Mislaid & The Wallcreeper: The Nell Zink Collection. Nell Zink

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СКАЧАТЬ and gave it to Byrdie. “Carry this in your pocket, and if she shows up out of the blue, just give it to her.”

      Byrdie put it in the inside pocket of his blazer and said, “I thought you knew where she was. I thought you were waiting for me to be old enough, and maybe today’s the day you were going to tell me.”

      “Oh, Byrdie,” Lee said, shaking his head. “I wouldn’t hide that from you. I wish I had something left to hide.”

      “Remember Antietam?”

      “Sure,” Lee said hesitantly. “A lot of good men died—”

      “No, I mean when I drove the car.” Byrdie had been allowed to guide Cary’s Maserati through the narrow right-angle curves of the battlefield memorial during an otherwise forgettable excursion to the Inn at Little Washington because it had an automatic transmission. “That was the best day of my life. What I mean is, I know you’re weird and everything, but the real problem is you don’t care about normal stuff and you don’t have any money. Dad, I’m in school now. I need decent golf clubs.”

      Lee sighed. “Byrdie, you’re not thinking straight. Who do you know who has decent golf clubs?”

      “Grandpa.”

      “So tell me, is he going to invest in duplicates of things he already owns?”

      “No.”

      “But would he buy himself something better and give you his castoffs?” Lee shifted to the Tidewater-plantation-owner accent, a lilting drawl carefully cultivated in certain circles and said to be unaltered in its abject Anglophilia since 1609: “Grandfather, I was wondering, have you seen those new golf clubs, made of rare Siamese elephant parts? Coach claims they’re unsportsmanlike, for the other teams, if we’re the ones to have them.”

      Byrdie interrupted, “Yeah, yeah, I get it. But it’s not going to work. It’s not like he ever gave you anything!”

      “I want stuff he’s only giving away over his dead body. I’m Sherman and the Grand Army, and you’re the little match girl. Golf clubs, what a fucking joke.” Byrdie laughed, not sure why. Lee stooped down and enfolded him in his arms. “Byrdie, I love you desperately. I want you to have more than I have. Meaning more than the shit nobody else wants.”

      “I love you, too. But don’t touch me. There’s people watching.”

      Meg all but knew for sure that Byrdie was at Woodberry. She thought of driving there to see him, then imagined the look on his face. Would he be happy to see her? Probably not. More likely enraged. Or just distant. It had been a long time, especially for a kid.

      She drafted long letters and tore them up. You don’t burden a teenage boy with your guilt. Especially not when you really are at fault. She had abandoned him. He had been nine—long past the cuddly stage—but it was entirely possible that he missed her. Maybe he cried for her at night when he was sad. She suspected he was much too cool for that, and that Lee would be giving her bad press.

      The same ambivalence about consequences kept her from coming clean to Karen. Hiding Karen from her father: It might not solve any problems she currently had. But once upon a time it had solved a problem, and now it prevailed by force of habit.

      Hiding Lee from his daughter was different. It solved a future problem: the problem she would have if she stopped hiding him. Karen was not going to be happy. She might be happy to hear that her father was alive and well. But she would not be happy with Meg.

      Here a person might ask: Was Meg self-centered or what?

      Meg was self-centered.

      Early life spent fighting for chances to be herself, planning the cockeyed social suicide of manhood in the army; weeks of unrequited lesbianism; willing submission to a teacher who ran circles around her socially, intellectually, emotionally; marriage to him. For comic relief, visiting poets and two introverted kids. Would any sane person expect a life like that to result in a warm, affectionate personality? Meg was a shallow smartass brimming with fierce, self-sacrificing maternal feelings, saddled with a passion to be loved that no one had seen but Lee. She knew she was ridiculous. That’s why she expressed her love for Karen through irony.

      And that irony of ironies, her lifelong poverty. From the poverty of a rich kid with an allowance designed to teach the virtue of thrift, to the poverty of a poet’s wife feeding houseguests on a budget, to genuine poverty, to faking poverty for the DEA. Too late she noticed that bringing Karen up poor wasn’t ironic. It was poverty.

      Once you’ve lied to your child for years, it gets hard to find reasons to tell the truth. Karen’s reaction to the truth would be to throw herself into Lee’s arms. When he found out Meg had raised Karen black, he was likely to revisit his plan of commending her to psychiatric care.

      Because people never grow accustomed to lies. They either believe them or they don’t. And a big lie is never forgiven. The person who told the lie stops existing, and in his place stands a paradox: the truthful liar. The person you know for sure would lie to you, because he’s done it before and confessed. You never, ever believe that person again.

      The lie Meg repeated to Karen every single day was a very big lie.

      Little children don’t remember the past, and they believe anything you tell them. So Karen didn’t know she had been done to. But Byrdie hadn’t been so little when Meg left. He had been nine. Old enough to have a worldview and draw his own conclusions.

      Meg was fenced in: On the one side, her lies to Karen. On the other, her crime against Byrdie.

      There was only one way she could hope to be loved by any child, ever: carry on. Byrdie would never trust her. But Karen might, if she was kept from the truth.

      Meg’s feelings for Byrdie were fierce and self-sacrificing. Feeling that he was at Woodberry made her unbearably nervous. September 1980 was a month spent on edge.

      The fierce desire to see him, the self-sacrificing willingness to avoid disrupting his life. In October she capitulated and did what any normal mother would have done: She bought a watch cap and sunglasses and stalked him on a weekday afternoon.

      And she found him. He was alone on the tennis courts, practicing a two-handed backhand against a ball machine.

      She sat down inside a boxwood shrubbery—it was old, with a capacious interior—to watch. Feeling the smooth curvature of something artificial under her ass, she noticed that this particular hedge was a repository of many empty liquor bottles. It was dark in the shade of the bushes with sunglasses on. She stroked the dirt to check for broken glass and sat down again. She watched Byrdie practice.

      He stopped, startling her. But he didn’t leave the court, or even look her way. He gathered the balls in a basket and dumped them back in the machine.

      He was only fourteen, but almost as tall as Lee. He looked a lot like Lee, but with Meg’s suntan and brown hair. He could not have looked any healthier. He didn’t look happy, exactly, but he was working on nailing a two-handed backhand.

      Meg felt her heart constrict. There was so much she wanted to say to him. Things any normal mother would say, like that a one-handed backhand is more versatile. She was flooded by overwhelming emotions, which she immediately repressed, and the upshot was small, narrow emotions, tightly squeezed.

      She realized she had better get СКАЧАТЬ