Christmas in Austin

by Benjamin Markovits

  He was walking back to his room, when a door opened suddenly, and Ben came out in his pajamas. “Jesus,” he said. “You gave me a shock.” He was carrying a pair of shoes in his hand. “You should be in bed.”

  “I had to pee.”

  “Go back to bed.”

  Cal just stood there. “What are you doing?” he asked, in his normal voice.

  “Nothing. Go to bed.”

  But he wouldn’t go, and in the end there was nothing Ben could do but take him along. They crept together down the stairs. Cal asked him, “Where are we going?” and Ben eventually realized it was better not to answer. If you answered, he kept talking.

  Liesel always left one of the downstairs lights on when she went to bed, the light over the oven, which cast a dim artificial colorless glow, but it was bright enough to show them the kitchen doorway. After that, it didn’t matter how much noise they made; all the bedrooms were upstairs.

  “What are we doing?” Cal asked again, and Ben finally told him.

  “We’re waking up Julie.”

  “Is she coming, too?” he said.

  “No, she’s not coming. I just want to scare her, a little.” And then, “It’s just … we’re having some fun.”

  The backdoor was always unlocked, in case Nathan or one of his family needed to get into the main house from their apartment. A light shone on the concrete patio; the outside air felt warmer than Ben expected. Cloud cover had blown in, there was a low sky, and in the distance, over the trees and the tennis court, the Jose Cuervo sign lit up the telephone wires. It all seemed very … undark, as if the night were only 60 or 65 percent night. But he warned Cal to be quiet again, because Nathan and Clémence lay sleeping just ten feet away, on the other side of those sliding doors.

  He sat on the back steps and put on his shoes. Cal wore his thick slippers, but his pajamas were really for a two- or three-year-old. The pants fit like shorts, the shirt was like a T-shirt, but Cal wouldn’t let Dana throw them away, and for the past several nights she had put him to bed in them, because he felt so hot. But the fever had passed, and he was vividly awake now and almost totally consumed by excitement, which brought its own kind of stillness or concentration, because he stopped asking questions.

  As they walked across the stones in the grass toward the back of the yard, Ben had no clear idea what he wanted to do. Maybe just look at her, and maybe if Cal hadn’t come along, he would have looked at her and left her alone. That would have allowed him … a kind of feeling of power that might have been enough … a secret, something he could tease her with, what she looked like when she was sleeping in the playhouse. Or maybe he didn’t even have to tease her. Just the fact that he could have done something if he wanted to, and nobody knew.

  Julie had been getting on his nerves since they came to Austin—her Doc Martens, for example, which looked like clown shoes, and which she wore because she was somehow embarrassed about growing up, and having breasts, or whatever, and looking like a woman, so she tried to look ugly instead, and cut her hair off, so that nobody could make fun of her for trying to look like a pretty woman, or something like that. Also, she turned everything into an argument. As if she were the only one who ever thought about racism or inequality or sexism, and even if you were just making a dumb joke, even if it was dumb, it was also a joke, and you didn’t have to take it so seriously. But the thought of her lying there woke in him protective feelings, too, a twelve-year-old girl in her pajamas, and something harder to pin down, an appetite for intimacy or closeness, which they used to have as children but was being withdrawn.

  It was darker under the shade of the old pecan, the wet grass reached his ankles, he wasn’t wearing socks. Maybe it had rained earlier, maybe that’s what woke him up. The lights of the main house glowed eighty feet behind them. Nobody could hear them, except Julie.

  Cal reached up for Ben’s hand, and Ben let him take it. They walked around the side of the playhouse to the back window—ducking under a tree, Ben felt the leaves brush his face. Julie lay on the mattress on the floor, but it was hard to see her … the screen was dirty, and the broken metal mesh produced an impression of light sketching, as if she were drawn in pencil strokes. But he thought there was something awkward about the way she lay, half on her side, with her T-shirt pulled out of shape. Her foot had come out at the end of the duvet. It looked like she was wearing a sock, maybe she got cold in the night, and Ben dragged Cal away from the window, toward the tennis court, which had a border of smooth stones. He picked up a handful and threw them onto the roof of the small house.

  He thought they might sound like heavy rain or something like that—it seemed relatively harmless. The roof was covered in old asphalt shingles, but there was also a layer of leaves, nuts and twigs lying on top, which scattered when the stones hit them and made a scratching noise. He threw another handful. One of the pebbles struck the metal gutter that ran around the edge of the roof and clanged.

  For the first time Ben felt a pulse of fear, maybe because he thought they’d get caught. But also out of a kind of sympathy for Julie: he was imagining what it must feel like to lie there, listening. The yard spread around them, large and gloomy under the trees, the main house looked far away, and the back gate led to an almost unused alley, a dead end, where anybody could be sleeping or lurking.

  Cal picked up a stone and threw it against the side of the house. There was a sharp crack, and then they heard something else, the door opening (which they couldn’t see; it was on the other side), the screen door clappering behind, and footsteps running through the ivy.

  “I think you broke the window,” Ben said.

  “I did what you did.”

  “I threw it against the roof. It doesn’t matter.” And then: “It’s not your fault.”

