Offspring (7 page)

A branch was swaying above the treehouse, maybe ten feet up. He couldn’t see anything through the leaves. But something was there. Or had been.

Maybe it was gone now.

A squirrel or something.

And maybe it wasn’t.

But the thrill of fear was there. That hadn’t gone, it prickled the skin all over his body. And somehow that made the treehouse even better, that something had scared him there.

What a place!

He hurried down the ladder.

“There’s nothing I can do,” said Claire. “He’s on the
road
already.”

Admittedly it was early. But the vodka tonic helped. And since Melissa was in for a nap now, Amy joined her.

“Where?”

“I don’t know where. He wouldn’t say. Just that he’d see us tonight. So we could talk. Jesus, the last thing I want to do tonight is to talk to Steven. Maybe two months ago I’d have wanted to. For Luke’s sake if nothing else. But now . . .”

She heard Campbell’s pickup pull out of the driveway. It made her feel strangely adrift, abandoned. She didn’t even know the man except for ten minutes’ talk in the kitchen. But he was normalcy, he was the regular stuff of David’s and Amy’s everyday life—one more person on their side, and by extension on
her
side.
It’s crazy
, she thought. But she hated it that he was leaving.

“I don’t get it,” Amy said. “He doesn’t want the divorce?”

“I don’t know. He said he wants to talk about it. He’s mad about something. He had that tone. Controlled. Edgy. Like he gets when he’s holding something back that he doesn’t want to deal with right away but he sure as hell will when the time comes. He’d been drinking.”

“Good. Maybe he’ll drive himself into a tree.”

Claire reached for her drink. Her hand was shaking. She willed it steady.

“I don’t want him to see Luke,” she said. “He missed Christmas. He missed his
birthday.”

“You think Luke will want to see him?”

“I don’t know. Probably. Probably he won’t think about the last six months. He’ll just be excited to see him again. He’s his father.”

And what nasty accident of genetics was that?
she thought. That Luke should be such a decent kid, with such a father?

Oh, Luke was trouble. He was angry. He was defiant. Especially to her he was defiant lately. But partly that was his age and partly it was resentment and confusion over Steven being gone and the two of them being all alone together. Partly it was Luke feeling powerless to make things better. And partly it was her own fear. Her own frustration and anger ingested and absorbed by him.

He was angry all right. Yet there was a firm core of kindness in Luke, of caring and concern. You saw it in the way he’d looked at Melissa before. You saw it in the way he treated other kids. He wasn’t a bully
and he didn’t appreciate kids who were. Though god knows he was big enough to qualify if he wanted to. He was even nice to the girls in his class.

At his age, that was something.

“You know he still has Steven’s Christmas present wrapped in his room? A bird. A blue ceramic bird they made in school. It’s absolutely terrible. He has to
tell
you it’s a bird or you’d never know what it was. But he made it for Steven.”

She was going to cry.

No you’re not
, she thought.

Amy helped, reached across the table and took her hand. The same gentle squeeze that had stopped the tears dozens of times over the years. Stopped them or started them flowing, as need be.

The back door opened and she started, afraid for a moment that it was Luke. She wasn’t ready to see Luke yet, to have to talk to him about Steven.
I hate this
, she thought.
It’s been
six months.
Am I supposed to let him see him now?

But it was only David. He took one look at them and his smile faded. He stopped in the doorway.

“What’s up?” he said.

“Steven’s
on his way,” said Amy.

“What?”

“He just called half an hour ago.”

David closed the door behind him. He went to the antique Coolerator, took out a beer and opened it. He closed the refrigerator door. He did all of these things carefully, as though door and refrigerator and bottle were all extremely fragile, as though they might break out of sheer molecular tension.

“What about the restraining order?” he said.

“He seems to be choosing to ignore it,” said Amy.

“Oh yeah? The hell he is.”

He went to the phone and started dialing.

“Who are you calling?”

“Vic Manetti. The police.”

“Wait. Wait a minute,” said Claire.

