At Risk (13 page)

“What have you got against us?” Al says. “What did we do to you that was so terrible?”

“Nothing,” Polly says. “Look, I don’t want Mom to be upset.”

It’s nowhere near the truth and Al knows it; he laughs in a peculiar, dark way. Ever since her mother took him back, Polly has not trusted Claire to be anything but weak. That’s exactly what they don’t need now, a weak old woman crying in their kitchen.

“She’s our granddaughter,” Al says. “You can’t stop us from helping.”

“You do what you like,” Polly says tightly. “You always have.”

After she hangs up on her father, Polly starts to cry. When she was a child she didn’t believe in bad luck. She thought her childhood was rotten because her parents didn’t love her, and she couldn’t wait to get out of their clutches. She was all wrong about luck, she sees that now, and it’s frightening to think what else she may have been wrong about. When her parents come to visit she knows Claire will dust the night table in the guest room and then she’ll set out the framed family photographs she always carries in her suitcase. There’ll be a green garbage bag filled with the tissue paper she’s used to pack Al’s sweaters and shoes. The children will be delighted to see their grandparents, they always are. Polly cannot believe that Al and Claire lavished one-tenth of the attention on her that they give to Amanda and Charlie, but then quite suddenly, she thinks about the velvet cloche Claire made for her. Every stitch was done by hand, small stitches no one would ever see. It took a long time to make something so perfect, longer than Polly would ever have imagined.

That night, after the children are in bed, Ivan spreads his work out on the coffee table and starts to go over his lecture. He can hear Polly cleaning up in the kitchen; he can hear the tap water running and the occasional clinking of dishes against each other. Ivan leans back against the couch and lets his arms go limp. There’s no point in going over his work; all he can think about is blood and bones and antibodies. He’s not going to Florida, and he’ll never deliver his paper. He goes into the kitchen to tell Polly, but when he gets to the doorway he sees that she’s not really rinsing off the dishes, she’s just standing there, letting the water run so he’ll think she’s cleaning up. So he’ll leave her alone. That’s what she wants.

Ivan goes back through the living room; he grabs his jacket and his car keys and keeps on going, through the front door, which they never use. When he starts the Karmann-Ghia, smoke pours out of the exhaust pipe and the engine rumbles. Just above the sink, where Polly is standing, there is a window. She can see Ivan warming up the car; she could stop him if she wanted to, at least ask him where he’s going to. But she doesn’t, she doesn’t even try.

Ivan drives out to Red Slipper Beach. Two small deer run in front of his car, and he has to brake suddenly.

He parks at the observatory alongside an old beat-up Mustang, and he rolls down his window so he can listen to the ocean. It’s low tide and the odor of seaweed is strong. Ivan doesn’t know if he’s been avoiding his colleagues or if they’ve been avoiding him, but he feels as if he hasn’t talked to another human being for weeks, other than the perfunctory conversations he’s had with Polly, meaningless talk about the new clothes she’s bought for the kids or the cost of the new shocks for the Blazer. He can see one of the graduate students, a kid named Sandy, locking up the observatory. Sandy waves at Ivan as he gets into his car and Ivan waves back. He waits for the kid to leave and then he gets out of his car and walks to the observatory. In his wallet, shoved between two twenty dollar bills, is a phone number he’s been carrying around for days. Max Lyman at the institute gave him the number. Max’s cousin is a social worker who helps staff an AIDS hotline in Boston, sponsored by a gay organization Ivan’s never heard of.

Everyone who enters the observatory is supposed to sign in, but tonight Ivan doesn’t bother. He’s not here to look at stars. He goes into the office, switches on a desk lamp, and sits down in an old leather chair he’s sat in a thousand times before. The phone receiver is cold when he picks it up, as cold as a telescope feels against the corners of your eye. When a human voice answers his call, Ivan’s throat is so tight that what comes out doesn’t sound like any recognizable language. But the voice on the other end of the line keeps talking, telling Ivan it’s all right, he doesn’t have to say anything right away, he can just go on crying. The voice belongs to a man named Brian, who staffs the phone two nights a week. The odd thing is, he doesn’t even sound like a stranger, and maybe that’s why it gets easier and easier for Ivan to call him, so that by the following week Ivan doesn’t have to look for the paper with the hotline number.

He knows it by heart.

AMANDA AND JESSIE ALWAYS sit next to each other in class. They have been best friends for three years, and they can slip notes to each other so fast a teacher would have to have X-ray vision to catch them. On the morning of the first day of school, Jessie is already waiting when Polly drives up in front of the school. Amanda and Jessie have carefully planned their outfits; they’re wearing matching polka dot dresses identical in all ways, except that Amanda’s dress has been painstakingly ironed by her Grandma Claire, up for a visit over the long Labor Day weekend.

It was not quite the disaster that Polly imagined, even though Claire, who has never believed that dishwashers do as good a job as she can, managed to wash the dishes by hand every time Polly turned her back and Al has sworn to return and fix the broken porch step. Al played endless rounds of Monopoly with Charlie and lost every game, and on Sunday he drove Amanda and Jessie to the theater at the mall and took them to see a movie their parents had forbidden them to see. On Monday evening, when her parents were getting ready to leave, Polly felt that she was being abandoned. She insisted that her parents stay for dinner, even though this meant they would hit the worst of the Labor Day traffic returning to New York. It is terrible to admit, or even to think about, but she’s afraid to be alone with Ivan.

