The Boy (9 page)

A
t the airport in Phoenix, Eva stood out against a curtain of drab humanity like the noon sun, light streaming out of her like something by El Greco.

“Oh my love,” Anna said, burying her face in her daughter’s hair, leading her by the hand down a million escalators out into the wide world, where they both stood blinded by the day, Eva up to her mother’s shoulder already.

“Look,” she shouted, standing on the tips of her toes, describing a wildly uneven line with her hand to Anna’s domed forehead. “I’m as tall as you!”

They stopped at a gas station, got gas, a bag of chips, and together they set out across the desert with music on the stereo. It wasn’t until past the Apache park, where the earth met the sky among the most improbable lines, that Anna turned and said, “Eva, there is something I need to tell you.”

“Mom.”

“What?”

“There is something I need to tell
you
.”

Anna turned. “What?”

“Look at the road.”

“I’m looking at the fucking road.”

Eva’s little body grew stiff.

“I’m sorry,” Anna said softly. “Please say what you were going to tell me.”

Eva had her face turned to the window, her small hands tucked between her small knees.

“Please, darling.”

Her little girl turned, ice in her blue eyes.

“Daddy says you cheated on him, too.”

Anna nearly slammed on the brakes, but the highway ran like a hard, fast river behind them and there was no time for anything.

“That was before you were born,” she said.

Eva said nothing.

“That was before you were born, it was at the beginning. I didn’t trust your father, I didn’t trust him as far as I could throw him. Once I got pregnant with you, everything changed. We were a family, a unit, and I would have never cheated on him then.”

Eva shrugged, her body turned to the window, her scapula pushing up hard up against her skin—an angel’s wing cut off.

“Daddy says it doesn’t matter. He says you cheated on him and he didn’t leave you.”

Anna slammed her hand against the wheel. “Son of a bitch! Well, you go ahead and believe what you want. I know what happened. I don’t need to explain it to
you
.”

“Yes you do!” Eva shot back without a moment’s hesitation. “You do need to explain it to me! I’m your
child!
”

“That means nothing,” Anna said. “That means absolutely nothing.”

The road lay like a ribbon of fire in front of them, one more blazing thing to look at and feel and get past, on the way home. Esperanza was right, this was Indian country, there was no relief from it. Just the flat exactitude of so much rock against so much sky, the purely passive life of minerals stacked in meaningless odds against the pull of gravity, the passage of time.

Mother and daughter drove across the state border in silence. They drove past rotting trailers barely anchored on the rocky land, past rusting carcasses of cars and trucks. When they pulled up against Anna’s uneven fence, not a word had been exchanged. Anna put the car into neutral.

“Eva, there is something I need to tell you.”

Eva yanked her backpack from her feet onto her knees. “What?” she said.

“There’s someone staying with us for a while.”

“Who?”

“The son of a friend.”

“What friend?”

Anna took a deep breath. “Richard Strand.”

Eva’s head turned with a jerk. “The boy from the party?”

“He’s got no place to go. He had a terrible falling out with his father and he has no place to go.”

It took a fraction of time so small for Eva to process the information and come up with the
only
relevant question that, sitting there, her mouth slightly open, Anna could not help a stab of pride.

“Where’s he sleeping?”

“On the couch.”

“How much longer?”

“Couple days.”

“Two,” said Eva, raising two stiff fingers. “Two days.”

Esperanza had the table set, a bowl of Cheetos glowing orange in the middle. Eva flew into her arms and the two stood as one, Esperanza’s nose buried in Eva’s hair, for a long time.

“Mijita,”
Esperanza said with a voice nobody recognized, not even her. Anna looked around her and saw no trace of the boy’s belongings. Clearly Esperanza had been busy.

“Where is he?”
Anna mouthed. Esperanza gave a savage shrug and looked away. Sighing, Anna brought Eva’s small suitcase to her room and sat on the bed.

