Building Character
BY KYLE FRANCIS WILLIAMS
The seeds came in the mail like anything else. Bud looked at the row of them, taped across a sheet of blank paper, almost like reading. Then he put them down. Boring, as far as felonies went.
His friend Tim found them a few days later, sitting on top of the TV-VCR on Bud’s dresser. He held the paper to the screen, over Sean Penn’s face, and asked, What’re you going to do with these?
Plant them, Bud said.
Then what? Tim asked. Smoke it?
Sell it? Tim asked.
The tape cut out just when Sean Penn, as a hazy puddle of muted colors filtered through the paper, had ordered a pizza to class. The static through the sheet looked one color the same way the calm of the Sound did, with the seeds like impossible holes draining that water endlessly and uselessly into the dark. A lot of things looked that way to Bud, after long enough.
Where did you even find this thing? Tim asked.
I think it was my dad’s, Bud said. I don’t know. I found it in a closet.
Tim peeled the line of seeds from the paper and stuck them to the TV-VCR screen, and tried to write PLANT ME into the screen’s dust. That night, the seeds became the dots Ferris Bueller’s friend got lost in, and Bud got lost in them too. Fleur, his mother, saw this, passing by the door of his room: him, sitting on the floor against the side of his bed, the box of tapes next to him, a bowl raised to his lips. She didn’t say anything. He didn’t say anything. But they looked at each other a long time, all eyes, through the cold bath of that blue light.
#
Bud put on another tape while Tim set up the planter and the light in the closet. Tim had stolen them from work. Bud was going through the box of tapes one by one. He didn’t know what he put on until it started, because none of them were marked. He was always surprised. The only part of this one he’d ever seen, he realized, was when they danced on the tables. Bud had never seen a school library like that one: skylights, sculpture, microfiche machines. Their own school library had had no windows, and most of the books had their front covers ripped off. He packed a bowl.
You know, Bud said, I’ve never actually seen any of these movies.
Tim poured the dirt, also stolen, into the planter.
I thought I had, Bud said. I mean, most people have, right?
Bud breathed in and held it while Tim took the line of seeds off the screen, the seeds off the tape, then put the tape back onscreen where it hung, there and not there, as an outline and air bubbles cutting and warping the light. Then Bud let it go.
Have you? Bud asked, holding out the bowl.
Tim breathed in. He held it, then he let it out. The smoke rolled over the dirt and Tim buried the seeds in it, then sprayed the dirt with water. Bud watched, then was done watching, but was only midturn back to the screen when Tim turned on the light.
ii.
Fleur found Bud sitting on the floor again, but at the foot of his bed, soaked in that light pouring from his closet, violet, and in that light Fleur thought she had not been a careful enough mother. She had not always checked the milk before pouring. But she had worked for the milk, had worked to make sure he always had the milk, hadn’t she?
The TV-VCR lightly volleyed the word Dude around the room. The tapes threw her. She knew he’d found them in the attic because she remembered putting them there, and though she hadn’t forgotten them there, she had hoped to, and thought she had been well on her way to forgetting them completely, until, there they were, throwing her, right back onto the floor of the living room, sitting against the couch, watching Bud’s father laugh aggressively at whatever the redhead said.
She had no illusions about her son’s indoor gardening except maybe that it meant something. He stared into his closet, after all, like he was watching something happening. She wanted to see what he saw, went into his room and sat on the bed at Bud’s shoulder, and tried just to look, but she only saw the mess, and how obvious this light must be in the window for anyone looking in from the corner. She tried, she sat there with him, but she didn’t know how he could stand to just look at something.
#
Liv at work asked whether Fleur’s son was still at the garden center while doing her makeup at the desk they shared, one long desk that both was and was not the reception desk for the medical billing department, with the exit and its bright red letters always tantalizing in Fleur’s view. Fleur knew that Liv didn’t really care about the garden center, and really wanted to ask, and did ask, through her hand mirror,
Whatever happened to those classes he was taking at Suffolk?
