The Boy (6 page)

“You booked Corumbao for me.”

“As I was saying, I’m too old.”

“Come for dinner. I’m all about
caipirinhas
these days.”

In the casual comfort of Mia’s dining room, under the casual spell of her mellow marriage to a man
exactly
her age, Anna renewed her vow: no commerce with the boy, no matter the cost.

“Does Richard know?” Mia said, pulling out a cigarillo.

“No.”

“Maybe you should tell him.”

“Are you kidding? He’ll shoot me.”

“Not if you shoot him first. You seen his last one?”

“The one with the orange hair?”

“Blue and white.”

“You’re behind. The blue-and-white one got the boot.”

“Why?”

“She put out her cigarette on his leather couch. She was a Gnostic, an early Christian, and a firm believer in putting out her cigarettes on his furniture.”

Mia let out a tendril of bluish smoke. “You sure he doesn’t know?”

“Nah.”

“How can you be sure?”

“He would have called.”

Eva was fast asleep later that night, Esperanza in front of the television, when the phone rang.

“Now?” asked Anna.

“Now.”

Richard Strand was in the kitchen making chicken
mole,
filling the house with the deep, sweet scent of melting chocolate.

“Have a seat,” he said, and Anna lowered herself onto the same stool of that untroubled night in May, wishing desperately she could turn back the hands of time.

“Can I get you something to drink?”

“A shot of vodka. Actually, two. Two shots of vodka.”

Richard Strand went to the freezer, took out a bottle of vodka, and poured out a double for himself, a thimbleful for her. “Cheers,” he said, and they actually clinked glasses before he pierced her with a stare so cold and resolute that she considered a clean leap out the kitchen window.

“Jack is my
son,
” Richard Strand said. “Did you know Jack is my son?”

“Of course I know Jack is your son.”

“So what do you think you’re doing with my son?”

Anna lowered her eyes.

“Look at me. My son is twenty years old. How old are you?”

“Richard . . .”

“Answer the question. How old are you?”

“Old,” she said sharply, holding his stare. “And you? How old are you? I mean specifically in relation to the half-naked high schoolers I keep seeing around here.”

Richard picked up a wooden spoon, turned to the melting chocolate. “I’m making chicken
mole
. My son loves chicken
mole,
” and in his voice, impossible to miss, were both the yearning and the distance, the unmistakable signs of an impossible pursuit. She drained the vodka as Richard went on stirring, releasing traces of cinnamon and cumin along with his own deep need. For what? thought Anna. For the reconstituted dream? For the exalted return to the place that never was? The boy’s only reference to his father had been short and not particularly sweet, some barbed remark about the number of barely legal girls Richard Strand had installed in his home and in his children’s lives.

“He came to my house once,” she said softly. “I went to his house once. I haven’t seen him since.”

Richard Strand turned and glared.

“I know what went on,” he said. “You don’t have to tell me what went on. I have a son who’s a wreck and a friend who doesn’t give a damn.”

Anna pulled back, surprised. “A wreck? How could he be a wreck?”

“He’s
a
kid,
Anna,
a kid
.”

“Fuck.”

“Yeah,” Richard Strand said between tight teeth. “Literally and figuratively.”

“All right, let’s strive for a degree of civility.”

“Civility? You call what you did to my son
civil?
”

“I didn’t do anything to your son.”

“You fucked him. You fucked him and you dumped him and you did it knowing that he was
my son.
How about I send somebody along to fuck your daughter up? How does that grab you?”

Anna was off her stool before she knew it.

“Watch what comes out of your mouth.”

“You watch your hormones.”

The two stood facing one another until Richard laid a heavy hand on her shoulder and said, “Just talk to him, explain to him. Don’t just drop him like some piece of trash. He’s
my son.
”

“Richard, there’s nothing to talk about. He’s twenty, I’m forty-two. End of story.”

“End of story, my ass. You started it. You wrote the first chapter, you wrote the second chapter. Now write an ending that is respectful of who my son is and how far he’s come.”

“How far he’s come? Richard, I don’t know your son from a hole in the ground. I have no idea how far he’s come.”

