Leaving the Sea: Stories (11 page)

Mather starts to walk home, carrying the boy, along the bus route, even though it’s less direct. He figures that the bus, when it comes, won’t cruelly pass him by if he stands in the road and waves. The roads are so empty that Mather wonders for a moment if something terrible has happened, and everyone is at home watching the news, knowing better than to go outside. He stops walking and listens. It’s the quietest he’s ever heard his city. The boy, too, seems transfixed, staring into the darkness. But then a bus rolls into sight and Mather stands right over the white line, waving. He doesn’t want to take any chances.

Maureen doesn’t call the next day, or the day after that, and then it’s the weekend. On Sunday, Mather’s parents visit, but they’re so tired they don’t leave their chairs. Mather’s parents have been to Lisbon, and they tell him of eating fish seared on the rocks at the harbor. The flat rocks are heated by torches overnight, and when the morning’s catch comes in a man cleans whole fish to order and lays them out, butterflied, on the hot stone, which is black and oily from the cooking. When you salt this fish, it’s the best thing you’ve ever eaten. You eat it with your fingers. Even the locals eat it, which, of course, is the best endorsement.

Mather’s father studies him for signs of enthusiasm.

Mather nods his approval and says that he’d love to try it sometime.

The boy goes to the front hallway and grabs his little white shoes, then brings them over to Mather. Then he carries first one, then the other, of Mather’s old maroon work shoes, dumping them loudly at Mather’s feet.

“He wants to go out,” Mather mumbles.

Mather’s parents smile with abstract pleasure but do not move.

When he doesn’t hear from Maureen by Monday afternoon, Mather calls and gets her voice mail. He would like to know her plans. The boy is doing fine, he tells her. He’s actually eating, and he gets up twice at night, but Mather downgrades this to once in his message, because somehow the extra night wakings might seem like his failure. He asks Maureen to get back to him so that he knows when to drop Alan off.

He gets no call the next day. The day after that, at work, the nursery is closed. The lights are off and the door is locked when Mather carries the boy over in the morning. Mather waits outside while his colleagues head upstairs. He calls the nursery number and gets no answer. He bangs on the dark glass. Finally, when he is going to be late for work, he takes the boy up the ramp to the elevators and brings him into the suite of offices.

Mather asks someone named Drew what’s going on with the nursery today. Drew has pictures of kids on his desk. He must have used the nursery at some point. But Drew shrugs and looks at Alan in Mather’s arms as if Mather has smuggled contraband into work.

“I’ll go see Ferguson, I guess,” Mather says.

Ferguson is the supervisor and maybe he’ll understand.

“He’s not coming in this morning,” Drew says, his face arranged in an unconvincing look of concern.

Mather heads to Ferguson’s office, anyway, and asks his assistant if he can see him.

“And you are?” the assistant asks.

“It’s just for a moment,” Mather says. “It’s an emergency.” He holds up the boy as proof. See my emergency.

The assistant doesn’t look. “Your name?” he asks.

“Mather,” Mather says. “I work over there.” He gestures at the cubicle with his head. There’s a young woman working at his desk. Sometimes temps from the night shift set up at empty desks for their red-eye projects and have to move when the full-timers come in. He’s going to have to ask her to leave and she’s going to be annoyed, even though it’s his desk.

“How’s Friday at eleven?” the assistant asks.

“The day after tomorrow?”

The assistant is irritated. “That would be Friday, yes.”

“Could you please let him know I’ve had an emergency and need a personal day?”

The assistant eyes him carefully. “You’d better write that out yourself to be sure the message is how you want it.”

But Mather says that he trusts the assistant to get it right. It’s not very complicated.

At home, he phones Maureen’s office and the call is routed to a receptionist. Maureen is not available. But he’d like to know if she’s there, if she’s actually at work today. The receptionist repeats that she’s not available to come to the phone and would Mather like to leave a message?

He says that it’s about her son and would she please call him.

The boy won’t nap, but he doesn’t cry. He sits in his crib quietly, and Mather notices that his breath is coming heavily, with a faint whistling sound. Under the boy’s dark hair, Mather thinks, the scalp looks unusually red, and when he touches it the boy flinches. He gives him the humidifier mask and the boy takes hungry gulps of the wet air. When Mather tries to remove him from the crib, the boy protests, points back to his mattress, so Mather leaves him there, and the boy crawls under the tank of the humidifier.

