The Kingdom of Childhood (15 page)

And then I felt a hand sweeping my hair over my shoulder, followed, without hesitation, by lips touching my neck. I let out a small shriek and spun around, dropping the wool. Zach stood there grinning, his expression a little confused. “Sorry. I figured you heard me come in.”

“No. What are you
doing
here? Go, before Ms. Valera comes in.”

“She left. Nobody’s coming in.”

I picked up the ball of yarn from the floor and, as I straightened up, caught him undoing his pants. My face contorted with anger. “Jesus, Zach.
No
. Of all the places to come up with that idea. Not
now
.”

“Oh, c’mon. It’ll take, like, a minute. I’ll lock the door.”

“No.”
I turned my back on him and grabbed the box of lanterns, wedging it onto the empty shelf. In the act of pushing its edge into place, the crochet hook slipped out of the ball in my hand and fell against the tile with a clatter. I tugged the string to bring it back up, and all at once, Bobbie’s last few rows of crocheting came undone like a zipper pulling apart. This time my shriek was not small at all, but one of raw and ragged anguish.

“What’s the matter?” asked Zach.

I dropped to my knees and picked up the raveled pile of yarn. The long string was kinked at regular intervals, like an undone braid. I looked up at Zach and in a furious voice asked, “Why did you do that?”

“I didn’t do anything.”

“Well, if you hadn’t come in here and scared the life out of me—”

“I just thought you wanted to see me.” His voice was hard, curt; as were his eyes. He pulled up his zipper and reclasped his belt. “Chill the hell out. It’s
yarn
. Jesus.”

He turned and left the room. The tile floor was cold even through my tights, and the slam of the door jarred me. And then I was alone in the familiar classroom, in its spacious silence, the shadows broken only by the hallway light that came through the small rectangular window on the door. I looked down at the loose pile of wool in my hands and, for the first time since the drive home after her funeral, cried in my grief for her.

The day after the Martinmas celebration, school was out for Veterans Day. Zach, having agreed to work for his dad for the day, awoke while it was still dark outside and groggily pulled on his clothes. As he nursed a commuter mug of green tea he stared out the window of the pickup truck at the abandoned Beltway, the white streetlights whizzing by in the darkness, the trees like thin, hard shadows behind them. His father, silent and nearly as tired as Zach, let the radio do the talking. Although he was the same age as Judy, his taste in music was better; he listened to the same stuff Zach liked, and Zach felt a fresh appreciation for it after weeks of tolerating Judy’s dentist’s-office radio station.

They arrived at the embassy, where his father was installing a new library, and carried in the tools. The buzz and whir of the saws brought Zach out of his drowsy haze, and soon enough he was hard at work. This job, like most of his father’s, required precision, care and neatness; the entrance was draped in sheeting that locked them into a plastic cocoon, and Zach found himself doing as much vacuuming as carpentry.

Crouched on the floor and waiting for instructions, Zach watched his father work. Like Zach, he wore safety goggles, a dust mask and a hard hat; only a few chunks of his Viking-blond hair peeked around the edges. His blond-lashed blue eyes were serious and sharp as he measured, making rapid calculations in pencil on the two-by-fours. When Zach was a child his father had seemed so
big
, and even now, at his adult height or nearly so, the man dwarfed him.

His father glanced up, catching Zach looking at him. “I appreciate your help, son.”

“Not a problem.”

“It’s good to have some time with you before the baby gets here.”

“Uh-huh.”

The older man stood and crossed the room, reaching into a bucket for a hammer. Zach pulled his mask down and took a deep breath, then coughed at the dust. His father grinned and passed him a water bottle.

“You’re quiet today,” he observed. “Something on your mind?”

Zach shook his head, but as was usual these days, he was lying. Alone with his dad, in the privacy of the shuttered room, he felt the uneasy urge to start a conversation he knew would lead to much more than he was prepared to discuss. If Judy were an ordinary girl, he would have a dozen questions for his father about relationships that moved too fast, and how to say no when it was what you meant deep down, and whether it was common for all the shimmer to burn off a relationship and leave only the sex. But he had grown to identify so strongly, and so uncomfortably, with his mother and Booger, that he was afraid anything he disclosed to his father would lead to him disclosing
that
. At one point he had wondered if he was wrong about his mother, if he was perhaps making too much
of a simple flirtation; but now, older and wiser, he knew hiding an affair was so brutally simple that what he had witnessed was, at best, a poorly concealed one. He was glad he had not realized this while they were still in New Hampshire, or he doubted he could have restrained the urge to corner Booger on the path to the yoga studio and smash him into the pavement.

