“I don’t give a shit, Fran.”
She’d been so good up until now, but she was done being good, trying to squeeze into the little box they wanted to keep her in.
Tom leapt out of the hole as if she were holding a gun.
“Get the fuck away from me!” She remembered Helen on stage a few weeks ago, hollering, throwing pots. It felt great. It felt grand, stepping out of character in front of them all.
“Vida, come here. You’re upset.” He was reaching his arms out for her, arms that he’d withheld for so long now, tucking them tight under his body in bed in case they tried to wander. She wished she could chop them off.
“You fucking touch me I’ll kill you.”
She was aware now of Stuart, Peter, and Caleb staring at her from across the grave. Caleb had been crying. But Stuart and Peter had obviously been having a mud fight; their clothes were covered in splats of dirt. They had played like insensitive beasts while a grave was being dug.
What was her point? What had she come out to say? They were clustered together now, bewildered together at the edge of Walt’s grave, this family she did not belong to. She swung back toward the house. Her bag was by the front door. Keys on the hook. It was so simple to leave. She’d never been able to leave Peter before, never let herself fantasize, even momentarily, about leaving. But that feeling of wanting him away, that wretched feeling of him inside her, stuck to her, had always been there. Wanting to leave him was one of her most familiar but unrecognized impulses. Perhaps all these years of fearing she would kill him in her sleep were all about getting free of him. Exhilaration flooded her as she moved toward the front door. There was her car out on the road. She pressed her face against the front window. Had she known she would do this? Had she known it even when she issued her bewildering yes to Tom’s proposal? Had it been there all along, a tiny hopeful seed in the cold ground?
First stop would be O’Shea’s on the way out of town, where Tom had taken her once, back when he didn’t fuss about her having a drink. She hoped the same Irishman would be behind the counter. “What’ll do you?” he’d said. She loved that accent, right out of Dubliners, though he’d never read it, never even heard of Joyce, poor man.
Good-bye, Walt, she whispered and shut the front door. Her feet took her swiftly across the grass. She felt like one of Stuart’s girls, young and weightless, with nothing but mysteries ahead.
EIGHT
IN HISTORY CLASS PETER LIKED TO SIT IN THE BACK BESIDE THE WINDOW. From that angle he could see their old cottage and the playing field behind it, a patch of land he still considered his own backyard. That field looked now as it always did in winter: abandoned, soggy, the lime lines ravaged, one goal having fallen in a storm. The cottage, with its tidy yellow clapboards and shimmering black shutters, sat on the knoll above. A light was on in Peter’s old room, a baby’s room now. Peter, too, had been a baby in that room. He had been every age in that room with the sloping ceiling and crooked windows and the closet with the old wallpaper he used to peel when he was angry. What had he been angry about then? He couldn’t remember anything more specific than a dull thudding wanting feeling. He thought her marriage to Tom would quell it and for a little while it had, but the sensation was back again. Only now he didn’t simply want another change; he wanted to step out of the very skin of his life and into another.
His mother hadn’t come home last night. Tom had driven him to school and they’d barely spoken. Peter guessed Fran had probably told her father and Stuart about the kissing. They wouldn’t want him around for much longer if his mother didn’t come back — or even if she did.
When Tom had pulled around the circle to the front door, he’d said, “If anyone asks,” and seemed unable to go on.
“I’ll just say she’s sick.”
“Good. Okay then. Have a good one.”
There had been something about shutting the door on his stepfather, leaving him to drive away alone, that seemed cruel. Peter had stood on the pavement dumb and inert for an awkwardly long time. He’d wanted to say something encouraging to bring color back into Tom’s gray skin. Peter didn’t know his mother this far out of her orbit. Anything could happen now. “You, too,” he offered, then let the door go, softly.
He’d forgotten, until he entered this classroom, that most of his grade had stopped speaking to him. They were working in small groups today, pretending to be landholders from 1749 working out their income and assets. Peter’s group was ignoring him. The truth was, even when he wasn’t being ignored, he didn’t contribute much to group work. Group work was just a way for teachers to get another free period. By this time of year Mr. Hathaway had given up the pretense of visiting each group, listening with fake interest, and moving on. Now he just worked at his desk, scratching out his illegible remarks at the bottom of each of their takehome tests from last week. When he looked up suddenly, Peter turned back to his group and nodded. Sarah, Kristina’s best friend, shot him a scowl and he had nowhere to put his eyes but back out the window.
Kristina had told her friends that he’d locked her in that bedroom in Scott Laraby’s house, that he’d tried to have sex with her. She even claimed to have cuts and bruises. Jason had not come to his defense.
He remembered how big that JV field used to seem to him, how when he was four or five he’d watch the games at dinnertime, kneeling backward on their couch, a plate of fish sticks balancing beside him. His mother hated the games out the window and always went to her room and shut the door. Those boys he had watched, so hard and tall and serious, with smoke rising off their skin into the cold fall air, were no older than he was now. He’d played on that field this fall, though only once, when a Fayer victory was certain, and even then only for a few minutes at a time. He’d never known what those boys he’d watched had known — the red steaming face, the burning chest, the ache to win, the ability, he saw now, to become with his others teammates one victorious organism. Looking at the field was making him feel worse than looking at his classmates ignoring him and just as he was about to turn back to them he noticed a mark at the far side of the field, a sort of gray-brown gash in the turf. Who would have dug a hole in the soggy grass? A dog? A fox? He thought of the military term “foxhole.” Was this what a foxhole really was?
“Mr. Avery, I’m sure your groupmates would appreciate those penetrating thoughts of yours,” Mr. Hathaway said, not even noticing how his group had shut him out of their conversation, which had quickly moved more than two centuries beyond the issues of 1749 landholding.
As soon as Mr. Hathaway’s attention fell away, Peter returned to the hole in the field. Now he couldn’t determine if it even was an indentation; at certain moments it seemed to be something on top of the grass. It was like that trompe l’oeil when the little girl’s shoulder becomes the witch’s hideous chin: first it was a hole, then it was a clump. It was part of the earth, part of the torn earth, he was certain, until it moved and then suddenly he no longer needed to see — he knew. The coat. The hair. It was his mother.
He was nearly to the door before Mr. Hathaway looked up.
“I’m going to throw up,” Peter said, capping his mouth.
“Gross!” a chorus of his enemies exclaimed before he shut the door on them all.
He took the absurdly curved and elaborate staircase three steps at a time.
“This is not the Indy Five Hundred,” a teacher called out above him, and he slowed obediently for a few seconds.
Now he was in the front hall. A portrait of his great-grandfather hung over the fireplace. A lot of good you can do me from up there, he thought, crossing over to the back staircase. The side door of the boiler room would be the quickest, most discreet route to the field.