I woke up early and snaked seventy bucks from the last of my mother’s stash. The money would get me to New York City, where I planned to dump the whole story on Uncle Donald. My hope was that he would loan me the cash if I promised to repay him with the income from whatever crappy job I landed on my sixteenth birthday. When I got back to Holedo, I’d slip the bills into my mother’s hiding places—only under the left side of her mattress instead of the right, in her pink plastic music box instead of her wooden one, and so on.
“You see,” I would say, “Dad didn’t steal your savings after all. You just forgot where you put it.”
Okay, so the plan had its kinks, but blaming my father would last only so long. And once my mother saw the money, I knew she’d be too relieved to get hung up on the details. Besides, the trip would buy me time to figure out what to do about Edie, to deal with the shredded, butchered feeling in me that wouldn’t leave. More than that, I would finally come face-to-face with my brother, Truman.
I pulled a duffel bag from my closet, smacked it around a couple of times to shake off the dust, and unpacked the contents from my sixth-grade hiking trip three years ago. Out with the baby binoculars and crumb-filled plastic Baggies. In with the socks, underwear, jeans. I threw in a flannel shirt, since my hooded sweatshirt had been abandoned at Edie’s. I didn’t plan on staying overnight, but I wanted to be prepared for just about anything.
Last night had taught me something.
The bus schedule I nabbed from the bottom of my mother’s stuffed purse said my ship sailed at 8:00 A.M., so I had to move fast. I scribbled a quick note to my mother: Gone for the day with Leon. Don’t worry. Things will be okay. Another mini–suicide note. I dropped it on the kitchen table and stuffed a banana and two Ring Dings into the pocket of my father’s orange hunting coat, the only thing I could find to keep me warm, since my winter coat had also been abandoned at Edie’s.
On my way out the door I stopped to look at my mother, asleep on the living room couch. Eyes closed shut. Lips puckered and tight. Hair frizzed around her face in a branchy black web. Her black coat pulled to her chin with a clasped hand. A folded silver gum wrapper on the coffee table in front of her. Lying there with the tweedy couch arms raised above her small frame, she reminded me of a somber Sleeping Beauty in her glass coffin. I couldn’t look at her without hating myself for what I had done.
Last night after Marnie had said her kissy-face good-byes, my mother left a long, pissed-off message with my father’s dispatcher. I took the opportunity to bow out and drew a steaming bath in our midget-size tub. While my feet thawed under the hot faucet, I listened to my mother crying on the couch. The sound made me think of a kitten being squeezed too hard. A baby struggling for air. It killed me to know I had fucked everything up so miserably, and more than anything I wanted to get out of the tub and say something stupid to make her laugh. But I was too worried she’d pick up some sort of guilty signal flashing above my head, and that would blow the lie about my father. So she cried herself to sleep while I soaked in the warm water, mentally rehearsing my plan to make things better.
Even as she slept on the couch, my mother wore that black wool coat—her body shivering anyway. I wanted to go to her, to pull a blanket up to her chin the way loving parents do to their sleeping children on The Wonderful World of Disney. But I was afraid she’d wake up. Instead I quietly walked over to the radiator in the kitchen to check on the heat myself. From deep inside its rusted rib-cage body, I could hear a steady ping and knock. The landlord obviously wasn’t going to get his ass up here anytime soon. For the hell of it, I twisted the knob by the cracked linoleum floor. Steam spit into the air like a miniature geyser. Heat pricked my face. Then silence. Again I twisted the knob and waited.
Ping.
Knock.
Ping.
A long, steady breath of steam sprayed into the room and kept coming. The piece of shit wasn’t broken after all—someone must have turned it off. Why hadn’t my mother tried giving it a good, hard twist like I just did? It didn’t make any sense. But with only twenty-six minutes to get to the station, I had no time to play detective.
I left the soon-to-be toasty apartment and hiked it downstairs to my bike. The chilly morning air smelled like a tire fire. Even though it had warmed up a bit, my body shivered—probably remembering what I had been through six short hours ago. Pedaling like crazy, I retraced part of my route from last night. Past Cumby’s. Past the motel. This time no Leila. No Roget. No Edie.
I made it to the bus station with five minutes to spare, dumped my bike behind a fence, and bought myself a ticket. It was my first time ever taking off to such a faraway place, and my stomach felt cramped and twisted when I thought about the crowded city streets of New York. A million faces as strange and scary as those newspaper stories.
NIXON ORDERS 90-DAY PRICE FREEZE TO CURB
DOMESTIC INFLATION
BENGAL REBUILDS AFTER CYCLONE
POLICE STILL SEARCHING FOR SUSPECT ACCUSED
OF SLAYING TWO BOSTON WOMEN
I repeated the plan in my head to calm myself: find Uncle Donald’s apartment, explain the whole dirty deal, get the money, and head back home. With every passing minute my scheme sounded more far-fetched. But what choice did I have? The thought of going back to Edie’s made my hands shake and my breathing speed up. I was afraid that if I walked through her door, if I caught sight of her face, if I heard the sound of her raspy voice, then the dark tangle of feelings inside me would well up and overtake me. I was afraid I might hit her like my father did and that maybe I wouldn’t be able to stop there. I thought of the knife plunged into Sharon Tate’s pregnant stomach, and this is what came into my mind: If a person could get that swept up in their anger and commit such an unthinkable evil, then maybe I could, too, simply because I’m human. The thought came and went in a flash, leaving me feeling sick. I looked around the station, as if to make sure that no one had heard what I was thinking.
At two minutes to eight I spotted a walking skeleton of a man across the parking lot. He boarded one of the buses and drove it around to my gate. “All aboard,” he said when he swung open the door.
I climbed the rubbery black steps, and he ripped my ticket in half.
“Looks like it’s just the two of us until Hartford. Why don’t you sit up here with me?” he said when I took my seat three-quarters of the way back.
I could have told him to bug off, but I decided just to go with it. I dragged my duffel bag to the first seat and sat right in front of a sign that read PLEASE DO NOT TALK TO THE DRIVER WHILE THE BUS IS IN MOTION. Obviously my gummy-mouthed chauffeur didn’t give a dirty nipple about that rule.
We were about to shove off when someone outside screamed, “Wait! Hold the bus!”
