The Dwelling: A Novel (37 page)

He’s somewhere in the house, anyway.
Maybe in the yard. She put the pudding and the spoon on his dresser where he would see it when he walked in, and left the room, the door to the cubbyhole standing open, the names just visible if you looked, in the sun.

She ran a warm bath. Peaceful.

It was Peter’s favorite.

All nine of them ran up the side of the hill, as fast as they could. At the top, they dropped to the ground and rolled back down, earth, grass, wild field flowers, rushing past them loud in their ears, brush catching and sticking to their hair and clothes. At the bottom when they finally stopped, they were dizzy. They stood up on confused legs and stumbled around until the dizziness was controllable, then did it all again. The last time Peter rolled to a stop, he rested there, lying on his back looking up at the cloudless sky.

George stopped too, where he fell.

Hal banged into Peter and rolled over him. Then there was a mass of them, nine of them including Peter, lying on their backs. For a while all he could hear was breathing.

Do you go to school?
Peter asked them.

Mariette giggled.
It’s summer.

It’s spring,
Peter said.

It’s summer. No school in the summer.
Peter tried to think of what he was supposed to say next, but it was too hard with the sun hot on his front and his eyes closed. Every now and then a breeze, warm and soft, blew over him and it felt a sigh. Like a dream. He tried to remember when he’d come and couldn’t. Thinking felt like slogging through water.

It’s always summer,
Ethan said. They played red rover.

Barbara dropped a bath bead into the warm water, running her hand around the edges to swirl the scent around. She gave the door a push, hearing it close. The pantyhose fell onto the sweater with her panties. She slipped into the tub, heat flooding over her. Sweat formed on her upper lip.

The tub dominated the little bathroom and getting into it gave her a new perspective on the space. She’d only showered until then, the tub having been a source of anxiety. It felt different now. The water so warm and lovely. The scent of lilac drifted above her, filling the room. She pulled the shower curtain halfway around the tub in case Petey needed to come in. The curtain diffused the light and made the air inside the tub steamy and the light soft. She lay back and closed her eyes.

Her breathing became shallow and regular as she relaxed.

I’m getting married.
The pain hit like new, his voice on the phone saying it. The familiar voice that used to say love words to her. It repeated itself in her head like a schoolyard taunt. How could he? She still felt married to him.

If he wants a wife why doesn’t he just marry you again?
What had she told him? She couldn’t remember. In spite of knowing about the reasons for his leaving, Barbara had been, still even after the divorce, entirely unprepared for
I’m getting married.

She wanted to curl up into a little ball. Instead she lay on her back, still, feeling her heart pounding and the sting of tears in her eyes and nose. Her face felt hard like her stomach. She forced herself to breathe deeply. She ran her arms up her sides in a gesture of soothing, then let them drop into the water and float.

She could imagine doing it.

The razor up the arm, from wrist to elbow. It would sting if you did it fast. Hurt more if you did it slowly, if you were afraid. It would hurt more when the water got inside the wound. If you kept your eyes closed, it would hurt less. If you didn’t see it.

It would sting. Then it would be warm. You might feel a rush of heat leaving your body. The force of your own heart—pumping fast because you were afraid—pushing your life out into the water. It would feel hotter than the bath: like when you peed. The heat would be different, not encased in your flesh.

There would be fear. Last-minute regret, maybe. But peace would come before your skin became cold and you got so tired—she thought that was what would happen, you wold fall asleep, feeling peace, the warmth of your own blood lapping over your legs and arms, taking you away.

She could imagine doing it. Her eyes closed and she drifted somewhere between waking and sleep, arms dangling, floating, gently at her sides. She let herself feel the peace. As her face softened and relaxed, she looked like she was smiling.

Mariette wore a crown of wild daisies. She danced.

The boys stood around. Each had a stem of wheatgrass dangling from his mouth. They bounced when they chewed. Petey said it tasted green. After talking about it, they decided that things could taste green. Or red. But not blue.

