House of Heroes

by Mary LaChapelle

  After dinner, while Brian took his shower, Neil and I sat on the foot of the stairway. His hair was still damp from his own shower and smelled like shampoo. He was wearing pajama bottoms but no shirt, and even though he said that he wasn’t cold, I made him wrap his towel around his shoulders. “Your mom says you’ve been having some accidents at night.” I had already told myself I wasn’t going to start the conversation this way.

  “It won’t happen again.” He tucked his chin in.

  “Did you know that I used to have the same problem?”

  “Yes,” he said stoically.

  Great, I thought, Claire had already told him—now what was the part I was supposed to tell him?

  “Well, I don’t anymore,” I said. He was quiet.

  “But when I did, I used to tell myself not to, and I still did.”

  He didn’t respond, and I imagined he was determined that wasn’t going to be the way it was for him.

  “It’s nothing to be ashamed of, Neil, even if it happens many more times.”

  Then I took him down to the basement and showed him how to run the washer. “We don’t mind doing the sheets for you,” I told him. “But sometimes I used to feel better when I could do them myself.”

  Neil continued to wet the bed regularly. Brian was uncharacteristically kind about it. Except for some nights when there was an unresolved animosity between them and I would overhear his: “And you better not stink the room up again.” The best, last shot he could give Neil—leaving him with something he had no answer for. I’d stop Claire from interceding, and I’d stop myself, knowing it was only a way of making Neil feel weaker. But Brian’s words would put me on edge. I felt as invested in Neil’s making it to the morning as he was himself.

  He’d become even more concerned about house fires now that winter was setting in. Sometimes we would hear him on the stairs in the middle of the night, and we’d figure that he was checking to see if we’d really unplugged the Christmas tree lights as we had promised. One night he came into our room and said to Claire, “Feel my heart. Does it sound right?” He’d been lying in his bed imagining that it was off, that it might be beginning to fail.

  His concerns were relentless. And if that wasn’t bad enough, some days he would have spells of arrogance when he let us know that no one but he had enough sense to make it to the next day. One evening I walked into a scene between him and Claire in the kitchen. “I like my garbage disposal!” she was shouting. “I intend to use my garbage disposal! If… If… You.…” She’d run out of her usual poise.

  Claire thought it was worth talking to a psychologist about, but I wanted to believe that what was happening to him was still containable. Bringing someone else into it might make what was wrong even more solid and hard to shake.

  One night, after she had put her book down, put out the light, Claire turned on her side and began to rub the back of my neck. Though her hands were a comfort, lying there in the dark bedroom, there was also a feeling of being pulled into some bleak outer region. Lying still, trying to discern what it was, I remembered how I had touched the body of the man in the creek. The preciousness of her touch then was as much a source of anguish as it was of tenderness. I was struck down, as we all are at times, with the realization of how fleeting a simple happiness can be. How, when looked at from the distant perspective, like from the god’s eye above, looking over our tiny lives and the eternity that surrounds each one, how then each happiness would not appear as even a spark of light.

  As Claire rubbed my neck, I didn’t know what to say. But after I’d let my thoughts stray for a while, I turned over, and I told her about the first wake that I’d ever been to. It was for a boy a year younger than myself. His name was Jeff Thorn, and he had fallen through the ice of a pond near our house. He’d been in my Boy Scout troop.

  “What on earth brought that to mind?” she asked, continuing to massage my neck.

  I told her that I’d been thinking about the accident, and how any thought of death always brought back that first experience in a funeral parlor. I’d been told to wear my scout uniform, and when it was my turn to stand by the casket, my knee socks had fallen down. I wanted more than anything to pull them up, but I knew it wouldn’t be right. I remembered the curve of his head under his blond brush haircut, and most remarkably that his lips were nearly blue, giving me the impression that he was still cold.

