WHAT DOES THE FUTURE HOLD for me? What are my career interests? What do I look for in a spouse? Will I have children? How will I balance the demands of career and family? Joshua sat staring at the questions on the blackboard and let Lisa Boudreaux—his so-called wife—do the work. She wrote the questions in her notebook and then took Joshua’s notebook and wrote them in his. Now they were supposed to discuss these questions, desk-to-desk, like all the other “married” couples around the room, making compromises like real couples did.
“What if one wants to be a farmer and the other a Broadway star?” Mr. Bradley had asked them, smiling, pretending to be confounded. “What if one hates snow and the other is a dog musher? What if Cindy likes to party and Jimmy wants to bake bread?” He paced, then stopped suddenly and looked at them with the expectant air of a TV talk show host. His own wife—his actual wife—was a teacher at the school too, in math. He set his stick of chalk down dramatically on the metal rim that ran the length of the board and then turned back to face them. “Welcome, ladies and gents, to ‘Life and Love and Work.’ ”
Joshua stared at his forearm. It was covered with an intricate blue pen drawing he’d made of a spider web. They’d just completed the unit called “Life and Personal Values.” When they were done with “Life and Love and Work,” they’d move on to “Life and Money,” a sort of light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel project, in which they’d each be given an imaginary five thousand dollars to invest in the stock market. The class itself was simply called “Life.” Everyone had to take it in the last semester of their senior year in order to graduate from Midden High School, even the kids in special ed.
“What do you want to be?” asked Lisa, once they’d arranged their desks. Her pen had a pink feathery furry thing at the end of it, and she swished it contemplatively along her pale cheek.
“An astronaut,” he said, after thinking for a while.
Lisa wrote this down in her notebook. “I’ll be an astronaut too. We’ll make, like, a ton of money.” She took Joshua’s notebook and wrote We are both astronauts!
“We could get on the same flights together or whatever,” she said. “We’ll be like this total couple in space.” She put her fluffy pen down and took a cherry Ricola from her purse and sucked on it while still holding it in her fingers. Together they glanced around the room. Joshua knew he’d gotten lucky. At least they were at the same level, socially. Not extremely popular, but not unpopular either. Many of the couples had not been so fortunate. People in drama and band and Knowledge Bowl had been paired up with heavyweights like Jordan Parker or Jessica Miller, who sat looking mortified. And Tom Halverson and Jason Kooda had had to agree to be married to each other, thanks to a shortage of girls.
“How many kids should we have?”
“Six.”
“No,” said Lisa, bobbing in her chair. “Like ten.” And then she wrote ten and underlined it twice.
He smiled at her. She was basically a cool, sweet, hot girl. Not perfect, but hot. Her body was one long noodle, tall and thin and flat, and all the clothes she wore accentuated that. It was not so unlikely that she was his wife. In seventh grade she’d been his girlfriend for two weeks, his longest relationship until he went out with Tammy Horner for six months last year. He and Lisa broke up because she thought they were getting too serious too fast during their afterschool, before track practice make-out sessions in the back of the dark band room where everyone went to make out, where Tammy Horner and Brian Hill had allegedly gone all the way a few months ago. Brian Hill was a pussy as far as Joshua was concerned, and nothing made him happier than the fact that Brian had been the biggest victim of “Life and Love and Work,” having been forced to draw a straw along with Tom Halverson and Jason Kooda and not only be married to someone who was not a girl, but in fact to someone who was Mr. Bradley.
“Okay, so seriously, we have to kick ass on this, Josh. I totally have to get an A.” Lisa opened the classified section of the Star-Tribune that they’d been given. They had to find a place to live that was financially feasible in relation to their professions and number of children. Then they’d cut the ad out and paste it to a page and write all about why they chose that house and where it was located—they could say it was anywhere they wanted—and how much they paid in rent or mortgage and what percentage of their income that was, and how it met the needs of their family.
“I think we have to live in Florida, don’t we?” Lisa asked. “That’s where they take off.”
“Take off?”
“The astronauts—you know—the launching pad for the rockets is there.”
Joshua began to draw a spider with his pen onto his arm, onto the web. Without looking up he said, “We could live in Port St. Joe.”
“Where’s that?” asked Lisa, carefully ripping a jagged square out of the newspaper.
“Florida. I went on vacation there one time.”
Port St. Joe, he wrote in his notebook and then took hers and wrote Mr. and Mrs. Wood live happily ever after in Port St. Joe.
“Hey, who said I was going to change my name?” Lisa asked, punching him in the arm. He grabbed her scrawny wrist and held on to it just hard enough that she couldn’t pull away. “Mr. Bradley! My husband’s abusing me,” she yelled. Her wrist was so soft, almost unreal. “Mr. Bradley!” she shrieked again, though he ignored her, engrossed in a conversation with Brian Hill. “I want a divorce,” she said, hitting Joshua with her free hand until he let her go.
Tammy Horner turned and rested her eyes on them for a moment and then turned away. Joshua’s heart lurched and then slowed and he cackled loud enough so she could hear, knowing that she would know the cackle was meant only for her. He had loved her once, but he hated her now. Sometimes he drew a pen tattoo of her name on his hand and then washed it off.
“So we live in Florida?” Lisa asked.
