We’ve got to get at the emergencies, sir, she demanded. The other people need to see if it isn’t correctly so that a reaction can’t do it! Show us the planets.
Ma? he asked, hoping that speaking to her directly would shatter the pane of craziness she’d pulled up between them. He posed the question again—Ma?—wrapping his fingers around her forearm as if he meant to tug her into reality.
Show us the planets! she repeated, and slammed her hand on the table, slightly lifting the cards, pennies, and dominoes, nearly knocking over a tiny vase designed for a single flower.
Eddie peeled her hot hand off the table, threaded his smaller fingers between her rough ones, the nail polish now candy-apple red and flaking off, and led her to the balding patch of soil just outside, the size of a carpet, where a few sprigs of clover hugged the sides. Distant dogs barked and trucks rumbled down the highway, wailing like giants in pain.
She followed him, stumbling, and when he’d adjusted to the beauty of the cooler evening air and the spectacular array of pink and blue clouds in the immense sky, he pointed to a bright dot near the moon and said, There.
Calm settled on her shoulders, randomly. The sight of Venus might have had nothing to do with the shift in her mood. It seemed that as far as she was concerned, Venus could have been a flashlight, a motorcycle careening down a one-lane highway, a match losing its fire. Even so, they sat spellbound. She kicked off a sandal and absentmindedly drew circles in the dust with her toe, not looking down. In that moment of peace, he put his face between his knees so she wouldn’t see, and rubbed it there silently, his cheek against his leg, letting numb tears fall from his eyes.
6.
Your Own Cord
The cops in the pink and orange donut shop said the police couldn’t go find Eddie’s mother right then because you had to wait.
Everybody who got somebody missing gotta wait, they told Eddie. Not just you, son.
He sat with three policemen at a table with four plastic seats, the officers looming above his thin brown limbs. Eddie swiveled in his seat, fascinated by how it swung and caught, focusing on the chair to avoid the eyes of the cops. Everything outside now had the same glossy dark about it as the inside of somebody’s eye.
You can’t always tell right away, one cop leaned over his massive coffee to say, if a person has run off for personal reasons or if something of a different nature has happened that necessitates officers of the law getting involved.
Eddie unconsciously made a face that showed he didn’t understand this principle—when somebody disappeared, didn’t you just go find her? Wasn’t it that simple?
This fellow’s convex belly kept his cop shirt taut. His mustache went down to his chin on either side, and he had a soft, genuine expression, none of which matched his starchy uniform.
Sometimes folks can’t cope, he kept explaining, and they run away from their lives on purpose because they think that their problems will go away if they take their bodies off the scene. A bad person didn’t do anything to them, he said, scrunching the space between his brows, they just hit the highway. And in the first few days, unless we find somebody who says they saw a bad guy taking the person away, there’s always a hopeful chance that the person will come back on their own recognizance, because they realize that they love everybody they left behind and that all they really needed was a little breather.
What’s recognizance? Eddie asked.
Um, by themselves. It means you do it by yourself. Of your own accord.
Nope, another of the cops said. That’s reconnaissance. Nobody paid attention to him.
I went to look for her myself, Eddie said. Because everybody here says don’t trust the police.
The cops glanced at one another and then at Eddie.
I don’t know why anybody would say a mean thing like that, the handlebar-mustache cop said. Don’t you trust us, son?
Can I trust somebody else? Eddie asked. Is there a different police where she won’t have to use her own cord?
The officer’s chest jounced under his taut shirt as he laughed.
Already this waiting period had made Eddie skeptical enough that he decided not to get the police involved even when the time came. He would do it himself. The police, he realized, wouldn’t have the same incentive. His suspicion that they didn’t think his mother was worth finding came not from anything they said but from their general attitude of mildly amused boredom, even from the officer who sounded as if he wanted to help but couldn’t break the rules. He probably didn’t want to seem different from his partners.
That policeman scrawled Eddie’s address and Mrs. Vernon’s number on the back of a parking ticket. Eddie got up to leave, and at that point he gave the men a more detailed verbal picture of Darlene, the one he’d worked on some in his head, and they promised to stay alert and contact him as soon as the waiting period ended. A fourth cop came back from the bathroom and sat in Eddie’s chair.
Brave kid, Eddie heard one of them say as he crossed the tile floor and shoved the door open with his shoulder. He launched himself into the pink lights flooding the far reaches of the parking lot.