The Boy: A Novel

by Santoro, Lara

  “Two,” said Eva, raising two stiff fingers. “Two days.”

  Esperanza had the table set, a bowl of Cheetos glowing orange in the middle. Eva flew into her arms and the two stood as one, Esperanza’s nose buried in Eva’s hair, for a long time.

  “Mijita,” Esperanza said with a voice nobody recognized, not even her. Anna looked around her and saw no trace of the boy’s belongings. Clearly Esperanza had been busy.

  “Where is he?” Anna mouthed. Esperanza gave a savage shrug and looked away. Sighing, Anna brought Eva’s small suitcase to her room and sat on the bed.

  She had inhabited such vast spaces for so long. She had slipped through the cracks of things infinitesimally scaled—minnow-like, minuscule, resistant to rest, to repetition, always out for the next best thing. Not even Eva’s father, with his polar pull, had her truly tethered. But after Eva’s birth, after the big move, not a second, not a moment had been free. Before or after drop-off, before or after pickup, in the brief parentheses of time between the two, it was Eva. Mornings, afternoons, evenings had turned into lists of met or unmet needs. The lunch box Anna delivered on time, the birthday party she lit up with a piñata, the distance she covered, the gift she picked, the pancakes whose obscure chemistry she oftentimes deciphered, the single item, plucked out of the heart of some dusty store and handed over with the tenderest smile (in return for which the tenderest smile was given)—it did not matter, there was always something, and it was always Eva.

  “I need this,” Anna whispered, her head in her hands. “God, please, I need this.”

  At the dinner table, things loosened, slackened some. Eva stuffed Cheetos in her mouth five at a time and Esperanza laughed, spraying the immediate surroundings with Frito pie. Anna sat quietly, drinking red wine, smiling—waiting for the crash.

  “Mamma.”

  “What?”

  “You’re not eating?”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  Anna smiled. “I’ll eat tomorrow.”

  “You haven’t eaten anything all day. Espi, she hasn’t eaten a thing all day.”

  Espi’s shoulders went up. “No more Cheetos,” she told Eva. “Have some Frito pie.” As Eva dug a spoon into an aluminum container of wildly tinted fat, Anna heard the door slam shut and turned around. There—motorcycle jacket on, helmet hooked on elbow, eyes large and lost—was the boy.

  “I didn’t know we were having dinner,” he said.

  “Neither did I,” said Anna. “Grab a chair, sit down. Eva, you remember Jack. Jack, you remember Eva.”

  Eva gave a sullen stare and looked away, one cheek bulging, spoon held limply in one hand. The air grew thick with things unspoken: the pinky promise, the time away from the boy’s hands, the dance of summer (the breathless turning under that blind zodiac of stars), the bright, unforgiving return.

  The boy pulled out a chair and said, “I would have come home sooner if I’d known we were having dinner.”

  Eva shot her mother a look. “Home?”

  “Eee!” Esperanza said, slapping a hand down on the table. “Who’s coming to Sonic?”

  Eva laid her cold blue eyes on the boy. “Home?” she said.

  Anna shot to her feet. “You’re going to Sonic,” she said.

  Her little girl got up. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Fine,” Anna said. “I’m going to Sonic. Catch you all later.”

  The night pressed in like cold fire on all sides. It hardened and tightened and got so close Anna pulled, tires burning, into the nearest bar.

  “Jim Beam,” she said. “Double.”

  An old man with a bandanna gave her a long look. “Be careful, hija,” he said. “There are cops everywhere.”

  Anna looked at her drink and said nothing.

  “Take the back roads,” said the man with the bandanna. “Stick to them back roads, no?”

  The house was dark and, for some reason, cold, as if wrapped in some bad secret, when she got back. Eva was in her room, the boy in her bed. Anna nudged him awake.

  “Jesus, how much did you drink? You’ll set the house on fire.”

  “You’re sleeping on the couch,” she said.

  “The couch?”

  “The couch.”

  “Why?”

  “I told Eva you were sleeping on the couch.”

