Black Out: A Novel

by Lisa Unger

  “Mom.” One word. It was a gentle admonishment, as well as a request that she lighten up a bit.

  She smiled and felt some of her tension dissolve. No matter how sad, how angry she was, she and her son had the kind of chemistry that made it difficult to fight. They were as likely to dissolve into laughter as they were to slam doors or raise their voices. Unlike the chemistry Ricky had with his father. When her husband and son fought, she understood why world peace was impossible, why people wouldn’t someday just learn to get along.

  “How’s the band doing?” she said. A change of subject would do them both good.

  “Not great. Charlene and Slash had a fight; she smashed his guitar. He can’t afford another one. We don’t have any gigs lined up anyway. We might be taking a break.”

  “Who’s Slash?”

  “You know, Billy Lovett.”

  “Oh.” Billy of the golden hair and sea green eyes, the charmer, the star soccer player, once upon a time the heartthrob of the fourth grade. He and Ricky were both seniors getting ready to graduate, unrecognizable by those fourth-grade pictures, taken when sunlight seemed to shine from their very pores. Now they looked more like they slept in coffins during the daylight hours. That Billy wanted to be called Slash was a new development.

  “Sorry to hear that,” she said. Honestly, their band was awful. Charlene’s voice was middling at best. Ricky had been playing the drums since fourth grade. His technique was passable, but he didn’t have any real talent for it—not that Maggie could hear. Billy, aka Slash, was a fairly decent guitar player. But when they got together, they emitted a raucous, angry sound that inspired in Maggie an awkward cringing.

  “Wow,” she’d said to them after she and Jones went to hear them perform last year at the school battle of the bands. They’d been in the final three but eventually lost to another, equally unpleasant-sounding band. “I’m impressed.”

  Ricky poured himself a glass of orange juice, managing to spill a few drops on the granite countertop and the just-cleaned hardwood floor. She grabbed a rag and wiped up after him.

  That’s the problem. You’re always following him around, cleaning up his messes. He thinks he can do anything. Her worst fights with her husband had been about their son, their only child. Jones didn’t seem to notice that their son, “the freak,” as Jones liked to call him, had a 4.0 average and nearly perfect SAT scores. His early acceptance letters to Georgetown and New York University were hanging on the refrigerator, where she used to hang his crayon drawings and report cards. And those were just the first two.

  What difference does any of that make when he doesn’t even want to go to college? All that brilliance and all he can think to do is get his fucking nose pierced?

  But Maggie knew her son; he wouldn’t have gone through all the work of those applications as early as he had if there wasn’t someone beneath the punk hairstyle and tattoo who knew what an education meant. He didn’t want to work at the local music shop all his life.

  “So are you and Charlene going to the winter formal?”

  He flashed her a look, turning his too-smart eyes on her. They were black, black pools, just like her father’s eyes had been. Sometimes she saw her father’s strength, his wisdom, there, too. But mainly, she saw the twinkling before some smart comment or the flash of attitude. Like right now.

  “You’re kidding,” he said.

  “No,” she said, drawing out the word. “I’m not kidding. It might be fun.”

  “Um, no, Mom. We’re not. Anyway, it’s not for months.”

  “You could do it your own way, with your own style.” The rag still in her hand, she started wiping down things that didn’t need wiping—the chrome bread box, the toaster oven, the Italian pottery serving bowl where they kept the fresh fruit, when they had any in the house—which at the moment they did not. She really needed to go to the grocery store. God forbid Jones or Ricky would ever pick up the list on the counter and go without being nagged for three days.

  She wondered what “your own style” might mean to Ricky and Charlene. But all the other moms she ran into at the school or the grocery store were readying their daughters and sons for this high school event—shopping for dresses and renting tuxes already. Maggie could settle for gothic formal wear; she could handle that. She used to be cool a hundred years ago. She went to NYU, partied in the East Village—Pyramid Club, CBGB—wore all black. Her son’s style didn’t bother her as much as it did Jones. It was the whole college thing that kept her up at night. And Charlene, she worried about Charlene.

