The way I imagined what went on between my mother and Frank on the other side of the wall, though I tried not to, they were like two people shipwrecked on an island so far away from anyplace no one would ever find them, with nothing to hold on to but each other’s skin, each other’s bodies. Maybe not even an island, just a life raft in the middle of the ocean, and even that was falling apart.
Sometimes the headboard banged against the wall for whole minutes at a time, as regular and steady as the sound of Joe’s wheel in his cage, the endless circles he made. Other times—and these were harder to lie there and listen to—the sounds were like what you might expect to come from a nest of baby animals. Bird sounds, or kittens. And a low, slow, satisfied growling, like a dog on the floor by the fire with a bone, working it over in his mouth, licking it clean to get the last piece of anything that tasted of meat.
Now and then, a human voice. Adele. Adele. Adele.
Frank.
They never, that I heard, spoke about love, as if they were past even that.
These moments, I knew, they were not thinking about me lying in my bed on the other side of the wall, with my Einstein poster and my mineral collection and my Narnia books and my signed letter from the Apollo 12 astronauts and my Thousand and One Great Party Jokes and the note I’d saved from the one time Samantha Whitmore ever acknowledged my existence on the planet: Do you have tomorrow’s math homework?
These moments, they were not thinking about the heat wave, or conserving electricity, or the Red Sox, or peach pie, or back-to-school shopping, or his appendix stitches, though I had seen them and knew they were still raw on his lower belly, same as the place was, along his calf muscle, where the glass had cut him. They were not thinking about third-floor windows or TV anchorpeople or police roadblocks or the helicopters we had heard circling town all afternoon the day before. What were they expecting to see—a trail of dripping blood? People tied to trees? A campfire, and a man beside it roasting squirrel meat?
So long as we stayed inside this house, no one would know he was here. Not in the daytime, maybe, but at night anyway, nobody could get to us. We were like three people not so much inhabiting Earth as orbiting above it.
Not that either, exactly. The configuration was two and one. They were like the two Apollo astronauts who moved together along the surface of the moon, while their trusty companion stayed behind in the space capsule, monitoring the controls and making sure things were all right. Somewhere far below, the citizens of Earth awaited their return. But for the moment, time was suspended, and not even atmosphere existed.
CHAPTER 11
THEN MORNING CAME—SUNDAY NOW—and we had to deal with things again. Sometime that afternoon my father would be coming by to get me, and though I didn’t want to go with him any more than he wanted to take me, I would.
School was due to start on Wednesday—seventh grade. Nothing to look forward to there but more of where I’d left off in the sixth, only the boys who called out faggot and asshole under their breath when I walked past in the halls would be that much bigger now, while I—in spite of what my mother claimed the MegaMite had done for me—looked small as ever.
The girls’ breasts might have grown over the summer—probably would have—but all that would mean was more trouble, concealing their effect on me, every time I got up from my desk to change classes. Who wouldn’t know my terrible secret, watching the way I carried my books, crotch level, making my way from social studies to English, English to science, science to lunch? Never mind that no one cared, my useless boner would tirelessly announce itself, like the way Alison Smoat kept raising her hand with some comment in social studies, though the teacher never called on her. Knowing—as we all had by then—that once she started talking, you could never shut that girl up.
There would be basketball tryouts. Then the election of class officers. They’d cast the fall musical. The different groups of students who mattered in this place would claim their tables in the lunchroom, making it clear to the rest of us all the places we shouldn’t even think of sitting. The principal would give his talk about peer pressure and drugs; the health teacher, after reminding us we were too young for sexual activity, would show us what a condom looked like and roll it out over a banana, as if I’d have any use for one, anytime in the next decade, or ever, maybe.
Visualize what you want to happen, Frank had said to me, from his improvised pitcher’s mound. But I did my visualizing mostly in my bed.
I visualized Rachel McCann taking off her bra for me then. See how they grew over the summer? she said. Would you like to touch them?
I visualized some girl I couldn’t even identify coming up from behind while I was working on my locker combination, putting her hand over my eyes, whirling me around and sticking her tongue in my mouth. I couldn’t see her face, but I could feel her breasts pressing against me, and her tongue on my teeth.
Why don’t you drive for a change, Henry? my mother says. What do you say we head out to the beach?
Only it’s not my mother and me. It’s the three of us, her in the back, me at the wheel, Frank on the seat beside me, just to make sure I’m doing it right, the way a father would, but not mine.
What do you say we get out of town for a while? Frank says. Head north. Try someplace different.
We set Joe’s cage on the seat next to my mother, and a few books maybe, a pack of cards, my mother’s tape of sad Irish folk songs and a few of her outfits no doubt. No foodstuffs. We’ll stop at restaurants when we get hungry. I will bring my comic book collection but no puzzle books. I only liked those puzzles so much, I realize now, because there was so little else to do, but now there is.
It surprises me that this is so, but I may even throw the baseball and my glove in the trunk. In the past, I always approached my father’s suggestion that we play catch with a sense of anxiety and dread, but with Frank it had felt good to throw around the ball that way. With him, I wasn’t ridiculous.
