What They Always Tell Us
Contents
To Mom and Dad—for everything
And in loving memory of
Eleanore Hubbard “Lolly” Wilson (1904–1992),
author, artist, and grandmother
Alex
O
n a Saturday morning in November, Alex finds himself alone for the weekend, so he decides to break a few rules. First, he wears his father’s worn-out, blue terry-cloth robe around the house and turns the thermostat up. He doesn’t flush the toilet right away or put the seat down, nor does he take the trash out, just lets all the debris—balled-up napkins, fast-food bags and wax-paper cups, a clunky box of stale cereal—pile and cling close to the edges of the trash can. Last night he ate a cheeseburger and an order of fries with ketchup on his parents’ wedding china, and he didn’t even wash the plate afterward, just let it sit on the counter, the crumbs and salt caking on the grease. He also drank three Heinekens from the refrigerator, and some of his older brother’s stash of cheap vodka from a large, green-tinted plastic bottle, which James hides in his old toy chest under his tennis gear.
The weekend isn’t supposed to be a solitary one, but James has also broken rules: after their mother and father left for a wedding in Nashville—leaving numbers to call in case of an emergency, and money for meals and groceries—James went to stay with his girlfriend at the La Quinta hotel by the interstate. He told Alex that he had planned this La Quinta weekend for a while.
“Don’t screw it up for me,”
he said. James’s girlfriend is named Alice, but the name doesn’t suit her, Alex thinks, because Alices are usually maids or Sunday school teachers or sweet-faced TV weather girls. He has seen this Alice at school—she’s a senior, like James—and Alex knows that she always wears tight jeans and too much makeup, she swears a lot, and she smokes Virginia Slims cigarettes in the parking lot both before and after school. Alex is certain that she’s had plenty of other boyfriends before; James isn’t so special.
So, a whole day alone, and Alex doesn’t feel like doing much of anything. No homework, no exercising, no pleasure reading, nothing. His parents had almost made him go to the wedding—a family friend’s son is getting married, someone Alex doesn’t even really know because the guy is so much older—but they finally relented, allowing him to stay home under the watchful eye of James. Ha.
When he gets tired of sitting around, Alex walks around the house, peering out the windows like he’s examining some strange world. The front lawn is beige and brittle, and the limbs of the slouchy oak tree are an exposed and pocked pale gray. The backyard butts up to a small thatch of forest of mostly pine trees that are tall and thin and almost menacing-looking. Alex and James used to play in that forest, but neither of them has ventured back there in years.
Alex ends up in the kitchen and picks at a powdered doughnut he has plucked from a plastic package. When he looks out the bay window at the house across the street, he sees the small boy who lives there with his mother. The boy and his mother are quiet and have kept to themselves, mostly, since they moved in this past summer. Alex’s mother said they must be renting the place, because as far as she knew, Mr. Pembroke still owned that house. Mom has done all the neighborly things—made them cookies and stuff—but, still, the two of them remain mysterious. The little boy has red hair, extremely red, the unnatural color of a Coke can. Today, he lies in his driveway without a coat on and reads a heavy book. Alex often sees the boy outside, lurking, talking to himself, moving his hands about like a conductor, always alone.
The phone rings—an angry, intrusive noise—and Alex thinks about not answering it. The little boy, as if he can hear it ringing, picks up his head and stares at Alex’s yard. Before his parents left, they instructed Alex to tell anyone who calls for them that they are busy or out running errands, not out of town. In case a potential robber or kidnapper or killer calls and gets some ideas. Yeah right. Before the answering machine can pick up, Alex answers quietly.
“May I speak to Mr. Joseph Donaldson, please?” A female voice, overly formal, practiced.
“He’s out of town.” Another broken rule, but it doesn’t matter—it’s just a woman from the phone company and she says she’ll call back at a more convenient time.