He nodded. In real life Lisa was engaged to Trent Fisher. He was older, twenty-six, a logger. Technically, since she wasn’t yet eighteen, every time they did it, it was statutory rape, but nobody cared. They’d been dating since she was in eighth grade. She wore his class ring wrapped with yarn so it would fit.
“Are you going to change your name to Fisher?” he asked.
“Probably,” she said hesitantly, readjusting the clip in her hair. “Why?”
“Just curious.”
He took the fluffy pen from her desk and examined it to see how the feather thing stayed attached. It smelled like a combination of perfume and bubble gum, which is what Lisa Boudreaux smelled like too.
During seventh period he walked through town, not caring who saw him or that he was supposed to be in study hall. It was Monday, the first day of the last week that he would have to drive his mother to Duluth for her radiation treatments. He’d driven her for the past two weeks, Monday through Friday, going home immediately after school instead of to the Midden Café to wash dishes. He walked past the café now and saw Marcy through the front windows, but she didn’t see him. He thought about going inside to say hi—it was Vern’s day off and Angie would be there too—but he didn’t, afraid of how they would act when they saw him. At school he was still fairly safe. Only a few people knew about his mom having cancer. The streets were empty, all the kids still in school. He wished he were going to work, though he usually went there with a mild dread, bracing himself for Vern’s bullying and blathering, and a monotonous night scrubbing pots. When he’d told Marcy and Angie about needing to take three weeks off, they cried and told him he could take four. He wouldn’t, though. He’d go back as soon as his mother’s radiation was done with and her cancer eradicated. He would work and save money. Money for June, when he graduated and could move to California and escape Midden, which he considered barely a town. The library was not a library, but a milk truck painted green and parked two days a week in the Universe Roller Rink lot. The mayor wasn’t a mayor, but Lars Finn, whose real job was at the feed store. The firefighters weren’t firefighters, but anyone who volunteered, guys with big guts and a lone woman named Margie. Even the clinic was a sham; no actual doctor worked there, though whoever did was referred to as a doctor anyway. Dr. Minnow, Dr. Glenn, Dr. Johansson, Dr. Wu—a string of ever-changing people who came to fulfill a requirement to become a nurse practitioner and in exchange got a break on their student loans. They were mostly women. One came to school and talked to them about birth. She told them about how, before the baby came out, a woman’s cervix dilated to ten centimeters, and then she took a large protractor with a piece of chalk fitted into it and drew a perfect ten-centimeter circle on the board. It stayed for weeks, the circle itself, and then the ghost of the circle, still visible though it had been erased from the board.
Joshua recognized that his mother was not so unlike these women, so open about various things. She had told him all about sex already, about women’s bodies and men’s. She felt that it was important to know what she called “the facts of life.” She told him that she had lost her virginity at seventeen, and advised him against it until he was twenty-one. He did not tell her it was too late, that he’d been sixteen, with Tammy Horner. During this discussion he sat silently, looking anywhere but at his mother, and she told him to always use a condom no matter what urges he felt, because of AIDS, and then she gave him a box of condoms—handing it to him in its little paper bag with the receipt inside. He buried it in a drawer beneath his T-shirts.
On their drives to Duluth and back she’d asked him questions about Tammy Horner, whether he loved her still, whether he was interested in someone else. He hadn’t been alone with his mother for such extended amounts of time since he was little—before he’d started school, when Claire was away at school all day—but mostly they didn’t talk at all because his mother was too sick. On the drive home the first time they went, his mother had asked him to pull over so she could get out and vomit, holding on to the side of the car. He shut the engine off and got out, walked to the back of the car to see what he could do. “Leave me alone,” she’d said. “I don’t want you to see this.” And then when he stayed, watching her, she hollered, “Go!”
Within a few days she didn’t mind vomiting in front of him. She took a plastic milk jug in the car with her, with the top cut off but the handle still intact, to vomit into while he drove. They had dozens of these jugs around the place to use as scoops for the dog food, the corn for the chickens, oats for the horses. By then his mother had had to stop working at Len’s. He didn’t know what was next for her, and neither did she. “What we’re going to do is wait and see,” she’d say, wiping her mouth, forcing herself to drink another sip of Gatorade.
Despite the fact that the radiation made her sick, it would shrink the tumors that grew along her spine and ease her pain. The nurse named Benji had explained this on the first day they went. Before Benji radiated Teresa, he had shown them both around the radiation room.
“This is where it all happens,” he said, waving his hand. There was a silver table and, hovering over it, a metal contraption that culminated in an arm that reached out with a dumb round eye, wide and conical like what Joshua imagined an elephant gun would look like. On one side of the room there was a wall that was not actually a wall, but rather a special kind of glass through which they could see the people in the waiting room, without being seen by them.
“That way Mom can keep an eye on you,” Benji said, swatting Joshua’s shoulder. “To make sure you’re not flirting with the girls.”
He looked out into the waiting room and didn’t see any girls. He saw a number of gray-haired people who wore brightly colored coats and ratty boots made of rubber and fake fur, and a woman with a cast on one foot, rocking a baby in a plastic carrier with the other.
His mother came up beside him and tapped on the glass. “Yoo-hoo,” she called, testing it out, to see if she could get anyone’s attention, but nobody moved or looked.
“I guess I’m safe,” she said, and laughed.
“Very,” Benji said, handing her a gown.
In the waiting room, Joshua sat near a tank of fish, then stood to gaze into it, feeling that his mother was watching his every move. From this side, the wall of glass was pure black. He pressed his face in close, making a tunnel around his eyes with his hands to block out the light of the waiting room.