David looked at her.
He’s a very nice man
, thought Claire,
and he cares. But I’m not at all sure about this
. He replaced the phone on the receiver and looked at her.

“What,” he said.

“Luke,” she said. “I’m thinking about Luke.”

He walked to the table. She could feel his anger and indignation held tightly in check.

“What about Luke, Claire? Luke saw you backed against the kitchen wall one night while Steven worked off his drunk by slapping you around. Isn’t that what the restraining order was about in the first place?”

“Yes.”

“So what
about
Luke?”

“Steven’s his father. It’s been six months.”

“So?”

“Luke misses him. He doesn’t even talk about it anymore but that’s just protective. He misses him anyway. I wish he didn’t but he does. And I just don’t know if I have the right to—”

“Of course you have the right. You have
every
right to—”

“Steven was drunk that night.”

“He could be drunk right now,” said Amy.

She felt suddenly exhausted. There was no denying it. The voice on the phone was a drinker’s voice, alternately slurred and too crisply under control. She remembered the night in the kitchen, screaming for Luke to get out of the room, to get back into bed, and Luke running, terrified into total unnatural silence. She remembered feeling Steven’s physical presence loom over her like the threat of bloody death or worse, like a kind of rape, while he slapped her face and punched her in the ribs and stomach and breasts,
targeting
the breasts as though they had some sick special meaning to him, knowing the meaning because for months he had not wanted to make love to her, he had wanted to drink instead, and she had asked him why that night, pleading for their marriage, not knowing he was drunk at first, and he was telling her why, with each blow to her breasts he was telling her why, that it was her womanness he loathed, he hated, her unspeakable flesh.

“I’ll call,” she said.

“Let me,” said David gently. He put his hand on her shoulder. “I know some of these people.”

He went back to the phone and dialed. Claire looked at Amy, and Amy nodded to her, saying, it’s the right thing. It’s the only thing. And squeezed her hand again.

“Hello? Gloria? Is Vic there? It’s David Halbard up on River Road.”

The air seemed suddenly stiller, the house quieter, now that it was happening. Now that he was actually calling the police to keep Steven away from them.

She remembered her dream last night. He was some sort of vampire or dog or snake. He was lying across her body and had pinned her to her bed. His teeth were in her neck. He was a dog and he started to pull back his head with her flesh in his teeth and shake
.

The dog dream, in variations, went all the way back to her childhood. She would wake having peed the bed.

It was the first time the dog was Steven.

“Uh-huh? Okay. Well, we’ve got a kind of situation here as well. What it amounts to is we’ve got houseguests, a woman and her eight-year-old son. The woman’s an old friend and she’s involved in a very messy divorce right now. There’s a restraining order against her husband.

“Yes, physical violence involved. He’s not supposed to see them under any circumstances. None whatsoever. But now we’ve had a call from him saying he’s on his way up here from Connecticut. He says he’ll arrive tonight sometime. We don’t know when or what the hell to do once he gets here.”

He looked puzzled.

“What do you mean have I got a gun? Gloria, are you kidding?”

He listened, half smiling at first. They watched him. His voice got quieter.

“Can you give me any idea why?” he said. “I see. All right, we’ll try it. But I’m not sure it’ll do a whole lot of good. There’ll be somebody there if we? . . . Okay . . . Thanks, Gloria. Take care, all right?”

He hung up, walked to the table, sat down, and drank his beer.

“That was truly
strange,”
he said.

“What,” said Amy.

“Gloria says that Vic and most of the sheriff’s office are out investigating a murder. The state police are involved, too. They’re strictly skeleton staff over there. I told her what we had and she said that, in the first place, they can’t do anything until Steven actually arrives—which I guess I expected—but that if he insists on seeing Claire to call them, and that they’d ‘try like hell to find somebody to send over,’ was the way she put it. She said not to let him in the house if I could possibly help it, to try to talk him into turning around and going home again.”

“What was that bit about the
gun?”

