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The Nurse and the Black Lagoon
Jessica Treadway

When the phone rang, she muted the TV slightly and listened for the machine. Who would be calling during Seinfeld—during the first episode of the new season? She heard her daughter Katy’s fast, confident voice issuing the message for incoming callers. “Brian and Katy are out having fun, but our parents have nothing better to do than sit around and wait for the phone to ring, so please start talking and they’ll pick up.” Joe had protested about the message, but in such a way that Irene knew he didn’t really mind. So she’d said, Oh, let’s keep it on for a while, it’s cute, and he capitulated, and she knew he was secretly pleased to have the world—or at least anyone who might ever dial their number—know what a saucy and no doubt popular daughter he’d helped create.

A moment’s pause followed the beep, and Irene thought it would be a hang-up. But then a man’s voice came on, hesitant as if he weren’t sure he had reached the right destination through the wire. “Mr. and Mrs. Ludwig? This is Lieutenant John Scully of the Morrisville Police. We have your son Brian in custody at the station. You probably know where it is on Elm Avenue, the old Hardy school. Can you please come down or call when you get in. Something a little serious has occurred.” He disconnected without saying good-bye, as if he knew that to do so would compromise the urgency he felt obliged to convey.

Irene stood frozen over the phone with the remote control still in her hand. She had kept thinking she would pick up the receiver during the officer’s message, but she just stood there and listened, paralyzed, until he was finished. Then she did pick it up and started to dial the number printed on the orange neon Town Information sticker that had puckered and faded from sitting in the family room’s direct sunlight over the years. Police, Fire, Poison Control. But before she could complete the call, she hung up. She stuck a videotape in the VCR and pressed record. Joe was appalled at this later, and she was surprised herself when she realized what she had done. “I think it was my way of not letting it sink in, the phone call,” she told her husband. “I didn’t want to know what it was.” By the time they had this conversation, she had bailed Brian out and he had sequestered himself in his bedroom. Joe and Irene were trying to decide what to do next. Katy was ignoring the phone messages from her own friends, watching and re-watching the six-hour tape Irene had recorded on NBC.

When she got to the police station Sunday night, she had let herself entertain, although only for a few seconds, the idea that the “something a little serious” had happened to Brian, so that he was hurt (she would not let herself go as far as dead). But then, she reasoned, the police would have come to the house. Wouldn’t they? That’s what happened on TV. And it would be more than “a little serious.” In her mind she went in the other direction on the spectrum of possibilities and imagined that Brian might have been caught with other kids in the woods by the high school, drinking beer. But that wasn’t his style; his friends didn’t hang out in the woods, and he didn’t drink beer. In fact, that was the sad, fraudulent part about the answering machine’s message. Katy was usually out having fun, but Brian was in his bedroom playing video games.

When she saw him in the room where the police were holding him, she felt a rise of the fresh, uncomplicated joy she hadn’t remembered since before her children were teenagers. There he is. And he didn’t appear to be injured.

Yet there was something wrong; he wouldn’t look at her. “Is your husband with you, Mrs. Ludwig?” the lieutenant said. “It would be best if you both could be here.”

“He’s in Chicago,” she told him, “for work. I’ll call him. But I wanted to find out first.”

“Mom,” Brian said. It was the voice of her six-year-old son from ten years ago, confessing to her on Christmas afternoon. She’d found him crying next to the Christmas tree, next to the 215-piece airport-and-helipad set she and Joe had spent hours assembling in front of the kids’ stockings the night before. I heard you guys, Brian had cried into her sweater, where he pitched himself after she asked him what was wrong. I sat on the stairs and watched you and Daddy put it together. They’d had the Santa Claus talk then and there, much earlier than Irene had planned or wanted, and without Joe, who had taken a noon flight to Florida on Christmas—Christmas Day, dammit! she’d snapped at him on the phone that night—for a convention he had to set up.

He’ll get over it, Joe’d told her. For god’s sake, Irene, it’s Santa Claus. Tell him children are starving in Africa, for Christ’s sake.

He’s six, she’d said. Don’t be ridiculous.

He’s old enough to understand starving, Joe shot back before some client called to him and he had to get off the phone.

“I’m sorry,” Brian said to her, now as he had then, and she felt herself preparing to tell him he hadn’t done anything wrong.

“It’s okay, honey,” she said, realizing that though it was silly she still wished he would throw himself at her, as he had then, in the belief that there might be some comfort for him in her arms.

But her son was backing up against the white brick of the wall. “What, honey?” The sight and feel of him retreating made her skull go cold.

“Sit down, Mrs. Ludwig,” the lieutenant told her, and she sensed in him the sympathy of one who has the fascinating but delicate duty of changing somebody’s life for the worse.

What Brian had done, Lieutenant Scully told Irene, was burn down the playground at Eastbrooke Elementary School. A neighbor whose yard bordered the playground called 911 at 6:56 p.m., during Wheel of Fortune, to report the fire. By the time the trucks got there, the whole thing was gutted—the entire wood-based structure in which every piece of equipment was connected to another: the round drum of the crawl tunnel, the segmented step-bridge, spiral stairs climbing to yellow slides. The only parts left remotely recognizable were the chains connecting rubber tires in the obstacle course, and the steering wheel that encouraged kids to pretend they were captaining a ship full of playmates through sawdust seas.

Of course, Lieutenant Scully didn’t go into these details. Irene knew them because of the pictures she saw on the news that night. All Lieutenant Scully said was that Brian was being held on suspicion of “malicious destruction of property” at the school. He had been seen watching the firemen from the hill to one side of the playground, overlooking the kickball field. He didn’t try to run when the police approached him, but he had no account of why he was there. He didn’t respond when they asked if he’d set the fire.

