gotten pregnant from some other guy, a professor in her new department in Arizona. And so the man Barry was talking to in our driveway was a liaison for a private investigator in Arizona, my mom said, who Barry had hired to give him all the details of what she was doing while he was away. The whole scenario seemed improbable to me, and so weak-minded of my uncle who I adored that I was upset with my mother for even suggesting it. I didn’t believe her.
“How did he have the money to pay for all that?” I asked her. “Isn’t that expensive?”
“He didn’t have the money,” she said. “That’s why he left. That’s why Barry is always leaving.”
“But that doesn’t even make sense,” I said. “Why would he want to know the details if he already knew she was cheating on him? That just sounds like torture.”
“It’s love, honey,” my mom said. “It’s complicated.”
“That’s stupid,” I said.
“It is,” she said.
My mother was telling the truth. I’ve yet to meet a person who didn’t become a stranger to themselves in love, at one time or another. And since I often saw kindness in my uncle Barry, since I saw something close to a boy like me in his eyes, I knew that he was likely as confused by his actions as I was. The random women who brought him home, the awful spying, I’ve no doubt that he is still surprised that these were choices he made, that he was even the least bit involved in these things. Like he always told me:
“I couldn’t believe it, either. But there I was.”
I’ve yet to see him again.
All this to say that what my uncle Barry displayed for me that summer was just how strange and complicated adults are. As a kid you assume you know them because you see them often, and because they care for you. But for every adult person you look up to in life there is trailing behind them an invisible chain gang of ghosts, all of which, as a child, you are generously spared from meeting.
I know now, however, that these ghosts exist, and that other adults can see them. The lost loves, the hurt friends, the dead: they follow their owner forever. Perhaps this is why we feel so crowded around those people who we know have had hard times. Perhaps this is why we find so little to say. We suffer an odd brand of stage fright, I think, before all those dreadful eyes. And maybe that’s what my uncle had noticed about Mr. Simpson on the lawn that night of the fight. Maybe in my eyes, a child’s eyes, it was just the three of us squatting in the grass. But, to those two men, the lawn appeared to be full of bodies, full of the people they’d made mistakes with in life now tethered to them and ill-rested and serving no purpose but to remind them of the one awful thing: that life is made up, ever increasingly, of what you cannot change. One man’s daughter. Another man’s wife. The song plays on.
Yet all I know for sure is that two days after the fight on the lawn, our telephone rang.
It was Lindy.
24.
This was late July of 1991 and although he’d left, my uncle Barry’s scent was still in the house. Our phone had been ringing so often from people looking for him—creditors, his wife, her new man—that I’d come to ignore it. Then, after a particular ring, my mother called me into the kitchen. She held the phone to her shoulder. “It’s Lindy,” she whispered, and the look in her eyes was so hopeful. “Are you two talking again?”
“I’ll pick it up in my room,” I said.
Little need to explain the panic that shot through me.
The year Lindy and I had spent not talking to each other felt insignificant compared to the concentrated silence that followed our interaction after the dance that spring. Who were we now, I wondered, since she’d whispered something seductive in my ear? How much did she really know about me, about my feelings? Was that a night she even remembered? Or was that finally the real Lindy I had spoken to at Melinda’s party, the one who’d sought me out and pulled me close?
I had no idea, and so I agonized over the event in a manner so complete that I’d begun to wonder if it had ever really happened. Had I felt her hot breath on my cheek? Had I held her up from falling? Had I touched the soft scars on her thighs? Had I carried her? Hidden her? Saved her? Understood her? The opposite of this seemed more likely to me now, as if I’d never known Lindy Simpson at all. I wondered, for a moment, if I would even recognize her voice.
I picked up the phone in my room and waited until my mother hung up. Then I stood there with the receiver in my hand, looking at myself in a full-length mirror. I saw a skinny thing in ragged shorts and a T-shirt. I looked nervous and unprepared. I smiled as if Lindy might see me. On the other end of the line, I heard music playing low in the background.
“Hello?” I said.
A long silence passed between us.
“Yeah,” Lindy said. “So, I’m supposed to apologize about my dad.”
Although I recognized her voice immediately, although I likely could have recited nearly everything she’d said to me in life, I had no clear idea of what she was talking about at that moment.
“Apologize?” I asked. “For what?”
I could hear her flipping through radio stations. I imagined her rolling her eyes.
“I don’t know,” she said. “For my dad being pathetic, I guess. For the other night with the Kerns. My mom made me call. I think she’s going to leave him.”
“Shit,” I said. “Your poor mother.”
Lindy laughed when I said this, a surprising sound I hadn’t heard in years. It must have surprised her, too, as she cut it off like a switch.
“What?” I said. “Why did you laugh?”
“Nothing,” she said. “I’d just forgotten what a fucking weirdo you are.”
“I’m weird?” I asked her.
I thought this might be a good thing.
After all, this is what I’d been going for. This is why I wore black T-shirts and ghoulish jewelry and shaved the sides of my head. This is why my bangs hung over my eyes. This is why I was likely unattractive to all but one particular type of girl, one with issues, one with problems.
I smiled. “What do you mean I’m weird?”
“You sound like an old grandma,” she said. “Your poor mother. Who says shit like that?”
This was not the weird I wanted.
“An old grandma?” I asked. “What did you expect me to say?”
“For starters, idiot, you don’t have to act all sad. It’s not like your parents are splitting up.”
“My parents already split up,” I said.
“Oh, yeah,” she said. “Still.”
And then nothing.