i've long stopped wondering why you won't answer
Your name is Rosario Lalonde, you are in the third grade, and all of your teachers have been acting strange since the morning. Your little sister sits beside you - she skipped a grade, so she’s in your year - idly drawing curlicues in her penmanship notebook. You’ve been trying to hold it for what feels like five years, because you do not like interrupting teachers, but you really do have to go to the bathroom.
You raise your hand. Your teacher, who seems to be at wits’ end, despite the fact that the other students have been blowing spitballs at each other less frequently than usual today, glances up.
“May I please go to the bathroom?” you ask, with your best seven year old enunciation.
Your teacher seems to need to contemplate this for a while until Roxy, of course Roxy, it’s always Roxy, chirps up that the bathroom is literally two rooms away from this classroom.
“Okay, then. Hurry back, Rose?” the teacher asks.
“Can I go too?” Dirk asks, from the back of the room. “Please? I’ve been waiting since 8.”
“Yes, yes, you both may. Stay together, okay?”
You both chorus your “yes ma’am”s in unison, even though it would be rather impossible for you to stay in the same place as each other and use the bathroom at the same time.
Not only is the classroom for Grade 3-03, the section of third grade for gifted and talented students, near the bathroom, it’s near the main office.
So you hear what sounds like your mother shouting at the principal echoing down the hallway.
Dirk’s ready to investigate, creeping slowly down the hall, before you even suggest it.
“What do you mean that I can’t take the Striders with me? I’m listed second on that card for emergency contacts, right under their own father, who cannot get here right now for reasons I’ve already explained!” she shouts. “Try to call him again! You won’t get him! I don’t know what’s going on, but I am not leaving this school until I have all four of those children! You can be sure of that!”
Your mother lets out an impressive string of curse words in Spanish, and then resumes her indignance in English.
“Mami?” you call down the hall.
Your mother pokes her head out of the principal’s office. Aforementioned principal is not far behind her.
“Please, can me and Dave go home with Tia Roxy?” he asks, trying to sound as pathetic as possible.
You’re not old enough to know the meaning of the words “emotional manipulation” but you do know that Dirk has an unrivaled knack for getting what he asks for, from everyone except for his father.
Your mother has clearly been crying heavily. Not even the kind of crying she does after she and your father argue, where she manages to conceal it with carefully re-applied makeup. No, she’s near the end of her rope, and nobody has yet told you why.
The principal looks conflicted for a moment, but ultimate acquiesces to the guileless expression on Dirk’s face.
“We’ll need to leave a message with Derrick and David’s guardian, of course,” the principal says to your mother.
“Do, then,” Mami says. “After that, I expect Dave and Roxy to be released to my care.”
“Naturally, Ms. Lalonde. I apologize for the mixup, but there’s just so many things going on at once an--”
“It’s fine. I understand. Don’t worry about it.”
When you’re sure the adults are no longer talking - you know better to interrupt adults in conversation - you walk up to your mother and tug on her white jacket with the black sleeves, which she seems to wear year ‘round. She looks down, sees who it is, and manages a weak smile.
“Can I go to the bathroom first? Me and Dirk, well, Dirk and I--...” Your mother has a wet little smile for your eternally exacting diction. “We both have to go to the bathroom.”
“Where’s the bathroom?” she asks.
“Hurry up, then. Meanwhile, I’ll grab your sister and Dave.”
You take Dirk’s hand - he’s doing that thing where he goes blank as a freshly washed chalkboard - and lead him down to the boys’ room. You kick him in the leg, and then his eyes lose that glassy sheen.
“My mom’s taking all of us home, but she said we could go to the bathroom first,” you explain.
He nods, still slightly blank. You wonder if kicking him again would help. You decide against it.
Later, with all four of you in your mother’s car - Roxy gets to ride in the front passenger seat, she called first dibs - she struggles to explain what’s going on. She has to keep pausing to wipe her eyes, her hands gone white knuckled on the steering wheel.
“Something happened in Manhattan. Planes crashed into the Twin Towers.”
Dave cranes his neck to look toward Manhattan, as if he can see something to confirm this, and your mother snaps at him to stop with uncharacteristic annoyance. Then, she apologizes. She even hands him her cell phone, and tells him to play Snake for a while.
