Beaming Sonny Home (15 page)

“Venus,” Mattie said softly, and now she could hear the relentless nighthawks eating up their share of flying ants and mosquitoes. A truck rumbled past and Mattie heard radio music blasting from within its cab. “Sonny,” she then said, as though maybe the two words were one and the same. Maybe she hadn't known Sonny all those years, either. After all, he was a boy without a name, the way Venus had been without a name, all those sixty some years it had dangled before Mattie's eyes, dangled like that shiny pendant a hypnotist swings. But that was how Mattie had lived her life, wasn't it? She had lived it like a woman in a stupor. It was important that she outwit her husband, Lester, outwit poor little birdbrained Martha Monihan. And she had been so content on doing so that the years had dissolved before her eyes. Her life had come and was nearly gone, and what did she have to show for it?

“Venus,” Mattie said again, and settled further down into her sweater. But not even that soft Canadian wool—this was a sweater Mattie had knit for herself, and let's just see one of her girls knit something—not even her handmade sweater could thwart the chill that was creeping into her bones. Trouble was in the air, trouble as real as the nighthawks, as real as the two bats that were now circling the night-light, looking for moths and bugs. Sonny had taken his hostages on Monday and now here it was Wednesday night. Mattie had felt the tension mounting as she watched each news segment, tension growing as the crowd grew, silently, the way mold grows on bread. She could see Chief Melon's face go from relaxed and in control to edgy and nervous, his skin stretched on his face as though it were a wide elastic band. And the people who had turned up to cheer Sonny onward, well, that was trouble walking on two legs. A crowd of trouble. And now Sonny had done the unforgivable. He had made the chief of police and his entire department look like fools on television, in front of everyone. Mattie had felt, up to that point, that Chief Melon saw inside Sonny, too, almost the way she did. He had spent all that time on the phone with her boy and, surely, he had come to realize that Sonny Gifford's actions were forty percent broken heart and sixty percent county fair. Sonny couldn't turn his back on an audience, even if he
was
lovesick. But now things had changed. Mattie thought about Sonny's words earlier that day, when he told his listeners that he must boldly go where those
Star Trek
people went. It reminded her of another piece of the puzzle, something else Sonny had done as a child. He must have been about ten years old, as well as Mattie could remember, and he had had a bad dream, in the heart of a winter's night. Mattie could remember waking to his cries of terror and seeing the bed empty beside her, Lester not yet home. The latter wasn't unusual, but Sonny's cries were. In his room, she found him out of his bed, cuddled in a little heap on the floor, elbows and arms shielding his head as though something or someone was trying to hit him. Mattie reached out to touch him, calm him, eventually to hold him. But the minute he felt her hand upon his body, he cried out, “Beam me up, Scotty!
Please
, beam me up!” And Mattie took it almost as an insult. It had always seemed to her that Sonny was in search of a family, someplace he would feel safe. Some planet he could live on in peace. And this was in spite of all the love she had personally given him. But it wasn't enough. He needed Lester's love, too, and the love of his sisters. He needed to feel comfortable enough in his own home that when he drew pictures at school of his family, he could draw them all in one room, instead of placing himself apart from them. And there he was, wishing to be aboard the
Enterprise
rather than living in Mattagash, Maine. Daring to conquer new worlds, rather than abide in pain in the old one. He was looking for a father in the likes of Captain Kirk. Maybe a sister in that black woman who wore the short skirts. Yet, to this day, Mattie couldn't be sure where Sonny's pain had come from. Maybe in the way big, looming Lester had made him feel tiny as a mite. Maybe that was it. And no matter how big Mattie tried to make Sonny feel afterward, it never seemed to do any good. Maybe that was the answer, Mattie decided, sitting on her summer porch and gazing at Venus. Maybe that was Sonny's secret. He had lived as a handful of taffy between his mother and his father all his life. He had been pulled in so many directions, stretched here and there, that all he could do was plaster a mighty smile on his face and set about life hoping to become Mattagash, Maine's Biggest Underachiever. And he had succeeded. But now he was underachieving on
television
, with a bevy of cops watching him do it, and trouble was floating in the air like a good old river breeze.

