by Sheri Holman
“I’ve tripped over this damned thing twice,” Mom says, coming inside with half a dozen ripe tomatoes and two fat zucchini. “What the hell is it?”
She lines up the tomatoes on the windowsill over the sink and pulls off her gloves. Her hands are swollen and pink, and though they aren’t dirty she runs them under cold water anyway.
“It’s an old projector that belonged to some guy Dad used to know,” Wallis answers. His name was Tucker Hayes. She doesn’t tell Mom that Dad’s mother killed him and we found his clothes in the woods.
“It belongs in the attic,” says Mom.
“Jasper says one of the movies is worth a fortune.”
Mom sighs at the mention of Jasper’s name. “I know what your father is going to say. We invited him into the house, now we’re responsible for him. We can’t just put him back on the street. But I don’t know how we can afford to keep him.”
“I still don’t know why he’s here,” Wallis says. “We were happy before he came.”
Her mother stares out the window over her yard and garden where she has had to re-stake her tomato plants against hungry deer. She has spent decades of her life getting this yard and garden exactly how she wants it. Wallis thinks of that trick where a magician grabs a tablecloth and yanks, leaving the cups and plates spinning in place. Mom shakes her head.
“No happy family would take a risk like this,” Mom says. “That’s how they stay happy families.”
Wallis waits for more but more doesn’t come. Instead her mother gives herself a shake. “It’s after ten,” she says, looking at the clock. “Who sleeps so late in someone else’s house?”
It feels good to take action, so Mom marches up the steps to her sewing room and knocks sharply on the door. Wallis leaves her cereal melting in the bowl and follows.
“Jasper,” Mom calls. “You need to get up. The school is expecting us before noon.”
“What if he won’t go back?” Wallis asks.
“He will if he plans to live in this house,” Mom answers tightly, rapping again. They both wait for his sour, rumpled face to appear but a minute passes with no response. Inside, Wallis can hear the faint jabbering of the Morning Zoo over the clock radio. Traffic and weather. Always weather. Her mom wouldn’t barge in but Wallis turns the knob and throws open the door.
“Mom said get up,” she says roughly, stepping in.
The curtains are drawn and the room is dark. Mom flips the overhead light switch to reveal the empty daybed tightly made with sharp military corners. Jasper has picked up the overturned lamp and the room is meticulously tidy, nothing like her own room strewn with clothes and half-read books and half-eaten sandwiches, all the things she’s picked up and discarded in the daily graze for pleasure. He still feels like a guest here; if he felt at home, he would have unpacked and moved in, trusted Mom with his mess and his jeans size and every other thing he’s been withholding. By the bed, Mom sees his wastepaper basket overflowing with wadded Kleenex and shudders. This room used to smell like chalk and cloves from an orange pomander Wallis made one Christmas and hung from the doorknob. Mom had kept that clove-pierced orange until the fruit was shriveled and hard, because no matter how faint, she said, it smelled like a little girl’s love. Now the wastebasket smells rank, like chestnuts in bloom.
“I’ve been up since six,” Mom says. “He didn’t leave with your father.”
Wallis looks around the room and sees his duffel bag is gone.
“Maybe we should call the police?” she asks.
“We can’t,” Mom says swiftly. “They won’t file a missing person’s report until he’s been gone twenty-four hours. He’ll be back soon.”
There is no note—he must be coming back. If he were running away he would leave a note. That’s what people do. Wallis stands in the empty room, once filled with ribbons and thread and all the womanly things women no longer use but like to keep around. It smells so strongly of boy she can’t even recognize it anymore. Her mother angrily snatches up the wastepaper basket and goes to dump it in the garbage outside.
“Well?” Mom says, when Eddie gets home from reading the eleven o’clock weather. She turned off the television and reheated the meatloaf and his hot supper is waiting for him on the kitchen table when he pulls up.
“They found a buyer,” he answers, loosening his tie and undoing his top button. He hands Wallis his plaid jacket and she tosses it over the back of a chair. “Some guy from Atlanta with a superstation.”