The driver slammed on the brakes and opened the door. I looked up to see that skinny girl from the police auction and last night at Cumby’s. Again. This time she was carrying a sign that said EQUAL PAY FOR EQUAL WORK. She was dressed in a St. Bartholomew outfit—plaid skirt, dark sweater, and tights—which explained why I never saw her in my school. Leon always said that Bartholomew girls were starved for action, so he hit on them every chance he got. I didn’t think he’d go for this one, though. Not that she wasn’t pretty, because she was. Sort of. But her signs were a bit much.
“Thank you for stopping,” she said to the driver, breathless. “You saved me from Saturday services.”
The old guy must have thought she was a bit weird, too, because he didn’t invite her to join our party. She moseyed on down the aisle to the very back of the bus, clumsily balancing her sign, a duffel bag, and a giant black guitar case in her arms. No kids today. When she passed me, she smiled. This time I looked away, because I had too much to think about and didn’t want her chatting me up as well. When we started moving again, I turned to look out the window but couldn’t help stretching my neck a bit to see what she was up to.
“Damn it!” she said to herself as she stood by the bus bathroom emptying her duffel bag. “I forgot my boots.”
With that she took a bunch of clothes and went into the bathroom and shut the door.
“So,” the driver said after a long, long silence in which he steered the rickety bus out of Holedo and down the highway, “what’s your name?”
I had been staring out the window, thinking of my father out there, somewhere on a similar highway. A series of solid yellow lines connecting us in a complicated route. A stretched umbilical cord from my seat in this bus to him. “Leon,” I said, wanting just for this ride to be someone else.
“I’m Claude. What’re you going to do in the city, Leon?” Claude spoke in a too-loud, over-the-shoulder voice that he must have cultivated through years of trapping passengers in this seat as he drove with their lives in his withered, hairy-knuckled hands. The high volume probably did the trick when the bus was jam-packed. But at that moment, in the empty belly of the beast, Claude’s voice sounded louder than necessary. Adult to child.
I glanced behind me to make sure the picket girl was still in her dressing room. She was. “I’m going to meet a girl who wants me to lick her crotch clean,” I said, giving him my best Leon. Served the guy right for not leaving me alone. After all, I had a mess of shit to sort out. Talking to him was a waste of time.
“Well, there’s nothing like some good pussy,” Claude shouted back.
Obviously my Leon tactic didn’t give him the leave-me-the-fuck-alone shock I had expected. We switched lanes, and a tractor-trailer passed. I thought of my father again. Driving. All those connections between us. I didn’t know why I was thinking about him, almost missing him right now. Maybe because we had both been burned so badly by Edie. And even though we’d never swap war stories, it might feel good to have him around as a silent partner in all this.
“Listen,” I said, wishing I had ignored Claude’s invitation to sit up front in the first place, “I need to take a snooze. So if you don’t mind, I’m going to close my eyes.”
“Sure thing,” he said. “May as well rest up. The city’s a tough place for a young fella like you.”
“I can handle it,” I said.
“I hope so,” he shouted back. “All those muggers, beggars, murderers.”
A flapping feeling swept through me. In my stomach I imagined an invisible embryo somersaulting and leaving me unsettled, the way Edie always described. But I wasn’t going to let this no-brain bus driver get to me. “I said I can handle it,” I told him.
“Good thing,” he said, taking his eyes off the road and looking at me in his big mother of a mirror longer than I liked. His eyes were set deep in his face, with barely any lashes. His cheeks were jowly. “Police are always finding young kids like you dead in some fleabag Harlem motel room.”
“I’m just going to visit my uncle,” I said, wanting to shut him up once and for all.
“What about the girl?”
“Girl?” I asked, then remembered. “Oh, I’m going to visit my uncle after I lick her crotch.”
“Right,” he said.
The picket girl emerged from her dressing room wearing flared denim jeans bleached blue and white like the sky and a long-sleeved tight black shirt with buttons down the front. No more schoolgirl.
I closed my eyes to put an end to all the distractions. In the darkness behind my lids I saw a blizzard of Edie images: Edie writing the Dominick-I-need-to-see-you note last fall when her face was black-and-blue. Edie tilting her head and lacing her fingers between mine as we lay in her bed. Edie tucking her stray hair behind her ear and leaning forward to kiss me. Edie walking into her bedroom and finding me gone last night.
As much as I hated to admit it, and as pissed off as I felt, I was going to miss my nights with her. Over and over I wished there were some sort of explanation. Maybe I had heard her wrong, I tried to tell myself. After all, she hadn’t said my name. For all I knew, she could have been talking about the paperboy. But I knew what she had done. What I didn’t get was how she could go through with it. How could Edie have faked all those nights at her house? Laughing with me? Holding my hand? Kissing me? It was a lot of effort just to get her claws on some cash. And there had to be an easier way to get back at my father.
To stop myself from thinking about Edie, I tried to conjure up everything I knew about my Uncle Donald. A few hours earlier, when I sneaked into my mother’s room to grab the bus fare, I dug up Uncle Donald’s number and gave him a wake-up call. When he answered—his fat-man’s voice, crackly with sleep—I hung up. Just a test to make sure he wasn’t off globe-trotting to get funding for one of his engineering projects. I wanted to be sure he would be present for my visit, since it wasn’t the type of thing I could blurt out over the phone. After all, since he traveled so often, and since my mother usually went to visit him instead of the other way around, I had only met my uncle a handful of times. From what I knew, he seemed like a cool enough guy—big and burly, always cracking some over-my-head joke and making himself laugh. I used to ask my mother why he didn’t invent something useful, like a remote control that would start her car in the morning so it would be warm when we got in, or a radio battery that didn’t die after a couple of days. But my mother said his inventions were not that gimmicky. He focused more on doodads for disease-research laboratories, more interested in curing cancer than warming my ass. And for that he made a bundle.
As far as I knew—which was not much—Uncle Donald didn’t have a girlfriend. Probably because his Santa Claus belly and gray beard weren’t exactly the type of thing chicks got hot for. Besides, between traveling and raising Truman, how could he have time for a love life?
Truman.
The thought that I was actually going to meet my half brother face-to-face after all this time was too much to think about. I could have let my mind hunker down on a million different questions: What if he wanted to come back to Holedo with me? What if he was retarded or crippled and that’s why my mother didn’t like to talk about him? Instead of sailing off into one of those scenarios, I told myself not to focus on it too much in order to avoid jinxing anything.
