Real Life (31 page)

It was Dorrie's fault, anyway. If she had been honest in the first place—told him about his mother long ago, last summer, when he first came to live here, instead of hiding the facts in a box under her bed—none of this would have happened. As soon as he wasn't sick anymore, he would have it out with her. As soon as his head cleared, as soon as his stomach settled, as soon as he could summon up the strength to do anything but stare at those depressing purple flowers and think about the futility of just about everything that came into his mind.

Sunday was a long, sick blur. On Monday, he was a little better. He lay listening to the sounds of Dorrie moving around the house. From time to time, she looked in on him, bringing ginger ale and feeling his forehead with her cool hand—not saying much. He heard her downstairs working at her wheel, then someone coming into the shop, then someone else. Daisy jumped to his bed and blinked at him from the valley between his knees. He slept, dreamed, and woke to the distant whir of the wheel again, and the phone screaming into his headache. He wondered if Nina would call, then found he couldn't think about that without despair. There were calls from what seemed to be the furnace man, and one of his aunt's Boston galleries. He heard her talking to the doctor: “Yes—all right—a hundred and one—yes—no, I don't think so—yes—thank you—I will.” Later, she went to the grocery store (he could tell by the clank of bottles to be returned) and while she was gone he dreamed of an endless algebra problem, a formula that twisted and looped and snaked around corners, teasing him by lengthening no matter how fast he followed it with his pencil.

When he awoke it was dark out and his cheeks burned. He kicked off the sheet. Dorrie was doing something in the kitchen. She heard him stir, and came to the doorway. She was still mad as hell at him, that was obvious. Maybe not as mad as she had been Saturday night, when she had looked like she wanted to hit him. He knew she'd fought with Alex about him too; he'd awakened in the night to hear her and Alex yelling and then Alex slamming the door and driving away. The fight in the night, was the way he thought of it. The words wove through his head, into his dreams: the fight in the night, the fight in the white night, the night fight.

She said, “Let's take your temperature again.” He lay there sucking on the thermometer, gazing at the ugly purple flowers in the painting. He closed his eyes, opened them again, closed them. His head felt like a knife was in it, probing. Life had never been so bad. Everyone hated him; he hated everyone. And he had been having such crazy dreams. He tried to grab at the last one, the algebra dream, but the details were gone, leaving only the sense of angry frustration.

“It's down another point,” Dorrie said.

She shook the thermometer and sat by his bed in silence, studying him, leaning over absently to pet Daisy, who woke up and yawned and went back to sleep. The house was still except for the faint sound of rain, gentler now, dripping on the porch roof outside his window. The rain had been coming down for almost two days. He imagined it swelling the pond, points of wet hitting the rough, gray water.

After a while, Dorrie said, “Do you want to tell me why you did it, Hugo?”

“No,” he said. He turned his head to look at her. She wore a bright red sweater that hurt his eyes. If he didn't tell her, his getting drunk and breaking into the Garners' was pointless, childish. Fleetingly, he thought of Nina, her tiny soft lips. He made up his mind. It would be a relief to talk, even though every word was like a nail in his head. “All right, yes,” he said. “I did it because everything was so rotten.”

“Everything was rotten,” she said. “I see.”

He knew exactly how much she saw: nothing. “I couldn't take it anymore,” he said. “I had to do something.” He pushed himself up to a sitting position, and she lifted the pillow into place behind him. When he moved, the knife stabbed. He considered, for a moment, his illness: what if it wasn't flu? What if it was something worse, and fatal? He couldn't remember ever feeling like this. He'd had the flu last winter, but there had been no weird dreams, no knives and nails. He hadn't had this feeling of detachment from life, as if he were a boat cut loose and heading for the waterfall. He realized that he didn't care how sick he was, any more than he cared about anything else. There was no point to anything, least of all his life. The idea scared him: if that was true, what was left but to die?

