Curled in the Bed of Love (18 page)

She turns to Evan. “You know you can always ask us about your father.”

“It's not like he's really my father or anything,” Evan says. “I don't even know him. And I'm almost grown-up now. It's too late.”

Evan is safe, immune to her longing. The pain of his beginning has taken on the proportions of beauty recollected, faded to a sweet ghostly undertone.

VII
. At the end of the art period, as they finish their chalk drawings, the third-graders bring them to Katie, touching her with their dusty fingers to get her attention, clamoring for praise, which is easy for her to give. She loves kids' artwork. For them, no mental construct intrudes between emotion and thing; their drawings always betray the beautiful, unique distortions of what they really see. It's what Katie lacks and why she was right to become a teacher instead of struggling to mere competence as a graphic designer. Her love for her own children, indistinguishable from her pride in their flourishing selves, made her think, this is my gift, why not use it? She finds it as hard to distinguish between pride in her students and pride in herself for their class projects—lanterns made from elaborately cut milk cartons and tissue paper, Balinese-style puppets of paper and wood, carved dried gourds strung with beads to make musical instruments.

She takes a drawing from someone's hand, and when she looks over the edge of the paper, she is surprised to discover the owner is Maeve. A possessive swell of joy takes her by surprise—as it does a dozen times a day—but she cannot scoop Maeve into her arms at school. She and Billy debated whether it was good for the kids to be assigned to the alternative public school where she teaches,
but it's a good school, a real community, and the kids suffer only from a sweet shyness when they come to her art class.

Maeve's vivid drawing of a horse plucks Katie from her perch of professional admiration. Maeve loves horses, begged them to pay for riding lessons. Billy and Katie vie to take her to the stable just to exist within the aura of Maeve's delight, which is Maeve's gift, so easily expressed in the fluid parabolic lines of her drawing.

Katie murmurs, “It's beautiful,” holds herself to this quick intimation of her feelings. She might hurt Maeve if she dared to betray her genuine awe, might burden her with extravagant expectations. But Maeve looks at her as if she is waiting for more.

Katie has the same habits for keeping order at home as she does at school. She and Billy pay conscientious attention to everything from bedtime and snacks to teaching the children about recycling and table manners. She used to be someone more careless, expansive, when she was with Malcolm, but that other self, a stranger, seems like an accident, temporarily and mysteriously shaped by circumstances. Maybe the bulky solidity of her life now, the quantity of care it takes to ward off chance, shapes her just as arbitrarily, and she is no more a virtuous wife and mother than she was an adventurer. Maybe she only imagines that Maeve hangs on her arm for an extra moment, waiting for more from her when she can't afford to drift across the borders of the straight and narrow.

VIII
. Evan starts to have headaches when he turns twelve. He doesn't complain. Only when the headache is so fierce that he can't eat or has to lie down in the dark will he ask for Tylenol.

Evan's pediatrician refers them to a neurologist. The neurological workup shows no obvious physical cause. The neurologist asks if there's a history of migraines in the family, because the onset sometimes occurs at adolescence, and Katie can supply only half of Evan's medical history. The doctor questions Evan about
whether he is happy at school and whether he feels pressure to get good grades.

Katie takes Evan to another doctor. For a few months, their lives are a round of tests—allergy skin tests, more neurological scans, blood work—and experiments with different medications—ergotamine, sumatriptan, Fiorinal.

Nothing works, and Evan doesn't complain, which shames Katie. Once when he was seven, he punched Katie's arm, and he only looked at her when she lectured him about hitting. Goaded by his indifference, she kept after him all day, claiming he'd bruised her. That night, he got out of bed and came to find her, sobbing that he hadn't meant to hurt her. And she felt terrible for not having recognized the remorse in his silence, his sealed shame. She doesn't want to fail him again.

She takes him to another neurologist for another round of tests. When they arrive for their follow-up appointment, this doctor talks about how migraines are caused by a kind of misfiring in the brain and prescribes a tiny dose of a tricyclic antidepressant that sometimes corrects this chemical deficiency.

