What the Family Needed

by Steven Amsterdam

  It was blank.

  There were eleven blank ones before that. They had been bent open and creased down, as if he had spent as much time composing on these as the previous ones that were filled with his scrawl. She flipped through again, expecting a message to fall out or materialize from the emptiness. She held the pages up to the light to see if they had been etched in some way to hide his words from his brother or his prying mother. They weren’t. Perhaps he’d used lemon juice, Natalie and Ruth’s trick for writing notes to each other for one entire year when they were young. (Long before Sasha or Alek had a hint of chin hair, Natalie taught the boys the lemon juice trick—invisible at the time of writing, revealed with heat. But she knew, even as she held a page over the toaster to make the words materialize for them, that they would never find any use for the trick; they were, alas, boys, and didn’t have as many secrets to share.) Holding the journal close to her face, she could see the pages were smooth and had never been dampened.

  Visible written entries stopped twelve days earlier. The last of these were about Alek’s best friend Ned, who had recently had sex with his girlfriend—for the second time, apparently. Ned must have shared the specifics of anatomy and procedure with Alek because they had all been recorded. The embarrassment of detail convinced Natalie that Alek was still a virgin. Although he was only sixteen, it felt like another milestone he was skipping. Months ago she had decided, or at any rate accepted, that he and Vicenta, who had been “hanging out” since the school year began, were ready. Natalie had more than once caught them furtively holding hands while they watched TV. She didn’t know the parents well, but she trusted Vicenta. She was a year ahead of Alek, which Natalie took to be a fact in support of his maturity. She was pretty, but not too. And Spanish, which Natalie admitted to having a suspect appreciation for, if only for its own novelty in their neighborhood. Plus, Natalie was confident that, after much school board debate, the sex education teacher was being fiercely explicit about the perils of pregnancy and, now, HIV. Both kids would have been smart enough to use condoms.

  But at first glance, no mention of Vicenta in the diary. Evidence of any sex life at all could have explained his sudden neglect of other areas. Natalie looked back a few pages, through ruminations on some unforgivable demands of his English teacher and a few lines from a poem or song—“drop me far, drop me deep / leave me just my soul to keep.” She didn’t think they were all that pleasant, but she couldn’t imagine that it represented a bridging step to drug addiction. She was eager to find Vicenta somewhere in there.

  Three days before the writing stopped: “Vicenta (love) says I am loco perfect.” Natalie assumed this was a compliment and slammed the pad closed with revulsion for having read this much.

  What had she been expecting to find? I cut school to rob 7-Elevens in his blocky handwriting? No such clarity. Textbook boy stuff with a few empty pages. She turned off the shower.

  Downstairs, Peter sounded like he was finishing up his reprimand. Thankfully, Sasha—one year older than Alek, and infinitely more social—wasn’t home for this or he would have found a way to mock Alek or Peter or all of them.

  Natalie opened Alek’s bedroom door, took the three steps to the closet, reburied the journal, and backed out into the hall in one neat movement, asserting to herself all the while that it was her house and she was the keeper of its contents. Alek came up the stairs as she pretended to be walking out of the bathroom. His eyes were on the carpet. He couldn’t have been aware of her trespass.

  “How did it go?” she asked him, with a conspiratorial kindness that repulsed her.

  He looked up, his eyes red, and gave her a sarcastic brow raise. “You could have stayed.”

  “I’m sorry, love.” She knew she hadn’t exactly played the role of his liberator in the whole scenario.

  “Why did you leave me with him?”

  For expedience. If she could find out what was keeping Alek from his responsibilities—by any means necessary—surely she could help.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “I was having a hot flash.” It was cheap, she knew.

  “So you had a hot shower?”

  “No, I—” and she followed his eyes to the steam coming out of the bathroom.

  That fumble was all the proof he needed of her falseness. The uselessness of adults. He gave her a grim dismissal. “Whatever you two want,” he said. “You own me, for the next few years at least.”

  “Don’t be dramatic. We’re trying to—”

  Alek abandoned her for his room, pulling hard on the door so that air blew against her face, but stopping right at the end so that it closed with barely a sound, circumventing the house rule against slamming.

  Natalie let out a sigh that matched it, but inside she was transformed into a fountain of frustration. Like a hot flash, but invigorating. She wanted to force her way in, push him to the ground—tenderly, of course, protecting his head—and sit on his chest and start demanding answers. The surge of violence startled her. Teenagers.

  Peter climbed the stairs, looking every bit as worked up as Alek had looked worked over. Hushed, he met her two steps from the top.

  She said, “I’m sorry, sweet. I had to escape from the two of you together. You were getting nothing from each other. What happened?”

  “What do you imagine? You left, he got upset without you to bat for him. But he held tight. Didn’t tell me where he’s been going. Not our business, apparently. Doesn’t want time off, doesn’t want a shrink. Says he’ll attend school and swimming without fail from this day onward. There’s no reason to believe what he says and I told him so. From tomorrow, and until we get some idea of what’s actually happening inside that head of his, I bring him to school. After work you take him from there to swimming practice and wait for him till he’s done. I think that’s fair.”

