Evening News Page 5

  Shaken, taken aback by her sudden brutish impulse, she reached out and tweaked the braid, as she often did, playfully. It was a routine. She would tug and he would stick out his tongue, as if the two were connected. But this time he didn’t play. He just grabbed her hand and held it so hard, it hurt.

  “Come on,” she said, tugging him up. “Let’s go home.”

  She noticed an obese woman in pale green hospital scrubs watching them, Giselle in particular, suspiciously. As if sizing her up as a possible child abuser. Was this a tantrum over a candy bar or something more sinister? The woman had her arms full of half-price chocolate Easter eggs. Giselle wondered if she actually worked at a hospital or just wore the loose pajamas for comfort. When the woman saw that Giselle saw she was watching them, she didn’t look away as most people would have. She stood her ground. “Come on, Teddy,” Giselle whispered. “People are looking at us.”

  At that he opened one eye and looked up, right at the formidable woman in green. Then he looked at Giselle and must have seen something that reassured him, because he stood up, wiped his nose with the back of his hand, and managed a trembly “okay.”

  Giselle held his hand as they walked out of the store and started across the spooky, wet parking lot, the way she used to do when he was younger. Suddenly he stopped and said, “My bike.” His voice sounded timid, but his posture looked stubborn.

  She wanted to leave the bike for later. She wanted to say, It’s raining. We’ll get it tomorrow. But under the circumstances, she was afraid he would interpret it as some form of punishment, of rejection, so she sighed and turned back. “Okay, go get it.”

  He ran back to the bike rack, the heels of his trendy sneakers flashing on and off in the dark like fireflies. Silently, he wheeled the bike, carefully avoiding puddles, to the car and tried his best to help as Giselle struggled to fit it into the Honda. Mostly he just succeeded in getting in the way, and she just managed to restrain herself from snapping at him, “Let me do it.” She felt a sharp tug as she tried to straighten up. The shoulder strap of her purse had twined itself around the bike’s handlebars. She swore under her breath, trying to free it, then just flung it on top of the bike and slammed the hatchback.

  Teddy sat meekly in his seat as she started the engine and turned on the lights. She could see him crying again and she sat there for a second, exhausted and overwhelmed by how difficult this was going to be, how every word and gesture at this juncture seemed to call for a delicacy and restraint that seemed to require too much energy. She could barely lift her feet off the ground, let alone tiptoe through a minefield. And then, on top of all that, she berated herself for feeling this way. Shouldn’t the right words and gestures just come naturally? She was his mother, after all. Where was her unconditional maternal love? Was anything in this world ever truly unconditional? Didn’t everything have its breaking point? She wasn’t God, after all. She remembered her cathechism: God is good. God is great. God has no beginning or end. It occurred to her that it was just as well she didn’t really believe in God. Maybe some mothers could lose a child and keep their faith, but she knew she wasn’t one of them. She leaned over, patted Teddy’s knee, and said, “It was an accident. No one blames you.”

  “Really?” Teddy’s voice sounded heavy and waterlogged, as if it were bubbling up from the bottom of some deep, dark pond.

  “Really.” As she shifted the car into reverse, she flashed on Dan’s fist pounding the night table and his voice muttering, “Stupid kids,” the lamp shattering into pieces on the floor. She wondered how many other lies and half-truths she would have to tell before they were through this. Teddy mumbled something she couldn’t hear. She stepped on the brake and turned to him impatiently. “What?”

  “Your seat belt,” he said. “You forgot to put it on.”

  A spark of love flamed up inside her. Giselle crushed him against her, practically strangling him in his shoulder belt, and let out a couple of choked sobs — as if she were the one being strangled — even though on the way over she had ordered herself not to cry in front of him. At least not tonight. But he seemed relieved. She felt the brittleness melt a bit as he patted her back and whimpered over and over, “I’m sorry, Mom, I’m sorry.”

