The Boy: A Novel

by Santoro, Lara

  “Can we play Wig Out?”

  “We’re definitively playing Wig Out.”

  “Daddy says you cheat at cards.”

  “Your father lies. As a practice, as a principle. Darling, come home.”

  In her younger days, Anna had often thought that death would come for her quickly, that it would grab her by the neck and shove her under. There would be no time to square her soul to the stars, no time to locate the exit onto the other side. There would be the sudden, irreparable opacity of things, a single unforgiving instant in which every borrowed day would be weighed against not the purity of her soul but against the work of her hands. After Eva’s imperial entrance, Anna’s beliefs had changed. She would be judged not by the work of her hands but by the quality of sap running up and down her lengthening weed well after she was gone.

  “Let me speak to your father again.”

  “Oh hello, Anna. Still unshackled?”

  “Get her Little House on the Prairie.”

  “Which one is that? The one with a whole load of Yanks dressed like Heidi?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “Eva, your mother wants you to watch people jumping rope and picking apples. Do you want to watch people jumping rope and picking apples?”

  Had the man ever been serious? Had he taken anything remotely seriously in his life? He had come into effortless being with few of the weaknesses, the standard failings of the human heart. Untainted by fear, unconstrained by circumstance, he moved through life as if through a game of something on green grass. While she stood mutely at the foot of her own inadequacies, he soared above the world’s open wounds without a single thought of God. There was no stealing his lunch, no getting his goat. She’d seen him cry only once in their history together, at the airport, right before her flight, and even those tears had seemed calculated, manufactured for the occasion.

  “Anna, I beg you, don’t leave me.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “I’ll do anything.”

  “Let go of my arm.”

  “Anna.”

  “Eva, it’s time to go.”

  “Daddy.”

  “Please don’t take her away.”

  “Eva, give me your hand.”

  “Please.”

  “Let’s go.”

  “Bye, Daddy.”

  “I beg you.”

  “Bye, Daddy.”

  Anna slid the knife into an onion’s flank and dropped it on the board with a sharp intake of breath, blood pooling fast and hard around her fingernail and falling—thick, red, ruby-red—onto the counter.

  “Fuck,” she said.

  “For God’s sake, Anna, will you please stop this truck driver business? Eva says you swear all the time.”

  Anna closed her hand into a fist.

  “Will I stop this truck driver business? Will you stop behaving like a fucking two-year-old all the time? Your daughter is coming back to a classroom full of poor, angry kids with crew cuts and a million axes to grind. They will dismember her on arrival.”

  “Anna, you really must watch the way—”

  “I must watch nothing. You get her Little House on the Prairie.”

  And she hung up.

  Silence lapped at her in slow, low waves. She walked into the pantry. Putting out her bloodied hand, she let her fingertips describe the curve of an apple first, an onion next. She lifted an egg. She had forgotten the existence of eggs, the implausible humility of eggs. She had forgotten so much since the boy, let go of so much.

  “Hey.”

  She turned and there was the boy, motorcycle jacket still on despite the heat.

  “You’re bleeding,” he said.

  She shrugged.

  He didn’t provide first aid. He didn’t take her by the hand and lead her into the bathroom, search the cabinet, seal the wound. He pressed his thumbs lightly against her lips and brought his mouth to hers.

  Chapter Eight

  Summer has its own music. It’s slow and soft and, more often than not, slightly swollen between notes. Even Esperanza, whose scrubbing had the adrenaline-pumped edge of a full cardiovascular routine, mellowed her game. The boy procured a device through which movies and television shows could be plucked out of the ether and watched online. Anna and Esperanza stood staring at the small black box.

  “It’s messed up,” Anna said.

  “It’s like witchcraft,” Esperanza said. “Where did he get it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Who paid for it?”

  “Who do you think paid for it.”

  “Eee,” said Esperanza. “This is starting to be too much.”

  “You can watch them, too.”

  “But no, it’s not what I’m saying.”

  “I know what you’re saying.”

  Esperanza shook her head, plunged her hands into her pockets.

  “This isn’t right. It’s just not right. I wash your dishes, I mop your floors, I do your laundry. What does he do?”

  “Nothing.”

  “He eats your food, he lives in your house, he drives your car.”

  “He does.”

  “So he owes you money, no?”

  “He does.”

  “Like I owe you money.”

  “Like you owe me money.”

  “So he can do the dishes, no? He can do the laundry, no? He can get down on his knees and scrub your toilet, no?”

  “Esperanza.”

  But Esperanza shook her head, dug her hands deeper into her pockets. “This isn’t right. It’s just not right.”

  “He’s leaving, Espi. He’ll be out of here in two weeks.”

  Esperanza took her hands out of her pockets.

  “Don’t call me Espi,” she said.

  Anna took Paco down by the river and sat on a rock watching the golden thing run smiling in and out of the water with a stick in his mouth.

  “You’ve got it easy,” she said, and the dog agreed with a sharp bark, a delirious wag of the tail.

  “It’s messed up.”

  Again, the dog agreed.

