Pat was crying now. But Beth knew she could not afford to give in to either rage or pity. She could not, would not stop. She would talk until the window slammed shut. “And you know what the only thing we still have is? Awareness. We can be aware that we have two sons and they’re both strangers in our house, and if we don’t pretend this isn’t true, maybe we can save something out of it. You’ve pretended long enough, and…you could say I have, too. How we got here doesn’t matter.”
Pat looked at her then: his eyes not knowing, or full of solace, as they had been so often in years past, but, like her father’s, trusting and desolate and weak.
“What does, then?” he said. “What do you want from me?”
And if Beth had ever doubted it, she was sure at that instant that there was to be no shared responsibility for the consequences of whatever happened with Sam. Even if Pat didn’t hate her—and she could see that he didn’t any longer dare hate her—he would still be unable to say to his family, “We talked it over. We decided that Sam is too unhappy this way. We decided what was best for us to do.” There would be no “we” about it. Pat would not be disloyal to her, but it would be salt plain that he was living with a choice that Beth had made.
And now she would have to make it.
Reese
CHAPTER 32
“So it’s kind of like a joint-custody arrangement? One week here, one week there?” asked Tom, one leg thrown up over the arm of his overstuffed chair. Reese had observed that since his marriage, a few months earlier, old Tom had loosened up considerably. Perhaps getting all that regular…But no, he wasn’t going to head down that particular path today.
“Actually, I don’t know what they worked out exactly; it’s only been like a few weeks. I know they went to see a judge and stuff,” Reese said. “I guess there are rules about it. But he hasn’t been around much.” Which was overstating the case. That day when he saw Sam heading down the drive, Reese had just dived into the sounds from the luxe new CD player his father had finally allowed him to take money out of savings to buy. He didn’t even go down. He could picture the scene on the porch: his dad all slumped over, probably crying, his mom standing there like she was watching the Hindenburg burn. And poor Kerry, holding Blythe’s hand and asking, “When’s Sam coming back?” Shit, you had to be a goddamn masochist to live in the Cappadora Days of Our Lives. The boom box, Reese figured, was sort of a lollipop to keep Vincent from crying over the loss of his already long-lost brother; shit, this got redundant. Like he gave a damn.
The house was already about seventy percent quieter, which was fine with Reese. They had never really made it as the Cleavers, anyhow, and Mom somehow looked more normal with her eyes watching the planets spin than she’d ever looked trying to actually see what people were doing.
“…feel about that?” Tom was saying.
“Pardon?”
“Earth to Reese.” Tom was such a card. His slang was about thirty-five years old—Reese expected him to say “groovy” any minute—but he did his best. “I was asking you how it felt to know that Sam had made that choice. Did it feel…kind of tough on you?”
“On me?” Reese was surprised. “No. I thought it was kind of a kick in the butt, excuse the expression, to my parents.”
“Yeah, I can see that,” Tom said. “So. How’d summer go? Still training for going out for basketball?”
Reese sure as hell wasn’t going to tell him about the sweet little meeting with Shit-for-Brains Teeter. “Yeah,” he said. “But I might not. I mean, of course, I’m academically challenged and understimulated in the traditional high-school setting, as you know.” Tom snorted with laughter. “But my dad has this idea that if I don’t get into the UW I’ll die young or something. So I have to book next year. Really book. I might not have the time to give to the game, you know?”
Tom made a little steeple of his fingers. After years of seeing it, Reese knew deep thoughts were on the way.
“You sleeping okay?”
“Yep, pretty fair. No problem.” Actually, this was a damned lie, but there was, again, no sense getting into it. He’d been having his fucking little-kid nightmare, twice in the last week. It annoyed him to think he was probably going to always be more or less borderline nuts, over something he didn’t even care about anymore, or even remember. Much, that is. He felt his heart skip and flutter. Oh, shit, no, shit no. Not that, too.
“What’s wrong, Reese?” Tom swung his leg onto the floor, crouched forward in serious-shrink posture.
