The Witch (14 page)

At first they were embarrassed, then, one at a time, they began to snigger and giggle, half-choking on the laughs they tried to keep down.

“She was a handful.”

“A pistol.”

“A work of art.”

“I hope you didn't give her a house key, Dad.”

The father lowered his head into his folded arms on the tabletop, and only gradually did they realize that he was sobbing rather than laughing.

Should they comfort him, or pretend it wasn't happening? There was no history for this, no guide for the pure awfulness of it. Finally Richard reached for the piece of paper like a man picking up the check in a restaurant. “It's okay, Dad. I'll help you. We'll think of something.”

Richard and the father wrote a letter—that is, Richard wrote it and the father read it over and said, after much scowling and gritting of teeth, that it was all right. The letter spoke of the father's regrets that he had so often lost his temper over so many unimportant things. He understood now that he had been hard to live with, that he had too often ignored her or taken her for granted. He respected the choice that she had made, he hoped that she was happy in her present situation (“Situation!” the father said, rolling his eyes), since happiness was more important
than anything else. (“No it isn't,” the father said, but Richard insisted on leaving it in.) And he hoped that with his new, changed attitude, they could resume their life together, make a fresh start. The father enclosed a generous check, emphasizing that there were no strings attached and she should spend the money in any way she wished.

They mailed it off and waited. The next week, the check was returned, with
So kind. But I don't need money
written on the memo line.

Next Gabe said he'd take a turn. He thought about what he wanted to tell her, how he thought he understood her, or at least wanted to understand. Then he holed up in his apartment with his guitar, and after a number of false starts and late nights, he produced a tape of himself singing:

“A heart that's free is a lonesome bird

It flies so high, no one can follow

Is it an eagle or a swallow?

Sometimes it hears a distant word

Was it a yesterday or tomorrow?”

There were two other verses, about the bird soaring over land and sea, and all the wonderful things it saw, and then turning in its flight and riding a strong wind home.

The mother sent a postcard, a picture of a seagull soaring over the ocean waves.
So beautiful. But I am not a bird.

The father despaired. “I wonder if I could make things up with Francine,” he said, meaning it mostly as a joke, but not entirely.

“I could try,” Tim said. “I mean, try to talk to Mom.”

“You?” The father was lying on the sofa with his arm over his
face. He was shielding his eyes from the overhead light, which he always said was too bright, but the gesture gave him a tragic aspect. Now he sat up. “What could you do?”

Tim shrugged. “Maybe I could drive out and see her.”

The father studied him. Tim said, “It's slow at work. They can't use me that much anyway.”

“Boy, one of these days you'll have to find yourself a real job. I suppose you want to take my car.”

But Tim said no, he'd just take his truck. So he loaded it up with some camping supplies in case he decided to camp, his clothes, and food that would be easy to eat, packages of crackers and lunch meat. Before he left, the father took out his wallet and extracted a quantity of bills. “Here. In case the battery craps out, anything like that.”

Tim thanked him and they shook hands. Then he said, “What should I tell Mom if she asks me why anything would be different? If she came back.”

The father thought about this. “Tell her, now I know she can leave if she wants to.”

In the rearview mirror, Tim saw him standing in the driveway, looking helpless and irritated.

He drove all that first day and into the night. The land didn't change much, farm fields, mostly, and the highway straight as tape. He stopped and got a room at a truckers' motel, something he had never done on his own, and he half-expected somebody to tell him he was too young or in some other way prohibited from making such transactions, but no one did.

The next day was much like the first. He played his music and ate some of the food he'd brought, and watched the highway signs announce the different destinations. At sunset he pulled into a roadside campground with a shallow green lake,
and pitched his tent at a campsite on its far end. It was still chilly at night and he bought firewood from a gas station out on the highway and got a fire going in the burn pit. He ate the hamburgers he'd bought and watched the play of the flames and the smooth dark water beyond.

