The Underneath Read online

  Somewhere, Ben reckoned, the Department for Children and Families must have a folder on him, a faded green folder such as this, with a label on the side, Benjamin L. Comeau. And inside, a photograph of his blank child’s face, his shuttered eyes, the clear skin of his seven-year-old self. There would be the story of Benben, their version, succinct, factual, reports from doctors and shrinks, foster parents, schools, assessments from a dozen caring women like Lacey. He’d really been no trouble, he’d adjusted, a bright boy, scholarship material. He wondered if Lacey had already found the file, read it; if it would somehow count for him or against him in his bid for guardianship of Jake. He was in the system, once and always, its ward, its product.

  Lacey regarded Shevaunne. “You’re aware that you missed your last drug test.”

  “I had the wrong day, I, ah, I wrote it down wrong. It was my fault, yeah,” Shevaunne nodded, licked her lips.

  “And your P.O., Officer Feldman, wasn’t able to find you at the address listed here in Concord.”

  “I moved in with Ben. Ben, here. In April. May? Was it May, Ben? And I meant to tell Feldman. It’s just been, you know, I’m staying out of town, Ben lives out in Lost Nation. I’m out there so I can stay clean.” She began to jiggle her left foot.

  “And will today’s test be clean?”

  Shevaunne glanced at Ben, he did not reciprocate. “Yeah, I’m clean.” Then she bit her lip. “But I had a little toke and a beer.”

  “As long as it was ‘little.’ But it shouldn’t happen again.” Lacey flipped to another page. “And where is Jake at the moment?”

  Shevaunne’s drifting gaze suggested he could be anywhere, in the car by himself, under a bed.

  Ben leaned in. “He’s at the daycare. Little Feet.”

  “And he’s enrolled in school this fall?”

  “Yes,” said Ben.

  “Where?”

  “East Montrose.”

  Lacey nodded, returned her attention to Shevaunne. “He was supposed to start last year. You had him registered in Concord. Why didn’t he go?”

  Shevaunne looked at the floor. “I forgot.” A long moment passed, Lacey purposefully leaving the space. At last Shevaunne looked right at Lacey, “I know I’m a shit mother. And that’s why I’m here with Ben, so he can be Jake’s guardian. I mean—in case—” she gave a little laugh. She was very convincing, thought Ben. “We all know what’ll happen to me. Eventually.”

  “We don’t know that.”

  “I’ll stay clean and go back to school and get my GED, and what? Work in Dollar General? Sure.”

  “People do. People have jobs, they raise their children.”

  “People,” Shevaunne made a little noise, possibly a laugh. “Junkies are not people.”

  “To this office you are, to the legal system you are.”

  “That’s sweet.”

  “Nothing to do with sweetness.” Lacey shuffled more papers. “It says here ‘Father’s whereabouts unknown.’ Any ideas?”

  “Dead. Or jail be my guess.”

  “Do you have a name?”

  “Sure,” Shevaunne obliged, and Lacey dutifully picked up her pen. “Junkie Dickhead.”

  Lacey simply put the pen down, swung back to Ben. “And, Ben, anything going to come up in the background check?”

  “I’ve got bad credit, some legal stuff.”

  “What legal stuff?”

  “Fraud, trespass.”

  “Any convictions?”

  Ben shook his head. “Not yet.”

  “But pending?”

  “It’s on appeal.”

  “Can you give me the case details?”

  Ben shifted in his chair. “Guy called Paul Steiner. Didn’t like how I logged his land.”

  Lacey continued: “Otherwise, I see four years of military—Marines, right out of high school?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Honorable discharge. Right? And between then and now?”

  “Alaska, Colorado. Just worked whatever jobs. But I’m from here, guess I was always going to come back here.”

  “Your own business, the logging. And how’s that—aside from Mr. Steiner?”

  “Pays the bills. Mostly.”

  “Stable?”

  “For logging. For ’round here.”

  “Why do you want to be Jake’s guardian?”

