Her pulse slackened. This wasn’t a sadness she could touch. Out of deference to it, she left him there on the floor.
Peter was late coming home, so she couldn’t find enough time before dinner to sit him down and tell him about Alek. Sasha had band practice in the next town, which meant that the meal itself would leave the three of them alone.
To questions about his week, Alek gave answers that were wordy enough to satisfy Peter and false enough to make Natalie uncomfortable.
After they had finished the dishes, she told Peter about the assistant principal but not the standoff upstairs. It was bad enough that he had taken advantage of her trust. She couldn’t admit to having used force—unsuccessfully—on their teenage son. Already, Alek was beginning to feel like her fault.
“What should we do now?” Peter asked, without even a touch of blame. Natalie was grateful but still didn’t have an answer. How would they undo whatever it was they had done in order to get him to speak again?
“I don’t know,” she said.
Peter shrugged sympathetically and left the matter with her.
When he climbed into bed next to her, she curled slowly, as if already asleep, toward him, showing enough affection for a cuddle but not enough energy to discuss their son anymore. As she fell into a light sleep, it occurred to her that the mastery of parenthood was learning to care less and less.
At four a.m., Natalie stole away from Peter’s snoring and his warmth, and out to the carpeted silence of the hall. No driving energy or concern woke her. She was simply awake again, watching over everyone. Sasha’s light was off and his bed was empty. Alek’s door was closed, but the light was on. The sound of conversation came from inside.
Natalie wanted to knock. They would open it and let her in. It would be a midnight clubhouse, like when the boys used to commandeer the backyard for the afternoon and invite Peter and Natalie to watch plays that usually revolved around juvenile puns.
They had graduated to adolescent secrets, which explained the closed door. Sasha had reached him and tonight Alek was talking. She would listen and show matter-of-factness about any transgression he threw at her. The only necessary ingredient was his tiny faith in her capacity to hear it, but surely she had earned it by now.
As Sasha would say: As if.
Natalie lowered herself to look through the keyhole.
Alek, in gray tracksuit pants and a gray hoodie, was sitting on the edge of his unmade bed alone. No sign of Sasha. On his lap, Alek was holding the diary open. He was looking at an architectural drawing of an elephant hanging on the wall, some poster he had brought back from a school trip to a science museum when he was eleven. Recently, he had asked Peter to frame it. The frame had to have a gold finish, it had to be shiny. Alek had been particular and Peter had been feeling indulgent.
Alek spoke with reverence in the general direction of the elephant and smiled—more pleasantly than he had at any of them in weeks. It looked like he was also listening, as if the elephant were explaining an extremely detailed plan.
Where was Sasha? Now she remembered him saying he would be sleeping over with one of the boys from the debating team.
Alek stood up and walked over to the wall, placing his ear near the elephant’s mouth. A slow nod indicated comprehension, followed by a little laugh. His eyes looked half-dead, like they did when he went into that daze in the car. He vacantly smiled at the wall. This wasn’t part of any school play. This wasn’t an imaginary friend.
He nodded again, then faced the page of the diary, which she knew was as blank as his face. His head bobbed, as if he was taking dictation, his index finger tracing words around the paper and weaving with occasional flourishes. Then he turned a page and continued. When he spoke, his voice was too quiet and rushed to make out what he was saying, but he addressed the elephant for about a minute. Not troubled—confiding, the way he used to talk to Ned. At some point, his gaze changed. Whatever the situation had been, it was over. Alek laid the shoelace across the diary, and then closed it, adjusting the book in the center of his lap with a look of satisfaction. The day’s thoughts had been recorded and he was a good boy. But she didn’t recognize him. He was somebody else’s good boy, not hers.
Alek hugged his pillow and continued talking with variations—softly here, an angry edge there, sometimes waiting for a response that she couldn’t hear. At the end he was silent, but he turned his eyes to the ceiling, his neck jutting forward as if he was listening to the scratching of mice.
