“No.”
Dylan looked relieved. “Thanks,” he said.
“I’ll have that fifty bucks back now.”
“Sure, okay.”
“How’d he find out, anyway?”
“Didn’t he tell you? Mrs. Kushner saw you climbing down the tree.”
“Great,” John said, and swore under his breath.
“What kind of deal did you work out with Dad?”
John treaded carefully. “Nothing, yet.”
“Well,” Dylan offered, trying to be friends, “I don’t think you’re going to be grounded anymore.”
“Why not?” Being grounded for absolutely ever was the thing John feared most.
“Because they don’t know what the hell they’re doing.”
• • •
HAROLD HAD LEFT the breakfast table and gone upstairs to lie down, not up to going in to the office. Audrey had let him go, but he knew it was just a matter of time before she came after him. He felt profoundly depressed; he’d felt such despair by the end of breakfast that he’d wanted to weep. If only he could pinpoint the exact cause of his despair!
Instead, he began to focus on the unpleasantness of their family meals. Breakfast this morning had been excruciating. Maybe he would take to his bed indefinitely and have Audrey send him up his food on a tray.
Harold stared bleakly at the ceiling, at the network of fine cracks in the plaster. Other families hardly ever sat down to eat together anymore. They’d just grab whatever. But Audrey had put her foot down about the family meals years ago—and it was making them all crazy. She was living in a fantasy, Harold thought to himself, his resentment bulging like a boil getting ready to burst, if she believed all these forced meals together were doing them any good. Just look at them! They were hardly the ideal family that Audrey had in mind. Other families—hundreds, thousands of them—got to eat in front of the TV, and they seemed to do all right.
The fact is, Harold told himself, as if this was crystallizing for him for the first time, Audrey is a control freak.
Then he had his first truly subversive thought in years. It bubbled up from somewhere. He’d buy a portable television and set it up in the kitchen so that from now on they could all watch the news while they ate supper! To hell with Audrey—they’d try it his way for a change.
When he heard Audrey coming up the stairs a little while later, he was already feeling a little better—because he had a goal. Audrey sat down beside him, her wide rump pooling on the bed. He wished she’d go away.
“Harold,” she said.
When he didn’t say anything, she pulled a scrap of paper out of her housecoat pocket and held it up in front of his face. He looked at it and paled. Jesus. That was it.
“We need to talk about this,” Audrey said.
Harold closed his eyes. He could think of absolutely nothing to say, no feasible way to explain the crazy things he’d written. Christ.
“You can’t go on avoiding things forever,” Audrey said firmly. “Obviously there’s something wrong. You need help.”
He could just go along, he thought tiredly—it would take less effort than resisting her. Either way, the result would be the same. She’d win in the end.
“There’s nothing to be ashamed of,” Audrey said. “This . . . crazy thinking . . . may just be from getting hit on the head. I think we should get it checked out.”
Harold mutely gave in. Let her think it was brain damage. He didn’t care anymore.
“I’ll call Dr. Goldfarb and get a referral,” Audrey said.
• • •
HAROLD WAS STILL in bed upstairs; he hadn’t moved in a couple of days, except to go to the bathroom. Audrey was worried sick, but when she’d called Dr. Goldfarb the day before, his secretary had told her he was away till Monday, so for now there was nothing she could do. But Audrey couldn’t stand to do nothing, so she started to think about Harold’s upcoming birthday. She was out of ideas. She decided to talk to the boys and plan something extra special, something to cheer Harold up.
She tried to pull the boys away from the TV but they were in the middle of a football game and they swatted her away like an annoying fly. She had to wait until halftime. She kept sticking her head in the basement, and when the game finally stopped she grabbed the remote and hit the mute button.
They looked at her like she’d lost her reason.
“What’d you do that for?” Dylan said.
“I want to talk to you,” Audrey said firmly, “about your father.”
John looked away uneasily, trying to lip-read the commentators on the TV.
“In case you’ve forgotten, your father’s birthday is coming up,” Audrey said, “and I think we should make a fuss.”
“You mean more of a fuss than usual?” Dylan said.
“Yes.”
“Why?” asked Dylan.
John looked at Dylan like he wanted to kick him.
“Because,” Audrey said, “in case you haven’t noticed, your father is going through a difficult time.”
“We noticed,” said Dylan. “So—are you going to tell us what’s going on?”
John glared at his brother, but Dylan didn’t seem to care.
“Well,” Audrey said, sighing. “It’s complicated.”
“It’s all right, Mom. You don’t have to tell us anything,” John said.
Her heart went out to John, who always hated to deal with anything embarrassing or uncomfortable.
“I think if Dad’s cracking up, we should know about it,” Dylan said.
“He’s not cracking up!” Audrey protested, her voice rising. She paused to wonder at the perspicacity of her youngest boy. He hadn’t seen Harold talking to people who weren’t there; he hadn’t seen the paper that she was still carrying around in her pocket because she was afraid to put it down anywhere. At least she didn’t think he had. But he’d hit the nail on the head anyway.
“He’s depressed about his friend dying.” She tried that out.
