Morning drinking isn’t usually my style, but I decide to go downstairs to Grady’s before I pick up the gun and drive up to see Rebecca. “Becky,” I guess it is. What I do know about her is that she took a perfectly nice name and white-trashed it. “Becky.” I hated her. A rush of dread washes over me, tempered with something else: fear. I know I should let the detectives handle this, but I also know I can’t.
Inside Grady’s, I’m surprised to see other people. Not many—a few old goats gumming the rims of pint glasses. Bloody Marys and Hamms beer on tap are two-for-one before 5:00 p.m. What a steal. I planned on just one, but I double fist it since the second is free. Just two. I can still drive and keep my wits about me, I tell myself.
It’s those first few sips that I love the most. The anticipation of momentary euphoria, the alcohol buzzing between my temples, warming my chest. After a couple drinks, though, I’m just chasing that initial feeling, and each subsequent drink isn’t as satisfying as it is necessary. After pounding the drinks with hot sauce and sucking down both Bloodys, I walk out into the overcast morning and get a cup of coffee even though the dehydration is making me headachy and I should drink water instead.
As I drive, I think about all the ways this could play out. I’ve gone over what I’ll say a thousand times, but I’m still not confident I know what will come out of my mouth. The fact that there is a gun under the seat is almost impossible for me to believe. I actually reach my hand under and feel for the box just to make sure I wasn’t imagining the whole thing. It’s there.
I picture Liam in my mind, and as angry as I am with him for betraying me, I can’t help but talk to him, and still love and desperately miss him.
The thought about mass shootings only reiterates that it could be any nutjob in the world—a fortysomething guy still playing video games and living in his mother’s basement who developed some sort of obsession with me, and I could be wasting precious time with futile pursuits, but where else can I look? I have to follow the threads I can see. It’s all I have.
My heart races as I pull up, slowly, wheels popping the crunchy ice that has formed overnight. The trailer looks dark and uninhabited. The fire pit from the other night is full of empty beer cans and covered in frost. Her car isn’t here. It doesn’t look like the boyfriend is home either, but I have to find out. I keep my car running and walk to the front door, looking over my shoulder. It’s quiet in the trailer park. The only sounds are the distant bark of a dog and a couple young kids wrapped in wool coats playing on a rusted swing set two yards over.
I swallow hard and then knock on the door and wait. There’s no answer. I knock again.
“Hello? Becky?” I call. Nothing. I look around one more time to make sure none of the neighbors are taking notice, and then I step up on a cinder block on the side of the trailer and peer through a window to get a look inside.
I only see a baby bouncer in the living room (it looks like), a coffee table cluttered with sippy cups and beer bottles, baby books and pizza boxes. It’s dark and there’s no movement, so I go back to my car. I shiver a moment, blowing into my hands for warmth and shaking off the cold. I hadn’t thought about whether I’d wait or not, but now I know I have to.
I wish I would have thought to bring a bottle of something. Maybe she’s just taking him to work and will be back, so I turn on public radio and pull the hood of my coat over my head and wait. By 10:00 a.m. I doze off, and when the howling scream of a little neighbor kid jerks me awake, I’m horrified I slept like that. The blasting heater in the car and lack of sleep for days has gotten the better of me. I wrench my head to see where the noise is coming from, but it’s just a boy, crying and red-faced with fury at his sister for taking his trike and riding off. A mother appears on a concrete step and stoops to pick him up and bring him inside.
I look at Becky’s house. Still dark. No car. I’m starving after forgetting dinner last night and having Bloodys for breakfast, and I have to pee. I start to talk myself out of waiting, but decide I can pee behind my car. It’s too cold for people to be around and the area feels deserted anyway, eerily quiet in the absence of the two screaming kids. I can’t wait. I wouldn’t even make it to a gas station.
I squat and try to keep an eye out at the same time without falling over. I remember a party Ellie and I went to years ago. A hot tub party in January. It was lightly snowing and maybe ten degrees, but Andy Sharp and his friends had gotten their hands on a bottle of peppermint schnapps. His parents were away for a few days, so we drank and flirted in his backyard hot tub, the steam meeting the cold air and enveloping us in a fog, lightly pierced by sprinkles of snow. It was magical and otherworldly. When Ellie and I had to pee, he didn’t want us to drip water into the house, so we squatted in the snow in dripping swimsuits, the steam billowing from our bodies. We held hands to keep our balance and couldn’t stop laughing. We used to be so close, and now I seem to widen the distance between us on purpose.
