Chinese Handcuffs (14 page)

Dillon walked into the kitchen, where his dad sat reading the paper over breakfast. Caulder Hemingway looked up and smiled, sliding the sports section to Dillon's usual spot at the table, and nodded toward the sink counter, where an open package of granola and a carton of milk stood waiting. “Didn't get to the dishes,” his father said. “Have to rinse out a bowl for yourself.”

“Need to get us a domestic,” Dillon said back, shoving a plastic bowl under running water in a semivaliant attempt to wash out the SuperBond-like remains of
yesterday's
granola. He chiseled small bits loose with the handle of a spoon, semiseriously rinsed the bowl again, and filled it to the edges. “Surface tension,” he said, carrying it carefully to the table so as not to break the scientific seal restraining the milk from overflow.
“We learned about it in fourth grade. Who says your educational tax dollars are going to waste?”

Caulder Hemingway smiled and shook his head slowly, returning to the front page.

Dillon ate a couple of bites of the granola, then laid his spoon carefully down beside the bowl. “Dad,” he said.

“Hmmm?”

“How come we never talk about Preston?”

Caulder stared at him over the top of the paper, taken somewhat by surprise but considering the question.

“Or Mom. And Christy.”

“I don't know why you don't talk about them,” Caulder said, folding the newspaper in front of him. “I don't talk about them because I don't know what to say.”

Dillon nodded slowly. “Yeah. Me, too.”

“Do you want to talk about them?”

Dillon nodded again. “Yeah, I think I do.”

His dad leaned forward, resting on his elbows. “Where do you want to start?”

“I'm not sure. It just seems like three years ago we were a family of five and then three and now two, and nobody ever said anything about how it happened. Or how anybody feels about it. Mom's same as you. When
I go over there, she acts like she's always lived there. Christy and I are the only ones who ever talk about it.”

“What do you say?”

“Well, she just wonders what happened, and I make up things to tell her.”

Caulder smiled. “To tell you the truth, son, I'm a little like Christy. Most of the time I wonder what happened, too.”

Dillon merely watched his dad, wishing he were as clear about where he wanted the conversation to go as he had been last night lying in bed thinking about it.

“Much as I hate to say it,” Caulder went on, “this family thing kind of took me by surprise. I mean from the beginning. I always thought if I put food on the table, kept a roof over our heads, didn't lose my temper too often, and set up a few family vacations, that I had the father part of this show pretty well covered.”

“You did a lot more than that, Dad,” Dillon said. “Look at all the things we learned from you.” Dillon flashed back to nights in the distant past—back before grade school—lying out in the backyard under the stars, listening to his dad talk about time and space in a way he barely understood but utterly treasured, how the light that reached our eyes was really from long ago and that we could actually see back into the past by merely gazing
upward on a starry night. When Dillon had pressed him, Caulder would say, “Just remember things aren't always as they appear,” and let it go at that.

“Look at the things
you
learned from me,” Caulder said. “I didn't do as well by your brother. Or Christy.” Dillon's father closed his eyes and shook his head slowly. “He was the first, and I thought I had to do everything right, you know, make no mistakes with discipline and all that, and me just out of the service. Preston might just as well have been born into basic training.” He smiled a tired smile. “I left the humor out. If I had it to do over again, I'd do a lot of things different.”

“Like what?”

“Like paying attention. Like going with my instincts, tending to your mother.” He laughed a short laugh. “She used to say I didn't care. She'd get all quiet, and I'd never ask what was wrong. She thought it was because I was ‘insensitive,' as she put it, but really it was because I was scared there
was
something wrong. God knows I wouldn't have known how to fix it.”

“It must be tough at first,” Dillon said, “I mean, starting a family and everything.”

