One of Grace’s arms draped over the couch and grabbed the empty air, searching for her drink or perhaps simply arranging weeds in her dream at the edge of the carpet. She moaned and shifted, then sat bolt upright and cried out, in a voice rent by epiphany: “She embezzled from Girl Scouts!”
The boy put his nibbled straw to his lips in a shushing motion and then said into the phone, “She’s shouting because of how lame that discovery is. It’s second-class work.”
But her mind was on fire. Susan had stolen from Girl Scouts. Was this not an act of love? Grace’s heart was pounding through her body. She leaped up with her orange cup and went to the liquor cabinet for another drink, slopping gin all over the sideboard. She took a clarifying chug. This discovery felt like a communiqué. It sounded absurd, but Grace couldn’t help but thinking that Susan had somehow arranged to have her find out about the embezzlement. This was, she felt, an olive branch, presented in the only way possible. Susan could not call her outright, what with all the restraining orders and pending court dates. The only way she could reach out to Grace would be to plant a clue—a loving clue, tied to a memory when they were aligned against something together—somewhere out in the mess for Grace to find.
When she returned to the living room and saw the boy hang up the phone, she already knew that Greg was out of the picture. She felt it in her bones—or, rather, she felt the lead shot of worry in her bones discharge, leaving her as light as a child’s balsa plane.
“Greg’s gone. I made sure. He wanted me to tell you that you’re being shortsighted. I said, sure thing, private eye. He didn’t get it. So dumb.”
“I’ve got another—”
“Nah. I think I’m done.” He squirmed into the corner of the couch.
“Wait. Just wait.” The boy hadn’t eaten—the normal dinner hour had long passed. She stepped toward the kitchen as if following a strange choreography—one foot shooting out in a wide side-step, the other in a heel-scraping jazzy thrust. It was the dance of staying upright. When she got to the refrigerator she opened it, clung to the handle, and spied the boy’s sober dinner—a gluten-free enchilada and greens—among the fresh veggies, soda water, and cheese wheels. She could not serve such a thing to him. It would be dispiriting.
She thought of a gambler she once saw at the slots, a fat nobody slug who, by dint of his hot streak, became a kind of temporary god. Friends and hangers-on brought him meatloaf in Styrofoam, drinks, crab cakes, pudding … it went on and on into the night. If he moved, it was understood, the streak would end. It was also understood that these offerings of cake and meat were really being laid at the feet of Lady Luck, who was at that moment making herself manifest in that bloated husk.
She found a piece of old cherry cheesecake in tinfoil and a can of whipped cream tucked behind a stand of low-fat salad dressings. She snapped off several single-serve Jell-Os from a pack. High in a cabinet, she found a bag of chocolate baking chips. Under the stove, she found a deep roasting pan. She filled it with her finds and topped it off with a few travel bags of potato chips and some Lifesavers she dug out from her purse. She laid the feast at his feet. “Eat,” she murmured. “Then we’ll talk.”
He pulled up the bag of chocolate chips by the corner and studied it. “This isn’t my normal dinner,” he said, “but that’s okay.”
She had figured the boy’s powers of disentanglement came from an ascetic temperament, a personality naturally averse to the complications that came from any great pleasure, be it food or (one day) gambling or sex or whatever. But he had no trouble digging in. He ripped open the Jell-O pods, topping them with whipped cream. He unwrapped the Lifesavers and placed a chocolate chip in each opening and dunked the potato chips in the cheesecake as if it were a dip. He was both avid and precise, enjoying the treats fully but with an admirable sense of proportion. He didn’t shake out the chocolate chip bag when he was finished to conjure a final morsel, but neither did he leave anything behind. (She checked.) God, he was so wise. She watched him from the couch, squirted whipped cream in her mouth, and swallowed it down with a hard sound, like a frightened character in a cartoon. Then she outlined the final call.