She had inhabited such vast spaces for so long. She had slipped through the cracks of things infinitesimally scaled—minnow-like, minuscule, resistant to rest, to repetition, always out for the next best thing. Not even Eva’s father, with his polar pull, had her truly tethered. But after Eva’s birth, after the big move, not a second, not a moment had been free. Before or after drop-off, before or after pickup, in the brief parentheses of time between the two, it was Eva. Mornings, afternoons, evenings had turned into lists of met or unmet needs. The lunch box Anna delivered on time, the birthday party she lit up with a piñata, the distance she covered, the gift she picked, the pancakes whose obscure chemistry she oftentimes deciphered, the single item, plucked out of the heart of some dusty store and handed over with the tenderest smile (in return for which the tenderest smile was given)—it did not matter, there was always something, and it was always Eva.

“I
need
this,” Anna whispered, her head in her hands. “God, please, I need this.”

At the dinner table, things loosened, slackened some. Eva stuffed Cheetos in her mouth five at a time and Esperanza laughed, spraying the immediate surroundings with Frito pie. Anna sat quietly, drinking red wine, smiling—waiting for the crash.

“Mamma.”

“What?”

“You’re not eating?”

“No?”

“No.”

Anna smiled. “I’ll eat tomorrow.”

“You haven’t eaten anything all day. Espi, she hasn’t eaten a thing all day.”

Espi’s shoulders went up. “No more Cheetos,” she told Eva. “Have some Frito pie.” As Eva dug a spoon into an aluminum container of wildly tinted fat, Anna heard the door slam shut and turned around. There—motorcycle jacket on, helmet hooked on elbow, eyes large and lost—was the boy.

“I didn’t know we were having dinner,” he said.

“Neither did I,” said Anna. “Grab a chair, sit down. Eva, you remember Jack. Jack, you remember Eva.”

Eva gave a sullen stare and looked away, one cheek bulging, spoon held limply in one hand. The air grew thick with things unspoken: the pinky promise, the time away from the boy’s hands, the dance of summer (the breathless turning under that blind zodiac of stars), the bright, unforgiving return.

The boy pulled out a chair and said, “I would have come home sooner if I’d known we were having dinner.”

Eva shot her mother a look. “Home?”

“Eee!” Esperanza said, slapping a hand down on the table. “Who’s coming to Sonic?”

Eva laid her cold blue eyes on the boy. “Home?” she said.

Anna shot to her feet. “You’re going to Sonic,” she said.

Her little girl got up. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“Fine,” Anna said. “I’m going to Sonic. Catch you all later.”

The night pressed in like cold fire on all sides. It hardened and tightened and got so close Anna pulled, tires burning, into the nearest bar.

“Jim Beam,” she said. “Double.”

An old man with a bandanna gave her a long look. “Be careful,
hija
,” he said. “There are cops everywhere.”

Anna looked at her drink and said nothing.

“Take the back roads,” said the man with the bandanna. “Stick to them back roads, no?”

The house was dark and, for some reason, cold, as if wrapped in some bad secret, when she got back. Eva was in her room, the boy in her bed. Anna nudged him awake.

“Jesus, how much did you drink? You’ll set the house on fire.”

“You’re sleeping on the couch,” she said.

“The couch?”

“The couch.”

“Why?”

“I told Eva you were sleeping on the couch.”

The boy sat up in a shaft of moonlight, his dragon tensing over his skin.

“What have you told her about us? I can’t find any of my shit.”

“Nothing. I told her nothing.”

“What do you mean, nothing?”

“Nothing.”

“What does nothing mean?”

“It means nothing. How can I describe nothing to you?”

He moved and the dragon moved with him, and he was so warm and strong, his smell so deep and familiar, that Anna couldn’t help running a hand down his back.

“Describe nothing to me,” the boy whispered, gathering a handful of hair, bringing her lips to his. “Do it.”

He was on the couch when Eva woke up. She stood there in her pajamas staring down at him, arms crossed, the dog like a magnet at her side.

“Get up,” the little girl said. In the kitchen, Esperanza and Anna exchanged a quick look.

“Get up,” she said again, her voice like a razor this time. Anna ran into the living room, grabbed her daughter by the arm.

“You can’t tell him to get up!” she hissed.

The little girl yanked her arm away. “Everybody’s up.”

“So what? Let him sleep. He’s just a boy. He needs to sleep.”

“I’m just a girl and I’m up.”

Anna turned to Esperanza for help. Esperanza poured coffee into a cup, walked slowly over to the couch, pushed one foot against the boy’s still sleeping frame and said, “Get up.”

