Bright Shards of Someplace Else Read online

  “Well? How’d it go?”

  “I got the charges off the bill. And I redid your contract so you now have unlimited minutes and it’ll cost less than what you were already paying.”

  “Really?” Grace figured the boy was lying or simply confused. No way could the boy have done what he’d said.

  “Really. And it wasn’t even hard. It was boring. Kid stuff.” He sneezed into his sleeve. “The representative started talking to me about her life and her kids and junk. Her name’s Tracy and she said my call made her day.” He squeezed the juice bladder in his fist. “You can call the automated system and check if you don’t believe me. It’s okay if you don’t believe me. Most people don’t. I won’t be mad.”

  Grace studied the boy. She wanted him to see that she wasn’t just another skeptical, unimaginative adult. She was different.

  She felt different, alright. Her cup seemed to have lightened to the point that it was floating off her hand, pulling her arm up with it. Why did she suddenly care what the kid thought?

  “I believe you,” she began, lurching toward the phone with her cup held above both of them. “But I’m going to check anyhow.” She pressed redial and hit the menu buttons while the boy watched like a master observing a fumbling apprentice; he whispered “just hit zero” when she accidentally got to the wrong part of the menu and had to start over to get to her billing statement. A sensual and robotic voice reported in perfect deadpan that the boy had done it. Zero on her balance and forty dollars per month.

  “Wow, kid … color me impressed.” She was now sitting next to him on the couch, the phone between them on the cushion. He had grabbed his video game again and his thumbs twitched on the buttons with what seemed to her a virtuosity. She had been really dreading making that call, and now it was all taken care of, just like that. This small relief was like a shot of clean oxygen in a deep cave. “Andy,” she began. “Would you like to make another call?”

  “Only if it’s tougher.”

  “It’s tougher. I owe some money. A few thousand, in fact. I need you to see if you can get the interest charges off the debt.”

  “Who do you owe?”

  “I owe some money to Firekeeper’s Casino. I have a credit card with them. I lost some money playing slots. I think there was something wrong with the machines that day, or something. Usually I can just watch the lights and the fruit and get a payout pretty regularly. I have a system. This one night the same two bananas and a cherry kept coming up. Maybe you could say there was a glitch.”

  She was lying about the banana and cherry thing, but not about her system. Typically she did get a payout, although she had to admit that her system usually involved simply getting blitzed and pulling from a five-gallon bucket full of tokens at her feet. The servers and staff would all whistle when she came in with the bucket, and the other gamblers—those who were tourists and not locals, so to speak—might turn and look at her like she was something more real, in that context, than they were. The rest of the herd didn’t look up. To her credit, the bucket was never actually full. She filled the bottom with several hotel-bar-sized bottles of wine and liquor, covered them with a tin pie plate, then topped it off with tokens. She wasn’t about to blow her money on the house’s pricey drinks, so all night she would feed the slots and surreptitiously fill up her red plastic cup. She’d watch the fruit and the lights and get to feeling that she was decoding a language every time she pulled the handle. When the payout came, it was like she’d been speaking pidgin to an uncomprehending foreigner and had suddenly achieved fluency. The dings and bells told her she had made herself understood.

  “I don’t think that would work,” the boy said. “And why were you gambling so much? The odds of those machines are, like, really bad.”

  Grace had to expect some judgment, she figured. She had lost thousands over the years. She had little left for legal fees and nothing left of her mother’s inheritance. She wasn’t above prostrating herself in front of the boy, if that’s what it took to get the job done.

  “What can I say? I’m stupid. I mean, you get a payout so you keep playing. Sometimes I don’t know when to fold ’em, as they say. But there are people a lot worse off than I am.”

  “Just because people are worse off doesn’t mean you aren’t bad.” He seemed to consider his own words. “I guess I should say ‘no offense.’ So, no offense.”

  “None taken. Hey, we all make mistakes. I’m sure you get in fights with your little friends or steal their crayons sometimes.” She sucked down the last of her drink, then picked the now-tiny ice cubes from her cup and pressed them into the dirt of a potted plant on the side table.

