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Normally, his mother or stepfather is there when he returns from school. Robert is a freelance writer and sometimes teaches math classes at the university, so he works out of the apartment, his notes or student quizzes usually spread out on the kitchen table. His mother teaches kindergartners, so she is usually home by two-thirty at the latest.
Nobody in the kitchen. Outside, the water pours down in thick sheets that look like Saran Wrap. He feels lucky to have escaped the worst of the rain, even though the quiet apartment gives him the creeps. He moves cautiously, announcing himself with each step. His own room appears undisturbed: sleeping bag unzipped on the bed, pajamas draped over his chair, the unmasted Santa Maria (the model ship he's been working on for his history class) still spread out on a plywood board in the middle of his room. Barry changes clothes rapidly, putting the wet heap in a plastic bag in his closet, then wiggles into shorts and a T-shirt.
He knocks softly on his mother's bedroom door. "I'm home." Still no answer. One of his biggest fears is walking into his mother's room unannounced. He did that one night after his parents divorced and before she married Robert. Without thinking, he threw open the bedroom door to find her straddling a pasty-skinned man who had a welted pink scar on his left thigh.
That was a difficult period in Barry's and his mother's life that he doesn't like to think about anymore. It started when his father left. Barry hasn't seen him now for three years, not since he was six, but his father still calls on holidays and sends him presents and birthday cards and always signs them,"Love, Dad."
The night his father left, Barry was lying in bed, listening to his parents arguing in the next room. His father's voice was just a low hush, but his mother was bitter and hurt in a hysterical way that frightened him, made him want to crawl deeper under the covers, sleep and not have to hear what he was hearing.
"You're goddamned right I blame you," she said. "You did it--you!-- and now you expect me to understand and forgive and be sweet about the whole thing?"
"I'm sorry."
"'Sorry' isn't good enough. And to have to find out about it in that way, of all ways. How humiliating!"
"What do you want me to say?"
"I sure as hell hope you've been safe, because if you haven't, if you've given it to me, then I'll . . . I'll, I don't know what I'll do."
"Oh, for Christ's sake, Jenny."
"Were you?"
"Yes. There's nothing to worry about."
"Well, at least there's something to be thankful for."
"I think we can get past this."
"No, I don't think so."
"Please, don't cry."
"I can't go back, knowing what I know," she said.
"What about Barry?"
"Haven't you caused enough heartache already?"
His father went to a motel that night, and then a few days later moved his things, which his mother boxed and taped, out of the house. His father told him that he and his mother would not be living together, but he loved Barry very much and loved his mother, too, and that Barry should take care of his mother now because he had to go away. They hugged, and his father kissed him on the forehead, and Barry kissed him back and then started shaking because he sensed that this was the end of things as he had known them, that something irreversible was happening now that would split his life in two: before this moment and after.
In the days and months that followed, his mother seemed sad and confused. At night, she would crawl into bed with Barry, and tell him that his father had to go away for a long time, that Daddy still loved him, but that his father had done a very bad thing to the family. She would clutch Barry tightly to her, and tell him she loved him so much, that he was the only person in the world she could trust.
For almost a year, his mother continued to act strangely. At night, through the air conditioner vents, he could hear her crying. And when she wasn't crying, she was going out with a lot of men, none of whom she particularly cared for, even several of the men his father used to work with. She put on fancy dresses and lots of makeup to impress them; she kissed them, and, he figured, did other things, too.
When she would go out, their next door neighbor's son, Paul, would babysit him. Barry and his mother's life together got worse when she found out what happened out at Mead Lake, an event that seemed to ruin Paul's life and that made Barry's mother even more angry at Barry, his father, herself, the whole world.
Barry was glad when his mother married Robert. He tries now not to dwell on what happened before that time, but odd moments like this--the simple fear of opening closed doors--brings it all back in a rush that reminds him that there are too many things he has no control over, including his memories.
###
He finally creaks open their door. "Mom? Robert?"
