today?” Nana handed a glass to him, and he sipped, nodding yes.
“You let Billy take them all home again?”
“You know I hate to clean those things.” Billy was the third of seven children. Mr. Bergin drove trucks when Eastern Shore produce was moving, and drank when it wasn’t, so the fish would be welcome at the Bergin table. And Dylan really hated cleaning them. But he liked fishing with Billy.
Nana smiled briefly, looking from one boy to the other. James and Dylan might both be called serious boys. James was lean, despite his round face. Dylan was stockier with wide, swimmer’s shoulders. Most people, if they saw Dylan and James together, would see the resemblance. They both had crew cuts over high, intelligent foreheads, and the ruddy rounded cheeks of their Gaelic Northwest Ireland ancestors. There was a trace of those fierce, fragile island people in their deep-set, dark brown eyes. They were both good students, and avid readers, though James had not adjusted well to high school. They shared a devotion to boy’s mystery and detective stories. One or the other was likely to receive a Hardy Boys mystery, or Tom Swift, or Encyclopedia Brown book for their birthday, and it was not long before both had read it. The books often came in the mail a day or two before their birthdays, from their mom.
They liked to argue about the stories they read. “Anyone would know she was the murderer,” James might say, or point out a twist in the story as being too farfetched. “Tom Swift wouldn’t be all that great without his father’s money.” Dylan liked heroes, and James liked attacking them. Dylan liked the way James challenged him, Nana could tell, and the brothers were close, despite the difference in their ages. But sometimes James could be harsh.
“Nobody’s all good,” he would say to Dylan. “The sooner you get that straight,” he’d continue, tapping the side of his head lightly, “the easier it’ll be on you.”
Nana sighed. James and Dylan were sipping their drinks, watching her.
“Boys, I have some hard news.” Nana set down her glass with care. “I don’t know how to tell you in pieces, so I am just gonna tell you. Your mother—I guess she was real sick.” She placed a hand on Dylan’s arm. “I didn’t know. Even your father-” she glanced at James, pausing to catch her breath. “”Your father didn’t know until just a little bit-”
Nana gulped at her lemonade, her look a cross between anger and frustration. “She was real sick, and now…she is in a better place. Your momma has passed.”
A sound like an owl screech escaped James, and he turned his back on them, rigid on the top step, facing down the sidewalk.
Nana turned to Dylan. He looked dumbly at his glass. He had an idea he was supposed to be sad. He guessed he might be a little. He nodded, as if he understood. But he didn’t.
Nana was funny about pictures. She kept photos of her family in the front room–ancient black and whites of smiling young people, most dead now. Dylan’s father was in a couple of the pictures, along with Sam’s three older brothers, and Nana, and Nana’s own husband, Walt Paxton. But there were no pictures of Dylan’s mother.
In a drawer in the sewing room were several of Maureen, smiling and holding James. There were also a couple of Maureen posed with James, David, and Sam. She was thin, with bobbed light brown hair, much like his, thick and well-mannered. The light had done a funny thing in the pictures. He couldn’t make out her eyes. That was pretty much how he pictured her. A woman in her twenties, before and after David disappeared, with a dark blur under her bangs where her eyes must be.
Each year, James and he would receive a gift from her on their birthdays, along with a short note. Nana always said the same thing—“This came for you.”—and Dylan had followed his brother’s habit of opening the gift and note in private. Once he had asked James about the notes he got, and James had replied, “It’s always the same stupid ‘How are you? Miss you. Hope you like the book.’” James had never mentioned the notes, but Dylan had once seen the stack of them at the bottom of a desk drawer under a cigar box.
No one ever said much about Maureen’s leaving, and David’s disappearance. Nana once, maybe fearing that Dylan would blame himself for his mother’s departure, tried to explain. But her words sounded like she was at the far end of a tunnel. He couldn’t make them into something he cared about.
James mumbled something, his back still to them.
“Sorry, son?” Nana responded.
“Where is mom—where was she?”
“Your mom was somewhere around Houston, Texas. I got a call from your father, from California. She got real sick, and she talked to your dad just days before she died. Then another man called your dad to say yes, Maureen Paxton had passed. She was only 39 years old.”
Nana rocked, her face clouded. Dylan watched his grandmother out of the corner of his eye. For a second, she looked much older, like her neck had collapsed into her shoulders, and she was shrinking like the evil witch in the Wizard of Oz. He turned to her, startled, and she was normal again.
A puzzled look crossed over her face. “She told your father she was sorry and wrong. Over and over. I think it really helped him. He sounds—so different now. I guess she finally healed up enough to see how other people must hurt about it too.”
This last elicited a bitter snort from James.
Nana patted Dylan’s hand. “I am sorry too. Sorry for her short, sad life. But she did accomplish some mighty good work.”
“She did? Like what?” James turned for an instant. His face was twisted and deep red. Dylan swung his legs to coax the glider to move, and drained his glass.
“Why, she made you of course.” Nana smiled, and bent to pour them more lemonade.
Nana had another piece of news.
“Your dad is coming home.”
4 / Superman’s Rocket
Seasons changed, but James’s life was still. In the place where his mother used to live, James had draped a dark shroud. Not a lifeless, droopy thing, but a breathing, expectant shadow. It pulsed with anger and hurt, and he stoked it like a furnace. For James, the world was forever tilted since that April morning.
“My bike fell over. My bike fell over. Let me go. My bike fell over.” He chanted in a cadence to distract his father, who already was traveling to a different place on a ride without controls that was picking up speed.
Mrs. Somers had been only too glad to let his dad use her phone. She’d set James down on her porch glider, trying to calm him. He remembered not breathing, and the hiccoughing terror, and snot pouring down his chin. James hadn’t understood what was wrong. But he sensed his father fleeing after the baby, and the screeching was his own voice. It lasted until his air was gone, then a viscous sucking. Dying. First his mother, waving goodbye, smiling, to live at bus. Then David. How did he climb from the buggy? And his father, eyes empty, licking the lips in a hollowed face. The sound of the sirens, piercing between his cries. His father stumbling off the porch and back across the street to stand beside the carriage.
His father seemed to shred like Superman’s rocket from Krypton. Pieces of his dad flaming up in his own wake, ripping away. Two police cars arrived together. The first pulled up alongside his father, the second nosed to the bumper of the first. Four police heaved out of the cars, stepping slowly toward his dad, glancing down the empty street.
“You
