A Theory of Small Earthquakes Page 20

  I can’t take care of you right now, Alison wanted to say. “I think you were right about Corey acting out because of Mark and me,” she said. “So I’ve got to make things better with Mark.”

  “Too bad that means leaving me out.”

  “Zoe—”

  “Call me when you find Corey.” Zoe hung up.

  Alison met Mark at the door, cell phone in one hand, cordless phone in the other.

  “I can’t believe he’s been lying to us,” Mark said. He dropped his briefcase on Corey’s chair. “I can’t believe he lied to Zoe.”

  “I know.” The distraught look on Mark’s face was oddly comforting to Alison. He was Corey’s dad. He cared about Corey as much as she did. He would be her partner, if only she’d let him be.

  “Teenagers lie,” Alison said. “It’s their way of having some control over their lives.” She stood behind Mark’s chair and put her arms around him. His shoulders tensed. Then he let his head fall back against her.

  “What’s happening to our baby?” Mark choked out. “He was such a sweet, innocent boy. I feel like we’re losing him.”

  Alison led Mark into the living room. They settled onto the couch, inches apart. “I don’t understand it either,” Alison said. “But I don’t think the situation between you and me is helping.”

  Mark looked sad. He looked scared. He looked like he loved her.

  “The distance between us . . .” Alison said. “Sleeping separately. Not talking. Not making love. That’s not the way I want us to be.”

  “I don’t want that either,” Mark said. “I don’t know how we got here. I swear I don’t. But I want us to try and love each other again.”

  Footsteps pounded up the front steps. “That’s him.” Alison squeezed Mark’s hands. “Oh thank God, that’s him.”

  The front door opened. “Mom?” Corey called. Relief whooshed through her, then left her limp. Corey alive was all she wanted. And here he was.

  “We’re in here,” Alison answered. Another set of footsteps came up the steps. Zoe’s.

  “She found him,” Mark said quietly.

  “She found him,” Alison repeated.

  Corey swaggered into the living room, reeking of pot. Zoe was just behind him. Corey leaned against the wall. Zoe perched on the edge of the couch between Alison and Mark.

  “What are you doing home?” Corey asked Mark.

  “Sit your butt down,” Mark said.

  Corey didn’t move.

  “Now,” Mark roared.

  Corey’s hooded eyes widened. He folded his tall, skinny body into the easy chair, his long legs sticking straight out in front of him. Alison saw that his eyes were bloodshot. His face was a closed fist. Fresh tears sprang to her eyes. Who is this hostile, shut-down kid?

  “Where were you?” Corey asked Alison. “I waited for you for hella long. I had to catch the bus.”

  “Where did you wait?” Mark asked.

  “At the gym,” Corey answered.

  Alison stared at him, horrified by the proficiency of his deception.

  Zoe stood up and beckoned to Corey. “Come with me,” she said and walked into the kitchen. Corey followed her like a lamb.

  “You’re being a jerk,” Alison heard Zoe say, quietly enough to pretend she and Corey were having a private conversation, loudly enough for Alison and Mark to hear.

  “They’re jerks,” Corey said. “Did you hear Dad yell at me?”

  “Do you remember anything we talked about in the car? About what it does to your soul to lie?”

  After a long silence, Zoe said, “You ready for a little attitude adjustment, dude?”

  And then she led him back into the living room. He plopped onto the chair. Zoe didn’t sit down.

  “I’ll let you guys talk,” she said. She turned to Corey. “I love you,” she said.

  “I love you too,” Corey mumbled.

  Zoe shot Alison a sympathetic glance and left.

  “I went to the gym at five,” Alison said, watching Corey’s face. She saw her words registering slowly, as if on a seven-second delay. “I know the coach sent you home. I know you’ve been missing practice. I know you’ve been lying to him. And to Zoe. And to us.” She swallowed around the lump in her throat. “I know you’re high right now.”

  Corey picked at a loose thread on his jeans. “So what if I smoked a little weed?” he said. “You guys did it. I bet you still do.”

  “Where were you after school today?” Mark asked.

