Hannah heard the back door slam.
She saved the chapter she was working on and leaned back in her chair, waiting for Randall to put his books down and come back to her study to say hi.
But he didn’t come.
She waited, listened for his footsteps through the house, but she heard nothing.
So she pushed back her chair, got up and walked through her bedroom, out to the living room, then along a narrow corridor to Randall’s room. She pushed open his door and stepped inside. Posters of Star Trek villains and all-girl pop groups covered his walls. His bed was neatly made and his closet door opened on a carefully organized array of clothes. A couple of framed math and computer studies awards hung on the wall and in the old metal birdcage that sat on the far edge of his desk, Spunky was curled up in his bed of shredded paper. A former lab rat, Spunky was black and fat, getting bulkier all the time. An insatiable appetite for pepperoni.
Randall was eleven years old and had his father’s thick blond hair and liquid blue eyes and knobby cheekbones. Sometimes on a groggy morning, when Hannah shuffled into the kitchen to find her son at the breakfast nook reading the newspaper and drinking orange juice, her pulse stuttered hard and she had to take a deep, calming breath, for this son of hers was more than a rough approximation of his father. Randall was turning into his physical duplicate, as if Pieter Thomasson’s Nordic genes had prevailed in all the thousand microscopic battles for supremacy. At the oddest times her ex-husband looked out at her from Randall’s eyes, grinned at her from her son’s lips, and sometimes he even haunted her sleep as the two of them, Pieter and Randall, appeared in her dreams as terrifyingly interchangeable.
Randall was wearing baggy jeans and a black T-shirt and his Marlins baseball cap was on backwards. He was tapping his right foot fast against the oak floor, probably keeping time to the infernal beat of his cursor.
Hannah smiled and shook her head and ducked down to give him a kiss on the cheek.
“Hey, pardner,” she said.
“Hey.” A listless voice.
“You didn’t come say hi. What’s wrong?”
“I didn’t want to interrupt your writing.”
“You can interrupt me anytime you want, Randall. You know that. I like it when you interrupt me.”
A blade of sunlight from the west window cut across his desk and lit up the side of his face and she could see the faint dusting of peach fuzz on his cheek. He was going to have a beard as downy and inconsequential as his dad’s.
“How was school? You do okay on that English composition?”
“I got a B.”
“B’s are fine.”
“Not as fine as A’s.”
“And did Miss Mays like the drawing of the osprey?”
“She put it up on the board. I guess she liked it. Unless she was trying to make fun of me.”
“Oh, she must’ve liked it. It was very good, Randall. Very realistic.”
The assignment had been to draw one of the animals of the Everglades. Drawing was torture for him. So personal, so much exposure.
“Everybody else did alligators. There were a couple of deer. I was the only one who did an osprey.”
“So you were original. That’s good.”
“I wish I’d drawn an alligator like everyone else.”
She came up behind him, tried to keep her voice upbeat.
“You remember what day it is, right?”
“I remember.”
“We have to get rolling in ten, fifteen minutes.”
“Oh, Mom,” he said. “Can’t we skip it for once?”
“But you like Dr. English.”
“She’s okay.”
“And we skipped two weeks ago, Randall.”
“Once a month is enough. Cutting back would save money.”
“Don’t worry about the money. The money’s irrelevant. What matters is for you to start feeling better.”
He was using the computer mouse to flick through screen after screen, bright images coming and going almost instantly.
“What’re you working on, Randall?”
“A project for computer science.”
“Tell me again. What’s it about?”
He looked up at her. His mouth twisted into a smirk.
“Go on,” she said. “I know I won’t understand it. But I like to hear the words.”
“Cognitively self-modifying automata.”
She nodded.
“And what’s that in English?”
“Little bugs that live on their own inside a program. The longer they survive, the more they learn and adapt. They get smarter and smarter and harder to detect.”
“That sounds like computer viruses.”
“Viruses destroy things. These are just bugs. They’re neutral. They’re just there, learning, not hurting anybody.”
“And they’re teaching that in computer science?”
“They’re trying to.”
He smiled politely and his eyes strayed back to his screen.
“I really hate my clothes,” he said.
“What?”
“Oh, never mind.”
“Your clothes? Why? What’s wrong with your clothes?”
“They’re wrong. They’re geeky.”
“They’re geeky and I hate them.”
“Well, then we’ll go shopping, find you some new clothes.”
“I don’t like when you go shopping with me. You watch me all the time. You smile and stuff.”
“I make you self-conscious?”
“And I don’t want to go to soccer anymore either.”
“You love soccer, Randall.”
“I only go because you want me to. But I don’t like it. It’s too hot out there, no shade, I get all sweaty and I can’t breathe. The coaches scream at me. And I don’t like the kids. I don’t like getting kicked in the shins. I’m not doing it anymore.”
“There’s nothing about soccer you like, really? Now be honest.”
