What Hearts Page 8

  His mother surprised him by wheeling around in a sudden fury. “What is this?” she sputtered. “What is supposed to be so weird about you, Asa?”

  Her flare burned off his pretense of light-heartedness. But he had started something, so he plugged on, without playacting now. “Well,” he said, “you know. I’m—different. I mean—here we are in the South and Dave has this big family and all the kids are normal Southern kids. They go to church all the time, they take it very easy, they don’t worry about much. Great sense of humor—tease a lot, but it’s because they like you, you know. That’s the way Dave was when he was a kid, I know, and that’s the way he likes kids. That’s what kids are, to him. But I’m different. I care too much about things they don’t even notice. Stupid things I know don’t really matter, really. Like, I mind that they crease my comic books. When they come over, they come in, all friendly, and I really like them, I like my cousins—I wish I was that friendly all the time—and they plop down and yank out a bunch of my comics. That’s okay. I can put them back in order. But they fold them, fold the covers back, sometimes they wad them up and put them in their back pockets to go down and eat. It’s dumb to care so much about it, I know, but—I try to keep them land of neat. I take care of them, is all. But I know it doesn’t matter. What matters is that we are all cousins, we are all family. You’re not supposed to let junk like that—like stupid comic books—come in the way of your love of your family. But I can’t help it—before the love comes on, I start worrying about my comics, and I hate doing it, and Dave is right.”

  “Right? What does he say that is right?”

  Asa had not planned on this, but now he was nervous and upset and he couldn’t seem to stop. He tried to back off. “Oh, nothing. I mean, he’s right. He’s just trying to help me.”

  “What does he say?”

  “He lets me know I’m being sort of a nervous finicky guy. Like maybe I like things better than people, you know? And that’s wrong, I know it is. So I ought to be different. It is better to be land of loose and easy about stuff.”

  “Oh yes,” she said. “Like Dave. He’s very loose and easy about stuff, isn’t he? That’s probably how you got that bruise.”

  Asa shut up and plucked grass. His mother watched him for a minute, then stared back out across the creek. He snuck a look at her; she wasn’t crying or anything, at least. After a few minutes he asked if they could resume their practice.

  She was grave for the rest of their workout. On the way home, silence waited between them. Then she said, “I’m very sorry, Asa.”

  He pretended not to know what she was talking about. A few minutes later she added, “It’s no good.”

  “No, don’t,” he said. He had to say something. “It’s fine.” He gave her a pretty good smile. Then he took her hand, and they held hands all the way home.

  In the middle of the night he woke up to find Dave shaking him. He smelled coffee, but it was too dark for morning and he could feel he hadn’t been asleep long enough.

  “Wake up,” said Dave. “I need your help. We have to get some coffee in her.” Then he ran from the room. Asa pushed his covers away and followed him downstairs.

  Dave, in pajama bottoms, was in the kitchen pouring coffee into a mug. “Too hot,” he said. “Ice.” He yanked open the freezer and pulled out an ice tray and smacked it very hard against the edge of the counter. Chips of ice sprayed all over. He picked a few off the counter and put them in the coffee, then said, “Come on,” and walked past Asa, leaving the freezer door open.

  They went into the bedroom. The light was on. His mother lay diagonally across their bed, her arms at her sides; to Asa she looked strangely heavy and still, like a slab of wet clay. His throat went cold. “Is she—”

  “She’s—asleep,” said Dave, giving him a quick look. He was on the far side of the bed, at her head. “Come here. We’ve got to get some coffee in her.” He was flustered; it gave him an odd gentleness. “Do you want to hold her head or pour?”

  “I’ll hold her head.” Asa went around and lifted his mother behind the neck. Dave held the mug up to her mouth and poured some coffee in. A little ran out of the corners of her mouth onto the sheets; the rest seemed to vanish until she coughed and spewed it.

  “More,” said Dave. This time her throat executed a kind of swallow.

  Asa’s arms were trembling; he was glad, actually. He knew he was in the middle of something that ought to be making him frantic, and instead he felt all cool and easy. The trembling showed he felt something, he guessed. “Why is she so asleep?” he asked.

