Ten Thousand Saints - Eleanor Henderson [127]
At home in her own bed at last, Eliza watched an old tape of Santa Barbara, paged through her Greek textbook (she’d forgotten nearly every word), and ate the banana pudding Neena had left for them. She felt strangely safe here. It was the last place her mother would think to look for her. And if she did: so be it. She was tired of running.
But she still couldn’t sleep. The down mattress pad she had always loved was too soft for her now. Twice she got up to tell Matthew and Ben to turn down the video game they were playing on the computer. Twice she got up to pee. After the second time, she stopped at her mother’s door and knocked on it. Jude answered in another pair of sperm boxers, these red. This time he was shirtless.
“Sorry about before,” she said, sinking into the pool of her mother’s bed. “I’m not mad at you. I’m mad at Johnny.”
“I tried to find you, but you weren’t standing outside like you said.” His voice was hoarse with sleep. “I didn’t know where you went.”
“You came after me?”
“I was worried.”
“Neena had this little baby, her granddaughter. She was this big.” She cradled an invisible baby in her arms. She wanted to say that she looked like Teddy, but this wasn’t precisely true. She closed her eyes and tried to conjure his face, but his features swam out of her reach. “I can’t remember what Teddy looked like,” she said quietly.
Jude’s eyes were closed, too, his face raised to the ceiling. “He was handsome,” he said. But Eliza could tell that he was seeing something more behind his eyelids, contours sharper than he could describe, or cared to.
She lay down across the sheets, which smelled like the lavender soap Neena laundered them in, and she told Jude that she used to sleep in this bed after her dad died, to keep her mother company. Eliza wanted to sleep in it again, but Jude didn’t lie down beside her. When the baby kicked, he didn’t want to feel it. Eventually she said good night and walked back down the hall to her own room.
That week, they came and went.
Eliza and Jude window-shopped at the baby boutiques on the Upper West Side, where a crib shaped like a sailboat cost a thousand dollars. Delph and Kram played pickup with some guys in Central Park, and Matthew and Ben went to work selling merch at Some Records. They reunited only for an occasional meal, and the show at the Pyramid, which Rooster did book. Delph and Kram left early to go to some club in Brooklyn some girls had invited them to. Di’s dining room table, polished as a pond and the size of a shuffleboard court, was quickly buried by maps and guides, ticket stubs, subway tokens, backpacks, cassettes, Gatorade bottles, granola bars, a jingle jangle of spare keys.
Johnny and Rooster went to the Love Feast at the Krishna Temple on Sunday night. On Monday they skated their friend’s half-pipe until Rooster got too tired. On Tuesday they swam at Coney Island, deep in the ocean where no one could see their limbs tangled underwater. On Wednesday they watched another friend paint a train car in Harlem, a city of skyscrapers and lights and highways as intricate as any eight-headed dragon, then watched the police paint over it. They were starting to crack down now. Even in the month Johnny had been gone, the police had begun to multiply all over the city, lifting their rodent heads out of the manholes. You could hardly suck a token anymore.
On Thursday they walked to the West Village, where gay men strolled hand in hand, walking good-looking dogs, licking ice cream cones, wearing shirts or maybe not. Johnny felt that he knew his city, that New York belonged to him, but sometimes