  He wasn’t a relative, he wasn’t a family friend; he was a guy from Shevaunne’s sketchy life. A creep, a predator, potentially. He couldn’t, therefore, use words like “love.” On the other hand, Lacey was aware that he was Jake’s only real shot at staying out of the over-crowded foster system if Shevaunne fucked up. If. When.

  Ben said, “Just give him a home he can count on, regular meals, school. A quiet, safe place.” He raised his eyes to hers, just a moment, before dropping them again. “What I didn’t have.”

  Lacey fluttered her pretty hands over the folder, shutting it. “And you’re aware that Jake suffered trauma with a previous male in his life?”

  “I assumed. Something made it so he won’t talk.”

  “You should be aware of the severity of the incident.”

  Shevaunne stood up, moved to the window.

  “Jake was placed in foster care two years ago,” Lacey began. “Shevaunne lost custody for 18 months. He had been found wandering along the railway tracks, poorly nourished, covered in lice and bed bug bites.”

  There was more, Ben could tell.

  “Shevaunne?” Lacey glanced at Shevaunne, as if for permission. Shevaunne shrugged. So Lacey turned the file toward Ben, her pretty painted nail arrowing to a specific paragraph.

  Please don’t, he thought, please don’t let there be—

  Lacey’s manicured index finger arrowing to the words. Ben read. He read. He sat back in the chair.

  Lacey folded her pretty hands, moving on. “The guardianship hearing will probably take place in a few weeks. We have to go to court and make a clear case because Ben isn’t a relative. Until then, Shevaunne, you’ve got to see your P.O. and go to meetings and submit to your tests and those need to be clean. If we have to take Jake away before the hearing, it will endanger Ben’s bid for guardianship. You could lose your son for good this time. Is that clear?”

  “Yes,” Ben said.

  Shevaunne still had her eyes out the window and Lacey shut the file. “We have the home visit scheduled for two days’ time. Is that still convenient?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Outside, Shevaunne and Ben got in the truck.

  “I still don’t get it,” she said.

  Ben put the keys in the ignition. His hands were trembling; he did not want her to see.

  Shevaunne went on. “I keep trying to figure you out.”

  He finally found the slot, jammed the key in, the engine roared.

  “Like, come on, Ben. If you wanted to fuck me that would be one thing. Don’t ya wanna fuck me?” She glanced at him almost coyly, shifting her arms so her breasts squeezed upward.

  Suddenly, he lashed out, his hands at her throat, his thumbs pressing upward against her jaw. He felt her life, he felt the pulse, her neck thin as a chicken’s, the delicate bones, the pale blue veins of her. She tried to pry him away, but he held her until she gargled and fretted and little flecks of white spit gathered at the corners of her mouth. Then he let her go. “I would never fuck you. You make me sick.”

  “Be sick then,” she held his gaze. “But I need my bump.”

  17

  The spring peepers and their bright kettle whistle in the wetlands; a car on the mountain road—a drunk, maybe, taking the back way, the night way. Kay gazed out through the window above the kitchen sink as the dark moved in, soft as moss. Only the black silhouette of the hills retained relief against the star-lit sky; all else compressed into blackness. She took the hammer and butted the tap to turn it on.

  Alice had carefully placed the hammer there; she had shown Kay and Michael the force necessary to turn the old iron tap on and then off. �
�My Al’ll be up to fix it any day,” she’d promised. Did it mean something, this broken tap, in a house of scrupulous repair? This house of coded secrets.

  The water surged out warm on Kay’s hands, into the sink. A miracle fluid, miraculously made warm. She added the soap, frothed the bubbles. Other women had stood here, as she did now, a long line of women, a matriarchy, connecting back through this ritual of washing dishes, this solitary task.