“What’s that?” Mom asks. Eddie shrugs.
“We’ll be watching a lot of Braves baseball and old movies.”
“And the staff?”
“They want to keep the six and eleven. But they want kids. We’re out.”
Mom nods.
“Your show, too?”
“We tape the last promo tomorrow. Frankenstein. As it was in the beginning, so shall it be in the end.”
Her mother says nothing as she pours Eddie his glass of milk. She had been too calm all day, walking through the mall, letting Wallis buy whatever she liked. Only after they stopped for ice cream and Ann sat sipping her coffee for an hour had Wallis realized she was stalling; giving Jasper more time before they might have to return home and find him still missing. Her father takes a bite of his meatloaf.
“Jasper’s gone to bed already?” he asks.
“I don’t know,” Mom answers. “He’s not here.”
Eddie looks from her to Wallis, but Wallis looks away. He pushes back from the table and starts up the stairs. “When?” he calls.
“Sometime last night?” Mom replies. “He didn’t sleep in his bed.”
“Why didn’t you call me?”
“So that you could miss another day of work?”
Wallis hears her father leave Jasper’s room and head down the hall to check the top drawer of his own dresser. All the credit cards are there, the checkbooks, the paper rolls of quarters and dimes waiting to go to the bank. Mom’s rings and her grandmother’s pearls. There was plenty he could have stolen but nothing is missing, they checked all that earlier. Eddie stalks past them downstairs and out the sliding door.
“Where are you going?” Mom asks, but Wallis already knows. She follows her father to the carport where his coffin rests on sawhorses waiting its retirement. He is looking for Jasper in the places Wallis hid as a little girl.
He opens the lid and the light of the bare bulb falls on the shallow heart carved in its underside.
“W + J?” he asks, searching her face.
Her hand the night she inscribed that heart had been moving in some other dimension where loving Jasper would be acceptable to everyone, cause no trouble, break no laws. Now that he has run away, she feels sick at the sight of it, as though she had awakened from a troubled fever dream.
Her mother steps out into the yard and stands at the edge of her peony beds. “Did Jasper hurt you?” she asks.
“Of course not,” answers Eddie.
“I’m asking Wallis.”
“Listen to yourself,” Eddie turns on her. “He’s just a confused kid who thinks nobody cares about him and it seems he’s right.”
“And yet,” observes Mom, “we are not talking about finding you a new job, or where we might live if we have to move, or where Wallis will be going to school. We’re talking about him. Even when he’s not here, he’s still the center of attention.”
While they argue, Wallis leans against her father’s box, remembering how peaceful it had felt to float. She wanted Jasper to kiss her and he did. She wanted him to go away and now he’s gone. She leaves them in the yard and walks back to the house where Tucker Hayes’s projector is sitting by the kitchen door like a pet waiting patiently to go out. Wallis sets it on the table and flips the latches. The iron arms are naked and the Edison short, as she knew it would be, is gone.
“He stole it,” she says, when Eddie returns to the kitchen.
“It was his,” he replies. “I gave it to him.”
“Clearly he�
�s going to pawn it,” Mom says, stepping in.
He is a thief and runaway, Wallis thinks. He was my first kiss.
“I’m going to drive around,” her father says.
“He’s probably five states away by now,” says Mom.
“I’ll come with you,” interrupts Wallis, following her dad to the hearse. Her mother doesn’t move.
“I guess I’ll stay home,” Ann says bitterly. “In case he comes scratching at the door.”
Eddie throws the hearse into reverse and backs down the driveway after Wallis climbs in. His high beams sweep the yard and soybean field, penetrating into the woods where she buried and pissed on Jasper’s fingernail parings. I didn’t do anything, she tells herself, it’s not real, but if she did nothing then there is nothing to undo, which makes it worse. Eddie rolls down his window, reaches across her and rolls hers down, too. He drives slowly as if searching out a dog struck and lying dead on the side of the road.
“He can’t keep running all his life,” he says fiercely.
“There’s a pawnshop downtown,” Wallis offers. “I think it’s open all night.”
“He wouldn’t pawn that movie.”
