Where the God of Love Hangs Out - Amy Bloom [44]
“You’re late, Lion. We’ll talk when you get home.”
“I’m not sorry,” he said, and I could have smiled. Good, I thought, spend the day not being sorry, because sometime after that you’re gonna feel like shit. I was already sorrier than I’d ever been in my whole life, sorry enough for this life and the next. Lion looked at me and then at the keys in his hand.
“I guess I’ll go. Ma … Julia …”
I was suddenly, ridiculously angry at being called Julia. “Go, Lion.”
He was out the door. I started breathing again, trying to figure out how to save us both. Obviously, I couldn’t be trusted to take care of him; I’d have to send him away. I thought about sending Buster away, too, but I didn’t think I could. And maybe my insanity was limited to the Lion, maybe I could still act like a normal mother to Buster.
I called my friend Jeffrey in Falmouth and told him Lion needed a change of scene. He said Lion could start housepainting tomorrow and could stay with him since his kids were away. The whole time I was talking, I cradled the bottle of bourbon in my left arm, knowing that if I couldn’t get through the phone call, or the afternoon, or the rest of my life, I had some help. I think I was so good at helping Lionel quit drinking because I didn’t have the faintest idea why he, or anybody, drank. If I met him now, I’d be a better wife but not better for him. I packed Lion’s suitcase and put it under his bed.
When I was a lifeguard at camp, they taught us how to save panicky swimmers. The swimmers don’t realize that they have to let you save them, that their terror will drown you both, and so sometimes, they taught us, you have to knock the per son out to bring him in to shore.
I practiced my speech in the mirror and on the porch and while making the beds. I thought if I said it clearly and quietly he would understand, and I could deliver him to Jeffrey, ready to start his summer over again. I went to the grocery store and bought weird, disconnected items: marinated artichoke hearts for Lionel, who was dead; red caviar to make into dip for his son, whose life I had just ruined; peanut butter with the grape jelly already striped into it for Buster, as a special treat that he would probably have outgrown by the time I got home; a pack of Kools for me, who stopped smoking fifteen years ago. I also bought a wood-refinishing kit, a jar of car wax, a six-pack of Michelob Light, five TV dinners, some hamburger but no buns, and a box of Pop-Tarts. Clearly the cart of a woman at the end of her rope.
Lion came home at three, and I could see him trying to figure out how to tackle me. He sat down at the kitchen table and frowned when I didn’t say anything.
I sat down across from him, poured us each a glass of bourbon, and lit a cigarette, which startled him. All the props said “Important Moment.”
“Let me say what I have to say and then you can tell me whatever you want to. Lion, I love you very much and I have felt blessed to be your mother and I’ve probably ruined that for both of us. Just sit still. What happened was not your fault; you were upset, you didn’t know…. Nothing would have happened if I had been my regular self. But anyway …” This was going so badly I just wanted to finish my cigarette and take the boy to the train station, whether he understood or not. “I think you’d feel a lot better and clearer if you had some time away, so I talked to Jeffrey—”
“No. No, goddammit, I am not leaving and I wasn’t upset—it was what I wanted. You can’t send me away. I’m not a kid anymore. You can leave me, but you can’t make me leave.” He was charging around the kitchen, bumping into the chairs, blind.
I just sat there. All of a sudden, he was finding his voice, the one I had always tried to nurture, to find a place for between his father’s roar and his brother’s contented hum. I was hearing his debut as a man, and now I had to keep him down and raise him up at the same