The boy listened gravely to her instructions, a golden shred of Jell-O trembling on his lips. He nodded and looked at her in quiet assessment, the way someone will check a dish he is scouring to see if it has come clean or needs another dunk. As the phone rang at the other end of the line, Grace reached out a limp hand in muted protest. She half-wanted him to hang up. But the boy was smiling. She heard Susan’s voice, so much like her own, answer with a loud, startled hello, as if she were drunk. No surprise there. Once Grace dated a contractor who built kitchen cabinets for Susan and got to hear all about Susan’s habit of changing the plan based on what was in her cup. “She wanted pine when she was drinking a pale ale, walnut when she was having a Guinness, and stainless steel when she was drinking vodka …”
The boy began speaking. “I’m calling on Grace’s behalf.”
And then he tangled with her. Boy, did he. Grace sat on the edge of the couch, knocking back her drink—a fresh one had appeared of its own volition, sensing that things were getting festive. First he soothed her with a string of careful little platitudes, words as smooth as bath beads: “there’s no pressure,” “you’re entitled to your feelings,” “darkest before dawn,” “easy now.” Then, while playing with the webbing between his toes, he rolled out an aggressive opening gambit, a double-jeopardy thingamajig—or was that a catch-22?
“If two people have restraining orders against each other,” he lectured into the mouthpiece, “then they can meet without a problem, since they will both be violating the restraining order to the same degree. So to report the violation, in that situation, would be to report yourself.” Grace couldn’t get within fifty feet of Susan and Susan couldn’t get within fifty feet of her, but if they both approached each other, say, in a public place, like at a certain fountain Grace knew with a cherub pissing recycled slurry in perpetuity, then they were safe. Come to think of it, the boy reminded her of that cherub, minus the profane spout; as he talked his eyes were uplifted in blissed-out relief, as if he were letting out a stream of something too long bottled up.
Andy was making short work of Susan. She could see it in the way he grinned and showed his squat baby teeth, like old gravestones sunk in soil. She could see it in the way he gleefully kicked the couch cushions—a boy revving up a playground swing. He was a prodigy … that he was. Grace had given him her worst to deal with, and he waved his hands over it and there it went. A popped bubble. A steamed-out stain.
The couch beneath her chin was chocolate-smeared, and a Life-saver was stuck to the pillow. Lots of cleaning up to do before the mama bear comes home, she thought, and lay down, nestling her drink into the deep-pile, sea-foam carpet. She snapped one eye open to keep it on the boy. An alien sound issued from the phone—her sister’s laugh. When had she last heard it? They had been passing each other in the courthouse, and Grace had tripped in her heels as she was turning to give Susan a cold look of reptilian indifference, a look ruined when she went down on one knee while J. T. Hillman, Esq., flapped his hands over her like a bird startled off his perch. Susan had laughed then—a sound that bounced off the marble steps and high ceiling, that pinged around in Grace’s head exclusively and often. The old laugh and the new played off each other like fancy music with diverging motifs, the sort of music a pair of neighbor sisters, goody-goody brats, used to practice in their backyard on their piccolo and flute while she and Susan tried to hit their instruments with rotten apples from above.
By noon tomorrow the two of them would stand before the gushing cherub. Grace would throw in a penny or two while she waited. Love and embezzlement. Amen and goodnight.
The boy was off the phone now and leaning over her. “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” she chanted, lifting her arms as if to pull him in for a pat on the head or a kiss. He was smiling at her but out of reach. His cheeks were flushed and his wh
ole head, even the downy hair, had a heavy-bright look, like hand-colored black-and-white film. A candy knocked around in his mouth.
Her days of nannying had given her a taste for the vividness of children, the potency of those little dominoes ready to tip in a snaking line of lifelong complication. But the boy ran it in reverse, as if he had been born foreseeing all the complications and all the ways out. Above her head he made a wide arc with his arms and brought his fingers slowly together, meeting between her eyes at the exact midpoint. “You and Susan will meet like so. Approach at the same pace.”
“Wow. Thank you … can’t believe it … that’s something else …”
Her words faded and she shut her eyes. She was spent. A wrapper crinkled and she smelled fruity, humid breath. The boy pressed two Lifesavers on her closed lids. The couch lurched like an old boat being kicked away from the shore.
