Safe Passage (23 page)

    
"What excuse were you going to write for your absence?" she asked. Percival could forge both her signature and Patrick's better than any of the other children. He did it for his brothers when they had papers to be signed and she had already left for work. Sometimes
Mag
felt guilty, but mostly she was grateful to Percival for handling all those tiresome papers for her, leaving her free. Of course that was a mistake.

    
"They think I'm having root-canal work done," he said. Patrick had made several trips to the dentist recently to have a root canal made in one of his molars.

    
"Are you having root-canal work because of the nice weather, or because of English?"

    
"Both," he said.

    
Percival hated his English teacher. He had gotten a 97 the first marking period, but then he'd acted up in class until the teacher made him write a certain sentence twenty-five times. He wrote it in an illegible chicken scratch. He did not believe a high school student should be subjected to writing sentences. There was no further punishment the teacher could inflict, except make sure he never got another high grade in her class. Percival did better than almost anyone on the standardized English tests, so she could not flunk him as she would have liked, but she marked him down. "She's not being fair!" Percival often screamed.

    
"So she's not fair. Life is not fair. You think every boss you have when you take a job will be fair?" Patrick said. "You have to learn to cope in life even with unpleasant English teachers."

    
Percival's
way of coping was to cut the class.

    
"I didn't cut the whole day," he told
Mag
. "I didn't leave till after math." He was getting an A in geometry; why should he cut math?

    
"That was noble of you."

    
"I thought so."

    
"What period was English?"

    
"Third."

    
"Is it over now?"

    
"Of course. It's after lunch, what do you think?"

    
"Then you don't mind my taking you back."

    
"For what? For gym and history? I don't care." His eyes narrowed. "What're you going to tell them?"

    
"I'll tell them the dentist appointment took longer than we thought it would. That happens sometimes with root-canal work."

   
 
So she dropped him at school, but it was too late to visit Mr. Carney. She went to her next appointment with Betsy Palmer, a twenty-year-old unmarried mother of two, pregnant with a third.
Mag
liked her. No one had told Betsy the facts of life early on and she still hadn't quite figured them out.
Mag
referred her to Planned Parenthood. She never admitted she had seven sons of her own or said that birth control didn't always work. She never told Betsy how sick the Pill had made her, never said that Percival had been conceived on
Emko
foam or that the twins were the result of a diaphragm that fit poorly, as such devices did on women who had given birth three or four times. Betsy never asked her. She was the caseworker and Betsy was the client; Betsy was trapped and
Mag
was free. Betsy's two-year-old climbed on
Mag's
lap and pulled at her beads. Betsy was grateful that
Mag
allowed it, but kindness was easy when escape was an hour away.
Mag
did not have to cook for those children or do their laundry. She was at work. She accepted a cookie and forgot about Percival and Mr. Carney. When she left, the sun was still warm outside Betsy Palmer's housing project, and
Mag's
mind was empty as the sky.

    
Mr. Carney was dead. They told her the next morning when she got to the office. He had fallen in his kitchen about the time
Mag
would have visited. His son-in-law found him, still warm, when he brought him a carton of eggs from the store at closing time.

    
Mag
really would not have needed to quit. She learned later it was almost impossible to be fired from a government agency, even for killing a client. She had not actually killed him, of course; the supervisors assured her she had not done that. He was old, ill; he soon would have gone into a nursing home. She quit all the same. She claimed responsibility—nobly, she thought—but she was never sorry. Percival, subdued by the idea that his mother had caused a death because she had picnicked with him, did not cut school again for the rest of the year. He ended up with a C in English and had a better track season than they expected. She thought of Mr. Carney sometimes with the same detachment she felt when she remembered Mrs. Cohen or Mrs.
McClune
or Betsy Palmer. Two years later when Gideon ran faster than Percival at the cross-country meet in Brunswick, when Gideon came in first and Percival came in fifth,
Mag
looked at
Percival's
ragged, defeated face and, remembering his grin that day at the creek and the good months that had followed it, was not sorry then, either, that Mr. Carney had died.

    
A light in front of her turned red. She slammed on the brakes and barely managed to avoid hitting the car in front of her. For a moment her heart leapt to her throat, but then an awful calm descended upon her. She was not going to have an accident. She had almost had an accident once before, but it would not happen again today. She was perfectly safe. She knew it absolutely.

    
After Mr. Carney died, she hadn't known it would be so easy for a cold-blooded murderer to get other jobs. The hospital hired her to help check out Medicaid patients. She did that until the day
Izzy
broke his ankle and then she never went back. Later she worked for the county's parks and recreation program, signing people up to use pavilions on summer weekends and take tennis classes in the park. The older boys learned to drive, and she thought: I can concentrate on working now; they will drive away from me. But they did not drive
away,
they only used gallons of gas and came home when the tank read empty. The younger boys stampeded the house, left shoes in the family room, ate crackers on the rug, yelled in front of company, "Tell Darren to stop farting!" until civilizing them was all she could do. She counseled displaced housewives; helped organize a shelter for the abused. Her sons contracted pneumonia, tore ligaments, got drunk, dented cars; there was always some reason to quit. She said to herself: These jobs are markers, I am laying the base; and waited, biding her time, for her career.
When Simon was ten her opportunity finally came.
She was called to an interview in Washington, an hour away, with a nonprofit women's agency that needed an administrator.

