“I worked really hard on it,” Max added.
“I’m sure you did,” she said, bringing his head up and to her chest. He heard her heart, smelled her skin.
“I almost died. I was buried in the snow,” he said, his words muffled in her shirt.
She held Max tighter now, and for a moment Max felt hopeful. He was no longer cold, and his face no longer burned. For a moment Max again forgot that he might be in trouble, and that trouble would come as soon as his mom walked into his sister’s room.
“I’m sorry you had a bad day, Maxie,” she said.
It sounded like she was actually sorry, but was she sorry enough to understand what Max had done in return? He avoided her eyes, though he could feel the heavy weight of their compassion.
“Where’s Claire?” she asked.
“Who cares?” Max said.
“Who cares?” she laughed. “I do. And you should. She’s supposed to be here. You can’t be here alone after school. You both know that. Did she leave? I want to ask her about this igloo situation.”
This conversation was becoming very satisfying. It hadn’t occurred to Max until then that Claire was in trouble herself. She shouldn’t have left! She was supposed to watch him but she had gone off in the ugly station wagon to chew tobacco. If Max was careful with this situation, he could divert all the attention to Claire’s misdeeds.
But then came the sound of dripping.
“What’s that?” his mom asked.
Max put on an unknowing face and shrugged.
His mom stood quickly. “Sounds like something’s dripping. Did you take a bath?”
Max shook his head. He hadn’t bathed; that was true.
She left the room. He could hear her in the bathroom, tightening the knobs on the tub. The drip persisted. “Where is that coming from?” she asked aloud.
Then she was in Claire’s room.
She screamed.
Max never thought she would scream.
“What is this?” she shrieked.
This will be be hard, Max thought. So hard. He considered his options. He could make up a story about where the water came from. A hole in the roof? Maybe a window had been left open. He wished he’d thought of that sooner. Animals might have come in, tracking snow …
But he had never lied to his mom before and could not do it now. Instead, almost without thinking, he threw off the covers and got out of bed. He walked into Claire’s room and heard the squish of the carpet under his feet. Standing in the doorway, her eyes wild, she saw the bucket and Max’s snow clothes. She bent down to feel the floor and took in a quick breath.
“Did you do this?” she asked.
Max nodded and shrugged at the same time.
“Max, what were you thinking?”
He couldn’t remember. His thoughts had scattered again, into a dozen tiny holes.
She ranted for a few minutes, using her most colorful language, before returning again to the question: “What were you thinking?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“It’s hard to explain.”
She was on her knees now. “This is not good, Max. All this water … It could soak into the beams. It could cause permanent damage to the house.”
This news brought Max to the verge of tears. He wanted this to be temporary. He wanted it all over by dinner. Now the prospect that he’d ruined the house brought an endlessness to the day that crushed the light inside him.
She left the room. Max could hear the opening and slamming of cupboards as she cursed quietly to herself. She was gone a few long minutes. She returned with a pile of towels. “Come on. I’ll help you clean it up.”
They spread towels on the floor, trying to soak up the water. While they were on their knees, she noticed the water on the dolls, the pictures torn from the wall.
“Oh my god,” she said. “The walls? The walls? What the hell is wrong with you?”
Max was wondering the same thing about himself.
She left the room and walked down the stairs. Max heard nothing for many minutes but he dared not move. He heard the car start, roar for a minute. Was she leaving? Then she turned off the engine. Finally he heard her walking up the stairs again and soon she was by his side again, on her knees, helping with the towels on the floor.
“What happened to you two?” she asked. “You used to be so close.”
This made Max more sorry than before.
“I don’t know,” he mumbled.
She let out a sigh that filled the room. “I really need you to help keep this house together, Max,” she said. “I need you to be a force of stability, not chaos.”
Max nodded gravely. Keep the house together. Force of stability. On their hands and knees, Max and his mom continued to place towels on the carpet, trying to soak up the mess beneath them.
CHAPTER V
Max ate his dinner in his room, a plan of action that seemed the best for all concerned. He could hear Claire and his mom and Gary below, ticking and clicking their way through a quiet meal. He hadn’t apologized yet and Claire hadn’t either, and he was of the opinion that allowing the near-death of a brother was worse than soaking the room of a sister. After dinner he heard her leave, off to a babysitting job across the river.
When he was sure she was gone, Max stepped quietly into his mom’s office in a corner of the back porch where she’d set up a desk and pair of bookshelves. The porch overlooked the back yard, black in the cold night, nothing out there but grey tree trunks, their bony fingers pinching brittle, shuddering leaves.
His mom was on the phone, typing on her computer, loudly, like someone pretending to type on a computer. Tap-tap, slip-tap, tap-tick-tap. Her long black hair fell forward, covering her cheeks; a strand was stuck to her lips. She seemed to notice Max but did not look directly at him.
