Somebody's Fool, page 17
“You kept taking him back, is how she sees it.”
“Okay, but it was me he beat on, not her. I got the scars to prove it.”
“I know you do, Janey,” Ruth said, adding, “so do I.”
“Wonderful,” Janey said. “Throw that in my face while you’re at it. You took my beating.”
“I was glad to take your beating.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Saint Fucking Ruth.”
They were quiet then, and because the quiet seemed to give her permission, Janey began to cry. Finally, she said, “Where is she now?”
“Out in the shed.” Which was what they called the massive structure—ten times the size of the adjacent house—where Grandpa Zack’s treasures were stored.
“For the love of God,” Janey said. “It’s ten o’clock on a Saturday night. What is she doing out there?”
“She’s out there most nights.”
“Alone?”
“As far as I know. I don’t go checking on her.”
“No, you’re snooping on the computer,” Janey said.
Ruth ignored this. “She’s fixed it up nice. She’s got a sofa-sleeper in there and a TV. A small fridge.”
“But why?”
“I don’t know, Janey. You’re not the only one she doesn’t have a lot to say to.”
“And now this Will is back.”
“That’s the thing,” her mother said, embarrassment creeping back into her voice. “He’s not. He’s somewhere in England. On some sort of scholarship. It was on his last Facebook post. Also? He’s engaged.”
“Poor Tina,” Janey said, crying harder now. Poor little girl. Because that’s the way she still saw her grown daughter. “So, you’re saying she’s losing her mind.”
“I’m worried.”
“You think she’s hallucinating.”
“I don’t know. Like I said. The house is being renovated. Maybe it was a worker she saw, somebody who just reminded her of him.”
Janey stifled a sob. “Why can’t she just be normal?”
“Well, that doesn’t exactly run in the family.”
“I’m normal,” Janey managed to choke out.
“Right.”
“I am, damn it. As soon as I hang up, I’m going to drive out to the Hand and I’m going to laugh and dance and listen to loud music. And after that I’m going to go over to Del’s place and let him fuck me silly. And don’t tell me that isn’t normal, because that’s what you and Sully did every time Daddy wasn’t looking.”
“The difference was Sully and I liked each other.”
“I like Del just fine. You’re just jealous because I’m still young and I’ve got somebody in my life and you’re old and you don’t.”
It was the most hateful thing she could think of to say, and it was an exit line if ever there was one, but Janey surprised herself by not hanging up, and neither did her mother. For the longest time they kept the line open, as if there was something left to say. But if so, neither mother nor daughter seemed to know what it was.
Black Tooth
“ALL I CAN SAY IS, I better get this listing,” Toby Roebuck remarked after they had the sex Peter had been hoping for when he invited her out. A pretty funny line, he had to admit.
Leaving the wine bar, he’d hoped Toby might offer her nearby condo, but she said she was anxious to see how the renovations were coming on the Main Street house. They’d taken both cars and he’d worried the entire way that when they arrived back in Bath Thomas’s yellow Caddy would again be in the driveway. It wasn’t, though, which Peter hoped meant his son was telling the truth about being on his way to Canada. If so, then the reflection he’d glimpsed in Infinity’s backbar mirror belonged to another vehicle entirely.
When they arrived, Peter poured them both a brandy and gave Toby a tour of the first floor, including the new chef’s kitchen, which he was particularly proud of. The old kitchen had been small and cramped, the adjacent dining room large and formal, so he and Rub had removed two non-load-bearing walls to open things up. In the center of the newly created space they’d installed a long butcher-block island that could accommodate half a dozen barstools. Above each, individual lights dangled from the ceiling. “Wow!” Toby said. “You did all this yourself?”
“Except for the electrical.”
She ran her painted nails over the butcher-block surface. “Well, whatever you spent, you’ll make it back and more. It’s all about kitchens and baths these days. Can we go upstairs?”
