The Boy (4 page)

“Does it cover your ass?”

“Vaguely.”

“Remain standing. Defy gravity and remain standing,” which Anna did, in exactly the same spot, with a great many people swirling around until the crowd parted along some preordained diagonal and Richard Strand approached, son in tow.

“Anna,” Richard said, leaning in for a kiss, “you remember my son Jack.” And before she could take up arms, before she could
conceive
of a defense, never mind raise one, Anna felt something turn in the middle of her—a slow movement just below the heart.

“Of course,” she said, trading a casual nod for a burning stare.

“She’s jumped ship,” Richard Strand told his son. “I haven’t seen her since the
mojito
party.”

“She’s been keeping the hell away,” said the boy.

“She’s been keeping the hell away?” Richard Strand inquired mildly. His son nodded.

“You’ve been keeping the hell away?” asked Richard.

“Me?” said Anna, her eyes on the shimmering crowd, a ghost of a smile on her lips.

“Yes, you,” said the boy.

She fixed him with cold eyes. “Richard,” she said, “this is the second time your son has forgotten his manners.”

Richard Strand turned to his son. “You’ve been disrespectful?”

The boy shrugged. “I don’t know. What’s disrespectful?”

“There are very clear standards,” said Anna. “Very, very clear standards.”

“Show them to me,” said the boy.

“There are rules,” Anna snapped. “Rules of conduct, rules of behavior. There is a stratified order from which
you
are not exempt.”

“A what?”

“A stratified order.”

Richard Strand laid a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Son, answer the question. Have you been disrespectful?”

“Depends.”

“On what?”

“On what she wants,” and for some reason, in the tempest of blood raised by the son, it was to the father Anna turned.

“You’ve got a problem,” she said. “A very big problem.”

Richard Strand looked at her out of clear eyes. “My son has never been a problem,” he said, so after a moment of clerical silence, Anna left them both standing under the marquee muttering, “motherfucker,” as she went.

The boy was everywhere that night, everywhere she looked, everywhere she turned, curse and apparition, apparition and curse, shoulders broad and loose beneath his T-shirt, hips fine and narrow in his jeans. Anna called on the moon repeatedly for help, a low, lazy moon in the lowest quadrant of the sky at first; a hard, distant globe glaring down on human folly by the end. Tight in her skin, hot in her head, she resolved a thousand times to leave but didn’t. Every time she looked up, he was there, his eyes fixed knowingly on hers.

It was infuriating. The boy’s relationship to the ground was so smooth, the core of him so casually aligned with the visible and invisible worlds, that Anna felt compelled to revisit her youth: had she ever stood that way? Unlikely. But it wasn’t just that. The boy did not just stand with full possession of his body, he stood with full awareness of the magnetic pull of his body. Time and again she battled the urge to go over and teach him a lesson but turned her back on him instead as the moon leveraged itself higher and higher in the sky.

At one point, blurred, indistinct, Anna went inside searching for the bathroom, thinking not of the boy but of Richard Strand, of the love he had for his children. Destiny had been cruel, denying the man full custody through three divorces, but now this son, the first of five, was here to stay. She pulled her dress down, opened the door, stepped out in the hallway, and came to a sudden stop. There, his clear eyes on hers, was the boy.

Nothing was said, not a word exchanged. He covered the distance between them, laid his hands on her hips and pressed her slowly against the wall.

She had no idea how long it was before they heard some shuffling, a muffled exchange followed by an indignant, “Mom!” She disengaged to find Eva and two newly acquired minions—one of whom had his mouth screwed in an expression of infinite disgust—gaping up at her. “Go!” she said, but her daughter pointed a stiff accusatory finger at her and shouted, “You’re kissing him! Stop kissing him!”

“Go!” she said again. “I’ll be right out!” Eva stormed out, miniature slaves in tow, but Anna stayed right where she was, doing the exact same thing, until the weight of it started to bear down on her and she pulled away.

“Stop it!” she hissed.

The boy grabbed a fistful of hair and lowered his mouth to hers. “You stop it.”

It took a second, organized revolt by her daughter for them to finally part. Anna’s first, searing recollection the morning after was her own child marching her imperiously away as people exchanged amused looks.

The phone had rung the minute they got home.

“Hello,” had whispered Anna, still unstable on her feet.

“Oh, you’re home. How unexpected. May I speak to my daughter?”

“What time is it?” she’d asked.

“I haven’t got the faintest. Not in your part of the world anyway. May I speak to my daughter?”

“What time is it where you are? I mean, it’s like, what, four o’clock in the morning?”

