The World of Normal Boys

by K. M. Soehnlein

  “Jackson is not doing well. He suffered a neck injury.”

  “He’s going to live?”

  “So it seems.” Robin watches her to try to understand what this means, but she is silent for a while. She inhales. She exhales. Smoke hits the windshield and then flattens out around her. In the momentary glow from the ember, he sees the lines at the corner of her eyes, around her lips, across her forehead. She doesn’t look beautiful now.

  She says, “I want you to tell your sister this is not her fault.”

  He doesn’t say anything, and then she says, “She told me it was her fault and I don’t want her thinking that way.”

  “I’ll tell her.”

  “And I want you to tell Larry it is not his fault.”

  “OK.” He says this less quickly.

  “It’s not anyone’s fault,” Dorothy says, as if convincing herself. “It’s not . . . it’s just something that makes no sense.”

  “OK.”

  “I need you to be strong for me, Robin. You’re so much stronger than the others.”

  “I guess.”

  “You are. You are. This is going to be difficult.” She puts out her cigarette in the ashtray, stubs it over and over until every speck of flame is extinguished. Then she pinches the butt between her fingers and throws it through the crack in her window.

  “Is Dad mad?” Robin asks.

  “He’s very concerned,” she says.

  “Very concerned?”

  “Yes, dear. He’s waiting to see—”

  “—If Jackson’s going to die.”

  Dorothy leans back in the seat, focuses her eyes into the rearview mirror. She pokes at the corner of her eye as if flecking something painful from it. She says, “I don’t think it’s that bad. We don’t know how bad it is.”

  He hears her impatience with him, which makes her words less convincing. It makes him angry with her, and when he speaks again there is spite in his voice. “He could have brain damage or turn into a vegetable or a retard with a crooked body spilling his food on the floor and shitting in his pants.”

  “Good Lord, Robin, enough! We don’t know. We’ll just have to wait and see.” It sounds like an order.

  He asks, “Are you mad at me?”

  “No, of course not. Of course not.” Long pause. “Of course not.”

  “I wish Jackson didn’t go up that slide,” he says.

  She is silent.

  “I wish I didn’t go up after him,” he says. “I thought they were going to push Ruby off.”

  More silence.

  He asks, “Is this God’s will?”

  Dorothy leans forward and sighs in exasperation. She says, “Robin, I said I want you to be strong.”

  “OK,” he says. He thinks, I have never been that in my life, ever.

  In the dark Jackson’s empty bed is a gaping hole, a vacuum. Robin stands next to it staring, unblinking. The blanket ripples, as if covering boiling liquid. He holds his breath, throws back the cover, steps back in fear. The sheets are flat and still, pictures of superheroes frozen in action. He crawls onto them and sniffs Jackson’s smells: gassy and dirty and a hint of syrup. He gets up again and smoothes everything back in place.

  His parents take turns at the hospital all night, coming and going in shifts. Robin does not want sleep. Downstairs his father sobs in waves, Robin feels them through his feet. His mother paces back and forth between the living room and the kitchen. The fridge swings open again and again, he knows she is getting drunk on white wine. He goes to the window, needs air, his throat is dry. His hands are itching under the bandages, it hurts to push up the sash.

  There’s a piece of rock stuck way back in his throat, rotating its sharp edges. He coughs. He keeps coughing until his mother comes upstairs.

  “Have a little of this.” She tilts the glass to his lips. It’s sweet and bitter—perfect. “Try to sleep, Robin.”

  “I will.”

  She kisses him good night on the lips and he pushes his face into hers until their noses mash and she pulls away. “Give me more wine,” he says. He finishes it off, a couple of gulps.

  He dreams he is a woman with scarlet flowers in her hair. A woman in a dress with pieces of glass stitched into the wool. His sister letting the hem out, him tripping on the edge, cuts on his feet. When he wakes he is on the floor. He gets up to pee like any other night and then remembers the whole day. In the bathroom he tries to force out vomit, his finger down his throat. Just a few sour burps. He rips the bandages off his hands. The skin beneath is whiter, edged by a thin, gummy line from the tape. Back in bed he dreams again. Sharp-fanged dogs snapping in the air in front of him. His fingers weaving through their rough coats, grabbing on, tearing off chunks of hairy flesh. Running. The pitch of sirens.