  “I know,” she said, digging in her pocket for a tissue. “I know you’re sorry.” She wanted to say, Tell me it wasn’t you. Tell me it was Eric. Instead, she bit her lip, and whatever superhuman force that allows mothers to lift cars off crushed infants enabled her to keep her mouth shut.

  The short ride home was silent except for the radio playing what Dan called elevator music. Teddy sat rigidly, clutching his Goosebumps paperback in his lap. She found herself driving slower and slower, as if the car were dragging its feet, as they approached Buena Vista. Luisa’s big Buick was gone. She no longer drove at night, so Giselle assumed that Dan had given her a ride back to her condo, which was only a few minutes away. She doubted that he’d be gone long. Usually she handed Teddy the Genie — he got a kick out of levitating the garage door — but tonight she just punched the button herself, pulled into the crowded garage next to Dan’s twin Honda Civic, and turned off the motor. He just sat there. They both seemed reluctant to go inside. Finally she said, “You have to remember that Dan’s still in shock. We all are,” she added, not wanting it to sound as if she were criticizing Dan. Already she could see the danger in taking sides. “He might not know what he’s saying right now. You might need to give him a little time — a couple of days — to, you know, get hold of himself.” When Teddy didn’t say anything, she asked, “Do you know what I’m saying?”

  “What about my dad? He said I could go there.” Seeing the look on her face, he added, “I mean for a while.”

  “I told him we’d call him in the morning. First thing.” She got out of the car and locked the door, then opened the hatchback to get her purse. “Can we just leave the bike till morning?”

  “I don’t care,” he said sullenly. “Why can’t I go to Nebraska?”

  “You have school,” she said. He just looked at her as if they both knew this was a ridiculous answer. She sighed. “We all think it’s important that you stay here right now. We need to pull together as a family. There’s Trina’s funeral and —”

  “I don’t want to go to the funeral!” he interrupted. “Don’t make me go. Please, pleee-aase.” He sounded on the verge of hysterics. She hadn’t even thought ahead to the funeral. The word coming out of her mouth shocked her. Her knees buckled. She leaned against the car to steady herself. He was tugging frantically on her purse strap, pleading with her.

  “I don’t know, Teddy,” she sighed again. “We’ll see.” She shook him off, maneuvering her way past the lawn mower and a box of stuff for Goodwill to the kitchen door. “Let’s try to take things a step at a time. Okay?”

  Teddy just stood by the car. “I wish we’d never moved to California.”

  She wanted to turn around and smack him, but she forced herself to ignore the comment.

  So he repeated it more loudly: “I wish we’d never moved to California!”

  Jesus, is he deliberately trying to provoke me? She turned around and glared at him. “And I wish you’d had the good sense not to play with a loaded gun.”

  He smiled to himself as if he’d just proved a point. “I knew you blamed me. It’s all my fault.”

  “That’s not true!” she snapped, angry at herself for letting him provoke her. He is the child. I am the adult. Something she would probably have to repeat to herself, like a mantra, thousands of times, in the hours, days, weeks — maybe years — to come. “It’s no one’s fault.”

  “How can something be no one’s fault?” he asked. He sounded genuinely interested, as if he were waiting for a real answer.

  “I don’t know.” She sighed again, louder and longer. “Sometimes things just happen.” She held the door open, waiting for him to precede her into the house, not taking any chances that he’d bolt. She thought how handy religion could be at a time like t
his. “It’s God’s will,” she could hear her mother’s reedy voice saying. “He works in mysterious ways.” And Giselle’s father would nod in pious agreement. Although he would also probably beat the shit out of the poor kid and never even see any flaw in the logic.

  ***

  The feeling in the house was beyond emptiness, a vacuum, sucking them down into it. She let out a small cry. Trina’s new pink tricycle was standing in the middle of the living room. Giselle was sure it hadn’t been there when she left. Dan must have moved it. Teddy stared at the bike as if he’d seen a ghost. She was glad for these few minutes alone with him. She hoped she could get him into his pajamas and into bed before Dan got back. Skip the bath. In the morning the terrible reality would be waiting there for them, like an endless bad dream, but at least they might have more energy to deal with it. It was one of the great truisms: Things always look better in the morning. Trite but true, at least up to this point in her life. This time she had the feeling that the opposite could just as easily be true: Things will look even worse in the morning. And in the afternoon. And in the evening. And on the day after. And on the day after that. Maybe — who knew? — as time went on, there were some things that got harder and harder to take. Like frostbite — as the numbness wore off, the pain burned hotter.

