“I just wanted to have a nice night. Together.”
“Come on, Sharon.” Dad moves as if to touch her again, but his hand instead finds its way to his whiskey glass, which a waitress has just deposited before scurrying quickly away. A double, judging from the size of it. “It isn’t your fault. It was a nice idea.”
“It’s not okay,” I repeat, a little louder. No point in keeping my voice down. Everyone is already staring at us. A busboy coming toward us with ice water catches sight of Mom, turns around, and bolts back toward the kitchen. “There’s no point in pretending. You always do this—both of you do.”
At least Mom stops crying. Instead she stares at me, openmouthed, her eyes all bleary and red. Dad grips his glass so hard, I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole thing shatters.
“Nick, honey—” Aunt Jackie starts to say, but Dad cuts her off.
“What are you talking about?” he says. “Do what?”
“Pretend,” I say. “Act like nothing’s changed. Act like nothing’s wrong.” I ball up my napkin and throw it on the table, suddenly disgusted and sorry that I even showed up. “We aren’t a family anymore. You made sure of that when you left, Dad.”
“That’s enough,” Dad says. “Do you hear me?” The angrier Dad gets, the quieter his voice. Now he’s speaking in practically a whisper. His face is a mottled red, like someone choking.
Weirdly, Mom has gone totally still, totally calm. “She’s right, Kevin,” she says serenely, her eyes floating up past my head again.
“And you.” I can’t help it; I can’t stop it. I’m never this angry, but it all boils up at once, something black and awful, like a monster in my chest that just wants to tear, and tear, and tear. “You’re on a different planet half the time. You think we don’t notice, but we do. Pills to go to sleep. Pills to wake up. Pills to help you eat, and pills to keep you from eating too much.”
“I said that’s enough.” Suddenly Dad reaches over the table and grabs my wrist, hard, knocking over a glass of water onto Mom’s lap. Aunt Jackie shouts. Mom yelps and leaps backward, sending her chair clattering to the ground. Dad’s eyes are enormous and bloodshot; he’s holding my wrist so tightly, tears prick my eyes. The restaurant has gone totally silent.
“Let her go, Kevin,” Aunt Jackie says very calmly. “Kevin.” She has to put her hand on his and pry his fingers from my wrist. The manager—a guy named Corey; Dara used to flirt with him—is moving toward us slowly, obviously mortified.
Finally Dad lets go. He lets his hand fall in his lap. He blinks. “God.” The color drains out of his face all at once. “My God. Nick, I’m so sorry. I should never have—I don’t know what I was thinking.”
My wrist is burning, and I know I’m going to cry. This was supposed to be the night Dara and I fixed everything. Dad reaches for me again, this time to touch my shoulder, but I stand up, so my chair grates loudly on the linoleum. Corey pauses halfway across the restaurant, as if he’s afraid he might be physically accosted if he comes any closer.
“We aren’t a family anymore,” I repeat in a whisper, because if I try to speak any louder the pressure in my throat will collapse and the tears will come. “That’s why Dara isn’t here.”
I don’t stay to see my parents’ reaction. There’s a roaring in my ears, like earlier today, just before I fainted. I don’t remember crossing the restaurant or bursting out into the night air but, suddenly, there I am: on the far side of the parking lot, jogging through the grass, gulping deep breaths of air and wishing for an explosion, a world-ending, movie-style disaster; wishing for the darkness to come down, like water, over all our heads.
Nicole Warren
American Lit-Adv
February 28
“The Eclipse”
Assignment: In To Kill a Mockingbird, the natural world is often used as a metaphor for both human nature and many of the book’s themes (fear, prejudice, justice, etc.). Please write 800–1,000 words about an experience of the natural world that might be seen as metaphorically significant, employing some of the poetic techniques (alliteration, symbolism, anthropomorphism) we’ve covered in this unit.
One time, when my sister, Dara, and I were little, my parents took us down to the beach to watch a solar eclipse. This was before the casino opened up in Shoreline County and before Norwalk got built up, too, and became a long chain of motels and family-style restaurants and, farther down, strip clubs and bars. FanLand was there, and a gun store; nothing else but gravel-dotted sand and coastline and little dunes, like wind-whipped cream, spotted with sun-bleached grasses.
There were hundreds of other families on the beach, making a picnic of it, spreading out blankets on the sand while the disk of the moon moved lazily toward the sun, like a magnet pulling slowly toward its pair. I remember my mother peeling an orange with her thumb, and the bitter smell of pith.
I remember Dad saying, Look. Look, girls, it’s happening.
I remember, too, the moment of darkness: when the sky turned to textured gray, like chalk, and then to twilight, but faster than any twilight I’d ever seen. Suddenly we were all swallowed up in shadow, as if the world had opened its mouth and we’d fallen down a black throat.
Everyone applauded. There was a small constellation of flashes in the dark, miniature explosions while people took pictures. Dara put her hand in mine, squeezed, and began to cry. And my heart stopped. In that moment I thought we might be lost forever in the darkness, suspended in a place between night and day, sun and land, earth and the waves that turned earth back into water.
Even after the moon rolled off the sun, and the daylight came again, a bright and unnatural dawn, Dara wouldn’t stop crying. My parents thought she was cranky because she’d missed her nap and had wanted ice cream on the way over, and we did get ice cream, eventually, tall cones too big for either one of us to eat that pooled in our laps on the way home.
