Then, just when it got too hot to do anything, it started pouring. It rained so hard the morning of the annual Antrim Street Block Party that the yard sale had to move indoors to the Presbyterian church. It was still drizzling a couple of hours later, and people carried umbrellas for the garden tour. Maia led neighbors through Antrim’s secret gardens, lush oases behind closely built houses.
Gazing at her neighbors’ crimson roses, their hidden lawns, and flowering ginkgos, Kerry wished that she had time to tend her own overgrown patch, or money to afford a gardener. Long ago she had imagined that her children would help her. Together as a family they would clear away the dead branches and the big weeds and sow new grass. “Apart from seeing friends, no teenager will go outside,” Maia had warned her, and Kerry understood that now, as she did so many other things.
When evening came and neighbors cordoned Antrim off with orange traffic cones, the street began its transformation. Lois strung sparkling lights through oak branches. Sage set up camping tables. Neighbors carried out their lawn chairs and their salad bowls piled high with fruit or pasta, watermelon slices, bulgur wheat. There were casseroles, and bags of pretzels, and roasting pans filled with deep-fried cauliflower. Greg played his banjo, and his new girlfriend, Nella, joined him on her flute. Preschoolers ran in a pack and were thrilled to draw chalk pictures where they couldn’t play on any other day, the middle of the street.
Like moths Aidan and Diana materialized, pale, in the fading light. Diana hovered near the grilled portobello mushrooms and listened to her mother and Maia go on about the year the whole street flooded. Remember that?
“You and Aidan were just two years old,” said Kerry. “The basement filled with water.”
“That was the worst flood I’ve ever seen,” said Maia. “That was build-an-ark-type rain. Collin and Darius took a kayak and paddled down the street.”
Lois was testing out her photos for the slideshow, even as Greg fixed the screen, a white sheet strung from the great branches of a maple. “Oh, God,” said Diana, because there she was at four, riding her tricycle in a purple satin cape and a gold crown. “I had to run behind you,” Kerry said. “I had to lift your cape, or it would get caught up in the wheels.”
“And there’s your brother, and there’s Liam, and who’s that? Jack?” The boys must have been in kindergarten. They looked so small and delicate, standing shirtless, holding water balloons.
“Yeah, that was me,” said Jack. He was helping his father, aka Scienceman, set up a giant gyroscope.
“I can’t believe you still do that,” Diana said.
“This is my community,” Jack told her. “There aren’t a lot of block parties anymore.”
She just stared. There was something so horribly sincere about him. She remembered her mother dragging her along with Aidan to watch Jack and his mom perform in the North Cambridge Family Opera as singing insects. What had he been? A dung beetle? Cricket? She concluded, “You’re just weird.”
Jack told her, “You’re just mean.”
His directness startled her. When he narrowed his blue eyes to look at her, she wanted to hurt him. “My brother is completely bored with you,” she blurted out.
Coolly Jack said, “Then you and I have something in common,” and he left her standing there.
Pictures in the trees of Lois and her godchild from Uganda, the water fight when five boys got ahold of the Mednicks’ garden hose.
“Hey, baby! Hey, Nina,” Maia called out.
Diana turned to look, and then she looked again at Nina. Of course teachers had first names and didn’t live at school. Miss Lazare didn’t sleep under her desk. Diana knew all this in theory, but it was a shock to see her teacher there.
Instinctively, Diana shrank back as Nina and Collin approached the table for their drinks.
“Hi.” Collin breezed by, but Miss Lazare gazed into Diana’s eyes as though she could see inside of her.
What? Diana demanded silently. Instantly she felt huge and guilty.
She knows, Diana thought, even as Lazare walked on. She knows!
Diana scanned the crowd. Old guys, couples drinking hard cider, mothers nursing babies in lawn chairs. Kids rumbling up and down in Big Wheels. There he was, sitting alone on their front steps.
“Aidan.” She ran up to him.
“What?”
“Lazare knows we cheated.”
“No, she doesn’t.”
“Yes, she does.”
“What did she say?”
