by Susan Conley
I stare out the window and see Kit far at sea with no one to save him. He is someone who would go to the South Pole. He’s never been afraid of the ocean.
When this gets too scary to think about, I climb out of bed. Some of the potato chips spill on the sheet.
Charlie slides back into the bed and laughs at how easy it is to trick me into giving up my spot.
LATER I FOLLOW SAM up to the loft, where the ceiling slants down so low over his bed that it’s like I’m talking to the poster of Kevin Durant from the Brooklyn Nets.
“What’s the deal, Sam? What’s with the pot?”
“It was a one-time thing. It was an experiment.”
“Tell me the experiment’s over.” I stare at Kevin Durant’s kind-looking eyes.
“It’s over.”
“Promise me. Because I can’t take it right now, Sam. I can’t. It’s not happening. Are we clear?”
“Clear.”
“No friends after school and no phone for the week.”
“You’re hard-core, Jillian.”
“Don’t call me Jillian. Call me Mom. I’m your mom. Your mother.”
“Well, I was about to tell you we need a microphone, Mom, and an equalizer for the band. It’ll cost like five hundred dollars, and could you loan me? Could you do that, please? Please please? We’ll be practicing at Roman’s house like every day once I’m ungrounded.”
I try not to laugh.
“What you need is to not smoke pot ever again in the McDonald’s parking lot, because if you do, you won’t have a phone or a life, much less an equalizer or new microphone.”
It’s important to be almost solemn with him.
Then I cry a little.
“Don’t cry, Mom.”
This is when I see that I have him. “Who’s Roman?”
“New. Croatia. Tall. Basketball. Did you know that I’m almost ready to leave this place?”
“Leave when?” I look around the room. There’s just enough space to cram in the old bureau I painted and his single bed. “We’re on an island, in case I need to remind you.”
“You should be ready.” He pulls the covers up to his chin. “You should watch out. Any day now. Robbie and Roman and me. Burlington, Vermont. I need to get away from this family and go do radical things.”
I want to tell him I’m not holding my breath.
“What I want is for you to get a good night’s sleep.”
“I have worries.”
“Tell me.” I close my eyes. “Tell me about your worries. Tell me.” It feels like every muscle in my body is flexed now.
“I can’t.”
“No, you can.” I look at him. “You absolutely can. You can tell me anything.”
“I just need sleep. I just need to talk to Dad again.”
He rolls over, and several minutes go by during which I rub his back and feel how close I got to his secrets and then how far away again.
“If I come back as another person after I die,” he says, “will I still have my same personality?”
“I think you will.”
“I want to. I want to still be me.” He’s been saying this last part for years.
I rub his back some more.
Then he asks me to do his feet and his Achilles tendons, which ache from all the running at basketball practice. He says he promises not to smoke pot and to always be on time for his classes.
I’m flooded with love for him.
I leave him and poke my head in Charlie’s room.
He says Tom Sawyer is better than Gulliver’s Travels, last semester’s English book. “Tom Sawyer’s good, even.” The book is propped up on his knees. “But the writing can be dense and hard to understand.”
“Harder than Shakespeare?”
“Tom gets in real trouble. He gets punished.”
“I don’t think my children know what punishment is.”
“Goodnight, Mom. Goodbye,” he says, maybe by way of not having an argument with me over what punishment is.
He looks like an old man under the quilt. I make a pact with myself to try to pay more attention to him, because Sam takes up so much room.
I go to hug him, but he waves me off. He’s been doing this more since he started dating Lucy.
It’s true that Kit and I rarely really punish the boys. I know Jimmy thinks it’s a fault of ours. But even Jimmy’s grown softer because of the boys.
“By the way, Mom,” Charlie says, “Robbie smokes pot.”
I can’t really hear him. “He what?”
“Robbie dabs.”
“And so?” It’s late. I don’t really know what the word dab means, but I can’t appear uninformed.
“It’s only a matter of time,” he says.
“Until what?”
“Until Sam is doing it too.”
“There you go again. Parenting him. I hate when you do this.”
“The good news is they’re all still scared of you.”
“Who are?”
“Robbie and Roman and Derrick.”
“Scared of me?”
“We all are.” He laughs then.
“Good.” I smile at him.
PART THREE
BELIEVE
AFTER KIT AND I moved to the island, I got a grant from the state to teach filmmaking at the youth prison. There weren’t many girls in this prison. Only three or four, because they don’t like to put girls in prison. But there were lots of boys. Almost one hundred of them, broken up into pods down these locked cinder-block wings.
I took The Duchess to the mainland two days a week and drove to the prison with old video cameras. The boys made short animation films and did documentary-style interviews. They were starving for things to do and desperate to get out. They wanted people—adults, their parents, anyone at all—to save them.
“Please save me,” a boy named Michael always said to me when he got up to go to the bathroom during class.
