Fade Away Part 2
*not mine. Author: Joni_Slade. Credit to her and characters from AIO*
He’s weaseled his way into our house again. He came last night with some line about hearing we needed our car repaired, and he’d do it for a place to stay, and Mom finally agreed even though Dad didn’t believe Richard could do it. Whatever. I’m back in front of my window tanning my legs, and incidentally the window faces our driveway. Richard keeps walking by and blocking my sun. I can hear him whistling even with the window closed. He’s got a rolled-up Odyssey Times in his back pocket and is wearing a shirt that looks a lot like one from a prison uniform, only covered in motor oil. He shaved this morning, which makes him look like his old self, which makes it harder to be around him. I’d go somewhere else, if there was anywhere to go on a Sunday.
I get so sick of this that I throw down my magazine and stalk back to his old room. Mom’s redecorated it since he left, but that’s where he’s staying for now. He brought a bag with him, and I unceremoniously dump its contents onto the bed.
Utterly boring. Wouldn’t you expect an ex-con to carry something mysterious or interesting? No--just a couple changes of clothes and a sponge bag. Unreal.
I look carefully around the room. He’s set up his laptop at the desk--aha! I turn it on, wait impatiently for it to load.
My mouth falls open at what I see. It’s loaded a page of indecipherable text, combining numbers and letters and characters I’ve never seen before. I wonder frantically if I’ve broken the thing, but I know computers better than that. This looks like a program. It’s asking me to enter a password to proceed, but that’s the only part of the page in English. I shut the thing off and leave in a huff. Not even Richard’s computer will speak to me.
I wile away the afternoon in front of the TV and ignore Richard when he comes in smelling like cars, and ten minutes later when he walks by smelling like soap. I hear him puttering in the kitchen and ignore that, too.
After awhile the food he’s making smells so good that I just have to get out of there. I grab Dad’s lighter and pack of cigarettes off the mantelpiece and storm through the kitchen and out the back door, plop down on the steps of the porch, and light up.
The screen door creaks open and bangs shut as Richard joins me. I watch him surreptitiously, wanting to see his reaction to me smoking, but he doesn’t even seem to notice. He just sits down on the opposite side of the stairs and opens the newspaper he’s been carrying around all day.
"Spanakopita’s in the oven," he says, eyes on the paper. What could possibly be so interesting about Odyssey?
I puff smoke into the sky. Enough smoke and I won’t smell the delicious food cooking behind me anymore.
"Your dad’s Greek." I hadn’t meant to say it. It just happened.
He folds the paper shut. "No," he says. "Half Greek."
"How’d you find out?" I ask, disappointed in being wrong. Mom always refuses to talk about Richard’s dad.
"How did you?"
I shrug. "Snooping."
"I’m impressed," he says, eyeing me. "It took me a long time to track him down."
"You met him? I never knew."
"Remember that bus trip I took for my eighteenth birthday?"
I snort, then cough in the smoke. How could I forget? Mom and Dad had refused to let him back in the house after he came home. Turns out they’d just been waiting for him to turn eighteen--turns out he’d been in too much trouble.
"I didn’t meet him," Richard continues. "But I saw him. That’s all I really wanted to do."
"So you’d know," I mutter. "So you’d know he didn’t fade away." Flicker, and fade. I hug myself a little tighter and lean against the railing of the porch.
"Rae--" Richard begins.
"So when are you leaving?" I interrupt. "After you talk to that farmer tomorrow?"
"It sort of depends. I’d been . . . thinking of staying."
"You fix that car today?"
"Yeah."
"So, you’re done being useful. I don’t think Mom and Dad will let you stick around much longer, not even after they said they forgive you." Out my window last night, I’d heard them talking out here--Richard saying he needed to ask their forgiveness, them all perplexed and granting it--if not, Dad had insisted, their charity. But he hasn’t asked me.
Richard set his newspaper down. "Guess I can’t count on your floor anymore, huh?"
My floor. My empty floor. We’d wait until midnight, even on school nights, and then I’d signal with a flashlight through my window. He’d be waiting outside, and I’d let him in the front door if I knew Mom and Dad were asleep, and he’d creep inside and crash on my floor--he couldn’t sleep anywhere else, or Mom and Dad would see him. That was until he started making good money--before he could afford a place of his own. After his grade-changing scheme took off, he left me entirely--and that was over two years ago. A lot can happen in two years! The cigarette trembles in my fingers--he never even considered--my floor might be occupied, thank you very much!
