Sons of Liberty

by Adele Griffin

  And although Rock nodded casually, as though Cliff’s decision were the obvious one, he was secretly relieved. Sometimes it seemed as if Cliff stood only a moment away from walking out the door and evaporating into another world, for good. You gotta give me some warning, he always wanted to say to his brother. Let me know when you’re going, let me know where I can find you.

  The vase arrived via Saturday UPS, a giant brown box addressed to “The Kindle Family.” Rock signed for it himself.

  “It’s from Aunt Louisa,” he announced, as Cliff and Brontie and their mother gathered around, picking at the tape with their fingernails. It was rare that packages arrived in the mail, especially large, unexpected ones.

  “Look at this!” Their mother lifted the vase from its bed of packing peanuts and cradled it in her hands with awe. “Louisa made this herself. It’s so precious. I can hardly believe it.” She set the vase in the middle of the kitchen table.

  But later that day, as Rock sat at the table eating lunch, the vase’s flashy presence made him feel fidgety. He couldn’t figure out why it bothered him, but eventually he even turned his chair to remove the vase from his vision. And even then, just knowing that the vase was inches away got him restless.

  “I hate that stupid vase,” he burst out when he couldn’t stand it anymore.

  “What … why?” His mother looked up from her book.

  “I don’t know,” Rock answered honestly. He looked at the vase, trying to decide. His eyes then passed over the small rectangle of room: the thin metal runner dividing the discolored kitchen linoleum from the hardwood living-room floor and the yellowing columns of newspapers stacked by the fireplace. Some stacks stood as tall as tables, but his father refused to throw the papers away since they contained articles he wasn’t finished reading. Then Rock saw how his mother, folded up for warmth on the frayed sofa, looked as aged and worn as any piece of furniture in the room.

  When Rock looked once again at the vase, presiding over the house in all its useless glamour, it reminded him of last spring when that Avon lady had bounced her Cadillac down the potholes of Linwood Drive and sold his mother a sackful of expensive makeup.

  “You’re being silly, Rock. It’s a lovely vase,” his mother said, interrupting his memories.

  “It’s stupid-looking,” Rock said. He stood and jerked his jacket off the back of the kitchen chair. Suddenly the tiny space of the cottage was beginning to suffocate him. “Because it doesn’t match this ugly house.”

  “Where are you going?” His mother put down her book and started plucking nervously at the edge of her bathrobe sleeve as she watched him. “Why are you saying these awful things, Rock?”

  “Because—because it’s all true.” Rock answered, zipping up his jacket. “This house is ugly, and cold, and it’s too small, and we don’t need a stupid vase.” He hated himself as soon as the words left him, hated the hurt they stamped in his mother’s face, but he kept speaking. “It’s like that dumb makeup you never wear. Why’d you buy that cruddy makeup if you weren’t ever going out anywhere, if you weren’t ever going to use it? Forget it, I don’t care why. I don’t want to talk about it.” He moved to the front door and opened it, allowing the cold air to blast any warmth the fireplace had been working to offer.

  “Where are you going? Rock, come back. Rock, sweetie—I’ll put the vase away if it bothers you. You wouldn’t leave me, would you? You wouldn’t do that to me. Don’t leave here, Rock, without speaking to me.”

  “I’m not leaving for real, I’m just going outside, okay? Get off my back.” He turned away from her then, from her beseeching eyes and twisting hands. He slammed the door, hard enough, he hoped, to crack the vase.

  Outside was cold. Too cold to go biking, too cold for the JennAir. Out of habit Rock shuffled a few steps down toward the Mobley cottage, then turned and ambled to Liza’s old rappeling tree. The clothesline rope still hung on the fingertips of its branches. Rock caught the cord in his hands, twirling it in his fingers. He breathed deep and thought he caught a whiff of Liza’s Certs-and-apple smell, and then his insides felt like they were being squeezed so painfully, crushed by fists of missing her, of wanting just for a second to know that she was all right, that she was safe.

  “Rock!”

  Rock turned at the sound of his mother’s voice. He turned around, shocked by the image of his mother standing on the stoop and then walking toward him, slowly, so slowly that from a distance her movement seemed graceful, like slow motion, but then Rock saw that his mother’s entire body was shaking. In the winter sun, her face was candle white and her hands looked like rocks stuffed inside the pockets of her robe.

