A Face in Every Window (15 page)

B
OBBI LEFT, YET
I couldn't stop thinking, or dreaming, or fantasizing about her. I thought about her all the time, especially at night. I imagined us together in my room again, whispering about life and chaos. I imagined her kissing me, and better yet, me kissing her, the real thing this time.

Mam asked me one morning when she caught me staring into my bowl of cereal for too long, "JP, are you feeling all right?"

I felt surprised, even nervous, that she had caught me. Did she know I turned out my lights early in the evenings and climbed under the covers and fantasized about Bobbi? Did she know how long I stayed in bed in the mornings, how long my showers now took?

I told her I felt tired from so much studying. I said I'd be fine by the time vacation ended, and in my mind added,
when Bobbi gets back.

I decided I would invite her to stay in my room again when she returned. I bought boxes of strawberry Pop-Tarts
without the frosting, her favorite food in all the world, she once declared. I stacked them on my bookshelf so she'd see them when she first entered the room. I bought a case of Dr. Pepper, her favorite drink, and set it on the floor beneath the Pop-Tarts. I had walked through the woods and gathered pinecones and dry leaves and stones. I stashed my schoolbooks under my bed and created a nature display on my desk, imagining Bobbi glancing over it, picking up a stone to feel its heft, rubbing her thumb across its uneven surface, touching a pinecone and pricking her finger, twirling a leaf and smelling its brown earthiness, all while she talked to me, told me her fears and dreams. I would listen to her, and then I'd say what I should have said that Christmas Eve when she told me about her father. I'd tell her that I would take care of her, that I'd always treat her right.

I brought Mam and Pap's five poinsettia plants up from the parlor and set them about the room to add a touch of cheer and warmth, and I had my film from Christmas Day developed. I glued all my pictures of Bobbi on the sheet of posterboard I had left over from one of my science projects and taped the poster to the slanting part of my ceiling, above my bed. Then I sat back and surveyed the room and the photographs with satisfaction. All it needed was Bobbi.

The others were worried about her. We hadn't heard a word from her since she'd left, but I knew she was all right. I felt certain her father hadn't hurt her and everything was going well; she'd be back at the end of vacation. I figured my will alone would bring her safely home again. She had had on the Einstein T-shirt I had given her for Christmas when she left, and I imagined her wearing it every day and thinking of
me as I thought of her. We were connected I knew she'd come back.

Mam wished she would call. She said she'd feel better if Bobbi would call. I didn't want to hear her voice over the telephone. I was happy to have the time to plan, to prepare for her homecoming, to set it up just right Speaking to her then, over the phone, would break the spell. We would not speak until we were alone in my room. It had to be just right, just perfect.

Larry suggested we all drive over to the old neighborhood and check up on her, but before we could do it, before I could object, Bobbi showed up, a grocery bag filled with clothes in one arm and a new boyfriend linked in the other.

His name was Don Delveccio, a twenty-eight-year-old whom Larry, Mam, and I recognized as the guy who used to go door-to-door offering to paint the houses in our old neighborhood or fix the plumbing or time the car. Word got around that he didn't know what he was doing and no one would hire him anymore, and we figured he had moved on, but there he stood in our entrance, arm in arm with Bobbi, while she introduced him, her face glowing.

I watched her set her bag down on the dining room table. I saw her take her free hand and, together with the one holding on to Don, use it to squeeze Don's biceps, biceps about four times as big as mine. He smiled at her, cocky and proud, and Bobbi glowed. She glowed as though all of heaven's light shone on her. I stood in the shadows behind the others and tried to swallow, to breathe, but something, some invisible hand, was pressing on my Adam's apple.

No one else minded Don, not his age, not his reputation, not his looks. Those looks. He was good-looking to the point
of being too good-looking, as if his looks were a mask, as if there were some ugliness hidden beneath that smooth tanned skin of his, behind his deep, blue-eyed stare, his firm jaw. He moved as if he were watching himself, noting his own every gesture, calculating, timing every action, every sentence he uttered. He was just too careful with himself, as though holding himself in check, guarding himself. I knew he was trouble, but Bobbi believed she'd found everything she had been looking for, in him. Even Bobbi's father feared Don, and that's what she wanted, she told me later, after Don had left and she had come to my room to retrieve her sleeping bag and raft, which still lay on the floor next to my bed.