“Well,
find out,
why don’t you.”

“I can’t,” Anna said, fighting a wave of panic. “I can’t be around him, I’m sorry, but it’s not something I can do. Please don’t make me explain. It should be obvious enough.”

Richard Strand went back to stirring. For a while no one spoke. Then Richard turned to face her. “He needs to hear that. You’re not getting involved with my son again, but he needs to hear that.”

“Richard . . .”

“Make sure he hears that.”

She called the boy, and they agreed to meet at the southernmost coffee shop in town, past the church of Saint Francis of Assisi, where immediately after their move Anna and Eva had spent every Sunday morning between nine and ten—Eva doodling in her red notebook, bored by the priest, Anna staring up at the bruised, bleeding god wondering how someone as badly fucked up as that could lend assistance just then.

“God will help us,” she kept telling Eva, who’d pierce her with her indigo eyes and say things like, “But if God is in the trees, how can he help us?”

“Who told you God is in the trees?”

“My teachers at school. They say God is in the air and in the trees. They say he’s inside me and inside you.”

“Inside you, maybe.”

“You too, Mom.”

“I don’t know about that.”

“Mom.”

“Okay, okay.”

“Say it.”

“What?”

“Inside me and inside you.”

“Inside me and inside you.”

“And the trees.”

“Screw the trees. There can’t possibly be enough to go around.”

In church, those empty mornings, Anna had the time to revisit the day her life had fallen apart. Like walking through an empty house in the dead time before dawn, she moved from moment to moment as if from room to room—past smoky mirrors, daybeds shrouded in white linen—toward a door and a bed by an open window on which two bodies lay asleep. Time and time again in her memory she stopped at the door, knowing what she would find but not knowing if her heart could take it. Time and time again she went ahead so those pale limbs entwined in sleep could catch fire in her imagination and remind her why she had put a continent plus an ocean between Eva’s father and herself—why there was no going back.

Years slipped past without a single reference to their desperate departure until one afternoon, on the way to soccer practice, Eva said, “I want my daddy to take me to soccer.”

Oblivious to the tempest raging in her little girl’s heart, Anna had shrugged.

“The likelihood is small.”

“Why?”

“Your father lives on a different continent.”

“He lives on a different continent because you left him! You left him and now I don’t have a dad!”

“Your father cheated on me, Eva.”

“No he didn’t!”

“Yes, he did. He cheated on me.”

“My daddy doesn’t cheat!”

“No? Go ahead and ask him. Ask him why I left.”

“Liar! You’re a liar!” her little girl screamed, and out of nowhere, impetuous and wild and absolute in its desolation, came a flood of tears—sobbing so deep and uncontrolled Anna felt like ripping her own teeth out.

It had never come up again, not once. Like a confession before a priest, the exchange had grown faint and seemed to have left no trace in time.

Now, the church came into view and impulsively Anna stopped, got out, and galloped toward the door, pulling on the handle with a smile, only to find it locked. She stepped back in disbelief. A locked church was like a turned grave; it spoke of some violation, some desecration, not just the breach of an agreement but a betrayal, an omission bordering on outrage. Resisting the urge to beat on the door with both fists, Anna slid to the ground and sat there, knees against chest, pursuing distant flocks of birds with tired eyes until the moment came, and she got up.

There was no one in the café, only the boy. He was slumped on a chair like a boxer between rounds, looking at her out of eyes that were impossible to meet. She had rehearsed her speech. It was going to be short and businesslike, drained of emotion, free of apology. But when she opened her mouth not a sound came out. He shifted in his seat and she caught a glimpse of the dragon against the whiteness of his flesh. She’d forgotten how creamy his skin was, how smooth against her own. She had forgotten how beautiful he was, how strong, how tall, and before she could help herself she had a hand on his knee, her forehead on his shoulder. He was rigid at first, cold and unyielding at first, but gradually he turned on his chair so she could slide one leg over his knees and straddle him and their mouths could meet—and they could kiss.

I
t was mid-June when Eva left. Water ran low and slow in the
acequias,
the air was thick with sun dust and juniper pollen. Aspen leaves had thickened and darkened and now danced delirious in the wind.

