A Face in Every Window

by Han Nolan

  I stayed at the dinner table with the rest of the crowd after I had finished eating. We sat around the table, again with the candlelight, and talked about Mam coming home soon, and how surprised she'd be with the house and Aunt Colleen living with us. I thought how surprised she'd be when she saw the change in Aunt Colleen, and I hoped, too, that she would find me changed as well. I had resolved to be more accepting, more tolerant of her attempts at finding her way. I looked around at the group seated at the table and smiled to myself. I resolved to be more accepting and tolerant of all of them.

  ***

  I TRIED TO speak to Bobbi in school. I wanted her to see how I had changed. I wanted her to know that I was willing to be there for her, without judging her. This was more of my resolve. I wanted Bobbi back home with us, where I felt she belonged. Larry had told me she'd moved with Don into some nearby apartment. After Pap's accident she'd skipped school a couple of days and I thought that maybe she wouldn't be coming back at all, but she did, only she wouldn't talk to anyone except a few girls who hung around with her. I had noticed she had dropped out of chorus and that Don waited for her at the main exit every day after school.

  Monday, I found her at her locker by herself, and I went up to her.

  "I just want to know if you're all right, that's all. I just want you to tell me how you're doing once in a while."

  Bobbi slammed her locker door. "It wasn't his fault, you know."

  "What?"

  "Pap got tangled up in the cord. Don didn't push him. He wasn't trying to hurt him, so I'm sick of everyone thinking it was his fault."

  "Hey, he was hurting you, remember? Listen to yourself trying to stick up for him. You're making excuses for him."

  Bobbi shrugged. "I made him mad."

  "So what does that mean? He should try to toss you headfirst off a roof?"

  "No! He just wanted me to come inside. He never would have pushed me off."

  "He just wanted you to do what he wanted. He just wants complete control over you. I see him waiting for you every day."

  "Sounds a lot like you, O'Brien."

  Bobbi started to leave and I said, "Thanks, and the family's just fine, so glad you care."

  Bobbi halted, started to turn around, changed her mind, and strode away down the hall.

  ***

  LATE THAT NIGHT, after Leon, Jerusha, and Melanie had read some of their poems, Larry stood up and I thought he planned to read us one of his poems, but instead he held up a magazine he had in his hand. He no longer wore the scarf around his neck. He didn't speak with an English accent. I couldn't recall when he'd changed. He just wore jeans and a sweatshirt and talked like the old Larry.

  He stood with the magazine in his hand and said, "I have an announcement to make," and I thought about what Tim had said about Larry always making some upsetting announcement.

  Larry cleared his throat and said, "I've come to a decision. As soon as I can get into a class, I'm going to the Fox Maple School of Traditional Building in Maine. I'm going to learn how to build timber-framed homes."

  "What are those?" Melanie asked.

  Larry opened up the magazine titled Joiners' Quarterly and passed around a picture of a room with large exposed beams up near the roof, no ceiling.

  "It's the way our house here was built," Larry said, "only most of our beams and posts are hidden by plaster." Larry took the magazine back and set it on the table next to him. He leaned over the picture and placed his index finger on it. "These houses are built to last," he said, tapping his finger. "I've been reading all about them. They've got integrity, and so do the people who build them, and I'm going to become an apprentice up there in Maine and learn how to build them." He raised his voice, his eyes widened. "I'm going to build houses, great, big, beautiful houses, and mountain retreats—and ... I'm going to build a career out of it. This is what I'm going to do with my life. I've decided. I'm going to do it!" Larry grabbed the magazine and sat back down.

  Harold clapped his hands and the rest of us joined in. I knew Larry had been thinking of his father when he spoke. The determination in his voice, the pride, the spirit, all were meant for his father. If our house was, as Jerusha claimed, the great incubator, then I figured Larry had become our first hatchling.

  ***

  THE NEXT DAY Mam came home, arriving a day earlier than she had planned. She rode up to the house in a taxi, appearing tired and dazed and even more so when she took the tour of the house and learned that Aunt Colleen now lived with us.