“I don’t like all the other people in the stands. All the parents and the little kids. Everyone hanging around watching, whistling and cheering. I’d rather be alone.”
“You need friends, Randall.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Of course you do. Everybody needs friends.”
“You don’t have any friends.”
“Sure I do.”
“Name one.”
“There’s Gisela.”
“One friend, big deal.”
“There’s Max.”
“He doesn’t count. He’s your book agent.”
“But he’s my friend too.”
“He has to be your friend. You pay him. Anyway, he lives in New York. You see him like twice a year. That’s not a friend.”
“Randall, this is a ridiculous conversation.”
“I have Stevie,” he said. “I don’t need any more friends. Stevie’s plenty.”
“Look, Randall, I like that you have an E-mail friend. But a real friend is someone you know face-to-face. Someone you spend time with. If you gave it half a chance, I’m sure some of your soccer teammates, or kids in your class would be thrilled to be friends with you. Isn’t there someone you want to invite over? You could swim in the pool. Have a cookout.”
“Yeah sure, Mom, sit around a campfire, roast weenies. Oh, boy.”
“Come on now, Randall.”
“I don’t need anybody. I’m happy by myself.”
“Remember how much you used to like to fish, go swimming, snorkeling? You need to get out of this room, away from the computer.”
“Why? What’s so good about being outside?”
“It’s healthy. It’s enriching.”
“You get skin cancer outside.”
“Oh, now you’re being silly, Randall.”
“You don’t get outside. You don’t do things.”
“Of course, I do,” Hannah said.
“All you do is write. You stay inside and you write. That’s all you ever do. Turn on your computer first thing in the morning, sit down in front of it and type. Turn it off before you go to bed.”
She drew a slow breath, let it out.
“I hate my clothes,” said Randall. “They’re stupid.”
Hannah put her hand on his shoulder. She could feel the vibrations radiating from his body like the hum of a tuning fork buried deep in the bone, a low throb that had begun to pulse years ago, that morning when he found his grandparents dead.
The watershed moment. Everything forever different afterward. His startle reflex on hair-trigger. Now he was jumpy. Any little noise, a bird exploding into flight, an avocado falling from the tree would send him reeling. His appetite was erratic. He was depressed, quiet, stayed in his room. He had manic bursts, long hours lost in his programming language, deaf to the world.
“Have you been sleeping, Randall? Did you sleep last night?”
He pointed and clicked, pointed and clicked.
“Randall?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not sure. How do you know if you’re asleep? You lie there in the dark, you close your eyes, how can you tell?”
“Have you stopped taking your medicine again?”
“I take it some of the time.”
“Okay,” she said. “Well, go wash your face, put on a fresh shirt. We’re going to see Dr. English.”
“Do I have to?”
“Yes, you have to. You always feel better afterward, you know you do.”
“I feel better because the appointment’s over.”
“When you grow up, Randall, you should be a lawyer. You’re so good at arguing.”
“Do lawyers have to play soccer?”
“Not unless they want to.”
“Then that’s what I want to be, a lawyer.”
She ruffled his thick mop, gave his scalp a gentle scraping with her fingernails, something that usually made him croon. Today he was silent.
“We’re still pardners, aren’t we, Randall?”
It was an old refrain. Single mother, only child, the mantra of their loyalty.
He lifted his hand from his mouse and turned to look at her. She gave his scalp another scratch.
“I’m not crazy, Mom.”
“Nobody said you were.”
“Only crazy people go to shrinks once a week.”
“That’s not true. A lot of people go to psychiatrists. It’s because they want to feel better, because they want to understand how they can start enjoying life.”
“I enjoy life.”
“Do you?”
He moved his cursor around the screen, sailing across the electronic net.
“I’m not crazy,” he said. “I’m not a wacko.”
“Did somebody call you that? Somebody at school?”
“Never mind,” he said. “Just never mind.”
“Is somebody bothering you? Tell me his name. I’ll talk to his mother.”
“Oh, yeah, talk to his mother. Boy, you really know how it works, don’t you?”
“Randall,” she said. “If somebody’s bothering you …”
“Nobody’s bothering me. I’m fine. Just a little crazy, that’s all.”
“Oh, come on. Don’t say that.”
He settled finally on his own Web page. In a banner across the top Randall’s World glowed in a brilliant red. He had created the page a few months back as a school project and every week or so he redid it, another look, another motif. This week there were animated frogs swimming and flying over a purple bayou. Others perched on a floating log. Their long tongues unfurling, snapping flies out of the air. Silly and childish, something any eleven-year-old boy might like. Thank God, thank God, thank God.
“I’m sorry, Mom,” he said. “I guess I’m just in a bad mood.”
“Bad moods are allowed,” she said. “As long as you give equal time to good ones.”
He looked up at her, managed a smile.
“So we’re pardners then?” she said.
“Sure, Mom,” Randall said, looking back at the flying frogs. “Pardners.”