All American Boy (41 page)

It was quiet now. Wally walks through the house marveling at the stillness. But echoes of the past can still surprise him around any corner.

You little pervert! Do you have any idea how you have shamed the name of Day?

She found him in the basement. His father.

Hanging by his own belt
, Wally knows.
She found him hanging from a rafter. He was probably all blue or black or green
—
whatever color hanging corpses turn
.

Have you any idea how you have shamed the name of Day?

He hears his mother hacking in her room.

Why did I come back here?
Wally feels trapped, tricked, bewildered.
What was I hoping to find?

“I'm going out for a bit,” he tells his mother, standing in the doorway to her room.

“All right, Walter.”

“You'll be okay there for now?”

“Yes. I'm fine.” She looks over at him. “Walter?”

“Yes?”

She fumbles for words. “I want—I want to be able to tell you to have a good time, wherever you're going. I
want
to say it, but I can't. Because ever since you left, Walter, I don't know what it is that you
do
.”

He laughs, a little bitterly. “You never have.”

“No. I suppose I never have.” She looks at him, as if looking at him for the first time. “And I never asked.”

The Nyquil she's taking must be making her loopy. She's never been this inquisitive before.

“Mother,” he tells her, “you can rest assured I'm not doing anything wrong.”

“It doesn't have to be
wrong
,” she says weakly, looking up at him with her sunken blue eyes. “I just don't understand. It's something I just don't understand, Walter.”

She covers her face with her shriveled old hands, the veins on the back making a network of blue.

“Your life outside this house has always been mysterious,” she says from behind her hands. “I've never understood what it is that you do.”

In that moment, in that moment when she sat there so weak, so frail, so desperate, covering her old face with her old hands in her bed, he wanted to stay with her forever. He wanted to call Missy and tell her he was never coming back, that he wasn't going away to school, that he was going to forget all about the city and acting and being gay and just stay home with his mother. Stay home with her and watch game shows and eat goulash and plant marigolds in the rock garden, forever and ever.
We could be happy again, Mother. Just you and I. The way it was, a long time ago
.

He walks over to her, putting his arm around her shoulders and kissing her cheek. When was the last time he had kissed her? Years ago. An eighth grade play, perhaps? The day Sister Angela presented him with his certificate for perfect attendance?

He feels her hand press his, slipping something inside his fist. Wally looks down. A five-dollar bill rolled up tightly, still moist from her palm.

“Mom, I don't need—”

“Take it. It's not much. It'll make me feel better if I know you have it.”

He stuffs it down into the front pocket of his jeans. He imagines her lying there, nervously rolling it tighter and tighter, as she waited for him.

He had no place to go. He just needed to get out of the house. So he walks down Washington Avenue to Josephine's old house. No one's bought the place since she died. People think it's haunted. Wally imagines it might be. He looks through the window into the empty rooms inside. Then he sits on the steps with his face in his hands.

It doesn't have to be wrong. I just don't understand
.

And it wasn't all her fault for not understanding, for not wanting to know. It was
his
fault, too, for not wanting to tell her. “And why don't you want to tell her about your life?” his therapist had asked, before Wally decided that therapy wasn't working, that he was just wasting Miss Aletha's money. “After all, your father's gone now. Why not try telling your mother a little about who you are?”

“I don't know,” Wally replied, defensive, on edge, coy. “What is it that you
want
me to say? That maybe some place deep down I still want her to love me, and I think that if I tell her about who I really am, she
won't
?”

“Maybe that's some of it.”

“
Some of it?
Isn't that enough?”

But more. The goddamn therapist had wanted
more
.

When he gets home, he finds her vomiting, deep wracking spasms that threaten to split her frail little body in two, just the way it had happened when Wally was born.

“I wish you'd consider coming back for Zandy's memorial.”

Miss Aletha stands in the doorway watching as Wally tosses his few belongings into his backpack. His razor, his toothbrush, the sweatshirts and underwear he'd bought over in Mayville when this little trip home turned out to last longer than he expected.

