The Burgess Boys

  “I can’t tell you what to say.”

  “Nice your brother’s coming. Is it the famous one?”

  “No. The famous one is off vacationing with his wife.”

  A long silence followed. Mrs. Drinkwater said, “Zachary’s father? Does he know?”

  “I emailed him.”

  “He’s still living in … Sweden?”

  Susan nodded.

  Mrs. Drinkwater looked at her little desk, then at the wall above it. “I wonder what that’s like, living in Sweden.”

  “I hope you sleep,” Susan said. “I’m sorry about this.”

  “I hope you sleep, dear. Do you have a pill?”

  “I don’t take them.”

  “I see.”

  Susan stood, ran a hand over her short hair, looked around as though she was supposed to do something but couldn’t remember what.

  “Good night, dear,” said Mrs. Drinkwater.

  Susan walked one flight down and knocked lightly on Zach’s door. He was lying on his bed, huge earphones over his ears. She tapped her own ear to indicate that he should remove them. His laptop lay on the bed beside him. “Are you frightened?” she asked.

  He nodded.

  The room was almost dark. Only one small light was on, over a bookshelf that had stacks of magazines piled on it. A few books lay scattered below. The shades were drawn, and the walls, painted black a few years earlier—Susan had come home from work one day and found them that way—were empty of posters or photographs.

  “Did you hear from your father?”

  “No.” His voice was husky and deep.

  “I asked him to email you.”

  “I don’t want you to ask.”

  “He’s your father.”

  “He shouldn’t write me because you tell him to.”

  After a long moment she said, “Try and get some sleep.”

  At noontime the next day she made Zach tomato soup from a can and a grilled cheese sandwich. He bent his head close to the bowl and ate half the sandwich with his thin fingers, then pushed back the plate. When he looked up at her with his dark eyes, for a moment she saw him as the small child he’d once been, before his social ungainliness had been fully exposed, before his inability to play any sport had hindered him irredeemably, before his nose became adult and angular and his eyebrows one dark line, back when he had seemed a shy and notably obedient little boy. A picky eater, always.

  “Go shower,” she said. “And put on nice clothes.”

  “What’s nice clothes?” he asked.

  “A shirt with a collar. And no jeans.”

  “No jeans?” This was not defiant, but worried.

  “Okay. Jeans without holes.”

  Susan picked up the phone and called the police station. Chief O’Hare was in. Three times she had to give her name before they let her talk to him. She had written down what she would say. Her mouth was so dry her lips stuck to each other, and she moved them extra to get the words out.

  “Any minute now,” she concluded, looking up from the notebook paper she’d written on. “I’m just waiting for Bob.” She could picture Gerry’s big hand holding the telephone, his face without expression. He had added a great deal of weight over the years. Sometimes, not often, he came into the eyeglass store at the mall across the river where Susan worked and he’d wait while his wife’s glasses were fixed. He’d nod to her. He was not pleasant, or unpleasant; she’d have expected it that way.

  “Yuh. Susan. The way I see it is, we got a situation here.” His voice over the phone was tired, professional. “Once we know who the perp is, I’d be wrong not to send someone to get him. Lot of publicity with this.”

  “Gerry,” she said. “Dear God. Please do not send a cop car. Please do not do that.”

  “Here’s what I think. I think we’re not having this conversation. Old friends. That’s what we are. I’m sure I’ll see you soon. Before the day is over. That’s it.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  Bob drove comfortably in his brother’s car, the motion steady beneath him. Through the windshield he saw signs for shopping outlets, or lakes, but mostly there were the trees of Connecticut always moving closer, then whizzing by, then gone. Traffic moved quickly and with a sense of community, as though all drivers were tenants in this fast forward-moving form. The image of Adriana appeared in Bob’s mind. I’m scared, she had said to him, standing by the doorway in a maroon sweat suit, her streaky blond hair moving in the breeze. She had a throaty voice he’d not heard before—she had never talked to him before. Without makeup she looked much younger; her cheekbones were pale, her green eyes, rimmed with red, were large and questioning. But the fingernails were bitten, and this broke his heart. He thought: Almost, she could have been my daughter. For years Bob had lived with the shadow of his not-children appearing before him. Earlier in his life it might have been a child on a playground he passed by, yellow-haired (as Bob had once been), playing hopscotch tentatively. Later a teenager—boy or girl, it happened with each—on the sidewalk laughing with a friend. Or, these days, a law student interning in his office might reveal a sudden aspect of expression that would cause Bob to think: This could have been my kid.