Three more hours go by with no sign of Becky. I find a stale snack pack of Fig Newtons in my glove compartment and eat a couple. Assuming the guy she’s with has a job, I don’t want to be here when he gets home. I need to talk about this with her alone. He probably doesn’t know about the affair, just like I didn’t, and the point is not to punish her, but to extract information I need, not that I care if it ruins her life. But it could blow up and certainly backfire if I handle it wrong. Even if he does know, speaking about it in front of him is a bad idea. I’ll have to come back.
I stop at a roadside diner with World Famous Waffle Fries and order the special. A waitress named Trudy with spiky platinum hair and pineapple earrings delivers a plate of runny eggs and oily potatoes that I eat without protest, I’m so hungry. I drain a couple oversize cups of water, trying to ignore the bleach smell, and I feel a little better. I don’t want to go home.
My mother has been unreachable since she called me, asking to see me. One of the games she plays. I’m already this far north, so I decide to drive to Elgin and drop in on her, whether she’s high or not. I want to try to see what she wants. It’s no doubt the police have talked to her in their investigation of me, and the days keep ticking past with no progress. Today has been a wash. I need to know something.
I get back in the car and head back to the dump I grew up in: the Crestwood apartments, a dejected, two-story building with a stony exterior and few windows. It rests on a bleak square plot with an overabundance of brown, overgrown grass and no trees. I find it astounding that my mother had managed to keep it this long without eviction. Section 8 and welfare probably cover just enough to provide the stability that enables her habit.
It hasn’t changed. When I was a kid, I thought the girls in the front stoop with their glossy lips and hoop earrings were the coolest girls I’d ever see, and the prettiest. I asked to take them to my school for show-and-tell once. Now, it seems comical that anyone would not recognize them as “escorts,” even a kid, but of course, we didn’t see the world that way then.
I still have the same key she gave me when we changed the locks the day my father left. Geoffrey and Lisa Bennett are still written on a tiny insert of paper on the front of the mailbox. It’s weird to see my father’s name, even weirder that she never changed it. She’s never gotten past him walking out. After a few knocks, I crack the door open and call out.
“Hello? Mom?” There’s no answer. The smell of urine and stale air make me cough and take a step back outside for air. I cover my nose with my arm as I go in, but the stench of soiled linen and decaying food in the unwashed dishes that are littered around the place makes me feel ill, despite my attempts to take shallow breaths.
“Mom? Are you here? It’s Faith.” I hear a rustling from the back bedroom. A couple of guys from the next apartment fall into the hall, laughing, high. Then one falls into the other and it turns into a fight, so I close the apartment door. My mother appears in a bra and sweatpants. I was right. She’s clearly been on a binge.
“The fuck? What are you doing here?”
“You called me,” I say.
“The hell I did.” She spits her response. I wonder if she really doesn’t remember. It’s very possible, so I don’t explain that I came earlier than we agreed; I just go with the idea that she forgot.
“You did.”
“Well, I ain’t got nothin’ to say to you, so you can go.” She sits. Mascara is smeared around her eyes, and her hair is a nest on top of her head that once must have been a ponytail. She’s sickly thin, but I’m not one to talk.
“Well, I came all this way, so maybe you can spare a few minutes.” I push. After a few minutes taking me in, she shakes her head.
“Shit,” is all she says, and then steps over the mounds of dirty clothes and booze bottles and boxes of God knows what. She manages to get herself to the kitchen, piled with dirty Tupperware and takeout boxes, blanketed with a fine, blue mold. She grabs a bottle of vodka and two plastic cups with Pizza Hut logos on them, and pours us a drink. She pushes some things off the small kitchen table to clear a spot. I stand there, watching her. It’s been so long, and she looks like a shrunken, morose version of the mother I remember as a child.
“Well then sit, for Christ’s sake,” she orders. Her phone blasts a country song and I jump. It’s an old pay-as-you-go flip phone, and she snatches it and answers.
“Yeah?” She disappears to the back room without a word to me. I can hear her explaining my presence to someone, the guy she’s currently seeing, no doubt.
“Well, I don’t the fuck know, do I, Jerry? Just get it yourself.” She closes a door, I think, because her argument becomes muffled.
I close my eyes to absorb the stillness of the room and remember sitting here as a child, the sweet heavy odor of vanilla cakes baking in the oven. That was before my father changed. Before Lenny Dickson moved into the building and offered him a way to take the edge off after his long days laying shingles, and coming home to two screaming kids and a nagging wife.