“Did you see me looking in?” he asked her when they were driving home.
“Oh—did you? No. I wasn’t turned in that direction most of the time. What could you see?”
“Nothing.”
They drove in silence for a while. This was day one, several minutes before his mother would have to tell him to stop the car so she could vomit into the ditch. He could sense that she was waning as she rested her head back against the seat.
“So, did it hurt—the radiation?”
“No. Radiation doesn’t hurt, honey, it’s just … I don’t know … like powerful rays of light.”
“What did it feel like when it was shooting in?” he asked.
She thought about it for a few moments, fanning her face with her gloves.
“Nothing.”
• • •
When he saw all the buses driving through town to line up at the school, he blended in with the kids streaming into the parking lot, to avoid being noticed, and got into his truck. Before he started the engine, he saw R.J. walking toward him. He waved, and R.J. got in.
“You’re so fucking busted,” he said. “Spacey saw you leave. She was standing right by the window when you took off.”
“I don’t care,” Joshua said. “What are you doing now?”
“Nothing.”
When they pulled up to R.J.’s house, Joshua got out too.
“Don’t you have to go to Duluth?” R.J. asked, and blushed. He couldn’t even allude to Joshua’s mother being sick without blushing.
“Pretty soon.”
Inside, R.J.’s mother, Vivian, was sitting on the floor with her elbows propped on the coffee table, rolling joints. A pile of them was stacked neatly like logs inside a tin container. “My boys! How are my boys?” she asked.
“Fine,” Joshua said, sitting down in a chair near the stereo. R.J. went into the kitchen and came back holding a tube of cookie dough he’d sliced open, gouging out chunks to eat with the blade of a knife.
“You want some?” he asked, holding a slab of dough out to Joshua, who took it and ate it in one big bite.
“You want some, Mom?” R.J. asked, turning to Vivian.
“That’s why you’re so fucking fat,” she said. Her hair was parted in the middle, shoulder-length, feathered into brown sheets on each side of her head.
She finished rolling a joint, then lit it up, inhaled, and handed it to Joshua. He was high already—he and R.J. had smoked on the drive from school—but he took a couple hits anyway and passed the joint to R.J., who passed it back to his mother without smoking.
“This is good stuff,” she said, smoke coming out of her mouth. “Bender’s special batch.” She gave it back to Joshua. “I’m all done.”
“Me too,” he said.
“You can keep it,” Vivian said, sprawled back on the couch. Her fingernails were freshly painted red, so long they curved in toward her palms at the ends. “My little gift to you.”
Joshua gently tamped the burning end out in an ashtray that sat on the arm of his chair. He tucked the rest of the joint in his coat pocket.
“So did R.J. tell you about our little plan?” she asked Joshua.
“It’s not our plan,” R.J. said. “I told you I’d think about it.” He held the tube of dough in his lap, sitting in a chair that was the twin to Joshua’s, an itchy brown plaid.
“Bender and I thought we’d let you sell to your friends and whatnot. Dime bags and loose joints. Whatever they want.” She lit a cigarette and sat back, smoking and gazing intently, but dreamily, at Joshua. “We figured you two could use the money, with graduating and all, and our place wouldn’t be like Grand Central Station. It’s making me fucking paranoid, you know? All the people coming in and out. And half of them are your friends anyway.”
“They’re not our friends,” R.J. said, holding up the remote, trying to turn the TV on. He banged it on his chair and then it worked.
“Well, they’re your peers. They’re people you know.” She flicked the ash from her cigarette. “What do you think, Josh?”
“I think it sounds cool,” he said, looking tentatively at R.J. “If we keep it low-key.”
“Completely,” said Vivian. “No way would we be anything but low-key. Everything is totally mellow. It’s not on the level of dealing. It’s on the level of just having mellow connections with people and you guys making some extra cash.”
“I don’t need any cash,” R.J. said.
Vivian looked at him for a while, then crushed her cigarette out. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about how I don’t need cash,” he said quietly. He turned the TV off.
“You don’t need cash, my ass. Who you think’s gonna buy the food you stuff into your big fat face? Huh? You think it’s gonna be me for the rest of your life? Well I got news for you, porky pie. I got news the day you turn eighteen.”
R.J. stood up. “I got news for you the day I turn eighteen too,” he yelled as he went back into the kitchen.
“What’s that?” she asked tauntingly, smiling at Joshua. “I’m just dying to hear your news,” she yelled, then fell onto her side on the couch laughing.
Joshua stood up and stared at a newspaper flyer that sat on the floor, advertising the things on sale at Red Owl—Granny Smith apples, an economy pack of paper towels.
“I gotta go,” he said. Then hollered, “I gotta take off, R.J.”
“I’ll go with you,” he said, walking back into the living room.
Joshua didn’t want R.J. to come but was afraid to say anything that would get him in trouble with Vivian again. “Okay,” he said, and they left.
He dropped R.J. off at the bowling alley, where he would play pinball and then walk down the street to the Midden Café, where he would play Ms. Pac Man. He did this almost every night.
