| PART TWO |
GHOSTS OF THE OLD COUNTRY
Late Summer 1988
1
SAMUEL WAS CRYING in his bedroom, quietly, so his mother wouldn’t hear. This was a small cry, just tiptoeing on the edge of actual crying, maybe a light whimpering along with the normal halted breathing and squished face. This was a Category 1 cry: a small, concealable, satisfying, purgative cry, usually only a welling of the eyes but lacking actual tears. A Category 2 cry was more of an emotional cry, triggered by feelings of embarrassment or shame or disappointment. This was why a Category 1 cry could be vaulted to a Category 2 simply by the presence of someone else: He felt embarrassed about crying, about being a crybaby, and this fact created a new kind of crying—that wet-faced, whimpering, snotty crying that’s not yet a full-throated Category 3, which involved larger raindrop-size tears and bouts of sniveling and convulsive breathing and a reflexive need to find a private hiding place immediately. A Category 4 was a weeping sobbing fit, whereas Category 5 was just unthinkable. His counselor at school had encouraged him to think of his crying in these terms, using categories like they do for hurricanes.
So that day he felt he needed to cry. He told his mother he was going to his room to read, which was not unusual. He spent most of his time alone in his room, reading the Choose Your Own Adventure books he bought from the bookmobile at school. He liked how the books looked on the shelves, all together like that, homogenous, with their white-and-red spines and titles like Lost on the Amazon, Journey to Stonehenge, Planet of the Dragons. He liked the books’ forking paths, and when he came to a particularly difficult decision, he would hold the page with his thumb and read ahead, verifying that it was an acceptable choice. The books had a clarity and symmetry to them that he found mostly absent in the real world. Sometimes he liked to imagine his life was a Choose Your Own Adventure book, and that a happy story was just a matter of making the right choices. This seemed to give a structure to the sloppy and unpredictable world he found in most other contexts terrifying.
So he told his mother he was reading, but really he was having a nice little Category 1. He wasn’t sure why he was crying, just that something about being at home made him want to hide.
The house, he thought, had lately become unbearable.
The way the house seemed to trap everything inside it—the heat of the day, the smell of their own bodies. They were caught in a late-summer heat wave, and everything in Illinois was melting. Everything was burning up. The air was a thick glue. Candles sagged where they stood. Flowers could not be supported by their stems. Everything wilted. Everything drooped.
It was August 1988. In the years to follow, Samuel would look back on this month as the final month he had a mother. By the end of August, she’ll have disappeared. But he didn’t know that yet. All he knew was that he needed to cry for certain abstract reasons: It was hot, he was worried, his mother was acting weird.
So he went to his room. He was crying mostly to get it out of the way.
Only she heard him. In the extreme quiet, she could hear her son crying upstairs. She opened his door and said “Honey, are you okay?” and immediately he cried harder.
She knew in these moments not to say anything about the elevation in his crying or react to it in any way because acknowledging it just fed the crying in a terrible feedback loop that sometimes ended—on those days when he cried over and over again and she couldn’t help but let her exasperation show through—with a wet blubbering hyperventilating kid-size mess. So she said, as soothingly as possible, “I’m hungry. Are you hungry? Let’s go out, you and me,” which seemed to calm him enough to get his clothes changed and get him into the car with only minor, post-crying hiccups to deal with. That is, until they got to the restaurant and she saw they were having a “Buy Two Get One Free” deal on hamburgers and she said “Oh good. I’ll get you a hamburger. You want a hamburger, right?” and Samuel, who all along had his heart set on chicken nuggets with that mustardy dipping sauce, worried that he’d disappoint her if he didn’t go along with this new plan. So he nodded okay and stayed in the hot car while his mother fetched the burgers, and he tried to convince himself that he wanted a burger all along, but the more he thought about it, the more the burger seemed revolting—the stale bun and sour pickles and those uniformly cut maggot-size onions. Even before she returned with the burgers he was feeling a little sick and throw-uppy at the thought of having to eat one. And driving home he was trying to contain the crying that was almost certainly coming when his mother noticed his wet, sniveling nose and said “Sweetie? Is something wrong?” and all he managed to say was “I don’t want a burger!” before he was lost inside a crushing Category 3.
Faye said nothing. She turned the car around while he buried his face in the hot fabric of the passenger seat and wept.