  “Hanging out.”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “You guys are trippin’. I don’t have to tell you every little thing I do.”

  “When Zoe picked you up yesterday, you told her you’d been to practice,” Mark said. “That’s called lying.”

  “That’s called my right to privacy,” Corey said. “You guys don’t tell me everything. Does that make you liars too?”

  Corey glared at Alison. “You told me you sleep in your office so you and Dad won’t wake each other up. Talk about lying.”

  Mark shot Alison a startled look. “What goes on between Dad and me is our business,” Alison said. “Not yours.”

  “So . . .” Corey said slowly. “Your privacy is your business. But when I want some privacy, I’m a liar.”

  “Exactly,” Mark said.

  Corey snorted.

  “You’re in trouble, Corey,” Mark said. “Your grades are down. You’re jeopardizing your place on the team. You’re in a crappy mood all the time. We’re worried about you.”

  “I’m only in a bad mood when I’m with you guys.” Corey slouched deeper into the chair. “Maybe I should go live with Zoe.”

  Alison felt the blow in her belly, Corey’s first home. His being was either a success of technology or a failure of human will, but he was her miracle boy, her most beloved on this earth. Wherever he’d come from, he’d gotten here through the portal of her body. However many parents she’d given him, she was his mom. She could blame her mother for her own suffering, but she had only herself to blame for his.

  Alison felt every mistake she’d made with Corey, a pile of bricks on her chest. His first year, when she’d left him with Zoe for ten hours a day. Her business trips. Letting her relationship with Mark fall apart.

  Mark was right. Even now, when he was being the difficult child he’d never been before, Corey opened her, softened her, changed her. And now he was demanding even more of her, acting like an utterly unlovable kid, needing her to love him anyway.

  It wasn’t easy for Alison to be that selfless. Since the day of Corey’s birth, being his mom had made her feel loved and loving, grown-up and competent, exactly what she’d always longed to feel. It was hard to give that up. But lately being Corey’s mom made her feel like a needy, suspicious failure, begging hugs from a six-foot, angry teenager, surreptitiously sniffing him like a drug dog, hoping not to detect a whiff of pot or booze.

  Instead of showering him with art supplies and guitar lessons to feed his creativity, she’d become his jailer. And the deepest cut of all: instead of basking in the reflected glory of her son’s sunny disposition—proof positive of good mothering, of a good mother, of a mother who is a good person—Alison had to face her own shadow side in Corey’s adolescent darkness.

  She looked at her son, stoned and sullen, and she thought about the secrets she was keeping. She wondered if those secrets were poisoning him somehow. She wondered if she were any better than her own mother.

  “We love you, Pickle,” she said. “Whatever’s wrong, we want to help.”

  “Then stop fucking calling me that. And just fucking leave me alone.” Corey’s voice cracked, skittering from one octave to another.

  Alison felt an instinct take hold. She followed it. She walked over to her son and kneeled in front of him. She took his face in her hands.

  Corey tried to shrug out of her grip. She didn’t let him. She turned his head and made him look at her. She saw pot and panic in his eyes.

  “I�
��ll never leave you alone,” Alison told him. “I love you. I’ll always love you. No matter what happens, I promise you. I’ll never leave you alone.”

  Corey stiffened, the way he used to arch his back as an inconsolable infant. And then he fell against Alison, his narrow shoulders shaking with sobs. The weight of him almost knocked Alison down, but she steadied herself and she held onto her son.

  23.

  oakland

  December 2003

  After Corey went to bed, Mark and Alison sat on the couch, sharing a bottle of wine.

  “I’m sorry I let things get so bad between us,” Alison said.

  “We both had a part in that.” Mark cracked his knuckles, a habit that made Alison cringe. She noticed that the blond hairs on the backs of his fingers were going gray.

  “I love you, Alison,” Mark said. “How can I say this without sounding like a bad rock ’n’ roll song? You’re it for me. But I want to know all of you. Not just the parts you want me to see.”

  “I don’t think it’s me you love,” Alison said. “I think it’s the person you wish I was.”

