The Boy: A Novel

by Santoro, Lara

  “This is the beauty of hemispheres,” she told a friend whose recently divorced husband had just dropped off a drum set for their five-year-old. “They separate you from your ex.”

  Alone with the dog in the car, Anna let her forehead rest briefly on the steering wheel. Then, pushing out a long breath, she rolled down Ben Romero Road. At the highway, she took a left toward the food store.

  They must have met a while back, she and the boy, before he’d gone off to college, because she’d had no trouble identifying him as Richard Strand’s son the night before.

  His father had come around within minutes of her arrival with skewered shrimps on a tray.

  “Eat,” he’d said.

  “Why me?”

  “Because I made them and no one’s eating them.”

  She’d picked up a skewer. “You’re going to watch me?”

  “I’m thinking about it.”

  “Don’t think. Move on. You’ve got a crowd to please.”

  Richard Strand had picked up a skewer and bitten into the impaled flesh with animal relish. “What’s wrong with these fucking people?”

  “They’re your friends.”

  He’d waved a hand. “Ghosts. Mere shadows.”

  “Kick them out.”

  “I’m thinking about it.”

  “Call the cops.”

  “I’m thinking about it,” and he’d moved on, turning women’s heads as he went. Few men at this dry end of the Rockies dressed like Richard Strand, with a crisp linen shirt, always white, over faded jeans and soft Italian-leather shoes.

  “It’s obscene, the way people dress around here,” she’d said to him once, not long after they met.

  “I know.”

  “Let’s all go back to the jungle. Tarzan and all that.”

  “You get all worked up.”

  “I’m not worked up.”

  “Why do you get all worked up?”

  They’d met late one afternoon in a bowl of dust, down in the canyon, down by the river. The wind was picking things up and throwing them around with bald malevolence as Anna stood on the side of the road with her new life, her new truck, a flat tire—and no idea where the spare might be.

  “You don’t know where it is?”

  “No.”

  “Meaning you might not have one.”

  “Possibly.”

  “You’re driving around without a spare tire.”

  “No, not necessarily. I’m assuming there’s one somewhere.”

  “But you don’t know where.”

  “No.”

  Then by chance she had moved right next door to Richard Strand, on the same side of the Rio Hondo, which ran cold and fast into the Rio Grande and there crashed and bled—thinned out, forgotten—to the Mexican border. Richard Strand’s house was bigger than hers. It was full of flowers, full of birds in small cages, fish in aquariums, walls with memories twenty years thick, children’s laughter somewhere in the back, so she had quickly formed the habit of going over.

  Richard Strand was a man without prejudices, a quality never more apparent than when he spoke to his youngest children—Matthew and Mickey, respectively nine and six—to whom he would say, “You’re right, buddy, they suck! Sharp corners suck! What are we going to do about this one you keep hitting your head on?” Or, “I couldn’t agree with you more, bud, it’s a hot oven, a really hot oven, I’m not surprised your hand hurts.” And once, sensationally, “I know, buddy, I know. Who put these steps here? That’s what I want to know. Who put these steps here?”

  But Richard Strand was also a man of fixed emotions. Anna had never seen him angry or upset, she’d never heard him swear or raise his voice. Despite the cinematic, almost hypnotic appearance of various girlfriends in various getups, Richard’s house had become the closest thing to a sanctuary Anna could think of.

  “It’s like you’re a private signatory to the Geneva Convention,” she’d said with feeling once, seconds before a girl barely out of high school streaked across the living room screaming, “Chinga la puta de tu madre!” and slammed the front door behind her. Richard had let out a sigh.

  “You pick them too young.”

  “I know.”

  “Why do you pick them so young?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Stop picking them so young.”