“Nothing. She just looked at me. It’s obvious. They’re all sitting at school comparing end-of-year portfolios.”
Aidan dismissed this. “Yeah, I don’t think so.”
“I’m serious.”
Aidan stood up. “You don’t have to do anything. I take the blame and say I copied you.”
“They’re not going to believe that.”
“They will if you let them.”
Walking down the street with Maia, Kerry saw her children standing in the soft light of her porch. “They’re really very close,” she told Maia. She saw the conversation, but she couldn’t hear the words.
Maia said, “And there you were, worrying all winter.”
Quietly Kerry said, “You would have worried too.”
“They come out of it. They start growing up eventually. Look at Collin!”
Kerry flushed under her freckles. She could not share Maia’s joy—not while Collin worked at Arkadia. Yes, it was a full-time job. Yes, he had benefits. Yes, he could earn a living making art, but the thought sickened her. “It’s like working at a munitions factory.”
“Kerry.”
“I’m sorry. It’s true.” Kerry had known her neighbor almost fifteen years. Maia was just about her closest friend, but she spoke out anyway. “It’s like building bombs.”
Maia’s temper flared. “First of all, as you’ll find out, you don’t tell your twenty-four-year-old son where he can and cannot work. Second of all, games aren’t bombs.”
“Yes, they are. They are! They’re weapons of mass destruction,” Kerry burst out. In cloud, in smoke, in myth, Arkadian games were detonating in a million minds. She had been following the news. She’d read about the kid in Austin caught defacing public property, the kid in Seattle charged with hacking his school website so the banner read CU.
“Hey, are we fighting about this now?” Maia asked gently.
Kerry was too upset to speak.
“They’re pastimes,” Maia said. “They’re part of life.”
Death is part of life, thought Kerry. Maia’s words reminded her of chaplains and hospice nurses at the hospital.
Maia said, “Games are just like music and art and dreaming.”
“Whose dreams?” Kerry demanded. “Not my dreams for my children!”
Meanwhile, on the porch, Diana asked Aidan, “What are you going to do when they say they want to talk to you?”
“If that ever happens I’ll just sit there,” Aidan said.
“And you’ll admit you cheated?”
“Yeah.”
He opened the glass storm door.
“But what about Mom?”
The question pierced him. If Diana was right and they got disciplined, Kerry would search his room.
“We have to think.” Diana followed him inside the house.
But he was thinking of himself. He had to hide his BoX. “I want you to do something,” he told his sister.
“No,” Diana said, but she trailed him upstairs to his room, where he rooted in the closet under laundry, worn-out shoes, old schoolbooks, a pair of hockey skates. From the depths he pulled out the scuffed black BoX.
“It’s heavy,” Aidan warned.
She started back as if he’d handed her a loaded gun.
“Don’t drop it.”
“Your game? You’re giving me your game?” she asked, incredulous.
“Just hide it for a little while.”
“I’m not keeping this in my room.”
“Hide it somewhere else, then.”
“Why?”
“So I won’t play.”
“You’re going to stop?”
“Just hide it and don’t tell me where it is.”
He saw her wavering.
“I’m taking the blame,” he reminded her. “Just keep it somewhere.”
The BoX was cold and smooth. She was afraid of it, and at the same time she thought, But he won’t play. He’s going to stop.
He looked at her with trust, with urgency. “Hide it.”
Don’t even touch it, she thought, but she took the BoX.
He promised, “You don’t ever have to tell me where.”
And she accepted this fiction; she took this lie to heart, even as she said, “Yeah, so you won’t know where it is when Mom comes after you.”
—
On the Monday after the block party, Aidan and Diana faced Miss Lazare and Mrs. West and Mr. DeLaurentis and their mother. It was two-fifty in the afternoon, and the last bells had rung. DeLaurentis’s first-floor office vibrated with students’ feet.
Mr. DeLaurentis hung his suit jacket on the back of his chair, and all Diana could think was it took a lot of cloth to sew that blue dress shirt.
