Imagine Me Gone (5 page)

It’s been a week and John hasn’t spent ten minutes alone with him yet, and now he’s gone off with the other two. Michael plays with his brother and sister some, but fills most of his hours with reading and sketching out his elaborate parodies, the latest one being of our local newspaper. I found it on his bedside table this morning. The
Pawtucket Post-Intelligence: Local Family Goes on Holiday by Accident, Returns. A special joint-investigation with the 700 Club, plus weather
.

In my generous moods, I think John just forgets what I’ve asked him to do, and, being freedom-loving, thinks the children should all do as they like, but at other times my frustration intuits that it’s more than absentminded. He doesn’t know what to say to his elder son; it’s sticky and awkward, and he’d just as soon glide over it, flicking the switch from treating him like a child to treating him like an adult who can teach himself how to cope with the world. John was sent to boarding school at eight. He’s enlightened enough to believe that was and is a form of organized cruelty, but having gone through it himself, some remnant of the fear of being associated with weakness remains lodged in his gut. Michael gets the silent brunt of it, Celia and Alec none at all.

“What about Sand Dollar Beach?” I say. “We haven’t been there yet.”

“Are you suggesting a
divertissement
?”

“I’m suggesting a walk. It’ll be cooler in the woods.”

“Cooler, but treacherous in the event of a hurricane.”

“Come on,” I say, “let’s go.”

He puts his book down on the bench and with a pensive look of his own passes by me into the house. They’re polite, my children. We’ve raised them to be polite. It never occurred to us to do anything else. It’s not the British relegation of them to silence in the presence of adults. But manners teach them the forms of kindness. The way to greet a stranger, and eventually how not to make a scene over every little feeling because there are other people to consider. Overdo it and it will stifle them. I don’t think my mother ever stopped to wonder what good form costs a person, because the cost could never be greater than someone having a poor opinion of her. It could never exceed the failure to live up to the standards of propriety. John’s mother is more hidebound still, appalled that we don’t better contain the children’s energy. She told John it’s my American influence. She blames me for her son being in the States, as if I’m the one in control of where we live.

We didn’t discuss raising our children differently than we were brought up, it’s just a natural softening, I suppose. As if Celia would ever be a debutante, even if we had the money; it’s absurd. Of course I want others to think well of my children but they already do and through no great labor of mine. It’s just a matter of pointing out what’s rude and what’s the proper way to thank a person, and the importance of imagining yourself in someone else’s shoes, that’s all. John spanked Michael and Celia when they were much younger, and he’s spanked Alec two or three times, but it was only when they lied or refused repeatedly to obey. And now with the older two it barely arises. They’ve learned how to behave. We’re not a formal family, but we set the table for meals, and we eat meals together, and they have to ask to be excused when they’re done. I suppose some people would consider it dated. I should encourage their whims in case they are the seedlings of genius. But that doesn’t make sense to me. Whatever they do, there will be other people around and they’ll have to converse with them and be polite. I want them to be happy. That’s the point.

At the trailhead, Michael holds the branches of the blackberry aside for me as he leads the way through the overgrown stretch of path up the slope and into the trees. The beach is twenty minutes away, which is perhaps too far a round trip when I should be getting supper ready, but it’s good to stretch our legs. He’s talking about Mr. Carter, the man he got his king snake from, but the breeze carries every other phrase out of earshot. I stay close enough not to lose track entirely.

Last night it rained and the mushrooms are out—I should know their names but I don’t. There are the perfectly white billowy balls, like bits of solid cloud floating over fallen branches, and the creamy clusters with brilliant orange tips massed on the sides of rotting stumps, and those extraordinary zigzags of brown crescents wending their way up the bark of the older trees like staircases for the Lilliputians.

It’s amazing how many thin young pines and spruces strive to reach the sunlight lavished on the mature trees, and how many of them lie fallen like oversize matchsticks on the forest floor, the ones that didn’t make it, hosts for the lichen and moss, food for bugs.

We climb up and down the steps that Bill Mitchell cut into a giant Douglas fir that must have fallen years ago across the path and now has ferns growing in its opened seams.

I wish Michael enjoyed the wonder in all this more, but his asthma has taught him to be cautious of the outdoors, or of too much running in the field behind our house, and even of the winter cold, which can set off an attack.

“…where he keeps the iguanas,” he’s saying as I come up beside him, now that the path has widened, “with the little stream running through his downstairs, he says he’s thinking of getting a small crocodile if he can build a big enough habitat, but he’s not sure, because it would take up the two spare bedrooms.”

John met David Carter a few years ago when he came to a minority entrepreneurs’ forum. If I remember rightly, he wanted to expand his pet business, and John tried to convince his partners to invest. They didn’t, but John stayed in touch, and he took Michael over to see the reptiles. One day, without consulting me, they brought back a four-foot-long black king snake. I could hardly say no given Celia’s rabbits, Alec’s hamster, the birds, and Kelsey. Michael has never given it a name, which seems right somehow. It’s apparently a constrictor, not a biter, but if that is meant to reassure me, it does not. He takes good care of it, mostly, cleaning its terrarium in the playroom, feeding it those awful dead mice, but he did leave its sliding door open a slit one night, and it got out, somehow making its way up into his bedroom, leading to a terrible commotion when he woke to use the bathroom and placed his foot on it. I didn’t mean to yell at him the way I did, but the whole thing was too awful.

“If he got the crocodile,” Michael continues, “then he’d have a complete collection, or almost with the boa and the python, and the monitor lizard.”

“He doesn’t let you get close to those other creatures, does he?”

“It doesn’t
matter,
” Michael says, swatting at ferns with a stick. “They’re tame.”

We walk for a minute in silence.

“I think he’s sad,” he says. “I think that’s why he keeps so many pets in his house.”