  Whenever I saw his brother in school, or his parents in church, even after some years had passed, I would always wonder how they thought about him. He had been with two of his cousins when he had fallen through. One cousin was saved by the other. But Jeff wasn’t grabbed in time and was pulled by the current under the ice. That was the crudest part to accept—that he was floating just under the surface, but unable to be reached.

  The next morning Brian and I were sitting in our pajamas at the kitchen table, a bowl of cereal in front of each of us. Before he had even poured his cereal, he had dug a small booklet of paper and ink tattoos out of the box. Super hero tattoos. He licked his arm and pressed one of the small squares against his wetted skin. When he peeled the paper off his arm, I could see that the image had transferred perfectly. I went back to reading my paper, only to be intermitently interrupted by, “Look, Dad,” showing how now he had put one on his chest, now on the palm of his hand. Brian’s at that age that vacillates between being very cool and not cool at all. And if he irritates me, I have to remind myself that it’s because we’re a lot alike.

  Neil had taken Maggie, in her snowsuit, out on the patio, and we could watch the two of them playing through the pair of atrium doors that faced us. Though the patio had been shoveled the day before, another dusting had accumulated overnight. The sun was out, which made the few snowflakes in the air glisten around them. It was a happy sight.

  They were playing Follow the Footprints. Neil was the leader, and he was taking carefully small steps so that Maggie could follow him. Maggie can be tyrannical when it comes to play, and whenever it appeared that Neil might stop, she would grab his legs and whine. As she did this for the third time, Neil picked her up around the waist and began to spin. Her face appeared as only a small circle in the centrifugal splay of her pink snowsuit. Neil’s head was back, and his eyes were closed. Maggie, startled at first, leaned her head against him and smiled, a peaceful, satisfied smile. It was a matter of trust, I thought. That was how he was. And for the first time in months I felt easy about him.

  We were invited to a party on New Year’s Eve. We had arranged for a baby-sitter, really a chaperone for Brian, since he was having his own sort of New Year’s Eve sleep-over with some of his friends. I’d bought some nonalcoholic sparkling wine for them to open at midnight, and I could hear them making bets in the basement about who was going to be able to pop the cork. Maggie was already asleep, and Neil was in his room. Claire was dressing. There had been weather reports all evening about a blizzard on its way, and the travel advisories cautioned anyone who had plans to drive out of town, but we were only a mile from our party. I needed to pick up the baby-sitter. When I went to warm up the car, it seemed oddly settled in the snow; all four tires were flat.

  I bumped down the basement stairs. Brian was crouched by the fireplace with two of his friends. He had a pack of cigarettes in his hand. “That’s out!” I grabbed them from him. He shook his hair back, looked up at me startled. “Now why don’t you tell me about the car?” As soon as the words were out of my mouth and traveling the short space between us, I knew it wasn’t his doing. “Never mind. No smoking!” I said. “We’re going to be home tonight.”

  I found Claire in the bathroom, surrounded by her makeup and the aura of perfume. I put my hand on her elbow and nearly shouted, as if there were some noise I needed to compete with, “Cancel the baby-sitter.”

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “Neil,” I said. “We’re going for a walk.”

  “There’s a blizzard out there!” I heard her say.

  But I was alread
y out the door. Neil had heard everything. He’d come out into the hallway. He stood with his legs set apart, like this was a showdown.

  “There’s a blizzard out there,” he said.

  “Good,” I said. “You can protect me.”

  Outside, the snow was blowing and drifting more than it was falling. We could barely see the street. Our Christmas lights outside were lit; they were wound around the long stairway railing that led to the sidewalk below. I could hear them clinking in the wind as we made our way down the steps. The sound was like a charm. The blowing snow was painful against the face, and we had to keep our eyes narrow. Neil was wearing the hood up on his jacket, so he wasn’t much more than a small dark form moving alongside me.

  “We’ll walk along the parkway,” I said. The wind was shrill, and we could hear the old bodies of the nearest trees groaning against it. Everything was white, except for the silhouette of the creek as we approached it. The bridge was white, except for the dark arch underneath it.

