She met him one night last spring when she set out on her own in search of her husband. After spying out all the usual places, she parked on the side of Hanover Street, wondering where to go next. That’s when he pulled up behind her, got out of his car, and tap-tap-tapped his sleek black flashlight against her window. She had failed to signal, he explained, and her brake lights weren’t working either. He could have written her a ticket. But if she promised to have her husband fix those lights first thing in the morning and to remember to signal the next time she pulled to the side of the road, he would skip all that and simply follow her home to make sure she got there safe and sound.
She sat behind the wheel of her car and made that promise.
She actually crossed her heart.
He wasn’t at all the type of man she usually found attractive. Her first husband, before he died, had been a dreamer, always working odd jobs while coming up with a new way to hit it big. And her present husband was a free spirit, a trait she had been drawn to until it wreaked havoc on her life. But this man—a police officer—seemed solid and strong, despite what her husband always said. Like his squad car steadily trailing her home—secure, capable, watchful.
She told herself that none of those feelings mattered. After all, she was a married woman. Given the way her last family had fallen apart, along with all the other lives she had traded in, she was determined to make this one work. If not for her sake, then for her younger son’s. But then she saw the officer again in the market on a Sunday afternoon in June. Her husband had been on a bender for days, and the sheriff walked alongside her, up and down the aisles of the grocery store, past the rainbow of cans and boxes, until they had both filled their carts.
Not long after, she began meeting him at the motel.
July. August. September.
To be kissed.
To be held.
To close her eyes and listen to his deep voice.
He left her with a sense of calm that wasn’t quite love but something almost more indelible, because there was none of the turmoil she had known in her other relationships. With him she still had the pieces of herself intact even when they were apart, whereas those other men had left her feeling shattered. Unglued.
Then she missed her period.
At first she lied to herself. She was nervous, and that had thrown off her body clock before. But her belly began to show, and she simply wanted to will it all away.
October. November. December.
She twisted the knob on the radiator until it stuck. The heat’s broken, she explained to her son, I’ll wear this coat until it’s fixed.
Until I’m fixed, she kept saying to her best friend. Then it dawned on her: Couldn’t her friend use her hospital connections to ask someone for help? Couldn’t she sneak into a supply room and steal some ergot? But the nurses threatened to report her friend, and now she was worried for her job.
It’s a hospital, she told her friend again and again with a false sense of calm. Trust me, people have asked that question before.
Her husband called from the road and said he would be home in one week. He acted as if it were perfectly normal for a man with a wife and kid to be gone through the holidays. More than anything she wanted to shake off these last months the way he had. But when it came time to face him, her pregnancy would be impossible to deny. And since there was not a chance that it could be his child, she was afraid of what he might do.
She made plans to go away.
The officer had no money of his own, but he knew a friend who knew someone who could arrange for her to have a late-term abortion. She planned to use a few thousand dollars of the emergency money she had saved from her brother. She would fly to Mexico City. An expatriate doctor would take her to a house where he did this sort of thing all the time. It was safe. It was clean.
She opened her jewelry box, and almost all of the money was gone.
She peeled back her bedroom rug and pulled out coupons and singles tucked between two hundred-dollar bills.
She lifted the top to an old shoe box and found only a handful of small bills inside.
She was four and a half months pregnant and could not wait another day. The officer said a doctor friend had told him exactly how to do it. This doctor friend had given him the instruments. Her best friend came up with the latex gloves and sterilization kit. She unplugged the phone so people would think there was trouble with the line instead of wondering where she was if they called and didn’t get an answer. She met the officer in the parking lot of the motel where the child inside her had been conceived.
It was a bitter, snowy night, and she wanted to say good-bye to her younger son just in case something went wrong. Things had been tense between them, and she wanted to make amends. When this was over, she might even tell him about the nightmare with her first husband and son. He was old enough now to know. But he had gone off for the day with his friend.
A speculum. A smooth slim probe of steel.
Her stomach convulsed. Her vagina bled. The officer kept trying to stop the blood, but it gushed, faster and faster. The towels became drenched, and the more he tried to help, the more the blood pooled around her. She looked up in a blur and saw that his face had gone ghost-white with panic. He had been trained for emergencies but never for an emergency like this one. He could be arrested for his involvement here. He could lose everything he had ever worked for. In a court of law, he would be treated no different than a murderer. She knew. He knew. They both knew. Be right back, the officer said, gripping the gold badge on his chest as if his heart ached beneath it, broken and hardened by fear.
He left the room.
She thought of her husband calling him a coward—a lazy, crooked coward—and something told her he would never be back. That’s when the unglued feeling overtook her. There on the floor, she felt as if a pack of wild dogs had been let loose inside her, trampling her insides, shredding her to nothing. She rolled her body over. In one last effort, she stretched her hand to the phone.
Her best friend answered.
Something’s wrong, she told her between breaths. I’m bleeding and it hurts. He said he would be right back. But I know he’s gone for good. How quickly can you come?
MARNIE TOLD me again and again the story of how my mother died. As we drove inside the dry cockpit of her car on our way to the memorial service, she found it necessary to go over the details one more time. My mother’s first meeting with Roget, their secret rendezvous at the motel, her pregnancy hidden beneath that coat, and, of course, the missing money. Each time my mind bubbled with questions but only grasped them for a few fleeting seconds before letting go. The answers didn’t matter, because the end result was the same: My mother was gone, and I was to blame.
When I looked over at Marnie, she was crying again, her face crinkled into a distorted blob. One hand held the steering wheel while the other dabbed a clump of baby-blue tissues at her cheeks. “How dare those policemen cover for that chicken bastard. If he had just stayed with her, called for help. . . ” Her hand smacked the steering wheel. Her tears kept coming.
Your mother might still be alive, I thought, finishing her sentence.
The more Marnie repeated that story, the more numb I became. My eyes bulged. My voice whispered. I spoke in one-word sentences, if at all. I stared out at the road, the double yellow line stretching before us and leading the way. Tree branches leaned over both sides of the street, tunneling us as we drove beneath. The sky had been full of glaring, after-the-storm sunlight for the last couple of days, but it had yet to melt the bulk of the snow. My mother couldn’t be dead, I kept telling myself as I stared out at all that whiteness. I had just seen her two days before, asleep on the couch while I cranked on the radiator. But then my mind flashed on that image of her body in the motel. After I found her like that, I had blacked out, fallen to the floor. Right smack in the middle of my forehead I sported a plum-colored bruise the shape of South America. Not from the fall but from the door hitting me when the officers busted back inside. I reached up and touched that bruise as we drove. I winced at the sting, then finger-combed my hair forward to cover it.
“How’s your head, Dominick?” Marnie asked, turning her red eyes away from the road toward me. No more “honey cake” or “sweet lips”—just plain old Dominick. She had ditched the Southern act the night my mother died.