The girls were back, Rita and Gracie. They pulled up to the house in Rita's big black Buick, the radio playing loudly. Both car doors opened, slammed, feet trod upon the porch, and then they disappeared inside the house without having seen her sitting in the shadows. Her girls were home from the hunt, from the battle, from the assault on Sonny's life. Mattie released the breath she'd been holding, and it seemed as though even the peepers in the swamp heard her, for they grew still for a moment. A blinking light appeared in the sky above Venus and Mattie saw that it was an airplane. Or maybe it was the
Enterprise
. She watched as it slowly ate a path across the sky and then disappeared behind the farthest mountain range. The door opened again and Gracie ambled out, with that little bounce to her gait that she seemed to have acquired after Charlie left her for Sally Fennelson.

“It's a bit chilly out here, Mama,” she said. “You want me to bring you a coat or something?”

Mattie shook her head. “Thank you, Gracie, all the same,” she said, “but I got my handmade sweater keeping me warm.” She smiled, and in the light wafting out from the living room window, she saw Gracie smile back. How long had it been since this kind of soft emotion floated between them? But every once in a while, and who knew for what reason, Mattie and her daughters, one at a time, seemed almost ready to bust down all the walls they had put up, those years of architecture. And then a little wind would come up and blow all those good designs away. And it did just then.

“You ain't sitting out here planning on sneaking a ride to Bangor, are you?” Gracie asked. “At least, we've been inside wondering about just such a thing. You think too much when you're sitting in your rocker, Mama, and I mean to tell you that you've thought up some doozies in your lifetime.” So Gracie had come as a spy after all. Mattie smiled again at her youngest daughter, born in 1954, a mere month after Martha Monihan had stopped by the little mushroom house to announce to her best friend, Mattie Gifford, that Lester was in bed with Eliza Fennelson. Mattie still had an ornamental plate tucked away in her trunk of special things, a birthday gift from Martha, back when they were still in school. The artwork showed two little girls walking hand in hand across a meadow of bluebells. The word
Sharing
was painted in red swooping letters above their heads. Below their feet, at the bottom of the plate, was the sentence
That's What Good Friends Are For
. Mattie had almost laughed that day she had finally tucked the pretty plate away in her trunk, where she wouldn't have to look at it. I didn't know you meant sharing husbands, too, Martha, she had thought as she wrapped the plate in tissue paper. And, if she told herself the truth, sitting there in her rocker, with Gracie hovering in the light drifting out of the living room window, she hadn't been in her best frame of mind to accept Gracie into a burdensome world. She had given birth to Gracie after losing her best friend to her husband. That had been Gracie's trousseau. Maybe Mattie even sent her a kind of jolt she never got over, right through the umbilical cord, a trait in life that would ensure that her own husband would be unfaithful. After all, why Gracie? Why not the other girls? Yet Henry Plunkett and Wesley Stubbs were as faithful to their wives as husbands could possibly get without being family pets. Only Gracie knew what it was like to wake up at night and feel how cold sheets can get on the empty side of a bed. But it was even wider than that, this scab that grew over their family life, this hideous scar. There was something about how Lester doted on his daughters—they were women, after all—that had always torn at Mattie's heart. This was true, wasn't it? Wasn't there anguish in seeing him tousle their hair, cuddle them onto his lap, tweak their noses, tickle them into silly confessions of childhood pranks? He had stopped touching his wife, stopped touching her in that loving and tender way that takes place in a kitchen, or in a living room, just weeks after they were married. He only touched her in the bedroom, until, with so many other bedrooms to keep warm, he even forgot about her there, too. But what was even worse, or as Mattie came to feel over the years, was that he never touched his boy, Sonny. “Because he's a boy, that's why,” Lester would always answer. “We don't want him turning into a sissy right before our eyes.” But then, the girls courted Lester, didn't they? Jumping him from behind doors, combing his hair into peculiar styles. All this while Sonny watched from that lonely distance that grew like a field between him and his family. One time, when they were in their early teens, the girls even put makeup on Lester, as a Halloween prank, and then goaded him into wearing a dress. Mattie remembered how she was struck with the fact that Lester was even beautiful as a woman, more beautiful, certainly, than she was. More beautiful than most Mattagash women, what with his full lips and naturally long eyelashes made even longer with mascara. That was the day she put their wedding picture away for good. She tucked it down into the trunk where the ornamental plate and other sad memories were lurking. There was no need to keep it out any longer. For one thing, the marriage had been bogus for years. And for another thing, it had become apparent to Mattie that, beautiful as he was, Lester had been both bride and groom on that day of their marriage. He had razzled and dazzled the troops, while she fought desperately to walk a steady gait in shoes that were killing her.