“I have a mother, Anna, thank you, I’m sure she’s in bed right now. May I speak to my daughter?”

“I mean it, what are you doing up so late?”

“I am not in England, Anna.”

“No? Where are you?”

“Where I am should hardly concern you considering you chose to take up residence on some scrap of barren land on the other side of the world.”

“It’s not the other side of the world.”

“It is
precisely
the other side of the world. Measure it. May I speak to my daughter?”

“Eva,” said Anna with a sigh. “Your father is on the phone.”

Breakfast was a tricky affair. Sensing the mood, Esperanza lit a cigarette and left. Mother and daughter sat across the table in silence until Anna said, with some determination, “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

“You were kissing him!”

“So what? He’s not married, I’m not married, where’s the problem?”

“Mom! You don’t kiss boys at parties!”

“You don’t kiss boys at parties? The whole reason you
go
to parties, the whole reason parties were invented, is to kiss boys at parties. You don’t kiss boys at parties. That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard in my life.”

Eva rolled her eyes. “Mom.”

“What?”

“It’s like me going out with a
four
-year-old.”

“Four and a half.”

“Mom.”

“Jesus, Eva, what?”

“I don’t want that boy coming over.”

“Coming over? Who said he was coming over?”

Eva let her spoon slide into the milk and tucked her small hands between her knees so Anna went around to her side of the table and whispered, “It’s okay, my love, I promise you he won’t come over.”

Eva raised her moon-eyes to hers. “Pinky promise?”

Anna curled her pinky around her daughter’s. “Pinky promise.”

N
ights passed on currents of such violent longing that Anna set to work keeping thoughts and memories at bay. She purchased new and old fiction, new and old nonfiction. She read about the Mongols, the rise and fall of the Duke of Zhou. She bought yarn and made Eva a cap that fit her so well she was compelled to make another for Paco, with holes for his ears. She downloaded a chess program and spent hours getting her ass kicked by her computer, whose advertised neutrality she began to doubt.

“Mom, how can you hate a machine?”

“There’s something in there, I know there’s something in there.”

Esperanza leaned in to get a closer look. “Where?”

“Under the keyboard.”

“Let’s take it apart,” said Eva, and Esperanza, whose clan had produced some legendary
brujas
—witches who laid waste to lives and pastures with simple incantations—jumped back and said, “
Hija,
there are things we do not play with.”

Time passed. Anna ran into Richard Strand at the food store. He asked her what was wrong. “I never see you anymore.”

“I’ve got a million things.”

“Like what?”

“A friend in the hospital.”

“Another one?”

“Same one.”

“Is it my son?” he asked.

Anna gave a vehement shake of her head.

“Then what?”

“Nothing. Come over. This afternoon. Bring Matthew and Mickey.”

His eyes lit up at the offer, and later that day he covered the fifty yards between them and sat with her talking about debts owed and never paid, partnerships run aground, the new sushi place in town, until a scream broke the peace and they rushed outside to find Mickey on his back, underneath the apple tree. The kid was fine, his father wasn’t.

“That’s one hell of a dangerous tree you’ve got there, Anna.”

“Dangerous? What’s dangerous about it?”

“It’s
big
. Isn’t that right, buddy? Isn’t that a big tree?”

“Richard.”

“What?”

“A tree is a tree.”

“Baloney,” he said.

“Baloney?”

“Baloney.”

Another week went by. Esperanza was arrested for disorderly conduct in one of the casinos, and Anna bailed her out at four o’clock in the morning.

“Don’t tell Eva,” were Espi’s first words. “Swear to God you won’t tell Eva,” but of course at the breakfast table Eva sat up in her pajamas. “Oh my God!” she shrieked. “What happened to you?”

“Nothing.”

“Mom, she’s got a black eye! Espi’s got a black eye!”

Anna stood over her with a bowl of cereal. “It’s okay,” she said. “She’s predisposed.”

“Espi, I want to know what happened.”

Esperanza reached instinctively for her cigarettes.
“Mijita…”
she said.

“No
mijita
. Tell me what happened,” and bit by bit, as Anna presided queasily over the improbable exchange between a child and a
norte mexicana
with the entire history of her dry land—the cellular awareness of so much spilled blood—scored in her face, the story came out of how a man had said something he shouldn’t have.

“Why did you have to hit him? Why couldn’t you just walk away?”

Esperanza and Anna exchanged a brief look. Underneath it all, the two women spoke the same dialect, they were equally versed in the language of violence, equally incapable of brooking or even understanding the type of compromise that seemed to come so naturally to Eva.

