Jennifer Haigh (42 page)

They'd parted without kissing good-bye. "I'll call you," Sri said over his shoulder.

But he hadn't called.

For two days Billy had distracted himself with Gwen's problems.

Now his anxiety returned in a wave. Nursing his sister through heartbreak was taxing enough, strange and awkward and worrying enough.

Would she confide in him? Expect wise counsel? Dear God, was she going to cry? The presence of his boyfriend would have heaped on more strangeness. Yet Gwen had seemed surprised by his absence.

"Where's Sri?" she'd asked the moment she walked through the door.

It was true, what Sri often said: he was terrified of change.

He was thinking such thoughts when the telephone rang.

"Hey," he said breathlessly.

"Billy?" His mother sounded puzzled. "Dear, I can't believe you answer the phone that way."

"Sorry," he said, flustered."I was in the middle of something."

"Well, don't keep me in suspense. How did it go with your sister?

I've been so concerned about her."

Here we go, Billy thought. His own fault: he had told Paulette that Gwen would be visiting. He had brought this on himself.

He settled into the sofa."She seemed a little—stunned, I guess."

"Did she tell you anything? Of course I'm delighted to have her back, but I'd love to know what happened. What changed her mind?"

Rico wasn't the person I thought he was
, Gwen had explained.

"She didn't say much. They had a fight, I guess."

"How did she look?"

"Different," he said thoughtfully. Walking to the diner Saturday morning, they had passed a hip hair salon, and for a moment he'd considered dragging Gwen inside—her hair was long enough, finally, that a stylist would have something to work with. But he had stopped himself. The gesture would have been far too gay.

"Darling, that's not very helpful. Can you at least tell me what she was wearing?"

Typical Paulette.

"The usual," Billy said.

"Oh, dear." She paused."And what about work? Can she get her job back?"

"She doesn't want to." She'd sooner work the drive-through window at a burger joint, she told Billy, than go back to the Stott.

Maybe I'll finish my dissertation
, she said without enthusiasm.
I haven't figured it out yet.

Billy heard a strange whirring at the other end of the line."What is that noise?"

"A saw, I believe. Your brother is in the backyard cutting some wood."

"Scott?"

"Yes, dear. He's been here all weekend, working. I can't tell you what a relief it is, to have something done about the porch."

"Scott?"
Billy repeated.

"He's doing a magnificent job. I didn't realize how complicated it was to do an authentic period restoration. Your brother has done quite a lot of research."

Billy frowned. His brother doing anything constructive—hell, anything not patently
de
structive—was hard to imagine.

"That's great, Mom," he said, eyeing the clock."Tell him I said hi."

More whirring, followed by a shrieking.

"Tell him yourself, if you like. He's eager to talk with you."

Oh, Jesus
, Billy thought. He waited.

"Hey, Bill," Scott huffed, sniffling."Mom said you saw Gwen."

"She was here for the weekend." He was struck by the oddness of the situation: his brother was in Concord with their mother, and Billy himself was not. Except for his grudging holiday visits, wife and rug rats in tow, Scott hadn't visited in Concord in years.

"What happened, man?" Scott demanded. "That dirtbag kicked her out?"

"Um, no," Billy said, a little confused. "She left him, apparently."

"She
did." Scott's tone was skeptical, as though he knew otherwise. As though Billy had gotten it all wrong. "O-
Kay
. Why would she do that?"

"I'm not sure." Billy hesitated. "I got the impression that he was up to something—illegal, maybe. And Gwen caught wind of it."

"No shit," said Scott."What exactly did she say?"

"'He wasn't the person I thought he was.' Something like that."

Billy paused. "You met the guy. Could he have been some kind of criminal? A drug dealer maybe?"

"That's an interesting question," Scott said expansively, as though warming up for an oration on the subject. There was something oddly familiar in his tone—a self-importance, a leisurely appreciation of the sound of his own voice. For a moment he sounded just like their father."He was definitely nervous. You should have seen the look on his face when I showed up out of the blue. He was shitting his pants. Of course he was on good behavior with me. The brother from the States.

But there was something slippery about him. A little too smooth, if you know what I mean. A drug dealer?" He paused as if weighing the matter."Yeah, it's possible. Wouldn't surprise me a bit."

