“How?” I said. I was asleep on my feet and my face hurt so much that the pain was all I could think of.
“I’ll think of something,” she said.
“He’s going to take my kid, Gracie,” I said.
“We can stop him,” she said. I laughed then, even though it hurt, a bitter choking chuckle halfway to a sob. “What are we going to do, Grace, call a cop?” I said.
That night I gave up and slept on the floor in Robert’s room. Bobby saw the puddle of pillow and blanket on the floor and tried to put his hand out to me. I cringed, pulled away, then looked him full in the face. Once I saw a man in the psych ward reading the notebooks he’d written before he’d been given antihallucinogens, reading the gibberish he’d written frantically, fanatically, as though it was the secret of the universe. Bobby looked a little like that when I pulled back from his big hand.
I’d taken two Percocets I had left over from having my wisdom teeth out, and when I woke up, my one cheek beating with every beat of my heart, the sun was making shards of daylight across the blue carpeting and the house was empty. I ran from room to room calling Robert’s name, and finally I called the principal of his school, who called the counselor at the school day camp, who said that he was in gym, playing pillow polo. There were only ten days left of day camp. We were renting a house at the beach for the first two weeks of August, a cottage on Long Island Sound. But I wasn’t going.
I’d called a family planning clinic in lower Manhattan to make an appointment for the next day. Then I’d called Patty Bancroft. And I bet Bobby thought it was because he’d broken my nose and bloodied my face. He’d never touched my face before; it was as though, as never before, he’d touched my insides, who I was, who I am. And it was his threat, too, that made me understand that I had to run to hide, to get away. What was I going to do, call a cop?
But maybe it was Robert who made me run, really. It was the look on his face on the way home from Grace’s apartment that last time, the look on his face as we passed under the streetlight on our corner. The look on his face was nothing, nothing at all, the look he might have if he were watching a boring movie on television or playing with his food at the dinner table. The part of a little boy that would be frightened if his father threatened his mother and his aunt, the part of him that would be scared and screaming if his mother’s face was all bruised and bloodied: that part of Robert was dead. Or been driven so deep inside that you couldn’t see it and he couldn’t feel it. I saw it for a moment when he came home that next day from day camp and saw me in the kitchen, in the sunlight; I saw the kind of horror and fear that a normal kid would feel. But then it was gone again, his face flat and closed, as he asked me whether I’d had an accident. So many accidents during his childhood, and all of them lies.
That’s why I left when I did, how I did. During the long nights of a Florida winter, alive with wind sounds and whispers, as I imagined that Bobby was on the roof, at the door, jimmying a window open, I had a lot of time to think. And that’s the truth. That’s why I left. I’m a nurse, you know, a Catholic girl, a mother, and the wife of a man who wanted to suck the soul out of me and put it in his pocket. I’m not real good at doing things for myself. But for Robert? That was a different story.
Oh, goodness gracious, you must be Beth. And Robert.” Cindy was right, her mother was thin and dark, as though she’d been dried by the sun, a raisin of a woman with her daughter’s big blue eyes and electric smile. She stood aside to let us into the house, her arm extended as though we were being welcomed to something magical.
“Merry Christmas,” Craig said, getting up from the couch, a mug of eggnog with snowflakes painted on it in his hand.
“Merry Christmas,” said Mike Riordan, who was sitting next to him.
“Hi, Mr. Riordan,” said Robert. “What are you doing here?”
“You come in here, Beth,” Cindy shouted from inside the kitchen.
