by Lisa Howorth
The toilet seat was down, but there were no dribbles on it, so the flush she had heard from downstairs had most likely been Eliza. They really had to talk; she knew Eliza wanted to know, and should know, really, what had happened in Richmond, but couldn’t bring herself to act interested enough to ask, and would just pump William for information in the morning. William, his father’s son, would reduce all the details Mary Byrd gave him to not much more than “yes” or “no” or “I don’t remember; ask Mom,” which would make Eliza crazy. Maybe there’d be some one-on-one time after drama, while her daughter was captive in the car and before she picked up William from soccer. She knew Eliza would also want to know why she’d gone to “that guy’s” funeral. It was a good question that Mary Byrd would give half an answer to, if she could think of something.
William’s door was wide open and he was looking at a book by the beam of his bedside light, an old railroad engineer’s lamp that Mary Byrd had found rummaging around in a junk shop.
“Hey!” She walked over and sat on the bed and kissed him.
“Hey.”
“How is everything?” she asked. “How was the ice storm? I bet you guys did some great sledding.”
He kept looking at his book. “It was pretty cool. At first we could sled, but then all the trees and branches fell down and it was scary. Mom,” he added, “you don’t smell that great.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. Dad just made me a garlic omelet. I’ll try not to breathe.” She pulled the sheet over her mouth. “Dad said y’all were like pioneers, with all the electricity and water off.”
“Yeah. But then it got boring with no TV and only peanut butter and soup and hot dogs. We had to eat the hot dogs on hamburger buns. And then Dad made us help pile up all the branches.” Taking notice of Mississippi Trees in her hand, he asked, “What’s that book?”
“It’s that book about trees; you know, the one we used for your leaf identification project last fall,” she said. “Evagreen gave me some seeds and I was going to read about how to plant them.”
“I hate that book. It’s boring,” he said.
“Okay, Contrary. You don’t have to hate something just because it doesn’t interest you.”
“What’s ‘contrary’ mean?” he asked.
“You know, like Eliza acts: cranky. Or like how Evagreen sometimes acts. It’s not exactly that they’re mean, they’re just against a lot of things. Like Evagreen likes things to be her way. She thinks she knows the best way to do things, and she’s contrary if you don’t agree.”
William said, “You mean like Nana?”
“Exactly. It doesn’t mean they don’t care about you, or they’re mad at you, they just like to control things and want things their way. Kind of strict, or bossy; they like to disagree with stuff.”
“One time I saw Evagreen playing with my airport and my planes,” William said. “I was contrary about that.”
“Really? Huh.” Mary Byrd thought about that for a second. “She was probably just dusting them. Or maybe she’s interested in planes, too.”
“She was talking to them.”
“Well, remember Ken, her son? He’s in the Air Force and used to fly planes. Maybe she was thinking about Ken,” she said. “Why don’t you ask her, maybe? When she comes back.” Mary Byrd fervently and selfishly hoped that she would come back.
“She’ll probably just say, ‘Mind your own beeswax, Little Mister Man,’ like she always does,” William said. “Did Ken really fly planes? In a war?”
“Hmm, I’m not sure. I think so, for a little while, in Desert Storm.”
“Did he bomb people? Or was he a spy?”
“I don’t know.” Jeez, William. “Ken’s a really good guy, but in the military you’ve got to do whatever they tell you. But let’s not ask Evagreen about that. She’s got enough … sad stuff to think about right now.”
“Spies aren’t sad,” he said. “And you always tell us, ‘Don’t be afraid to ask questions.’”
“Well, just don’t, okay? Sometimes there are things that grown-ups don’t like to talk about,” Mary Byrd said. “There’s a difference between school questions and personal ones. You could ask Daddy about Ken. He probably knows.” Pass that hot potato. Why did so many things she told her children come around to bite her in the ass?
“So, what are you reading, Will?”
“I’m not really reading.” He scrubbed his pajama sleeve across his face. “It’s a book about Greek myths. We’re doing them at school. It’s got some cool pictures.”
“Like what?” she asked, covering her mouth with her hand. “Which gods and goddesses do you like?”
“Well, no goddesses.” He turned back a few pages. “This guy is cool.”