  “Go fetch!” she said, throwing the dog the stick.

  Esperanza was gone when she got home, the boy was stretched on the couch, occupying every angle of the couch, coating the piece of furniture like a finish, a veneer, a beer in one hand, the remote in the other.

  “Where’s Espi?”

  He barely looked up.

  “I don’t know. She left.”

  “Did she say where she was going?”

  The boy hit pause.

  “No, she didn’t. Why, what happened?”

  “You have to start washing some dishes.”

  The boy put the remote down.

  “I have to start washing some dishes?”

  “You have to start washing some dishes.”

  He looked at her with great, almost lofty neutrality, as if the message she had just delivered didn’t involve him somehow.

  “I have no problem washing dishes.”

  “No? You have no problem? How come you haven’t washed a single one? How has this strange, this honestly puzzling occurrence come to pass? Go ahead. Enlighten me.”

  “Nobody asked me.”

  “Nobody asked you. Can’t you see? Are you blind? There are dishes in the sink all the fucking time. All the fucking time.”

  The boy got up.

  “All right,” he said, “this is where we start calming down. This is where we take a deep breath and start calming down.”

  And standing there, pushed up against the foulest quarters of her soul, wrapped in rage as in barbed wire, certain of what would come next—the fission, the cleave at nuclear level, the implausible, the unimaginable blast—she looked at him, at his smooth skin, at his clear eyes, at all the things he had yet to live through, all the pain he had yet to feel, and felt herself grow still, and quiet, and afraid.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  He took his time, looking at her. Then he put out a hand.

 
“You maniac,” he said.

  The phone rang early the next day, and it was Richard Strand.

  “I hear my son lives next door.”

  Anna rolled over and gave the boy the phone. In the kitchen, grinding coffee beans, trying to drown out the sounds from the bedroom, she saw a magpie land fatly on her fence and turn its head sideways with a mechanical jerk. The colors were deafening—cobalt blue, brilliant white, black like a killer whale coming up from the deep—the head tender and fragile beyond what, in Anna’s sudden fury, seemed right.

  Nothing is right, she thought. Nothing.

  The boy came into the kitchen, slapped one hand against the wall.

  “Fuck,” he said.

  “Okay. Let’s hear it.”

  “He started crying.”

  Anna turned. “Crying?”

  “Crying.”

  “Jesus.”

  “It’s all I need. A grown man crying on the phone.”

  Anna threw the sponge into the sink. “He’s your father. Show some fucking respect.”

  The boy brought his face within an inch of hers. “I show respect to those who deserve respect,” and barely a minute later she heard the roar of his motorcycle, a nearly audible rising of dust, and then silence.

  She took the dog down to the river but kept him close to her this time, hearing, as the wind moved through the canyon, the distant sound of deranged weeping, the legendary keening of La Llorona, whose madness it had been to kill her children by drowning them and whose fate, sealed beyond the recall of time, was to walk the water’s edge forever calling out their names.

  The dog put his head on Anna’s lap and closed his eyes. “I know you think she’s gone for good,” Anna whispered in his ear, “but she’s not, she’s coming back soon.” The dog let out a sigh but seemed much more buoyant on his way home, running in circles around her, barking loudly for his stick, running so fast he went tumbling over it each time. “Let’s go,” she told him later that afternoon, and together they walked over to Richard Strand’s house and stood waiting at the door.

  “Where’s my son?” Richard Strand said.

  “Out for a ride.”

  He looked at her, his pupils cold and clear against the back of his eyes.

  “Why isn’t he here?”

  “I don’t know. Ask him.”

  He pulled the door open. She followed him to the kitchen, where he turned and spread his arms wide.

  “What the fuck,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “He’s my son.”

  “I know.”

  “What are you doing with my son? I’ve asked you once before, I’m asking you again. What are you doing with my son?”

  “It’s beyond anything, Richard.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I have no control. Zero. I wish I could explain it.”

  Richard Strand stood in his kitchen, by his pots and pans, by the warped, blackened things that spoke of his love for his children and asked, “Do you love him?”

  “Do I love him?”

  “Do you love my son?”

  Anna looked away.

  “I can’t be without him,” she said. “I tried. I can’t.”

  “Will you hurt him?”

  “Not if I can help it.”

  “He’s my son.”

  “You keep saying that.”

  “Let’s not forget how well I know you, Anna, let’s not forget what I did for you.”

  Middle of winter, the ground solid ice, birds huddled in Siberian solidarity on power lines. She’d woken up with Eva somehow by her side and—tongue stuck to her palate—she’d reached for a glass of water on the bedside table.

  “Why are your hands shaking, Mamma?”

  She’d called Richard Strand, and he’d pulled a thousand strings, called in a million favors. He’d taken in Eva and checked Anna into detox at noon the same day, ahead of a waiting list so long there were people camped out with plumbing around the damn place.

  “How do you think I feel?” Richard Strand said. “Go ahead. Ask yourself the question.”

  Anna shook her head. “I’m not drinking,” she said.

  “You were drinking at the mojito party. You were drinking at the Croquet Party.”

