Stay Up With Me Read online

  My mom used to say it was the TV that made my father sick. But I said it was getting kicked out in the cold that did it. She asked him to leave in January and you do not want to know what January is like where I live.

  It’s close to zero every day and the ice mats in big chunks on the door so it’s a hassle prying it open every morning, and the wind howls and whips through the piles of snow that cover our car and our mailbox and the red-and-white barbershop pole downstairs.

  The day they fired my father we stayed in all afternoon watching soap operas and game shows. He ordered a pizza and said this was an opportunity, but it wouldn’t last long and so we should enjoy this time together.

  When my mom came home from work, he told her he’d been let go but it was all right, he loved us and that’s what was important. She hugged him, but she looked desolately out the window, like an Iraqi war widow I saw on CNN whose husband came home with no legs. And I knew things were about to change. We watched movies that night until I got tired and went to sleep, but when I woke up at two to get a glass of juice from the fridge, he was in the family room, the couch surrounding his body like an old coat.

  Something happened the day they fired him. He seemed content in the way calm people get when their bus is delayed and they figure complaining will do no good. He entered this funk in which he stopped washing or changing his clothes or eating at the table or bothering to sleep anywhere but the couch. And he watched TV. My mom says now she could see it coming on even before he got fired because no one gets fired for no reason, though it never seems justified when it happens to you.

  He grew fat in front of the tube and he called about jobs a few times, but his heart wasn’t in it. And when I tried to talk to him about it one night, he forgot my name for a full minute. He kept calling me Karl.

  “I’m tired, Karl. Leave me alone for a bit,” he said, each word slow and planned out.

  “What’s my name, Dad?” I asked.

  He looked at me puzzled and then looked back at the TV.

  “What’s my name?” I said again.

  “I know your name, now hush up,” he said, calm, like we were in a library and he was reading a book.

  “What is it then?” I asked. I wanted to hear him say it.

  “It’s Dexter, okay, it’s Dexter,” he said. But he forgot for a moment, and anyhow his brother Karl had been dead for twelve years.

  He pointed his plate, smeared with dried salsa, at Hawkeye Pierce on the screen.

  “You like this show, Dex?” he asked. And I said, “You know I do.”

  Russell’s Jeep is humming now and the snow is melting off his defrosting windshield, just like it melted in his hair. Snow doesn’t stick to Russell. He opens the passenger-side door and pulls the seat down so I can squeeze myself into the backseat. It’s not really a space for a person, more for a toolbox or Russell’s snowboard, but I sit lengthwise with my knees against my chest.

  “You okay there, Dex?” he asks, but he doesn’t wait for an answer and moves his head back out of the Jeep. The wind is so loud outside I can barely hear the music that’s playing from Russell’s stereo. The Jeep smells like cold clean air, the kind you earn by not leaving food or sweaty things around in it. Russell jumps in his side and he drops down the emergency brake. He runs his fingers up my mother’s back and into her hair and gives her head a little scratch. Then he puts his hand on the gearshift and moves into drive.

  The snow is falling and the road is sloshing around Russell’s tires. There are only a few cars out and they are crawling, their drivers fearing they’d spin out if they went more than fifteen miles an hour. Russell’s got a jazz CD in, the kind where everyone’s trying to figure out what song they’re playing, and he’s acting like he knows it, wagging his index finger like a conductor’s wand to the blasts from the sax.

  Russell sells boats and rifles and fishing gear to sports stores so he’s on the road a lot, all over the East Coast. It was Russell who told me my father was in the hospital. He knew because he was with us for Christmas and answered the phone when the doctor from New York City called.

  The doctor said my father is chock-full of chemicals from the landfill where he worked, which led to his slowness and forgetting all the time. He also had pneumonia and some complications from that, but they aren’t sure where the pneumonia came from. The doctor said my father is comfortable and is getting good treatment, which I know means he’s dying.

  When my mom found out, she cried a lot and she wanted to drive down to New York. But Russell said that would be “jumping the gun.” I think the main reason I can’t stand Russell is the way he acted the night of the call. He kept saying my father would get better and that we were lucky we had each other, as if he knew us.