“This is impossible,” Irene said, but she didn’t go into why—the memory of the day the playground had been built, a Saturday in May at the end of Brian’s second-grade year. One of the Eastbrooke fathers, an architect, had presented a plan to replace the metal jungle gym and swingset that had been collecting rust and dents for two decades. Irene joined the committee of parents responsible for applying for permits, renting equipment, and organizing a schedule. The new playground could be put up in one long day of work by volunteers under a construction supervisor, the architect said, so a day was designated and more than a hundred people showed up, with many entire families including Irene and Joe and Brian and Katy. A group of mothers babysat while other parents took up pieces of the pre-fab “circuits,” the various stations comprising the new playground. It was the first stunning and endless spring day of the year, the sun high over a faint warm breeze. Irene had never been so exhausted as at the finish, when everyone gathered on the hill to eat pizza and admire what they had accomplished, the gleaming and colorful structures which the kids swarmed as soon as the guy from the company did his inspection and deemed it okay. Irene remembered imagining that this was what it must feel like to the Amish, when they raised a barn or a house: a sense of pride and fulfillment at belonging to a group whose members showed so much devotion and care for the common good.

Thinking of that day as she listened to what Lieutenant Scully was telling her, Irene tried to recall if there had been anything negative about the experience. She remembered a brief but palpable panic when Laura and Stew Bender’s daughter Ellie went missing; she was found moments after the search was started, having chased a cat into the woods. Afterward, Laura Bender was part of the pizza clean-up crew with Irene. “I knew she had to be somewhere,” Irene remembered Laura saying several times, giddy with relief. “There’s that line, you know? Between thinking they’re okay and thinking they might actually be gone somehow? I never crossed that line this time, but one more minute—I was getting close.” The other mothers, including Irene, nodded; they all knew which line she meant.

Now that Irene thought about it, she remembered that Brian, who was in Ellie Bender’s class, had gone blank when it first seemed she was missing. Gone blank was a phrase Irene used to herself, to describe what she saw in her son’s face sometimes (and what she felt sometimes in her own): an expression that might have looked mild or innocuous to a bystander, but that in fact actively concealed a measure of emotion he (and she) did not want to risk showing, and was afraid could not be contained.

Unlike her brother, Katy hadn’t inherited this trait of Irene’s. Their daughter took after Joe, who had little talent for hiding anything. It meant that Joe and Irene didn’t have to worry about her using drugs or having sex they wouldn’t know about, and this was a relief; but it also meant that when she was angry at one or both of them—which, lately, was often—she didn’t stomp out of the room to sulk in private but remained to let them feel the full force of her fury. Even after the torrent of words she would not leave their presence, as if she wanted to be sure their focus would not shift from her, from whatever complaint or passion had inflamed the fight.

Facing Brian in the police station, Irene found herself wishing that her son could be more like his sister. She felt she would give anything to be able to read his now-more-than-ever-gone-blank face. Was it outrage at having been accused of something he would never imagine doing? Was it fear? Or—this possibility was one she had to avert her eyes to consider—could it be guilt?

So: “This is impossible,” she’d said, and she meant all of it—the trip to the police station, the information about the playground being burned down, the fact of Brian being held in connection with the crime. “This is impossible,” she’d said, but the truth (she saw, when she could finally look up) was that it wasn’t.

Joe took the first plane he could book after the meeting on Monday he couldn’t get out of.

“You’d get out of it if he was dead,” Irene accused him over the phone. “If he was in the hospital.”

“But he’s not.” Joe made the clicking sound with his tongue that drove her more crazy than any other habit of any person she’d ever known. He said he couldn’t help it—that it was a reflex—but she believed he could stop if he tried, so it was a steady source of conflict between them, especially because it became more pronounced when he was tense or afraid. “He’s neither of those things. He’s fine. We’ll figure it out, Irene.”

The flight put him at the airport at six o’clock, rush hour, and Irene, who hated driving on the highway, asked him to take a cab home. “I don’t want to do that,” he told her. “It’ll give us a chance to talk without the kids around.”

“Couldn’t we just go out somewhere when you get here?” she said, but she knew he was right, and she also knew that if she were to be honest with herself, if nobody else, she was trying to put this off—talking with Joe—because until then she might be able to pretend that it wasn’t such a big deal, even if it was true that Brian had burned down the playground. Maybe it had been an accident. Maybe he’d been experimenting with cigarettes, or—what else? What else could it have been? There had to be something that made sense. When they’d come home from the police station, she’d tried to talk to Brian. She’d gone to his room with a plate of cut-up apples with the skins peeled off, the snack she always fed him when he was three and four and five years old, watching Roadrunner videos before bedtime.

He’d come to the door when she knocked, and opened it halfway and timidly. When he saw the plate of apples in her hand he just stared at it, even as she held it out to him. Then he said, “You’ve got to be kidding, Mom,” in a voice that, despite the words, wasn’t mean—in fact, it was so gentle she almost didn’t hear. Then he closed the door, also gently, and she could tell he remained just on the other side of it, listening, as long as she did. She wanted to ask, “Brian, can’t we talk?” but if she was being honest she had to admit that she had no idea what to say to him, how to talk about this, how to be. She had to admit she felt relieved when he left the door closed, and she could feel him waiting for her to walk away. To keep the apples from rotting, she put them in lemon juice in the fridge.

Joe let her drive home from the airport because of the Ativan he’d taken during the flight. She liked it when he took Ativan because it made the tongue-clicking go away. She asked for one and he declined and she said, “Why not, you asshole? One little pill?” and he turned toward her and said, “You just called me an asshole?” and she said “You heard me,” and he flicked the dashboard with two ineffectual fingers and Irene laughed.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Joe said. “Have you gone crazy, too?” He put his hands in the let-me-explain-something-to-you position that had annoyed Irene since their first date. “I go away on Wednesday—for a major conference, mind you, one of the biggest of the year, I had to do presentations every day—and everything is fine. Monday I come home because my kid burned down a playground, and now my wife is calling me an asshole because I won’t give her medication that was prescribed for me.” He put his hands together in a martyred prayer. “Do I have that right?”

“Stop being so high and mighty,” she told him. By the time she finished speaking, she’d pulled to the side of the highway, where she collapsed her face over the steering wheel and began to heave.

“Ah, Reenie.” He hadn’t called her that in years—more than thirty pounds ago. “Ah, God.” Joe was patting her knee and at the same time craning in his seat to look at the traffic whizzing past them in a blare of horns. “We really should keep going here—this isn’t safe, honey.” She knew he was right, but she didn’t seem to be able to stop crying. At least crying was what it felt like, though there were no tears. “Reenie, let’s switch. Come on. I’ll drive us.” Another round of beeps and blasts, as they opened their doors and each walked to the other side of the car, Irene still holding her face. It was another five minutes before they could ease back into the traffic. They spent the time silent as the car filled with their dread.

