A Good and Happy Child (35 page)

I found, almost by magic, that as I sat listening to Kurt, all the noise in my head had indeed ceased.

“Okay.” I nodded.

“Okay?” he repeated, louder now, jolly.

“Okay.”

We exchanged a smile.

He heaved himself to his feet, groaning. “All right, now clean this place up, it’s a mess,” he joshed me. “What’re all these boxes doing here, anyway? Somebody movin’ in?” He winked.

r r r

That night, dinner dragged. My mother, seemingly exhausted from her anxiety and our fight, did not cook. Kurt warmed up frozen pizzas. My mother did not touch hers, but allowed Kurt to refill her glass of red wine many times. I ate my pizza mechanically, tip to crust, and just as mechanically reached for more. Kurt seemed to be watching us.
266

J u s t i n E v a n s

“Your ghost,” he said, in the midst of a silence. I raised my head from my plate. “Your ghost might actually help me,” he said. My mother looked at him in disbelief.

“I was telling George today how much I like having you around.”

Kurt placed his hand on her arm. “Might be nice to
keep
having you around.”

My mother said nothing. Clearly, Kurt was pleased with himself for some reason and wanted to get something off his chest, no matter what the emotional climate.

“Thing is, I’ve been offered a job in Cincinnati,” he said. My mother lit up. “The one . . .?”

He nodded. “They met, and exceeded, my salary requirements.”

He grinned. “And, I gotta tell you . . . I’m not kidding . . . my
first
thought
was: I can’t do this without Joan, and George.”

“Kurt . . .”

He raised a hand to silence her. “Now I thought to myself: I can ask Joan to come. But if I ask her
before
I accept, she’ll feel responsible for whatever decision I make. So I got crafty. Decided to keep the company dangling till I got Miss Joan in my clutches. My good friend the ghost helped me there. Because look who’s here in my house?”

He made a blinking expression, as if he’d just woken to find us at his table. My mother and I managed a laugh.

“Meanwhile the company thinks I’m playing hard to get. So what do they do?” He paused for effect. “They up my offer fifty percent.”

“Fifty percent!” exclaimed my mother.

“That’s what I said,” he laughed. “So now it’s an easy call for everybody. Right? I accept. Got plenty of moolah to go around. And I swoop in for the kill with you all.” He grinned. “Joan. George. I’m going to Cincinnati. I want you to come with me.” He pounded his meaty palm on the table. It made a startling bang, rattling the silverware. “Who’s onboard?”

“Kurt,” my mother said, shaking her head. “You’re crazy.”

a g o o d a n d h a p p y c h i l d

267

“Did I mention the signing bonus, the moving expenses? Enough for a down payment on a big place in Cincinnati. Plenty big for three. And now,” he said, “with the ghost keeping you out of Piggott Street; George having some troubles . . . I figure it’s a way to get everyone excited about moving.” Then he whispered coaxingly to my mother:

“Plenty of schools there with women professors, Joan. Not just German 101, either. I checked.”

My mother rolled her eyes. “You checked?”

“I checked something else, too.” His face grew serious. He rubbed his finger on the tabletop. My mother and I waited, puzzled. “A minor who’s been involuntarily committed to psychiatric treatment in one state and moves to a different state . . . will not have his status follow him. Not transferable,” he said quietly. “Never, under no circumstances. There’s no federal law. That minor would have to repeat his actions in the new state and get a new evaluation to see if they fit that state’s criteria.” He lifted his eyes. “Understand me, guys?”

My mother and I looked at each other. I felt a thrill rise in me: it shook off every drop of misery that clung to me. I was happy. My mother was happy. I’d forgotten what it felt like. Glee and surprise and fancy all at once brightened our faces. We looked at each other, at Kurt, at each other again, unable to pick which question to ask first, which feeling to give vent to.

“So?” he said. “You coming?”

And suddenly it all came out at once, the yeses, the thank-yous, the thousand questions: have you been there, what is it like, where will we live, when are you going. This last Kurt corrected.

“When are
we
going,” he said. “Listen. I wouldn’t have done this if it weren’t for you. And I don’t mean I did it
for
you, or
because
of you, or as a favor, somehow.”

“Then why?” said my mother playfully.

