The Birthday Room (3 page)

“Do you think he's writing?” his mother asked, tilting her head upward.

“Maybe.”

“I hope so. I think he's a fine writer. I'd love for him to have some luck with it. Some success.”

“Yeah.” Ben was trying to think of a way to change the subject. Talking about his father's writing could easily lead to talking about his father's new studio, which, in turn, could easily lead to talking about Ben's new room—a subject he wanted to avoid.

It was four days after Ben's birthday, and he had avoided it fairly well so far. His mother had been avoiding something, too; she had been avoiding the subject of Uncle Ian.

“Dad's music must be on pretty loud,” Ben said. “I mean, if we can hear it with the windows shut and the air conditioner cranking.”

“Well, at least he's actually
in
his studio. That's more than I can say. If I'm in mine for more than five minutes, I can't bear it and I have to leave.” His mother clinked her teeth against the rim of her wineglass. “I look around my beautiful new studio—all set up and ready to go, the warp strung on my loom—but I can't seem to get moving. I tell myself I'm tired from working at the store, but I suppose it's more than that.”

“Hmm.” Ben didn't know how else to respond.

“But that's not why I asked you to stay home tonight,” she said. “I know you'd rather be hanging out with Brian and Jamie, but we need to talk about Uncle Ian.”

Ben had been anticipating this. “No big deal,” he replied. “Brian and Jamie will live without me for one night.” He could picture them meeting at the university, down in back of the student union building by the lake. That had been their plan. They were going to see what fun they could have with the plastic turds and rubber puddle of vomit Brian and Jamie had given Ben for his birthday. Ben had loaned his gifts to his friends for the evening, hoping they wouldn't lose them.

Ben's mother refilled her glass. “Okay,” she began. “Here goes . . .” She took a sip of wine, then twirled the glass as she spoke. “Even when we were small—growing up—Uncle Ian and I were never very . . . oh . . . connected. I always thought brothers and sisters should share some special bond or something, but we didn't. We were forever at each other, arguing constantly about any old thing. I guess I'd have to say that I always loved him, but I really didn't like him very much.”

“Can you be more specific?” Ben asked. These were the exact words his mother had said to him many times during discussions that had started too broadly, or in vagueness, discussions that needed her guidance if the two of them were ever to get to the point.

“Sure. I remember him pushing me off the swing in the backyard on a regular basis—that's how I broke my arm. I remember him getting so mad at me when your grandpa showed me even a teensy bit of favoritism that he would pull my hair or pinch my legs. I remember him drawing a mustache on my official Bobby Sherman fan-club photo. With permanent marker.”

“Who?”

“Oh, no one you'd know or care about.” She laughed. “Just shows how old I am.”

“Ancient.”

“Thank you,” she said, the laugh lingering. She went on, serious again, “When we were in high school, he poured bleach on my favorite pair of blue jeans, ruining them. I cried over that one. I cried a lot, I guess.” With her free hand she waved away a moth, thick as a chunk of bread. It flitted against the railing, then melted into the darkness. “He used to call me Judy instead of Julie, for years, just to spite me. I
hated
that. God, did I hate that. He never did it in front of Grandma or Grandpa, and I was never certain if they believed me or not when I complained about it.”

None of this seemed out of the ordinary to Ben. Jamie and his brother Gil were always fighting—verbally and physically. Sometimes they pounded each other so hard they sported bruises on their arms for weeks. The bruises were purplish blue like grape juice stains or tattoos of delphiniums. “Sounds like normal stuff to me.”

His mother shrugged. “Those may not seem like terrible things, but it's funny to me that I can't remember nice things. Just unpleasant ones. It always seemed to me that he was a wall keeping me from day-to-day happiness.”

Silence.

Ben wagged the fingers on his left hand. There was enough light from the moon and the street lamp to cast a faint shadow. The shadow looked like an octopus with the wrong number of tentacles, moving frantically but getting nowhere. “So that's it?”

“What?” She was miles away.

