Here’s hoping for change in our lifetime, because the above would be a hard thing for me to bear. I won’t give in to my nature, which tells me to act tough and invulnerable and pretend otherwise.
I’d also like to back up slightly and note that the moment when life brought you to my door might not have been entirely random and accidental. I suppose it depends on your thoughts about life. In certain moments I suspect life knows exactly what it’s doing.
All my love to you,
Lucy
She refolded the letter and placed it in careful order back in the shoebox. Just as she was replacing the lid, she heard Pete’s voice.
“Ma’am?”
He was leaning his shoulder against the wood trim of the living room doorway, looking bigger than he’d been when she met him. Even though it had only been three months.
“‘Dr. Lucy’ is better than ‘ma’am.’”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“What is it, honey?”
“I ran into my dad in town today.”
She felt crystals of ice appear fully formed, from nowhere, coating all of her internal organs at once.
One of her deepest worries was that Pete’s father would have a change of heart and want him back. In fact, she had expected it to happen by now. But there had been nothing but radio silence on that channel.
“What did he say to you?”
“Nothing. He didn’t say a word to me. He was coming out of the hardware store. I had to go into town to the hardware store to do an errand for my work. And just as I’m going in, there he is coming out. And he didn’t say a word. He turned his head away and acted like I wasn’t even there. Or like I was just any other stranger you’d look at and then look away. But I could see . . . something. I don’t know how to say in words what I saw. Kind of a jolt, I guess. A jump. Like if you touch an electric fence. We both got that jolt. But then he just acted like I wasn’t even there.”
She watched his face for a moment, waiting in case there was more he wanted to say. She couldn’t quite read his expression. His face looked the way it always did. The way it always had, as long as she had known him. Maybe his sadness over these new events was no bigger or more powerful than the sadness he had brought with him to her door on that first day.
“Are you okay?” she asked him after a time.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You want to sit with me and talk about it?”
“Well, that’s really all there is to say, I guess. I just thought I should tell you.”
“Thank you. I’m glad you did.”
“Except . . . I just don’t get it is all.”
“How he could do that.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I don’t really get it, either,” she said. But she knew he needed more. So she dredged up more. “I think he’s probably feeling hurt. I think about it sometimes. I wonder if when your father threw you out he thought you’d be back in forty-five minutes with your hat in your hands.”
“I don’t have a hat, ma’am.”
She almost laughed, but she stopped herself, because he might not understand the reaction. She wished again he would come sit with her, but he clearly didn’t care to. He was restless, and probably wanting to remain just at the periphery of this discussion, with plenty of room to retreat.
“It’s just an expression,” she said. “He probably figured you had no other options for where to live. He might have been trying to teach you how much you needed that miserable home. If so, it really blew up in his face, and maybe he’s hurt by the fact that you’re getting along just fine without him.”
“So, you’re saying he loves me? Because I thought he hated me.”
“I guess I’m saying it must be really hard to love someone and hate them at the same time.”
She heard him breathe, even at that distance. Heard him expel air he must have been holding on to for a while.
“Yes, ma’am. I can tell you for a fact that it is.”
Then, because he did not seem inclined to come to her, she stood, left the box of letters on the seat of the chair, and walked to him. He did not retreat. She put her arms around him, which was still a fairly new experience for them both.
“Thank you, ma’am,” he said into her shoulder.
He broke away and ran upstairs.
She put the letters away in the closet, then sat down at the typewriter to write a new one. She had to tell Calvin about Pete’s first day at school, and how she had signed him up at the new address without incident, and how Pete had run into his father in front of the hardware store.
She would not ask Calvin if he was seeing anyone new. Partly because he would not want to feel compelled to say until he was ready. Partly because she didn’t want to know.
NOVEMBER 1962
THREE YEARS AND THREE MONTHS AFTER THE BELLS MOVED AWAY
Chapter Twenty-Seven: Pete
At the end of his school day, and after work, Pete slipped into the house, silently looking around for Dr. Lucy so he could ask her a question. He looked in the kitchen, but didn’t find her. But then, through the kitchen windows, he saw her out in the backyard feeding the horses.
He trotted to the back door and threw it wide.
“Hey!” he shouted. “What’re you doing that for? That’s my job!”
She looked up. Smiled in a way that looked oddly content. At least, for Dr. Lucy.
“You come home from work so tired, though.”
He jogged across the yard and ducked through the boards of the fence. It was harder than it used to be. He’d grown a lot in the three years he’d lived here with her, and he had to position his body just so to squeeze through what had gradually become a tight space.
“Doesn’t matter,” he said, gently removing the grain bucket from her hands. The five horses who had not yet been fed milled around him, tossing their heads and bumping him with their noses. “It’s still my job.”
He looked into her eyes for a moment, and she into his. And he almost asked her. But then he didn’t. Couldn’t, really.
“I’ll get started on dinner,” she said, and reached up high to give his shoulder a pat.