I notice an oil rag he left dangling on the arm of one of the porch chairs, and consider flinging my cigarette at it. Guess who they’d blame if our house burns down? But my hand is shaking so hard that I can only stub out the cigarette on the stair.
"You can’t count on my floor," I say, my voice like a croak. Humiliating. I look at him to make up for it--give him a good hard stare--and he crumbles.
He’s so good at steeling himself against the outside world, that this so rarely happens. I know why he does it. I remember the big brother he was--always helping mom with me, with the house, acting like everything’s fine with him because there was nobody who’d listen if he complained. He learned early on not to be a burden. But now, gone is his charm, his easygoing friendly manner--his asking for forgiveness, his casual happiness--he keeps up the act for everyone else, always, but he drops it for me--drops it like he can be himself, like I can’t judge him, like I’m not even here. Flicker. Fade.
He looks up into the sky and swallows. "What is with everyone?" he demands. "I say I’m sorry. I ask their forgiveness--I need it!"
Needs their forgiveness--Lucy’s forgiveness, and she won’t give it to him.
"I’m trying really hard to understand why--the looks I get on the street around here."
Looks of contempt--I’ve seen those, too, when anybody bothers to look at all.
He gets to his feet and starts pacing, clutching his hands together. "I’m out of there, you know? It means I’ve done my time."
Losing his cool.
"And you, Rae--"
I--
"You of all people should know!"
I of all people need him to be strong.
"How would you feel if nobody ever forgot about that time you stole--what was it?"
"Earrings," I reply, blinking slowly up at him and suddenly wondering what he’s talking about.
"Yeah--everyone forgot about that! Everyone forgave you!"
"I faded," I murmur.
"But you can’t forgive me for going to jail!"
I pause in the middle of fishing another cigarette from the box. "Jail? I’m not mad about that."
Richard stops pacing and turns to face me, starlit from all sides. "Then why?"
I take my time lighting my cigarette. "You abandoned me," I say at last, looking down.
"I couldn’t very well be here when I was in jail." He sounds annoyed.
"Not that! Before that! You--you forgot about me. You were always hanging out with Lucy Goody-Two-Shoes Cunningham-Schultz!"
"Rae, that was--"
"That was--that was ridiculous!" I leap to my feet, two years of suppressed rage spilling over. "What kind of freak are you, huh? What kind of big brother--half brother--ignores his sister--who gave him a place to sleep, by the way--to hang out with some other girl who’s ten years younger than him!"
My shouts fade into silence. Richard grabs the railing of the stairs as if catching himself.
"Eight," he says softly. "Eight years younger."
"What’s the difference?"
His hand tightens on the railing. "Two years. Two years makes a big difference, Rae."
And I know he isn’t talking about Lucy anymore. I listen to the crickets and puff on my cigarette while Richard is like a statue, his shadow long against the grass.
"I never knew you felt I’d--I’d abandoned you. I never thought you really cared one way or the other."
"Well you should have realized." The last word sounds like I’m crying, so I swallow and try to think about something else.
"But I’m glad I didn’t," he says. "I might have gotten you involved in what was happening. I’m glad you weren’t a part of that--it was dangerous. It’s what landed me in jail."
"Tell me about it," I demand.
He’s looking right at me and for a moment I think he’ll refuse, but then he starts in, about how he first met the Blackgaard who later created Blackgaard’s Castle, and about all the things Blackgaard had him do, and about why he’d really been hanging out with Lucy--to get information from her. I imagine what would have happened if he’d confided in me--I could have befriended Lucy--we’re closer to the same age, anyway. I could have found out that password. I think about the burning barn. I could have gone along--been his caddie, carried his pipebombs and napalm or whatever. Better that than where I’d been--fast becoming object, singular.
"I could have helped you," I tell him when he’s done. You could have helped me! Long time ago, but I’m still there--there and fading, fading fast. I used to be real, before.
Richard sits down next to me with a sigh. "You could have helped me," he agrees. "But it’s better that you didn’t. What’d you think of my computer?"
I blink hard at the sudden change of subject, and toss the butt of my cigarette into the yard. I guess I hadn’t tried to hide the fact I’d looked though his stuff.