Thank you for your expert opinion
, Billy thought.

"Anyway, all's well that ends well," said Scott.

Billy thought of Gwen as she'd looked when she'd appeared on his doorstep, her eyes swollen, as though she'd spent the whole flight from Pittsburgh crying like a child. No, not a child: the sorrow had remodeled her face in ways that seemed permanent. As though, like a war widow, she'd been crying for months or years.

"What are you doing there, anyway?" Billy asked."Fixing Mom's porch?"

Scott laughed, a low, hearty chuckle. "I wish it were so simple.

The porch is beyond repair. I'm starting from scratch here, Bill, and given the historical value of the house, I want to get it exactly right.

It matters, you know? I mean, for the National Register of Historic Places—"

"The house is on the register?"

"No, but it should be. Josiah Hobhouse and all. I'm looking into nominating it. But one thing at a time, you know? Anyway, long story short—"

Too late for that,
Billy thought.

"I met this carpenter the other day—he knows Mom, actually—and he does nothing but historic restorations, on the Vineyard mostly.

He's walking me through the whole process, which materials to use—"

"That's great, Scotty. Listen, I have to run. I have something on the stove."

"You're cooking?" Scott whistled. "Say no more. She must be something."

"Must be," Billy agreed. "Good luck with everything, and give Mother a kiss from me."

He hung up the phone, aware that he hadn't said a proper goodbye to his mother, a delicate extrication that usually took ten minutes or more. He felt a little relieved, a little lost.

In the kitchen he resumed chopping. His whole life his brother had seemed so much
younger
—a toddler in diapers when Billy started Little League, a pot-smoking delinquent when Billy was busting his ass in med school. Then Scott came back from California with a wife and kids, and suddenly Billy had felt old. For the first time in years, he found himself imagining the life he might have had with Lauren McGregor, or someone like her. It was nothing he pined for. Family life, that grimy jumble: tiring and chaotic on a good day; on a bad one, a nerve-shearing slice of hell. Watching his kid brother wrangle two children of his own, Billy had suffered a series of realizations. That his own choices—like Scotty's, like Gwen's—were binding. That like a grave illness, adulthood had befallen all three of them. That fortuitously or not, their courses in life had been set, the only lives they were going to get.

Sri arrived at seven, ever prompt. "What's all this?" he said, peering into the kitchen.

"Dinner." Billy leaned in to kiss him."I thought I'd feed you, for once."

"I can't stay."

Billy noticed, then, that he wasn't carrying his overnight bag.

"Why not?" he asked, though he already knew. Had known it, in some way, all weekend: his stomach, his nerves, the jangle and hum.

"It's better this way," said Sri.

"How?" Billy's voice cracked, surprising him. "How is it better?"

Sri sat on the edge of the couch, but did not settle in. He moved differently in the apartment, as though he were a visitor. As though he had already gone.

"I made a mistake," Billy began haltingly."Asking you to leave. I missed you constantly. Gwen would have loved to see you."

"So it's not Gwen," Sri said softly."It's you."

"It's complicated with Gwen. It always has been." How to explain his weird protectiveness, the fact that, until a car accident knocked him unconscious, his sister had never met a single one of his friends? His impulse, always, was to hide her, to shield her from embarrassing questions. He hadn't spoken to his cousin Mimi in years; she'd taken up permanent residence on his shit list for inquiring about Gwen's health.

At fifteen he'd started the only fist fight of his life, over a stupid joke: Warren Marsh, the twerp next door, calling Gwen his
leetle seester
in a Peter Sellers accent, a high squeaky voice.

"I've been doing it forever," Billy said. "Keeping things separate.

My parents separate from my friends. Gwen separate from everything.

It's just the way my family is."

"So you're not ashamed of me," said Sri.

"Of course not," Billy lied, knowing that he was, in fact, ashamed of everything: of Sri, of Gwen, and of himself. That he was globally ashamed.

"It's hard to explain," he said slowly. "If I had a girlfriend, I wouldn't tell my mother that either. And she would never ask. She wouldn't lean across the dinner table and ask, Billy, are you dating someone? The whole subject is off-limits. Because if she asked me that question, she would have to ask Gwen."

"So your whole family is in the closet," said Sri.

"So to speak." Billy agreed.

"How is Gwen?"

