“Stop it. Nate, stop it!”
My shouts make it worse. He begins to pull and squeeze harder, in rhythm to my voice.
I silence myself. Breathe deep.
“Let her go. I am calling 911.”
I set down the box and hold up my phone. I am too far away for him to hang on to her and reach for my phone. I know what Nate is thinking. He will lose any chance at the police force if I make this call. I can almost see him making the calculation: she will not make the call, she will not risk me losing my job—or will she?
Lauren’s hair is pulled tight across her temple, and her eyes are creased in pain. I shake the phone at him, my mouth tight. I feel a little like I did when he was three, refusing to climb down from the monkey gym, or eleven, threatening to walk out the door. Which doesn’t make any sense. Because Nate grew up a long time ago.
Nate stares back at me. Something in his eyes makes me afraid. I am not sure he is going to let go. What is he thinking? Does he have control?
With a shake, he releases her. Lauren sinks to the couch, tears spurting out. Nate turns on me.
“Who the hell do you think you are, walking in our house without knocking? Don’t walk in my house again!”
It is an absurd response to the situation. His door was standing wide open. Anyone could have heard what was going on in here.
WHEN NATE WAS FOUR YEARS
old, Jim signed him up for a soccer team. I had never played soccer, and neither had Jim. The flyer said, “No special equipment. Wear tennis shoes and gym shorts. Shirt provided.” The shirt was a navy blue uniform with a white 6 and the words “Las Vegas Parks and Recreation” on the back. I think we must have ten photos of him in that first uniform shirt.
But the team was a disaster. After the first game, Nate wouldn’t kick the ball. He wouldn’t even get near the kids kicking the ball. I offered him a dime for every time he kicked it, but Nate, who was a pretty tough little four-year-old, stayed away. Of course, the coach was very nice about it. He said that some boys aren’t ready for team sports, may never be. Jim and I asked Nate why he didn’t kick the ball, but all he said was “I don’t want to.” He used to suck his thumb on the way home from games, which was a habit I thought he had dropped.
And it wasn’t that we hadn’t noticed that every other child had on special soccer shoes and shin guards. We did notice. But this equipment was optional, and Nate didn’t seem to like soccer, so we thought we were being moderate in not rushing out to buy professional equipment for a preschooler. And it wasn’t until the end-of-the-season picnic, when the coach had the parents play the children, and one of those four-year-olds kicked me in the leg with a tiny cleat, that I figured it out. That’s a true story. It never occurred to me that Nate needed those shin guards.
Nate never did tell us when he was hurt. Where did he get that idea? That he couldn’t tell us if something hurt?
I STEP OVER THE BOX
of glasses and make my way toward Lauren. Nate jerks forward, and for an instant, I think that he is going to grab me. Like that, I am a little girl—three? five?—and a man is holding my arm, digging his fingers into my skin, yanking my shoulder backward.
“Don’t you ever touch my coat again, you little shit. I better not catch you near my things.”
Then Sharlene is there, shrieking, and he is yelling at her. He lets me go, and I run, the opened pack of Life Savers from his coat pocket still in my hand.
Nate jerks, but he doesn’t touch me. He passes by on my right, and as he heads out the door, he says, “Dad was right to leave you” in a voice so filled with hate it makes me feel weak.
I SEE NATE. SEVEN OR
eight years old. A stocky child, wearing blue jeans and a brown football jersey. Bare feet. Jim is punting a football to him across a sun-filled park, and the ball sails up and up very fast, and Nate is at the other end of its arc, waiting to catch it, fairly dancing on those bare, fat toes, and trembling with delight and fear. Will he catch it? Will it hurt? And at first he doesn’t catch it. He fails valiantly. Throwing himself to the ground beneath the ball, stretching his arms out far. But I know Nate, and I know he is deliberately coming up short. He is afraid that it will hurt.
