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There’s a poster with Peter McVries’ face posted outside the grocer’s.
Actually, there are a few posters with Peter McVries’ face posted outside the grocer’s. They’re in the window in a line, one after another, freshly printed and still crisp at the corners. They must’ve gone up in the last twenty-four hours, replacing promotions for low prices and when local vegetables will be in season. It’s not a Peter McVries she recognizes. He’s mean-mugging the camera, close-up, tough and terrifying with his scar and his dark eyes staring out so dull and serious. That’s not how Ginnie Garraty is used to seeing him. At home, he’s melancholy at worst and sunshine at best, tickling Ray and laughing loud enough to shake the windows. At home, he’s gentle help with the dishes and singing softly along to the radio while the suds soak into his and Ray’s hands. The bold, bright text talks about recruitment, the fine print about productivity and brotherhood and the importance of the Walk — State-approved, nothing that would ever come out of Pete’s mouth without a gun to his head.
They repeat all the way down the windows, covering the usual advertisements, all the way to the door.
Ginnie steels herself to walk by them all, one by one, and keeps her eyes on the pavement. Springtime weeds burst through the cracks under her feet. Maine is in full bloom. The lead up to the Walk is always a celebratory thing here. Maybe it’s like that everywhere, but she wouldn’t know. All she knows is Freeport — and Freeport is on the Road. Every year, the stubborn handful of boys who manage to make it days into the Walk limp their way down Main Street. Posters are hung, usually, in shop windows. Sometimes the town hall gets a fresh coat of paint. Odds are run in the paper. Official bets are run through the post office, but quieter, smaller gamblers place theirs at local businesses. Bets between coworkers, between friends, between family members. If my Walker wins, you have to do all the dishes for a whole month! Spectators aren’t allowed, not unless it’s the final two, but there are always a few busybodies staring out the doors of the open shops along the strip, at the beauty salon and the butcher and the bank.
She’s never been eager to spectate. There’s a certain fascination to it that captures the attention, but she’s never been able to shake the impending sense of doom that comes with it. Maybe it’s because the first year of the Walk, before they knew it would be an annual thing, was the same year Ray took his first steps. She and William didn’t watch it on television that year, because he was off on a long haul and she was alone with the baby. She’s never been able to think about or talk about or watch the Long Walk without imagining her own baby there, his steps beating down against the pavement. He used to run ahead of her on Main Street, down the empty middle of the road when there were no cars on Sundays, and she’d have a terrible premonition of her boy, bloodied and beaten down, trudging along with a carbine pointed at his head.
William used to tell her she was being a worrywart, when she said things like that. That’ll never be our boy, he laughed, brash and bold and bearded and so, so beautiful. And he’d draw her into his big arms and kiss her hair like he could protect her from anything and everything. So she’d believed him. She never had any reason not to.
But mother’s intuition is a real thing.
Walking Main Street has been hard this past year, after seeing Ray there during the Walk. Ray doesn’t remember, she knows, but she’ll never forget. She’d never been so terrified, not in her whole life. Not when she went into labor and William was off on a haul. Not when the Major showed up at the house and dragged William into the street with a gun to his head. Seeing Ray — her boy, her baby — covered in filth and begging for a hug, desperate to apologize. Warning, Number Forty-Seven. The gun, the massive carbine, leveled at his skull, his sweet sweat-soaked red hair. She was screaming, but the words escape her now if there were any. Don’t do this in front of her! And Pete’s arms around him, hauling him back onto the Road, forcing him to walk, dragging him away from her.
Thank god for Peter McVries, she thinks, not for the first time. It’s almost a constant mantra of hers these days.
The bell above the grocer’s door dings when she steps inside.
Ginnie makes quick work of the aisles, her basket hanging off her elbow. When Ray was young, she used to take an awful lot of pleasure in getting the groceries. It felt like fulfilling her role properly: wife, mother, woman, with her giggling baby in the basket. She’d never been like William, so ready to rage against the man. She’d only ever wanted a quiet life, a simple life, with someone who loved her. She used to linger for hours, chatting with the other shoppers, bemoaning the difficulties of working and childrearing and keeping house, all with their kids running around at their feet. These days, though, she keeps her head low and fills her basket quickly. It’s been that way since they lost William. In and out, as fast as she can.
The poster hung behind the register promises that YOU COULD BE NEXT, the words stamped above Pete’s photo in a crowd of nineteen others — and one spot left blank, waiting to be filled with whatever unfortunate soul survives this year.
The owner’s wife, Linda, glances to the windows, where the posters are taped up, and gives her an apologetic look as she packs the groceries into a brown bag. It’s not her fault, though, Ginnie knows. It’s State-sanctioned. Linda has always been good to them, never turned her or Ray away after what happened with William, even gave Ray jobs hauling boxes and babysitting when they had the money to afford paying someone else.
Not many in town were willing to socialize — or be seen socializing — with a dissenter’s wife and son. Before he’d been shot in the street, no one seemed to mind too much, because it was all talk. No one could prove anything. But after? They became something like social pariahs in Freeport. Few of their neighbors came to the makeshift funeral. Invitations to potlucks disappeared. The women’s church group she’d attended for years stopped calling her. It’s why she and John drive the twenty or so minutes over to Yarmouth for dates, where nobody knows them, where nobody’s watching and judging, where his liking her can’t affect his practice and his patients’ trust in him.
