Safe Passage (9 page)

    
"What the hell are you doing?"
Mag
screamed. She started to lunge for Susan but Gideon held her back, clinging to her leg like a ball and chain. Her heart knocked unevenly and a black rage grew in her chest. Susan
Durrell
, startled, let go of Percival. He ran to
Mag
and grabbed her other leg. She couldn't move at all.

    
"If you can't discipline him," Susan said through her teeth, ''someone has to."

    
Mag's
rage grew until the room was black with it, but the boys held onto her slacks and whimpered. "You stupid bitch," she said. "I could have you arrested for assault."

    
"On what evidence?
The word of a three-year-old street urchin?
Your
word?" Susan smiled, more like an animal baring its teeth. "Obviously you don't care what things look like, but we have a nice home here and we're trying to grow
grass
.

    
"Grass,"
Mag
said. "You were going to beat my child because he put a dent in your
grass
?"

    
"We don't have any children here, and we don't want any. Susan's face was a maniacal white.

    
"You really are out of your mind,"
Mag
said.

    
"Do you understand what I'm saying? We
do not want
your six or eight little maniacs putting ruts in our yard and tearing up our bushes and picking our flowers. If you can't keep track of them, someone has to. I think now this one at least"—she pointed to Percival—"will stay the hell away."

    
"I think,"
Mag
told her, moving the children toward the door, "that if you want so much privacy and no kids on your lawn, you better start building your moat and drawbridge."

    
"Just keep them off our property," Susan said.

    
"If you ever lay a hand on one of them again—if you ever so much as talk to them—you can kiss your sweet suburban life good-bye. I mean that literally."

    
Susan Durrell blanched, though
Mag
would not have thought that possible on top of her previous pallor. Percival stopped crying.

    
"If she ever says anything else to you, I'm going to beat her up," she told him as they wheeled his tricycle back up the hill in the rain. "Don't tell Daddy."

    
Percival clapped. She believed he was undamaged. She'd swatted him many times herself, on a bare butt, with a hand and not a spoon. But still.

    
She never mentioned the incident to Patrick. The next day she bought a complete herbicide at the garden center. Early the following morning, before the sun or the twins were up, she walked down to the childless
Durrells
' yard, and sprayed and sprayed. A week later, the lawn began to die—first in patches and then all over, where she had sprayed. Susan
Durrell
, knowing full well who'd done it but with no hard proof, left the children alone—even Alfred and
Izzy
, who sensed what had happened and began to make a path across the
Durrells
' lawn every day on their way home from school. The next spring the
Durrells
sold their house.
Mag
understood that she was in control absolutely—of protecting her children, caring for them, defending them, nurturing them. Until then she had been a child herself, not wanting children, wanting only an education and her career. But at that moment she ceased to regard herself as the center of her own life and began to think of herself as a mother (not without resentment), and, spraying herbicide just before dawn, was astonished at the violence of her love.

    
But it didn't make her into a Beth O'Neal.

    
"Never in my life, not one time," Percival would yell at her, "have I ever gotten anything I want." It was true. Alfred had insisted on having his own room,
Izzy
wanted lizards and snakes. But Percival stumped her. No matter what she did for him, he never went off happily like the others, never seemed content, never left her alone. If she'd been like Beth,
Mag
might have invested whatever extra energy it took to figure him out. But she didn't. And if he were trapped beneath a ton of concrete now, it would be as if nothing had changed.

    
A bitterness
filled her. She had tried. When Percival was seven, she'd even sent him to take piano lessons from Alfred's teacher, thinking that would calm him, but it didn't. Waiting for Alfred after his own lesson was over, Percival would be sitting livid on Mrs.
Weilman's
couch when
Mag
came in to get them: hateful, challenging, furious.

    
"I'm thirsty," he would say in a stage whisper audible over Alfred's scales.

    
"There's nothing to drink here. You can wait in the car if you're going to act up."

    
"At least
ask
her. She has a kitchen."

    
"No."

    
"I'm really
thirsty
."

    
Alfred, smug, would look around from the piano bench, exercising the brilliant passive resistance he knew would eventually remove Percival from the situation.

    
"
Shhh
,"
Mag
would say.

    
"Don't talk to Mrs. Wellman, either," Percival would hiss. "At
all
."

    
"What if she asks how I am?"
Mag
would ask. "Am I allowed to reply?"

    
"Just don't get into one of your conversations."

    
Then Mrs. Wellman would glance into the living room, making
Mag
feel as if she'd walked into a formal dinner in jeans. Weeks later, when Percival complained about practicing,
Mag
let him quit, while Alfred continued his lessons for years—Alfred with his measured playing, his indifference to music, his rational soul. She'd expected from
Percival's
music something akin to the spell of a snake charmer—Percival slithering up from the piano bench mesmerized, obedient—but they had no such luck.

    
"I never get anything I want," he'd yelled at her later, "and I never get anything to eat."

    
She tried, but there was nothing she could do.
Percival's
blood sugar plummeted after he ate sugar or if he missed a meal. He held her responsible, never feeding himself a single morsel she didn't set before him on a plate. He shot imaginary enemies in the yard with a stick, climbed trees, fought with his brothers in the car—and then crept into the house, hands shaking, too weak to move. She found him lying under the kitchen table, groaning. "I don't
feel
good," he accused her.

