The Journey Prize Stories 30

by Sharon Bala

  I was coming off a day filled with box squats and jack-knives and the one where you swing ropes like they’ve bitten your hands and you must shake them off before you die. I hurt all over.

  Billy hummed behind me as the sink filled—low note, low note, high note. His hum changed intensity every few seconds. Hm, hmm, hmmmmm. Melodic trills, weird, jarring bursts. Adventure music. He punched the water and spritzed it at himself. He hummed, whistled, drummed the taps. He’d sometimes smear bubbles on his chin and, thus bearded, cast spells.

  I soaked in his noises. My eyelids warmed in the light.

  A strange slosh from the sink brought me back.

  I turned around to see Billy standing weirdly upright by the bay window. He’d left the tap on, oblivious to the bright sheet of water connecting sink and floor.

  He had a dragonfly’s severed head between two fingers, held up to his eye like a jewel.

  I ran and shut off the tap. Stood there dumbly as my socks took on water, too tired to connect any dots.

  A dragonfly had gotten caught in our glue trap. I didn’t say anything and began to spread towels. I mopped what I could. Billy just stood at that window the whole time and for some reason I still didn’t say anything. Finally I went and stood behind him. I asked, What are you doing? He said, I had to kill it. He told me how he couldn’t get the bug loose from the glue strip, even though it was only caught by a single wing. Every time he tried to pry the wing loose, the dragonfly’s three other wings would buzz at the touch of his finger, and one would catch in the glue, and when he’d try to pry that wing loose, again all the other wings would buzz and another would get stuck. Around and around. He said it would have starved to death anyway.

  * * *

  —

  Out in public, I’d feel Billy near me. Feel him, like palpably feel something, I don’t know what, emanating off him in staggered, gentle waves that didn’t quite prickle, but you imagined they might soon or could. And I’d tell him, Billy, if you open one more chakra outside the house I’m going to take away all your sitting cushions. He did that sometimes, open them in public. At first, I didn’t sense much beyond a faint ripple at the periphery of his body’s outline, or that my head would swivel toward him one moment before he actually entered a room I was in. But as he got deeper into it, really harnessing and accessing the Tall Energies, as he would describe them, the sensation became something almost impossible to keep secret, felt like those fine Velcro brushes across your skin. He’d do it in Bed Bath & Beyond, at school, even visiting the dentist. Super-crowded places. The mall. I’d say, Billy, if you even tickle or remotely touch your heart chakra in the food court, I’m going to take away every single one of your bronze chiming bowls, so help me God, I’ll put them in the top cupboard. Sometimes he’d relent, but sometimes he’d zoom through his heart chakra to throat to third eye, causing heads to swivel en masse in our general direction as people tried to figure out what was happening.

  We’d find Billy sitting in the yard or in the nooks and crannies of the house. I’d look for his short, sandy hair against the backdrop of fence, lawn, apple tree. He had cheeks like little buns. A big forehead (mine). This cute pointy chin. A small boy.

  He didn’t always sit in lotus. Sometimes he’d be in a regular cross-legged pose or have both legs straight out in front of him. On his head one day, all fours the next, then in some kind of twisted sideways sprawl. He sat so still for so long. My Billy, now a monk, now a garden gnome.

  He’d collected several Buddhist texts by then, been reading and studying them for who knows how long before we exposed him. Pali Canon, Taisho Tripitaka, Tibetan Kangyur, and various leather-bound Mahayana Sutras, some books without titles or, seemingly, any text in them whatsoever, though he’d dodge questions regarding those.

  Schoolwork hit a wall. I’d find abandoned math sheets in his dresser, geography assignments under his bed, writing prompts folded into orchids on his windowsill. Dust-caked geometry sets and cartons of colouring pencils still in their Staples bags piled up behind his bedroom door. Paperless binders. A copy of The Little Prince eight months overdue from the library with spirals drawn over every mention of the moon. Notebooks of blank pages with maybe one circle drawn on the last page and the caption Oh. I’d walk by his room, ask: What did you learn today? Always he’d reply: Don’t worry.

