For Today I Am a Boy (23 page)

“I would be a great mother,” I said.

Helen bumped her glass into her front teeth and then looked down at it in confusion. “I wouldn't,” she said, not rising to the bait.

 

Helen and I spent the afternoon popping into free museums and government buildings. Helen moved through each as though she were ticking it off a list in her head, so quickly that it was unclear why we'd come. We spent less than ten minutes inside the Library of Congress. We went from one end of the National Air and Space Museum to the other without going into any of the exhibition halls, as if the clusters of upright rockets and hanging planes were trees and jungle canopy to be slashed out of our way.

We stopped only at security checkpoints. Helen was well practiced. She knew which ones would ask you to surrender phones, which ones needed to search your shoes, which ones banned pens and paper. Like Mother, I saw our dead father everywhere. In the way the guards held their mouths in disgust, their bland, shaming voices: How dare you bring a water bottle? Did you think we wouldn't know? That we can't hear the vile thoughts in your head? The twisted happiness you squeeze out of dresses and dolls when you think you're alone? We are watching you from the other side.

How Father would love the new America, its all-seeing, all-knowing eye.

 

In the evening, Helen and I walked for nearly an hour along a boulevard of baking concrete, looking for a bar. The sun was setting and we moved through visible clouds of insects, their buzzing drowned out by low-flying planes from Reagan National Airport.

We ended up at the W Hotel on Fifteenth Street. The lobby had black marble floors and dripped with crystal. A bouncer hovered by the elevator, roped off with red velvet. “Rooftop terrace,” Helen explained to me. “It would help if you were better-looking.”

The terrace was no cooler than the ground, made worse by the dense crowd of wet, steaming human meat. Helen ordered us both straight bourbons. I held the glass to my face as we leaned against the railing. The W Hotel was a squat building that managed to look out over all the other squat Romanesque buildings of the capital.

Helen pointed out a few landmarks in the distance and then said, “I love America. Land of new beginnings. It's like LA and DC are on different planets. Canada is so much bigger but there's nowhere to go.” We could see the roof of the White House. Black silhouettes of men with long-barreled guns paced in circles, aimless as the flies and mosquitoes.

“Bonnie said you liked LA.”

She held the drink to her mouth thoughtfully, statue-still. Her lower lip stuck to the glass.

“Why did you leave?” I pressed. I felt dizzy and argumentative. “That's why I'm here. Mother wants to know—why you left LA and your six-figure salary. Why you called her. She thinks it's because of a man.”

Helen laughed. “What, like I'm Adele?” She bent in half over the railing, staring affectionately down at the city.

“I quit both of my jobs to be here, you know.”

“Nobody asked you to do that.” Her limp hands almost spilled her drink. She recovered it and took a sip. “Do you think Father's proud of me?” She turned, vindictive, channeling his ghost. “Do you think he's proud of you?”

“Father's dead.”

A blast of wind threw both of us back a step; it was followed by a sound like an angry bellow. The planter trees of the terrace flattened in one direction as a square, military-gray helicopter appeared above the trees of the White House lawn. It lurched as though being yanked upward on strings. Everyone rushed to the balcony, squashing Helen and me against the railings. People watched until the dot vanished among the clouds.

“Can he see us?” Helen asked. The president, Father, God.

 

We got into the car, and Helen drove back and forth across state lines until she found a gas station that sold beer. I let her drive, squinting red-eyed at the dark, complex interchanges. She seemed to be doing fine.

We went back to her townhouse to drink more. I sat down on the rug in her living room, and the rough weave scratched my mosquito bites raw. She cleared a space for herself on the couch, tossing lamps and boxes aside.

She came across a box that gave her pause. It was full of labeled cassette tapes, carefully organized by date into smaller boxes. Her fingers danced across the top of the tapes as she sucked at the beer bottle. “Guess,” she said.

“Guess what?” I said, itchy as hell.

“Why I left LA.”

“You got your heart broken,” I spat.

“Nope.”

“You got fired.”

“No, but you're getting closer.”