  The boy sat up in a shaft of moonlight, his dragon tensing over his skin.

  “What have you told her about us? I can’t find any of my shit.”

  “Nothing. I told her nothing.”

  “What do you mean, nothing?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What does nothing mean?”

  “It means nothing. How can I describe nothing to you?”

  He moved and the dragon moved with him, and he was so warm and strong, his smell so deep and familiar, that Anna couldn’t help running a hand down his back.

  “Describe nothing to me,” the boy whispered, gathering a handful of hair, bringing her lips to his. “Do it.”

  He was on the couch when Eva woke up. She stood there in her pajamas staring down at him, arms crossed, the dog like a magnet at her side.

  “Get up,” the little girl said. In the kitchen, Esperanza and Anna exchanged a quick look.

  “Get up,” she said again, her voice like a razor this time. Anna ran into the living room, grabbed her daughter by the arm.

  “You can’t tell him to get up!” she hissed.

  The little girl yanked her arm away. “Everybody’s up.”

  “So what? Let him sleep. He’s just a boy. He needs to sleep.”

  “I’m just a girl and I’m up.”

  Anna turned to Esperanza for help. Esperanza poured coffee into a cup, walked slowly over to the couch, pushed one foot against the boy’s still sleeping frame and said, “Get up.”

  The boy sat up, eyes unfocused, hair sticking out like straw. He took the cup, looked at each of them in turn, and shook his head. “This is fucked up,” he said.

  Anna felt her heart turn in its cage. What if he left? Fear crawled up her spine like an insect, settling, dark and dangerous, on the back of her neck.

  “I wholeheartedly agree,” she said. “It’s fucked up.”

  “Mom.”

  “What?”

  “You have to stop swearing.”

  Anna turned to face her child. “I have to stop swearing? You have to stop ordering me around. You have to stop thinking you’re in charge here, because, guess what? I have news for you, you’re not. I pay the bills, and as long as I pay the bills, as long as I put a roof over your head and pay the bills, you do as I say. Now go get ready for school.”

  There was silence in the car like nothing Anna had ever listened to, silence like a scalpel bringing down flaps of flesh, laying bare the pathetic thing she truly was.

  “I’m sorry,” Anna said as they pulled up to the school, the dog flattened in the back like a sheet of office paper.

  Eva undid her seat belt. “I’m not talking to you,” she said.

  “You’re not talking to me?”

  “No.”

  Anna’s head began to pulse.

  “Is this a joke?” she said. “After everything I have done for you? After all the sacrifices I’ve made for you, suddenly I have the audacity to tell you to stop ordering me around and you’re not talking to me? I have given you everything, Eva. Everything. I have traded my own life for yours. In fact, I haven’t had a life. You have. I haven’t. And this is what I get?”

  “I’m going to school, Mom.”

  “You’re going to school.”

  Eva nodded, looking straight ahead.

  “Go to school. Go. Get out.”

  And she did. Her little girl got out.

  At the food store, Ree was checking the protein content on a box of cereal.

  “Hey,” she said, “this is fourteen grams. Fourteen grams is not bad. Not bad at all.”

  “Fourteen grams in which context?”

  Ree cocked her head
. “In which context? Are you okay?”

  “No.”

  “Is it the boy?”

  Anna said nothing.

  “It’s always the boy.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Oh good. That makes me very happy. What do you want to talk about?”

  Anna looked around. “I don’t know. Congress. The Budget. The Debt.”

  “What debt. We got a debt?”

  “We can talk about kids. How we’re fucking them up.”

  “It’s too early in the morning for that. Let’s talk about injustice, let’s talk about cooking. Who ever thought I would spend my adult life cooking? It was never a possibility, I was going to run the world. Cooking was, like, something my mother did.”

  “Don’t cook then.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “Let them starve?”

  “Why not? I mean, what have you got to lose?”

  “It’s a concept, a definite concept. Melanie should go pretty quickly, she’s only two.”

  Anna ran her hands down her face.

