Mouthful of Birds(42)

A few months after high school started, the father left again. And one afternoon, finally, the father managed not to come back. For a time he was on the lookout, expecting the police to find him again. Would his father have some document with his address on him? His mother quickly got used to living without her husband. Almost three years later, the phone rang and it was his father. “I feel very alone,” his voice said.

“Where are you, Dad? I’ll come get you,” he said, and when there was only silence, he tried: “Are you to the west? Or should I take the highway? Are you near or far?” He waited, but the father had already hung up.

“Does it hurt there?” Mrs. Linn asked sometimes, and her hands moved around the painful zones.

But, and maybe it was better this way, she almost never asked the question when it really did hurt.

Later on, his sister left home, and he did the same a few years after. He left on a Saturday; he remembers because his father came home on a Wednesday. He had waited for his father nearly seven years, but all it took was for him to pack his own suitcases and leave home, and his father, just four days later, rang the doorbell of the house. His mother says that she looked out and saw him waving at her from the gate, and that for some days after, she didn’t quite know what to do with him. They agreed to sleep in separate rooms, and soon they grew used to each other again.

When his son was born, the past became distant for all of them. They had Sunday dinners with the family and his father tousled the grandson’s hair with such affection that he wondered if he hadn’t exaggerated the pain his father had caused him. When it came down to it, he thought, maybe that’s what adolescence was all about: the invention of a couple of unforgivable events that help you leave home. And that’s the way things still were with them.

A few weeks ago, he went to see Mrs. Linn without an appointment. He had his father in the passenger seat, in hermetic silence. He needed to see her, and she understood that as soon as she heard that both of them were in the waiting room. She wasted no time ushering him in, while his father waited outside.

Mrs. Linn asked him to sit on the massage table and tell her what had happened. He said that that afternoon he’d been reading in the kitchen when his son came to get him and dragged him to his room. He’d prepared a little puppet show, and asked his father to sit and watch it. His son went behind an improvised curtain, and he could catch glimpses of the boy as he made a great effort to put the puppet show on well. He had never seen his son so serious. And now Mrs. Linn had to be patient, because what happened was something strange, difficult to explain.

Mrs. Linn nodded, but she reached toward her tubes of lotion and picked one up before sitting down beside the massage table.

The boy brought a puppet out onto the stage and the puppet opened its mouth, white and huge, and it trembled without closing it, as if it were screaming. He was only a few feet away, as alarmed as the puppet. But what happened next, what happened next was impossible to explain to Mrs. Linn. The boy hid the puppet behind the curtain and brought it out again, made it scream again, and hid it again. His son did that over and over, until he recognized the pain between the nape of his neck and his throat. The pain that stiffened him and terrified him in his dreams, the pain that tied him to his father and to his own image in the mirror, the yellow pain.

Mrs. Linn held her largest tube of lotion, and she accidentally squeezed it too hard. The almond perfume flooded the room.

“I felt,” he said, trying to understand himself, “my son’s boundless need for attention. An insatiable need, that’s what I felt. A need impossible to satisfy.”

Mrs. Linn put down the tube of lotion and nervously extended her fingers, as though stretching them.

“And then I couldn’t look at him, at my son. I looked away.” He tried to concentrate, but he felt a little dizzy.

Then the boy put down the puppet and he looked out from the stage himself. He hid behind the curtain for a few seconds and then appeared again. The pain he felt every time his son disappeared was something brutal. Every time the boy hid behind the curtain again, an invisible thread pulled at him violently.

Mrs. Linn brought the tube of lotion to her chest, and for a moment her elbows poked out behind her, more ready than ever to sink and compress.

“I understood that I could no longer live with him, or without him. It was a huge mistake, whatever it was that joined us. A tragedy in which we would both fail miserably.”

Mrs. Linn handed him the tube of lotion and he held it, and somehow the tube gave him the strength to go on.

He tried to explain himself: he couldn’t meet the boy’s gaze. He looked for a point among the toys in the room, a fixed point that would save him from the panic, and he latched on to a yellow puppet hanging near the window.

Mrs. Linn’s arms now hung straight down from her shoulders and her fingers were just barely moving, as if they were practicing in the air a new way to knead.

“So I went to get my father, and I made him get into the car. I got on the highway and drove in silence for about thirty miles.”

For a few seconds Mrs. Linn’s fingers stopped, as if they’d lost the thread or didn’t entirely understand what he had just said, but as soon as he went on, Mrs. Linn’s fingers followed him.

His father didn’t say anything as they drove, and when the city’s lights started to disappear, he stopped the car on the side of the road and asked his father to get out.