All of the boys had braided tails of sweetgrass hanging from their back pockets. Berk had lost his. They had played a game of tail-tag with elaborate rules and out-of-bounds. It had taken most of the game to explain the rules. Their time-outs were long and involved. It was a game for summer afternoons.

It did taste green to Peter. He spat out bits of grass every so often, but his lips felt stiff and distant. All his reflexes required thought. It was hot and easy just to sit and stare at the sky or to walk and feel the waves of grass under his hands.

Far off in the distance was the other hill. Sometimes he could see a building. Sometimes he couldn’t. But it was the nature of the place that he always forgot to ask.

This time he almost remembered. When the clouds came.

Ethan, Berk, George, Hal, Jack, Lonnie, Alan, and Mariette looked fretfully up at the sky all together. Clouds advanced over the sun and darkened it.

Everyone grew silent when the clouds came. Ethan stood up when it was dark enough to be menacing rain. Summer disappeared and in its place a grim midwinter evening. The wind picked up.

We have to go,
he said. The others stood. They fell into line, one behind the other, by age, not height. Peter knew Berk was older, and George, who was taller, shifted in behind him.

You have to go home now, Peter,
Ethan said. He was the oldest. More than twelve. He was a beautiful, strapping boy, with an expression that was somber most of the time. He organized the games. Peter wanted to tell him no, that he wanted to stay. That they should come back, but by then they were going. Already.

Don’t go,
Peter said instead. He said it into the wind. They didn’t hear him. They didn’t look back. He called it out again, cupping his hands around his mouth.
Don’t go!

Mariette looked back at him. Her eyes were round, white against her tan. She raised a tiny hand and pulled the daisy crown from her head. She dropped it to the ground. She tried a little smile and a wave to Peter.

Don’t go.
They disappeared quickly, as though every time he blinked they were farther away until they were nearly at the building in the distance.

He shouldn’t follow them.

Let me come.
He tried to call it out. He shouldn’t go there, to the hill. Not sure why, just shouldn’t. Seven blond heads faded beyond the hill, in turn. Just before she fell behind the rise, with the building dark in front of her, Mariette looked back. Her lips moved. She was a great distance away, but Peter heard her in his head.

Make your mom come.

Then they were gone. He stood up on tiptoe, straining to see where they went. He thought he could see blond heads by the building. And in an instant he knew that the building was the Barn.

The Barn shifted and changed in his view, moving farther away, then appearing again as it had. He couldn’t see far enough over the hill. He couldn’t see the children.

On his toes, he squinted and strained, shifting this way and that to keep his balance. He would get a tantalizing look and then it would fade.

The wind grew fierce, the sky black with huge thunderclouds. Dust from the fields blew over his face and he squeezed his eyes shut against it. It scraped his skin and he turned his back. The wind whipped through his clothes and the first
BOOM!
crash of thunder made him scream and that was when he wanted out. He clamped his hands to his ears just as another
BOOM!
shook his body, and then the air he sucked into his lungs in great heaves of panic and fear was different; stuffy and airless.

Petey was in his room. He was
Back.

The little door to the cupboard was closed, latched. Without wondering how that could be, Petey reached out from his place on the floor and opened it wide.

The cubbyhole’s inside door stared at him, what he wanted to see, with its scroll of names at just about eye level and much more readable than they had seemed before. The end of Lonnie was cut off, so that it looked like “Lonn.” The edges of the first letters on all the names except Jack’s had been rubbed off—maybe by a hundred fingers opening and shutting the door.

It made Petey happy to see the names.

The floor in front of the cubbyhole was cold and he got up. He thought he could smell flower stems crushed on his fingers. The green juice of the long stems of wheatgrass was still in his mouth.

Wasn’t it?

He sat down on his bed. Blinking, he tried to decide what was real. He leaned one hand on the bed. Felt it give. Felt the smooth texture of the sheets under his hand. Sun, like in the field, poured in through his window, but it was low.

