Labor Day by Joyce Maynard Page B

up, Frank slipped up the stairs, as they had planned he would. As far as Evelyn was concerned, it had been just the three of us here. Me and my mother, and her son.
    She had stepped into the living room now. Her father was stabilized, she said. Still in intensive care, but no longer critical. How can I ever repay you, Adele? she said.
    I knew my mother just wanted them to go, but Evelyn had been driving for two hours. You look like you could use a cold glass of water, my mother told her.
    She had just come back with the water when the news came on. An update. Energy consumption during the day’s heat wave had left the area in the danger zone for major power outages, and there was still the rest of a long hot holiday weekend ahead of us.
    We know it’s hot out there, folks, the newscaster was saying, but our friends at Public Service are asking us all to turn off those air conditioners whenever possible. If the heat’s getting to you, consider a cold shower.
    In other news, he said, police in the tristate area continue their search for the prisoner at large in the region since Wednesday.
    The photograph of Frank flashed on. Up until this moment, Barry had seemed only marginally aware of his surroundings, but as the image of Frank filled the screen, he began to wave his arms and call out, as if greeting an old friend. He was making noises, slapping his head, slapping the television.
    In the past, I knew, one of Evelyn’s themes in her conversations with my mother had to do with how people were always underestimating her son’s intelligence and comprehension of what was going on. For a while there, she had campaigned to get him mainstreamed into a regular classroom at school. But now, as Barry yelped and waved, she seemed barely to notice his agitation and excitement—the way he had started flailing his arms, more furiously than normal, with his shoeless feet kicking air. His eyes, that normally seemed not to focus, were locked on the television screen.
    Time to get you home, son, his mother said, sounding weary.
    Together, the three of us—Evelyn, my mother, and me—backed the wheelchair through the open door of our house—out into the darkness—and lowered it onto the walk. We watched as Barry’s mother slid the chair onto the ramp and up into the back of her van and buckled him into place. As the rear doors closed, I could see his face. He was still calling out, the same one syllable, the first word I had ever heard him utter that I understood.
    Over and over, he was saying it, garbled but intelligible. Frank.
     
    T HAT NIGHT AGAIN , I HEARD THEM . They had to have known the sound would carry through the wall between our rooms. It was as if they didn’t care anymore who knew or what anybody thought about it, including me. They were in their own place now, and it was like a whole other country, a whole other planet.
    It went on for a long time, their lovemaking. Back then I didn’t use that word for it—not that word or any other. It was nothing I’d known in my own experience or anyone else’s either. Nothing I encountered on those rare times I slept at my father’s house, though he shared a bed with Marjorie. Nothing I could imagine happening, in any of the other houses on our street, and nothing like any scenes they showed on television either—those times Magnum P.I. leaned in to kiss that week’s beautiful woman, or some pair of guest stars nuzzled in the moonlight on The Love Boat .
    The way I imagined what went on between my mother and Frank on the other side of the wall, though I tried not to, they were like two people shipwrecked on an island so far away from anyplace no one would ever find them, with nothing to hold on to but each other’s skin, each other’s bodies. Maybe not even an island, just a life raft in the middle of the ocean, and even that was falling apart.
    Sometimes the headboard banged against the wall for whole minutes at a time, as regular and steady as the sound of Joe’s wheel