Illumination Night

by Alice Hoffman

  Vonny and Andre have been arguing all morning. Though they will all be together today, Vonny is so anxious about the impending separation from Simon that she has a lump in her throat. Because of this she has been attacking Andre. In the past he would have ignored her; now he’s fighting back.

  “Could you open your window?” Vonny says.

  Only one-tenth of her irritation is showing, but Andre gets the message. He slams the crank until the window rolls all the way down. Their driveway has been raked, but next door there are enormous ruts that make navigation impossible. Pools of water have collected, and there are small cyclones of mosquitoes above the muddy water. Vonny urged Mrs. Renny to direct all her visitors and deliverymen to their drive, but now they come face to face with some teenager’s car, which screeches to a halt, then slides through the mud like a hydrofoil.

  Andre sticks his head out the window and shouts. “Back up, idiot.”

  The teenager inches backward.

  “Could you close your window halfway?” Vonny says.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t go at all,” Andre says.

  For Simon, a glimmer of hope.

  Vonny pretends not to have heard Andre’s comment. “I wonder if Matt will be in your class,” she says to Simon.

  Jody is running across the lawn. She stops and knocks on Vonny’s window. When Vonny rolls her window down, Andre looks over for an instant and sees Jody’s breath mix with the damp air.

  “Sorry about blocking the driveway,” Jody says. “Good luck at school,” she calls to Simon, and then she takes off to catch up to her ride.

  “Will you tell your friend I don’t want her Romeos using our driveway,” Andre says.

  “Tell her yourself,” Vonny says.

  “My stomach hurts,” Simon announces.

  “Great,” Vonny says to Andre, as though it were his fault. “She’s not my friend, she’s my babysitter,” Vonny adds.

  “She’s my babysitter,” Simon says.

  “You could use a babysitter,” Andre tells Vonny.

  Simon looks up, worried.

  “Daddy’s making a joke,” Vonny tells him.

  The school, small by adult standards, is huge as far as Simon is concerned. Simon is in the middle holding his parents’ hands, gripping his mother’s as tightly as he can. Voices carry as older children run to class, their open coats flapping behind them. Vonny and Andre smile at each other over Simon’s head. They’re proud of Simon today, and they have no idea that each time he looks over his shoulder it’s because he is certain bats are sweeping down the hallway behind him, their black wings blocking out the overhead lights.

  Six children and their parents have been invited today. Six more will come tomorrow. They all crowd into a classroom that already holds thirteen students and the teacher, Miss Cole. When they form a circle on the floor, Simon inches onto Andre’s lap. He can feel his father’s heart beating. The teacher asks the visiting children to come meet the fish and the hamsters, but Simon doesn’t move.

  “Fish,” Vonny urges him.

  The other children have lined up to follow the teacher across the room.

  “What color do you think the hamsters are?” Vonny asks, desperately she knows.

  Simon hides his face against his father. Andre moves Simon aside, stands, then takes his son’s hand. The fish tank is just below a window that overlooks the schoolyard. Andre crouches down and puts an arm around Simon’s shoulders. There are two angelfish and a trail of neons. A catfish stirs up the green gravel as he searches the bottom for food. The teacher allows one small girl to feed the fish. While the others cluster around, the teacher approaches Simon and Andre. “I think you have the wrong classroom,” she says to Andre. “The preschool is down the hall.” She leans toward Simon. “When you’re a big boy, you’ll come here, too.” She smiles.

  Andre keeps one hand on Simon’s shoulder. He knows without even looking that Simon’s face has turned red, just as he knows the teacher was trying to be kind. This sort of kindness turns Andre’s blood to ice, but he’s careful to keep his tone friendly as he tells Miss Cole that they do have the right classroom since Simon will be five next November. Miss Cole thinks she is making it better by telling Simon how lovely it is that he’ll be in her class. She doesn’t realize that she’s slipped into baby talk; she’s cooing in a manner she’d never use with a larger child. Once Andre manages to drag Simon over to the hamster cage, Miss Cole offers him the honor of feeding them.

  “I don’t want to,” Simon says.

