Waiting for Christopher (3 page)

S
he had nearly scaled the fence, its links circling her fingers like so many rings, when the boy’s mother came back. Feena, her world chopped into tiny, mesh octagons, watched the woman hold out one hand, watched the child take it.

It was such a simple, clean negotiation. Both mother and son seemed to know their parts, seemed to have played them over and over. Feena felt relieved, as if she’d been watching some sort of ritual, a performance that had now come to an end. She dropped from the fence and turned toward the gate.

Perhaps, she decided, she’d go help Mr. Milakowski. It was nearly closing time. The Muzak continued to blare from the loudspeakers, but the fire engines and teacups sat stalled and empty. Passengerless, the boats still fitfully circled their narrow course as if, Feena thought, kids had jumped ship in the middle of their rides.

She was nearly at the gate when she heard it again. Sharp, outraged yelling. She saw them off to her right, the mother bending over the boy. “Didn’t I tell you?” the woman asked, punctuating her question with a slap at the circle of arms that once again protected the little boy’s face. “Didn’t I say, you keep blubbering, I’m out of here?”

But the child kept crying, howling louder and louder until the woman slapped him again. “You don’t believe me, huh? You think all I got to do is stand around while you put on a show?”

More howls. More slaps. “It’ll get dark. Everyone’ll go home and you’ll be here all by yourself.” A significant pause, lingering, slapless, to let this picture sink in. “Just keep right on bawling, Mister Smarty, and see what happens.”

Under his raised arms, the child didn’t try to stop but yielded completely to the sobs that shook him like tremors. “That’s it, Christopher. I’ve taken all the noise from you I’m gonna take.” The woman straightened, turned sharply as a cadet. She strode through the gate, and as she brushed past Feena, their eyes met for a split second. The woman looked away and marched determinedly toward the parking lot.

Feena waited just inside the gate now, watching the boy named Christopher, wondering if she should approach him. He stood unmoving, rooted to the spot as if he’d been there forever. Staring past Feena at his vanishing mother, his expression wasn’t fearful so much as patient, waiting for the dark she’d promised him.

Just when Feena had decided to try to talk to him, to pick him up and carry him to Mr. Milakowski, his mother, yelling as she came, moved in on them again. Apparently, she’d never intended to leave at all, was interested only in tormenting the toddler. Now you see me, now you don’t. Feena was furious, even if the little boy wasn’t.

This time, she didn’t even glance at Feena, seemed not to notice anyone but her son. “Look at that.” There was a nasty, teasing edge to her voice. “Mister Smarty-pants is Mister Scaredy-pants now.” Hands on hips, she loomed over him, looking down. “Guess now you know what happens to bad boys, don’t you?

“Guess you’re going to let Mommy be, right?” In the space she left him between taunts, the boy held both his arms out to her. Wordless, fighting tears, he begged her to pick him up. But she batted his hands away.

“What happens to bad boys who keep bothering Mommy?” For a second, in an instinctive reflex, he held his arms up again, then quickly pulled them back, stood with them at his sides, only his face raised to her.

“Come on.” She sighed theatrically, adjusting her purse strap again. Then she grabbed one of his hands and dragged him toward the gate. “I got stuff to do.”

“Kids,” Peter Milakowski said, closing the brightly painted door of the miniature-golf booth, fishing a padlock from his jacket pocket. “You have it easy. You don’t know.” He waved the tiny lock at Feena, who, with nothing to do now that the clubs were secured for the night, stood with her hands in her jeans pockets, letting the old man talk. “When I was a kid, what did I know?

“Nothing, same as you,” he answered himself. He smiled sadly, the skin under his eyes working itself into intricate crepe-paper ridges. “You think your corn flakes, they come from nowhere? Your clothes, you think they don’t cost money?”

“Mr. Milakowski.” Feena looked for an opening, a way past his philosophizing, the bony reef of words that always surrounded him. “What if a kid has serious trouble with a parent? Like hitting and things.”

“Hitting?” he asked. He shook his head. “What’s hitting? Nothing, that’s what. Your mother works hard, she gets tired, is all.”

