Saint Maybe (11 page)

“Hello?” their mother said into the receiver.

Her forehead was suddenly creased.

“Hello, is this … who is this?”

She listened. She said, “You mean the, um, the
wife
Mrs. Rumford?”

Then she said, “Sorry.” And hung up.

Thomas said, “Agatha kicked me, Mama.”

Their mother closed the cookbook and stared down at it. She stroked the cover, the golden letters stamped into the cloth.

“Mama?”

“We’d better go to bed,” Agatha told Thomas.

“You’re not the boss of me!”

“It’s time, Thomas,” she said, and she made her voice very hard.

He slid off his chair and followed her out of the kitchen.

In the children’s room, Daphne was asleep. They undressed in the dark, using the light from the hallway. Thomas wanted his cowboy pajamas but Agatha couldn’t find them. She said he’d have to wear his airplane pajamas instead. He climbed into them without an argument, staggering around the room as he tried to
fit his feet through. Then he said he had to pee. “Use Mama’s bathroom,” Agatha told him.

“What for?”

“Just do.”

She’d kept him away from the other one all evening. She worried the toilet would flood again.

She lay down in bed and pulled the covers up and listened to her mother moving around the house. Every sound meant something: the TV clicking on and then off, a drawer in the living room opening and then closing, the clang of a metal ashtray on the coffee table. Their mother smoked only when she was upset, holding the cigarette in some wrong-looking way with her fingers sticking out too straight. Agatha heard the scrape of a match, the pushed, tired sound of her breath whooshing forth.

Where were the pills? The popping of the lid off the pill bottle?

At least when she took pills she didn’t fidget around like this.

Thomas appeared in the doorway—a black-and-gray shape against the yellow light. He crossed not to his own bed but to Agatha’s. She had more or less expected that. She grumbled but she slid over to make room. His hair smelled like sugar browning in a saucepan. He said, “She didn’t come kiss us good night.”

“Later she’ll come.”

“I want her to come now.”

“
Later,
” Agatha said.

“She didn’t read us a story, either.”

“I’ll tell you one.”

“Reading’s better.”

“Well, Thomas! I can’t read in the dark, can I?”

Sometimes she noticed how much she sounded like her mother. Same sure tone, same exasperated answers. Although she failed to resemble her in any other way.
At a family dinner last winter Grandma Bedloe had said, “What a pity Agatha didn’t inherit Lucy’s bone structure.”

“Once upon a time,” she told Thomas, “there was a poor servant girl named Cinderella.”

“Not that one.”

“Once upon a time a rich merchant had three daughters.”

“Not that one either. I want ‘Hansel and Gretel.’ ”

This was no surprise to Agatha. (He liked things that rhymed.
Nibble, nibble, like a mouse, who is nibbling at my house?
) But Agatha hated “Hansel and Gretel.” There wasn’t any magic to it—no fairy godmothers, or frogs turning into princes. “How about ‘Snow White’?” she asked. “That’s got
Mirror, mirror, on the wall
 …”

“I want ‘Hansel and Gretel.’ ”

She sighed and resettled her pillow. “All right, have it your way,” she said. “Once upon a time Hansel and Gretel were taking a walk—”

“That’s not how it starts!”

“Who’s telling this: you or me?”

“First there’s their parents! And dropping breadcrumbs on the path! And the birds eat all the crumbs and Hansel and Gretel get lost!”

“Keep your voice down!” Agatha hissed.

Daphne slept on, though. And in the living room their mother’s footsteps continued. Pace, pace. Swish of kimono. Pace, pace.

The night after Danny’s funeral, she had paced till morning. (Back then she didn’t have her pills yet.) The next day when Agatha got up she found the ashtray heaped with nasty-smelling butts and her mother asleep on the couch. Danny’s picture stood on the coffee table nearby—the one she usually kept on her bureau. He was
laughing under a beach umbrella. His eyes were dark and curly and full of kindness.

Agatha never thought about Danny anymore.

“I have to pee,” Thomas whispered.

“What, again?”

He slid out of bed and hitched up his pajama bottoms. “It was too much grapefruit juice,” he said.

Agatha leaned against her pillow and folded her arms and watched him go. The cigarette smoke from the living room made her nose feel crinkly inside. Wasn’t it strange how dead butts smelled so dirty, but lighted cigarettes smelled exciting and promising.

Something nagged at her mind, a bothersome thought she couldn’t quite get hold of. Then she noticed what she was hearing: the flushing of the toilet. Oh, no. She threw back her covers and started out of bed.

Too late, though. Thomas shrieked, “Mama! Mama!” and their mother cried, “Thomas?” Her bare feet came rushing down the hall. Her kimono made a crackling sound like fire.

Agatha decided to stay where she was.

“Oh, my God,” her mother said. “Oh, my Lord in heaven.”

She must be standing in the bathroom doorway. Her voice echoed off the tiles.

“What did you put down that toilet?” she asked.

“Nothing! I promise! I just flushed and the water poured everywhere!”

“Oh, my Lord above.”

Agatha wondered if the toilet was still running. She couldn’t hear it. She imagined the house flooding silently with the murky yellow water from Daphne’s diaper.

“Just
go
, will you?” their mother said. “Go back to bed and stay there. And don’t you dare use this toilet again till I can get hold of a plumber, hear?”

The word “plumber” sounded so knowledgeable. Yes, of course: there was a regular, normal person to take charge of this situation, and that meant it must happen to other people too. Agatha pulled her covers up. She watched Thomas enter the room and trudge to his own bed. He walked like an old man, huddled together across the back of his neck. He lay down and reached for Dulcimer and hugged her to his chest.

It wasn’t like him to be so quiet. Maybe he had guessed the toilet was Agatha’s fault.

She said, “Thomas?”

