What Hearts (10 page)

He went back into the bedroom. Dave was there, leaning close to her, watching for some sign; from his face it was obvious he had no clue about what he was waiting for. Asa said, “I'm calling the hospital.”

“No!” Dave roared, spinning on him. The gentility was gone. “You will do nothing but what I say, you hear? This isn't a time for a kid to interfere, I don't care how smart he thinks he is.” He glared at Asa; the boy held his eye
for a moment, then started to walk toward the kitchen. Dave said, “Wait,” more gently, and came over to him.

“Listen, please,” he said.
Please
was not a word Asa heard from him often; he listened.

Dave put his hands on Asa's shoulders and looked straight into his face. “Listen, son. That's my wife over there. Your mother, and my wife. We want her to wake up and be okay. Both of us. I would not let her sit there in danger, understand?”

“You lied about the pills,” said Asa. “I can't trust you.”

Dave groaned in exasperation, and with an offhanded force that seemed weary, almost casual, he thrust Asa straight back until the boy slammed into the side of a bureau. Asa's ears filled with a buzzing from the back of his head, but he stayed erect; Dave stepped close and squatted, sticking his face close.

“You'll pardon me for not giving a dingle,” he said, “but right now I just don't feel all torn up with the need for your ‘trust.' It's not something your mother's pining for over there, either. Frankly, boy, I don't think you're the
kind of person who will ever trust
anybody
. It kind of takes an honest heart to do that, you understand what I mean?”

“Yes,” said Asa, “I do.” Then with a concentration of all his strength he snapped his arm out and punched Dave flush on the temple. The shock of it felt good; he left his arm, stiff and solid, in the air between them as Dave jerked backward and sat down hard. Dave shook his head and blinked fast for a moment, but quickly his eyes found Asa's and they stared at each other. For some time neither spoke or looked away. Then Asa lowered his fist, and Dave smiled grimly. There was a red circle near his left eye.

“Well,” he said. His voice gurgled a little; he cleared his throat. “Well. Now, I guess, we're even.” He Started to stand up, careful to lean away from Asa as he did so.

“We'll, never be even,” said Asa. “We shouldn't try.”

Dave hesitated, then chuckled darkly and shook his head. He stood all the way up, stepped past Asa, and went to bend over Asa's mother. Asa walked to the other side of the
room and sat on the floor with his back against the wall.

Dave left after a few minutes. Asa remained, watching her. From time to time Dave checked in, bringing coffee, which he got down her without Asa's assistance. In a couple of hours her breathing got a little easier, but she showed no signs of waking up. At one point Asa went over and tried to hold her hand, but he felt stupid. So he sat on the floor and waited, and after a while he fell asleep.

He woke to the sound of heavy footsteps and Dave's voice cursing. He opened his eyes. The light was off and the room was pretty dark, but it was dawn beyond the curtained windows; a long shape was just falling forward onto the bed with a thick
WHUMP
. The bathroom light went on and Asa heard Dave curse again. He stood up and went to the door.

Dave was looking into the sink. It was full of jagged pieces of glass, some of them covered with amber goo. Thinking back, Asa realized that before the footsteps he had heard—and incorporated into his dream, something about a science class—the sound of glass
breaking. It was probably what had brought him to the surface. Glass breaking, heavy footsteps, his mother collapsing onto the bed, Dave cursing—he tried to put it together.

Dave turned. “She wanted to wash her hair,” he said. But he spoke with a pitiful lack of conviction, and a moment later he added, in a low, defeated voice: “Get dressed, son.”

They carried her out to the car in the faint blue light, and stretched her out in the backseat on some blankets. She seemed to be as heavily asleep as ever; Asa wondered how she could have waked up and gotten to and from the bathroom and then slipped back. But he didn't need to understand: there she was. They climbed into the front seat.

Dave took turns that led them out of town, onto the road that went north. Asa had not really expected they would go only to the hospital in town; things seemed too big for town, all of a sudden. “Excuse me,” he said. “Are we going to Raleigh?”

Headlights flashed over Dave's face. “Yes we are.”

He offered no explanation. But then Asa
and his mother never needed an explanation when they were taken to Raleigh: It was Dave's hometown, where all his family lived, and it drew them whenever they did not have a good reason to stay where they lived. He remembered suddenly that it was his mother's hometown too; this was a fact, but not one that he felt very keenly. For one thing, he had known her first in Washington; for another, they always spent all their time in Raleigh with Dave's family. She seemed as much of an outsider with them as Asa did, despite her native ability to talk the talk and mimic the behavior of the Southern wives who had never left.

“Is Mom going to Butner?” Asa said.

“Yes,” Dave said. “She is.”