I was so young, but I remember feeling the changes. They were slow. It didn’t happen in days; it stretched over months. After he started to become different, I knew my mother felt like she was eternally walking on eggshells to assure his contentment. He was once a loving man, but he’d become so volatile. I know I remember that. She was not permitted to descend into unpleasant moods because there would be no one to keep us quiet in the evenings, assuaged with construction paper and crayons and our favorite television shows on the floor of the back bedroom. There would be no one to cook canned soup on the stovetop when he got home at night, or make excuses to the neighbors about the sounds they heard, or keep a part-time job to make sure the electricity bill was paid. These were her unspoken responsibilities.
I pick up my cup of vodka and look toward the living room. Before the change, the house was always warm and full of chaos, the TV always on in another room; it was filled with tacky afghans, doilies, Precious Moments figures, and kitsch. It’s all still here and hasn’t been updated since the midseventies; it’s now just covered in a film of filth and neglect. The kitchen is still a dull rust and green color with rooster wallpaper. The living room has burnt orange carpet to match. Cookies sit stale inside old, yellow Tupperware on the counter, a corded phone rests on the wall, and there are too many saved magazines and ashtrays filling side tables and countertops. A place suspended in time.
There’s a little snow globe up on top of the crown molding in the kitchen. I put that up there once when we were decorating for Christmas. That was probably twenty-five years ago. It seems impossible that I can go out in the world and find and lose jobs, fall in love, make unforgivable mistakes, hurt people, get my heart broken, develop wrinkles and cynicism, and change so completely from who I was in this house, and come home and that little Christmas globe hasn’t moved, probably not even to be dusted, through all of this—through a person’s whole life.
When my mother returns, she’s pulled on a tattered robe that doesn’t do much to conceal her bra. She picks up her vodka and lights a cigarette. When she sits, she wraps one leg around the other, and she’s so thin that her legs almost twist around each other twice.
“Well?” she demands, saying nothing else.
“Well, what? You called me, so...? You don’t remember why, I guess.” I’m not gonna put up with any shit; I can see how it’s going to be. Her fingers shake as she taps the ash off her cigarette.
“The cops are comin’ around,” she says, blowing out a nauseating wheeze of smoke.
“What did you say to them?” I ask urgently.
“Nothing. I told them to fuck off. But they’ll be back, so?” She stops and stares at me, eyes bulging.
“So...what?”
“What did you do?” she asks coldly.
“I didn’t do anything, Mother. What do you plan to say?” She could say any outrageous thing she was high enough to conjure up the next time they come.
“What do you want me to say?” she asks, and then I realize what this is about. She wants money.
“Well, what do you know about the situation?” I ask, knowing she barely knows her own name and might not even remember me telling her about Liam, inviting her to the funeral, any of it.
“Nothin’.” She hacks, a deep smoker’s cough rattling up her chest into a phlegmy ball she swallows away. “That’s why I’m askin’ you.”
“If you don’t know anything, then I guess that’s what you tell them.” I give her a combative stare. “Right?” I should leave the vodka alone and keep myself sharp, but I want it too much. I pick it up and take a swallow, feeling so let down that this is all she wanted.
“Then I’ll just tell them what I told the National Examiner when they was out here pokin’ around.”
“You spoke to a tabloid?” I feel the blood rush out of my face.
“They asked about your childhood. Said they’d give me five hundred dollars to talk with them. They was nice. I didn’t think you’d care since you already said all those nasty things about us in your books.”
“What do you know about my books? You didn’t read them,” I snap.
“Candace Lechers did, though. She told me all of the nasty stories you have in there, making us look like sickos to make a buck.” She coughs and spits again.
“First of all, sharing my personal stories helps people. Other victims are comforted to know that I’m not just giving out advice I studied, but that I truly understand...” But she cuts me off.
“Victim, my ass!”
“What did you say to them?” I demand.
“They took photos of the apartment, said it was good to have a visual of where you grew up.”
“Jesus,” I whisper in disbelief.
“What? Too good for this place, are ya? You were fed, clothed...”
“Just what else did you say?” I’m not going to get stuck in the same cyclical argument where she defends her parenting job because we didn’t end up in foster care.
“They asked about the stuff you said about your father in the book, if it was true. I said no fuckin’ way it was true.” Her hands tremor, and she reaches for a small glass pipe; she makes no attempt to hide it from me. She lights the base and inhales the rest of the white substance. It doesn’t take long before she’s calm.
