The Dwelling: A Novel (36 page)

“We’re divorced,” she said simply, the voice belonging to someone else.

While Barbara put the last bits together for the lunch, Petey ate his sandwich at the table. He took bites without deliberation, not tasting them, the bread and meat pressing together between his tongue and the roof of his mouth feeling like cardboard. He had a hard time chewing, couldn’t seem to move the food around in his mouth. Barbara brought him a plate of orange noodles and they sat together at the little table, holding their forks. Barbara pushed hers around the plate. Petey shoved forkful after forkful into his mouth and swallowed, methodically.

“I ran away from school,” Peter blurted. Then burst into tears.

Petey went to his room.

Barbara cleaned up the kitchen and when that was done, sat down at the end of the dining-room table, her typewriter in front of her. She rolled a fresh envelope into the carriage and it sat there. She didn’t want to do it. Felt too tired. She thought about how nice a long, long bath would feel. She sat there and stared, listening to the music that filtered around the house without a distinct origin. Time went by. At one point she heard her son laugh. Once in a while there were too many footsteps, for so few people living there.

There’s something wrong with this house.
And she smiled, cruelly.

*  *  *

Petey had gone up to his room after looking through the kitchen window for a long time. They weren’t in the yard. They were waiting for him upstairs.

He sat on his bed for a minute or two and they didn’t come. He thought he could hear them. He knew where they were.

He got off the bed and went slowly to the little cupboard door cut down from what had been a huge, tall board, once the door to a large barn. The bottom half had been cut into a little round door. What had happened to the rest of it, he didn’t know. There were lots of boards from the barn in the bedroom. The window was trimmed with it, and the baseboards had once been the horizontal slabs for the horse stall. If he looked, he could find a gouged piece where a horse had chewed and chewed. The boards had all been deeply stained and varnished, but you could still see the marks and bores where machinery had run into walls, where chains had hung and eroded into the wood, where scratches had been made.

He pressed his thumb on the little latch and it made a nice click when it opened. A gratifying sound. He pulled the door open until it was adjacent to the wall and left it there. Inside it was black as pitch; black as night. In spite of the sun streaming in through his window, none penetrated the darkness of the cubbyhole. He listened, hoping to hear them, but it was silent.

His heart pounding because he didn’t really,
really
want to do it, he ducked his head and walked into the blackness.

The retarded kid who had been nice that first afternoon at the bus stop when Andy and Marshall had beaten him up had the same recess time as Petey’s class. His name was Kevin. After a while Petey had got used to him following him around. Kevin couldn’t find Petey at lunch. He had seen him that morning, but not at lunch. Then not at recess.

Eventually someone took note. Kevin asked Mrs. Waddell if Peter had a dentist’s appointment. He’d had one himself not long ago (to him: it had in fact been months before, but had hurt—like a
bugger
—and he remembered it well; he was preoccupied with dental appointments after that). Mrs. Waddell hadn’t answered with much more than a negative throat sound. She was watching the little kids. She hated playground duty.

The very things that worked against Petey with the children worked in his favor with the adults: he was not an attractive child, and did not stand out as a student, because he was new and had yet to make any sort of an impression whether with good work or bad. When a teacher looked out over the sea of faces, their eyes skidded over him, pausing only on kids like Bethany Sanders, who had curling blond hair and saucer-sized blue eyes and wore a different dress every day, or even Brad Genner, who had pleasant features, smooth white teeth and an easy smile and was very smart. Or Andy Devries and Marshall Hemp, who were troublemakers with soft, clean brown hair and easy smiles and quips that were mean and funny, comments that were repeated later in the staff room with guilty snickers and chuckles hidden behind hands with remarks like
oh, my
and
What will he be like in ten years?
But the eyes just swept past boys like Petey. Pe
ter.