  Charlene, a little girl lost, hiding behind a mask of black eyeliner and vamp red lipstick. She had an aura that somehow managed to be knowing but desperate, fiery yet vulnerable. She was the kind of girl who started wars, at once acquiescent and defiant. She’d spun a web around Maggie’s son without his knowing it, without even perhaps her intention. Spider silk was stronger than chain if you happened to be a fly.

  There was something in the pitch of his voice when Ricky had first told her about Charlene that had made her stop what she was doing and listen, something about the look on his face. She knew it was going to be trouble.

  Maggie kept waiting for the death knell: Mom, Charlene’s pregnant. We’re getting married. But she was smart enough to keep her mouth shut, to welcome Charlene into their home, into their family as much as Jones would allow. She wasn’t a bad girl. Maggie even saw a little of her younger self in Charlene. A little.

  Maggie remembered how she’d railed and rebelled when her parents tried to keep her away from a boy she’d dated from a neighboring high school. Phillip Leblanc—with his punky hair and his paint-stained black clothes (he was an artist, of course), he was everything boys from The Hollows were not: cool, exotic, artistic. She did love him, in that way that teenage girls love, like a lemming. Which is not love, of course. Unfortunately, at seventeen, no one realizes that. And the only thing her parents accomplished with their endless groundings and tirades was to push her into his waiting arms. It was a big mess, from which she’d barely extricated herself. But that was another life. She still thought about him sometimes, wondered what became of him. Her random Google searches over the years had never turned anything up. He was a troubled boy, she realized now, and probably grew into a troubled man.

  Even her mother had admitted recently, during one of Maggie’s laments about Charlene, that they’d handled it all wrong. Maggie was surprised, because her mother was generally not one to give an inch. But Mom was long on self-reflection these days—when she wasn’t obsessing about some noise in her attic.

  Luckily, Jones recognized that when it came to Charlene, their son was standing on the edge of a cliff. Any sudden movement to help or control might cause a leap. They wouldn’t get him back.

  That girl is sleeping with our son, he said to her one night as they sipped wine by the pool.

  I know, she said, not without a twinge of something angry or jealous or sad. She’d seen Charlene with her hand on Ricky’s crotch just the day before. Somehow it made her remember changing his diapers and giving him a bath. She’d felt another lash of grief. Sometimes it seemed like that was all it was, motherhood—grief and guilt and fear. You said good-bye a little every day—from the minute they left your body until they left your home. But no, that wasn’t all. There was that love, that wrenching, impossible love. It was all so hard sometimes, hard enough with two careers that they hadn’t wanted another. But it was over so fast.

  There’s something not right about that girl.

  I know it, she said.

  Jones cast her a surprised glance over the table. I thought you liked her.

  She gave a slow shrug. I care about her because I care about Ricky. And he loves her.

  With a sharp exhale: What does he know about love?

  Not enough. That’s why it’s so dangerous.

  . . .

  “I’ll pay for the tux and the limo,” she said now. Was she begging?

  “Come on, Mom.”
<
br />   “Just think about it. Ask Charlene. Even a girl as hip as Char might harbor secret fantasies about dances and party dresses.” She tried for a smile but suspected she might just seem desperate.

  “Okay, okay. I’ll ask her.”

  He was humoring her, but she felt a little jolt of excitement just the same. She never thought of herself as that kind of mother. But there she was, pushing her kid to go to the stupid winter formal so she could have the pictures, join in with the other moms as they talked excitedly about gowns and flowers, limo services. It was embarrassing.

  She went back to gazing through the catalog in order to appear nonchalant—a sensor alarm for the pool, a ceramic frog that hid a key in his belly, a floating cooler. She felt like buying something. Anything. She noticed her nails. She needed a manicure.

  The screen door slammed again. When she looked up, her son was gone; her husband had taken his place, sorting through the mail. If they knew how alike they were in every way, they’d both burst into flames.