He watched her go and wondered why these tough moments of communication looked so easily done by other people, and why they felt so desperately hard to him.
In the morning, at the breakfast table, he asked.
He accomplished this partly by gearing himself up for the task before coming downstairs, partly by being careful to look away from her face as he did.
“Dr. Lucy? Did you read the paper yesterday?”
She looked up from her coffee with obvious curiosity, but he was careful to keep his gaze trained down at the table.
“Did I read the paper? That’s an interesting question. I get the paper, as you must have figured out by now. I sit here with the paper on the table with me while I eat. I read the weather and the funny pages because the news breaks my heart. Sometimes I think I should stop taking it altogether, but then I think, ‘What will I use to line the bottom of Archimedes’s cage?’ Why? Was there something special in the paper yesterday?”
“Maybe,” he said, carefully staring at a jar of jam on the table.
A long silence fell. Pete couldn’t tell if she felt inclined to fill it, because he didn’t dare look at her face. Not even in his peripheral vision.
“Pete,” she said after a time. It was that quiet, patient voice indicating he was being foolish. “Isn’t this the part where you tell me what it might have been?”
“Oh. That. Yeah. I suppose so.” His throat felt tight, but he pushed on. “Couple kids at school yesterday . . . and one teacher . . . they said my dad might’ve been in an accident. Well . . . I guess accident is the wrong word. More like a . . . fight, I guess. They said it was in the paper. There was some kind of brawl at that bar in town, and a couple people got stabbed. And I guess my dad was one of them.”
He braved his first look at her face, but it was too late. She had turned awa
y sharply and risen from the table. He watched her hurry out into the living room.
Pete sat frozen for a moment, wondering what had just happened. What did it mean when you told someone a thing like that and they ran away? And what did it mean you should do next?
A moment later she reappeared, holding a section of newspaper in her hands. Pete breathed for what felt like the first time in a long while. And understood. The older newspapers were stacked on top of Archimedes’s cage.
His heart beat faster as he watched her flip the pages.
“Oh,” she said. And stopped flipping.
“Found it?”
“Yes.”
She read in silence for a moment as his heart pounded—possibly hard enough to kill him from the feel of it.
“They told me he was alive,” Pete said when he couldn’t stand the silence any longer. Even though it might only have been four or five seconds.
“That’s what it says here. Want me to read it to you?”
“No, ma’am,” he said firmly. It surprised him to hear himself say it, and it seemed to surprise her as well. “Um. Yeah, that sounded strange, I guess. But I’m not sure my heart could take it. You know. Every little thing they wrote in there. Maybe just give me the gist of the thing.”
“Okay.” She tried to look into his eyes, but he didn’t allow it. Her voice came out soft. Gentle, as if trying to deliver cutting truths in such a way as to leave Pete uncut. “There was a drunken brawl down at the Welcome Inn. Somebody pulled a knife. Must have been somebody who doesn’t live around here, because the police don’t know who it was, and nobody’s been arrested. But your dad got stabbed nine times, and the bartender got stabbed once trying to pull the guy off him. He’s at the county hospital in serious but stable condition. Your dad, not the bartender. The bartender wasn’t seriously hurt.”
“Is that good or bad?”
“Getting stabbed nine times? I think most people would agree that’s bad.”
“No. Not that. I know that. That condition thing at the end.”
“Oh. Serious but stable. I’d have to say it’s a little of each. I’ll make you some cereal to save time and then I’ll drive you down there if you like.”
His gaze came up and bored right into hers. And he saw the pity there. The hurt on his behalf. Which, he suddenly realized, was just what he’d been trying to avoid all along.
“Ma’am?”
“What’s the confusing part, Pete? I’ll take you down there if you want to go.”
“I can’t do that, ma’am. I have work. And school.”
“I think this is important enough that you could be excused.”
“But I can’t, ma’am.”
“You can miss an hour of school. I’ll write you a note.”
“That’s not what I mean. I can’t go see my dad. It’s my dad. I can’t go near him. He won’t want me to.”
He looked away from her again. To avoid all that hurt on his behalf. Another long, drawn-out silence fell.
“I’m sorry if it was thoughtless of me to suggest it,” she said after a time. “I thought maybe this was one of those circumstances that cancels out everything else. But that’s a call you have to be the one to make.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said.
She offered him bacon and eggs, since they were in no hurry now. But he chose the cereal instead, because he’d lost his appetite. Which hadn’t happened in as long as he could remember. Even when he was upset he usually ate like a horse. But not that morning. That morning he forced down a bowl of cornflakes because he knew he would need the energy. But it tasted like cardboard, and he really only ate it out of need.
He was on his bike, pedaling from work to school, when he decided. Though, in truth, it didn’t feel much like a decision. It felt as though the handlebars of the bike turned on their own. As if they chose for him.