  "Of course, I'll leave whenever you say, Erin," Aunt Colleen said, and Mam, coming out of her stupor for just a moment, reached out her hand and grabbed Aunt Colleen's arm. "No, I'm so glad you're here. It's perfect. Everything's perfect, thanks."

  Then she hugged Aunt Colleen, and Pap hugged them both and almost fell, and Mam cried. I thought it was because of Pap and his leg. Every time she had looked at him her face had clouded over, her mouth turned down as if she was trying to hold back her tears, and then when he hugged them both she let go.

  "What is it, Erin?" Aunt Colleen said.

  Mam shook her head. "I'm just so glad to be home." She looked around at all of us, wiping her eyes, trying to smile. She reached out and took Aunt Colleen's hand, then released it and laughed. "It's just good to see you all, but I am tired. It's been a long day." She looked at all our faces, then frowned again.

  "Where's Bobbi?" she asked.

  We explained the rest of the Pap-and-his-broken-leg story, and Mam nodded, but I knew she didn't hear a word of it.

  "Well," she said, letting out a big breath of air, "I think I'D get myself a bath in my newly repaired bathtub, thanks to Colleen, and get a good night's sleep." Mam took Aunt Colleen's hand again. "Colleen, will you come with me?"

  The rest of us tried to figure out what had happened, why Mam had come back early, why she'd arrived in a taxi and not in Dr. Mike's car. We all agreed Mam and Dr. Mike must have had a fight, and I couldn't help but feel pleased inside, even if I had resolved to be more accepting of their friendship.

  ***

  THE NEXT MORNING I got up early so I could fix Mam breakfast in bed before I left for school. I wanted to tell her so much about what I felt, what I had been thinking about, how I had learned to let go of things a little bit, how I understood her need to have friends, how I had made a real effort to fit in. I didn't think I could really tell her all these things, but I figured bringing her breakfast in bed could be a peace offering. I thought she'd understand without my having to say anything.

  I knocked on Mam and Pap's bedroom door and she called for me to come in. She sounded as if she had been crying.

  I opened the door and found Mam sitting on the edge of her bed with her back to me. She had drawn the curtains and turned on the lights of the Nativity set, which Aunt Colleen and Ben had hauled upstairs and placed in front of the fireplace. The set filled that whole side of the room. Mam turned around to face me when I came in. She saw the tray, closed her eyes, and shook her head.

  "JP, could you get that out of here? Quick."

  "What's wrong? It's just eggs and toast and—"

  "Please!" She put her hand up to her mouth.

  "Sure." I turned around and set the food on the floor outside her door. I stepped inside and closed the door behind me.

  "You okay?"

  Mam nodded and backed herself onto the bed, leaning against her propped-up pillows.

  "Where's Pap?" I asked.

  "He slept downstairs. I think in the parlor in one of the chairs Colleen bought."

  "Are you sure you're all right?" I asked again, stepping closer.

  Mam nodded and reached for a cracker. She had a package of saltines on the bed beside her, where Pap should have been.

  "What's that?" I asked.

  "What, this?" Mam held the half-eaten cracker up. I saw her blush. "A cracker."

  "You don't eat crackers." I stepped closer to her bed. I didn't know much about such things, but I had heard that women eat soda
crackers when they have morning sickness, when they're pregnant.

  "Now I do. I had them all the time while I was in Switzerland. I guess I've just gotten into the habit" Mam tried to smile, but her voice sounded defensive and she looked frightened. Her shoulders were hiked up, her eyes looked everywhere but at me. She had her hair pulled back off her forehead, and I saw that the hair around her temples was wet.

  "I can't believe it," I said, breaking my resolve to be more accepting and tolerant.

  I pointed my finger at her and raised my voice, "You're pregnant! Aren't you? Aren't you?"

  "JP, calm down."

  "Calm down? I haven't even begun to get upset."

  I paced in front of her bed, my arms waving and shaking and gesturing all over the place. "How could you? How could you? I can't believe it. You're pregnant Are you pregnant? Just answer me, Mam."

  "Yes, JP. I'm pregnant."

  "You are not!" I said, making no sense at all and not caring. "I can't believe it I'll kill him. How could you be so stupid?"

  Mam sat up. "Now, that's enough! You asked and I told you. I'm pregnant."

