The 10 P.M. Question (29 page)

“Oh, Frankie,” she sighed. “Isn’t it hard?”

Frankie leafed slowly through the sketchbook, watching the purple drawings give way to profusions of color. The family turned all shades, and after a while, their formation changed, too. Sometimes Frankie was with them; sometimes he was with the Aunties. Sometimes it was just Frankie and Louie and Gordana. Sometimes it was Frankie with Walt and Stanley, which was funny since those two animals had never been together in real life.

His Walt and Stanley drawings were comically primitive. Looking at the careful C curls on Walt’s coat, Stanley’s precise but oversized whiskers, Frankie remembered suddenly the story he’d invented:
Days with Walt and Stanley
. He could remember telling himself the story as he drew the pictures. And here were the pictures. Walt and Stanley at the river. Walt and Stanley in a boat. Walt and Stanley on a swing. Walt and Stanley
in a tree house.
Dead Walt. Sad Stanley.
RIP Walt
on the wooden cross in the Aunties’ garden. Good-bye, Stanley — there were no more drawings of the cat after that. Frankie remembered the line he used to say at the end of all the stories:
Don’t worry, Stanley. Walt is beside you.
He’d adapted it from
Hansel and Gretel
. But poor old Walt had died anyway. He sighed and turned to the second sketchbook.

It was all ducks in the first few pages. They had been his first bird drawings, because of the ducks on the river at the bottom of the Aunties’ garden. Frankie assessed them with a critical eye — the proportions were wildly askew, and occasionally the birds seemed to have more than two feet, but what could you expect from a four-year-old? After a few pages the ducks were joined by other birds. Sparrows? Thrushes? He recognized the pugnacious stance of a magpie, and that made him remember Teen’s bird feeder, wrecked in a storm years ago. There were drawings of the bird feeder. Swans from down the road. A budgie in a cage. Very purple pukekos.

The drawings changed to pencil. Frankie remembered those pencils perfectly. He’d gotten them for his fifth birthday from the Aunties, a huge packet of Crayola. Fifty pencils! And the words written in a rainbow across the packet:
Super spectrum of color
. He could remember Gordana reading it to him, following her clear consonants and the rainbow letters with his finger.

Frankie pulled back the eiderdown and got beneath it. He lay back on the pillows and propped the sketchbook against his upright knees. A great crowd of memories had been waiting for him, he thought, as if behind a half-open door. Turning the pages of the sketchbook was like opening the door again and again, and after enough pages, the door seemed flung wide. The memories were pushing over each other in their hurry, so that even as he turned a page, he knew what he’d see next.

It was a picture of Ma, a long-haired Ma in a green brocade ball dress, hung about with stars of every size and Crayola hue. She was suspended, floating, in some outer lit-up heaven. She was over the page again, then again and again, in the sky, on the ground, in night and in day, sometimes with wings, sometimes not, always in the green brocade gown.

He had drawn Ma over and over, a kind of
Don’t worry, Frankie. Francie is beside you
. It didn’t really look like Ma, of course, but Frankie knew it
was
Ma because now he could remember doing the drawing. He could remember showing Ma waving — yes, there it was — you could tell it was a wave because there were three little lines above her hand, signifying movement, like a comic strip. He could remember when he’d first done that, how pleased he’d been with the technique.

Frankie looked up at the bird kite. What did that wave mean? Hello, Frankie?
Good-bye,
Frankie?
Don’t worry, Frankie. Francie is beside you.

“The thing is, Frankie,” Alma had said, lighting another cheroot, “you must talk to Francie yourself. She must tell you how it was; it will be good for both of you. We’ve been saying that to her for years, but she doesn’t like to upset you. She doesn’t like to upset herself, I suppose. And fair enough. It’s hard to bring it up, relive it.”

Alma fiddled with the match as she always did, digging it into the step, flicking off the burnt carbon. She put it back into the matchbox and looked at Frankie.

“But people keep silent for too long and then, next thing, silence is their bad habit. Things fester.”

“I want you to tell me,” said Frankie.

