by Susan Conley
It’s freezing outside. The sky is a flat November gray, and Kit’s gone. I came back to Maine for him, and he’s left me here.
I turn and look at the house.
Charlie mashes his face against the window next to the door to try to get me to laugh. It doesn’t work. But I go back inside without having any big emotion.
THE BOYS LEAVE AROUND five for a pep rally behind the high school. Sam’s almost out the door when I catch him.
“Do you know how much I love you?”
“Mom.” He scowls. “Don’t ever say that.”
“But do you know?”
“Mom, stop,” he says. “You can’t ever say that to me again.”
The house is too quiet after they leave. Jimmy’s out on the back stairs having his last cigarette. I’m going to make myself stay awake by working on the blue afghan I’m almost done with. I put on a rerun of The Office.
When Jimmy comes back in, I stand and try to give him the recliner, but he waves me off and says he doesn’t own the chair.
Everything in the room looks preserved from when Martha lived here except for the recliner. There’s the slatted-wood coffee table, and the mustard couch, and the matching turquoise lamps with horsehair shades.
Jimmy stares at the TV. Then he says he could never work in an office like that. He can only fish.
“Well, Kit may have to,” I say. “Maybe he should take some of that money the state is giving to the fishermen whose quotas were cut so bad in the last round. Money for community college. Or computer training.”
“Kit will no more work in an office than I will.” Jimmy laughs. “Just shoot me.”
I have all the pieces of the afghan done, and now I’m crocheting them together like my mother taught me. “He can’t lobster. He can’t shrimp. What is he supposed to do?”
“He’s supposed to have his wife up at the hospital with him. We don’t leave our sick, Jill.”
“We do when we have teenage boys who need us.”
“I see no one in need here. I see boys who could use a little toughening.”
Now we are getting into it.
“You mean the way that you raised Kit? All that toughening? Because I don’t think it worked, Jimmy. I don’t think my boys need any more toughening. It’s hard enough to be a boy these days.”
“I raised Kit as best I could.”
“You raised him?”
“I raised him. I raised Candy. I kept this roof over our heads. Candy has her stories. I know what she says. She’s proud, like Martha was. You have no idea how Candy suffered after Martha died. No idea.”
He stands and walks to the hallway. “But don’t forget who their father was. You think a teenager knows how to raise a teenager?”
He goes upstairs, and my hands are shaking. I have to put the needles down.
* * *
—
CHARLIE COMES BACK HOURS later and says the pep rally was okay. Not great. Just okay. A few drunk idiots from the senior class brought fireworks and tried to ruin everything, but Principal Pierce was there. Charlie went to Lucy’s afterward and lost Sam along the way.
“You were meant to stay together.” I stare at him. I’m still getting over Jimmy’s tongue-lashing. “What don’t you understand about the word together?”
“I’m not his parent. That’s what you keep saying. Besides, he’s got his new friends.”
“What friends?”
“The kid Roman and the other one, Derrick.”
I give him a look.
“They’re fine, Mom.”
“Do any of them party?”
“Please don’t use that word, party. You don’t do it right.”
“Okay. But do they?”
“I’d say it’s possible.” He opens the fridge and pulls out the orange juice.
“Did you eat anything at Lucy’s?”
“Lucy’s mom made beef with vegetables and rice and spices. That’s like the best thing I’ve ever eaten.” He pours a glass of the orange juice and drinks the whole thing.
“Sounds so good. And you and Lucy?”
“What about us?” He places the empty glass in the sink.
“You’re good?” I try to say this casually. I ought to be able to ask him.
He rolls his eyes.
“What’s wrong with me asking? Tell me.”
“The reason I like Lucy’s mom is that she doesn’t ask me stuff.” He says this so sarcastically.
I’m kind of stunned. It’s like he’s fallen in love with the whole family. Lucy’s mother and sister and three brothers. I want to show him that we can be a family too. Sam and Kit and Charlie and me. I just didn’t expect to lose him so soon.
Candy told me that I have to be patient. There’s no rushing it with teens.
I text Sam twelve times.
He doesn’t text back.
Then he walks in around 1 a.m.
I stare at him and come out of the dream. “Where have you been?” It takes me another minute to get up from the recliner. “What have you been doing all this time?”
“We drove around.”
He’s over at the bottom of the stairs with his hands in the front pockets of his jeans.
“You drove where?”
“Just around.”
“You drove around?”
“We ate at McDonald’s. Went to Roman’s to play songs. Why are you mad at me? Why are you like using that tone?”
“I’m not mad. I’m worried. And this is not a tone.”
“No, you’re mad and I did nothing wrong. I was just driving around. Jesus, Mom.”
I can’t believe he’s acting like the person who’s offended.
Kit used to spend all night driving with friends in cars. He said they’d drive and drive and end up at the McDonald’s parking lot.
I go stand next to Sam at the bottom of the stairs and try to smell his breath and his hair. I can’t find any evidence. But even I know there are ways to do drugs and not get caught.
