At twenty minutes after ten, the school secretary walked Eric to the auditorium, where a long desk and two chairs were set up beneath one of the basketball hoops. A nice lady sat down and told him to sit down. She asked him lots of questions: about the meanings of words, and about similar words. She had him solve lots of puzzles: for the words she was looking for, for what was missing from pictures, for what symbols went together, for what shapes went together, for what word or symbol or shape he would choose to fill in various blanks. She had him put red-and-white blocks together making patterns he liked, and while he did that, she read him a long line of numbers he had to try to remember so he could repeat them, and he did that easily, reeling them right off, forward and backward. Everything she had him do he thought was great fun and very easy. “Good job,” she said. “You’re all done.”
The school secretary led him back to Mr. John’s class, and the whole way, he thought if school was like that test, he wouldn’t hate school as much as he did.
By eleven thirty, he was out on the playground, playing dodgeball because the line for tetherball, which he preferred, was too long.
*
From nine forty until two forty, Joan sat at the kitchen table reading and editing and making notes on and about Words.
*
At three, she was parked outside of the school, waiting for her children to emerge, which they did five minutes later.
*
By three thirty, they were home, and the boys were eating a snack.
*
At four, Martin came home early from the hospital, still jet-lagged from China, feeling that his presence had been missed, that he needed to be around much more, that Eric required a watchful eye, despite his being good all weekend.
*
At four fifteen, Martin was in the backyard, and the three Manning men were tossing a football around, or rather Martin and Daniel were tossing a football around, and Eric was complaining that he did not want to play, that football was stupid, and why couldn’t they get a computer.
*
At five, Joan forced Eric to take a bath and wash his hair.
*
At six, the family ate in the backyard, fish that Martin had barbecued and no one particularly liked.
*
At six thirty, Joan brought out bowls, spoons, the gallon of Mint Chocolate Chip, the squeeze bottle of chocolate syrup.
*
At seven, Daniel went into the house, went into his room, pulled the book from his backpack, moved quickly down the hallway, looked out the living-room windows where he saw his parents had not moved from the table. Eric was in their father’s lap, their mother was lifting a glass to her mouth.
He slipped the collection, called Other Small Spaces, back into its place on the bookshelves. His mother’s name had not been written on the flyleaf because her name was printed on the title page, and on the spine, and in raised letters on the front cover that he could run his fingertips over.
He did not write his own name on the flyleaf as he always did. He didn’t want to, not since the first day of school when Miss Nilson altered his world.
On that first day, he’d read his story aloud, and Miss Nilson asked him to stay past the bell, and she said, “You must feel like the luckiest boy to have such a talented writer for a mother. I’ve read her books and all of her other published stories. You must be so proud, knowing that your mother’s work has been read by so many, that she has received such big prizes for her writing. I can only imagine your family’s dinner conversations. And look, you’re following in her footsteps.”
He had not known about any of that. He had not known his mother was a writer, was famous, that he was not the only writer in his house.
And that night, when he questioned his mother, she admitted she had published two books, but she had said nothing, nothing at all, about winning prizes and awards, and said no when he asked if she was writing now.
When she left his room, he tried not to blame her, but he did, and it was all desperate anger inside him. And he had thought how Eric always said, “You’re my best friend, Daniel,” and sometimes Trevor was Daniel’s, or at least he would say that when they were getting along, but really, his best friend had always been his mother, so how come, when he asked her those questions, she hadn’t been able to read his heart, or feel his pain, or know his mind was filled with confused thoughts jumping around like rabbits.
And it was then, right then, he instantly understood what he had read in the big books he loved, that when people were hurt down to their bones, it was because they had been betrayed, and he had been betrayed, and betrayal felt like this. The very fact of her had stamped out what made him special, crushed his secret desire to be a famous writer.
And all this past week, he felt rooted to the ground, clenching his hands in fists, saying to himself, “She’s a mother, just a mother, that’s all she is.”
But this morning, hiding in the library reading “Deep in the Valley,” he had realized three things: that her talent was unique, that he could never hope to match it, and that he would never get over it. The fury he felt toward her was blinding and white-hot, because she had destroyed him, completely and absolutely. Why that should be so, he could not explain to himself. He hadn’t been able to read another story, had slammed the book shut, and stayed in the library the rest of the day, his face in his hands.
He looked once more at his mother’s book on the shelf, then turned away, went back outside, sat at the table, and pretended he did not hate her.
*
At eight, Eric went to bed.
*
At nine, Daniel went to bed.
*
At ten, Martin went to bed too.
*
Joan did not go to bed. Since Friday night, she had been taking advantage of Martin’s jet lag, continuing to make her slow way through Words. She had one hundred and fifteen pages to go, and a lot of work to do to bring what she had written thus far into being, the ways in which she thought her characters, and their stories, needed to move forward, the new chapters she was keen to write. She still was not certain whether she would start anew, or wind back to the start and first revise all of those pages. But she was working with pleasure, with relief that Eric’s mishap with the aspirin had not harmed him, and that Daniel, while still quieter than usual, had smiled a few times at dinner, even as she sometimes caught him studying her. He hadn’t kissed her goodnight, but he hadn’t kissed Martin either. She was eager for the next day, for Martin to brush the top of her hair with his lips and leave by the back door, to drop the kids off at school, to return to the novel she could feel in her marrow had the poetic heft, the depth, all the sinews and tissues, to be extraordinarily fine.
*
At two in the morning, Joan slid naked into their bed. She was no longer angry with Martin, about his comment that he did not blame her for Eric eating all of that aspirin, the bottle left out on the counter. He had meant to assuage, even if his words had had the opposite effect. She settled against him, and he moaned softly, and then his right arm, his right hand, fell across her left thigh, and she, too, went to sleep.
*
On Tuesday morning, the world blew up.