The Mourning After (18 page)

The thought makes Levon sick to his stomach.  Troubled families with botched histories spawned stories like this.  Not the Kellers and his deeply principled mother.

As if sensing where his mind has drifted she says, “My parents are going to tell your parents.”

Levon is thinking about how brave she is and how everything is now changed.  “He should’ve never gotten in the car,” she said.  “He should’ve stayed with me, and we could’ve worked it out.”

Levon sits upright, struck by the dual meaning of what she is saying.

He asks, “Did you see David get into the car with me?”

“What does it matter?” she answers, looking away sullen and apologetic.  “When we were outside by the pool, I slapped him across the face and told him I hated him.  It was the last thing I ever said to him.”

Levon feels as though the same hand has smacked him across the cheek.  He is struck by the bitter sadness of their goodbye, while his mind hones in on something else.  His heart is thumping wildly in his shirt. 

She is saying, “I have to live with that for the rest of my life.”

More tears.  A baby.  A pregnancy.  A car door opening. 

Levon’s volatile mind is racing.

“No,” she cries, “I didn’t see him get into the car.  I never saw him again.  That slap was the last I saw of him, the last thing I gave him.”

The phone call from Rebecca’s mother comes the next day.  Levon sees the numbers on the caller ID.  There is no way he can save his mother from the impact the conversation will have.  So much for burying secrets.

Edward Blake
the name reads across the tiny screen. 

The house is quiet other than the penetrating ring.  His father and Chloe have all but abandoned him for hamburgers at The Charcuterie, and Sid and Lyd were meeting friends for lunch at the Bal Harbour shops, so he and the mad woman upstairs were left to contend with the matter of the phone.  Levon shakes his head, projecting the seismic tremors that are about to result from their telephone call.  Scurrying up the stairs, taking two at a time, Levon wants his mother to pick up the call before it’s sent to voicemail.  Maybe they aren’t calling about the baby but are checking to see how the family’s holding up.  They had formed a close friendship over the years through the kids, so it wouldn’t be unexpected for them to phone.  Levon, though, knows the truth. 

One ring.  Two rings.  Three rings. 

If it goes to five, the call is lost.  The saccharine-laced recording of his long ago cheery mother would trickle through the phone line, masking a home gone sour.

Without knocking, Levon pushes open the master bedroom door.  The black envelopes him, and he gasps from the cold, putrid air.  Four rings.  His mother, startled, wraps the covers around her and sits up in the bed.

Hurling himself across the room, Levon lunges for the receiver.  “Hello,” he says.  “Uh, hi, Mrs. Blake.”  The words are hurried and nervous.  Levon pauses before answering, “I’m fine.”

“Tell her I’m sleeping,” Madeline Keller grunts, lying back down and covering her face with layers of down bedding.  Levon is holding the phone in his right hand while his left draws the curtains and opens the window next to the bed.  The light hurts his eyes, though the fresh air feels good.

“Shut it,” she mutters.

“Yes, she’s right here,” Levon chants into the phone with more clarity than before.  “Let me get her for you.”

With that, his mother swipes at him to get out of her room.  Her skin feels cool on his arm like vampire flesh.  Her frail body can barely squeeze out a substantial shove, and she retreats, glaring at Levon with bloodshot eyes flanked by dark black circles.  If Levon didn’t know better, he would have thought she had been punched.

The enemy is in Levon’s hand, and he is thrusting it at his mother.  She is insistent that he help her—to make up some excuse—and Levon is as equally persistent.  “Take it,” he demands.  “You
need
to take it.”

This volition in her normally docile son stirs something frightful and foreboding in Madeline.  She grabs the phone with such violence that one of the fingernails she hasn’t gnawed off stabs at Levon’s skin.  When her words find their way out of her throat, they are hoarse and gravelly from sleep, nothing like Lucy’s conviction that one should always answer the phone with a smile in their throat.

“Hello,” she says.

It is not until Levon backs through the doorway and leans against the wall outside her room that he can catch his breath.  He realizes that he had been holding it in.  The exhale accompanies a quivering that shakes his entire body.  His fingers are tingling, a sensation he is unsure if he is imagining.  The breaths come deeper and deeper.  He hopes he is not having a heart attack.

