One of Us (28 page)

"Hello, dear," she said. "What a wonderful surprise."

I leaned over the counter and kissed her cheek. "What's happening?"

"Oh, you know, getting wrinkly. It takes up most of our time. Come on back—your father's cleaning out the pool." She raised an eyebrow, spoke a little louder. "And tell Helena she's welcome, too."

I turned to the doorway as Helena shuffled into view, looking about twelve years old. "Hello, Mrs. Thompson," she said. A look passed between her and my mother. I don't know what it meant, but then, I don't know how Mother knew Helena was there. Women see the world differently, and they know different things. Anyone who thinks we all live in the same place needs to open their eyes.

My mother shut up the office and we walked around to where my father was happily skimming leaves out of the pool. We sat in deck chairs and sipped sour lemonade, laughing while I told my parents lies of omission.

It was the only way it could be. I didn't have the heart to tell them I was going to prison, probably for a long time. There would have been no way back from that announcement, and I felt it was better to just take what time I could. Better for me, and for them. I could write them when the time came, when it was too late for them to do anything except accept. There's no point in embracing disaster before it happens. If you do that, it merely destroys the present, too.

Sure, I could have avoided the rap for a while. I could just not go back to LA, keep moving around the country. Return to the life I'd abandoned, except this time I'd be back to scrabbling for a living, not dreaming for big bucks. I could work bars and stay in motels, growing old in empty rooms with the smell of spilled beer and toilets that had been sanitized for my protection and comfort. Gradually I'd change from transient young man to transient old, and after that there was nothing but a long, dusty slide into darkness. I couldn't face it. I didn't think I had it in me any longer, that I had the energy to pretend that I wasn't drowning, but waving. Since I'd seen Helena again, that just didn't feel like an option. The question I'd asked myself so many times had been answered: Yes, I'd had what I wanted—and then I'd lost it. I'd already turned the right corner once in my life, and then I'd lost my way. Now I felt how you do halfway through a debauched evening when you haven't been drinking fast enough. Run out of steam, suddenly weary and melancholy, with nothing but sleep being attractive or even attainable.

Nobody asked what Helena was doing there. She sat a little distance from me, nodding and listening to my father as he explained the top five things that could go wrong with air-conditioners, their symptoms and the best ways of fixing them. We sat there like a family, alone in the garden of an old motel that had always been home to me, surrounded by chirruping hoses and the sound of the sea just over the rise. It felt like a life I had always lived, and like some future incarnation of me would forever be seeking this place, as if this were where I should always be. Here, or nearly here. Nearly home.

The air started to cool, and the sky hazed with late-afternoon clouds. Then, just at the right time, my father invited Helena to go look at something with him—the fuse boxes, probably, his pride and joy—and my mother and I were alone. We didn't say anything, just watched the water in the pool flicker and glint. Storm clouds kept building up over the intercoastal waterway, making the light clear and strange.

"Ma," I said eventually, "when I was a kid, did anything strange ever happen to me?"

She clasped her hands on her lap. "What do you mean?"

"When I was about eight."

"Not that I recall," she said, but with a quickening of my heart I knew she was lying.

"It was a Sunday evening, you were working at the Oasis. You got back and Dad was asleep and we watched a movie."

"Sounds like a hundred Sunday evenings."

"I'm talking about one in particular."

"It's a long time ago, honey."

"So was Dad's twenty-first birthday, and don't tell me you don't remember that. Anything to do with us, you're an encyclopedia."

She laughed, tried to change the subject. I just looked at her.

"Ma, I don't do it often, but right now I'm breaking rank. This is very important. You know what I'm talking about, and I need you to tell me what you know."

She looked away, her face pinched. There was a long, long pause.

Then she asked: "What do you think happened?"

"I don't know," I said. "I can't remember."

Her eyes flicked up at me. "I wondered if this was going to come up someday. I thought probably not. But every now and then I remember it, and I wondered if you did, too."

