by Susan Conley
“Okay. Okay.” It’s easy to agree, because I don’t have any more text to talk in. I don’t know any more text.
I want to say I’m sorry any of this is happening, and that I’m only here to support him. That’s all I’m here to do. I’ve been trying to hold him up and am apparently giving my husband only my crumbs.
* * *
—
WHEN WE GET HOME, I go back to the waterbed. Lara’s made spaghetti while we’ve been gone, and she and Charlie and Jimmy finish eating in the kitchen.
“Please feel my forehead,” I ask her when she comes up to check on me. “It’s warm, right? I’m sure I have a fever.”
She puts her hand on my face. “No fever.”
She is kind and does not say how neurotic she thinks I’m being. Then she goes downstairs to help Jimmy clean up.
* * *
—
“REMEMBER WHEN WE HAD power?” I said once to Lara when the boys were babies and I’d escaped to Portland.
“If you mean sexual power, we never had any. None. It just felt like we did.”
We were drinking beers down on the pier, and a painting of hers had just been in the museum’s biennial. Her career was happening while mine felt stalled.
She wanted to get another beer, but I said I had to drive back to the island.
“It amazes me how much you’ve changed. It’s just a beer. No one’s going to die at home while you sit here.”
“I have a family,” I told her. I was so dramatic that it’s cringy now.
“There’s a world going on out here, Jill. Not everyone wants to move to an island and make babies.”
It was one of our few fights. I couldn’t tell if she was envious of me for having the boys or if she was mocking me, or both.
“You make it sound elitist or something,” I said.
“Well, mothers can totally be that way.”
“I can’t believe you,” I said. “You make it seem like an entirely different thing than it is.”
“I’m just saying you’re removed up there.” She finished her beer.
“Where do you want me to live? My husband fishes, Lara. That’s what he does. I have children to raise.”
Motherhood had given me somewhere to put all the love I felt inside me. I hadn’t known I’d been looking for a place to put all the love. This was what I wanted to say to Lara. But I don’t think she wanted to hear it. It was something I kept from my closest friend.
* * *
—
SAM COMES IN NOW and lies next to me in the bed, which I can’t really believe.
“Careful,” I tell him. “You could make a wave big enough to throw me off the bed.”
He laughs.
Sometimes that’s all I need from him. I’m getting sleepy. “To what do I owe this visit?”
“It’s weird,” he says, “to live in Dad’s old house without Dad, isn’t it?”
“But it’s not forever.” I can’t tell where this is going, but Sam always has a motive. “Tell me how it’s weird.”
“Because Jimmy’s here, and he’s never usually here when we are. It makes me think about how everything’s different now, and Dad is like really not here.”
I take a good look at him. His face is thinner than last week. Is he eating? I try to keep track, but for all I know he could be having Doritos and Coke for lunch every day at school.
“The thing about Jimmy is that you have to humor him. He’s worried, you know. He’s Dad’s father and he has a problem with people getting sick.”
Kit’s like this too. If one of the boys even gets a cold, it sets Kit off. Then he’s checking temperatures and making them soup. It is the only time he won’t go out fishing. I get it. I get that this worry is his mother’s legacy. But I don’t think Kit sees it. I’m not a therapist, and if I tried to talk to him about it, he’d never listen.
“You okay?” I nudge Sam with my shoulder.
He doesn’t push me away. So I put my hand on his face and rub his forehead.
“You miss Dad.”
“Of course.”
“You wish he was here.”
Sam closes his eyes.
“Oh honey, it’s okay. It’s really all okay.”
Tears leak down his gaunt cheeks.
“But it’s not okay, Mom. I just really worry about him. I like think about Dad all the time, and then I can’t sleep. Like what’s going to happen to him? When will he be back? I mean, don’t lie to me again.”
“It’s not like that at all. Dad’s coming home soon, and you’re going to bed because you have school tomorrow.” I’m losing him. He needs more than words. Or more than my words. I’m not enough.
Lara comes up then and takes Sam’s sweatshirt off and tosses it to him.
“Don’t leave us,” I tell her, and smile, but it’s a fake smile.
“You’ve got this.” She looks at Sam. “Your mother has this, right, Sam?”
“I hope so.” He climbs out of bed and walks down the hall to his room, and I know I’ve lost him.
“I have to teach tomorrow,” Lara says. “A class of twenty-year-olds on cultural appropriation in abstract art.”
“I think Marsh has appropriated my husband.”
“I think you need to sleep.”
I climb out of the bed and hug her hard. I really don’t want her to go, but I say, “Thank you thank you thank you for coming. It means everything.”
THERE’S A BASKETBALL SCRIMMAGE on Wednesday night at the Y, where one half of Sam’s team is playing the other half, and Charlie and I go because Sam asks us to. He so rarely asks us. He always asked Kit. But I think he’s nervous tonight.
The gym at the Avery Y was built underground, and it has no windows and smells of body odor and decades of old sneakers. Sound echoes so it’s hard to think. It feels now like this life I’m leading is Kit’s life. That he chose it.
