22

“I need to talk to my mom,” said George. His head was throbbing again.

“We’d like to speak to Sally Dermont,” said Irene. George stood beside her, his hand on her waist.

“Who may I say is here?” the receptionist said.

“It’s me, Rebecca,” said George.

“But who is she?” Rebecca wanted to know.

“Irene Sparks,” said Irene. “I work with George.”

The words coming out of Irene’s mouth were clipped and taut, like she was angry. The receptionist pushed a button on the phone and said a few quiet words into her headset. They sounded angry, too. George didn’t know what was going on, but he was a little afraid to talk to Irene in her current state. He coughed into his hand and then regretted it. His head felt awful, and coughing seemed to send pain thumping through his skull.

“Come get me,” she had said to him. “We need to go talk to your mother. Immediately.” George had asked why, and Irene had hung up the phone.

“Ms. Dermont will be with you shortly,” Rebecca said.

Irene and George took seats on one of the luxurious chairs in the waiting area. George tried thumbing through his e-mail on his phone, but Irene just sat rigidly beside him, her knee bouncing up and down, her teeth clenched. There was no good e-mail. Some data from the old orbiter on the Gould cluster. Some interdepartmental bullshit.

“What’s wrong,” he tried asking her at one point. But she just shook her head and said, “I don’t even know yet.”

They waited there for a full thirty minutes, and George had resorted to playing chess with his phone, when finally he heard the sound of high heels tapping down the hall, and Sally Dermont emerged in the room.

“Mom,” he said. “Hey.”

Her ice-blond hair was sculpted like a helmet around her head. No more hippie dress today. She was wearing a perfect pantsuit in a muted rose, with an ivory scarf wound around her neck. She carried a piece of paper in her hand.

“Yes?” she said curtly. George felt like he was in trouble here, too.

“I want to talk to you,” said Irene.

“About?” asked Sally.

“About George and,” said Irene. “And about Bernice. Bernice Sparks. My mother.”

“I don’t believe I know you,” said Sally. “Who are you again?”

“Mom, she was at the cottage the other night, on the porch, remember? And also at the banquet at the institute,” George explained. “This is Irene Sparks. We’re dating. You met—”

“I don’t even think the banquet was our first time meeting, actually,” Irene cut in. “I am pretty sure I have seen you before. I don’t know where, but I think that when I figure it out, I will realize that I was not awake when it happened.”

George saw Sally’s jaws clench together, and she turned as if to go directly back down the hallway without responding to Irene at all. Then she turned to look back over her shoulder for a brief second, locked eyes with George, and said, “Come on.”

In Sally’s office, Irene sat down in one of the chairs set up on one side of the desk for consultations, square and low, leather and cool metal. Sally stood behind her desk.

“What can I do for you, now, specifically?” she said. She set the piece of paper down on the desk, facedown. “A friend of George is a friend of mine, I suppose. However odd the circumstances.” She forced a smile. “And a bonafide scientist always has my respect. I do remember meeting you now, at the banquet, of course. And on the porch. You are dating my son. I guess.”

He had seen his mother acting like this before. It was the way she behaved to his father sometimes, when he’d been blissed out on pills for three days or had forgotten where he parked yet another car in the city. She’d hate him, she’d rail at him, and then it was as if she’d swallowed a pill that allowed her to tolerate anything. Then she would adopt this horrible, taut politeness. Thinking of pills made George stand up and cross the room so he could rummage in his mother’s cabinet. He located a bottle of painkillers, uncapped it, and knocked two into his palm, slapped them into his mouth. Turning around, he saw his mother and Irene squaring off across the desk.

“I want to know,” said Irene, “if you knew my mother. She seems to have known you. She seems to have known George as well.”

“No,” said Sally. “I don’t know her. I never did know her.” Sally smiled, showing those two rows of perfect teeth. She tapped her fingernails on the desk. “I’m very sorry for the confusion.”

“But you’re lying,” said Irene flatly. George stared at her. Her hair was yanked back into a ponytail, her shirt was buttoned incorrectly, with one extra buttonhole at the collar on the left side. One leg of her jeans was tucked into a white sock. He wanted to take her in his arms, fold her up, press her against his body. Gorgeous creature, how dared she to speak this way to his mother? He was shocked and turned on at the same time.

