Close Encounters Read online

  “That’s not true.” My mother folded her arms, which I knew, from living in the presence of psychiatrists all my life, was a defensive, closed gesture. “You can talk to us about anything, honey. All those nights I looked for you…I wasn’t doing it for my health!”

  “If things are so great, then why did I hear you and Dad talking about separating?”

  That night, my parents packed me into the Volvo for the drive to Greenspring Hospital. This was not the way Tara would have wanted it, I knew. Nothing seemed more real—school, my parents, my friends—than the space in which Tara and I had been interacting, the dreamlike world of symbols and patterns and hope. At the traffic light, I jumped out of the car and ran as fast as I could toward the abandoned house on St. Paul, zigzagging through yards and alleys until the sound of my dad’s voice tapered off. I knew I could sneak through the back window and sleep in the old dining room. Over the months when I was still hanging out with him, Joshua and I had stashed his old sleeping bags and a kerosene lamp there. That night, among the dirt and broken glass, I dreamt that Tara visited me. She touched my face, looked into my eyes. Hers were as red as burning coals.

  All that was three years ago, I think. Sometimes I pick up the City Paper to see what the date is or to use it for toilet paper. Every now and again, I see the yellow Volvo make its passage through Orleans Street, Fayette, Patterson Park Avenue, but I don’t recognize that woman inside. She is too old, I think, to be my mother. Sometimes I wish she would get out of the car so I can see what color shoes she’s wearing, or maybe if she wore sunglasses instead of those bifocals I would know for sure.

  It’s hard to believe three years have gone by, that I grew out of my shoes and clothes like the Hulk, that the face I see in the bathroom mirror of Popeye’s is angular and long and that my voice, when it’s used, is deeper, coarser from smoking, its opinions more jaded. But I’ve learned to survive here. When you’re living day to day, one has to stick with a plan, and the plan that’s easiest for me to follow is to find food, find money, find drugs and, hopefully, find Tara. There’s no time for reflection, for choices, what could have been. It’s just you and a Hail Mary pass every day.

  I live in the abandoned houses mostly, but sometimes a man who’s picked me up feels sorry for me and lets me spend the night. After I give him a blow job, he makes me something to eat, and I stuff candy or snack-size potato chips into my pockets. Sometimes they offer me clothes, thinking the color schemes I’ve chosen are more out of necessity than a plan. One night I called my parents from this guy’s house on Lombard Street, but I hung up after I heard my mother’s voice. I wondered if they were still together, my parents. I couldn’t imagine, after losing both of their children, that they still would be.

  This girl came up to me one day. I was eating Bar-B-Q-flavored Utz potato chips. I always buy them because the bag is yellow and orange. Usually, I would walk up and down Patterson Park Avenue looking for tricks and looking for Tara, keeping an eye out for the cops and the looney bird. Or else I would be lying in a stupor on a park bench in Patterson Park, seeing glimpses of Tara in the trees. And sometimes myself. Sometimes we are together, and my parents live up there, too. But we can never be together again, the four of us, all of us have been found.

  So the girl comes up to me, she’s young and blonde, and she asks for a chip, says she’s hungry. She’s maybe twelve or thirteen, about Tara’s age, but she’s so wan, so broken and, to be honest, I can’t even remember what Tara looked like. I look at her shoes. They’re pink jellies. I give her the bag, ask her where she’s staying.

  “With my mother over on Bank Street,” she answers, and I ask her to turn around. Because I want to see, want to see how she looks at me. But she doesn’t turn around, she’s suspicious, who the hell is this boy in red and yellow telling her to do shit?

  “I lost my sister,” I explain. Last year, maybe six months ago I still had a picture of Tara. It was taken in Ocean City when we were on vacation or something. I think I left it at some guy’s house when I was washing my clothes. When I went back a few days later and knocked on the door, some woman answered. Probably his wife. I told her I had the wrong house and beat it out of there before she called the police.

  “Oh. Do you want me to help you find her?” The girl asks. She hands me back the bag of chips.

  “Keep them.” I push them toward her. “She’s been missing for a long time. Not like five minutes ago. Like four years.”