Whenever I tried to speak, it felt as if a giant metal fishhook were lodged deep in my throat. Yes. No. Okay. Maybe. That was all anyone got from me when it came to conversation. “Okay,” I said and looked down at the worn floor mats of her car. Another thing I couldn’t do: make eye contact.
Even though her dogs, Fred and Ginger, had died over a year ago, I could still smell them from where I sat, dressed in the stiff blue suit Marnie had brought to me that morning. At my feet were scattered pennies, torn coupons, and newspaper clippings. When I was a kid, I used to collect that crap off her floor. Marnie would make like her tape deck was a candy machine and pull out red and white pinwheel mints for me to buy. A penny apiece. She accepted coupons, too.
My mother was dead, and here I was thinking about Marnie and our stupid baby games. What kind of son was I? I didn’t let myself answer that question. Instead I thought of what Marnie had told me about my mother turning off the radiator so she had an excuse to wear that coat. If only I hadn’t been so caught up with Edie, I might have suspected. I thought of all the clues that I had let fly right over my head. The way my mother carried on about Roget at the auction. His phone call afterward. That night he had driven me home in my underwear. What was it he had said? She has a lot on her plate, so go easy on her, or something like that. Yeah, well, maybe he should have listened to his own advice and gone easy on her instead of leaving her alone to die. I wanted to kill him, to grab the pistol from his holster and shoot it into his stomach, to let him suffer a bloody death the way my mother had. But I told myself that as guilty as Roget was for abandoning my mother in that motel room, I was far guiltier for betraying her long before that.
She needed that money. She needed me.
We pulled up in front of the funeral parlor—a one-story white building that looked like an ordinary house, something a little old lady might own, if you took away the RINETTE FUNERAL HOME sign above the door. I saw my father standing beneath that sign shaking hands with everyone who entered. Ever since he showed up the day after my mother’s death, he had been acting as if we had all been one big happy family until tragedy struck. He had yet to address the fact—at least to me—that my mother had died from a botched abortion, never mind mentioning that the baby couldn’t have been his. He simply played his part as the brokenhearted husband. He made all the arrangements: memorial service today, a few words at the cemetery afterward, burial when the ground thawed. He had even gotten here early this morning to have “some time alone with my wife.” His perfect-father routine made me hate him more than ever.
Inside, there were more people than I expected. Leon and Mrs. Diesel. Mr. and Mrs. Ramillo, the egg-shaped older couple from next door. A few of Marnie’s friends from the hospital, all gussied up in frumpy Sunday dresses. My father’s drinking buddies and Mac Maloney, the owner and bartender of Maloney’s Pub. The place smelled mothbally and used, like a library, only without the books. A bald-headed priest made a beeline for me the moment I stepped through the doorway. His name was Father Conroy, he told me. He was new to the parish in Holedo and deeply sorry for my loss. As he launched into a speech about God’s great plan for all of us, I looked away from his eyes, down at his hand shaking mine. The guy was missing a thumb, just like my woodshop teacher last year who had accidentally cut his off with a radial saw. I found myself imagining the far-fetched occupational hazards of a priest that could have led to losing a finger. Maybe he had sliced it off while cutting up a batch of holy bread. Maybe some hungry church lady had sunk her teeth into it as he lay a communion wafer on her tongue.
“She’s with the Good Lord now,” he said and gave me the kind of watery-eyed, dull expression that made me think of a fish tank. Steady bubble. Zero surprise.
That hook was still lodged in my throat, so I simply nodded. He couldn’t possibly believe what he was saying anyway. Ask every Catholic on the planet and they would tell you abortion was a sin. Never mind a priest, who was bound to believe that my mother had bought herself a one-way ticket to hell the night she checked into that motel room. I knew better. If there was a heaven, my mother would be there, the child inside her grown full-term.
I’d be the one in hell.
Father No Thumb led me to a chair at the front of the room, where I was bookended by my father and Marnie. My mother’s closed wooden coffin was buried beneath dozens of tight red roses like animal hearts, baby’s breath all around. I imagined the hushed silence inside, the thin breathless air, the stillness. There was a framed picture of her on top of the casket, smiling in that closed-lip way. Seeing it made my head feel thick and cloudy, used up. “How you doing, son?” my father said, clasping his hand on my shoulder and squeezing.
I shrugged. Across the room a line was forming, and I kept my eyes on the crowd in hopes that my father would look away, too, and not say anything else to me. One by one, people began filing past my mother’s casket, doing a kneel-and-pray routine before moving on to my father, then me, then Marnie. Before I knew it, I was caught up in a blur of faces and whispered apologies.
“I’m so sorry. . . ”
“If there’s anything I can do. . . ”
“Please call if you need help. . . ”
Marnie got right down to wailing and carrying on. But I stayed stone-faced with each and every handshake. I told myself that I didn’t deserve their condolences, seeing as I was the one who had put my mother in that casket. I had led her straight to death’s door with all my lying and underhanded schemes, so I was the one who should have been saying how sorry I felt.
As I sat, blank and stiff, letting their words slide right off me, my father sponged up every last bit of their attention. He kept saying the same thing over and over: “I loved that woman. . . God, how I loved that woman.”
If you loved her so much, I thought, then why didn’t you bother to come home for the last month of her life? And why were you in Edie Kramer’s bed last June? That’s what got this doomsday ball rolling in the first place. But I didn’t bother saying anything, because I had a funny way of showing love to my mother as well. I just let him play his part and kept nodding and looking down at the red rug of the funeral home with each passing person.
No tears, I promised myself.
When I looked up, Leon was kneeling before me. Hair grown almost down to his shoulders. New sand-colored cords and a blue button-down shirt with metal snaps left unsnapped over his chest. A guy from school named Ed Dreary stood behind him. I hadn’t hung out with Ed since the fifth grade. He was so dopey and pathetic, with his dandruff-flecked hair, rhino nose, and Nixon cheeks, that guys in school had started calling him Special Ed a few years back, and the name stuck. Weird that he and Leon were together.
“Hey,” Leon said.
“Hey,” Special Ed said, too.
“Hey,” I said back to both of them.
“You okay?” Leon asked.
I nodded yes. I was fine. I wasn’t crying, was I?
“About that letter,” Leon said. He stopped and glanced at my father, who was busy professing his undying love for my mother to a stubby woman with windshields for glasses. Leon lowered his voice still more and said, “From your friend.”
I cocked my head at him, confused. Sniffled because my nose was running. Must have been that library odor. All those roses that looked like animal hearts.
“Edie Kramer,” he whispered, close enough that I could smell the last cigarette on his breath.
I felt that fishhook shift and dislodge itself in my throat, choking me as I tried to speak. “I don’t ever want to talk about her again. Ever!”
My first full sentence in days, and it came out louder than I had expected. The woman with the Bozo glasses looked over, then turned back toward my father. “I loved her more than anything,” he told her.
