Laura Adamczyk - Hardly Children

This is fun! I say, sitting down in my lounger. We never get to hang out.

We hang out all the time.

I meant before, I guess. I crunch into a chip. Aren’t you having fun? I ask.

Not really, no.

Emily’s phone rings on the table between us. She looks at its face then presses a button on the side, silencing it and turning it over. It could be La Quinta or the deep voice from the other day or someone else entirely. Emily rubs her eyes then moves her hand to her chest, letting it rise and fall there.

Emily, I say.

What. Her head is down, her face hard beneath her sunglasses.

The music has clicked over to a funk song with lots of bass and brass. I stand up and start doing this dance I made up where I pretend my arms don’t work. I leave them dead and hanging and get them flopping around by moving my legs and torso.

Emily.

I’m not looking at you, she says.

I move so that my shadow is cast over her. I twist back and forth so hard that my arms fly up and hit their opposite shoulders.

Stop it, she says.

Em, I don’t know what’s happening—my arms don’t work.

You look like an idiot, she says, but I know she doesn’t mean it; her mouth is smiling without her permission and her shoulders start to shake. This is my favorite part. When she’s laughing at me but doesn’t want to. When she tries not to encourage me, but her smile keeps cracking through.

Stop it! she cries. She pushes her hand into her smile as though to crank it back down, unable to stand the way we give each other joy.

BACK AT HOME,I pass her room on the way to the shower. The door is cracked and I can hear her soft crying.

Em? I push open the door.

She’s sitting on the edge of her bed. She raises her face, eyes red-rimmed and too wide, like I’ve caught her at something. I walk in and lower myself next to her, and the depression of the bed sinks our shoulders together. The water in my hair, full of chemicals from the pool, has bled through my T-shirt and dampened my back.

Will was never really my favorite person, I say.

She lowers her head and sniffs.

He was always a little goofy, a little cheesy for my taste.

She slowly shakes her head.

Didn’t you tell me once that he got all of his jokes from a book? A joke book?

She puts her hand to her brow.

And, truly, the incessant video game playing was a little tired, like maybe he was kind of a clich é? Of a dude? Who plays video games?

It’s not Will, she says, breathing deeply. She rubs at her eyes and gets to telling me some things. She goes back in time and then moves forward. I sit beside her, and it takes so long, me not saying a word, that my hair dries up into its natural curl and the light of the day passes over us.

IN THE SHOWER,I don’t have much loose, so I work my fingers through my hair and tug. I tug and tug until I have enough.

I’M NOT LONELY WHEN I’M WITH YOU

It’s all I want to say, but I wash and condition and pull out more in the rinse. I gather it into a loose disc the size of my palm and smush it onto the wall in case she needs it.

THOMAS THE LIBRARIANhas written down some names and numbers on a piece of paper for me. I’m searching them out with the grave intensity of an Indiana Jones type, imagining the reward to be bigger than a bunch of books. It was endearing to watch him do his job—his face wrinkling with thought, writing with one of those little golf pencils. He sends me to Fiction first, then Science/Health/Medicine and Biography, then back around to Poetry. It feels like I’ve been given a map to a foreign city or a set of very complicated instructions. By the time I’m done, my arms and chest ache with the books’ weight.

It would be easier if it were just one book, I say, relinquishing the pile to him.

What book would that be? he asks. His smile is soft and curious. He scans the books, one at a time, dissembling my stack on one side then making a new one on the other.

How to Be , I say, shrugging. How to Get from Here to There . How to Help Yourself … or Others .

Well, here’s a good place to start, he says, and slides them to me.

THE FOLLOWING WEEKI’m sitting on the edge of Emily’s hospital bed, surrounded by pink balloons, pink cards, and a spray of boldly, unnaturally colored flowers in a vase. I made the mistake of talking to Cousin Stacy when she called me the other day, and now it feels like a bunch of people have come over uninvited.

I’ve got an idea for a movie, I tell Emily. She’s tired but awake, quiet.

She sighs, less annoyed than usual, which for her is like saying, Yes, please tell me all about it.

Things keep going wrong, I say.

She nods her head and swallows, a movement she makes look painful. They put a tube down her throat for the anesthesia. It’ll be a week or two before we know for sure how everything went.

But then maybe at the end things start to go right again, I say.

There’s a quiver at the side of her mouth. That’s stupid, she whispers. Her eyes are down.

Why?

Because you can’t just tack a happy ending onto something like that. It’s cheap. It’s not real. She closes her eyes and swallows again.

I regard all the balloons and flowers on the two side tables. Pink, I think. Nobody knows us. I grab a gift mug from behind one of the vases. It’s big and white with pink, looping script on it, filled with candy wrapped in gold, crinkly plastic.

Hey, look at this! I say. I can’t tell in which way I’m trying to cheer her up. The ironic, Can you believe this shit sort of way, or the Hey, believe this way.

She takes it in her hand, reading the inspirational message on the side. No doubt she’s wondering when these words ever worked or what simpleminded soul they might have worked on. She turns the thing over and drops the candy into her lap, rears back, and, despite the bandages, throws the mug across the room. It hits the opposite wall with a ping. I go over and pick it up. It’s mostly fine, save for a spot on the rim, now chipped like a tooth.

I look up at her with golden eyes. Now we’re talking!

I bring the mug back and set it on the table in case she wants to throw it again. Emily doesn’t know, but I made a few phone calls earlier. One to the man she used to be married to and the other to you-know-who. Will’s voicemail voice sounded needlessly chipper, like nothing even close to bad had ever happened to him before. You-know-who was a muffled ghost, her voice startlingly the same, as familiar to me as my mother’s or Emily’s. I don’t know when they’ll get back to me or what will happen when they do, but I’m trying to manage my expectations, to think about it in such a way that any outcome will be desirable. Like this vase of flowers. After the leaves fall off the stalks and the night nurse comes and throws it all away, dumping out the stinky water, I tell myself it won’t be such a big deal.

THE FATHER ARRIVESevery dead summer to drive the girls west. No destination named, only a direction and the promise of mesa, mountains, stone-dry heat. Two weeks—the longest uninterrupted time they spend with him all year. They pack sleeping bags and pillows, Roald Dahl books, T-shirts, and bathing suits. It is the four of them in the cab of his truck, the short trailer hitched behind. A tape deck and three tapes. The shift from mother to father is swift. Do you have everything you need? A hug, a hug, a hug, and a wave.

At rest stops the girls imagine a mirror family on the other side of the highway, except they envision a father and a mother, a son or daughter or both at the end of her hand or hands. The girls do not need to say or even think that a father with his daughters is not like a mother with her daughters. At the stops, losing him for minutes, they coalesce, become a team. Three girls among women washing their hands, three girls among women’s bodies, the air thick and hot, the sweet smell of a stranger’s shit. In the lobby they look at state maps set behind glass, the red You Are Here dot. We’ve gone this far, are going to go this far .