My mother was in the kitchen, sitting at the table, drinking a cold cup of coffee. I opened the fridge and poured a glass of milk and tried not to look at her. When I finished my milk, I put my glass in the sink and turned to leave.
“Rinse your glass out,” my mother said. She wasn’t facing me, but knew I had forgotten. “You and your brother, you always forget. Or maybe you just don’t listen.” I rinsed the glass out and stood by the sink, watching the water swirl down the drain, unsure what to do, what to say. “Come here,” my mother said. “Come sit by me.” She pulled a chair out with her foot. “Things haven’t been good lately. Have they?”
I shrugged. Her breath tasted of coffee and wine.
“No, they haven’t,” she said. “I know that. I wish there was something I could do, you know, but I don’t know what.” She kicked me under the table, by accident. “Do you? Do you have any ideas?”
I could feel my mother’s eyes on me, but I continued to not look at her. I focused on everything else in the kitchen instead. The empty cookie jar. The splintered square table. My mother’s coffee cup. I closed my eyes and imagined each item disappearing, being sold by my mother when something bad happened and we needed the money. I imagined having to say goodbye to everything in the apartment, one by one.
“The pool,” I said. “You could take us to the pool.”
My mother laughed. “Is that it? Is that all you guys want?” I nodded. “All right, cute boy. If you think that’ll do it, then the pool it is.”
She sipped her coffee some more, and I got up to go back to bed. She kissed me on the cheek and said she loved me.
“You promise?” I said.
“I promise.”
twelve
I WOKE BEFORE my brother. I didn’t like doing this, being out in the world before him, but there was a sound. It was the dumb buzzing of my mother’s alarm, beeping me out of my sleep. I closed my eyes and sent her a mental message to turn the thing off. The message didn’t get there. I put my head under my pillow and fake suffocated myself. That didn’t stop the sound either.
I stomped down the hall and knocked on my mother’s door. Soft, then loud, then angry. I hated this. She slept like my brother, not lightly like me. I banged three more times and threw the door open, letting it whack the wall. I went straight for the alarm and mashed buttons until I found the snooze.
Another sound, this one from beyond our walls. It was the early chirp of a bird, calling to one of his buddies. My mother’s window was open, and I could feel the morning breeze fly by, puffing out the window’s thin curtain. I breathed in the air, which smelled of chlorine, tasted like the pool.
I turned to the mess of covers in my mother’s bed. It was dark in the room, blacker than the hall. “Are we still going to the pool?” I said. The lump didn’t respond. “Mom.” Nothing. I bumped the bed with my hip. “You promised,” I said. “We’ve got new moves to show you. You’ve got to see our new moves.”
When there was still no movement, I put my hand on the blanket where I thought her hip would be, but the covers caved. I felt all around, before diving into the cold blankets. She wasn’t here. She was supposed to be, but she wasn’t. I looked at the alarm to try to make sense of this. Its double zeros looked like surprised eyes.
I walked to the kitchen, knowing my mother wasn’t there. My brother was there, though, sitting at the table, eating a big bowl of cereal.
“I used the last of the milk,” he said.
“Where’s Mom?”
He pointed his spoon at a sticky note on the fridge. She had arranged her words like a poem.
Boys, Rick is sick.
Had to run to work. Should be home
after lunch. Stay inside. Sorry
NO POOL.
I Love You.
I crumpled the note in my hand. “She said she would be here.”
“What do you care, stableboy? Dad’s picking you up later anyway.”
I sat down and stared at my brother’s cereal. “That isn’t milk,” I said. “I hate this.”
“I know,” my brother said.
“Rick was fine last night.”
“I don’t know.”
“She told me.”
“That’s your problem,” my brother said. “You’ve got to stop listening to her. She just says things.” He stabbed a few flakes. “So does Dad. You know he’s the one who messed up Rick? Yeah, I heard them talking last night. Rick was here until like two, begging. What a fucking baby.”
He took a final violent bite of cereal. Two G.I. Joes from a forgotten plot lay in the middle of the table. I made the Army guy my dad. The guy with the metal head, I turned into Rick. Metalhead wouldn’t tell my dad what he knew about the Stranger, so my dad had returned to the golf course, confronted him in the cafeteria, or in the golf cart garage. My dad said, Listen, Metalhead, you know what the Stranger has done, what he’s promised to do. Stop playing games. Metalhead scoffed, twirled his keys around his finger, the rabbit’s foot a green blur. I could help, he said, but I also could not. So the Stranger wants you out of the picture? Seems to me that’s something we have in common. And maybe my dad would lunge for him then. Or maybe he’d ask him one more time, politely, with respect, before Rick — before Metalhead — told him to pound sand. You don’t get it, he would say. I don’t like you. I’m not like you. When I get ahold of something good, he would say, putting two fingers in my dad’s face, shaping them into snake fangs, which would paralyze my leg a few days later — when I get what I want, I don’t let go.
“Dad pushed him,” my brother said. “That’s all I know.”
A moment later there was a knock on our door, our dad telling us to let him in.
“What will you do?” I asked my brother. “When I’m gone.”
A worm of a smile wiggled its way across my brother’s face. He stood up, patted me on my shoulder. “The stableboy is gone, so I guess I’ll ready the horses.”
* * *
My dad put me in the cruiser. As I waited for him to walk around and get in the driver’s side, I looked out at our apartment building, its dull brown bleached light by the sun. Tall maples curtained the front windows. I tried to see through those curtains, through those walls and into our apartment, to guess what my brother was doing.
I saw nothing. I felt like I’d left recess early, and everyone was having fun without me.
I shook my head. I put Sandy’s words in my mind and told myself my brother would be fine. Where would he go? Where can anyone go? When my thoughts began to clear, I saw the smoking lady, this ghost of early summer, by the dumpster. She was smoking and talking to someone. I couldn’t tell who, not until my dad backed out and pointed the car away from the Frontiers. We drove too fast for me to be sure, but I was almost positive the person the smoking lady was talking to was Chris.
* * *
That night I was tucked in. I was put to bed and promised to. My dad wasn’t going out. Not tonight. He patted the blanket and asked if I wanted a story. No, I told him, which wasn’t true. I wanted a story, just not from him.
In the middle of the night I was woken by water rushing through the pipes above the bed. My dad must’ve used the bathroom upstairs. Minutes later, he was standing over me. Son, he whispered. Son. He couldn’t see me, or tell if I was sleeping, and for a moment I studied him, the way he waited, impatiently, his arms crossed, his body in full uniform.
“I have to run to work.”
“Now?” I said. The word came out as more whimper than whisper.
“Yes, it’s an emergency.”
“Is it him?”
“Don’t know what it is yet.” I sat up, but held the blanket close. “You’ll be fine,” he said. “I’ll lock the door and you’ll go back to sleep.”