He latched the cubbyhole door. He was tired (from playing?). His bed was rumpled. There was a confused moment of desperation when he wasn’t sure, couldn’t tell, didn’t dare to decide one way or the other, each conclusion having its own horrible, bad ends
(But was I? Could I really have been? Gone there? Did I? Pleasepleaseplease let there be a there).

He cocked an ear and listened to the house.

Far away, a sound that might have been thunder.

“Mom?” he said, down the stairs. He’d found the pudding and eaten it. He didn’t know what time it was. It seemed late. The house was quiet.

Behind him, the bathroom door opened. “I’m here, honey,” his mom said. She was pink and sweaty in a robe. From behind her, smoky steam billowed and settled with the motion of the door opening and closing. Her hair was dry, but pushed back over her forehead.

“Oh,” he said. “What time is it?” They met eyes. Met secrets. Both frowned, sizing up. Barbara smiled, a long, loving smile that was sleepy and happy at the same time. Petey grinned back.

“I don’t know. Are you hungry?”

“I guess.”

Barbara swayed into her room to get dressed. From the top of the stairs Petey listened to drawers open and close lazily and then he went down.

She had fallen asleep in the tub. According to the clock on the dresser it was after six. Was that possible?

Three hours? She shook her head, and felt the urge to stretch, not from stiffness, which she should have felt if she had indeed lain in the tub for three hours, but because she felt languid and like a cat after a nap.

The water was still warm when she’d come out. There were snatches of alarm at such behavior, it didn’t seem right to sleep, unknowingly, for three hours! A child wandering around the empty house, alone. She tried to work up a head of steam over it, but found she just couldn’t. She felt rested.

And she’d had the loveliest dream.

By the time they had dinner, the old sitcoms were on—laughing shows, as Petey called them—and Barbara decided they could eat in front of the TV. She’d asked Peter where he’d been. He told her he’d been outside, playing. He said it very quietly, very quickly, and she didn’t believe him.

They had beans and wieners. Petey poured ketchup over his.

On the television, fifties’ Dad comes home from work and says something terribly clever. The little boy tells a lie and runs upstairs.

“Spreading your sunshine,” Mom says, walking into the living room with a knowing, motherlike expression that throws the audience into gales of hysterical laughter.

She tried to watch. The beans were soggy in her mouth and she couldn’t eat them. She waited for the phone to ring. For Dennis to call. The warm, languid feeling that she’d carried for so long after her soak was all but used up. Anxiety was a breathing thing, waiting just below the surface, waiting for the phone.

The show was in black and white. Television took the high road every time. The fifties, if you went by television, seemed so innocent and bereft of complication. It was all long-finned cars, and waitresses on roller skates and beehive hairdos.

No one had affairs, got pregnant in high school, took drugs or came home drunk. It was a golden time. Wise fathers and homey mothers, children who sparkled and said amusing things. It hadn’t really been. Fathers in the fifties probably walked out on their wives and children, too; it just didn’t fit the sitcom format.

Music up. Mother sits crying at the kitchen table. Boy, eight, bounds in at the back door, heading for refrigerator. Sees mother crying.
What is it, Mother?

Oh dear, your father’s left us. He has another woman.

Break to commercial for razor blades and rope.

Petey said suddenly, into her thoughts (guilty), “What are dreams for?”

She started and the laugh track sounded. “What kind of dreams?” she said carefully. “Like daydreams?”

“When you go to sleep and dream,” he said matter-of-factly.

“I’m not sure. Are you having bad dreams?”

“No,” he said, almost fiercely. “I
like
my dreams.”

And the phone rang. Barbara’s heart clenched. “You go ahead, honey. I think it’s your dad.” It rang three more times while Petey looked at her for reaction and got up and answered.

Of course, she listened.

Petey’s end was all yups and nopes. And an
okay.
There had been one fake-enthusiastic
oh, yeah?
He must have said there was a surprise. The call did not go on long.

“He’s coming to get me Friday,” Petey said. He sat on the couch beside his mom. He leaned into her and she put her arms around him, resting her chin on his head. Like they used to.