The Dwelling: A Novel (27 page)

Slowly his face lost its tightness and he settled down. She stroked his hair softly and stared at him intently, as if able to will away his troubled thoughts.

“Baby, ssssh…”
She stayed there for a long time. Until every demon passed.

Those little bastards. Why was everyone such a bastard?

She made it as far as the top step outside his room before dropping down and sinking her head into her hands. What kind of place had she brought him to?

With an ear half-cocked, just like when he was little, she listened for his breathing to get slow and regular, waited for sleep to truly take him—to a safer place. When he slept, just like he had as a toddler, he tucked a pudgy fist under his chin. His face would lose that look of concentrated confusion and relax. His lashes would lean gently on his cheeks. He would look like a baby, an angel.

God, at least let his dreams be nice.

A couple of years before, she would have called the parents. She wanted to; she wanted to call up the mothers of those children and scream into the phone,
What kind of animals are you raising?,
scream until she was hoarse and if she was a man, by god, she might have gone over there and thrown her weight around, see how they liked it. See how they liked to be the little one, the one on the dirty end of the stick.

He was just a little kid. How could people not see what a beautiful little boy he was?

Barbara had debated explaining their situation to Petey’s new school—in brief, of course, at least to his teacher and the principal. Explain Petey’s silence, the expression of disbelief that he seemed to have on his face all the time, explain the little compulsions he had picked up over the last year, like eating without stopping, barely taking time to chew, that look he got on his face when he was doing it. Like a good mother, it had crossed her mind to explain, enlighten and, with hope, garner some compassion for her boy. The thought had crossed her mind and then disappeared in the—

In the what?

In the mess that had become her world. In the melting-pot of her brain, where all facts, initiatives and ideas came together to be about Dennis, the divorce, the pain of Barbara Parkins-Staizer. Petey had been lost in that mess for nearly a year.

She cried very quietly so that he wouldn’t hear her, and she did this with practiced skill, so second nature by then that this time she realized she hadn’t even noticed that she had been crying at all. Once she did she cast a guilty glance toward his room and listened for a minute. His breathing was slow and easy. He was asleep. She smeared tears across her cheek and felt her nose running. She stood up on uncertain legs and stepped carefully down the stairs, not wanting to wake him up.

She needed to talk to someone. To hear a voice.

The phone at the bottom of the stairs was mute with accusation. Who would she call? She could call her mother, she could always call her mother. Barbara was lately of the opinion that her mother spent whole days thinking about the fool she had raised. But she’d also noticed Petey before Barbara had really given it a thought.
He’s getting very fat, Barbara. What are you feeding him? Mother!
She didn’t have to call her mother, she could hear her voice in her own head as clearly as if she were in the room. Hovering over her shoulder, shooting spiny comments at every move Barbara made, every decision, until everything she did became so filled with trepidation that she ceased to move altogether. And yet, her mother was often right; cruelly right.

You have to watch out for the boy now. He’s without his father.

I know, Mother.

You could change that, Barbara.

No, I can’t, Mother.

Men are men. They’re all bastards. You have to turn a blind eye and take your licks.

He’s gone, there’s nothing I can do.

You’re not a woman, Barbara.

She could call Debra. Debra was divorced. Successfully. Their friendship, since Barbara and Dennis’s break-up, had changed course somehow, and they had both known it. Her shoulder, hardened by her own break-up, was no longer a place to cry. They could discuss clothes, clubs, movies, books, but nothing heavy. If Barbara tried to bring up a subject on the
verboten
list, Debra’s eyes glazed over. She did not want to relive her own pain. Understandable.

The only other friend of any consequence she had was Gail, the neighbor from two doors down at the old house. Gail with 2.4 children, her husband in affable agreement to almost everything Gail said, her suburban life with blond kids, good kids (thin,
acceptable
kids), her dog, and unspoken judgments and pursed lips about the way the world had turned, and right in her own backyard!). Dennis still saw them, she knew. She supposed that he had gotten custody of Gail and Bob in the divorce. The temptation to ask (and the gleeful telling, probably) about Dennis would be worse than any tone Gail would take with her, and she
would
take a tone.

