Labor Day (11 page)

I knew I’d need a hostage, he said. A particular type of person.

He looked at my mother. My mother looked at him.

Then again, he said, it’s an open question, which person is the captor here, which is the captive.

He bent his head close to her ear and brushed her hair away, as if to speak directly into her brain. Maybe he thought I wouldn’t hear, or maybe he was just beyond caring.

I am your prisoner, Adele, was what he said to her.

CHAPTER 10

I
THOUGHT WE’D JUST LEAVE
B
ARRY
where he was, but Frank figured he’d enjoy watching, so he carried him outside and set him in a lawn chair, with the Red Sox cap on that he’d picked up for himself at Pricemart. We were far enough back from the road that no one could see us, besides Barry.

It’s your job to root for your favorite team, my friend, Frank told him.

Don’t get your hopes up, I told him. You never saw anyone suck at baseball worse than me. (Barry, maybe. But I didn’t want to hurt his feelings.)

Want to run that by me again? Frank said. Didn’t you hear anything I told you about thinking positive?

Oh right, I said. I’m going to be the greatest center fielder since Mickey Mantle.

Mantle didn’t play center field, Frank said. But that’s the idea.

Here was the odd thing. When Frank threw the ball, I caught it. After my mother came out, and we gave her my glove and told her to take the catcher position, I hit his pitches. Not all but more than normal. You might have thought he was just feeding me candy, but that didn’t even seem to be the case.

He had stood beside me on the imaginary plate and placed my hands on the bat, repositioning the angle of my elbow and wrist, a little the way my mother did when she had taught me the fox-trot.

See the ball, he said, under his breath, just before the pitch left his hand. I got so I was saying the words too, like they would bring me a hit. It seemed they did.

If I had a whole season to work with you, he said, we could really get somewhere with your game.

A lot of your problem was in your head. You see yourself screwing up, it’s going to happen.

Picture yourself jumping out a hospital window and landing on two feet—a little glass on your head maybe, a gash down one side of your shin—you’re out of there.

To be honest, he said, the person whose arm worries me here isn’t you, Henry. It’s your mother.

You could use some serious remedial work, Adele, he said. You, I might need to work with you a lot longer. Years possibly.

Seeing her laugh like that, I realized it was a sight I hadn’t witnessed in a long time. I was catcher now. Frank was still pitching, but now he stepped away from the spot he’d designated as the mound and approached my mother on the plate. He positioned himself so he could wrap his long arms around her. Send one our way, Henry, he said, tossing me the ball.

Only one pitch, since there was no catcher. I raised my arm
and released the ball. The two of them swung. There was a hard, solid cracking sound. The ball went flying.

From over in his lawn chair, Barry let out a yelp.

M
Y FATHER CALLED
. H
E AND
M
ARJORIE
and the kids were at a cookout. He wanted to know if we could do our Friendly’s night tomorrow instead of tonight. There was a sound to his voice, as he said this, that reminded me of how people acted on the phone, times when my mother got me to help her out with MegaMite, and I’d knock on the door of someone who used to be a customer, but didn’t want to buy vitamins anymore, and I knew they were just wishing I’d go away so they could get back to their life and stop feeling guilty.

You and your mother doing OK? he said. His voice had that sound where I knew he was feeling sorry for us, at the same time he just wanted to get off the phone and back to his other family, where things were easier.

We’ve got friends over, I told him. As Frank would have said, I could pass a lie detector test with that statement.

Evelyn also called. Traffic had been so bad on Route 93 it had been two o’clock when she reached the hospital. They were waiting to talk with the doctor now. She was hoping Barry could stay on till after dinnertime.

Just get here when you can, Evelyn, I heard my mother say into the receiver. He seems to be doing all right.

Evelyn must have asked about the diaper situation then. That was the part that worried her. He was a big boy now, Barry. Not the easiest thing anymore, lifting him out of the chair.