Katie says, “That's enough,” and yanks Evan up out of the chair. She shakes on the drive home, with Evan beside her saying, “Mom, calm down.”

When they get home, she finds Billy in the kitchen starting dinner. She asks him to come to the bedroom so they can talk, and then after she carefully shuts the door, she lets her fury spill over.

“That asshole prescribed antidepressants,” she says. “He just wants to put Evan on more horrible drugs instead of figuring out what's wrong. I want him to order a
CAT
scan, but he won't.”

“Maybe that's not the point anymore,” Billy says. “Maybe there isn't a specific reason, and the best thing we can do is just help Evan learn to live with it.”

“Live with it? You sound just like that doctor. Who cares why he has to suffer?”

“He has mild headaches,” Billy says. “He's not
suffering.
”

“Yes, he is!” She and Evan are alone in this.

Billy mistakes her tears of anger for tears of weakness. He takes her in his arms, speaks soothingly. “You've dragged him to enough doctors. Now you start talking about
CAT
scans. You're not doing him any good. You've got to get hold of yourself.”

Held in his arms, she is compressed to a shape dictated by his muscles, his bones, his reach.

She wants to hit him. “We haven't tried everything. There's acupuncture. There's biofeedback.”

“Biofeedback isn't a bad idea,” Billy says. Even his gentleness can't disguise his lawyer's instinct to seek compromise, negotiate a settlement instead of a trial date. Her panic bangs against the sturdy slope of his body like a bird against a window, smacking itself inert. The grief she wants to feel for this small corpse may even be what makes her press her mouth so fiercely to his.

IX.
When the phone rings, Maeve jumps up to get it, nearly knocking over the chessboard. She loves to answer the phone. When she speaks into the mouthpiece, she enunciates her lines like an actress, oozes etiquette and politeness. “May I ask who is calling please?”

She puts a hand over the mouthpiece, then bellows in her real voice, “Mom, it's some man for you.”

When Katie takes the phone from Maeve, Malcolm speaks a quiet hello into her ear. “Who answered the phone?” he says.

“That was my daughter.”

“I thought—at first, you know—that it might be him.”

“Evan's voice is changing,” Katie says. “It's much deeper than Maeve's.”

“Maeve. That's a pretty name.”

“Just a second.” Katie untangles the phone cord and backs into the kitchen from the dining room. She looks at her family before
she closes the door on the cozy vision at the table: Billy and Evan leaning over the chessboard, their elbows on the table, Evan warning Maeve that if she doesn't move her bishop, it will be threatened by her dad's knight, and Maeve, tiny distillation of fierceness, hotly answering that she knows that, he doesn't have to tell her everything.

“How are you, Malcolm?” Katie says.

“Good,” he says. “I'm good. I'm in rehab now. I've been in rehab for two years.”

She wants him to tell her what he wants. Instead, she says, “That's good news.”

“Well, you know, you take it one day at a time.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I was wondering if I could see you sometime,” he says. “Just to talk.”

Katie is glad that Billy and the children can't see her cowering over the mouthpiece of the phone. Up until now, she has been conning herself, the way she and Billy are always conning the children, translating all the sticky and unpleasant truths of the world into patient, tolerant restatements of the facts: warnings about strangers whittled down to mild guidelines about who to talk to when and the reassurance that most people are nice, the ugly facts of prejudice translated into a mingled contempt and pity for people governed by ignorance and fear. Malcolm is a pair of headlights bearing down on Katie in the dark.

X.
When Katie peers in through the window of the cafe, she recognizes Malcolm right away. Reflexively she compares him with Billy: Malcolm, still wiry, sits on the chair as if he must concentrate in order to keep still instead of flying up from where he's perched; Billy can place his body anywhere, standing or sitting, and seem instantly, organically rooted to the spot, moving with smoothness from the fulcrum of an essential calm.

When she approaches the table, Malcolm jerks up, half rising from his chair and then falling back as if it's a grievous error to be startled so easily. She might not have recognized him if she had only his face to go by—its lines and creases have been sharpened by the taut, collapsed skin; his teeth are a dull, yellowish brown; his eyes bobble with the mechanical instability of a doll's.