  He went to check, but it was hard to see in the dark. Maybe it wasn’t broken, maybe the cracking sound was just the noise of stone on glass. There was a screen in front anyway but the screen was damaged. He said to Cal, “She really didn’t mess around, I mean, she was gone,” and he thought he might be able to laugh at her about it in the morning. But he also felt like, I didn’t even get to see her, something was missing, a confrontation, but also like, for maybe a minute or two, Jesus, she must have been scared, while she lay there awake and wondered whether to run, before she ran. I guess that’s what I wanted, and Cal said, “She just … she just ran,” and waited for Ben to laugh before he laughed, too. Ben laughed and said, “She was like … gone.”

  Cal laughed and Ben felt sad or stupid or dissatisfied, because they were standing at two o’clock in the morning at the back of the yard outside an empty shed and had to walk through the wet grass to go to bed.

  “Don’t tell anybody, okay,” Ben said.

  “I won’t.”

  “If we have to say something, I’ll say it.”

  He took his cousin’s hand again as they walked around the hut and under the pecan tree toward the house. Ahead of them, sixty or seventy feet away, somebody stepped into the patio light that shone over the backdoor—a man, it must have been Nathan, barefoot and moving gingerly over the pebbled concrete. Ben stopped, he pulled Cal back a little, they were still in the shade of the tree.

  Nathan stood on the edge of the patio and looked at them, or looked at the playhouse behind them, and Ben couldn’t tell if he could see them or not, but after a minute he turned away and disappeared again behind the side of the apartment.

  “Let’s just wait here,” Ben said. “Are you scared?”

  “No.”

  “Are you feeling better?”

  “I’m okay.”

  “You’re a tough kid,” Ben said, and thought, this is dumb, we can’t stand out here all night, and started walking back through the grass.

  When they reached the patio (Nathan and Clémence slept behind glass doors; the curtains had been drawn when they set out, and Ben peered around the side of the apartment to see if their lights were on; they weren’t), he whispered something to Ca
l, and they snuck along the far edge of the patio, by the bamboo hedge that bordered the neighbor’s yard, and then along the side of the main house to the backdoor. There were four steps and he opened the screen door for Cal, and held it with one hand while Cal stepped under his arm. Then he opened the main door and Cal went in while Ben carefully let the screen door close against the weight of his shoulder, and turned the handle of the house door so it didn’t make a sound.

  WEDNESDAY

  Margot and Willy both woke up with temperatures. They had caught Cal’s cold, and Nathan in particular slept badly, with Julie in bed beside him—she was too scared at first to sleep on her own after coming inside. Then Margot cried out with an earache at four in the morning. Julie ended up retreating to her mattress on the floor, next to the pool table, while Margot slipped in between Nathan and Clémence. But that was another argument. It’s not fair, Julie kept complaining, loudly in the dark, I’m lying here on my own, it’s creepy, until Nathan gave up and got up and crawled on to the mattress beside her. It was like old times, musical beds, the first intense years of parenthood. Vague hours before dawn, warm shifting interchangeable bodies, half-states of consciousness, somewhere between dream and anxiety.

  Susie had a rough night, too. Willy started whimpering when Ben crept into their room at 2 a.m., took off his shoes and slid silently under the covers. He pretended to sleep when Susie came in to check on them. For several minutes, he listened to her trying to keep Willy quiet, lying in bed with him and whispering “Sh, sh, sh, you’ll wake your brother.” Feeling ashamed but also somehow hidden or protected by his sense of shame.

  Only Cal slept late. Dana woke up at eight and rolled over to look at him. He lay with his head flung back off the side of the mattress, and his mouth wide open. His color was good, his breathing sounded comfortable, he was out cold, and Dana lay for a while listening to him before she got bored and went down to breakfast without him.

  Nathan and Susie were arguing when she walked in. Susie said, “Look, this is the kind of thing that happens. I thought it was a dumb idea from the beginning. People get drunk over the holidays, they wander into other people’s backyards, we’re just lucky that’s all it was.”

  “You don’t walk in and throw stones at somebody’s garden shed. That’s not a thing that a reasonable person should have to game plan for.”

  “I told you last night I thought it was inappropriate. I told you so last night.”

  “You’re conflating things, Susie. You’re not making sense. You sound like Liesel.”

  “What did I do?” Liesel asked, and Julie walked in the backdoor with Clémence behind her. Ben, who was eating waffles, didn’t look up.

  “Hey, Julie,” Susie said, in a different voice. “I hear you had a bit of an experience.”

  “I don’t know what I had. Maybe I’m crazy, maybe I made it all up.”

  But Nathan before breakfast had checked on the playhouse. (In his socks; they were still wet from the grass and had tracked footprints into the breakfast room.) The window at the back was cracked, and there were stones lying in the dirt underneath it.

  “She’s a brave girl,” her mother said, who had her arms around Julie. “She got the hell out.”

  “I don’t feel so brave,” Julie said.

  The rest of the argument was about whether or not to call the police. Susie thought you should absolutely call the police, but Julie didn’t want to. She seemed softened by something, more childish. She kept her left hand on Clémence’s lap, and Nathan poured the milk for her cereal.

