Of the three of us, it seemed as if I was the only one who felt concerned, actually. I had a feeling I should be doing something about the situation, but as usual, didn’t know what. And Frank seemed so calm and clear about things, you wanted to go along with him. Even though really, he was going along with us, of course.
I have a sixth sense when it comes to people, he told my mother. I took one look around that store, big as it was, and knew you were the one.
I won’t lie to you, he said. It’s a difficult situation. Many people would not want to have anything to do with me at this point. I’m going on my instincts here that you are a very understanding person.
The world is not an easy place to get along, he said. Sometimes you just need to stop everything, sit down and think. Collect your thoughts. Lie low for a bit.
I looked at my mother then. We were coming down Main Street now, past the post office and the drugstore, the bank, the library. All the old familiar places, though in all the times I’d passed this way before, it was never in the company of anyone like Frank. He was pointing out to my mother now that it sounded as if the rotors on her brakes might be a little thin. If he could get his hands on a few tools, he’d like to take a look at that for her, he said.
In the seat next to her, I studied my mother’s face, to see if her expression changed, when Frank said these things. I could feel my heart beating, and a tightness in my chest—not fear exactly, but something close, though oddly pleasurable. I had it when my father took Richard and the baby and me, and Marjorie, to Disney World, and we got into our seats on the Space Mountain ride—all of us but Marjorie and the baby. Partly I wanted to get out before the ride started, but then they turned out the lights and this music started and Richard had poked me and said, If you have to barf, just do it in the other direction.
Today is my lucky day, Frank said. Yours too, maybe.
I knew right then, things were about to change. We were headed into Space Mountain now, into a dark place where the ground might give way, and you wouldn’t even be able to tell anymore where this car was taking you. We might come back. We might not.
If this had occurred to my mother, she didn’t let on. She just held the wheel and stared straight ahead same as before, all the way home.
CHAPTER 2
WHERE WE LIVED THEN—THE TOWN OF Holton Mills, New Hampshire—was the kind of place where people know each other’s business. They’d notice if you left your grass too long between one lawn mowing and the next, and if you painted your house some color besides white, they might not say anything to your face, but they’d talk about it. Where my mother was the kind of person who just wanted to be left alone. There had been a time when she loved being up on a stage, with everybody watching her perform, but at this point, my mother’s goal was to be invisible, or as close as she could get.
One of the things she said she liked about our house was where it sat, at the end of the street, with no other houses beyond us and a big field in back, opening onto nothing but woods. Cars hardly ever came by, except on those occasions where someone missed the place they meant to go and had to turn around. Other than people like the man raising money for the orphanage, and the occasional religious types, or someone with a petition, hardly anyone ever came to see us, which to my mother was good news.
It used to be different. We used to visit people’s houses sometimes and invite people to ours. But by this point, my mother was down to basically one friend, and even that one hardly ever came by anymore. Evelyn.
MY MOTHER AND EVELYN MET UP around the time my father left, when my mother had this idea to start a creative movement class for children at our house—the sort of activity it would have been hard to picture her getting into, later. She actually did things like put up flyers around town and buy an ad in the local paper. The idea was, mothers would come over with their children, and my mother would put on music, and lay out things like scarves and ribbons, and everyone would dance around. When it was over, they’d all have a snack. And if she got enough customers, she wouldn’t have to worry about going out into the world and getting a more normal type of job, which wasn’t her style.
She went to a lot of effort setting things up for this. She sewed little mats for everyone, and cleared out all the living room furniture, which wasn’t all that much to start with, and she bought a rug for the floor that was supposed to be someone’s wall-to-wall carpet only they hadn’t paid.
I was pretty young at the time, but I remember the morning of the first class, she lit candles to put around the room, and she baked cookies—a health food kind, with whole wheat flour and honey instead of sugar. I didn’t want to be in the class, so she told me I could be the one to work the record player and keep an eye on the younger children, if she was busy with one of the older ones, and later, I’d serve the snack. We had a dry run, the morning of her first class, where she showed me what to do and reminded me, if anyone needed to go to the bathroom, to help the little kids with things like fastening their pants after.
Then it was the time her customers were supposed to start showing up. Then it was past the time, and still nobody.
Maybe half an hour after the class was supposed to begin, this woman arrived with a boy in a wheelchair. This was Evelyn and her son, Barry. From the size of him, I got the impression he was probably around my age, but he couldn’t talk so much as he just made noises at unusual moments, as if he was watching a movie nobody else could see, and all of a sudden there was a funny part, or one time, it was as if some character in this movie that he really liked a lot had died, because he put his head in his hands—which wasn’t all that easy, since his hands jerked around a lot, and so did his head, not necessarily in the same direction—and he just sat there in his chair, making these sobbing sounds.
Evelyn must have had the idea that creative movement could be a good thing for Barry, though if you asked me, he moved pretty creatively to begin with. My mother made a big effort, though. She and Evelyn got Barry on one of the special mats, and she put on a record she liked—the sound track of Guys and Dolls— and showed Barry and Evelyn these motions to make to “Luck Be a Lady Tonight.” Evelyn showed some promise, she said. But moving to a beat definitely wasn’t Barry’s type of concept.
