“Henry, don’t you want to play in your room?”
He shakes his head. No, he would not like to play in his room. His room is a place where he only allows himself to feel good.
She reaches inside the closet, smooths his hair. Her hands smell like onions and lavender hand lotion. When he looks up, her eyes finally settle on his, and he thinks that she might know something is up. She opens her mouth, and he knows the words that will come out: What did you do? You look guilty as sin.
But she doesn’t say this. Something retracts the words back down into her. She swallows them, her throat bobs. He knows she must have magnets inside her, like he does, that are pulling bad feelings down into her belly. They pull down the reprimand on her lips, too, because she sees the question in the curl of his frown: What have you done? And because she doesn’t want to be asked this question, she doesn’t ask it of him, either.
“Well,” says his mother, pulling her hand away. “Supper’s about ready. I’m making chili and cornbread.”
“I knew it.”
“Because the onions stink, huh?”
He nods, smiles his happiest fake happy smile at her.
“You get out of the closet when you hear Daddy pull in, alright?”
“Okay,” he says.
She closes the door almost all the way. Frankie, who has crawled up behind their mother, peers in and laughs when he sees Henry’s face. “That’s funny, huh?” says their mother. “Brother is hiding.” She pulls Frankie back with her into the kitchen.
When Henry hears the crunch of wheels in the driveway, he tucks the little car back in a corner, determined not to touch it anymore that evening, and comes out of the closet. His father walks in the front door and wipes his feet. He has a paper bag in one hand and a blue-and-silver can of beer in the other. His mother comes and kisses his father on the cheek before going back to the kitchen.
“Hi, sweetness. Hey, Frank,” he says.
Frankie bangs out a song on the refrigerator door with a spoon and ignores him.
“Hi, Daddy,” says Henry. He keeps his back against the closet door.
“Hi, buddy,” he says. “You want a present?” He holds out his paper bag.
His mother calls, “Don’t give him candy before dinner, Andre.”
Henry walks to the paper bag that his father holds out to him and peers inside. There is another can of beer and a box of Bottle Caps.
“Do I get my choice?” Henry asks.
He gets the reaction he hoped for. His father’s big chest heaves with laughter. His older brother really does look like him—Andre the junior and Andre the senior are both tall, both broad in the shoulders. Handsome, according to his mother and his aunt. But when Henry looks at his father, he mostly looks at his mouth and his crooked, bright-white teeth and how his lips lie over them. His father’s mouth tells Henry what he needs to know about how to act.
“The candy is for you, buddy,” he says.
Henry takes the candy out of the bag and shakes the box. He hears the pieces, imagines the tangy purple and orange, the cola that, amazingly, really tastes like cola.
“Thank you,” he says.
“You’re welcome,” says his father and hugs him with one arm. Henry makes himself stand still. “And now I’d better wash up. Filthy hands are no good for eating,” he says, holding up black-smudged fingers.
“Eww,” says Henry, because he thinks his father expects him to. His father makes hitches for mobile homes. Henry doesn’t think of it as dirt or grease but just as the regular color of father-hands.
Henry takes the candy to the kitchen and holds the box out in front of his mother. “Can I have this?”
She wipes her hands on a dish towel. “After dinner,” she says. “And you have to share with Andre.”
When she says his brother’s name, she becomes still. He’d forgotten Andre, too. He isn’t in the house; he’s still at Will’s, probably eating burgers and drinking cans of RC with the Millers. His mother breaks out of her frozen state and grabs him by his arm. He feels Cassie’s fingers in the places where his mother’s are now. There will be four bruises like piano keys on his arm, he can tell. Cassie started them, and his mother’s grip assures them.
“You need to get your brother,” she says, likely thinking of the last time Andre came home so late from the Millers’. “Go as fast as you can, and when you come home, come in through the cellar door and then walk up from the basement,” she says.