  Teachers called the house, their voice a half whisper. They weren’t sure if he’d spoken a single word in class all term. Could we test him for autism? Could we get a doctor to prescribe amphetamines? Had they prescribed too many amphetamines? Was he vaccinated?

  Craig maybe had it worse than me. This was his boy. His son. The one who would become him, beat him at sports when it was finally appropriate, fight tigers, arm wrestle lightning. Billy cradled grasshoppers like newborns. Severed branches, errant spiders, road-killed birds on the boulevard—all might feel his love. One day he sat for hours with a dead, emerald green hummingbird shrined in his lap. When I looked for it later on, I couldn’t find the bird’s body anywhere, nor see any disturbed plots of grass or overturned soil. But I was too afraid to ask him about it, figured boys will be boys with corpses.

  * * *

  —

  I tracked down a local Buddhist monk through Craigslist. He called himself Ashwa. Two days later, Ashwa showed up on our doorstep looking so smooth-faced and ambiguously ethnic that I wanted to cry.

  I let him in the house without saying anything. Ashwa wore a sort of red sarong that went to his ankles. I couldn’t tell how the sarong actually stayed on his thin body: there were no knots, clips, or belts of any sort. Ashwa was bald. Maybe thirties or forties. Threadbare sandals. Ginger-root toes, the skin a dark, scabby brown. I wanted to kneel there, Pope-like, debased—Mom had always termed it humility—and clean his feet.

  I remember how he closed the door behind himself and waited without even the vague suggestion of fidgeting. Water peppered the glass door panels. The sounds of wind and creaking trees, our fence a constant wooden groan. It had rained for three days.

  “Mrs. Baker,” he said.

  “Thank you for coming.” I bowed without thinking.

  He only smiled and didn’t bow back. “So, your son is pursuing enlightenment?”

  “Would you be able to talk with him?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I don’t know. Talk to him, explain that he’s a kid and needs to realize that he’s just a kid and has to live a bit and do things and speak to people.”

  Ashwa considered this. “Is he here?”

  “He’s upstairs to the right, in his room. We have tried everything.”

  Ashwa slipped out of his sandals and walked by me up the stairs. His feet crunched against the wood. The edge of his shoulder blades stuck through the back of his tunic like the stumps of fallen trees.

  I sat in the kitchen with the lights off, one fingernail picking at the kitchen table’s lacquer. Some kind of resin. Expensive. Three layers. Was it okay to have this man upstairs with Billy? I hadn’t let Craig know yet, didn’t want him to worry or over-think. Rain curled down the windows in invisible channels, paths left by Windex, pollen, the oily footprints of flies. The greens of the lawn, the ash of the sky. Our cedar tree, beads of water on every twig and needle. The patio chimes rang crazily.

  Eventually, I stood from the chair and crept upstairs, stopping short of Billy’s room. I tried to get my head as close to the edge of the door as I could, one ear almost on the ground.

  “—and so,” said Billy in his clear but uneven voice, “envision a sphere, like the world, filled with dirt. Really picture this sphere, its curved, complete surface, its weight. Let all the things other than the sphere fade, they are gone, now there is only the sphere of dirt, hanging in grey. After that becomes comfortable in your mind, let the dirt also disappear. The sphere is just hollow now, transparent. Do you see it? Finally, let the sphere itself go. See how it fades. There is nothing. Allow it to go. This is no—”

  “Okay,” I s
aid, half falling into the room. I crouched there with my fingernails in the floor. “That’s about enough.”

  They both turned to me from where they sat facing each other.

  “I understand this may not have been your goal, Mom,” said Billy with a small nod.

  “Ashwa, you can go.”

  Ashwa bowed to Billy, I swear to God. He started walking out, but paused as he passed me.

  “Would it be possible to return at a later date?” he asked.

  “Fuck no,” I whispered to him.

  “Mom, this is unnecessary. He’s well-intentioned.”

  “You need to do your math homework and make your bed.”

  Billy nodded.

  I noticed Ashwa had left. The faint closing of the front door downstairs.

  “He was very wise,” said Billy, his eyes on the crenulations in the ceiling drywall.

