Saint Maybe - Anne Tyler [36]
“It’s Howard Belling all over again,” her mother said, which was confusing because, for a second, Agatha thought she meant that the plumber was Howard Belling. “It’s the same old story. Unattached, they tell you. Separated, they tell you—or soon about to be. And then one fine morning they’re all lovey-dovey with their wives again. How come other people manage to have things so permanent? Is it something I’m doing wrong?”
“No, Mama, you didn’t do anything wrong,” Agatha said.
Her mother tipped another pill into her mouth and took another swallow of Coke. The ice cubes sounded like wind chimes. She raised one foot, her ankle just a stem above the clumsy shoe. Agatha thought of “Clementine.” Herring boxes without topses, sandals were for …
“No wonder men aren’t afraid of things!” her mother said. “Would you be afraid, if you got to wear gigantic shoes like these?”
Yes, even then she would be, Agatha thought. But she didn’t want to say so.
Her mother bent to kiss her good night, brushing her face with the soft weight of her hair, and then she rose and left. Her shoes clopped more and more faintly and her ice cubes tinkled more distantly. Agatha closed her eyes again.
She tried to ride away on the beat of rhymed words—herring boxes without topses and Johnny over the ocean, Johnny over the sea, Johnny broke a milk bottle, blamed it on me.
Nibble, nibble, like a mouse, she thought. Who is nibbling at my house?
She kept repeating it, concentrating. Nibble, nibble … She fixed all her thoughts upon it. Like a mouse … But no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t push back the picture that kept forming behind her lids. Hansel and Gretel were wandering through the woods alone and lost, holding hands, looking all around them. The trees loomed so tall overhead that you couldn’t see their tops, and Hansel and Gretel were two tiny specks beneath the great dark ceiling of the forest.
3
The Man Who Forgot How to Fly
In his ninth-grade biology class, Ian had watched through a microscope while an amoeba shaped like a splash approached a dot of food and gradually surrounded it. Then it had moved on, wider now and blunter, distorted to accommodate the dot of food within.
As Ian accommodated, over and over, absorbing the fact of Danny’s death.
He would see it looming in his path—something dark and stony that got in the way of every happy moment. He’d be splitting a pizza with Pig and Andrew or listening to records with Cicely and all at once it would rise up in front of him: Danny is dead. He died. Died.
And then a thought that was even worse: He died on purpose. He killed himself.
And finally the most horrible thought of all: Because of what I told him.
He learned to deal with these thoughts in order, first things first. All right, he’s dead. I will never see him again. He’s in Pleasant Memory Cemetery underneath a lilac bush. He won’t be helping me with my fast ball. He hasn’t heard I got accepted at Sumner College. Trees that were bare when he last saw them have bloomed and leafed without him.
It felt like swallowing, to take in such a hard set of truths all at one time.
And then he would tackle the next thought. But that was more of a struggle. Maybe it was an accident, he always argued.
He smashes headlong into a wall by ACCIDENT? A wall he knew perfectly well was there, a wall that’s stood at the end of that street since before he was born?
Well, he’d been drinking.
He wasn’t drunk, though.
Yes, but, you know how it is …
Face it. He really did kill himself.
And then finally the last thought.
No, never the last thought.
Sometimes he tried to believe that everyone on earth walked around with at least one unbearable guilty secret hidden away inside. Maybe it was part of growing up. Maybe if he went and confessed to his mother she would say, “Why, sweetheart! Is that all that’s bothering you? Listen, every last one of us has caused somebody’s suicide.”
Well, no.
But if he told her anyway, and let her get as angry as she liked. If he said, “Mom, you decide what to do with me. Kick me out