We stood alone in the room, we talked, but our words were the wrong words, we said all the wrong things, and she didn't notice the gifts, the treasures I had placed about the room.

She told me, in a voice that grated against the voice I had given her in my fantasies, that she was in control at home now, and her father knew it. She laughed, and it didn't sound like music, like the tinkling bells of my fantasies, but like a dog's bark.

"He knows he's been replaced," she said. "Don is taller, bigger, stronger, younger, and better looking, and he made it real clear to Daddy, without actually saying anything, that I'm his now and Daddy had better not lay a hand on me."

What I had noticed when I'd watched her with Don that first day was the way Bobbi acted around him. She took smaller steps when she walked, made smaller hand gestures, even kept her voice small, timid, when she spoke around him. She looked at him after everything she said, as if checking to see if he approved. She moved and spoke as if she were in a
box with a lid on it, and it reminded me of the pantomime Larry and Ben had done on Christmas Day, where they felt their way around an imaginary box, placing one hand at a time in front of them, then hands to either side, then turning around and feeling the invisible wall behind them.

Bobbi told me she had never felt so free, but I thought she had just leaped from one box to another, and when she left my room that afternoon, I reached up to the posterboard covered with her pictures and tore it down.

No one said much to Bobbi about her new boyfriend. I wanted to say something, to protest, but I couldn't put into words what I felt. I couldn't quite put my finger on what was wrong with Don, not in any way that would get rid of him. Since he lived some twenty-five miles away and Bobbi went to school during the week, he only came by on weekends, at first, always with some gift in his hands, flowers or jewelry; and he stayed only long enough to make polite conversation and pat Parakeet, pretending to like her, before whisking Bobbi away for the evening.

I tried to let go of my fantasy, to ignore Bobbi's presence down the hall and her face across from mine at the dinner table. I tried to bury myself in my schoolwork, in the neat stuff I was working on in the computer lab, only it didn't seem so neat anymore and the schoolwork felt tedious. I couldn't focus on anything. I felt as if I were treading on something slippery and treacherous somehow, and yet I didn't know where the feeling was coming from. I couldn't sleep at night. I felt restless, and then I noticed the whole household seemed restless, too. I could hear people all night long, getting up, walking around, the refrigerator door opening and
closing, toilets flushing, voices whispering, laughter, tears, all of life, all night long. I thought how the chaos never rested, never slept. It boiled all day, all night, downstairs, upstairs, in each body, in each mind, even in my mind. I knew that, yet I could make sense of none of it.

I ate Bobbi's Pop-Tarts, drank her Dr. Pepper, let the poinsettias go without water, brushed my nature display onto my floor and never noticed when I walked on it, never heard the crunching sounds beneath my feet. I felt like a mess, a wreck. I believed the whole household was falling apart, that the house itself would come tumbling down any second and we'd all be buried in the rubble. For some reason our ship had at last dislodged from the shore and was setting out to sea, gaping hole in the side and all.

But for all the gloom and doom I felt, I didn't see it coming: Mam's little bomb.

She dropped it one night when we were all seated around the dinner table: Bobbi, Jerusha, Susan, Melanie, Ben, Harold, Leon, Larry, Mam, Pap, and me. Everyone was talking at once, as usual. We had finished eating but no one wanted to make the move to start cleaning the dishes, so we were all sitting and talking. I had just decided to excuse myself, which I usually did after Jerusha and I finished my dinner, and return to my room, claiming I had to study for a history test, when Mam banged her knife on the side of her glass and everyone stopped talking and turned to her.

Mam stood up, her face bright, excited, her eyes dancing. "I have some really exciting news to tell you all...," she began.

Pap bopped up and down in his seat. "And I know what
it is, and I'm not saying 'cause it's a secret about a Switzerland place."

"Patrick, let me speak."

Pap sat back and said, "I know, but I know what it is. I was just saying that, but I won't tell it"

I could tell Mam was bursting with some kind of news and I wondered if somehow she had entered and won another contest, this time a trip to Switzerland. I didn't have more than a second to wonder, because Mam blurted out, "I'm going to Switzerland!"

