The Hazards of Good Breeding

by Jessica Shattuck

  “You were much in love with your husband?” Jean Pierre asks.

  “Oh, no—I mean—well, maybe in the beginning,” Faith answers. “I guess.”

  “Hmm.” Jean Pierre frowns.

  “Why?”

  “No reason.” He pauses. “You deserve to have been.”

  It gives her an inadequate, wasted feeling, as if she has been a coward, someone to be pitied. “Well,” she says, feeling in her handbag for her lip gloss.

  “You were in love also before you met him?”

  Faith considers early boyfriends—Pete Sammuels, and Trick Hudson with those awful braces which had food stuck in them half of the time. But this is embarrassing; to remember possible love affairs she is harkening back to the ninth grade when she was barely even a full-fledged adolescent! Of course, Frank Lawrence was crazy about her, and that was right before Jack, when she was eighteen, but love—the idea never even crossed her mind. He had that ridiculous way of speaking as if he were involved in an amateur performance. . . .

  “There were other times.” She does not need to sit here and be treated like an old maid. “Excuse me,” she says in a formal voice, leaving Jean Pierre sitting with a funny look on his face, staring after her as she walks away from the table.

  In the bathroom she reapplies her lipstick and pats her hair, takes some time squirting the lotion from the little white dispenser beside the sink onto her hands. What is she doing here? It feels lonely, suddenly, to be in this place that is neither New York or Boston—where no one knows her whereabouts. She might as well be in some nondescript airport in a connecting city. And meanwhile (there is the prickle again, more uncomfortably this time) her little son is quite possibly all by himself in that big, creaky old house, doing what? What on earth is there for him to be doing? She should have done something to make sure he didn’t end up alone there for the weeks until he will go off to that horrible camp Jack insists all his sons go to. She should have made more of a fuss in the custody hearings; she should have tried to have him spend the whole summer with her. Especially if Jack is in some sort of “mess,” according to Rock Coughlin.

  This stops her short. She has not thought of this, actually, since telling Lucy about it this morning. She doesn’t really care what sort of mess Jack is in, but what might it mean for Eliot? He has possibly been even more than marginally neglected. She could be back in Concord by now, getting to the bottom of things, checking in on her son. She picks her purse up off the bathroom counter and walks out into the dining room with an urgent sense of purpose.

  “What is it?” Jean Pierre asks, looking up at her in concern when she has reached the table.

  “I think—” Faith is surprised to feel her eyes are hot with tears. “I have a feeling—” She stops, unsure how to continue. “I should go back to Boston right now. I think my son who I called is—maybe is in trouble—”

  And already, to her amazement, without any questions or laughter, Jean Pierre has raised his hand to signal for the check from the waiter.

  “ELIOT,” CAROLINE CALLS almost before she is through the door once she is back from the Artful Dodger. She tries to keep her voice normal—curious, maybe—but not worried or upset. It sounds strange when it comes out, though—shrill and ineffective, the voice of some tired, hysterical old aunt.

  “Eliot?” she repeats as the screen door slams shut behind her. The house is lit up like a Christmas tree. Its ancient windows look stretched out with the pressure of so much brightness from within. Out on the front lawn, Stephan, who has driven her back from the Artful Dodger, is making his way through the purply darkness to the oak with the Revolutionary War bullet in it. She wishes he had just dropped her off and driven home—she is in no mood to give him the tour he has requested.

  Caroline crosses the kitchen and the dining room—both fully illuminated and exposed somehow; the dining room in particular looks small, uninteresting, and naked under the bright light of the dusty chandelier. As she walks through the doorway to the gun room, Caroline can hear chaotic clapping and announcing sounds. The television—she breathes out a great sigh of relief. “El?” she calls again, more steadily this time.

  But the voice that greets her is not her brother’s. “Carol?”

  Rock is sitting sprawled out on the sofa, feet up on the coffee table. He has an amazed, wide-eyed look, as if it is five A.M. and he has been up all night.

  “What are you doing here, Rocky?” Caroline asks, trying to keep the exasperation out of her voice. “Have you seen Eliot?”

