by Jauss, David
Each Friday, Mrs. McClure came to visit for a few minutes. She never mentioned the windows, but Jimmy knew she hadn’t forgotten about them, because she always told him he couldn’t go home just yet. He wished she’d tell him how long he was going to be punished, but all she’d ever say was, “It won’t be much longer now, sweetheart.” At first he thought he’d have to stay at the Kahlstroms’ for eighteen days—one for each window—but when the eighteenth day came and went without her coming to take him home, he began to worry it’d be eighteen weeks. But then, a few days before Christmas, she called and told him to pack his things because she was coming to take him home. At the door, Mr. Kahlstrom shook his hand and hugged him. “Be good, Jimmy,” he said, patting his back. Mrs. Kahlstrom wasn’t there; she was upstairs in her room, and although he couldn’t hear her, Jimmy knew she was crying. “Tell Mrs. Kahlstrom…” he said, but he didn’t know what he wanted him to tell her, so he stopped. Then Mrs. McClure took his hand and led him down the sidewalk to her car. He wanted to turn around and see if Mrs. Kahlstrom was watching from her window upstairs, but he didn’t.
On the way home, Mrs. McClure mentioned that his mother had been at a hospital in St. Paul. “What was she doing there?” he asked.
“Getting better,” Mrs. McClure answered. “Wait till you see her. She’s a new person now.”
And she was, too, at least for a while. His first day back, she told him he was the best Christmas present she had ever gotten, and she baked a turkey and made mashed potatoes and gravy. And afterward, she gave him a present—“Just one, for now,” she said, “You’ll have to wait till Christmas Eve for the rest.” It was a Nerf football, just like the one Mr. Kahlstrom had bought for him. He looked at her. Her chin was trembling. “Mrs. McClure told me you liked playing football,” she said. “I thought maybe we could play a little sometime.”
They only played a couple of times, though, before she started getting tired again. The first Saturday after Christmas she went to bed right after breakfast. Jimmy watched cartoons in the living room all morning, then made himself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch. After he finished it, he went into her room to ask her if she wanted something to eat, too. She was standing in front of her bureau mirror. She was still in her nightgown, but she was wearing a strange white hat with a pink ribbon around its brim. Jimmy wasn’t sure, but he thought he’d seen that hat before. Then he remembered: it was her Easter hat, and she’d worn it back when his father lived with them and they still went to church. “Are you going to church, Mom?” he asked. She turned around, and he saw that she’d been crying. For a moment, he was worried that she was going to say something about the windows. But then she said, “While I was in the hospital, I got a letter from Mr. Gilchrist. You remember Mr. Gilchrist, don’t you?” Jimmy nodded. Mr. Gilchrist was the vacuum salesman who made the noises with her in the bedroom. “Well, he said he wouldn’t be coming to town anymore. He said his company changed his route.” She laughed abruptly, then frowned. “Men,” she said. She looked at him. “I wish you weren’t a boy, Jimmy. You’ll grow up to be just like the rest of them, and you’ll leave me too.”
“No I won’t,” Jimmy said.
“Yes you will.”
“No I won’t,” he repeated, shaking his head.
“Goddamn it, you will,” she said, and tore the hat off her head and flung it against the wall. Jimmy flinched and took a step backward. “I’m sorry,” she said then. “I didn’t mean it.” She reached out for him. “Come here, honey. I’m sorry.”
But he didn’t move.
“All right then,” she said, and dropped her hands to her sides. “Do whatever the hell you want. You will anyway.” She got back into bed and pulled the covers up to her chin. Jimmy stood there, watching her. “What are you waiting for?” she said. “Go.” And he left.
The next day she was better—she even helped him build a snow fort in the yard until she got too tired—and Jimmy thought everything was going to be all right again. But by mid-January, she was so tired all the time that she had to go back to the hospital. Mrs. McClure said she was a lot better than she had been, but she still wasn’t quite well. When Jimmy asked what was wrong with her, she said, “It’s nothing to worry about. She just needs a rest.” Jimmy tried to convince her that his mother could rest at home—he could clean the house for her and do the laundry and cook—but she only sighed. “It’s not just for a rest, Jimmy. Your mother’s not very happy right now. At the hospital they’ll help her be happy again.”
