“Who are you?”
She stared at him, letting him know she wasn’t frightened. He was nothing—a leather-faced middle-aged man, his cheeks dotted with discolored spots that could be the beginning of melanoma, if there was any justice in the world. He was nothing, just blood and bone, viscera and sinew; he was the thing rotting by Thursday if killed on Monday.
“I’m the person who knows what you are,” she said.
His face went white. “You’re trespassing,” he said. “You need to go or I’ll call the police.”
“I’ll dial the number for you.”
—
THE PROBLEM WAS, everyone knew he was Wakeland’s. He drove around town with the man in his Mustang. When Wakeland had the team over for barbecues, Ben was the one who stayed late, drinking beer on the patio. Ben was the star, the one with two county records—one in freestyle and one in butterfly—the one who would get scholarships to college, and Wakeland was the man who would make it happen. All the guys on the team were jealous of him, and Ben liked their jealousy. He needed it then; it was like food for his ill-formed teenage soul. Once, in L.A., Ben had helped internal affairs nail one of their own, a narco cop skimming off the top of the drug-raid stash and selling on the side. When they brought him in, he told them he’d gotten so turned around that everything seemed straight again. His kid needed to go to college. His wife needed a new car. His house was falling down and needed repairs. So what if he took a little dope that would grow mold in a precinct basement to make his family’s life a little better? Maybe that’s how it was for Ben, everything so crooked it turned straight again. By the time things started happening with Wakeland, he needed the man—felt love for him, maybe, the kind you felt for an authoritarian father—and when he didn’t need him anymore, he was so far in he didn’t know how to get himself out. He never should have gone back to Wakeland’s apartment after that day. But he did; God damn, he did, and still, all these years later, Ben couldn’t say exactly why.
After Rachel refused to see him, he drove to his mother’s place. He needed an answer to something, needed it today.
“You haven’t been here in a month,” she said from the couch when he came through the door.
“We just went to the cemetery. I was here four days ago with Emma.”
“Emma?”
“Your granddaughter.”
“Oh,” she said, her voice wavering, her hand pressed up against the side of her head, trying to grasp a fading memory. “How can I forget my granddaughter?”
“You’re sick, Mom.”
“This man is too hairy,” she said to the television, as Tom Selleck climbed out of the water after a swim. “Why have you been away for a month?”
Ben turned off the television and knelt in front of his mother, pushed his face close so she would focus on him.
“You look tired,” she said, putting her hand on his cheek. “Have Rachel make a nice dinner for you and put your feet up.”
“Mom,” he said. “I need to ask you about Lewis Wakeland.”
“The coach?” she said. “Oh, he’s a nice man.”
“No, Mom,” he said. “He isn’t.”
“Oh, he looks out for you.”
“Why did you let me run around with him?”
“There were ants in the kitchen today,” she said, waving her hand at the linoleum floor, shuddering. “Get rid of them for me.”
He found a line of ants running along the edge of the floor from the laundry room to the cabinet beneath the kitchen sink. His mother had turned the television back on. “Don’t you dare,” Margaret huffed at the screen. He got down on his knees and sprayed the ants with glass cleaner, their black bodies wrinkling up with the chemical, and remembered the night he woke up soaking wet in his bed.
He was fifteen, for God’s sake, and he’d dreamed he was standing on the edge of the school pool during a tournament. Everyone was up on the blocks, waiting for the starting pistol, but Ben had to piss. He was bursting with it, and in the dream he pulled his dick out of his suit and let a stream go into the pool, standing on the damn blocks, the whole world watching from the bleachers. The gun sounded and he dove into the water and that’s when he woke up to find himself soaking wet, the smell of his own piss wafting from the sheets.
He panicked, stripped off the bedsheets, and carried them down in the dark to the laundry room. He closed the door and shoved the wet sheets into the washer and fiddled around with the dial, the stupid thing clicking loudly as he tried to figure out how to run the damn thing.
Then his mother was there, pushing open the door, her eyes squinting in the brightness of the room.
“What’s wrong?” she said.
“Nothing.”
How did you tell your mother you’d pissed yourself? How could you explain that? He turned the dial and tried to get the goddamned thing to work, but the machine was broken or something. Then she put her hand on his and held it there on the cycle dial, and he burst out crying. He was so embarrassed—about pissing the bed, about the new things that had started happening at Wakeland’s apartment.
“I don’t feel good,” he’d said.
She touched his forehead. “No fever.”
“No, Mom, I don’t feel right,” he said. “I feel messed up.”
She ran her eyes over his face, trying to piece together his riddle. He wanted her to figure it out without him having to say it, wanted her to work some mother magic and suddenly understand everything.
“You’re tired,” she said finally. “Rest and you’ll feel better in the morning.”
The next morning out on the patio, Voorhees tried a man-to-man about the birds and the bees, while his mother fried up some eggs.
“It’s normal,” Voorhees said, misreading the situation entirely. “It happens to all boys.”
And then he told Ben that he knew he wanted to do things with girls, about how God says you shouldn’t do those things until you’re married, how it was sinful and dirty, and all Ben could do was bite his tongue and think about what idiots adults were, goddamned fools. They sat down together and ate their eggs and then Ben’s mother walked him into the laundry room and showed him how to use the machine. Yeah, he’d clean up his messes. In the dark, alone in the middle of the night, he’d fuckin’ do that.
Now Ben finished with the ants and threw the towel in the trash. A commercial was on the TV, and he got down in front of his mother again to block out the screen.
“How could you not know what Wakeland was?” he said.
“The show is back on.”
He hit the television knob and shut off the screen.
“You were always so much trouble,” she said, her watery eyes glaring at him. “Always yelling, always running away.”
“Why did you let me travel alone with him?”
“He’s getting you a scholarship.”