I peeled my banana and practiced my conversation with Donald in my head. I decided I would tell him exactly what had happened.
Direct. Honest for a change.
In Hartford a gaggle of giggling girls boarded, all of them dressed in University of Connecticut sweatshirts. Ponytails. Twisted braids. Fruity perfume. Mint gum. Without any coaxing from Claude, they bunched up front and whipped up a conversation with him in no time. He played Mr. Innocent pretty damn well, too. All flattery and laughter. Little did they know one of the last things he had said before they boarded was “Nothing like some good pussy.”
I kept waiting for him to warn them about dead people in motel rooms, but he never said a word on the subject. They were traveling in a pack. I guess he thought I needed to be warned.
“Cool!” one of the girls said to Claude, and the whole crew shrieked with laughter.
I had missed the punch line but was really sick of their flirt-with-the-bus-driver routine anyway. Out my window the miles of forest gave way to clusters of neighborhoods. An aboveground pool left uncovered in somebody’s backyard. A lawn with patches of frozen mud and snow. As the scenery flashed by, I made promises to myself. The first had to do with my mother. Before I went into the bath last night, the final thing she had said to me was “Dominick, I’m just so tired. Things have got to get easier for me.” I didn’t have an answer for her then, but when I got home tonight, I was going to make sure she got the rest she needed. I had been a bigger prick than my father, and I was going to make it up to her. First with the money. Then by being the kind of son she wanted. Like one of those changed people in a fairy tale.
Poof.
Clean bedroom.
Grade-A student.
No girlfriends over the age of seventeen.
That would be me.
The second promise I made was about Edie. I vowed to myself that I would get even with her, squared away. Somewhere, somehow, she was going to pay. I didn’t have a specific plan, but I knew one would come to me.
By the time the bus pulled into Port Authority, I had pretty much stitched up my entire life, complete with Edie begging my forgiveness, a tropical vacation with my mother, every last penny paid back to Donald from a part-time job, and even a girlfriend my own age. In my head it was perfect.
Now I just had to make it come true.
Claude slapped me five, and I hopped off the bus behind the girls, trying to look like I knew how to get where I was headed. The truth was, I didn’t have a fucking clue. On the way here, the bus had driven through a stretch of burned-out brick buildings and sidewalks crowded with scowling faces. We almost sideswiped two taxis, and the bus stalled at an intersection, instigating a honking chorus from the parade of cars behind us. The whole experience left me feeling more than unstrung about my New York adventure.
Thank God for the I-for-Information sign at the top of an escalator. I waited in a line that looked more like one at a soup kitchen than a bus station, folding and refolding Uncle Donald’s address in my hands. Around me the dirty station was a hive of activity. People darted past one another, racing out to the street or down to the buses. Whenever I breathed in, I got a good whiff of a pissy, ammonia smell, so I tried to hold out for as long as possible before taking in more air.
In. Out. In. Out. I felt like a woman in labor.
“What’s the best way to get to Ninety-seven Bleecker Street?” I asked the lipsticked black woman on the other side of the glass when it was my turn. She hooked me up with two sets of directions. One for the subway and one for the bus. But when she saw the lost look on my face, she told me my best bet was to take a cab.
I made my way out of the station into the silvery winter daylight. The air felt cold and windy, but nothing compared to the arctic freeze I had survived last night. I had seen enough New York movies that making my way along the sidewalk felt pretty much like I had imagined. Gritty. Massive. Holedo times a thousand. It reminded me of a carnival ride or a movie that ran endlessly. All anyone had to do was take a breath and jump on in, which is exactly what I did.
A pink neon sign flashed WET! HOT! NASTY! Another buzzed LIVE GIRLS! If I were here for any other reason, I might have walked by those buildings, maybe tried to sneak inside even though I was underage. But I had to keep my mind on my mission.
The money.
My brother.
A taxi zoomed down the street. I waved my hand in the air, but the driver whizzed on by. Another taxi was right behind. Again I waved, and again the driver blew past me. I stood on the street a moment, wondering what the hell I was doing wrong. Looking lost was a direct invite for a wacko to brush up against me. “Plan A: You give me a quarter,” he said. His breath pure decay. “Plan B: You give me fifty cents.”
I clutched my duffel bag against my chest like I was protecting something precious in there. A baby. A bundle of money. In my head I heard Claude’s warning: muggers, beggars, murderers. . . kids like you dead in some fleabag Harlem motel room. I made my way down the sidewalk away from the creep. And when a cab wheeled down the block, I waved both my arms in the air like someone drowning, calling for help.
“They’re full!” another man who looked enough like Claude to be his brother shouted from a slumped position on the sidewalk. “Look for one with the roof light on.”
I couldn’t even hail a cab without a how-to lesson from a bum. I thought about thanking him but heard Claude’s warning again, so I scoped out an available taxi and threw my hand in the air. When the driver actually stopped, I leaped inside and told him to take me to 97 Bleecker Street, Apartment 3B.
“Should I drop you in the living room or the kitchen?” he asked.
I knew he was making a joke, but I didn’t get it. I was too busy rationing breaths again, since the cab smelled worse than the bus station. In. Hold. Out. Hold. Repeat. “Huh?” I managed on an exhale.
“I don’t need the apartment,” he said in a tongue-clucking accent. “Just the building number or the cross street.”
Taxi lesson number two. “Oh,” I said, cranking the window open to make breathing a bit easier, only to find exhaust blowing back at me. “Sorry.”
As we drove downtown, the tall steel buildings and straight-arrow streets slowly vanished. Before I knew it, we were bumping along a crooked road lined with trees and brick houses only five or six stories tall. It was a part of the city I had never seen in movies, like something straight out of a storybook, one of Edie’s fairy tales.
The driver stopped in front of 97. I gave him five bucks and hopped out. My uncle’s building was a wide, brick-faced job with only six floors and dead ivy vines stretching across its face. I couldn’t bring myself to buzz right away, so I stood there a moment looking up and down the block. Not far down the street a playground was deserted, probably too cold out for little kids. One of the swings—left twisted and tangled into a noose by some long-gone brat—moved back and forth in the wind. A man with a braid walked the perimeter of the park, a bouncy white poodle on his leash. I watched his ropy knot of hair drum against his back as he moved. I watched his dog press its gummy nose to the ground.