"Not for a long time. It came back to me yesterday."

"Your father doesn't know anything about it," she said quickly. "I decided not to tell him. You know how he gets. He would have been worried."

Gently: "About what?"

A pause, then: "I got home late," she said. "There was a party that night, students from the U over in Gainesville, and they made a hell of a mess, like they ordered burgers just to have something to throw at each other. Jed asked me if I'd help clean up before I went off shift, and I did. Then I walked home."

She stopped, and I was distraught to see that she looked near tears. "Ma," I said, "it's okay. Whatever happened didn't do me too much harm. I'm doing all right, aren't I? Hey—look at this jacket. They don't just give these away."

"It's very nice," she said, smiling a little. "But do your clothes always have to be black?"

I frowned at her. ''Ma ..."

"You were in the parking lot," she said in a rush. "Behind those big old trash containers. I wouldn't have seen you, except I recalled they'd be coming for them Monday morning and I wondered whether Dad remembered to take out our own trash. I looked over and saw something, and realized it was a little foot poking out from behind. I ran over and looked and you were there."

"Doing what?"

"Sleeping, it looked like, except your eyes were open. You were lying there, curled into a ball, arms wrapped tight around your chest. Your knees were scratched like you'd fallen, and your shirt was buttoned up wrong. It was so quiet and I was so scared and I wanted to call out, but I just couldn't. I was too frightened. I touched your face and it was so hot but very pale, and I thought maybe you'd had a fit or something, and I didn't know what I was going to do. Then you started to move. You closed your eyes and opened them again, and your color looked better, but you still looked strange. I kept asking you what was wrong, but you wouldn't say anything, just kept moving your arms and legs real slow, like you were remembering how. Five minutes later you were sitting up and asking me why I'd been crying."

"And I had no idea why I was there?"

"I asked you all the way home, but you still looked faraway, and all you kept saying was that you were thirsty. I got you inside and your father was asleep and you went straight into the kitchen and drank one of those entire pitchers of Kool-Aid you used to like."

"I remember," I said. "Tropical fruit."

"I started to make some more, still half out of my mind worrying what was up with you, and I turned around and saw you were sitting in front of the television in the living room like nothing had happened. I went and sat with you, and we watched a movie together, and after a little while it was like you came back and you were my son again."

"I never said anything about what had happened?"

"I didn't ask, Hap. I was worried about what kind of thing it might be, whether you could have met some bad man or something and that what happened was so awful, you just didn't want to remember. You didn't seem upset, you were just the same, except that if I tried to give you tropical fruit, you wouldn't drink it. We switched to grape, and that was okay, and so I just let it be. I'm sorry. Hap."

"It's okay. Ma, it really is."

"Are you sure? Have you remembered what happened?" Her hands twisted together; I put one of mine on top of them.

"No. But at least I'm sure now that something did. And it's not what you were worried about. I've just got some loose ends to tie up, that's all."

"You're in trouble, aren't you?"

"Yes," I said gratefully. "What's that? Maternal intuition?"

"Maybe. So don't you make fun. I talked to your grandmother a few days ago. She said she'd heard a rumor about something or other. Wouldn't say what, exactly, just hinted darkly. You know how she is."

"Still got an ear for gossip," I said.

"I don't think there's much else to do where she is." As far as I'm aware, my mother has never been on the Net. Don't think she's likely to start now: She thinks of it as some people used to think of heaven, or maybe of hell. "You should go visit her sometime."

"I will," I said, and meant it. As I always did. In the same way you mean to go visit someone when they're dying slowly in the hospital, and then you never quite have the time until they're gone and there's nothing to see except an empty bed.

"I won't ask you what trouble you're in. Hap. If you wanted us to know, you would have said. But I know it's there, just like I know you'd really like a cigarette about now but you won't smoke in front of me because you know I don't like it." I laughed, and we looked up and saw that my father was heading back toward the pool, Helena walking beside him.