“What do you mean, why did she have to hit him? He
asked
for it,” said Anna.

“You don’t go around hitting people,” said Eva.

Silence fell like a gavel.

“Mamma?”

“Yes.”

“You gave me too much cereal.”

Later that day the phone rang with a number no one recognized, and Anna backed away from it as if from fire. “Hey,” the message said. “This is my number. Call me.”

“This is my number. Call me. What’s that? How do you begin to account for that?”

“Eee,” Esperanza said. “That’s nothing.”

“Nothing? I could be his mother.”

“Wait until he takes you out to dinner and he has no gas to get back home, forget picking up the check. I need rubbing alcohol.”

“Why?”

“I want to mix it with Windex.”

“Why do you want to mix it with Windex?”

“So it doesn’t streak. I saw it on the cleaning channel.”

Anna set out toward town with the dog in the back. To her right, a horse corral was decaying placidly under the great sky. To the left, the untrammeled earth rose and fell great distances along lines both jagged and smooth all the way to the horizon. The sagebrush swayed on either side of her, pliant and docile and nearly gray among so much gray rock.

Anna thought of a conversation she’d had shortly before the big move, a quiet exchange with an old friend in which she had coolly, dispassionately stated, “A place is just a place.” She’d picked New Mexico for no other reason than she’d been told it was cheap and cheerful, yet after they arrived—she and her little girl with their overnight bags full of all the wrong things—Anna had stepped out into the vastness with a cup of coffee and this place, this uncontained earth under this uncontained sky, had become as necessary to her as the air she breathed.

It hadn’t been easy. She wasn’t a parking lot mom, not a member of that colorful congregation of formidable hikers who somehow found the time to linger at drop-off and pickup, having formed, Anna suspected, fast friendships in the midwifery center in town. She did not escort her daughter to her classroom by the hand, as seemed to be the custom in the morning, nor did she loiter in the playground waiting for the children’s collective disposition to mature into a staggered, orderly departure from the sandbox or the swings. She had stopped counting hoarsely to ten, more for Eva’s sake than for that of a curiously attired mother of three who had approached her—red-faced, a strange tic in one eye—and informed her that counting to ten had come to constitute verbal and emotional abuse.

“We do not count to ten,” the woman said.

“You don’t count to ten.”

“Absolutely not.”

“What do you do?”

“We wait.”

“You wait for
them?
”

“Exactly.”

“For the children?”

“For the children.”

“You, the grown-ups, wait for the children.”

“That’s correct.”

“You should stop smoking dope.”

“I don’t smoke dope.”

“You’re smoking too much dope.”

It had taken some convincing—a few deliberately repetitive talks on the ills of wasting time with no time to waste—but Eva had eventually formed the habit of detaching herself from play the second her mother materialized at the far edges of the playground, reducing Anna’s commerce with the other mothers to zero, and multiplying their dislike of her by a thousand. She had taken no notice until the May Fair, when she’d run into a wall of hostility so thick that she had left Eva with Ree and hightailed it.

“I don’t understand,” she said to Ree that evening. “What have I done?”

“You don’t mingle. You don’t volunteer.”

“I don’t have
the time
to mingle. I don’t have the time to volunteer!” and to a measurable extent, that was true. After several glorious months of self-financed unemployment, Anna had gotten a job cooking, initially just a couple prep shifts dicing onions and making mayonnaise, then, thanks to the high volatility of all restaurant kitchens, full exposure to the hissing, blistering, humbling inferno of the line.

“You don’t have time? Well, guess what? Neither do they. They
make the time,
they make the effort.”

“But why?”

“Because a school, every school, is a community project.”

“A community project? What are you talking about? I’m paying trained professionals to give my daughter an education. Isn’t that enough?”

“Start volunteering,” Ree said.

Anna remembered signing off with high amusement on the promise to contribute thirty-five hours of volunteer work to the school. The day after the May Fair, Clean-Up Day, she’d shown up with her own vacuum cleaner, as per instructions, and vacuumed the hell out of every room. The following day, a Monday, she had sent Eva back to the swings.

“Nice day,” she’d said to one of the mothers, and while that first approach had gone entirely unrewarded, others hadn’t. Slowly, purely through the forgiveness built into the matrix of every woman with small children, she had found her place.

At the old blinking light, Anna put the car into neutral, checked her phone for reception, saw something out of the corner of one eye, and turned to catch the boy streaking past her like an arrow shot by a jealous god. Off the seat, beautifully balanced on the pedals of his mountain bike—shirt unbuttoned, body offered recklessly to the sun—he saw her and he hit the brakes, coming to an abrupt stop as she drove past.