  “No—he hasn’t—not since I’ve been here. I just came by—I wanted to—” he is saying, but already Caroline is sprinting up the stairs. “Eliot?” she calls hopefully. Here, too, the lights are blazing—is this Eliot’s work or Rock’s? There is no sign of Eliot in his bedroom, the bathroom, the maid’s room that was Rosita’s, the old smoke room with its age-old smell of cured animal fat at the end of the hallway, or anywhere else. Rock is right—he is not home. For the second time today, he is missing.

  Caroline walks back down the stairs and stands in the doorway to the TV room, trying not to give in to the heavy feeling of foreboding balanced on her shoulders. On the TV, lots of husky girls in red and white miniskirts and ponytails are leaping around to what sounds like a speeded-up arrangement of “My Country ’Tis of Thee.”

  “Do you want to sit down Carol?” Rock says, turning to look at her.

  “I don’t—” Caroline begins. “I just—” She feels overwhelmingly tired suddenly. And the sofa does look inviting. She sits down on the arm of it, leans her head against the wall. Onscreen, the troupe of cheerleaders—that is what they are—spin and whirl around some awful gymnasium. Caroline stares at the TV, her mind whirring—or stumbling, really—through possibilities of rational explanation for where Eliot could be. A friend’s house (does he even have friends?). Should she call the cops? Would that be hysterical?

  “Do you know where your father is?” Rock asks in a strange inversion of her thoughts.

  “I have no idea,” she says, pronouncing each word clearly. “I have no idea where my father is. I have no idea where my brother is. I have no idea about anything.”

  Rock looks over at her with a strange look of concern and—is it nervousness? “I just—I actually came over here partly because, I know it sounds weird, but I saw him a few hours ago—”

  “Eliot?”

  “Your father.”

  “Oh.” Disappointment wells up in her. “Where?”

  “Well, that’s the weird part.” Rock shifts his position to look more fully at her, and he does—he really does—seem nervous. Paler than usual and sort of twitchy. “There’s this guy—remember Don Hammond? he worked at Emack’s when we were in high school?”

  “The drug dealer?” Caroline asks, narrowing her eyes. Rock looks high. He is probably about to launch into some elaborate delusional story. She tries to listen, but her mind has returned to Eliot, who is covertly xeroxing a “missing” poster of some young black boy, according to Stephan. Is he somehow mixed up in a child abuse case? Or has he been converted to some cultish religion?

  “. . . and he was just sitting there in the car.” Caroline forces her attention back on Rock. “I don’t know, maybe it’s stupid, but I just felt like you should know because he seemed kind of strange—and because—”

  Caroline stares at him. Her father sitting in his car outside a drug dealer’s house? The image is so incredible it almost makes her want to laugh. Sex and drugs—next he’ll be blasting Trent Reznor. It would be funny, except for the condom at Lilo’s. This stops her; it seems, for some reason, to lend credence to the idea.

  “Because?” she says.

  “Because there was this thing Denise was saying—I didn’t even know if I should mention it. I’m sure it’s not true, but I guess—I guess I thought you’d want to know even if it’s just some weird rumor. . . .” Rock’s face is flushing uncharacteristically. “That your dad and—that Eliot’s old babysitter is preg
nant and—it’s his baby . . .”

  Caroline can feel the blood rush through her veins in an aggressive, possibly dangerous, charge at her head, and then drain away, leaving some cooler, less sustaining substance in its place. Oh, she wants to say, but she can only think it. His baby. His, meaning her father, and baby, meaning his. In the same sentence. She can see this, the phrase, the possessive pronoun and noun, suspended in her mind. So this is why Rosita left.

  She is not sure how much time has elapsed since Rock has stopped speaking.

  “Caroline?” There is the sound of footsteps and the dogs barking from the kitchen. Stephan—she has completely forgotten him.

  From where he is sitting on the sofa, Rock’s eyebrows rise in surprise.

  “Hi,” Caroline says, straightening, pulling herself forward off the wall with what feels like heroic determination. “In here.”

  “That’s an amazing sight,” Stephan is saying, ignoring the dogs, whom Caroline has let out from behind the grate and are barking close on his heels. “Shhht. Cut it out,” Caroline reprimands them. They seem unusually wound up this evening.