  “Oh,” she answers, lighting a cigarette, and I’m almost crying, for my mother, my sister, I don’t know. “She run away or something?”

  “No… I did,” I say, and she stares at the sky. It is not pity or embarrassment; it’s not even boredom, her reaction. It’s as if I said the weather was nice or something. “Your name’s not Tara, is it?”

  “Nope. It’s Chrissie. Listen, you wanna go with me?”

  “Go with you where?”

  “Like, go out with me?”

  “Go out with you?” I laugh. I had forgotten what laughing sounded like. I laugh so hard I’m crying almost, and everything hurts, the way it does every day, but in a good way today. “You don’t even know me.”

  “But you seem nice. I mean, you let me have your chips.”

  “You’re too young.”

  “Well, so are you.”

  “Maybe you can be my sister or something.” I compromise, and I’m starting to get itchy, ‘cause I haven’t had anything today. “Listen, you got a couple of dollars? I’ll be your boyfriend if you give me a couple of dollars.”

  Later, it’s evening, and we’re sitting on the bench by the duck pond. The pot we bought has taken the edge off, but I know I’m going to have to get to work soon, walking the beat to get some money, to look for Tara. Chrissie is holding my hand, smoking with the other, and I remember the way Tara and I used to watch cartoons in the den years ago, the soles of our feet touching as we would lie at opposite ends of the couch. I would take my socks off and rub the soles of my feet against Tara’s.

  “What are you doing?” she would giggle, lifting her legs straight up.

  “I’m branding you,” I answered. “Hey, do you see that dog on TV, Scooby Doo?”

  “What dog?” she answered, cocking her head toward the right and staring at the light and pixelation.

  Chrissie squeezes my hand, and I’m crying, and I’m sure she thinks I’m a nut. If the looney bird drove by just now, I would climb in and fall asleep. I would run my hand along my mother’s corduroys and know her, just by the touch. Touch is all we’ve ever known, our family. Everything out here, it’s just so deceiving. Maybe I am just really high and actually lying on my bed at home, and it’s only been three minutes, not three years. Not a lifetime, a lifetime without touch. When Chrissie has to go home because of curfew, I scrape together my last few dollars for the subway uptown, maybe up to North Charles Street, home. But, inside the station, I sit on the bench and watch the trains slow down and speed up, appearing, disappearing, moving people deep underneath the city to new locations, an elaborate, methodical system of disappearing. One minute they’re here, and the next minute, they’re not.

  THE WEIGHT

  IT WAS A STUPID NAME, John Boy, but they called him it because they were just kids, high school kids, not very clever or sophisticated. His real name was Gavin, but no one seemed to remember that. No one seemed to remember how Gavin came to attend Galveston High, either—he did not come up through elementary and middle school with them. Yet, somehow, in high school, there he was—his rich auburn hair longish, rakish—not like the close-cropped cuts that were popular for the boys. And he lived out in the old farmhouse on Whipple Tree Road, a structure that stood vacant for many years, dilapidated, dusty, and mysterious, only to be inhabited a few years ago by Gavin and his equally mysterious family.

  Ava supposed it was the farmhouse that contributed to Gavin’s nickname, along with the pairs of worn Levis and white t-shirts he wore to school day after day. Strangest of all were hi
s shoes—sometimes he appeared in scuffed, round-toed cowboy boats, and other days, he wore moccasins. Never expensive sneakers, the staple of every American boy. These days, when everyone shopped at the mall and tried to cloak their small-town roots as much as possible, Gavin was an anomaly, a throwback, a weirdo.

  A John Boy.

  Ava was not crude. Sure, she smiled when the boys snickered at Gavin or talked about him behind his back, but she never engaged in such teasing herself. She had a reputation as a popular student and daughter of the local doctor to protect.

  Naturally, when Mr. Trebelhorn, their physics teacher, suggested that Gavin tutor her in physics for the last quarter, Ava was hesitant. Surely, Gavin was one of the smartest boys in their class, but could she afford his company in their senior year? He had received heavy ridicule in the parking lot that morning when his truck, an ancient Ford, broke down in front of her boyfriend Lenny Chrisman’s Trans-Am.

