Their faces in the newspaper. It all came back, everything that happened that spring. The spring those pictures were taken. I decided to skip my first day of work. I wouldn’t be able to concentrate anyway. I’d go out somewhere. Where? And if the paper was still on the table when I got home, if Maria hadn’t put it in the recycling, then. Then I would read what it said.
Was it Maria’s day? She comes every second week to clean for us and vex us. For example, our most needed utensils? She deliberately hides them, I’m sure of it, yet when I ask her politely and respectfully and without a hint of criticism to put things back where she finds them, she merely informs me that I put them in the wrong places. “Jane, do it the way I do. Because it’s better.” She’s Slovakian, short and muscular with a yellow bob and chapped hands. Joe Jr. claims she pays inordinate attention to his underwear drawer, that his briefs are always meticulously folded and stacked and, occasionally, on some Slovakian whim, transferred to a different drawer. “It freaks me out,” he says.
“Yet this same woman,” Joe Sr. says with a finger in the air, “this same woman will not dust.”
Maria would make the newspaper vanish. She would say that we had our chance to read it and we lost that chance. She’s done it before. But it was Monday, I remembered then. Tuesday is Maria’s day.
I went to wake Joe Jr. for school. He’s fifteen so this can be a challenge, though, surprisingly, he was already awake. I heard sounds before I knocked. “Come in,” he said.
He was sitting on the edge of the bed in his boxers with the cello between his bare splayed legs. Instead of the bow, a bamboo backscratcher. “What are you doing?” I asked.
“I didn’t want to wake you,” he said.
“I don’t mind being woken by the cello.”
“I’m not that good yet. Listen.” And he played a little silence for me.
I was supposed to begin copyediting a manuscript, the first job I’d accepted all year, but even before I could feel guilty about playing truant (I hadn’t checked my e-mail to see if it had arrived yet), even before I had decided where to pass my truancy, the phone rang and I left Joe Jr.’s room to answer it. It was the editor phoning from Toronto to say there had been a delay. I cleared the gladness from my throat. “Oh well.”
“I apologize,” she said.
I like this woman, Morna Crane, whom I’ve worked for before though never met in person. She does things like this—phone instead of e-mail, then take the trouble to prolong the conversation to a friendly length, which she did by asking, “What’s the weather like out there?”
Though I’ve never been to Toronto in the early spring, I had a snowbound childhood and remember the season’s fetid start—the dirty snow receding, the sordid revelations: candy wrappers, plastic bags, dog shit. “Do you really want to know?” I asked as Joe Jr. finally emerged from the bathroom, handsome despite all the holes he’s punched in himself, hair gelled into glistening tufts (an operation so time-consuming breakfast must be taken on the run). He stood in the open door of the fridge swigging milk from the bottle. I’d set out the day’s provisions—bun wrapped in wax paper (breakfast), five-dollar bill (lunch). He took them, kissed me on the phone still held to my ear, and left for school, dragging the cello down the hall.
“Tell me everything, Jane,” Morna said. “Don’t spare me.”
“Our magnolia is blooming. The cherries too.”
She sighed. “I saw on the news that it’s snowing in Calgary. That comforts me a little.”
And I got an idea. I’ll go look at the beautiful trees, I thought.
On the crest of the hill, at the four-way stop just before the descent to Arbutus Street, there’s a bit of a view northward toward the mountains, over other cotton-candied streets. Two varieties of flowering trees were in bloom, one a darker and one a lighter shade of pink. I drove through the frothy tunnel of 33rd Avenue, past the bright armies of daffodils amassing in the mansion gardens of Shaughnessy. All these carnival colours. All this spring cheer. It’s a bit much, I thought.
The radio brought the story up again while I was driving. I could have switched it off but was better prepared now after an hour of consciously avoiding thinking about it. It was over in a few sentences anyway. Sonia Parker, one of the “masterminds” of a 1984 bomb plot gone awry, had been released yesterday. Peter English would be released in 2009. The next item, in keeping with the terrorist theme, was about the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.
