Chapter Forty-One
FORTY-ONE
After they found and buried one bird and saved the life of another, the four friends went their separate ways at the crossroads, calling out: “Tomorrow! Tomorrow! Tomorrow! Tomorrow!” Ted looked over his shoulder and kept Joar’s body in his eyes for as long as he could. They didn’t know it then, but they would only swim in the sea together one more time.
A little while later, Joar was sitting on the floor of his room with his mom, and asked nervously:
“Should we puke on it?”
Joar had been so convinced that his mom would know exactly what to do with an injured bird, but she was standing next to him now and in every way possible looked like she didn’t.
“Puke?” she said.
“Don’t mother birds do that to their kids? They eat and then fly to the nest and throw up the food into their kids’ mouths?”
“I have no idea,” his mom smiled happily, because that was how happy she was every time Joar knew something she had never heard of.
“Ted said this bird probably isn’t even a kid, but then how the hell are you supposed to know that?” Joar said, peering suspiciously at the bird, like a bouncer trying to guess if the bird had shown a fake ID.
“Oh, darling, you’re asking me, when I’m such an idiot?” his mom laughed.
“You’re the one that keeps everything alive,” Joar answered very seriously.
Because she did. Plants and him and herself, against all the odds, in a home where everything ought to die.
“How lucky am I?” she whispered then, hugging him tight.
“Mom…,” he groaned, and rolled his eyes.
But she was right, of course, because most teenage boys don’t hug their mothers back. So how lucky was she to get to be his?
“Do you think it’s hungry? We’ve got cake! Someone at work had a birthday, and there was some left over…,” she suggested.
Joar laughed: “Maybe we should start by just giving it water, Mom?”
She sighed at herself and let her hands take turns hitting each other.
“Yes, yes, of course, I’m such an idiot, I just get so nervous , darling, and then I say such silly things…”
She was always nervous, always felt stupid. She called from the kitchen to ask if Joar wanted cake if the bird wasn’t going to have any, and Joar replied: “Do bears shit in the woods?”
Then she laughed loudly and called back: “Is water wet? Do one-legged ducks swim in circles?”
They had been telling the same silly, silly jokes since Joar was little. In a way, it was their equivalent of Joar and his friends calling: “Tomorrow!” A gentle reminder that they still had each other, in spite of everything.
“You’re not stupid, Mom, you just have… poor judgment,” Joar said softly when she came back with cake and water.
“I don’t really know what that means,” she smiled in embarrassment, but then she added proudly: “But I can’t be completely stupid, you know, because then I couldn’t have had such a smart son! And I haven’t puked on you one single time, unlike some mother birds…”
Joar admitted: “I don’t really know what the hell it means either, I just heard Ted say it about his big brother one time…”
Then they both laughed, such a miraculous sound in that house that the walls must have been shocked every time. When his mom gave the bird water, she did so by putting one finger at the end of a straw, so she could feed it drop by drop, and Joar thought that was so smart he wished everyone who thought she was foolish could have seen it.
Because plenty of things could be said about Joar’s mom, and sadly most people said them all the time. Never directly to her, of course, it was actually pretty remarkable that such a small woman could have a back large enough for half the town to talk about her behind it. But Joar, as Ali often said, had “insanely big ears for such a small head.” So unfortunately he had already heard everything at a young age. The neighbors in the street and the moms at soccer practice and the teachers at school, they all sniggered the same sort of things his paternal grandmother used to say before she died: Joar’s mom wore heels that were too high and blouses that were cut too low, she talked too much and wasn’t ashamed enough. She was too old for the way she dressed, too adult for her giggle, wore far too much makeup to be someone’s mom. “Poor child,” Joar had heard old women whisper in the supermarket, because that was the worst sort of gossip: the sort that is disguised as concern. Joar’s grandmother had been better at that than anyone, and it often made Joar sad when he thought of her death, because she had been so very old then, and he was worried his old man would live just as long.
Because they were right, the old women in the supermarket, Joar was a poor child. But not because of his mom. She was all that was good in the world. Definitely not an idiot.
But did she have poor judgment? Do bears shit in the woods?