"Heartbroken."
Like me
, Billy thought.
We are both heartbroken.

He would realize later that he should have said it. The latest on a long list of things he should have said.

I love you. Don't leave me.

Mother, I'm Dad, I'm Lauren, I'm Yes, I am.

"Your family is not simple," Sri said."Mine isn't either, I suppose—what's left of it. But they're very far away. And I've been gone so long that I no longer care what they think."

"I don't care either," Billy said, too quickly. "My family. I don't care what they think." As he said it he heard how absurd it was. The biggest lie—among many—he'd told in his life.

"I'm tired of being temporary," said Sri. "We've been a temporary couple for four years. If it were up to you, we'd be one for the rest of our lives." He frowned. "It's as if you're waiting for something to change. You like to believe you can still change your mind."

"But I hate change. You say that all the time."

"Yes. But you like the illusion that change is possible. That's the thing you can't give up."

"Listen to me," Billy said."It can be different. I can—"

"—change." Sri smiled broadly, as though Billy had said something extraordinarily funny. He pressed a fist to his eye. He seemed delighted and furious and ready to weep.

chapter 8

Scott had become an early riser. His whole life he had cursed the alarm clock, but now something inside him had shifted. He made a game of creeping silently out of bed, careful not to wake Penny.

There was a plush satisfaction in landing at Ruxton at sunrise, a full hour before Rick O'Kane. Unlocking the door to his office, eyeing the plastic toys decorating Jordan's desk, he felt a calm mastery of his time and surroundings. Dashiell Blodgett:
Conquer your environment before it conquers you.

He didn't waste these precious early hours grading papers. Mornings were for his own projects. He had borrowed from the library a half dozen books on building and architecture:
Residences of Olde New England, Maintaining Your Historic Home
. Fueled by coffee—he picked up a Styrofoam bucket each morning at Dunkin' Donuts—he pored over them tirelessly. The porch completed, he'd identified several other projects at his mother's house that needed his attention. The westfacing windows should have been replaced years ago; no wonder the house was drafty. A bedroom ceiling showed water damage. The roof had been replaced a few years back, but apparently not soon enough.

He committed his plans to a small grubby notebook: sketches, notes, shopping lists for Builder's Depot. Often, as he planned, he called the mobile phone of Gil Pyle, a carpenter his mother knew.

On his way to an early job in Newton or Wellesley or Newport, Pyle would greet him curtly—"Hey, shithead"—as though they were the oldest of friends. This, Scott realized, was half the reason he called. Pyle would listen to the details of Scott's plan and offer a few curt suggestions: use number twelve, not ten; give the stuff a full day to dry; check out the salvage yard in Dorchester, they got windows coming out the ass. Things the books didn't tell you, tricks that only builders knew.

Pyle shared this information freely, expecting nothing in return.
Your mother's been good to me
, he said.
I owe her big time. Anything you need, man. Just ask.

That his mother knew such a person continued to amaze him.

Battle Road, dear
, she said when Scott asked where they'd met. As a kid Scott had found the battle reenactment hilarious, grown men dressing up in costumes to charge and salute and fire muskets. Now that he knew Gil Pyle, he saw it differently. He wished, secretly, that he could do it himself.

He was surprised to discover that Pyle knew quite a bit about him.
I hear you spent some time in Cali
, he said once when they were unloading his truck.
I rode my bike out there when I was a kid. Landed myself in the hospital with heat exhaustion.
Pyle knew that Billy was a cardiologist in New York; he knew how Scott's parents had met and even, he implied, why they'd divorced. Most improbably, Pyle knew—and this was so astonishing that Scott nearly dropped a hundred pounds of lumber on his foot—everything about Gwen.

Even within the family, his sister's condition had always been top secret.
Don't tell Mamie your sister is at the doctor's.
Without ever having asked why, he'd understood the importance of keeping quiet. That his mother had discussed Gwen with a stranger, a man who banged nails for a living and dressed up once a year in breeches, was stupefying.

