Hiding Read online

  My mom was interested that I finally had a girlfriend, and wanted to tell me things so I wouldn’t mess it up, because when she asked me how I felt about Laura and I told her, to tell the truth, she looked a little worried.

  And she would know. My mom did a lot of dating in her day when she was a teen—and I guess she was pretty good at it because she wound up marrying my dad when she was nineteen. Maybe she was too good at it, because when I think about it, nineteen’s still pretty young.

  She wouldn’t really talk but just sort of recited from her roster of thoughts about how it is with boys and girls and love and everything, and I will admit that I did get a lot out of what she said. But I didn’t actually accept it all as a sort of, like, gospel of truth, because in lots of ways—though she never actually admitted it—what she told me about how to treat girls was sort of like a criticism of how my dad was. I mean, if she said a boy should do some particular thing, or not do it, it was usually in reaction to something I knew for a fact had to do with my dad.

  Anyways, it was her who told me that you can’t worship a girl. They don’t like it. She said if you get too gushy, they start to feel sort of embarrassed by it, and even ignored after a while, like you’re in love with love and not really them, and they start to wonder, you know, if it’s real.

  That kind of surprised me.

  What’s funny is that my mom left my dad just a few days after Laura left me. That’s the reason why my dad got totally bummed out, but to tell the truth, things hadn’t been so hot between them for months.

  He tried keeping it together, but after she left, he stopped going to work. I mean, it’s not like he can’t go back or anything, because he sells real estate and works for himself and can take as much time off as he wants, but he just sort of lost all his vital energy, which is what he always said.

  I can’t really say what happened between them. I mean, my mom always complained about how there was never enough money, which is what made my dad mope around a lot, because he felt it was a problem he just didn’t know how to solve.

  But other than that they loved each other a lot. My dad was really kind of crazy about my mom. They were crazy about each other. A kid can tell.

  Then something happened, and everything changed.

  They never really told me about it. It was obviously something personal—something very, very personal that you just can’t explain to your kid. And after my mom left, my dad just lay around on the couch, mainly, watching TV.

  Anyways, the night this all started was like that. He was on the couch. The TV was on. I was standing in the hall and I could see him. He looked sort of dazed, or glazed, really—I mean his eyes looked glazed, shining in the dark with little moving pictures of the idiotic show he was watching. I swear he seemed hypnotized.

  Now, usually under these sort of circumstances when he sees me out there, he’ll look over and ask me something, usually whether I want to play rummy, because he’s a big rummy fan and used to play it with my mom all the time.

  But this night I’m talking about, which was right at the end of last August—right at the end of summer vacation—he didn’t say anything. He just lay there like a zombie, wearing the same old T-shirt he’d had on since that morning when he’d gone out to clip the hedges.

  To tell the truth, I knew exactly how he felt. After Laura left me—after she’d told me how her mom had said I was “just a boy” and that she didn’t see me as a guy who’d grow up to “accomplish anything important” like Laura’s dad and everything—I used to mope around a lot too. I’d also lie in bed watching TV shows, stuff I’d never even heard of. I felt so wiped out, I mean so incredibly devastated that Laura had insisted we had to break up, that I just couldn’t move, and I was tired all the time, I mean so completely and totally exhausted, that all I could do was lie around, which of course just intensified how much I was thinking about her.

  All I could think about was how beautiful she’d become when she’d left me.

  I mean, she was beautiful when we met, but the funny thing was that she became more and more beautiful, until she really did become, at least for me, truly the most beautiful girl in the world, which finally happened the day she said we had to break up.

  You wouldn’t believe how she told me, either.

  She said, “My mom says you’re just a boy.”

  We were standing on this playground behind my old elementary school. We used to go there a lot just for privacy, but this time there were lots of kids on the jungle gym and I heard their voices and saw them running around.

  I instantly knew what Laura’s words implied, and it made me feel terrible, like I was stuck being just like the little kids on the jungle gym and I’d never really grow up.

  I looked at her darkly, and said, “What else should I be? I am a boy. Does she want you to go out with somebody older? Does she want you to go out with a man?”

  “That’s a pretty stupid thing to say,” she said, like I was mocking her mom’s wisdom. She winced at me. “Don’t be so sarcastic!”

  “I can’t help it,” I said. “I feel sarcastic.” I felt my voice tremble. “Are you leaving me?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  I just looked at her. Her face was so incredibly beautiful—so hard and cold and incredibly beautiful. And the awful thing was that it was becoming more and more beautiful every second, like it was somehow becoming exponentially more beautiful, to use a math phrase, because isn’t that how things get with a girl when she’s ending everything and you just can’t stop it? And her eyes, which are dark brown, by the way, sort of very liquid dark brown, looked so incredibly hard. I knew her mind was made up about us no longer being together, and nothing I could say would ever make a difference, and I just couldn’t stand it.

