Hope and Other Punch Lines Read online

  I don’t answer.

  “Of course not. Those are the sorts of memories mothers hold on to, not sons.” She shrugs, wipes a tear from her cheek. Clears her throat and starts again, calm this time: “Your father saved six people, including a pregnant woman. Seven if you count her baby.”

  I stay quiet, because I don’t trust myself to speak. The anger takes root. I should be feeling grief instead—though it’s hard to miss something you never had. I want to put my fist through the wall. I want my knuckles to bleed. I want to unfold that damn blanket.

  “He was so close to coming home. So close! You can see it in that horrible photo, which I hate, by the way. Hate. It’s like being slapped in the face every time I see it. He’s running toward us. You were so tiny then. With that literal broken heart. You, in that little hot box, with wires and breathing tubes and the bruises all over. That should have been enough to keep him putting one leg in front of the other. That should have been enough. Why wasn’t it enough?”

  My mom starts to weep. She gives up on wiping away the tears. Lost cause. I do nothing to comfort her.

  “He went to work that day to get his lucky hat. ‘I’ll be back in no time,’ he promised. ‘In and out.’ We were both so scared for you. We were desperate. He thought the hat would help. He needed to feel like he was doing something.”

  “You lied,” I say. Two words. I can manage two words. They come out like spit.

  “I don’t know how to explain this.”

  “Try,” I demand. I close my eyes, one sense down. There, easier. “You didn’t not just tell me. I asked you straight out and you lied.”

  “I couldn’t do it, Noah. I’m still so angry at him. So unbelievably angry, which isn’t fair. I know that. How was I supposed to tell you about all those people showing up at our door to say thank you, as if I deserved gratitude for what your dad did? As if I were happy that they got to live when he chose to die? I wanted to slam the door in their faces. Even the pregnant woman, with that swollen belly and those swollen eyes. I even begrudged her. ‘God bless you,’ she said to me, sitting right at our kitchen table, your dad’s and mine, and I laughed right in her face, I really did laugh, like it was funny, because what I wanted to tell her was God has nothing to do with this. God has left the building.”

  My mom stands up, as if we are done, as if we don’t have almost sixteen years of lies between us. She sits back down, wipes the still-flowing tears with the arm of her shirt.

  “We ran into that lady once. In a mall, right in front of Macy’s, and her baby wasn’t a baby anymore, though she was pregnant again. He was around your age, five-ish, and you looked at each other, peeking around our legs. Before either of us could say a word, she started to cry, like she had the right to cry, not me, and yes, I realize no one has a monopoly on pain, but still. Her son had a mom and a dad and soon a baby brother or sister. She wasn’t doing it alone. I picked you up and ran to the parking lot. Once we got into the car, I broke down, I lost it, and I swear I’ll never forget this. You, all buckled up in your little seat in the back, said, ‘Mommy, why was six afraid of seven? Because seven ate nine!’ You were trying to make me laugh. Even then, you were you, Noah.”

  “You lied,” I say again, because the other words—Why didn’t you tell me?—are too hard right now. I don’t want to hear stories about me as a baby. I’ve seen the pictures. I used to be adorable. Who cares? Nothing lasts forever.

  “I didn’t want you to feel that somehow we weren’t enough for him to come home to. I couldn’t bear that. I wanted you to not to have a single bad feeling about that pregnant lady. Was that wrong? Because that’s the truth. I didn’t want to infect you with those feelings of betrayal.”

  “It didn’t work,” I say.

  “What didn’t work?” she asks. “What do you mean?”

  “I thought he was alive. All these years. I thought he was there at the World Trade Center, that he survived and decided not to come home, probably because I was so sick. I thought he left.” I choke out the words, realize I’m not as far gone as I thought, because the embarrassment rips its way through my body, slices the numbness right in half.

