Black and Blue (18 page)

“I bet he’s mad at you.”

“I’ll bet he is, too,” I said.

We walked home then, along the highway, and somehow it was better. Somehow it was good. The wind blew trash across our path, bits of wrappers, foil and plastic, and we must have looked a sight to anyone passing by. But it felt somehow festive, our isolation, as though we were having an adventure. “I’m full,” Robert said, patting his belly, smiling up at me, kicking at a soda can along the gravel verge. I felt the ghost of Bobby at my shoulder, but it was the good Bobby, the Bobby who I’d found sitting quietly in the dark by the side of Robert’s bed that night so many years ago, when our little boy woke up crying, reliving the fall on the bed, the doctor’s hands, the needle with the lidocaine, the operating-theater light in his eyes. “I got him, Fran,” Bobby had whispered to me, and I’d gone back to bed.

We walked over to the Lakeview with a Styrofoam container of food from The Chirping Chicken for Mrs. Levitt. Her hair was every which way when she opened the door, and there was a football game on the television. The living room was dark but when she saw Robert she moved around turning on the lights. “This is a beautiful boy,” she said. “He should have some soda.” Robert was frightened, I could tell, his eyes ricocheting around the room, lighting on the hospital bed then bouncing away. “It’s all right,” Mrs. Levitt said. “That’s Mr. Levitt. He likes the Green Bay Packers, don’t you, Irving?”

“That’s college football,” Robert said, looking at the TV.

“Aah,” said Mrs. Levitt, “what do I know? Besides, you don’t complain, right, Irving?” Her food was on the kitchen counter, and I put it on a plate and brought it to the card table. The two of
us sat on either side of her as she ate, patting her mouth with a paper napkin. She held forkfuls out to Robert, but he shook his head.

“You make house calls on holidays, Mrs. Nurse?” she said, and I smiled. We didn’t stay long, just long enough for her to feel as if she’d had company on the holiday. As we left she handed Robert an old, old copy of
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
with a dark-green cover and a gilt fleur-de-lis on its spine. Inside in faded ink was a big, round, florid signature: Irving S. Levitt. Robert clutched the book as we walked home.

There were almost no cars on the highway, and the breeze was a little cold, as though even the tropics had to pay homage to the Pilgrims’ chilly feast. It’s as if life stops in America on holidays. Or maybe it’s that way everywhere, all over the world, all the places I’ve never gone, countries I’ve never seen. It used to be that way on Sundays, when Gracie and I were young. The newsstands and the variety stores were quiet and dark, the OPEN signs in the windows flipped over to CLOSED. The little knots of people at the corners where the buses stopped on weekdays, workdays, were gone, and the streets had a sleepiness like the sleepiness indoors, where working people dozed in their chairs and children chafed at the torpor, bored with checkers and Old Maid and the bickering of their elders. Now only the holidays—the real holidays, not President’s Day, or Labor Day—have that bittersweet air of stop time I remember from Sunday, the sabbath. It was the way life had seemed to me when we’d first arrived in Lake Plata, like falling through nothing. It didn’t seem that way as we walked home, the turkey I’d asked the waitress to give us for sandwiches in a plastic shopping bag in my hand. It seemed as though we were taking it
easy, having a real holiday, nothing to do, no stories to tell. Or to make up as we went along.

“I love you, sweetie,” I said.

“I love you, too. If I can get that video game for, like, half price, can we buy it?”

“Don’t push your luck.”

“Please?”

We had a good time, the rest of that desultory day. I know, because I read about it later in Robert’s composition, which made it seem real to me, so real that I put the composition in my bedside drawer after it came home from school. We took out the pot of wallpaper paste I’d bought to paper the bathroom and used it instead to paste pictures from old
Sports Illustrated
s to Robert’s closet door. Mattingly, Dr. J., Boomer Esiason, even the women from the Olympic basketball team. We sat cross-legged on the floor of his room, which was dingy and had a line of dirty rubber soles marks around the wall a foot above the molding, as though some kid had kicked and kicked and kicked and kicked. We made a mess, Robert and I. We’d never made much of a mess before. The closet door was covered with biceps, long legs, faces. It was almost like company. We crammed the leavings from the magazines into a garbage bag, and Robert stood back, his fists on his hips, and narrowed his eyes.

“This is the coolest thing we’ve ever done,” he said. “Bennie’s not gonna believe this.”

“It looks really good,” I said.

“How will we get it off?”

