Black and Blue (12 page)

“You know what, Frances Ann?” Bobby had said, sitting next to my bed in the single room on the hospital’s maternity floor,
Robert’s misshapen little head cupped in his palm. “We got everything.”

Jesus, I loved him. There, I said it. It makes me feel stupid, sometimes, feeling my scars, the spots where you can just make out the damage and the ones where the bruises and hurts live on only in my head. I loved Bobby, and he loved me. Anyone who heard him say it once would never disbelieve it. In the beginning I loved him, loved him, loved him pure and simple. And then after a while I loved the idea of him, the good Bobby, who came to me every once in a while and rubbed my back and kissed my fingers. And I loved our life, the long stretches of tedium and small pleasures that marked most of our time together. Our life was like a connect-the-dots drawing, and those were the lines, the bad things only the haphazard arrangement of dots they connected.

And now all the love goes into what’s left of that life, one boy, his basketball shoes too big for his little body. I watch him and I’m afraid my face looks the way Ann Benedetto’s face looked when she watched Bobby, like a hungry cat when it hears the can opener, all eyes and appetite. I’m afraid that I’ll wind up the way she did, with nothing but the casual, almost charitable, almost condescending affection that a grown man has for his mother once he’s moved on to another woman, another source of intensive care. Alone in that spotless house, with the photographs on top of the television, Bobby at four, his foot tucked under him, his chubby fingers wrapped around his knee. Bobby at twenty-six, in his dress uniform. Across the living room, on the wall unit, was the photograph of her husband in his own police blues.

“My old man was some piece of work,” Bobby always said. He’d
been shot, Robert, Sr., by a junkie who didn’t know how to wave a gun around during a bar robbery without having the thing go off. It was two months after we started going out, and I cried at the funeral, not for Lt. Benedetto, who I’d met only once, but for his son. The sound of the bagpipes was like strange birds, and the cops were like an army, blue with black swipes of elastic over their badges.

That’s all he ever said,
some piece of work
. Never an anecdote, or a word of affection or even anger. His father was the stone in Bobby’s heart. And maybe his own father would be the stone in Robert’s. The patterns, the patterns, as inviolate as a clan tartan. Red, green, black, blue, father, son.

I’d been standing staring into the depths of a half-filled cart, and when I looked up a tall man had stopped Robert at the end of the aisle and was putting a hand on his shoulder. Suddenly I felt my stomach empty out, felt as though I might faint. I pushed forward, but there were two elderly women crowding the aisles, peering at coupons, and by the time I got past them Robert wasn’t there. The man was looking at chickens, or pretending to. Looking too hard, I thought, like a bad actor, so that he didn’t look up until I’d planted myself in front of him.

“Excuse me,” I said. “What were you saying to that child?”

“What?”

“That boy? The one with the dark hair? What were you saying to him?” I realized the two women with the coupons were looking at me. My voice was too loud, even to myself.

“Robert Crenshaw? I teach him PE. At the elementary school.”

The relief in my posture, the surrender to the safe and commonplace in my shoulders, head, face, must have been so profound
that he peered at me perplexed for a moment, then smiled. “You’re Robert’s mother,” he said. “And I just scared the heck out of you. I am really, really sorry.”

“No, no, forget it. It was silly. It’s just—”

“—that you have to be more careful today than when we were kids. Hey, in my job I know.” He stuck out a big hand, thick-fingered. My own disappeared inside it, then reappeared as I pulled away, like a small fish released from the maw of a big one. He was a bigger man than I’d thought, seeing him across the parking lot and lawn of the school that first day, big and bulky, flushed and friendly, with thinning blond hair and light eyes behind aviator glasses. What kind of animal does your gym teacher remind you of? I’d ask Robert walking home, another game we played. And the answer would be something good-natured, plodding, big and big-hearted. A bear maybe.

“Mike Riordan.”

“Beth Crenshaw.”

“I know,” he said. “You and Mrs. Roerbacker work in the library.”

“Sorry. I missed meeting you somehow.”

“I’m a gym rat,” he said. “I’m practically mildewed. You from New York?”

“No,” I said, feeling my shoulders tighten again. “Delaware.”

“You sound like New York,” he said. “I’ve been meaning to call you about Robert.”

“Why?”

