Crushed

by Laura McNeal

  Clyde stood—gingerly, painfully—and shouldered his knapsack.

  As they walked down the hall together, his father put an arm around Clyde and said gently, “So what did the other guy look like?”

  “Like he won,” Clyde said. His nose hurt when he talked, and there was pain in his teeth. “I can ride the Vespa home,” he said.

  “Not with one eye you can’t,” his father said. Then: “So what happened?”

  Clyde stared ahead. “I don’t really know.”

  His father gave him a mild let’s-not-play-games look, and Clyde gazed down the long, empty hallway. “It’s just a guy who’s always hated me.”

  His father took this in. “How come he doesn’t like you?”

  “Yeah, well, I asked him that once. He said I uglified his view.”

  “Uglified it?”

  Clyde shrugged. The gesture made him aware of a deep pain in his ribs.

  “I can’t leave my Vespa here all night,” he said. “Someone’ll steal it.”

  His father said, “We’ll come back with Mr. Heathrow’s truck.” Another tenant in their building.

  His father pushed open the school door and they walked out into the twilight. There were halos of frozen air around the yellow sodium lights.

  They drove a few blocks in silence, then his father said, “So what’s this kid’s name—the one whose view you uglify?”

  “Theo Driggs,” Clyde said, and immediately wished he hadn’t.

  His father gave him a quick look. “Don’t I know that name?”

  Clyde knew his father might not figure this out, but probably he would, and, besides, he didn’t feel like lying right now. He said, “Theo Driggs was one of the people I was doing, you know, research on with your computer.”

  His father turned to Clyde. “Was that part of the problem here?”

  It would have been part of the problem if Clyde had found anything about Theo, or if he’d written The Yellow Paper, but he hadn’t, no matter what anybody thought.

  “No,” Clyde said, “my looking him up had nothing to do with it.”

  Chapter 48

  To Help His Mother Out

  Clyde woke up at six the next morning, the first day of his suspension. It was dark outside, and it was cold in the room. He touched a finger to a lower tooth, slightly loose, and the source of sharp pain when experimentally tapped. The rest of him didn’t feel that great, either.

  Clyde pulled the covers to his chin and went through a logical process he’d been through a dozen times since the fight. Someone had told Theo that he, Clyde Mumsford, was the Yellow Man. Theo had said that this someone was a rich girl. A long-legged rich girl. And the fight occurred only hours after his giving Audrey Reed the stuff about Wickham Hill.

  So it was Audrey Reed. It had to be Audrey Reed.

  It didn’t matter how many times Clyde went through this reasoning; the conclusion was always the same, and always just as depressing. How could Audrey have thought he wrote that stuff? And how could Audrey, who he’d liked a lot, and who he’d only wanted to help—how could she have turned him over to Theo?

  Clyde wanted to get up, but dreaded leaving his room. His mother had been asleep when he’d come home the night before. She hadn’t seen his face yet.

  Probably his father had prepared her, but then again, maybe not.

  Clyde lay back in bed, turned his extended hands outward, and opened his fingers into what he hoped might be a Zen-like pose. After closing his eyes, he willed his mind to go white, which it would not do—until it did. Clyde was asleep.

  At 8:15, he awoke to a knock at the apartment door. “Marian?” his mother said.

  Clyde heard the front door creak open and a cheerful female voice called something that sounded like, “Aye, nane ither!”

  “Oh, good,” his mother said.

  Whoever Marian was, she was jabbering away in the front room even though his mother was hardly responding. Clyde eased himself out of bed, picked out a flannel shirt and buttoned it over a sizable purplish bruise, then tried to sneak into the bathroom so he could wash his face. But when he pushed open the bathroom door, the stranger was there, rummaging through a drawer. She was middle-aged, trim, and wore a bright floral smock, the kind nurses wore in hospitals. Her cheeks were ruddy and her smile spanned a face that seemed unusually broad.

  “You must be Clyde,” she said. “You’re looking no weel, son.”

  Clyde liked the sound of her voice, but he had no idea what she was saying. That he was or wasn’t looking real? He decided not to say anything.