Music from somebody's radio reached him from a campsite farther down the shore. He could see people dancing in the light, and shadows from a lantern hung on a tree branch. A girl walked out of the darkness and stood at the edge of the firelight. “That's a nice fire you got going,” she said.

“Thanks.”

“You mind if I sit here for a while? Some of the guys we came with are kind of jerks.”

Tim said that would be fine. She sat down on one of the cement blocks that ringed the burn pit. She'd brought two beers with her and asked if he wanted one, and Tim said he did. She had long, pretty hair that picked up the colors of the fire, copper and red. “Are you from around here?” she asked.

“No. Just stopped off for the night.”

“That's too bad,” she said. “I could use a new friend.”

“I'm just here for the night,” Tim said again. A log burned through and collapsed in a flurry of sparks.

“Well, that doesn't have to be a big problem.”

In the morning she kissed him and said she'd better be getting back before her friends finished sleeping it off. He watched her walk away down the trail, hopping from one stepping stone to another.

That day he came to the mountains. The truck's engine labored in the thinner air, and his head too slowed down. Tim drove up and up, around the mountains' curves, and got out at the observation post at twelve thousand feet. The peak was bare
of trees, and snow frosted the scrub growth. The lack of oxygen made him clumsy. He didn't stand there long, in case he took a wrong step and fell all the way to the bottom of the world.

That night he camped in one of the park campgrounds, where the rangers handed out warnings about fires, hypothermia, animals. It was too cold to sleep in the tent, and so after a couple of hours he got up and tried to stretch out in the truck's front seat. He didn't sleep well, imagining he heard stealthy, blundering sounds around him, and once, when he raised his head to look, he saw a piece of the darkness detach itself and move unhurriedly away. He watched for long enough to be sure he wasn't making it up, and then he lay down and slept.

Once he left the mountains, he hurried through the brown country that lay beyond. He passed little desert towns spread out along the highway like spilled bones. The truck's air-conditioning petered out to a current of lukewarm air. He rigged some of his shirts over the windows for shade. The desert was so big and empty, it canceled out any memory of green or coolness. He had never been more alone in his life. He felt how being alone might be something to exult about.

Here was another range of mountains that he had not expected, but that was all right, since he was willing to be surprised by things. There was a snow squall at the top of the pass and the truck's tires kept skidding sideways, and it took almost an hour to get down to where it was only raining. Not until he reached that point did he allow himself to imagine how it might have felt, sliding off the road's edge in a cage of crumpling metal.

Then he came out of the mountains, and here was the very end of the highway, and the city where his mother lived, and the street and the house where she lived. Tim went straight there and rang the bell.

She opened it and they knew each other right away. She was a little thinner and grayer. She hugged him and stepped back to look at him and then hugged him again. “You've grown up,” she said.

He told her all about his trip (except for the part about the girl): the long highway and the mountains and the campfires and the desert and driving through the snow on the pass, and she shook her head and said, “Some of that sounds a little dangerous.”

“I guess.”

Tim rested while the mother went out for groceries. She cooked a dinner of his favorite foods, and while they were eating, Tim said, “Dad wants you to come home.”

“I know.”

“You don't have to just because he wants you to.”

“It's nice here,” the mother said, folding her napkin into pleats. “But there are many things I miss. Including him. I don't expect you to understand.”

Tim kept silent. “Hey,” the mother said. “Don't look like that. It killed me to leave. I died and went to guilt heaven. But it would have killed me to stay too. You don't know what you really want until you end up doing it. Are you done eating? Let's go for a walk.”

Fog was rolling and roiling in from the west, turning the sunset bleary. The mother said there was a place where they could see the ocean, and so they walked down a street of stucco buildings with red tile roofs, to a barricade at the end. Far below it was a wide beach and the crashing ocean waves. The air was chilly gray, and the mother took Tim's arm and leaned into him. “We have so much to catch up on. And when we get back, so much to set to rights.”

“I won't be going home with you,” Tim said, and the mother stepped away from him, searching him with her look.

“I'd like to try living somewhere else. Doing something else. I could learn how to do a lot of different jobs.”

