The Boy (2 page)

“I didn’t do anything to the guy.”

“I know
you
. You did something.”

“I did nothing.”

Her father tapped his fingers on the table and looked away. Anna bit down on a toothpick and broke it in half.

She’d vanished for days, giving him no idea of her whereabouts. She’d tried and largely failed to hit him countless times. She’d fought a raging addiction to cocaine and lost on numerous occasions. Once, she’d called him a whore. But she’d also bought him his first flying lessons and gone over the structure and texture of clouds, the myriad manifestations of magnetism, the rate of descent after an engine failure with him before
his exam. She had taken him on the road with her, she had put a meal in front of him every single night and quivered with joy at his delight, she had carried his child
.

A pall of silence fell. Anna stood, gave a small shrug, and said,
“A la guerre comme à la guerre,”
but her father waved a tired hand in the air.

“This is not a war. This is a pantomime between two fools. My advice? Start taking pictures. Make sure he’s not in them.”

“I don’t take pictures.”

“Start taking pictures.”

“I don’t take pictures.”

“Then leave him alone. He’s a good father, leave him alone,” and sitting at the old family table, her skin tight around her bones, bile spilling onto her tongue, Anna found herself backed up against the vast, uncluttered lath of truth.

Because it was, in fact, the truth. Eva’s father had tuned in with stark curiosity—and tremulous tenderness—around the time Eva turned two and then gone on to conquer regions Anna had never even surveyed: the voice never raised, the complaint never dismissed, the extra hour spent in the service of some unsophisticated understanding, some low epiphany.

“Eva, my most precious thing, this is called a road. In the old days, this is where people walked. Today, this is where cars run. Big cars. Fast cars. Can you see them, darling?” or, “Eva, sweetheart, this is a knife. It has a handle, see? You can hold it by the handle. But this? This part is called the blade and it’s sharp. It can cut you, see?” and on that occasion, with unaccountable acumen, he ran the little girl’s thumb ever so slightly over the processed steel edge, leaving her with a clear sense of
sharpness
without even the intimation of a cut. Anna witnessed several similar procedures—her breath caught in her throat, her hand extended in urgent, unarticulated plea—but not once had the little girl come away injured, or even remotely troubled. The implicit threat of passing vehicles, the unsympathetic nature of sharp objects, the deep danger of edges—curbs, embankments, balconies, shores—all acquired proper significance in Eva’s mind without a single yank, pull, or shout.

But that had come later, much, much later. For the longest time, for what to Anna seemed an ice age, the evolving circuitry in Eva’s brain had a single, largely silent observer: her. The first months were by far the worst. At the end of a night she would remember as Hangman’s Night, a cry so fractured escaped her baby’s lips that Anna looked on the pale glow spreading over the garden below as if on the advance of cancer on a living body.

The cry, so disconsolate, so deep, marked a turning point in Anna’s life, a moment in which absence, and not presence, laid greater claim to the marrow of things, and nothing—not the stirring of life among the leaves, not the faithful turning of the sun, not the punctual pandemonium of dawn on the equator—would ever be counted on to subvert that basic chemistry again. She’d been warned about postpartum depression, but when that implacable darkness hardened into a dumb malevolence, Anna found herself questioning the very existence of light.

She put the nannies in charge and hit the road then, returning from a magazine assignment three weeks later to a baby she barely recognized. She bounded up the stairs and ran to the crib, crushing Eva into her arms, whispering, “Mamma’s back, my love, Mamma’s back,” only to have a howl of high-pitched protest split the night—and cleave her heart in two.

Ten days later, she was gone again. There was no breathless return this time. She climbed the stairs slowly, wondering if Eva had sprouted hair in the month she’d been away. Mother and daughter studied each other silently, Eva sitting upright by that stage, a streak of ice in her blue eyes as Anna rummaged in her bag for a tambourine-like instrument plucked out of the steaming bowels of Congo. She handed it over with a queasy smile.

