Lost (18 page)

In his misery, he didn't hear them come in, but the lights were on and Uncle Barney was there, and Aunt Maggie, and others, too, and Patsy ran to them. “Walter peed his pants.” He heard his mother saying, “Let me go to him. I can make it,” and she came weaving across the room, bumped the coffee table, and loomed down beside him. Her face looked mashed and red. “It's okay, it's okay, Waltie.”

“I had an assident,” he said, sobbing.

“Oh, that's okay. I don't care at all,” she said.

“But I promised I wouldn't …”

“I know you didn't mean to. Mommy knows. Let's see if we can't lie down. Just the two of us.”

Across the room he saw Patsy high in Uncle Barney's arms. “But I'm not tired,” he wailed.

“I know,” she said. “But I am. So tired, and you'll feel lots better.”

She helped him clean up with soap and a washcloth. He put on his pajamas, and she was sitting by his bed asleep when Walter closed his eyes.

In the night, he awoke with the foot of his bed stacked deep with coats. The door to the living room was open a crack and a blade of light cut across the room. He could hear a buzzing spiral of voices.

“All it says is he's missing in action.”

“Missing in what action?”

“I know he's gone. I can feel it.”

But when Walter stepped under the arched doorway, blinking, no one was talking. They were sitting on the divan and on chairs and the arms of chairs; their heads were bowed and all the lights were on, but no one was talking. Patsy, he noticed, was asleep on Aunt Maggie's lap. “Mary, get him,” someone said. “Poor little guy missed his supper. Must be starved.”

“That's all right,” his mother said, and picked him up. “I'll do it.” And she was telling him, “We don't know for sure, but I don't believe your daddy's coming home.”

Maybe the children would have remembered it as a dream, but the next morning there were cups and saucers all over the living room, on the windowsill, on the arms of chairs, on the floor, and their mother had to pick them up and Patsy and Walter helped. But there never was any funeral, just a black ribbon twined around the red cord of the photograph. And for the length of that summer their mother still waited for the mailman to come. Only now, instead of being nervous and ill-tempered when the letters didn't come, she was distracted and slow. Every day, she collected the mail from the foyer floor and shuffled through it, her face a stone of disappointment.

One hot day, the goldfish died because, she said, the water wasn't any good, but they knew she didn't like the goldfish. She had done it. She forgot to feed it and it died; the mason jar full of water, the colored rocks that grew into a weird knotty castle, the little box of food—all were gone. They would have buried the goldfish, but she threw it out with the trash and they never saw it again. Walter asked if they could get another one, but she said no, she didn't want to take care of it. Walter said he would take care of it, but she said no and that's final.

By July, she was drinking whiskey every day. She didn't worry about her looks, left her hair in bobby pins most of the time, day and night, with a cloth wrapped around her head and knotted in front. She didn't powder her face or bother to put on lipstick, and she looked as if she had washed her face too hard, it was so blank. Some days she didn't even change out of her nightgown. For a while, she hardly scolded the children at all, barely went through the motions, leaving them to their own devices. And they knew she didn't want to be bothered—she was cross most of the time—knew she didn't want them around. Every day when they were up and had dressed themselves, Patsy asked her what she wanted them to do today, and usually she said, “Don't bother me,” or “Go play,” or “Just get out of my way.” And then she would look from Patsy to Walter. “Look after him, Patsy. He's your baby brother.” She didn't like to hear the picture-show stories any more, and one Saturday she forgot to come and meet them for an extra long time. After that she just told them to come home with the Turnbull girls.

On rainy days when they couldn't go outside, she sometimes let them make her drinks. They knew how she liked them. Walter stood on the kitchen counter to get the glass and Patsy climbed on a chair to reach the ice cubes. Four ice cubes in the glass, fill it up with whiskey, then dig a red candied cherry from the slim jar and float it on top. Patsy hopped down from the chair and, using both hands, carried the full glass to the bedroom. Once, when they reached the doorway, Walter said, “Let me give it to her this time,” and carefully, not spilling a drop, they switched hands on the glass. She took the glass from him but, hardly glancing at it, flung it against the wall, the glass breaking, the amber liquor splashing everywhere. “Don't ever serve me my drink in a short glass,” she said, the tip of her cigarette bouncing up and down as she spoke. “I want my drinks in tall glasses. Gimme another one and do it right.” Another time, when they were late coming home, she threw her drink in Patsy's face so fast she couldn't blink, and the whiskey hurt her eyes. Then, because it was their fault, she told them to mop it up.