  “When you gonna sell that piece of shit for parts?” Lenny had snickered while Gavin calmly tooled under the hood, his white t-shirt smudged with grease. “Tell you what, John Boy, I’ll give you a nickel for the whole thing.”

  Gavin had been late for first period and, his clothes now smeared with black, had been asked to go home and change. Ava’s humiliation for him was complete when she spotted him, through the window of Mrs. Barlow’s Spanish class, halfway down the road, again tinkering under the hood of his broken-down truck.

  While Gavin seemed completely immune to his daily servings of ridicule, even the act of feeling sorry for Gavin burdened Ava with sorrow she could not bear. She decided she just could not go through with the tutoring in light of her perfect, meticulously planned senior year. Being tutored by Gavin, sitting in his presence, feeling, by osmosis, she supposed, his unfortunate hardships, was something she could not risk.

  “If you don’t carry an ‘B’ for this quarter, Ava, I’m afraid you’re going to fail.” Mr. Trebelhorn flipped through her scores on the last few quizzes.

  “Is there anyone else who could do it?” Ava suggested. She could compromise and sit with Courtney Simmons during study hall. “Even Courtney?”

  “You could ask her, but I think you’ll find her tied up with the quiz bowl.” He shut his grade book. “Gavin’s a nice boy, Ava. It’ll be as good for him as it would be for you.”

  When Ava approached Gavin at his usual lunchtime spot, alone on the bleachers, he did not look up as she approached.

  “Mr. Trebelhorn already told me,” he explained, taking a sip from his thermos. “About the tutoring.”

  “Oh, OK…so, how do we do this? Do you want, like, payment or something?” Ava asked cautiously, looking back at the cafeteria, where Lenny had come out with his friends.

  “I don’t need your money.” He looked at her coolly. It surprised her to think that he might hate her, especially considering all the internal wrangling she did sometimes, albeit grudgingly, on his behalf. “Mr. Trebelhorn asked, and I said I’d do it.”

  “Is your truck OK?” she asked, wanting to press upon him her concern, however self-serving, for his welfare.

  “It’s running.” He picked at something on his moccasin. “I need to go down to the parts store and buy some new spark plugs. So when do I fit into your social schedule?”

  “For tutoring?” she responded dumbly. Her face burned. “Um, Tuesdays are good. Did you want to come to my house at seven?”

  He nodded, still picking at his shoe. Ava felt stunned and small, on the verge of tears, almost. It was not as if she expected him to be grateful for her offer, the chance to flirt with brighter futures, but his complete indifference surprised her. She turned to hurry back to the cafeteria before being spotted.

  “Ava,” he said her name, and she felt the stark, short syllables like ice water in her spine. “Don’t worry—you’re going to get an ‘A’ this quarter. I’ll personally see to it.”

  “Thanks,” she answered, but could not speak his name in return.

  Forced to engage with Gavin on some level, Ava caught herself wondering sporadically about him, his motivations. In the time before their first session Ava gathered everything she knew about him, hoping to weave some blanket of clarity, some familiarity with him. She knew he lived with his mother, that they were from California. She sometimes saw them in town together, shopping at the Safeway—his mother tall and elegant but dry and washed out in some way, like an empty bottle. Mostly, however, she saw Gavin alone.

  “The family orders a lot of medical supplies,” Ava’s mother offered at dinner. “I always see a van parked out front when I’m on my way to visit Sandy.”

  “Do you think his mother’s sick?” Ava asked, balancing some penne precariously on her fork.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen her, Ava—it’s possible. Is she one of your patients, Harv?”

  “Don’t recall her.” Ava’s father chewed vigorously as he thought. “Probably Sandabar’s. He gets all the new patients.”

  When Tuesday evening came, Ava walked through her house, looking for blatant signs of extravagance, of frivolity. She did not think Gavin was poor, necessarily, but the gravity of his solemn demeanor made her feel ashamed of her relative life of ease. She picked the plainest area, the breakfast room, as their study location, moving her mother’s mound of decorating magazines from the table and into the den. She rummaged through the cupboards, wondering what he ate, when the doorbell rang.