“Let’s not,” he suggested. “It’s all torn up.” Which was true. Both upstairs baths were being retiled, and except for the master bedroom, which was closed off, there was dust and debris everywhere. Also, with sex in the offing Peter found her enthusiasm for real estate unnerving. Even now that the sex was over, her immediate return to the subject was mildly off-putting. “You know,” she said, staring up at the ceiling, as if her realtor vision allowed her to see right through it, “if you hired more help, you could probably get the place on the market by June. Why miss the season?”
For some reason, this pragmatic suggestion caused Peter to reflect upon his earlier conversation with her ex-husband. Was it possible that Carl had been right about Sully having had a serious crush on Toby? The possibility prompted further speculation: If his father had ever been lucky enough to coax her into the sack, would the experience have broken the spell she’d cast over him? He doubted Sully would’ve been disappointed in the sex itself, but Toby’s ability to immediately segue to mundane subjects mere moments after the final shudder of pleasure might well have rattled him. Despite being a realist about most things, Sully was, Peter suspected, a closet romantic. Having nursed a crush for years, he would’ve expected transcendence, and here was yet another dissimilarity between them. Sex, though pleasurable, generally didn’t overwhelm Peter, though he did enjoy its afterglow, especially if it could be enjoyed in dark silence.
Toby, he realized, was now up on one elbow, staring at him. “What’s with you tonight?”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ve been acting like you’re somewhere else.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. Nor was the irony of each lamenting the other’s lack of focus lost on him. Should he come clean about Thomas’s visit? He’d actually been on the verge of doing so during dinner, but the wine bar had been too noisy, the music too loud. He’d imagined this postcoital moment as a better opportunity for intimacy, but now that the moment had arrived, the urge seemed to have passed.
Perhaps sensing this, Toby said, “Fine. Be that way,” and slipped out of bed. “Don’t go anywhere, though. I may not be finished with you.”
When the bathroom door closed behind her, Peter rose and went over to the window, where he parted the curtain and peered into the dark street, again half expecting to see the yellow Caddy glide by or, worse, be sitting in the drive. As much as he wanted it to be true, Peter didn’t believe his son’s story. Somehow sex with Toby had clarified his thinking on the subject. Thomas’s unexpected appearance on the porch this morning had been no spur-of-the-moment decision. When he left West Virginia, Bath, not Montreal, had been his destination. The yellow Caddy he’d glimpsed in the wine bar mirror was Thomas’s.
Also coming into sharper focus was why the conversation with his son had been playing on a loop in his head all evening. On the surface his visit had been pleasant enough, but something Peter wasn’t able to put his finger on at the time had felt off about it. How was it that Thomas appeared to hold no grudge about how things had worked out? About him and his little brother growing up with their mother in West Virginia, estranged from himself and Will up here in Bath? How could he not be bitter? When Peter himself was Thomas’s age, he’d never missed an opportunity to needle his father about having opted out of his own young life. Sully’s defense had been that he figured Peter was better off without him, especially after Vera remarried and Ralph proved such a good stepfather. Unwilling to accept this lame excuse, Peter had been determined to make Sully understand that his boyhood, while safe, had still been full of terrible longing and wrenching doubt. For this, Vera was partly to blame, of course. She’d made Sully feel like an unwelcome intruder in her home, but Peter still hadn’t been able to understand why his father had given him up without a fight. The only conclusion he could come to was that he must not be a boy worth fighting for.
Wouldn’t Thomas harbor similar resentments? Why hadn’t he demanded to know why, when Charlotte ordered Peter to stay out of their lives, he’d gone along as if hers had been a reasonable demand? Okay, maybe Thomas had gently mocked him (I never would’ve got to see where Will grew up, and I always wanted to.), but where was his righteous anger at the injustice of it all? How could he not resent the fact that he and his little brother had missed out—on a nicer place to live, on a doting grandfather, on the opportunity for a better education? Thomas had made it sound like he was merely curious about Will’s life up north, but he would’ve been more than curious, wouldn’t he? He’d have been sick with envy. To triumph over such resentment, you’d have to succeed in life in a way that rendered your older brother’s unmerited good fortune irrelevant. If Thomas had started his own company, then sold it to Amazon and bought a yacht with the proceeds, sure, he could afford to be cavalier about all of Will’s advantages, but clearly, nothing like that had happened. The way he dressed, together with that beast of a car he drove, proved it. Why, then, wasn’t Thomas seething?
