Be Mine (28 page)

We finished eating in silence, and when we were done, I stood up to clear the table, trying to take Garrett's plate away first. He'd only eaten half his dinner, but his napkin was beside his plate. He'd put his fork down, his hands in his lap, and before I could take it from him, he stood up with the plate himself and said, "Mrs. Seymour, let me help."

"Thank you, Garrett," I said.

He took Chad's plate, too, and Jon's, and I followed him into the kitchen with the glasses, a handful of silverware.

"Mrs. Seymour—," Garrett said when we were alone in the kitchen. "There's—"

"Garrett," I said, whispering. I tossed the handful of silverware into the sink and turned to him. "I'm so sorry, Garrett, that you had to be involved in this. Please forgive me, Garrett. I promise you, no one will hurt you. It's all been a terrible mistake."

Garrett took a step toward me, and he said, "Did Chad tell you then? You know he thinks—" He nodded his head in the direction of the dining room, where Chad and Jon were talking about something clinical, it seemed, abstract—
mismanagement ... precision ... opportunity for growth and development...

"No," I said. "Not Chad.
Bram
"

Garrett looked as if he were simply, purely, confused. He put our dishes down on the counter. He looked, I thought, with that buzz cut, in that starched shirt, so vulnerable and young I couldn't help it, I went to him, and took him, as I had so long ago (those skinned knees, the blood running in dusty rivulets down his shins) in my arms. He let me hug him for only a moment, and then he pulled away, glanced toward the dining room, and we both saw him at once—Chad, standing behind us in the doorway to the kitchen.

Those voices had been the television, in the living room, not Chad and Jon.

Chad said, "Am I interrupting something here?"

Garrett stepped backward, away from me.

I said, "No, Chad. Garrett's just helping me—"

"Yeah," Chad said. "I can see that."

I stayed in the kitchen after that, cleaning up. When I finally came out, Chad and Garrett were gone.

"Where are they?" I asked Jon.

Jon shrugged. He was still watching the political debate on television. He looked up from it and said, "They went out. They didn't tell me where they were going."

I
LAY
awake long past midnight, waiting for the sound of Garrett's car pulling into the driveway, dropping Chad off—but, eventually, I simply fell asleep to the sound of a coyote, far away, howling, over and over.

The sound of it was mournful, but not desperate—a wild and melancholy dog singing a tuneless song, not a cry for help or an appeal to God. The sound of it made its way into my dream. I was rocking a baby (Chad?—no, this was a new baby, a girl) in my arms. As we rocked, she made those soulful, uncomplaining sounds against my breast, and after a while, I joined in, and it was oddly comforting, and beautiful, rocking together, howling quietly and distantly, in unison, into the night. When something loud (a car door slamming?) punctured the silence outside, I woke up and realized that I was actually humming aloud. Whatever it had been, the noise from outside, it didn't wake Jon any more than my humming had.

I lay in the dark and listened to the silence.

Now, there was nothing out there—as if the night had
imposed
silence upon itself, as if it were holding its breath, tiptoeing, a finger to its lips,
shhhh.

I tried to return to my dream (the lulling hum of that baby in my arms), but it was gone.

When I fell asleep again, finally, I didn't dream at all.

I
N THE
morning, I woke to the sound of Chad's alarm clock, shrill and insistent, and remembered that it was his first day back at the lawn service. I got out of bed and went to his room, and when I got there I saw that he had one hand on the alarm clock, which he'd managed to turn off, but that he'd fallen asleep again—on top of the bedspread, fully clothed in the same things he'd been wearing the night before. His room was suffused with the smell—stale and familiar and redolent of the past—of beer and cigarette smoke.

"Chad," I said from the doorway. "You've got to go to work, don't you?"

He blinked, and the alarm clock slipped out of his hand to the floor.

"Yeah," he said, then sat up and looked at me. "Oh, Mom," he said. "I'm a very hungover boy. Do you still love me?"

"Yes," I said, blinking at the sudden tears in my eyes as I said it.

