The Illusionist (6 page)

The next morning, the heat was blinding even before eight o'clock. I got out of bed, went into the kitchen, and found Eddie already awake. He was sitting very still at the oak table, as if he'd been up for hours, drinking coffee and smoking a cigarette. His thin dark hair fell over his square face, almost in bangs. I knew Eddie was supposed to be handsome, he was so tall and lithe, with tapering limbs and dark eyes, almost Arab eyes. His penis was big like the rest of him, but too big for me.

That part of life, desire, had always been silent in me. Maybe it was because Eddie was more a brother to me than a lover, and what I loved was having love around me, the state of it. We had been together since ninth grade, when my mother got sick with the breast cancer. I felt so undeserving of Eddie's love, so lucky, because he was so handsome and already a football star and I was tall and plain. Maybe he loved me because I was steady and did well in school and I kept him on the right path. We were a couple, waiting outside class for each other, so regular you could set your watch by us.

My dad was so stunned by my mother's illness that he could do nothing, and he just sat there helplessly, watching her, while I took care of her. I'd come home from school, make dinner, clean the house, and bathe her, fix her hair.

It was funny how, for a while when she was sick, my mother got even more beautiful. She was thinner, her eyes were bigger and shining and after they gave up on the chemo, her hair came in softer, like a baby's, and she let it grow to her shoulders. Her hair was a pinky blond color and it had a wave to it, and I'd brush it for her, and rub lotion on her body. She'd smile up at me, “Thank you, sweetheart. You are so sweet.” Just having me bathe her and wash her hair would exhaust her, and she'd have to take more oxygen and she'd go right to sleep. . . . Please do not make me remember this. . . .

And it was killing my dad. He just could not handle it. That was when I began going with Eddie. Everyone envied us, because
Eddie was a football star already, and he was only with me. Even though Eddie was big and handsome, there was a secret part of him that was vulnerable. He had a little stutter sometimes, when he was nervous; not many people realized that. I loved him for it, it was an imperfection that made him human, that I could love, that made him seem not so big, not so imposing. And we were a solid couple, almost like parents to our friends, to be counted on to be a unit.

But I was never attracted to Eddie in the right way, and that was my secret. I figured it had something to do with that we made love for the first time right after my mother died, and maybe it was bad-luck love because it was the day after she died. I let him go inside. For two weeks I was too scared to do it again. Then I let him because he said he was so desperate, I felt it was his due, he was like a husband. And I couldn't bear to see him suffer, if he needed it so much.

When I got pregnant, the Laskos didn't want me to have the baby, they didn't want Eddie saddled with the responsibility. I stood my ground, I was not going to give up a life when my mother had been taken from me, faded into wind.

We found the little house in West Taponac in the classifieds, got it for almost no rent because Mr. Jukowsky couldn't get farmhands to live there. Bobby came three weeks early. He had hyaline membrane disease and on the second day, blew a hole in his lung. They kept him in the hospital three weeks. He was so skinny, and right from the beginning I thought he would never make it, that he would die too.

Of course, he didn't die, and we brought him home eventually. Eddie worked at Happy Clown after school and his parents gave us money. Eventually, I got the job as an aide at the Home. Even though Bobby was still a baby, there must have been something in me that sensed Eddie would leave us, and I had to be sure I could always take care of Bobby.

I wanted us to be a little family. I tried, tried, tried. I fixed up the little house with stuff from the Salvation Army in Sparta. Then Bobby had a croup attack and we had to rush him to the
hospital, and I lay with him in the oxygen tent. Eddie was more scared than I. The croup turned to asthma and every time Bobby got it, gasping for breath, his little chest heaving, Eddie would pace frantically, his eyes flashing in terror.

I could feel Eddie growing quieter and quieter, sadder and sadder. He would look at Bobby and me as if from a great distance. He started spending more and more time at his parents' house. He was always sweet to us though, treated us well. But I could feel him slipping away, and there was nothing I could do. Nothing.