Their bed is unmade, the sheets and pillows a dirty tangle, the comforter draped over the side. Both his mother's and Robert's clothes are strewn about the gold carpet. "Mom," he calls again, louder, his voice cracking. He doesn't know what to expect, and he feels a tingle, like a light electric current, running over his arms, neck and scalp. He listens attentively, hears nothing, then edges deeper into the room.
The bathroom door is slightly ajar, the light on. "Hello, is anyone here?" No response.
Horror film images flood his mind: a hatchet-toting, stocking-faced maniac, his mother's bludgeoned body. He feels an urge to turn tail and run, slamming doors behind him. He listens again, takes a deep breath, and presses his ear to the door but hears nothing but an irregular drip from the faucet. When he eases the door open, he discovers Robert, slumped in the tub, naked.
By reflex, Barry slams the door shut, then stammers, "I'm sorry. I didn't know you were in there."
Robert doesn't answer, so Barry knocks, calls his name two more times, waits a full, agonizing minute, and still no response.
He opens the door again and notices that Robert is, thank God, bloodless. But his eyes are closed, his chin resting on his chest. His face is thick and puffy, and the water seems to cut him in two--his head, chest, and bent knees the only parts of his body completely out of the water.
"Robert?" he whispers. His stepfather doesn't move, doesn't say a word.
He leans in close to Robert's face, and smells it on him, pungent and forbidding, like the formaldehyde Mr. Hegler uses to pickle frogs and baby pigs. In the soap dish is a tumbler with clear liquid in the bottom, three pellets of melted ice floating on top. Barry pulls back the curtain and finds a near-empty bottle of rum hidden between the curtain and tub. All this scares him. He's never seen Robert drink liquor before, none, not even a beer.
When Barry's mother first started dating him, Robert took them to a barbecue where all of the other adults, except Robert, carried around salty-rimmed margaritas and green-labeled bottles with German names on them. Afterwards, Barry asked him why he didn't drink, and Robert said, in a deep, mock-serious voice, "I don't need artificial stimulation," and then added, with a strange laugh that puzzled Barry, "definitely nothing that tastes like horse piss."
Later, after Robert dropped them off at home, Barry's mother explained to him that Robert's father had been a terrible alcoholic, and Robert knew that if he ever started drinking, he wouldn't be able to stop. He would suffer the same fate as his father, hurting both others and himself. Barry's mother spoke urgently and admiringly of Robert's willpower and perseverance, "his sense of restraint." Listening to her talk that night about him, in a whispery, girlish voice that he'd never before heard from her, Barry knew that she would soon marry Robert. And within three months she did, and their life, Barry felt, had been much better.
That is, until recently. In their arguments late at night, his mother says things like, "I don't really know you" and "We rushed into this" and "You're not as strong as I thought you were." These phrases scare Barry, make him feel like the earth is about to crack open again. He knows his mother would hate to see Robert this way, in the tub, drunk. He knows that look of hers. Frowny, with her mouth downturned and her eyebrows stitched together.
Barry nudges his stepfather's shoulder. A mumble, nothing understandable, but at least he is alive. Robert rolls his head to the other shoulder. Barry slaps his face lightly. He thinks he should do it harder, like he's seen people do in movies to stop hysteria, but it would be too weird, shameful, to strike his stepfather. Just more mumbling, the body still dead weight.
Until this moment he tries hard to avoid looking at the part of Robert that is in the water, but he does so now, he can't help it. The amount of hair surprises him: the dark line that stems down from his navel and flowers out into the wet, black thatch that seems to float on top of the water and encircle the shriveled part, which looks purplish in the water. It seems sad and strange and funny too, like a small animal hiding in the bushes.
"Come on! Wake up!" he says suddenly, too loud for this small room, his quivery voice echoing off the wall. Nothing.
