Among the Ten Thousand Things (19 page)

That night off the phone Jack wouldn’t remember but in snatches. What he’d remember best was wanting, that he’d wanted for so many things. He’d wanted it to be an hour ago, or two, before the call, or a year ago, or several, whenever he’d started drifting. For it to be home. For home to be ten years ago. For ten years ago to be when he was still young.

Also, he wanted a drink, and for that he needed a crowbar. How else would he get into Charles’s damn cabinet.

After two or after three, he crept down the stairs and into the study. He knelt in front of the cabinet and pulled the knobs, stuck the fat of his pinkie in the keyhole, rattled the thing.

He found a letter opener in the pen cup on the desk. It fit narrowly into the void around the cabinet door, knocked down and up against the metal bolt of the lock. He tried to pry the door and the opener snapped.

The lamp fell as he was spinning the whole thing around, and Jack flapped his arms like a conductor—
silenzio!
—palms open to catch the waves of sound as they passed.

The cabinet’s back was not fuzzy fiberboard but dark mahogany, no panel he could lift. Jack reached under and ran his hand along the bottom, and it was like this, on his knees, arm hooked under the thing like feeling inside a lampshade or up a dress, it was with this particular blocking that he became aware of his audience.

Charles, of course, and the hour was indeed after two or after three but, worse, was after four and just past five, five-fifteen, and here was his stepfather come down to help Phyllis with the coffee.

Sound came from the kitchen. He could hear the click-click-click of the gas range and his mother’s low hum-song to herself, la-da-da, and he heard Charles too, who didn’t have to say anything. A while later the sun was up and so was Jack, barely, for morning service, on the disagreeable planks of the church’s first pew.

Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it.

Jack had to leave, quite immediately, after that.

Deb spent her birthday just how she said she wanted: lazy in her boxy blue sleep shirt, blowing the dust off old records with Gary. There weren’t any presents, though Kay devoted twenty minutes to a card made with orange highlighter and printer paper folded twice, and when Simon came back from the sandwich shop, he gave his mother the rest of his ice cream.

The ferry was back to its weekend schedule, and for her birthday dinner, they just made the six-fifteen. The boat was small and tipped easily, which made the ride more fun, salt spray prickling their arms and necks and faces. Like the whole sound playing with them.

And Newport! Newport was where everyone had been hiding. The main square where the ferry dropped them was alive with people, polos and white shorts spilling out of yachts with funny names painted on:
Diablo del Mar
and
College Tuition;
sitting at outdoor restaurants, again with the names: The Black Pearl, The Red Parrot, The Barking Crab; saying cheers over sparkling wine and lobster and clam chowder. Deb could feel her children’s buzzing thoughts, Oh, couldn’t we just stay here where there are
stores,
and where, yes, there are strangers, but none who will try talking to us?

At an Italian restaurant on the water, they ate as the last red crown faded from the evening sky and everyone paid too much attention to the food, zucchini flowers and orecchiette that Kay pressed inside out, like turning one kind of belly button into the other, and the plates soon were empty, slick with olive oil and needles of rosemary. The kids fell to listening and then not, as the grown-ups talked, a little about art and a little about the past.

Gary took up the wine bottle from the table and tipped the neck of it toward Simon. “Little for you?”

“I’m okay.” Simon returned to texting under the table. He was used to his parents’ friends slipping him thimblefuls of champagne at parties, as if they could win his favor that way, like it was some great boon.

“Who you talking to?” Deb asked, her eyes winkingly on Simon.

“Uh.” His thumb darted around the screen. “Nobody.”

“You’re texting
nobody
?”

“This is like Odysseus,” Gary said, scraping forward his chair.

Kay laughed and Simon pointed the phone at her. “You shut up. You don’t even know what that means.”

A rectangle of tiramisu was brought out, and the staff sang “Happy Birthday” halfheartedly. Deb took a deep breath, but it was the sea breeze that blew the candle out.