At home they sat in the driveway instead of going right in. They watched as Katy, in her bedroom, pulled her curtain aside, looked out at them, then walked away from the window without giving any sign. “What’s he doing?” Joe asked, giving a nod toward the other window.

Irene shrugged but only halfway, leaving her shoulders raised. “I don’t know. Neither of them went to school. He wouldn’t come out.” Slowly she allowed her posture to deflate. “What should we do?”

Joe pinched his nose with his thumb and forefinger, a gesture she had come to associate over the years with stalling until he figured out what to say. “Maybe this isn’t as bad as it seems,” he began, but Irene interrupted him.

“I already tried that. It doesn’t work.” She opened her door and he looked at her; she felt like reaching back in across the seat and smacking the fear out of his face. “Come on.” It was like the days when Brian and Katy were children, dawdling over some toy they’d been playing with during a ride. Just a minute, Mom, they told her, slow to exit their booster seats at four and six and eight years old, eyes focused still on the handheld pinball game as they practiced at being teenagers, affronted by her power.

The house was quiet, an eerie sign. Usually, if the kids weren’t watching TV, there was at least the beat of a stereo thumping from one or both of their rooms. Irene resisted the impulse to turn on the TV for benign company, a laugh track or talk show or even the smarmy sounds of paid programming. “Hungry?” she asked Joe, and he looked up surprised and hopeful at the solicitude of her tone. Then she saw the understanding cross his face, the realization that now she was stalling and it had nothing to do with how he felt, with his hunger or nervousness or guilt about why he’d been called home early, his boy suspected of a crime. So he would not give Irene what she wanted, the time she would welcome to make a sandwich or pour him a beer. “No,” he said, “let’s go get him,” and they were both aware that he sounded like a man about to hunt the one who was stalking his family, instead of his own tall sweet son.

Irene climbed the stairs first, feeling Joe’s step behind her heavy on her heels. In the hall they ran into Katy on her way to the bathroom. Her face looked swollen, not from tears but with a new font of knowledge too big for the space it occupied. “Be nice to him,” she told her parents. “He feels bad.”

“Well I would hope so,” Joe said, and mother and daughter sent him silent rays of contempt.

Irene asked, “Are you going to Chelsea’s?” but Katy gave her a look that implied she was crazy.

“I can’t go anywhere,” she accused them. “We’re going to have to move, you know. To a whole new town somewhere. In a whole new state.”

Irene said, “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Oh, don’t you.” Their daughter shut the bathroom door with as close to a slam as she dared to, when she needed so much.

They knocked on Brian’s door and when there was no answer, they went in. He was sitting at his desk looking at the computer, where a game of Star Wars filled the screen. “Turn that off,” Joe said, and without swiveling to face them, Brian complied; the sound of the computer going dead was a grievous sigh.

“Brian,” Irene said, “what happened?” She sat on the bed, but Joe remained standing. Brian stood up from the computer and leaned against the desk as he had leaned against the wall at the police station, backing away from Irene. He was so tall he had to bend so his head wouldn’t hit the bookshelf above him. When he was younger, the shelf had been squeezed tight—with National Geographic volumes about the solar system, Encyclopedia Brown mysteries, King Tut pop-ups, all the Narnia books. (One weekend, inspired by Narnia, he had created his own universe on a piece of poster board; Irene remembered some of the planet and continent names, even now: Spartica, Willing, Playhow.) Now the bookshelf contained the boxes from computer games, discarded pieces of Lego sets, and bottles of the aspirin he downed more often than Irene suspected was healthy, for the headaches neither he nor the doctors could explain. He reached for one of the bottles now, but it was empty. He slammed it into the wastebasket, which wobbled from the force.

Joe said, “Did you do this thing, Brian?” Irene could hear in her husband’s voice the most fervent of pleas.

Brian shrugged, but she could see it wasn’t meant to be elusive or insolent—just a preliminary gesture to answering. “Yeah.”

Joe let out a breath she sensed he had been holding since she’d called him from the police station the night before. She waited for him to say “Why?” but when he didn’t, she understood, because it left a space for her to ask the question, and she couldn’t bring herself to it, either.

“Because he’s a frigging wack job.” They hadn’t heard the bedroom door opening, or Katy coming in. She stood with her long arms crossed in front of her. The small wings of her black hair stood up beside her temples, as if she had been able to give them shape with her anger, instead of a spray or gel.

“Kate,” Brian said. He made the most barely perceptible movement toward his sister, but stopped himself as if realizing she would not welcome it. Irene felt the crack in her heart widen. “I’m sorry.”

“Sorry? How about crazy?” When Katy spoke lately, she tended to raise her eyebrows so high in her forehead they disappeared into her bangs. This time the brows came back down almost immediately in an imitation of melting, and Irene saw that it wasn’t anger her daughter felt now—it was fear. And this Irene understood, because she felt it, too. In fact, as she stood there between the walls of her son’s room that seemed too small to contain the whole family, she recognized that fear was what they all felt, including Brian.

“Could I be alone now, please?” Brian gestured with his head toward the door.

Katy told him, “Whatever you say, freako,” flouncing into the hall, down the stairs and out the front door. Irene—who would be ashamed of this for the rest of her life—took the easy way and followed Katy out of the room, even though she sensed (and knew she was right in sensing) that her son, despite what he said, did not want his family to leave.

Joe stayed. “I’m not moving till I get some answers,” Irene heard him say, as she shut the door behind her, closing the truth inside.

She went to the basement. She was sure of what she was looking for, and yet she could not find it. It was the oddest thing, so odd that she convinced herself for a few moments that someone—Katy, or—no—Brian, it would have to be—had taken the boxes and hidden them, specifically so she would not be able to locate them at a time like this. But why? It took her several minutes of searching and puzzling to remember, slowly, that the boxes were gone, and that she knew this; they had not survived the flood that soaked the basement two or three Aprils ago, and though she had tried to air everything out and to fool herself into believing it would dry, all of it was lost. After that they put down pallets but it didn’t really matter, because they would never have anything again as valuable as what the weather had already ruined.