  “I’ve thought about it a lot,” she said, watching the kids play, so all I could see was the side of her face. Then she turned to me, her beautiful face hard as stone. “I agree with my mom. She can’t understand why we’re together. She says you’re doing nothing with your life. You’re just not an achiever. She said that. I agree with her. You’ll never accomplish anything important. She’s right.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I mean, I didn’t want to put her mom down, but really, how did she know what I would be when I’m older?

  Maybe I will accomplish something important.

  I probably won’t, that’s true—I mean, there’s certainly no groundwork for that ever happening, and certainly my dad didn’t do much to kind of propel me ever going in that direction, so maybe she was totally right, but it just sounded so mean and petty.

  Not that the idea hadn’t already sort of occurred to me.

  Like, sure, of course it had, and I’d even seen that book called Rich Dad Poor Dad, all about how only successful dads can raise successful kids, and I must admit the whole theme of it completely bummed me out, because who can really go laying these sort of curses on a kid?

  What Laura said hurt so bad I could hardly talk. But what I did manage to say was I thought her mom couldn’t say that for sure about me, because nobody knows what will happen to them later on, and that anyways I thought my life would begin when I was twenty-five.

  I know I already told you I said that, but I think it’s important for you to know that it was Laura I was talking to, and she got a little depressed by it, like I said.

  At first I thought it was a very clever, relationship-saving thing to say, because it did, at least, suggest that maybe in the future I might have a sort of turnaround. I even wanted to tell her how I’d made plans all about it, hidden plans that I’d never told anybody, about how when I was twenty-five I’d be old enough to be on my own and get out of my nosy neighborhood and live downtown in some big old empty hotel, and that she could even do it with me, and we’d be free to kind of be anonymous and just be ourselves away from anyone who wanted to tell us what to do or be or anything like that. For months I’d really dreamed and hoped about that and made all kinds of plans, espec
ially since I’d met her.

  But the truth is, saying the thing about being twenty-five only worked totally against me and buried me even deeper, because she was obviously looking for further reasons to dump me—I could see that she needed them—because her eyes looked hard, like I said, but still had a little sympathy—I could detect just the dimmest little glint of sympathy—but that little glint extinguished completely, and she said, “I can’t wait that long. I need a boy whose life begins right now. I just can’t love you anymore.”

  And that was that. That ended it. She walked off. I saw she was crying really hard, but she didn’t turn when I called after her, so what difference did tears make?

  What I didn’t understand was a look I saw in her face right before she walked off. It was like maybe she loved me but she wouldn’t give in to it, and it, like, tortured her. I’d never seen anything so terrible, and I swear I didn’t just imagine it. I mean, I could see her face sort of trembling with a struggle, because right under the coldness I saw such warmth and beauty and sadness and humanity, which is what I always saw in her face, and I think it was meant for me.

  But it didn’t matter. Her mind was made up. I didn’t say a thing. I just watched her walk away, crying.

  I can’t even tell you how my stomach felt. I was losing her forever, and it reminded me of building some incredibly intricate thing, like some big complicated Tinkertoy thing I might have made as a kid, and now it was all falling apart and all I wanted to do was locate the secret crux place where I could reconnect things so it would stay standing, and I’m fumbling around everywhere but I can’t find the secret crux place, because no matter where I reach and grab and try to steady it, the thing just keeps falling until it goes ka-plotch.

  Anyways, that’s why I knew how my dad felt. I sort of related to it. And probably his ka-plotch was even worse than mine—I mean, it had to be, because after all, I wasn’t married to Laura or anything. We hadn’t even talked about marriage, although I will admit that the idea had certainly occurred to me many times.

  But with my dad, he’d been married to my mom for, like, seventeen years and they’d had me, for god sakes, so I knew he was having a very hard time, and I will say that I felt pretty sorry for him, although in all honestly he was not too much fun to hang out with—I mean, it had gotten to the point where I could barely stand seeing him just lying around, and all I could think of at that moment was going outside to sort of get away from him.

  So I said, “Hey, Dad. I’m going to go take a walk for a while.”

  He didn’t even answer me—just sort of made a little groan and maybe waved his hand.

  I waved back, and in a few seconds I was out the door and crossing the yard in the dark.

  Chapter

  Three

  The porch light was out in front of our house because my dad had forgotten to turn it on, and as I came across the grass I saw all these hedge clippings lying all over the place, because he’d sort of given up doing the clipping when he was only halfway done and didn’t bag everything up and take it out back like he usually does. I guess he just didn’t have the energy; that whole summer he’d complained about never having much vital energy. For a second I thought I’d bag the clippings, because the lawn did look a little shabby, and in my neighborhood, certain nosy neighbors—especially our next-door neighbor—are very sensitive about things like that. But to tell the truth, I felt sort of tired already because it was pretty late, and I knew there’d be no harm in waiting to bag it all up in the morning.

  I left my yard and crossed the street beside my house and went over to where this big red-brick building is, and I crept into the shadows behind some hedges and stood still. You see, in my neighborhood, just like I mentioned with my next-door neighbor, you have to be careful, because people, in a way, are always sort of spying on you.