Anna, Eva, and Esperanza set out in the middle of the night across a searing emptiness so Eva could fly out of Phoenix and get to the other side of the continent on a nonstop flight and, from there, fly on to London. The sun found Anna at the wheel, Esperanza snoring in the passenger seat, Eva prim and erect in the backseat, a map over her little legs, eyes fixed maniacally on the road ahead.

“I don’t understand. What have I done? What have I ever done to leave you with such little confidence in my driving skills?”

“Mom, look at the road.”

“I’m looking at the road.”

“No, you’re looking at me, look at the road.”

They stopped three times total—once because Esperanza had tears in her eyes from the pressure on her bladder but, faced with the indignity of squatting by the car in partial view of traffic, settled mutely in her seat again, closing her eyes like the martyrs of her religion—and they got to the airport five hours before departure.

“Go have fun,” Anna said, tossing Esperanza the car keys.

“Are you crazy?” yelled Eva. “She’ll go gamble!”

The two women looked at the child.

“Hija,”
Esperanza cut in haughtily, “I have no money to gamble
with
.”

The two hugged with surprising formality, and it was only thanks to an unplanned backward glance that Anna caught a furtive tear sliding down Esperanza’s cheek. “Wave to Espi,” Anna said. Eva waved.

“Wave a little harder.”

“Mom.”

“You’re hurting her feelings. Wave.”

“I’m waving.”

“Jesus. Will you remember
my
name when you get back?”

Only at the gate did Eva’s senior citizen façade come crumbling down. She clung polyp-like to her mother’s arm.

“Please, Mamma,” she pleaded through a mask of tears, “I don’t want to be with Daddy, I want to be with you.” It took the personal intervention of the captain to get her on the walkway.

“Don’t forget to feed Paco,” were her parting words, shouted with a broken voice. “And fix the brakes, okay, Mamma? Promise me you’ll fix the brakes.”

Esperanza had to be paged by airport security and was belligerently drunk by the time they hooked up at baggage carousel number four. “Stole my money,” she said, spitting on the floor. “Fucking Indians stole my fucking money.”

Anna drove in silence through a fantasy of gradually graying rock until the New Mexico border, when Esperanza awoke from a dead sleep and said, “We should have a border, no? How come we don’t have no border?”

“It’s the same country, Esperanza.”

“No it’s not. I know history, that country is Indian country.” Anna shrugged.

“I know history,” Esperanza said. “That thing back there is Indian country.”

Anna took the car to the shop the next day and was treated to a stinging display of hostility. “You’re lucky to be alive,” the mechanic said, tossing her the keys.

Her little girl called from London. “You fixed the brakes?”

“Yes, my love.”

“Were they bad?”

“Yes, my love.”

“I
told
you.”

“I know, my love.”

The boy kept calling and Anna kept standing there watching the phone ring, incapable of lifting the receiver.

She could conjure only fragments of what his presence in a house without Eva would bring: his smell on her sheets, his music on her stereo, the collapse of time, the erasure of time, the thinning out of sounds, the muting of voices, the heartbreak of flesh against flesh—and she was ready for none of it.

“I nearly killed my little girl driving up to Phoenix, my brakes were so bad,” she informed Mia’s machine. “Don’t go to Phoenix, by the way, no point in ever setting foot in Phoenix. The guy at the car shop was appalled. He asked me if I had children. I said no. He said, ‘Haven’t I seen you with a little blondie?’ I said, ‘Me? A little blondie? Look at me, I’ve got Bedouin blood.’ He gave me a dirty look. The guy’s got children. His brakes don’t need fixing.”

Mia called back within half an hour. “I know the guy. He beats his wife.”

“He beats his wife?”

“Kicks the shit out of her.”

“How do you know?”

“Have you
seen
her?”

“No.”

“That’s all you have to do. Take a look at her.”

“That’s terrible. I was just saying, though, I should have gotten those brakes fixed sooner.”

“Not by that motherfucker.”

