dating my mom.”
Keller cocked his head. “So you knocked over my trash can, in preparation for asking me to give you money for a bike?”
“My dad said you were a sleazebag who was dating Mom. You and Mom went to Boston.”
Keller had been called many things. Many, many things. But sleazebag had not been among them. It was unexpected, but it stopped just short of amusing him. “And if I
“I never thought you’d lend me money,” Brad mumbled. His thumb was at his mouth again. “I didn’t . . . why would I think you’d give me that kind of money, just because you bought twelve bucks’ worth of raffle tickets?”
“I’m not following the logic here,” Keller said. “If I’m the enemy, why, exactly, did you come to see me?”
“Because I didn’t know. I don’t know what my father’s getting at half the time. My dad’s a major nutcase, in case you don’t know that. Somebody ought to round him up in one of his burlap bags and let him loose far away from here so he can go live with his precious turkeys.”
“I can understand your frustration,” Keller said. “I’m afraid that with all the world’s problems, setting turkeys free doesn’t seem an important priority to me.”
“Why? Because you had a dad that was a nutcase?”
“I’m not understanding,” Keller said.
“You said you understood the way I feel. Is it because you had a dad that was nuts, too?”
Keller thought about it. In retrospect, it was clear that his father’s withdrawal, the year preceding his death, had been because of depression, not old age. He said, “He was quite a nice man. Hardworking. Religious. Very generous, even though he didn’t have much money. He and my mother had a happy marriage.” To his surprise, that sounded right: for years, in revising his father’s history, he had assumed that everything had been a facade, but now that he, himself, was older, he tended to think that people’s unhappiness was rarely caused by anyone else, or alleviated by anyone else.
“I came here and threw over your trash and ripped up a bush you just planted,” Brad said.
The boy was full of surprises.
“I’ll replant it,” Brad said. He seemed, suddenly, to be on the verge of tears. “The bush by the side of the house,” he said tremulously. “There was new dirt around it.”
Indeed. Just the bush Keller thought. On a recent morning, after a rain, he had dug up the azalea and replanted it where it would get more sun. It was the first thing he could remember moving in years. He did almost nothing in the yard—had not worked in it, really, since Sue Anne left.
“Yes, I think you’ll need to do that,” he said.
“What if I don’t?” the boy said shrilly. His voice had changed entirely.
Keller frowned, taken aback at the sudden turnaround.
“What if I do like I came to do?” the boy said.
Suddenly there was a gun pointed at Keller. A pistol. Pointed right at him, in his living room. And, as suddenly, he was flying through the air before his mind even named the object. It went off as he tackled the boy, wresting the gun from his hand. “You’re both fucking nutcases, and you were, too, dating that bitch!” Brad screamed. In that way, because of so much screaming, Keller knew that he had not killed the boy.
The bullet had passed through Keller’s forearm. A “clean wound,” as the doctor in the emergency room would later say, his expression betraying no awareness of the irony inherent in such a description. With an amazing surge of strength, Keller had pinned the boy to the rug with his good arm as the other bled onto the doughnut bag, and then the struggle was over and Keller did not know what to do. It had seemed they might stay that way forever, with him pinning the boy down, one or the other of them—both of them?—screaming. He somehow used his wounded arm as well as his good arm to pull Brad up and clench him to his side as he dragged the suddenly deadweight, sobbing boy to the telephone and dialed 911. Later, he would learn that he had broken two of the boy’s ribs, and that the bullet had missed hitting the bone in his own forearm by fractions of an inch, though the wound required half a dozen surprisingly painful sutures to close.
Keller awaited Sigrid’s arrival in the emergency room with dread. His world had already been stood on its head long ago, and he’d developed some fancy acrobatics to stay upright, but Sigrid was just a beginner. He remembered that he had thought about going to her house that very night. It might have been the night he stayed. Everything might have been very different, but it was not. And this thought: If his wife held him accountable for misjudging the importance of their daughter’s blemishes, might Sigrid think that, somehow, the violent way things had turned out had been his fault? Among the many things he had been called had been provocative. It was his daughter’s favorite word for him. She no longer even tried to find original words to express his shortcomings: he was
In the brightly lit room, they insisted he remain on a gurney. Fluid from a bag was dripping into his arm. Sigrid—there was Sigrid!—wept and wept. Her lawyer accompanied her: a young man with bright blue eyes and a brow too wrinkled for his years, who seemed too rattled to be in charge of anything. Did he hover the way he did because he was kind, or was there a little something more between him and Sigrid? Keller’s not having got involved with Sigrid hadn’t spared her any pain, he saw. Once again, he had been instrumental in a woman’s abject misery.
Trauma was a strange thing, because you could be unaware of its presence, like diseased cells lurking in your body (a natural enough thought in a hospital) or like bulbs that would break the soil’s surface only when stirred in their depths by the penetrating warmth of the sun.
Keller remembered the sun—no, the moon—of Lynn’s cradle. The cradle meant to hold three babies that held only one. He had suggested that Sue Anne, depressed after the birth, return to school, get her degree in art history, teach. He had had a notion of her having colleagues. Friends. Because he was not a very good friend to have. Oh,
