The English Teacher (26 page)

At the Exxon station a kid Peter’s age filled up the tank and didn’t even notice a body in the back. But through the doorway of the mini-mart, eating a pink coconut cupcake, a cop was staring right at him. As imperceptibly as he could, Peter tried to lift up his rib cage and harden his expression. He did not catch the cop’s eye again, but looked straight ahead with preoccupation, as if while waiting for his tank to fill he had many adult thoughts to untangle.

Behind him, his mother was stirring. A long swish.

Not now Mom not now he was thinking but didn’t dare move his lips. Peter checked the digits on the pump; it wasn’t even half
full. The cop pushed through the door. When he paused to hike up his trousers he left pink sugar fingertip marks on either side. Then he headed directly toward Peter. He put a hand on the roof and bent his head down at the window. Peter fumbled to unroll it.

“I suppose you’ve got your driver’s permit.” He said per
mit.

“Yes, sir.”

The cop leaned in farther and addressed the back. “I assume you’re over eighteen and in possession of a valid driver’s license, ma’am.”

In the mirror Peter found his mother upright, open-eyed and nodding.

The cop patted the roof of the car. “Hope you folks enjoy your visit here.”

The kid, who’d been waiting behind the cop, took his place at the window to collect his money. Peter could barely remove the bills from his mother’s purse, his hands were trembling so wildly. The police cruiser pulled out of the parking lot and headed away from the highway. The kid didn’t have enough ones in his pocket and said he’d be right back, but Peter got his hands around the key and took off.

He waited for his mother to speak, to holler at him, and when she didn’t he glanced and saw she’d shut her eyes again, her face clenched as if sleeping hurt.

It took a long time for the shaking to stop, but when it did he felt good. He felt great. He remembered the radio and turned it on. A sign read
You Are Leaving Pennsylvania
but there was no sign to tell him which state was next.

The sun, which had been flickering through the trees, disappeared. He was hungry again but didn’t want to risk a stop. He sang along to the music and tried not to think about food. All at once the earth seemed to open out and he could see in the dusk long swathes
of land and a farmhouse miles and miles away, with a light on. It was like looking across an ocean. He could see the curve of the earth. In that one glimpse of distance he understood so much more about everything he’d ever studied in school: Western expansion, cyclones,
O Pioneers!
Instead of shutting you up in classrooms for twelve years, why didn’t schools just put you on a bus and show you the world? He’d never known how cramped and ugly New England was until now.

At the risk of waking his mother, Peter rolled down the window to let in this new air. It was much warmer than he’d expected and he stuck out his whole left arm and let his fingers rattle in the wind. There were no other cars on the road and even though it was paved and occasionally signposted, it was easy to pretend he was the first person to travel across it. The exhilaration of freedom coursed through him like a drug. He remembered similar moments, like the time Jason’s sister Carla, before she went to college, picked them up at the movie theater with a hitchhiker in the front seat. They’d driven the guy to an intersection a few miles up the road where he could catch a lift to Canada, he said. He had no bag and no shoes, and when he got out a wave of envy and wanderlust had passed through Peter. That his mother would eventually rouse herself fully and demand he turn around, that he had a geometry exam tomorrow and a history paper due on Friday was information this swell of freedom could not contain. This was his life now; he was a driver heading for parts unknown.

The road began to dim. Then he remembered headlights. He pulled the silver plug and the road ahead glittered. The dotted lines came fast on his left and he tried not to let them distract him. The sky, which had been a vast dome with deep purple clouds, was now close and black and indistinguishable from the land.

Within minutes the dark eroded his exuberance.

“Ma!” he said and got no response. He had the feeling that something
terrible was about to happen, that this was how death happened to everyone: a few hours of joy and then you’re snuffed out for good.

An eighteen-wheeler passed on his left, buffeting the Dodge with its wind. The car was flimsy, no longer the haven it had been all day. He felt himself growing younger. He needed to eat, to pee, to sleep. He needed to be taken care of now. But in the backseat his mother just rolled over.

NINE

FOR A LONG TIME SHE HUNG ACROSS WALT’S BACK, HIS PACE SLOW AND
rhythmic. They didn’t speak. She was drunk and he was dead. He placed her on a small sofa. Her face stuck to the cushion. My legs are too long, she cried, but he had gone. She smiled and nodded at a policeman. It was one of the few things her mother had taught her, to smile and nod at the police. But never seek them out, never call that kind of attention to yourself, no matter what has happened. She taught her that, too.

All the chairs were being taken out of her classroom. Students she didn’t recognize hoisted them, seats down, on their heads and carried them off. She made a barrier with her arms and legs in the doorway but they passed right through her. Fran passed through, too, reading aloud from a yellow sheet of paper, though there was only one word on it:
Mom.
All the while there was this tugging at her mind that she had forgotten something, but when she strained to remember, the feeling disappeared. For a long stretch of time she dreamt only of the word
blunt,
the b and the u and the n, a sort of visual onomatopoeia, she decided, over and over.

There was pain in her hip, her shoulder; her lungs were sore and she could only take in shallow breaths. She smelled grass. She was in her bedroom with the fading buttercup wallpaper and her mother was handing her a book. “I just got it out of the library. It’s
about a woman who gets—” Vida knew what she was going to say next and lunged, smashing her hand against something hard.

She is walking down an unfamiliar street, searching for clues to where she is. Ahead is a sign but everything is blurred. She hears a voice, a Cockney accent. She’s in London. London! But she can’t see it, and she’s waited so long to get here. Someone takes her arm. It is Carol. Carol who finally read all her notes has forgiven her. They are walking swiftly now, through a huge house full of people. Carol leads her upstairs and down a corridor to a long narrow room. She shoves her in and shuts the door. Her vision clears. In the window a boy is hanging from a necktie. It is Peter. The thing she’s been trying to remember. She is flooded with the pleasure of remembering. Peter. He is dead, but she has remembered him.