“Nothing, nothing. I think I’m getting the flu or something is all.”
“Are you sure that’s all it is? I mean, this is pretty heavy stuff, Reese. Getting him back. Figuring out that whole deal. Then having him go, and having to figure out that whole deal.”
“I don’t have to figure it out. It’s got nothing to do with me.”
“I think it has.”
“That’s your job, Tommaso. You always have to think it has, or you’d be out of work.”
“True enough. But I know that shit has a way of catching up with you, too. What about your mom? You getting along?”
“Oh absolutely. With Sam gone, she has a new appreciation for my many talents. We played mixed doubles tennis on Thursdays, then there’s bridge on Fridays….”
“That gets old, Reese.”
“Well, so does the question,” Reese snapped. “I mean, my mom has spoken to me like ten times in nine years, and eight of those times were in the past couple of months. It’s not, like, her fault or anything, but my mom sort of generally hates my guts.”
“Whoa! Whoa! Wait a minute, buddy. I know your mom has her problems with intimacy, shall we say, but I’ve never once had the impression that—”
“Well, look at her face once. She looks at me like something you try to scrub off the bottom of the refrigerator.”
“I don’t think that’s true. But it’s important that you feel that way.”
“Tom, I’ve been coming here, what, four years? A little more? How often have you met my mom?”
“Once or twice.”
“Well, if you gave a fuck about your kid, wouldn’t you think that maybe you’d like to check in more than once or twice? Tom, I don’t give a damn. I got one more year in the bosom of my family….”
“Make that two. At least, Reese. And what about your father, and Kerry? Are they just some kind of background scenery? Don’t you care what they think?”
“Sure I do.” Reese stopped for a moment and got up to look at his favorite horse picture, the one of Tom and his little sister. “Your sister, she still ride?”
“No,” Tom said ruefully. “She’s in middle school. And she wants to be a pompom girl. She looks like…like some trashy backup singer in a garage band.”
“Tom, Tom, Tom—she’s just expressing herself, you know.” Reese waved a finger. Tom grinned.
“Well, see, what Kerry does, she rides horses now. And swims. And plays flute. And plays soccer. Kerry is going to grow up to be this one-woman vaudeville show, like riding horses while tap-dancing and playing the flute. All she ever does is take lessons.”
“Maybe she feels it’s a way to get some attention for herself.”
“I think it’s a way to get out of the house. Which I totally understand. And which is why Dad virtually lives at Wedding in the Old Neighborhood. Especially now.”
“So you feel pretty left out.”
“Tom! I’m sixteen. I’m not in kindergarten. It’s just that…this isn’t the family who goes bowling on Friday nights, you know? And thank God, because that would make me puke. But sure, my dad loves me and he loves Kerry.”
“But your mom hates your guts. And she’s the one you’re around most.”
“If you can call it that.”
“What would you call it?”
“I’d call it, like, two people who have to live in an airport, the same airport….”
“And where are they going? From the airport?”
“I didn?
??t mean they were going anywhere.”
“But say they were.” Tom was up to his old tricks.
“If they were, my mom would be going…Jesus, I have no idea…to Mars. And if she had her way, I’d be going to…Siberia. Or hell. Or something.”
“Why would your mother, who’s already lost one kid, twice, want her other kid to go to hell?”
The flutter-beat in his chest returned again. “I have no idea,” Reese said evenly. “She resents all the shit I’ve caused in school. I know that. It gets in her way.”
“But you said she wants you to go to hell. That’s not what most people want for a maladjusted teenager, if you want to call it that.”
Call it what you want.” Reese glanced at the red numbers on the clock. “Hour’s up.”
“Don’t give it a thought, Reese. My next appointment canceled. And your dad’s loaded.”
“Not to hear him talk.”
“Well, don’t worry about it. We were talking about going to hell.” And, speaking of that, why don’t you? Reese muttered to himself.
“It’s obvious. She blames me.”