Asa waited a long time to ask his next question. He waited while they rode between tobacco fields and past gas stations opening up for the day, while the sun rose, pink and then yellow and then white in a white sky. He listened for his mother's breathing over the rumble of the car, and every so often he heard a snaggled intake of air. Dave stopped for
takeout coffee at a diner an hour up the road and bought Asa a honey bun. Asa waited until he had eaten his bun and Dave had drunk his coffee. He waited a while longer. Then, trying to sound very light, trying to sound as if it did not really matter a bit, he was just wondering, no problem at all, he asked: “Will we spend the night?”

Dave looked at him as if he must be nuts. “Of course,” he said. He shook his head at the boy's strangeness, and Asa knew just what he was thinking. Imagine going to Raleigh and not spending the weekend!

Asa said nothing; he vowed he would not. But Dave surprised him. After only five minutes, he said, “Oh!” and hit the steering wheel with the palm of his right hand. He turned and looked at Asa.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “You were supposed to try out for Little League tomorrow morning.”

“It's all right,” Asa said, looking straight ahead.

Dave hit the steering wheel another, harder lick, and cursed. And suddenly Asa could feel clearly that Dave's anger was curling toward
the woman in the backseat. It was
her
fault. She had
done
this, deprived his stepson of a chance to be a regular boy. Asa had seen how Dave's shifty anger could work, and he knew that soon his missed tryout—indeed, perhaps the entirety of his strange life, all predicated upon this lost shot at normalcy—would be another black mark against her, another sin.

Well, for this Asa would not stand. If
he
could get by without anger, what right did Dave have to be mad? Whose tryout was it, anyway? So, looking over, Asa said firmly, “Oh, no. It's all right. I wasn't going to try out.”

Dave frowned. “You weren't?”

“No,” said Asa.

“Why not?”

Asa took a breath. Outside, a sparrow hawk fluttered in the wind over a red clay field. “Well,” he said, “it's a complicated game.”

Dave thought for a moment. Then he let out a long breath. “Well,” he said, “I told you so.”

“Yes,” said Asa, “you did.” And that seemed to do it. They spoke no more. Asa turned then to watch out the side window, in which he
could see a reflection of his face, watching. The drive went on in silence. After a couple of hours, as he stretched, he decided the scrub shortstop, the one who had come in after the line drive popped the other boy in the chest—he decided this kid would hit a home run in the top of the eighth. Yes, he liked that. Quik-E-Freeze would win. He felt a little guilty about this, a little selfish. But what the heck, he would do it: the Cool Guys would win, and he would feel great. Somehow, he hoped, he deserved this.

 

ONE

Asa was in love. He loved Jean Williams. She had been in his class since the fifth grade—or rather, he had been in hers. Fifth, sixth, and now seventh: Asa and his mother had not moved, and not moved, and not moved again. Now he could let himself count on seeing Jean every day—every moment, if he liked: a glance across the room would produce her. So far, everything he noticed about her was just right, whether it was the lean tension in her hands as she held a book, the sound of her voice pretending to order “
riz, petit pois
” from a mock restaurant in French class, or the curves of her neck when her hair swayed during field hockey games he watched after school in secret. It all added up to a sum inside him, a simple sum.

Their first meeting had been simple, too. One day midway through the fifth grade she came over during art class and sat sideways in the desk in front of him. Around them kids were gabbing: the art teacher allowed roaming and talking, in the spirit of creative freedom. Jean sat, turned toward him, and leaned one elbow on the edge of his desk. That small gesture, the intrusion into his territory, shook him with a sudden pleasure. It was powerful, and despite the ease with which she placed her elbow, Asa had a sense she knew how daring it was.

She said, “You have moved a lot, haven't you?”

Asa swallowed. He rarely answered a question without having figured out quickly what thought was behind it and what response was anticipated. This time he didn't have a clue. So he simply said, “Yes.”

Jean nodded. Her eyes were technically brown, but when she got this close Asa could see they were a lot lighter than could possibly be imagined from a distance, nearer the
color of butterscotch. She said, “I figured you had.”

“How?” he asked.

“You work hard,” she said. She leaned her chin lightly on the hand connected to the arm that rested on his desk. His legs tickled. She went on. “You figure things out, and you attack.”

“Attack?” He must have looked horrified, for she laughed and blushed and put out her hand to tap him on the shoulder.
Tap, tap
. It was like the first time he had been touched by the ocean.

“I don't mean, like, to do battle,” she said. “I mean—well, you seem to know how to get to people. What I like is, you seem to do it to be
nice
. And, well—” She looked at him, and with a thrill he saw that she too felt something that made her nervous. “And that's, well
—nice
.” She laughed at her own verbal awkwardness, and got up.

