Leo’s racquet scooped low for the shot. Thwock! The ball skidded up the back wall, arced high across the court, and grazed the front wall six inches from the floor.
“And I am,” he shouted, “the King of Racquetball!”
“Nice shot,” I conceded. “Okay, that’s it. Your game.”
He’d just whipped me three in a row—something he’d never been able to do before. Soaked with sweat, out of breath, we headed for the rain room.
“Hey, Birds,” Leo called over, midshampoo. “You got time for a beer?”
I told him I didn’t—that I had to get dressed and get out of there.
“Yeah? What for? You got a hot date or something?”
I cut the water, grabbed my towel. “Hot date with Ray’s social worker,” I said. “We’ve got to go over his Medicare stuff.”
It was a lie. Joy had called, out of the blue, the night before. She was in Three Rivers visiting friends, she’d said; she wondered if she could come over and see me before she went back. Just to say hello, show me the baby. I’d said no at first. What was the point? But she’d kept pushing: we hadn’t seen each other in almost a year, there was so much that she wanted to tell me about. Had I gotten the picture she’d sent of Tyffanie?
That hospital mug shot: for some stupid reason, I’d stuck it on my refrigerator door. Joy promised she wouldn’t stay long. A fifteen-minute visit and she’d be on her way.
“Must be a bummer, huh?” Leo said. “All that convalescent-home bullshit?”
“It’s doable,” I said. “Especially now that Ray’s mellowed out a little.” If I had told Leo about Joy, I would have gotten a lecture about how I didn’t owe that bitch anything. How, after what she’d tried to pull, I should have just told her to go to hell and hung up on her. I knew it was stupid, meeting her; I didn’t need Leo to point that out. But fifteen minutes was all she’d asked for. You could live through anything for fifteen minutes.
“Hey,” I said. “Let me see your deodorant, will you? I was in a rush getting over here. Forgot all my shit.” The truth was that I’d been distracted—nervous about Joy’s visit.
“Geez, I don’t know, Birdsey,” Leo said. “I’m not sure I want to make that big a commitment to you yet.” His Dry Idea came flying at me. “Hey, Dominick. Guess what I heard today? From Irene?”
When I looked over at him, he was pulling up a pair of jazzy boxer shorts. “Whoo-ee,” I said. “Where’s my sunglasses? When’d you start wearing those things?”
“Since I read what jockeys do to your sperm count,” he said. “But listen to me. I’m serious. She said that Big Gene told her—”
“Who said?”
“Irene. Their accountant. She says Gene told her he’s thinking about retiring at the end of the year. Doing some traveling with Thula. I think that tumble she took over at the house kind of scared them a little. Forced them to reevaluate things or whatever. . . . End of this year, Birdsey. Nobody knows yet.”
“I don’t believe it,” I said. “They’re not going to have to carry him out of there?”
I laced up my sneakers, went over to the mirror to calm my hair down a little. I’d forgotten my hairbrush back at the house, too. If I’d known that seeing her was going to get me this bent out of shape, I’d have stuck to my guns. I raked my fingers through my hair. That was all she was getting: a quick finger-comb. I didn’t even owe her that much.
“Hey, Dominick?” Leo said. He had that anxious look on his face that he gets sometimes. I was pretty sure I knew what was coming. “Let’s say he does pack it in. I mean, I’ll believe it when I see it, too, but let’s say he does. . . . You think I’d have a shot at General Manager?”
Poor Leo: he was the Rodney Dangerfield of Constantine Motors. All those years down at that place, and all he’d ever really wanted was a little respect from his father-in-law. That, and his own office—a desk parked off the showroom floor. But, sure as hell, the partnership was going to bypass him and name Costas’s son, Peter, as General Manager. Big Gene would kick Leo in the balls one more time. Break his daughter Angie’s heart by breaking her husband’s agates. No doubt about it.
“I think you got a shot at it if the partners have half a brain among them,” I said.
“You think I could handle it?”
I looked at his face in the mirror, behind my face. My answer was important. “You kidding me?” I said. “You’d do a great job.” That was the thing with Leo: for all his bullshit, all his bluster, he’d always registered a little low in the self-esteem department. He should have left that dealership years ago.
He nodded, pleased with my answer. “Yeah, my time has come, I think. I’ve had their best sales the last four months in a row. Did I tell you that?” He knotted his tie, banged his locker door shut. “I’m freakin’ forty-three years old, man. I’m the father of his grandchildren.”
“Hey, speaking of which,” I said. “What the fuck you worrying about your sperm count for?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Us sex machines just worry about shit like that.”
We left the gym, headed toward our cars. I was easing out of the parking lot, stewing again about Joy’s visit, when Leo tooted, motioning me to wait. I braked, rolled down my window. He pulled up beside me. “Hey, I heard something else today,” he said. “I’m not supposed to say anything. Angie would kill me. It’s about her sister.”
My hands gripped the steering wheel a little tighter. I waited.
“She and Danny? They’re splitting up.”
I just sat there, nodding, unable to think.
“It’s not another woman or anything. It’s one of those stay-friends-but-go-their-separate-ways deals. He wants to move back to Santa Fe and she wants to stay here.”
“It’s definite?”
“Far as I know. At first she was going with him, but then she did an about-face. Hey, don’t call her or anything, Dominick. Okay? Angie would murder me. The Old Man and the Old Lady don’t even know about it yet.”
I said I wouldn’t say anything.
“So anyway, about that other thing? You really think I got a shot at it?”
“What? . . . Yeah. Absolutely.”
“You think I could handle it, though? Right? Be honest. It’s not like I majored in business or anything.”
“You majored in acting,” I said. “That’s better training for that place. And anyway, you had their best sales the last four months in a row, you just swept me in racquetball. You’re fuckin’ invincible, Leo.”
He grinned. Nodded in agreement. “I’m fuckin’ invincible.”
Driving home, I wondered why the news about Dessa wasn’t elating me. I’d been waiting for years to hear what Leo had just said. For years . . . She’d probably stay out there at that farmhouse, I figured. Or sell it, maybe. If she was going to sell, she’d better get that damn place repainted. Subtract five or six thousand from the asking price if she didn’t. It figured, though, didn’t it? Now that I’d just sold all my equipment, she’d probably want to get it painted. . . . But maybe she’d stay there. Live by herself for a while. I wondered what she’d do about that jazzy mailbox of theirs: paint over it? Leave it as is? Constantine-Mixx, happily ever after. . . . Much as I’d always wanted to hate Dan the Man, I’d never quite gotten the hang of it. From all reports, he was a nice enough guy—even Leo admitted it. He’d been decent to me that day on the phone, after my brother died. I had to give him that much. . . . But she wasn’t going to come back to me. Life didn’t work that way. You couldn’t just pick up where you’d left off. For my own mental health, I might as well nip that little fantasy right in the bud. You see that, Doc? Aren’t you proud of me? . . . It must have been hard for her, though, these last couple of months: deciding whether to go or stay. I wondered if it had anything to do with those kids over there. Those sick kids at the hospital. . . .
