Authors: Lisa Howorth
William said, “You mean like Nana?”
“Exactly. It doesn’t mean they don’t care about you, or they’re mad at you, they just like to control things and want things their way. Kind of strict, or bossy; they like to disagree with stuff.”
“One time I saw Evagreen playing with my airport and my planes,” William said. “I was contrary about that.”
“Really? Huh.” Mary Byrd thought about that for a second. “She was probably just dusting them. Or maybe she’s interested in planes, too.”
“She was talking to them.”
“Well, remember Ken, her son? He’s in the Air Force and used to fly planes. Maybe she was thinking about Ken,” she said. “Why don’t you ask her, maybe? When she comes back.” Mary Byrd fervently and selfishly hoped that she would come back.
“She’ll probably just say, ‘Mind your own beeswax, Little Mister Man,’ like she always does,” William said. “Did Ken really fly planes? In a war?”
“Hmm, I’m not sure. I think so, for a little while, in Desert Storm.”
“Did he bomb people? Or was he a spy?”
“I don’t know.” Jeez, William. “Ken’s a really good guy, but in the military you’ve got to do whatever they tell you. But let’s not ask Evagreen about
that
. She’s got enough . . . sad stuff to think about right now.”
“Spies aren’t sad,” he said. “And you always tell us, ‘Don’t be afraid to ask questions.’”
“Well, just don’t, okay? Sometimes there are things that grown-ups don’t like to talk about,” Mary Byrd said. “There’s a difference between school questions and personal ones. You could ask Daddy about Ken. He probably knows.” Pass that hot potato. Why did so many things she told her children come around to bite her in the ass?
“So, what are
you
reading, Will?”
“I’m not really reading.” He scrubbed his pajama sleeve across his face. “It’s a book about Greek myths. We’re doing them at school. It’s got some cool pictures.”
“Like what?” she asked, covering her mouth with her hand. “Which gods and goddesses do you like?”
“Well,
no
goddesses.” He turned back a few pages. “This guy is cool.”
Mary Byrd took the book and turned it around to see the picture. “Oh, Mercury. Yeah, he does look cool. What do you like about him?”
“Look,” he said pointing to Mercury’s feet, which had wings attached to his sandals.
“Oh, yeah, now I get it.” She smiled at him behind the sheet and tried to turn the book back around, but he closed it and set it aside.
“I wish I had those. You could go anywhere, and if I didn’t like something, or something bad happened, I would just fly away.” William smiled a little sheepishly, knowing he might be too old to think something so fairy-taleish and impossible. “Would you like it, Mom?”
“Are you kidding? I’d
love
it,” she laughed. “What kind of shoes would you have?”
He thought a second. “Remember my glow-in-the-dark, cheetah Converse high-tops that I had when I was little? Those.”
Mary Byrd felt a pang. Little—he’d only outgrown those shoes a year or two earlier. “Those would be perfect.” She wondered what had ever happened to Stevie’s little blue PF Flyers, always untied.
“What would you have?”
“Hmm,” she said, striking a thinking pose, chin on fist. “I think I’d have red Prada lizard high heels.”
“What’s a Prada? Is it a kind of lizard? Like a Komodo dragon?” he asked hopefully.
Laughing from behind the sheet, she said, “No! It’s the name of an Italian fashion designer who makes fabulous shoes.”
His little face took on a scornful look. “High heels would be dumb,” he said. “You couldn’t do anything fun or even
walk
.”
“Hey, if I had red lizard Pradas with wings, I would
not
be walking!”
William reached over to his bedside table and picked up one of his special little planes—the Russian Seagull—parked there and began examining it carefully, as if he didn’t already have every micro-millimeter of the thing memorized. Maybe, Mary Byrd thought, he didn’t like the idea of his mother ever wanting to fly away, or of her having any reason to want to. Or maybe he was just waiting for her to talk about Richmond. Or maybe he was just a little eight-year-old guy, sitting in his bed with a toy, waiting for his mom to go away so he could play with it.
