Stay Awake Stories Part 6

"I'm just sitting here at the kitchen table, having a cup of tea," she said thoughtfully. "Just sitting here looking out at the moon shining over the ocean."

My own life wasn't as interesting as the stories that Ca.s.sie told about herself and our siblings. Perhaps that was the problem; perhaps that was why I didn't always quite believe her. My foster parents, the Dowtys, were simple, kindly, middle-of-the-road people: a math teacher and his wife. I grew up with them in Cleveland, Ohio, and then I remained there afterward, mostly of my own free will, with one year of college to my credit and four years working as a housepainter for my foster cousin Rob Higgins. I lived in a little converted apartment above my foster mom's garage, and I paid her a hundred dollars a month for rent. I was twenty-five years old, and I'd visited only three other states, and zero foreign countries. These were the bare numbers of my life, which I kept in my head. I had 7,891 dollars saved up in the bank. I had ten toes and nine fingers. I got up at six in the morning six days a week. Sometimes I worried, wondering what Ca.s.sie was telling the other siblings about me, because there was so little interesting to say.

It was funny, I suppose, that Ca.s.sie and the others had so quickly come to occupy such a large part of my daily thoughts. The truth was, I'd hardly considered them at all in those long years since I'd last set eyes on them. They had almost completely faded out of my mind before that one day when Ca.s.sie called me for the first time.

"Happy birthday, Robert!" Ca.s.sie had said. Those were the first words out of her mouth when I answered the phone. "You'll never guess who this is!" she said.

It was actually the day after my birthday, and I was still a little hungover. I was sitting in my recliner, watching TV, and I put the sound on mute with my remote. I sat there blankly for a bit.

"This is your sister Ca.s.sie," she said at last. "You probably don't even remember me, do you?"

I hesitated. What does a person say to a question like that? I thought I could feel a kind of glimmer of recognition, though I wasn't sure if it would officially be considered "remembering." For some reason, I pictured her with red hair and freckles, and I thought hard about it until I pulled up a momentary flash of recollection. Here was the kindly policeman who carried me on his shoulders; here were the tops of the heads of my siblings below me; here was the weeping voice of my mother, who was locked in the bathroom with the water running. My babies! my mother was crying. Come help Mommy! Come save Mommy! And from my perch on the kindly policeman's shoulders I could see more policemen coming with crowbars, and a shiny puddle of water was emerging from under the crack of the door.

I sat there silently for a moment, considering this memory. Then I slid it slowly to the back of my mind again, and shifted the phone from one side of my face to the other.

"Ca.s.sie," I said. "Sure I remember you."

a a a I opened my eyes.

The electricity had been off the night before, another power outage, but now it was back on. The bedside lamp bent brightly over me. The digital clock was blinking, the television over in the corner had come on and was sending a mist of static into the room. I noticed that there were some hard objects in the bed, and when I felt underneath me I discovered my flashlight and the cordless phone, and I sat up. It was morning, basically. Late August.

The night before, I'd fallen asleep while still talking to Ca.s.sie, and little sc.r.a.ps of our conversation floated back into my head. Tell me, she'd said. What's the first thing- "-the first thing you remember," she said.

"I'm thinking," I said, and she let out a breath.

"Don't blow a gasket," she said. "Geez. It's not such a difficult question."

"Well," I said. I considered again: nothing.

"Okay," she said. "So just tell me about Cleveland-how about that? Tell me about the first time you came to your new-"

Your new family, she said, and I shifted.

"Um," I said. I considered. I tried to think of interesting anecdotes.

I was so boring, I thought.

I had become aware of it, more and more, as the summer wore on, as the first rush of enthusiasm and excitement began to grow cooler. I thought of Ca.s.sie a lot while I was at work. What kinds of things could I tell her next time we talked? What would I say? I tried to save up little jokes I'd heard, articles from the newspaper. I moved through the days watchfully, waiting for a quirky little moment I could package up for Ca.s.sie.

I arrived in Cleveland the summer I turned twelve. A social worker put me on the train in St. Louis. I guess things had been explained to me in some fashion or another and I was aware that my new foster parents were going to meet me when I got to my destination. I was given some papers to carry with me and someone had packed me a lunch in a paper bag, a juice box and some baby carrots and a peanut b.u.t.ter sandwich.