“Happy to,” said Alma, blowing smoke in an expert stream. “But only if you talk to Francie, too. And Uncle George. Poor old Uncle G. He never likes to ruffle the waters. He likes it all ticketyboo, now that it’s so much better —”

“But it’s not better!” Frankie cried. “Nothing’s really better!
Ma
isn’t better. Louie said —” He stopped, remembering with an ache the emptiness of Louie’s voice that day outside The Istanbul. “Louie said Ma was a
caged bird
.”

Alma gave a small grimace, and Frankie felt the familiar treachery. “I know Ma
is
better —”

“Look, Frankie,” said Alma, seeming to make up her mind on something. “It’s important to have a long view in these matters. Once upon a time, your mother was unable to get out of bed. Once, her world had shrunk to this”— she drew a wobbly rectangle in the air with her big hands —“the size of a
bed
.”

Frankie’s skin pinched and contracted. He knew it was true. There were parts of that
once
that he could call up in a moment, like the daytime flash of a nightmare.

“I know. . . .”

“Now,” Alma plowed on. “
Now,
she runs a business from home. She’s stable; she’s successful; she’s . . . I . . .” Alma paused. She was choosing her words with care, Frankie could tell. “I want to say she’s happy, but really, what a stupid word — it’s not
useful.
. . . She’s content. Content is a good ending for Francie.”

Frankie looked at his great-aunt. Her face was weathered and whiskery, like an old walrus. She seemed always to have looked exactly the same. He remembered other times he’d sat close by her, inching toward her fleshy comfort.

“You used to say that Ma was resting up,” said Frankie.

“So she was,” said Alma stoutly. “Resting from life. Temporarily. I told you she’d be back, too.

“And I’ll tell you what,” she continued. “I was
very pleased
that I could say that to you, you understand? Very pleased. I couldn’t say it to your mother when she was the same age.”

Frankie stared at her; the terrible truth of Ma’s childhood bereavement was written on Alma’s walrus face. He closed his eyes, taking it in. Ma had never gotten her own mother back. She hadn’t gotten her father.

He heard Alma’s big chest going up and down. He heard the fountain and the gulls and Teen whistling in the house.

“Is that what did it to Ma?” he said finally. “Her parents dying? Is that what made her —?” He never liked to think the word that hovered there, much less say it. There were so many of these, the words he didn’t like to think or say.

“Break down?” said Alma. She was like Gordana, Frankie thought. And Sydney. They were able to say the hard words, all of them. They didn’t cower and snivel like he did, hearing and seeing and speaking no evil.

“Could be,” Alma said. She looked around the garden and back at the fountain, narrowed her eyes at the falling water. “These things are so complex, Frankie. Some people are just more fragile. Look at me, and the girls. I’m an old boot, you know that, and so is Teen. Nellie’s the sensitive one. She feels things more. And then there’s what life throws up . . .”

“Am I wired like Ma?” said Frankie. He said it to the side, very softly, hating the thought, hating himself for hating it. “Gordana says I am.”

Alma lit a third cheroot, blew out thoughtfully.

“Maybe,” she said. “In some ways. But not every way. You must talk to Francie,” Alma said again, very firmly. “Francie’s thought about it all for a long time now.”

“But it happened,” said Frankie slowly. “It happened . . . more than once. It happened twice.” He dug this out, like a particularly difficult splinter.

“Yes, it did,” said Alma. “When you were four, and then just after your sixth birthday.”

Frankie pressed his feet into the steps again, willing himself forward.

“But why did I come here?” he said, and then because it sounded rather ungrateful, he said hurriedly, “I’m glad I did. I mean, you, the Aunties, I mean it was great and everything —”

Alma put her arm around his shoulder and squeezed him. “Oh, Frankie, you are such a
kind
boy.”

She grinned, remembering, too. “It
was
great — we loved it. We loved having Francie’s boy to look after.” She squeezed him to her again. “And you were such a dear little boy. You
are
a dear boy. . . .” She turned and eyed him speculatively. “Not so little anymore, though. You’ve grown. You’ll top Louie one of these days.”

“You really think so?” said Frankie, absurdly pleased, and then astonished he could be diverted by something so trivial.

They sat for a minute or two, listening to the random music of the fountain. Behind them, in the house, Frankie could hear the heavy tread of an Auntie, up and down the passage, bureau drawers opening and closing.

