by Alan Cumyn
“Mom, it’s all right.” His heart was pounding in his brain but he felt calm.
“Where did you put him!”
Stan put his hand on Janine’s shoulder. She was trembling in the sheets.
“Give us a minute,” he said, dead calm, a whole expanse of desert in his voice. “Mom, this is Janine. We’ll be out in a —”
Another voice said, “Who’s that? Oh, my God!” A woman was peeking around the door — big glasses, mousy hair. “Oh, my God!” she said again and disappeared, but her voice rattled in the stairway. “Feldon! Oh, honey — Feldon!”
“Is that Kelly-Ann?” Stan said, stupefied.
“Get yourself together!” Stan’s mother hissed and ran out of the room, clacking in her heels, slamming the door.
“Uhnn,” Janine said under her breath, like she’d been punched in the stomach.
Stan knelt beside her and gathered her in his arms.
“Listen.” His hands were shaking, too, but he didn’t feel that way inside. He felt like he was on the bridge of a battleship somewhere. That he had huge forces at his command.
“Listen. We’re going to get dressed and go downstairs. You’re my girlfriend. I love you. And my mom is —”
“Feldon! Where are you!” Kelly-Ann screamed downstairs.
“Is she —?”
“Feldon’s mom, I guess,” Stan said.
He tried to kiss her but she pushed him away.
“Now your mom is going to hate me.” She whipped her bra on like she’d been practicing for years. Stan rooted amongst the tangle on the bed, on the floor. His sorry underwear again. He found a new shirt and his old jeans. The battleship feeling receded and his head felt light.
“Stanley! Stanley!” his mother screamed, probably from the kitchen. “Get down here now!”
Janine raced into the rest of her clothes.
“I’m going to go,” she said, scared. Stan took her shoulders again. He was only half dressed, but they’d shared everything.
Everything.
“Stanley!” his mother screamed.
“I love you,” he said.
—
Down the stairs. Stan held her hand.
His girlfriend’s hand.
“Mom,” he said in the kitchen. “This is Janine Igwash.” He meant to give some kind of apology —
an apology that actually was no real apology, more like an admission of the excruciating embarrassment of this particular moment caused by . . .
He waited for the words to assemble themselves. He thought of his mother racing off as a young woman to her military lover’s apartment in the fifty-five minutes after sociology, at the same time that she was supposedly going out with the man she would stupidly marry.
How to put everything in a few sentences, and not only in front of his mother and Janine but Kelly-Ann, too, this mousy woman whose face was shock pale — hardly the look of someone who had just been on the beach in Montego Bay with her own lover?
All these thoughts, and what came out was, “He’s in the cupboard.”
Right beside where his mother was standing.
“He fell asleep in the cupboard!” Stan said. It was impossible to keep the anger from his voice. Because of the way they were looking at him — at him and Janine, as if they’d been off screwing around or something while Feldon wandered away.
No one moved so Stan reached past his mother and opened the cupboard door.
“He’s right . . .”
But Feldon wasn’t there.
“I’m going home now,” Janine said. “Nice to meet you, Mrs. Dart.” She even extended her hand, which Stan’s mother looked at like it was diseased.
Janine bolted down the hall.
Stan stood dumbstruck, still looking in the Feldonless cupboard.
“I’m calling the police,” Kelly-Ann said.
She seemed older than Stan had expected. Not as old as his mom, who dyed her hair . . .
“I’m sure he’s around . . .” Stan said. Kelly-Ann had her cellphone out. Then he said, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. He really was dead asleep . . .”
Why did he use the word dead?
“You left him asleep in the cupboard?”
Kelly-Ann was on the verge of shredding him.
Stan’s mother gripped his shoulders now. “What time did you leave him? Stanley! What time!”
He didn’t know. Time seemed irrelevant, at the time. He remembered the kiss, which was endless, on their knees in front of the cupboard door.
“We were playing hide-and-go-seek,” he said.
“Bullshit you were!” his mother said. “I know exactly what you were playing!”
Kelly-Ann got through to the police.
“My little boy has disappeared,” she said, real fear in her voice.
Stan heard himself sound exactly like Ron. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean . . .”
Any of it.
“I was visiting my sick uncle at Mitou Bay,” Kelly-Ann said on the phone. Mitou Bay!
Where the hell was that?
Not Jamaica.
The cops were never going to understand even the simplest aspect of all this. Stan hardly understood it and he’d been there for a large part.
“No. No. I don’t believe my husband took Feldon . . .”
Kelly-Ann was shrinking in the kitchen, trying to summon help.
“We are estranged. Yes. He’s a pathological liar. He took the boy to his ex-wife’s home . . .”
Stan’s feet started moving. Out the kitchen. Out the front door. Down the steps . . .
“Stanley!” his mother called. “You come back here! The police are going to want to —”
He had to make things right.
—
He ran and he ran in the heart of the afternoon with the already low slanting light of fall easing into winter. He ran as if Coach Burgess were watching, clipboard in hand, estimating his character. As if Janine were with him, the wild girl with the strong stride. As if he had to keep up with her, impress her somehow, be worthy. He ran as if he wanted to stay by her a long, long time.