Adrift, they did all the things she would never let them do. They climbed the high trees behind their house; they swung on grapevines; and once Walter even went to the river with the older boys. Patsy said, “You better not, Walter. She'll be mad at you. She'll be
awful
mad.” But he didn't fall in the river, as his mother always said he would. No currents sucked him under.

When she thought they were really bad, she made them hold out their hands. They would beg her: “Mommy, please don't milk my mouses.” But she would catch their fingers in hers, folding them down in a deep indrawing clench until the fingers nearly ruptured at the joints. And they squealed and squealed. “See,” she said, “that's what bad little mice sound like.” The one time Walter went to the river, she asked where he'd been and he didn't lie. He told her he didn't fall in. That night, giving him a bath, she was supposed to be washing his hair when she dipped him back to rinse it and plunged his head under the water. She held him under till he couldn't breathe. He thrashed and kicked, water flying, his body squeaking and thumping on the bottom of the tub until at last she drew him up. Patsy stood screaming in the doorway, afraid to come in and afraid to leave, shouting at her to stop. “That's what happens to bad boys who won't listen,” his mother said while he coughed and spit bathwater and tried to scream. “Next time you'll drown.”

Afterward she held him on her lap and pulled Patsy up in her other arm. She hugged them and asked them to forgive her. “Mommy's sorry,” she said, her words slurring, “Mommy gets a little under the weather sometimes and she don't know what she's doing. But you kids have to do your part, too. You should stay away from Mommy when she's like that.”

“But I told the truth,” Walter said, weeping. “You said to tell the truth.”

“Then let's pretend this never happened. That's what we'll do. Forget all about this like it never happened, and go back to the way we used to be. Okay? Whaddaya say?” But she couldn't go back, and it was as if they had two mothers and most of the time they couldn't tell which one she was. They tried to stay away from her, ran from her. “I'll look out for you, Walter,” Patsy said. “If I yell, go hide.” But now, when their mother wanted to give him a bath, he hid all by himself until she said they wouldn't use the bathtub, only a washcloth and soap, or until she just forgot and changed her mind.

Sometimes the neighbors let Patsy and Walter come to their house for supper, something the children liked to do, except that their mother might decide to come find them. She always smiled to the neighbors and made excuses, but she turned on them at home. One night, she told them to go in the shed outside and lock the door, she was so mad she didn't know what she might do otherwise. They hid under the house where she couldn't crawl. Other nights, they would go home dreading that they would find her crying or reaching from place to place to get across the room, or mad at them, ready to slap them with her wedding-ring hand that cut.

Mrs. Petrie, a big bouncy woman from down the street, appeared every so often to “wet her whistle,” as she put it, with a jigger or two of whiskey. “Adele, honey,” she said, “you've got to pull yourself out of this thing. You're a living mess. Why don't you come out with me sometime to the Capri Club, down on Delacroix? Have yourself some fun?”

Their mother said she didn't think so.

But it didn't take many of Mrs. Petrie's visits before the picture came down from above the divan: the black ribbon, the gold tassels, all of it gone, like the goldfish—only “put away,” their mother said. Where it had hung, the wallpaper was lighter and it was worse than having the picture there, she told Mrs. Petrie.

Even when the days began to dwindle and darken, as long as it was warm enough to play outside, she let them stay till night in the neighbors' yards—the Turnbulls', or the Snyders'—and she would leave in the late afternoon for the Capri Club in a clean dress, her hair brushed soft and pretty and her lips wet red, almost the color of their daddy's red Ford coupe she'd promised she wouldn't drive, but did.

