The Boy: A Novel

by Santoro, Lara

  “Tell me what you’re thinking,” she would ask him.

  “Later.”

  “Tell me something.”

  “Later.”

  In the silence of the house, his mysteries became her own. The childhood dreams he had of becoming an astronaut until he heard David Bowie describe Major Tom’s cold drift into space. The realization, early in high school, that a particle behaved differently if observed or left alone.

  “Where’d you read that?” Anna asked.

  “In every physics book printed since Heisenberg.”

  “Who’s Heisenberg?”

  “The guy who ran the experiment.”

  “What experiment?”

  “An electron coming through an opening either as a particle or as a wave depending if somebody is watching.”

  “You’re making this up.”

  “Why would I make something like this up?”

  “Because you’re a kid. Kids make stuff up.”

  “Yeah?” he said, sliding one finger under her bra strap. “What kind of stuff?”

  Late in the morning one day, he let his forearm fall heavily over his eyes and said, “I used to think I had the best father in the world. The tall, dashing guy who showed up in a convertible, music blaring, and whisked you away from baseball practice with all your friends watching, wishing they, too, had a dad like that.”

  “I don’t want to hear it,” she said, and she really didn’t want to hear it, but the boy had perfected the art of ignoring her at all the right junctures so he just went on.

  “Then I got to college and I fell in this hole and, when I came out, there was this rage, this fucking rage. And it had to do with my father. My mother was, like, never there, but at least she was never there, you know? You could pat her on the head and up her dose of lithium and she’d only smile at you. My father came in and out of my life like a fucking tornado and it was always about him. ‘Hey, bud, how about we go hit some balls and get a cocktail?’ ‘Hey, bud, I got tickets to Friday the 13th. Big, bad, scary movie but don’t worry, I’ll sneak you in.’ Friday the fucking thirteenth? I couldn’t sleep for years. Years.”

  “We make mistakes,” she said quietly.

  “Yeah. Big mistakes.”

  “No one’s perfect, Jack.”

  “There are degrees of imperfection.”

  “Nothing could be truer. Absolutely nothing. Can we drop it now?”

  “Yeah,” the boy said, getting out of bed. “We can drop it.”

  He was peering into the fridge—a morning ritual of alarming length, as if the food were hard to locate, or possibly situated somewhere else—when she came in.

  “Why don’t you take him out?” she said.

  He turned his head slowly. “Take who out?”

  “Your father. Drive a stake into his heart. Get it over with.”

  The boy straightened, shut the refrigerator door with a sigh.

  “Guess who’s getting all crazy again.”

  “The man paid your bills. He put a roof over your head. He put food on the table. He toiled endlessly so you could drop out of college. And he’s the guy who ruined your life?”

  “Anna.”

  “What?”

  “Come here.”

  The bikers left town, and Esperanza reemerged with a conscience so dirty she picked up a rag and started scrubbing the minute she walked through the door.

  “I need more rags,” she said. “And bleach. I need more bleach.”

  At the store, Ree’s cart was predictably empty. “I pull in here and I get my cart and I start looking around and suddenly I’ve got no idea why I’m here.”

  “Were you purchasing sustenance for your children?” asked Anna.

  “That’s what I’m assuming, I just don’t know what. And you know what I’m thinking? I’m thinking it’s because I’m tired of cooking. I used to run a manufacturing plant in China and all I do is cook. What about you? Do you cook all the time?”

  “Some of the time.”

  “Haven’t we had this conversation before?”

  “We have.”

  “Remind me again. Who cooks when you don’t?”

  “Eva.”

  “Eva? She’s eight.”

  “She wanted to do it. She was desperate to do it. Age six she started harassing me. First it was coffee. Then it was scrambled eggs. Then it was pancakes. Now she makes bread.”

  “You’re shitting me.”

  “I am not shitting you.”

  “Grace couldn’t boil an egg if I boiled it for her.”

  Anna gave her a sympathetic nod then, suddenly overcome by the molecular imperative to hear her daughter’s voice, she pulled out her cell phone and ran out of the store.

  She had to go through the girl’s father, of course. He answered the phone with typical boorishness. “Oh hello, Anna. Why, yes, Eva is standing right here.”

  “Let me speak to her.”

  “I’m very well, thank you for asking. And you? Are you in jail? In an asylum? Or should we be so bold as to set our sights on a halfway house?”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let me speak to my daughter.”

  “Rumor has it you were caught snogging a twenty-year-old. I told Eva she’d be wise to keep an eye on her little playmates when she gets back.”

  “God, how funny. How about you? Still with the Nobel laureate?”

  “Nothing wrong with a trophy wife, nothing wrong. At least she’s legal.”

  “Great talking to you. Put Eva on the phone.”

  “A pleasure as always. Eva, your barking mother wants to talk to you.”

  Anna’s heart warmed at Eva’s high-pitched protest. “My mother is not barking! Mamma! Hey, my Mamma!”

  “What are you doing with that criminal, that lunatic, that threat to society?”

  “Daddy’s fine. He’s just had a bit to drink.”

  “Is he driving?”

  “Mom!”

  “Answer the question. Is he driving?”

