Wish You Were Here Read online

“He’s tougher than you think,” I said. “He’s the smartest person I know.”

  She gave me this look like she thought I was suffering brain failure.

  I said, “You think he’s dumb because he blew off school, don’t you? Give me a break. Do you really think there’s anything worthwhile going on there? It’s nothing but a big waste of time.”

  “Maybe,” she said. “But it’s what you’re supposed to do at this time of your life. It’s your job.” That’s what she always said about school. Anytime I ever complained about how stupid it was, she’d say, “Sometimes life demands stupid things of us, Jackson.” As if that made stupidity okay. Still, she’d drummed this sense of responsibility into me so successfully that I’d already gotten through that first week of school like a robot.

  By the second week, the rumors about Brady were thick. He was in Pennsylvania: Beth Barrett was sure she recognized him when the TV camera panned the crowd at an antinuke rally. The guy she saw had ratty blond hair like Brady’s, that same teddy bear body. He had on a psychedelic T-shirt—hot pink and blue, with “Grateful Dead” on the back—just like the one Brady always wore. Eric Harmon heard that the Arizona State Police had called Brady’s dad and asked him to send Brady’s dental records to see if they matched up with a dead kid they’d found in the desert. At a dinner party, Tom Best’s parents heard that Mr. Burton’s Chevy had been found in a Shell station in Wyoming. Supposedly, when Brady realized he couldn’t charge gas anymore, he’d ditched the car and set out hitchhiking.

  Stephanie Carr told us she dreamed of Brady every night. He was serene, she said. He was in a quiet place, surrounded by trees. She saw a lake in one dream, turquoise, deep. First period, while the images were still fresh, she’d sit in Western Civ with her eyes closed, thinking where, where, where, like a mantra. When the bell rang, she’d reach across my desk and borrow my notes, which she’d copy all through Conversational French.

  Even teachers were talking about him. I was an office messenger one period of the school day. I’d sit there, pretending to study, and eavesdrop on their conversations. They loved to one-up each other. They’d hash over absurd conferences they’d had with Jerry and Layla—the two of them having called a truce and united forces just long enough to come in and blame the school for whatever mess Brady was in. A lot of teachers said flat out they were glad to get rid of him. The nicer ones worried. “That kid has no common sense,” they said. “Something terrible is going to happen to him.” But they didn’t miss him.

  Mrs. Blue was the only teacher who was truly sorry he ran away. But then, she was the only teacher who ever figured out that there was a lot more to Brady than he let on at school. Sometimes we talked after Western Civ class, and she’d bring up something he said or did—usually something outrageous or funny or secretly nice. Once she said, “Jackson, I always thought Brady could’ve been a good writer if he’d just put his mind to it. You know, he did a great job on that pioneer journal assignment we did last year. But when I told him so, he started acting even worse than usual in class … ”

  She felt so bad about what had happened, as if she’d failed Brady somehow, that I had to tell her he really did care about writing, he really did try. I said, “He’s probably writing every day—wherever he is. Science fiction, that’s what he loves.” I even told her about the novel he wrote when we were in the sixth grade—how Layla had it printed and bound and gave it to all her friends for Christmas without first asking him if she could. After that, I told Mrs. Blue, Brady never showed his stories to anyone, not even me.

  “So it wasn’t you,” I told her. “It wasn’t anything you did.”

  “Thanks, Jackson,” Mrs. Blue said. She put her hand on my shoulder for a second, then turned away. Jeez, she was practically crying.

  It gave me some kind of weird power knowing what to say to make people feel better about Brady, having information nobody else had. Before, it seemed like no more than the love-me-love-my-dog syndrome that made me part of our group. I was Brady’s friend; I tagged along. For the most part I was invisible. Now our friends stopped me in the halls, phoned me in the evenings, came over to talk to me at parties. They’d say, “Now, what exactly happened that day at Brady’s dad’s house?” Then they’d listen intently while I repeated it. They acted as if Brady’s disappearance were a story problem from sixth-grade math: If a boy says ABC to his father, wrecks X number of tapes and other household goods, then steals Y number of credit cards, Z amount of cash from his dad’s top drawer, plus a blue 1983 Chevy, where will he end up?