  “Dinner is at six.”

  * * *

  —

  Billy turned eleven and Leandra, a girl who lived down the street, came over to play. They set up in the backyard and began to dig a hole. I watched them from the kitchen. Clouds sped by overhead, their shadows like big swollen birds. I’d hoped for some profound connection, a bridge for Billy back to Regular Land. The kids hardly spoke. Leandra might say something, smile, then lapse back into digging. They dug for probably two hours. Such focused excavation. Crouched quite close to one another, their hips and elbows occasionally touching. I’d forced Billy to wear a white T-shirt along with his loose yellow pants. He still would not wear shoes or socks. Leandra wore a pretty flowered sun dress. Her black hair hung as if decorated with heavy beads. They each dug with a small garden trowel. Eventually they stopped digging and stared into the hole for several minutes and I couldn’t see their lips to know if they spoke. Sweat shone off their necks. Their shoulders rose and fell and I thought: baby camels, baby camels. And then Leandra twisted to the side and kissed Billy on the cheek. Said something. Billy backed away, almost in a hop, but stayed crouching with his fingers in the grass. Said something. Leandra’s face softened, caved in. She unwound from her squat and walked from the yard, waved at Billy without looking back. That wave. Billy stayed crouched next to the hole. He peered into the hole, then at the red gate she’d left through, then back into the hole. Billy’s sun-cast shadow a long thin spear by then, the day gone a shade of amber. He crouched there for some time. I couldn’t look away. I noticed muscles in his cheek for the first time, crimped lines in his upper lip. Mastication. Rapid blinks like his face might be able to fly away. I was rapt. Guilty and rapt, my chest hot. Billy crouched by that hole until the clouds slowed and thickened to steel wool overhead and I made him come inside.

  * * *

  —

  One day we finally managed to get Billy down to the ocean on a family outing. Craig seemed like the odd one out for once, claiming back pain, and said he’d rather sit inside and stay cool and have a beer. Billy had quietly agreed to come when I, after some searching, found him in the downstairs den sitting beside the couch with his fingers arranged into a complex triangle. This was summer and the absence of school had been good.

  We drove to Dallas Road. Craig parked in the shade below a bright orange arbutus. I peeled my bare legs off the car’s seat and stretched and made sure we didn’t forget our small cooler with the turkey sandwiches. Billy wore only his billowy yellow pants, no shoes or socks or T-shirt, the day hot enough for legitimate fashion-minimalism.

  We didn’t lay out a blanket. Too much driftwood and rock cluttered the shore. Each of us found a comfortable nook between uprooted trunks or stones and settled in to watch the ocean. Gulls swooped above a quartet of paragliders. Gusts and white waves throwing themselves about in the distance. Quiet on the shore. Our sheltered cove with its hot air and driftwood stacked as if thrown. All felt slow and viscous.

  Billy had chosen a hollowed volcanic bowl, a dry tidal pool maybe, and sat cross-legged in the depression and looked very small and like he was held in an immense cupped palm. He stared at the paragliders as they took off from the water, landed, took off again. Though he didn’t himself participate in sports or games anymore, he’d often stare at people doing these things.

  I went over to where Billy sat and dropped into a deep squat next to the stony depression.

  “How’s it going?” I said.

  “Good.”

  “I love you.”

  His eyebrows moved but he didn’t respond.

  “You love me too, right?”

  “It’s been bothering you, yes?”

  “What’s been bothering me?”

  “I do love you, of course.” He brought one knee to his chest.

  “And do you love this beach?”

  “Of course.”

  “And that guy over there with the blue shirt?”

  “Yes.”

  “These things are different, Billy. I’m your mother.”

  “Attachment to these things, Mom, that’s where we get caught up. That kind of love brings so much pain.”

  “That kind of love? You mean like mine and your dad’s?”

  A nod.

  “We all have difficult moments, but we are happy with our love.”

  “That type of love is about ‘me,’ about ‘I.’”

  “Do you not want that?”

  “The kids in my class fight and scheme and send notes. Penny kissed Isaac behind Gerald’s back and they all don’t speak to each other anymore. I saw Gerald sitting by himself on a swing hardly swinging at all. Barely moving.”