“Your life doesn't seem so rotten, Hugo,” she said. “Unless I'm missing something.” It seemed to him that she was choosing her words carefully, speaking with exaggerated calm—the way you talk to a crazy person. Is that how it had looked to her, his breaking into the Garners'? Like the act of a nut case? He wondered if she would send him to a psychiatrist. He tried to imagine himself lying on a couch like they did in movies, telling some old guy with an accent about how rotten his life was. The idea was ridiculous. It wasn't some doctor he had to tell, it was Dorrie. Out with it, Hugo. Now's your chance.

“You're missing something, all right,” he said.

“Well, why don't you just give me a little hint?” Before he could speak, she went on. “Tell me one thing first, Hugo. Why the Garners' place? When they've always been so nice to you.”

“That's why,” he said.

“What do you mean, that's why?”

“I couldn't just break into some stranger's house.”

“Hugo.” For a minute he thought she was going to laugh, but it was just her voice; her face was as stern as ever. “Hugo, I guess what I really want to know is, why break in anywhere at all? Why didn't you and Nina come here if you wanted to spend the evening together?” She said that with heavy sarcasm, as if spending the evening together was a filthy thing to do. Heart of clay, he thought. “There was no one home. You would have been alone, if that was the idea.”

“It wasn't just that,” he said. “I needed to get drunk.” Hadn't he already said that? Maybe in the dream where he had it out with her and cried. “I knew the Garners had some wine.”

She took a deep, annoyed-sounding breath and let it out. “All right. Let me keep asking questions. Why was it so important to get drunk? Just because everything was so rotten? Whatever that means. I don't like this, Hugo. It's against the law to break into someone's house, it's against the law to steal, and it's certainly against the law to drink at fifteen. I assume you're aware of all that?”

He turned his head away. “Obviously,” he said.

“Why this insane desire to get drunk, at your age?” she asked.

He stared at his grandmother's painting and his entire body was flooded with what, in his illness, he had been trying to avoid: the remembrance of kissing Nina. He had felt it picking at the edges of his consciousness, bringing with it only regret for what might have been. Now it possessed him like a fever, 102 degrees of
Nina, Nina
. At last, after all those months of ignoring him and falling in love with Carl McGrath, after he had thought over and over again that he'd lost her, there was the miracle of her turning to him on the Garners' sofa and kissing him. What did it mean? Her tiny body pressed to his, her firm little breasts against his chest. He had buried his hands in her hair and kissed her, one long kiss that had lasted—how long? Hours. And then she hadn't spoken to him in the car, had sat there with her arms wrapped around her guitar, hadn't even looked at him as she got out. She had said a sullen good night to no one in particular, and had run in the dark and the rain up to the Verranos' door without looking back. It hadn't meant anything, her kissing him. It was part of the long series of letdowns that was life. This one thanks to Dorrie and Alex barging in on them at the Garners'. “Oh, Christ,” Nina had said, and pushed him off the sofa.

“Hugo?”

Nina faded away. Dorrie held out the ginger ale to him, and he took a drink through the bent straw. It was mercifully cold. He looked at her and lost his nerve. How did people say such things to each other: You lied to me, everyone lied to me, my mother was murdered, my mother was a junkie. It all seemed unreal. Maybe he'd dreamed that too—the newspaper under the bed. He wanted to turn his head away and go to sleep.

“Hugo?”

“I told you,” he said. “Everything was rotten.”

“All right. Then tell me something else.”

“What?” he asked, in dread. It had been in the back of his mind all day that he had done something more, something worse, something he'd forgotten, something that did give her the right to hate him.

But all she said was “Do you realize that what you did was wrong?” Her voice was no longer calm, no longer so considerate of his sickness. He moved his head painfully to look at her again. There were lines in her face, worse than usual, half-moons under her eyes, angry roads mapping her forehead. Her eyes were burning and intense, as if everything that had happened was her hell, for some reason, as much as it was his. She said, “I need to know—are you sorry about it? Do you regret it? At all?”