  “He wants us down there,” I yelled at my mother. “You owe it to him. If he dies, it’s on your head!”

  At that my mother walked into her bedroom and slammed the door. I would have followed her. I would have apologized, maybe talked her into driving to New York, but Russell blocked my path.

  “Dexter,” he said. “Let’s you and I go for a soda.”

  And so we did.

  It was December 27 and all the lights were still up on First Street. The town was silent other than the hum of a thousand green and red bulbs laced over street signs and lanterns and dropped through the arms of short bare trees. Russell drove me in his Ford Taurus—his practical car—to the Ritz Diner, which stays open all night for the college kids and the all-night power plant workers and the winos who have no other place to go. It didn’t seem like the kind of place Russell would frequent, but every other place was closed.

  He had on a tight red racing sweater and did not remove his ski hat when we slid into a booth. We sat not talking for a while within the rustle of the diner: newspapers folding, a jukebox fluting, a waitress lazily clearing plates.

  “You miss him a lot, don’t you?” he said finally.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “What kind of kid wouldn’t want his pop around?”

  He looked over my shoulder as he spoke. The owner of the Ritz, a red-faced man with a spruce white ring of hair around his otherwise bald head, approached carrying two menus.

  “You fellows take your time,” he said, opening them in front of us.

  I sensed Russell was building up to something; he was going to lay his cards on the table. He rubbed his left eye, then flashed it four or five times as if finding the right focus.

  “A boy needs someone around. He needs someone to look up to. I know that.” He nodded his head. “But, mister, don’t go riding your poor mother about that man in New York. He’s put her through quite enough. She’s getting her life on track again. Don’t go throwing her off the rails.”

  He leaned toward me, over the table as though he might at any moment grab my collar.

  “Listen, she can’t remember a single happy memory about that man. All she remembers is him sitting around and driving her crazy. You want that again? Your father’s been sick before. He’ll be all right. It’s part of his makeup.”

  He disappeared then behind his menu. All I could see was the top of his ski hat.

  “What if he isn’t all right?”

  “Look, if it’s serious, we’ll get the news. We’ll get you to New York. But it doesn’t do any good to start imagining how the world’s going to come apart.”

  Two women in the next booth were listening to our conversation. One of them, blond and with a pierced eyebrow and bright red lipstick, turned around quickly when I looked up.

  The Ritz owner glanced over at us from the counter, where he was reading the paper, and Russell motioned him over.

  I told Russell to order for me and I went to the men’s room. I stayed there for fifteen minutes maybe, sitting on the pot, not doing anything but avoiding Russell. And when I walked out, he was eating a wet piece of apple pie and talking to the woman with the pierced eyebrow.

  There was a half-melted ice-cream sundae at my place. I took a bite of
it.

  “Are you okay, Dex?” the woman asked, looking concerned.

  It annoyed me that I’d been their topic of conversation.

  “Yes, but I’m not as hungry as I thought.”

  “No one’s forcing you, Dex,” Russell said. “You can do whatever you damn please.”

  My mom is looking back at me as we push through town, by the stores on Bridge Street on our way to the lake drive. She wants us three to get along, to be a family. It’s our chance to leave Oswego she says, maybe even upstate New York. Russell’s company is headquartered in Florida, and he’s due for a transfer.

  There is a huge orange snowplow ahead of us spraying snow about. Russell flicks his wipers to full speed. He swerves side to side waiting for his chance to spring us out into the open road. Eventually the plow driver, a thick-bearded man in a blue woolen Giants hat, pulls to the side to let us by.

  We’re curving out on Route 104 along the lake, with the orange sun cutting down beneath the clouds, and I think about how long it’s been since I’ve been outside, I mean really outside. I take in a couple lungfuls of air.

  Russell steps hard on the gas pedal and the Jeep begins to bounce off the snow craters beneath us. “Yeeeeee haaaaaa!” he yells. He laughs and my mom does too, but she says, “You’re going a little too fast.”

