“What was that? Why’d you trance out on me?”
Three days later, she announced that there was no future for them as a couple.
“There’s always going to be two separate paths for us,” she said like she’d been practicing it. “I’m sure it’s totally obvious to me and totally not to you, but that difference right there is how it would be for us. You thinking one way and me the other, forever.”
Alek had not only given her something she didn’t need, he had brought this all on himself. Helpless, they sat there and started their long good-bye, on the front steps of his house, just out of the way of the rain.
The hallway was sagging and chipped, much like his parents. The afternoon would be punctuated by creaks. Some easy, pretty touches might improve moods and flexibility.
No, too risky. Instead, he restumped the foundations. Subtle, but lasting. The house would stand as long as they needed it. He got ahead of himself and before he knew it, the leak he could hear in the kitchen wall was taped, every room was repainted, and the floors were sanded from a dull tarnished bronze to goldenrod, right under their feet. It’s just a visit, he reminded himself.
“So Alek,” his father said, resting his hands heavily on his shoulders, “why don’t you get settled?”
Alek dropped his pack in the middle of the front hall. “Done.”
His father smiled, a bit more easily than before. Maybe there had been an effect from the renovations. “Then may I give the others their marching orders?”
“I’m all geared up for the love-and-concern pile.”
“Will do.” Content with a job, his father headed for the kitchen.
Again, his mother embraced him as best she could, resting her head against his chest. “I’m never letting go,” she said.
He looked around for other touch-ups he could do. The time that he had admitted to Vicenta that he once believed the house to be a force of evil, she didn’t look surprised. She told him he was projecting anxieties about his family onto the house because he couldn’t deal with feeling trapped by them. What he couldn’t deal with was psychiatry.
His mother said, “How does it feel to be back? I wasn’t sure if I would ever see you again.”
How did he feel? Free as a baby in his mother’s arms.
The hallway was dotted with framed photos of the family, mostly without Alek. His father’s retirement from the newspaper; Ben and Janelle with a pimpled Ivan at a barbecue; Giordana in cap and gown, with Jonah mock-kneeling like a supplicant next to her; Sasha and Damon in suits, dancing together at a party; Ruth and his mother, in sundresses and arm in arm, kicking, in a two-woman chorus line. The lone photo of Alek was so old, it had a white border. The four of them at the beach, smiling for the camera. Teenaged Alek looking off to the side, one foot braced behind him in the sand, ready to jet out of the shot.
There was a mild risk to it, but he rearranged the frames, adding a few pictures of himself from over the years, not that he’d ever taken any. A small gesture, but it was finite. It felt right. Alek grinning at the grill in some kitchen he was working in; leading that group toward the steaming volcano two days before it erupted; huddled under a yellow rain poncho at the foot of some glacial waterfall, backpack hump behind him; some group shots, him with friends and girlfriends from along the way, sitting down to meals, picking beans, asleep in a giant oak.
His father was on the phone. “He seems all right, considering.”
The last time Alek and his mother were in this hallway, they’d had a fight about medications.
Being new meant that he lived too long in his childhood bedroom, which came with its own difficulties. One of these was appearing normal. Unfortunately, his many attempts to stick to acceptable conversation and commonly understood time lines had failed. They could tell he was still a shade too playful with reality for an adult, which always led back to a doctor’s office.
The first pills hadn’t cured him, so they tried others. When those didn’t work, they upped the dose, combining them with another family of pharmaceuticals, and then they hyphenated his diagnosis so it would all be justifiable. What he received were side effects—shaking, thoughts that went nowhere, and a dead sex drive that translated into a dead everything. The ahistorical comments, though, hadn’t slowed down a bit.
It was too much. The struggle to contain it all was turning him into a parody of what they wanted. At the next deadlock, he tried the big bluff: he admitted that he had made everything up. He promised he wouldn’t do it anymore.
The excuse was as much a way out for him as it was for them. He would restrain himself from making further adjustments so there would be no more jumps in the record; they could pretend it was all a bad dream.
They didn’t buy it. It was like blaming his disappearances on congestion. They accused him of pouching pills in his cheeks.
His father came up with a bargain: Alek could continue to live with them as long as they watched him swallow three different pills every night. That would be a condition of the comforts of home. Alternately, he could leave. There was no choice. If he stayed, he would become the drugged son in the upstairs bedroom.
Alek bounced his pack down the stairs toward the front door. His mother said, “Why don’t you try what your father suggests for a few weeks?”
His father followed close behind, knowing he wouldn’t. “That’s good, leave. You’ll see. The first boss that doesn’t think that showing up for work is optional, the first girl who doesn’t want to smoke the same things that you smoke, we’ll find out how strong your principles are then.”
As he headed for the door, the three of them pushed through the narrow hall, crowding the space where he and his mother were currently standing. Alek wondered if she felt those people too.
After he had left that day, he stood on the top step like a man on a plank. If he waited long enough, she would come out and wave him back in. She didn’t.
