"Yes?"
"The day smelled a lot like this one. There was the same smell in the air."
"Go on."
"My brother ignored her, and tumbled me closer to the corn; he was a bit older than I was and much bigger. The governess came over to scold him, and he laughed and deliberately pushed me into the corn, and those stalks came into my eyes..."
"Are you all right? Are you calm?"
"...Yes."
"Good. Go on then."
"Nancy... ran over, and I felt her hands on my face, and she pulled them out of my eyes with that sucking sound..."
"Yes?"
"I... remember clearing away the blood, and I saw my brother... push Nancy down into the corn patch, and he... got on top of her, weighing her down..."
"And then?"
"It's very difficult..."
"You must, as I said."
"He... was on top of her. He grabbed a husk of dried corn and began to... stab her in the face, in the eyes, and she screamed and screamed and..."
"You must go on."
"And the blood covered my eyes and I couldn't see any more, and I awoke in the hospital."
"Very good. Is that all?"
"Yes, that's... all..."
"You are all right?"
"Yes. Yes, I'm all right."
"You are calm?"
"Yes."
"Good. It is good that you remember these things."
"I can't believe I didn't remember!"
"You must be calm. It was necessary. You are calm now?"
"Yes."
"Good. There is something I must tell you."
"What do you mean?"
"Your brother has escaped from the institution he was in. That is why you were brought here."
''I—''
"Listen. Are you calm?"
"Yes, I am calm."
"Good. Your brother will try to kill you. He wants to kill you. That is why you are here."
"I am safe?"
"That is why you are here. You will remain calm?"
"Yes."
"Good. There is something else I must tell you. Do you know where you are?"
"At another hospital, outside, on the grounds."
"That is not correct. Smell the air. Reach down and feel where you are. Do you know where you are?"
''I—"
"Yes, the corn. It is Autumn. Do you know who I am?"
"A doctor. Another doctor."
"I am your brother."
"Oh my G—"
Two
Sometimes now, when a cup fell from a cupboard, or a book fell from its shelf, or a spoon hit a pan or the television snapped on loud, she suddenly heard the scream of brakes.
"Mom?"
He placed his knife on his fork, ever so gently, but the sound went through her like a fingernail down a blackboard.
"Yes, Tanny?" The voice was a practiced voice, not really her own. The practiced voice was calm; her own voice wanted to scream and scream like those brakes.
"My birthday—"
"I know, Tanny," and the practiced voice spoke a little too quickly, a little too loud.
He came close, a mop of dark amber hair over darkly serious eyes, and carefully opened a paper, putting it by her plate. A boy without a father. She wanted to touch him, but she was afraid that if she touched him, if she lay her hand on his head, he would fall to pieces and that when the pieces hit the floor she would hear the wail of locked brakes forever.
Oh, Carl, why can't you be here for him again!
And then Tanny was gone, with the door to his room clicking gently shut (scream!) and the house grew winter cold around her.
That night, each night, she dreamed a dream. Sometimes it began with Tanny and Carl fishing on the short dock that jutted crookedly into the blue lake as she looked on. Sometimes she sat in a wooden-slatted beach chair and watched while Tanny and Carl flew a kite in the small meadow by the cabin, or while they rowed in aimless circles at the exact center of the lake while their laughs, high and low and crystal clear over the water, reached her content ears. Sometimes Carl and Tanny were sitting at dinner in the cabin while she served them, a single candle orangely illuminating their faces for her. This is how it had been in life: she the happy spectator as her son and husband lived their happy lives before her. After one of these scenes, the rest of the dream was always the same. They were in their bright yellow station wagon—Carl and Tanny in matching short-sleeved red and white checked sport shirts and she in a light blue dress. Carl drove, and they moved down the brown and green mountain like a drop of white wine down an upheld corkscrew. There was laughter in the car, Tanny's high laugh mixing with the low laughs of she and Carl. Tanny hit a camp pan with a spoon and he and Carl sang for her in the back seat. And then, suddenly, there was the scream of locked brakes, and then all the bright colors, green and brown and yellow and blue, turned bright red—
Oh Carl! She cried out, awakening and his name, his face and his deep laugh were all mingled with the sound of locked and screaming brakes.
In the day she looked at her son and wanted to cry because his father was not there for him.
It was snowing when Tanny's birthday present came. It was unloaded by two men, tall, in coveralls and parkas, but they were gone nearly before they were there. The big box was opened and suddenly the truck was gone and Tanny was gone, leaving her stranded outside his closed bedroom door.
"Tanny?" her practiced voice said.
"Thanks, Mom." The voice was distant.
She began to speak again but then she went away.
Dinner sat and cooled, and after the time for patience came and went she knocked softly on his door. She heard a shuffling, the flick of a switch (scream!). She reached for the knob but suddenly he was there.
"Sorry," he said, and he rushed past to the dinner table, closing the bedroom door behind him.