“So you fought with your brother when you were kids. Big deal, Mom. I mean, that's no reason not to talk to him. And this,” Ben said, tossing his hand out toward her, “was an accident.”

“Ben? Stop.” She steadied his hand.

“Tell me everything. You have to.”

“Listen, there's so much, too much, to go into. And it doesn't concern you.”

“But don't you see, Mom? It does. It's
my
birthday gift. And I'm
twelve
now.”

“Yes, you are.” Ben's mother brushed her bangs out of her eyes, then did the same to him. “Well, you know the background material, and the rest is just more of the same.” She swallowed some wine and forged ahead in a voice that lifted and dropped depending on what she was saying. Some things Ben had heard before (the things about his grandparents), but most he had not.

She told Ben again about the car crash that had killed his grandmother when his mother was twenty-one years old and Ian was nineteen. And how she had volunteered to drop out of college to work at her father's bookstore and to live at home, cooking his favorite meals and playing the piano for him at night, helping him through his grief. She didn't see Ian for weeks on end even though his dormitory was only a mile or so away, and she wanted him to be with them if for nothing else but to take up space in the dreary house.

She told Ben that later when her father was diagnosed with cancer and grew sicker, Ian drifted farther and farther away, taking off when she needed him most, borrowing money from their father, quitting college for the last time, and traveling all over the country and Europe, only showing up at the very end when it was too late.

She said: “Someone had to be responsible.”

She said: “If it wasn't for your father, I don't know what I would have done.”

She said: “And you, having you got me through.”

Ben knew that his grandfather had died two days after he was born, as though his grandfather had been hanging on to welcome his only grandchild.

By this time, his mother had set the wineglass down and had folded her arms. “Your birth and his death were all tangled together for me,” she said, blinking her eyes several times. “And that's when Ian decided to stay in Madison. Grandpa had given the store to Dad and me, and—”

“Maybe Uncle Ian wanted the store, too?”

“No. No, he didn't. He just wanted money. He had been learning how to make furniture on his travels. And he used his inheritance to put a down payment on a tiny house and to buy woodworking equipment.” She paused. “I think we tried to be a family for a while. I baked bread for him, and he offered to babysit from time to time. But it was always strained. We never talked about anything that mattered.”

“How many times do you think I saw him? How many times did he baby-sit me?”

“Oh, I really couldn't say. Seven or eight times, I guess.”

“I don't remember him.”

“You were too little.”

“And then?”

“And then the accident happened. After that it was just too difficult for the two of us to be together. We saw less and less of each other. And then he moved. First to California, where we stayed in touch for a while, and then I heard from an old family friend that he was in Oregon, but I never knew for certain.”

“Now we do.”

She nodded, then gazed off into the distance without focus. “But it doesn't change things.”

Ben glanced at his mother. In the shadows and with her head angled away, the curve of her cheek was puffy like a berry. He couldn't see her expression. But he could guess what it was. Ben knew that his mother was done dredging up memories, and it was clear that what she had told him was to her mind a solid explanation for choosing not to go to Oregon.

“There,” she sighed, turning back, her eyes sharp. “Enough said.” She shot her chin forward, as if to strengthen her point. “Well, you've had an unusual birthday. At least you have one magnificent present, if I do say so myself.”

“So what will you tell him when he calls?”

“
If
he calls—and I have a feeling it's a very big if—I'll just say thank you, and we can't do it right now.”

“Oh.” Ben turned her words over in his mind. He looked up at the moon. It was merely a ball caught in the tree branches, a spangle. Distance changed things, Ben thought. Distorted them. Of course, the moon was huge, but he would never really know that from this particular spot on the earth. And if his father hadn't taught him years ago that the moon shone by reflecting the sun's light, he might still assume that, from where he sat, the moon was conspicuous and electric of its own volition. How far is it from Wisconsin to Oregon? he wondered. Ben bit the inside of his cheek. He squirmed; every inch of him felt fidgety. He had something he needed to clear up. “Mom?” he said cautiously.

