The Kingdom of Childhood (13 page)

Russ left for Iceland at the beginning of November, carrying with him the large black suitcase that had caused so much trouble not long before. Two other professors from his department went with him, and so there was no ceremonial send-off at the airport; instead, I came home from work and found his bags gone from the foyer. In the past I would have felt slighted at the lack of a proper goodbye, but now I only felt numb. Later in the week, as I tidied up from dinner and prepared to head out to the open house Dan had scheduled, Scott casually mentioned he would be spending the night at Zach’s. As soon as the words left his mouth I knew he was lying. Zach had been in my classroom only hours before. It was the sort of thing he would have mentioned.

At the open house I spotted Zach sitting on the stage with Temple, his colorful eurythmy robe still on, biding time after the evening’s performance. It amused me that his teachers had recruited him for the demonstration of the technique—the “art of expressive movement” he had been learning, like all of his classmates, since grade school. Most
likely they had singled him out because he was a new student and thus an easy target for what most of his classmates would avoid at all costs. But, too, he was probably good at the dancelike movements it required. His body moved with a leonine grace, that I knew well; it was one of the most attractive qualities he possessed.

I beckoned to him from my place near the entrance, and he hopped off the stage. When he was near enough not to be overheard, I asked, “Would you like a ride home?”

“Sure.”

“Well, isn’t that a little strange,” I teased. “I was told Scott is spending the night at your house.”

His eyes darkened with confusion. “No, he isn’t.”

“I know.” The corner of my mouth twitched upward. “I assume he’ll be at Tally’s, or in a motel, or something. Who knows. He’s eighteen now, and don’t you forget it. But what he told me was that he would be at your place.”

Zach shook his head, not catching on. As if speaking to a child I enunciated, “He won’t be home.”

“What about Russ?”

“In Iceland until Tuesday. I told you that yesterday.”

“No, you didn’t.”

I tipped my head, feeling the hunger in my eyes barely contained. “You can call your folks from my place,” I whispered. “Tell them you’re spending the night at Scott’s.”

He winced. “I hate to lie to them, Judy. You know that.”

“It’s not a lie at all.”

A sigh grumbled deep in his throat.
“Judy.”

“I can just take you home if you prefer. It’s entirely up to you. I only thought, it’s not every day that Scott enables this sort of thing. Usually you consider him something of a—what’s the word you use? Buzzkill?”

He managed to snicker and roll his eyes at the same time.

“I need to finish talking to these parents in the hallway,” I said. “Meet me at my car in twenty minutes and let me know the plan.”

Zach wadded his filmy eurythmy robe into a ball and leaned over to grab the slippers he’d stashed away at the edge of the stage curtain. Temple had wandered off to speak with a teacher, leaving Zach alone on the stage. He felt deeply irritated at Scott using him, of all people, as a cover story. Without Zach’s knowledge or consent Scott had involved him in a lie. It was especially galling in light of the way Scott constantly razzed him in public about his supposedly pathetic sex life, then depended on Zach to facilitate his own. He had half a mind to take Judy up on her offer just for spite. Not that Judy would care what his reason was, so long as he was in her bed.

He watched the few remaining little kids play with the picturesque toys the teachers had set out—a basket of knitted dolls, a set of nesting arches in rainbow colors, wooden figurines in the shape of characters from nursery rhymes. Dr. Beckett’s kid lay on his stomach stacking the animals from “The Musicians of Bremen,” seemingly oblivious to the wilder boys around him. Atop his corduroys and simple red T-shirt he wore a golden Michaelmas cape. The sight of it tugged at Zach a little bit, evoking a memory of being six and happy, standing before his teacher in a cape just like that one as his teacher presented him with his rough-cut Michaelmas sword.
Zachary, you have polished your sword so strong, so bright. Use it only for the right.
The Waldorf rhymes came back to him easily, carrying all his childhood memories on their words.
Enjoy it while it lasts, kid,
he thought to himself. Not very long ago that had been him, stretched out on the floor with a fistful
of animals, and the land of make-believe was the only place he needed for a boost of courage, strength and might.

