Hazard Page 15

  Slithering down, I blew out my lips. My spine loosened, bone by bone, and a cascade of knots released down my legs. No one would see us now. Balancing the box so Roddy could reach inside, I gratefully turned my eyes to the screen.

  Within seconds, I was swept into the sky, soaring high over the peaks of Salzburg, and then, with a gentle dive, descending on the camera’s wings to a bare hilltop and a tiny figure, twirling and hatless, who didn’t look big enough for the open-throated notes she was flinging into the air.

  The hills are alive …

  Julie Andrews and the sheer joy of her voice stilled me. I sat spellbound, my Sugar Babies suspended at my throat, half torn open. Maria swept me along in a breathless tide of freedom and possibility: a nun tearing around on a mountain top without permission, someone who couldn’t bear the rules, the closed rooms or silence of the abbey, so like my house. So like me, she didn’t fit her life.

  I could have closed my eyes in that moment and needed nothing more, but there was more: the Von Trapp children high stepped to the pitched bleats of their father’s marching whistle. Within seconds, Louisa was me, blonde and thirteen, and Liesl, sixteen and dark, was Barbara Ann, and also me, since she was falling in love.

  For several minutes, I lost track of everything around me, even the wrapper crinkling in my palm and the bite and pop of sugar on my teeth. Ominously, the Nazis were moving in. So absorbed was I in the dissonant, frightening horns and deep pounding kettle drums that I forgot Roddy was sitting right next to me, absorbing the same agitated rhythm. In the next instant, he exploded and I let out a thin, high squeal as he vaulted up and out of his seat, whirling his head and flapping his hands, lurching to and fro as if he were a bucking bronco.

  Tearing my face from the screen, I shot Barbara Ann a horrified look and we both and bounded into action, snatching at Roddy’s arms and hands. His limbs, whipping around like ropes, slapped my cheek and lip, whap whap, sending me sideways.

  “Ow!” burst from the chair in front of us, and from all sides came a hissing like missiles through the darkness, “Shhhhh!”

  I must have appeared as fitful and feral as my brother. Like a wild forest child unleashed from a pen, or, at the very least, an orphan in need of parents who’d do the right thing and yank me out to the lobby for a good thrashing. But I flailed on, even as I believed that, somewhere in the darkness, Wyn was staring open-mouthed at my large-headed flapping shadow. I had no choice. I was caught in a situation far beyond my control. Abandoning Barbara Ann and Roddy was unthinkable.

  I don’t know how long the three of us flailed. It took my sister, taller and stronger, to bring Roddy down into his seat. She caught him in a kind of wrestling hold, folding and clamping him into his chair. She and I rasped in unison, “Stop. Stop it now or no more movie!”

  Seconds passed, my pulse pounding as my fingers clutched Roddy’s arm. Through his shirt sleeve I felt him soften, but I held on anyway, scrunching down, pressing my spine against the seat, craning my neck so I might catch Barbara Ann’s eye. Two of my curlers dislodged, and I yanked them out with my free hand, shuddering as the damp curls fingered my neck.

  What now? I mouthed, but Barbara Ann wasn’t looking my way.

  Through the dim light, I saw her fingers over her mouth. Like me, she’d slid into her seat, her scarf off-kilter. Her fists were bunched to her mouth as if she were trapping something; her shoulders shuddered. When she turned to glance briefly at me, tears glistened on her cheeks.

  A thick syrupy pain rose in my chest. I couldn’t bear to see her undone. I knew it meant we’d failed at our one chance to be normal. A noise escaped from her through the darkness, like a sob pushing out between her fingers. I squinted, searching for her face. Then I spotted, in the folded divot of her brow and the crimped corners of her eyes, something that astonished me: mirth!

  My hands clapped hard on my mouth as I dove forward, plunging my head down between my knees. Sputtering, I fought back waves of laughter roaring up from my shoes. It came in pounding swaths, relentless and hard, burning my stomach and escaping from my clamped mouth in a wheezy wailing. I sounded like a moaning dog. My nose ran all over my hands. Sugar Babies bounced around my shoes. I wasn’t supposed to laugh this way, but I couldn’t stop. I didn’t want to. Something had cracked open my ribcage, and the pressure inside, held for so long, was bursting with all the force of the earth, blessedly powerful and out of my hands.

