elevator. We both blocked our eyes from the glare, and then it got dark again. I could hardly see.
I heard my father take a deep breath through his nose.
“I’ll take you home in the morning,” he said.
“Okay,” I said.
I eventually fell asleep on a pull-out couch and my father passed out on the front porch of the stilted cabin, sitting in a lawn chair with the Styrofoam cup in his hand. Laura slept alone in her room.
The next day I pretended to feel sick.
I barely spoke to anyone and feigned sleep the entire ride home. My father, now sober and guilt-ridden, tried to explain life to me in the car, to give me some eloquent bit about how love finds you when you’re not expecting it, how it doesn’t bother with age or situation, and how it doesn’t always play fair. He told me repeatedly to take good care of my mom because she was a special woman he would always love, and she deserved the best. He continued to talk even when he thought I was asleep and yet surprisingly little was revealed. Or perhaps I just didn’t listen.
I had my reasons.
Earlier that morning I had overheard him tell Laura that he was just going to drive to Baton Rouge and drop me off and that he’d be back to the camp that evening. I heard him tell her that she’d done great, that I was just an angry teenager, and that they would have some “real fun” upon his return. So I had heard enough, to be honest. I had nothing to say.
When we got home, my father told my mother that something was wrong with me. He said he would call her later that week to check up, but that he had an appointment to get to that afternoon and couldn’t stick around. My mother, we both could tell, had been crying.
“Kathryn,” he told her, “don’t be so dramatic. He might just have a cold or something. I tried talking to him, but he slept the whole way home in the car.”
“Glen,” my mother said, “that’s not what makes him sick.”
My mother looked over at me and, for the first time in my life, I did not recognize her expression.
“You need to see something,” she told him. “You need to see what I found in his room.”
15.
I ’ve imagined this day to death, the day I became a suspect.
In the first version, a child’s version, my mother is a wreck. As soon as I left the house with my father, she cried over a teapot. She cried over her laundry. She took off her fancy clothes and put on pajamas, poring over old photos of my father and me. She thought about us entirely, and wondered why men act the way they do. She still considered me a good boy in this fantasy, the same swaddled infant who once nestled up to her breast in the delivery room, and so she planned out my meals for the upcoming week. She tearfully sliced up that roast so I could have sandwiches the next day. She double-checked to make sure we had the potato chips I liked. Then she walked into my room with a load of freshly folded clothes under her arm and, by total accident, stubbed her toe on a wooden box underneath my bed, with a latch on it that I had mistakenly left unlocked.
In the second version, the one that came to me when I grew up a bit, I see my mother as a complicated person, a woman lonely and in need. In this version she recovered quickly after my departure and suddenly saw her empty house as a palace where she could finallyrule. She poured herself a glass of wine before lunch. She lay on the couch and unbuttoned her blouse. She fell into adult dreams and dialed up her numerous gentleman suitors to say,
I’m here, now, I’m alone, I’m normal for a
change
. And whether they came over or not, whether she took out her frustrations in a way that so many of us would, this is beyond the reach of our business. But after night came, and she was alone again, she stumbled tipsily into my room. She dropped some half-folded laundry on the floor and, exhausted, decided to make a pillow of my black T-shirts and baggy jeans that now smelled of fabric softener. And then, before
I heard my father take a deep breath through his nose.
“I’ll take you home in the morning,” he said.
“Okay,” I said.
I eventually fell asleep on a pull-out couch and my father passed out on the front porch of the stilted cabin, sitting in a lawn chair with the Styrofoam cup in his hand. Laura slept alone in her room.
The next day I pretended to feel sick.
I barely spoke to anyone and feigned sleep the entire ride home. My father, now sober and guilt-ridden, tried to explain life to me in the car, to give me some eloquent bit about how love finds you when you’re not expecting it, how it doesn’t bother with age or situation, and how it doesn’t always play fair. He told me repeatedly to take good care of my mom because she was a special woman he would always love, and she deserved the best. He continued to talk even when he thought I was asleep and yet surprisingly little was revealed. Or perhaps I just didn’t listen.
I had my reasons.
Earlier that morning I had overheard him tell Laura that he was just going to drive to Baton Rouge and drop me off and that he’d be back to the camp that evening. I heard him tell her that she’d done great, that I was just an angry teenager, and that they would have some “real fun” upon his return. So I had heard enough, to be honest. I had nothing to say.
When we got home, my father told my mother that something was wrong with me. He said he would call her later that week to check up, but that he had an appointment to get to that afternoon and couldn’t stick around. My mother, we both could tell, had been crying.
“Kathryn,” he told her, “don’t be so dramatic. He might just have a cold or something. I tried talking to him, but he slept the whole way home in the car.”
“Glen,” my mother said, “that’s not what makes him sick.”
My mother looked over at me and, for the first time in my life, I did not recognize her expression.
“You need to see something,” she told him. “You need to see what I found in his room.”
15.
I ’ve imagined this day to death, the day I became a suspect.
In the first version, a child’s version, my mother is a wreck. As soon as I left the house with my father, she cried over a teapot. She cried over her laundry. She took off her fancy clothes and put on pajamas, poring over old photos of my father and me. She thought about us entirely, and wondered why men act the way they do. She still considered me a good boy in this fantasy, the same swaddled infant who once nestled up to her breast in the delivery room, and so she planned out my meals for the upcoming week. She tearfully sliced up that roast so I could have sandwiches the next day. She double-checked to make sure we had the potato chips I liked. Then she walked into my room with a load of freshly folded clothes under her arm and, by total accident, stubbed her toe on a wooden box underneath my bed, with a latch on it that I had mistakenly left unlocked.
In the second version, the one that came to me when I grew up a bit, I see my mother as a complicated person, a woman lonely and in need. In this version she recovered quickly after my departure and suddenly saw her empty house as a palace where she could finallyrule. She poured herself a glass of wine before lunch. She lay on the couch and unbuttoned her blouse. She fell into adult dreams and dialed up her numerous gentleman suitors to say,
I’m here, now, I’m alone, I’m normal for a
change
. And whether they came over or not, whether she took out her frustrations in a way that so many of us would, this is beyond the reach of our business. But after night came, and she was alone again, she stumbled tipsily into my room. She dropped some half-folded laundry on the floor and, exhausted, decided to make a pillow of my black T-shirts and baggy jeans that now smelled of fabric softener. And then, before
Similar Books