  Mark considered this. “It’s both,” he said.

  Alison stared at him, taken aback by his honesty.

  “I wouldn’t have put up with your ambivalence all these years if I didn’t think you could change.” He cupped the bowl of his wine glass in his hands. “You have changed. With Corey. You’re so soft and open with him. I just wish you could be that way with me.”

  “I am. I mean, I was, until—”

  “Let’s not bullshit each other, okay?” Mark said. “I see how you look at me. I see you listing all my faults in your head.” He licked a drop of red wine off his upper lip. Alison remembered the first time she’d met him, how badly she’d wanted to taste those luscious lips.

  “Even loving Corey terrifies you,” Mark added. “No wonder you don’t want another child.”

  “That again,” Alison sighed.

  “That still,” Mark said.

  Alison heard Zoe twenty years earlier, complaining about her intimacy issues. She heard Mark now, complaining about the same thing. Alison had convinced herself that she’d left Zoe because she felt smothered, because she didn’t want to inflict lesbian motherhood on her kids, because she’d fallen in love with Mark.

  Ten years later, she’d convinced herself that she’d lost interest in Mark because he bored her, because he didn’t know her, because he didn’t turn her on anymore. Maybe I do need to do something about myself, she thought. But can I let him in more than I have without telling what he can’t ever know?

  “It is hard for me to trust people,” Alison said slowly. “I guess it’s because—”

  “Your childhood sucked,” Mark interrupted her. “I’d give you a better one if I could. But I can’t. No one can. Not even Zoe.”

  Mark understood her so much better than she’d thought he did. “I’m asking you not to let your past ruin what we have,” Mark said. “Or what we could have.”

  Alison’s throat ached. “I wanted to give Corey everything,” she said. “And I screwed it up. I screwed him up.”

  “Don’t give yourself too much credit, Alison. Corey’s on his own path. And he’s a great kid. He’ll be fine.”

  Alison sniffled. “An hour ago, you were totally freaked out about him.”

  “I am freaked out about him. And I also know he’ll be fine.”

  Mark put his arms out. Alison leaned back against his chest. He smoothed her hair back from her forehead. He stroked her arms. His hands moved to her breasts. Alison felt a tingling between her legs.

  “Let’s go to bed,” she said.

  Mark didn’t hesitate. He took Alison’s hand and led her upstairs. He kissed her all the way to the bed. He pulled her down, still kissing her, and wriggled them both out of their clothes. He pulled her naked body onto his. Alison had forgotten his penis, hard now and urgent against her thigh. Mark’s lips burned a path across her body. She lifted herself up, lowered herself down onto him.

  “Alison,” he gasped. He flipped her over, got on top of her, and crouched there. Alison closed her eyes.

  “Please,” she moaned.

  “Look at me,” Mark said hoarsely.

  I can’t.

  “I love you, Alison,” Mark said. “Open your eyes.”

  She tried. Her eyes were hummingbirds flitting around the room. She turned her head to the side on the pillow and lifted her hips. Mark guided himself back into her.

  “Don’t stop,” she groaned.

  Mark thrust into her and then he let loose. She felt it happen. She felt him fly off into her. He took her with him, and then they were grunting and gasping, wet flesh slapping wet flesh, hands grabbing hair, skin, sheets.

  Thoughts flipped through Alison’s head: Can Corey hear us? Should we stop? Her body blew them away. And then there were no thoughts, only her body, only Mark’s body, only Mark, Mark, Mark taking her back.

  “Wow,” Mark said. They lay tangled up together in the fragrant swamp they’d made, their nest a twist of soft yellow sheets. Pale pink light seeped through old wooden windows that faced the Oakland hills.

  Mark wrapped his arm around Alison’s shoulders. She nestled her head into her favorite place, the hollow below his neck. She closed her eyes. He let her.

  It was too late to sleep, too early to get up. They started talking again, making plans to save their son. Mark said he’d try to get home by dinnertime on weeknights. Alison said she’d do more of the after-school chauffeuring herself. They’d divide up the list of Corey’s teachers and call each one of them every week.