Joy was parked in front of the condo, already waiting for me. Fifteen minutes early. I drove right past her without even seeing her. I’d been looking for her Toyota, I guess—had had my head filled up with Dessa. I was out of the car, halfway to the house, when she called my name. Got out of this battle-scarred white Civic hatchback.
She opened the back door, fiddled with the car seat. Lifted the baby out and into her arms. Joy with a kid: if I wasn’t standing there, watching it with my own eyes . . .
The two of them came toward me.
Go away, I felt like shouting at her. Stay the fuck away from me.
Joy was nervous—laughing, tearing up a little. She looked awful. “It’s so good to see you, Dominick,” she said. She was too dressed up or something. Wearing too much makeup. In the sunlight, you could see where it ended, under her chin.
“This is Tyffanie,” she said. Was she sick or something? She almost looked sick.
The baby was already bigger than Angela. Well, older, too. My eyes bounced from the top of her head to her pierced ear to her little fingers. I couldn’t look at her face-on.
“Here,” I said. “Let me help you with this paraphernalia. Your traveling-light days are over, huh?” I grabbed the baby seat she’d been lugging, lifted the diaper bag strap off her shoulder. “Oh, yeah,” I said. “That’s right. What am I doing?” Put everything back down again. Unlocked the door with my shaky key.
“Same old place,” Joy said, when she walked in. In baby talk, she told Tyffanie that this was where Mommy used to live. Joy, who liked to talk dirty during sex—who’d come out with stuff that embarrassed me sometimes. Now she was talking baby talk.
When she’d asked me over the phone the night before what was new, I’d told her about my brother’s death, about selling my business. I’d skipped the news about Ray. There’d never been any love lost between those two: Ray and Joy. She mentioned Thomas now, again—told me how sorry she was. But life had to be a little easier now. Right?
Six months before, that remark would have pissed me off. Would have put me right on the defensive. But I let it go. It was and it wasn’t easier, I said. Had she had lunch yet? Did she want a sandwich?
That would be great, she said. The baby needed to be changed. Could she use the couch?
“Go ahead,” I said. “You don’t have to ask first. God.”
Out in the kitchen, I got plates, Sprites, sandwich stuff. Funny how I could look at that kid’s picture on my refrigerator fifty times a day but couldn’t face her in person. . . . Jesus, Joy looked bad. All that makeup: it was like she was trying too hard or something. “Turkey breast okay?” I called in.
“Sure. Great. Mustard, not mayo, if you’ve got it.”
I’d already gotten the mustard out. What did she think—ten, eleven months and I would have forgotten she hated mayonnaise? . . . Weird: her asking permission to use the couch to change the baby. She’d ordered that damn thing. Out of a catalog. We’d had a fight about it the day it arrived. I’d flipped it upside down and wobbled the frame for her—had given her a demonstration about cheap construction, a lecture about why it was stupid to buy a twelve-hundred-dollar piece of furniture based on some pretty picture in a magazine. It was no wonder she’d run up all that debt that time: her eyes were bigger than her head. We’d always been a mismatch, her and me.
We ate at the kitchen table, the baby sitting between us in her yellow plastic seat. Whenever Joy talked baby talk to her, Tyffanie’s arms flailed. She looked nothing like that hospital picture anymore. She had her mother’s looks.
“Do you want to hold her?” Joy asked me. I said no, thanks, that was okay.
“Where’s that smile?” she asked Tyffanie. “Can you give Dominick a smile?” She looked over at me. “Do you want to be Dominick or Uncle Dominick?”
“Whatever,” I said. I was nothing to this kid.
She leaned toward Tyffanie. “Don’t you love the way babies smell?” she said. Their foreheads touched; Joy took a whiff. “Smell her, Dominick. Go ahead.” She slid the seat across the table to- ward me.
“That’s okay,” I said. Leaned back a little.
When she asked the baby if Uncle Dominick could “pwease smell her,” Tyffanie broke out in a grin so sweet and pure you could have put it on baby food jars. She was beautiful, really. Like mother, like daughter. Six weeks old and she already knew how to flirt.
I took a bite of my sandwich. Checked the wall clock. If they were only staying for fifteen minutes, Joy had better start eating. “So?” I said.
“So,” Joy repeated.
She bullshitted me for a while about how great everything was. Portsmouth was great, Tyffanie was great. She didn’t mention the asshole. If everything was so perfect, why’d she look so bad? Why were her eyes so jumpy-looking? The wreck of the Hesperus, I thought—that phrase my mother used to use.
Joy said she hadn’t really understood the meaning of life until Tyffanie had come along, but now she understood it perfectly. Well, great, I felt like saying. Make sure you share the news with Plato and Kierkegaard and all those other philosophers who’d banged their heads against the wall, trying to figure things out.
She asked me again if I wanted to hold Tyffanie. I said no thanks.
“Oh, go ahead, Dominick,” she insisted. “Pick her up. She’s great with strangers.”
I shook my head. Took another bite of sandwich. This visit had been a mistake.
“Not that you’re a stranger,” she said. “I didn’t mean that. Hey, if I had been a better liar, you would have been this little girl’s daddy. Right?”
I just looked at her. She looked away, looked back at me again. “I am so sorry about the way I hurt you, Dominick,” she said. “I’m sorry about everything. You never should have gotten mixed up with a loser like me.”
I didn’t take my cue—tell her she wasn’t a loser. Tell her that all was forgiven now that she was a mommy. Now that she’d cracked the code on the meaning of life. Fifteen minutes, she’d promised, but she’d already been there twenty-five. Hadn’t even touched her damn sandwich yet. Eat! I wanted to scream at her. Eat and leave!
“So why’d you get her ears pierced?” I said.
Because she was just so pretty, Joy said. Because Tyffanie was Mommy’s pretty little girl. It was just cartilage there, she said. She’d checked with the pediatrician first; Tyffanie hadn’t felt a thing. She would never, ever do anything to hurt Tyffanie. “Your parents had you circumcised,” she said. “I know that for a fact. Did that hurt you?”
Tyffanie made her lips into an O—made spit bubbles, nonsense noises. Joy laughed and mimicked her. Abruptly, she stood and snatched her out of her seat, dangling her in front of me. “Here!” she said. “Hold her, Dominick! She’s great!”
