Beautiful Ruins

You and Pat. Was it really that bad? Maybe. Three boyfriends ago, Coverall Carl, the contractor who worked on her house, had pushed her to get married, but wanted Debra to put Pat in a military school first. “Jesus, Carl,” she’d said, “he’s nine years old.”

And now, up to bat, P.E. Steve. At least his kids lived with their mother; maybe this time no civilians would get hurt.

She walked down the narrow hallway past Pat’s school picture—God, that smirk, in every picture, that same cleft-chin, wet-eyed, see-me smirk. The only thing that ever changed in his school pictures was his hair (floppy, permed, Zeppelin, spiked); the expression was always there—the dark charisma.

Pat’s bedroom door was closed. She knocked lightly, but he must have had headphones on, because he didn’t answer. Pat was fifteen now, old enough that she should be able to leave him home alone without some big speech every time she went out, but she couldn’t help herself.

Debra knocked again, then opened his bedroom door and saw Pat sitting cross-legged with his guitar across his lap, beneath a Pink Floyd poster of light going through a prism. He was leaning forward, his hand outstretched toward the top drawer of his nightstand, as if he’d just shoved something inside. She pressed into the room, pushing a pile of clothes out of the way. Pat took off the headphones. “Hey, Mom,” he said.

“What’d you put in the drawer?” she asked.

“Nothing,” Pat said too quickly.

“Pat. Are you going to make me look in there?”

“No one’s making you do anything.”

On the bottom shelf of his nightstand she saw the rat-eared, loose pages of Alvis’s book, at least the one chapter he’d written. She’d given it to Pat a year ago, after a big fight, during which he’d said he wished he had a father to go live with. “This was your father,” she said that night, hoping there was something in the yellowed pages to anchor the boy. Your father. She’d nearly come to believe it herself. Alvis had always insisted they tell Pat the truth once he got older, when he could understand, but as the years went on Debra had no idea how to do that.

She crossed her arms, like some picture from a parenting guide. “So are you going to open that drawer or am I?”

“Seriously, Mom . . . It’s nothing. Trust me.”

She moved toward the nightstand and he sighed, set his guitar down, and opened the drawer. He moved some things around and finally removed a small marijuana pipe. “I wasn’t smoking. I swear.” She felt the pipe, which was cool. No dope in it.

She searched the drawer; there was no marijuana. It was just a drawer full of junk—a couple of wristwatches, some guitar picks, his music composition books, pens and pencils. “I’m keeping the pipe,” she said.

“Sure.” He nodded as if that were obvious. “I shouldn’t have had it in there.” When he got in trouble, he always became strangely calm and reasonable. He’d break into this we’re-in-this-together mode that had always disarmed her; it was as if he were helping her deal with a particularly difficult child. He’d had the same quality at six. One time she’d stepped outside to get the mail, talked to her neighbor, and came back in to find Pat pouring a pan of water on the smoldering couch. “Wow,” he said, as if he’d just discovered the fire rather than set it. “Thank God I got to it early.”

Now he held up the headphones. Subject change: “You’d like this song.”

She looked down at the pipe in her hand. “Maybe I shouldn’t go out.”

“Come on, Mom. I’m sorry. Sometimes I fiddle around with things when I’m writing. But I haven’t gotten high in a month—I swear. Now go on your date.”

She stared at him, looking for some sign that he was lying, but his eye contact was as unwavering as ever.

“Maybe you’re just looking for an excuse to not go out,” Pat said.

That was like him, too, to turn it around on her, and to peg it on some real insight; it was true, she probably was looking for an excuse to not go out.

“Loosen up,” he said. “Go have fun. I’ll tell you what: you can borrow my P.E. clothes. Steve especially likes tight gray shorts.”

She smiled in spite of herself. “I think I’ll just go with what I’m wearing, thanks.”

“He’s go

“You think?”

“Yep: roll call, stretching, floor hockey, shower. That’s P.E. Steve’s dream date.”

“Is that so?”

“Yep. The guy’s fatuous.”

“Fatuous?” That was Pat, too, showing off his vocabulary while calling her date a moron.

“But don’t ask him if he’s fatuous, ’cause he’ll say, ‘Boy I hope so. I paid a lot for this vasectomy.’ ”

She laughed again in spite of herself—and wished, as always, that she hadn’t. How much trouble had Pat squirmed out of at school this way? Female teachers were especially helpless. He got As without books, talked other kids into doing his work, convinced principals to waive rules for him, ditched school and invented fabulist reasons for his absence. Debra would cringe during school conferences when the teacher asked about her diagnosis, or about Pat’s trip to South America, or about the death of his sister—Oh, and his poor father: murdered, disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle, dead of exposure on Everest. Every year, poor Alvis died all over again, of some new cause. Then, around his fourteenth birthday, Pat seemed to realize that he didn’t need to lie to get things, that it was more effective, and more fun, to simply look people in the eye and tell them exactly what he wanted.

She wondered sometimes if having a father around would have balanced her indulgence of him; she’d been overly charmed by his precociousness when he was little, and probably too lonely, especially in those dark years.

Pat set his guitar down and stood up. “Hey. I’m kidding about Steve. He seems nice.” He walked over. “Go. Have fun. Be happy.”

He really had grown in this last year. Anyone could see it. He’d gotten in less trouble at school, hadn’t snuck out of the house, had gotten better grades. Yet she was still discomfited by those eyes, not by their structure or color, but some quality in his stare—what people called a glimmer, a spark, a thrilling watch-this danger.

“Do you really want to make me happy?” Debra said. “Be here when I get home.”

“Deal,” he said, and stuck out his hand. “Okay if Be

“Sure.” She shook his hand. Be

“I’ll be home in three hours,” Debra said now. It would be five or six hours, but this was a habit; cutting the time in half so he might get in only half the trouble. “Until then, don’t . . . um . . . don’t . . . uh . . .”

As she looked for the proper scale of warning, Pat’s face broke into a smile, eyes tipping before the corners of his mouth began their slow climb. “Don’t do anything?”