“Here,” she said. “Shake it.” Eva closed her chubby fingers on the edge of the tambourine, held it suspiciously aloft, then brought it down with a clank onto her head. The scream that followed was operatic, nothing Anna was prepared for. Both nannies came rushing in. “What have you been feeding her?” Anna asked them before she left the room.

Funny. Funny how quickly and efficiently Anna had buried those first years, how fact had turned into pure fiction. Out of those lost latitudes, a single shard of uncontaminated evidence kept surfacing with perverse regularity: a black-and-white photograph of Eva gazing down at a cake with two candles (one for good luck) taken by her father as Anna stood in a swirl of desert dust on the roof of some abandoned building, trying to place a call.

“Why’d you bother having her?” Eva’s father said when she got back. Anna pulled the vodka out of the freezer.

“I tried calling. No one picked up the phone.”

“It was her
first
birthday for fuck’s sake.”

“I tried. No one answered.”

Fastidious and feline in his tailored suit, Eva’s father laid a coldly furious eye on her. “You were going to express your regrets to an
infant
over the phone?”

“Something like that.”

“Suggesting
what,
if I may inquire, as the reason for your absence?”

“Work,”
Anna said, knocking back a shot.

“Oh,
work,
” he said, his voice smooth and dangerous. “I’ll leave you the privilege of telling her that when she’s old enough.” And of course, years later, when the question came out of nowhere, Anna found herself unable to meet her little girl’s eyes.

“Why, Mamma?”

“I had to work.”

“It was my first birthday! The biggest birthday of all!”

“Not really.”

“Yes really.”

“What about zero to one? Zero to one seems bigger to me.”

“Mom.”

“What?”

“There’s no cake from zero to one.”

It was impossible to explain, the obscure misery of those lost years away from her job when she was with her child, away from her child when she was on assignment, never at the right place at the right time, balanced, as if on a tightrope, between points she could never reach.

She kept it up, though, until the day a bullet came zinging past, setting off an echo in one ear. The ring became a nightly persecution, doubling in depth and strength, keeping her up, wearing her down, making her crazy in the mornings trying to light a cigarette with that dead vibration in her skull.

“Why don’t you just bloody quit?” the girl’s father asked, reaching over and putting out her cigarette, “You do realize you have a child.”

“I thought you had one, too.”

“Small children need their mothers, not their fathers.”

“Says the resident expert on small children.”

“I don’t claim to know much about children, Anna, but what I do know, what only a fool could fail to notice, is that this constant going away on your part, this constant vanishing act, is harming her.”

“How about
you
put in some time?”

“I do the best I can.”

“Which, scrupulously added, comes up to
zero
. Or right around there.”

“I do the best I can, Anna, the best I can. And will you please stop smoking? It’s a filthy habit.”

She went around to a few doctors, sat in waiting rooms with little Eva in her lap and that dead ringing in her ear, and got told the same thing over and over: avoid loud noises. So she quit her job, her life on the road, that vastness that for years had been her soul, and settled down with a man she did not trust and a toddler with an iron will. “NO,” Eva had formed the habit of saying, pounding her little fist on the table. “NO.”

“No?”

“NO.”

“What do you mean, no?”

“NO.”

“No is not an option, Eva.”

“NO.”

“No is the wrong answer, Eva.”

“NO.”

“Eva, there is no such thing as NO, do you understand?”

“NO.”

Inconsistency, Anna would learn, was not one of her daughter’s shortcomings. It was NO and NO and NO again until after their escape from Eva’s father to a new continent, to a furnace of light at the southern end of the Rockies and to motherhood redefined, reimagined, reconceived, with Anna shuttling between therapy and parenting classes, and Eva on a stubborn diet of white bread and green beans.

“Pretty limited food range your daughter has,” a mother of five astutely and perhaps not unkindly observed after a playdate.

“I know,” said Anna. “I’m trying to expand it.”

“She’s what? Three?”

“Four.”

“Too late.”