The baby, legs ajerk, hung suspended between us.
They stayed another half hour or so. After they drove away, I found Tyffanie’s pacifier—her “binky,” Joy had called it. It was on the kitchen floor. So what? I told myself. She can pull into a convenience store someplace and get another one for seventy-nine cents. When I went into the living room, I saw that she’d forgotten the changing blanket, too. It was folded up neatly on the arm of the couch. I picked it up. Saw the envelope she’d hidden under it. Opened it like it was a letter bomb—which, in a way, it was.
It’s four in the morning. Tyffanie’s still asleep. I have awful news. . . .
She hoped she was going to find the courage to tell me what she had to tell me in person, she wrote; she was putting it down on paper in case she lost her nerve.
She was HIV-positive.
She’d found out during Tyffanie’s pregnancy—during what should have been one of the happiest times of her life. Thad’s lifestyle had finally caught up with him—with both of them. He wasn’t as careful as he always claimed with his little “other relationships.” It shows you how much he ever really cared about me, right?
The baby had been tested three times—twice out in California and once here, up in New Hampshire. By some miracle, she seemed to be free of the virus. They’re pretty sure, anyway; she has to keep being tested up to her eighteenth month. Then they’ll be sure. But three different doctors have said they thought she’ll be fine. That it would have shown up by now. She hung on to that: the possibility that she hadn’t screwed up things for Tyffanie. Some days it was the only thing that had kept her from going off the deep end.
Thad’s never even seen her. Great father, huh? Almost as good as mine was.
The Duchess had taken off for Mexico during Joy’s seventh month, according to her letter. He and this other guy were chasing after some new “cure” that the U.S. wouldn’t approve. Thad had full-blown AIDS. He told her he needed whatever money he had for his own treatments, and they’d had a big fight. What had she ever seen in that self-centered scumbag, anyway? Because that was what he was—scum. He had wrecked her entire life, and she wasn’t just talking about HIV.
She’d driven east by herself, just her and the baby, after a big blowout with her mother and her mother’s “subhuman” husband. The trip had been hard; she’d had to stop all the time for Tyffanie, sometimes in places she wasn’t too comfortable about stopping in. She’d spent way more of her money than she’d planned to. But she was glad she’d done it—come back east. She was moving back to Three Rivers at the end of the month. That was partly what this visit had been about—setting things up, finding a place to stay. She’d rented a little third-floor apartment over on Coleman Court. She was moving in on August first. She’d already gotten a waitressing job—down at Denny’s, Monday through Wednesday nights to start. It was just temporary. She’d look for a job with benefits when she got back. Her landlady was going to take care of Tyffanie on the nights she worked. This woman had some major “issues”—she weighed over three hundred pounds, for one thing—but she was a licensed day care provider. She was great with kids from what Joy could see. That was all that counted.
Tyffanie and I were the only two people in the world that meant anything to her, she wrote. She loved me. She still loved me. I realized that even before Thad and I were halfway to California—realized that I’d made another one of my huge mistakes. But for my sake, she wished I had never even walked up to the membership desk at Hardbodies that day. Because if we hadn’t met, she wouldn’t have had the chance to wreck my life.
You have to get tested, Dominick. I feel so ashamed. I’m sorrier than you’ll ever know. . . .
I stood there, numb. Thought, in succession, these things: Were we both going to die, then—Thomas and me? . . . Where did you even get an AIDS test? . . . If I died, who was going to shave Ray?
I have absolutely no right in the world to ask you this, Dominick. But I don’t have a choice. I’m desperate. I know I’m going to be too afraid to ask you this when I see you.
If your HIV test is negative—if you don’t have the virus—would you please, please, please consider taking Tyffanie? Only if I get real sick. If it turns into AIDS. Maybe it will never even come to that. Not everyone who has HIV comes down with AIDS. Maybe there’ll be a cure. I know I have no right to ask, but I’m scared to death that Tyffanie is going to end up with strangers. Bad people. There were so many of them out there, she said. Joy didn’t want her mother raising the baby. She was fifty-one years old. She had never wanted her own kids. I have to know that Tyffanie has a chance in life, Dominick. Maybe it’s what God wants. He took your own little daughter away from you. Maybe he wants me to die so you can have my little girl. . . .
I let the letter fall. Got to the bathroom and gave up my lunch.
I drove up to Farmington that Friday. Paid my twenty bucks. They assigned me a confidential number, drew my blood. The woman at the window told me I had to let three business days pass and then call the lab at the end of the third day. Which was Wednesday in my case, she said. The test results usually came back around three, so I should call between four and five-thirty.
I couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t tell anyone. Leo would tell Angie and she’d tell Dessa. What could Dr. Patel say that would make any difference?
I visited Ray as usual. Brought him his clean laundry, shaved him, chatted with him and his buddies. One afternoon, passing the wheelchair “sentries,” I locked eyes with that shriveled-up human skeleton who sat out there. Princess Evil Eye. She was staring at me something fierce that day—like she knew what was up, what I was waiting to hear about. But this time I stood there and stared back at her. Gave it back to her. . . . It made no sense, really; it was pathetic. Little kids were dying every day from cancer, car accidents, AIDS. The other day in the paper, they’d run a story about a seventeen-year-old boy who’d put up a yearlong fight waiting for a bone marrow match he’d never gotten. But there she sat: a geriatric nuisance, a vegetable with a beating heart. They must have to bathe her, shovel food into her, wipe up whatever came out the other end. What a waste, I thought. What a fucked-up universe. She gets to hang on to life and, meanwhile, over there at that children’s hospice . . .
“Something bothering you?” Ray asked me.
“Huh? No. Why?”
“I don’t know. It just seems like something’s eating you.” I waved away the remark—told him I was fine. What was he, a shrink now?
Was something eating me?
The nights were bad; that was when the worst panics fell over me. I slept in fits and starts, sitting bolt upright from noises I thought I heard, from dreams. One night the phone rang at 2:00 A.M. I couldn’t answer it. I was sure it would be Joy. Whatever my test said, I wasn’t doing it—cleaning up her mess for her. She had no right to even ask. I was nobody’s father.
Tuesday night—the night before I was due to call for my test results: that was when I hit bottom. Crying jags, the shakes. I went out for a drive to calm down and ran right through a red light at Broad and Benson. No one was coming the other way, thank God, but they could have been. That was the point: someone could have been coming. I guess I was a little screwy by then from all that sleep deprivation.