“Well, on second thought, I probably don’t need those shoes,” she said. “I’d love for
you
to be able to fly, but I think I’m just fine right here with my family in our cozy house on this dumb old earth.” She brushed his stiff, tousley hair, so like Charles’s, and not, she could smell, washed, back from his squinched-up forehead.
“Dumb?” he said.
“Oh, you know, dumb; like lots of times things in life are crazy, or don’t make any sense.” She gave him an opening.
He
should bring Stevie up, not her. Was that right?
“Are things always spozed to make sense?
“Hmm.” She thought. Which way to go now, Dr. Spock? “No, I don’t think so. People
want
everything to make sense, and that’s what people try to do—figure stuff out. Why things happen, what the reasons are, and how things can be fixed. We want life to be nice and neat and sometimes it’s not. Sometimes it’s dumb. And messy. And sad.” Mary Byrd picked up one of his hands. “God, these fingernails! They are so gross. What have you been doing, William, working on an oil rig?” She pulled open the little drawer in the bedside table and rummaged around for clippers. “What’s under your nails could be your next science unfair project. Hey, I hope you guys got your proposals in?”
“Yeah. I’m going to do a new kind of Humvee with more stuff to keep guys from getting blown up.”
“Very cool,” she said, still looking for clippers.
“Yeah. Eliza said I could use her glue gun.”
“Oh, great! What’s her project?”
“Something dumb about germs and lip gloss, I think.”
“Huh,” said Mary Byrd, finally finding what she thought were the clippers. “What is this blue gunk all over these nail clippers? Yuck.”
William rose up to look. “Oh, that’s the shark I made with Play-Doh. See? The clipper part is the jaws. That red stuff inside is part of a person he ate.”
“Jeez, William.” She picked the Play-Doh off the thing and began clipping.
William watched her. “You mean the world is messy like my fingernails?” he asked. “Like they get dirty, and we cut them, and they just get dirty and long again anyway?”
His mother laughed. “Hmm, maybe a little like that. But really I mean more like complicated-and-unhappy-messy. Like what happened with Angie.”
“But that’s grown-ups, right? Things for kids aren’t unhappy, right? Unless you’re a kid in a Nazi concentration camp.”
“Well, that’s the way things are
supposed
to be. That’s the way grown-ups
want
things to be,” she said.
William looked at her solemnly but slyly. “Not
all
grown-ups.”
Okay, here it was. He was thinking about what had happened to Stevie at the hands of a grown-up. He knew nothing specific, of course, but all kids knew about sexual abuse now. Had knowing about Stevie hurt William in any way? Maybe the children should never have been told until they were older.
She sighed. “No, you’re right. But
most
grown-ups want kids to be safe and happy. But that’s what I mean about messy. There are always going to be people who are crazy, and they make things happen that are bad and hard to understand. Like Hitler, right? Sometimes there aren’t any answers about why bad things happen.” She was practically quoting Teever.
Now his eyes looked directly into hers. “What if something bad happens to me?”
Her heart thumped hard inside her chest. It was awful for a child his age to have this fear. “Oh, darling, it won’t.” She put her arms around him. “If you’re thinking about Stevie or something you saw on TV, those things almost never happen.” She’d give anything to say, “
never
,
ever.
” She thought of Freddy Brickle’s parents lying to him about Zepf’s ridiculous sentence. “There’s a bigger chance of you being run over by a school bus driven by chimps than of those things happening to you.” Probably not true, but they laughed. It’s a hard line to walk with a child, she thought, that line between truth and comfort. They so easily saw through the comfort. “And Stevie made a mistake. He talked to a stranger, and you know better than to do that, right?” The nail clipping resumed matter-of-factly. “You should be more worried about getting the Ebola virus from what’s under your nails.”
“That would be cool because then my eyes would bleed.”
“Yeah, very cool. Ha.”