  “I don’t get in fights with friends because there are none to fight. And I don’t use crayons. Colored pencils give a lot better control.”

  Should she latch onto the friend comment and try to find some deeper emotional ground with the boy? Or was it best to just roll on past? The house and the mother told the story: this unusual, cloistered boy no doubt lived a solitary life, too precocious for his peers and too young for any adults to take seriously. She could tell him that she, too, considered herself an outsider, with few allies in the world and even fewer friends. But why draw attention to that? Better to just give him the phone. The call would offer him an escape from his circumscribed life as a boy-genius; that was better than the two of them moaning about loneliness. She ruffled his hair with awkward affection; her hands, wet with ice, got nicely dry in his blond mop.

  “I hear you. I’m a colored pencil girl, all the way. Try drawing an eyeball with a crayon! Ready?”

  The boy nodded, and again she laid out the relevant information. Grace jumped up from the couch as he began dialing. She paced around the first floor, hearing snippets of his progress (“Can I speak to a manager?”) and debating about whether she needed another drink. She popped the cork from a small bottle of port and escaped her indecision. She returned to the boy and sat across from him; he was in the midst of a monologue:

  “You could get into my notes page and erase the earlier records on my account so no one would know what you did. You could also do the opposite and rack up my bill. I think your job would be fun, Jim, for these reasons.” The boy’s voice, this time, sounded higher and oddly husky, like female smoker trying to baby talk. He spoke quickly and laughed a bit, a charmingly nervous sound that threaded through his words and made everything he said a sweet half-joke. “Oh, so it’s not fun … just in a call center. I guess if I were you I’d want to do something crazy now and again. But I’m already a bad gambler. So I shouldn’t propose stuff like that.” He paused and pulled the phone away from his ear and held it out at arm’s length. This struck Grace as a showboating gesture, as if he were a cyclist weaving through traffic no-handed. The voice on the phone—Jim—let loose a stream of corporate gibberish into open air, but the boy didn’t appear to be listening. He pulled the straw from his juice and gnawed on it. In a slow, smooth motion, he wound the phone back to his ear and said a few garbled and urgent words into the mouthpiece.

  Another long pause, and then “No, of course not … no more than five or six times, tops … As a matter of fact, yes … She plays volleyball? The sport of princesses!”

  The thread was lost on Grace, but she felt hypnotized by the boy’s tone, the widening of his eyes, the small, polished giggles, the cajoling followed by a sudden cold word, which crackled like ice dropped in a hot toddy. Andy was talking on the phone, but she felt his disjointed comments were making an appeal to her personally. For what, she couldn’t say, but she was starting to feel different—yes, her head was swimming, but that wasn’t different, not really—she felt, watching him, that he was, with his little-boy claw hands, ripping a hole in a heavy scrim that long lay between her and the rest of the world. She was, she felt, surfacing. But she was also getting the bends.

  The boy sat Indian-style on the couch cushions, his fluffed-up hair forming a perfect looping curl, like a bent horn, right on the top of his head. In a
nother place and time a boy like him would be trussed up in velvets and dripping gold tassels and paraded through the town on a platform carried high by elders, and as he passed her on the street she would hope simply to catch his eye, or—better yet—to hear him speak. Or maybe she would trek to him, as he sat in the center of a do-nut of fog high on a precipice. Tell me, oh wise one …

  She laughed to herself; he was just a kid, whatever that meant. He laid down the phone and said, simply, “Done.”

  “You did it.”

  “Yup. Easy-peasy. It’s all about what you do and don’t say, and I know when to shut up and when to speak. It’s like a game.”