“Where’s Bro?” Dirk asks. “He’s okay, isn’t he? He’s not…?”
“He’s stuck at work. His boss, well, his boss’s son works not too far away from there, over in the Financial District. So he went to go find out what’s going on with his son, and told Derrick to hold down the fort until he came back.”
You, you’re always attuned to the most minute changes in the way your mother speaks. She’s calling him Derrick, as opposed to Dirk, You Idiot, or Di-Stri, so it must be serious. But the Strider brothers and Roxy need not know that.
Her explanation seems to satisfy both Dirk and Dave.
“Say, do any of you want to get ice cream?” your mother asks, all of a sudden. None of you are going to argue with that proposition. All of you nod. “Good, I’ll take you to Baskin Robbins.”
You know that Baskin Robbins is right next to the liquor store on Rawson, and while you two are arguing over flavors and configurations of toppings, your mother will duck into the other store and get herself something to drink.
Your little sister may be the one named for the woman driving the car, but you will always be the one who better understands the cogs and gears driving your mother’s actions. When you were five, you asked her if she was ever angry that she had you and your sister, because of the way she always smiled when she talked about how she had wanted to become a scientist when she was younger. She assured you this was not the case.
Then, she read you a poem by Robert Frost, about roads and differences, and you fell asleep in her lap, the cadence of the verses lulling you into an easy slumber.
You think you know why your mother tells you and Roxy to stay in your room when your father makes his rare appearances. Roxy always likes it when he comes home, because you two hide in the closet and make a fort out of blankets and books. You think you hear screaming, your mother screaming that she’ll let him near you two over her dead body, but then Roxy reads from Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, with different voices for each character, and you partially let the worry slosh out of your mind so you can hear about Buckbeak and the Grim.
Roxy is the outgoing headstrong kind one, and you are the quiet thoughtful wary one, as if each of you have been evenly given half of your mother’s characteristics. You two may be in the same grade, but Roxy is so much younger than you when you really give it thought.
It’s why you and Dirk get along so well. He and Dave are the same way.
You will protect them. You will protect each other.
===> Be Derrick Strider I
You call Simon every hour and a half to two hours, because you’ve come to know the way his voice sounds when he’s on the verge of a nervous breakdown. You keep your conversation short, because you know he wants to keep the line open in case someone else calls, and you’re not much one to really shoot the bullshit.
You sit in your boss’s office, and tell… what’s his name. Krishna? that you want to speak to Simon. He puts his roommate on.
“Have you spoken to Katya yet?” you ask Si.
As if you need to ask. If he had, she would have probably answered the phone herself.
“I don’t know where she is,” Simon tells you. “Her phone keeps going to voicemail.”
“Maybe it’s dead,” you suggest.
“Maybe she is,” he replies in a strangled murmur. “She was at Ira’s last night.”
“Irina. Her sister. She lives in Bay Ridge. She woulda had to take the N to get to class today. And she had early classes at NYU this morning, and that train goes to Cortlandt Street, right under where, right… where, where, where…”
You try to starve the flicker of of panic in his voice before it can ignite fully.
“Simon,” you say. “Keep it together.”
“How do you expect me to--?”
“The kind answer? Because I think she’s probably fine. You always used to bitch about how you never understood why she got a cell phone if she never bothered to charge the damn thing. The cynical answer? Because if anything has happened to her, having a nervous breakdown isn’t going to change it. Wait, Simon. Just wait. Keep it together, okay? That’s all you can do.”
Simon sighs. You think you hear the beginnings of a sob in his throat, that he fights down like a shot of pure absinthe.
“You’re right. I’m going to go now, because--”
“In case she calls,” you reply.
“Right. Thanks. For um. Checking up on me. How are your sons?”
“At Ro’s place, since I’m stuck at work. She probably took them to get ice cream so she could go next door and buy a handle of Stoli on her way home. Either way, they’re safe. I spoke to her before I called you.”
“That’s good, at least,” he replies.
Sometimes you just want to climb out of your skin and walk away for an hour or two. Sometimes you can. Try as you might, right now, you can’t. You’re worried sick over your kids. You’re worried sick about the world.