Still, he takes the back roads toward town. He doesn’t have a plan, but is moving to be moving so that he doesn’t have to be at home with Mom. They come to the intersection where trees and darkness swap out for the neon of fast-food restaurants and doughnut shops, the strobing of streetlights on the overpass. Eddie drifts straight through the green lights at every intersection, past the three balls of the pawnshop with their crackle and buzz of trapped red gas.
“It’s not his fault,” Wallis says quietly.
“Of course it’s his fault,” Eddie replies, his eyes still searching past the headlights. Maybe Jasper will dart across the street like a panicked deer. “If he didn’t want to live with us, we could have found him somewhere safe.”
“I put a spell on him,” she says.
“What?” Eddie asks.
“I wanted him to like me, so I made up a spell and burned a lock of his hair. I stole his fingernail clippings and buried them. I’m like the other women of our family.”
Her father looks over at her, annoyed. “Those were stupid ghost stories, Wallis. Made up by a bunch of ignorant women to feel important. Don’t talk yourself into that shit like my goddamned mother. I can’t take that right now.”
“I mean it’s not real,” Wallis says, backtracking. “I know it’s not real.”
“Which is it? Do you want that much power over another person’s life? It’s fine to take the credit but do you want the blame?”
Wallis sinks down in the seat and looks up out the window. The sky over the city deepens from indigo, through violet, up to blindest black. The stars are falling here, too, as they were in the mountains, only the lights make everything harder to see.
“Look at it this way,” Eddie says, realizing he’s been too harsh. “Maybe you’re not in control, either. Maybe someone has placed a spell on you.”
She closes her eyes. It’s a comforting thought.
Mom got the call two days later. She could have phoned Eddie but instead she and Wallis drove downtown to the Biograph alone. Sit up and look straight ahead, she instructed Wallis, hitting the power locks on her ’78 Cutlass when they stopped at a light. Don’t make eye contact with anyone; even with the doors locked, a brick might come through the window. What have you done, Mom, to be so afraid? It’s not me, Mom assures her. I’m the victim here, not being able to drive in whole sections of my own city. I mind my own business. I don’t know what everyone is so angry about.
The marquee of the Biograph still reads The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, but it is daytime and so they are showing a movie called Babylon Pink, which makes Wallis think of plastic flamingos standing single-footed in yards. Two spots are open in front and Mom awkwardly parallel parks. A long line of men wait patiently for the feature to begin and Mom feeds the meter quickly, as if one of them might snatch the coins from her fingers.
“Hurry up, dear, they’re waiting for us,” Mom says more loudly than she needs, to let the men know she and Wallis are not alone down here; should something happen to them, they would be missed.
The manager who greets them inside the movie house wears a suit the same brown as Mom’s Oldsmobile. He is pale enough to have crawled from beneath one of the cracked Islamic floor tiles.
“We found him in the alley,” he says. “Sprawled out behind the Dumpster, looking like this. I tried to call the paramedics but he begged me not to. Said he didn’t want to get Eddie in trouble. When he told me which Eddie, I said I’d call you instead. He didn’t want that, either, but I couldn’t leave him.”
The manager leads them past the golden-cage ticket booth and the popcorn counter to a small door marked OFFICE. He’d locked it behind him, worried, Wallis guessed, that Jasper wouldn’t be there when he got back. As he fits the key in the lock, Mom turns to her.
“You wait right here,” she says. “Let me take care of it.”
Wallis ignores her and pushes in past the manager. The room is even tighter than Eddie’s dressing room at the station, with cheap teal carpet, a rust-colored velour love seat in the corner, more metal file cabinets, and framed, sun-faded movie posters. A window looks out onto the blank brick wall of the alley. Behind a desk overflowing with papers and books and stacked video cassettes sits Jasper.
“Damn it, Wallis,” Mom says in exasperation.
Jasper looks up when they come in. His forehead is swollen over his brow and his right eye is a slit in purple flesh. His nose is bridgeless, as if it has been broken. The manager washed him up but he missed the dried blood crusted on his temple above his ear.
