"Bram."
"Sherry. What are you wearing?"
I hesitated. He asked again. I told him. My nightgown. It was white.
"Push it up over your thighs," he said.
I didn't do it, but when he asked if I had, I said yes, I had. It seemed, at the moment, the easiest thing to say, the thing that might end this conversation the most quickly. I took the phone and sat down on the couch.
"Are you wearing panties?"
"Yes," I said.
"Pull them down. I want them down around your ankles." He paused. "Are they down yet?"
"Yes," I said. "They're down."
"Spread your legs. I want your knees apart. I want those sweet thighs open. Are they open?"
"Yes," I lied.
He said, "I'm touching myself now, baby. I'm hard as a rock."
I listened.
All I could hear was his breathing. And then the rhythm of him touching himself, growing stronger. A moan. And then he said, straining, "Wrap your lips around it, baby. Put your mouth on it. I want to feel your tongue on it. That's right, that's—" And then he was quiet.
Wind in a tunnel between us.
On the roof I heard a scurrying of clawed footsteps.
A squirrel. Maybe two. They were back. The children of the squirrel Jon killed in February? Or a new family of squirrels, nesting in the eaves? They sounded wild up there. Busy, frantic, making a nest for themselves on the roof of ours. I listened, until finally he was moaning, loudly, "Oh, babe. I love you, babe. I need to be inside you now. I need to be between your legs. I need to be fucking you, fucking you hard, right between your fucking legs, right now, babe, right now. I'm coming, babe. I'm coming all over us, sweetheart."
I said nothing. I was shaking. I held the receiver away from my mouth, afraid he could hear the chattering of my teeth. Bram said nothing for what must have been a full minute afterward—just the sound of the second hand of the clock in the kitchen, dry and static as those squirrel claws on the roof, and then he sighed, and said, "I just came all over your face, baby. I just came in your beautiful mouth, Mrs. Seymour."
"Bram," I said when I could speak again. "Bram." I could think of nothing else to say. Everything around me had lit up—foreign and silver. The stack of magazines in the corner. The vase full of dried flowers on the mantel. The Oriental rug, its dizzying geometric designs, its disorienting patterns. Far off, I could hear an ambulance wailing its way somewhere. Someone's ordinary day, over.
"Bram," I said again. "Are you still there?"
"Yeah, I'm here."
I cleared my throat, pressed the phone harder to my ear, passed my free hand across my eyes, and said, "I have to tell you, Bram, this has to end."
"No," Bram said.
I said, "But—"
He said, "How long is it going to take you to get your pretty little ass over here?"
Then, there was the small digitally silent snap of his cell phone cutting me off.
I TRIED to go on with my morning. I made the cup of coffee. I picked up the book about Virginia Woolf. I put it down. I passed the phone, afraid it would ring. I went to the back porch with my coffee cup, out of which I had not yet taken a sip. I didn't bother to take the book with me. I stepped off the porch, onto the grass. It was damp.
In the distance, from the Henslins', I could hear cows lowing. One insistent bird in the maple tree would not stop shrilling at me—a steady torrent of singing that sounded both angry and ecstatic. It must have had a nest nearby. It must have been trying to warn me away from it. I couldn't see the bird, could not find the branch from which it was threatening me, because the tree was so blinding with brand-new leaves, but, after listening for a few minutes I realized that the sound of it (weak-weak-weak-weak-weak) seemed to be coming from my chest.
That bird, inside me, seemed to be my heart.
I went back inside.
I put the coffee cup down.
I took out the phone book and looked up Thompson, letting my finger travel down the inch of them until I came to the one on the street on which Garrett lived. He answered on the first ring.
"Garrett," I said.
He cleared his throat. He said, "Mrs. Seymour?" His voice sounded hesitant, I thought, a reticence that had become the very syllables of my name.
I said, "Garrett. I need to talk to you about something."
"About what, Mrs. Seymour?"
Behind him, I could hear music. (Handel? Was it possible? Could Garrett be listening to the Messiah?)