He hadn’t thought the phone would be for him anyway, because no one has called Alex for a couple of months, ever since he swallowed Pine-Sol at Marty Miller’s lake house party and had to be rushed to the hospital. The party took place in early September, the weekend after Labor Day, and served as the annual welcome-back-to-school drunk fest for the junior and senior class. Because of Alex the party had been ruined. And after that night, everyone thought Alex was mentally disturbed. Fucked in the head.
After the incident, Alex was out of school for three weeks. He sat at home, mostly in his bed, waiting for the phone to ring, waiting for his friends Kirk and Tyler—his musketeers, his mother always said—and the others to call him, maybe with some gesture of concern. He expected that, at least from the girls like Beth or Lang. Girls are supposed to be sweet and caring, aren’t they? But they never called, either. Instead of sympathy he was greeted with silence. And that’s not all—they avoid him at school, too. All of them, all of his classmates. They walk by without meeting his eyes, and he can almost hear their thoughts about him as he continues down the halls:
Freak, loser, stay away from us.
James thinks Alex is crazy and has said as much. At the hospital, while their parents talked to the doctor in the hall, James said, “Why would anyone do that? Why?”
Alex had wanted to answer him, but he just fingered his identification bracelet and watched the empty gray-green screen of the TV that was perched on a ledge in the corner of the room. If only he could have transported himself into the TV, into some after-school special, where a boy like him, after an event like this, could return home, return to school triumphantly in the fiftieth minute of the show, all forgiven, all misunderstandings cleared by the time the credits started rolling.
After the party, Alex’s mother locked all the cleaning supplies in her bathroom cabinet, using an actual padlock, even though Alex swore that they didn’t need to worry about him doing something like that anymore. It was ridiculous, locking it away. After all, couldn’t Alex just buy more on his own if he really wanted to do it again? Now the lock is gone, but his mother still hides all toxic supplies behind boxes of Kleenex and rolls of Charmin.
On this Saturday, Alex has taken a bottle of Mr. Clean (as if, somehow, a different brand would be enough of a deterrent) out from under the dusty cabinet and placed it on the kitchen counter next to the blender. He has no plans to use it, but he gets a rare bold charge from placing it in plain sight.
Outside, the little redheaded boy is throwing pebbles at the neighbors’ iron mailbox, which is painted to look like a cozy, two-story lime green house, complete with a shingled roof and a flagstone walkway. Alex’s own house is redbrick, two-story, rectangular, pretty, but not an architectural wonder. The backyard has a swing set that hasn’t been used for some time now but that is still rooted in the ground with concrete. Alex’s mother wants to build a gazebo where the swing set is, but his father is dragging his feet about it, complaining that it’s too expensive. Alex thinks about all this now, the particulars of his home. He has lived in this house his whole life. And yet it doesn’t feel like it used to, it doesn’t feel familiar—something is different, and the silence only reminds him of this. He even smells his house—the way a stranger would upon entering an unfamiliar dwelling. It is a sour smell, like a lemony sweat, maybe from the dried-fruit potpourri his mother places out in cut-glass dishes all over the place.
The phone rings again and he grabs it immediately. He doesn’t say hello, but holds his mouth there, as if waiting to kiss it.
“Hello?” a voice says. Maybe the same woman as earlier.
“No one’s home,” he says, and hangs up.
At noon Alex showers and changes his clothes but continues to wear the robe over a pair of jeans and a purple T-shirt that his eighth-grade class made a few years ago. The T-shirt shows everyone’s signatures under white stenciled lettering that says
MRS. JOHNSON’S BEST-EVER
8
TH GRADE CLASS
! It’s cheesy, he should throw it away. But it still fits, and its worn cotton feels comfy.