Mary Byrd took the book and turned it around to see the picture. “Oh, Mercury. Yeah, he does look cool. What do you like about him?”
“Look,” he said pointing to Mercury’s feet, which had wings attached to his sandals.
“Oh, yeah, now I get it.” She smiled at him behind the sheet and tried to turn the book back around, but he closed it and set it aside.
“I wish I had those. You could go anywhere, and if I didn’t like something, or something bad happened, I would just fly away.” William smiled a little sheepishly, knowing he might be too old to think something so fairy-taleish and impossible. “Would you like it, Mom?”
“Are you kidding? I’d love it,” she laughed. “What kind of shoes would you have?”
He thought a second. “Remember my glow-in-the-dark, cheetah Converse high-tops that I had when I was little? Those.”
Mary Byrd felt a pang. Little—he’d only outgrown those shoes a year or two earlier. “Those would be perfect.” She wondered what had ever happened to Stevie’s little blue PF Flyers, always untied.
“What would you have?”
“Hmm,” she said, striking a thinking pose, chin on fist. “I think I’d have red Prada lizard high heels.”
“What’s a Prada? Is it a kind of lizard? Like a Komodo dragon?” he asked hopefully.
Laughing from behind the sheet, she said, “No! It’s the name of an Italian fashion designer who makes fabulous shoes.”
His little face took on a scornful look. “High heels would be dumb,” he said. “You couldn’t do anything fun or even walk.”
“Hey, if I had red lizard Pradas with wings, I would not be walking!”
William reached over to his bedside table and picked up one of his special little planes—the Russian Seagull—parked there and began examining it carefully, as if he didn’t already have every micro-millimeter of the thing memorized. Maybe, Mary Byrd thought, he didn’t like the idea of his mother ever wanting to fly away, or of her having any reason to want to. Or maybe he was just waiting for her to talk about Richmond. Or maybe he was just a little eight-year-old guy, sitting in his bed with a toy, waiting for his mom to go away so he could play with it.
“Well, on second thought, I probably don’t need those shoes,” she said. “I’d love for you to be able to fly, but I think I’m just fine right here with my family in our cozy house on this dumb old earth.” She brushed his stiff, tousley hair, so like Charles’s, and not, she could smell, washed, back from his squinched-up forehead.
“Dumb?” he said.
“Oh, you know, dumb; like lots of times things in life are crazy, or don’t make any sense.” She gave him an opening. He should bring Stevie up, not her. Was that right?
“Are things always spozed to make sense?
“Hmm.” She thought. Which way to go now, Dr. Spock? “No, I don’t think so. People want everything to make sense, and that’s what people try to do—figure stuff out. Why things happen, what the reasons are, and how things can be fixed. We want life to be nice and neat and sometimes it’s not. Sometimes it’s dumb. And messy. And sad.” Mary Byrd picked up one of his hands. “God, these fingernails! They are so gross. What have you been doing, William, working on an oil rig?” She pulled open the little drawer in the be
dside table and rummaged around for clippers. “What’s under your nails could be your next science unfair project. Hey, I hope you guys got your proposals in?”
“Yeah. I’m going to do a new kind of Humvee with more stuff to keep guys from getting blown up.”
“Very cool,” she said, still looking for clippers.
“Yeah. Eliza said I could use her glue gun.”
“Oh, great! What’s her project?”
“Something dumb about germs and lip gloss, I think.”
“Huh,” said Mary Byrd, finally finding what she thought were the clippers. “What is this blue gunk all over these nail clippers? Yuck.”
William rose up to look. “Oh, that’s the shark I made with Play-Doh. See? The clipper part is the jaws. That red stuff inside is part of a person he ate.”
“Jeez, William.” She picked the Play-Doh off the thing and began clipping.
William watched her. “You mean the world is messy like my fingernails?” he asked. “Like they get dirty, and we cut them, and they just get dirty and long again anyway?”
His mother laughed. “Hmm, maybe a little like that. But really I mean more like complicated-and-unhappy-messy. Like what happened with Angie.”
“But that’s grown-ups, right? Things for kids aren’t unhappy, right? Unless you’re a kid in a Nazi concentration camp.”
