He waved dismissively. “It’s my job.”
3.
She could hear the band from the parking lot, even feel them—a vibration, rattling the rearview mirror of her car as she bent into the backseat to extract Abby. They were on the second movement of their show, The Scores of John Williams, and the song, the Yoda melody from Star Wars, was a soft transition between showstoppers.
Abby had only been to the high school a few times, and she took in the sights and sounds of adolescence with bright interest: the beaten-up cars of band kids, some football players stripped to their T-shirts and pads even in the cold, a couple of pretty girls—drama kids, Susanna guessed—smoking cigarettes behind the auditorium, their nails painted blue and green and their hair tied back with patterned silk scarves. Costume or affectation, Susanna wasn’t sure. Older girls fascinated Abby, and she was drawn to them like a sad puppy, pleased and beseeching, grateful for any show of attention. When one of the smoking girls smiled at her, she beamed.
“How’s it going, half pint?” the girl said.
Abby grinned and didn’t reply.
Susanna stopped Abby before turning the corner to the practice field and hunched over her. “It’s cold out, duckie,” she said, retying Abby’s coat hood so that only a saucer’s worth of pale face showed. She adjusted her daughter’s gloves, tucking them into the elastic bands of her sleeves, then tapped her playfully on her nose, which was pink with chill.
“I can hear Daddy’s music,” Abby said.
Susanna took her small hand, feeling a hitch in her chest at the little fingers, thick and clumsy in their knit gloves. “I know you can.” She started across the lawn briskly, while her courage and ire were up, Abby trotting a little to keep pace. Dale was up in the Box, which was really just a rickety wooden scaffolding, two stories high with a platform at the top and a relatively new set of handrails, which Dale himself had installed last year. As always, a long cord trailed from this perch down to a set of speakers on the ground, and Abby jolted, her hand clutching harder at Susanna’s, as Dale’s voice suddenly blasted from them, the music on the field disintegrating in little squawks and stutters before coming to a stop:
“No, no, no. You’re falling apart again in the fifth set. Take it back to three. Mack, you’re always about two big steps out of formation whenever the percussion backs into the circle. Your steps are too big. Smaller steps, OK? Color guard, what in God’s name are you doing back there?”
“It’s the wind,” a girl shouted. “These flags are too light.”
“Then put weights on them. But not until we manage to finish the show without stopping. This is ridiculous.”
The students were groaning and shifting from foot to foot. It was a strange thing, how much power Dale had over the fifty or so teenagers standing in a November chill, their breath painting the air, fingertips torn from gloves so that every note of John Williams could be played to perfection. Susanna could see a resignation in them, even now, that was rarely present in her eighth graders. They were defeated but respectful. Dale had cultivated a reputation for paternal gruffness and heart—“your chewy center,” Susanna said sometimes, playfully, to irritate him—and the students wanted mostly to please him, to see his mild smirk, to hear him say, in his unimpressed way, “Not bad.” Daddy Dale, they’d call him when spirits were high: these teenagers, some almost to college, who wouldn’t have been caught dead calling their own fathers anything but Dad. When Susanna was pregnant with Abby four years ago, the band kids all started calling her Mama Suzy, and more than one girl reached out and put her hand right on Susanna’s belly, as though it were fine, as though they didn’t need to ask. It was one of the reasons Susanna had started accompanying Dale to fewer competitions: not the distaste of being fussed over by teenage girls (though she was, a bit shamefully, uncomfortable with it, with them) so much as the distaste of being called Mama—as though, still then in her early twenties, she were not just Abby’s mother but some band mother, a mother de facto, a mascot. As though her life, too, revolved around these kids and their practices and their small weekend triumphs.
“I want bigger punch from the brass, too.” Dale sang some bars now in his pleasant tenor, calling the notes dees and dums and dahs. This had always embarrassed Susanna. “Like that: dah dee dah dah. OK, get into position. Let’s see if we can make it through the song without stopping.” The kids straightened their backs, lifted instruments into place. In the back of the field, the color guard held their flags, which were made with some kind of greenish, gauzy cloth, above their heads. Loyal. Determined. Dale would have been a great preacher, Susanna sometimes thought wryly. Or drill sergeant. Or cult leader. He was the kind of man with the public charisma to lead people to water or to Jesus or off the edge of a cliff.