“Too late to feed her?” She got a pitying look. “No. Too late to introduce her to new food.”

The woman’s eyes were large, her skin sufficiently translucent to produce in Anna an instinctive current of distrust.

“There’s been research done, tons of research done, showing that infants under one will try every type of food at least
five
times if it’s given to them by their mother, but
only
by their mother.”

Anna looked away.

“There’ve been books published.”

“Books?”

“Lots of books. I gave mine radishes, I gave them squash. I gave them tomatoes. And spinach. I gave them lots of spinach.”

“No harm in spinach.”

“I gave them sauerkraut.”

“You gave them sauerkraut?”

“I gave them sauerkraut. And guess what? They
love
it.”

“Right on. You’ve got yourself a team of sauerkraut eaters. You should field them in formation.”

She got a long, cold stare; and in those large, oddly reflective eyes, as if on a screen, Anna saw herself slicing bread and boiling beans, because, just after their move, Eva would eat
nothing else
.

She tried to sneak in some whole wheat. Eva picked up the slice and held it against the light. “What’s this?”

“Bread.”

“Why is it dark?”

“I have no idea.”

“I don’t like dark bread.”

“You’ve never tried dark bread.”

“Mamma, I don’t want dark bread.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t.”

Motherhood multiplied by a thousand, motherhood on a constant edge, motherhood like a prison sentence until the day Anna got called in and told that her daughter was shoveling handfuls of dirt in her mouth at recess.

“Dirt?”

The teacher gave a grave nod.

“In her mouth?”

Another nod.

“She eats it?”

“We are not sure, we think she does.” Nearly a minute went past before the teacher, a transplant from the Hungarian countryside raised on the milk of human kindness, took Anna’s hands in hers and whispered, “Why would she do that? Why would Eva feel the need to do that?”

Reclaiming her hands with a jerk, Anna had no trouble adding up a father, a continent, two nannies, and two dogs, and saying, “She’s lost everything. The girl’s lost everything.” A few minutes later, fumbling badly with the buckles of Eva’s car seat, Anna felt her daughter’s tiny palm on her cheek. “Mamma, are you crying?”

“Little bit.”

“You never cry.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Why, Mamma? Why are you crying?”

“They say you’re eating dirt. They say you squat behind bushes, put dirt in your mouth and eat it.”

“I can stop.”

The first buckle snapped shut. “You can?”

“Yes.” The second buckle slid in. “You sure?”

“It’s
my
mouth, Mamma.”

Things crack under too much pressure, and in the interstices occasionally new life takes root. From one day to the next, the school drop-offs, the playdates, the blessedness of Sunday mornings at home settled into a merciful routine. Eva got a dog out of a cardboard box in front of the food store and called it Paco, the Spanish nickname for Francisco. She was a bunny, a pirate, then a witch at Halloween. Anna started a column for the local paper. Eva acquired a taste for chicken and beef, zucchini and rice, shrimp tempura.

They moved houses, settling down into a narrow pass glazed with snow and ice. The roof leaked and Anna axed the ice off of it, putting in gashes a foot long. Accumulated snow snapped branches off their apple tree, tearing Anna and Eva from sleep in deep terror, and Anna pruned it at the wrong time of the year. Then frost loosened into mist, ice turned to mud, the sun rioted longer and longer over the escarpment, painting the rock beneath it all kinds of violent hues. The hummingbirds came in crazed droves. Knees against chest, Eva dropped crocus bulbs into the earth. Caught in a shaft of dying light, Anna watched.

That was how summer came that year.

T
he sun rose over the escarpment and ran fast and hard over a stretch of broken ground on which a few casitas sat despondent, down to the river and up to the house, casting long, gaunt shadows on the patio outside. A few miles past the solitude of the mesa, past acres and acres of chamisa, past the steady metronome of what had once been a furiously blinking light, the town was starting to stir. The bells of the church of Our Lady of Guadalupe were about to resume their division of time into half-hour segments, and soon school buses would begin their artful rounds up and down dirt roads lined with
latilla
fences and red willows. Dust would rise, sounds would multiply, while all around, threaded in a near perfect circumference on the horizon, mountains solid and distant breathed out the quiet power of stone.

