The Dwelling: A Novel (35 page)

Petey’s face pinched in pain and horror. He muttered, “I’m sorry,” which Mr. Casem didn’t seem to hear. He was so angry. He shook him lightly, just once, but behind it Petey could feel the anger.

“Is this what you eat at home? Hmmm? Is it?” Petey shook his head, no. “Then what is it doing in this classroom?”

“Nothing.” Petey lost the battle and tears rolled down his cheeks. His face was as red as Mr. Casem’s.

In a moment Mr. Casem realized he’d gone too far and had somehow to regain control of the situation. Distantly, he could hear a little girl crying.

“All right then, go back to your seat and color the assignment.” Unable to speak, Petey nodded. Mr. Casem gave him a little nudge toward his row. He straightened up, his face red and angry, his eyes narrowed. “No more slacking. Color those pictures and then we’ll discuss the food groups,” he said, lowering his voice. The kids bent maniacally over their pictures and colored, desperate to stay in the lines. From somewhere in the middle of the room, a little girl sniffed on the edge of tears.

Petey flopped into his chair, squeezing his eyes shut tight against the room. The room felt like it was going to blow up. He leaned over in his seat, afraid to get up, and fished the picture of the cow off the floor. He colored his oddly shaped circles black. When the tip broke from the force of his pressure, he used brown. He colored the eyes blue. He made everything else brown.

Mr. Casem never called on him during the discussion, and Petey never raised his hand.

He took off at lunchtime, not telling anyone.

Todd Campbell came up to him at the lockers and told him Casem was an asshole, and saying he bet he got fired if Petey told his mom. By recess, the story would be all over the school. And next week he would have Casem again, for Good Health. He took his lunch out of his locker like the other kids but instead of turning at the gym or the multipurpose room where most of the kids ate their lunch, he just walked out of the back doors. No one stopped him or even noticed.

He took the long way, skirting the street that would walk him west to Belisle and instead went farther to where the busy street started. It was lunchtime and the streets were packed with people. No one noticed the little boy without his jacket, cheeks burned red, eyes puffed out from crying and from holding it in. He was cool in his T-shirt, but it was nice in the sun. He wished he was lying in the field. He wished he was dreaming.

He had not yet deliberately associated the two children in the yard with the kids in his dream. He had actually avoided thinking about it, in the way that children can compartmentalize things that are too complicated to figure out. He knew and didn’t know. He didn’t care.

A lady bumped into him and apologized. “Aren’t you cold, sweetheart?” she said, frowning and smiling.

“No, thank you,” he answered politely.

She looked at her watch. “Oh, you’d better hurry along. Lunch is almost over.” And she patted him on the head.

He thought of his mom. She would be mad. They would know at school that he was gone and then they would phone her. He thought of his room and was suddenly very tired. Maybe if he went home, his mom would let him go to his room (with a pudding) and sleep. He sighed deeply and walked to the end of the street, turning to go home, trying to debate in his head whether to tell his mom about Mr. Casem or not. She would be mad at somebody.

Barbara had taken off her jacket and blouse and lay on the bed in her bra and skirt. In a strange way she was okay, she felt terribly exhausted and depleted, but okay. She wondered if she was in some kind of shock. She wanted to disappear. But she wouldn’t; she never did.

She tried closing her eyes, but when she did, the conversation rolled over and over in her head as though on a loop.
Then he said…then I said.
When she couldn’t stand it any more she opened her eyes and stared at the ceiling.

Around her, the house shifted like a child in its seat.

The tub filled slowly with water and she listened to it in a way she hadn’t before. The tap ran into a tub half-filled already with water. She could hear it splash. It was pleasant. The sound of soaking in warm scent, smothered in a quiet feeling. Something scraped rhythmically across a wooden beam above her head. Very faintly, she could hear music playing, something old.

The water from the tap stopped running. She waited, poised for the sound of the plug popping out and the draining. A beat went by. And another. Her ears sharpened for it.

What she heard instead was water lapping up against the secondary drain, a hollow
clug clug
, rhythmic; like waves.