  “You’re amazing. Just, wow.” The boy had lifted another burden off her as if unhooking a balloon from its bunch to sail away. A giddiness rose up in her, and she looked around for something to distract her from a manic laugh. On the side table, she spotted the mother’s list. Eczema cream twice nightly. No liquids after nine. Make sure he uses floss and gets the uppers and the lowers …

  Grace stood up and floated into the bathroom. The cream bore a piece of masking tape marked “Andy.” The tube was solid in her hand, fraught; it was one of the boy’s things. She returned and presented it to him on her outstretched palms.

  “You’ve got to apply this,” she said, and he plucked it from her and squeezed a pearl into his hand. He anointed his inner elbow with what she now recognized as characteristic grace, and she knew the night was back onto appropriate footing: the responsible au pair and the obedient child.

  “Is that all you have?” Andy said.

  “You have to floss at some point, too.”

  “I mean, all the calls you have?”

  Of course she had more calls! A problem for every call and a call for every problem—she could think of another one right now. But it wasn’t the kind of call he could make.

  “It’s not the kind of call you could make.”

  “Why not? Does it have to do with your legal stuff?”

  “Sort of. And other, personal stuff. It wouldn’t be strictly a company call.”

  “I can make all kinds of calls.”

  “Well, I’d have to give you more background and you’d really have to listen.”

  “Okay.”

  She could not really let him make this call, but she saw no harm in laying out, as a form of bedtime story, just what kind of shit she was in. In that spirit she went to the kitchen, where she made up a cup of warm milk and honey for the boy and a milky drink for herself—one of those creamy liqueurs that were normally served hot and topped with whipped cream and sprinkles, though she now just zapped it for thirty seconds in the microwave. She brought the drinks into the living room and turned off all the lights but the one next to them. Then, she began.

  She started out telling her story in clear, picture-book sentences, the kind that are one to a page. “There were once two sisters,” she said, and in her mind’s eye she saw the idyllic accompanying picture—a washed-out pastel of two sisters swinging on a tire swing over a blue-ribbon stream. “They were the best of friends,” she continued, conjuring another picture—this time of the two of them laughing and giggling as they hid under the clothing racks while their mother yelled in a panic over their heads. Those storybook illustrators weren’t good at panic, though. Maybe the girls could be pushing one of those big circle things, like kids from a bygone era. Maybe the story worked better in a different time period.

  “Is this a real story?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then why are you telling it like that? Those circle things are called trundle hoops, anyway.”

  She was on the wrong track here, somehow. The call wasn’t about her history with her sister; he didn’t need to hear about all that. It was about Greg. Nearly every romantic relationship she’d had in the last five years had come from the situation with her sister. She’d dated lawyers, of course, but also mediators (when they tried that), court staff, even former employees of her sister. Now she was seeing Greg, the private investigator. When she first met him he was attractive because he seemed to have the power to get her free. He was that rope cast down to her in the pit. But soon enough he, like the rest of them, became just another part of the problem, just another part of what she simply referred to in her mind as “Susan.” The word no longer conjured up a person, but a constellation of bills to pay, appointments to make, paperwork to fill out, and moves demanding response. Susan was a word for the wild rudder of her life that she had to counteract daily at the helm. Greg was now part of Susan.

  She began telling the boy all this, sketching out the feud and the lawsuit and Greg’s poor performance as an investigator and how she had gotten involved with him for the “wrong reasons,” and that now she wanted to fire him and dump him in the same brisk call. This would be tough, she explained, because fired employees and dumped boyfriends often wanted explanations. She didn’t like explaining herself but always felt herself doing it, ad nauseam. Plus, Greg had a funny way of moving his upper lip that reminded her of the lower fringe of a jellyfish, undulating and curling in. He changed the way he walked based on who was watching. When he spoke he sounded intelligent but had a bovine look in his eye that made her doubt the existence of his soul. She wished there were a special kind of radio that would tune in to other people’s thoughts, even for just a minute. She’d pay a mint for that. When she was a kid sometimes she thought she could hear Susan’s thoughts when the two of them were falling asleep in their bunk beds. The moment was like a crossed-wire connection, and Susan’s thoughts were always about the social situation between the fish in their fish tank.