Jimmy didn’t say anything then. He knew why she was unhappy; it was all his fault. Why had he thrown those rocks? If he had just put that first rock down and walked away, she wouldn’t have to go back to the hospital and he wouldn’t have to go back to the Kahlstroms’. He didn’t want to live there anymore. It wasn’t that he didn’t like the Kahlstroms—he did—but he missed his mother when he was there. Most people didn’t know how nice she was; they only saw her when she was too tired to be nice. But sometimes when he’d tell her something funny that happened at school she’d laugh so hard she’d have to hold her sides and she’d smile so big there’d be wrinkles around her eyes. He loved that smile, and in the weeks that followed, he often stood in front of the Kahlstroms’ bathroom mirror and tried to imitate it. He’d stand there for a long time, smiling at himself with her smile, until Mrs. Kahlstrom would get worried and come looking for him.
This time, his mother got out of the hospital after only a month, but Mrs. McClure said he couldn’t go home just yet. He cried so hard then that the Kahlstroms agreed to let his mother come once a week for a visit. That Sunday, Mrs. McClure dropped her off in her Subaru. Jimmy was upstairs in his room when the doorbell rang. “Your mother’s here,” Mr. Kahlstrom called, and Jimmy came running downstairs just as he opened the door for her. It was snowing lightly and her hair and the shoulders of her coat were dusted with snow. “Come on in, Mrs. Holloway,” he said, and helped her out of her coat. “Welcome to our home.”
She didn’t look at him. She just cleared her throat and said, “Thank you,” then looked at Jimmy, who was standing beside the potted fern in the hall. “Jimmy,” she said, and knelt on one knee for him to come to her. He had been looking forward to her coming, but now that she was here, he felt strangely shy, and he walked toward her slowly, with his eyes down. Then her arms were around him and she was kissing his cheek. She didn’t smell like herself, though; she was wearing perfume that smelled like the potpourri Mrs. Kahlstrom kept in an Oriental dish in the bathroom. He stepped back and looked at her. Her eyebrows looked darker and there were red smudges on her cheekbones. As she stood up, her silver earrings swung back and forth. She was smiling, but it wasn’t her real smile, the one she gave him when they were alone.
“If you’d like, you can sit in the living room,” Mr. Kahlstrom said. “I’ve just built a fire in the fireplace.” He led them to the living room. “I’ll leave you two alone,” he said then, and went upstairs to join Mrs. Kahlstrom, who had told Jimmy at breakfast that she hoped he’d understand but she just couldn’t be there when his mother came.
Jimmy sat in the wingback chair beside the white brick fireplace and swung his legs back and forth. His mother stood in front of the fire a moment, warming herself and looking at Mrs. Kahlstrom’s collection of Hummel figurines on the mantel, then sat down on the end of the sofa next to the chair. He knew he should go sit with her, but he didn’t. Then she touched the cushion beside her and said, “Won’t you come sit with me?” He nodded and slid out of the chair and climbed up next to her. It felt strange to be alone with his mother in someone else’s house—it was like they were actors in a movie or something and not real people. He didn’t know what to say to her. He wasn’t at all tired, but he stretched and yawned. He didn’t know why he’d done that, and he suddenly wanted to be upstairs in his room, playing with his toys, the visit over and his mother on her way back home.
“Mr. Kahlstrom made a fire,” he finally said, though she alrea
dy knew that. Then he added, “He showed me how to do it. First you crumple up newspaper, then you stack up little sticks like a teepee over it and—”
“Jimmy,” his mother interrupted. “I wish I could bring you home with me right now. You know that, don’t you?”
He nodded.
“It may be a little longer, but I’m going to bring you home with me soon. Okay?”
“Okay,” he said.
“And things’ll be a lot better than they were last time, I promise. I still had a lot of anger in me then, a lot of hurt. But I don’t feel like that anymore. I’ve got a new outlook, and I’m going to make a better life for us. You’ll see.”