The principal had a whiteboard covered with a grid for days of the week, a poster that said BE THE CHANGE YOU WANT TO SEE. Binders filled his bookshelves, and his phone lay on the desk, along with twin essays on morality in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
“It’s my fault,” Aidan confessed immediately. “I stole her paper without her knowledge.”
“You expect us to believe that?” DeLaurentis asked, and he turned to Diana. “You had no idea this was happening?”
She shook her head.
“How do you steal a paper from your sister? You found it? You just saw it lying around? What?”
“I took it from her computer,” Aidan said.
“You just left it there on your computer?” DeLaurentis asked Diana.
She nodded. “That’s where I wrote it.”
“Don’t you have a password?”
“Yes.”
“But I know it.” Aidan was way too calm, taking all the blame.
Mrs. West said, “Aidan, this was cheating. You get that, right?”
He didn’t even blink.
Miss Lazare started talking about what would happen if they were at college, but DeLaurentis cut her off and said, “Excuse me, one step at a time. The goal is getting into college. Let’s get there first.”
Lazare looked hot and flushed, all You can do better, and you know it in your heart. Kerry’s eyes filled with tears, and DeLaurentis reached behind him for his box of tissues, but even then—especially then—Aidan sat unmoved.
He betrayed no emotion as DeLaurentis talked about the Honor Code and pride in end-of-year portfolios and summer school. I knew it, Diana thought; and she was scared, not so much by the situation as by her own psychic powers, the whole thing playing out as she’d imagined.
She held still, afraid of crying, but Aidan radiated confidence. He was a beautiful liar, his voice unwavering, his details bold and magical, conjured up as though he were remembering. She was sleeping with her head down on the kitchen table and her computer open.
Diana listened in awe. Her brother was so smart. Nobody, not DeLaurentis, not Lazare, not even their mother could trip him up or force him into inconsistencies.
Except that his teachers had caught him copying. DeLaurentis would not allow Aidan to forget that.
“So you’re admitting that you plagiarized,” DeLaurentis said.
“Pretty much.”
“Excuse me?”
“I did it.”
By the time the meeting ended, the building was deserted. The twins followed Kerry through dank tiled halls. Outside, the field was empty. Kerry led the way and unlocked the car. She said nothing. She let herself in and just stared out the dirty windshield. She wasn’t crying anymore. Her eyes were blank, and that was almost worse.
The twins exchanged glances, and for the first time Diana saw regret in Aidan’s eyes. A touch of sadness and embarrassment. Poor Mom. Poor us. Wordless, like little children, they piled in back with all their stuff. Neither would brave the front seat. Diana felt miserable, but more than that, a sense of solidarity, as Aidan untangled his seatbelt from hers.
How angry was their mother? White-hot. Incinerating. She marched up the porch steps, unlocked the door, and threw her keys down on the kitchen table. In silence, Diana and Aidan watched Kerry open mail, ripping envelopes, tossing junk into the brown paper recycling bag. In silence, they saw her pile up breakfast dishes in the sink, scummy cereal bowls sitting out since morning. Then up the stairs she went, but not to her own room. They heard her slam Aidan’s door behind her.
Diana retreated to the living room couch and considered her brother leaning in the kitchen doorway. “What now?” she said.
“What now?” Aidan echoed, mockingly. He could be so warm. He was brilliant as the sun, and then the next moment he turned his back on you.
“I feel like we should do something.”
Aidan lashed out. “You mean like make a card?”
There had been a time when the two of them gave Kerry cards after they did something wrong. A drawing of a heart, a portrait of the stray cat they’d adopted. A rainbow and the single word SORY. That wasn’t happening now. Kerry was ransacking Aidan’s room. Aidan had predicted this, but he was furious at the invasion. He had never been sorry for what he’d done. Now he wasn’t even sorry for his mother.
—
Upstairs Kerry collected two joysticks and a headset. Pawing through his laundry, she searched for more. She would do better. She would be stronger. Take Aidan’s games away, cut him off from his computer. She had to find a way to punish him—and not just for cheating. He’d dragged Diana into trouble. This was the hold Arkadia had on him.