  “I’m in a mess, Ree, a real mess. Eva’s smelling blood. She thinks he’s only staying a couple days and even that she’s not putting up with.”

  “You told her he was only staying for a couple days?”

  “I’m afraid I did.”

  “Well, tell her the truth. Tell her he’s moved in and she has to suck it up. I’m so tired of these kids just taking over, man. I mean, what happened to us? We were the ones. We were the ones who were going to make it all fall into place and look at us, we’re under the tyranny of a bunch of five-year-olds. Tell Eva she has to suck it up.”

  “You tell her.”

  “I don’t know. It might sound a little strange, coming from me.”

  She didn’t turn right to go home. She turned left and drove across town to the church of Saint Francis of Assisi. If she were to find it locked again, if the outrage were for some reason to repeat itself, she would go to the parish office and beat on the door until somebody came. She would then take the trouble to explain that a public place of worship was just that, a public place of worship, even for the likes of her, who had long stopped worshipping that particular God but needed solace—silence and solace.

  The memory of a morning in church in those early days pierced her like a lance. Eva had been doodling in her notebook—encased in the autistic shell she slipped on in great haste every Sunday before church—when suddenly she’d stood up and started singing the Hallelujah. Watching her, the sting of tears in her eyes, Anna had said to herself, If I can give her this, this sense of belonging, I will have accomplished something. She will walk into a church one day, having lost her faith, having lost her way and—without knowing how or why—find mooring in a litany of sounds. She’ll find relief, she’ll recover purpose, only to lose it again, but no matter, no matter.

  Luckily, the door was unlocked and Anna walked, a sudden tremor in her breath, to a spot roughly in the middle of the old adobe church and, there, sank to her knees.

  Bringing both hands to her heart she said, “Please.”

  Things happen, things that shouldn’t, things that respect no law, follow no method, assist no function, and are, in spirit and essence, nothing but madness—the cutting loose of the individual from the collective soul. On the cold floor of the church, Anna recalled her middle school teacher—hair teased, finger raised in ridiculous admonition—declaiming shrilly, “Errare humanum est, perseverare autem diabolicum!” To err is only human, to persevere is of the devil. Anna nodded to herself, tears falling on unyielding stone, but then felt something turn. How could she go back to that drab life, how could she give up the thrill of the boy’s hands on her naked back, the warmth of his breath mingled with hers? And why? Why should she? She had the right to life, to an identity separate from that of her child. She had a right.

  At home Esperanza had the cleaning channel on and Anna had to resist the impulse to hug her until she looked up from the TV and said, pure metal in her voice, “The kid’s gone.”

  For a moment Anna could not breathe. “What do you mean, gone?”

  Esperanza shrugged. “Gone. He packed a bag and left.”

  Anna counted to five before she said, calmly, “Did he say where he was going?”

  Esperanza didn’t even bother looking up.

  “No,” she said. “He didn’t.”

  Richard Strand opened the door with nothing on his face. Nothing.

  “Is he here?”

  “He is.”

  “Can I talk to him?”

  “No.”

  “Richard . . .”

  “No.”

  Anna looked down at her hands. They were shaking, so she cupped her elbows and pulled them in.

  “Is this your decision or is it his?”

  “For the moment, mine.”

  “Richard . . .”

  “Good-bye, Anna,” and as she followed the movement of his arm in cold disbelief, the door inched shut in her face.

  Chapter Ten

  Low clouds moved in, and nothing was right. Even the children—golden, supple, fleet—running on winged feet toward their parents’ cars seemed to Anna distinctly insect-like in their hectic sweep across the parking lot. And her little girl advancing, eyes lowered, the weight of the world chained to one foot, punitive in her progress.

  Eva opened the door and settled in without a word.

  “There’s reason to celebrate,” Anna said sharply. The little girl sat still, slack about the mouth and shoulders.

  “He’s gone. He’s out of the house. Are you happy? Are you satisfied? Because it’s all about you, right? All about you.”

  “Mom,” Eva said.

  “What?”

  “He’s Richard’s son and Richard’s your friend.”