He rode up to the front doors of the county hospital and glanced down at the watch Dr. Lucy had given him for his fifteenth birthday. It was twenty after nine. That brought up a panicky feeling, because he had been due at school twenty minutes earlier. He had never been late to school. It seemed unthinkable.
But it was no longer a fixable problem. It was done.
He locked his bike to a power pole out front and forced himself to walk inside. He’d always been afraid of hospitals, ever since he was four and his mom had had that operation for her appendix. Though it was nothing he could have put into words, hospitals smelled like death to him, and wore a pall of grief and loss that seemed to penetrate his skin and infect him.
He walked up to the front desk at the far end of an impossibly long lobby. It took the woman behind the counter a long time to look up. He cleared his throat lightly.
“Can I help you?” she asked. Her voice was hard like metal, her accent thicker than most in these parts.
“Bernard Solomon?” It sounded too squeaky, but anyway he had gotten it out.
“Are you family?”
“Yes, ma’am. I’m his son.”
Before he averted his eyes so he would not see it, her face turned into a mask of the same pity he’d seen on Dr. Lucy that morning. He felt tears behind his eyes, but he fought them.
“Room 104,” she said.
Pete stuck his head through the door, leaving his body in the relative safety of the hallway.
His father lay in a hospital bed with his eyes closed, a sheet pulled up to his armpits. He looked small. And old. It seemed impossible that a man could age so completely in only three years. And could his dad have gotten smaller? It didn’t seem like a possible thing. Pete must have been remembering wrong.
He took four steps into the room.
Pete stood staring down at the figure in the bed, wondering why he didn’t feel afraid. He had expected to feel terror in seeing his father again. Instead he only wondered how it was possible that this frail older man had ever inspired fear.
Then his father’s eyes opened, and he looked right into Pete’s face. And Pete did feel a jolt of fear. Old habit, maybe.
“What?” his father asked calmly.
Pete realized—from the look on his father’s face, from the tone of his voice—that the old man had no idea who he was talking to. He hadn’t recognized Pete yet. Granted, there had been a great deal of growing involved, but still it seemed strange.
Maybe they had him on a lot of drugs.
“It’s me,” Pete said.
The silence that followed felt electric. Dangerous. Dark. Pete watched his father’s eyes change, and knew in some deep place in his gut that his father would be physically assaulting him in that moment if his condition had allowed.
“You’ve got some nerve coming here, Petey boy!” The sentence started as a low growl in his chest and ended as a full-throated shout.
“Okay. Never mind. I’ll go.”
“Damn right you’ll go!”
The old man looked past Pete, and Pete turned to see a nurse run into the room to see what all the shouting was about.
“You get him out of here!” his father said to the nurse. “This . . . person is no family to me. I want him gone!”
Pete didn’t wait for the nurse to take sides. He just ran.
Pete woke from a strange stupor to feel his bicycle wheels bumping over the gravel of his driveway. Only then did he realize he had ridden home instead of to school—not thinking, not aware of his surroundings. Just pedaling and crying.
Dr. Lucy met him at the door. She looked into his face for a long time.
“Well, that explains a lot,” she said softly when it was clear he did not intend to speak.
“What does it explain?” he asked, his voice muddled by the crying.
“Your school called and said you were absent. I knew it wasn’t like you to cut classes. To put it mildly. So I figured you must have gone to see your dad.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And it didn’t go well.”
“No, ma’am.”
She stepped back from t
he doorway to allow him through. She held her arms out to him, but he only hurried past and ran for his room.
“Can I fix you something to eat?” she called out as he trotted up the stairs.
“No, thank you. I’m not hungry.”
She didn’t comment on what a huge development that was. Pete, not hungry. She didn’t have to. It was a thing that spoke for itself.
She left him alone for a time. It might have been an hour. It could even have been two. Pete had been sitting on the edge of the bed, staring out the window at the horses. Not bothering to look at his watch.
He’d been nursing a feeling of longing. Of missing. But it was not his father he was missing. It was his blood brother. It was Justin. He could have talked to Justin about this. He could write to him about it, and he would. But in that moment it didn’t feel the same. It didn’t feel like enough.
She knocked softly.
“You can come in, Dr. Lucy,” he called.
Truthfully, he’d gotten his fill of being alone. If asked, he would still claim—in simpler words—that he wanted no one’s attention to his suffering. But it would no longer be a full truth.
She sat on the bed with him, her hip a few inches from his own. She did not try to touch him in any way. She also didn’t speak. He found himself grateful to her for that.
The silence lasted for a minute or two.
“I always thought he’d change his mind,” Pete said. “You know. Wish he could have me back.”
“Yes,” she said. “I thought so, too.”
“Not that I wanted to go back with him. It’s much better here with you. It’s just . . .” For a long time, Pete didn’t say what it just was. And she didn’t push. “Why doesn’t he want me, Dr. Lucy? What’s wrong with me?”
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