The Story Until Now: A Great Big Book of Stories (9 page)

A sound stirs the air, a kind of shudder. He wonders but does not ask,
Mother, did you sob?

Her head comes up. “Happy?”

Startled, Happy looks inside himself.—
Did I?
There is nothing he has to say to her.

Then she just begins. “You don’t know what it’s like living with a man who beats you. I was pregnant with Brent and our parents forced the marriage, crazy thing to happen in this day and time, like it ruined his life to marry me, we had too many babies, and who—
who
got me pregnant every time? Do you see what I mean?”

Happy won’t speak. The words come so fast that he chooses not to understand them.
Ow, it hurts!

Never mind, nothing he says or does not say will stop her. “Hal hated his
life so he drank, and the more he drank the more he hated it so he drank some more and the more he drank, the madder he got and nothing I could do or say would make him happy. Every little thing I did used to make him mad at me. The madder he got the more he hit me, but he never hit me when I was pregnant. Oh, Happy, do you understand?”

For another long time, they are both silent.

A long sigh comes ripping out of her. “You do what you have to, just to keep it from happening again. When anger takes hold like that, it has to come out somewhere. Look.” She holds up a crooked wrist; even from here it looks wrong. She touches a spot on the temple; she doesn’t have to tell Happy about the long white scar under the hair.

He tried so hard not to remember, but he remembers. On his belly under the crib, Happy watches her over ridged knuckles.

Again. She says it again. “He never hit me when I was pregnant.” Her breath shudders. “So I had you. I’m so sorry!”

Happy strains to make out what she’s trying to tell him but there is no way of translating it.

“I tried. I even named you after him!”

Frederick, he supposes. He supposes it was on the dogtag, but Brent says
his
name was on the dogtag, and Happy? Frederick is not his name.

In the still air of the bedroom, her voice is sad and thin. “My four big boys fought back when he hit them, so I had you. Anything to stop him. But this time.” That sigh. “He didn’t. Forgive me, Happy. I did what you do to make it through. I couldn’t take it!”

The story she is telling is sad, but it’s only a story. Wolves know that fathers aren’t the only ones that hurt you.

“You cried. You cried so much. He got so mad. He came at me. He kept coming at me and oh God, oh, Happy. I put you in front of me.”

Happy flinches.

“I couldn’t watch. I left him to it.” Relieved, she says in a light voice, “And that was it.” As if it’s all she needs to do.

Fine. If she is done, then, she’ll leave. As soon as she leaves he’ll get up and lock the door.

Then, just when he thinks it’s over and he can forget this, she groans. “I’m so sorry, Son.”

There is another of the long, painful pauses that wolves prefer to using words. Silence is clear, where words are ambiguous.

She says, “I never knew what he was doing. I didn’t want to know.”

She says, “I know, I know, I should have left him, but where can a woman go
with four little boys and a baby? I should have kicked him out, but how would I feed my children then?”

The silence.

“So you do forgive me, right?”

Forgive
is not a word wolves know.

“Right?”

He won’t move or speak. Why should he?”

“These things happen, son. Things happen when people are stretched too far and their love is stretched too thin. Oh,
please
try to understand.”

There is a long silence while she thinks and Happy thinks.

Just when he’s beginning to hope she’s run out of words forever, she says in a voice so light that it floats far over his head, “Then you got lost. And everything changed. He got himself a nice new wife and moved to Hollywood. After everything I did to make him happy. The others grew up and moved away. Until you came, I didn’t have anything.”

Happy doesn’t expect to speak, but he does. The words that have been stacked in his head for years pop out like quarters out of a coin return.

“You didn’t look for me, did you.” It is not a question.

She sobs. “You don’t know what it’s like.”

He does.

After a while she goes away.

Happy slinks to the door and locks it even before he hears her stumbling downstairs, sobbing.

“Can I come in?” Her voice is sweet. Just the way he remembers her. Even through the door, Susan is soft and he will always remember that body. He almost forgets himself and answers. Happy is stopped by the fact that except for the slip with the mother, he hasn’t spoken. There are too many words backed up in him. He can’t get them in order, much less let them out. He just doesn’t have the equipment.

Instead he hitches across the floor the way he did when he was two and sits with his back against the door, putting his head to the wood. Feeling her. He feels her outline pressed to the other side of the panel, her heart beating. Susan, breathing.

“Don’t worry,” she says. “I understand. I just want you to come out so we can be together and be happy.”

His fingers creep along the door.

“Happy,” she says, and he will not know whether she is talking about their
future or using his name, which is his secret. “You know, you’re really a very lovely man. It’s a shame for you to be shut up in there when you could come out and enjoy the world!”

Swaying slightly in time with that musical voice, he toys with the lock. He can’t, he could, he wants to open that door and do something about the way he is feeling. With Susan, he won’t have to wonder how the parts fit together.

Like a gifted animal trainer she goes on, about his bright hair, about how lucky she felt when she first saw him; she is lilting now. “It’s sunny today, perfect weather, and oh, sweetie, there’s going to be a party in the garden!”

Then he hears a little stir in the hall. Someone else out there with her, breathing.

“A party in your honor. Cake, sweetie, and champagne, have you ever had champagne? You’re going to love it …” He does indeed hear music. Someone tapping a microphone. Voices in the garden. Behind Susan, someone is muttering. She breaks off. “Brent, I am
not
going to tell him about the people from Miramax! Not until we get him out of there!”

