Through the scrim of young white-barked trees that had grown back since the developers came and went, I saw Hamish lying in the driveway, one of his many cars ratcheted up, with a bright cage light hanging from the front fender. I slowed down and brought my car to a halt. Without a thought for what I would say when I saw her, I swung my car off the empty road and drove up the length of Natalie’s driveway. I seemed to be doing almost explicitly what Jake had told me not to, but I couldn’t stop myself.
As my headlights mingled with the glow from the broken car, Hamish rolled himself out on his mechanic’s dolly and motioned for me to switch them off.
I turned off the ignition and got out. My first steps were wobbly on the gravel drive.
Hamish ducked toward me, flipping his hair to the side of his face.
“Mom’s out,” he said.
I had never stopped thinking of Hamish as the boy who played with Emily in the sandbox in the community park at the end of my street. “Hamish is going nowhere-fast,” Natalie said in the years after Hamish Sr.’s death. She seemed happy about it. As if she’d lost one Hamish, but this Hamish was sure to stick around.
“Out where?”
“She’s on a date,” Hamish said, and smiled. His teeth were as white as stadium lights. Natalie had told me that he bleached them every six months.
I didn’t know which was stranger, that I found myself in the driveway of my oldest friend after killing my mother or that Natalie had gone on a date without telling me.
“I just remembered I wasn’t supposed to say anything,” he said. “Don’t tell her, Helen. I don’t want to get her mad at me.”
“No worries,” I said-two ridiculous words that I had picked up from an Australian-born administrator at Westmore. It applied to everything. “The kiln has exploded.” “No worries.” “I’m canceling Thursday’s Life Drawing class.” “No worries.” “I’ve murdered my mother, and she’s rotting as we speak.”
“Seriously, Hell,” Hamish said. He had picked up the nickname habit at Valley Forge Military Academy, where Hamish Sr. had forced him to go to develop moral fiber.
“I’m not feeling too well, Hamish,” I said. “I’m going to sit down.”
I opened up my car door again and positioned myself sideways with my feet on the gravel. I bent from the waist and propped my body up with my elbows on my knees.
Hamish squatted down beside me. “Are you okay?” he asked. “Should I call Mom?”
The light from the hanging lantern came beneath my open car door to illuminate what met the ground. I saw Hamish’s shoes in the dust and my own thoroughly filthy jazz flats. I edged them off with my toes while Hamish watched. I thought of the day in the basement when he had cupped my cheek.
“Will you lie on top of me?” I asked.
“What?”
I looked up at him, at his beautiful prematurely creased face, the freckles that peppered his nose and cheeks from too much time in the sun, his blazing white teeth.
“You trust me, right?” I said.
“Sure.”
I did not stop to wonder what I looked like. I stood up, and so did he. I opened the door to the back and crawled in across the bench seat.
“Get in,” I said.
I thought of my mother on the cold cement floor. I lay on my back with my feet hanging out over the drive. Hamish crawled in but sat on the edge of the seat with the open door behind him.
“I’m not sure what this is,” he said.
“I’m cold,” I said. “I just want to feel your body on top of me.”
I wanted to fuck him.
I closed my eyes and waited. A moment later, I could feel Hamish gingerly-too gingerly-place his body over me. He was bracing himself against the backseat and still resting most of his weight on the floor.
“I don’t know what you want,” he said.
“I want all of you on me,” I said, opening my eyes.
“Hell,” he said. “I’m…” He glanced down his body instead of finishing the sentence.
“Just put your full weight on me,” I said. “It’s fine.”
And then, within a moment, his body-all, what was it, 185, 190 pounds?-was laid out on top of me and pressing down. I felt his erection against me, the tops of my feet jostling the middle of his shins, his face to my right, his ear a seashell tunnel beside mine. I thought of the phone in my mother’s kitchen. How many times had it rung before stopping?
I brought my right hand up and ran it along his side until I found the edge of his T-shirt, then slipped my hand up under it and onto his bare skin. He grunted beside me, an animal waiting to be touched. Sarah had had a crush on Hamish, growing up.
“We can do anything,” I said.
It was as if I’d turned a key. He raised his head. His eyes looked dreamy and distant in a way I’d never seen the eyes of my best friend’s son.
“Sure, baby,” he whispered, and I tried not to hear the tone in his voice. A tone I was aware he adopted with the women I’d seen riding on the back of his motorcycle. They wore ludicrous shorts while wrapped around Hamish’s Kevlar-encased torso and legs. I tried to picture myself clinging on to him. He had more than once invited me to do so, but I had always declined. “He has the hots for you,” Natalie had said once, and the two of us had laughed together as we drove off to some sort of pitiless exercise class while Hamish peeled off in the opposite direction on his Japanese death machine.
His lips were pendulous, ridiculous, young. I reached my arm up and pulled his head down to kiss them. I was beginning to feel his weight, his bones against my bones. I would have wished it could be different than this, that I could have fucked my best friend’s son without having to be made aware of it. I tunneled into it, firmly now, as I realized thinking was not going to get me anywhere. Morality was just a security blanket that didn’t exist. All of it, what I had done and what I was doing, was not leading me perilously toward the edge of a cliff. I had already jumped.
I tugged upward at Hamish’s shirt, and taking his weight away from me for a moment, he peeled it off over his head. He was beautiful, his chest muscular and divoted, but his beauty was as much about youth and a life still ahead of him as anything else. I felt a stab of regret.
I turned my eyes away from his face and unbuttoned my pants. As he rushed to help, he bumped his head on the inside of the passenger-side door. It made a horrible hollow sound. I thought of Mrs. Leverton hitting the ground outside her house six months ago. How she had called through the bushes to my mother to get help. How the enemies had fleetingly bonded. They were desperate to be able to continue living on their own in their own houses.
Mrs. Leverton thought I was a degenerate, a failure as a wife who modeled nude for a living, but in one solid sense she was envious of my mother. Mrs. Leverton had a son who wanted to do everything for her, but “everything” was an assisted-living facility attached to a nursing home with a pricey hospice program. “Everything” was paving the road to her death with his money. He would line her way to the grave with gold when all she really wanted was to be allowed to die in her own home.