When I reached the parking lot, I sat in the car for a few minutes until I was breathing normally again.
Queen Elizabeth Park is the highest point in the city proper. I hadn’t been up there for years. On the plaza in front of the geodesic dome, a contingent of senior citizens was Catching the Monkey’s Tail as they Tai Chi-ed in perfect unison. I made my way past them, feeling clumsy, and headed for the lookout where three life-sized bronze people stand waiting for their picture to be taken. According to the nearby plaque, they’ve been posing there since 1984. The view behind them is entirely obscured by trees now, which seems fitting since the present skyline would have been unrecognizable in 1984. We couldn’t have imagined how the city would grow and change, upward and outward, its concrete leavened. Because we didn’t believe it would still be here. Only the mountains would be left standing. Or so we thought.
I headed through the Quarry Garden, over the Japanese bridge, down to where I’d seen the largest group of trees as I drove in. Walking under their collective canopy was like entering a cloud. I remembered bringing Joe Jr. here when he was about five, him in his baseball cap standing under a tree like the one I was standing under now, letting his head fall back as he gazed up through the ruffled branches. The cap tumbled off his head. “Mom,” he said, sounding like he hated to be the one to disabuse me. “They’re not really real, you know.”
I sat on the damp grass under the tree. Then I lay down. How wonderful and sublime, the scent of the blossoms. I only noticed when I closed my eyes. Naturally, I thought of Chekhov, Chekhov on his deathbed and how the doctor gave him champagne. Chekhov sat up, smiled, and said to his wife: “It’s been a long time since I drank champagne!” He drank it, then he lay back down and died.
I don’t know how long I’d been lying there when my purse rang under my head and startled me upright. It was Joe calling from work. Of course I expected the worst. What else? “Nothing’s wrong,” he said. “Did the book arrive?”
“No. There was some kind of delay. Tomorrow maybe. Shouldn’t you be working? Isn’t somebody dying over there?”
“Not at the moment. Ma for dinner? That all right?”
“Fine.”
“Maybe we’ll play a few songs for her. You remember Simon’s coming?”
“I didn’t, but it’s okay.”
“It’s not too much?”
“It’s fine.” I wondered if Joe had seen the paper, if that was what the call was really about. There was a pause full of hospital sounds—nurses being bossy, carts rattling by.
Joe: “I wanted to ask your opinion. The Streptococci?”
“The what? Oh. I like The Joes better.”
“Won’t Simon feel left out?”
“You’re kind. And literal. Were The Ramones all named Ramone?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Really?” I was stunned. “The Ramones were brothers?”
“Well, not from birth.”
I walked around the park. I had lunch in the café next to the organic grocery store, then stopped in to buy more food, grocery shopping being sort of a second job these days, part-time and volunteer. I was stalling, though I wouldn’t have if I’d known Joe’s mother was already sitting patiently on our porch with a casserole dish in her lap. When I pulled up later that afternoon, Rachel called out, “I’m early!”
I came up the steps and hugged her, thinking, as usual, that every time I do she’s smaller while every time Joe Jr. is bigger. The hug went on a little too long. One of us wasn’t letting go. Who? The one with the heavy dish in her hand, or me? Finally, we separated and I turned to unlock the door.
“I still find this mat rude,” she said. “Go Away.”
“It’s not meant for you.”
“Are you sure?”
Then I remembered the newspaper lying on the mat that morning, the reason I’d stayed out most of the day. It was on the kitchen table now. I didn’t want Rachel to see it so, while she dealt with her shoes and coat, I hurried ahead to get rid of it. When I got to the kitchen, though, the paper was gone.
Rachel set the casserole dish on the counter. “That’s apple crumble.”
“I’ll get the groceries,” I said, slinking off, perplexed. I brought in the first set of bags from the car and Rachel asked if she should put them away. “I’ll do it,” I said. “There’s more.”
“I’ll put the kettle on,” she said.
