The Birthday Room (14 page)

He even wondered if death would be better than the truth. An honorable death. If his father were killed trying to stop a robbery at a gas station . . . something like that. A car accident would be okay, too, if it were someone else's fault or caused by a surprise storm.

But the truth was worse. The truth was that two and a half weeks ago, his father hadn't come home from work. He had called that night to say that he was going to live with someone else, a woman from his office.

Mitch hated thinking of that night—his mother pressing apologies upon him, and then her silence and the way she kept hugging him, her shoulder bending his nose back until he had to squirm away. He'd felt as if he were nobody's child.

The following morning, his father made a couple of phone calls to Mitch that left him more confused than ever, and left him with more questions than answers.

As that day passed, and the next, Mitch's sadness grew; it became a rock inside him, pulling him down. He carried the sadness everywhere, morning, noon, and night. It hurt to breathe. And then, after three days of looking at each other with mutual uncertainty, Mitch and his mother packed up their most necessary possessions and drove to Mitch's grandparents' house on Bird Lake. “I can't live here anymore,” Mitch's mother had said as she stuffed clothes into duffle bags. “We don't belong here, now.”

She told him they'd come back sometime during the summer to straighten things out and to pick up whatever they might have forgotten. He told her about a new movie he'd heard of, not because he really cared about this, but because it was a way to keep her from saying things that made him more uneasy than he already was. At one point during their conversation, her voice cracked and she had to turn away for a moment before she began talking again. She circled back to the same topic. “We couldn't afford to stay here if we wanted to, anyway,” she said. “Not on a teachers' aide's salary.”

It was June. School had just ended for the year, which made the situation easier for both of them.

“We can look at the bright side,” said his mother, as they headed southeast out of Madison. But she never said what the bright side was.

Depending on traffic, it was about a two-hour drive to Bird Lake. They took the back roads, curving through small towns and past cornfields and new subdivisions. For most of the trip, the music on the radio was the only sound in the car. The harsh sunlight had volume and weight, and added to the general weariness Mitch felt.

“Will Dad know where to reach us?” Mitch asked, looking out at a particularly bucolic farm. He imagined the farm family: one trustworthy farm father, one reliable farm mother, one strong farm son. Everyone perfect and happy. “Did you tell him we'll be at Papa Carl and Cherry's?”

“Of course I told him,” said his mother. “I left a message at work.”

“What if he doesn't get the message?”

No answer.

“Will he call us?”

After a long pause, she said, “Yes. I don't know. Yes.”

“This is just temporary, right? I mean, we'll move back to Madison before school starts in the fall.”

This time her response was a shrug and a sigh. And then she made a high, tiny noise like the cry of a small bird. Her hands trembled slightly on the steering wheel.

His mother was usually calm, constant, consistent. She had become a different person. Someone he didn't know. And his father—now he couldn't believe anything he had ever believed about his father.

He really was nobody's child.

Mitch's maternal grandparents—Papa Carl and Cherry—took them in like mother bears welcoming home their long-lost cubs. At least, that's the way it felt to Mitch. There were freshly baked chocolate-chip cookies from Cherry and gifts of dollar bills concealed in hearty handshakes from Papa Carl and hugs from both of them. There were soothing refrains, some directed at Mitch and some overheard: “Of course you can stay,” “What are families for?” “It's not your fault, Mr. Mitch. How could it be your fault?”

But before a full week had passed, a shift occurred. Arguments between Mitch's mother and grandmother leaked out from behind closed doors. And doors were slammed. Cherry sighed a bit too loudly and too often, her pleated face working like a mechanical toy, her chest heaving. And Papa Carl went off alone—fishing or running errands in his truck. He'd disappear for hours. Mitch longed to go with him but felt overcome by his growing shyness and was reluctant to ask. One afternoon, as he wandered aimlessly around the yard, Mitch came upon Papa Carl, surprising them both. In the seconds before Papa Carl looked up and forced a smile, Mitch caught sight of him leaning against the back side of the tool shed, head drooped forward, eyes closed, fingers pinching the bridge of his nose, as if by doing so he'd stop some unbearable pain.

After an awkward moment, Mitch said, “I have to go to the bathroom,” and took off for the house, ashamed.

Cherry said to no one in particular, “Someone's been sitting on the sofa with a wet bathing suit. Again.”

Papa Carl said to no one in particular, “I'm going out. I don't know when I'll be home.”

Cherry: “Last I checked, groceries weren't free.”

Papa Carl: “I could kill Wade Sinclair.”

Cherry: “This house seems smaller by the minute.”

Mitch started to daydream about the house next door. The
empty
house next door. It seemed to him to provide a good solution to a mounting problem. He and his mother could move in. Papa Carl and Cherry would have their house back, but they'd still be close. Mitch needed them close, right now. Despite the tension that enveloped all of them like a caul, he loved his grandparents and knew they loved him.

His thoughts about the house may have begun as a whim, but they'd become serious. Firm, possible; a decision. He'd start to make the house his own, little by little. And so he swept the stoop and cleaned the birdbath and sat under the back porch and carved his initials into the front-porch railing, thinking that each thing he did would somehow bring him closer to ownership. If he could believe the impossible truth that his father had left him and his mother, then he could believe that this house was there for the taking. Didn't it make sense that after something horrible happens, something better should follow?

The morning after he carved his initials into the porch railing, Mitch checked the local newspaper to see if there were any nearby houses for sale or rent. He wanted to get an idea of how expensive the house next door might be. He found nothing, so he tracked down his grandmother. She was in the kitchen, chopping vegetables at the table. Her pale, veined hands worked expertly.

“Cherry, what does a house around here cost?” Mitch asked. “To rent or to buy,” he added.

