Crushed

by Laura McNeal

  She looked as if she’d been napping, because when she said, “Hello, Clydefellow,” her voice seemed to float.

  “Hi, Mom.”

  He kissed her on the forehead and patted her nose, something he’d started doing, he was told, when he was two. He was now sixteen, but his mother still liked the kiss and the nose pat, and expected it at certain ritualized moments of the day, including his return from school.

  Clyde’s mother had been sick for the last five years, since her diagnosis of stage four ovarian cancer. When Clyde had heard the term stage four, he’d asked his father what it meant, and his father had stared into the distance without answering. “Is there a fifth stage?” Clyde had asked, and his father had had to look away from Clyde when he shook his head no.

  But his mother was still alive. She wasn’t well, she wasn’t cured, she wasn’t even in remission, but she was alive. In the past five years she’d been through three operations, two full courses of chemotherapy, and another course of radiation treatments. For one full year she couldn’t eat and had to take everything she needed intravenously. In boxes under the bed, there were six or seven different wigs she’d used to cover the baldness caused by the chemotherapy. His mother sometimes got discouraged, but if she ever once complained—and she must have, she absolutely must have—it wasn’t when Clyde was around to hear it.

  His mother’s hair was presently growing back from the last chemo—it looked okay, really, almost like she’d had it chicly buzz-cut—and her skin was still a smooth olive brown, but her eyes had sunk deep into their darkened sockets. He’d thought once that she looked like a prisoner of war, and then realized that was exactly what she was—a prisoner of her own private war.

  “So how was school?” she said now.

  “A seven,” he said, a complete lie. It’d been a two, maximum, until he acted like a wimp in Patrice’s class and then like a sub-idiot in front of Audrey Reed and her friends, which had dropped the day’s score to something fractional, but he knew it was better not to mention any of this to his mother (once he’d told her how some kids had called him The Mummy and she’d obsessed about it for days and had actually wanted to call the principal). Today, for insurance, he added, “Maybe an eight.”

  She nodded. “How about the tests?”

  “Good.” At least that much was true.

  His mother shifted under her covers. “Could you do my feet?”

  Her feet were cold. Her feet were always cold.

  Clyde refolded and tightened the blanket that his father had wrapped around her stocking feet before going to work about half an hour earlier. Everything in the room was neatened up, the way his father always left it.

  Clyde’s father was an accountant at Bor-Lan Plastics and had never been an around-the-house type, but once Clyde’s mother was diagnosed, he’d quickly adapted his life in order to extend hers. They’d needed money, so they’d sold their house in Jemison and rented this apartment on the south side. His company tried to accommodate his new situation. They’d let him change his hours to coincide with the swing shift (the factory was open twenty-four hours a day, and his office overlooked the factory floor) so he could be home during the day, and they’d let him assume responsibility for security screening of employment applications, which he could do at home on the computer, in order to make extra money. He’d become good at dealing with doctors, insurance companies, intravenous medications, and food prepared as Clyde’s mother needed it. He’d even become good at mopping the apartment’s linoleum floors and vacuuming the rugs.

  The Parkview Apartments were a mistake from the ’70s, a plain three-story rectangle of brick plunked down at the rim of a plain rectangular park. The walls were thin and the doors were hollow, but the rent was low and his mother had loved the view of the park.

  Today, down on the sunny lawn, a group of guys were playing touch football, five against five, the kind of game Clyde had loved before his mother had gotten sick. The ball was snapped and one of the ends, a tall boy, started a slant pattern, then went long. He broke completely free, but the quarterback underthrew him.

  When Clyde had been talking to Audrey Reed that afternoon, he’d seen the word hopeless on the cover of her green notebook. He’d also seen a street name and number, and after walking away from Audrey and her friends, he’d pulled out a pen and written this address on the palm of his hand before he could forget it.

  Now, facing the window with his back to his mother, staring down at the park as if waiting for the next play in the pickup football game, Clyde casually brought his left hand in front of him. When he unrolled the fingers, the address was again revealed on the palm of his hand.