“Tim.”

“I give him the excuse he needs to be angry. It's always been that way. It'll be better for you if I'm not there. Better for me too.”

“Do you feel you have to do this for me, honey?” The fading light turned her face and hair silvery. “You don't. Your father can change his ways. Don't give me a brand-new sorrow.”

Tim shrugged. “Sometimes you don't know what you really want until you end up doing it.”

“I have never blamed you for anything that night. How could I? You were just a child.”

“Well I'm not now, am I.”

They watched the moving water for a while, until the pale sun vanished and drew the remaining day with it, and then they started back.

The eldest brother sent the princess a casket filled with gold, and the second brother sent her a bird that sang the sweetest songs. But the youngest brother said, “I have no gift to offer, only a tale to tell, and at the end of the tale, I will speak no more. I give you all my unsaid words from this day forth, the secret names of everything I love.”

The parents were not home—they were the kind of parents who went places at night—and so Massey kept watch, parked on a side street half a block away. It was cold enough for the car windows to steam over and he rubbed a section of glass every so often to clear it. The house was a single-story brick ranch, a design so ordinary and utilitarian that even if you had not been inside it, as Massey had not, you knew its components. Three bedrooms, two baths, kitchen with breakfast nook, the family room arranged for the worship of television. But at night it took on a dim and secret look, all the windows covered over with blinds and swaddling curtains.

Phoebe's car, the Civic they let her drive, was parked in front. It was almost ten o'clock and Massey had been watching for more than an hour, his attention diffuse, wandering. Now and then a car rolled down the street, but none of them pulled into the driveway behind Phoebe. Other houses showed lights,
people watching the news, finishing up the dishes, collapsing into the end of their days. He had no particular curiosity about them. He was almost peaceful sitting here, or at least he would not be peaceful anywhere else.

Massey's phone buzzed. It was a text from Phoebe:
I see you
.

Massey started the car, putting the heat on high. He'd kept it off because a running car was more conspicuous. So much for that. He drove the mile back to his own house, the headlights sweeping across its frozen lawn. He waited for the garage door to roll up, slid into his space, parked, and went in through the kitchen.

“Me,” he announced, in case anyone was paying attention. Lila was probably upstairs reading. His son was in the den, playing one of his computer games. Massey stood behind the screen and to one side of it until the boy was forced to acknowledge him. “Time to wrap it up, Kev.”

“All right,” his son said, still distant, absorbed.

Massey got a Coke from the refrigerator and sat at the kitchen table. Phoebe was going to take her time coming home just to demonstrate that she could ignore him, and her curfew. And probably to make a point about how pissed off she was. It would be better to have all that out in the kitchen.

He heard the garage door twenty minutes later. Phoebe came through the door ready for battle. She said, “I do not freaking believe you.”

“You were supposed to be home at ten.”

“Yeah, and you were supposed to be doing what?” She was blazing. The cold and the anger turned her cheeks red, a delicate flaring and fading of blood. “This is such shit.”

“Watch your mouth.”

“You know what we were gonna do? Order a pizza and have them deliver it out to the car. God, you are just incredible.”

“That's about enough.” From the sounds in the next room, Massey could tell that Kevin had registered the argument and was retreating upstairs.

“So did you observe any, you know, criminal activities? Was I cheating on my Spanish homework? Because that's what Maura and I were doing.” Phoebe hesitated just long enough so that Massey knew she wasn't sure about what came next, how to best sustain her anger, and that gave him some advantage.

He said, “If you weren't doing anything wrong, then you've got nothing to worry about.”

Phoebe gave him a look of tight-mouthed hatred, then walked to the base of the stairs. “Mom!”

They both waited. It wasn't a thorough fight until Lila got involved. Phoebe dumped her backpack. Massey glanced at an ad circular on the kitchen table. They heard Lila moving in the upstairs hallway, a grim, stalking tread. Phoebe came back into the kitchen. Massey counted the stairs as Lila came down: twelve, thirteen, fourteen. She was wearing her bathrobe and the fabric made small crinkling sounds.