“For what?”
“For what?”
“You heard the question.”
“For the kid going back to George is what. She was like, always, ‘Pay more attention to him,’ ‘Don’t be so hard on him’….”
“Were you hard on him?”
“No. I shot some hoops with him. I didn’t, whatever, read him bedtime stories….”
“He’s too old for bedtime stories.”
“I mean, I treated him perfectly normal, given that I don’t have much in common with a sixth grader!”
“Even a sixth-grader who happens to be your brother you haven’t seen in nine years? Don’t you think that might call for a little more attention, Reese? Or would that be too much effort?”
“Tom,” Reese pleaded. “I think I have a fever, is what I think. I’m going.”
“I think you have a bad case of the poor-little-me’s, is what I think. Your dad ignores you. Your mom hates you. Even your little sister takes too many riding lessons. Sound like Oliver Twist, you know, Reese?”
“So I give, okay? All I know is, she thinks the whole fucking thing is my fault, and you don’t know, because you never see her except when she’s acting all…there, and all nice….”
“‘The whole fucking thing’? You mean what you said, him going back to George?”
“No!” Reese caught himself, ran his hands down his forearms, so he wouldn’t scream.
“What, then?”
“Nothing.”
“What, Reese? I can sit here all day.”
“For fucking losing Ben in the first place. Happy now?”
“No. And she does not.”
“She does so.”
“No one would blame a seven-year-old kid for not watching his kid brother in a crowded lobby of a hotel, and anyway—”
“You don’t know,” Reese said miserably. “You weren’t there!”
“Neither was she.”
“But she knows! She knows!”
“What does she know?”
“She knows that I…”
It was as if he were having the running dream right then, having it awake. He started thinking of that smell, the day Ben was kidnapped, that bottle-gravy smell of that hotel kitchen, under the scent of all the woman’s powder and cologne. And he wanted to puke on the rug, or get up and knock Tom’s glasses right off his smug, pink-Irish face. The dick. “Look, Tom,” Reese said with an effort. “I don’t know what I meant by that. She just gives me the creeps.”
“Maybe you give her the creeps.”
“Maybe I do.”
“Maybe she was right. Maybe you did drive the kid away. Maybe he could tell you didn’t want him around. That if he was around, maybe you wouldn’t be able to get everybody to sit up and pay attention every time you decided to pull some JD stunt, huh, Reese?”
Reese put his face in his hands. “Don’t ask me. I don’t know.”
“I think you do know, Reese,” Tom said. “I think you do know. I think you know, and you’re afraid to tell me, because that would take you to a place you’ve managed to stay away from for a real long time, wouldn’t it, Reese? And it would take a lot to go there. A lot of effort. And you seem to like to take the easy way.”
“The easy way?” I sound like a whistle, Reese thought. He wondered if whatever little bulimic or pyro was waiting in the outer room could hear him. Oh, right. Canceled. At least that. He lowered his voice. “If you think that living in the Addams Family has been easy, you’re the one who ought to be sitting over here.”
“I never said it was easy. I just said that maybe some people have enough guts to go there, and some don’t.”
“Guts? Look, nobody has ever called me afraid. They’ve called me a lot, but never chickenshit.”
“I am.”
“Go to hell, then.”
“I thought that was your destination.”
“Very cute, Tom. Highly professional.”
“Reese, you might as well hang it up,” Tom sighed. “You’re going to be stuck where you are until you finally meet someone big enough and mean enough to beat it out of you. That’s if you’re lucky. I just wish you weren’t so determined to take the whole family with you.”
“I’m not,” Reese said then. “I just want them to leave me alone.”
“I thought that’s what you didn’t want. But it sounds like every time somebody tries to get close to you, you can’t wait to find a way to piss in his face.”
“Don’t,” Reese warned.
“Why, Reese? Gonna rumble with me, next? Not content with blaming your mother for all your troubles?”
“Blaming my mother? Christ, I’ve been trying to tell you. It’s her! It’s her! She knows what I did, and she hates me for it, and I don’t blame her!”
