The Boy: A Novel

by Santoro, Lara

  “‘O Captain! my Captain!’ Where to?”

  “The Galapagos! Barbados! Neptune! Jupiter! Orion!”

  And next, Anna would intone, “‘I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Warships on fire off the shoulder of Orion…’” and Eva, who had never seen Blade Runner but had memorized the speech, would almost always cut in.

  “Mamma.”

  “What?”

  “It’s ‘attack ships,’ not ‘warships.’”

  “‘Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched b-beams shine in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate . . .’”

  “Mamma.”

  “What?”

  “It’s ‘c-beams,’ not ‘b-beams.’”

  “Since when?”

  “Since the movie.”

  “‘I watched c-beams shine . . .’”

  “It’s ‘glitter.’ Not ‘shine.’”

  They unraveled time, simply by lying there, under the great sky.

  “What’s your first memory?” Eva asked one day as a pale quarter moon rose over the canyon.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Everyone has a first memory.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Mamma.”

  “I’m serious, I don’t know. What’s yours?”

  “You covered in blood. And dust. You covered in blood and dust.”

  On this cracked land at the northern end of the desert, much had been forgotten, much cast aside. Anna propped herself on her elbows, jolted into memory. It seemed like another life, the day she’d climbed barefoot and drunk on a dirt bike in the African bush and set out, cursing, for something she had no chance of finding—not in the cold, cold shadow of Eva’s father. Hours later, when she’d finally found her way back, shaking from the trauma of a fractured shoulder and badly lacerated skin, he had looked her over and picked up the car keys on his way out. He’d resurfaced three days later.

  “Get out,” she’d said.

  “I told you not to get on that bike.”

  “I said, get out.”

  “I told you.”

  “What are you after? A prize for telling me?”

  “I can’t do this anymore.”

  “Nobody is asking you to.”

  “Anna.”

  “Nobody’s asking you shit.”

  Now, behind mother and daughter, the river flowed thick and slow to the Mexican border. Walls of basalt rose on either side, intricately cracked, split deep from top to bottom.

  “Where were you?” asked Anna.

  “At the door when you came in.”

  “With Lynette?”

  “Yes.”

  “I didn’t see you.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “No it’s not okay. It’s fucked up.”

  “Mamma.”

  “What?”

  “You have to stop swearing.”

  Back at home, Esperanza had the cleaning channel on and a list, queasily committed to paper, of wipes and mops and degreasers and polishes Anna had to get for her at the store the next day. Anna made dinner, and in the simple lowering of food to the table, in the plain offering of victuals, found unimaginable release, a stillness close to peace. Esperanza poked at her zucchini, ignored all lettuce, grew faint at the sight of chard, and typically lasted no more than half an hour before heading out to Sonic.

  “I want to go with Espi!” Eva screamed when Espi got up from the table.

  “Eat your dinner.”

  “But I want to go with Espi!”

  Esperanza had one foot out the door—cigarette dangling off the corner of her mouth, lighter held aloft already. “Do what your mother tells you,” she said.

  “But I want a slushy!”

  “Do what your mother tells you,” Esperanza said and pulled the door shut.

  That night, in bed, Eva added a third prayer to her list.

  “Dear God and all the angels,” she said, holding her mother’s hand in hers. “Please help Mamma not to swear.”

  When Esperanza came back, three hours later, she stank of booze and cigarette smoke. She gestured Anna to the door.

  “Is Eva in bed?”

  “She is,” said Anna.

  “Good. I don’t want her seeing me like this.”

  It was summer. Things were fast forgotten, soon forgiven. Esperanza instructed Eva in the art of cop interception through some listening device purchased from a drug dealer in Espanola and strove to impress upon them both the futility of geometry.

  “What is she going to do with the area of a square when she grows up?”

  “Espi,” said Eva, looking up from her math workbook.

  “Yes, mijita?”

  “It’s a rhombus.”

  “Eee, that’s even worse! They should be teaching her how to make money on that thing in New York, no? What’s it called, Anna, that thing in New York?”

  “The Stock Exchange.”

  “The Stock Exchange. So she doesn’t end up like me, living in someone’s house, mopping their floors, doing their laundry, because she can’t afford a transmission, no?”

  “Espi,” Eva said, peering up out of grave eyes. “The reason you never have any money is because you gamble.”

  Esperanza picked up a rag and shook it out. “Hija,” she said, “I have never gambled in my life.”

  Eva approached her mother obliquely a few days later in the kitchen, clearly intending to part with a piece of information of some significance. “Mamma,” she whispered, “Espi has a Taser! A pink Taser!”

  “Why does Espi have a Taser?”

  “I don’t know!” said Eva, her eyes cutting about the room.

  “Esperanza,” said Anna that night over dinner, “why do you have a Taser?”

  “Eee!” said Esperanza. “Because you never know!”

  “Never know what?”

  “Who could be there!”

  “There where?”

  “Anywhere!” Esperanza said, getting up with her plate. She only approached Anna after the girl had fallen asleep. “I got it for Eva,” she whispered, “for when she turns nine.”