  Grace ranged wildly in her talk to the boy. She felt, sometimes, that he was the perfect confidant—mature enough to understand, young enough not to have his insight clogged up with learned falsehoods. At those moments she talked to him like a man. Other times he seemed more like a dog or cat, some questionably sentient being to whom she could spew her thoughts without concern about judgment or even comprehension. She spoke in that vaguely doubting way pet owners confided in their pets, then stopped to giggle at how silly she sounded. Or she sometimes spoke to him like an object, a key stuck in a lock, and in these cases she mumbled to herself about him while looking at him: Stop it. Stop. He’s just a little boy, you shouldn’t be talking to him this way.

  She slumped on the couch. It was dark outside and she stared at the orange bottom of her cup, which caught the lamplight and reflected a small sun on her hand. The cup probably wasn’t even microwave safe.

  “Okay, is that all? Can I call now?”

  “You can’t. Don’t you see? The guy’s my employee and boyfriend. It’s a call I have to make.”

  “Why? I could say I’m your new boyfriend. Or new investigator. Or best friend. Or representative. I’ve been my own father on the phone before and called about the treatment of myself at school. I’ve said stuff like ‘He’s a good kid, just weird,’ because I know that’s how it’s said. I can do anything. Plus you don’t even like the guy. So it doesn’t matter.”

  Something needed correcting in the boy’s logic, she knew, but she didn’t feel moved to do it. She looked out the large picture window behind him. The driveway was lit up by small recessed lights pressed into the shorn lawn. It was raining, and the drive looked, through the distortion, like a bridge twisting in the wind. She remembered seeing an old black-and-white clip of a concrete bridge snapping like a jump rope before throwing off its burden of cars and souls. Something about the image made her take heart: that a solid bridge could get so loopy had good implications, she thought, and the silent, forgotten deaths made her feel she’d dodged a nasty bullet just by being born in a later age. The wind made the rain sluice down the window at all angles. The thin, wet trails all seemed to converge behind the boy’s head, making him seem the center of a web—or an incredible deal that all arrows were pointing toward, a pattern of emphasis familiar to her from the neon signage that so often lit up her repetitive nights.

 
“You’re right. Go for it. I’ll pay him for his work, but I want out. Get me out.”

  The boy cracked his knuckles like an old pool shark and made the call. Grace could hear Greg announce his company name in a harangued voice, as if he had been fielding nonstop calls, though Grace knew that was a put-on. She fell back against the couch cushions, kicked her shoes off, and lay down. The throw pillows smelled like potpourri—lilac and geranium, a steamy whiff of green.

  The smell transported her to the dank crawl space in her mind where all her out-of-rotation bitter memories were stored. (The more contemporary ones were on display right behind her eyes.) There, her eyes fell on a bouquet of nettles, dandelions, milkweed, and some spiky yellow flower that grew by the drainage ditches hemming her childhood lawn. She had built the bouquet for her Girl Scout pastime badge, and the flowers she had chosen were supposed to be both aesthetically pleasing and calling to mind the arrangement of character traits a young scout should exemplify. The other girls had chosen daisies for sweetness, roses for fidelity, petunias for perseverance, and the dull like. Grace’s bouquet, she explained, expressed the critical qualities of defensiveness, invasiveness, passivity, and squalor.

  The bouquet did not go over well. The troop leader pulled her aside and accused her of undermining the spirit, if not the letter, of Girl Scout Law. The other girls’ blank sincerity was thrown up in her face as if she alone had flung open the door to all the forces of ambiguity that would soon enough sully their innocence for good.

  When Grace had told Susan about this—at dinner, when their mother and father were arguing and deaf to their talk—little Susan had said a shocking and perfect thing: “She’s a cuntbug.” Cuntbug. The word had moved Grace profoundly. “Cunt” was a word they shouldn’t have heard—lewdly adult. But “bug” commandeered the expression into a realm of childhood whimsy, a place that was far more ecstatically dark than anything a grownup could dream up. She loved her evil little sister then.