I admired the irony of it, in a way: the way God had waited all those years and then had finally gotten around to me after all. Had finally zapped me for being the son of a bitch brother. I’d never figured that out: why God had given Thomas schizophrenia and not me. But now I thought I glimpsed the master plan. The Lord Almighty had been saving me for something else. The AIDS virus: the disease you couldn’t win against no matter how well you played defense. And He was a jokester, too: that little scare He’d given me when I thought Thomas had the disease. But that had turned out to be a false alarm. Previews of coming attractions. He’d been saving the HIV card to play on me. . . .
I kept thinking about that goofy priest—the one at my brother’s burial service. The guy in the sandals. Father LaVie, who’d beaten cancer. The padre with the amazing shrinking tumor. . . . They’d imported him from somewhere else because all the priests at St. Anthony’s were busy that day. He’d told me where he’d driven in from, but I’d forgotten. I opened the phone book to the list of towns. Danbury, Danielson. . . . That was it. He’d said he was pinch-hitting at a rectory up in Danielson.
It was Father LaVie who answered. Sure he remembered me, he said. And how about this for a coincidence: he’d just read an article that day about twins who survived their siblings and had started thinking about me. How difficult it must be to mourn a twin. So how was I? What could he do for me?
I rambled on, in no particular order, about Ray’s gangrene, Angela, the weight my brother had put on me. About what a bully my grandfather had been and how I’d bullied Thomas all our lives because I was insecure in my mother’s love. About Joy’s visit, her news. “Every time I take a step forward, I get clobbered,” I told him. “God must really hate me.”
Father LaVie promised me that there was meaning to be mined from suffering—that God was merciful, whether we understood His ways or not. This is pap, I thought—Hallmark greeting card theology. But when I hung up, I felt calmer. Better. Whatever that test result was going to say, it was beyond my control. All I could do now was hang on. Pray for a merciful, not an ironic, god.
On Wednesday afternoon, I called the test center. Got busy signals until four-forty-five. The woman had me repeat my number. “Okay, just a second,” she said.
I closed my eyes. Gripped the receiver. I had it: I knew I did. I’d gotten the virus to pay for the sins I’d committed against my brother, my mother, my wife. . . .
The phone clunked. “Okay,” she said. “It’s here. Non-reactive.”
“Non-reactive?”
That was good, she said. That was what I wanted. Non-reactive.
I walked around the condo. Took deep breaths. Dropped to the floor and did push-ups. Go to some bar and get shit-faced, I told myself. Go celebrate life.
I grabbed the keys, got in the car. It took me to the hospital.
I passed sleeping children, fretting children, empty cribs. Passed those two rabbits that Dessa had told me about. Pet therapy, she’d called it. “You wanna play?” a bald-headed girl asked me. She sat before a TV screen, playing Nintendo. “I’ll let you. There’s two controls.”
“Can’t now,” I said. “Maybe later.”
Dessa was in a room off to the left, seated in a rocker, holding and rocking a sprawled boy in feet pajamas. A big bruiser. The two of them, sitting, rocking, made a kind of pietà.
“Hi,” Dessa said. “What are you doing here?”
Bob Marley was playing from a kiddie tape recorder: One heart, one love . . .
The boy was staring at a strange lamp on the table next to them. One of those fiberoptic things—hundreds of strands, a small, fragile tip of light at each end. I squinted at it and it became the night sky in miniature—the heavens themselves.
“I heard . . . I heard there were kids at this place that need holding,” I said.
Dessa nodded. “This is Nicky,” she said. “My leg’s asleep. I could use a break.”
He had black hair, bushy eyebrows, huge brown eyes. “Hey, Nicky,” I said. Reached down and took him from her. Lifted him into my arms.
All my life, I had imagined the scenario in which my father would, at last, reveal himself to me. As a kid, I’d cooked up cowboy dads, pilot fathers who made emergency landings on Hollyhock Avenue, hopped from their planes, and rescued us from Ray. Later, I had cast gym teachers, shop teachers, the man who owned the hobby shop downtown, and even benign Mr. Anthony across the street as potential fathers: the real thing, as opposed to the intruder who had married my mother and installed himself at our house to make us miserable. I was thirty-six years old and still fantasizing when the doctors told Ma that her cancer would kill her. Over the months I watched her wither, I’d kept romanticizing her death—shaping it, as usual, to my own selfish need. She would pull me close and deliver me to my father, I thought—whisper his name into my ear and then go peacefully, having delivered us both. . . . By then, I had managed to gain, then lose, my grandfather’s “history”—had lost it permanently, I thought. My suspicion at the time had rested on Angelo Nardi, the dashing Italian stenographer my grandfather had hired to help him write his story, his “guide for Italian youth.” They’d been friends, she said. She made him coffee, helped him with his English. She’d hardly ever gone out. Who else could it have been? . . . Later on, after Domenico’s manuscript had come back to me—had dropped thunk! onto my hospital bed—I’d begun the history in hopes that I would find my father within its pages. Hesitantly, with growing difficulty, I had let Domenico’s voice fill up my head—had struggled with the ugliness and dread of what I became surer and surer his sorry story would reveal. . . . But in the end, Domenico had left me nothing more than a legacy of riddles and monkeys, cryptic remarks about secret-keeping that neither confirmed nor denied what I had come to fear: that he had taken evil advantage of the harelipped daughter he assumed no other man would want. That he had needed to punish, even in her death, the troubled wife he had always wanted but never really had.
But in a lifetime of fantasizing—of waiting for my real father to appear—I could not have imagined that I would find him in the exact same place—in the exact same booth—where, ten months earlier, my brother had sat across from me and warned me that, should America launch a holy war against the Nation of Islam, God’s vengeance would be swift and terrible. That he, Thomas, was fasting in preparation for a sacrifice he hoped would short-circuit a Holy War and rescue the children of God. . . . And the last person I had ever expected would deliver me from the pain and confusion of a withheld identity was the man who, I had always felt, had stepped in and stolen my true father’s place. In the end, it was Ray who delivered me—Ray who took me, finally, into his arms and held me and brought me home to the man I had spent a lifetime looking for.
“So how’s it feel, overall?” I asked him.
“Feels all right. It’s chafing a little. I probably overdid it.”
It was Ray’s first foray into the world on his brand-new leg. Things had gone well for a change—better than expected. We’d gone to Benny’s for some batteries. Had stopped back at Hollyhock Avenue to check things out—make sure everything was secure. Now we were at Friendly’s having lunch. Celebrating his new leg.
“Well, they said they can make some minor adjustments after you’ve taken it for a couple of test runs,” I reminded him. “Make sure you tell them about that chafing.”
“Okay, Dad,” he quipped. Our waitress approached with menus.
“Hi, guys. My name’s Kristin. How are you two doing today?”
“None of your business,” Ray said. He cracked a smile. He was feeling his oats.
“None of my business, huh? Okay, you old grouch. What can I get for you, then?”