Funny how that has a way of happening.

Wally looks over at her. “Is that really a good idea?”

“Why not? He'd want you to be there.”

“Do you think?”

She nods.

Wally zips up his backpack and sets it against the wall. There. He's all set to get on the road first thing in the morning. All set to blow out of here.

“And him?” Missy nods toward the other room. “Are you taking Dee with you?”

“Yeah,” Wally says. “I'm taking him with me.”

He likes how that sounds. As silly as it might be to feel that way, he likes how that sounds.
He's taking Dee with him
.

Missy sits down on the bed and arches an eyebrow up at Wally. “But I thought he was just using you. Just trying to get a job. Concerned only about getting his rocks off.”

“Yeah,” he says, smiling, sitting down next to her. “At this point, I take what I can get.” He rubs noses with her. “I'll make sure he's back for school on Monday.”

“I'd appreciate that. Don't want the state calling me an unfit guardian.”

Wally kisses her cheek. “You're the best, Missy. You know that?”

She grins. “So I've been told. A few times in this long, long life.” She looks over at him. “So any news about finding the boy?”

“What boy?”

“Your cousin. The one who's gone missing.”

Wally smirks. “He's
not
a boy, Missy. Kyle is my age.”

“You're all boys to me. Well, I hope he's okay, wherever he is.”

Wally stands up. “Kyle was a monster.”

“He was a
boy
, just like you.”

“No. He was
born
wrong. The wiring in his head wasn't right.”

“You don't know that.”

“The things he did, Missy. I had fucked-up parents, too, but I didn't beat people up. I didn't steal and do drugs and piss all over the school.”

“Oh, that's right, you were a good boy.”

Wally just laughs.

“Who's to explain why we do the things we do?” Missy asks. “Why one of us chooses one form of rebellion and another does something else? Who's to say why and how we settle on our own particular method of survival?”

“But Kyle was
cruel
,” Wally says.

He'd come here to make peace, Wally supposes, but he can never make peace with Kyle. Kyle was bad. Kyle was cruel. He can't make peace with that.

“He was my evil twin, my doppelganger, my foil, my Bizarro double,” Wally had once described Kyle for Ned. He remembers a time when both were eight, when they got into a knockdown, rolling-on-the-grass kind of fight. Kyle had whupped Wally's butt, leaving him with a shiny black eye.

His mother held an ice pack to his face.

“What did you fight about, Walter?”

“You.”

“Me?”

“Kyle said you were crazy.”

He remembers his mother's face when he said that. He saw the little lines indent across her brow, the sudden whiteness that came to her lips.

“And why did he say that?” she asked.

Wally was so angry, so filled with outrage. “He said that Aunt Bernadette told him you were sent to live in a funny farm.”

His mother said nothing, just removed the ice pack to inspect his eye.

“What's a funny farm?” Wally asked her.

She replaced the ice pack. “Just a place where people go.”

“And the people there are funny?”

She smiled, even laughed a little. “Yes. I suppose they are.” She paused. “Not always, though. Sometimes they're very sad.”

Later, when Wally would go to the institute after Ned's death, they asked him if depression ran in his family. “I think my mother was institutionalized once,” he told them, “but I don't know any of the details.”

Not a one. As a boy with a shiny black eye, he had looked up at her and asked, “How come you never told me about it? The funny farm?”

His mother looked as if she might cry. “I suppose there are many things I've never told you, Walter.”

“Like what?”

“Like … oh, I don't know.” Her eyes moved past him to look out the window. “Like how when I was a little girl I used to love to dress in pretty clothes and tie ribbons in my hair. Like how I used to pick the crab apples from the tree because I thought they were cherries.” She looked down into Wally's face. “Like how, when you were born, I didn't know if I could do it right, be a mother to a little boy. How could I understand what boys go through?”