That night, Teagan said, she’d leave the door open. She remembered about the door but not the hanging beads, which Simon collided into a hundred small clicks, scattering out and into his hands as he roped them together. Holding them still, he waited for the sound of any thing, of grown-up legs swinging out of bed.

Inside the house was darker than out, without the moon, and his vision beat blue until there was light enough for him to let the beads go gently free and climb to where she’d said she would be waiting for him. Quarter speed ahead he crept, past the living room where Teagan’s mother slept, a large mound before the tube TV, on mute. He heard the whistling way she snored, shallow, teakettle breaths.

At the stairs his hand reached for the railing, but he drew it back, remembering the loose post she’d warned him about. This was his first time on her stairs. Coming up on the landing he had to think: Don’t trip. At the far end of the hall, he could just make out Teagan’s name woodcut in pink-painted bubble letters.

The entrance to her room unsealed even before he got to it. She must have heard him, to be already on the other side, stepping back now to let him in. She wore a thin, white nightgown with satin strips ribboning the neck. At the hem it was broad and starched and stood apart from her. He watched her ease the door shut and couldn’t remember if he’d closed the one downstairs.

Making it through the house was like a game he’d won, but nothing was won yet.

She sat at the foot of the bed, and Simon sat too. It was a high bed, with posts, that left their feet to dangle. The room, what he could see of it in the low light, was gently frothed, like the nightgown. Rosebuds bloomed up the walls and on the triangle of quilt between his legs, and something about how pale the pinks, how chipped the white wood and wicker, aged the room—still girlish but preserved—and Simon remembered that it had been her grandmother’s. Over the dresser, Van Gogh sunflowers curled in a glassless frame.

Teagan bounced a little on the mattress and laughed air out her nose. “So.”

“So.”

“Yeah.”

When Simon snuck out of the house, Kay was ready and on the move. She couldn’t believe he was sneaking out, and in following him (again like in a movie), it almost didn’t occur to her that she was doing it too. She felt like a secret agent, light-stepping through the kitchen to pluck her mother’s phone from its charger. In case she lost him.

Clearly,
clearly
Simon was breaking the rules, only it didn’t look like anything wrong because of the way he walked, without hesitation. Watching her brother cross Teagan’s lawn, she could see the growing up of him, a little, where it had started to take root. It had started in his step.

Then he was inside—she hadn’t even seen anyone let him in—and Kay was a little disappointed he hadn’t caught her, even when she’d hurried her feet close behind. I’m not following, she was ready to say, even though it was all she could be doing. That and, It’s a free country. Another line she never got to use.

She walked to the porch and sat on its lowermost step. The house was like a pirate ship alive behind her, beached up from the ocean bottom. The planks, the little rugs and the railing, everything she touched left a trace of itself on her fingers.

Simon and Kay had each taken great care stealing past their mother’s door, a black-ops precaution that was actually unnecessary, because Deb wasn’t in there. She was on the edge of the bed in Gary’s room, wearing her sleep shirt and listening to Debussy on a turntable.

“You know, I bet I still know the steps.” She stood and hobbled on one leg, arms akimbo. At her birthday dinner she’d had a few glasses, and Gary a few more.

“You should see yourself right now.”

“No, wait, I—” She switched legs, laughing. “Wait, here it is.”

Simon’s hand found Teagan’s on the bedspread. He kissed her mouth, the skin around her mouth, her cheeks, her neck. He breathed into her ear by accident, and she made such a happy sound that he returned there again and again.

In the unmoving dark of the porch, Kay ran a thumb over the buttons of her mother’s phone. She looked at her own serious face in the camera, brightening and dimming the screen. She watched the time change and listened to her breathing. She wasn’t sure if it was earlier or later in Texas, if there was much or any difference.

“Jack Cell” in her mother’s phone. It went straight to voice mail, but she left no message. There was a slug on the step beside her. There were no fireflies that she could see.

In Gary’s room, Deb was dancing. They’d stopped laughing. She kept her gestures small to fit the space, concentrating hard on the floor to follow the music. Throwing her hair forward over her face. The girl in
Afternoon of a Faun,
a part she’d always coveted.