When I gazed up at the building again, I thought about my uncle and brother inside, living their lives. Making lunch. Watching television. Reading books. Whatever an abandoned brother and a kooky uncle do on a cold Saturday afternoon in January.
“It’s just one little visit,” I said out loud, trying to unjumble my insides, to stop the somersaulting feeling. I unfolded the address one final time and checked the apartment number. Before I lifted my finger to the buzzer, I thought about turning around, getting back on the bus to Holedo. But what was waiting for me there?
My sad, angry mother who thought my father had ripped her off.
Edie, who had fucked me over.
I couldn’t go back now. And it seemed too late anyway.
My hand was reaching up.
My finger was pressing the button.
My shoulders were tightening against the cold as I waited for Uncle Donald’s thick voice to answer. Or Truman’s.
“Who is it?” a woman asked instead.
So my uncle had a girlfriend after all. The sound of her singsong voice made me feel better. Maybe she would take a liking to me and help Donald understand my need for the money. Maybe she would understand how nervous I was about meeting Truman. “I’m looking for Donald Biadogiano,” I told her, trying my best to sound calm, mature. “I’m his nephew, Dominick.”
The intercom went shhhhhhh, then chirped. “Dominick?” She said my name like a question. Obviously my uncle had never mentioned his dear old nephew from Massachusetts before. “Sorry. Donald’s not at home.”
“Will he be back soon?” I asked, praying for a yes. What had I been thinking? Just because he answered the phone at the crack of dawn did not mean he would be here in the middle of the day.
“I don’t know when he’ll be home. Try back later.”
“Wait,” I said.
“Yes?”
I took a deep breath. My throat tightened. “Is Truman here?”
This is it, a voice said. You are going to find out about your brother.
Shhhhh. Chirp. “Truman?” the woman said after what felt like forever. “Truman who?”
I had never really thought about my brother’s last name before. It certainly wasn’t Pindle. But did he use Biadogiano? Or the last name of the man in the photo beneath my mother’s bed? “I don’t know his last name exactly, but he lives here with Donald.”
“Donald lives alone,” the woman said. “And that’s more information than I should be giving out over the intercom. Like I said, you’ll have to stop back later.”
The speaker went lifeless, and I stood on the street staring at the playground. The man and his poodle were gone. The noose was swaying in the breeze. The New York sky was the same dismal gray as the feathers of the pigeons on the sidewalk. A shitload of wet winter snow was bound to drop sometime soon. The thought of wandering the streets, waiting, hoping for Donald to show, made me lay my finger on the buzzer again.
“Who is it?” the woman asked as if she really expected it to be someone else.
This time her singsong had a little less song to it. The wishful image of her as my accomplice went splat in my brain. “Me again. Listen. I came all the way from Massachusetts to see my uncle. Can you at least let me up so I can leave him a note?”
A long pause that I took as a no. Then the door buzzed. Before she could change her mind, I pushed myself into the cramped lobby. The place had the flat, chalky smell of chemicals. Rife with powdery poison, like our apartment back in Holedo after the exterminator sprayed for roaches and set traps for mice and rats. For the third time that day I found myself rationing breaths. I was becoming an expert at barely breathing. I treaded up the ancient wooden staircase in the winter work boots my mother had given me Christmas morning. I hadn’t worn them before today, and they were heavier than my sneakers, heavier than Edie’s black shoes. I hated all that weight on my feet. It made walking work, especially upstairs.
Before I could knock, the woman called from inside the apartment, “Leave your message on the landing and I’ll get it later.”
She had an Irish accent, a squeaky leprechaun sort of deal that I had thought was merely singsonginess through the intercom. I wondered if my uncle had met her on one of his trips overseas.
“I don’t have a pen and paper,” I told her. “Besides, I’m his nephew. Can’t I at least come inside? Who are you anyway?”
“I clean for Mr. B,” she said.
The friggin’ cleaning lady. No wonder she didn’t know anything about me or my brother. “Well, I’m sure Mr. B told you to expect me,” I said.
“He told me nothing.”
Plan A: You open the fucking door. Plan B: I trick you into opening it. “Could you slide a piece of paper and a pen under the door?” I asked, staring down at the fluffy hallway carpet, flush against the door. I knew it would never fit and she’d have to open up. After that, I wasn’t sure what I had in mind.
My Irish enemy shuffled around on the other side of the door. After a couple of tries she actually managed to slide out a piece of paper, crinkled and torn. Lucky for me, the pen wouldn’t fit. Right on schedule, two locks twisted and clicked. The door creaked open. The woman behind the voice was too tall, with a white, papery face and white hair pulled back in a kerchief. A ghost with big ears, a ringed neck, and a billboard forehead.
“Thanks for opening up,” I said, trying to put her at ease. “I really appreciate it.”
She smiled—her teeth yellow against the rest of her backdrop—and handed me the pen. She kept guarding the door, though, like I was going to make a break for it. “Sorry I can’t let you inside. But this is New York.”
“I understand,” I told her, still waiting for step two of my plan to come to me.
“I’ll clean while you write,” she said. “Knock when you’re ready.”
Before I could stop her, the door was closed again. I stood in the hallway a moment, clenching the pen and paper. Part of me wanted to slam my fists against the door until she let me in. But I doubted that would work, and not knowing what else to do, I wrote:
Uncle Donald,
Surprise! I’m in the city! But don’t tell my mother. I’ll walk around your neighborhood for a while, then stop back. If you come home, please stay put. I really need to see you. Remember, please don’t tell my mother I’m here.
Love, Dominick
If I’d had another piece of paper, I would have written the thing again, getting rid of those overly cheerful exclamation marks and making myself sound a little less worried about him blabbing to my mom. Erasable ink. That was another invention Donald could make billions on. People like me would pay big bucks to fix their mistakes. I was just about to fold the paper and knock when the door opened. The white lady was holding a framed picture. “It’s you, right?” she said.
In the photo I was a kid—only about two or three years old—with a bowl haircut at a lake beach with Uncle Donald. Must have been taken before my memory kicked in, because I couldn’t remember a single day like that with Donald. Still, I knew where this was leading.
“That’s me all right. Donald and I go to the lake every summer.”
“I’m Rosaleen. I dust your face whenever I’m here. I didn’t recognize you because you’re so big now.” The door opened all the way, and Rosaleen ushered me inside. Finally.
