Given Ghosts

By Jane McCafferty

Donavon Kerry sits on the porch swing with his unofficial stepmother, the two of them doused in orange sunlight this evening, her long-fingered babies already down for the night in their white wicker basinets in the living room. He’d helped her get them settled, a job he enjoys, since the babies seem to like his singing. She calls him the baby whisperer.

“Haven’t asked you for the car in months,” Donavon says. “And you and Charlie aren’t going anywhere, right?”

She laughs. “You got that right.”

“And you know I’m a good driver, Bev.”

“Yeah, and you’re sixteen. Might as well give you a hand grenade.”

This falls flat; Donavon’s not typically sixteen. Not drawn to speed, not a risk taker, and he’s more interested in the inner than the outer journey.

“All we want is to go up north and see this kid’s grandma. She’s not doing so well. Lives in a trailer and — ”

“What kid’s grandma?”

“Cale and Daniel’s.”
 “Didn’t I feed them pancakes two weeks ago?”

“You did. With whipped cream.”

Beverly lights a cigarette and peers to the left into the late sun, then closes her eyes and lets it bathe her face. “Cute kids. Hyper, though. The one’s got ants in his pants.”

Donavon feels a wave of pity for this woman who has tried to raise him since he was twelve, this woman who had lived with his father faithfully, vehemently, against all her better judgment, until two years ago. She’s only seventeen years older than Donavon is, and she has these twin baby girls inside who take all she has, and this new husband, Charlie, a guy who holds down an office job for the city. Charlie is forty something with a beer gut, and you can almost hear him deciding he’s had enough of effort and ambition, that now it’s time to surrender and ride things out on the couch with some chips. Most people Donavon’s age would feel disdain for such a blatant embrace of middle aged sloth, but Donavon, not one to judge, describes Charlie as “a pretty good dude.” Sometimes he sits with Charlie and watches sports, though Donavon’s not a real fan, and mostly, when he’s watching, he’s writing a song in his head inspired by Japanese horror movies, various poets from around the world, and random trash he finds on the street.

It’s true about the kids’ grandma not doing so well, and it’s true they want to go up north, but really they’ve been invited to a skinny-dipping party at a quarry with some rich kids, one of whom is a black girl named Dee who has written Donavon countless poems, having met him on Facebook and seen him only once, in person, down in Oakland one night where he wore striped pajamas and a top hat. “He’s the one!” Dee had shouted to her friend, looking at him as she crossed the street. He’d taken off his top hat and bowed.

Her poems are so odd, so indecipherably, incomprehensibly perfect, he’s fallen madly in love for the first time.

Thus the urgency, and the lies.

“It’s just their grandma’s pretty much all alone. And she just wants some boys to bake for. She wants us to come up there to her trailer and eat her brownies.”

Beverly’s mouth forms a sympathetic pout. “Aw,” she says. “OK. I guess so. You can have the car for three hours. Just tonight. Because I’m tired and going to pass out.”

She gets up from the swing, pulls her long hair back from her face and looks at him for a moment before walking toward the door.

“You can’t go to bed before the sun sets!” Donavon says, curbing the great joy and relief in his voice in case she hears it and changes her mind.

“Oh yeah? Watch me.”

“But the keys.”

“Kitchen counter.”

To drive a car with the right music — tonight it’s Fidel — is to feel an infinite sense of possibility and hope that might never come again. But you have to drive like you were born driving. One arm out the window like an oar in the water feeling the sweet freedom of night. He hasn’t felt this happy in a long time, driving down to Lawrenceville to pick up his friends, two kids he’s known since eighth grade.

The only thing Donavon dislikes about driving is how he sometimes catches himself turning into his father behind the wheel. He drums the steering wheel with his index fingers, he stretches up high in his seat so that his head touches the ceiling like his father used to do. His father looked at the road like it was an opponent, something he was ready to beat down if need be. No other driver was going to pull one over on him. No pothole would surprise him. Donavon has all the physical habits but not the same fierce vigilance. He’s singing, and the song is flowing out of him filled with great melody, inspired by a visit he’d had with his father the day before, a visit caught in his head — he wished he could shake it like a snow-globe and watch settle, but nothing about his father will ever be settled.

