The Burgess Boys (22 page)

“You probably wonder how I know that,” Jim went on, merging onto the highway. “You learn all sorts of things reading the
Shirley Falls Journal
online. Okay, be that way.” He added, “So I told Susan this morning, when she was outside with the dog, that Zach might have done this to impress his father. Didn’t mention the girlfriend. Just that Steve had emailed Zach some vaguely negative things about the Somalis. And you know what she said? She said, ‘Huh.’ ”

“That’s what she said?” Bob looked out the window. After a while he said, “Well, I’m worried about Zach. Susan told me he’d soiled himself in the cell that day. That’s probably why he didn’t come down for dinner when I was up here. He was totally humiliated. He didn’t even tell you yesterday when you were asking what happened to him there.”

“When did she tell you that? She didn’t tell
me
that.”

“This morning, in the kitchen. When you were on the phone and Zach had taken his stuff upstairs.”

“I’ve done everything I can,” Jim finally said. “Everything to do with this family depresses me profoundly. All I want is to get back to New York.”

“You’ll get back to New York. Just like what you said about Pam, some people get what they need.”

“I was a dickwad. Let it go.”

“I can’t just let it go. Jimmy, did she really come on to you?”

Jim exhaled through his teeth. “Oh, Christ, who knows? Pam’s kind of crazy.”

“Who knows? You know. You said it.”

“I just told you—I was being a dickwad.” Jim paused. “Exaggerating, okay?”

They drove in silence after that. They drove beneath a gray November sky. The bare trees stood naked and skinny as they passed them. The pine trees seemed skinny too, apologetic, tired. They drove by trucks, they drove by beat-up cars with passengers sucking on cigarettes. They drove by fields that were brownish gray. They drove beneath underpasses that spelled out the names of the roads above them: Anglewood Road, Three Rod Road, Saco Pass. They drove over the bridge into New Hampshire, and then into Massachusetts. It wasn’t until traffic came to a halt outside of Worcester that Jim spoke. “What is this shit? Man, what’s going on?”

“That,” said Bob, nodding to an ambulance coming in the other direction. There was another ambulance, and two police cars, and then Jim said nothing. Neither brother turned his head when they finally passed the accident. It was their bond, and had always been that way. Their wives had learned this silently, Jim’s kids, too. It was a respect thing, Bob had told Elaine in her office, and she had nodded knowingly.

When they were almost on the other side of Worcester, Jim said, “I was a shit last night.”

“You were.” Bob could see in the side mirror the large brick mills receding.

“It messes with my head, going up there. It doesn’t mess with your head as bad, because you were Mom’s favorite. I’m not whining about that, it’s just true.”

Bob thought about this. “It’s not like she didn’t like you.”

“Yeah, she liked me.”

“She loved you.”

“Yeah, she loved me.”

“Jimmy, you were like a hero or something. You were good at everything. You never gave her a minute of grief. Of course she loved you. Susie—Mom didn’t like her so much. Loved her, but didn’t like her.”

“I know.” Jim let out a big sigh. “Poor Susie. I didn’t like her either.” He looked in the side mirror, pulled out to pass a car. “I still don’t.”

Bob pictured his sister’s cold house, the anxious dog, Susan’s plain face. “Oy,” he said.

“I know you want a cigarette,” Jim said. “If you can wait till we stop for food, that would be good. Helen will smell it for months. But if you can’t wait, open a window.”

“I’ll wait.” This unexpected kindness Jim flicked toward him made Bob garrulous. “When I was up there before, Susan got mad at me for saying ‘Oy.’ She said I wasn’t Jewish. I didn’t bother telling her Jews know about sorrow. They know about everything. And they have these great words for it. Tsuris. We have tsuris, Jimmy. I do, anyway.”

Jim said, “Susie used to be pretty, do you remember that? Christ, if you’re a woman and you stay in Maine you’re really at risk. Helen says it’s about products. Skin cream. She says Maine women think it’s indulgent to use products, so by the time they’re forty their faces look like men. It’s a credible theory, I guess.”