And then he does it. He dives down, arms extended, no hesitation, and he catches the punt. And up he pops, like a marionette, and yells over and over, “I caught it! I caught it!” The delight in his voice, in his body, as he races all the way back across the park with the ball, to dance into Jim’s chest, yelling, “I caught it, I caught it!” His arms lift the ball high, tugging his shirt up, exposing his belly. Everyone in the park can hear him. The absolute delight of a seven-year-old boy who has met his own hope.
“Mom, did you see it? Did you see me? I caught it! It went way in the air, and I had to fall to the ground, and I caught it!”
That’s Nate. That thrilled child is my son. That little boy lifted in the air by his father and calling to his mother, for all the world to hear. I did it! I did it! See how happy life makes me.
I CROSS THE ROOM AND
sink down next to Lauren on the couch. My heart is pounding, but as I pull her into my arms, I feel oddly angry. I want to go after Nate, I want to know what is wrong with my son, and I am feeling something like rage at Lauren. Why was she so silent? Why is she still just weeping in my arms?
What is wrong with her?
It is crazy to be angry at Lauren in this moment. I know that. But anger is what I am feeling. When Margo’s husband told her that he sometimes had a one-night-stand when he was on a business trip, and that he thought talking about this might make their sex life hotter, she sat in my kitchen and sobbed for weeks. I wanted to shake her. I didn’t care if she took the bait and had hot sex with her husband or threw him out on his ear, but that she would sit and cry about it, day after day, drove me crazy.
“MOMMY, WHY DO YOU LET
him hit you? Why don’t you hit him? Why don’t you make him go away?”
“Shut up, Avis. I don’t need your shit right now.”
“Mommy, Rodney and I can help you. Mark has a gun. Rodney found it. You could use that gun.”
“Avis, shut up. What are you doing going through Mark’s things? Do you want to get us killed? Do you?”
I DON’T LET LAUREN KNOW
I am angry. I sit and hold her. I stroke her hair, and I tell her I am sorry. I am good at comforting people, no matter what I am thinking. I could comfort Rodney, when he was such a little boy, and I could comfort Sharlene. I just take them in my arms, and I do not talk.
JIM AND I LET NATE
get away with too much. I didn’t have the slightest idea what a mother should do with a son. My basic idea was not to be Sharlene and not to have Nate turn out like Rodney. It wasn’t much to go on. Compared to the other kids in the neighborhood, Nate did get in a lot of trouble. He got detention after school, had to run laps after practice, had to be grounded on the weekend. It all seemed mild to me. By the time it occurred to me that maybe Nate’s small rebellions were more significant than I thought, things had already gone too far.
I HEAR NATE KICK SOMETHING
in the side yard, and I hear the iron fence squeal open, and I hear the sound of his boot against the motorcycle stand. The motor chokes, then catches, and the bike roars onto the street.
“Mom?” Lauren says. “He was really upset today. He’s been upset since he and Jim went biking on Sunday. And he’s drinking. Just beer, but when he drinks, he . . .”
I can guess what she is going to say, but I wonder if she will be able to say it.
“ . . . he scares me when he drinks.”
Her voice catches. I stroke her hair. I think about Sharlene, holding clumps of hair in her hand, and crying, he pulled out my hair, he pulled out my fucking hair. I think that I would have killed Jim if he had ever pulled my hair, I think that Jim would never have pulled my hair, I think that Jim now loves Darcy.
<
br /> IT MATTERED TO ME THAT
Nate had so many friends in high school. I didn’t have friends in high school. I started working at the Four Queens when I was fourteen. I carried sacks of change to the cashier and wrapped up keno tickets in rubber bands. I got tips from the regulars, and the tips were bigger at night, so by fifteen, I would usually work until one or two in the morning. It might have been Vegas, but nobody I knew in school worked in a casino. I suppose the ones that did dropped out pretty early. But I loved school. I just tried to keep my two lives separate: there was Sharlene and Rodney and the casino, the drunk men, the tips, my mother’s affairs. And there was school. Where the PE teachers wanted me to try out for a team. And the US history teacher wrote me a college recommendation letter I hadn’t even asked for. Where nobody knew.
