“And don’t you think they’re nice little girls?” she goes on. “Better than you thought they’d be?”
I nod.
“That was a big relief to me,” she says. “I actually liked them. What if I hadn’t?”
“Yeah,” I say. “What if they’d turned out to be like Brady? You want to talk about looking on the bright side, Mom, think about what it would’ve been like if Ted had showed up with a couple of kids who acted like Brady. Boy, he used to cook up some great ways to sabotage Layla’s romances. Wouldn’t you just love to get him as a stepkid?”
“Oh, God,” she says. “I love Brady, but he’s a handful. He’d be way too much for me to take on as a stepkid, no matter how madly in love I was with his dad. Oh, ugh—”
We both start to laugh at the thought of her—or anyone—being madly in love with the Jer.
Then she goes serious on me again. “I’ll tell you something else, Jackson,” she says. “Tonight, the way what happened with the girls hurt me made me realize how much I want things to be all right with them. How much I want to be with Ted. You know, I’ve run this through my mind over and over. I love him, but is it real love? I mean, the way I feel about Ted is nothing like the way I felt—”
She lets out a long breath and gives me this look like, Man the torpedoes, full speed ahead, and I get this feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach. I know exactly what she’s going to say.
“It’s nothing like the way I felt about your dad.”
I’ve always known how much Mom and Dad once loved each other. I’ve always known it was a special, wonderful kind of love—at least for a while, and that has always been the saddest thing to me about the divorce. It’s hard enough just to know it. But when Mom speaks the words, actually admits how she feels, it all seems so hopeless: love in general, I suppose. Life. I mean, what’s the use of loving someone if it turns out you can’t live together, can’t make each other happy? It makes me never want to love anyone for fear that in the end all I’ll have is this terrible, terrible love and no place for it to be but trapped deep inside my heart.
“I probably shouldn’t even be telling you this,” Mom goes on. “Oh, honey, I know all this is so painful. I hate the way my getting married is putting your life in turmoil all over again. But if I’m going to do it, well, it seems like the least I can do is to help you understand the way things are. God help me, I still love Oz. I always will.”
“I know that,” I say, my voice breaking.
“You do, don’t you?” She sighs. “You know all kinds of things you shouldn’t have to know at your age. Jackson, I’m so sorry for that.”
I shake my head just a little, as if to say it’s all right. It isn’t, though. It will never be all right. But we both know that, so why say it, even if I could? And it seems important to her to finish saying whatever it is she means to say to me. I just let her go on.
“Before I met Ted, I thought well, if I can’t stop loving Oz—and I know I never will—I guess that’s that. I didn’t know you could love two people at the same time. But—”
She pauses, presses her fingertips against her eyes, and her voice goes wobbly again when she says, “What I’m learning is love doesn’t measure like anything else. The more there is, the more there is—honey, I know this is true. When I’m not crazy, when I’m not worrying about how all this is going to affect other people—you, Ted’s girls—it’s the thing that amazes me. I don’t have to quit loving your dad to love Ted. The way I feel about him can be there inside me just as it’s always been, a kind of ache. A balance almost. Without it, I wouldn’t realize how different what I feel for Ted is. How possible. How right—Jackson, does this make any sense at all?” she asks.
“Yeah,” I say. And right then I think I love my mom more than I’ve ever loved her in my whole life. Which would explain why I feel sick inside thinking that soon it will be Ted she’ll be talking to about her life. He’ll be the one who’ll hear her secrets. She stands, the blanket still wrapped around her. She pulls me out of the chair, puts her arms around me, hugs me. “Oh, Jackson,” she whispers, “what would I do without you?”
I don’t answer. I can’t.
She holds me at arm’s length, looks at me a long time, then hugs me again—this time quickly. “Let’s get some sleep,” she says. “Good grief, it must be nearly morning. We have children to entertain tomorrow. Hearts to win, yes?”