He caved at the last minute, jogging across the parking lot to catch up with Judy just as she climbed into her Volvo. She reached across to pop open the passenger door and started the car. He glanced at the gas gauge and noticed it was nearly at the empty mark. Briefly he considered pointing this out to her, then thought better of it.

“So where are we going?” she asked, and didn’t seem surprised by his answer.

Without Scott present at the house, Zach decided to be nosy. He had always enjoyed exploring other people’s houses, sometimes overstepping the bounds of good guest behavior. Judy, somewhat to his surprise, did not jump on him as soon as they walked in the door, and as she cleaned up the kitchen he felt free to roam. He had been in her bedroom several times before but always under the gun for time, in an elevated state of arousal before he even arrived, in a rush to leave as soon as they were finished. But tonight there would be no such restrictions, and the long stretch of time felt luxurious.

In the bathroom he found the drawer where Scott stored a selection of hair products that would make any girl proud. He flipped through the oldest photo albums, tuning out Russ’s face and analyzing the looks of a much more youthful Judy. She had been cute back then, although no more his type then than she was now. He preferred blond and elegant to dark-haired and elfin, but, of course, Judy’s looks had little to do with why he felt drawn to her. Her foot on his erection when he’d thought he was the one running the show: that’s why he was with her. Because he could swim down into her desire as long as his breath would hold, and never find the bottom. And yet, at the top, the pool shimmered glassy and still. It was sexy as hell.

Avoiding Scott’s room and Russ’s office, he made his way around the top floor to the bedroom, where he crouched down and viewed the tattered cardboard boxes and dust bunnies under the bed. The night table drawer held a plastic comb, a few hair elastics and a copy of Anaïs Nin’s
Little Birds.

“Look at you, getting all up in my business,” she teased from the doorway. A wineglass, nearly empty, dangled in her hand.

He turned around and grinned, only slightly embarrassed. “You’ve hardly got anything interesting in here.”

“You just haven’t been looking in the right places.”

“And none of the normal stuff.”

“Normal stuf?” Her brows knitted. “Like what?”

He stood up and hiked himself onto the bed. “Birth control. Candles. Those strips that go on your nose to stop you from snoring.”

She laughed. “Neither Russ nor I snore. I keep my birth control pills in my purse so Russ doesn’t find out about them. And I’m not a candle girl.”

“Why not? I thought every girl was.”

“Not me.” She sat beside him on the duvet. “When I was little I had to read a book about a girl who plays with a match and sets herself on fire.
The Dreadful Story of Pauline and the Matches,
it was called. I can still remember nearly the whole thing.” Her gaze shifted to the wine swirling in her glass. In a singsong voice she chanted, “‘It’s very, very wrong, you know. You will be burnt if you do so.’”

“That’s a children’s book?” He grinned. “Nice.”

“Oh, yes. It’s from the one I told you about in the woods that day.” She swallowed the last of her wine. “At the end there’s nothing left of her but a pile of ashes and her little red shoes, and only the cats mourn her. It gave me nightmares for weeks. It seemed like the most horrible thing in the world,
the worst death. Because of it I’ve never been much a fan of fire.”

“That’s weird. They use candles at school all the time.”

“Sure, and I’m okay with it as long as it’s contained. I do think fire can be beautiful in a terrifying sort of way. I just wouldn’t choose to put it around my house when I’m trying to relax.” She threw him a tight smile. “Or where it might get knocked over. I’d find that inhibiting, wouldn’t you?”

“Yeah, I suppose so.”

She nodded and looked thoughtful. “I imagine it’s where people got the idea of God. Something beautiful and warm that you feel drawn to, but powerful enough to devour you. It’s human nature to identify the natural world with ourselves, and vice versa. We imagine that if a human could channel the powers of nature, then there’s someone to whom we can plead our case, who could contain a disaster. But I’ve never seen that work very well.” She hopped down from the bed. “I’m going to take a shower. There’s plenty of food in the kitchen if you’re hungry. All the additives and high-fructose corn syrup you could ever want.”

He grinned. “I’ll be all right.”