Two more trips to the car so the metabolic furnace inside the resident fifteen-year-old might be stoked. Rachel, meanwhile, was already making her rounds of the houseplants, pushing a finger into the soil to check for moisture, plucking off dead bits. No judgement was implied by this. She’s one of those super-seniors. Active Native Daughter of British Columbia, editor of the Heritage Society newsletter. Every autumn she hikes into the mountains to collect, catalogue, and consume wild mushrooms. She’s also handy with a needle. Among Joe’s most prized possessions is a petit point Sex Pistols album cover Rachel made for him in the eighties, God Save the Queen, no less. She’s doing one for Joe Jr. now, The Clash’s London Calling, but in crewel because petit point, she says, is murder on the eyes. Anyway, I am so far from threatened by her solicitude and competence that I never even look at the plants.
“I haven’t seen paper grocery bags in years,” she said, coming in from the living room with dried leaves cupped in one hand.
“That’s why I shop there.”
When she opened the cupboard under the sink to get at the compost, I took advantage of the moment to stash a box of dish detergent. “Hold still,” she said, pulling something out of my hair. She showed me what it was. “What have you been doing?”
“Buying groceries with sticks and grass in my hair,” I said.
“Flower petals, too, by the looks of it.”
I jammed the blocks of ice cream in the freezer then went to the bathroom to check how bad I looked. A paper didn’t just disappear. I’d left it there that morning face down on the table. We have a key hidden in a spot so obvious no thief would bother looking. Rachel knows about it, so why didn’t she use it? Then I remembered, belatedly, that she receives the newspaper herself every morning and listens to the CBC all day long, and I sank down on the edge of the bathtub and cried into a towel. I was crying out of gratitude. For her tact. For everything she’s ever done for me.
Every year around this time, I have to grapple with these memories and feelings. Spring is difficult. Spring is a challenge.
Joe Jr.’s door was closed. I don’t usually go in without his permission, but now I tapped on the door and opened it with the intention of looking for the lost paper. Surprise! Joe Jr. curled up in bed with the iPod clutched in his fist. Sometimes when I look at him I see every stage of his life in superimposition, the culmination of a whole person, not just the disinterested grunter he is so often now. It’s almost overwhelming. I closed the door again.
In the kitchen Rachel asked, “What’s wrong, Jane?”
“Joe Jr.’s home.”
She frowned. “I rang the doorbell.”
“He’s plugged in.”
She nodded. “Is he sick?”
“Oh, God. I hope not.”
“Well, don’t fret. Joe will have a look at him.”
This is the kind of brave talk you get out of people who eat wild mushrooms. Every time he gets sick, I think he’s going to die. Of course, I didn’t know if Joe Jr. was sick. I felt sick thinking there might have been something about me in the paper. Since I hadn’t actually read the article myself yet, I couldn’t be sure, but I doubted it. Then I remembered the recycling (belatedly again) and stepped out onto the back deck. Opened the blue bag, and yes! There it was, the prodigal Vancouver Sun, at the very top, all the sections intact. I was losing my mind. I glanced at the headline again—Opposition Mounts to Iraq War—but when I flipped the paper over to see their long-ago faces, to read what was being said about Sonia and Pete now, the article was gone.
Strips of newsprint border hanging down like the empty arms of cut-out dolls.
“Tea,” Rachel called.
I stuffed the paper back in the bag and staggered in, trying not to show my shock. Joe Jr. must have cut it out. But why? He’s never expressed an interest in current events.
Rachel was at the table, watching me through the steam of her raised mug, waiting for me to sit. “Jane? Are you all right?” “Yes.” I sat and stared out the window until the magnolia gradually came into focus, giving me something to say. “You asked what I did today. I went to Queen Elizabeth Park to look at the trees.”
“How nice. The cherries are blooming.”
Apparently there are hundreds of different varieties in Vancouver. She named about a hundred of them, also several kinds of plum, but I was barely listening. I was hoping, desperately, that it wasn’t Joe Jr. who had cut the article out, but who else could it have been?
