Safe Passage (5 page)

    
"At least the rain keeps people inside,"
Mag
said, needing to draw some response from him. All the boys had hated it when people came outside wanting to complain or pay or exchange greetings. They said it slowed them down.

    
"You'll be surprised," he said woodenly. And
Mag
knew he was thinking he couldn't bear anyone to come out today, oblivious of the news, and ask him how he was.

    
She could hardly stand it. It seemed to her that Simon suffered enough. When he was born, the first thing she'd noticed about him was the small round hole in his head where his left ear was supposed to be, but no outer ear whatsoever. It had seemed to her then that he was bearing the punishment for her failures. Now it occurred to her that this additional burden of
Percival's
fate might be just too much for him.

    
"He's deaf," she'd said to the doctor when she first saw him, suddenly realizing both the enormity of her guilt and of his suffering. It was her fault. Four years before, when the twins were born, giving her six sons at the age of twenty-five, the obstetrician had said, "You ought to consider having your tubes tied. You can't do this forever." She had been giddy then, feeling superior for having produced two sons at once, and refused. Also, she believed if she had her tubes tied, the children might be kidnapped or run over by a tractor trailer as an irony to remind her she hadn't wanted them-leaving her alone with a useless reproductive system. Later, when Darren cried with colic and Merle cried in sympathy, when she was snowbound for a week with all six of them (only Alfred was in school all day), it occurred to her that lower animals also produced their young by the litter. But she was too busy then, for irony or surgery, either one.

    
She had almost begun to believe she was through with pregnancies when Simon came along, squalling and red and earless. Knowing he was deaf, understanding he was heir to her punishment, she loved him the most. She had her tubes tied before she left the hospital, reasoning that nothing worse could happen. She hadn't wanted children, had listened to music, not heeded them, and it seemed fitting that Simon was born unable to listen at all—though hideously unfair to Simon. It was a pure gift when they learned Simon's hearing was normal, and another when he began to snap his fingers when he was happy and snapped them all the time.

    
Before his hair grew in, she dressed him in hats to hide the defect, but Simon pulled them off. People stared; Simon smiled back. He lived in a closed universe of brothers who did not regard his
earlessness
as abnormal, so neither did he. "Where's your eye?" the boys would ask when he was little, and Simon would point to it. "Where's your mouth?" When they got to his ear, he would point to the normal one unless they indicated the left side and asked, "What's that?" Then Simon would smile with delight, put his hand on the hole, and answer gleefully: "No ear!"
To guffaws all around.

    
Other times when they were small, three or four boys would pile on Patrick as he lay on the family room couch on Sundays, watching basketball games. "Oh, I see," Patrick would say. "What we've got here is an ugly sandwich. I'm the bottom bread, Darren's the mayonnaise, Simon's the top bread—and Percival is the
ugly"
This formula could be expanded to accommodate lettuce, pickles, and onions and any number of players, with the child closest to the middle singled out for insult as the ugly. Usually it was Percival, but often Darren or Merle, since everyone enjoyed the idea of one twin being ugly and not the other, when they looked exactly alike. Simon invariably ended up high in the pack so his older brothers wouldn't crush him-and maybe he believed, truly, that he was always the top bread and never the ugly.

    
Once his hair grew in, it covered the naked hole and made him look normal.
Mag
almost believed punishment had passed them by until Simon was five and had to have his tonsils out. A week after the surgery his fever shot up to 103, he broke out from head to toe with welts, and his lungs filled with fluid from an allergy to an antibiotic. Allergies came from Patrick's side—but when Patrick had grown allergic to beer, he had only sneezed uncontrollably, while Simon, sweet Simon, would die.

    
But Simon lived, Simon lived!
Mag
took her first full-time job as soon as he got better-canvassing neighborhoods for a product survey—because she knew she couldn't stand it if one of the children died while she was home doing nothing but tending them, when all she'd ever wanted was a life of her own. Yet in the morning, packing lunches, she would hear a boy coming down the stairs and know it was Simon because he was snapping his fingers. And that, as much as her work, made her happy.

    
She would have been content, then, having a defective son who didn't recognize his flaw. She would not have asked him to change. But then adolescence overtook him, and though his voice didn't deepen and he didn't stop snapping his fingers, an inner turmoil had been shaking him for a year. He went around the house making the strange dancing motions favored by his black friends at school. He spent hours looking at himself in the mirror. He stopped playing basketball-his favorite sport—and refused to run in races, though like his brothers, he ran well. He played baseball instead, though he was never any good at it, and soccer because they let him be goalie.
Mag
believed he switched to those sports because at second base and goalie his head was reasonably still. She believed he'd given up basketball and running because when he was moving fast or jumping, the air blew his hair back from his face and exposed his missing ear for everyone to see.

    
When
Mag
saw a newspaper article about a surgeon who remade parts of people that were missing, hope bloomed in her chest. She consulted the doctor herself before mentioning it to Simon. The doctor said Simon was at the perfect age for ear reconstruction, because ears reached almost their full size by eight or nine. Though the surgery had to be done in several stages—two or three operations in all—the process would be complete in a year, with no corrections needed later to compensate for further growth.

    
When she brought up the possibility of surgery to Simon, he turned to her with a face the color of wax. He said, in a voice she had heard before only from a cute little black kid on TV: "What you
talkin
' about, Mama? You want me to
die
?"

