The Broken Places

by Susan Perabo

  “HIKE!”

  Paul slipped on his first step but quickly regained his footing, lost Hester by cutting left, then faked out June with a burst of speed as if going long and then stopping suddenly and turning just in time to catch the flawless pass thrown by his father. Hester was only a few yards away, but Sonny leapt forward and bumped her to the snow, leaving Paul a clear path to the steps.

  “Guys six, Dogs zip,” Sonny said.

  Paul tossed him the ball. “You go long this time.”

  Sonny nodded, but didn’t crouch for the hike. Instead, he spun the ball slowly in his hands. Paul always knew when his father wanted to say something serious; he always spun something — a fork, a pen, a book, a shoe — as if the momentum of an inert object would somehow dislodge the words that were stuck in his throat.

  “What?” Paul said.

  Sonny stopped spinning, grinned sheepishly. “Do me a favor, huh? Sounds kinda goofy, but . . . be a pal for your mom while I’m gone, okay?”

  Paul scoffed. “A pal?”

  “Yeah, you know . . .” Sonny looked at the house. “Just listen to her and stuff. I worry, you know, that she doesn’t have anybody to —”

  “She’s fine,” Paul said, kicking the snow, preparing a safe spot to plant his feet. “She’s fine, Dad.”

  Sonny sighed. “Well, you’d think so, wouldn’t you? I’m just saying . . .”

  “Five-twenty-six-sixty-five . . . HIKE!”

  Sonny hiked and went lurching across the yard, faking out Hester immediately and beating June by five full steps by the time he reached the doghouse. Paul reared back and let go with a perfect pass, watched it spiral a straight line toward the white sky, then begin its descent into his father’s hands. In all ways it was an ordinary moment, but for an instant as the ball was falling a hole opened in Paul’s chest and he felt suddenly sad and old, as if something he hadn’t known he had were being taken from him.

  It was basketball season now, although Casey basketball wasn’t worshiped with nearly the same reverence as football. There were six junior high boys’ teams that played at the Y — no uniforms, just red pinnies versus green pinnies — and Paul rarely scored unless he was fouled, in which case he almost always made his free throws. Between the driveway on Willow Lane and the drive at Casey Station #1, he figured he’d sunk about ten thousand free throws in his brief life, but he was one of the shorter kids in basketball and was usually dwarfed under the hoop, each layup attempt met with hands that reached six inches higher than his own.

  That night when Paul got home from his game at the Y he heard a tremendous racket coming from the basement. Someone was whaling away on his drum set, which he himself hadn’t touched in at least six months. He thought one of his friends must have come over, must be waiting for him, but when he descended the stairs to the basement he found his mother in what could only be construed as a trance: her eyes closed, her tongue poking through her teeth, her long braid whipping around as she hammered fiercely at the snare and the toms, sweat glistening her neck. She didn’t even notice him standing there until, with a final and violent strike of the cymbal, she opened her eyes and blinked disconcertedly into the light of the basement, as if she’d forgotten where she was.

  “Oh,” she said. “Hi.”

  “Wow,” Paul said. He couldn’t find any other words. The whole scene made him uncomfortable, like he’d just caught his mother in the shower, or snorting cocaine off the coffee table, or torturing a cat.

  “I didn’t hear you come in,” she said. She snatched a hand towel from beside the drums — a hand towel? like a rock and roll drummer? — and mopped her brow. “What time is it?”

  “Almost six,” he said. “Um . . . when’d you start playing the drums?”

  “I don’t know. A little while ago.”

  “How come?”

  “Well, they were just sitting down here, gathering dust. I decided I needed a hobby.” She crisscrossed the sticks onto the snare. “Are you embarrassed?”

  She seemed to be asking if she should be embarrassed, that an outside opinion was necessary to fully assess the situation.

  “No,” he said quickly. “I just never knew a mom who played the drums.” And she, he thought, would not have been the one he’d expect to make the plunge. There was something unnervingly imprecise about whaling away on the drums, something that seemed to contradict everything he thought he understood about his mother. Wouldn’t needlework be more to her liking? Or crossword puzzles?

