Afraid to go on this trip. J. says I’m catastrophizing. Trying to believe he’s right. On the next line, undated so that I took it as an afterthought, she’d written Really can’t wait to get away.
I admit it, seeing that felt like something of a punch. From me? I thought. She really couldn’t wait to get away from me? There was no evidence of this, but instinctively I felt I understood what she meant.
Telling myself I was in the process of returning the notebook to where it belonged, I flipped back through the pages to an entry she’d made in March: Bert not doing well. This time the hurt—though I know it sounds silly—came from the fact that she wrote my name out instead of using the more intimate initial, as she had with Jack. She’s completely undone about spring break. I can’t blame her, but on the other hand, it’s her fault for not letting Will know what’s happening. Almost called him myself to tell him, but J. reminded me this is between them.
It had never occurred to me that Grettie might think about contacting Will, without telling me. I suppose it’s not that big a stretch—she is his godmother, after all—but as far as I know, aside from the birthday cards she sends him, they don’t communicate except when the three of us are together. I wouldn’t have expected her to have his number, or for him to have hers. I was glad she decided against telling him how upset I was at not seeing him during his spring break, on top of not having seen him at Christmas. That was for me to let him know, if I wanted to.
Although to be honest I’d been a little relieved, on top of the sadness, when he sent me a message to say he’d be staying on campus during the break to work for his advisor, that second week in March. They could get so much done when other people weren’t around, he wrote. When there were no classes for his advisor to teach. I’d been trying for months to figure out how to tell him that the cancer had come back, and that I’d begun treatment for it, before he actually saw me (which I guess would have let him know instantly), but I hadn’t come up with anything. This way, I had more time.
It was wrong to read Grettie’s diary, I knew that. I put it back in her nightstand, under the piece of her childhood blankie she still rubbed between her fingers at night before falling asleep. Was Jack aware that she did this? Once, I had been the only person who knew. Of course her husband also knew it, I told myself. And much, much more than I ever would. That’s what being a partner meant.
It was hot in the house, hotter than outside, because naturally they’d closed all the windows before they left. I considered opening one, but I was afraid I’d forget to shut it. Instead I went into the bathroom and dabbed cold water on my face with my fingers, not wanting to use a washcloth or a towel because Grettie might notice. I dried my fingers on the bottom of my blouse, then checked the mirror to see how I looked, though I made sure not to lean in too close. I could have looked better, but I’ve also looked worse. Too late, I realized I’d wiped off the minimal makeup I put on before I left my own house in anticipation of seeing the therapist. Well, too bad. It didn’t matter how I would look to him, did it? I tried to convince myself of this.
When I was halfway down the stairs, I heard movement in the kitchen. Somebody else was in the house, which was supposed to be empty. It wouldn’t be Cam or Bella—they were out of town, at work and camp. I froze—what to do? Sneak back up the stairs and try to hide, until whoever it was left? But what if, instead of leaving, that somebody had heard my movement, and decided to come upstairs to find its source?
I decided to stay where I was and continue hoping that whoever it was would leave by the back door. Once I heard it shut, I would look to see if anything was missing, and call the police.
But instead of that happening, Trudy Foote’s dropout son Derek walked into the family room. He headed to pick up the remote to the TV, then lowered himself onto the couch. Not flopped back, the way Will would have, but set himself down carefully onto the seat cushion, with a measure of respect he might have shown for furniture he’d been invited to occupy as a guest.
As he leaned back he caught sight of me there on the stairs, yelped, and jumped up again. He looked as shocked to see me as I felt to see him. “Oh, my God,” he said. “Mrs. Chase. What are you doing here?”
Will’s friends always called me Mrs.—it was what they had been taught. I laughed, the radical and foolish laughter of the immensely relieved. Instead of some stranger who might have killed me, it was only a boy I knew. I guess he wasn’t really a boy, the same way Will isn’t, but it’s hard not to think of them both that way. “Derek. Doesn’t it make more sense for me to ask you?”
It appeared to mean so much to him, the simple act of my using his name, that I had to look away.
He set the remote down and stood up. If it had been anyone else it would have made me nervous—who am I kidding, I probably would have run out of the house screaming for help—but because it was Will’s old friend I only noted how much taller Derek still was, of the two of them. “I’m not hurting anybody,” he said. “I’m not taking anything. Well, except some chips.” He pointed toward the Pringles can on the kitchen counter. He smiled a little, as if he thought I might join him in pretending he’d made a joke. When I didn’t smile back, he said, “Okay, fine. I’m leaving, I promise. I just needed to hide out for a while, I just needed to get away.” He didn’t have to say from whom—I knew he meant his mother. “And I didn’t break in, I know where they leave their spare key.”
How did he know that? I asked. He told me he’d been the one to feed their now long-dead cat William Butler, years ago, whenever the family went away on vacation or holidays. When he said it, I remembered offering to perform this task once when Jack’s father died and they all had to leave abruptly for Galway, but Grettie told me the Foote boy would do it, he was reliable and she thought he liked the chance to get out of his own house and spend some time in hers.
