Don't Cry: Stories (16 page)

“I know you,” said the child, still looking down. “You were in the magic cave. Downstairs.”

His mother looked irritated. “The what?”

“He means the walkway connecting the terminals,” said Bea. “It is like a magic cave, the way they’ve done it up.”

At this, the boy looked up; his gaze was alive and tactile, like a baby touching your face with its hands.

“What a beautiful little boy,” said Bea “And imaginative, too!”

“A beautiful little pain in the butt, you mean.” But the mother’s face was grudgingly pleased. Her name was Lee Anne; her son was Michael. They had been visiting her sister, who lived in a suburb called Canton, and were now waiting for their return flight to Memphis, which had been delayed. Bea and Lee Anne talked about

Canton and Livonia, where Bea s family lived; Bea described the crab-apple tree, with its hard dark fruit and soft pale flowers. While they talked, Michael walked around and around them, as if he was dying to run or dance. Could you eat the crab apples? he wanted to know. Could you throw them at people? Could you put them on the floor at night, so crooks would slip and break their butts?

“Michael, sit down,” said Lee Anne.

He sat, and immediately began to rock and nod his head.

“Well,” said Bea, “I—”

“You talk to yourself,” said Michael, rocking. “In the magic tun-nel, you talk to yourself.*’

“Don’t be rude!” snapped Lee Anne. She whacked her son on the head with the flat of her hand. “And quit rocking like a retard.” “It’s all right,” said Bea. “I probably was.”

“That doesn’t matter; I still don’t want him being rude.” She stood, looming over Bea with an air of physical dominance that was startling before Bea realized it was habitual. “Listen, could you just watch him for a minute? I want to see if I can talk to these jackasses here.” She gestured at the check-in counter, where a man and a woman in short-sleeved uniforms made automaton motions.

“Certainly,” said Bea. Lee Anne held her eye for a second as if to make sure of her, then went on toward the check-in counter, her hips expressing a steady, rolling force.

“She’s the one who said you talk to yourself,” said Michael sullenly He was still now, and very sober.

“It’s okay, honey. I do talk to myself sometimes.”

He raised his head and touched her again with his tactile gaze. Except this look did not have the feel of a baby’s touch. It was warm and strong, curiously adult. “Who do you talk to?”

“Somebody who’s gone. Somebody I used to love.”

Used to. He turned away, but still she felt it coming from him, warmth as strong as the arm of a man laid across her shoulders. Feeling came up in her.

Attention: Those passengers waitingforflight 83 to Memphis—

“I talk to my father sometimes,” he said. “Even though he’s gone.”

She started to ask where his father was and then stopped herself. Feeling came up.

—will be boarding in approximatelyjive minutes.

“My father is fighting in Iraq,” said Michael. He looked at her, but his eyes did not reach out to touch her. They looked like they had when he rode above her on the escalator—deep and fiery, but murky, too.

“You must be proud,” she said.

“I am proud!” His eyes were bright, too bright. He was beginning to rock. “My father is our secret weapon! He’s fighting on the shoulders of giant apes! He’s throwing mountains and planets!” Impulsively, Bea knelt and took the boy’s shoulders to stop him from rocking. She looked into his too-bright eyes. “And he is proud of you,” she said. “He knows he has a very good boy He is very proud.”

“Okay, Mikey, it’s time to go.” Lee Anne was back, and full of business. “We’re outta here.” She hoisted a backpack up on a chair and slipped one arm through a strap. She glanced at Bea. “Nice talking to you.” She shouldered the pack with a graceful swooping squat, then picked up a bulging canvas bag.

“Yes, you, too. And best to your husband in Iraq.”

Michael shot Bea a look. Lee Anne’s face darkened unreadably. “He’s been telling you stories,” she said. “I don’t have a husband. I don’t have anybody in Iraq.”

And they were gone. Bea saw Lee Anne slap her son on the head once more before they disappeared. Oh, don’t, thought Bea Please don’t. But of course she would. The woman was alone and overworked, had probably never married, probably hadn’t wanted the child. At least I talked to him, thought Bea; I talked to him and he responded—he responded almost like an adult speaking a child’s language.

