Crushed (14 page)

Chapter 44

Start-up

She couldn't believe it. She simply couldn't believe it.

Her mattress lay on the floor, and her clothes and bedding lay in a heap on top of the mattress. The dresser, nightstand, and mirror were already gone. The headboard and footboard were gone.

Audrey lay down on the pile of clothes and tried to make herself believe that all of these familiar things would be rearranged in another house as soon as tomorrow, and they would be hers again.

From down the hall, she could hear a man saying, “You're supposed to leave that lamp on. It's some kind of shrine or something.”

“Why's the room empty?”

“No clue.” He paused. “Okay, then. Let's hit the piano.”

Audrey pulled some of the clothes and blankets over her and burrowed into the rest. She lay within the clothes for a long time, but couldn't get warm. Beyond her, heavy scraping sounds and bumps and grunts continued for a while, and then, finally, the house was still. She peered out of the blankets. The light was pale blue in her room, the color of twilight. She lay looking at the walls and remembering Oggy. Did Oggy know they were moving? Were the men taking Oggy's things, too?

“Audrey?” Her father, from downstairs.

Audrey didn't answer at first. He called again.

“Up here,” Audrey said.

She sat up and straightened her hair. It seemed to take him a long time to climb the stairs. When he reached her doorway, he came in but didn't flip on the light. Instead, he crossed the room and stood looking out the window at the darkening blue roofs and white skiffs of old snow.

“I lost the house,” he said.

Audrey didn't know what to say to this.

“I tried to save it, but that's how I lost it.”

Audrey twisted the fringe of a scarf Oggy had knitted for her and wished very, very hard that Oggy were here to stop all of this.

“I was having trouble making the payments and doing the upkeep, so when this start-up company came to me with a proposal for spam-screening software, I thought,
This could really
go somewhere.
And it could have. It was a brilliant idea.”

Audrey twisted the fringe. She didn't want to hear this story. She wanted Oggy. She wanted her house, and her room, and the life that had always been hers.

“I helped the start-up guys pitch the software and business plan to my employers, but they passed. I felt they were wrong, so I invested myself.” He sighed and stared off into the distance. “Some problems developed, and the start-up needed more money.”

He'd taken a second mortgage on the house, whatever that meant. He'd sold jewelry. He'd sold the Jaguar. He'd tried to cut back on expenses. And then Mr. Maryonovich had found out he'd invested in the company.

Her father's shirt was white, almost glowing, against the blue of the window. Audrey was hungry now, besides being cold. She pulled on one blue mitten and tried to find the other one. “What's wrong with that?” she asked.

“It was in my employment contract. No private investing in projects presented to but declined by Maryonovich, Siegel and Greenbrier.”

Her father was quiet.

From the next-door driveway, Audrey heard a car door slam, and then the engine started. “Be right back!” someone called—probably Mr. Key—but right now, to Audrey, it was just somebody completely different from her, somebody whose life was the same tonight as it had been this morning.

Her father said, “I was fired.”

Fired? Her father fired? “When was this?”

Her father breathed deeply in, then out. “Almost a year ago.”

A year ago? Audrey found the other mitten and pulled it on. “Then why'd you have to work late all the time?”

Another deep sigh. “Working at the start-up, trying to make it go.”

Audrey clenched her mittened hands and waited.

“They filed for chapter eleven two weeks ago.”

A silence, then Audrey said, “What about Oggy? When she comes back from Germany, she'll just follow us, right?”

Her father stared out the window and said nothing. Then he said, “I don't think we can afford to bring her back.”

Audrey stood up with the mittens on and put Oggy's scarf around her neck. “That's not possible,” she said. “Of course she'll come back.”

Her father turned to look at her, then stared out at the darkening neighborhood.

“I can't promise that,” her father said. Then: “It's just that keeping the house was my way of . . . keeping your mother. A poor way, probably, but . . .”

Audrey was glad the room was dark. She didn't want to see her father's face too clearly, or for him to see hers. She wondered what sort of place they were going to now, and if anyone—her mother, Oggy—could follow them there. No one would keep the light on in the window now, that was for sure.

To Audrey, it was as if all the important lights had just been switched off.

Chapter 45

The Visiting Hour

Clyde's Monday afternoon was no better. He had his book bag over his shoulder and was feeling better than he had in weeks when he reached the parking lot. The vase was done. It would have to dry now and then be fired, and then he could glaze it for the second firing. If everything went just right, both firings could be done by Christmas vacation.