What a shit that guy was,
Zach thought with a flare of anger. Walking right past Zach, and sometimes his dad as well, with his rolled-up mat under his arm, all serious about his advanced
asanas.
Zach suspected the furnace closet, with its collection of spare mats and the jutting towel-folding table of peeling linoleum. What kind of person had it in himself to do that—to politely ignore the kid and the husband while getting off with the wife-and-mother in between yoga sessions? What kind of guy would do that to someone as decent as his dad?

He hugged his knees to his chest and rocked on his feet, and his father said, “Sheesh, kiddo, are you ever flexible.”

Zach stood up and vacuumed the floor, again.

That night he lay in bed with his hands behind his head, exhausted from the day’s work, listening to the murmuring on the other side of the wall. His mother’s voice was nearly inaudible; only his father’s baritone vibrated noticeably through the drywall. He closed his eyes and tried to take advantage of the sound. When he was a child he had found it easier to fall asleep when he could listen to the meandering drone of his father’s voice. But shortly he heard his mother laugh; the bed creaked, and before long the sounds grew different, more rhythmic in some ways, more random in others.

He turned over on his stomach and pulled the pillow over his head.

It had never bothered him before, but tonight it did. It was too easy to visualize now. Like learning a new language, the
sounds didn’t all run together like they used to—what each represented, he immediately recognized. It was
gross,
all of a sudden; but also, it gave him a feeling of dread. His mom was on bed rest. Rhianne had a long list of things she wasn’t supposed to be doing, and this was one of them. He hated the thought that she was giving in to it anyway, driven by the same monster that he couldn’t control, the same weakness that had driven her to Booger. She was pregnant. She was a mother. She needed to be better than that.

He pressed the pillow against his ears with his fists and waited until it was over.

At the funeral, back in July, Bobbie’s grave had been a neat rectangle sliced into the turf. Its edges were so sudden and stark against the healthy grass that it might have been drawn by a child, Harold and his purple crayon, sketching an incongruous shape right
here;
because goodness knows none of us was quite sure how it came to be there. The rich gardening smell that rose up from it, good loamy soil, seemed like an affront to her, something to be ignored. Now, in the chill November air, everything was more correct. The yellow grass crunched harshly beneath my thin-soled shoes; the wind carried the smell of drying leaves, and where there had once been a gaping wound in the earth, there was now only a hard ridge, barely visible, like a scab.

I approached her headstone in my pea coat, flowerless and empty-handed. Prayers were not on my agenda; she and God could hash out her needs between themselves, and I knew I wouldn’t be doing her any favors by offering myself as a reference. I stuffed my hands into the sleeves of my coat and spoke aloud to her, haltingly.

“Bobbie,” I began, “I’m sorry about what happened in your classroom the other day. I know you would think I’m horrible
for what I’ve been doing. Believe me, I think about that often. You aren’t the kind of teacher who would ever have—done anything wrong with a student. I didn’t intend to make you the host of anything like that.” I took a long, shuddering breath. “I’m very sorry.”

A small plastic nosegay had been wedged into the flower holder. Its lurid green stems shivered stiffly in the wind. I thought about how Bobbie had looked in the hospital that last week, lying in her bed under a jumble of clear tubing, her hair soft and short and growing back finally, her droll gaze gone flat and perturbed as she stared at the television. At one point her sister-in-law came in and told her she was putting up a great fight.
I’m not fighting anything,
she snapped.
I’m not
winning. I’m not losing. I just lie here and it fucks me up. It’s cancer,
not a football game.
I felt terribly sorry for her then. I didn’t pretend to know how she suffered, but I knew what it meant to feel helpless that way, invisibly taken over by a force that confounded you.

I crossed my arms over my chest, letting my coat bunch up against my chin. “I just don’t know where to go from here. I can’t stop, Bobbie. I crave him worse than I’ve ever craved anything. I just have to let it run its course until he gets tired of me. And I know he will. I know it, and I can’t stand it. I’d do anything to keep that from happening.”

I clutched my arms more tightly around my coat and snuffled noisily. Tears overflowed onto my cheeks and immediately chilled. I wiped my gloved hand beneath my nose and felt my neck tense with an unreleased sob. And that was the worst thing: knowing that I was speaking into the void, into the endless empty space before me. Because only Bobbie knew what the word
anything
meant coming from me, and if she wasn’t here to stop me, who would?

On Tuesday the students returned to school punchy and disobedient, as though having one day off made them feel entitled to two and they would punish us for not granting it. As the day wound down, the low roar of teenagers being let out of Madrigals practice was audible from the opposite side of the school. I found Scott playing Medieval Judo with his friends in the hallway outside the multipurpose room. Zach was spread-eagled on the tile, apparently recovering from a mortal injury.

“Ready to leave?” I asked Scott. I looked down at Zach. “Are we taking you home?”