  “I didn’t…I didn’t realize. Oh, Noah.” She reaches to hug me, but I turn around. I can’t watch the pity flash across her face. I cover my head with a pillow, like a little kid. “You’re just like your dad. Your eyes and the shape of your mouth and your insatiable curiosity and, oh God, your sense of humor. How you want to make everything a lighter burden to carry, and not just for you, but for everyone else. Maybe even more for them. You are all love and magic, like he was. It never occurred to me that if I didn’t tell you the truth, another myth would take its place. I’m so sorry.”

  I feel no relief. Her apology bounces off me. What did I think was going to happen with this whole Baby Hope photo search? Did I think I’d discover my dad was still alive? Seriously? And even if he was, what was I going to do? Track him down?

  Things stay lost. I thought I’d already learned that lesson.

  “You know, it took me years to realize that it had nothing to do with us. Your dad didn’t turn around and save all of those people because he didn’t want to come home. Or because we weren’t enough. Your father turned around because that’s who he was. Extraordinary. He was a hero. He never had a choice.”

  “We all have choices,” I say, and then I get up and pack a bag.

  I play it cool when I see Noah at camp. All Hey, what’s up, super casual, not at all like my grandma, Paula, and I spent hours last night analyzing his behavior. Not like I’ve replayed that kiss a million times in my head and want some more pleasethankyouverymuch. I can do this platonic-friends thing. No hard feelings. No feelings at all. Not a one.

  My heart is not hiccupping. That yearning I’m feeling is merely hunger, not longing.

  It’s all cool.

  I’m cool.

  “Hey,” he says, and does his best guy nod. I wait for him to say something, anything else, even a Yesterday was a mistake, let’s just be friends, to which I had the response all prepared: Totally agree. He looks rough today, hair all over the place. Before he has a chance to speak, Uncle Maurice, Knight’s Day Camp’s fearless leader, breaks out a bullhorn and starts shouting instructions. Today is the start of Color War, which I’ve been looking forward to since I took this job.

  “All groups are to be split in half, designated blue or red, and then paired with their opposite gender counterparts. Junior counselors go with opposite junior counselors. Senior counselors with opposite senior counselors,” Uncle Maurice announces, and I hear Julia mutter under her breath: “Crap.” Clearly, she wants to spend the day with Zach about as much as I want to with Noah. Which is to say not even a little bit.

  I don’t even want to look at Noah—no need to stare rejection right in the face—so I look over at Zach, who looks at Julia, who looks at me because she doesn’t want to acknowledge Zach. And around we go in this exciting game of avoiding each other.

  “I’m on Abbi’s team,” Livi declares, and upon hearing this, the rest of the girls line up behind Julia.

  Little traitors.

  We divide everyone into equal groups. Uncle Maurice hands me ten red kid-sized T-shirts that have the camp logo, a graphic of a Knight, and then pauses and quietly hands over one more kid one for me. I pull it on over my tank top and try not to stare as Noah takes off his shirt, which looks old and battered and says University of Michigan, and carefully folds it. He then slips on his adult-sized camp shirt. His abs, while nowhere near Charles’s level of chiseled, are not as boyish as I would have guessed. There’s a possibility this guy actually does crunches when he’s not watching comedy specials. Or at least while he’s watching.

  “Hey,” Noah says. He’s walked over to me, and he’s standing so close, I can feel his breath on my ear. I try to squash the hope that takes flight in my chest. “About ye
sterday. I’ll…Can we talk later?”

  There it is. Over before it even began. I guess it’s a credit to him that he wants to discuss things as opposed to letting me know via the cold shoulder. He doesn’t really owe me anything.

  “It’s fine,” I say, flushing as I remember that this morning I gargled not once, but twice with mouthwash. Just in case. I ignore the sadness that crashes over me, a cold, unpleasant shower of disappointment. “Friends?”

  I put out my hand for him to shake, like this is the start of a job interview or something, and he looks at my hand and then up at me, like he has no idea what that gesture means.

  “Sure,” he says, keeping his hands in his pockets, which means mine is left dangling, and I awkwardly drop it. “Right. Friends.”