The boxes had contained the children’s artwork and other projects from nursery through middle school—all the sweet, sad artifacts of childhood seeped through and puckered, warped or dismembered beyond worth even to the mother of their makers. “What do you need this stuff for, anyway?” Katy had demanded, as Irene surveyed the sodden boxes and couldn’t help her tears. The crying made Katy madder, and Brian, though he didn’t say anything, had gone blank and turned away. Joe had to be the one to cart the boxes to the curb.

Irene had forgotten all of this until now, as she stood in the basement with her hands twitching, knowing what they wanted but finding nothing to light on to take the twitch away.

When the kids were little she used to bring them to the crafts store every couple of weeks. They always came home with a new project which the three of them did at the dinner table when the dishes were cleared. I am a good mother, Irene could hear in her head as she dropped the items on the counter in front of the cashier. Actually, what she heard was She is a good mother, projected back toward herself in the cashier’s unheard voice.

Brian’s favorite things to buy at the craft store were blank books, in which he wrote and illustrated his own stories. Irene’s favorite was titled The Nurse and the Black Lagoon. When he showed her the cover, Irene said, “Do you know what a lagoon is?” and Brian said, “No,” as if it couldn’t have mattered less.

Menny pursons hav bin to the nurse, went the first page. The “inventive spelling” system favored by the school district drove Joe nuts. “How are they supposed to learn anything?” he said to Irene, when the letter came home from the teacher explaining the protocol, adding that parents should not correct their children when they made mistakes reading aloud. “Why don’t they have inventive math, then, too? What’s the difference between letting them spell cat with a k and saying two plus two equals seven?” Irene didn’t have an answer. Joe brought it up with Brian’s teacher when they had their conference, and the teacher explained the rationale. It made sense back then, but Irene couldn’t remember it now.

Menny pursons hav bin to the nurse. Brian started having his headaches that year, in the first grade. They had his eyes examined and eventually the doctor even ordered a brain scan, but the physical tests revealed nothing. It’s probably just nerves, the doctor told Joe and Irene. Some kids get stomachaches, his probably just shows up in his head.

But what can we do about it? they asked the doctor. The pain was as real as if there had been a tumor. They could see it pounding behind his soft gray eyes.

The doctor shrugged. She had no children, Irene felt sure—she was too young yet, wore no ring, and didn’t seem to need to relieve their boy’s suffering, the way a parent would. “Try to help him relax,” she suggested. “Does he have some favorite music? Maybe a washcloth on his forehead, before he goes to bed.”

Irene recalled how angry this had made Joe. “‘Maybe a washcloth on his forehead,’” he muttered on the way home, low enough that Brian couldn’t hear. “Talk about brilliant. A washcloth on his forehead—Jesus Christ.”

So a couple of days each week, Irene had picked Brian up at the school nurse’s office. In his story’s picture he drew the office in detail, with its cot in the corner, the nurse’s desk and its bowl of peppermints, the blinds she pulled against the sun in the hope of soothing what he called “the hard hurt” at the sides of his head. The nurse’s name was Mrs. Rising and Brian loved her, so Irene came to love her, too. She never intimated that there was anything wrong with Brian psychologically; and she treated his symptoms as real. “I wish I could do more,” she whispered to Irene once, as Brian pulled the Velcro across his shoes. “It’s because he’s sensitive, which is a good thing. He’ll outgrow the headaches. But he’ll always be sensitive. As soon as he learns how to modulate it, he’ll be all right.”

Irene knew that it was true—that she had a sensitive son. She remembered his face in the school bus window as he waved at her madly in the mornings, especially on Mondays, after weekends without having to say good-bye to Irene. Katy never had separation problems; even on the first day of nursery school, Irene had to ask for a kiss before leaving her daughter to take over the room.

Menny pursons hav bin to the nurse, Brian wrote. But not menny pursons hav bin to the black lagoon. Turning the page from the illustration of the nurse’s office, Irene had felt crazily curious, wondering how Brian would draw a picture of something he could not describe or define.

But it was just a black page: he had taken a crayon and colored the whole page black, with not a single dot or jot of white space left uncovered. Holding it up toward the ceiling to see if any light could get through (it couldn’t), Irene realized that without knowing what a “black lagoon” was, he had rendered it perfectly, through instinct—a metaphor for nothingness, the dark, inescapable depths.

It was the only reference in the entire book to the black lagoon, and it was here that the story ended. Usually, Brian felt compelled to fill all the blank pages, but not this time; it was a two-sentence story (Many persons have been to the nurse. But not many persons have been to the black lagoon.) and now that she thought about it Irene could remember Joe shaking his head when he saw it and asking her, “Why can’t he write about cowboys, or astronauts? Something more normal? I mean, how many kids his age go around writing about the school nurse?”

“He likes her,” Irene said. She was folding socks into balls.

“Well, he shouldn’t. He shouldn’t even know her.” Joe picked up the second book on the bed, the one Katy had written with Irene’s help. Cats Know How to Build Sandcastles. “Now that’s more like it,” he said.

She left the basement quickly, once she realized that there was nothing there for her. She could feel in the house that Joe and Brian were still in Brian’s bedroom. It was too early to go to bed yet. She turned on the TV, sat down with a magazine, and waited to see what would come on.

After a half hour Joe came downstairs and told her, “He wants to talk to you.”

“What is it?” she asked, but he was shaking his head.

“I couldn’t really get it. The cop’s probably right, he needs therapy. Jesus. I’d better go look up what we have.” He headed for the desk where they kept the insurance papers. “Where’s Katy?” he said over his shoulder.

“Not home yet.”

“Well, let’s find her. We’ve had enough surprises for one week.”

“Call Chelsea’s,” she told him, knowing he would have no idea how to do this, but also knowing that Katy was okay. “I’m going up.”

Brian was waiting for her in his doorway. He showed her in like a host. “What’s going to happen to me?” he asked. She saw how scared he was, and she also knew that he wasn’t referring only or even primarily to the courts. Yet she decided to address this part first, because it was easier. Even though she didn’t have a precise answer, she could find something to say.

“Well, that policeman seemed to think we had a good chance for probation, since you don’t have any record.” She decided not to tell Brian that Lieutenant Scully had said teenage boys often set fires to send up a “cry for help.”

