“It was in the garage,” she said evenly. “It was just sitting there on the lid of the garbage can.”
“I know,” Peter said, astonished. He felt dizzy, confused. “That’s where I left it.” It came to him now in full color: hearing the hollow rumble of the school bus’s engine coming around the corner, running into his garage with the ship to place it somewhere safe until his return.
“You left it where it could slide right off and fall? You left it where it could get damaged? Why?”
“I was playing with it. I wanted to show it to Kate. You know, because I liked it. I really liked my present, Mom. And then I left it there because I heard the bus.” Peter looked at the wreckage strewn across his comforter and felt a roar come into his head. His mother put her fingertips to her temples and stood.
“Why would you want to show that girl? Why would you take it outside?”
“I don’t know. I just wanted her to see it.”
“Well that’ll learn you.” She crossed the room and slapped him hard across the mouth. “And that’ll learn you.”
Peter staggered back, his face numb at first and then, on a delay, his left cheek felt as if stung by a thousand needles. He touched the corner of his mouth with his tongue to search for blood. As he clutched his cheek, he looked around at his books, his poster of the solar system. What was he meant to learn? He really tried to see it. He felt like he was breathing through a straw.
“But you broke it,” he said. “It was okay when you found it. And then you smashed it.” His voice felt thick as he spoke and the pressure in his head was so heavy he was afraid something would burst. “You said it cost all that money. It didn’t get broken where I left it.” He felt wild all of a sudden. He flew to his bed and whipped the comforter and blankets off, and all the little bits of ship that hadn’t already been scattered went flying. He toppled the tower of books on his desk. He threw a basket of Magic Markers he kept on a shelf. He went to his windowsill and grabbed the snow globe she’d given him when he was just a kindergartner. Santa flying his sleigh high over the Empire State Building. He held it over his head.
Brian came running up the stairs to Peter’s room, still holding the remote control of the TV.
“What the hell is going on?” He saw the shipwreck. “Christ.”
Anne gathered her robe around her. “Ask him. Ask him how he treats nice things.” She came over to Peter and shoved him. “Ask him.” Another shove. “Ask him.”
“Stop it, Anne,” Brian said, pulling her away. “Stop.” He threaded his fingers behind his head and stood at the window for a moment with his back to them. When he turned he said, “Okay, Pete.” He began opening Peter’s dresser drawers. He grabbed underwear, an undershirt. Sweats. He pushed everything into Peter’s chest and told him to shove it all in his backpack.
His mother watched them. “What are you doing?” she demanded.
“You did this,” Brian said calmly. “The way you act. You did this.”
As Peter followed his father down the stairs, they heard her shrieking after them, though the words were sheared off as soon as Brian closed the front door.
Having to wait for the car to warm up cut down on the drama of their exit, and already, the adrenaline that had left Peter breathless had slowed. His cheek still stung but it was better now. It didn’t feel right, leaving her alone in the house with that stunned expression on her face, and he circled back to the idea that there’d been a misunderstanding of some kind. There was a piece of the story either she was missing or he was.
Next to him, fiddling with the heating vents so that they were all pointed toward the windshield, his father was caught up in some private riptide that Peter could feel only faintly. Brian banged the steering wheel with the heel of his hand. He did it again. The snow was already thick on the street and mailboxes, the battle scars the kids had left on the Maldonados’ side yard already made smooth again. Once they could finally back out of the driveway, the car fishtailed toward their mailbox, and then all the way down the block. His father leaned forward over the steering wheel to better glimpse the road in between frantic sweeps of the wiper blades. They turned onto Madison, onto Central. A plow flashed its lights at them and passed by, followed by a salt truck. Up ahead they could see that Overlook Drive and its steep hill had been barricaded. All the traffic lights in town had been changed to flashing yellows so that no one would consider stopping short for a red and spinning out of control. Peter was clutching his backpack so hard his hands began to cramp.
His father let the car roll to a stop in the middle of Central Avenue. Everything around them was the perfect stillness of a black-and-white photograph, a ghostly hush that settled over the parked cars, the abandoned playground, the gazebo on Central that hosted jazz quartets on summer Fridays and now held nothing but silence. The wipers beat on.
“Damn it,” he said.
“Pretty bad out,” Peter said.
“Yeah.”
“Where are we going?”
His father rubbed his eyes.
“I just need to think for a sec, buddy.”
A blue car appeared in the distance and moved toward them. Peter didn’t recognize it as Mr. Gleeson’s car until it was right beside them. Both men rolled down their windows, and the snow swept into the car like the storm had just been waiting for a chance to scoop them up.
“The roads are a mess!” Mr. Gleeson shouted. “Everything all right?”
“Fine! We’re fine!” Peter’s father answered. It was his cop voice. Sure of itself. Full of authority.
“Is that Peter? Where you guys heading?”
“Wanted to rent a movie!” Peter’s father said. “We’ll be stuck inside from the looks of things.”
“Everything’s closed,” Mr. Gleeson said. “Parkway too.” For a moment Peter thought Mr. Gleeson was going to get out of his car and come peer into theirs.