This happened to boys his age.
An involuntary “Oh” escaped from her lips and she pulled away from the door. When she peered back in she saw that he hadn’t even flinched. This was what was going on. This was why he had closed them all off.
Natalie was no longer the author of her family. How she would handle the assistant principal, how she would talk to Alek from now on—that was the least of it. There was no more hoping that the right words from her or Vicenta or Ned or Sasha would make him the way he was last year, or two years ago. When was it he had last been a regular kid? Ever?
In the hall she could hear the house settling into the chill. If four in the afternoon was the most feverish hour for the sick body, four in the morning should be the coolest, but here was Alek, so politely and thoroughly disturbed.
Within a few minutes, Natalie was driving through their neighborhood. The order of it all was striking, as if maintaining appearances required no effort. The garbage at the curb awaiting collection; the joggers on the road before six; the quiet, empty high school looking forward to inhaling all the children of the town except Alek.
The note she left in the kitchen said she was leaving for work early. No one would find it for at least another hour. The message she left at school was that she had a stomach bug and wasn’t coming in.
The highway to the beach wasn’t busy yet, so she darted her way through truckers and long-distance commuters. The drive would take time and she would likely be caught in some tie-up along the way. It didn’t matter.
Every radio station was broadcasting something trivial. There was no recognizable music at this hour. She tried to whistle or sing but didn’t have the ability to sustain anything against the flow of her thoughts and all the people who were, for the morning, behind her.
There was a particular beach she had in mind. It had high dunes and a real surf. They had been there a few times as a family. Only when she was approaching its strip of motels did Natalie remember that the last time they were there a wave dumped Alek so hard that Peter had to carry him, in tears, up to the lifeguard station. He had cuts all over his chest and took an hour to settle down, glaring at the seas as if it had done it on purpose. All the more reason to swim here. He had spent the rest of that afternoon out past the sandy stretch of the beach, fascinated by the busy little worlds of rocky tide pools.
“They’re so delicate,” Alek said. “A big wave comes by and shakes it all up like an Etch A Sketch and it has to start all over again.”
He would make a wonderful marine biologist, she thought at the time. All he had to do was get back in the water.
When she pulled into the lot, a group of surfers were already finishing, drying off by a station wagon. Natalie parked a distance from them, close to the beach and the empty lifeguard chair. She changed in the front seat and walked down to the sand as the sun turned the morning water to gunmetal.
In the protected corner of a dune, four teenage boys were huddled under blankets, sitting around a dead bonfire from the night before. There were beer bottles planted in the sand all around them and they were laughing loud enough to be heard over the surf. Healthy, sane.
No one else was in the water. The waves were breaking close to the shore, loudly, with a pace that would be hard to interrupt. Natalie hadn’t tried her new skill in the ocean, but she was unafraid. She put on her goggles and dove through the whiteness. The cold forced air from her lungs, but she managed to jump through the waves to less turbulent water. In a minute she coul
dn’t touch the bottom and the temperature dropped. But it was tolerable. If she remembered her landmarks and followed the coastline at this distance, she could swim for as long as she wanted.
Straightening her course on the water, she began. The tide lifted her as she swam with the line of the waves. If I swim far enough . . . That was the feeling that had brought her here. There was no end to the sentence. If. As though some deal had to be struck.
Eventually she would go home, tell Peter, call the school, and turn Alek over to a chorus of professionals who would pretend to know what he needed. They would all get sucked up in a sad circle of hopes and failures.
When she looked back and saw that the dunes had given way to a rockier coastline, she turned away from land, and headed straight out. The ocean was endless, but she knew it wouldn’t drown her.
This is what it’s like where he’s going.
She pushed through to the next swell.
Where we’re going.
The thought already felt like a cure.
If.
With her arms and legs making tiny nicks in the surface of the ocean, she still might be able to rescue him. All she had to do was concentrate on swimming faster than him, swimming all the way to Russia if she had to, and surely she would have the strength to bring him back.
