by Brady Udall
33.
THE BOY AT THE WINDOW
THE BOY WAITS AT THE WINDOW. HE HAS AWAKENED FROM A DREAM he can only dimly remember—the sensation of floating underwater and being nibbled at by a thousand tiny amphibian mouths—and has once again assumed his post on the radiator. After an hour’s troubled sleep he is wide awake, eyes peeled, leg jiggling, his heart ratcheting inside his chest like an old-fashioned windup toy.
To pass the time, he is reading from one of his new favorite books, Improvised Explosive and Incendiary Devices for the Guerrilla Fighter. He holds the pages up so they catch the milky moonlight. He can read the words as clearly as if it were midafternoon.
Let guile and patience, the book says, be your closest allies.
Tonight is the first night in at least a week that he hasn’t snuck out to haunt the empty roads on his younger brother’s Big Wheel, hiding in roadside ditches when the odd car happens by, stopping off at darkened houses to creep through backyards and peer into windows and puzzle over the inventory of certain clotheslines, and finally pedaling madly onward to finish the mile-and-a-half trek to his house, the place of his true birthright and inheritance, to see if his mother has come home. It has become an obsession, this nightly checking, like the washing of hands or the inspecting of locks, a necessary chore that must be done before sleep can come.
He has decided his vigilance might be working against him, that ignoring the problem might be the best way to solve it. He half believes that in restraining himself from making his nightly rounds he is breaking an established pattern, altering certain cosmic inevitabilities, and thereby forcing a change that may just have him waking up tomorrow to find his mother restored to her rightful place, happy and improved.
He knows this is impossible and yet is still enough of a child to believe that it isn’t.
One thing he knows for certain is that he must be careful. If he makes one mistake, and his night wanderings are discovered, he will be confined to this room every hour of the day except school and church and he knows he will not be able to stand it. Last night he was not being careful; he had parked his Big Wheel around back and entered Big House, sweaty and light-headed, thinking about his raw feet and smarting knees. He didn’t notice the family dog falling in behind him as he crept up the stairs, and when the dog cut ahead of him, yipping and tossing his head in a way that meant he wanted to play, the boy was so surprised he jumped back and fell sideways against the wall with a thud. Above him two picture frames rattled and went silent. The boy waited. The dog stared at him and ran his tongue across his upper teeth. “Bad dog,” the boy whispered to the dog with a mixture of annoyance and affection. “Bad, bad, ugly dog.”
At the end of the hall a black form appeared. “Who is it?”
“The boogeyman,” the boy said in his best Vincent Price boogeyman voice, “and I’ve come for your liver.”
The shadow took a step back and shook its head. “You don’t scare me one bit.”
It was his little sister in her pink nightgown. The boy was now standing in front of his mother’s bedroom doorway, peering into the darkness to confirm what he already knew: his mother was not there. He was joined by his little sister, six years old with a sugary crust of sleep around her eyes and bed-snaggled hair. When they were smaller, this particular sister had become attached to the boy, could not sleep at night unless he was next to her, singing “The Deep Blue Sea” in the quiet, husky way she liked. In a family such as this, the younger ones need a protector, an advocate, an ally, and she had chosen this boy. For a year or two she hovered near him the way a small, ice-bound moon attends a gaseous and unstable planet. The boy had mostly forgotten this; but not his sister. Though she was older now, feisty and independent (as children in such families can tend to become), she leaned in to him a little, let her arm touch his, to let him know she remembered.
Because the boy was the Bad Brother, a Weirdo, and reportedly a Pervert (which she took to mean a person who doesn’t respect the privacy of others), and because she was now old enough to be conscious of her social standing both in the family and the world at large, she would never show him such affection in public, but here in this dark hallway there was no one to see.
“She’s not coming back,” said the sister.
“She will so,” said the boy firmly. “But she won’t if you keep saying things like that.”
“I’m not going to tell on you for being here.”
“You do, you’ll live to regret it.”
“Can I tell you something and you won’t get mad?”
The boy shrugged.
“Maybe if you’d stop being such a jerk all the time you’d be happier and people would like you.” With that she gave the dog a brisk head rub and retired to her bed.
Now, sitting on his radiator, the boy knows his sister is wrong; being nice, being a good person, doesn’t make you any happier. Look at his mother. She is the nicest person he knows, and where is she now?
The guerrilla fighter should be ready and willing to suffer and, yes, die for his cause.
The boy likes this. He thinks about it and decides that if it’s all the same he would rather not die for his cause, but suffering he can handle. Suffering he is used to.
The room is hot and the boy’s skin itches. Right now his head wound is begging to be scratched with a special urgency, and after thirty seconds of excruciating self-denial, of pretending to read the book in his lap with grave interest like someone in a library, he digs savagely under the bandage, raking his fingers across the humped stitches until it hurts. Satisfied, he imagines the cool spring air outside, the slick grass under his feet, the hollow, granular sound of the Big Wheel tires on the chip-and-seal asphalt. Instead of going out on a reconnaissance mission or trying to stir something up like the guerrilla fighter he is, he waits and watches. There is tension in the house tonight, something charged in the atmosphere, and he’s pretty sure it’s not the ghosts who are rumored to live in the cellar or Jesus Christ the Eavesdropper who listens in on everyone’s conversations and, like Santa Claus, knows who is sleeping and who is awake. It is something else, something dense that presses on the back of his neck. Something that makes his leg jiggle and his heart race.
