The Fading Read online

  ‘But how I am supposed to—’

  ‘We just have to get by,’ she cut him off. ‘One day at a time.’

  ‘Do I have to go back to school?’ he said.

  His mom studied him, then laughed. ‘Do you want to?’

  ‘I hate it.’

  ‘Then you can stay home with me. I will teach you and we’ll have more fun, won’t we?’

  He smiled at how easy this was, then frowned. ‘But what about Dad?’

  ‘You let me worry about your father. He’s a man, and like lots of men he deals with things by pretending they aren’t there. He’s not as strong as you or me and he’s afraid of what will happen if he sees the truth. He doesn’t understand, but maybe … maybe someday he will. And if he doesn’t, that’s his problem, not ours, okay?’

  Noel nodded, but he didn’t think she understood how serious it was.

  His mother leaned across the bed and held him tight. ‘I love you so much. So so much.’

  ‘I love you too, Mom.’

  She rose unsteadily from his bed. At the door, when she paused and looked back at him, he did not like the way she was grinning. Like an enchanted girl in a fairy tale, not any way a mom was supposed to look.

  ‘What’s it like, Noel? What’s it like to disappear?’

  He couldn’t find the words, so instead he slipped off his bed and reached under the frame. He pulled a shoe-box out and opened the lid. Inside was a leather pouch for his marbles. He emptied it of the money and held up the rolled bills and coins, an offering and a confession.

  His mom’s eyes went wide. ‘Where did you—’

  ‘I took it from the store. In Mr Hendren’s class.’

  ‘Where they sell the pencils and stuff?’ She was staring at the money, not him.

  He nodded.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Mr Sobretti told me to. He said I might need it.’

  Noel’s mother jerked back a step. She looked at him quickly, then away, as if she were embarrassed, or afraid. Her hand was at her chin, scratching her throat.

  ‘Keep it,’ she said, backing away. ‘You deserve it. You deserve the whole world, baby. And I’m so sorry I can’t give it to you.’

  She closed the door and padded quickly away.

  Noel leaned back on his pillows, thinking about how Mr Sobretti had been right. His parents couldn’t help him. He was going to have to be careful, and smart, and take what he could so that one day in the future when things got hard and he was on his own, he would be able to survive.

  He fell asleep to the gentle murmur of her crying sounds reaching through the walls, long after he’d given up waiting for the heavy chime of his father’s key ring dropping on the table by the front door.

  8

  Noel was in the garage looking for something more to pawn when he noticed the gasoline can by the lawn-mower and decided to burn his father’s house down. The can was only about a third full but there was enough to soak a good patch of carpet. The fumes would fill a room and he could use one of the matchbooks piled high in the oversized wine glass on the hearth – apparently Happy John and his new fiancée Lisa had been to a lot of bars and restaurants and hotels and fancy places in the past few years – and there’d be a helluva boom.

  Noel had come to the house in Westminster eight weekdays in a row and there was nothing left for him. He’d eaten all the good food. He’d emptied the change jar on the dresser of its silver. The checkbooks were of no use beyond ordering a couple pizzas, but last time he did that the Domino’s guy had scoffed. He couldn’t pass them at a bank and there was no real money hidden in the house. After the power tools and the antique radio and the box of cheap jewelry, there was nothing more he could steal, at least not by carrying it home strapped to the back of his motorcycle.

  The Honda was parked two blocks away at the clubhouse, chained to a fence post. Someone in the homeowners’ association might remember that, but Noel doubted it. You wouldn’t automatically connect a motorcycle with a fourteen-year-old kid, even if that kid was, as his last family counselor had said to Rebecca, fourteen going on eighteen. And anyway, who cared if he got caught? What would his dad do? Send him to juvie hall? Military school? None of those places could keep him.

  He carried the metal can back into the kitchen and set it on the counter. He was thinking rags, he was thinking Molotov. He looked under the sink. There was a green bucket with rubber gloves, a tile brush, sponges – and some scraps of Happy John’s discarded t-shirts. Noel placed a handful beside the fuel. He unscrewed the steel nozzle and bunched a scrap of rag into the hole, but it fell through, into the gas.