Anna ran both hands through her hair. Sleep had come in tight-fisted spurts, between long spells of wakefulness during which her mind had turned tirelessly around the boy. The way he’d sat loose and cool in his young body as she grew stiff in hers, the way he’d propped his elbows on the counter behind him, careless and lazy—inured, it seemed, to the standard fluttering of the human heart in the face of probable rejection.

As a rule, men approached Anna with circumspection. Those who pushed past the first exchanges nursed deep doubts, in part because of her situation—single mother, single head of household, single holder of insurance, single everything—in part because they sensed a roiling of dark particles beneath the affable exterior.

“I listen to you and you know what I hear?” one of them had taken the trouble to write in a letter posted from the middle of the American nowhere. “The hiss of a pressure cooker.”

Some approaches had been more sanguine than others, but they had been on the whole discolored by doubt, tainted by fear. Anna had had a single sustained dalliance since the big move, the duration of which she could calculate in weeks rather than months. Eva had never even met him. Thinking back to the handful of seconds spent sparring with the boy, feeling the texture of her own anger as he spoke, Anna realized that what had most incensed her had been his lack of fear. But why? Why deny a boy the recklessness of youth? Why attempt, with her dismissal, to reduce his flight to a pathetic crawl? The boy was just a boy, unshackled by age and circumstance, blind to the finality of the grave, deaf to the murmurings of the dead.

Anna got up and went to the kitchen. A small voice rose from her daughter’s room.

“Mamma?”

Buried beneath the covers, Eva smelled of goodness and deep sleep. Anna pulled her gently onto her lap and they stayed sitting like that for some time.

“Come on, my love, it’s time for breakfast.” She wrapped Eva in her polka-dotted robe, retrieved her slippers from under the bed, and together they walked to the dining room, where Eva sat waiting with ruffled hair and unfocused eyes for her bowl of cereal. At eight, the girl was old enough to get her own breakfast, but something in Anna could not, would not, give up the pleasure of feeding her own child.

When breakfast was over, Eva brought her bowl to the sink, washed it, and laid it out to dry before crossing her arms and looking around with cold, critical eyes.

“Have you packed my lunch?”

“No.”

“Have you fed Paco?”

“No.”

“Do I have any clean clothes?”

“In the dryer.”

“Mamma.”

“What?”

“You have to do a load of whites.”

Anna knew legions of single mothers, agitated women at the mercy of their despotic offspring, but never had she come across a reversal of roles as clear-cut as that between Eva and herself. On the way out the door in the morning, it was Eva who emptied the trash, assembled the videos for return, made sure the dog was fed. What Anna neglected to do, Eva took care of with a roll of the eyes. “You were going to let poor Paco starve?” or, “You were going to pay
more
late fees?” Anna couldn’t remember when the turnabout had taken place, when she’d gone from being at least nominally in charge to having to travel the straight and narrow all the time. All she knew is that the transition had been wonderfully smooth—a wholly implausible, yet utterly welcome, balancing of forces.

The first intimation had come one sleepy afternoon in the dead of winter when Eva, barely five, rolled out her cash register and coolly counted out one hundred eighty-two dollars and fifty-four cents. Anna had no trouble remembering her reserves at age five: they consisted strictly of IOUs, money she owed her sister, so she’d peered down incredulously. “Where’d you get that stash?”

“Some I earned, some I got given,” had been Eva’s arch reply. Challenged to prove it, her little girl had started accounting for every penny until, not even a quarter of the way through, Anna had begged for mercy.

