Pictures of You (11 page)

“That’s where you’re wrong,” said Charlie’s father. He threw
up his hands. “I’m going to shower and then hit the hay,” he said, rising heavily and going into the house. As soon as he was gone, Charlie’s mother leaned toward him conspiratorially. “I don’t understand it,” his mother said. “I’ve heard the story three times already, but still, I just don’t understand it. What was she doing on that road, anyway? Why would she let Sam run out of the car?”

“Maybe she didn’t let him.”

“What do you mean, she didn’t let him? What did Sam tell you?”

“I told you, he won’t talk about it. Maybe it’s good that he forgets.”

“Oh, sweetheart,” his mother said, touching his shoulder. “You think he can forget?”

“Did you like her?” he asked quietly. He half expected her to say “who,” but instead she shut her eyes for a moment. “What difference does it make?” she said, finally.

“It makes a lot of difference to me.”

His mother picked up her wine and sipped. “This wine is heavenly. I don’t know why no one is drinking it but me.”

“What do you remember about her?” he asked. “Do you remember she used to always wear her cardigan sweaters with the buttons at the back? That she didn’t eat ice cream, but she could easily go through a box of Mallomars all by herself?”

“Stop this,” his mother said. “Please.”

“Tell me about when she came to visit you that time in New York. What did you talk about? She was so excited. She spent days figuring out the perfect gift to give you, planning the things you could do together. She so wanted you to like her. Did you?”

“Charlie,” his mother warned. “Why are you doing this?”

“Don’t you have memories of Dad in your early days? Don’t you go over and over them? Relive them?”

“Sometimes,” she said evasively.

“You’re lucky you still have each other,” Charlie said. “You’re lucky you’re so close.” He looked thoughtfully at his mother. “You
know that one thing April and I had in common. We both spent our childhoods being jealous of our parents.”

“What are you saying?” His mother put her wineglass down, resting it carefully at the center of the table.

“You and Dad. You’ve always been this unit with me on the outside. I felt so left out sometimes. I remember you kissing in the audience when I was in a school play once. I was so scared you wouldn’t look up in time to see me sing my song, and when you did I was so relieved I almost cried. I felt like my whole childhood was me shouting,
Look at me! Look at me!
I kept trying to get you two to notice me instead of each other.”

“You’ve got the story wrong.”

“How have I got it wrong? I know what I remember.”

She lowered her voice. “You know what you
want
to remember. You saw what you
wanted
to see. Your father and I have had our moments, let me tell you. It hasn’t been all peaches and cream.”

“What moments?” Charlie leaned forward. His mother was in her seventies, but she was still beautiful, her hair thick and lush and copper as a penny, her skin dewy. All her clothes were expensive, simply and beautifully cut, and she still turned heads when she walked into a room. She had once shown him pictures of herself when she was nineteen and had won Miss Coney Island, a gorgeous young girl in a polka-dot two-piece, the silky championship band draped across her. His father, a Columbia law student on summer break, had taken one look at her and that had been that: two weeks later, they were married and living in a two-bedroom Upper West Side apartment with a doorman. Love at first sight that had lasted.

She waved her hand. “I shouldn’t have said anything. I don’t want to talk about this anymore. People have all sorts of things going on in their lives and they stay together because they love each other, or they have kids to consider, or they just think it will be worse if they leave.” She touched Charlie’s sleeve. “You don’t have
to worry about your parents,” she said. “We’re doing fine. Subject closed. It’s you we’re worrying about now. You and Sam.”

All the next day, Charlie watched his parents. He knew his mother. If she said she wouldn’t talk about something, you could pack a case of dynamite beside her and even light it, and she’d still keep mum. His father was even worse, so calm and unflappable, his face unreadable. When he was growing up, Charlie was never sure if his father was angry with him or not unless he came right out and told him. Even now, he could count on his hands the few personal stories his father had ever shared. The anecdotes were brief, but they were also perfect surprises, like the after-dinner mints he sometimes carried in his pockets, little jolts of sweetness that lingered.