  The parking lot of the food store was full, which put the estimated shopping time for a gallon of milk and a dozen eggs at roughly half an hour. There were going to be the mothers, a clear-eyed, hard-calved army in Birkenstocks and socks, a few fathers, many with the lowered stares of the routinely prevailed upon, a few casual acquaintances in need of a good confession, someone from her yoga studio eager to discuss her back bends. It was going to take a lifetime just getting to the checkout line. Sighing, Anna went in.

  She charged head down through the aisles, making it to the refrigerated food section without a hitch. She descended like a bird of prey on the milk, pressed a carton of eggs to her chest, turned, mentally homed in on the shortest line to the nearest register, and there—doll-like, beautiful, eyes like fields of cannabis swaying gently in the wind—was Ree.

  “What are you doing here?” Ree asked.

  “I’m buying food.”

  “It’s a food store, Anna. What else would you be buying?”

  “I agree. What else would I be buying?”

  “I mean now, this early in the morning.”

  “I’m always in here this early in the morning.”

  “You are? How come I never see you?”

  “Because you’re always stoned.”

  “I’m stoned now and you’re in perfect focus.”

  “I don’t know, it’s a good question. You want to talk about it?”

  “Not really. Just tell me how you are.”

  A woman was advancing down the aisle with two children like ripe plums, like sweet candy in her cart, and Anna could not help a smile. Increasingly, children were becoming the only thing worth looking at. Like the silver veins of rivers and oceans, the raw flanks of mountains, they had the power to leave her mute.

  “How am I? Let’s see. I had this kid, this child, come on to me last night.”

  Behind a fog of dope, Ree’s eyes remained perfectly motionless.

  “Age of consent?”

  “Jesus, Ree.”

  “What do you mean, Jesus? You never know with these things, they creep up on you. Anyway. What was I saying?”

  “Age of consent.”

  “Right. How did you meet?”

  Her eyes on the children, Anna shook her head. “I don’t remember,” she said. “I don’t remember how we met.”

  It could only have been years before, when the boy had been too young to make an impression. She had a fairly sturdy recollection of the boy’s entirely unexpected acceptance into an Ivy League school because Richard wouldn’t shut up about the money.

  “I could buy a house, I could own real estate in Florida.”

  “Don’t send him.”

  “The room deposit? A thousand bucks.”

  “He doesn’t need to go.”

  “The textbooks? Two grand.”

  “Keep him home. Have him polish your shoes. It’s a dying art.”

  “Tuition? Don’t get me started on tuition.”

  “He could set up a stand at Grand Central Station.”

  “People live on that kind of money. They live on it.”

  “Or Penn Station. There’s always Penn Station.”

  He’d pushed her out the door with the excuse that his youngest son, Mickey, had tripped and hit his head. “I know, bud,” she heard him say as the door closed shut. “It’s that table. How about we get rid of that table? You and me, huh?”

  But that was all. That was all she could remember.

  Anna parked, crossed S. Street, feeling, as she did, the hard mineral aggregate of the high desert on her tongue and wondering for the millionth time why she, who loved water so much, had settled on such badly broken
ground. There was a town in the state called No Agua. It wasn’t that far away.

  She inspected the row of names on the buzzer, pushed the one that said Dr. Roemer, climbed one flight of stairs to the waiting room, picked up a magazine, beheld a woman’s naked buttocks for a split second, then let her eyes drift to the window—to a tree shooting up like a tongue of silver fire against the unfiltered blue of the New Mexican sky. “Relax,” the boy had said with the authority conferred by zero obligations, zero deadlines, a handful of bonds—and then only of the lightest fabric.

  “I slept like shit,” she told Dr. Roemer before even sitting down. The doctor’s face was like a slab of stone.

  “You always sleep like shit.”

  “Which is my curse, my cross to bear, but last night was worse.”

  “Why was it worse?”

  “I met a boy.”

  “Whose boy?”

  “You mean whose son?”

  The doctor, a man bovine in mass and apparent temperament, gave her a slow nod.

  “My neighbor’s son,” she said. “Friend and neighbor, actually. Good friend, stellar neighbor. Waters my plants when I’m away.”

