Lowboy (18 page)

I
’m sorry I did that,” said Violet. They’d been riding in silence for a half-dozen blocks and she couldn’t have stood it for an instant longer. If he’d been angry at her she’d have minded it less: he’d been angry before. But there was nothing resentful or sullen about his reluctance to look at her or to speak. He’s frightened of me, she thought with a kind of sick wonder. He’s asking himself what I might do next. She put her hand on his shoulder and apologized again.

“I’m sorry, Detective. I really thought those two girls—”

“No need to say anything, Miss Heller.” The gentleness in his voice surprised her. “I wish you’d stood back when you spotted them and let me do my job, but you were excited. I can understand that.”

She watched him for a time before she spoke. “I wasn’t sure you’d catch them. You seemed hurt.”

“You’re right. I wasn’t steady on my feet.” A car pulled out in front of them and he tapped the brake. “Not to mention that I’d lost them once already.”

She didn’t know what to say to that so she kept quiet. The sick feeling was gradually receding. He hadn’t looked at her yet but that would come.

“How are you feeling now, Detective? Any better?”

“Much better, Miss Heller. Thanks for asking.”

“You’re sure about that? You won’t pass out and drive us off a pier?”

He smiled. “Not on your life. I love this car too much.”

“And you’re not angry with me?”

“I’m driving you to your apartment, aren’t I?”

She blushed at that but he was looking past her. “Maybe you shouldn’t, Detective. Maybe you should keep on—”

“I’ve got people in the stations, I’ve put the traffic police on notice, I’ve got a bulletin out with both of the children’s descriptions. There’s not much else I can do, to be honest, until the next sighting comes in.” He smiled again, this time seemingly to himself. “Believe it or not, driving around aimlessly takes up a lot of my day.”

“Driving hysterical mothers around aimlessly, you mean.”

“You’re not hysterical, Miss Heller.” He squinted calmly at the car in front of them. “Not anymore, at least. And we’re not driving around aimlessly. I’m taking you home.”

The rush of gratitude she felt was so strong that she was tempted to take his hand from the wheel and kiss it. I have to do something, she thought, breathing in stutters like a twelve-year-old girl. I have to do something with this feeling.

“There’s something else,” she said before she could stop herself. “It’s about Will.”

He looked at her now. “What is it?”

She fussed with her seatbelt to buy herself time. “I didn’t tell you earlier because I didn’t think—” She hesitated. “I didn’t think you’d try to understand me.”

She felt the car lose momentum as he watched her. “I’m trying to understand you now, Miss Heller.”

It took her most of the next block to decide where to start. “Now
that Will’s with Emily—now that she’s run off with him, I mean— I want to tell you about his ideas on the subject.”

The car slowed even further. “What subject is that?”

Already she found that she could barely answer. “The subject of girls.”

“Of sex, you mean.”

“I’m not so sure that you could call it that.” She cleared her throat. “Will never cared about girls—not the way most boys do. Not as far as I could tell. He didn’t seem to think of them as different.” Why am I so inarticulate, she thought. Why am I so prudish.

“Different how?” said Lateef.

“He could see the differences between people, like any other child—he could see that you and I aren’t alike, for example—” She hesitated again, afraid to give offense, but Lateef only nodded. “He could see that much, but he didn’t seem to be able to put people into groups. He just saw the people themselves, I mean. The individual people. Does that make any sense?”

“I suppose so,” Lateef said. He sounded uncertain.

“Alex and I didn’t give it much thought when Will was small, of course, but by the time he’d turned eleven or twelve we’d started to worry. I’ve always known that I kept Will too close, that I was too greedy, and I’ve been told that does things to a boy.” She gave a sharp laugh. “Richard said so, for one. ‘You’re turning that boy into a faggot, Yda.’ He loved to say that. So when Will brought Emily home—an actual girl, and pretty in a tomboyish sort of way—all I felt was relief.”

“It must have surprised you a little,” said Lateef. “That the girl took an interest, I mean.”

“It didn’t surprise me at all. Girls have always liked Will.” She stopped herself then, knowing how she must sound, and waited for her defensiveness to ebb. “It was his indifference,” she said finally. “Girls never made him nervous, because there was nothing that he wanted from them yet. They mistook that for confidence.” She shrugged. “Maybe it was, of a kind. Will always did exactly what he wanted.”

“What sort of things did he do?”

