“Home by six,” Hannah called. “Aunt Liz’ll be here.”
Ingrid jabbed her thumb in the air as the Jeep roared out the driveway.
Back in the kitchen, Eddie stood in front of the open refrigerator eating leftover pepperoni pizza and feeding the crusts to Cherokee, the family’s Irish setter.
Hannah reached around him for the milk and poured a glass. “At least drink this. And sit down. People who eat standing up get high cholesterol.”
He took the milk from her, slammed the refrigerator shut with a backward kick and slumped in his chair. In shorts, his bare legs seemed to stretch halfway across the kitchen and the dark hair on them looked coarse as string.
Hannah leaned against the sink and watched him drink. The milky mustache on his upper lip made an unattractive contrast to the one starting to grow there naturally.
“Did you wash your hair this morning?”
“You always ask me that.”
“It doesn’t look like it.”
“I got oily hair, Ma. I can’t help it.” He muttered shit under his breath and she pretended not to hear.
Pick your battles, she thought. Living with teenagers taught a mother to think strategically. Or it should. Lately she couldn’t keep from picking at Eddie. Everything about him got under her skin and bit hard.
She squirted scouring glug into the sink and took a brush to the persistent coffee stains. Pregnant with Eddie, the smell of the stuff and its bilious blue-green color was all she needed to make her throw up. Now she enjoyed using it, took satisfaction from watching it foam up and the porcelain sparkle.
I am really pathetic.
She laughed aloud.
“Can you drive me to the card show tomorrow?”
“You’ve got school.”
“If I wait until Saturday all the good deals’ll be gone.”
“You’re not missing school for a sport card show.” Sometimes she scrubbed so hard the muscles across her shoulder tightened up like rubber bands on braces. “You’ve already got thousands of cards.”
“They’re an investment, Ma.”
“That’s what you tell me.” She rinsed the sink, turned and looked at her son.
He had pimples across his forehead like a relief map of the Sierras. Like his oily hair and incipient mustache and the dark hair on his legs, she disliked this sign of hormone activity. For some reason they put her against him. “Anyway, I’m always at Resurrection House on Fridays.” She held out his napkin.
He ignored it and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “All you ever think of is that place.”
“They count on me three days a week, Eddie. I may be a volunteer, but it’s still a job.” She waved the napkin in front of his face.
He grabbed it and shoved it in a sterling silver ring with his initials on it. “Big deal,” he said.
“It is a big deal. If it weren’t for me and a few other women, the babies at Resurrection House would never get held or talked to or rocked. . . . When Angel came out of the hospital the drugs her mother used had practically destroyed her nervous system. I had to make her a special—”
“Yeah, I know.” Eddie headed for the door. “You told me about a million times.”
“Do you have your homework?”
“Gee, no, Ma.” He grinned and crossed his eyes. “I forgot.” His braces gleamed in the sunny kitchen.
For an instant Hannah saw in her tall awkward son a baby boy with a wicked grin, and her heart stopped. She reached out to touch him, but he ducked away just in time.
The phone rang as she was pouring soap in the dishwasher. She picked it up and held the receiver under her chin while she wiped the counters and straightened the bowl of flowers on the butcher block.
“I heard Paco’s Jeep.” Jeanne Tate lived and worked on the next property up Casabella Road: Hilltop School. She called Hannah almost every morning from her office.
“His name’s Frank.” Ingrid’s beloved had been ordinary Frank Pinelli until last year when he began calling himself Paco. Hannah knew the affectation irritated her illogically. She shouldn’t care what the kid called himself so long as he behaved around Ingrid. Maybe that was the problem. She knew he wasn’t behaving himself and neither was her daughter and she didn’t want to think about it.
“What time’s the flight?” Jeanne asked.
“Around noon. I have to check.”
“Well, it should be interesting.”
“It should be.” Hannah imitated her friend’s dry tone.
“Almost five years. I checked my old calendar.”
“We’ve seen her plenty in between.”