He went to stand behind her chair, put his hands on her shoulders. And from this position he could see through the windows out onto the balcony. There he saw that the goddess of love, in a beautifully tailored pantsuit, was standing at the railing and looking out over the city.

“Why? Why are you lying?” Irene pressed on.

Sally paused for a long moment with all her fingers spread out on the desk, and then she turned to the window and looked out over all of Toledo. On the outside, on the balcony, George saw the goddess of love tip forward without warning and spill over the balcony. His mother did not see this. She knocked her knuckles against each other and pursed her lips together.

“Mother,” George said. “What’s going on?”

Then Sally finally turned, passing over George and looking straight to Irene.

“I think I know why you’re here,” she said. “But you should know you’re in way over your head with me. I can prove exactly where I was at every minute of the day your mother died. And you don’t want to fuck with me. I’m an attorney. I know what I’m talking about.”

“The day she died? How do you know the day she died?”

Out on the balcony, the goddess of love stood back up at the railing. And she tipped over the edge. Her legs disappeared. Her shoes disappeared. And she stood up again, ready to tip. The balcony was high above the city of Toledo. The goddess of love tipped over the balcony and fell far, far down. And stood up again.

Sally was silent.

“Who are you?” Irene said. “Who were you to my mother? Why was she talking to George as if she knew he was going to fall in love with me? And why was she talking to you on her recording? Was that you in Dark House on the night she died? Were you there, too, looking for my mother?”

“She was nothing to me,” said Sally, but Irene went on.

“How do you know her? What did you do to her? Why should I care where you were on the day she died. On the day she died? Were you THERE?”

“George, you need to leave,” said Sally. “And take that with you.”

“Mother, that is my girlfriend. She is actually … she is my fiancée,” George began.

“No, I’m not,” said Irene.

“Get out!” his mother snapped at Irene. Then she shook her head to George. “I’m sorry, baby. I’m sorry.”

“Come on, George,” said Irene. “It’s OK. It’s alright. I’ll figure this out on my own.”

George was distracted. He had a hard time pulling away. He was watching them tipping over the railing, in rows, in columns, the goddesses diving off the balcony again and again, without ever showing a face.

*   *   *

I am dreaming but I am not aware. I am riding on my moped between the Akkad site and my experiment site in the collider, and everything feels smooth. Like there’s nothing but pure air, and there’s nothing but cool breezes, and someone has shifted the visible spectrum five nanometers to blue, and the world down below looks cleaner, and brighter, and I don’t even question why and I don’t know I’m asleep.

If I could figure it out, I would rip the lid off that tunnel and float out of there, and I would go back to Pittsburgh, or to the moon, or somewhere, anywhere but where I am headed. But I don’t know anything so I go on.

I get the first sense of foreboding when the lights go dimmer, and then in my dreaming heart I am aware that I am approaching the same old thing that I fear the most. I see wires broken, the ones that feed the magnets. They’re twisted and blackened and broke. Then the tunnel itself begins to fail around the edges—a tile here, chunk of concrete there—and I am afraid. I see the familiar mess ahead of me, fading in from the blackness, the broken floor, the crashed-in piece of the world. It’s whistling and gaping, but instead of being peripheral to me, and instead of creeping in on the edge of what I see, it is straight ahead, and I am heading toward it, and I can’t stop the moped now, because it’s just going on its own. The center of Dark House is here.

I try to wake myself up. I count my fingers clutching the handlebars: four and six. I shut my eyes and will myself into my mother’s house. My mother’s bathroom. My mother’s basement. On my mother’s porch, sitting on the swing. Somewhere across the world from this, but instead I’m on the moped and I’m flying down the tunnel, kilometer by kilometer, toward the broken floor, the twisted pipe, and my fear is that I will go hurtling into it. I’m so afraid that I turn and bite myself on the shoulder but feel nothing. I smash my face down onto the handlebars and do not feel it. I grab at a broken sheet of metal that has sheared off the tunnel beside me, and it slices through my hand but leaves no mark and I feel nothing.

Then I see her, standing in front of me: tall and sure. George’s mother is here. She puts out her hand, and my vehicle stops. She’s suddenly so familiar, but I remember seeing her with long hair and a happy face. I remember her from when I was a little girl, before the fire. I remember her hugging my mother. I shake my head back and forth, and everything gets clearer. I have never been able to remember anything that happened before the fire. I have always assumed that what happened before the fire was too bad to even remember. I don’t mind forgetting bad things, but here she is—part of this thing that I forgot.

