Every Visible Thing
Every Visible Thing
Lisa Carey
FOR TIM
Contents
Acknowledgments
Prologue: The Fureys, 1975
1. Camera
2. Stopwatch
3. Zippo
4. Light Bulb
5. Scissors
6. Fur Coat
7. White Dress
8. Thermometer
9. Bicycle
10. Envelope
11. Igloo
12. Toothbrush
13. Casserole
14. Hammer
15. Lipstick
16. Underoos
17. Fish Tank
18. Pajamas
19. Pills
20. Wings
Epilogue: The Fureys, 1986
About the Author
Praise
Other Books by Lisa Carey
Copyright
About the Publisher
acknowledgments
Thanks to the MacDowell Colony for time, space, and pampering, and to my MacDowell friends, especially Erin Flanagan, for lunch breaks and laughter. Thanks to my editor, Jennifer Brehl, her assistant, Katherine Nintzel, Michael Morrison, Lisa Gallagher, Pam Jaffee, and all those at HarperCollins who have been so wonderful through every step of the last three novels. Thanks to my agents, Christy Fletcher and Elizabeth Ziemska; to my favorite bookstores, Brookline Booksmith and Longfellow Books in Portland; to my family and friends—unpaid editors and therapists; to my grandfather, Thomas J. Carey, for selling my books to everyone he meets; to my husband, who must have thought being married to a writer would be more exciting; and to my three best friends, Sascha, Beth, and Marianne, who remember what I was like in high school and love me anyway.
prologue
the fureys, 1975
Lena’s favorite part of kindergarten is the end, when her brother comes to pick her up. At two P.M. on the clock where she is learning to tell time, Hugh descends from the second floor where they keep the fifth-graders, and her class is let loose to gather coats and clean out their cubbies. The kindergarten is not a room with desks, but an open pit with massive red-carpeted stairs leading down, each one as high as Lena’s waist. Her brother likes to run down to the center of the pit and back up again, because he remembers, when he was in kindergarten, climbing these stairs like she does now: as if they are mountains.
Hugh is a giant towering over toggle coats. He is as tall as the mothers, who arrive in dribbles, flushed and hair blown wild as if they have run all the way. Hugh helps Lena gather her projects, rolls up her finger paintings, and carefully stacks the macaroni sculptures on top of one delicate, official envelope, somehow making it all fit into her monogrammed canvas book bag. He refuses to carry her Spider-Man lunchbox, even though it was once his, a boy’s lunchbox, a girl in her class has told her, as if this involves some sort of betrayal. Lena can’t always remember which things belong to boys and which to girls; the distinctions are recent and make little sense to her.
Outside it is October. This morning she left her new sky-blue coat open, but now it is chilly, and Hugh helps her thread the imitation bone tusks through the loops. In her pockets she finds leaves ironed in the school’s waxed paper—yesterday’s project already forgotten. As soon as they are out of sight of the park, where eighth-graders run laps and the Extended Day kids form clusters by age in between the jungle gyms, Hugh accepts her backpack and lunchbox so she can run ahead unencumbered. She kicks through leaf piles, worries briefly about the new scuffs on her saddle shoes, skips a block to the intersection she is forbidden to cross alone, sprints back and asks her brother if he will play LEGOs with her when they get home. “Maybe,” he says, refusing to promise. She pleads until he says he has homework, which silences her. Homework is serious, sacred. Lena doesn’t have any because kindergarten, according to her brother, is merely a practice year before real school begins.
On these walks home Hugh is quiet. Lena doesn’t mind because she knows once they’re home they’ll have to tell their mother and then their father all about their days, and on the way there he likes to stay in his head. Hugh is very smart. There is talk of him skipping the sixth grade, going directly to the third floor where there is a separate teacher for every subject. He will get annoyed if she interrupts his thinking, so she thinks with him. She thinks about her birthday, which is the day after the day after tomorrow, wonders whether her mother will make a bunny-shaped cake with coconut fur, or if she’s old enough now to have an ice-cream cake from Carvel. She thinks about Halloween and the angel costume her father made for Hugh that she is now big enough to wear without toppling over from the heavy wings. She thinks about Thanksgiving at her grandmother’s house where she will play unsupervised with children called her second cousins, as if the first batch has been misplaced. She thinks about her snowsuit with the clip-on mittens and igloos and Christmas and smelling the tree and new pajamas and her mother’s reindeer cookies and the baby doll at church and the Charlie Brown Special about the tiny tree that nobody wants. She knows as she march-swish-march-swishes through the leaves that all these things are coming because of the smell of the cold and the apples in her lunchbox and the darkness that ends her day too early and seals her inside.
Their house, a brown-shingled two-family, is at the end of a dead-end street. Lena’s family lives on the first floor and a group of nursing students live on the second, in an apartment that is both identical and completely different from theirs, because of the furniture and photos and strange smells. The nursing students change every year, except for Joyce, who is already a nurse, and needs roommates to pay the rent. They all adore Hugh, call him a ladies’ man, and let him try their stethoscopes. Lena doesn’t know what to say to them. With their bickering perfumes and starched uniforms and pristine white clogs, they seem like a different kind of woman than her mother.