  Anna started the car and reversed in a hard, jagged line away from the school toward a boy she did not see with a backpack, shoes, and no socks, legs like twigs. She hit the brakes with time to spare but, within seconds, there was a man with bulging eyes beating on her window with a fist.

  “Are you crazy? Are you out of your mind? You could have killed him! You could have killed my son!”

  Anna stepped out immediately. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t see him. I’m so sorry, Tyler. Are you okay?”

  “You were going a hundred fucking miles an hour, that’s why you didn’t see him! This is a school, there are children everywhere, you don’t tear ass around the parking lot of a school!”

  Anna raised both hands. “I’m so sorry,” she said, and if it hadn’t been for the small boy, who slipped his small hand in his father’s and, looking up with large, steady eyes, said, “I’m okay, Dad. It wasn’t that close,” who knows what would have happened. Who knows what the combined effect of fear and rage in a father’s heart might have been.

  “I see you driving like that again, you can forget driving in this state until my son’s in college. You got that?”

  Anna nodded meekly.

  “And you can forget driving with your daughter in your car, okay? I’ll make sure of that. It’s called child endangerment. That’s what it’s called. Child endangerment.”

  In the car, Eva would not stop crying.

  “It’s no big deal,” said Anna, but Eva kept crying, and there was nothing in the world between school and home, only the severed sound of a sobbing child and the slow, hard beating of an adult heart and, somehow, a steady progress past the old blinking light toward the mesa and, at the point the canyon closed in around the river, the faint cries of La Llorona.

  Anna’s latilla fence looked puny as she parked in front of it, incapable of holding anything in or out. Eva darted out of the car and was in Esperanza’s arms by the time Anna walked into the house.

  “What did you do to her?”

  “I did nothing to her.”

  “She nearly ran over Tyler! She almost killed him!”

  “Let’s stop talking garbage. I did no such t
hing.”

  “Yes you did! And you don’t even care!”

  “Mijita,” said Esperanza, lowering her face to Eva’s and pulling her closer.

  It seemed to Anna, standing there, confronted with the implausibility of a united front at her expense in her own house, that every moment spent in the pursuit of Eva’s happiness, every second devoted to the task had been a mistake, an error in judgment so colossal, so dire, that no compensation would ever be adequate enough, no matter the size or shape.

  “I have given you everything,” she said. “Everything.” And she turned and headed out into the afternoon alone, shielding her eyes from the sun as she went.

  There was no music in the bar, only a kind of bruised half-light in which three men sat with drinks in their dry hands.

  “Jim Beam,” Anna said, pulling out a stool. “Double.”

  Chapter Eleven

  The call came at eight in the evening three days later. Esperanza was out, Eva on the couch watching TV, Anna in her study trying to pluck words out of thin air, Jim Beam like liquid amber, liquid fire, on her desk. The phone rang, and Anna peeled out of her study and into the living room and stood there staring at the sequence of digits she knew so well.

  On the couch, Eva laughed her little girl’s laugh and folded a long, pale leg over the other.

  “Hey.” The boy’s voice was thick and syrupy.

  “Where are you?”

  “At Tito’s.”

  Anna nodded, her mind already at work on the intricacies of crossing the entire town with cops lying spiderlike in their black cars.

  “You coming?”

  Anna cast a quick look at Eva. “Yes.”

  “I’ve got to be somewhere in one hour,” he said.

  “One hour?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where?”

  “A party,” said the boy, like it was nothing.

  She ran from room to room, picking things up, dropping them, not remembering what their purpose was, the reason for their strange location, their stubborn solidity. She considered getting into the shower but there was no time. The house seemed suddenly hostile, labyrinthine. There were rooms with things that belonged to other rooms, a closet full of clothes she could not find, a pencil for the eyes she had purchased that was gone, her perfume, a brand-new bottle of Chanel No. 19, also gone, and a strange volition to the dispersion, as if the chaos had been coordinated ahead of time for the precise purpose of driving her mad and denying her even a scant ration of human happiness.