I walked down the stairs toward him so that we were on the same level. When he took a step back as I approached, I felt for sure I was in no danger. I told him that I’d come to replace the trash and recycling bins in the backyard, but since they hadn’t been emptied yet, I’d decided to wait to see if the trucks would come anytime soon.
“They could have asked me to do that.” Derek’s tone was one of injury. Then it seemed to dawn on him why Grettie and Jack might not have enlisted his help. “But I guess they wouldn’t, since they hate my parents so much.”
“I wouldn’t say they hate them.” Grettie wouldn’t have used that word. It was disdain, not hatred, that she felt for the people trying to block Arcadia Glen.
“Don’t tell my mother, but I don’t agree with her about that.” Derek gestured out the kitchen window, and I moved closer to see the backhoe poised to begin digging the foundation of a new house. Probably to signal that he had every intention of winning his fight to relocate the old graves, the developer had let the machine sit there, mid-job, through the winter and spring. “Didn’t you ever see Poltergeist? You start digging up dead people, you got a problem on your hands.”
He was trying to distract me, I realized. Again he wanted me to laugh or at least smile, something that would let him know I wasn’t about to call the police. I watched him shift from one foot to the other, at the same time pushing brown curls away from his eyes. His mother had said more than once, in my presence and also Derek’s, that his hair was wasted on a boy, he should have been a girl with all those curls.
I looked down and saw that he’d taken his shoes off—the pair of Skechers was lined up neatly by the back door. He was in his sock feet, and the socks looked clean. They looked like the kind of socks Cam wore. Had he taken them from Cam’s drawer? Perhaps sensing my suspicions, Derek kept talking. “My mother’s a total poser with these protests, in case you couldn’t tell. She doesn’t give a shit about history. And she goes on and on about nature, but she’s never spent a day in nature in her life. She doesn’t even like to sit on our screened porch.” At this I di
d laugh, and he looked up surprised.
“Then why’s she doing it?” I asked.
“She just wants to get her name out there, I think. It makes her look like she stands for something. Like she’s not wasting her life.”
Well, I could understand this. “Did she actually say so, or are you just guessing?” Not that I didn’t believe it about Trudy, I was just curious about how frank she might have been with her son.
But he didn’t answer my question. When I saw that he’d cast a worried glance at the crumbs on the counter between us, I understood suddenly—much later than I should have, later than I would have if it hadn’t been so hot out, if my brain had been working entirely right. “It’s you, isn’t it? You’re the one breaking into people’s houses.”
Derek flushed. “Of course not. Of course it’s not me.”
I just looked at him. Was he waiting for me to apologize for my accusation? Instead I said, “You’re the Snack Burglar.”
This time instead of cringing, he punched a fist into his palm. “So you’re laughing at me, too.”
“I’m not laughing, Derek.” This time, hearing me say his name, he looked wary rather than touched. “Why would I laugh at a thing like that?”
Instead of answering he cupped a hand under the counter’s edge, swept the crumbs into it, then opened the hand over the sink before running the water hard. “I guess you’re probably going to tell the police what you think,” he said. “About me being the one.”
I hesitated. He’d made us all nervous, invading homes this way. It was a crime. I knew that by rights, he should be punished.
But to be honest, I didn’t really care if some family in this snooty town lost a sleeve of crackers to this poor boy who’d had things so tough his whole life, having the screwball parents he did. And he’d been Will’s friend all those years.
Knowing it was probably wrong of me, but feeling unable right then to figure it all out, I said okay, I wouldn’t tell anyone. “But you have to promise not to come into this house again, ever. Or any other houses—I mean it, Derek. I’m going to come back here later today to take care of those bins, and I’m not going to tell you whether it’s five minutes or five hours from now. If I find you here, I won’t just call your mother—I will call the police.”
He thanked me, and I saw his shoulders trembling.
“Why are you doing it, anyway?” I asked.
You would have thought I’d asked him to explain photosynthesis or something—that’s how blank he looked. “I don’t know. I guess I just like to see all the family rooms. Eat something that isn’t on my ‘safe’ list. Something that isn’t good for me. I don’t even think I have food allergies, I think my mother just gets off on having a kid with ‘issues.’ Even though I haven’t been a kid for a long time, I’m eighteen fucking years old. Oh, sorry.” He had to pause for breath; all of that had taken a lot out of him. “You must think I’m insane, right?”
“Nobody thinks you’re insane, Derek.”
“My mother does.” He said it without emotion. “She thinks I need ‘behavior redirection’. She’s trying to get me into some program that said they’d have a bed open today. I don’t want a bed in a program, I don’t need a bed in a program, but nobody seems to care about that.”
He was getting himself all worked up, which was bad for both of us. In an effort to calm him down I said, “You just said it yourself, you’re eighteen. You don’t have to go. And if you did decide to go, you don’t have to stay.”
He snorted. “That’s easy for you to say. You don’t understand how hard it is to just leave, sometimes, even if they haven’t pink-slipped you. I know you don’t know what I’m talking about, but trust me, it’s true.”
Oh, I knew what he was talking about! But I couldn’t say so. And how could I have forgotten about the pink slips?
“What kind of program?” I asked.