Summer progressed, Eva was gone, judgment suspended, so it wasn’t long before the phone rang again, and Anna took the call.

“What are you doing?” Eva asked her mother the next time they spoke.

“Nothing,” Anna said, watching the boy come out of the bathroom with a towel around his waist.

“Nothing? You must be doing
something
.”

“I swear to God, I’m doing nothing.” The boy approached, his intentions clear, and she waved him furiously away but he sank slowly to his knees and ran his hands up her calves.

“Mom,” she heard Eva say as if through a fog, “you never just do
nothing
.”

“I do too.”

And her little
witch,
her little magician, her miniature Merlin, from across a continent and the incalculable density of an ocean said, “Is somebody there?”

Anna shot to her feet. “Is somebody here? Why would someone be here?”

“Mom.”

“What?”

“You’re sounding all strange.”

“I’m sounding strange? What about you? Are you picking up a British accent?”

“Mom, I’m in Britain.”

“I know you’re in Britain, but that doesn’t mean you have to pick up a British accent. I’m leaving you at baggage claim if you come back with a British accent. You can hitchhike home.”

“Daddy says I sound like a Yank.”

“Don’t listen to a word your father says. You know what he’s like.”

“I know,” Eva sighed. “Daddy’s irresponsible.”

“Crazy irresponsible. Off the charts irresponsible.”

“It’s what he says about you.”

“Like I said, don’t listen to a word your father says.”

She emerged from sleep the next morning in a different skin, both lighter from the touch of the boy’s hands and heavier with the awareness of some ineluctable slide. She turned to face him and recoiled. She’d never seen him asleep before and she was out of bed before she knew it. This was not the integrated man-boy she had fallen for, not the thing standing loosely in his body; this was a child pushing up from childhood, a changeling called upon to impress a tender geography of bone and memory into the cramped, unyielding mold of manhood.

She was in the kitchen staring at nothing when he came in.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“You’re a child,” she said.

He said nothing. He took her by the hand and pulled her back to bed, covering her body with his, pinning her head between his elbows, letting his mouth fall open slowly against hers. In the silence of the ripening day, she traced every ridge, every curve of the boy’s body, committing to memory not the body but the soul before its sure alteration.

“The die is cast,” she said.

“The what is what?”

“One die. Two dice.”

“One die, two dice. I see. What about the die?”

“It’s cast.
Alea jacta est
. I had to study Latin, long story. Do you know who Caesar was?”

“Yeah, the Roman guy.”

“The Roman guy. Do you know what he did?”

“He got stabbed.”

“That too, that too. But before that, he took his army across this river called the Rubicon and marched on Rome. His chances of success were ridiculously low but, like he said before crossing the Rubicon, the die was cast.”

The boy ran a slow hand through her hair. “Good attitude,” he said.

“Can you blame me?”

“I can and I do.”

Anna let her gaze drift to the window. “Your father is going to flay and quarter me.”

“My father,” said the boy, “needs to learn how to mind his own business.”

“He’s your father.”

Leaning back against the pillows, folding his face into a caricature of distress, the boy raised his voice to a falsetto. “Are you okay, buddy? You okay? Should we cut down that tree you keep falling out of? Eat frozen food so you don’t burn your hand? Get rid of that second story so you don’t keep going down the stairs on your fucking head while I’m doing little Bunny over here doggy style in the next room?”

Anna stared, her breath caught in her throat. “Your father
raised
you.”

“My father did no such thing. Age four, I packed my own lunch.”

Anna cleared her throat. “Your father was younger then.”

“Age
four
. If I didn’t pack my lunch, no one would pack my lunch.”

“We make mistakes,” Anna said.

“I don’t give a fuck. Mistakes, no mistakes, that’s in the past. But this, this is
my
business, okay? My business. Not his.”

“He’s worried about you. Your father is worried about you.”

He sank his fingers into her arms. “Don’t you get it? I’m in this. I’m in this for real. I’m
never
letting go.”

“Christ,” Ree said. “Is that what you
wanted?
”

They were at the sushi place having lunch. Anna let out a sigh.

“I don’t know. I don’t know what I wanted.”

