The thump outside woke me up. Raccoons, I thought. Rolled over. If she’d just put the damn garbage lids on tight. . . .
We made a baby, Dominick. You and me.
They rape me!
Don’t think about it now, I told myself. Don’t think. Take deep breaths. Sleep!
1:07 A.M., according to the clock radio. Well, it was finally here: D-Day. The day of his hearing.
Joy rolled onto her side. She’d been cheating on me and now she was lying through her teeth. Hey, it wasn’t like I hadn’t been warned ahead of time. Miss Shoplifter. Miss Screw Her Own Uncle. Get through the hearing and then deal with it, I told myself. Watch her. Give her enough rope to hang herself. Hell of a way to be thinking about the woman you slept next to. . . . Come on, Dominick. Sleep.
I flashed on the Duchess earlier that night in our kitchen—him and his toasted pumpkin seeds. I bet that little flit knew who she’d been screwing behind my back. Whose baby it was. Joy told the Duchess everything.
Outside, another thump. Footsteps. . . . Footsteps?
I got out of bed and padded across the bedroom floor. The notes on Thomas’s hearing that I’d flung earlier rustled under my feet. Outside, a voice. By the time I got to the stairs, I was running.
I threw open the front door. “Hey!”
One of them grunted as they took off. Kids. I took off after them in my bare feet and skivvies—chased those bobbing baseball caps through two or three front lawns.
Stopped. Winded. . . .
Five years ago, I’d have had one or both of them down on the ground—would have had them wishing they hadn’t messed with my house. I stood there, my heart pounding like a jackhammer. Forty, man. Shit.
They’d wished the neighborhood Happy Halloween by egging car windows, snapping radio antennas. That jack-o’-lantern the Duchess and Joy had put out lay on our front walk in chunks, its broken mouth smiling up at the moon.
Now I was wide awake. Now I was up for the long haul.
Back in the house, I flopped onto the sofa, aimed the remote. Better to troll than think. Letterman was dropping dollar bills out a window. The Monkees—middle-aged, now—were hawking oldies. I surfed past CNN, the Catholic station, a couple of those 1-900 bimbos who wanted to share their “secret fantasies.” . . . She manipulated me with sex—used it whenever she wanted something. She’d done that right from the beginning. . . . The Business Beat, Rhoda Morgenstern, VH-1. Shit, man. I had to get some sleep.
“Dominick?” She was up at the top of the stairs. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.”
“Are you crying?”
“No. Go back to sleep.”
Later, back in our bedroom, I stumbled into my pants, groped around for my wallet and keys. “Where are you going?” her voice said. I’d figured she would have fallen back to sleep.
“Nowhere. Out.”
“Why were you crying down there? Is it about your brother?” I finished lacing my work boots and started out of there. “Dominick? Are you upset about the baby?”
While I was backing the truck out the driveway, the porch light went on. The front door opened. She stood outside on the stoop, arms crossed, those muscular legs of hers visible beneath her nightgown. Don’t talk to me, I thought. Don’t call my name.
Those asshole punks had egged my windshield. By rights, I should have gotten out and cleaned it off. Or turned off the goddamned motor and gotten back in bed with Joy—hung on for dear life, no matter what she’d done—no matter what she was trying to pull. Instead, I flicked on the wipers. They smeared a layer of shell and egg slime between me and my visibility and I remembered too late that the fluid well was dry. Fuck it, I thought. Threw her into gear anyway. Who the fuck else was out at this time of night?
I drove through downtown, up River Avenue, to Cider Mill and Route 162. My eyes burned, my stomach hurt, from sleeplessness. Everywhere I drove, smashed pumpkins were in the road. It hadn’t even been a conscious decision, really—me driving out there, past that shabby farmhouse of theirs. If she’d have just held on, I would have come around. Gotten over the baby. I know I would have. . . .
I pulled over. Turned the lights off but kept her idling. Walked past their jazzy mailbox, up their gravel driveway. I’d never come this far before.
The house was dark, their van parked in front of the barn. Good Earth Potters. I leaned against the side of it and looked up at the house. She’s gone for good, I told myself. You screwed up and she cut you off, same as he cut off his hand. She amputated you. You’re dead meat, Birdsey. Go home to the woman you don’t love.
