Landslide

by Susan Conley

  I ask if I can go with her.

  I’m so angry at Sam. So angry. Then my worry outweighs my anger. Then my love outweighs my worry. It goes in a circle. Anger. Worry. Love.

  I don’t know if you can flunk out of high school for not going. Maybe you just get held back a year.

  I ask Katherine to cut my hair shorter but piecey on the sides. “Please don’t do anything that makes me look middle-aged.”

  She shakes her blond mane over her shoulders. “I’ll do a bob that angles up in the back.”

  “I’m afraid of bobs. Aren’t bobs middle-aged?” I can see in the mirror what a bad shade of charcoal my hair is, and how it poofs out around my face. I should never have dyed it.

  “Okay. What I’m going to do to your hair will never be confused with a bob.”

  But then she gives me a bob. Now I look middle-aged. It’s as if she’s already left for Florida and didn’t hear anything I said. My hair is short and frizzy, and soon I’ll be wearing mom jeans and Lara will evacuate me.

  * * *

  —

  I DRIVE BACK DOWN to the village, and the whole time my head is worry worry worry. I pull into the dirt landing next to the store and call Kit on my cell.

  He doesn’t answer.

  Why have a phone, really?

  There’s a stillness in the village this morning. Everyone is out on their boats or down at the pier or has gotten jobs in town if they had to.

  I call Candy, and she comes out the side door of the store in her red robe with the New England Patriots coffee mug in her left hand. It’s hard to believe she’s already fed a couple dozen lobstermen in the dark. Or that after the first round she went upstairs and napped and is now starting over again.

  She’s short and wiry like Jimmy, with a soft, round face like her mother’s, and long copper-colored hair.

  “What on earth?” she says.

  “Just look at me, will you!” I push the car door open.

  She puts the mug on the car roof and presses my hair down with both her hands, then shakes her head.

  “I look like Charlie, don’t I? I bet I look like Charlie.”

  “Charlie’s handsome, so I don’t know what you’re complaining about. But you’re right.” She leans on the car door. “It is not a good haircut.”

  I push my driving glasses up on my head and try to tell her about Sam and the joint in the Instagram post and the school conference.

  “Why is he so defiant? I mean, this was never me. Who is he?”

  “He’s all Jimmy.” Candy crosses her arms above her chest. “Sam is all Jimmy.” Then she pats my back. “Jesus, Mary, Joseph. Someone cut this family a break.”

  She reaches for my hand and tries to pull me up. “Come in. Come have a coffee while I get dressed. Come.”

  I shake my head. “I shouldn’t even be here. I should be up at the hospital.”

  “You need rest. I’ll go. Flip and I will go.”

  “I’m taking the boys up on Friday.”

  Flip comes out then and waves and gets in his pickup. He’s tall and completely bald and is less volatile than Jimmy but no less impassioned about keeping the village a working village. I finally filmed him last month and got him to tell me his father’s stories about the hundreds of thousands of cod that used to come up through Sewall in great migrations.

  Flip said the boats came from as far away as Russia with giant nets, and that when we finally put a stop to it, it was probably too late.

  Candy bends down and hugs me. She’s a hugger, like Kit. It’s surprising the way they hug, and I attribute it to their mother. But Candy also withholds important information like Kit does. Even after her second glass of chardonnay, she’s never told me what really happened the day their mother died. I know it’s a Maine thing, this withholding. But sometimes it seems like a competition to see how much bad news you can take without cracking.

  * * *

  —

  I STEER The Duchess back to the island. The sun still isn’t fully down yet, and the sky is a soft gray. Everything looks peaceful on the water, and I have some time to think about who I want to be when I get to the house.

  Sam and Charlie are both lying on the rug in front of the woodstove. Don’t ask me how either of them got home. Sam is actually reading his Shakespeare.

  I ask him to fry bacon for the pasta. This is the one thing I say to him. If I say anything else, I’ll say too much. At least I know this about myself.

  He gets up and turns the burner on and stares at me. “You don’t look like you, Mom. I think your hair’s too short.”

  I can’t believe that he dares talk to me.

  Then he says, “Please hurry dinner. I’m so hungry. Hungrier than ever before in my life. The most starving ever.”

  “Good, because I’m making mushroom soup.” I stir the pasta. “And pasta with mushroom sauce.”

  “Really, Mom?” He squeezes his hands together by the stove. “You know I can’t stand mushrooms!”

  I think he’s going to cry.

  Charlie can’t keep the joke going any longer and laughs, and that breaks it.

  Then Sam picks me up from behind. “Good one, Mom. Good one. You really got me!”

  “Put me down and set the table.” I try not to smile.

  He takes the blue plates down from the shelf. “But really, what did you do to your hair, Mom?”

  “It will grow.” I bring the pasta over to the table.

  The boys sit down. They’re not listening to me anymore. They’re eating like they’ve never seen pasta before and have stopped caring about my hair, if they ever cared.

  “I need to grow,” Sam says, almost to himself, and takes another big bite of pasta. “I really, really need to grow. Like today.”

  WHEN IT’S SO DARK out that I can’t tell the sky from the ocean, I lie on my bed and make Sam confess where he was when he wasn’t at school.

