Second Nature

  “My mommy’s in there,” Stephen told her.

  The dog quickly looked back at him when he spoke.

  “We fell down,” he said, and his face felt even hotter.

  It was dark out in the woods, and the trees looked as if they might come alive and swoop him up in their arms. Stephen had been glad that the big dog had come up to him. He had seen Lassie on TV; he knew dogs could always find the way back home. But he must have blinked, because the big dog had suddenly disappeared into the darkness. He looked and looked, but she wasn’t there. Then he heard a whimpering, and she was back. She walked away again, stopping after a few paces to look back at him. He followed her then, and each time she disappeared, Stephen found that if he just kept going she’d be waiting for him.

  After a while he could no longer hear the fiery sound of the plane. The woods were still, except for the wind, which called out numbers and names in a hollow blue voice. The moss was so thick Stephen stumbled, and his shoes slipped into badger holes. He was getting tired, but each time he stopped, the dog came out of the darkness and pushed against his back, and they kept on this way until they came to the base of a ridge. His feet hurt by then, and he was hungry. He wanted oatmeal with raisins, or chocolate chip cookies, or a big, red apple, peeled and cut into quarters by his mother. The sky was still filled with lights, but he couldn’t see them anymore because the pine trees grew so close together, and they were so tall, taller than the brick buildings on his block. That was where he had thought they were heading, but now he had the funny feeling that the buildings and shops and sidewalks that he knew were so far he’d never be able to walk all the way there. His throat became dry just thinking about the distance, and his thirst was so bad he started to make little choking sounds that were almost like crying.

  When the two other dogs came out of the shadows, Stephen had leaned against the big dog’s side for comfort. One dog was even bigger, and black, so that all Stephen could see of him were his eyes and his teeth. The other was gray and white and he looked over at the black one, waiting for some sort of sign: flattened ears, hair standing on end, a rumbling sound deep in the throat. The black one was crouched down as he came toward Stephen, but he stopped when the big dog came between them. Her tail was straight up and she showed her teeth, and the black dog looked at her bewildered, then moved aside.

  Stephen held on to the big dog’s fur as she led him toward the base of the ridge, where a cave had been dug. It was even darker here than it had been outside, but Stephen just kept following, though he’d had to crawl part of the way. The cave was surprisingly warm, so warm his eyes were closing as he followed her. The big dog stopped, and when Stephen’s eyes adjusted to the dark, he had seen that two puppies were waiting. As soon as the big dog flopped down, they scrambled over to her, and Stephen had heard them drinking. He was just as thirsty as they were, and when he went to join them, and found they were drinking right from the big dog, he did, too, and his eyes continued to close. As he drank he was saying good-bye, to feather pillows and ABC books, to cool lemonade on June days and potted hyacinths along the windowsill. On all other nights, he had worn blue pajamas and slept with a stuffed panda his father had brought home from a business trip; he had stretched out beneath his quilt and listened to the sound of traffic out on the street, like a river winding along the avenue. But on this night, all he heard was the big dog’s heart beating as he curled up beside her, and all night long he dreamed he was home.

  She told the butcher that they were no longer vegetarians, in order to explain why she was now one of his better customers, stopping in twice a week. She told her best friend, Michelle, whom she had never once lied to, that she couldn’t afford their nights out on Tuesdays, not even a movie or a Greek salad at the diner. She was not a particularly good liar; she stuttered and coughed when she amended the truth, but nobody seemed to notice. One night, as she brushed her hair a hundred strokes, Robin realized she was no longer even considering that she might take him back. She had begun to call him by his given name, and that alone had changed something. He was taking up more and more of her time, so much that she had begun to forget simple things: dishes in the sink, Connor’s lunch, the cat’s needing to be fed or set out at night, the name of the variety of hollyhock that grew beside her own garden gate. The last Sunday of the month she forgot to take an apple pie to her grandfather, and Old Dick refused to be consoled.

  “I didn’t have time to fix the crust,” Robin told him. “The market was all out of Mrs. Smith’s.”