  “No, he’s not driving!”

  “No? Who’s driving, then?”

  “The driver.”

  “Oh,” said Anna, instantly reduced to the core of her penniless state.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Well,” chirped Eva, clearly in great spirits, “we’ve just had dinner and we’re meeting David for after-dinner drinks.”

  “David’s another one.”

  “Mom.”

  “What?”

  “I love David.”

  “What’s there to love? The man’s got too much money.”

  “Mom!”

  “Eva, darling, come home. I can’t stand it without you.”

  “Oh Mom.”

  “No ‘oh Mom.’ I’m nothing without you, my love, nothing.”

  Eva giggled, and in the parking lot of the grocery store, alone in the sun’s lengthening rays, hours away from slumber, hours away from peace, Anna felt something tear badly in the middle of her.

  Anna did not cry. As a rule, as a practice, as an expression of who she was. Tears belonged to the unsettled world of children, to the hazy hemisphere of human madness. Nothing embarrassed her more than an adult crying. It strained every fiber in her body, hardened every cell, drained her of all emotion. Yet there she was, weeping as if at an Irish wake.

  “Call you right back,” she said but there was no fooling her little Merlin.

  “She’s crying! Daddy! Mamma’s crying!”

  “Is she really? How devastating.”

  “Mamma?”

  “I’m fine, my love, I’m fine. I miss you.”

  “You’re fine?”

  “I promise.”

  “How’s Espi?”

  Esperanza was far from well, having read into the boy’s encroachment signs of impending ruin for reasons she darkly described as her own.

  “She’s a little cranky.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I guess she’s broke.”

  “She’s always broke. Did
you feed Paco?”

  “No.”

  “Daddy, Mom forgets to feed the dog all the time.”

  “The dog? Ask her if she’s feeding herself.”

  “Daddy wants to know if you’re feeding yourself.”

  She’d had her key in the car door by then. She turned and trotted back to the store. “Of course I’m feeding myself.”

  Eva’s father had come to her place soon after they first met and surveyed her private panorama of two burners, a table, and a chair with clear distaste. He pulled the refrigerator door open and looked down on a bottle of vodka, a bag full of Arabica.

  “I don’t suppose you can cook,” he said.

  “Oh yeah, I can cook.”

  Later that day she put together a meal she dumped steaming hot in the trash.

  “Was that rice?” he asked.

  “It was.”

  “How extraordinary. I was wondering what food category that might have once belonged to.”

  “The rice category.”

  “How did it acquire that pastel color?”

  “Beats me.”

  “Right,” he said, pulling her to him and touching his forehead to hers. “There’s a pizza place right down the street.” And from that moment on, food had become a world in itself, a place full of silent warnings, issued by none other than herself as she pored over recipe book after recipe book. Never let the oil blacken. Always brown before braising. Steam if you can. Knead at an angle. Stir with rhythm and method. Don’t let the blade slip. Don’t leave the oven on. And don’t forget. Above all, don’t walk away and forget.

  “Any idea why the oven is on?”

  “What oven?”

  “The only oven we own, Anna. The one in the kitchen.”

  “I was going to make something.”

  “Something to eat, I presume.”

  “No, something to go bowling with.”

  “I’ve never been bowling in my life but I have, on the odd occasion, experienced hunger. Shall we attempt to put something in that oven?”

  Or once, on Christmas Day, “Any idea why there’s smoke billowing out from under the kitchen door?”

  She galloped to the kitchen. “We are so screwed,” she said. “So screwed.”

  “How many people did you invite?”

  “Ten.”

  “Well done. Truly impressive work. Magisterial.”

  “What about you? Couldn’t you check the oven? You got some kind of condition preventing you from checking the oven?”

  “I don’t cook, Anna. The fact can hardly have escaped you.”

  “Well, learn to fucking cook, why don’t you? Here’s the recipe book,” she said, throwing him the Larousse Gastronomique.

  It had taken time, time and patience, but in the end she’d developed a sharp sense, a good hand. At least she’d gotten that from trying to please him: the slow, not always smooth, conversion to the earthly merit of food prepared for the pleasure and comfort of others.

  Back in the store, Ree had a cooked chicken and a box of crackers in her cart.

  “Go to the cheese section. They’ve got this mango salsa that’s out of this world.”

  “What are you getting, Ree?”

  “A cooked chicken. So I don’t have to cook it. Were you just crying?”

  “I was.”

  “Is he riding his bike again?”

  “He lives in my house, Ree.”

  “In your house? Did you tell me that?”

  “I neglected to mention it.”

  “What about his father?”

  “His father’s uninformed.”

  “I thought he lived next door.”

  “He does.”

  “Shit,” Ree said. “No wonder you’ve got premonitions. Does he have a lot of stuff?”

  He did. An inexhaustible supply of Boston Red Sox caps, which had a habit of proliferating overnight. Truckloads of loose change. Three cameras, three iPods, two cell phones, two laptops. Shoes. Hiking shoes. Biking shoes. Climbing shoes. Surfing shoes. Jeans. T-shirts. A motorcycle, recently purchased by his father as a reward for dropping out. Two surfboards. A dirt bike. A skateboard crowded with stickers, unsettling testaments to a previous life. A PlayStation, never used. The bong, never washed. Toothbrush. Razor. Shaving cream. A guitar. A few books. Three unopened boxes full of secrets, things he refused to catalogue, even to her. Esperanza attempted to turn them into a casus belli, making the hazy case for an inspection on principle alone.