The apartment had red-painted walls that made the place feel closed in, slippery, and bloody. The inside of a clot. The clutter of dusty furniture made me think of those overpriced tag sales that Marnie loved to raid, filling her trunk with junk, junk, and more junk. Donald had piles of paper and boxes everywhere, like he was either moving in or moving out. Black-inked labels read DO NOT THROW AWAY! IMPORTANT! RESEARCH MATERIALS!
“Sorry again,” Rosaleen said. “But it’s New York. Killers are everywhere. Nobody’s safe. Do you want some tea?”
I wondered if she was reading from the same script as the bus driver Claude. After all, there was a playground practically across the street. How dangerous could this place really be? “Tea would be great,” I told her, figuring a drink would guarantee me at least ten minutes in the apartment.
When she disappeared into the kitchen, I scoped around for clues about my brother. Good thing Donald hired a housecleaner, because the place was filthy. A disaster area, my mother would say, like she sometimes did about my bedroom. The wooden floors scuffed with skid marks from someone’s boots. The frosty windows smudged and fingerprinted with swirling lines. Shelves crammed with books—Discoveries in Turbo Physics, Nuclear Cooling Systems, Biomedical Engineering in the Twentieth Century. A regular Fun with Dick and Jane collection.
I wandered over to a three-legged table next to a rocker with a frayed, woven seat. The tabletop was covered with framed pictures. Donald and a group of smart-looking guys in glasses and tuxes. Donald and another man with a beard and mustache, both in lab coats, holding up certificates with sunny golden seals. Donald wearing a dark sweater with a molten blue sky behind him and a smoldering sun.
None of anyone who could have been my brother.
On the mantel above the fireplace there were more photos. Still none of Truman, but I spotted one of my mother—a black-and-white shot I had seen before at home. It was taken when she was pregnant, and her stomach jutted out in front of her. Bigger than Edie’s and impossible to hide. She wore a loose patterned shirt that made me think of Indians and powwows. Around her neck hung a string of beads. Her hair was longer than I’d ever seen it and looked windblown. Her smile was nothing like the lips-together one I knew. She was actually grinning, showing her two overlapped teeth.
I’m just so tired, I heard her say. Things have got to get easier for me.
At least the heat was working now. She wouldn’t have to keep warm in that awful black coat. And I was going to replace the money somehow. I put down the picture and spotted one of Donald with the man from the photo under my mother’s bed.
Same bushy hair. Same tight mummy skin.
Bingo.
When Rosaleen came back into the room with my cup of tea and a plateful of miniature sandwiches, I showed her the photo. “Do you know who this is?”
“I haven’t the foggiest. But I dust him, too.”
She was a regular information bank. At the very least I hoped she could give me an estimate—give or take an hour or two—of when my uncle would return. But when I asked again, she shrugged her shoulders, whipped out a dirty dust rag, and started cleaning. Defeated, I put down the picture and took a sip of tea. The taste was a flower petal on my tongue, not at all like my mother’s Lipton’s. The tea bag bobbed up and down inside my mug, a tadpole in a murky pond. I was dying to press her about Truman some more, but I didn’t want to seem so unknowledgeable about my family that Rosaleen became suspicious and hurled me back out onto the street. I held in my questions and rode the wave of her mindless chatter as she moved around the apartment swiping random objects with her rag.
She talked about her cousin’s hip surgery.
She talked about her part-time job as a nurses’ aide.
She talked about the killer snowstorm that was headed our way.
She talked and talked and talked about everything, except my uncle and my brother. I wolfed down her eggy sandwiches and let my tea grow cold. When I couldn’t take one more second of her babbling, I asked, “Are you sure nobody lives here with Donald?”
Rosaleen put her hands on her hips and shook her head. A loose white curl of hair bounced against her huge brow, and she blew it out of the way. “I told you, your uncle lives alone.”
“Then where does Truman live?”
“I’ve never even heard of Truman,” she said. “Whoever he is, he doesn’t live here. I would charge more money if there was another mess-maker in this place.”
I thought of all those mornings my father and I drove my mother to the bus station so she could travel to New York. All those carefully wrapped presents in her dainty hands that I used to wish were for me.
I decided Rosaleen-the-cleaning-machine had to be wrong. Maybe my uncle lied to her about Truman for the exact reason she had said: He didn’t want her to charge more money for her services, which, judging from the looks of the place, weren’t very good anyway. But that scenario smacked of bullshit. While Rosaleen straightened up the apartment—or at least went through the motions—I ducked out of the living room and poked around some more.
In the bathroom: a single, worn red toothbrush, one flannel robe complete with crusty tissues in the pockets, and one comb with dandruff in the teeth. In the first bedroom: a queen-size bed made up like one in a motel with two pillows tucked under the top sheet, a baby-chopper fan above the bed just like Edie’s, which made my heart sink, a dresser filled with balled gray socks like dozens of dead mice, a closet filled with XL suits as somber and dark as an undertaker’s. In the second bedroom: no bed, just a desk bigger than a casket and cluttered with crap, doodles of something that looked like a car without wheels or a piece of complicated hospital equipment, formulas and equations with numbers and letters and symbols that looked like an algebra nightmare.
All of it Donald’s.
I was beginning to realize that Rosaleen was right, and the thought made me clench my teeth, squeeze my fists. There was no Truman. At least not in this apartment. Of all the scenarios I had imagined, it never occurred to me that Truman would simply not be here. First Edie had fucked me over. Now my own mother had lied to me. Not for days or weeks or months but for years.
My whole fucking life. She had lied to me.
Without planning it, I picked up the phone on Donald’s desk. As I spun the rotary, my mind raced with all the things I would say to her.
It’s time you told me about Truman.
Where the hell is my brother?
Why have you been lying?
Tell me. Tell me. Tell me.
The phone clicked through, and my heart felt like it might explode in my chest, the red chunks of it splattering against the wall for Rosaleen to clean like the flesh of that baby sliced to bits by the ceiling fan in my mother’s story. A recorded voice crackled, “I’m sorry, the number you have reached is temporarily out of service. Please check the number and try your call again.” I hung up, dialed again, slower this time. “I’m sorry, the number you have reached—” Again I hung up and redialed. Same recording.
What the hell was going on?
