She pulled on her robe and went into the hall. The house was quiet except for Buddy’s snore. Her usual insomnia treatment was to read until the book dropped out of her hand, but when sleep seemed impossibly out of reach, she’d do penance for her wakefulness by performing some onerous task: cleaning out the refrigerator, balancing the checkbook, verifying the date of each canned good in Dad’s basement pantry. (Scariest find: a can of kidney beans purchased by her mother twenty-five years ago.) Some nights Irene came dangerously close to pitching in on one of Buddy’s renovation projects.
None of that appealed to her tonight. She went downstairs and drifted through the first-floor rooms, her eyes growing wide in the dark. Surfaces caught errant light and became strange. Objects trembled with arrested motion, waiting for her to glance away. Every chair and table became a wary animal. Don’t be afraid, she thought. It’s just me.
Irene had realized at her mother’s funeral not only that she had inherited her position as Sole Responsible Adult, but that she’d been training for the job since she was ten. She was the one who’d managed Buddy’s tantrums. She was the one who’d poured water onto Frankie’s bed to get him up and out to school. (Only had to do that twice, but it worked.) Most of all, she learned how to keep Dad out of her way. She resented the job, but she was secretly proud of it. She knew that if she had not grabbed the wheel, they would have all gone over the cliff.
It wasn’t until the winter after she’d graduated high school, in the wide backseat of the Green Machine, that she was asked the question she’d been waiting to hear all her life. Lev Petrovski, half naked and beautiful and sweating despite the frost outside the windows, pressed his forehead to hers and whispered, “But who’s going to take care of you, Irene?”
This was not a statement she could weigh for truth. It was a question, and her heart shouted the answer: You, Lev. You will.
What a stupid, stupid girl she was.
On her second circuit of the first floor, she became aware of a faint, shifting light emanating from the basement. She went down the stairs and saw that Matty had left the new PC running. Multicolored lines zigzagged across the screen.
She sat at the desk (a battered hulk that had once occupied a corner of Frankie and Buddy’s bedroom) and touched the keyboard. A field of blue appeared, and icons popped up like square flowers. It was a new version of Windows, and everything seemed shinier and somehow more insistent than what she’d used at her old job. Back then she’d been considered the office computer expert, not because of any actual expertise, but because her immediate supervisor had abdicated all technological responsibility. It fell to Irene to print out the electronic mail (or else how could the partners read it?) and become the guru of WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3.
She bent to look for the computer’s off switch, and noticed that Matty had already hooked it up to a phone jack. It’s got a built-in modem!
Irene got up without turning off the machine. The little clock on the screen said that it was 12:32.
She went upstairs and found the stack of mail that had accumulated over the past couple of days. There were five AOL CDs, each one promising 50 FREE HOURS! Well, she thought, if there was one thing she had, it was free hours.
A few minutes later, the modem squealed loud enough to wake everyone in the house—or so it seemed; the night made the house seem both larger and smaller than it was in daytime. Soon the screen filled with a wall of colorful, rectangular buttons: “Today’s News,” “Clubs & Interests,” “Personal Finance,” “Entertainment.” And this one: “People Connection,” with a picture of two men and two women, laughing and smiling with their arms around each other. Her mouse cursor hovered over it, then slid away to safety. Who were these people? What the hell were they so happy about? And why should she connect with them?
She went exploring elsewhere, reading new stories she wouldn’t have bothered with if not for the novelty of them being on-screen, and looked through the “Education” section in case there was anything that might be of use to Matty. It was like wandering her house, except that everything was bright and blinking and pixelated.
Eventually, though, she returned to the “People Connection” button. She stared at it for ten, fifteen seconds. Then clicked.
She was presented with a page of “Chat Room Listings” that gave her another batch of online metaphors to unravel. She could chat (which meant type), in a room that didn’t exist, to people she couldn’t see. The number of categories was overwhelming: Friends, Gay & Lesbian, Town Hall…Romance. She could almost hear their desperate clamoring behind the screen. Do you like me now? Am I funny? Oh, sure, I work out all the time…
No. Nope. Nada. She was not going to become one of those lonely people sitting up all night bleaching their eyes against a computer monitor. She signed off, turned off the PC, and went upstairs to find a junk drawer to clean out.
It took all of two days for Matty to notice. He met her at the front door as she walked in from work, his voice quaking with indignation. “You installed AOL?” Then: “Without telling me?”
Irene flushed with embarrassment. “It was an experiment. We’re not paying for it, so forget it.”
“I’ll pay! Frankie’s giving me a job.”
“Frankie says a lot of things that don’t happen. And even if you paid, I wouldn’t let you on AOL.”
“What are you afraid of? It’s just the Internet!”
“The Internet is made out of people,” Irene said. “Terrible people.” She’d gone back online a second night, and had quickly learned that the AOL interface was little more than a colorful picnic blanket thrown over a seething pit of sex. She was not going to tell him how much time she’d spent staring into that tawdry abyss. Matty was at an age at which dirty talk would be kerosene thrown on an already burning crotch.
Last week the inevitable happened. Long after he’d headed up to bed, she’d gone into his room to deliver a load of laundry and found him rigid on the mattress, holding himself, staring up at the ceiling. She said a quick “Sorry!” and backed out of the room—and then was struck by the fact that he hadn’t moved a muscle, or even covered himself. Had the shock paralyzed him?
She knocked on the door. “Matty? Are you okay?” Then: “Of course you’re okay, it’s fine, it’s natural.” He didn’t answer. “I know you’re embarrassed, but I really need you to answer me right now.”
She pushed the door open an inch, not looking in. “Matty?” She heard a heavy thump.
“Matty?”
“I’m here!” he yelled. “Everything’s okay!”
I’m here? She left him alone, and told herself she’d talk about this later with him. She’d already put him through a sex talk that left him mortified and mute. She didn’t want to go further. That’s what dads were for.
Except Matty’s. Lev Petrovski was somewhere in Colorado, she’d heard, living in the woods where the postal system was so primitive that child support payments could not make their way out. Evidently.
Sometimes she worried that her son had inherited some of Lev’s weasel DNA. As Matty had grown up, he was learning to dodge her questions, just like his father, who was practically a Jeopardy! champion in his skill at phrasing every answer in the form of a question. When she asked Lev about getting married, he replied with, “Cool! When do you want to do it?” If she expressed doubt about his commitment, he’d bounce back with, “Hey, babe, don’t you know I’m your guy?” Then later, he’d touch her belly and say, “Aren’t you psyched about this baby?”