Gil Pyle had spent whole summers on the Cape and islands; he'd done clapboards for a Kennedy, floors for a Kennedy ex-wife. He'd built a gazebo for an aged actress in Edgartown, an open-air theater for a rockstar couple who liked to perform in their own backyard. If pressed, Pyle would serve up details—both rock stars kept a stable of beautiful lovers; the old actress answered her door each morning in full starlet makeup, each day a different wig. The stories ended always with the same refrain:
She's a nice lady when you get to know her. He's a decent guy.
About his own life Pyle was equally forthcoming. He had a daughter in college, an ex-wife in Maine, and an old girlfriend in Florida, the mother of his two young sons. He had spent six years in the army; there were stories about German girls and others, Belgian and French, he'd met on leave. Scott thought of his father's threat, years ago, when he was flunking out of Stirling:
Another semester like that, and the army can have you. I wish them luck.
It seemed, now, that Frank's idea had been a good one. It might have been the making of him. Scott could have, like Gil Pyle, seen the world. He might have become a man. Instead he'd wasted his parents' money in one school after another and was no better for it, an indentured servant who'd even sold his own likeness. Day after day he drove past the billboard on Route 11, unconsciously averting his eyes. Ruxton was his Siberia, a prison of humiliations. Only now, empty at sunrise, smelling of floor cleaner and the janitor's weary ministrations, did the place offer him any peace.

Later, after teaching his first-period class, he returned to his office and found the red message light flickering on his phone.

Hi, Hon. Ian's school called again. They need his fall tuition tomorrow.

They were really bitchy about it too. So don't forget, okay?

Ian's tuition.

He hadn't forgotten about it, not remotely. The phrase "twenty thousand dollars" came to mind approximately three times per hour.

The number
twenty thousand
haunted his dreams. His dream self wandered the towering aisles of Builder's Depot panicked and perspiring. He needed twenty thousand nails, or twenty thousand gallons of primer. This dream recurred two, three times a week, supplanting his usual Stirling dream, the flashback of academic panic. Scott lived in dread. Someday soon Penny—and perhaps even his mother—would discover what he'd done. As in the past, his dread paralyzed him. He hadn't yet progressed to planning, for example, how he would break the news to his wife.
The money's gone. Ian can't go to Fairhope.

The bell rang loudly, startling him. He had another class to teach.

He took a stack of weekly quizzes from his desk drawer and shoved them into his briefcase.

"McKotch." Rick O'Kane stood in the doorway in a pale, expensive-looking suit. His tan had deepened. He looked like a million bucks.

"Slow down, fella." O'Kane sat in the chair opposite Scott's desk, hiking up his trousers to preserve their crease."What's your rush?"

"I have class this period," said Scott.

"You don't, actually. I got Mary Fahey to cover for you." He reached into his jacket and produced a long envelope.

Scott stared at him dumbly.

"You have been selected for drug testing," O'Kane recited."This selection is random and, as you will recall, a condition of your employment."

Scott felt suddenly light-headed. His mind raced, trying to calculate how many weeks had passed since his trip to St. Raphael."When?" he asked.

"Now." O'Kane handed him the envelope."You're to report immediately to the testing center on Quinnebaug Highway. Standard procedure, McKotch."

Scott frowned. For his last drug test, he'd driven to a medical complex near the hospital."Not the other place?"

"We use a different company now. The address is in the packet."

O'Kane rose. "It's a ten-minute drive from here. Go directly to the testing site. Don't stop for doughnuts," he said, eyeing Scott's Styrofoam cup. "If you haven't reported in half an hour, they'll call me.

Have a nice day." He watched Scott levelly. He seemed to be waiting for something.

"Then what?" said Scott.

"I'll have your results in twenty-four hours. Oh, and don't worry about your classes," O'Kane said over his shoulder."You're covered for the rest of the day."

Dashiell Blodgett was right about one thing: ineptly, perhaps unconsciously, you forged your own destiny. Fate was a child's fingerpainting, a macaroni hut, a drunken calypso song improvised in the shower. Even in that final moment, as O'Kane handed him the packet, Scott could have talked his way out of it. He had a cold, a backache, a toothache; he was taking cough syrup, decongestants, massive doses of ibuprofen, which might skew the results of the test.

Jordan Funk had pulled this very stunt a year before, a move Scott had reluctantly admired.

Nice strategy
, he'd whispered to Jordan later.

I really do have a cold. I don't do drugs
, Jordan insisted, so primly that Scott knew he was lying. Yet O'Kane had fallen for his story, or pretended to. He might have done the same for Scott, if Scott had even tried.