He shrugged. “You tell me. Some place where you meditate, where you do a half-smile. Whatever that means. I read their brochure.” He gave me what might have been an approximation of a half-smile, or maybe it was actually a sneer at the idea of it.
I was tempted to tell him, though of course I would not, that I knew a lot more than he guessed. The half-smile had been described to me as a “distress tolerance skill”; in the middle of a stressful situation, you lift the muscles in your cheeks just slightly—just a little Buddha smile, the therapist said—and somehow this movement is supposed to make you feel better. Somehow, it tricks your brain. According to research, the therapist said, it causes you to perceive that you are in a better mental state than before the half-smile, and this perception, in turn, actually triggers a better feeling. Maybe not by a lot, the therapist conceded. But maybe just enough, when just enough makes all the difference.
The therapist wanted me to try it in front of him. Now, that sounds creepy, but at the time I thought he just wanted to make sure I got the maximum benefit out of the exercise. We’ll do it together, he said, but I was too self-conscious. I told him I’d do it when I was by myself, and that night I half-smiled into the bathroom mirror. Then again the next morning. I was surprised to find that it worked, kind of. But of course, I forgot about it the next time I felt really agitated, and the time after that. Then the half-smile left my mind completely until I was reminded by the intruder in Grettie’s house.
“She’s probably doing the best she can,” I told Derek, meaning his mother. “But I’m sure you know that. And I’m sure it doesn’t help.”
“You got that right.” His shoulders relaxed, which made me feel better for him. “Hey, how’s that genius son of yours, anyway? I saw him at a party in Allston last week, but he didn’t see me.” I assume to remain in my good graces, he wiped the counter with the towel Grettie kept on the oven door, then replaced it in a neat fold. “He probably wouldn’t even remember who I am.”
“Of course he’d remember.” Why would Derek say such a thing? They’d been friends, they’d had sleepovers. “But whoever you saw, it couldn’t have been him.” I didn’t intend to let him stay much longer; already I was feeling complicit in the way he’d invaded Grettie’s living space, I felt disloyal to her. “He’s not in Boston—he didn’t come home for the summer. His advisor needed him to do research. So he got an apartment near school, he’s living up there with his girlfriend.” Though I had complicated feelings about Sosi myself, it made me glad to be able to tell people that Will had a girlfriend.
Derek snorted. He must not have realized he was going to, because he apologized right after. I said, “What was that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing. Sorry. You’re probably right, it was just somebody who looked like him.”
“Of course I’m right,” I said.
“I mean we never really saw each other all that much, once I stopped taking tennis.”
“Remember that awful pro?” I didn’t mention that I’d run into the guy on my way to the hospital that morning; the shame of possibly having been flipped off by him was still with me, though of course I wouldn’t have mentioned this to Derek. “The one who ran you so hard one time you puked?”
He made a small, jerky motion with his head. “That wasn’t me who puked.”
“What?” But even as I asked, I understood what he was telling me. Who it actually was that the pro had called a pussy. Like so many things lately, it was both a shock and not. “Well, never mind,” I said quickly. “You slept over at our house sometimes, you remember that, don’t you?”
“Of course I do. That was awesome. Those pancakes you made in the morning, and you let us watch cartoons.”
Once, Trudy Foote called and asked if Derek could sleep over at our house on a Friday night because she and Fenton needed a night out, they were having so much trouble with Derek that they didn’t know what to do. I wondered why she didn’t just hire a babysitter, but I couldn’t ask without having it sound as if
I didn’t want her son to come over. Derek arrived with his own pillow—nonallergenic, he explained to me—and a laminated index card he handed to me with a little reluctance, a little chagrin. On one side was a list of Derek Foote’s Safe Foods and on the other a list of Derek Foote’s Forbidden Behaviors: “biting, scratching, kicking, spitting, deliberate burping, bathroom noises (other than involuntary), cartwheels in house.”
Reading it, I had burst out laughing, and Derek looked alarmed. “Oh, honey,” I said, “It’s okay. You can do cartwheels in our house if you want.” I tried to make him feel better by telling him the card was cool, it was like he had a driver’s license or something. A year or so later he probably would have used the word “lame” about my saying such a thing, but since he was only six he beamed at me, which made me love him.
“Did you know,” Derek told me now in Grettie’s kitchen, “that I always wished you could be my mother, instead of her?” He nodded toward his own house next door.
I was at a loss about how to respond. My first reaction was pleasure; then it occurred to me that he was probably setting me up to go easy on him. But I thanked him anyway, and said that was nice to hear.
This seemed to relax him further. I watched eagerness—or was it abandon?—inflate his face. “You know, sometimes I think about doing something big, something bad, like—I don’t know, burn down those houses or something.” He pointed out the window at the first, interrupted phase of Arcadia Glen.
It took me a moment to catch up to his words. “What? Did you just really say that?”
My reaction appeared to take him aback, as if he couldn’t understand why such a remark would alarm me. But he didn’t retract it. Instead he nodded, slowly, and I almost got the feeling that he was enjoying this, the idea that he might be freaking me out.
“You’re not serious,” I said, hoping he’d take it as a declaration of fact rather than a question. “Why would you say such a thing?”
The Gretchen Question Page 11