“You broke curfew.”
“What curfew?”
“The one where I said you needed to be home by eleven.”
He shakes his head at me and walks upstairs.
I CAN’T SEE SAM’S face under the quilts. Only a swatch of his straw-colored hair. It’s so dark outside it still feels like night. I put my hand on his back and press.
“Jesus, Mom.” He rolls over. “What time is it?”
I whisper that he needs to go down to the store to stack boxes because he broke curfew.
He looks like he’s going to fight me on this, but then he must decide he’s going to lose anyway, so he grabs his sweatpants off the floor and follows me in the dark.
I turn the Mr. Coffee on, and he makes two pieces of toast and slathers them with honey.
“You must text me at night.” I’m over by the back door in one of Kit’s old flannel bathrobes, staring at the gravel driveway. “You must tell me where you are and what you’re doing when your plans change.”
“But the plans are always changing, Mom. That’s the thing, okay? There are no plans.” He leans so far back in the kitchen chair that I think he’s going to break the spindles.
“Promise me you’ll text from now on. Promise.”
He takes another big bite of toast. “Okay. Okay. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I don’t mean to be such a jerk.”
I point to the door. “Go help Candy.”
WHEN HE’S GONE, I call Candy.
“It’s still night out,” she says. “Have you looked outside?”
“I know you’re up.”
She and Flip have been up since four. All the fishermen in Maine have been up since four.
“Well, I may be up, but I’m not human yet.”
This means
she hasn’t had her first coffee.
“Take my younger son from me before I hurt him. Please.”
“Send him down.”
“I already have.”
I GO BACK UPSTAIRS and pick Sam’s jeans off the floor by the bathroom door. There’s a little baggie of pot in the front pocket and the smallest clay pipe you can imagine. I walk downstairs and open the back door and stand under the pine trees and let myself get really cold to stop the zinging. It is so cold I could be at the South Pole. I’m no leader. I have not walked us to safety.
* * *
—
SAM COMES HOME MANY hours later and says it was really tiring at the store and that Candy was all worked up about how many boxes he stacked. He hopes I didn’t tell her anything about the curfew, because she was acting odd.
“Please promise you didn’t tell her anything, Mom?”
I almost start yelling at him then. But I’m still formulating my response to the pot.
He lies down on the couch and turns the TV on.
I stare at him from the hallway until I hope my eyes bore a hole in his head.
“Please don’t do that.” He takes a sip of water from the glass on the table. Then looks over at me.
“Do what?”
“Please don’t stare at me like you’ve never seen me before.”
* * *
—
I WAIT UNTIL DINNER. It’s a long wait. Sometimes it takes just one moment to break through the normalcy of your life. Then so much else gets exposed. Your relationship to your children. Your borrowed house. The small film you’re making and have secretly hoped will save your husband’s village but will not really save anything. The anxiety grates on me. I call to the boys and put the baggie of pot on the table with the lasagna.
Jimmy’s at the store, having a meeting with the lobstermen’s association. I can do this my way. Except I don’t really know what I’m doing.
“Oh good,” Charlie says when he sits. “I was hoping to get high before we ate.”
“Jillian,” Sam says. “Jillian.”
“Please don’t call me that. Call me your mother.”
My hands shake while I cut through the top layer of cheese on the lasagna and then down through the pasta and tomato sauce and beef.
“I can explain.” Sam puts his face on the table next to his plate and closes his eyes.
“But will it do you any good?” Charlie asks.
Sam says he’s sorry and that it is Robbie’s pot. Sam’s just taking care of it. “Keeping it so Robbie doesn’t smoke it all.”
If this is supposed to make me feel better, it’s not. The pot looks old and brownish and is a symbol of how things are unraveling. There’s a lot of pressure on the pot. The pot isn’t just pot. The shirt in the bathroom in Nova Scotia isn’t just a shirt.
“Oh really?” I say. “Like you’re the foster parent for the pot?”
“Exactly.”
“Sam.”
He’s not really here in the room with us. Maybe he’s high. Does he think we’re buying this?
“It makes me relaxed for like the only time in my life.”
“Oh Sam.”
“It’s true, Mom.”
“But you can’t live this way, Sam.” I look at his eyes.
First you have to get over the fact that they’ve even tried drugs. Then the fear becomes whether they’ll like them when they try them. It’s fear opening up upon fear.
He looks down at his plate.
“But I can live this way. I want to live this way. I like it.”
“You used to be interested in fixing things with Dad and in making songs and in birds.”
“I was six when I was interested in birds, Mom. It was like for a week.” He makes a fist. “Everyone smokes pot. It’s like a legalized substance, and you’re completely out of control.”
“But we’re not everyone. And it’s not legal. Unless you turned twenty-one and I missed your birthday. The pot’s much stronger now, and you never know who’ll get addicted.” I thought he knew all this and that I saw too many addicted boys when I taught in the prison. The only thing I know how to do is to make it harder for Sam to do drugs.