“What were you looking at?” Rachel asked.
“What? Oh. They were very—cloud-like.”
“Pink?”
“Yes.”
“Fragrant?”
“Mildly. I didn’t notice at first.”
“I wonder if they were the whatsits. Akebono.” She turned her head and spring suddenly arrived on her face, full bloom. “Ho ho! Here’s the guy who wouldn’t answer his grannie’s feeble knocks!”
Joe Jr. stood in the doorway, scratching, gelled spikes relaxed, flattened by the nap. I was at his side in a second, feeling his forehead, checking his piercings—the rings in his eyebrow, the stud under his lip—for telltale redness. “What are you doing home?” I asked.
“I skipped,” he said, yawning.
“You’re not sick?”
“I was bored.” He shrugged me off and made for his grandmother, who was waiting with arms wide, ready to fling around his waist. She tolerated the noogie then smoothed her hair back in place. “I rang the doorbell,” she teased. “You left me sitting in the cold.”
Joe Jr. pulled away and began to pogo violently and strum the air. “Da, da, da! I rang the doorbell! You left me sitting in the cold! I rang the doorbell! You left me sitting in the cold! Sitting in the cold! Sitting in the cold!” His muse tried not to look horrified. Then, abruptly, he turned back into a boy. “I have to write that down, Gran.”
“Are you serious, you skipped?” I asked because, now that he didn’t have meningitis, I was annoyed.
He’d already transferred his transient attention from Rachel to the fridge and, finding the fresh package of smoked meat in the drawer, began pushing it breadlessly into his mouth. “It was boring.”
“So?”
He turned to his grandmother. “Are you going to stay and hear us practise?”
“I could.”
“Is Simon coming over?” I asked, suddenly worried about the paper again. “Because there’s something I’d like to talk to you about before he comes.”
Joe Jr. shot me a glance, which seemed both significant and calculated not to be. I would have to tell him, I knew it then. More meat went in his mouth and when there wasn’t enough left in the package to make a decent sandwich, he tossed it back in the drawer. Instead of answering me, he said, “Gran, did Mom tell you I started the cello?”
“What?” Rachel turned to me for confirmation.
“It’s true,” I said.
“I’ll show it to you.” He beckoned to her and Rachel got up and followed Joe Jr. out of the room.
“After that,” I called to Joe Jr., “I need to talk to you.”
We’ve never told him about the trouble I got into when I was young. I didn’t want him to know his mother has a criminal record, despite the fact that the actual conviction is not very impressive. I didn’t want him to be ashamed of me, or someone at school to find out. I would never, ever want him to be ostracized.
While Rachel was in the bedroom with Joe Jr. and the cello, I made burritos. Joe Jr. was using the bow now, hitting about 50 percent of the notes (enough accuracy to plunge me into melancholy). And I remembered our terrible cooking, Dieter alternating between spaghetti and payloaded chili. Nutritional yeast dumped over everything like yellow snow. Sonia, preparing for a time when food would be scarce, always served an approximation of bread and water. Pete was the most creative, a liberal spicer. Once I came into the kitchen when he was cooking and saw a half-dozen garlic cloves stripped and lined up on the cutting board. “Smash, smash, smash the state!” He brought down the knife, scraped the chunks into the pot. One lone survivor, having leapt to safety, quivered on the counter. Pete popped it in his mouth.
The doorbell rang. I went to answer it and found Simon slouching on our mat, a six-foot-tall reminder of how like the newborn stage these teen years are—parents blind to the repul-siveness of the age except in other people’s offspring. Go Away indeed! Simon had an Adam’s apple now; it looked like he was gagging on a Russian word. There were the inevitable wires too, pumping in the jangle, and his teeth serving a three-year sentence in a metal cage. Compared with Joe Jr., Simon has taken self-skewering to a whole new level with actual grommets in his lobes I could see the light of day through. Yet when I opened the door, he took a step back, right off the mat, when, rightly, it should have been me recoiling from him. Under all the acne, I definitely perceived a flush.
