Tilt (11 page)

“I have to get the ship back!” she said.

Stan grabbed her arm just as she was slipping. The “ship” was a pine cone spinning in the current out of reach.

Stan picked up another one and handed it to her.

“That's not the ark of Ignola!” she said. She threw it in the water.

“The ark of Igwash,” Stan muttered.

“What are you talking about?” Lily said. “You don't know anything!”

He did know some things. He knew, whatever it was with Janine, that kiss was real. A person could run away from it, but that didn't mean it wasn't important.

A kiss like that changed lives. You didn't just give up on it.

“I hate fishing!” Lily said, splashing her hand in the water. “Why did we ever come?”

“It helps you think,” Stan said.

It was canned bean soup for dinner but Stan didn't care. He was so hungry he shoveled the brown mush into his mouth and washed it down with water. Prison rations, practically. But the biscuits were fresh-bought not frozen, and his mother had warmed them.

They were all sitting together in what just two days ago would have seemed an impossible scene: his mother and father at the same table, drinking wine — Gary's from the other night — with three children now instead of two, everyone eating in thick silence. Stan felt like he was in one of those parallel science-fiction universes where characters suddenly found that elements in their lives had become subtly altered, perhaps for evil reasons.

His father had a beard and was eating bean soup.

They always had meat and potatoes when he lived with them.

Feldon, his new brother, was leaning both skinny elbows on the table.

His real father would have straightened him up.

His mother had not thrown Ron and Feldon out of the house yet. Instead she had put on a nice blouse and Gary wasn't even around. Gary had been replaced by Ron.

No one was saying anything about it.

Or about the new toilet, which was in place but not to be flushed, apparently.

“So how were the fish biting, Stanley?” his father asked.

Lily sneezed prodigiously all over everybody's food.

“I don't think they caught anything but colds,” Stan's mother said.

Stan wiped his bowl clean with a last bit of biscuit. Was there more? He felt like Oliver Twist.

One wrong word and the whole fishbowl was going to explode.

“Can I bring Feldon to school tomorrow and show him to my friends?” Lily asked in her sweetest voice. Mucus hung from her nostril.

“Wipe your nose, please,” his mother said. “Feldon is not anybody's show and tell. Your father and Feldon will be moving on. Maybe tomorrow?” She eyed Ron, but he kept eating.

He was not sitting at the head of the table. He seemed a lot smaller than he used to.

“Your father called Kelly-Ann this afternoon,” Stan's mother announced in an all-is-under-control voice. She passed around a salad that no one wanted. The leafy greens were a bit black on the edges. Ron moved it aside. “Everything's straight. Isn't it, Ron?” she said.

Ron seemed fascinated with his last crust of biscuit.

“You figure you'll be heading home in the next couple of days.” Stan's mother hardened her eyes toward Ron.

“Or sooner,” Ron said brightly. He was not a bright man — Stan could see that now. When a dim man suddenly became bright, something was wrong.

A car passed in the street with headlights blazing, and the parallel universe held. Lily finally wiped her nose with a napkin and Feldon blew little bubbles onto his spoon.

The phone rang then and Stan wished it was Janine. Maybe she was calling to say she'd been thinking about him all day, really thinking, and had decided she wasn't a lesbian after all.

Nobody moved at the table. The phone rang, rang.

“Why do people phone during the dinner hour?” Stan's mother said.

Stan heard his own voice from the answering machine in the kitchen inviting the caller to say a few words after the beep.

Beep.

No words.

“Telemarketers,” Stan's mother said.

Maybe. But why were they the last family in civilization not to have call display?

Money. That was why.

Lesbians didn't just decide to not be lesbians anymore. Did they? Stan felt foggy on the subject. Some people were bi. Did they know at this age?

Maybe Janine was just trying him out. Her first boy.

Maybe she ran away after the kiss because she was confused.

Maybe she was waiting by the phone, wondering if he would call.

He'd never called her. Maybe that's what she wanted now.

Feldon studied his spoon. He had hardly eaten anything.

Then Ron looked at everyone with his droopy eyes and said, “I just wanted to tell you how much it means to me to be here. We're all family. I know it's hard to deal with sometimes, but in the end it's all we've got. I really believe that.”

