Alone With You

by Marisa Silver

  Tomasz sat back on his heels. His wet hands made prints on his pant legs.

  The night before, Eliana had insisted on driving to County even though there were closer emergency rooms. Tomasz had argued, wanting his son patched up and his mistake erased as soon as possible. But when they arrived, he understood why she had been so adamant. There were uncomfortable questions at the intake, and Eliana made sure Teo was assigned to a specific nurse who was a friend. Eliana described Teo’s skateboard accident, and the nurse agreed that a social worker was not necessary.

  “About last night,” Tomasz said. “You surprised me. That’s all.” He heard the feebleness of his words. He was hedging his bets, hoping that his apology would make it possible for his son to tell his mother’s lie when his friends and teachers asked him what had happened. The fact that he needed his son to protect him filled him with self-loathing. “I shouldn’t have hit you,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t care.”

  Tomasz felt his anger stir once again in the face of his son’s apathy. “Why don’t you care? You should care.”

  “The water’s freezing,” Teo said. He started to stand, and Tomasz helped him out of the tub. He handed Teo a towel. He wanted to do something, to dry his son or comb his hair.

  “I need to take a piss,” Teo said, and Tomasz left the bathroom.

  The following week, Tomasz and Gustavo were at the job site, pouring concrete into the mixer. They worked quickly to fill the shafts with cement. The machine was so loud they couldn’t hear one another, so they pointed and gestured. It was satisfying to see the holes fill up with something hard and strong, to know that the job was nearly finished and that it had been done well. Later, after all the concrete had been poured and the noisy machine was silenced, Tomasz and Gustavo began shoveling the leftover cement and gravel into piles.

  The wife came out of the house. She was wearing flip-flops and stepped carefully through the rubble. “Can I have a minute?” she said.

  Tomasz stopped his work.

  “I just want to make sure you tidy up,” she said. She was tense and could not look him in the eye. He waited for her usual apology, but it did not come. She set her jaw, as if reminding herself not to give into a more habitual emotion.

  “Missus?”

  “I need you to clean up after yourselves. The garbage.” She waved her hand around the property. “People are coming by.”

  “We are always cleaning every day,” Tomasz said. “Is there problem with other days?”

  “It’s just … everything’s such a mess.” A bolt of pain shot across her eyes and then vanished but she looked weakened. She reached over and ran her hand along the leaf of one of the garden plants. Her finger displaced a layer of dirt, tracing a clean path.

  Gustavo turned on the hose and began carefully spraying all the plants, washing away the dust. Tomasz resented the woman. Gustavo was doing a job that would have to be done again. It was a waste of his time.

  “And the Coke cans,” she said, gesturing to some empties lying by Gustavo’s cooler. “It’s really … you have to throw out your food containers. Your lunch things. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, missus,” he said. He wondered if this was a prelude to an argument he would have with her husband about money.

  “I’d do it myself, but—” She gestured to her girth.

  “It’s not your job to clean garbage,” he said. “I am worker. You pay me. I do my job what way you want me to do it.”

  Her cheeks flushed and her lips grew slack. “Please, don’t yell at me,” she whispered. “Please.” Her eyes filled.

  He took a step toward her, but she moved back, her arms instinctively covering her belly.

  “I am an honest man,” he said.

  “Of course. I didn’t mean anything. I just …” She looked down at her stomach. She fell silent.

  “When the baby come?” he said.

  “Four weeks. I’m excited. Well, I’m nervous, really.”

  “Everything change when the baby come,” he said.

  She nodded. Her little girl ran into the garden. She began to pick up stray pebbles and put them on the piles Gustavo was making.

  “You have children?” she asked.

  “A boy.”

  “How old?”

  “Fourteen years.”

  She widened her eyes appreciatively and smiled. “I can’t imagine,” she said. She looked at her daughter. Tomasz could tell that she could not picture her little girl at fourteen, that the future was unimaginable.

