Real Life (6 page)

But on his father's last visit, Shane and Monty were swimming at the reservoir with the Kushner boys, and Starr was at her friend Tammie's house, and Rodney, the baby, was alternately sleeping and crying in his crib, and Hugo was sitting on the stone step outside the front door playing with Rodney's Busy Box and listening to his father and Rose talking in the living room. Their voices were loud, then soft. “On the streets,” Rose said, and then, “Could be the big one,” and his father's laugh—the shrill, crazy-sounding laugh that meant he was high.

“I'll tell you one thing, Rosita baby,” he said, and then Rose must have stood up because the chair and floor creaked so that Hugo didn't catch what that one thing was. But then, clearly, he heard a match rasp and the sound of his father's deep inhaling and then Rose's, and then a pause, and finally his father's voice again. “I can't keep him with me, he just drags me down, Rose, how can I—” The high-pitched laugh came again:
hee hee hee
. “How can I do my fuckin' job with a kid dragging at my heels?” And the two of them exploded with laughter.

“Your fuckin' job,” Rose said, squealing. They laughed for a long minute, cackling and gasping, and then they wound down, slowly, saying, “Ooh—oh, my God,” their laughter bubbling up and then subsiding and coming again and, finally, with deep sighs, ceasing.

Hugo heard them pass the joint again, heard their breath stop and then start with a whoosh. Rose said, “You be careful at your goddamn job, Phinny. You joke too much. You're too reckless.”

“I can take care of myself,” his father said. “Just tell me what about the kid.”

“He can stay here. Permanently, I mean. What's one more?”

His father let out a sigh. “That's a load off my mind.”

They said some more things. Rose said, “As long as you come and see him. You know he's crazy about you.”

His father said, “I love the little guy, Rose.”

Rose said, “He's a good boy. I wish mine were more like him.”

But Hugo didn't listen very hard. He knew all that, what was said and what was left out. He knew Rose liked having him there; he knew she even loved him, probably, better than her own children; he knew his father loved him; he knew too that Rose loved his father, that his visits made her happy—she hummed and sang for days before his father arrived and cried after he left. He knew too that all this love being passed back and forth amounted, somehow, to emptiness.

His father said, “I'm proud of the kid, Rose.” But Hugo knew that too. His father had made a fuss over his last report card—took him out to McDonald's for supper and gave him five dollars, and when Shane forced him to hand over two his father made Shane give it back. Called Shane a little shit. He knew his father was proud of his schoolwork—stupid schoolwork, any dope could do it, except Shane and Monty, who always flunked everything. Hugo knew he was smart, and that his father liked it that he was. Big deal.

What he hadn't known was that his long dream of being with his father—forever, together, permanently—wouldn't come true. He had thought staying with Rose was like (she was sending him to a Catholic school) purgatory, where you waited to get into heaven. A better purgatory than the one waiting up in the sky (or someplace), which was just like hell but not permanent like hell. There was Rose, whom he loved, and Starr, whom he usually loved. And Tiger the dog. And Shane and Monty, who could be nice once in a while, and then they all had fun together. But it was purgatory all the same because heaven wouldn't be until he went to live with his father. And now there would be no heaven. There would only be these visits.

Hugo sat on the step and tried to make it better. Maybe his father would visit more often, at least, and stay longer. Maybe he would even take him on trips, like the one to New Jersey. That had been years ago but maybe now that it was settled, the load off his father's mind, maybe there would be more, the two of them going off in the car together: small heavens because there definitely wasn't going to be a big one. And maybe it wasn't as definite as it sounded. Maybe his father's job that they thought was so funny wouldn't work out. Other jobs hadn't worked out. Maybe then his father would get a job where it didn't matter if you had a kid dragging at your heels, like he could be a carpenter or a bricklayer and Hugo could hand him tools and pack the lunch box.

The voices inside were silent. Rodney stopped crying. The locusts sang
sizizz, sizizz, sizizz
. Tiger the dog came running up the driveway from whatever he'd been doing in the woods, and flopped down on the step beside Hugo. Hugo imagined his father and Rose sitting on the sofa together, dozing, leaning against each other. He would go in, eventually, and sit there with them until they woke up and then he would help Rose get supper. He wondered if his father would leave after supper or stay all night, if they would go for a walk before it got dark, maybe down the road to the old cemetery where his father liked to read the crumbling words on the gravestones, some of them from a hundred years ago or more. He laid his hand on Tiger's rough, sun-warmed fur and concentrated furiously on sending messages through the window to his father's sleeping mind: Stay overnight, stay overnight.