I recognized her. She’d been a fledgling that day when she’d waited on my brother and me—a trainee. Thomas had treated her to a sample of his religious manifesto and she’d stood there, order pad in hand, speechless. Now, ten months later, the Gulf War had been fought and filed away, my brother was dead, and Kristin here was an old pro at handling cranky customers.
Ray ordered the potpie; I got one of those “supermelt” things. Kristin asked us if we wanted our coffees right away. If we thought the hurricane everyone was talking about was actually going to come up as far as Connecticut. “Pfft,” Ray said. “Hurricane Bob. Doesn’t sound too scary to me. They just play these things up on the television to jack up their ratings.”
Kristin told us she and her boyfriend were going out after work to get candles, masking tape for the windows, junk food. She came from Minnesota, she said. This was her first hurricane. She was “psyched.”
After she was out of earshot, Ray muttered that she wouldn’t be so “psyched” if her roof blew off.
“Sure she would,” I said. “She’s young, she’s got a landlord to worry about the roof. All she’s got to do is screw her boyfriend by candlelight and pass the potato chips.”
“Sounds like a good life,” Ray said. “What the hell are you and I doing wrong?”
I asked him if he’d been following the news about Russia. “Looks like the Communists may be on the ropes over there, huh?” I said. “How do you feel about that?”
“How do I feel about it?” He said he didn’t feel anything. Why? What was he supposed to feel?
I reminded him that he’d gone to war to stop the Communists over in Korea. That he’d worked almost forty years building nuclear subs, just in case the Russians decided to drop the bomb.
“That was all politics,” he said. “I just went to work every day and did my job. . . . You mark my words, though. Day after tomorrow, all those TV guys that are ballyhooing this Hurricane Bob thing will be going ‘Hurricane? What hurricane?’”
I sat there, baffled by his nonreaction to the teetering of the Soviet empire.
Our food came. The restaurant emptied out as we ate. Neither of us said too much more and, in the silence, my mind drifted to the phone conversation I’d had that morning with Joy. I couldn’t promise her something like that, I’d told her. She’d be all right; they were coming out with new drugs all the time. How about that AZT stuff I’d just read about? Had she heard about that?
I’d try to help her out as much as I could, I’d said—help both of them out—but my own life was still up in the air. I couldn’t commit to something as big as that—I just couldn’t. She had to get a grip; there were support services available for people in her situation. It was just a matter of finding out how to access them. I hadn’t meant for it to come out like a speech—like my lecture that time about couch-buying. But that was what Joy accused me of doing: giving her a speech when all she needed was some peace of mind—a promise that her daughter would be taken care of by someone she trusted. Not shipped off to some foster home with perverts or people who only wanted the money. She’d cried more than spoken during that conversation—had finally hung up in my face.
“I been thinking about something,” Ray said. “It’s been bothering me.”
“Oh, yeah?” I said. I took a sip of coffee. I thought we were talking about his leg.
“Do you remember a conversation we had a couple of weeks ago? About your father? . . . How I said she never told me who he was?”
I nodded. Held my breath.
He had had a similar kind of thing pulled on him, he said—the way his family had tricked him into thinking Edna was his sister instead of his mother. That was what he’d been thinking about ever since that conversation we’d had. Our situations were different, of course, but similar in other ways. It had pulled the rug out from under him when he’d found out the truth, he said; he’d had a right to know who his own mother was, for Christ’s sake. Having the wool pulled over his eyes like that—well, in one way or another, he’d paid for that the rest of his life. He’d always felt inferior to other people, he said. Ashamed. And mad—mad at the whole world. Not that my situation and his were the same. Well, in a way they were. They were the same but they were different.
“What . . . what are you saying?” My heart raced; my breathing went shallow. Now that the moment was finally here, I was afraid to know.
“I had promised her, you see? Your mother. . . . She only told me a couple months before she passed away. I didn’t know anything about it before then. We didn’t talk about that kind of thing. I was just as much in the dark as you were. But after she got sick, it weighed on her. She needed to tell someone, so she told me. Made me promise not to say anything. But I don’t know. It’s different now. There’s money involved. . . . She couldn’t have seen that coming.”
What was he talking about?
“She was kind of ashamed of it, you see? Of what she’d done. Of course, nowadays, they have babies out of wedlock all the time, all colors of the rainbow, and nobody even thinks anything about it. But it was different back then. For the Italians, especially. People didn’t like them, see? They resented them. They’d come over here in droves, up from New York to work in the factories. . . . People used to say they were smelly, greasy, all sexed-up—the same kind of thing you hear about the coloreds.” He looked around, hastily, for blacks. “The Italians needed someone to feel better than, I guess. Lots of them were prejudiced as hell when it came to the coloreds. The Indians, too. Her father, for instance. He would have murdered her if he’d known.”
I was listening without really hearing him. He’d just mentioned Domenico. He was about to tell me that my grandfather was my father.
“She told me she’d always worried that if you two found out—well, not so much your brother as you—that . . . that you’d hate her for it. Or hate yourself. But I don’t know. Things are different now. You have a right to know, same as I had a right. To know about Edna, I mean. And now with that thing down there.”
I closed my eyes. This was it, then. Just say it.
“He died four or five months after you two were born. Never knew a thing about you. . . . She was kind of naive, of course—in the dark about a lot of things. She told me she didn’t even figure out she was pregnant until she was almost halfway along. Back then, there was no TV, of course. That kind of subject didn’t get paraded around the way it does now.”
Ray was wrong. Domenico had died before Thomas and I were born—had had his stroke in August. She had delivered Thomas and me four months after his death.
“He got killed over in Korea,” Ray said.
I looked up at him. “What?”
“He’d been stationed over in Europe. Germany, I think she said. And then, when MacArthur went into Korea, he got shipped right over. Didn’t even get to come home first. Got killed right at the beginning, I guess—during the landing at Inchon.”
Was this right? My father was . . . ?
“She read about it in the paper. That was how she found out he’d been killed. Got in touch with some gal she knew—one of his cousins or something—and I guess she filled her in a little more on what had happened. But he never got home. Your father. Never even knew anything about you two guys, she said.”
“But why . . . how come she . . . ?”
“He was a colored fella. Well, part colored, I guess. Heinz fifty-seven varieties. But you know how it is. You got some colored blood in you, you’re considered colored, no matter what. Least that’s the way it was back then. People didn’t mix the way they do now. Or have babies out of wedlock, either. . . . Her father would have killed her, Dominick. You see? He probably would have disowned her. Course, the funny thing is, he was the one who introduced them. Your mother and Henry. That was his name. Henry. Your grandfather knew his father.”