He stepped out the back door, killing time as he waited for her, into the yard bordered by a wooden privacy fence and plenty of trees. A few wrought-iron armchairs were scattered near a table that had once held an umbrella; he sat, polishing off a Coke from her refrigerator. Nothing was stopping him from getting into her wine, but he had considered and discarded the idea quickly. He still felt paranoid that Scott would turn up, and that fight stood a better chance of being fair if Zach was sober.

At one end of the yard stood a little playhouse, dilapidated and festooned with chipped paint and a few scraggly vines.
He supposed it had once been the property of Scott’s sister. The one he had built was far more elaborate and better constructed. He thought back to the challenges of the joinery, the pain-in-the-ass of replacing all the gingerbread after he’d put it on backwards. He thought back to the kiss. The instant before she moved, he knew she would, and then it happened all at once: her body rising, her hands on his face, and then her mouth astonishingly on his own: this teacher, this mother, this minor flirtation like a tavern puzzle he’d been toying with at a party. Weeks later, in the woods, there had been no way to decipher who was seducing whom; but in the playhouse, he knew perfectly well.

Not that it mattered now. He put a foot up on another chair and slouched down to look at the sky: Orion hanging above the treetops, Ursa Major, Venus’ pale blue glow. The absence of mountains still bothered him. Without their buffer the Earth seemed too close to the sky, arching toward it like a slavering dog on a leash, nudging impolitely into the territory of God.

From inside the house he heard the squeal of pipes. He glanced up at the second story, the light in the bathroom window broken by her intermittent shadow as she walked back and forth. By the time she got to him her combed wet hair would be curling slowly as it dried; her skin would smell of strawberry lotion, her mouth of wine. It was a mystery to him why Russ left her alone. His best guess was that Russ was having an affair of his own, which helped Zach assuage the guilt that nudged at him. Lying to his parents, on the other hand: try as he might, he couldn’t quite stop feeling like shit about that. But as he rose up through the deep of childhood and into the shallows of adulthood, it seemed that on the surface these shiny lies swirled like gasoline and, sooner or later, stuck to everyone. He pictured his younger self barefoot
in his rolled-up jeans, hopping from rock to rock across the slow Saco River in the shadow of his mother’s studio. The trees drooped an extravagance of green summer leaves high above his small dark head, the silver water swirled past stones rounded as toys, and somewhere not far past the singing insects and waving grass she was lying and lying, lying to his father, to him, lying with another man on a mat beneath her chalk-written quote from the
Bhagavad Gita
that read,
Observe your discipline, and arise.

Even her.

He twisted off the tab of his Coke can and plunked it into the opening. Inwardly, he reprimanded himself for the melodrama of his thoughts. In truth, by the time his mother started screwing around with Booger, he was at least fourteen and spending his time on less innocent pursuits than catching minnows in the Saco. The problem with vague knowledge such as his own was that it caused her affair to stretch back infinitely far and infinitely forward, allowing every memory of being booted from the studio to take on a sinister sheen, forcing him to wonder whether she still kept her heart divided for that jack-off in the Lennon shirt. But now, of course, he was hardly in a position to criticize her.

He stood up and stretched, feeling the shock of cold air against his stomach, the pleasing shiver along his spine as his muscles relaxed. He could use a shower himself, and would probably get around to it before the night was over, but he knew Judy wouldn’t care one way or the other. If anything she seemed to prefer him like this: nostrils flaring, tongue tracing his collarbone, it had some kind of feral draw for her. Inevitably she would press her face against his belly and, shoulders curling as she inhaled, proceed to tell him that he smelled amazing before promptly demonstrating that she wasn’t just saying it to be polite.

Through the kitchen wall behind him, he heard the whistle of the sink turning on and off: Judy rinsing out her wineglass. He pressed each fist against the opposite hand, cracking his knuckles, and then headed in through the back door, where the decorous click of the latch was lost in her warm
hello
.

The chirping of birds outside the window told Zach it was nearly morning. He lay beneath Judy’s duvet with his hands folded beneath his head, eyes focused on the slant of light from the streetlight that played against the ceiling. Beside him Judy breathed the slow rhythm of deep sleep, but Zach had lain awake every moment of the long night, occasionally drifting into a state of uneasy exhaustion that was not the least bit restful.