“Hmm?”

“Mom, if I had to choose, I'd take the trip over the room.” Somehow, saying it like that seemed less harsh than saying “I don't want the room.” But it was still the truth, and his parents had always taught him that it was never a mistake to tell the truth. It was always the reasonable thing to do.

“Really?” Her voice had risen and her head jerked a little.

Ben nodded. He tugged on his collar, scratched his legs.

“You're not kidding, are you?”

“No,” Ben whispered.

“Huh. Well . . .” Her eyes darted away from him toward a house across the street, its windows lit up, amber. He could see her jaw tighten.

“I'm sorry, Mom,” Ben told her in the thinnest of voices. He was on the verge of tears: a curse of being his age.

“Don't be sorry. It's not something to be sorry about. I'm just glad you told me.”

The air was motionless, as though his house, his street, his neighborhood had been tucked inside a box and tightly sealed.

Ben's mother smoothed her hands absently over her arms. Then, with a gentle shove, she directed him toward the front door. “Go, go,” she told him. “I'll be in in a few minutes.”

The cool blast of indoor air met Ben like a wall. He stood on the threshold, separating the cold and the light within the house from the heat and the darkness without. Soon he would drift off to his room and to sleep, a bit relieved for having been honest, and a bit something else, but what he didn't know. Sad for his mother? But first he pressed his forehead to the screen, watching her. Bleached by the moonlight, she wandered onto the lawn and froze for a moment like a statue in a formal garden. Then, taking slow, swaying steps, she disappeared behind the black shape of the hedge.

It was decided three days later: Ben and his mother would make the trip to Oregon, and Ben's father would stay home to take care of the bookstore. The knowledge that they were actually going ticked inside Ben like a clock.

“I can't promise you anything more than a disaster,” his mother had said with a half smile, as a footnote to her announcement.

“I love a good disaster,” Ben replied, a comment that downplayed his disbelief. He gave his mother a tremendous hug. “Thank you.”

His mother drew a long breath and exhaled upward, her lower lip protruding, her bangs fanning out. “Just bear with me,” she told him. “I mean it.” Then she laughed—a soft, kind laugh.

Two weeks after that, at dusk, Ben and his mother were thirty-five thousand feet above the ground, over a smattering of clouds, somewhere between Wisconsin and Oregon. They were flying, heading west toward the sinking sun, which burst at the horizon like a magnificent poppy.

Ben was so entranced by the color spreading across the sky that he forgot he was having a conversation with his mother. He only heard the end of what she was saying.

“. . . and it's a feeling I can summon up immediately,” she finished, and then she, too, saw the sky over his shoulder and out the window, and couldn't help but smile.

Part Two

THERE

 

4

S
AME WALK
, same hands, same worried forehead. Same droop of the shoulders, same tilt of the head.

Ben recognized his uncle instantly, because looking at the man approaching them in the airport terminal was like looking at his mother through the dense, swirly glass of the French doors between the living room and dining room.

Same long nose, same pale gray eyes, same thin coppery hair.

The three of them took in one another without blinking, saying nothing. After a long moment, Ben said shyly, “Uncle Ian,” and stepped forward. His mother shadowed him, joining him in a tentative hug with Ian. The uncle. The brother.

Three voices all at once: “Hi.” “Hi.” “Hi.”

And then Ian said firmly, “I am so happy to see you. Both,” he added in a whisper. His eyes seemed to be following an invisible bird from Ben's mother's shoes to Ben's shoulder to an exit sign above their heads and away. He rubbed his chin, then ran his thumb along his eyebrow.

Ben's mother nodded with pursed lips.

“Me, too,” said Ben. Suddenly he became aware of his hand and jammed it into his pocket. But that seemed awkward. He pulled it out, letting it drop at his side like a weight.

“It's too bad that Ed couldn't come with you,” said Ian.

“Yes,” said Ben's mother. “He wanted to. The store, you know. Someone had to be there.”