And then I couldn't say it, what I'd called to say to him. I could not mention Bram, or the threat. I could think of no excuses to make, no explanations that would explain anything at all. Instead, I inhaled, exhaled, swallowed, and said, "Chad is home from California, Garrett. We'd like to have you over for dinner tonight."
"Okay," Garrett said, as if I'd given him instructions rather than an invitation. "When, Mrs. Seymour?"
LATE in the afternoon, Chad pulled into the driveway in Jon's Explorer, fast. I could hear the gravel crunching, spinning under his tires. The brakes squealed when he stopped, and then the sound of his shoes kicked off on the back porch. "Ma? You home?"
I'd taken a shower. I'd gotten dressed. A pink T-shirt, a faded pair of jeans. I'd made the bed. But then I'd done nothing but lie on it for hours, until I realized that morning had blurred into afternoon, and that eventually they'd come home, Chad and Jon, and that I could not be lying on the bed when they did, so I'd gotten up, gone to the kitchen, measured the flour and the water into a bowl for a loaf of bread.
"Yes," I said. "I'm here."
I stepped out of the kitchen. Dough on my hands. I'd been kneading it and hadn't put enough dry flour on my hands to keep it from sticking to them. I was holding my hands in front of me, trying not to touch my T-shirt, and when Chad looked at them he said, "Hey, are you my mother?"
It was a joke left over from a picture book I used to read him as a child—the baby bird, hatched while his mother is away, tries to imprint on cows, on planes, on steam shovels, in search of a mother, and then, in a moment of recognition, finds his true mother and knows her instantly for who she is.
As a little boy, Chad had been endlessly entertained by that book. "Look, there's the mother," I would say, tapping at the illustrated mother bird, and he would laugh and clap.
He'd been, all those years ago, truly a mama's boy, I supposed—not in the sense that he was girlish or particularly needy, but because he seemed to feel that he should be (that he was) the center of his mother's world. When something distracted me (the phone, a book, or even his father) he was quick to get my attention again. He had a million tricks for doing it. Something in the house would break. A vase, a cup. He would suddenly be hungry, or thirsty, or would have lost his shoe.
But, then, in a few heartbeats, he'd grown up, and it became just a joke he told (Are you my mother?) whenever I was doing something he meant to imply was out of the ordinary for me, his true mother—like baking bread.
"I am," I said, still holding up my doughy hands, "your mother," and tried to smile.
He smiled back.
He looked disheveled.
He was wearing khaki shorts so long and with so many pockets, many of them looking heavily filled—with what? rocks? coins? jewels?—that they hung down nearly to his calves. He had on a pink polo shirt, and it was half tucked in, half untucked. On his left wrist he wore the watch I'd given him for graduation (Swiss Army, black) and a macramé bracelet with a single brown bead on it, which I'd never seen before. He looked, I thought, flushed, excited, as if he'd been running a race and had won it.
"Did you have fun with your friend?" I asked.
"Ophelia," he said with emphasis, as if I'd purposely refused to say her name.
"Ophelia," I said.
"Yeah," he said, but he smirked. Had I again mispronounced her name?
I went back into the kitchen, and, once there, tried to call as casually as I could back to Chad, "Is she a girlfriend now?"
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"Yes," Chad said, following me in. He opened the refrigerator and took the jug of orange juice out.
"So," I said, "you like her a lot?" I sank my fingers into the dough again, which felt too cold, and stiff, and grainy. I'd done something wrong.
"I do, Mom. I like her tremendously."
He drank from the jug then—something he knew I hated. I turned to watch him. He put the cap back on and said, "Sorry," but I wasn't sure if he was apologizing for drinking from the jug, or for liking Ophelia Vanriper tremendously. "I'm gonna take a nap, okay?" he said.
"Sure," I said. "Okay." I said, "Garrett's coming for dinner, but not until eight o'clock."
Chad turned around and looked at me.
Did he smirk again?
He said, "So, are you Garrett's mother now?"
"No!" I said, too quickly. His tone had surprised me. (Contempt? Accusation?) Less insistently, I said, "He's your friend, Chad. I—"
"Garrett's not my friend," Chad said, crossing his arms. "Ap-parendy he's yours."