His father didn't stay overnight. In fact, he left before supper. He gave Hugo a snapshot before he left, a color photograph taken in front of his father's old car, the Camaro. His father's arm was around his mother. His mother was smiling a big smile. She was pregnant. Her hands were clasped on her stomach. Somebody's cat was sitting on the hood of the car, washing, one leg in the air. His father wore a black jacket. His mother wore a sundress. She had long blond hair like Rose's. His father wasn't smiling at all.

He gave Hugo the photograph without saying anything about it except “Hang on to this, kiddo.” Hugo wasn't even sure it was his mother, but Rose told him later. And that was himself, Hugo, inside his mother's stomach, under her white hands: he pictured a tiny silver fish swimming through green water. He put the photograph away somewhere, and then when weeks and weeks went by, and winter came, and then spring, and his father didn't come back, he hunted frantically for it one day and finally found it in the dust under his bed. It reminded him immediately of that last day, his father saying, “He just drags me down,” and “That's a load off my mind,” and Rose saying, “Permanently.” When his grandparents came to get him, he put the photograph in his jacket pocket and took it along, just because it seemed wrong to leave it behind. But he didn't like looking at it: his mother was a stranger smiling into the sun, and his father looked unhappy, and all it did was remind him of his father and Rose laughing and getting high while he sat outside on the step.

The Gilberts drove up to Rose's place in Massachusetts on a dank day in early spring. Dorrie, bored and carsick in the backseat, listened fitfully to her parents' talk. Anna wondered if Hugo collected stamps. “So many boys at that age are obsessed with collecting—with little finite groups of things they can control. Stamps, baseball cards, that sort of thing…”

Her voice trailed off, and Martin took over. “Or chess. It's just the age to learn chess. They enjoy rules, I think—control, as you say.”

Dorrie wondered how they knew. Phinny at eight had been interested only in raising hell; control hadn't been one of his interests, nor had rules, not to mention chess and stamp collecting.

They talked about real estate. They were thinking of selling the house by the shore: it was too large, too hard to heat, worth too much to hang on to. They could sell it and buy another and still make a small profit. Martin was just about to retire; many of their friends had retired and moved away; there was no reason to keep the house, and they could use a change. Underneath all their chatter was the promise of Hugo, Phinny's boy, whom they were going to fetch. Every word they said was charged with excitement. This was their second chance. Hugo would be a mini-Phinny, the as-yet-unspoiled son of their son. He would be their atonement.

Phinny's name was no longer being mentioned. Anna had cried almost constantly for a week after they'd gotten the news of his death. She cried all through the memorial service, cried every time someone spoke to her, cried randomly through the day and in the night. Dorrie, who had been staying with her parents, slept badly, waking in the dark to hear her mother's wild sobbing and her father's murmurs. Then, a few days ago, Anna had taken a loud sip of hot coffee, raised her head, and said, “Well, I suppose life has to go on,” and sighed and wiped her eyes. Later that day she telephoned Rose, and then she vacuumed Phinny's old room and put clean sheets on the bed and went out to Child World and bought a Parcheesi game, a jigsaw-puzzle map of the world, an illustrated
Treasure Island
, and a book called
Encyclopedia Brown Saves the Day
.

Dorrie tried to imagine little Hugo moving into her parents' lives. She could think of him as nothing but a small Phinny, trailing trouble wherever he went. As for Phinny himself, she knew she mourned, and that the hard knot in her stomach that was partly carsickness and tension was also partly grief for her brother, for “the waste of human life,” as her mother had been calling it all week. But her feelings were complicated. Had she not, all her life, prayed to be delivered from Phinny in some miraculous, unspecific way? And now he was dead in prison. She had been startled, at the memorial service, by the slap of memories she didn't know she retained. Of the time when, age five, he had fallen out of a tree, a fragile apple tree he was forbidden to climb, and had lain there like a doll, limp and white, in a pile of autumn leaves. Dorrie had run to the back door, pursued by loss, screaming that he was dead, that they had to save him. (He'd had a mild concussion and a broken collarbone.) And another time, the first time she had ever seen him high, she'd come home from college for a weekend and he had met her at the train station, his eyes glittering and his walk uneven; his driving down the dark roads from New London she couldn't recall without a lunge of fear. “What have you been doing to yourself, Phinny?” she had asked him—her brother, a junior in high school. He had told her to fuck off, and after that she'd imagined him in car crashes—not dying but, after a hospital stay, repenting.

