“Go to bed,” she said tearfully. “Go to bed, you’re breaking my heart.”
“Am I?” Shockingly, he laughed, “Hurts, doesn’t it? I know.”
He left then, walking slowly, the limp pulling his body slightly to the left. Shortly she heard the heavy, tired clump of his shoes on the stairs—also a sound terribly reminiscent of her childhood, when she had thought to herself, The ogre’s going to bed.
She burst into a fresh spasm of weeping, got up clumsily, and went out the back door to do her crying in private. She held herself—thin comfort, but better than none—and looked up at a horned moon that was quadrupled through the film of her tears. Everything had changed, and it had happened with the speed of a cyclone. Her son hated her; she had seen it in his face—it wasn’t a tantrum, a temporary pique, a passing squall of adolescence. He hated her, and this wasn’t the way it was supposed to go with her good boy, not at all.
Not at all.
She stood on the stoop and cried until the tears began to run their course and the sobs became occasional hatchings and gasps. The cold gnawed her bare ankles above her mules and bit more bluntly through her housecoat. She went inside and upstairs. She stood outside Arnie’s room indecisively for almost a minute before going in.
He had fallen asleep on the coverlet of his bed. His pants were still on. He seemed more unconscious than asleep, and his face looked horribly old. A trick of the light, coming from the hall and falling into the room from over her shoulder, made it seem for a moment to her that his hair was thinning, that his sleep-gaping mouth was without teeth. A small squeal of horror strained itself through the hand clapped to her mouth and she hurried toward him.
Her shadow, which had been on the bed, moved with her and she saw it was only Arnie, the impression of age no more than the light and her own exhausted confusion,
She looked at his clock-radio and saw that it was set for 4:30 A.M. She thought of turning the alarm off; she even stretched her hand out to do it. Ultimately she found she couldn’t.
Instead she went down to her bedroom, sat down at the phone table, and picked up the handset. She held it for a moment, debating. If she called Mike in the middle of the night, he would think that…
That something terrible had happened?
She giggled. Well, hadn’t it? It surely had. And it was still happening.
She dialled the number of the Ramada Inn in Kansas City where her husband was staying, vaguely aware that she was, for the first time since she had left the grim and grimy three-storey house in Rocksburg for college twenty-seven years before, calling for help.
28
LEIGH MAKES A VISIT
I don’t want to cause no fuss,
But can I buy your magic bus?
I don’t care how much I pay,
I’m gonna drive that bus to my bay-by.
I want it… I want it… I want it…
(You can’t have it…)
She got through most of the story okay sitting in one of the two visitors” chairs with her knees pressed firmly together and her ankles crossed, neatly dressed in a multicoloured wool sweater and a brown corduroy skirt. It was not until the end that she began to cry, and she couldn’t find a handkerchief. Dennis Guilder handed her the box of tissues from the table beside the bed.
“Take it easy, Leigh,” he said.
“I cuh-cuh-can’t! He hasn’t been to see me and in school be just seems so tired… and you s-said he hasn’t been here—”
“He’ll come if he needs me,” Dennis said.
“You’re full of muh-macho b-bull-sh-sh-shit!” she said, and then looked comically stunned at what she had said. The tears had cut tracks in the light makeup she was wearing. She and Dennis looked at each other for a moment, and then they laughed. But it was brief laughter, and not really that good.
“Has Motormouth seen him?” Dennis asked.
“Who?”
“Motormouth. That’s what Lenny Barongg calls Mr Vickers. The guidance counsellor.”
“Oh! Yes. I think he has. He was called to the guidance office the day before yesterday Monday. But he didn’t say anything. And I didn’t dare ask him anything. He won’t talk. He’s gotten so strange.”
Dennis nodded. Although he didn’t think Leigh realized it—she was deep in her own trouble and confusion—he felt a sense of impotence and a deepening fear for Arnie. From the reports that had filtered into his room over the last few days, Arnie sounded on the verge of a nervous breakdown; Leigh’s report was only the most recent and the most graphic. He had never wanted to be out as badly as he did now. Of course, he could call Vickers and ask him if there I was anything he could do. And he could call Arnie… except, from what Leigh had said, Arnie was now always at school, at Darnell’s, or sleeping. His father had come home early from some sort of convention and there had been another fight, Leigh had told him. Although Arnie had not come right out and said so, Leigh told Dennis she believed that he had come very close to simply leaving home.
Dennis didn’t want to talk to Arnie at Darnell’s.
“What can I do?” she asked him. “What would you do, in my place?”
“Wait,” Dennis said. “I don’t know what else you can do.”
“But that’s hardest,” she answered in a voice so low it was almost inaudible. Her hands were clenching and unclenching on the Kleenex, shredding it, dotting her brown skirt with speckles of lint. “My folks want me to stop seeing him—to drop him. They’re afraid… that Repperton and those other boys will do something else.”
“You’re, pretty sure it was Buddy and his friends, huh?”
“Yes. Everybody is. Mr Cunningham called the police even though Arnie told him not to. He said he’d settle the score in his own way, and that scared them both. It scares me, too, The police picked up Buddy Repperton, and one of his friends, the one they call Moochie… do you know who I mean?”
“Yes.”
“And the boy who works nights at the airport parking lot, they picked him up, too. Galton, his name is—”
“Sandy.”
“They thought he must have been in on it, that maybe he let them in.”
“He runs with them, all right,” Dennis said, “but he’s not quite as degenerate as the rest of them. I’ll say this, Leigh—if Arnie didn’t talk to someone sure did.”
“First Mrs Cunningham and then his father. I don’t think either of them knew the other one had talked to me. They’re…”
“Upset,” Dennis suggested.
She shook her head. “It’s more than that,” she said. “They both look like they were just… just mugged, or something. I can’t really feel sorry for her—all she wants is her own way, I think—but I could cry for Mr Cunningham. He just seems so… so… “She trailed off and began again. “When I got there yesterday afternoon after school, Mrs Cunningham—she asked me to call her Regina, but I just can’t seem to do it—”
Dennis grinned
“Can you do it?” Leigh asked.
“Well, yeah—but I’ve had a lot more practice.”
She smiled, the first good one of her visit. “Maybe that would make a difference. Anyway, when I went over, she was there but Mr Cunningham was still at school… the University, I mean.”
“Yeah.”
“She took the whole week off—what there is of it. She said couldn’t go back, even for the three days before Thanksgiving.”
“How does she look?”
“She looks shattered,” Leigh said, and reached for a fresh Kleenex. She began shredding the edges. “She looks ten years older than when I first met her a month ago.”
“And him? Michael?”
“Older but tougher,” Leigh said hesitantly.” As if this had somehow… somehow gotten him into gear.