  Most of the coffee was in. Dave looked down into her throat, frowning. “Okay,” he said. “Lie her back down.”

  Asa resisted the temptation to correct Dave’s lie to lay; instead he said, “Maybe we should sit her up.”

  Dave looked at him. “Right,” he said. He jammed pillows against the headboard of the bed, and they pushed her against them. Her head fell forward, and Dave pushed it back until the pillows held it up. Her head didn’t seem to care. She was out. The only thing about her that moved was her lower lip, which pulled in a bit whenever she sucked a raggedy breath.

  “Why is she so asleep?” Asa asked again.

  Dave ran his fingers through his hair. “You want some coffee too? I got to have some too.”

  Asa followed him into the kitchen. “If you don’t tell me, I’m calling an ambulance,” he said.

  Dave was pouring coffee into the same mug. He turned as he poured. “No,” he said, far more reasonably than Asa expected. “I mean, we don’t need the ambulance. She’s all right. Really. Just sleepy.” He slurped some of the coffee and winced at the heat.

  “Why is she so sleepy? Why do we have to wake her?”

  Dave watched him over the edge of the mug as he took another, longer swallow. “Well, Sport,” he said, with a tone almost cheery, “she kind of goofed. She had a headache, and she went into the bathroom in the middle of the night, and she took what she thought was an aspirin. But it was a sleeping pill. They look the same.” He shrugged and lifted the mug.

  “One sleeping pill?” Asa said.

  Dave paused and considered, the mug an inch from his mouth. “Two,” he said, and drank.

  Asa went back into his mother’s room. She had slumped sideways. The friction of the skin of her left cheek against the wooden headboard was all that held her up from lying down again; the pressure pulled her lip up above her gum on that side and opened her left eye. Asa looked at the eye. Nothing but white was showing.

  He straightened her, and went into the bathroom. In the medicine cabinet there was nothing but shaving stuff and toothpaste. He looked under the sink. The wastebasket was on its side and a few wads of tissue lay near it. There was a brown prescription bottle upright on the floor there. Asa picked it up and read the name of the medicine: Seconal. Inside he found a single red, oval pill. There was no aspirin or aspirin bottle anywhere.

  He went back into the bedroom. Dave was there, leaning close to her, watching for some sign; from his face it was obvious he had no clue about what he was waiting for. Asa said, “I’m calling the hospital.”

  “No!” Dave roared, spinning on him. The gentility was gone. “You will do nothing but what I say, you hear? This isn’t a time for a kid to interfere, I don’t care how smart he thinks he is.” He glared at Asa; the boy held his eye for a moment, then started to walk toward the kitchen. Dave said, “Wait,” more gently, and came over to him.

  “Listen, please,” he said. Please was not a word Asa heard from him often; he listened.

  Dave put his hands on Asa’s shoulders and looked straight into his face. “Listen, son. That’s my wife over there. Your mother, and my wife. We want her to wake up and be okay. Both of us. I would not let her sit there in danger, understand?”

  “You lied about the pills,” said Asa. “I can’t trust you.”

  Dave groaned in exasperation, and with an offhanded force that seemed weary, almost casual, he thrust Asa str
aight back until the boy slammed into the side of a bureau. Asa’s ears filled with a buzzing from the back of his head, but he stayed erect; Dave stepped close and squatted, sticking his face close.

  “You’ll pardon me for not giving a dingle,” he said, “but right now I just don’t feel all torn up with the need for your ‘trust.’ It’s not something your mother’s pining for over there, either. Frankly, boy, I don’t think you’re the kind of person who will ever trust anybody. It kind of takes an honest heart to do that, you understand what I mean?”

  “Yes,” said Asa, “I do.” Then with a concentration of all his strength he snapped his arm out and punched Dave flush on the temple. The shock of it felt good; he left his arm, stiff and solid, in the air between them as Dave jerked backward and sat down hard. Dave shook his head and blinked fast for a moment, but quickly his eyes found Asa’s and they stared at each other. For some time neither spoke or looked away. Then Asa lowered his fist, and Dave smiled grimly. There was a red circle near his left eye.