  “Mom, where’re your shoes? Your feet are gonna freeze,” Rock said sourly. Just to look at her, to see his mother in the real outdoor light, angered him. She looked like an escaped mental patient. He wondered if this was the way she looked that time when she ran off to Arizona, and then a thought struck him, that perhaps his mother was planning to leave them again. Except that she never went anywhere, of course. He studied her, unsure.

  “Rock, I’m trying,” she said to him. “Will you help me?” She pulled one hand from its pocket and her fingers uncurled, reaching out. Rock stopped, uncertain whether to go to her or run away, then walked toward her, marching with the even footfalls of a soldier. His mother broke into a jog that swallowed the remaining distance between them. He drew back as she grabbed his shoulder and struggled him into an awkward hug.

  “You’re gonna freeze,” he said, breaking away from her.

  “Why are you so angry with me?” she asked. “You have to talk to me, Rock.”

  “Why are you so wicked weird, Mom?” Rock pushed his words past his better judgment. “How you sit in the house all day and cook and read and don’t have any friends. You know, I can barely remember the last time you went outside. And it’s not like it’s a”—he cast around for the right word and couldn’t find it—“a good house to sit around in. With so much else you could be doing. And don’t ask me what else, ’cause I don’t know exactly, except that it would be just about anything. Anything’s better. Anything.”

  “Rock, I know—”

  “You know who you remind me of?” Now that he’d started, he couldn’t stop, and his words burst from him with furious excitement. “That lady, the lady from Jane Eyre. That first wife, Mrs. Rochester. She haunted her house and then she set it on fire. Remember her, Mom? How she was such a freak?”

  “No, Rock. You don’t mean to say this to me.” Tears filled his mother’s eyes and only made Rock more angry, more sure of her weakness.

  “Yeah I do, it’s true, it’s true. You’ve got a problem, Mom.”

  “I can’t … Rock, you need to promise me something.” Her fingers held his chin like a clothespin. “I will try. I want to get better. I want to find a way to be brave, but you must promise me. Promise never to leave me. Please don’t ever leave me, like Liza. My heart would break. Please, sweetie, promise me now that—”

  “I’m not gonna promise anything,” Rock said loudly, pulling away. He began to run, past his mother and away from the house. “I’ll do what I want. Whatever I want.” He laughed, enjoying the bravery in the voice that spoke. “Whatever I want, Ma. You can’t stop me.” He would never be like his mother, too frightened to leave her home. He could go, just like Liza, like a patriot, like Robert Xavier Kindle, until something shot him down. And even then, he’d have known how it felt to run far, far away from whatever it was that made his house so cold and sad and impossible to leave.

  Rock ran until his lungs burned and sweat greased his skin. He wasn’t far from Jake Robar’s house, so he decided to walk over and see if Jake was home. He was.

  “You need to call your mother?” Mrs. Robar asked.

  “She knows where I am,” Rock replied.

  When it came time for dinner, he picked up the Robars’ kitchen phone and fake-dialed, pretending to call home to ask permission to stay and eat at the Robars’ house. Ser
ves Mom right, he thought. He hoped she was calling every hospital in Connecticut, looking for him. He tried not to think about his father’s fury.

  Mrs. Robar finally dropped Rock off at his house later that evening. The driveway was empty, he noticed. A bad sign. The sign of a blowout.

  His mother did not speak to him as he walked in the door. She continued to sit at the kitchen table, folding clothes from a basket of clean laundry. She looked up at Rock with red-rimmed eyes, then returned to her folding.

  Rock hung his jacket carefully in the closet. He knew how the house felt after there had been fighting. You could sense the tingle in the silence. The television was turned off, and Cliff’s radio was on too low. Brontie was awake and sitting at the table, playing her game of marching a crayon up and down her arm. The game was called “crayon contest,” Cliff had explained to Rock. Each crayon had to do a routine up and down Brontie’s arm, twirling and rolling its little crayon body for a score. Brontie acted as judge and all the contestants. The worst performer got snapped in half and the winner slept under Brontie’s pillow.

