This will be be hard, Max thought. So hard. He considered his options. He could make up a story about where the water came from. A hole in the roof? Maybe a window had been left open. He wished he’d thought of that sooner. Animals might have come in, tracking snow …
But he had never lied to his mom before and could not do it now. Instead, almost without thinking, he threw off the covers and got out of bed. He walked into Claire’s room and heard the squish of the carpet under his feet. Standing in the doorway, her eyes wild, she saw the bucket and Max’s snow clothes. She bent down to feel the floor and took in a quick breath.
“Did you do this?” she asked.
Max nodded and shrugged at the same time.
“Max, what were you thinking?”
He couldn’t remember. His thoughts had scattered again, into a dozen tiny holes.
She ranted for a few minutes, using her most colorful language, before returning again to the question: “What were you thinking?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“It’s hard to explain.”
She was on her knees now. “This is not good, Max. All this water … It could soak into the beams. It could cause permanent damage to the house.”
This news brought Max to the verge of tears. He wanted this to be temporary. He wanted it all over by dinner. Now the prospect that he’d ruined the house brought an endlessness to the day that crushed the light inside him.
She left the room. Max could hear the opening and slamming of cupboards as she cursed quietly to herself. She was gone a few long minutes. She returned with a pile of towels. “Come on. I’ll help you clean it up.”
They spread towels on the floor, trying to soak up the water. While they were on their knees, she noticed the water on the dolls, the pictures torn from the wall.
“Oh my god,” she said. “The walls? The walls? What the hell is wrong with you?”
Max was wondering the same thing about himself.
She left the room and walked down the stairs. Max heard nothing for many minutes but he dared not move. He heard the car start, roar for a minute. Was she leaving? Then she turned off the engine. Finally he heard her walking up the stairs again and soon she was by his side again, on her knees, helping with the towels on the floor.
“What happened to you two?” she asked. “You used to be so close.”
This made Max more sorry than before.
“I don’t know,” he mumbled.
She let out a sigh that filled the room. “I really need you to help keep this house together, Max,” she said. “I need you to be a force of stability, not chaos.”
Max nodded gravely. Keep the house together. Force of stability. On their hands and knees, Max and his mom continued to place towels on the carpet, trying to soak up the mess beneath them.
CHAPTER V
Max ate his dinner in his room, a plan of action that seemed the best for all concerned. He could hear Claire and his mom and Gary below, ticking and clicking their way through a quiet meal. He hadn’t apologized yet and Claire hadn’t either, and he was of the opinion that allowing the near-death of a brother was worse than soaking the room of a sister. After dinner he heard her leave, off to a babysitting job across the river.
When he was sure she was gone, Max stepped quietly into his mom’s office in a corner of the back porch where she’d set up a desk and pair of bookshelves. The porch overlooked the back yard, black in the cold night, nothing out there but grey tree trunks, their bony fingers pinching brittle, shuddering leaves.
His mom was on the phone, typing on her computer, loudly, like someone pretending to type on a computer. Tap-tap, slip-tap, tap-tick-tap. Her long black hair fell forward, covering her cheeks; a strand was stuck to her lips. She seemed to notice Max but did not look directly at him.
He stepped down into the office, keeping close to the wall. He almost knocked a photo from where it hung, but steadied it. In it, a dozen of his mom’s friends had gathered at a New Year’s Eve party she’d had at the house. Max had been allowed to stay up until twelve, “running around like a friggin maniac” one of the friends had said, laughing, drinking his drink. Late in the night they had built a small fire in the backyard, roasting first a pig and later marshmallows, the guests drinking until they passed out all over the yard and living room and the bedrooms upstairs. The picture showed everyone sane and sober, but Max knew that things had changed later. Later he saw so many strange things: someone hiding in the bathroom, a fight between two of the men, adults on the floor everywhere, grabbing at each other and Max. Someone, at some point, went missing in the woods and wasn’t found for hours. “Last time I do that,” his mother said afterward, though it had been fun, everyone agreed, on balance.
With her phone conversation dragging on, it seemed like a good idea to begin crawling, so Max got down onto all fours and crawled along the edge of the wall until he made his way to the back window. He breathed heavily on the cold glass, making a rough oval of condensation. He drew an apple onto it, liking the crisp line his finger made.
On the phone, his mom’s voice was thin and uncertain. “Do you know exactly what Holloway didn’t like about the report?” she said, pulling the hair from her forehead.
Max’s eyes fixed upon something under her desk: there was a red paper clip bent into the shape of a dragon. He did not want to attract attention, so he slithered, as slowly as he could, toward the paper clip and grabbed it. It was covered in a rubbery casing and felt good in his hands. With a similar length of rubber-covered wire, his father had once used a Swiss Army knife to cut the casing back and then twisted the metal into the shape of a swan. His father could do anything with a Swiss Army knife — or any knife, really. He would make things with his hands and then toss them to Max as if to say, It’s just this thing. Take it if it means anything to you. Max had kept everything he’d ever made — swans, yo-yos, pull-toys, a kite made from vellum and sticks from the backyard.
“I just don’t know where to begin,” his mom said. “I feel like I have to start over and even then I don’t know what he wants.” Her voice quavered, and he wanted to do something to make her feel stronger. So often, when she seemed upset, when someone on the phone was making her cry, he didn’t know what to do. But this night he thought he knew the solution.
He got up, and adopted the posture of a robot. He was very good at his robot imitation and had been told as much many times. He entered her peripheral vision, walking and sounding like a robot — a robot, he decided, who had a slight limp. She had laughed at this before, and he thought she might laugh today.
“I feel like that’s what I did,” his mom said into the phone. “Isn’t that what I turned in?”
Finally she saw Max and forced a smile. He continued walking, turning his head to smile at her, pretending that he was not noticing that he was about to walk into the wall. Thunk. He hit the wall. “Ohhh noo,” he said, in a voice half robot, half Eeyore. “Ohhh noo,” he groaned again, trying to walk through the wall, his robot arms rotating futilely.
She laughed, first silently, then out loud. She snorted. She had to cover the receiver to avoid being heard.
“That’s okay,” she said, recovering. “No problem. I guess I just have to get started. I’ll have it in the morning. Thanks Candy. Sorry to call you at home. This’ll be the last time. See you tomorrow.”
She hung up the phone and looked over at Max.
“Come here,” she said.