  “There could be drugs in there, no? There could be meth from El Rito, no? You know they’re making meth in El Rito? We could end up in jail.”

  “Go for it. Get a box cutter.”

  “Eee, you’re loca for this kid, and he’s just a kid.”

  “I’m telling you, go for it.”

  What was it about the boy that held them both in check? He was tall, tall in the way men are tall over women, comfortably, serenely tall; tall with a broadness and a thickness to him Anna could not begin to relate to, let alone match; tall with a vantage point so different from theirs, endowed with effortless nobility on the strength of verticality alone. But there was also the way he moved around the house, fluid, unhurried, with slow, mindless power. There was the way he sat, legs spread indolently out before him, arm resting on the back of the chair as Anna crossed and uncrossed her legs, her back rigid, her lips pursed.

  “It’s your house,” Esperanza said. “You open them.”

  “Forget it.”

  “Eee, you’re all crazy, I don’t even know how to talk to you anymore.”

  “Time in the can has never hurt anybody.”

  “You’ve never been in the can.”

  “Oh yes I have.”

  Esperanza’s eyes narrowed. “For what?”

  “Drunk driving.”

  “Eee, that’s just one night, no? One night is nothing.”

  One night, one night only, behind which lay years and years of parched dawns, queasy comings-to in the marshes of uncertainty, countless pushes homeward swerving across yellow lines, five car crashes—all of them in the breaking light of day, when mothers gathered small, warm bodies to their own—a thousand brawls fought on the edge of clinical delusion, once, spectacularly, in Paris, followed by the physical propulsion out of a private club onto unforgiving tarmac. At the hospital, the doctor had shaken his head, “Elle est folle, celle-ci.”

  “Yeah,” Anna said, her eyes on the dance of an aspen’s leaves. “Just one night.”

  “One night doesn’t count. Santiago Archuleta, my neighbor, no, he got caught for drugs and he’s still down in Albuquerque! And his wife can’t see him!”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know and, with these boxes, you and me, we end up in jail and where’s the money for bail? The kid’s broke, the kid’s got no money, no?”

  Money or no money, the kid had taken over in a flash, an instant. She had imagined his possessions to be in proportion to his age, so she had tried to hide her dismay when he’d pulled up in a U-Haul. It was astonishing to her, never mind to Esperanza, how quickly she’d accepted the clutter, how soon she’d held it up daily against the sparseness of her previous life, wondering how she could have ever inhabited such hollow spaces without grief.

  Days passed. The boy came and went, shifting the magnetic field of the house in his direction with every move, every breath, every smile. Determined to reclaim some territory, restore some balance, Anna bought the ingredients to make lasagna. Milk, flour, and butter for the béchamel; onions, carrots, celery, ground beef, veal, and pork for the sauce. She was cubing an onion when the phone rang.

  “Hey, Mom.”

  “Hey, the tiny one! Hey, the little one! Hey, my love! How are you?”

  “I’m very well, thank you. How are you?”

  “Eva, you can’t talk like that.”

  “Mom.”

  “Do you have any idea what they’re going to do to you in school? The minute you open your mouth?”

  “Mom.”
<
br />   “You’re not coming home like that. Rent some videos. Watch some American movies. In fact, let me speak to your father.”

  “Daddy, Mamma wants to speak with you.”

  “Oh hello, Anna. Are you incarcerated? Do you need money for bail?”

  “God, how funny. You’re going to send her back sounding like that?”

  “Sounding vaguely civil, you mean?”

  “You’ve clearly forgotten, because such minutiae are vastly beneath you, but your daughter is no longer in private school. She’s in public school. Public as in public, not private. Yeah? They’re going to crucify her.”

  “Eva, your mother seems to think speaking proper English will get you crucified in school. Small price to pay, I should think, for the privilege of speaking proper English.”

  “Let me talk to her.”

  “Always a pleasure, Anna. Always a pleasure.”

  “Mom?” Eva’s voice was uncharacteristically shrill.

  “Yes my love.”

  “Can we please not talk about this?”

  “We can, my love. What do you want to talk about?”

  “Has Paco been fed?”

  “He has.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m cooking.”

  “Cooking? You never cook!”

  “That’s because you’ve usurped my position. Two more weeks, Eva.”

  “I know. Have you registered me for soccer?”

  “I have,” Anna said, laying down the knife, wiping her hands, and writing on a board by the fridge, EVA SOCCER!

  “Did you get me a new lunch box?”

  “A new lunch box? What’s wrong with the old one?”

  “The handle broke. Remember?”

  “Yeah,” lied Anna, scrawling LUNCH BOX! “I want you home, Eva.”

  “I am. I’m coming home,” her little girl said.

  “We’re going to have tons of Mamma-and-me time. I’m going to teach you how to play chess.”