The Schwa Was Here

The way I see it, truth only looks good when you’re looking at it from far away. It’s kind of like that beautiful girl you see on the street when you’re riding past in the bus, because beautiful people never ride the bus—at least not when I’m on it. Usually I get the people with so much hair in their nose, it looks like they’re growing sea urchins in there—or those women with gray hair all teased out so you can see their scalp underneath, making me wonder if I blew on their hair, would it all fly away like dandelion seeds? So you’re sitting on the bus and you look out through the dandelion heads, and there she is, this amazing girl walking by on the street, and you think if you could only get off this stupid bus and introduce yourself to her, your life would change.

The thing is, she’s not as perfect as you think, and if you ever got off the bus to introduce yourself, you’d find out she’s got a fake tooth that’s turning a little bit green, breath like a race­horse, and a zit on her forehead that keeps drawing your eyes toward it like a black hole. This girl is truth. She’s not so pretty, not so nice. But then, once you get to know her, all that stuff doesn’t seem to matter. Except maybe for the breath, but that’s why there’s Altoids.

The Schwa wanted to know the truth more than anything else in his life. So now he was looking at bad teeth, bad skin, and a funky smell.

I know what happened in my house that night, but what happened in the Schwa’s house after he got home I can only imagine. All I know is what happened after. The radioactive fallout, you might say. But I’ve had plenty of time to imagine it, and I’m pretty sure it went something like this:

The Schwa gets home to find his father sitting up, feeling help­less. He’s too much of a wreck even to play guitar, because for once, he’s actually noticed that his son wasn’t home. Maybe he’s even been crying, because the Schwa is more like the father, and he’s more like the kid.

The Schwa comes in, sees him there, and offers no explanation. He waits for his father to talk first.

“Where were you, do you have any idea how worried, blah blah blah—”

He lets his dad rant, and when his dad is done, the Schwa, still keeping his hands calmly in his pockets, asks, “Where’s Mom?”

His father is thrown. He hesitates, then says, “Never mind that, where were you?”

“Where are Mom’s pictures?” the Schwa asks. “I know there must have been pictures. Where are they?”

Now his father’s getting scared. Not the same kind of fear he had as he waited for the Schwa to get home, but in its own way just as bad. The Schwa’s afraid, too. It’s the fear you feel when you’re off the bus, standing in front of that beautiful/horrible girl.

“Don’t tell me you don’t remember,” the Schwa says. “Tell me why there aren’t any pictures.”

“There are pictures,” his father finally says. “They’re just put away, that’s all.”

“Why?”

“Because she left us!” he yells.

“She left you!” the Schwa screams back.

“No,” his father says, more softly this time. “She left us.”

And Calvin, no matter how much he tightens his jaw, he can’t deny the ugly green-toothed truth. She left him, too.

They look at each other for a moment. The Schwa knows if it goes on too long, it will end right here. His father will clam up, and everything would go back to the way it was. But Mr. Schwa, to his credit, doesn’t wait long enough for that to happen. “Come on,” he says, and he leads his son out to the garage.

In the corner of the garage, hidden beneath other junk, is a suitcase. He pulls it out, opens it up, and takes out a shoe box, handing it to the Schwa.

The Schwa is almost afraid to open it, but in the end he does. He has to. Inside he finds envelopes—at least fifty of them. Every one of them is addressed in the same feminine handwriting. None of them have been opened, and all are addressed to the same person.

“These were written to me,” he says.

“If she wanted to talk to you, she could have come herself. I told her that.”

“You spoke to her?”

“She used to call.”

“And you never told me?”

His father’s face gets hard. “If she wanted to talk to you,” he says again, “she could have come herself.”

The Schwa doesn’t know which is worse—what his mother did, or what his father had done. She left, yes, but he made her disap­pear.

“When did the letters start coming?” the Schwa asks.

His father doesn’t hold back anything anymore. He couldn’t if he tried. “A few weeks after she left.”

“And when did the last one come?”

His father doesn’t answer right away. It’s hard for him to say. Finally he tells him, “I can’t remember.”

He can’t look his son in the face, but the Schwa, he can stare straight at his father, right through him. “I spent our savings to rent a billboard,” he tells his father. “A big picture of my face.”

The man doesn’t understand. “Why?”

“To prove I’m not invisible.”

The Schwa does not cry—he is past tears—but his father isn’t. The tears roll down the man’s face. “You’re not invisible, Calvin.”

“I wish I had known sooner.”

Then the Schwa goes into his room, closes the door, and goes through the letters one by one. Some have return addresses, some don’t, but it doesn’t matter because the return address is never the same. It’s the postmark that tells the best story. Fifty letters at least. .. and almost every postmark is from a different state.

21. Why I Started Vandalizing Brooklyn

The Schwa came to school on Monday with the shoe box of letters. He showed it to me as I stood at my locker before class, but I couldn’t read his emotions. He seemed changed in a basic way. You know—it’s like how when an egg is boiled it looks the same on the outside, but it’s differ­ent on the inside. I didn’t know what I was looking at now—Schwa, or hard-boiled Schwa.

“Can I read the letters?” I asked.

He held them back. “They were written to me.”

“Well, will you at least tell me what she said?”

He thought about the question and shrugged, without look­ing at me. “Mostly she writes about the places she’s been. ?Wish you were here’ kind of stuff.”

“But... did she say why she did it? Why she left?”

The Schwa did that weird not-looking-at-me shrug again. “She talked about it in her early letters. Said she was sorry a lot, and that it had nothing to do with me.” But he didn’t explain any further. Then he held out an envelope. “This is the most re­cent one. It’s about six months old.” I looked at it. The envelope had no return address. “It’s from Key West, Florida—see the postmark?”