Chapter 7 Peggy
I wake in the dead of night. He has his back to me. It’s been a week since he moved the boat and I’ve never felt it this cold. He stirs as I sit up, so I pause, holding my breath, the muscles in my thighs tensing, my temples throbbing. He settles. I wait a moment more and then I leave him.
I stand by the sliding bathroom door, looking out of the round window.
The night sky is awash with stars, more so than in the marina. Plush black velvet, with clouds moving across and me standing witness within this aging vessel, tethered to a mud bank, motionless in stagnant water.
Sammy is sleeping, his face hidden to me. I watch the duvet rise and fall with each innocent breath. Observing with the same concentration I had when he was a baby in Mom’s bungalow. Watching his perfect inhalations: each one a miracle.
The fire is out.
I take kindling from next to the woodstove and place it inside the firebox. There is some warmth left in the cast iron but not enough for the kindling to take. I light a match, the sulfur intoxicating in this thick silence, and my thoughts turn to what he once told me.
He sleeps and Samson sleeps and I calculate that my son has survived fourteen years under his roof and needs four more to make his own way in this world. He is a formidable survivor and by God he will continue to be one.
The flame catches the draft from the vents and I close the door gently and watch the colors shimmy behind blackened glass.
Fresh smoke in the air. The boat is motionless in dull, stagnant water and you might think I would be safe here by the fire, but I am not.
It’s not even what he might have done as a child that haunts my dreams; it is the manner in which he told me.
The expression on his face.
I do not sit in a folding camp chair; I remain cross-legged on Mom’s rug, stealing this moment of peace for myself.
My existence is a bare wall in a jail cell, each year checked off with a short, well-chewed pencil.
When Samson was a baby I thought that would be our most vulnerable time.
And then, when he was at elementary school, I imagined his little frame would slowly grow and become powerful and resilient.
But now that he is fourteen I have come to understand the bitter truth of our joint sentence.
I return to our room because he will not let me leave the bed in the morning before he does. It is a point of principle for Drew. First up, attacking the day: the action of it choreographed and farcical.
I lie still, trying and failing to sense the temperature rise in this so-called bedroom.
I am not sure it qualifies, considering the bed is damp, and smaller than a standard full, and it leads directly into the greasy engine room complete with lead-acid batteries and exposed wiring and tins of old marine paint.
Yesterday Mr. Turner arrived on this desolate stretch of canal in his own houseboat, the one that inspired Drew to make this drastic life change, and, in my eyes at least, Jeff Turner’s arrival set a timer ticking. A long and inextinguishable fuse.
Drew stirs and his leg twitches.
The man who told me he burned down his own home at the age of fifteen lies beside me dreaming about only God knows what.
His leg twitches some more.
He recalled the details with no sense of remorse or regret.
A flat expression. The door to his parents’ bedroom was locked, same as the window.
Their key was later discovered underneath the marital bed, encased in a blackened glass jar.
The spare was never found. The suburban house did not burn to the ground; it was still structurally sound when the fire was extinguished, but his parents, Evelyn and Bill, perished from smoke inhalation.
Drew told me how he set the fire and walked downstairs and waited.
When the yelling subsided, and their bedroom door stopped rattling inside its frame, he put on his winter coat and left the house.
Drew walked to a neighbor. When the firefighters found his parents his mother was still alive, but his father had succumbed.
Evelyn Jenkins made it to the emergency room but she passed away later that morning.
Drew explained this to me when I was eight months pregnant.
He had just finished building a handsome pine crib for Sammy.
He told me at the kitchen table in my late mother’s bungalow and I swear there were no tears in his eyes.
Drew couldn’t remember if it was the police or a social worker who talked to him after the fire, perhaps both, but he told them clearly it was all his fault and they told him it was not, and he must not think that way.
They said old wiring was to blame. The investigation had found faulty, out-of-date electrical cables, and signs that fuel had been improperly stored on the property.
They told him he must not feel guilty for what happened, and then they explained how they were going to find him a new home.
He told them he wished the fire had taken his grandpa as well and they told him he should not blame himself.
This is what shocked Drew the most. I am not sure he expected or even wanted to walk away from what he did.
He told me that night, Police don’t know what they’re doing.
Same as teachers and doctors and government: all education and no common sense.
I realized I should follow my own path. I was a man after that night.
Of course, that’s just the version he told me.
Who knows what actually happened.
He wakes me with a cup of sweet coffee at seven.
Freshly shaved head, glistening; sweatpants, one bloodshot eye.
“I’m off training. Have my eggs done when I get back in. Three-minute eggs, not a second more.”
In later years he explained that it was all a story, fiction, something he was working on for a scene in his new novel.
I didn’t know what to believe. Then he told me that I had imagined the whole conversation.
Once he said he had imagined it over and over, so it felt almost real but in reality he’d never gone through with it.