  “Who’s winning?” Rock asked her now, walking into the kitchen. “I bet red wins.”

  “You lose,” Brontie answered without looking at him. “You lost and lost and lost.”

  Rock felt his stomach tighten. “Where’d Dad go?” he asked.

  “He was angry with you for missing dinner,” his mother answered. “And you forgot to put your bike away. I didn’t have any way to tell him where you went.”

  “So did he go to Maguire’s? Did he say when he’d be back?” Rock was confused. Usually when his father was angry, he stuck around long enough to explain why and to enforce the punishment. Something wasn’t right.

  He turned and ran, tearing across the living room and up the stairs to his room.

  “Rock?” He heard his mother call his name. He didn’t answer.

  At first it looked like newspaper. Rock couldn’t figure out why all the paper was on his bed, and he opened his mouth to shout his brother’s name, to make him come and clean up his mess. But even as he yelled, “Cliff, come here!” he knew that he wasn’t looking at anything his brother had done. He knew what it was. He knew the punishment. “Cliff!” he shouted. Why did you? Why. Did. You. Whywhywhy? …

  He bent closer and caught a sour taste in his mouth, an acidic memory of the lamb and mint jelly that he’d eaten at the Robars’. It didn’t look like newspaper up close, more like the loose packing of a gift that had been hastily opened, or like confetti—a celebration that had run a bit too wild. A pack of index cards, now shredded, clumped, and scattered over his bedspread—who would think that a rampage could look like the mischievous remains of a party?

  “He’s at Maguire’s, of course.” Cliff’s voice sounded in the doorway. Rock could not turn around, did not want to show his brother the heat that boiled in his face. “He was really pissed.”

  “ ’Cause I didn’t show for dinner,” Rock said quietly. His hand brushed over the bedspread. Scraps drifted to the floor. He picked up a ripped edge of card and studied it intently, waiting for his brother to speak.

  “Yeah, because of dinner, and ’cause he was just generally in one of those moods. He put your bike in the basement on top all that fiberglass junk that’s been there forever. Just so you know.”

  “Cliff.”

  “Yeah?”

  “What’m I gonna do?”

  “Mom was really fighting for you tonight, Rock. She tried real hard. Dad, Brontie, me—we were all kind of in shock from how she was acting. You’d have been amazed.”

  “She didn’t save me, though. She couldn’t do anything in the end.”

  “Get some sleep,” Cliff said quietly, so that it wasn’t an order. “Let me do some thinking.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Rock, man. I’m real sorry. He’s always been a jerk about your paper, the way you talk about Ms. Manzuli and how smart she is and everything. He likes to be the only one who can teach us a single thought, you know?”

  “Uh-huh.” Rock nodded. He didn’t trust himself to look up until Cliff had turned and left the room. Then he kicked off his boots and yanked the bedspread down, so that the scraps scattered over the floor. It was true, what Cliff had said. Their father hated to hear about Ms. Manzuli or about Rock’s paper. Rock knew it, too, and had kept right on talking. So in a way it was his own fault, getting his dad all upset. Bragging about what Ms. Manzuli had said to him, about how she might organize a field trip for him and maybe a couple other kids to visit Philadelphia, to see Betsy Ross’s house and the Declaration of Independence. Why’d he keep telling his dad that stuff, when he knew it made him so angry? Why’d he keep pushing like that? He’d talk to his father the next morning, see what he could do to patch things up. He’d start recopying tomorrow, too; and, most importantly, he’d remember to shut up about stupid stuff like school.

  “Threw it away?” Ms. Manzuli’s smile didn’t fit the rest of her face. Her eyes were confused and two little red blotches burned in the usually pale skin of her cheeks.

  “It was my own fault,” Rock said stoutly. “Last night I put all my books and papers on the chair by the back door, on top of some old newspapers, and my dad was cleaning up, and he chucked everything.”

  “But when … how?” Ms. Manzuli shook her head. “I’m confused. You worked on it last night, then put your work downstairs on top of some old papers. Then your father threw everything away, and the trashman picked up the bags before you left for school this morning?”

  “I guess that’s the way it must’ve happened.” Rock tried to look puzzled, too. “I was wicked mad, this morning, when I realized.”