Leon cleared his throat and stood, let his hands fall near his crotch the way he always did. Like he was pointing to his package, or something perverted. “Okay,” he said. “Sure thing. Forget about it. I’m sorry.”
I wanted to say something more to make sure he got the point, but I was afraid I might start bawling, so I held back. Leon and Special Ed walked off, and I let myself get swept up in the sea of long faces and condolences. The woman with the glasses was gone, but a pack of Marnie’s friends made their way over.
Jeanette. Lois. Ruth. Carol.
“I’m so sorry for you. . . ”
“I lost my mother recently, and I know it’s hard. . . ”
“All we can do is pray for her soul now. . . ”
“She’s looking down on you. . . ”
After they blew off, I sat there kicking at my seat and wondering how long this torture would last. I couldn’t stand people feeling sorry for me when I was the reason we were all here. I was the reason my mother was gone. “Hey, kid,” someone said, and I looked up.
Uncle Donald. He had trimmed his beard back so it was just a thin shadow around the edges of his fat jaw, a dark line over his lip. He could have penciled the thing on. I had been so busy missing my mother and blaming myself that I hadn’t even planned on seeing him here today. I scanned the room in search of my brother, anyone who looked remotely like that boy at Laguna del Perro in 1955. Nothing. I stared back at my uncle, his large brown eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses. He wore a wrinkled black suit with a white shirt and a long thin tie. A folded yellow envelope stuck out of his pocket. This is my mother’s brother, I thought. If he’s alive, then how can she be dead?
“How you doing?” he asked me.
I shrugged. “Okay,” I told him. My voice cracked, but I didn’t feel that fishhook in my throat any longer.
“Come here,” he said and wrapped his bear arms around me.
Caught off guard by his hug, I felt myself begin to slip. The tears started even as I tried to hold them back. My mouth opened and let out a shapeless sound I had never heard myself make before. I don’t know why it took him to break the dam inside me, but it did. I cried, and I couldn’t stop. Everyone was probably staring at me, thinking what a pathetic mess I was or feeling sorry for me without realizing that it was all my fault. But I couldn’t help it. I missed my mother and wanted her back. I was never going to see her again.
“It’s going to be okay, kid,” Donald said. “Let it out. You loved her and it hurts, I know. Just let yourself cry.”
The more he said those things, the more I bawled. My nose was running all over the place, and whenever I tried to gulp in more air, I let out that shapeless sound that embarrassed me. I must have carried on like that for five minutes. Ten. Finally I loosened my grip on Donald and caught my breath. The funeral line was backed up like a traffic jam on Route 67. The crowd must have taken my cue, because most of the room had their waterworks going full blast. Even the priest was shedding a few tears, and he probably did a funeral or two a week.
I looked at my uncle, opened my mouth, and said, “Truman.”
His face was expressionless. He blinked, took a breath, blinked again.
“My brother should be at our mother’s funeral,” I said.
My uncle was quiet a moment. He rested his hand on mine. “I’m sorry.”
I started to say something else, but Marnie stood and pulled Donald away. She led him over to the priest and made the introductions. The father launched into his spiel about God’s great plan, and I resumed my staring contest with the rug.
Where was my brother?
If this event didn’t drag him out of the woodwork, nothing would. I decided that maybe he was dead, too. He had drowned that day at Laguna del Perro in 1955 after the picture was taken. My mother had been one of those women who couldn’t accept the loss of her child, so she still fantasized that her son was alive, simply living with her brother in Manhattan.
“Dominick,” a woman said, “it’s me, Mrs. Tanenbaum. I’m so sorry.”
It was the woman with the too-big glasses who had been listening to my father’s sob story a few minutes ago. I shook her hand and nodded, letting the name Tanenbaum bounce around my brain in hopes of recognition. I came up empty until she finished what she was saying and walked away. From behind I recognized her squat body and chunky rear from seeing her up at the chalkboard. Mrs. T. My kindergarten art teacher. Something about the sight of her—remembering the pasty smell of her skin as she had helped me make macaroni montages and cut scraps of construction paper into refrigerator art for my mother—caused my stomach to bend and coil. An invisible hand pushed on my chest and made it hard for me to breathe. I bolted for the glowing red EXIT sign, left the I’m-so-sorry parade behind.
Outside, I retched by the Dumpster. I’m not sure what my body was churning up, because I hadn’t really eaten since the bus ride two days before. But out it came, all soft and yellow whatever it was. When I couldn’t heave anymore, I stood there leaning against the cold blue metal of the Dumpster, wondering why a funeral home needed such a big garbage-disposal system. What could they possibly have to throw away? Dead flowers. Body parts.
When I turned around, I noticed Leon and Special Ed standing across the lot. They were dragging on cigarettes and flipping pages of The Discount Car News, circling ads. Leon raised his chin up at me as a way of saying hello. He had seen me puke my guts out plenty of times on our Holedo Hell-Raiser drinking nights, but this was different. “Sorry,” I said, feeling pathetic.
“It’s cool,” Leon said. “Do what you need to do.”
Special Ed nodded, and something about that nod—like he knew what the fuck I was feeling, like he knew what it was like to be responsible for your mother’s death—made me want to rail him. But I just turned and walked away. Special fucking Ed. What the hell did he know?
I stayed numb for the rest of the service and for the whole trip out to the cemetery, where Thumbless gave a speech about death being the beginning or some such line of bull. In my head I listened to the entire Tommy album to block it all out.
What about the boy?
What about the boy?
What about the boy?
He saw it all.
When the priest finished, Marnie promptly collapsed by the pile of flowers that covered the ground where my mother would be buried come spring. Jeanette, Ruth, Lois, and Carol fussed over her like a stew they were taste-testing.
“She needs air.”
“She needs water.”
“She needs to walk around.”
More salt, I thought. Less pepper. Let her boil down.
“Let’s walk her to the car,” they all concurred and escorted her to the Dart. Her meltdown would give me an excuse to keep riding with her instead of my father, who was side-saddling with the priest. As people plucked roses from the pile for keepsakes, I ran those Who lyrics in my head to keep from crying again. When I couldn’t stand it anymore, I switched to those lines from my mother’s sad songs. “I looked at my life today. I wish I was happy living this way.” That brought me closer to the brink, so I turned off the DJ in my head and started thinking about those fairy tales. That mother who gave her son the last of her money and he blew it on some beans. A giant stalk.
When it was all over, I got back into Marnie’s car and let out a sigh. My plan: to head straight home, lock my bedroom door, and cry alone. After that my life was as black as a blank chalkboard to me.
Once we were on the road I realized the whole gang was following us to the apartment for a reception. “Is this a bon voyage party?” I asked Marnie. “Enough is enough.”
