The Boy: A Novel

by Santoro, Lara

  The cry, so disconsolate, so deep, marked a turning point in Anna’s life, a moment in which absence, and not presence, laid greater claim to the marrow of things, and nothing—not the stirring of life among the leaves, not the faithful turning of the sun, not the punctual pandemonium of dawn on the equator—would ever be counted on to subvert that basic chemistry again. She’d been warned about postpartum depression, but when that implacable darkness hardened into a dumb malevolence, Anna found herself questioning the very existence of light.

  She put the nannies in charge and hit the road then, returning from a magazine assignment three weeks later to a baby she barely recognized. She bounded up the stairs and ran to the crib, crushing Eva into her arms, whispering, “Mamma’s back, my love, Mamma’s back,” only to have a howl of high-pitched protest split the night—and cleave her heart in two.

  Ten days later, she was gone again. There was no breathless return this time. She climbed the stairs slowly, wondering if Eva had sprouted hair in the month she’d been away. Mother and daughter studied each other silently, Eva sitting upright by that stage, a streak of ice in her blue eyes as Anna rummaged in her bag for a tambourine-like instrument plucked out of the steaming bowels of Congo. She handed it over with a queasy smile.

  “Here,” she said. “Shake it.” Eva closed her chubby fingers on the edge of the tambourine, held it suspiciously aloft, then brought it down with a clank onto her head. The scream that followed was operatic, nothing Anna was prepared for. Both nannies came rushing in. “What have you been feeding her?” Anna asked them before she left the room.

  Funny. Funny how quickly and efficiently Anna had buried those first years, how fact had turned into pure fiction. Out of those lost latitudes, a single shard of uncontaminated evidence kept surfacing with perverse regularity: a black-and-white photograph of Eva gazing down at a cake with two candles (one for good luck) taken by her father as Anna stood in a swirl of desert dust on the roof of some abandoned building, trying to place a call.

  “Why’d you bother having her?” Eva’s father said when she got back. Anna pulled the vodka out of the freezer.

  “I tried calling. No one picked up the phone.”

  “It was her first birthday for fuck’s sake.”

  “I tried. No one answered.”

  Fastidious and feline in his tailored suit, Eva’s father laid a coldly furious eye on her. “You were going to express your regrets to an infant over the phone?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Suggesting what, if I may inquire, as the reason for your absence?”

  “Work,” Anna said, knocking back a shot.

  “Oh, work,” he said, his voice smooth and dangerous. “I’ll leave you the privilege of telling her that when she’s old enough.” And of course, years later, when the question came out of nowhere, Anna found herself unable to meet her little girl’s eyes.

  “Why, Mamma?”

  “I had to work.”

  “It was my first birthday! The biggest birthday of all!”

  “Not really.”

  “Yes really.”

  “What about zero to one? Zero to one seems bigger to me.”

  “Mom.”

  “What?”

  “There’s no cake from zero to one.”

  It was impossible to explain, the obscure misery of those lost years away from her job when she was with her child, away from her child when she was on assignment, never at the right place at the right time, balanced, as if on a tightrope, between points she could never reach.

  She kept it up, though, until the day a bullet came zinging past, setting off an echo in one ear. The ring became a nightly persecution, doubling in depth and strength, keeping her up, wearing her down, making her crazy in the mornings trying to light a cigarette with that dead vibration in her skull.

  “Why don’t you just bloody quit?” the girl’s father asked, reaching over and putting out her cigarette, “You do realize you have a child.”

  “I thought you had one, too.”

  “Small children need their mothers, not their fathers.”

  “Says the resident expert on small children.”

  “I don’t claim to know much about children, Anna, but what I do know, what only a fool could fail to notice, is that this constant going away on your part, this constant vanishing act, is harming her.”

  “How about you put in some time?”

  “I do the best I can.”

  “Which, scrupulously added, comes up to zero. Or right around there.”

  “I do the best I can, Anna, the best I can. And will you please stop smoking? It’s a filthy habit.”