He notices the exposed part of Robert's body is covered in gooseflesh. Barry turns on the heat lamp, and immediately the room hums, brighter, warmer, light reflecting off the white walls, the porcelain, the tiles. The heat feels good on Barry's arms and the back of his neck, the noise a strange comfort after all the eerie silence.
###
Of course, seeing Robert like this reminds him of Paul. Paul was fourteen then, Barry seven. He had wavy red hair and freckles, a goofy laugh. Paul was the best babysitter. He didn't treat Barry like a little kid, boss him around, tell him to go off and play with other kids while he sorted through his mother's dresser drawers, peeked into closets, and talked on the phone. Paul treated Barry like a friend, and what happened out at the lake, underneath the tangled limbs of the live oak, wasn't as bad as everyone made it out to be.
Of course, no one would have ever known if Barry hadn't spilled the beans. Paul had told him that he could never tell a soul what they did out there, not ever, or else they would both be in hot water.
But one day, Barry's mother started scolding him for not doing his chores. She had a right to; he had been slack the whole week, pure laziness, moping around the house, feeling sorry for himself for no good reason, and a little guilty about what he and Paul had been doing. This was not long after Barry walked in on her with the man with the pink scar, and so he also felt weird about her, wanted to bring her back to his world. When she started in on him about the chores, he broke down, though he knew in his heart he was faking, putting on a show for her in order to gain her sympathy and to shift that angry, frowny look of hers away from him. He didn't mean to tell her everything, but once he started, he couldn't stop. He felt like a fire hydrant that had been turned on and the story, like a thick shaft of water, came barreling out of his mouth. He sensed that his mother was growing frightened--could see the stricken look on her face, a slight twitching of her eyes, her lips trembling--and this pleased him at first, then worried him. He finally amended his story and said that it only happened once. Only once. His mother clutched him to her as she had during the nights after his father left and started saying, "My God, what have I let happen? Oh, my God."
"I'm sorry. We didn't mean it. We won't do it again. I promise." He felt a terrible burning in his chest and head. He liked Paul, but he feared Paul would never talk to him again because he snitched. "Don't you worry about a thing, honey," she said, pulling him tightly to her. "I'll take care of everything."
That night a police officer and a lady from Social Services came to the apartment, and his mother made him tell them the story he'd told her. Barry was nervous and afraid; he said he didn't want to tell them. In the hallway, he pleaded with his mother, reminded her that they had only done it once. The policeman and lady seemed to understand the boy's reluctance.
They told him it was okay. Paul wasn't going to hurt him anymore. But he didn't hurt me, Barry said. Okay, they said, then just tell us what happened, simply and honestly, and we'll take care of the rest. We just want to understand what happened and take appropriate measures. They told him that there were a lot of other factors involved here that grownups needed to sort through, and the best way they could do their jobs was if he just told the truth. They wanted to help both him and Paul.
So he told the same story to the policeman and lady. They were very nice. The policeman took notes, and the lady nodded her head and encouraged him to go on, even in the most embarrassing parts. They looked at each other, knowingly, while his mother held his hand.
The next morning the same policeman and lady knocked on Paul's door. About an hour and a half later, they left with Paul in the woman's car. Paul's mother and father, worried expressions on their faces, followed in their own car. Barry watched from the window. Paul kept his head down the entire time, until right when they left. Then he looked up, saw Barry, and shook his head. Other kids from the block were standing around at the end of the block, waiting for the early school bus. They watched on tiptoes as the cars drove away, excited, talking among themselves. What's going on? Where's Paul going? What'd he do?
Barry felt sick to his stomach. He told his mother he didn't want to go to school, and she complied, something she never did unless he was actually throwing up. Her eyes were red. She put her arms around him, ran her fingers through his hair. "It's gonna be okay now," she said. "Everything's gonna be okay. Don't you worry." It seemed to him, though, that he'd set in motion a series of events that were spinning out of control.
