by Susan Conley
Then I close the door gently in Jimmy’s face.
CHARLIE GOES UP TO Bangor with his debate team after school on Monday. The freezing rain starts at about five o’clock, and the roads get even icier. He calls from the bus on the way home. Is it okay if he sleeps at Lucy’s house? She’s fine with it.
It means I won’t have to drive up in the dark and grab him at school.
I say yes, because the Subaru tires are old and don’t do well on ice.
I don’t know if I should talk to Lucy’s mother about this. Maybe she thinks I’m crazy, letting my son sleep at her house.
Charlie says he’ll sleep in the storage room in their attic.
Sam gets a ride down the peninsula with Robbie’s mother. I know she drives a Range Rover because Sam has told me about this car many times. Its heated seats and sunroof.
I meet them outside their gate, and Sam climbs into the Subaru. It’s raining too hard for me to get out and thank Robbie’s mother. I think her name is Gwen. All I can do is wave through the fogged windshield and hope she sees me.
Sam and Jimmy and I watch Jeopardy that night, and Sam pouts on the couch because I didn’t let him stay at Robbie’s and play video games. But I was never going to let him stay. It’s a school night. I’m trying to hold on to some of the routines at Jimmy’s. It’s been three months since Kit left. It feels like three years.
Tonight it’s a full moon high tide, and Jimmy walks down to the harbor to see how far the water has risen. He comes back and says the waves are breaking three feet from Candy’s house on the ledge. It’s the highest waterline he’s ever seen. He sits down in his recliner and shakes his head.
WHEN CHARLIE GETS HOME Tuesday night, Sam’s making grilled cheese. The Celtics have won, and Jimmy’s gone to bed. Charlie hangs his parka on the doorknob in the back hall and comes into the kitchen and opens the fridge.
I’ve missed him. It’s surprised me how much. He was gone one night, and it felt like a week. When he’s really gone and no longer lives with me, I’ll need grief counseling. I’m only partly joking.
Sam says, “We’ve decided there’s another word for it, Charlie.”
“Word for what?” Charlie says.
“For sleeping over,” Sam says. “We call them soirées.” He flips one of the grilled cheeses with the spatula.
“We do?” I take a sip of my mint tea at the table, where I’m trying to edit Shorty’s interview. “I have no idea what Sam’s talking about, Charlie.”
“I don’t sleep in Lucy’s room, if that’s what you’re thinking, Sam. I sleep in a room upstairs like an attic with all these boxes.” He gets out the orange juice and pours a glass.
“What we want to know”—Sam turns the front burner off and puts the sandwiches on the cutting board and slices them in half so the cheese oozes—“is if you used protection.”
Then Charlie pulls Sam down, and they go at it on the linoleum.
Every few seconds I tell them to stop. But I have no control over it, really.
When Charlie feels he’s won, or has caused enough pain to scare Sam, he climbs off.
What amazes me is that Sam still doesn’t let up.
“Well, did you do it?” he asks, and bites into his sandwich.
“Do what?”
“You know. Go all the way.”
“Sam,” Charlie says. “Get a life.”
“I’m trying. But my mother won’t let me out of the house. I’m being kept hostage.”
“Not true.” I go stare out the living room window. “Not true. Not true.” I’m guilty of things, but that isn’t one of them.
The waves in the harbor have little pointed tents on top that rise and fall, over and over. I think Lucy has saved Charlie by giving him a place for his emotions. But Sam doesn’t have any place for his emotions to go.
Kit calls, and I answer on the first ring.
The bifocal doctor says he’d like to speak to me. Before I can say anything, he gets on the phone and tells me that the blood infection is a little better but they still don’t know when Kit will be released.
“I don’t like infections,” the doctor says. “They make me angry.”
“Okay.” I try to make my voice upbeat. “This sounds good.”
The boys are on the couch now, eating Breyers mint chip out of the carton with spoons.
The doctor says, “Just to be clear, it is not good.”
“Great,” I say. “Thank you so much.” I take some small pleasure in hanging up on him.
“Dad’s bad,” Sam says, and stretches his arms up toward the ceiling.
“What are you talking about?” I walk into the kitchen. “The doctor said things were steady.”
“But not really, Mom.” Sam follows me. “I could tell by your tone. I can always tell by your tone.”
Jimmy comes down to the kitchen and looks hard at Sam. “Be nice to your mother.”
I can’t believe he’s on my side now.
“Mom lies, Charlie,” Sam says. “She’s not honest.”
“I do not lie.”
“Do too.”
“You both have to go upstairs,” I tell them. “I can’t take you another minute.”
“There,” Sam says. “See? She’s trying not to talk to us. That’s how she lies.”
I take Sam’s shoulders and walk him to the bottom of the stairs. “How much are you brushing your teeth?”
“I’ve never even had a cavity.”
“But you’re older now. Brush twice a day. We can’t afford cavities.”
“We can’t afford anything. What did the doctor really say, Mom?”