  “Not like that.”

  “Every time I turned around you had a glass of wine in your hand.”

  She stood up. “Wine is not the problem here, Richard. I’m sorry to inform you, but wine is not the problem. You’re the problem.”

  Richard Strand slammed his hand down on the kitchen counter. “I’m the problem? My son is at the mercy of a notoriously volatile serial alcoholic and I’m the problem?”

  Anna felt herself split down the middle: she lost vision, she lost touch, she came undone along some jagged line from her breastbone to her gut. She shot forward like a snake.

  “What have you done for your son? What the fuck have you, as a father, done for your son?”

  Richard Strand’s mouth fell open. He stood like Lot’s wife just out of Sodom, salt right down to the bone.

  “Everything I could, I did for my son.”

  “Everything you could? Does that include the chick who stole his savings from under his bed? Does it include the cunt that gave him a blow job when he was twelve?”

  Richard Strand grew totally still. “You’re out of control,” he said.

  “I’m out of control? Fuck you, Richard Strand. You’ve done nothing for your son. He’s a mess, a beautiful mess, but he’s a mess, so don’t start telling me.”

  We have children. We have children, and they’re nothing we’re prepared for. They come to us from the softest corners of the universe, from the breath, from the hands of God, and we raise them any which way we can. They sit in grocery store carts, eyes big as leaves, skin clear as water, prey to the great offense, the unending sin—trampled underfoot, slighted, ignored, forgotten, sometimes, only sometimes, taken with extreme precaution down the silver throat of the world in winter, the wide barge of life in summer, by men who have become men, and women who have learned to calculate the weight of a single instant before it all goes dark. We have children, and we don’t know how.

  Chapter Nine

  At the airport in Phoenix, Eva stood out against a curtain of drab humanity like the noon sun, light streaming out of her like something by El Greco.

  “Oh my love,” Anna said, burying her face in her daughter’s hair, leading her by the hand down a million escalators out into the wide world, where they both stood blinded by the day, Eva up to her mother’s shoulder already.

  “Look,” she shouted, standing on the tips of her toes, describing a wildly uneven line with her hand to Anna’s domed forehead. “I’m as tall as you!”

  They stopped at a gas station, got gas, a bag of chips, and together they set out across the desert with music on the stereo. It wasn’t until past the Apache park, where the earth met the sky among the most improbable lines, that Anna turned and said, “Eva, there is something I need to tell you.”

  “Mom.”

  “What?”

  “There is something I need to tell you.”

  Anna turned. “What?”

  “Look at the road.”

  “I’m looking at the fucking road.”

  Eva’s little body grew stiff.

  “I’m sorry,” Anna said softly. “Please say what you were going to tell me.”

  Eva had her face turned to the window, her small hands tucked between her small knees.

  “Please, darling.”

  Her little girl turned, ice in her blue eyes.

  “Daddy says you cheated on him, too.”

  Anna nearly slammed on the brakes, but the highway ran like a hard, fast river behind them and there was no time for anything.

  “That was before you were born,” she said.

  Eva said nothing.

  “That was before you were born, it was at the beginning. I didn’t trust your father, I didn’t trust him as far as
I could throw him. Once I got pregnant with you, everything changed. We were a family, a unit, and I would have never cheated on him then.”

  Eva shrugged, her body turned to the window, her scapula pushing up hard up against her skin—an angel’s wing cut off.

  “Daddy says it doesn’t matter. He says you cheated on him and he didn’t leave you.”

  Anna slammed her hand against the wheel. “Son of a bitch! Well, you go ahead and believe what you want. I know what happened. I don’t need to explain it to you.”

  “Yes you do!” Eva shot back without a moment’s hesitation. “You do need to explain it to me! I’m your child!”

  “That means nothing,” Anna said. “That means absolutely nothing.”

  The road lay like a ribbon of fire in front of them, one more blazing thing to look at and feel and get past, on the way home. Esperanza was right, this was Indian country, there was no relief from it. Just the flat exactitude of so much rock against so much sky, the purely passive life of minerals stacked in meaningless odds against the pull of gravity, the passage of time.

  Mother and daughter drove across the state border in silence. They drove past rotting trailers barely anchored on the rocky land, past rusting carcasses of cars and trucks. When they pulled up against Anna’s uneven fence, not a word had been exchanged. Anna put the car into neutral.

  “Eva, there is something I need to tell you.”

  Eva yanked her backpack from her feet onto her knees. “What?” she said.

  “There’s someone staying with us for a while.”

  “Who?”

  “The son of a friend.”

  “What friend?”

  Anna took a deep breath. “Richard Strand.”

  Eva’s head turned with a jerk. “The boy from the party?”

  “He’s got no place to go. He had a terrible falling out with his father and he has no place to go.”

  It took a fraction of time so small for Eva to process the information and come up with the only relevant question that, sitting there, her mouth slightly open, Anna could not help a stab of pride.

  “Where’s he sleeping?”

  “On the couch.”

  “How much longer?”

  “Couple days.”