He runs down into the basement and then back into the April night, using all his strength to push the cellar doors up and open. When he runs his feet barely scrape the ground. His mother lets him help, lets him move, fast and light over to the Millers’ house, and this is why he loves his mother. She makes plans, she gets ideas. She lies, and he loves her for that, too.
The reason he has to do this, go fast, go now, is because his father wants everyone home when he is or it hurts his feelings. He takes offense, if he gets home and finds one son in the hall closet and the other at the neighbors’. He feels they are avoiding him. This is what his mother explained after the last time Andre was out late, and they’d all gotten in trouble, and had the strangest punishment ever: his father pushing Andre onto the couch, covering him in a blanket, and then sitting on him to make him stay put. He sat on him for a long time, while Andre yelled that he couldn’t breathe. His father said that wasn’t true, that he couldn’t make so much noise if he couldn’t breathe, and that if he’d shut up for half a second, well, he might believe him that he couldn’t breathe and get up. Andre started to cry and their mother told their father to stop, that was enough. Andre never cried, was immune to groundings and whippings and being yanked around—Henry marveled at it. But his father wouldn’t get up, because his mother was sort of being punished, too, for letting Andre stay out so long. The more she begged, the more his father mashed Andre’s head into the couch cushion, until Andre did stop crying, and moving, and their mother, with a final meep, pressed her hands over her mouth to keep her voice from coming out.
Henry hadn’t been able to stand still, pacing back and forth, watching. When he heard that meep, he felt a giggle rising up in his throat, even though it wasn’t funny. He didn’t think it was funny at all. In fact, he thought his brother might really die, and he was terrified, and yet his chest was bouncing with laughter that he couldn’t let out. If he made a noise, it would only draw attention to himself, and then he would be in trouble, too, and he was not immune, not like Andre. He cried at the lightest slap, the threat of a raised voice.
His brother was let up then, sucking in air, white and walleyed as a fish. Andre tried to run but couldn’t even get out of the living room before he fell, panting on the floor, looking around like he didn’t know where he was.
When Henry gets to the Millers’, Andre is taking a one-handed shot at the basketball hoop over Will’s garage door.
“Andre!”
“What?”
“Dinner! Dad’s home.”
Will Miller is much shorter than Andre, a blond boy who blushes easily. His hair sticks to the sweat of his forehead. “You gotta go?” he asks Andre.
“Yeah. I do,” he says. “I’ll see you Monday.”
Henry and his brother walk to the end of the Millers’ yard and hear the screen door slam as Will goes inside his house. They break into a run at the edge of the property.
“Up through the cellar,” Henry says as he overtakes Andre. The moon is covered with clouds, and so the only lights come from their neighbors’ porches.
When the two of them reappear at the top of the basement stairs, they hide their breathlessness, and their mother says, “No tomatoes down there? Well, sit down, and we’ll eat it as it is.”
LATER THAT NIGHT, HENRY FINDS he has to go back to the closet. He climbs out of bed and pads across the thick yellow carpet of his room and down the stairs to the hall closet, where he feels around in the dark for his car.
His fingers brush against the baseboard as he s
earches beneath the cast-off clothes until he runs into something smooth—some hard, cool object. He would swear that it hadn’t been in the closet when he was here only hours ago. He stands on his tiptoes and reaches high, groping for the chain that turns on the closet light. Henry squints in the light of the one bulb and digs beneath the coats.
He finds a floral-print box. It isn’t exactly like the ones he saw in the van earlier but it is similar. It has a gold latch, which he immediately flips up.
There are two tiers inside, like in his father’s tackle box, the upper tier nesting in the lower tier until the box is opened. Arranged on these tiers are compacts of colored powder, tubes of lipstick. There are words printed on the tubes and compacts, but they are written in cursive, which Henry can’t read yet. There are gold-ribbed tubes in the box as well, and Henry thinks at first that they are bullets. Eyelashes sprout from a pair of plastic eyelids. His mother doesn’t wear this stuff. She just looks regular most of the time, no extra eyelashes. Sometimes she wears lipstick, but not this color. A small round box with the same floral pattern sits on the lower tier. He pops the lid off and finds folded plastic bags inside it. Nothing in them. Just a tint of blue on the plastic.