“That was the weird part. Gloria’s a bit flaky sometimes god knows and I don’t know if she was just playing Miss Melodrama or what, but she actually suggested I order him off at gunpoint. Or anybody else I didn’t know personally who came around tonight. Could you
see
me standing on the porch ordering Steven out of here, pointing a shotgun at him like . . . like Elvis in
Flaming Star?
Who the hell owns a gun? And even if we did . . .”

The screen door slammed. Claire jumped.

It was Luke. Beaming.

“Hey! Look, you guys! Look what I got!”

He was holding out his hand, coming toward her, and she might have scolded him for interrupting, some other time she probably would have, but somehow she
wanted
to be interrupted at the moment, with all this talk of guns and murder and with Steven
coming and calling the police in the first place, so she smiled at him, what she hoped was a bright normal smile, and looked down into his hand at the tiny white bones that chance had arranged almost to correspond to
his
bones, to the bones of the palm of his hand splayed toward the fingers, as though she were looking inside him, into his flesh. At
him
, really. At frailty.

At mortality.

Steven Carey saw her on the bridge, backpack on the ground in front of her, just beyond the Kennebunk entrance to the highway.

It was rare you saw a girl hitching alone these days. He was in the slow lane doing sixty-five. His reactions were still very good. He pulled over.

Through the rearview mirror he saw her haul the heavy pack up onto her shoulder and run awkwardly toward the car. The weight of the pack made her run at an angle. It threw her balance off. She looked like the cat he’d run over one night after a high school dance. He’d been driving his father’s old Pontiac. He’d stopped the car in the street to watch the cat in the headlights. The cat was leaking brain fluid and trying to run away, running at an angle.

He used a switch on the panel of the Mercedes’ armrest to unlock the back door and another to roll
down the window on the frontseat passenger side. The girl appeared at the window and looked at him.

She looked wary. But you could see that she was impressed by the navy blue Paul Stuart suit and the darker blue Mercedes.

Blue was the color for inspiring trust in juries.

“Hi,” he said. He smiled. “Put the pack in the back. Hop in.”

The girl did as she was told. He watched her through the rearview mirror. She wasn’t particularly pretty—nose a little too sharp, face a little too round. Eighteen or so and about ten pounds overweight. Thin brown hair. The usual jeans. And a pale green washed-out T-shirt that read, “Where the hell is Montserrat?” on the front and gave you a map of the Caribbean on the back.

She was strong. She handled the backpack well. And well mannered. She was careful not to slam the door.

She wore a bra.

They all did these days.

She got in front and he pulled away from the shoulder. He punched in the cigarette lighter and drew out a Winston.

“How far are you going?” she asked.

Her voice was breathy. He was disinclined toward breathy.

“Pretty much all the way up the coast,” he said. He laughed. “Some godforsaken place called Dead River. You?”

“Portland.”

He nodded. “There’s an exit right off here.”

“I know,” she said. “Thanks.” And finally she smiled. “Nice car,” she said.

“Thank you.”

There wasn’t much traffic. He drove easily, carefully, edging it up to sixty-five again and no further.

The lighter hadn’t popped. He pulled it out and it wasn’t even warm. The goddamn thing was broken. He felt like throwing the goddamn thing out the goddamn window. He took a pack of matches out of his jacket pocket and lit the Winston.

It was getting on to dusk, and though he had no need of them yet, he switched on the headlights.

“What’s in Portland?” he asked her.

She was biting at one of her fingernails. “My boyfriend goes to school there.”

The girl had a boyfriend.

The girl was getting laid.

The girl took off the bra and the boyfriend sucked her nipples
.

“You’re a student too?” he asked.

“I quit for a year. I wanted to work for a while. I go back in September.”

“Sure. Plenty of time for work,” he said.

She nodded. “I guess.”

Plenty of time
, he thought.
I ought to know
. Military academy to college to law school to practice practice
practice
. . .

She bit her nail again.

Marion did that.

A very bad habit.