His Y. His fishing village. How did this happen? I want to drive up to the hospital and get a look at his face. It would be better if I could see him. I’m going up there tomorrow. I have to.
One half of the team’s done something wrong with a play they’re meant to run, and the coach yells and bangs his fist on one of the metal chairs.
He gets more worked up as the scrimmage goes on, and then he throws a chair against the cement wall.
I’m embarrassed to be in the gym. I look over at Charlie next to me. “You can’t make this stuff up.”
He says everything about this coach is ridiculous. “Who would ever do that? I mean, throwing a chair in a scrimmage.”
* * *
—
I FOLLOW HIM TO the dark little lobby at halftime and buy a bag of popcorn and watch him drape his arm over the shoulder of a girl by the vending machines. Then he presses his lips into her hair. I can’t stop staring. He’s smiling at the girl and nodding while she talks to him. Then he helps her put on a purple parka.
I think he’s used some of the new hair gel, so his hair isn’t as wavy around his face, and he’s wearing the V-neck sweater I bought at Target two years ago that I’d forgotten about.
“Mom.” He’s got a please don’t ruin this for me look. “Now you get to meet Lucy.”
“Finally!”
I’m sure I overdo it here. I can’t help myself.
“She’s hungry,” Charlie says, and looks at Lucy’s face again. “So we’re going to go get some food for her at the Tugboat.”
“I’m not so hungry that I need to be rude, Charlie.” She smiles and puts out her hand to me. Her hair sits in loose curls around her face. She has on jeans and a cool red sweater with a blue heart on it and patent leather ankle boots with a chunky heel that make her almost as tall as Charlie. Her skin is a deep brown color, and her eyes seem to take in everything—my hair, my old jeans
, my big amoeba coat. “Hello, Mrs. Archer, so good to finally meet you.”
“Oh no, it’s so good for me to meet you. I’ve heard so much. We have to get you down to the house. We have to, Charlie, don’t we?”
Charlie says we do. But he’s got the faraway look and keeps walking with her toward the door.
“Have fun.” Without thinking I add, “You know how much, right?”
He turns and shoots me a look that says, Don’t ever say that again.
I get myself together and tell him to have a great time. Then I stand in the lobby and suck in my breath.
Well, that wasn’t good. That didn’t go well at all.
I eat more of the popcorn and walk back into the gym alone.
* * *
—
WHEN THE SCRIMMAGE IS over, I back the car out of the Y parking lot carefully, carefully.
Charlie’s in love. I’ve seen it.
Sam’s changed out of his uniform, but he’s still sweaty and worked up. I ask him if it bothers him when his coach throws chairs.
“Coach told us when he throws chairs and swears at us, it’s because he likes us, Mom. He cares about us.”
“That’s bullshit.”
“Excuse me?”
“That’s a bad excuse to get to yell at a bunch of boys.”
“You don’t understand.”
“No, I understand perfectly well.”
“No, you weren’t there, okay? You think you understand. But Coach is trying to get us to win. He says he just wants us to live up to our potential, Mom.”
“Throwing a chair is a strange way to show you care about people.”
Then Sam pulls his protective membrane down, so there’s no way for me to get in.
He almost stopped playing basketball a few years ago because of the coaches who liked to humiliate boys and yell at them. It was the strangest, cruelest thing, how these men acted.
Once when Sam was ten, we took him to a different gym with a different coach in a town farther away. Kit set it up through a friend from high school, but I had to take Sam to the first practice, because Kit wasn’t back from fishing. The coach was famous for his punishments, and he yelled at the boys and called them girls and pussies and told them they were weak.
Near the end of the practice, he made two of the youngest boys do twenty push-ups while all the other boys watched, and I was pretty certain he was going to punish Sam next for something he’d done wrong. But the practice ended without more punishment. Sam walked outside and leaned his head on the roof of our car and sobbed. It was dark out, and no one could see him but me. I told him that we were never going back there and we didn’t.
SAM’S INSTAGRAM POST TONIGHT: a series of direct-to-the-camera monologues by famous professional athletes who’ve lost their fathers and say they’ve never given up.
ON SATURDAY MORNING I’M floating on the waterbed, and I can see her kitchen again in my mind: the faucet and shallow sink you can’t fit a dinner plate in. The two-burner stove and loneliness and chemical smell. I don’t know if the smell came from what Marsh cleaned with or from the pharmacy down below. I wanted to get out of there even before I saw his shirt in the bathroom.
Most of the time I think people want connection and don’t know how to ask for it. Marsh did not want connection with me. I knew this as soon as she gave me the Sanka. She wanted my husband. With me she was just collecting facts.
I don’t drive up to see Kit. Instead I do something I haven’t done in months. I fall back asleep.
When I go downstairs in my sweatpants it’s almost noon, and Jimmy’s at the stove frying bacon. Sam’s at the kitchen table doing an art project he says he hates.
“What is this thing you hate so much, Sam?” Jimmy asks. He seems smaller today in the Wranglers, if that’s possible. As if he aged in his sleep.
“My life map.” Sam’s got a piece of white poster board on the table, and three Magic Markers, and a bottle of Elmer’s Glue, and a small pile of family photos I found for him last night. He looks desperate.