She knows Ray had it hardest, because kids can be crueler than gossiping grown-ups. Boys asked him questions about it, about whether or not the Major really came to their house and did it himself, if a bullet to the head really looked the way it did on television, if the stain in the street outside their house was from his father’s brains, if they’d really had to bury an empty casket because the soldiers took the body away. He’d gotten into a few fist fights over it. And that just made it worse. The girls tittered over him, but less because he was such a handsome young gentleman and more because his father’s sudden reputation had become his: a bad kid, someone to watch out for, not the type of boy who’s safe to date. Only Jan, who’d been his friend for so long, seemed immune to the rumors, though her parents certainly were not.
And Ray was so angry, so world-ending angry. Any young man would struggle, losing his dad, but Ray worshiped William.
Most boys do, she thinks. Idolize their fathers. But Ray — it was a whole different story. Maybe it was because William was away for long stretches, the life of a trucker, and he always brought back gifts: illicit records, banned books, whatever he picked up from whoever else was working the black market on his journey. Whenever William was home, Ray would hover around him like a buzzing bee. Dad! Dad! Dad! Didja know—? Didja hear—? Didja wanna see what I can do? He’d sit in the garage while William fixed cars for a bit of extra cash or whatever people were willing to trade for his labor between hauls, grinning his gap-toothed smile and telling his dad everything he missed. Mama and me went to the baseball field but it was too muddy to play. Mama and me knit you a sweater. Mama and me took a dance class, Dad, and I’m real good at it. William used to have to assign reading time for Ray and remind him to read really, really quietly, just to get a second’s peace. Ray clung to her, sure, but he wanted to be just like his daddy.
Losing him — and all his friends, too, just in case they got marked as dissenters for knowingly mingling with a dissenter’s son — it knocked Ray down a peg. Her popular, chatty, brilliant boy went quiet and angry and so lonely. He clung even tighter to her like she might disappear at any second, too, like the soldiers might snatch her off the streets if he wasn’t there. And people looked at them that way, too, crossing the road to avoid walking beside them. Ginnie couldn’t even blame them, not deep down in her heart. Nobody wanted the stink of William’s crimes to rub off on them. It wasn’t worth the risk.
When Ray was announced as the Walker for Maine last year, things improved. Freeport had never had it’s own Walker before, not once in nineteen years, and Ray was suddenly the talk of the town. Go-go Garraty. Maine’s own. Look at that good, patriotic boy, everyone said. Nothing like his daddy.
“How’s Ray doin’?” Linda asks, quiet in the din of shoppers, all midday mothers in their tired dresses and practical shoes.
“Better every day,” Ginnie answers, like she always does, even when it’s not true. “Doctor Patterson suggested getting braces for the boys’ legs before next winter, just in case. But you know Ray. Stubborn. Anyhow, the springtime is better for them, I think, than the cold.”
“Easier on the joints,” Linda nods sagely. Her husband is a good few years older than her, so she’d know all about aching joints. Her eyes flick to the windows. “And his . . . friend? He doin’ okay?”
Ginnie keeps her own eyes off the windows. She doesn’t know that boy, the one they’ve pasted on all the posters. That’s not the songwriter who’s living in her house. “Pete’s doing just fine, too.”
“And you, Ginnie? I know this year has been hard for y’all.”
That’s an understatement. The Walk itself was hard enough, all agony of watching Ray like that and wondering if he’d make it home, but the aftermath was double. Her boy in a hospital bed, alive only at the mercy of the Major and the wish of a boy in love. She’d wept, all snotty and wailing, when the doctors let her into his room on the coma ward and she caught her first glimpse of that awful scar on his face. Pete had been a silent statue at his bedside by then, more a piece of the furniture than a person to her. It took Ray a month to wake up. Unfocused eyes, garbled speech, no use of his hands, holes in his memory like Swiss cheese. And then another two months before he was well enough to come home. It was August when he limped across the porch with she and Pete holding him up.
Even now, almost a whole year later, and Ray’s still not the boy he was before. He probably never will be again. His movements are uncoordinated and arthritic, like a very small child or a very old man. He’ll walk with a limp for the rest of his life. His fingers can’t hold things quite right, and he’s still learning how to write again. If he ever drives again, it’ll be a miracle. His memory is still poked through with holes, and he’s always looking to them for reassurance, to fill in the gaps. And his stutter . . .
It’s hard to see him like this, her once-bright boy. But her grief feels excessive, inappropriate, when he’s alive in front of her, laughing on the porch in the sunlight. Alive — and forty-eight other boys are dead, forty-eight other mothers have lost their sons.
“I’m as good as I can be.”
She hands over her coin in exchange for her single brown bag, and marches out into the sunlight, past the scowling face of a Peter McVries she doesn’t know.
Around the back of the store, a car is parked, waiting for her. A 1955 Studebaker Commander, once a snazzy shade of blue and now grey with age. Ray had whistled like a soldier at a good-looking woman when he first saw it pulled into their drive. He was maybe sixteen at the time, fixing cars for a bit of extra money just like his dad because he was the man of the house. Jeez, doc, he said, you sure you want to trust me with this? And Doctor John Patterson had clapped him on the shoulder with a grin and professed that, if Ray was half as good with a car as his dad had been, he had no qualms whatsoever. Even offered to let Ray take it for a spin after the engine stopped making that funny noise.