She sat up, a torporish fog like a shell around her. The mattress creaked with the shift in weight and the sound, for a second, was lost. She sat on the edge of the bed and tried to recapture it.

From downstairs an old ballad droned, Ruth Etting or maybe Bessie Smith, something dreamy and sad, the recording tinny. She preferred show tunes.

Who’s Ruth Etting?

It was only a moment before it faded into far away and she could hear (feel) the sound of warm water lapping over flesh, washing up the front of the tub just high enough occasionally to swamp over the small silver cover and make that
clugging
sound, not unlike the drain. The other sounds of the house melted way as she focused.

The tub was full, this time. But, of course, that couldn’t be. Unless that had been covered at the end of
Everyone’s Guide to Simple Plumbing;
perhaps there was a section at the back. “Really Really Bad Drains!” or “Haunted Tubs!”

Barbara got up off the bed, a host of tempestuous images and thoughts running through her mind. She remembered the look on Dennis’s face when he had first seen Petey, his eyes wide with wonder and so much love; she remembered the dress she had worn to meet his parents, the first car they’d had
(Isn’t there something he uses that no one else does?),
packing her own suitcase once after a fight long before Petey was born, then sitting childlike and quiet on the bed while Dennis unpacked her case with great care, and put it all back into the drawers; the realtor who had showed them this house, telling her mother Dennis had left, trying to get the mattress for the spare bed up the stairs alone, her father’s hand on her back when she rode her bicycle. Her father dying. Her mother braiding her hair. The restaurant Dennis always took clients to.

Her legs felt weak. Her vision was tunneled. She wondered if she were dreaming.

The sun had gone behind a cloud. The hall had dimmed, the sun usually coming through the window in Petey’s room now darkened in shadow. It was cold in the hall. The floor was cold on her feet. Steam, equally cold so that it puckered her flesh, poured from the bathroom. She entered and looked into the tub.

The water was red. Red water had seeped up and stained the sides of the tub, curdling along the soap line. Red water sloshed up in rhythm, washing over the secondary drain
clug clug clug.
Toes stuck up through the red water, the deep, rich color hiding whatever else lay beneath.

Oh my god,
she thought, but it was slow (like moving through water). Everything was slow in occurring to her, so slow she might have been dreaming. She knew she should scream, run, something; instead, her eyes followed the toes, the natural line formed by memory.
Elementary, dear Watson. Where there’s toes, there’s fire.

A man lay in the tub. His head lolled over onto his shoulder, bent slightly forward, blocking his chest. Water lapped around his middle, the black hairs of his stomach and chest poking through the murky water, torso bobbing freely with the motion of his body.

She bent forward and looked at his face. His eyes were closed as though sleeping. The expression on his face was serene.

He’s at peace.

His hands floated by his sides. Deep gouges ran along the length of his arms, two rows on each arm. The flesh was curled at the cleave, the inside purple in the red water.

“You had enough,” she whispered, not really sure if she had said it or not. But knowing it was true.

The water was inviting. Warm water lapping over exhausted flesh.
A bath is a lovely thing. You could lie in one forever.
She smiled sadly. There was a scraping sound on the tile and she glanced down to see the claws on the feet of the tub clench and relax.

Barbara stood motionless, calmly, her hands clasped demurely in front of her in a sort of reverence for the overwhelming, seductive feeling of peace in the little steamy-cold room. She did not know how long she stood there, mind blank in a sort of echo of tranquillity. Long enough to feel chilled.

And then she found herself, alone, in an empty bathroom.

She blinked and shook her head. The tub was empty and dry, and white and pristine as the day she bought the house. She shuddered.
Awful thing,
she thought. She waited for a moment, expectantly, for the tub to begin its pop and drain, and it didn’t.

The room was soundless.

Why was I in here?
Something niggled, but would not come.

Downstairs, the front door opened and she jumped.

Dennis’s face and all that she knew (all that was over) loomed. Pain, her most visceral friend, threatened to bring her down and she swayed, her mouth opening in a groan that was silent, and all the while downstairs there was the sound of her other man, home. For him she had to be okay.