He stepped down into the office, keeping close to the wall. He almost knocked a photo from where it hung, but steadied it. In it, a dozen of his mom’s friends had gathered at a New Year’s Eve party she’d had at the house. Max had been allowed to stay up until twelve, “running around like a friggin maniac” one of the friends had said, laughing, drinking his drink. Late in the night they had built a small fire in the backyard, roasting first a pig and later marshmallows, the guests drinking until they passed out all over the yard and living room and the bedrooms upstairs. The picture showed everyone sane and sober, but Max knew that things had changed later. Later he saw so many strange things: someone hiding in the bathroom, a fight between two of the men, adults on the floor everywhere, grabbing at each other and Max. Someone, at some point, went missing in the woods and wasn’t found for hours. “Last time I do that,” his mother said afterward, though it had been fun, everyone agreed, on balance.
With her phone conversation dragging on, it seemed like a good idea to begin crawling, so Max got down onto all fours and crawled along the edge of the wall until he made his way to the back window. He breathed heavily on the cold glass, making a rough oval of condensation. He drew an apple onto it, liking the crisp line his finger made.
On the phone, his mom’s voice was thin and uncertain. “Do you know exactly what Holloway didn’t like about the report?” she said, pulling the hair from her forehead.
Max’s eyes fixed upon something under her desk: there was a red paper clip bent into the shape of a dragon. He did not want to attract attention, so he slithered, as slowly as he could, toward the paper clip and grabbed it. It was covered in a rubbery casing and felt good in his hands. With a similar length of rubber-covered wire, his father had once used a Swiss Army knife to cut the casing back and then twisted the metal into the shape of a swan. His father could do anything with a Swiss Army knife — or any knife, really. He would make things with his hands and then toss them to Max as if to say, It’s just this thing. Take it if it means anything to you. Max had kept everything he’d ever made — swans, yo-yos, pull-toys, a kite made from vellum and sticks from the backyard.
r /> “I just don’t know where to begin,” his mom said. “I feel like I have to start over and even then I don’t know what he wants.” Her voice quavered, and he wanted to do something to make her feel stronger. So often, when she seemed upset, when someone on the phone was making her cry, he didn’t know what to do. But this night he thought he knew the solution.
He got up, and adopted the posture of a robot. He was very good at his robot imitation and had been told as much many times. He entered her peripheral vision, walking and sounding like a robot — a robot, he decided, who had a slight limp. She had laughed at this before, and he thought she might laugh today.
“I feel like that’s what I did,” his mom said into the phone. “Isn’t that what I turned in?”
Finally she saw Max and forced a smile. He continued walking, turning his head to smile at her, pretending that he was not noticing that he was about to walk into the wall. Thunk. He hit the wall. “Ohhh noo,” he said, in a voice half robot, half Eeyore. “Ohhh noo,” he groaned again, trying to walk through the wall, his robot arms rotating futilely.
She laughed, first silently, then out loud. She snorted. She had to cover the receiver to avoid being heard.
“That’s okay,” she said, recovering. “No problem. I guess I just have to get started. I’ll have it in the morning. Thanks Candy. Sorry to call you at home. This’ll be the last time. See you tomorrow.”
She hung up the phone and looked over at Max.
“Come here,” she said.
He stepped over to her, his forehead at the level of hers. Quickly she took Max in her arms and squeezed him. It was so sudden, though, and the hug was so intense — her arms almost vibrating — that Max let out a gasp.
“Oh Max. You make me happy,” she said, kissing him roughly on the crown of his head. “You and Claire are the only things that keep me going.”
Her hug became tighter, too tight to be meant for him only.
There was a long silence. Max wondered if he should say he was sorry, because he was sorry. But he could not find the word Sorry. He could only find words like I want to live under my bed and Please take me back and Help.
“Do you have a story for me?” she asked.
Max did not have a story ready.
“Yeah,” he said, stretching out the word as long as he could, while he thought of something. She liked to hear his stories, and would type them out on her computer as he narrated. Still searching for a tale, he lay down under the desk, the location where he usually did his narrating. He liked to be underneath, her feet resting on his stomach, where he could watch her face — to gauge her reaction to the story as it progressed — and to see her fingers on the keyboard. He needed to watch her type to make sure she was getting it all down.
He began:
“Once there were some buildings. They were these huge buildings and they could walk. So one day they got up and they left the city. Then there were some vampires. The vampires wanted to make the buildings into vampires so they flew in and attacked them. They bit them. One of the vampires bit the tallest building but his fangs broke off. Then the rest of his teeth fell out. And he cried because he would never get new teeth again. And the other vampires said Why are you crying, aren’t those just your baby teeth? And the vampire said No, those are my grown-up teeth. And the vampires knew he couldn’t be a vampire anymore, so they left him. And he couldn’t be friends with the buildings because the vampires had killed them all.”
“Is that the end?” his mom asked.
“Yeah,” Max said.
His mom finished typing and smiled sadly down at Max.
“The end,” he said.
She continued to rub his stomach with her foot. It felt good and terrible and he was so tired, so very tired, so incredibly tired all over.
CHAPTER VI
A quiet, cream-colored morning. Max stayed in bed until Claire was gone, then slipped into her room. Her bedspread had, for now, been replaced by a sleeping bag. Her wall, where he had soaked her photo collages, was stripped clean. In his bare feet, he could feel the cold water still in the carpet. He knelt and rested his head on the floor. He could hear no creaking in the beams, no signs of permanent damage. But there were dangers, he was sure, that could not be seen or heard, structural weaknesses that might suddenly give way.