  Andre pours some food into his own hand and asks Simon if he’ll reconsider. When Simon shakes his head, Andre feeds the hamsters himself. They’re so overfed they barely notice the protein-rich kibble Andre drops through the mesh. One hamster burrows into a pile of cedar chips, waiting for noon, when the children leave. The other sits on his hind legs inside a blue coffee can, absolutely motionless.

  THEY talk about it late at night, after Simon is in bed. Feeling guilty, they whisper, convinced that in imagining there is something wrong they are inviting trouble. Are they too quick to think he is defective? Are they blinded by their love for him, unable to see what is clear to everyone else? Seeing Simon in a classroom of children, some younger than he, has set off an alarm they can still hear. He is smaller than any of the others. They know that for a fact. They hold hands across the kitchen table and think that whatever might be wrong is probably their fault.

  Jody sees the light turned on in their kitchen before she leaves at midnight and again when she’s dropped off at three in the morning by a senior she certainly won’t bother with anymore, even though he’s sworn his brother can introduce her to Carly Simon, a singer Jody thinks her mother and Vonny both like.

  Jody wonders when she sees their light. She thinks that couples awake at this hour are either making love or talking about divorce. She refuses to have a conscience. Vonny will just have to take care of herself. All the same, Jody can’t sleep. She swears she can hear a woman crying. She sits up in bed, her knees pulled up. She hears the call of an owl. As she lies down to sleep, she feels she may have fallen in love with all three of them. She will always be outside what they have. She will always want it. That night Jody dreams of owls and skies filled with immeasurable light. She dreams that everything she touches falls apart and cannot be put back together again.

  IT is late May. The water is calm, the air clean and sweet. Anyone would dread leaving the Vineyard on a day like this. On the ferry they count sea gulls and sailboats, and when the ferry docks at Woods Hole, Vonny and Simon walk down the wooden plank and wait for Andre to drive the truck down the ramp. Simon wears a shiny silver jacket Vonny’s mother has sent him, and black-and-white striped overalls. Their pediatrician has made all the arrangements for a series of tests at Children’s Hospital in Boston. It is far easier for Vonny to worry about how they will pay for all this without health insurance than to think about what the tests may reveal or whether they will be painful. They have promised to take Simon to the aquarium afterward, although Vonny worries that he won’t be in any shape to go. Still, she has told him about the dolphin show and the three-story-high tank and Simon now alternates between mute terror and excitement, an awful combination. Vonny can practically see his emotions surface through his skin.

  When Andre pulls the truck off the ferry, they run for it. Vonny is flushed by the time she lifts Simon inside. For a moment Simon forgets their destination and he argues with her so that Vonny has to carry him back out so he can get in all by himself. Vonny knows she should remember he is four years old, he is a big boy, no matter how he seems to her.

  Over Simon’s head, Vonny’s and Andre’s eyes meet. Andre has not slept well, and it shows. He has agreed to the series of tests, but he is still not convinced they are doing the right thing. There will be tests for irregular bone structure and hormone abnormalities. What is the worst that can happen? Hormone treatments that will cost more than they can possibly ever afford? A son who never is more than three feet
tall? Death during surgery? They want to be assured that Simon’s growth patterns fall within the normal range. Because the answer they want is so exact there is no room inside them for anything other than sharp, precise terror. Andre’s fear makes him withdraw, from Vonny and Simon both. They sing songs on the way to Boston, but Andre pays attention only to the mileage. They share a packed lunch of sandwiches and Fritos and juice, while Andre, who insists he’s not hungry, gulps a warm can of Coke.

  Outside Boston, Andre pulls into a Mobil station. He gets out and pumps the gas at a self-service island. As he waits for the attendant to come take his money, every truck going south on 93 looks like freedom. He’s been having trouble lately selling his bikes and their bank account is dwindling. If he’s not careful he’ll become the husband who goes for a pack of cigarettes and never returns. The father who steps out to fill up the truck with unleaded and then disappears. When he pays he counts out the bills slowly. He gets behind the wheel but, after pulling away from the pumps, he suddenly parks instead of getting onto the highway.

  “I’ll be right back,” he tells Vonny.