When Joar was little, his mom didn’t have a child seat on her bicycle, so she used to put him in the basket on the front like he was a small dog. She never told him to go to bed, it wasn’t unusual for her to suggest ice cream for breakfast, and when Joar occasionally forced her to eat healthy food, she would call him “boring.” Sometimes Joar would tease her about the time she accidentally set him on fire when he was seven, which was obviously an exaggeration, she just happened to set a small part of his pants on fire. She had been trying to mend a hole in them, because even if she was not so great at cooking, she was most excellent at sewing, but unfortunately they’d had their electricity shut off that week, so she had done it in the dark and accidentally knocked over a candle. In hindsight, sure, it might have been better if she had asked Joar to take his pants off first, but you can’t think of everything.
At an early age she would take the boy to the movies and smuggle him into R-rated films. Well, maybe not “smuggle,” the guy at the ticket booth might have had a crush on her and pretended not to notice. All men everywhere fell a bit in love with her, not even Joar could blame them for that. Sometimes they saw several films in a row, sometimes a really bad one ten times, all so they could stay there in the darkness where the world smelled of popcorn and always had happy endings. Of course most children get tired of being best friends with their moms, so she did everything with Joar as if it were the last time. But it never was. How lucky was she?
In the winter, on nights when Joar’s old man wasn’t home, they would head out and climb over a fence down by the ice rink and go skating in the light of the streetlamps. His mom used to be a figure skater when she was young, every time she swept out across the ice it took Joar’s breath away. It was the only place he knew where she wasn’t afraid. He got good at skating as well, so good that he had had to pretend to really suck at it when the school organized an ice hockey competition when he was nine. He didn’t want anyone to tell his mom that he ought to start playing on a team, because they couldn’t afford it, children who played ice hockey in their town didn’t get their electricity cut off and didn’t use newspapers as toilet paper at the end of the month. It didn’t matter, of course, Joar wouldn’t have wanted to play on a team anyway. They were run by a bunch of angry dads shouting at their kids, and if Joar needed to be around a raging fucking moron, he had one at home.
Sometimes the boy and his mom would lie on their backs on the ice rink at night and she would point out the constellations to him, she knew every single one, because she wasn’t dumb at all. Joar could have ended up with any idiot for a mom, but he got her. How lucky was he?
When he had just turned twelve, she taught him to drive a car. Apart from the fact that he could barely reach the pedals, it had actually gone pretty well, at least to start with, but then Joar asked what one particular traffic sign meant. When she said, “No idea, darling,” he asked: “Didn’t you have to learn that to get your driver’s license?”
“Oh, I don’t have a driver’s license, darling,” she replied, quite unconcerned, then said: “Turn left here.”
“You don’t have a DRIVER’S LICENSE?” Joar shouted.
“No, no, but how very sweet of you to think that I did,” she replied, evidently moved that he thought so highly of her.
“But what… what the hell, Mom? How did you learn to drive, then?”
“My mom taught me.”
Joar stared at her, and to his own surprise heard himself ask: “What do you do if the police stop you?”
His mom had looked at him so proudly, because that was the most law-abiding thing he had said in his entire life. Then she had admitted:
“Oh, I’ve only been stopped once. And then I pointed to you in the back seat and said you had an inflamed appendix and that we were on our way to the hospital.”
“I REMEMBER that! I thought you were JOKING!” Joar exclaimed.
“You’re so sweet, darling,” his mom replied. They had driven around town in the darkness all that night, and if she had let him, Joar would have just carried on driving, as far away as possible. But she didn’t dare leave her husband, and Joar couldn’t leave her. Their prison was invisible.
Now Joar was about to turn fifteen, and they were saving the life of a bird. His mom patiently gave it drop after drop of water, and Joar gathered twigs and leaves from outside the house to make a soft bed for it inside the box. How lucky was that bird?
“Did you know that birds don’t have nests? Not for themselves, I mean. They only build them for their kids,” Joar said.
“Did Ted tell you that?” his mom smiled.
“His brain is like poop. Everything sticks!”
When his mom laughed really hard, she would fart, no one apart from Joar knew that, because no one apart from Joar made her laugh like that.
“Open the window! Open the window! You’re going to murder the bird!” he coughed with tears in his eyes, and she laughed and laughed and laughed.
She stopped when she turned around. They hadn’t heard the key in the lock. Joar’s old man was standing in the doorway of the room looking at them, at first puzzled, then with hate in his eyes. He was six or seven beers into the day, he was breathing unevenly through his nose, his eyes couldn’t quite land on anything. But he saw the bird, he saw how happy Joar’s mom was, and the boy knew at once that there wasn’t going to be a happy ending to that.