He ran to the only place Feldon could be — where Stan’s feet knew to take him.
Down by the river. That’s where he would go if he were Feldon.
And that’s where Feldon was. Squatting by the edge of the greenish brown water, his hands on his kneecaps, eyes so serious. Neurosurgeon.
The big fishing rod was lying on the bank behind him, unused.
“Hey!” Stan said, breathless but still strong.
Feldon didn’t get up, but his face lit and Stan felt suddenly that they really were brothers.
“The fish in here swim backwards!”
Stan kneeled beside him. “Backwards?”
Feldon pointed. The fish was hardly a minnow, almost invisible in the murk, especially in the low slant of the sun. It was sliding backwards.
Slowly, slowly.
“Your mom’s here,” Stan said.
Feldon was mesmerized by the water.
“She’s pretty worried about you. I think we should go back to the house.”
Not a movement. Feldon’s eyes were fixed, his body quiet and still.
“I’m going to come visit you,” Stan said. “No matter where you end up living. They can’t keep brothers apart.”
Feldon nodded. He took a bit of grassy fluff and dropped it in the slowly moving water.
“Here, fishy. Have some lunch.”
The fluff floated off, swirled around a rock, got pulled into the main channel.
Feldon stood up finally. “I have to get off my feet,” he said with great seriousness.
“Do you?”
“To make a jump shot,” he said.
—
On the way back Feldon talked a lot about the fish.
“He wanted to have lunch but he couldn’t get to the top. Maybe he can’t swim very well. He’s just learning.”
“Maybe the current was pulling him backwards,” Stan said.
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A police car raced past them with siren screaming. Feldon looked up, unconcerned. It seemed to be heading in the direction of their house.
“Where’s the girl?” he asked.
“What girl?”
“The big girl.”
“Janine’s at her house now,” Stan said. “I’m going to call her later. A whole lot of dust needs to settle first. But I’m going to call her right after.”
Another police car whipped around the corner and sped past them, lights flashing, siren on full wail. Every car all the way up the hill homeward moved over to make room.
“You should bring her some flowers,” Feldon said.
“Flowers? Really?”
“Girls like flowers.” Feldon scrambled up a low wall off the sidewalk toward some patch of garden Stan had never noticed before. It was the front lawn of the seniors’ residence across the street from Longworth Mall.
“I don’t think you should be picking those.” But Feldon went ahead as if he’d heard nothing. Yellow ones, some purple, others that were not quite red. What was the color? Russet.
In very short order Feldon had put together a decent bouquet.
“Girls really like flowers,” he said again.
The Tilt-the-World groaned in the parking lot across the street. Hardly anyone was on it, and yet it just kept going.
A third police car screeched past, bound for hell up the hill.
“Maybe we should go see Janine first,” Stan said. “I could phone home from there.” He wanted to see her again right away. Let her know it was all right.
“Maybe she could give me some more hot chocolate,” Feldon said.
They were walking again. Heading home.
“Her mother’s got cancer,” Stan said. “She’s dying.”
“Where will she go then?” Feldon asked.
“I have no idea,” Stan said.
“Maybe when you die, that’s when you learn how to use your tail and your fins,” Feldon said. “You can go up to the top and have lunch.”
“You’ve really been thinking about this,” Stan said. The sun was so low the sky looked metallic, like a photograph in a glossy book. The silver beast tilted but just for a second the world stayed steady.
“Not really,” Feldon said. “I just now thought of it.”
Slowly, slowly they walked up the hill. Stan was mesmerized by all of it — from the slant of the light to the beauty of the traffic to the bittersweet feel of every step.
I’m going to remember this day for the rest of my life, he thought.
Then, only a few steps later, his stomach clenched around one particular thought.
Where did it come from? Why this instant?
Why did he suddenly know that today was the day he’d got Janine Igwash pregnant?
25
Pregnant. Why hadn’t he realized it before? Because he’d been in a dream, a stupid, thoughtless state of addlement. But now he was waking up.
Janine Igwash was pregnant. By him.
Why?
He’d sworn he would never be here. He was not going to become . . .
His fucking father.
“You’re hurting my hand!” Feldon said.
He was holding Feldon’s hand. Feldon had the flowers. Stan had the fishing rod.
“Sorry,” he said.
It didn’t even sound like his voice.
In Family and Sexuality class, Mrs. Hardon had said sperm needed only the slightest invitation to cause irreparable parenthood. Even if you’d already . . . shot across the bow. There was still sperm in the nozzle.
Lurking.
He was nothing but the agent of his own nozzle.
“We’re not going to see Janine right now,” Stan said.
Instead, the flowers were for Kelly-Ann.
It was a touching scene. The house surrounded by cop cars, lights blazing, Kelly-Ann scrambling off the front porch — Stan thought she was going to trip and break her neck — then hugging Feldon so hard he yelled in alarm.
Stan’s eyes welled up. He didn’t know what was happening. He didn’t get weepy about anything, usually. But the sight of the little boy squirming, of Kelly-Ann nearly killing him with her own relief . . .