“Roger,” I say, my own heart nearly bursting.
twelve
In the first weeks after Brady left, I stopped by to see his mom a few times, but she seemed distracted, aloof, as if my not having run away were a kind of offense. But I wake up the Friday after Thanksgiving remembering that Brady, Layla, and I have spent that day together every year since he and I were in kindergarten, and I’m sure Layla is remembering it, too. This was her favorite day of the year, she once told me. She loved the idea of Christmas coming, which she thought of as something apart from Christmas itself. Christmas depressed her. So she counted on that first official day of the holiday season to trick her for a little while into being the child she once was, the child she’s convinced still lives deep inside her.
Layla’s big on freeing the child within, which she is quick to point out is not all that easy. “The world believes the child in us is dangerous,” she says. She says that only by returning to the state of childhood can people feel free to express their true emotions.
I always say, “Yeah, yeah, right,” when she gets on that track. It’s either agree with her or admit that I think life would be even more of a mess than it already is if people went around expressing their true emotions every time they turned around.
But Brady loved to bait her. Last year, on the day after Thanksgiving, he was vegged out on the couch, watching TV. Layla tried to get him enthused about helping us decorate the house. “Honey, there’s a child hidden somewhere inside you that just loves the magic of Christmas,” she said.
He said, “Ma, I am a child. Every time I want to do something that’s the least bit interesting you tell me, ‘Brady Burton, you’re just a child.’ Then you tell me, ‘No.’ So if I’m a child and if putting up a bunch of Christmas junk seems incredibly boring to me—ergo boredom is my true emotion! Did you ever think of that?”
But Brady’s cynicism hadn’t dented Layla’s armor of good cheer. She tromped around the Christmas tree lot in frigid weather for an hour until she found the perfect tree. She sang, carrying the boxes of Christmas decorations down from the attic.
I expect to find her in a similar state this morning, especially when I pull up and see that she’s already hung a huge wreath on the front door.
I ring the bell twice, three times. Still no answer. I’m just about to turn away when I see a shadow move across the bay window in the dining room. Moments later, Layla opens the door. She’s wearing one of her silk kimonos; her long hair is all tangled. I’m used to that.
“My other kid,” Layla used to say when Brady and I were little, and he’d drag me into her bedroom or even, once or twice, into the bathroom when she wasn’t fully dressed. She’d just laugh.
But now she pulls the robe tighter around her, combing her hair with her fingers as if embarrassed by the fact that I’ve caught her in this state.
“Reporting for duty,” I say, after we stand there a long, awkward moment.
“Ah, the Friday after Thanksgiving.” She attempts a smile. “I should’ve known you’d show up, Jackson. Come in, honey,” she says. “I’ll fix us a cup of coffee.”
She talks to me over her shoulder as we walk down the hall toward the kitchen. “I got the wreath up. That’s as far as I got, though. I went back to bed. The doorbell woke me and—”
She waves off my apology. “No, no. God, it’s time for me to be up. It’s nearly eleven. What I started to say was that when I heard the bell I thought for just a s
econd that it might be Brady. You haven’t heard from him, have you, Jackson? That’s not why—”
“No,” I say.
She sighs, busies herself with the coffee. The kitchen looks as it always has: cluttered, the sun blinking through the plants that are tangled in the window. A prism catches the light and casts rainbows across the old wood table. We spent hours sitting here when we were little, Brady and I. Layla would put a plate of cookies out, fix us mugs of sugary coffee with lots of cream, and cinnamon sprinkled on top. She’d sit down with her own mug of black coffee, and we’d talk. Gerbil tricks. Baseball cards. Ecology. It was all equally fascinating to Layla. “You boys,” she’d say, and shake her head in amazement, as if we were the two smartest kids ever born.
Now there’s nothing but a stripe of light at Brady’s place.
“Remember when I taught you guys Gregorian chant for your Christmas project?” Layla says.
“Fifth grade,” I say.
Layla says, “You sounded like angels.”
“Then the next year Brady did that report on the pagan origins of Christmas and got in trouble.”