  He drove with the windows down so that the wind and the sound of the freeway would obliterate his thoughts. The sun was dropping in the sky and the air was cool on his face. It took him a moment to hear the ring of his cell phone. It was Eliana, calling from the hospital. He could hear sharp laughter in the background. She was probably in the break room.

  “She’s having an abortion,” she said.

  Tomasz felt something sink inside him. He hadn’t even thought about the baby, or about what would happen next.

  “They don’t have the money,” Eliana said. “I told them we’d pay for half.”

  “Okay.”

  They were silent for a long while, listening to the cellular emptiness. He wished he could hear her breathe. She was always the first one to say good-bye on a phone call once the subject of the conversation was finished. But she did not hang up.

  “Tomasz,” she said, finally, her voice uncharacteristically fragile and uncertain. “We’re too young to be grandparents. Right?”

  Tomasz’s father never spoke of his lost children, but Tomasz’s mother spoke of Stefan, Julietta, and Oscar often, and sometimes Tomasz had the impression that she did not think about them as being dead, only as being elsewhere. As the years went by, Tomasz lost any memory he had of these siblings. He would look at their framed pictures, which were hung on the walls among the pictures of all the other children. There were pictures of Tomasz and his living siblings as babies, toddlers, young boys and girls, graduates. But the three other children remained fixed in the single pictures that represented them at the age they were when they died. They seemed to Tomasz like characters out of a story, two mischievous boys and a girl who had fallen down a hole in the ground and landed in a strange world.

  Tomasz stopped at a bar down the street from his house. He ordered a whisky, his father’s drink, thinking of the man who had been old ever since Tomasz had known him. Tomasz held his drink with one hand and stared at the other, the hand he had used to strike his son. He could still make out a thin, nearly transparent scar on the palm from when he was eight years old and had cut his hand on a playground slide, a rough cuticle of metal slicing open the skin. Tomasz’s father rushed over to the park in his stained butcher’s apron. He picked Tomasz up in his arms and carried him the four blocks to the clinic. Tomasz could smell the cow flesh on his father’s clothes, and he worried that his blood and the blood of the dead animals were mixing, and that somehow he would end up with cow’s blood coursing through his veins.

  The doctor sewed up the wound and bandaged his hand so that it looked like a soldier’s stump. When he and his father returned home from the clinic, his mother grew pale and screamed. During the following weeks, she would not let him out of her sight except to attend school. His father complained that she was making Tomasz weak. Sometimes, he would catch his father wincing at him, as if the sight of his son hurt him. When it was time to go back to the clinic to remove the stitches, his father watched the doctor’s work with the breath-held anxiety Tomasz sometimes saw in his mother’s face when she dropped a pudding from its mold onto a serving plate, hoping that the shape would hold. As the doctor pulled out the final suture, Tomasz’s father turned his head away, as if he didn’t believe the hand had healed and was anticipating a spurt of blood. Tomasz had often watched his father take a cleaver to a lamb shank or the belly of a pig. He had always thought that his father was not scared of blood.

  Tomasz finished his drin
k and inhaled the vapors from inside the empty glass. His father had lost three children. But in the end, the man was not scared by death. It was the fact that Tomasz had healed that terrified him, that made him mute and unknowable to his youngest son. Each day Tomasz lived was another day he could die. It had never occurred to Tomasz that he could have hurt his father by simply being alive.

  A week later the job was complete. The underground columns had been bolted to the foundation. Gustavo and Tomasz covered the areas where the work had been done with layers of dirt. A landscaper would come the next day to put down new grass. A year from now, there would be no sign that the house had undergone such upheaval.

  At the end of the day, Tomasz rang the doorbell and the wife appeared. She seemed bigger than she had even a week earlier. She wore a tentlike dress and her hair was pinned up with plastic clips that he imagined belonged to her little girl. She led him into the kitchen, where she wrote out a check for the remaining amount and handed it to him. She seemed at once womanly and childish to him, and he felt awkward taking such a large sum of money from her, as if she were too young to understand exactly what she had gotten herself into.

