A Town of Empty Rooms (6 page)

Dan laughed; then he saw the question was serious. “No. New York. Dan Shine,” said Dan, as they shook hands. Forrest's grip was both papery and intent.

“Yankees,” he said, a little grimly.

“Well,” said Dan.

“I know where you live.”

“Excuse me?”

“We're neighbors. You live at 108 Maple Drive. I'm 104. Right next door!”

Dan looked more closely at the man. He had seen someone resembling him puttering around the front yard.

“I'm here working at the Chamber of Commerce,” said Dan. “We're putting Waring on the map — ”

Dan's career was doing public relations for cities that no one visited, trumpeting the beauties of forgotten lakes, unused hiking trails, empty museums, lonely battlegrounds. Prudrock, Virginia; Shell Run, Georgia; Tall Palms, Florida. They were the towns on the way to the more notable ones — Orlando, Myrtle Beach, Richmond, Atlanta — that
wanted a cut of the tourist business, and they hammered on Dan Shine's door.

Waring was like the other overlooked towns he had promoted, and he found them all a little awkward and touching. They all wanted to be visited. They all wanted to be part of people's vacation maps. There was a part of him that loved the yearning in the towns, even the abject desire for attention; the Chamber of Commerce members, the mayors, would shake hands with him and plead for help, and, over and over, he could give it.

“We are already on the map,” said Forrest. He gazed at Dan. “So, what brings you to our headquarters this morning?”

“Well,” said Dan, wondering himself. “You know, couldn't wait any longer — you know. I, uh, missed the old troop — ”

“He old enough for Cubs? Scouts?”

“Who?”

“Your boy.”

“Right,” said Dan, reddening. Zeb. “Five.”

“Old enough,” said Forrest. His eyes gleamed; he was a recruiter.

“Of course,” said Dan, trying to conceal the fact that he did not know what a Cub was.
He
wanted to wear the uniform; that was what he felt he shared with Forrest.

Forrest's wife was donning a blue vest that said
Welcome to Walmart. May I Help You?
“I'll be back at seven,” she said, gloomily.

“Have a great time!” said Forrest. He watched her leave. “Hard worker,” he said to Dan. “Best Walmart greeter there is.” He paused. “A lot to do to make this pack the best ever. We're all volunteers here. Work for the good of our boys and our country — ”

“I could help,” said Dan, eagerly.

Forrest blinked. “Sure,” he said. “Provide guidance for our young boys. Lead groups in crafts. Just put in an application. Easy. Just pass the background check and you're in.” He paused. “Gotta check out you New Yorkers!” He laughed and slapped Dan on the arm.

“Right,” said Dan, glad it was not Serena applying. He took the form from Forrest.

“Your son will never forgive you if you don't,” said Forrest. “I'll be watching you.”

Dan walked through the aisles, then back into the heavy summer air. He felt he had fooled the man, this neighbor; suddenly he was material to be a troop leader. It made him feel giddy, that he had tricked him, because really Dan wanted to be this — a man who could turn into a boy, a man who could belong to the Boy Scouts of America. Any man could belong. It sounded simple and beautiful.

Chapter Four

ZEB DID NOT WANT TO go to school. One week after school started, his reasons were sudden and numerous. He had a headache, then he said he was too tired, then he said his stomach hurt. In the morning, they had to lift him out of bed, where he feigned limpness, and they had to carry him to the breakfast table. He kept his eyes shut as they dressed him, like a rajah or a baby. It was as though each morning over breakfast Zeb was rehearsing all the sadness he would feel in his life.

They all sat, worried, frightened, around the table as he wept. Serena pulled him onto her lap, and they tried, in pained voices, to come up with possible reasons for his anguish. Perhaps it was a mean friend. Did a teacher berate him? Pull a colored stick with his name on it from his file? Did someone steal his lunch? Trip him in the hallway? The morning discussion became a litany of all the ways they themselves had been maligned as children, and Zeb listened with interest, collecting ideas. No. No. No.

