Charles Bock - Beautiful Children

Once you got to the second floor, a banister ran behind the stairwell. When they'd been house hunting, Lorraine had learned the logic behind this contraption: you did not want someone — say a child — to be running around upstairs, slip, and then fall down the stairs. The banister not only prevented this, but also created a small upstairs corridor. Lorraine had developed the habit of hooking tightly around the rail and heading left, into the master bedroom. Presently, however, she broke to her right, the first time in quite a while she'd taken this direction.

She hadn't intentionally stopped visiting her son's room, no more than she'd meant for Lincoln to stop sleeping in their bed, for the boy to disappear, or for any part of this snowballing hell that was their lives to get rolling the way it had. As with so many things, there had been reasons for it and then there had been the happenstance of how it all panned out. Part of it was logistical. By holing herself up in the master bedroom, Lorraine had, in effect, ceded the rest of upstairs to her husband. It just didn't feel right to venture inside the guest room, where her husband was sleeping in exile. Same for the hall bathroom, where he showered and shaved. It was improper. Disrespectful in some way. But to get to the boy's room you had to pass the guest room, then make a right turn before the door to the guest bathroom. In short, Newell's bedroom was deep inside Lincoln's domain. In the months following her son's disappearance, this hadn't stopped Lorraine; indeed, she'd sought out the pain of that empty room — approaching the door that Lincoln left closed, consistently feeling a flash of belief as she turned the handle, suddenly sure that her son would be safely inside, sprawled on the floor, having his action figures perform wrestling holds on one another. But the pain had become too much, and the turf war had taken its own toll, and eventually the door had stayed closed, the room drifting that much deeper into enemy territory.

She eased the door open and found the room as she'd grown to dread it: the bed made and neat, the carpet barren of the strewn clothes and toys that used to frustrate her. A residue of dust swirled in the half-light of the space where the window curtains did not quite meet. Lorraine walked the perimeter of the room, looking absently at toys, at mementos, finally, at nothing. She sat on the edge of the bed, and soon enough was remembering: moments when she'd come to tuck in her son, talk about his homework, or make peace with him after some sort of problem, mornings when he had to be up early and knocking brought no answer so she'd eased the door open and watched her son sleeping and peaceful, and she had been filled with love for him, so much love for this beautiful fucking child of hers, even when she could see he was faking and just did not want to get up to go to school; even when she had places to go and people to see, and did not have the time or energy for his crap, her love for him still could come out from hiding and just about make her heart burst. But these were the easy memories. The convenient ones. Truth was, when Newell had first turned up missing, these were the memories she'd willed into being whenever she used to come in here. They'd been a comfort, a natural defense mechanism. Today, however, these memories had accumulated almost mystifying levels of complexity. It was almost impossible for Lorraine to make sense of them, to feel anything beyond wear.

The bedspread. A cluttered goulash of red and gray images promoting the university basketball team. Lorraine straightened it a little, then stopped and let herself go beyond the easy memories. She recalled looking through a catalogue with her husband, how Lincoln had wished the boy wanted something with the logo of a Major League Baseball team. She lingered on her husband's ability to give in on that matter. After everything she'd been through with Link, Lorraine remained impressed at his ability to distance his preferences from those of his son's.

This afternoon she let her mind wander, gave herself to the poltergeists. A pillowcase looked clean unless you were the child's mother, in which case you could still make out the outline from the night when you had gone upstairs to ask about a school bake sale, and had surprised your child in his bed, causing him to spill the soda that house rules prohibited him from bringing upstairs, and that he should not have had anyway. Lorraine walked around inside the memories; even as their details rushed her, she lingered on every single one — the boy's pajamas getting soaked; the fantasy book he had been reading.

And the sports posters, curling at their edges, straining against the tape and wall tacks that held them in place. The pool of nickels and quarters and matchbooks that had accumulated on the boy's bureau — those, Lorraine steered herself away from, willfully directing her attention from Lincoln's belongings, toward the bookshelf: the comic books and school primers, the arrangement of die-cast figures. The room was pregnant with memories. An imagination unfurling; Newell explaining, from the sedan's rear seat, how he had set up this particular battle, and then the conflict's root. Lorraine saw herself pretending to listen, saw her son behind her, his mouth moving, forming unheard words. A different drive home now; Newell not responding to her inquiries, sullen, his one-word answers, his head in a comic.

At a hobby store she had examined all sorts of paints and tubes and thin brushes and flagged down a passing salesman and voiced her concerns about the model paint, making sure it was not lead-based and would not be harmful, and the child got impatient, he already was upset that she wanted to buy the cheaper kind of paint and not the officially sponsored brand of the National Association for Fantasy Figures, and he pointed to words on the label that said safe for kids, and Lorraine remembered this even as she looked at the grand total, those three figures that had ended up getting painted.

With no small amount of love, she could not help but remember the boy complaining that he was bored, and there was nothing to do. She'd respond with, Why don't you paint some of your action men, and he'd look at her as if she were insane. Maybe so. Maybe she was.

When she had been that age she had loved ballet and used to practice the drills in her room for hours on end. With each plié there was the possibility for physical perfection. Lorraine had tried to work toward that perfection, focusing on each movement, getting each part of the whole correct.

But then you couldn't get life correct, could you?

You look back and see clues everywhere, but how were you supposed to know? A twelve-year-old boy is attracted to darkness. To special effects and sarcasm. Saying no when any idiot could see the answer was yes. If every boy with a short attention span and a propensity for smart remarks abandoned his life, who would be left? In her weaker moments she could blame Lincoln for coddling the child, for being the one who got to spoil him, for forcing her to be the disciplinarian and watchdog she'd never wanted to be; but at the end of the day, her anger was pointless, the strap of ribbon that swirls from a maypole in a hurricane. It was easy to say that Newell spent too much time watching television or playing video games; the truth is that there are times when you have to cook or clean or need a moment to yourself and a television or game gets him out of your hair. That was not an indication of their abilities as parents.

They had tried to give Newell everything he had wanted. Where was the crime in that? They had poured their best wishes and hopes for the world into their son; what more could you ask for? And their boy knew he was loved. They had made sure of this much.

But Lorraine could repeat these sentences to herself so many times. She could console herself with a million fund-raisers, immerse herself in untold lost causes. In the end all she was left with were clichés. A pristine room of reminders. Everything waiting for the boy to return, waiting to pick up exactly where things had left off. He would be preparing for eighth grade right now. This was the difference between inanimate objects and people: people change.