Dare Me

14



Little Caitlin, her doughy face with that cherry-stem mouth, baby-soft hair sticking to her bulbed forehead.

Sitting on Coach’s sofa, I watch her amble around her strewn toys, the pink plastic and the yellow fluff of girlhood, everything glitter-silted. She steps with such care through the detritus of purple-maned ponies, gauzy-winged tutus, and all the big-eyed dolls—dolls nearly as empty-eyed as Caitlin, who reminds me of one of those stiff-limbed walking ones the richest girls always had, and we’d knock them over with the backs of our hands, or walk them into swimming pools or down basement stairs. Like stacking them up in pyramids just to watch them fall.

“I know, I know. Please, will you, will you…listen to me, baby. Listen close.”

In the dark dining room, Coach is on the phone, fingers hooked around the bottom of the low-hanging chandelier, turning it, twisting it in circles until I hear a sickly creak.

For hours she’s been hand-wringing, jabbing her thumb into the center of her palm, molding it there, her teeth nearly grinding, her eyes straying constantly to her cell phone. Ten times in ten minutes, a phantom vibration. Picking it up, nearly shaking it. Begging it to come to life. We can’t finish a conversation, sure can’t practice dive rolls in the yard. Any of the things she promised me.

Finally, her surrender, slipping into the other room and her voice high and rushed. Will? Will? But you…but Will…

Now, Caitlin’s play-doh feet stomp over mine, her gummy hands on my knees as she pushes by me, and I want out. It’s all so sticky and unfun and I feel the air clog in my throat. For the first time since Coach let me into her home, I wish I’d gone instead with RiRi to her new boyfriend’s place, where they were drinking ginger-and-Jack in the backyard and smashing croquet balls up and down the long slope of the lawn.

But then Coach, phone raised high in hand like a trophy, tears into the living room, her face suddenly shooting nervy energy.

She is transformed.

“Addy, can you do me a favor?” she says, fingering the hamsa bracelet, its amulet flaring at me. “Just this once?”

She kneels down before me, her arms resting on my knees. It’s like a proposal.

Her face so soft and eager, I feel like she must feel when she looks at me.

“Yes,” I say, smiling. “Sure, yes. Yes.” Always.


“It won’t be long,” Coach says. “Just a little while.”

She tells me Will’s having a hard time. Today, she says, is the third anniversary of his wife’s death.

My legs tingling, it’s like Lanvers Peak again, and I have a sense of my grand importance. Jump, jump, jump—how high, Coach? Just tell me, how high?


When he arrives, Will doesn’t quite look like himself, his face sheet-creased and he smells like beer and sweat, a dampness on him that seems to go to the bone. A six-pack is wedged under his arm. He sort of burrows against Coach for a minute and I pretend to look out the window.

While Coach hustles Caitlin off to the backyard, we sit on the sofa together, the cold beer bottles pressing against my legs.

There is a long, silent minute, my eyes following the milky rise and fall of his Adam’s apple, me so hypnotized, and thinking somehow of Coach’s fingers there.

“Addy,” he finally says, and I’m relieved someone is saying something. “I’m sorry I interrupted you two. You were probably doing things. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” I say.

When I was seven, my dad’s best friend died from a heart attack on the golf course and my dad locked himself in the garage for an hour and my stepmom wouldn’t let me knock on the door. Later, I think I crawled on his lap and I remember how he let me sit there for an hour and never once asked me to move so he could change the TV channel.

I don’t guess I should sit on Will’s lap but wish I could do something.

“Can I tell you something, Addy?” he says, and he’s not looking at me but at the furred white lamb on the coffee table, its head bent. “This awful thing happened to me on the way here.”

“What?” I say, rising up in my seat.

“I was coming out of the Beer Depot on Royston Road and there’s this bus stop out front. This old woman was coming off the bus, carrying her shopping bags. She had this hat with a big red flower, like a poppy, the ones you wear on Veterans’ Day. That’s what you’re supposed to wear on Veterans’ Day.

“When she saw me, she stopped in her tracks, right on the bottom step. She just stopped. It was like she knew me.