  I stopped pacing and looked at her. She sat with her eyes wide, breathing hard, almost panting.

  "Maybe you're not. How do you know for sure? You need to see a doctor."

  "I saw one in Switzerland."

  "How could they tell so soon? You need to be tested by a real doctor."

  "JP, I didn't get pregnant in Switzerland if that's what you think I'm eleven weeks along already and for most of that time I thought I was getting sick again. I thought I was sick, JP, but I'm not. I'm just pregnant."

  "So what are you saying? This isn't Dr. Mike's? This is Pap's?"

  Mam closed her eyes and sat back against the pillows again. She cocked her head strangely and said, "Yes. Yes, of course."

  I didn't believe her. I took a deep breath and then, pointing at her, I shouted, "You cannot be pregnant!" I stormed toward the door. "You cannot be pregnant!" I opened the door and slammed it behind me, and charged downstairs and out the door.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  I RAN TO the woods not caring that I'd be late for school. I shouted at the trees, at the sky. I cried and shouted some more. I wiped at my tears with the back of my hand and my damp hands felt raw in the nippy air. I stared at them. I held them in front of me and stared at my red knuckles and blinked back more tears. "I hate her," I told my hands. "I hate them all. I've tried. They've never tried. They don't try. It's always me having to make the effort. Why? What for? Why should I try to fit in all the time? Forget it. I refuse to accept this. Mam pregnant! I refuse. I won't accept it." I jammed my hands in my pockets and shouted at the trees again. "I refuse to accept her!" Tears ran down to my chin and landed on my shirt.

  I marched deeper into the woods. I thought of the times when it worked, when I fit in, when I made it work, the time I cooked the dinner for everyone—comfort food, they had called it—and the ride back from the Seeleys' with Larry and Ben, when I had been willing to see past their relationship. I tried, damn it! And there was the night in the cabin listening to Jerusha and Susan play their music and sleeping six across, and even Christmas Eve with Bobbi.

  I wanted that. I wanted more of those moments, but they always got ruined by someone doing something stupid, messing up. It wasn't worth it. I stopped walking and shouted to the sky, to all the world, "It's not worth it!" I shook my head and continued walking. "Who's she kidding? Pap's baby. I could kill that doctor. I really could. Mam's just trying to find her way, Jerusha? Well, she's thirty-seven years old. A little late to be finding her way, don't you think? Why'd she have me? I must have been her first accident. She's no mother. She's a child. She's like some wild teenager, always getting herself in trouble. She doesn't even have enough sense not to get pregnant." I looked back up at the trees. "I hate her! I hate her! I hate her!" I threw myself against a maple and sagged to the ground and cried, hugging myself.

  I cried a good while, cried and shivered and shuddered. I was still in the T-shirt I had slept in and the wind blew through it as if it weren't there. "Good," I said, and then, "I can't, I can't love her. Pap's baby. Yeah, right. Right! I'm sure!"

  I sat shivering at the base of the tree a long time, letting the same thoughts circle in my mind. Then finally I knew what I would do. I would talk to Dr. Mike. I would confront the bastard. I stood up and brushed my hands off on my pants. "Let's just see whose baby it really is."

  I marched back to the house and went straight to the phone. Mam had written Doctor Mike's numbers on the pad we kept by the phone. I dialed his home number first. No answer. I called the hospital and they put me on hold for close to twenty minutes. I stood rapping a pencil on the pad, keeping my rage going, keeping my courage up.

  "James Patrick?" Dr. Mike said when he got to the phone.

  "It's about time," I said. "I've been waiting at least twenty minutes."

  Dr. Mike sounded irritated. "I do have patients, you know."

  "Yeah, and I've got no patience," I said "I want to talk to you, face-to-face. Today."

  "I'm busy today. I've got my patients this morning and I'm picking someone up at the train station this afternoon, and then—"

  "I'll meet you there."

  "Where? No, that's ridiculous. We can talk another time."

  "What time you going to be at the station?" I said, with more force in my voice.

  There was a long pause, and then he let out a heavy sigh. "All right, if you insist, why not I'll be there around three-fifteen."

  I slammed the phone down.