    
"You don't feel good because you need to eat."

    
"It's your job to feed me."

    
"It's not my job. You're old enough to feed yourself." Seeing the situation, Alfred started making him a peanut-butter sandwich even as
Mag
railed. "What are you going to do when you move out someday?" she yelled at Percival. "You can put a slice of cheese on a cracker. You're not an invalid. Alfred shouldn't have to feed you."

     
"I'm probably dying." He rolled back and forth on the floor, crying, groaning,
making
a display. "Why are you letting Alfred do it, anyway? You make stuff for
them
," he said, pointing to the twins. "And
him.
" Pointing to Gideon, who in those days loved him so much he would have starved rather than take food from
Percival's
mouth.

 
   
"Oh, for God's sake, Percival." She plopped the sandwich in front of him with a glass of milk. He ate, and ten minutes later his blood sugar was normal, the crisis had passed. Yet sometimes he was in a corner of the house doing push-ups or imagining himself an astronaut, and she would forget. He was one of seven; she had other things to do. He was difficult—would not eat food he thought anyone else had touched, would not buy the school lunches but hated hers ("You give me such
barfy
sandwiches. I couldn't touch it—God, tuna fish on
rye
?"), blanched at the sight of a purple inspector's stamp on the fat of a pot roast. "Make me macaroni," he demanded. She, busy, did not. He starved morosely, never gained weight. Always lived too close to the surface. And at times—he didn't care.

    
He was ten the first time she threw him out of the car. He always fought with his younger brothers in the car unless Alfred or
Izzy
was there to stop it—especially with Gideon and the twins. He didn't pick on Simon because Simon worshiped him so openly.

    
That day he was beating on Gideon. They were only a year apart and almost the same size. Percival was gritting his teeth, and Gideon was pulling at
Percival's
jacket. They were grunting and hitting and making noise. Each one was trying to bellow louder, to gain ascendancy. Even their heads—
Percival's
dark, Gideon's blond—appeared and disappeared in the rearview mirror like animal hides, disheveled and wild. The twins cheered Gideon on. Simon woke from his nap in the back of the station wagon and began to cry.
Mag
couldn't stand it. As soon as they got home they would be friends again. It was only being confined in the car that reminded Percival of his station in life—a middle child, packed in—that roused his fury against the younger ones.

    
Percival was choking Gideon. Gideon was gasping, clutching at the air. "Stop it!"
Mag
yelled. "Do you want to kill him?" The truth was, Percival did. He was grunting, panting, crying—as if his life depended on his brother's death. Until at last, a dreamer waking, he would see himself as if from a distance and pull away, shamed, horrified at what he had done.
Mag
thought she would scream. She pulled to the side of the road. The boys looked at her expectantly. The fighting stopped.

  
  
"Out," she said to Percival.

    
"You've got to be kidding."

    
"
Out
." She grabbed his arm. He resisted. He was feisty, but skinny for his age, and she was stronger. The other boys looked on with wide eyes; even Simon stopped crying. Breathing hard, angry, she pushed Percival out, onto the blacktop. She closed his door, locked it before he could get back in, and drove off.

    
He got home half an hour later, enraged and humiliated, red-faced from running.

    
"That should teach you not to start fights when I'm driving," she said.

    
It didn't.

    
She shoved him out of the car a second time. A third. She made him get out farther and farther from home. At first he tangled with her when she tried to exile him, but finally he stopped—tired, she supposed, of her overpowering him in front of his brothers. She made him get out even when it was raining. "It isn't fair when the weather's like this," Gideon said. That was true but she did it anyway. When Percival started fighting in the car (regularly, inevitably), a hate rose up in her—a hate, yes—until she could not stand the sight of him: the noise, the anger inside him, the very sight. And she would hear herself saying, "Out"—driven by her anger and her hate. Then one day after stopping at several long lights, they turned a corner into their block and saw Percival already standing in the driveway. He had run that fast.

    
That was how Percival became a runner.

    
"This is his way of getting his emotions under control," Patrick said.

    
They joined a track club. They signed him up for the county elementary school meet. Percival won. In the evenings Patrick took Percival to the track and timed him. "Pick it up, Percival, you're a little off the pace," he would yell to him. They learned the difference between a 220, halfway around the track, and a 440, a quarter-mile. Patrick had been a miler in high school. He taught Percival about splits and running intervals. The track club coach gave him special workouts. Percival basked in the attention. He stopped fighting with his brothers in the car.

    
When Percival was eleven the track club went to a qualifying race for the regional Junior Olympics.
It was
Percival's
first time in statewide competition. He came in fifth.

    
"God, I ran so
awful
," he screamed, coming home. Tears trickled down his cheeks and his face was splotched with anger. Gideon, coming into the yard, said to his brother, "How did you do?" Percival shoved him into the dirt. It was the old Percival.

    
"You qualified to run in the regional," Patrick said.

    
"Yeah, but I came in
fifth
."

    
"You can't expect to win your first time in big competition."

    
"Gee, thanks for having confidence in me." He pulled leaves off the bushes with vicious swipes of his hand.