I woke at three in the morning and I could feel her out there, April, in the street in front of Yukiko’s house. I pulled back the curtain and there she was, sitting on the curb under a street light, a plastic bag next to her with something leafy sticking out of the top, a pineapple I think. She was hunched over her knees and staring at me like she could see me, though that was impossible. The lights were off and I was behind the curtain. But I’d swear she was looking right at me. Maybe it was a dream. Because if it was real and she was actually there, why didn’t I go out there and smash her face in? That’s the one idea that gave me some hope these days, the possibility of finding April and making her pay for what she did to Pill.
But everything is different at three a.m., and when I saw her last night I felt scared, like she was this monster I would never be able to get rid of. She would stay hidden from the police and everyone else but she would keep showing up in our lives.
Pill was waking up every night now. She slept in Yukiko’s room, on the dog bed with Sophie. When she started screaming I would run down the hall and pick her up and hold her until she stopped screaming. Then I would settle her back in the dog bed and lay on the floor next to her with my arm in her clenchy paws, waiting for her to fall asleep. Yukiko would get out of bed and drop a blanket on me, and I would sleep on the floor next to Pill. Or sometimes I went back to the study, a room with gold-striped walls and bookshelves reaching up to the ceiling. A bed was tucked in one corner. I liked to lie in it under all those books. Their presence was soothing, and when I couldn’t sleep, they provided distraction. I devoured the stories of Odysseus and Aeneus, and the histories of Samurai warriors and Christian martyrs. Those books pulled me into an existence totally unlike my own, where heroes fought and lived without fear of death, because death wasn’t the most important thing. It was God or honor or whatever, something higher, something beyond your own little life. I would read until my eyes were too tired to focus, and then I’d lie there in the dark, trying to sleep, but my mind would keep looping around some problem. I’d start thinking about Pill and what happened to her, or I’d suddenly see the guy from the accident, his one eye peering at me, and in my mind I kept trying to open the other eye, to look at him. It would go on that way until dawn came, then I’d give up and get dressed and put on my running shoes. I went for long runs, winding my way back and forth through Yukiko’s neighborhood and then venturing out into different parts of the city, streets with body shops and train yards and empty lots, their fences lined with trash. I thought if I ran far enough and long enough my body would just quit, and then I’d be able to sleep. And even if I couldn’t sleep, I was accomplishing something: I was searching for April, scanning every street, every car, every house, looking for her silhouette in the windows.
On that morning, as I was coming back from my run, I went to the street lamp where she had been sitting, and I searched the ground near the base of the lamp, hoping to find some evidence—a wrapper, a pineapple leaf, a cigarette. But I found nothing, not a hair, so maybe it really had been a dream.
Vern pulled up in his rumbling pickup, the back of it full of wooden beams and big plastic pieces, a roof and a slide, the makings of an outdoor play structure. He got out and stood there for a moment, studying me.“I’m gonna put all this together. Could use your help.”
“Okay, but I don’t have any skills.”
“I’ll teach you.”
“I mean seriously. The only thing I’ve ever made were some coasters in eighth grade, and those came out terrible. They were all wrong.”
“Then you need to learn.”
“Okay, whatever.”
Together we carried all the pieces to the backyard and dumped them on the ground. We dug holes for the supporting beams and mixed concrete and poured it into the holes, and then we assembled the frame. I was a quick learner, Vern said, though I think he was just being nice. The truth is I kind of sucked at first. At one point he positioned a screw on a wooden beam and handed me a power drill, and he told me to give it a go, but when I tried, the screw flew off to the side and hit a metal chair with an echoing clang.
“I’m going to kill someone,” I said.
“Don’t press so hard,” Vern said. “Let the drill do the work.”
The second time was a little wobbly but better, and before long I was drilling in screws quickly, and it was satisfying. It fixed my brain the slightest bit. Which I needed, because Pill was still acting like a dog, not talking. The psychologist said that she had PTSD with dissociation, and that becoming a dog was her way of dealing with what had happened. He wanted to start her on medication, and Yukiko jumped on that idea, but I was scared to mess with the delicate workings of her young brain. It seemed risky. I asked Vern what he thought about putting Pill on meds. He rarely offered his opinion, and that made me curious about what he believed about all this. He stopped what he was doing, took off his cap and wiped his brow. He was wearing a Chicago Bears shirt that had faded to coral pink but was now a dark orange around the neck and under the arms.
“Ehh, I dunno. My Indian blood takes over on things like that. My grandma used to say you lose part of your soul when something real bad happens. The soul is afraid and so some of it escapes your body and you are just left with part of it, like the film of milk in a glass after you drink it. Then sometimes the soul can’t find its way back. You have to get a medicine man to guide it.”
“Do you believe that?”
