Julia Pierpont - Among the Ten Thousand Things

“What, you mean legally?”

“That’s your word.”

“Wow. That’s impressive, thank you. That’s nice.”

“I’m just saying.”

“I’m just hanging up.”

That night off the phone Jack wouldn’t remember but in snatches. What he’d remember best was wanting, that he’d wanted for so many things. He’d wanted it to be an hour ago, or two, before the call, or a year ago, or several, whenever he’d started drifting. For it to be home. For home to be ten years ago. For ten years ago to be when he was still young.

Also, he wanted a drink, and for that he needed a crowbar. How else would he get into Charles’s damn cabinet.

After two or after three, he crept down the stairs and into the study. He knelt in front of the cabinet and pulled the knobs, stuck the fat of his pinkie in the keyhole, rattled the thing.

He found a letter opener in the pen cup on the desk. It fit narrowly into the void around the cabinet door, knocked down and up against the metal bolt of the lock. He tried to pry the door and the opener snapped.

The lamp fell as he was spinning the whole thing around, and Jack flapped his arms like a conductor— silenzio! — palms open to catch the waves of sound as they passed.

The cabinet’s back was not fuzzy fiberboard but dark mahogany, no panel he could lift. Jack reached under and ran his hand along the bottom, and it was like this, on his knees, arm hooked under the thing like feeling inside a lampshade or up a dress, it was with this particular blocking that he became aware of his audience.

Charles, of course, and the hour was indeed after two or after three but, worse, was after four and just past five, five-fifteen, and here was his stepfather come down to help Phyllis with the coffee.

Sound came from the kitchen. He could hear the click-click-click of the gas range and his mother’s low hum-song to herself, la-da-da, and he heard Charles too, who didn’t have to say anything. A while later the sun was up and so was Jack, barely, for morning service, on the disagreeable planks of the church’s first pew.

Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it.

Jack had to leave, quite immediately, after that.

Deb spent her birthday just how she said she wanted: lazy in her boxy blue sleep shirt, blowing the dust off old records with Gary. There weren’t any presents, though Kay devoted twenty minutes to a card made with orange highlighter and printer paper folded twice, and when Simon came back from the sandwich shop, he gave his mother the rest of his ice cream.

The ferry was back to its weekend schedule, and for her birthday dinner, they just made the six-fifteen. The boat was small and tipped easily, which made the ride more fun, salt spray prickling their arms and necks and faces. Like the whole sound playing with them.

And Newport! Newport was where everyone had been hiding. The main square where the ferry dropped them was alive with people, polos and white shorts spilling out of yachts with funny names painted on: Diablo del Mar and College Tuition; sitting at outdoor restaurants, again with the names: The Black Pearl, The Red Parrot, The Barking Crab; saying cheers over sparkling wine and lobster and clam chowder. Deb could feel her children’s buzzing thoughts, Oh, couldn’t we just stay here where there are stores, and where, yes, there are strangers, but none who will try talking to us?

At an Italian restaurant on the water, they ate as the last red crown faded from the evening sky and everyone paid too much attention to the food, zucchini flowers and orecchiette that Kay pressed inside out, like turning one kind of belly button into the other, and the plates soon were empty, slick with olive oil and needles of rosemary. The kids fell to listening and then not, as the grown-ups talked, a little about art and a little about the past.

Gary took up the wine bottle from the table and tipped the neck of it toward Simon. “Little for you?”

“I’m okay.” Simon returned to texting under the table. He was used to his parents’ friends slipping him thimblefuls of champagne at parties, as if they could win his favor that way, like it was some great boon.

“Who you talking to?” Deb asked, her eyes winkingly on Simon.

“Uh.” His thumb darted around the screen. “Nobody.”

“You’re texting nobody ?”

“This is like Odysseus,” Gary said, scraping forward his chair.

Kay laughed and Simon pointed the phone at her. “You shut up. You don’t even know what that means.”

A rectangle of tiramisu was brought out, and the staff sang “Happy Birthday” halfheartedly. Deb took a deep breath, but it was the sea breeze that blew the candle out.

That night, Teagan said, she’d leave the door open. She remembered about the door but not the hanging beads, which Simon collided into a hundred small clicks, scattering out and into his hands as he roped them together. Holding them still, he waited for the sound of any thing, of grown-up legs swinging out of bed.

Inside the house was darker than out, without the moon, and his vision beat blue until there was light enough for him to let the beads go gently free and climb to where she’d said she would be waiting for him. Quarter speed ahead he crept, past the living room where Teagan’s mother slept, a large mound before the tube TV, on mute. He heard the whistling way she snored, shallow, teakettle breaths.

At the stairs his hand reached for the railing, but he drew it back, remembering the loose post she’d warned him about. This was his first time on her stairs. Coming up on the landing he had to think: Don’t trip. At the far end of the hall, he could just make out Teagan’s name woodcut in pink-painted bubble letters.

The entrance to her room unsealed even before he got to it. She must have heard him, to be already on the other side, stepping back now to let him in. She wore a thin, white nightgown with satin strips ribboning the neck. At the hem it was broad and starched and stood apart from her. He watched her ease the door shut and couldn’t remember if he’d closed the one downstairs.

Making it through the house was like a game he’d won, but nothing was won yet.

She sat at the foot of the bed, and Simon sat too. It was a high bed, with posts, that left their feet to dangle. The room, what he could see of it in the low light, was gently frothed, like the nightgown. Rosebuds bloomed up the walls and on the triangle of quilt between his legs, and something about how pale the pinks, how chipped the white wood and wicker, aged the room — still girlish but preserved — and Simon remembered that it had been her grandmother’s. Over the dresser, Van Gogh sunflowers curled in a glassless frame.

Teagan bounced a little on the mattress and laughed air out her nose. “So.”

“So.”

“Yeah.”

—

When Simon snuck out of the house, Kay was ready and on the move. She couldn’t believe he was sneaking out, and in following him (again like in a movie), it almost didn’t occur to her that she was doing it too. She felt like a secret agent, light-stepping through the kitchen to pluck her mother’s phone from its charger. In case she lost him.

Clearly, clearly Simon was breaking the rules, only it didn’t look like anything wrong because of the way he walked, without hesitation. Watching her brother cross Teagan’s lawn, she could see the growing up of him, a little, where it had started to take root. It had started in his step.

Then he was inside — she hadn’t even seen anyone let him in — and Kay was a little disappointed he hadn’t caught her, even when she’d hurried her feet close behind. I’m not following, she was ready to say, even though it was all she could be doing. That and, It’s a free country. Another line she never got to use.