He spoke with an easy gallows chatter, a clean, perky voice on the dark stream: “My father is a systems analyst, and my mother caters parties. I’ve solved their problems, made all the calls. Even called my mom for my dad and my dad for my mom and patched things up. It was cake. I think I am their last problem, the one they traded for all the others. I’ve sat at the phone for their benefit and talked to myself, explaining that I shouldn’t be this way or know what I know, should just be a regular kid again and not meddle. When I got off, I said, ‘Look, see?’ and my mom and dad just nodded and looked at each other, like they were afraid. ‘I won’t fix anything again,’ I promised. They are so weird. Is there any more Jell-O?”
She shook her head, careful not to upset the candies.
The boy sat on the armrest with his knees folded up. His face prickled with heat. He picked his nose and stared through the window. Adult lives spread out before him like big sloppy maps their owners could not refold. He leaned over Grace’s head and waved bye-bye.
She felt the breeze on her face and was sure they were moving, with the boy at the helm. Better him than me, she thought. She heard a giggle as they took a wild turn. A cool wind traveled into the rings on her eyes and continued on through her. Nothing was on her mind.
In a whisper, the boy practiced for the next day: “I had a great time last night … my mother would have called but she is busy … no, in-disposed. Our needs have changed. We no longer have a need. You’ll make a great nanny to some other kid … That sounds good. End with that.”
DEAD HORSE PRODUCTIONS
As if running through a great headwind, the horse’s eyes were squinted, the lips pulled back to show the teeth, the whole head snaked forward and the ears laid flat. The impression of speed and determination in something so hulking and still was disconcerting. So was the untouched hay a few feet off, so much the possession of the horse that it seemed as if the animal might rise simply to fulfill the promise to eat it, the illusion of a dead man’s full planner.
It had died in the worst spot, too, perfectly aligned with the kitchen’s generous window. It rose up in Bill’s peripheral vision as he leafed through the phone book, first in the H’s for horse, then in the D’s for dead and dig. He looked up and met the dead horse full on for the hundredth time that day; much as he hated seeing it, half-seeing it was worse.
“Hi, my name is Bill and I have a dead horse I need taken care of; could you—”
“Excuse me, sir? Sorry to interrupt, but you should know Dead Horse Productions is an independent film company.”
The horse was mother’s animal, and he was on his mother’s farm, a now-defunct boarding stable she had run for the last twenty years. She had been a forceful, obsessed woman, and the training of horses had consumed her life from the time she was forty on, though she always lamented those lost years before. “If only I had gotten into horses sooner—think of where I’d be now!” she’d say, though to her family her fortieth year seemed her last true appearance. Bill remembered her being an active, curious woman who could have been noted for the light and easy way she picked up and dropped passions. Ice-skating, archery, poetry, music—Marie had tried them all and then let them go in a way that denoted not fickleness, but an admirable attempt to experience as much of the world as possible. Her children, largely raised in the pre-horse years, picked up this trait, and therefore none of them could understand her sudden and complete shift from a faintly amused woman resting lightly on the surface of things to a woman so inextricably joined to her passion that her house was literally grafted to her stable, with back windows that opened to the barn aisle.
Despite all this, he had picked up very little about horse husbandry, and certainly nothing about what to do with their carcasses. He sat cross-legged on the kitchen floor, leafing through horse-care books for any clue and glancing at the clock. He knew he could call Fran, his mother’s longtime stable hand and student, but he frankly did not want her involved. Fran had been his mother’s riding student for over a decade, and when Marie’s health began to fade and her horse boarding business was gradually dismantled, Fran had stayed on, still taking care of the barn in exchange for riding lessons and nominal pay. Fran did not believe Bill’s mother was senile, or perhaps she did not believe that senility could touch the exalted core of his mother’s horse-wisdom. For Fran, like so many previous riding students, was a loyal acolyte of his mother. Acolyte—there was no other word for it. The zealotry of the horse-world was another part of his mother’s new life that baffled him—who would have thought his cheerful, funny mother would one day have followers?