“Mom never
let
Susan feel pretty. Look, I’m not a parent, but you are. Why wouldn’t a mother like her own kid? At least say ‘Oh you look nice’ once in a while?”

Jim waved a hand. “It had something to do with Susie being a girl. She got screwed because she was a girl.”

“Helen loves your girls.”

“Of course she does. She’s Helen. And it’s different in our generation. Haven’t you noticed—no, I guess you haven’t. But our generation, we’re like
friends
to our kids. Maybe it’s sick, maybe it isn’t, who knows. But it’s like we decided, well, we’re not doing
that
to our kids, we’re going to be
friends
with our kids. Honestly, Helen’s great. But Mom and Susan, that’s what happened back then. Next exit we’ll eat.”

By the time they reached Connecticut it felt as though they were in a suburb of New York, and Shirley Falls was far behind. “Should we call Zach?” Bob asked, pulling out his cell phone.

“Go ahead.” Jim spoke with indifference.

Bob put his phone back into his pocket. Making the call required an effort he couldn’t muster. He asked Jim if he should drive for a while, and Jim shook his head and said no, he was good. Bob knew he would do this. Jim never let him drive. When they were kids and Jim got his license, he would make Bob ride in the backseat. Bob thought of this now and did not mention it; everything to do with Shirley Falls seemed far away, unreachable, and best left unreached.

It was dark by the time they approached Manhattan, the lights of the city spread out beside them, the bridges twinkling with magnificence over the East River, the huge red Pepsi sign blinking from Long Island City. As they slowed to get onto the ramp for the Brooklyn Bridge, Bob could see the spire of the Municipal Building, and also the tall and crowded apartment buildings right there by the Drive, lights on in almost every window, and he felt homesick for it all, as though it no longer belonged to him but was a place where he had lived in the far past. Across the bridge, down Atlantic Avenue, there was the sense of going deep into some country that was both familiar and foreign, and the simultaneousness of these impressions jarred Bob; he was a child now, tired and querulous, and he wanted to be going home with Jim.

“All right, knucklehead,” said his brother, pulling up in front of Bob’s apartment building. Jim kept his hands on the steering wheel, only raising four fingers in the gesture of a wave, and Bob took his bag from the back and got out. In front of his building he saw big squares of cut-up cardboard moving boxes near the recycling bin. Walking up the stairs Bob saw the bar of light beneath the door of what had recently been the emptied-out apartment of his old neighbors. Tonight he heard the lilting voices of a young couple, heard a baby cry.

Book Three

1

For most of the nineteen years of Zachary’s life, Susan had done what parents do when their child turns out to be so different from what they’d imagined—which is to pretend, and pretend, with the wretchedness of hope, that he would be all right. Zach would grow into himself. He’d make friends and take part in life. Grow into it, grow out of it … Variations had played in Susan’s mind on sleepless nights. But her mind had also held the dark relentless beat of doubt: He was friendless, he was quiet, he was hesitant in all his actions, his schoolwork barely adequate. Tests showed an IQ above average, no discernible learning disorders—yet the package of Zachness added up to not quite right. And sometimes Susan’s melody of failure crescendoed with the unbearable knowledge: It was her fault.

How could it not be her fault?

At the university Susan had been drawn to classes in child development. Attachment theories, especially. Attachment to the mother appeared to be more important than attachment to the father, though of course that was important too. But the mother was the mirror the child was reflected in, and Susan had hoped for a girl. (She wanted three girls and then one son, who would be like Jim.) Her own mother had preferred the boys; Susan knew this as clearly as she knew the color red.
Her
daughters would be loved without narrowness. The house would be filled with chatter; they would be allowed makeup as Susan had not been; they would be allowed phone calls with boys, pajama parties, and clothes bought from stores.