Fleur didn’t know. He never said, so she never asked. But she didn’t want to say that, so she said instead,
I think he’s growing pot in his closet,
and regretted it immediately. Liv shouted Fleur’s name like it was something to walk all over. She was excited about the ammunition Fleur had just handed her.
And you’re okay with that? Liv asked, spinning in her chair.
What’s there to do? Fleur said. He’s an adult.
Kick him out, Liv said. He needs to learn that you won’t always be there to coddle him, that he’ll need to be able to pull himself up.
He needs to get real, Liv added.
Fleur’s first instinct was to laugh but she and Liv didn’t share enough understandings for a joke. Liv was very serious, and Fleur knew this because Liv was leaning forward, and had put on her tallest voice. Fleur didn’t know whose reality Liv thought she lived in, or from where she’d pulled herself up, or from what height she’d acquired such authority. Well but Fleur did know. She knew exactly. She could hear Liv’s voice at the vineyard dripping drunk and saccharine: This girl at the office told me that her kid . . . .
You have a warped sense of how the world works, Fleur said. I think it’s because you have never suffered.
#
Liv became more passive aggressive throughout the day, had stopped talking to Fleur directly. She knocked her mug, stapler, and, somehow, single sheets of paper forcefully onto their desk, and Fleur felt it up her arms each time. Fleur knew that an apology, however insincere, would make her future work life easier, but she could not subject herself to it, no matter how uncomfortable she was. She’d been subjected enough, and anyway, this could be good for Liv. Maybe this would build Liv’s character, like dining alone while pregnant.
But in her discomfort, Fleur fixated on a small bag of cough drops that had been on the awkward non-border of their workspaces for weeks: these cough drops became something that finally and immediately needed to be dealt with, to be cleaned away. So at the end of the day, on Fleur’s way out, with her coat already on, and in one breath, she said,
do you want these still no good,
and they hit the bottom of the otherwise empty trashcan with a loud ring.
iii.
Bud didn’t know this one but Molly Ringwald was in it again. She was in all of them, huh? He and Tim had Mondays and Wednesdays off, as a remnant of a long abandoned class schedule, and they spent this Wednesday with Molly Ringwald. Bud expected these movies to be funny, or funnier, but found them mostly sad. Not because of the movies themselves, necessarily, though he didn’t think he’d ever seen suburbs so lush, not anywhere on Long Island where he knew people lived. But sad because of how they existed physically: Unmarked black tapes in an old liquor box, played on a small screen with speakers broken barely above a whisper. The half-seconds of commercials for businesses that didn’t exist anymore cut into half-spoken lines. What kind of person would make these? And what kind of person would watch them?
You think this is what it was really like? Bud asked. For our parents?
But Tim was stoned. He was focused on a tape he was holding very close to his face.
Like, Bud said, Look at these neighborhoods. Did our neighborhoods look like that when our parents were in high school? Look at these houses, what happened to all these houses? You know anyone who lives in houses like these? All glass, with in-ground pools—what happened to all these pools?
Tim was rubbing his finger along the hard plastic rivets of the tape. He said eventually,
We don’t live there.
But Bud didn’t know if Tim meant in time or in place. The fucked up thing was that, squinting, Bud could see his own neighborhood as a broken-down version of the ones onscreen.
Then where are these suburbs? Bud asked. Do they still look like that?
I don’t know, Tim said. Detroit?
This is what Detroit looks like? Bud asked.
I don’t know, I haven’t been to Detroit.
I’ve never been to Detroit, either. Why’d you say Detroit?
Or Chicago?
But Bud had neither been to Chicago. You could look at photos of these places, but that didn’t really tell you anything about living there. And Bud wasn’t sure he really wanted to know, or really compare. He watched Tim spin his finger around the spools of the tape he was holding.
You know, Tim coughed out, you can only play one of these a certain amount of times. Like, each time you watch it, it damages the tape. The tape degrades.
#
Bud woke from a work dream: Restocking, handling returns, explaining the benefits of higher-model tools he had never used and probably never would. It wasn’t an unpleasant dream while Bud was in it. It was fine. He couldn’t think, not while dreaming, What else was there?