“Dominick,” she said, her voice still shaky, on the edge of tears, “there are always receptions after funerals. It gives people a chance to reminisce about the person who’s left us. Besides, everyone needs to eat.”
“That’s right,” I said. “Now that we’ve all worked up an appetite standing around my mother’s grave, let’s go back and rustle up some grub. I bet my kindergarten art teacher and Mrs. Diesel will have a grand old time discussing their millions of memories of my mother. We can all talk about her affair with the sheriff. Or about her plans for an abortion. Or about her son who didn’t show at his mother’s funeral!”
Without realizing it, I had seriously raised the volume and was out-and-out screaming. Marnie looked at me with an open-mouthed, Halloween-horror expression on her face. She seemed to me like someone with no bones inside her anymore. Flimsy. Collapsible. We pulled to the side of the road, and she stretched her wobbly arms toward me to give me a hug. I knew that would only lead to one of her crying jags, and I’d end up having to console her, straighten her back up.
No thank you.
“I don’t want a hug!” I screamed, pushing her weak arms away.
“I’m sorry,” she said, recoiling. “It’s all my fault. I should have talked your mother out of it. Should have gone with her or something. I understand why you’re blaming me.”
If I traced back the blame, it landed on one person: yours truly. Sure, I could hang some of it on my father for meeting Edie in the first place, my mother for carrying on with Roget and getting pregnant, and Edie for fucking me over. But the biggest onus fell on me. If that money had been there, none of this would have happened.
“I’m not blaming you, Marnie,” I said, calmer than before. “You were the only real friend she had. Believe me, it wasn’t your fault.” I saw myself as a black-robed judge, slamming down his gavel. Marnie Garboni is found not guilty by reason of insanity.
Marnie pulled that same clump of stiff blue tissues from her pocket and blew her nose. “I was?”
“Yes,” I said and meant it. “Out of all the people at that service who told me how much they would miss my mother, I know you’re the one who will miss her the most. You talked to her more than I did. Listened to all her worries.” To myself I added, And you never lied to her like my father and me.
“Thank you for saying that, Dominick. It means so much to me.”
Even without the hug, I had wound up consoling her again. But there didn’t seem to be any other way out of this. I wanted to get back on the road, get through the dog-and-pony show at my house, then get rid of the whole clan so I could be alone. “She loved you so much,” I said.
A moment later we were moving again. We stayed quiet the rest of the ride home, where the party was already hopping. Jeanette, Ruth, Lois, and Carol were carrying on like they entertained here all the time. They had pulled back the sheer curtains my mother always kept over the closed windows, and the sun poured into our apartment, sprinkling shafts of light in unfamiliar places. Someone had clicked on the radio, and a flute was tittering in the background. On the kitchen table they had set out platters of food. Eggs with yolks whipped fluffy, sprinkled with a blood-colored spice. Lunch meats curled into finger-size slices, fleshy and damp. Hard squares of cheese, orange as the sun. Mrs. Ramillo brewed a vat of coffee, and everyone was getting tanked up on caffeine. She shoved a foam cup in my hand, filled to the rim. Holding that cup made me think of sitting in the back of Roget’s car, sipping from his thermos.
Your mother’s got a lot on her plate right now, so I want you to go easy on her.
I drank the coffee down despite the bad taste, then bumped around the kitchen with the empty cup in my hand. I thought of Ed Dreary, who used to eat a whole Styrofoam cup in the cafeteria if you gave him a quarter.
Some party trick.
My father was in the living room pinballing from person to person, sucking up more of their condolences, reminiscing about his “beloved wife.” I heard him say, “It’s just me and Dominick now. The two of us.”
Yeah, I thought. Until you disappear. Then it will be just the one of us.
I wandered out of the kitchen and ended up in my parents’ bedroom, where the bed was perfectly made, my mother’s nubby cardigan folded neatly on top of her dresser, her hairbrush full of black strands nearby. It looked as if she had only stepped out of the room for a moment. A piece of Juicy Fruit gum was folded in its foil wrapper on the nightstand. I picked it up and put it in my pocket, saving that weird habit of hers, though I wasn’t sure why.
“Knock, knock,” my uncle said, even though the door was wide open. “Anybody home?”
I had flipped open my mother’s music box, and that plastic ballerina was twirling away. He looked around her room at the threadbare white curtains, the oversize bedroom set she had picked up at a tag sale, the oak dented and nicked. “So this is where my sister was living,” he said, emphasizing the word “this” in a way that sounded condescending.
What the hell was he acting so self-righteous about? I’d seen his pad, and it wasn’t exactly the Taj Mahal. But I kept my mouth shut on that subject. I reached under the bed and pulled out the picture of the man I believed was Truman’s father. I held it in front of Donald’s face without saying a word.
He let out a sigh, took the photo from my hands, and stared at it. “This is your mother’s first husband,” he told me. “His name was Peter, and he drowned in a boating accident.”
Laguna del Perro, I thought. 1955. Had my brother drowned, too? I wanted to whip out that picture of my uncle and Truman but held back because I didn’t want him to know I had taken it from his apartment. My guess was he still hadn’t run into Rosaleen, so he had no clue I had even been there. “Did my brother drown, too?” I asked.
Donald handed the picture back to me, reached over and closed the music box. “You are dealing with a lot right now. I don’t think it’s a good idea to fill your head with more worries.” He picked up one of my mother’s pillows, then put it down, sat on the edge of the bed. “Listen. I have to leave tonight for a conference in Germany. It’s a series of presentations and a research seminar that I can’t get out of. Even for this. I’m sorry. But I’m going to give you my number at the hotel and some money in case you need anything. When I get back next month, we’ll figure things out together. I promise. Okay, kid?”
No, it wasn’t okay, but he didn’t seem to be giving me a choice. He pulled a yellow envelope out of the pocket of his blazer. Just a few days before, I had been counting on him to bail me out with some cash, and here he was forking it over. A little too late, I thought as he shoved the envelope into my suit pocket. He told me I should take a few days off from school, then force myself to go back. It would take my mind off things, he said. He gave me another hug, told me again that we would work it out when he got home.
After he left the room, I walked down the hall to the bathroom and splashed cold water on my face. I stood there staring in the mirror and trying to imagine sitting in a classroom as if nothing had changed. Could anyone tell by looking at me what a mess I had made out of my life? I imagined people gawking at me, whispering that I was the kid whose mother died from an abortion in the Holedo Motel.
Outside the door I heard snippets of chitchat from my mother’s farewell bash.
“I think Dominick is still in shock,” my father said. “It hasn’t really hit him yet that she’s gone.”
“He’s just a boy,” a woman’s voice said in response. “The poor thing.”
“Roget hasn’t heard the last from me,” Marnie said in a stage whisper right outside in the hallway. I didn’t know who she was talking to. Lois? Jeanette? “I’m not going to drop this. For Dominick’s sake.”