“It was strange for you here sometimes,” Alma said. “You missed everyone, even when you were happy. But we were the obvious place — you needed someone all day. And then the second time, it was because we were so familiar to you, like a second family. And Uncle G coped better with just Louie and Gordana.”

The sun was dropping, the air cooler. A blackbird called roughly from its perch on the front gate. Frankie leaned his head against Alma, the hard pillow of her flesh.

“Everyone copes differently, don’t they?” said Alma. She spoke slowly, as if she were thinking aloud. “Uncle G worked too much. Louie had his rebellion. Gordana got all flinty. And you —”

“I’m too scared to leave Ma!” The words bubbled out of Frankie, but he hid his face in Alma’s side. He couldn’t look at her. “I don’t want it to happen again, and if I stay there, keeping an eye on her, maybe it won’t.” He began to cry again, and it was hard to speak. “But. But, I’m just getting. More and more worried. And I
hate
it. I don’t want to be afraid all the time. I don’t want Sydney to go. And I don’t want to have to look after Ma; I don’t want to. I don’t want to do that anymore. . . .”

Frankie pulled the eiderdown up to his neck. It was nearly dark. He switched on the lamp attached to the headboard. He liked that old lamp. When he was six, he had thought it nifty that he had a clip-on lamp.

Nellie had brought him tea and fruitcake and told him to take it easy. He was into the fourth scrapbook. It was mostly birds now. He’d begun that book on his second stay with the Aunties. He had proper art pencils by then, another birthday present, and he’d drawn a lot of magpies. They had fascinated him, gathering in gangs on the fence around the back section, a little menacing, but tough and almost beautiful, their feathers shiny in the spring sun.

These drawings were pretty good, Frankie thought. He’d improved a lot between five and six. You really could tell the birds were magpies. And then sometime after that, he’d had an exotic bird phase — copying cassowary and fieldfare and weaverbirds from a bird encyclopedia Teen had given him, partly because he liked the words. He’d copied the nests too, and the eggs. He remembered all this as he turned the pages, and he remembered how he’d shown the book to Ma when he visited her.

That second time at the Aunties’ he didn’t see Ma for quite a while, weeks perhaps, and then the Aunties began taking him regularly to see her at home. She would always be sitting on the sofa and usually in her dressing gown, and he would sit in her lap and show her his most recent bird drawings. Soon he began doing the drawings especially for her, working up a new bird each time, looking forward to her delight, her gentle approval. A swallow. A nightingale because Ma said they sang beautifully. A kingfisher. A coot, because he liked the word. A dabchick, because Ma liked that word. He had found the dabchick in the encyclopedia and copied it carefully, its strange, staring, white-button eye and scruffy back feathers.

Frankie closed the sketchbook. There were two more books, but he would take them home with him, look at them later. He took a bite of Nellie’s fruitcake, gulped some tea, and thought about the dabchick. It was all there in his head, the dabchick’s shining eye and anxious thrusting neck, his feelings when he’d been drawing it. He’d thought the bird was a little like Ma; it was small and sweet, but ever so defenseless out there on the water. It seemed trembly, as if it knew there were threats nearby.

But when he’d shown the dabchick to Ma, she had smiled and said the bird reminded her exactly of him: it was small and dark, and looking about with its big eyes.

“My little dabchick,” Ma said. She’d held him very close, and he had burrowed into her so that he could smell what he was missing, the mix of lotion and bed linen and sleep in her neck.

Ma’s light was on, her door ajar. Frankie knocked softly and pushed it open. Ma was sitting up in bed, waiting for him, as Uncle George had said she would be. He had said she would be ready to talk. She had been reading, but she had laid the book aside. Frankie knew his face was like a buffeted tomato, red and puffy and going to liquid. He’d stared at himself in the bathroom mirror when he arrived home.

“Hi,” said Ma softly.

“Hi,” said Frankie.

“How’re you doing?” said Ma.

He nodded vaguely and sat down on the bed.

“Ten-ten p.m.,” said Ma, but Frankie didn’t smile.

He thought, with a kind of internal sigh, that it didn’t matter how much he talked, how much happened, he seemed somehow always back at the beginning. Back to not knowing where to start.

Instinctively he sought out the painting, the woman, her halo of hair, her amber eyes. Fright swept down his arms when he saw it wasn’t there.

“Where’s she gone?” Frankie cried, looking at Ma.