Family Night (29 page)

“Yes. That’s right. You know, Margaret. You know.” She did what he wanted. She smelled the strange odor of the gun, its bitter graphite and cold shell. She struggled to stand up. Tracy told her, “Don’t fool around, Margaret. It’s got your U.S. Daily Requirement of Iron. Ready to twirl.” He laughed, pleased with his talk, but she started again and he tugged her hair in one hand, nudged the gun with the other.

Cam had already started into the cornfield, and who knows what happened to Laurence. The cornstalks were dense, like bamboo thicket, rising in a wall eight feet high. A child could become lost in these acres. She wanted to find him, but Tracy took his time. She rolled her tongue, fluttered it, she let him sink deep into her throat to hurry him along. He was close; she tasted the first surge, salty and ferrous. She heard his shaky stuttering, and when he shivered against her, his knees dipping, she pushed him off-balance, stood up and ran.

She plunged into the cornstalks and moved down a row. The papery tassels closed over her head until she
couldn’t see in the dark. The dried stalks rustled behind her, rattled in metallic clusters as she burst in one direction, then another. Then it was Cam. He had Laurence in his arms. Together, they made a wide circle around Tracy, who was whistling for Margaret in long, piercing notes. Cam placed Margaret in the car and she held on to the boy. “He has the gun,” Margaret told him.

“He could have killed you. He was shooting a wad and could’ve brushed the trigger.”

“You saw us?”

“You’re lucky. That gun could have fired.”

“Shit. You saw what happened?” If Cam had watched them, it was proof. She didn’t want to have any proof. Cam went to get his gun from Tracy. The gun didn’t matter anymore. Cam didn’t want the gun now, it was repelling. Cam looked interested in something final. An ending. He couldn’t drive away without cutting it off with Tracy. Men have ways of making things official, Margaret was thinking. She couldn’t see from where she was sitting and she got out of the car and climbed onto the roof of the Duster. Tracy was standing where Margaret had left him, his jeans pulled up but still unbuttoned. Cam moved up to Tracy until they were face-to-face. She couldn’t hear what they said.

Tracy handed the gun to Cam. Cam aimed the pistol and the gun went off. A tight snap reverberating high in the air. Then its echo, immediate, but softer, waffling over the field. They all wanted to hear it. Again, Cam shot into the dirt. The sedge exploded in tight clods, mottled scruffs fanned in a loose broadcast, a red
chevron. Field birds lifted and funneled together. Cam walked back to the car.

Tracy came after him, but he wouldn’t let Tracy near her.

“You’re hitching, pal.”

“Give me a chance,” Tracy was talking beside Margaret’s window. “Tell Cam it’s all part of the picture. Tell him the whole story. Our story, Margaret. We’re doomed. Maybe all three of us, and tiny Laurence. The whole tribe. You can’t single one person out, Margaret—” He was shouting as Cam drove the car away. Margaret fought the glare in the side mirror and watched a mile, two miles, until Tracy condensed into a burning speck. Her breath came and went in severe notches. Minutes later she thought she saw Tracy on the shoulder, thumbing, but it was nothing. Tracy had disappeared. The hot western light sliced into the Duster. She moved over on the seat, into the shade with Cam. The sun turned its serrated wheel.

It was late afternoon when they came into Wilmington. Margaret saw the stacks at the chemical plants, still pumping, a lattice of artificial cloud ascending over the Delaware. When they came down the street and turned into the driveway, they saw an ambulance parked behind
the garage, its interior lighted, showing the movement of people.

“What’s this?” Cam said, “somebody’s in trouble—”

“Is it Celeste?” Margaret said, but Celeste was standing on the blacktop, bouncing a superball. Margaret pushed out of the Duster. Celeste ran to Margaret and tucked her face against Margaret’s waist. The girl climbed onto the insteps of Margaret’s feet and they waltzed a few steps right and left, tugging themselves off balance. The ambulance doors opened out, and Margaret saw Elizabeth sitting on the edge of a gurney, her back to them. Cam asked the paramedic what was happening. The paramedic said, “Oh, she’s getting her blood pressure done.”

“Her blood pressure?” Margaret said. “Is she all right?”

“She gets it taken every week. If we’re in the neighborhood, we stop by to do her,” the man said.

