“You know that model ship I showed you the other day?” Peter asked. “Do you remember if we left it outside?”
“No,” Kate said. “Why? Can’t find it?”
“No. And I think my mom was looking for it this morning.”
Kate dropped down to sit on her heels. “We had it by the rocks. Oh, but then we floated it. Was that the same day?” There was a pile of snow that had melted in the sun, and they’d placed the gleaming wood boat in the narrow stream that flowed from the top of Kate’s driveway to the street.
“I think I had it after that.”
Kate turned, her wide hazel eyes looking at him steadily. It was like watching choppy water go smooth as glass. There was a time—kindergarten or first grade—when one of them might have idly taken the other’s hand to crack the knuckles, to measure the breadth and length of their fingers against each other, to lock fists and declare a thumb war, and even then he could feel something in her settle, go still, when he had her full attention. But they’d gotten too old for thumb wars. She brushed her hair from her face and tucked it behind her ears. The others were calling her from the back of the bus. “Will you get in trouble?”
“No, it’s fine,” Peter said. He had a scab on his knuckle and he pried up the edge with his fingernail.
“But we’d better find it,” she said.
Peter shrugged. “Yeah.”
Over the years, whenever the subject of Peter’s parents came up, Kate studied him and was uncharacteristically quiet. Only once, when they were sitting out by the rocks—Kate wearing black wool tights on her head so she could pretend the legs were two long ponytails that reached her waist—had she hinted that she noticed anything was different about his mom, compared to other moms. That day, they’d looked up in unison as his mother drove up the street. They watched her park her car, hurry into the house without looking left or right or saying hello to anyone. Kate’s mother was outside pulling weeds. Mr. Maldonado was painting their mailbox post. Two houses down Mr. O’Hara was digging a hole to plant a sapling and had invited the kids on the block to help fill it in when he’d gotten the tree in place.
“Why is your mother like that?” Kate asked that day. The yards were small, shaded by heavy trees. Peter knew by the cracks of light between the branches and the rising chorus of cicadas that it would soon be time for all the kids to go inside. He had been hoping Mr. O’Hara would call for their help before his mother came home.
“Why is my mother like what?” Peter answered after a moment. They were in second grade, had just made First Holy Communion. Peter opened his hands as if in prayer, leaned over the tall grass between the two largest boulders—impossible to reach with a lawn mower no matter how hard Mr. Gleeson cursed and rammed his up against the crevice—and bringing his palms together he caught a grasshopper. He held the wings together with his thumbs so Kate could look at it more closely, and when he brought his hands to her face he could feel her warm breath on his wrists. They’d spent the summer trying to catch one, and there one was, sitting right beside them when they’d just about given up.
“Like she is. You know.”
But he didn’t know, really. And neither did Kate. So they let the subject drop.
* * *
After Central Ave. came Washington, then Madison, then Jefferson, and once the bus rumbled past the Berkwoods’ pine tree, Peter could see his own driveway.
“We’re gonna have a war,” Kate said as she leaned into him to get a better look out the window. Half the kids had taken out their lunches and fished out the snacks. The bus smelled like potato chips and Hi-C. “Two teams. Twenty minutes to make ammo and then the war begins.”
The bus bounced them up and down, jolted them forward and back. Branches, sky, and then he saw it: the maroon of her car. Beside him, he knew Kate spotted it, too.
“Okay, well, you’ll ask, right?” Kate said. “You might be allowed.”
“Yeah,” Peter said.
They tumbled down the bus steps, one after the other, into the afternoon. “See ya maybe,” Peter said, hitching his backpack up on his shoulder. The clouds were backlit, phosphorescent. Kate stood there for a moment like she’d forgotten something, and then she ran up her steps and into her house.
* * *
He found her in the near dark of the kitchen, pulling the yellow skins off a pile of chicken drumsticks. The cuffs of her shirt kept brushing the raw meat. “You can do this, can’t you?” she said without turning around. It was twelve twenty in the afternoon. They wouldn’t eat dinner for another six hours. She usually twisted her hair away at the top of her head when she was cooking, but today her hair was loose around her face, stringy. He tried to read what was coming in the set of her shoulders. He put down his backpack, unzipped his coat. She’d not eaten anything at dinner the night before, and he’d watched his father glance at her as he told a long, drawn-out story about something that had happened at work. He made himself a drink and then rattled the ice cubes around the bottom of the glass. She had a way of cringing and closing her eyes as if against the sight of something too painful to look at straight on, except it was just Peter, just his father. They were just sitting at a table. Just talking about stuff that had happened to them that day.
“Mom’s not feeling great,” Brian Stanhope said when she finally went upstairs to lie down. He seemed to not notice her leaving, but once she was gone he made himself another drink and then broke open a baked potato, dropped a slice of butter on the steaming white inside. “She’s on her feet all day, you know? Not like an office job.” He reached for the salt.
“You’re on your feet all day, too, right?”
“Ah, not all day,” Brian Stanhope said. “And it’s different for women. They need—I don’t know.”
