The Birthday Room (13 page)

Ben's ears reddened.

And then it was time to walk Lynnie home.

“Take a flashlight,” said Ben's mother. “And if you're not back in a half hour, I'll start to panic.” She winked at him and said good-bye to Lynnie.

Barely a word was spoken until they reached Lynnie's house. The porch light was on, lending a yellowy cast to everything within its reach. Ben studied Lynnie's face. Would he remember what she looked like?

“Bye,” he said, looking into her eyes.

“When do you think you'll come back?” she asked.

“Next summer,” he replied. “Or maybe Christmas. Summer, for sure.”

“Promise?”

“Promise,” he said. He knew she believed him.

“You'll have to visit your only cousin,” she said, smiling. “You'll have to.”

“Yeah.”

She stepped backward toward the door, waited a few seconds, and stepped forward again. “Bye,” she whispered.

“Bye,” he said, edging closer.

There was a moment of awkward bumbling—a handshake from him and a hug from her mixed together. And one last good-bye.

He turned to leave and decided not to look back. He decided to take a new route to Ian's. The sky was enormous, the stars abundant—a basketball net for the gods. He clicked the flashlight off. He wavered between feeling dwarfed by it all and feeling elevated in some way, part of something grand. When he felt elevated, he ran. As fast as he could. Despite the fact that the darkness obscured the bumpy, unfamiliar ground.

 

14

N
INA STAYED IN BED
. She had said her good-byes the night before at Ben's mother's insistence. And although Ben liked to rise early, four o'clock was even too early for him. He moved mechanically through the house—showering, dressing, pouring a glass of orange juice—like a bleary-eyed zombie.

Under an endless, dark sky, Ben helped Ian load the luggage into the car.

“Since we've got a minute alone,” said Ian, “I just wanted to thank you again.”

“This was a great trip,” said Ben.

“If our baby grows up to be half as nice as you,” said Ian, “we'll be lucky.”

Ben extended his hand for his uncle to shake, his left hand.

Ian squeezed it hard, but not too hard.

“I'm ready,” Ben's mother called from the stone path, interrupting them.

“We're off,” said Ian brightly.

Ben crept into the back seat and fell asleep against the window before the car had reached the highway. When he woke up, they were coming to a stop in front of the airport terminal.

The car was in a no-parking zone, so they emptied the trunk quickly while the engine idled.

“I know it was hard for you to ask me to come,” Ben's mother said to Ian. Her voice was full of caution and attention. “But I'm glad you did. I'm glad we'll have something to do with each other's lives again. I'm glad you wanted to see me.”

“Well—” Ian began. He and Ben exchanged a knowing look. “I'm glad, too.” He handed his sister her suitcase, and the visit was over.

Morning was breaking—a smear of rose at the horizon. Less than an hour later, Ben and his mother were boarding their plane, and morning was in full bloom.

“Are you okay?” asked his mother. She was wrapped in the thin blue blanket one of the flight attendants had found for her.

“Yeah. Why?”

“I don't know. You look—something.”

“Just thinking,” replied Ben.

“About?”

“Nothing really.”

She angled her head and arched her eyebrows in such a way that said: I'm your mother, you can tell me anything.

Ben shrugged.

“I'm sorry you had to see Ian and me fighting the other night,” she told him. “You didn't need to see us act like that.” She pulled the blanket tighter around her shoulders, clasping it with her fist at the base of her neck. “I never said I was a perfect mother.”

“I didn't either,” he said, trying to be funny. But he saw a hurt look cross her face and added quickly, “I'm kidding, Mom. That's called a joke. You're supposed to laugh.” He smoothed his kneecaps with both hands.

“I know, I know,” she murmured, shaking her head. “Don't pay any attention to me. I'm exhausted.” She folded into herself, sinking deeper into the cocoon of the blanket. Soon she was asleep, slumped against Ben's shoulder, her body limp, her mouth open slightly.

Sometimes mothers were difficult to understand. Impossible, even. If she had appeared so wounded because of a stupid joke, he couldn't imagine what would happen if he tried to talk about her being late the day of the accident, or if he told her that it wasn't
her
whom Ian had wanted to see, but
him
. These were secrets, and he would keep them secrets.

The airplane noises pressed into his head. He yawned. He closed his eyes. He thought about everything that had happened in the last few days. How could so many things be packed into so little time? He thought about all the new people in his life. He knew that he would always hold them in some corner of his mind. And he suspected that moments from this trip would rise from his memory at certain times for the rest of his life.

The drift of his thoughts had taken him back to the tree and then in and out of the past several days and back and back to his father and his friends and Gramma Lu and his own house and finally to sleep.

He woke with an idea. “Mom?”

“Hmm?” She was reading a magazine, the blanket draped over her lap now.

“If I decided not to use my new room as a studio, could I still have it?” he asked warily. “I mean, can I do whatever I want with it?”

She closed her magazine, and fingered the dog-eared cover. “Such as?”

“Well—” He was thinking of changing his tactic. He was thinking that this might not be the best time to spring this on his mother. “Well, I can't tell you yet. I'm still kind of forming my idea.”

“Why don't we wait until you've formed your idea,” she said coolly. “Then I'll tell you. Fair?”

“Fair,” he answered. He would wait. Wait until they were home and his father was present. Wait until she was in an extremely cheerful mood. Wait until the perfect moment.