For the first time tonight he notices movement outside. In his enclosure on the other side of the river the neighbors’ ostrich, who usually dozes during the first half of the night so he can pace away the rest of it, is up hopping against his fence, thrusting his head out over the top wire. Then, on this side of the river, someone materializes out of the night-shadow of the house. The boy’s father. On other nights he has seen his father get in his truck and drive off, sometimes in his pajamas, so this is nothing new. But this time he walks right past his pickup and down the driveway toward the road. Before he passes through the gate he stops, looks both ways, and then back toward the house.
He continues over the bridge, dragging his fingertips along the top of the guardrail, and then up the neighbors’ driveway to their house. His father walks stiffly, with a slight limp the boy has never noticed before. The boy knows that the neighbors, boring old people who hate any children who aren’t their grandkids, are spending the spring in Arizona. Two of the boy’s sisters were specially chosen to water their plants and feed their mangy barn cats, and one of the neighbors’ sons comes by every day to take care of the ostrich and the cows. But the boy’s father, as far as the boy can tell, has no reason to be going over there, not in the middle of the night, not like this.
From where he is he can’t see the front of the house, can’t see his father enter. He wonders if he should climb out the hall window to investigate, to improve his vantage point, but he remembers: Let guile and patience be your closest allies. The silence of the room is of such density it is hard for him to breathe. He is not sure how much time passes, maybe three minutes, maybe an hour. No lights come on in the house, which the boy finds strange. He does not take his eyes from it, not once, until two figures walk out the back door. His father a
nd a woman. A dark-skinned woman with long black hair.
The boy understands that this is why he has been waiting at the window so long, to see this. His father and the woman stand at the bottom of the steps and talk for a while. The image begins to blur and the boy doesn’t understand what is happening until he realizes that his face is so close to the window his breath is fogging it up. He swipes away the condensation with his forearm and the image is clear again. The father looks back at his house, thinking he is blocked from view by the line of feed bins, but the boy can see him. From up here, the boy can see everything.
The boy can see the man and woman walking side by side, the backs of their hands touching. He can see the dim shapes of cows, their white faces like scraps of paper floating on dark water. He can see one of the barn cats creeping between the wheels of a tractor. He can see the black TV antenna jutting over the house and, in the far distance, the mountains still capped with snow. He can see the ostrich stamping its feet and straining against the fence as the humans pass by, and when they stop under the dwarf elm, its white blossoms vibrating in the breeze like agitated moths, he can see how they face each other. He can see the woman press her forehead into his father’s chest. He can see the way he pulls her close.
34.
LETTERS MINGLE SOULS
SHE WOULD WRITE HIM A LETTER. NOT A HI, HOW ARE YOU? LETTER full of banal inquiries, but a letter of complaint, a cease-and-desist order, an argument, a shout, a baring of the soul in words, the kind of letter you could nail to a church door. Trish had returned from Nevada feeling strangely liberated, as if her talk with Golden had resolved something, as if she had asserted herself and was therefore in control of her own destiny and happiness, but that feeling hadn’t lasted much longer than the drive home. Now the trip came to her as a distant and bitter memory, even though it had happened just a few days ago. And here she was again, alone, sitting at her kitchen table in her quiet little house feeling quietly desperate, as if she’d never taken a chance, as if she’d been here all her life.
This desperation, she was sure, had to do with the sudden spike of activity in the Richards family: Golden losing his job, the Barge appearing mysteriously on Big House’s lawn, reportedly placed there by minions of his angry ex-boss for mysterious reasons, to make no mention of fleas and barn fires and birthday parties gone awry. There was something in the air, a sense of flux, or imminence, which left her feeling as she always felt at such times: that she was out of the mix, being left behind.
So: she was going to do something about it by…writing a letter. It was ridiculous, she knew. (It can never hurt, Uncle Chick always said, to acknowledge your own foolishness—which was one of the reasons she liked Uncle Chick so much.) What self-deluded saps letter-writers were, believing that by putting words on paper and sending them to the powers that be—the newspaper, the utility company, the local congressman—they were having an effect, making a difference. These kind of people, they were no different than she: helpless, irrelevant, and striving to feel less so.
Writing a letter, then, might or might not be better than sitting here in her profoundly sad nylon sweatpants and old cardigan, waiting while the world moved on without her, but it would give her something to do. She had gotten the idea this morning while visiting Rose at the hospital. She had come to enjoy those visits, not only because they filled a few hours, but because she had become fond of dumpy old Forest Glen; she was beginning to understand why Rose was in no hurry to leave the place. Sure, it smelled funny and was teeming with the deranged and suicidal, but its charms were undeniable: the I’ve-seen-it-all nurses in powder blue who approached cautiously and touched you with extreme care, the crisp white sheets on the beds, the murmuring televisions watching benevolently over every room, the tiny white paper cups full of pills floating by on trays, the staff asking each person they passed, residents and visitors alike, “How are you?” as if your feelings at that very moment were all that mattered in the universe.
