“If there’s no point… why are you talking to me?” He grimaced, wishing he could take that back, at least soften it.
“I tell you and tell you but you still do it. You still go away.” She was going to ignore what he had just said. He was relieved by that, and yet irritated.
He held his breath, knowing he needed to say something then, but not knowing what to say. “I need the time…”
“I need time, too! I’m stuck with the kids all day!”
“Well, I guess we need to work out some sort of schedule.” He looked away from her.
“You always say that, but it hasn’t changed, Reed.”
“We haven’t really addressed the question of scheduling our time with the kids.”
“Yes we have, Reed. We sure have.”
His throat tightened. He didn’t know where to go from there. “I don’t know what to say; I don’t know how to talk about this.” He unclenched his hands and stretched out his fingers. He was aware of her staring at his hands, seeing how helpless he was in the face of an ordinary argument, an argument like everyone had. “I don’t know either…” she said, turning, walking back down the stairs. “I’m going out for a while. I’ll take the kids with me.” He waited ten minutes before going back into the house, checking to see if they’d actually left. The house was indeed empty, toys lying on the living room rug where the kids had abandoned them, Carol’s half-eaten sandwich on the counter, a full pot of soup turning cold on the stove. Maybe she was taking them out to lunch; she did that sometimes.
Every time this happened Reed expected to get a phone call an hour later… her telling him that she and the kids would be spending the night at a friend’s house, that she couldn’t stand to be around him when he was like this. That would be hard to take. He’d always feared a phone call like that because he knew if she felt she had to do that, things would never be the same between them again. He didn’t know why that bothered him so much—maybe because it was what people who couldn’t talk anymore did to each other.
Or maybe there’d be a phone call from the police. There’d been this accident.
Stop it. Stop it…
Sometimes if you didn’t think you deserved someone, you dreamed they died. Reed found that to be one of the more unattractive tricks the human mind could play.
He sat out on the front porch for a while. Michael had been working out here; his tools were scattered everywhere. He appeared to be developing quite an interest in mechanical things. Bicycle parts, electric motors, old radios, parts of a phonograph, miscellaneous nuts, bolts, and unidentified apparatus filled one corner of the porch, made officially Michael’s corner to avoid arguing over it every day.
Michael was a private, mysterious sort of kid; he had been since they got him. He kept most things to himself, and usually the only way you could tell something was bothering him was by looking at his forehead and cheeks. They’d flush ever so slightly when he was upset. Otherwise you couldn’t have paid him to tell. His background was just as mysterious: he’d been found abandoned at age four in a railroad switching yard. He could talk, but even then he wouldn’t tell the social workers anything, He wouldn’t tell them he couldn’t remember, he just wouldn’t tell them anything at all. He’d gone through quite a few foster homes because of that quality; people said you couldn’t get close to him.
Maybe so, but Reed liked him. Always had. He recognized, and appreciated, the need for self-containment. It had been difficult for a long time—their mutual distancing had kept them away from each other. But in small ways—Michael volunteering to go with him to the store, inviting Reed to watch him tinker with some new piece of junk—there was a new closeness. There were still problems; that little progress, so significant to Reed, might go almost unnoticed by someone else. Carol still complained that Reed didn’t spend enough time with the boy.
She was right. Reed recognized that the same thing that made Michael appealing to him was also a barrier. The boy was just too much like him for him to be that comfortable. And with his black hair, generally pale features, and intense eyes, he even looked like him.
They were gone all day. Around seven o’clock Reed went upstairs to bed. After lying sleepless about an hour, he heard the front door open downstairs, Alicia laughing, Carol shushing her and telling her it was time for bed. Then, after a few minutes, the back door opening. He climbed out of bed and walked over to the window, waiting. The office light went on. He expected to find the magazines gone from her desktop the next morning.
After Reed climbed back into bed he heard footsteps on the stairs. Too light for Carol’s. He raised up onto his elbows and squinted into the dim light. For a moment he thought he saw himself standing at the top of the stairs. He reached up and turned on the reading lamp.
His son Michael stood there, not moving any closer. “Good night, Dad.”
Reed stared at him. “Anything wrong… Michael?”
“No. Just wanted to say good night.” Michael’s face was shadowed, his body still motionless.
“Good night, Michael.”
Michael’s body relaxed, turned, and seemed to drift back down the stairs, almost as if Reed’s words had released it from a spell. Reed turned out the light and lay on his back, staring up into the dark where the ceiling should be. Michael had never called him Dad before.
The light from the office window lay stark against his darkened sheets. He thought about getting up to close the curtains, but couldn’t quite bring himself to do it. He kept thinking, Carol is in the office, outside the house, so I’m responsible here. I have to keep my kids safe. The thought was frightening him. It seemed particularly hard to be a responsible adult at night when he was half asleep.
What if someone called for Carol? He’d have to go get her. He wondered if he could. He kept thinking about Michael, calling him Dad as he used to call that great big shadow of a man back in Simpson Creeks, Kentucky, his own dead father. He kept thinking about that, and how much he didn’t want to answer the phone if it rang.
Something was trembling in the room.
Reed stretched a sleep-palsied hand to where his wife lay… should have lain. For a moment he thought she had died, her and the two kids. Stop it… stop it. He remembered; they’d had an argument. She must still be in the office. Her side of the bed was still tucked in, flat, cool to the touch. He curled up on his side of the bed.
If they all died, it would be as if they’d never existed, as if ten years had just been erased from his life and he was a young man again, who had just left home.
The worst dream was other people, people you loved. Because when they died on you, part of your world suddenly became unreal. Stop it… stop it.
Something was trembling in the room.
Reed thought about turning on the light, but the thought seemed a long time coming, and he didn’t know what to do with the thought when it finally came. He had been having trouble sleeping—the colds were back, yes… he remembered, his nose continually raw—it kept him on edge, and full of faraway sounds with no apparent source. When sleep finally came, he didn’t know it. And the dreams didn’t know they were dreams.
He was seeing his life with Carol. Her hands massaging his hairline, outlining his jaw. He wanted to turn on the light and clear her away, burn the image out of his closed eyelids. But he could not.
Even now he wasn’t used to the idea of being married, having his own, separate family. Their skin, trying to remember them here, in the dark, seemed paler somehow than normal skin; their hair had too many shadows, their moist eyes too many highlights. They never had the reality his mother and father and little sister had, but seemed more a dream never meant to be remembered.