She had noticed that the new kid wasn’t around after lunch, but the thought kept slipping in and out of her consciousness, like the hum of a refrigerator or the drone of a lawn mower on a Saturday afternoon in June. Kevin said he thought Peter had run away from school, telling Mrs. Waddell at afternoon recess, but Kevin was one of those kids the adults listened to only halfway, and as soon as he disappeared and the discomfort of having him near her subsided, Mrs. Waddell forgot whatever it was he had said, only to remember an hour later, during grammar. At lunchtime she’d taken a look around the play yard and finally asked Andy Devries, of all people, if she knew where the new kid was. Andy spat before answering, and she chastised him for it, but later when she was talking to Tina Klassen about the missing new kid, she mentioned Andy spitting and remarked that he looked just like his father when he did it, and Tina Klassen knew just what she meant and they both
cluck-clucked
like old ladies, but secretly the image they carried in their heads about Andy Devries’s father was sexual in nature, his maleness a topic of exchanged looks at every parent-teacher night. He was a looker, that one, and the kid was going to be just like him.

They called his house and told his mother that he hadn’t been in school after recess that day. Barbara had listened to the teacher on the phone, calling at two o’clock in the afternoon, her forehead lined with a sort of distant anger.

“You noticed he wasn’t there
when?”
she asked.

The teacher had fumbled then, attempting to cover tracks of some distance. It boiled down to, he ran off at recess. Mrs. Waddell not offering the information that she really didn’t know when he’d gone. For all she knew, it might have been morning recess, except by then she’d heard what had happened with the gym teacher (and she was
appalled,
make no mistake about that, but these things happened and they have to be handled carefully; it was an unfortunate situation, an
accident).
Mrs. Waddell considered herself quite accurately
intuitive
and did not feel at all
concerned
about the boy’s whereabouts. While she did not explain why (people were so grounded in earth properties they missed the whole wide
other
world around them) she did tell Mrs. Parkins that the school—taking some liberty there—was not concerned.

“We have found that children who have not yet found their
niche
often
act out
in these sorts of ways. He is very likely just waiting until after school is out to come home,” Mrs. Waddell said reasonably.

“My son is not at school,” Barbara said, with deadly calm into the phone. “You don’t know where he is. You have called me at two o’clock in the afternoon—” She paused to think. “What kind of a school are you operating, Mrs. Waddell?” There was a patient, long-suffering sigh at the other end of the line and that made Barbara angry. Mrs. Waddell (while dreaming of teaching grades eight through twelve) had taken a child-psychology course at night, and waited patiently
(one of those mothers)
for Barbara to vent her (perfectly
understandable,
although unproductive and
unreasonable)
dismay.

“This is an unfortunate turn of events, Mrs. Parkins—”

“Don’t call me that,” said Barbara suddenly. “I’m Barbara Staizer now.”

There was a brief pause, during which June Waddell summed up the situation and allowed herself an unseen smile of self-satisfaction. So it was like
that.
“Mrs. Staizer, my apologies. Peter will likely show up there after school as though he’s been in school all day. It happens. When he arrives home—”

“For your information, Mrs. Waddell, my son has been home since lunchtime. He left school at lunchtime. He has been missing from your care since
lunchtime.
And he will not be returning to your school.” And she hung up.

Endless summer.

They played tag for the longest time. Petey fell exhausted into the heap with the others, all of them out of breath.
I tagged you, Mariette,
Ethan said.

Mariette answered,
I’m too tired.
Lying on her back, she rolled over and tagged Petey’s arm. Her fingers were warm.
You’re it,
she giggled. Petey rolled over and tagged Alan. Alan poked Berk with his toe. They were all it. Everybody was it.

You should bring your mother here,
Mariette said.
She could have fun with us.
She twirled a bit of foxtail above her face, dipping it close to her nose, to tickle it. When she did it to Peter, he felt like sneezing.

She wouldn’t,
he said.

Why not?

Petey felt the grass on his back and stared up at the sky. The sun didn’t hurt his eyes too bad if he squinted. It did eventually and he turned his head to the side, staring off into the distance. Far away, he could see the hill. It was nothing more than a bump on the horizon. It seemed to Petey that they had just climbed it.

Why not?
Mariette repeated the question, and Petey heard it like the first time.