  “Anything you say, babe,” he says, but he doesn’t slow down. My knees keep knocking me on the chin, until I cover them with my hands and then they hit me—about once every twenty yards.

  The lake flies by, endless and white. It looks less like the Sahara than the moon, pocked and jagged, and I wonder how long you could walk out on it and not fall in. Russell says he’s driven twenty miles across, but I guess that figures.

  The fish and hot dog stands are boarded up good, and the Rudy’s sign is swinging hard on a rusted-out chain, slapping against the side of the building. The road narrows as we swing by the summer cabins that perch like gravestones on white lawns.

  I’m thinking of my father driving Russell’s Jeep. I’m thinking of him fidgeting with the gadgets, running this thing slow and deliberate as if it was made of glass. Russell isn’t thinking of anything except how radical his Jeep is, though I might think that too if I had a Jeep.

  With a burst of speed, we weave around a bend and my mom says, “Really, Russell. Slow down.”

  Russell says, “I am,” and he whips his head back at me. “Am I going too fast for you, Dex?”

  I say, “Yes,” but he laughs like I’m joking, and he reaches over to his breast pocket. He somehow pulls out a cigarette with his right hand, sticks it in his mouth, lights it, and while he’s looking down we hit a sinkhole and my head hits hard against the roll bar. There’s a high drift in the road ahead and we swerve out of its way toward a utility pole. Russell slams on the brake, sending us past the pole into a spin, and I fall forward into the back of my mom’s seat.

  “Jeezus,” Russell says. He has lost control. His mouth is open and empty.

  “Jeeezus,” he says again, and he’s winging the wheel back and forth as though he’s bringing a ship in during a storm. I’ve got my arms around the top of my mother’s seat and she’s holding her hands straight out into the dash. We are sliding fast toward a culvert. Russell is panicked. It’s scary, but part of me is happy because Russell is fucking up.

  We wash off the road, through mounds of snow pushed off by the blowers, and as we smack the bottom of the culvert, I bang my head in the same spot as last time. It’s like a kick from a metal boot. I run my hand through my hair and I touch blood. The skin around the gash is puffed and sticky and my temples are throbbing.

  Russell lets out a deep breath from his lower lip, which blows his hair up, and he takes his glasses off. His eyes are startling. They are gray and deep set, surrounded by white skin, where the sun’s been blocked.

  “Jeezus, you all right, babe?” he asks my mom.

  She says nothing. Her face is ashen. She breathes hard and fast and the music is blaring now. I’ve still got my arms frozen around my mom’s headrest.

  “I’m sorry, Dex. You got the worst of that, didn’t you?” Russell says. He breathes onto his blue glasses and wipes them clear with the bottom of his sweater. He turns the CD player off, then leans back to look at my head.

  “It’s okay, Russell,” I say and pull away.

  “You know we’re really lucky,” he says. “Really lucky.”

  And I guess he would think that, but I don’t put much stock in that kind of luck. You could always say we could have died there and feel lucky until you die, but that’s an idiotic way to go through life.

  “Let’s go home,” my mom says, and there’s an edge now to her voice. “Let’s get this thing on the road and drive home.” Russell reaches his hand around her shoulders and my mom tilts away, her eyes trained across the lake.

  Russell’s cigarette is burning on the carpet before him and he stomps it out, pounding his foot hard into the floor. My mom glares at him and then out the window again and Russell says, “Can you give me a break here?”

  For a while my vision is blurred—glassy and dim, like film shot underwater. Then it is clear, but framed by moments of blackness like a slide show. I sit for a while in the snow, particles melting into my jeans, and I watch Russell and my mom moving around the Jeep, talking, plotting, their bodies appearing near me, then a few yards away.

  The lake and the sky are the same white now and it is as if we are caught in a cloud. I look out over the ice and let the whiteness spread through my brain, the wind now a steady moan around my ears. I feel Russell’s hand on my shoulder. “Come on, Dex. Get up and help us out,” he says, and he reaches under my arms to lift me.