And yet word collecting was most excellent when visiting his father, who’d spent much of the past ten years in and out of Western Psych. When out of the hospital these days, he works pushing a broom through a massive Presbyterian church in East Liberty, and just that afternoon, Donavon had stopped by and walked with him as he swept. He hadn’t wanted to talk much, so they sang together.

The ants go marching one by one, hurrah, hurrah

The ants go marching one by one, hurrah, hurrah

The ants go marching one by one, the little one stops to load his gun

And they all go marching on

Over and over again, father and son sang in the hollow church, the other janitor smiling and wagging his head, and Donavon, who towers over his father and who’d made sure to smoke some pot before the visit, had enjoyed himself.

I quite enjoyed myself, he’d said aloud in a British accent on his walk home in the dusk. That man is awfully good with a broom, is he not? Something restful about the repetition of the ants and the marching and the hurrah, hurrah. Something so funny about the way his dad would pause and use the broom handle for a sudden microphone when the hurrah, hurrah part came, his index finger held up to the air and his green eyes widening before he let the broom be a broom again. His dad wasn’t just crazy, he was also a good dude. Even the other janitor, a black guy so tall he could have played pro basketball , had smiled at him in a way that felt like a thumbs up.

And, Donavon said, again in his accent, “He seems in on the joke of his own madness, he did.”

At least sometimes, like that day when he kept winking at Donavon, winking and nodding as if to suggest it was all an act. As usual, before Donavan left his dad this afternoon, he asked him, “Got any advice, Pop?” His father leaned close, smelling seriously of cheap after- shave, his eyes wide, his breath hot as he whispered conspiratorially into his son’s ear.

I don’t believe I deserve all this applause, but I’ll always reserve a special place in my heart for Pittsburgh.

Then he stepped back to see if Donavon had a response to this, but Donavon just stood there looking at him, biting down on his lower lip. And then, “Uh…”

His father leaned close for another message. My man Willie Stargell says trying to hit Sandy Koufax was like trying to drink coffee with a fork.

It wasn’t exactly advice, but Donavon wrote it down in his small notebook anyway, and then looked up Koufax and Stargell on the internet. His dad wouldn’t have even been alive when Sandy Koufax was big, so why was he thinking of him? Donavon read about these old ball players, hunched in a library cubicle, the pot wearing off, sadness tumbling in. How had things turned out this way, so that probably he’d never get to have a real conversation with his father again, at least not the father he’d known when he was five, eight, ten. Even last year he had times when he seemed ok — one day they’d walked by the river and talked about the mystery of life, the Big Bang, and how there were as many worlds as there were minds to perceive.

“My dad’s wild, “ Donavon liked to say, if anyone asked. “Dude ‘s tuned into a whole different matrix.”

But he protects his father from the eyes of others. Nobody knows his father (who had clawed his way through law school in the eighties) sweeps the church, nobody knows his father has spent months on the north side, under a bridge, self-medicating voices out of his head, drawing pictures and trying to sell them for a dollar a piece on the corner. It has been years since Donavon has introduced his father to a friend, but tonight, driving, he wonders if this girl, Dee, poet from up north, might be someone who would understand how to visit his father without pity, without drawing conclusions that a son sprung from such a father must also be dangerously strange.

Maybe she has some interesting relatives, too, and even if she doesn’t, her poems prove she isn’t exactly bound by conventional bullshit. The last poem made no sense at all, and yet Donavon somehow feels its’ meaning vibrating in his gut, echoing in his mind, like she’s calling to him, calling out these words that mean something beyond meaning.