You wanted to tell it, thought Violet. So tell it. But she found herself talking in euphemisms and half-truths, filtering and dissembling, if for no other reason than from force of habit.

“I went through a bad time after Alex died, and Will had to stay somewhere else for a few months. Richard’s was the obvious place, but the two of them had just had one of their fights: Richard could be difficult, as I’ve said. I asked Will if he’d be okay at Richard’s house, if they’d get along, and he nodded in a bored sort of way and told me they’d get along fine. He was going to pretend he was a cat.”

Lateef frowned at her. “What does that mean, exactly?”

“I asked him the same thing. He just rolled his eyes at me and said ‘Meow.’” She shrugged. “A few months later, the next time I saw Richard, he told me Will had kept it up for three whole weeks.”

Lateef took in a breath but didn’t speak. For a brief moment she thought he might start laughing. “Is that what you wanted to tell me?”

You know it isn’t, Violet thought. But his disingenuousness no longer bothered her. It was a marker for her, a sure sign of his interest, and as long as she held his interest she was safe.

“A few months before Will brought Emily home, I’d had quite a shock: for the first and only time, I found a girlie magazine—one of the more harmless ones, I think it might have been a
Playboy
—lying open on the floor next to his bed. I laughed out loud when I saw it. This ought to shut Richard’s mouth, I thought. I picked it up—a little guiltily, I remember—and flipped it open more or less at random. That’s when I had my second shock. Parts of the girls had been cut out, very carefully and neatly. Not the parts you’d expect: it was the arms and legs mostly, sometimes the head. I found out later that Will was gluing them onto the comics he was making, onto the superheroes’ bodies, because as he got sicker he was losing his ability to draw.”

She glanced at Lateef, trying to read his expression, but he was staring fixedly out at the street. It doesn’t matter what he’s thinking, she said to herself. It’s too late for me not to tell the rest.

“When Will came home I asked about the pictures. We were sitting on his bed, I remember, and the magazine was lying open between us. He didn’t seem the slightest bit embarrassed. He started to tell me about his day at school—what he’d eaten for lunch, the train ride home, that sort of thing—and turning the pages of the magazine while he talked, as though it was one of my
National Geographics
. I just sat there on the bed and listened to him. I’d felt more and more helpless since that night in Richard’s living room: sometimes Will would be fine, the same as he’d always been, and the rest of the time he’d be impossible. It never seemed to matter what I did. Will’s illness had made me obsolete.” Lateef was shaking his head at her but she ignored him. “I found myself wishing that Alex was there, something I never wished for anymore. Alex would know what to ask him, I said to myself. I sat there looking at the side of Will’s face, still so delicate and babyish, trying to make sense of it somehow—to interpret it, I suppose.” She rolled down the window and let the wind hit her. “But really there was nothing to interpret. Just my thirteen-year-old son, chattering on about his day, flipping casually through a cut-up
Playboy
. I’d already made up my mind that it had no special meaning for him—that it was a magazine like any other—when he turned to a page that was different from the rest. He’d ripped it out and done things to it and slid it back into place very precisely. He stopped talking about his day and stared down at it with a—” She thought for a moment. “With a sly sort of smile on his face, the way any teenager would look at a dirty photograph. ‘What’s that a picture of, Will?’ I asked, feeling ridiculous as I said it. Then he laughed and held it up for me to see.”

When she kept quiet for a time Lateef shifted in his seat and fiddled discreetly with the rearview mirror. How patient he’s gotten, she found herself thinking. Just like I was with Will. He must not know how to act around me either.

“The picture took up a full page—it was the centerfold, I guess, or something like it—but the things Will had done made it hard to decipher. A woman was coming out of the water, I think. She might have
been at the beach. Will had taken a Magic Marker and blackened the water, if that’s what it was, and filled in the sky with what looked like hundreds of tiny rings or bubbles, though I found out later that they were degrees.”

“Degrees?” said Lateef.

“The symbol for a degree. The temperature symbol.”

He pursed his lips but said nothing.

“It was the only photograph in the magazine that Will hadn’t taken things from—hadn’t used for his comics, I mean—but he’d cut into it everywhere. He must have gotten hold of a razor, though I was careful not to have one in the house: I even kept the breadknife locked away. The face was just a ball of cuts—deep, heavy gouges— spreading out from the middle like an asterisk.” She closed her eyes. “He’d made it into a kind of opening. At least that’s how it looked to me. There wasn’t any face left.”