  She went around to a few doctors, sat in waiting rooms with little Eva in her lap and that dead ringing in her ear, and got told the same thing over and over: avoid loud noises. So she quit her job, her life on the road, that vastness that for years had been her soul, and settled down with a man she did not trust and a toddler with an iron will. “NO,” Eva had formed the habit of saying, pounding her little fist on the table. “NO.”

  “No?”

  “NO.”

  “What do you mean, no?”

  “NO.”

  “No is not an option, Eva.”

  “NO.”

  “No is the wrong answer, Eva.”

  “NO.”

  “Eva, there is no such thing as NO, do you understand?”

  “NO.”

  Inconsistency, Anna would learn, was not one of her daughter’s shortcomings. It was NO and NO and NO again until after their escape from Eva’s father to a new continent, to a furnace of light at the southern end of the Rockies and to motherhood redefined, reimagined, reconceived, with Anna shuttling between therapy and parenting classes, and Eva on a stubborn diet of white bread and green beans.

  “Pretty limited food range your daughter has,” a mother of five astutely and perhaps not unkindly observed after a playdate.

  “I know,” said Anna. “I’m trying to expand it.”

  “She’s what? Three?”

  “Four.”

  “Too late.”

  “Too late to feed her?” She got a pitying look. “No. Too late to introduce her to new food.”

  The woman’s eyes were large, her skin sufficiently translucent to produce in Anna an instinctive current of distrust.

  “There’s been research done, tons of research done, showing that infants under one will try every type of food at least five times if it’s given to them by their mother, but only by their mother.”

  Anna looked away.

  “There’ve been books published.”

  “Books?”

  “Lots of books. I gave mine radishes, I gave them squash. I gave them tomatoes. And spinach. I gave them lots of spinach.”

  “No harm in spinach.”

  “I gave them sauerkraut.”

  “You gave them sauerkraut?”

  “I gave them sauerkraut. And guess what? They love it.”

  “Right on. You’ve got yourself a team of sauerkraut eaters. You should field them in formation.”

  She got a long, cold stare; and in those large, oddly reflective eyes, as if on a screen, Anna saw herself slicing bread and boiling beans, because, just after their move, Eva would eat nothing else.

  She tried to sneak in some whole wheat. Eva picked up the slice and held it against the light. “What’s this?”

  “Bread.”

  “Why is it dark?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “I don’t like dark bread.”

  “You’ve never tried dark bread.”

  “Mamma, I don’t want dark bread.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I don’t.”

  Motherhood multiplied by a thousand, motherhood on a constant edge, motherhood like a prison sentence until the day Anna got called in and told that her daughter was shoveling handfuls of dirt in her mouth at recess.

  “Dirt?”

  The teacher gave a grave nod.


  “In her mouth?”

  Another nod.

  “She eats it?”

  “We are not sure, we think she does.” Nearly a minute went past before the teacher, a transplant from the Hungarian countryside raised on the milk of human kindness, took Anna’s hands in hers and whispered, “Why would she do that? Why would Eva feel the need to do that?”

  Reclaiming her hands with a jerk, Anna had no trouble adding up a father, a continent, two nannies, and two dogs, and saying, “She’s lost everything. The girl’s lost everything.” A few minutes later, fumbling badly with the buckles of Eva’s car seat, Anna felt her daughter’s tiny palm on her cheek. “Mamma, are you crying?”

  “Little bit.”

  “You never cry.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Why, Mamma? Why are you crying?”

  “They say you’re eating dirt. They say you squat behind bushes, put dirt in your mouth and eat it.”

  “I can stop.”

  The first buckle snapped shut. “You can?”

  “Yes.” The second buckle slid in. “You sure?”

  “It’s my mouth, Mamma.”