It was the alarm on Tim’s phone that crashed Bud awake. Because of how typical the dream was, Bud felt that he had lost time. That the dream had happened, but earlier in the day. But Bud recognized Tim’s morning alarm, and snoozed it for the both of them. Tim still lived at home too, with his mom—his dad was in prison—and it was all the same, wherever they went to sleep. Every few months they poked around listings to get angry over what a basement apartment went for.
When Bud realized that he would be, in a few minutes, doing awake what he had just finished doing asleep, he felt he had wasted his dream. What else was there? What a stupid fucking question, What else was there? He could have raised his arms and flown away, high up over the Island, shit, over the Atlantic, the Sound shrinking to nothing at his back. He could have had a deep and meaningful relationship with Molly Ringwald, could have told her jokes that she would laugh at, could have cooked her dinners he did not in fact know how to make, or could have just sat somewhere, in a movie theater, anywhere, and held her hand, and felt their hands together get warm and sweaty.
Bud sat up. He noticed that Molly Ringwald was not anymore on the TV-VCR, but neither was the static that played when the tape was over. The TV-VCR had been turned off. And the blanket from his bed had been thrown over him and Tim, and his door had been closed. But he could not remember the last time he had bothered to close his door.
Later a customer asked him, How will I know it’s working?
About dirt. A nutrient-rich dirt. Bud said,
If things grow.
#
Bud dug around in the attic for more tapes but found clothes that mostly didn’t fit. One nice jacket, a brown bomber with a white fur collar. He wore it down the attic stairs, wore it smoking in front of his closet, watched as it turned darker but still somehow shined in that violet light, and watched the smoke drift, and his own hands glowing too.
He wore it down the stairs to the kitchen, where his mother was eating dinner late. She’d made something from a packet with pasta and a lot of cheese powder. He thought she would say, That was his favorite jacket, but she didn’t. She just looked. She watched him serve himself on a small plate what she had made, and in a small mug the wine from the box she was drinking. He said both were good, taking small bites and small sips.
I’ve been going through dad’s tapes, he said finally.
Weird collection, he said. A lot of teen comedies.
Classics, I guess, he said. Things I thought I saw already.
His mother finished eating and pushed her dish slightly from her without getting up. Bud wanted to ask if she liked those movies too. Any of them. Instead he put more cheese into his mouth, and then swallowed it. Mom? He asked his plate,
How are you?
Fleur breathed deeply and slowly in from the nose, then out quickly from the mouth. It was not quite a sigh, not quite a shrug. It was not really anything. But she was sitting in front of him, maybe arm’s reach, really there. Wasn’t she something?
She put her dish in the washer, refilled her glass, and left the kitchen. The TV in the living room turned on, and was immediately drowned out by the vacuum. Bud listened from the table but could not hear her under the layers of that noise, looking at the food on his plate as the oil coagulated on top.
iv.
Fleur used to think this was all she wanted, for Liv to stop talking to her forever, but it actually made her incredibly uncomfortable, and so it made the workplace impeccably clean. She wiped down every surface before using it, got old coffee rings off the desk, and even found compressed air for her keyboard.
Bud hadn’t looked like his father in that jacket, but that jacket looked like his father. It was the most familiar object Fleur had ever seen. Everything about it was exactly how she remembered it. How many things are like that? she asked herself, while cleaning the microwave in the kitchenette.
But maybe this had nothing to do with her. Maybe she was just being presumptuous. He could be watching those tapes because he was bored and it was something to do. The jacket fit, so why not wear it, if it kept him warm. Husbands and fathers leave, that’s just what they do. It wasn’t worth talking about, and she’d always made sure Bud had what he needed. She took care of him.
But when she had walked past his room last night she heard the set, and could hear Molly Ringwald through the years. The same scene, sitting on the floor pressing record, stop, record, stop. She had washed her hands again in the kitchen like she could get something off them, but she had found the dishtowel through the years too, Bud’s father’s hands drying.
So she threw it away. It had felt like cleaning. But there was so much then to clean.
