VISUAL AID 16.0
I couldn’t help but stare at her (her left arm boa-constricting her hip) like an investigator inspecting fingerprints on a bedpost, desperate to find the truth — if only a smudge of it. I knew it was an absurd thing — lunacy, guilt and love couldn’t be eked out by connecting freckles, or shining a tiny light in the dugout of a collarbone — but I couldn’t help myself. Some of the things Jade had said had stuck to me. Could she have purposefully drowned that man? Had she really slept with Charles? Was there a lost love hiding somewhere in her outskirts, her periphery — Valerio? Even when she was in a sullen, distracted mood, as she was now, Hannah still grabbed one’s headlines, shoved other less captivating stories (Dad, Fort Peck) to page 10. FADE OUT: Dad, Fort Peck (my dream he’d go play Che in the Democratic Republic of the Congo). FADE IN: Hannah Schneider twisted along the couch like a piece of shimmering trash that had washed up on a beach, her face speckled with sweat, her fingertips nervously playing with the seam meandering through her dress.
“So you didn’t make it to the dance?” I probed, my voice flimsy.
The question shook her awake; it was obvious she’d forgotten the question of why I was here, that I’d just shown up in a four-door Chevy Colorado truck in Sunburst Orange, unannounced, with no shoes. Not that I minded; Dad was a man who always assumed he was the Primary Subject, Group Focus, Chief Plan Under Discussion, so the fact that Hannah, after I’d mentioned my fight with him, blatantly snubbed him, shook him off as a nonevent — it was kind of fantastic.
“Things ran late,” she said blandly. “We made pie.” She looked at me. “Jade went, didn’t she? She stormed out of here saying she was going to find you.”
I nodded.
“She can be a strange girl. Jade. Sometimes she can say things that are — how should I…well, they’re horrifying.”
“I don’t think she means anything by it,” I suggested quietly.
Hannah tilted her head. “No?”
“Sometimes people say things simply to fill silence. Or as a way to shock and provoke. Or as exercise. Verbal aerobics. Loquacious cardio. There are any number of reasons. Only very rarely are words used strictly for their denotative meanings,” I said, and yet Dad’s comments from “Modes of Oration and the Brawn of Language” weren’t making the slightest dent in Hannah. She wasn’t paying attention. Her gaze was snagged somewhere near the piano in the dark corner of the room. And then, scowling (lines I’d never noticed before darting through her forehead), she reached over the arm of the couch, yanked open the end-table drawer and seized a half-empty pack of Camel cigarettes. She tapped one out, windmilled it agitatedly between her fingers and looked at me with anxious interest, as if I were a dress on sale, the last in her size.
“Surely, you must realize,” she said. “You’re such a perceptive person; you don’t miss anything”—she interrupted herself—“or maybe not. No. She hasn’t told you. I think she’s jealous — you speak so lovingly of your father. I’m sure it’s hard for her.”
“Tell me what?” I asked.
“Do you know anything at all about Jade? Her history?”
I shook my head.
Hannah nodded, and sighed again. She fished a pack of matches from the drawer and lit the cigarette quickly. “Well, if I tell you, you have to promise me you won’t say anything to any of them. But I think it’s important that you know. Otherwise, on nights like this, when she comes to you so angry…she was drunk, wasn’t she?”
Slowly, I nodded.
“Well, on occasions like — well, like tonight, I can understand if you’d feel”—Hannah thought hard about what’d I’d feel, biting her lip like she was deciding what to order off a menu—“confused. Disturbed, even. I know I would. Knowing the truth will put everything into context for you. Maybe not immediately. No — you can’t understand what something is when you’re close to it. That’s like looking at a billboard an inch away. We’re all…what do they say…farsighted…or is it near — but later, no, that’s when”—she was talking all of this over with herself—“yes, that’s when it always becomes clear. Afterward.”
She didn’t immediately continue. She contemplated, with narrowed eyes, the fuming end of her cigarette, the tatty ears of Old Bastard who’d crept over to her, licked her kneecap and then slumped to the rug, tired as a summer fling.
“What do you mean?” I asked softly.
A shy, sort of mischievous smile was sneaking into her face — though I couldn’t be certain of this; every time she moved her head the yellow lamplight raced across her cheekbones and mouth, but when she faced me fully it dashed away.
“You can’t tell anyone what I tell you,” she said sternly. “Not even your father. Promise me.”
I felt a nervous knife-stab in my chest. “Why?”
“Well, he’s protective, isn’t he?”
I supposed Dad was protective. I nodded.
“Yes, well, it’d traumatize him, I’m sure,” she said distastefully. “And what’s the point of that?”
Fear began to course through me. It made me woozy, like I’d injected it into my arm. I found myself rewinding the last six minutes, trying to figure out how we’d taken this bizarre detour. I’d shown up, intent to perform a quiet, un-choreographed routine on Dad, but I’d been shoved into the wings, and here she was, the seasoned artiste commanding the stage, about to begin her monologue — a terrifying monologue by the sound of things. Dad said it was imperative to avoid people’s fervent confidences and confessions. “Tell the person that you must leave the room,” he instructed, “that you ate something, that you’re ill, that your father has scarlet fever, that you feel the end of the world is imminent and you must rush to the grocery store to stock up on bottled water and gas masks. Or simply fake a seizure. Anything, sweet, anything at all to rid yourself of that intimacy they plan to lay on you like a slab of cement.”
“You won’t say anything?” she asked.
For the record, I did consider telling her Dad was riddled with smallpox, that I had to race to his bedside to hear his humble and heartfelt Final Words. But in the end, I found myself nodding, the unavoidable human response when someone asks if you’d like to hear a secret.
“When Jade was thirteen, she ran away from home,” she said, waiting for a moment, letting those words land somewhere in the darkness on the other side of the room before continuing.
“From what she told me, she was raised to be a very rich, spoiled girl. Her father gave her everything. But he was the worst kind of hypocrite — he was from oil money, so he had the blood and suffering of thousands on his hands, and her mother”—Hannah raised her shoulders, shivered theatrically—“well, I don’t know if you’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting her, but she’s someone who doesn’t bother to get dressed. She wears a bathrobe in the middle of the day. Anyway, Jade had a best friend growing up — she told me this — a beautiful girl, fragile. They were like sisters. She could confide in her, tell her everything under the sun — you know, the kind of friend everyone wants but never has — for the life of me, I can’t remember her name. What was it? Something elegant. Anyway”—she flicked ashes off her cigarette—“she was considered problematic. Was caught stealing for the third or fourth time. She was going to be sent to a juvenile detention center. So she ran away. Made it all the way to San Francisco. Can you imagine? Jade? Atlanta to San Francisco — she was in Atlanta at the time, before her parents divorced. That’s twenty-nine-hundred miles. She hitchhiked with truckers and families she encountered at rest stops and was finally picked up by the police at a drug store — Lord’s Drugstore, I think it was. Of all names, Lord’s Drugstore.” Hannah smiled and exhaled, the smoke tripping over itself. “She said it changed the course of her life. Those six days.”