Once he was alone in his truck, Joshua drove away slowly, convincing himself that he had time. Plenty of it. A full half-hour before he and his mom technically needed to be on their way to Duluth. His house was a twenty-minute drive from town when the roads were good. He told himself these things, watching the clock that he’d glued to the dash of his truck, but a strange panic rose in him anyway. Why had he wasted his time after school? Why hadn’t he come home during seventh hour instead of walking around town? He became aware of the fact that he missed his mother, ached for her in his gut. The thought that maybe when he arrived at home his mother would be dead entered his mind and would not leave. He tried to make himself relax by imagining her doing what she was most likely doing now: lying on the couch, storing up her energy for the trip to Duluth. He imagined himself walking in the door and taking her hand. He imagined her saying what she said every day to him when he got home: “How was school?”
“Good,” he’d say, like he always did.
But when he walked in the door his mother was alive and well and standing in the kitchen drinking a glass of water. He didn’t go to her and take her hand.
“How was school?” she asked.
“Good,” he said, standing in the door, keeping his voice flat and disinterested. “Are you ready to go?”
She was dressed in a manner that she called “funky” or sometimes “all hipped out,” in an outfit that embarrassed and repulsed him: cowboy boots and grape-colored tights, a black miniskirt and a slim lilac sweater that ended at her waist but had a cascade of yarn tassels that came down almost to the edge of her skirt. Her legs in the tights looked bony and taut, like those of an adolescent girl.
“Well, I had a pretty good day myself. I raked the stalls. I’m not so nauseous. I think it’s thanks to the weekend being off radiation.” She wore lipstick the color of rust; the rest of her face was bare, which made the rust of her lips even more striking, her eyes more blue. She put her hat on, another funky thing, velvet leopard print, a get-well gift from her friend Linea.
“I’ll be in the car,” he said.
“Wait, hon. I’m coming right now.”
Spy and Tanner wagged their tails, pushing up to Teresa as she put her coat on. “Oh, you think you’re going with us, don’t you?” she said in her baby voice, bending to let them lick her face. “You’re saying, ‘We want to go too!’ You’re saying, ‘Where are Mommy and Joshie going?’ Aren’t you? Oh, yes you are.”
“Mom, they’re not saying anything, okay? They’re dogs.”
“Spy thinks that Joshie is grumpy today,” she said in a baby pout voice.
“Don’t call me Joshie,” he said savagely. “I told you. Don’t ever call me that again.”
He walked out and slammed the door so hard the dried-flower wreath that hung on the front fell off its nail. He hung it back up crooked. He didn’t know what he was doing. All he knew is that everything about his mother enraged him, especially her habit of reporting what the animals were thinking and saying, as if her mind were the conduit of all things. For hens and horses and dogs and cats his mother delivered a steady stream of translation to anyone who would listen—even to R.J. or Tammy or whoever he had over.
She stepped outside. “What’s wrong with you today?”
“Nothing’s wrong with me, Mom. It’s what’s wrong with you. Did you ever think of that? That maybe it’s you? That maybe you don’t know what the dogs are thinking? Or maybe that you don’t know everything in the universe?”
“Oh, but maybe I do,” she said like a sorceress, smiling, impervious to his mood.
This enraged him even more. He got in the driver’s seat and turned the engine on.
She got in next to him, buckling her seat belt. “So, how’d Mr. Bradley’s class go today?” she asked happily, tapping his knee. “Who’s your wife?”
At school the next morning Ms. Keillor intercepted him before he went to class.
“Mr. Wood,” she said dispassionately. “You’re to come with me.”
“Why?”
She turned and began to walk away from him.
“I didn’t do anything,” he said, but then followed after her, down the hallway, past the bathrooms and drinking fountains, one low, one high, through the gym doors and through the glossy, peaceful, honey-colored world of the empty gym, to the door at the back that had a warning, EMERGENCY ALARM WILL SOUND WHEN OPENED, emblazoned across it, though the alarm never sounded when Ms. Keillor opened it with her key. She wore the key on a yellow bracelet that looked like a telephone cord. The principal’s office was in a trailer out behind the school, and Ms. Keillor’s job was to escort students there, to take papers back and forth, and to keep track of the accounting in the cafeteria.
“After you,” she said, holding the door open for him, but then walked ahead of him once they were outside. She was barely five feet tall, slightly plump all over, like a teddy bear.
“You don’t have to take me. I know the way,” he said, but she ignored him. He unwrapped a stick of Big Red gum and put it in his mouth.
There were two trailers out back—both had small patio porches in front that had been built by the students taking shop. One trailer was for the principal and his secretary and the copy machine and teachers’ mailboxes, the other was where the special-ed and developmentally disabled students had their classes. Beyond the trailers was the playground for the elementary kids and beyond that a football field and bleachers, all of it covered in snow now. Ms. Keillor went up the stairs to the door and then turned to him. “Dr. Pearson is expecting you. You can tell Violet.”
He nodded, waiting for her to step aside so he could go in.
“I wanted to say that I heard about your mom and I was sorry to hear that.”
He nodded again, less perceptibly this time, chewing his gum, the cinnamon so fresh in his mouth it almost hurt. What did she expect him to say?
“You all don’t eat meat, do you?”
“What?”
“Your family. You’re vegetarians.”
He was used to this. He nodded again.
“We thought we’d make a dish and send it home—the ladies in the school would like to do something. We thought a pan of scalloped potatoes with something instead of the ham. Maybe peas or carrots.”
He couldn’t bring himself to look at her. He concentrated instead on her white Adidas.
“Which would you like better?”