  1501 Van Buren.

  He started slightly when his mother said, “Homework?” But as he was turning around (careful to keep the palm of his left hand turned inward), he gave her an easy smile and said, “Pope Catholic?”

  This was his standard line, and his mother replied with her own: “Unless there’ve been recent developments.”

  She then put on her earphones—the TV was wired so she could listen to it with earphones and not disturb anyone else—and Clyde glanced at the screen. She was watching some kind of cooking show, and how did you make any sense out of that? With her sickness, she couldn’t cook, couldn’t digest anything that couldn’t be poured, and here she was, watching cooking shows and marking recipes in cooking magazines.

  Clyde’s desk was on the other side of the living room. He opened his book, but his mind kept returning to Audrey Reed. The first time he’d really noticed her was one day early in the school year when he’d gotten up in World Cultures to check something in the big dictionary at the other side of the room and found Audrey Reed’s long, bare legs extended out into the aisle, and her all at once realizing she was blocking his way and smiling up at him and pulling her legs in and saying in a friendly, whispery voice that she was sorry.

  He’d begun watching her after that, especially when she was lost in her reading and sliding a finger through her long sandy hair to separate a small cluster of strands that she would make into a little brush that she moved nervously across her lips.

  And then, today, when he’d spotted her and her friends up on their little knoll and she sat facing the sun with her eyes closed so that, in that light and in that attitude, she looked not so much like a girl at Jemison High as some goddess he might invent for his own personal Greek myth.

  1501 Van Buren, he thought.

  He slipped into the kitchen and looked up Reed in the phone book. There were two columns of Reeds, none on Van Buren. Clyde brought a glass of water back to his desk, glanced at his mother—she was lost in her cooking show— and then booted up the computer and logged on to the program his father used for screening potential employees at Bor-Lan. The program searched every place a person’s name might be recorded: newspapers, magazines, legal documents, television interviews. It found addresses, phone numbers, liens, and crimes. Clyde wasn’t supposed to use it, but he found it interesting to slip unnoticed among the file cabinets of the world, peering in at everything that had been recorded about one individual or another.

  He typed in Reed and 1501 Van Buren, and watched as the name Jackson Luther Reed came up on the screen. Jackson Reed seemed to owe a lot of money to Citibank, and there seemed to be two large loans on the house on Van Buren— but one thing was certain: he had a daughter named Audrey Anne.

  Audrey Anne. At 1501 Van Buren.

  If he hurried through his homework, then made something simple for dinner—spaghetti, say, for himself, and some kind of creamed soup and smoothie for his mother—then he could tell her he needed to go to the library, which was true, but on the way back he could detour to 1501 Van Buren.

  Just do a little drive-by.

  What could it hurt?

  Chapter 7

  House

  Audrey’s car was an old white Lincoln Continental that her father called the Queen Mary and Audrey called the Titanic. He considered it her armor in an
y possible collision, and she had considered it the death boat of her social life before she realized that being small-chested, tall, and academically earnest would have sunk her anyway. As she cruised into the driveway at 1501 Van Buren that afternoon, she was surprised to see that her father was home. Usually he worked late.

  Like her car, Audrey’s house was white and overlarge. The huge white columned porch, the gleaming cupola, the Adamesque door, and the Palladian windows were enthusiastically described in Around Jemison, the historical society’s guidebook, which praised “the exotic sunken garden of the gracious McNair mansion” and noted that “since 1918, a light has gleamed in the upstairs window, left on in memory of the owner’s only son, who died in World War I.”

  Audrey’s mother had grown up walking by the McNair house, staring up at that light, and sneaking in to play in the exotic sunken garden. After the house was sold and the light went off, she’d made excuses to drive, walk, or cycle by, trying to get up the courage to ask the new owners to turn the light on again in memory of Grady McNair. When she finally did, though, “they looked at her like she was crazy,” Audrey’s father later related, “and told her not to set foot on their property again.”