Nate’s high school years were different, of course. He and his friends scaled rock walls at Valley of Fire, skied off-run at Mount Charleston, played Fugitive along the train tracks, held midnight volleyball tournaments at the park down the road. When they went to a dance, they went in a big group, in a party bus, and someone’s dad always figured out how to get them cheap prices for Mystère or Blue Man Group, and someone’s mom always offered her basement for the party after. These things meant so much to me. I used to list Nate’s activities in my head—all these normal high school things that my son did—like a nursery rhyme.
Of course, Nate was drinking at those parties. We never even talked about it. Beer seemed like a tame sort of rebellion to me. I had a son who was having an all-American childhood; I had won.
“HOW LONG HAS THIS BEEN
happening, Lauren?”
She makes a sort of moan and pushes away from me. She doesn’t look at me as she speaks.
“He’s been different since he came back. Since last December.”
December? This has been going on for a year?
Of course, I know what she means by different. I knew the instant I hugged him in the airport that time, that little course of energy through his body, that slight shiver. I knew the last deployment had been bad.
“Since December?”
“Well, not this. Not what happened today. This . . . this hasn’t happened for very long.”
I think about the bruise I saw on her shoulder the night Nate was sworn in. Why didn’t I ask her then?
“I mean . . . he just, he’s just nervous. A lot of times, he’s really nervous. And I feel like I have to tiptoe around. I thought he was sad, but lately he gets angry. He gets angry so fast.”
I look at Lauren’s slight frame. I think about my son’s fit body. It’s frightening to me; what must it be like for her?
THE ACCIDENT HAPPENED THE SUNDAY
night after one of those high school dances. The story was that there was some alcohol left. That might have been true. Or Nate and his friends might have been drinking every day by then. I wouldn’t have been looking for any signs of this. Nate’s world just seemed so safe to me.
Jeremy was driving. Speeding. Drunk. He wound up with seven months in juvenile detention. Paul was paralyzed. When it was all over, Paul could use his thumb and forefinger. I remember that. What a break it was that he had those two digits. Nate was in the backseat. Nothing but a concussion. Jim knew somebody, so it never came out that Nate provided the alcohol. It never came out that he had a guy who regularly bought alcohol for him and that Nate made a business out of reselling alcohol to teenage kids.
If it had, I wonder if they would have let him enlist. I know they wouldn’t have let him join the police academy.
“HAVE YOU TOLD ANYONE?”
“No.”
“There must be someone on the base. Someone through VA services?”
“Yeah, maybe.”
“They won’t put him on the force if they find out. He won’t get through probation.”
“I know.”
What am I saying? Do I want my daughter-in-law to get professional help or not?
I don’t know what I am saying. I am wondering if Jim knows someone, if Jim could persuade Nate to talk to someone. I am wondering if Jim can be persuaded to take time off from Darcy for this.
“I’ll talk to Nate. And I’ll talk to Jim. We’ll figure this out. We’ll figure it out, Lauren.”
She curls back into my shoulder then. I keep stroking her hair, wondering what I am saying. Can we figure this out? Do we have time? Should I be calling the police?
AFTER THE CAR ACCIDENT, THE
parties stopped, and the friends stopped hanging out in our family room. Paul’s mother told me that Nate stopped by nearly every day after school, to see if Paul had done his therapy or if she needed help hoisting him into his exercise apparatus. I’ve always been grateful to Paul’s mother for telling me that. She could have kept that to herself. She knew where the alcohol came from.
I STAY WITH LAUREN ANOTHER
hour, until she decides that she will spend the night with her friend Ashley. Nate does not come home, and Jim does not respond to the text I send. I am not ready to call Nate, so I write him a note and leave it in an envelope on the table. I tell him to call me, that we have to talk, that changes have to be made. I tell him that his dad and I are ready to help him, and Lauren. I wonder if he will call. I wonder how a mother makes a grown son do anything.