The wind picked up and a wooden cardinal that was hanging on a fishing wire from the eave banged rhythmically against the outside wall of the trailer. He reached up and stilled the wooden bird.
“That’s not your property,” Ms. Keillor said.
He let go.
“So why’d you feel the need to skip seventh hour yesterday?”
“Because I felt the need to walk to the river and get high.”
Deep pink splotches appeared on her face, then spread like a rash down onto her throat. “Why are you saying that? Why would you do that?”
He shrugged, blushing too, surprised at his own admission.
“You know there are people who you can talk to about this, Josh. There’s Mr. Doyle. That’s exactly what he’s here for. Those social-problem-oriented issues.” She put her hands into her coat pockets. “The brain does not do well on drugs, I don’t think I need to tell you.” Her face was slowly going back to its normal dough color. “Okay. You’d better get inside. And I’ll tell the cooks that scalloped potatoes would be fine. Which do you prefer, carrots or peas?”
He didn’t prefer either, but told her peas.
“That’s what I thought too,” she said. “Peas are awfully nice for color. And we wanted to help. I know that at a time like this, every family would need some help.”
They stood together for a moment on the porch. Joshua put his hand on the doorknob. He didn’t know what to say. Goodbye? I look forward to having scalloped potatoes? His mind was blank.
“Thank you,” he said, and walked inside.
He had to eat his lunch in detention, going to the cafeteria to get it at 10:45, before the rest of the students arrived. He saw Lisa in the empty hallway as he walked back to the detention room.
“My husband’s a prisoner,” she said. Her face was pale against her hair, as black as a crow’s wing, French Canadian.
“Spacey won’t even let me sleep,” he said, holding his tray. They both looked down at his food, chow mein, covered with a waxy brown sauce that had formed a skin on its surface.
“Did you write your rough draft?” she asked him.
“What rough draft?”
“The one that’s due today.” She looked at him, irked, but smiling. “We were supposed to write our dreams and share them with each other to see if they match. Didn’t you pay attention? What am I going to do today when you’re not in class?” She held a block of wood the size of a rolling pin with HALL PASS written in red marker on all four sides.
“I’ll write it now,” he said.
“But how are we going to discuss them if you’re not in class? They have to match or it won’t work out.” She took a slice of apple from his plate and ate it.
“What are your dreams?” he asked. “Just tell me and I’ll say what you said.”
He felt like they were very alone and intimate, sharing food. Her shirt was nearly as black as her hair, the sleeves translucent and speckled with glitter.
“Well. We have the dream about being astronauts and having lots of kids. I wrote about that. And the importance of having a good relationship,” she looked at him. “Those are my dreams.”
“They’re my dreams too,” he said.
“Joshua!” Mrs. Stacey yelled from a doorway down the hall.
His desk in the detention room had its own little cubby, half walls rising up on three sides. He ate his chow mein and the rest of the apple sections and drank two cartons of milk with his back to Mrs. Stacey.
“How’s your sister?” she asked when he was done eating, walking over to get his lunch tray.
“Fine.” Teachers often asked him about Claire. She was something of a local legend. Aside from getting the scholarship to attend college, she’d been the valedictorian of her class, the queen of Snowball, voted by her classmates the “Most Likely to Succeed,” and also “Girl with the Prettiest Peepers,” a distinction that had instigated what seemed to Joshua hours of Claire gazing at herself in the bathroom mirror. “Do you think my eyes are pretty?” she’d asked him, ignoring his pleas for access to the bathroom. “No,” he’d answered, dragging her out the door. He’d been bullied, throughout his childhood and adolescence, to tell her whether she was fat, whether she should get highlights in her hair, whether her butt seemed hideously large, or her thighs too squat. Whatever he said, she never believed him or took his advice; she simply presented the same questions to him all over again the next time.
“I wondered if she was coming home, to help out and all,” Mrs. Stacey said, blushing. Everywhere he went now people alluded to his mother’s cancer and then went red in the face, embarrassed to have to mention it at all.
“On weekends,” he said. “She’s got college.”
“Of course she does. She’ll go far, I’m sure.” She looked down at him, still holding his lunch tray, as if seeing him for the first time. “The two of you look like twins—just like your mom too. Like triplets.”
Joshua nodded, feeling humiliated but unable to disagree. He’d been told this all of his life: same eyes, same hair, knobby noses that were variations on a theme.
A bell rang, and he could hear the low roar of students out in the hall, going to lunch. He ached to be among them. “Can I take my tray back? I mean, so you don’t have to do it.”
Mrs. Stacey smiled at him, bemused. “I don’t know, can you?”
He stared dumbly at her for a moment, then asked, “May I?”
“No,” she said matter-of-factly, turning from him. “You may not. But I will do it for you.” When she left, he went to her desk. Her purse sat in an open drawer. Inside he could see a glasses case and a small spiral-bound address book and a fat red leather wallet. He went to the doorway. The hallway was empty, but he could hear a dim commotion in the direction of the cafeteria. He began to walk, not thinking of what he was doing until he was doing it, going calmly but quickly toward the side doors at the end of the building, and then out into the parking lot, past his truck.
