The First Time (41 page)

“You’re not going anywhere,” Jake repeated, standing his ground. “No one’s leaving this room. No one’s going to turn on the gas.”

Now it was his mother’s turn to laugh. “You can’t tell me you took that silly threat seriously. You know I’d never do such a thing.”

“I’m five years old, Mother,” the adult Jake responded. “Of course I take your stupid threats seriously.”

“Well, you shouldn’t.” His mother smiled, almost coquettishly. “You know I’d never do anything to hurt you. You’ve always been my favorite.”

“Have you any idea how much I hate you?” Jake asked. “How much I’ve always hated you?”

“Really, Jason. What kind of way is that to talk to your mother? You’re a very bad boy, Jason.”

Bad boy, Jason. Bad boy, Jason. Bad boy, Jason.

Badboyjason, badboyjason, badboyjason
.

“I’m not a bad boy,” Jake heard himself say.

“You take things far too seriously. You always did. Come on, Jason. Don’t be a whiner. You’re starting to sound like your brothers.”

“The only thing wrong with my brothers was their mother.”

“Well now, that’s not very nice, is it? I mean, I wasn’t such a bad mother. Look at you. You turned out okay.” She winked. “I must have done something right.”

“The only thing you did right was die.”

“Oh my. Well, aren’t we the melodramatic one. Maybe I should go turn on the gas after all.”

“You’re through terrorizing us. Do you understand?” Jake squeezed his mother’s arm so tightly, he felt his own fingers meet through her skin.

“Let me go,” his mother protested. “I’m your mother, damn it. How dare you talk to me this way.”

“You’re nothing but a drunken bully. You can’t hurt me anymore.”

“Let go of my arm. Get out of my way,” Eva Hart said, but her voice was weakening, and her image was blurring, smudging at the edges, like a chalk drawing, growing fainter with each word.

“You have no more power over me,” Jake said, his own voice clear and strong.

A puzzled look crossed his mother’s flirtatious hazel eyes. And then she was gone.

Jake stood absolutely still for several seconds, relishing the silence, then returned to the bed, dropping down beside Mattie, his hand absently caressing the gentle curve of her hip as his mind began picking up the books and toys that lay scattered on the floor, returning each to its proper place. With great care he retrieved the pieces of his broken model airplane and deposited them on the small table where the plane normally sat. Then he watched himself walk to the closet
door and open it, staring at the three small boys huddled together on the other side. “You can come out now,” he said silently. “She’s gone.”

Immediately, Nicholas bolted out the closet door and ran from the room.

“Nick,” Jake called out after him, watching him vanish into thin air. “Catch you later,” he said softly, returning his attention to the two boys still cowering in the closet. Luke sat closest to the door, his eyes open wide, staring blankly into space. “I’m so sorry, Luke,” Jake said, squeezing his ample frame inside the cramped space, kneeling beside the young boy who was his older brother. “Please, can you forgive me?”

Luke said nothing. Instead he leaned his child’s body into Jake’s side, allowing Jake to take him in his arms and rock him gently back and forth until he disappeared.

And then only the child Jake remained. “You’re a good boy,” Jake told him simply, without words, watching the boy’s smile reflected in his eyes. “A very good boy, Jason. A very good boy.”

“Jake,” Mattie was saying, sitting up beside him, her voice lifting him out of his past into the dawn of a new day. “Are you okay?”

“Fine,” he answered. “Just a little trouble sleeping.”

“I had a dream you were laughing.”

“Sounds like a good dream.”

“What about you?” Mattie asked, concern returning to her voice. “Any more nightmares?”

Jake shook his head. “No,” he said, folding her inside his arms, lying down beside her, and closing his eyes. “No more nightmares.”

K
im was daydreaming again.

She sat at the back of the classroom, her math text open to the appropriate page, her eyes focused on the pear-shaped teacher in the sloppy brown suit standing in front of the chalkboard, as if she were actually paying attention to what old Mr. Wilkes was saying—something about letting X represent the problem, as if anything could actually be solved by letting one thing pretend to be something else—when in fact her mind was thousands of miles away, across the ocean, in Paris, France, strolling arm in arm with her mother down the famed Champs Elysées.