And she got on the plane. The stewardess smiled at her, and she slowly made her way down the neutral space of the aisle. She found her seat, stowed her bag, then took out her book and opened it. Children had always responded to her. When Megan and Susan were little and they fought, she rarely had to punish them; she just talked to them in her love voice, and usually they would forget their fight and look at her, waiting to see what she would say next. She could say, “Let’s go out into the yard and see what we can find. Maybe we’ll see a field mouse or a four-leaf clover!” And quiedy they would take her hands and go.

The stewardess came down the aisle, closing the overhead compartments, making sure they were tucked into their seat belts. What luck: She had the whole row to herself

Before they went to sleep, her children would talk to her about anything, ardessly opening their most private doors so that she could make sure all was in order there. When Megan wet the bed, she would go, half-asleep, to her parents’ room, pull off her wet gown, and get between them in her mother’s chemise, a little white sardine still fragrant with briny pee. Even at thirteen, Susan would run to her, crying, “Mama, Mama!” Once she sank down on the floor and butted Bea’s stomach like she wanted to get back inside it.

The plane pushed back. Now no private door was open to her;

not even Megan’s face was open to her. Susan hadn’t come to I her even when she was raped in the parking structure, hadn’t even I told her about it until ten years later, when she could say, clipped I and insistent, that it wasn’t “such a big deal.”

The plane turned on the runway like a live thing slowly turning I in heavy water. Sunlight glinted on its rattling, battered wing. Still, I Megan had flown her out to visit, and taken her to a play. Susan and I her girlfriend were coming for Easter. Both girls came to visit every I Christmas, and had since they’d moved away from home. When I she left Mac and was living from apartment to wretched apart- I ment, the girls divided their Christmas time with scrupulous fairness. Megan spent two nights in Bea’s apartment, while Susan I spent two nights with Mac; then they switched. The two of them I spent Christmas Eve with her, and Christmas Day with him, then 1 the other way the next year.

But she knew they’d rather see her than Mac. Sometimes Susan even sneaked in extra time with her mother, pretending to Mac that she’d left on Tuesday, when she had really stayed through Wednesday with her mother. It was cruel, but so was Mac. When the girls stayed with him, he walked through the house, yelling about how terrible Bea was or declaring that he wanted to die, and that if it wasn’t Christmas Eve, he’d kill himself that night. When he did calm down and talk to one of his daughters, it was about grocery-store prices or TV shows. “And I tell him over and over again that I don’t watch TV!” said Susan, laughing. Susan laughed, but Megan got mad and fought with him. “Oh give it a break!” she yelled. “You’ve been talking about how you’re going to kill yourself for the last ten years, and you know you aren’t going to!” And then she told her mother and Susan about it.

“When I was there, I did a meditation with him,” said Susan.

"With him?” asked Megan. "Or at him?”

“I told him I was going to pray,” said Susan. "And we sat together in the dark.”

They were in the living room, she said, at night with the shades open so they could see the heavy snowfall. Susan went into "a light trance.” In this light trance, she “connected” with Mac as he lay on the couch, seemingly in a light trance of his own. She connected with his heart. In his heart she saw a small boy, maybe five or six years old, alone in a garden. The garden was pleasant, even beautiful, but it was surrounded by a dense thicket of thorns, so that the boy could not get out and no one else could get in.

“I asked him if he wanted to come out,” said Susan. “And he just shook his head no. He was afraid. I told him I loved him and that other people out here love him, too. He looked like he was thinking about it. Then Dad got up and went to the bathroom.”

Megan sniggered. The plane picked up speed. Bea thought, Mac was six when his parents died. But she didn’t say it.

Stop it, you little idiot! You little—

That child, playing on the chairs, full of hope and life. Making up a hero father whom he could be proud of, longing for him, longing to be worthy of him. Didn’t the mother see? How dare you? said Megan. How dare you disrespect his service>

The plane steadily rose, but she felt as if she were falling.

Mac died in his apartment, with the girls taking care of him, or trying to. She did not spend the night there; she did not sit at his side. But during the day, she went there to be with Megan and Susan. They had a hospice nurse who monitored him, washed him, and told them how much and how often to give him morphine. The nurse’s name was Henry, and they all liked him—Susan said that Mac seemed to like him, too. When he was finished upstairs, they made coffee for him, and he would sit in the living room, talking and looking at pictures of Mac when he was young. Megan showed him the picture of Mac in his army uniform, just before he shipped out. “He volunteered,” she said. “Before he was even eighteen, he signed up.”

