Like the boy David, of whom I was also curious, I chose to park under a tree, but the one I selected was a cedar of Lebanon on private property, a few feet down a side street, where I could park with the top down, facing the school, and still keep an eye on the motorcycle. A cedar branch extended its long, green-sleeved arm into the street, offering a natural umbrella of shade for my small car. I had my laptop computer and some loose files with me, so I didn’t care how long I had to wait for school to let out. When a person wants to establish her own charitable foundation, a person has to fill out enough forms to keep the IRS happy for a lifetime.
The first school bell rang at one-twenty, the last bell at one-thirty. School still let out early the first day.
I had a sudden, startling memory of what it had been like to sit in those hot classrooms in late August, early September. Boys with their legs sprawled wide under their desks, their elbows taking up most of the aisle space. Girls with their chins in their hands, their other hands holding pencils, doodling on the cover of the steno pads they used to take classroom notes. All of us drooping, barely awake, now and then exchanging glances, arching our eyebrows at each other as the teacher droned at the front of the room. White chalk words on the blackboard up front. All the windows open, but nothing moving in the stifling air inside where we were. A smell of bubblegum as somebody surreptitiously unwrapped a piece. The feeling of a scar in the wood of my desk, under my fingertips. The sense of the presence of the cute boy one row back to my left. The sweat at all of the places on my body where my clothes were binding me. All of life feeling as if it were on hold waiting for the bell to ring …
I quickly stashed my files away under my dash where they wouldn’t get blown, then started the car in readiness for following David when he came out. I didn’t spot him until he reached the bike. What a gangly, unattractive kid he looked from a distance—not the child most likely to be selected from a lineup of potential stepchildren, that was for sure. He had on another white, long-sleeved shirt—or maybe it was the same one—and jeans that hung loose at his thin hips, a blue backpack, the black tennis shoes, and the Star Trek cap over his bush of long, curly brown hair. He took off the cap and stuck it in his backpack, which he attached to the bike with elastic cords, then he unhooked a black helmet from the handlebars and put it on along with a pair of clear plastic goggles.
The other kids were flowing out of the school and flowing to their cars and the sidewalks like long lazy drops of water separating from a meandering stream, but David moved as if he was in a hurry to get away from there—kicking up the stand on the bike, swinging a leg over, revving up, and starting to move out, weaving between the cars whose owners were slower to get going. I was glad I’d already started my car, and now I rapidly put it in gear, released the brake, and edged to the corner, watching him. He bumped over a curb, a sidewalk, another curb, and then he was noisily careering off down the street toward downtown.
I bypassed the traffic starting to emerge from the school parking lot by turning left into a private circle drive and then exiting it from the other side, ahead of the teens in their cars. With a quiet roar, I sped ahead of them. From behind, I heard a young male voice yelling at me: “Yo, baby!” I smiled to myself. Seen from behind, with my blond ponytail streaming out and dressed so casually, I probably looked his age. What a shock and disappointment he’d get if he drove up beside me, ready to throw me a line, and I looked over at him and smiled, and he discovered that I was old enough to be his mother.
As for the boy whose stepmother I might be, he had slowed to a sedate pace. Now, away from the school, he was a surprisingly careful driver. I’d expected him to be a wild male teenage driver, to speed, to race through yellow lights and the beginnings of red ones, to be one of those cocky, impatient, angry boys who tailgate, who dart between lanes, who curse and honk. But no: He drove the speed limit. He looked both ways several times before entering any intersection, he always signaled when he changed lanes, giving the drivers behind him plenty of time to notice his blinking light and upraised arm. He didn’t tailgate. He didn’t thread the lanes or slither between two cars at a stoplight. You’d almost have thought he was guiding me. Now I began to see the logic of why a kid might go around dressed in a man’s dress shirt on a hot day: It made good, light, protective clothing on a motorcycle, shielding him both from the sun and the pavement in case he landed on it. Even his reckless exit from the high school parking lot made a certain kind of sense: He was a teenager, after all, and maybe he needed to show off for his peers. Or thumb his nose at them.
“Do you have peers?” I muttered to the kid three cars ahead of me. “How about friends? Got any of those?”
I thought back over his hasty exit from school: He hadn’t stopped to talk to anybody, no high fives, no shouted jibes, no greetings or farewells. Just jump on your bike and gun it. I didn’t know what that was like, being solitary in high school, because it hadn’t been that way for me. I’d been lucky, there’d been friends, and it was a rare afternoon that I went home alone.
“What’s it like to be you?” I asked his curved white back. “A kid like you?”
Geof wouldn’t know either. Granted, he’d been a hellion, a rebel, even a juvie in his bad old days, but he was never alone either. Even juvies have friends, they telephone each other, they ride in cars together, they hang out, even as cheerleaders and football players do. Geof would never have joined up with a real gang—he was too much of an iconoclast even then for that—but he’d been popular in his own weird way, just as I had been in my goody-two-shoes way.
We weren’t like the kid driving ahead of me.
“What the hell do you know about it?” I demanded of myself as he signaled for a left turn and I followed him slowly onto Central Avenue. “For all you know, he’s got a whole team of pals waiting for him at the harbor, and they’re all going sailing this afternoon, and his worst problem is trying to find time alone to do his homework.”