  “Bullshit,” he spat back. He still looked formidable, even in bed, beneath a tartan blanket. “I want my pie,” he insisted.

  “Ssh,” Robin whispered. “Do you want Ginny to hear?”

  “I hear everything,” Ginny called from the dusty living room, where she was watching her program.

  “I’ll bring you two pies next time,” Robin offered.

  “Not a good deal for me,” her grandfather said. “I could be dead. You don’t look well,” he added. He reached for his bifocals, which hung on a string tied around his neck. “Let me see your face.”

  Robin was sitting in the big chair by the window; she lifted her chin to him. Her hair was piled on top of her head, caught up in a silver clip, and she was wearing old clothes, a gray thermal undershirt, jeans, worn riding boots splattered with mud. As a child, she’d been stubborn and willful; she considered her grandfather’s land to be the whole universe, and anyone who stepped inside the iron gates had to play by her rules. Even Michelle was always a foot soldier or a lady-in-waiting, always second in command. When Poorman’s Point had belonged to her grandfather, she believed she could do exactly as she pleased, and her grandfather had encouraged it; he didn’t mind if there were burrs in her hair or if she slogged through the marsh grass in her socks. Ginny would throw up her hands and shriek, but she couldn’t stop Robin from inviting squirrels to the tea parties she held on the porch. Robin was never satisfied until those squirrels ate their salted peanuts off the china plates and sipped lemonade right out of the cups.

  “You’re lying about something,” Robin’s grandfather said. He was still sharp, and he drove a hard bargain; it was impossible to get away with much in his presence, whether or not he was wearing his glasses.

  “Don’t be silly,” Robin said, but she stumbled over the word “silly” and her face grew as pink as a cabbage rose. As soon as she could she put away the groceries she’d brought him, vacuumed the living room under Ginny’s direction, and got out of there, taking the stairs two at a time, running down the gravel driveway to her parked truck.

  Of course, that was the thing about lying, once you began, you had to do it again and again. After fifteen years of decreeing the difference between right and wrong, Robin had turned Connor into a liar as well, and had even advised him on what lies to tell. When Stuart called, Connor insisted that Robin had a bad case of laryngitis, which made it impossible for her to speak on the phone. He asked his father not to come to the house but to meet him instead at Harper’s, for dinner or lunch; they needed time alone, man to man. Roy fell for this line and was pleased, and he didn’t seem to notice that, when they did meet, Connor didn’t say a word. At the hardware store, Connor told Jack Merrill they were having problems with the electric company again; he even managed to act embarrassed as he paid for the box of white utility candles. But of course, it wasn’t the electric bill that was the problem. Lamps cast shadows and drew the attention of anyone who might be walking a dog or riding a bicycle along the street after supper. At twilight, they closed the curtains and double-locked the front door. If an unexpected guest should arrive—a school friend of Connor’s, or Michelle’s younger daughter, Jenny, selling mint cookies to raise funds for a class trip—they wouldn’t answer the doorbell. Instead, they sat in the dark. They listened to the wind and the echo of footsteps on their front porch, and if they counted slowly to one hundred, whoever it was who had come to visit would be gone.

  Every evening, before dayligh
t was gone completely, Connor played checkers with Stephen. Stephen definitely liked to win, and he showed no mercy. One day, after only a few games, he was double-jumping so much that Connor decided they should leave checkers behind and move on to chess. Robin wasn’t home yet, so after he set out the pieces on the board, Connor went to the kitchen and got beers for both of them. That evening, he heard Stephen laugh for the first time. As it turned out, Stephen was a natural at chess, a bit better at offense than defense.

  “Your little horse,” Stephen said, triumphant, as he took Connor’s knight.

  Connor grinned right along with him. When his mother had told him the little she’d heard of Stephen’s history from her brother, he’d thought living in the woods sounded exciting. Now he reconsidered, and he wasn’t so sure.

  “Were you actually with the wolves, or just kind of in the same vicinity?”

  Stephen stopped smiling; he turned his gaze back to their game. “The same vicinity,” he answered.