“That’s not true,” said Bea. “He was eighteen. And he only signed up because he knew he’d be drafted anyway.”

Televisions came down from the ceiling in whirring rows. White-faced, Megan left the room. Henry looked at Bea, looked away. Colors flowed across the rows of dark screens, making hot rectangles, oblongs, and swirls. In the kitchen, Megan faced her, eyes glittering with tears of rage. “How dare you? How—” Bea said no to a beverage but accepted the packet of peanuts. She looked out the window, holding the nuts. The sky was bright, terribly bright, but still she felt the darkness coming. Do you remember the first time, Beatrice? How you were scared and I held you? You were so beautiful and so innocent. But you scared me a little, too, did you know that? Mac had written ■ these things on brown grocery bags, cut to the size of notepaper to recycle and to save money. He never sent them; she found them, stacks of them, when she and the girls were going through his things. We could have that passion again, I know it. Remember, Beatrice, and come back. Please, Beatrice, remember what we had.

Faces bloomed on the overhead screens, clever, warm, and ardent.

She did remember. She remembered that she had been fright' ened and that he had held her; that he had bruised her body with the salty, spilling kisses of his sex, that each bruise bloomed with pleasure, and that pleasure filled her with its hot dissolving blossoms.

And still she couldn’t cry. A stewardess came down the aisle,

headphones draped gracefully over her arm. It had been two years and she had not cried for him once. The stewardess smiled and offered her draped arm. Bea shook her head and turned away, into the darkness. I am old and worthless, and I am going home to shadows on the wall. Susan— Megan— She raised her fists and weakly beat upon her forehead. Why are they so far away? Why don’t they have children? Why does Megan stare at me so coldly when I tell her she is beautiful?

Shadows on the wall: streetlamp, telephone wire, moths, bits of leafy branch. A pale rectangle of light. When the darkness came, these things lost their earthly meaning and became bacteria swim-ming in a dish or cryptic signaling hands or nodding heads with mouths that ceaselessly opened and closed, while down in the corner, a little claw pitifully scratched and scratched. Loving, conceiving, giving birth; if human love failed, it was bacteria swimming in a dish, mysterious and unseeable to itself From a distance, it was beautiful but also terrible, and it was hard to be alone with it night after night, without even an indifferent husband lying with his warm back to you.

Hard to bear, yes. But she could bear it. She had been a child herself, and so knew the cruelty of children. She knew the strength of giving, even if you did not get what you wanted back. She had thrown her body across a deep, narrow chasm; her daughters had walked to safety across her back. They had reached the other side, and she had stood again, safe and sound herself; all was as it should be. The darkness passed. She picked up her book. And he came to her: Michael, the little boy.

He came first as a thought, a memory of his face that interrupted her reading in the middle of the second page. He had so much in his eyes, and so few words to express it. How could his mother give him the words? Or the music or pictures? She thought of him. And then she felt him. She felt him in a way she would later find impossible to describe.

“He was looking for me,” she would say to Susan some time after. “He needed me.”

But it felt more specific than that. She felt what was in his eyes, hot and seedlike and ready to unfurl. Waiting for the right stimulus, like a plant would wait for the sun. Vulnerable but vast, too, like a child in her arms.

When she told Megan, Megan surprised her by saying she’d had experiences like that, too. “But you never know,” she said, “if it’s really the other person communicating with you, or if it’s just your mind”

“No,” said Bea. “It wasn’t my mind. It was him. It felt just like him.”

Love me. See me. Love me. He had no words, but what he said was unmistakable.

“What did you do?” asked Susan.

“I answered him,” said Bea. “I tried, anyway. I tried so hard, I wore myself out.”

I see you, she answered. You are a wonderful boy and you will grow into a wonderful man. I love you; I love to look at you. She put her arms around him, gently, not too tight. She held him and talked to him until finally, she felt him ebb away, as if he were going to sleep. She reclined her seat and closed her eyes. Just don’t get lost in the thorn garden. We need you right here. Don’t go behind the thorns. A tear rolled down her cheek, and she turned her head to hide it. We need you right here.