Grand & Humble

  “What?” Ricky said.

  “I can’t,” Harlan said.

  “Can’t what?”

  “Listen to my gut.” He sighed. “It’s telling me to stand up to my mom.”

  “So?”

  Harlan explained how the one time he had stood up to her, she went and got him kicked off the swim team. “So you see? I can’t do it.”

  “Bullshit!” Ricky said. “Har, are you listening to yourself? You just got through telling me that if you don’t listen to your gut, some disaster is going to happen. A disaster! You might even die! If your gut is saying the only way to avoid that is to stand up to your mom, you need to listen, dude, listen.”

  “But I also need to swim!” Harlan said.

  Ricky shook his head. “No. Swimming’s not the same thing. It’s great and everything. But swimming’s just something you do. It’s not who you are.”

  “So what now? What do I do next?”

  Ricky thought for a second. Then he said, “You really feel like if you don’t stand up to your mom, something bad is gonna happen?”

  Harlan sighed again. “I’m sure of it.”

  Ricky shrugged. “Then you don’t have any choice. You have to tell your mom to go to hell.”

  Harlan found his mother in her dressing room just off the master bedroom. She had a whole network of rooms back there: the dressing room, a walk-in closet, even her own private bathroom, which his dad was not allowed to use. But there were no windows here, making it feel a little like a cave. That seemed fitting, somehow—like Harlan was Beowulf finally confronting Grendel’s mother in the depths of her lair.

  His mom was sitting at her dressing table, wearing a bathrobe. There was a huge mirror in front of her, but Harlan was standing at the wrong angle, so he couldn’t see her face.

  “Mom,” he said. “There’s something I need to say.”

  She didn’t even look over at him. “Not now, Harlan. I have an important dinner tonight, and I need to get ready.” Incredibly, Harlan’s mom still hadn’t said one word to him about his having a panic attack the night of the Eye Ball. Apparently, she couldn’t conceive of a son of hers doing such a thing, so it was like she had just decided to pretend it had never happened.

  “Yes, now,” Harlan said. “It can’t wait.”

  His mom turned to him at last. She hadn’t put her face on yet. For the first time since he could remember, he was seeing her without any makeup. She looked drab and gray, like a burned-out lightbulb. But more than anything, she looked sad.

  “What is it?” she said. “But make it quick.”

  “Something needs to change,” he said.

  “What? What are you talking about?” Did she really not have any idea where this was going? She sure sounded convincing.

  But Harlan wasn’t giving up that easily. “You can’t just tell me what to do anymore.”

  She turned back to the mirror and picked up a pair of tweezers. As far as she was concerned, this conversation was over.

  “Did you hear me?” Harlan said.

  She rolled her eyes—or was it just that she was tweezing her eyebrows? “Harlan, I’ve got a million things to do. There’s a new tie on your bed. I’d like you to wear it to the Harris Foundation dinner this weekend, with your navy jacket.”

  “Mom,” he said evenly, “that’s exactly what I mean. I never said I’d go to the Harris Foundation dinner. You never asked. In the future, I’ll do two events a month for you and dad. But they’ll have to fit into my schedule. I think that’s fair. And I’ve already done two events this month, so I won’t be going anywhere this weekend.”

  His mother put down the eyebrow tweezers. “Harlan, didn’t we go through this already? Do you want to lose your swimming privileges?”

  “I don’t care about swimming. This is more important than swimming.”

  “Fine,” his mother said. She picked up a bottle of liquid foundation and started smearing it over her face. It made things smooth and uniform, but hard, like porcelain.

  He studied the back of her swanlike neck. “Fine, what?” he asked.

  “Fine, you won’t be swimming anymore. And I wouldn’t get too comfortable with that car of yours either.”

  “Mom,” Harlan said, oh-so-patiently, “you saw what happened at the Eye Ball. Did you think I was putting on an act? Don’t you see? I can’t do it anymore.”

  She didn’t respond. She was determined to keep pretending that the incident at the Eye Ball had never happened.