“One, two, three,” he chanted.
The music swelled again. Susanna looked up at the Box and thought Dale spotted her, so she waved. But he continued to hunch over the railing, one hand on his headset, and she supposed that he’d only glanced her way to check out the clarinets. This close, she could make out their low, woody hum above the sunny brass, the glassy flutes. Susanna had once played clarinet. It was a dull instrument, she thought—the instrument of dowdy brown-haired girls with heavy thighs.
It was a quarter till by her watch. She guessed that there were at least another eight minutes to the show from this point, if the kids made it to the end, and she shifted restlessly back and forth between her feet, Abby’s hand still grasped tightly in her own. The students near her were squinting into the wind; at the back of the field, a tossed flag flew out of formation, and the girl who’d lost it went scrambling to retrieve it and return to her spot. Susanna couldn’t watch them without feeling their stress, without worrying, as they did, that Dale would erupt into a rant of disappointment. But still—and worse for her today—they pressed forward uninterrupted, and Dale, his back to the brisk wind, was unconsciously conducting, his left palm bobbing, a motion that always reminded Susanna of putting her hand outside of a car window on a warm day, skipping it on a current of air, letting her fingertips jump driveways and mailboxes and walked dogs. She and Ronnie had made a game of it as girls, Susanna always in the seat behind their father, Ronnie on the passenger side where there was more legroom, their arms extended out on both sides of the car like flapping wings.
She led Abby over to the scaffolding and put the gloved hand she was holding on a wooden beam. “Mommy’s going to go up to tell Daddy something,” she said. “You keep your hand here and don’t move it, OK?”
“What happens if I move it?” Abby’s expression might have been mischievous or it might have been wary.
“You lose the game,” Susanna said.
Abby stood very still, her feet neatly side by side, back straight. Her arm was raised to almost shoulder level to grasp the beam, and the set of her mouth was serious.
“It’ll just be a minute,” Susanna said.
The stairs, she noted with unease, groaned as she scaled the scaffolding, and the wind up here was worse, whistling from behind her against the metal roof of the high school. Her sister was missing—she could be anywhere, anything might have happened to her—and here Dale was, riding this band tower like the captain of a ship, as though what he was doing really mattered. He was glancing over his shoulder as she surfaced, expression unsurprised, though this was the first time in their marriage that Susanna had joined him up here, the first time she’d interrupted one of his practices. He might have felt the vibration of her ascent. But he had also seen her wave before. She was suddenly sure of it.
There was a lull as the Yoda theme ended, a hiccup of silence before the first startling blast of “The Olympic Fanfare,” and Susanna said, stealing the seconds, “I need you to keep Abby.”
He switched a button on his headset and moved the microphone down beneath his chin. His face was pink with windburn, his lips chapped, and he looked vigorous and strong, like he’d been skiing or out for a run. The band continued to
play from below.
“I’m meeting a detective about Ronnie,” Susanna said as loudly as she could without shouting. “I’m going to let him into her house. He agrees with me that something seems off.”
“Why didn’t you leave Abby at the day care?” He had the look already, Susanna noted: eyes popped, brows knit with incredulity; his mouth was slightly open, his head cocked to the side. She had always hated the look, even as she knew that she had her own version of it, the one she wore when he came home an hour later than he’d promised, or when he told her only the night before that it was his turn to bring snacks to the teachers’ lounge.
“They close at five thirty. You know that.”
“And you can’t bring her with you? To this—” He waved his hand, conducting again. “This whatever it is?”
“I wish you’d take this seriously for a moment,” Susanna said. “My sister’s been gone over a week. She hasn’t been at work. She’s not answering calls. I’m not bringing our daughter to meet this detective. I can’t keep my mind on this and her all at once.”
