Thirsty - M. T. Anderson [42]
I am listening to my parents, and they seem farther away because they are in the right-side-up world.
“Don’t tell me that!” my mother is yelling. “Do you know how long it’s been since you got a raise? Do you know?”
My father says something, but I can’t hear it.
“What are you saying? Just tell me what you’re saying,” screams my mother, “because I do everything I can to keep this family going, and I don’t want to hear —”
My father says something else, very softly, but slams the table while he says it.
My mother says, “Your older son spends his life watching TV, your younger son — God knows — is doing drugs or — I don’t even know what — and you’re going out to play golf. Play golf! Great father! Golf! Go ahead, in the rain — I hope you get a bogey!”
Then they tell each other to go to hell, and they start slamming doors.
Upside down, everything seems so light and strange. The white lamp has risen like a bubble and now bobs against a tabletop. The TV Guide has shot up onto the sheltering sofa. Everything is poised with infinite care.
I have almost gone to sleep when my father comes in.
He says, “Christ,” and walks out again. Then he looks in again. “What are you doing?” he demands. “Don’t you have anything better to do than lie around daydreaming? You’re not even right-side up. Get up. Do something.”
So I get up. I start to pace.
As I pass through the front hall, my father is leaving to cool down in the car.
I pace in circles from room to room.
The first time around the house, I think about how I played right into the vampires’ hands. I ask myself how Chet could possibly use the Arm for evil. I do not come up with an answer.
The second time around the house (as I pass through the kitchen, where my mother is adding soap powder in the dishwasher), I think about how Chet would have come back and really helped me by now if he cared. If he were good, he wouldn’t have abandoned me.
The third time around, I realize that I am all alone. I have probably played into the hands and claws of evil, and now I am all alone.
And my revolutions get quicker and quicker as I think: Damn Chet, damn him because now I can’t speak to anyone, can’t tell anyone; and the thing I want to tell them most, the thing I need to say to them, is just that: that I can’t speak, and that I’m all alone; and how can you tell people you’re all alone when you’re all alone?
How?
Silence is there, stifling me like a dirty sock.
The afternoon rain drools down the gutters, and the birdseed washes around on the feeder dish. Rain muffles the house and drowns the yard.
My mother is sitting at the table, with her hands spread wide on the blond wood. The gray wet light of the rain has seeped into her hair and it is turning gray, too.
She looks up at me. She tilts her head to the side and moves it up so she is looking into my eyes. I stop my rotations. For a while, I stand there with my hand resting on the lintel of the kitchen door, looking into her eyes.
She looks very old and very human.
“Mom,” I say tentatively. “Do you have a second?”
“I’m sorry about the fight,” she says, blinking down, carefully slanting her fingers to match the grain of the wood. “Your father and I . . . can argue.”
The rain is soft against the grass. “Do you . . . ?” I ask and hesitate. It is a dumb question. “Do you believe in angels? Not faeries or anything, but, you know, celestial beings sent to guide us?”
She looks at me longer. Then she looks down at her hands, which have pulled away from the wood of the table and curled fondly around each other. Then she stands and half sits on the table, with one heel resting against the bottom rung of a chair. She says to me, “I do. I guess I do.” She frowns.
I move toward her. It is just about three steps. I am standing at the edge of the table nearest to her. Only a few inches away.
“In what way?” I say. “I mean, in that adult ‘Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus’ way?”
She curls her lower lip uneasily beneath her upper teeth and shakes her head. “No,” she says softly. “I think they are real.”
“And