“Community service,” the other paramedic said. “We keep a list of the heart patients. She can come right down to the fire department, say, if she’s out shopping at the Merchandise Mart. We can do her out at the station anytime.” He tore loose the Velcro patch and unwrapped Elizabeth’s arm. He told Elizabeth it was good, 120 over 80, she’d outlive everyone.

Cam was resting against the hood of the Duster. Then he pushed himself up and rubbed the sting away from his elbows; the hood was shimmering. The ambulance had frightened Cam. He studied his mother, who had not yet turned around to greet them. She wasn’t in any kind of hurry. Nothing could pull her away from her health check. Then the fellow was taking her pulse. He
extended her arm and propped her elbow. When the man was finished, he patted Elizabeth’s knee, looked at her, and patted her knee again. The paramedic was speaking to Elizabeth in a low voice no one could follow. Again, the man patted the back of her hand. When Elizabeth turned to face her son, she was shivering. Her tears glazed her face powder in narrow lines, like glass shatters. She pressed her knuckles against her mouth, keeping back a spill of words. She stepped down from the ambulance and caught Cam by his shirt. She jerked his shirt tail loose from his jeans and tried to reel him closer. “Do you feel better now? Are you happy?” she said.

Cam looked over his mother’s shoulder at a stand of trees, Norway maples, burning red in the sunlight. He followed the power lines sagging through the upper limbs. He blinked at his mother’s face, then returned to the trees in the distance. Elizabeth inhaled, held her chest expanded, her sobs extinguished. She told him she was sorry, she was sorry he went out to Chicago. “For nothing.” She was kneading his shirt in her hands; she wedged herself into the narrow straddle of his legs. She wanted to hear the conclusion, Cam’s verdict, but she couldn’t bring herself to beg for it.

Cam freed himself, regained his posture, took his mother’s elbows and steered her backward a few steps. He shoved her gently, the way someone releases a model sailboat on the water. He turned and walked into the house.

Celeste found the little velvet boxes strewn around the Duster. These she collected, placing one inside the other, the lids snapping shut. Margaret told her, yes,
she could keep the mysterious gradation of boxes, but she hoped the girl would forget to take them back to Providence.

Richard was working in the yard and Margaret walked over to him. “I have to get the next train,” she told him. He smeared potting mix on his trousers, patting his left pocket, then his right, until he heard his car keys jangle. He had been digging an even shelf along the terrace. Small mounds of grass clippings steamed along the flagstone sidewalk; a basket of weeds stirred, as if still searching. The black earth was neatly etched with fresh seed. He said he was planting autumn flowers, specimens that can hold on late, far into November.

“I wish I could dig up that yucca and take it back to Providence.”

“Impossible,” he said. “It’s naturalized; it’s got some big roots. It would have to be sectioned.”

“Oh, is that right?” she told him. She didn’t really want to know the procedure for something that she had mentioned for its larger meaning. “Besides, I live in an apartment, you know.”

When Margaret went into the house, Cam took her aside. He told her, if she wanted to, they could go once again to Ocean City. He would try to reach that fellow and make an official appointment to test the Donzi. His face looked electric, newly chiseled with fresh concerns. His eyes were black, dilated, the pale gold of the iris dissolved except for a tiny flashing band. He pleaded with her. “We need a small vacation,” he told her, “we deserve it. A little cruise is the thing,” he was telling her.

“I have to go home,” she said.

He looked puzzled. He looked as if he didn’t believe she existed outside of their forty-eight-hour triangle. “I guess it doesn’t matter. It had nothing to do with you in the first place,” he said.

She didn’t want to be dismissed like this. Didn’t he see that she felt awful abandoning her post? Wasn’t she the navigator, folding the map into a manageable square? Didn’t she light Cam’s cigarettes, taking the first drag, the tiny pink lines of her lipstick smearing the filter? Didn’t she punch the radio, finding all the chart-busters? Now it was over? She still felt the vibration of the Duster and a high ringing in her ears like the imperceptible seismic shuddering that makes an entire anthill pick up and go elsewhere to start over. Whatever it was, she insisted to Cam that her participation in his search must have had an effect on the outcome.

She embraced Cam. The hug’s brief force seemed simultaneously felt and delivered. She rubbed her eyes, rotated the hooded spheres beneath her fingertips. She was suddenly weighted with the knowledge that all of experience must be memorized. She would always have to recall the truth and also what the truth summoned, what the truth seeded in her imagination. There’s just no end to it. All of childhood,
imperishable
, and now this. The truth, the existing truth as it must be recognized, and years from now, rebirthed, reinvented.