They’d worked together at the mill, Ray said. After Henry’s father died, Connie’s father had more or less kept up with the family. Had sent the mother a little money from time to time because the kids were still young. It was unusual for her father to do that, Connie had said. “Her old man was pretty tight with his dough, I guess. But he helped Henry’s family out here and there. For some reason. He really ruled the roost, you know—your grandfather. Over at the house. What he said went.
“He worked at the store where they traded, you see? Henry. So she got to know him that way. Saw him every week when she did the shopping. That was how it started—because her father had known his father and because she saw him all the time at the store. They were just friends at first, for a long time. For years, I guess. He used to sneak over to the house and visit her. Her father worked nights, you see? Then, I don’t know, I guess one thing just led to another. They were human, same as everyone else. And like I said, she was kind of naive—didn’t know too much even by the time I come along. Kind of in the dark, still, even after she’d had two babies. . . . Her father would have killed her, you see? If he knew she’d fallen in with a colored guy? If he had lived, he probably would have put her out of the house. Sent her over there to live with his folks.”
“You guys save any room for dessert today?” Kristin asked. Man, I jumped. “Oops, sorry. Did I scare you?”
“No,” I said. “No thanks. We’re right in the middle of something.”
“Oh. Sorry. I can take this whenever you’re ready. Or if you want, you can—”
“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll take care of it. Thank you.”
We finished our coffee. Sat there, for a few minutes, in silence. Then Ray reached across the table and patted my hand. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “It’s like I always say. Mongrels make damn good dogs.”
“Henry what?” I said.
“Hmm?”
“Henry what?”
I drove out to the Indian graveyard first. Walked right up to him. Henry Joseph Drinkwater 1919–1950. In service to his country . . . I stood there, unable to feel much of anything. He was just a carved rock. A name and two dates. Up the path, over the rise, I could hear the Sachem River, the never-ending spill of the Falls.
At a pay phone, I looked up the address of the Wequonnoc Tribal Council office. Drove up to a dilapidated two-story house with trash in the yard. Following the sign, I climbed the fire escape stairs to the second-floor office. The door was locked; the inside empty. relocated to wequonnoc boulevard, wequonnoc reservation (route 22), the hand-lettered sign said.
I drove down to the reservation—past the bulldozers and cement mixers, the land that had been cleared and stumped. The coming casino. The tribe’s new headquarters sat at the end of a rutted road, the beginning of the woods—an impressive three-story building made of cedar and glass. Brand new, it was. Drilling and hammering echoed inside.
I entered. Asked an electrician if he knew where I could find Ralph Drinkwater.
“Ralphie? Yeah, sure. Second floor, all the way down. I think he’s still here. That suite that looks right out onto the back.”
He was hand-sanding a Sheetrock seam, lovingly, it looked like to me. I stood there, undetected, and studied him. He’d sand a little, blow on it, pass his fingers across it, sand a little more. RALPH DRINKWATER, TRIBAL PIPE-KEEPER, the plaque on the door said.
The office was handsome. Huge. Cathedral ceiling with exposed beams, floor-to-ceiling stone fireplace that faced an entire wall of glass. Jesus, what a life he’d had. His sister gets murdered, his mother goes off the deep end. And then that scummy business out at Dell Weeks’s house—posing for dirty pictures just so’s he’d have a place to stay. But he had declared who he was all the way through: Well, I’m Wequonnoc Indian. So I guess not all of us got annihilated. . . . You guys ought to read Soul on Ice! Really! That book tells it like it is! . . . He’d been crapped on his whole life—had scrubbed toilets down at the psycho-prison for a living . . . and had still managed to be a good man. To rise up out of the ashes. And now, he’d arrived at this big, beautiful room. This big, brand-new building. He’d come, at long, long last, into his own.
“This going to be your office?” I said.
He pivoted, spooked a little by my voice. Stared at me for three or four seconds more than was comfortable. The dust he’d raised from sanding gave him a frosted look.
“What can I do for you?” he said.
I told him I wasn’t sure—that I had just needed to find him, talk to him if he had a minute. “I found something out this afternoon,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“That my father’s name was Drinkwater.”
I watched the surprise flicker in his eyes. Watched them narrow with well-earned distrust. He nodded, leaned against the wall for a couple seconds. Then he turned his back to me and faced his wall of glass. Faced the woods. A crow flying past was the only thing that moved.
“This afternoon?” he said. He turned around again. Looked at me. “What do you mean—you just found out this afternoon?”
I started to shake; I couldn’t help it. I walked a few steps over to the raised hearth of his big fireplace and sat. Told him about my conversation with Ray.
He had known all along we were cousins, he said; he’d thought I’d known all along, too. That I’d wanted it kept a deep, dark secret.
“Well, I didn’t,” I said. “I’ve been in the dark until two o’clock this afternoon. I’m just . . . I’m trying to figure it all out. And I need help, man. . . . I need some help.”
He nodded. Came over and sat down on the hearth next to me. The two of us looked straight ahead, out at the tangle of trees.
My father and his father were brothers, Ralph said. His aunt Minnie had told him one time, way back before she moved to California. Before his sister died. “Do you ever see two little boys at your school named Thomas and Dominick?” Minnie had asked him. “They’re twins, same as you and Penny. They’re your cousins.”
There were four children who’d lived, Ralph said: Henry, Minnie, Lillian, and Asa, in that order. Asa was his father. “Ace,” everybody’d called him—the youngest and wildest of the bunch. Their parents were mixed: their mother, Dulce, was Creole and Portuguese; her maiden name was Ramos. Their father, Nabby Drinkwater, was Wequonnoc, African, and Sioux.
Every one of the kids but Minnie had died young, he said; Lillian of encephalitis, Henry in the Korean War, and Ace from driving drunk. He’d never married their mother; Ralph and Penny Ann were three years old when he flipped his car over and killed himself. Minnie was seventy-two or -three now—a widow, retired from a job with a packing company out in San Ysidro. He’d gone out to see her once—had hitchhiked most of the way. They wrote back and forth. Minnie was considering moving back to Three Rivers, once the casino got under way. Did I remember his cousin Lonnie Peck, who’d died in Nam? Lonnie was Minnie’s son. She had four other kids—two boys, two girls—all well, all with families. Minnie’s son Max was a gaffer at Columbia Pictures. Ralph had seen his name at the end of a couple of movies—right there in the credits at the end. Maxwell Peck, his cousin. “Yours, too, I guess,” he said.