###
Finding his stepfather here in the bathtub, the heat lamp buzzing on them, the rain still beating down on the roof and windows, Barry has that same sensation, a sick feeling that bad things are about to be unleashed again. He doesn't know what to do, but he believes he should do something. He fears what will happen if his mother comes home and sees Robert this way, drunk in the tub, the room in shambles. She won't have much tolerance for this kind of failure. Already he senses in the stiff silence and their hushed arguments a connection to the time when his father left. He doesn't want Robert to go away, like his own father had to, like Paul had to. Barry likes his stepfather, maybe even loves him, it is too early to tell. But, more importantly, he doesn't want his and his mother's life to go back to the way it was before Robert entered it.
Sitting on the toilet lid, he quickly concocts a plan. If he picks up their room, cleans Robert up and, somehow, moves him from the tub to the bed, his mother might then be more forgiving. If he cleans the liquor smell off him, washes out Robert's mouth with some toothpaste, puts a splash or two of cologne on his face and hands, then maybe she won't have to know what happened. She will think Robert was just tired, went to bed early.
Quickly, he begins cleaning the bedroom--hangs the clothes up, smoothes down the bed, except for the place where he plans to move Robert. Underneath the bathroom cabinet, he finds the Lysol and sprays lemony mists into the air. After he gets Robert to bed, he will clean the tumbler and put it away, then race through the rain to the dumpster and throw the bottle away so she won't find it. As he picks up, his heart beats rapidly in his chest; his throat is scratchy and dry. He can't help but think of Paul, and remember how people twisted those events.
When he returned to school, three days later, the news about Paul and him had already spread. In class, his reading teacher, Mrs. Rider, treated him as if he were a bird with its wing torn off. She gave him more time to turn in homework, asked him often if he felt all right, patted his hand.
Everybody--the principal, the newspaper people, the women's club that his mother belonged to--made him feel like a deformed poster child. One of Jerry's kids. In his name, they called special PTA meetings, enforced curfews, became mistrustful of babysitters, made everyone in the neighborhood sign petitions, harassed the punky-haired teenagers. They were angry and energetic, and they didn't seem to care about him. Not really. He understood these people had good intentions, that's what his mother told him, and he had also been told, countless times now in too-serious lectures, about other children who were killed or suffered permanent damage. Things cut off, insides torn up. It made him feel guilty and scared and phony to be lumped together with those kids.
It was much worse, he thought, than what he and Paul had done. He and Paul were friends. What they were doing out by the lake didn't seem that bad. At the beginning, it was just swimming without their trunks, then touching with their hands and later with their mouths. It was a game, strange and thrilling and sort of curious, like walking over the railroad tracks that ran across the river, or swinging out across the lake on the thick rope and letting go, or doing the loop-the-loop on the roller coaster at Six Flags. It had all seemed sort of funny to him then, and Paul had his goofy way of making him laugh about it. He didn't feel "violated" or "molested" or "abused" like everyone seemed to believe. Paul was his friend, and a pretty good guy, even if he was, as everyone said, a pervert.
He wanted to bury himself in the sand, change his name, take back all that he had said, haphazardly, to his mother and to the lady and policeman. But his and Paul's secret was out, and there was no turning back. All the kids at school seemed to know. They kept their distance at first. But in class, at lunch, and at recess, he could feel their stares and whispers.
Most of the girls looked at him with big, pitiful cow eyes, as if they knew first-hand what an awful ordeal he'd gone through. The boys were more cruel. In their huddles, they would snicker, call him names. He wondered if he was a queer. He didn't like being called that. As far as he could tell, being queer was like being crazy, only on purpose.