There was another angle to try before giving up. He went back a decade, to their first friction, the time when the routine of the house and high school were starting to get in the way of his exploration. He gave his mother a flex of sudden nerve and muscle. He couldn’t go back and change himself, but he could change her. She would spy on him and discover his secrets. She would pin him down and make him talk. He would tell her. From there, they would have figured out a way to all live together. A change would come that would bring him back inside or send him with confidence into the world. Alek waited, but nothing happened. The new memories came to him. She had taken her strength in the wrong direction and Alek hadn’t confided in her or anyone. Nothing was different. He was still standing out there alone with the front door he had slammed behind him. Just because it was magic didn’t mean it was easy.
With Alek’s additions, the photo wall had become much more welcoming, but he had been careless. If there were photos in the hall, there would have been letters. Brief, yes, but it meant contact when there had been almost none. He would have to ride this through, trying to keep a grip on the shape of the day. Already, these modifications had transformed his mood. The impulse to undo what he had done was gone.
Even the eagerness of the need in his mother’s touch—it eased by a fraction.
“Everything is more or less where it’s always been,” she said, pushing away from him with a poke in his chest, “except where Dad and I have become too wizened to bend down or reach up.” She turned her back to him. “You look well,” she said, bracing herself against the wooden skirting with her fingertips. “Older, but that is apparently the only way we acquire all this alleged wisdom. I, for one, haven’t attained enlightenment. Yet.” A weak chuckle followed, while she moved gingerly down the hallway toward the kitchen.
As she walked, Alek noticed that the wall was still filling with pictures. They were scuffing the new paint job as they straightened themselves into rows. He had written to his parents, often, always with new photos. Here I am arriving in another strange place. Here I am leaving it. Her
e I am full of resolve. Here I am full of resolve again. They probably wrote two for every one of his.
Even though he could think back and remember months and years with no contact, the letters settled into him too. The tracks of his wanderings turned, if only to make sure he received the mail, wherever he was. The hundred letters he had received were treasured. They were a talisman of home. He became aware that every one of them was right there with him, cramming into a big manila folder at the top of his pack.
His father called from the kitchen. “There’s cider in here if you want. We bought that brand you like.”
The wall continued to change. A few of the friendly faces he had met along the way began to bleach away, leaving him on his own in a tent or at a beach. They would stay in his memory, but that was it. Their lives would have clicked into different plots. The shared meals, the muddy walks in inescapable rain—gone. Their memories of him would be getting scratched out right now.
The appearance of pictures slowed as the folder in his pack grew tight. All this new history took hold. Alek realized that he was comfy.
His bedroom had become his mother’s studio. On top of the desk lay a recent painting of hers, a view of their garden from a grasshopper’s height. There were no signs that he had lived here recently, which was a relief.
Still, remnants of his childhood and adulthood peeked at him from various corners. Two rows of sci-fi novels crammed together on the bottom of the bookshelf; the wooden pegboard game he’d made with his father, now a paperweight; the elephant print tucked behind the desk and sitting on the floor. The book he was after, Tales from Other Lands, was in a box marked “Boys,” high up on a wardrobe shelf. He opened to the last story to look at the illustration. It was as he remembered it. A tan collage of a square-faced boy talking to a bright red swirl that took up most of the page. The image had imprinted on him, but he had forgotten the story:
There was once a boy who was too curious for his own good. He left his family’s farm to make his fortune. Before he had even said his farewell to the dog—right outside the front gate—he met a giant snake, with scales the color of rubies. The snake said to him, “You must stay with your family.” The boy said, “But I want to see the world.” The snake said, “Their blood is your blood. They are yours, you are theirs, forever.” The boy went back home and grew responsible. He helped his father with the animals and the fences. He worked with his mother to keep the garden and cook their meals. No one ever found out that he had even dreamed of seeing mountains and oceans. Occasionally he would write a good-bye note and pack some clothes and a bunch of carrots, but as soon as he’d leave, guess who would always be waiting for him? The snake spoke to him the same way every time. And every time, the boy was back home before his note was ever found. Eventually, he fell in love with a woman from a nearby town and they built a house right next to his parents. The young couple married and had five children. They worked very hard and were soon able to buy their own cows, pigs, and chickens. They planted the best crops for the land they had and kept them productive year after year. The man and woman were happy much of the time, but they had to work long hours to keep everyone fed, especially when his parents grew frail. Thoughts of leaving were nearly forgotten. Whenever he had a fleeting idea of running away from his ever-increasing responsibilities, the snake would appear to him, sometimes in his own bed as he was falling asleep. “Their blood is your blood. They are yours and you are theirs, forever.” The man’s children grew up and fell in love. They left home to see mountains and oceans. No snake is stopping them, he thought to himself as each one of them went off. The boy became an old man, burying his father, his mother, and finally his wife, at the very back of the farm. Years later, when his breathing grew difficult and his legs grew shaky, he sold his livestock to a neighbor, packed the few possessions that mattered to him, and started down the road. Immediately, the snake was there beside him. Before it could even speak, the man shouted, “What do you want? There’s nobody left at home! There’s no kin there to share a meal with me. Surely I can go to see what I’ve missed by staying here.” The snake raised its head high over the old man and said, “You have already seen all that this life has to offer you,” and plunged his fangs through his shirt and into his heart. He had done what the snake had told him to do and this was his repayment! The old man was enraged, his mouth opening and closing with injustice and blood. Staggering back against the fence that had given shape to his life, he looked into the snake’s shining eyes and saw compassion. The last thought he had as he fell to the ground was that the snake had protected him for all these years.