He sighed. His stomach cramped, let go, cramped again. What did it matter? He closed his eyes, and when he opened them she was still looking at him, waiting. Heart of clay. “All right,” he said. “I'm sorry about the Garners. I'm sorry I did it to them. That was stupid. But I don't see that it's got anything to do with anything else.” With you, he meant, but her face was clenched with anger, and he couldn't say it. The long speech tired him; he swallowed some ginger ale and finished, “I don't see that it's such a big deal.”

She brought her fist down furiously on the side of the bed—once, twice, shaking the mattress beneath him. The ginger ale in his stomach was like seawater, like sludge. He was going to throw up; he was going to die. She said, “Don't you dare say that, you little bastard.”

He gathered his strength. She had no right to talk to him like that. He said, “If I did something wrong it's my business, not yours.”

His voice was barely audible, but she heard it. She put her face close to his. “It is my business, damn you, Hugo. I won't have this kind of thing, I won't live with it, I've been through it all before.” She spoke through gritted teeth, her voice low, but it rose at the end with something approaching hysteria, and the knife in his head plunged in deep. He had no idea what she was talking about, and he didn't care.

“You made me look like a jerk with Nina.” The seawater churned and soured in his throat. “I'm going to throw up,” he said, and stumbled out of bed, dislodging the cat, catching his foot in the sheet, pushing past Dorrie. He just made it to the bathroom, and leaned over the toilet, puking. He seemed to throw up forever. It was horrible, but he felt instinctively that this was the last time, he was better. Somewhere at the back of his mind it occurred to him that he was probably losing weight.

When he was done, he sat back on his heels, the cold rim of the toilet bowl against his forehead. The toilet smelled of vomit. He reached up and fumbled for the handle to flush it. His aunt was there, and flushed it for him. Shit, she had been watching him. He stayed where he was. He felt better, but weak. He would have to get up, walk by her, get back in bed.

She was crouched beside him with the washcloth. She wiped his face, put her hand under his arm to help him up. “Do you feel better?”

“Yes.” He shook off her arm. “I'm fine,” he said. “Just don't fuss at me.”

“Suit yourself,” she said, and threw the washcloth into the sink. He sighed, and lowered his head to the toilet bowl again. All right: he had hurt her feelings when she was trying to be nice. He should be sorry. He was sorry. He just didn't care.

He got back into bed, and as he fell asleep he heard her, in the kitchen, slamming things around and swearing.

She sat at the wheel while Hugo slept. She was making more soup bowls for the restaurant on the shore: that tricky, low-slung shape, not too shallow. She discarded more than she kept; it didn't matter, she was ahead of schedule, for once.

She thought obsessively of Alex. She was waiting for him to call her. The phone had rung constantly: never him. Surely he would call—wouldn't let a curse and a slammed door be his last words. How, she wondered, had the farcical elements of this night—Hugo's teen-age libido, the prowling around in the rain, her crazy fears—how had they escalated to the point of madness?

“I don't understand you,” he had said. “Your brother you wanted to murder. You wanted to put rat poison in his root beer, for Christ's sake. His kid you defend to the death. He needs discipline, Dorrie—not defense. That's how your parents ruined your brother. They never made him pay.”

She said, “You know he's nothing like Phinny”—hoping it was true. She thought of Hugo's stricken face when they walked in on him, of how he had cried in front of Nina, embarrassed, unable to stop.

Alex said, “How did such a charmless little bugger turn you into a mother hen?”

Anger took her over. He was like some vast powerful dictatorship making war on a harmless little state, Russia invading Afghanistan. “You go to hell, Alex,” she said, hating him. And yet it all seemed false; she kept waiting for him to laugh, make a joke of it, put his arms around her and offer comfort. The look in his eyes, it seemed to her, was more anguished than cruel.

She imagined him driving home in the rain, tired and angry, the tiredness eventually taking over, the anger dissipating by the time he reached his apartment. She had thought he would call her then, remorseful. She waited, still awake, her own anger dwindling down. All right, he had been wrong; he had been hasty; he had been, she supposed, upset by their discussion of his own children. Had taken out his own pain on Hugo. She understood that, it was a pattern, it would pass in time. And Hugo was no saint. Why had she felt she had to defend him so violently?