 

15

T
HE ROOM WAS EMPTY
, but it wouldn't be much longer. A carpenter would be coming in a few days to start building bookshelves. A sofa—the kind with a bed hidden inside—was on order and would be arriving in a couple of weeks. And soon the nightstand Ben was refinishing would be done. He had found it in the alley behind the bookstore, chipped and dirty, and taken it home to the garage to fix. He had sanded it and given it a thick coat of bright blue paint. What he hadn't done yet, and planned on doing, was to paint an apple on the top and letter the words
SEEK NO FURTHER
.

The room was to be a guest room. A gift for the new baby. So that Ian and Nina and the baby could visit whenever they wanted.

Ben had told his parents about his idea one night during dinner shortly after the Oregon trip. Ben's father had cooked a fancy meal for no real reason, and everyone had seemed in especially good spirits.

“Let me think about it,” his mother had replied calmly. And then no more than five seconds later, she'd said, “Yes,” as Ben's father nodded. “I always wanted a guest room.”

Ben's mother had called Oregon, and called again, but there was no change—the baby had not turned. School had begun. One week passed. And another. And the baby's due date crept closer. Ben did his homework at night at the cluttered kitchen table. Most nights now, he could hear both his parents, above him, busy in their studios. His father often paced as he worked, searching for the perfect word, the sound of his footsteps like an animal trapped in the ceiling. And his mother's loom had sprung back to life after lying dormant for so long.

Sometimes, when he had finished his homework, he tried to write to Lynnie, but the words came out all wrong. Sometimes he worked on a letter to the baby, explaining the gift, but how can you write to someone not yet born or named?

So then he would sketch in his book from Ian (in which he safely kept his uncle's picture of the house made of branches). He had been practicing drawing hands. His new art teacher, Mr. McCarthy, said that drawing one's own hands was the best practice for an artist. He said that hands were the most difficult things to draw, and if you could master that, you could draw anything.

Ben mostly drew his left hand, because he was right-handed. Putting down lines lightly at first, setting boundaries, building the form. It
was
hard to do. It
was
hard to get a hand to look like a hand and not some weird sea creature or a row of sausages. When his drawing was going well, he often worked until his mother had to turn off the kitchen light and steer him toward his room. On those nights, he knew, the way he knew his name, that he truly was an artist.

One evening, after dinner, the telephone rang.

Ben answered it in the kitchen. The voice on the other end was familiar, but shaky. “You're a cousin!” the voice announced, delirious.

And in the instant before Ben even thought to ask, “Is it a boy or a girl?” or to call his parents, or to say, “Congratulations!” he lifted his eyes to the ceiling, to the attic, and he smiled.

Mitch Sinclair was slowly taking over the house, staking his claim. He had just finished carving his initials into the underside of the wooden porch railing, which was his boldest move so far. The other things he had done had required much less courage. He had swept the front stoop with his grandmother's broom. He had cleaned the decaying leaves and the puddle of murky water out of the birdbath in the side yard and filled it with fresh water. He had spat on the huge rotting tree stump at the corner of the lot each day for the past week, marking the territory as his. And he had taken to crawling under the screened back porch during the hot afternoons; he'd lean against the brick foundation in the cool shade, imagining a different life, if, as his mother had said, their old life was over. Forever.

Although he'd seen the house many times while visiting his grandparents, Mitch had never paid much attention to it before. The house was vacant. It was old and plain—white clapboard with dark green trim—and had been neglected for quite a while, so that all its lines, angles, and corners were softened like the edges on a well-used bar of soap. The windows were curtained, keeping the interior hidden. However, the curtains covering the small oval window on the back door were parted slightly, offering a glimpse of a sparsely furnished, shadowy corner of a room. That's all. With some hesitancy, Mitch had tried to open the door, turning the loose knob gently at first, then rattling it harder and harder. The door wouldn't budge. The front door was locked as well. Mitch's grandparents' house stood a short distance from the vacant one. The two yards were separated by a row of scraggly lilac bushes and clumps of seashells that reminded Mitch of crushed bones.

Both yards sloped down to Bird Lake. Mitch went swimming nearly every day; he lived in his bathing suit. There were more people around because it was summer, and yet it was quiet. A sleepy, sleepy place, Mitch's grandfather called it. When Mitch made a casual observation at dinner one night—breaking the dreadful silence—about the lack of potential friends, his grandmother said crisply that she liked having as few children around as possible. She quickly added that she didn't mean him, of course. But Mitch hadn't been so sure.

Mitch ran his finger over his initials. M.S. His father's initials were W.S. Wade Sinclair. Turn an M upside down and you get a W, thought Mitch. We're the same. It was an idle thought, but it caused a burning knot to form in his stomach. “We're not the same at all,” Mitch whispered. And we never will be. At the moment, Mitch hated his father, hated him and yet longed to see him so badly tears pricked his eyes. He thought he could destroy this empty little house right now with his bare hands, he was that upset. But he wanted this house. He wanted it for himself and for his mother. To live in.

Mitch rubbed his finger over his initials again. “Ouch,” he said. A splinter. A big one. But not big enough to pick out without a tweezers or a needle. He retreated to his spot under the porch and settled in. He hadn't asked his grandparents yet what they knew about the house, because he didn't want an answer that would disappoint him. Maybe he'd ask today. He dozed off in the still, hazy afternoon, blaming his father for everything wrong in the world, including his aching finger.

Sometimes he wished his father had simply vanished. That would have been easier to deal with. Then he could make up any story he wanted to explain his father's absence. Or he could honestly say that he didn't know where his father was or why he had disappeared. And if he had vanished, there would be the possibility that, at any moment, he'd return. There he'd be, suddenly—hunched at the sink, humming, scrubbing a frying pan, a dish towel slung over his shoulder. A familiar pose. Everything back in its proper place, the way it was meant to be.