No. That wasn’t this kid’s worst problem.
We were heading straight downtown, not to the fixed-up touristy part, but to the old rundown part where working fishermen still lived in boarding houses, the fishermen without families. It was the same neighborhood where I’d gone with Sabrina earlier that day, and when David stopped, it was on 15th Street, only three blocks west of where his former stepfather, Dennis Clemmons, still lived and a universe away from the nice suburban home where he’d resided with his parents.
He drove his bike up over the curb in front of an old clapboard boarding house with a sign out front advertising rooms to let: TV, private baths. I quickly parked at the opposite curb, far down the street, keeping my engine running, my foot on the clutch. But when he turned off his own engine, got off his bike, and propped it on its stand, I shut down my car. I watched him lope up the front walk and use a key to open the front door. He wasn’t gone long. Just as I was considering whether to sit there a while longer or to go on my way, he came running back out again, but he’d changed clothes while he was inside. Now he wore the same shoes but cheap-looking black trousers, a short-sleeved white shirt with an insignia on it, and a black baseball cap with an insignia on it, too. Not the Star Trek cap, but it was familiar; in fact, the whole outfit looked like something I’d seen before, although not on him. He looked like a dork in it, a dweeb, a whatever insulting word his peers would have used to describe what we used to call a nerd. He hopped back on the bike, backed it over the curb before starting it, turned his cap around so the bill hung down his neck, snapped his helmet on, and started off again.
I followed him a mile and a half through light afternoon traffic to a McDonald’s restaurant. He parked at the back door and went in that way.
So now I knew where I’d seen that uniform before, and I knew where he lived, which didn’t look like any relatives’ house, and I knew that he worked and where, which suggested he wasn’t living off any inheritance or an allowance from his relatives either.
“And why is that?” I as
ked the back door of McDonald’s.
He’d left his backpack on the bike.
I pulled my car closer to the back door of the restaurant, and engine idling, I looked it all over: I thought he’d said the bike was a 750, which meant it was a good-sized one, and it looked it up close. It would take a person of some strength to hold it upright when it wasn’t running and long legs to feel comfortable sitting on it. Again, it reminded me of a wasp because of the way it looked and because of the intimidating buzz it made going down a road at any speed. Motorcycles made people stare in interest or alarm, like stinging insects did; they made people angry, annoyed, or frightened or drew their envy and fascination. Not a neutral machine.
Why had he left his backpack out here, unprotected, unsecured except for a bungee cord that tied it down behind the black vinyl seat? The pack was mostly dark blue, but close up, I saw that the flap that came down over the top was forest green, and it was fastened only by a black cord looped over a barrel-shaped button. There were a couple of zippers on it, and it looked heavy and bulgy, as if it had school books in it. I fantasized about getting out of my car, going over to the bike, touching the backpack, and then opening it.
A sound from inside the restaurant made me look up. The kid was standing there, holding the door open, staring at me as I examined his bike.
I held his gaze, trying to show no more surprise than he was.
“I’ve never been on one of these,” I said, talking kind of loud over the noise in the parking lot and the sound of my own car and my own heart pounding. I resented the fact that this kid had the capability of making me feel ill at ease in my own body, my own personality, my own home and hometown. Who was he, this pimply stranger, to have that kind of power over me, us, our lives?
“Wait a minute,” he said and disappeared into the restaurant.
When he appeared only a couple of minutes later, he had somebody with him, a girl in a uniform just like his. She ran over to a white multispeed bike—as in bicycle—and unlocked a matching white helmet from it, which she handed to David before she ran back into the restaurant. They didn’t exchange any words; he didn’t even say thanks.
“You can wear this,” he said to me.
Oh, shit, I thought, push has come to shove. He was offering me a ride on his motorcycle.
I thrust myself out of my car and took the flimsy-feeling helmet he handed me and eased it down on my head and fumbled the strap into place under my chin. “Is this legal?” I asked him, pointing to my head, which all of a sudden felt extraordinarily fragile to me.
“No, but it’ll get us past a cop.”
That didn’t seem to me to be the point of a motorcycle helmet, but I decided to let it pass and to take my chances. People rode on motorcycles every day without getting their skulls squashed like cantaloupes, didn’t they? And he’d seemed to be a careful driver. Maybe I’d survive without being paralyzed for the rest of my life.
“Wear your sunglasses,” he instructed. “They’ll protect your eyes.”
I stuck the arms of my sunglasses between the inside of the helmet and my head, and they wedged there a little painfully over my ears.
“You can leave work?” I asked.
“Screw ’em. They’re looking for an excuse.”
“But I don’t want to get you fired.”
“It’s not your problem.”
He got on, turned a small key in an ignition, and twisted his right handlebar. The bike’s engine revved up louder than my heart. “Put your foot here,” he said, pointing to a small silver bar in back of his left foot. “Watch out for the exhaust, or you’ll get burned. Get on behind me.”
