Peter Straub - Mr. X

Over lunch, the astonished Phil explained the Machiavellian stratagems by which my mother had sandbagged him. Star ate half of what was on her plate, looked at her watch, and stood up from the table. She had a long drive ahead of her, time to go, thanks so much, goodbye.

By the time I carried her bag downstairs, she was giving Laura a hug from the depths of her new winter coat. I walked her down the path to the Lincoln, wondering if she thought she could get in and drive away without speaking to me. We came up to the car door, and I said, ‘Mom.’ She wrapped me in her arms.

‘Come with me,’ she said. ‘Throw a few things into a suitcase and tell those nice people you’re going to stay with me while you think things over.’

‘What?’ I pulled back and looked at her. She was serious.

‘I have enough room to put you up. You can wait tables at Inside the Outside until we find something better.’

If she had sandbagged Phil, what she was doing to me felt like a mugging. ‘What’s going on? Laura’s after me about transferring or dropping out for a semester, you can’t even look at me, both of you act like I turned into some person you don’t even like … I’m not where I’m supposed to be, I’m too skinny, I’m a liar … All of a sudden, come to Cleveland …’ I raised my arms and shook my head in bafflement. ‘If you can, explain it to me, how about that?’

‘I want to protect you,’ she said.

I couldn’t help it – I laughed at her. ‘Middlemount’s a lot safer than a nightclub in the middle of Cleveland.’

Some thought, an explanation or rebuttal, surged across her face. She visibly thrust it away. ‘Maybe I never had a chance to go to college. But you know what? Working at Inside the Outside isn’t such a bad deal.’

I had offended her. Even worse, I had insulted her. ‘Hey, Mom, I never wanted to go to Middlemount, it just happened.’

‘Then get in the car.’

‘I can’t.’ In the face of her huge, silent challenge, I said, ‘I did have a lot of problems, but I can work them out.’

‘Uh-huh,’ she said. ‘The things you don’t know, they’d fill a football stadium.’

‘Like what?’ I said, remembering the refusal I had just seen.

‘You and me, honey, we don’t know anything at all.’ The warmth of the new coat enveloped me once more, and when I felt her arms and shoulders tremble as she kissed my cheek, I almost decided to climb into the old Lincoln and drive away. Star patted the back of my head twice, three times, waited a beat, then once more. ‘Get back inside before you freeze to death.’

I spent most of the next few days studying.

The Grants kept up a cheerful patter during the drive to O’Hare, though I could tell that Laura was still unhappy. Phil marveled at my mother’s progress in the year since their last championship. In the past, he had been able to predict her decisions three or four moves ahead. ‘I knew her game better than she knew mine. I could surprise her, whereas she always had to take chances to surprise me.’

‘Whereas?’ Laura said.

‘Yes. The point is, once you get to that stage, the situation never changes. But this year, Star figured out my strategies before I knew what they were. I thought she was just messing around until she started taking my pieces off the board. The level of her game went way past mine, which means that her ability is out of sight.’

‘Whereas yours is merely above average,’ Laura said from the back seat.

‘Why are you picking on me? Ned, she’s picking on me, isn’t she?’

‘Sounds like it,’ I said.

‘You in a bad mood, honey?’

‘I’m afraid of losing Ned.’

Phil looked at her in the rearview mirror. ‘We can’t get rid of the guy. He’s coming back in a couple of weeks.’

‘I hope he does,’ Laura said.

Phil glanced at me, then back up at the mirror. ‘After you two got back from downtown, Star seemed sort of antsy, like she was upset. Did she seem upset, Ned, when you were saying goodbye?’

‘More like worried,’ I said. ‘She wanted me to drive back to Cleveland with her.’

‘Oh, no,’ Laura said.

‘Just get in the car and drive away?’

‘After telling you I was leaving.’

Laura said, ‘I knew it,’ and Phil said, ‘I’ll be damned.’ He checked the mirror again. ‘What did you say?’

‘It’s not important.’

‘I don’t know,’ Phil said. ‘Ned, one thing about your mother, and I’ve always thought she was great –’

‘No kidding,’ Laura supplied.

‘You do, too, Laura, come on, one thing about Star, she’s full of surprises.’

I tried to say goodbye to the Grants at the security check, but they talked their way past the guards and walked me to the departure gate. We were about half an hour early. Phil wandered off to inspect a gift shop. Laura slumped against a square column and smiled at me from a face filled with complicated feeling. I remember thinking that she had never looked so beautiful, and that I had rarely been so conscious of how much I loved her. ‘At least you didn’t run away to Cleveland.’

‘I thought about it for a second or two,’ I said. ‘You knew what she was going to say?’

She nodded, and her warm eyes again met mine. ‘Star and I have some things in common, anyhow. We both want our Ned to be safe and happy.’

I looked down the corridor, where Phil was peering at a rack of baseball caps. ‘What was all that about Biegelman’s? When you and Star got back, you were mad at me, and she was in outer space.’

‘Forget about it, Ned, please. I made a mistake.’

‘You thought you saw me in Biegelman’s?’

Laura rammed her hands into the pockets of her down coat and bent her blue-jeaned right leg to plant the sole of a pretty black boot on the flank of the column. The back of her head fell against its flat surface. She turned her head toward the people moving up and down the corridor and smiled reflexively at a small boy encased in a snow-suit waddling ahead of his stroller.

‘There was a little more to it.’

A long stretch of corridor opened up in front of the boy, and he broke into a lumbering run until sheer momentum got the better of him. He flopped down onto the tiles, his arms and legs spread-eagled like a starfish. Without breaking stride, his mother leaned over, scooped him up, and dumped him into the stroller.

‘Eventually, I got tired of trailing after Star.’ Laura was watching the boy’s mother move efficiently down the corridor. ‘I love her a lot, Ned, but sometimes she can make it hard to give her what she needs.’ She turned her head and smiled at me again. ‘We got to Biegelman’s, she found exactly the right coat, it was on sale, we hadn’t seen anything else all morning, so it should have been simple. All right, it was a little expensive, but not much. I would have bought it for her in a second.’

I was thinking: The story always hides some other, secret story, the story you are not supposed to know.

‘But Star didn’t like my spending so much on her, so she had to play this game. The coat wasn’t the right color. Could the clerk see if they had one in a lighter color? It was obvious they only had that one, and the only woman in Naperville likely to buy it already had it on. Mr Biegelman came up to help, and I walked away. When I looked back, your mother was gone. Then I looked through the window, and there she was, out on the sidewalk in that coat. She was talking to you.’

‘Me?’

‘That’s how it looked,’ she said. ‘Star seemed so unhappy … so disturbed … I don’t know what. You, the person I thought was you, turned his back on her and walked away. I started to go toward the door, but Star came back in and gave me this look , so I didn’t say anything. Mr Biegelman gave us the extra discount, and I pulled out my credit card. But I did ask her about it on the way home.’