I looked in the mirror and decided I had a choice: I could stand around being pitied by this pack of losers or I could find a way to make things up to my mother. I didn’t have a plan, but I knew I needed to get out of here and clear my head. I waited until Marnie’s voice floated back down the hall, then went into my parents’ bedroom, where Marnie’s pocketbook sat on the chair under the pile of people’s coats. I had learned my lesson about stealing money, but this time I was only borrowing something: her car. With the keys in my pocket, I made my way through the living room and told my father I was going for a walk.
“Want some company?” he asked, doing the concerned parent routine in front of his audience.
“No thanks,” I answered and headed out the door before anyone else snagged me.
When I reached Marnie’s Dart, I took a breath and climbed inside. I looked around to make sure no one was watching, then adjusted the seat, stuck my key in the ignition. The piece of shit started right away, and I put it in reverse, backed out of the lot. Without knowing exactly where to go, I headed slowly down Dwight Avenue. I had watched my mother drive enough to know when to gun it and when to brake. Marnie’s boat swayed back and forth on the road, and I felt like I was sailing. A cop car was stopped in the parking lot of the Doghouse. My heart lurched for a second, but the officer didn’t even look at me. Let him pull me over. I’d tell him to spend his energy nailing that no-good sheriff instead of picking on an orphan like me. The way Marnie had explained it, she told the police right away that Roget had been with my mother in the motel. They put out an APB, but when he turned up, their take on things suddenly changed. Roget had been with two other officers in a meeting at the new station, the police explained. He couldn’t have been there. It was impossible. Marnie was flabbergasted. She kept telling me she was going to find a way to nail Roget, but I couldn’t imagine the Bingo Lady taking on the Holedo Police Department and winning. And even though it tore me up to imagine him walking away from this whole thing, I didn’t know what I could do about it.
When I passed the motel, I slowed the car down. The place was still blocked off with DO NOT CROSS—POLICE INVESTIGATION yellow tape. No cars in the lot. A NO VACANCY sign out front. I glanced up at room 5B and a cold tingle moved through me like ice in my veins at the sight of that door.
You will never see your mother again, a voice said.
I bit my lip.
Imagined her in a glass coffin instead of that heavy wooden one at the funeral parlor. Imagined that someone could kiss her and bring her back to life. But who would that be? Not Roget. Not my father. Maybe Peter, her first husband. I wondered if she loved him. I wondered if she was with him now.
To keep myself from crying, I stepped on the gas. Without planning it, I made the turn toward Edie’s. I wasn’t sure why I was going there, seeing as she was long gone. But I guess I didn’t know where else to go or what to do next. And when I came over the top of the hill, there it was in front of me. The slanted roof. The lemonade paint, peeling. The lion-faced knocker. I stopped the car dead in the street the way my mother had the night we came looking for my father. I had reamed out Leon just for mentioning Edie’s name, only to leave my mother’s reception and park in front of her house. Add the word “hypocrite” to my list of personality flaws.
As I sat there in the bright afternoon sunlight, staring at the place, the only sound was the whining of a chain saw, someone somewhere must have been doing away with a tree that had fallen in the storm. I listened to the revving and putt-putting of that hungry saw as it sliced and tore through wood. A breeze blew over the hill and sent Marnie’s antenna clacking back and forth.
“I hate you, Edie Kramer,” I whispered into the air. I said it once, twice, three times. Then again, louder, “I fucking hate you!”
I took my mother’s silver gum wrapper from my pocket and held it in my palm like some sort of magic charm. I felt myself tearing up, losing my grip the way I had when Donald hugged me. I snorted and sniffled. Hammered my hand against the dashboard until it hurt so much I had to stop. A lot of good it did me to talk to an empty house. I had really avenged my mother’s death, telling that Victorian how I felt. I needed to do something. I needed to show my mother that I loved her. I wiped my eyes and looked at the FOR SALE sign half covered with snow and knocked crooked from the plows. CONTACT VICKI SPRING.
Follow the signs, I heard my mother’s voice say. Life lays them right in front of you.
One. Two. Three.
All you have to do is look.
That’s when it came to me: If anyone might know where Edie had moved to, it would be her. Vicki Spring.
Maybe my mother had led me to this spot, given me this sign because she wanted me to find Edie. There was nothing I could do about Roget at the moment, but maybe this was the way she wanted me to make things right. Once again I saw my life as that blank black chalkboard, and I thought of the choices before me. I could go home and lie on my bed, stare at the ceiling, and miss my mother. In a few days I could go back to school as if nothing had ever happened, even though I knew different. And then what? I just didn’t know. Or I could follow the signs like my mother told me to do. I could follow them to Edie, get that money back, and keep all those promises I had made to my mother on the bus a few days before. Even though they were promises I had made to my living, breathing mother, I told myself that if she was looking down on me, then she would see how much I loved her despite the mess I had made. She would know that I was trying to fix what I had done.
Then I saw something glittering beneath the surface of those thoughts. An urge that was far more powerful and determined. A desire that rose up in me, fast and quick, like something from the bottom of a lake rushing toward the surface, breaking out of the dark, still water and letting its ugliness be glimpsed in the light of day. And this is what that desire said:
Get back at Edie.
Make her pay for what she did.
She should suffer.
She should ache.
She should feel the way you feel.
Then those words disappeared, submerged back into the dark waters of my mind. I found myself chilled, shaking, afraid of what evil I was capable of committing. Just as I had a few days before, I wondered again if a hungry darkness could possess me the way those Manson followers had been possessed the night with Sharon Tate.
I shook my head to get rid of the thought.
As much as that feeling scared me, everything seemed to pull me toward Edie. All the things I wanted, or thought I wanted—the money, proof to my mother that I was sorry, and something else that I wasn’t quite sure of yet—swirled together in my mind. And I knew I had to find her.
At that moment I felt my old self shriveling and a new self being born. This me was harder and more determined. He wouldn’t be tricked. He wouldn’t be scared. He wouldn’t show anyone his sadness. “Bury it,” I said out loud. “Bury it and do what you can to make up for your mistakes.”
The car windows had fogged up a bit and I wrote BURY IT in crooked letters on the driver’s side. I put the car in drive and made a U-turn. The Moorehead Real Estate office was located over in the next town of Buford. It took me fifteen minutes to get there. Already I was a pro at driving, and I still had just over a month to go before being legal. My only behind-the-wheel crime so far was braking too hard a couple of times, which sent the junk on Marnie’s floor scuttling forward. Other than that it was smooth sailing.
I parked the Dart out front and made a plan in my head. If I flat-out asked this Vicki woman if she knew where the owner of the Victorian in Holedo had moved to, I doubted she would divulge that information. But if I pretended to be interested in the house, then casually dropped in a question about the former owner, she might spill. I knew I didn’t look like their typical customer, but I was banking on my suit and tie to win Vicki over. The old me would have been nervous, but I refused to give in to that feeling. My mother had sent me into bars. She had sent me into Edie’s. It was as if in some strange way she was sending me into this office right now. And I didn’t intend to disappoint her.
