The Dwelling
Page 31
What she heard instead was water lapping up against the secondary drain, a hollowclug clug , rhythmic; like waves.
She sat up, a torporish fog like a shell around her. The mattress creaked with the shift in weight and the sound, for a second, was lost. She sat on the edge of the bed and tried to recapture it.
From downstairs an old ballad droned, Ruth Etting or maybe Bessie Smith, something dreamy and sad, the recording tinny. She preferred show tunes.
Who’s Ruth Etting?
It was only a moment before it faded into far away and she could hear (feel) the sound of warm water lapping over flesh, washing up the front of the tub just high enough occasionally to swamp over the small silver cover and make thatclugging sound, not unlike the drain. The other sounds of the house melted way as she focused.
The tub was full, this time. But, of course, that couldn’t be. Unless that had been covered at the end ofEveryone’s Guide to Simple Plumbing; perhaps there was a section at the back. “Really Really Bad Drains!” or “Haunted Tubs!”
Barbara got up off the bed, a host of tempestuous images and thoughts running through her mind. She remembered the look on Dennis’s face when he had first seen Petey, his eyes wide with wonder and so much love; she remembered the dress she had worn to meet his parents, the first car they’d had(Isn’t there something he uses that no one else does?), packing her own suitcase once after a fight long before Petey was born, then sitting childlike and quiet on the bed while Dennis unpacked her case with great care, and put it all back into the drawers; the realtor who had showed them this house, telling her mother Dennis had left, trying to get the mattress for the spare bed up the stairs alone, her father’s hand on her back when she rode her bicycle. Her father dying. Her mother braiding her hair. The restaurant Dennis always took clients to.
Her legs felt weak. Her vision was tunneled. She wondered if she were dreaming.
The sun had gone behind a cloud. The hall had dimmed, the sun usually coming through the window in Petey’s room now darkened in shadow. It was cold in the hall. The floor was cold on her feet. Steam, equally cold so that it puckered her flesh, poured from the bathroom. She entered and looked into the tub.
The water was red. Red water had seeped up and stained the sides of the tub, curdling along the soap line. Red water sloshed up in rhythm, washing over the secondary drainclug clug clug. Toes stuck up through the red water, the deep, rich color hiding whatever else lay beneath.
Oh my god,she thought, but it was slow (like moving through water). Everything was slow in occurring to her, so slow she might have been dreaming. She knew she should scream, run, something; instead, her eyes followed the toes, the natural line formed by memory.Elementary, dear Watson. Where there’s toes, there’s fire.
A man lay in the tub. His head lolled over onto his shoulder, bent slightly forward, blocking his chest. Water lapped around his middle, the black hairs of his stomach and chest poking through the murky water, torso bobbing freely with the motion of his body.
She bent forward and looked at his face. His eyes were closed as though sleeping. The expression on his face was serene.
He’s at peace.
His hands floated by his sides. Deep gouges ran along the length of his arms, two rows on each arm. The flesh was curled at the cleave, the inside purple in the red water.
“You had enough,” she whispered, not really sure if she had said it or not. But knowing it was true.
The water was inviting. Warm water lapping over exhausted flesh.A bath is a lovely thing. You could lie in one forever. She smiled sadly. There was a scraping sound on the tile and she glanced down to see the claws on the feet of the tub clench and relax.
Barbara stood motionless, calmly, her hands clasped demurely in front of her in a sort of reverence for the overwhelming, seductive feeling of peace in the little steamy-cold room. She did not know how long she stood there, mind blank in a sort of echo of tranquillity. Long enough to feel chilled.
And then she found herself, alone, in an empty bathroom.
She blinked and shook her head. The tub was empty and dry, and white and pristine as the day she bought the house. She shuddered.Awful thing, she thought. She waited for a moment, expectantly, for the tub to begin its pop and drain, and it didn’t.
The room was soundless.
Why was I in here?Something niggled, but would not come.