My mom is always sad,
he said.

She’d be happy here.

I don’t think so. I don’t think she can be.
He said it and it was the first time he’d thought it. But he knew instantly that it was true and that he had known it all along. His face screwed up into a frown. He scratched a sweaty, itchy part of his back. The grass itched. It was too hot. He was uncomfortable and fidgeted. Mariette raised herself up on one elbow and tucked the foxtail under Peter’s chin. Her eyes were as blue as the sky, as though Petey were looking right through her eyes, and seeing the sky.

The sky through Mariette’s eyes grew dark and gray.

We don’t have a mama.
Mariette tickled him. He stared at her eyes, thinking something was wrong with the color and then realized it was just the sky, growing cloudy.

Then Ethan stood above him and dropped a baseball onto his tummy. It didn’t hurt. It rolled off him silently onto the sweet grass of the field.

Let’s play ball,
Ethan said.
You pitch.
No teams, just hitting and catching and throwing. Every now and then, Peter looked off into the distance. The hill was farther away every time.

Barbara hummed an old song, now stuck in her head.

And he will not be returning to your school.
She would keep him home with her. They would do something else. Have school at home. She would teach him. They would stay in the house together.

She felt a sort of relief. It was over. All the anxiety about school and bullies and fitting in and fitness programs and trying to squeeze a (fat) square peg into a round hole, and the empty hours between eight-thirty and three-thirty. Over.

She wondered if Petey had heard her on the phone, but all was silent upstairs, the reasons for which she did not explore. He was all right up there. She was sure of it. Everything was going to be all right. Briefly, she stood beside the phone, fighting for a moment. Call the school? Make some sort of statement, and send him back, or just let things go? The receiver was still warm from her hand. The phone itself was indifferent, neither inspiring nor rejecting her. It sat.

Barbara went into the kitchen and got a spoon out of the dish drainer and a pudding from the treat cupboard, for Petey.

She mounted the stairs tiredly. A bath would be nice.

Peaceful.

It was very quiet upstairs. The afternoon sun had lowered in the sky and it streamed in through Petey’s window, flooding across the floor into the bathroom. It was so bright and pretty. The odd smell from the yellow room was generally worse when the upstairs warmed with the heat of the day, but she was used to it; it had become background noise. She hadn’t quite put her finger on it. It smelled of swimming pools and locker rooms. A disinfectant, but more specific than that—and it could hardly be a disinfectant. She was an Ajax girl.

“Peter?” she said, into the still air. He didn’t answer. Barbara poked her head into his bedroom. There was a comic on his rumpled bed, but it had been there all day. She bent at the waist and looked under the bed. Dust bunnies.

The cubbyhole door was open. She stepped inside the room to close it. The sun had rested on the dark varnish all day and the door was warm. The sun glinted off a blemish in the wood and it caught her eye. She looked a little closer, seeing a pattern. A row of words running down the side of the door. She’d never noticed that before. Squinting, she got closer.

The varnish had been laid on thick and the wood gleamed. She had to open the door wider to get the sun off it to see what they said. Years had worn the wood down and it was hard to make out. The stain made it better.

She could read only a couple of them:
Ethan, Marianne? Bert,
maybe. There were three or four others there. Names. Her finger traced the letters of the others, or tried to. They were too faint. The letters were even and well drawn as though carved or chiseled into the wood. Her grandfather had chiseled the family name Staizer into a bench that he kept in the backyard. It looked like that. Strange she had never noticed before. She wondered if Peter had seen them.

“Peter?” she said again. He wasn’t upstairs.

It bothered her and she wasn’t sure why. Cool air seemed to breeze out of the cubbyhole and the inside was as dark as ever, in spite of the light in the room. She could make out the outline of a box of toys, but nothing more. She knew the wood in the bedroom had been salvaged from somewhere—she’d assumed a junkyard or something like that—and it was disarming to think that it was from somewhere less anonymous. She straightened up. She had enough (not) to think about. Giving the room a last glance, she saw nothing that indicated Peter had even come upstairs.