Little Children (30 page)

Not tonight, though. Out of respect for his own dead mother, if for nothing else.

“Sorry,” he said. “Wrong number.”

He hung up, feeling sweaty and light-headed. There was one more person he could call, come to think of it. He had the number in his wallet, scribbled on a sticky note. She wasn’t home, though—probably out on another blind date, boring some guy silly. All he got was her spacy voice on the answering machine.
This is Sheila, please leave me a message
. Ronnie waited for the beep, which took way longer than it should have.

“You are one loony bitch,” he told her. “Why don’t you put
that
in your personal ad?”

After that he was at a loss. It wasn’t even nine o’clock, and he didn’t have a fucking clue what to do with himself. He couldn’t just sit around the house all night, making prank phone calls, could he? It would have been easier if he was a drinker. Then he could at least go out and get plastered, then come staggering home to sleep it off. If that had been his problem, everything would have been so goddam simple.

“Hey, Ma,” he said, as if she were standing right there beside him, “I think I’m gonna go out for a while.”

Lewis didn’t even look up when she returned to the living room, taking a seat on the other end of the couch and picking up the copy of
Family Circle
that had just arrived in the mail.

“What are you reading about?” she asked after a moment or two, unable to tolerate the silence.

“Las Vegas.”

“In
National Geographic
?”

“It’s a history of the city. How it’s evolved since the fifties.”

“That’s not right,” she said. “You’d think
National Geographic
would have better things to report on. The rain forest or something.”

“It’s actually very interesting.”

At eight-thirty, she put down her magazine and told him she was going upstairs to get ready. He grunted, still absorbed in his article.

She took a long bubble bath, closing her eyes and breathing deeply, trying to clear the clutter from her mind and will herself into a sexy mood. She’d recently come across an article (
Five Zesty Ways to Spice Up Your Marriage!
) that recommended fantasizing about partners other than your husband, and decided to give it a whirl. Bruce Willis didn’t work, for some reason, and neither did Brad Pitt, but that was probably because he was in dire need of a haircut and a shave, and, quite possibly, a hot shower. But then, out of nowhere, she found herself thinking about Tony Soprano, a man she found completely repulsive, with his big hairy belly and gutter mouth, the way he bent that girl over a table with his pants around his ankles, a cigar clenched between his teeth as he pounded away.

Disgusting.

She yanked the drain plug, forcing the image out of her mind, wishing Lewis had never convinced her to get HBO. After she brushed her teeth and dabbed some perfume on her neck, she slipped into a pink satin slip with a lacy bodice, ran a brush through her hair, and stepped into the bedroom, pausing to let herself be admired.

Her husband should have been sitting on the bed in his glasses and boxer shorts, nodding in fervent approval, but he wasn’t there. A queasy, almost desolate feeling came over her as she contemplated the undisturbed bed, the clock on the end table reading 9:02. She headed straight downstairs to see what was keeping him.

“Honey?” she said. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

“You know what?” he said. “Why don’t we give it a rest?”

“But it’s Tuesday. It’s our date night.”

He stared at her for what felt like a long time. There was the oddest look on his face, like he pitied her for something.

“I really don’t feel like it.”

Mary Ann gulped. It took an enormous effort to remain composed, to keep the tremor out of her voice.

“You don’t love me anymore.”

Lewis didn’t answer right away. He seemed to be giving her statement some serious consideration, as if he hadn’t thought about it in a while.

“Our son is four years old,” he said. “You have to stop talking to him about Harvard.”

Hands clammy and heart pounding, Sarah pulled into the Rayburn School parking lot at seven minutes after nine, not nearly as late as she’d feared. She kept her headlights on, their dusty beams shining on the deserted playground—the seesaw and slide, the play structure with its swaying bridge and festive little gazebo, the fateful swing set—waiting in an ecstasy of suspense for Todd to step out of the shadows, the sight of him always so startling to her after even the briefest of separations, the way he had of seeming so matter-of-factly present and so utterly fantastical at the same time.

At eleven after nine she shut off her headlights.
It’s all right
, she told herself,
he’s only ten minutes late.
She had to make a conscious effort to ignore the flutter of panic in her belly, the little voice reminding her that he’d never been late before. It was something they’d joked about at the Town Pool, the invariable pattern of their relationship—the boys always early, the girls always late.

But maybe it was a good thing, this little break in protocol. This way Todd would owe her an apology, and he’d be that much less likely to hold it against her that they weren’t going to the beach after all, that they’d be stuck in her house with Lucy, still trapped within the suffocating borders of Bellington and parenthood.

“What we doing?” Lucy inquired.

“Waiting for Todd,” she replied. “He should be here any minute. He’s going to sleep over at our house tonight.”