I steer him up the stairs into the bathroom and hand him his toothbrush from a blue cup Jimmy keeps on the sink.
I say, “It’s the infection again.”
He stops brushing and leans his face close to my face. “What are you even saying?”
“But we’re still shooting for Saturday.”
“If he doesn’t make it back Saturday, my trust in you is completely lost.”
I want to tell him that we’re all suffering. And that it’s time for him to grow up and stop taking jabs at me. Because he wears me down and this is how he wins.
“It’s so lame of the doctor. So beat. This whole town is beat. This whole state, and we should be there with Dad. We should totally be there.”
“What about school?”
“What about it? All my grades suck.”
“I know that isn’t true. I think you have too much homework and that we need to get you out of some of those classes.”
“It makes me want to scream when you say that. I want to take my punishment like everyone else.”
“But school’s not meant to be punishment, Sam.”
“Do not even start with that stuff. This is serious.”
I try to hug him by the sink, but he turns away.
“Mom.” His face gets red. “His boat almost blew up. What does school matter? Stupid, stupid school.” Then he walks out of the bathroom.
JIMMY AND CANDY LEAVE for Nova Scotia Friday morning before the sun’s up.
I go out to the driveway to thank them. Candy’s behind the wheel, and she rolls down her window and tells me to go back inside.
I say I’m embarrassed I’m not the one going, and that I’ll have a bed set up in the living room for Kit by the time they get back tomorrow.
The sky is gunmetal gray, and it’s starting to sleet. A loneliness creeps into everything I say. “Be careful,” I warn her. “Drive slow. You don’t have to go. I can go. I can do it.”
She says he’s her brother, for God’s sake. “Of course we’re going. Now get back inside, Jill, and dry off. We’re a family. Always have been, always will be.”
I’M AT THE KITCHEN table that afternoon editing on my
laptop when Sam walks in and says he’s been kicked off the basketball team.
At first I don’t understand what he’s telling me.
Then he says he wants to jump off a bridge.
“That’s not even funny.” My eyes sting from the computer screen.
“It’s true, though.”
“What did you do?” I stand up from the table. “Tell me what you did this time.”
He pulls up the hood of his sweatshirt and ties it under his chin. Then he shakes his head at me and goes and lies down on the couch. “It’s bad. It’s bad this time. You don’t want to know.”
“You didn’t really get kicked off, did you?” I follow him. “Tell me you didn’t.”
“No, I did.”
* * *
—
CHARLIE COMES HOME MAYBE ten minutes later and stands in the hallway and tells me that lots of kids smoke pot in the school parking lot, over by the big piles of sand. But it’s pretty hard to get caught. Teachers don’t go out there to check very often. But Sam’s managed to do it.
Principal Pierce calls an hour later and says that in addition to being removed from the basketball team, Sam’s been suspended from school for three days.
What will he do with his time? This is what I want to ask them all. What do you think he’ll do with his time?
If boys don’t fill it with basketball and debate team and science experiments, they find other things to fill it with, and this is how they start to get lost. When a boy gets kicked off the basketball team, it’s everything.
* * *
—
AT SOME POINT NEAR dark, I make the boys bring down one of Kit’s old twin beds so he can sleep in the living room. There will be no stairs for him for weeks. The bed is heavy and it takes some yelling and maneuvering to get it down. First Charlie yells at Sam about not listening to his directions, and then Sam yells at Charlie for bossing him.
We decide to put the bed by the far wall next to the couch, coming out vertically so Kit can lie in the bed and see through the hallway to the kitchen.
When we’ve got the bed where we want it, Sam tells me that he and Roman and Robbie may take their band to Burlington before school’s even over.
“How will you do that?” I’m sitting on the arm of the couch, trying to have a concerned look on my face.
“Roman’s van.”
“But what about school? And will you get a job to pay for the trip?”
“I’ll get a job, but not Roman. He says he has a learning disability. I’ll do some independent study or something to get my credits.”
I look out the window. Three cormorants are standing way down on Shorty’s pier with their heads tucked under their wings.
Where’s Sam getting the pot? How much is he smoking?
“A learning disability that prevents him from working?” Charlie yells from the kitchen where he’s making tuna supreme.
“He gets money from the government. Or his parents do. And he volunteers.”
“Who does?” Charlie says.
“Roman. Because he can’t get a real job and make more than the minimum wage or he’d lose the government money. But it’s not enough.”
“What is not enough?” I don’t understand.
“The government money,” Sam says.
“How do you know this?” Charlie says. “How do you know all these really personal things about him?”
“It’s our band, Charlie. It’s our band, all right?”
* * *
—
A STORM COMES THROUGH later, and the hard rain pelts the shingles on Jimmy’s roof.
Charlie’s over on the couch with his biology book. He says it’s Sam’s turn to bail The Duchess.
Sam’s down on the floor, leaning against the couch, tossing a basketball over his head and watching the Celtics.
He says, “It’s not like I’m addicted, if that’s what you think, guys.”