  “We need to pay more attention to each other too,” Mark said.

  They agreed to take a yoga class together at the Funky Door, a studio they could walk to from their house. They’d start a vacation fund for romantic getaways. Alison would move back into their bedroom. They wouldn’t forget to make love.

  Alison dozed off. Mark woke her, saying her name. The bedroom was bathed in light. “There’s something else I need to talk to you about,” Mark said.

  Fear yanked Alison up from sleep.

  “I don’t want to fight about this again. But I really, really want us to have another kid,” Mark said. “We’re forty-two years old. This is it, Alison. Our last chance.

  “I really think it would make us all happy,” he said. “Even Corey.”

  Alison imagined Corey softening up to a brand-new baby, just as Alison had softened up to him.

  She looked at Mark, reflexively scouring his face for resemblance to Corey, and she found it. His eyes were hooded. His jaw was girded for her refusal.

  Alison reached up and stroked his cheek. “Let’s do it,” she said.

  Mark’s jaw went slack. “You mean it?”

  “I do,” Alison said.

  Two years after 9/11 had disposed of so many people’s disposable income, the serious magazines that used to run Alison’s investigative pieces had folded. The magazines she still wrote for had been steadily losing ad pages. Which meant they were losing editorial pages. Which meant they had less room for the kind of serious stories Alison wrote. Which made her queries harder and harder to sell.

  She knew that the story she was working on would be a hard sell. Parenting magazines were only interested in kids up to age twelve. Fashion magazines only cared about raising hemlines and heels, not children. Housewives’ magazines wanted “inspiring” parenting stories, not “depressing” ones.

  She reread her query, hoping to uncover an uplifting hook.

  “TEENS IN TROUBLE”

  query for a feature story

  In the past six months alone, high school shootings in big cities and small towns across America have taken a dozen lives. The number of teenagers who live in chronic conflict with their parents, run away, drop out of school, and/or are incarcerated in juvenile halls is on the rise.

  The crisis among American adolescents of both genders and all races and classes has been escalating since the 19
60s, when teenagers’ rebellion was a movement with its own politics, music, and drugs. Today’s teens smoke pot and groove to reggae, hip-hop, and rap, but they’re also drinking, smoking, shooting, and swallowing harsher substances: methamphetamines, heroin, cocaine, Ritalin, Prozac. They seem driven not by idealism, but despair.

  If our children are the canaries in America’s mine, what is the warning they’re sounding? What can parents, teachers, communities, and social and political institutions do to make teenagers’ lives worth living?

  To answer these questions I’ll interview kids and their caretakers in juvenile halls, suburban families, foster homes, therapy offices, and high school halls. I’ll also bring a personal touch to the piece, interviewing and writing about my almost-fourteen-year-old son.

  Uplifting? Not so much, Alison sighed.

  She heard Zoe’s Volvo squeal to a stop outside. Today’s the day, Alison told herself. She couldn’t put it off any longer.

  “Mom?” Corey yelled.

  On her way downstairs, she met Corey coming up. The size of him stunned her, and his handsomeness. His backpack hung off one broad shoulder. His basketball was tucked under his long, lean arm. Alison’s heart swelled in her chest, as it did each time she laid eyes on this boy.

  “Corey Iverson,” she greeted him. Corey’s full lips—Mark’s lips, Alison always told herself—twitched into a pleased smile. Allen Iverson, the superstar point guard of the Philadelphia 76ers, was Corey’s idol. Alison indulged Corey his hero worship, hoping it was inspired by Iverson’s basketball skills and not his proclivity for landing in jail.

  “Wassup, Mamacita.” Corey smiled. Encouraged, Alison went to hug him, an old habit dying hard. He leaned into her embrace for an instant, then ducked away. “I have homework.” He headed for his room.

  Zoe was standing on the porch, scuffing at flakes of paint with her foot. “These steps need repainting,” she said.

  “Those steps needed repainting a week after they were painted,” Alison agreed. She ducked her head at the ’72 Volvo in the driveway. “Speaking of repainting . . .”

  “I love that color,” Zoe said.