“It depends on whether the judge sees it as an act of arson or what they call ‘malicious mischief,’” the police officer told her, after taking her into a side room of the station. It felt familiar to Irene, despite the fact that she had not been inside the building since two of the town’s four elementary schools had been combined and the Hardy school transformed into police headquarters. With a start that made her feel, absurdly, like laughing, she realized that where she stood now with Lieutenant Scully was the old nurse’s office—Mrs. Rising’s room, from which she had picked Brian up on so many deadened afternoons. She had the idea to mention this coincidence to the officer, until she realized that it would likely be treated as more than just a coincidence—perhaps Scully would use it, even anecdotally, as early evidence of Brian’s being disturbed.

“Probably, since he’s been clean up to now, he’ll get away with probation and a fine, maybe five hundred dollars,” the lieutenant said. He seemed to notice the wince Irene made when she heard get away with, and he waved at his own words as if to clean his spoken slate. “Or there’s a program over in Ravena for teenage fire-setters. When they get enough kids from the surrounding towns, they send them through the program together. One afternoon a week plus Saturday mornings.”

“What for?” Irene knew she sounded stupid, but she really wanted to know.

Scully shrugged. “To help them find out why they do it.”

“Well, in Brian’s case, it must be some kind of mistake.” She knew what she sounded like—every mother in the world must say the same thing, right?—but she also believed herself. “He must have lit a match for some reason, and it got out of hand.”

“He smoke?” the officer asked. Irene shook her head.

Scully shrugged again. “Maybe you’re right,” he told her. She thought she might hug him—he was somebody’s son, perhaps somebody’s brother.

But the impulse passed; he was also the person who had arrested Brian.

Stretched across his bed now, Brian was waiting for her to tell him what neither of them could possibly know. “Dad and I were thinking you might want to see somebody,” Irene said. “Besides whatever the courts do. Like a therapist?”

Brian looked at her without registering any expression. She thought he was going to say something, but he didn’t.

“Do you want to tell me what happened?” She held her breath as she pressed the words out.

“I want to,” Brian said, and she coughed on the mixture of relief and fear as they found each other in her throat. The look he gave her was almost one of pity. “But I can’t.”

And just what was it she thought he might say? That there was a girl involved, maybe—some tough and unloved sophomore who had involved Brian in the problems of her own life, made him into a rescuer and confidante so that he lost his own sense of values in trying to salvage hers? Irene still didn’t see how this would translate into Brian’s having set fire to the playground, but she was desperate to make it be true.

But when she asked Katy about it she found out that no, there was no girl. There had never been any girl, not since Ellie Bender in first grade. “Doesn’t that strike you as odd, Mom?” Katy said. They were having this conversation in the kitchen and Katy was dipping pretzels in the peanut butter jar, washing the bites down with grape juice from a can. Irene had made dinner, a stroganoff, but she ate it alone; Joe was still at work and Brian never took meals with the family anymore, just stole out of his room to take things from the kitchen, which he ate in front of his computer or in bed. He had stopped going to school and had lost a week already. Irene didn’t know what to do.

“I don’t know about odd,” she answered Katy, though now that she thought about it, there had been times when she’d wondered why Brian hadn’t wanted to go to dances or, in junior high, the Friday Night Flings, when all the grades got together at the school twice a semester to play games in the gym or swim or watch movies like Night of the Living Dead in the auditorium.

She’d never asked him about it, though. When he was younger, he used to like spending Friday nights with Irene and Joe, and Katy too if she didn’t have a plan. They’d either order in pizzas from Tony’s Pies and rent a movie, or have dinner at Tony’s and see a newer release (Batman, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?) in the cineplex at the mall.

“You’re not trying to tell me he’s gay, are you?” Irene asked her daughter.

“Not gay. Just weird. Off. Like he still lives on this planet, it’s just that his is tilted the tiniest bit different from our own. Gay would be better, really,” Katy opined. “At least then you’d know what it was.”

“He always liked Ellie Bender, I remember that.”

“You can’t count Ellie Bender.” Saying this caused Katy to spray pretzel salt from the corners of her busy mouth. “That was just kid stuff. Not even real.”

“Of course it was real.” Irene put her fork down. “He loved her. I know what you’re saying, it wasn’t a grown-up kind of love. But it was real. You should have seen him that day, when he thought she’d been kidnapped.”

Katy snorted, barely recovering before the pretzel went down the wrong way. “Kidnapped, yeah right. You still don’t know what happened that day?” Katy took a long gulp of juice. Irene could feel puzzlement and danger tugging at her brow. “Brian was the one who found that kitten and like lured Ellie into the woods with it—he knew she would come. Then he told her to hide and not come out when the grownups called, because they’d both get in trouble.” Finally satisfied, Katy replaced the lid on the peanut butter. “I can’t believe you don’t know this, Mom.” Unlike herself, she hesitated before going ahead.

She had not correctly gauged the nature and level of her mother’s response to this statement, though it had been a long time since she had miscalculated by so much. In the moment after she spoke, Katy herself flinched, as if to do so could mitigate her mother’s pain. She rarely showed this much attention to what somebody else felt, so the foreignness of the impulse made her need to sit down.

Irene, too, lost a beat, and she took a step backward. Regaining her breath and balance, she looked at her daughter with a measure of hatred she could recall feeling, previously, only for people who’d ever threatened her children in some overt or implicit way. And Katy felt it; she would always remember this as the moment of her own growing-up, the separation of herself from the illusion of a mother who would love her no matter what.

“I don’t know how you could say something like that, so ridiculous,” Irene said. “Of course that’s not what happened. Did he tell you that? He’s just trying to get you on his side.” Even as the words emerged, she knew they made no sense. Get Katy on his side in what? How would telling a made-up story contribute toward that end?

And when and how did it happen, that they weren’t all on the same side?

Katy saw that she didn’t have to say what she would have said—that her mother seemed about to go postal. It was the favorite new expression at the school. She continued the story. “Brian caught the kitten and showed it to Ellie and made her go with him into the woods.” She paused and pursed her lips to indicate that Irene might not want to hear what was to follow.

“Are you going to tell me they played doctor or something?” Irene felt her stomach girding, muscles clenching to fend off an attack. “Every kid does that. You did it with Jeff Calderwood. Remember?”

