Ten Thousand Saints - Eleanor Henderson [31]
She allowed him time. She didn’t want to push. She left breakfast on his desk in the morning, toast and eggs he ate at some point, leaving the crusts behind as evidence, then walked to Ash Street, where she sat in front of her table from eight in the morning to eight at night, chain-smoking, reading the same page in her library book over and over again. The bookmark was a pamphlet on FAS. On the front was a picture of a pigtailed girl on a carousel. Jude had been a happy child, exuberantly, senselessly happy, but also gloomy, and unpredictably hostile, and strange. He bit, and he kicked, and he threw. At five or six, he’d brought to her in a shoe box a collection of gifts: a button, a toy truck, some coupons she’d clipped, the husk of a beetle. When she’d responded with inadequate awe, he’d given her a black eye. His fists were still pummeling when she lifted him by the armpits, his little legs wheeling, his face sopping with sweat. Where did this person come from? she’d thought. One of her drawing students, suspecting Les, had called in the domestic violence agency from Montpelier, and she’d had to swear up and down that her abuser was in kindergarten.
A week after he came home from the hospital, she sat on his bed and said, “Jude, honey? You’re going to have to get back to school soon.” She was rubbing his calf rapidly through the blanket, as though trying to start a fire. When she saw what she was doing, she put her hands in her lap. “You don’t want to get too far behind.”
Jude said nothing. He was wearing his headphones, she realized. He was lying on his side, facing the wall, his body entwined in the sour-smelling sheet. The only times she’d heard him leave the room all week were when he crossed the hall to the bathroom, and evidently it hadn’t been to take a shower.
The next morning she came into his room before the sun rose. “Come on, babe, I started the shower.” She made the mistake of sitting on his bed, sighing loudly, and slapping him—tap, tap—on the bottom.
Into the pillow, he said, “I’m not fucking going. Ever.”
“Jude,” she warned, reaching to slip his earphones from his ears.
He spun around at her so fast she flinched. His eyes were distant and glazed, but they burned right through her. It was seven o’clock in the morning.
“You’re stoned,” she said, more to herself than to him. Of course he was. Why wouldn’t he be? What else were Delph and Kram bringing him in those paper bags?
That afternoon she listened for the jangle of the fire escape as they left his room, and then leaned into the passenger side window of Kram’s car as it was about to drive away.
“I know you think you’re helping, boys. I appreciate it, I do. But if you help him anymore, I don’t think he’s ever going to get out of bed.”
They hung their heads, nodded at the dashboard. Nobody felt compelled to look anybody else in the eye, and she was glad.
And then there was Prudence, crawling onto and across Harriet’s bed, skulking in her nightgown like that clingy old cat of theirs, depositing her sullen head on her mother’s breast. Harriet spread her open book across her lap, removed her glasses, ashed her cigarette, and kissed the part in Prudence’s hair. “What is it, babe?”
“When’s Jude going back to school?”
Every day that Jude missed school, the attendance office called with a recorded message. Two of his teachers had called. The principal, whom Harriet had had the pleasure of meeting several times before the funeral, had sent a letter, asking Harriet to come in for a conference, which she did, not bothering to take off her coat. She could feel the disapproval steaming off of him, just as it always had, dressed up in courtesies.