  “Where’s Johnny Rotten?” asked Jones without heat.

  “He was here a minute ago.” She closed the catalog and threw it in the trash.

  “Heard me coming,” he said. He opened the phone bill, glanced at it, and put it on the counter.

  “Probably,” she said. Then, “No more fighting today, okay?”

  “What’s to fight about, Maggie? The war is lost. Nothing left to do but surrender.”

  She felt her throat constrict. “It’s not a battle. There aren’t supposed to be winners and losers. He’s our son.”

  “Tell that to him.”

  She looked over at him, but he was a locked box, staring down at the rest of the mail—more junk. She didn’t know how to comfort him anymore, how to soften him. The years, the job, had made him harder. Not all the time. But his anger used to be hot. He’d yell and storm. Now he folded into himself, shut everyone else out. You didn’t have to be a shrink to know this wasn’t a good thing.

  He glanced over at her. A quick up and down. “You look nice. Do something to your hair?”

  “I had it trimmed a couple of days ago.”

  She tossed her copper curls at him, blinked her eyes in a teasing come-hither.

  He moved over to her and wrapped her up in his big arms. She leaned into him, feeling his broad chest through the softness of his denim shirt, then looked into his beloved face.

  “I can still drown in those blue eyes, Maggie,” he said with a smile.

  The years, parenthood, money worries, all kinds of stresses, had not robbed her of her love for him—though there were times when she feared they had. She still loved the sight of him, the smell of him, the feel of him. But sometimes she felt like they didn’t always look at each other anymore. Like the gold watch his uncle left him, or the diamond earrings in a box that had been her grandmother’s—precious things in the landscape of a life, cherished but barely noticed. Trotted out for special occasions, maybe, but most often taken for granted.

  There were worse things. She’d seen her friends’ marriages implode and dissolve, leaving massive emotional wreckage or just disappearing at sea, second marriages no better. She didn’t always like Jones. Sometimes she ached to punch him in the jaw really hard, so hard she could split her own knuckles with the force of it. But she loved him no less totally than she did her own son. It was that complete, that much a part of her. He was half of her, for better or for worse.

  “He’s okay,” she said, squeezing his middle. “He’s going to be okay.”

  Silence. Jones took a deep breath, which she felt in the rise of his chest against hers.

  Because that was what it was, wasn’t it? Not just anger. Not a need to control in the way we most often mean it. Not a lack of love or understanding for their boy. It was fear. Fear that, after all the years of protecting his health, his heart, his mind, setting bedtimes and boundaries, giving warnings about strangers and looking both ways before crossing the street, it wouldn’t be enough. Fear that, as he stood on the threshold of adulthood, forces beyond their control would take him down a path where they could no longer reach him. Fear that he’d be seduced by something ugly and would choose it. And that there would be nothing they could do but let him go. She believed they’d taught him well. Prayed they had. Why did her husband have so little faith?

  “I hope so,” he said flatly, like it might already be too late.

  She pulled back to look at him, to admonish him, but saw by the clock on the stainless-steel microwave behind him that she had just five minutes until her next session. She didn’t have time for a throw-down. She saw him notice her eyes drift, and then he moved away from her, unknowingly mimicking Ricky by opening the refrigerator and peering inside.

  “Off to save the world,” he said. “One desperate soul at a time. But what about her husband?”

  “What about him?” she said, pouring herself a cup of coffee before heading down the hallway that connected her house to the suite of rooms where she saw her patients. “Is he a desperate soul?”

  They were kidding around. Weren’t they? When she turned to look at him, he was still gazing into the refrigerator, looking odd—too tired around the eyes.

  “Jones?”

  He turned to grin at her. “Desperate for some lunch,” he said with a wink. Did it seem forced?