Her mother had called last night to find out how Kim was managing at school, with Grandma Viv, with her new puppy, with her therapist.

Fine, fine, fine, fine, Kim responded to each fresh inquiry. How about you?

Everything was great, came the enthusiastic response. They’d already seen the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, Montmartre, Notre Dame, the Quai d’Orsay. Today they were heading off to the Champs Elysées and the Arc de Triomphe. The weather was wonderful; Jake was wonderful; she was wonderful.

Except then she’d started coughing and gasping for air, and Jake had to take over, finish the conversation for her. How was she doing? her father asked. How was school? Mattie’s mother? The new puppy? Her sessions with Rosemary Colicos?

Fine, fine, fine, fine, Kim said. Put Mom back on the line.

It was hard for her mother to talk for long stretches, her father explained, although generally speaking she was managing very well, he was quick to assure her. They’d call again in a few days. Paris was great, he said. Next year, they’d take her with them.

Sure thing, Kim thought now, tugging at the tight little bun at the back of her head, loosening several of the bobby pins and feeling them drop from her hair, hearing the soft
ping
as they bounced off her shoulder and fell to the floor. She reached down to pick them up, eyeing the strange combination of open-toed summer sandals and heavy winter boots that adorned her classmates’ feet. All it took was one nice day, when the sun came out and the temperature rose a few degrees above freezing, and half the student body was already in bare feet and sleeveless T-shirts. Couldn’t wait for summer, Kim thought, straightening up, stabbing at her head with the errant bobby pins. Couldn’t wait for time to bring them one season closer to death.

“Kim?”

The sound of her name crashed against her ears, like cymbals colliding. It filled the inside of her brain, echoing and reverberating, bouncing around her skull as if desperately searching for a way out.

“Sorry?” Kim heard herself ask Mr. Wilkes, who was staring at her as if he’d been expecting a more pertinent response.

“I believe I asked you a question.”

“I believe I didn’t hear you,” Kim replied before she had time for a more considered response.

Displeasure flickered across Mr. Wilkes’s watery green eyes. “And why is that, Kim? Were you not paying attention?”

“I would think that was fairly obvious, sir,” Kim replied, stunned by her rudeness but enjoying the assorted gasps and giggles of her fellow classmates. It had been the most response she’d drawn from any of them in weeks.

The bell rang. The twenty-seven somnambulant teenagers slumped in their seats immediately sprung to life, rose up as one, and headed noisily for the door. “Kim?” the teacher asked as Kim was about to leave.

Kim turned reluctantly back toward Mr. Wilkes.

“I know about your situation at home,” he began. “Your father informed the school about your mother’s condition,” he continued when she said nothing. “I just wanted you to know that I’m here for you, in case you ever wanted to talk to someone.”

“I’m fine, sir,” Kim told him, gripping her books tightly to her chest.

Fine. Fine. Fine. Fine.

How dare her father call the school? How dare he inform her teachers of her mother’s illness? What right did he have to do something like that? “Can I go now?” she asked.

“Of course.”

Kim fled down the halls to her locker. What else had her father blabbed to the school about? Jake Hart, the Great Defender, she thought derisively. The Great Blabbermouth was more like it, she decided, fiddling with her combination lock, mixing up the numbers, having to do it again. On the third try the locker opened, and Kim threw her books inside, retrieved her lunchbag, carried it to the cafeteria.

She found an empty table in the far corner, sat facing the wall, her back to the rest of the student population. She opened her lunchbag, frowning at the peanut butter and jam sandwich her grandmother had made. “I don’t want your mother saying I didn’t feed you,” Grandma Viv explained. “If you’re nothing but skin and bones when they get back from France, whose fault do you think it’ll be?”

It would serve them right, Kim thought then and now, throwing the sandwich toward the yawning garbage bin in the corner, the sandwich hitting the top of the large container and coming apart, falling to the floor, sticky sides down. “Damn,” Kim said, retrieving the sandwich and tossing the two halves directly into the bin, leaving the remnants of peanut butter and jelly on the linoleum floor. Yes, sir, it would serve her parents right if she were nothing but a bag of bones by the time they returned from their trip to Gay Paree. That would teach them to abandon her. Not that she didn’t
understand their desire to get away, but just because she understood it didn’t make it any easier, didn’t make her less alone.