  “Did you hear me?” Harlan said.

  “I heard,” she answered. “It doesn’t change anything.”

  “Mom, why are you doing this?”

  “Doing what? What am I doing?” It sounded like she honestly didn’t know.

  “Just answer me one question,” Harlan said. “Why are you so angry with me?”

  She kept working on her face. She put down the bottle of foundation, then picked up another container and started powdering. “Angry at you?” she said. “Do I look like I’m angry at you?”

  Yes, Harlan thought, watching her work. She looked absolutely furious. Who else would answer the question “Why are you so angry at me?” with such indifference?

  But Harlan didn’t budge. “I’m not going to the dinner,” he said. “And, for the record, in the future I’ll decide my extracurricular activities.”

  She sighed. “Harlan, I’m sorry you feel that this family is such a terrible burden on you.”

  “Guilt won’t work, Mom. Not this time.”

  “You’re going to the dinner, and that’s final. I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

  “I’m not going, Mom. Get me kicked off the swim team, take my car, I’m still not going.”

  She just kept working on her face.

  “Mom?”

  When she still didn’t answer, he stepped toward her. She was sitting in a swivel chair, and he reached for her shoulder, to turn her around and make her face him. “Mom, listen—”

  The second he touched her, she pulled back, as if recoiling from the brush of a ghost. “Don’t touch me.”

  He withdrew his hand, but he didn’t step away. She immediately started working on her face again, but too broadly, awkwardly. She was trying hard not to let Harlan see her sweat, but it wasn’t working. So close to her, he could even see her tremble.

  “You know what?” Harlan said. “When I came here tonight, I thought this was about the Eye Ball and the Harris Foundation dinner—about the fact that you’re threatened by my standing up to you. But now I see that this isn’t about that at all. It’s about the fact that you’ve resented me all along. The thing I still don’t understand is why. What did I do that makes you so unhappy?”

  She froze, eyeliner in hand. “Do you really want to know?”

  It took Harlan aback, hearing his mother basically agree that she “resented” him. At the same time, he knew she was only trying to throw him off-balance—like the way she’d smashed the plates on the floor when she was resurfacing that mosaic table.

  “I said I did,” Harlan said. “And I do.”

  She swiveled around to face him. He couldn’t remember the last time they had been so close—and face-to-face, no less. “You may not like it,” she said.

  “Tell me,” Harlan whispered, unnerved in spite of himself.

  “You’re adopted,” she said matter-of-factly.

  Harlan had expected her to say a lot of things. But he hadn’t expected this. “What?”

  “It’s true. You’re the son of my brother and his girlfriend.”

  It’s a lie, Harlan thought—another way to throw him off guard. Or was it? Somehow it had the ring of truth.

  “I remember the first night you came to us,” his mother went on, almost wistfully, as her eyes lost their focus. “Just a baby. You looked so helpless. You reached up to me, desperate to be held. But you barely cried. You had already learned that it didn’t make any difference.”

  “But why—” Harlan started to say.
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  “Because he was a drunk!” his mother said. All of a sudden, her eyes had their focus back, and more. “Among other things. One night, he got drunk and left you alone in the bathtub. You almost drowned.”

  H2O danger Tub! The words of the Ouija board hit Harlan right in the gut. That hadn’t been a reference to Harriet Tubman High School, or anything in his future; it had been a reference to his past, to danger in an actual tub—a bathtub he’d been left alone in as a baby! Did this also explain the premonition he’d had that night—of his drowning at what he’d thought was the meet with Harriet Tubman High School? Like all his premonitions, it had been shadowy and unclear. So maybe it wasn’t the future he’d seen, but the past; Marilyn Swan had said that the future and the past were often hard to distinguish. Maybe all his “premonitions” were impressions from the past! And speaking of Mrs. Swan, this could definitely be what she had meant about an “accident in the water.”