  She imagined those other housewives—the many wives of this house—their feet right where hers were planted, their hands as hers, dipping and sponging, caressing the plates and cutlery. They were not all resentful. Some liked the peace, and others had only the expectation of such work, they were born to it. Maria? What about Maria? Poised here in front of the mixing bowls she’d used to make Candice’s fudge. Maria treating herself to a lick of the sweet batter. Maria, who said, “Frank, honey, you need to fix this sink.” He kept everything else fixed.

  The hammer lay there by the tap. Kay touched it. The hammer, the hammer. She turned it in her hand and put it down again. Marriage was like a hammer: you could build things with it or bludgeon each other to death. Marriage was like a hundred different things, but similes ultimately failed, because marriage was the air around the hammer, the air which held all words and deeds and feelings, breathed, thought, intended, everything unseen, everything existing and no longer existing, history, pre-history, dinosaurs, pond scum, star dust, the boundless, shifting, unavoidable, choking air of every single, merciless day. She had believed in the iron and steel of marriage, the substance, dense and defined, the bitterness, sourness of her sweat and words across the dinner table, the sunless steppe of their bed.

  But marriage did not exist as a weight and a shape, it was a wish thrown into a well.

  *

  She knelt before the cupboard but didn’t open it. She had a suspicion the writing wasn’t there, she’d imagined it, projected it.

  Slowly, then, she ran the nail file along the seams and popped the latch. The latch worked so fluidly, mounted by a careful, precise craftsman, the kind who kept tools in perfect order. The words were there, each expressing its own discrete menace.

  DIRTY SQUEAL SQUEAL

  DIRTY PIG SLIT YOU OPEN

  “Hello, Frank,” she whispered as she edged herself in, on her hands and knees, now pressing her eye to the hole in the wallboard. There was nothing to see, darkness thick as felt.

  “Mum?”

  She startled. Why hadn’t she heard him? The floor was a minefield of creaks, and somehow Tom had traversed it without a sound.

  “Mum, what are you doing?”

  Trying to block the writing with her body, she began to slither out.

  “Just thought there was a leak.”

  “Oh,” Tom said, believing her, because he believed grown-ups, he was five. “Can I see?”

  “It’s not very interesting, love. Just some pipes.”

  “But can I see?”

  Crawling out completely, she shut the door, replaced the laundry basket. “What are you doing up?”

  “I had to pee.”

  He shuffled forward, pulled down his pajama bottoms. She wondered at what point she wouldn’t stand in the room with him when he peed. And at what point she’d never see him naked again—that body she’d grown, birthed, bathed, wiped, caressed. She’d taught him how to urinate, how to clean his foreskin because Michael had been away. And yet it would be Michael who’d share his nakedness in years to come, man-to-man, peeing in the woods. Nothing prepares you for the retraction of intimacy, she thought. Just as nothing prepares you for the way it slams into you like a cast-iron skillet.

  “Mum,” he spoke over the steady tinkle. He was very serious. “Do octopuses pee?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “If they do, won’t it just float up and get in their eyes?”

  “They live in quite a lot of water, so maybe the pee would just disperse.”

  “What does disperse mean?”

  “Float away. Like if you pee in the pool, there’s such a little amount of pee and such a lot of water.”

  “Hamish says they put special stuff in the pool so if you pee the water turns blue and everyone can see.”

  “Grown-ups say that so kids won’t pee in the pool. But there’s no dye.”

  Tom turned, looked up at her. “Really?”

  “Grown-ups said the same thing to me when I was your age.”

  “When’s Dad coming back?”

  Because he was always there, even now, in the middle of the night, in the middle of a discussion about pee.

  “I don’t know, love. Maybe not until London.”

  “Can’t we stay here? I don’t want to go back.”

  She knelt. “It’s not always summer here and the winters are very long. It gets very, very cold.

  “We could have a fire.”

  She kissed him. “Off to bed. You need your sleep for camp.”

  His lean brown back, she watched, the shoulder blades protruding slightly, the dimples where the top of his buttocks tucked against the sacrum. He was miraculous.