“So if Mrs. Barnes comes in our classroom and asks me a multiplication and I can’t think of the answer, can I say, ‘stuff in life doesn’t always have answers’?” He grinned. Braces were in his future, she noticed for the first time. She’d let him keep his passy too long.
“Uh-huh. Go ahead—try it.” Children called Mrs. Barnes a math terrorist because as principal, she cruised the classrooms and the cafeteria, randomly demanding answers to multiplication tables. If you didn’t know, you got After-School. Somehow she was related to Evagreen, but Mary Byrd wasn’t sure how. “But you get what I was trying to say, don’t you, Will?”
“Yeah.” Raising the plane into the air, he buzzed her face a little too close, maybe not accidentally.
“Hey!” she protested. “Do you want a one-eyed mother?”
“Cyclops,” he said. “Are you sad about Stevie?”
“Of course. But not like I was. You sort of . . .” she paused. “. . . get used to the sadness. That was a really long time ago.”
He was zooming the plane around, avoiding looking interested. “What was he like?”
What
had
he really been like? she wondered. What kid stops to think about what his or her brothers or sisters are
like
? “Oh, he was regular. A pain in the booty for his sister, but sweet,” she told her son. “He came to live with us when he was practically still a baby, and he was cute, with blond hair and blue eyes and freckles, and Uncle Nick and I were really excited about having a new brother. When he got older, he was really funny. He loved goofy jokes. He liked sports. And he was crazy about trucks the way you’re crazy about planes and tanks.” It occurred to her she might not want William to have Stevie’s little dump truck, or that
he
might not want it.
“Did y’all torture each other, like Eliza and I do?”
She had to laugh and say honestly, “Of course. I was really too old to be doing it, but Nick and I loved to scare him.” A slight breeze of regret chilled her for a second. “You know—we did Halloween kind of stuff, like putting scary masks in his closet, or sneaking up behind him when he was watching
The Tingler
or this scary show we loved called
The World Beyond
. But he could give it back, too,” she said. “One time he put a flopping, almost-dead bird in my room. Another time, I was showing him how to play those clap-clap games—you know, ‘My boyfriend’s name is Fatty/ He comes from Cincinnati,’ and instead of slapping my hand, he punched me and I had a nosebleed.” With that, William jerked his hand in a mock punch. ‘‘Hey! Be still!” she said, continuing to clip. “And another time I was sick in bed and he made me throw up by singing the SpaghettiOs song over and over outside my bedroom door. “Uh-oh, SpaghettiOs,” she sang again.
William laughed at this but abruptly grew serious again. “Mom, what happened to the guy?” he asked.
“What guy? The bad guy?”
“Uh-huh.” He quit with the one-handed air traffic and waited.
“They never caught him,” she said evenly, almost lightly. “Until now. The good news is he’s already in a jail in North Carolina, a million miles away, for some other bad stuff. But the police in Richmond finally figured out that he was the guy, after all these years. That’s why I had to go up there, to help them, so he never gets out of jail.
Never
¸
ever.
” She wished so much for this to be true.
“Was he born bad? How did he get like that?”
William was normally so recalcitrant that his intelligence always surprised her. “I don’t know, Will,” she said. “I don’t think people are
born
bad. Can you imagine a precious little baby, like baby Brian, or Allie and Bryce, down the street, being bad? I think bad things sometimes happen to people and then they can sometimes—not very often—turn bad, too. Because they’re feeling hurt. Or angry, or lonely, and it makes them crazy.”
People in bad sitchyations do bad things.
The conversation was making the previous year’s talk with William about where babies come from seem like a nursery rhyme. “My guess, or at least what I like to think, is that most people are born good and try to grow up good,” she told him. “You know what? The best thing for people to do is to stay close to the ones they love. Better yet, to the ones who love
you
.” Maybe they should have been sending Eliza and William to church and Sunday school, she thought. Maybe it
was
better for children to believe in a lot of comforting juju.