I CAME HOME AND MY ARM HEALED. MY BROTHERS WERE TENTATIVE around me, kind even. I think they were a little shocked that I had survived something worse than anything they’d lived through. They had not realized that I was also invincible, I guess, and it made them wary of my power, of what I could do to them.
Hobart, who hobbled around on crutches because of his broken leg, both of us recovering, spent a fair amount of time with me while my mom was at work. We would drink huge glasses of sweet tea and take turns reading out loud to each other from Patricia Highsmith novels. I kind of grew to truly like him, how tender and sensitive he was once you got past the bluster of him.
He had quit the job with the newspaper and was unemployed, had basically moved in with us. I would read the classifieds section of the newspaper with him and circle jobs that looked interesting. One of them was to be a delivery driver for Schwan’s, and Hobart applied and they sent back a catalog of their food. We’d spend a lot of time looking at ugly pictures of chicken Kiev and ice cream bars. We started checking for interesting sales, and we’d drive a few towns over to buy a bunch of VHS tapes of rare movies, ones I’d never even heard of but Hobart said were brilliant. He said he might open a video store in Coalfield, one with hard-to-find cult classics, and later on that is what he ended up doing, and even though it didn’t make much money, he kind of became famous among collectors and film buffs, all those weird people on internet forums. He had a knack for finding stuff. He was generally clueless, but he was good at this.
One afternoon, after I’d read a section of This Sweet Sickness, we were making peanut butter sandwiches, and Hobart said, “I hated being a teenager.”
“I don’t hate it,” I said, feeling a little affronted.
“Well, I did,” he told me, looking so sad. “Not because I thought something better was coming. I just never felt right inside my own body.”
“I feel that sometimes,” I admitted.
“And then I got older, and, guess what? I still never felt right inside my body. I don’t think I ever will. I kind of flamed out everywhere I went, always got a little less than what I thought I’d get. But I guess that’s okay. I think maybe it’s necessary to feel like you’re not quite settled, or maybe for some people it’s necessary.”
“Even if you do feel settled,” I suggested, “something could happen to ruin it.”
“Yeah, that’s true,” he said, laughing. “I guess I just mean that sometimes your mom says that things will be better for you in the future. And I think they will, Frankie. I think you’re really smart and I think you’ll do fine. But I also think it’s not so bad if you never quite feel right in this world. It’s still worth hanging around. You just have to look harder to find the things you love.”
“Okay,” I said. I kind of wanted to hug him. I thought for a split second about telling him that I made the poster, but I knew I wouldn’t. But the fact that I considered it made me realize that he could marry my mom and I’d be happy about it.
MY MOM MADE ME GO ON LONG WALKS THROUGH THE NEIGHBORHOOD, to clear my head after so long in the house, and I would wave to Mr. Avery and he would wave back. And every time we made it back to our front door, my mom would hug me and say, “You’re going to be okay, sweetie.”
I never heard a word from Zeke. I knew there were so many reasons that he wouldn’t contact me. He was terrified of the poster and what might happen if anyone found out. But I knew, more than that, he was ashamed that he’d hurt me, had done something awful. If he didn’t check on me or apologize for what he’d done, he could pretend it hadn’t happened.
In my head, I kept thinking about how he had pushed me away when I’d needed him, had pushed me down the freaking stairs, and maybe it was my own blindness, but I didn’t believe it was on purpose. I know that I was making excuses for him, trying to ignore all the ways that his rage had pushed his life into bad places. I was protecting him because I guess I thought he needed it. And if I protected the person who hurt me, who had broken me, then I was stronger than he was and I was stronger than anyone who might try to hurt us more. And maybe that would bring him back.
I’d made the decision that I would forgive him, and I wouldn’t apologize for that. And I’m not apologizing now. But after he left, I just wanted him to talk to me, to reach out, and I really believed it would go back to the way it was. But I couldn’t be the one to call for him. It had to be him, I thought. And he wasn’t going to do it.