Jimmy looked at her. “You’re not mad anymore?”
“No,” she said, and Jimmy smiled. But then she added, “At least not like before. I’m learning to deal with it. It was hard at first, but it’s getting easier.”
Jimmy looked down then. She was still mad, she still had not forgiven him.
“At any rate,” his mother continued, “Mrs. McClure says it won’t be long before I can bring you back home.”
Then she was silent. She was looking at the flames in the fireplace. One of the logs popped and some sparks struck the black mesh screen.
Jimmy knew he should say something, but he thought if he opened his mouth, he’d start to cry.
“The Kahlstroms have such a nice house,” his mother said then. “I’ve always loved fireplaces. When I was a girl, I used to imagine the house I’d live in when I got married, and it always had a fireplace in it. And after dinner on cold winter nights my husband would build a big, roaring fire and we’d all sit around it and talk, the firelight flickering over our faces.” She shook her head and laughed. It didn’t sound like her laugh. And the things she was saying didn’t sound like anything she’d ever said before. “I had it all figured out,” she said. “I was going to have five children. I even had their names picked out—Joseph, Kevin, Abigail, Christine, and John, in that order. No James—that was your father’s idea.” She laughed again. “I had everything figured out. Every blessed thing.” Then she turned her face toward him. There were tears in her eyes. “Don’t you ever have everything figured out, you hear? Don’t you—”
Then she couldn’t talk anymore.
“What’s wrong, Mom?” he managed to say.
“I’d better go,” she said, and stood up. She took a crumpled Kleenex from her purse and wiped her eyes with it. “This was a mistake. I shouldn’t be here.” She looked around the room at the large-screen TV, the piano, the watercolor landscapes on the walls, the philodendron in the corner, and added, “I don’t belong here.”
“Don’t go,” he said, but it was too late: she was already on her way out.
“Tell Mr. and Mrs. Kahlstrom thank you for letting me come see you,” she said as she put on her coat.
“Mom,” he said. “Mom!”
She leaned over and took his face in her hands and kissed him. “My baby,” she said.
And then she was out the door, and he was standing at the window, watching her walk carefully down the icy sidewalk through the falling snow, not even a scarf on her head, and Mr. and Mrs. Kahlstrom were coming down the stairs asking why she had left so soon. When he tried to answer, a sob rose into his throat and stuck. He shook his head, unable to speak.
Mrs. Kahlstrom put her hands on his shoulders. “Don’t worry, honey. You’ll see her again next week,” she said, but he wrenched himself out of her hands and ran upstairs and locked himself in the bathroom. And although Mr. and Mrs. Kahlstrom stood outside the door and tried to comfort him, it was nearly an hour before he came out.
Mrs. Kahlstrom hugged him hard then and said they’d stay downstairs with him next time, if he wanted, so they could make sure his mother wouldn’t upset him again. Jimmy didn’t say anything for a long moment. Then he took a deep breath and said something he’d been wanting to say for the past four months. “If I get a job delivering papers, and save all my money, and pay for the windows, will Mrs. McClure let me go back home?”
“Windows?” Mrs. Kahlstrom said, then looked at her husband.
Mr. Kahlstrom wrinkled his forehead. “What windows, Jimmy? What are you talking about?”
And then he confessed it all.
Mr. Kahlstrom took Jimmy to see the high school counselor the next afternoon. His name was Mr. Sargent, but he told Jimmy to call him Ken. He was a skinny man with a ponytail, and he was wearing a corduroy sport coat but no tie. He leaned back in his chair and put his scuffed Hush Puppies up on the desk. Behind him, on the wall, was a poster of a strangely dressed black man kneeling in front of a burning guitar. “So, Jimbo,” he said, “what’s a nice guy like you doing in a place like this?”
Jimmy sat there, looking down at his lap. His hands were shaking and he couldn’t make them stop. He watched them tremble. Somehow, it seemed like it was happening a long way away, to somebody else maybe.