#
Liv stopped at the desk on her way out. Fleur was in the middle of finally throwing away the pens in her pen cup that no longer wrote. She imagined Liv’s house to have stone lions at the driveway, but when she imagined this she also imagined herself scraping off the dirt built up on them, and she hated Liv for this image. She had a sheet of test paper with half-made stars and deep black holes but it was amazing how many pens didn’t make a single line.
He’s an adult, Liv said. You said that yourself.
Yeah, Fleur said, scratching the paper without making a mark. We’re all adults.
v.
Bud got compliments on the jacket at the bars Down Port. It encouraged him to drink more, which encouraged Tim to drink more. They ended up very drunk.
By the time Bud got home, he’d only get a few hours of sleep before work. He wanted to put on another tape but couldn’t find the box. It had been moved from the floor, and the pile of tapes had been stacked neatly back inside. He spun around. The closet door had been closed, its light turned off. He got on his knees to turn the light back on and spray the dirt but stopped. He put his fingers to it, and the dirt clung to them damp.
Bud woke up in the middle of the night, on his bed for once, with his mother standing at its foot as a shadow against the purple lamplight. He could not have been asleep long because Winona Ryder was still on screen. He thought this was possibly a dream, that this figure might turn around and not be his mother at all, but he wasn’t dreaming. It was his mother looking into the closet, away from him. He watched her. He thought she would have known he was awake, and thought, if she knew he was awake, and that her standing at the end of his bed like this was weird, she would have to say something to him. She would have to, he thought. He didn’t know what she would say but she would have to say something. Maybe just, Sorry for waking you. Or, Bud what the hell is all this?
He waited. She had her hand raised and was moving it through the light. He watched her. He was actually holding his breath, and kept on holding it as she turned quietly away from the closet, and then walked slowly out of his room, turning the TV-VCR off and closing the door as slowly and quietly as she could behind her.
In the morning she was gone.
vi.
Fleur’s phone buzzed. She watched its soft light pool on the dark ceiling of the motel room as a pondlike haze of green, blue, and red. Then the light went out. It did not drain or fade, it just stopped being there. She didn’t know what kind of mother ignored her child’s calls but she’d ignored the office too, and they’d called all day long. She thought she would watch the sunrise on the beach before work, because what a wonderful thing she could do whenever she wanted to make the effort: a small island condolence. But then she didn’t leave the beach when she meant to. The thought that she could be a little late on a Friday morning eventually became the thought that they didn’t need her that day at all, really. She could just take the day. She got a bagel and a coffee. She drove to the end of Sunrise and back, then got a slice of pizza. Then she got on the LIE. It wasn’t until she was in the Hudson Valley that she realized how far she really was. She let herself talk herself into a weekend getaway, found a motel outside Poughkeepsie, and thought that, in the morning, maybe she would go to Woodstock to eat something organic before going home.
But she spent the morning on the phone instead, and then the afternoon. She’d tried all the numbers she still had. The woman who answered first was tired of receiving these calls.
What calls? Fleur asked her.
Collection agencies, the woman explained. Banks and busybodies. The phone company recycles numbers. She wasn’t hiding that man somewhere and she would not pay his debts.
Old friends hadn’t heard from him, but neither had they heard from her, to be fair. One said he moved upstate, another said Virginia. No matter where, Somewhere Else. Then they would ask her what she ended up doing with herself, which was a question she’d been asking herself all week, so her kitchen was immaculate. Her trunk was full of things she’d meant to drop off at Savers on the way to work. She would replace the plates with her next paycheck, then the pots and pans. But after a few more calls, even just her address book looked like it needed cleaning.
vii.
Tim asked what Bud meant by Gone. It sounded too much like a movie.
I haven’t seen her for three days now, he said. Also, the microwave is missing?
Tim shook his head. It was weird, sure, but if something had happened, someone would have called him, right?
I mean, Tim said. You are next of kin.
viii.
Fleur stood at the door of a nondescript house in what seemed to her like a pleasant enough retirement community in West New York. The diner had early bird specials that came with half a grapefruit and coffee, and she’d drank three cups before deciding that, yes, she could knock on this door, if it meant she could give her son something he needed.