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘What are you doing?’

  Noel turned. A girl was standing on the other side of the kitchen, near the hall with the coat rack. She looked younger than him, which meant they were probably close to the same age. She was short and thin with black hair bobbed like half the girls wore it at the last school Noel had attended before giving up again. The strap of her book bag cut diagonally across her chest, between the slightest of dual rises. The bag was Army Surplus but the rest of her was name brand, and she looked like the kind of girl who could evolve either way. Punk, prep, rat, rocker, athletically sexless. He couldn’t help staring at her, morphing her through costumes, his own leanings still undefined. Her eyes shone with a fearless frigid intensity.

  ‘It’s cool,’ he said. ‘My dad lives here.’

  ‘I know, but what are you doing?’ She took a couple of steps into the kitchen and set her hands on her hips.

  ‘What?’ He was a child denying the obvious.

  Her eyes went to the gas can and widened: that’s what.

  ‘Who are you?’ he said.

  ‘Julie.’

  ‘Julie?’

  ‘Uh, Wagner? My mom lives with your dad? Which means I do, too.’

  He’d known Lisa had a daughter, not that she’d been imported. ‘Where’s your room?’

  ‘The basement. I keep it locked, so you better not have even.’

  ‘Oh.’ He didn’t know there was a basement, hadn’t found the door on his first rounds. She was new here, probably felt like an alien in the new school, the new life. This was comforting to believe.

  ‘So, what the hell are you doing?’

  ‘Just cleaning up.’ Noel screwed the nozzle back on and carried the gas can back to the garage, set it against the wall near the lawnmower, and returned to the kitchen. He washed his hands at the sink, reminded himself to breathe normally while feeling the stab of her disbelieving eyes at his back.

  ‘When did you guys move in?’ he said over his shoulder.

  ‘You’re not supposed to be here.’ Julie’s footsteps pattered across the floor, and the sound of collapsing books came as she slung her bag into a dining-room chair. She appeared on the other side of the breakfast bar, a fence between them.

  ‘Why not?’ Noel smiled in challenge. ‘He’s not my dad any more?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, chewing the inside of her cheek. ‘You just aren’t.’

  ‘Are you going to tell on me?’

  ‘That depends.’

  ‘On what?’

  ‘On what you were doing with the gas can.’

  Noel laughed. ‘I rode my bike. It ran out of gas.’

  ‘Bikes don’t use gas.’

  ‘What grade are you in?’

  Julie’s upper lip curled. ‘Ninth, but I skipped fifth. Why, what grade are you in?’

  ‘I’m not in a grade, Julie. I don’t go to regular school, which you probably heard. And my bike is a motorcycle, so, yes, it does run on gas.’

  ‘You’re not old enough,’ she said. ‘You don’t even have a license.’

  ‘So?’

  She crossed her arms. ‘You’re totally lying.’

  ‘Why do you care? Where did you come from?’

  She wouldn’t let it go. ‘But why did you have to come all the way here for gas?’

  He dried his hands and sighed. ‘I guess
I didn’t.’

  They stared at each other. He could see that she knew the real reason, or some bullshit school counselor version of it. He could hear his dad talking to her and Lisa at the dinner table. Noel is a troubled boy. He’s very fragile. He’s not to be in the house without supervision. He shrugged and looked away. He couldn’t look at her too long or else she would know he was already thinking things about her.

  ‘It’s okay if you miss your dad,’ she said.

  Noel laughed and went to the fridge. He needed a Coke or something, then he was getting the fuck out of here. ‘Why would I miss an asshole like John?’

  ‘He’s not an asshole,’ Julie said.

  ‘Really? What is he, then?’

  ‘He’s really nice. And sometimes nice is enough. That’s what my mom says.’

  ‘And what do you say?’

  ‘We lived in Florida. My mom came here first, for her job. Then my dad sent me to visit and I decided not to go back.’

  ‘Good for you.’ Noel slammed the fridge. ‘Tell your mom to buy some Coke.’

  ‘You’re the one who’s been eating all the food.’

  He glared at her.

