The Dwelling: A Novel (26 page)

Petey scooped up the clothes that he had dropped to the floor and stood for a moment looking around with them in his arms. He couldn’t remember where he was supposed to put them. At the other house the laundry hamper was in the bathroom, but this bathroom was too small. He thought maybe it was his mom’s room. He started off in that direction.

Just before the door, he heard a small click. Not markedly, but unconsciously. It was enough for him to turn in reaction.

The little wooden door to the cubbyhole was swinging open, very slowly. He watched it, standing there, his arms full of his clothes from the day, the T-shirt with the grass and snot stains rolled into the middle, his jeans and socks a shell surrounding it.

The door swung fully open, right to the wall and stopped as if held there. Petey waited for the next logical thing to happen.
Something’s coming out.
He did not think this pointedly, but assumed as much in the way a child of eight will follow things through to a literal conclusion. He waited, staring into the dark gape of the closet, so dark that the two boxes of toys (mostly kid stuff now) were buried in shadow. He couldn’t even see them.

For a long time, nothing came out.

He heard it before he saw it. Coming from inside the shadows was the familiar sound of plastic wheels on bare floor, and while he stood there, a hot-wheels car (Corvette Stingray, his dad bought it for him, it was his
dream machine)
rolled through the cubbyhole doorway, across his bedroom floor and slid under the dresser, disappearing. He heard it gently hit the wall.

He recoiled for a second, belatedly startled, then worked through it easily. Petey was good at logic. Good at math. He was developing that kind of brain.

The door had swung open because the house had a lean. The car, loosed from the box (could have happened at any time), shifted with the motion of the door opening and rolled out. These things were not indexed in the thought, but assumed in one smooth motion of logic. Then dismissed.

Petey walked over to the wall and, shifting his load to free a hand, he snuck his fingers between that and the door and swung it back shut. He latched it with the old-fashioned latch that looked like the one he remembered being on the jam cupboard (which never had any jam in it but just stupid jars and Tupperware) at his grandma Parkins’s old house. She was dead now. He snapped the latch shut, a good solid sound.

There was a brief moment of consideration and, against logical thought, Petey listened for sounds inside the closet. There were none. The door felt warm.

He took the clothes into his mom’s room and found the hamper.

“Mom?” he called down the stairs when he was finished. “I’m ready.”

*  *  *

Barbara sat on the stairs outside his room for a few minutes, just as she had when he was little, although back then there had been no stairs, and back then there would have been other sounds in the house: Dennis working on something in the basement, the intermittent sound of a power tool, the TV on, muffled curses coming from the little room off the bathroom after he’d gotten his computer and spent hours learning how it worked. It was quiet in this house.

Let tomorrow be better.
She’d tucked him in and they’d read a comic book together.
Scooby Doo.
They would have done better than that, but most of the books, his and hers (and some of Dennis’s, but just the ones she liked, god knows he’d never miss a
book),
were still in boxes in the living room. He read a panel, then she read a panel and they’d read the thing together in that way. While he read, she watched his face, brows sometimes furrowing, puzzling out a word. He was not a great reader. He was better with numbers. Sometimes, if it was funny—he liked it when Scooby spoke with his distinctive lisp, and Barbara tried her best to imitate it—his face would open up with a smile and he would look so carefree and joyful, however briefly, forgetting everything and Barbara would be amazed by his beauty. How did others not see it?

He’d been a beautiful baby, with soft pink skin that would take years to pale and freckle, and lovely red hair. His cheeks had always been full, and she could remember pressing her cheek against his just to feel the pillow-fat softness. She’d left his hair long, long after she probably should have cut it and only did after Dennis insisted that he was starting to look like a girl. The curls were gone with that haircut and he had begun then to look like a boy, and by the time he was three or four, she realized for the first time that he was going to grow up and not be a baby forever. That sort of thought had crept up on her every year. The one thing he had retained from babyhood was his long dark eyelashes, brown, not black, but thick and dark enough to pass as black. They were from Dennis. So was the weight.