Downstairs, the front door opened and she jumped.
Dennis’s face and all that she knew (all that was over) loomed. Pain, her most visceral friend, threatened to bring her down and she swayed, her mouth opening in a groan that was silent, and all the while downstairs there was the sound of her other man, home. For him she had to be okay.
On unsteady legs, she made her way down the stairs. Her son looked up to her, his beautiful wide green eyes peering up, mouth pursed, forehead crunched in an expression of dismay.
The stairs were warm where the sun poured in through the tall narrow windows beside the door. She paused ever so briefly on one spot and let the heat soak into her cold feet. Petey didn’t seem to notice her pausing. He was staring at her.
“What are you doing home?” she said, her voice flattened.
“You don’t have a top on,” he said. Barbara looked down. She was in her bra. Her skirt was wrinkled and twisted to one side. Her pantyhose sagged at the knee. She came down the stairs, took her sweater off the hook by the door and put it on. As she turned to face him, Petey grabbed her around her middle and hugged her hard. She knelt and put her arms around him, feeling his weight, his heat, his clinging. They stayed like that for a minute.
“What happened?” she asked, saying the words into his neck. He smelled like outdoors, fresh.
“School’s over,” he said shortly.
She made a sound of affirmation in her throat. They parted and she stood, running her hand through his thick red hair. It had lost its baby softness a long time ago, and was just hair now, but her fingers felt the baby he had been. He hadn’t been bald like most babies. And from the start, his hair had been red. Like Dennis’s. Dennis’s mother had told her that when Dennis was born he looked like a matchstick, so red was his hair and so white his body.
Scattered on the floor were her three letters. She stooped and picked them up, clutching the sweater around her. She held them. “Are you hungry?”
“Yeah,” Petey said. “I have my lunch.” He had the brown bag in his hand. She nodded. The two of them walked to the kitchen. On the way through the living room, Barbara dropped the letters onto the sofa. They were crushed and bent. She would have to redo them.
“What do you want?” she asked him, pulling open, by accident or design, the treat cupboard. Petey hesitated. Choose food, of a sort.
“Kraft Dinner?” She closed the treat cupboard and found the cupboard where such things were kept in untidy piles, bags of macaroni, spaghetti, jars and cans of spaghetti sauce and tomatoes, all things that didn’t readily stack or row neatly. She pawed around until she found a lonely package of Kraft Dinner in the back, and took it down.
Barbara went through the motions of making lunch, pulling out pots and lids and adding things in a way that seemed precisely timed, and yet were only false images of cooking.
Petey sat at the table and watched her. He hadn’t seen her like this in a long time—not since they had left the old house. He wondered if he should tell her what had happened.
“Petey, I have something to tell you,” she said. A rational voice somewhere lost inside her told her sternly (a voice surprisingly like her mother’s) that now was not the time.
“What?”
She stirred the pot on the stove needlessly. Kraft Dinner didn’t stick. It didn’t do anything. You could probably leave it on the counter next to a pot and it would cook itself without error. She stirred, staring into the murky water. Now and then a tiny little yellow log would bob up to the top.
With her back to him, she told him that his father had called from work.
When Petey didn’t respond, she finally turned and looked at him. Their eyes met. His face looked drawn and old, his cheeks slack. He blinked and she wondered if he understood, but didn’t have the energy to explain it.
“He wants you to come to his house this weekend and meet her, his new…wife.”
His lips formed the words,new wife, without sound. “Is she my mother, too?”
Barbara shook her head. “I’m your mom and he’s your dad. She’ll be his wife, is all.” It came out blankly, but properly, like all the books said it should. There was no inflection. It all felt blank. And sleepy. Her stomach was heavy like lead. She explained that he would probably call back tonight and talk to Petey. She rambled for a moment about how he could see Jeremy and maybe some of his other old friends. While she rambled, upstairs a plug popped out of the drain and water ran out through pipes. If she noticed, she did not acknowledge.