  “That’s where you found the man,” I said, knowing that he was already thinking of this.

  “Yeah.” I could barely hear his answer over the wind.

  Now I was doubtful what business I had bringing him out here. Before, in the house, I had been so sure that out here was part of the whole explanation that I somehow needed to give him. But I didn’t know what I wanted to say, and his silence, the fact that he didn’t object, was a reproach to me. He thought I was a fool, and this was simply a time for him to gather more proof of that.

  “I want to talk to you,” I shouted over the blowing.

  But he didn’t answer me. He had his hands deep in his jacket pockets and looked like all he could be concerned with was resisting the cold. We were walking along the creek path in the direction of Lake Harriet, and for some reason, maybe because the path was on lower ground now, the wind had died down.

  In the quiet, Neil suddenly appeared so small against the great white background. I slowed my pace, because I realized he’d been walking double time to keep up with me. He was just a little boy, yet I had wanted somehow for him to get through these things and still seem powerful. Now I could see he was just terribly alone.

  “I’m sorry I left you that day,” I was shouting, still not accustomed to the new quiet. We could hear our boots crunching in the snow. I was getting used to the cold now—it wasn’t as painful, but it made me more aware of how he wasn’t talking. “Neil?” I finally said.

  “We could have saved him.” He said it so quietly, I wasn’t positive that this is what he said.

  We kept walking. It must have been clear to him, as it was to me now, that we would end up at Lake Harriet. I understood what he said. Even I had believed the man might have survived until I had actually touched him.

  “No,” I said. “I touched him. I felt for his pulse. Honey, we couldn’t.”

  “But I touched him too!” He had turned around, was walking backward; his hood had fallen away from his small face.

  His sleeves had been wet when he had come to get me. I should have known that with his easy confidence he would have barely hesitated to go down there.

  “He was just hurt!” Neil was shouting, facing me. We were reaching the end of the path. The lake was a great open expanse behind him. “We could have done mouth to mouth, something, right away!”

  “No, Neil.” I continued to walk forward slowly, while he slowly walked backward. “It was right for you to want to do something about it. It’s just that we couldn’t.”

  And then we were on the shore of the lake, and he was weeping. I picked him up and walked out onto the ice. He didn’t wrap his legs around me but let them dangle, making himself heavy—one last gesture to deny the way things are.

  I told him the ice was safe, that it was January now. But even in some Januaries, I told him, people have been known to fall through the ice. “If I fell through the ice, right now,” he cried, “you could save me.”

  “I would try,” I told him. And saying this made me start to cry. He wrapped his legs around me. This was the first time we had ever cried together. And we stood there for a long time, under a clouded night sky without stars, and looked back at our footprints in the snow, letting in the gentleness that follows a subsided blizzard and the time it takes to go on.

  THE MEADOW BELL

  Lakeund Kramer was watching Jimmy, who sat in a patch of shade on the front lawn, just beyond the driveway to the farm. It was August. The boy was sitting Indian style, bare-armed and bare-legged, with oversized blue thongs on his feet.

  Lakeund couldn’t at first make out what Jimmy was playing. He had gathered mushrooms, that’s what he had done—the soft gray and beige variety. There was a pile of various sizes in his lap, and he was arranging them into some kind of scene in the grass—a farm, where the smallest mushrooms were the people and the animals.

  After a minute, Jimmy looked over as if Lakeund had called him. His face was too far away to really see, but Lakeund saw it in his mind, and this impression was as strong as if he were staring at a clear photograph. He was an open-faced little boy with round eyes and a blond down on his skin that make Lakeund want to touch him. He walked down the driveway closer to where the boy sat. He’d thought that Jimmy was smiling, but now he could see that he was not. He was simply looking, taking Lakeund in, or perhaps he was taking in the yard, or the trees, or maybe the whole afternoon. Lakeund didn’t know. He was close enough to see that Jimmy was wearing his thongs on the wrong feet and how they curved out in an awkward way. It was very quiet in the yard, but after a moment a car could be heard coming up the road.