“I wouldn’t think reptiles made the best company.”

“Did Dad want to help him because he’s black?”

I’m not sure how to answer this. I don’t know why John’s taken an interest in getting minority businesses started. It may have begun through the Small Business Administration, some advantage to that sort of investing. But if so he’s carried it well past that: a Hispanic magazine in Chicago, a restaurant chain started by a black football player. It’s a fair amount of what he does. If he were American, I suppose you’d say he was lending a hand in the next stage of civil rights, supporting black ownership, and maybe that’s what he’s doing—we don’t talk about it—but because he’s English that doesn’t seem the best way to describe it. He’s not caught up in that particular history. I’m not sure what the draw is, though I’m all for it, certainly.

“I suppose your father enjoys his company,” I say. “I’d say that’s mostly why he wanted to help him.”

“I think one of the reasons he’s sad is because he’s black.”

“Don’t say that, Michael. You mustn’t say that. There’s no reason someone should be sad because of what race they are. It has nothing to do with that. Doesn’t he live on his own? That could make anyone lonely.”

“That’s not what I mean. I don’t mean that being black makes him sad, like he doesn’t want to be black. It’s something else.”

“What has he been talking to you about?”

“Nothing. The snakes.”

“Well, I think you must be imagining it, then. People aren’t lonely because of the color of their skin.”

He
ruminates
on this awhile as we enter the meadow. Half of it is covered in shade, and it’s in the shade that the buds of the wild primroses have begun to open, their heart-shaped yellow petals peeling away from the stamens. Caterpillars feast on the seeded heads of the milkweeds. Butterflies flutter in the high grass. We have a field behind our house in Samoset, but not so lovely and secluded as this.

Michael seems to take no notice at all of where he is.

“If you were a slave, you’d be depressed,” he says. “And you’d be terrified.”

“What are you talking about? Mr. Carter runs a business. He lives in a perfectly nice house. I hope you don’t say this kind of thing to him. He could be quite offended. He has nothing to do with slavery. Where did you get that idea?”

“You can’t say that. His ancestors, they were slaves.”

“Michael: What has he been talking to you about?”

“Nothing. I told you.”

“So you’re just dreaming all this up on your own?”

“Never mind. You don’t get it.”

This is one of his new refrains:
you don’t get it
. I suppose I should be used to it coming from my children. And I would if I thought the phrase meant for Michael, as it already does for Celia, an attachment to a world of peers. But when Michael says it to me it’s not because he’s caught the first hints of adolescent cynicism from some commiserating friend. He’s referring to something else, something he sees alone. It’s not just I or his siblings who don’t get it.

The ground slopes down from the meadow and a few minutes farther on bits of clear sky show through the gaps in the trees as we approach the cliff above the beach. It’s a sharp drop-off, thirty feet or more. The way down is to the right, along the angled sheet of granite running from the trees to the ocean. It’s lined with cracks, amazingly straight and parallel and sealed with some kind of black magma however many thousands of years ago. Boulders sit on it like old men keeping watch for returning ships.

The beach itself is small, just a clearing in the rocks, really, with hard-packed sand, where a flock of plovers skitters through the thin water of the retreating waves. Farther back, the sand is dry and powdery, strewn with seaweed and driftwood. This is where we’ve found the sand dollars the last couple of years, which the children put in the saucepans and buckets they collect the crabs in, furnishing their little aquariums with other inhabitants of the sea.

Michael, eyes down, writes in the sand with his stick. He’s only a few inches shorter than I am and a year from now he’ll be my height, and soon enough taller altogether. He doesn’t know what to do with his new body, how to sit or stand, which is why he never stays still, hiding in constant motion. Or it’s partly why, the rest being his ceaseless brain. His limbs twitch in response to it, more bother than pleasure, let alone athletic joy. A whole dear, unknowable creature, molting before my eyes. And if in that strange little office off the ward of the hospital in London the doctor had said to me, No, you might want to reconsider what you’re getting yourself into, you might want to put the marriage off, if he hadn’t asked me if I loved John, the unthinkable would be possible: Michael wouldn’t be here at all. His name loses meaning when I repeat it too often to myself, but I have no other word to designate the mystery of him, my firstborn. There’s something illiberal about the way infants are thrust into the hands of people who have no idea what they’re doing, who can only experiment. It’s unfair, he had no choice.

“Aren’t you going to look for sand dollars?”

He keeps writing, giving no indication that he’s heard my question.

“What does that mean?” I ask, coming up behind him to read what he’s scrawled in capital letters: YOU MAKE ME FEEL MIGHTY REAL.

“It’s a lyric. By Sylvester. You don’t know Sylvester?”

“Is that disco?”

“That’s an understatement. But, yes, you can call it disco.”

“You like those records so much. Why don’t you ever dance to them?”

He rolls his eyes and walks away toward the far side of the beach, scraping a curving line in the sand behind him. He’s at that turntable of his hours a day with his headset on but he never does more than move his head back and forth. It seems a pity to me that he doesn’t take physical pleasure in it the way we did, and sometimes still do, with our music.

“We’re going to move back to England,” he says, still facing away from me. “Dad’s going to move us back there.”

Something in the tone of his voice brings me to a halt. It’s been cracking lately, dropping down a register at the oddest moments and then skipping back up into his boyish chirp, but these words come out complete in his new lower range, a sound from his chest, not his throat, and he utters them in a perfectly matter-of-fact way. Most disconcerting of all, he says them slowly, and he never speaks slowly.

“What are you talking about?” I say. “Did he tell you that?”

It wouldn’t be beyond John, in some abstracted mood, to mention such a thing, thinking aloud to the children with no cognizance of where it might lead their own thoughts. If it’s true, I’ll wring his neck—to hear it from Michael first.