The elderly man who answered took a moment, but did recognize her. Her hair was hardly different, after all this time. It was nice to see her. You know, he’d always liked her quite a lot, and was sorry he couldn’t do more for her at the time, and was even more sorry now that he could do even less. He only got postcards. No return address anymore, for Christmas and anniversaries and—actually, would she do him a favor?
If you do catch up with my son, the man asked, would you tell him not to bother with the anniversary cards anymore? His mother’s been dead for years.
ix.
When Bud woke up, Tim was still next to him on the floor. But Tim was awake, and nothing in the room had moved. Bud got up to water the dirt. He didn’t know what else to be doing. His mother wasn’t a lost cat, he couldn’t wander the neighborhood calling her name. Though he’d thought about it, and had left the house more than once just to turn around and look back at it, until Tim said it was freaking him out.
Bud and Tim hadn’t really slept, but it was their day off now so it hardly mattered. They watched another tape. They smoked another bowl. His father must really have liked Molly Ringwald, though Bud couldn’t imagine his father’s reaction to this one: a couple staying together though a young pregnancy. Imagine?
Toward the end of the movie a full commercial break had been left on the tape. Maybe his father had fallen asleep, or was out of the room when the commercials started. In one, a rock ballad encouraged Bud to join the Navy, telling him, You Are Tomorrow. AT&T wanted him to Reach Out and Touch Someone. Toyota sang to him about how easy it was to buy their latest car. The last commercial, which cut into the Toyota commercial like someone had hijacked the airtime, was for a local vacuum store. A sweaty older man said he was basically giving his vacuums away.
I think that’s Chris’s grandfather, Tim said.
Who? Bud asked.
You don’t remember Chris? He moved away, because he got out of a drug charge on a plea deal. His family owned this vacuum store.
When?
I guess when we were kids. It was closed by then, but the sign was still on the building when we were in high school.
Bud couldn’t remember. Most of his childhood was unfixed. Maybe childhoods were like businesses, not something everyone can really have, or keep.
Are there still vacuum stores? Bud asked to make sure.
Well, no, Tim said. Now there aren’t.
#
In the afternoon they heard a woman downstairs shouting if anyone was home.
The woman had let herself in. Bud and Tim found her in the kitchen looking through the cabinets. The woman smiled turning to them, leaving the cabinet open behind her. It was mostly empty. Bud hadn’t realized the plates were missing.
The woman explained she was from Fleur’s office. Fleur hadn’t shown up to work on Friday, nor today, so she wanted to pop in during lunch to see it Fleur was okay. She straightened her shoulders. The boss had sent her, she meant, to see if Fleur was okay.
She looked at them for an answer, resting her hand on the counter where the microwave had been. Then she started walking slowly around the kitchen, touching things. She ran her hand over the kitchen table, where a pot had burned a small brown mark near the center, which Fleur usually covered with an old runner, but that was gone too. She made faces at everything, and at them. She opened the fridge to see what was inside, then the freezer.
She hasn’t been here, Tim said finally.
The woman walked up close to Tim and looked all around his face, then said, Hm. Actually pronounced it, Hm. She knew all about him, she said, and what he was putting his mother through. Though, also, living like this, she couldn’t imagine what Fleur had ever expected.
One day, she told Tim, you’ll have to grow up.
Bud thought that, from this angle, with the woman on the left and Tim on the right, the scene made complete sense. Was, in fact, a kind of trope: the wakeup call. Of course this character would have to grow up one day. But then Tim said,
Fuck you, lady.
And then Tim was shouting,
Who the fuck do you think you are? What the fuck do you think you’re doing here?
The woman leaned far back from Tim with one hand raised to her chest. Bud thought she looked scared, like Tim was a grotesque statue that had suddenly come to life. Bud stepped aside so she could get by, and Tim followed her out still shouting, asking how she’d even gotten inside, if she’d broken in. Outside, Bud thought her car was impossibly white, so bright it was hard to look at. Before she got in it she shouted back that the door was unlocked, and who could blame her for thinking this house was abandoned, just look at it.
