He looked at me curiously. ‘What are you sorry for?’
I thought of the spiny, crackling snaps under my skin, the day I yelled at him and slammed my bedroom door. How his face had crumpled, how he’d looked so devastated. I shook my head, afraid to say more.
After the snow globe incident, when my father was in the psych ward, he wore a nightgown that stopped at his knees, and then, later, pale green hospital scrub pants. He said his roommate smacked his lips in his sleep. In the ward’s lobby was a bulletin board with construction-paper balloons pinned to it. Someone had printed each patient’s name in the middle of each balloon. I didn’t cry when I saw my dad’s hospital bracelet, or the curled-up, mumbling woman in the corner, or the jagged scar on my father’s palm. I didn’t cry when I asked him what it felt like, suffering with whatever had befallen him, and he replied, ‘It’s something that’s been inside me for a long time. And you fight and fight and fight against it for so long, but then, it just crashes over you and pulls you down.’ But when I saw his name written in one of those construction-paper balloons, Richard, optimistically, innocently, I had to turn away from him, duck my head into the water fountain as if I desperately needed a drink.
We sat in the common room and he pulled a hand-drawn card from the scrub pants’ small back pocket. ‘Here,’ he said. It was a gelatinous map of the world; he’d penciled in each individual country, body of water, mountain ranges, and even added some fish in the oceans and birds in the sky-birds, come to think of it, that looked a lot like the drawings on the graves in Philip’s backyard. Everything on the map was right: France was next to Belgium, Germany and Switzerland. Japan was to the right of Korea. He even got all of the newly independent Soviet Union countries in the right places: Belarus and Estonia and Uzbekistan. Somewhat arbitrarily, he’d drawn a stick person over Spain, and another over Australia. There was a line between the two of them, linking them together. Inside, the card said, Me and You.
We walked now in silence, catching up with the others. ‘Hey,’ my father said, stopping short halfway down the cemetery’s wildflower-strewn hill. ‘You know what’s over there?’ He pointed to a house.
‘What?’ I asked.
‘Old man Cross’s trampoline.’ He shaded his eyes. ‘I wonder if it’s still there.’
‘It is,’ Pete answered. ‘I drove by before you got here the other day.’
They exchanged a glance. ‘You want to go?’ my dad asked.
‘Sure,’ Pete said.
‘Summer? Steven?’ My father looked at us. Suddenly, he could be eighteen, the age when he left Cobalt for good. Pete giggled beside him.
‘Nah,’ Steven said quickly.
‘I’ll go,’ I offered.
‘Of course you will,’ my father said, and took my hand.
PART THREE
Brooklyn, New York,
June, 1998
acting for beginners
Prologue
Let me start off by saying that it’s all right that you haven’t been in touch. I understand how busy your life must be, what with your new job-your sister told me a little about it. For what it’s worth, I’m extremely proud.
And I get, too, how life can snow you under so quickly. Even here, I find myself so busy. There are so many activities they encourage us to try, like ceramics, book discussions, tai chi on the front lawn-a whole crowd goes to that, thinking it will work as well as antidepressants. Recently, I took my first tennis lesson. As it gets warmer, I’ll be able to practice more and more. There’s something very soothing about tennis, especially thwacking the ball against a brick wall all alone.
A lot of things here make me think of you. Not long into my stay, I noticed a starling with only one leg. He managed to get around all right, but it still looked so difficult and painful. I gave him my extra crusts of bread and coaxed him to hop up on my finger. The gray cat started coming around not long after, small and skinny and with a pus-filled eye. I tried to catch her, but cats aren’t like dogs-they’re slaves to no one. I snagged a can of tuna and an opener from the kitchen, opened it on the lawn, and hid behind the hedges. It took a while, but the cat finally slunk to the can and eagerly began to eat.