  He asked if she had family nearby.

  Parents in Bensonhurst who managed apartment buildings. Shaking her head, she wasn’t close to them. But she had a job in Manhattan as a paralegal. Except how would she work, feeling so— And she made a circular motion by her ear. Her lips were very pale. Work will help, he told her. You’ll be surprised.

  I won’t always feel this way?, she asked.

  Oh no. No. (But he knew: The end of a marriage was a crazy time.) You’ll be all right, he told her. He told her that many times, as the shivering dog sniffed the ground; she had asked him many times. She said she might lose her job; a woman was coming back from maternity leave and it was a very small office. He gave her the name of Jim’s law firm; the place was big, they hired frequently, she was not to worry. Life had a way of working out, he said. But do you really think so?, she asked, and he said he did.

  The pinkish-tinted buildings of Hartford passed by, and Bob had to slow the car and concentrate. Traffic was picking up. He passed a truck; a truck passed him. And then as he finally drove into Massachusetts, his thoughts, as though waiting, turned to Pam. Pam, his dearly loved ex-wife, whose intelligence and curiosity were matched only by her conviction that she had neither. Pam, whom he had met walking across the campus of the University of Maine more than thirty years ago. She had come from Massachusetts, the only child of older parents who, by the time Bob first greeted them at graduation, appeared worn out by their chaotic daughter (the mother, though, still living, bedridden, in a nursing home not far from this turnpike, no longer knowing who Pam was, or Bob either, should he choose to visit, which he had in the past). Pam, full-figured when she was young, intense, bewildered, always ready to laugh, always tumbling from one enthusiasm to the next. Who could say what anxiety drove her? He recalled her squatting one night to pee between two parked cars in the West Village, drunk and laughing, after they’d moved to New York. Here’s to the women’s movement, a fist in the air. Equal pissing rights! Pam, who could swear like a sailor. His dearly loved Pam.

  And now, seeing a sign for Sturbridge, Bob’s mind went to his grandmother, who used to tell stories of their English ancestors arriving ten generations earlier. Bob, sitting in his child’s chair: “Tell me the part about the Indians.” Oh, there were scalpings, and a little girl kidnapped, taken off to Canada, and her brother, though it took him years in his raggedy clothes, went and rescued her, brought her back to their coastal town. Back then, his grandmother said, women made soap out of ashes. They used daisy root for earaches. One day his grandmother told him how thieves would be made to walk through the town. She said if a man stole a fish he had to walk around town holding the fish, calling out, “I stole this fish and I am sorry!” While the town crier followed, beating a drum.

  Bob’s interest in his
ancestors was over with that story. Forced to walk through the town yelling, “I stole this fish and I am sorry!”?

  No. The end.

  And the beginning of New Hampshire, with its state liquor store right off the turnpike, autumnal clouds low in the sky. New Hampshire, with its archaic legislature of hundreds of people, and still that license plate LIVE FREE OR DIE. The traffic was bad; people were getting off at the traffic circle to make their way to the foliage in the White Mountains. He stopped to get coffee and call his sister. “Where are you?” she said. “I’m losing my mind. I can’t believe you’re so late, except I can.”

  “Oy. Susan. I’ll be there soon.”

  The sun was already on its ride down. Back in the car, he left behind Portsmouth, gussied up for years now, the way so many of these coastal towns were; all that urban renewal started in the late seventies when they got their cobblestone streets back, their old houses fixed up, lampposts from the olden days and lots of candle shops. But Bob remembered when Portsmouth was still a tired naval town; and a deep tremor of nostalgia passed through him as he recalled the potholed, unpretentious streets, the large windows of a department store, long since gone, where the displays had seemed to change only from summer to winter, mannequins waving eternally with a handbag hanging from a broken wrist, an eyeless woman standing next to a happy eyeless man, a garden hose at his feet—they did have smiles, those mannequins. All this Bob remembered, for he and Pam had stopped here on their way to Boston in the Greyhound bus, Pam, swaybacked in her wraparound skirt.