There’s a stack of photos, too, beneath this bag, though he doesn’t get to look at them because a sudden terror of getting caught seizes him, and he reburies the box beneath Andre’s corduroy coat. His guilt is replaced by paranoia, a sort of spirit that grabs at his ankles running up the stairs until he can cover them beneath his quilt.
The Act You Do When You Want A Bed To Sleep In
This is another act I’ve already done. Lots and lots of times. Kylie made me think of it, so here it is, number three.
I usually did this one at dusk, when it looked like if I slept in the park one more night, I’d get picked up, because a cop kept nodding at me too casually, like, “Don’t mind me, I’m a friendly officer who doesn’t suspect for a second that I’ve seen your mug on the side of a milk carton.”
Right when I needed her to, she’d appear, some college girl in perfect white Keds and pink hoop earrings. I’d coax her into handing over those Keds and juggle them. Then, I’d add her earrings. Then, a book from her backpack. I’d toss them around and make it look like a big effort, and when I returned it all to her unharmed, she would smile, and I would “slip” out of character and smile back. She would feel special, and the rest would be easy.
I did try to live in a motel once, but my neighbors were all owl-eyed and yellow-fanged and full of drugs. I heard their children’s bodies hitting the floors and the walls, and I couldn’t stay because it made me think of Frankie.
Nothing is worse than thinking about Frankie. Nothing could land me back at home faster than that kid. So I don’t think about him.
The college girls always had a good place to stay, and I kept crashing with them even after I’d turned eighteen and didn’t have to worry about getting picked up. It was nice. I’d wake up buried beneath a mountain of someone else’s security blankets: stuffed bears and elephants and yarn-haired dolls. These things would all smell like the girl who had invited me home, like apple lotion and Exclamation perfume. And sure, I usually slipped out before she woke up, but I’d leave a note, and I never felt cruel.
Real cruelty takes time, and I didn’t stick around long enough for that. Sure, it isn’t nice to perform your way into a girl’s bed, it’s not strictly honest or professional. But there are worse things a guy could do.
CHAPTER 5
St. Louis
June 1990
ADRIENNE WAS TRAPPED IN HER bed, paralyzed by sleep. Shadows moved around her house, clicked doors open, shook the plumbing. She wanted to investigate the noises, but no matter how hard she tried, no matter how many times she said, “I am going to wake up, now,” she could not pull her eyelids apart to make it happen.
Finally, she managed to pull back the white coverlet and kick her legs over the side of the bed. She padded on bare feet to the kitchen, thinking she had heard the pantry door swing on its hinges. The air rushed out of her chest when she saw her ex-husband there, spreading peanut butter on a piece of wheat bread, not even using a plate. She didn’t say anything, only turned on her heel and stalked back to the bedroom to get her gun out of the hatbox and say what she had longed to say to him for years: “Get out of my house, or I’ll kill you.” But halfway to the bedroom, she realized that she was still in bed, sleeping, only dreaming she had gotten up. She woke up for real this time with her heart in her throat, able to move, but afraid to. Her sheets stuck to her. The coverlet was heavy over her body.
It was just an accidental nap, she told herself. She’d had a migraine and had fallen asleep.
She missed the first show of the season. She was in bed instead, having nightmares. That was what happened.
Feeling oriented again, Adrienne propped herself up on her elbows. The migraines had been happening more often and they were taking longer to pass. It’s stress, she thought, it’s because you’re anxious about Curtis coming to town. It’s almost time for your period. You’ve had too much caffeine lately.
Whenever she had a migraine, she had to make a list of all the things that it could be that were not tumors in her brain.
