The Nix(24)

He parks, double-checks the address. At the building’s front door there is a buzzer. Right there, written on slip of yellowed paper in ink now faded to a light pink, is his mother’s name: Faye Andresen.

He presses the buzzer, which makes no noise whatsoever and makes him think, along with the age of the contraption and the rust and the wires jutting out, that it’s broken. The way his mother’s button sticks for a moment before finally giving way to the pressure of his finger with an audible tick makes him think the button has not been pressed in a very long time.

It strikes him that his mother has been here all along, all these years. Her name has been out here on this slip of paper, washed by the sun, for anyone to see. This does not seem allowable. It seems to Samuel that after she left, she should have ceased to exist.

The door, with a heavy magnetic-sounding click, opens.

He enters. The inside of the building, past the entryway and vestibule with its bank of mailboxes, seems incomplete. Tile floors that abruptly give way to subfloor. White walls that don’t seem painted but rather merely primed. He climbs the three flights of stairs. He finds the door—a bare wooden door, unpainted, unfinished, like something you’d see at a hardware store. He doesn’t know what he expected, but he definitely did not expect this blank nothingness. This anonymous door.

He knocks. He hears a voice inside, his mother’s voice: “It’s open,” she says.

He pushes the door forward. He can see from the hall that the apartment is bright with sunlight. Bare white walls. A familiar smell he cannot place.

He hesitates. He cannot immediately bring himself to walk through this door and back into his mother’s life. After a moment, she speaks up again, from somewhere inside. “It’s okay,” she says. “Don’t be scared.”

And it nearly breaks him, hearing that. He sees her now in a rush of memory, lingering over his bed in the bleary morning and he’s eleven years old and she is about to leave and never come back.

Those words burn him straight through. They reach across the decades and summon up that timid boy he once was. Don’t be scared. It was the last thing she’d ever said to him.





| PART TWO |


GHOSTS OF THE OLD COUNTRY


Late Summer 1988





1


SAMUEL WAS CRYING in his bedroom, quietly, so his mother wouldn’t hear. This was a small cry, just tiptoeing on the edge of actual crying, maybe a light whimpering along with the normal halted breathing and squished face. This was a Category 1 cry: a small, concealable, satisfying, purgative cry, usually only a welling of the eyes but lacking actual tears. A Category 2 cry was more of an emotional cry, triggered by feelings of embarrassment or shame or disappointment. This was why a Category 1 cry could be vaulted to a Category 2 simply by the presence of someone else: He felt embarrassed about crying, about being a crybaby, and this fact created a new kind of crying—that wet-faced, whimpering, snotty crying that’s not yet a full-throated Category 3, which involved larger raindrop-size tears and bouts of sniveling and convulsive breathing and a reflexive need to find a private hiding place immediately. A Category 4 was a weeping sobbing fit, whereas Category 5 was just unthinkable. His counselor at school had encouraged him to think of his crying in these terms, using categories like they do for hurricanes.

So that day he felt he needed to cry. He told his mother he was going to his room to read, which was not unusual. He spent most of his time alone in his room, reading the Choose Your Own Adventure books he bought from the bookmobile at school. He liked how the books looked on the shelves, all together like that, homogenous, with their white-and-red spines and titles like Lost on the Amazon, Journey to Stonehenge, Planet of the Dragons. He liked the books’ forking paths, and when he came to a particularly difficult decision, he would hold the page with his thumb and read ahead, verifying that it was an acceptable choice. The books had a clarity and symmetry to them that he found mostly absent in the real world. Sometimes he liked to imagine his life was a Choose Your Own Adventure book, and that a happy story was just a matter of making the right choices. This seemed to give a structure to the sloppy and unpredictable world he found in most other contexts terrifying.

So he told his mother he was reading, but really he was having a nice little Category 1. He wasn’t sure why he was crying, just that something about being at home made him want to hide.

The house, he thought, had lately become unbearable.

The way the house seemed to trap everything inside it—the heat of the day, the smell of their own bodies. They were caught in a late-summer heat wave, and everything in Illinois was melting. Everything was burning up. The air was a thick glue. Candles sagged where they stood. Flowers could not be supported by their stems. Everything wilted. Everything drooped.

It was August 1988. In the years to follow, Samuel would look back on this month as the final month he had a mother. By the end of August, she’ll have disappeared. But he didn’t know that yet. All he knew was that he needed to cry for certain abstract reasons: It was hot, he was worried, his mother was acting weird.

So he went to his room. He was crying mostly to get it out of the way.

Only she heard him. In the extreme quiet, she could hear her son crying upstairs. She opened his door and said “Honey, are you okay?” and immediately he cried harder.

She knew in these moments not to say anything about the elevation in his crying or react to it in any way because acknowledging it just fed the crying in a terrible feedback loop that sometimes ended—on those days when he cried over and over again and she couldn’t help but let her exasperation show through—with a wet blubbering hyperventilating kid-size mess. So she said, as soothingly as possible, “I’m hungry. Are you hungry? Let’s go out, you and me,” which seemed to calm him enough to get his clothes changed and get him into the car with only minor, post-crying hiccups to deal with. That is, until they got to the restaurant and she saw they were having a “Buy Two Get One Free” deal on hamburgers and she said “Oh good. I’ll get you a hamburger. You want a hamburger, right?” and Samuel, who all along had his heart set on chicken nuggets with that mustardy dipping sauce, worried that he’d disappoint her if he didn’t go along with this new plan. So he nodded okay and stayed in the hot car while his mother fetched the burgers, and he tried to convince himself that he wanted a burger all along, but the more he thought about it, the more the burger seemed revolting—the stale bun and sour pickles and those uniformly cut maggot-size onions. Even before she returned with the burgers he was feeling a little sick and throw-uppy at the thought of having to eat one. And driving home he was trying to contain the crying that was almost certainly coming when his mother noticed his wet, sniveling nose and said “Sweetie? Is something wrong?” and all he managed to say was “I don’t want a burger!” before he was lost inside a crushing Category 3.