  The men’s room is unlocked and not very clean. He washes his hands for a long time. There is a half-open window that doesn’t alleviate the smell of urine and gasoline. He could hoist himself up and be out that window in no time. He has forty-three dollars, a MasterCard, and Visa. He had expected to hate Florida when they visited Vonny’s mother two winters ago, but now he thinks of brown pelicans, of heat and melting tar. He could be riding solo, no helmet, no passenger adding excess weight. He turns off the water and runs a hand through his hair. When he walks out the door, he’s still not certain he’s going back to the truck. The traffic on 93 is deafening and the sky is a deep, cloudless blue. If he hitches straight through, he can be in Florida in two and a half days. He zips his jacket, then looks over at the parked truck. Vonny and Simon are gone. Were they ever there? Were they creatures he invented? He thinks of kidnapers, murderers headed toward western Massachusetts, people who will stop at nothing on a route straight toward evil. He is paralyzed. He is a spear of fire. Vonny and Simon round the corner, coming from the women’s room on the other side of the station, and he can’t be convinced it’s really them. The relief he feels stings so badly he blinks.

  Their pockets are stuffed with candy bars. The windows of the gas station are opaque and filled with the sky. It is Andre’s moment to run for it and he knows it. But he slowly walks across the blacktop, shielding his eyes from the sun. After he gets into the truck and pulls the door closed, Vonny hands him an Almond Joy, already melting from the heat of her hand.

  THE doctor greets them as though he’s known them for years. They’ve been told most children fare better when only one parent accompanies them, so Vonny is to stay in the waiting room. Simon isn’t talking, but he goes with Andre and the doctor, until they reach the door. Then he thinks needles, he thinks metal clamps, blood, dark hallways, cold hands, strangers. He runs back and throws himself on Vonny.

  “Please,” he says to her.

  The word twists across Vonny’s soul. She wants to sweep him into her arms and run out of the building. She wants to fend off the doctor with bands of electrified light. Instead, she puts her hands on Simon’s shoulders and holds him away from her. She is a traitor. She smiles.

  “I promise it won’t take long,” she tells him. “Then we’ll go to the aquarium.”

  “I don’t want to go to the aquarium.” Simon’s voice is hot and hoarse with terror. “I want to go home.”

  Andre says something to the doctor, then walks back to them. He squats down next to Simon.

  “I’m going to be right with you,” Andre says. “You’re not going to be alone.”

  Simon looks at him warily. It’s not Andre’s blood that will be drawn today.

  “Hey, guess what the doctor’s name is,” Andre says. “Dr. Fishman.”

  Simon laughs in spite of himself.

  “Can a doctor be a fish?” Andre says.

  “No,” Simon says.

  Andre stands and takes Simon’s hand. It turns his stomach to do this. How can he do this so well?

  “Can a fish be a doctor?”

  “Nah,” Simon says.

  Andre looks at Vonny and nods. Simon is falling for it. Andre walks toward the door, and Simon follows along.

  “Let’s ask him if he sleeps in a fish tank,” Vonny hears Andre say as they leave the waiting room. She can hear Simon laugh. Later, Simon will cry and there will be several times when he will want to cry, but will hold it in. Things will hurt him and he’ll be afraid of things. And yet Vonny is able to read a magazine; she can drink coffee and watch a two-year-old work a puzzle while her son is taken from the lab to the X-ray department. How can she idly count the change in her purse, then phone to check on the times of the dolphin show? Why is it only later, in the darkened aquarium, as Andre and Simon watch the huge sea turtle, that Vonny has to look away from the Band-Aids lining Simon’s arm?

  A diver in a black wetsuit floats through the green shadows of the tank, rising above schools of fish, sharks, moray eels.

  Why is it only then that she feels as if she is sinking?

  Chapter Four

  THE HOLE IN THE SKY

  IT is possible to enter Manhattan without ever crossing a bridge, if you’re not afraid to fly. Vonny takes New York Air from Dukes County Airport to La Guardia. When she manages to get a cab, she insists that the driver take her via the Midtown Tunnel. It is July and the back of her linen dress sticks to the plastic seat as she argues with the cab driver. Every time he says the words “Triborough Bridge,” Vonny’s heart flips over. Her internal temperature rises five degrees. The heat in New York is thick and damp. The cab driver is Israeli and such a good arguer Vonny has to offer him an extra ten dollars to take the route she wants. She does not trust him not to make a break for the 59th Street Bridge until they are ensconced in a traffic jam at the Midtown Tunnel toll booths. Only then does she allow herself to relax. Her knuckles, of course, are still white.