Outside the window, snow had started to fall. Wind pressed the flakes against the glass, where they melted and drooled down the pane. I glanced at the pile of papers on Donald’s desk. Between the doodles and nightmare formulas was a desk calendar. Under January 23, 1972, I recognized my uncle’s handwriting from the envelopes he addressed to my mother. It read: Pan Am Flight 237 to Cleveland, 1:00 P.M.
He wasn’t coming back in a few hours.
He was halfway to goddamned Ohio.
I wasn’t sure what to do next.
No Truman. No Donald. No money. The entire trip had been one big bust.
Down the hall Rosaleen was humming something hopelessly happy, and I closed the door to block out the sound of her. I picked up the phone and dialed Leon’s number. Maybe he could clue me in on my mother’s whereabouts, the reason for her disconnected phone. He answered on the first ring. “Man, you are just the person I wanted to see,” he said. “Where the hell are you?”
“New York. But don’t tell anyone.”
“What the hell are you doing there?”
“It’s a long story. I’ll explain later. Have you seen my mother around today?”
“Nope. But your imaginary friend Edie was upstairs banging on your door.”
I felt punctured at the sound of her name. Edie was at my apartment, and I could have been there to make her pay me back. I could have been there to listen to what she had to say. Only I had come up with a brilliant plan to go to New York, which so far was a complete and total waste. “Tell me what happened.”
“Not much to tell. Edie Kramer was knocking away. When no one answered, she just stood there. Then she turned to me at the bottom of the stairs and said, ‘Are you Leon?’”
Shit. I never should have mentioned Leon to her those nights at her house. Who knew what was coming next? “What happened?”
“I told her it was me in the flesh, and she handed me a letter in an envelope. Said to give it to you.”
“Do you have the letter?”
“Yeah. Do you want me to read it?”
“No. I’ll wait until I get home tonight.”
“Too late,” Leon said. “I ripped it open the second she waddled off.”
“You fucker. That’s my private letter.”
“What are you, the postmaster general? Do you want me to read it to you or what?”
I huffed. “Fine.”
Leo crinkled the paper a moment, then cleared his throat. “Are you ready?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure?”
“Read it!” I yelled, not caring if Rosaleen heard me.
“Okay, okay. It says, ‘Dominick, I don’t know why you left without saying good-bye last night. But I want you to know that I’m sorry if what’s about to happen will hurt you. I needed a friend during this lonely time, and you were an angel. Someday I hope you’ll forgive me. Someday I hope you’ll understand. Love, Edie.’”
I walked to the bedroom window, stretching the phone cord as tight as it could go. Up close I could see that the snow was mixed with rain. Wind whipped the flakes and drops around into a blur of white and gray. Down the street the swing had twisted itself out of the noose and was moving back and forth. I imagined a child out there, swinging. “That’s it?” I asked.
“The end,” Leon said. “What the hell is all that about? Man, you weren’t shitting me about knowing her. Did you get the bitch pregnant, angel?”
I wished I could have bragged about Edie like I did after that first night. Back then if this had happened, I would have gone on and on about it to Leon, flaunting that letter like it was some kind of trophy. But what Edie had done to me was nothing to brag about. And even though the Dominick who would have carried on like that was inside me somewhere, he seemed invisible. There but not there, like the child I imagined on the swing in the storm.
“Did she say anything else?” I asked, unsure of what I was hoping to hear.
“Sorry, angel. Just got in the car with some dude and left.”
If he called me “angel” one more time, I was going to head straight back to Holedo and pummel him. I didn’t care if he was twice my strength. “There was a guy in the car?”
“Yeah. A black guy.”
“Who was he?”
“Flip Wilson. How the fuck should I know, Pindle? You’re really annoying the shit out of me. See if I ever open your mail again.”
“Dominick,” Rosaleen called from the living room. “I finished cleaning.”
“I gotta go,” I said. “I’ll see you when I get home.”
I hung up the phone while Leon was still in the middle of another crack. When I returned to the living room, Rosaleen was fussing with her coat, a way-out green cape that she tied around her neck. The place seemed as if the storm had moved inside, dust floating in the air like snowflakes from Rosaleen’s cleaning frenzy. Other than that, the apartment looked the same as when I had arrived. Fingerprints still smudged the windows. Papers still unfiled.
“I suppose I could let you stay until Donald gets home,” Rosaleen said, pushing her arms through two slits in the cape. “But I have no idea what time that could be.”
A week from Tuesday, I wanted to say. “He’s expecting me, so he should be here soon.” Silently I thanked God that she was leaving, that she hadn’t asked who I was talking to in the bedroom.
“It was nice to meet you,” she said at the door. “Try to keep things neat.”
Good thing I wasn’t in a better mood, because I would have busted out laughing. “I’ll do my best,” I told her.
The moment she was gone, I bolted the door and came up with a new plan: one last look around for signs of Truman, then head home to Holedo on the three o’clock bus before the storm shut down service. I would pedal my ass straight to Edie’s and find out what she meant by “what happens next.” I would demand my money back, then go home and nail my mother down about my brother’s whereabouts once and for all.
I walked back to the bedroom and got down on my hands and knees to look under Donald’s bed. Torn blanket. Old shoes. New shoes. More textbooks. I opened his nightstand drawer and dug around. Nasal spray. Antacid. Tissues. Take-out menus. I went to his desk again and pulled open those drawers. Scraps of scribbled notes—Pick up samples before noon. Mail grant material by September 1. Prepare lecture on cell duplication. A checkless checkbook with a balance of $10,422.89.
A lot of good that did me.
Just as I was about to give up, I hit pay dirt in a shoe box in the back of my uncle’s closet. Nothing about Truman, but I found some cold hard cash instead. Fifteen hundred to be exact. Either it was a family thing or most of America was hiding their money in the same place and I could get pretty damn rich robbing houses. I hadn’t planned on getting the money this way, and it wasn’t enough to replace what I had stolen from my mother, but I would take what I could get. Donald could blame his batty cleaning lady when he found it missing—if he found it missing in this dump.
Inside the shoe box with the money was a Bible. It threw me for a loop, since Donald didn’t seem like the type who would own anything religious, never mind keeping the good book in a special hiding place. I flipped the thin pages, hoping he had crammed more money inside. No green stuff, but a scrap of newspaper fell to the floor, fluttering like a fat gray moth.