Someone could come home. He couldn’t shake the feeling. Scott and Tally could have a fight; Russ, who never seemed to communicate with Judy anyway, could return early from Sweden or wherever he was. Whenever he managed to talk himself down from such concerns, other thoughts, some even more insidious than getting caught, crept into his mind.

Booger, for example. He pictured the guy’s skinny pale legs, the way his arrogant gaze rested on Zach when he entered his mother’s classroom, his narrow cyclist’s hips in his snug black exercise pants. Everything about him—his manner, his looks, his simpering New-Age-i-ness—was repellent. Had
Zach hated all of those things before Booger made his appearance, or did he hate them all because they were aspects of Booger? Whichever it was, he couldn’t help but imagine all the things Scott would despise about him, for the same reason, if he knew. Zach would become the measure of repulsiveness, fitted into the same category of Scott’s mind where Booger now resided in Zach’s.

He listened to the twitter of the birds and sighed quietly. The dawn chorus—a poetic name for a truly obnoxious phenomenon. He gave up on sleep and softly pushed back the duvet, moving slowly so as not to wake Judy.

She rolled over anyway, regarding him with eyes that were large and suddenly bright in the dark room. “You’re getting up already?”

“I can’t sleep.” He pulled on his jeans and immediately felt a measure of relief. He was dressed now, more or less. That in itself was absolving.

“There are muffins in the kitchen.”

“I’m all right. I’ll eat when I get home.”

“Are you leaving already?” Her voice was skeptical. “I’ll drive you home if you give me a few minutes to wake up.”

His laugh was short and abrupt. “I don’t think I want my folks looking out the window and seeing that.”

“They won’t be up at this hour, will they?”

“I’ll walk. It’s cool.”

She sat up, leaning on one arm. In the darkness she looked incredibly young. The shadowy light smoothed the fine lines of her face, catching in the whites of her eyes and the rounded edges of her teeth, giving her a doe-eyed, vulnerable look; her disheveled hair looked thoroughly black, unlaced with silver. Perhaps it was her nightclothes that sealed the effect: she wore an old T-shirt and, beneath the duvet, flannel-print pajama pants, like any girl his age. She was so damned
small
.

She asked, “Will you do something for me before you go?”

He lifted his shirt from the floor and looked at her with nervous impatience. His mouth felt cottony, his stomach empty, and, lacking new contacts or anything with which to clean the old ones, his eyes stung with dryness and fatigue. Most of all, he needed space. He felt a little ill with the gluttony of the previous night, a little dizzy and overindulged. It was not unlike gorging yourself on a giant ice cream sundae: past a certain point, you sort of felt like you wanted to puke.

But before he could utter a curt response she asked, “Would you fill up the Volvo for me?”

He smiled in confusion. “Your car?”

“Yeah. It’s nearly out of gas, and Russ won’t be back for days yet. I could ask Scott, but you know how he is.”

“Is there some reason you don’t do it yourself?”

She shrugged. “The smell bothers me, that’s all.”

“No problem,” he replied, and he meant it. He stuffed his feet into his sneakers, fished her car keys and a twenty-dollar bill from her purse, and slipped out of the dark house into the damp morning air.

It felt good to be behind the wheel, with the cool wind rushing through the open windows and the radio, for once, set to a station he actually liked. At the gas station he filled the tank and browsed the mini-mart for necessities: a cold bottle of green tea, eye drops, and a breakfast of an apple and a bag of almonds, the only non-objectionable snack foods available. With most of Judy’s twenty gone, he climbed back into the car and signaled his turn onto Crescent Road.

The town was still sleeping. Rising up along the road were the whitewashed cinder-block apartment buildings, the small postwar town houses, that marked off the hamlet of Sylvania from the sprawling prefab buildings of the larger suburbs. A banner hung above the road announced a community art
contest. Past the low-slung Catholic church—in whose shadowed lot he often met Judy in the evenings—lay Hauschen Lake, glittering darkly beyond the pines. He followed the uphill curve until he saw the sign for Judy’s street, and then, on impulse, turned his gaze toward the top of the hill and hit the gas.