Caulder laughed. “You wouldn't believe it, my boy. I swear to God I must have thought people were like Disney animals. I used to watch those wilderness
pictures about bears and lions and prairie dogs and the like, and those animals just had their babies and fed 'em for a while and whopped 'em alongside the head when they screwed up, and the babies grew up just fine—except for the ones that got eaten. I thought it was just natural to know how to be a dad and a mate.” He looked around the empty kitchen. “I was wrong. The thing, apart from opposing thumbs, that separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom is common sense. They got it; we don't.”

Dillon was moved that his father would talk with him like this. It was an experience he'd not had before—one he'd longed for, more than he had known.

“You know, Dad,” he said after a few seconds of considering the possibilities of sending Stacy to the zoo for parenting classes, “we can still be a family, you and me. It's not too late.”

Caulder's eyes softened, and he smiled slightly. “Yeah,” he said, “we can. It's never really too late to build something. And Christy can be part of it, too, at least part-time. I made the mistake of thinking that since she was a girl, her mom should raise her. I cheated her out of a lot, and she knows it. I feel it sometimes when we're together. I owe your sister.”

 

Stacy walked into her dining room and slid into her seat beside Ryan, who sat in his high chair, eating the raspberry jam off the face of his toast. She put a hand out and caught his arm as he was about to turn the toast into a Frisbee, took it from him, and put it on her own plate. Her father was a late sleeper and would not be up this morning until long after Stacy had left for school, but her mother sat before a full breakfast of eggs and bacon and toast. She was a big, strong, round woman with energy enough to power the entire family, and she looked entirely capable of taking on surrogate motherhood at this late age of sixty-one. She had accepted Stacy's pregnancy out of hand, with never a word of judgment or hint of rebuke. Stacy's father had not been capable of quite so grand an acceptance of events but through his wife's sheer will had been forced to accept not only the relationship with Preston as he watched it disintegrate into a narcotic fog over the months but the fact that Stacy would carry Preston's baby to term and would refuse to give it up for adoption. Early on a serious rift had developed between Stacy and her dad over the situation, but time and relentless good-humored pushing by Mrs. Ryder had helped both Stacy and her father overcome it.

Stacy lifted the lid over the frying pan and removed
two poached eggs, skipped the bacon, and dropped two pieces of toast into the toaster. “I'm going to tell,” she said to her mother seated in the dining room. “Today.”

“Tell what, dear?”

“Who the drool king really belongs to,” Stacy said, moving to the doorway to catch her mother's reaction, but Isabelle Ryder prided herself in never giving away startled inner responses.

“Really,” she said. “Why would you want to do that?”

“The longer I put it off,” Stacy said, “the more I'll look like a fool when people find out. If it was a mistake, it's mine, and I may as well start living with it.” Stacy had been awake most of the night, running the dialogue at Jackie's over and over. There was more than what she'd heard, she was sure of that; Jennifer Lawless had been too pulled back, too reserved to be responding merely to Dillon's revelations about Preston. But all that aside, Dillon had made a valiant effort to get to the truth of the world as he knew it, and Stacy appreciated that. Dillon had a certain dignity when he went off half cocked. That was the thing she had always missed in Preston: the ability to shoot from the hip while pretending you had taken great care to aim. As she had
knelt next to Ryan's crib following her second visit to his room that night to comfort him, she realized what was missing in her life. It wasn't Preston—he'd been gone long before he was gone—it was humor. It was laughter. She remembered when, not so long ago, she had been joyful most of the time. That's why she had always been such good friends with Dillon; he made her laugh. Preston owned her heart, but Dillon had laid claim to her spirit long ago. Since Preston's death—since that bastard
killed himself
—there had been no more joy. And without the joy she had wedged Dillon out. Dillon was the Good Humor man, and she knew she had been turning away from him and all he stood for since the funeral. And since the baby—since the
shame
—there had been even less. What Stacy understood, kneeling there in the moonglow, gazing at Ryan—as joyful a creator of human waste as toddled the face of the earth—was that she didn't
really feel
any of the shame, and she didn't feel the sadness of Preston anymore either. She played at feeling those things because that's what people—her parents included—expected. Peering through the wooden bars at Ryan, his fist crammed halfway down his throat, looking for all the world as if he were guzzling the contents of his arm,
Stacy Ryder called a halt to her time of mourning. And she also called a halt to her time of lies. You can't laugh when you lie because lies signify shame, and there is no laughter in shame.