My mother didn’t say Frank was the one who’d changed him. Frank, the one who’d carried him back into the house after the baseball practice and run him a bath, filled it with ice cubes and shaving
cream. From where I sat, in my room, I could hear the two of them: Barry making small, cooing noises; Frank whistling.

What kind of idiot am I? Frank said. I never got around to introducing myself, buddy. My name is Frank.

Barry made a sound then.

That’s right, Frank told him. Frank. My grandmother called me Frankie. Either one is fine by me.

He made us dinner again. My mother sat on the edge of the counter, sharing a beer with him. She had dug up an old Chinese fan, probably from some dance routine she’d done one time. Now she was fanning him.

I bet you could think up a nice dance to do for me with that one, Adele, he told her. You’d probably have some great-looking outfit to go with it. Or not.

Nobody was hungry, due to the heat, but Frank had made a cold curry soup with the last of the peaches and the last of an old container of hot sauce we had, from some take-out food we got once. After, my mother fixed root beer floats, and Barry and I sat in the backyard, beyond the sight lines of the Jervises’ aboveground pool, where we could hear the splashing of the girl with asthma and her little brother. When the bugs got bad, we came inside and turned on the television. They were showing
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
. Frank propped up Barry in his chair and wrapped another cool cloth around his neck. My mother made popcorn.

When we heard the sound of Evelyn’s car pulling up, Frank slipped up the stairs, as they had planned he would. As far as Evelyn was concerned, it had been just the three of us here. Me and my mother, and her son.

She had stepped into the living room now. Her father was stabilized, she said. Still in intensive care, but no longer critical. How can I ever repay you, Adele? she said.

I knew my mother just wanted them to go, but Evelyn had been driving for two hours. You look like you could use a cold glass of water, my mother told her.

She had just come back with the water when the news came on. An update. Energy consumption during the day’s heat wave had left the area in the danger zone for major power outages, and there was still the rest of a long hot holiday weekend ahead of us.

We know it’s hot out there, folks, the newscaster was saying, but our friends at Public Service are asking us all to turn off those air conditioners whenever possible. If the heat’s getting to you, consider a cold shower.

In other news, he said, police in the tristate area continue their search for the prisoner at large in the region since Wednesday.

The photograph of Frank flashed on. Up until this moment, Barry had seemed only marginally aware of his surroundings, but as the image of Frank filled the screen, he began to wave his arms and call out, as if greeting an old friend. He was making noises, slapping his head, slapping the television.

In the past, I knew, one of Evelyn’s themes in her conversations with my mother had to do with how people were always underestimating her son’s intelligence and comprehension of what was going on. For a while there, she had campaigned to get him mainstreamed into a regular classroom at school. But now, as Barry yelped and waved, she seemed barely to notice his agitation and excitement—the way he had started flailing his arms, more furiously than normal, with his shoeless feet kicking air. His eyes, that normally seemed not to focus, were locked on the television screen.

Time to get you home, son, his mother said, sounding weary.

Together, the three of us—Evelyn, my mother, and me—
backed the wheelchair through the open door of our house—out into the darkness—and lowered it onto the walk. We watched as Barry’s mother slid the chair onto the ramp and up into the back of her van and buckled him into place. As the rear doors closed, I could see his face. He was still calling out, the same one syllable, the first word I had ever heard him utter that I understood.

Over and over, he was saying it, garbled but intelligible.
Frank.

T
HAT NIGHT AGAIN
, I
HEARD THEM
. They had to have known the sound would carry through the wall between our rooms. It was as if they didn’t care anymore who knew or what anybody thought about it, including me. They were in their own place now, and it was like a whole other country, a whole other planet.

It went on for a long time, their lovemaking. Back then I didn’t use that word for it—not that word or any other. It was nothing I’d known in my own experience or anyone else’s either. Nothing I encountered on those rare times I slept at my father’s house, though he shared a bed with Marjorie. Nothing I could imagine happening, in any of the other houses on our street, and nothing like any scenes they showed on television either—those times Magnum P.I. leaned in to kiss that week’s beautiful woman, or some pair of guest stars nuzzled in the moonlight on
The Love Boat
.