  Chapter Four

  His eyes open, then shut against the bright assault. He hears his name, wags his head to shake off sleep. Even through his eyelids, he can tell the room is holding too much light. Again, a voice. Ruby’s.

  “Nana Rena’s here,” she says.

  Robin pulls his arms down from above his head—his sleeping position—and props himself up on one elbow. He breathes deep before making the effort of opening his eyes again. A pain somewhere below the back of his neck clamps against his shoulder. He jerks to a sitting position to relieve the pressure, rubs his hand where it hurts. The room looks like a black-and-white photo, all the color sucked out by the sunlight.

  Ruby is sitting upright on the edge of Jackson’s bed, watching him. Her heels are kicking backward into the bedspread and the metal frame beneath. Her uncombed hair is straining against a couple of crudely placed barrettes. “We don’t have to go to school today,” she says.

  “What time is it?”

  “It’s lunch,” she says. “Nana wants you to get up and eat something. Mom and Dad are at the hospital.” He feels instantly annoyed to have been left behind, but also something else—some vague relief.

  She says, “Do you feel like eating olive loaf? That’s what Nana’s making. Olive loaf sandwiches.”

  He groans and drops his head into his palms, presses his fingertips into his face. “What’s going on with Jackson?” he mutters, filling his cupped hands with his moist, sour breath.

  “Uh ... uh ... I don’t know.” Her heels thud faster into the bedframe.

  “What do you mean you don’t know?” he says, then wishes he didn’t because when he looks up her face is a guilt-stricken mask.

  “I don’t know,” she says. Her voice nearly cracks and her face seems to be growing flatter as she tries to hold back tears or a wail or something.

  “OK, sorry,” he says. “Sorry.” Her face relaxes a little. He presses his fingers deep into the gristly shoulder muscle, still aching. He senses another, more familiar pressure in his lap, realizes he’s woken with a boner, realizes he has to pee badly. He wants Ruby to leave, but except for her swinging legs, she isn’t moving. She’s staring past his face at something. “You were doing it again,” she says. “Picking at the paint in your sleep.”

  He looks behind at his headboard. A jagged circular patch the size of a dinner plate has been scratched into the blue-black woodgrain varnish. The exposed spot is smooth and pale like hard plastic, and certainly bigger than the last time he took note of it. He scans his fingernails and sees the telltale dark filings embedded there. His father has yelled at him about this but he doesn’t know what to do about it, he can’t very well control what he does in his sleep.

  “You were doing it when I came in here,” Ruby says. Her face holds a certain fascination in the midst of everything else it’s telegraphing—the guilt, the anticipation—which pisses him off.

  “Yeah, well.” He almost says, At least I don’t wet my bed—which was Ruby’s problem for years—but something tells him that’s the wrong attitude to take with her under the circumstances. Then he remembers his conversation with his mother in the car. He sucks another heavy intake of air and says, “You know, it’s not your fau
lt.” The words don’t come out as comforting as they were supposed to.

  Her face freezes again. “What?”

  “You know”—he nods his head toward Jackson’s pillow—“what happened.”

  “I know.” Her eyes move inside their sockets as if she’s trying to remember something she’s been told. “Umm . . . it was an accident.”

  “That’s right.” He nods vigorously, and she mirrors the gesture, matching him nod for nod. This seems to do the trick. Ruby hops to the floor, turns around, and smoothes out the spot where she had been sitting. “See you downstairs,” she says as she exits.

  He tears off the covers and makes a dash for the bathroom. He taps his toes on the cold tile until his bladder lets go and he pisses for what seems like forever. The releasing of it actually hurts. At the first sense of his muscles relaxing, it’s as though the air in the room begins to stir, blowing back at him the noisy memories of the day before. “Goddamn it,” he says, suddenly finding himself on the top of the slide, looking down at Jackson’s striped shirt. “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.”