She had pressed him after the comic book to tell her the names of the boys in the fight. He had explained that it would ruin his life if she called their parents and halfheartedly admitted that he had lost his temper.

They’d called him names. He wouldn’t say what names, but she suspected well enough.

They talked about sticks and stones, brave, hard words for an eight-year-old to remember. Throughout the conversation, which got very quiet and introspective, she had remained upbeat and calm, but could feel her heart breaking, looking down at his round, beautiful face. His eyes had been downcast, his long lovely lashes shadowing his cheek, and had not looked at her until the end when he kissed her good night, smiling as he had when they’d read the comic book.

“Good night, sweetheart, I’ll see you in my dreams.” She’d said it but didn’t sing it, a joke. They’d used to sing it when he was little. He smiled, but didn’t laugh. He was getting too old.

“’Night, Mom.” He rolled over onto his side and she covered him. He looked back at her over his shoulder and said, “You’re going to stay up here for a while, right?”

“Yup. Going to put clothes away for a bit in my room, okay?”

“’Kay.”

She smoothed the covers over him and brushed hair off his forehead. Looked at the bruise on his cheek. There had been incidents at his other school, but they had been rare. Kid stuff, Dennis claimed. She hoped this was just a one-time thing, some kind of initiation. Not every child could be popular and on top but she hoped to god, and anyone else who might be listening, that her child didn’t end up on the bottom.

She snapped off the light.

“Love you,” she whispered into the dark. He heard her.

“Love you, too,” he muttered from under the covers.

Please leave him alone.
She thought-prayed to whoever was listening that he needed a little extra help (because his mother might not be quite up to the job, just yet).

Barbara Parkins-Staizer? Not Parkins anymore, but Staizer again, maybe, or maybe just the hyphen. It was hard to get used to either, neither sounded exactly right, and she still hadn’t really,
really
decided to change, but was still sort of trying those changes on (out of anger).
This too shall pass.
That was what Debra had told her, anyway.

She folded the sweater in her lap and tucked it neatly into the middle drawer of her childhood dresser. She would keep that dresser in the closet, pushed to one side, and use the ample space on the other side to hang her few hangables. Not so many now—half, really. Dennis had got the big dresser in the divorce. She hadn’t cared. He probably could have taken everything in the house and it would have been weeks before she had noticed. She hadn’t even seen him take it. He’d left a note. Near the end there, he’d taken to coming to the house when she was out and taking what he needed then and leaving a note in order to avoid the scenes that ranged between tearful acceptance and offers of friendship (always ending in tears of hysteria) to angry rages during which she might actually throw something—especially something he wanted. He himself was always the same, and it was still impossible for her to admit that his general feeling seemed to be one of relief.

He got the big dresser. She got the smaller, daintier bureau with the mirror—sort of good of him to leave that for her since she felt the need lately to look at herself all the time, just to make sure she was still there—and she’d pinched her childhood dresser from home. Her mother had shaken her head in disgust at that, the unsaid,
you had a husband and you let him go.
And then what?
Now you have no dresser?
Barbara smiled grimly.

She spent an hour putting things to rights in her bedroom. Her
own
room, something she hadn’t had since she was a girl. She had done things her way.

Her bed had been pushed up against the wall, beside the window.

There was a pretty picture in her head of the girl she wanted to be, looking pensively out the window late at night and keeping watch. The first day in the house—when there were so many things to be done—she had gone upstairs to start on Petey’s room (priorities: bathroom, Petey’s room, kitchen), and glanced into her bedroom. Dropping the bag she had been carrying—towels—she went directly into it and pushed her bed frame up against the wall. It had to be moved out again to put the mattress on, but it had been a
moment.
My room. My bed. My window. There had been a sadness under the ferocity of the act, but she had chosen, briefly, bravely, to ignore it. She had her bed by the window.