“Hey, he’s fine. You know, he’s new. He’ll open up more when he gets used to the drill here. There’s no problem. I just want him to play on our soccer team. No big deal, no high pressure, two
practices a week and they’re before dinnertime. I never yell and scream, and I give them off the day before a big test. But we start next week and he’d need to stay after school and either walk home or have you pick him up. He’s new and he didn’t seem too sure it would be okay with you. Bennie Castro’s playing, if that makes a difference.”

“I’ll talk to him. It’s fine. It would be good for him.”

“Great. Great.” He paused. “I’ll send home a permission slip and some more information. You can call me if you have any questions. I’m the vice principal, too, whatever that means. Call about anything, the school, the homework, whatever.” He hesitated, looking into his cart. “Would you mind if I asked you something?”

I shook my head.

“How much do you know about chicken?”

“Chicken?”

“Cooking chicken.”

“I’ve cooked a lot of chickens, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“You know those things that you can put inside the chicken, sort of holds them standing up so they cook faster? They’ve got them back with the pots and pans and things. They’re metal, shaped kind of like a big golf tee. Do those things work?”

I laughed. “I don’t know,” I said. “It never occurred to me to buy one. A chicken only takes an hour anyhow. Why rush it?”

“That’s what I thought. Thanks,” he said, staring into the meat case.

Suddenly I heard Gracie’s voice, as clear as if it was coming over the loudspeaker instead of John Mack Carter’s tips for using exciting, exotic cilantro in a variety of dishes with an international
flair. Where were we sitting, Grace and I? Was it that coffee bar on Lexington Avenue, where the counterman always called her “Professor,” or the Greek restaurant in the Village with the homemade pita that made us both so full we would groan all the way to the subway? The Greek place, I think, and Grace talking about the tall man she kept running into at D’Agostino’s, who wanted to know about tarragon, about potatoes, about sour and heavy and light cream. “As though I wouldn’t know that asking a woman about how to cook is the oldest pick-up line in the book,” Grace said, shaking her head.

“I didn’t know that,” I’d said.

“When was the last time somebody picked you up?” she said.

“Almost twenty years ago,” I’d said. Bobby, in the bar where Tommy Dolan had introduced us. Bobby, one black apostrophe of hair over his forehead, saying, “Hey, Fran Flynn. I guess if everybody likes you I might like you too.” Bobby, leaning against the bar, a perfectly natural pose, his elbows back, his big forearms knotted, his pelvis thrust forward, which was the whole point.

“Well, good luck,” I said to Mike Riordan, and then felt myself turning hot, and red, the same way I’d colored that first time I met Bobby. I felt foolish as I strode off to pick up parsley, tomatoes, and garlic. Soccer season. Rules, practices, uniforms. Maybe while Robert was at practice, after I got home from the Levitts, I would do something to his room, cheap bright curtains and a new quilt, some more posters, a desk. I thought there had been an old desk in one corner of Cindy’s basement. Vermicelli, chicken stock, tomato paste. The cart was getting too full; Robert would complain about the weight of the bag all the way home, particularly if he had a comic he wanted to be reading instead. It was time
to check out, head home. A stockboy sent me seven aisles over, to where the comic books shared an aisle with greeting cards and paperbacks, but only one elderly woman was there, reading birthday cards with her face close to their gaudy surfaces. I walked slowly, snaking through aisle after aisle, thinking about how big the market was, bigger than any I’d visited in the city, looking for Robert. Looking and looking. I began weaving through other shoppers, past cans of soup and coffee, cases of Coke and Pepsi, stacks of paper towels and toilet paper, back to the comic aisle, empty now. Part of my mind kept thinking that I needed paper towels, and the other part was saying, shouting, screaming over and over again, “Robert? Ba? Baby? Where are you?” I turned in aisle sixteen, dairy, and made my way back again. “Have you seen a boy, about ten, in a green T-shirt with a tiger on the front?” I began to ask the other shoppers, and “No,” they said, no, sorry, no I haven’t. Of course they haven’t, thought one part of my mind, because he’s in a car now, driving down the highway, saying, hey Dad, I missed you Dad, how’s Grandmom, where we going, when are we going to go back and get Mommy?