“Is Miss Spring here?” I said over the jangle of bells on the door.
An apple-cheeked woman sat at the front desk looking totally bored despite the ringing phones. “She’s behind you,” she said, flipping through the pages of a Cosmopolitan. The cover lines read “Complete Guide to Encounter Groups” and “Confessions of a (Formerly) Fat Girl.”
I turned around, but the second desk was empty. Then the door opened with another jangle of bells, and I got what Apple Cheeks meant: Vicki was just coming in herself. She was a pert-faced woman with narrow shoulders and a slim waist. Thirty, I guessed. Thirty-five. Dyed blond hair, cut super short like a man’s. Soft pink lipstick.
“This boy is here to see you, Vicki,” the secretary—or whoever she was—said, putting away her magazine.
Boy. That wasn’t going to help in my effort to convince her I was legit.
I thought about bagging the plan and straight-out asking Vicki if she knew where Edie had moved. But something still told me she wouldn’t give that information to a perfect stranger. Act casual, I reminded myself. Like I don’t really need to know where the previous owner had gone—I’m simply wondering.
Vicki smiled, which crimped the skin around her eyes and aged her. Forty, I thought. Forty-five. She had the thickest eyelashes I’d ever seen. Only six or seven spider legs to a lid. “What can I do for you, young fella?”
First it was “boy,” now it was “young fella.” This rickety little scheme was never going to fly. Still, I did my best to get the thing in the air. “I’m here about the house in Holedo that’s for sale. The yellow Victorian on Barn Hill Road.” I talked in a low voice, buttoning my blazer and standing up straight.
“What about it?” she asked. Vicki took off her scarf and hat, hung them on the knotty wooden coatrack by the door. “Do you know something about the vandals?”
“Vandals?” I said, then remembered. The window. “Oh, no. Nothing about that. I’m here because I’m interested in buying the place.”
“You!” that secretary said over the ringing of another phone. “Call us when you’ve finished high school.”
“Would you mind answering the phone, Lydia?” Vicki said.
“Actually, my mother would be the one buying the place,” I told her as Lydia picked up one of the lines and gave an overly cheerful “Good afternoon, Moorehead Real Estate.” Just saying the words “my mother” put a hole in me and left me feeling deflated. But I struggled to keep afloat. “I’m just here to look.”
“If your mother is interested in the place, then why isn’t she here?”
Because she’s dead, that’s why. Stay cool, I told myself. You can swing this. “She sent me to scout out places for her. I was wondering if you could tell me about the house so I could fill her in.”
Vicki made her way to the desk and began flipping through messages. She picked up her phone and started to dial. “I’m a very busy woman. If your mother is interested, she will have to get in touch with me herself.”
Fuck you, too, Vicki Spring. “Fine,” I said, pissed that my plan was doing a crash and burn right before my eyes. It was all that secretary’s fault. If she’d just stuck to answering the phone and minded her own business, I might have been able to play this thing my way. It’s not over yet, I reminded myself. You’ll get what you want somehow. “Will you still be here in a few minutes? I’ll pick up my mother and come back.”
Vicki put down the phone, taking me seriously once again. “I have an appointment. But I’ll be done at four-thirty. If your mother wants to see the place, I can meet her at the house then.”
“Great,” I said, not knowing what I would do to make this happen. “We’ll see you at four-thirty. Barn Hill Road. Holedo.”
I left the office and headed back toward home, wondering how I was going to pull this one off. I could just skip the four-thirty appointment, but then I’d never have another shot at finding out where Edie had gone. I could show up alone and tell Vicki that my mother couldn’t make it after all. Maybe she’d give me a quick tour and I’d fish out the answer to the $64,000 question. But I knew she was too no-bull for that. The moment she saw me alone, she’d probably get in her car and drive back to Buford.
By the time I reached Dwight Avenue, I was wishing I had just gone for broke and asked her what I wanted to know right up front. So much for following the signs, I thought as I parked Marnie’s car in the same spot where I found it. Just skip the appointment and let Vicki Spring wait in the cold for you and your mother. Serves her right for giving you the runaround.
Upstairs, the party had cleared out except for Marnie. She sat at the kitchen table, picking at the leftover baloney and staring off into space. Her puffy eyes and red nose let me know she had just finished up another one of her sob sessions. “There you are,” she said. “Your father went to look for you.”
I pulled off my blazer, loosened my itchy tie. “For me? Why?”
“He said he was worried.” Marnie tore a fleshy baloney scrap in half and dropped it in her mouth.
“Spare me,” I said.
“He seems to have mistaken himself for Mr. Cleaver all of a sudden. It’s all I can do not to smack the man across the face. If your poor mother only knew the way he was carrying on after what he put her through.” At the mention of my mother, Marnie looked down at her almost-empty platter of lunch meats. “I don’t know why I’m grazing on this stuff. I’m too upset to eat. But you should get something in your stomach, Dominick. I want to make sure you stay healthy.”
My mind flashed on an image of my mother calling from the window to ask if I wanted lunch when I first got that note from Edie. Marnie was beginning to sound just like her. “Marnie, could I ask you a favor?”
“Whatever you need. Just name it.”
Here goes. “I want you to help me find out where Edie Kramer moved to.”
Marnie made a sour face. She stuck her fingernail in one of the eggs and scooped out a mouse’s portion of the yellow stuff. She held it in the air when she spoke. “How do you know that woman moved? And why in the world do you want to find her?”
“It’s a long story.”
She sat there staring at me, not eating a bit of that yolk on her finger. I got the feeling she was in the mood for a long story, that she wasn’t going to budge until I gave her more. But I couldn’t trust her with the truth. No way could I confess to anyone what I had done to my mother. So this is what I came up with: “I think my father gave the money he stole to Edie. I hitched a ride with Leon’s friend Ed over to her house to see about getting it back, but she’s gone. There’s a ‘For Sale’ sign out front.”
“Hold your horses. Why don’t you just ask your father—” Marnie said, then stopped herself, finally licked her finger. “Never mind. That dog wouldn’t admit a thing.”
We were both quiet a moment. I sat down next to Marnie. Up close, her skin looked papery and blotched. God had cheated her out of a chin and given her that beak nose as some sort of sick joke to keep men away. Anyone else might have given up, but Marnie kept on dyeing her hair all these years, wearing her wild colors and acting like a celebrity with her bingo show. I wondered what she would do with herself now that my mother was gone. Maybe she would finally land some dream man like she had always wanted.
“Marnie, I never told you this before. But do you remember that night last summer when we drove over to Edie’s house?”
“Of course,” she said. “Your mother was really fired up that evening.”