“The friend we’d never heard of?” Dylan asked.
“Don’t be a smartass,” Audrey snapped. She took a deep breath and tried to speak more calmly. “And you know he’s had those two hits on the head,” she reminded them. “That sort of thing can cause a change in personality. Usually only temporary,” she added hastily.
“Yeah, right,” Dylan said.
“Anyway, he’s agreed to see the doctor again. Maybe he just needs some time to get over the concussions,” Audrey said hopefully.
“In the meantime . . .” John trailed off.
“In the meantime what?” Audrey said.
John seemed unable to find the words. John always seemed to have trouble articulating what he wanted to say.
“You want to know what’s going to happen to you after the stunt you pulled,” Audrey said. John nodded. “Well, I’m not going to board up the window—that would look terrible.”
This was a little confusing for John. It also didn’t give him the information he so badly needed to know. He waited anxiously.
At last Audrey said, “I haven’t figured that out yet.” She saw Dylan smirk at John, and added, with a spark of irritation, “But for now you’re still grounded—indefinitely. And if I were you, I’d lie low for a couple of days.”
John looked down at his feet.
“Now, what are we going to do about your father’s birthday?”
“Mom, maybe Dad isn’t in the mood for a big splash for his birthday,” Dylan pointed out. This seemed pretty obvious to everyone. The game was coming back on, and John’s eyes slid back to the television. Audrey kept her grip firmly on the remote.
“I wasn’t thinking of a party or anything,” Audrey said, “but we ought to do something special.” Then she had an inspiration—why didn’t she think of this before? “You boys could make something for him. That might cheer him up.”
Dylan groaned and rolled his eyes. John looked doubtful.
“Like what?” John asked.
??
?I don’t know,” Audrey said brightly. “I’ll leave that to you. I’m sure you’ll come up with something.” She tossed the remote back to the couch—where Dylan neatly intercepted it with one hand before it hit the cushion—and left them to their football game.
“What do you make of that?” Dylan said, when Audrey had gone back upstairs.
“I don’t know,” John said, not wanting to talk about it.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Harold wasn’t the only one having an identity crisis. It was with dismay that Audrey read in the newspaper that the average age of a child leaving home was now twenty-eight. She had a neighbour, a woman with four children, who started training for a marathon just to get away from the kids. Audrey saw her every day, running down the street away from her house. Audrey, standing in the living room looking out the window with a cup of coffee in her hand, watched her go now. She understood perfectly.
It was Monday at last, and the house was empty. Dylan had annoyed her this morning by impersonating her at breakfast—dancing and twirling around the kitchen with the Swiffer while he poured coffee and hummed along with the radio. Surprisingly, Harold had got up and gone to work as usual, looking much like his normal self. Audrey, exhausted from the weekend, had let him go. She returned to the kitchen, poured herself a second cup of coffee, and glanced again at the newspaper for confirmation. It definitely said twenty-eight. She’d never last that long.
For a moment she fantasized about getting a job, or going back to school. She’d been having this fantasy quite a lot lately, but practicality always took over. Her family needed her too much. They seemed to need her more now than ever, which wasn’t how it was supposed to be at all. But the last thing she should be thinking about, under the circumstances, was herself.
Today she would call Dr. Goldfarb again. She had a brain wave and figured she could talk to Goldfarb about Dylan’s drug problem at the same time, thus killing two birds with one stone. Also, she still had to find a birthday present for Harold—now she was thinking of something along the lines of a new, comfy bathrobe, as the old one which she seemed to be looking at all the time these days was getting pretty ratty, which irritated her.
Or was that too enabling?
Downstairs, in the laundry room, she sorted the pile of wash that always seemed to spring up overnight like a giant mushroom in the moist darkness of the unfinished part of the basement.
• • •
BACK AT WORK, Harold felt himself starting to revive. Even his spine was straighter; he was like a thirsty plant that had been given some water. There was nothing like having a goal. He was going to work through lunch and leave work early to buy a television at Future Shop on the way home. For this reason, he had taken the rental car to work again today instead of the subway and would again spend over twenty dollars on parking. It would be worth it though. Also, he’d been thinking about the girl at Staples, the one with straight As. Audrey was adamant the boys not have after-school jobs, but during this morning’s staff meeting, Harold had had the brilliant idea of tying their allowance to chores. Instead of handing out twenty dollars a week to each of them like he did now, their spending money could be made contingent upon their doing chores around the house! Why hadn’t they thought of this before?
He had also learned from Al that his car was in fact going to be fixed and would be ready in a couple of days. Harold was sitting at his desk thinking about how to find a lawyer for John’s careless driving charge, when he noticed the spider. How did a spider get in here?
He watched with interest as the spider wove its web at the base of his potted palm. It was fascinating to watch it work; Harold hadn’t been this interested in anything at the office in ages. The papers that required his attention were sitting on his desk, ignored.
When, Harold asked himself, had he lost his natural boy’s interest in bugs? He could remember, as a child, trapping clusters of tiny fruit flies in his cupped hands, shaking them all about and then releasing them, laughing at their seemingly drunken flight. He could suddenly remember this very clearly—he used to do it in the barn at Riverdale Farm.