  Audrey’s mother had died of something called acute myeloid leukemia when Audrey was three. The McNair house came on the market soon after, and Audrey’s father, almost vindictively, bought it. He could not quite afford it, but he told himself that was just temporary—he was doing well in his firm and would do even better as time passed. He put a lamp in the upstairs window and left it on, more in memory of his deceased wife than of Grady McNair.

  In Audrey’s four-year-old mind, the belief formed that if she turned off the light, her mother would go out, too. And that wasn’t her only fear. The whole house was terrifying: the darkly papered walls, the carved posts and paneling, the smells of coal and mildew, and—her father immediately regretted telling her the legend—the memory of the dead soldier. When the wind inflated a curtain, four-year-old Audrey thought she was seeing the soul of the soldier, or of her mother.

  After they moved in, a sixty-year-old German woman named Olga Hoffmann—“Oggy,” to Audrey—had joined the household, first as nanny and then, later, as cook, driver, and mother-substitute. Room by room, Oggy painted and papered the walls so that, in time, the house became lighter and cleaner. The framed pictures of Audrey’s mother smiling in the Queen of Jemison Days float and lighting the candles on Audrey’s first birthday cake were joined by photographs of black-eyed, white-haired Oggy serving Audrey oatmeal, stabilizing Audrey’s first ride on a Schwinn, and supervising one of Audrey’s early swimming lessons.

  Audrey’s memories of her mother were visual, and remote: the white crown of roses on her mother’s head in the bridal and Jemison Days photographs; the white pearls at her throat; her eternally young face. Audrey’s memories of Oggy were deeply physical: the Werther’s butter toffees she carried in her purse, her German vocal groups harmonizing on the stereo, the watery jasmine of Echt Kölnisch Wasser, a cologne that came in gold-and-turquoise-labeled bottles that Oggy always gave to Audrey when they were empty. There were many images of Oggy waiting—waiting for Audrey to come down for breakfast in the morning; waiting with German cheese-cake when she came home from school; waiting in the car, reading Frau im Leben magazine, until Audrey’s piano lesson was over. And finally, as Audrey reached adolescence, she’d found Oggy surprisingly frank about sexual development. (“I think today we go buy our Audrey a Büstenhalter,” she’d announced matter-of-factly one day after studying Audrey’s barely budding breasts. “Maybe also supplies for your Periode.”)

  This afternoon, Audrey opened the front door and said, “Hallo?” She wished, impossibly, that Oggy would call, “Hallo!” in return. To Oggy, she could have described how handsome Wickham Hill was, how horrid Sands and Zondra had been, and how intense Clyde the Mummy was, preferably while slicing yet another thin piece of Käsekuchen. But this past August, Oggy’s sister in Germany had broken her hip, and Oggy had taken a leave of absence to care for her in Berlin.

  Without Oggy’s counterbalancing weight, the world of Audrey and her father seemed to tip slightly, with everything sliding this way and that. Audrey didn’t know how to cook, clean, or iron. (In truth, she hadn’t realized that clean clothes were initially wrinkled, or that Oggy had ironed her sweat-pants.) The house began to remind Audrey of the way it had looked when they moved in: dust on the stairs, spots on the windowpanes, dead flies on the windowsills, rust-colored stains in the washbasins and tubs. Oggy had been gone nine weeks now, and her sister was still bedridden.

  Audrey stood in the hall and waited a second longer to see if Oggy had magically returned. Then she said, “Hallo?” again.

  There was no answer, but Audrey followed the smell of frying meat into the kitchen, where she found her father standing over the stove, still wearing his business clothes. When she tiptoed up behind him and gave him a light poke in the ribs, he gave a start and turned with a stricken look that dissolved upon seeing Audrey.

  “Stealthy little Polliwog,” he said.

  “Jumpy ol’ Dad.”

  Audrey could always tell how much her father loved seeing her by the way his face would lose its haggardness for a second or two. “Jumpy, hungry ol’ Dad,” he said. “How about you? Hungry?”

  “Was, until I saw the frying fatty meat,” Audrey said with a grin.