  “Did you win?” she asked.

  “Huh?”

  “Weren’t you playing basketball?”

  “Oh yeah,” he said. “No, we lost. Did you talk to Dad?”

  “No,” she said. “Why?”

  He shrugged. “I just thought he might of called.”

  “It’s still early out there. He’s probably just getting settled. You ready to eat?”

  “Sure,” he said absently. His mind was stuck on settled, bouncing back over it again and again like one of those scratched record albums his parents unearthed from the depths of their closet every few months. There was something too permanent about that word, settled, something that implied a whole new life. Would his father unpack his two suitcases, fill a foreign chest of drawers with his clothes? Of course he would; he couldn’t stand to live out of a suitcase, even for a couple days. He didn’t even like putting on clothes straight out of the dryer. He had neatly full drawers at home and neatly full drawers at the station and now he’d have neatly full drawers in California. Another place to consider home. As if two weren’t enough for any man.

  Sonny called late that night, and again two nights later, and then four nights after that, but his conversations — with both Laura and Paul — were brief and noticeably low on details. The movie was going fine, Sonny said. The actors were fine. The director was fine. The weather, fine. The hotel, fine.

  “How are you?” his father asked.

  “I’m fine,” Paul said.

  And he guessed he was. Though he’d spent thousands of days and nights with his father absent, there was something about this excessive degree of absent — two thousand miles away, in a world Paul could not even imagine — that lent a strange serenity to the house and to his heart. For one, the possibility of his father in peril was nonexistent. Even during Sonny’s recent months off active duty, there was always the chance an emergency would arise that would force his father back into his turnout gear. Now, when a siren wailed, Paul’s heart did not skip, his knees not chill. Was this how other people felt all the time? he wondered. Was this how normal kids — kids like Carson and Joe — felt, going hours, days even, without fearing the worst?

  And he found something else had changed too, something he couldn’t have predicted. More and more each day without his father, he enjoyed spending time alone with his mother. He would have thought that in his father’s absence her love and concern would have become more stifling, but just the opposite had occurred. One afternoon he came home from basketball practice with a fat knot on his forehead and all she’d said was “ouch,” then gone to the freezer and gotten him a bag of frozen peas to slow the swelling. They ate takeout at odd hours, stayed up late watching movies rented from the video store, winged snowballs at the dogs in the backyard. They even started playing music together in the basement. He only knew a dozen or so songs on the guitar, but she would accompany him on the likes of “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore” and “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad,” playing a soft 4/4 beat in the background with the snare and hi-hat cymbals while he stumbled through his chords, then coming in for a sloppy solo before the final verse.

  “A couple years and we’ll be ready to go on the road,” she said one evening, tossing her towel at her feet.

  “We need a lead singer,” he said. “Maybe Dad’ll do it.”

  Her expression soured. “Honey, you’ve heard your father sing. He’d ruin us.”

  “You’re right,” he said, recalling his father’s and Ben’s impromp
tu, half-drunken performance of the Doors at a department picnic a few years back, how someone’s dog had sprinted away, barking hysterically, when his father — standing on the hood of Ben’s pickup — had screamed: “Try to set the night on fiii-iiiire!”

  “So it’s just you and me,” she said. “Cutting-edge instrumentals. We don’t need anybody else.”

  He strummed absently on his guitar. They could make a video, he was thinking. They could make a video at the fire station. They could put the drum set on the roof of the engine and they could play from up there. No one had ever thought to do that before; it was surely as his mother had said: cutting-edge.

  “Do you still want to go?”

  “Huh?” he asked, jolted from his fantasy. “Go where?”

  She thumped the bass twice. “To California.”

  He was set to leave the following weekend. He’d been talking about it at school nonstop, had already chosen the clothes he would take, picked up four rolls of film at Dewey’s, paid for out of his allowance.

  “What do you mean? Sure I still want to go.”

  “We’re having pretty much fun here, aren’t we? Just the two of us?”