Dan sat at the kitchen table and held his son's hand. He had taught himself to walk into a room and say, “Dan Shine. Pleasure to meet you.” He had learned how to look into the pupils of his clients' eyes, how to grip their hands a beat longer than they held his, how to clap men on the shoulder, how to touch women lightly on the lower back, to convince them; he had learned how to nod, absently, when clients said something grandiose or laughable, nod just enough so they felt taken seriously. He had walked into the Chamber of Commerce in Waring and burst out, “Let's get this town on the map!” and watched their faces light up.

He had wanted Zeb and Rachel to have no hesitation. He wanted them to know — intuitively, easily — everything he had not known. He
had spent too many years watching, envying, trying to catch up. This was something he believed the moment he held Zeb — his tiny, damp, rubbery body — in his palms; he wanted his children to have an easier time than he had.

When Zeb was a baby, when he woke up screaming, Dan sometimes walked him around in the middle of the night, the baby's small, hard head pressed against his throat. Dan was surprised by the monumental burning in his chest.
Please feel this,
he thought; he would love Zeb so thoroughly, so much more than he himself had been loved, that his son would have no fear.

Now Dan could try to do what he did day in and day out; he would mount a campaign.

“You'll have a great day!” Dan announced. “Remember yesterday? Remember Grayson? He gave you his brownie at lunch?”

“No.”

“You'll play a great game of tag.”

“I'm not going.”

“You'll find a great new book. You'll learn to read!”

“No.”

Zeb clung with fortitude to his misery; Dan backed away. Serena carried Zeb into the car and strapped him in. Rachel would sometimes shriek with an unfortunate sympathy, and then Serena was rushing up the grass with two children screaming, trying to walk her son into the next stage of his life. The parents marched their children across the gray, trampled grass to deposit them into the flimsy classroom trailer. Zeb was the only one who screamed. The other children filed inside, and the other parents looked at Zeb, bemused and grateful for their own luck. The teacher grabbed Zeb's hand and pulled him in, as though rescuing him from a kidnapper. “Bye!” Miss Donna said brightly. “Have a good day!”

Serena stood outside the classroom, in the parking lot, listening to the screams. The police car was still there, protecting the school against vague and numerous insurgents: the parents' inevitable disappointment in their children, the children's balking at their loss of freedom, the teachers' frustration at their meager pay. The screams subsided a
few minutes after she left. She stood, waiting for them to begin again, but they did not. The policeman was watching her.

At the end of school, she stood on the sidewalk, waiting for Zeb to emerge. He skipped out, now calm, inhabited by atstonishing new desires. “I want a new pack of YuGiOh cards,” he said, his small face intent. “I want Obelisk the Tormentor.”

 

 

 

ONE NIGHT AS THE CHILDREN slept, Dan watched Serena fold laundry in the living room. Dan picked up a pair of socks and began to roll them. He looked at her, and the tension he felt in his jaw now, most of the time, subsided for a moment; he wanted to know what was wrong with Zeb.

“What is happening with Zeb?” he said.

He looked adrift, standing there, wondering about their son. The silence between Serena and Dan had been so weighted and wounding, the fact he was asking for an answer, to anything, made her look up.

“Maybe it's something at the school,” she said, carefully. “Maybe his classmates — ”

“Maybe his teacher?” he asked. “What's her name — ”

“Miss Donna. The CEO of kindergarten.”

He laughed. She stopped folding and listened; he had not laughed at anything she'd said in a while.

“Is it her?” he said. “Is she too hard on her product line?” He was restless, folding up the small shirts and tossing them on the sofa. “What do you think? Who do you think is upsetting him?”

They were both afraid. The heater thunked, alarmingly; they stood in this flimsy house that held the odor of dirt; the low-echoing sound reminded her where they were. It felt like nowhere. She wanted to go to him and touch his cheek, the hard, clear slope of it; she wanted him to reach forward and touch her arm, softly, the way he used to, to feel his hand slip gently beneath her shirt. He looked so frightened pacing the room, and she could hear some crumbling in his voice. There was something pure in the knowledge that here was the only other person
in the world who bore the same fear that you did about your child. They had shared other things — the idea that the other person said things that seemed infinitely smart and important, the sensation of being asleep together, flesh against flesh, over years, the shudder of sex, the sounds they made into each other's skin during orgasm, the odd understanding that all these pots and pans and utensils were theirs, the perception, over the last decade, of the shift and startling fading of youth, and then this, this emotion that began five years ago. The moment Zeb was born, they were united in love for him but also in this profound and utter fear.