  He says he was at Roman’s.

  “But I don’t even know Roman.”

  “I told you. He’s a senior. His dad’s maybe an electrician. I think his mom works at a hair salon.”

  “It’s nice you have a new friend, but you’ve got to go to school. You know that, right?”

  “You really don’t have to worry about me. Please stop.”

  “I just want you trying at school.” I take his hand. “School is everything. Dad wants you in school. I want you at school. Why don’t you see that?”

  He stands up, and his sweatpants come down to his calves. “But my brain doesn’t like school. You know that! I’m stupid at school.”

  “Don’t talk like that, Sam Archer.”

  I want to warn him that some people, maybe not Mrs. Curtis but other people, will have low expectations for him because he’s a boy. I’ve seen the way people sell boys out, and he should trust me on this.

  “You will check in with Mrs. Curtis in homeroom every day. And you will check in with Nettie. We will all know if you’re not there.”

  He asks me again when Dad is coming home.

  I tell him that it’s up to the doctors.

  He shakes his head. “Who are these doctors, anyway?”

  “You’ll see them on Friday. You can ask them yourself.”

  He shakes his head again and goes into the kitchen and fries some salami and two eggs.

  Charlie’s on the couch now reading The Princeton Review’s Complete Book of Colleges. He says the salami looks like a plate of grease.

  “Actually, no,” he says. “It’s a grease bomb.”

  “It’s delicious.” Sam takes a bite. “So please shut up.”

  Then Charlie makes something he calls tuna supreme, which involves a can of tuna and sliced pickles with a glob of mayo on top. He’s wearing the gray Champion sweatpants and a blue sweatshirt with the hood up, s
o he looks like a boxer, even though Charlie hates boxing. Last month he announced a weight-gain plan involving eating as many calories after dark as he can.

  Sam says, “Your tuna supreme looks grosser than my fried salami, dude.”

  “Good people,” Charlie announces, “all I am trying to do is find something to eat in this house.”

  VERY EARLY ON THURSDAY morning I tell Charlie how Sam’s been skipping school. I’ve got to tell someone. It’s thirty-three degrees out. I have on two sweaters and the amoeba coat. The ocean looks like a bluish-gray animal that keeps changing shapes.

  “Sam’s in tenth grade.” Charlie stokes the woodstove. “You don’t fool around in tenth grade. You listen.” He goes back to the table, where he’s preparing for a gun-control debate.

  “Mrs. Curtis told me that Sam is a leader, and when he says negative things, the other kids in class say negative things too. Then the class is lost.”

  I shouldn’t confide in my seventeen-year-old, but it feels good.

  “Sam isn’t a leader,” Charlie says. “I’ve never seen a moment when he’s been a leader.”

  Sam comes down in old blue sweatpants with no shirt on and stomps into the bathroom and turns on the handheld shower. The pipes make the screeching sound again.

  “Please go with me on this, Charlie.” I pour the boiling water into the French press. “You need to understand that Sam is a leader when you’re not around.”

  “When has he ever led? Give me one example.” He laughs, and I can see all his teeth—the straight ones on top and the bottom ones that are trying to crowd each other out.

  “It’s just not your style of leading. It’s different. It’s not like when you lead.”

  * * *

  —

  ONCE WHEN CHARLIE WAS six he found me in the garden behind the house and told me that he’d taught Sam how to swim.

  “How did you do that?” I asked, and stared at his dripping shorts.

  I’d been trying to get Sam to swim for months.

  “It was easy. I pushed him off the rocks. Then he swam back to shore.”

  “Wow.” I went back to the gardening. I didn’t want to hear about anything else Charlie had done that would later implicate me.

  “Yeah. Wow.” He wouldn’t meet my eyes. He looked guilty but like he’d discovered some power he hadn’t known he had.

  AFTER I TAKE THE boys to school, I stop at Shaw’s and get the food Charlie will cook with Lucy.

  “And this bothers you why?” Lara asks when I call her on my way back to the island and tell her that I’m leaving Charlie and Lucy alone in the house tonight and taking Sam to Candy’s for dinner. “Your son is seventeen.”

  “My mother would die if she knew I was doing this.”

  Lara strikes a match. “You have to decide.”

  “Decide what?”

  “If you’re going to be a sex-positive house.”

  “I thought I already was sex-positive.”

  “Oh, you are sex-positive, but now it’s whether your house is going to be. Or if you’re going to pass the shame or blame about sex onto this girl Lucy. The same shame that’s been passed on to girls forever.”

  “Oh please.”

  “No, really. It’s whether you’re going to make Lucy and Charlie feel bad about their bodies.”

  “Jesus, Lara.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  I park under the trees and carry the bags of food down to The Duchess and putt across the channel. The sky is a pinkish gray. I tie the boat at the float and lug the bags up to the house and put most of the food away. Then I start editing the film. I have almost five hours of footage to get through today.

  Charlie and Sam row home in the afternoon, and Charlie opens the fridge and does a survey of yogurt and pickles and milk.

  “Thank you for shopping, Mom,” he says. “But I don’t think there’s anything here for Lucy and me to actually eat.”