Cherry looked up, her paring knife poised in midair. “I don't know, exactly,” came the slow reply. “I really don't.” Her voice had an edge of testiness to it. She resumed chopping.
Chop, chop, chop
.

Mitch pressed on, “Do you know what's going on with the house next door? The white one. I think it's empty.”

“House next door?” Cherry came down hard with the knife, and a piece of celery shot across the room like a bullet. “I don't even know what's going on in
my
house. How would I know about the house next door?” She directed a withering look her grandson's way.

Mitch's throat knotted. “Sorry,” he whispered.

Silence.

Cherry bomb, thought Mitch, eyes skimming the floor for the celery piece.

Again:
chop, chop, chop
. Then: stop.

Little disturbances rippled across Cherry's face. “No,
I'm
sorry.” She sighed, and her sharp, pinched expression turned soft. “That house has been vacant ever since we retired here,” she told him. “I think the owners are from Madison. I've seen a man over there once or twice, checking on things. A yard service cuts the grass, if you want to call it that. More like dirt and weeds. That's about all I know.” She paused, then laughed wearily. “My patience is wearing thin, but I shouldn't lose my temper with you. You're only twelve. I tend to forget that.” She reached out and touched his hand, a feathery touch. If his eyes had been closed, he might not have felt it.

The sky was ice blue. The air was motionless. The sun hammered down. Mitch took a quick swim, dried off, then spent a good part of the day under the porch of the vacant house, hiding from the world. To get under the porch, he'd slide a broken, latticed panel aside just far enough, so that he could squeeze through. Then he'd pull the panel back into place, crawl over to the foundation, and sit.

His interaction with Cherry bewildered him. How come, he wondered, it's so hard to love all the people I'm supposed to love? He squinted out through the diamond-shaped pattern of the latticework. His mind turned fast, from Cherry to his father. He wondered when he'd see his father again. He wondered: Is he thinking of me right now?

Without realizing it, Mitch had brought his finger—the one with the splinter—up to his mouth and was playing it against his teeth. The finger hurt when he thought about it, and when he really concentrated on it, it hurt a lot. The tip was red. He'd decided to keep the splinter. He reasoned that the splinter was part of the house, and so, now, part of the house was embedded in him. And didn't that make it more likely that the house would eventually belong to him and his mother? The splinter would be his good-luck charm. He ran his finger under his T-shirt, lightly touched his heart, and wished.

Suddenly, a squirrel appeared at the panel. It moved its head from side to side in small, jerky increments, then darted off. “Lucky, stupid little thing,” Mitch whispered.

“Mitch!”

He heard his mother calling him. He got down on his hands and knees and crawled forward so that his face was against the latticework. He watched her.

“Mitch!” She broke through the row of lilacs that divided the two yards. She looked uncertainly up toward the house, down toward the lake. Appearing defeated, she threw out her arms, then let them drop to her sides. She stood completely still for a moment, turned, and headed back in the direction of Papa Carl and Cherry's.

He didn't want her to know where he was, so he waited until she was out of sight before he followed her, calling, “Mom! Here I am!”

After lunch, and again after dinner, he headed for his spot under the porch. Both times he brought things with him. After lunch, he brought hand clippers to trim some of the weeds at the edge of the porch, a can of root beer, and an old, stained cushion, from his grandparents' garage, on which to sit. After dinner, he brought duct tape to repair, as best he could, the broken latticework, and another can of root beer. He also brought a photograph he'd taken from one of his grandparents' albums.

In the photograph, Mitch and his parents were standing close together, arms entwined, with Bird Lake in the background. Everyone was smiling. Mitch remembered the day from the previous summer as a twinkling jewel of a day. They'd fished, swum, eaten outside on a blanket. Mitch and his father had played catch with a football, too, every chance they could (Mitch was trying to perfect his spiral), even after the sky had been drained of light and the ball had become ghostly, almost invisible.

Using the duct tape, Mitch fastened the photograph to one of the boards above him, the underside of the porch. He could see the photograph if he wanted to, by leaning back and looking up.

As the sun lowered, a weak puddle of light slanted closer, creeping across the dirt into his realm. Soon everything would be dim and blue and quiet, like a bigger version of the dusky place—his room—under the porch. He didn't mind being here, alone. This particular solitude was becoming familiar to him, and not unpleasant. After a while he grew oddly calm, and just as he had gotten perfectly settled, comfortable on the old cushion, something happened.

It was the slamming of the car doors that he heard first. One-two-three-four. Then a large dog tore past him, down to the lake, and ran back, responding to its name: “Jasper! Jasper, come!”

The air was electric.

“We're really here,” he heard a boy say.

“That didn't take very long,” said a girl.

“Let's unload the car before we do anything else,” said a man.

“We'll go down to the lake together,” said a woman.

“Listen to your mother.” It was the man again. “I mean it.”

Minutes later, footsteps could be heard directly above him. These people, whoever they were, were on the screened porch, separated from him by mere inches. A couple of the boards creaked and sagged with their weight. He felt a clutch of fear. His heart beat faster, faster. He sat, barely moving, pinned to the cushion by what was happening.

“Hurry, hurry,” said the boy.

“It'll be okay, Mom,” said the girl.

The dog barked and paced across the porch, his nails clicking on the floor like drumbeats.

“I'm ready,” said the boy. “Let's go to the lake.”

“Just a minute,” said the man.

“I can't believe this is ours,” said the girl.

Mitch held his breath. His skin was slick with sweat. He felt the girl's voice, her words, throughout his entire body. He had been scared, and now he was indignant, too.

I can't believe this is ours
.

No, it's not, he thought. It's mine.