He went on and on in the dim room, and I bowed my head dutifully scribbling notes, wondering if he had anything to teach me about mental illness that I didn’t already know.
I found the keys in the planter, just as Rachel had promised, and let myself in. It was a carpool day and Luke would be home at three.
“Just, you know,” she said on the phone, “just let him do what he wants. Make him a snack, let him watch television or play a video game. I’ll supervise his homework after dinner.”
She sounded nervous.
“Don’t worry,” I told her.
“And if anything, just call,” she said. “I’m minutes away.”
She was opening a bookstore in town, which impressed me as being nothing short of suicidal in the electronic-book age. But she had leased a spot on the square and was waist-deep in renovations. It was to be a bookstore and café, a gathering space with a wireless Internet service. She was planning discussion groups and open-mike poetry nights, free coffee for study groups. She had a thousand ideas for the space and the passion of a zealot-parties, author visits, story time, a small play space in the kids’ section. I simultaneously admired and felt sorry for her.
“Don’t worry,” I said again. “We’ll be fine.”
“Stroll down if you two feel like getting out for a while,” she said.
“We will.”
We, that magic word, that syllable of belonging. Its sound tells others that you are a part of something instead of apart from everything, which is how I have always felt.
The house had the special hush of emptiness, where all the sounds we don’t hear-the heat, the refrigerator, the settling and creaks-create a quiet symphony. Rachel had cleared some more boxes and the place was looking more settled. There was a pile of newspaper on the table, an empty coffee cup, rinsed and sitting in the dish rack. I found myself compelled to walk around. As I climbed the stairs, I heard some cubes drop in the icemaker and it made me jump a little.
Her room was at the top of the stairs, the master suite. Light washed in through a big bay window where there was a cozy seat with chenille throw pillows and a folded blanket. A low bed was covered all in white with crisp linens and a down comforter. Silk pajamas were tossed over a dove-gray chair. A hardcover book by an author whose name I didn’t recognize sat askew on the bedside table. On the cover a slim girl walked into a stand of trees.
I walked down the hall. Two other bedrooms were totally empty except for a few unopened boxes. Rachel had mentioned that she planned to use one of them for her office. She said that she used to write and had plans to start a new novel after they had settled in. She’d said it with a certain wistfulness, as though she were not at all sure that they would settle in. I had been curious enough to Google her name, to see what she might have written. But nothing turned up. Actually, nothing at all turned up. Similarly, nothing came up for Lucas Kahn. So, he hadn’t been in any real trouble-which was comforting.
Luke’s room was the expected disaster area. Boxes half unpacked, clothes in piles, books stacked beside the shelves. There was a huge computer screen on his desk, which was part of a wall unit of shelves and cubbies. He had his own television. Cable box and video-game system lay on the floor; long, black umbilicals led back to the large flat-screen mounted on the wall. A wireless game controller sat on the beanbag seat.
It would be another half hour before he got home. So I started shelving the piles of books on the floor. I didn’t want to just sit around doing my reading when I was being paid fifteen dollars an hour.
I got immersed in the project, as I am prone to do, organizing books by subject and size, and I lost track of time. I must not have heard him come in.
“What are you doing?”
I spun, startled, to see him standing there. Backpack slung over one shoulder, coat in his hand. He had some kind of blue paint on his shirt, and a warrior stripe of it on his right cheek.
I felt guilty, as if I’d been caught stealing.
“Oh, Luke,” I said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t hear you come in.”
“Obviously,” he said. There was no trace of the shy, sweet boy I’d met the other day. He was icy, his face slack and eyes dead. He walked into the room and put his backpack down. He stood blocking the door, and looked at me with unmistakable menace. I found myself thinking of Rachel, and how skittish she was around him.
“I was helping your mother unpack the other day,” I said. I lifted my chin and squared my shoulders to him, kept my voice low and easy. He wasn’t going to cow me as he had his mother; that was for sure. “So I thought I’d help you start shelving your books.”
“I don’t want your help,” he said. “Get out.”
Gut-punched by the quiet ugliness of his tone, I let the book drop from my hand to the floor with a thud, rather than move to put it on the shelf. I kept his gaze as I moved past him toward the door. I am not a large person. Always the smallest kid at school, as an adult I stood just over five foot four inches, with a slight build. He was only eleven but he did not seem that much smaller than I was. We were nearly the same height. My arm brushed his on the way out. My face must have been scarlet, as it always got when I was angry or embarrassed.
“My mother told you to make me a snack and then let me do what I wanted, right?”
“Uh,” I said. I turned to face him. I wasn’t going to let him talk to my back as if I were the help, which maybe I was. But fuck that. “Yes, that’s right.”
“Then do that,” he said. Again, we locked eyes.
He followed me as I exited the room and closed the door behind me. I turned around, considered knocking and apologizing, trying to get off on a better foot. But then I noticed that there was a lock on the outside of the door. Did she lock him in there sometimes? I don’t know how long I stood there, looking at the lock. It seemed so odd, so incongruous with the woman I met. It wasn’t reasonable, was it, under any circumstance to have a lock on the outside of your child’s door? A dead bolt? But, then again, maybe it was already there when they moved in. Maybe she hadn’t put it there at all.
I went downstairs and called Rachel, told her what happened. She sighed heavily when I was done, and I felt like a failure. I could hear the sound of someone hammering in the background.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was just trying to help you out. Like the other day.”
She sighed again. I expected her to tell me that it was okay and not to worry. But she didn’t.
“Just make him a ham sandwich with apple slices,” she said. “And put it outside his door. He’ll get it after you’ve gone back downstairs. Just stay away from him. He might get over it and come down. If not, I’ll be home by six.”
“Okay,” I said. I thought I heard her disconnect the call, and I was about to hang up.
Then, “Lana?”
“Yes,” I said. I was childishly eager that she not be mad at me, that she would offer some words of support.
“You’re a tattletale.”
I realized that it was Luke, not Rachel. He’d obviously been listening in on the line upstairs, chiming in now that his mother was off the phone.
Embarrassment and a flash of anger got the better of me.
“Luke?” I said.
“Yes,” he answered, mimicking me with annoying accuracy.