Some of the boys had done bad things, and some had done very bad things, and none of them were beyond repair. I really felt this way and wanted to tell the guards and the prison director with the orange beard that if only the boys could get a little more.
A little more what? Kit asked me one night when I came home from the prison and sat in the wooden chair outside looking for whales.
More attention, maybe, I said. Or respect? Though what I’d say now if he asked is that the boys just needed to be seen. It’s not complicated. Needing to be seen.
There was one guard who never smiled and never let the boys talk in line on their way back to their pods, and I wanted to tell him that the boys weren’t who he thought they were, and that it was wrong to think boys lacked feeling or remorse. Because really they were quiet and scared.
Some had mental illnesses, and some had very bad parents, and all of them needed treatment, and wasn’t that easy to see? It was easy.
It was more complicated than that though, and I knew it. But I wanted to keep my feelings about the boys in prison simple.
Once when I was leaving the prison there was a fire alarm and the prison went on lockdown so no one could get in or out. This sounds counterintuitive. If there was a fire in a prison, you’d want to unlock the doors and let the children out, but the alarm had been pulled so many times for things that weren’t fires that the guards no longer believed the alarm.
When the alarm went off, I was upstairs in the area where parents waited for visiting hours. I hated being locked in. Hated it, but I could see the blue sky outside and the Subaru in the parking lot, and I knew I’d drive away soon.
A man and a woman waited in there with me. They were white and thirty-something and strung out on opiates maybe. Slurring and with unkempt hair. I could hear them talking at the check-in desk to the guard with the gun at h
is hip. Their son had been released the day before but not to them, and he hadn’t come home, and they’d been expecting him.
This was the year before Charlie was born, 2001. I couldn’t understand how the parents didn’t know where their boy was. Their little boy. In a way they were all little boys in there. Even the ones who’d done the most horrible things had also experienced horrible things done to them.
* * *
—
THEN CHARLIE WAS BORN, and Sam very soon after Charlie. I didn’t work at the prison anymore. It seemed like a foreshadowing of how badly things could go.
Sometimes I felt guilty that Charlie and Sam collected mussel shells while the boys in the prison were desperate for someone to save them, but Kit and I couldn’t afford day care.
I was often alone with the boys when they were babies. It took several years to figure out the balance between taking care of them and making the films. What I really mean is that I never figured out the balance. The boys always caught me by surprise with what they required. The amounts of love and attention, and I still think of those years sometimes as the lost years. Or the years I was invisible.
* * *
—
ONCE WHEN HE WAS seven, Sam cornered me in the kitchen and told me I’d waited too long to have him.
“Twenty-nine years old,” he said with his serious face. “Way, way too late.”
“What are you even talking about?” It was July and so hot I’d made cold tomato soup and given them cold cereal and anything else cold I thought they’d eat.
We’d covered the island two times inspecting raccoon droppings and bear droppings, even though there were no bears, but it was still exciting to talk about them.
I was okay being alone on the island with the boys, because I knew Kit was coming back. I could count the days and dole myself out to the boys in this way. This was after the rougher time, when the boys were both babies, and I thought I was going crazy out there alone and had nothing to dole out because I was so tired.
“Dumb dumb dumb,” Sam said.
He wore the towel cape and muck boots and Charlie’s cutoffs, and he had made holsters out of rope and felt. The metal pipes in the holsters were stuck together with wads of masking tape. “When I’m fifty, you’ll be almost eighty, and then you’ll die, and we won’t have a relationship anymore.”
I stared at him. “Is this what you think of? Our relationship?”
I had the mess of tomatoes to clean up, but I should have taken him more seriously. This is what I often think about Sam. If I just take him more seriously, I can solve him. But then I run out of time or get distracted, and the puzzle of him starts over again.
“It was stupid, Mom. You didn’t plan well.”
“What was stupid?” I can be slow like this.
“To have me so late. You won’t know me or my kids.”
Oh God. Who was he? What was this malarkey? He was seven.
“But I know you now. Besides. I’m going to live till I’m a hundred.”
He seemed disgusted with this statement, as if he knew it was my Hail Mary. Then he turned on his heels and left.
SOMETIMES THERE ARE NO Instagram posts. Then a series of videos by an ex-NBA player with mottled green tattoos who sells an enzyme drink called BELIEVE for rapid muscle growth.
ON WEDNESDAY MORNING WE’RE about five miles from school when I see the gas needle buried in empty. “I need to announce that I’m not sure we’re going to make it to school today. LOL.”
“Please don’t ever talk in text like that again, Mom,” Sam says from the backseat, where he’s watching the trees. “Please.”
I’ve started keeping a running list in my mind of things I need to do for the wolves. On bad days I call this the List of Resentments. I try not to think about the list. But my brain would have worked differently without the boys. I think it would have stayed more open, and that I would be making more films and not a List of Resentments.
I look at the trees through the dirty windshield. Really look at them. If I hadn’t had the boys, my brain would have stayed freer.