“I think it’s a little peculiar. She stays away—makes a point of staying away . . . Now all of a sudden and with no warning, she announces she’s coming home. Don’t pretend you’re not curious.”
“Who’s pretending?” Hannah knew perhaps too much about Jeanne’s life, but about Liz’s she didn’t know enough. She hadn’t even met the Frenchman she lived with. Gerard. Older and the son of a famous psychiatrist. Maybe he didn’t really exist. Liz had made him up. She had always hidden herself inside books and imagination. She knew how to lie. They all did.
Jeanne said, “I have to hang up in a minute. Parent interview. New kid all the way from Wisconsin.”
“How’s Teddy?” Teddy Tate, Doctor of Education, and Jeanne’s husband. Together they owned and ran Hilltop School.
“He has a headache. He’s lying in bed right now with an ice pack on his forehead.”
Hannah couldn’t manage to feel sorry for Teddy.
“It’s the dry weather. He’s had them on and off for weeks. Today’s the first time he’s stayed down. He’s being stoical mostly. Up and around, doing his projects, chasing his tail.”
“Better his own, than someone else’s.” It was a mean thing to say. “Sorry, Jeanne. Tell me about the Wisconsin kid.”
“Busy now.”
“Jeanne, I said I was sorry.”
“I know you’re sorry.” Implication: sorry comes easy for you, Hannah Tarwater. “Are we still on for Saturday night?”
“Did you hear me? I said I was sorry. You know the way I talk, I say—”
“And I assume we’re both welcome?”
“Jesus H. Christ.”
“Just checking, Hannah. Just checking.”
The phone line clicked dead.
Hannah stared at the receiver in her hand.
She was fifty years old; was there any hope at all she would ever learn to keep her mouth shut? She was mad at Jeanne for being touchy. Mad at herself for making a joke at the expense of the esteemed Dr. Theodore Tate—renowned horse’s ass. Every woman in town knew he was a lech; was it possible Jeanne didn’t? Somehow Hannah had never found the nerve to bring the subject up because since childhood Jeanne had been able to intimidate her. Hannah was also mad at the kids and mad at Dan. Mad at Liz too. She knew how Liz would look when she got off the plane, all strong and striding and confident. Almond-tanned. While every other woman in the English-speaking world fretted about overexposure to the sun’s rays, the genes of some long-ago Sephardic ancestor put lucky Liz at low risk for melanoma. This irritated Hannah and she didn’t care why because it just did. Thank heaven she didn’t have to explain it to anyone because she hadn’t a clue. She had always been moody but in the last couple of years she had begun to fear the sunrise, not knowing what darkness awaited her, what illogical anger or resentment. And then someone would tell her how good she looked, and she felt like a cheat. There she was, apparently a woman with her world in full bloom. Fifty and still mostly blonde, her skin good and barely lined, her body straight and slim and strong. A woman to be admired and envied. Right? Hah. God, she hated her moods. The way they stormed in and took over her life. Even as a kid, she could wake up feeling cheery as a red apple and in an hour, for no reason she could ever identify, everything went wormy with anger or dread.
After five years away, Liz had suddenly announced she was coming back to Rinconada for
a visit. When Hannah asked her why, she waffled around, wouldn’t say anything specific. That vagueness was all it took to set Hannah’s imagination going. Liz had cancer, Hannah was sure of it.
“Why are you coming?” Hannah couldn’t help asking when Liz called her from Florida to talk about the rain. Liz had laughed.
“Because I love you. And I miss you.”
And I have cancer and I’m going to die and I don’t want to tell you in a letter. On the phone the word was right there, cancer, waving on the line like a pair of blood-red panties.
Hannah walked to the window and stared down the garden to the pool and below it to the barn and paddock and the line of trees that marked the slope leading to the creek. The view further depressed her: autumn flowers sparse and stunted, a film of dust on every leaf and blade of grass. More than three years without a season of generous rain had stressed even the stoic eucalyptus. Against the sky, they drooped in bedraggled silhouettes like a line of dirty mops.