“What in hell is a life map?” Jimmy says.
“Think of a family tree.” I pour my first cup of coffee. I’m glad for both of them this morning and how they distract me.
There’s a photo of Jimmy and Martha on the wall above Sam’s head taken before Kit was born. Maybe 1972. They’re sitting on the stern of their first lobster boat. Martha has her hair tucked into a plaid kerchief and is wearing tan polyester slacks with no pockets. I’ve stared and stared at this photo over the years, looking for clues to her.
People say she was a force of good in the village and also at the phone company where she worked for seventeen years. She had the same crinkly eyes as Kit, and the same chiseled nose, and the same smiling mouth that hid her stubbornness.
In all the time I’ve known Jimmy, I’ve never seen him hug anyone. But there he is with his arm across Martha’s shoulders. I look at the photo. Then I look over at Jimmy cooking his bacon. And all I see now is his heartbreak. If you read this house carefully, that’s what you always see.
Jimmy comes over to the table and stares at Sam’s poster. “Looks to me like you’re almost done here.”
Kit can’t recall a day when Jimmy helped him with his homework. Jimmy was always on his boat. Now he is what he calls semiretired. He turns the burner off and sits down on the other side of Sam with the bacon.
I’m slightly more afraid of him than usual. He keeps giving me his disapproving look. Like if he could find the right time, he’d openly criticize me for not going back to the hospital, or say something about the way I’ve let Sam grow his hair long, which would be another way of saying Why in God’s name are you not at the hospital?
I think Candy’s also wondering about me. She keeps saying she and Flip will take the boys so I can go be with Kit, and I keep telling her that she doesn’t have to. But I don’t know how much longer I can punish him.
Sam has drawn a simple brown tree on the poster board, and on each leaf of the tree he’s written the name of a family member. Kit and Jimmy and Candy and Charlie and me.
I stare at the tree, and it feels like my marriage is so far away from me. I start helping Sam glue photos to the poster board.
“I don’t just hate my life map,” he says. “I hate all my classes.”
Jimmy mops the bacon with a paper towel and acts like he doesn’t hear even half of what gets said in his house.
He nudges Sam with his shoulder. “Want some? It’s really good bacon.”
Sam takes two pieces.
Then Charlie comes out of the little bathroom under the stairs. “What exactly are you doing now, Mom?” His bangs are sticking straight up in all the gel, which I guess is the look he wants.
“Helping Sam with his life map.”
“Why isn’t Sam helping Sam with his life map?”
“I like it. I like gluing photos on poster board.”
Charlie takes a piece of bacon and leans against the orange counter and finishes in two bites. “Sam should glue his own photos. I had to do mine.”
“Well, good for you, but I’m having fun.”
“I can hear you.” Sam stares at his brother. “I’m right here, Charlie. I can hear every word you say.”
“Well, she’s ruining your life by doing everything for you.”
“You’re ruining my life by being you.”
Sam gets up and grabs his Shakespeare off the counter and goes and flops in Jimmy’s recliner. “Why do people even like Shakespeare? It’s not written in English.”
“I never read a word of it.” Jimmy takes more bacon.
“You don’t have to like it,” Charlie says. “Just read it and imagine you’re in the story.”
“Good idea, Charlie,” I say. “Try what Charlie said.”
“Who would ever wa
nt to be in a Shakespeare story?” He tosses the book on the floor. “Have you really read Romeo and Juliet, Charlie?”
“I’ve read the comedies and most of the tragedies.”
“Because you wanted to?”
“I took the Shakespeare elective. Remember?”
“Fuck Shakespeare. It hurts my head.”
“Sam,” I say. “Stop it. I mean it.”
“What? I really mean it. I don’t understand the fake language. It seriously harms my brain.”
“It’s not fake,” Charlie says. “It’s the way people talked in the sixteen hundreds. It’s about doing anything for love. It’s the best play.”
“You just like it because it’s all about dying for a girl. No one should talk like that, ever.” Sam stomps upstairs to put more clothes on.
“Yeah, ‘dying for a girl,’ ” Charlie calls up the stairs. “Get a vocabulary.”
Jimmy starts laughing and goes and stretches out in the recliner and turns the NASCAR channel on.
I get up and look in the fridge. We’re out of real milk, but I find a can of evaporated milk in the cupboard above the sink and make pancakes to help everyone feel better.
Charlie gets the first round and says they taste spongy.
“Thank you for that compliment,” I say. “Give me strength.”
Sam comes down the stairs in an old blue sweater of Kit’s and a pair of sweatpants that balloon around his ankles and says, “You always say that, Mom. Strength for what?”
“Strength to get through another day with you.”
Then I grab him and hug him before he turns away. It feels forced, but I do it anyway. Everything feels forced right now.
“Mom,” he says after he eats his first pancake, “these taste sour. Like something sour is in them.” He frowns.
I put the spatula down next to the frying pan and walk out the back door. I think I’ll have a cry or some other form of big emotion out here, because the boys don’t like my pancakes. I was trying hard with the pancakes.