Mad River Road (14 page)

Emma knew she should stop, but she couldn’t. She had to make her son understand how important it was for him to continue with their charade, that their happiness and well-being depended on it. “You don’t want to go live with a bunch of strangers, do you?”

“No!” the little boy cried, burrowing deep into her arms, his round little cheeks wet with his tears.

“Okay then, what’s your name?”

No response beyond the sound of muffled tears.

Emma pushed her son away, held him at arm’s length. “What’s your name, little boy?” she asked, as if she were someone he’d met on the street.

“Dylan,” the little boy sputtered between sobs.

“Dylan what?”

“Dylan Frost.”

“All righty then.” Emma closed her eyes and pulled her son close, rocking him gently back and forth. “That’s really good, Dylan. You’re such a good boy. Mommy is so proud of you.”

“I’m Dylan Frost,” he repeated for good measure.

“Yes, you are. And you know what?”

“What?”

“It’s almost your bedtime, Dylan Frost. So if you want me to hide, we better do it quickly. You ready?”

He nodded, light brown hair falling into troubled blue eyes.

It was probably time to color his hair again, Emma thought, deciding to leave that battle for another day. “Okay, start counting.”

Once again Dylan counted, once again Emma hid behind the shower curtain, and once again Dylan raced down the stairs to check out the kitchen cabinets.
Emma looked at her watch, knowing Mrs. Discala would be here in a few minutes and that she was nowhere near ready. She wondered what the protocol for book club meetings was, whether it was acceptable to be ten, even fifteen minutes late. Should she bring cookies, a bottle of wine? I have neither, she realized, hearing Dylan’s footsteps clambering up the stairs.
Finally
, Emma thought as he returned to the bathroom and pulled open the shower curtains, looking genuinely surprised to find her there.

“You found me!” Emma wailed in mock consternation.

“Let’s play again,” Dylan shouted.

“Uh-uh. No. Now it’s time to get ready for bed,” she told him firmly. “You go get your pajamas on while I get dressed.”

Dylan pouted momentarily before giving in and doing as he was told. Emma climbed out of the tub and wiped her feet on the threadbare pink mat before returning to her room and rifling through her closet, ultimately selecting the too-heavy black slacks and a not-too-old peach-colored jersey. Her hair was only partially dry, and several dark strands were already twisting into unruly waves at both sides of her head. “Damn,” she said, knowing she didn’t have the time to tame them into something more manageable. The story of my life, she thought as her son came bounding into her room dressed in his blue flannel pajamas.

“Where are you going?” he asked warily when he saw her.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Emma lied, wishing she didn’t have to. But Dylan got so anxious whenever she went anywhere without him, and she just didn’t have the
time to explain everything right now. It was just easier this way, less traumatic for both of them.

“Then why are you all dressed up?”

“I’m not dressed up.”

“Yes, you are.”

“Well, I’m not going out,” she lied again. “Mrs. Discala is coming over for a visit.”

“Why?”

“Because I asked her to.”

“Why?”

“Because,” Emma said firmly, in no mood to play “why” games. She had only a few minutes to get Dylan in bed and asleep before she had to leave. Normally, Dylan was as quick to fall asleep as he was deliberate in his nighttime rituals, sometimes even nodding off before his head hit the pillow, and not waking up until morning. Unless, of course, a bad dream shook him awake in the middle of the night. No problem, Emma thought, guiding her son back into the bathroom and watching as he slowly twisted the cap from the toothpaste tube, then meticulously spread the white-and-green-striped gel across the soft bristles of his orange toothbrush. She’d only be gone a few hours, back in plenty of time to reassure him if he were visited by nightmares.

Emma studied her reflection in the small, rectangular mirror over the sink as her son began the long process of brushing his teeth. I look so tired, she thought. Not quite thirty, yet sallow and old before my time. What I need is a holiday, she decided. A few days alone. How wonderful that would be, she thought, silently counting out the last of the fifteen strokes her son required to brush his top row of teeth before starting on the bottom. She fought
the urge to grab the toothbrush from his hand, finish the job for him, then hurry him into bed. But she’d tried that before, she remembered, and the resultant scene had set them both back for days. At the time, she’d actually considered consulting the school nurse but quickly decided against it. A school nurse understood runny noses and scraped knees, not obsessive-compulsive behavior. And a therapist was out of the question. Therapists cost money, money she didn’t have. Besides, a therapist would ask a lot of questions, and Emma had no answers for those questions. At least, none that she could share.