  “That’s just a part of growing up, honey.”

  I ran my fingers through sand. A spider appeared, skittered under a log.

  “What were you like as a child?” he said.

  Some grits of sand clung to the ridge of his right cheek. I resisted the urge to brush them off.

  “I was just a regular girl,” I said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “I sometimes, you know, kissed people, and I sometimes sat on swings and was sad and hardly swinging at all.”

  “What made you the most sad as a kid?”

  “Oh, I don’t remember.”

  Both of us stared at the deep black-blue of the ocean. Snowfall of white foam past the point. Closer in, the water bulged with a strange flatness, taut sheets over a sleeping animal.

  “I remember being sad when I was excluded,” I said.

  “Why were you excluded?” Billy had a way of asking questions that made you realize you could legitimately say anything, no matter how vile.

  “I wasn’t always excluded. Only sometimes. There was this group of girls. The group had a name, but I can’t remember the name. Someone had invented a name and everyone else was too scared to question it. I was a little fat back then. Chubby. The most popular girl was a really skinny girl named Madeleine, with black hair and the tiniest wrists you’ve ever seen.”

  Billy only nodded.

  “She’d always put things around her tiny wrists and exclaim how it was much too big for her wrists and would only fall off. She’d force kids to give her their watches and bracelets. To try on. This was back when people had watches and bracelets.”

  Billy’s eyes were perfect ovals.

  I don’t know that I’d ever told anyone this.

  “Sometimes, I’d be in the group and we’d be mean to other people, and sometimes I’d be out of the group and they would be mean to me. Always one way or the other and I couldn’t figure it out.”

  I could still hear the other girls call me fat, their teeth visible, how they closed up like a culvert of human backs. I’d stare at their ring of giggling bodies from wherever off to the side I’d chosen to stand during my exile. The feeling of being a paused television. Not able to leave. Not able to join. Tent pegs through my feet. I never cried when they did that. Always felt that the world meant for it to happen and that maybe the sky would splinter and fall on the other girls in big, jagged shards, fall on them till the only things left were little pi
nk hair ties and candy necklaces and thick, frilled socks and I’d sort of tiptoe through the wreckage putting everything in a big canvas sack.

  * * *

  —

  Two weeks later, Billy sat down next to the tree in our front yard and would not come in when I yelled that lunch was ready. At first, Craig and I laughed at the spectacle, nodded knowingly like Wait until an ant crawls on his toe. Then we went more neutral, certain he’d come in by nightfall. By midnight for sure. Soon we pleaded and argued and threatened to carry him bodily into the house. I could say we should have just picked him up. Got Craig to cradle him like the victim of a house fire. There was a moment, both of us knelt right in front of Billy, and I could really feel the softness of the soil and grass against my knees, where Craig and I looked at each other with a kind of So, are we going to do this? Can we do this? intention, and neither of us made the signal to pull the trigger. We both, I’m sure, knew that this was the time to slip an arm under his little knees and back and swoop him inside. Neither of us gave the signal. The wetness of the grass began to soak through my tights. Cool air tickled my earlobes, seemed to hold them gently. Craig went in the house and came out with a grey moving blanket. He draped the blanket around Billy’s shoulders. Billy didn’t move. So still. Head slightly bowed, legs in full lotus, the sole of his right foot pointed at the stars.

  “We’re going to go in now, Billy,” I said. “We love you, you should join us.”

  “Let us know if you need anything,” said Craig. “I’ll bring some food out in a few hours.”

  * * *

  —

  On the second day, Craig called in sick to work. I skipped the gym. Billy didn’t move as we strung a holey blue camping tarp over where he sat. Craig suspended one of his hydration bladders from a branch. We angled the drinking hose to hang down near Billy’s unmoving mouth. I placed a chocolate mint Cliff Bar (with the package torn half open) on the grass next to Billy’s pale little right hand. We both sat in front of Billy for about twenty minutes, seeking communion, awaiting his response, like it was owed, before we gave up and went inside for a glass of wine.