“What about a bicycle?” her mother said. “Do you suppose he'll have one to bring? I don't know how we'd ever get it in the car.”

“It would be simplest to get him a new one, Anna. I don't suppose he's got anything better than an old broken-down thing at Rose's.”

“What a lovely idea, Martin! We'll get him a new one. Something classic—bright red, with a good big basket.”

It struck Dorrie that they were like lottery winners spending their new wealth: Oh, yes, we'll have that, and that, and one of those.… Their affection for Hugo, so long unrewarded, was their winnings, and they were spending it prodigally. Their reckless high spirits were obvious even from the backs of their heads—her mother's passé French twist, her father's shiny bald spot. They gleamed, and their voices rang sharp and metallic in the closed car, always on the edge of pleased laughter.

“I'll get that old sled out of the cellar and spiff it up a little.…”

“Let's call Chuck Thurman about putting the house on the market.…”

“That nice carved chess set must be in the attic.…”

Rose lived outside Worcester, on a country road lined with sagging trailers and junked cars and sparse weeds. Martin and Anna had met Rose only once, years ago, when she and Phinny had brought Hugo for a visit, two stilted hours with Phinny's bad temper and Hugo's whining. Of Rose they recalled gross obesity, a rich and frequent laugh, and what seemed to be a sincere appreciation of their flower beds: Rose down on her knees crooning over the pansies. “It was unbelievable how she resembled Iris,” Anna said in the car. “It's grotesque. But she seems a good woman, in spite of everything.” The four illegitimate children, she meant. The fat. The bad grammar.

“We have no reason to believe she hasn't been good to Hugo,” Martin put in, eager to be fair but determined to let no hitch prevent their taking Hugo away. Rose had sounded cooperative on the phone—had seemed, in fact, to welcome their plan. She had, after all, four of her own. Dorrie wondered what a social worker would make of the situation: the orphan son of two junkies poised between an unwed welfare mother and an elderly couple who barely knew the boy.

“Could this really be the right road?” Anna asked, eyeing a yard full of rusting car bodies. Before every house there seemed to be a dog tied up, barking. “This doesn't look quite—”

But there around the next bend was the mailbox by the road:
TCHERNOFF
in spiky black letters, and a yard full of chilly-looking children, one of whom was unmistakably Hugo.

He was eight, a fat little boy with a runny nose. He came dashing down to meet the car, then stopped in the middle of the dirt driveway and stood with his hands in his pockets, smiling tentatively. When the car stopped, Anna whimpered, “Oh-oh-oh,” fumbling with the door handle, and rushed forward to hug him. “There's my boy,” said her husband, following more slowly. Dorrie sat in the backseat until she couldn't get away with it any longer (her mother looked back and gestured impatiently, “Come on”) and then she got out, stiffly, and followed them all up to Rose's trailer, where Rose stood waiting, the neck of a beer bottle in one ham fist.

No one had foreseen that Hugo wouldn't want to go. Rose hadn't told him yet; that, of course, didn't help. It wasn't that she didn't want them to have him. “I'm reconciled,” she said. “That kid deserves better than this.” She had said as much on the phone, and she said it again to Dorrie and Anna in the narrow living room, while the kids took Martin out back to see where they'd buried the dog, Tiger, who had been hit by a car. “I love that kid, but I don't mind telling you I'm really strapped most of the time,” said Rose. “I haven't been able to work because of my back, and I get food stamps but they don't go all that far when you've got five—and I'll tell you, them boys can eat.” She offered them all a beer. Anna and Martin declined, but Dorrie took one and stood there swigging it from the bottle as Rose did. It immediately calmed her stomach. She imagined her mother, on the drive home, saying, If she's so strapped, how can she afford beer, I'd like to know?