Safe Passage (17 page)

    
It wasn't that he didn't like Farley. He did. They ate together, sat on the bus together coming home from meets. He'd liked Percival, too—more—and that didn't stop him from doing what he did at Brunswick. He pushed the thought away. Until today he had not thought there was any way, now that he had been running cross-country with Farley for two years, that he was going to let Farley graduate a year from now without having beaten him.

    
This morning, he had been sweating hard as he neared the end of his run, but he had not felt tired. He could tell from the strength in his body that the coach had been right when he said Gideon was starting to peak. He knew why the coach had been pleased with him. In spite of his loss the day before, he was getting closer to beating Farley every race. Even his father would have to approve. He turned a final corner, heading back to his apartment. In the distance his roommate, Daniel, was waving at him from the balcony. Normally Daniel would still be asleep. He was the laziest roommate Gideon had ever had.
Lazier than any of his brothers.
It seemed odd for Daniel to be gesturing with such unaccustomed energy. The high, heady feeling went out of his limbs. There was something urgent and ominous about Daniel's wave. He did not realize how ominous until he heard his father's voice on the phone. He listened to his father tell him about the explosion in Lebanon. He said he would be home as soon as he could get there. His father told him not to come.

    
He didn't know why he did what he did next. He didn't say a word to Daniel. He turned and walked out the door and down the stairs and started to run again. It was crazy, because he had just run twelve miles.

     
He ran a block. His mind was empty at first. When a thought came to him it was a double thought, first of Percival being blown apart and then of his father telling him not to come home. A sinking feeling came over him—not the black dots before the eyes when you're about to pass out, but a more entire feeling, as if someone had painted the inside of him with tar. He couldn't run any farther and could barely walk. His limbs were heavy, on the edge of paralysis. He felt that, in a moment, his limbs would refuse to move at all. Moving fast was all he could ever count on, and at that moment, that simply, it was gone. He forced himself to walk back to the apartment. It was like trying to walk through water. This must be what it felt like to have polio, he thought. He sat in front of the TV watching the news updates. Daniel hovered around, but Gideon could not bring himself to speak. Percival was probably dead. His arms and his legs did not want to move.

    
"I could drive you to the airport in Salt Lake City," Daniel said finally. "If you want to go home."

    
"They told me not to come," Gideon said.

    
"They said that to make it easy for you, probably. It's probably tough being at home right now."

    
"Yeah, probably."

    
Daniel dropped him off at the airport. He had not checked airline schedules and had to wait half the day for a plane to Denver. Now he was going to have to wait another hour before he could get from Denver to Chicago. He hoped his arms and legs would hold out. He told himself all he had to do was get on that plane to Chicago. Then his legs would have the whole flight to recover, they wouldn't have to move an inch. He told himself this was exactly like reaching down and going on when you were too tired to finish a race. Once, during some race, Gideon had slowed down and his father had shouted to him, "It's only another two-twenty, Gideon. Anyone can run a two-twenty." Gideon had pictured himself running just halfway around the track, and it did not seem so impossible. In Chicago all he had to do was get off the plane, walk through the airport, and get on another plane to Washington. It was no worse than gutting it out through that last two-twenty. He remembered his father's words. No matter how tired he was, if he concentrated hard enough, he could always finish.

    
Mag
had begun to feel almost numb. A whole day had passed and they still knew nothing. The eleven o'clock news was coming on. Even the phone and the doorbell had finally stopped ringing. Earlier, in her slightly removed state,
Mag
had concentrated on Percival for hours, sending out tendrils of protective thought as if they might still do some good. But eventually she could not sustain even that. In the enormous commotion, her fear of each caller being the Marines became only an ache somewhere below the skin. There was just too much activity.

    
In late afternoon, Beth O'Neal called to say that she, too, had heard nothing. The news bulletins became further and further apart. They waited. Simon rubbed his missing ear and kept looking down at the FREESTATE STRIDERS logo on
Percival's
old shirt he was wearing. Patrick squinted because his headache persisted, but his eyes stayed open.
Izzy
kept observing Patrick the way
Mag
imagined he would observe a laboratory specimen, with great interest but also a certain amount of anguish for having to subject his own father to such scrutiny. And just before supper—a meal no one really wanted after the late, aborted lunch, but which Alfred insisted upon in the name of normality—Cynthia arrived.

    
Mag
saw her coming up the walk in the rain, trailed by her boys. She was wearing jeans and a baggy sweatshirt that did not disguise at all the size of her breasts. Her sons, Jason and Joshua—those terrible names,
cliche's
of names, when
Mag
had named her own sons so much more imaginatively—looked wide-eyed and so frightened that
Mag
wondered what Cynthia had told them. Stepping into the hall, Cynthia leaned forward as if she were debating whether to hug
Mag
. In the end she only lifted her hands and shoved something forward, which turned out to be homemade bread. It was very awkward.

    
The children stood in the hallway in awed silence until
Mag
said, "Come on in, Alfred's fixing supper in the kitchen. Go say hello to everybody." A wave of relief came into their huge eyes, and they scrambled off so joyfully that
Mag
realized for the sixth or seventh time since she'd met them that it wasn't the boys she disliked, only Cynthia's crime of foisting them on Alfred. It was Cynthia—not the boys themselves—who had called upon Alfred's sense of responsibility to the point that he asked for
Mag's
house. And also, though she tried not to admit this, she would have liked the boys to have had some distant resemblance to Alfred—his high cheekbones, his square chin,
something
—since he was bent on sacrificing himself for them even at the cost of children of his own. But the boys looked exactly like Cynthia.