  ‘They thought it was me for the first few days, as if I would eat frozen egg rolls and bean burritos.’

  ‘They know I’ve been here?’

  ‘Well, duh. Who else would it be?’

  ‘Shit. I gotta go.’ He headed toward the front door.

  ‘I won’t tell,’ Julie said behind him.

  ‘Like I give a crap!’ He slammed the door. Outside, walking to the clubhouse, he felt like a jerk. But then again, screw her. Some little spoiled brat moves in, acts like she owns the place. Didn’t buy his story about the gas. Probably’d tell her mom as soon as Happy John’s new trophy wife got home. Although, really, Noel had seen Lisa and she wasn’t much of a trophy. She had that nutty permed hair and a serious butt.

  Julie, though. Not bad at all. Why hadn’t he seen her before today? Home from school early? He looked at the Swatch he’d absorbed at the mall the week before he turned thirteen. It was five minutes till three. Stupid. He must have gotten distracted in the garage. Julie the Princess Eighth Grader now had major leverage over him.

  Whatever. He’d find another way to fuck with Happy John, from a distance.

  He went back again the next day. Told himself it was to look for more money. His stomach was queasy during the ride out to Highway 36. Told himself it was because he didn’t eat breakfast. He rode up and down the street, to see if anything was different. The shitheel hadn’t called his mom last night, so maybe the brat had kept her word. He locked the Honda up near the pool and took his time walking back to the house. The neighborhood was all gray. Gray three-story town houses with sharp angles, with a line of yellow and blue flags lining the streets, like this was a yacht club. In the middle of Colorado. Yuppieville.

  On her way out the door for work this morning, his mom had asked him what he was going to do today.

  ‘Same thing I do every day,’ he said from the bathroom, into the mirror. He had a new pimple in the small cluster that liked to form at the left corner of his mouth. He needed a haircut. ‘Read some books and do the exercises.’

  Three years ago, when he had turned eleven, Rebecca took him to Boulder Bookstore on the Pearl Street Mall and bought him $300 worth of books. She started him on Jonathan Livingston Seagull and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The White Mountains, gradually led him into Johnny Got His Gun, Gatsby, 1984. ‘I knew it,’ she told him midway through the first year, after administering a standardized test one of his former teachers gave her. ‘You’re reading at the eleventh-grade level.’

  After he got a taste for it, losing himself in the safe and simple bubble that was reading for pleasure, his mom let him wander his way through the Beat writers. On the Road, Howl, Naked Lunch. Reading pacified him at first, giving him an excuse to stay in bed all day, hiding from all those eyes. The blink, as he had come to think of it, came now and then, but he was safe at home and stopped worrying about it so much. At times it was like a private shame, taking him when he was alone. In the shower. When his mom was at work, masturbating to old copies of Playboy he’d stolen from his dad.

  Once, during that first year, he found himself so engrossed he did not even pause his reading when the hands holding Deliverance vanished and the warped paperback hung suspended over him, its pages turning themselves, as if the Word was being handed down to him from a divine source, saturating his brain with poetic and terrifying survival images that seeped into his dreams, waking him only after the book fell on his belly, which had reappeared as he slumbered away the rainy afternoon. He was in love with books, the frail lives and unmasked adults inside, the adventure and wickedness and heroism (and the cruel costs of all these things).

  After he was hooked, her quizzes began. Sometimes Rebecca read the books in parallel, assigning him reports on topics she chose from the texts. He spent most of his twelfth year in biographies and, as a reward, crime novels. Aging boxers. Felons. Women who liked knives. Last year he’d trudged through a seemingly endless historical phase. Shogun, Exodus, and more Michener than any boy should have to endure. Sometimes he lay in bed and stared up at the book titles on his shelves and imagined them as courses he would never get to take at a real college, filling in the discussions and lectures with imaginary professors and midterms, moccasin-wearing classmates and cute rich girls of his own choosing. His geography and history and science were Centennial, Hawaii, Poland, Space. His friends were Malcolm X, The Old Man and that boy on the Sea, George and Lenny, the Animals on the Farm, and Charlie, the little girl who could start fires.

