“I don’t know what to say,” Claire tells Mr. Hogue. “Pete has never done anything like this before. We have our problems sometimes, but I’ve never known him to deface property. He’s a good boy.”
“I see from our records that there was a custody dispute between yourself and Pete’s father,” Mr. Hogue says. “Perhaps he’s expressing some of his frustration at the absence of a strong male presence in the household. That can be very difficult for a boy his age, just entering adolescence.”
“My son sees his father practically every weekend,” Claire tells him. She will never get used to this: the way her divorce, and then what followed it, has left her in a state of endlessly defending herself, re-explaining their lives.
“And can you think of anything else that might have changed recently in your household?” he asks her. The way he asks this question, and the way he is looking at her (at her breasts, she thinks; maybe she’s crazy, but that’s what it seems like to Claire), she believes he knows the answer already. This is a small town. Plus Ursula attends this school, though she is seeing a different counselor in her Remedial Social Skills group.
“For several months now I have been involved in a serious relationship,” she says.
“And this man you’re involved with—how does Pete feel about him? Would you say their relationship is of a positive nature?”
“My son doesn’t answer when Tim speaks to him,” she thinks but doesn’t say. “Sometimes I overhear him on the phone with his father, doing imitations of Tim. When Tim brought over pizza last night, Pete took his up to his room.”
“It’s okay,” she says. “The usual.”
“There’s a group here at school for students dealing with stepparent issues,” the counselor says. “Sometimes nothing can be more helpful to a kid like Pete than knowing he’s not the only one.”
“I don’t think that would be the best idea at the moment,” she tells him.
“I must tell you, Ms. Temple,” Mr. Hogue tells her, “that your son’s behavior has reinforced our sense that perhaps there are issues surrounding sexuality in the home which have been troubling Pete. So I have to ask you, are you comfortable that this boyfriend has in no way violated his boundaries with Pete? Or that you yourself, however inadvertently, might not have demonstrated certain behaviors that could be troubling to a young person at this highly sensitive, highly volatile stage of life?”
“I can’t imagine what you mean,” she says. “Pardon me. I can imagine. It’s just so far from anything that’s going on in our household, or anything that ever would.”
“Where did he get the condoms, Ms. Temple?” he asks her. Then he sets a bag of chewing tobacco and a pair of red lace panties on top of the desk.
“I’m sorry to have to do this,” he says. “But I thought you should know we found these in your son’s locker, too.”
The panties are hers, of course.
“We’re going to have to suspend Pete from school for five days,” Mr. Hogue tells her. “If I may, I’d like to suggest that you consider therapy for your son. And try to spend some quality time with him.”
This is how Claire came to hit her son. She has thought about this moment many times since it happened and replayed it over in her head like an umpire’s bad call. Or worse. The moment in a Preakness race when a champion filly breaks its leg, the moment in a figure skater’s Olympic long program when she lands her jump wrong and crashes onto the ice and all you want to do is rewind the film and make it turn out different next time.
• • •
It was winter. Before shed met Tim. Before Pete had Ursula to be angry about, and Jenny, and faxes coming in at five A.M., and wind chimes outside his window to remind him that his mother has a lover who won’t leave them alone. Back when he still thought nothing could be any worse than knowing his mother and his father hated each other so much now that when he wants to show his father his Don Mattingly card, he can’t just say, “Come up to my room.” He has to take it out onto the porch.
“Before you play any computer games, you’ve got to put your dirty clothes in the wash,” she said to him. This was a Sunday night shortly after they’d come back from his father’s house. These are the hardest times, second hardest being Fridays just before they go. By now she has learned not to expect a whole lot from her children on Sunday nights. Mondays she can enforce the usual rules again, but the best thing to hope for, Sundays, is for the three of them to watch a little television, have a piece of pie if she’s made some, and get to bed before anybody does any terrible damage to anybody else. That winter she hadn’t learned this yet.
Pete was playing Dragon Master when she said that to him about the clothes. Directly after arriving back home after his weekend with his father, Pete had walked into the house, thrown his jacket on the kitchen table, dumped his Nike bag in the middle of the living-room floor, and opened the refrigerator. His backpack and baseball glove were still in the car. Never mind that neither he nor Sally is likely to tell their mother, “Thank you for driving, Mom.” What he had said to her was, “We never have anything good to eat.” Then he had turned on the computer.
It’s not just Pete and Sally who have a hard time Sunday nights, either. It’s also Claire, who had just spent the last two hours driving the road that leads to their old house and back again. For twenty minutes she’d sat parked in the driveway of the house she used to live in, waiting for her children to come out, looking in the windows she used to look out of.
Her babies were born inside this house, on the very bed where their father now screws Melanie. Melanie’s car was parked in the driveway, next to Sam’s. She’d been up visiting again, evidently, and she had made them all fondue. She had played them this great U2 tape and lent Sally a silver miniskirt. They were the same size. “She’s so cool, Mom. It’s almost like having a big sister when she’s around,” Sally told Claire on the ride back from their old house. At this point Sally still thought Melanie was just a friend of the family.
“Pete,” Claire said again. More sharply this time. “No computer until you’ve put your stuff away. I’m assuming you’ve got your homework done.”