Peter wondered if the way his mother acted sometimes was related to the reason Renee Otler was allowed to go to the bathroom in the middle of assembly even though no one was ever allowed to go during assembly. Kate wouldn’t talk about it on the bus. When they were alone out at the rocks, she said that he better not tell any of the boys, but Renee had gotten her you-know-what on the playground the day before and the school nurse had showed her how to use a pad. She was the first of the girls, as far as Kate knew. “I’ll probably be last,” she added as she pulled her T-shirt tight across her chest and frowned at what she saw there.
When Kate said “pad,” Peter felt a shock go through him and he could feel his face burn. Kate tilted her head with interest. “You know about periods, right?”
* * *
“Sure. Just like this?” Peter said now, pulling at the edge of the slippery chicken skin. The kitchen was so dark that Peter had trouble making out the bowls she’d set up on the table: eggs beaten in one, a pyramid of breadcrumbs in another. As she made her way upstairs to her bedroom, he tried to find the rhythm that she seemed to have when she made their dinner. He oiled the baking sheet, as he’d often seen her do, lined up the breaded chicken drums. He could hear the kids assembling outside. He washed his hands, and as he listened to the soft tick-tick-ticking of the gas stove heating up, he stood at the back door and glimpsed Larry McBreen’s red-and-blue striped jacket as he stomped along the cut-through behind the Gleesons’ house. The Maldonados would be out. Kate’s sisters. The Dills. The Frankel twins, who went to public school. Everyone.
When he found that ship, he’d go up and show her that he had it, that he’d not lost track of it. She’d been so excited to give it to him. Together they’d read the certificate that had come with it, and she said she’d bring him to the library to find a book on Sir Francis Drake, or about woodworking, or about shipbuilding, or all three. That night, when he went to the fridge to get out the carton of milk, she’d pulled him toward her like she used to when he was five or six, and whispered that it had cost six hundred dollars, plus another seventy-five for shipping. Then she made her eyes big, as if she let the information slip out by accident and had not, in fact, been dying to tell him, and by that he knew he shoul
d never tell his father. She’d seen it in a catalog one of her patients had left behind at the hospital and decided Peter had to have it. When she’d pictured having a son, she’d always pictured him playing with things like that ship. It was made in London, she continued, her eyes full of delighted mischief as if he knew what that meant. She’d lived in England for nearly two years, a long time ago. They had the loveliest things there, she told him. What had gotten into her head about New York? She couldn’t remember. A job? Some notion that it would be better than England? She’d told him all of it before. It was her favorite subject when she was in a talkative mood. He got a restless feeling when she spoke of those years. It was a tragedy, clearly, from her view, that she’d left one life and ended up in another. A path had diverged in a wood and she chose the one she’d regret forever. And yet there Peter was, very glad to have been born, listening to her, thinking she looked prettier than the other mothers when she dressed up a little and washed her hair. Anyway, she said, smiling faintly. She was so happy he liked the ship because that said something about him, it really did. It said something about his taste and his intelligence. And then, when she went to work on Monday morning—the only morning she had to leave before his bus—he’d brought it outside to show Kate and he hadn’t seen it since.
The thing was, the ship was fun to look at, but after a few days of looking, there was not much more to do with it. It floated, just as she promised it would, but when they sent it sailing down Kate’s driveway with the rushing meltwater, it had gotten a pair of scratches that ran parallel to the hull. He’d pulled off his mittens and rubbed at the scratches with his thumb, but there they were, glaringly obvious in the polished mirror finish of the wood. Kate wanted to send it downstream again, this time with an old Barbie on board, but he was afraid it would get more scratches. So he’d put it somewhere safe. But where?
The quiet of the house when she kept to her room was not the peaceful silence of a library, or anywhere near as tranquil. It was, Peter imagined, more like the held-breath interlude between when a button gets pushed and the bomb either detonates or is defused. He could feel his own heartbeat at those times. He could track his blood as it looped through his veins.
His father seemed to go on with life as if his mother were merely at work, or at the store. He didn’t seem to notice when she began to skip meals, when her teeth became dull and thick with plaque, when her posture changed. Even if she stayed mostly up in her bedroom for three, four, five days, his father still ate his cereal standing at the sink. He still read the headlines of the Post out loud. When he reached for the little paper package of ground coffee and found it empty, he still said to Peter, “We’re out of coffee,” and then he’d go write it on the list Anne kept on a pad by the telephone, as if she’d merely stepped out. When Peter was little—first and second grade—his father sometimes spoke to her before he left for work, shutting the door to their bedroom so that Peter wouldn’t come in. “Look out for your bus, buddy,” he’d say, and Peter—bundled in his winter coat, his backpack straps securely looped across both shoulders—would keep an eye on the clock over the table. When the little hand was nearly on the eight and the big hand was between nine and ten, he knew to go stand outside.