There was a candle-flame in his eyes, a warmth that hadn't been there for a long time. It warmed something in her, and for the first time in a long time the screaming went away.
"Tanny?"
He looked up, a startled deer.
Suddenly she didn't need the practiced voice.
"I... know how hard it's been on you since... the summer," she said, and as she said this the screaming tried to start again, way down at the bottom of her mind. "I... I know how much you miss your father, how much fun you two had together. I know you miss all those places he used to bring you and the things he did for you. I know you miss the things he used to make, the puppets and the toys he brought home as a surprise, and the popcorn he made, and the surprises he always had. I... wanted you... to know that I..."
She couldn't go on, and then her body was trembling all over and in her ears the sound, the high, tearing, locking sound...
Beyond the screams that filled her ears she heard the soft click of a bedroom door.
In the night, after the dream came and was gone and with it all its horrid sounds, as she lay breathing quietly again in the center of her large, sweat-soaked bed, she heard laughter. Tanny's voice was there, and another one, lower-pitched.
She held her breath and closed her eyes, and the voice didn't go away.
"And then we'll build a campfire," Tanny's voice said.
Muffled laughter.
"And then can we go to the movies?"
The other voice said something she couldn't hear, and then the two voices laughed again.
In bare, cold feet she made her way to his room. Under the door were colors, red and green. As she threw open the door she suddenly remembered waking up in the hospital to see that Tanny was there but Carl wasn't. I don't know how any of you got out alive, there was nothing we could do for your husband, we think the other driver was drunk, poor boy, growing up now with no father... She remembered the red and white checked sport shirt Tanny still had on, the torn sleeve on one arm, the v-shaped rip showing his bruised skin underneath, the blank, struck-animal look of loss in his eyes...
"Tanny..."
"Mom."
On the screen before him, as he hit a button, something red moved away into the distance, becoming haze.
"I was just playing a little bit."
She looked at the screen, at her son.
He held up a fat book of instruction meekly for her inspection. "You program in numbers and stuff and it..." He looked down. "It makes someone for you to talk to."
She reached down to touch him and suddenly she was lost again, powerless, trembling.
"No, Tanny, it's... all right. Go back to bed."
Oh, Carl!
All through the night she dreamed of Tanny and Carl together again, and in her wakeful moments the laughter and voices from Tanny's room came and went...
In the morning, after Tanny's cocoa cup was drained and his snow-boots were buckled and his mittens dry and secure and his hood and books in place, after the yellow bus had gobbled him up (she always closed her eyes when this happened, listening for the snap of the closing door that would start the screaming in her ears), she went into his room.
She went in there to dust, she told herself. She went in to straighten up, to take all the empty boxes and string and paper stuffing from his birthday present away. She did all this, and more. She straightened the comic books and dusted his reading lamp; put his running sneakers and hiking boots back in the closet. She did all this, and then she stood before the machine.
It looked more of a mystery to her than it had the night before. Now, with its buttons unlit and cold, with its screen a cold green eye, it looked dead and yet somehow alive.
She touched a button and nothing happened.
She touched a green button, way off to the right, and winced at the sound of a flicking switch.
The screen went bright and something, a red shadow, was there, moving across the screen and then gone.
A boy without a father.
"Carl?" she whispered, and then she quickly touched the green button again, watching the screen turn dark, dead green, and hurried from the room.
The days and nights passed, and the voices and laughter continued.
"Tanny, we have to talk."
"I'll be late for school, Mom."
"I'll drive you."
Over his oatmeal, he looked up. "You never drive," he said, and it was an accusation.
She said, very slowly and carefully, "I've heard you every night with your machine."
"Oh," Tanny said in a low voice.
"I want you to know it's all right as long as you don't carry it too far."
He looked as though he wanted to find a place in his oatmeal to hide. "Thanks."
"Tanny—" she started to say, wanting to tell him, as her shivering began, how much she wanted more than anything in the world to have his father back again so that she could watch the two of them and be happy, but he pushed away from the table, and was into his coat and out the door just as the bright yellow bus stopped to swallow him up.
In the long morning, at each tick of the hall clock and each creaking sigh of the big empty house settling around her, she sat in her chair and heard the imaginary screaming of brakes.
The world went round. White snow melted into gray slush, which melted into silver water, which melted into the warming earth. Green shoots, tender things with strong roots, shot up, along with white dandelions that waved in the wind and then exploded, sending themselves away. The sun burned warm yellow again. School boys grew thin, as winter mittens were packed into mothball boxes and hooded snowsuits turned, like midnight pumpkins, into canvas jackets with thin zippers.
The spring didn't warm or launch her, but found her wrapped all the more tightly in her cocoon. By day she wandered the house restlessly, straightening and then straightening again; by night she lay awake staring at a spot in the center of the darkened ceiling and listening to the laughter from Tanny's room. She tried to think of Tanny and Carl together, but this only brought a chill to her bones. She never went into his room now; but sometimes, when the door lay open a crack or when he ran out to his bus, leaving it open, she would walk slowly past, as though in awe, and steal a look at the icy blank screen within. Carl.