Lucy didn’t seem unduly troubled by this answer. Sarah had never really been able to figure out just how much she understood—even in her limited three-year-old capacity—about her relationship with Todd. All through the summer, she had just accepted whatever happened as if it were well within the natural order of things. When they were hanging out with Todd and Aaron every day, that was fine with her. When they stopped, she asked about it once, and seemed to find her mother’s explanation—
Aaron’s grandma wants them all to herself
—completely satisfactory. Sarah couldn’t help hoping that Lucy would show the same flexibility toward the much larger changes that were about to shake up her life, but she couldn’t quite suppress the suspicion that she was being a bit too passive as a parent, not doing enough to prepare her daughter for the immediate future.

“Honey,” she said. “Do you like Aaron?”

“Sometimes.”

“He’s a nice boy, isn’t he? You play so well together.”

“He likes cars,” Lucy said, a trace of contempt in her voice.

“Would you like him to be your brother?”

Lucy giggled nervously. She seemed to think Sarah was playing some sort of game with her.

“Him not my brother.”

“He might be.” Sarah turned in her seat and looked her daughter straight in the eyes, hoping by this to make her understand that they were having a very serious discussion. “Someday. Not your real brother, but your stepbrother. That means we would all live together in the same house, at least some of the time.”

“I don’t like that.” Lucy sounded angry.

“Sure you will. It’ll just take a little time to get used to it.”

Lucy shook her head in ferocious denial.

“Not get used to it.”

Sarah decided not to push it. You just had to take these things one step at a time. Given enough time and love, kids would adapt to anything. And Sarah couldn’t help thinking that, however Lucy felt about it right now, she’d be better off in the long run with Todd as the father figure in her life than she would be with Richard.

“Mommy?” Lucy asked a couple of moments later. Her voice was soft and tentative, as if she’d been thinking things over.

“Yes, honey?”

“Can you swing me?”

“Sure,” Sarah said, before she’d even realized what she was agreeing to. “But just for a little while, okay?”

Todd had left his house at nine o’clock sharp, but he got sidetracked at the library. The skateboarders were out, and he stopped for a minute to see how they were doing. To his surprise, they greeted him like an old friend as he assumed his once-familiar post by the mailbox.

“Dude,” this gruff-voiced kid called out. “Where the fuck you been?”

“We missed you,” another one added, somehow managing to sound sarcastic and sincere at the same time. “We thought you didn’t love us anymore.”

“Yeah,” said G., the skinny leader of the pack. “Thought maybe we were boring you.”

“Not at all,” he explained, oddly flattered by the attention. “I’ve just been going through some weird shit.”

He hadn’t watched them for weeks, not since before the bar exam, and was amazed at how much they’d improved in the interim, as if they’d all gone to skateboard camp or something. Kids who’d looked like beginners in June were whipping around like experts. The ones who were good then had blossomed into virtuosos, though G. remained in a league of his own.

As always, there was something hypnotic about the spectacle of the boys on their boards, the steady flow of riders gliding past him, each following the one before in almost metronomic regularity, the insistent hum of wheels on pavement. They were improvising these overlapping figures in the street, six of them weaving in and out of each other’s paths, crouching and standing like human pistons, shifting directions on a dime with these abrupt pivots and trick spins, performing nimble, almost monkeylike, maneuvers with their feet, flipping their boards into the air, then landing gracefully on top when they reconnected with the ground.

He knew Sarah was waiting, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to leave. Every time he did a gut check, it always felt like he needed another minute or two to clear his head, to gather up his courage for the big and terrible step they had agreed to take together.

He’d meant it on Thursday when he told her that they should run away together, meant it like he’d never meant anything in his life. In that sublime moment, the two of them lying on their backs on the fifty yard line, gazing up at the star-studded emptiness of space, the words had emerged from his mouth with a conviction that startled both of them. He remembered the thrill that had passed from his fingers into hers, then back again, an electrical current filling him with the conviction that a life with Sarah—a life rearranged and made whole—was not only possible but absolutely necessary.

Four days had passed since then, four strange and painful days during which this conviction had been tested in a hundred different ways. It started first thing on Friday, when Kathy shook him awake at eight o’clock in the morning and told him that they were going away for the weekend, just the two of them, to the same inn in the Berkshires where they’d spent their honeymoon.

“I’m taking the day off,” she said, running her hand over his forehead as if checking for a temperature. “We need a little time alone.”

He could have said no, of course, could have told her right then that he’d made other plans for his life, but he was still in too much of a daze to put up a struggle.

“Yeah, sure,” he said, raising himself up on his elbows and blinking away the harsh morning light. “Whatever.”