“Yeah, well, I told you guys that my father wasn’t inside. But I lied. He was there, asleep in Edie’s bed. I didn’t tell the truth because I hated to see her cry. And Edie, well, she sort of conned me, too. But I am really sorry for it.” I decided to rein myself in before I said too much. “I know my father was having an affair with her. I even know that Edie needed money because she’s pregnant. That’s why I think he gave it to her.”
Marnie rested her cheek in her palm, digesting what I had just told her. Normally she would have puffed right up at the first hint of gossip. Something this juicy would have had her bloated. But she just sat there. She looked wiped out from all that had happened the last few days, and here I was dropping more news in her lap. After a moment she took my hand. “Dominick, finding that money isn’t ever going to bring your mother back. You know that, don’t you?”
“I know,” I told her. “But I feel like I have to do something.”
“Me, too. That’s why I want to find a way to get Roget. You know, your father doesn’t even realize it wasn’t his baby. Your mother was sure he would figure it out. All I know is that he and Roget should burn in hell together.”
I sat there waiting for something more than Marnie’s usual line of tough talk that would land us nowhere. Finally she said, “Okay.”
“Okay what?”
“I’ll help you,” she said. “What do you need me to do?”
I explained the whole plan on the way to Edie’s house. I told her that Ed Dreary had given me a ride to the real-estate office and that Vicki had treated me like a criminal. “Say no more,” Marnie said when we pulled up front. “I know her type, and I’ll take it from here.”
Vicki was waiting outside, her face masked behind a pink scarf, hands stuffed in her pockets. She was doing a little bounce number on her heels in an effort to stay warm. The moment we stepped onto the porch, Marnie became my mother—or not exactly my mother but some warped version of one. “Pleased to meet you, Miss Spring. I’m Dominick’s mother, and I understand you have a problem giving out information to my son when he is perfectly capable of scouting out locales for us to take up residence.”
Locales? Take up residence? Jesus, she made it sound like we were house-hunting in the South of France. Thankfully, Vicki had left her wise-ass sidekick back at the office to not answer phones, so we were spared her commentary.
“Nice to meet you,” Vicki said, completely ignoring Marnie’s opening diatribe. “Before we go inside, I just want to warn you that I have four other buyers who are close to signing.”
“Let’s skip the broker routine,” Marnie told her. “I’m freezing out here, and I want to see the place.”
Oof. I wished Marnie would lighten up a bit, or she was going to blow this whole scheme. The idea was to get chummy with Vicki so she would give us the dirt. Not piss her off so she’d send us packing.
Vicki had trouble getting the front door unlocked, and we stood there a moment longer. I kept feeling as if Edie were going to open up any second. “Hey, handsome,” she would say and give me a kiss as if the last few days hadn’t happened. Then for some reason I imagined my mother opening the door. She was pregnant and happy. She hadn’t died after all; she had moved to this house, and we were coming to visit.
“There we go,” Vicki said when the lock finally turned. She stepped back and let Marnie and me enter before she did.
It felt strange to walk through Edie’s front door without her around. I thought of that first night when I made my way down the hall in search of my father. But there was not much time to reflect on any of what had happened here because Vicki stayed on our backs, moving us from room to room with only a few seconds in each one. There were rooms in the house I had never even seen. A whole third floor with three bedrooms, one with a bookshelf that opened up and led to a narrow twisting staircase like something out of a mystery movie. Marnie kept making a tsk-tsk sound with her tongue and pointing out the features she didn’t like, hamming up the prospective-buyer routine more than she needed to. I kept my hands in my pockets, fingering that silver gum wrapper of my mother’s like a good-luck charm.
When we made our way back down the stairs and landed in Edie’s bedroom, Marnie started in. “Look at these hardwood floors. They’re a mess. And that ivy wallpaper in the dining room is the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen. I can’t begin to imagine the heating bills. Do you feel the draft, Dominick?”
Just ask the fucking question already. “It sure is cold in here,” I said, crossing my arms. Someone had taped a sheet of plastic over the broken kitchen window, but it didn’t help, because the place was colder than ever.
“Like I told your son this afternoon, the window was smashed the other night,” Vicki said, eyeing me. “Vandals. That explains the draft.”
I was getting the distinct feeling that Vicki suspected me as the window smasher. She was right, of course, but God knows how she picked up on it. Just let her try to prove it. Vicki Spring and her broken window were the least of my problems.
Finally Marnie said, “Tell me about the previous owners.”
Bingo.
“Well, they were divorced, and the wife lived here alone for a few years.” Vicki held her hand to the side of her mouth and dropped her voice to a whisper as if there were someone in the next room who she didn’t want to hear. “Between you and me, she’s pregnant with an illegitimate child. She was planning on renting out some of the rooms originally. But then she called me up and said to put the place on the market. She was leaving town.”
“Really. Where did she go?” Marnie said.
“New York City,” Vicki answered. “Manhattan.” And then she snapped back into business mode. “So are you interested? Because I have another buyer with an offer breathing down my back. But I like you people, so I want to give you a fair shot.”
Marnie looked at her deadpan. “I wouldn’t live in this dump if you gave it to me for free. Let’s go, Dominick.”
With that, we were out the door. Part of me wished Marnie had taken the time to fish for more information, but I was glad for what we got.
New York City. What in the world was Edie doing there?
On the ride home Marnie was busy making plans. “Okay,” she said, “I’ll call my Aunt Gladys who lives in Queens to see if she has any leads that will help us find Edie.”
“Marnie, it’s a big place. I doubt she’ll know.”
“Gotta start somewhere,” she said.
The truth was, I didn’t want Detective Marnie Garboni investigating this case with me any longer. Just being with her made me think of my mother. I kept feeling as if I were going to turn around and see her in the car with us, that she was going to interrupt Marnie any second. And when she wasn’t there I felt my insides drop. Still, I let Marnie make her plans. She made it sound as if we were going to be the Caped Crusaders, righting the wrongs of the world. All we needed was our superhero costumes and a couple pairs of tights.
We reached the apartment, and Marnie stopped the car. It had grown dark, and we both stared up at the dim blue light of the television flickering in the living room window. My father was home again.
“Do you want me to come in with you?” she asked.
“That’s okay,” I said. “I can handle him.”
“I want you to take this.” Marnie handed me a yellow pill smaller than a baby aspirin, lighter than Styrofoam. “My doctor gave them to me. Just take it tonight if your mind is racing. It will help you sleep. And if things get ugly, you can always stay at my place. Just give a holler.” She reached over to hug me, and this time I let her. She felt smaller than I remembered, but I probably hadn’t hugged her in years. I didn’t know why, but I felt like I wasn’t going to see Marnie again for a long time. Maybe what had happened with my mother would always make me feel that way when I said good-bye. I would never know when I left someone if it would be forever, because who knew what the world could deliver? Charlie Manson’s gang could walk in and butcher Sharon Tate when she never expected a thing. My mother’s first husband could drown in a boating accident and change her life for good. I could leave one morning for New York City and find my mother dead when I returned that night.