“I’ll do it in the morning,” he told her. “It’s just some dumb mimeographed sheets.”
“You’ll do it now” she said. “I don’t suppose your dad sent money for hockey?”
Moments like this she’s like a drunk and she knows it. Knows she’s taking her children and herself to a place where nobody will have a good time. And still she’s got the pedal to the metal.
“He said he already sent you the child-support check,” said Pete. Zap. Zap. Zap.
“Great,” she said. “That should cover maybe three school lunches and one set of rubber bands on your braces. You know what goalie pads cost? You know what those stitches cost in the emergency room last week, and your sister’s yearbook pictures? I’m hemorrhaging money.”
“It’s not my business,” he said, zapping one of the hundred little characters who seem to dance forever across the computer screen like cockroaches. “Dad says when you start talking about money I should just tell you it’s not my business. Kids aren’t supposed to think about money.”
“Easy for Mr. Good Times to say. Thank you for your insights, Mr. Mellow. He doesn’t have to think about money, either. He just leaves it to me to come up with it all.”
She heard the voice in her head telling her to stop it. But she has knocked the bottle over now. She couldn’t keep the words from spilling out. The Melanie part sits in her mouth like a piece of rotten fruit. But in small ways there is this bitter bile that seeps out of her.
“Mom,” Sally was saying. “You know you’re going to regret this later. Why don’t you let me fix you a cup of tea. Put on a record. Take a bath.” She was massaging her mother’s shoulders.
“Just leave me alone, okay?” said Claire. “You don’t know half of what goes on.”
“I don’t want to,” Sally said. “Even though you keep wanting to tell me.”
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Pete was playing Dragon Master through all of this, still ignoring her. She unplugged the computer.
“What are you doing?” he screamed at her. “I was on the third level.”
“I guess that’s what it takes to get your attention,” she told him.
He stamped up to his room, leaving the Nike bag on the floor. Claire followed after him.
“Don’t think you can get away with that kind of behavior!” she told him. “I’m in charge here.”
He turned on his Tom Petty tape. Stretched out on his bed, opened a Mad.
“Look at me” she said. He turned the page.
“Look at me,” she said again.
He turned another page. His jaw had this hard, clenched look she knows very well, a mouth like a hyphen. She had seen that face plenty of times before, just not—until recently—on her son.
“Look at me!” she screamed. “Don’t shut me out like that. Don’t push me away from you.”
He didn’t move.
She unplugged his tape player. He looked up then, but not to meet her eyes. He was shaking his head in that terrible way his father used to, that said, “You poor, pathetic crazy woman.” This is where Sam would pick up the video camera and begin taping. “Look at yourself. If you dare.”
That’s when she did it. First she grabbed his shoulders and shook him. His eyes staring straight into hers had a look of defiance and contempt. His body offered no resistance.
What she wanted to say was, “Come back to me!” She wanted to tell him, “Remember who I am? Remember who you are? Remember just last spring when you hit that home run in the playoffs, with the bases loaded in the seventh? And how, after rounding third, and tagging home, you didn’t even break your stride? Just kept right on running, straight into my lap? Where did that boy go?”
She wanted to wrap her arms around his wiry little body. Kiss his eyelids until he managed to wriggle free, saying, “Cut it out, Mom. You’re getting drool on my shirt.” She wanted to rub her face in his goofy, shelf-cut hair with that single wispy braid of his. My darling boy, she wanted to say. My darling, darling boy.
Only that was not what she did. What she did was slap him across the face. Hard, too. And the worst part was that even then he didn’t look angry or hurt or even surprised. He had that blank look.
She has never hit him again. She knows now she can’t reach her son that way. He’s drifting away from her. He has this terrible anger in him, and it’s growing like a tapeworm.
Last night after she got home from her conference with the guidance counselor, his mom told Pete he has to send letters to Mr. Bennett and Miss Connor apologizing for the graffiti. He will also have to repaint the walls in the boys’ bathroom after school, but he can’t do this for a week because he is also suspended from school. He’ll have to buy the paint, which will cost around fifty dollars. He will have to use the money he’s been saving for the new TPX bat he’s got on layaway at Ray’s Sporting Goods. The worst part is she’s going to send him back to therapy. He’d rather have her lock him in a room for a whole day, with a pair of headphones on playing country music. Burn his entire collection of Mads. Make him eat lunch with Kiki Saunders every day for a week and let her tell him all about her fascinating trip to Colonial Williamsburg.
He knows kids who would run away from home at a moment like this, but Pete thinks that’s just dumb. What’s the point—you know they’re going to find you in the end, and then you’ll just be in even worse trouble. That’s the awful thing about being twelve years old. You’re just so totally powerless.
Did anyone ask Pete if he wanted his parents to split up? They certainly didn’t ask if he wanted his mom hanging around with a dork like Tim, or his dad going to rock concerts with their babysitter. Here he is, a guy that’s been asking for a puppy his whole entire life, and when they finally get a dog nobody even consults him. They end up with this hundred-year-old mutt that dribbles pee on the floor and can’t even fetch a ball. And now his mom’s telling him he’s got to go sit in this therapist’s office that he can’t stand when he should be off playing basketball, and talk about his feelings, and the longer he won’t cooperate, the longer he’ll have to go.