“What you did? What did you do?”
“What did I do? What did I do? I let go of his hand! And you know what I said? To my sweet little kid brother? I said, ‘Get lost.’ I said, ‘Get lost.’” Reese figured he’d cry then—it would have been a relief to cry then—but he didn’t. He was boiling. Boiling dry. The top of his head would be rising like the lip of a tea kettle if Tom could see his insides.
“Reese,” Tom said, far away. “Reese.”
“What.”
“Did you always know this? Did you remember it just now?”
“I don’t know.”
“You do know.”
“I always knew it. And I didn’t. That’s the truth. It was, like it was in a box. But I remembered it when he came home. Like, first a little. Then some more. Then the words.”
“Reese, think. Think a minute. There’s no way on earth your mother could know you said that. And you didn’t mean for him to literally get lost.”
“But he did. He did.”
“The fact is, you didn’t mean it, and you didn’t even know what it really meant. You were just a tired little kid sick of watching his little brother while your mom goofed around with all her friends. You were probably hungry, and bored….”
“Yeah, so big deal. She still hates me.”
“I don’t think she hates you, Reese. I think she’s scared of you.”
“Scared…of me?”
“I think she’s scared you’re going to find out about her, the same way you were scared she’d find out about you.”
“Find out about her? What did she ever do?”
“Think about it, Reese. Think about it and we’ll talk next time. It’s in there, Reese. You opened the box. That’s a pretty brave thing to do, Reese. Now, we have to look at whatever flies out of there, and if we have to, we’ll swat it down, like a bug. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“It wasn’t your fault, Reese. It wasn’t your fault. You don’t have to believe me now. Like, people didn’t used to believe there were such things as atoms, because they couldn’t see them. But there are.” Reese shrugged. “
Listen. I told you one time about my little brother. The baby who died of SIDS. I told you I was the one who found him. But I didn’t tell you the rest. My mom sent me up there to get him out of his crib.” Reese looked up. Tom was looking at one of the horse pictures, directly over Reese’s head. “And I was mad. I was sick of carrying around babies. There were eight of us, and we all had to take care of the little ones, and it wore you out. So I went up there, and I reached for Taylor’s arm. And it was cold. It felt…like a little cucumber from the refrigerator. Cold and hard. And so you know what I did? Reese?” Reese nodded. “I had been reading the comics, and my mom kept telling me, ‘Go get the baby, go get the baby,’ and all I wanted to do was finish the comics. So I did. And finally, when I went up there, and found him like that, I was still carrying that newspaper. And I spread it out, and I covered him all up with the comics. I’m sure I didn’t know, or I didn’t let myself know, that he was dead. But what I do know is, I wouldn’t let my mother touch me for…really, for years. She thought it was because of what she’d done to me, exposing me to that awful thing, when I was just a little kid myself. She thought I was afraid of dying in my sleep. And I was. But that wasn’t the big thing.”
Reese jerked his head. “What was?”
“The big thing was, I didn’t know until I was in high school, or even college…I thought I killed Taylor. That I messed around so long that he died from starving to death or something. That if I had just gone up there sooner, when my mom told me to, he would have been able to live, just a little longer. Reese, I thought that when I was older than you are. And you can see, I can tell by looking at you, you can already see, it simply wasn’t true. It couldn’t have been true.”
Reese nodded again. His head was big, pulsing, like a balloon on a stick in the wind. He didn’t think he’d ever had a headache this bad, so bad he almost asked Tom for some aspirin or something. But Tom would probably have had to write a prescription or some deal; doctors never just gave you anything to make you feel better. There had to be a big process.
Air, Reese thought, when Tom finally let him go, with a brotherly squeeze on his shoulder. He’d been in the fucking horse gallery for two hours. Jesus. He’d opened the box, and what for? He knew Tom was a decent guy, but that story about the dead baby—he didn’t really get it; no one could really get it.