  “Well,” he said. His voice gurgled a little; he cleared his throat. “Well. Now, I guess, we’re even.” He Started to stand up, careful to lean away from Asa as he did so.

  “We’ll, never be even,” said Asa. “We shouldn’t try.”

  Dave hesitated, then chuckled darkly and shook his head. He stood all the way up, stepped past Asa, and went to bend over Asa’s mother. Asa walked to the other side of the room and sat on the floor with his back against the wall.

  Dave left after a few minutes. Asa remained, watching her. From time to time Dave checked in, bringing coffee, which he got down her without Asa’s assistance. In a couple of hours her breathing got a little easier, but she showed no signs of waking up. At one point Asa went over and tried to hold her hand, but he felt stupid. So he sat on the floor and waited, and after a while he fell asleep.

  He woke to the sound of heavy footsteps and Dave’s voice cursing. He opened his eyes. The light was off and the room was pretty dark, but it was dawn beyond the curtained windows; a long shape was just falling forward onto the bed with a thick WHUMP. The bathroom light went on and Asa heard Dave curse again. He stood up and went to the door.

  Dave was looking into the sink. It was full of jagged pieces of glass, some of them covered with amber goo. Thinking back, Asa realized that before the footsteps he had heard—and incorporated into his dream, something about a science class—the sound of glass breaking. It was probably what had brought him to the surface. Glass breaking, heavy footsteps, his mother collapsing onto the bed, Dave cursing—he tried to put it together.

  Dave turned. “She wanted to wash her hair,” he said. But he spoke with a pitiful lack of conviction, and a moment later he added, in a low, defeated voice: “Get dressed, son.”

  They carried her out to the car in the faint blue light, and stretched her out in the backseat on some blankets. She seemed to be as heavily asleep as ever; Asa wondered how she could have waked up and gotten to and from the bathroom and then slipped back. But he didn’t need to understand: there she was. They climbed into the front seat.

  Dave took turns that led them out of town, onto the road that went north. Asa had not really expected they would go only to the hospital in town; things seemed too big for town, all of a sudden. “Excuse me,” he said. “Are we going to Raleigh?”

  Headlights flashed over Dave’s face. “Yes we are.”

  He offered no explanation. But then Asa and his mother never needed an explanation when they were taken to Raleigh: It was Dave’s hometown, where all his family lived, and it drew them whenever they did not have a good reason to stay where they lived. He remembered suddenly that it was his mother’s hometown too; this was a fact, but not one that he felt very keenly. For one thing, he had known her first in Washington; for another, they always spent all their time in Raleigh with Dave’s family. She seemed as much of an outsider with them as Asa did, despite her native ability to talk the talk and mimic the behavior of the Southern wives who had never left.

  “Is Mom going to Butner?” Asa said.

  “Yes,” Dave said. “She is.”

  Asa waited a long time to ask his next question. He waited while they rode between tobacco fields and past gas stations opening up for the day, while the sun rose, pink and then yellow and then white in a white sky. He listened for his mother’s breathing over the rumble of the car, and every so often he heard a snaggled intake of air. Dave stopped for takeout coffee at a diner an hour up the road and bought Asa a honey bun. Asa waited until he had eaten his bun and Dave had drunk his coffee. He waited a while longer. Then, trying to sound very light, trying to sound as if it did not really matter a bit, he was just wondering, no problem at all, he asked: “Will we spend the night?”

  Dave looked at him as if he must be nuts. “Of course,” he said. He shook his head at the boy’s strangeness, and Asa knew just what he was thinking. Imagine going to Raleigh and not spending the weekend!

  Asa said nothing; he vowed he would not. But Dave surprised him. After only five minutes, he said, “Oh!” and hit the steering wheel with the palm of his right hand. He turned and looked at Asa.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “You were supposed to try out for Little League tomorrow morning.”

  “It’s all right,” Asa said, looking straight ahead.