  “You can have party now,” Tomasz said. “No one will fall down hill.”

  “What?” the wife said.

  “Friends. They can come by like other day,” he said, remembering her words.

  “Those were buyers,” she said. “But they didn’t want the house.”

  “You sell the house? But it is good house now. I make it safe for you. Up to code.”

  “My husband and I …” she said, her hand cupping her belly, “we’re splitting up. You made the house safe for someone else.”

  Tomasz left the house and went to the bank to deposit the check. It was only eleven in the morning. His next job would not begin for another week. He drove past a complex of movie theaters. Eliana told him watching movies and television would improve his English. But he knew that if he sat in a dark movie theater in the middle of the day he would feel ashamed. He stopped at the market and picked up food and a six-pack of beer. When he returned home, Teo was there.

  “Why aren’t you in school?” Tomasz said. Teo sat at the kitchen table eating a bowl of cereal.

  “I don’t feel well.”

  Tomasz was concerned. He walked over to Teo to check his forehead, but Teo leaned back to avoid his father’s hand.

  “I’m fine now,” Teo said. “I was just tired.”

  “You can’t leave school because you don’t want to be there,” Tomasz said.

  “I don’t care about school,” Teo said.

  “Jesus Christ, Teo,” Tomasz said, his voice shaking. “Do you know what is happening to that girl today?”

  Teo stared at the box of cereal.

  “Say something!” Tomasz yelled at Teo in English.

  Teo looked up, startled by the unaccustomed language.

  “Speak!”

  “I couldn’t be at school,” Teo said, his voice shaking. “I couldn’t sit there and think about it. Okay? I couldn’t listen to those teachers going blah, blah, blah, talking about, you know, obtuse angles and all this shit. I thought I was going to fucking explode!” He raised his fist and brought it down so hard that milk spilled over the sides of the bowl. He stared at the mess he had created, then he looked up at his father. Tomasz thought about his own father and the dead children who had betrayed him, who had not lived long enough to mask their need for him with rage.

  * * *

  The clinic was filled with women and children and a few men. Kids played on the floor, or watched the fish swimming in the giant tank set into the wall, their small hands pressed flat against the glass. There were no young girls in the waiting room. Tomasz motioned Teo toward two empty chairs. Teo crossed his arms and leaned over his knees, as if he were trying to hide. Tomasz reached for a magazine nearby. It was a kids’ magazine full of puzzles. He flipped through it and found a page where you were supposed to locate objects hidden in a dense drawing of a forest. Teo had liked this kind of game when he was younger.

  “Someone circled everything already,” Tomasz said. “They’ve ruined it for everyone else.”

  Teo looked at the magazine. “Everybody does that. It makes it easier,” he said, without rancor. His sense of what made a person bad and what made him merely human unmanned Tomasz. His heart split open for his boy who knew so little and so much.

  The door that led to the examining rooms opened, and a nurse emerged, followed by a girl and a woman. Amber had skin the color of light caramel. Her long hair was uncombed and fell in tangles down her back. She wore pink shorts, sparkly flat shoes, and a tank top that showed off her bony shoulders and advertised nothing more than her youth. Teo stood. She looked briefly in his direction but nothing in her face showed that she recognized him, or if she did, that it mattered to her that he was there. Her mother signed some papers, and the two left the clinic.

  Teo remained standing. He stared at the floor as if he were counting the colored specks in the linoleum. His hands hung uselessly by his sides. His fingernails were lined with dirt. Tomasz stood, put a hand lightly on Teo’s back, and guided him to the door. Outside, Tomasz unlocked the truck and they slid into their seats.

  “It was good you were there,” Tomasz said.

  “Whatever,” Teo said. He wiped his nose with his arm. Mucus got trapped in the short hairs there, and Tomasz reached over to brush it off. Teo was fourteen. He had the beginnings of a beard. His body had betrayed him when it told him to lie down with a girl on a cushioned bench press in the abandoned weight room and find his way toward someplace he could not name but only feel when he reached it. One day, Teo might have kids of his own. But one of his children would already be gone, and Teo’s heart would be full of fear for the ones who lived.