“We do know, Mom. We do. You can’t be addicted to pot, Mom.”
“You can, Sam. Either way, what matters is not to do it. Give me your phone.” I put my hand out. “Please just give it to me.”
“I need it pretty much for my entire existence. I’ll die without it. Please don’t make me.”
He’s joking and not joking. He scares me a little.
This is when he should say sorry. He should say, Sorry for the pot, I’m really sorry, Mom.
He tosses the phone, and it lands in my lap. I feel a little victory about the phone, and then I crash.
I put it on the table next to my plate, but it’s silly to take the phone. The flimsiest consequence. What will I do with the phone, anyway? I need him to have it, especially now, so I can keep track of him.
People told me you can run out of options when you have teen wolves. I didn’t believe them. The mothers at the library story hours and the back-to-school nights. I thought I understood Sam, and this was all that mattered. I thought I’d never need to take his phone away, and I’d never run out of options.
I think the boys are waiting for what I’ll say next. I am waiting too. Kit should be here. It would be better if he was here and we were together.
Charlie finally gets up and puts our plates in the dishwasher.
“I don’t need to go to school,” Sam says. “I want to be a fisherman.”
“You can be. Just one who graduates from high school. But I thought you wanted to play in your band when you graduate.”
Charlie says, “I think bands are an excuse to do drugs.”
“Shut up, Charlie. You don’t know fuck about bands.”
“Sam!” It’s the first time I’ve let myself yell in days. “You can’t lie to me! You can’t lie! Honesty is everything. Where do you get the pot?”
“Mom,” he says. “Sometimes you can’t take the truth.”
Charlie’s hanging by his fingers from the little molding above the kitchen door. I look over at him, and he shrugs. “It’s true, Mom. Sometimes it’s better to give you the facts in pieces.”
“I’m not going to change who I am,” Sam says, and goes and lies down on the couch.
Charlie follows him in there and stretches out in the recliner. “I can’t believe what comes out of your mouth, Sam.”
I leave the phone on the table. Sam can have his phone. What good does his phone do me?
I go sit on the arm of the couch. “Sam, if you’re not going to stop smoking pot, then you’re not going to live with me and Charlie and Jimmy.” It’s too hard to try to find the right words. “I’m not asking you to change who you are. I’m asking you not to do drugs, which doesn’t seem like much.”
Is anything getting through?
“Jesus.” Charlie shakes his head.
“Jesus me? Or Jesus Sam?” I can’t tell who Charlie’s mad at.
“Just Jesus,” he says, and turns on the TV.
I stare at the basketball game and miss the island and miss my bedroom with the peeling windowsills. We can never live in Jimmy’s house again. Something in this house brings out the worst in us.
Charlie goes upstairs and comes down carrying three notebooks and says that he’s driving to Lucy’s to study.
I won’t let him go. The roads have black ice.
He says he and Lucy have a plan and that they only have this one last year together in high school before she leaves for college. He has to go to her house.
I hate it when Charlie’s mad at me even more than I hate it when Sam’s mad at me. But the roads are really bad.
Then he mopes around the
kitchen, opening and shutting the plywood cupboards, looking for things to eat.
“Did you not get more salt-and-vinegar potato chips like I asked?”
“Wait,” Sam says from the couch. “You’re not actually crying over potato chips, are you, Charlie?”
JIMMY’S STANDING IN THE hall outside my bedroom an hour later.
“Jill,” he says, “you need to know that Sam’s downstairs having a shit fit in the kitchen about you taking his phone.”
I climb out of the waterbed. It takes a minute. When I open the door, Jimmy looks older than he did a few hours ago. Craggy nose and white beard. Why haven’t I noticed that he’s lost almost all his hair?
He’s lived in Sewall all his life. This staggers me. Don’t let that become my husband. Don’t let that become Kit.
He says, “Why in God’s name doesn’t someone bring these boys up right?”
“Sam can have his phone, Jimmy. The phone is the least of our problems.”
“It’s none of my business, Jill. Your marriage. But if you aren’t driving up to that hospital to get him, then I am. People go to hospitals to die. Martha would want him home, and I’ll be damned if we’re going to lose his boat. But I will tell you right now that someone needs to give that Sam a talking-to.”
I can see down to the front yard through the round window at the end of the hallway. The grass is brown and frozen over with ice.
As if I’m not trying to talk to Sam. As if it isn’t all I think about.
Jimmy’s face is red and swollen with emotion. I’ve never seen it like this. He says, “Someone needs to get that boy on the water and out of his own head. He reminds me of the way I was, hell on wheels. Get him down to Shorty’s tomorrow. Shorty says he’s waiting for him.”
“He has school tomorrow. He’s sixteen, Jimmy. It’s important he go to school. Shorty would be better off driving you up to the hospital to get my husband discharged. Please tell Kit I say hello while you’re there. Tell the cook on the boat hello too. As for talking to my son, Jimmy, yeah. I’ve been trying to talk to him all along.”