Читать книгу The Editor - Steven Rowley, Steven Rowley - Страница 14

I wake to the sound of my mother crying. I grasp and find one of the buttons sewn on the mattress, the one that I cling to when I wake from nightmares of monsters grabbing my feet, but the button fails to provide familiar comfort for a simple reason—I’ve never heard my mother cry. Not like this. And it’s more frightening than any demon.

“Mom?” I call, but no one answers.

I study the contents of my bedroom in the morning light to distract myself. I can see my dresser and my toys and the needlepoint fire engine my grandmother stitched. The curtains flutter and float on the breeze sneaking in the open window. I know where I am and I know my name and that I am seven years old and I’m comforted by at least that much. Still, I feel apprehension, bordering on anxiety—what news could this crying possibly bring?

I look down under the bed like I always do to make sure it’s safe before planting my feet on the floor, and slowly slink out of my room. My mother is in the living room chair where my father usually sits, smoking a cigarette. She’s watching our small TV while clutching a mug, as she does in winter when she wants to warm her hands. The news people on the screen seem especially somber, more so than usual. The volume is low and I can’t make out their words, but their expressions need no interpretation.

“Mom.” I say it again, real quiet this time, in case I am not supposed to see this.

I fidget with the snaps on my pajama pants, grasping for an activity so that I’ll appear casual when I am eventually seen (and I will be seen). I count the seconds, as I somehow know they are the precious foundation of a future important memory; the more seconds I can count, the stronger the memory will be. There won’t be many. My mother has eyes on all sides of her head.

… nine … ten … eleven … twelve …

“You should be getting dressed for school.” Her head remains perfectly still, encased in a cloud of dancing smoke.

I remove my hand from the snaps of my pants and take a step closer, looking at the thick, brown carpet the entire time, imagining it a sea of mud. Or quicksand. I quickly lift my feet just to make sure I still can.

“Go on, Francis,” she says, encouraging me again to retreat, to get dressed, to leave. Sensing that I am not only disobeying her but am actually advancing, she sets her mug on the TV tray, ashes her cigarette, and wipes her eyes with the backs of her hands in a vain effort to transform this crying stranger back into the mother I know.

I place one foot in front of the other, carefully, deliberately, heels touching toes every time, each foot docking with the other before I attempt any further forward motion. I can smell the acrid smoke of my mother’s cigarette and I inhale it deeply, inhale her. Eventually I am beside her. I grasp the arm of the chair, afraid to reach out for her, afraid, given her strange trance, that she might dissolve into ash like her cigarette from even the faintest human touch.

“It’s Bobby.” She starts sobbing. I’m startled by how much sobbing looks like laughing. And by how the way she tucks her head into her arm makes her look like one of the preening swans that used to visit our duck pond. “They got him.” I wrack my brain trying to place this Bobby, and discern just how close he is to us. They got him? I’m not even sure what that means. Did a van pull up alongside him? Is he a cousin or a family friend? If they got him, were we somehow in danger of being snatched too?

I look closely and can spot where tears have dripped and stained the sleeves of the blouse that covers her spindly arms. I want to lick them, her tears, like our dog Casper did mine the night my hamster died. I remember how loved I felt in that singular moment, puppy lashings covering my salty face, both rough and soft like the finest-grained sandpaper from my father’s workshop; I want nothing more than for my mother to feel this loved too. But just as I work up the nerve and I can feel the smallest tip of tongue cross the threshold of my lips, my mother inhales so deeply on her cigarette that I can hear the paper and tobacco crackle; somehow it’s the loudest sound in the room.

She exhales her words. “They killed him just like they did his brother.”

Nothing my mother ever said has stopped me so cold. This was not grief I was witness to, it was rage. I want to ask who “they” are, who is doing this killing, but I know better than to open my mouth. I want to know how people could be so angry or violent, but I know not to form this thought in words. Not right now. The only way to coax more information out of my mother is to stay silent and let her volunteer it. I delicately trace the five freckles on her forearm; I have them memorized. They are stars, the makings of a constellation filled with stardust and matter that holds the answer to every question that could ever be asked. You just have to be quiet enough to listen, so I put my ear to her arm.

She stubs her cigarette in the clay ashtray I made for her in Scouts, giving my handiwork her full attention as if soaking in its imperfections, its mottled shape and uneven glaze. She then turns to me, startled to see me leaning against her, and stares at me this time, taking in my imperfections, the excuses she would have not to love me if I were someone else’s son.

“Remember his name. Robert F. Kennedy. He was a good man.”

His full name does not help me place him, so I stare at the television, hoping the images will help. Most of the pictures are of chaos, and they move too quickly to clarify much of anything.

“Who is he?”

My mother thinks about how to answer. “He was Irish like we are Irish. He was Catholic like we are Catholic.” She clutches the cross that she wears around her neck. “He represented a hope that the future would be good. Now I don’t think I understand the future at all.” She kisses me on my head, as if to wish me luck in these unknowable times, and I lean in, trying to get her to do it again. But she doesn’t say anything else for so long, I think the conversation is over. Then, out of nowhere, she adds, “You share a name with him, in fact.”

I think of my name, James Smale, finding no overlap.

“Francis. You have the same middle names.”

“Dad gets mad when you call me Francis.”

“Your father gets mad about a lot of things.”

“I like Francis,” I say, my ability to suck up to my mother knowing no bounds.

“Your father’s name is James and he wanted you named after him. But I chose Francis, and so it became your middle name.” She starts to quiver again, but this time she doesn’t break. She gets up to turn off the television and I hear the hum of static and then nothing. Silence, except for the twittering of birds by the feeder outside and the faint singing of chimes. I want my mother to stop crying, but I also know that when she feels sad I am the only one who can comfort her—and that means maybe getting out of going to school today.

So I remain perfectly still.