“Hello, Simon.”
He did that darty thing with his eyes, sniffed, made an utterance. Hi, I presumed.
“Joey’s in his room,” I said, standing back to let the guitar case through.
He’s not so bad. He actually reminds me of Joe years ago. And he took his boots off, which, considering the laces, was a major concession, though I wasn’t prepared to wait. “Go on in when you’re finished,” I told him, assuming he could read lips.
I went back to the kitchen. A few minutes later I glanced up from grating cheese and saw him in the doorway, staring. “He’s in his room!” I added hand gestures.
Right after Joe got home and washed his hands, literally and metaphorically, of the day’s suffering, we sat down to dinner. I never got the chance to ask Joe or Joe Jr. about the article.
“Joey! Simon!”
They looked up—startled, innocent, already helping themselves—and seeing Joe’s signal, jerked the earbuds out by the wires.
“So how was everybody’s day?” He turned to me and kissed my cheek. “How was your day, my darling? What happened at school, boys?”
“Nothing,” they chorused.
I tattled. “Joe Jr. says he skipped a class. He came home and slept instead.”
“It was boring,” Joe Jr. said.
Joe turned to me. “I think that’s reasonable.”
“Joey played the cello for me,” said Rachel. “I never thought I’d live to hear someone in this family playing Bach.”
“Was that Bach?” Joe Jr. asked, looking pleased with himself.
I noticed how Simon kept glancing at me from across the table. I could see right in his mouth as he chewed, beans stuck on his braces, mud on a wire fence. When I met his eye: dart, dart. Normally Joe Jr.’s friends ignore me. When I come into the room they immediately mute themselves, except for the yelps when they punch each other, or the snickers. They hardly look at me, not the way Simon kept looking at me now. How to describe it? With interest.
And a horrible thought came to me. Joe Jr. did have the article. He had it and he’d shown it to Simon.
Joe: “Boys? What do you think of this? The Streptococci?”
Thumbs down from Joe Jr. “Nobody’ll get it.”
“What is it?” Simon asked.
“Then how about The Cankers?”
“I thought we were going to be The Cretins,” Simon said. “Like? One, two, three, four, Cretins wanna hop some more?”
“Jane has a problem with The Cretins. She doesn’t think it’s very nice.”
“I like The Joes,” I said.
The boys groaned.
“Think of it as a tribute. Joey Shithead. Joe Strummer. Joey Ramone. Joey Normal and the Fuck Ups.”
Rachel frowned. “What’s all this nasty talk about?”
“We need a name. We’re, like, a punk band, Gran.”
“You’re like one or you are one?”
“Dad’s getting us a real gig.”
“I’m working on it,” Joe said. “I still have connections, Ma.”
“Though half of them are lawyers now,” I pointed out. “You remember Molly? She’s a lawyer.”
Rachel: “How about The Tone Deaf? Are you playing the cello in this band, Joey?”
“No, that’s for school. No one else was playing it. Mom told me that story so I thought I’d try it.”
“What story?” I asked.
“You were reading that book. About the guy who brings his crazy friend home and is embarrassed because his dad plays the cello.”
“You mean Fathers and Sons?”
I’m the odd reader out in this family. The Joes have no use for books; they live for the music I mostly tune out. I was so touched that my son had actually paid attention to something I cared about that tears came to my eyes. Quickly, I wiped them with my napkin because crying is a hundred times worse than playing the cello, even old Kirsanov knew that. Joe rose from the table and went into the kitchen to get dessert, trading a concerned glance with his mother on the way. Then I really felt foolish, because I knew for certain that they all knew what had happened to that article. They all knew and I didn’t. I was the cretin.
The apple crumble hit the trivet; the boys attacked. Joe set the ice cream down beside it and I remembered that Russian word, the one I’d imagined bulging in Simon’s throat. Morozhenoye. I got up to put the tea on. When I got back to the table Simon was saying, “There’s, like, a demonstration.” He glanced at me, ears reddening around the peepholes. “You should come.” He seemed to be saying this to me specifically. Inviting me.