But I understood why she was crying. Because in that moment I’d felt it, too: a sheer, driving terror that the darkness was permanent, that the moon would stop its rotation, that the balance would never be restored.
You see, even then, I knew. It wasn’t a trick. It wasn’t a show. Sometimes day and night reverse. Sometimes up goes down and down goes up, and love turns into hate, and the things you counted on get washed out from under your feet, leaving you pedaling in the air.
Sometimes people stop loving you. And that’s the kind of darkness that never gets fixed, no matter how many moons rise again, filling the sky with a weak approximation of light.
Nick
8:35 p.m.
I fling open the front door so hard it cracks against the wall, but I’m too pissed to care.
“Dara?” I call her name even though I can tell by feel, by intuition, that she hasn’t come home.
“Hi, Nick.” Aunt Jackie emerges from the den, holding a glass filled with what looks like neon-green sludge. “Smoothie?”
She must have headed to our house in her car straight from the restaurant. Maybe Mom and Dad sent her ahead to talk to me.
“No, thanks.” I’m really not in the mood to deal with Aunt Jackie and her self-help “wisdom,” which always sounds like it came off the inside of a bottle cap. Let truth radiate toward you. Focus is about presence. Let go or be dragged. But she’s positioned in front of the stairway, blocking access to my room. “Are you staying here tonight or something?”
“Thinking about it,” she says, taking a long sip of smoothie and leaving a green mustache around her upper lip. Then: “That isn’t the way to get a response, you know. Not if you really want to talk to her.”
“I think I know my sister,” I say, irritated.
Aunt Jackie shrugs. “Whatever you say.” She stares at me for a long second, as if debating whether to tell me a secret.
“What?” I ask finally.
She bends over, setting down the smoothie on the stairs. When she straightens up again, she reaches for my hands. “She isn’t mad at you, you know. She just misses you.”
Her hands are freezing, but I don’t pull away. “She told you that?” Aunt Jackie nods. “You—you talk to her?”
“Almost every day,” Aunt Jackie says, shrugging. “I spoke with her for a long time this morning.”
I pull away, taking a step backward, nearly tripping on Aunt Jackie’s bag, which is slumped, body-like, in the middle of the hall. Dara used to make fun of Aunt Jackie for her patchouli smell and weird vegan concoctions and endless chatter about meditation and reincarnation. And now they’re besties? “She won’t talk to me at all.”
“Have you asked?” she says, with a pitying look. “Have you really tried?”
I don’t answer. I brush past Aunt Jackie, take the stairs two at a time up both flights to Dara’s room, which is also dark, also empty. The birthday card is still sitting on her pillow, exactly where it was this morning. Could she have been out since last night? Where could she have gone? To Ariana’s, maybe. Or maybe—suddenly the answer is so obvious I can’t believe it didn’t occur to me before—she’s with Parker. They’re probably together on some crazy Dara-inspired adventure, trying to make it to North Carolina and back in twenty-four hours, or camped out together in an East Norwalk motel, throwing potato chips to the gulls from their window.
I pull out my phone and dial Dara’s number. It rings five times before going to voice mail. So either she’s busy—if she is with Parker, I don’t want to think about what she’s busy with—or ignoring me.
I text her instead.
Meet me in front of the Gateway @ FanLand. 10 p.m.
I hit send.
There. I’ve asked, just like Aunt Jackie said I should.
Downstairs, Aunt Jackie has retreated to the den. I root around in the kitchen for a key to Dara’s car. Finally I find a spare nestled in the back of the junk drawer, behind a bunch of highlighters and half a dozen matchbooks.
“You going somewhere?” Aunt Jackie calls as I head for the door.
“Work,” I call back, and don’t wait for her reply.
Dara’s car smells earthy and strange, like there’s fungus growing beneath the seat cushions. It’s been months since I’ve been behind the wheel of a car, and a tiny shiver of dread passes through me when I turn the key in the ignition. The last time I drove was on the night of the accident, down on that bleak portion of 101 that shoulders up to the stone-rutted coast, with its thick nests of sandwort and gnarled beach plum trees. I haven’t gone back there; I haven’t wanted to.
That road leads nowhere.
I back out of the driveway, careful to avoid the trash cans, feeling awkward and a little jumpy behind the wheel. But after a few minutes, I relax. Rolling down the windows, turning onto the highway, gathering speed, I feel the tension in my chest break apart slightly. Dara still hasn’t responded to my text, but that doesn’t mean anything. She’s never been able to resist a surprise. Besides, the 22 goes straight to FanLand. She may have blown off dinner just to get to the park a little early.
At FanLand, the parking lot is still packed, though immediately I can tell the crowd has changed: there are fewer minivans and SUVs, more beat-up secondhand Accords, some thumping with bass, some releasing fine plumes of sweet-smelling smoke from the cracked windows, as kids pass back and forth into the lot to drink or get high. As soon as I park, I start scanning for Dara, ducking low to try and see past the fog-patterned windows without trying to look like I’m looking.
“Hey, sweetheart. Nice ass!” a guy shouts from a nearby car, and his friends erupt into laughter. I can hear a girl shriek in the backseat, “She does not.”