Downstairs, Max sat alone on the couch, eating his breakfast — cereal, grapefruit juice, and two bananas. He was reading the sports section of the newspaper, a habit his father had encouraged; when Max was not yet two he began eating his breakfast next to his dad in the morning, the two of them nestled in a corner of the couch, reading the comics and then the sports and sometimes the real estate section.
“Hey Max,” Gary said from the kitchen. “You know where your mom keeps the coffee?”
“In the cabinet under the sink,” Max said.
He heard Gary open that cabinet and close it.
“You sure?”
This was the one pleasure Max took from having Gary in the house. Gary couldn’t remember where anything was in the kitchen, and seemed to be the most gullible adult Max had ever met. This made it far too easy for Max to hide something different every day, some different essential element of Gary’s breakfast, and then pretend to help him find it. One day it was the coffee; another day the filters; another day the lemonade Gary liked to drink; another day the little scooper Gary needed to determine the correct dosage of lemonade crystals in his glass. One day Max replaced Gary’s new English muffins with the molding ones his mother had just thrown out. Another day Max put the butter in the freezer, and heard, from the couch, Gary ruining his muffin while forcing the ice-hard butter into the muffin’s nooks and crannies.
“Maybe the one by the hall?” Max said.
Gary opened the cabinet by the hallway, spent some time looking inside, and finally Max heard it close.
“Wait. I think maybe the fridge,” Max said. “Mom read something about refrigerating it, how you’re supposed to.”
“Thanks bud,” Gary said. And so the fridge opened and closed. A minute later: “Darn,” he said. “I thought we had it that time.”
“Aw, shoot,” Max said.
And the great thing was that whenever Max played the game — only a few times a week, so as to avoid arousing suspicion — Gary seemed to think that the two of them were in it together, that Max was doing everything in his power to help. In Gary’s mind, they’d bonded.
“Oh well,” Gary said, entering the foyer. “Guess I’ll have to spring for the real thing at Monaco’s, eh?”
Max nodded, not having any idea what that meant, and returned to his newspaper. A few seconds later he looked up to find Gary sitting on the bench near the front door. Max had never thought to sit on this bench, which was used for papers, mail, and other things on their way into drawers or out the door. At the moment it was also home to a delicate bird of clay that Max had made in art class, blue and with a dozen toothpicks extending from its torso; the art teacher, Mr. Hjortness, had called it the Blowfish Bluebird, and Max liked that name a lot. Now Gary gently but quickly swept the bird aside to make way for his buttocks. Next he reached down, fumbling for something under the bench. There were many shoes under the bench, all of them his or his mom’s or Claire’s. Now Gary’s shoes dwelled there, too, and it didn’t seem right.
“Hey Max,” he said, while not looking at Max. He was tying his small shoes — they looked like eels, narrow and made of cheap black pleather — and saying, “Max … Max … What rhymes with Max?”
Max didn’t care what rhymed with Max. He wanted Gary to first stop talking, then to leave the house.
Gary, now done with his shoes, looked up. “Hey Max. You know where your mom keeps any tools?”
Max had never seen tools in the house. At least not since his father had left.
“Have you tried the kitchen?” Max said, suppressing a laugh. He heard Gary start toward the kitchen and then stop.
“The kitchen? What would a hammer be doi
ng in the kitchen?” Gary asked. He really had no sense of humor at all, thank god.
Now he was in front of Max again. He was looking out the window, at his car, a crumbling white sedan. “Not that I’m ‘handy’ or anything,” he said, making a crank-turning gesture intended to mean “handy.” “I can’t get my trunk open. I need a big hammer or something. Sometimes you just need a hammer to get down to real business, am I right or am I right?”
Max couldn’t think of a good answer to that round of nonsense, so he went back to his sports section.
“Oh well,” Gary said, as he shoved his pale, freckled arms through the sleeves of his jacket. “Another day, huh?”
Max shrugged again without looking up.
Gary took a few steps toward him; he was suddenly far too close. “Listen. I’m, like, trying to make your mom happy.”
Max’s face went hot. Every so often Gary decided to make such a pronouncement, a statement meant to define exactly why he was sleeping in their home three or so nights a week. And always Max wanted these moments over as soon as possible. He felt Gary close, standing to his right, trying to catch Max’s eye. Max stared so intensely at his cereal that he felt sure he could see the microscopic chemical compounds that formed each flake.
“Whatever,” Gary finally said. He walked over to the stairs. “See ya Connie,” he yelled.
“What?” his mother yelled down the stairs.
Gary mumbled something to himself and, returning to the foyer, began looking for something in his pockets. He didn’t find it, so he eyed the change bowl on the bench. It was a silver bowl, evidence of some anniversary, and it was always full of coins, safety pins, barrettes, pens and pencils. And now it was filled with Gary’s soft pink hand. Max watched as Gary’s fingers made their way through the bright coins, slithering in every direction. Like the tentacles of a squid bringing food into its gaping maw, the fingers gathered ten or so quarters into the sweaty center of his Gary’s fist. He deposited the bounty into his front pants pocket and left.