She miscarried. “You shouldn’t have told people,” her mother said. But Susan was showing, and in her second trimester how could she not have told people? “A girl,” the doctor said, because she asked. The first night, Steve held her. “I hope the next one’s a boy,” he said.

They were not toys on a store shelf, one falling and breaking, the next coming home in one piece. No, she had lost her daughter! And she learned—freshly, scorchingly—of the privacy of sorrow. It was as though she had been escorted through a door into some large and private club that she had not even known existed. Women who miscarried. Society did not care much for them. It really didn’t. And the women in the club mostly passed each other silently. People outside the club said, “You’ll have another one.”

The nurse who handed her Zachary must have assumed that Susan was weeping with joy, but Susan was weeping at the sight of him: skinny, wet, blotchy, his eyes closed. He was not her little girl. She panicked at the thought she might never forgive him for this. He lay on her chest with no interest in suckling. On the third day a nurse put a cold facecloth to his cheek to see if that would rouse him, but he only opened his eyes and looked startled before his tiny face wrinkled with sorrow. “Oh, please,” Susan begged the nurse, “don’t do that again.” Her breasts hardened with milk, became infected with their engorgement. She had to stand in blistering hot showers, pressing the milk out. Her skinny, shriveled baby boy remained indifferent, lost weight. “Why won’t he suck?” Susan wailed, and no one seemed to have an answer. A bottle of formula was produced and Zachary sucked on that.

“He’s strange-looking,” Steve said.

He seldom cried, and when Susan checked on him in the night she was often surprised to see his eyes open. “What are you thinking?” she would whisper, stroking his head. At six weeks he gazed at her, and gave the smile of someone patient, kind, and bored.

“Do you think he’s normal?” she blurted to her mother one day.

“No. I don’t.” Barbara was holding Zach’s tiny hand. He had, at thirteen months, just learned to walk, and he was moving between the sofa and the coffee table. “I don’t know what he is,” Barbara said, watching him. Adding, “But he’s dear.”

And he really was: unfussy, quiet, his eyes on his mother. It’s not that Susan forgot about the little girl she’d lost—she never forgot—but the love she had for the lost girl seemed to merge with the love she felt for Zach. Sent to preschool, Zach suddenly cried without stopping. “I can’t leave him there,” Susan said. “He never cries. Something’s wrong with that place.”

“You’ll turn him into a wuss,” Steve said. “He’ll have to get used to it.”

A month later the preschool asked that Zachary leave, his crying was disruptive. Susan found another preschool in a neighborhood across the river, and Zach didn’t cry there. But he didn’t play with anyone. Susan stood in the doorway and watched the teacher take his hand and lead him over to another little boy, and Susan watched while the other boy pushed her son, who, so skinny, toppled over like a stick.

By elementary school he was teased mercilessly. By middle school he was beaten up. By high school his father left. Before Steve left, there were loud arguments that Zach must have heard. “He doesn’t ride a bicycle. He can’t even swim. He’s a total weenie and you made him that way!” Red-faced, Steve was adamant. Susan believed her husband, and thought that if Zach had turned out differently, his father might have stayed. So that was her fault too. These failures isolated her. Only Zach was present in her quarantine, mother and son knit together by an unspoken sense of bafflement and mutual apology. At times she yelled at him (more often than she knew), and she was always, afterward, sick with regret and sorrow.

“Good,” he said, when she asked how it had been at the hotel with his uncles. “Oh, yeah, totally,” when asked if they’d been nice to him. “Talked and watched TV,” when asked what they had done. “Stuff,” he said, shrugging pleasantly, asked what they had talked about. But when her brothers had left, she felt Zach’s mood sink low. “Let’s call your uncles, see they got back to New York all right,” she suggested, and Zach made no reply.

She called Jim, who sounded tired. He did not ask to speak to Zach.

She called Bob, who sounded tired, and he did ask to speak to Zach. Susan moved into the living room to give Zach privacy. “Good,” she heard her son say. “Yeah, it was.” Long silence. “I don’t know. Okay. You too.”