“We’re too late then! Waited too long!” Peter’s father shouted with sort of a goofy look on his face, like he’d been caught doing something he’d be teased about later on. The snow was belting him in the face and immediately turning into beads of water against his warm skin.
“Take it easy!” Mr. Gleeson shouted into the whirling storm.
“Will do!” shouted Peter’s father.
With the windows rolled up again, the car seemed even more quiet. The storm whistled and every once in a while a gust blew a drift from the ground so that it looked as though snow was falling up and down and every which way. They remained idling in the middle of the street.
Eventually, Peter’s father gestured toward the auto shop on the corner. “Flat roof,” he said. “You see? He’s already got at least a foot up there. I’d shovel that off before morning if I were him.”
“Wouldn’t it be dangerous to go up there in this storm?” Peter asked.
“Sure, but if he doesn’t want it to collapse.” Brian shrugged, placed his hands on the wheel at ten and two.
Peter looked building by building to check for flat roofs. Pies-on-Pizza. Nail Fetish. Heads You Win Beauty Parlor. All closed.
“I can’t have friends over,” Peter said without looking at his father. “Ever. I can’t have them in there. Even when she seems fine.”
“No, that’s true.”
“Why?”
“Your mom, she’s just—I don’t know. She’s sensitive. She gets worked up. But trust me—some kids? They’ve got it worse than you, my friend. Worse by a mile. Some of the things I’ve seen you don’t even want to know.”
“But—”
“Look. You have a lot. You know what I was doing at your age? I was working. I was delivering papers. My mother? She drank all day long, Pete. You’re probably not old enough yet to know what that means. She put booze in her coffee, in her orange juice, everything. By your age I was getting calls from the neighbors, from the grocery store, ‘Hey, come collect your mother, Brian, she’s in bad shape.’ And she’d be kissing me—‘So sorry, sweetie’—and then I�
��d have to let her pretend she was helping me with homework so she wouldn’t feel so bad about it.”
“But you said she brought you and your friends to the Polo Grounds that time. That she bought tickets for everyone.”
His face softened as he thought back, and after a moment he nodded. “That’s right. I told you that? Yeah, it was me, your uncle, and a couple kids from the building. One time—did I ever tell you this?—she signed a test my friend Gerald failed. It was snowing just like today and he carried the test in his hand the whole walk home. It was all rumpled and wet, with a big red F over his name. He needed a parent signature, and he was so scared about it he came to our apartment first to think out a strategy. She must have been listening because she told him to hand over the test so she could take a look. Next thing she’s signing his mother’s name big and bold right across the top of the page. ‘Don’t worry so much,’ she says to him. Then she gave us money to go buy ourselves a candy bar. Our teacher never even questioned it.”
“Your friends liked her.”
“They loved her. I wish you could have known her.”
Then he put on the car’s hazards and slowly, slowly drove back home.
three
ON NEW YEAR’S EVE 1990—the year Kate and Peter were in eighth grade—Anne Stanhope walked up to the deli counter at Food King and took a number. She looked beautiful. Her coat was long and narrow. She was without a hat on that cold day but her scarf—a tartan plaid—was looped twice around her neck. Mrs. Wortham, who worked in the podiatrist’s office in town, was also waiting and noted the height of Anne’s heels—four inches, maybe more, dainty things, especially considering the slush and salt-coated streets outside. She thought, Oh, well, she must have come from work, some people don’t get the day off, and then she remembered that Anne Stanhope was a nurse. Maybe she’s going to a party, Mrs. Wortham decided. After taking her number from the spool of tickets and without saying hello to anyone, Anne stood off to the side like the others who were waiting for one of the hair-netted employees to turn the dial on the counter. “Forty-three!” was called. “Forty-four!” One by one various residents of Gillam stepped forward and spoke their orders across the tall glass display. A pound of smoked ham, thickly sliced. A half pound of provolone. The store was crowded that day. People had worked through their Christmas leftovers and wanted a fresh start for the new year. Anne Stanhope held the number fifty-one.
Forty-five, forty-six, forty-seven. Johnny Murphy, who’d been sent to the store by his mother, spotted one of his old high school baseball coaches. Home on break from his first year at college, Johnny greeted the older man warmly and stood at the counter blocking the way until someone joked that Mr. Big-Time Pitcher had better shove over. He’d gone to college on scholarship, and the whole town had followed his senior year wins over neighboring towns that were wealthier, had better facilities. Number forty-eight forgot the list his wife had written before sending him off, so he hemmed and hawed up there until he settled on London broil and a pound of German potato salad. Forty-nine and fifty were called up together, to opposite ends of the counter. It was busy now, the numbers ticking by more quickly because the manager had sent help to get through the midday rush.