We drive north, into Maine, the radio playing. At a shacky little place on the water—Old Orchard Beach—we stop for lobster rolls, and my mother gets fish and chips.
Boy, these taste a lot better than Cap’n Andy’s, she says, putting one in Frank’s mouth.
How’s your lobster roll? he asks me, but my mouth is too full to answer so I just grin.
We get lemonade, and after, ice-cream cones. At the next table, a girl in a sundress—because it’s summer again, or maybe Indian summer—is licking on her own cone, but lowers it now and waves. She doesn’t know anything about who I was at my old school, who my mother was in our old town, or about Frank’s picture in the paper.
I saw you carrying a copy of Prince Caspian, she says. That’s my favorite book.
Then she’s kissing me too, but differently from how the other girl did it. This one is long and slow, and as we kiss each other, her hand is pressing against my neck and stroking my cheek, and mine is in her hair too and then on her breast, but softly, and of course I have a hard-on now again, only this time there is nothing embarrassing about it.
Your mother and I thought we’d take a little walk on the beach, son, Frank says to me. And the thought occurs to me that here is one of the best parts about his showing up. I am not responsible for making her happy anymore. That job can be his now. This leaves me free for other things. My own life, for instance.
COFFEE ON THE STOVE AGAIN. The third morning in a row, and now I was almost used to it. There was a wet place on my sheets as usual, but I was not as concerned as I used to be. My mother wasn’t monitoring my laundry. She had other things on her mind.
This time, she was already up when I got downstairs. The two of them were sitting at the kitchen table, with the paper open. Some family’s boat capsized at Lake Winnipesaukee the day before and now they were looking for the father’s body. An old lady on a senior citizens’ excursion to the outlet stores in North Conway collapsed of heatstroke on the bus and died. The Red Sox were holding on to second place, with the playoffs
around the corner. The old hopes of September rising once more.
But the story my mother and Frank were reading was none of these. Maybe they read it, maybe they stopped at the headline: “Police Intensify Search for Prisoner on the Lam.” The authorities were offering a $10,000 reward for information leading to the apprehension of the man who escaped from Stinchfield Penitentiary on Wednesday. Some officials were speculating that given the issues of the holiday weekend, combined with what they would guess to be the severity of the man’s injuries and the fact that he was recuperating from surgery, he might still be in the vicinity, possibly holding some local citizen or citizens hostage. The prisoner might or might not be armed but was considered dangerous regardless. In the event that anyone spotted him, under no condition should he or she attempt to apprehend the man. Contact your local police authorities, the story said. The reward would be paid following a successful arrest.
I stepped into the mudroom. It had been a few days since I’d cleaned out Joe’s cage. I picked him up and held him in the crook of my arm while I laid down a fresh piece of newspaper. Not the one with Frank’s face on the front, though it was there in the stack. The sports section.
Normally, Joe would be doing laps on his exercise wheel this time of day. First thing in the morning he was always his friskiest. But today, he had just been lying on the floor of the cage when I came in, panting. It was the heat probably. Nobody would want to move around any more than necessary on a day like this one.
I stood there in the mudroom for a minute then, stroking his fur. He nibbled gently on my finger. Through the screen door, the sound of my mother’s voice, talking to Frank.
I have a little money, she was telling him. After my mom died, I sold the house. It’s just sitting in my savings account.
You need your money, Adele, he said. You’ve got a son to raise.
You need to go someplace safe.
Suppose you came with me?
Are you asking me?
Yes.
Over lunch that day, Frank told us how much better the spot on his abdomen was, where they’d cut into him. He should have asked the doctor to save him the appendix, put it in a jar or something, he said. I’d like to see what the little bugger looked like that made all this possible, he said.
Getting out. Meeting you.
When he said that, I figured he meant my mother, though we were both at the table.
He had never told us how long he’d been locked up, or how much more time he was supposed to stay there before they let him out. I could have read it in the paper, but it would have felt like cheating, doing that. Same as it would asking the details of what he was in for.
They were in the kitchen, washing the dishes. My old job, but I wasn’t needed for that one anymore, so I lay on the living room couch, flipping the channels and listening.
Good as it feels, he said, to wake up where I am now (this would be in my mother’s bed, with her next to him), I can’t call myself a free man until the day comes I can walk down the street with my arm around your waist, Adele. All I’d ever ask for out of life.
Nova Scotia, she said. Prince Edward Island. Nobody bothers you up there.
They could raise chickens. Have a garden. The Gulf Stream flowed through the ocean there.
My ex-husband would never let me take Henry away, my mother said.
You know what that means, then, don’t you? he told her.
They were leaving, and they were leaving me. All this time I’d been picturing how now it would be the three of us together, like when we played catch in the yard, only really, it was going to be the two of them. And me left behind. That’s what I concluded.
One day soon—not today, because the bank would be closed, and not tomorrow either, for the same reason, but after that, they would drive over to her bank. A couple of years had passed since my mother had last entered the bank, but this time she would. She would go up to the teller window herself this time—Frank would be waiting in the car—and say, I want to make a withdrawal. Ten minutes later—because it might take that long, counting out the bills—she would go back out to the car, with the sack of money in her arms, and place it on the floor of the car.