Kim’s stomach growled, part hunger, part protest. She checked the rest of her lunchbag. A box of
2
percent milk and a Snickers bar. Kim felt her mouth begin to salivate. Immediately she retrieved the chocolate bar from the bag and hurled it toward the garbage bin, watching it score a direct hit, disappear inside. She’d given up chocolate bars. They weren’t good for you. Too much fat. Too much sugar. It was important she watch her diet, exercise some control over the things she put in her mouth. Probably if her mother had been more careful about what she’d eaten, if she’d avoided all those sweet desserts and those ridiculous marsh-mallow strawberries she so loved, she’d be all right now. No, you couldn’t be too careful. So many chemicals, so many additives and dyes in everything we ate. You practically took your life into your hands every time you opened your mouth.

Even milk, Kim thought, tearing open the wrong corner of the small cardboard box and watching the warm milk bubble up and ooze across her fingers. Who knew what the dairy industry was adding to the milk to disguise the poisons the cows ingested daily. Look at the number of people who were lactose-intolerant these days. There had to be a reason people were becoming more prone to all sorts of dreadful diseases.

Kim lifted the small container to her lips, smelled the tepid liquid, felt it curdle on the tip of her tongue. Next thing she knew, the milk had joined the rest of her lunch in the garbage bin, and she was on her feet
and heading toward the gym. If she wasn’t going to eat, she might as well get an early start on her exercise program.

She’d started working out regularly after the debacle with Teddy. At first she did only ten minutes a day, a few crunches, a few lunges, some easy stretches, a few laps around the track. But every day a few more exercises got added to the mix, so that now she was exercising almost two hours daily. First came a series of simple stretches, then half an hour of low-impact aerobics, then more stretches, then more aerobics, this time high-impact, for at least thirty minutes, followed by two hundred stomach crunches and one hundred pushups, then more stretches, in addition to running and skipping and jumping and a few more stretches for good luck. Even when she was holding George, her stomach was busy crunching in and out, in and out, because you could never be too fit. You could never be too healthy.

Kim laced up her running shoes, checked her watch. She had over forty minutes before her next class. Enough time to get a good run in, she decided, beginning her first circle around the gym. In another month she could add swimming to her list. Kim pictured her mother in their backyard pool. Back and forth, back and forth, one hundred lengths, every day from May till mid-October. And what good had it done her? Kim wondered, stopping abruptly. All that chlorine in the water. So hard on your hair. Think what it must do to your insides. And you were bound to swallow some of it. It was unavoidable. Kim resumed her running, deciding swimming might not be such a good idea after all.

“Hey, Kimbo,” someone shouted. “What’s the hurry?”

Kim looked toward the wide double door to the gym, saw Caroline Smith flanked by her two clones, Annie Turofsky and Jodi Bates, resplendent in matching red sweaters.

“Where you going?” Jodi asked.

“Someone chasing you?” asked Annie.

Kim tried to ignore them. They’d barely spoken to her in months. They were only interested in her again because she’d been rude to old Mr. Wilkes in class, which meant she was potentially interesting, potentially dangerous. Why should she cater to their cruel whims? Why should she feel obliged to answer them? Except she didn’t feel obliged, she realized, slowing down and jogging toward them. She felt grateful. “What’s up?” she asked, as if the last several months had never happened.

“What did old man Wilkes say to you after class?” Caroline asked. “We took bets he was going to suspend you.”

“No such luck.”

“Who’s the old bag who’s been driving you to school all week?” Annie asked.

“My grandmother,” Kim answered. “And she’s not an old bag.”

Caroline shrugged, her two companions immediately following suit. Nothing interesting here, the shrugs said.

“I’ve been staying at her house while my parents are away in France,” Kim volunteered.

“Your parents are away?” Caroline asked.

“Why didn’t you tell us?” Annie Turofsky said, her high-pitched voice an accusation.

“When did they leave?” asked Jodi Bates.

“More important,” Caroline said, “how long will they be gone?”

“They left last week,” Kim answered, basking in their renewed attention. “They’ll be back Wednesday.”