  Rebecca employed New Age weirdos to entice him into philosophy, which only left him tired and frustrated. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, with its strangely inviting lavender cover, its quiet angry dad and troubled kid, was a puzzling exception. He read it twice and then carried it everywhere for a few months, dipping into its looping metaphysical passages while his mom dragged him around on her errands. Though he didn’t understand a lot of it, it made his brain hurt in a good way, serving as a sort of Jungle Gym for the mind, and gave him the idea to buy the Honda.

  Maybe it was being cooped up in his room for three years. Maybe it was puberty. Whatever the reason, he was now sick of books and wanted to be around real people. He’d seen a good deal of the world without hardly ever leaving the house. He craved experience.

  ‘How’s it going?’ his mom said, rummaging in her purse, cursing lost keys. She was always running late, forgetting something, coming back two or three times before the Corolla was safely away. ‘I’m sorry I haven’t been much help lately.’

  ‘It’s fine. A little more math and I can take the GED and get it over with.’ He walked into the kitchen to look for some breakfast. ‘We’re out of waffles,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll go to the store tonight.’ She pulled on a dirty purple windbreaker one of her boyfriends had left behind and he didn’t understand why she kept wearing it. It was too big for her and made her look like the people they had seen in line for food stamps. ‘Anything else you need?’

  ‘Milk, cereal, bread, lunch meat, Cheetos, bacon, Rice-A-Roni, some steaks—’

  ‘Okay, Noel, I’m doing the best I can. Jesus.’

  He came out of the kitchen which, in their apartment off Kalmia, was only about four steps from the front door. ‘Do you need some money?’ he asked her.

  ‘No. Absolutely not.’

  ‘Right.’ He dug into his jeans and handed her two crumpled twenties he’d taken from the open cash register at the grocery store last week. He hadn’t been in the bubble, but being in the bubble had taught him the value of opportunity, and the ease with which the common blindness of others presented it.

  She hesitated, but not for long. ‘This isn’t right.’

  ‘Have a good day at the restaurant,’ he said, and kissed her on the cheek.

  ‘I promise someday—’ Rebecca started.
/>
  ‘I know, I know.’

  ‘For such a tall drink of water, you’re a good kid,’ she said. ‘Stay out of trouble.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  Tico’s was Boulder’s busiest Mexican restaurant. With her tips it was almost enough, but also, in another way, it was not even close to enough.

  The TV was on, so he didn’t hear Julie come through the front door. Of course, he hadn’t heard her come in yesterday, either, so maybe she was just really quiet. He’d been telling himself he would leave by one. Then one thirty. Then two. But every time he got up to leave he wound up pacing the kitchen, checking the cupboards, as if hidden in one of them was the answer to the question: if he really wanted to fuck with Happy John, what was he doing here? He could have ridden to the store – the new Richardson Sporting Goods mega-store at 88th and Wadsworth – and slashed his dad’s tires. He was eating the last Oreo when the sound of her book bag crashing onto a dining-room chair startled him.

  ‘What a surprise,’ Julie said.

  He wiped black crumbs from his lips, thinking of his pimples. Her lips were shiny with some kind of pink gloss and she was wearing designer jeans, a plain white shirt buttoned to her throat, and a gold chain with a cross. She planted her hands on her hips again, stepping back into her bossy role. He swallowed, licked his teeth.

  ‘Well?’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Exactly. What do you want?’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell on me?’ he said.

  ‘Maybe I did.’

  He smiled. ‘Nope.’

  ‘What’s your problem anyway? What did you do?’

  ‘No idea what you’re talking about,’ Noel said.

  ‘Your dad said you got kicked out of school. You had to go to family counseling. Then you went away for a while.’

  Noel went to the fridge and drank milk, watching her over the carton his nose was stuck in. He guzzled for effect.

  ‘Really?’ she said. ‘You really have to do that?’

  Noel belched.

  Julie made a horrible face. ‘You filthy pig. No wonder they locked you up.’

  ‘They didn’t lock me up. I went into an exile of my own choosing. And Happy John’s the one who went away, remember?’