"Chad—"
"Really, Mom, where'd you get this 'Garrett is your friend' business? When have I ever invited Garrett over? When was the last time you saw me hanging with Garrett? Fifth grade? Third grade?"
"Chad," I said. There was an expression on his face I'd never seen before. Was he exasperated with me? Was he tired of me? "I just—"
"You just like Garrett Thompson, Mom. It's okay to say it. You like Garrett Thompson, and you've invited him over. That's fine. But don't tell me it's because he's my friend, okay?"
I could think of nothing to say except, "Okay," but immediately wished I hadn't.
It seemed to confirm something in Chad's mind.
He looked away from me.
He said, "I have to take a nap now, Ma," and turned out of the kitchen.
I stood where I was and listened to his footsteps on the stairs, ascending, and wanted to call after him, wanted to tell him to rest, to sleep, that I loved him, that he was my son, not Garrett Thompson, or anyone else. I wanted to call out to him that I was sorry.
But I didn't. I finished kneading the dough. I washed my hands. I heard Chad's bedroom door close. I heard the bedsprings when he lay down. I put the dough under a clean dishrag in the corner of the kitchen. I turned the ringer on the phone off in case Bram tried, again, to call while Chad was home, and I was about to sit down again, with a cup of tea this time, to pick up the book about Virginia Woolf, when I heard dres in the driveway and went to the window instead.
Bram's red Thunderbird.
"BRAM," I said, leaning down to speak into his unrolled window. "What are you doing here, Bram? My son is home." I was whispering. Chad's bedroom looked out onto the driveway, and his window was open.
"I don't care," Bram said.
He didn't bother to whisper.
He opened the car door and stepped out, then slammed it closed behind him and leaned back against his car. He looked at me for a moment, then up at the sky, and then directly into the sun with his eyes open. Was he drunk?
"I can't have him see you," I said. "You have to leave." I took a step backward, under the porch eaves, where Chad wouldn't be able to see me. I made shooing motions with my hand toward Bram, his red Thunderbird.
But Bram just shook his head, then looked from the sun to me, blinking, squinting. What could I have been to him after that incandescence but a silhouette, a black paper cutout?
He said, "No, babe. You're the one who has to leave."
I took another step backward. I could feel the tears spring unexpectedly into my eyes—burning, scalding. I said, "Bram, please."
"Well, Mrs. Seymour," Bram said. "If you didn't want me to come here, you should have come to the efficiency. Like you said you were going to." He swept his hand out in front of him. He lifted his eyebrows. He said, "How was I supposed to know what happened? I thought maybe you had an accident. Maybe you hit another deer. You told me not to call here, so what could I do but come here?"
The tears had spilled from my eyes to my cheeks. Bram took a step toward me and wiped them away matter-of-factly with his thumb. I caught his hand, looked into his eyes. I said, "Bram. You—"
"Is your husband here?" Bram asked. He nodded toward Jon's Explorer. "Is this his piece of shit?" He looked hard at the SUV as if he were planning to take it apart, to expose it for what it was—as if he were trying to decide where to start.
"No," I said. "My son is here. Bram"—I took a step backward, up the stairs to the porch—"I'm going into the house now, Bram. Please, if you care about me at all, you'll go. I'll call you later. We can meet somewhere and talk, but now you have to go."
But Bram took a step toward me and pulled me to him by the waist. Standing on the step, I was eye level with him. He did not, at that moment, look like a spurned lover, but like an angry child (Are you my mother?), or like a child who was holding his mother hostage (You are my mother). "I'll go," he said, "if you kiss me."
"Bram," I said.
"Please," he said.
I couldn't speak.
If I kissed him, would he leave?
What choice did I have but to kiss him?
I motioned for him to come up on the step, under the roof, where Chad, if Chad was looking out his bedroom window, couldn't see—and then I stood still, my face toward him, and let him kiss me.
It was a deep kiss—tender at first, his lips even seemed to be trembling, and then he pulled me closer to him, his arms so tight around my hips and sides I couldn't break away, even with my hands at his chest—and then the kiss became harder, and deeper, his tongue in my mouth, his hand on the back of my neck, and then he let go, and pushed me backward, gently, but it was a push. "Thanks," he said. "You call me. Tell me where we're going to meet."