  Dave hit the steering wheel another, harder lick, and cursed. And suddenly Asa could feel clearly that Dave’s anger was curling toward the woman in the backseat. It was her fault. She had done this, deprived his stepson of a chance to be a regular boy. Asa had seen how Dave’s shifty anger could work, and he knew that soon his missed tryout—indeed, perhaps the entirety of his strange life, all predicated upon this lost shot at normalcy—would be another black mark against her, another sin.

  Well, for this Asa would not stand. If he could get by without anger, what right did Dave have to be mad? Whose tryout was it, anyway? So, looking over, Asa said firmly, “Oh, no. It’s all right. I wasn’t going to try out.”

  Dave frowned. “You weren’t?”

  “No,” said Asa.

  “Why not?”

  Asa took a breath. Outside, a sparrow hawk fluttered in the wind over a red clay field. “Well,” he said, “it’s a complicated game.”

  Dave thought for a moment. Then he let out a long breath. “Well,” he said, “I told you so.”

  “Yes,” said Asa, “you did.” And that seemed to do it. They spoke no more. Asa turned then to watch out the side window, in which he could see a reflection of his face, watching. The drive went on in silence. After a couple of hours, as he stretched, he decided the scrub shortstop, the one who had come in after the line drive popped the other boy in the chest—he decided this kid would hit a home run in the top of the eighth. Yes, he liked that. Quik-E-Freeze would win. He felt a little guilty about this, a little selfish. But what the heck, he would do it: the Cool Guys would win, and he would feel great. Somehow, he hoped, he deserved this.

  WHAT HEARTS?

  ONE

  Asa was in love. He loved Jean Williams. She had been in his class since the fifth grade—or rather, he had been in hers. Fifth, sixth, and now seventh: Asa and his mother had not moved, and not moved, and not moved again. Now he could let himself count on seeing Jean every day—every moment, if he liked: a glance across the room would produce her. So far, everything he noticed about her was just right, whether it was the lean tension in her hands as she held a book, the sound of her voice pretending to order “riz, petit pois” from a mock restaurant in French class, or the curves of her neck when her hair swayed during field hockey games he watched after school in secret. It all added up to a sum inside him, a simple sum.

  Their first meeting had been simple, too. One day midway through the fifth grade she came over during art class and sat sideways in the desk in front of him. Around them kids were gabbing: the art teacher allowed roaming and talking, in the spirit of creative freedom. Jean sat, turned toward him, and leaned one elbow on the edge of
his desk. That small gesture, the intrusion into his territory, shook him with a sudden pleasure. It was powerful, and despite the ease with which she placed her elbow, Asa had a sense she knew how daring it was.

  She said, “You have moved a lot, haven’t you?”

  Asa swallowed. He rarely answered a question without having figured out quickly what thought was behind it and what response was anticipated. This time he didn’t have a clue. So he simply said, “Yes.”

  Jean nodded. Her eyes were technically brown, but when she got this close Asa could see they were a lot lighter than could possibly be imagined from a distance, nearer the color of butterscotch. She said, “I figured you had.”

  “How?” he asked.

  “You work hard,” she said. She leaned her chin lightly on the hand connected to the arm that rested on his desk. His legs tickled. She went on. “You figure things out, and you attack.”

  “Attack?” He must have looked horrified, for she laughed and blushed and put out her hand to tap him on the shoulder. Tap, tap. It was like the first time he had been touched by the ocean.

  “I don’t mean, like, to do battle,” she said. “I mean—well, you seem to know how to get to people. What I like is, you seem to do it to be nice. And, well—” She looked at him, and with a thrill he saw that she too felt something that made her nervous. “And that’s, well—nice.” She laughed at her own verbal awkwardness, and got up.

  That was it. From that point on, Asa had isolated Jean and his feelings about her from the rest of the world. This love—he started calling it that after a while—was his only known instance of simplicity. He wanted to protect it from the usual analysis and calculation that he cast over everything else out there. The protection worked. Things stayed simple. He and Jean became friends. They sometimes talked, mostly about school. They sometimes walked together, if they were going to the same place. Nothing in his behavior could be taken as a sign of the deepness inside him. He never meant to tell her anything about it. Except for wanting, at times, to reach out and touch her on the hand, lightly, very lightly, with a finger, he never meant to do anything direct.