Anne Tyler - Saint Maybe

“Oh, my Lord above.”

Agatha wondered if the toilet was still running. She couldn’t hear it. She imagined the house flooding silently with the murky yellow water from Daphne’s diaper.

“Just go , will you?” their mother said. “Go back to bed and stay there. And don’t you dare use this toilet again till I can get hold of a plumber, hear?”

The word “plumber” sounded so knowledgeable. Yes, of course: there was a regular, normal person to take charge of this situation, and that meant it must happen to other people too. Agatha pulled her covers up. She watched Thomas enter the room and trudge to his own bed. He walked like an old man, huddled together across the back of his neck. He lay down and reached for Dulcimer and hugged her to his chest.

It wasn’t like him to be so quiet. Maybe he had guessed the toilet was Agatha’s fault.

She said, “Thomas?”

No answer.

“Thomas, is the water still spilling over?”

“Doe,” he said, and the stopped-up sound of his voice told her he was crying.

“You want to come sleep in my bed?”

“Doe.”

In the hall she heard their mother’s bare feet heading toward her bedroom, and then a pause and then hard shoes clopping out again — or maybe boots. Something big and heavy. Clop-clop toward the kitchen, clop-clop back down the hall. The swabbing of a mop across the bathroom floor. Well, so. It would all be taken care of.

Agatha relaxed and let her eyes fall shut. She might even have slept a few minutes. She saw sleep-pictures floating behind her lids — a black cat hissing and then Ian rattling his dice and all at once flinging them into her face and causing her to start. Her eyes flew open. The lights were still on, and the radio was playing a Beatles song. Ice cubes clinked in a glass. The cloppy footsteps came down the hall, and there was her mother outlined in the doorway. From the ankles up she was thin and fragile, but on her feet she wore two huge shoes from Danny’s closet. She came over to Agatha’s bed, shuffling slightly so the shoes wouldn’t fall off. “Are you awake?” she whispered.

Agatha said, “Yes.”

She realized that Thomas must not be. His breathing had grown very slow.

Her mother sat on the edge of the bed. In one hand she held a glass of Coke and in the other her brown plastic pill bottle, uncapped. Probably that was what had rattled in the dream; not Ian’s dice after all. She tipped the bottle to her mouth and swallowed a pill and then took a sip of Coke. She said, “Do you believe this? Do you believe a person would just have to fend for herself in this world?”

“Won’t the plumber come help?” Agatha asked.

“Everything is resting on my shoulders.”

“Maybe Grandma Bedloe knows a plumber.”

“It’s Howard Belling all over again,” her mother said, which was confusing because, for a second, Agatha thought she meant that the plumber was Howard Belling. “It’s the same old story. Unattached, they tell you. Separated, they tell you — or soon about to be. And then one fine morning they’re all lovey-dovey with their wives again. How come other people manage to have things so permanent? Is it something I’m doing wrong?”

“No, Mama, you didn’t do anything wrong,” Agatha said.

Her mother tipped another pill into her mouth and took another swallow of Coke. The ice cubes sounded like wind chimes. She raised one foot, her ankle just a stem above the clumsy shoe. Agatha thought of “Clementine.” Herring boxes without topses, sandals were for …

“No wonder men aren’t afraid of things!” her mother said. “Would you be afraid, if you got to wear gigantic shoes like these?”

Yes, even then she would be, Agatha thought. But she didn’t want to say so.

Her mother bent to kiss her good night, brushing her face with the soft weight of her hair, and then she rose and left. Her shoes clopped more and more faintly and her ice cubes tinkled more distantly. Agatha closed her eyes again.

She tried to ride away on the beat of rhymed words— herring boxes without topses and Johnny over the ocean, Johnny over the sea, Johnny broke a milk bottle, blamed it on me .

Nibble, nibble, like a mouse , she thought. Who is nibbling at my house?

She kept repeating it, concentrating. Nibble, nibble … She fixed all her thoughts upon it. Like a mouse … But no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t push back the picture that kept forming behind her lids. Hansel and Gretel were wandering through the woods alone and lost, holding hands, looking all around them. The trees loomed so tall overhead that you couldn’t see their tops, and Hansel and Gretel were two tiny specks beneath the great dark ceiling of the forest.

In his ninth-grade biology class, Ian had watched through a microscope while an amoeba shaped like a splash approached a dot of food and gradually surrounded it. Then it had moved on, wider now and blunter, distorted to accommodate the dot of food within.

As Ian accommodated, over and over, absorbing the fact of Danny’s death.

He would see it looming in his path — something dark and stony that got in the way of every happy moment. He’d be splitting a pizza with Pig and Andrew or listening to records with Cicely and all at once it would rise up in front of him: Danny is dead. He died. Died .

And then a thought that was even worse: He died on purpose. He killed himself .

And finally the most horrible thought of all: Because of what I told him .

He learned to deal with these thoughts in order, first things first. All right, he’s dead. I will never see him again. He’s in Pleasant Memory Cemetery underneath a lilac bush. He won’t be helping me with my fast ball. He hasn’t heard I got accepted at Sumner College. Trees that were bare when he last saw them have bloomed and leafed without him .

It felt like swallowing, to take in such a hard set of truths all at one time.

And then he would tackle the next thought. But that was more of a struggle. Maybe it was an accident , he always argued.

He smashes headlong into a wall by ACCIDENT? A wall he knew perfectly well was there, a wall that’s stood at the end of that street since before he was born?

Well, he’d been drinking .

He wasn’t drunk, though .

Yes, but, you know how it is …

Face it. He really did kill himself .

And then finally the last thought.

No, never the last thought.

Sometimes he tried to believe that everyone on earth walked around with at least one unbearable guilty secret hidden away inside. Maybe it was part of growing up. Maybe if he went and confessed to his mother she would say, “Why, sweetheart! Is that all that’s bothering you? Listen, every last one of us has caused somebody’s suicide.”

Well, no.

But if he told her anyway, and let her get as angry as she liked. If he said, “Mom, you decide what to do with me. Kick me out of the house, if you want. Or disown me. Or call the police.”

In fact, he wished she would call the police. He wished it were something he could go to prison for.

But if he told his mother she would learn it was a suicide, and everyone assumed it was an accident. Driving under the influence. Too much stag party. That was the trouble with confessing: it would make him feel better, all right, but it would make the others feel worse. And if his mother felt any worse than she did already, he thought it would kill her. His father too, probably. This whole summer, all his father had done was sit in his recliner chair.