Every day he seems like more of a stranger. He disappears at odd hours, he’s been avoiding going to the institute, and he has started Amanda on a strict regimen of large doses of folic acid and vitamin C. Once, while Polly was searching in his backpack for a pen, she found a folder filled with articles about alternative therapies for AIDS patients. Startled, she dropped the folder on the floor. This is not at all like Ivan, who has always put his faith in science, in medicine, in tested and proven remedies. Amanda complains about the vitamins, she says they make her gag, but Ivan insists; he gives her glasses of Gatorade and Hawaiian Punch to wash down the capsules. When Polly suggested they talk with Ed about the vitamins and the high-fiber diet Ivan’s demanded they all go on, Ivan refused. What can he offer us, Ivan asked her. Nothing.

So far, five children have been registered at private schools, pulled out of Cheshire before the first day of classes. Although Linda Gleason phones Polly each time there’s a parents’ or teachers’ meeting, Polly doesn’t bother going to them; she can’t waste the time better spent at home, with Amanda. She pities Linda Gleason, who has to try to keep everything under control, but she pities the principal from a distance; it’s not unlike watching a puppet show.

From where she’s parked, in front of the school, Polly can see two people on the sidewalk, each handing out pamphlets to parents. One of them, a woman in a blue cotton dress, looks familiar; Polly thinks her child may have been in nursery school with Charlie. Polly is not about to let Amanda go in there alone, but as soon as Polly starts to get out of the car, Amanda has a fit.

“You can’t walk in there with me,” Amanda insists.

“Is there a rule against it?” Polly says. “I see parents out there.”

Charlie grabs his backpack and looseleaf and takes this opportunity to escape.

“See you,” he shouts, and as he gets out Amanda shoots him a dirty look.

“I’ll just walk you to the door,” Polly says. It is bad enough to be separated from Amanda for an entire day. Impossible to let her walk past these people leafleting against her.

“Mother!” Amanda says. “I’m in sixth grade!”

Amanda’s braids are so tight Polly can see her clean scalp. The back of her neck is soft and pale. Out on the sidewalk, Jessie is waiting, shifting her weight from one foot to the other.

“I’ll pick you up at three,” Polly says.

“Four,” Amanda says.

“Four?” Polly says.

“It’s the first day of practice,” Amanda explains. “I don’t want you to make a big deal out of it.”

Amanda leans over and kisses her good-bye, but Polly can feel her bursting to get out of the car. Amanda opens the door and runs to Jessie. When the girls reach each other, they cling together and squeal.

“My mother wanted to walk me into school,” Amanda confides. She looks back and waves at Polly. Polly waves back, then forces herself to drive on.

“Oh, God,” Jessie says with real feeling.

“I don’t look sick, do I?” Amanda says.

“You look great,” Jessie says. “Your dress looks fantastic.”

Amanda smiles, but when they get to the door she feels scared. Scared she might throw up or something worse. She hesitates, until Jessie says, “If anyone says anything mean to you. I’ll hit them.”

Amanda laughs at that, especially because Jessie is so small. It’s strange, but even when she laughs she feels something hot behind her eyes. Sometimes she holds her breath and tries to imagine what it’s like to be dead. How would it be to leave her body behind? She has never believed in heaven, but now she wonders. Sleep, white clouds, wings. Could she actually believe in that? No, she does not. It’s easier to think about becoming one with the earth. She could believe that; out of her body will come grass, roses, black-eyed Susans. She could almost believe that, if it weren’t happening to her.

“Don’t look behind you,” Jessie Eagan says in the hallway.

Amanda peeks over her shoulder and sees a boy in their grade. Keith Davies.

“He’s staring at you!” Jessie whispers loudly, excited.

“No he’s not,” Amanda says, but when she looks he is staring at her. He’s dopey-looking, but sort of cute, too.

“Sixth grade is the best grade ever,” Jessie says.

“Yeah,” Amanda agrees. “Are you ready?”

“Ready,” Jessie says, although as they walk into their class room, they momentarily forget that they are sixth-graders and hold hands.

At two forty-five, Amanda and Jessie head over to the gym, their identical pink gym bags slung over their shoulders.

“Oh, no, not Charlie,” Jessie says dramatically when they see him, standing in front of the gym.

Amanda is puzzled when Charlie doesn’t have a fast come-back. He can usually create a nasty pun on Jessie’s name in no time flat. Amanda herself is in good spirits, no one said anything awful to her, and her teacher, who Amanda thinks is too pretty and young to be a teacher, called her aside and told her that it was a pleasure to have her in class and that if she missed any time her work could he sent home to be made up. Amanda doesn’t intend to miss any time. She’s a little nervous about gymnastics practice, and she hopes the aching in her legs won’t mess her up and push her way back in the rankings.

“Well, what is it?” she says to Charlie. She doesn’t actually want to be seen talking to a third-grader. Charlie shrugs, so Amanda turns to Jessie and says, “I’ll meet you in the locker room.”

“All right,” Jessie says, going on ahead, “but my dad’s going to let you have it if you’re late.”

“What’s wrong?” Amanda asks Charlie.

Charlie shrugs again. He has a creepy feeling in his stomach.

“Come on,” Amanda says. She can hear the coach setting up in the gym. The exercise mats hit the floor, then whoosh as they’re rolled out flat.

“Sevrin’s not in school,” Charlie says.