Bud did. The foundation of the house poked a few feet out from the ground, cracked, and the concrete steps up to the front door were crumbling, with rust-colored holes up their right side from where an iron pipe handrail had once been, Bud assumed, though he couldn’t remember it. The vinyl siding was sagging and in places coming off entirely. The lawn was patchy, yellow here, and there just dirt. The fence only enclosed the backyard on three sides, the front having fallen down at some point, evidently, though Bud couldn’t remember that either. Bud did not want to think, and put effort into not thinking this, but could not stop himself from the thought that he would not have blamed his mother for leaving, if that is what she wanted, if that is what she had done, but he did wish she had talked to him about it, or anything.
Tim watched the woman’s car until it turned a corner toward the highway and he could not follow it anymore. He didn’t understand how Bud was so calm. Didn’t that make Bud want to do something?
What’s there to do? Bud asked.
I don’t know! Tim said. Something. Fucking, punch something. Fucking—something. I don’t know.
Bud blinked. Tim blinked. Then Tim put his hands into his pockets and left, saying,
I need to go punch something.
x.
The calls from the office stopped because Fleur’s phone had finally died. She was relieved, but also, if it relieved her to stop receiving the calls, why hadn’t she just turned the phone off, rather than wait for it to die?
She could have gone straight home but here she was instead, in Woodstock: a cute main street, lined with Tibetan prayer flags. A restaurant served her locally foraged mushrooms for lunch. One last night away, she let herself have it. She’d earned it. The motel room smelled like patchouli. She looked at the postcard Bud’s grandfather gave her. It was cheap. The ink that mapped out the address—all that Bud’s father had written on the card—was smeared over the plasticky paper, so glossy she could almost see her reflection: a massless shape, a darkish purple nothing. It was easy, she thought, once you were gone, to stay gone. She couldn’t even rip it, it was so hardly paper. It was horrible, but there she was, all she could bring home to her son.
xi.
It was dark by the time Bud went back inside. He’d spent a long time looking at the house. It was pretty far gone, but not too far gone. Most of the other houses on the street looked better, sure, but not by much. Though he could see now how the violet light from his bedroom splashed out into the night.
He reached to turn on the lamp in the living room but it wasn’t there anymore, so he left it dark. He walked through the house trying to see the inside for the first time, or for its full age. However his mother saw it. Maybe if he could see it that way, he would get it. But maybe he was just high. And maybe he should just water his dirt and go to sleep.
#
Tim didn’t come for him the next day so Bud walked it. Through his neighborhood to route threefortyseven, walking the shoulder for about six miles with the sun moving to directly overhead. The streets had no sidewalks, but he and his mother could not afford another car. He wondered if there were any cars in any of the garages he passed, or just more heavy boxes filled with old lives no one could throw away. But even more likely was that the garages had been converted into poorly insulated bedrooms or studios technically, legally unfit for occupancy.
On the highway he passed bus stops but no busses passed him. Had anyone in the movies he’d been watching ever needed a bus? He was over an hour late when he got to work. Sweat soaked through his shirt and everything else. Tim asked where he’d been earlier, when Tim went to pick him up, and how his mom was. Bud just looked at him.
Didn’t you see her? Tim asked. Her car was in the driveway.
#
It was, too. But the door was locked. He knew he had a key but not where it was. He knocked. He rang the bell. Tim watched from his car as Bud circled the house. Every window was locked. All his calls went straight to voicemail. He sat on the step with his head against the front door. He could hear the vacuum. Eventually Tim sat next to him and said,
We should probably get back to work.
xii.
The movers said they could take it all to Savers in one trip but the truck was already almost full with just the attic in it. And still there was so much more to take. Had Fleur really never thought to save up and replace her mattress in thirty years? Is that why her back always hurt?
Just as they were trying to shut the truck door on the couch, Fleur thought that, wait, they should take the kitchen table too. The image of it was impossible, the table was younger than Bud, but she couldn’t shake it, she could just see exactly those elbows on it holding up that head rocking back and forth saying No, No, No.
