Ten Thousand Saints - Eleanor Henderson [32]
“He just needs a little more time,” she told Prudence.
“How much time?”
“Pru, stop it with the baby voice. Talk to me normal.”
“How—much—time?” Prudence sassed, propping her head up on her hand.
“Your brother’s sixteen now. If he wants to drop out, there’s not much we can do about it.”
With her finger Prudence traced one of the diamonds on the faded patchwork quilt. “People are saying he dropped out, and I don’t even know if it’s true.”
Harriet ashed her cigarette again in the ashtray on the nightstand. “People will say all sorts of things.”
“Someone said Teddy killed himself. He didn’t, did he?”
“Of course not.”
“And Rachael said someone said Jude killed him, that the drugs were all his idea.”
Harriet put her cigarette to her lips, then removed it. “How can that be true,” she asked, “if Teddy killed himself? Which is it?”
Prudence sighed. “You shouldn’t smoke in bed.”
“You shouldn’t tell your mother what to do.”
It irritated Harriet and comforted her, the persistent morality of her secondborn. She, too, had been named for a Beatles song, a fanciful name given by fanciful parents (but it was a good song!) who couldn’t have known how apt it would grow to be.
She had a funny thought: if she had a spouse, it was Prudence. Prudence was the one who shared the worry about their Jude. But now Prudence had surprised her. She would have expected her daughter to be the one to intervene with Jude, to try to speak some sense into him, but Pru was as apprehensive around Jude as Harriet was, hovering at his door but never daring to knock. As far as Harriet knew, she had not laid eyes on her brother since he’d returned home.
What were they so afraid of? He was just a teenage boy.
The next evening, the first evening his friends didn’t come, Harriet brought dinner to his room—macaroni and cheese with sliced hot dogs—and took her seat on the bunk bed. He was lying on his stomach, facing her. No headphones, but his eyes were closed. “Jude, hi,” she said, as though she’d just been passing through the hall and decided to drop in. “Look, I’m not going to bug you about going back to school. I know you’ll go back when you’re ready.” His eyes remained closed. “I just want to tell you that, if you need medicine, we can get it for you. If you need to talk to someone, someone professional, you can do that, too. If you’re not taking your Ritalin, we can—”
Jude emitted a long, painstaking groan, intended to obscure her voice.
“Jude, they’ve got drugs for depression now. All kinds of things.”
A louder groan, flat, dispassionate.
“Jude, Jesus.” She tapped him on the bottom again, as if to turn him off, and oddly, it worked. “I spoke to one of your doctors when we were at the hospital.” She was looking at the pamphlet in her lap, speaking quickly. “She said your birth mother might have drank alcohol, drunk alcohol, while she was pregnant, and it could be the reason you’ve been having so many problems, and apparently it’s fairly common. She said there are drugs for this kind of thing, you just have to get tested, and apparently the drugs are just phenomenal. . . .” She trailed off. She placed the pamphlet on the bed beside her and gave it a pat. The fact that she had a history of communicating to her son through pamphlets with titles such as What Are Nocturnal Emissions? did not make her cowardice any more bearable. Still staring into her lap, she didn’t see her son’s eye, the one not pressed to the pillow, peel open, slow as a budding flower, fix itself to the side of her face, and then close.
Five
Delph and Kram began to come separately, or not at all, and when Jude’s stash ran out and the minutes were stinging and clear, the afternoons they didn’t come were like open wounds. When they did come, they didn’t bring pot. “That fruit will kill you, dude. You should keep the brain cells you have left.” Delph said he’d run dry. He was actually thinking about giving the stuff up.
“I got money,” Jude said, staring at the slats of the bunk above him, where