  Now she heard his footsteps on the wooden floor, the creak of the old bed as he got back in. She felt a sudden rush of fear, as she used to when they were babies, asleep, and she’d convinced herself they weren’t breathing. For how soft a baby’s breath, how vulnerable the child in sleep. For other children had slept in those beds, those sheets. Where were they?

  Where, Frank? Kay thought, returning to that faint tremor in Nadine’s voice. The simple solution was to go to the police, express her concerns, and wipe her hands of it. But she wouldn’t—for the same reason she wouldn’t tell Michael: it was a story, she was possessive of it. She wanted to open the black garbage bag all by herself and see what was inside, right down inside.

  It was difficult to type holding her phone above her head and Kay wondered how Michael had managed for all those hours, tapping and whispering. What dedication. To whom? Barb? Barbara as Michael called her, exotic accent on the final syllable.

  After several awkward and unsuccessful configurations, she sat on the toilet’s tank, wedging the phone against the window. She glanced through her emails; there weren’t many aside from “Pearl Street” from Michael, possibly because she’d posted an automatic reply: We’re on vacation in a remote location with no phone or internet. It may take me a few days to respond.

  Scrolling on to Skype, she trawled through her contacts, Julian, Marco, Teddy, Gina, a dozen or so people she didn’t remember or didn’t remember friending or who’d been part of her past life. Teddy was recently married, a glamorous German countess, so he was off the list. Marco? It had been too long; she didn’t know if he was still single or even where he was. She’d heard vague rumors that he’d gone off the rails and was teaching history at an elementary school in the Hebrides. Gina. Was in Afghanistan for Reuters. But Sam, for instance, Sam, of course, available. She hit video dial, it rang twice, and there he was, un-ironed, un-shaven. They peered at each other.

  “Sam!”

  “Kay, darlin’.”

  “How are you, Sam?”

  “Better than not at all. And you?”

  “Good, yeah, well, we’re all well.”

  He squinted at her through the camera. “Where the hell are you?”

  “Vermont.”

  “Vermont?” he looked perplexed. “Don’t they make a lot of cheese there?”

  “Ha. We rented a house for the summer.”

  “I can only see white tile. Are you sure you’re not in an asylum of some kind?”

  “The bathroom. I’m in the bathroom. It’s the only place I can get reception.”

  “You look great.”

  “It’s the high pixilation. I’ve only got one bar of reception.”

  He pushed his forelock back, appraised himself in his own image. “I look like shit.”

  “Shit from a goat’s ass.”

  “With diarrhea.”

  “And a weeping S
TD.”

  They laughed, it was so easy.

  “Tell me about Vermont.”

  “The kids love it. I’m writing.”

  “Good. That’s good, isn’t it?”

  She might imagine she was there with him, sitting in a coffee shop in London or Addis, their coats slung over the back of their chairs, half-eaten pastries on the table. How it had been for years. They were always half-flung from the broken world into the civilized one, the dust still on their shoes. She peered in at him.

  “Where are you?” she said, instead of answering his question.

  “Ali’s.”

  “Christ, Ali’s! I can’t believe it’s still there. How is Ali?”

  “Bitter, cantankerous.”

  “And what’s the story?”

  “South Sudan.”

  “Ah.”

  “Ah, indeed,” said Sam. “Aahhhhh. As in, ‘Open wide, this won’t hurt.’”

  “At least it’s still considered a story.”

  “They put Kanye West on the cover and me on page 36.” Sam shifted in the light of Ali’s Carpets and Internet and Kay could suddenly see his age. They’d been babies when they’d met, mid-20s, young, thrusting journalists, they strode across the continent. Sam’s face was lined, now, bags beneath his eyes.

  “I heard about the Magnum award. Congratulations.”

  “Sure,” he shrugged. “Only I’m not going to take that picture anymore.”

  “But you will.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Nope.”

  “Because you care, Sam, you care.”

  “I’m going to become a professional ping pong player.”

  Kay laughed. Then realized Sam was waiting for her to finish. “Oh, my God, you’re serious.”