She removed the ice pack again and sat there with it in her hands. And then she started to cry. It made Wally very uncomfortable. He watched her, not knowing what to do or say, just wanting her to stop crying, just wanting her to smile. Mothers weren't supposed to cry. They were supposed to be strong. Strong and pretty and smiling.

“You can't be going around getting into fights, Walter,” she said at last. “Especially without your father here. He'd know how to handle it, but I don't. I've gotten through a lot, Walter. I got through my Mama dying and Rocky dying and I even got through going to the funny farm. But I don't know if I can get through this.”

He didn't know what she meant by “this.”

“Oh, Walter,” his mother said, “I want to do what's right. I want to be a good mother. But sometimes I just don't know what to do. Sometimes I just don't understand.”

“What don't you understand?” Wally asked, reaching over and taking the ice pack from her hands to place it against his eye. It was starting to throb again.

“About
you
, Walter. What makes you so different.”

She wiped her tears then, holding out her arms. Her son fell into them, dropping the ice pack, heedless about his eye, just grateful beyond words that she had stopped crying and that she was taking him into her arms.

“I'm going to try, Walter,” his mother said, her lips at his ear. “I'm going to try to be a good mother, to do the right things. But you'll have to help me, okay?”

He nodded against her breasts. “How?”

She held him tighter. “Just be a good boy. Can you do that? Always be a good boy?”

He nodded again. It was a big thing to ask, to
always
be a good boy, especially since he didn't always know what a good boy was supposed to do.

Still, he decided, if she was going to try, he would too.

Standing in the hallway outside her bedroom that last week before going away to school, he listens to her retch, spewing up into a plastic bag the last of the tomato soup he had made for her.

Stop doing this to me! You're the mother! You're supposed to be taking care of me! You were supposed to take care of me all along
—
and you never did! You broke your part of the bargain! You didn't try! You didn't even fucking try!

She's quiet now. “Are you all right?” Wally calls into her.

“Yes,” she says in a voice that pops with phlegm.

He pokes his head into her room. “You sure?”

She nods, turning on her side, away from him.

Wally hears a car in the driveway. “Dr. Fitzgerald's here, Mom. I'll send him down.”

She doesn't reply.

Wally heads back into the kitchen and sees the kitchen is a mess: unwashed pans in the sink, old newspapers in a pile, and he hadn't had a chance to empty the garbage. Coffee grounds are seeping through the paper bag onto the floor. He pushes the bag under the sink just as the doctor rings the bell.

“Thanks for coming,” Wally says, letting him in.

“No problem.” Dr. Fitzgerald is an old man. He takes off his hat and sets it on the couch. His face holds a thousand creases when he smiles. “I've gotten out of the habit of making home visits, but I've known that old gal in there for years. In fact, I brought
you
into this world, Walter.”

They head down the hallway. His mother looks up and smiles when they enter. Wally realizes she hadn't been able to fix her face. The doctor will see she doesn't have any eyebrows. Her face is gray, her wrinkles deep. “Dear Angel,” the fellas had written. Wally spots the plastic bag filled with vomit sitting by the side of the bed. He picks it up.

“I'll leave you alone,” he says, shutting the door behind him. He carries the bag of vomit to the garbage and sets it on top. He covers it with the newspapers and lifts the whole pail, intending to take it out and dump it in the can outside.

But the garbage falls. Coffee grounds, eggshells, crumpled Kleenex tumble across the kitchen floor. The plastic bag opens and Wally watches as his mother's vomit oozes out, orange and pink, Campbell's Tomato Soup with Phlegm and Bile.

He starts to cry.

Always be a good boy, Walter. Can you do that?

By the time Dr. Fitzgerald comes out of the room, most of the garbage is cleaned up. Wally stands with his arms folded over his chest as the old man walks down the hall.

“Well,” the doctor says, one side of his mouth crooked in a grin, “I guess the old gal will pull through.”