  He put down his guitar; if he’d kept it in his hands surely he would have hurled it at her, or snapped its neck over his knee. Had it all been a devious ploy, a master plan? Had his mother spent the last two weeks just pretending to be fun, just so she could talk him into staying home?

  “You promised,” he said sharply.

  “Don’t get angry,” she said. “I’m thinking of you, honey. Your father’s so busy. He might not —”

  “You promised!” he shouted. “I’ve told everybody at school! I can’t just tell them I’m not going now. It’s not fair.”

  “I’m just saying —”

  “You never let me do anything,” he said. He felt tears swell in his eyes and quickly blinked them away. Jesus Christ . . . just once he wanted to be able to get mad at his mother without crying, wanted to be angry like a man and not like a baby. “It’s embarrassing. People feel sorry for me. Everybody knows you’d probably keep me locked in the house if you could get away with it.”

  She recoiled, as if she’d been smacked across the face. “Honey, I didn’t mean . . . I didn’t know —”

  “I’m going,” he said, blinking madly against the tears. “You can’t stop me.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “I could stop you,” she warned.

  “But you won’t,” he said, his heart pounding. “You won’t.” He was certain of himself in a panicked sort of way, as if he held a weapon on her, but a weapon he wasn’t exactly sure how to fire.

  It was Sunday the ninth of February, finally Paul’s day of departure, and he was filling his bag with shorts and T-shirts in anticipation of the weather that awaited him in the West. He had never been so far from home before. The family had flown to Dallas once, for a firefighters’ convention, and the summer before they’d taken a road trip to Michigan to see some of his mother’s friends from college. But California was something else entirely, so far from central Pennsylvania that he couldn’t even get there in one flight; he’d go from Harrisburg to Detroit, then from Detroit to Los Angeles. Hollywood! And a whole week off school! It seemed impossible, something that would happen only to the most fortunate boy in a made-up story, like Charlie Bucket getting the whole Wonka chocolate factory for himself. His mother had insisted that he take his textbooks, that he keep up with his class readings so he wouldn’t be too far behind when he returned. But returning was a long way off — a world away, it seemed. He could read everything, he figured, on the long plane ride home.

  “Can I help you pack?” his mother asked from his bedroom doorway.

  “I guess,” he said, glancing up. “I’m almost done, though.”

  She picked up his socks and began rolling them into baseballs and placing them around the edges of his duffel bag. Then she set to work on the pile of underwear that lay on the bed, folding each brief into a perfect square. Paul felt he was too old to have his underwear folded, and he told her so.

  “Is it the underwear or the folding?” she asked, troubled.

  “Both,” he admitted. “I can pack on my own, you know.”

  “Of course I know. You can do all sorts of things on your own, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to stop doing them.”

  “Ever?”

  She sat down on the bed, resigned. “Listen, I kept my promise to you and now I want you to promise me something. I want you to promise me you’ll be careful. Will you do that for me, honey? Will you promise me?”

  She said it as if he were packing for a mission to the moon, as if his chances for safely breaching the atmosphere of Casey were slight at best. Paul wanted to ask her why, if she was so worried, she didn’t just blow off school for a week and come along to California with him. Would she be happier here, alone?

  “I’ll be good,” Paul said.

  She shook her head. “I didn’t say good, I said careful. You just pick up the phone and call me if you want to come home, if you don’t like it out there.”

  “It’s just a week.”

  “Nine days,” she said. “And it’s a whole different world out there, Paul. It’s not like Casey. There are a million people there, honey. Literally, a million. You won’t know anyone.”

  “I’ll know Dad,” he said, irritated.

  “Of course.”

  “And Ian,” he added, setting his new sandals on top of his underwear.

  “Ian . . .” She sighed. “I’m not sure anyone knows Ian. Not even Ian. I don’t want you following him around, you understand?”

  “What would I want to follow him around for? I don’t even like the guy.”

  “Well maybe you wouldn’t,” she said. “But your dad might. I just think you two need to look out for each other.”