Endings could be so cruel. What was a child supposed to learn from that, except that you had to help your parents with chores? He saw his six-year-old self on the carpet, lying on his stomach and staring down at the picture, trying to understand. He would have talked back to the picture, telling the snake to mind its own damned business and telling the boy to run as far as he could.
Once, on his own quest to see mountains and oceans, Alek had hooked up for a while with a relief worker who was bouncing between gigs. She had been with a lot of flakes before, so she was onto him early. Too wild-eyed when he talked, no romantic history to speak of. She didn’t know what she was after either, but all she knew was that one day he was going to get weird on her. Waiting till he was at ease, when his head was resting in her lap, she leaned forward to find out what he was about. Her hair made a shimmering curtain around his face. They were alone. She made her move. “Quick: Which word makes you feel better, ‘tightrope’ or ‘net’?”
“Both,” he said. It won him a very decent kiss, for honesty, if he remembered correctly. But she later used it as evidence that he would never be comfortable holding still with her.
By now, it was almost certain that they had never met.
Listening to the house, he could still hear pictures skittering on the wall. This was not how the visit was supposed to go. He was choosing the net. Or the net was choosing him. He couldn’t say for sure if it mattered anymore. Since Giordana had called, had he ever had a choice? In another unguarded hour this would be his bedroom again.
Alek and his father were out on the porch, saying little when the caravan drove up. In one car, there was Ruth with Giordana and Jonah and their dog; in another, Sasha and Damon in the front, with Ben, Janelle, and Ivan squished into the back.
They all spilled out. Jonah took Ruth’s hand to lead her up the steps. Giordana retrieved a foil brick, Ruth’s orange cake, from the car.
Ben and Ivan hung back, like they’d been forced to dress up and behave for the day, but Janelle leaped ahead, grinning at Alek as she took the five steps all at once, the way she used to. Ivan had become the tallest.
The dog was the one who beat them all to the front door and sat there, tail wagging with anticipation.
Alek followed Peter into the hallway, bracing himself for the full immersion.
Though he had visited each of them in recent years, he watched the way they saw him. Their caution and indulgence told him who he was: a grizzled man, shorter and less sparkly than he had once been. He had worn out the patience of a perfectly honest family and was still being given a hero’s welcome.
Sasha pulled his brother into a buddy embrace, savoring it. Inevitably, he also forced a laugh at the importance of the moment, saying, “Wonderful, wonderful,” in a precise imitation of their father.
Ben shook Alek’s hand but kept his distance, saying, “You look well,” and nothing else.
Janelle wrapped herself around Alek and clasped her hands tightly behind him. “I can’t believe it’s you. You were my first job!”
Ivan shook Alek’s hand the same way his father did—uninterested in making an impression. He watched Alek with an uneasy smile, like he was sniffing around for schizophrenia.
“Do you even remember me?” Alek asked him.
“Barely,” he said, startled, as if he hadn’t expected Alek to speak.
Giordana pulled Alek
close, till they were forehead to forehead. What power would she have picked now, or would she still want to disappear? She gripped his shoulders with her usual intensity and said, “You feel so very good. Thank you.”
From behind her, Jonah started to offer his greeting, but Ruth pushed through to plow her fingers through Alek’s hair and cover his cheeks with kisses.
“There’s some silver coming in around the edges, but we’ll allow it,” she said. She held him tight, so she wouldn’t lose him again.
Remember: They’re not asking you for a thing.
Ruth turned Alek’s chin toward her, holding it under the hallway light so she could look at him. “Tell me. Do you have any stories for us, my sweet?”
Alek evaded the question with a smile.
On the plane, he had sat next to a housepainter who lived six months of the year with his wife and traveled on his own for the other six. “You’d think all that separate time, her at home and me getting myself lost, would lead to friction. Seventeen years says it doesn’t. I come through the door and it’s like any other Friday night.”
Alek told the man believable bits of his own story. He found himself envying the man’s wandering as well as the fact of his wife. Alek had never managed any balance. The wandering had become halfhearted—a juggling act he could sustain for no particular benefit; and the wife, well, she had never materialized. The man claimed to be jealous of Alek. He was being polite. Alek listened. The fond regard covered for what the man really saw: a vagabond mess. Their talk ran down after that, but as they parted at the baggage claim area, the man squeezed Alek’s shoulder like they were old friends. “And what’s next for you? What are you going to conjure up to make your family forgive you for abandoning them?”
Jonah pointed to the dog. “And this is Lance.”
The collie was on all fours, groomed and proper. Alek squatted to greet him. Lance sniffed with minor interest. It was almost hurtful. Usually, animals were hypnotized by his fragrance and attention.
What the Family Needed Page 19