The more Peter replayed their conversation in his head, the more he wondered if Thomas’s end of it had been a well-rehearsed performance. Only when he seriously entertained this possibility did he recall how peculiar some of the details of their interaction had been. For instance, when Peter had informed him that Will was currently in England on a Fulbright, hadn’t Thomas’s left eye visibly twitched? And later when he’d invited him to stick around for a day or two, assuring him that there was plenty of room, hadn’t that eye twitched again? And what about Thomas’s facetiously reporting that his brother Andy had turned out to be gay? (Had he?) Had Thomas actually gotten a girl pregnant, as he’d joked about having done? At the time Peter had written off these bizarre declarations as bungled attempts at humor, but wasn’t it also possible that they served a darker purpose: to illustrate that Peter didn’t have the faintest idea who Thomas and Andy were, or what their lives had been like?
But slow down. Even if all that was true, wasn’t he still jumping to conclusions? If Peter was indeed clueless about his son’s life, could he really say with any degree of certainty that Thomas hadn’t somehow managed to grow up decent and forgiving? Maybe he too had benefited from having a kind, loving stepfather. What if he actually was better off for Peter’s absence? What if Peter was just projecting onto Thomas his own recollected anger at Sully, his own sense of injustice? It was possible. And yet. Peter actually had been in Thomas’s place, and not that long ago. The myriad resentments he’d felt where Sully was concerned had taken him most of his adult life to work through, and in the end he hadn’t so much banished them as brought them under control, allowing Sully, a man who was as charming as he was feckless, to grow on him, to gradually enter his affection. Whereas Thomas, if their conversation today was taken at face value, had skipped that entire process. Was that even possible? Peter wanted to believe so. That morning, when Thomas inquired after Will, he’d thought, Good. Maybe time had in fact healed some very old wounds. As boys they’d been constant antagonists, forever bickering, always at each other’s throats, and the collapse of his and Charlotte’s marriage had only exacerbated matters. Just how badly, Peter hadn’t realized until he and Will had made that ill-fated trip to West Virginia after the divorce. He’d hoped that by then Charlotte might have surrendered a few of her grievances or, failing this, that they could arrive at some sort of accommodation. From the moment they walked in the door, however, it had been clear that Charlotte’s hatred had calcified. When she wasn’t spitting venom at him, she was bragging about how many men she’d slept with since they separated, how every single one of them had been better in bed than Peter, how she wished their marriage had come apart sooner, so they wouldn’t have wasted all that time. Was she actually wishing away their children? Peter couldn’t tell, but one thing was for certain. His ex-wife had become someone he no longer recognized, both irrational and unhinged.
“Admit it,” she’d raged at him. “You want me dead. I know you do, because that’s how I want you.”
Every attempt he’d made to calm her down had caused the conflagration of her rage to burn hotter. She’d even mocked his plan to have Thomas and Andy spend the summers with him and Will so the boys wouldn’t completely lose touch.
“What do you care if they do?” she’d sneered at him. “You got the one you wanted, right?” Peter could still feel the force of that thrust, the truth of it. Because yes, Will had been his favorite, a kind, sweet boy.
At some point during that awful visit, they’d sent the boys outside so they wouldn’t have to listen to so much acrimony at full volume, but somehow conflict had followed them out into the weedy backyard. There, Thomas and Will had gotten into a fistfight over the stopwatch Sully had gifted his grandson, a fight that, to Peter’s amazement, Will had actually won. It was the only time he’d bested his younger brother in any sort of physical contest. But if Peter was proud of him, Will himself was clearly ashamed. When Peter and Charlotte emerged from the house, Will had run to him and sobbed into his shirtfront. Little Andy, also wailing, had gone to his mother, and Thomas, one eye already closing and turning color, had joined her as well. Peter could picture him even now, his small face a mask of profound resentment, his mother’s face in miniature. It was the face of a boy determined never to forgive or forget.
“Wow,” Toby Roebuck said, having materialized at his elbow. “You really are a mess tonight.”