The engine makes that funny noise now — Ray never did manage to make it stop for good — as John turns the key in the ignition and Ginnie slides into the passenger seat.
“All set?” he asks, tossing her a charming grin.
John’s a good man, a nice man. Quiet, sensible, the opposite of William, who’d swept her off her feet with his incorrigible zest for life and rebellious ways. He’d been a widower about as long as she’d been a widow and they’d always been fine friends. Still, she’d turned him down for a full year of him asking, because Ray was still finishing school and William’s death seemed fresh all over again every day.
She never wanted to upset Ray, or make him feel like she was trying to replace his father. Not that she ever could. She and John, they can never get married. Or, really, she can never get married. Not only because she’ll always love William and wear the wound of his loss like a badge of honor, but because she’s legally still married. The State doesn’t issue certificates of death to widows of dissenters. No real funeral, no obituary. Just a stain on the road and her son’s tears to mark that her husband was dead. She couldn’t bring herself to go down to the courthouse and apply for divorce on grounds of abandonment, which was the only way for a woman in her situation. And she hadn’t wanted to lead John on.
It was Ray who urged her to say yes, to go out on the town. I don’t want you to be alone, he said, and he’d only looked sadder when she answered: I’m not alone. I have you. It had made her feel like a burden, his drooping frown and furrowed brow. How could she put that on him, her loneliness? She’d thought, at the time, that maybe he was thinking of proposing to Jan, of starting his own family, and that she was holding him back. Guilt burrowed in her heart, and she said yes the next time John asked. It wasn’t until his name was announced in the paper, a whole year after she started seeing John, that she realized what she was really keeping Ray back from: the Long Walk.
“All set,” she says, but they’re already pulling out of the back lot and onto the highway.
Maine is a beautiful state, when it lets itself be. Winters are grey and slushy, all barren trees and rough coastal winds, but springtime breathes a new life into it. The grass on either side of the road is green, the trees bursting with buds and blossoms, farmland rolling lush and plentiful as far as the eye can see. Ginnie rolls the window down, her hand hanging out into the breeze, the scarf knotted under her chin keeping her hair in place. John passes her his cigarette and she takes a drag; she doesn’t smoke at home, only in the backyard in secret when she can’t help herself, so that Ray doesn’t see and get any ideas about doing it himself. She’d made a big stink when she caught him with a pack at fifteen and she doesn’t want him to think she’s a hypocrite.
The road to Yarmouth isn’t long, but it’s not short either. Far enough for anonymity. Far enough for no one to care who they are or who they might’ve been married to before tragedy struck. They ride in silence, only the radio and the wind for noise. They don’t need more than that.
They hold hands over the gearshift.
The sun is setting by the time they reach Yarmouth proper and John eases the car into the lot of the drive-in, putting a hand on the back of her seat to balance as he backs into their space. It’s competent and casual and it reminds her of the way Ray used to drive, the way she taught him to drive. He squints in the dying light as he tunes the radio, frowning behind his glasses. Grey at the temples, so distinguished. Ginnie admires him in the quiet, until her heel knocks against the paper bag and reminds her of their treats. Corn chips and Mallo Cups and two clinking bottles of bubbling, dark Moxie. John leans over to kiss her, a quiet and sensible peck. The bottle opener on his keyring pops the caps off and she laughs — no, giggles — when he wraps his arm over her shoulders like a high school boyfriend.
It makes Ginnie feel like a girl again.
The big screen flickers to life, a few commercial advertisements playing one after the other. Remember to get popcorn at the rundown concession stand. Sodas for sale, too. The night grows darker. They rip open their bag of corn chips. The lights change as the advertisement does and—
My name is Peter McVries. Number Twenty-Three. And I am the last Walker of the 1968 Long Walk.
Her head shoots up from where it’s been tucked into John’s shoulder. There, on the stained fabric screen, is Peter McVries. No smile on his face, his scar standing out stark and harsh against his cheek despite the makeup she knows they caked over it.
The boys I walked with walked bravely and proudly for their country, Pete is saying now, his eyes staring out over the crowd. I am honored to have shared the Road with them. He adjusts slightly on camera, his head moving like he’s changed the way he’s putting weight on his feet. His feet are ruined, too, just like Ray’s. Nowhere else in the world can young men have the opportunity to prove themselves to the whole of the country and be an example of the value of hard work, to live the true American Dream. We will be number one in the world again. You can be number one. The Long Walk is the answer. That’s why, this year, I encourage all young men between the ages of eighteen—
“Ginnie,” John whispers. His thumb runs over her shoulder, back and forth, soothing. “Darling, you’re shaking.”
These reels — propaganda reels, Ray would say, just like his dad — always play before movies, especially this time of year. It’s just like the posters. In the past, they faded into the background, something she saw and quietly disapproved of and never gave any more thought than that. But now? Now they’re impossible to ignore.
Suddenly, the warm spring evening seems very cold. Ginnie shivers.
Blinking, John’s arm retreats from around her. He hurries off his jacket, thrashing ridiculously, and lays it over her back, hooking the arms over her shoulders. “Should we go? Do you need me to take you home?”