“I don’t know. My cousin was real bad after Afghanistan. He kept drinking and beating people up, getting arrested. So they got him a Mesquakee guy who did a ceremony. Went on for two days. It helped a little, maybe. But he was never right after the war. He died pretty young, from sepsis or something. He was only forty-two.” Vern squinted up at the sky. “I’m sorry about what happened to your sister, Sam. Sorry I ever let April back in my gym.”
Suddenly I felt shitty, like I would cry, and I didn’t want to cry. I wanted to get away from the place we had gone to. “Let’s not talk about it,” I said.
“Fine by me. Help me with this.” Together we lifted the rock climbing wall, and he held it against the structure while I secured it with long metal screws. And that made me feel a little better because Pill loved to climb. She would be climbing for hours once she saw this.
“So are you gonna wrestle again?” Vern asked. “Darius keeps bugging me.”
“Maybe. Yukiko says it’s a job without a future.”
“Really? That’s interesting. Her husband made a good future out of it.”
“He was a wrestler?”
“That’s how he got his start, yeah. Then he went on to other things. I’m not saying you shouldn’t listen to her,” Vern said. “She’s a smart woman. She’s done a lot for you and Priscilla. But it’s a little strange, her talking about wrestling that way when it’s given her in a nice house like this, in Oak Park.”
Yukiko didn’t strike me as the type of person to marry a wrestler, and maybe that’s why she never talked about him, and why she was down on the idea of wrestling in general. Maybe something about that part of her life embarrassed her. But it still seemed strange that she didn’t talk about her husband. I knew his name was Lyle and that he had died not too long ago, but I didn’t even know how he had died, and it didn’t seem like something I should ask because she obviously didn’t want to talk about it. But I wondered more than ever now that Vern said he’d been a wrestler. I wanted to know.
Darius showed up later in the day. He came across the yard with his arms outstretched, a gold medallion flashing in his chest hairs. He shook my hand and pulled me in and slapped my back, his cologne washing in, drowning me.
“You so skinny, man. What the hell happen? You look like you have eating disease. Like you college gurl who puke after she eat.”
“I’m not puking,” I said.
“Put some weight on. We need you. I’m losing money because I don’t got a decent partner. These guys we got now is all shit.”
“I need to stick around here, help Pill.”
“But if you come back, you make money. You help her that way.”
“Yeah, but—”
“Yeah but what? What excuse you possibly got?”
I was tempted. The idea of grabbing someone and throwing them down, of being thrown—it appealed to me. But there was Yukiko and her pressuring me not to do it. Anyone can do that sport, she said. But how many people have the mind for calculus? You shouldn’t risk damaging your brain, she had said. But the brain I had possessed a month ago, the one that could do AP Calc, was no longer in the house. These days, I was stupider than shit. Wrestling was the one occupation I could imagine doing because it didn’t require much thought, just agility and theatrics. But I couldn’t explain this to Yukiko. She wasn’t argumentative the way Frankie was. She never raised her voice. She was calm. But she had a way of pinning me down with her logic. I couldn’t dismiss what she was saying as bullshit, the way I could with Frankie, but I couldn’t explain my own side of things either.
Yukiko came out carrying a bag with soft drinks. Pill was following her, and she was holding a stuffed penguin Vern had brought yesterday. She was mashing it against her face and whispering to it in gibberish.
“How is Mr. Penguin?” I asked. “Can I see him?” I reached for him, but she snatched him away and barked aggressively.
“Oh my god, stop,” Darius said. “You pissing her off!”
She took the penguin to Vern and shoved it under his face while he was bending over, and he stood up.
“Hello, Penguin,” he said. He took off his cap and wiped his brow. “You got a name for him yet?”
“Yip!”
“Well?” She smiled up at him. “Not gonna tell me? I bet I can guess. Is it Fluffy?” She shook her head. “Fatso?” She shook her whole body, twisting back and forth, her braids whipping her face. “Then I give up,” he said. “You have to tell me.”
She looked up at the sky, which was overcast but bright, a homogenous, backlit silver. Then she thrust the penguin toward him and said, “Frank!”
Frank. An actual word. Or a name, technically, but whatever—a name is a word. It felt like a sign. I smiled at Yukiko, wanting to share this little triumph with her, but she frowned back.
“It’s almost noon and you haven’t eaten anything,” she said.
“I’m doing this.”
“You can take a break,” Vern said.
“Yeah, go,” Darius said. “I stay and help Vern.”
“Why does everyone suddenly want me to take a break?”
“You smell bad,” Darius said. “You need shower.” He sat on a chair and crossed one leg over the other and opened a can of lemonade. Vern sat next to him.