  Since I was Brady’s best friend, everyone figured he’d let me know where he was. I figured he would, too. I’d go home every afternoon fully expecting to find a postcard from some exotic place. Or to hear the phone ring at an ungodly hour. “Collect call for Jackson Watt from Brady Burton,” the operator would say. I’d say, “Do it,” and there’d be Brady, barking at me, telling me how great it was on the road, saying, “Jax, come on, man. You’ve got to come right now.”

  I just might have gone, too. The way I felt those first few weeks—cool for the first time in my entire life—I might actually have had the courage. But as time passed and there was still no word, people lost interest in what had happened to him, and I began to feel like a fool for still caring. For believing that once Brady made it to the wider world he’d give me a second thought. He’d laugh if he realized what a big deal his leaving was to me. How I’d used him to make me feel like a player. Get a life, Jax, he’d say. The more I thought about it, the stupider, the smaller I felt. Me, run away? Oh, right. By the end of October, I could hardly even drag myself to parties.

  Not that I’d ever been the party animal Brady was. He loved to chug a few beers, then entertain everyone doing imitations of our principal, Mr. Parker, who read the morning announcements like a zombie, mispronouncing every third word, and our history teacher, Mr. Nowicki, who’d packed a radio in Vietnam and eventually managed to turn every class discussion to what it had been like there, how everyone in his unit had been perpetually stoned.

  Alcohol made Brady weirdly amiable. When it was time to go home, he’d say, “Okay, Jax. Who’s too wasted to drive?” He’d usher the ones I named into my VW bus: “the Magic Bus,” he called it. He’d pop in a tape—usually some mix he’d made—turn up the stereo full blast, and pretty soon everyone would be hooting out the windows, laughing and singing. He’d yell, “Halt!” if someone had to puke, and I’d put on the brakes. I’d drop them off at home, one by one, Brady last. “Thanks, dude,” he’d say, and weave up to the front door like one of those harmless drunks in a movie from the fifties.

  Now parties were awful. I sat and watched everyone get loaded, knowing I’d never have the nerve to say anything about their driving without Brady there to jolly them along. In fact, without Brady there making a joke out of everything, some people turned downright mean.

  The night of homecoming I said, “Remember last year when Brady’s car got a flat tire in the parade?”

  Eric Harmon said, “Is Burton all you can talk about, man?”

  Tom Best said, “Face it, dude, Brady is history.”

  “Yeah, Watt, have a brew for once,” someone else said. “Loosen up.”

  Kate Levin giggled. “Hey, we should get Brady’s picture put on one of those milk cartons. Like those kidnapped kids. Some lady in Toledo would spot him in the grocery and call in.”

  “Or in Kalamazoo at the Burger King,” Tom said. “With Elvis.”

  Had they all forgotten how close we once were? How close Brady made us right from the beginning? How when we were freshmen he thought up the idea for the club?

  We had to make these time capsules in World History class. “Choose a series of artifacts or visual images that are representative of American adolescence in the latter part of the twentieth century,” Ms. Redmon had said. Some people turned in real capsules with real things inside: Walk
mans, photos of rock stars, football programs, friendship bracelets, neon-colored Chuck Taylors, TV Guides. Ms. Redmon said we could interpret the assignment creatively. Brady was the only one who really did.

  He got one of those black-and-white speckled composition books, wrote “DIVORCE: A DAY IN THE LIFE” in big letters on the front, and asked everyone in our class whose parents were divorced to write something in it. He got an F.

  “You didn’t really do any work,” Ms. Redmon told him. “And your topic is too narrow.”

  “Fuck it,” he said after class. But I knew he was upset.

  Usually, Brady threw away all his school papers, whether he’d gotten a decent grade or a poor one. He kept the notebook, though. And in spite of the fact that he was mad at Ms. Redmon about his grade, he admitted that her assignment had been worthwhile. The idea of the time capsule nagged at him. We should be responsible for recording our lives, he said. That’s when he started the club.