The class folded after that one session, but Evelyn and my mother got to be friends. She’d bring Barry over a lot in his oversized stroller, and my mother would make a pot of coffee, and Evelyn would park Barry on the back porch and my mother would tell me to play with him, while Evelyn talked and smoked cigarettes, and my mother listened. Every now and then I’d hear some phrase like delinquent child support or face his responsibilities or my cross to bear or deadbeat bum— this was Evelyn talking, never my mother—but mostly I learned to tune the whole thing out.
I tried to think up things Barry could do, games that might interest him, but this was a challenge. One time when I was really bored, I hit on the idea of talking to him in a made-up language—just sounds and noises, along the lines of the ones he made himself now and then. I parked myself in front of his stroller and talked to him that way, using hand gestures, as if I was telling this elaborate story.
This seemed to get Barry excited. At least, he responded by making more sounds than before. He was hooting and yelling, and waving his arms more wildly than normal, which caused my mother and Evelyn to come out on the porch, checking things out.
What’s going on here? Evelyn said. From the look on her face, I knew she wasn’t happy. She had rushed over to where Barry’s wheelchair was parked, and she was smoothing his hair down.
I can’t believe you’d let your son make fun of Barry like this, Evelyn told my mother. She was packing up Barry’s stuff, collecting her cigarettes. I thought you were the one person who understood, she said.
They were just playing, my mother said. No harm done. Henry’s a kind person, really.
But Evelyn and Barry were already out the door.
After that, we hardly ever saw the two of them anymor
e, which wasn’t such a loss in my opinion, except that I knew how lonely my mother was for a friend. After Evelyn, there was nobody.
One time a kid in my class, Ryan, invited me for a sleepover. He was new in town and hadn’t figured out yet that I wasn’t somebody people had over to their houses, so I said yes. When his dad came to pick me up, I was all ready for a quick getaway, with my toothbrush and my underwear for the next day in a grocery bag.
I think I should introduce myself to your parents first, Ryan’s dad said, when I started getting in the car. So they won’t worry.
Parent, I said. It’s just my mom. And she’s OK about this already.
I’ll just duck my head in and say hi, he said.
I don’t know what she said, but when he came back out, he looked like he felt sorry for me.
You can come over to our house anytime, son, he said to me. But that was the only time I ever did.
SO IT WAS A BIG DEAL, bringing Frank home in the car with us this way. He was probably the first person we’d had over in a year. Possibly two.
You’ll have to excuse the mess, my mother said, as we pulled into the driveway. We’ve been busy.
I looked at her. Busy with what?
She swung open the door. Joe the hamster was spinning in his wheel. On the kitchen table, a newspaper from several weeks back. Post-it notes taped to the furniture with Spanish words for things written in Sharpie: Mesa. Silla. Agua. Basura. Along with teaching herself the dulcimer, learning Spanish had been one of my mother’s projects planned to occupy us over the summer. She had started out back in June playing the tapes she got from the library. ¿Dónde está el baño? ¿Cuánto cuesta el hotel?
The tapes were intended for travelers. What’s the point of this? I had asked her, wishing we could just turn on the radio, listen to music, instead. We weren’t going to any Spanish-speaking country that I knew of. Just getting to the supermarket every six weeks or so was an accomplishment.
You never know what opportunities might lie ahead, she said.
Now it turned out there was another way for new things to happen. You didn’t have to go someplace for the adventure. The adventure came to you.
Inside our kitchen now, with its hopeful yellow walls and its one remaining working lightbulb, and last year’s magic ceramic seed-growing animal, a pig, whose crop of green sprouts had long since turned brown and dried up.
Frank looked around slowly. He took in the room as if there was nothing unusual about coming into a kitchen in which a stack of fifty or sixty cans of Campbell’s tomato soup lined one wall, like a supermarket display in a ghost town, alongside an equally tall stack of boxes containing elbow macaroni, and jars of peanut butter, and bags of raisins. The footprints my mother had painted on the floor from last summer’s project of teaching me how to fox-trot and do the two-step were still visible. The idea was for me to put my feet over the foot patterns she’d stenciled on the floor, while she counted out the beats as my partner.
It’s a great thing when a man knows how to dance, she said. When a man can dance, the world is his oyster.
Nice place, Frank said. Homey. Mind if I sit down at the mesa?
What do you take in your coffee? she asked. She took hers black. Sometimes it seemed as if this was all she lived on. The soup and noodles were bought with me in mind.
Frank studied the headline on the newspaper that sat there, though it was several weeks old. Nobody seemed in a rush to say anything more then, so I thought I’d break the ice.
How did you hurt your leg? I asked him. There was also the question of what happened to his head, but I thought I’d take things one at a time.