He crossed the street and his insides jumped, giddy to be free. He walked past the motel, through the bakery parking lot, past a metal for sale sign that blew and squeaked quietly in the wind, onto the highway. He walked south, toward Len’s Lookout, but veered off the road and into the woods before reaching it, not wanting Leonard or Mardell to see him. Through the snow he followed a path he’d worn all winter down to the river, to the spot on the bank behind Len’s that he and Claire had claimed as their own when they were kids. The river wound through town, going under roads, past houses and buildings, past countless towns, to Minneapolis and St. Paul, and farther south, all the way to the Gulf of Mexico, but this spot of the Mississippi was their spot—Claire and Joshua’s—and when they talked about it and said the river, each of them knew precisely what the other was talking about. He didn’t come back here with Claire anymore, but he came often on his own, and sometimes with R.J.
He climbed onto a rock that sat near the frozen river’s edge. He could hear the water beneath the ice, gurgling, as if it were going down a giant drain. He smoked from the one hit he had in his pocket and walked to the river. Several holes had melted through the ice, and he could see the water raging by. He put his hand in to see how cold it was—freezing—then shook it and put it, wet, into his coat pocket.
The three towns of Coltrap County were all situated on the river. Flame Lake was twenty miles to the north of Midden, Blue River thirty to the south. The river started out so narrow that even in Midden it was still more stream than river, with not a hint of what it was, or would become: “The mighty Mississippi,” his mother would say, “the father of all waters.” Blue River had a festival each year in the Mississippi’s honor, as if the river were theirs, as if the river were blue, as if it weren’t the color of mud three hundred and sixty-five days a year, as if it didn’t flow through Flame Lake and Midden first. When Claire and Joshua lived above Len’s Lookout, when the river was their main playground, they had a game called Blue River Piss Off! Claire had started it one day, standing in the river.
“You’re peeing!” Joshua yelled, swimming frantically away from her, kicking his feet to splash her.
“Shhh …” she said. “I’m doing something. I’m saying, ‘Blue River Piss Off!’ ” Her face was serious, concentrating, and then it became wild and frenzied and she spun and shrieked and dove upstream.
From that day forward, whenever one of them peed in the river they would chant “Blue River Piss Off!” and laugh like hyenas. When the river was too cold or too fast to go in, they would throw things in it, orange peels and apple cores, pieces of string and blades of grass, and yell “Blue River Piss Off!” letting the water take it, watching it go. They felt a surge of power, a sense of righteous rage. Blue River had a Burger King, a hospital, a jail. There was the courthouse with a broken clock, a park with a gazebo painted white. The people who lived there thought they were better than all the rest of the people in Coltrap County, thought themselves more stylish and smart.
Joshua picked up a stick now, a branch the length of his arm, and set it into the water, in a place where the ice had melted. “Blue River Piss Off,” he said.
The branch caught on the ice, half of it in the water, the other half jutting up. He threw a rock at it, but it wouldn’t budge. He wished Claire would come home, though when she did they fought. She’d been home each weekend since their mother got cancer and on the other days she called several times. When their mother wasn’t feeling well enough to talk, she spoke to Joshua. “How is she?” she’d ask, serious as an actress in a movie, suddenly grown up.
“I don’t know. Okay I guess,” he’d say.
“Okay?” she’d ask. “Define okay.”
“Okay as in fucking OKAY, okay?” he’d yell, wanting to hang up. Sometimes, ultimately, he did hang up, but then she would call back, angrier than before.
He wondered what he should do now. It was just past noon. He stared at the river and saw that the branch he’d thrown into the water had freed itself from the ice and disappeared.
Bender was home. His semi was parked in the driveway out front. He’d be gone for days at a time and then inexplicably be home for weeks.
“Did they let school out early?” Vivian asked, opening the door. Joshua followed her into the kitchen, where Bender sat eating a taco.
“You can make one for yourself,” he said to Joshua, waving to the bowls and dishes of food on the table. Joshua picked up a taco shell and piled it full of cheese and salsa and ate it standing up.
“Where’s your sidekick?” Bender asked.
“At school. I had detention, so I thought fuck that.”
Bender nodded. He was a small man with an elfin face. In the silence, Joshua could hear his mother’s voice murmuring from the radio on the counter, saying something about natural cures for insomnia. The station was playing reruns until she got better. The volume was turned so low he could almost keep himself from hearing it if he tried. He heard her say, “Now let’s talk about homeopathic remedies. Are there any you can recommend?” He cleared his throat to drown her out.
“Vivian told me about your mom,” Bender said. “That’s a shock.”
Joshua nodded. “She’s getting better. She’s having radiation.”
“Tell her hi from us,” Vivian said, and tapped the ash of her cigarette into an empty can of Coke.
“I will.”
“We were just listening to her show,” Bender said, gesturing toward the radio.
“She’s taking a break until she’s done with radiation,” Joshua explained. “She’s only got three more days of it.”
“I always liked that show.”
“It’s very informative,” Vivian said.
Joshua turned the radio off. He wasn’t usually so bold, but he wasn’t able to keep himself from doing it. He said, “So, Viv was telling me about maybe me and R.J. selling for you.”
Bender laughed. He was tan, despite the fact that it was winter, but his face turned red from the laughing. “Sure, I got plenty to sell,” he said. “I got some new things too. We’re branching out. R.J. said he showed you the meth I made.”
“Where’d you make it?”
“Out in the garage,” Bender said. “There’s more money in meth than there will ever be in weed.”
“It’s not just anyone we would trust, Josh,” Vivian said. “I hope you know that. Because if you fuck with us, your ass is grass.”
“I know.”
“Good,” she said, putting her hand on Bender’s shoulder. “ ’Cause you’re just like a son to us.”