  But his mom had no way of knowing what Mrs. Swan had told him, or what the spirits—or his own subconscious—had been trying to tell him with the Ouija board. Which meant his mom had to be telling the truth!

  It was too much information. Harlan could barely take it all in. But he’d said he wanted the truth, so now he was determined to see it through.

  “What happened to them—my parents?” Harlan asked. “Are they still alive?”

  “Not your father,” his mom said. “Four years after he lost custody to us, he committed suicide.”

  “Why didn’t you tell—” But even as he was speaking, Harlan had another thought: this was why his mother resented him! She was finally really telling the truth. Her feelings for Harlan weren’t about him at all. They were about her brother—a drunk, “among other things.” For the control freak that was his mother, that would have been inexcusable. Had his mom tried to control her brother too, only to lose him in the end? No doubt Harlan looked just like him. (This also explained her obsession with keeping him away from drugs and alcohol; it wasn’t just about him not embarrassing her and his father.)

  “He was crazy, Harlan,” his mom said. “Eventually, he even started seeing things.”

  Seeing things? Harlan thought. As in “premonitions”?

  “When I look at you,” his mom went on, “at how erratically you’ve been acting, I see the same thing happening all over again. That’s why it’s so important that you listen to me, and do the things I ask. If you keep going down the road you’re on, you’re headed straight for disaster.”

  Disaster. There was that word again. Was she right? Were his premonitions a sign that he was just like his father—that he was crazy?

  Suddenly Harlan started laughing. And all the anxiety and confusion he’d been experiencing? It was gone, like black smoke swept away by a clarifying wind.

  His mom pulled her robe tight. “You think this is funny?” she said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I think it’s hilarious!”

  His mom wasn’t right; Ricky was. Harlan had to listen to his gut. It was all he had to go on. And even now, his gut was telling him that his mom was full of crap. Oh, her argument that his standing up to her put him on the road to disaster was interesting. There was a reason why his dad’s campaign manager and political strategists all ultimately answered to her; she was an expert tactician, and quick on her feet to boot.

  But his mom was absolutely wrong when it came to Harlan. As a result, she had to be stopped once and for all. And Harlan had come prepared, with just the right weapon. This time he did have a strategy.

  Harlan kept laughing, but he wasn’t feeling happy so much as serene. So this is what wisdom felt like! He’d never experienced anything quite like it before.

  “Don’t you laugh at me!” his mom said. “And don’t you dare laugh while—”

  “Listen,” he said, stopping her in mid-sentence; he didn’t think he’d ever stopped her in mid-sentence before. “Things are going to be different around here from now on.”

  “I refuse to listen—”

  “Do you know why?”

  He’d stopped her again. She didn’t answer his question. She looked confused; by throwing the adoption in Harlan’s face, she thought she’d won. Now she didn’t know how to respond. Her big guns hadn’t been so big after all.

  Harlan reached into his pocket and pulled out a plastic bag full of white pills.

  “Do you know what these are?” he said.

  She still didn’t speak. Could it be that she was finally at a loss for words? His mom, the woman who wrote the speeches that got his dad elected to the U.S. Senate and who, even now, edited the words churned out by his staff of highly paid speechwriters?

  “They’re drugs, Mom. Ecstasy, to be exact.” He wasn’t lying. Jerry Blain was good for something after all.

  “What are you—”

  “Nothing at all. I’m certainly not taking them, if that’s what you’re thinking. But here’s the deal. Unless you back off, I’ll be caught with them.”

  “You would do that to your—”

  “I’d do much more than that,” he said, still speaking calmly, evenly. “And think about it. The Senator’s son? Caught with Ecstasy? Does Mr. Family Values really want to have to explain that to his fans at the Christian Coalition? Remember how much embarrassment the Bush girls caused their parents?”

  Harlan’s mom glared at him. What little color there had been in her unrouged cheeks was gone now. It was blackmail, plain and simple: that’s what he was doing to her. Just because his mom didn’t want him ending up an addict like his biological father, that didn’t mean she wasn’t aware of the political ramifications too. He hated that he had to resort to such a thing—to lower himself to her level. But he had to do it. It was the only way. Sometimes you had to fight fire with fire. Sometimes the path to peace was war.

