It was dark outside, and all the way home Robbie told Stevie about the adventures of the walk earlier that day. Robbie took a wide berth around the yucky hole and begged the others to be just as careful. But Stevie just plowed straight ahead, walking as close to the hole as he could, which drove Robbie to fits of anxiety.
“Stevie,” said DeAnne. “You may be angry at me, but Robbie hasn’t done anything to you.”
After a moment, Stevie said, “I’m sorry, Robbie. I’ll be more careful next time.”
It mollified Robbie—in truth, Stevie could do no wrong, as far as Robbie was concerned. Robbie seemed to have been born with the gift—or perhaps the curse—of empathy. If Stevie or Elizabeth or Step or DeAnne was hurt, Robbie got almost frantic in his sense of urgent helplessness. He had to do something to help, and yet at the age of four had no notion of what that might be. His life was almost entirely focused on others. And it made DeAnne wonder if a compassionate, Christlike character might be something you were born with, rather than something you acquired. Maybe all of Christianity was devoted to making normal people believe that they should live and feel and think the way that a few, special people just naturally did. In which case most believers would end up either frustrated at their failure to measure up, or frustrated because they did measure up but got no joy from suppressing all their natural instincts.
Nonsense, she decided. We are what we choose to be. Robbie is so profoundly compassionate because his spirit is that way, and always was that way, long before he was born. And if I’m not as good a person as he is, that doesn’t mean that I can’t learn to be. To believe anything else would be to despair.
To believe anything else would mean rejecting every other choice she had made in her life.
Step didn’t get home by eight o’clock. DeAnne put Elizabeth and Robbie to bed, but she let Stevie stay up a little while longer, waiting for Step. “Here, sit and read a book to me.”
He sat next to her, but then he said, “I don’t feel like reading.”
“Then let’s see what’s on TV.”
But with the cable not yet hooked up, there wasn’t anything watchable—too much fuzz, and only three VHF channels, with a maybe on a fourth one. And two channels on UHF, one with a dingy-looking old western, and one with a screaming used-car salesman. She should have let the old man hook up the cable. Baptize. Bappy. What a name. Of course she would have to tell Step about what she did today. Leaving the door open like that. Or maybe she shouldn’t, so he wouldn’t worry. But no, she had to tell him, because they didn’t hide things from each other, especially things that made them look stupid. Only this wasn’t about whether DeAnne looked stupid, this was about whether the children would be safe. Step couldn’t be worrying all the time about whether she was keeping them safe, he had to concentrate on work. Besides, if she told him he wouldn’t blame her, he’d blame himself for not being home, for not having been a good enough provider so that now he had to go away all day and leave her alone to take care of everything. No, that would not be a good story to tell him. But she couldn’t leave it unconfessed either. She would write it in the family journal, and tell him later, much later, when she had gone for several weeks—no, months—without leaving the door open like that.
“I want to play Kaboom,” said Stevie.
She sighed inwardly. He’d rather play a videogame than sit with her. A game that he could not win, a game that always made him so frustrated that he used to hit the computer or throw down the joystick until Step had to ban him from the computer several times, to help him learn to control his anger.
Anger was the mode he preferred tonight, apparently. “Go ahead,” she said. “I don’t know where the cartridges are.”
“Right here,” he said, going straight to a cardboard box and pulling out a plastic case with slots for all the Atari cartridges. Step had set up the computers the moment all the beds were together, and of course Stevie knew right where everything was.
It was nearly nine and DeAnne was about to send Stevie to bed when Step finally got home. He knew he had let them down and felt terrible about it. “I’m so sorry. Is he still up?”
“Playing Kaboom,” she said.
He went to the family room and knelt down beside Stevie. “Son, I’m so sorry I was late. It wasn’t my car, and we kept finding new bugs in the program, and I kept saying I had to get home, but he’d say, ‘Let’s just fix this one thing and try it,’ over and over again, and it was his car, what can I say? Even as it is he’s mad at me for leaving the thing unfinished.”