  It was summer, there were no more mad dashes out the door in the morning, no shrill recriminations with the dog cowering in the back of the truck. Time softened, lengthened, grew more lenient. Eva sat her mother down at the dinner table with paper and pencil. “Do you remember the old house when we had to build the fence for Paco?”

  Anna nodded, thankful those days were gone. She’d turned into a taxi service then, taking phone calls at all hours of the day and night from people whose greeting was, “Hi, you don’t know me but I have your dog . . .” She’d shown up at various residences with smoke coming out of her ears, determined to give the dog a beating, only to have him greet her with such wild abandon she lowered the tailgate of her truck without a word of censure and watched him leap, a great smile on his face, onto the back of the truck and, there, resume position as unrewarded navigator. She had picked a house with a fenced yard after that, and the dog, nicknamed by those who knew him The Forlorn Paquito, became even more forlorn.

  “Yes, I remember perfectly.”

  “You remember the fence?”

  “No.”

  “It was made of metal.”

  “I remember metal.”

  “It’s what we’re going to get for the chickens.”

  “What chickens?”

  “The chickens we’re going to get.”

  The difference between them: Anna had never felt the slightest connection to the ground, not once had she experienced the urge to sink something into it and watch it grow. The mere idea of chickens made her queasy; the duty of recycling or, God forbid, composting, was one that belonged to others, yet her daughter had directed countless campaigns for a vegetable garden, had commandeered their vehicle repeatedly to the recycling plant, and had emerged from various chicken coops owned by friends holding not one, not two, but three sharp-
beaked, crazy-eyed things lovingly in her arms, as if they were puppies.

  “Chickens stink,” Anna said.

  “But Mamma . . .”

  “They stink,” Anna said.

  Summer carries with it both mutiny and slumber. The heat swallows hours, entire midsections of the day, but beneath all that something always stirs, something always pulls, a kind of anarchy just below the skin, something to do with the body—what the body might want, what the body might get, should the heat hold.

  On one end of town, not far from an abandoned mill, a marquee went up for the Croquet Party, a seasonal extravaganza sponsored by a few good families on a single premise: that everyone wear white. Eva agreed to a white T-shirt over white tennis shorts. After standing in front of the closet for a long time, Anna pulled out a short thing with a zipper down the back.

  Ree called. “What are you wearing?”

  “A short dress.”

  “How short?”

  “Roughly ten centimeters above the knee.”

  “I don’t do centimeters.”

  “I don’t do inches.”

  “Does it cover your ass?”

  “Vaguely.”

  “Remain standing. Defy gravity and remain standing,” which Anna did, in exactly the same spot, with a great many people swirling around until the crowd parted along some preordained diagonal and Richard Strand approached, son in tow.

  “Anna,” Richard said, leaning in for a kiss, “you remember my son Jack.” And before she could take up arms, before she could conceive of a defense, never mind raise one, Anna felt something turn in the middle of her—a slow movement just below the heart.

  “Of course,” she said, trading a casual nod for a burning stare.

  “She’s jumped ship,” Richard Strand told his son. “I haven’t seen her since the mojito party.”

  “She’s been keeping the hell away,” said the boy.

  “She’s been keeping the hell away?” Richard Strand inquired mildly. His son nodded.

  “You’ve been keeping the hell away?” asked Richard.

  “Me?” said Anna, her eyes on the shimmering crowd, a ghost of a smile on her lips.

  “Yes, you,” said the boy.

  She fixed him with cold eyes. “Richard,” she said, “this is the second time your son has forgotten his manners.”

  Richard Strand turned to his son. “You’ve been disrespectful?”

  The boy shrugged. “I don’t know. What’s disrespectful?”

  “There are very clear standards,” said Anna. “Very, very clear standards.”

  “Show them to me,” said the boy.

  “There are rules,” Anna snapped. “Rules of conduct, rules of behavior. There is a stratified order from which you are not exempt.”

  “A what?”

  “A stratified order.”

  Richard Strand laid a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Son, answer the question. Have you been disrespectful?”

  “Depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On what she wants,” and for some reason, in the tempest of blood raised by the son, it was to the father Anna turned.

  “You’ve got a problem,” she said. “A very big problem.”

  Richard Strand looked at her out of clear eyes. “My son has never been a problem,” he said, so after a moment of clerical silence, Anna left them both standing under the marquee muttering, “motherfucker,” as she went.

  The boy was everywhere that night, everywhere she looked, everywhere she turned, curse and apparition, apparition and curse, shoulders broad and loose beneath his T-shirt, hips fine and narrow in his jeans. Anna called on the moon repeatedly for help, a low, lazy moon in the lowest quadrant of the sky at first; a hard, distant globe glaring down on human folly by the end. Tight in her skin, hot in her head, she resolved a thousand times to leave but didn’t. Every time she looked up, he was there, his eyes fixed knowingly on hers.

