After the Parade (36 page)

In Mortonville, nearly everyone had owned a gun. The guns were mainly for hunting, which meant that the men at the café talked about gun legislation as though the government wished to control their very right to eat. Occasionally, one of the young couples from the Twin Cities who kept a summer lake cabin nearby would get involved in the discussion, inserting statistics about gun violence or gangs, these arguments laying bare the divide between urban and rural. Most of the farmers would stir their coffee and keep quiet because they did not like to argue, but Harold Bildt would turn to the city folks and say something about his right to protect himself from the dangers that they had created in the city. Harold sold rifles at the hardware store, and sometimes, when Aaron's mother set his food in front of him, he
would say, “I got new stock in. You should come over and pick one out.”

“I appreciate the concern, Harold,” his mother would reply, “but I wouldn't know what to do with a gun.”

His mother always walked away when the conversation turned to guns because she said it made no sense to argue with Harold about them. “He's not going to change his mind, and I'm not going to change mine. In the meantime, we've got to keep being neighbors.” Aaron knew his mother was right. There was a fine balance involved in living peacefully with people with whom you did not agree, and nothing changed the fact that Harold Bildt had been a good neighbor. If an appliance was acting up, he came over and fixed it right away. He let them run a tab, and early on when they could not make payments every month, he did not constantly bring it up as a way of keeping them grateful.

“You don't need to do anything with it,” Harold called after her. “You just have it around in case someone gets funny ideas about how much money a place like this keeps in the till overnight.”

“If someone wants the little I've got in the till that bad that they'd break in here for it, then they can have it. I'm not coming down to stop them.”

*  *  *

That afternoon at the hippie café, Aaron told Bill what had happened in his driveway because he knew that Bill would not get so focused on the gun that he would be unable to listen to the rest of the story. When he got to the part about how he had turned around to find Agnes Nyquist asleep on his bed, Bill laughed. “What did you do?” he asked.

“I waited for her to wake up. What else could I do?”

Bill snorted. “Well, to state the obvious, you could have woken her up, maybe given her a squirt of ice water with her own gun.”

“I don't know how to explain it, but she looked vulnerable lying there, like it was the first time she'd rested in days. Then, I went into the bathroom, and she'd made everything so neat, the towel folded perfectly, the bar of soap dried off.”

“At least you didn't leave her there sleeping and go off to work,” said Bill.

“Actually, I thought about it.”

“Because she reminded you of your mother?” Bill said. Two days earlier, he had told Bill about his mother's disappearance and Bill had simply nodded, accustomed to stories like this. Aaron thought that maybe he had told him precisely because he would regard it as ordinary. “I can find her,” Bill said. “Aren't you at all curious about where she got to, what she's doing, whether she's even alive?”

“I am not,” Aaron said. He wondered whether this sounded like the truth. He wondered whether it was the truth. He knew that it was possible to push a thought so far away for so long that you did not even know whether you were lying to yourself. They drank in silence for a bit, and then Aaron said, “I have a picture.” He realized that this made it sound like he was agreeing, which was not his intention. He was just talking.

“A picture's good,” Bill said. “I need her name, her full name, date and place of birth, even better a Social Security number, and anything else you've got.” Bill picked up his beer again, and just before he put it to his mouth, he said, “No charge, of course. Since we're, you know, friends.” He drank loudly, as if embarrassed to have made this declaration, but they were friends, unlikely friends, but perhaps that was what friendship always was: two people met and, despite themselves, despite their own fears and oddness and bad traits, somehow liked each other.

“It's my birthday,” Aaron announced. He meant to acknowledge the friendship also through this admission, but he realized that it sounded as though he were accepting the offer as his birthday due.

“Happy birthday,” said Bill. They knocked glasses and drank. Normally, Aaron drank two beers while Bill consumed twice as many, but that afternoon Aaron drank four also. It was his birthday.

The next morning, as Bill stood smoking on the doorless balcony, Aaron handed him a piece of paper with the information he had requested, everything but his mother's Social Security number, which he did not know. During the night he had awakened with his stomach in
knots and gone into the bathroom, where he stood over the toilet trying to vomit. When he lay back down, he finally acknowledged the truth: what he feared was learning that his mother had been living all these years in a town just like Mortonville, working at a place just like the Trout Café, which would prove what he had believed all along, that the reason she left was to be away from him.

“At the bottom I wrote two questions,” he told Bill. “It's all I want to know—nothing else. I don't want addresses or telephone numbers or photos.”

Bill unfolded the paper, his lips moving as he read through the information. Aaron could tell when he got to the two questions:

1. Is she alive?

2. Is she happy?

Bill looked up. “Happy?” he said. “How the hell am I going to know if she's happy?”

*  *  *

When Aaron was ten—almost ten—he fell into a coma that lasted two days, a coma that the doctors were never able to explain. It started on a Wednesday, after school. He went upstairs to do his homework in their apartment above the café, and when he did not come back down at four to eat a quick meal before helping his mother prepare for the supper crowd, she came upstairs and found him on his bed. When he awoke Friday evening, he did not remember arriving home from school Wednesday afternoon and drinking a glass of milk before climbing the stairs to his room, did not remember sitting at his desk and working out ten math problems (correctly) before going over to his bed to lie down. When his mother could not awaken him, she had run downstairs and across the street to Bildt Hardware, returning with Harold, who carried Aaron, wrapped in a blanket, down the back stairs to the Oldsmobile. Harold had offered to drive so that his mother could sit in the backseat with Aaron, but she had said no, so firmly that Harold turned without saying another word and went back to his store.