His mother’s absence gave the house and adjoining barn the eerie feeling of a holy place newly fled. Everything about her house and stable was deeply ritualized—she rose at a certain hour, fed the horses the same time every day, opened the barn’s sliding doors a certain width, hung the halters so all the metal rings were lined up so one could look straight through them and see the wood of the tack room wall beneath. His mother had been unable to perform these tasks in recent months, and when Bill had moved in to both help her and assess her deterioration (he and his sisters had lived with his mother in shifts), he noticed the obsessive care Fran took in upholding these compulsions. Whatever his mother had done, no matter how inessential, Fran did. Fran fed the horses at the same hour, mucked using only the blue fork, never the green, walked out into the pasture and manually slapped the horseflies off the horses for two hours each morning, and wiped her boots twice on the bristle brush, and Bill had noticed that once after he walked out of the barn’s sliding door, Fran stole up behind him and slid it open a few inches more—the ordained span.
Now he almost wished Fran were here. If he didn’t find a way to get rid of it, the dead horse would be the first thing his mother, his sister, and the nurse would see when they drove down the long, winding driveway; the first sight to spill through the bright kitchen window, the last thing they’d see at night, since the horse was fast becoming a white lump on the otherwise unbroken plane of the pasture and he could only imagine how the moon would light it up. He could picture the scene of fragile dignity as his mother unbent from the car and walked to her home, flanked by a nurse and a daughter. Such a situation was already so delicate—already so sad—that the only way it could be partially redeemed would be if his mother walked to her own front door with a steady and sure step, a kind of physical if not mental lucidity. The dead horse would throw this all off. His mother would see it and swerve, stumbling in the banked snow on the driveway’s edge while his sister and the nurse wondered aloud about the “sleeping horse.” He could picture his mother looking over her shoulder at the dead horse while the two women led her forward, and that image of his bold and passionate mother being kept from a truth (and knowing it, even through her confusion) struck him as tragic an indignity as anything she had yet endured.
But all this pivoted on the dead horse. He bore down on the phone again. He called excavating companies, animal control, even a crematorium, who assured him that, yes, you could burn the horse but it would take at least four or five hours, and that the incinerated hair on the bu
rning hide would produce an odor that may linger for days. He called a rendering plant operator, who asked thorough questions about the weight, height, horse-shoe size and body fat of the horse, before saying that, yes, he was more than willing to come get the carcass—tomorrow. The excavator explained that no one digs in January, and to get through such a thick crust of frozen soil would take his 670 Bobcat, and the 670 had a cracked block and was sitting outside his window waiting for a clear day for him to load it up and take it to scrap. Animal control, once he got through, helpfully directed him to the places he’d just tried.
He hung up, put on his winter gear, and went out to the pasture to see what could be done. The dead horse’s greasy black bubble of an eye opened to the sky, and there was a network of cracks in the pupil, like the thin shattered crust of a partially frozen lake, everything still swimming beneath. He leaned over to see if the hide was frozen to the ground, stumbled, and fell on the animal’s bloated barrel. Splayed over the dead horse, he felt a subtle collapse beneath him. He flew backward in a spray of red dots. For a panicked moment he thought that by falling on the horse he had somehow forced the blood out of it. He pictured a red burst out of the hind end like a crushed tube of paint, but then he felt the hot points on his upper lip and realized he had a nosebleed.
He tipped his head back and squeezed the bridge of his nose and tried to make his way toward the barn without stumbling. As he walked blood slid down his upturned cheek and into his left ear. All he could see was the gray-blue cloudless sky and the flakes spiraling like bubbles exhaled from a fish as he glided through the pasture, the tip of his nose the highest point, like a fin. He felt for the barn’s side door and swung it open, and in the dark and dankness he was greeted with a chorus of whinnies and celebratory stall-kicks—the survivors expected their dinner. “I don’t have anything for you,” he said, weaving under the fog of their joined breath. He groped for the old rotary phone on the beam and rubbed around for Fran’s phone number, which was carved below. Since he couldn’t look down, he had to squat low to read the number and dial over his head. “Fran,” he said in a gurgling nasal, “Fran, I need you to come to the house.”
Bright Shards of Someplace Else Page 3