    
"That was very sweet of you,"
Mag
said, turning the bread over in her hands. "Did you make it yourself?" Cynthia nodded.
Fat chance
. Here was a woman with two sons, a divorce, a master's degree, and a job with the school system. Why should she spend her day off kneading bread?

    
"The kids helped. It gave us something to do. I didn't want them running around over here while you were waiting to hear something."

    
Of course not.
The kids could run around here after
Mag
had moved to the Keys. She was not taken in by the good-mother image of Cynthia cooped up in the rain with small children and a clump of yeast dough.

    
"Patrick still doing okay,
Mag
?"

    
Mag. Patrick. Calling them by their first names ever since their first meeting—just like that—though neither of them had ever said, "Call me
Mag
" or "Call me Patrick."
As simple as moving into the house.
What would be better? Mrs. Singer? Mr. Singer?
Certainly not Mother or Dad.

    
They walked through the hallway into the family room and kitchen, where Cynthia kissed Alfred lightly on the mouth—a brisk, businesslike kiss.
Mag's
sister had told her once, "If Alfred marries Cynthia, then you'll finally have a daughter," but the idea seemed ludicrous.
Mag
could never view Cynthia as a daughter. Daughters would be like her nieces, who'd sulked their way through adolescence into languid adulthood, guided by a feminine mystique
Mag
couldn't understand. Cynthia was anything but languid and daughterly. She was a vamp.

    
Of course she didn't look particularly
vampy
right now.
Mag
searched for a better word. Except for her overripe body, the woman wasn't even particularly feminine. The calculated kiss she had given Alfred summed her up perfectly—a gesture preplanned to elicit approval from prospective in-laws, given with the same reasonableness and essential lack of passion that she worried about in Alfred. Conniving, yes. But when you got right down to it, Cynthia was a woman who'd named her sons the names every other mother was choosing that year—names that would never be embarrassing or unusual or even interesting.

    
A taker: That was the word. Cynthia was a taker.

    
Alfred was setting the table. Cynthia immediately began to help him.
Mag
was struck by how quickly the two of them seemed to have settled down to routine. They probably set the table together just this way back in their little apartment. She could envision them clearly a couple of years from now—locked in to dinner at six, Sunday breakfasts, semiannual visits to the dentist. Having ruled out more children, they would have to settle for routine as the sole fruit of their orderly minds. Poor Alfred; he deserved better. Even she herself had had a little excitement over the years. After the children were born, Patrick still went after her with the same hunger he'd had in the backseat of his car, and she'd said once, "For God's sake, what motivates all this?" And he'd replied, "It's your blond hair and white skin and pink nipples. You look more naked than other women." His answer had excited her—spoken to her of his experience with women before he met her, and his continuing lust for her, and the life they had woven of it. Of course it had turned out to be all a trap—a way of getting her well trained. But at the time her bounty of secret sex and unplanned sons had seemed almost daring. Alfred would not have even that. Cynthia, too, might look more naked than other women when she undressed, but
Mag
suspected she would turn out to be not a great love but only a good roll in the hay, the way piano lessons had turned out to be only a technical exercise. And Alfred would be left with her kids. More than ever,
Mag
did not want Cynthia living in her house.

    
"Dinner's served," Alfred said. Looking at the food,
Mag
felt that only minutes had passed since their disastrous lunch, with Simon digging blood from beneath his fingernails. It was pure wrongness, sitting down to a family meal of good food and laughter. Why did it matter who lived in her house?

    
After supper, Jason and Joshua fell asleep in front of the TV, with their heads on either side of Simon's lap. Simon remained motionless for over an hour so as not to awaken them. His newfound capacity for stillness disturbed
Mag
, but she did not say so. At nine, Alfred and Cynthia carried the sleeping boys out to the car to go home. Simon, too, got up and started walking back and forth across the family room. His hours of stillness had revived him to violent energy, though he had been up this morning before five. 0ccasionally he sat, but then he leaped up after a few minutes and walked some more.
Izzy
and the twins were sprawled on the carpet near the TV, but Simon didn't stop his pacing, only stepped over them each time as he passed. And now the news was coming on, and Simon was still walking.

    
The news told them nothing. There was a recap of the day's events.
The hotline number.
Films of young Marines working under floodlights, trying to pry out other Marines still crushed under smoldering debris. Destruction. Then President Reagan came on, standing under a large black umbrella held by an aide, holding his wife's hand. He had the grace to look pained.

    
"There are no words," he said, "that can express our outrage and, I think, the outrage of all Americans at the despicable act….

    
Patrick strode over to the TV set and turned it off. "Let's go to bed," he said. He sounded imperious…annoying. No one moved.

    
"I can't believe last night at this time nothing was wrong," Simon said. He did not stop pacing. He reached the far end of the family room and opened the slider to let Lucifer in.

    
"None of us can believe this,"
Izzy
said.

    
It was true: They did not believe it. Even what little they knew…it was as if, in a certain sense, they did not believe it.

    
The cat shook rainwater from its fur and headed to the kitchen. Simon followed, to feed it.

    
"He's been out all day, why couldn't you just have left him there?"
Mag
asked.

    
"He's hungry, Mother,"
Izzy
said, not waiting for Simon to answer.

    
"Another mouth to feed, just what we need. I could also do without him sleeping on my pillow."