No more Forest Glen, I thought with growing delight, no more miserable house, no more demon, no more slamming and splintering shower door . . .

“I just think,” said Kurt, “we need to get the hell out of here.”

268

J u s t i n E v a n s

•

•

•

Mom let me stay up late, to celebrate, so it was after ten when she came to my room to observe our new bedtime ritual, the pre-teeth-brushingpill-taking.

“Are you excited?” she asked me, when we were finished. I had become so adept at cheeking I could even hold a conversation with the pill wedged in my gums.

“Yes.”

“Good. Me, too.” She paused. “It’s good to have something good happen.”

“It’s like Kurt said.” I smiled. “Maybe the ghost helped us.”

“Maybe,” said my mother, with effort.

I thought for a moment. “Does Kurt like me?”

“Of course!” she exclaimed. “Kurt adores you. Why do you even ask?”

“It seems like a big step to have a . . . ,” I hesitated, “a kid move in with you, too.”

“Kurt’s a grown man, who can make decisions for himself,” my mother replied. “I think he’s the kind of person, who, once he makes up his mind, doesn’t change it. That’s one of the things I like about him.”

I nodded, satisfied. “That’s one of the things I like about him, too.”

Once alone, I looked for a hiding place for the pill. I settled on the top side of my sock and underwear drawer—the pill stuck to the wood nicely. Then I undressed and tried tossing my balled-up socks into the cardboard boxes. I missed the first try. Hit the second. I retrieved the sock-ball, and stood back to “shoot” again, when the reality struck me: we were moving. I would never live in Preston again. I went to the box, the one containing Mom’s office stuff, and gingerly pulled out the picture frames. My mother in her doctoral gowns. My father, bundled in a winter a g o o d a n d h a p p y c h i l d

269

coat and wearing Watergate-era sideburns, carrying me as a baby. A portrait of my mother from decades ago: a black dress, white pearls, a broad smile. No marriage, no child, no worry lines. I started to dig for more photos, hoping selfishly to find more of myself, and to spur a nice nostalgia session.

And then I saw it. The ripped fold of an airmail envelope, like a lick of blue flame.

My mother’s words echoed in my mind:
I think he went away
because of me.
What did she mean? I remembered the letter she’d read that day, in tears. Could this be it? If so, could I find out the truth?

I tugged the remaining picture frames from the box . . . I dug deeper, searching for the slip of blue I was sure I’d seen . . . found bills, payments . . . and only one blue airmail envelope, addressed in my father’s spidery writing. It seemed thin, light. I opened it—no pages inside. None of the crinkly thin paper that stuffed his other missives to me and to my mother. I deflated. My mother must have taken this one by accident. Indeed, a card seemed to have fallen inside the blue envelope. I shook it out. A single, oversized, cream-colored stationery card, with some boyish, handwritten letters in black ink. Not my father’s writing. I tossed it aside and searched the rest of the box. I found nothing. I emptied it to the corners, placing the contents to one side, like an archaeologist excavating a site. No more airmail envelopes. No more personal correspondence. No hidden secrets.

Discouraged, I placed the objects back into the box, one at a time, until I reached the airmail envelope once again. I searched it for any useful hints. The post date—June. The first few weeks of his trip. Why would my mother choose this envelope to bring with her from the house? Nervous about upsetting the order of the box in any way, I reached for the cream-colored card to place back inside. The card was crinkled, battered. There were brown and green fingerprint smudges on its sides—odd, since its thick stock, embossing, and fountain-pen script gave it an elegant air.

To go with your beautiful blue eyes,
it said.
Happy Birthday.
270

J u s t i n E v a n s

Had my father sent this to my mother? She did have blue eyes. But how could he, since it was not his writing? I held the card another moment. Who had written it, then? I cocked my head, looked to the ceiling for an answer. Three letters under my fingertips, in blocky Deco capitals, raised from the paper: K M A. Kurt Moore. I had scarcely known his last name until seeing it on the mailbox when we arrived. My mind puzzled over this again and again, until it grew dizzy and seemed to drift off on its own, leaving me slumped against the door in the tiny room while some other, subterranean part of me—the wiser part, wearing an eyeshade and willing to slave over a handful of contradictory clues—did the work. N o t e b o o k 1 8

The Hiding Place

In Kurt’s guest room, my mother stood over the chest of drawers, which was now stuffed with my underwear, pj’s, and jeans. The top sock drawer was pulled open; her left hand held two or three balled-up pairs of socks: she held her right open as if cradling a baby bird. My heart dropped.

