“What next?” Marty asked, though he still hadn’t taken a full step. When Clairie didn’t answer, he lifted his arm to the side and brought it around in a long slow wave as though silencing an orchestra.
“Marty.” Clairie was standing directly behind him. Ms. Higgins’s voice came from a distance as she congratulated a pair somewhere across the room. Clairie traced a finger down the bumpy nodules of his spine and he shivered. “I know why you’re really here,” she said. She ran her nails along the hem of one T-shirt sleeve. “My friend’s younger brother goes to Jefferson and told me all about it. I wouldn’t call that fighting.” She rested her fingertips on his triceps. He felt the moisture of her breath on the back of his neck. “That was some brutal shit,” she whispered.
She pinched a section of skin overtop the muscle and squeezed hard. It burned, and he remembered the way Joshua’s lip had opened suddenly, the flesh splitting to reveal the brightness of blood. Marty clenched his teeth and tried to remain perfectly still. “Kind of hot if you ask me,” she said, “giving some helpless kid a beatdown for no reason.” He could feel her lips forming the words near the edge of his ear. He tried to concentrate on her voice but she pinched him harder. White flashes filled his vision. “You’re a real brute,” she said, digging her fingernails deeper. Tears formed in the corners of his eyes and soaked into the blindfold. Finally, she released his skin, the burn that remained nearly as bad. “Now move the fuck forward.” Marty raised his foot and took a step.
A few days later, Joshua’s mother called for the apology. She wanted to set up a face-to-face meeting. She asked Marty’s mother to bring him into the room while they spoke and to place her on speaker-phone. They did not have speaker-phone, so Marty sat beside his mother on the couch while she held the receiver between their ears. Joshua’s mother used terms like “healing process” and “closure.” She sounded oddly cheerful, but her words were muffled and hard to make out as though she herself was on speaker-phone. Marty wondered if Joshua was sitting beside her, if she had her arm around his shoulders for encouragement. “This is just another step,” she said.
Marty’s mother apologized again as she had at the school disciplinary hearing and his juvenile court date. “There have been some difficulties lately,” she added.
“We are all evolving,” Joshua’s mother said, “each and every one of us. There’s no need to retread old ground, Rosaleen.”
Marty felt a pit open in his stomach. He had not heard his mother called by her name in a long time. He looked toward the front door and remembered his dad coming in from a jog, his round face flushed, crescents of sweat beneath each arm. He would stretch his calves by leaning forward and pushing against the wall as though he meant to topple it. He had a way of play-rhyming his wife’s name. “Rosaleen and her magic spleen,” he would sing loudly, trying to draw her out from wherever she was in the house. He would walk into the kitchen, stopping to drink straight from the faucet, and then move room to room looking for her. Marty and Nate would trail him as he opened and closed doors, tapping his fingertips against the drywall, calling out his nonsense rhymes. “Rosaleen owns a crystal canteen. Rosaleen, let’s get PG-13.” When he finally found her, she would squeal and laugh as he chased her down, wrapping her in his sweaty arms and saying over and over, “Rosaleen, if you know what I mean.”
Marty reached up and pressed on the bruise Clairie had left. At first there had been only some redness and two curved marks like parentheses where her nails had broken the skin, but now a green and purple bruise, yellowed at its center, covered an area the size of a half-dollar.
“Saturday for lunch then,” Joshua’s mother was saying. “Why don’t you bring him by around eleven? And we’d love it if you could stay as well. Are there any dietary restrictions?” Marty’s mother twisted the phone cord around her fingers like a rosary.
“No,” she said, “none that I can think of.”
The Reserve was a new wooded subdivision near the edge of the city. The development bordered a golf course and several of the striking green fairways wound their way past the homes. Many of the lots were still being leveled and huge backhoes and graders sat on wide tracts of fresh dirt. Most of the houses were two-story brick structures with copper overhangs and multi-tiered roofs that slanted down at dramatic angles. None of the lawns had grass and the houses rose from the middle of the bare yards as though they’d sprung directly from the earth. Marty sat staring up at Joshua’s house, which looked like all the others. Deep in his pocket was the turtle shell. He’d retrieved it the night before from the shoebox beneath his bed, which also contained two M-80s, a Zippo lighter he’d found in the mall parking lot, a Frederick’s of Hollywood catalogue he’d swiped from Nate’s room, and the Swiss Army knife his father had secretly given him for his eleventh birthday, a gift his mother would have deemed too dangerous. She sat in the driver’s seat wearing a blue patterned sundress, both hands gripping the wheel. They were in the driveway, but she had yet to put the car in park. By the time she turned to him, Marty already knew what she was going to say.
“I don’t think I’ll be able to make it.” Marty felt his cheeks burn. It was the same thing she’d said before his club-team soccer playoffs, the same vague excuse she’d offered for missing his school’s parent-teacher conferences. “Here,” she said, handing him her cell phone. “You can call me at the house when you’re ready to get picked up.” A golf green sat at a distance and Marty watched a man line up a putt. He struck it and then squatted low, waving his arm frantically as though directing the ball. Marty couldn’t stop the tears and so he turned toward his window. He wished he’d stolen the blindfold from the Minefield exercise. He wished he were wearing it now.
“But you promised her.” He spoke slowly to keep his voice from breaking, feeling each word. “They’re expecting you.” His hands were at his sides, and he felt the rough ridge of the turtle shell through his khaki shorts.
“I didn’t promise,” she said. “I did not.” If Nate had been there, he would have fought with her, accused her until she herself was in tears. They were brothers, but they had always been different that way.
Marty took hold of the door handle. He lifted his shoulder and rubbed his eyes across it roughly. “Please don’t make me go alone.” He hated the way it sounded, regretted it the second it came out. He saw himself as Nate might, whiny and weak. He was the real pussy and that was why Nate hadn’t called. Before she had time to respond, he pushed open the door and jumped out.
Joshua’s mother answered the door wearing a ruffled skirt fastened with a braided leather belt, a frilly top the color of freshly tilled soil, and earrings that looked to Marty like miniature wind chimes. A bright raspberry headscarf came halfway down her tan forehead and held back her dark blond hair. “Won’t your mother be joining us?” she asked, looking out over Marty’s head as though she might be hiding somewhere.
“She’s not feeling so well,” Marty said. “Allergies.” He was having trouble looking at her when he spoke.
“I’m sorry to hear that.” She smiled, trying to hide her disappointment, then invited him in. “You should tell her to try tea tree oil,” she said, shutting the door behind him. “I spritz the entire house with it.”
She led Marty through a series of bright rooms, each painted the color of a different fruit: lime green, tangerine orange, cherry red. The place had not been completely settled into. Unpacked boxes were stacked in corners and modern-looking furniture and exotic artwork were scattered about the house in no discernible order. Three giraffes with their necks intertwined, carved from a single piece of wood nearly as tall as him, stood near a hallway closet; the dining room table was covered with African tribal masks; a Navajo rug resting against a wall had begun to unroll like a giant, elaborately patterned tongue. In the living room, floor to ceiling windows looked out on a sloping dirt yard that ran to the edge of a lush green fairway. A stone path cut the yard in half. A wide hole had been dug for a pond and was draped in a shiny black liner and surrounded by colorful rocks. In the center of the room, the coffee table was hidden beneath a stack of blueprints.