  The motor is idling. My mom is in the driver’s seat, and Russell and I stand behind to push. He has graded a wall of snow and dirt with his boots to keep us from sliding back.

  “When I say ‘Go,’ move this thing into gear,” he yells to my mom.

  We count to three and then Russell yells, “Go! Go! Go!” and the wheels sound like buzz saws ripping through the ground. The Jeep climbs two feet and then falls, like a house, pushing us aside. The air around us is filled with fumes that seep inside my lungs and splotch the snow black.

  “Let’s try it again,” he says. My head feels feathery and I am of no use here. I want to take a bath and go to sleep. The light is beginning to fade and the temperature has dropped a few degrees. The wind is snapping at our faces.

  The two of us rock the Jeep up and back, up and back, and then, like we’re charging a castle, we lower our heads and surge.

  “Go! Go! Go! Go! Go!” And we get the front wheels on the road and almost the back wheels too, but it isn’t enough. The Jeep pins us back into the snow and I am sweating now. Russell is exasperated. I know he’s thinking it’s my fault somehow; if it had just been him and my mom, this wouldn’t have happened, which is bullshit. These things happen, even to people like Russell.

  He digs in. “We got it this time, Dex,” he says. “We got it licked.” We lower our heads together, dig our shoulders and bent arms into the rear corners of the Jeep, and like two friends we push through the mounds of snow and earth. Everything is giving beneath us, the ground is moving backward, and Russell is yelling, “Go! Go! Go! Go! Go!” screaming now until the Jeep, wheels spinning wildly, mounts the culvert onto 104. My mom’s momentum carries her a hundred yards down the road. She is whooping and so is Russell. He makes a snowball and hurls it at her.

  I am covered in snow now, some of which has melted through my coat to my chest, and my face stings from the cold of the spray and the wind.

  “Hey, wait for us,” Russell yells to my mom, and he starts running for the Jeep, his legs churning like the athlete at the end of the race, and I’m floating now on a wave of dizziness.

  I am running light-headed, first slow, but then hard, and as fast as I can. It’s the way I used to feel in gym after a long basketball game, strained, but alive, very alive. I can’t hear the wind a
nymore and I can’t see the cars or houses, just the white road in front of me, and I can feel the warm flow of blood on my forehead. I can faintly make out the Jeep’s honk and my mom yelling behind me, but I’m running and I’m on my own and it’s all I can do to keep from falling down.

  Stay Up with Me

  Henry is in the part of the dream where his father carries him piggyback through the shoulder-high waves. His father’s T-shirt is soaked through, and the salt water is making the cut on Henry’s elbow sting, when a woman’s voice calls out, “Henry . . . Henry.”

  Before his eyes open he knows who it is. He can tell by the smell of her shampoo it’s Alice. He’d been napping in the café around the corner from his apartment—the one open until midnight. “He just left,” Alice says, sitting down at Henry’s table, which is by the corner window.

  She does this fairly frequently, finds Henry, now a boy-faced thirty-one, somewhere in the neighborhood when she wants his advice. Once—when she needed to choose between two job offers, she searched the grocery store, three coffee shops, and two bars before discovering him seated with his eyes closed on the couch at the Laundromat. Henry has been escaping into dreams a lot lately, in movie theaters or on buses or subways, but mainly in cafés or coffee shops where he spends the bulk of his afternoons and evenings reading or working on one of his scripts.

  “He thanked me,” she says with a pained smile. “Services rendered, I guess.”

  He stares at her blankly, then glances at his watch.

  “I’m sorry to bug you. But I really need you, Henry.”

  She gives him the little-girl pout, the one that often convinces him to give her rides, or buy her dinner.

  “All right, then. When did he come over?”

  “Just after nine.”

  Henry does the math. It is eleven now. “Now that’s ‘efficiency.’ ”

  “It’s not like that. He works in the emergency room and he has this ridiculous schedule. Anyway, I think I was insensitive to him.”