  ***

  THAT AFTERNOON I cut my last class, borrowed Jerusha's bike, and left in plenty of time to meet Dr. Mike. It felt good to get out on the bike and feel the cold air on my face. It helped to clear my mind. I knew just what I wanted to say. No shuffling around—get right to the point, catch him off guard. I made a fist and took a jab at the air.

  I had about ten minutes to kill when I reached the deserted station. No one was around in the middle of the day. Long grass grew up from beneath the stones in the center and along the edges of the tracks, and they looked as if they could have been tracks from twenty years ago. They were timeless, silent. I leaned Jerusha's bicycle against a bench and began pacing and planning just how I would say what I wanted to say, and the whole time thoughts of Mam and Dr. Mike in Switzerland, sharing a hotel room, and sharing a bed, kept playing in my mind.

  I remembered all the dates, to galleries, dinners, operas, plays. I wondered how many were really plays and operas and how many were evenings spent at Dr. Mike's place, or did they go to hotels? I could feel myself tensing, my hands in fists, my teeth biting into my lower lip, my eyes burning from staring without blinking as I paced. Memories of early days with Mam, days of discovery along the creek, days in winter when she taught me how to build a snowman and later, after a giant storm had dumped so much snow on top of an already record-breaking winter of snowfall, when she taught me how to make a real igloo. Would she be teaching the new kid about igloos? Mike's baby? Would she teach it about making vent holes in the roof of the igloo to keep carbon monoxide from building up? Would she show it how to smooth down the sleeping platform so that when it froze you wouldn't have lumps and bumps under your sleeping bag? Would she teach the child about chlorophyll, explain to it how the leaves weren't really green at all, that the chlorophyll absorbed most of the bands of light and only reflected back the green and yellow wavelengths? Would she share our private universe with some other child, the universe she'd tossed away when Grandma Mary died?

  I could feel the tears building up again and a lump had formed in my throat that wouldn't go away. I brushed at the tears and told myself to get mad, get angry. Forget about the past, forget all that. It's long gone.

  I saw Dr. Mike's BMW rolling down the road. I stopped pacing and waited, glaring at him through his dark windshield.

  Dr. Mike got out of the car and walked toward me, striding as if he thought he were a god. I s
pread my hands out, then clenched them in fists again.

  "All right, James Patrick. I have about five minutes," he said when he'd gotten close enough. "What is it you wanted to discuss?"

  I wondered if he spoke to his patients that way: I have five minutes to tell you you're dying of cancer and explain the rest of your life. Now, any questions?

  "My mother's pregnant." I said, swallowing hard, trying to get rid of the lump in my throat. He stood facing me, and I wanted to stare him down but I couldn't. I looked away.

  "Yes, that's correct."

  I turned back to him. He nodded at me and walked onto the train platform. He gazed down the tracks, acting as if he were dismissing me.

  I stepped up onto the platform with him and asked, "Is it your baby?"

  Dr. Mike turned his head and gave me half a smile, maybe a smirk. "Ah, that's why you wanted to talk to me. Well, now, don't you think you should ask your mother that question?"

  He stood there so smug, the doctor-god.

  "I did ask her."

  I saw a train coming down the tracks, its big light glaring like the sun. Dr. Mike got closer to the edge of the platform and watched.

  "I did ask her," I repeated, raising my voice. I could feel heat rising in my head, and a heaviness there, and then, staring at the back of Dr. Mike, I had this sense of sparking lights shooting off behind my eyes. I wanted him to pay attention, to stop dismissing me.

  "Hey!" I shouted.

  He jerked his head in my direction.

  "She said it was Pap's."

  He raised those bushy black brows of his, surprised. Then he broke into a smile and laughed. "Well, then, there's your answer, isn't it?"

  "Is it?"

  "You have your answer," he said, turning back to the train, dismissing me again—smug man.

  The train was coming too fast. It wasn't his train. It was going to go through, not stop. I heard it coming, saw it speeding along the tracks. Dr. Mike didn't know yet that it wasn't his train. He moved closer to the edge. Idiot-god.

  Then I heard a voice inside my head tell me to push him.

  Push him. Quick. Hurry. No one will know. Perfect crime, perfect murder. Hurry! Do it!