“It wasn’t doctor,” Katy said.

“Yes, it was. Jeff’s mother called me.”

“I mean with Brian.” Irene had never seen her daughter’s eyes flashing so dark. “It was the kitten. He dug a hole and he put the cat in it with Ellie watching, feet first. The cat of course was trying to get out and it scratched him up his arm—don’t you remember how he came out of the woods all bleeding and stuff?”

Something crinkled in Irene’s brain—the physical equivalent of when all the lights in the house dim and surge again at the same time. Then the power stayed on and she forgot the flicker.

“But he wouldn’t let it. He filled in that hole with only the cat’s head sticking out, and he made Ellie promise not to tell.” Katy paused to take an especially deep breath, as if relating all of this to her mother exhausted her and she needed to catch up. “She did, though. Not right away. But eventually, everybody found out.”

“This is ridiculous,” Irene said. And yet. And yet. With a silent gasp of clarity she saw her son’s arm dotted with Flintstone Band-Aids, which was all she could find, in the glove compartment, the day the playground was built. Brian was embarrassed and tried to refuse, but Irene prevailed, and it was she who covered all the scratches, which Brian said he’d gotten from thorns while looking for Ellie when she disappeared in the woods. Now that Irene thought about it, she remembered that the scratches and the Band-Aids came before Stew and Laura Bender raised their alarm. It hadn’t made sense to Irene at the time, and she forgot about it instantly upon realizing that it didn’t make sense.

That moment—the one just before forgetting—was the one she found herself in now. Even Katy could tell how hard it hit her. “Sorry, Mom,” she said. “But maybe this was a good thing—the fire. Maybe now he can get some help.”

The therapist’s name was Samuel Tassarotti. Irene didn’t like him, because he was always on Brian’s side. Again with the sides, she thought, driving home one day, but it really did seem that way. She and Joe were the bad guys. Somehow, the reason for their son’s being an arsonist lay with them. Sam liked Brian and Katy, and Irene found herself hoping that he would at least give her some credit for that. Did he think it was easy to raise likable teenagers? Or maybe he was so good at what he did that his own kids were paragons of the breed—scholarship winners and Mathletics champions all in one. He reminded her of the therapist in that movie, Ordinary People—the one played by Judd Hirsch. They were both therapists in sweaters. The homely and comforting look, she supposed, but it made Irene wonder how professional they could be.

In the family sessions, Irene kept encouraging Sam to surmise that it might be possible for physiology to be responsible for the fire. The headaches, she kept saying, and though she knew it was silly she couldn’t help pointing at Brian’s head as he sat in the chair next to hers. He just wasn’t in his right mind, because the pain is so bad.

But Sam Tassarotti thought it was the other way around. He believed Brian’s headaches were the result of internal stress.

“What kind of internal stress does a six-year-old have?” Joe demanded. “That’s how old he was when they started.” Irene knew her husband didn’t like Sam, either, though neither of them had admitted this to the other. She could tell by the way Joe kept pressing his glasses up on his nose, jamming them against his forehead. What he really wanted to be pushing was the therapist, Irene saw.

Sam said, “You’d be amazed at how early kids can catch on to things. Especially if they’re sensitive, like Brian.” Sensitive—that word again.

“What’s there to catch on to?” After he spoke, Joe’s breath came out of his nose in a form of fuming. “What are you saying? That there was something in the family that he felt nervous about?

“Because let me tell you, Sammy boy, you’re shooting blanks up the wrong tree with that theory.” He reached for a Kleenex and blew his nose fiercely as Irene laughed. “You think my blowing my nose is funny?” Joe said, and Irene said, “No. But ‘shooting blanks up the wrong tree’ is. You’re mixing your metaphors.”

Joe looked as if he might want to shove her in a sack and toss her out the window. “Well, excuse me for not going to college and learning something useful, like metaphors.”

“There were things. Are things,” Katy said. She hardly ever spoke at these meetings, and she seemed almost surprised that she had said something now. She didn’t look at either of her parents, or at Brian, as she continued. “There’s always the question of whether Dad’s going to be home for dinner or not. How many places to set at the table. If we put down four plates and he doesn’t come home, you get mad, Mom, because the extra plate reminds you he isn’t there. If we put down three and he does come home, he gets mad that nobody set a place for him. Stuff like that happens all the time.

“See, we have these jobs,” Katy went on to explain to the therapist. “You know, chores, which is fine. Believe me, I have friends who don’t have to do anything for their allowance, and they’re total princesses.

“Now it’s more like mow the lawn and take the recycling out, stuff like that. But when we were little, setting the table was one of Bri’s and my jobs, and you just wouldn’t believe the tension that went into it every night.

“When it was my turn to set,” she continued, looking at her lap as if it contained a screen showing her the memory, “I’d start worrying about it at two o’clock, in the line for the bus going home.”

Irene said, “I just wish he would call, that’s all. If he doesn’t call, it’s like he doesn’t remember that I exist.” She didn’t seem up to addressing her husband directly.

“Do you people have any idea what’s going on in the world?” Joe’s voice actually contained contempt for his children. “Ever hear of Serbia and a thing called the war? Not to mention global warming and the hole in the ozone. And you’re going to sit there and tell me you get nervous about plates?”

“Yes,” Katy said. She sat up straighter in her chair and leaned toward her father. “Yes, that’s what I’m telling you.” She let the heel of her sneakers kick rhythmically at the bottom of her chair.

“Why is it that sometimes you’re not home for dinner, Joe?” Sam asked. He kept his own voice neutral, matching his beige cardigan.

“Because I have to work late. I realize that selling computer systems probably doesn’t impress you very much, Sam, because it’s all about machines, instead of getting in touch with our feelings. But you know what? It’s a pretty damn good living.” Joe paused to let this linger for all of them, not only Sam. “You think there’s no stress involved in my game? But you don’t see me setting fires at playgrounds because of it.”

They all looked at Brian when Joe said this. He just shrugged and raised his eyebrows as if to show that he thought his father had a point.

“Brian,” Sam said, and Irene felt her stomach relax a fraction, because the focus was off her. “What happened just before you set the fire? What were you thinking about?”