“Mrs. Carpenter,” says Layla. “That bitch. When I called to talk to her about Brady’s grade, she said, ‘I clearly told the children to do a report on Christmas, Mrs. Burton.’ Of course, I totally blew it. I said, ‘You think Christmas began everything?’ Boy, she really had it in for Brady after that. You know, Jackson, I never could quit getting in the middle of Brady’s problems. But he always meant so well, and honestly, sometimes I rack my brain trying to figure out how Brady could’ve ended up such a mess when he was such a bright little boy, so sweet. When I loved him so much. Loved. See, I think of my own child in the past tense. It’s depressing.”
“He’ll come back,” I say, though today I’m not sure I believe it.
“You want to know what I feel worst about?” she asks. “What makes me feel so ashamed? Jackson, the first few weeks I didn’t even miss him. It was a relief to me to have him out of the house. He’d been so—difficult all summer. I felt battered. But now I’m scared, Jax. I just want him to come home. I don’t care what a pain in the ass he is. I just want him back with me. I miss him so much, I’m about to die. And, honey, I miss you, too, you know? I miss the old days, all the fun we had. You boys were always so close. You had such a special friendship.”
I nod.
“You miss him, don’t you, Jax?”
“Yeah,” I say. “I miss him.” And I do. But I’m also pissed off at him, and hurt. Sometimes I wonder whether ours was such a special friendship, after all. But I keep that to myself.
Layla sighs. “I’ll tell you something crazy,” she says. “Some nights I turn Brady’s stereo on full blast—that U2 tape he left in the tape deck—and I pretend he’s in there sulking, dreaming about running away, or maybe on the phone, cooking up some outrageous plan that’s going to get him into trouble again. My support group says I have to accept the fact that he’s gone,” Layla says. “My therapist says it’s time to get my act together, that I’ve done all I can for Brady and I should move on, do something for myself for a change. The guy I’ve been dating says, ‘Hey, you have me.’ But—”
“Really, he could come back anytime,” I say. “For Christmas … ”
Layla looks away from me.
The kitchen clock says eleven forty-five. I’m supposed to meet Dad for lunch at noon, but I could call him and say I’ll meet him later. I hate to leave Layla here alone. “I could stay a while if you want,” I tell her. “Help you decorate. Then if Brady does come home—”
“I think I’m done with Christmas,” Layla says. “It’s just one more damn trick the world plays to keep you from dealing with the way things really are. I mean, even if Brady did come home for Christmas, you and I both know it wouldn’t make a bit of difference to him whether or not the house was decorated. Oh, damn him,” she says, crying, “goddamn him,” pressing the heels of her hands hard against her eyes. Then she reaches across the table and puts her hands, still wet with tears, over mine.
“Honey,” she says. “Let go. We’ve both got to let go of what Brady’s been to us. All those people with all their good advice are right about that. Even when he does come back—if he does—he may not be anything like the person we remember.”
She laughs a little, a kind of mean laugh. “And we may seem different to him, you know? I wonder if it ever occurs to him that we might change while he’s out there doing what he damn well pleases. That maybe we already have … ”
Her words make something shift inside me. Whether Brady’s changed or not, I don’t know. But I have. I’ve had to change to fill in the blank space he left, and in some ways I’m not sorry. I imagine taking Brady to The Peak with me to work out. He’d insist on wearing those ridiculous baggy surfer shorts and his orange Chuck Taylors with the laces untied. All the while I explained the Nautilus machines to him, he’d be smirking.
“Okay, man, I think I’ve got the program here,” he’d say. “Fifteen reps times ten machines times four times a week plus sweat minus IQ equals Rocky Balboa. But what’s the point? Come on, Jax, we’re outta here. Let’s go get some pizza.”
Would I say no?
thirteen
The week after Thanksgiving, Mom and Ted buy a big house on Washington Boulevard. It’s white, with green shutters and those windows that jut out on the second story. Cape Cod, Mom calls it. There’s a huge maple tree on either side of the brick sidewalk, each with thick ivy growing in a perfectly trimmed circle around it. An old-fashioned arched gate opens onto the brick patio in the back.
“Can you believe it?” she keeps saying when they take me to look at it. “This house? Jackson, how many times do you suppose I’ve driven past this very house and said, ‘Now, that’s what a house is supposed to look like!’”