He went to school the next day acting like nothing had happened the day before.
“Well, hello there,” Ms. Keillor said when she saw him in the hall. And then added, “Come with me” before he had time to say hello in return.
They walked out to Dr. Pearson’s trailer without a word. When they got to the door, Ms. Keillor opened it and said, “I’ve got a dish to send home with you. I’ll send it up to Mrs. Stacey by the end of the day.”
He walked into the trailer, over the plush cream carpet, to Violet’s desk. Before she looked up from her computer screen, Dr. Pearson appeared in the open doorway of his office.
They entered without speaking. Joshua sat down on the varnished wood chair he’d sat on the day before, and the week before that.
“You’re skipping school,” Dr. Pearson said. “And now you’re skipping detention too.” He stared at Joshua, as if waiting for the answer to a question he’d posed. Joshua tried to meet his gaze, but then looked away at a row of metal balls that hung on wires from a stand on the desk. He reached for one of the balls and then let it go, so it hit the other balls and they all swung and banged into each other.
“Do you have something to say about that?” Dr. Pearson asked.
“Not really,” Joshua said, trying to sound polite. He didn’t mean anything personal against Dr. Pearson and he considered telling him that.
“Pardon me?”
“I said, no. I don’t. I have no explanation for skipping school.”
“And skipping detention.”
“It was boring.”
Dr. Pearson smiled. “Well. That’s a shame. I’m sorry to know that we didn’t keep you well enough entertained.”
“I wasn’t saying you had to.”
They sat in silence again.
“You know what’s next, don’t you?”
Joshua shook his head.
“I think you’re lying to me. I think you know full well what’s next. In fact, I know you do because I told you yesterday.”
Joshua waited.
Dr. Pearson leaned against the back of his chair so that it rocked away from the desk. He took his glasses off and set them on his knee. His brown hair grew only in a ring that ran around the sides of his head.
“You did this to yourself, do you understand?”
“Yeah,” Joshua said.
“You’re to sit in detention the rest of the day, all right? And it doesn’t matter if you’re bored. I don’t give a rip. You’re to stay there. And then tomorrow you don’t come at all. You don’t come until next Thursday. You’re not welcome here. You understand? You’re being suspended for one week. Those are the consequences, Josh. You know that full well.”
Dr. Pearson stared at Joshua for several moments, then put his glasses on and stood up. “Ms. Keillor will send a letter home to your folks and it will tell you what work you need to do while you’re out. Being suspended doesn’t mean you aren’t responsible for the work you miss. You do all the same work. Violet will walk you back.”
Joshua spent the morning drawing engines, carburetors, air filters, and cans until Mrs. Stacey saw what he was doing and took all of his paper away. He read for a while, The Norton Anthology of Poetry, poems he was supposed to have read three days before. He went down the list, checking them off as he read, twenty-six in all, poems by Stevie Smith, W. H. Auden, and HD. He had no idea what they were about. At least most of the poems were short. He shut the book and wrote porno in pen on his forearm and then, next to it, drew a man with a long beard and horns.
When the last bell of the day rang Mrs. Stacey came in with a casserole dish covered with aluminum foil. “Ms. Keillor asked me to give this to you.” And then when he took it from her she said, “You can bring the pan back next week when you come.”
He walked out in the crowded hallway, mortified to be holding the pan. He hesitated, considered setting it on top of the pop machine and walking away. Kids laughed and talked and ran and screeched all around him, happy to be done with school. He spoke to no one, carrying the pan, his silence almost making him feel invisible. He went out to his truck in the parking lot. R.J. was nowhere in sight. Maybe he had skipped seventh hour. Just as he drove out of the lot, Trent Fisher pulled in. He saw Lisa Boudreaux in his rearview mirror, running from the school doors to Trent’s Camaro.
“I brought something from Ms. Keillor and the cooks. Scalloped potatoes,” he said to his mother when he walked in.
“That’s nice,” she said, lying very still on the couch. “That’s what you can have.” If she moved, if anything moved, if the light in the room changed, it hurt her. He could see that.
“How was school?” she asked, with her eyes closed.
“Good,” he said. “Are you ready to go?”
She didn’t answer for a long while and then she opened her eyes, as if she were startled to see him.
“Are you ready?”
“Oh—I thought I said—we don’t have to go today. They decided I should take a day off because the radiation is making me so sick.”
He sat down on the floor next to her, next to the dogs. He rested one of his hands near her hand, near where Shadow was sleeping, curled up like a lima bean against her hip.
“I thought the radiation was supposed to make you better.”
“It will, honey. It just takes a while to kick in.”
She turned to him. “Bruce is working at the Taylors’ place—he’s got so much work—but he wants to finish up there tonight. He’s not going to come home until it’s done, so he’ll be late. You can go ahead and have what you brought for dinner.”
“Okay,” he said. Shadow’s tail waved slowly up and down, grazing lightly against his hand.
“You got the application from the Vo Tech today.”
“I saw.”
“I know how well you’ll do. You don’t even have to go—you know so much about cars already—but they like you to have your degree, the places that hire now.”
He took his shoes and socks off. “I heard your show today.”
She didn’t reply or make any indication that she heard him.
“It was the one about not taking sleeping pills. About how you can do things like drink chamomile tea instead.” She’d done that with them for years, made them chamomile tea before bed. She grew the chamomile herself out in the yard. “Do you want some tea?” he asked, though it seemed she was already asleep.