“Addicted to what?” Charlie asks.
“It was an experiment.”
“What was?” Charlie says.
“Smoking.”
“That’s what you said the last time.” I’m sitting in the recliner trying to enjoy the sound of the rain.
“I wanted to see what it was like,” Sam says.
Part of me wants to get up and shake him.
“I’m only doing what every teenager in America does.”
“Shut up, Sam,” Charlie says.
“But I don’t have a problem.”
“You smoked pot in the school parking lot when you were under contract with the basketball team.” It’s important to state the facts.
Charlie puts his book down and looks at his brother. “Where did you get the weed?”
“I should leave,” Sam says. “I should just leave this state.”
“The Duchess is sinking, Sam,” Charlie says. “You need to go bail it.”
Sam throws the ball up and catches it. Throws it again. This time it hits the water glass on the coffee table, and water spills over Charlie’s math notebook.
Charlie leaps off the couch and tackles Sam down to the floor.
“Are you gonna bail the boat?” Charlie says. “Say it. Say you will.” Charlie has an edge to his voice that I haven’t heard before.
“Fine,” Sam says. “I’ll bail the goddamn boat.”
He goes in the back hall and puts Kit’s rubber boots on.
“This family is killing me.”
When he’s like this, we have to leave him until he figures out a way to forgive us for the things he’s holding against us that we haven’t done.
“I’m leaving.” He has his hand on the doorknob. “This is me. I’m really going now.”
AN HOUR GOES BY. Then another. I make an apple crisp and try to pretend Sam’s not out in the freezing rain without a coat.
He doesn’t come home for the Cleveland Cavaliers versus the Oklahoma Thunder on ESPN. I stand next to the recliner, listening to the rain and looking out the window waiting to see his shape walk up the dark hill.
I call Kit at eleven.
He answers and says, “Jimmy brought chewing tobacco and Candy’s making me shave my beard. I think I’m going to get out of here.”
“Well, we could use you here. Sam’s out in the rain without a coat. It’s been three hours, and it’s almost snowing, and he’s no longer on the basketball team.”
“What do you mean, no longer on the team?”
“Meaning he got kicked off for smoking pot, and we had a deal.”
“Who did?”
“Sam and me.”
“What deal, Jilly? Can you just slow down a little, babe?”
“He promised. At least I think he promised.”
“He promised what?”
“He promised not to smoke pot, and you ruined everything.”
“Please don’t call to insult me. Please don’t. Please slow down. Teenagers do things, Jilly. They do things.”
“I don’t think they have to do things. Charlie doesn’t do things.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I’ve been devoted to them.”
“You don’t own devotion.” His voice rises. “Jilly, where’s Sam? I want you to slow down and tell me where you think he is.”
“I bet he’s down with Flip watching TV. Or over at Shorty’s. Or Robbie’s. Or in Avery with Roman or Derrick from the basketball team. He doesn’t have a coat,” I remind him. “No coat.”
“Why no coat?”
“I think it was an act of protest.”
Kit says, “Should we call Tim?”
Tim’s been the sheriff in Sewall for the last ten years. He was one grade ahead of Kit in high school.
He says, “I’ll call Tim and Flip and Shorty. You sho
uld sleep.”
“You know I can’t.”
I hang up and get in the Subaru and drive around the village twice. Then I park outside the store and reach Candy at the hospital.
She’s calling everyone she knows now up and down the coast.
It’s midnight, and I leave two messages at Robbie’s house, but I don’t have a number for Roman’s or Derrick’s. I drive back to the A-frame and lie on the couch with my phone, waiting for Sam to call.
* * *
—
CHARLIE FINDS ME HERE on the couch at six o’clock in the morning and is really disturbed by this.
“We sleep in beds, Mom. That is why we have beds.”
“Sam didn’t come home last night.”
“I know this. I share a room with him, remember?”
He seems calmer than I am. He almost always is. He says he thinks Sam’s gone back to the island and we need to go out there and look.
I’ll do anything anyone suggests. I put the amoeba coat on and the puffy gloves and follow Charlie down to the wharf. Steam curls off the harbor, and there are lots of seagulls standing on the ledge, waiting out the wind.
I take one glove off and call Lara. She doesn’t answer.
The Duchess is still tied up to Jimmy’s wharf. Charlie says it would be just like Sam to hitch a boat ride to the island and that we still have to go look.
It takes us ten minutes. We have to keep our chins tucked into our coats to stop them from freezing. Charlie docks the boat and jumps out and ties the stern line to the float. I do the bow.
The rooms inside the house seem smaller and colder now, and two ghosts live here. I’ve got to get outside.
We take the path through the woods to the southern tip. The ocean today is a cold, possessing ocean. The sound of the waves crashing against the rocks is a religious sound. Like the sound of the organ at the church my mother used to take us to.
I talked on the phone with her yesterday before Sam had gone missing. She said she needed more oxygen now and that my father was off getting several of her tanks filled.