DAY 3: BOY STILL MISSING
It didn’t make any sense that he would save a headline but not the article, yet that’s all there was. The words gave me the same nervous feelings I got from all those headlines I’d read with Edie about murder, cyclones, and fucked-up things in the world. I had enough to think about at the moment, though, so I shoved the slip of paper back into the Bible, tossed it in the box, and headed for the living room.
Before walking out the door, I picked up that picture of the man beneath my mother’s bed. Carefully I slid out the frame, looking for a name or date on the reverse side. There was nothing. I shoved the photo back behind the glass, put on my dad’s hunting coat, and stuffed the money into the duffel bag. I walked to the kitchen window to check on the weather. Outside it had grown dark.
Wind still whipping.
Nobody on the sidewalk.
Rosaleen had left the picture of me at the beach with Donald on the stove. Clearly not where it belonged. I carried it back to the living room and was about to put it with all the others when something made me stop. I flipped back the frame and slid the photo out like I had the other. I guess I was wondering about the date, since I really couldn’t remember a single beach excursion with Donald. On the back of the photo my mother’s even, careful script made me hold my breath.
Donald and Truman, Laguna del Perro, 1955
It wasn’t me in the picture after all.
It was my brother.
I turned the photo around and looked at Truman’s face. After all this time, there he was smiling back at me, erecting a bucket-shaped castle with the rocky sand. Even with different fathers, he looked so much like me that it was scary. Same stringy hair. Same wide eyes. Same wimpy white skin that would be burned at the end of a too-sunny day like that one. He was my brother for sure. A part of me.
I could have stood there staring at the picture for hours. But the thought of getting back to Holedo, where I would sort out this shit for good, instead of playing my lifelong guessing game, made me carefully place the picture in my duffel bag and head toward the door. Before leaving, I took a set of spare keys off a nail by the coatrack, tried them in the dead bolt to be sure they worked in case I ever needed to get back in the place and didn’t want to deal with Rosaleen, then headed downstairs.
Even with the storm, my uptown trip was easier than downtown.
An available taxi. An odorless driver who moved swiftly through the slippery streets.
Five bucks later I was back at Port Authority. This time I didn’t have that lost look on my face and nobody bugged me as I rushed through the station, careful not to slip on the wet floor, down the escalator to my bus. I climbed on board, and instead of Claude, my driver was a sloppy-looking, red-faced man who tore my ticket without even looking me in the eye. The bus was mobbed, and I found the only empty seat near the back, next to a sleeping nun.
The driver made an announcement that because of the weather, we would be traveling slowly and the trip would be longer than usual. More good news. I settled in as best I could without getting too comfy with the nun, since the last thing I wanted was to wake her. As the bus chugged out of the station and moved through the snow and rain onto the highway, I caught my breath, tried to clear my mind.
Across the aisle a porky girl with a freckle overdose was chowing down on Good & Plenty. Smack. Smack. Gulp. “Please don’t eat me! I don’t want to be dead,” her older brother said in the squeaky voice kids use to animate almost everything. Once he got his sister to feel guilty, she set a few of her pink or white beans on the armrest and stroked them with her pudgy fingers like pets. Then her brother said, “I waited my whole life for someone to eat me, and now I’m just going to waste away on this dumb bus.” After that the girl happily mashed the candy to bits in her mouth, only to find it calling to her from the depths of her stomach. “Why did you kill me? Why? Why? Why? I hate being dead.” When the girl was near tears because of her brother’s brain fuck, their mother cranked her fat neck around from the seat in front of them and told them to knock it off. They shut up for a few minutes, but then the routine started all over again.
The whole game made my head pound. While they carried on, I kept staring at the picture of my brother. I flipped the photo over and read my mother’s handwriting, then flipped it back and looked in Truman’s brown eyes. I wondered what he was thinking that day at the beach. I wondered what he was thinking now. Most of all I wondered how my mother was going to explain all this. I must have flipped that picture back and forth a hundred times and asked those questions about a thousand more as the bus moved north toward Holedo.
The Good & Plenty gang got off in Hartford. The girl left a row of candies stashed on her seat like the colorful eggs of a bug waiting to hatch. “I saved their lives,” she said quietly to me so her brother couldn’t hear. He was too glad to be getting off the bus to notice anyway. “Take care of them,” she whispered.
The second she stepped off the bus, I brushed the candies to the floor and stretched out on the empty seats. Across the aisle the nun stirred and let her mouth drop open like a ghoul in a black cape, but she kept sleeping. In her hands she clutched a Bible. In mine I clutched Truman. In between staring at his picture and piecing together all I had or hadn’t learned today, I poked my head up to check on the bus’s progress through the storm. Over the even domino row of seats I could see the driver’s dark, shadowy figure like death at the wheel, the green road signs slipping by, one after another. Other than the occasional dull murmur of people’s conversations, the only sounds were the ratchety squeak of the seats, the hum of the tires beneath us, the wind blowing through the rubber of the folding bus door. We were moving pretty fast, considering. I decided to give some shut-eye a shot, and by the time we got to Holedo, my neck and shoulders were stiff from sleeping in my cramped and twisted position.
“It’s eight P.M. local time here in sunny Holedo,” the driver announced over the loudspeaker when we finally pulled into the station after what felt like a decade on the road. “Our flight is landing only one hour behind schedule.”
Everyone on board was too dead from the trip to react to his joke. The nun, in particular, was still out cold, and I was beginning to wonder if she had missed her stop. But I decided to let God take care of her.
I put the picture of my brother back in my duffel bag and hopped off the bus. The air had that muffled hush of a winter storm. The snow falling full throttle. A plow rumbling in the distance. I could see its yellow flashing lights reflected on the weighed-down white branches of the trees. Buried in a thick layer of slushy snow, my bike looked like a crooked skeleton behind the fence where I had dumped it that morning. I picked it up, wiped the seat with the sleeve of my father’s hunting coat, and started pedaling. I may as well have been pedaling on the moon, as desolate, dark, and cold as everything was. I usually did a decent job of maneuvering my bike in snow. But the stiffness in my neck and the duffel bag over my shoulder made steering near impossible. Twice I lost my balance and fell against the curb. After the second fall I stayed off the bike and walked it toward Edie’s instead.
The colder I got and the heavier my feet felt, the more I wanted to abort the mission. But Edie’s letter kept ringing in my ears.
I’m sorry if what’s about to happen will hurt you.
I needed a friend during this lonely time, and you were an angel.
