Chapter Eighteen
The two years between the boys’ ages kept them at bay from each other, at times.
Around his other friends—especially at school—Skip could act like it was a drag to have a pipsqueak riding his coattails.
But it was just that: an act. He never outright shunned Tom, never told him to get lost or belittled him.
He inched away now and then, was all, but even when he did, that early impulse to protect Tom held, and he kept an eye out for him.
It was more than just the differences in their ages and sizes, or the fact that Skip was twice as strong.
It was something that emanated from his gut, and it never occurred to him to question it.
If one of his other friends said anything mean about Tom Salt, Skip put a stop to it.
If there was any sort of scuffle on the playground in Tom’s vicinity, Skip was usually on hand to make sure Tom held his own.
And Tom, through Skip, was learning to hold his own.
Bullies bullied less when they knew you’d strike back.
Outside of school, one-on-one, their ages dropped away.
They were goofballs, they cracked each other up.
Tom did impressions of the teachers they’d both had, and the principal, and Jack Benny.
He did a bit where he was his own ventriloquist dummy, and it was so stupid Skip couldn’t stop laughing.
When Tom spent the night the first time, Becky had to get up after midnight, rap on Skip’s bedroom door, and ask them to keep it down.
Everett snored away in the next room, undisturbed.
“Maybe having Tom stay over isn’t such a good idea,” Cal said when Becky slid back into bed beside him.
“They’re fine,” she said, scrunching her pillow. “Would you rather have Ron?”
No. Ron Burgess—the only other friend Skip had invited to stay the night—was loud, crass, slammed doors, and ate like a woodchipper.
They were very happy not to have Ron back.
But having Tom under their roof overnight, from time to time, and having him there in the morning, continued to give response to an echo Cal had been trying not to hear for the past seven years.
And while he saw no resemblance, he couldn’t shake the possibility—not completely.
He couldn’t not notice the boy’s mannerisms—the way Tom moved his hands, held his head—and see traces of himself that weren’t supposed to be there.
Was this the birthright of his actions, he wondered—living with the uncertainty of uncertainty?
—
Tom stayed over on the night of Skip’s tenth birthday, in March of 1954, and after Skip raked in an Ampro reel-to-reel tape recorder he’d been wanting since Christmas (from Becky and Cal), an archery set (from Ida and Roman), and a boomerang wrapped in the exact shape of a boomerang (from Tom), the boys proceeded to eat slice after slice of a chocolate cake Becky had made, and bowl after bowl of peppermint ice cream to go along with it.
Cal threaded the reel for them, and with the tape recorder parked in the middle of the table, Skip went around with the microphone.
He recorded Everett saying, “Get that thing away from me,” and Roman saying, “I like Ike.” He recorded Ida singing a whole verse of “A Little Bird Told Me.” While she sang, Everett leaned over to Cal and said, “Give me a dollar.”
“Why?”
“I didn’t know I was supposed to have a present.”
“Don’t worry about it, Pop.”
“Just give me a goddamn dollar.”
Cal got out his wallet and gave Everett a dollar. Ida finished singing, and as the rest of them clapped, Everett slid the dollar across the table to Skip and wished him a happy birthday.
Skip consumed the most cake and ice cream of all, the day being his, so when Becky and Cal were awakened in the middle of the night by the sound of someone being sick, they both expected it to be Skip.
But when Cal looked into the bathroom, it was Tom he found.
Crouched in front of the toilet with that affronted look on his face that kids get when they throw up.
“All out?” Cal asked, and Tom nodded uncertainly, then leaned over the bowl as another surge came.
Cal got a washcloth, wet it, wrung it out. He handed it to Tom and sat on the edge of the tub. When the next wave came, he reached over and gently laid his hand on the boy’s back.
—
Tom had declined a ride from the Jenkinses and had pedaled home through the cold, thinking he was feeling better.
But moments after walking in, he said he didn’t want any breakfast because his stomach still hurt, and he went upstairs and crawled onto his bed with his scarf and tennis shoes still on.
Sick child, Margaret thought. Tom was a fairly self-sufficient boy. When he’d been sick in the past, he didn’t need much, wasn’t a complainer. He was like a machine, and when something went wrong with him she generally just waited and the problem resolved itself.