“I should?” I asked.
The colour spread from his perforated lobes. “You all should,” he said. “It’s totally illegal, their being in Iraq.”
“Where’s the demonstration?” I asked.
“At the Art Gallery. It would be awesome if you came.”
Awesome? What the hell? I wondered. What was that kid thinking about me?
After dinner they went downstairs to practise. Joe Sr.’s lair is down there, a TV, a stationary bicycle, an unambitious set of weights. It’s also where he stores and listens to his vast punk record collection. Maria is not allowed, not even to get at the black hole of the bathroom.
When Joe Jr. was around twelve, he began spending time in The Lair. While it hurt to be replaced as the preferred parent, I knew it was only fair. I’d been tightly and intricately attached to Joe Jr. I never sent him to daycare or preschool. When he started kindergarten, I used to lie on the living room floor for the entire two and a half hours, imagining all the calamities that could transpire while he was out of my sight. Earthquake. Fire. Gunman walking in spraying bullets. Pedophile lurking in a bathroom stall. Out-of-control car careering through the playground. Somewhere, some rogue state firing off something nuclear. I believed that if I worked through each of these scenarios, they would be less likely to happen because, statistically, the chance of thinking of a bad thing happening before the bad thing actually happens is much smaller than a bad thing happening. More people are killed in car accidents than people who think they might be killed in car accidents. Needless to say, it was a trying year.
Downstairs, the racket started as Rachel and I loaded the dishwasher in tandem. “I could hardly look at that poor boy,” she said.
“Simon?”
“It nauseates me.”
“His acne or his ears?”
She grimaced. “Acne is natural. Self-mutilation isn’t.”
I nodded. “Ugly is the new beautiful.”
“Again,” she sighed. “They never learn. Look at Joe. His ears are in tatters from all those pins. Is he a physician or an embattled tomcat? I’m sure his patients laugh at him behind his back.”
“I don’t think so. They’re probably just happy to see him after the six-hour wait.”
She nudged me. Simon had come up the stairs. He gawked at us briefly—well, me—then disappeared down the hall, returning a moment later with an enormous boot in each hand. Before closing the basement door again, he cast me a backward glance.
I felt annoyed by his attention now. The grey-haired Shaughnessy matron mimed a finger down her throat. “At least they didn’t tattoo themselves back then,” she went on. “You remember Silly Putty?”
“Sure. It’s still around.”
“Joe used to push it onto the Saturday comics, then stretch it out of shape. That’s what those tattoos are going to look like in fifty years. These kids don’t realize they’re going to be old one day.”
And I thought: maybe they’re not.
A new song started up downstairs. Soundproofing spared us the lyrics, but we could hear that one of the three chords was different from the three chords in the last song.
“Does Joey have a tattoo?” Rachel asked.
I hated to tell her. It was a sore point for me too. “A very small one. Tiny. Joe went with him to get it. To make sure about the needle. Anyway, all this is wonderful for Joe. It’s the dream of every punk rocker who ever sold out. His offspring is picking up the torch.”
“I guess.”
Then they called us, so we dried our hands and started down the stairs to where the walls are painted black and the light bulbs red. “Rachel?” I said, before I lost the chance. “Did you see the article?”
She turned around on the stairs and, under the light, looked drenched in blood. “That’s why I came so early. I thought you might want to talk. But you seemed distracted. I’ve been waiting for you to say something.”
“I’m sorry, Rachel.”
“Are you all right?”
“Yes, but I didn’t get the chance to read it. It didn’t mention me, did it?”
“No.”
“I feel better now. Thanks.”
“All that was a long time ago, Jane.”
“I know,” I said.