  Things crack under too much pressure, and in the interstices occasionally new life takes root. From one day to the next, the school drop-offs, the playdates, the blessedness of Sunday mornings at home settled into a merciful routine. Eva got a dog out of a cardboard box in front of the food store and called it Paco, the Spanish nickname for Francisco. She was a bunny, a pirate, then a witch at Halloween. Anna started a column for the local paper. Eva acquired a taste for chicken and beef, zucchini and rice, shrimp tempura.

  They moved houses, settling down into a narrow pass glazed with snow and ice. The roof leaked and Anna axed the ice off of it, putting in gashes a foot long. Accumulated snow snapped branches off their apple tree, tearing Anna and Eva from sleep in deep terror, and Anna pruned it at the wrong time of the year. Then frost loosened into mist, ice turned to mud, the sun rioted longer and longer over the escarpment, painting the rock beneath it all kinds of violent hues. The hummingbirds came in crazed droves. Knees against chest, Eva dropped crocus bulbs into the earth. Caught in a shaft of dying light, Anna watched.

  That was how summer came that year.

  Chapter Two

  The sun rose over the escarpment and ran fast and hard over a stretch of broken ground on which a few casitas sat despondent, down to the river and up to the house, casting long, gaunt shadows on the patio outside. A few miles past the solitude of the mesa, past acres and acres of chamisa, past the steady metronome of what had once been a furiously blinking light, the town was starting to stir. The bells of the church of Our Lady of Guadalupe were about to resume their division of time into half-hour segments, and soon school buses would begin their artful rounds up and down dirt roads lined with latilla fences and red willows. Dust would rise, sounds would multiply, while all around, threaded in a near perfect circumference on the horizon, mountains solid and distant breathed out the quiet power of stone.

  Anna ran both hands through her hair. Sleep had come in tight-fisted spurts, between long spells of wakefulness during which her mind had turned tirelessly around the boy. The way he’d sat loose and cool in his young body as she grew stiff in hers, the way he’d propped his elbows on the counter behind him, careless and lazy—inured, it seemed, to the standard fluttering of the human heart in the face of probable rejection.

  As a rule, men approached Anna with circumspection. Those who pushed past the first exchanges nursed deep doubts, in part because of her situation—single mother, single head of household, single holder of insurance, single everything—in part because they sensed a roiling of dark particles beneath the affable exterior.

  “I listen to you and you know what I hear?” one of them had taken the trouble to write in a letter posted from the middle of the American nowhere. “The hiss of a pressure cooker.”

  Some approaches had been more sanguine than others, but they had been on the whole discolored by doubt, tainted by fear. Anna had had a single sustained dalliance since the big move, the duration of which she could calculate in weeks rather than months. Eva had never even met him. Thinking back to the handful of seconds spent sparring with the boy, feeling the texture of her own anger as he spoke, Anna realized that what had most incensed her had been his lack of fear. But why? Why deny a boy the recklessness of youth? Why attempt, with her dismissal, to reduce his flight to a pathetic crawl? The boy was just a boy, unshackled by age and circumstance, blind to the finality of the grave, deaf to the murmurings of the dead.

  Anna got up and went to the kitchen. A small voice rose from her daughter’s room.

  “Mamma?”

  Buried beneath the covers, Eva smelled of goodness and deep sleep. Anna pulled her gently onto her lap and they stayed sitting like that for some time.

  “Come on, my love, it’s time for breakfast.” She wrapped Eva in her polka-dotted robe, retrieved her slippers from under the bed, and together they walked to the dining room, where Eva sat waiting with ruffled hair and unfocused eyes for her bowl of cereal. At eight, the girl was old enough to get her own breakfast, but something in Anna could not, would not, give up the pleasure of feeding her own child.

  When breakfast was over, Eva brought her bowl to the sink, washed it, and laid it out to dry before crossing her arms and looking around with cold, critical eyes.

  “Have you packed my lunch?”

  “No.”

  “Have you fed Paco?”

  “No.”

  “Do I have any clean clothes?”

  “In the dryer.”

  “Mamma.”

  “What?”