“Don’t worry about that now,” I said.

Then we watched an old movie on television, wound around
one another on the scratchy old couch, and ate turkey sandwiches, and toasted each other with ginger ale. There was an old jar of maraschino cherries in the refrigerator door, just like in an ordinary house, like my real house, on the bay in Brooklyn, the jar of cherries you bought for one guest who drank Manhattans—Bobby’s aunt Mae, his uncle Thomas’s wife—and that ever after sat and sat on that shelf inside the door. I put a cherry in each of our sodas.

“I used to do that for Aunt Grace when we were little girls,” I said. “I’d put the cherry juice in, too, and make it a Shirley Temple for her.”

Maybe that was what did it. Or maybe it was just curling up on the couch with Robert, feeling him warm and pliant beside me, smelling his hair the way I used to smell Gracie’s as I pulled it into an unruly ponytail. Or maybe it was just that it was, after all, Thanksgiving.

My sister’s Thanksgivings were like those horrible short stories in
The New Yorker
, that seemed to have no beginning, no ending, no point. A visiting professor from Oxford who wanted to know all about the Pilgrims. A research assistant whose husband had just left her for another man and who wept in the kitchen and drank too much wine. The couple who lived down the hall from Grace, artists who brought couscous with cranberries in it. Oh, it was funny to hear all about it afterward, and I always did, because the last thing Grace did on Thanksgiving night was to call and tell me all about it.

“And, naturally, she’s sitting at one end of the table telling me how satisfying it is to work with her husband, how close it’s made them, and he’s sitting at my end with his hand on my thigh,” she’d
say, and “Have you ever made stuffing with chestnuts? If not, don’t, because it sucks!” and “Tell Robert this Brit brought me little plastic Pilgrims and I’m foisting them on him when he comes to see me next week.” She always called me, just shy of eleven o’clock, Grace did. And so, after Robert stumbled from the couch to his room, his breath smelling of mayonnaise as I kissed him good night, I picked up the old rotary phone on the wall in the kitchen, poured myself more ginger ale, and sat on the linoleum cross-legged, my heart going like a mouse in a cage. She knew, when she picked up; I could tell she knew by the way her voice was, soft and whispery, not like Grace’s insistent alto at all. She had to say it twice—“hello … hello?”—because the shock of hearing her overcame me suddenly, knocked the wind out of me.

“Happy Thanksgiving, baby girl,” I finally said, and my voice wasn’t my own either.

“Oh, my God,” she said, and she started to cry, “oh, my God. Oh, Frannie. Oh, Frannie.” For a minute or two all we did was cry.

“Where are you?” she finally wailed, and then immediately, in a more ordinary adult Grace voice, “Don’t tell me. Don’t tell me anything that matters. Don’t tell me anything that I can give away.”

“To Bobby.”

“To Bobby. That son of a bitch.” Her voice thickened again. “He sat in my living room and he cried. He cried. I almost felt sorry for him. I would have, if I hadn’t seen your face. Even then, he got to me. I wound up telling him that if I heard from you I’d make you call him.”

Her words caught in her throat, part grief, part fury. “A week
later he comes back and wants to know, have you called, where are you, what’s your address. And I said I had no idea, I hadn’t heard anything from you. And he accused me of being an accessory to a kidnapping! I couldn’t figure out what he was talking about at first. I said, Bob, don’t forget that I saw her face. And he says to me, that’s exactly why you don’t want to fuck with me, Grace.”

“Did he hurt you?”

You could hear the hum of the telephone static in the silence, in the moment when Grace tried to decide which would be better for me, the truth or a lie. She went for the lie. Don’t we all?

“No,” she said.

“Don’t let him in again, Gracie. You can’t take the chance. He just goes out of control.”

“I know. I know. My God, Fran, what you’ve been living with all this time.”

“We’re fine,” I said. “Robert’s fine. He’s getting settled. I’m working. I’ve got a place, and a little money.”

“Let me send you more.”

“I can’t. I can’t give you the address. Or the phone number. It’s not that I don’t trust you. It’s just safer.”

“The bastard could break my leg and I wouldn’t tell him anything. That son of a bitch. My God, Frannie, I feel like such a fool. All those years you taking care of me, such good care, and you were in so much trouble and I didn’t even figure it out, or do anything. Nothing. I did nothing.” She started to cry again, my little sister, the way she had when she was a child, when I’d hold her head to my chest, hold it still to stop the sobs. “I didn’t do anything to help you.”