“About a million,” I say. “And that’s only counting the times I was with you.”
I can have the attic room, they say. It’s the most private place in the house. The girls’ rooms are the ones you see from the street, each one exactly the same size, with a little bench seat built into the window that juts out over the yard. Ted and Mom’s room is over the garage, huge, with its own bathroom. Near the kitchen, there’s a little greenhouse, where Mom can keep flowering plants all through the winter.
The house is in great shape—and empty, so Ted and Mom decide to move in right after the wedding.
“I can take a leave of absence from school till the first of the year,” Mom says. “If we really work hard at it, we ought to be able to manage it. It makes sense, don’t you think?”
“Sure,” I say. Any other answer and I’m going to have to try to explain why the thought of moving so soon gives me this turned-inside-out feeling. I don’t know why I feel that way; I just do, at the same time that my rational self sees that doing everything at once makes sense. It would be stupid for Ted to move into our little house and then out again. And in my case, a clean break with the past is probably the best thing. With only two weeks to get organized, there won’t be any time to worry about how this new life is going to be.
Every day, Mom goes out armed with lists. She tromps around buying the things we need for the new house. When I get home from school, the two of us begin the nightly task of boxing up our stuff. We get slowed down because we keep remembering things. Emptying out the curio cabinet, Mom dusts each object: pretty cups and saucers, teapots, dishes, funny salt and pepper shakers, old fountain pens, an antique fan. She unearths the heavy silver tea set Dad’s parents gave them for a wedding present.
“Just imagine this next to some of the other presents your dad and I got,” she says. “A hundred-pound bag of brown rice, a pinecone wreath, a copy of Be Here Now. I ought to give this to Oz, you know. It belonged to his mother’s family … You never knew your Grandma Watt, Jackson, but she really was a lovely person. Oz adored
her. It wasn’t until she died that he became completely estranged from his family … ” Her voice trails off. She wraps the tray in newspaper, sets it carefully in the box.
Before we pack the photo albums, we have to look through them, laugh at the forced holiday shots, the goofy vacation shots: me in different places, getting taller and taller, growing into myself.
“Remember when Grandma dragged us all to Disney World?” Mom says. “Spring break, the absolute worst time to go. The crowds were horrible. Your dad snapped when we were watching the parade on Main Street, getting elbowed and stepped on by full-grown adults trying to get closer to Mickey Mouse. He said to my dad, ‘Earl, you Republicans make fun of the Red Chinese the way they put pictures of Chairman Mao all over the place and worship them. But look here. All these Silent Majority types falling all over themselves, worshiping a mouse. It isn’t even a real mouse!’ I felt guilty, of course. Here my parents had spent all this money on a vacation—
“Honestly, Jackson,” she says, “I hate to think of how much of my life I’ve wasted trying to please one person I loved without upsetting some other person I loved. I still haven’t gotten used to being with Ted, who acts as if every single thing I do or say is an act of genius.”
Hey, I want to say. What about me? Don’t you remember I think you’re wonderful? But I’m afraid that if I try to tell her how I feel, I’ll start crying. Or worse, admit that I’m jealous of Ted sometimes and scared of how she and Ted together will affect, forever, the way she is with me.
Brady would say, “You’re crazy, man. You’re always worrying about your mom; you’re always feeling responsible for her. Can’t you see this lets you off the hook? Can’t you see this is your exit?” But I’m not ready to exit yet. Everything is changing too soon.
God, I hate this. I hate all our stuff in a mess around us. I’m scared to move. In a new place, how will I know who I am? And what happens if Brady comes back, comes looking for me here, and I’m gone? That, at least, is sort of funny to think about. I mean, imagine it: he skulks into town in the dead of night, bangs on the kitchen door in his usual inconsiderate way, and scares the crap out of the nice young couple who will be living here after we’re gone. Yeah, it’s funny. Hilarious, really. But thinking about Brady making a fool of himself isn’t enough to zap my anxiety.
Wish You Were Here Page 7