Except I didn’t go home. I got back in the truck and hung a U at the next fork. Took a left onto the parkway. It was a relief to drive past the state hospital for once. The roads were slick from a mist so soft and light it seemed to hang suspended in the air around the streetlamps. I flicked on the wipers—pushed around the egg slime a little.
Driving through New London, I hung a left onto Montauk and headed for the beach. Parked, walked across the boardwalk and down into the sinking sand. At the water’s edge, little waves lapped in and phosphorescence bounced and winked at the toes of my work boots. Phosphorescence, man. Pixie dust. What was there about water?
When I came off the beach again, I saw a cruiser parked next to my truck. Engine and lights off. Waiting. Just him and me in that empty thousand-car parking lot.
A window whirred as I approached. “Evening,” the cop said. In the dark, he was a voice, nothing else.
“Evening.”
“Out for a stroll?”
“Yup.” It was like speaking to nothing. Like speaking to the goddamned mist. He started his engine when I started mine. Tailed me all the way back through town until I turned back onto I-95.
Driving over the Gold Star Bridge, I looked across the river at the halogen glow: Electric Boat, third shift. At EB, they were still building submarines around the clock—even now, with the Cold War on the respirator. Nautilus, Polaris, Trident, Seawolf: war and Connecticut had always had a romance going, a kind of vampire’s dance. “It puts food on the table, too, doesn’t it, wiseguy?” I heard Ray’s voice say. “You ate every night while you were growing up, didn’t you?”
Was that what Joy expected me to do? Be like Ray: be a father to someone else’s kid and hate the kid for it? Do a number on some poor little bastard his whole life? For a second or two, I could taste the bile that must have sat in Ray’s gut all those years: catch a fleeting glimpse of life from Ray’s perspective.
I exited in Easterly and drove up Route 22, out by the Wequonnoc reservation. As close as I can figure, that’s when I must have started dozing. . . .
In the dream, I’m my younger self, slipping and sliding on a frozen-over river. A tree’s growing out of the water—a cedar, I think it is. Beneath my shoes, babies are floating by. Dozens of them. They’re alive—trapped under the ice. They’re those babies the nuns told us about in Sunday school—the ones that died before they were baptized and had to stay stuck in limbo on a technicality until the end of the world. I worry about those babies—wonder about them, about God. If He made the whole universe, why can’t he just relax his own rule? Accept those blameless babies into Heaven? . . .
And then Ma’s in the dream. Alive again, up in the cedar tree, holding a baby . . .
A movement beneath the ice distracts me and when I look down, I see my grandmother, alive, under the ice. Ignazia. . . . I recognize her from the brown-tinted photograph in my mother’s album. Her wedding portrait—the only picture of her I’ve ever seen. We make eye contact, she and I. Her eyes beg me for something I can’t understand. I run after her, slipping and sliding across the ice. “What do you want?” I shout down. “What do you want?”
When I look up again, the cedar tree’s in flames. . . .
I awoke to a car horn’s blare. Jesus! Jesus!
A rock ledge rushed past, headlights crisscrossed in front of me. I veered to the right and drove over an embankment, unsure how far I’d fall.
There was an ugly scraping sound beneath me, I remember— the wail of my own Oh, no! Oh, no! My head bounced against the roof. Barreling toward that tree, I held out my hand to stop the collision. . . .
I was out for a little while, I guess. I must have been. I remember pulling my hand back inside the busted windshield. Remember the pain, the pulsing blood.
That same cedar tree grew in a pasture, not the river. A half dozen Holsteins stood staring at me, griping from the far end they’d run to when I’d come flying over their bank. Disturbed their peace. I grabbed a paint rag, pulled the tourniquet tight with my good hand and my teeth. I got out of the truck. Sat down in that frost-dead field.
The mist had stopped—had made way for a bright, hard-edged moon. Crumbs of windshield glass glittered in the hair on my arm. In the moonlight, my blood looked black.
Up on Route 22, I saw a vision: the steady flow of gamblers in cars, driving to the Wequonnocs’ casino. “What do you want?” I had yelled through the frozen river to my dead grandmother. “What do you want?”