Step wanted to storm into Dicky’s office and call him every name he could think of. But he couldn’t. If only Arkasian had come through. If only Step had a contract with somebody else, a way to get out of this place. It would be such a joy to tell Dicky Northanger exactly what he thought of him. Instead, Step put the memo into his attaché case, locked it again, and then headed for the pit.
The pit was silent when Step came in, and for a moment he thought that they all blamed him for this. But their silence, he realized, was because Dicky was in the room, leaning over the shoulder of one of the programmers. Since Dicky rarely came into the pit, this was in itself significant—but then, perhaps Dicky was doing it in order to stifle the outrage that they were all no doubt feeling. Well, that was fine with Step. The longer Dicky hung around in the pit, the more their anger would focus on him instead of on Step.
“Glass,” said Step. “I need you in my office, if you can. I’m having some trouble with the way hyphenation is handled and I think there’s a system to it that you can explain to me.” They had worked all of this out the week before, but Dicky certainly wouldn’t know that.
It didn’t matter. “Glass will not go into your office right now,” said Dicky. “And there is no reason for you to be in the pit. Glass is helping me work with my programming staff, and that takes precedence over anything the manual-writing staff needs. In fact, you should make a list of your questions and leave them on my desk, and I will get the answers for you. The programming staff has been inclined to goof off, and I am not allowing any further distractions.”
“Documentation is not a distraction, Dicky,” said Step.
“No, it’s not,” said Dicky. “But people walking into the programming center and talking loudly are a distraction, and I won’t have it. Leave your questions on my desk.”
Step stood there a moment, looking at him, and then he thought: We didn’t get all the crickets last night. There’s one left, waiting to jump on me the second he thinks I’m not watching. Well, Dicky, I’m a champion cricket killer. I’m an expert at it. And if I can slaughter those crook-legged hordes, I can handle one lone whining fiddler like you.
Step went back to his office and wrote a memo.
Dear Ray,
Dicky has barred me from the pit, and wants me to funnel all my questions for the programmers through him. If that’s the way you want it, fine with me. But if that isn’t the way you want me to do my job, then the change will have to come from you.
Step signed it and carried it to Ray’s secretary, Ludy. “Is Ray in?” he asked.
“Yes, but he’s not seeing anyone,” she said.
“Does he have anyone in there with him?”
She looked a little startled. “Step, I can’t see that that’s really any of your business.”
“I just wanted to know if, when I walk in there and lay this memo on his desk, I’m going to be embarrassing him in front of someone else or not.”
Ludy didn’t blink an eye, and her smile didn’t fade. “Compared to barging into his office, Step, embarrassing him in front of somebody else is hardly going to be a problem. I really advise you against it.”
“Well, then, tell me what else I can do to make sure he gets my memo. I’ve written him a couple of dozen memos about different things since I’ve been here, and as far as I know he’s never got them. He never answers them anyway, and the only time he ever phoned me was yesterday when he knew perfectly well that I wasn’t in.”
Ludy reached her hand closer to him across her desk; if he had been sitting by her, the gesture probably would have been a touch on the arm. “Step, he gets all your memos.”
“Cross your heart?”
She smiled. “And hope to die.”
He handed her the memo. “And you might tell him that if he doesn’t answer this one, he’s going to be looking for a new manual writer.”
“I’ll tell him,” she said, “that you’d really appreciate an answer as soon as it’s convenient. That way, if he does want to send an answer, you’ll be around to receive it.” She winked at him.
“You’ve got a twitch in your eve.” Then he winked back. Ludy rolled her eyes, and he left.
When DeAnne called Bappy to find out about what exterminator to call, he seemed almost excited. “I do that myself!” he crowed. “I worked for one of them companies way back and I’ve kept up! I’ll be right over, and you just make sure all the containers in your kitchen is closed up tight.”
“The kitchen?” she asked. “Do you have to spray stuff in the kitchen?”