Feldon dropped his spoon, and brown mush soup oozed onto the floor. Nobody moved. Stan's mother was looking at her husband — at her ex-husband
— with such . . . what?

Like he'd just boiled the children in the bath water.

“You are so full of —”
She threw down her utensils and bolted.
Clump, clump, clump
went her heavy feet on the stairs. The walls shuddered with the slamming of the bedroom door.

Ron finished his biscuit carefully. Stan had the sense he wasn't exactly sure where his next meal might be coming from.

—

The telephone in the kitchen beckoned, but there were too many bodies in the little house, not enough space to make a private call. Then Gary called — on the home line, not on Stan's mother's cell — and he and Stan's mother talked and talked while Ron made up the bed in the den and settled Feldon.

One call, that's all Stan wanted. Two minutes to ask Janine a simple question. Why did you run away?

Stan was getting his room back. Ron and Feldon would sleep on the wretched pull-out that ensured guests didn't stay too long.

“If he's not gone tomorrow you're going to be reading about us in the newspapers,” Stan's mother said on the phone to Gary, over and over, with slight variations, for forty-three minutes. Ron couldn't help but overhear. He kept tucking in the sheets and re-tucking and adjusting the blankets and testing the springs, like a man determined to make making the bed last as long as possible.

One simple question for Janine.

“I don't care what happens at work tomorrow! The whole office can sink into the ocean. If Ron has gone, I'll be the happiest woman on the planet!”

Ron adjusted and readjusted the window blinds, then started over again.

Finally Stan's mother got off the phone and immediately called to Stan to please help his sister with her math. Lily was still making up her own rules for addition and subtraction. An hour later she had to be stick-handled into pajamas and teethbrushing. She told him an elaborate story of the river faeries who enchanted all the fish to walk upright and wear long gowns and tuxedos.

One brief, private conversation on the phone. If Janine liked girls the most he could accept that. He just wanted to hear it from her.

It wasn't long before Stan's mother sequestered herself in her bedroom. Ron and Feldon slept downstairs, Lily snuffled in her usual fitful state, and Stan lay in bed. Janine's damp clothes were still balled on the floor. They smelled of her. He realized he still had his father's phone. He could call her on that and yet he didn't.

It didn't feel right anymore.

He closed his eyes and in his head it was morning. Morning in a parallel universe. They were older. She was sleeping — it was the most natural thing in the world. Her black hair was a storm on the pillow. One bare breast poked above the blanket.

A line just popped into his head.

One bare breast above the blanket
.

And the next line came pulling along.

One soft sigh on the shadowed wall
.

It was sounding . . . like a poem. An entire poem just fell out, pre-formed.

 . . . and dreamy early-morning breathing,

eyelids drawn, face so fair,

as real as real though you're not there.

Stan could see it all, this parallel morning with Janine beside him in some other version of his life. As if it would be completely natural to wake up beside a naked, beautiful person.

An ordinary miracle, somehow.

—

Stan said the poem to himself — it was just a verse, really, it would need more — over and over while the black of night turned to shades of gray. It was in his head now. No need even to scratch it in his notebook. He really ought to undress, to slide under the covers, surrender to sleep. But he'd slept most of the day and had failed to phone Janine.

Why?

It didn't feel right. He was operating on feel.

Why did he feel now as if the exact right perfect thing to do would be to get up and step away in the night and go to her? This was the moment. What had to happen between them had to be private. He felt that knowledge in his body the way he could feel the perfect jump shot starting from the ground, the rotation of the ball as it arced toward the basket.

She was waiting for him. Until now she'd done all the chasing. Now she'd run, and it was his turn to go after her.

Stan got out of bed and dressed. It was crazy, crazy. He gathered his runners from the front hall closet, kneeled and pulled them on, then slipped on a jacket. It was going to be cold.

And there on the front porch were Ron and
Feldon.

“What are you doing here?”
Stan and his father said at the same time.

Stan backed down first. He was still the kid. Ron probably outweighed him by fifty pounds.

“Nothing,” Stan said, as if he had to explain himself to this deadbeat. Then, “I'm going out.”