  “What did you do to get food?” Connor said. “Did you have to kill the things you ate?”

  Stephen took Connor’s bishop and placed it on the coffee table.

  “Deer and things like that?” Connor said.

  “Things like that,” Stephen said. He nodded to the chessboard. “Your move.”

  Connor carelessly moved a pawn. “Did you cook them, or just eat them? Like raw or something?”

  One more move and he could put the boy in check. He knew the right maneuver instinctively, just as he knew the moves to make before a kill. This board of black and white squares was nothing compared to a dark night and tall grass. There was a strategy always, a place for each of them, to the left and the right, in a fan shape, deep in the sweet grass. It took forever, and no time at all; once you were running, you could taste what you were after.

  “Holy shit,” Connor said when Stephen captured his queen. “I sure screwed up.”

  Stephen held the white queen in his hand. He should not be in this house and he knew it. The nights had become more difficult for him. He paced the guest room, wearing out the carpet. It had been so long since he’d been able to run that he could actually feel his muscles growing weaker. The calluses on his hands and feet were no longer as thick; if he pricked himself with a thorn, he would probably feel it now. On some nights, the scar on the inside of his thigh caused him great pain, as if to remind him of who he’d once been. But the truth of it was, he’d been locked away for so long that when a butterfly came in through the open window one evening, he’d been startled.

  They should have finished him off after he’d been caught; they should have left him where he’d fallen. Yellow leaves would have covered him, and frost, and the long, brown feathers of the hawks above him in the sky would have fallen across his back like a blanket. He put aside his beer and shook Connor’s hand when congratulated on his win. After the chessboard had been put away, he said good night and went upstairs. If he was downstairs when Robin came home, she would look at him and ask what was wrong, and he wouldn’t know if she really wanted an answer. He’d already realized he could not begin to understand the things men did; now he saw women were even harder to figure out. Sometimes it almost seemed as if they were thinking one thing and talking about something else completely, and you didn’t know what to believe: the thing they said or the thing they didn’t say.

  A long time ago he had given up speech because it had ceased to matter. Year after year, he had named his brothers and sisters with words that had less and less meaning, until he had stopped naming things altogether. Things were, with or without names. The snow always fell and then melted. There was no point in questioning why, just as there was no reason to ask why the moon turned orange after the first frost or why white flowers appeared each time the earth grew muddy and warm. Ask one question, and a thousand would follow. Doubt, and who were you? Nothing but a creature who paced all night long, who watched the night from behind a screen window. Do what you must; he’d learned that at least. Hang clothes in the closet, unlace sneakers, don’t look in mirrors, try not to think.

  Up in his room, Stephen rewound one of the story tapes Robin had given him and read along with a flashlight. It was a silly children’s tale in which rabbits and bears were not flesh and blood but partly human things who wore suits and could talk. As Stephen followed along, the sound of his own voice disturbed him, but he kept at it. He heard the truck in the driveway when Robin came home; he heard her footsteps on the stairs and, later, the sound of the shower running. Once, he had had the ability to hear a single drop of rain on a single green leaf. Now the sounds all ran together, and he had to force himself to concentrate in order to read.

  And when, finally, his eyes grew weary, and the words on the page ran together in a jumble, he put his book away. He tried his best to ignore the moonlight. Instead, he concentrated on all the things he must learn, inconsequential things he could forget as soon as they allowed him to go home. How i came before e, except after c; how orange juice was poured into a cup, and bread must always be sliced with a knife. How a book began at the beginning, and ended at the last page; how to sit, motionless, in a chair by the window, while out in the driveway a deer that has wandered down the road chews the new shoots of hollyhocks. How to spend the night in a locked room, when what he wanted was right down the hall.

  THREE

  EVERY MEMORIAL DAY THE Dixons had their big party. They hung red, white, and blue streamers from the branches of their maple trees and started barbecuing chicken and ribs at noon. Their little poodle, Casper, was locked in the utility closet early in the day to make certain he wouldn’t bother the guests or steal chicken bones off the paper plates. Various neighbors were enlisted to prepare huge tubs of potato salad and cole slaw, and the first of the season’s lemonade was always served, made with real lemons and cold spring water.