Dale lifted his glasses and pinched the skin between his eyes. “Saturday. I ask for a little consideration until Saturday. That’s it.” A drop of rain hit his shoulder and he wiped at it roughly. “This is my job. This is what I do for a living.”
“Ronnie is my sister,” Susanna said. “Do you not get that?” More drops were falling, stippling the plank floor, and she trembled in her thin coat. “I don’t have a choice. Your daughter is at the bottom of this tower, and it’s raining, and it’s about time you stepped up and did your part. None of this is important like you think it is. None of this.” She waved her own arms mockingly toward the field.
“I have practice.” He turned and leaned back over the railing, shoulders hunched against the rain. “It’s over in an hour. I can watch Abby then.”
“I’m not kidding with you, Dale.”
“Neither am I.” He switched his mike back on. He’s going to electrocute himself, she thought.
Let him, a voice inside her whispered. It might have been Ronnie’s.
Susanna stumbled on the stairs down, so angry that her legs were unsteady. This was his job, was it? Standing in the rain? Bossing around children? And he only asked for a little consideration, as though it wasn’t Susanna always picking Abby up, as if it wouldn’t be time soon enough for concert band, All-District and All-Region, more long Saturdays away, more long weeknight practices. He made only three thousand more a year than she did. He worked the same eight-hour school day. But these practices, these fucking band practices, had given him—he thought—the entitlement to do as little as he desired to in the rest of their married life. Susanna did the parenting, the cooking, the cleaning, the grocery shopping; she paid the bills and balanced the checkbook; she sent birthday cards to Dale’s parents and sisters and nephews because she knew that Dale wouldn’t remember to, or be bothered to. She was the manager and the secretary and the janitor of their marriage, Dale the CEO, and she was sick of it, she was sick. She came to the bottom of the steps and saw Abby still standing in her hooded coat, hand still on the tower’s scaffolding, her body a hard right angle. She loved the child more than she loved Dale, more than she had ever loved him. She loved her more than Ronnie. It was, she figured, a given that she loved her more than herself. But that was the cruel punch line of motherhood, wasn’t it? You loved more than yourself, you lost yourself, and your husband grew to depend upon it, to take advantage of it. You made a daughter and wanted more for her than that, but you lost the ability to show her the way. A way to be a woman who loves rather than a mere vessel of love.
Susanna lifted her coat over her head and ran.
Abby might have called after her. Susanna felt the call rather than heard it, the band too loud for a four-year-old’s voice to penetrate, and she hadn’t even made it to the parking lot before she hated herself, before she felt certain she’d done the wrong thing. Dale was there—Dale would go to their daughter—but this was the kind of moment that Abby would never forget, her mother running away from her, ignoring her. There would be years and years to make this up to her, years stacked one atop another like those mattresses in the fairy tale, and beneath it all the pea, the tiny bit that shouldn’t matter but does, the princess tossing and turning above it. Had Susanna ever forgotten the day at the van with Ronnie? Or the time she’d seen her drunken father, naked as Noah, passed out on the living room sofa? He’s dead to me anyway, she’d said to Dale, remembering the scrollwork of curly hairs on her father’s soft inner thighs, the flaccid penis drooping, his scrotum bunched like moldy fruit.
She looked back once before rounding the corner and making the last dash to her car. Abby hadn’t moved. Her hand was still in place against the tower, the other lifted in good-bye, and Susanna was too ashamed to wave in reply, to let her daughter know she’d seen her.
Chapter Nine
1.