Petey’s eyes went up to the ceiling and then down to her again. “Why doesn’t he marry you again if he wants a wife?” he asked.
The macaroni fattened and grew creamy. She turned off the element and pulled the pot off. The rings were red with heat and she felt it distantly through the opening of the sweater. She had the incomprehensible urge to press her hand on it.
“We’re divorced,” she said simply, the voice belonging to someone else.
While Barbara put the last bits together for the lunch, Petey ate his sandwich at the table. He took bites without deliberation, not tasting them, the bread and meat pressing together between his tongue and the roof of his mouth feeling like cardboard. He had a hard time chewing, couldn’t seem to move the food around in his mouth. Barbara brought him a plate of orange noodles and they sat together at the little table, holding their forks. Barbara pushed hers around the plate. Petey shoved forkful after forkful into his mouth and swallowed, methodically.
“I ran away from school,” Peter blurted. Then burst into tears.
Petey went to his room.
Barbara cleaned up the kitchen and when that was done, sat down at the end of the dining-room table, her typewriter in front of her. She rolled a fresh envelope into the carriage and it sat there. She didn’t want to do it. Felt too tired. She thought about how nice a long, long bath would feel. She sat there and stared, listening to the music that filtered around the house without a distinct origin. Time went by. At one point she heard her son laugh. Once in a while there were too many footsteps, for so few people living there.
There’s something wrong with this house.And she smiled, cruelly.
* * *
Petey had gone up to his room after looking through the kitchen window for a long time. They weren’t in the yard. They were waiting for him upstairs.
He sat on his bed for a minute or two and they didn’t come. He thought he could hear them. He knew where they were.
He got off the bed and went slowly to the little cupboard door cut down from what had been a huge, tall board, once the door to a large barn. The bottom half had been cut into a little round door. What had happened to the rest of it, he didn’t know. There were lots of boards from the barn in the bedroom. The window was trimmed with it, and the baseboards had once been the horizontal slabs for the horse stall. If he looked, he could find a gouged piece where a horse had chewed and chewed. The boards had all been deeply stained and varnished, but you could still see the marks and bores where machinery had run into walls, where chains had hung and eroded into the wood, where scratches had been made.
He pressed his thumb on the little latch and it made a nice click when it opened. A gratifying sound. He pulled the door open until it was adjacent to the wall and left it there. Inside it was black as pitch; black as night. In spite of the sun streaming in through his window, none penetrated the darkness of the cubbyhole. He listened, hoping to hear them, but it was silent.
His heart pounding because he didn’t really,really want to do it, he ducked his head and walked into the blackness.
The retarded kid who had been nice that first afternoon at the bus stop when Andy and Marshall had beaten him up had the same recess time as Petey’s class. His name was Kevin. After a while Petey had got used to him following him around. Kevin couldn’t find Petey at lunch. He had seen him that morning, but not at lunch. Then not at recess.
Eventually someone took note. Kevin asked Mrs. Waddell if Peter had a dentist’s appointment. He’d had one himself not long ago (to him: it had in fact been months before, but had hurt—like abugger —and he remembered it well; he was preoccupied with dental appointments after that). Mrs. Waddell hadn’t answered with much more than a negative throat sound. She was watching the little kids. She hated playground duty.
The very things that worked against Petey with the children worked in his favor with the adults: he was not an attractive child, and did not stand out as a student, because he was new and had yet to make any sort of an impression whether with good work or bad. When a teacher looked out over the sea of faces, their eyes skidded over him, pausing only on kids like Bethany Sanders, who had curling blond hair and saucer-sized blue eyes and wore a different dress every day, or even Brad Genner, who had pleasant features, smooth white teeth and an easy smile and was very smart. Or Andy Devries and Marshall Hemp, who were troublemakers with soft, clean brown hair and easy smiles and quips that were mean and funny, comments that were repeated later in the staff room with guilty snickers and chuckles hidden behind hands with remarks likeoh, my andWhat will he be like in ten years? But the eyes just swept past boys like Petey. Peter.