She and Rose were sitting together in one of the visiting rooms watching $10,000 Pyramid with the sound off, clutching one another’s hands for comfort like an elderly couple in a chaotic bus station, when some kind of therapy session started up in the room across the hall. A woman with a booming, mannish voice began talking to a group of patients about the transformative power of the written word. “The spoken word,” she said, “is unreliable, let’s face it, people! When you speak, you are speaking in the moment and prone to mistakes, and once the words come out of your mouth they are gone forever, or lodged in the memory of others, where they can be twisted or misconstrued. But the written word, it can be carefully fashioned, see, you can take your time with it, it lasts! Nobody is putting you on the spot. You write something down, there is power in it exactly because you have taken the time and the effort to put it down.”
With the easy solicitude of a first-grade teacher she asked the group what form of the written word they preferred. There was some mumbling Trish couldn’t make out. Newspapers, somebody volunteered. Comic books. Suddenly there was shouting. Magazines! Novels! Crossword puzzles! Someone who may have been a joker hollered, “Movies with subtitles!”
“The question is,” the woman said, “what are you going to write? You could write stories, you could write a poem, but honestly, who wants to read a poem?”
Everyone seemed to agree that nobody wanted to read a poem.
“That’s what I thought,” the woman said. “You could write in your diary, which is a perfectly good thing to do, but what about a letter? More than kisses, letters mingle souls. You know who said that? John Donne. You guessed it, a poet. Those kind of letters, the kind that mingle souls, those aren’t the ones we’re talking about today. We’re talking about a less poetic kind of letter in which you clear the air or stake your claim or tell somebody off. So. Anybody here feel misunderstood or unappreciated or angry?”
I do, Trish thought, raising her hand just a little. Me.
“Maybe you need to clarify your life? Maybe you need to gain control over your emotions instead of giving them free rein in your mind and heart? Maybe you’ve got a bone to pick?”
Yes, yes and yes.
“Why not a letter, then. I bet there’s somebody out there who needs to hear from you. Maybe it’s somebody in your life right now, maybe it’s a person you’ll never see again. Who knows, it could be your old self, the self that got you in the mess you’re in now. Maybe you need to write a letter to that whiskey bottle that’s been on your mind all day. Maybe you need write a letter to your mean old father. I’m thinking maybe we all need to write a letter to our mean old fathers.”
Trish, for the first time in a long time, thought of her mean old father. Who had not been mean at all, but patient and serene, almost saintly with his white beard and quivering hands. He was sixty-six years old when she was born, seventy-eight when he died, and in the time between he might have held her in his arms a few times or spoken to her in passing, but she had no recollection of any such thing.
What kind of letter would she write to him? It would probably be very short, something like:
Dear Dad,
Remember me?
A SIGN OF LIFE
So she got out her legal pad, her good pen and started writing.
Dear Golden,
There are so many things I want to tell you, but I have never really known how.
She slapped the pen onto the table and sighed. This was absolutely, without a doubt, the most idiotic idea she’d ever had. She tried another sentence, gave up immediately and tossed her pen across the room, hitting the ceramic cactus on the windowsill and knocking it onto the counter, where it broke into three pieces.
“Great,” she said to herself, the broken cactus, the quiet house. “Look at us now.”
She considered calling her mother, but she knew exactly what her mother would say. Honey, I don’t want to say I told you so, but damn it if I didn’t. Do yourself a favor and get out while you still can.
She thought she heard the faint, gravel-popping sound of a car pulling up out front. It was late and the house was so quiet she could hear the flipping numbers of the clock radio in the other room.
She went to the family room, stole a peek out the window. It was Golden in his pickup, parked on the other side of the road, for some reason. He didn’t get out, just sat there with the engine running and headlights off. She picked her way across the road in her bare feet, opened the passenger-side door, and got in.
“Hey there,” he said, “I—”
“What are you doing here?” she said with piercing, antagonistic cheer. In the few days since he’d been back from Nevada—for good, apparently—there hadn’t been time for the wives to get together to decide on Golden’s new rotation schedule, so he was left to come and go at his leisure. Which bothered Trish only because his leisure did not seem to include her. Which, come to think of it, was one of the primary reasons she felt so compelled to write him the letter.
“Just checking up on things,” he said. “Making sure everybody’s safe.”
“You look worried,” she said, which was putting it mildly. He looked distraught, his features bunched in the middle of his face, his eyes tense with something very close to fright. He hadn’t shaved in a few days and his silver whiskers glinted among the blond and red like flecks of mica in a bed of sand.
“Little bit,” he said distractedly, staring out the window into the foggy dark. “Little bit…worried.”
“You want to talk about it?”
He shrugged and shook his head; he never wanted to talk about it. And then he did something unexpected: he scooted toward her across the seat and with a meek sigh let his big head fall heavily into her lap. “I don’t know,” he mumbled into the fabric of her sweatpants. “I don’t know what to do.”
“Join the club, big guy.”
“You know that hospital where Rose is? I think I need to check myself into that place.”