Dylan half-filled the little pink plastic cup at the side of the sink, stopping the water at a dark grain that ran through the pink plastic, then rinsed his mouth, starting on his left side then transferring the water to his right cheek before spitting three times into the sink. He then returned the plastic cup to its exact position at the side of the sink and wiped the side of his mouth with a flimsy white washcloth. “Finished,” he said proudly, as he said every night.

Emma ushered him out of the room with an affectionate pat on his tiny behind, followed him into his room, and watched him touch the wooden baseboard of his narrow bed twice before climbing under the covers and reaching up behind his head to tap the wall. Was he checking to make sure it was still there? she wondered. Was he looking for signs of permanence, however slim? And was she responsible for such irrational behavior? she asked herself again, her own nightly ritual.

Well, I
did
change his name and tell him strangers might come to take him away, she reminded herself, shaking her head in regret as Dylan turned on the radio
at the side of his bed. Still, she wasn’t to blame for their current situation. Yes, their standard of living had fallen precipitously, and yes, she was often tense and depressed, but she loved her son more than life itself, and she hoped one day he’d understand why she’d had to spirit him away from everything he loved and felt comfortable around. Had she made the right decision? I have nightmares too, she wanted to say. “Good night, sweetie-pie,” she said instead, stroking his hair. “Sleep well.”

“Tell me a story.”

This was a new wrinkle, Emma thought. Something totally unexpected. He senses something is different, she realized, glancing down at her watch, noting it was almost seven-thirty and wondering what was keeping Mrs. Discala. “I don’t know any stories,” she told him honestly.

“Daddy knew lots of stories.”

Emma’s entire body tensed. “I know, sweetheart, but—” She broke off, feeling suddenly stupid and inadequate, the way she’d felt throughout most of her marriage to Dylan’s father.

“But what?”

Daddy was a liar
, she wanted to shout. Instead she said, “How about I tell you a story tomorrow? Maybe we can even go to the bookstore, and you can pick out a book.…”

“Tell me a story
now,”
Dylan insisted.

Emma searched her imagination for several seconds, found nothing. What was the matter with her? What kind of mother was she that she didn’t know any stories? “Okay, if I tell you a story, you promise you’ll go right to sleep?”

Dylan nodded enthusiastically.

“Okay. Just one,” she said, stalling for time. Surely she could remember at least one story from her childhood. Except that no one had ever read her a bedtime story either, she realized.

“Mommy?” Dylan was looking at her questioningly.

“Okay. There was once a little boy,” Emma began.

“What’s his name?”

“His name is Richard.”

“I don’t like that name.”

“No? What name do you like?”

“Buddy.”

“Buddy?”

“Yeah, there’s this boy in my class named Buddy, and he’s cool.”

“Cool?”

“Yeah. So can the boy in the story be named Buddy?”

Emma shrugged, once again checking her watch and seeing that it was now seven-thirty on the button. “Buddy, it is.” Where
was
Mrs. Discala? She was normally so prompt.

“Mommy?” Dylan prompted again.

“What?”

“There was a little boy named Buddy.”

“Right. Once upon a time, there was a little boy named Buddy, who was five years old.”

“What did he look like?”

“Buddy was about three and a half feet tall and had soft brown hair that matched his beautiful blue eyes.”

“Like me?”

“That’s right. He looked just like you.” Now what? she wondered. She’d never been very good at this sort of thing, never the girl who, like Lily, had been asked to read
her compositions out loud in class. Her imagination just didn’t work that way. While she could easily go on about her own experiences—God knows there were plenty of stories she could tell there—she’d never been any good with things like nursery rhymes and fairy tales. “Anyway, Buddy loved licorice sticks,” she recited, happily borrowing from Lily’s rejected story, “the long, twisted, red ones that his sister used to tell him weren’t really licorice at all, but some kind of plastic.”