Irene was sure Brian would not answer the question, so she was surprised when her son spoke as if he had given the subject some thought. “It’s like I get these pictures in my head of things that could happen. Things I could actually do, but that I shouldn’t. That no one should, because they’re so bad. The headaches are worse, then.”

See, Irene wanted to say to the therapist, but Sam sent her a warning look.

Katy asked, “Is that what happened with the kitten?”

Irene was afraid Brian would take offense at this because it had never come up in a family session, but when he just sat there and reflected upon Katy’s question, she realized that Sam Tassarotti already knew about the day Ellie Bender went into the woods.

“It is kind of the same,” Brian said, and Irene noted that he spoke in a detached manner, as if he were talking with curiosity about someone else’s motives and mind. “The pictures in the head part. And then I do the things, in the pictures, to show myself that it isn’t as bad as what I was thinking. But it is. It is that bad. It’s not like I get any relief from it, or anything.” He leaned over in his seat, clapping the heels of his hands against his eyes. “So why do I do it? Why don’t I know better by now?”

“Because you keep hoping it will be different next time.” Sam had leaned forward, too, so that he and Brian were almost touching while the rest of the family sat in an excluded circle around them. “Ever hear of Alcoholics Anonymous? That’s their definition of insanity—doing the same behavior, over and over, each time expecting a different result.”

“My son is not insane,” Joe said, standing, and after a second Irene realized that she should stand, too. Their children remained seated, still not looking at their parents. “But I think maybe you are, Sammy. You’re insane if you think I’m going to listen to any more of this horseshit from some guy in a sweater who charges a hundred and sixty bucks an hour. Not to mention what you get from all the other sucker patients you must see in here every day. Couldn’t you go out and buy yourself a decent suit?”

Irene’s breath had stopped in her chest, but in the next moment she let it out. “I could, of course,” Sam Tassarotti said, “but I prefer not to.”

Brian laughed and they all looked at him. “‘I prefer not to,’” he said, by way of explanation, and when that didn’t help any of them he said, “It’s from ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener.’ It’s a story by Herman Melville. We did it in English this year.”

“You see that?” Irene asked Sam. “He’s in AP English and AP History. That means Advanced Placement, and he can get credit for college when he’s only in high school.”

“I know what AP means,” Sam said quietly.

“This guy just keeps saying he prefers not to do anything. I mean, everything they ask him to do, he says he prefers not to. It’s hilarious.” Brian was cracking himself up, and he and Sam seemed to be the only ones not alarmed by this.

“It doesn’t sound hilarious,” Joe said. “It sounds stupider than hell to me.”

Sam said, “I think we’re getting off track here.”

“That’s the most brilliant observation you’ve made today.” Joe picked up his coat from the sofa arm; he had declined to leave it on the waiting-room tree rack, with the rest of theirs, because he didn’t trust that some lunatic wouldn’t run off with it.

“Why don’t you sit down, Mr. Ludwig.” Sam spoke so softly that Joe had to lean in to hear him, and Irene saw that this was what the therapist intended. “There are only a few minutes left, anyway.” He turned to Brian, and behind him, Joe set the coat back down. Katy and Irene still sat in their chairs, each looking at some spot on the table in front of them. There was one of those gravity ball-knockers on the table—the kind where two silver balls take turns hitting each other in the opposite direction—and for a moment Irene was tempted to start it going, but she couldn’t remember if the point of it was that it would, once activated, never stop. Then she thought maybe—from a lecture at the museum, when she was chaperoning a field trip?—that friction would eventually cease the movement of the balls. But she couldn’t remember, and she wondered why Sam had this toy on his table. Or was it even a toy?

“Are there any feelings attached, when you’ve done these things, Brian?” Sam Tassarotti asked. He dropped his voice further. “Any anger?”

Brian shook his head. “No,” he added, for emphasis.

“Not any anger at all? That’s unusual.”

Brian shrugged. “So I’m unusual. So what?”

“Are you angry at me, right now?”

“No.”

“Who are you angry at?”

“Nobody.” He barely whispered the word, and in it they could all hear what Sam Tassarotti had been hunting for. They could all hear it, except Brian. “Can I go now?” he asked, and Sam nodded. Brian stood up and slunk toward the door, which even Irene wished he would slam behind him, because it was so painful to witness such unexpressed rage.

The rest of them got up to leave, too. “I’ll be in touch with my recommendation,” Sam Tassarotti told them. “I think I can help him, but it’ll be tough on all of you, not just Brian.”

“Great,” Katy said, flipping her hair out of her sweatshirt hood. “Just what I was hoping for, when I got to high school—a brother who could go postal at any time.”

That appointment (the juvenile court judge had ordered eight sessions before the therapist would make a recommendation to the court about how to proceed with Brian’s case) took place on the Thursday before Halloween. For weeks, since before the fire, Irene had been collecting applications for the colleges Brian had ever mentioned, or for which she thought he might be a suitable match. She laid them out on the dining room table in color-coded folders—red for the long shots, blue for the could-go-either-ways, yellow for safeties. Primary colors. She was proud of herself.

As she was putting the remaining, empty folders into a manila envelope she labeled Katy/College—the phone rang. Sam Tassarotti did not engage her in the customary how-are-you chitchat, and she wondered if he was like this, plunging straight to the point, in his personal calls or whether it was just his way with clients (the word she preferred to “patients”). “I’m glad you answered instead of one of the kids,” Sam told her. Irene sat down at the kitchen table and began picking at the fringes of one of the placemats. “I’m going to recommend probation for Brian,” Sam said, “provided he continues therapy, and I think he needs twice a week. I don’t have room in my schedule myself—I think I told you that I do a lot of these evaluations over the short term, then recommend patients out. But I can give you the name of this great guy over in Ravena. He specializes in this sort of thing.”

“What sort of thing?” Irene realized it was probably a stupid question, but she told herself, No, he’s not being specific, I have a right to ask.

“Firesetters,” Sam said, and the blunt speed of his answer made her cringe.

“Juvenile arsonists. It’s more common than I’m sure you’d guess. That’s the good news—there are programs to address this particular criminal behavior.”

“My son isn’t a criminal,” Irene said, as the fringe came off in her fingers.