Then, around third or fourth grade, Peter noticed his father didn’t go in and talk to her anymore. Sometimes he’d glance up the stairs before he left for work. Sometimes he’d say goodbye and then circle back, as if there was something he’d forgotten. It occurred to Peter that his father actually liked these periods where she disappeared to her room for a few days. He seemed lighter, more relaxed. He sat on the couch after work and left his drink on the coffee table. One night he told Peter that it was his thirty-sixth birthday, and Peter felt terrible that probably no one had said happy birthday to him all day, but his father didn’t seem to mind. He let Peter have toaster waffles for dinner. He watched basketball on TV and stayed up all night. The drone of the television at three o’clock in the morning was somehow more upsetting to Peter than the fact that his mother hadn’t come downstairs in a week, and Peter would wake up disoriented, panicked, like he’d slept through his alarm and missed the bus. Sometimes, he’d bring his pillow to the hall and wait. She went to the bathroom, he knew. She would lean over the bathroom sink, put her mouth on the lime-scaled faucet, and take long slugs of cold water before heading back to her room.
“Mom,” he’d say when she stepped out, and she would stop, put her hand on his head, completely unsurprised to find her child lying in the hall in the middle of the night. He’d remind her—two weeks ahead of time, a month—he had a birthday party to attend, a present to buy, a family tree project at school he needed her help on. He’d inform her that he’d eaten a grape jelly sandwich for both breakfast and lunch, hoping to draw her out. But she’d just close her eyes as if the sound of his voice was abrasive, and retreat again to the cave of her room until she was ready to emerge.
And when she did emerge after a few days, she usually emerged as Peter’s favorite version of his mother. She’d been tired and needed rest, Peter figured, and she’d gotten it. Often, after seeing only dim glimpses of her for days, he’d wake to the smell of bacon and eggs, pancakes. She’d greet him softly and then she’d watch him eat while she smoked a cigarette and blew the smoke out the back door. She was calm. Serene. Like a person who’d been through a harrowing experience and was relieved to have arrived on the other side.
Maybe she was coming down with something, Peter thought as he put the chicken in the oven and searched the pantry for what might go along. A can of green beans. Something to make her happy. Maybe she’d caught the flu. He’d go up to her bedroom door and tell her it was all done. No need to worry. He could bring her a plate later or she could come down, whatever she felt like doing. He’d just gotten out a saucepan when he heard his father open the door. “Anne?” he called out, and then “Oh,” when he crossed into the kitchen to find Peter.
“School got out early.”
“Where’s Mom?”
“Resting,” Peter said. “I was just—” He held up the can of beans.
“We’ll do that later, buddy. That’ll just take a minute when we’re ready to eat.”
Peter put the can down. He left the saucepan on the stovetop for later. “Well, then can I go out to play for a while? Some of the kids—”
“I saw them. Go on. Have fun.”
“The chicken is—”
“I’ll take care of it.”
* * *
The first shot of war had not yet been fired. The teams had assembled on the wide stretch of flat yard beside the Maldonados’ house. Kate saw him first. “We get Peter!” she called, and every head turned. “Did you find it?” she asked when he took his spot beside her. They’d drawn boundaries—one team would fire from behind the grove of trees, the other from behind Mr. Maldonado’s Cadillac.
“Not yet,” he said.
A snowball exploded on the front hubcap of the Caddy. In an instant, Peter, Kate, and the rest were returning fire, the cold burning their hands, their cheeks, while under their coats their bodies grew warmer. As Kate gathered as many snowballs as she could, Peter crouched beside her, hammering them at the other team faster than she could make them. His nose running, his cheeks stinging, he forgot about the ship, about his mother, about the chicken drums he hoped his father would remember to take out of the oven. Kate was laughing so hard she fell face-first into a pile of snow.
Their side ran out of ammo. When half their team broke off to build up a store again, the ones who kept fighting got pelted, had to go lie down in the graveyard. “This sucks,” Kate’s sister Natalie said after a few minutes. “I’m going inside.” When she stood up and walked across the battlefield, skirting the dead bodies like they were nothing, the game collapsed and the battlefield became just a yard again, the soldiers became kids. One by one, the others emerged from cover and headed home. The snow began to fall in earnest.
“You coming?” Sara said to Kate as sh
e headed for their front door. The three Gleeson sisters crisscrossed traits. Kate looked more like Natalie, but Natalie had dark hair and was at least four inches taller than Kate. Sara and Kate were both blond, but other than those two details they didn’t look at all alike. All three of them spoke with their hands, like their mother. “In a minute,” Kate said.
“You going in?” Kate asked Peter when it was just the two of them left.
“I guess,” he said.
“My mom made hot chocolate. We could take a thermos to the rocks.”
“I better not.”
“Okay,” she said, looking past him to his house, to the upstairs window where his mother was looking down at them. “It’s your mom,” Kate said, offering an uncertain wave. Then she dropped her hand and waited, as if giving Peter’s mother a chance to wave back. “My mom?” Peter wheeled around, cupped his hand to his eyes.
“That’s your room, isn’t it? Your window?” Kate asked.
* * *
By the time he stripped off his wet mittens, hat, scarf, coat, and boots and bounded up the stairs to his room, the ship was in bits. Some things came off easily as they were made to do in case they needed replacement. The jib, the boom, the crow’s nest. But the entire hull was in splinters. Seeing the raw, broken-open insides of wood that had been varnished to a shine was like seeing something naked and vulgar, and Peter had to look away.
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