Broken

No saki

Broken

No saki

Written a hundred times or more, in handwriting that was like a brand new other-worldly calligraphy, on the back of an Eat-n-Park placemat. His kind of girl. Finally. And she was beautiful, jet black as a queen, with royal posture and large, black, far-seeing eyes, and arms twice as strong as his.

The friends in Lawrenceville, brothers a year apart, have big personalities that keep getting bigger as they compete with each other for the limelight. They’re hyper, hilarious boys. Cale, the smaller one, is forever taking dramatic bows, a habit he acquired in childhood, apparently, and a way to deal with too much body energy. He takes bows when he enters a store, bows when he meet someone new, bows when his friends laugh at his jokes. Tonight, Maria Junie, their mother, is out on the curb with them, all dressed up for a date. Stacked in a flowery blouse. White high heels, a pair of jeans. Curly hair, like her sons.

“Hi, Donavon,” Maria Junie says. “The boys say you’re going to a baseball game in Cranberry?”

“That’s right,” he lies, avoiding her eyes. Maria Junie was a good cook, often invited him for lasagna and once let him use this electric foot-bath thing she got for Christmas.

“Well,” she says. “Have fun and no drinking, obviously, and no speeding, obviously, and no picking up the opposite sex.”

Cale takes his bow before he gets into the car. Daniel in the front, and Cale in the back. They all wave to Maria Junie on the curb, who waves back wary, a tentative smile on her face.

“Want to know how to say naked in a quarry with 42 girls in Spanish?” Daniel says, slamming the door.

Cale in the back says, “It’s like we’re goin’ to Islam heaven and we don’t even have to die.”

“Who said 42?” Donavon asks. 42 naked girls? He only needed one, but he had to admit, he wouldn’t mind seeing 42.

“That Kenny dude who Hannah Nix knows.”

“That dude is sick,” Donavon says, and puts in a cd of a local band called Run Forever, and Cale, in the back, has a fit of ecstasy.

How can this song be so fucking good?

I’m gonna cry!

In the rearview Donavon watches him hang his head out the window, and feels a surge of affection shoot through his body.

Donavon understands wanting to cry because this band, Fidel, scrapes the bottom of their souls and dishes it out with a side of burnt love, and the car is their ticket to the land of the naked quarry and to Broken no saki. He’s driving up route 28. The joy makes him generous, and he says to the boys, “I think we really should visit your grandmother first. And not just use her as an excuse.”

Cale says, “She’ll be shitfaced.”

Donavon says, “And you of all people got a problem with that?”

“Maybe I got a problem with nothin’. Maybe I think everything’s perfect just the way it is,” Cale says.

“And maybe I think you need to shut up,” Daniel says.

“My grandmother’s on the west coast,” Donavon says. “Grows her own dope. And you know what I say to that? I say, more power to ya, Gwenny!”

“Gwenny? You call her Gwenny?” Daniel laughs.

“It’s her name. Short for Gwendolyn.”

“Our grandma used to be hot,” says Cale.

“Yeah, well Gwenny’s still pretty hot,” Donavon says, though he hasn’t seen her in years.

“Yeah but you think that Whitney girl’s hot, the fat one with the shaved head.”
 “Damn right I do.”
 They laugh.

“And what about that chick from last year, the one who said she was a saint and then charged people for putting her hands on their heads?”

“Clare Dugan,” Donavon says. “Maybe she was a saint.”

“Saints don’t charge for that shit, Donavon!”

“How do you know? When’s the last time you talked to a saint?”

The brothers laugh.
 Then they’re on the ramp to the interstate and Cale decides he’s tired of the backseat and wants the front seat, so climbs on top of his brother so they can have a little wrestling match. Whoever wins gets the front seat. Cale must be tickling Daniel because he can’t stop laughing. A contagious laugh, so Donavon is laughing too and then somehow he is crashing the car he is crashing into another car he is spinning and not possible all is dark and knives of light where is he now where are they now and the smell of where is he and how did it happen and glass help us someone falling.