“You didn’t know.”

“How could none of us have known? I called Winnie at the hospital. She said the same thing. She suspected, but she said they all told themselves that you wouldn’t put up with it.”

“It’s amazing how much you’ll put up with,” I said.

“I lie in bed at night and think about having him killed and dumped some place where no one will find him. Sometimes I can’t believe it’s me. I want him dead. If he were dead, then everything would be fine. You’d come back. You’d be safe. I pray that a car will run him down, or that some scumbag on the streets will shoot him.”

“I’m safe now, sweetie,” I said, matching Grace lie for lie. “Don’t talk about killing anybody.”

“Twice my mailbox has been broken into and the super thinks it’s druggies, but I think it’s him. I had my phone checked for bugs.”

“Jesus, Grace, he wouldn’t bug your phone.”

“Oh yeah? You sit there and tell me you’re sure he wouldn’t do that.”

“He might,” I finally said. We were both silent again, the silence of two people who have long lived with and loved the sound of each other’s breathing. That’s what I wanted Robert to do, when he was grown-up, living a life away from me. I could hardly stand to think of it, but when I did I thought of telephone calls when I would just listen to him breathe over the line.

“How’s Mom?” I finally said.

“The same. She told Aunt Faye you’d decided you needed a change of scene. She told me that Bobby was rude to her when he came to her house. Rude. Jesus God, what an understatement. ‘He was really rude to me, Grace Ann,’ she says.”

“Oh, I bet he was,” I said. “Never mind. Tell me the dinner story.”

“What?”

“You know.”

She thought I was crazy, wanting the old familiar story of her Thanksgiving dinner, the story of the strange food, the urban strays. But she did it. There’d been a defrocked priest who’d been prominent in the antiwar movement a quarter century before, who brought a bottle of good wine and then drank the whole thing himself. “It’s the first time I’ve heard anyone actually use the word
imperialist
in conversation,” Grace said. There was Grace’s lesbian friend Trudi, who taught Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein and got into an argument with everyone else at the table about whether the Virgin Birth meant Mary was gay. There were two old women from the building who sounded like second cousins to Mrs. Levitt, who brought rutabagas that had turned out to be surprisingly good, and a graduate student from American Samoa who felt compelled to tell Grace in the kitchen just as she was whipping the cream for the pie that he loved her. “Oh, for God’s sake, Ramon, cut that pie and put it on plates, I told him, and that was the end of that,” Grace said in her old, wry, dismissive, strong Grace voice.

“We went out to dinner at a pretty bad restaurant,” I said softly. “It was nice. We went to see one of my patients. We watched
Miracle on 34th Street
after. I think that’s why I called.”

“We watched it, too,” Grace said. “Trudi cried and said she’d always been in love with Natalie Wood.”

“We were watching the same movie at the same time. That’s pretty good.”

“I miss you so much,” Grace said.

“I know.”

“Give Robert a hug and tell him I miss him, too.”

“I can’t, Grace. I can’t tell him I talked to you. I can’t confuse him too much, about now and then, here and there. I can’t stay on too much longer, either. I’m afraid. I’m afraid for you, mostly.”

There was silence again. “
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
is on the Movie Channel at midnight,” Grace said. “You want to watch it together?”

“We don’t get cable here.”

“Will you call again?” Grace said.

“If it’s safe,” I said. “I’m with you every day in my mind. I’m running.”

“I’m running with you in my mind,” Grace said. I put down the phone in Florida and she hung up in New York.

I
bought Robert the game he wanted for Christmas and hid it in the crawl space above the second floor. I bought Cindy a small sweet landscape I saw in a poster shop at the mall, and Mike Riordan a nylon jacket for running on rainy days. I bought presents for all my patients, although we weren’t supposed to: a computer game for Jennifer, full of dragons and demons and a female superhero in a breastplate; a book for Melvin on smart investing and a romance novel for his wife; and, for Mrs. Levitt, a three-year subscription to
People
magazine. Christmas was coming, and I had enough money to buy presents. No one asked for the rent; I didn’t get a phone bill. There were calluses on my heels from my running shoes. When the phone rang now I just answered it, listened to the home-care agency ask about taking on a short-term assignment, Cindy ask whether I wanted her to drive me to school for soccer practice, the school to ask if Robert could take Tylenol for a headache. Twice it rang and no one was there. That happens to everyone, I told myself. To everyone.