“Hey,” he said and grabbed her arm to stop her moving. “Happy fucking birthday.”

“Thank you.” A nod affirmed it. “I’m officially old.”

He stood and slipped his fingers through hers, their hands left to hover in some kind of pact.

Teagan’s hand: warm on his thigh, reaching the zipper of his jeans.

Simon’s hand: brave enough to slip inside her collar and cup the skin just below.

Kay had walked home from Teagan’s house before, but her father was right: It got much darker here, not like New York. She closed her eyes, thinking how long it would be before Simon came out, if he’d stay all night. Wondering what he was doing in there.

The night air slid over her cheeks. A sound behind her—she hadn’t realized the front door was open. Open wide, beads tapping together in the breeze.

“Feel much different?” Gary asked.

“Being old?”

“Being wanted.”

“That, oh.” She laughed and turned toward the mirror, still playing with her hair.

Over his fly Teagan was making circles and figure eights and not really any sense, but it felt good, without knowing where her hand would go next. Simon’s own fingers found her nipple, and she pushed into him with a long heavy stroke that he liked better than anything. His hand under her shirt forgot what it was doing, but her hand didn’t. He could not believe this was happening in front of another person. He saw that she was waiting for him to kiss her, and he did, deep and hard and fast. It was enough for everything, for the whole night. If he could love, he loved her.

Kay slipped past the hanging beads. Up on her toes, surprisingly quick. Forgetting to breathe. Simon was here somewhere, doing things that required the dark and minimum sound.

In the living room, television light. Blankets and pillows charaded as people. Then she was on the stairs without knowing exactly how.

“Turn around.”

“Make me.”

He put his hands on her, thumbs pressing hard into her top shoulder bones. “Deb, you are the kindest, most beautiful, most—kindest—”

“Oh, you’re drunk.” She raised her arms as if to fly away from him.

Teagan was hooking two fingers into the loops of his jeans and leaning back, pulling so he’d follow. He climbed over her, clumsy over her, trying to keep his elbows locked. She slid one thigh between his two, braiding herself around him with legs stronger than they looked.

He would have liked to see everything better but was afraid now to pull away, didn’t want to do anything that would turn out to be the wrong thing. He was pushing up her nightgown and she was pulling down her underwear and the more time that passed the longer he would have to think about what he was doing, the danger of getting into his head and outside his body. He was so sick of thinking things. Faster than the speed of thought, that was how he moved into her.

She cried so loud he nearly stopped, but as she cried she nodded. She reached a hand around and pushed him toward her from behind. As he moved her jaw fell open, and he could just make out the place in her tongue where the stud had been. He concentrated on the shadow piercing in her mouth, the hole within a hole, and tried to think only exactly about how it felt. He was glad she closed her eyes.

Kay stood very quiet at the top of the stairs.

Down the hall, the hard of something rapped against a wall, once, twice, but didn’t sound like anyone wanting to be let in.

Suddenly she felt herself wanting to cry, and what was wrong with everyone, and what was wrong with her, and why was she alone here?

What was wrong, she didn’t recognize. Didn’t know enough to know what she didn’t understand, which was that she’d been feeling—for some time, but more now than ever—she’d been feeling—

There was one sharp, quick sob, definitely a person.

She spun around and tripped over her own ankle, landed on her knees partway down the stairs. Tears in her eyes from the shock of the fall. Unable even to perceive in real time what she was doing, which was flinging herself to her feet, running down and back out through the wave of beads, racing herself home.

Afterward the thing he most wanted to do was to collapse on top of her. But her head was turned off to the side and she was quiet, and so he stood, unsticking his skin from her skin, which seemed to want to stay touching, the soft sound it made, like peeling a Post-it.

He picked his puddled jeans up off the floor. “Did you hear something, before? I thought I heard someone walking around.”

“It’s just the house,” she said, rolling her nightgown down from around her waist. He held her underwear out to her and was surprised when she pulled it back on, slick where he’d touched it.