Next thing Anne Stanhope knew, everyone who’d been waiting alongside her seemed to be ordering, or seemed to have ordered already. There were people who’d come after her—she couldn’t have described them; she felt merely a gathering presence beside and behind her—who now had their meats and cheeses and salads and were on their way. Only Anne Stanhope remained. The employees behind the counter were so busy that the dial was at fifty-two and then almost instantly at sixty. Sixty-one was called. People stepped around her, in front of her, and she felt—right down to her fingertips—a kind of quickening. The gathering of momentum was familiar, though she hadn’t felt it in a while—her heart and her pulse and some wild fury coming together in a rhythm that gained force and speed the longer she stayed quiet, the more she looked around and noticed. Her peripheral vision sparked and distorted the edges of everything so that when she turned quickly to look at something, it moved just out of sight. And even while everything inside her body seemed to speed up, everything outside of her body—the movements of the other shoppers, the reaching and lowering of boxes and packages into carts—slowed. A carton of milk had a wet drip gathering along the cardboard seam. The tip of an old man’s nose was so vein threaded it looked blue, and when he went to rub it she saw the delicate hairs inside his nostrils, every bit as private as hair in any other part of the body. In the distant front of the store, the automatic doors wheezed open, and she could feel the cold air racing down the aisle to slide under the collar of her coat. She could see that the people around her didn’t care that she’d been missed. She took a step back and saw in vivid color—because her mind was that sharp at moments like this, everything spotlighted so that details she’d overlooked were now glaringly obvious—that in fact they’d orchestrated her exclusion for private, petty reasons that weren’t worth trying to understand. They smirked and nodded and gave each other signals. They’d banded together and decided that number fifty-one would get skipped.
She stepped out of her heels to get a better sense of what was happening, to defend herself if need be, and in one nimble motion she bent and swept the shoes from the floor, tossed them in her basket. She unwound the scarf from her neck.
“Wait!” she called out, raising her hand like a grade-schooler who’d just thought of the answer. She pushed forward to the counter.
“Are you all right?” a woman standing nearby asked. “You can’t take off your shoes.”
“Why can’t I?” Anne snapped, turning on the woman to study her. The woman’s lips were rubbery, untrustworthy, and she had shades of laziness in her expression that Anne found disgusting. Some distant part of her recognized the woman as a Eucharistic minister at St. Bartholomew’s, and she was amazed she’d never noted how revolting she was before this. This woman had put her filthy fingertips on the host, the body of Christ, and Anne had taken it into her mouth. She felt her stomach rise and a crawling at the back of her throat. She put a fist to her pursed mouth and willed herself not to vomit.
“Stop!” she shouted when the feeling passed. Everyone from the seafood case to the imported cheeses stopped talking and looked. She held up her ticket and stepped forward. “It’s my turn.” There was something pathetic in her voice—she could hear it as if she were listening to someone else—and in case they thought she was going to cry she repeated herself, louder, with more determination. But in the few short steps she took to the counter—she felt the cold of the linoleum floor on her bare feet as twin cramps at the bottom of her calves—she forgot what she wanted or why she was there, only that every single person in her vicinity had plotted against her.
“How dare you,” she said to the elderly man standing in front of the pasta salads. And then: “Stop looking at me.”
“I’m very sorry,” the man said, stepping aside. “Please go right ahead.”
“Stop looking at me,” she repeated.
“I’m not. I wasn’t. There’s no need to raise your voice, honey,” he said softly, and everyone understood he was trying to placate her, that this was a situation that could go a hundred different ways and he was trying to get it to go the calmest, easiest way possible. “I’m very sorry about that. It was an honest mistake but now you go right ahead.”
“Stop looking at me,” she shouted at him, and then she swung around and shouted it in the general direction of the rest of the store. The taller of the two hair-netted women behind the counter asked her in a firm tone to please lower her voice, while the other called the manager. Anne turned slowly in a circle, taking in everything and everyone, and then she walked over to the pyramid of crackers—stone ground, whole wheat, sesame, plain—and bumped it with her hip. When it toppled she wrapped her arms around herself and squeezed her eyes shut. There’d been a dozen people standing around but now there were two dozen
. More. No one said a word. “Stop looking at me,” she said at a normal volume. Then she covered her ears and began to howl.
Over the loudspeaker, someone paged the manager for a second time.
* * *
Peter, who’d opted to wait in the car listening to the top one hundred countdown, had just looked at the dashboard clock when he heard an ambulance in the distance. When it seemed that the siren couldn’t get any louder, it got just a little bit louder until it pulled up to the front of the supermarket and went abruptly silent. He watched in the side-view mirror for a moment, and then he turned and watched out the back windshield of the car. There were people gathered and the EMTs were waving them back. A police cruiser pulled up behind the ambulance. A second cruiser approached from the south lot. Peter had been at Food King once when a man had a heart attack. The man had been holding a gallon of milk, and though Peter hadn’t seen him fall, he’d seen the gallon container glug-glug-glugging milk from its throat, spreading down the dairy aisle while the man on the ground clutched his shoulder. His father had pulled him away before Peter could see what happened next. Thinking about it, Peter wondered why he hadn’t thought of the man again until now. Death was something for grown-ups to worry about but, still, he knew that when his time came he didn’t want it to come at Food King. Janet Jackson was up for the second time, and Peter slumped down in his seat. He didn’t see how they’d get through all one hundred songs before midnight, as the DJ had promised. When he looked up an old man he recognized as Chris Smith’s grandfather was standing at the driver’s side window. Mr. Smith made a cycle motion with his fist and Peter rolled down the window.
Ask Again, Yes Page 5