It must have been around 2 a.m. when we got in. I remember, at least, that it was the wee hours of the morning, though I don't know why I would have come in at such a time. I remember only that the conductor came to the seat where I was sleeping and ran the beam of his flashlight gently across my face. "This is your stop coming up, young man," he whispered. The social worker had spoken with him when I was being put on the train, so he must have known some part of my story. He looked down as if he knew some terrible secret about me, stern and sorrowful the way old workingmen get in the years before they retire, and he stood there waiting to be sure I was awake before he moved on down the aisle. There was the faintly dusty smell of the old air-conditioning and the hiss of the pneumatic door opening between the train cars. Beyond the window was dark but you could hear it raining.

Mr. and Mrs. Dowty were there on the platform when the train stopped. Water was trickling down from the awning that led toward the station building and pa.s.sengers were opening up their umbrellas as they got off the train. I stepped down the metal stairs with my old alligator-skin suitcase and that was when I saw Mrs. Dowty looking right at me. She was a skinny little woman in a blue navy pea coat, and I saw that her eyes had rested on me-hopefully, though also a little concerned, I thought. She had a little sign that she had made on which she had printed my name. ROBERT POTTER, it said. WELCOME HOME.

Mr. Dowty had been standing there holding her hand, and when he saw me coming forward he untwined his fingers from hers and came forward, smiling. He was a short man, only a little taller than Mrs. Dowty was, with a bald head and square black gla.s.ses.

"Robert?" he said to me. "Robert?" And I was surprised to see that his hands and fingers had a lot of dark hair growing on them, despite his baldness.

"How do you do?" he said, and we shook hands.

"Let me take that for you!" he said, and he slipped the handle of my suitcase out of my grasp.

"Did you have a good trip?" he said. "It's awfully early in the morning for a boy to have to get up and around!"

I nodded and followed along beside him. All during this time Mrs. Dowty had continued to stand there holding her sign, the two of us watching each other as I approached, and I wasn't sure what to make of it at first. I thought maybe she had been expecting something else, a different type of boy altogether, and there were b.u.t.terflies in my stomach.

She had her hand up holding the throat of her coat closed and there was a gust of wind off the lake.

"Anna," Mr. Dowty said, "I believe this is our boy," and she stood there for a minute longer.

"Yes," she said.

We drove home through the silent, faded city and I sat in the backseat with my head pressed against the window. Did we talk? I don't remember that we said anything-Mr. Dowty driving, Mrs. Dowty next to him in the pa.s.senger seat, planes of light tilting and pa.s.sing across our faces. I saw some men sleeping on steaming grates on a sidewalk, and blank brick fronts of empty warehouses. The halogen streetlights bent their heads over us, the traffic lights hanging like lanterns from braided black wires. No one else seemed to be awake, and we pa.s.sed under a cement train bridge and curved up a hill lined with dark trees, houses and apartment buildings hidden between the branches. I closed my eyes and opened them, and then we were pulling into a driveway and here was the house where I would be living from now on.

I don't remember what I was feeling at the time. I could never very clearly recall the foster home where I was living before I came to the Dowtys', and perhaps even then I had almost forgotten it. I thought of myself as an object, a box, and my mind was clenched in the center of it and m.u.f.fled under layers of packing, in hibernation, and I imagine that I must have moved mechanically when Mr. Dowty opened the door of the car, holding my suitcase in his hand, speaking in a voice so soft that it seemed to be only inside my head. Come on, now, Robert, let's go to sleep in a nice soft bed, come on now, and I followed him through the backyard gate and through the doorway and up the stairs to where a room had been prepared for me.

It was a small, neat room on the corner of the second floor, and even at that hour, sleepy and dazed as I was, I was aware of the room as a kind of empty s.p.a.ce, a place that hadn't been lived in for some time. The carpet had been freshly vacuumed-you could see the lines where the vacuum had brought the s.h.a.g of the blue carpet up into tufts, like artificial gra.s.s. The bed was tightly made, the pillow folded under the bedspread and tucked like a package, a quilt folded over the foot. There was a little desk with a lamp on it and a blotter with a single pencil in the center, and above the desk was a bookshelf with the books arranged, it seemed, from shortest to tallest, the spines all even with one another in a single, smooth wall, as if they were bricks. Mrs. Dowty went in ahead of me with the polite, careful steps of a nurse, which she was, and I stood in the doorway as she went to the dresser along the wall and opened the top drawer, displaying its dustless vacancy as if she were showing me a cabinet of knickknacks that mustn't be touched.

"You can put your clothes in here," she said. "But you don't need to do that tonight. I imagine you're very tired and want to go right to sleep."

"Yes," I said. I looked down at my shoes, a pair of ragged, cracked high-tops with laces the gray color of dishwater, and I felt lonely and ashamed.