Teagan didn’t look at him again until they were down in the kitchen. There she handed him a peach from a wire basket and waited for him to bite into it. The juice ran down his wrist and he hoped she didn’t hate him already. No muscles in his thighs at all. Together they tiptoed to the front door, which had been open the whole time, and she let him kiss her carefully good night.

On the walk back toward his house he knew he was happy, because his legs, only noodles before, wanted so much to run.

The record had stopped.

Deb was looking at Gary, and then she was looking beyond him, over his shoulder, to the partly open door, where she saw the shine of eyes, then a face. It was a girl who gave the impression of a second daughter, because Deb believed hers to be in bed already, lights out. In the dark of the hall, she appeared to have no body.

“Baby?” The face retreated into dark. “Honey, come in. Why aren’t you asleep?”

The door eased open and Kay looked to be crying, indeed was all kinds of wet. Moons of sweat had pooled under her arms, and she’d scraped a knee.

“What happened to you? Have you been outside?” Because she had on her shoes.

She got her into a chair and brushed soil from the scrape on her knee, inwardly ransacking the bathroom cabinet, if they had any bacitracin in the house.

“Where else does it hurt?”

“No place.” Kay leaned over her red-glistening knee. “Don’t touch.” She’d fallen twice on the way home.

“Baby, you have to tell me what happened.” She squeezed Kay’s waist, her shoulders, as though she could feel a break if there was one. “Where were you?”

“Don’t!” Kay’s hands threw fists when she felt Deb trying to touch her.

“Honey,” Gary knelt down and held her by the wrist. “You’ve got to tell us.”

“Both of you, please! Stop yelling at me.”

“We’re not!” Deb shouted. Then, calmer, “Honey, we’re not. Okay? This isn’t yelling. Gary, go get Simon please.”

“He’s not there.”

“What do you mean?”

Her mother carried her back. On foot was the only way Kay could remember how to get to Teagan’s house; Gary took his car and kept at an even crawl behind them, wheels crunching the graveled ground.

Kay hadn’t been carried in forever. She faced the opposite direction, arms gripping her mother’s neck, the road bobbing and blurring, Gary’s low beams catching her eyelashes and the ends of her mother’s hair. At corners Deb prompted, “Straight?” Kay sometimes nodding into her mother’s shoulder, sometimes turning her head to be sure, saying, “That way.”

They were coming up the block when Deb saw her son, very small, walking their direction. He seemed actually to be strolling. Dillydallying.

“Which is the house?” she shouted, thirty feet away.

He stopped, then jogged to them. “What the hell—what are you doing?”

“You don’t ask me anything right now. Where’s the house?”

Kay twisted her head. “He’s here. We found him. We can go home.”

“Simon, which house?”

Kay yelled, “You said we were just going to find him!”

“I want to talk to that girl’s mother.”

“But you said!”

“Katherine, quiet.”

“Okay,” Simon said, “what the
fuck
is going on?”

“Fine, don’t help. Just like him.” Deb charged ahead, surprisingly quick under her daughter’s weight.

“Just like who?” Simon hurried like a small dog after them. “Just like Dad?”

“Put me down,” Kay pleaded.

“Here, is this it?” Deb had stopped in front of the wrong house. Both Simon and Kay hesitated. It would be the only thing worse. Deb could tell from their faces it was wrong and moved on to the next one, which she could tell was right.

“Here, Simon, take her.”

“Mom, this is insane.”

“I can stand!”

“She hurt her leg. Take her.”

Simon did, awkwardly, Kay passing like an orangutan between them. Deb pulled her sleep shirt down over the short shorts that had been the only thing handy when she was blind angry and they were leaving. Gary killed the engine. Dark and quiet as she climbed the porch.

“I don’t know
what
you did,” Simon said, like a threat, into his sister’s ear. They let a little go of each other, his arms loosening and her legs drifting down toward the pavement. Kay slipped quickly off her brother, and he didn’t try to stop her. She ran with her head down and crumbled on the curb two houses away.

Teagan answered the door. “My mother’s asleep,” she said when Deb asked to speak with her.