Home? Yes, she wants to go, to take her boys in her arms and kiss them both on the head. To give Pete one extra, for all he’s been through. Sometimes it’s easy to forget all the horrors he’s seen, all the weight pressing down on him, when Ray’s stumbling around with his scrambled-egg brain and his unpredictable moods. But if they go home, the boys won’t be there. They’d planned a date night of their own, just two buddies stopping down at the diner for two fizzy glasses of Coke and a plate of fries to share. She’d planned to stay out late, late enough to give them some privacy. She can be happy for them, after all, and still not want to know what they get up to. And sneaking away to Yarmouth always makes her feel young and beautiful and free in a way that she hasn’t ever felt, not even when she ran off with William, falling in love the first time.
The only time, really.
She shakes her head, hands fisting around the lapels of his jacket. “The movie hasn’t started yet.”
“Ginnie,” he puts his hand over hers. “Let me take you home.”
“We already paid to watch.”
The film proper starts to stretch across the screen. John squeezes her hand. “A dollar I’m happy to waste.” He chuckles, shaking his head, and grins at her. “Besides, I don’t reckon either of us were planning on watching mucha the movie, anyway.”
She’s decent enough to blush, though she’d been planning the same; she was just too much of a lady to ever say so out loud. Years without William, she got lonely.
“John—“
“Ginnie.” He clucks her on her pointed chin. “You need to go home. Doctor’s orders.”
The ride back to Freeport is a lot less fun than the ride out, but it’s usually that way. Putting the coat of respectable middle-aged widower back on, stripping off the romantic young thing she still feels like when no one’s watching. There’s no room for that in Freeport. In Freeport, Ginnie’s a simple woman and everyone knows all her business — or most of it, anyway. No one knows about John, about her and John, except for the people in her house.
John turns the radio down when Pete’s voice starts to play out of the speakers. My name is Pete McVries and—
Luckily, they don’t have to drive all the way through town to reach the old house. They cruise off the highway and down the back roads until the porch light shines in the distance. No sidewalks on the street, that’s saved for the town proper. Her old jalopy is parked haphazard in the driveway, to her surprise.
“Oh,” she says, “the boys are back.”
John nods, the engine quieting under the turn of the keys. “The boys. So Mister McVries is still crashing with you?”
“Yes, Pete still lives with us,” she answers with an absentminded laugh, bending to retrieve her purse. She checks the inside of her handbag — spare change, identification card, a single old penny candy, a discreetly hidden tampon and even more discreetly hidden condom, though neither are really necessary anymore — and snaps it closed. John can keep the corn chips and what’s left of the sodas. “Things haven’t changed that much since your last house call.”
Because he does visit in a professional capacity, from time to time. It can be hard to get the boys into town, to the doctor’s office. Sometimes it’s just easier to have him stop by — and Pete can afford the extra charge for home care, with his winnings.
“I just — isn’t it awful to have a houseguest for so long? Surely it’s starting to feel a bit cramped. I can’t imagine sleeping on the couch is good for his back.”
It’s a reasonable assumption to make. No one would think that Pete and Ray have been sharing an old twin bed for a year. That would be uncomfortable for two fully grown men. Inappropriate. “Pete isn’t a houseguest,” Ginnie says. “He’s family.” And suddenly she’s more eager to see and check on him than Ray, to erase the memory of that mean-mugging son of a bitch from the movie reel. Leaning over the gearshift, Ginnie presses a kiss to John’s cheek. “Good night.”
It’s nice to see the wooden slats of the porch again, after months hidden underneath snow and ice and melting salt. Ray used to sand it down and repaint it every spring, and William before him. It groans under her sensible heels and the door answers in kind when she pushes it open by the handle.
“Hi, Mom,” Ray calls from where he’s sat at the table.
Even from the door, she can see that his round chin is red, a little sore looking. She imagines — oh, yup, here comes Pete, rushing in from the garage in rumpled jeans and the pit-stained undershirt Ray wore yesterday, his jaw a little rough and prickly around the edges. If his skin pinked up like Ray’s, she imagines he’d be just as red around the mouth just as often.
They think they’re sneaky, these boys of hers. But she sees them. In the mornings, she spots the way Pete walks up behind Ray’s chair and bends to press his nose behind his ear, lips to his freckled neck. Hears him whisper good mornin’, baby. And Ray’s response, his hand petting over the back of Pete’s neck to keep him there: g-g-g-good morning, husband.
She sees the ring on Ray’s finger, the one none of them have had the courage to mention.
Sometimes, in the night, she can hear their bed creaking. That old bed groans and gasps for any movement, she knows; it used to be a comfort, hearing her little boy roll over in the night. But that first time she heard it — after Ray sat her down while Pete was in the shower and said I’m in love with him, mama — her whole body froze in fear. She had the horrible wish that it was one or the both of them tossing and turning through another nightmare, that soon enough they’d wake up screaming and crying, that maybe Ray would end up wetting the bed again in terror. And then she’d felt so terrible for thinking so that she cried. Sometimes the bed creaking stops after a minute, just a shift atop the mattress. Sometimes it goes on and on and on and then she’ll hear the door open, hear the bathtub run, hear the stairs creak as one or both of them take the sheets down to the laundry. She’s long since decided it’s not her business, what kind of creaking it is. But when they spend the days like that, all blushy and sweet on each other, it’s hard not to make assumptions.