Concentrate, concentrate,
he keeps telling himself.  He is determined to hear their dialogue.  He stands transfixed outside the door, waiting for the script to begin: the
No,
the
how could you?
the slam when she throws the phone across the room, and it smashes against the wall.

“What can I say?…Yes, I know…”

Levon comes up with variations of Mrs. Blake’s part in the dialogue, which elicit his mother’s meager responses.

“Now’s really not a good time, Marcy.”

Pause.

“What do you mean?” his mother asks, her tone changing, the pitch abruptly higher.  Levon thinks his heart might jump right out of his chest.  The thumping sounds are interfering with his hearing, and the rush of adrenaline is sending swells of sweat down his cheeks and into his armpits.  He hopes he remembered deodorant.

“That can’t be,” she says. “It’s not possible.”  And now she is crying.  Her words are jumbled up in her sobs.  Deciphering the pain from the confusion is a daunting task.  The one sound that is crystal clear is her desperation. 

“There have to be other options…She doesn’t have to do that…We can take him…”

Levon hears the cries rise and fall.  They reach a crescendo until the last coherent sentence Levon can discern is, “Please don’t do this. Please…,” which concludes with the crashing sound of the phone, the anticipated dissolution to their exchange, thundering through the air. 

A fragile silence floats through the doorway.  He prepares himself for the storm surge, the aftermath. 
How much can one person take?
he asks himself.  It is the question that circles Levon while he waits in the hallway.  Around him, familiar family photos dot the walls.  Their watchful eyes stare him down.  Chloe’s big brown eyes are hypnotic; David’s eyes are teasing.  The pictures had changed in the recent months.  Or, perhaps, it is his memory of them.  Levon’s backside is against the wall, and he’s counting the seconds until she finds him cowering in fear.  Prayer has typically never worked for him, yet he clenches his eyes and the numbers fall from his mouth like frantic pleas.  Her movement is slight, though he can hear it sneaking up on him.  Whether it is a scolding or an inquisition, he is prepared.

She is in a trance when she walks through her door.  This is what Levon observes: her hair is unkempt; her dark eyes are bloodshot and swollen; the thick, white chenille bathrobe swallows her up; her words are sharp as a blade.

“You knew about this?”

They are the same height. Where Levon dwarfs his mother in sheer heft, she makes up for in robust personality.  She gets right in his face and starts shrieking.

“You knew about this, and you didn’t tell us?”  Then, she threw out impossible questions with impossible answers, like what did
they
do wrong as parents.

“I only found out yesterday.” 

“And you kept it from us?”

Levon lowers his head. 

He wonders if she notices David peering over his shoulder, encased in velvet and glass.

He wonders when everything went so wrong.

He wonders if his mother would suffocate if he sits on her.

Levon notes that even while she struggles with unthinkable sorrow, what personifies her most is her all-encompassing rage.  It’s woven into her frazzled hair, tucked deep inside the folds of her eyes, and is lurking in her crossed arms that shade her chest.

“We should have been told,” she says flatly, worn out from her tirade.  “There were things we could’ve done.”

“You’d been through enough.”

“Does your father know?”

“If he knows, it’s not from me.”

Nowhere is there acknowledgment of their precious son’s mistake. He and David had been warned about girls and rubbers and pregnancy.  He was ten when his mother gave him entry into the secret world that David had already inhabited, when she whipped out
How Babies Were Made,
the purple and blue book decorated in cutouts of naked boys and girls covering their privates with their hands.  He was heading off to summer camp where it was widely known that sex education was
taught
by teenagers.  David was twelve and giggling through the evolutionary explanation that began with illustrations of chickens and dogs humping and concluded with humans having intercourse.  The book was entirely outdated, but his mother had learned about sex from the illustrated couplings, and, therefore, it was good enough for her kids.

They had come a long way from that afternoon when Levon pulled his brother aside with questions.  “No, bro, you don’t jump on a girl’s back like a piggyback ride.”

Levon is snapped back to the present by the door slamming downstairs.  Levon’s mom pulls her bathrobe tighter as she heads for the stairs.