  “Look, Charlie.” Sam holds up a bag of spelt bread. “You can have pickles and honey on a piece of spelt.”

  “But you know how much I hate spelt, Mom,” Charlie says.

  Are those tears in his eyes?

  “Stop. There’s good food here. I worked hard to get this food for you guys. Please stop. There’s steak in the fridge. There are potatoes.”

  “Phew,” Charlie says, and lies down on the couch.

  Sam goes up to his room to do who knows what.

  I yell up the ladder that he should pack before we go to Candy’s, because we’re leaving for Canada early the next morning.

  * * *

  —

  BUT THEN THE SKY darkens, and the wind picks up, and the boats slam against the float. No one is able to go anywhere. The water’s too rough.

  Charlie still begs me to let him go get Lucy.

  “Are you looking at the same whitecaps I’m looking at?” I ask him. “Do you see that wind?”

  He lies on the couch with his eyes closed.

  “I’m sorry. I know you’re disappointed. I know how much this meant to you.”

  He doesn’t open his eyes, but he says, “It’s really hard to get her here. Her mom almost didn’t let her come. You don’t even know Lucy’s mom yet. You should know her. She’s amazing. She’s raising Lucy’s brothers and sister on her own. You should meet her.”

  “That would be nice. I’d love to meet Lucy’s mother.”

  I go into my bedroom and stand at the window and look at the storm. Then I call Kit. It’s a wonder that Charlie taught him how to answer his phone. God forbid he should try to FaceTime or Skype. There’s never any way to see him.

  “What have I ever done to the boys,” I tell him when he answers, “except feed them and buy them cell phones? Sometimes Sam doesn’t speak to me all day.”

  “Most teenage boys don’t speak. We’ve made it this far without trouble, Jilly.”

  “I don’t consider this very far. Sam isn’t even sorry. I mean, he put the picture on Instagram. Who does that?”

  “But you smoked pot, Jilly.”

  “Pot hated me. I always thought I was dying. I should have had girls.”

  I go into the kitchen and try to talk to Kit and pull a garbage bag out of the can under the sink at the same time. Then I hear a dog bark.

  “Who’s that?”

  “Maxwell’s barking at some squirrel out the window.”

  “Maxwell?”

  I hear Marsh tell the dog to get off Kit’s bed. I can’t recover after that. I’ve pictured him alone up there. Solitary. Just waiting to come home. There’s a silence on the line while I wish Marsh away. She brings out a jealousy I didn’t know I had.

  The sky is drained of color and looks like a black cloth that no light will ever penetrate, and these gusts of wind blow through and almost lift the house up.

  “The weather’s bad,” I finally say. “I need cash to buy Sam new basketball sneakers.”

  “Use the credit card, babe.”

  “The credit card is maxed out.”

  I wait. Then I say, “I can’t believe you’re in the hospital and we’re arguing.”

  “We aren’t arguing. Put Charlie on. Please put him on for me. I want to hear him.”

  “He’s feeding the lizards.”

  When Charlie brings a lizard out of the terrarium like this, I worry it will run away and get lost in the house. He loves the lizards and knows everything about their digestive tracts and hydration needs and has names for each of them. Sometimes he complains that the lizards are taking over his life. But we can’t ever lose them.

  Sam and I call the lizards the Boys.

  Kit helps with the Boys. They’re his territory.

  “Well, tell him to call me. Ask both boys why they don’t call me.”

&nb
sp; “You’re forgetting about their unformed frontal lobes, ” I say. “They don’t think about calling anyone.” Charlie’s lying on his back on the rug with the lizard in his left hand, and he smiles at me and nods.

  “You could make them call.”

  “I’m having a hard enough time managing their sex lives and drug use.”

  He laughs, and Marsh’s dog barks again.

  Then he asks me what time we’ll get there tomorrow.

  “Three o’clock. I’m aiming for three. But it sounds like you already have plenty of company.”

  I hang up then.

  After I do this I don’t really know why I’ve done it.

  “Well, someone seems upset,” Charlie says.

  “Your father and I were just having a conversation. That’s what adults do, Charlie, they talk about things.”

  But my head feels underwater. I’ve read how jealousy reveals everything bad about the person who feels jealous.

  “No, really,” he says. “Why the mood?”

  “I’m worried about your father.”

  Sometimes I think Charlie holds me to a higher standard and then I fail to meet this standard. He has no idea, really, what I’ve done or not done, but I think he can still somehow feel it when I’ve failed.

  “Dad is fine.” It’s like he’s talking to the lizard now, not to me. “Dad’s a big boy. He’ll be all right.”

  HERE IS A MEMORY: Kit takes me to a smaller island near his island with a white sand beach. These are the days before the boys are born. We’re camping in the dunes above the beach, and we swim and pretend to read on the striped blanket, but I can’t pay attention to the words because Kit’s lying beside me in the sand with his hand on my hip. I have nothing to want because I have him and want him entirely.

  BEFORE WE LEAVE FOR Canada, the boys and I go out to the trawler to batten things down. The nets and ropes and old, coffee-stained maps. A pilled fleece vest.