“Thanks for your help,” I told Marnie as I got out of her car.
“No need to thank me,” she said. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”
I knew she was trying to be nice, but the thought of Marnie calling me seemed strange. She was my mother’s friend, after all. I nodded and smiled anyway, closed the door, and headed up the stairs to my apartment. Welcome to your new life with your father, I thought as I stood at the door.
I found him at the kitchen sink when I stepped inside. A soldier’s line of Schlitz cans and a bottle of vodka on the counter. Great, I thought. Now it’s time to get drunk.
“Hi, son. I was waiting for you.”
I didn’t say a word.
“I want you to witness something.” He took each and every can, snapped off the top, and dumped the shit down the sink the way my mother used to do. The vodka, too.
I watched him without saying a thing.
“Aren’t you going to ask why I’m doing this?”
My voice had shut down again. I nodded. Shrugged.
“That’s it,” he said. “No more. I swore to your mother today when I stood at her grave that I would take care of you. No more drinking. No more disappearing. I quit my job, too. I’ll find something close to home. I’ll be here every night.”
I stood there staring at him, felt that icy tingle in my veins. He could have just tossed the cans and bottle in the trash. I didn’t need the circus act, watching it wash away like liquid gold down the drain.
Big. Fucking. Deal.
“Well, don’t you have anything to say?” he asked when he was done.
I took a breath. Tried to find my voice, but it was still gone. I shook my head no. Buried my feelings. Gave him that bug-eyed expression. The new me.
For a moment he actually looked disappointed.
Good. He should be hurt. Like I needed his big-deal promises. He should have sworn off booze and other women while my mother was still alive. Then none of this would have ever happened.
You stole the money, a voice in my head said.
“That’s okay. You don’t have to say a thing,” my father said. “So do you want to watch TV or something?”
“No thanks,” I told him, finding my voice again. With that I turned and went to my room. Left him standing with all those empty beer cans and the vodka bottle.
I waited a moment to see if he would follow me, but he didn’t. I closed my door and popped Marnie’s pill without any water to slug it down. All day I had wanted to be by myself, and I was finally able to stretch out on my bed and let my mind wander. I thought about my mother, dredged up all kinds of memories. Christmas morning when I unwrapped the boots she had given me. The sad look on her face as the two of us sat by our tree with its blur of blinking lights like a traffic accident. Our final Christmas together, and that was the image that stuck with me. One memory I kept replaying happened when I was younger and my father was working at a machine shop. She let me stay home from school to keep her company, and when he came home for lunch unexpectedly, she hid me in their closet. I remembered being terrified as I stood in the dark pressed between his flannels and her blouses. I remembered her hysterical laughter when he left and she came to my rescue. “It’s our little secret,” she had said, hugging me.
I fell asleep.
When I woke, it was just after midnight. My father was at the foot of my bed. “That baby wasn’t mine,” he was saying. “I did the math, and it couldn’t have been mine.”
I rolled over and looked at him, his bulky shoulders silhouetted in the moonlight from my window. I could tell by his smell and by his slurred words that he had been drinking. So much for his promises. What did he do, stick a straw down the drain and suck all his booze back up through the pipes?
“I thought you were through with that stuff,” I said, shifting the pillow under my head and letting my eyes adjust to the dim light. He had his shirt off, and I could make out my mother’s name tattooed in small letters on his chest. When I was younger, I used to wonder what he would do about that tattoo if they ever split up for good. I guess I would find out soon enough.
“I am through with it. But I came across a flask in my truck when I went for cigarettes. I thought I’d have one last farewell toast to your mother. You know, I kept wondering why she would do such a thing. I mean, we were on the skids, but to do that to our baby. Then I realized it wasn’t our baby. Couldn’t have been.”
I kept quiet. It wasn’t my job to help him piece his pathetic life together.
“I still love that woman, though. Even if she did get herself in trouble with some other guy, I still love her.”
Maybe it was Marnie’s pill, or maybe I had finally had enough, because I felt a hard pellet of anger taking shape in the back of my mouth, and out it came. “If you loved her so much, then why were you such a shitty husband? You want to know what she was like when you weren’t here? She cried all the time. We drove around looking for you constantly. Maybe if she wasn’t married to such an asshole, she wouldn’t have found someone else to fuck.”
My father dropped his chin and gave me a stunned look. He clocked his hand back to hit me, but his fist froze in the air.
You don’t understand the way he gets, Edie said. You haven’t seen it.
His eyes ballooned. His jaw locked itself in a snarl. He growled, then punched the wall instead. Put a good-size hole in it, too. He lifted his fist again and jackhammered three more craters in the wall. Then he grabbed the chair by my desk and hurled it at my closet door, knocking over my record player in the process.
Well, now I had seen the way he gets. And I didn’t give a shit. Let him tear up the whole apartment if it made him feel better.
“Fuck you!” he shouted. “Don’t you dare judge me. Who do you think you’re talking to?”
He raged on and on, first yelling, then talking to himself, then finally blubbering away. Good. He deserved his misery. When he finally got the hint that I wasn’t going to feed into his psycho scene anymore, he left the room. I could hear him bawling in their bedroom. I listened until his cries became whimpers and then the whimpers became snores.
That’s when I got out of bed. Something made me go to my window and look outside. Leon was out there in the parking lot. I watched him in the bright moonlight as he climbed into a red Thunderbird with a bunch of guys. They were all laughing and smoking. Special Ed was there, too. I stared down at them until they drove off to who-knew-where, and then I picked up that picture of Truman and my uncle at Laguna del Perro.
You are dealing with a lot right now, I heard my uncle say. When I get back next month, we’ll figure things out together.
I didn’t think I could wait that long. I put the picture down and stood in my dark bedroom, looking at the damage my father had done. The holes in my smooth blue bedroom wall looked like craters on the moon. I reached into the pocket of my pants and pulled out my mother’s silver wrapper of Juicy Fruit. I don’t know why I did what I did next, but I unwrapped the gum and held it in my hand. It looked like a miniature clump of Silly Putty, wrinkled and gray as an old woman’s skin. I lifted it to my mouth, slipped it between my lips. The flavor was gone, but I kept it there anyway, let it rest on my tongue, then moved it around my mouth.
I walked to the kitchen and grabbed a garbage bag to pack some things. But when I looked around, there didn’t seem to be anything in this place I really wanted. The picture of my brother. The money from my uncle. Other than that, my mother had been the only important thing here, and she was gone. She was never coming back. I found a scrap of paper. This is what I wrote:
Dad—
I don’t want to live here anymore.
Dominick
I dropped the note onto the kitchen table and put on my coat. Opened the front door, closed it behind me. And just like that, I left home.