Now I am really aware that I am in Dark House. I am standing in a bedroom. My rocking horse is there, charred just enough to remind my mother of the fire, but still able to rock.

“I had to come and see you,” Sally thunders, towering over me. “There are things you should know that I can’t tell you in front of George.”

“What things?” I ask.

“We thought it was a good idea!” she yells.

“Who?”

“Me! And Bernice!” she says. “And it was a good idea. It would have been good for both of you. But she fucked it up. She fucked everything up.”

“My mother? My mother? Where is she?”

“We made you for each other,” she says. “You and George. Everything, everything, everything was made for you and him. We gave birth to you, together. We planned for you to be together.”

“But I don’t know him. I don’t remember. What happened?”

“We were best friends, do you get it? We wanted our kids to be in love, and safe, and for it to be easy. So we made you, together.”

“And you thought that would work?”

“You were never supposed to know! You were supposed to grow up, meet, and fall in love. It would be easy, after everything we had done to make you perfect for each other. We had a plan, but your mother fell apart,” she says.

It was easy. I fell in love with George as easily as anything that has ever happened to anyone.

“What did you do to my mother?” I ask.

She comes toward me, and she almost looks like she wants to be sweet.

“I didn’t do anything to her but help her, and you too. Don’t you understand?” she says. “I loved you, Irene, from the moment I saw you. And I always meant to keep loving you. But because she made such terrible mistakes—I had to throw you away instead.”

“What are you talking about?”

“She lost her mind. She burned down your house! She was a—drunk!”

“I know that,” I say.

“You are damaged. I made a mistake! You are made from a drunk and a—loser. That is your makeup. It’s unfortunate, but it is real. George is not for you.”

“I’m dreaming,” I say. “You can’t be here.”

“I know it’s hard,” she says. “But you can always say that you are not to blame.”

“Who came first, me or George?” I want to know. It seems important.

“You were born together.” Sally reminds me impatiently.

“Who. Got. Pregnant. First.” Because I know what I mean.

“I did,” Sally snaps. “And then we got her pregnant. Together. With you.”

“What did you do to me? What did you do to her?”

“Don’t you know who your father is?” she says to me. The world around her ripples, as if I am already underwater and sinking toward the bottom of some cold bay. But I concentrate to listen, because this is important. “I’ll tell you now. I know she never would. It’s Uncle Ray. It’s George’s ‘Uncle Ray’—no, he’s not my brother or Dean’s brother. That man who shot himself playing roulette? That’s your father.”

“That’s not true!” I say.

“I chose him for three reasons,” she goes on. She puts up three fingers, and I count them: one, two, three, four. “One, he was available. Two, he was willing to turn his back on you and never look back. Three, he was born in June. There. Your father. The composition of you. I made you for George out of him and her, and I planned it for you to be perfect. But then she turned out so, so bad. It’s not your fault, Irene. You came from two bad things. What could you do? What could you do to help yourself? There is badness inside you. I thought that your mother was good. But she wasn’t.”

I’m fighting off images and skips in what I see: I see my life before the fire.

I see warm-weather picnics, and cold-weather mittens in a blue basket, and I see my rocking horse standing in a different room, a room with trees outside. It is the room in George’s cottage, where I have slept with George. I see two high chairs together, and I know I usually sit in one of those chairs. I see pancakes on a platter, and two mothers cooking in the kitchen. I think very hard, and I see George, and I see George’s mother, and she’s smiling at me so kindly, so encouragingly, and I want her to love me. I do not want to disappoint her. But I know that I have.

“When I put you in her, I didn’t know she was a drunk!” she is saying. “I didn’t know she was a liar! I thought it would be different. But I’m sorry, but you can’t have him now. I cannot let that happen.”

“It’s all fake?” I say. “Our love? It was all a trick? All a scheme?”

She is nodding her head. She is shrugging. “If you want to call it that. I tried to get her to stop, but she kept going. I tried to pull the plug, but she wouldn’t leave us alone. All those years, she kept at it. She wouldn’t stop spying on him, trying to get you two aligned. Everything we did, she did with you. It was so annoying! As if she didn’t realize, wouldn’t realize—I’m not like her!”

“We’re not in love?”

“It was only science,” she says. “It was a good plan. But she wasn’t worth it, and now here we are.”