He looked miserable, though. She sat on the edge of his bed and untied his shoes, took them off.
She put her hand on his forehead, his cheek.
It was just too much cake and ice cream, he said, diagnosing himself for her, and she thought, Why did you spend the night over there in the first place?
She’d been uncomfortable with his growing friendship with Skip and had been very unhappy with the idea of his being an overnight guest in Cal’s house.
But Felix had gone and approved it when she wasn’t around.
Three times now. Because she knew that, sooner or later, Tom was bound to ask if Skip could stay over, Margaret had proactively told her son she didn’t want him having any friends stay the night.
She didn’t feel she needed to give a reason.
Just then, something Lydia had said—when Margaret was little and had a stomachache—came back to her. “Lie on your right side,” she told Tom. “Your stomach empties on that side. If anything’s still in there, it’ll get out faster.”
Tom rolled onto his right side, away from her.
What else? She suggested he take his scarf off. He tugged it from around his neck, held it up, and she took it from him and folded it. She patted his back gently, unaware that this was the same spot Cal had touched just hours before, the warmth of her hand, after the fact, overlapping his.
—
She’d done her best to love him as he was, she really had, but her son kept changing on her.
He’d gone from being the mistake she’d had to carry around, to the mystery she’d had to keep alive, to the beautiful little boy with Cal lurking inside him, waiting to jump out.
His hair and eye color meant the fuse on that bomb was long and probably slow burning, but it sparked nonetheless.
She envied Tom, at times. Not just his youth and the open life ahead of him, but also his ignorance of the situation he was at the very center of.
She envied Felix for that same ignorance, and she envied—and resented—the contentedness that sometimes radiated off him lately.
Or, if not contentedness, undisturbedness.
He seemed, in general, more alert, responsive, not as drawn away by whatever was going on in his head.
That was it, she thought: he seemed to have broken free of the undertow that had had ahold of him since he’d gotten back from the war.
How had he finally managed that? Was it the job change?
The appeal of building furniture instead of overseeing men melting aluminum?
Or was it something that had happened with the psychic—Cal’s wife?
Margaret still didn’t understand what had drawn Felix to Becky Jenkins—but what did she understand about him, really?
And what was she supposed to do while Tom’s fuse burned and Felix got his second wind in life? How many times could she teach other couples to dance, and see the enjoyment on their faces as they moved about the floor, figuring things out?
—
Winter held on until late May, culminating in an ice storm that made her cancel classes and, homebound, start her spring cleaning.
When the ice melted, she took all their coats, jackets, and scarves to the dry cleaners on Second Street.
She added the tan canvas jacket Felix wore to and from and sometimes at work all winter; its elbows and cuffs were darkened with grime.
She also brought in her three cocktail dresses—not that she had much use for them, but an annual dry cleaning gave her the opportunity to admire them, and to point out to Mr. Spencer at Ever-Bright Cleaners that they were quite special and to please be careful with them.
When she picked everything up a week later, there was a little crumpled fold of paper safety-pinned to the bill. She asked Mr. Spencer what it was.
“Found in the jacket,” Mr. Spencer said, without looking up from the buttons he was pushing on the cash register. “Breast pocket.”
In the car, she carefully unpinned and unfolded the paper. It didn’t look very old. A poem, she thought at first. But it was in Felix’s handwriting, and when had he ever written poetry? A list maybe. She read it over and over.
Who did he want to be on an island with?
Whose voice and face and “every part” did he miss?
Someone he’d gone to bed with, that much was clear.
Someone he no longer saw but wished he did.
Her thoughts leapfrogged to his past, before her.
His fiancée, maybe. Or someone since then?
There’d been islands mentioned in his letters throughout the war—none of them by name (some with that information inked out by the censors).
Every port in the Pacific was on an island, it seemed.
I wish we’d met sooner.
I wish we’d had more time.
She pulled out of the Ever-Bright parking lot, then sat at a red light, the dry cleaning on the seat beside her, wondering if WAVES and WACs had been stationed overseas; her understanding was that they’d all been stateside. A local woman, maybe. An islander. Or…