He wakes on a gurney in a hospital hallway, his mouth tasting of blood, a taste that brings back Cindy Badey, who bit him hard when he tried to kiss her the year they were seven. Blood tastes like metal, salt, night. He keeps his eyes closed so Cindy Badey in a green dress is holding forth a bowl full of wet mud in back of Andy Zankowski’s house. Wet mud on a spring day, sunlit in a blue bowl, her bitten nails pink with polish. “This one’s gonna be ok,” a low voice says, and Donavon feels a hand gently touch his shoulder. “He was the driver. Had the seat belt on,” the voice says.

Donavon keeps his eyes sealed. He’d loved Cindy Badey in pre-school and kindergarten, loved how her head was strangely indented on the sides, shaped a little bit like an eight. Her milk mouth. Her tee-shirt with the roses. Her Pokeman cards in a purple purse she wore around her neck. Her smell. In first grade the two of them had rolled down the hill in a barrel, highlight of that year. The voice comes back and says, “We checked his vitals, wrapped his head. He can stay here and rest for now ’til a room opens up. Must have given us the wrong phone number, though. We called and got a man singing an old Stevie Wonder song.”

Someone laughs. “You mean like a recording?” says the voice, husky and close.

“Nope. A real live man doing My Cherie Amour.”

“That’s a good song,” says another voice.

“Yeah, and he could sing. I told him he better come down here. I think he dropped the phone. Hope it was a wrong number, or this kid’s old man is nuts, or tripping on acid.”

Donavon still won’t open his eyes, but feels the voices moving away from him, and almost cries out, Where are my friends? but to cry out would make all of this real, would rip through the fabric of the dream, and Cindy Badey’s bowl of mud would vanish.

The mud looks beautiful and wet and she’s put little forsythia on top of it, a cake decoration. The two of them had a mud cake decorating business one day, crouched near a gulley. His mother had only been dead a year then, and Cindy Badey had been the only person who talked to him about that. She went to Catholic school. She had an intricate vision of heaven. She knew his mother was an angel, and that he could look up and whisper things and be heard.

And now he says, Where are my friends?

And if the dream is ending and the answer to his question is bad, he doesn’t want to know, doesn’t ever want to know, so he turns inward, dives deep as he can go, and his eyes are wet for Cindy Badey. He misses her terribly, even though she bit him, and once paid him a quarter to pretend the mud was chocolate soup and just eat it, and for her he’d eaten half the bowl. If he could only be back there with her, and touch her eight-shaped head and put one of her plastic panda bear barrettes in his hair, then he wouldn’t be here.

Friends, he thinks And soon he’s saying it, and a nurse comes and asks him if he’s all right, does he need some water, does he understand what’s happened and where he is, and Donavon tells her yes, finally opening his eyes. She nods, wide-eyed and so young he gets an unwelcome glimpse of how close he is to having to join the world of adults. “You’re doing all right,” she says, softly. It stuns him to feel how much closer he is to this unblinking red headed nurse than to seven year old Cindy and her bowl of mud. Sorrow rises in him use as a great tidal wave over the question he will not ask even as it rises in his throat one word at a time as if it’s a live thing climbing with sharp claws into the air of the hospital hallway. Where are my friends? And a voice inside him answers, They’re dead. And he hears someone down the hall say I’ll say it again. I can’t stand one more kid dying in a fucking car accident, and in some deep tunnel of self, Donavon starts to scream.

Red sun sinking down onto a tangerine stretcher of sky. Like the sun’s going to hit the stretcher and bounce back up into the arms of God, said the Preacher called Reverend Junco, who stands in a robe looking like a retired boxer, and now a crowd’s gathering to clap.

Heart of Jesus in the sky!

Some of them are real believers. One yellow-eyed black guy has tears running down his face.

Heart of Jesus in the sky!