What do you say we blow this town? he’d say. Words from some old western I’d watched, from back in the day.
I’ll miss him so much, my mother would say. Meaning me. Maybe she’d start to cry then, but he’d comfort her, and pretty soon she’d stop.
You can have another baby, Frank would tell her. Same as your ex-husband did. We’ll raise our kid together. You and me.
And anyway, your son will be all right. He can go live with his father. And the stepmother, and those two other kids. They’ll have a great time. His father will coach him on his baseball.
I didn’t want it to, but the scene kept playing out in my brain. Him stroking her hair, telling my mother I didn’t really need her anymore. Her with her head on his shoulder, believing it.
He’s not a kid anymore, Frank would tell my mother. I happen to know all he thinks about now is getting into some girl’s pants. He’s moving on. If you have any doubt, just take a look at the sheets on his bed. A boy that age, he only cares about one thing.
Rachel McCann’s thighs. Sharon Sunderland’s underpants. The tits on a Las Vegas showgirl.
It’s about time you thought of yourself for a change, Adele, he would tell her. Enough of that husband-for-a-day idea. Frank could be her husband forever.
I made a racket, coming in the room, though sometimes I wasn’t sure if that even mattered, my mother and Frank were so deep in their own world now. The one with only two people in it—her and him. But by the time I got to the refrigerator to take out the pitcher of milk for my cereal—real milk, for once, Frank’s idea—they were talking about something else. He had noticed a spot next to the shower in the bathroom where the water had seeped under the linoleum, causing dry rot. He wanted to tackle that problem today. Remove the tile, and the punk wood underneath. Replace them with better.
Maybe we won’t be staying around here long enough to make a difference, she said.
Still, he said. With something like that, it’s always a good idea to take care of it. I don’t like to leave a mess like that for someone else to take care of.
There it was, proof. They were leaving. What was supposed to happen to me then?
CHAPTER 12
OVER BREAKFAST, FRANK HAD TOLD US about the farm where he grew up, in western Massachusetts. His grandparents had run a pick-your-own operation—blueberries mostly, though in the later years they’d put in Christmas trees and, for the fall, pumpkins. From the age of seven, he was driving the tractor, rototilling between the rows, keeping the chickens fed, and taking care of the trees. They didn’t come out shaped like Christmas trees, naturally. It was all about pruning.
His grandparents had a stand out front, where they sold their goods, along with things like his grandmother’s jam, and pies she made, in berry time. Frank would have rather shoveled chicken shit all day, excuse his language, than work the farmstand, so after his grandpa died his grandmother had hired a girl to help out. Mandy, a local girl, a year older than Frank. Hard-luck background. Her mother had run off with some guy, and she never knew her father in the first place. At the point Frank met up with her, Mandy had dropped out of school. She was living at her sister’s. Cleaning people’s houses and picking up jobs when she could. The one at Chambers Farms, for instance.
He went out with her, if you could call it that, the summer after high school graduation. Mostly they drove around, listening to the radio and making out.
I was a virgin, Frank told my mother. As usual, the two of them appeared to carry on their conversations no differently with me around than they would have if I wasn’t. I might as well have been invisible.
That fall he’d shipped out to ’Nam. A two-year tour of duty. Less said about that the better. The idea had been to get a college education when he got home, but by the time he got back, all he wanted
was to find some quiet spot where people would just leave him alone. The night terrors hadn’t gotten bad yet, but they’d started. There was no such thing anymore as a good night’s sleep.
While he was gone, Mandy had written to him, three times. Once, right after he left, to say she would be thinking about him and put him in her prayers, not that he ever saw her as the praying type. Maybe she liked the idea of having a boyfriend overseas.
No word from her after that for all that year and most of the next one. Then out of the blue, near the end of his tour, a long letter on lined notebook paper, in the same round handwriting, leaning backward, with the happy faces in the dots when she made her i’s.
She wrote with news about people in their town. A boy they’d both known who’d reached into a hay baler and lost his arm. Another boy who’d crashed his car head-on into an oncoming station wagon a few months back, killing all three members of the family in the other vehicle. She had cut out the obituaries of several older people in their town—friends of his grandmother’s, in some cases—who’d died of natural causes, and one, the man who’d delivered their milk, who had pulled his truck into the garage one day, closed the door, and turned on the engine. No note.
It was hard to say what the point of all this bad news was supposed to be, except that Vietnam wasn’t so terrible after all, or maybe that every place else was just as bad. Life is short, why not go for it?
Her letter, and the one that arrived two days after, before he’d had a chance to answer the first, had an effect on him—though he was not yet twenty-one—of leaving the impression that tragedy and death would follow a person wherever he went in life. There was no such thing as escape, except maybe the kind that Mr. Kirby had accomplished when he pulled himself into the garage that day and turned on the ignition. If there had ever been a day when he thought that coming home would make things better, that day was past.
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