Someday I hope you’ll forgive me.
Someday I hope you’ll understand.
When I wasn’t thinking about the letter, I found myself thinking of my mother’s handwriting on the back of that picture, wondering about the disconnected phone at our apartment. At the corner where I would have to turn either toward home or toward Edie’s, I stopped in the middle of the empty, snow-covered street. Breathless and cold, I thought about simply going home. My direction depended on whose answers I wanted more. My mother’s or Edie’s. I knew that the truth about Truman mattered to me the most, but when my feet started to move, I was walking toward Edie’s.
At the top of the hill I could see that her house was completely dark, not even the porch light lit. Near the end of her driveway a sign had been pitched by the mailbox. FOR SALE. MOOREHEAD REAL ESTATE. CONTACT AGENT: VICKI SPRING. The sight of it made my face wrinkle and wince as if I had been slapped. So that’s what she had meant by what happens next. Edie was moving. Selling off her old furniture and now the house. Skipping town with my mother’s money.
Not if I stopped her first.
I dumped my bike and trudged through the snow to the front porch. The door was locked, so I started banging. “Edie!” I yelled in a white fog of air. “Edie! Open up now!”
I waited for her to answer, pacing the porch and punching the door when I walked by. The wind let out a lonely-sounding whistle, like someone far away calling for help. In the distance I could hear another plow scraping and moaning. No noise came from inside the house.
Finally I peeked in a window.
The living room was empty.
I walked around to the back of the house and looked in the kitchen window.
Empty as well.
The seashell wind chime still hung by the back door; I ripped it down and hurled the piece of shit at the picture window. It clanked against the glass and fell to the snow in a soft, silent hush. Nothing broke. In my throb of anger I found myself digging around for a rock or a brick. I got my hands on an empty planter, lifted it up out of the snow, and hurled that, too. This time the glass shattered in an explosion of noise. It looked like a million stars or icicles coming undone. The second the shattering was over, the air seemed even quieter than before. Just the patter of snow and rain hitting the ground. I made my way up the stairs, stretched my arms to the window, and climbed inside.
What was I looking for? Clearly, if Edie had been home, she would have come running by now. I suppose I wanted proof that she had taken everything, left nothing behind, and was gone for good. And that’s exactly what I got. All that remained was the ivy and flowered wallpapers, the matted brown carpet in the hallway, scattered dust balls blowing through the place like tiny tumbleweeds. The house felt like a giant clammy mouth that had finally been stretched open and forced to breathe with the breaking of the window. Air blew in through the rooms and seemed to snake around every corner, wiping out even the faintest smell that might have been left of Edie’s perfume.
I walked through the echoing, hollow hallway to her bedroom and stood in the doorway. She had left the ceiling fan going, and the blades kept moving above the empty space where her bed used to be, as menacing and evil-looking as ever, circulating the air the way she liked even though she was gone. I remembered the first time I saw my father in this room, bare-chested and sleeping in Edie’s bed. I remembered the last time I woke here in my underwear and went to find her.
I should have known that between that starting point and now, something was seriously wrong. A woman like Edie didn’t go after a kid like me unless she wanted something. She had used me. No matter how she tried to soften things in her letter, that was the only truth about our relationship. And even if I missed her as much as I hated her, even if I worried about her out there somewhere with that baby in her belly, with that man who I never met behind the wheel of her car, I had to swallow that truth and move on. She was gone, and I needed to walk out of this place and stop thinking about her forever, no matter how hard that would be.
I decided that I would go home and tell my mother everything. Then I would make her tell me everything, too, beginning with the truth about my brother. After that, we would start fresh with our lives.
I walked outside and found my bike, blown over by the wind and twisted in the driveway. I climbed on and pedaled away from Edie’s house, listening to the gravel crunch beneath the snow and my bicycle tires one last time, feeling the wind from the top of the hill blow against my forehead and muss my hair. I coasted down the hill faster than I should have considering the trouble I had steering. I wanted to make a plan for my mother and me, to stop thinking about Edie like I promised myself when I walked out her door. But she was still with me. As I rounded the corner toward the Holedo Motel, I heard her words in my head.
We’ll check in to the room together.
When I looked up, there were dozens of cop cars in front of the motel. No sirens. Just the buzz and murmur of a police radio. I heard the words “Body. APB. Pregnant female.” I heard the numbness of radio static, then the same words repeated: “Body. APB. Pregnant female.” I wheeled my bike through the snow-covered parking lot, which had been flattened into a slick white rug by so many tire tracks, and got off between two empty cop cars. I spotted Marnie’s yellow Dart parked in the far corner of the lot. Roget was nowhere.
We’ll leave in the morning. Then check in to the room together.
Edie had to be here. But something was wrong.
I’m sorry if what’s about to happen will hurt you.
I left my bike and made my way up the cement stairs to the crowd of policemen on the second floor, outside room 5B.
“Hey, kid,” someone called from the parking lot. “You can’t go up there.”
“Who’s in there?” I asked when I got closer to the mob of policemen.
Two of the cops turned and looked at me. Marnie was standing behind them, and they opened up to her like two double doors. She screamed at the sight of me. Not a word, but a sound. “Ooopllejjjj! Ooopllejjjj!” One of the officers held her by the arm. She looked ancient. Broken. Black, inky tears smeared down her cheeks.
“Marnie. Who’s in there?” I said, but it was no use. She just kept screaming.
“Is Officer Roget here?” I asked.
Both policemen eyed each other. “We’re looking for him,” one said finally.
“Is Edie Kramer in that room?” I asked, loud and trembling.
With that, Marnie let out a yelp louder than all the others and fell to her knees. And I knew that it was true. Edie was in there, and something was very wrong.
If something should happen to me, she whispered.
I broke past both cops who tried to hold me back. They got tangled up in Marnie’s flailing arms instead. I busted by an ambulance man in a white uniform, shoved myself into the motel room, and slammed the door behind me. Locked it. Closed my eyes. “When I turn around, Edie will be here and she will be okay,” I said.
Slowly I turned.
I felt my body lift from the ground.
I was looking down on the room like a camera on the ceiling. The scene came in flashes: On the floor was a woman. Facedown. Hair matted. Neck twisted. Hand holding the telephone. Towels between her legs. Blood running wild along the carpet. A pregnant woman trying to get rid of her baby. Only she had killed herself instead. The woman was my mother.