  Anyone whose parents were divorced and who wanted history to remember the effect of divorce on their lives could join. We’d be totally available to each other. A member could call another member at any time, day or night, and that person was honor bound to help him. Like AA, Brady said.

  The thing is, just being together made people feel better. We’d meet at someone’s house every few weeks, eat pizza, and talk. It got so that we’d try to one-up each other with the crazy things our parents had done. Like Eric’s parents having the Grandparent Ticket Lottery for his brother’s graduation because there were eight grandparents instead of the usual four. Or Pam Flowers’ parents, who’d gone steady in high school, going to their twentieth class reunion together as a joke—her mom wearing her dad’s class ring on a chain around her neck. Brady put me in charge of writing everything down.

  After a while, the club got to be less formal. The gatherings became parties for all our friends. But because Brady had made us comfortable with the idea of talking about our lives, there was always a group sitting around, deep in conversation. I still wrote down the things people said, but not right at the time, like I had before. I wrote later, alone, sitting on my bed—like I am now.

  I still have that notebook, and I’ve kept it up these past two months even though Brady’s gone. I’ve quit going to parties, but I write down the news I hear, eavesdropping in class, at lunch, in the halls. In fact, keeping up the notebook is the only real reason I can see for being in school at all.

  I hate being there. I sit in class and stare at our so-called friends one by one, thinking hey, remember the time Brady drove you down to IU for Journalism Institute when your dad had to go pick up his girlfriend at the airport? And you—remember the time your mom had the car accident and he drove you to the hospital every night to see her? And how about that T-shirt he gave you, asshole, when you told him your parents were splitting up? The one he had made specially for you, with a picture of Beaver Cleaver and his family silk-screened on it, circled, with a line slicing across the middle?

  Fuck ’em, Brady’s voice says inside my head. Fuck it all. But that’s all it says—nothing about what to do instead of caring, since I don’t have the guts to run away.

  Walking down the hall, I feel like I have ankle weights on. Just getting from one class to another and then, finally, home, exhausts me. But when it’s time to sleep, I lie on my bed, bug-eyed, watching the digital clock click off the seconds, minutes, hours.

  Tonight I got up, though, and got the divorce notebook out of my desk drawer. I wrote for a while in it, the usual thing. Then I turned the notebook over and upside down so that when I opened it, it seemed like a blank book again. On the first page, I wrote everything that had happened since Brady left, all I felt. I’ll keep on writing in it until he comes back.

  I have to believe he’ll come back. When he does, he’ll grab the notebook and throw himself on my bed to catch up on the divorce data. When he’s done, I’ll say, “Flip it over, man.”

  He’ll read what I’ve written about my life; then he’ll fill in his half of the conversation. He’ll say, “Okay, Jax, here’s the program.”

  And everything will fall into place.

  four

  Dad picks me up for our regular Wednesday night dinner and says, “Jackson, I bought a family membership at the health club so the two of us can work out together.” He tosses me a bag from Capitol Sporting Goods. Inside are two pairs of gym shorts and some tank tops, the kind with deep-cut armholes, like bodybuilders wear. There’s socks and a new pair of Reeboks. There’s a new gym bag with a couple of white towels in it. Oh, great, I think. He’s feeling guilty about not spending quality time with me. Or he’s freaked out because I don’t hate Mom’s boyfriend. Or he feels sorry for me because I’m so pathetic since Brady left. I hate it when he gets responsible. I’m starving, but I don’t say a word when we drive past the steak place where we usually eat.

  Walking into the club, we’re blasted with music: there’s a different song playing in each one of the four aerobics classrooms. The girl at the desk smiles as my dad explains the sign-in process to me. “Welcome to The Peak,” she hollers over the din.

  In the locker room, there are mostly yuppie guys, loosening their paisley ties, stepping out of their pin-striped suits. As usual, my dad’s wearing jeans and one of his dozens of concert T-shirts. Tonight: George Thorogood and the Destroyers. He’s in pretty good shape because of the work he does—he’s a carpenter and rigger with the stagehands union and spends a lot of time hauling equipment and climbing around stage sets—but now, as he changes into his workout clothes, I notice that he’s bigger than he used to be. The muscles in his arms are bulging. His gym shorts are tight around his thighs.