Sam Tassarotti cleared his throat. “He set fire to a playground,” he reminded her. “How did he know there wasn’t some child asleep in there somewhere? It’s happened before. We find them, not a lot, but it’s happened—kids who live in the neighborhood, and they wander out of their yards, and their parents call us and we find them sleeping up in that little clubhouse above the slides. That used to be above the slides.” He paused and for a moment Irene prayed something had interfered with their connection. But then he spoke again. “Then it’d be manslaughter, and you’d be looking at a whole different ball of wax.”

“But it isn’t,” Irene said. In her head, the word became Mans laughter. “It’s just a fire set by a teenager who didn’t know what he was doing. They must make some allowance for that.”

“They do.” On the other end of the line, Sam held his hand over the mouthpiece, but Irene could still hear him speak to someone in a tone that indicated he was calling from home instead of his office. She pictured him in a kitchen, wearing his sweater, microwaving leftover coffee in a mug that said World’s Greatest Dad, or more likely, something like Pfizer Pharmaceuticals. “That’s why Brian’s not in jail, and that’s also where I come in. The court listens to me—that’s why they pay me the big bucks.” He made a wry sound resembling laughter. “I’m going to give you a couple of names and numbers, and you can set up some appointments for Brian and figure out which is the best fit. Brian’ll be on probation for six months, at the end of which I talk to the therapist he’s been seeing, we all meet, and I make a report to the judge. As long as he stays out of trouble during that time, his record will be clean. Got a pencil?”

Irene said, “But is this really necessary? I understand that he did a wrong thing. I get that. But I don’t really see why he needs to go to a therapist. What’s he going to talk about, all that time?”

Sam said, “Well, of course I don’t know what the details would be. But—and I understand this is hard, Mrs. Ludwig—we already know about the fire and the kitten episodes, between then and now. This type of thing is usually a progression, and takes place over time. That’s what someone can help him with. Got a pencil?”

She took down the names and phone numbers, thanked him, and hung up. In the next room the dryer was humming, and then it buzzed. She sat at the table until it buzzed again, at which time she got up to take the clothes out, and she folded them.

When she’d put all the piles in the appropriate bedrooms, she went back to the kitchen and got out the yellow pages, sat down at the table with the phone, and started dialing. By five-thirty, she had a pad filled with figures and notes. Katy was the first one home. She’d had soccer practice, and her ponytail hung sweatily down the back of her green jersey. “What’re you doing?” she asked her mother, but Irene shook her head and gave a smile she had not exercised since the children were little and could be sent into paroxysms by the prospect of a trip to the Tastee Freeze.

“You have to wait ‘til Daddy gets here,” she said.

“What about Bri?”

“Go get him, will you? He’ll want to hear this.”

By the time Brian and Katy came to the kitchen, Joe was home. He asked if he could change into his sweats before hearing whatever it was Irene had to tell them, but she said It’ll only take a minute, just sit down. They took their usual places at the table.

Before she could say anything, Brian asked, “Did that guy Sam call? The therapist?” The three of them were looking at her, trying hard—all three of them, she could see—not to care about her answer, or at least to appear as if they didn’t.

“No,” she said, “but it’s only Thursday, and Halloween’s coming.”

Katy said, “What the hell does that have to do with anything?”

“Language, missy,” Joe said, but Irene could tell he agreed with Katy’s question.

“I just thought maybe he has little kids, and he’d be helping with costumes or something.” Irene was doing what she had heard Katy refer to, on the phone with her friends, as pulling excuses out of her ass. She hated the expression, of course, but it seemed apt; she’d had no idea what she was going to say, before she said it. And no idea where it would come from, when it did.

Brian said, “He didn’t call? He said he was going to,” and Irene summoned her highest, most protective courage to reiterate that No, she had not heard anything from Samuel Tassarotti since the last family session they’d had.

They all knew better, but none of them said so. “What’s the big announcement, then?” Katy asked.

“Well—” Irene tried to pull off the smile she’d been imagining on her own face all afternoon. “You remember how we used to talk about putting in a pool?”

“That was like ten years ago,” Katy answered. “When I was in nursery school.”

“I don’t remember that.” Brian’s face showed a look of confusion, and Irene believed that he was telling the truth. If Katy hadn’t just confirmed it, she might have wondered if she had recalled correctly herself. But her daughter’s certainty spurred her forward.

“Remember, you wanted one of those winding slides?” she said to her son. “You used to talk about celebrating your half-birthday, in the summer, so you could have pool parties instead of being stuck inside in December. You don’t remember that?”

But Brian had gone blank, and Irene, feeling the blood rush to her stomach, put more expression into her own face and voice to compensate. “We just couldn’t afford it before now. But Daddy’s been doing well, like he was telling us the other day, and I called around and got some estimates, and—well, Katy, remember Hannah Craigie, from your first soccer team? Her brother puts in pools for a living. He’s coming over tomorrow to make sure it would all work, with the grading of the land, but he says he’s seen our yard and everything should be fine.”

Her family was staring at her. Then Katy started to laugh. Joe said to Irene, “Are you insane?” and Katy, through her hysterical-sounding mirth, said, “Postal is more like it. Try postal, Dad.” Only Brian remained silent, and his eyes when they looked at Irene held neither mockery nor fear.

“A pool’d be nice,” he said, and the quietness of his voice calmed the rest of them down.

“But it’s about to be winter,” Katy told her brother. “Not to mention we’re not kids anymore.”

“Not to mention,” Joe added, “that a pool isn’t exactly the most important thing going on in our lives right now.”

“I was thinking it would be so nice, in the summertime,” Irene said. “Of course I know it wouldn’t happen right away—I’m not an idiot, Katy. But just imagine it’s one of those perfect sunny days with absolutely no wind, and in the backyard we have this beautiful pool with blue water, and the sun bouncing off it in sparkles. It would be like Hawaii, or that time we went to Florida for school vacation. Remember, watching The Weather Channel in the hotel? If we’d stayed here, we would have been freezing and shoveling out our cars, and instead we got to lie by the pool and relax the whole time. By the time we got home, everything had melted.”

“Pools are a pain in the ass,” Katy said. “They look good on TV, but somebody has to be skimming crap off the top all the time. And I’m telling you right now, I’m not going to be doing that.”

“I’ll skim,” Brian said. He was pulling fringe off a placemat identical to the one Irene had mutilated an hour ago. “That could be my job.”