Since there didn’t seem to be any point denying this, Peter didn’t. She stroked him hopefully, having apparently decided in the bathroom that indeed she was not through with him. When it became clear that her efforts were to no avail, she dressed and left.
* * *
—
Peter was generally a light sleeper, but the combination of alcohol, sex and emotional exhaustion from the day’s events plunged him into a profound slumber, so when the upstairs toilet flushed, his first thought was that the sound had to be part of the strange dream he’d been awakened from. Had Thomas been in it? Go back to sleep, he told himself, but no sooner had the thought registered than he heard, directly overhead, the sound of muffled footsteps. Thomas? Had his son belatedly decided to take Peter up on his offer to spend a few days in Bath? But that made no sense. How would Thomas (or anyone else for that matter) have gotten in without a key? When would he even have arrived? After Toby left? Could Peter have been sleeping so soundly that he hadn’t heard someone enter the house, climb the hall stairs and let themselves into the upstairs flat? Groggy, he rose, went over to the window and parted the curtains, convinced, though it made no sense, that this time Thomas’s yellow Caddy would be in the driveway. But again, no.
So, okay, he told himself sternly. Whoever was upstairs, it wasn’t Thomas. The fact that he’d been dreaming about his son when the toilet flushed did not mean that Thomas was the one who’d flushed it. But if not him, then who? The only other person with a key to the front door was Will, who was in England. And even if he’d flown home early, hoping to surprise his father, he wouldn’t have gone upstairs. He’d have claimed his own downstairs bedroom. The place had been locked up tight when he left for Schuyler and was locked when he returned with Toby. Later, when she left, the door would’ve locked automatically behind her. The seldom-used rear door was always locked, the only key to it on Peter’s key ring. Which meant…what? He massaged his temples, trying to reason it through. There had to be a simple explanation.
But if so, it eluded him. In fact, he couldn’t even come up with a complicated one that made any sense. If whoever was up there had no key, then that person had broken in, either by picking one of the locks or forcing a ground-floor window. But seriously? On Upper Main Street in Bath? Pulling on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, Peter made his way through the dark downstairs flat, looking for evidence of an intruder—a half-open window, an overturned chair—but there was none. No one could be upstairs, but apparently somebody was. Stopping at the hall closet where Will stored his sports equipment, he grabbed an aluminum bat, thinking, Just in case. But in case of what? Out in the hallway, he checked the front door, but no, it was locked, just as he knew it would be. He considered turning on the hall light, but decided—again, just in case—not to signal his approach. At the foot of the stairs, however, he stalled. He had, he realized, two working hypotheses for what he would find upstairs, the first ludicrous, the second batshit crazy. Neither seemed to require the aluminum bat he was gripping.
Thomas. Ridiculous though it was, Peter simply couldn’t banish the notion that the intruder would turn out to be his son. There were a fair number of moving parts in Peter’s life, but only one—Thomas—was new. And if it was Thomas up there, it followed that his purpose would be dark. Otherwise, the yellow Caddy would be parked out front. There were only two reasons to break into someone’s home. You either meant to steal something or do someone harm. If the intruder was Thomas, then theft could pretty much be ruled out. Just that morning Peter had taken him on a tour of the house, so his son knew it was basically a construction site up there. Nothing much worth stealing unless you were in the market for a circular saw. On the other hand, maybe the intruder had been downstairs when Peter and Toby showed up. Had he scurried upstairs to avoid detection? But that would mean he’d been up there for the last two hours, which also made no sense. A thief would’ve slipped out of the house while he and Toby were otherwise occupied. By the same token, though, anyone bent on doing Peter harm would have come downstairs and done so as soon as she left. But who would’ve wanted to harm him in the first place? The only person he could think of who’d ever truly hated him was Charlotte, and that was a long time ago. Did she still? Possibly. Though Vera’s hatred of Sully had been impotent, she’d nursed it all the way to the grave. Maybe Charlotte’s rage wasn’t impotent. Maybe hers was the rage that hell hath no fury like. Had she managed to instill that same black hatred in Thomas?