"Is it in another language or something?"
"Some of it. It’s a cipher I made up myself--in prison. I was bored."
"So nobody else can understand it?"
"I’m the only one. You want to learn?"
"I can’t--remember how bad I am at English?"
"You weren’t bad. You ask all the right questions. That’s a good mind for codes."
All of a sudden there’s paper spread on the porch and he’s marking it up with a pen. I try not to grin like an idiot in my delight. He’s teaching me his secret cipher--and we’ll be the only two who know. He draws a conversion chart of numbers and letters, and it looks pretty simple. Then he writes some words.
"You translate that," he says, and goes inside.
I throw the pen at him when he returns. "This makes no sense!"
He hands me a plate and I set it aside, determined to ignore it.
"Well, there’s more to it than this," he says, indicating the conversion chart. He explains that there are many references to other things I’ll have to learn--pool slang, computer code, and books. He lists titles I’ll have to find and read--Don Quixote, King Rat, Their Eyes Were Watching God--whatever books he could get his hands on in prison. I pick up my plate and start to eat, the feeling of enjoying food--enjoying life--so unfamiliar. This sounds like hard work, but it’s something we’ll share--something of substance--something there, real, important. Like black marks on white paper, bold as anything. Real.
Richard continues to write, while I read.
Of course, Richard does not stay. There is nothing for him to stay for. Me? Well, what use is a written code if you’re free to talk to someone in person?
I hear from him now and then, brief unsatisfactory updates. I write back just as vaguely. Things are going better for me now, but I don’t want him to know how much better. If he thinks I am fine without him, he might never return.
One day, I get a postcard from him that Dad almost throws away.
"It looks like some kind of gimmick," he says, handing it over. He can’t even tell who it’s from.
I have to refer to a few books to translate it, but at last it’s done. It says:
Be my eyes and ears?
Yrs,
Richard
I half-run to Finneman’s Market for a newspaper. It’s about the election for mayor, which I haven’t been paying attention to. There’s a debate that night, and I decide to attend.
I watch, unseen, unseeable. But I hear, and learn, and report back to him in our code. I find I like it this way--they’re not my stories. I am neither subject nor object. I am not a player on the board.
I may be in the background, but I will never fade away.
He’s weaseled his way into our house again. He came last night with some line about hearing we needed our car repaired, and he’d do it for a place to stay, and Mom finally agreed even though Dad didn’t believe Richard could do it. Whatever. I’m back in front of my window tanning my legs, and incidentally the window faces our driveway. Richard keeps walking by and blocking my sun. I can hear him whistling even with the window closed. He’s got a rolled-up Odyssey Times in his back pocket and is wearing a shirt that looks a lot like one from a prison uniform, only covered in motor oil. He shaved this morning, which makes him look like his old self, which makes it harder to be around him. I’d go somewhere else, if there was anywhere to go on a Sunday.
I get so sick of this that I throw down my magazine and stalk back to his old room. Mom’s redecorated it since he left, but that’s where he’s staying for now. He brought a bag with him, and I unceremoniously dump its contents onto the bed.
Utterly boring. Wouldn’t you expect an ex-con to carry something mysterious or interesting? No--just a couple changes of clothes and a sponge bag. Unreal.
I look carefully around the room. He’s set up his laptop at the desk--aha! I turn it on, wait impatiently for it to load.
My mouth falls open at what I see. It’s loaded a page of indecipherable text, combining numbers and letters and characters I’ve never seen before. I wonder frantically if I’ve broken the thing, but I know computers better than that. This looks like a program. It’s asking me to enter a password to proceed, but that’s the only part of the page in English. I shut the thing off and leave in a huff. Not even Richard’s computer will speak to me.
I wile away the afternoon in front of the TV and ignore Richard when he comes in smelling like cars, and ten minutes later when he walks by smelling like soap. I hear him puttering in the kitchen and ignore that, too.
After awhile the food he’s making smells so good that I just have to get out of there. I grab Dad’s lighter and pack of cigarettes off the mantelpiece and storm through the kitchen and out the back door, plop down on the steps of the porch, and light up.
The screen door creaks open and bangs shut as Richard joins me. I watch him surreptitiously, wanting to see his reaction to me smoking, but he doesn’t even seem to notice. He just sits down on the opposite side of the stairs and opens the newspaper he’s been carrying around all day.