Later I would learn that this had been the room of the Dowtys' son, Douglas, who had been dead three years by the time I came. Douglas had been sixteen, had died in a diving accident, Mrs. Dowty said; he broke his neck on the cement bottom of the town swimming pool, and by the time he was pulled out of the water his brain had been deprived of oxygen for too long.

"We were able to donate some of his tissue. His bones," she said. "Corneas ..." She considered, and I a.s.sumed that there was a long list of things that she had memorized, items that recited on in her mind, though she was silent. "So," she said, after a pause. "So. I like to think that not only does his spirit live on in our hearts, but his physical body lives on to some extent as well."

I had been there for months when she told me this; we were sitting at the kitchen table and Mr. Dowty had already gone off to work at the high school, but I was staying home with the flu. It was winter and outside it was all snowy white and shoveled pathways along the sidewalks.

I was glad that I didn't know, that first night, that I was going to be sleeping in the room of a dead boy. Still, I suppose that in some ways I did know, as I unb.u.t.toned my shirt and unlaced my shoes and took off my jeans. There was a kind of steady, weighted stillness in the room as I folded my clothes as best I could and put them into a pile. I got into the bed, in between the cool, dry sheets, and put my head against the thick pillow and folded my hands over my chest as if I were in a coffin. After a moment my eyes closed without my noticing.

When I woke up the next morning, it had been daylight for a while. It was a day in April and for a moment I expected to still be on the train. I could not remember where I was, I didn't recognize the room, and I felt that blank, open s.p.a.ce in my mind, which is what it must be like to have amnesia or Alzheimer's disease, that sense of grasping, a foot coming down and not finding the ground. I sat up, and I could just barely hear them talking in some other part of the house and my brain pulled out a little flash: the Dowtys standing on the train platform in the rain, in the night, two silhouettes under umbrellas, but it might as well have been an old black-and-white movie I had seen a long time ago on a television in the recreation room of the group home, a memory light as a piece of ash.

I was aware again of the room I was in, that silent feeling of disapproval, and I could see Douglas's collection of books looking down at me from their shelf. Field Guide to Insects of North America. The Observer's Sky Atlas. From Atoms to Infinity. Half Magic- I was moving my eyes along the shelf, reading each t.i.tle, and I heard a young man's voice say, very distinctly: You mean he's sleeping in there right now? In Douglas's room?! Or so I imagined. I pulled back the covers and slipped on the same jeans and T-shirt that I had worn when I left St. Louis.

I didn't want to stay in bed while they were awake-thinking I was a lazybones. And although I wanted to take a shower I didn't want to be naked in the house with all of them out there, talking about me. And so I found my way down the stairs, following their voices, and around the corner from the foot of the staircase I could see the yellow wallpaper of the kitchen and a young man, a teenager, sitting at the kitchen table. I could see through the doorway his tennis shoe and the ham of his calf and his hand reaching down to scratch the sock on his ankle. This, I would learn later, was Rob Higgins.

a a a Rob Higgins was eighteen years old that year. Only six years older than me-though the distance between twelve and eighteen is very far, maybe the longest six years we ever travel. Spying on him from around the corner, I guessed that he was in high school. He looked like one of the boys that went to the Catholic high school near the group home back in St. Louis, a certain kind of face that I a.s.sociated with bullies. Reddish hair under a baseball cap. Freckles. Small, upturned nose. A sort of wiry quarterback build. I thought of the names that such boys would call after us as we hurried back from our school to the blocky, narrow-windowed cl.u.s.ter of buildings where we were kept. "r.e.t.a.r.ds!" they called. "f.a.ggots! n.i.g.g.e.rs!" And though these words didn't even apply to us, they were still scary-they had a blunt force, the ugliest, dirtiest names that these dull-witted high school boys could think of. That was what we were to them.

Maybe at one point in his life, Rob Higgins might have been one of those types, with their boisterous, unimaginative confidence, but he wasn't that way any longer. Even then, I could see that something about him had been subdued and broken down, and I relaxed a little.

Rob Higgins was having a hard time, Mrs. Dowty told me later. A tough life, she said, some of it his own making, some of it just bad luck. Whatever c.o.c.kiness had been a natural part of him had withdrawn and would probably never really return to him.

He was Mrs. Dowty's nephew, her sister's son, and he and Mrs. Dowty had grown close since the death of Rob's mother and Mrs. Dowty's son in the same year. They had bonded, Mrs. Dowty said, and Rob had started to spend a lot of time at Mrs. Dowty's house, though this didn't turn out to be a cure for anything, necessarily. He continued to have problems-issues with drugs and depression, I gathered. Trouble getting along with his teachers. An intense and destructive relationship with a girlfriend.