“That’s where the bugs like to be best, where the food is,” he said. “And you best get the kids out of the house while I’m doing it.”
She had plans for today. And Step had taken the car, since he was so late to work. Maybe she could take the kids over to Jenny’s house. And most of her work could wait. Mostly checkbook balancing, not that there was much to balance. She could do it after Bappy was done. And her little hope of perhaps taking a nap at the same time as the children, to make up for last night’s lost sleep—well, she had scheduled naps before, but she didn’t often get to actually take them, and that was OK, it was part of the territory. Part of the never-ending struggle to get organized. When she finally got organized, there’d be time for naps. “How long will it take?” she asked.
“Couple hours,” said Bappy. “Got to get under the house and up in the attic, you know. Do it right. You said you already got the place plugged where they came up through?”
“With old socks is all,” said DeAnne.
“’Bout what I’d use myself, anyway,” said Bappy. “Just so it’s plugged. Anyways, two hours after I’m done the stuff will all be settled and then y’all can come on back into the house and open up the windows and air it out. But don’t you be thinking of coming back too soon. Got to take care of your precious burden.”
It took her just a moment to realize that her “precious burden” was the baby, who even now was pressing hard against the distended wall of her stomach. Well, she didn’t need Bappy to tell her that she shouldn’t be inhaling bug-killer when you never could tell what might cross the placenta. And she didn’t want her older kids to be breathing it straight into their lungs, either.
She called Jenny, who really sounded delighted about having sudden all-day company, and when Bappy pulled into the driveway in his pickup truck and started pulling what looked like scuba gear out of the back, DeAnne gave him the spare housekey, shouldered an extra-heavy diaper bag, and led the kids off on the walk to the Cowpers’ house.
DeAnne had driven Stevie to school this morning, but, knowing that Step would be late enough getting up that he’d need the car to get to work, she told Stevie to take the schoolbus home. He would have no idea that the house was being fumigated. It was only eleven o’clock, so maybe they’d be back in the house before the schoolbus dropped Stevie off—but maybe not. She’d have to make a point of being there to meet him. She hated the idea of any of her children ever, even once, coming home to an empty house.
Life in Jenny Cowper’s house was hard for DeAnne, at first. Chaos bothered her, the children running every which way, yelling at each other or coming in at odd intervals to scream out a report of some disaster to Jenny, who, likely as not, said, “Thanks for telling me, dear,” and then did nothing. At first DeAnne was horrified at how lackadaisical Jenny was about her children’s safety. And when DeAnne saw Jenny’s five-year-old sitting on top of the crossbar of the swing set in the back yard, riding it like a pony, she could not restrain herself. “Jenny, you’ve got to do something.”
Jenny looked up at her and smiled. “Like what, staple his feet to the ground? The first time he climbed up there I nearly had a heart attack, but the fact is that he’s a good climber and he never falls. I’ve watched him, and he’s careful. So I figure, he’s going to climb, and better if he does it where I can see him, where he can show off to me, instead of doing it when I’m not watching. Now that’s dangerous. So we have a deal—he
can climb up there, but only when I’m watching.”
“Forgive me, Jenny,” said DeAnne, “but you’re not watching. You’re talking to me.”
Jenny laughed. “OK, then, I’m listening. If there’s a scream, I know I need to do something.”
“There’ve been fifty screams already.”
“I know, but they weren’t the kind of scream you worry about. And half of them were you, anyway, DeAnne.”
“Did I scream?”
“This little high-pitched scream, yes. I know you think I’m the worst kind of mother, and I’ll tell you, I used to be like you. After my kids all the time. Hovering over them.”
“Do I hover?”
“Don’t you?” asked Jenny.
“I want them safe,” she said. “If something happened to them . . .”
“But things will happen to them. You think just because you’re watching them, stopping them from having any fun, they won’t still break their arms or split their lips? And what are you going to do when your Elizabeth starts dating, make it so she never gets a broken heart? God gave our children life, and it’s not our place to take it away from them just because we’re afraid. That’s what I think.”