Mather checks on him later and he is still awake, but he cries when Mather tries to pick him up. The tank is empty, so Mather rinses it out and fills it with more distilled water. The boy returns the mask to his face and Mather can hear a whinny in his breath now. Is he getting worse? The redness on the boy’s scalp has spread beyond his hairline, down his face.

Mather’s mother, before she retired, was a nurse, so he calls her.

“You worry too much,” she says. “Leave him alone. Children are remarkably strong. They’re much stronger than us. You never got sick, never once. You never caused us any problems.”

The next morning the car-pool vehicle does not come. Mather has been up for hours and is packed and ready to go. He’s lost track of whose turn it is to drive today, so he can’t even make a phone call. He’s been so grateful to be part of the car pool, since he has no car of his own, that he’s paid more than his share of the gas, to be sure that nothing goes wrong. He tries not to make trouble, particularly on days when he has the boy. But there’s no car today, and if he doesn’t leave right away he will be late for work.

On the bus there are no empty seats, so Mather stakes out a position for himself against a pole. The boy is pale inside his snowsuit. His face is dry and peeling. His skin seems nearly translucent. His cough is small and weak, and it could be that he’s dehydrated.

The bus lets him off downhill from the Faraday gate. With the boy in his arms, Mather hikes up the side of the road as a stream of cars pass them on the way to work. He sees some people he knows, but no one stops. He’s never hiked this road, and it’s much steeper than he would have thought. He’s drenched inside his winter coat, and the boy’s face is flushed, even though he’s not exerting himself. At the gate, Mather has to show his credentials and they ask to pat down the boy, who goes with one of the guards without complaint. He doesn’t even seem to notice that someone else is carrying him.

The nursery is closed again this morning. Someone has taped a notice to the door, but it’s since been ripped down, leaving the tape fastened over a shred of blank paper. Mather brings the boy up to his office and there are two temps sharing his desk. He stands there holding the boy, needing to put him down so that he can figure out what to do.

“All right,” he says to the temps, trying to sound cheerful. “I guess I have to get in here.”

He has no idea what he’s going to do with Alan today, but at least if he gets his desk back he can settle in and maybe make a play area for him on the floor.

The temps look up at him and blink. “We’re here until noon,” the young man says. Probably he’s in his early twenties, but he looks like a boy.

“Well,” Mather says, “you need to move to the conference room or somewhere else, because this is my desk.”

He shouldn’t have to say this.

“Mr. Ferguson told us to work here,” the other temp says impatiently, a young woman who is so striking he’s afraid to look at her.

The boy wriggles out of Mather’s grasp and sets off away from him, not even looking back, so Mather excuses himself to follow him, until they bump into Ferguson, who is speaking with some executives outside the conference room.

“Well, who do we have here?” Ferguson says, addressing the boy.

Mather leans over the boy, as if he needs to formally present him to his supervisor. “This is Alan,” he says.

“Alan. Is that right? Are you helping your father get his stuff, Alan?”

“My stuff?” Mather asks. “What do you mean?”

“I had a note that you were leaving.”

The executives standing with Ferguson smile at Mather. Ferguson smiles, too.

“No, no, no,” Mather protests. “I had to take a personal day yesterday. His mother is supposed to have him and the nursery was closed. I’m sorry for the misunderstanding. I’m not leaving.”

“Well, that
is
a misunderstanding,” Ferguson says. “That contradicts the note I received.”

His face has clouded over. When someone like Ferguson exceeds the allotted time for encounters with employees in the hallway, he does not try to hide it.

“No,” Mather says. “I’m here, I’m here. I’m not going anywhere.”

“Okay,” Ferguson says, and he looks down at the boy, who’s still in his snowsuit, pressed against the glass of the conference room. “But what about today?” Ferguson wants to know. “What’s your plan?”

What he’s going to do is check the nursery again, Mather tells Ferguson, because maybe they’ve opened it by now, and then he’ll be right back. But of course the nursery is still closed when he gets there, locked and dark, with no note on the window. He asks the security guards if they know anything, but they don’t. From the guard booth, they look over at the unlit nursery room as if they’ve never seen it before. So Mather has no choice but to go home with the boy in his arms, who is so light it feels to Mather that he is carrying an empty snowsuit.