“Poor Tess,” someone says behind her.

“Tess? That’s not Tess. That’s my son, Angel.”

She is aware, occasionally, of a door slamming, of a shoulder beneath her, of darkness but not silence. For a few minutes at a time she is lucid. She is in the backseat of a car, her car. She recognizes the roof, the pinpricked vinyl. She remembers Walt’s grave, the countertop at O’Shea’s. Someone must be driving her home from there. Her heart races. When he stops the car he will expect something for his trouble. She returns eagerly to the buttercup wallpaper, the thin curtains rolling in the breeze. She is on her stomach reading. It is a Saturday and no one is home but her and there is a big bowl of peanuts on the table beside her. She eats them one by one, sucking off the salt first, then biting gently so it splits, then letting the halves nestle in either side of her mouth before chewing. It is morning and she can stay up here all day. Downstairs a door slams. He is on her before she registers his feet on the stairs, his weight pressing the air out of her chest, his arms knocking the book from her fingers. She has no air to scream with. She is overwhelmed by the familiarity of the act, the belt, the grunts, the blood
in her mouth, as if it has happened not once before but hundreds of times. It is not anger or sadness or fear that she feels, just a habitual acquiescence. Yes, this is what happens to me, her body seems to be saying. When he is done he thanks her. She is not surprised by the voice or the thin ponytail resting on the collar of his jacket as he turns to go.

TEN

APRIL WASN’T SURE WHAT AT FIRST CAUGHT HER EYE. USUALLY SHE WAITED
for the customers to see her, need her attention, and she liked to toy with them, dragging her eyes slowly up off her magazine to their eager faces. But these two she was watching even before they came through her door. The driver got out first, scanned the street, then opened the back. He leaned in all the way and April expected him to bring out some sort of jacket or bag, but instead it was an old woman, stooped and shoeless. They stopped outside the door, admiring the ribbons. April was in charge of tying fresh bows, twenty-five of them, every morning and replacing the ripped, faded, or stained ones. She hoped Billy Hughes, who’d never eaten here as far as she could remember, had seen a picture of her work. Could they get mail over there? Probably not.

The old lady raised her hand and ran it down every ribbon like a child. April almost called out to her to stop but then wondered if the woman was retarded and let her finish. They finally pushed through, the young fellow struggling a bit to keep the woman upright and the door open. She’d been all wrong about their ages. The driver was a mere boy, and April didn’t know a state in the union that let fourteen-year-olds drive. And then the old lady: she wasn’t much over forty, a good deal younger than April. She could tell by the hair. Nothing stiff or brittle about it. It was young hair, even if the face was a bit trashed.

“Y’all two?”

The boy seemed confused by the question. April held up two menus and pointed to a booth. He nodded, and followed on behind her.

She heard him whisper at her back, “Is it all right that she has no shoes?”

There was something special about this boy. The way he tipped his head up to her when he ordered, the way he maintained eye contact even though it seemed to pain him.

“I’m losing my marbles,” April muttered as she threaded the order up into the rod on the other side of the window.

“You just figuring that out now?” Dave said, snapping up the ticket, then groaning about the onion rings.

April went back to her perch at the register. She could see the boy’s profile from there. He was talking but the woman wasn’t talking back. She was bent over her cup of coffee, her hair everywhere, the barrette in back useless. She was a sight. When he gave up, his eyes drifted around the restaurant, though his mind seemed caught somewhere else entirely.

Dave grunted, and she spiked their ticket and brought them their food.

“Thank you so much,” he said for both of them.

She looked at the photo of Sgt. Billy Hughes on the wall. He’d always seemed so innocent. All these weeks she’d been staring at his face and she’d never noticed the hint of arrogance in his eyes, the mischief in his mouth. April bent her head and prayed for God to forgive her those last thoughts and deliver all the hostages home where they belonged. She raised her head and there was the boy standing on the other side of the counter, wanting to know about the restrooms. She pointed and he signaled to the woman and they went down the hallway together. April cleared their dishes. His plate was clean, but she’d barely taken a bite. As she moved to the kitchen,
she heard a commotion down where they’d gone. She peeked into the dark hallway. The woman was clutching the boy with both hands. “Please don’t make me,” she whispered. “I’ll be right out here,” he said, calm and steady. “Let’s not go through this again.” “I can’t. I can’t.” She had slipped to the ground. The boy finally gave in and the two disappeared into the ladies’ room.

“Where y’all headed?” she said when he reappeared at her counter with the bill and a twenty, trying to maintain the incurious tone she usually had with out-of-towners.

“Uh.” The boy looked at her desperately. He was the kind of kid who seemed incapable of a lie.

“You’re just heading out,” she said dramatically, sweeping her arm westward. She shrugged up her shoulders, turned down her lips, and said, “Maybe all the way to California.”

The boy laughed. “Maybe,” he said, and then with the first animation she’d heard in his voice, “Maybe!”

He took the change with another smile, shoved two dollars into the tip jar, and called out, “C’mon, Ma.”

It was rude to not even call out good-bye, but she felt like she’d been punched in the chest, hearing
Ma,
knowing now this was that sweet boy’s mother. Why hadn’t she guessed they were related? Because there are just some women who you know have never raised a child. It’s in their eyes. April herself was one of them. That woman, she’d have sworn, was another.

Just before they stepped off the curb, the boy tried to take his mother’s arm. But she jerked away fast, as if his touch would burn. She lay down in the back, disappearing from April’s view. With the engine running, his hands on the wheel, the boy sat stockstill, his face set and his mouth so pale it seemed to disappear.

April wiped her tears quick away. Dave would make such fun if he saw.