Ben
He had spent nearly three hours trying to get the sparrow out of the apartment. Despite the need for air-conditioning against the heat, he usually propped a window open with a brick to keep things circulating. It was the only open window on the block and that’s how the bird got in in the first place.
A second before Janelle slipped her key in the front door, the sparrow, as if sensing that the available fun was about to be sucked from the situation, escaped. Up till then the bird hadn’t been in a particular rush. On its way out, it managed to tear a snag across two muslin curtains before swooping out to freedom. It perched on the fire escape, for one last look at the lumpy and confused guy, sticking his head out of the window, and took off. There was a smile on the sparrow’s tiny beak. It was delighted.
Then Janelle was home. Seven-thirty p.m. and she was expecting dinner and a sleeping toddler. Instead, there was no sign of food and the apartment looked ransacked. The chase had left its mark on every surface. The punch bowl was in five useless pieces on the kitchen floor. The entire legacy of Ben’s father, and they used it for fruit. No fruit was visible, only shards, making it clear that the shopping hadn’t even been done. Janelle steadied a stern glance at Ben’s tracksuit pants, the ones he lived in, as if to ask if he had even broken a sweat that day.
The fact of the sparrow’s invasion carried no weight with Janelle at all. What was the justification for the open window anyway? If she had asked, Ben was prepared to say that this might have happened on any day in any other season when one opens a window. But it happened today, Janelle would say, and he would hate her for the adolescent logic.
Ivan was roaming around the sofa and making noises about the prolonged bird chase.
When it was just Ben and Janelle they had done well. They had been so young it was like a head start in front of everyone else. Janelle planned and Ben implemented. They saved, they traveled. There was time to be cheerful. Her career went one way, his went the other—they adjusted. Since Ivan, though? Ben didn’t like to blame an innocent kid who had never asked to be born . . . but.
As Ben cleaned up the aftermath of the chase, he desperately recounted for Janelle the lame strategies he had wasted hours on, with broom, with bucket, with album cover—each of which the bird seemed to comprehend with a superior intelligence and respond to with an even more superior attitude. It would wait him out in some hidden nook, then race across the room, studiously avoiding all the open windows, to find another as-yet-unwrecked corner of the small apartment. What Ben was trying to relate was that it was so frustrating it was funny. The point he ended up making, though, was that the sparrow won.
Ben hurried to heat a frozen block of stew into a presentable dinner. Janelle used the time to wind Ivan down, rocking him against her shoulder as he slowly wheezed himself quiet. Ben noticed she still had her house keys in one hand, as if retaining the right to walk out and find a different home and husband for the night.
“Ivan needs a new diaper,” she said.
“Anything else?” he asked from the kitchen.
Whatever other improvements she could imagine in their life, she kept them to herself.
The stew was still cold in the center. Ben watched Janelle survey the remains of their living room. The deep scratch on the dining room table. The tear in the sofa cushion. He didn’t even know how that one happened.
“Must have been a vicious sparrow. It looks like the leather was cut with a knife,” she said.
Janelle untangled a piece of elbow pasta from her son’s hair.
She couldn’t help but say it out loud: “It’s so ridiculously emblematic.”
The next morning was all about finding a repair shop for the cushion. Janelle loved that sofa and fixing it would serve as penance. After all, he was the one with the free schedule. On the phone, a man told Ben that it was possible to mend it. Despite Ivan’s refusal to sit still in his stroller and his penchant for public tantrums, the prospect of being able to present an affordable solution to Janelle remained a priority for Ben in planning the day. Ivan struggled like a strapped demon for the train ride. Two minutes before they arrived at their stop and in front of an unimpressed mid-morning commuter audience, he threw up all over Ben’s sneakers. A few baby wipes were sacrificed for the cleanup as Ivan’s tears started again.
“Hope you enjoyed the show,” Ben muttered to the crowd, wheeling Ivan from the train.