When he got to his scooter, he noticed at once that its footpeg was wet. Which was strange, because although snow was banked at the sides of the lot, the asphalt was dry.

Clyde bent closer to look, then touched a finger to the wetness and brought his finger close to his nose.

“Would you call it ‘uriniferous'?”

Clyde, turning, found himself face to face with Theo Driggs. Theo wasn't alone. Stepping out from behind a van and moving closer were four or five of his drones.

Theo moved close to him and pretended interest in the wetness. “Looks like some stray dog took a shine to your scooter.” Then: “Looks like a lot of
product
there, though.” Then: “Maybe it was a horse of some kind.” He turned his smile now to Clyde. “Maybe even a horse's ass.”

Clyde didn't say a thing, although he remembered it was the Biggest Horse's Ass award that Theo had won in
The Yellow
Paper.
The cold was chafing, and Clyde's bare hands smarted.

Theo said, “So what do you know about
The Yellow Paper
?”

“What?” Clyde said. “I don't know anything about it.”

Theo actually chuckled. “I think you do. I think you are a scooterist–slash–spineless yellow journalist.”

“I don't know what you're talking about,” Clyde said. He had an uneasy feeling that his words made him sound more guilty than innocent.

“I'm talking about a reliable source—a little rich girl who turned stoolie and sang your song.”

“What?” Clyde said. Then: “Who?”

“A girl with long legs,” Theo said. He looked away, and Clyde followed his gaze. On the horizon was a hilly park, gray-brown and subdued in the wintry air, its trees and bushes stripped. At its edge, two-story houses stuck out of the trees and absorbed what remained of the weak sunlight. Some of the windows were yellow with light, and smoke rose from two or three of the chimneys. Clyde wished he were in one of those houses.

Still looking out, Theo said, “Visiting hour is over.”

Clyde was wondering what this meant when the first blows fell from behind.

He turned, and in the flurry and blur of flesh and fists and faces, Clyde tried to find Theo's nose and shot out a series of rights.

“Fight!” someone yelled from across the parking lot, and other voices began chiming in, too. “Fight!” “Fight!” “Fight!”

Chapter 46

Bearbaiting

Bare trees forked upward into the white sky.

This was what Clyde, lying on the ground, first became aware of when he opened his eyes—that, and the seepage of blood through his nose and into his mouth.

“Back off, juveniles,” a deep male voice said. “The fun is over.”

The tight circle of gawkers around Clyde and Theo loosened slightly, and the man with the deep voice stepped inside. He was one of the security guys, a black man. He looked down at Clyde's face and said, “Oh, Christ.”

Behind him, kids still stood around—guys mostly, but girls, too, watching with bright eyes, their faces pink from the cold, their breath like fog.

The guard looked at Theo, who still stood with clenched fists, breathing heavily. Then the guard turned to the onlookers. “What happened here?”

“Just a fight,” someone said, and then one of Theo's friends added, “That kid on the ground started it.”

“Yeah, I believe that,” said the guard, who clearly didn't. “Okay, why don't all you losers except Driggs find yourself a change of venue?” When nobody moved, he growled, “I'm talking
immediately.
”

The students began to move away, grudgingly peeling their eyes away from Clyde on the ground. They all looked so
interested,
as if he were in one of those medieval street acts where someone came to town with a bear on a chain and people stood around watching a pack of dogs set loose to attack it.

He'd been the bear. He'd been the
it.

He stared again at the long, spindly tree-fingers pointing up to the sky.

“Get up, Mumsford,” the security guard said.

Clyde turned onto his side, breathing hard. He knelt, then stood. His legs felt boneless, ready to buckle.

“Well, I can only hope you screwups had fun,” the guard said, “because now we go see Murchison to tote up the bill.”

As Clyde took a first step forward, he touched a finger to his upper lip and brought it away smeared with blood.

Chapter 47

How Come

Murchison's office was as bright and clean as an operating room. Clyde and Theo had to sit in a kind of foyer listening to the buzz of the fluorescent tubes while they waited for their “guardians” to arrive. Theo's uncle arrived first, a heavyset man whose half-closed eyelids didn't disguise his pride in the obvious difference between Clyde's damage to Theo and Theo's damage to Clyde. Theo and his uncle went into Murchison's office and closed the door. After they left, Clyde was still waiting.

“Why don't you go wash up before your dad sees you?” Murchison said.

Clyde walked to the bathroom, where he got the blood off his face, but his shirt was hopeless. He tried not to look at himself again, or to touch his swollen eye, or to think about Theo Driggs. He returned to the brown vinyl chairs and closed his eyes until he heard the door open. His father was here. Now he would see.