    
And today, in the dark rain, she felt the unfairness of his having to contemplate not only his own death from surgery but
Percival's
from war. She was not sure he could bear it.

    
He appeared out of the darkness, shouting something at her.

    
"What?" she yelled back.

    
"I said I'll take the path over to

    
She saw that he had finished his papers on
Canterwood
and even refilled his bag. He moved across the lawn swiftly, angrily. She understood. He was racing against himself, playing a survival game. The more he exhausted himself, the less he would think.

    
"Meet me over there in the car," he shouted, not slowing down. Then he was gone, down the wooded path between two houses, onto the street behind. Though the two streets butted each other, you had to go all the way around the block to get to Trevor Circle in the car, and he did not want to wait for her. On foot, it was faster to take the shortcut through the trees.

    
She was finishing her last few houses when a dog began to bark. She could not place it at first; it was somewhere in the distance. The barking grew louder, more violent. Then both the pitch and the direction of the noise became unmistakable. Monster! The dog lived on Trevor Circle, terrorizing the residents. In ten years she'd known many animals, but only one like this. A growl, deep and vicious, then the frenzied sounds of attack.

    
She ran to the car. She could imagine it: Simon emerging from the woods, loaded down, at the bend of the road.
Monster sitting in silent ambush on its porch until he approached.
Now the dog was racing toward him, snarling out its fury, baring its teeth—a wide, yellow, knee-high burst of anger. She imagined Simon fending it off with threats, with great
wavings
of a rolled-up paper, but she didn't know if it would work. Monster had bitten Simon on the calf during the summer. He still had the scar.

    
Her heart beat so fast that she felt ill. She could take the footpath, but the car was a better weapon. She got in and drove down
Canterwood
wildly, around the block toward Trevor Circle. She lost the sound for a moment and then picked it up again-a fierce, untamed mix of barking and growling. She had begun to tremble.

    
She turned onto the street. She would honk, weave back and forth,
let
Simon jump in. But in the small silence before she took action, the sound modulated. It became an ordinary bark, no longer the anguished fury of attack. The sweep of her headlights caught Simon far on the other side of the circle. The dog was not at his heels. It was trotting back toward its home. Simon was jogging across a lawn to drop a paper, having escaped from the attack. Monster's house was on her section of the route, not his; it was only that he had to walk past the animal to get there. Now the dog saw the car and hastened toward her. It resumed the frenzied barking. She stopped at the bottom of its driveway just as the dog reached her car. The door of the house had opened and a man was standing on the porch, sheltered from the rain.

    
"Daisy!" he called. He didn't venture off the porch. Daisy indeed!
Monster
. Her heart still pounded. That such people should be warm and dry in their houses, and Simon should have to fend off their dog in the rain. That such a dog should be allowed to exist …The man in the doorway wasn't someone they knew; he'd lived there less than a year.
Mag
turned toward him, hoping he could see. She stuck her arm out the window, slipped the paper out of its plastic sleeve. There was a little puddle in the middle of the driveway. She dropped the paper into the water. The dog barked faster, louder, and ran for her arm. She pulled it back.

    
"Here's your paper!" she called to the man on the porch. "Come and get it!"

     
"You better not leave it there! You're supposed to bring it to the porch!" The man didn't move from the doorway.

    
"Not with that dog out here. Ever hear of the leash law?" "You put it on the porch anyway!" he yelled at her. "I'll call and complain."

    
"Be my guest."

    
"You get it up here!" he threatened.

     
"Next time I'll drop it in the intersection," she said.

    
The dog had retreated, was heading for the porch. She put the car in gear and drove around the curve, toward Simon. He had finished delivering his papers and was standing in the street, listening.

    
"He get you?" she asked. Suddenly her voice was shaky, thin.

    
"No. Usually I wave a paper at him and he goes away. Toreador-style, you know? But he surprised me. Barry Kline says the neighbors are getting up a petition to make them keep him inside, and I guest mostly they are.

    
"Bastard,"
Mag
said.

    
"Language, Mom."

    
"That idiot—standing on his porch so he won't get wet, while the dog chases you halfway down the street. He even said he'd complain. I hope he does."

    
"He never complains."

    
"I took the paper out of its bag and dropped it on his drive-way."

    
"All
right
."
 
Simon snapped his fingers.

    
"There was a little puddle in the driveway."

    
"I know it well." Simon smiled and his fingers snapped. Then he remembered what day it was; they both did. As if a switch had been thrown, the sound of the snapping stopped. The car was cold and silent except for the rain.
Mag's
hands were shaking. She wrapped her fingers around the steering wheel and willed herself to drive.

    
There was one more block to do. She forced herself to load papers into her bag calmly. They would finish, and this would be over. That was what Patrick would say.

    
It was still quite dark and the rain had not let up. In an odd way, the darkness and rain were like a veil around her, protecting her. The trembling began to lessen.

    
As if to mock her for thinking she was safe, a porch light went on as she approached the next house.
An elderly woman in a robe cracked open the front door.
The old never sleep,
Mag
thought. She recognized the woman, but vaguely. "Simon?" the woman said.

    
"No, it's his mother."

    
The woman squinted. "I believe I used to see you back when those twins used to bring the paper."