  “So Color War,” I say.

  “Color War,” he echoes, as if to say, I see your intense discomfort right now and I have no desire to save you from it. Which is pretty crappy of him, considering he’s the one who ran away yesterday, not me. He’s the one who wants to “talk.” If he wanted us to be together, there wouldn’t be the need for a conversation. We’d continue what we started.

  “We’re going to kick the blue team until they’re dead!” Livi says, interrupting our weird showdown. Her whole tiny body vibrates with excitement. “We’re going to be the winningest!”

  “I like your enthusiasm, but we’re not supposed to actually kick the other team. Or, you know, kill them,” Noah says, charmed by Livi, which in turn charms me despite myself.

  “Not actually kill ’em dead,” Livi explains, and shadowboxes the air before progressing through an array of karate moves. “But boom, pow, wham, boink ’em!”

  “That was some impressive onomatopoeia,” Noah says, smiling at Livi, and then he pauses only a half second before mock-punching my shoulder.

  We’re back to being buddies. I tell myself I don’t mind. I tell myself you can’t lose something you never really had.

  * * *

  —

  The blue team is going down. We’re in the middle of an aggressive game of musical chairs—it turns out I’m a ringer—and I’m distracting myself by getting completely swept up in the competitive spirit. Red paint decorates my face. My hands still burn from tug-of-war. My voice is shredded from screaming. The scoreboard is officially tied, and we’re moments away from learning who won the day’s Color War.

  After a particularly brutal seventh round, most of my fellow reds have been eliminated. Only Livi, Noah, and I are left from our team. From the blue, there’s Zach and two boys whose names I do not know and who I intend to beat, despite the fact that they are four years old and the cutest.

  The music switches on, and we begin to circle again, moving increasingly faster in our weird squat-run so that our butts are ready to find the nearest chair. The song swells along with my heart. For the first time in my life, I understand all those sports fans who cry over things like the Super Bowl. I’ll admit it: I want to win. I want to win more than I’ve ever wanted to win anything in my life.

  This feels much bigger than the first day of a silly camp Color War. This is about giving Livi a taste of victory after no one wanted to be on her team. This is about giving me a taste of victory too. Some sort of cosmic sign that I will be okay for now, that this heartbreak is temporary, that I’ll survive summer’s end.

  The music stops. I drop to the nearest chair and manage to beat the two blue boys, who end up falling onto my lap.

  “You’re out!” I scream, exuberant, punching the air, until I see that both Livi and Noah have been left standing too. Shoot. It’s just me and Zach for the last round, and victory now rests solely on my shoulders. A crowd has gathered around us—a bunch of the older kids and even Lifeguard Charles—and the cheering grows louder.

  I can do this, I tell myself. I will do this.

  I think tactically. I’m about half of Zach’s size, so I can’t meet him with brute force. I’m going to have to be sneaky and fast.

  The music starts—a girl-power pop song, one of my favorites, one that I danced to in my room before the start of camp, one that promises I’m better off without him—and we start our rotation around the single chair. I’m breathing heavily, enough to feel the burn in my lungs, sharp and tight. I ignore the pain.

  “Go, Abbi! Go!” Livi yells.

  “You got this,” Noah says, calm and fierce at the same time.

  “Take him down!” Julia screams, crossing team lines to root for me.

  I watch Zach’s hairy knees as we move, and listen. I know this song, have air-drummed to it enough to know when the absence of music means an extra beat or dead air. Then, as the singer promises to come back stronger, louder, better, there it is, a millisecond of a pause and the music stops. Zach starts to lower his heavy body onto the chair, and so I do the only thing I can. I slip right under him and land first.

  I win.

  The crowd goes wild. Everyone is screaming. Zach still sits on me, but I’m so excited that I barely notice. The chair, this victory, is mine. All mine.

  After a moment, I push his back to get him off me, but he doesn’t move. I push again.