Then, on that hot morning last summer, standing in front of Eddie in my T-shirt, the heat trapped in the little house—it is not insulated—I hear a fly buzzing in the window, which is sealed shut with paint. And Eddie is watching me with those dark, Arab eyes. “I-I'm sorry,” he says, with his little stutter. “I'm so sorry.” And I can tell he wants
me
to comfort
him.
“Please, forgive me. . . .” he says.

“So, when are you leaving?” My voice is flat.

“I don't know. . . .”

“Do it now. If you're gonna do it, do it now.”

*  *  *

That summer, all around me the fields filled with color—purple vetch, black-eyed Susan, goldenrod. Butterflies drifted across the tall grass. I heard nothing from Eddie, from the Laskos, since I had called them and they said they didn't know where he was. But I knew they were protecting him. They hadn't wanted us to have the baby, and now they just pretended I didn't exist anymore.

At night, sometimes, after we ate, I'd take Bobby out into the fields to look at the stars. Above us was the harvest moon, almost as big as the sky itself, the tips of the long grass lit up in the moonlight, and Bobby rendered into silence with his crazy mother carrying him out there way past his bedtime under the huge sky. As we walked, he'd stare up at the sky intensely, his eyes like black jewels, I could see the moonlight pooled in them. “Look, honey,” I said. “See the stars.” I wanted to be able to tell Bobby the names
of all the stars, to point out the forms they took, the Big Dipper, the Twins, all the mythological figures. But I'd stare up at the sky and I couldn't find them. I wondered if you had to be a rich person to name the stars? In books, it seemed like only rich people knew.

Bobby, in my arms, weighed nothing. I would have given anything to have Bobby be heavier, stronger, not to have this feeling that any moment he could die on me, fade away.

And I was scared here in the long grass, but excited by the two of us being alone, the immensity of the sky, though my dad was ten minutes away. Only a mile away from here, a 300-pound black bear had been sighted by a farmer and the farmer took a picture of him, with the animal looking straight into the camera. The picture appeared on the front page of the
Ledger-Republican.

Standing in the middle of the field that summer and holding Bobby, I looked back at my little house on the hill. A speck of white in the moonlight, the light in the window. Just him and me now. But my dad would help us.

I keep a diary, always have, ever since I was ten years old. My diaries have pink or blue leatherette covers, brass locks that tarnish and flake, and little keys. . . .

August 30. He has left me but all his life what he has done will live in him. Even when he has his own family he'll have to remember what he did and his other child he left behind and it will weaken him and poison him and that's my only revenge.

Now, four months after Eddie has left us, next to me here in the truck, there is this creature, this person I am afraid to look at.

“Which way?” Dean asks.

“Left here onto Church Road. I have to pick up my son at my dad's. Bergen Falls, just before West Taponac.”

We turn onto Church Road and the truck glides along the curb through the little settlement. There is a scattering of houses, the
Lutheran Church, the graveyard with its soft, rainwashed headstones, wonderful names carved on them—Proper and Stockings and Hogeboom—tiny stones of buried children jutting up through the ground, their names and dates washed away.

There is only one tiny general store, in a white clapboard building, which sells newspapers, and a thin stock of milk and bread, canned goods and lottery tickets. I always wondered who lived here, what work they did. I knew there must be a history here—perhaps once this had been a mill town, or a horse stop with an inn.

You hardly ever saw anyone outside here, except for an occasional kid on a bicycle, or an old person walking a dog, or a woman pushing a stroller along the edge of the road, some young single mother who didn't own a car. And yet you knew people lived here, the houses weren't abandoned yet. The grass was cut, you could see curtains in the windows, satellite dishes in some of the yards.

Off to the left was my dad's apartment, above the video store, which was closed up now. My dad had gotten his own car back, and my black Toyota was parked next to his.

“You can drop me off here,” I said. “I'm okay now if you've gotta get back.” I said it praying he would say no, knowing somehow he would, though not sure till he said it, knowing that we had unfinished business between us.

He stopped the truck. “I'm making dinner,” I said. “If you want some. . . .”

“Yeah, sure,” he said.