When I’d been younger I’d worked at the hospital sometimes on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, ceding the holiday to the older women with children and in-laws to cook for. But even in the lounge of the medical-surgical floor, or the emergency room, we managed to construct our own traditions, the fancy trays of meats and cheeses studded with radish roses, the plates of cannoli and cream puffs, the tiny tree with felt ornaments that one of the aides made, with each of our names spelled out on a bell or a star in glue and glitter. And later we’d made our own Christmases, Bobby and Robert and I. Christmas Eve dinner at Ann Bene detto’s, scungilli and calamari and baccalà, the walk home through a cold Brooklyn night along streets bright as day with lit-up lawn reindeer and sleighs and Mr. Costanza’s house, that got in the Daily News every year because it took $500 worth of Con Ed juice to light it for a week. Morning mass at St. Stannie’s, the kids clutching whichever toy was the favorite that year, Ninja Turtles, Power Rangers, Battle Beasts, dinner in the early evening. And after the guests were gone and the dishwasher was humming and Robert was in bed, his new toys ranged around him like a bulwark, the smell of fresh plastic and evergreen in the air, Bobby would put on his Nat King Cole album and at the words “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire” he would take me in his arms and dance me slowly, seriously, around our small and narrow living room, singing along in a baritone grown a little uncertain with age. I can feel him, smell him, if I close my eyes and hum that song to myself.
It was the Florida weather that had saved me, as I’d climbed out of bed that morning to dress. It was as warm as April in New York, so that it made it hard to believe in reindeer in the snow or sleigh rides. Even Robert felt it: “It’s weird to wear a short-sleeved shirt to Christmas,” he’d said as he loaded new batteries into his video game. That was the new word, weird. “It’s weird to be going to somebody else’s house for Christmas,” he said later, eating his cereal. “It’s weird not to have a bigger tree,” he mumbled, putting his bowl in the sink.
“That was the biggest tree I could afford,” I said, my voice quavering. “Those were the presents I could afford. This is the kind of Christmas I could afford.”
“It just feels weird,” Robert said, his own voice unsteady, and I’d hugged him hard then.
“It’s weird not to be with your father,” I said. “And Aunt Grace, and Grandmom. It’s the hardest thing in the world not to be with the people you love on Christmas Day.”
“But I’m with you,” he said. So sweet, sometimes, the way he would say things like that, as though just like his father he was two people, the one who hated where he was, and the one who’d made his peace with it. As I’d begun to do. I wondered, just for a moment, whether Bobby had done the same thing, whether even now he was sitting with a glass of red wine, saying “Ah, good riddance” to one of his cop friends while the wife checked on whether the ham was ready to glaze and the kids bickered over their new toys. But I looked down at Robert’s shining hair and knew that that couldn’t be true, no matter how much I wanted it. “My son,” Bobby used to call him. “My boy.” That possessive pronoun. My wife. My girl. He’d never give us up. Somewhere, somehow, I knew that he was listening to that Christmas song and seething. Robert went up the stairs of the Roerbacker house to help Chad with his new Duplo blocks and I went into the kitchen to arrange Cindy’s baking-powder biscuits on a cookie sheet.
“Mama, honey, go sit back down,” Cindy said, when Helen Manford followed me, pulling idly at the cord on a little Santa pin that made his eyes light up red and faintly demonic.
“I had a pin like that when I was a kid,” I said. “I had a red Christmas coat one year and I wore that pin on the lapel.”
Mrs. Manford smiled. Farm or no farm, dirt or no dirt, she still had a kind of beauty, with a grace of bone and posture that would forever survive sun and long hours and hard work. Next to her, her daughter, with her bright lips and hair in a curly twist, looked like a jumped-up imitation of the real thing.
“Go ahead and tell her,” Cindy said, sipping some white wine, pouring me a glass. I could he
ar the men from the living room, like the rumble of thunder.
“I got this one when I was a girl, too. Fourteen, I think. I loved it so dearly that I managed to hold onto it. I even got the jeweler up on the highway to find some kind of new battery for it when it wouldn’t light up anymore.”
“Once when I was seven or eight,” Cindy said, “there was a hurricane and they evacuated us all to the high school. Mama’s running around, getting the picture albums and the records from the farm, bills and invoices and all that. All of a sudden she lets out this little yelp, runs back into her bedroom and comes out with her hand in a fist. ‘Oh, for pity’s sake, Helen,’ my dad says, and sure enough it’s Santa.”
“You’d better take good care of him when he’s yours.”
“Oh, for pity’s sake, Mama, you’ll live forever.” Cindy turned down a fruit sauce bubbling on the back of the stove. “I’m gonna kill us all with this meal.”