I went downstairs and made a pot of strong coffee, eggs, bacon, toast, while Chad showered. When he came downstairs I gave him a sympathetic and disapproving look. He was wearing jeans and
FRED'S LANDSCAPE CREW
T-shirt.

"Please," he said. "Mom, don't look at me. It hurts."

"What time did you get home last night?" I asked.

"I don't know," Chad said, spreading strawberry jam on his toast.

"That late," I said. "Did Garrett drink as much as you?"

"Garrett drank a lot," Chad said. "Once word got around the bar that Garrett had joined the Marines and that I was his friend, we got so many rounds bought for us we couldn't keep up."

"Where were you?"

"Stiver's."

"Stiver's? How? You're not twenty-one."

Chad snorted. He said, "Mom, we've been drinking at Stiver's for years. They don't care how old you are."

"Oh," I said. It was not, I decided, the time to interrogate him about the past, about Stiver's, about drinking, but I wondered—when? With whom? Where had I been? How could I not have known? Instead, I asked, "Then Garrett drove you home, afterward?"

"Yeah," Chad said.

"Drunk?"

"Please, Mom. We made it, okay? Don't scold me." He looked up at me, and what I saw there made me take a step backward. It was like a little threat, I thought, the expression on his face—eyes narrowed, lips parted. What was he telling me with that expression? What did he know?

Bram?

Had Garrett told him after all?

Or, that red Thunderbird—was it certain, then, he had seen it?

Or, did Chad know, simply, that his father and I had, ourselves, driven home from Stiver's, drunk, only two months ago?

I said nothing more.

I poured more coffee into his cup.

"Thank you, Mom," he said.

***

O
N THE
drive to Fred's Landscaping, Chad kept his head against the passenger-side window, his eyes closed, but when we pulled up to the enormous garage that is Fred's, he leaned over and kissed my cheek (toothpaste, soap) and said, "Love ya, Ma," and got out.

Fred—a fat man in jeans that hung so low on him that not only did his belly pour out from under his T-shirt, but I could also see where the pubic hair began to ride down into his pants, curly and black—waved to me before he and Chad high-fived each other. Chad turned then and blew me a kiss before disappearing with Fred into the garage.

He still loved me.

Everything was the same.

The blown kiss. The summer job.

Just like last summer, I thought, I would pick him up here at five o'clock, and he'd get into the car. He'd be speckled with damp green bits of shredded grass and leaves, smelling of lawn, fair weather, hard work. He would kiss me on the cheek. He would take a shower at home. We would have dinner when Jon got home from work. If the subject of the Thunderbird came up, we would think of something, Jon and I together. If Garrett had told him, we would sit down with Chad. We would have a long talk. We were his parents, and we'd find a way to explain.

W
HEN
I got home, I poured the last inch of coffee from the pot into a cup, and brought it with me outside, to the back porch.

The sun all over the backyard had lit it up.

Out there, in the scrubbrush, Kujo was barking, howling, so consumed with whatever he was doing that he didn't notice a small white-tailed rabbit hopping mindlessly across the green lawn toward the road. When the mail truck came down that road, blowing up dust and dirt as it does, it had to swerve to avoid hitting that bunny, which continued its straight line right into the truck's path.

T
HE MAIL:

A sporting goods catalog for Jon, a phone bill, a credit card solicitation, and a white envelope with my name and address written on it in an unfamiliar hand.

Inside, a white sheet of paper, and, in black pen,
Sherry. I wish now rd written you a love note sooner. Tm sorry I waited this long to tell you how beatiful you are. I can never let you go. Your mine forever. Call me please. Bram.

I had never seen his handwriting before—cramped and masculine, as if writing with a pen on a piece of paper were oppressive, feminine. My name in that writing looked foreign to me, a name belonging to someone else—to a woman who had brought her lover into her home, made love with him in her marriage bed. To a married woman who had kissed her lover on the back porch of her own house as her son slept in the bedroom over them. To a woman who might weakly pretend that she had ended her affair but who, in truth, had made nothing clear to the man who had written her name on that envelope.

What, I wondered, had made her think it would be so easy to undo sins of such magnitude?