She fades in and out as I stop looking directly at her. I hold my hands out in front of me, and I look at them. They look like monster hands. I know that if I saw a dream mirror, I would see a monster face looking back. Everything I have ever worried about myself, coming out the mouth of this put-together woman and her big bossy mouth. I am worthless. I am the most insignificant blob of cells, of all the cell blobs there are walking around. I am unwanted. I am a creature formed for a purpose and I am failed in my purpose and there is no purpose left for me. I feel the most terrible despair.

I get off the stalled moped and I begin to walk, and I walk past her where she is still standing there, so tall and still. She keeps making words come out of her mouth that I cannot hear. She is shrieking. She is calling to me. She is saying STOP STOP or she is saying YOU ARE FILTH ANYWAY SO JUST GO AND BE SAD or she is saying YOUR MOTHER IS YOU or whatever she is saying. She can’t grab me or touch me at all. When I am past her I can’t tell anymore what she’s saying, and it doesn’t matter, because I’m going where I have always belonged, and to the place that I see I have created for myself long ago, to use when I most need it, which is now. I walk to the edge of the hole in the middle of Dark House, and without waiting or thinking, I lean forward, and I fall in. And I am gone. It doesn’t even feel terrible.

*   *   *

The first thing I remember, falling into the hole in Dark House, is my mother standing in the basement next to the ironing board, throwing clothes into a bag. I am ten. I am crying, saying, “Please, don’t go.” But my mother fiercely, angrily stows things in this black garbage bag, storming around the basement like she is cutting her life apart with an ax. “I would kill myself,” says my mother in this memory. “I would kill, kill, kill, kill myself if I wasn’t afraid to go to hell. After all this time, I think I’m actually afraid to go there!” And then my mother laughs a dry, humorless laugh and marches up the basement stairs. I remember reaching out to grab her by the elbow, begging her to stay, and now she swings around and snaps. “Don’t you touch me! Don’t touch me!”

The second thing I see is a moment when I was older, maybe twelve. I had been prescribed a dental retainer to wear during the day and at night. But it got left on my lunch tray at school, and I threw it out with the garbage. Twice. I see myself walking upstairs to find my mother lying in bed with her arm over her face. I remember standing inside the door, telling her about the thrown-away retainer really fast, and then slipping out into the hallway. In seconds, my mother is on me, her teeth bared. “You ungrateful, arrogant arrogant arrog.” My mother’s breath, her body, her hair, even her skin smell of gin. “This is the limit, the limit,” she says to me. “I will take your model rockets, and I will melt them down. It will be plastic for plastic on the kitchen stove: you throw away your plastic, I throw away your plastic, plastic for plastic, for plastic, for plastic.” I can feel her hand grinding into the meat above my elbow. Her feet, bloated and mottled, sticking out from below her flannel nightgown.

The third thing I remember is new: from before the fire. A fog has been lifted between me and my own mind, and I can see this for the first time:

I am standing on the road outside George’s country house. I am young, almost three, and my mother and I are taking a walk. The fire hasn’t happened yet. I am falling forward, rushing down through the hole in Dark House, terrifically afraid, but I can’t stop myself from remembering it. I am afraid to think, afraid for what horror might be waiting for me, what painful memory from the time that I forgot. What have I been hiding from my own brain for all these years behind the wall of the fire? But I cannot pull away. Because I am holding my mother’s hand.

“Look, mother,” I say. “It’s the naked hairy ape!”

“Irene,” says my mother. “Shhh. Let’s go into the house.”

In front of us, on the other side of the street, there is a neighbor clipping his long rows of hedges without his shirt on. Clipping and clipping hedges, with all his gray hair curling up from under his arms, out from his chest, up his back and into the back of his head. I remember this man. He lived next door.

Back in the house, my mother is, laughing, talking to someone.

“I’ve called him that a thousand times just talking to you!” My mother laughs. I am looking at the back of her head and I cannot see the other person, but I hear laughter. “Of course I didn’t realize she was picking up on it! She just called him that to his face!” The two people convulse with laughter. They cannot stop.

I remember violets. Violets in my hand, picked from the cracks of the patio bricks. A wave of violets. I remember these violets were before the fire. Before the fire, I remember a boy in the other high chair. It’s George. He is looking right at me.

And then I understand that the reason I could not remember the things that happened before the fire was not because these memories were so sad, but because they were so happy. I was so, so happy back then.