Back home, they ate in silence. Samuel sat with his mother in the hot kitchen, slumped in his chair and chewing the last of his chicken pieces. The windows were open in hopes for a breeze that did not come. Fans blew hot air from here to there. They watched a housefly buzz overhead, spinning circles near the ceiling. It was the only sign of life in the room, this insect. It bumped into the wall, then the window screen, then suddenly, unprovoked, directly above their heads, it fell. It dropped dead right out of the air and landed on the kitchen table heavy as a marble.
They looked at the small black corpse between them and then at each other. Did that really happen? Samuel’s face was panicked. He was on the verge of crying again. He needed a distraction. The mother needed to intervene.
“Let’s go for a walk,” Faye said. “Fill your wagon. Bring nine of your favorite toys.”
“What?” he said, his huge frightened eyes already slick and liquided.
“Trust me. Do it.”
“Okay,” he said, and this proved an effective diversion for about fifteen minutes. It felt to Faye like this was her primary duty as a mother: to create diversions. Samuel would begin to cry and she would head it off. Why nine toys? Because Samuel was a meticulous and organized and anal sort of kid who did things like, for example, keep a Top Ten Toys shoe box under his bed. Mostly in the way of Star Wars action figures and Hot Wheels. He revised it occasionally, substituting one thing for another. But it was always there. At any given moment, he knew exactly what his ten favorite toys were.
So she asked him to pick nine toys because she was mildly curious: What would he abandon?
Samuel did not wonder why he was doing this. Why nine toys? And why were they bringing them outside? No, he had been given a task and he was going to complete it. He thought little of arbitrary rules.
That he was so easily tricked made her sad.
Faye yearned for him to be a little smarter. A little less easily duped. She hoped sometimes he would talk back more. She wanted him to have more fight, wanted him to be a sturdier thing. But he wasn’t. He heard a rule and he followed it. Bureaucratic little robot. She watched him count his toys, trying to decide between two versions of the same action figure—one Luke Skywalker with binoculars, and one Luke Skywalker with a lightsaber—and she thought she should be proud of him. Proud that he was such a mindful boy, such a sweet boy. But his sweetness came at a price, which was that he was delicate. He cried so easily. He was so stupidly fragile. He was like the skin of a grape. In response, she was sometimes too hard on him. She did not like how he went through life so scared of everything. She did not like to see her own failures reflected back at her so clearly.
“I’m done, Momma,” he said, and she counted eight toys in his wagon—he had left behind both Luke Skywalkers, it turned out. But only eight toys, not nine. He hadn’t followed her one simple instruction. And now she didn’t know what she wanted of him. She was angry when he blindly obeyed, but now also angry that he didn’t obey better. She felt unhinged.
“Let’s go,” she said.
Outside it was unimaginably still and sticky. No movement except the heat ripples coming off roofs and asphalt. They walked down the wide street that curved through their particular subdivision and branched occasionally into stubby cul-de-sacs. Ahead of them, the neighborhood was all crunchy yellow grass and garage doors and houses following identical plans: front door set way back, garage door pushed way forward, as if the house were trying to hide behind it.
Those smooth beige faceless garage doors—they seemed to capture something essential about the place, something about the suburbs’ loneliness, she thought. A big front porch brings you out into the world, but a garage door shuts you off from it.
How had she ended up here, of all places?
Her husband, that’s how. Henry had moved them to the house on Oakdale Lane, in this little city of Streamwood, one of Chicago’s many indistinct suburbs. This after a string of small two-bedroom apartments in various Midwestern agro-industrial outposts as Henry climbed the corporate ladder in his chosen field: prepackaged frozen meals. When they landed in Streamwood, Henry insisted it was their final move, scoring as he had a job good enough to stay for: associate vice president of R&D, Frozen Foods Division. The day they moved in, Faye said, “I guess this is it,” then turned to Samuel. “I guess this is where you’re going to be from.”
Streamwood, she thought now. No streams, no woods.
“The thing about garage doors…,” she said, and she turned around to find Samuel staring at the asphalt in front of him, concentrating hard on something. He hadn’t heard her.
“Never mind,” she said.