“Plastic?”

Full of horrible red dye that would give him cancer when he grew up
, Emma continued silently but didn’t repeat out loud. Dylan had enough to worry about. Why couldn’t Lily have written something more child-friendly?

“Anyway, Buddy and his mother lived in a small house at the edge of town.”

“Where was Buddy’s father?”

“Buddy didn’t have a father,” Emma said curtly. The phone rang. “Close your eyes,” Emma directed her son. “I’ll be back in a minute.” She raced into her bedroom, answered the phone in the middle of its third ring. “Hello?”

It was Mrs. Discala, and she was terribly sorry, she wouldn’t be able to babysit after all. She’d hurt her back that afternoon while planting a new rosebush in her backyard, and she’d been lying down ever since, thinking it would feel better soon, but it didn’t, and she’d just gotten off the phone with her son, who was a paramedic, and he’d told her to take a few Advil, pour herself a hot bath, and get into bed. She was really sorry, she hated to do this to Emma, especially at the last minute, but she didn’t see how she could look after a small child, even one as good
as Dylan, even if he was already asleep. She just couldn’t do it, she was sorry, she apologized again.

“It’s okay,” Emma said, hanging up the phone and bursting into tears. “Damn it.” She was surprised by just how disappointed she was. Having shut herself off from adult companionship for so long, she hadn’t realized how desperately she’d been craving it. Only now did she understand how much she’d been looking forward to tonight. Even if it meant sitting around with a bunch of women she didn’t know, discussing a book she’d never read.

Whatever had possessed her to tell Lily that
Wuthering Heights
was one of her favorite novels? Favorite
titles
, maybe, since that was about as far as she’d ever gotten with the damn book. Reading had just never been high on her list of priorities. Probably the result of that tony private school she’d attended—
phony
tony, she amended now—where students were expected to read a book a week, part of a general program to promote excellence. Except when had they ever promoted anything but self-interest and the preservation of the status quo? No, at Bishop Lane School for Girls, to which she’d been granted grudging acceptance because her mother was part of the custodial staff, it was much more a question of where you came from than where you were going. And since she’d come from little, it was generally assumed she wouldn’t amount to much.

So it was probably much better that this evening had worked out the way it had, she thought. She’d only have embarrassed herself, said something stupid, revealed herself as a charlatan and an impostor. The women would have shunned her, as her classmates at Bishop Lane had when they found out she was little more than a charity
case. The janitor’s daughter, they called her. And it didn’t matter that her maternal grandfather had once been as rich as any of them, because
their
parents hadn’t frittered away their inheritance on a series of bad deals and worse investments,
their
fathers hadn’t abandoned them when the money ran out,
their
mothers hadn’t been forced to work two jobs to pay off the crippling debt, and then a third job to cover current expenses. Was it any wonder her mother had never had time to read to her when she was a child? Was it any wonder her life had been an ever-twisting, downward spiral of bad choices and worse consequences?

She’d spent almost thirty years railing against the notion that biology was destiny, jumping over the many hurdles constantly materializing in her path, determined to escape the inevitability of her fate. Yet whatever road she took, it seemed she always ended up back where she’d started. The cities might be hundreds of miles apart, the street names might be different, but basically they were all the same. No matter how far she traveled, no matter where she settled, she always found herself back on Mad River Road.

Emma wiped the tears from her eyes and expelled a deep breath of air. She needed a cigarette. My kingdom for a cigarette, she thought, looking around the room, seeing the small television tucked in the corner and wondering if there was anything decent on tonight to watch. Probably she should move the TV down to the living room so that Dylan could have easier access to it, but the truth was that the TV was as much a soporific for her as the radio was for her son.

Emma walked into Dylan’s room, prepared to offer him half an hour in front of the TV in exchange for not
having to finish her story, but mercifully, he was already asleep. “Thank you, God,” she whispered, kissing his cool forehead and making sure his blanket was secure. “Sleep well,” she whispered from the doorway.