“Well, that’s the way things are supposed to be. That’s the way grown-ups want things to be,” she said.
William looked at her solemnly but slyly. “Not all grown-ups.”
Okay, here it was. He was thinking about what had happened to Stevie at the hands of a grown-up. He knew nothing specific, of course, but all kids knew about sexual abuse now. Had knowing about Stevie hurt William in any way? Maybe the children should never have been told until they were older.
She sighed. “No, you’re right. But most grown-ups want kids to be safe and happy. But that’s what I mean about messy. There are always going to be people who are crazy, and they make things happen that are bad and hard to understand. Like Hitler, right? Sometimes there aren’t any answers about why bad things happen.” She was practically quoting Teever.
Now his eyes looked directly into hers. “What if something bad happens to me?”
Her heart thumped hard inside her chest. It was awful for a child his age to have this fear. “Oh, darling, it won’t.” She put her arms around him. “If you’re thinking about Stevie or something you saw on TV, those things almost never happen.” She’d give anything to say, “never, ever.” She thought of Freddy Brickle’s parents lying to him about Zepf’s ridiculous sentence. “There’s a bigger chance of you being run over by a school bus driven by chimps than of those things happening to you.” Probably not true, but they laughed. It’s a hard line to walk with a child, she thought, that line between truth and comfort. They so easily saw through the comfort. “And Stevie made a mistake. He talked to a stranger, and you know better than to do that, right?” The nail clipping resumed matter-of-factly. “You should be more worried about getting the Ebola virus from what’s under your nails.”
“That would be cool because then my eyes would bleed.”
“Yeah, very cool. Ha.”
“So if Mrs. Barnes comes in our classroom and asks me a multiplication and I can’t think of the answer, can I say, ‘stuff in life doesn’t always have answers’?” He grinned. Braces were in his future, she noticed for the first time. She’d let him keep his passy too long.
“Uh-huh. Go ahead—try it.” Children called Mrs. Barnes a math terrorist because as principal, she cruised the classrooms and the cafeteria, randomly demanding answers to multiplication tables. If you didn’t know, you got After-School. Somehow she was related to Evagreen, but Mary Byrd wasn’t sure how. “But you get what I was trying to say, don’t you, Will?”
“Yeah.” Raising the plane into the air, he buzzed her face a little too close, maybe not accidentally.
“Hey!” she protested. “Do you want a one-eyed mother?”
“Cyclops,” he said. “Are you sad about Stevie?”
“Of course. But not like I was. You sort of …” she paused. “… get used to the sadness. That was a really long time ago.”
He was zooming the plane around, avoiding looking interested. “What was he like?”
What had he really been like? she wondered. What kid stops to think about what his or her brothers or sisters are like? “Oh, he was regular. A pain in the booty for his sister, but sweet,” she told her son. “He came to live with us when he was practically still a baby, and he was cute, with blond hair and blue eyes and freckles, and Uncle Nick and I were really excited about having a new brother. When he got older, he was really funny. He loved goofy jokes. He liked sports. And he was crazy about trucks the way you’re crazy about planes and tanks.” It occurred to her she might not want William to have Stevie’s little dump truck, or that he might not want it.
“Did y’all torture each other, like Eliza and I do?”
She had to laugh and say honestly, “Of course. I was really too old to be doing it, but Nick and I loved to scare him.” A slight breeze of regret chilled her for a second. “You know—we did Halloween kind of stuff, like putting scary masks in his closet, or sneaking up behind him when he was watching The Tingler or this scary show we loved called The World Beyond. But he could give it back, too,” she said. “One time he put a flopping, almost-dead bird in my room. Another time, I was showing him how to play those clap-clap games—you know, ‘My boyfriend’s name is Fatty/ He comes from Cincinnati,’ and instead of slapping my hand, he punched me and I had a nosebleed.” With that, William jerked his hand in a mock punch. ‘‘Hey! Be still!” she said, continuing to clip. “And another time I was sick in bed and he made me throw up by singing the SpaghettiOs song over and over outside my bedroom door. “Uh-oh, SpaghettiOs,” she sang again.