He surprises her by reaching out to shake her hand. His hands are cool and dry to the touch and too big for his body. Oh, she remembers him always having to arrange those big hands, find somewhere to put them, as if they were extra possessions.

He says he appreciates her willingness to see him. It's been so long; it's not like he isn't fully aware of what he did to her and their son.

“And you're looking so good, you sure don't need me around,” he says. His words flicker and dart like his eyes, a zigzag of tangled false starts and sudden shifts of direction. “But the thing is—when you're stable, when you're ready, um, you got to make amends, and I've been straight for two years, I don't need to tell you what a job that's been, and I wonder about him, you know, my blood, my son, somewhere in the world, and I don't even know the first thing, which I have no right to ask, I forfeited that right, I know that.”

Katie feels as if she's clutching her middle-class self in her lap like a big, bulging purse. Malcolm's jerky mannerisms aren't even organized enough to be termed nervousness, and he is afraid of her, afraid of all the armor that living in the world, thriving in it, has granted her. She plans to tell Billy about this visit after the fact, when it's taken care of. He'd have offered too many good reasons why she should have refused Malcolm, and she could not have accounted for her
yes.

“Evan's fine,” Katie says. “He's a great kid. Levelheaded, smart, sweet.”

“And how are things going for you?” Malcolm says.

“Things are good,” Katie says. “I'm an art teacher. I work with little kids.”

“I remember that,” Malcolm says vaguely. “You wanted to be an artist.”

“What about you?” Katie says. “Do you still play?”

He watches his hands fumble with his coffee cup, shred the napkin beside it. “No. That's gone.”

He presses his palms flat to the table in order to keep them still. “I'm a counselor at a clinic. I go to schools, give talks, lead groups for people in recovery.”

“I'm glad you're
OK
,” Katie says.

“Man, I got to go through an incredible amount of orthodontic work. Horse rots your teeth.” He laughs. “But one good thing, out of all this—surprise, surprise—I was always careful about needles, never shared. A good middle-class kid after all.”

She's forgotten, till now, Malcolm's bitter amusement at anything conventional, at her small efforts at domesticity when they shared an apartment. A once familiar expression bobs on the surface of his eroded face and then disappears.

“I did wonder why you wanted to see me,” she says.

His eyes flicker to avoid hers. “The people you've hurt—you're supposed to make amends. I know I've got to prove I'm on the level and all that.”

She sees that he has no idea how to ask her for anything or what to ask her for. She has spent the last ten years ready to protest to him, “Yes, this life is good.” But he hasn't been the one arguing with her. He has no claim to lay on her.

XI.
When Katie and Maeve get home from Maeve's riding lesson, Maeve insists on boasting to Billy and Evan about how she was thrown. Maeve was cantering around the perimeter of the riding ring, the instructor standing at the center calling out instructions, when Maeve's horse began to buck. He
threw her over his head and then jumped her prone body, loose reins flying.

Evan says, “Mom must have had a heart attack.”

“I'm proud of her,” Maeve says. “She behaved herself.”

When she saw Maeve thrown, Katie didn't cry out. She didn't run into the ring. She watched the instructor catch the horse, lead him to Maeve, question Maeve about whether she was hurt. When Maeve got to her feet and smiled at Katie, Katie made herself smile back.

Billy looks at Katie and laughs. “Honey, it's
OK
. She's all in one piece.”

Evan comes to give Katie a hug. At thirteen, he has suddenly grown bigger than Katie, and it is so amazing to be held by him, to feel the thick cord of muscles in his arms, the man-sized bones of his shoulders. “Poor Chicken Little,” he says.

Yes, Katie felt terrified. But she can't admit what else she felt—the adrenaline rush when it was over, when the instructor helped Maeve back on the horse. The threat, sudden and literal, immediately evoked its countermeasure of joy, an exultant traitor to Katie's every maternal instinct.