“The kids?” he says.
“Holly and Fiona have them.”
“Imagine—that.”
“I know. I never would’ve believed it from those first times. They’ve been so good, though. They stayed with me that whole night, when it happened. I don’t know what I would’ve done.”
“What about—tomorrow? Will—you—be able to visit me—” he has to strain now, and the frustration shows in his face, the tic working, the hypothalamic denial going on, more pronounced because of his anger. Finally, he gets it out. “Tomorrow?”
“Jonathan has school. Kalie will stay with them. You know I will.”
He squeezes again. There are plastic tubes running into his nose and along his wrist, an apparatus next to the bed, a structure of ill health.
All part of the badness of her father being here.
They watch the game. In the next bed, partly obscured by a hanging curtain that ought to be more privacy-making, is a man with some sort of trouble in his legs—he’s had surgery, too, and is also hooked to an IV. He sleeps fitfully, saying names. His chin descends into his neck, a single slack fold of gray-stubbled flesh. He looks helpless and too inert, until he utters the names, and then he seems dimly pathetic. There’s something exasperated and anxious in his voice. “Lillian,” he murmurs.
“Georgia. Belle—Belle, honey?”
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An elderly woman nods off in a chair by his bed. When she opens her gray eyes, dazed and sleepy, she looks at Alison through the open space in the curtain and nods with a seriousness that seems faintly censorious, as if the opening is Alison’s fault.
“Elaine?” the man mutters, and then mumbles something indistinguishable. “Lydia,” he says.
The woman looks at Alison. “People who work for him,” she says.
“He runs a sheet-glass store.” This seems oddly flimsy as an explanation: there’s something too familiar in the way he says the names.
“Marie, you sweetie.”
“Shut up, Drew,” the woman says. She looks at Alison. “He’s had phlebitis. He’s going to be okay.”
Alison nods and looks away.
“Oh,” the man mumbles, seeming about to laugh. “Agnes, for Christ’s sweet sake.”
The woman turns a bright violet color and gets up to close the curtain. “You’re talking in your sleep, Drew. Shut up.”
“Oh, Martha. I got a headache.”
“It’s the medicine. Shut up.”
Alison stands and kisses the side of her father’s face, and then sits down again. Oliver winks at her. “Gonna be—fine,” he says.
In the first hour, he was angry at the doctors and nurses, cursing them, a man frustrated to the point of rage at the nonunderstanding of everyone around him. The doctors told Alison that this was normal, that this was all part of the attack, and was probably healthy. In any case, it was unavoidable. So, the wink, now, is especially charming, and it is intended, she’s certain, knowing him as she does, to communicate to her his understanding that the worst is over; he will be himself again. He is already showing that, squeezing her hand once more and then patting the back of it.
The game goes on in a blaze of scoring. Washington and Dallas, neither side playing much defense—it seems at first that the thing must surely be decided by who has the ball last. But then, shortly after the start of the second half, Dallas begins to pull away. They’re up by twenty-four points as the fourth quarter begins, and they have the ball t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t
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again. Oliver has watched and dozed and waked, teasing her about sleeping through it, and now he stirs, gives her hand another soft pat.
“Hell,” he says. “Let’s go. The Redskins—don’t stand a—a—chance now.”
“Go?” Alison says.
“We’ll miss the—traffic.” The phrase seems momentarily to have confused him. He looks at her and then slowly gazes at the curtains surrounding the bed. It’s as if he decides that his first impression is indeed right: they can get up and leave now. They can miss the traffic. But, then, another glance around convinces him otherwise. His mouth tightens, and it’s clear that he wants to keep from her what has just happened.
“You should go get the kids. And—don’t—worry—”
“Daddy,” she says, fighting back tears.
He nods at her and smiles. It’s a little conspiracy they act out, to keep from herself her own perception that this might actually be the beginning of something they have both dreaded. His eyes well up.
“They said you’re going to make a full recovery,” she tells him.
The voice on the speaker system announces that visiting hours are over. She stands, leans over him, and kisses his cool, dry forehead, then steps back. His eyes follow her.
“You look so much like your mother.”
She bows. It’s the old exchange between them. She kisses him again, and then asks if he wants the television off.
“I like the noise.” He gestures with his head toward the hanging curtain and the other bed. “I think they might want it on.”
“Okay.”
At the door, she pauses. The elderly woman is still beyond the curtain.
Alison starts back to Oliver—she won’t leave until the hospital enforces the end of visiting hours. But then, the elderly woman makes her way across the foot of Oliver’s bed. She’s carrying a paper bag and a heavy-looking purse, and she looks at Alison with concern that Alison knows is a reluctance to get tangled at the door with leave-taking. Alison blows Oliver a kiss, and walks out into the hall and, along it, to the exit.
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3.
Monday, at the high school, Elizabeth goes through the long morning, giving writing assignments, filling out forms, spending time in the library. She works with Calvin Reed for a few minutes, just before the lunch hour, and the boy seems to have drawn even further down into himself. She says, “Do you think you could meet me halfway a little?”
He stares dumbly at her.