The sun rose above the portal and soon it was time to run, the dog having taken position by the door at the stroke of eight, stolid and stoic in his determination not to be left behind. Eva stood by him in silence, lunch box held primly in both hands, as Anna ran cursing from room to room, looking for a book, then for the car keys, and finally for her cell phone. They ran to the truck—dog first, Eva second, Anna third—and proceeded in a flurry of accusations and recriminations—all voiced by Eva, who hated to be late for school—past the post office and over the bridge toward town. “We’ll get there on time,” Anna swore, “I promise you we’ll get there on time,” which, barring a few exceptions, all recorded in Eva’s jagged handwriting on the fridge, they never failed to do, pulling up just as Eva’s classroom door inched shut.

“Did you get to school on time?” Eva’s father acquired the habit of asking every time he rang.

“Kinda.”

“Eva, my love, there is such a thing as an alarm clock. I am afraid it will be up to you to purchase one.”

“Mamma, Daddy says we need an alarm clock,” Eva said with serious eyes. After the fourth or fifth reminder, Anna grabbed the phone from her hand. “What’s the endless fascination, the gnawing obsession? You want an alarm clock? Get yourself an alarm clock. Get the Swiss kind. I hear they work better.”

“I have an alarm clock, Anna. It rings at precisely four-thirty in the morning.”

“Get yourself another one. Maybe two will do the trick.”

He put a Swiss one in the mail and Eva laid it gingerly, still unwrapped, in her room, between a framed portrait of him in high spirits and a handful of sand dollars they’d stolen together from a rising tide.

“Did you get the alarm clock I sent?” he asked the next time he called.

Eva shrugged.

“Sorry, my love, did you hear what I said?”

Filtered through wires and cables and circuit boards, not to mention land and air and dark matter both unmeasured and unclaimed, Eva’s father’s voice somehow rang out as if through a megaphone.

“Did you hear what I said?”

Anna began wiping down the kitchen counter.

“I put it in my room,” Eva said in her small voice.

“Sorry, my love, in whose room did you put it?”

“My room.”

“May I speak to your mother?”

Anna signaled wildly no.

“Mamma’s in the shower.”

“Darling, what’s the alarm clock
doing
in your room?”

“I put it next to your picture, Daddy, and next to the sand dollars,” and through silence that struck like a sandstorm, Anna heard, distinctly, the encumbered beating of the girl’s heart.

“You want me to set the alarm clock?” Anna asked gently after Eva got off the phone.

“No,” said Eva, and like other things—the first-aid kit Anna never got around to ordering, the educational wooden blocks she never got around to buying, the ski helmet she saw no point in spending money on—the subject was dropped, no action ever taken.

“This is the beauty of hemispheres,” she told a friend whose recently divorced husband had just dropped off a drum set for their five-year-old. “They separate you from your ex.”

Alone with the dog in the car, Anna let her forehead rest briefly on the steering wheel. Then, pushing out a long breath, she rolled down Ben Romero Road. At the highway, she took a left toward the food store.

They must have met a while back, she and the boy, before he’d gone off to college, because she’d had no trouble identifying him as Richard Strand’s son the night before.

His father had come around within minutes of her arrival with skewered shrimps on a tray.

“Eat,” he’d said.

“Why me?”

“Because I made them and no one’s eating them.”

She’d picked up a skewer. “You’re going to watch me?”

“I’m thinking about it.”

“Don’t think. Move on. You’ve got a crowd to please.”

Richard Strand had picked up a skewer and bitten into the impaled flesh with animal relish. “What’s wrong with these fucking people?”

“They’re your friends.”

He’d waved a hand. “Ghosts. Mere shadows.”

“Kick them out.”

“I’m thinking about it.”

“Call the cops.”

“I’m thinking about it,” and he’d moved on, turning women’s heads as he went. Few men at this dry end of the Rockies dressed like Richard Strand, with a crisp linen shirt, always white, over faded jeans and soft Italian-leather shoes.

“It’s obscene, the way people dress around here,” she’d said to him once, not long after they met.

“I know.”

“Let’s all go back to the jungle. Tarzan and all that.”

“You get all worked up.”

“I’m not worked up.”

“Why do you get all worked up?”