NATE PLAYED BASEBALL FROM THE
age of six. I must have sat on rickety metal stands—so hot for five months of the year that bare flesh burned on contact—and watched him play in a thousand innings. A little boy, squinting back tears after getting hit by the pitch. An eight-year-old, being chastised by the umpire for throwing his bat. A ten-year-old, stealing second, and then third, delighted. All those little boys, all those uniforms, all those games.
“Come on, Nate! Eye on the ball. Watch the ball.”
“Nate, it’s okay. Everybody has a tough game. You’ll get the next one.”
“Way to go Nate! That ball was a rope!”
“I knew you were going to catch it! I could just tell by the look on your face that you had that thing.”
How could that little boy with the SeaDogs cap now be the man brutally twisting his wife’s wrist, grabbing her hair, yanking back her head? How did those images go together?
12
* * *
Bashkim
TODAY IS WEDNESDAY, BUT it is the last day of school because tomorrow is Thanksgiving. And we are having an assembly. I love assemblies. At my school, we always have morning assembly for the little kids, and afternoon assembly for the older kids. That’s because the multipurpose room is too small for 742 students plus teachers. The fire department has a sign on the door that says, “Maximum Capacity: 280 Persons.” I think I am the only person that has ever read this sign, because even if we have two assemblies, we still have more than 280 persons in the room. I don’t even have to figure out the problem, because I can do 300 plus 300 in my head, and that is only 600. Three hundred is more than 280, and six hundred is a lot less than 742 students, plus teachers, so I think that we should have three assemblies.
But I don’t say that, because it is not the kind of thing Orson Hulet students say, and because I heard Mrs. Monaghan telling another teacher that I worry a lot. I don’t want her to know that I am worried about this too. Mrs. Monaghan likes us to solve our own problems, so I solve this one by trading spots with my friend Carlo. That puts me close to the door, and if something happens, I have already figured out that I will yell to Carlo to follow me, and then I will head straight for that door. Even if it is black dark because of smoke, I know where the door is. It is about twenty-five steps behind me, plus two steps right. If I bump into something, I waited too long to step right, because there is a little wall right near the door. Also, I will keep yelling Carlo’s name, so he hears which way to go. I think about whether I should leave Carlo close to the door, but he hasn’t planned any escape, so he might just run in the wrong dire
ction anyway. It is better if I know where we should both go.
THE REASON I LIKE ASSEMBLIES
is because they are not all boring. First, every class sits in its own section. The teachers sit in chairs, and the kids sit on the floor. We are supposed to get in our sections quickly. The principal stands up front, and she holds two fingers in the air. As soon as she does that, we are all supposed to hold two fingers in the air and be real quiet. It’s kind of funny, because somebody always forgets to look at the principal and keeps talking when everyone else is quiet. And it’s kind of not funny, because I don’t ever want to be the kid who keeps talking.
After we are all quiet, some fifth graders walk the flags to the front. There is an American flag, and a Nevada flag, and four flags with words on them: Effort, Respect, Honesty, Kindness. Those are important words at Orson Hulet. And then we sing a song. Usually we sing “America the Beautiful,” but today some kindergartners come in, and they sing a song about Thanksgiving. Which is pretty good for little kids, but I think my class sang it better when we were in kindergarten.
The best part about today’s assembly is that Mr. Loomis, the music teacher, is going to do some magic for us. Mr. Loomis is a real-life magician. He has a show on the Strip, at the Hard Rock casino. Alyssa says we can’t go to it because you have to be eighteen years old to get in. She knows, because she asked her mom to take her. I don’t know why Mr. Loomis teaches us music if he has a magic show at a casino, but he does. In music class, Mr. Loomis is a little bit cross, but at an assembly, he is so funny.
Today Mr. Loomis has a bowling ball. He throws it up in the air and catches it. It is very heavy. Then he tries to spin it on his finger, but it doesn’t work, and it falls on the ground. Boom. Everyone jumps. Mr. Loomis puts his toe on the ball, and he just looks at it. Then he puts his finger on his eyebrow, and makes a face at the ball. All the kids are laughing because we know Mr. Loomis is going to do something funny.
We Are Called to Rise Page 9