No answer.

“Thomas, is the water still spilling over?”

“Doe,” he said, and the stopped-up sound of his voice told her he was crying.

“You want to come sleep in my bed?”

“Doe.”

In the hall she heard their mother’s bare feet heading toward her bedroom, and then a pause and then hard shoes clopping out again—or maybe boots. Something big and heavy. Clop-clop toward the kitchen, clop-clop back down the hall. The swabbing of a mop across the bathroom floor. Well, so. It would all be taken care of.

Agatha relaxed and let her eyes fall shut. She might even have slept a few minutes. She saw sleep-pictures floating behind her lids—a black cat hissing and then Ian rattling his dice and all at once flinging them into her face and causing her to start. Her eyes flew open. The lights were still on, and the radio was playing a Beatles song. Ice cubes clinked in a glass. The cloppy footsteps came down the hall, and there was her mother outlined in the doorway. From the ankles up she was thin and fragile, but on her feet she wore two huge shoes from Danny’s closet. She came over to Agatha’s bed, shuffling slightly so the shoes wouldn’t fall off. “Are you awake?” she whispered.

Agatha said, “Yes.”

She realized that Thomas must not be. His breathing had grown very slow.

Her mother sat on the edge of the bed. In one hand she held a glass of Coke and in the other her brown plastic pill bottle, uncapped. Probably that was what had rattled in the dream; not Ian’s dice after all. She tipped the bottle to her mouth and swallowed a pill and then took a sip of Coke. She said, “Do you believe this? Do you believe a person would just have to fend for herself in this world?”

“Won’t the plumber come help?” Agatha asked.

“Everything is resting on my shoulders.”

“Maybe Grandma Bedloe knows a plumber.”

“It’s Howard Belling all over again,” her mother said, which was confusing because, for a second, Agatha thought she meant that the plumber was Howard Belling. “It’s the same old story. Unattached, they tell you. Separated, they tell you—or soon about to be. And then one fine morning they’re all lovey-dovey with their wives again. How come other people manage to have things so permanent? Is it something I’m doing wrong?”

“No, Mama,
you
didn’t do anything wrong,” Agatha said.

Her mother tipped another pill into her mouth and took another swallow of Coke. The ice cubes sounded like wind chimes. She raised one foot, her ankle just a stem above the clumsy shoe. Agatha thought of “Clementine.”
Herring boxes without topses, sandals were for …

“No wonder men aren’t afraid of things!” her mother said. “Would
you
be afraid, if you got to wear gigantic shoes like these?”

Yes, even then she would be, Agatha thought. But she didn’t want to say so.

Her mother bent to kiss her good night, brushing her face with the soft weight of her hair, and then she rose and left. Her shoes clopped more and more faintly and her ice cubes tinkled more distantly. Agatha closed her eyes again.

She tried to ride away on the beat of rhymed words—
herring boxes without topses
and
Johnny over the ocean, Johnny over the sea, Johnny broke a milk bottle, blamed it on me
.

Nibble, nibble, like a mouse
, she thought.
Who is nibbling at my house?

She kept repeating it, concentrating.
Nibble, nibble …
She fixed all her thoughts upon it.
Like a mouse
 … But no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t push back the picture that kept forming behind her lids. Hansel and Gretel were wandering through the woods alone and lost, holding hands, looking all around them. The trees loomed so tall overhead that you couldn’t see their tops, and Hansel and Gretel were two tiny specks beneath the great dark ceiling of the forest.

3

I
n his ninth-grade biology class, Ian had watched through a microscope while an amoeba shaped like a splash approached a dot of food and gradually surrounded it. Then it had moved on, wider now and blunter, distorted to accommodate the dot of food within.

As Ian accommodated, over and over, absorbing the fact of Danny’s death.

He would see it looming in his path—something dark and stony that got in the way of every happy moment. He’d be splitting a pizza with Pig and Andrew or listening to records with Cicely and all at once it would rise up in front of him:
Danny is dead. He died. Died
.

And then a thought that was even worse:
He died on purpose. He killed himself
.

And finally the most horrible thought of all:
Because of what I told him
.

He learned to deal with these thoughts in order, first things first.
All right, he’s dead. I will never see him again. He’s in Pleasant Memory Cemetery underneath a lilac bush. He won’t be helping me with my fast ball. He hasn’t heard I got accepted at Sumner College. Trees that were bare when he last saw them have bloomed and leafed without him
.

It felt like swallowing, to take in such a hard set of truths all at one time.

And then he would tackle the next thought. But that was more of a struggle.
Maybe it was an accident
, he always argued.

He smashes headlong into a wall by ACCIDENT? A wall he knew perfectly well was there, a wall that’s stood at the end of that street since before he was born?

Well, he’d been drinking
.

He wasn’t drunk, though
.

Yes, but, you know how it is …

Face it. He really did kill himself
.

And then finally the last thought.

No, never the last thought.

Sometimes he tried to believe that everyone on earth walked around with at least one unbearable guilty secret hidden away inside. Maybe it was part of growing up. Maybe if he went and confessed to his mother she would say, “Why, sweetheart! Is that all that’s bothering you? Listen, every last one of us has caused
somebody’s
suicide.”

Well, no.

But if he told her anyway, and let her get as angry as she liked. If he said, “Mom, you decide what to do with me. Kick me out of the house, if you want. Or disown me. Or call the police.”

In fact, he wished she
would
call the police. He wished it were something he could go to prison for.

But if he told his mother she would learn it was a suicide, and everyone assumed it was an accident. Driving under the influence. Too much stag party. That was the trouble with confessing: it would make him feel better, all right, but it would make the others feel worse. And if his mother felt any worse than she did already, he thought it would kill her. His father too, probably. This whole summer, all his father had done was sit in his recliner chair.