Two months ago when she’d first started getting the headaches more frequently, she also noticed her breasts were a little swollen. For a few bright hours after she made this discovery, she believed she might be pregnant. Later, she didn’t know why she’d jumped to this conclusion, but as soon as the thought had occurred to her, she started cleaning the house, vacuuming and dusting until she was sweaty. She daydreamed, while she worked, of a white bassinet in the living room, a Winnie-the-Pooh mural in the guest room. Caleb kissing a bald baby head before he went off to work. A drawer full of tiny socks.
It was extremely unlikely that she would be pregnant. She’d always had irregular periods, even after the surgery to remove the tumor that leaned against her pituitary gland. This was the tumor that had caused her to grow and grow and grow until she was what she was. She had it removed many years ago, but the doctor had warned her that things would never be quite right for her as far as her hormones were concerned. There was too much chaos in there for the elegance of fertilization and gestation: no well-timed release of an egg, no ordered, predictable cell growth. No baby could live in her body.
But that was nice, she’d thought. It had felt real enough.
Now, as she reached for the remote on the nightstand and flipped on the television, she found it difficult to believe that she could stand living inside her body. Her migraine was beginning to subside, but she ached in strange ways, in her joints. It felt like she had bruises deep under her skin, on her bones.
On the news, the anchor was talking about a plane that had crashed. Everyone had died. Two hundred and twenty-three people. Which meant there were thousands more people mourning and having nightmares and shivering every time a plane flew over them. At the same time, these people would search for quiet moments when they didn’t have to think about the dead or imagine their final, awful minutes. They would hope to lose themselves in a conversation about something else, a dumb movie, a gin and tonic and a basket of onion rings at happy hour. They would push the dead away so that they could be alive.
Her blue-and-yellow macaw, Richard, who had been perched on the headrest of the bed, opened his wings and hopped down onto the pillow next to Adrienne. The blue feathers around his neck ruffled as he tried to catch his balance. She closed her eyes for a moment to shut out the light—the sound of the television comforted her, but the flash of the screen threatened to bring her headache back full-force.
“Hi, Richard. Sweet bird. Sweet boy,” said Adrienne.
“Sleepy head,” he said.
“Yes, I know. Mama’s a sleepy head.”
He blinked at her, cocking his head to one side. She petted his neck, and he stretched toward her to give her a better angle to rub him with. “That’s the stuff. Peanut butter and jelly,”
he said.
She used to think his voice was creepy. She thought the fact that he made human sounds with a reptilian tongue made the words sound not-quite-right. He was originally purchased as a part of her act when she was the Amazon Woman at Bill’s Caribbean Steakhouse in Louisville, and even though she fed him, and he helped keep her act popular, they were not friends. They barely touched each other when they were not onstage. He had lived with her, though, for ten years straight now. She could only imagine that he somehow loved her with his little tree-nut-sized brain. This was why she let him sit on the bed, even though his claws piqued the coverlet. That, and Richard would very likely outlive her. He was forty-seven, thirteen years older than she, but parrots could live to be a hundred, and she could not. And so after she was gone, Richard would still be walking around, sliding his face across the floor, eating pasta and peanuts and carrying memories of her in his head. She wanted the memories to be good ones.
This was what she was thinking when she heard keys in the door and the smooth mechanical shifting in the lock. She bounded into the living room, checked the peephole, and then undid the chain when she saw it was Caleb. She returned to the bedroom, Caleb following her.
“How was the show?” she asked.
“Fine,” he said, taking off his tie.
“How were the new clowns? Was Kylie nervous? Did you tell Henry to break a leg?” She repositioned herself on the bed, and Richard drew closer and began preening himself.
“They were fine, too. Seamus liked it. That’s all that matters.”
“You said it was all about the audience,” she said.
Caleb sat in a white wicker chair by the door and slipped off his shoes. “Well, they liked it, too. Everybody liked it. Everyone lifted them up on their shoulders and carried them to their trailers. And then they did the same thing to me for finding them.”
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