“You don’t have to be afraid,” Mr. Sargent said. “You can say anything in here. This is one place where you can say whatever you want. ‘Cause I won’t tell anyone anything you say. That’s what ‘confidential’ means—you can be confident that I won’t tell anyone your secrets.”
Jimmy sat on his hands to make them stop. Then he tried to look up, but he couldn’t. Finally, he said, “Did Mr. Kahlstrom tell you?”
“Tell me what, Jimbo?” Mr. Sargent said.
Jimmy didn’t want to say. He was hoping Mr. Sargent didn’t know.
“Tell me what?” Mr. Sargent asked again, more softly this time. “You can tell me.”
“The windows,” Jimmy managed to whisper.
“Oh, the windows. Sure, he told me about the windows. But who cares about the lousy windows?”
Jimmy looked up, startled. Mr. Sargent smiled and went on. “It was wrong to break the windows, of course, but I don’t have to tell you that—you already know it. But once they’re broken, there’s nothing you can do about it, except admit it like a man and say you’re sorry and go on with your life. Everybody makes mistakes. That’s how we learn to be better people. If we didn’t make mistakes, we’d never learn anything. So think of it that way—as a mistake you made that you can learn from.” Here he took his feet down from the desk and leaned forward in his chair. “What have you learned from all of this, Jimbo? Is there anything it’s taught you that’ll help you on down the road?”
Jimmy didn’t think he’d learned anything, unless it was that he wasn’t who he’d always thought he was. He didn’t know who he was now, but he was someone else. Someone crazy, like his mother. And once Mr. Sargent found that out, he’d make him go to a hospital too.
“Let me guess, then,” Mr. Sargent said. “You tell me if I’m getting warm, okay?” When Jimmy didn’t respond, he repeated, “Okay?” Finally, Jimmy nodded. “All right, then. Did you learn that—hmm, let’s see—that it’s best to talk about your anger instead of breaking things??
Jimmy hadn’t been angry when he broke the windows, but he nodded yes anyway.
“Good. That’s a good thing to learn. And did you also learn that secrets make you unhappy? That the longer you keep something inside, the more it hurts?”
Again Jimmy nodded, though he thought he hurt more now that people knew what he had done. And even though Mr. and Mrs. Kahlstrom told him he wasn’t taken away from his mother because he broke the windows, he didn’t know if he could believe them. They wanted him to like them, so maybe they would lie. And they wanted to adopt him, so maybe they would tell Mrs. McClure about the windows and Mrs. McClure would tell his mother, and then she’d say she couldn’t take him back because she couldn’t afford to pay for the windows like Mr. and Mrs. Kahlstrom could.
“That’s good. That’s very good. And did you maybe also learn how much people care about you? Because if they didn’t, I wouldn’t be here talking to you. I’m talking to you because I care, and because Mr. and Mrs. K care, and because everybody who knows you cares about you and wants you to be
happy. Is that maybe something you learned from all of this, too?”
Jimmy looked at him, then at the floor. He didn’t see the floor, though; he was seeing his father, the morning of the day he left for work and never came back, trimming his mustache in front of the bathroom mirror.
It took him longer this time, but once again he nodded.
The following Sunday, Mrs. McClure’s Subaru pulled up in front of the Kahlstroms’ house, but Jimmy’s mother was not in it. “What a terrible day,” Mrs. McClure said to the Kahlstroms, as she flicked the snow from her boots with her gloves. “We must have a foot of snow already.” Then she cocked her head toward Jimmy. “I’m sorry, sweetie, but your mother isn’t feeling well today. She said she’d try to come again next week. I hope you aren’t too disappointed.”
Jimmy said, “You told her, didn’t you.”
“Told her what?”
“You know.”
“Oh, that. No, I didn’t say anything. I told you I wouldn’t tell, and I won’t.” Then she frowned. “Is that why you think she didn’t come?”
“You can tell her if you want,” he said, sticking his chin out. “She won’t come anyway.”
“Of course she will. She’ll come tomorrow or the day after,” Mrs. McClure said. “It’s just that today—” But before she could finish, Jimmy turned and started to run up the stairs. “Jimmy!” she called after him. “Let me explain.”