  “That bullet hole in the tree,” he is saying. “I got it on camera. The contrast isn’t any good because it’s so dark, but maybe I’ll come back tomorrow. . . . Oh—hey, I didn’t know you were here,” he says seeing Rock from the doorway. “I’m sorry, am I interrupting—?”

  “No,” Caroline says. “No,” she narrows her eyes and stares at him. It must be through Denise that he knew Eliot had no babysitter anymore. “I just feel a little queasy.”

  “Oh,” Stephan says, raising his eyebrows. “Should I come back for the grand tour?”

  Outside, there is a faint scratching sound that could possibly be a car turning off the road onto the driveway. “Yes,” Caroline says. “I think so.” She stops herself. It is the sound of wheels crunching over the gravel—she is quite sure. Could it be Eliot? Getting dropped off by someone? She starts across the dining room and through the window she can see the sweep of the headlights, which blink once and then fall into darkness. The Explorer. Her father’s Explorer. She breaks into a jog across the rest of the dining room, through the kitchen, out the door onto the steps. There were two people silhouetted in the front seat, she is sure of this. Eliot! Maybe there has been some plan all along for her father to pick him up somewhere at a designated time.

  The next few seconds seem enormous—made up of a myriad of complex, independent movements and actions, and at the same time seem very simple and absolute, streamlined almost as if they have been rehearsed. The driver’s door opens and then the passenger’s, but instead of Eliot, the person who steps out is a young woman in a loose dress and glowingly white sneakers who is unmistakably pregnant. Caroline stops short in her approach, and from behind her she hears the screen door screech wide as Stephan pushes it open and pauses on the threshold between light and darkness, inside and outside. And almost before Caroline sees them, she feels them coming, lets out a little cry, but already the dogs have shot out through the door Stephan is holding open, and in a flash they are running, charging up the driveway with their tails straight out behind them like streamers.

  As Caesar approaches the woman—Rosita, Caroline recognizes her now, and she is pregnant—she takes a nervous step backward and raises one hand to her head, in a gesture of shock or despair that is almost predictive, an effect preceding its cause, and Caesar slows, lowers his head almost submissively for a moment, but then at once he jumps up and at her, his big paws rising to land on her shoulders. And then for a moment he seems to have subsumed her—his black head obscuring hers and dropping, dropping, until with a breath-stopping thud her head hits the car’s rear tire. There is a great deal of shouting—Caroline is not sure if it is coming from her own mouth or her father’s or even Rock’s; she is dimly aware he, too, has emerged from the house. But the noise attaches itself to nothing, hangs simply overhead, and dissipates into absolute silence. There is no sound from the woman, no bark or growl from the dogs, and no more shouting. In the distance, there is the sound of the rhododendron leaves scraping, like anxious hands, one against the other.

  Caroline moves off the flagstone path onto the driveway, as if through some substance thicker than air—thicker, even, than water. Caesar stands off to the side with his head lowered, almost crouching. On the driveway, the woman’s body is slung across the pale stones like something roughly used and then abandoned. Her father is kneeling beside it, and Rock, too (how has he gotten there so fast?). Her father is saying something that sounds strange but reassuring, foreign almost, like a comforting word in another language. The dogs stand back a few yards, licking their paws, looking uneasy. One of them is emitting a soft, low-pitched whine.

  As Caroline approaches, Rock stands and starts toward the house, but something stops him—his face rearranges itself into an expression of incredulity. Caroline thinks, for a moment, it is she who has somehow surprised him, but then turns and finds herself looking straight into the slick black eye of a camera. It is Stephan, standing not two feet behind her, filming the disaster he has, in a way, created. A tiny green light blinks on as if registering her attention. Something fierce rears up inside her, cutting through the oppressive weight of inaction; she thrusts her hand out over the cold glass lens and yanks it downward, in an age-old gesture of protection.