  How long I heaved, I don’t remember, resting between bouts of laughter and then plunging again, wheezing and coughing. Vaguely, I knew Barbara Ann was but three feet away, doing exactly the same thing, and somewhere above me, muffled and far away, I heard the bright notes of birds.

  I wouldn’t fully understand for two more decades why I hadn’t dared look up and take in the final moments of the Von Trapps’ happy ending, choosing instead to stay where I was, folded in half, peering at Roddy’s socks and Hush-Puppied feet, his pale unmarked shins stilled and relaxed, a confetti of Cracker Jacks littered about his toes. With each new swell of hilarity, rising and receding in my belly, I felt a deeper and fuller sense of relief. I knew finally what I’d known all along. I was not going to pull this off—pretending I could be like everyone else. A door had swung open on invisible hinges and, for the first time, I saw what was inside. I wasn’t like other teenagers. I never would be. My life wasn’t going to happen that way.

  At last, feet and legs began moving all around me, taking people out of the row and up the aisle to the lobby. Lifting my head from my knees, I squinted. Houselights and glances seared the room. I saw Barbara Ann two seats away, gazing about, shoulders resting against the seatback. One curler was missing from the side of her head, making her look deformed, as if a divot was missing from her skull. I touched my own head, patting a half-moon one way and then another, my fingers dipping into depressions where I, too, had holes.

  Far down in front, thick waves of stage curtains began to close, splashing at the midline, a brief flouncing of hem. The theater was nearly empty. Beside me, Roddy upended his Cracker Jacks box and shook it softly.

  “Toy in there,” he said.

  Chapter 18

  Tears

  When I was sixteen, my family settled into a kind of normalcy. Like most families hit with tribulation, mine got on with life. Between my winning in gymnastics and making straight As, Barbara Ann getting into college, Roddy learning how to count to 100, and my father’s salary steady enough for a big house in the Colorado foothills, my mother occasionally smiled. I did not know we had more ahead of us.

  On one particular Friday in October, the afternoon was crisp and cut with fall light, conditions that made me giddy. My friend Sherry and I were goofing around in my backyard, taking liberties and indulging in disrespect. We wore short, flared cheerleading skirts, white blouses with puffed sleeves, and matching gold vests. Sewed on our backs were dark green BCs for Bear Creek, and spilling down the thighs of our skirts, our names, embossed in green, thrashed as we kicked and lunged.

  I considered cheerleading a frivolous activity, but like most girls of my active nature, I seized whatever sanctioned outlets I could to avoid sitting in the bleachers. As a cheerleader, I could flip and jump and shout, and no one would stop me or tell me to sit down and cross my legs. It was better than nothing—better than sitting on my duff in the stands, bored and barking like a goose. We had the sorriest football team in Jefferson County but I had a job to do: scream on, no matter what the score or how utter the failure.

  “Blah blah, sis boom blah—we missed the goal—ha ha ha!”

  I flapped my crepe paper shakers and kicked like a chorus girl, madly, with too much enthusiasm. Sherry pranced beside me, pumping her arms, up and down, in and out, furiously marching her feet. Tonight’s game was less than two hours away and we both knew it was hopeless: we were going to lose. We’d been losing for weeks.

  “Never score, we’re not sore, we just stink and stink some more,” Sherry croaked.

  I dove into a
forward roll and she followed, both of us landing on the grass, side by side, sitting with our legs stretched out in front. Instantly, we started walking on our buttocks. I couldn’t bear it—I spit and burst into laughter, flopping into her, and we both crumpled onto the grass, our shakers flaying green and gold.

  “All right you two,” my mother chided through the patio door, “act like ladies and get going. It’s five o’clock.” The screen veiled her face but I could tell she was smiling. A smaller shadow hovered beside her. Through the sliding door, two small palms appeared, pressed to the glass: Roddy’s hands.

  Sherry stuffed her shakers into her mouth, muffling, “Oh no, what if we miss the game?”

  The sight of us reflected in the patio glass, hair askew, vests twisted, doubled me again, and I folded over, nose near my knees, wheezing.