If they’re going to try to sneak around, the garage is a better place for it. The sound doesn’t travel up to the second floor; it’s why she and William used to fight there, if they had to fight at all, so Ray wouldn’t hear them. And, sure, they got handsy in there, too, when they needed some alone time and didn’t want Ray snooping around at the creaking of their bed frame. It was a handy little space, a tool bench and a sink with running water, and the backseat of the old junker William had been working in when he was Squaded.
It seems her boys have figured that out for themselves.
It’s hard to see them like this, even though she’s always known Ray was . . . different. No mother wants her son to have a touch of the lavender; it’s not safe. And it terrified her, when he was little, so she always tried to steer him away from it. She put undue emphasis on how nice his friendship with Jan was, how much Jan liked him, what a good girl she was and what a good wife she’d make. He loved her, she knows he did, but she could tell his heart wasn’t in it. He dated her to make his mother happy, to try to be normal after seeing what abnormality gets you. Even now, it makes her a little sick to think about, her son with another man. But her discomfort feels embarrassing and childish, when he’s not just alive but happy, truly and impossibly happy. When he has someone who loves him enough to give up everything for him, even his own life. When he’s loved kind of way everyone should be loved, but especially Ray.
“Look this way, baby,” Pete says and takes Ray’s red chin in his hand, tilting his face up to the yellow light shining from their kitchen ceiling.
And when the light hits just right, she can see that it’s not beard burn on his chin, not at all, but instead the beginnings of a bruise — a bruise that travels up the unscarred side of his face to his cheekbone and his eye.
“Ray!” she shrieks, her heels clip-clopping across the kitchen tile in her rush to the table.
“Mom,” Ray sighs, slumping into Pete. It jolts the wet rag of melting ice he’s holding to Ray’s face. It’s pinked up from the blood, thinned by the wet fabric, coming from a scrape below Ray’s eye. “I’m f-f-f-fine. We’re f-fine.” He grins and his teeth are pink, too. “You should see the o-o-other guys.”
Slowly, John walks into the kitchen with his hands on his hips. “What in the hell happened to you two?” He tuts his tongue at Pete and gestures him out of the way with a limp wave of his wrist, taking the rag from him. “Oh, son, let me take a look. I’m a doctor, after all.” Pete steps to the side, but it’s clear he doesn’t want to. His eyes never leave Ray, his forehead wrinkled in stress, his nails coming up to his mouth to be chewed. John shakes his head down at her son. “Now, Ray, I thought you stopped getting into fights.”
“I don’t st-st-st-start fights,” Ray winces away from the ice. “I f-finish them.”
Ginnie hovers. Anxious. Useless. “Pete, what happened?”
He shrugs his dark shoulders. Ray’s shirt is too big for him, loose around the collar and the body if not in the shoulders, and it hangs off his frame like a statement. Even all folded up like he is, his biceps are impressive. His frown is, too. There’s blood smudged on his neck, dried down lighter than his skin, now that she knows to look for it. He looks like the sort of man who’s not to be messed with. He looks like the man on the poster, the same far-away stare in his eyes. “Some guys had some not-so-nice things to say while we were out on the town, that’s all. Ray didn’t take too kindly to it.”
Yeah, that sounds like her son, alright.
Ray tries to rear back, but John’s hand on his head holds him steady. “Oh, f-fuck that, Pete. They shouldn’t have b-b-been saying that shit to you.”
“I don’t give a damn what people say ‘bout me, Garraty.” Pete’s low voice is soft and stern all at the same time. “You shouldn’t, either.”
“But you’re my guy.” Under John’s arm, his hand reaches out in offering. Pete takes it and gives it a squeeze. “I’m not just g-gonna let people t-t-treat you like that.”
“They called you worse. Hell, Barkovitch said worse to both of us,” Pete says with the air of a reminder.
Barkovitch. Number Five. A nasty little blonde thing, with a camera in his hands. Ginnie remembers all of them, all forty-eight boys lost on that road, their names and their faces. They’d all been in the paper, the yearly spread of Walkers listed in alphabetical order by state, their pictures with their ages and weights and the number to call to place bets. She’d felt like a real heel, staring down at those little faces and praying for their deaths if it meant only her son came home. Those poor boys. Their poor mothers.
“And I sh-should’ve made him e-eat concrete for it.”
“You know, Ray,” John says absentmindedly, “the Christian thing to do is turn the other cheek.”
“Yeah, well, I’m n-n-not Christian,” Ray says. “And my other cheek is already fucked up.”
John looks to her in alarm. It’s a hell of a thing to say, but it can’t be much of a surprise. William refused to attend church for a long time and Ray followed right along after him. Everyone knew her husband and son wouldn’t be at the church luncheon, that her son’s baptism was as good as null and void. But they were quiet about it, still. Since the Walk, though, Ray’s lost a bit of his filter, can’t be trusted to keep his mouth shut when he should.
“Language, Ray,” she scolds without spirit.
Pete shuffles uncomfortably, still chewing on that cuticle. “Is there anythin’ we should be watchin’ out for?”
It’s a good distraction. Doctor, patient, diagnosis. John uses the edge of the towel to wipe away the worst of the carnage from Ray’s face and goes for the bactine that’s sitting in the old first aid kit she’d missed Pete lug in from the garage. “Well, he‘s only a bit banged up,” John says.