She had noticed that the new kid wasn’t around after lunch, but the thought kept slipping in and out of her consciousness, like the hum of a refrigerator or the drone of a lawn mower on a Saturday afternoon in June. Kevin said he thought Peter had run away from school, telling Mrs. Waddell at afternoon recess, but Kevin was one of those kids the adults listened to only halfway, and as soon as he disappeared and the discomfort of having him near her subsided, Mrs. Waddell forgot whatever it was he had said, only to remember an hour later, during grammar. At lunchtime she’d taken a look around the play yard and finally asked Andy Devries, of all people, if she knew where the new kid was. Andy spat before answering, and she chastised him for it, but later when she was talking to Tina Klassen about the missing new kid, she mentioned Andy spitting and remarked that he looked just like his father when he did it, and Tina Klassen knew just what she meant and they bothcluck-clucked like old ladies, but secretly the image they carried in their heads about Andy Devries’s father was sexual in nature, his maleness a topic of exchanged looks at every parent-teacher night. He was a looker, that one, and the kid was going to be just like him.
They called his house and told his mother that he hadn’t been in school after recess that day. Barbara had listened to the teacher on the phone, calling at two o’clock in the afternoon, her forehead lined with a sort of distant anger.
“You noticed he wasn’t therewhen?” she asked.
The teacher had fumbled then, attempting to cover tracks of some distance. It boiled down to, he ran off at recess. Mrs. Waddell not offering the information that she really didn’t know when he’d gone. For all she knew, it might have been morning recess, except by then she’d heard what had happened with the gym teacher (and she wasappalled, make no mistake about that, but these things happened and they have to be handled carefully; it was an unfortunate situation, anaccident). Mrs. Waddell considered herself quite accuratelyintuitive and did not feel at allconcerned about the boy’s whereabouts. While she did not explain why (people were so grounded in earth properties they missed the whole wideother world around them) she did tell Mrs. Parkins that the school—taking some liberty there—was not concerned.
“We have found that children who have not yet found theirniche ofte
nact out in these sorts of ways. He is very likely just waiting until after school is out to come home,” Mrs. Waddell said reasonably.
“My son is not at school,” Barbara said, with deadly calm into the phone. “You don’t know where he is. You have called me at two o’clock in the afternoon—” She paused to think. “What kind of a school are you operating, Mrs. Waddell?” There was a patient, long-suffering sigh at the other end of the line and that made Barbara angry. Mrs. Waddell (while dreaming of teaching grades eight through twelve) had taken a child-psychology course at night, and waited patiently(one of those mothers) for Barbara to vent her (perfectlyunderstandable, although unproductive andunreasonable) dismay.
“This is an unfortunate turn of events, Mrs. Parkins—”
“Don’t call me that,” said Barbara suddenly. “I’m Barbara Staizer now.”
There was a brief pause, during which June Waddell summed up the situation and allowed herself an unseen smile of self-satisfaction. So it was likethat. “Mrs. Staizer, my apologies. Peter will likely show up there after school as though he’s been in school all day. It happens. When he arrives home—”
“For your information, Mrs. Waddell, my son has been home since lunchtime. He left school at lunchtime. He has been missing from your care sincelunchtime. And he will not be returning to your school.” And she hung up.
Endless summer.
They played tag for the longest time. Petey fell exhausted into the heap with the others, all of them out of breath.I tagged you, Mariette, Ethan said.
Mariette answered,I’m too tired. Lying on her back, she rolled over and tagged Petey’s arm. Her fingers were warm.You’re it, she giggled. Petey rolled over and tagged Alan. Alan poked Berk with his toe. They were all it. Everybody was it.
You should bring your mother here,Mariette said.She could have fun with us. She twirled a bit of foxtail above her face, dipping it close to her nose, to tickle it. When she did it to Peter, he felt like sneezing.