  This year the Dixons really had something to celebrate. Matthew, whom they’d always worried about—his lack of friends for one thing, his weight for another—was home from his first year at Cornell. Matthew was a sweet-faced, hulking boy who had spent his entire high school career locked in his bedroom with a computer. But now it seemed to have paid off. He’d made dean’s list at Cornell and had been allowed to register for graduate seminars; next fall he’d be teaching a section on computer languages to freshmen. As guests arrived, they fished beers out of a trash barrel filled with ice, then stopped by the barbecue, where Matthew was turning peppery ribs with metal tongs, and they patted him on the back, congratulating him and welcoming him home.

  The young people congregated in the rear of the yard, sitting cross-legged on Indian bedspreads, drinking lemonade and beer. The sunlight was honey-colored and thick. Summer was close enough to make everything seem charged, the blades of grass, bare knees, the lazy sound of ice in a paper cup. Lydia Altero, who was seventeen and had brown hair to her waist, sat with her girlfriends and watched Connor duck under the branches of a maple on his way to get himself a drink. He was so tall and so uncomfortable with the neighbors who greeted him that all his movements looked tender and silly. Lydia felt herself grow angry when Josh Torenson bumped into Connor as he approached the rear of the yard and lemonade spilled onto Connor’s white shirt. Without bothering to think what her girlfriends would say, Lydia went over and handed him a paper napkin.

  “Josh is an idiot,” she said. She judged people smartly and quickly, and often found herself in a huff. “Lemonade doesn’t stain,” she told Connor.

  Connor stared at the napkin as if it were something delivered directly from the moon. Lydia Altero hated him, didn’t she? At least that was what he’d always been led to believe. Because their mothers had been best friends for so long, he and Lydia had always been thrown together, with unpleasant results. Lydia was only a few months older than Connor, but she had specialized in pinching when they were babies, and graduated to snubbing him completely by the time they’d entered junior high.

  “Well?” she said to him now. She held on
e hand over her eyes to block out the sun. “Aren’t you going to clean your shirt?”

  It seemed impossible that Connor had known her his whole life and had never once noticed how beautiful she was.

  “What?” Lydia said when she saw the look on his face. “You,” Connor said, before he could stop himself, and then he got all flustered, and pretended to dab at his shirt, which had already dried in the sun.

  Lydia chewed a piece of ice and acted as if she didn’t know what he meant, but there were goose bumps up and down her arms. She’d fallen in love with him so slowly she didn’t even know it herself, until it had all but smacked her in the face last week when she’d seen him talking to a red-haired girl before gym class. She’d actually taken sick with jealousy and had to be sent home by the school nurse.

  “Who’s that with your mom?” she asked.

  Connor whipped his head around as though he’d been shot. Over by the long picnic table, set out with pies and cakes, his mother was introducing Stephen to the Carsons and the Simons. Robin was wearing a blue dress and a strand of old pearls that had belonged to her grandmother. It was amazing to see how calm she looked; how young, really, as though she weren’t even Connor’s mother. Robin arched her neck when she laughed at one of Jeff Carson’s jokes, then poured two glasses of lemonade. When she saw Connor staring, she waved, then turned back to Miriam Carson. This was the date they’d been aiming for. They’d anxiously planned for Stephen’s introduction to their neighbors back when it seemed they had all the time in the world, and now it was here, and Connor wondered if he was the only one who was worried. Stephen’s bad haircut had grown out, and he was wearing the clothes they’d picked out for him at Macy’s. Standing beneath a mimosa tree on a beautiful hot day he looked like any handsome young man you might meet at a party. There was an official story they were supposed to tell, with facts Connor had helped them invent, but looking at Lydia he became undone. Could it be that he’d never noticed that her eyes were blue? Lydia turned for a moment, to wave away her little sister, Jenny, so she couldn’t eavesdrop, and when she turned back to Connor, he could feel his pulse quicken.