“Please, God, make Liz okay and let her bring the rain with her.” Hannah rested her forehead against the window glass. Like the parched earth she felt abandoned, uncared for and depleted.
Reflexively, her mother’s critical voice played in her head. You have so much, Hannah. It’s a sin to want more when others have nothing.
Her father had taught her to make an alphabetical gratitude list. He said it was what he did. Even a priest in the Episcopal Church has his down days, Hannah. The thing is, not to give in.
First up: A.
Angel.
I am grateful for Angel because she smiles at me and holds out her arms to me, because there are things I can do for her that no one else can.
B.
Baby.
Angel. I’m grateful for the smell of her skin after I bathe her and for her heart I can hear when I press my ear to her chest.
C: child.
Angel. I am grateful for the soles of her feet and her long toes.
D: daughter.
Angel.
Jeanne Tate’s brain was like an old-fashioned oak desk fitted with niches, and drawers and cubbyholes. Moments before a parent conference it was fruitless to wonder about the mystery of Liz’s visit or let Hannah irritate her, so she squirreled her questions and feelings away and didn’t think about them after that. It was as if they didn’t exist at all.
Most of the parents Jeanne Tate interviewed were younger than Simon Weed; and she couldn’t always conceal her contempt for the yuppie moms and dads who appeared in her office wearing gold and smelling expensive. Yuppie. The word was dated now—or so Hannah told her every time she used it—but to Jeanne it best described the parents who parked their sleek cars in front of the school and then had to be told to move them to the parking lot behind the gymnasium as if they couldn’t read the sign that said NO PARKING, as if they were exempted. Hard bodied, glowing with affluent good health, cell phones ringing, palms stuck to miniature computers that told them where they were supposed to be and why: couldn’t they walk the little distance up the hill from the parking lot like everyone else?
Simon Weed might be older than most parents but Teddy had read aloud his credit report. He was another Silicon Valley millionaire, might even be a billionaire, Jeanne supposed. Such numbers became meaningless after a while.
Teddy had already begun to talk about pressing him for a contribution to the computer center Teddy was positive the school needed in order to stay competitive. That’s what Teddy did; he asked people for money and they gave it to him. The school was richly endowed because Teddy was a born fund-raiser and funds were everywhere in the Santa Clara valley. Happy Teddy, a boy in a world where every day was payday, where the skies rained dollars, not raindrops.
Weed might not be the easy touch Teddy thought he was. Jeanne saw that he had been cut from a different loaf than the rest of the zillionaires. For one thing, he had followed the signs directly to the lot, and Jeanne liked that. She also liked the paunchiness around his middle and the telltale line bisecting the lenses of his wire-rimmed glasses. Here, for once and all the way from Wisconsin, was an imperfect specimen, a real human being. She felt disposed to like his child as well.
“My company’s out here. Since I always seem to be working it makes sense to have Adam here too.”
Jeanne agreed and asked him a few more questions about his business—electronic somethings, she had only the vaguest idea what a transistor was, let alone a chip, or this little thing Simon Weed was explaining to her—but she knew how to nod intelligently. She was very good at that.
“Adam was born almost three months premature,” Weed said. “He’s got a little brain damage—enough so I’ve learned not to expect too much from him. He can get Cs, no question, but he has to work mighty hard. His last experience was pretty, well, pretty pitiful.” He looked guilty. “Public school.” Weed slapped his driving gloves across his palm as if he could punish himself.
“If a child works hard at Hilltop,” Jeanne said, “his grades will reflect that effort.” She heard the pedant in her voice and wished she could take the words back, start again. Speak the truth for once. We’ll take good care of him. He’ll be safe here. We’ll be kind. You won’t regret giving him to Hilltop.
What came out instead was, “Mr. Weed, I try to be sympathetic with public school educators. They don’t have an easy time of it, and sometimes children like Adam fall between the cracks.” She cringed at the cliché but kept going. “It’s sad how many children miss out in life for that very reason. But that doesn’t have to happen to Adam.”