She’d always wanted that, it touched some kind of childhood chord in her, but Dennis had been adamant about there being enough space between the bed and the window to get out in case of a fire.

“You want us to burn in our beds because we can’t get out the window?” he’d said firmly. The thing was, both she and Petey had been small enough to crawl across the bed and get out the window. Only Dennis had been too large. ’Course, he was smaller now. That had been the thing. In the last six months before he finally left her, he’d been losing weight. He’d started working out, going to the gym, running in the morning before work, and she’d been pleased—
I was so stupid!
—and had dropped about thirty pounds. He’d lost more since. Not for her, like she’d foolishly believed. For the other one.

The other one. Nameless. She could pass her on the street and not know she had.

It was impossible to stop the process once it had begun, and there it was, the bad pain, the terrible pain, worse even than the reality of the situation she was currently in, the pain that she imagined was like a bone breaking, the first, nearly audible snap of
PAIN,
then the flooding over her of the real stuff, the real pain, visceral, whole body, complete.

She breathed deeply, tilting her head so that the tears would stay back. She felt the stinging in her nose first, and the full feeling of her face tightening. Her lips quivered for a second. She breathed and sat like that until she thought it would stop. It would stop.

Ancient history now. And no one cares.

She had a phone number. In the dark, disturbing days after she’d realized it, after checking the phone bills, she’d called. Again and again and a terrible, horrible voice (actually an ordinary voice, which was strangely worse, but she was not about to allow that thought, not yet but
it would come, it would come)
had answered every time. She’d fought the urge to speak, not hard because in the space between the last ring and the voice that answered there was every terror she felt, every fear, no anger at those moments, just terror, and in the stark face of it, she had nothing to say. What to say to the woman who has everything? She would hang up.

Another victory: she hadn’t dialed the number in three weeks. By now it was probably changed. And, of course, there were no more phone bills to check.

Her room was almost done. She planned filmy lace curtains for the big window beside the bed where she could look (pensively) out at the moon. Her pretty picture. Her largest piece of art, Klimt’s
The Kiss,
would go over on the far wall. It was romantic and moody and had lots of bright yellow in it, a good color to wake up to. She might, when next spring rolled back around, paint the bedroom yellow. Bright, sunny. Not the yellow that was in the back bedroom (which would eventually be a sewing room–book room), but something
nice.
Whatever it was called, that color was unsettling.

The sweaters put away, she gave the room a good look-around. Her bed seemed small in the large room, and as yet there was nothing to add to it except an ancient rocking chair that was ready for the dump but that she kept for sentimental reasons. She’d rocked Petey in that chair. She had her little dresser, daintier in the largish room than it had been in their cramped, smaller room at home, but other than that it looked a little vacant. A guest room with a permanent guest. It would be pretty with curtains and the big picture. A nice fat overstuffed chair, maybe, and a tea table. Next spring.

It was a good house. It had to be. She had spent the bulk of her settlement on it, and now it was hers without a mortgage. There was about twenty thousand dollars with which to start their new lives, hers and Petey’s (Pe
ter,
she reminded herself). She wasn’t absolutely sure, but she thought it was enough for about six months, and then she would have to work in earnest. Fifteen years of marriage had come to about $110,000, plus child support.

Goddamn bastard shit Dennis hope you get herpes (not AIDS I need the child support ha ha).

Ancient history.

Barbara had just shut off the light in her room when she heard Petey’s muffled voice, like shouting, saying something she didn’t catch. She went to his door and looked in. “Honey?”

His arm waved in the air above his head.
“Don’t!”
It dropped and his elbow twitched up in a reactive gesture and he said something else, fiercely, unintelligible. He was sleeping. Talking in his sleep.

Barbara slipped into his room and knelt beside his bed, stroking his head. “Ssssh…” she whispered. She soothed and stroked, whispering quietly, close to his face. He shifted on the bed. His little hands were clenched into fists, his face scrunched up, bottom lip jutting out because of his fat lip or some dreamt injury. “Ssssh…”