  A million years ago.

  “Stay in the present,” Elaine would say, and so now he was on his way to the unlovely Susan. Family is family, and he missed Jimmy. Bob’s ancient inner Bobness had returned.

  They sat on a cement bench in the lobby of the Shirley Falls police station. Gerry O’Hare had nodded to Bob as though he had seen him yesterday—though in fact it had been years—and then taken Zach through a door to an interview room. An officer brought coffee in paper cups to Bob and Susan; they thanked him, and held the cups tentatively. “Does Zach have friends?” Bob asked when they were alone. He asked this quietly. It had been more than five years since Bob had been to Shirley Falls, and the sight of his nephew—tall, skinny, blank-faced with fear—had startled him. And so had the sight of his sister. She was thin, her short wavy hair mostly gray now; she was strikingly unfeminine. Her plain-featured face looked so much older than he had expected that he could not believe they were the same age. (Twins!)

  “I don’t know,” Susan answered. “He stocks shelves at Walmart. Sometimes—hardly ever—he drives over to West Annett to see a guy he works with. But no one comes to the house.” She added, “I thought they’d let you go in with him.”

  “I’m not registered to practice here, Susan. We went through this.” Bob looked over his shoulder. “When did they build this place?” The old Shirley Falls Police Department had been housed in City Hall, which was a spread-out big building at the bottom of the park, and Bob remembered it as having an openness; you walked in and there were cops behind a desk. This was not like that. This had a small lobby facing two darkened windows, and they’d had to press a doorbell-type thing in order to get someone to even step up to one of them. Bob felt guilty just being here.

  “Five years ago maybe,” Susan said vaguely. “I don’t know.”

  “Why did they need a new police station? The state’s losing population, getting poorer every day, and all it does is build new schools and municipal buildings.”

  “Bob. I don’t care. Frankly. About your observations on Maine. Besides, this city’s population is growing—” Susan’s voice dropped to a whisper. “Because of them.”

  Bob drank his coffee. It was bad coffee, but Bob was not particular about his coffee—or his wine—the way so many people were these days. “Say you thought it was a dumb joke and you’ll have a lawyer on Monday. They might try to get you to say more than that, but don’t.” Bob had told this to Zachary. Zachary, so much taller than the last time Bob had seen him, so skinny, so scared-looking, had just stared at him.

  “Any idea why he did this?” Bob tried to ask the question gently.

  “None.” After a moment Susan said, “I thought maybe you could ask him.”

  This alarmed Bob. He didn’t know what to do about kids. Some of his friends had kids he loved, and Jim’s kids he loved very much, but not having kids made you different. He didn’t see how he could explain that to Susan. He asked, “Is Zach in touch with his father?”

  “They email. Sometimes Zach seems … well, not happy, but less unhappy, and I think it’s because of whatever Steve’s written him, but Zach won’t talk to me about it. Steve and I haven’t spoken since he walked out.” Susan’s cheeks grew pink. “Other times Zach gets really down, and I think that’s related to Steve too, but I don’t know, Bob, okay?” She squeezed her nose, sniffed hard.

  “Hey, don’t panic.” Bob looked around for a paper napkin or a Kleenex, but there was nothing. “You know what Jimmy would say, don’t you? He’d say there’s no crying in baseball.”

  Susan said, “What in hell, Bobby?”

  “That movie they made about women’s baseball. It’s a great line.”

  Susan leaned forward to place her cup of coffee on the floor beneath the bench. “If you’re playing baseball. My son’s in there getting arrested.”

  A metal door opened, slammed shut. A policeman, short, and with a sprinkle of dark moles on his young face, walked into the lobby. “All set, folks. They’re transporting him over to the jail. You can follow him there. They’ll book him and call the bail commissioner, and you can take him back home.”