  17

  ELIOT HAS IMAGINED this moment often enough that now that it has arrived it feels insubstantial, only possibly more real than it has been the hundreds of times he has thought through it before. He has changed into his Paul Revere knickers, strapped on his backpack (outfitted with water, a sandwich, two apples for Blacksmith, and his leaflets) backward so he can reach into it while he rides. He has saddled Blacksmith and led him out to the muddy ground in front of the stable without a hitch. Above him the night sky seems unusually bright and hollow, scattered with stars. Eliot knocks his hand against the rough-grained wood of the stable door to be sure this time he has his body with him. It grates satisfyingly against his skin, sends the sting of a splinter into the fat of his palm. He is here now, and ready.

  Blacksmith sighs and looks patiently into the layered, swaying darkness of the wood as Eliot puts one foot in the stirrup and swings himself up onto his back. It feels somehow higher up than usual; the ground looks faraway and unreliable, but Eliot is not afraid. His body feels firm and indestructible, as if it is made of some solid, uniform substance as durable as Styrofoam. He nudges the horse’s warm flanks and Blacksmith starts forward with a swish of his tail over his hindquarters. All around, against Eliot’s face and neck and the thin blue nylon of his Paul Revere knickers, he can feel the refreshing cool of evening. There is nothing but the hiss of Blacksmith’s footsteps, the chink of the buckles on his stirrups, and the rush of an occasional car on the other side of the trees.

  The path that winds into the wood behind the stables will bring them to the first leg of the Revolution Way Bike Trail. Eliot has selected this route carefully. It will take him through Lexington and then Arlington and into Cambridge, where he can then make his way along the river and across to Boston on the Weeks Footbridge. Once he is there, there will be no more bike route. Thinking about this part of the trip makes Eliot nervous. He does not have Rosita’s exact address, but when she lived with them she would go to her brother-in-law’s on Saturdays, to a place called Roxbury, which he has found on the map—a broad area between a pearlike shape called Olmstead Park and on the other side, the bay. And she must still be there. Eliot has not believed his father for a moment that she moved. She would have told him if she was moving somewhere.

  When Eliot is near enough to Concord Center to see the faint forms of the white clapboard buildings of Concord Academy, he slows Blacksmith down to a walk and unzips the backpack, which feels snug and heavy, like a baby against his stomach. He will have to move quickly; it is not quite late enough to be sure there will be no one on the sidewalks even on this sleepy end of Main Street. At the public notice b
oard on the corner he stops and dismounts, loops Blacksmith’s reins around his elbow, takes two thumbtacks from the front pocket of his backpack and a flyer from the stack inside. With a quick look over his shoulder, he posts it above an advertisement for typing classes, beside a poster of a band called Thunderhead.

  MISSING, it says, ROBERTO RODRIGUEZ. CALL 617 223 4987 IF YOU CAN HELP. It sends a thrill through Eliot—Roberto’s dark eyes shining out from the white paper and his own phone number at the bottom of the page. Of course, Rosita will never see this sign here, but it feels important to put it up anyway. Every flyer he puts up will bring Roberto that much more out of the forgotten jungle and into this world of peaceful green lawns and clapboard houses. Once he has reached Roxbury, Eliot will make his way through the tarred wilderness of streets with names like Mansur and Bragoon, which he has picked out because they were the smallest, narrowest gray lines on the map he printed off the Internet in his school library. And he will tack his flyers everywhere—one on every lamppost. He knows when Rosita sees them she will call.

  In the beginning, Eliot considered taking the commuter train to find her—the same one she would take to go to her brother-in-law’s on Saturday mornings. But the train does not run after ten P.M., and anyway it is better to go on horseback. This way he can make stops in Lexington, Belmont, and Cambridge—he can connect the two worlds with this paper trail of flyers. And until he crosses the river, he can follow in the footsteps of Paul Revere.

  Eliot drives the last thumbtack into the post and Blacksmith shifts his weight and snorts, picks up his right foreleg and replaces it on the ground as if in indecision. Two figures have come into view on the other end of Main Street—a man and a woman holding hands under a streetlamp. Eliot swings himself back up onto Blacksmith, crosses the empty street, and makes his way out from under the glare of the streetlights. In front of First Parish Church he posts another flyer, and another again on the mailbox at the corner of Thoreau Street. He had not planned on putting so many up here, but his conviction ripens with each car that passes without stopping to ask what he is doing—a young boy out on a horse in the middle of the night.