  She thought of that young couple with the baby, a big news story a while back, who got lost in a snowstorm. The wife had to stay behind in a tiny cave with the baby for two days while her husband hiked out for help. At the time Giselle had wondered what the wife had to feel as she watched him disappear into this white wilderness, and what they had said to each other before he’d actually set out. Months later Giselle saw them on Primetime Live or 60 Minutes. One or both of them had lost some toes to frostbite. The baby was perfectly fine. A miraculous story of love and endurance. Survival. She had thought, watching them talking and holding hands, how very possible yet disappointing it would be if, some years down the road, they ended up getting a divorce. They were, after all, still so young — even though they seemed so united by this ordeal. And for the first time it occurred to her, What if the baby had died? What if he’d come back and found the baby frozen stiff? It would have been a whole different story.

  Teddy made a beeline straight to his room and shut the door. She saw the hem of light under his door blink off. So this is how it’s going to be, she thought, feeling shut out. Part of her wanted to say, Fine, and go sit in the living room alone, drinking the rest of the bourbon, if Dan had left any for her. But the other part of her walked up the hall and knocked softly on Teddy’s door.

  “Go away,” he said. “I’m sleeping.” His voice was muffled in the pillow.

  She opened the door and sat down on the foot of his bed. He buried his head under the pillow, as if the bright light from the hallway hurt his eyes. Or he didn’t want to be seen. She slid her hand underneath his T-shirt — he hadn’t bothered to change into his pajamas — and skated her fingernails over his thin bony back, something he usually loved. He was the smallest boy in his fourth-grade class. In the class picture this year they had placed him in the front row, next to the girls, most of whom were taller than he was. The Cornhuskers T-shirt his grandparents had sent swam on him. Giselle had suggested that he put it away for a couple of years, but he’d insisted on wearing it. At the touch of her fingers, he tensed his muscles, but she kept it up until she felt his body gradually letting go. Then she kissed him on the back of his head, smoothed the damp hair from his forehead, and whispered, “Good night. I love you.” Still, she thought the missing word silently — I still love you.

  As she stood up and tiptoed across the carpet toward the door, he turned his head in her direction. “Mom?”

  “Yes, Teddy?” She paused and waited.

  “Do I have to go to school tomorrow?”

  She caught her breath. Monday morning. She hadn’t gotten that far yet. The thought of school, the resumption of a day-to-day routine. “No,” she said. “Don’t worry about school right now. We’ll explain to your teacher.” Then she paused again at the doorway, struck by a new thought. “Unless you want to. Do you want to go to school tomorrow?” She thought maybe he needed to do the normal things, to get out of the house, into the rest of the world, where life would still be going on as usual.

  “No way.” He shook his head violently. “Everyone will know. Eric will tell them.”

  “They’ll know it was an accident. We’ll talk to Mrs. Shimono personally, and she’ll explain that it was just an accident.”

  “She doesn’t like me,” he said dully. “Because my penmanship is sloppy. She only likes the girls with neat penmanship.”

  “She does too like you,” Giselle told him. “Look at all those nice things she said about you on your last report card.”

  “I don’t think so.” He sounded unconvinced. “She just likes to be polite to the parents.”

  In fact, she had been less complimentary about Teddy than his previous teachers had, something Giselle had attributed to a certain quiet reserve. But maybe she was wrong. Maybe Mrs. Shimono didn’t really like him, or boys in general. Giselle wished he still had Mrs. Honey, his third-grade teacher, whom he’d been crazy about. A woman just as sweet as her name. He was going to need all the sweetness he could get in order to swallow this bitter pill.

