Five Tuesdays in Winter(5)

I’d dried us all off as best I could but we dripped a bit coming through the French doors and through the library, little drops that sank darkly into the blue-and-gold carpet. I sounded like I was hurrying them. I sounded like I was concerned for the rug and trying to find the most direct route to the stairs, but I was taking detours, guiding them through sitting rooms and studies and short hallways, listening hard for someone on the phone. I wanted to hear how he spoke to Raven. I knew how he spoke to his sister (blunt, sarcastic) and his mother (softer, upbeat, the edge slightly dulled, nearly but not quite solicitous), but how would he speak to his wife?

He wasn’t in any of the rooms. I spotted a little closet with a door ajar and dark dribbles on the beige rug. It was empty except for a shelf and an old black dial phone, the only phone I ever saw in that whole house. But the receiver was on its cradle and Hugh was not in the room.

He was on the bottom step of the front staircase, his elbows on his knees, head bent forward and hanging limp below his sharp shoulder blades. He didn’t look up until Stevie poked him in the ear. He didn’t straighten up. He just turned his head toward us.

“Hey, you,” Stevie said in an awkward imitation of his uncle.

“Hugh, me sir?” he said. He looked ill, greenish gray, though everything looked a bit that way in that dim house in the middle of the day.

“What’re you doing?”

“Thinkin’. What’re you doing?”

“I’m being put down for my nap.”

Hugh gave him a slight smile. “That sounds nice. I’d like to be put down for a nap.”

Stevie shook his head.

“No?”

Stevie kept shaking his head. He was already out of his conversational depth. And he was tired. But he was blocking my way up, with one hand on Hugh’s leg and the other on the first newel post of the banister. I could tell without looking that Elsie had already fallen asleep. Her forehead lay hard and moist against my neck.

“Do you like coming here to this house?” Hugh asked him.

“Yeah,” Stevie said, swaying, shifting his small weight from the knee to the post and back.

“I remember coming here to visit my grandmother.”

“Your grandmother?”

“Grammy’s mommy.”

“Grammy’s mommy,” Stevie whispered, trying to fathom what that meant.

“She only wore black, huge long dresses down to her ankles. She was the last Victorian. And the only ghoul I ever met.”

“What’s that?”

“A ghoul? It’s worse than a ghost.”

“Oh.” He wouldn’t want to continue that conversation.

They looked at each other, Hugh breathing loudly through his nose, Stevie still swaying from knee to post. I could smell Hugh. I knew the scent by then. It was sharp and unclean, even after a swim, and I knew I wouldn’t like it anywhere else but coming up from his long taut body. I breathed it in greedily.

I knew I should nudge Stevie up the stairs but I sensed Hugh didn’t want to be alone. Something within him was crying out for something. Neither Stevie nor I knew what it was or what had happened, but we were compelled by it anyway.

“How’s your dad?” Hugh said. For a few seconds I thought he knew about my dad and the drugs and all the rehab places, that my mother had told all that to Mrs. Pike and they all knew and laughed about it at dinner when I was in the pantry, and my body stung everywhere at once.

“Good,” Stevie said. “Busy.”

“He and your mom get along?”

“Yeah.” There was a question in it.

“Sometimes parents fight. Like you fight with Elsie. They don’t do that?”

Stevie shook his head.

“Your dad is kind to your mom?”

“Yup.”

“And your mom is kind to your dad.”

“Yup.”

“Do you hear them talking? Not to you and your sister but to each other, about grown-up things?”

“Yup. A lot.”

“And they talk in nice voices?”

“Uh-huh.”

“When do you hear them talking?”

“Most times. Morning.”

“You can hear them from your room?”

Stevie took a breath for a big thought. “I think they’re watching TV but I go in and they’re not, they’re just lying there looking at the ceiling and laughing. They’re weird, I guess.”

“They’re not weird. They’re happy, Stevie. Will you promise me you’ll remember that?”

“’Member what?”

“Your mom and dad laughing. Will you promise? Even when you’re old as Grammy you’ll remember?”

“Yup. Okay. Good night.” He laughed. “I mean, not good night but good nappy night.”

“You won’t forget?”

“About what?”

“You’ve already forgotten!”

“No I didn’t. I won’t forget.” He laughed again. He didn’t move to go upstairs. “Laughing is weird. Why do we laugh?”

“Probably so we don’t blubber like babies.”

“Oh.”

Stevie took a couple of steps up and I followed. Elsie shifted with the sudden movement but didn’t wake up.