Stevie said nothing, just kept swinging the paddle left and right to catch the little bombs as they dropped from various points along the top of the screen. Then he missed one, and all the bombs on the screen at that moment exploded.
“Stevie, your mom said you were upset when you came home from school today. Do you want to tell me what happened?”
Stevie just stared at the screen, until finally he said, “I don’t want to talk to you about it.”
That slapped Step hard, DeAnne could see it. “Well, then, who are you going to talk to?”
“Mom,” said Stevie.
DeAnne could not believe what she was hearing.
Step stood up. “He’s punishing me for not getting home soon enough,” he said. “And probably for not taking him to school this morning.” Step did that—stating out loud how he interpreted the kids’ actions, so that they would see that he wasn’t fooled, or correct him if he was wrong.
Stevie didn’t correct him, so Step went on. “As long as you’ll talk to one of us, that’s all right. And if you were trying to hurt my feelings, then you’ve succeeded. I really am sorry that I wasn’t here when you needed me, but we explained to you that this is the way it’s got to be for a while. Most fathers have to go to work, and when you go to work, you can’t always be home when your kids need you. That’s the way it is, if we’re going to have food on the table and a roof over our heads.”
Stevie said nothing. DeAnne had never seen him so unforgiving. In fact, she had never seen him act unforgiving at all. Maybe what happened at school today really was awful, so awful that Stevie couldn’t forgive his father for not being there to protect him.
Well, she’d find out soon enough now. “Come on, Stevie,” she said. “Let’s go to your room and you can tell me what happened.”
“Not in front of Robbie,” he said.
“OK, we’ll go to my room,” she said. “Step, if you can’t wait for supper, fix yourself something, but if you wait I’ll poach some eggs or something.”
Step nodded, learning against the bookshelves. As she followed Stevie out of the room, she thought she had never seen Step look so bent, so broken, in all the years she’d known him. It made her want to go to him and hold him and comfort him . . . but she knew that Step would understand, would agree that it was more important for her to be with Stevie. The child’s needs always took precedence over the adult’s. That was the way it had to be, when you had children. That was the contract you made with the kids when you chose to call their spirits from heaven into the world, that as long as they were young and needed you, you did whatever you could to meet their needs before you did anything else for anybody else.
They sat next to each other on her side of the queen-sized bed that Step’s parents had given them as a wedding present. “What happened today, Stevie,” said DeAnne.
Almost immediately, his face twisted up and the pent-up tears flowed again as they had flowed in the car. “I couldn’t understand them, Mom!”
“What do you mean?”
“I couldn’t understand what they said! To me, I mean. I could understand them mostly in class, when they were talking to the teacher, but when they talked to me I didn’t understand hardly anything and so I just stood there and finally I said, I can’t understand you, and they called me stupid and retarded.”
“Honey, you know you’re not stupid. You know you’re a straight A student.”
“But I couldn’t und
erstand anything.” He sounded fierce now; much of his anger, she realized, must have been from the frustration he had felt, being unable to communicate with the other kids. “I asked them what language they were speaking, and they said ‘American,’ and then they started making fun of the way I talk, like I talked wrong or something. But I didn’t say anything wrong!”
“Honey, you’ve got to understand, this is a school in a fairly rural part of Steuben. A country school. They just have thick southern accents.”
“Well they understood everything I said.”
“Because you talk normal American English. Like on television. They all watch TV, so they’re used to understanding the way you talk.”
“Then why don’t they talk that way?”
“Maybe in a couple of generations they will. But right now they talk in a southern accent. And besides, you did understand some of what they said, or you wouldn’t have known they were calling you retarded and stupid.”
He began to cry harder. “I made this one girl write it down for me. That’s how I knew. And then they all wrote it down. Retarded and stupid. They wrote it on papers and gave it to me. All day. I didn’t read them, though. I mean after the first couple.”