The way I imagined what went on between my mother and Frank on the other side of the wall, though I tried not to, they were like two people shipwrecked on an island so far away from anyplace no one would ever find them, with nothing to hold on to but each other’s skin, each other’s bodies. Maybe not even an
island, just a life raft in the middle of the ocean, and even that was falling apart.

Sometimes the headboard banged against the wall for whole minutes at a time, as regular and steady as the sound of Joe’s wheel in his cage, the endless circles he made. Other times—and these were harder to lie there and listen to—the sounds were like what you might expect to come from a nest of baby animals. Bird sounds, or kittens. And a low, slow, satisfied growling, like a dog on the floor by the fire with a bone, working it over in his mouth, licking it clean to get the last piece of anything that tasted of meat.

Now and then, a human voice.
Adele. Adele. Adele.

Frank.

They never, that I heard, spoke about love, as if they were past even that.

These moments, I knew, they were not thinking about me lying in my bed on the other side of the wall, with my Einstein poster and my mineral collection and my Narnia books and my signed letter from the
Apollo 12
astronauts and my
Thousand and One Great Party Jokes
and the note I’d saved from the one time Samantha Whitmore ever acknowledged my existence on the planet: Do you have tomorrow’s math homework?

These moments, they were not thinking about the heat wave, or conserving electricity, or the Red Sox, or peach pie, or back-to-school shopping, or his appendix stitches, though I had seen them and knew they were still raw on his lower belly, same as the place was, along his calf muscle, where the glass had cut him. They were not thinking about third-floor windows or TV anchorpeople or police roadblocks or the helicopters we had heard circling town all afternoon the day before. What were they expecting to see—a trail of dripping blood? People tied to trees? A campfire, and a man beside it roasting squirrel meat?

So long as we stayed inside this house, no one would know
he was here. Not in the daytime, maybe, but at night anyway, nobody could get to us. We were like three people not so much inhabiting Earth as orbiting above it.

Not that either, exactly. The configuration was two and one. They were like the two
Apollo
astronauts who moved together along the surface of the moon, while their trusty companion stayed behind in the space capsule, monitoring the controls and making sure things were all right. Somewhere far below, the citizens of Earth awaited their return. But for the moment, time was suspended, and not even atmosphere existed.

CHAPTER 11

T
HEN MORNING CAME
—S
UNDAY NOW
—and we had to deal with things again. Sometime that afternoon my father would be coming by to get me, and though I didn’t want to go with him any more than he wanted to take me, I would.

School was due to start on Wednesday—seventh grade. Nothing to look forward to there but more of where I’d left off in the sixth, only the boys who called out
faggot
and
asshole
under their breath when I walked past in the halls would be that much bigger now, while I—in spite of what my mother claimed the MegaMite had done for me—looked small as ever.

The girls’ breasts might have grown over the summer—probably would have—but all that would mean was more trouble, concealing their effect on me, every time I got up from my desk to change classes. Who wouldn’t know my terrible secret, watching the way I carried my books, crotch level, making my
way from social studies to English, English to science, science to lunch? Never mind that no one cared, my useless boner would tirelessly announce itself, like the way Alison Smoat kept raising her hand with some comment in social studies, though the teacher never called on her. Knowing—as we all had by then—that once she started talking, you could never shut that girl up.

There would be basketball tryouts. Then the election of class officers. They’d cast the fall musical. The different groups of students who mattered in this place would claim their tables in the lunchroom, making it clear to the rest of us all the places we shouldn’t even think of sitting. The principal would give his talk about peer pressure and drugs; the health teacher, after reminding us we were too young for sexual activity, would show us what a condom looked like and roll it out over a banana, as if I’d have any use for one, anytime in the next decade, or ever, maybe.