He was sitting there eating cereal and he looked up and regarded me when I came in. It was the kind of look that you would give if a small animal-a squirrel or a stray cat-walked brazenly into your house and stood in the doorway of your kitchen while you were bringing a spoonful of Corn Pops to your mouth.

"Well! If it isn't young Robert Potter!" Mr. Dowty said. He was at the stove making some scrambled eggs in a skillet and he was the first one to speak. "I was just about to come and wake you up!" he said.

"Oh," I said.

"Are you hungry, sweetheart?" Mrs. Dowty said.

Rob Higgins said nothing-but he kept his eyes on me steadily, a kind of mild hostility emanating from him. A drop of milk fell from his spoon and he blinked.

I was telling this to Ca.s.sie one night when we were first getting into our mode of marathon telephone conversations.

"Wow," she said. "That's a great story, Robbie!" She had been making appreciative sounds the whole time-"yes," "mm-hmm," "right," "oh-I get it ..."

And of course when you are in the presence of a good listener you can start to feel as if you actually have something interesting to say.

"I don't know why you say that you can't remember anything," she said. "That all seems pretty detailed to me!"

"I guess so," I said. "My memory has actually been pretty good since I came to Cleveland. Or at least it seems like it is." I considered for a moment. "I guess the big problem is that I'm not always sure about whether anything is accurate."

"Hmm," she said. "That's a problem for everyone, sweetie."

Sometimes I thought about asking Mrs. Dowty.

She came up to my room above the garage, looking for unwashed gla.s.ses and dirty dishes, and I sat there in bed, in my underwear, embarra.s.sed. It was two o'clock on a Sat.u.r.day afternoon.

"Hey," I said. But she was in a mood. She picked up one of my socks from the middle of the floor and looked at it gloomily.

"You don't have to do that," I said. "I'm going to do it."

"Then you should have done it already," she said. "What were you doing up at all hours last night? I saw that light of yours was still burning at four in the morning!"

"Nothing," I said, though for a moment I wondered if she had been able to see me through the window as I talked with Ca.s.sie on the phone. I should just tell her, I shouldn't lie, I thought. "I was just ... thinking about stuff, I guess," I said, and she gave me The Eye.

"If you're having problems with the insomnia, you should go talk to Dr. Bloom," Mrs. Dowty said. "She could probably give you some medication for it."

"Mom, I'm fine," I said. "Geez. I haven't seen Dr. Bloom since I was fourteen."

"She did you a lot of good," Mrs. Dowty said. "You were in pretty rough shape when you came to us. You know that, Robert. And Dr. Bloom got you calmed down, didn't she?"

"I guess so," I said, though the truth was I hadn't thought of Dr. Bloom in years. I didn't recall that she'd done me that much good. Mostly, it seemed to me, the two of us just sat around and played cards for an hour every week, and then she would write me a prescription for something.

Well," Mrs. Dowty said, "you're a grown-up now-you have to make your own decisions, don't you? I can't force you to do anything."

"I just like to stay up late," I said. "That's all."

Mrs. Dowty sighed and nodded a little. She held three drinking gla.s.ses in her right hand, cl.u.s.tered between her fingers like bells, and for a second it seemed as if she were offering them to me. I held my hand out awkwardly. The pads of her fingertips inside the rims of the gla.s.ses, the formation of flesh pressed and wet against a "You can't go on like this forever," she said.

She peered out the window, down at the driveway and the basketball hoop that she and Mr. Dowty had set up for me when I first came to live with them. For a moment, maybe we both thought about the kind of kid I'd been back then, picturing me down there dribbling and shooting, twelve years old, small for my age, dribbling and shooting, smaller than anyone else in my cla.s.s, seventy pounds, maybe, circling in the driveway and dribbling and shooting, and I could remember that so much more vividly than anything in my life up to that point that it seemed as if I must have spent seven years in that driveway and only a few long summer afternoons in various foster homes, instead of vice versa. What was the name of that family I lived with before I was sent to the Dowtys?

Lamb? Lambert? Something like that. I sat there, sending out feelers into my memory, tracing it back past the Lamb/Lamberts and it was like trying to place stepping-stones down from one bank of a creek to the other side The group home in St. Louis and The Lamberts And the Holroyd sisters And that lady Darlene, who was my mother's cousin And those ones who were religious.

Morrison?

I had never been a very good rememberer. That was one of the downsides of being in contact with Ca.s.sie. It reminded me of the things I didn't like about my own mind, the problems with the ways in which it worked and didn't work.