  “Will you start the car? Please? Dad?” Teo’s voice was ragged.

  Tomasz did as his son asked. Teo reached over, punched the radio on, and turned the tuning knob up and down the dial, looking for some familiar sound to fill the space between them.

  Alone With You

  AS SHE WALKED ALONG THE HARD-PACKED FLOOR OF THE SAHARA, her camel lurching desultorily behind her, Marie thought about the first time she had been called an idiot by her son. It had been his earliest epithet, hurled at her sixteen years earlier in response to her unwillingness to give him a second box of animal cookies. Teddy had been four then, and his eyes grew bright and his mouth slack with wonder and misunderstanding, as if he had fired a toy gun only to find it real and fully loaded. Marie was quick to turn away and not acknowledge the power that this tiny person had over her. She knew that children called one another names all the time, and that Teddy was only trying on the newly acquired language of hurt. And she was sure Teddy didn’t really think she was an idiot. How could that be true when he so often asked her what things meant or how things worked, looking up at her with a surrendering, hopeful expression?

  A funny thing to remember, she thought. The desert was working on her like the moments before sleep when her mind kaleidoscoped, and loosened fragments arranged and rearranged themselves at random. Bits of life made themselves prominent, the small, insignificant injustices, the moments when, from deep within the crowd and noise of her existence, she recognized her solitude. She let drop her camel’s reins, realizing that the animal, a creature of these long aimless walks and monotonous vistas, had no talent for flight.

  The trip had been her idea. Teddy, back from college for spring break, winced when she introduced the notion at dinner. She could sense him about to mount his defense, but then he backed off, looking down at his lap, as if chastened. His silence saddened her. Both her husband and son had lived the last twenty months in deference to her situation, something she took no pleasure in. She did not like being the focus of interest, and felt embarrassed that her frailties were so baldly on display. For so long, a wary caution had pervaded the house. She sometimes had the impression that she was the stone in a game of curling, her husba
nd and son rushing ahead to sweep the ice so that she would not stumble and go off course.

  Teddy, alarmed by the notion of his parents breaking in on his backpacking trip through Spain and Morocco with his new girlfriend, Elise, could not finally hold back, and Marie was grateful for his irrepressible egotism. He and Elise didn’t even know where they were going to be on any given day, Teddy argued, canting his head so that his soft, floppy hair covered his eyes. The feckless gesture had charmed Marie when Teddy was a boy, an attempt to conceal his transparent obfuscations, the small brilliances of childhood that made it possible to magic one hour of television into two. The gesture still warmed her but in a nostalgic way that reminded her that there were all sorts of innocuous deceptions that one came to cherish, especially when they were replaced by more dangerous ones, subterfuges of the mind, for instance, or of familial kindness. Teddy’s reedy tenor rose up a half octave, his adolescence making a quick and petulant reappearance. He and Elise had saved only enough money for hostels and sandwiches. Surely his parents weren’t going to want to travel like that. “I mean it might be, you know, hard on you, Mom,” he said haltingly.

  “I’m feeling good for now,” Marie said. “And I need an adventure, don’t you think? I deserve an adventure.” She felt only slightly ashamed to be playing on her family’s guilt, but now that she had introduced the idea of a trip, she could not let it go. She needed them to be together in a place foreign enough that they would stand apart from everything around them and she could see them clearly and make her decision.

  Edward looked up from his chicken. His long face was scored down each cheek with vertical crevasses, which deepened Marie’s impression of him as an outcropping, something obdurate and fixed. His thin lips moved, and Marie felt herself grow eager and alert, as she had during their twenty-three years of marriage whenever she waited for his tersely apportioned expressions. “That seems like a fine idea, if you’re up to it, Mimi,” he said.