Mr. X - By Peter Straub Page 0,1

Peoria on my birthday, June 25. I took the envelope into my room, dropped it on my desk, put Gene Ammons’s Groove Blues on the turntable, and, once the music began flowing into the air, opened the envelope and looked at the card my mother had sent me.

Balloons, streamers, and lighted candles floated above an idealized suburban house. Inside, beneath the printed Happy Birthday!, she had written the only message she ever put on one of her cards:

My beautiful boy—

I hope …

I hope …

Lots o love,

Star

I knew that her wishes weren’t for a happy birthday but an untroubled one, which would have been happiness enough. A half second after this insight opened the door, the first adult recognition of my life slammed into me, and I saw that my mother slighted my birthdays because she blamed herself for what befell me then. She thought I got it from her; she could not bear to think about my birthdays because they made her feel guilty, and guilt was the emotion free spirits like Star could least handle.

The sound of Gene Ammons playing “It Might as Well Be Spring” soared out of the speakers and passed straight into the center of my body.

In khaki shorts and polo shirts, the Grants were monitoring the progress of herbs and vegetables in their garden. In the moment before they noticed me, I experienced the first in about a month of those What’s wrong with this picture? moments, an animal awareness of my incongruity in this sweet suburban landscape. Danger; shame; isolation: exposure. Me and my shadow, there we were. Laura turned her head, and the bad feeling vanished even before her face warmed and somehow deepened, as if she knew everything going on inside me.

“Action Jackson,” Phil said.

Laura glanced at the card, then back into my eyes. “Star could never forget your birthday. Can I see it?”

Both Grants liked my mother, though they liked her in different ways. When Star came to Naperville, Phil turned on an old-fashioned courtliness he thought was suave but Laura and I found hilarious, and Laura made room to talk by going out with her for an hour’s shopping. I think she usually slipped her fifty or sixty bucks, too.

Laura smiled at the elegant white house and birthday-party froufrou on the front of the card and looked up at me. The second grown-up recognition of my life flew between us like a spark. Star had chosen this card for a reason. Laura did not evade the issue. “Wouldn’t it be nice if we had dormer windows and a wraparound porch? If I lived in a place like that, I’d impress myself.”

Phil moved closer, and she opened the card. Her eyebrows contracted as she read the message. “ ‘I hope …’ ”

“I hope for that, too,” I said.

“Of course you do,” she said, getting it.

Phil squeezed my shoulder, getting into executive mode. He was a products manager at 3M. “I don’t care what these clowns say, it’s a physical problem. Once we find the right doctor, we’re going to lick that thing.”

“These clowns” were my pediatrician, the Grants’ GP, and the half dozen specialists who had failed to diagnose my condition. The specialists had concluded that my problem was “not of organic origin,” another way of saying that it was all in my head.

“Do you think I got it from her?” I asked Laura.

“I don’t think you got it from anybody,” Laura said. “But if you’re asking me does she feel terrible about it, sure she does.”

“Star?” Phil said. “Star would have to be nuts to blame herself.”

Laura was watching to see how much I understood. “Mothers want to take on anything that could hurt their kids, even the things they can’t do anything about. What happens to you makes me feel terrible, and I can’t even imagine what it does to Star. At least I get to see you every day. If I were your real mother, and my only chance to end world hunger for the next thousand years meant I had to go out of town on your birthday, I’d still feel awful about letting you down. I’d feel awful anyway, real mother or not.”

“Like you weren’t doing the right thing,” I said.

“Your mother loves you so much that sometimes she can’t stand not being Betty Crocker.”

The idea of Star Dunstan being anything like Betty Crocker made me laugh out loud.

Laura said, “Doing the right thing doesn’t always make you feel good, no matter what anybody says. Doing