    
So there she was, driving home from Washington after spending a full two hours talking to the agency's director, knowing she would be made an offer because she had presented herself so well. She was driving along I-270 north of the beltway, ready to pull out to pass. A horn honked at her from her left, from a car that had been coming up beside her in her blind spot. She jerked the wheel hard to the right. Her car headed for the shoulder, toward a hill, a great bank of trees. She jerked back to the left. She
oversteered
again. The car began to zigzag, out of control. She couldn't believe it. She moved the wheel, and the car did not respond. It was going in its own direction. It couldn't be happening, but of course it was. She did not have time to be frightened. The car hurtled ahead. Careened. Turned.
I am dead
, she thought. She waited for the impact, but the other vehicles on the highway had stopped. Her car skidded across an empty lane, slowed, and came to a halt on the grassy median strip. She had not hit anything. People pulled over, asking if she was all right. She nodded, smiling, thinking,
I
sbould
be dead
. She sat there shaking, and after a while she drove away. She had not even bumped her head on the headrest. It was a warning.

    
"What? You think it's an omen?" Patrick roared at her. "You think God is interested in whether you work in the city or not? That He wants you to stay home and take care of your kids? What an arrogant, racist attitude. You think God is more interested in you than those refugees trying to get out of Vietnam?"

    
He had a point, of course, but two days later when they called to offer her the job in Washington, she turned it down. She did not choose her life. She did laundry and ran errands and took jobs that were always jobs, never careers—even the present one—but it was not her choice. She had floated into it and it carried her, an undertow, and she couldn't get out. It was not what she chose. So she did none of it very well, only told herself it would soon be over, the boys grown, Patrick successful. And this was her punishment.

    
But why hadn't it happened before? Why now, when she was almost finished raising them, when they were finally coming into their own?

    
She would not have an accident however badly she drove today because of the irony. She would need to be alive and well to savor the death of her son.

 
   
She pulled off the road. It was not possible even for her to go to work. Nothing would save her. She made a U-turn and headed home.

    
A Radio-93 car was in the driveway, and a pretty reporter was standing at the front door, neat in a burgundy suit, with a box of sound equipment belted to her waist and a microphone in her hand. Darren was in the entryway with no coat on, trying to get rid of her,
Mag
supposed, but it was the reporter who was talking.

    
"…understand that your brother and the O'Neal boy were in the same unit. Now that the O'Neal boy has been located, what does this do to your hopes?"

    
Darren's pale face blanched, and his limp blond hair fell down his forehead into his eyes. "You can't expect us to…" he said before his voice rose into a squeak. He cleared his throat. Merle appeared in the doorway behind him, with his ludicrous scraggly mustache.

    
"You don't just give up hope," he said in a whine almost as unforgiving as Darren's. The reporter inched closer.

    
"And yet this must be a terrible time for you…" Her voice dripped drama.
Mag
came up behind her on the walk. The woman turned and began to point the microphone in her direction.

    
"Fuck off,"
Mag
said. She swept by the other woman and pulled the door closed behind her, bringing the twins inside with her and leaving the reporter on the stoop. For twenty-four years she had refused to use F-words in front of her sons, no matter how angry she got, and now the twins were staring at her as if she'd lost her mind.

    
"It's not something they can say on the radio," she explained. "They couldn't use the tape." The twins didn't change their expression. Why were they trying to be the media contact, anyway? It was Gideon they loved, not Percival. Why did their voices betray them as if they cared?

    
"She went away, didn't she?"
Mag
asked. The twins looked pathetic. "Didn't she?" she whispered. In unison, both of them nodded and shuffled down the hall.
Mag
went into the living room and turned the stereo up as loud as she could.

CHAPTER 9

    
All night, Alfred's sleep had been interrupted by troubling dreams that vanished from memory the moment he startled awake. Five or six times he found himself sitting in bed, feeling as if some urgent responsibility had been presented to him in his dream and was hanging over him now, if only he could remember what it was. For long moments he stared into the darkness, the sound of his heartbeat drumming in his ears. And then, exhausted but still without knowing what was expected of him, he fell back to sleep. Toward morning, in the half-light, Cynthia touched his shoulder. "I'll take off of work today, too," she said. "We can take the boys to your mother's if you want, or leave them with the sitter, it doesn't matter. I wouldn't feel right going in to work."

    
He had been dozing when she said that. For a moment he was disoriented…his dream lingering on the edge of consciousness, the cold morning air against his face. Then her voice began to soothe him. She was not going to work. She would be with him all day, whatever happened, whatever news…He did not think beyond that. He was touching her, taking her breasts in his hands, feeling the nipples grow hard, rubbing her belly, her thighs. She moved against him, allowing it. He buried his head in her breasts. She was caressing him—not in a lewd, stolen way but freely, softly, like the wiping away of tears. A swelling, exultation; and then he
was
inside her. Afterward she fell asleep but he lay awake beside her, watching. He had not thought he would make love to her until the waiting was over. But now he felt no guilt, no regret.

    
It was a great relief, and not just physical. He had always believed in abstinence before—something his internal sense of justice demanded, he supposed. At Grandmother Singer's, he had never eaten the Lifesavers he brought, knowing his brothers were
existing
on stewed chicken and lettuce. And once, when Simon had an allergic reaction after his tonsillectomy and seemed likely to choke to death, Alfred managed to go several days without eating at all. He'd thought it wrong to enjoy his health and his pleasures while someone he cared for was suffering. But lying in bed with Cynthia, those gestures seemed as childish as Simon's deciding to have his ear fixed if Percival would live—the sort of mute, meaningless sacrifice you make only when there is nothing else you can do. It no longer seemed necessary. What was necessary was to handle the crisis. And it seemed to him that if Cynthia would take off work today to stay with him, then he could handle anything the Singer household could dish out—his mother's behavior, his father's blindness, even his brother's death.