  Sherry and I had been comrades since fifth grade, since Mrs. Larson’s god-awful class. We had both come of age bouncing on trampolines and hurling down tumbling mats, and our bodies had blossomed similarly, with small buds for breasts and fitful on-and-off rhythms to our monthly bleedings. Our friendship was a protector, a small bubble of safety. Both of us were in many ways innocent, terrified of the cool kids who smoked dope, who went all the way. We on the other hand went to church and still obeyed our parents, or at least tried to hide our mild misdeeds from them, mostly without success. With Sherry, I didn’t have to put up a cool front or pretend I knew how to flirt with boys. We shared our most private thoughts; we giggled at passé jokes, burst into hysterics, wet our pants, and made fun of life before we went back to being serious and pretending that we cared about football.

  I got up, brushing grass off my skirt. Sherry whisked my back, sweeping away tiny sticks and ants, and then turned so I could do the same for her.

  “Uh-oh, dirt on your behind,” I said, soberly. She didn’t turn, but held her hands fixed against her skirt and swished her bottom back and forth.

  I knew things about friendship. You could not create it by yourself. You had to find another, and then the two of you had to do important things, like be brave, spend time together, have each other over to your homes. Share your life. Deep down, I knew what it was to lose a friend: I had lost Lily to Texas and knew that when a friendship ends you lose a bit of yourself.

  At some level, all of this lived within me, though none of it rose to the surface; it didn’t have to. Friends were like breathing for me: vital and ever present. I was never without them. I collected them, not by the dozens—never in large numbers—but always by the handful. And among those, one was always a close, enduring soul mate.

  “I’ll drive,” I offered, popping the Belvedere’s trunk. We laid our shakers on the floor, smoothing the disheveled strands, and then hopped in. I started the engine and checked myself in the rearview mirror. Egad, I looked a mess.

  “Hang on, I need my brush,” I snorted, hopping back out.

  The light was falling and I was anxious now. Goofing aside, we couldn’t be late to the game; it would mean a demerit and a mark on our good names. I touched the kitchen door knob and stepped inside, banking left to run down the hall to the bathroom.

  Halfway there, I halted. A deep mournful cry seared my ears, coming from somewhere in the house. Moving down the hall, I crept toward the sound, to my parents’ bedroom, and hesitated at the door. It was partially open, wide enough for me to spot my mother inside, sitting on the bed. Her arm encircled Roddy’s back and she held her mouth close to his ear. His head hung forward in his hands, and his legs collapsed inward, knock-kneed.

  At twelve years old, Roddy nearly matched her size, but he was crumpled like a child into her arms. She rocked him and murmured, “I know, honey. I know.”

  Roddy’s cry was a sound I had never heard from him: a mixture of disbelief, startle, and pain. As if he’d seen a ghost of someone he had cherished and would never see again. It held no envy or outrage, but something else, some other emotion.

  “I want a Sherry friend,” he said. His voice trembled, muffled in my mother’s dress.

  I covered my mouth. The sound of my brother’s sob generated a pain I had no words for. It buckled me. I held onto the doorframe, unable to move.

  It came again, his broken voice. “I want a Sherry friend, Mama.” His head buried in my mother’s lap, his forefinger waved at the window where, outside, Sherry waited in the car.

  His words raked over me. A deep and shuddering loss moved the air. I leaned forward and braced both hands on my knees, flashing to the scene moments before, witnessing it from Roddy’s eyes, through the glass: me and Sherry flailing like happy fools, undone by laughter and delight.

  For an interminable time, I hung there, sensing that I couldn’t go in. The intrusion would wound him again, the sight of me and what I had, what I would always have. I didn’t step into the room. I eased the door closed and turned back down the hallway, slipping out to the garage and the waiting car.

  Sherry had one foot up on the dashboard and was tightening her laces. “I bet the traffic’s awful,” she said, amiably.

  I didn’t answer. As I backed the car down the driveway, she regarded me. She knew me better than anyone.

  “I have a brush, you know. You can use mine,” she offered.

  “Oh.” I sounded sickened, grateful to have to watch the road. I kept my eyes averted.