Ree poked her seaweed suspiciously with a chopstick. “Well,” she said, “you’ve got it.”

“Got what?”

“I don’t know.”

“Will you stop
poking
the fucking thing and eat it?”

Ree lifted a single strand of pickled seaweed to her nose and sniffed it. “I don’t know about this.”

“Why did you order it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Because you’re stoned. You thought you were ordering something else.”

Ree raised her green untroubled eyes to meet Anna’s. “You’re absolutely right. And you know what? I’m not eating this shit. So. You’ve got it. What are you going to do with it?”

“I don’t know.”

“No?”

“No.” The two sat staring out at the sacred mountain, the site of a million pilgrimages under the great New Mexican sky.

“I’ve got premonitions,” Anna said. “Intimations of disaster.”

“Oh shit,” said Ree.

“Oh shit is right.”

“It’s like something out of Aristotle.”

“Sophocles.”

“Aristotle.”

“Aristotle’s the philosopher.”

Ree lifted a chopstick against the light, measuring out a corner of heaven with it. “Whatever,” she said.

Summer advanced with the subtle power of amnesia, and soon no covenant was safe. Every day Esperanza complained about some item she hadn’t seen before. A baseball cap. A new iPod. Handfuls of change. Spectacularly, one day, a bong.

“You should see it,” Anna told Dr. Roemer. “The thing’s on wheels.”

“Are you happy?”

“I can’t tell.”

The doctor picked something off his shirt. “I’m not surprised.”

“No?”

He shook his head. “No.”

“Why not?”

“No one can make you happy.”

Truth reveals itself through absence, absence through truth. Sitting in the doctor’s office, pierced by a stare so ancient there was no placing it in time, Anna felt herself crash into a zero moment of total certainty. It lasted only a second but the outlines remained, lingering in the form of a slow suspicion, a pale doubt.

“What are you talking about?” she said. “You’re married. You’ve been married twenty years.”

“Yes, but the minute I start depending on my wife for my happiness, I’m screwed. The minute I wake up and think, I hope my wife is in a good mood otherwise I’m screwed, I’m screwed. No one can make you happy. Only the thinking in your head can make you happy.”

Anna checked her nails; they were disgusting. She always checked her nails, and they were always disgusting.

“Why do you feel the need to get so dogmatic with me all the time?”

“Dogmatic?”

“Dogmatic, imperial. What’s the problem here? You’re married, I’ve got a boy staying at my house, no one’s upset, it’s all good, but you’re lecturing me. Why are you lecturing me?”

“Because you keep coming in here all fucked up.”

“You’d be out of a job if I didn’t keep coming in here all fucked up. You should thank me, you should make your gratitude felt.”

“Tell me what happens when Eva comes back.”

“When Eva comes back?”

The doctor gave her his mandarin look.

“He leaves.”

“Just like that?”

Anna looked away.

“He picks up all his stuff and leaves?”

“Something like that.”

“Come on. Can we be serious for once?”

Anna shot to her feet. “What do you want from me? Tell me what you want from me.”

Seconds ticked past, silence thickening around them like a shroud.

“Why do you pay me?” said the doctor.

“Who knows? Who knows why I pay you.”

“You’re free to leave, Anna. Door’s right there.”

“Look,” she said, sitting back down. “All I want is a break. I have led the life of an indentured servant. I have been reduced in every possible, conceivable way to the role of a
caregiver.
What about me? Who takes care of me? I’m tired, Doctor Roemer. I have been constrained beyond all reasonable parameters, I have been enslaved, shackled like some goddamned convict and I’m tired. I
need
this. I need it more than words could possibly begin to express.”

“Well,” the doctor said, leaning back in his chair, touching his fingertips together, “you’ve got it.”

Strangely, it rained, and to placate Esperanza, who hated the rain and the boy with total impartiality, Anna left the boy at home and drove them to Las Vegas, where she sat for three days with a magazine she never opened by a pool without a deep end. Esperanza raged like a brushfire past her on a couple occasions, and when they finally hooked up in the lobby for the trip back home, she had the breath of a dragon, the eyes of an assassin.