“I’m not through with you.” She points at Levon.  “Craig, we need to talk,” she barks.

Levon fears for all of their lives.  What if she has really gone crazy?  He didn’t want to end up as the subject of a
Dateline
special where the seemingly perfect family is shattered by an act of violence.  The shiver down his spine is an entirely different sensation than the pulsing traveling down his fingers.  Though the confrontation is over, Levon’s breathing remains fraught and hurried.  He can’t seem to catch it.  All his parents need is for him to drop dead on the wooden floor outside their room.  His fall would shake the pictures from the wall, and the one of David holding a football in one hand and Chloe in another would come sliding down, hitting Levon atop his head, the frame shattering into pieces.

Yet, the image dissipates into something else entirely.  He doubts they will care if he dies.  She would hear the loud thud of his tubby limbs, and she would run upstairs, tripping over his lifeless body, only to find the shattered glass and David’s luminous face staring up at her.  Then, she would tuck it under her arm and cry for the frame of her favorite photo.

“Mommy’s angry,” Chloe sighs when she reaches the top of the stairs and finds Levon panting against the wall.

“Go to your room,” he tells her, shielding her from what is to come.  When he is sure the door is closed and Chloe is lost in Hannah Montana, he sits at the top of the stairs and listens to the battle waging downstairs.

“Rebecca is pregnant.  At least, for a couple more hours.”

“What are you saying?”

“Don’t act like you didn’t know.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Levon can’t see his father’s reaction, but he can taste his lack of knowledge.  “Why are you hysterical? 

His mother enjoys moments like this.  Being in the know gives her unprecedented power. “You don’t get it,” she says. 

Levon crosses his arms and his head finds refuge on his forearms.  When he closes his eyes, he is able to see his mother’s smirking face.  It is full of hostility and distrust.

“Get what?”

She draws out each syllable, careful to annunciate the words as one would for someone hard of hearing.  “Rebecca is pregnant.”

“Oh,” he says.  Then, “Oh, shit.”

He repeats it again.

Levon is proud of his father for finally figuring it out.

“They want her to have an abortion!  An
abortion
!”

“Calm down,” he tells her. “What happened?”

“What the hell do you think happened?”

“I thought they were careful,” his father says.

Madeline’s tone is cruel. “If they were careful, she wouldn’t be pregnant.  If they were careful, God damn it, what does that even mean?”  Her sentences are spilling into one another.  Where one ends, another has already begun.  She sounds manic.  “And I can’t even get angry at them for not being careful because I’m fucking
happy
she’s pregnant.”

“Then why the hell do you sound so pissed?”

“They’re getting rid of it.  Today.  Right now.”

A helicopter flies overhead and Levon can’t make out the next couple of exchanges.  Insults and accusations are muffled by the swirling blades, which sound conspicuously like whimpers.

“This baby is all I have left of him.  If they get rid of it, they’re getting rid of David.”

Levon pokes out his head from behind the banister and sees his parents facing off in the kitchen.  His mother’s arms are flailing in the air, punching at Craig, while her eyes remain fixed in terror.  Tears stream down her cheeks.  He’s trying to calm her, but there is too much agony for his trembling hands to make a difference.  “Don’t touch me,” she shouts in his face.  At this, Craig Keller backs away from the woman he no longer knows.

When the hyperventilating ends, she retreats to the other side of the room with her back to her husband.  He says, “We can’t ask her to have this baby, Mad.  It’s not fair to her.”

“I’ll take the baby,” she fights back.  “I’ll raise it myself.  I’ll love that baby.  You know I’ll love that baby.”

“David wouldn’t want it this way.”

The mention of his name settles her down before the next round of tears.

“Maybe I should call Edward.” 

Madeline Keller shakes her head.  “No.  It won’t change anything.”

“I’ll call if you want me to,” he says, pressing on.  “I’ll get Rick Mann on the phone.  He’s the best.  We must have some rights.”

“We lost those rights the day we buried our son.  We lost everything.  Really, what’s left?  There’s nothing left.  This baby is the last part of David, the last link.  And I can’t have that either.  He’s slipping away.  How many times do I have to lose him?”