It was a cold night, the first of the season, and Christopher’s mother had insisted that they light the fireplace—the real one, not the gas logs in the recreation room that you could coax into flame with a switch—and drink hot cocoa. So he did as she asked, letting her fill his Telluride mug from the saucepan on the stove, letting her drop in a half dozen mini marshmallows, letting her steer him to the room in the house that he most hated, where he’d have to sit ramrod-straight on the sofa to balance his drink. This was the Sitting Room. He thought of it that way, as a formal destination, and it was: a place you planned to go to, or where your mother told you to go, and not a place where you happened to end up. He came into this room perhaps half a dozen times a year. It faced Main Street and the formal entryway, a pair of double doors so tall that Christopher couldn’t reach the lintel if he stood on tiptoe and stretched his middle finger as high as it would go. He didn’t even have a key to that door. Most days he entered the house through the utility room, grabbed a soda from the kitchen, and then went back out immediately to the guesthouse, where he’d been allowed to sleep since his thirteenth birthday. He had a twenty-six-inch color TV and a VCR out there—his parents’ hand-me-downs, but still—a Super Nintendo game station, a foosball table, and a new IBM computer with a dot-matrix printer. The walls were draped with banners that he’d printed out over summer break, when the novelty hadn’t yet worn out. The one hanging over his bed was five sheets of paper long and read CHRISTOPHER’S PAD in block letters. He’d found pictures of Corvettes in the clip art folder and used these to flank the legend.
She wanted him to speak first. He would not speak first.
“Well,” she said finally. She was sitting on the sofa opposite his, looking at the fire, legs pulled up catlike beneath her hip. The soft light of the flames made her face seem prettier than it really was. Younger. She was a fixture in his life, a neutral—at most, perhaps, a reflective surface. He checked her face to make sure that he was loved, forgiven, approved of, amusing; he checked to determine if he was in trouble. He paid attention only to the things she said that concerned him. He was the center of her life—he knew this, had not considered it could be otherwise—so most of what she said concerned him. And this was true not because he was a bad child or an unusually spoiled child, but because he was a child still.
“We could watch TV if we were in the rec room,” he said, filling the silence.
“Mmm.” She still looked at the fire, not at him. Her dark blond hair, smoothed behind an ear, glinted. “That’s true. And yet, here we are.”
He looked around as if to confirm the fact, miming surprise, thinking she might laugh.
“They’re going to suspend you, Chris,” she said. “What on earth do you have to say for yourself?”
He choked a little on the cocoa he’d just sipped, surprised that she’d unleashed on him so quickly.
“Well?”
“Nothing,” he said. “I guess I don’t have anything to say.”
Her face sagged into distress. “Why did you do that to that girl? Was it—” She ran h
er thumb along the lip of her mug. “Did it go how the principal told me it did?”
Christopher remembered the instant when he’d looked down, as if from a distance, and watched his hand take up a wet, sloppy handful of his pasta. Then the memory shifted to sensation—the hard fling forward, the pull in his shoulder. Finally, a snapshot: the ropes of spaghetti spattering Emily’s shocked face. The act was in motion before Christopher could decide to do it. Which was not to say that he’d been possessed or out of control, that he hadn’t wanted to hurt Emily in that moment, because he had, and he’d felt good—damn good—when he did. For the instant. By the time Leanna had lobbed her chunk of garlic bread and Craig his chocolate pudding, and the cafeteria had erupted around them all in gleeful, frantic confusion, Christopher was already wishing that he hadn’t done it. He wished this as he threw the rest of his spaghetti, his own pudding and bread, his paper basket of iceberg lettuce and pink dressing—as he yelled “You freak!” and heard the word echoed by the kids around him. What power he had! He hadn’t known how much until that moment.
“I’m sorry, Mom,” he said, and he meant it.
She exhaled. “Jesus. What a cruel thing. To think that I was just at school the other day defending you, saying how mature you are.”
He blew on his cocoa though it had already gotten cool.
“I mean it. I called your father at work this afternoon—”
Christopher gulped.
“—and told him everything. He didn’t care like I did. He said boys will be boys. And I can see you wanting to smirk over there—”
He shook his head emphatically.
“—but I’d save it if I were you, because he’s steamed about this suspension stuff. If it goes through, that’s just the beginning of what you’re going to suffer. Don’t think it’s going to be a week home playing video games and foosball.” She rubbed her eyes. “But he has Johnny Burke on it, so we’ll see. Though I’m not convinced that you should get off the hook for this one.”
The Next Time You See Me Page 12