“To see a girl,” Ron said.

Feldon was bundled on the front porch bench in his jacket, clutching Mr. Strawberry, his eyes closed, head about to droop.

No way Lily would knowingly give up Mr. Strawberry, not even to a half-brother. She was going to be furious.

“If you're going out it's to see a girl,” Ron pressed.

The battered brown suitcase they'd arrived with was leaning against the front porch.

“And you're running away like you always do,” Stan heard himself say. “That's all you ever know to do.”

Ron looked to the darkened driveway. What was he waiting for?

“I bet you didn't call Kelly-Ann,” Stan said. “I bet you lied about that.”

“I told you. She's a certified lunatic,” Ron said. “Like most women.”

He was an old gray bearded man making pronouncements. Was this the same guy who drove Stan to the dock all those years ago?

He was waiting for a taxi.

“Look around you. What do women really want? To get their nails in you. Nails in flesh. Either you're running at midnight chasing some scent, or you're breaking their grip, trying to get your flesh free.”

It was almost as if he'd been waiting on the porch hoping the taxi would be delayed so he could unload this bag of misery.

“Why did you never call me?” Stan said.

Ron bit his lower lip and shook his head almost imperceptibly.

“You got a phone to Lily somehow.”

“Look. You were always on your mother's side. If I'd tried to get in touch with you, your mother would have . . .”

The thought died in the night.

“You know the thing I wanted most in life?” Ron asked. “Music. Probably I never told you. I used to play the sax. There was a group of us in high school —
the Shades. Tony Claremont, he's a recording artist now. Check the liner notes for new albums.
Tony Claremont — keyboards.
He made it, man. He didn't get bogged down with a wife and kids and mortgage and shit. He just did it. I could be there, too, if I'd stayed with it. You got something you really love?”

A gust of cold wind rattled some leaves across the porch. Winter soon enough.

“Basketball,” Stan said.

“Basketball!”
Dismissal dripped from the word. “You're like, a point guard or something? Can you shoot?”

His father was taking Feldon in the middle of the night to stay one step ahead of Kelly-Ann. This old gray man with the paunch who used to play the saxophone when he was in high school.

“Yeah, I can shoot,” Stan said.

It was all a matter of feel.

Suddenly Stan knew what to do.

“Why don't you leave Feldon here?” he said. He crossed his arms but kept relaxed. He might need to knock his father's knee out from under him.

“Leave Feldon here?” Ron smiled madly.

“You don't want him weighing you down when you're trying to establish yourself,” Stan said. “You'll be a lot quicker on your own.”

It was as if pictures in the shadows were playing across the dim man's face. He even shifted his eyes toward the sleeping boy.

He looked like he'd been on the mat in defeat for a long time.

“Kelly-Ann's going to be here by morning,” Ron said. “She's going to find the boy and I am never going to get to see him again.”

The boy
. The boy had a name!

Ron wiped a hand through his thinning hair.

“I'll hide him for you,” Stan said. Now a light appeared at the end of the street. The taxi? Ron shifted his gaze, too. “I'll tell them you and Feldon took off —”

“Your mother would give him up.” Ron picked up the suitcase and lifted Feldon to his shoulder in one decisive movement. What was Stan even thinking? That he could take on this guy twice his size?

The taxi crawled up the street.

“I'll take him to my girlfriend's,” Stan heard himself say. “She's got a great family. He'd fit right in for a couple of days. It won't take you longer than that to get established, will it? You'll be set in three or four days?”

Give Feldon the favor you gave to me, Stan thought. Just take off.

Headlights turned into the driveway. If Stan swept across with the kick, he could maybe catch Feldon as Ron crashed down.

Stan moved to block his dad's route to the stairs. A strong driving punch to the pit of the stomach might do it.

Stan had never hit anybody in the pit of the stomach. But he felt ready now.

“I think that's our taxi,” Ron said. Feldon rubbed his eyes and looked around sleepily.

“Leave him with me. I've got the phone you gave Lily. As soon as things are settled —”

“Are you blocking my way, son?”

Thunderstorms inside Stan's body now. He was standing in front of his own father. He tucked his chin in. Battle stance. But hidden, almost nonchalant.