  “Cheeky, cheeky,” her father said. “I’ll have you know I went to Oggy’s favorite butcher shop for these morsels.” He converted to a bad Teutonic impression of Oggy. “Dis Wurst is de best!”

  Audrey laughed because it had been a while since her father had even tried to be funny.

  While her father cracked eggs into a mixing bowl, Audrey split English muffins and set the table with apple butter (his favorite) and orange marmalade (hers). His suit had a strange shine to it, as if it were worn, or inexpensive.

  “That jacket’s showing its age,” Audrey said.

  He smiled over his shoulder. “I know. I need to buy a few new suits. Problem’s making the time.”

  “What about Enzio?” Enzio was the tailor who brought suits to the firm for him and other executives to try on.

  Her father seemed not to hear her, and as he slid eggs and sausage onto the china plate, it was clear he was distracted.

  “Dad?” Audrey said.

  He didn’t answer. He was just standing with the skillet in his hand, staring toward the wall.

  “Dad?”

  This time he heard her, and turned. “Oh, sorry, Polliwog,” he said. “But you know what? I just thought of something that might be important to a project.”

  So, after gulping down a couple of bites of food and giving Audrey a kiss on the forehead, her father headed out the door and back to work. She listened to the sound of his car recede into stillness.

  Suddenly the house felt deeply silent. Audrey ate another bite or two, then scraped her plate into the trash, cleaned up the kitchen, and walked down the hall to Oggy’s room.

  Oggy’s bedspread was white chenille, and Audrey tried not to wrinkle it as she lay down. She studied the painting Oggy looked at when she went to sleep and when she woke up: a woman harvesting wheat. Beside her on the nightstand was a round silver-framed picture of Audrey at about five years old, wearing a Halloween princess costume. Audrey slid open the drawer of the nightstand and selected a white handkerchief with little pink flowers silk-screened in the corner. It smelled faintly of the Echt Kölnisch Wasser, and Audrey laid it over her face and closed her eyes. She pretended that she was five years old and Oggy was in the kitchen frying Reibeplätzchen. This worked the way it always worked—within five minutes, Audrey was asleep.

  Half an hour later, she woke up, refolded the handkerchief, and looked at the woman harvesting wheat. She smoothed out the chenille spread. Then she headed upstairs, turning off lights behind her so that, by the time she started her homework, the only illumination within the old McNair mansion shone
from the empty memorial room and Audrey’s bedroom window.

  Chapter 8

  The Distance Between Them

  A bad feeling had risen in Clyde when he’d brought up Jemison on MapQuest and found Van Buren on the east side of town. Half an hour later, as he turned his scooter into Audrey’s neighborhood, the bad feeling grew worse. Right and left, huge trees spread over wide lawns that fronted two-, three-, and even four-story houses. At the end of long brick and stone driveways stood Audis and Land Rovers, Mercedes and Escalades.

  Most of the house numbers were illuminated, and though 1501 was not, it was easy to find. Clyde’s eyes were drawn at once to the house’s only lights. One shone behind a drawn upstairs curtain, but the other lighted window was open. A person could be seen sitting at a desk.

  Audrey Reed. He was pretty sure it was Audrey Reed.

  Clyde circled the long curving irregular block and passed by again, a little slower. This time she was looking up and her face seemed spotlighted. The pull of Audrey Reed’s lighted window was almost gravitational.

  Clyde parked the scooter about a hundred yards down the block and sneaked back to Audrey’s house on foot. Clyde had never been in a residential area so quiet. There were no voices, no radios, no TVs—everything seemed sealed completely shut. He crouched behind the low, serpentine rock wall that ran along the street frontage of 1501, but when he looked over the wall, something was changed.

  The light in Audrey’s room was out—itself alarming—but there was something else. Without her lighted room as a focal point, Clyde became aware of the cupola; the wide, curving, columned porch; the length of the lawn; the height, width, and depth of the house—the almost ungraspable bigness of it all—and, without quite knowing why, found himself backing away, as he might from a terrible accident. Beyond the lawn, he turned and ran for his scooter.