I was moving so fast that I bumped into someone’s cart and knocked a box of cereal from it. I came around the corner in frozen foods and almost collided with a man holding a box of macaroni and cheese, reading the back, and I saw that it was the gym teacher again but I suddenly couldn’t recall his first name, only that he wanted Robert to play soccer, that I needed paper towels, and that my son was gone. He knew right away, as he looked up, saw me, smiled, then frowned, that something was wrong.

“I can’t find Robert,” I said, my voice an octave higher than usual, almost falsetto.

“Calm down,” he said. “Calm down.” He took my arm at the elbow and led me toward the front of the store, leaving our two carts next to the freezer cases, glass and chrome and foggy windows like the cases in the morgue at the hospital, where we nurses tried never to go if we could help it. I could tell by the feel of his hand at my elbow that he was used to taking charge. “He can’t have gone far,” he said, like it was something he’d said before. At the window where they cashed checks he stuck his head inside. “Excuse me,” he called, and then I remembered that his name was Mike. A heavy girl with bad skin came to the window. C
USTOMER
S
ERVICE
, said the sign over her head.

“I’m on break,” she said.

“We’ve lost a child,” Mike Riordan said. “Can you do a page or something? Robert is his name, Robert Crenshaw.”

“I can’t page without the manager.”

“Where’s the manager?”

She called into the back “Where’s Lenny?” and there was a mumbled sound, and then she came out of the booth and I started to cry, my hands over my face. “Kids get lost in here a lot,” she said, as if to be helpful, and then, calling over to the closest register, “Pete, where’s Lenny?”

“Hold on,” Pete said. “I got a price check.”

“Where’s the paging equipment?” Mike Riordan said pleasantly.

The girl pointed back toward the booth, and he said, “Use it right now or I’m going to go in and use it myself.”

“Don’t have a spas, mister,” she said. “Your wife should have been watching him.”

“There’s Lenny,” Pete called, and Mike turned toward a dark man in white shirt and pants. H
ERE TO SERVE YOU
: L
ENNY
said the tag on his shirt.

“Please,” I said.

“They want me to page for their kid,” said the girl. “They can’t find him. I told them I couldn’t page without you saying so.”

“He’s ten,” I said. “He was supposed to be in the comic aisle. Where the cards and magazines are.”

“Skinny kid?” said Lenny. “Dark hair, green shirt?”

“Yes,” I said, knowing the worst, knowing what Lenny would say next, describing the man who’d left with the kid as dark, nice-looking, big through the arms and shoulders, looked like the kid, looked like his dad. And Mike Riordan would want to call the police and I would want to die, right here in the supermarket, rather than go home to that apartment alone. Or back to Brooklyn.

“I just threw him out on his butt. He’s probably still out in the parking lot.”

“What?” Mike Riordan said, but I was already halfway to the doors. The pavement between the store and the parking lot was full of people loading groceries into the backs of their cars, but off to one side, where the gum machines and the little automated horse ride stood, Robert was sitting on the ground, his arms held tight around his knees, his head down as though he was one of those little black bugs, the ones that roll up into a ball to protect themselves when they’re disturbed.

I ran to him, touched his arm, and he jumped, then jumped at me, almost knocked me down as he threw his arms around me.
Neither of us spoke and I just held him, held him tight, saying nothing, trying to stop the shaking in his back and shoulders. Then I heard a voice behind me say, “Hi, Robert. You okay?” But Robert shook his head and kept it pressed to the front of my body, although his arms had fallen to his sides.

“That bastard, excuse my French, says that he thought Robert was alone and that they have a rule against unsupervised kids in the store,” Mike Riordan said from behind me. “Apparently they’ve had some problems with vandalism, shoplifting, and he just throws kids out if they’re by themselves.”

Robert’s head snapped up, and spit flew from his mouth as he cried, “I told him and told him that my mom was there and I could find her. I told him I wasn’t unsupervised. He just kept saying sure, sure, she’ll find you outside. He wouldn’t listen to me.”

“Oh, sweetie,” I said, holding him tight, but he pulled away.

“He wouldn’t even let me look for you. I told him where you were, and then you weren’t there. Where did you go? Where did you go?” He was so loud now that an elderly man came over to peer at him, at us, as though to save him from being abducted by the woman in the faded blue shorts and white polo shirt, the man in the blue button-down and the aviator glasses. “He’s fine, he’s fine, he’s just upset,” Mike said.