  “Maybe you won’t even go back to that school,” she blurted out without thinking. “Maybe we’ll move.”

  “Back to Nebraska?” Teddy sat up in bed and looked at her hopefully.

  “No.” She let out an exasperated sigh. He barely remembered Nebraska; he had been perfectly happy in California up until now. “Forget I said that. It’s too soon to make plans. One step at a time, remember? And the first step is sleep.”

  He sank back under the covers, and she shut the door softly behind her. She stood in the hallway for a moment thinking, Now what? The door to Trina’s room was shut. Usually they left it open so they could hear if she cried out in the night. The baby monitor had broken months ago, and they had never bothered to replace it. Trina liked the door open. She would cry, “Up!” — meaning “open” — if someone forgot and shut it. She had the general idea but still didn’t quite have her bearings when it came to prepositions. Giselle had the feeling that if she opened the door softly, she would hear the little sleep noises Trina made in the back of her throat. Little burbles and gurgles. It still had not really sunk in yet. She had seen too many movies; she was still holding her breath, waiting to be saved in the nick of time. All those sappy, sentimental blockbusters. Until she’d taken Dan’s class, she had thought that sentimentality was a good thing. He was the one who made her see that it was actually a bad thing, something that intelligent, sophisticated people avoided at all costs. Of course, that was before his father’s death.

  When Dan’s father died of a sudden massive coronary three years ago, they had been in bed together; she had been lying next to Dan, holding him, as his mother delivered the bad news. Before his father’s death, Dan had been cautious about keeping his distance, not introducing her to his parents, not spending too much time with her son. He was thirty-five and had never been married. He said he liked his life the way it was; he liked the solitude, the freedom to spend all night reading and writing.

  After his father’s heart attack, he spent a week with his mother and brother. They had convinced their mother to sell the house and move into a condo, and they were busy with Realtors. But every night Dan would call Giselle before he went to bed, something he had never done before. There was a new sentimentality, a vulnerability about him that seemed to put them on a more equal footing.

  When he got back from his parents’ house in Los Feliz, he began spending more and more time at Giselle’s cramped apartment. On the weekends the three of them — Dan, Giselle, and Teddy — would do typical family things together, like going to the beach or the zoo.

  A month later they were married — a trip to City Hall — and two months after that she was pregnant. On purpose
this time. She might have preferred to wait until she had finished her belated B.A., but Dan was eager to start a family of his own. Teddy was almost seven, and Dan thought if they waited, Teddy would be too old to relate to a younger sibling. Dan had this image of one happily integrated household — the Partridge family, only smaller and hipper. Giselle could see his logic. Plus, this was one area where she was the expert and he was the novice. She might not have a Ph.D., but she had given birth. She might not have been to Europe, but her uterus was as fertile as prime Nebraska farmland.

  She heard the Buick sail into the driveway, scraping against something. She got up and walked to the kitchen. The Beemers’ dog started barking. Dan shouted at him to shut the fuck up. As she was standing in the kitchen, pouring herself the last dregs of the bourbon, she could hear Dan muttering curses to himself, as if assessing some damage to the paint, and then he struggled to push open the warped kitchen door that they always had difficulty closing properly. She thought of Ed’s do-it-yourself efficiency. She doubted that Dan would have the faintest idea how to plane a door. She walked over and tugged it open from the inside. Off balance, he stumbled into the kitchen, grabbing on to her for support. They clung together for a moment before he pulled away and walked over to the refrigerator.

  “Did you find Teddy?” he asked, staring blankly inside. The kitchen was dark — she hadn’t bothered to snap on the light. As she watched Dan standing in the bright circle of light from the refrigerator, she felt like a member of the audience, sitting out in the dark, waiting for the actor in the spotlight to speak his lines. It seemed suddenly as if nothing were normal and natural between them anymore. Their real life had been canceled. Or someone had flipped the channel. And now they were stuck in some godawful soap opera that could go on and on for years. The Guiding Light. Search for Tomorrow. Even before she met Dan, when she was just a college dropout with a baby, she had never watched the soaps.