  Jimmy jerked his arm up suddenly, the way children will do when they want to surprise someone. He was holding one of the mushrooms, a remarkably slender one with a small top. He was very pleased with this mushroom, and this made Lakeund smile. “You’re right, honey,” he said. “It looks just like a little man.”

  It was their neighbors, Roman Kohl and Harley Brandt, they had heard approaching. Lakeund watched them pull off the road, with a flash of sun on their windshield and so much dust that at first he hadn’t recognized their truck. At first he had believed it might be someone special, and he had quickly stripped off the white smock he had worn all day to make cheese. He had gathered it into a bundle and hid it deep underneath the boughs of the pine tree that shaded the cheese house. Looking up from behind the tree’s boughs, he put one finger to his lips to show Jimmy this was a secret they shared.

  Now Harley and Roman had him surrounded in the driveway with their usual conversation. Their words passed over Lakeund’s head like the honks of geese—the high migrators that one cannot even see. Roman shifted his belly from side to side, first leaning his hand on one hip, and then leaning his hand on the other. Harley kicked up little poofs of dust with his shoe. Though they had lived on the same road as Lakeund the length of their lives, they were not his friends. Roman and Harley had always had ideas in common. They had been planning and scheming and failing since they were little boys. And they never stopped trying to draw others into their partnership. Lakeund had little time for them. When they directed the conversation at him, Lakeund would nod or smile or comment on some small piece of information he had been able to pull out of the blur of their voices.

  “The big lake…” Roman was saying.

  This brought Lakeund back to the discussion. “You’re talking about Michigan? You’re talking about fishing?” Lakeund focused first on the bulb of Roman’s rosy nose and then on the insignia of Harley’s visor cap, which said: A-I SPARK PLUG.

  “Yeah! Where you been?” Harley said. “After a few stops tonight, we’re driving on to Green Bay. We’ll sleep in the truck tonight, and in the morning we’ll do some big lake fishing. You had a good time of it last time you came along.”

  Lakeund knew this was true. But he said, “No, the last time I caught hell from the family.”

  “That’s because you never told them where you were going,” Roman said.

  “No,�
�� Lakeund said. “Too much work.” And he thought about how successful his business was, and how the two of them should know it hadn’t gotten that way from goofing around.

  “Well, come to Peter’s for a beer anyway.”

  “Not tonight,” Lakeund said. “Eileen will be expecting to go to a fish fry.” He felt for the cloth of his pockets as the two of them shrugged their shoulders and got back into the truck.

  Jimmy jumped to his feet as he heard them start the engine, and Lakeund’s hands came out of his pockets as he watched the boy run alongside the truck, almost tripping over his thongs. There was something in the boy’s excitement that made Lakeund begin to run too. Suddenly he wanted to go with them, not for the beer, but just to be away, to be somewhere else. And they must have seen him in their mirrors, because they stopped in a cloud of dust. Lakeund dropped the tailgate and hopped on.

  But Jimmy was left behind. Lakeund could almost feel the dust left around the boy as they drove away, how it sprinkled down on the skin of his shoulders and into the short hairs on his head. He held a large blue thong in each of his hands and waved them in the air.

  Lakeund waved back. But he couldn’t be sure if Jimmy was meaning to wave goodbye or if he was just simply waving the dust away. “Tell your mother I’m over at the Meadow Bell!” he shouted. “Tell her only for a beer. I’ll be back soon.”

  The boy stopped waving and seemed to listen as he held each thong out to his side, looking like a little airplane at the end of a runway, still as could be.

  The family got another dreamer when Jimmy was born. Of all his children, this was the one he most wanted his sister, Lucy, to know. And yet this was the only one she didn’t know—the one that had come well after they had lost touch.