  “Been playin’ shinty?” she asked.

  “Shinty?”

  “It’s like hockey on dirt.”

  Clyde pictured himself on the ground below the watching crowd. “Dirt was involved, yeah,” he said.

  She touched his chin—she smelled heavily of lavender— and studied his face with medical interest. He risked a glance sideways and in the mirror saw his own reddened eye looking back at him through swollen, yellowish lids.

  “So who are you?” he ventured, keeping his voice low.

  From her expression, the question surprised her. “I’m Marian from the hospice, dearie,” she said, touching his arm in a friendly way. “Did your father no tell ye?”

  “I guess.” Clyde had heard his father discussing hospice, but he couldn’t remember what it meant. Some kind of nursing care, he thought.

  “I’ve been comin’ in for aboot a week.”

  “For what?”

  She looked at him a moment, then seemed to make some kind of decision. “Well, right noo I’m awa to wash your mother’s hair with een of these”—she held up two shampoo bottles and read a little from each label. “We can either invigorate fine, lazy hair or . . . calm stressed, anxious hair.” She smiled at Clyde. “Fit de ye think?”

  Clyde took a moment to translate. Hair was involved, clearly, and shampoo promises. He thought of his mother’s hair—singed, it seemed to him, by the chemical meant to kill her cancer. “The anxious one,” he said finally.

  “Clyde?” his mother called back from the living room.

  Clyde turned and called, “In here, Mom.”

  “Let me look at you.”

  He stood, wooden.

  “On ye go,” Marian said in an encouraging voice. “I’m just getting some hot water fae the bath.”

  As he approached his mother’s bed, she craned her head to see, but almost at once her eyes filled with tears and she let her head drop gently back on the mountain of pillows. “Pretty bad,” she said, holding out her hand for him to take.

  “Your father made it sound like just a black eye. Something boyish.” She stared at him again. “But this . . .” Her voice trailed off.

  “It looks worse than it feels, Mom. It’s not that bad, really.” Then, smiling painfully, “I was never going to get the Cary Grant roles anyway.”

  “Yes, you were,” she said. Then, in a more decisive voice: “And you still will.”

  From the bathroom could be heard the staccato sound of water filling a plastic tub.

  “Why’s that Irishwoman here?” he said in a lowered voice.

  “Scottish.”

  Clyde gave a painful shrug. “So what is she doing here?”

  His mother looked away and seemed to choose her words carefully. “She’s here to help me out.”

  “Help you out with what?”

  In an odd voice she said, “That’s all. Just help me out.”

  She’d been looking off toward the big window but now she turned to Clyde, and as soon as her eyes were on him, they brimmed again with tears. “I’m sorry,” she said, looking away from him again. “I’m sorry, sweetie.”

  Marian entered with a plastic tub shaped like the sinks in hair salons. “Help me clear this table, will ye, Clyde?”

  Clyde picked up cookbooks and cooking magazines, a tissue box, and two half-empty glasses of water. Marian began to remove pillows and arrange towels, a complex arrangement she worked like a f
amiliar puzzle. Finally his mother leaned back on the towels and closed her eyes, and Clyde turned to go.

  “I want to hear about this Theo person,” his mother said.

  Clyde stopped. “Nothing to tell,” he said.

  “Dis he play for the ither team?” Marian asked.

  “That’s pretty much it,” Clyde said, because it seemed, suddenly, as true as true could be. “He plays for the ither team.”

  When she heard Clyde’s accent, his mother started to laugh—a full, genuine laugh that made her chest heave beneath the sheets. Marian seemed so pleased with his mother’s laughter that she laughed along good-naturedly, too.

  “Noo then,” Marian said when the laughter subsided. “Nae mare kiddin’ on.”

  Clyde turned quickly away and went into the kitchen. He’d remembered suddenly what “hospice” meant. It meant the very last stage. Hospice workers came to help you die. To help you out.

  He leaned on the sink, trying to occupy himself with the childhood game of alphabetizing the things outside the window: asphalt, bucket, Corolla, dirt.