William laughed at this but abruptly grew serious again. “Mom, what happened to the guy?” he asked.
“What guy? The bad guy?”
“Uh-huh.” He quit with the one-handed air traffic and waited.
“They never caught him,” she said evenly, almost lightly. “Until now. The good news is he’s already in a jail in North Carolina, a million miles away, for some other bad stuff. But the police in Richmond finally figured out that he was the guy, after all these years. That’s why I had to go up there, to help them, so he never gets out of jail. Never¸ ever.” She wished so much for this to be true.
“Was he born bad? How did he get like that?”
William was normally so recalcitrant that his intelligence always surprised her. “I don’t know, Will,” she said. “I don’t think people are born bad. Can you imagine a precious little baby, like baby Brian, or Allie and Bryce, down the street, being bad? I think bad things sometimes happen to people and then they can sometimes—not very often—turn bad, too. Because they’re feeling hurt. Or angry, or lonely, and it makes them crazy.” People in bad sitchyations do bad things. The conversation was making the previous year’s talk with William about where babies come from seem like a nursery rhyme. “My guess, or at least what I like to think, is that most people are born good and try to grow up good,” she told him. “You know what? The best thing for people to do is to stay close to the ones they love. Better yet, to the ones who love you.” Maybe they should have been sending Eliza and William to church and Sunday school, she thought. Maybe it was better for children to believe in a lot of comforting juju.
“Okay.” Mary Byrd gathered up the little crescent clippings from the blue quilt. “Done. You need to go to sleep.” No more questions, she hoped.
The tiny plane took off again. “So you can’t make a promise that something bad won’t happen to me?”
She sighed. “No, darling, I can’t. There’s lots of stuff I can’t promise you, but I can tell you that I’m very, very sure something bad won’t happen to you because Dad and I are protecting you and Eliza and taking care of you every single d
ay and every single night, and will be, even when you’re grown-ups. Even when you have your own children,” she added in a strong, upbeat voice. “How’s that?”
“Well, will I be bad?”
God, Mary Byrd thought. Now they worry not only about someone doing something awful to them, but that they might grow up and be that person, “No! That’s another thing I can’t promise but I’m absolutely, positively sure about. You and Eliza are going to be great people. Nothing’s going to happen to you or make you bad.” Not wanting to think of all the temptations they’d be dodging in life, and soon, she mentally crossed her fingers. “Okay?”
“Okay,” he said, and then, “Who cares about Eliza.”
“William. She might be contrary now, but she’ll start to get nicer. You’ll see. She loves you even if she acts mean, just like you love her.” Mary Byrd thought, but did not say, You would miss her horribly if she were gone.
“Hmph.” He landed the little plane and picked up his book again.
Mary Byrd leaned over and kissed him. “Three more pages and lights out.” She walked to the door and said, “Love you, Air Force Captain William Thornton,” keeping it breezy.
“Okay,” he said, covering his face with his book. “Love you, too, Cyclops Mother.” She left his door open a cat’s width, the way he liked it.
As Mary Byrd headed to the stairs, she felt, for a minute, a little of the old, pointless sadness that seemed to be part of her, like her bones or blood. The world was not a great or easy place and it was stupid and pathetic to think that it was. But she also felt oddly high, as if she’d had a Xanax; had she? No, she remembered that the last Xanax had gone with Ernest. Teever hadn’t fooled her. She was thinking that what goodness and happiness and rightness there was could be claimed, but you had to work hard at finding it and hanging onto it. She wanted her children to know reality, up to a point, but she didn’t want them living darkly or fearfully. For too long she’d let her own self get distracted by guilt and fear. Some measure of that seemed lifted from her. Oh, there would always be plenty of crap to feel guilty about. Making good sport, speaking lewdly, committing uncleanness. Drinking, smoking, pills. Leaving dishes in the sink for Evagreen. Lies. And plenty to be scared about: second-story fires. The New Madrid fault. Hurricanes and tornadoes. Mini-strokes and colon cancer. Cooties of all kinds. Her mother. But fuck all that. The old dumb earth could tilt and spin all around her but she was really going to try not to fly off her own personal axis. She just plain felt better, in spite of everything. She hoped it would continue.