“I don’t want to hear one word about cholesterol on Christmas Day,” Mrs. Manford said. “There’s too much of that as there is. Cynthia Lee, it’s not a good idea for you to be drinking and cooking at the same time. You’ll burn yourself on that stove.”
“It’s a glass of wine, Mama. Want one?”
“No, ma’am,” said Mrs. Manford.
“Take these spiced pecans out to the table for those guys to munch on,” Cindy said, handing her mother a bowl.
“Well, they smell good,” Mrs. Manford said doubtfully, carrying the food into the next room.
“There’s a guest in that living room that you didn’t tell me about,” I said to Cindy.
“Well, since you two are such friends, I figured I didn’t need to,” Cindy said. “Hold this chafing dish.” She poured creamed onions into it, then waved me over to the table and handed me a silver lid.
“That’s all you’re going to say?”
“Oh, for pity’s sake. The poor man has his mama and two of his sisters coming with their kids tomorrow. He told Mrs. Patranian he was going to stay home today and straighten up his place. She was going to take him home and feed him lamb and some terrible bean stuff she was telling me about. You should have invited him yourself.”
“We were coming here!”
“So, see—I saved you the trouble.”
“You should have said.”
“Good thing you dressed nice. You look good in green. Not like most blondes, who just look washed out.” She squinted at me. “Wait a minute, wait a minute. I’m not so drunk that I don’t notice you’re not wearing your glasses. You finally get contacts?”
“Leave me in peace and give me something to do,” I said.
“You knew he was coming after all,” Cindy crowed, and I hit her with a dishtowel.
Cindy’s Christmas was ham with raisin sauce and mashed sweet potatoes with marshmallows browning on top, creamed onions and baby peas, papier-mâché angels on the mantel in the living room, and a silvery white artificial tree with red lights and ornaments. “I know, I know, it’s tacky,” she said when I caught her buying evergreen fragrance in a can. “But I can’t stand picking pine needles out of my carpet.”
Craig was tending a fire in the fireplace, although it was almost seventy degrees outside and the air-conditioning was on. He and Mike and his father-in-law were talking about the football standings, pro, college, and local high school, and whether the mayor of Lakota was a crook, a smart politician, or both. Cindy’s father, Ed, leaned forward and did most of the talking. He was a short fireplug of a man, while Craig was tall and quiet, a big bony man with a thatch of gray-brown hair, whose smile seemed to be a kind of muscle spasm he neither controlled nor invited. When he and Cindy were in the same room it felt as though they’d divvied up the parts of their marriage, and Cindy, along with kids and home decor, had gotten the part that controlled laughter and sociability. “He’s my rock,” she liked to say of Craig, and there was something stony, fossilized about him, a man prematurely old at forty. But I was inclined to like him because of the way he let Cindy clean up around him and chide him for his bottle caps and missing buttons as though nothing could be more welcome or more sensible than being chided. I liked him even more that night, when he rose beneath a brass chandelier that was bound and gagged in an endless rope of fake greenery and red ribbon, a dishtowel tucked in the waistband of his pants, raised a glass of white wine, and said, “Merry Christmas to all. Thank you for joining us, Mike and Beth and Robert.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“Don’t speak too soon, Miss,” said Ed Manford, bent over his plate. “You haven’t tasted any of this yet. Maybe you don’t know that our girl has a reputation as a chef.” He laughed, one of those short barking laughs that seem to be the specialty of small men, and that are never really mirthful. “And I’m not talking Julia Child, that’s for sure.”
“Here we go,” Cindy said under her breath.
“You’re a nurse or a nurse’s aide or something, aren’t you? You ever dealt with a case of ptomaine?” Bark, bark. “There’s Pepto in that bathroom, isn’t there, Craig?”
“Ed, don’t start,” said Helen Manford, turning her sweet potatoes over with her fork as though she expected to find something buried inside them.
“Did she tell you about her first try at home cooking?” Ed Manford added, leaning toward me until his beefy upper arm was against the side of my breast and I was back as far as I could go in my chair. “Barbecued chicken, done to a turn. Brown and crispy, like out of a picture in a cookbook. Just one little thing.” The bark again, this time with more of an edge. “She didn’t defrost it. Red and raw and all bloody inside. Good thing we had some bologna in the icebox.”