I opened the door to the back porch and hurried in, and shut the door behind me.
Bram started up his car—that huge motor roaring—and let it idle loudly in our driveway for a few minutes before backing out and peeling into the road, leaving the smell of rubber burning behind him.
SHAKING, I sat down at the kitchen table, and listened.
Had Chad gotten out of bed? Had he looked out his window? Had he heard Bram? Seen him? Or (dear god, please) had he slept through it all?
I sat where I was for over an hour before I heard Chad walking above me.
The sound of bedsprings. Footsteps.
By then, the bread dough under the dishrag had bloomed horribly—a distorted, gigantic, mushroom cloud of flour and air. I stood up when I heard Chad on the stairs, took the dishrag off, and punched it back down. It surprised me how quickly that mound collapsed, but I kept punching.
Chad came into the kitchen behind me and said to my back, "Hey, what did that bread dough do to you?"
I felt the relief of it collapse around me. He hadn't heard. I felt the relief of it spread through me like cool water. He'd heard nothing. He'd slept through it. Somehow. He didn't know. I said, turning, "Chad—"
He said, "Yeah, Mom?" as he went to the refrigerator, going for the jug of orange juice again.
"I love you, Chad," I said.
"Hey," he said, "I love you, too, Mom."
He took the cap off the jug.
For my sake, I suppose, he took a glass out of the cupboard and filled it, then raised it to me as if in a toast before drinking it all without taking a breath.
AS SOON as Chad pulled away in the Explorer to pick his father up from work, I called Jon. The sound of his voice, answering the phone—steady, sober, patient—brought something up from my throat that had been there since Bram had driven away in his red Thunderbird two hours earlier. It caught there. A bit of barbed wire. A piece of broken glass. I couldn't speak except to say his name, but Jon knew it was me.
"Sherry," he said. "What's wrong?"
I said, "Jon, something happened."
"Are you okay?" he asked. "Is Chad okay?"
"Yes," I said. "But, Jon, Bram came here."
"What?"
&n
bsp; "He came here. To the house. Chad was asleep, but—"
"Did he touch you?" And then he qualified it, asking, "Did he hurt you?"
"No," I said. "He just wanted me to talk to him. He wanted me to kiss him."
"Jesus Christ," Jon said. "Did you? Did you kiss him?"
"Yes," I said. "I had to."
"Sherry," Jon said, sounding angry now. There was a thinness to his tone, an implication that his patience was running out. He said, "You have to end this, Sherry. I know I played a part in it, and I'm willing to take full responsibility for that, and I'm being honest when I say that I'm not angry at you. But this game's over. You have to tell him that."
"I didn't want him to come here," I said. (Was I whining?) "Do you honestly think that I would want him to come here, after everything that's happened, with Chad here?"
"I don't know," Jon said, and the flatness of his tone took my breath away.
When I could speak again, I said, "You don't know? Jon, if I'd wanted him to come here, would I be telling you about it now?"
There was a silence. In it, I imagined Jon taking stock of everything he'd ever known and thought about me. I felt as if a flock of invisible birds had descended on me—so much fluttering and heartbeat and breathing, searching around in the bones and clothes of me for flesh to eat.
"Jon?" I said. "Do you think I wanted him to come here?"
Jon said nothing. I said, more loudly—maybe I was shouting—"Jon, are you there? Are you listening? I've told you, haven't I, over and over—you know how sorry I am. You're not going to pull away from me now, are you? You're not—"
"No," Jon said. "No. No. Sherry, calm down."
"Calm down?"
"Yes, calm down. No. I don't think you wanted him to come to the house today, Sherry. But I also think that if you'd told him, Sherry, like I told you to, that you were ending this, he wouldn't have come over. You certainly didn't have to let him kiss you. Don't patronize me, Sherry. I'm not a child."
"Jon," I said. "You don't know. You don't know Bram like I do," I said, and regretted it immediately.
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