They’d met late one afternoon in a bowl of dust, down in the canyon, down by the river. The wind was picking things up and throwing them around with bald malevolence as Anna stood on the side of the road with her new life, her new truck, a flat tire—and no idea where the spare might be.

“You don’t know where it is?”

“No.”

“Meaning you might not have one.”

“Possibly.”

“You’re driving around without a spare tire.”

“No, not necessarily. I’m assuming there’s one somewhere.”

“But you don’t know where.”

“No.”

Then by chance she had moved right next door to Richard Strand, on the same side of the Rio Hondo, which ran cold and fast into the Rio Grande and there crashed and bled—thinned out, forgotten—to the Mexican border. Richard Strand’s house was bigger than hers. It was full of flowers, full of birds in small cages, fish in aquariums, walls with memories twenty years thick, children’s laughter somewhere in the back, so she had quickly formed the habit of going over.

Richard Strand was a man without prejudices, a quality never more apparent than when he spoke to his youngest children—Matthew and Mickey, respectively nine and six—to whom he would say, “You’re right, buddy, they suck! Sharp corners suck! What are we going to do about this one you keep hitting your head on?” Or, “I couldn’t agree with you more, bud, it’s a hot oven, a really hot oven, I’m not surprised your hand hurts.” And once, sensationally, “I know, buddy, I know. Who put these steps here? That’s what I want to know. Who put these steps here?”

But Richard Strand was also a man of fixed emotions. Anna had never seen him angry or upset, she’d never heard him swear or raise his voice. Despite the cinematic, almost hypnotic appearance of various girlfriends in various getups, Richard’s house had become the closest thing to a sanctuary Anna could think of.

“It’s like you’re a private signatory to the Geneva Convention,” she’d said with feeling once, seconds before a girl barely out of high school streaked across the living room screaming,
“Chinga la puta de tu madre!”
and slammed the front door behind her. Richard had let out a sigh.

“You pick them too young.”

“I know.”

“Why do you pick them so young?”

“I don’t know.”

“Stop picking them so young.”

The parking lot of the food store was full, which put the estimated shopping time for a gallon of milk and a dozen eggs at roughly half an hour. There were going to be the mothers, a clear-eyed, hard-calved army in Birkenstocks and socks, a few fathers, many with the lowered stares of the routinely prevailed upon, a few casual acquaintances in need of a good confession, someone from her yoga studio eager to discuss her back bends. It was going to take a lifetime just getting to the checkout line. Sighing, Anna went in.

She charged head down through the aisles, making it to the refrigerated food section without a hitch. She descended like a bird of prey on the milk, pressed a carton of eggs to her chest, turned, mentally homed in on the shortest line to the nearest register, and there—doll-like, beautiful, eyes like fields of cannabis swaying gently in the wind—was Ree.

“What are you doing here?” Ree asked.

“I’m buying food.”

“It’s a food store, Anna. What else would you be buying?”

“I agree. What else would I be buying?”

“I mean now, this early in the morning.”

“I’m always in here this early in the morning.”

“You are? How come I never see you?”

“Because you’re always stoned.”

“I’m stoned now and you’re in perfect focus.”

“I don’t know, it’s a good question. You want to talk about it?”

“Not really. Just tell me how you are.”

A woman was advancing down the aisle with two children like ripe plums, like sweet candy in her cart, and Anna could not help a smile. Increasingly, children were becoming the only thing worth looking at. Like the silver veins of rivers and oceans, the raw flanks of mountains, they had the power to leave her mute.

“How am I? Let’s see. I had this kid, this
child,
come on to me last night.”

Behind a fog of dope, Ree’s eyes remained perfectly motionless.

“Age of consent?”

“Jesus, Ree.”

“What do you mean, Jesus? You never know with these things, they creep up on you. Anyway. What was I saying?”

“Age of consent.”

“Right. How did you meet?”

Her eyes on the children, Anna shook her head. “I don’t remember,” she said. “I don’t remember how we met.”