  “Thank you.” The twins said this in unison.

  The late afternoon light was fading and the town seemed twilight-gray and somber. Following the cruiser they could just make out Zach’s head in the backseat. They drove toward the bridge that would take them across to the county jail. “Where is everyone?” Bob asked. “Saturday afternoon and the town is dead.”

  “It’s been dead for years.” Susan leaned forward as she drove.

  Glancing down a side street Bob saw a dark-skinned man walking slowly, his hands in the pockets of his open coat, which seemed too big for him. Under the coat he wore a long white robe that went to his feet. On his head was a squarish cloth hat. “Hey,” Bob said.

  “What?” Susan looked at him sharply.

  “Is that one of them?”

  “One of them? You’re like a retarded person, Bob. Living in New York all these years, and you haven’t seen a Negro?”

  “Susan, relax.”

  “Relax. Hadn’t thought of that. Thanks.” Susan pulled into a spot near the police car, which had driven into a large parking area behind the jail. They had a brief glimpse of Zach in handcuffs. He seemed to fall against the cruiser once he stepped out, then the officer guided him toward the building.

  “Right behind you, buddy,” Bob called out, opening the car door. “Got you covered!”

  “Bob, stop,” said Susan.

  “Got you covered,” he called again.

  Again they sat in a small lobby. Only once did a man in dark blue clothes step out, to tell them that Zach was being booked, fingerprinted, and that they had put in a call to the bail commissioner. It might take awhile for him to show up, the man said. How long? He couldn’t say. And so brother and sister sat. There was an ATM, and a vending machine. And, again, the darkened windows.

  “Are we being watched?” Susan whispered.

  “Probably.”

  They sat in their coats, looking straight ahead. Finally Bob asked quietly, “What’s Zach do other than stock shelves?”

  “You mean, does he drive around and rob people? Is he addicted to child porn? No, Bob. He’s just—Zach.”

  Bob shifted in his coat. “You think he has any connection to a skinhead group? White supremacy group, anything like that?”

  Susan looked at him with surprise, and then squinted her eyes. ??
?No.” Adding in a softer tone, “I don’t think he has a real connection with anybody. But he isn’t like that, Bob.”

  “Just checking. It’s going to be okay. He might have to do community service. Take a diversity class.”

  “Do you think he’s still in handcuffs? That was terrible.”

  “I know it,” Bob said, and he thought about how the sight of his Preppy Boy neighbor being led across the street felt as if it had happened years ago. Even his morning talk with Adriana seemed not believable, it was so far away. “Zach’s not in cuffs now. That’s just procedure. To escort him here.”

  Susan said tiredly, “Some of the local clergy want to have a rally.”

  “A rally? About this?” Bob rubbed his hands across his thighs. “Oy,” he said.

  “Could you not say ‘Oy’?” Susan asked angrily. “Why do you say that?”

  “Because for twenty years I’ve worked for Legal Aid, Susan, and lots of Jewish people work for Legal Aid, and they say ‘Oy’ and now I say ‘Oy.’ ”

  “Well, it sounds affected. You’re not Jewish, Bob. You’re as white as they come.”

  “I know that,” Bob agreed.

  They sat in silence. Bob finally said, “When is this rally?”

  “I have no idea.”

  Bob dropped his head, closed his eyes.

  After a few minutes, Susan asked, “Are you praying, or are you dead?”

  Bob opened his eyes. “Remember how we took Zach and Jim’s kids to Sturbridge Village when they were little? The smugness of those toady women who guide you around dressed up with those dumb hats that cover their heads? I’m a self-loathing Puritan.”

  “You’re a self-loathing weirdo,” Susan answered. She was agitated, craning her neck to peer through the darkened window of the entrance. “What’s taking so long?”

  And it was long. They sat there for almost three hours. Bob stepped outside once to have a cigarette. The sky had grown dark. By the time the bail commissioner showed up, Bob’s weariness seemed like a large wet coat he was wearing. Susan paid the two hundred dollars in twenties, and Zach came through the door, his face as white as paper.