Outside the sun tries to slip through the stubborn clouds, and he sits on his bed like he is waiting for something to happen. He eyes a stack of books on the floor next to his desk, school textbooks covered with brown grocery bag paper that he has doodled on. His wire-bound notebooks are also filled with doodles and a few scribbled sentences, often incomplete. Alex opens the yellow notebook, the one for American government class, and sees a page that is dated October 1, the day he returned to school—just over a month ago. On the page, in his neat print, he reads
WEEKEND PLANS
. But no plans are listed. He used to make lists all the time, lists that outlined what he needed to do, what he wanted to do, what his parents wanted him to do, what he would like to buy, what books he should read to better himself. So many lists, so much plotting out. And for what? Every day feels the same now. The only time he experiences quick spurts of excited happiness is right when he wakes up in the morning, but that’s before he’s fully awake, before he realizes a whole day like all the others stretches in front of him.
He leaves his room and heads downstairs, restless. In the living room he looks outside once again and sees that the boy is still out there, walking on the curb as if negotiating a balance beam. Alex wants to go outside to check the mail. But he doesn’t want to have to look at the kid, doesn’t want to nod or say hello as neighbors should. That requires too much energy. He wishes the boy would go inside to eat lunch or something. He suddenly remembers that the kid’s name is Henry. A few weeks ago the child’s mother—a pretty woman with wispy, dirty blond hair who likes to wear short skirts with ankle boots and other flashy but stylish clothes—hung a large white banner across the garage that read
HAPPY 10TH B-DAY HENRY
! The day after, Alex saw the kid on a ladder taking it down, while the mother, wineglass in hand, watched from the front door.
Alex decides to check the mail anyway—he will just have to keep his eyes glued to the walkway until he is safely inside again. He walks to the foyer and pulls open the door, and it sticks a moment, then squeaks open. The air is a little nippy and smells of wood burning in fireplaces. The sun is still trapped behind the clouds—it might as well give up. He walks to the mailbox self-consciously because he knows he’s being watched. And just as he feared, Henry talks to him.
“Hey there.”
Alex nods without looking at him.
“Why you wearing a robe?” the boy asks.
Alex looks at Henry, who stands on the opposite curb. He is wearing black church pants and a yellow sweatshirt with no logo and is holding the large book against his chest. The book is clothbound red, and even from a few feet away Alex can see that it is heavily dog-eared. Henry’s mouth is open like he is preparing to swallow something, and he is scratching behind one of his ears.
“Because I feel like it,” Alex says, reaching and opening the mailbox, which is empty.
“I could’ve told you the mailman hasn’t come yet.”
“Well, now I know,” he says. In a sudden fit of irritation that surprises him, Alex asks, “Why have you been outside all day long?” He turns to face the kid only briefly, then looks back inside the mailbox, as if a letter will appear out of thin air to prove the kid wrong.
“I just want to,” Henry answers. “I get sick of being inside.”
“It’s not even a nice day. And what’s with the book?”
“Oh. I’m reading the dictionary. My mom says it’s never too early to sharpen my vocabulary. She gave me the dictionary for my birthday.”
“That’s nice,” Alex says, but what it really is, he thinks, is weird. He turns to walk inside.
“You’re going in?” Henry says.
“What?” Alex says, turning and tightening his eyes.
“Do you know what
smalto
is?”
“What? No,” Alex says.
“It’s colored glass. Like they have in churches. I just learned that.”
“You shouldn’t be reading the dictionary. You should be playing or something. Whatever you kids do nowadays.” Like he is so old himself, a hardened adult, though he is only sixteen and a half.
“Who would I play with?” Henry asks. “I don’t know any kids in this neighborhood. I don’t even know if there are any.”
It’s true—the neighborhood is old now, full of doctors and lawyers (like Alex’s father) with kids in high school or away at college, professors from the university, and retirees. When Alex was little, there seemed to be a lot of kids to play with, but everyone has grown up and remained in the same houses. Henry and his mother are rarities—new people. And really, no one knows much about them. The house they live in belongs to the president of the local paper mill, Jack Pembroke, who lives in a big mansion on the grounds of River Crest Country Club, which he also owns. He has never even lived in the house across the street. Alex remembers that the man’s son used to live there, but he moved out or away, and for many years it had been empty, as if forgotten, until Henry and his mother moved in.