"Spanakopita’s in the oven," he says, eyes on the paper. What could possibly be so interesting about Odyssey?
I puff smoke into the sky. Enough smoke and I won’t smell the delicious food cooking behind me anymore.
"Your dad’s Greek." I hadn’t meant to say it. It just happened.
He folds the paper shut. "No," he says. "Half Greek."
"How’d you find out?" I ask, disappointed in being wrong. Mom always refuses to talk about Richard’s dad.
"How did you?"
I shrug. "Snooping."
"I’m impressed," he says, eyeing me. "It took me a long time to track him down."
"You met him? I never knew."
"Remember that bus trip I took for my eighteenth birthday?"
I snort, then cough in the smoke. How could I forget? Mom and Dad had refused to let him back in the house after he came home. Turns out they’d just been waiting for him to turn eighteen--turns out he’d been in too much trouble.
"I didn’t meet him," Richard continues. "But I saw him. That’s all I really wanted to do."
"So you’d know," I mutter. "So you’d know he didn’t fade away." Flicker, and fade. I hug myself a little tighter and lean against the railing of the porch.
"Rae--" Richard begins.
"So when are you leaving?" I interrupt. "After you talk to that farmer tomorrow?"
"It sort of depends. I’d been . . . thinking of staying."
"You fix that car today?"
"Yeah."
"So, you’re done being useful. I don’t think Mom and Dad will let you stick around much longer, not even after they said they forgive you." Out my window last night, I’d heard them talking out here--Richard saying he needed to ask their forgiveness, them all perplexed and granting it--if not, Dad had insisted, their charity. But he hasn’t asked me.
Richard set his newspaper down. "Guess I can’t count on your floor anymore, huh?"
My floor. My empty floor. We’d wait until midnight, even on school nights, and then I’d signal with a flashlight through my window. He’d be waiting outside, and I’d let him in the front door if I knew Mom and Dad were asleep, and he’d creep inside and crash on my floor--he couldn’t sleep anywhere else, or Mom and Dad would see him. That was until he started making good money--before he could afford a place of his own. After his grade-changing scheme took off, he left me entirely--and that was over two years ago. A lot can happen in two years! The cigarette trembles in my fingers--he never even considered--my floor might be occupied, thank you very much!
I notice an oil rag he left dangling on the arm of one of the porch chairs, and consider flinging my cigarette at it. Guess who they’d blame if our house burns down? But my hand is shaking so hard that I can only stub out the cigarette on the stair.
"You can’t count on my floor," I say, my voice like a croak. Humiliating. I look at him to make up for it--give him a good hard stare--and he crumbles.
He’s so good at steeling himself against the outside world, that this so rarely happens. I know why he does it. I remember the big brother he was--always helping mom with me, with the house, acting like everything’s fine with him because there was nobody who’d listen if he complained. He learned early on not to be a burden. But now, gone is his charm, his easygoing friendly manner--his asking for forgiveness, his casual happiness--he keeps up the act for everyone else, always, but he drops it for me--drops it like he can be himself, like I can’t judge him, like I’m not even here. Flicker. Fade.
He looks up into the sky and swallows. "What is with everyone?" he demands. "I say I’m sorry. I ask their forgiveness--I need it!"
Needs their forgiveness--Lucy’s forgiveness, and she won’t give it to him.
"I’m trying really hard to understand why--the looks I get on the street around here."
Looks of contempt--I’ve seen those, too, when anybody bothers to look at all.
He gets to his feet and starts pacing, clutching his hands together. "I’m out of there, you know? It means I’ve done my time."
Losing his cool.
"And you, Rae--"
I--
"You of all people should know!"
I of all people need him to be strong.
"How would you feel if nobody ever forgot about that time you stole--what was it?"
"Earrings," I reply, blinking slowly up at him and suddenly wondering what he’s talking about.
"Yeah--everyone forgot about that! Everyone forgave you!"
"I faded," I murmur.
"But you can’t forgive me for going to jail!"
I pause in the middle of fishing another cigarette from the box. "Jail? I’m not mad about that."
Richard stops pacing and turns to face me, starlit from all sides. "Then why?"
I take my time lighting my cigarette. "You abandoned me," I say at last, looking down.
"I couldn’t very well be here when I was in jail." He sounds annoyed.