  He smirked into the privacy of his closet, yanked another shirt off its hanger. So this was it; this was why she had given in so easily. It didn’t have squat to do with keeping promises. She was letting him go to California so he could check up on his father. He was now the older sibling, the responsible one, the one who’d heed the warnings and spot danger — in the form of Ian Finch, or something else so wickedly foreign she couldn’t name it — on the horizon.

  “We’ll be fine,” he said, tossing in the last shirt and zipping up the duffel.

  “Paul . . .” She reached out for his hand, and he took it loosely, sat down beside her. He felt awkward next to her, awkward in a way that made him want to put some distance, at least a foot of bedspread, between them. Long gone were the days when he could press his face into her shoulder for comfort; when would she finally realize this? When he was thirteen? Sixteen? Twenty-five?

  “Your father . . .” she started.

  “I know,” he said impatiently, slipping his hand free from her grip. “I know he’s been kinda weird. But you shouldn’t give up on him.”

  Her eyes widened in surprise. “You think I’m giving up on him? Why would you think that?” Now her eyes narrowed. Her eyes, Paul thought, were her greatest weapon and her greatest weakness. Once you learned to read them you knew her words before she said them, maybe before she even knew them herself. “Did he tell you that?”

  “He didn’t tell me anything,” Paul said. “I swear. It’s just —”

  “I haven’t given up on him, honey,” she said gloomily. “He’s just been . . . unanchored, I guess. Drifting a little. And I think it’s probably even worse when he’s around Ian all the time. You know what I mean, don’t you? He just might be . . . caught up in Ian things or something. I don’t want you to go all the way across the country only to feel like a third wheel.”

  “I won’t,” Paul said, getting to his feet. “I’ll be fine. We’ll be fine.”

  She looked up at him hopefully. “Promise?”

  Stepping into the terminal at LAX, Paul was swallowed by the swirl of passengers and greeters, his heart fluttering with the vicarious joy of so many people genu
inely happy to see each other. Hugging and rehugging, unabashed smiles, tender kisses, squealing children, rows of families holding hands as they departed the gate (Red Rover, Red Rover . . . just try and break us), years of disappointing baggage falling away around him — so briefly — at the moment of reunion.

  But his father wasn’t there. He turned circles in the melee, looking for a familiar face. Was that? — no. Oh, there he — no. Gradually the crowd dispersed, and he sat down, alone and deflated, cradling his duffel bag in his lap. There was some mix-up — his father had written down the wrong flight number, the wrong airline. Well heck, he wasn’t a baby; he could take a taxi, could get there on his own . . . but what hotel were they staying at? He realized he didn’t know, or if he knew he’d forgotten. He could call his mother and find out — but no, really, he couldn’t. A call like that would only confirm her worst fears. She’d probably demand he get on the next plane back to Pennsylvania. And she would never forgive his father.

  A heavyset man with a loosened tie sat down two chairs to his right and made a call on his cellular phone. At the gate across from his, three children were sitting on the floor playing cards. It had only been five minutes, Paul thought. Five minutes, ten at the outside. Dads were always late, right? When the boys took a Saturday trip to the mall for pizza and a movie, Mr. Diehl regularly screeched into the parking lot twenty minutes after the assigned pickup time. But that was Carson’s dad. His own father was never late. Everything about his father was on time.

  So okay, he reasoned, there’d been an accident on the way to the airport. His father was injured, but not severely, and right now he was lying in an ambulance telling the paramedics in no uncertain terms that someone needed to get to the airport immediately because his son was arriving and he didn’t want to leave him there alone, sitting by himself in a strange city where he knew no one. Yes, an accident. He breathed a little easier. His father had not forgotten him. His father had merely been in an accident.

  But then there he was, jogging down the terminal, dodging those who had the gall to walk at a relaxed pace. He wore black sweatpants, sneakers, and an old T-shirt. His usually clean-shaven face was covered by something just barely resembling a goatee. Clenched in his fist was what appeared to be a basketball jersey, which he held triumphantly in the air as he approached.