Which was fine, it was whatever. I could take a break, though I wanted to keep pounding and drilling and putting stuff together. I went inside and ate a pile of rice and tofu, and then I went upstairs to shower, but before I got there I stopped on the landing under the huge stained glass windows. The light was chill and regal in that part of the house, like the light in a castle, or that’s how I imagined the inside of a castle, and I wanted to just stay awhile. I sank to the landing, thinking I’d sit for a minute, but then I stretched out on my back. My fingertips were sore and red, swollen with splinters. A spot of kaleidoscopic light shimmered and danced on the carpet, and I moved my hand under it. It kept dancing, sending a current of buzzing warmth into my palm and up my arm, and I drifted off with that sensation.
When I woke Yukiko was standing above me, a silhouette against the windows.
“I fell asleep,” I said.
“The guys are finished. They ordered pizza.”
“But I wanted to help them. I wanted to get to the end.”
“You needed to sleep, I guess.” She sat on the step next to me. She smelled good. She was wearing long silver earrings that swung in and out of her hair. I wanted to lay my head in her lap, wanted to have her stroke my hair the way she did Priscilla’s.
“Sam,” she said. “I know you are reluctant to put Priscilla on medication. But it might help her sleep. Which would help you.”
There were violet half-moons under her eyes and something soft and opening in her expression, and she was leaning toward me the slightest bit. It felt like I could get closer, like it was possible in that moment. But then she sat up and slapped her knees, all business. “Come get some pizza,” she said. And then she was gone, and I was left with nothing but my own aching body and the ceiling way up above and the dancing light gone, replaced by a muted, dusky glow. I showered and went out onto the deck. Pill was sitting on Yukiko, curled up with her head on her chest and the penguin tucked under her arm. The play structure was finished and it rose out of the middle of the yard, tall and majestic.
“Pill, did you see it?” I asked. “Come on, let’s go swing. I’ll push.”
She gazed out at the structure for a moment, but then dropped her head back on Yukiko.
“Maybe after she eats,” Yukiko said.
“Sam,” Darius shouted. “Come eat, man.” He dug into a cooler and pulled out a dripping beer bottle and offered it to me. I didn’t like beer, from the little I’d tried, but I suddenly wanted one badly.
“He’s only eighteen,” Yukiko said.
Darius made a farting sound with his lips. “In my country, he old man.” Vern handed me a coke and two pieces of pepperoni on a flimsy paper plate. I took one bite of the pizza and then set it down and went out to the play structure. I sat on a swing and kicked up my feet, hoping this would tempt Pill, and sure enough, she sat up like a groundhog, and then she jumped down and skittered toward me. She pulled on the swing chains, trying to wrench them out of my hands, whimpering, so I switched places with her. But once she was on the swing she didn’t want to be pushed, she just sat there with her feet dangling and her head hanging down. She got this way in the evenings sometimes, droopy and lethargic. Even fetch with Sophie couldn’t snap her out of it.
She slipped off the swing and drifted to the firepole and jumped onto it, her bare legs squeaking on the metal. In the past she would have scrambled all the way to the top—she was strong and brave that way—but now she just clung to the base of the pole and looked up like it might magically send her skyward. I pushed her to the top, and she scrambled into the little clubhouse.
“How is it?” I called.
“Yip.”
I climbed the ladder and peeked in. The penguin was lying on the floor in front of me, his orange tuft of hair standing out from his head and his glassy eyes open, alarmed. Behind him, in the shadows, Pill was on her back, knees hanging open. She was pushing at her crotch through her shorts, a weird smile on her face.
“Pill, don’t do that,” I said. She ignored me and went harder, and I worried she would hurt herself. I grabbed her wrists, but she yanked them free and slapped my arms. I grabbed them again, but then she growled and bit my arm, bit hard. It smarted. “Little shit!” I shouted. Yukiko was suddenly behind me.
“Don’t fight with her, it won’t help.”
“Do you know what she was doing?”
“Yes, she’s done it before.”
“She’s going to hurt herself.”
“But this is not how you deal with it. Please, let me.”
Fine, I thought. Whatever, I didn’t care anymore. I dropped to the ground, kicked at the mulch and then punched the climbing wall, which was a mistake because it didn’t give at all and my hand screamed in pain. I held my wrist and tried to open and close my fingers but they barely moved, they were so stiff and swollen. I could hear Yukiko up in the play structure, talking to Pill in the voice she used, calm and reassuring but with a trace of badass.
“Dude, why you hit the wall like that?” Darius said.
“Cause I’m stupid.”
“You so stupid.” And he turned to Vern. “He so stupid.” Vern gave him a look, and Darius stopped smiling. I sat down between them. Vern handed me my plate of pizza and Darius thumped my back sort of hard, and something about it felt good. I wanted him to hit me again, harder, and I wanted to hit back.
I wasn’t done with wrestling.
“So when is our next show?” I said. He smiled, his whole face lit up, and he hit me again.
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