At home he calls Maureen again, but her voice mail is full and she’s not picking up. Mather would try Robert, to reach Maureen, but if he was ever told Robert’s last name he can’t remember it now. Mather knows nothing about him, let alone where his hometown is.

There are a few of Maureen’s friends to try, but Alma is the obvious one, the loyalist, whose negative forecasts about Mather were always, according to Maureen, 100 percent accurate.

“If Alma is so smart,” Mather once asked, “then why is she fat and alone?” He wanted to think that this was an innocent question, prompted by irreconcilable pieces of information.

“Of course you’d ask that,” Maureen said, smiling. “Of course.” She always seemed genuinely happy when Mather was at his worst.

And of course you’d have no answer, Mather thought, back at her, in the unspoken way he often fought with her, but then Maureen did have an answer, at least about Alma’s weight. A gland or a duct or perhaps an entire organ had begun to work overtime, could not stop laboring inside Alma, as if there were always unfinished work to do. Or was it the reverse? The result was that incredibly pale skin Alma had and, yes, it was true, some extra weight. A depressed metabolism, because Alma actually ate less than the rest of us. But Mather didn’t even deserve to know that, Maureen assured him. He wasn’t even worthy of knowing that about Alma.

She picks up on the first ring, stating her full name, Alma Ryan, which everyone does at her office, a publishing house specializing in children’s books. Mather quickly says that it is him, and that she shouldn’t hang up, because this is about Alan, and does Alma know where Maureen is?

“What happened to Alan?” Alma asks in a careful voice.

Mather explains that nothing has, but Maureen is still not back and this isn’t like her and it’s causing problems for him. He’s home with the boy now when he needs to be at work. He might even lose his job because of this.

“I’m sorry to hear that your child is an inconvenience to you,” Alma says.

Mather curses at her, freely and at length, and Alma hangs up. Then he calls her right back.

“Alma Ryan.”

Mather explains that he is sorry and he needs her help. Alan is no inconvenience to him. Alan is his son and he loves him. Alma has to believe that, no matter what she thinks of him. But the boy needs his mother, too. Mather explains that Alan is too little to be away from his mother for this long, with Mather not even knowing where she is or when she’s coming back. Maybe Alma does not know the details, but Alan is not well. His asthma. This is not fair to Alan.

He explains this to Alma, but when he waits for her to respond she isn’t there. The line is dead. It is possible that Alma hung up as soon as she heard Mather’s voice. She doesn’t pick up again.

In the late afternoon, the boy won’t breathe through his mask. He covers his mouth with his hands and turns away. Mather tries to listen to his breath, but the boy won’t stay put. Still, Mather hears a whistle in the boy’s lungs, and he pictures them shriveling inside the boy’s small chest, as dry as paper curling up in the heat. He knows that if the boy would inhale the vapors from the mask his lungs would lubricate and he would feel better, but the boy is stubborn and the more Mather tries to press the mask over his face, the more he twists out of reach.

Mather reminds himself that it isn’t serious. The treatments are supposedly optional, meant to increase the boy’s comfort. It is only asthma. But the boy is pale and certainly too little for his age, and he sits listlessly on the rug after his nap, uninterested in the toy cars that Mather has arranged around him.

Mather schedules a sitter, and the next morning he shows her around the apartment while the boy clings to him. Mather demonstrates the ventilator to the sitter, but it is clear that she has already decided that it is too complicated for her to operate.

Mather was going to leave early for the bus stop, to be sure that he wasn’t late for work, but then his doorbell rings, and he runs downstairs to the car-pool vehicle, the boy crying behind him in the sitter’s arms. A proper good-bye would only have made it worse, and the boy will recover faster this way. In any case, Mather needs to go to work. This is how it has to be.

In the dark car, no one so much as looks his way. Mather wonders what happens day after day in this car before he is picked up that makes for such grim silence. They stare ahead while he settles in and buckles his seat belt, and for a moment Mather feels the enormous relief of traveling alone, even if there are mute coworkers pressed against him. He has no one to take care of and he can relax.