There was a knock on his partially open door, but Harold didn’t look up. He called, “Come in.” He didn’t realize that in his enthusiastic study of the spider he had leaned so far forward in his chair toward the potted palm that he was actually below the sightline of the desk.
“Where the hell are you, Harold?” Stan Toft, his supervisor, asked.
“Over here,” Harold said, popping his head up for a minute, and then dropping below the desk again.
“Did you drop something?” The other man came over to see what Harold was doing.
“This is fascinating,” Harold said.
“What?”
“Have you ever watched a spider weave a web? It’s really something.”
Stan looked carelessly at the spider and then more intently at Harold. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.”
“Good. Then get back to work. I want your report by the end of the day.”
Harold reluctantly turned back to his desk. He picked up a pen and started to scan a page. But once his supervisor was out of the room, he went back to studying the spider. He admired its purposefulness, its skill, how it seemed to build something out of nothing. He could happily watch the spider work for hours.
“I don’t like to disturb you when you’re busy,” his mother said, from somewhere between the filing cabinet and the potted palm.
Harold got an unpleasant adrenaline surge and whipped his head around to where the voice was coming from. “Leave me alone!” he said, a knee-jerk reaction.
“I’m worried about you,” said his mum.
Harold looked around wildly and got up to close his office door. “I’m fine,” he said. “Now go away.”
“Harold, I’m your mother. I may not have been the best mother, but you could have done a lot worse.”
This was true; he really didn’t have anything against his mother, other than her consorting with the dead. He’d held that against her all his life and this wasn’t helping any. Now that he was sober, he’d lost all interest in those questions he’d had ready for her the other night, save one. “Am I going to die?” he whispered.
“How would I know?” his mum answered.
“Is that why you’re here?”
“I’m dead, not omniscient. I can’t tell you what’s going to happen.” She paused, and added, “It’s not that different here than it is there, to tell the truth. We have a little more perspective, but that’s about it.”
This was all so bizarre that Harold was beginning to wonder if he was imagining it. Either way, the implications were alarming. He wanted more than anything to escape, to pretend this wasn’t happening. He didn’t want to know why his mother was here.
“I have to go to a meeting now,” he lied.
“Fine. But when you have a minute there’s someone here that would like to talk to you.”
“Who?”
But she was already gone, and Harold turned at a sound near his office door. His supervisor, Stan, was standing there, tapping his knuckles on the opened door, looking at him uncertainly.
“For a minute there it looked like you were talking to the filing cabinet,” he said.
Harold laughed as if it were a great joke.
• • •
HAROLD WAS AT Future Shop after work, staring at a dizzying array of televisions. This was more choice than anyone could ever need. He just wanted something simple. He searched in vain for someone to help him navigate through all this excess functionality, but it looked like he was on his own. He read about the features of each model carefully, comparing prices. At last, he made his selection, telling himself it didn’t really matter—he’d just take the cheapest one. It was a fourteen-inch jvc and he thought it would fit nicely on the end of the kitchen counter.
He searched carefully for the right box, and then, with a grunt, careful to lift with his legs not his back, hoisted i
t up and carried it with some difficulty to the cash. It wasn’t that big, but it was awkward and heavier than he expected, and his stomach got in the way. When he got to the cash there was a lineup. He needed to put the TV down but there was no room on the counter, so he put it down on the floor, this time forgetting to use his legs instead of his back, because he was more focused on not dropping the damn thing and he was running out of time before he’d lose his grip. When he tried to straighten up, a stabbing pain shot down his lower back and into his leg.
Shit.
He straightened gingerly, careful to put weight on his right leg very gradually. He was breathing heavily and wincing in pain, embarrassed that he couldn’t carry a portable TV a few feet without injuring himself. He was surrounded by slim, limber people in their teens and early twenties, and for a few seconds he actually considered starting an exercise program, maybe some stretches at least.
When it was his turn, the girl at the cash leaned over and scanned the box and said, “Will that be a cash or credit?”
Harold was leaning his fingertips on the counter and still trying to put his full weight on his right leg when he suddenly remembered the screwed-up state of his financial identity. He’d been so blinded by his desire for this TV that he’d simply forgotten that for the time being, his credit was nonexistent. He’d had to use cash when he’d bought the shredder. How could he have forgotten something so critical?
She raised her eyebrows at him, impatient, and said, “Do you have a credit card, or will that be cash?” At the word cash, she smirked.
The smirk tried his patience severely, but of course he didn’t have that much cash on him; just paying for the parking had cleaned him out. He felt the flush creep up his neck.
She shook her head. “Next,” she called, fed up. The people in the line behind him were fidgeting rudely, utterly without compassion. He saw the rolling eyes of the superior young woman behind him; a kid no older than Dylan looked impatiently at his watch and huffed loudly.
None of these people, Harold thought numbly, realized the situation—that he wouldn’t be able to get through supper tonight— that he simply wouldn’t be able to carry on—without this TV.