“No thanks.” She opened her eyes. “Aren’t you hungry?”
“Kind of.”
“Well, then, you should eat. But help me to bed first. I think I’ll just spend the night in bed to get my strength back. I need you to arrange the pillows right.” She stood up and he followed her into her room.
Once she was settled he sat on the couch eating the scalloped potatoes, picking out the peas. Even the dogs wouldn’t eat the peas. He washed his plate and then dried it immediately and put it away, trying to be helpful. He got a glass of water to bring to his mother, to set on the shelf near her bed so it would be there when she woke, but then he couldn’t make himself go into her room, feeling strange and shy all of a sudden. He could see her bare feet poking out from under the blankets from where he stood in the hallway. It struck him how familiar her feet were to him, even the calluses on the insides of her big toes. His stomach hurt, and he was acutely aware of all the sounds she made, the small moans and shallow coughs, her body shifting in bed. He went back into the living room and sat down on the couch in the nest of blankets his mother had left behind. He wished they had a television. He would never forgive his mother and Bruce for denying him that.
It was silent except for the damper of the wood stove clicking the way it did when the fire began to die down. He got up and stoked the stove and went to the phone. Why hadn’t anyone called—Claire or Bruce? He dialed Claire’s number and David answered, told him Claire was at work, that she worked until midnight, but would be “so glad to hear he’d called.” Hearing David say this made him want to rip the phone out of the wall for a reason he could not comprehend. What did David know about him and Claire? What did David know at all?
“Do you want me to have her call you when she gets in—is it urgent?” He could imagine David sitting there with a little pad and pen, waiting to write down whatever he said. He said no thanks and hung up. He called R.J. and R.J. picked up.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Nothing,” R.J. said. “What about you?”
“Nothing.”
“Did you tell your mom and Bruce about getting suspended?”
“Nope.” There was a corkboard near the phone and Joshua rearranged the thumbtacks so they formed a J.
“What are you going to do tomorrow?”
“Nothing,” Joshua said.
When he hung up, he turned the lamp off and lay down on the couch. The moonlight cast shadows on the walls, on the outlines of the furniture and his mother’s paintings. He sat up and looked out the window for a while at Lady Mae and Beau, who stood in their pasture, and then lay back down, covering himself up with the blankets.
A couple of hours later he woke with a start. He realized that his mother was up, that she was in the bathroom with the door open, its light beaming out in a bright rectangle on the floor several feet away from him. She coughed and then vomited into the toilet and he sat up, listening, wide-awake.
“Mom?” he said, without getting up to go to her.
She didn’t hear him, but continued to vomit, roaring now, and then choking and roaring again. When she was done he heard her crying softly, still leaning against the seat of the toilet, her voice echoing against the bowl.
Incrementally, he lay back down and closed his eyes, pretending so fiercely to still be asleep that he began to believe it himself, not so much that he was sleeping but not present—the way he believed himself to be invisible to Claire when he was very young and they would play hide and seek, even when he was standing in full view.
At last his mother stopped crying and blew her nose. He could hear the squeak of the cold-water faucet and the water running, his mother lapping it into her hands and splashing it onto her face several times, and then finally she turned the water off and called his name.
He didn’t answer. He stayed so still he hardly allowed himself to breathe. He willed himself to relax his hands, which were clasped tightly on his chest, releasing them bit by bit, trying to make them look like the hands of a sleeping person.
“Joshie,” she said again. Then, “I’m sick, honey.” Her voice wavered, squeaked, gave way to tears. “I’m just so, so sick, and I need your help.”
He was asleep. He could not help her because he couldn’t know she needed it. She would walk into the room and see that any minute. He clamped his eyes shut, waiting for her, willing her to come. He breathed through his nose, concentrating on allowing the breath to go further than just to the tops of his lungs. He would never go to her. Nothing in him would. She would gather herself, he knew, and then walk into the living room and see him on the couch and he would pretend to wake up in response to her presence and she’d say, “Why don’t you go to bed?” and he would stumble past her, up the stairs, a pattern the two of them repeated at least a couple of nights a week.
But she didn’t. With new vigor she said, “Josh, I need you to go get Bruce. I need to go to the hospital. I’m too sick. I’m very, very, very sick.”
Delicately, without moving his hands, with one finger, then another, he applied pressure to his chest, as if he were playing a keyboard. It calmed him. He pressed harder and harder against his rib bones, with one finger, then the next.
“Oh, God,” his mother whimpered. “Just one thing. Just don’t let me die. I don’t want to die.” Her voice cracked and she sobbed. He’d never heard her sob like that. Nobody had ever sobbed like that. With such velocity, at such length. She sobbed so hard that Tanner and Spy rose simultaneously from where they lay near Joshua and went to her, their nails clicking along the floor, and stood and barked at her.
“Shhh …” she said finally. He could imagine her hands. How they went to her face to brush her tears away, how she would push her hair back behind her ears, collecting herself, and then he heard her scratching the dogs’ necks the way they liked it, so robustly that he could hear the metals on their collars jangling.
“It’s okay,” she said in her baby voice, sounding exactly like herself now. “You’re worried about Mommy, aren’t you? Mommy made you upset, but now it’s okay. Mommy’s fine. And now you have to be quiet. You have to be good dogs. You don’t want to wake Josh.”