Pap clapped his hands and shouted, "Switzerland, yea!"

Mam nodded, tears filling her eyes with excitement "Mike has invited me to go with him. He has a medical convention to attend there and I'm going. I'm going to Switzerland!"

Mam sat down and put her face in her hands and cried. "I can't believe it" She shook her head, her face still buried. "I'm going to see the Alps. I never thought..."

She didn't finish her sentence but burst into heavy sobbing and everyone gathered around to hug her, and she told them of her lifelong dream of traveling, and Pap wanted to know if Mam was happy or sad.

I left the table and went outside to stand on the porch, to breathe fresh air, to think a single, clear thought instead of the ones that were racing through my head like so many molecules unleashed and untamed, heated to the boiling point.

At last one clear thought did emerge: Mam could not go off with Dr. Mike. Whatever it took, I would stop her. I would kill Dr. Mike if I had to. It was as clear and simple as that.

I
KNEW I
needed a plan, but I couldn't come up with one. My mind kept imagining ridiculous or dramatic solutions like locking Mam in a closet and blasting away at Dr. Mike with a machine gun from my attic-room window, or standing on the runway, again with the machine gun, and forbidding the plane to take off with Mam on it. I had simpler ideas such as stealing her passport, which, I discovered, she'd gotten weeks earlier, meaning she'd been planning this trip with Dr. Mike a long time. I also thought about calling the travel agent, pretending to be Dr. Mike, and canceling the reservations, but I knew neither of these would be permanent solutions to my problem. The machine gun looked to be my best bet, but I couldn't begin to figure out how I'd go about getting hold of one or, once I did, how I'd actually use it. Still, in my daydreams, I shot down Dr. Mike all over town, at the hospital where he worked, at his and Mam's favorite restaurant, in the middle of an opera, at an art gallery, and the best one, as he was driving up the drive in his slick BMW.

I wanted to talk to Mam, but every time I thought of something to say to her I found I couldn't say it I wanted to say,
I refuse to let you go!
I wanted to tell her what she was doing was morally wrong; she had a husband. She had me. I wanted to ask,
Are you sharing a hotel room? Are you sharing a bed?
Just the thought of asking, and worse, the thought of what her answers would be, kept me silent. I wanted to appeal to her practical side or maybe make her feel guilty by asking,
What will Pap do all day while you're gone?
But she had arranged for Aunt Colleen to take Pap to the Center for his classes. She had everything arranged.

Melanie and Jerusha brought hangers of dress clothes to the house for Mam to try on, clothes from their own homes. Susan lent her a pair of never-worn hiking boots that she claimed pinched her heel, yet she'd never bothered to take them back. Mam said they fit perfectly. She had everything going for her, and I could think of nothing realistic to stop her.

I noticed Mam was avoiding me. I'd try to catch her eye across the table at dinner, but she was too busy passing around books and pamphlets about Switzerland, telling everyone of her plans, and describing the fancy hotel where she'd be staying. She talked fast, hardly taking a breath, not letting anyone get a word in, especially me. The atmosphere in the house had turned festive, more so as the time drew near for her to leave.

All I seemed to be able to do was watch and hover. I found myself following her around when she was home, hoping for a moment alone with her and dreading it at the same time. I hung around outside her bedroom door, my
head resting on the side of the door frame while Mam reviewed some of her high school French with Jerusha and Melanie. Both of them, I found out, had traveled all over Europe with their families. In between French dialogues, Mam would go into the bathroom, change into one of Melanie's outfits, and then come out saying "
Voilà!
" and walking as if she were on a runway. She wore her hair up in what Jerusha called a French twist, and her neck looked long and white, whiter than her face, which had the freckles to give it color. Melanie and Jerusha lounged on Mam and Pap's bed and gave Mam a thumbs-up or -down on each outfit.

I knew Mam saw me standing outside the door, but for the longest time she ignored me. Then she came out in a dark green suit and Jerusha and Melanie applauded and Mam turned this way and that like a model, and looking all proud of herself, she asked me, "JP, what do you think of your mother?" She smiled and held out her arms, still looking not at me but down at the sleeve of her jacket, admiring herself.