Samuel pulled the wagon, and its plastic wheels clacked on the street. Sometimes a pebble would lodge under one of the wheels and the wagon would stop moving and the jolt would almost knock him down. He felt, whenever this happened, like he was disappointing his mother. So he watched for any kind of debris and kicked away stones and pieces of mulch and bark, and when he kicked he was careful not to kick very hard for fear his shoe would get stubbed in a sidewalk crack and he’d go tumbling forward, tripping on nothing, just walking wrong, which he worried would also disappoint his mother. He was trying to keep up with her—since she might be disappointed if he fell behind and she had to wait for him—but he couldn’t go so fast that one of his eight toys might topple out of the wagon, which would be a clumsy thing she definitely would be disappointed by. So he had to achieve exactly the right pace to keep up with his mother but then slow down on the parts of the street that were cracked and uneven, and watch for debris and kick debris away without tripping, and if he could do all of this successfully then it might be a better day. He might salvage the day. He might be less of a disappointment. He might erase what happened earlier, which is that he was a giant stupid crybaby, again.
He felt bad about this now. He felt that he certainly could have eaten the burger, that he just psyched himself out, and if he would have given it a chance he was sure the burger would have been a perfectly acceptable dinner. He felt guilty about the whole thing. The way his mother turned the car around and fetched him chicken nuggets seemed to him now so heroic and good. Good in a way he never could be. He felt selfish. The way his crying let him get whatever he wanted even though that was not his intention at all. And he was trying to figure out a way to tell his mother that if it were up to him he’d never cry again and she’d never have to spend hours calming him down or pandering to his inconsiderate and thoughtless needs.
He wanted to say this. He was getting the words right in his head. His mother, meanwhile, was looking at the trees. One of the neighbor’s front-yard oaks. Like everything else, it was drooping and desiccated and sad, its branches listing to the ground. Leaves not really green but a scorched amber. There was no sound at all. No wind chimes, no birds, dogs were not barking, children were not laughing. His mother looked up at this tree. Samuel stopped and looked too.
She said, “Do you see it?”
Samuel didn’t know what he was supposed to be seeing. “The tree?” he said.
“Up near the top branch. See?” She pointed. “All the way up. That leaf.”
He followed her finger and saw a single leaf that did not look quite like the others. It was green, thick, it stood straight up and it was flopping around like a fish, twisting as if there were a swirling wind. It was the only leaf on the tree that was doing this. The rest hung quietly in the dead air. There was no wind on the block, and yet this leaf was a maniac.
“Do you know what that is?” she said. “It’s a ghost.”
“It is?” he said.
“That leaf is haunted.”
“A leaf can be haunted?”
“Anything can be haunted. A ghost can live in a leaf as well as anywhere else.”
He watched the leaf spin around as if it were attached to a kite.
“Why is it doing that?” he said.
“That’s the spirit of a person,” she said. “My father told me about this. One of his old stories. From Norway, from when he was a kid. It’s someone not good enough to go to heaven but not bad enough to go to hell. He’s in between.”
Samuel had not considered this a possibility.
“He’s restless,” she said. “He wants to move on. Maybe he was a good person who did one really bad thing. Or maybe he did lots of bad things but felt very sorry about them. Maybe he didn’t want to do bad things, but he couldn’t stop himself.”
And at this, once again, Samuel cried. He felt his face crumple. The tears came so unstoppably quickly. Because he knew he did bad things over and over and over. Faye noticed and closed her eyes and rubbed her fingers hard at her temples and covered her face with her hand. He could tell this was about as much as she could tolerate today, how she’d met the limits of her patience, how the crying about bad things was itself another bad thing.
“Sweetheart,” she said, “why are you crying?”
He still wanted to tell her that what he desired more than anything else in the world was to stop crying. But he couldn’t say it. All he managed to do was to spit out something incoherent through the tears and mucus: “I don’t want to be a leaf!”
“Why on earth would you think that?” she said.
She took his hand and pulled him home and the only sound on the whole block was the clacking of the wagon wheels and his whimpering. She took him to his room and told him to put his toys away.
“And I told you to bring nine toys,” she said. “You brought eight. Next time try to pay more attention.” And the disappointment in her voice made him cry even harder, so hard that he couldn’t talk, and thus he couldn’t tell her that he put eight toys in the wagon because the ninth toy was the wagon itself.