  In the other room, Marian began talking about the laziness of his mother’s hair and what this alfalfa shampoo intended to do “aboot it.”

  Ice, junk, kettle, lilac. The lilac bush by the fence held granules of ice in its clustered branches. It wasn’t going to bloom for at least five months. He couldn’t wait that long. Maybe he couldn’t even wait until Christmas.

  “Alfalfa sounds nice,” his mother said, her voice quiet. “I can’t really smell anything now, so you make me smell good, Marian, okay?”

  His mother and the deathwoman sounded like old friends. Clyde stared out the kitchen window. It was starting to snow outside, tiny white bits that lay for only a moment on the wet wood of the windowsill before disappearing.

  He poured a glass of orange juice and pressed the cold carton to his cheek. He picked up the phone book and turned to F for florists. His mother loved any kind of flower, and he had his tip money. When his mother fell asleep, he’d buy the nicest flowers they had in the shop and set them on her table in full view, so they’d be the first thing she saw when she opened her eyes. For the time being, an old vase would just have to do.

  Chapter 49

  Take-out

  That same Tuesday, four hours after school ended, Audrey Reed and her father parked behind a yellow-brick apartment building on Genesee and started carrying boxes of clothes up a concrete ramp. Her father propped open the heavy metal fire door and led her to an ancient elevator, which they packed so full of boxes that they barely had room to stand. The apartment was on the third floor, at the far end of a well-lighted hallway, freshly carpeted. When her father unlocked the door marked 3-E, Audrey walked slowly in.

  The floor was wood. The doorknobs were glass. The walls had recently been painted white. Audrey set down a box of sweaters and went to the radiator, which she touched with a flattened palm. It was warm and ticking.

  Her father carried his box into the kitchen, and she heard him set it down. He stepped into the living room, looked around, and gave Audrey an apologetic look. “Pretty grim, huh?”

  “No,” Audrey said, “it’s not that bad. And it’ll look a lot better when the Anchor Brothers bring the furniture.”

  Her father didn’t comment on this. Audrey leaned on the radiator and felt the warmth spread through her legs. “So, how many bedrooms does it have?” She was hoping there were three, which would leave one for Oggy.

  Her father hesitated. Then: “Just two.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Two.”

  “But it’s just for the time being,” he said. “Things will get better.”

  Oggy was seventy-four. Audrey wondered how fast things would get better, and she almost said so, but her father looked so depressed that she decided she had to say something cheerful. “It’s like one of those apartments you see in ads. You know, where a hunky guy and a girl are lying on the floor, eating take-out Chinese among a few tasteful boxes and a ladder.”

  “Well,” her father said, “the take-out Chinese we could manage. But I haven’t been hunky since 1973.”

  “Sure, you have,” Audrey said, though he didn’t look so hunky now. His black hair had turned gray, and he looked haggard. His shirts were loose on him, and the cloth on the collar was pilled where it rubbed against his neck. Audrey moved toward him and threw an arm over his shoulder. “Now let’s go bring in the tasteful boxes.”

  Setting up the apartment that night was a little better. Audrey pretended she was playing house. Nothing was permanent, she reminded herself. She was just making do. A box could be a nightstand, and her mother’s china could go into the built-in, glass-knobbed hutch, and they could camp out for a while.

  Audrey even began to picture what it would be like to live with Wickham in an apartment just like this one, to walk to her college classes and then lie on the floor with him and eat take-out Chinese. That’s what she was thinking about that night when she finally fell asleep.

  Chapter 50

  Breaking the News

  Audrey forced herself to tell C.C. and Lea about the new apartment on Wednesday when they met at the lockers before the first bell. Audrey expected pity, but Lea said “an apartment” sounded chic.

  “Do you have a buzzer?” C.C. asked.

  Audrey nodded, and C.C. said, “So, Audrey, honey, we can come to the door downstairs, buzz you, and be buzzed up?”

  “Uh-huh,” Audrey said. “Unless I decide you’re unbuzzable.”