Once, Charlie’s father had taken him along to court, and Charlie had been astonished at his father’s passion. His father whirled his arms in the air like eggbeaters. He practically grew ten inches as he begged the jury not to convict his client. “He’s an innocent man!” he shouted. Charlie had felt his skin tighten, bursting with love and pride and excitement, but as soon as the case was over, his father had returned to his plain old ordinary self, speaking to Charlie as calmly as he did to his potted plants.

T
HAT EVENING, THEY
all went to dinner at Derby’s, a small kid-friendly pasta place Sam liked. Charlie couldn’t concentrate. His parents were sitting so close together, their elbows touched. He watched his father kiss his mother on the cheek. His mother rested her hand on his shoulder when she reached past him for the salt. Sam tried to spin his fettuccine on a fork and, giving up, took small, delicate bites.

They were on dessert, sharing vanilla and strawberry sorbet, when Charlie’s father excused himself. “Got to scout out the rest room,” he said. Charlie watched him striding across the room; he excused himself a lot these days. Prostate, his mother had told him. The man got up five times a night because he had to pee. But he
was still handsome, Charlie thought. Still had all his hair and most of his muscle tone, and of course, those steely blue eyes that had so intimidated Charlie as a child.

But now Charlie wanted to talk to his father, to be reassured that everything between his parents was all right.

“You okay?” his mother asked. “You look like you’re on another planet.”

“Earth to Daddy,” Sam said, nibbling a spoonful of vanilla sorbet.

“Must be catching,” he said. He put down his napkin and went in the direction of the restroom. He found him in the hallway, leaning against the wall. He had his back to Charlie and was on his cell phone. Business. His father was still working. He
loved
his job, and if you even mentioned retirement, he practically got apoplexy. Well, Charlie thought, good for him, and then his father sighed. “Darling,” his father said, and Charlie froze because there, for a moment, he heard the same passion his father exuded in court.

Charlie put his hand on his father’s shoulder and felt him stiffen. “Gotta go,” he said, and snapped the phone shut, and when he turned to Charlie, his face was composed. “Who was that?” Charlie asked.

“Business. Clients. It never ends.” His father tucked the cell phone in his pocket. “You know how it is,” he said, but he didn’t look at Charlie.

“You call your clients darling?” Charlie said.

“You must have misheard me,” his father said evenly. “I said nothing of the kind. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I should get back to my grandson before he polishes off all the sorbet without me.”

Charlie leaned against the wall. He saw his father back at the table, feeding his mother some sorbet from his spoon, the two of them laughing, their heads bent so close they were almost touching. Anyone watching them would never in a million years think anything was wrong with such a handsome couple. “You didn’t want to know,” his mother had told him. “You saw what you wanted to see.”

They went home and Sam went to bed, and then Charlie’s parents, but Charlie stayed up. The house was quiet. The world outside was winding down. He picked up the newspaper, reading every page because what else was there to do? It was stupid, but he began to read the obituaries. He hadn’t put one in for April. They broke his heart, all those others suffering the way he was. The photographs showed a smiling beefy man, a beautiful young woman, and one little kid. Each piece told a story. A love story. Charlie felt his cheeks growing hot. He didn’t bother to brush away his tears, because, when you came down to it, he could have written any of those lines. And each one said the same thing:
Come home. Come home
.

I
N THE FOLLOWING DAYS
, the house was filled with casseroles from neighbors. The phone never stopped ringing. There were calls from his friends and one or two of Sam’s pals, quiet, bookish boys who were somehow on the outside, just like Sam. Sam’s teacher, Miss Rivers, called and the school sent over a big fruit basket wrapped in pink cellophane. Margaret from down the block stopped in to meet Charlie’s parents and offered to sit for Sam, though she knew nothing about asthma or kids. Dan, over on Pearl Street, told Charlie that he and the wife would love to have Charlie’s whole family come for dinner, any time they wanted. “Thank you,” Charlie said, but how could he tell people that all the casseroles and plants upset him more, that right now it was all he could do to take care of his son, let alone be sociable?