He was not allowed to talk to Paul again. Within a week, Paul and his mother and his older sister went away to stay with Paul's aunt in Oklahoma. And a couple of months later, Paul's father pulled a moving van up to their apartment and moved everything out. Barry didn't go outside then, just watched from the window as everything was loaded into the truck. The other kids from the apartment complex watched, too, though they pretended to play football, jump rope, climb around in the trees of the courtyard, but Barry could see them staring and snickering. One older boy, an eighth grader, went up and wrote something with his finger on the dirty front window of the truck, but Paul's father caught him before he could finish, chewed him out, told him to wash it off. The boy refused, and Paul's father grabbed his arm tightly until the boy yelled in pain. The other kids circled around, quietly, until Paul's father let go. "Get out of here," he said to the boy. "All of you, get lost," he said with a threatening wave of his hand. But he was the one who left, locking up the truck and the apartment and returning to finish the loading after the kids were called in for dinner. Barry watched all this from his window and felt sorry for Paul's father, and guilty.
A couple of months after Paul and his family left, Barry found a note in his desk that said, "Like father, like son," and there was a crude drawing of what he and Paul had done. He didn't understand it, but it made him angry and ashamed. He stuffed it in his backpack and then later that evening his mother found it while she was unloading his homework. They were in his bedroom, and when he turned around it was in her hands.
"Who did this?" she asked angrily.
"I don't know. It was in my desk."
"Why was it there?"
"I don't know," he said.
"What do you mean you don't know?"
"I don't know. Some kids, I guess."
"Wait here," she said.
She left the room, and when she came back several minutes later, she wasn't angry anymore. She held a white bowl. She knelt down in front of him. In the bowl, he saw the torn-up pieces of the drawing.
"Listen to me, honey," she said. "I don't want you to pay any attention to this."
"Why?" he asked.
"Because it's stupid and mean. Sometimes other children do things to hurt people because they think it's funny. It's not funny, and you have to just forget it."
"Is it true?"
"It's stupid and mean," she said again. "And there's only one thing to do with such trash." She drew a packet of matches from her other hand. "Hold this," she said, and gave him the bowl.
As the match flared, she said, "Hold the bowl out in front of you, honey, so it won't burn you. Yes. Like that."
She carefully touched the match to several pieces of the torn-up picture, and then dropped the match in the bowl. Together, they watched the pieces quickly turn black and shrivel into ash. A thin line of smoke streamed up. She took the bowl from him.
"If you ever get anything like this again, you bring it me, and we'll take care of it. Okay?"
"Okay," he said.
She kissed him on the forehead and then left the room. He followed her to the hallway, and watched her go into the bathroom and shut the door. He heard the toilet flush quickly and the water in the sink running, and then she came out with the bowl.
"Would you put this in the dishwasher?" she asked. While he went to the kitchen, she went into her bedroom and shut the door. He heard the phone in the kitchen ding once, as it always did when someone in the other room picked up the extension and dialed.
There were no more drawings after that, and he tried, as his mother told him, to forget it.
###
But now, seeing Robert like this, following in his own father's alcoholic footsteps, Barry thinks of that drawing and his mother's reaction to it, how she had not answered him when he asked, "Is it true?" Was that what his father did to ruin the family? He thought that his father had been with another woman, but he was afraid to ask his mother at the time. Barry has seen pictures of Robert's father when he was a younger man, and it surprised him how identical their faces were. They could have been the same person. What awful things did Robert's father do? Barry wants to find out that, too, but he knows also from his experience with Paul that there are some secrets that should not be shared. When they are, then they're not yours anymore. People will turn them into something else.
As Barry places his arm under Robert's neck to pull him out of the tub, it happens. No warning. His mother pushes open the bathroom door, popping the thick wood against the porcelain. Robert startles awake, his eyes suddenly open and bloodshot, like a frightened deer, the rest of his face still soggy, drunken, defenseless. She gasps, as if someone punched her in the stomach. The sudden shock of her presence freezes Barry. He sees in that half-second the whole scene registering on her face, the evidence: her husband naked and drunk in the bath, her son kneeling by his side, the heat lamp on them all like a buzzing spotlight.
"What in the hell is going on?" she sputters in a voice full of anger and something else he is not sure he will ever understand. He feels he should speak, try to explain, but there is so much buried in her question, and in this moment, that he has no idea where to begin.
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