  My next-door neighbor—his name is Mr. Miller, by the way, and he used to be the dean of this girls’ college out in Harford County, but he’s retired now—actually sits on his porch every day—you can see him through the gray screens—and I swear if he’s not watching for the slightest disunity in the houses and yards all around him—and especially in our house, because it’s closest—then I don’t know what he’s doing out there. At least this is what my dad has always said about him, and I have to say I agree.

  People in my neighborhood really are a bit nosy—actually more than a bit. I think it’s why they move here, if only to exercise that option. My dad says that too, and he’s lived here all his life, so he ought to know. He says you have to watch out because what the neighbors do is start casting aspersions on you if you aren’t careful to do everything right. They keep up on you. I don’t mean like a Neighborhood Watch to look out for vagrants and outsiders or things getting stolen or kids coming up on porches and wrecking stuff—although there has been plenty of that around where I live, and I even know lots of kids who have done it. I don’t mean that sort of criminal stuff, because about that, naturally, all anybody’d do is call the cops and have the person arrested, and he’d be in trouble and have to pay the penalty, et cetera, et cetera.

  It’s a different kind of thing I’m talking about.

  A different kind of trouble.

  In my neighborhood it’s like you feel you’re in trouble all the time, but you know you haven’t really done anything to deserve it. So you keep trying to do little things to get yourself out of the trouble you feel you don’t even deserve, little things like keeping your yard perfectly straight or your house perfectly painted and your car new or at least perfectly clean. Because if you don’t, you feel you’ll have to pay some sort of awful penalty, although in the absolute truth, nobody ever says what the penalty might be, or even what the rules are that you’re trying to keep up with. It’s really kind of an easy place to sort of look down on yourself all the time, because you get to feel everybody has maybe a sort of snooty attitude toward you and your whole family, and when you come right down to it, they don’t think you really belong. And I don’t mean just little things like bagging up your clippings right away after cutting them, but more important stuff like what people think of the school you go to or what your dad does for a living.

  It’s a place where people can sort of act like you don’t even exist, even if they actually know you really well and used to be your friends, which is exactly what happened with Mr. Miller’s niece and nephew, who are twins my age. We used to play together all the time when they came by to spend the day with their uncle. But one day I came out when they were chucking this ball to each other in their yard, and they didn’t come into mine when I asked them. They didn’t even look at me. Then one of them, still without looking at me, said, “We’re not allowed to play with you anymore.”

  I stood there speechless for a minute.

  Then I asked, “Why?”

  But neither of them answered. They just went on chucking the ball back and forth like a couple of zombies. It occurred to me to maybe yell at them or go in their yard to get their attention, but from the blank zombie looks on their faces, I just didn’t want to. I mean, it didn’t really seem to be worth it, and anyways, I figured it would probably just make things worse. So I just stood there looking at them, feeling kind of sick, until I went back in my house.

  I don’t know what it was. I never found out. Maybe Mr. Miller had heard my parents arguing too loud or maybe he thought something was wrong with our house. It’s impossible to say, but from that day on, those kids acted like I wasn’t even there.

  And let me tell you, it’s experiences like that—and I’ve had plenty of them—that put your imagination in a certain place, a certain sort of paranoid place, so it’s really no wonder why I went around hiding all the time.

  Maybe this all sounds crazy to you and you’ve never heard of a neighborhood like mine. But I’ve been around a bit and seen lots of other neighborhoods, and I know for a fact that my neighborhood’s not the only one like that, believe me.

  So when I crossed the stree
t this night I am telling you about, I made sure to leave my yard at the farthest possible point from the streetlight on the corner, and I dashed across the street like a shadow, because you never know when somebody might be watching.

  True, I didn’t see anybody at any window, and you better believe I’d paused to take a look. I didn’t even see any light at any window, so I realized it was probably a little later than I’d thought, probably almost midnight, maybe even later, because now, when I considered it, my dad had been watching one of those long sales shows on TV, one of those celebrity-hosted infomercial sales shows—I think it was about a new kind of blender—and usually they only sell cable time for that sort of junk way past prime time.

  But nobody was watching me, at least as far as I could tell.

  Still, it actually looked like the houses were watching, because they all had this sort of dark, shuttered look, and they all look a little similar anyway, all built on variations of the same sort of plan just like my house, with three stories and slanted roofs and brown shingles, and windows on the second level that look like lidded eyes if you factor in the shades, and porches with low roofs and fence railings that with only the barest added imagination always look like a grinning mouth with gritted teeth.

  Anyways, I just stood there.

  Hidden.

  In the bushes.

  Or rather, behind this long hedge that runs along the bottom of this concrete ramp that leads up to the entrance doors of this big red-brick building, which by the way is the only commercial building for miles around, because my neighborhood really isn’t zoned for business.

  The air felt pretty cool. I hadn’t brought my windbreaker. That was a big bummer, because I own a pretty good windbreaker; my mom had bought it for me just about a week before she left. But I didn’t have it on me, and I sure wasn’t going to go back into the house to get it.