That was it. From that point on, Asa had isolated Jean and his feelings about her from the rest of the world. This love—he started calling
it that after a while—was his only known instance of simplicity. He wanted to protect it from the usual analysis and calculation that he cast over everything else out there. The protection worked. Things stayed simple. He and Jean became friends. They sometimes talked, mostly about school. They sometimes walked together, if they were going to the same place. Nothing in his behavior could be taken as a sign of the deepness inside him. He never meant to tell her anything about it. Except for wanting, at times, to reach out and touch her on the hand, lightly, very lightly, with a finger, he never meant to do anything direct.

But then, as the beginning of seventh grade approached, an ambition began to grow around the love: somehow, he wanted his feelings to emerge, to be strong in the light of day. He wanted them to do some work in the world. Hiding this fine stuff inside struck him as finicky, almost dishonest.
Stand up!
he felt like saying to himself;
Declare something—
to Jean, he supposed.

But he was wary of this newfound boldness. Several times he almost spoke to her—when
he found himself next to her in the cafeteria line, or saw her alone in a library aisle, looking at the mysteries—but he stopped short. He was not nervous. He just had the nagging feeling that he lacked some kind of knowledge, not about himself or Jean, but about loving.

Willing for the first time to learn, he realized that he was—had long been—surrounded by public examples of the things lovers did. For two years he had seen the same billboard beside the public library, bearing a gaudy photo of a young man twirling a young woman in some land of dance performed in a wooded dell, with hot-green letters begging to know:
IS YOURS A KOOL LOVE
? For two years he had watched girls in the hall writhe when a certain boy passed, rolling their eyeballs and pretending to collapse onto the friends giggling beside them; for two years he had watched as most of the other boys in his class drifted uneasily into some kind of sober association with this or that girl. None of these things had called forth a recognition.

His biggest surprise was the music. For years Asa had listened to music for an hour or
so every night as he lay in the dark in bed. His transistor radio fit neatly under the curve of his hip beneath the covers, and the pink wire of an earphone snaked invisibly up his side. Several times Dave or his mother had popped into his room while the radio was playing its hidden tunes, and neither had ever detected a thing. He was completely secure. Snug in the dark, lying on his back, he absorbed the songs that came to him through the night. They sank right into his bones. Somehow his mind and body joined up to know these tunes, better than he knew anything. After a while “This Magic Moment” and “Our Day Will Come” and “What's Your Name” and “It's Too Late” and fifty others seemed no longer to come
to
him up the pink wire, but rather to come
from
him, as if he had only to open his mouth and create them, full blown, in all their sonic blare and nuance.

And what, exactly, did he know from this music? When Chuck Willis's voice throated upward on each stretched syllable of the phrase “she's gone” (wailing the two words into nine distinct sounds at one point), when
The Drifters dropped into the mysterious swing of the refrain “sweeter than wine…softer than a summer night,” when the distant voices (the Romantics?) sighed with a kind of merry resignation behind Ruby as she promised “and we'll have everything”—what did this teach him?

For two years it taught him nothing he could spell out. Then one night he lay in the dark listening to Timi Yuro say that the love of a boy could change a girl into a woman—and it hit him. The words, all of them he had ever heard, in every song—they were words of love. They were about—or were supposed to be about—his feelings for Jean. Or, perhaps, it was this way: his feelings for Jean were supposed to be what these songs described.

Chuck Willis had felt what Asa felt? And
sung
about it? And The Drifters—all that your-lips-touching-mine business—was that supposed to be happening? Was that what he should be wanting? For the next few days he shuddered every time another explicit lyric careened into his awareness; where before he could snap his fingers and cut a quick step
while singing “These arms of mine…” he now thought of the actual arms, and what wasn't between them, and how much they would not know what to do if something were—and then he forced himself to think about something else.

The pressure began to squeeze. He couldn't run away, but he couldn't figure everything out by himself. He faced the fact that he needed some help; he needed to talk to somebody. Somebody who had brought love out of the silence, and put it to work. Somebody who had made love the decisive thing.

TWO

Since her last stay in the hospital, Asa's mother's life had changed. She came home just before the sixth grade started, and she was very settled. Not depressed: she smiled a great deal, with good humor and all that, but she sat a lot and watched things. Before, most of the time she
had been wild with energy, constantly active, sometimes scary, always interesting. When he got home from school, she might be composing a symphonic mystery meal using ten pots and twelve mixing bowls, flour and goo all over the kitchen, a meal that never appeared on the dinner table; she might be on a ladder painting some of the shutters yellow, quitting halfway through and leaving Dave to mutter and Asa to scrape paint for three weekends. Sometimes, too, the whole house was heavy with a day's worth of darkness, and his mother was asleep. But even the sleep days were extreme enough to be intriguing, in the whole mix of things.