  He sees me looking, and grins. “I got tired of looking like a wimp,’’ he says. Then, “Speed it up, bud. I’ve got someone lined up to show you the machines.”

  I put on the red pair of shorts, one of the tank tops. The new Reeboks are so white they’re like beacons. Anyone who hadn’t already noticed the way the tank top flaps around my chest would take one look at these shoes and laugh his head off because it’s so obviously my first time here. That’s not the worst thing, though. The walls are mirrors. I have to look at myself.

  Dad introduces me to Kim, his trainer. Our trainer. She’s twenty-something. Pretty. Five foot two, tops—but built. Curly blond hair. She’s an exercise physiologist, he says. From his tone of voice, you’d think he was telling me she was a brain surgeon.

  Bingo. I get it: his new girlfriend.

  “Jackson,” Dad says, “Kim’ll have you looking like Arnold Schwarzenegger before you leave for college.”

  “Oh, Oz.” Kim giggles; then I see her realize I might think she’s giggling at the hopelessness of his promise. She rearranges her face into a more professional expression—or at least as professional as anyone could hope to look, dressed the way she is: shiny black tights, bright pink bralike top that matches her long pink fingernails, a pink headband the same color, and pink socks that fall around her ankles.

  She opens a file cabinet, takes out a chart, and hands it to my dad. “You get started, Oz.” She checks her watch, pink also. “Twenty minutes on the StairMaster, right? I’ll come check on you in a few minutes, after I’ve done Jackson’s profile.” She takes out another chart and prints my name in block letters across the top.

  “So,” she says brightly, “what do you want to work on?”

  “Hey—” I attempt a grin. “You’re the expert. You tell me.”

  “Hmm,” she says, looking me up and down, scribbling on the chart. “Pecs for sure. Lats.” She gestures toward one of the Nautilus machines. “We’ll put you on the pull-down for those. You’ll want to build your biceps, of course. Everyone wants good biceps. And lots of legwork.”

  “I’ve got a terrific mind,” I say. But her blank look tells me she doesn’t get the joke.

  Brady
would die laughing. At Kim, because she’s such a dim bulb. At the machines that look like high-tech skeletons, at the dorks working out on them, moaning and grunting like they’re having orgasms. He’d love schlepping around this place with his gut hanging over his gym shorts, ogling the women jogging on the treadmills and pedaling the stationary bikes. He’d figure out some way to rub up against Kim’s breasts when she helped him get situated in the Nautilus machines, all the while cracking jokes, so instead of getting mad she’d think he was the most amusing person in America. It used to drive me crazy sometimes, the way he always managed to make girls think he was so charming. I mean, what’s the attraction? He’s got a lousy body, a big mouth, and hair that looks like it got caught in a Mixmaster.

  “Body is not the same as body language” is how my mom explains this phenomenon. According to her, girls like Brady because of the way he moves: loose and slouchy, his arms always open, his hands rising palm up, as if saying, who cares?

  Obviously nothing like my own uptight self. It’s pathetic. I have to make a conscious effort to unhunch my shoulders and unfold my arms, so Kim can guide me into the machines properly. I pretend it doesn’t bother me a bit that nearly every time, my whole body starts shaking after a few reps, and she has to set the weight lower. Nearby, Dad’s finished his twenty minutes on the StairMaster and is now doing squats over by the big-screen television, sweat flying off his hair like rain. I can’t believe he’s subjecting me to this.

  “Hey, look on the bright side,” Brady would have said. “The humiliation pretty much guarantees a hard-on’s out of the question. At least you won’t have to deal with that.”

  “This is going to be great for you, Jax,” Dad says over dinner. “Put some muscle on that frame. Six months from now, the girls will be all over you.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Six months from now I’ll probably be as big a dude as you are. My life will be a veritable love buffet.”