  “Maybe it was broken already,” Julie said. “I don’t know. I don’t really have anything to say. I mean, it’s like, dumb kid sleeps in the garden shed and gets scared. That’s not really a crime scene.”

  “I saw the stones.” But Julie told her father, “Those stones get everywhere,” which was true.

  “Look,” Nathan said. “I’m not going to force you to do anything. It’s up to you how you want to respond to this. If you think that nothing happened, and the right thing to do is let it go, that’s what we’ll do. But if you think that somebody was out there, who might have been a danger to you or to somebody else, and should be reported …”

  “Let it be,” Clémence broke in. “She’s said what she wants to do. This isn’t one of your moral questions.”

  “Excuse me, but that’s exactly what it is …” and so they were fighting now.

  Susie stayed quiet and Dana thought, I should stay out of it, too. Everybody looked tired, and somehow hungover, sensitive to noises and slights, and probably upset about Rose, though that’s not the kind of reason or motive that Nathan would ever admit to. When she said this kind of thing to Paul (trying to help him understand his moods) he always told her, that has nothing to do with it, you’re imputing to me your own emotional reactions, and so she learned not to offer these explanations. Essinger men liked to believe that they weren’t motivated by feelings. Cal would probably be like that, too.

  David came in, dressed and showered, fat, good-natured, social, and offered to buy everyone coffee. “Where’s Willy?” he asked.

  “I let him watch TV,” Susie said. “He didn’t want any breakfast.” And then: “Apparently Margot’s got it, too.”

  “I’m sorry, it’s all my fault,” Dana said.

  “What is?”

  “For bringing disease into this house.”

  “Don’t be silly,” Clémence told her, but nobody else said anything.

  *

  When David came back with the coffees, Susie handed him the baby. “I’m going up to shower,” she told him, and Ben followed his mother out of the kitchen.

  “I want to talk to you,” he said.

  “Can it wait? I didn’t sleep much and I just want five minutes to myself.”

  “Please.”

  “Okay, so talk.” But he didn’t want to talk in the hallway and in the end they went into Liesel’s study, where Ben shut the sliding doors behind them. Susie sat down in the desk chair and faced her son.

  “Okay, so talk,” she said again.

  “Do you think they’re going to call the police?”

  “It’s up to them. It’s up to Julie. I think they should, if only because I think Julie should learn that if this kind of thing happens, you report it, you tell people, you make a stink, even if it doesn’t do any good. This is what she should learn. But it’s not up to me.”

  Ben said, “I want to tell you something, but after that I don’t want to talk about it. I mean, you can get mad, you can shout at me, that’s fine, but after that I don’t want to talk about it.”

  Susie stared at him. He stood on Liesel’s old rug under the ceiling fan and still looked like what he was, a twelve-year-old boy. Other kids, some of his friends, seemed to be going through growth spurts; their mothers complained about how much they ate, and other things, which Susie hadn’t had to deal with yet. In any case, that was David’s department. There must be some benefits, she liked to joke, to marrying a man who had gone to an English public school. They learn to deal with certain facts without embarrassment, and she wondered if Ben was leading up to something like this.

  “Okay,” she said.

  “I don’t want to talk about it with Dad either. Whatever you want to say to me about it, I want you to say it now.”

  She waited. “I’m listening,” she said eventually.

  “It was me who threw stones at the playhouse.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I just wanted to scare Julie a little. It kind of annoyed me the way she was acting, like … There was no good reason.”

  “What time was this?”

  “I don’t know, maybe two o’clock. I woke up and everybody was asleep. I thought it might be funny just to see her there.”

  “Did you set your alarm? I don’t understand. Was this a plan? Did you plan this?”

  “There was no plan. I just thought it would be funny.” There was a silence, which he broke. “Are they going to ca
ll the police?” he asked again.

  His voice was changing, he sounded like Willy, like a kid.

  “They’re not going to call the police.”

  “Are you going to tell them?”

  “I have to tell them. Otherwise they might call the police.”

  “Can’t you get them not to without telling them?”

  Susie held her hands between her legs (they felt cold) and leaned forward slightly in her mother’s chair. She thought, I have to be careful what I say.

  “I have to tell them.”

  “Just so you know, I didn’t break the window.”

  But this set her off. “Don’t lie to me, Ben, on top of everything else.”

  “I’m not lying, it’s true!”

  “Who broke it then?”

  He hesitated. “I think it was already broken.”

  “Ben …”

  “It was! I didn’t do it.” He was crying now, or trying to, and took off his glasses. “You have to believe me.”

  “I don’t want to believe any of this,” Susie said. “None of this makes any sense. But if you’re going to tell the truth, you should just get it over with.”

  “I am telling the truth. Why don’t you believe me?”

  She didn’t say anything, she just looked at him.

  “You have to believe me,” he said.

  “I don’t really care if you broke the window or not. That’s not the point.”

  He had stopped crying now. His throat hurt, it didn’t feel natural, and Ben put on his glasses again. From where he stood, he could see Liesel in the backyard, hanging out clothes on the washing line. There was a brown tub at her feet. She bent down slowly and straightened up again.