It’s a gallery of album covers down there: D.O.A., Pointed Sticks, The Clash, The Ramones, The Subhumans, the petit point Sex Pistols, framed, in a place of honour. Strings of interlocked safety pins hang in the doorway like a beaded curtain. Drawing it aside for Rachel, I wondered how many safety-pin factories had closed since the demise of punk. Joe had probably single-handedly kept one in operation. As well as the curtain, he once made himself an entire suit of safety-pin chain mail. This was during med school, which, according to Joe, was one long, jittery Wake Up–pill high. The problem with the suit was it wasn’t safe to sit in.
I sat on the weight press bench while Joe led his mother to the only chair, an armchair rescued from the Dumpster, his threadbare throne. He’d changed into his Sex Pistols T, a decade unwashed at least. (He claims it’s too fragile to get wet.) Joe Jr. wore something affectedly torn. Simon wasn’t wearing a shirt at all, treating us to the full spectacle of his bubonic back and chest. They had their boots on and the dog collars bristling with studs. While Joe fiddled with the amp, the younger Joes bounced up and down like tennis players warming up.
“Ready?” Joe asked.
Joe Sr. armed himself with the bass, the boys their guitars. They one-two-threed and exploded into a raucous “Now I Want to Sniff Some Glue,” segued into “Fucked Up Ronnie,” leaping dervishly, crashing into each other, Joe’s forty-three-year-old pectorals bouncing along with him. The exertion of punk is all the cardio he gets and, already, he shone with sweat.
At the end of the medley, Rachel burst into applause. “How stirring!”
Rachel went home after the concert. The boys retreated to Joe Jr.’s room, Joe Jr. having successfully avoided talking to me all evening. Joe Sr. was in the shower. I had the feeling he was doing it too, avoiding me, so I went to bed where I lay in wait for him. I took Fathers and Sons because I thought maybe I could get Joe Jr. to read it, since he’d already expressed an interest. The first thing I did was look for that Bazarov quote.
The shower shut off in the next room and a minute later, Joe came in with a towel tucked around his waist. He smiled and, turning his back, dropped the skirt, effectively mooning me. “Ha!” I said as he fell naked between the sheets. “That’s perfect. Listen. Art is just a means of making money, as sure as haemorrhoids exist.”
He laughed. “Someone came in with a bleeding case a few weeks ago. Really gory. The guy wept for joy when I told him what it was. He thought he had cancer. Everyone thinks they have cancer.”
I closed Fathers and Sons. “What was wrong with Simon tonight?”
“What?”
“Didn’t he seem to be acting strangely?”
“He’s fifteen. I know! How about The Piles?”
“Is something going on?” I asked.
He immediately reached for The Journal of Emergency Medicine lying on the lid of the laundry hamper for a pretence of reading before sleep. “Masturbation probably.”
“Tonight?”
“Continuously.”
“Did you see the paper?”
He pushed his face a little deeper into the shielding pages. “I glanced at it.”
“You saw the article?”
“Yes.”
“Yes! So where is it now?”
He tossed his magazine on the floor and turned to me, pouchy under the eyes, I noticed now. The poor man was tired. “I called Joe Jr. at school and asked him to get rid of it. I thought you hadn’t seen it, Jane. I didn’t want you to be upset.”
And I was filled with shame because it’s easy to forget that my moods affect them too. In our early years, Joe was convinced I had an off-season sort of SAD. Every spring he would bring me pills the way other husbands bring cheering flowers. Really, there’s nothing clinically wrong with me. I just feel guilty whenever the trees flower.
“Rachel said I wasn’t mentioned.”
“It was the same old thing. Those two. The bomb. You know it all by now.”
“Did Joey ask why you wanted him to do this?”
“No.”
“Did he say anything about it tonight?”
“No.”
“That’s funny,” I said, though really, why would he be curious about his mother? Except that Simon seemed to be. “So where is the article now?” I asked.
“He’s got it, I guess. You want me to get it?”
“Tomorrow,” I said and, satisfied he was just trying to help, I kissed the good, long-suffering doctor, heroic lancer of haemorrhoids, and let him get some sleep.