The boy sat up, eyes unfocused, hair sticking out like straw. He took the cup, looked at each of them in turn, and shook his head. “This is fucked up,” he said.

Anna felt her heart turn in its cage. What if he left? Fear crawled up her spine like an insect, settling, dark and dangerous, on the back of her neck.

“I wholeheartedly agree,” she said. “It’s fucked up.”

“Mom.”

“What?”

“You have to stop swearing.”

Anna turned to face her child. “I have to stop swearing? You have to stop ordering me around. You have to stop thinking you’re in charge here, because, guess what? I have news for you, you’re not. I pay the bills, and as long as I pay the bills, as long as I put a roof over your head and pay the bills, you do as I say. Now go get ready for school.”

There was silence in the car like nothing Anna had ever listened to, silence like a scalpel bringing down flaps of flesh, laying bare the pathetic thing she truly was.

“I’m sorry,” Anna said as they pulled up to the school, the dog flattened in the back like a sheet of office paper.

Eva undid her seat belt. “I’m not talking to you,” she said.

“You’re not talking to me?”

“No.”

Anna’s head began to pulse.

“Is this a joke?” she said. “After everything I have done for you? After all the sacrifices I’ve made for you, suddenly I have the
audacity
to tell you to stop ordering me around and you’re not talking to me? I have given you everything, Eva. Everything. I have traded my own life for yours. In fact, I haven’t
had
a life. You have. I haven’t. And this is what I get?”

“I’m going to school, Mom.”

“You’re going to school.”

Eva nodded, looking straight ahead.

“Go to school. Go. Get out.”

And she did. Her little girl got out.

At the food store, Ree was checking the protein content on a box of cereal.

“Hey,” she said, “this is fourteen grams. Fourteen grams is not bad. Not bad at all.”

“Fourteen grams in which context?”

Ree cocked her head. “In which context? Are you okay?”

“No.”

“Is it the boy?”

Anna said nothing.

“It’s always the boy.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Oh good. That makes me very happy. What do you want to talk about?”

Anna looked around. “I don’t know. Congress. The Budget. The Debt.”

“What debt. We got a debt?”

“We can talk about kids. How we’re fucking them up.”

“It’s too early in the morning for that. Let’s talk about injustice, let’s talk about cooking. Who ever thought I would spend my adult life cooking? It was never a possibility, I was going to run the world. Cooking was, like, something my
mother
did.”

“Don’t cook then.”

“No?”

“No.”

“Let them starve?”

“Why not? I mean, what have you got to lose?”

“It’s a concept, a definite concept. Melanie should go pretty quickly, she’s only two.”

Anna ran her hands down her face.

“I’m in a mess, Ree, a real mess. Eva’s smelling blood. She thinks he’s only staying a couple days and even
that
she’s not putting up with.”

“You told her he was only staying for a couple days?”

“I’m afraid I did.”

“Well, tell her the truth. Tell her he’s moved in and she has to suck it up. I’m so tired of these kids just taking over, man. I mean, what happened to us? We were the ones. We were the ones who were going to make it all fall into place and look at us, we’re under the tyranny of a bunch of five-year-olds. Tell Eva she has to suck it up.”

“You tell her.”

“I don’t know. It might sound a little strange, coming from me.”

She didn’t turn right to go home. She turned left and drove across town to the church of Saint Francis of Assisi. If she were to find it locked again, if the outrage were for some reason to repeat itself, she would go to the parish office and beat on the door until somebody came. She would then take the trouble to explain that a public place of worship was just that, a public place of worship, even for the likes of her, who had long stopped worshipping that particular God but needed solace—silence and solace.

The memory of a morning in church in those early days pierced her like a lance. Eva had been doodling in her notebook—encased in the autistic shell she slipped on in great haste every Sunday before church—when suddenly she’d stood up and started singing the Hallelujah. Watching her, the sting of tears in her eyes, Anna had said to herself,
If I can give her this, this sense of belonging, I will have accomplished something. She will walk into a church one day, having lost her faith, having lost her way and—without knowing how or why—find mooring in a litany of sounds. She’ll find relief, she’ll recover purpose, only to lose it again, but no matter, no matter.