“What's so important that I have to get out of bed?” Her disgusted look took in both of them. She already knew.

“He's been spying on me again.”

“Not spying.”

“Hanging around Maura's house like some pervert!”

“Her parents weren't there,” Massey said, addressing Lila. “She neglected to mention that.”

“They went out to a movie! God, now he wants to tell them what to do too.”

“If there aren't going to be any adults in the house, we need to be aware of that.”

“What, I need a babysitter? Why don't you just lock me in my room?”

Lila sat down at the kitchen table, opposite Massey. There was a jar of hand cream on the lazy susan; she opened it and rubbed some into her knuckles. “We've talked about this,” she said. “Dave, we had an agreement.”

“Honey,” Massey said to Phoebe, “it's not you I don't trust. Or Maura. But say other kids stopped by, even kids you knew and thought were your friends. It's just so easy for things to get out of control.”

“He means, have sex,” Phoebe informed her mother. “Maybe I should, just so everybody can stop worrying about it.”

“No,” Massey said, meaning, Stop talking.

“Because then I'll be, you know, defiled. A lost cause.”

Lila said, “If you mean that as a joke, it's not funny.”

“No, see, it's hilarious. I can post it on Facebook: Finally lost it! I can—”

“Not one more word!” Massey shouted, so loud and thundering that it made them both flinch, jarred their expressions of hard contempt into something like fear. And he knew he could do this, roar and stamp and overwhelm them, just as he knew he would be made to regret doing so.

It didn't take them long to recover and to close ranks against him. His wife said, “Really, Dave. Yelling doesn't help anything.”

His daughter said, “See? See how he acts?” She shook her head and her bright hair slipped across her shoulders. They looked so much alike. Two versions of the same fair-skinned, fine-boned woman. His wife softened and weary, his daughter all sharpness and quick anger. And now neither of them was on his side.

“What you need to understand, honey,” he began, hoping to win them over with calmness and care, “is that nobody ever plans on terrible things happening—well, normal people don't. But sometimes they do happen. Given the opportunity. The circumstances. Say that there's alcohol involved. Other stuff. Don't roll your eyes, you want to tell me I'm wrong? Nobody ever brings anything to a party? I'm not saying the boys you know aren't good guys, most of them, I'm not saying they would ever set out to hurt you—”

“But they are, of course, easily inflamed hormonal dirtbags and you can't take your eye off them for a second. Nice. Kevin has so much to look forward to. Are we done? I still have to read a chapter for history.”

Massey said nothing. Lila said, “Don't stay up too late.” Phoebe sniffed and left the room and took her time on the stairs.

Lila said, “You can't keep doing this. It's unhealthy. For you and her both. And it doesn't work.”

“All right.”

“And this time you mean it.”

Massey gave her a heavy, irritated look, but he'd left himself nothing to say.

Lila got up from the table and went to the sink, running water and making a racket with the plates. The bathrobe made her look bulky and insulated. “You think I don't worry about the same things you do? Like I haven't imagined every horrible situation? Of course I have. I'm her mother. But if you push her and push her like this, she'll end up doing something stupid out of spite.”

“She doesn't need to be going out on a school night,” Massey said, by way of not answering.

“I suppose she doesn't need to go away to college either.”

“That's not for another year.”

“And by that time we'll have provided her with sufficient guidance and progressive amounts of responsibility and independence so she can handle it.”

“Didn't colleges used to have curfews, codes of behavior? No boys in the rooms, three feet on the floor in the lounges, that kind of thing?”

Lila actually laughed at him then. “I'm sorry, but you're just being ridiculous.”

“I hope I am. I really do.”

Later on, in bed, the lights off, the two of them rolled into the quilts and blankets, the furnace thrumming against the cold, Lila said, “She's a good girl and you shouldn't worry about her.”

“She's not the one I'm worried about.”