Why hadn't he tried?

Idling in traffic on Quinnebaug Highway he saw the truth clearly, elegant in its plainness. He didn't
want
to keep his job. Ruxton had been misery from the beginning. As a boy he'd been a surly, reluctant,and underachieving student. Now he was a surly, reluctant, and underachieving teacher. School had been the great torment of his life, the scene of all his shames and rages. He was an adult now, free to choose where and how to spend his precious years on earth. And where had he chosen to spend them?

In school.

He had never wanted to be a teacher. Marooned in California, with a baby he hadn't planned and a woman he wasn't sure he loved, he'd wanted to be a kid again. His mother had dashed this hope.
Finish your degree
, she'd begged him.
Let me help.
Cal State San Bernardino had accepted his credits, the courses he'd selected more or less randomly his three semesters at Stirling: History of the Fertile Crescent, Introduction to Psychology, Shakespeare on Film. He'd been high when he chose these courses, which amounted to exactly nothing. General Studies was the only degree within his reach. He tacked on an extra semester to get his teaching certificate (what else could he do with a degree in general studies? become a general?) and a few months later Scott was standing in front of a classroom.

He had jumped at the chance to teach at Ruxton, imagining Ruxton would be just like Pearse. He was desperate then, delusional, a stoned amnesiac who'd forgotten that Pearse had been a jail to him. At fourteen he'd felt exiled there, sent up the river for poor table manners and teasing his sister. A convicted serial biter, banished from his family, doing hard time.

Jesus, he'd hated Pearse.

As Ian would hate Fairhope.

This revelation so startled him that he nearly veered off the highway.

The money wasn't the point. Suddenly it didn't matter that he'd handed twenty thousand dollars to a near stranger, that Ian's tuition check, when Penny wrote it, would bounce into another galaxy.
Ian's not going to Fairhope
, Scott would tell her.
He's not a criminal. We're not sending him away.

He saw instantly the rightness of this decision. Penny might require convincing, but she would come to see it too. With righteous conviction he pulled into the parking lot of QuineMed Testing associates.

Oh, and guess what
, he thought.
I pissed into a jar this morning. And tomorrow I'm going to lose my job.

The house looked dead at ten in the morning. Scott got out of the car, breathing deeply. His shirt smelled of formaldehyde, an odor he'd acquired in the offices of QuineMed. His experience there had been less humiliating than he expected. For his last drug test, a male nurse had followed him into the restroom and stood outside the stall, ear cupped, no doubt, to hear his piss fall into the sample cup. QuineMed's operation was lackadaisical by comparison. Scott had watched another testee take his sample cup into the washroom. The nurse on duty seemed not to notice that the guy wore a battered Carhartt jacket too heavy for the balmy weather, voluminous enough to hide ten containers of clean urine. Scott wondered, briefly, if O'Kane had chosen this slapdash outfit for a reason. If he expected the guilty to cheat; if he was, in fact, inviting deception. Scott could have beaten the test with minimal effort, if only he'd wanted to.

The garage was open, Penny's van parked inside, as though resting from the ordeal of getting the kids to school.

"Penny," he called, stepping into the living room."Pen, I need to talk to you."

He glanced around the room. The usual disorder: junk mail, the random sneaker, the Diet Coke can on the coffee table. (Penny drank several cases a week.) The smell of toast hung in the air. All this was normal, perfectly usual. Yet something seemed very wrong.

He realized it then: someone had turned off the television.

"Honey?" he called, slightly alarmed. He headed down the hall toward the bedrooms, rubbing at his stubbly chin.
Pen, I have something to tell you
, he practiced.
Don't worry. Everything will be okay.

Their bedroom door was open, the bed unmade. The bathroom, Ian's room: both were empty. Only Sabrina's door was closed.

"Penny?" He pushed open Sabrina's door and stopped short. On the pink carpet, his wife sat on the floor in her underwear, her back against the bed. Beside her, his arm around her shoulders, was a blondhaired man in head-to-toe denim: jeans, vest, shirt. They did not stand.

They cowered like misbehaving children.

"What the hell?" he said, his heart hammering.

"Scotty." She got to her feet, looking stricken. She wore bikini panties and the bra he liked.