Ten Thousand Saints - Eleanor Henderson [133]
“Oh, don’t tell me.”
“I don’t know. Maybe they’ll make up.”
“She needs her mother,” said Harriet. “This is ridiculous. We should be arrested. I should—”
“Hey, baby.”
The words were as clear as if they had been spoken at Jude’s side.
“What?” he said.
“What?” said Harriet.
“Everything but my toothbrush. Did I leave it there?”
“Hold on,” Jude whispered to his mother, although it was clear that the voice hadn’t heard them, and she hadn’t heard it. It was not the same voice he had heard before. It was Johnny’s. It was one side of a conversation, transmitted from Neena’s phone line.
“I’ll be home soon,” said Johnny.
“Come home, Jude,” said his mother. “For Christ’s sake, just come home.”
Twenty
Hey, baby.
After Jude hung up the phone, he lay down on the bed again. Down the hall, a door opened. The TV cut off. “Will you guys help me carry this shit?”
He had never heard Johnny call anyone that. Not his wife. Not as a joke. Baby was not dude or man or fag. He’d said it with an adult affection, a degree of intimacy that made a fist of Jude’s balls.
He said the words aloud. “Hey, baby.”
And he felt Teddy’s hot breath on his face. Teddy blowing a gust of pot smoke into his mouth.
On the phone, no voice had answered Johnny. The empty space rang in Jude’s ears. Then the front door, again opening, then closing, silenced it.
Sitting up, he looked at the number he’d scribbled on the back of a flyer. Di’s hotel room in Chicago. How had his mother managed to get that?
Jude put the paper in his pocket and walked down the hall. Everyone was gone. He knocked on Eliza’s door. He didn’t expect her to open it, but she did.
“I thought you were Johnny.”
Jude’s balls loosened. On the TV behind her, Santa Barbara was on pause. Julia was embracing Mason, but over his shoulder, her face had an unsettled look. Eliza had taught Jude all the characters’ names.
“He just left. I think everyone went to the protest.”
Leaving the door open, she turned, walked to the unmade bed, and lurched backward onto it. She laid her wrists over her eyes. The lower half of her body hung over the edge, her knees dropping gently apart, her nightgown draping a shadow between her thighs. His body went rigid. He closed the door behind him.
He deserved her, and Johnny didn’t. This had been his belief all along, but he had lived with his discontentment uneasily; he’d felt unentitled to it. Now his desire flamed up in him, fully formed, righteous; he held a ticket; he had the burden of proof . . .
“You know how your phone does that weird thing with the voices?”
Eliza lifted one of her wrists from her eyes.
“I just heard Johnny talking to someone. He was on Neena’s line. He called the person ‘baby.’ ”
Slowly, she sat up. His heart was pounding with anticipation, but the look of dread on her face brought it under control.
“Who was he talking to?”
He sat down beside her. He tried to remember what he’d heard. Johnny was moving back out. He was probably staying with Rooster. He was always staying with Rooster. Unless he was lying about that, too. There could be someone else. But Jude didn’t think there was.
When his father had told him that he was adopted, the revelation was both terrible and gratifying—a piece of news that restored order to his universe, an answer to a question he hadn’t thought to ask. Of course. He knew with that certainty that the person Johnny had been talking to was Rooster.
But he would give the truth back if he could. At sixteen, he still wished he could shake his father’s words out of his ear.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I couldn’t hear her.”
Who was he protecting, Eliza or Johnny? She was looking at her bare feet, which dangled off the bed, not touching the carpet. Sometime when Jude hadn’t been looking, her henna tattoos had faded and then disappeared. He looked at his own feet, in a pair of white tube socks with a hole in the right toe.
“You wanted