It was futile. Would she replace the floors, too? Would she knock down the walls? But the movers were honking their horn, waiting for her to get in her car and follow.
They got to Savers only just before it closed. The warehouse guy looked like he would murder her, but he took her stuff. She asked if she could run in for just a few things, to replace what she had brought, but he only glared. He told her how much he would give her and she knew that, had she arrived earlier, it would have been more. But she took the money. Of course she took the money. She had to use most of it to pay the movers.
Handing the money to them she thought they might refuse. That they might just say, Keep your money, you’re obviously going through something right now—and that then she might cry, and one of them might hold her, too warmly, and damp, but it would still be nice. They had big arms, these men. And with those big arms they took her money, and one of them slipped the warehouse guy a twenty to take the couch back for himself.
#
She would be fine if she obeyed all the laws. Her registration was fine. Her inspection was fine. Just stop at the stop lights, stop at the stop signs, stay at the speed limit, don’t swerve like a fucking drunk. Avoid the corners where cops waited just for someone like her. She’d be fine.
Somehow she was, too, even though her eyes kept drifting. It was misting out and she kept looking at the lights from the streetlamps, from porches, from oncoming cars, through the dark and the mist, haloed and bright.
She drove through her neighborhood and parked across the corner to give her house a good look. In the dark it looked like no one lived there, like anywhere else. Except that purple light in the upstairs window. That was kind of funny.
Then she saw her son come around from the backyard. He rang the doorbell, banged on the door. She didn’t realize she’d locked the door. What was left to keep inside? She could have stopped him, come to his rescue, but she didn’t. She wanted to know what he would do.
Her son tried the door another minute. She couldn’t hear the words he was shouting, just the shapes of them. Then he sat on the steps. He sat for a while, tried yelling again, but ended up just knocking the back of his head against the door repeatedly. A light flicked on in a neighbor’s window. She was not the only one watching the show, not the only one watching him decide something.
What he decided to do was stand under the living room window at the side of the house. Actually, he had good posture, her son. Had she taught him that? Shoulders back, chin up: he looked perfectly composed, bending down to pick up something heavy. But his entire body arched awkwardly backward with his arm raised, then pulled forward like a catapult. Then he stood there another minute looking at what he’d done, and Fleur was surprised. She thought the glass shattering would be louder but from here she had barely heard it.
xiii.
Bud’s shoes crunched over the broken glass. He threw the rock back through the window into the yard, then went and unlocked the front door, like he was letting himself inside. He looked around. Things were different. There were less things. There was a white shimmer on the wood floor from the moonlight or the streetlamps, shuttering across the whole floor with no furniture to stop it.
The kitchen table was still there so he sat at it. He closed his eyes and felt the breeze from the broken window. This was it, now. Clean house. When he opened his eyes he would sweep up the glass, and in the morning he would see about getting the window fixed, or figure out how to see about getting the window fixed.
Upstairs he found his bedroom door closed, so he passed it. He hadn’t been inside his mother’s room since he was a child. He had the image of a room completely empty except for a box in the middle of the floor filled with tapes, and then of him sitting in his room with those tapes forever, just trying to make sense of her. Except he couldn’t even remember the room’s proportions. The image wouldn’t stay still, because the shape of the room was indefinite. He tried to fix it in his mind before opening the door. It felt important to do this.
Smaller than he thought, and mostly empty. No box of tapes after all, and no bed, but still a dresser. Clothes in the closet. Were these things someone would come back for? He didn’t know. He considered everything he’d found in the attic. He didn’t know, but he doubted it.
In his room nothing appeared moved. The static still played from the TV-VCR, the light spilled still from his closet. He put on a tape at random but nothing happened. Rewind—he’d never hit rewind. The image whirred backward and he checked the plant, then double-checked it. He got on his knees for it. In the dirt, still damp in its middle, was something poking out from the dark, a small fluorescent green heart growing up to him.
He heard someone come in the front door downstairs and walk across the glass he hadn’t swept up. He figured it was Tim. He was excited to show Tim what he’d found. What he’d grown, this small thing.