I knew the basics of my own life story, of course. I was five when LaChandra and Nicholas were murdered, and then there were several foster families, one after another, each one farther away from my old home. I came at last to rest in the home of Mr. and Mrs. Dowty when I was twelve, and that was where I went to school from seventh grade on to graduation. I began to work for my cousin Rob's house-painting business during my freshman year at the community college, the year that Mr. Dowty died, and I continued to work for him after I stopped attending cla.s.ses. I lost the ring finger of my left hand during a fall from a ladder.

Mostly, I thought, I was an average, normal person. I paid my bills. I went out to the bar on a Friday night with my buddies and had a decent time. I liked to laugh at funny shows on TV and I did my work and I tried not to take stuff too seriously.

Still, sometimes I felt worried. On Friday nights, sitting in Parnell's, I'd listen to the other guys talk about themselves, retelling a memory of something that happened to them when they were kids, and I realized that my own brain worked differently from the way theirs did. Their minds were built up of stories-Tony, with his sagas of girlfriends and breakups, or Tino, with his rambling supply of misadventures in which he was always the prankster or the victim, or even Rob Higgins, who had his life sorted and categorized into a catalog of best and worst moments.

I loved the way that they could maneuver through their pasts so easily. I loved the way the events in their lives had beginnings and middles and ends, the way their stories had points to them-morals, or punch lines, or twists.

But when my turn would come around, I never knew what to say. I can't really think of anything, I'd tell them. I don't really recall, I'd say, because I didn't know how to describe the place I went when I sat home at night, when I sank down in the old claw-footed bathtub with my eyes closed, when I stared at the mirror, watching my reflection run its fingers across its face. I'd ask my mind to remember simple things: the house where I lived with my first foster family, for example; or the Christmas of my eleventh year; or my oldest sister's face.

But what I got was another thing entirely. Even though I'd concentrate, the pictures my brain would send me often didn't make much sense. I'd conjure up a vivid image of a row of brownstone apartments and a cobblestone street; I'd imagine that I recalled an organ grinder and his monkey on the corner, and people pa.s.sing by in clothes from a hundred years ago. I'd call forth a farmhouse in the middle of cornfields, and I'd see myself walking on a winding dirt road, looking up as a pterodactyl slowly flapped its wings, pa.s.sing across the moon. I'd picture a crumpled potato-chip bag, or a snowy tundra, where a woman was pinning white sheets to a clothesline in the wind, or the sound of something scratching on the door in the night. Maybe, I thought, the memory-recording apparatus in my head had been damaged in some way.

But when I mentioned all this to Ca.s.sie, she seemed unimpressed. "That's all very poetic," she said. "But that's just whimsy, Robbie. It's not memory. I mean, you do know the difference between fantasy and reality, don't you?"

"Yeah," I said.

"You're not a schizophrenic, are you? I mean, you don't really believe you once saw a pterodactyl, do you?"

"No," I said. I hesitated for a moment. "No, of course not."

"Well, then," she said. I was sitting there on my narrow bed, picking at my bare feet. It was about one-thirty in the morning. We had been talking nearly every night for months, and this wasn't the first time that I didn't know what to say.

"You don't have to make up stuff to impress me, Robbie," she said. "I love you just the way you are."

"Thank you," I said, and she laughed lightly in that way that usually made me feel a kind of glow but this time did not. I wished I could see the expression on her face.

But I couldn't picture it. Actually, I still didn't know what Ca.s.sie looked like, and that, in fact, was another small point of contention that had developed between us. She had promised on several occasions to send me a photo, but it never arrived.

"What!" she had said, the first time I brought it up. "You mean you haven't got those photos yet? I sent them two weeks ago!"

"Well," I said. "They never came."

"That's crazy!" she said, after another week had pa.s.sed. "I can't believe your cruddy mail service! They must have gotten lost again!"

"They must have."

"Well, I'll send some new ones. I'll send them certified this time."

"Okay," I said, and waited as June turned into July. But when I asked her again, her voice got a little chilly.

"I really don't like to have my picture taken," she said. It was one of the times when there were weird noises in the background again, as if she were just outside the door of some busy, unhappy place, like a police station or a hospital waiting room.

"Actually," she said, "those photos I sent you were basically the only ones I had. Now I'll have to get some new ones taken."

"Well," I said, "I'd really like to have a picture of you."

"Ha!" she said. "It's probably better if you remember me like I was! I'm basically the same as I was twenty years ago-just older and fatter!"