  This led to a free-ranging discussion of who in the world was unbuzzable (Theo Driggs and Sands Mandeville) and buzzable (Mark Strauss). “And Wickham,” Lea said to Audrey in her soft voice. “Wickham is definitely buzzable.”

  “What about a trash incinerator?” C.C. asked. “Can we throw things down a chute?”

  “No incinerator. But you should see the elevator. It’s one of those metal-cage kinds from the nineteenth century. I feel like Lily Bart when I get in it.” (When they’d read House of Mirth at the Tate School, they’d all gone through a Lily Bart phase.)

  “Über-urban,” C.C. concluded, and Lea added, “Très Über.”

  Telling Wickham about her moving was somehow harder. She blurted it out between first and second period, trying to make the arrival of the repo men seem like a funny story.

  But Wickham didn’t laugh. “I’m not sure I’m with you here,” he said. “They’re going to auction off your house?”

  Audrey nodded.

  Wickham seemed hardly to believe it. He looked away. “That was a great house,” he said, more to himself than to her. Then, in a voice so thin it seemed brittle, he said, “I’m really, really sorry.”

  Audrey shrugged. “It was always too much, anyway. Too much space, too much carved wood, too much history.” She made a smile. “The only thing I’m worried about is Oggy.”

  “Oggy?” he asked.

  “Oggy,” Audrey said. “You know. The woman who took care of me after my mother died.”

  But when she looked at Wickham, it was hard to tell what she was looking at. He was here physically, but he seemed to be somewhere else. She thought suddenly of Jade Marie Creamer and wondered if Wickham was thinking of her, too.

  “Can you come over and see the apartment after school?” she said.

  Wickham’s eyes came back into focus. “Sure,” he said. “Maybe not today, but sure.” And his face went vague again.

  “Is there something wrong?” Audrey said.

  He shook his head. “It’s just that I’m, you know, worried about you.”

  Audrey had the strange feeling that this wasn’t quite true, and there followed a miserable silence, which Wickham finally ended by changing the subject. “So did you hear what happened to your friend the busboy?”

  “Clyde Mumsford? He’s not my friend.”

  Wickham shrugged as if he didn’t quite believe this. “He got suspended.”

  Audrey felt a prickling in her stomach. So that’s why Clyde hadn’t b
een in class yesterday. “Why?”

  “Fighting Theo Driggs in the parking lot.” He chuckled lazily—a laugh-version of a drawl. “I guess Theo pretty much tenderized him.”

  “Why?” Audrey asked again, her stomach heavy now.

  Wickham shrugged and looked around, as if he were anxious to get going. Without looking at Audrey, he said, “Since when does Theo need a reason?”

  The tardy bell rang, and Wickham seemed happy to have an excuse to go. Around them, students everywhere moved into hurry mode, and Wickham, backing away from Audrey, said, “Later.”

  He turned and fell in with the stream of students moving away from her.

  “See you in physics,” she called, but Wickham didn’t seem to hear.

  Chapter 51

  See Me

  Most teachers would have waited until after Thanksgiving to hand back essays, but not Mrs. Leacock. She had them graded two days after receiving them. Wednesday, November 26, was a half day and everyone was jittery, ready to be off. Some kids were already absent—the lucky ones who were flying to relatives’ houses or ski resorts or Florida condominiums.

  Mrs. Leacock was not in a holiday mood. She wore a familiar light blue sweater and a blue stone pendant that swung from a black silk cord. Audrey watched the pendant swing as Mrs. Leacock called out names and walked from aisle to aisle.

  Usually you could tell by the student’s face if the grade was good or bad: flushed cheeks and a small, victorious smile, or flushed cheeks and a look of disappointment or even resentment, followed by the flipping of pages to read marginal comments. Audrey waited with more than usual nervousness for the sound of her own name as Mrs. Leacock’s blue stone pendant swayed. “Greg Telman,” she said. “Leslie Poll.”

  Audrey licked her lips and studied the backs of her hands, which always cracked this time of year. Tiny white lines crisscrossed her knuckles.

  “Audrey Reed.”