“Uh-huh.” He raised his knees and then, with acrobatic quickness, leaped to a crouch and then straightened up.

As I had done before, I dropped off Scott at home with an excuse that I needed to stop at the grocery store across town. Once we pulled away from the house, Zach said, “I don’t think he’s going to buy that one much longer.”

“He doesn’t care. He isn’t paying attention.”

The side of Zach’s mouth twisted with doubt. “I wouldn’t be too sure. That’s probably what my mother thought, too.”

My heart palpitated. “Your mother found something out?”

“No, I mean, when she was getting with the yoga guy. She probably thought I wasn’t paying attention.”

“Oh.” A cold light rain had begun to fall. The windshield wipers squeaked across the glass. “Okay, I’ll try to be more innovative.”

I turned into the school parking lot, but it was still full of cars from extracurriculars. “I forgot about that,” I said. “Damn.”

“It’s not a good night for it anyway,” Zach said. “I’ve got a lot of homework tonight, seriously. And I’m out of condoms.”

“Your teachers know you had Madrigals tonight. They’ll
let you slide on the homework. And we can go without the condoms.”

“No, we can’t.”

“Yes, we can. I’ve been on the Pill for weeks now, and neither of us is sleeping with anybody else, so far as I know.”

“Yeah, but it’s still safer if you use them.”

“Safer for what? I don’t have any diseases. Do you?”

In a scornful voice he said, “No. But they say you ought to act like everybody does, anyhow.”

I gave a deprecating laugh. “Oh, the things they teach you teenagers.”

Zach sighed and looked out the window. I asked, “Do you want me just to take you home?”

“You may as well. There’s really no place else to go.”

“Oh, be creative,” I suggested. “It’s suburbia. Parking lots are a dime a dozen.”

“We’ll get caught.”

“Not if we’re careful.” I turned onto the road toward the lake.

“I won’t last.”

I shot him a furtive glance. He sat with his knee against the dashboard, chewing the side of his thumbnail. “What?”

“I won’t last. It’ll be over in ten seconds. There’s nothing in it for you anyway.”

“Zach.” I laughed. “Is that the real reason? Is that why you’re so uptight about covering up? Because I swear you’re like Linus and his blanket with those things.”

“No,” he said, the disparagement thick in his voice. He cut a glance toward me. “It’s because I don’t want you to get
pregnant,
for God’s sake. If that happened my life would be over.”

“I don’t want that any more than you do,” I told him coolly. “That’s why I went on the Pill.”

I turned the car into the deserted lot next to the lake and parked toward the back, near the woods. I laid a hand on his thigh and said, “Hey.”

He turned his face toward me.

“Why are you so moody?”

“Because thinking about cops and babies doesn’t turn me on.”

“Is something else the matter?”

“No. I’m just tense. I’m
tired.
”

I slid my hand beneath his hair and massaged the back of his neck. His skin felt warm, warmer to the touch than my own. For a moment he did not respond; then, not drowsily but deliberately, he closed his eyes. The tension in his neck dissipated beneath my fingers, but his body, even slouched low as it was, looked ready to spring. I rubbed my flat palm in small circles down his back. He curled forward in response, little by little, until his forearms rested against his thighs. His jeans puckered at the back of his slim waist, the bumps of his spine disappearing into the gathered elastic of his boxers.

“Do you remember,” I asked, “when I took you out for coffee, back before, and you rubbed my feet, and you asked me—”

“Yeah.”

“Why did you do that?”

“Because I wanted to see what you would do.”

I grinned. “After I apologized a dozen times for that episode in the playhouse? That’s not very nice.”

He shrugged. His hair swung freely at the side of his face.

“The apology felt a little phony. I was curious what would happen if I pushed it.”

“Except I called your bluff.”

“It wasn’t a bluff. If it was, we wouldn’t be here right now.”

I stroked the small of his back, the skin so smooth it felt sculptural. “You’re right about that.”

He leaned his forehead against the dashboard and sighed. Then, extracting himself from my hands, he climbed over the center console into the backseat. The car rocked lightly on its shocks.

Twisting around to face him, I asked, “What are you doing?”

He loosened his belt and regarded me with an impatient gaze.

“You changed your mind?” I asked.

“You didn’t change yours.”

“I was just buying some time.”

He beat an edgy rhythm with his palms against the leather. “You want it or not? Because I really do have a ton of homework, and it’s getting late.”

I cringed. “Don’t say it like that. It sounds awful that way.”

“Is that a no?”

I should have affirmed that it was. I knew the full litany of what he did not want to do, and this was where it began. If there had remained any possibility that life could throw a cup of cold water in my face and reverse the course of things, it would have been that moment, that question.