“This is stupid.” I crawled across the rug and came to the canister of bug repellent she'd bought at the pharmacy. “God, why didn't we use this?” I moaned.

“Let me show you something, little brother,” Helen said, plucking the canister from my hand. She took a lighter from her pocket. She sprayed a mist of repellent and then lit it. A fireball exploded between us.

For a moment, a moment shorter than a blink, I saw Helen through flames. And she saw me. She allowed her face to open up, to be vulnerable, sisterly, small. And I could imagine her crying on the phone now, crying to me just as easily as to our mother. “I done bad,
Ma-ma.
I done bad.”

All the tiny flames went out like a breath. Helen and I stayed kneeling on the rug across from each other. “I just wanted him to be normal,” she said. “Like I wanted you to be normal.”

“Who? What are you talking about?”

She pulled out one of the tapes and the personal recorder that was in the box with them. She slid the cassette inside and pressed Play. Her own voice came from the speaker. “Case notes,” it said. “April twenty-sixth.
Reis versus Reis
.”

I sat back on my knees. In my earliest memory of Helen, Father had tasked her to divide up a small cupcake between the four of us. We were all shouting: Adele deserved the whole cupcake because she was the oldest. Bonnie deserved it because she was the youngest. I deserved it because I liked cupcakes the most. Helen ignored us all. Her concentrated face, tongue poking from between her lips, focused just on steadying the knife, on making two perfect cuts, in half and half again.

 

Initial consultation: A father seeks to win custody of his son. Good afternoon, Mr. Reis, Helen says. Marcus, he says. His voice is calm. He wears a gold necklace, gold rings, and a gold watch. (“Note,” the recording says. “Remind Marcus not to wear his jewelry to court.”)

You seem very calm, she says.

I just want my son, he says.

They talk for an hour. They go through the papers. His case for custody is sound. The wife lives in a small apartment in Pasadena with the lover who ended their marriage. Mr. Reis kept the four-bedroom house. The wife is unemployed. Mr. Reis owns a construction company with significant government contracts.

The son is fourteen years old with severe autism and a fixation on maps. Mr. Reis argues that the wife is negligent. She lets the teenage boy wear diapers. She dresses him in wrap dresses, as they are easier to get on and off. Lets him eat alone and with his hands. Lets him sit all day surrounded by atlases and globes, memorizing, reciting, drawing maps, the same ones over and over again. The boy, however, cannot answer geography questions when asked directly and is not classified as a savant. The boy is obese. (All this said on Helen's recording in clipped, orderly sentences.)

Mr. Reis has drawn up a contract with a full-time ABA therapist, who will be with the boy eight hours a day, five days a week, if Mr. Reis is granted custody. Mr. Reis has consulted a psychiatrist, who will meet with the boy weekly. Mr. Reis has a plan.

Private negotiations between the parents fail. They go before a judge. Helen is confident. The therapists testify. Studies show, they say. Complex system of reward and punishment. Token economy. Alternative means of communication. Results, they say, and Helen smiles. In her youth, Mrs. Reis had a dropped charge for marijuana possession. Her housekeeper, whom they have quietly bribed through a third party, testifies to her continued use.

Mrs. Reis's lawyer attempts to restrain his client, but Mrs. Reis shouts out in court anyway. He's happy, she says. Look at him. He's never going to have a job. He's never going to be normal or productive. There's only one thing in this goddamn world he enjoys, so why not let him have it?

These experts would disagree, Mrs. Reis, Helen says.

Mr. Reis smiles. It just takes hard work and time. His son will learn to tie his shoes, button his shirt, hold conversations, look people in the eye, sit at the dinner table. (“A simple win,” Helen says into the tape.)

 

I woke up on the floor. My ribs felt crushed from my sleeping on the tiles, and the throbbing in my head beat in time with the throbbing of my mosquito bites. My memory of the previous night faded out like a scene from a movie. I couldn't remember how the tape had ended.

I found Helen in the kitchen, already showered and dressed, leaning on the counter with a mug of coffee and reading the paper. Her wet hair dripped and left a trail down the back of her blouse. She wore more makeup than the day before. “Good morning, Peter. Coffee?”