“But it’s not me, really. It’s—”

“You be thankful for only hitting. You be thankful you got a mother. Period.”

She wanted to explain about Christopher. About the woman’s fleshy arms, her baby’s patient, empty eyes. But it was no use. The old man had an almost romantic notion of childhood, a conviction that real suffering belonged only to adults.

And maybe he was right, Feena told herself. Maybe it was no big deal. The boy wasn’t starving, after all. His mother hadn’t actually left him. There were other children all over the world, thousands and thousands of them, who were probably much worse off. Who had real problems, problems even Mr. Milakowski would have acknowledged.

Maybe, Feena decided as she headed back to the car, she was just bored. Looking for someone besides herself to feel sorry for. Someone with her dead brother’s name. What sort of tragic novel did she think she was living, anyway?

She reached across the steering wheel, already burning hot, to retrieve her copy of
Jane Eyre
. It was a good thing that summer vacation was over, that school would start next week. By that time, she certainly wouldn’t be bored anymore. She’d be too busy trying to be mellow and kick-ass all at once. Trying to hide her brains and her sloppy, wild heart.

Instinctively, Feena kept the book behind her as she pushed open the Pizza Hut’s unlocked front door. Her mother, who must have caught an early bus, lay sprawled, shoeless, drink in hand, across the length of the couch. She didn’t turn around when Feena came in, but remained facing the Sony. A thin, languorous arm with a gold watch at the wrist waved from the couch.

“Hey, Mom.”

“Don’t slam the door, Feen.” Lenore’s head turned a few degrees, one of her silver fish earrings glinting at Feena. On the screen, a man leaned over a woman in a hospital bed. “Darling,” he said, “I can’t bear to see you in pain.”

Feena knew the drill, knew there was no point trying to interrupt the shows her mother taped for herself every day. “Some people gamble,” she always told Feena. “Some people do drugs. Me? I need the soaps. Sue me.”

As she passed the kitchen, Feena hoped her stomach would forget she’d had only a hard-boiled egg and celery for lunch. In her room, she reassured herself by looking at the new pink shirt she’d hung over her mirror.
New school
, she told herself.
New start
. She lifted the hanger, as if she might find something new in the glass underneath, too. But she didn’t. In the second before she let the shirt fall back into place, she saw what she always did: the same thick horsy body, the same pasty moon face veiled with freckles. One egg and three celery stalks, she reminded herself crossly, couldn’t be expected to make her hipless and hollow-cheeked overnight. She slipped the book into the bookcase by her bed, then stood in the doorway, looking over her mother’s shoulder at the TV.

“What did you say?” A blond woman was talking to the same man who’d been in the hospital a moment before.

“I said,” the man told her, “I don’t care if Sarah never gets well. As long as it means you and I can be together.”

The woman slapped him then, and the actor reeled backward, shocked and sheepish.

Feena wondered how they did it—made that dull, solid thud when she hit him. It sounded real. It sounded hard enough to hurt. “You’re talking about my sister,” the blond yelled. “I don’t ever want to hear you say anything like that again.”

Fade to commercial. “Mom?” Feena took a tentative step into the living room.

Lenore turned, resurfacing. She’d eaten or drunk most of her Sandy Mauve lip-gloss away, looked softer, prettier than when she’d left for work. She took a quick sip from the glass in her hand. “Lord, I wish I could edit out this junk. What’s up, anyway?” She glanced at Feena now, eyebrows floating a little too high, mouth tight. Feena knew that look.
Make it quick
, the look said.
You’ve got until the bleach gets the stains out
.

“I saw this kid on the rides today.”

“So?”

“So I was watching him and his mom. I thought she was—”

“Have you been shutting yourself up in the car again? For crying out loud, Feen, can’t you find some friends instead of using up my gas?”

“Mom, what do you want me to do—go out to the highway and flag down cars? This place is not exactly crawling with potential playmates, you know.” She glanced toward the window and Ryder’s. “Unless you count preschoolers.”