It has to be chemical, because the boys have taken over my brain, but I would have them all over again if I could.
The big thing I want to report to Kit but can never find the right words to say on the phone is that the boys and I are not the same person. We never were. Sometimes it’s like we’re meeting one another for the first time, and they are not my friends or even my allies.
Hello, I imagine saying to them. Hello, I am your mother.
* * *
—
WE MAKE IT PAST the credit union. Charlie has a biology test he studied for until midnight. He wonders out loud why I didn’t get gas earlier. Then he says he’s not sure that he can take either of us anymore. Me or Sam. And that maybe he should move to Lucy’s. “They all want me to.”
“Oh really?” I am focused on the gas gauge. If we run out of gas, my credibility will be forever hurt.
“During the school year it would be much easier to live there than go back and forth to the island. All of Lucy’s family want me to do it.”
He’s moving in with them and I haven’t met Lucy yet?
I tell him he’s unfair and that he was the last one to drive the Subaru, and that if he says one more word about the gas, I’ll pull over and he’ll have to get out and walk.
No one speaks after this.
* * *
—
WE ROLL INTO DALE’S Service Station, and my hands are shaking when I unscrew the gas cap. It’s the fastest I’ve gotten gas.
Charlie is only three minutes late to school.
He jumps out before I park.
Then I get out too, because it’s the day of Sam’s parent-teacher conference.
He tells me on the sidewalk it will be better if I don’t talk during it. Then he smiles.
“Like not say anything? I have to say something.”
The high school is made of dark red brick and smells of unidentified lunch meat. It’s where Kit and Jimmy went to school, but this history doesn’t seem to be anything Sam takes pride in.
We climb the cement stairs and wedge ourselves into the brown laminated desks with attached metal chairs, and Mrs. Curtis smiles at us and thanks us for being there. She’s sixtyish, with short, feathered hair like a grown-up Dorothy Hamill.
Then she holds up a black attendance book in her hand and tells me that Sam has ten tardies and eight absences since school started this year.
She pauses to let that sink in. “It is only October thirtieth.”
I don’t understand at first what I’m looking at.
Mrs. Curtis uses a yellow pencil to walk me through the columns. There are so many days that I thought Sam was in school when he wasn’t at school I can’t understand.
I don’t look at Sam. I just look at the columns. But I can’t control what my face is doing.
“Not bad, Sam. Pretty impressive, really.” But my heart’s in my throat, because where has he been when he hasn’t been in school?
“We are reading Shakespeare,” Mrs. Curtis says. “Sam has important things to say that he is not saying, because he is rarely in class.”
I nod. How did I let him wear that torn Clash T-shirt, and why hasn’t he cut his hair?
“When Sam does talk, he often makes good comments, but then he disparages his comments, which sets a tone for the class and sabotages any good points he made earlier.”
“But the girls already know everything,” he says. “They know all the answers, so it’s not even worth it to talk.”
I look at Mrs. Curtis and want to remind her about the bridge and Liam and to tell her that Sam has come pretty far and that he’s better than this. Better than Mrs. Curtis thinks.
But there is no chance to talk, really, because Mrs. Curtis speaks qui
ckly.
“You’re a leader of the class, Sam. You can figure out how to handle five girls. The others follow your cue.”
Here she turns and speaks directly to me. “He talks over me and under me, Mrs. Archer. I can’t seem to get him to quiet down.” Then she stares at Sam for a moment through her reading glasses, which are attached to a long brass chain that hangs around her neck. “I really thought he’d be my leader.” She shakes her head.
I find this the saddest part, because Mrs. Curtis uses the past tense. As if we’ve already lost Sam to the band in Burlington, Vermont.
I want to tell him that each time he skips school, he lies to me.
Mrs. Curtis says that she’d like to see a better system in our family for getting Sam to school. She’s relying on Kit and me to make this work.
“We’ve got some things going on at home,” I try to tell her.
She stands and nods the kind of nod that implies the Archers always have things going on at home. Then she thanks us for coming in.
When we’re out in the hall of lockers, Sam says, “What’s truancy, Mom?”
I can’t breathe very well. I want to yell things at him and go on a little rant. But whenever I try yelling at him he looks amused, which masks the genuine hurt I think he feels that anyone would ever dare yell at him in the first place. So then I’m up against willful ignorance and righteous indignation.
I don’t answer except to say he’s walking home after school. I’m not coming to get him.
“That’s impossible, Mom. We live on an island, remember?”
“Well, you will have to figure that out, then.”
I HAVE AN APPOINTMENT with Katherine at Hair Creations in the little strip mall across town. On the way over there I call Nettie, the school social worker, and leave a message telling her that we have another problem with Sam. Nettie hasn’t seen Sam in over a year, but I know she’ll understand.
Then I sit in Katherine’s black vinyl chair, and she tells me that she can’t take the Maine winters any longer and is moving to Orlando.