  “Seems reasonable,” she said, although it sounded like thumbscrews. The alibi for her departure from the table was weak and she had no other plan to suggest. Neither of them knew what they were doing for Alek. Increased monitoring was as thoughtful an approach as any.

  Natalie spent the afternoon pruning the hell out of the roses. She planted an apple sapling and put in some bulbs for spring. She raked the leaves into a pile that the boys would once have adored, but that was distinctly in the past, so she burned it. While the smoke spun upward, she weeded. It was as if every thistle was another instance of bad parenting and she tugged with care to be sure she pulled up each of their tiny roots.

  An urge to get away led her to drive over to the pond for a walk. The small clearing of sandy beach was empty. It always was, unless it was the absolute swelter of summer. The water was dark and still, except for a few red leaves spinning near the shore. Ordinarily Natalie, too thin and easily chilled, wouldn’t have considered it, but she still felt this extra energy inside. She had to burn it off or she would take it out on Alek. What else was the bathing suit in the back of the car for?

  She changed behind a tree and walked down to the edge to see how brave she really was. Going under, it was new water. Like when Peter had first brought her to the pond—before the boys, before they had even bought the house. She was never a bold swimmer, her habit being to make slow contented circles close to the shore or paddle around with minimal splashing, on lookout for birds or other distractions in the surrounding woods. Not today. Without pausing to adjust to the temperature or marvel at the clarity of the late afternoon light, she swam the length of the pond and back. Ten times, with pure speed. She did ten more laps just as quickly, stopping only because she was starting to worry about the time. She wasn’t even out of breath.

  “That flame’s too high,” Peter said.

  “Not quite.” Natalie rotated the chicken thighs in a sizzling pan. “I had a ridiculously good swim at the pond,” she said.

  “I should have gone.”

  “I wonder. I wonder if I would have done as well with anyone else around.”

  Peter frowned.

  She turned off
the flame and shook the pan a few times before putting it over a cool burner. “There, done.” She reached for his hand. “Suffice it to say that the pleasure for us is in me telling you about it.”

  “Sufficed.”

  “It was lovely, though. I felt Olympian.”

  “Wonderful. Hormones?” he suggested.

  “No doubt,” Natalie said. “Call the boys.”

  She may as well have requested only Sasha’s attendance. Alek absented himself so thoroughly from the conversation that even Peter gave up on forcing him to engage. Sasha tried, prodding him to gossip about an English teacher they both had who was pregnant, but that went nowhere. Natalie kept watching him through the meal. She felt that he was watching her too.

  The force that had propelled Natalie across the pond kept her from sleeping. Giving in to it at midnight, she wandered the house. A sentinel watching over her men. Peter with his smooth tidal snore, Sasha sleeping sweetly. Alek, with his door closed and light on. Perhaps he was awake with the same bug? No, he had his own concerns. If he could rip through water like Natalie, he would be turning up for swim.

  In the morning, Natalie watched Alek get into the car for the enforced ride. He complied, sitting limply in the passenger seat.

  At her school, Natalie’s ability to work with the chaos of her students was mythic. The afternoon schedule of reading corner followed by art time was a vibration of coordinated productivity. Even the children’s ability to color in appeared to be improving. Later, when the parents came, she provided far more than her usual dose of feedback. The children in their construction paper crowns trudged home, their parents proudly holding hands and carrying all the gold-starred projects. As they scattered, Natalie felt thirsty for more.

  She didn’t discuss Alek with anyone, even at lunch when one of the other teachers went on and on about her son’s chronic lying. Peter wasn’t the type to talk about it at work either. The last thing he would mention to the staff of a small local paper would be his own small local news. One time Ruth had called Natalie an uptight suburban lady. Fondly, of course. If she and Peter knew more about Alek, they might be capable of unburdening themselves and commiserating with their peers, Natalie hoped. Had their reserve turned him inward?

  After school, she took a break from corralling first graders into playgroups to call the assistant principal at the high school. Peter had made him complicit with their surveillance. The man duly confirmed Alek’s attendance that day.

  Natalie drove up the ramp to retrieve him. Alek and Vicenta were sitting on a concrete bench in front of the high school. He was staring at a patch of trampled grass while Vicenta spoke to him, steadily rocking toward his ear, as if she were insisting on being heard. He maintained his shrugging, evasive expression. Her seriousness seemed to be matched by his vagueness. A disloyal thought bubbled up in Natalie: What was Vicenta even doing with him?

  Alek said something that made Vicenta laugh and she punched him on the arm. Her hand lingered on his shoulder. At least they were still together. He wasn’t completely adrift. But it didn’t explain the blank pages or the absences. He was hiding from all of them.

  Cruising slowly closer, Natalie announced herself with a short toot. If the two of them hadn’t had sex, it was Alek’s choice, she was sure. It was the way Vicenta faced him and the way he turned away. The feeling was confirmed when Vicenta complimented Natalie’s extremely ordinary blouse. It was as if she was trying to worm her way into Natalie’s good books in order to get closer to Alek. Good luck with that.