“What happens if I need to go shopping tomorrow?” Both of Lenore’s fish were trembling, indignant. “What happens if the car won’t start?”

“Don’t cry,” a new man told the blond woman on TV. He had gray hair and a soft, startled voice. “Please, don’t cry.”

Lenore pivoted, faced the screen. Both fish disappeared.

“Mom, I just—”

“Not now.” Lenore waved the back of her hand at Feena.

“But I—”

“Shhhhh. Later.” Another wave, smaller this time, as if she were swatting a fly off her shoulder.

W
ashanee Springs Regional was more and less than Feena had expected. More students, less attitude. The day after Labor Day, she found herself gliding invisibly as a ghost along the noisy low-ceilinged hallways. One student asked her where the bookstore was, and another apologized when he bumped her with his backpack, but most hardly noticed her at all. Relieved, she stopped worrying about what she was wearing, about the single pimple, blazing like a red star in the middle of her forehead.

Last year at Edgemoor, things had been different. She’d been the youngest person in school, and school had been a lot smaller. So small that she and Denise Northrup, the dark- haired, soft-spoken girl who’d been her friend from the first day, who loved books and lived outside of town in a log cabin, were typed from the start. They were in an accelerated English class, so they were “smart.” They didn’t have the right label patch on their jeans, so they were “nerds.” Which meant that they sat with the other smart nerds in class, they ate at the smart nerd table in the cafeteria, and they walked home with the smart nerds after school. “It’s a caste system,” Denise told her. “And we’re one step below the sacred cows.”

But it wasn’t like that here, where four separate districts fed into the same city-size high school. Feena felt a glorious, free-floating anonymity, lost among new jeans, old jeans, torn jeans. There were whites and blacks and Hispanics; preppies with collared shirts and razor-sharp parts in their hair; slow-eyed stoners, dressed in black; skinny kids with arms and legs that had outgrown the rest of them; heavy kids who shuffled down the halls without looking up; freaks and honeys, jocks and brains; and a few fine fools who didn’t fit anywhere, who made their own rules.

Like Raylene Watson. Feena noticed her from the first day, envied the way the girl’s calm fortified and protected her, the way she moved like an African goddess through the changing, mottled crew in the cafeteria. Without trying or caring, Raylene was a force to be reckoned with. She spoke sparingly in class, but with a tongue of fire in the halls. She stood outside the school doors before opening bell with her friends—a few white, most black—and studied strangers with heavy-lidded, disdainful eyes. She was, Feena observed from the sidelines, one of the most popular girls in school.

Which meant, of course, that Feena would have little to do with her. Feena already knew that. Although this school was bigger, more forgiving than her old one, it would require a miracle on the order of a Cinderella makeover to beam her into the privileged realm where people called you Girlfriend, sought out your opinion, copied what you wore. In fact, despite the few glimpses she had of Raylene, the otherness of her confidence, her laughter, Feena accepted her own bit part and never so much as wished for a starring role.

For several weeks, she made her quiet way to and from classes, began to relax, to feel easy, if somewhat lonely, at her new school. She made several friends—a shy girl from History 1 who dotted every
i
in her notes with a heart, and a funny girl with glasses and a thick accent Feena couldn’t place—people to sit beside in the cafeteria, to pair up with in gym. All in all, she counted herself fortunate. Until the day she discovered Raylene’s secret.

“Can’t you chill your sorry butts one second?” Raylene was juggling books, talking over her shoulder to two girls as she headed toward her locker. “Mr. Norman and his quadratic equations can wait on us.” Feena, late for her own class, was pinned to the wall as Raylene rushed by. How she admired the sophisticated, bitchy sound of the girl’s words. And the lazy Southern drawl that went with them.

“What’s a square root ever done for you, anyhow?” Still, Raylene seemed to be in a hurry, jamming everything into the locker at once—backpack, books, papers, purse, Walkman. Of course, it didn’t work, and before she could slam the door shut, most of her things clattered to the floor, bouncing and rolling toward Feena, whose sneaker toe broke the Walkman’s fall.