You’re not a woman, Barbara.

Barbara walked past the phone, the hallway cold, the cold seeming to follow her into the kitchen. She would have a drink. There was a bottle of Canadian Club that Debra had given her for Christmas, about a month after Dennis had left. It had been a joke, to cheer her up. Debra’s divorce was four years old already, long past the point of regret and pain and well into the realm of her own life. She was a good example of how things can go
right
after a divorce: her life was so wonderfully full and she was always laughing and running off somewhere with someone. “Greener pastures and bigger dick,” was how Debra referred to divorce now, but it hadn’t always been so, and Barbara, under the constraints of their current unspoken agreement, couldn’t help but feel resentful for the hours of time she’d put in listening to Debra cry and rage. She also, regretfully, remembered her own smugness, which now looked so foolish and naive, listening to the details, a Gail-like
tsk-tsk
carefully hidden under veils of sympathy.
Poor baby. Men are bastards.

The bottle wasn’t hard to find. The label had been replaced by one of those fake ones that you can produce on the computer; at the time (after a couple of belts at Debra’s) it had seemed funny, but now was not funny in the least.

BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS
, and under that it had said,
THE BROKEN HEART
’
S BEST FRIEND
.

It was a little after, or before, breakfast, but she didn’t think anyone would notice.

Barbara sipped her drink and opened boxes of books, shoving them indiscriminately on the shelf adjacent to the sofa. It would crowd the one corner of the room, but if she got a big chair or a love seat or something LARGE for the other corner, it would all balance out.

No ice. The whiskey was warm and sharp in her mouth and down her throat—
this too shall pass
—but the ice-cube trays were still buried in one of the many boxes still to be unpacked in the kitchen. She supposed if she was going to take up drinking whiskey that she should also take up making ice cubes. For now they would stay buried. Too bad. She liked the sound of ice tinkling in a glass. It sounded
festive.

She separated Petey’s books from her own (and the ones of Dennis’s that she had taken because she liked and because she
could).
The titles were all so familiar to her:
Charlotte’s Web, Stuart Little, The Secret World of Og, Henry and Ribsy;
just before Dennis left she and Petey had finished reading the first in the Harry Potter series. It occurred to her that they hadn’t read “a long book” together since then. They had stuck to comic books and Arthur stories. Short, easy things. She couldn’t really remember what they’d read.

She’d been in a fog. She would not be up for any mother-of-the-year awards. Not for a while, anyway.
This too shall pass.

She’d always assumed, vaguely at least, that she would have another child. They’d talked about it. But it was as though suddenly Petey was five and then he was seven and then, by the time he was eight, any desire for another child had been eclipsed by the slow disintegration of their marriage. If there had been two children, they might have been able to comfort each other during those first months after Dennis had left, but there had just been Petey. There had been nights when she hadn’t been able to speak, and if she did, then it was to rage or cry. There had been many times when she’d cried while cooking supper, doing the dishes, laundry.
All day.
She’d broken down once in the middle of the grocery store, in the bread section, as she recalled, standing there, leaning against the cart, bawling like a baby, Petey looking at her, his round, freckled face white with—
embarrassment? Fear?
A lady had stopped and asked her if she was going to be all right and she’d blurted out that her husband had left them and that she was never going to be all right again. The woman had patted her shoulder or back or something tentative and then pushed her cart away as though it were catching. Petey just stood beside the cart, silent through the whole thing. After the woman walked away, he went to the shelf and picked up two loaves of bread. “Two enough, Mom?” he’d asked, and she’d nodded and they moved on to Produce.

I’ll make it up to him, all of it.