Another time he claimed I was mixing up an old radio play with what had actually happened.
Or that he was anxious before Sammy’s birth and described his nightmare to me in the middle of the night, and now I was recollecting that as if it were fact.
He says out-of-date wiring killed his parents.
I take the coffee through and think about giving it to Sammy, but I pour it down the sink instead. I do not trust it since Mr. Turner moved his houseboat directly behind ours and sent Drew into this invisible, silent rage. I’m probably being paranoid, but I’d rather be safe than sorry.
“What time is it, Mom?”
“Past seven.” I sit on the end of his dinette bed. “Your dad’s out training.”
He jumps out of bed, smiling, and pulls off his pajama shirt. So pale and slight. He puts on his school gym shirt and says, “Why didn’t you wake me?”
“I didn’t think you wanted waking.”
He runs out through the kitchen and past the woodstove and Drew’s bureau desk and jumps onto the bank to join his father.
The boat is warming up.
I have not told anyone I am submitting my book to publishers.
I have not even told Mrs. Appleby, though I think she would be pleased.
Thank goodness for libraries, that’s all I can say.
I have sent the book to three publishers so far.
I found their addresses in the back of a magazine.
Three independent publishers: two in New York and one in Chicago.
I used the library as my return address and Mrs. Appleby approved the printing.
I had to dip into my hidden stash to afford stamps, but it was worth it, even though I have received one rejection already.
Years of shopping for discount almost-out-of-date food and then carefully peeling off the discount stickers before bringing the food home.
He asks for receipts these days so I can no longer save that way.
Years of picking up every single coin I have ever seen.
Slow accrual in the clear-sighted knowledge that one day I will need money of my own.
Drew says I am not good with figures, so ever since Mom died he has taken responsibility for our account.
I fought against it, of course, argued and protested, but I soon realized I had to pick my battles and play the long game.
Keeping Samson alive and well had to come first. Now I have two submissions out there.
One in New York and one in Chicago. Perhaps they are being read right now.
Part of me would love to tell him all about it but the other part knows it would set him off.
The boat shakes.
Sammy walks back in.
“What’s wrong, Sammy?”
“Won’t let me train.”
“Why not?”
He cannot look me in the eye.
“Says I don’t try hard enough. Says they’re not real push-ups. Says I look like a girl doing them.”
“Come here.”
“No.”
“Come on.”
He shuffles over to me.
“Your dad’s old-fashioned, that’s all. Give him time.”
“I don’t see how I’ll turn into what he wants me to be if he won’t let me train with him. I was trying my best.”
“I know you were.”
Four more years and you will fly free, my love.
“You quit, did you?” says Drew, appearing near the fire in his drenched shirt. “Gave up, kid. Threw in the towel, did you?”
“You told me to leave.”
“And you just did it?” His chest is heaving with each breath. “First sign of friction and you folded over, went running back to your mother.”
Samson stomps to the bathroom and locks the door.
“Go easy on him, Drew.”
“Don’t see my eggs ready.”
I need the bathroom myself now. Tightness in my stomach.
“I didn’t expect you back so soon.”
“Didn’t marry you to expect, Peggy. Married you to do what I tell you. Three-minute eggs, that too much to ask?”
“Why don’t you have a shower and I’ll boil them.”
“Not enough water in the tank for a shower. Washcloth in the sink will do.” He walks toward the bathroom. “Princess, you done in there?”
Samson walks out, his eyes to the floor.
Drew looks back and says, “Make sure—”
“Three minutes,” I say. “I heard you. Do you want your bread toasted?”
He approaches slowly, pulling off his shirt. Sweat glistens all over his face. A drip on the very tip of his nose. “You interrupt me like that again and watch what’ll happen. We’ve been over this. You agreed, or have you forgotten?”
“I remember.”
“I doubt it. You interrupt me again if you like. Go on.”
I don’t move a muscle.
“Eggs,” he says. “Three minutes.”
“I need the bathroom before you wash. If that’s OK.”
He lets me squeeze past him.
A drop of his sweat on my arm.
I emerge a while later and his face is like thunder.
“What’s wrong?” I say.
He points to the pan on the burner.
“What?”
He turns off the gas and I walk to him.
“You never put the eggs in, Peggy. No water either. Which means a fire hazard. And you know how I feel about fires. How did you forget it like that?”
I stare at the burner in disbelief. “I’m sorry. I don’t even remember putting the pan on. I was going to do it after.”
“What?”
“I must have…”
“You telling me you have no memory of putting the egg pan on? This is serious, girl. You really don’t remember?”
My mouth is dry.
I rub my temples.
“I do remember now. I’m sorry I left it, my mind was somewhere else. I’ll put your eggs on now.”
“Don’t want eggs.”
“Andrew, please. I was forgetful, is all. I’ll cook them. Toast?”
“I said I don’t want any eggs.”