  There has been good news about Simon, and Vonny should be happy. Certainly, she’s relieved. All the tests Simon has had are negative. He has no hormone imbalances, no skeletal abnormalities. The decision is theirs—to wait and hope that he grows or to begin hormone treatments that may cost upward of ten thousand dollars a year, treatments the doctors cannot assure them won’t be harmful. Only one of the doctors, the hematologist, who Vonny is sure knows no more than she does, has ventured to guess how tall Simon will be, suggesting five feet. If they’re lucky. Their own pediatrician still believes that Simon’s growth rate may increase.

  In other words no one knows anything.

  Guided more by fear than reason, they have decided against the hormone treatments. But Vonny cannot get rid of the knot in her stomach. The whole world seems dangerous. Anything can happen to Simon. A list of possible plagues haunts her. The older Simon gets, the less she can do to protect him. She cannot discuss any of this with Andre, who thinks she’s overprotective anyway, but she has other fears about a very real issue Andre can’t deny. Quite suddenly, they have no money, a zero balance in their savings account, a few hundred, already claimed by unpaid bills, in their checking account. That is the reason for Vonny’s trip. It is not just the fifteen-hundred-dollar bill from Children’s Hospital. Andre has not sold a motorcycle for months. It now seems likely that he’ll have to work as a mechanic, not in his own shop this time, but as a hired hand, taking orders from somebody else. For days they have argued over who would be more humiliated if Vonny went to New York. To ask for money—or, as Andre sees it, to grovel for it—causes a man like Andre deep, immutable pain. It drives him even deeper into himself. Both of them have begun to wonder if he is a failure. On the night before Vonny was to leave she asked Andre outright if he didn’t want her to go.

  “You have to do what you think is right,” Andre had said darkly.

  “What is that supposed to mean?” she had shouted.
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br />   Because Andre refused to speak to her after that, Vonny has made her own decision and is about to spend her first night away from Simon. She has anticipated being away from him for weeks but, once she passes through the Midtown Tunnel, being alone has the power to erase even the most recent past. Simon and Andre both begin to fade. She has not been to New York for two and a half years and in that time the city has gotten bigger and noisier. It is so foreign that even the air looks different, turgid and faintly yellow. As she gets out of the cab her small suitcase seems too heavy. She can almost imagine that the cells that make up her body are dispersing, joining with the hot yellow air.

  She has always been careful not to ask her father for anything, and unlike many of the women she knows she was happy to change her last name when she married Andre. Vonny’s father, Reynolds Weber, married her mother during a burst of rebellion. In his case this meant rejecting his family and his family’s money. The marriage did not work out. After the divorce, Reynolds began to manage several of his father’s pie factories, and as soon as his parents died, Reynolds quickly sold out to a nationwide baked-goods conglomerate that kept the Weber name, but halved the amount of fruit in each pie. Since then, Reynolds has devoted himself to his second marriage and to collecting gold coins minted before 1900. Vonny has come to ask for five thousand dollars, which, though it is a price far less than any of these coins is worth, will save them from having to take out a mortgage on their house.

  If she has ever been more nervous, she cannot remember.

  She has not asked her father for anything since she was sixteen and desperately wanted an angora sweater that cost twenty-three dollars. She seriously thought she would die if she couldn’t have that sweater and was surprised when she didn’t.

  She makes it past the doorman without collapsing, but she feels dizzy and has to hold on to the brass bar in the elevator. She plans to spend one night here, then go out to Long Island and stay for another night with Jill, her childhood friend, whom, although Vonny cannot quite believe this, she has not seen for three years. She has timed her arrival carefully, phoning her father’s secretary for a two-o’clock appointment, in the hopes that Reynolds’s wife, Gale, and their eleven-year-old son, Wynn, will not interrupt their meeting. It is a joke between Reynolds and Gale that they tried for Wynn longer than most people stay married, nearly ten years. Whenever Vonny is nervous about Simon’s emerging independence, Andre says, “Do you want him to be another Wynn?” which is hardly fair since the only incriminating evidence against Wynn is that he is not allowed to take a bus by himself and that he is forced to wear scaled-down but otherwise identical versions of his father’s wardrobe.