She sat against the edge of the drop-leaf table made of glossy wormwood. She fingered the gullies, the tiny mars and spirals that gave the wood its value, its beauty. She wanted to ask Elizabeth if it really was
worms
, if worms designed these golden planes.

There was the doorbell. Margaret went to the front
hall and tugged the heavy door. It was a woman in a breathtaking Kelly-green suit. Her hair was dark auburn and fell in several loose crests. It was beautiful, like Elizabeth’s hair had once been, and Elizabeth took notice of it. The woman was the social worker Cam had mentioned. She wanted to speak with Cam, and Margaret went to get him. Cam walked the woman out to the front lawn and they stood on the flagstone path. She was explaining something to Cam, and he listened, his head cocked in hopeful submission. The woman was trying to help him keep his son, and Margaret thought the woman looked strong, efficient, like she might be able to do it. Then Margaret wondered if maybe this person was using Cam’s difficult case to further her career. Margaret wondered about this woman. Her suit the color of the healthy turf.

When the social worker departed, Cam stood alone on the flagstone sidewalk. He waited for her car to drive away and he lifted his arm, keeping it high; then he let it drop back. Next, it was Darcy pulling up in Cam’s Bronco. She edged onto the lawn’s velvet shoulder, but Richard was around in back and couldn’t tell her to roll it back onto the road. She walked into the house, calling the name of her boy. Laurence ran into the room, leaped up, falling against her. Margaret noticed that Darcy did not bend her knees, she did not meet her boy’s wild greeting. She stooped just slightly, her kisses hardly fell upon the boy’s hair. Darcy was dressed up; her skirt was pale pink pleats that belled at the knee like an inverted flower. She had her hair in a tight spiral with a tortoiseshell clasp. Her lips were edged with
cinnamon liner, her eyes accented in ascending hues of smoky coral. Cam went forward and Darcy lifted herself up on the ball of one foot to reach his lips. The kiss was a public gesture, neither stiff nor friendly. Darcy was making a claim without promising any further contract.

Margaret was filthy, the hair at her temple burned into a scruff; the rest was knotted from riding with the Duster’s windows wide open. The two women nodded at one another in an agreement to remain uncompromised by conversation. They didn’t share small talk. After a moment, Darcy asked, “Are you wearing my shoes?” She knew perfectly well they belonged to her. Margaret tugged the pumps away from her feet, but she didn’t hand them to Darcy, she arranged them on the piano, and Darcy collected them.

“The Duster has new tires,” Cam said.

“New tires? Why?”

“They’re radials,” Cam told her.

“That’s bizarre.” Darcy was frowning. “Why the new tires?”

“A second thing, it’s going to need some body work. I’ll take care of it, don’t worry. We backed into something,” Cam said.

“I didn’t think you could go anywhere and not smash something. Well, as long as you pay for it.” Darcy was taking Laurence out the door, she was taking him home. She didn’t even notice the cut on his forehead. Then they saw Darcy was taking the Duster. She left Cam’s Ford sinking into the sod and she walked behind the house to get the other car.

“Have you got anything left in the Duster?” Cam asked Margaret.

“No, I have everything.”

Cam said, “You have those little boxes?”

“Celeste has those.” They might have been thinking of Tracy’s cousin Franklin, or the storefront with
ELITE
CHICKS
. It might have been something different for the two of them, but together they enriched their private memory in one synchronic, scary sensation.

The wall phone jangled in the kitchen and Margaret went in and lifted the receiver. She recognized Tracy’s tenor. He was singing. He was singing some Bob Dylan lyrics:

“Down along the cove, I saw my true love coming my way …”

“You need help,” she told him. She turned the receiver upside down as she spoke into the mouthpiece. She tried to tell him one or two of her thoughts, but the Dylan song was still coming from the inverted speaker.

“Do what you have to do,” she told him. “Go right ahead. Sing. We’re not together. We can’t
live
together.”

Elizabeth was standing in the kitchen doorway. “Who is that? Is that Lewis?” she said. Her color drifted, whitened. She walked out of the kitchen, taking careful steps as if she were crossing a glass bridge. Margaret hung up the telephone and went into the living room. Cam was leaning forward on the piano bench, ripping loose bits of cat hair from the carpet.