Mother looked at me sternly: "She part of it, too?"

"Not really."

"So what's she doing here?"

"We ran into each other. She came along for the ride."

The sternness went up a notch. "You going together again?"

"No. She's with someone else."

"Shame," my mother said. "She was the one."

The sky was darkening around the edges and it was time for us to go. I helped my father with something on his computer, which made me feel better, made me think that I had some chance of paying backward, instead of just forward. The prospects for forward payment weren't looking great at the moment, unless you included working in a prison factory assembling products for multinational corporations.

I looked at the paintings on the motel walls again, and instead of irritation felt something like pride. If that's the way you see the world, I thought, all the pastels and white spray and wheeling seabirds, good for you. Long may you look through that window. I only wish all of them had the same view.

Out through the screen door and into the parking lot, the rental car lurking in magnificent isolation and saying "The real world awaits you, my friend, and it has a lot more stamina than you." I clapped Dad on the shoulder, and he kissed Helena on the cheek. Mother hugged me to her, and I faltered, then hugged her back. We're not a physical family. It's just not something that we usually do. But she held my head close to hers for a moment, and I let her, and before she disentangled and I went on to do what I had to do, she whispered something in my ear.

"I don't care what she's told you," she said. "She's not with anyone else."

Then we were apart, and when I looked back at her she was saying good-bye to Helena and I couldn't ask her what she meant.

SCHOOL WAS LONG finished by the time I parked the car in front of the yard; the last stragglers waiting for a ride were gone. I stood in front of the chain-link fence and looked across at the trees on the other side, wondering if there were still Black Knights to be discovered there, and whether anybody ever looked for them now. I never found one when I was a kid. They always eluded me, no matter how much time I spent sitting up in the branches pretending I was just a large and surprisingly nongreen clump of leaves. Earl let his go in the end. One afternoon we just decided to open the box. The bug lumbered around the container for a while, evidently not realizing how much bigger its world had become—then took awkwardly to the air and careered off out of sight.

"So what now?" Helena asked. She'd been silent on the short ride from Tradewinds, maybe mulling over my father's advice about how best to deal with flying ants.

"We walk around it."

"Hap, I like a stroll down memory lane as much as the next girl, but I wonder whether this is exactly the time for it."

"Yes," I said, "it's exactly the time. And memory lane's just what it is. So walk it with me."

"What on earth are you talking about?"

"I'm not sure." I had an idea, and it was growing in my mind. But it wasn't close enough yet for me to articulate it to myself, never mind anyone else. "Just trust me."

And so we walked. I didn't know if this was going to work, just that it was the only thing I could try. The light was about right by then, and it was the same time of year. It might have made sense to do it alone, replicate it exactly, but I figured I needed someone else there to make it real. Our own past always lives on, to some degree, within ourselves: We need the gaze of others to make it real. We went the long way around, as I had about twenty-five years earlier, and I told Helena what I could remember.

As we turned into lane the lights clicked on and I shivered, feeling abruptly younger, almost as if this were a walk back in time and at some point Helena would just disappear, leaving just a small boy in shorts. I was aware of how much taller I was now, of the extra pounds I carried, the scar tissue. Everything I'd done felt like accretions around an earlier self, moss gathered by a stone whose progress was now slowing to a halt. I stopped as we turned into the long back side, staring at the streetlight in the distance.

Helena waited, knowing there was nothing she could say or do to help. I didn't get anything as we walked that stretch, even when we stopped to look in at the trees, closer now, only twenty yards from the corner.

But as we passed under the lamp I felt something, almost like a thickening in my head. The sensation slipped out of my fingers like a fish if I tried to concentrate on it. Blanking happens when you use a memory so many times that you wear it out, like rubbing a sheet of metal for so long and so often that it fades to nothing, and you can see right through it. Attempting to touch it again just makes things worse. You have to come at it from an angle, see it from the side, make the most of what is left. I tried but couldn't capture it, and glanced at Helena, shrugging.