“I wish I knew,” she said.

He sat on the couch; she sat next to him. She could sense his restlessness in the way he was tapping his foot, and she put a hand on his leg, gently.

She remembered the day that they had brought Zeb home from the hospital. They had sat in their living room, this unbelievably small, pink person wrapped in a blanket, in her arms, and after the relatives and friends had brought their casseroles and left, when there was finally silence, they remained seated and looked at their son. They were alone, the three of them. Suddenly she was aware of the sound of the city roaring below them, the whine of a wet, gray April New York City morning, the sounds of people going to work, impassive through birth and death. Sitting in this small room with this tiny being, she felt, acutely, the sense that they had all been thrown there, carelessly, that the continents and the oceans clung to the earth by the most fragile gravity, that they could grip this child tightly and he could still fall through their arms. She understood, more fully, her father's fear of what could happen to her. She stared at the boy and she wanted to surround him, and she saw the way Dan's large hand set the blanket around the child's face, the way his hand trembled. She loved him for his helplessness, for the way he, too, was now a prisoner.

She felt him pause for a moment when she put her hand on his leg. They sat for a moment, like this, as though they were testing it. Maybe now they could move on from the standoff between them. Dan looked up at her for a moment, and, as though her face was too bright, like the sun, he jumped up and started walking around the room. They had
eight hours before the shrieking began again. She knew that walk, its briskness; he wanted to fix this. Now.

“It's not the teacher. Not the students. Maybe it's something else.”

“Like what?”

“What do you say to him?”

They had not begun accusing each other when Zeb was first born; that happened over time, when the endless sleeplessness made their brains feel like cotton, when the children, inexplicably, flew into demonic rages in supermarkets, when she counted to three and no one had any desire to do what she asked, when it became clear they were, as parents, as helpless and sometimes ineffectual as castaways thrown into an ocean on a raft. Someone had to have gotten them into this mess. You. How could happiness feel this bad?

It began then, the occasional moment of blame, the desire to squeeze out of the chaos and find this — an escape. But now she saw something new in his eyes: desperation.

“I tell him, ‘Go inside.'”

“What about saying, ‘Kindergarten will be fun! You'll be the star!'”

“Like that will make it happen?” she asked.

They wanted their child to walk into school, happy, even carefree, the way other people's children seemed to be — how did the other parents engineer it? He rubbed his hands together the way he did when he was about to make a presentation.

“But why do other kids just walk in?” he asked.

“Maybe they've lived here longer. He's just been here a month.”

“Maybe you're saying something that's scaring him,” he said.

Something hardened in her. “Me? Why does it have to be me?”

“It has to be something,” he said, folding a child's pair of jeans, as if that gesture would reveal some innocence.

“Well, keep thinking,” she said. She walked to the other side of the room, annoyed.

 

 

SHE REMEMBERED THAT, AT THE beginning, he had seemed devoid of fear. The first time she and Dan walked down the street, she felt like she wanted to capture him, like a butterfly. The longing became
wide inside her, like a net. It buoyed her up so she felt like her feet were light on the sidewalk. He walked, but what she loved about him, what she wanted to absorb, was his eagerness, which he had manufactured, somehow, to reside in every part of himself — his large, slender hands, which reached up to gesture through the air when he made a point, which reached forward, gently, to tuck a strand of her hair behind her ear. She saw it in the way he rushed into a restaurant and moved them three times until he had found the right seat. She saw it in the way he pressed the waiter for the best year for the Cabernet. She saw it in the way he took her hand later, the way he leaned in and kissed her. Early on, he seemed to believe their life together was determined; it was a certainty that startled her.