“Where's your mind right now?” Gracie asked, and Mattie remembered her daughter there, in the cool night air. “See? I told you it's dangerous for you to get into your rocker and rock yourself toward a deep thought.” Mattie felt a sudden urge to say something important to Gracie, something a daughter could hang on to after a mother's death, words a daughter could bite into. She wanted to say,
Sweetie, I know how broken your heart must have been to find out about Charlie and Sally Fennelson. I know how even your breasts can ache on them lonely nights you sit up waiting, how all the veins running up and down your arms hurt. I know how loud the seconds can sound as you stand by a window and peer out into the night, a child sleeping somewhere in your house so that you can't cry out loud. I know what it feels like, so come here and let me hold you until some of that soreness goes away.
But Gracie had never admitted to her family that Charlie was the one to leave. Just as it had happened to Mattie, it had happened to Gracie: all the town knew but the two of them. Mattie hadn't known about Charlie either, or she would've told her daughter. Mattagash had managed to pull the wool twice over Mattie's eyes. When Gracie told Charlie to get out because he was never home anyway, she probably knew in her bones something was going on somewhere. But it gave her a parcel of pride that it happened the way it did, and Mattie felt good about that. A week after Gracie officially told Charlie to leave, Sally Fennelson threw her husband, Duane, out of their house trailer and long, lanky Charlie Craft moved into Duane's shoes, into his life. “She can have him,” Gracie had announced about Charlie, “now that I got rid of him.” Mattie herself didn't know the truth until Rita and Marlene just up and told her one day, let her hear all about the soap opera. Charlie had been seeing Sally for a year. Well, peace of mind comes in the strangest boxes. But Gracie's fake pride prevented Mattie from some of that
bonding
Gracie was forever talking about. Besides, how could Mattie tell her girls what a rogue their beloved father had been? They really believed he had been playing poker all those nights, as he used to tell them. Maybe word of his actions had reached the girls finally, as adults, but they grew up thinking he had strung the stars. And Mattie let them. But then, Jupiter and Venus had been two of those stars, or so they thought.

“I was just thinking of your father,” Mattie answered, finally. It was the truth. “I was just thinking of Lester. It'll be almost five years since he died. And I was thinking, in a way, of Clarence Fennelson. Twenty-eight years. Imagine that. I must mention this to Elmer if he ever turns up again. Clarence was his favorite nephew.”

“Where
is
Elmer?” Gracie asked. “You two are like ticks on a dog and yet I haven't seen him once since I been over here.”

Mattie shrugged. “Yesterday I called Pauline and told her to peep through the windows during her Avon rounds. But his pickup truck is gone, and so is Skunk. So Elmer's kicking up his heels somewhere. Pauline said everything looked fine through the windows.” A speeding car passed in a screeching of wheels as it rounded the bend in the road, music pounding from its interior, and then it was gone.

“Crazy young fools,” said Mattie.

“I gotta tell you that I'm glad in a way Elmer isn't here,” said Gracie. “I know darn well he'd drive you to Bangor, and I can see the two of you now on television, with Skunk sitting up between you in Elmer's rusty old pickup.” Mattie said nothing. The nighthawks were still busy.
Pee-ik. Pee-ah.
The bats circled the pole light frantically, swooping and diving. The summer peepers kept up their strain, filling the swamp with their own music. Behind the house came the sound of the Mattagash River, gallons of water tumbling over one another in order to get to the ocean. Mattie waited. Gracie waited. At first, Mattie thought her daughter might say something, might try to tear a brick out of that wall of bricks between them. Did she even care anymore? The truth was that, with Elmer vanished into the Mattagash Triangle, Mattie needed a friend, someone to talk to, someone who would listen patiently and then give up some honorable advice. A car's headlights swung around the turn in the road. Mattie heard the engine first, and now she waited as another neighbor roared past the house, this time in a long white car. There was only one long white car in Mattagash, where cars were as recognizable as people. As it passed the house and went on its way, following its beams of light, two heads rode silhouetted inside.