Why, I wondered, had she expected that, with no real effort, she could simply return to her ordinary life after departing from it so blithely, so completely?

Looking at my name, captured in Bram's unfamiliar handwriting, I heard Jon's voice say,
End this now,
and I put the envelope, with Bram's return address written in the left-hand corner, in my purse, got my keys, and headed for the car.

B
RAM'S
neighborhood was an area of small houses only a mile or so off the freeway. It was easy enough to find his street, Linnet Drive, but more difficult to find his house, because there were no numbers visible from the street. It was as if, here, someone had come through the neighborhood and painted over the addresses, or stolen the numerals from the mailboxes, as an elaborate prank. Always the postman's daughter, I wondered how the mail got delivered, how often it wound up at the wrong houses, if the neighbors returned the misdelivered mail to one another, or simply threw it away.

Then, I saw it:

The red Thunderbird.

My hands began to sweat, seeing it. Cold and damp on the steering wheel, they slipped as I turned into the driveway behind that car. I hit the curb, but managed to park, to step out of the car, to walk toward the front door.

It was a light blue house. There was a white birch tree in the front yard. Bandages of white bark had peeled from the trunk, near the roots, and fallen onto the lawn, revealing raw, pink flesh underneath. There were crows in the top branches. They cawed when I stepped out of the car, but went silent, looking down at me from their high branches as I passed under them. Somewhere down the block, a cat yowled, but other than that, the neighborhood seemed deserted, dead quiet. I climbed the two steps to Bram's front door.

It was painted red. There was a peephole in the middle of it, like a single, brass-rimmed eye. The curtains in the front window were heavy and white, and pulled closed. I took a breath, knocked on the storm door, which raided in its frame. I stood still, then, and listened. I heard nothing from inside the house.

I knocked again.

Nothing.

I looked around until I found a doorbell behind the branches of a forsythia bush—its yellow flowers already having bloomed and faded—and rang it, and the bell was so electrical and loud, even from where I stood on the other side of the door, that I imagined it rattling the walls of the house, blowing the curtains open, knocking cups and plates from the cupboards—and still I heard no movement from inside. But when I turned and began to walk back to my car, I felt something behind me, and whirled around to look.

The front door was open, and a woman was standing at it.

She said, "Yes?" from the other side of the storm door.

I took a step toward her, and she disappeared in the glare on the glass. I squinted, but still couldn't see her. I said to that glare, "I'm looking for Bram." I said, "Are you—"

"Yes," she said. "I'm his mother."

I felt my heart stutter, then start. I opened my mouth to speak. I said, "Oh."

The woman opened the storm door a crack then, and I saw her even more clearly. Yes. This was Bram's face—female, older, but she had Bram's deep-set eyes, the eyebrows, the facial structure. She was wearing a white robe. Her eyes were dark, but not suspicious. Was I wrong, or did she look, somehow, amused? Did she know Bram had told me she was dead? (
Why
had he told me she was dead?) When I managed, finally, to say, "Do you know where he is?" she smiled and shook her head. She said, "No, hon. No, I sure don't."

"He's not here?" I asked.

"No," she said. "He's not here."

"His car?" I said, nodding toward the Thunderbird.

"Yeah," she said. "Well, his car's here, and all his things are here, which is certainly a mystery. But
he's
not here. I haven't heard a word from him since yesterday. I must have been at the store when he came home with the car. Amelia is going crazy. He was supposed to have the kids last night. She had to get a sitter."

I took a step backward, told her I was sorry to have bothered her, that I worked with Bram at the college, that—

"Well," she said. "If you hear from him, tell him we don't know what he's up to, but it's time to check in with his mother. Boys," she said, shaking her head. "They never grow up, do they?"

She smiled again. I tried to smile back.

C
HAD
smelled like sunlight and grass when he got in the car. He sighed, sitting down in the passenger seat. He pulled off his T-shirt and wiped it across his face. When he leaned forward to do it, I saw a long scratch on his back. Had a branch, or a rake, or some other hazard of the landscape torn the flesh there during the day? I said, "How are you, Chad? How's your hangover?"

"Better," he said. "I sweated it out."