“George,” she said slowly. “Come here please.”

r r r

While Kurt traveled to Cincinnati to meet his new “team” and look at houses (
in Covington, Kentucky, just across the river,
he said;
we can still
be southerners
), my mother and I remained in his house by the James River. No one wanted to return to our place on Piggott Street.

“Probably nothing would happen,” Kurt had said.

“Probably not,” agreed my mother.

“You’re not going back there,” Kurt dared her.

“Not until I run out of blouses.”

“Washing machine’s downstairs,” Kurt said. “Leggett’s is open late.”

This seemed to satisfy everyone. Major decisions appeared to have been made offstage: my mother and Kurt shared a bedroom; they
271

272

J u s t i n E v a n s

shopped together; my mother pored over Cincinnati real estate listings in a newspaper from the public library while Kurt expostulated on economic factors affecting interest rates for mortgages; and yet the issue of marriage never arose, nor, for that matter, did the fact that my own father had died only months prior. My mother, liberated from my father’s old-fashioned mores, seemed to ease quickly into the seventies-flavored ethics of the time. Kurt was a new world for her, far removed from the one she and my father had circumscribed, where command over the great ideas, and wit, were sufficient to define and fulfill any person; and where deviation from these virtues—to show a lack of seriousness, or ignorance—was to deserve contempt. Kurt’s bookshelves contained thick volumes on art and architecture, and a whole shelf of broken-spined classics. But he also liked fishing. He listened to bluegrass. He read—actually read—the stock tables in the
Washington Post.
He liked television and the homestyle food he could find in bar and grill joints in the county, and he was friends with his garage mechanic. His house—modern, airy, luxurious—reflected what I later learned to be the virtues of the upper class, the nonscholarly affluent: an expectation of quality, pleasure,
fun.
On the one hand, the wine cellar; on the other, the trippy Peter Max poster my father would have winced at. And if Kurt’s house defined his ethic, my mother and I were mighty glad to be in it. As soon as Kurt pulled out of the driveway for his flight to Cincinnati, we began to play around like two teenagers left alone in a swank hotel. Mom raided the wine cellar (a green bottle of Riesling chilled at fifty-four degrees;
cellar temperature,
she said), and I sat in front of the giant television set with
a remote control
(this was cool in 1982), flipping between a football game and a kung fu movie. I padded around, feeling the clean, new wood under my feet, smelling the mildew-less carpets and furniture and pillows, and flicking light switches—ones not linked to cruddy overhead lights or antique standing lamps with yellowing shades, but lights with dimmers, museum-type lights, track lighting. Cozy, delighted, we watched the intermittent snowfall. I did homework at the kitchen bar. Mom a g o o d a n d h a p p y c h i l d

273

read from a tourist guidebook about Cincinnati. From her hungry flipping of pages, you’d think it was Tuscany. I had just pulled on my pajamas when Mom knocked at the bedroom door carrying a load of laundry.

“Mind if I put these away?”

“Nope.” I crawled into bed—clean sheets—and opened a new fantasy paperback with a Tolkienish cover and illustrations. Mom loaded my pants drawer. Then my shirts. So full of contentment was I that I didn’t realize what was happening. When she reached my sock drawer, she stopped.

“What’s this?” she asked.

“What’s what?”

“This.” She poked at something in her palm.

“George, come here please.”

I crossed to her. In an instant all my equilibrium vanished. I knew what she held in her palm.

“Can you tell me what these are?”

“No.”

“George.”

I hesitated. Then, sulky, trapped: “They’re my pills.”

“Can you tell me why they’re in with your socks?”

“No.”

My mother waited.

The fact was, in the new environment, I was far from perfecting my new cheeking-and-hiding methods. After I affixed them to the top of my drawer, the tablets must have dried, and after a day or two, fallen onto my socks.

“I don’t like taking them,” I protested. “I told you. I’m like the walking dead.”