Rebecca Coleman - The Kingdom of Childhood

“What kind of trouble?”

“For bringing us to Pinerest Hospital.”

“I thought you said you were at Holy Cross.”

Scott growled into the receiver. “Damn it, Mom, I don’t think you listened to a freakin’ thing I said. I need you to pick me up. Do you get that part?”

“Scott, there’s no reason to be surly about it. I can barely understand you.”

“Yeah, story of my life.”

At the hospital I found Scott easily, sitting in a molded plastic chair near the exit, alone. He didn’t look to be in any way injured, which relieved me, considering how little I’d managed to put together from his phone call. I asked, “Where’s Tally?”

“Her folks picked her up.”

“And they didn’t offer you a ride?”

“They’re not exactly happy with me right now.”

I sighed. “What about the rest of your friends? Was anybody else hurt? Does anyone need a ride home?”

“No.”

In the car I pieced the story together slowly, using yes-and-no questions that forced Scott to produce answers. Finally I asked, “So how did you manage to get help?”

“We sent Zach out.”

“Oh, so Zach was there.”

“Yes, Zach was there,” he said peevishly. “Zach is always around when you need him.”

I slowed for a red light. “Well, even if the police aren’t charging you with trespassing, I think we’ll need to have some consequence. You should have had better sense than to go to a place that dangerous.”

“A consequence . Gosh, I didn’t realize you were still playing that game.”

“What game is that?”

“The mom game. You haven’t even asked for my grade report from last month. I got my SAT scores in October, and my boot is still sitting by the fireplace.”

“Is it my job to put your boots away now?”

“I put it there for St. Nicholas Day. It was over a week ago. I put out my boot for you to put candy in like you always do, and it’s still sitting there with nothing in it.”

I chuckled, but an immediate wave of remorse seized me. Scott was right. Every year of his life I had filled his boot with candy and little toys, or, in recent years, a gift card or two. Always the candy was special and unusual: barley lollipops made in antique molds, hand-pulled candy canes, marzipan animals from Germany. It was the joyful, noncommercial version of Christmas that I delighted in more than the shock and awe of Christmas morning. This year it had not even entered my mind.

But I turned to look at the tall boy beside me, with his five o’clock shadow and his broad shoulders, and I said, “I thought you’d gotten a little old for that sort of thing. You spend nearly all your time these days holed up in the den with Tally, and don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing in there. I don’t think that girl has ever bothered to say hello, but I’m hearing plenty from her, believe you me.”

“At least Tally likes guys her own age,” he muttered.

I took my eyes off the road to glare at him. “I beg your pardon?”

“You heard me.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

He shook his head, his eyes squinting in disdain. “Come on, Mom. You aren’t fooling anybody.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Silence iced over the car. After a minute I said, “Go on. If you’ve got some nonsense you want to throw at me, throw it.”

In my peripheral vision I could see him staring at me, the tightness around his eyes still prominent. When he spoke, disgust tinged his voice. “Mom,” he said, “I don’t use condoms.”

It took me a moment to put together what he was telling me.

“Well,” I replied, turning onto the exit toward our house, “you should.”

Scott went straight to his room, without a good-night or a thank-you to break the silence that had descended after our abbreviated conversation. It was three in the morning. Wide awake now, I turned on the gas beneath the teakettle and glanced into the living room. There was his blue-and-white ski boot, tongue pulled forward, askew by the fireplace. I had no idea how I had managed not to notice it. But then, maybe I should not have underestimated the lapse in my attention. Fallout from it seemed to be everywhere.

The truth was, I realized gradually, I didn’t really care if Scott knew. If he wanted to heap resentment upon me for it, then he could just add it to the pile he’d been shoveling since he was about thirteen. I felt relatively certain he would not tell anyone, because I could imagine no embarrassment greater to a teenager than for his friends to discover his mother is sleeping with one among them. I cared if he told his father, but mainly because Russ would destroy me in the divorce—and that was a genuine concern. Russ would not be likely to keep his mouth shut. He specialized in preemptive criticism, delivered by deadly accurate, laser-guided verbal missiles loaded with contempt. He would wedge as much distance as possible between himself and my dalliance, and he would do it by digging up all the dirt he could find and broadcasting it like seeds by the handful. And of it there was plenty.

Off went the stove. I picked up Scott’s boot and put it away in the closet. Poured a cup of tea with my shivering hands.

Then I turned on the coffeemaker and sat down with a bag of Russ’s pills, hoarded in a corner of my purse and a meat mallet.

Zach slept most of the day and awoke when Fairen called late that afternoon, her bright, energetic voice breaking through the wall of his fatigue. She wanted to know if he needed a ride to the Advent Spiral, and he was happy to take her up on the offer. By the time she arrived he had managed to work in a shower and an enormous bowl of lentil dhal, and felt almost human again.

The multipurpose room had been emptied of all its chairs and tables, leaving a wide parquet floor on which pine boughs had been arranged to form a great spiral. The room was deeply dark. Only a few candles in the corners provided a small light, their white flames flickering under the invisible draft from the heating ducts. Zach followed Fairen to the section of the floor where his classmates sat. Temple was there, but Scott did not appear to be present; Judy, too, was blessedly absent, so far as he could tell. He guessed the open flames were not her thing. The Advent Spiral was the school festival most likely to end in third-degree burns, which, to Zach’s thinking, also made it the most interesting.

A teacher struck up a few notes on a harp, and a young teenage girl stood and walked forth into the spiral, carrying in her hands a crimson apple fitted with a glowing white candle. At the center of the spiral she stopped and set down the candle beside a bough before slowly walking back out. One after another, the younger children, and a few of the older ones, followed her lead, each leaving their candle and its apple at a point along the path. Now and then a child’s toe struck an apple, and a flame wobbled. Other times, the hem of a dress breezed just above a candle. A bucket of water sat next to the stage, but if it came to that, things already would be quite fascinating.

“I’m going to go up,” Fairen whispered. “Are you?”

He shook his head.

“Oh, come on,” she encouraged. “What kind of Waldork are you?”

“Not as big of one as you are, apparently.”

She stuck her tongue out at him and rose, collecting her candle-fitted apple from a teacher who stood at the spiral’s opening. Her hair was up in braids that crossed at the top of her head, like a Swiss peasant girl. He supposed this was in deference to the St. Lucia theme of the celebration, and since she was too old to crown her head with a wreath bearing four candles, she carried on the childhood tradition with an approximation of it. She lit her candle and progressed slowly up the spiral, and he watched her reverent face, her sly eyes gone childlike beneath the gossamer crown of her braids.