He sat with the engine idling while I climbed up the outside stairs to my dad's door.

I could hear within the sound of Barney on the television set. “Oh ho hi, everybody! Oh ho . . .” My dad and Bobby were sitting on the couch, watching TV. “Two fellas together!” I cried.

Bobby looked up, saw me. “Mommy!” He jumped down from the couch, ran across the floor, flung his skinny frame into my arms—and bumped the top of his head on my chin. “Ouch!” I cried and I rubbed the top of his head to make the pain go away.

My father rose from the couch, a smile on his face. He was so thin and gray, and bent, the flesh seemed to hang loose and transparent from his bones. “Hello, sweetheart.”

Bobby was overexcited from his asthma medicine. You could tell he was tight, his eyes were too bright, his cheeks flaming.

I bent my head down, inhaled the fragrance of his hair, the smell of shampoo, the smell of life itself. Bobby had dark, thin, silky hair like Eddie's. I hated cutting it and it was still like a girl's, and his cheeks were like the pulpiest fruit, made you want to bite them.

Bobby grabbed both my cheeks. “Where Mommy go?” he asked, looking into my eyes, his voice mock ferocious.

“You know I went to work, honey. . . . What did Dr. Vakil say?” I asked my dad.

“Just give him the mask tonight. He thinks it's under control. Said call him if you're worried.”

My father stood there stooped, smiling, a tremble in his body, I noticed, as I gathered the Pulmo-Aide machine, and packed Bobby's things into his little backpack.

“He's a good guy, ain't you, buddy?” my father said. The two of them spent their days together struggling for breath, my father with his emphysema from the cement plant, Bobby with his asthma.

“I got a friend downstairs in his truck, waiting,” I said to my father. “Hurry up, honey,” I told Bobby. “Let's get your jacket on.”

“Barney!” Bobby shouted. “Barney got a headache.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “Barney got a headache.”

I carried Bobby outside, down the steps. Too light, too light, I thought.

Down in the yard, in front of the building, I presented Bobby to Dean sitting in his truck, as if I were giving Dean a gift. “This is my son, Bobby.”

From the truck window, Dean smiled at Bobby. “Hey there, little guy.” I was happy that he had greeted him this way.

Bobby stared at him with those dark, steady eyes of his, his fist jammed into his mouth. I strapped Bobby into my Toyota, and we
drove out, me leading the way, Dean following behind in his truck.

It was ten minutes from Bergen Falls to my house. And as you approached it, driving along the road, inevitably, your eye was drawn to it, my little house on the hill. Way up there, a good half mile from the road, just a tiny white speck. The only building in sight.

Behind the house the sky was darkening. For miles and miles around the fields were dipping and rising; and then on the horizon beyond, there was a harsh ridge of trees. Behind the ridge, the sun was setting, and the thin, spindly branches of the trees melted together like lace, the orange light like coins spinning between the threads.

From the road, looking up, you might think at first my house was abandoned. If you were an outsider in the county, you might think my house was just one of those odd buildings that were scattered all over, buildings that seemed to have no actual function—neither houses nor barns. Isn't it strange, you might think, a building so small no one lives there, so far up off the main road? But then at dusk, at night, you saw a speck of light in the window, a sign of life, and you realized someone did live there.

At the entrance to Schermerhorn Road, I stopped my car, and left the motor running while I opened the mailbox, number 105A, Dean waiting in his truck, at the edge of the road.

I reached in, got the mail, and stood for a second examining it. From the big oak beyond there came the sound of screeching, the pulsing of wings. The oak had thick, gnarly old branches, circling upwards, and its limbs were bare of all leaves now.

I peered at the black branches. The tree was infested with birds. The branches were alive with them, they seemed to move and undulate, swarming with birds, sparrows, flying in and out of the tree screeching and chattering. Beyond, in the field, a crow skimmed the surface of the ground, looking for something alive.

No good mail in the box today. Only the electric bill and a sale flyer from City Shop. I got back in my car, and we continued up
the hill, me leading the way, my little car straining against gravity as I drove.