  With Sherry, I had shared my hopes and dreams and my innermost thoughts, but I couldn’t tell her what I had just seen: that our friendship was an injury. I couldn’t ask her to hold that. Saying certain things out loud gave wings to the words. The only way I could fathom holding this wound of my brother’s was to push it back under my ribcage.

  “Are you okay?” Sherry whispered.

  I nodded, casting a grateful glance her way. “Headache,” I said, offering her the only reason I knew we could both accept.

  In all of the years I had shared with Roddy, I had not known this about him: that he saw this part of my life and could perceive something as abstract and indescribable and essential as friendship; that he could know he needed it and that he was without it. Even though he had me, and Barbara Ann, and my mother and father, he recognized something else in Sherry and me, a different kind of love and safety.

  Now, as Sherry clicked on the radio and we inched in traffic, I knew he was still crying. My throat stung; I blinked hard, struggling to see the road. For the first time, my brother’s loss shifted from something outside of me, something he had and that I could make better, to something inside of me, something I tasted and swallowed and held in my stomach. I didn’t know that this moment in October 1968 would never leave me; I would carry the memory of my brother’s cry the rest of my life, and each time it arose, it would have the power to buckle me.

  What I did know as I drove down Sheridan Avenue was that I had witnessed an ardent cruelty—a God who gives a boy enough understanding to know what he is missing, to see and feel what he can’t have, and who denies that boy this simple happiness. For the longest time, I had thought my friends were enough for Roddy—that by including him in our play and games, or joining him at his marble chute, I had provided him with friendship. But I had only given him a sister’s love. He wanted his own friend—a best friend. More than a person, he wanted the essence of friendship, the special thing that comes from resonating with another.

  More than any other disappointment in his life, this one would break my brother. He would turn ever more inward, so thoroughly that he would never cry again.

  In the stadium parking lot, I got out under the lights. The thought of running back and forth on a field with Sherry, chasing a score, bouncing up and down, flailing mops of crepe paper, struck me as heartless, all the more so, given what I knew: that I was privileged. I had woken up that morning inside my brain, inside my fated mix of genes, none of which I had earned, and all of which granted me this special thing, this ability to make and have a friend.

  Sherry tossed me my shakers and I caught them, one by one, grasping their soft s
illiness to my chest. Years from then, my mother would tell me that this was the day my brother broke inside and turned inward in a way she had never seen before. He lost his wide-eyed assumptions that he was like everyone else in his life, and especially his sister. Until that moment, only people on the outside had hurt him: the taunting bullies in the school parking lot, the staring kids in restaurants. This time, his deep wound did not come from a pack of heartless boys; it came from me. In the near distance, the band boomed alive, announcing the start of the game. Hurriedly, I took off toward the field, running, shakers held high in one hand and with the other, wiping my eyes.

  Chapter 19

  Trapeze

  By the time I turned sixteen, training for competition ruled my waking life. At dawn, I arose, showered, and drove myself to the gym in the dark, fitting in ninety minutes of practice before splashing my face with water and running to class. After school, I returned to the gym and lost track of time. My mother would have to appear in the gym’s double doorway, gesturing to her watch and motioning me to come on so we could get Roddy to his tutoring lesson across town. Smeared in chalk and sweat, hands and ankles throbbing, I would jump down from the high bar or beam or trampoline, landing with a reluctant two-footed thump on the ground.

  At the beginning of my senior year, I learned that my high school, Bear Creek, would host the 1970 Colorado girls’ state gymnastic championship. At long last, I was to compete with my team on our home turf, for all to see.

  I couldn’t admit even to myself that I was terrified. A swath of silver and gold medallions dangling from brilliant blue ribbons hung on my bedroom wall; the Rocky Mountain News had announced I was destined for the Olympics, and the Denver Post ran my photo after I captured the state championship title two years in a row. Despite all this, I was jittery. I had grown used to performing in faraway gyms where my mother and Barbara Ann were the only spectators I knew. Even my father wasn’t there; he couldn’t be: someone had to watch over my brother. I had become comfortable performing in the half-light, where the stakes were low and consequences mild. For the first time, I would be center stage, with curtains whipped back and all lights ablaze.