But for the past year when Asa got home from school every day, his mother was watching old movies on television in the living room. She greeted him cheerily from the sofa, reaching up to pull him down for a kiss. At least one window was always open and the air was pretty fresh, but the blinds were down. She said one or the other of her pills made her eyes sensitive.

Asa always sat with her for a few minutes in
front of the television set, answering her questions about school. She almost never looked at the screen while he was there. She held his hand and asked him about his day. He, on the other hand, found himself watching. If something happened on the screen, he would interrupt his own school report to point it out to her; he did not want her to miss anything on his account. She never even glanced, but continued to regard him with an expectant smile.

Every day, after fifteen minutes, he got up and went to his room and got her pills. She always had water in the living room, but he brought her an extra glassful anyway. She gulped the pills down with her eyes on the screen; but watching her eyes, he could tell she wasn't paying attention to the movie at those moments. She was pretending to watch, pretending the pills were nothing, not even a distraction, but in her eyes he saw a flare of terror and disgust as sharp as a struck match. He left her alone for a while then, coming back through the room a few times just to check up silently.

But today he did not leave. She swallowed
her pills, settled back with the brief rage in her eyes, and stared at the screen. After a few minutes she looked at him, puzzled.

“What is it?” she said.

“I want to ask you about something.” Once again, he did not meet her gaze. On the screen, a young man whose hair was shiny with pomade stared sadly out the window of an elegant apartment at the lights of a city far below. From the slick hair, the rich material of the curtains, and the way he smoked his cigarette, Asa could tell the movie was from the 1930s. The way they filmed cigarettes in the thirties was different: the smoke looked like rich perfume made visible. A closeup showed the man's eyes gazing out through a swirling haze that would have gagged Asa. But this guy took in a breath and let out a sigh: he had bigger things on his mind than air. Asa coughed.

“What do you want to ask about?” said his mother. She was watching the screen now too.

Asa said, “What do you do when you are in love?”

He had expected her to laugh or something like that. But she spoke very easily, without
effort. She said, “Well, you enjoy the way you feel.”

He waited a respectful moment, then pressed. “Yes, but what do you—you know
—do
? I mean—if you feel all of a sudden you have to
do
something?”

She looked at him. “Well, most people
talk
.” She said it as if she didn't think all that highly of talking, or perhaps of doing what most people did. They both looked back at the television. Now there were shots of a young woman with lipstick that looked black buying something in a department store. It was a watch, a man's watch, rectangular and large. The young woman wore a flat, dense little hat that looked like a round book.

Asa said, “I suppose you've got to talk before you do anything else.”

His mother was silent for a moment. The young woman on TV was certainly talking, telling the clerk wrapping her watch about what a wonderful fellow she was purchasing it for. She sounded nervous, as if she were auditioning for the role in the movie. Asa's mother said, “You don't necessarily
have
to talk. There
are other ways to communicate.”

“Like what? What—” he hesitated only an instant—“what do
you
do when you're in love?”

She smiled. “Well,” she said, “I've always found it very natural to leave town.” Then she laughed, hard enough to make her cough. One of the pills always made her very dry. Asa handed her one of her water glasses, and she drank. Then she took Asa's hand and looked at him.

He met her eyes. “Why do I want to do this at all?” he said. “For a long time it's been enough just to feel things. Now all of a sudden I want to get it out. Why is that?”

“You want to share something you've made. Just like with the comic books you wrote and drew in the fifth grade. You put all this work into making something, and naturally you want to show it off. It's human nature.”

“I'm not sure I ‘made' this.”

“Oh, yes, you did. It did not just happen to you. It never does. We like to think that sometimes.” Her gaze did not falter, but for an instant something jerked in her eyes. She went on. “When we love someone it is
because we built that feeling, bit by bit. It's a
choice
. It's what we make only for ourselves, like me baking three cakes and eating them all while you and Dave were away for the Duke-Carolina game that weekend.”

He looked away, then back. “Even,” he said, “even love in the family? Even that—you choose that?”

She thought for a long moment. “No,” she said. “It's different. Mothers, kids, fathers—you don't have to choose that. But you do have to make it. You make it, you build it.”

“Bit,” he said, “by bit.”

She stared at him. He wondered how they had gotten onto this; here he had started with talk about his feelings for Jean, but in ten minutes he had pulled his mom to the edge of someplace he probably did not want to take her. But she looked away briefly, the moment passed, and she brought herself back to his questions. “There's another reason you're feeling this,” she said, with a smile so soft it looked wistful. “You just want to make the girl you love happy.”