Mom’s voice rings in my ear. Are you in love with him?
I turn my head without moving my body. With my good eye, I take in his silhouette, and begin to feel that timeless combination of jubilation, perspiration, and indigestion.
Are you, Mary?
“So,” I whisper. “A junior in college. That makes you . . . what, twenty? Twenty-one?”
“Jeez, Mim. Just like that, huh?”
Too nervous, too cold, too a-thousand-things to smile, I pull the blanket up to my chin. “Willy-nilly. The only way.”
He leans up on one elbow and looks at me, and . . . God, people are wrong when they say eyes are the window to the soul. Windows don’t effect change, they reveal what’s inside. And if Beck’s eyes aren’t changing me—and I mean really stirring every ounce of Mim right down to the bottom of the barrel—then I don’t know a thing.
“What difference would it make?” he asks.
He knows what difference. “Don’t say that. You know what difference.”
Sighing, he lies on his back again, putting one hand behind his head, the other on his chest.
“You do,” I say.
His breathing slows. I see it in the rhythm of his hand rising and falling. I see it in his warm breath, plunging into the night air. I watch that breath take shape, and form two short, lovely words: “I do,” he says.
29
Architectural Apathy
“FIFTY-TWO, FIFTY-FOUR, FIFTY-SIX . . . fifty-eight.”
Beck turns into the driveway of 358 Cleveland Avenue and shuts off the engine. The sun has only just risen; a dim morning mist somehow adds an extra serving of strange to this heaping pile of peculiar. I rub the back of my neck, reminding myself never to sleep in the bed of a truck again.
We’re in Bellevue, just across the Ohio River. On the way through town, we passed one stop light, one gas station, a Subway, and the most rundown downtown I’ve ever seen. All the shop windows were either boarded up or smashed in, each storefront more dank and depressing than the last.
“Okay,” says Beck. “I guess, I can just—okay—I’ll just . . . I’ll go on and . . .”
“You want us to go with you?” I ask.
He smiles, but for the first time, it’s unnatural. “No thanks. Actually, definitely not. You guys stay in the car. I’ll just—go ring the doorbell and take it from there.”
“Piece of cake,” I say.
Beck stares through the windshield. “Piece of cake.”
“Cake?” Walt lifts his head, emerging from his Rubik’s fog. I swear, as much as I love the kid, sometimes I forget he’s even around.
“There’s no cake, Walt.”
Beck laughs harder than the situation warrants. After quieting down, we sit in silence for a minute.
“Beck?”
“Yeah?”
“You have to, you know, get out of the truck, if you wanna ring the doorbell.”
Wiping sweat off his forehead, he opens the door. “Wish me luck.”
“Good luck,” I whisper.
“Good luck!” shouts Walt.
In keeping with my detours-have-reasons theory, I’d decided after the game that helping Beck was imperative. This is his Objective. Like Arlene’s box, or like my getting to Mom.
Cleveland Avenue is Beck’s Cleveland.
On the front porch, he fumbles for the doorbell, finds it, rings it, waits. Number 358 is sandwiched between 356 and 360. I suppose these townhouses are economical, but this sort of cookie-cutter design just oozes architectural apathy.
“What’s Beck doing?” asks Walt.
“He’s checking in on an old friend.”
“How old is he?”
“No, not old, just—never mind. It’s a she, and she’s probably in her twenties.”
Having never seen a Claire, it’s hard to know what to expect. Typically, I hear a name and immediately know what I’m dealing with. Walt, Beck, Carl, Arlene . . . these are good people. As opposed to Ty and Kathy and Wilson. But Claire . . . Claire is a tough one. I watch from inside the truck as my first Claire opens the door, and I have to say, it doesn’t bode well for the Claires of the world. She greets Beck with a frown which I understand to mean, this isn’t an especially awful day, and this isn’t my especially frowny face, but I’ve frowned for so long, this is the face my face now makes. Her eye sockets are sunken and dark, and I’d bet all the cash in the can (what’s left anyway) that Claire is an avid smoker.
Beck disappears inside the townhouse.
I have to do something. Anything.
“Yo, Walt.”
“Yes?” he asks, cubing it up big time, just click-click-clicking away.
“Can you do me a favor?”
“Yes?” He shakes his head no.
“I need you to stay here while I check the tires.”
“The tires?”
“Yeah, I thought I heard a noise back on the interstate. I just need to make sure they’re still . . . filled with air and whatnot. Can you do that? Can you stay right here?”
He throws his head in the air and mixes up the squares. “Yes.”