I’m going to be straight with you here, Henry, he said. I was surprised he’d taken in my name. To my mother he said, Cream and sugar, thanks, Adele.
Her back was to the two of us, counting out the scoops. He appeared to be speaking to me, or about to, but his eyes were on my mother, and for the first time I could imagine how a person who wasn’t her son might see her.
Your mom looks like Ginger on that show on Nickelodeon, Gilligan’s Island, a girl, Rachel, told me one time. This was in fifth grade, when my mother had put in a rare appearance at my school to watch a production of Rip Van Winkle where I played Rip. Rachel had put forward the theory that maybe my mother actually was the actress who played Ginger, and we were living here in this town so she could escape her fans, and the stresses of Hollywood.
At the time, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to discourage this theory. It seemed like a better reason than the real one for why my mother hardly ever went anyplace. Whatever the real reason was for that.
Even though she was a mother—not just a mother but my mother—and what she had on was an old skirt and a leotard she’d had for a million years, I could see now how a person might think she was good-looking. More than that. Most people’s mothers you saw at school, parked outside at three o’clock to pick up their kids or running in to bring the homework they’d forgotten, had lost their shape somewhere along the line, from having babies probably. This had happened to my dad’s wife, Marjorie, even though, as my mother always pointed out, she was a younger woman.
My mother still had her figure. I knew from one time when she’d tried them on for me that my mother still fit in her old dancing outfits, and though the only place she danced now was our kitchen, she still had dancer’s legs. Now Frank was looking at them.
I’m not going to lie to you, he said, again, the words coming out slowly, as his eyes took her in. She was filling the pot on the Mr. Coffee with water now. Maybe she knew he was watching. She was taking her time.
For a minute then, Frank seemed not to be in the room at all, but someplace far away. To look at him, you might think he was watching a movie projected on a screen located somewhere in the vicinity of our refrigerator, that still displayed the faded photocopy of my African pen pal, Arak, held up by a couple of magnets with calendars on them of years that were over. Frank’s eyes were fixed on some spot in outer space was how it seemed for a moment then, instead of what was there in the room, which was just me, at the table, flipping through my comic book, and my mother, making the coffee.
I hurt my leg, he said—my leg, and my head—from jumping out a second-floor window at a hospital they’d taken me to get my appendix out.
At the prison, he said. That’s how I got out.
Some people make all these explanations first when they give you the answer to a question that might not reflect so well on them (a question like, where do you work, and the answer is McDonald’s, only first they say something like I’m really an actor or I’m actually applying to medical school soon; or they try to make the facts seem different from how they really are, like saying I’m in sales when what they mean is, they’re one of those people who calls you up on the phone trying to get you to sign up for an introductory subscription to the newspaper).
Not Frank, when he told us the news. The state penitentiary, over in Stinchfield, he said. He lifted up his shirt then, to reveal a third wound that you wouldn’t have known about otherwise, though this one was bandaged. The place where they had removed his appendix. Recently, from the looks of it.
My mother turned around to face him. She was holding the coffeepot in one hand and a mug in the other. She poured a thin stream of coffee into it. She set the powdered milk on the table, and the sugar.
We don’t have cream, she said.
No worries, he told her.
You escaped? I asked him. So now the police are looking for you? I was scared, but also excited. I knew that finally, something was going to happen in our life. Could be bad, could be terrible. One thing was for certain: it would be different.
I would have gotten farther, he said, except for the damn leg. I couldn’t run. Someone had spotted me and they were closing in when I ducked in that store I found you at. That’s where they lost my trail, out in the parking lot.
Frank was scooping the sugar into his coffee now. Three spoonfuls. I’d be grateful
if you’d let me sit here awhile, he said. It would be hard going back out there right now. I did some damage when I landed.
This was one thing the two of them could agree on—my mother and Frank: that it was hard going out into the world.
I wouldn’t ask anything of you, he said. I’d try to help out. I never intentionally hurt anyone in my life.
You can stay here awhile, my mother said. I just can’t let anything happen to Henry.
The boy has never been in better hands, Frank told her.
CHAPTER 3
MY MOTHER WAS A GOOD DANCER. More than that. The way she danced, she could have been in a movie, if they still made movies where people did that kind of dancing, which they didn’t. But we had videos of a few of them, and she knew some of the routines. Singin’ in the Rain, the part where the man twirls around a lamppost from being in love, and the girl’s wearing a raincoat. My mother did that number one time, in the middle of Boston, back when we still went places sometimes. She took me to the science museum, and just when we got out it started to pour and there was this lamppost, and she just started dancing. Later, when she did things like that, I’d feel embarrassed. Back then, I was just proud.
Dancing was how she met my father. Whatever else she had to say about him, she told me the man knew how to move a woman around the dance floor, which meant a lot in her book. I couldn’t remember all that much about times my parents were still together, but I could remember the dancing part, and young as I was I understood they were the best.
Some men just set their hand on your shoulder or against the small of your back, she said. The good ones know, there has to be strong pressure there. Something to push back against.
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