His father didn't say anything, though. He followed Clyde into the office and listened to Mr. Murchison describe the school policy on fighting, and the number of days—three— Clyde would be suspended. “I understand,” his father said, and signed the papers put in front of him.

Clyde stood—gingerly, painfully—and shouldered his knapsack.

As they walked down the hall together, his father put an arm around Clyde and said gently, “So what did the other guy look like?”

“Like he won,” Clyde said. His nose hurt when he talked, and there was pain in his teeth. “I can ride the Vespa home,” he said.

“Not with one eye you can't,” his father said. Then: “So what happened?”

Clyde stared ahead. “I don't really know.”

His father gave him a mild let's-not-play-games look, and Clyde gazed down the long, empty hallway. “It's just a guy who's always hated me.”

His father took this in. “How come he doesn't like you?”

“Yeah, well, I asked him that once. He said I
uglified
his view.”

“Uglified it?”

Clyde shrugged. The gesture made him aware of a deep pain in his ribs.

“I can't leave my Vespa here all night,” he said. “Someone'll steal it.”

His father said, “We'll come back with Mr. Heathrow's truck.” Another tenant in their building.

His father pushed open the school door and they walked out into the twilight. There were halos of frozen air around the yellow sodium lights.

They drove a few blocks in silence, then his father said, “So what's this kid's name—the one whose view you uglify?”

“Theo Driggs,” Clyde said, and immediately wished he hadn't.

His father gave him a quick look. “Don't I know that name?”

Clyde knew his father might not figure this out, but probably he would, and, besides, he didn't feel like lying right now. He said, “Theo Driggs was one of the people I was doing, you know, research on with your computer.”

His father turned to Clyde. “Was that part of the problem here?”

It would have been part of the problem if Clyde had found anything about Theo, or if he'd written
The Yellow Paper,
but he hadn't, no matter what anybody thought.

“No,” Clyde said, “my looking him up had nothing to do with it.”

Chapter 48

To Help His Mother Out

Clyde woke up at six the next morning, the first day of his suspension. It was dark outside, and it was cold in the room. He touched a finger to a lower tooth, slightly loose, and the source of sharp pain when experimentally tapped. The rest of him didn't feel that great, either.

Clyde pulled the covers to his chin and went through a logical process he'd been through a dozen times since the fight. Someone had told Theo that he, Clyde Mumsford, was the Yellow Man. Theo had said that this someone was a rich girl. A long-legged rich girl. And the fight occurred only hours after his giving Audrey Reed the stuff about Wickham Hill.

So it was Audrey Reed. It
had
to be Audrey Reed.

It didn't matter how many times Clyde went through this reasoning; the conclusion was always the same, and always just as depressing. How could Audrey have thought he wrote that stuff? And how could Audrey, who he'd liked a lot, and who he'd only wanted to help—how could she have turned him over to Theo?

Clyde wanted to get up, but dreaded leaving his room. His mother had been asleep when he'd come home the night before. She hadn't seen his face yet.

Probably his father had prepared her, but then again, maybe not.

Clyde lay back in bed, turned his extended hands outward, and opened his fingers into what he hoped might be a Zen-like pose. After closing his eyes, he willed his mind to go white, which it would not do—until it did. Clyde was asleep.

At 8:15, he awoke to a knock at the apartment door. “Marian?” his mother said.

Clyde heard the front door creak open and a cheerful female voice called something that sounded like, “Aye, nane ither!”

“Oh, good,” his mother said.

Whoever Marian was, she was jabbering away in the front room even though his mother was hardly responding. Clyde eased himself out of bed, picked out a flannel shirt and buttoned it over a sizable purplish bruise, then tried to sneak into the bathroom so he could wash his face. But when he pushed open the bathroom door, the stranger was there, rummaging through a drawer. She was middle-aged, trim, and wore a bright floral smock, the kind nurses wore in hospitals. Her cheeks were ruddy and her smile spanned a face that seemed unusually broad.

“You must be Clyde,” she said. “You're looking no weel, son.”

Clyde liked the sound of her voice, but he had no idea what she was saying. That he was or wasn't looking real? He decided not to say anything.

“Been playin' shinty?” she asked.

“Shinty?”

“It's like hockey on dirt.”

Clyde pictured himself on the ground below the watching crowd. “Dirt was involved, yeah,” he said.

She touched his chin—she smelled heavily of lavender— and studied his face with medical interest. He risked a glance sideways and in the mirror saw his own reddened eye looking back at him through swollen, yellowish lids.