Ralph had hated my brother and me when the four of us all went to River Street School, he said—Thomas and me, him and his sister. He’d hated the way everyone always lumped us together—two sets of twins, one black, the other white and therefore better. And then? After Penny Ann got murdered? That day I read that speech about her at the tree ceremony? He’d wanted to kill me that day, he said—pick up a rock and bash my skull in with it. “I thought you knew,” he said. “I thought you wanted to deny your own father. Your Wequonnoc and African blood.” The first time he’d run across the word hypocrite, he said, he’d thought immediately of Thomas and me: the Birdsey twins, who lived a lie.
And later on? That morning when the two of us showed up on Dell Weeks’s work crew? Man, he’d wanted to bust my head in that day, too. Mine and my brother’s. Six different public works crews and they’d stuck us with his. He was as good as we were—as smart, if not smarter. But there we were, his big shot “white” hypocrite relatives, home from college and rubbing his face in how much further you could get in life if you lied about who you were. If you kept it a deep, dark secret.
It had been our mother’s secret, I told Ralph. Not Thomas’s and mine.
“Your brother knew,” Ralph said. “How come he knew and you didn’t?”
“He didn’t know,” I said. “She kept it from us both.”
But Ralph said he and Thomas had talked about it once—during that summer on the work crew. That Thomas had brought it up: how they were cousins. “I remember that conversation,” he said. “He said your mother told him.”
“He couldn’t have known,” I said. “She wouldn’t have told him and not me.” And as I said it, it came flying back at me—hit me right between the eyes: that day I’d finally sprung him out of Hatch. That trip we’d taken out to the Falls. Thomas had stopped in front of Penny Ann Drinkwater’s grave. Remember her? he’d said. We’re cousins. And I’d dismissed it as more of his crazy talk. . . .
He’d known.
She’d given Thomas his father but had withheld him from me. . . .
Ralph and I talked for a few minutes more, me trying to take it all in. Trying not to sink into the unfairness of it: Ma’s same old fucking favoritism.
“So . . . how do you become a Wequonnoc?” I said. “What do you do?”
Ralph misunderstood the question. He started talking about Department of the Interior requirements and notarized genealogy reports, about the way the tribe planned to disburse income once the gaming revenue started coming in. “They used to tell me in school that the Wequonnocs had all been wiped out,” he said. “But now that everyone’s picked up the scent of money, you’d be surprised how many cousins I got.”
“I don’t give a shit about the money,” I said. “I’m telling you, I didn’t know. I found out two hours ago. I’m just trying to figure out who the fuck I am.”
He looked over at me. Studied my face for the truth. We just sat there, looking at each other. Then he got up and walked over to a big, plastic-shrouded desk parked in the middle of the massive room. He lifted the plastic, opened a drawer, and took something out of it. “Here,” he said, tossing something at me. “Catch!”
I plucked it from the air and looked at it: a simple, smooth gray rock.
“Found it on the reservation the other day,” Ralph said. “Way the hell out, sitting all by itself at the edge of a stream. What shape is it?”
I looked at it again. Closed my fingers around it. “It’s oval,” I said.
He nodded. “When a Wequonnoc baby’s born, the women take the cord and form it into a circle. Cinch it, so that it has no beginning or end. Then they burn it in thanks to the Great Creator.”
I looked at him. Waited.
“Wequonnocs pray to roundness,” he said. “Wholeness. The cycles of the moon, the seasons. We thank the Great Creator for the new life and for the life it sprang from. The past and the future, cinched together. The roundness of things.”
I palmed the rock. Squeezed it, released it, squeezed, released. “The roundness of things,” I said.
“You want to know how to be Wequonnoc?” he said. “There. That’s your first lesson.”
I looked out Dr. Patel’s office window. Watched the wind toss the trees, ripple the surface of the rushing river. It had been pouring most of the morning, gusting more and more like it meant it. The forecasters had been warning that, by the time Hurricane Bob arrived at midday, it could reach speeds of ninety or a hundred miles an hour. But when I’d called and asked the doc if she wanted to cancel our 10:00 A.M. appointment because of the weather, she’d said no, not unless I wanted to.
“You were saying?” she asked me now.
“No, I was just telling you, I’m having a hard time with it. I mean, I’m trying real hard not to fall back into my same old thing—the anger, the jealousy. It’s pretty pathetic to be jealous of a dead brother, right? Pissed at your mother when she’s been in the ground for almost five years? But I don’t know. It’s hard. . . . I mean, I was the one who kept asking her. I was the one who needed to know who he was. She knew how much I needed to know. . . . Did she hate me or something? Was that why she wouldn’t tell me?”
Dr. Patel shook her head. We could only second-guess as to her reasoning, of course, but had it occurred to me that my mother might have withheld the information out of some sense of maternal protectiveness? Out of love, perhaps, not hate?
“How do you figure that?”
She reminded me that Ma had lived her entire life accommodating the needs of angry men. “First her father, then her husband, and then one of her sons.”
“Me, you mean?”
She nodded. “Thomas had a very different nature. Yes? He seemed to have developed a temperament much like your mother’s. I have long suspected, Dominick, that what you perceived as your mother’s greater love for your brother may have been merely a greater sense of compatibility. Maybe she told Thomas about his and your conception because she knew he would not react in anger. Maybe she felt she didn’t need to protect him from his own rage the way she needed to protect you from yours.”
“Protect me?” I said. “I don’t get it.”
“Well, let’s say that you had gone to her at age thirteen, or sixteen, or seventeen, and demanded to know who your father was. And suppose she had—”
“I did go to her,” I said. “It was like she was deaf or something.”
“Let me finish,” she said. “Suppose you had asked her for the information and she had given it to you. Said to you, her angry young son, ‘Dominick, your father was half Native and half African American.’ How do you think you would have reacted?”
“Well, think about it. Might you have been confused?”
I told her I was pretty damn confused now. That I was halfway through my life and had just found out who I was.
“Your confusion is understandable,” she said. “But at age forty-one, you have resources to draw on, a greater understanding of the world, a whole catalog of human desires and shortcomings that would not have been at your disposal back then. If you had found out the truth at sixteen or seventeen, don’t you think you might have reacted with your characteristic anger?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe. But that doesn’t—”
“And do you think you might have turned some of that anger on her? Or on her soul mate, perhaps? Your brother?”
“Maybe.”
“And back onto yourself, perhaps? Is it possible that the knowledge you sought, delivered at the wrong time and with no real support to help you fathom it, might have made you somewhat self-destructive?”
“Self-destructive, how?”
“Well, in the socially sanctioned ways American boys are self-destructive, I suppose. With alcohol, perhaps? Or drugs? Behind the wheel of a car? All of the above?”
“But even so. That still doesn’t give her the right to keep it from me.”
“Don’t misunderstand me, my friend. I’m neither condoning nor validating your mother’s decision. I certainly agree that you had every right to know who your father was. I’m merely trying to present an alternate theory as to how she may have been thinking. Why she might have kept the knowledge from you.”