“But we still countin’ this as a head injury, right? What if he has another seizure?” Pete asks.
Ray sighs. “Pete, I’m f-f-fine.”
John raises his brows. “Did he have one?”
“I d-don’t even r-r-r-r-remember it,” Ray says.
Pete nods, his thumbnail coming out of his mouth. “In the hospital, right before he woke up from the coma. He hasn’t had any more, but they said we should be on the lookout, just in case.”
That was the scariest part of the hospital, in the time before Ray woke up. When he twitched, and hope rose in her chest, and then he started thrashing and she screamed wordless and Pete ran as well as he could to get the doctor. She raised a burly boy who wasn’t afraid to use his words or his fists — in that particular order, thank you very much — but, for the last year, Ray’s been fragile as a baby bird, in a way he hasn’t been since he was an infant swaddled in her arms. And she’s been terrified for him for so long.
“Pete,” Ray pulls away fully from John’s patient hands, and shoves himself to his feet to take Pete’s face in his hands. “I’m okay.” He lowers his voice to a whisper. “I’m okay.”
Pete cuffs a hand around the back of Ray’d neck and gives him a hard little shake, like you might with a dog. “Boy, if you don’t stop scarin’ me half to death.”
A chortle bursts out of Ray. “You l-l-like me that way. There w-weren’t even any g-g-g-guns this t-time.”
“God help me,” Pete sighs. “You certainly keep life interestin’.”
Ray drops his forehead to Pete’s shoulder, buries his face in Pete’s neck. Pete’s fingers slide up into his hair for just a moment, petting softly over the nape of his neck. It’s not casual, but it could be. War buddies get close like that, don’t they? Children cling to their friends like that, don’t they? They’d slept like that on the Walk, holding each other up and keeping each other going, trading off heads on shoulders and eyes open — and they weren’t the only ones. Number Forty-Eight helped a boy make it through that first late night. Number Forty-Six and Number Six held each other up, too. Lonely boys, boys without a buddy, they didn’t make it as far. The whole country saw it. The whole country accepted it then. Why is it too close, too inappropriate, in the privacy of their home, when it wasn’t on the road?
“All tuckered out, hm, Ray?” Pete hums, all soft and adoring like Ginnie used to talk to Ray when he was a toddler.
John looks like he’s about to say something about it, mouth opening with an opinion sitting on his tongue, so Ginnie says: “Why don’t you take him up to bed, Pete? Get his teeth brushed and pajamas on. We’ll clean up down here.”
Ray rumbles something about being able to get himself ready for bed, all young man stubbornness, but Pete just laughs and gives him a shove towards the stairs. They make sounds of annoyance at their weight as the boys trample up to the second floor. She waits to hear the bathroom door close before she starts packing up the first aid kit. There’s old gauze and the like spilled across the kitchen table, like Pete tore through it a panic. It was probably Ray, she thinks, who pushed a rag into his hands and told him to get ice from the freezer in the garage; he’s had enough experience with nursing his own wounds, in days past, though she doubts he remembers that now. Muscle memory, maybe.
“Ginnie,” John says softly, folding the rag carefully and laying it over the edge of the sink. “I think we need to talk.”
The first aid kit closes with a metallic clink. It can stay on the table for now. The boys can put it back where it belongs in the morning. “I’m sorry tonight did go how we planned. I’ll make it up to you.”
He shakes his head and adjusts his glasses. Together, they move towards the front door, cutting a path through the living room between the television set and the couch. “No, that’s not it at all.” She expects them to step out onto the porch and kiss goodnight, but he stops at the door and turns to her. “It’s about Mister McVries.”
She blinks. “Pete? What about him?”
“I’m worried it’s not good for Ray, to have him around like this.” John steps in, his hands on her arms, and lowers his voice. “Darling, I worry he’s taking advantage of Ray.”
Her hands go a little numb. Not from pressure or anything medical and concerning, but from sheer nerves.
And, sure, she’s had the same worries at the beginning, in her less charitable moments. Trying to rationalize it away, blame someone else for the way Ray’s turned out. Telling herself that Ray is fragile and impressionable and childlike now, that he feels obligated or indebted to Pete, that he’s too broken down and scrambled up to know he’s being taken advantage of. But that’s all empty excuses. Ray is the one who cried out for Pete in the hospital, every time he woke up and he wasn’t in his direct line of sight. Ray is the one who insisted they would share a bed when they finally brought him home. Ray is the one who snuggles into Pete’s side on the couch and directs his arms around him, who draws the curtains just to kiss him in the living room. Ray is the one she hears whisper I wanna play mommy and daddy when their bedroom door is closing behind them. Ray is the one who told her point-blank that he was in love and he’d leave with Pete if she didn’t like it, that between her and Pete there was no choice at all. Ray’s been this way since he was little, she knows, even if she’s the only one left who remembers what happened with Jimmy Owens.
“I don’t really think that’s your concern,” she says primly. “Ray’s not your son.”
John almost flinches — almost. A professional mask slips over the set of his mouth. “But he is my patient. And I can’t, in good conscience, stand by and say nothing. Homosexuality is an illness and that man is trying to infect Ray. Every day you let him linger in this house, he’s making Ray sicker and sicker—“
How can he say that Ray is sick, that Pete is sick, when they’re both getting better and better every day? When a year ago they were walking to their deaths and now they’re brushing their teeth upstairs like normal boys? If he could see them laying out on the grass in the sun and laughing with their arms brushing, if he could remember the horror show they’d been this time last year with blood and sweat and shit all over their clothes, he would never say such a thing.