Aaron knew these details, the blow-by-blow account of what had happened, because his mother, hoping to force his memory, had described it all for him later, starting with the moment she entered his bedroom and called his name, shaking him harder and harder. As she spoke, he had closed his eyes and tried to visualize it, but he knew that the images in his head were not memories. “Finally I lifted your shirt,” she said, “and put my finger inside your belly button.”

He opened his eyes. “Why?” His mother knew that he could not bear to have his navel touched.

“I just wanted to be sure,” she said.

“Sure of what?”

“That you weren't playing a game,” she said, which made no sense because his mother knew he was not a boy who played games. “Now concentrate.” He closed his eyes again and willed himself to recall the swaying of the car and the blanket like a cocoon around him, but he could not remember any of it. His mother always ended the story at the moment that she sent Harold Bildt back to his hardware store, which meant that he would never know what she had done as she drove the eleven miles to the hospital in Florence, whether she had spoken to him soothingly or even sternly—“I want you to stop the foolishness this minute, Aaron”—or whether she had not spoken at all.

The café had stayed closed while his mother sat beside his bed, waiting for the doctors to know something, waiting for him to open his eyes. When he finally did open them and took in his surroundings, she was there, sitting at the window, her head turned away from him so that she did not even know at first that he was awake. For several minutes, he had watched her stare out into the darkness as he tried to recall what had happened. He remembered walking down the alley to the café, stopping to feed the stray cat he called Clary that waited for him after school because Aaron always brought the cat leftovers from his lunch. The smell of tuna casserole and Clary rubbing himself against his legs—these were the last things Aaron remembered. Over his bed the nurses had stretched a length of string, on which cards were slung like tiny saddles. They were from his classmates, but when he read through them later, he could not reconcile the sentiments
expressed—“Get well soon. We miss you!”—with the names printed after them, for these were the same children who rarely spoke to him and chose him last for their teams, even their spelling teams, though he was clearly the best speller in the class. On the table sat a pitcher of water, a vase with flowers, and a stack of books,
his
books. He turned back toward his mother, who was still staring out into the darkness, and whispered, “Mom,” and then, “Mother.” Neither sounded right, but she turned from the window, slowly, as though she had forgotten where she was, forgotten that he lay in a coma behind her.

Three doctors came in and stood around his bed, unsure what to say about the coma or his sudden recovery from it. “Welcome back, young man,” said one of them finally, as though he had been on a trip. “What's the last thing you remember?”

“Clary,” he said. “I was feeding Clary.”

“That doesn't make sense,” his mother said, not to him but to the doctors. “Clary is a family friend, but Aaron hasn't seen him in nearly three years. He's a dwarf,” she added, as though it might be relevant.

“It's nothing to worry about,” said the doctor who had asked Aaron what he remembered. “There's bound to be some confusion.” He leaned in close and looked into Aaron's eyes with a small flashlight, then wrote something on a chart while one of the other doctors, a tonsured man named Dr. McFarley, fiddled with the water pitcher beside the bed before suggesting that the coma might have been anxiety induced.

All three doctors seized on this. “Is he under stress at school?” they asked. “At home? Anywhere?” Aaron lay in the hospital bed listening.

“His birthday's coming up,” his mother said finally. “I told him he could invite only four friends. He looked upset. Maybe he feels bad about not inviting the others.”

It was true that he had been upset, upset because he understood that
four
was not a restriction but a quota, even though his mother knew that he did not have four friends to invite. She glanced at Aaron, giving him the look that they had used to signal collusion against his father, a look that meant that his job was to play along. Later, when he was back home, she told him that the coma was a mystery and would always be a
mystery and that sitting in the hospital talking about it would not have solved the mystery, that she had just wanted to get him out of there.

In the end, the three doctors agreed that the coma was probably anxiety induced. They told his mother that she needed to find a way to accommodate all of his classmates, so the afternoon of his birthday, she closed the café and the party was held there, amid the booths and tables. All of his classmates came, though Aaron did not know whether they came because their parents had made them or because the coma had temporarily elevated his status or simply because they were attracted by the novelty of having the café to themselves. He received twenty-eight presents, most of them reflecting the tastes and interests of the givers—rubber snakes and magic tricks, various wheeled objects, and lots of bubblegum—but only one book, from Vickie, the messy girl who loved reading almost as much as he did. He knew that she had read the book before giving it to him because there was a thumbprint on each page, although the smudges stopped twenty pages before the end. He wondered whether she had grown bored with the book or run out of time. It did not occur to him that she might have washed her hands.

In the year following the coma, his mother took him in twice for checkups. Both times the doctor said he seemed fine, that there was nothing to worry about. Still, he thought his mother did worry, and he took to making noise as he studied after school—dropping a book, stepping heavily from desk to bed—but later he decided that he had imagined her concern. There was no proof other than the comments from customers about how frightening the whole thing must have been for her, but their comments were not evidence of what his mother actually felt, and beyond taking him in for checkups, she said nothing. Over the years, when he thought about the coma, he thought about waking up in the hospital and looking around for his mother, how that had been his first response, and about seeing her there at the window, how he had wondered—but would never know—whether she was watching something outside in the darkness or just studying her own reflection.

*  *  *

The Ngs' arguments were intensifying, in frequency and in volume. Aaron did not have the courage to address the situation directly, to go upstairs, knock on their door, and stand there explaining that he could hear them, that he had been listening to them scream for three months now. He could not get by on so little sleep, which meant he would need to move soon. This was what he was contemplating as he and Bill sat in the café ten days after his birthday, having a beer though it was not yet two o'clock because classes had been dismissed early, after a jackhammer started up in the street outside the school.

“I found her,” Bill said. He was actually well into his second pint.