Now that we’ve settled into our temporary life in Florida, I need to give Mel an explanation about what she found in my journal. She’s been patient: looking carefully at me when she thinks I don’t see, opening her mouth, drawing breath, then abruptly going shut, holding herself back from the question she was going to ask.
Being sick has given me an excuse to keep it to myself. But I owe her this. Without knowing how, quite, or why, I owe it to her to tell her. I owe it to myself, I think. Had I slipped under completely—those few terrible moments under the bright lights, the self deeper than my body wavering on the dividing line between something known and something deeply, nauseatingly unknown—it would have been an unforgivable omission. Never telling anyone else about Teddy. Our summer.
I start approaching my lingual therapy sessions with this goal in mind. Get enough words back to finish this unfinished business so we can get on the other side of normal. So we can get to work again.
One night, out on the deck, I start slow. “I need to talk to you about the thing you found.”
Her eyes go wide. She nods, still peering out into the yard. “Yes,” she says.
“I should explain,” I say to her. “I need to—I mean, it’s kind of hard to, you know. Tell the whole story. But I want to.”
“I was curious,” she admits. Cracks through the weird silence, here, to give a partial grin. Trying to lighten it all up. “Yeah, man. What the hell kind of project was that?”
“It’s not exactly a project.” I take a deep breath. I feel a cold prickle on my skin, a dampness under my arms and behind my knees. The prospect of saying it all out loud is sending my body into revolt.
Mel leans in. “You okay?” She studies my face. I’m still shaky, still weak enough to warrant caution. “We started out pretty early today. You had therapy. If you want to go to bed early, I totally understand. There’s nothing we have to do tonight.”
“No,” I tell her, gripping the armrests. “I need to do this.”
Her fingers go for her breast pocket. She fumbles out a smoke. It occurs to me that she might be a little shaky, too. About what I might tell her. What she might have found. That she senses what’s coming. When I reach over to grab a smoke for myself, she doesn’t protest.
I take a deep breath.
TEDDY’S HOUSE
I need to tell you about the day I saw my house on the CBS Evening News.
There’s a difference between seeing your town on the national news and seeing it on the local. Anyone who grew up with a television containing no flyover states—nothing that represents where and who you are—will know what I mean. You will come to assume that where you are is not part of the greater whole.
Because of TV, I was keenly aware that there were other places, bigger places, where words were said differently, where people moved more quickly. I imagined an outline of America with only a few bright points within, the rest a hazy, slightly sinister filler. The outline spoke very little to who I was, but God knows, volumes to who I wanted to be. Which was, in a word: elsewhere. I could expect a weird, secondhand familiarity on the local news. The accents of the weathermen, the muted on-set colors. Sometimes I saw things on the local that I had seen myself first, and not through the vainglorious eye of TV: Interstate 64, Rupp Arena. A particular Walmart in Grayson where we shopped for school supplies. It seemed more opaque than real TV; seemed, somehow, to have cost less money.
But seeing your place on national TV, there’s a sense that you’ve been incorporated into the world. And of course, context—how you and yours come into that world—means everything.
I was, as a kid, very much alone. From the adults monitoring me, criticizing me, giving me little more than a compulsion to shut out as much of the sanctimonious, supervisory world as possible—I would never, as an adult, really have a boss—to my peers, who made stiflingly sure to thin me out of their ranks as quickly as possible, my isolation was defining. It was not only how I thought of myself but how others thought of me as well. The other kids hated me. My own sister loved to tell me this, loved to be the carrier of sour information: what was said about me on the bus, who did a great impression of the way I walked, who wanted to kick my ass. When I asked her why—genuinely wanting her direction, a way to fit into life in our town—all she yelled was something she got off a high schooler’s T-shirt: “If you cain’t play with the big dogs, stay off the porch.”
My parents liked my siblings more, a suspicion confirmed by nicknames, tones of voice. They understood my sister and brother. I baffled them. They were awed, but not made proud, by the test scores I brought home. They found the pictures I drew strange.
My kid life was a more or less constant state of humiliation, the feeling that my skin didn’t quite fit me right and that everyone could see it.
—
“Seriously? You didn’t have any friends?”
Mel is sitting up straight, legs stretched long and crossed in front of her. She is staring out into the yard, unseeing, the way she does when she is listening.
“Not really.”