They wonder why kids like playing video games? When a guy has his hand on the joystick is probably the one time in his whole life as a kid where he actually gets to control how things turn out. That and when he turns on his boom box. Pete’s mom says she can’t understand the music he listens to, it’s so loud and angry-sounding. Right, Mom, he should tell her. That’s the point.
It’s thinking about the music his mom hates that gave Pete the idea, actually. Knowing he has to do something. Knowing how mad he is and how few options he has.
Next morning when he gets up, Pete puts on his baggiest shirt. Also a pair of his sister’s old pants with the cuffs rolled up. He straps his backpack on his back and stuffs an old asthma inhaler belonging to his friend Benny in his pocket. If he gets caught, which he doesn’t plan to, he’s going to act like he’s having some kind of seizure and start swallowing his tongue. Then they’d be so glad to get him out of their store they’d forget all about the shoplifting part.
His mother must be out walking with Nancy—talking about him, most likely—or she would’ve stopped him. Either that or she’s up in her office reading faxes.
He heads for the highway leading to the mall. He pedals hard, listening to the Beasties on his Walkman to get psyched.
He parks his bike—no lock in case he has to make a quick getaway. The spaced-out girl is at the cash register. Yes.
He heads to the videos first, looking for Van Damme, and finds the tape he wants. He holds it up as if he’s studying the names of the cast. Now he turns around so he’s facing the back wall. Lifts his shirt slightly. Pushes the tape into his pants.
He heads for the pop music section, with his backpack looped over his shoulder, unzipped partway. He picks up a Nirvana tape, and Green Day while he’s at it.
The hardest part is walking out the door. They have this metal detector set up, like at airports, with an alarm that goes off if you try to take something you haven’t paid for. But the space cadet at the cash register is on the phone and flipping through a copy of Rolling Stone. When she turns her back for a second, he knows it’s now or never. He tosses the backpack over the top of the detector. He’s out of there.
After he’s down the block, he stops to catch his breath, although he can still feel his heart beating double time. It’s like the first time he jumped off the bridge at Ryan’s Quarry last summer, and when he and his dad rode on that roller coaster at the Deerfield fair. He was so scared he almost wet his pants.
He has to do it again.
One of Claire’s favorite times with her children when they were small was reading to them. Even when she and Sam had very little money, she always bought them books. Not paperbacks, either. She loved the thick smooth paper of a full-sized hardbacked picture book, the smell even. Their collection was vast and wonderful: Russian fairy tales with gilt-edged illustrations, every Chris Van Allsburg, every William Steig, Frances the badger, A Chair for My Mother, Harold and the Purple Crayon, James and the Giant Peach, In the Night Kitchen.…
Bedtimes at their old house, Claire used to pile Sally and Pete under the covers with her after their baths and they would have what they used to call a book festival. When they were very little, they often wanted her to read the same story over and over again. Blueberries for Sal, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, Sylvester and the Magic Pebble. But later—on snowy days especially, if there was no school, or Sunday nights—they would pile a tall stack of picture books on the quilt and go through every one. When they begged Claire for just one more chapter of Matilda or Half Magic, she would usually say yes because the truth was, she also wanted to know what happened next. And not just that, either: She loved the feeling of her two children, one on each side, snuggled up against her with the wind howling outside and the quilt pulled up around them.
&n
bsp; A few months after Sally and Pete had settled into their new house in Blue Hills with Claire, she had called up Sam one night to say she wanted to pick up the children’s books at their old house.
“You can have some of them if you want,” Sam told her. “But they aren’t all yours. There’s a lot of them I want to hold on to.”
This was a shock. Not simply because Sam had never been a big one for reading to the children when they were little. At that moment all Claire’s sense of loss and violation concerning her marriage rose from her like a great, billowing cloud so dark it covered her sky. And when the cloud finally dissipated, what was left was the image of those books.
Her children’s books were, for Claire, the most tangible evidence she possessed of her hours and years as a mother. She could trace her life with her children through their pages: the way the eighteen-month-old Sally loved to stick her finger in the hole of the wedding ring when Claire held her on her lap and read Pat the Bunny, the way Pete placed his finger to his lips and mouthed “Shh” at that page in Goodnight Moon with the quiet old lady murmuring “Hush.” The tune she had made up and attached to the mother’s song in Love You Forever, and the way Pete had stopped her in the middle of singing it one night and with his eyes full of real tears said, “No more. Please. It makes me too sad.”
And more. The way Sally fell in love with that phrase in Babar where Babar’s suit is described as “a becoming shade of green” and the way, on the page where Babar brings Celeste to a pastry shop, Sally would choose the pastry she’d get, if it was her. Her gut-splitting laughter over the line in Caleb and Kate, where “the cart said farewell to the wheel.” Her tears at the death of Old Yeller.
Claire thought about all of these things when Sam told her he was keeping half their children’s books. It wasn’t even so much a matter of thinking about them: She felt them, and how it felt was that she had to have every book, every single one.
• • •
Where Love Goes Page 22