Again Lateef made as if to ask a question but kept quiet.

“He gave the picture to me so that I could see it better. Wavy lines were coming out of the opening like spokes, or like the light behind a saint’s head in a painting. It reminded me of portraits of the pope I’d seen when I was a girl.” She paused again, trying to remember exactly. “Her chest and her stomach were covered in a kind of black mesh.”

Lateef coughed into his hand. “What about the girl’s genitals, Miss Heller? Had he cut those away?”

“He hadn’t cut anything away. He’d taken a cutout from some other page—a hand with bright blue fingernails—and pasted it over that part of her. That was the most horrible thing about the picture, at least to me. The hand wasn’t covering her sex so much as growing out of it. When I asked him what it was his face went blank. ‘That’s the problem, Violet,’ he said. I asked what he meant but he just shook his head. I began to feel dizzy. I was frantic to say something else, I remember, something to keep him from seeing my disgust. ‘What’s that, then?’ I said, pointing at the cut-apart face. That made him laugh. He rocked back and forth on the bed and hummed and
nodded to himself, the way he’d done on that first terrible night at Richard’s. ‘Oh,
that
, Violet,’ he said, and laughed again. ‘I can tell you that. That’s the solution.’”

When she stopped for a moment to compose herself she could see that he thought she was finished. There was more to tell of course but it could wait.

“Why didn’t you mention this to me before, Miss Heller?”

“I’m mentioning it now,” she said. “Because of Emily.”

While she’d been telling the story they’d arrived at her building and now they sat idling in front of it. The sight of its blandly lit foyer depressed her beyond words. When Lateef finally spoke she received it like a stay of execution.

“There’s something I don’t understand,” he said after a long spell of quiet. “Why would Emily have run away with your son a second time? What could she possibly want from him?”

She considered the question, still staring into the foyer, and decided that she didn’t want to answer it. “She’s in love with him, Detective. Isn’t that enough?”

His smile was so regretful that it shamed her. “You know it’s not, Miss Heller.”

She nodded at that and closed her eyes and shivered. She dreaded being asked to leave the car. The thought of climbing the stairs to her lightless apartment and waiting there meekly for news brought a sob out of her that she had no way of suppressing. It rang out in the cramped car like a gunshot. Lateef sat up at once and took her arm.

“What is it, Miss Heller? Should we get you upstairs?”

“I have something else to tell you,” she managed to answer. “Something else about Will.”

He sat back wordlessly and waited. Give him what he wants, she told herself. Don’t test his patience.

“A week or so before what happened at Union Square, I came home from work and sat down at the kitchen table, trying to get interested in making dinner. I heard Will and Emily in the other room, but that didn’t surprise me: she was eating most of her dinners at our
house by then. It got quiet for a while—quiet enough that I noticed— and then Emily came out alone. ‘I’d like to ask you a question, Yda,’ she said. There was something different about her, something formal. I smiled at her and asked her to sit down. I already knew it would be about Will—what else did we have to talk about?—but I couldn’t have predicted what came next. I was about to say something else, maybe ask what she wanted for dinner, when she made a sort of face and said, ‘Why won’t he touch me?’ She said it louder than she’d meant to, I think, because afterwards she pressed her lips together. When I didn’t answer she said it again, more quietly this time, still standing in the middle of the kitchen. I had no idea what to say to her, as usual: I must have mumbled some cliché or other. ‘He thinks I’m beautiful,’ she said. She said it as though she was daring me to doubt it. ‘He
told
me that.’”

Lateef tapped his fingers restlessly against the wheel. “Go on,” he said, not looking at her. He thinks he knows what’s coming, Violet thought.

“I looked at Emily for a while, trying to see her the way Will saw her, and for once it actually seemed as if I could. I felt sympathy for her then, genuine sympathy and fondness, for the first time since the day Will brought her home. ‘Emily,’ I said. ‘You understand that Will is special, don’t you?’ I actually used that word—that stupid, hateful, patronizing word. ‘I know he’s in pain,’ she said quietly. ‘That’s what I mean,’ I told her. ‘That’s what I mean exactly.’ We sat there looking at each other for I don’t know how long, neither of us saying a word. What a remarkable girl, I thought. So articulate and thoughtful. She could easily pass for someone twice her age.”