careless? He’s deaf in his left ear from an ear infection he got when he was five. I am always explaining to his teachers that they need to remember to be on his good side when talking to him and that he startles easily if approached from his bad side.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I was just surprised by how cold you are. Here, take that off. I brought a dry sweatshirt.”
He does as I say for once, peeling off the sodden sweatshirt and tossing it aside. I pick it up. It’s not just damp, it’s soaked.
“What happened?” I ask.
He shrugs and pulls on the dry sweatshirt. Before he can pull the hood up, I examine his face. The moonlight casts deep shadows beneath his eyes and under his sharp cheekbones. When did he get so thin? A splatter of acne scars his cheek—or is that a scratch?
“Let’s get you home and warmed up,” I say. “Or do you want to go back to the dorm?”
He shakes his head. “Nah. The drama crowd is having a party.”
The drama crowd. As if he’s not a part of it. “Jean said you were great tonight,” I say. “Didn’t you want to go to the cast party?” I hold up his wet sweatshirt and give it a surreptitious sniff to check for alcohol, but it smells merely salty, like ocean and sweat.
He shrugs again and gets to his feet. “For a little while . . . but only because Lila was there. I had a couple of beers . . .” He looks away from me and hunches deeper into his hood. Because he’s lying about how many beers he had or because he doesn’t remember? A couple of times in the last few years Rudy drank so much he blacked out and couldn’t remember later what had happened.
“Did you leave Lila there? What happened? Did you guys have a fight?” I ask.
“She can take care of herself,” he says, his voice cold. “Besides, she won’t text me back.” He holds up his phone. His cracked screen shows a record of text bubbles all on one side. So I wasn’t the first one he texted. And he must have done something to really piss off Lila if she won’t even respond to him.
“Maybe she turned off her phone,” I say. “We could stop by the dorm.”
“Stop hovering, Mom.” He shoulders past me to walk down the path. “I’m not going to stand under her window with a boom box like in some dumbass, lame nineties rom-com.”
“Hey,” I say as I follow him on the narrow path. “That movie was 1989 and let’s not diss John Cusack.”
He laughs and I feel a swell of relief. It will be okay, I tell myself again. But just in case, I’ll call Lila in the morning.
WHEN WE GET home I drop the damp sweatshirt on the radiator and offer to make Rudy something to eat. He declines and slopes off to his room. I listen for the sounds of bedsprings, but instead I hear the ping his laptop makes when he opens it.
I think of going upstairs, but then I hear the door to the guest room open and Harmon’s footsteps head down the hall to our room. If I go join him he’ll ask me what happened and I don’t have it in me to tell him that Lila and Rudy had a fight, to see the look in his eyes that says he didn’t expect it to last.
Instead I open my laptop and spend the next few hours grading papers. Twenty-two research papers on The Scarlet Letter. Most of them have done a pretty good job. This was a good group. I’ve gotten through half of them when a ping alerts me to a Twitter notification. I follow so few people on Twitter that I click on it, thinking it might be from Lila and that I’ll get some feeling for her state of mind from it, but the tweet’s from Jill Frankel, the drama teacher.
Congratulations to all the people who made last night’s performance of The Crucible such a success!!!
I see she’s tagged Lila, so on a whim (and not, I hear myself explaining to an invisible audience, because I’m stalking my son’s girlfriend) I click on Lila’s Twitter profile. I’m touched to see that one of her most recent tweets is a photograph of her and Rudy in front of the Maiden Stone. Rudy is actually smiling in the picture. Oh please, I think,