Reuben shakes his head. “Might be best if she didn’t, Sammy.”
Sam waits on the daybed for Deanie to come out of the bathroom. From upstairs the tube in Reuben and Pearl’s bedroom endlessly recycles the meager war news, in counterpoint to Indy’s exuberant recombinations of the half-dozen meaningful syllables in which she now converses, complete with seemingly intelligent inflections. The earrings Sarah made for Deanie pool in a cut-glass dish on a water-stained deal table that has been cleared of plants to make a nightstand. A scatter of tape cassettes and a knot of bandannas lie next to the dish. He thinks of this room before she stayed in it: the fecund greenhouse smell of potted plants in a suntrap, the old cigar stink, dry wicker and chintz cushions.
Grasping the frame of the door, Deanie teeters on the threshold. Her eyes are pink and swollen.
“It isn’t going to happen,” he says, and the promise clarifies everything for him. “I’m not letting them move you anywhere.”
She lets out her breath and he sees that she believes him.
“Hey,” he says, “come on upstairs. I want to play you some stuff.”
She floats behind him nervously and scampers past Pearl and Reuben’s bedroom door even though it is closed. Flopping stomach down onto his bed, she is breathless with giggles.
Pulling his headphones down over her ears, he plugs in the Gear Daddies. Fast forwards the tape to “Boys Will Be Boys,” which isn’t ever going to get any air time because it tells its truth in the most accurate language. It makes him think of his sister and of Deanie too. Especially now, with DHS getting set to exile her to Lisbon Falls.
She’s fucked again,
and she don’t know why.
The lyrics make Deanie laugh with a brief and bitter merriment.
He doesn’t know how he can honor his promise to keep her at Greenspark. If she goes somewhere else, Tony Lord can never reach her again. Better she should miss the rest of this season than remain at risk from that creep.
“That’s great,” she says, pushing the ‘phones back and letting them fall around her neck.
“I know what to do.”
That rivets her. She sits up and cocks her head like an attentive puppy.
“I’ll sell the bike.”
Her hands fly to her mouth.
And it all comes tumbling out without a stutter. Pay the medical bills and give her the rest and put her on a bus to his aunt in Oregon. Big city like Portland, there must be some good plastic surgeons. Aunt Ilene would find one. How much could it cost? What’s left of the price of the bike should more than cover it. If she gets it done this summer, she should be able to play ball next year. Some high school in Portland would be lucking into a wicked hook shot. It isn’t the same as staying here but she’d be safe from that shithead. And if she has to make big changes in her life, at least she won’t be jerked around by some underfunded, understaffed state agency.
He’ll be out of school in June, he reminds her. He could follow her out there. He might have a draft board on his ass but all that is beyond his control. Deal with it when it came down. If ever.
He spins a fantasy about what it will be like to live in Oregon, in Portland. Does she realize every week they could hear live music?—everyone plays Portland, sooner or later. He saw the laser Zep show there. She’d get off on it in a major way. Oregon’s a lot like Maine—not so frigging cold—but also green and thinly populated, with ocean to one side and mountains to the other and people who don’t care to live in each other’s pockets. They wouldn’t have to stay forever, just long enough to get her through high school.
“This is crazy,” she keeps interjecting but she’s into it, watching his mouth as if a shower of gold coins were falling out of it instead of this wild-ass fantasy. And when he tells her about the laser show he saw and imitates the heads in the audience, she laughs until she has to hold her stomach. She rolls over and buries her face in the pillows so her giggling won’t carry down the hall to his folks.
He runs down and she rolls over on her back and looks up at him. She sits up and sniffs and wipes her eyes.
“Shit,” she says. “I almost wish it would happen.”
They have to look each other in the eye then.
“It’s possible,” he insists. “It’s a fallback position.”
He sees she wants to believe it. He’ll just have to make it happen for her.
“Come on,” he says, “we gotta get you back downstairs.”
The baby fussing and Pearl shushing her provides cover for Deanie to tiptoe to the stairs. Back in his room, he pops out the Gear Daddies and slots a mixed dub, a Duran Duran single in six different versions. Music for meditating on the day’s game. They had smashed Chamberlain’s zone so decisively, icebreaker through rotten ice, the other team had never recovered. The next one will be tougher. Have to be careful not to get overconfident, lose their edge. The season’s going fast now. Everything’s going fast. School. Everything.
Waking on his stomach as the tape whispers and then clicks over to the next side, he realizes he is still on top of the covers. The clock says 1:09. His headphones have shifted forward. He readjusts them as the power mix of “Violence of Summer” begins—the A side of the dub—and he wonders how many times the tape has looped through the machine.
Next to him, the bed shivers with someone else’s weight. It’s Deanie, kneeling on the edge, watching him. He laughs sleepily but he is intensely awake. On hands and knees, she crawls