What the fuck even? How could some shit like this happen. You put your feet up on your boss’s desk because you can and the sheer fucking audacity of it might allay the creeping anxiety that threatens to strangle the life out of you.
It does, for a second or two.
So you call Ro back and tell her to get you a pint of mint chocolate chip ice cream.
Apparently, she’s already home, and all she has is vanilla and strawberry, so you’re just gonna have to deal with it. She asks if you want to speak to Dirk and Dave, and you do, just not yet. If you lose your shit in front of them, you’ll scare them, and you don’t want them to be scared. You want to put that off for as long as possible.
Although Ro seems more distressed than you do, after a pause, she starts to speak, her voice gaining confidence as she goes on.
“Dirk?” she asks. “It’s okay. We’re safe. It’s gonna be okay, alright?”
“I guess, Ro,” you say, trying to stop shaking, trying to keep it cool, keep it Strider cool. “Watch the idiots. Don’t let them eat too much junk food.”
“Mountain Dew and Doritos for everyone,” she says. “Got it.”
September 2002 to September 2009
Sometimes That Jackass tunes Ro up so badly that she can’t entirely conceal the aftereffects with makeup.
Sometimes she sends Rose and Roxy over to your apartment to stay for a while.
You start teaching them how to strife, but are not as hard on them as you are on your sons. You don’t want to terrify them.
You’re trying, you tell yourself, when Dave shrinks away from you whenever you enter a room.
After you ring the bell for like eighteen times, Ro opens the door to her apartment, but only as far as the chain will go. She glares at you like you’re a piece of dogshit she’s stepped in.
“Derrick,” she says. “Get outta here. The kids’ll be home soon.”
She makes to close the door, but you stop it with one hand.
“Ro, will you just hear me the fuck out?”
“And why should I do that?” she asks, arms crossed over her chest.
“I want to talk to my children,” you say, trying not to sound as utterly broken as you feel.
She’s Dirk and Dave’s provisionary guardian for the moment. You can see them if she gives it the okay.
The first week you spent without your sons, you turned up your music as loud as it would go, neighbors be damned, and sat against your speakers, letting your teeth rattle with the backbeat. Then, you decided you’d just take on extra shifts at your job until you ran out of work you could possibly do. Even your supervisor didn’t want to give you any overtime pay, so after a while, he just told you to go home. The cars could wait another day, and besides, you looked like death warmed over.
You returned to your empty apartment.
You turned up the music again.
You start babbling at Ro.
“I never wanted to hurt them, if you can believe that,” you say. “I…”
“...wanted to make them stronger, you ended up scarring them for life, Dirk, and you’re really sorry about it,” she says, reciting the message you’d left, word for word. “Cut the shit, I’ve heard it already. I do listen to my voicemails.”
That’s an utter lie. The only time Ro listens to her voicemails is when her mailbox is full and she needs to clear it out.
You know you’ve fucked up, and you can’t take this shit anymore.You’re ready to fall to your knees and start begging.
You take off your shades.
“What do I have to do for you to let me see them?” you ask.
“If they want to talk to you, that’s on them, not me,” she says. “They’re old enough to make their own decisions. Shit, they’re almost as old as you were when you had--”
Ro gives one great sigh, contained therein a thousand smaller sighs, for a thousand various reasons.
“I’m sorry, Dirk. Real sorry, but the answer is no,” she says. “I wish things had gone differently.”
A million ways your lives could have gone twenty years ago, and you never thought things would end like this.
“Me too,” you murmur, laid bare, utterly bereft of your usual pretenses and rationalizations.
You’ve hurt your kids. You’ve seriously hurt your kids. You may have hurt them beyond repair. The worst part is, you don’t even think they hate you. Instead, they’re scared of you. You may have been a better parent than your parents, but that’s setting your standards at the center of the earth.
Dirk and Dave deserved better.
You put your shades back on.
This time, when she closes the door in your face, you don’t ring her bell again. You walk out of her building, and back across the street to your own apartment, thinking of a girl who once gave you a cigarette on the corner of W 4th Street.
You lie down on your ratty bedsheets, take off your shades, put them on your bedside table, and have something akin to a staring contest with the ceiling for a few hours.