The road crested, then expanded toward a highway whizzing with cars. Even at this early hour the delivery trucks raced along, the poor suckers with inflexible jobs tolerated their commute, and Zach joined them. He drove without any particular idea of where he was headed, following the curve of the road as it roared past office buildings and storage facilities, broken-down ranch houses and an electrical substation. After a while he took an exit and the road grew narrower, flanked by forest. The sky, glowing a deep hazy blue but streaked with rose and yellow, looked like the painting on Judy’s classroom wall blurred by distance. On an impulse as immediate as the one which had led him on the journey, he pulled onto the shoulder and shut off the car.

His brain was tired, but the drive had turned the nauseated gloomy feeling into one of shallow exuberance, and he gamely wished to follow that thread wherever it took him. With his bag of almonds in hand, he crunched through the russet leaves into the woods. The mild hill was slick with pine needles, but he dug his toes in deeper, touching the trees for balance, and made the climb. Farther in, a tall chain-link fence marked some border that seemed to make no sense at all; the woods continued beyond it, and no sign announced an owner or reason. He clasped the bag of almonds in his teeth and clambered over the fence, taking the eight-foot drop in easy stride.

The forest. It felt good to be here. He breathed in the piney air and hiked up the crest of the hill, where it leveled
off and stretched into a few acres of sweetgum and fir before flattening into farmland. Upon sight of the yellow fields he understood where he was. He had driven past this place with his friends before; it was an agricultural facility of some sort, a practice farm where they tried out new plant hybrids and fertilizers. Still, he had trees and space and he was blessedly alone. He sat down beside a spruce and ate his almonds, then lay on his back to watch the last of the darkness slip from the sky.

The November trees, their contorted branches nearly bare, made it easy to catch the subtle shifts that marked the sunrise. In his home state it would be far too cold to lie in the woods in nothing but street clothes and a down vest, but here he felt barely a chill. The leaves crackled beneath his back and, above, the last remaining ones shuffled softly to the earth, a sound best heard with his eyes closed.

Beautiful,
he thought.

He breathed in the clear air and felt the living woods surround him, the ground buoying him on a litter of leaves, the sunlight a pale, narrow beam that promised warmth yet to come.

When he awoke, a county sheriff was glaring down at him, hands on his belt.

Zach’s mind, most recently settled into the depth of the word
beautiful,
rose to the state of
oh shit.

“You damn runaways always gotta show up here,” the officer said. “You kids ever hear of the mall?”

Already pushing himself up on his arms, Zach mumbled, “I’m not a runaway.”

“Get up. You got ID?”

Zach fumbled for his wallet, handed over his driver’s
license, and rubbed the sleep from one eye with his palm. “I didn’t know I wasn’t allowed to be here.”

“Of course you’re not allowed. This is a federal facility.”

“I thought it was a farm.”

“It is—USDA. Licensed personnel only.” The officer held up Zach’s driver’s license. “New Hampshire. Not a runaway, huh?”

After drifting off following nearly twenty-four hours without sleep, his body begged to be allowed to return to the forest floor. Even the presence of a police officer could not stop him from nearly falling asleep on his feet. Shaking his head groggily, he said, “I moved to Sylvania last summer.”

“So what are you doing all the way up here?”

“Visiting my girlfriend.”

The side of the officer’s mouth lifted in a peevish smile. “Don’t see her around here, do you?”

“No. I stopped here just to—see the woods. I like the woods.”

“You walked from Sylvania.”

He shook his head again and wavered on his feet. God, he needed to sleep. He couldn’t even figure out how to put the words together to explain how he had arrived here. When he thought about Judy’s car on the shoulder at the bottom of the hill, his thoughts melted into a puddle. He blinked several times in an attempt to clear his head, and the man asked, “How much have you had to drink?”

“Drink? Nothing. Just some tea.” Coffee would have been a good idea, he realized now. He still wasn’t used to choosing it, with one of his parents normally around.