Stan, too, was going to be a parent. It just kept hitting him, one load of bricks after another. He’d have to leave school. He’d have to get a job, in a brick factory, probably. He’d be moving bricks from one place to another. Probably by hand. He didn’t know anything else.
He’d have to learn that, even.
He’d have to support Janine and the little baby. And his mother would be alone with Lily. His mother and Lily would unravel each other. And Stan would come home to Janine — to some filthy little apartment they couldn’t afford — after a long day of moving bricks, his arms stretched from the weight of it all.
Janine would look at him with that face mothers get, that end-of-the-world face.
He’d come back to his crying kid and his unraveling wife — her parents would probably make him marry her — and they’d be together in a squishy, filthy, stinking, dark peeling-paint apartment . . .
Desolate in the driveway, Stan gazed at Kelly-Ann Wilmer clutching Feldon and weeping. Everyone was weeping.
Stan wept for himself. His blood was turning to chalk.
He might as well call himself Ron.
They were all a huge public spectacle — cops, neighbors, Lily home from school, his mother. Lily was wandering around in circles talking to invisible people at her toes.
“He was just down at the river,” Stan said to nobody at all. No one was listening to him anyway.
—
Dinner was something from a box that went in the microwave and then came out hot and mushy. The colored parts were vegetables, Stan guessed. The whitish-yellowish parts were pasta. Gary poured wine for everyone — even Stan — except the children, who got berry juice.
The wine sat murkily on Stan’s tongue, like some token of the adult world that was hard to appreciate. Gary went on about — vintage, mustiness? — while Stan considered brick dust filling his lungs.
“To life!” Gary said, and everyone clinked. Stan’s mother was looking at Gary like . . .
“I have a word to say about life,” Gary said.
. . . like he was a Greek god or something.
“Some days,” Gary said, “you lose your job.” He looked over at Stan’s mother. So that was it. How were they supposed to live? But Gary was looking at her like she was the greatest thing since . . . “Some days you get accepted into a special school —” Gary glanced now at Lily chopping her mushy noodles into smaller and smaller bits — “or you lose your kid, then you find your kid.”
Kelly-Ann had Feldon on her lap, clutched like he was a parachute she hadn’t strapped on.
“It all could happen on the same day. What’s important, what really stays with you . . .”
Is what your nozzle caused you to do, Stan thought.
“ . . . is all of us together. I don’t care what anyone says, we are . . .”
Just agents of our nozzles, Stan thought. Our nozzles and our appetites.
“ . . . a family,” Gary said. Some kind of eye-based tractor beam vibrated between him and Stan’s mother.
“I know this has been a tumultuous day . . .”
They were getting married, Stan thought.
“ . . . but I would like to make an announcement. Isabelle and I have decided —”
“I got my girlfriend pregnant!” Stan blurted. That stopped the words in Gary’s throat.
“What?”
“Janine is pregnant,” Stan said. “She’s my girlfriend. It’s my fault.”
Stan’s mother crashed her cutlery on her plate. Everyone else was silent. Even Lily looked up.
“Oh, Stan,” his mother said in a little voice.
Freight trains collided in his ears.
Why had he said it? Why had he said it out loud?
Gary still had his mouth open, but nothing was c
oming out now.
Welcome to the family, big fella, Stan thought. Welcome to the nut house.
“When . . . when is she due?” Stan’s mother said. “Have you talked to her parents? Has she considered . . .?”
“It’s all really new!” Stan sprang to his feet because he had to, his whole body uncoiled. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
Up the stairs. To hell with the squeaks. A huge storm seemed to be blowing all around him. He launched into his room where it had all happened, where his life had come peeling apart in a matter of minutes.
Why?
Because he was Ron’s fuck-up son.
There was the bed, sheets and blankets still wrapped in knots. That’s where the disaster had unfolded. It was like he’d been on drugs or something. He’d gone completely out of his mind.
There was the balled-up T-shirt-and-gym-sock combination on the floor. Why hadn’t he just stopped there? Obviously he was unfit for . . .
But Janine had wanted to go on. She’d never tried boys. She didn’t know what she was doing.
But it was his fault. He knew himself.
He thought he knew.
He buried his face into the wreck of his bed. Everything was cold now. Cold and dark. It was difficult even to remember the steam heat of it.
“Stanley.” His mother’s voice.
“I closed the door for a reason!” Stan barked.
Everyone else in the family was allowed to come apart. Everyone else could slam the door and be left alone. But not him.
Why didn’t he have a lock on his door?
“Don’t come in!”
But she came in anyway, bearing food. Cold microwave mush. She sat on the edge of his bed — the very scene of the disaster — and put the ridiculous plate on the floor right beside his smelly wad of disgrace.
He could hear her sniffing distastefully.
“You really need to do your sheets,” she said.
He didn’t have to talk.
“I’m sorry for this afternoon,” Stan’s mother said. What was the phrase? Eggshells. Eggshells in her voice. “You know, as a parent, sometimes you get completely blindsided by something. You just . . . barge in with the current crisis in your head, and you have no idea. I’m sorry.”
If he kept his head in his pillow she would go away eventually.
“Janine seems like a nice girl.”
If he stayed still as a corpse . . . if he became a corpse. If he willed all the life to drain from his . . .