  Suddenly, my disloyal lungs decide now would be a good time to revolt. They don’t even give me a chance to revel for a few minutes. I cough deep and hard and it hurts in a way coughing is not supposed to hurt. I feel like I’ve dislodged an organ.

  “Get off of her!” Noah yells, right up in Zach’s face. I cough more. I feel the blood vessels in my face fill. Too hot. “You’re hurting her.”

  “Seriously, move,” Julia says as Noah grabs Zach by the collar and lifts him off me.

  “Relax, brother, I was playing,” Zach says. “I was barely sitting on her. She’s fine.”

  Except despite the fact that I’ve been freed, I can’t get any air. The coughing gives way to a whooping wheeze. The world blurs and I see explosions of light.

  “Help!” Noah screams. “She has asthma!”

  “What?” Zach asks.

  “Someone call an ambulance,” Noah says.

  Ambulance? No. This isn’t happening. I’m fine, I want to say. We won Color War! Please don’t ruin this for me.

  I want to tell him This will pass. It always does.

  I want to say I know what this is.

  I want to say I still have one more month.

  No words come. I’m trapped in one of those nightmares where you can’t scream.

  I try to grab hold of something solid as I fight for consciousness, and Noah takes my hands.

  “It’s okay,” he says, squeezing tightly. His voice is faux calm, betrayed by an unmistakable undercurrent of panic. “They’re coming. Put your head between your legs. I promise you’re going to be okay. Breathe. Abbi, please breathe. Breathe.”

  I lean forward. The air only comes in tiny squeezed-through doses, like air is something solid and hard and impassable. I can’t get nearly enough. I have no idea how long I’ve been sitting here. I picture my inhaler in my bag, which feels hundreds of miles away. All that empty space between us.

  “Breathe,” Noah says again. “I’m here. Breathe.”

  “What’s happening?” Livi asks. “Did Abbi eat red paint?”

  That’s the last thing I hear before everything goes dark.

  Abbi’s blood is on my shirt and on my shoes and I have no memory of how it got there. I call Jack from the emergency room, my hand shaking so hard I have trouble pressing the buttons.

  “On my way,” Jack says.

  “They won’t tell me anything. They took her behind the swinging doors and told me to wait. How am I supposed to wait?”

  I pace up and down in a loop, step over the bleary-eyed and the sick. A little kid with a shiner vrooms a Matchbox car up the back of his seat while his mom tries to wrangle an ice pack onto his face. I ignore the nurse who keeps point
ing at the No Cell Phones sign. This place feels postapocalyptic: already on alert and resigned to defeat.

  I can feel the adrenaline rush through my veins, and feel enraged at the useless energy. I want to help her, goddammit.

  “Abbi’s going to be fine,” Jack says. Nonsense words. A sentence that has as much value as when people find out my dad is dead and say, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know. As if their knowing has any bearing on the matter.

  “There was blood everywhere. I mean, I thought she was going to die right on the field. I’ve never seen anything like it.” I don’t tell Jack that I said a prayer under my breath, that it felt like I needed to mark the divide between when Abbi was okay and when she wasn’t. That when she passed out, I thought, This is it. This is how it looks when people die.

  “She’s going to be fine,” he says again.

  “She was blue. In the ambulance.”

  “Noah,” Jack says. “Take a breath.”

  “I thought she was going to die. Seriously. I mean, she still might. She could be dead back there, for all I know.” I hear the hysteria in my voice, the crack on the word dead. In the ambulance, she opened her eyes and looked at me, and I held her hand and said over and over: You’re going to be fine. I wonder if she thought the same thing I did when Jack said them: that the words were as hollow as lies.

  “My ETA is T-minus three minutes,” he says. “Sit down. Relax. I’m almost there.”

  “I’m going to strangle Zach with my bare hands. Break both of his arms. He’s never going to do one of those stupid headstands again.”

  “I promise we can tag-team body-slam him WWE-style later. But right now, you need to sit down.”