"Not that! Before that! You--you forgot about me. You were always hanging out with Lucy Goody-Two-Shoes Cunningham-Schultz!"
"Rae, that was--"
"That was--that was ridiculous!" I leap to my feet, two years of suppressed rage spilling over. "What kind of freak are you, huh? What kind of big brother--half brother--ignores his sister--who gave him a place to sleep, by the way--to hang out with some other girl who’s ten years younger than him!"
My shouts fade into silence. Richard grabs the railing of the stairs as if catching himself.
"Eight," he says softly. "Eight years younger."
"What’s the difference?"
His hand tightens on the railing. "Two years. Two years makes a big difference, Rae."
And I know he isn’t talking about Lucy anymore. I listen to the crickets and puff on my cigarette while Richard is like a statue, his shadow long against the grass.
"I never knew you felt I’d--I’d abandoned you. I never thought you really cared one way or the other."
"Well you should have realized." The last word sounds like I’m crying, so I swallow and try to think about something else.
"But I’m glad I didn’t," he says. "I might have gotten you involved in what was happening. I’m glad you weren’t a part of that--it was dangerous. It’s what landed me in jail."
"Tell me about it," I demand.
He’s looking right at me and for a moment I think he’ll refuse, but then he starts in, about how he first met the Blackgaard who later created Blackgaard’s Castle, and about all the things Blackgaard had him do, and about why he’d really been hanging out with Lucy--to get information from her. I imagine what would have happened if he’d confided in me--I could have befriended Lucy--we’re closer to the same age, anyway. I could have found out that password. I think about the burning barn. I could have gone along--been his caddie, carried his pipebombs and napalm or whatever. Better that than where I’d been--fast becoming object, singular.
"I could have helped you," I tell him when he’s done. You could have helped me! Long time ago, but I’m still there--there and fading, fading fast. I used to be real, before.
Richard sits down next to me with a sigh. "You could have helped me," he agrees. "But it’s better that you didn’t. What’d you think of my computer?"
I blink hard at the sudden change of subject, and toss the butt of my cigarette into the yard. I guess I hadn’t tried to hide the fact I’d looked though his stuff.
"Is it in another language or something?"
"Some of it. It’s a cipher I made up myself--in prison. I was bored."
"So nobody else can understand it?"
"I’m the only one. You want to learn?"
"I can’t--remember how bad I am at English?"
"You weren’t bad. You ask all the right questions. That’s a good mind for codes."
All of a sudden there’s paper spread on the porch and he’s marking it up with a pen. I try not to grin like an idiot in my delight. He’s teaching me his secret cipher--and we’ll be the only two who know. He draws a conversion chart of numbers and letters, and it looks pretty simple. Then he writes some words.
"You translate that," he says, and goes inside.
I throw the pen at him when he returns. "This makes no sense!"
He hands me a plate and I set it aside, determined to ignore it.
"Well, there’s more to it than this," he says, indicating the conversion chart. He explains that there are many references to other things I’ll have to learn--pool slang, computer code, and books. He lists titles I’ll have to find and read--Don Quixote, King Rat, Their Eyes Were Watching God--whatever books he could get his hands on in prison. I pick up my plate and start to eat, the feeling of enjoying food--enjoying life--so unfamiliar. This sounds like hard work, but it’s something we’ll share--something of substance--something there, real, important. Like black marks on white paper, bold as anything. Real.
Richard continues to write, while I read.
Of course, Richard does not stay. There is nothing for him to stay for. Me? Well, what use is a written code if you’re free to talk to someone in person?
I hear from him now and then, brief unsatisfactory updates. I write back just as vaguely. Things are going better for me now, but I don’t want him to know how much better. If he thinks I am fine without him, he might never return.
One day, I get a postcard from him that Dad almost throws away.
"It looks like some kind of gimmick," he says, handing it over. He can’t even tell who it’s from.
I have to refer to a few books to translate it, but at last it’s done. It says:
Be my eyes and ears?
Yrs,
Richard
I half-run to Finneman’s Market for a newspaper. It’s about the election for mayor, which I haven’t been paying attention to. There’s a debate that night, and I decide to attend.
I watch, unseen, unseeable. But I hear, and learn, and report back to him in our code. I find I like it this way--they’re not my stories. I am neither subject nor object. I am not a player on the board.
I may be in the background, but I will never fade away.