“That was very wise of you,” said DeAnne. “And very cruel of them.”
“But when I was leaving at the end of school I left all those notes on the table and Mrs. Jones made me go back and pick them all up and take them with me.” The humiliation of it made him shudder. “So I picked them up and threw them in the trash and then she yelled at me.”
“She yelled at you?”
“She said that I had an unfriendly attitude and a chip on my shoulder and I’d better learn some manners or I’d never get along.”
She put her arm around him. “Oh, son, I’m so sorry. She should never have said anything like that.”
“They’re all against me there, Mom,” he said. “Even the teacher.”
“Stevie, I know it seems that way—”
“It doesn’t just seem, it is!”
“Mrs. Jones just didn’t understand what those papers were, or what the other kids had been saying.”
“She talks just like they do, Mom,” he said. “They just hate me because I’m from Utah!”
“Kids are cruel,” said DeAnne. “You knew that—the way they treated Barry Wimmer.” She remembered back to her own childhood, to her parents’ words to her. “Not all the kids were making fun of you, were they? Weren’t most of them just standing around watching?”
“They didn’t stick up for me, either,” said Stevie.
“No, they just watched. They just watched, and that made you feel like they all agreed with the mean ones. But they don’t, not really, Stevie. They just—they just hadn’t decided anything at all. So if they see you tomorrow standing tall and—”
“Don’t make me go back, Mom!” cried Stevie. He was trembling. “Don’t make me go back to class! Not Mrs. Jones’s class! Don’t make me!”
“Son! Calm down, please, calm down.” She had no idea what to do about this. Every natural instinct told her to say, Yes, Stevie, you’re right, that class is the last place in the world I’ll ever send you, and you can stay home with me and be safe for the rest of your life. But she knew that, however much she might want to say that, she couldn’t. It wouldn’t be right. “These things aren’t under my control—I can’t keep you out of school, and I can’t get you into another class unless Dr. Mariner agrees.”
“Don’t make me go back,” he whispered.
“Son, you’ll see—tomorrow they’ll probably still be mean, but it won’t be new anymore and so they’ll get bored and do something else. And in a few days the nicer kids will start being friends with you. Plus you’ll get used to the way they talk and you’ll understand them and things will be fine.”
“They’ll never be fine,” he said, and he got up and stalked out of the room. It was sadly funny, his furious walk, the way he tried to be forceful as he opened the door, but ended up fumbling with the door handle because he was still small enough that door handles weren’t easy. One thing was certain, though. She could not let this go without talking to Dr. Mariner.
The Steuben phone book was by the kitchen phone. Step was at the table, eating a tuna sandwich. With mustard on it, which always made her cringe a little, but he wouldn’t have it any other way.
“What was it?” asked Step.
“The kids made fun of his accent and the fact that he couldn’t understand their accent, and then Mrs. Jones actually told him off because he wasn’t being polite enough to her or to them!”
“Adults can be so stupid with children sometimes,” he said.
“He begged me not to send him back to school tomorrow.”
“So keep him home,” said Step.
“Are you serious?” She could not believe he was saying that.
“The teacher’s unsympathetic and the kids are all little shits,” he said. “Keep him home.”
She hated it when he used words like that, even though he apparently thought it was cute—it was so juvenile of him to use shock words, as if she were his parent instead of his wife. But she had long since learned that it was better to pretend she hadn’t noticed than to make a big deal about it.
“We can’t do that,” said DeAnne. “There are truancy laws, you know.”
“Just for a day. And tomorrow you call Dr. Mariner and ask for him to be reassigned to another second-grade class.”
“I was going to call her tonight.”
“Tomorrow is business hours. Tonight is home time.”
“This is a real problem, Step, and she will understand my calling her tonight. I can’t let him miss tomorrow or he’ll think that he can get out of school whenever he wants to avoid something unpleasant there.”