  “Hi.” She stood at the door and smiled, motioning him inside. He wore the same jeans that he had worn to school that day but had changed to a striped, button-down short-sleeve shirt. The smell of soap and shaving cream loomed between them as he passed her. Ava’s parents had entered the hallway in the meantime, her previous sleuthing work piquing their curiosity.

  “Hi Gavin.” Ava’s mother extended her hand. “We’re Ava’s parents.”

  “It’s a pleasure.” Gavin received their hands firmly, and it occurred to Ava that her parents, away from the school’s finicky and superfluous rules of judgment, felt that Gavin was quite the catch, with his dark, complex features, his manners, his intelligence. “Ava is extremely well-liked at Galveston.”

  “You’re new to the area, yes?” Ava’s father pressed. “I’m one of two doctors in town. I’ve seen most of the community at some point in their lives.”

  “Two years,” Gavin answered. “We moved from California.”

  “Oh? Your father transfer for work?”

  “No, sir. My mom wanted to come. She thought it would be better for us.”

  “Yes,” Ava’s father agreed, although he wasn’t quite sure what ‘it’ was. “Well, I’d better let some of your academic magic rub off on Ava.”

  “Well, if I’m lucky, maybe Ava’s social magic will rub off on me,” he answered. She led him to the breakfast room, where they diligently worked on vectors for an hour.

  “So why did you move out here?” Ava asked as they finished up Chapter 16.

  “It’s a long story.” Gavin did not meet her gaze.

  “Well, do you like it here?”

  “It’s no different than anywhere else.” He closed his book carefully.

  “But everyone’s so…cruel to you here.”

  “I really don’t care about that.” This time he met her gaze. “There are so many things that happen in one’s life…it’s just not that important to me. Don’t worry; I don’t expect you to have to defend me now that I’m tutoring you.”

  “Why do you have to be so cold to me?”

  “I’m not. I don’t mean to be.” He smoothed the cover of his book. “I’m just being honest. Look, you’re not a bad person, Ava. It’s just…I think we have different things going on with us right now. I’m sorry that I’ve hurt your feelings.”

  Ava did not know how to answer. Even though she did not know how she would repay him in terms of gratitude for his tutoring, she had not expected him not to even give her the chance, an opening. When Lenny called later that night, she feigned a heAva
che to avoid talking to him. Whatever he said would not compare to the strange encounter with Gavin, one she needed to mull over in her head and, perhaps in some strange and unexpected way, savor.

  “Hey, it’s John Boy, John Boy, Hayseed Johnny,” Lenny sang flippantly to Gavin as he passed them.

  “Hi, Gavin,” Ava heard herself speak.

  “What, you sucking Johnny Boy’s dick?” Lenny questioned incredulously as Gavin passed without acknowledging either of them.

  “He’s tutoring me in physics, Lenny—and maybe he’ll stop if you keep teasing him, so quit it.”

  “Tutoring you? Like coming to your house and shit?”

  “Yes—would you stop making a big deal about it? Mr Trebelhorn set it up.”

  “So what’s he like?” Lenny slapped his baseball glove against his thigh and fondled a baseball with his free hand. “Does he impress you with all the knowledge in that lumpy head of his?”

  “He doesn’t do anything except go over the problems.” Ava tried to wrest the ball from his grasp. “What, are you jealous?”

  “Shit, no—he just never says a fucking thing to anybody, so I wondered what he actually said when he opened his mouth.”

  “Well, it’s nothing earth shattering.” Ava shrugged. “Unless you’re Albert Einstein or something.”

  But it was earth shattering to Ava in that Gavin was such a good teacher, setting up models with straws and paper cups and fishing lure. Although she decided she could never like physics, she liked spending Tuesdays listening to Gavin talking about physics.

  When Gavin called her after school one Tuesday and said his truck broke down, that he would be unable to make their session, Ava offered to drive over to his house, an offer he reluctantly accepted.

  “Why don’t you come around back?” Gavin said from the driveway, where he stood waiting. “The stairs in the kitchen go up to my room.”

  Although it was dark, Ava could make out odd structures in the yard, beams of wood fashioned into triangles and then continuing onto each other.