She pulls herself back from him. “Get out of my house.”
“I know you don’t want to believe it, not about your own son, but you gotta see what I’m talking about! He can barely walk half the time, couldn’t tell you his own birthday, Ginnie, but he’s getting in fist fights for that man. You’re really trying to tell me you’re okay with that? That it’s good he came home bloody and bruised tonight? You wanna act like you don’t know what those boys were calling them?”
“Get out,” Ginnie shoves at his chest, “of my house.”
“You should listen to her,” comes a low voice from behind, echoed by the deep growl of the old creaking stairs. Pete’s half in shadow, his hand tensed on the guardrail. “And leave, Doctor Patterson, sir.”
Ginnie steps back and feels Pete join her at the bottom of the short staircase, a protective presence at her side like Ray always has been. She wraps her arms over her chest. “Yes, I agree.”
There’s nothing left to be said. John nods once, firmly, and lets himself out. The door shuts behind him and then there’s a moment of silence, of nothing, until the headlights of the his snazzy car light up the front room and peel wildly out of the driveway. Only once they’re alone, really alone, do her shoulders begin to creep down from around her ears. A heavy sigh leaves her, disappointment and fear settling low in her stomach. Her numb hands rake through her hair, dislodging the clip holding her ponytail back.
“I’m sorry,” Pete whispers.
Her chest aches. “Oh, Pete, I wish you hadn’t heard that. Don’t listen to him for a second.”
He shakes his head and flaps a hand at the door. “Not that. For tonight. I should’ve been watchin’ our surroundin’s better, Missus Garraty. I should’ve — it’s just so easy, to get wrapped up in the way the world could be, you know? When it’s just me and him, it’s like the rest of the world, all the bad in it, like it doesn’t exist.”
That — that, right there — is why she can never be too sad about Ray being the way he is. Because he’s managed to find the most beautiful man in the world, the kindest and gentlest man, a man who’s seen all the bad and chooses to be soft anyway.
Thank god, she thinks, for Pete McVries.
“But I know better. I know better.” He starts pacing, walking back and forth across the living room back to the kitchen in his thick socks. “And I should’ve — Ray doesn’t know. He thinks he knows, but he doesn’t, not really. Me? I spent my whole life hearin’ all kinds of shit — sorry, stuff like that. Ray’s just not used to it, you know? Doesn’t know how to handle it.” He drags a hand over his head. “We weren’t even bein’ . . . lovey. Any two buddies could’ve been actin’ like us. I know how to act in public. I know how to act ‘round white people in public. I didn’t so much as put a finger on Ray, but . . . I’m famous now, didja know that, Missus Garraty? My face is all over town. I’m hard to miss. People pay closer attention. People wanna see what I’m doin’, wanna know why I wished for him.”
Ginnie takes him by the shoulders — and he flinches away like he’s expecting to be hit. He’s only a year or so older than Ray, but there’s something about him that’s aged faster on the inside. No naïveté, no blind idealism of youth, not for this poor boy. She puts her hands on him, soft and careful, and guides him into the garage. He goes on feet that move automatically, like a sleepwalker. And his mouth is still going, still talking, as they step down from tile onto concrete and the door closes behind them.
The garage smells stale, even with the window left open, like gasoline and old wood and boy-sweat. The dust has been brushed off most things, the sink wiped out clean, the safe under the toolbench emptied, and there are two clear handprints left behind on the hood of the car that were certainly not there before the dust was cleaned off. But she decides to ignore that. She goes across to the window, closes and latches it, just in case there’s anyone outside who might overhear. The toe of her heel clatters into a bucket, tipping it and dumping a rag into the floor. No, not a rag. His shirt, Pete’s sleeveless shirt, the one he was wearing earlier today, collar coated red-brown with blood.
“Pete,” she says, but it’s like he can’t hear her.
“So it’s—“ Pete’s voice breaks. “It’s my fault. It’s all my fault. Your doctor is right. I’m bad for Ray. I’m a bad omen. I bring bad things with me everywhere, ever since I was little. There is somethin’ rotten in me, there always has been.” His hand scramble at his shirt, like he could grab whatever’s rotten and rip it out. “And I — I try, I try so fuckin’ hard to be better, but I — I can’t.” He folds over himself, face in his hands. “He’d be better off if he never met me. He’d be — I don’t know, safe and married to a nice girl and perfectly normal.”
“If he never met you,” she says sharply, “he’d be dead.” That shocks his face up from his hands. It’s her tone, she knows, more than the words. “He’d be dead a hundred times over, if it weren’t for you. That first night, on that hill . . . he’d have gotten his ticket, if you weren’t holding him up.”
She remembers the way William used to talk. I don’t want Ray to end up like all these mindless sheep, he used to say, late in the night, in the quiet of the garage with Ray asleep upstairs. Passionate and rageful and desperate. Too beaten down by the State to find meaning in this world. I want him to be like me. He’s going to end up like me, if I have anything to say about it.
And the only reason he’s not — the only reason his brains weren’t splattered all over a road just like his father’s — is because of Peter McVries.
Pete blinks, slow like a cat. “You told Ray you didn’t watch.”