Giordana often told Ben how awed she was with his stay-at-home status. She said, “Your son will teach you everything you need to know about the universe.” Maybe she was being ironic when she said it. While Ben was sponging Ivan’s body fluids from various places, she had nearly finished her Ph.D. And she wasn’t showing any sort of pull toward breeding, either. Her frequent declaration that she was happily single used to seem like a twisted delusion. Ben now saw it as wisdom.
The shop where he was going to have the cushion repaired specialized in fetish gear. At the counter, a man in a leather police cap took a disapproving look at the cushion and said, “Not that leather. I don’t have the needle.” Ivan was waving his hand back and forth through a curtain of whips. Ben placed the cushion in the stroller and kept the boy close beside him as they left the shop.
It was still early. At least they’d get some exercise. After the struggle of applying sunscreen to Ivan’s flinching face, Ben led them home along the waterfront, stopping every few steps to let his son point out a passing truck or pick up a cigarette butt. At some unguarded moment, Ivan managed to pry open the sippy cup he had been fondling all morning and spill grape juice on the cushion’s wound. Ben dabbed it off without losing his temper, even as the slit turned a permanent purple. From now on, the cushion would simply be turned over. That is, he thought, so ridiculously emblematic.
Negotiating the boy through a steady current of barely dressed joggers and bike riders, Ben felt more ungraceful than ever. He was bogged by the foolishness of wheeling a stained cushion around, by Ivan wandering in all directions, and by his very own flesh. Would things have been that much different if he had a job? In her mind they would.
For lunch, he gave up on getting Ivan to eat anything nutritious and sat on a bench, letting the boy feed him peeled carrot sticks one by one from a plastic bag. Ivan fed him the celery sticks next. After that, Ben let him eat a completely unearned vanilla pudding on his own.
They watched a hovering group of gulls dip and bounce above the water, gently rocking like the small waves below them. Ben thought of a mobile and tried to teach Ivan the word. He explained it as different pieces of art on different branches, like a tree, but balancing each other and hanging from the ceiling, and staying still or spinning, depending on the b
reeze. Ivan repeated the word back to him but couldn’t have understood. The boy wasn’t as verbal as they would have liked. This was also presumed to be Ben’s doing, since he was home with him all day. Ivan handed the cushion to his father as he climbed into the stroller and sat down, kicking his legs for them to go.
Ben pushed onward to the park, commending himself for saving the cost of the train. He headed to a favorite bench in a secluded corner. It was shut off from the main field by a small ridge of climbable rocks and a solitary tree that shaded the whole area—landscaped for a child’s enjoyment and a parent’s watchful eye.
But Ivan was contentedly snoring in the shade. He wasn’t about to climb anything. The boy already looked chunky from a steady diet of Cheerios, pasta, and inaction. This was Ben’s contribution too. Why not teach him about the joys of beer this afternoon? Get him started early. Ivan was probably doomed to a lifetime of slept-through opportunities and unhealthy sloth. Ben planned to let him go on napping for twenty minutes and then wake him so that he would, A, be able to sleep later, and B (although Ben wasn’t actually in the mood), play spaceman on the rocks. This bit of exertion would fortify Ivan for all the setbacks to come. Ben could hope.
A bird interrupted.
A large, brown, hawk-like creature walked sternly across the patchy grass toward the bench. It staked out the highest rock, all the while keeping a curious gaze on Ben and Ivan. It had a butcher’s knife beak and a steely expression, as if it knew what the sparrow had gotten away with and was about to commence an even more destructive plan of action.
The bird opened its wings out slowly, purposefully, and with a push, launched itself upward, leaping to a higher perch in the tree. The branch swayed with the new weight. The bird paused, keeping its wings spread, showing off the same move a few more times as it made its way up and up. At each stop it tilted its head at him kindly with the allure of someone demonstrating a salad slicer, as if to say, See? You can do this too. Finally, it pushed off and out into the sky, without looking back.
What the Family Needed Page 7