  Ruby is sitting at the kitchen table, studying the flat sandwich on her plate with a degree of scrutiny intense even for her. As far as Robin can tell it’s just the usual pink meat on white bread with a yellow smear of butter—the way she always has it—though Ruby’s lifted off the top slice of bread and is poking at the insides, dropping her head close for a good sniff. When she looks up at him, her eyes bug out a little; it’s that guilty look he saw upstairs in his bedroom. The feeling that the two of them are accomplices in a crime against their brother is so strong it takes all his concentration not to think about it, which he knows doesn’t make very much sense: thinking hard about what you want to forget. With her wounded stare focused on him, Ruby looks like something stuffed with too much of something else, as though she might literally burst open. Robin has a sudden flash that this is the face Ruby will be wearing all the time now, and he feels angry again, wishing she could just play it cool the way they’re supposed to, at least until someone tells them what is going on.

  Across the room, at the counter, is their grandmother, her broad back to them, her doughy elbows poking into the air. She is building a pile of sandwiches like the one on Ruby’s plate.

  “Robin’s here,” Ruby announces.

  “And it’s a good thing, too, with enough food to feed an army of boys twice his size,” Nana Rena says.

  Robin hasn’t seen his grandmother since the summer, at a family picnic at her house in Massachusetts. The sight of her, the sound of her peculiar accent—that funny Polish roughness mixed in with the twangy New England vowels—is an instant comfort. She’s the first person, the first anything, he’s seen since the playground that looks and sounds exactly the way it’s supposed to. She’s wearing her “around the house” wig today—the plainer, grayer of the two she has—and her green dress, the one with the hundreds of faded blue flowers printed onto it. In the past Robin and Ruby and Jackson have joked about Nana Rena’s wardrobe, about the three ugly dresses she wears in regular rotation, but today the sight of this dress couldn’t be more welcome.

  She turns around slowly, balancing herself carefully in a series of steps that allows her weight to shift in increments. Robin’s never seen her pivot from the waist; in fact he isn’t sure that under her big square frocks she actually has a waist. He thinks of his mother’s joke: “It’s easier to jump over Nana Rena than walk around her.”

  “Well I’d like to say good morning,” she says, “but you couldn’t find enough good to kick your boots at today.”

  He walks to her open arms and lets himself be clasped into the meat of her, her thick fingers combing through his hair. He smells her predictable smells, the battle between cooking and cleansers, the heaviness of age in her breath. He lets himself stay there against her for a lot longer than usual. Only when his eyelids begin to dampen does he pull back.

  “Did you drive all the way down here?”

  “Since the crack of dawn,” Nana says, arranging a sandwich and some potato chips on a plate. “I had to fight for a day off, if you can believe. As if those girls couldn’t go a day without me. The world is full of places that need kitchen help and full of bosses who give you a darn day off, and if Smith College won’t let me out when my own grandson is at death’s door—” She cuts herself off suddenly.

  “Mom said Jackson’s not going to die,” Robin says.

  Nana Rena moves her hand swiftly through the air in front of her face and chest, a blur that Robin recognizes as her abbreviated Sign of the Cross. He knows what the next thing out of her mouth will be—“P.G.,” which means, “Please, God.” She hands him the plate she’s been fixing. He stares at the food and can’t decide if he is very hungry or if it will make him sick. Nana Rena says, “I don’t know what the doctors are telling her today but when I was over there this morning, there wasn’t anyone breaking out the champagne.”

  Against his better judgment Robin finds himself looking back over to Ruby, to see what her reaction to these words will be. Her frightened, guilt-stricken face has given way to something more focused and intent, and she opens her mouth to ask a question. “What about a guardian angel?”

  “You mean for Jackson?” Robin asks, surprised.

  “Well everyone has one. Nana, doesn’t everyone have one?”