“Just make the slightest effort.”
“No.” On his assignment, which is supposed to be a narrative, he has written: “Got arrested summer. B & E. Distruckshun of goods. Nobody home. Got plasted. Thru up all over.”
She looks at it. She has learned that the best kind of response to writing is always specific and involving not the expression—at least, in the beginning—but the subject matter, to earn the student’s trust. She says,
“Is this your home you’re talking about?”
He shrugs. “It says B & E.”
“Can you tell me more about it?”
“No.”
“I want to help you, Calvin. But you have to let me.” The words feel stale in her mouth.
His expression is of complete nonunderstanding. But there’s something else, too—a kind of blank coldness, as though she’s something made of metal, about which he feels only the mildest curiosity. She thinks of the cold eyes of cats, the dead stare of a snake.
When James Christ comes in, he wants to tell her about a disturbance out in the hall. He had to break up a fight between two girls.
“There’s three groups in this school,” he tells her. “The leaders, the mob, and the sufferers.”
“It’s like that in every school,” Elizabeth says, barely listening to him.
“Yeah, well I got ganged up on. I was one of the sufferers. Can you imagine what I went through with my name? I’m still going through it.
But you’re right. It’s the world. And I guess I better get used to it.”
“But it isn’t supposed to be about you, now, is it?”
“Oh, well pardon me all to hell.”
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Sometimes it seems to Elizabeth that, in his small way, James Christ, by the very fact of his namesake, underscores the sense of Christ as historical: a man, with a man’s temperament and a man’s frailties, wha
tever else he was. It’s abysmal to think of the son of God being, even for a moment, petulant or irritable. Annoyed by a sound. Last spring, a bird outside her window seemed to repeat the same five syllables over and over, like a high-pitched cackle in the back of the throat of a very old witch. On and on it went, and she, who loves birds and birdsong, would gladly have shot it if she could’ve located it.
Now, in the early afternoon, she heads to the STOP room where, con-firming her own unpleasant expectations, she finds Calvin, sitting in the first stall with a pencil in his hands, legs straight out under the table, down-slanting shoulders slumped, a little nervous motion of the hands with the pencil the only motion at all. He’s staring at the shiny surface of the desk, polished black slate.
There’s no one else in the room. Usually, there are at least three or four others. She takes her seat at the front of this classroom with dark paint over the window in the door, and the rows of stalls, each with its chair and its table. As she takes her seat, she watches Calvin, who doesn’t look up, seems not to have heard her come in. “Did you sign in?” she asks him.
He nods without turning.
On the sheet before her is the paper with lines for students to write their names and the time they arrived. He hasn’t put the time down.
She writes it in for him, then sits back and brings The Great Gatsby out of her bag. “Do you have something to do?” she asks him.
“No.”
“Your teacher didn’t give you anything?”
“Math. Fuck it.”
“You know what the rules are about that kind of talk, Calvin.”
“Fuck it,” he says.
How much a part of her would like to stand and say, “Well, you know, all right. And fuck you, Calvin. Fuck you and everybody that looks like you.” But she holds her temper, opens the drawer of the desk, brings out a piece of paper, and stands to take it to him. Now he does 206
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look at her—at the front of her. There’s something so measuring, so nakedly lubricious about it that she almost stops and turns from him. It requires a kind of dismissal of her own doubts to keep coming toward him. She hands him the paper. “Draw me something.”
His eyes have trailed up her body to her face. There is nothing at all in his expression.
“Go on,” she says. “I know you can draw. Draw me anything.”
He shrugs and moves the pencil, holding the paper she’s given him and gazing at it as if he expects it to begin speaking to him.
She returns to the desk, sits, and reads for a time, purely for the pleasure of it, though she will be teaching it soon enough. Then, because she has to, she takes out her work folder with its hundred essays in it. She hears the pencil moving on the page, and so she watches him a little, surreptitiously. His intentness grows. He’s soon lost in whatever he’s drawing, his knuckles showing white where his fingers grip the pencil. The pencil makes a scratching sound, and she wonders why the point doesn’t break on it. She tries to read a little. She recalls Saturday night with Will, how perfect it was and peaceful. But then she remembers that, on Saturday, Oliver Ward had a stroke and poor Jonathan Lawrence spent the night in a hospital waiting room. She glances up at Calvin, who’s still moving the pencil point hard back and forth on the page, concentrating so heavily, staring down. Her own sensitivity to the troubles of others often makes her feel susceptible, exposed, and there is always the urge to look for some way to help. Before her are all these student essays to evaluate, and she begins doing that.
Calvin makes a small, child-voiced, throat-clearing sound. It amazes her, the notes his larynx can reach, coming from that big body. She looks up and sees that he’s holding the paper toward her. She stands, reaches for it, but he draws it back.
“Just want to show it first,” he says.
She comes around the desk and approaches him. She can see from here that he’s filled the page with something dark, a lot of shading and dark lines. Before she can get to him, the door opens and another boy is there, with Mr. Petit. The boy is all slouch and swagger. “This young man will be spending the next hour here,” says Mr. Petit. “His name is Roger Stillman.”