  He had her now, and she knew it. He could see it in the set of her jaw. It was over, and he’d won. She was vanquished. This time, he had all the leverage. This time, he was the one who would be getting his whole way.

  Even so, there was no reason to rub it in, to take what little dignity she had left; there was no need to do to her what she would have done to him. Without another word, he turned to go.

  “You’d really destroy your own future just to get back at us?” his mom said from behind him. “You hate me that much?”

  He stopped just long enough to answer the question. “I don’t hate you at all,” he said. “But you forced me to choose between myself and you. And I chose myself.”

  MANNY

  Manny sat across from his dad at the kitchen table.

  “Your parents were killed in a car accident when you were three years old,” his dad said.

  “I know,” Manny said. “You told me this already.”

  His dad shook his head. “I didn’t tell you the whole truth. I said you were home with a baby-sitter, but you weren’t. You were with them in the car.”

  “A truck,” Manny said without thinking. “We were hit by a truck.”

  His dad stared at him. “That’s right. Do you remember the accident?”

  Did Manny remember the accident? Or was he just remembering his last nightmare, where he’d come up from out of the cave-in and been creamed by the front of a truck?

  “My nightmares!” Manny said suddenly. “The accident is what my nightmares are all about!” The truck. The asteroid. The tidal wave. He thought about his other nightmares too—they all involved something huge slamming into him.

  Then there was the smell of gasoline. That was part of all his recent nightmares as well. Was that another buried memory from the accident? Did the truck crash into their car, rupturing the gas tank, and had Manny, even as a three-year-old, somehow registered the smell?

  “Glasses!” This time, Manny shouted.

  His dad was confused. “What about them?”

  “Did my biological father wear glasses?”

  Manny’s dad hesitated. “Yeah. I guess he did.”

  So, in the aftermath
of the accident, Manny had somehow seen his dad’s broken spectacles, and remembered. He must have seen the whole accident, but suppressed it. Manny still had no conscious memory of the event itself, not even fleeting images. But the memories were in his head somewhere, pushed deep into the Mariana Trench of his subconscious, and now images from those memories were bubbling upward, resurfacing in the form of nightmares.

  So was that it? Had Manny solved the Mystery of the Recurring Nightmares? Would they finally go away for good?

  His dad didn’t say anything, just looked down at the table.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” Manny asked.

  “You had no memory,” his dad said. “Not just of the accident. Of your parents. The doctor said not to push things. That your memory might return someday. Or that because of your young age, you might never remember. He did tell me that you might have nightmares, but you never did. Not until just these past few months.”

  “No,” Manny said. “I mean, why didn’t you tell me all this yesterday? You said that when my parents were killed, I was home with a baby-sitter.”

  “Downtown,” his dad said. “At the intersection of Grand and Humble. That’s where the accident was. It was a miracle you weren’t killed too. A damn miracle.”

  That’s interesting, Manny wanted to say. But it isn’t the answer to the question I asked.

  “Dad?” Manny said.

  Suddenly his dad stood up and turned away, toward the stove. A second later, the teakettle on that stove began to whistle, almost as if his dad had somehow known it was going to happen.

  His dad reached for the kettle and started pouring the boiling water into a teapot.

  “Dad,” Manny said, more forcefully.

  “Damn!” his dad said. He’d burned his hand from a splash of hot water.

  “Dad! Answer me!”

  His dad put the kettle back on the stove and swung toward the sink. He turned the cold water on full blast and plunged his hand under it. He was still facing away from Manny, so it took a second for Manny to realize that his dad was crying.

  “Dad?”

  He didn’t answer. Manny wasn’t sure if his dad could hear him over the splashing of the water, so he stood up and walked to the sink. His dad’s body was shaking, like he was in the middle of an earthquake, but one centered on him alone.