  Natalie escorted the prisoner to the sports complex at the university, past the outdoor pool to the indoor one where the boys wouldn’t get too chilled. Bless their little bodies. It had been a while since Natalie had stood around poolside during practice. The shimmering surface demanded that she dive in, but she was the only parent there. It would have been unseemly. When Ned, nearly Peter’s height now and sprouting hair everywhere, gave her a sheepish “Hello,” she suppressed the urge to take him aside and interrogate him about Alek.

  Across their designated lanes, the clutch of boys displayed the entire bandwidth of male physical development and emotional immaturity. Some were splashing, pushing each other in, yanking on bathing suits, and swimming crosswise under all the lane dividers. The coach condoned it, telling them to knock it off while chuckling. A few were performing quick, minnow-like laps, springing off the far end and shooting back to the start in one or two breaths. When they completed their circuit, they pushed themselves up, little suburban gods rising from the water, and shivered across the pale blue tiles to see where they’d left their towels.

  Alek kept himself more in line with the loaf-shaped kids, swimming decently, participating precisely as much as required. Natalie resented the coach for ratting out her son. It wouldn’t have been a calamity if he had missed a few of these afternoons. The other boys, even Ned, seemed to know to leave Alek alone, like he was wounded.

  On the drive home, Alek dead-ended every one of her questions.

  The next day, after delivering him to the pool, she decided to forget about seemly. She went to the women’s lockers and changed into her bathing suit. Diving into one of the open lanes—a reasonable distance away from team practice—she saw that Alek hadn’t even seen her. If he did, he looked unlikely to object.

  Besides, she was aquatic. Her butterfly stroke threaded the water without a wake. Timing herself against the swiftest of the boys, she outdistanced all of them by laps. Even when they would take breaks or start skirmishes because they were tired, she found no need to stop. After the first twenty, she paused to check her pulse. It barely fluttered above its resting rate. She swam faster and farther than she ever had. And with more grace. This wouldn’t be mentioned to Peter. It was too strange. If it continued for another week, she vowed to make an appointment with the GP. For the time being, she would enjoy it. She noticed the coach noticing her and, rather than have a conversation with him about it, slowed down to a human speed.

  In the car, Natalie asked Alek why he wasn’t talking to Ned.

  “Not sure if I get him anymore.”

  “That’s a shame. Did something happen between you two?”

  “No.”

  “Did he do anything?”

  “No.”

  “Did you do anything?”

  “No.” He grinned at an inside joke. “I don’t do anything.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You’re being opaque.”

  Nothing.

  Natalie waited a few minutes, commenting on the fiery leaves of an enormous maple—earning more of his sullen silence—before trying to connect again. “Vicenta hasn’t been to dinner in a few weeks. Do you want to have her come by?”

  “I’ll ask her when I see her.”

  “Thursday would be good.”

  Alek put his fingers to his temples and said, “Let’s ask her now.”

  His eyes rolled into a fixed position and stayed there for too long. Natalie tried to watch the road but was alarmed at the intensity of his joke. He went utterly blank in the face. A few years back she’d had a student with epilepsy and had witnessed a seizure. This was how it began.

  “Alek?”

  He returned from wherever he had been. “What? I guess I’ll invite her when I see her at school.”

  He drummed the window.

  “Are you talking to anybody these days?” she asked.

  “When I’m able to.”

  Another surge hit her: Whatever was occupying his mind was disrupting his education and his participation in the family. It was therefore her business. Forget the legitimacy of a boy child and his secrets. Any explanation he gave would have to be heard, but keeping a private life from your mother was an outrage against nature. If she had pulled to the side of the road and turned off the car, if she had pushed him against the passenger door, made him a little uncomfortable in order to get some answers, she would have screamed at him, one important word at a
time, “This is real life!”

  “Did you want to say something to me?” he asked.

  It felt like a taunt. She let the fury subside. That was not the way to engender communication.

  Calmly, she asked, “Do you still keep a diary at least? You were doing that at one point.” A clang of guilt behind the question.

  “Yes, I still keep a diary.”

  Which was more or less their last interaction until that night at dinner, when Sasha started to tease him about being driven around by his parents.

  “No more disappearing acts, no more tricks, you’ll have the toughest keepers in five towns. You’re going to be living the clean life from now on—”

  Peter, who had been betting from the start that drugs were the culprit, interrupted. “What do you mean a clean life?”

  Sasha backtracked. “He doesn’t need to be under lock and key. He just goes off into his head too much.”

  Alek exploded at all of them. “Is checking out every now and then some big sin? It’s how I handle all of you. All right?” He left the table for the refuge of his room.

  Sasha reached for his brother’s remaining lamb. “Can I?”

  Against the backdrop of Peter telling Sasha that he should be a kinder brother and the sound of Sasha scraping food onto his own dish, Natalie followed Alek upstairs. She knocked, but he said nothing. She knocked again, as if he would change his mind. The door was between them. What was she going to do? Break it down?