She crossed the intersection and a few minutes later found herself parked outside the grocery store in a world flattened to the single dimension of Richard Strand’s son. She dialed Ree’s number.

“The boy was on a bike,” she said.

“A bike?”

“A bike.”

“Like, a bicycle?”

“Yeah, a bicycle.”

“Is that good or bad?”

“The boy is ambulating. The boy should stay home.”

“Have him arrested.”

“The boy should remain
indoors
.”

“Have him shot. No, wait, shoot him yourself. Go to Walmart, get a gun, and shoot him.”

Anna took out her car key and ran it hard and fast into the cool metal of a post. “I’ve done everything right, Ree. I’ve behaved impeccably. I’m minding my own business, I’m driving across town, and suddenly, there he is. On a
bike
.”

“I’m telling you, shoot the motherfucker. That way he won’t be riding his bike no more.”

Anna hung up, checked her watch, and called Mia, who was never home.

“I saw him,” she told the machine. “He had his shirt undone, flapping behind him in the wind. What happened to decency? What happened to the social protocol? Since when do people get to ride around with their shirts undone? And you’re never home. You realize you’re never home?”

It was hours before she could begin to see that Dr. Roemer was right, that it was all in her mind. Out of her fevered fantasy, out of her endlessly turning mind, had come a projection of need so strong she had galloped to the kitchen less than a week before, grabbed a piece of paper, and written in breathless, jagged strokes,
I want you so much my mouth hurts
. Had her mouth really hurt? It was hard to tell but it was easy to see, as she rolled up to the old blinking light on her way back, the arbitrary creation of the arbitrary need.

At the light she covered her face with both hands, appalled by the morning’s violent spasm. A boy flying past on a bike belonged to the world and to godlike the laughter of children through the leaves, the tumult of water over stone, the languor of summer. Let the boy ride his bike, thought Anna, let the boy go; and suddenly, for the first time in weeks, she felt her soul grow still and expand into a state of measurable freedom.

She drove the rest of the way home whistling badly out of tune, stopped by the post office, picked up a stack of bills, and covered the short distance to her house. There, propped against her gate, was a bicycle. A gray bicycle slashed through with red, a pedal still slowly turning.

Anna got out and stared, silence settling like dust over the bicycle, the dirt road behind her, the house before her, and every little thing in between: the weeds pushing blindly through flagstone and gravel, the undecipherable progress of a beetle on the gate, the acrobatics of two white butterflies engaged in play. Heart pounding, she pushed the gate open.

He was sitting bare-chested on the step by her front door, elbows propped on knees, chin propped on hands. “What are you doing without a shirt on?” Anna said, her voice strange to her own ears.

The boy stood up, sinewy and muscular at once, strong and pale and loose, his veins cutting languidly down the length of his long arms, a tattooed dragon brooding darkly over one shoulder.

“Let’s go,” she said. “Let’s get that shirt back on.”

He slid a lazy hand into the pocket of his jeans. “Why?”

“What do you mean, why? You’re on my property. You’re not wearing a shirt. People wear shirts when they are on my property. People wear shirts in
general
when they are in public.”

The boy spread his arms to encompass his surroundings. “You call this public? It’s fenced.”

“I’m not about to debate public and private with you. Put that shirt back on.”

Lips compressed around a little smile, the boy picked up a balled shirt off the ground, snapped it open, and pulled it on as Anna began to shout, “Esperanza? Eva?”

“No one’s home,” the boy said, and before Anna could process the anomaly, he reached for the grocery bag.

“Let me give you a hand.”

“What hand? Get off my porch.”

“Jesus Christ. What are you so scared of?”

“Who’s scared? I’m not scared. Get off my porch.”

“I’m not getting off your fucking porch!”

Anna pulled out her house keys and dangled them in the air.

“I’m going to go inside. As a favor to your father, I’m going to put these things in the fridge and count to ten before I call the cops.”

She had the phone in one hand, she had her thumb on the number nine, she had her line ready.
There is a young intruder on my property,
he’s unarmed and seemingly well-intentioned but refuses to leave
. She had the first stirrings of melancholy already, the cold crash of chemicals after a sudden spike. She had cold skin and a cold heart, both feet in the grave and only going through the motions, when the boy, her neighbor’s son, stepped coolly inside and flowed nearly undetected through time and circumstance, gliding as if on wheels across the living room to the window where she stood, phone in hand, calling the police.

“I’ll take that,” he said, sliding the phone out of her hand.