Almost eighteen, Donavon’s only a part-timer under the bridge, but he’s quite popular with the men who live there, since his father is still bringing a lot of food a few times a week, serious leftovers from the Presbyterians, who like to eat after church. His father puts it all in a hefty bag, and everyone gathers, but not like vultures, since his father gives everyone a number — Donavon catches a glimpse of his old self as he takes control — and they all line up, and like the loaves and the fishes, said Reverend Junco, there’s always enough.

After the sun’s gone, and the autumn darkness pours down, Mickey and Dino build the usual fire. Donavon’s got a bag of marsh-mellows. He’s crouched down beside a guy called Monk who doesn’t say a word to anyone. It has not been a good day for Donavon. He’d seen Rosalie Puccini, someone he’d known in high school, someone who knew his whole story, and someone who pretended not to see him. It happens. It’s been over a year now, but he knows some people think he was stoned when he drove, and blame him; though they’d never said a word about it — except for one girl named Heidi Klinger, who’d leaned out of a car and screamed Look! It’s Donavon I Murder My Friends Kerry! when he’d stood at a bus stop corner near Rite Aid one sunny afternoon. Others probably just felt pity but were too uncomfortable to talk. He’s afraid, really, to call anyone on the phone. He wouldn’t know what to say. “Wanna hang out?” wouldn’t work anymore. Those words would ping back into his face. A few nights ago, at the kitchen table with Beverly and the babies banging the trays on their high-chairs, Beverly said to him, “What’s your father think of you down there under the bridge?”

Donavon shrugged. “He talks to me through poems these days.”

Beverly said, “I know your father’s heart. He’d rather see you making progress, Donavon.”

“Making progress?” Donavon laughed.

“With your life. Making progress with your life. It’s not funny.”

Beverly didn’t understand the emptiness that blared in the heart of her words. Couldn’t know that he tried to be in the house as little as possible so as not to infect the innocent babies with his darkness. After working at Wendy’s, he took his long walks at night, all the way downtown, crossing one yellow bridge after the other, smoking so much pot he’d forget who he was, the black river below shining with lights that looked like faces of the dead.

He roasts his marsh-mellow now. He came down tonight wanting to see his father, and finally his father appears, stepping out of the thin lavender dusk like an apparition. He’s doing a little better these days, and this gives Donavon moments of hope. Could the old father somehow step out of the new father, like a man out of a closet? And then close the door behind him, and walk forward? Could they get the hell out of here and start over?

“Good evening, compadres,” his father says. “And hello, dear son.” His hair is streaked with silver, and slicked straight back. He’s wearing an oversized suede coat that make his shoulders bigger and squarer than they are. He sets a black hefty bag down. “Afraid all I got is stale bread tonight. We’ll eat when the moon begins to rise. And be grateful for what is.”

Nobody argues. Tonight Donavon’s father is a quiet, dignified man who takes his seat by the fire with a book of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Every so often, he reads a few lines aloud, just loud enough for Donavon to hear.

The world is charged with the grandeur of God

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed.

Donavon, still a word collector, takes out his small brown book and writes down Crushed.

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

And then writes, Bright wings. Bent world.

His marsh-mellow catches fire. He watches it burn. “Better that way,” says a guy named Reese, who’s fighting a heroin addiction with everything he’s got.

And then Donavon sees her. Out near the edge of the street. Maria Junie, mother of the ones he killed. She’s walking toward him. He turns back toward the fire. Maybe he imagined her. He hopes so. He’s imagined her before.

Last time he’d seen her, Maria Junie, standing in the dim hospital room where the shades were drawn and you could feel daylight pressing up against the window, he lay in bed while she said How could you not tell them to put their seat belts on! Yours was on! Is that all you care about is yourself?

And he’d been groggy with pain meds and smiled at her, a smile of sorrow and fear, involuntary and wrong, because he’d been lost. He hardly knew where he was. She walked over and slapped the smile off his face.

You little sonofabitch.