  “Does he know?”

  “What?”

  “That you’re sleeping with his son.”

  “Who’s sleeping with his son? I’m not sleeping with his son. You think terrible things about me. All the time you think terrible things. Like I don’t pay you. Like I walk away without paying you.”

  “Why did you sleep like shit then?”

  “Because I kept thinking about my neighbor’s son, which is different from sleeping with my neighbor’s son. It’s a comparatively innocuous occupation, you must admit.”

  “But you couldn’t stop.”

  “Stop what?”

  “Thinking about him.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Let’s see. Chemistry. Physical attraction. My body. His body. You know.”

  “His body wasn’t in your room last night. It’s not in this room today.”

  Anna cocked her head.

  “Excuse me?”

  “His body is not in this room.”

  “So?”

  “So what are you attracted to?”

  Anna let her eyes wander. “I’m weary of your traps, Doctor Roemer, so I’ll tentatively, very tentatively, say the idea of his body.”

  “That’s right. An idea that lives in your mind, which is the same thing as a story you’re telling yourself: I need this boy’s body to be happy.”

  “Who’s talking about happiness? This is sex at its most basic.”

  “Fine, let’s try a little variation. I need sex with this boy to be happy. Is that true?”

  “It’s not untrue.”

  “So you have sex. Because of the nature of your attraction, you keep having sex. Then you start wanting things a . . . how old is he?”

  “Twenty. Maybe twenty-one.”

  “Okay. You start wanting things a twenty-year-old can’t give you and he starts wanting things a forty-year-old can’t give him, and what happens next?”

  “Train wreck.”

  The doctor smiled. “So let’s do this one more time. I need sex with this boy to be happy. Is that true?”

  “No.”

  “And if that’s not true, what is?”

  For a while neither of them spoke.

  “I don’t know,” Anna said. “I don’t know what’s true.”

  The doctor clapped a soundless clap. “In China they say, live in a state of constant unknowingness.”

  “We’re not in China.”

  “China, not China, it’s all the same. If you were prepared to live in a state of constant unknowingness, you would not be sleeping like shit.”

  “Maybe I should move to China.”

  “Maybe.”

  “You got a place in China?”

  “No.”

  “That’s crazy. You’d think you’d have a castle by now, a place with a pool at the very minimum.”

  “I’ve never been to China. Have you ever not paid me?”

  “Never.”

  “Good. You got me worried.”

  “I start today. On account of all the bullshit you’ve been giving me without a fixed domicile in China.”

  “Anna.”

  “What?”

  “Leave the kid alone.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s fixing to fuck you up real good.”

  Chapter Three

  Summer ripened slowly. First the ground hardened, next the wind died and the sage, dormant throughout spring, came to life with a whisper and a smell to it. Anna took Eva and Paco to the river every day, and the two took turns jumping in and out with sticks in their mouths.

  The great river. The strong river of the north. Anna had looked it up when she first moved. To the Apaches it was Kotsoi, the Great Waters. For the Tewas it was Posoge, the Big River. Only the Navajos, the vanquished lords of what was once a nation, called it something else entirely. To them it was the Tooh Ba’aadii, the Female River, because it flowed south, a feminine direction, and no name seemed to Anna more intuitively attuned to the nature of a waterway that cuts canyons, threads basins, finds its way to the sea, with barely a whisper.

  At the water’s edge, the earth behind them dreamed itself into root and bark. Anna offered her face to the sun and gave silent thanks. The tempest raised by the boy had passed, almost forgotten now. She’d run into Richard Strand at the food store one afternoon.

  “Come to dinner,” he said.

  “Who’s coming?”

  He waved a casual hand. “Kids, a couple pals, the usual. I haven’t seen you in a while.”

  She looked around her. “We’re always here. How come we’re always here?”

  Richard Strand had considered the question neutrally. “We’re buying food.”