Lila's hand found its way through the blankets and rubbed the back of his neck. “I can't believe that when you were that age, you were really so bad.”

Her breathing slowed and lengthened and she slept. Massey knew that was exactly why he worried. He had not been so bad, not at all.

The next morning Phoebe was still mad at him, making a point of ignoring him as she fixed her toast and ran up and down the stairs, assembling all the components of her day. Kevin ate his cereal in front of the television, watching some show that looked like one of his video games, muscle-bound robots warring with each other. Lila was getting ready for work in the half bath off the laundry room, the only place in the house, she said, that she could call her own. Massey stood at the kitchen counter making his lunch. Phoebe stalked back and forth often enough to make her point, and Massey accepted this as his punishment. When he was ready to leave the house, he waited for her to
come downstairs again, hoping to cross paths with her one more time and say something that might make things good again between them. But she eluded him and he drove off without speaking.

Massey didn't buy the idea that kids were so different nowadays. Sure, they had their phones and everything that went along with the phones, and it was easier and quicker to do themselves harm with pictures and words. But there had always been a stream of private, subterranean talk, excluding parents, teachers, and those unlucky or uncool kids who existed as objects of pity and scorn. Just as there had always been needy, complicated friendships, alliances, feuds, outright wars. And the great confusion of sex gilding everything, its dramas played out in ways that were entirely private yet entirely public, and the best you could hope for, as a parent, was that the damage be survivable.

The summer that Phoebe was eleven, Massey was sent to pick her up from a day at the swimming pool. He parked the car and went out to the raised concrete walkway, looking down. It was late afternoon and a line of shadow moved almost perceptibly across the water.

Crowds of kids were still in the pool, or quick-walking along the concrete apron. Every so often one of the bored teenage lifeguards would rouse himself to yell “No running!” Or “No cannonballs!” In the single lane roped off for lap swim, a very old, pale man wearing a bathing cap swam up and down so slowly it looked as if he was drowning.

It took Massey a minute to spot Phoebe's bright green two-piece swimsuit. She was sitting on the edge of the pool with two other girls, their feet dangling in the water. A boy swam up to them and scooped handfuls of water their way, making them squeal. Then the boy propelled himself halfway out of the
pool and made a grab for Phoebe's swimsuit straps, trying to pull them down. More of the squealing. The girls kicked water at him.

“Phoebe! Get over here now!”

She squinted up at him. They all did. The boy pushed away from the wall and dove smoothly underwater. Phoebe got up and came to stand directly beneath him. “Hi Dad.”

“It's time to go. Get your things.”

“Can we give Shelby a ride?”

“All right. Hurry up.”

“We have to take showers first.”

She'd wrapped herself in a beach towel. Her small, wet head protruded from the top, her bare feet from the bottom. The sun was fading fast and her teeth chattered.

“Make sure you dry your hair,” Massey told her, and she headed off for the locker room. Massey found a spot at the pool's entrance and waited. He watched other people leaving, including some of the kids Phoebe's age, but he couldn't tell if the boy who had grabbed at her swimsuit was one of them.

Phoebe and her friend came out, dressed in shorts and T-shirts. Their hair was damp and combed and they carried their wet suits and towels in printed canvas backpacks that resembled toys. “That doesn't look like dry hair to me,” Massey said.

“The dryers weren't working right. It's pretty dry.” She spotted the car, and the two girls went on ahead of him. Phoebe was taller and her bare legs and backside were taking on the first signs of definition, though she still had a child's skinny, breakable-looking body.

When they reached the car, the girls got into the back seat and Massey told them to make sure they fastened their seat belts. He asked where Shelby lived and set off in that direction.
And though he knew better, he could not keep from asking, “Who was that boy, the boy who was into all that horseplay?”

“Horseplay,” Phoebe said, trying out the word, and she and Shelby had to giggle at it, and pretend to be horses, nudging each other and neighing.

“Phoebe? You know the boy I mean? Who is he?”

“Oh, Billy Robillio.” Shelby made another horse sound, cracking Phoebe up.