“My mother let us stay home,” he said. “One day. One day a year, she said, any one of her kids could stay home just because they couldn’t stand to go. They could only do it once, but they got that one day. Most years I didn’t even use it. But things were better because I knew I could. And when I went on those days that I didn’t want to go, when I had almost decided not to, then I was there because of my own choice, and not because anybody made me. I think it was a good plan.”
“But this is only his second day at a new school,” said DeAnne. “And what if Dr. Mariner won’t let him change classes? Do you think that on Wednesday it will be any easier for him to go?”
“It might,” he said.
“And it might not,” she said. “I can’t see that it will help him if he clings to his mother’s apron strings just because things were hard for him.”
Step sat there, looking at his sandwich. “Do what you want,” he said.
“Oh, Step, don’t be that way. I thought we were having a discussion.”
“No, you’re right. He needs to go. I guess I was just thinking that if I didn’t have to go back to work tomorrow, that would be the best thing in the world. Only if I stayed home tomorrow, then I’d never go back. So you’re right.” He looked up and grinned. “You got to send your little boys back into the cold cruel world.”
“Was it that bad today?”
“Not bad, just weird,” he said. “Don’t worry about it. There were a couple of minutes that I just felt like quitting, but what can you expect? I haven’t worked for anybody but myself in so long now, of course I felt rebellious and frustrated.” He took a bite, but she didn’t say anything. “And then coming home and having Stevie so mad at me—and I thought, He’s right. I should have been home. I should never have taken this job, we should pack up whatever we can fit in the car and drive back to Indiana or back to your parents’ place and I should sit down in the basement and teach myself to program the stupid Commodore 64 and somewhere between here and bankruptcy maybe I’ll come up with a hot game and we’ll be rolling in undeserved money again, like we were a year ago.”
“That wasn’t undeserved money,” she said.
“Oh, you know what I
mean,” he said.
“If you want to quit, then do it,” she said. “If we have to move, then we’ll move.”
“No,” he said. “You think I haven’t thought it through? We can’t afford another moving van, we don’t even have enough cash to get through the month, let alone get to another state. All of our credit cards are to the hilt. We’ve got no choice unless we want to go be street people or something. I go back to work tomorrow, and Stevie goes back to school, and if he hates me for not being there, then that’s just one more part of being a father.” He laughed bitterly. “Sons are supposed to hate their fathers. It just isn’t supposed to start so young.”
“He doesn’t hate you,” said DeAnne. “He was just—frustrated.”
“Call Dr. Mariner before it gets any later.”
She looked up the number and called. It was well after nine o’clock, and she might have gotten the principal out of bed, but Dr. Mariner was a southern lady, so she denied that she had been inconvenienced at all, and as DeAnne told her of Stevie’s problems that day at school, Dr. Mariner clucked in sympathy. “I’ll tell you what,” she said. “Tomorrow I’ll keep Stevie in my office, to take some tests that we need him to take anyway. Placement tests, to see if he should be in our gifted program—his records from that school in Indiana were quite impressive, you know. And while he’s taking those tests, I’ll talk with Mrs. Jones. And either we’ll change his assignment, or Mrs. Jones will make sure that things go more smoothly in the old class. How will that be?”
“You’re wonderful, Dr. Mariner,” DeAnne said, trying not to gush in her gratitude. “Thank you.”
“All in a day’s work, Mrs. Fletcher. Thank you for calling. Good night.”
“Good night.”
DeAnne hung up the telephone and slumped into a chair.
“Good news, I take it,” said Step.
“She’s going to keep him out of class, taking placement tests,” said DeAnne. “And then either reassign him or work things out so it’ll go better in Mrs. Jones’s class.”
“Well, see? You were right. Calling her tonight was exactly the right thing. That’s why I chose you to be the mother of my kids, because you’re a thousand times smarter than I’d ever be.”
Lost Boys: A Novel Page 8