  “You have to do a load of whites.”

  Anna knew legions of single mothers, agitated women at the mercy of their despotic offspring, but never had she come across a reversal of roles as clear-cut as that between Eva and herself. On the way out the door in the morning, it was Eva who emptied the trash, assembled the videos for return, made sure the dog was fed. What Anna neglected to do, Eva took care of with a roll of the eyes. “You were going to let poor Paco starve?” or, “You were going to pay more late fees?” Anna couldn’t remember when the turnabout had taken place, when she’d gone from being at least nominally in charge to having to travel the straight and narrow all the time. All she knew is that the transition had been wonderfully smooth—a wholly implausible, yet utterly welcome, balancing of forces.

  The first intimation had come one sleepy afternoon in the dead of winter when Eva, barely five, rolled out her cash register and coolly counted out one hundred eighty-two dollars and fifty-four cents. Anna had no trouble remembering her reserves at age five: they consisted strictly of IOUs, money she owed her sister, so she’d peered down incredulously. “Where’d you get that stash?”

  “Some I earned, some I got given,” had been Eva’s arch reply. Challenged to prove it, her little girl had started accounting for every penny until, not even a quarter of the way through, Anna had begged for mercy.

  The sun rose above the portal and soon it was time to run, the dog having taken position by the door at the stroke of eight, stolid and stoic in his determination not to be left behind. Eva stood by him in silence, lunch box held primly in both hands, as Anna ran cursing from room to room, looking for a book, then for the car keys, and finally for her cell phone. They ran to the truck—dog first, Eva second, Anna third—and proceeded in a flurry of accusations and recriminations—all voiced by Eva, who hated to be late for school—past the post office and over the bridge toward town. “We’ll get there on time,” Anna swore, “I promise you we’ll get there on time,” which, barring a few exceptions, all recorded in Eva’s jagged handwriting on the fridge, they never failed to do, pulling up just as Eva’s classroom door inched shut.

  “Did you get to school on time?” Eva’s father acquired the habit of asking every time he rang.

  “Kinda.”

  “Eva, my love, there is such a thing as an alarm cl
ock. I am afraid it will be up to you to purchase one.”

  “Mamma, Daddy says we need an alarm clock,” Eva said with serious eyes. After the fourth or fifth reminder, Anna grabbed the phone from her hand. “What’s the endless fascination, the gnawing obsession? You want an alarm clock? Get yourself an alarm clock. Get the Swiss kind. I hear they work better.”

  “I have an alarm clock, Anna. It rings at precisely four-thirty in the morning.”

  “Get yourself another one. Maybe two will do the trick.”

  He put a Swiss one in the mail and Eva laid it gingerly, still unwrapped, in her room, between a framed portrait of him in high spirits and a handful of sand dollars they’d stolen together from a rising tide.

  “Did you get the alarm clock I sent?” he asked the next time he called.

  Eva shrugged.

  “Sorry, my love, did you hear what I said?”

  Filtered through wires and cables and circuit boards, not to mention land and air and dark matter both unmeasured and unclaimed, Eva’s father’s voice somehow rang out as if through a megaphone.

  “Did you hear what I said?”

  Anna began wiping down the kitchen counter.

  “I put it in my room,” Eva said in her small voice.

  “Sorry, my love, in whose room did you put it?”

  “My room.”

  “May I speak to your mother?”

  Anna signaled wildly no.

  “Mamma’s in the shower.”

  “Darling, what’s the alarm clock doing in your room?”

  “I put it next to your picture, Daddy, and next to the sand dollars,” and through silence that struck like a sandstorm, Anna heard, distinctly, the encumbered beating of the girl’s heart.

  “You want me to set the alarm clock?” Anna asked gently after Eva got off the phone.

  “No,” said Eva, and like other things—the first-aid kit Anna never got around to ordering, the educational wooden blocks she never got around to buying, the ski helmet she saw no point in spending money on—the subject was dropped, no action ever taken.