Once home Lena will tack her projects—they mean nothing to her, she has moved on, but this is expected—on the wall-sized corkboard in the kitchen. She will present her mother with a white envelope: her first school photo back from the printer. There is one eight-by-ten framed in the plastic window, behind it are two five-by-sevens, four three-and-a-half-by-fives, and twenty-four wallet-sized. On photo day her mother dressed her in a patchwork blouse, far more girly than what she usually wears, and pink plastic barrettes shaped like butterflies. She does not look like herself; the blue background makes her pasty, and her smile seems on the edge of tears. Her hair is tangled as usual, past the help of the small plastic comb given to her by the photographer’s assistant. When her mother looks at these photos she will sigh a little, then smile and praise and immediately cut along the white bars and release one of the wallet-sizes to tack onto the corkboard. The eight-by-ten will be framed and set next to the series of Hugh’s photos that crowd the built-in bookshelves in the living room. The rest will be sent in cards to her relatives, on which she will be asked to write her name under a note composed by her mother. This will happen on a sunny Saturday morning when she’d rather be outside, long past the time she has forgotten both her pride and her embarrassment over the photo.
Lena prefers the photos her brother takes with his Polaroid Instamatic—given to him on his last birthday. He encourages her goofy poses, doesn’t care what she wears, and gives her the smelly piece of film that the camera spits out. She holds it carefully by its edges, and watches as it slowly develops into her. She likes seeing herself the very next moment, rather than weeks or months later, when so much has happened that she feels like a different girl.
While her mother makes dinner, Lena will play with her baby brother, Owen, spinning, squeaking, and rattling the objects on an activity center that was once hers, the white plastic edges spoiled by tin
y teeth marks. She will watch her mother chop vegetables at the kitchen counter, pausing every few seconds to lift her cigarette from the orange plastic ashtray, laughing at everything Hugh says. Lena will run to answer the door for her father, who thinks it’s funny to ring the bell as if he is a visitor, then watch Hugh play chess with him at the same time as he does his math homework. When Lena whines over the injustice of this, Hugh will help her build another complex in the LEGO city that he started when he was six, and has recently bestowed to her. They will all have dinner together, salad and steak for the grownups, mac and cheese with cut-up hot dogs for what they call their “two-point-three children.” Except Owen doesn’t really eat, just sits in his mother’s lap and sucks a bottle.
After dinner will be her bath, a lonely affair as she is now trusted to clean herself as long as the door remains open and she calls out every few minutes to say she is okay. Her mother will put Owen down in his crib, installed in a curtained-off corner of Lena’s room, and her father will grade papers while Hugh watches the news. Once in her pajamas she might get a few precious minutes with her father, who has recently begun to talk to her the way he talks to Hugh. He asks her what she is learning in school, and she knows instinctively that she must give an interesting, nonbabyish answer. Occasionally, when stumped (most of what she does in school is play games), she makes something up, and she can see, even before her father’s frown, something like a curtain pass across his eyes. Then she will ask him if God is a man, or where heaven is, or what her guardian angel looks like, because these questions are sure to light his eyes and distract him from her childishness. His answers are long and convoluted; he peppers them with phrases like “the Jews believe,” “the Christians think,” and “in the Muslim tradition,” until Lena is completely lost and has forgotten what she asked in the first place. But she nods along, because anything is better than being alone in bed.
Eventually, her mother will come in and say “Lena, bedtime,” though she will look pointedly at her husband, in that way that Hugh once told her means they are teaming up. Her father will tuck her in, tight down to her ankles like a mummy. Hugh is allowed up for another hour, so she will hear his voice, along with her parents’, murmuring importantly in the living room. She will hold her eyes wide open, determined to stay awake as long as everyone else. And she will fall asleep until another day when she will start school—she still does not quite understand this—at the same hour she went to bed.
But home and all that it encompasses are a few minutes away. Right now she is still walking with her brother, the tallest boy in the fifth grade, who, despite his deep thoughts, takes her hand and march-swishes for a few squares of the sidewalk. For the moment all that matters is his slightly sweaty palm around hers, and she wonders, as the leaves fall, laying the path before them, what it is like to stride at the height of a grownup, to be a boy, to dwell on things that are more complicated and farther-reaching than the games you will play in the next hour or day or season. She wonders what her big brother thinks about.
1. camera
1985
The first time I tried killing myself, nobody noticed. This was last year, when I was in the ninth grade. I took a whole package of Actifed, tiny white pills I had to push one at a time through the tinfoil backing. It was the only drug I could find in the medicine cabinet besides vitamins and Owen’s inhaler. The thing is, I’m not sure why I did it, except that I had a test the next day in Ancient Civilizations that I hadn’t studied for. It was an honors class. I used to get all As in grammar school, which was why I was allowed to take it. I’d never failed a test in my life. But I hadn’t been doing my homework, and I’d barely taken notes in class. It had gotten to the point where just seeing the textbook in my bag made me chant you’re dead you’re dead you’re dead, over and over in my mind, until I barely knew what the words meant, but they scared the shit out of me anyway. I took the pills at three in the morning with a bottle of ginger ale. All that happened was my vision went a little funny and then I threw up. By the time my parents woke up I was green and pasty-mouthed and still heaving. I didn’t exactly announce what I’d done, so they thought I had the flu and let me stay home. My mother is in medical school, where she gets to pretend to be a doctor and has to stay over at the hospital about every other night. My dad used to be a theology professor at Boston College, where I was supposed to go someday because it would be half-free, but they fired him. Now he works for a publishing house downtown, editing religious books written by other people. It must be boring because he never talks about it. When Owen and I stay home sick, we do it alone.