  It was infuriating. The boy’s relationship to the ground was so smooth, the core of him so casually aligned with the visible and invisible worlds, that Anna felt compelled to revisit her youth: had she ever stood that way? Unlikely. But it wasn’t just that. The boy did not just stand with full possession of his body, he stood with full awareness of the magnetic pull of his body. Time and again she battled the urge to go over and teach him a lesson but turned her back on him instead as the moon leveraged itself higher and higher in the sky.

  At one point, blurred, indistinct, Anna went inside searching for the bathroom, thinking not of the boy but of Richard Strand, of the love he had for his children. Destiny had been cruel, denying the man full custody through three divorces, but now this son, the first of five, was here to stay. She pulled her dress down, opened the door, stepped out in the hallway, and came to a sudden stop. There, his clear eyes on hers, was the boy.

  Nothing was said, not a word exchanged. He covered the distance between them, laid his hands on her hips and pressed her slowly against the wall.

  She had no idea how long it was before they heard some shuffling, a muffled exchange followed by an indignant, “Mom!” She disengaged to find Eva and two newly acquired minions—one of whom had his mouth screwed in an expression of infinite disgust—gaping up at her. “Go!” she said, but her daughter pointed a stiff accusatory finger at her and shouted, “You’re kissing him! Stop kissing him!”

  “Go!” she said again. “I’ll be right out!” Eva stormed out, miniature slaves in tow, but Anna stayed right where she was, doing the exact same thing, until the weight of it started to bear down on her and she pulled away.

  “Stop it!” she hissed.

  The boy grabbed a fistful of hair and lowered his mouth to hers. “You stop it.”

  It took a second, organized revolt by her daughter for them to finally part. Anna’s first, searing recollection the morning after was her own child marching her imperiously away as people exchanged amused looks.

  The phone had rung the minute they got home.

  “Hello,” had whispered Anna, still unstable on her feet.

  “Oh, you’re home. How unexpected. May I speak to my daughter?”

  “What time is it?” she’d asked.

  “I haven’t got the faintest. Not in your part of the world anyway. May I speak to my daughter?”

  “What time is it where you are? I mean, it’s like, what, four o’clock in the morning?”

  “I have a mother, Anna, thank you, I’m sure she’s in bed right now. May I speak to my daughter?”

  “I mean it, what are you doing up so late?”

  “I am not in England, Anna.”

  “No? Where are you?”

  “Where I am should hardly concern you considering you chose to take up residence on some scrap of barren land on the other side of the world.”

  “It’s not the other side of the world.”

  “It is precisely the other side of the world. Measure it. May I speak to my daughter?”

  “Eva,” said Anna with a sigh. “Your father is on the phone.”

  Breakfast was a tricky affair. Sensing the mood, Esperanza lit a cigarette and left. Mother and daughter sat across the table in silence until Anna said, with some determination, “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “You were kissing him!”

  “So what? He’s not married, I’m not married, where’s the problem?”

  “Mom! You don’t kiss boys at parties!”

  “You don’t kiss boys at parties? The whole reason you go to parties, the whole reason parties were invented, is to kiss boys at parties. You don’t kiss boys at parties. That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard in my life.”

  Eva rolled her eyes. “Mom.”

  “What?”

  “It’s like me going out with a four-year-old.”

  “Four and a half.”

  “Mom.”

  “Jesus, Eva, what?”

  “I don’t want that boy coming over.”

  “Coming over? Who said he was coming o
ver?”

  Eva let her spoon slide into the milk and tucked her small hands between her knees so Anna went around to her side of the table and whispered, “It’s okay, my love, I promise you he won’t come over.”

  Eva raised her moon-eyes to hers. “Pinky promise?”

  Anna curled her pinky around her daughter’s. “Pinky promise.”

  Chapter Four

  Nights passed on currents of such violent longing that Anna set to work keeping thoughts and memories at bay. She purchased new and old fiction, new and old nonfiction. She read about the Mongols, the rise and fall of the Duke of Zhou. She bought yarn and made Eva a cap that fit her so well she was compelled to make another for Paco, with holes for his ears. She downloaded a chess program and spent hours getting her ass kicked by her computer, whose advertised neutrality she began to doubt.

  “Mom, how can you hate a machine?”

  “There’s something in there, I know there’s something in there.”

  Esperanza leaned in to get a closer look. “Where?”

  “Under the keyboard.”

  “Let’s take it apart,” said Eva, and Esperanza, whose clan had produced some legendary brujas—witches who laid waste to lives and pastures with simple incantations—jumped back and said, “Hija, there are things we do not play with.”

  Time passed. Anna ran into Richard Strand at the food store. He asked her what was wrong. “I never see you anymore.”

  “I’ve got a million things.”

  “Like what?”

  “A friend in the hospital.”

  “Another one?”

  “Same one.”

  “Is it my son?” he asked.

  Anna gave a vehement shake of her head.

  “Then what?”

  “Nothing. Come over. This afternoon. Bring Matthew and Mickey.”

  His eyes lit up at the offer, and later that day he covered the fifty yards between them and sat with her talking about debts owed and never paid, partnerships run aground, the new sushi place in town, until a scream broke the peace and they rushed outside to find Mickey on his back, underneath the apple tree. The kid was fine, his father wasn’t.