“And this thing happened. I just couldn’t move. I was just standing there, beer in my hand, and we just locked eyes. And something happened.”

His stare is glassy, and he has one finger tracing the tops of the beer bottles sitting between his legs.

“Did she know you from somewhere?” I ask, not sure I’m following.

“Yes. Except she didn’t. I never saw her before in my life. But, Addy, she knew me. She kept staring at me from under that poppy hat. And these black eyes, like lumps of coal. She would not let me go.” He shakes his head back and forth. “She would not let me go.”

I’m listening, but I don’t know what I’m hearing. I wonder how many beers Will has had, or if this is what mourning can look like, diffuse and mysterious.

“Addy, I think…” He has his eyes fixed again on the toy lamb on the coffee table, its head tilted, like a broken neck. “She knew things about me. It all became clear. She knew. The things I did as a kid, the Slip ’N Slide accident with my cousin and the sparkler bombs in the church parking lot and the time my dad showed up drunk at my job at the Hamburger Train and I shoved him and he fell on the wet floor and hit his head. And the first time in the Guard, and how now, after those bad drinking years, I only remember the MEDCAP missions, those little Allahaddin girls who slipped me love poems. I never remember any of the rest of it at all.”

He pauses, his beer bottle tilting in his hand.

“She knew things I never told anyone,” he says. “Like about my wife. Six years we were together, I never bought her a Valentine’s Day card.”

The empty bottle slips from his fingers, rolls across the sofa cushion.

“She knew all those things. And then I did.”

I don’t know what to say. I want to understand, to touch a bit of this shiny despair.

“What did you do?” I finally ask.

He laughs, the hard sound of it making me jump. “I ran,” he says. “Like a kid. Like seeing the bogey man. A witch.”

We are both quiet for a moment. I’m thinking of the old woman. I can see the poppy-blooming hat, and her face, her eyes inked black and all-knowing. I wonder if anything like that will ever happen to me.

Will leans down and picks up his bottle, setting it on the coffee table, its clammy bottom ringing the wood.

“Remember that night we all drove up the peak?” he says suddenly.

“Yes,” I say.

“I wish it could always be like that,” he says, twisting off a new beer cap.

I look at him.

Then he says, “Look at you,” reaching out and flicking my blond braid. “You’re so easy to talk to, Addy.”

I try to smile.

“Let me ask you,” he says, pressing the bottle against his damp forehead. “Do people see you, so pretty and your hair like a doll, and do they know about those things you hold inside of you?”

How did he know I held such things? And what things?

“Can I trust you, Addy?” he asks.

I say he can. Does anyone ever answer that question with a no?

And I wait for him to say more. But he just looks at me, his eyes blood-webbed and so sorrowful.

None of it makes much sense and I think Will must be very drunk or something. Something.

For a second it all overwhelms me, and all I want is to listen to music, or do a bleacher sprint, or feel the featherweight of Tacy’s elfin foot in my flat palm, her counting on me to hold her up, and it being so easy.

“I’m sorry I ruined your afternoon,” he says.


I’m in the backyard, leaning on the enormous dutch door playhouse Caitlin occupies, jumbo chalk jammed in her chubby hands. Still half breathless from my talk with Sarge Will, I smoke three of Coach’s American Spirits and think about what’s going on inside.

Nearly an hour goes by, those two inside, and Caitlin falls asleep in the playhouse, her mouth sucked over the corner of the foam table inside.

Her hair scalloped into a ponytail, Coach runs barefoot across the lawn. I think she’s going to hug me, but she’s not a hugger, and kind of arm-hooks me, Coach-like, wringing my shoulder.

“Thank you, Addy,” she says, breathlessly. “Thanks, okay?”

And she smiles, with all her teeth, her face taffy pink.

It’s like I’ve just done the greatest thing I could ever do for her, like a single-based split catch, like a pike open basket at the State Championship, like a balm over her heart.

For a moment, my fingers touch her hard back, which shudders like a bird’s.

Touching it is like touching them, their beauty.