Awkwardly, I did, and once seated, I didn’t know what to do with my hands. He answered that for me by starting up with a jerk, so that first I jolted backward and then was yanked forward again by gravity, and my arms instinctively went around his waist. He was bones and muscle, no extra flesh at all. It felt strange to be so intimately connected to this kid, this stranger, with my sweaty chest pressed up against his sweaty back and my bare arms around his midriff. We roared off down Frederick Boulevard, and I wondered how in the world I could have gotten the impression he was a cautious driver. He weaved between cars, skidded around corners, squealed to stops at lights, until I just had to give in to the fear and put the left side of my face against his sweaty back and close my eyes and pray it wasn’t my day to die. Closing my eyes all the way wasn’t a good idea, however; it made me feel vertiginous and vulnerable, as if I were sitting in space going a million miles an hour through an asteroid field where I felt as if I were going to collide with something hard and fatal at any moment. I squinted through my sunglasses, but the world was a blur going by. Maybe one of Geof’s uniformed officers would time us or spot my illegal helmet, pull us over, make me deplane from this rocket. One could only hope.
When I opened my eyes fully again, we were almost out of the city.
“Where are we going?” I shouted in his right ear.
“I can hear you,” he said over his shoulder in an almost normal voice. “You don’t have to yell. It hurts my ears.”
“Where are we going?” I repeated more quietly. I thought about telling him that I had to get back soon, but then I realized I was beginning to enjoy the ride, now that we were out of traffic. I loosened my grip on his waist and leaned back and sat more upright, putting my fingers lightly on his belt for security but allowing a few inches of space between our bodies.
“I’m just taking you for a ride,” he said.
“I’ve got to get back,” I objected.
His response was to rev the bike to a faster speed.
I was already scared; there didn’t seem to me to be much point in getting any more frightened. But this time, I kept my eyes open.
11
GEOF USED HIS OWN LUNCH BREAK THAT DAY to get a paternity test.
“Will it be essay,” I had said as we were getting dressed that morning, “or multiple choice?”
“Neither,” he had retorted just before he had stepped into the shower. “A paternity test is where they tie you to the bed with sheets and beat you until you scream, ‘Yes! He’s my kid, yes, I admit it, he’s my kid!’”
Personally, I thought he still looked eager to make that confession.
“No, really …” I stood in the steam in the bathroom and raised my voice over the pouring water. “Is it still a blood test, or do they do some kind of DNA test these days?”
“What?” he called out.
I had already put on my shorts and T-shirt for the day, but now I shed them and stepped behind the shower curtain with him.
“Well, hi,” he said, water streaming over his grin.
“So is it a blood test or DNA?”
He grabbed my left arm and turned it over to expose the inside of my elbow, which he stroked with the bar of soap he was holding. “What they will do is suck a couple of vials of my precious bodily fluids out of here, and they will check my blood type and some obscure red blood antigens and they’ll do what they call HLA typing, which detects proteins that are present in my lymphocytes, whatever the hell those are.”
“Will they check your carbohydrates, too?”
He laughed. “No, my carburetor.”
I took the soap away from him and started soaping him down.
“Um. Lower.”
“So what will all of that tell them?”
“It’ll determine whether David and I share the same blood type, for one thing, but as I understand it, the deciding factor is the HLA typing. If I’m the one, David will have half of those little proteins from his mother and the other half from me. If he doesn’t have any from me, then he won’t have to buy me a Father’s Day gift next spring.”
I looked into his eyes and smiled a little. “And are you counting on a bottle of cologne?”
He smiled back at me. “I guess I am, kind of.”
I gave him a wet kiss, patted his tush, and got out of the shower before I made the mistake of saying
what I was thinking: So what are these little dead trophies that you were so concerned about last night, Geof? Mother’s Day gifts?
The house was cold from having the air conditioner on all night, but neither of us had made a move to turn it off and to open the windows again.
That was the morning, a peaceful start to a day that was about to become one of the strangest of Geof’s life.
Taking the blood test was weird enough, of course.
But after leaving the clinic that noon, feeling keyed up, anxious, and curious, Geof—I found out later—went looking for David’s relatives, starting with his grandparents, the Ronald Mayer Seniors.
He drove out to the home of Ron’s parents in the old rich part of town, the one on which the suburb where Ron and Judy had lived was modeled. In this, the original one, when you described a house as Colonial, you literally meant that it was built around the time King George was on the throne, and when you said a house was Federalist, you meant it had stood since the papers of the same name had been written.
I grew up near that neighborhood; so did Geof, but that didn’t mean we knew everybody who lived there. I didn’t know any of the Mayers, for instance, and Geof had only known the oldest boy, Ron. Geof sometimes accused me of talking about Port Frederick as if it were still a cozy little fishing village when the truth had always been that while there were dozens, maybe even hundreds, of residents we’d known all of our lives, there were also plenty of strangers, even to a cop.
The senior Mayers’ house was a huge, old rambling one set way back in the curve of a sheltered cul-de-sac, a luxurious, semicircle of shade, one of many in that part of town. Their house was sheltered, nearly hidden, by vast reaches of shrubbery and flowers that were themselves descendants of fine old roots and trees so venerable you wondered if minutemen had propped their muskets against them.
Confession Page 11