  “I know. But it’s like we’re enslaved. We’re always here, with our little carts, running into each other, buying food.”

  “You get all worked up. Why do you get all worked up?”

  “I’m not worked up.”

  “Come for dinner.”

  “No.”

  Richard Strand’s eyebrows had shot up.

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’ve got a friend in the hospital.” And she’d taken off, leaving Richard Strand standing, jaw a little slack, in the cheese section.

  Since then, life had lost its sting. Esperanza’s transmission had died a sudden death and Anna had gone around to the shop. “Three thousand dollars,” she’d told Esperanza that evening, handing her the bill. Esperanza had slapped a hand on her mouth.

  “Ohi, mi madre!”

  “Ohi, mi madre is right,” Anna had said; and so for now, until Esperanza worked off her debt, there were three of them in the house: Anna in her study pushing words around the junkyard of her mind, Esperanza and Eva eating popcorn on the couch.

  The two were thick as thieves. “Mom,” Eva called out the day Esperanza moved in, “you need to get Espi Jenny Craig!”

  In her study, Anna pressed save on her computer once more.

  “What’s Jenny Craig?”

  “Diet meals!” Esperanza shouted. “It’s how Mary Martinez got skinny! She was big, no? And now she’s wearing skinny jeans!”

  “You owe me three thousand bucks, Esperanza.”

  “But I’m here, no? I’m working!”

  “Three thousand, Espi.”

  “Eee, your mother is hard, but I’m a sure thing, right, Eva? I’m a sure thing,” and Eva, whose wrists were like popsicle sticks, yelled out, “I want Jenny Craig, too!”

  At her desk a few days later, in the same agony of silence, of failure, of new and old beginnings, Anna saw Esperanza’s head pop in through the opened door. “We’re going to Sonic.”

  “What’s Sonic?”

  “The slushy place!” a small voice shouted from behind the door. “No slushes,”
Anna said, and a couple hours later there was half a Frito pie and two empty bucketfuls of orange slush in the trash.

  None of it, however expertly orchestrated, prevented Espi from getting it in the neck.

  “Espi.”

  “Yes, mijita.”

  “Your eyes are always red.”

  “Eee, I know! What can I do? I don’t know what to do! I’m always putting this stuff in!” And Esperanza pulled out a bottle of maximum-strength Visine—pure bleach by the look of it—and waved it in the air with clear animosity. “And it’s expensive! Five dollars a bottle. Six with tax! And it lasts me a week!”

  “Espi?”

  “Yes?”

  “Why are your eyes always red?”

  “Don’t ask me! Ask my mother! It’s how I was born!”

  “You were born with red eyes?”

  Espi, whose crimson sclera were the result of prodigious beer drinking after Eva went to bed, cast a furtive glance in Anna’s direction.

  “Eva, go do your homework.”

  “I don’t have any homework.”

  “Go do something.”

  “Like what?”

  “Go run around outside. Take Paco with you.”

  “Paco’s tired,” Eva said as the Lab, having perceived a summons and sensed the possibility of some retrieving, stood salivating by her leg.

  “Paco is not tired. Paco is dying to go.”

  Eva took Paco’s head in her small hands. “You’re tired, aren’t you? Aren’t you, Paco?” and the dog, spiritually attuned to the child in a way Anna had always found miraculous, lay down and let his head rest on her feet.

  Down by the river, afternoons, she and Eva played games. Eva put a fishnet bag over Paco’s head and they took bets on how long it would take him to paw it off. The dog became a regular Houdini, extricating himself with increasing economy of movement in preparation for some great vanishing act that would teach them both a lesson.

  In the falling light, as the river went from silver to jade, they wrote words on each other’s backs and had to guess. Looking at a book, they tightened knots along a piece of rope, undid them, learned how they went from memory over and over again. On an old tree trunk, feet off the ground, Eva was the captain, Anna the sailor.