Chekhov was a doctor. His stories are full of medical men and women, the occasional scoundrel, but most of them sympathetic and hardworking. Dr. Samoylenko with his kebabs and mullet soup. Dr. Ragin in “Ward Number Six,” who ends up committed to the same asylum as the patients he neglects. The frustrated, overworked Dr. Ovchinnikov in “An Unpleasant Business.” Joe is, I think, most like Dr. Osip Stepanych Dymov from “The Grasshopper,” in the background making everything run, taking no credit. No one remembered Dymov until exactly half past eleven every night when he threw open the dining room doors and announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, supper is served.” Throughout dinner his wife would call him her darling maître d’hôtel and extol his charms to her arty guests. “Gentlemen, look at his forehead! Dymov, turn your profile to us. Gentlemen, look! The face of a Bengal tiger, but an expression as kind and charming as a deer’s. Oh, you sweet darling!” Yet she started an affair with her painting teacher, and when the doctor found out, he began inviting a friend to dine with them so Olga would not have to lie. And after dinner, when his friend played the piano, Dymov would say, “Why, hang it all, my dear fellow, let’s have something really sad!”
Joe has a raptor’s face, but a deer’s expression too. He would, of course, ask for something really angry.
When Joe Jr. was younger I was fearless. Nightly I would brave the obstacle course of Transformers, the carpet land-mined with Lego, slippery with hockey cards. Willingly I risked these childish hazards because I needed to be sure he was actually still there in his captain’s bed, tucked in and breathing and safe. Safe from the harm I’d imagined throughout the day. But as he got older and slept less soundly, he’d sense my intrusion and wake. I had to stop checking on him despite my urge to protect him, which persists even now that he’s a foot taller than I am and perfectly capable of looking after himself. It should be easier, but it’s not. It’s worse than ever. The older he gets, the more imperilled, or so I feel anyway. Because of Pascal. Because, what if the same thing happened to Joe Jr.?
I tossed and turned. I curled my toes up tightly, then relaxed them, did the same with my feet, then my calves, and so on, like you’re supposed to, but gave up. Gave up and gave in to the compulsion and went to Joe Jr.’s room to make sure he was okay. Standing in his bedroom doorway, I faced different hazards now. His scorn, for one. I couldn’t even see him, but I heard him. He breathes like his dad. All that was visible were the fluorescent constellations stuck to the ceiling, still glowing after all these years like the heavenly bodies they represent. When I noticed them, I was amazed, just as I am nightly amazed by the reappearance of the stars and how they prove that, against all odds, the world has endured another twenty-four hours. They gave me courage and so I shuffled in, feeling my way with my feet until my shins collided with the bed. I froze while Joe Jr. slept on, oblivious to my bumbling—until I sat down.
“Ow!”
I sprang up. “Oh, God. I’m sorry. I woke you.”
Groggy. “Mom? You sat on my leg.”
“Sorry!”
“What time is it?”
“Shh. Go back to sleep. I’m leaving,” I said.
“What are you doing in my room?”
“Nothing. I’m leaving.”
I turned and walked straight into the edge of the door. It felt like a punch. More stars, brighter now, and a waterfall in my eyes. My nose sang with pain and when I cupped it, I felt something warm running out. Joe Jr. switched on the lamp.
“Are you okay?”
As soon as I could see, as soon as I ascertained that blood had not been shed, I turned to Joe Jr. sitting up in the bed. These days I rarely see him undefended by attitude like this and, in that moment, he looked exactly like his baby self. The clock on the bedside table, its face round and reproving, jabbed its hands past two-thirty.
“You want the article, I guess,” he said.
What I actually wanted was that he would always and forever be safe.
Joe and I have tried to raise Joe Jr. in such a way that lying would be unnecessary. It seemed we were successful, for his confession spilled right out. “Dad asked me to take it. That was why I came home early. And because I was bored.” But the next thing he said just floored me.
“Were you a terrorist, Mom?”