“Can I shower first?”

“Extra towel hanging up for you.”

The shower was enclosed by unfrosted glass. I watched a centipede crawling across my reflection in the mirror over the sink, lifting its iridescent body in waves. I thought about turning up the water temperature. It was still over a hundred degrees outside, but the steam would prevent me from having to see my shriveling male body.

I closed my eyes and opened my mouth. The water tasted milky and strange. I heard the door swing all the way open and hit the far wall. I was too tired to react or hide my nudity. I just stood there, naked in the shower stall, arms hanging down.

Helen raised her voice to be heard. “You haven't done anything.”

Like it was that simple. Like we had talked about it in those stark terms, like I could have done the job with a pair of garden shears. “No.”

She hesitated, and then added, “I don't think you should.”

“I know.”

I knew what Helen saw when she looked at my sunken chest and the thing clinging tight and shrunken between my legs: absolute, immutable truth. There is and there isn't. And look, there, there is.

Helen entered and leaned her back against the wall. “He's brain-dead.”

“Who?”

“The Reis boy. He attacked the ABA therapist. He broke her collarbone and gave her a concussion. She quit.” The voice on the tape started to come back to me. This was exactly what it had said, in the same loud, flat tone. “The psychologist put him on meds that kept the violence in check, at least most of the time. Then Marcus left him alone for a moment and the boy started ripping pages out of an atlas and cramming them down his own throat.”

The lukewarm water, heated from the hot earth around the pipes, finally started to run cold. “He had been without oxygen for too long when the paramedics arrived. He's a vegetable. His mother wants to pull the plug. His father doesn't. His father wanted me to get a court order preventing her from doing it.”

I felt a sickly movement in my gut. Alcohol poisoning, or hope.

“He was happy,” she said. “With his stupid fucking maps. He was happy. No amount of therapy was going to make him happier than that. I took it all away.”

I turned off the water, stepped out, and grabbed the towel off the rack. I wrapped it around myself under the armpits. She must have seen much worse in LA, people who molest their children, beat them senseless, hand them off to strangers to do the same. She had won cases for bad people before, had stayed up all night researching arcane precedents for them. There were judgment calls where she'd made the wrong call. This wasn't such a call. She had known, without a doubt, that Mr. Reis was the better parent. Look at the documents. Anyone would agree. There is and there isn't.

Helen looked at my feet, my legs, and the shapeless rectangle of the thick white towel before she found my face. Possibility bloomed like a fireball. She shrugged.
I don't know,
it said. There is and there isn't, and there could be. She strode out of the bathroom. I heard ice hitting the bottom of a glass, the bourbon that had sat open all night glugging as it was poured. I couldn't believe it. Helen had shrugged and Father was dead.

10

I
INTERVIEWED AT
a French restaurant called Le Carré sur le Carré—the Square on the Square—in Angrignon, a wealthy Anglophone area of Montreal. They told me to come in at nine in the morning. The doors were locked, but I could see a waiter standing on a table scooping fly carcasses out of a chandelier with his hands.

I knocked on the glass. He dumped the flies into a bucket and let me in, then sent me to the kitchen. He was tall and stick-thin with the wet, buggy eyes of a lizard, and I could feel him watching me as I walked through the swinging doors.

“Hey! Whoa!”

I almost crashed into what appeared to be a child in a red baseball cap. I realized he was wearing a chef's jacket and carrying a bag of garbage. “I'm sorry,” I said. “I'm . . .”

He put the garbage on the floor, wiped his hand on his jacket and extended it to me. He wore his chef's jacket with the sleeves rolled all the way up to the elbow. His wide, red straight-laced skater shoes were the same color as his hat. “You must be Peter. I'm John. I'll be trying you out.”

John was short and stocky, with a classically handsome face that seemed more of an objective fact than a matter of attraction. Bonnie called these men “picture handsome”—they looked good in photographs but were somehow too clean-cut for desire. I shook his hand. “Hi.”

He hefted the garbage bag again. “I read your resumé. I'd be surprised if we don't hire you. Have any questions before we get started?”