Tilt - Alan Cumyn [59]
“Stanley! Stanley!” his mother screamed, probably from the kitchen. “Get down here now!”
Janine raced into the rest of her clothes.
“I’m going to go,” she said, scared. Stan took her shoulders again. He was only half dressed, but they’d shared everything.
Everything.
“Stanley!” his mother screamed.
“I love you,” he said.
—
Down the stairs. Stan held her hand.
His girlfriend’s hand.
“Mom,” he said in the kitchen. “This is Janine Igwash.” He meant to give some kind of apology —
an apology that actually was no real apology, more like an admission of the excruciating embarrassment of this particular moment caused by . . .
He waited for the words to assemble themselves. He thought of his mother racing off as a young woman to her military lover’s apartment in the fifty-five minutes after sociology, at the same time that she was supposedly going out with the man she would stupidly marry.
How to put everything in a few sentences, and not only in front of his mother and Janine but Kelly-Ann, too, this mousy woman whose face was shock pale — hardly the look of someone who had just been on the beach in Montego Bay with her own lover?
All these thoughts, and what came out was, “He’s in the cupboard.”
Right beside where his mother was standing.
“He fell asleep in the cupboard!” Stan said. It was impossible to keep the anger from his voice. Because of the way they were looking at him — at him and Janine, as if they’d been off screwing around or something while Feldon wandered away.
No one moved so Stan reached past his mother and opened the cupboard door.
“He’s right . . .”
But Feldon wasn’t there.
“I’m going home now,” Janine said. “Nice to meet you, Mrs. Dart.” She even extended her hand, which Stan’s mother looked at like it was diseased.
Janine bolted down the hall.
Stan stood dumbstruck, still looking in the Feldonless cupboard.
“I’m calling the police,” Kelly-Ann said.
She seemed older than Stan had expected. Not as old as his mom, who dyed her hair . . .
“I’m sure he’s around . . .” Stan said. Kelly-Ann had her cellphone out. Then he said, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. He really was dead asleep . . .”
Why did he use the word dead?
“You left him asleep in the cupboard?”
Kelly-Ann was on the verge of shredding him.
Stan’s mother gripped his shoulders now. “What time did you leave him? Stanley! What time!”
He didn’t know. Time seemed irrelevant, at the time. He remembered the kiss, which was endless, on their knees in front of the cupboard door.
“We were playing hide-and-go-seek,” he said.
“Bullshit you were!” his mother said. “I know exactly what you were playing!”
Kelly-Ann got through to the police.
“My little boy has disappeared,” she said, real fear in her voice.
Stan heard himself sound exactly like Ron. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean . . .”
Any of it.
“I was visiting my sick uncle at Mitou Bay,” Kelly-Ann said on the phone. Mitou Bay!
Where the hell was that?
Not Jamaica.
The cops were never going to understand even the simplest aspect of all this. Stan hardly understood it and he’d been there for a large part.
“No. No. I don’t believe my husband took Feldon . . .”
Kelly-Ann was shrinking in the kitchen, trying to summon help.
“We are estranged. Yes. He’s a pathological liar. He took the boy to his ex-wife’s home . . .”
Stan’s feet started moving. Out the kitchen. Out the front door. Down the steps . . .
“Stanley!” his mother called. “You come back here! The police are going to want to —”
He had to make things right.
—
He ran and he ran in the heart of the afternoon with the already low slanting light of fall easing into winter. He ran as if Coach Burgess were watching, clipboard in hand, estimating his character. As if Janine were with him, the wild girl with the strong stride. As if he had to keep up with her, impress her somehow, be worthy. He ran as if he wanted to stay by her a long, long time.
He ran to the only place Feldon could be — where Stan’s feet knew to take him.
Down by the