That night Brendan woke himself up with a scream.
He looked around his bedroom. Everything was still. The green digital readout on his clock radio said 3:17.
He had had that dream again. The one with the blue elephants. They were circling him. Taunting him. Insane-looking creatures with wide grins and big floppy trunks and all the grabbing arms. Like the demon pachyderms in Disney’s
One of them came over to him and bent down.
That’s when Brendan woke up.
His shirt was damp with perspiration. His bed was a mess from kicking around.
He went to the toilet and peed in the bowl.
He flushed the toilet. In the dim light from the street he looked in the mirror.
“I can’t,” he whispered.
Brendan lit a cigarette and went to the window. He looked across the front yard, the dark street, the field of scrub and landfill on the other side. A fat white moon had risen above the horizon and whitewashed the scene.
The Matthew Arnold lines jetted up from nowhere, as usual.
He thought about Richard in wheezy sleep in the next room. He wondered how many nights the old man had. He wondered what would happen if he didn’t wake up the next morning—if Brendan went in there and found him cold and blue. He wondered if he went in there and did something about it.
Would he be horrified? Would he cry?
He thought about Nicole. He wondered what nightmares she dreamed. He wondered if she cried.
He raised his eyes and let the white light flood his mind.
A huge crystalline moon sat in the sky over Rachel and Martin like a piece of jewelry.
“There’s something I want to tell you,” she said.
“I hope it’s how madly in love you are with me, and that you’re finally over your PMS, which I thought was surely terminal.”
He was making light of the moment, but she really couldn’t blame him. They were sitting on the balcony of the Blue Heron overlooking Magnolia Harbor. The reflection of the moon made a rippling carpet all the way out to the horizon. Above was a cloudless black velvet vault dappled with stars. They had just eaten a sumptuous meal —Martin, the
“Martin, I think we should talk.”
“Uh-oh. Is this the big thorn you’ve been sitting on for the last month?”
“It’s a problem I have … we have.”
Martin’s face hardened. “Rachel, if you’re going to tell me that you’ve found somebody else, I’m not sure I can take it.”
“It’s nothing like that.”
“And you’re not sick.”
“No.”
Martin nodded, as if to say that the high horribles had been eliminated. “Okay, hit me.”
“It’s Dylan.”
“What about him?”
“He has brain damage, and it’s because in college I took some dope, something called TNT, which some guy I know made in a chemistry lab. In any case, I read a report saying the stuff damaged female reproductive cells, resulting in chromosomal defects of their children. I had him tested, and the left hemisphere of Dylan’s brain is underdeveloped, and it probably was caused by the TNT.” Rachel was amazed at her glibness. That was totally unexpected.
She couldn’t tell if it was the flickering light from the small glass kerosene lantern that sat between them, but Martin’s face seemed to shift several times as he struggled to process her words.
“You’re telling me that my son has brain damage because you took a lot of bad dope?” His voice was a strange hissy whisper.
“Yes. His IQ is eighty-three, which is the low side of average.” Again, she could not believe the smoothness of her confession—but, of course, she had rehearsed it so many times over the last several days that she had managed to strip the words down to their phonetic bones.
“Eighty-three. EIGHTY-THREE. My son is going to grow up dumb because you took some sex drug?”
“Martin, you’re shouting.”
“I don’t care,” he said. “I read about that TNT shit. It was for sex thrills. SEX THRILLS.”
The people at other tables were glaring at them in astonishment.
“You goddamn idiot! You ruined my son. You ruined my only
“Martin, keep your voice down.”