On unsteady legs, she made her way down the stairs. Her son looked up to her, his beautiful wide green eyes peering up, mouth pursed, forehead crunched in an expression of dismay.

The stairs were warm where the sun poured in through the tall narrow windows beside the door. She paused ever so briefly on one spot and let the heat soak into her cold feet. Petey didn’t seem to notice her pausing. He was staring at her.

“What are you doing home?” she said, her voice flattened.

“You don’t have a top on,” he said. Barbara looked down. She was in her bra. Her skirt was wrinkled and twisted to one side. Her pantyhose sagged at the knee. She came down the stairs, took her sweater off the hook by the door and put it on. As she turned to face him, Petey grabbed her around her middle and hugged her hard. She knelt and put her arms around him, feeling his weight, his heat, his clinging. They stayed like that for a minute.

“What happened?” she asked, saying the words into his neck. He smelled like outdoors, fresh.

“School’s over,” he said shortly.

She made a sound of affirmation in her throat. They parted and she stood, running her hand through his thick red hair. It had lost its baby softness a long time ago, and was just hair now, but her fingers felt the baby he had been. He hadn’t been bald like most babies. And from the start, his hair had been red. Like Dennis’s. Dennis’s mother had told her that when Dennis was born he looked like a matchstick, so red was his hair and so white his body.

Scattered on the floor were her three letters. She stooped and picked them up, clutching the sweater around her. She held them. “Are you hungry?”

“Yeah,” Petey said. “I have my lunch.” He had the brown bag in his hand. She nodded. The two of them walked to the kitchen. On the way through the living room, Barbara dropped the letters onto the sofa. They were crushed and bent. She would have to redo them.

“What do you want?” she asked him, pulling open, by accident or design, the treat cupboard. Petey hesitated. Choose food, of a sort.

“Kraft Dinner?” She closed the treat cupboard and found the cupboard where such things were kept in untidy piles, bags of macaroni, spaghetti, jars and cans of spaghetti sauce and tomatoes, all things that didn’t readily stack or row neatly. She pawed around until she found a lonely package of Kraft Dinner in the back, and took it down.

Barbara went through the motions of making lunch, pulling out pots and lids and adding things in a way that seemed precisely timed, and yet were only false images of cooking.

Petey sat at the table and watched her. He hadn’t seen her like this in a long time—not since they had left the old house. He wondered if he should tell her what had happened.

“Petey, I have something to tell you,” she said. A rational voice somewhere lost inside her told her sternly (a voice surprisingly like her mother’s) that now was not the time.

“What?”

She stirred the pot on the stove needlessly. Kraft Dinner didn’t stick. It didn’t do anything. You could probably leave it on the counter next to a pot and it would cook itself without error. She stirred, staring into the murky water. Now and then a tiny little yellow log would bob up to the top.

With her back to him, she told him that his father had called from work.

“He’s going to get married,” she said. And swallowed. Saying it was better than she’d thought it would be. The words sounded as though they had been said very far away from her, and by another person.

When Petey didn’t respond, she finally turned and looked at him. Their eyes met. His face looked drawn and old, his cheeks slack. He blinked and she wondered if he understood, but didn’t have the energy to explain it.

“He wants you to come to his house this weekend and meet her, his new…wife.”

His lips formed the words,
new wife,
without sound. “Is she my mother, too?”

Barbara shook her head. “I’m your mom and he’s your dad. She’ll be his wife, is all.” It came out blankly, but properly, like all the books said it should. There was no inflection. It all felt blank. And sleepy. Her stomach was heavy like lead. She explained that he would probably call back tonight and talk to Petey. She rambled for a moment about how he could see Jeremy and maybe some of his other old friends. While she rambled, upstairs a plug popped out of the drain and water ran out through pipes. If she noticed, she did not acknowledge.

Petey’s eyes went up to the ceiling and then down to her again. “Why doesn’t he marry you again if he wants a wife?” he asked.

The macaroni fattened and grew creamy. She turned off the element and pulled the pot off. The rings were red with heat and she felt it distantly through the opening of the sweater. She had the incomprehensible urge to press her hand on it.