“So who
are
you?” he ventured, keeping his voice low.

From her expression, the question surprised her. “I'm Marian from the hospice, dearie,” she said, touching his arm in a friendly way. “Did your father no tell ye?”

“I guess.” Clyde had heard his father discussing hospice, but he couldn't remember what it meant. Some kind of nursing care, he thought.

“I've been comin' in for aboot a week.”

“For what?”

She looked at him a moment, then seemed to make some kind of decision. “Well, right noo I'm awa to wash your mother's hair with een of these”—she held up two shampoo bottles and read a little from each label. “We can either invigorate fine, lazy hair or . . . calm stressed, anxious hair.” She smiled at Clyde. “Fit de ye think?”

Clyde took a moment to translate. Hair was involved, clearly, and shampoo promises. He thought of his mother's hair—singed, it seemed to him, by the chemical meant to kill her cancer. “The anxious one,” he said finally.

“Clyde?” his mother called back from the living room.

Clyde turned and called, “In here, Mom.”

“Let me look at you.”

He stood, wooden.

“On ye go,” Marian said in an encouraging voice. “I'm just getting some hot water fae the bath.”

As he approached his mother's bed, she craned her head to see, but almost at once her eyes filled with tears and she let her head drop gently back on the mountain of pillows. “Pretty bad,” she said, holding out her hand for him to take.

“Your father made it sound like just a black eye. Something boyish.” She stared at him again. “But this . . .” Her voice trailed off.

“It looks worse than it feels, Mom. It's not that bad, really.” Then, smiling painfully, “I was never going to get the Cary Grant roles anyway.”

“Yes, you were,” she said. Then, in a more decisive voice: “And you still will.”

From the bathroom could be heard the staccato sound of water filling a plastic tub.

“Why's that Irishwoman here?” he said in a lowered voice.

“Scottish.”

Clyde gave a painful shrug. “So what is she doing here?”

His mother looked away and seemed to choose her words carefully. “She's here to help me out.”

“Help you out with what?”

In an odd voice she said, “That's all. Just help me out.”

She'd been looking off toward the big window but now she turned to Clyde, and as soon as her eyes were on him, they brimmed again with tears. “I'm sorry,” she said, looking away from him again. “I'm sorry, sweetie.”

Marian entered with a plastic tub shaped like the sinks in hair salons. “Help me clear this table, will ye, Clyde?”

Clyde picked up cookbooks and cooking magazines, a tissue box, and two half-empty glasses of water. Marian began to remove pillows and arrange towels, a complex arrangement she worked like a familiar puzzle. Finally his mother leaned back on the towels and closed her eyes, and Clyde turned to go.

“I want to hear about this Theo person,” his mother said.

Clyde stopped. “Nothing to tell,” he said.

“Dis he play for the ither team?” Marian asked.

“That's pretty much it,” Clyde said, because it seemed, suddenly, as true as true could be. “He plays for the ither team.”

When she heard Clyde's accent, his mother started to laugh—a full, genuine laugh that made her chest heave beneath the sheets. Marian seemed so pleased with his mother's laughter that she laughed along good-naturedly, too.

“Noo then,” Marian said when the laughter subsided. “Nae mare kiddin' on.”

Clyde turned quickly away and went into the kitchen. He'd remembered suddenly what “hospice” meant. It meant the very last stage. Hospice workers came to help you die. To help you
out.

He leaned on the sink, trying to occupy himself with the childhood game of alphabetizing the things outside the window:
asphalt, bucket, Corolla, dirt.

In the other room, Marian began talking about the laziness of his mother's hair and what this alfalfa shampoo intended to do “aboot it.”

Ice, junk, kettle, lilac.
The lilac bush by the fence held granules of ice in its clustered branches. It wasn't going to bloom for at least five months. He couldn't wait that long. Maybe he couldn't even wait until Christmas.

“Alfalfa sounds nice,” his mother said, her voice quiet. “I can't really smell anything now, so you make me smell good, Marian, okay?”

His mother and the deathwoman sounded like old friends. Clyde stared out the kitchen window. It was starting to snow outside, tiny white bits that lay for only a moment on the wet wood of the windowsill before disappearing.

He poured a glass of orange juice and pressed the cold carton to his cheek. He picked up the phone book and turned to
F
for florists. His mother loved any kind of flower, and he had his tip money. When his mother fell asleep, he'd buy the nicest flowers they had in the shop and set them on her table in full view, so they'd be the first thing she saw when she opened her eyes. For the time being, an old vase would just have to do.