“You expect me to believe that? Your eyes are bloodshot from here to hell and back.”

“It’s my contacts, that’s all. Look at my license. I’m sixteen. I can’t drink.”

“Like that’s ever stopped you kids before.” The sheriff took him by the upper arm and led him toward a sand-colored car between the forest and the field. “You got a parent at home?”

The momentary prickle of fear that seized him quickly gave way as his mind finally kicked into gear. “Yeah,” he muttered. “My stepmom.”

By the time Judy appeared at the door of the security station, Zach felt considerably less agitated than he had in the first moments after being escorted into the officer’s car. First, he gradually realized the man was not, in fact, a county sheriff, just some rent-a-cop who worked for the agricultural center and wore a brown uniform. Second, Judy’s shrieking in his ear included a rant about how she
hated
driving Russ’s car, which reassured Zach that he could count on her to bail him out, however grouchily. As the minutes ticked by and he scratched at a mark on the officer’s desk with his fingernail, he grew to feel almost cocky. What was she going to do—report him to his parents? Ditch him? Refuse to let him tank up her car again? No—the power was all his. He had spent the past ten hours pleasing the living hell out of her. She was just fortunate that when he found himself being dragged along by a guy in a uniform, he had the good sense to keep his version of their relationship G-rated.

She caught his eye as the officer came toward her. She wore one of her baggy kindergarten-teacher jumpers over the T-shirt she had slept in, but her coat disguised the strange look. Her hair was back in a loose, messy ponytail. He shot her a smile and was rewarded with a venomous glare.

“Said he was visiting his girlfriend,” the officer told her. “Staggering around like he’s three sheets to the wind.”

Judy responded with a few short shakes of her head directed at Zach. “I told you to stay away from that girl.”

“I told him we could charge him with trespassing on federal property, but so long as there’s an adult going to set him straight, we won’t pursue it. I’ll let you two work that out.”

“Oh, we will,” she muttered as she signed the clipboard.

Once enclosed in Russ’s red sport-utility vehicle, Judy turned toward him with a look that made her earlier glare seem angelic. “What the
hell,
Zach.”

“I felt like driving.”

“You felt like driving.
My car.
And practically getting arrested. God, are you ever lucky I knew how to play along when he called.”

Zach shrugged.

“And now here we are in
Russ’s
car,” she continued, “you in your T-shirt with cat hair all over it, forcing me to
sign off
on a document that says I picked you up at seven in the morning. How is
that
going to look? Are you
trying
to get me arrested? Or to find yourself in court giving a blow-by-blow of all this in front of your mother?”

He shrugged again. He recognized the melodrama. It was a mom thing. The best course of action was to shut up and let her vent it until she was done.

“You have nothing to say for yourself,” she prompted.

He considered that, then said, “I’ve got to pee pretty bad.”

She banged the steering wheel with both hands. “
Damn
you, Zach. You’ve got some serious nerve. You’ve got
chutzpah
.”

“Chutzpah?”
He laughed. “Is that like
R-R-R-Rudi?
”

Her open palm collided with his face in a burning slap. Hand flying to his cheek, he sneered at her. “
Ow
. What the
fuck
.”

“Don’t you mock me,” she ordered, but her tone had a nervous waver.

“Don’t you
hit
me, goddamn it. What the hell was that?”

She turned the key in the ignition. “That was me snapping you out of it.”

“Snapping me out of
what?
”

“Your attitude problem is what.”

“My
attitude problem?
” He felt his face growing hotter by the moment. “Who the fuck do you think you are, my mother? Even
she
doesn’t hit me.”

“Don’t start with me, Zach,” Judy warned. “It’s not like you’ve never taken your aggressions out on me.”

“When have I
ever
done anything like that to you?” he said. All the muscles in his body seemed to shiver with fury. “When have I
ever
laid a hand on you because I was angry.”

“Why
would
you be angry?” she yelled, her voice filling the car. “You call all the shots. You’re the one who walks away happy no matter what. You take advantage of me and scare the shit out of me and then you have the nerve to sit there with that smug look on your face mocking me for being upset. How
dare
you.”