Ginnie smiles, but it feels sad on her face. “Oh, honey. Mothers lie to their sons all the time.” She sighs and tightens her ponytail. “Now, are you hurt?”
“Hurt?” He says it like he’s never heard the word before. “No, I’m not hurt, ma’am. I’m just fine.”
“There’s an awful lot of blood on your shirt for you to be just fine.”
Pete looks down, like he’s expecting to see it even though he’s changed. “Ray’s. It’s all Ray’s blood.” He shakes his head, runs his hand over the pit-stained shirt hanging loose over his stomach. “I tried to stop it. I tried to let it roll off my back, like I always do. But ignorin’ it didn’t make them go away and then Ray said somethin’ back and I saw fists start swingin’ and I picked him right up, swear to god. I got him around the waist and carried him out of there.” His dark brow folds and creases, his lips tugging down at the corners. “But Ray—“
“Ray’s a good boy and I love him to death, but he’s always been too emotional for his own good. He’s always jumping into things head-first, without thinking it through. Sometimes he gets himself hurt. Sometimes it works out and he brings a nice boy like you home. If we’re lucky, he’ll wise up sooner rather than later. But that’s his job, not yours.” She laughs through her nose, a good kind of grief pulling a sad smile across her mouth. She tilts her head. “You’re a good boy, too, Pete. You know that, right?”
“You tell me so, ma’am.”
“And what did I tell you about calling me ma’am?”
It gets a smile out of him. “Sorry. You tell me so, Ginnie.”
It’s probably his accent, but he says it just slightly wrong, the way William did when they first met and she had to say no, Gin-nie, like gin in a martini.
“That’s better. I’m going to tell you one more thing: you’re a good person.” He’s taller than her, but shorter than Ray. It’s not hard to catch his eyes. “Not because you saved my son. Not because you won the Walk. Not because you remember to pick up milk when you’re out or because you follow traffic laws or because you try to stay out of fights. Just by being you, every day, you’re a good person. You don’t need to worry about being rotten or being bad for Ray, ‘cause I know you’re not. I’m telling you now, Pete McVries, you are a good person and I thank god for you every day.”
He’s crying now, the quiet kind of tears that just roll down your cheeks without permission. Ray never cried like that; he was a big crier as a kid, all gasping breaths and theatrics, wobbling lower lip and fat tears and wailing. At some point, he stopped crying — or stopped doing it where she could see, where she could hear, stopped calling for her to soothe him. It wasn’t until he was in the hospital after the Walk that she saw him cry again, no longer a little boy but a fully grown man. The hospital was the last place she saw Pete cry, the only time she’d seen Pete cry.
She fights the urge to wipe at his tears, just like she would for Ray. He’s such a dear boy. But she really doesn’t want to embarrass him.
“I try,” he promises. “I try really hard.”
“I know. I see it. It’s the trying that matters.”
Pete’s got big eyes, big dark eyes, like a puppy dog or a deer, like something gentle and sweet and made to be loved. And so, so sad. Gut-deep kind of sadness, the kind that took her out of her body when William died.
This might be the most they’ve ever spoken, just the two of them. Even in the hospital, they mostly sat together in silence, watching Ray sleep. Guilt sinks into her chest. This boy has lived with her for almost a year and she’s never taken the time to talk to him, to get to know him. Sure, Ray takes up most of their time — and it’s hard to pry him away from Pete, always clinging, like being on opposite sides of the room is too much — but she should’ve made more of an effort.
“You know what did it?” Pete says softly. “Ray was ribbin’ me, sayin’ I’m handsomer in person than I am in my posters. That’s what made those boys take notice.” To say she’s surprised would be a lie. It might be an innocent joke, but Ray’s never been able to hide the adoration in his eyes when he looks at Pete. “If we were anyone else on the street, it wouldn’ta meant anythin’. But I showed too much of myself on the Walk. Stupid in love, I guess. I didn’t — I didn’t think I’d have to live with it, after.”
“Well, I’m sure glad you’re here to live with it,” Ginnie says, patting a hand to his scarred cheek. She hasn’t touched it before — hasn’t even touched Ray’s, he won’t let her — and she’s surprised to find it’s as soft as the rest of his skin. “And that Ray’s here to live it with you. Even if it hurts sometimes.” She steps back, across the cement floor, and wraps her arms around herself. “Now, go on upstairs and get yourself to bed. You know Ray won’t sleep until you’re with him.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He catches himself, one foot in the garage and one foot on the kitchen tile. “Yes, Ginnie. Good night.”
“Good night.” It’s been a long day. It’s absentminded, instinct, when she says: “Love you.”
But it’s also true.
Pete freezes, a deer in headlights. A long moment passes, like he’s not quite sure what to do with that. Though she knows Ray says it to him all the time, it’s different from her. A smile crawls across his handsome face. “Love you better.”
It’s funny — she always wanted another child, another boy. She and William tried for years, after Ray was born, but it never worked out. A missed period, then it could come two weeks late. It took a long time and a lot of disappointment before she’d come to terms with the fact that she was only ever meant to have Ray. Who would’ve guessed that she’d just have to wait a few more years and Ray would bring her the son she’d been missing? She never quite expected someone like Pete. Unconventional, sure, but undeniably right.
“No, you don’t. That’s a fact.”