Bare Legs Bare Lies

The lock clicked and I was already moving, keys still in my hand, bare feet slapping the concrete of the driveway. The porch light caught the edge of my dress as I ran. I didn't look back at the house. No point.

My son was in the passenger seat, belt already buckled, staring straight ahead through the windshield like he was watching a movie only he could see. Fourteen years old and he still waited for me to tell him what to do. That was the thing about Marcus. He'd sit in a burning building and not move unless somebody said the word.

I opened the driver's side door and looked at him. At the gear shift between us. At the bucket seats my husband had insisted on when we bought the car three years ago, back when we still pretended we agreed on things.

"Slide over," I said.

He didn't ask why. He just unbuckled and climbed across the console, long legs folding awkwardly, and settled into the passenger seat. I sat down where he'd been. The leather was still warm from his body. I swung my legs in and pulled the door shut, and the dome light clicked off, and we were in the dark together with the engine ticking as it cooled.

I looked down. The dress had ridden up past mid-thigh. I tugged at the hem but it didn't have much give. It was the kind of dress you wore to a party you weren't supposed to be at. Silk, pale green, nothing underneath it but me.

Marcus was wearing his baggy cargo shorts and that gray t-shirt with the hole in the collar he refused to let me throw away. His bare knee pressed against my bare thigh. Neither of us moved away.

"How are you doing?" I asked.

He shrugged. That was Marcus's whole vocabulary lately. A shrug, a nod, a grunt that could mean anything. His therapist said it was normal. His therapist said a lot of things that cost two hundred dollars an hour.

"You hungry?"

Another shrug.

I put my hands on the wheel. The garage door was still open behind us, a rectangle of yellow light spilling onto the driveway. In a minute I'd have to back out and then we'd be on the road and there wouldn't be any way to pretend we were just sitting here, a mother and her son, deciding where to eat.

"Your father's going to call," I said.

"I know."

"What are you going to tell him?"

Marcus turned his head and looked at me. He had his father's eyes, that flat brown that gave nothing away. But he had my mouth, wide and a little crooked, and right now it was pressed into a line.

"I'm not going to tell him anything," he said.

"Marcus."

"You said we were leaving. You said not to tell him."

"I said we were going to your aunt's for a few days."

He kept looking at me. Fourteen years old and he could already see through every door I tried to close.

"That's what we're doing," I said. "We're going to Aunt Deb's."

"Okay."

The way he said it. Like he was agreeing to something he'd already decided to survive. I wanted to shake him. I wanted to explain everything, all of it, the whole ugly mess, but he was fourteen and he was sitting in the passenger seat with his bare knee against my leg and I couldn't find a single sentence that wouldn't make it worse.

I turned the key. The engine caught and the dashboard lit up and the radio came on, some pop song I didn't recognize, and I turned it off.

"Put your belt on," I said.

He did.

I backed out of the driveway slow, the way you do when you're not sure you remember how to drive. The street was empty. Mrs. Patterson's porch light was on across the way, and I knew she was probably standing behind her curtain, watching, because she'd been watching all week. Ever since the ambulance came. Ever since the neighbors started talking.

I put the car in drive and we rolled forward, past the mailbox, past the oak tree Marcus used to climb when he was seven, past the house where the Hendersons lived with their perfect lawn and their perfect marriage and their two kids who never seemed to have any problems at all.

"Mom."

"What."

"Are we coming back?"

The question sat between us like something alive. I could feel it breathing. I could feel Marcus waiting, his whole body turned toward me even though his eyes were on the road.

"I don't know," I said. And that was the truth. The first true thing I'd said in months.

He nodded. Just once. Then he reached over and put his hand on my arm, light, barely there, the way you'd touch something you weren't sure was real. His fingers were cold. The air conditioning was too high. I hadn't even noticed.

I turned it down. I kept driving. The road unspooled ahead of us, dark and straight, and somewhere behind us the house sat empty with the porch light still on and the front door locked and everything we owned still inside it, waiting for someone to come back and decide what it all meant.

We drove past the edge of town. Past the gas station where Marcus had his first Slurpee. Past the church where I got married in a dress that covered everything and meant nothing. The streetlights thinned out and then stopped, and it was just the headlights and the dark and the two of us breathing in the same small space.

"Mom," Marcus said again.

"Yeah."

"Can we stop at McDonald's?"

I laughed. It came out of nowhere, a real laugh, the kind I hadn't made in so long I almost didn't recognize the sound. Marcus looked at me like I'd lost my mind. Maybe I had.

"Yeah," I said. "We can stop at McDonald's."

He smiled. Small, quick, gone before I could hold onto it. But it was there. It was real. And I thought, okay. Okay. We can do this. Whatever this is.

The road kept going. So did we.