God knew he had enough on his plate. He was a big boy. The doctor said he would grow out of most of it, but that he might just be big. “Like his dad,” Dr. Poulin had said. Like his dad. Dennis had been on the heavy side when she met and married him, not something that had ever mattered to her, and when Petey inherited his weight, she hadn’t thought about what it could mean for him. Red hair and freckles didn’t help. And in a couple of years—if he was like Dennis—he was going to need glasses. She hoped that somewhere in the neighborhood there was a Jeremy—

There was a
thump!
from upstairs, loud, like the sound of something (soft) falling over, and in her haste, Barbara jumped up and knocked over her drink onto the bare floor of the living room.

“Shit,” she said out loud, looking upward. Glancing at the mess her drink had made, she grimaced and went into the hall without turning on the light there. The stairs were dark, but she could see the faint light coming from the upstairs bathroom, the door half shut to cut the glare to his room. From the bottom of the stairs, she looked up and listened. It was quiet. All she could hear was the buzz of the clock in the hall. She stood still, hardly breathing, not wanting to make a sound and wake him, if something had fallen—

—and hadn’t woken him. She listened intently. There was no further
thump!,
he did not call for her, and Barbara relaxed, diverted her attention back to the floor and the spilled drink. She leaned down and righted the glass. The smell of whiskey filled her nostrils and she wondered idly if it would score the varnish. On her way to get a cloth to wipe up the mess, something else caught her attention, again from upstairs.

Whatever she heard was enough to stop her. She paused between living room and dining room and figured she would just go up and have a peek. Petey was maybe having a nightmare. She remembered reading something once about young children sleepwalking during times of trauma and he wasn’t yet used to the stairs.

In the pause between deciding, she heard a giggle. Then something else, not intelligible, but a word maybe. Very distinctly.

Barbara frowned, and went to the bottom of the stairs, one foot on the bottom step, listening. “Petey?” It sounded loud in the dark hall. It was very quiet upstairs, the hush falling into a gap, like breath held.

Feet bare, padding across the floor, quick little steps (too little, she acknowledged before it was too late to take it back but that was
impossible)
across the floor upstairs. Barbara tightened, swallowed.

“Petey?” she said, and for the first time realized how dark it was up the stairs, in the hall, and how she couldn’t see. There was silence up there again, but she was oddly reminded of slumber parties as a child, the little girls spread out over bedrooms (never at Elizabeth Staizer’s house, no way) giggling in the dark, daring each other into darker rooms, down hallways, nasty tales of hooks and prowlers in basements and in closets.

She took the stairs with soft steps.

“Petey?” she said louder, stronger, at the top of the stairs.
We’re only fooling!
The light was on in the bathroom and she pushed the door open as she passed it, illuminating the hall and Petey’s room, in a band, from the doorway to his bed, pushed against the far wall (by the window).

Party’s over!

He slept. His covers were pulled under his arms, elbow tucked close to him, fist under chin, just as she’d left him. His face was still and relaxed.

She watched to see a smile appear, a suppressed giggle released,
fooled ya! fooled ya!,
but none came. His lips were parted slightly, eyes still under pale lids. It was not fakery.

Barbara frowned. Her eyes darted around the room, indexing and marking off what might (or might not) have made the noise she’d heard. His comics were still piled as they had been when she put
Scooby Doo
back on top; there was no laundry in a dark corner. Everything was in its place. She began to relax.
He hadn’t heard it.
Hadn’t woken up. She breathed deep and let it go. Smiled.

She went to him anyway, wanting to touch him, like saying good night, and there
was
something out of place. The closet door was open, pressed against the wall, wide.

Pulling the door closed, there was a brief moment when she glanced inside and thought,
It’s so dark in there you can’t see the back wall,
and marveled at the fact before pushing the door shut. She gave it a final push before turning back to Petey and (with her other hand) touched his shoulder, lightly. It seemed enough.
I heard it swing open, hit the wall. That was the thump.