The brother. Happy shuts down. What else would he do after what Brent did to him? Things in this room, he realizes; Brent was that much older. Brent giving him a mean, sly look on his last night in this world he outgrew, letting their father hit the gas on the minivan and drive away without him.

After a long time, when it becomes clear that there’s no change in the situation, Susan gets up off her knees—he can feel every move she makes—and leans the whole of that soft body against the wood. He stands too, so that in a way, they are together. She says in a tone that makes clear that they will indeed lie down together too, “Champagne, and when it’s over, you and I …”

There is the sound of a little struggle. Brent barks a warning. “Ten minutes, Frederick Olmstead. Ten minutes more and we break down the door and drag you out.”

He does not have to go to the window to hear the speech Brent makes to the people assembled. He can hear them muttering. He smells them all. He hears their secret body parts moving. They are drinking champagne in the garden. Then it changes. There is a new voice. Ugly. Different from the buddabuddabudda of ordinary people talking.

“Thank you for coming and thank you for your patience.
OK
, Brent. Where is he?”

It’s him.

Brett whines, “I told you, Dad, I couldn’t …”

“Then I will.”

Another voice. The mother. “No, Fred. Not this time.”

There is a smack. A thud. Under the window, the father raises his head and howls, “Two minutes, son. I’m warning you.”

Happy’s hackles rise. His lips curl back from bared fangs as in the garden under the window the mother cries, “I told you never to come here!”

There is a stir; something happens and the mother is silenced.

Him.

He commands the crowd. “Give me a minute and I’ll bring the wolf boy down for his very first interview.”

His father comes.

He will find that Happy has unlocked the door for him.

Big man, but not as big as Happy remembers him. Big smile on his face, which has been surgically enhanced, although Happy will not know it. Smooth, beautifully tanned under the expensively cropped hair, it is nothing like the angry face Happy remembers. The big, square teeth are white, whiter than Timbo’s fangs. Even the eyes are a fresh, technically augmented color. Blue shirt, open at the collar. Throat exposed, as wolves will do when they want you to know that they do not intend to harm you. Nice suit, although Happy has no way of knowing.

“Son,” he says in a smooth, glad tone that has sealed deals and gotten meetings with major players all over Greater Los Angeles. “You know your father loves you.”

This is nothing like love.

Caught between then and now, between what he was and what he thinks he is, Happy does what he has to.

He knows what all wolves know. If you are male and live long enough, you will have to kill your father.

It doesn’t take long.

Brent finds the door locked when he comes upstairs to find out how it’s going. He says through the closed door, “Everything
OK
in there?”

Although Happy has not spoken in all these days, he has listened carefully. Now he says in the father’s voice, “This is going to take longer than I thought. Reschedule for tomorrow. My place.”

There is a little silence while Brent considers.

Happy is stronger than Timbo now. Louder. “Now clear out, and take everybody with you.”

It is night again. The mother knocks. Happy has mauled the body, as Timbo would, but he will not eat. There is no point to it.

“Can I come in?”

He allows it.

There will be no screaming and no reproaches. She stands quietly, studying the body.

After a long time she says, “
OK
. Yes. He deserved it.”

When you remember old hurts you remember them all, not just the ones people want you to. Therefore Happy says the one thing about this that he will ever say to her:

“He wasn’t the only one.”

“Oh, Happy,” she says. “Oh God.” She isn’t begging for her life, she is inquiring.

It is a charged moment.

There are memories that you can’t prevent and then there are memories you refuse to get back, and over these, you have some power. This is the choice Happy has to make but he is confused now by memories of Sonia. Her tongue was rough. She was firm, but loving. This mother waits. What will he do? She means no harm. She wants to protect him. Poised between this room and freedom in the woods, between the undecided and the obvious, he doesn’t know.

What he does know is that no matter what she did to you and no matter how hard to forgive, you will forget what your mother did to you because she is your mother.

—
Asimov’s
SF
, 2007

Automatic Tiger

He got the toy for his second cousin Randolph, a knobby-kneed boy so rich he was still in short trousers at thirteen. Born poor, Benedict had no hope of inheriting his Uncle James’s money but he spent too much for the toy anyway. He had shriveled under his uncle’s watery diamond eyes on two other weekend visits, shrinking in oppressive, dark-paneled rooms, and he wasn’t going back to Syosset unarmed. The expensive gift for Randolph, the old man’s grandson, should assure him at least some measure of respect. But there was more to it than that. He had felt a strange, almost fated feeling growing in him from the moment he first spotted the box, solitary and proud, in the dim window of a toy store not far from the river.

It came in a medium-sized box with an orange-and-black illustration and the words
ROYAL BENGAL TIGER
in orange lettering across the top. According to the description on the package, it responded to commands which the child barked into a small microphone. Benedict had seen robots and monsters something like it on television that year. Own It With Pride, the box commanded. Edward Benedict, removed from toys more by income than by proclivity, had no idea that the tiger cost ten times as much as any of its mechanical counterparts. Had he known, he probably wouldn’t have cared. It would impress the boy, and something about the baleful eyes on the box attracted him. It cost him a month’s salary and seemed cheap at the price. After all, he told himself, it had real fur.