It sounded so sensible, so wise. And yet, and yet. “What about this missing child?” DeAnne said, pointing to the newspaper.
“Isn’t that awful?” said Jenny. “And there was that other one I told you about not six months ago. I tell you, you see those faces on the milk cartons, and you think, there’s some mother out there, and one day she looked for her little boy and called his name and he didn’t answer, and she went out and called and called, and he didn’t answer, and then all of a sudden it comes into her heart that he never will, he’ll never answer her again, and oh, DeAnne, doesn’t it tear your heart out?”
“Yes,” said DeAnne. “He was just walking over to his friend’s house, three doors away, and he never got there.”
“And that mother’s going to blame herself, DeAnne, I know she is,” said Jenny. “She’s going to say, If only I had watched him. Walked out in the front yard and watched him till he went in the front door of that house.”
“Yes,” said DeAnne. ‘Yes, and she’s right!”
“No she isn’t,” said Jenny. “Because inside that house there could have been a gun with bullets in it, and so what should she have done about that, stood over him the whole time he was playing? Forbid him ever to go to a friend’s house? Lock him in his room? Do you think that the boy wouldn’t have known that his mother was watching? That she didn’t trust him to get from his house to a friend’s house three doors away?”
“But he couldn’t!”
“This time he couldn’t,” said Jenny. “But maybe he’s already done it a hundred times. Like when your kids learn to walk, you don’t hold their hand anymore, they get to a point where you just let go of their hand and they walk by themselves. Do you think that means they never fall down again?”
“Turning up missing isn’t quite the same thing as falling down.”
“Do you think I don’t know that? Do you think I don’t know that one moment of carelessness and my Aaron could be lying there under the swing set with a broken neck? Dead or paralyzed for the rest of his life? Do you think I don’t have a stab of fear go through my heart when I see him up there?”
“Then why do you let him?”
“Why does God let us live on this earth?” asked Jenny. “Why doesn’t he come down and watch every move we make and keep us from ever, ever, ever doing anything wrong? Because we can’t grow up if somebody’s doing that. We can’t become anything. We’d be puppets.”
DeAnne didn’t know how to answer. Anguish was twisting her inside. Partly it was the newspaper story about the mother of that little lost boy. Partly it was the strain of not being in her own home, of having her kids playing with these wild hellions that Jenny was raising so free. Partly it was what Stevie had gone through at school for weeks and weeks, without DeAnne having any idea. It was Dolores LeSueur taking him aside and sowing the seeds of some terrible life-sucking weed in his mind, and by the time DeAnne knew about it, the seeds had already taken root, and there was nothing she could do except hope that Stevie’s native goodness and common sense would help him get rid of those thoughts on his own.
“I just can’t stop watching out for them,” said DeAnne, “even though I know that I can’t protect them from everything. I know that. I know that they’re out of my protection for so much of the time. Stevie at school, and when I’m out of the room even. Anything could happen. But I can still do something, I can still try.”
“For what it’s worth, DeAnne, I actually do step in and stop my kids from doing really dangerous stuff,” said Jenny. “It’s just my, um, my threshold isn’t as low as yours is.”
“Jenny, I’m not talking about you now,” said DeAnne. “I’m talking about me. Because I know you’re right, and I’m just—I don’t want to overprotect my children and turn them into frightened little hamsters in the corner of a box. But I can do something. I can maybe save them sometimes, can’t I? It’s like my neighbor across the street in Orem. There was this guy with a pickup truck who used to roar down the street, going too fast, and she just hated it, and her husband even spoke to him about it but he just laughed and told him to drop dead. So one evening, it’s dusk, you know, when it’s dark enough that you can’t really see anymore but you still can, sort of, and she realizes, I’ve let the children play too late, I’ve got to get them all into the house, and she goes outside and she’s calling out for them and then she hears that truck turn the corner and gun the motor and there’s the headlights coming down the street and then she hears the sound of her son’s Hot Wheels on the asphalt of the street. Not on the sidewalk, on the asphalt, and she thinks, he’s in the street, he’s going to die, and sure enough, there’s her son tooling across the road, his legs churning, and there’s the truck, and she knows the truck will never see the boy in time to stop, and her son is twenty yards to her right, much too far for her to run to him in time, and the truck is coming from the left, and he’ll never hear her shouting at him, not with that engine, and so without even thinking about it she just steps into the road in front of the truck. Just steps into the road.”