  Nana Rena nods without a great deal of force and says, “You just say your prayers, young lady, and you’ll get all the guarding you need.”

  Ruby looks off into the air, her gaze fixed on nothing in particular. “Can you pray to a guardian angel or does it have to be to God directly?”

  Nana puts her hands on her hips and pauses for a moment. “If there’s any doubt, you should go right to the top.”

  “What do I do? Just ask God to make him better?”

  “What else would you do?” Robin asks, impatient with this discussion. It’s like being in school and one kid keeps asking all the questions, tying up the whole class, and you can’t figure out why the teacher just doesn’t tell him to shut up.

  “There are other prayers, you know,” Ruby says. “You know, real prayers like ‘Hail Mary’ and that stuff.”

  “Anything will do,” Nana says. “These days, anything will do for the Catholics. We didn’t used to have it so easy; you used to work for your grace. When I think about how many rosaries I’ve said—”

  “I think a guardian angel might be more friendly than God,” Ruby says hopefully.

  Robin slaps his sandwich to the plate. “We don’t even go to church anymore,” he says to Ruby. “So what makes you think you know so much about it? Since Jackson’s first communion, we never even go.”

  “So? I can pray if I want to. It’s a free country.”

  Nana speaks up. “Your mother has to live with herself for that. I won’t take the blame. Eighteen years bringing my children to church every Sunday. I did my part.” As she speaks, she repeatedly squirts a mist of blue, all-purpose cleanser from a bottle. She bends into her work, her arm militantly arcing a dishcloth across the countertop. “Of course, things are on the up and up now that we’ve got one of us in the Vatican.” A delighted smile takes hold of her; Nana has treated the recent appointment of the first Polish pope as a kind of modern-day miracle.

  Robin bites into his sandwich and stops listening. He likes everything about his grandmother but her unwavering belief. If he prayed to God right now would Jackson get better? If he prays to God and Jackson doesn’t get better what would that prove? Flashes of going to mass: people mumbling lengthy, memorized prayers, standing, sitting, kneeling like robots, the priest trying to convince everyone (even himself?) about the lessons in the Bible. Lessons thousands of years old! What did the Bible have to say about guys like Larry, who bullied and hurt people and got away with it? What did it have to say about high school? Or wet dreams, or Todd Spicer, or thinking about boys the way you’re supposed to think about girls?

  He shakes his head to clear his thoughts
, hating the fact that one piece of confusion inevitably leads to another: that thought he just had about boys—about liking boys instead of girls—that was a thought he’d never quite made into a sentence before, with a beginning, a middle and an end, even in his head. He concentrates on chewing his sandwich, on the way the slippery meat with the smooth flecks of green olives and pimentos sliced into it wads up into the bread between his teeth. Salt and sweet on his tongue. A lump going down his throat into his belly. A beginning, a middle, and an end. Communion never had any taste at all.

  A car is coming up the driveway. Ruby runs to the window and then returns to the kitchen. “It’s Aunt Corinne,” she says. “I think she brought food.”

  Nana Rena checks her wig with her hands, rocking the hairpiece from side to side until she judges it just right. “Well, don’t leave them waiting out there, Ruby. Go on. Let them in.”

  Ruby remains in place. “She’s with Larry,” she says, her face blanking out again.

  The doorbell’s ding-dong-ding chimes around them. “Go on, Ruby,” Nana Rena repeats.

  Robin understands that Ruby doesn’t want to see Larry. He stands up dramatically, both hands on the table, hissing an exasperated take-charge sigh. “I’ll get it.”

  Corinne’s face is the picture of pity—neck tilting to the side, lips pursed in a frown, eyes glossy and blinking. The softness under her chin is rippled into itself. Her hair is pulled back into a single ponytail, with plastic combs above her ears keeping it all flat and shiny. Robin can detect none of the goofiness he saw Sunday night, when she was dressed up in her World Series outfit.

  She holds a Corningware dish covered with its own fitted plastic lid. “I made that one I know you like: green beans and cream of mushroom? Larry’s got the dried onion rings.”