Charlie grieved hard, and it began to worry him how detached Sam still seemed. Charlie cried in the shower, the water storming down on him. He wept in the middle of the supermarket when he saw the packets of soup April loved. Little things made him flare with anguished fury: a couple kissing on TV, or a newspaper stand being out of the mints April had loved. But Sam—Sam moved as if in a dream. Charlie’s parents didn’t seem to make note of it, but it unsettled Charlie so much that, one day, he went into the backyard where no one in the house could hear him and called Sam’s teacher
to ask what to do. “He doesn’t cry,” Charlie said. “I told him his mother was dead, but he acts as if he doesn’t believe me. Could he still be in shock?”

Miss Rivers was quiet for a moment. “Kids grieve in their own way and work on their own time,” she said. “You just let him be.”

Charlie hung up and came into the house, into the kitchen, where his father was cooking and his mother was playing with Sam. His father was a gourmet cook, who liked to putter in the kitchen and be liberal with exotic spices. At first, Charlie was a little worried about the meals his father had insisted on cooking, but now, he could bless him for the kid-friendly menus he concocted: hash browns and hot dogs, hamburgers and plain old spaghetti, mashed sweet potatoes and the creamy mac and cheese he was now popping into the oven.

He was grateful for his mother, too, for the way she took care of everything. “Museum, beach, movie, that’s where we’re going to go,” she said, ticking them off on her hands, smiling conspiratorially at Sam. Charlie liked all the noise and fuss over Sam, the exhortations for him to eat, to wash his face, to stop biting his nails like that, did he want to bite them right down to the knuckles?

“How about we put those hands to use while we wait for lunch?” Charlie’s mother asked, and drew out a box of modeling clay in bright colors. Sam looked suddenly greedy. The two of them sat at the kitchen table, and Charlie watched his mother trying to make a dog with her long manicured nails. When a nail broke, she didn’t say anything but kept on working the clay. Charlie wanted to go over and hug her, but he couldn’t make his legs move.

A few days later, his parents returned to Manhattan, urging Charlie and Sam to come, too. “I wish we could stay longer,” his father said. It was a relief that they’d stopped talking about a funeral or a memorial service. His mother hugged Charlie tightly. “Don’t do anything stupid,” she said. “Don’t you dare try to be brave.”

Charlie wasn’t quite sure what she meant, but he kissed her
and then he let Sam fill her arms. “It breaks my heart to leave this boy!” she said. She hugged Sam. “What can I buy for you? What do you want?”

“He doesn’t need anything,” Charlie said.

“Don’t be silly,” she said. She leaned closer to Sam. “Sugar, your mom’s an angel now,” she said. She lifted one hand like a barrier against Charlie. “She’s in Heaven watching over you. She sees you and you can talk to her.”

“Mom …,” Charlie said.

Sam broke free of his grandmother’s grip and gave her a glassy smile.

Charlie missed his parents as soon as they had left. The house felt strange and quiet in their absence. He would have to go back to work. Sam would go back to school. He’d have to somehow muddle through all of this. He picked up the newspaper, riffling through the first few pages and then, there, like a physical blow was April’s photograph. Why was this still in the news? Why did he have to be reminded this way? She was standing in the sun, wearing a flowery dress. “Runaway Mom,” read the headline. “Three Hours from Home.” Had she really been running away?

He stared down at the newspaper again. There beside his wife’s picture was a photograph of a woman he remembered seeing about town. All that curly black hair. “Did photographer’s road rage cause accident?”

S
AM WAS HAPPY
his grandparents had visited, but he was glad they were gone, too. He didn’t believe his grandma when she said his mother was an angel. He knew that wasn’t true, but she still kept saying it, over and over again. He didn’t love it that they kept asking him about that day, either, and when they did, he made his mind a blank sheet of paper. He felt his voice growing smaller. “What happened?” they asked. “Do you remember?”

He told them it had been foggy, too hard to see. He didn’t tell them that it was his fault. Sooner or later, everyone would know that and then he would be in trouble.

“He doesn’t remember,” Sam’s dad said. But the truth was Sam did remember. All of it, so clear and sharp he could feel it happening all over again.

T
HAT DAY, THE DAY
of the accident, he had come into the kitchen dressed in his favorite blue-and-red striped jersey. Usually, his mother was up, singing along to the radio and making them breakfast. “Sleepyheads arise!” she’d call. But today, his mother was sitting in the dark at the kitchen table, in her flowery blue nightgown, and she wasn’t saying anything at all.