  “There’s leftover lasagna and a fresh salad I just made,” she said, feeling a pang of domestic guilt for having eaten quickly without him even though she’d suspected he would pop home for lunch. She quickly quashed it. I’m a wife, not a handmaiden. I’m a mother, not a waitress. How many times had she said those two sentences? Maybe one of these days she’d start to believe it herself.

  “My cholesterol?” he said, raising his eyebrows.

  “Low-fat cheese? Whole wheat pasta? Ground turkey?”

  “Ugh,” he said, finding and reaching for it. “When did we get so healthy?”

  “We’re not healthy, Jones. We’re old.”

  “Hmm.”

  She gave him a quick kiss on the cheek and left to meet her patient.

  2

  She loved him. She knew what that meant, no matter what anyone said. It was impossible not to recognize love, wasn’t it? It was a dry brushfire, a shift of tectonic plates at the bottom of the ocean. It changed the topography of a life, destroyed and created. Her heart beat so fast and her throat was so dry before she saw him that it felt like panic. When would he get there? Would he ever get there? Did he really love her, too? Would he change his mind? That delicious worried waiting and then the meeting, flesh on flesh, the skin of his neck against her mouth, that deep exhale—passion like the relief you feel after releasing a breath you’ve held underwater. How could she not recognize love? She’d been with other boys, crushes. It hadn’t felt like this.

  “A moment of pleasure can lead to a lifetime of pain,” her mother, Melody, had warned during one of her operatic lectures on action and consequence. Charlene felt sorry for her sometimes, wondered if her mother even remembered pleasure, if she remembered love. Or had she crossed so much time and distance that she’d forgotten the way, wouldn’t remember the language even if she found it again?

  There was an old photo album Charlene had found in her grandmother’s house, at the bottom of a box in a dusty guest room closet. In the album, filled with images of people she didn’t recognize, Charlene had unearthed a picture of Melody on her wedding day. Her mother was as slight as a reed, wearing a willowy vintage lace gown. She’d been just so pretty. But that wasn’t the reason Charlene had slipped the photo from its plastic sleeve and put it in her purse. It was the expression on her mother’s face as she looked at her new husband. She was lit up with bliss, a wide smile, glittering eyes. In all her life, Charlene had never seen her mother look like that. Never. The girl in the picture was a stranger, someone Charlene wished she knew. She looked funny and cool, like she’d make dirty jokes and drink too much.

  Charlene had found the picture after her grandmot
her passed. They were cleaning the house, getting it ready to sell. Charlene wanted to keep the house, move in and sell the dump they lived in.

  “No way,” her mother said. “Do you have any idea how much work it is to live in an old place like this?”

  But it was beautiful, three stories of lace curtains and hardwood floors, swirling banisters and rattling windows. Every stair had a unique song, every door stuck in the summer humidity. In the air, Charlene thought she could always smell her grandmother’s perfume, a light floral scent that, for some reason, set her to humming “Rock-a-bye Baby.”

  But it was more than the work of living in an old house that had motivated her mother to sell; Charlene could see it on her face. It wasn’t even the money, though she knew that was a factor. Charlene didn’t know what it was, why her mother would want to sell her childhood home, let other people move in and “renovate”—strip the house of all its personality and history.

  “You’re too young to understand. Sometimes you just want the past to go away; you don’t always want it lingering, tapping you on the shoulder, reminding you about things you’d rather forget.”

  “Like what? What do you want to forget? I thought you loved this house. “

  “I do, and I know she’d want us to stay.”

  “Then why, Mom?”

  “I’m just selling it, Charlene. We need the money. End of discussion.”

  And there was something so sad and strange about her mother that, for once, Charlene did shut up when she was asked. She had been thirteen at the time, filled with a big, ugly anger and a crushing sadness about losing her grandmother and the house she loved. But there was no talking to Melody about it. Life is loss, Charlene. Get used to it. Was that true? Charlene wondered. Was that all it was?

  She’d lost her father already. She’d been too young to grieve for him; but she knew other girls had something she’d never understand. She wrote a song about it all, “Selling Memories.”