“I don’t want him coddled.”
In Jeanne’s experience all parents wanted their children coddled, fussed over, and given special privileges; but she smiled at Simon Weed and pretended she believed him. “Here at Hilltop, Dr. Tate and I believe no good comes of hiding the truth from children, no matter how unpleasant or challenging that truth happens to be.” Weed looked agreeable to this so she went on. Words came easily, always. In graduate school when she was writing Teddy’s papers for him, she had to stop herself from writing too much.
She said, “In Adam’s case, he will have to acknowledge the fact of his brain damage for the rest of his life and age eight isn’t too young to start. We won’t make excuses for him but we also won’t punish him for what is certainly not his fault. We will teach him to make good use of the talents and abilities he has.”
“Mrs. Tate, I love my son. But he’s . . . sensitive. And losing his mother like he did last year, well, he’s pulled back from me. I can’t tell what he’s thinking anymore. And he spends too much time alone. He has a way of... disappearing, sometimes for hours at a time. What I’m trying to say is, he needs a lot of attention.” Simon Weed took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “He’s never been a gregarious child, but he was close to his mother. She taught him to ride. He wasn’t very good at it, but it gave him pleasure. Then he had to be the one to find her . . .”
“Perhaps you should tell me what happened.” Jeanne resisted a strong temptation to reach across the desk and touch his hand.
Simon Weed looked startled by her request and she thought for a moment that he would refuse. “He went down to saddle his mare.” He spoke so softly Jeanne could barely hear him. “She was right there in the barn, hanging from a crossbeam.”
Jeanne imagined a horse hanging from the barn roof and scolded herself for being perverse.
“Afterwards, I tried to get him to talk about it, but he clammed up. Sometimes I wonder if he’s forgotten it completely.”
Jeanne looked at the picture of Adam Weed on her computer screen. A boy with a pinched face and dull eyes separated by two deep vertical creases. She sensed the effort it took for him to look out at the world and not inward to his pain, to keep from imploding, from shrinking to a dot no larger than a period on a page. “Children forget in order to protect themselves. It’s actually very healthy.”
“But he’s got to remember sooner or later, doesn’t he? I don’t wan
t him to grow up twisted, Mrs. Tate. When I die, he’ll be a rich man no matter how well he does in school. But I want him to have a life . . .”
“And there’s no reason he can’t have a good one. None at all.”
Simon Weed shifted in his chair. “How does a father know he’s doing the right thing? I told him we were coming here and he cried. He begged to stay with me.” He shifted again, his discomfort so intense Jeanne felt it come across the desk at her like a blast of heat. “I think he might need . . .” Weed struggled with the word, “psychiatric help.”
Jeanne didn’t approve of psychiatrists, particularly not for children, although she knew this was an old-fashioned attitude, one she had inherited from her father along with the rest of the Hilltop Method. She remembered him saying once that no child had problems so severe they couldn’t be cured with fairness and discipline. Over the years, a handful of troubled boys had tested Jeanne, but never enough to tempt her away from her father’s opinion.
“Give Adam a little time and he’ll find his place at Hilltop. He’ll be in the junior dorm, sharing a room with one other boy. His housemother is Mrs. White. Sooner or later, he’ll open his heart to her. All the boys confide their problems to Edith. I’m tempted to do it myself.” Jeanne laughed to dispel any suggestion that she might actually have problems. “We also have a brother system at Hilltop. Every boy in primary has a big brother assigned to him. This is someone he can go to when he needs help with his homework or if he thinks another boy’s bullying him or if he’s just lonesome for home. I’ve chosen Robby McFadden to be Adam’s big brother. This afternoon Robby will introduce your son around, give him a tour of the campus, find him a gym locker—”
“I’d feel better if you—”
“Tomorrow I’ll get acquainted with Adam myself. I promise.” Jeanne stood up and held out her hand. “Trust me, Mr. Weed, your son will do well at Hilltop. This is a very special place.”
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