She and Tanny hardly spoke; their meals were silent eating times with only the setting out of plates beforehand and the cleaning of dishes afterward to frame them. When the yellow bus disgorged him after school he went to his room, and when he finished his supper he went to his room again. On Sunday he stayed in his room all day. It finally came to her, through the thick, gauzy layers of her isolation, that his bond with the machine was becoming too strong.
"School will be over soon, Tanny," she said one Sunday, when the sunlight was so warm and close it seemed to heat the food on their plates.
He nodded distractedly.
"Would you like to go away for the summer, just you and me?"
He looked up, as if seeing her for the first time in a long while. "Where?" he said. There was discomfort in his voice, as if he wasn't sure he was really speaking with her.
She took a long slow breath, fighting the demons within her.
"We could go to the mountains." Again a measured, practiced breath. "To the cabin."
He looked at her so hard her composure began to crumble, but then she realized that he was trying to comprehend what she had said. "You mean it?"
Fighting the paralysis that wanted to overtake her, she nodded, and tried to smile. "I thought we could fish, get the old boat out—though we might have to work on it a bit to get it in shape."
"Really?" There was a trace of excitement in his voice; but it disappeared as he saw the suddenly terrified look on her face which she was unable to hide any longer.
"I guess not, Mom." Again he looked down at his plate, getting ready to dismiss her from his thoughts.
With great effort she froze a smile on her face.
"I really mean it, Tanny. Just like old times. I can watch while the two of you—"
She was unable to control herself then. The trembling began in her hands and soon her whole body was shaking. Then she was sobbing into her hands. She couldn't stop shaking, and the tears wouldn't stop. "The... two... of... you..." she sobbed.
When she did stop crying, and looked up to see that it was dark in the house and that the warm May sun had gone away leaving only night, leaving her alone in a pool of darkness, she heard, down the hall from behind the closed door the sound of laughing voices, and she knew that now there really were two of them again.
May bloomed into June. The yellow bus drove quicker these days, hurrying toward the end of school and summer rest. The bus seemed almost angry, impatient for these last few school-days, these days of tests and short-sleeve shirts and the abrupt and rude opening of windows by shouting girls and boys calling to friends on the sidewalk, to be over.
She passed these mornings in the kitchen, at the table before her cold cup, or in the living room, sunk deep in a chair in the one dark corner where even spring and coming-summer had not penetrated. She felt as if she were wasting away; as if, within her cocoon, the time for blooming had passed and now all that was left was slow and inevitable decay. Each day the cold chair swallowed more of her; and in her mind, as if she were chained to a seat in a movie theater, or strapped before Tanny's machine, she endlessly reviewed scenes of Tanny and Carl doing things together while she watched. Her nightmare became a constant day and night visitation which always ended with the same scene of blood and loss. She thought of Tanny recreating these same scenes with his father in front of his machine, and these thoughts made her even more helpless in the face of the mounting dread and weakness she felt.
Tanny avoided her. He walked from the room if he stumbled on her quiet, shade-like figure. They ate their meals at the same table but there might as well have been a wall of brick down its center; and, when he took to leaving his meals uneaten, to go back to his room, putting a more material wall between them, she said nothing. Only her body spoke then, and the shuddering and the sobs it gave her filled her with nothing.
When he came down to eat his silent breakfast on the last day of school something moved deep within her. There was something there, a small and violent flame that burned still in a place where there was no grief or fear, and it suddenly kindled and pushed her to action.
"Tanny," she said weakly, and she had to rise in painful stages from her living room chair. She could hear him in the kitchen, hurrying to finish, hurrying to be gone before she could face him.
"Tanny," she cried, and as she stumbled to the hallway he was past her and out the front door, slamming it (scream!) behind him. She rushed to the window and as he stepped on the bright yellow bus he looked fleetingly back at her. There was an odd look, of surprise, almost, on his face, and something else strange about him... And then the bus was gone.
For hours she hovered around his room like a lost bird. She tidied the room next to it; the room behind it. The rugs in the hallway she brushed and then vacuumed and then brushed again. The laundry closet across the way she cleaned from top to bottom. The chair in the living room beckoned but she blocked it from her mind, knowing that by what she was doing that tiny flame within her was pushing her toward the place she had to be.
Finally, late in the afternoon, she pushed open the door to Tanny's room.
The flame within her almost died at that moment. She fought to control the shivering that began with her hands, the thing that would destroy her and make her unable to go on. The room was... different. There was no laughter left. There was a sense of defeat—of death—in the air. Suddenly, she knew the worst that would happen, what the dread and chill and weakness of the past months had been leading her toward.
Please, Carl, no.
Hornets and Others Page 5