Mom doesn’t rush to him as she would if it had been Wallis. This is a boy’s beating, far beyond her experience.
“What happened?” Mom demands of the room. She doesn’t care who answers but her tone says someone must. Wallis feels herself wanting to respond on Jasper’s behalf. I walked into a door. Isn’t that what battered wives say? His eyes—eye—has shifted back to the desk; he can’t hold Mom’s gaze. “We need to get you to the hospital,” Mom says.
“I’m fine,” Jasper cracks his fat lips and the words drop out.
“You are obviously not fine,” Mom says, neither tenderly nor scolding, just speaking as neutrally as Wallis has ever heard her. Jasper rests his head on the desk and the manager steps in.
“Listen, this is a rough part of town. Kids can’t wander the streets late at night. I should be calling the cops, but I know Eddie, and Jasper here says Eddie will get in trouble if I do. You guys need to work this out. I don’t want to get in trouble for not reporting it.”
“Do you have your things, Jasper?” Mom asks. He shakes his head.
“He was robbed,” the manager says.
“Did you get a look at them?” Mom asks. Jasper shakes his head.
“I already asked him all this stuff,” the manager says. “He doesn’t know anything. He might have a concussion.”
Mom has seen and heard enough. She thanks the manager, and in a completely unexpected gesture, reaches into her pocketbook. Is she going to tip him? Wallis wonders. Give him hush money? Mom takes out her checkbook, scribbling a figure and signature on it, and passes it to him. The manager isn’t sure whether or not to take it—no one knows exactly what this transaction is for or about, only that somehow it makes sense for money to trade hands. Time. Effort. A donation. Call it what you like, the check implies. Jasper looks away.
“Thank you for your trouble,” Mom says. She turns to Jasper.
“Let’s go,” she says.
Jasper shakes his head. No.
“Let’s go,” Mom repeats quietly. “Or I’ll phone the police and let them sort it out.”
Jasper rises then and trails behind them out of the manager’s office. His jeans are torn and stained with mud. He walks with a limp, as though his hip has been knocked out of joint.
Mom steps out of t
he theater more confidently now, with a male beside them, a roughed-up male, like a spoil of war; she could be leading him by an invisible leash as a cautionary tale to all those men with their hands in their pockets waiting in lines for dark theaters on workdays. He is not one of you, she could be saying, he belongs to me. Whatever it is, she walks with her head held high, refusing to hurry now, though Jasper tucks his face and tries not to see. Across the street, sitting on the high marble steps of the beaux-arts post office, two black boys, skinnier even than he, sit smoking, appraising them.
“Take the backseat,” Mom says, softer now, as she unlocks the car, “so you can lie down.”
Jasper obeys, stretching out across the tan leather seats. For once Mom doesn’t care about dirt or even blood. Closing his eyes, he is completely shut inside himself. Wallis hears his labored breathing.
“I’m going to give this forty-eight hours with ice and aspirin,” Mom says. “If the swelling hasn’t gone down by then, I’m taking you to the hospital no matter what you say.”
Nothing from the back. Wallis has climbed into the front seat by her mother and turns around to look at him. Everyone knows this is what happens if you run away from home. She waits for the lecture she knows is coming, how he panicked them all with no regard for all they’d done for him, how having a home was a privilege and rules existed not to punish him but to keep him safe. But Mom sits behind the steering wheel without turning over the motor. She stares out over the crowd of milling men waiting for their porn movie to begin, and suddenly Wallis realizes what Mom has done. This was her chance to be done with Jasper. He left on his own, she could have told herself they’d done their best, let him be someone else’s problem. But instead she reclaimed him like a piece of lost luggage, and now he is theirs. All those men outside the Biograph had mothers, too, good and bad, who let them go and hoped for happy endings. The men who were once boys shuffle into an orderly line just long enough to get through the door. Once inside, they’ll spread out again, putting seats between them. Outside Wallis’s window, a little red box flashes on the parking meter.
“We’ve expired,” Wallis says, craning her head to look for the traffic cops. “Mom.”