She didn’t even look like herself. He’d always liked her, maybe she was even his personal favorite when it came to mothers of friends. She had once won 300 bucks in the lottery and to celebrate took him and Cale and Daniel to The Cheesecake Factory, where he’d had the best food of his life. He’d even written a poem about that food.

She turned and left his room. “I shouldn’t have done that,” she said, turning at the door. “Shouldn’t have — oh, God. ”

Then she was gone.
 And after that, when he healed enough to get out of the hospital, his right hand still in a cast, he used his left hand to pour himself out in apology, and told her how Cale and Daniel had started fooling around and wrestling and that’s why they didn’t have seatbelts on. He walked all the way down into Lawrenceville and left the note in her mailbox one night. But he never heard back.

Well, they were her only family, and he understood. But it nearly kills him to see her out there on the sidewalk now. She’s a little heavier, her curly hair longer, but he sees her face with such intense focus it’s as if he’s taken it inside himself. As if her face is both across the way, and right there behind his heart. What is she doing here? In her white pants and short black boots and pale blue parka.

She walks toward them all now, her fingertips in the pockets of her pants, and when she’s close enough, Reese cries out to her. “You from the church?” and then, “Welcome you either way!” And turns to Donavon, “Burn ‘at sweet thing a marsh-mellow, Donny.”

Donavon is afraid he’ll be sick. His hands are wet. His heart is thunder. He keeps his eyes on the marsh-mellow in the fire. He isn’t breathing. His face is hot. Her face is hotter, inside of him.

“Donavon?” she says.

He makes himself look up at her, squinting as if she’s the brightest light.

“I hardly recognize you,” she says. “Some old friends of the boys told me they heard you were down here with your dad. So I came. Came to thank you for that letter you wrote. And to say I’m sorry. I’m so ashamed I slapped you. And so ashamed that — -”

“No,” he says, urgent, meaning don’t be ashamed. His heart clenches and opens and clenches like a fist, and he looks at the fire, holding his breath.

“And I have something for you. Something I should have given you that day in the hospital. I don’t know why I’ve kept it, but I know it’s wrong that I did.”

She pulls out a white tee-shirt from her black purse. Holds it up by the shoulders. In black letters it reads:

Broken

No saki

It’s like a message from a hundred years ago. “A girl came to the hospital to see you, but you were sleeping. A black girl who said she knew you. I told her I’d give you the shirt. So here I am, giving you the shirt.”

She holds it toward him, but he can’t make himself reach for it. She tosses it to him. He catches it, grips it.

“ Real sorry it took me so long. No excuse.” Her voice shakes at the edges. She turns to walk away.

He gets up with the long stick that ends with a burnt marsh-mellow and rushes after her. Walks beside her for a moment hunched in his army coat in the sharp autumn air, breathless, wordless. “Thank you,” he finally manages. “Thank you so much, Maria Junie.” And she nods, her lips tight, her eyes peering straight ahead. “It was just an accident, Donovan,” she says, and finally turns to look at him. “Don’t you want to live your life? Make something of yourself? You’re a smart kid, Donavon. Don’t think you can make your dad better by punishing yourself. And do me a favor, remember me like I am tonight, and not like I was when I slapped your face?” Her wide eyes are soft, and yet searching urgently, as if she’s trying to get some glimpse of her sons. Certainly they’re both inside him, and always will be, he wants to say, but he knows the conversation is over. Has to be. She’s come all the way down here to offer him this careful, wrenching forgiveness, and it’s all she can bear.

She hurries away from him, down the sidewalk, without looking back. 
 “Thanks,” he calls. He watches until she turns a corner, blocks away. He’s a different person now. That too he won’t be able to put into words for a long time. A small light breaks slowly inside his chest like water into parched earth. He takes off his coat, and puts on the Broken No Saki shirt over his sweater. Then puts his coat back on. Stands with his eyes closed for a long time, breathing.