She emptied Aidan’s closet, piling the floor with childish things, old Legos, outgrown clothes, broken toys. She would fumigate. Burn all his stuff. Attack his computer with a baseball bat. If only it would make a difference. If only she could drown his phone.
Stripping his bed and peering under it, she excavated dirty T-shirts and twisted jeans. She dumped all the old papers and candy wrappers from his desk drawers, riffled through the binders piled on the floor. Just two years before, Aidan had blazed through homework every afternoon. He’d aced his tests and writing assignments too. Didn’t she have his A paper on the battle of Vicksburg?
Jostling his monitor, Kerry saw his screen glow and darken. A silvery pattern, the sheen of water, shimmered and rippled eerily, but she didn’t know how to break into his machine.
She knelt down, peering under Aidan’s desk and touched a scar on the wood floor, a deeper gash than other scratches. For a moment she paused, tracing the raw place, but she didn’t know the cause.
Feeling for his surge protector, Kerry unplugged the black cord. She had done it before. Now, once again, she would pull up her son’s computer by the roots, discontinue cable service, disable the house router. She would stanch the electric river through which games flowed. None of this would frighten Aidan. Last time, he’d simply walked away, surfacing days later at Liam’s house. Panicked, Kerry had come running after him. This time she would not negotiate. Don’t give in, she told herself, although her child was almost seventeen, and more than six feet tall.
She sat back on her heels, and sadness overcame her as the monitor went dark. Other kids enjoyed games for a weekend. Jack would play, but he went to Math Circle and competed on the robotics team. Even Liam had his band. Aidan was the one who couldn’t stop. For this, she blamed herself.
She had a good job, but it wasn’t good enough. She earned decent money, but not enough. She loved him, but that was not enough. She could not afford a mountain program; she didn’t have the cash to send him to some snow-capped wilderness where he might waken from his soul-sucking dream. If she took him to the police, maybe that w
ould scare him. If she found explosives in his closet, if she discovered drugs, or caught him dealing, then she’d have some leverage. What could she do with a son whose drug of choice was legal? Whose weapon was his own imagination?
Just as Kerry despaired of Aidan and his future, he grew quiet, almost docile. He accepted the loss of his computer, along with being grounded every afternoon and weekend. He accepted that he had failed English and would repeat the class next year. He accepted that he had failed biology as well. After the term ended he would return for summer school. When Kerry asked him to wash dishes or take out garbage or bring up the laundry, he did it instantly.
At first, his compliance made her nervous. She had prayed, but this was more than she had hoped. Aidan returned from school to do his homework. He ate dinner. He even slept at night—he really slept. When Kerry returned from her night shift, she didn’t hear a sound. Aidan’s behavior seemed to her too good too fast, and yet she wanted to believe in him. Maybe it was true, as she had read, that deep down teens craved structure and authority. Confiscating Aidan’s electronics may have been his secret wish!
Aidan never asked for his computer and his games. Nor did he run away to play with friends. Day by day, he worked to earn his mother’s trust. He held out his open palm for Kerry, and, like a hungry woodland creature, she watched him from a distance. Steadily he made his offering. No sudden movements, no threatening gestures, as Kerry crept closer. Trembling, she circled hungrily. She knew better. Experience told her otherwise, but need trumped fear as she began grazing from his hand.
Kerry re-established Sunday breakfast, which she prepared after her Saturday-night shift. She made the children French toast as soon as she came home, and they ate together at the kitchen table, their plates drenched with syrup, their glasses filled with fresh-squeezed orange juice. Aidan was quiet, but his mother didn’t mind. Just two weeks after she had confiscated his computer, she saw a calmer manner, a steadier gaze. No longer did he fidget at the table and race away to play. To her mind, he’d hit rock bottom, and now he was rebuilding. She rejoiced, but tried to temper her excitement. On Friday morning, when he said he wasn’t feeling well, she took his temperature. Trust but verify. He had a fever of 101, and she allowed him to stay home from school.
The Chalk Artist Page 15