For some reason that day, when they were gone, after my stomach settled and I had some toast, I decided to go through Hugh’s stuff. I inherited his room. It’s in the back of the house, far from my parents and Owen, near the sun porch and the back door and the kitchen. They gave me Hugh’s room when I started high school, making a big show out of cleaning him out, not wanting me to feel like I was living with a ghost. They couldn’t go all the way, though, and I found everything in the basement, in banker’s boxes with his name written in black Magic Marker on the contents line.
I took a few things at a time, so they wouldn’t notice. First it was his turntable and his records, which I listened to when the rest of them were asleep. My favorites were the Beatles and Prince, much easier to listen to than the Clash or the Sex Pistols. My brother’s tastes seemed divided between normal music and the loud, screaming, unbearable stuff he must have thought was cool. I tried but couldn’t stand those. Only boys, and the occasional tough, disturbed girl, listen to punk as if it is music.
I brought his books up next, sliding in between my Anne of Green Gables series and Gone with the Wind, Hugh’s mauled copies of The Catcher in the Rye, Invisible Man, The Brothers Karamazov. His Snoopy, with its loose neck and the fur gone gray. I even sneaked a few items of his clothing: a flannel shirt, black fatigues from the army-navy store, the leather jacket with snaps and a dozen zippers, unfathomably left behind. I couldn’t wear these things without my parents recognizing them, so I kept them in my closet, hidden at the far edges behind the confirmation dress I never wore and my old blue toggle coat, which for some reason I refuse to let my mother send to Goodwill. At night, after my parents went to sleep, I would take out the jacket, slip it on over my flannel pajamas, and finish my homework with leather heavy as a warning on my shoulders. (I made up all my work for Ancient Civilizations. I didn’t want things to get so out of control again.) In the tiny zippered breast pocket, I found a smashed, brittle plastic square with one squishy condom inside. This was disgusting, the thought of my brother stashing it in there. He had a girlfriend in the ninth grade, and I wondered if the condom was something he would have actually used, or just wishful thinking. It was kind of exciting after I got over the shock. No one had ever found this before; it was something only I knew. That my brother, at the age of fifteen, had walked around with the promise—or hope—of sex in his pocket. Though the date stamped on the edge of the plastic was from three years ago—apparently condoms expire, just like milk—I left it in there. I liked the idea of it wrapped in the satin lining, still waiting to be used.
It wasn’t until this past summer that I found the film. It was in a box with other photo supplies—printing paper, bottles of chemicals, a metal can of compressed air. Hugh was obsessed with photography. He was the one who took pictures when I was little; my parents only ordered the school photos and took half a roll on Christmas and birthdays. When he was in high school, they let him convert the back bathroom with the broken toilet into a darkroom. He spent his weekends locked in a cube of red light, printing his photos onto eight-by-ten paper, hanging them on a clothesline to dry. There were only a few old photos in the box, mostly rolls of unprocessed film and envelopes full of plastic strips of negatives. It was hard to tell what the pictures were of, except that they involved people. When I held the strips up to the window, the dark and light areas were reversed, so faces looked like black h
oles and trees like lollipop sticks.
I used to think the police took Hugh’s photos, along with all the other evidence they eventually returned. Besides the few pictures framed in the dining room, all of Hugh’s photos seemed to have disappeared with him. But then I remembered my parents looking for them, asking me if I knew where they were. Maybe they wanted to find out who he was hanging out with, something they weren’t so sure about near the end. Now I think they never even came across this box. It was mislabeled, in Hugh’s writing, with the words “Old Stuffies.” I am the only one who knows about it.
I signed up for Photography this year. I could have brought the film to CVS, but that seemed wrong. I want to develop them myself. It will be like searching for him, long after everyone else has given up.
My last class before Photography is always Honors Geometry, F block, room 247. On the first day of class, while taking attendance, Mr. Herman looked up after my name and asked if I was Hugh’s sister. I didn’t study for the first test and a received a 47. He hasn’t looked at me since.
Every day in Geometry I keep a record of the minutes left in class along the margins of my notebook. It’s the only way I can get through it without screaming. I write each minute down and cross it out when it has passed. In between, I write notes to Tracy, who sits behind me. Tracy is my only friend. After being tortured by all the popular girls in grammar school, I never thought I’d have a girl as a friend. But it’s too complicated to be friends with boys in high school. Most of last year I had no friends at all, besides the desperate-to-sit-with-anyone lunch partners my first month. Because I didn’t act as eager as they did to have a shadow, I got a reputation for being a loner, and it made people assume I didn’t want any friends at all. Sometimes I don’t.