“Good heavens,” said Jenny.
“And the truck guy saw her and he slammed on his brakes and it turned out that he really could stop in time, but then she was a full-sized person, who knows whether he would have seen her little boy? And he gets out of his truck just yelling and cussing at her, you know, what kind of idiot are you, and she just stood there crying and crying until finally the guy sees the little kid pull up to his mom on his Hot Wheels, right there in the middle of the road, and the guy realizes that he never saw the little kid until right that minute, and he says, ‘My God,’ and they didn’t have any trouble with him speeding down that road anymore.”
“I don’t know if I could have done that,” said Jenny. “I would have stood there on the curb and screamed or something. I don’t know if I could have just . . . stepped into the road.”
“She didn’t know either, till she did it,” said DeAnne.
“Well of course you save your kid from a speeding car,” said Jenny. “Even a lousy mother like me would try to do that! But what she did—I mean, that’s beyond love, that’s all the way into crazy. What if the truck couldn’t stop? What does that do to the little boy, seeing his mother killed right in front of his eyes? And he grows up without his mom.”
“He grows up knowing that his mom gave her life to save his. That’s got to help.”
“Or he feels guilty all his life because he feels like it’s his fault she died. DeAnne, I’m not saying she was wrong—I mean, she was right because it all worked out. But even saving his life, she might also do harm. Anything can do harm, anything might work. Well, not anything, but you know what I mean. Maybe you’re right to be so protective, and maybe I’m right to run a looser ship. Maybe maybe maybe.”
“So n
o matter what we do, we’re probably wrong.”
“No, DeAnne, don’t think of it that way. Think of it that no matter what we do, as long as we’re trying to do our very best for our kids, it will work out. Maybe they’ll get hurt. Maybe they’ll grow up so mad at us that they don’t speak to us for twenty years. Maybe they’ll get killed—that’s part of life. It’s the worst thing in the world, to lose a child. At least I can’t think of anything worse. But it happens. And when the child dies, God takes him into his home the same way that he takes old people who die. I mean, even if his life was short, it was life, and was it good? Was he happy? Did he have a chance to taste it, to choose things for himself, to—”
“I know,” said DeAnne. Despite her loathing for herself when she was weak enough to cry in front of someone else, her tears started flowing. Just thinking of children dying, and the mother whose son was lost today, and her friend in Orem who knew, knew, that she would give her life for her child. And Stevie. “I’m sorry. It’s just . . . what we’ve been going through for the past while with Stevie . . . ever since we moved here. I’ve just felt so helpless. And now things are going to be OK with him, because Step went to school and took care of it, I mean things are going to be fine now, if he can just get rid of these imaginary friends. So why am I crying now? Why do I just feel shaky and cold and—”
Jenny slid her chair over next to DeAnne’s and put her arms around her and DeAnne cried into her shoulder. “You can’t stop bad things from happening,” said Jenny softly. “That’s why you’re crying. You think I didn’t ever have a day like this? Days like this? And then I came out of it and I realized that I can only do what’s possible, and I stopped expecting myself to make life perfect for my kids, perfectly happy, perfectly safe. They cry sometimes, they hurt sometimes, and it still tears me up inside, but I can only do what I can do, and that’s what you’ve got to realize too, DeAnne. I saw that the day I met you, that you just expect too much of yourself, and so you’re bound to fail all the time, because you don’t count it as success unless you’ve done what nobody can do.”
Lost Boys: A Novel Page 22