No more.

“I'm not sure that's a good idea, dear,” Mrs. Ryder said now. “Maybe we should talk about it.”

Stacy shook her head. “There's nothing more to talk about. I'm tired of everyone at school treating me like some kind of saint for helping my parents out in this ‘time of crisis.' That's what Mr. Caldwell called it the other day. A ‘time of crisis.' I'm like some kind of tragic heroine or something.”

“There are worse things,” her mother said.

“Like having people know you slept with a drug addict and he probably killed himself because you told him you were pregnant?”

Mrs. Ryder put her fingers to her temples, massaging them gently. Her job in this family was to still the waters, keep an even keel. That wasn't always easy, but her presentation of calm in any storm was a powerful tool in that regard. “There's more to it than that, Stacy. We've talked about this.”

Stacy sat next to Ryan with her breakfast. She hadn't expected her mother's blessing, merely felt she
should let her know before carrying out her plan. “Well, anyway,” she said, “that's what I'm thinking. You and Dad going anywhere this weekend?”

 

What Dillon loved about Stacy Ryder as much as anything was her capriciousness. From the time they were small children she delighted—and sometimes horrified—him with her off-the-wall actions, seemingly performed without the slightest regard for the consequences. Years back at the traveling carnival, after she had slipped those Chinese handcuffs over his finger, allowing his sister to escape into the crowd, she had given no thought whatever to the harassment Dillon would face when his mother caught up to him, which as he remembered, was substantial. Even back before that, in first grade, she had pulled off an impulsive move so cold-blooded even Dillon began to fear her. On a day in December that started out below zero Fahrenheit and seemed to get colder, the kids spent morning recess indoors, playing games and coloring. Stacy and a kid named Johnny McMasters got into a squabble over who was going to use the yellow first, and Stacy won out, having by far the better grip. Johnny evened the score a few minutes later with a hard shot between the shoulder blades, and before Stacy could lay waste to
him, the teacher stepped in and stopped it.

During afternoon recess, when the temperature had finally crawled a little closer to zero, several of the more hearty students bundled up and went out onto the playground with the teacher's aide, and Stacy challenged them all to follow the leader through a little obstacle course she had set up, which ended with a rung-by-rung trip across the playground high bars. Stacy made it all the way across, a substantial feat for a first grader whose grip was eroded considerably from the thick wool mittens covering her hands, but most of the rest of the kids fell to the snow after the first or second rung. Dillon made it all the way, and Johnny McMasters, a sinewy little whippet with tenacity to match his revenge quotient, was now about halfway but losing his grip.

“Hold on,” Stacy yelled. “Just rest a minute. You can make it.”

Johnny, having forgotten the morning fracas, listened intently. “I'm slipping,” he grunted. “My hands are slipping.”

Stacy stood directly below him. “Try to pull yourself up,” she said. “Slip your elbows over the rungs. Then you can rest while you hang there.”

Dillon saw a look pass over Stacy's face as she coaxed Johnny on. He wondered why she was helping
her earlier assailant, knowing from personal experience that was definitely not Stacy-like.

Miraculously, and with a little help from Stacy pushing up on his feet, Johnny pulled himself up far enough to slide his arm over the rung and support himself by the crook of his elbow, then follow suit with his other arm. He dangled there at the center of the rungs, adjusting his mittens and resting his hands to continue the journey.

“Wanna do something neat?” Stacy asked from below.

“What?” Johnny yelled back.

“Put your tongue on the bar.”

“What?”

“Put your tongue on the bar. It's like a Popsicle.”

Johnny stuck out his tongue, which was instantly welded to the freezing bar.

Stacy turned and walked toward the school, where the teacher's aide was calling them all in.