Theo Read Free Page B

Noises. Two rooms. He stands outside, between the rooms, listening. He feels funny, and kind of hollow. He also gets stiff, and knows about that. He doesn’t want the noise to be his mother, but he doesn’t want to find out. He listens longer, then scuffs back down the hall making more noise, hitting his hand along the wall as he walks, holding his hand on his pajamas. Alex pants behind him.
    Someone may wake up, but Theo hopes not yet. Behind him down the hall a voice now sings, somewhere; muffled, hard to tell if it is a man or woman. Something in it makes Theo think: Mom. And he makes a face and runs, getting to the stairs and thumping down them, running down the stairs. The last time she smiled and flicked it with a finger, kissed him on the cheek and said it’s okay, love, a beautiful natural thing. That was awful.
    Colin, somewhere below, is yodeling.
    Gazebo, Theo thinks.
    Theo keeps flapping down on the carpet, to the cool tiles of the entry hall, feet now slapping like fish, he likes the sound, and toward the swung-open tall slab doors and over the car hood, scrambling and out and down the stone steps and onto the gravel bit ouchouchouch like on hot pavement and onto the grass, moist because the sun hasn’t reached this side yet, but everything is light, and he runs to the right down the line of windows and the wild bushes crazy with flowers and stems sticking out and untrimmed and reaches the edge of the wingand goes right again and past more windows, running, and the trees are getting bigger, and he dodges a rusty bike he had forgotten about and runs into the rear lawn and toward the gazebo and there’s a naked guy sitting in it, cross-legged. The man has long hair and a sharp face and something’s wrong with his arms. They stop at the elbows. And he’s naked, and his eyes are closed. Theo stops running.
     
    New people always showed up: his mother brought them home or they followed her. Sometimes they were friends of Colin or, very occasionally, of his father. These he liked best; he liked them because they knew his father and being around them was a little like being around his father.
    His mother attracted people, collected people, like pets. She called herself a broker, sometimes, said she should get a cut, she bridged worlds, that was her art, she said, a waving cigarette veiling her face as she talked to Theo sleepy in bed, him waking with her stroking his face, smiling lopsidedly at him, or crying. Sometimes, however, what she collected wasn’t nice like that; when they wanted things and took stuff or got loud or pushed and she let them. Sometimes she screamed at them, hit them, got other people to hit them: he’d heard it. He’d seen her point guns.
    It wasn’t always clear what the rules were, what you had to do to make her mad. Theo believed it mostly depended on how long it had been since his dad’s last stopover. Sometimes it happened after drinks and amber bottles with medicine labels and small ceramic boxes with flip tops and the skull with the top cut off and the white powder, yellow powder, brown powder, on book covers or tables or glass-covered pictures laid flat. Sometimes there was blood on the glass after. One timeone of the dogs had gotten really sick after licking something from a low leather-topped stool. Theo was really worried. After that it wasn’t hard to understand that it could do bad things to people.
    He stayed away from all that as much as he could, but as much as he could wasn’t much. Theo had to figure out a way around it kind of all the time.
    Theo was hoping to have the gazebo to himself. Even though the house and the land are big, like the last house, sometimes it is hard to be alone. A lot of the time adults think he needs babysitting, or that they need to do what they call ‘playing’ with him, because there aren’t other kids around. But it is the opposite of playing, and mostly he just wants not to be noticed. People fuss over him, rub his hair. Ladies hug