She stood. Walked over to the window where I was. Placed her hand on my shoulder and looked out, beside me, at the gathering storm. “I don’t for a moment accept your theory, by the way,” she said. “That she withheld the information from you because she hated you or wanted to punish you—to make your life miserable, for some reason. You don’t really believe that. Do you?”
I took a deep breath, exhaled slowly. “No.”
“Well, then, we’re making progress.”
“Are we?”
“Oh, I think so, yes. I’ve been watching your hands as we’ve talked. Three times, now, I’ve observed one hand undo the opposite fist. Are you aware of that, Dominick—that you’ve been prying your fists apart? It’s a healthy sign, I think. Come, sit down.”
In ancient myths, she said—in stories from cultures as far-flung as the Eskimos and the ancient Greeks—orphaned sons leave home in search of their fathers. In search of the self-truths that will allow them to return home restored, completed. “In these stories, knowledge eludes the lost child,” she said. “And fate throws trial and tribulation onto his path—hurls at him conundrums he must solve, hardships he must conquer. But if the orphan endures, then finally, at long last, he stumbles from the wilderness into the light, holding the precious elixir of truth. And we rejoice! At last, he has earned his parentage, Dominick—his place in the world. And for his trouble, he has gained understanding and peace. Has earned his father’s kingdom, if you will. The universe is his!”
“And everyone lives happily ever after,” I said.
“Sometimes,” she said. “Sometimes not. I mention it because it is one way to interpret the recent turn of events: perhaps in order to find your father, you had to earn the right to him.”
I sat there, hands in my pockets, my right hand fingering the oval rock.
“Now,” she said. “Our time is up. We should both go home before this tempest that’s descending blows the two of us away.”
This tempest, I thought. Tempesta, Drinkwater, Birdsey . . . I started home and then changed my mind. Drove over to Rivercrest, instead. I wanted to check in on Ray.
He was pissed that I’d come. “Jesus, get the hell home, will you? What’s the matter with you, driving around with a hurricane coming? I’m okay. I’m fine. Go home.”
On my way out, I stopped in the front foyer to zip up my slicker, watch the deluge I was getting ready to run out into. The sentries were all at their stations—Daphne, Warren, and the rest of them. They were all hopped up about the hurricane; it was the liveliest I’d ever seen them. That’s when it dawned on me: she was missing. The oldest of these oldies but goodies. Princess Evil Eye.
“Where’s the Queen Mother today?” I asked Warren.
“Huh?”
“Your other buddy, there. The old gal.”
“You mean Prosperine? They took her to the hospital early this morning. Pneumonia.”
Prosperine?
“Probably on her way out, if you ask me. She wouldn’t eat or drink anything, they said. Getting ready, I guess.”
I sat slumped in the living room, glancing back and forth from the window to the TV. I’d filled the bathtub, put out candles and flashlights, taped the windows. It was hard: facing a hurricane alone.
I flipped the remote back and forth, back and forth, from the Weather Channel to CNN: live feeds of Hurricane Bob, file footage of Gorbachev. He was under house arrest in the Crimea, they said. Details were sketchy. Tanks had started rolling into Moscow to answer the swelling resistance. . . .
How could she possibly be alive? I wondered. There had to be other Prosperines in the world, right? The world didn’t work this way.
I got up and looked out the window. A tree branch flew past, someone’s rain gutter clattered end over end down the street. . . . She wasn’t even coherent, for Christ’s sake. She’d just sat there in that foyer every day like a diapered vegetable. How could she possibly have recognized me?
Then it dawned on me. She hadn’t recognized me. She’d recognized my grandfather.
The coup leaders invoked a news blackout. The wind moaned. The power flickered and died. Hurricane Bob had just about arrived—had turned daytime as dark as night.
That’s it, I thought. She’s dying over there. She might not live past the storm. I put on my slicker, pulled up the hood. Stepped into the wind and pelting rain. In the fifteen steps from the house to the car, I got soaking wet. Stay home, stay home, every TV reporter and news anchor had warned. I started the car.
The streets were empty, the windshield wipers almost useless, even at manic speed. Sirens screamed in the distance. I negotiated around fallen limbs, past flying shingles. A couple times, I thought my car would blow right off the road.
But I made it. I got there.
The lights were dimmer than usual; walking down the corridor, I could hear and feel the backup generators cranking. Room 414A, the security guard told me. I took the stairs. Climbed the first flight, the second. I passed three, and then stopped. Stood there be– tween the third and fourth floors. I thought for a minute. Turned and went back down to three. The floor where Dessa worked. The kids’ hospice.
It was quiet there. Just a skeleton crew: the kids, three or four of the parents. Dessa wasn’t there.
An aide stared at me as I emptied board games out of a cardboard box. “I, uh . . . I’m a friend of Dessa’s. Dessa Constantine? I just . . . I just need to borrow these guys for a few minutes.” I opened the cage, pulled out those two rabbits, one at a time, and put them into the box.
“You can’t just take them,” she said. “They belong to the hospice.”
“Uh huh,” I nodded. “I know. I’m just borrowing them. I’ll bring them right back. This is kind of . . . kind of an emergency.”
I kept backing up, backing out of there. A rabbit emergency: she must have thought I was nuts. Hurricane blowing outside, rabbit-napper on the floor. I don’t know what that woman thought.
albrizio, prosperine. do not resuscitate. Prosperine Albrizio? Prosperine Tucci? It didn’t really matter who she was. What mattered was that I got to her in time.
I entered the room. Placed the box I was holding on the floor. I stood before her.
“I need . . . I need you to forgive me,” I said. Her breathing was wheezy; her filmy eyes were slits. She betrayed no sign of consciousness. Did she even know anyone was in the room with her?
“Can you forgive me?” I asked. “Make me whole again?”
I reached down. Grabbed the two rabbits by the scruffs of their necks and held them up—held them before the dying woman. One of them kicked the air and then was still. Back and forth, back and forth, they rocked before the Monkey.
She moaned softly. Closed her eyes. Wind and rain beat against the building.
I dropped one of the rabbits back into the box. Held the other one, still, before her. And when she opened her eyes again, the two rabbits had become one.
She watched it swing, pendulum-like, before her—watched the reversal of the dark magic she had witnessed long, long ago. “Forgive me,” I whispered.
Her shaking, ancient hand came out from beneath the sheet. Reached out, caressed the rabbit’s fur. I watched the hand move back—touch, first, her forehead, then her heart, her left shoulder, her right.
Her eyes closed again. I dropped the rabbit back into the box. Picked it up and left.