About the same time, she had the telephone put in her bedroom where she spent hours, talking and laughing. On the first day of school, she took Patsy to meet her teacher, leaving Walter in the car while she was gone. But after that Patsy walked to school with the neighborhood kids. One evening, Suzie Turnbull told Walter he couldn't come to their house any more because her mommy didn't want them to associate with each other because she didn't think highly of his mommy because she had sex and that's bad. “
You
ask her,” Patsy said as they went to the kitchen. “No, you do it,” Walter whispered and they argued, in whispers. Most of the time it was Patsy who got them in trouble, but it was Walter who got punished.

“Mommy, what's sex?” Walter finally asked her.

“I don't know. Why?”

“Is it like a fever?”

“It must be.” And all the time she kept telling him it was a bad dream when the noise woke him at night and he went to crawl in with Patsy. “It's just a bad dream, Walter,” she would say, coming to their door. “Just an old nightmare. Go back to sleep.”

But when the night noise woke them up, it didn't end like a dream—it kept going a little louder and on and a soft, sawing, creaking noise, like a train rumbling and squeaking far away. “What is it?” Walter said, staring at his sister in the dark. Patsy stared back at him. “I think it's some monster!” And they hid under the covers—until they decided it
was
a train—the sound of a train bringing their daddy home, and they listened to the creaking lullaby rhythm, and threaded through it came their mother's whimpered complaints as if she were sad and fighting for breath, Uh-ah, again and again and quicker until it was louder than the train noise, and Patsy said “It's Mommy!” and Walter said “She's hurt!” And he had to use the toilet.

Moonbeams lit the hall in intervals. Their feet padding on the hardwood floor, they hurried to her bedroom door and took turns peeking through the keyhole where a soft light glowed on the other side. Patsy turned the knob and pushed the door open far enough for them to slide into the shadowed room; there was a smell in the room like candle wax. A man's pale back rode up in the shadows and the loud creaking noise ricocheted around the room; their mother's moaning flattened in their ears and Patsy said, “Don't hurt Mommy,” but her voice faded to nothing, and then Walter tried to speak but he was too afraid—he had to go to the toilet too bad to step farther into the room. The man fell off to the side and the bed bounced. They heard him mumbling in the pillow, his voice smothered, and their mother was sitting up, holding the sheet across her. “It's okay, sweetie. We were only fooling around with each other. Just carrying on. You needn't worry. It's okay. Really.”

Patsy took a step forward, but drew a quick breath and stepped back. It flickered across Walter's mind that the last time, when his dad brought the little box with the holes in the top so the fish could breathe, there had been that same noise in the morning before the funny papers and she had been hiding his dad in her room all night as a surprise. He scooted a step into the room and whispered, “Mommy, is Daddy home?”

“No, baby … Ah, Davy, don't be mad, don't be mad, he's just a baby—he don't know.… I told you, sweetie … I told you. Oh, hell, goddammit, Walter …” She put the back of her hand over her mouth because she had said a bad word, and she rubbed her eyes with the insides of her wrists the way she did when her hands were dirty and she had a bad cold. “Go back to bed now.”

“I hafta go to the toilet.”

Patsy said, “Walter, let's get outa here. Come on.” She reached out and grasped his arm, but he pulled away from her, and their mother said, “Well, go ahead, then, Walter. You can go by yourself.”

“Can't either, in the dark.”

“You can turn the light on. Just close the door first and then turn it off when you leave. You can do that.”

“Can't reach it.”

“You can too. You reach it all the time. Do it this once for Mommy.”

Louder. “Can't reach it.” He looked for Patsy, who had backed all the way out to the hallway.

“All right, then.” She yanked her robe into bed with her. Flopping from side to side, she covered herself. “Come on. Hurry up.” She flipped the bathroom light on; the light shone fan-shaped in the bedroom and he walked through it into the bathroom. She shut the door.

On the other side of the wall, they had words, angry and hurried. The man said, “That's it, Adele, that's it.” And before Walter had finished, he heard their voices trickling away in another room. He's going away, Walter thought, and flushed the toilet. The razor strap was gone from the nail. She had taken it when she reached for the light switch.