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The boy stares hatefully, but is silent.
Elizabeth hands Mr. Petit a referral sheet.
“Can you please fill it out for me?” he says. The look on his face stops her.
“Of course.”
“I have work to do. It was Mrs. Terrence who sent him to me in the first place.”
The boy walks to a chair opposite Calvin and sits down, still glaring.
Mr. Petit leaves, and Elizabeth writes out the referral.
“You know why he won’t suspend me?” the boy says.
Calvin’s staring at his drawing and makes no response.
“Because I know something.”
Elizabeth says, “Quiet please.”
And there is quiet. A long, freighted silence. Time comes for Calvin to go to his next class, a gym class, though Elizabeth supposes that the gym teacher will send him right back here. He’ll no doubt spend many days this year in this room. Now he scratches his name on the sign-out sheet, his drawing folded and stuffed into his ratty notebook.
“May I see the drawing, Calvin?”
He looks at her and then at the boy. “No.”
“I can insist, you know.”
Reluctantly, he takes the drawing out and holds it toward her. It’s a nude, perfectly rendered. A woman lying back on a bed, legs slightly spread, staring. The face is startlingly, very disturbingly, like Elizabeth’s, as is the shape of the body. She works to ignore this, though she feels as if this is a form of aggression. Of course, to show him that he has upset her would give him exactly what he wants. “You have talent,” she tells him, handing the drawing back.
“I can make more.”
“That would be boring, though.”
He actually smiles—a thin, loutish grin. “Not really.”
“Why aren’t you in the art classes here?”
“Color-blind.”
“Do you know the drawings of M. C. Escher?”
“I’ve got to go,” he says.
She walks with him to the door, and when she steps out into the 208
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hall, he walks past her and on, not looking back. “Calvin?” she says.
He stops. The bulk of him in the hallway is almost frightful; four other kids walk by him, not even coming up to his waist. His hips are so wide, his legs are like thick stumps, and he’s wearing his pants the way all the boys wear them now—halfway down his ass.
“Stay out of trouble?” she makes herself say. “Don’t come back?”
He nods again, more definitely this time, and walks—lurches, it seems—away. When she starts back into the STOP room, she nearly collides with James Christ, coming from the other direction. It’s like one of those comic passes in the movies: they move one way and then the other in tandem, and then she reaches over and takes his arms above the elbow and moves him. “I’m getting another job,” he says. “I’m already gone.”
4.
Alison drives to Holly and Fiona’s house. There’s no haze at all in the air now, and the mountains in the distance are a crisp, bright palette of color. How tired and depleted she is. Today, Oliver was mostly sleepy and unresponsive, so she simply held his hand and read a magazine article about global warming. Now, pulling up to the curb, she sees Kalie out on the sidewalk in front of the house. Kalie’s drawing with chalk on the concrete, and Holly stands with her, watching. Alison gets out of the car, and, as she approaches, realizes that Fiona is sitting on the roof of the house, a blanket over her shoulders, wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat against the sun. She has her arms resting on her upraised knees, and sips something out of a cup. Alison looks at her and waves. But Fiona is gazing off at the distance.
“Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain,” Holly says, smiling.
/>
Alison stares.
“Fiona’s having one of her fits.”
Fiona sips whatever’s in the cup and then holds it up as if to toast them.
“She wants me to call your colleagues, you know. But I’m not obliging, so she’s a bit stuck. You never saw anyone stubborn as that lady.”
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“It must be cold up there,” Alison says. Then, to Fiona: “You know you ought to come down from there. You might fall.”
“Are you on duty, dear?” Fiona asks.
“Do I look it?”
“Shouldn’t you do something?”
“Why don’t you come down. I’ve got an impressionable somebody to think about, you know? And a good example means a lot, don’t you think?”
“I’m enjoying the finer things up high. It’s quite safe.”
Holly laughs. “One card less than a deck,” she murmurs. Then she bends, with hands on knees, admiring Kalie’s drawing, which is of a big cartoon face, a line mouth drawn in a long, thin smile, enormous, floppy-looking ears. She has colored the eyes a strange, deep pond green. Next to that is another figure—something like a dinosaur, wearing a derby hat, with a bright yellow mane jutting from it. The mane, Kalie says proudly, was her idea. Alison kneels and kisses the side of Kalie’s face, admiring with her the work she has done, wanting to hold on.
“It’s such a nice view of the sky from up here,” Fiona calls from the roof. “I don’t think anyone could make me come down.”
“I don’t think anyone’s going to try,” Holly calls to her, “sweetheart.”
“It won’t matter. I’m staying. I like it.”
“You do that, lovie. You must be a little chilly, though.”
“Nothing I can’t stand. I can always jump down if I get too cold, you know.”
Alison walks to the spot of ground just beneath where the old woman is sitting and says, “You have to not talk like that around my child.”
“Sweetie,” Holly says to Kalie, “let’s go in the house, what do you say?”
“Okay,” says Kalie, rising, smacking herself on the backside to remove dust.
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