This playdate thing, though. He can see it all now: him with little boys in the house, villagers converging with pitchforks. This Caleb must be Andy Jacobson’s son; Andy stayed here in town after graduation, married Angie somebody, two classes behind them, and went into his father’s fuel-oil business. Definitely not one of the guys Billy came out to back in high school. Around here, Billy’s thing has always been not to be not out but not to make an issue of it — when he was living in New York, it was a whole other story — and he’s sometimes more cagey than the situation requires. He introduced Deke to Mrs. Krupa next door as “my sister’s boy” rather than “my nephew” because it sounded more folksy, and because nephew seemed like a euphemism for catamite.
But a playdate crisis was bound to come sooner or later. You can’t lock a kid up and never let him make any friends — which in fact would look more suspicious than anything. So maybe they could go to Caleb’s house. Or come here, with Mrs. Bishop as duenna.
Billy thought at first that Deke might need psychiatric care and feeding. (Maybe Cassie’s sticking him in his room in front of the TV hadn’t been such a bad idea, considering what he might otherwise have seen.) But he seems fine — if Billy’s any judge of what’s fine — simply having a routine and getting some attention. He doesn’t even appear to suffer from TV withdrawal, and asked only once if he could watch The X-Files. Billy said it wasn’t on until after his bedtime, so why didn’t they play Candyland instead. And Deke was fine with it. Billy’s rule is, if Deke brings something up, they talk. If and only if.
A couple of days after he got here, Deke asked when he was going to see Mommy, and even Billy recognized this as a cue. “You must miss her,” he said. Hey, no shit.
“I don’t know,” Deke said. “Sometimes.”
“Well, it’s going to be a while longer,” Billy said. “But I called her at the hospital this morning, and she said be sure and tell you she misses you, too.”
Deke frowned. Billy could guess what he was thinking: if he missed her and she missed him, then what the hell was going on? But he didn’t ask any more questions.
Billy had talked to Cassie that morning; that much was true. She’d warned him not to trust Deke because he was a “star baby.” She meant a changeling left by aliens; the real Deke was on some star being dissected alive.
“A star?” Billy had stupidly said. “Or a planet?”
“Oh,” she’d said. “The stickler. You stick it in your boyfriends’ asses, and then they stick it in you. And you call it the life of Riley.”
When Billy left New York, his teaching job, his lover and the cats, the forsythias were starting. Now the trees are bare again; out in the country, orange pumpkins litter the brown fields. This morning, while shaving, he noticed there’s only a speck on his earlobe where his earring used to be.
He sleeps in his parents’ bedroom: bizarre, but less so than it would’ve been to move back into his own little room across the hall and leave the big bedroom empty. They probably conceived him in this bed, but it’s like the time his father took the family to Gettysburg: long ago something happened on this spot, but now so what? He’s put Deke in his old room, which his father cleaned out and repainted as soon as he went off to Brown. Cassie’s room still has her single bed with the dust ruffle, her big old teddy bear Weezer, her books from Pippi Longstocking through Lady Sings the Blues. Deke will stay in there for hours, going through drawers, exploring the closetful of toys. Once, while outside raking leaves, Billy watched him through the window. He’d hauled out this old game of Cassie’s called Operation, where you touch different body parts with this penlike thing and tiny bulbs light up. He’d knelt on the floor, touching this spot and that — Billy couldn’t see what — and moving his lips: a healing ceremony for his mother? When Billy moved closer to the window, he could hear that Deke was singing “The Ants Go Marching One by One.”
Last Christmas they were all in this house, in their former configurations. Mom was still alive, still well enough to get the stepladder out of the garage and string the colored lights on the twin spruces flanking the front walk. (She never took them down, and Billy’s of two minds about whether to plug them in come December.) Cassie and Deke had driven out from Boston, and Billy and Mark had taken the train up from the city after throwing their own Christmas party, at which Mark — who called himself “a prolapsed Catholic”—had given everybody those WWJD bracelets, explaining that they stood for “Who Would Jesus Do?” What happens this Christmas, Billy can’t imagine.
His mother died at the end of February. His father had died nine years before, the quintessential family man’s death: heart attack after shoveling snow. That was in February, too; Billy flirted with seeing it as noncoincidental, but the dates (the seventh and the twenty-third) didn’t resonate. Mark saw Billy through the vigil at the hospital and the funeral, then, two weeks later, made his announcement. Two weeks to the day. They could, and should, still share the apartment, but Mark had decided to make the thing he was having with Garrett — which he’d been calling a “friendship”—be his real thing. In fairness, Billy had to admit (to himself) that he had a “friendship,” too. For the past few months he’d been thinking up nighttime errands — he’d turned super-responsible about the cats’ litter — and calling Dennis, who always worked late, from pay phones. Dennis was living with Giuliano — who Dennis suspected was seeing somebody else. And they all more or less knew one another. It was like some daisy-chain soap opera out of the Age of Disco, with a certain “I Love Lucy” quality, if you stepped back far enough. Billy, finally, stepped way, way back.
During spring break he went to Key West: sat in the sun, drank gin and tonic. And after a couple of days, he called and added a connecting flight from LaGuardia to Albany to his return ticket. There was an empty, mortgage-free house where he could live for the cost of the property taxes and utility bills. He could take the train down twice a week to finish out the semester, and meanwhile look for a used car and a job. A job a regular person might have. The day he mailed in his students’ grades, he bought a ’95 Honda Civic with forty-three thousand miles on it; two weeks later he started work at a company that did tech support under contract to Microsoft. Billy liked computers, and he was a quick study; he had no experience, but neither did half the employees. He’d worked up a little song-and-dance for the interview to explain a career change at thirty-two: he grew up here, liked the area, was burned out on New York City. If that didn’t play in Albany, he didn’t know Albany. But he never got to say his piece. They were hiring: end of story. If he didn’t work out, somebody else would.