“That was twenty years ago, Dad,” Cindy said.
“She made a picnic last year for the soccer tournament,” Mike said. “That was the best fried chicken I ever had. And that chocolate cake you brought. That was great, too.”
“Remember that barbecue they had for the girl’s third birthday, El?” Mr. Manford said, as though Mike had said nothing at all. “I was in the bathroom for the rest of the evening. I never figured whether it was the potato salad or the spareribs.”
“No one else had a problem,” Cindy said, but he didn’t pay any attention. “How’s your ham, Helen?” he asked. “Done enough?”
“It’s perfect,” said Craig Roerbacker. “Everything’s perfect. As usual.”
“Really. Great meal, Cindy. Great meal,” said Mike.
“Not a whole lot of money in teaching, is there?” Mr. Manford said.
“Nope,” Mike said. “You have to love it.” He smiled at me. “And have a sense of humor.”
“Spoon. Spoon. Spoon. Spoon,” shouted Chad from the children’s table set at one end of the room.
“Pipe down, little boy,” said Ed Manford, shoveling in his food.
“Spoon!” Chad yelled again, happily.
“You be a good boy, now,” said Helen.
“Leave him alone, Mama,” said Cindy. “It’s Christmas.” Over at the children’s table Robert was whispering to Craig and feeding him sweet potatoes, teaching him his favorite party trick, being good, being quiet. Teaching him to make himself disappear when the grown-ups started to raise their voices.
We all had coffee afterward in the living room, the fire burning blue in the stone fireplace, Mr. Manford asleep in the recliner chair. Both Cindy and her mother took aspirin after dinner. Chelsea hit Chad with Holiday Barbie because he’d disarranged the doll’s hair; she’d been sent to her room, where she’d fallen asleep sprawled across her bed in a red lace party dress. “You’re not supposed to be mean at Christmas, Mommy,” she sobbed as she went up the stairs, Barbie’s head going bump-bump-bump on the treads. Robert read One Fish, Two Fish to Chad—I could tell because from time to time I could hear Chad shout “Fish!” from upstairs.
“I told him if he went to sleep I’d kick the soccer ball with him tomorrow,” Robert said when he finally came downstairs.
“Bless you, sweetie,”
Cindy said, her head tilted back in the circle of her husband’s arm. From upstairs we all heard the word faintly: “Ball! Ball!” All of us laughed except for Mr. Manford, who was snoring, and Mrs. Manford, who was cleaning the kitchen, though Cindy had tried three or four times to persuade her not to.
Mike drove us home, of course. Cindy’d asked him before we’d even arrived. The lights of the strip were glowing like decorations in the mist, but for the first time since we’d come to Lake Plata, maybe the only time all year, all the parking lots were empty, as though of one accord we had all decided to take one day off from cheap hamburgers and labor-saving appliances and instead come together in our living rooms. We passed house trailers set back behind the Price Club warehouse and tiny cinder-block houses that couldn’t possibly have more than two rooms, and I was certain that each had some Christmas tradition, and perhaps as much of a divide between what we felt and what we wanted to feel as there’d been at Cindy’s that night. I couldn’t help thinking of how Cindy had once been in love with Jackson Islington, who wanted to settle down on a farm; I couldn’t help thinking of Ed Manford’s stubby hands, a faint tracery of black soil etched in so deep that it would never come out, no matter how much he scrubbed. He’d eaten everything on his plate, then taken seconds.
“How in the world did that hateful man ever produce someone as sweet as Cindy?” I said in a low voice after looking in back to make sure Robert was occupied with his new video game.
“That’s a good question,” Mike said. “You see it all the time. Some really good kids with terrible parents. And some great parents with tough kids.”
“And then you’ve got Cindy and Craig, who seem so grounded, with Chelsea, who is scared to death of everything. Cindy couldn’t use the electric knife for the ham because it freaks Chelsea out. I’ve never seen the point of an electric knife. It’s just as easy to carve with the old-fashioned kind. Cindy said that as soon as Chelsea hears it humming, she starts to think someone’s going to cut a hand off.”