  “Your father must feel absolutely devastated. He must have known how hard you’d been researching.”

  “Yeah, he was totally sorry.”

  “And you didn’t just misplace it, you don’t think?”

  Rock shook his head. He knew from the way she was staring at him that Ms. Manzuli wanted to ask more questions, and so he made his face into a wall that she couldn’t see past.

  “I’ll talk to your teacher, Rock, if that’s what you want me to do. Maybe we can all work out an extension.”

  “That’d be cool.” Rock nodded. “A lot of it’s in my head, you know. My dad and I both have a photographic memory. It’s pretty awesome.” As soon as he’d said it, Rock wished that he hadn’t, because it sounded so stupid and untrue. But Ms. Manzuli didn’t make him feel dumb. She nodded as if she believed him, and then opened a drawer at her desk and pulled out a small brown paper bag.

  “I got this when my husband and I were in Delaware the other week. I kept meaning to give it to you and I’m sure glad I brought it in today. Maybe it’ll be inspirational or something.” Rock took the bag and pulled out the lightweight, narrow package before he had time to make a mental guess at what she could have brought him. He stared at the large, gray-tipped feather that lay encased between a plastic cover and blue felt mounting.

  “What’s that?” he asked awkwardly. His voice sounded rude.

  “See, it’s …” Ms. Manzuli plucked off the bits of Scotch tape holding the clear plastic cover to the fabric support. Rock watched as she picked up the feather and then in upward-climbing script wrote her name, Marianne D’Amato Manzuli, on the paper bag. “It’s a real ink pen, see, but it’s also a wild-goose feather, and I thought … but you don’t have to have it, of course. I just thought it would be … fun, I guess. Stupid, maybe, but—”

  “I’ll take it,” Rock interrupted. He had already grabbed it out of her hand. “I got it,” he said. He knew he should say something else, like “Thanks” or “Are you sure you want me to have this?” but he didn’t want to say those things to Ms. Manzuli. He didn’t want to put on a grateful face like his mom did when someone went shopping for her. He didn’t need that pen, he didn’t need to make that face. “I got it,” he repeated, his other hand sliding the felt case off her desk and into his book bag.

  �
��It’s yours,” Ms. Manzuli said, folding up the paper bag with her name on it. “To sign all your important documents.” She smiled, a real smile, with all her pale teeth showing, and pointed to the wall clock. “But you better get going so Mrs. Lewin isn’t worried.”

  He’d started rewriting already: before school, on the bus, curled up against the brick wall at recess, and then after school, late into the evening. Sometimes he went over to the Mobleys’ house. Arlene welcomed him with cider and gingerbread squares. They almost never spoke of Liza, and yet Liza was everywhere—in the frown in Arlene’s face, in the way Arlene darted around the house like a restless phantom, peering out windows and jumping whenever the phone rang. It unnerved Rock, but the Mobleys’ house had a wood stove, so it was warmer than his own house. And he felt closer to Liza, closer to the news of her that never came. She’s tough, Rock would remind himself. Tougher than most guys. She’s lying low awhile, so Timmy or the cops don’t squeeze her out.

  Arlene made his own attempts at calm more difficult. “She’s most probably been kidnapped,” Arlene said once. “She’s dead, most likely. By now.” Her voice bellowed over her vacuuming. Rock ducked his head lower, wrote faster, pretended not to hear.

  Later that week, walking back from the Mobleys’ house, Rock caught a glimpse of Cliff and their mother walking across the front lawn. Cliff’s hand cupped her elbow, and her face glowed as she waved briskly at Rock. No one wants to be in that house, he realized. Not even Mom. Later that night, Cliff told him that they’d been walking every day since last Sunday. At first they walked around the front lawn, Cliff explained excitedly, but today they’d been down by the mailboxes. The next afternoon, Rock himself saw them ambling back from the pond. By the middle of the next week, Cliff and their mother were making short trips to the end of Linwood Drive.

  Sometimes Rock could hear their voices as they came inside, and he strained to make sense of the conversations. They spoke in low voices without pauses and spaces.

  “What do you guys talk about?” Rock asked. “What’s wrong with Mom? No one tells me anything and I got a right to know. I’m in this family, too, in case you forgot.”