I look at her, her black-spotted teeth and pockmarked face that used to be quite beautiful in her day. I’m so angry that I have an urge to hurt her. How could she do this to me? On the other hand, why am I surprised? I feel a flush of shame rise up in my checks at the thought of pushing her up against the wall by her neck.
“That’s what you told them? You told me to shoot him once, but I guess he wasn’t abusive. That was just a whim you had...”
“Abusive. Oh, for Christ’s sake, that therapy word. You overreact, Faith. You always have. It was his parenting style, that’s all. You kids turned out just fine.” She lights another cigarette off the first one. I catch a glimpse of the punishment closet in the hall leading back to the bedrooms. I wanted to ask her if she remembered when he found me filling his car with snow because I wanted to help him wash it. He raged like I’d never seen. I was only five or six. I tried to tell him I kept hearing “washed clean as snow” in Sunday school and I was trying to help. But there was water damage to the leather, and he pulled me by the arm and locked me in the closet. "I know it was for at least two days, maybe more. That’s where the panic attacks likely started, my first therapist told me. There’s no point telling her this. She was there.
One, two, three, four. I take a long, silent breath and turn away from the closet.
“You can disagree, Mother, all you want, and say that his parenting style was the same as the way he was raised and it was fine, but if you actually read the stories, each one of them is a true account of what happened, no matter your opinion on it, and you can’t deny the actual play-by-play, so you can’t tell a national tabloid that they’re lies.” I’m trying to stay as controlled as possible.
I look at the burn marks down her arms, raised up in scar tissue, and I have been working with victims in denial long enough to know that nothing I say right now is going to change her mind. I know that she believes what she told the neighbors. Not that he held cigarettes to her flesh until they made weeping holes and finally extinguished, but that she’s a clumsy cook. That’s all.
She still believes the story she rehearsed hundreds of times. There’s no point to any of this. I allow myself to be blackmailed because there’s no other way to control her, and I can’t have my own mother fanning the fire of lies and suspicion already burning out of control.
“How much do you want?” I stand; I’m done with this. I reach for my purse.
“Same as the paper gave me.” She curls her scrawny knees into her body like a child, and crushes out her cigarette.
“I don’t carry five hundred dollars in cash on me. I have forty. I’ll have to come back.” She takes the forty greedily.
“Okay,” she says, satisfied.
“You tell them you don’t know anything,” I say, “because guess what? You fucking don’t. Do you even know why they’re trying to talk to you?” I cram my wallet back in my purse and cross my arms.
“You musta did something.”
“Jesus,” I mutter. “They’re asking for current information that may help us figure out what happened to my husband. And you have no current information about anything, and you didn’t know him, and so you have nothing to say. That’s all you’re going to say. Leave anything having to do with my father out of it. That’s ancient history.”
“You think you just know everything. I bet your father is pretty goddamn pissed off at you for all the terrible things you wrote about him.”
“What?” I freeze at the thought of this.
“They should go bother him and see what he has to say about you instead of botherin’ me. Stupid fucking cops you got comin’ around here, making everyone nervous.”
“Do you know where he is?” I ask urgently.
“The cops should look for him and talk to him.”
“I’m sure they probably tried. Nobody knows where he is...” I pause and study her face a moment to see if I’ll get anything out of her. “Except maybe you.”
“I don’t know shit, I told you that a hundred times.” She stands and walks to the door so I’ll leave.
When my first book came out, I had the crazy idea that I might look for him after all the years that had passed, and maybe reconcile. Now that I was an adult and had money, maybe even get him help. It would be a sensational, touching redemption story. I found that he moved to Florida and only had a PO box. I wrote and emailed with no response. So much for that. I never cared to try again. Screw him. But now, what she said rings in my ears.
“I’ll be back with cash when I can,” I say. She doesn’t push me about when. She knows that I can turn her in in a second or get the place raided if I really wanted to. She only has so much leverage. Holding out on my father’s whereabouts is her best weapon.
She looks like a skeleton, standing in the dark backlight of the apartment door as I look back. I get in my car and exhale a long, slow sigh. I feel dirty and so tired. All I can think of is what she said.
I bet your father is pretty goddamn pissed off at you for all the terrible things you wrote about him. Not only might he be pissed off, he’s also a violent psychopath with a severe addiction. And no one knows his exact whereabouts. I’ve exposed all of his sins and made him look like a deplorable, utterly sick man, which I believe he is. My God. I don’t want to believe that he could be involved in this, but now it’s all I can think about.