DAHLIA
I WAITED TILL LOU AND THE GIRLS LEFT THE HOUSE THAT MORNING. Then I went to the closet to look for my good blue dress, the stockings my mother had given me for my birthday some years ago. They were still in the wrapper. If you ever have an occasion to wear them, she’d said in that way of hers, proving that even a present with a bow on top could be an accusation.
Well, I won’t, I told her, accusing back—as I pushed the gift in her direction. She left it there on the table before she walked out.
Foolish words you play over and over in your mind, I thought as I pulled those damn stockings on. As if those silly arguments matter when you come to a day like this—my mother too old and sick with the rheumatism to come by anymore, and across town, the boy she refused to call a grandson slouching in the new suit Louie had bought him in the same courtroom where, decades earlier, I left a part of myself forever. After I checked myself in Zaidie’s full-length mirror to make sure the seams were half straight, I put on my shoes. I’d only worn them twice in twenty-six years—first on the day I married Louie with only his mother and his aunt Leona in attendance, and then when the department come to interview me. I even dug out the hat Anna had bought me, thinking that if only I put it on and went to Mass with her, I’d be cured of what ailed me. Hah.
I might have got myself out the door, too—if I hadn’t passed the other mirror, the one in the foyer that captured Zaidie as she moved from a skinny little wren to the girl she became, and made a joke of all the predictions the doctors and case workers made about Agnes. A dwarf, for heaven’s sake.
Jimmy never stopped to study himself in front of that mirror like the girls did, but it drew him just the same. The night he left to drop off Agnes at practice was no different. He glanced quick at himself on the way out, raised his eyebrows a little and pushed back his hair, as if he was startled by his good looks. Since the Nothing’s Perfect and Jane had come along, there was something else there that surprised him—the happiness he never thought he deserved. Remembering that look, seeing it, broke me even more than what was going on across town.
Still, I might’ve got myself out the door if I didn’t catch a glimpse of someone I’d almost forgotten. The coward stared me down, strong as ever. Dress yourself up all you want, Dahlia Garrison, she taunted. You’ll never make it to that courtroom. You don’t have the courage to walk across the street and you know it.
I WAS ON the sofa, laid out like someone in a coffin, hat, shoes, and all, when Louie came up the front steps, his feet heavy as if they were carrying three men. He stood in the doorway like he hadn’t decided whether to come in or not. “Six years,” he spat out.
He finally came inside, but not like he wanted to—more like a man who’s got nowhere else to go. Like a man who was doing a sentence of his own.
“There’ll be nothin’ left of him in six years, Dahlia. Nothin’.”
Right about then he noticed me, sitting up in the clothes that were supposed to make me look like what I never was: respectable. “For chrissake,” he scoffed. “Did you really think you could—”
If I hadn’t seen the turn in him at the door, it was impossible to miss now. In all our years, he’d never talked to me like that. Never looked at me the way he did, either. He shook his head and headed for the kitchen.
“At least a half dozen of them Woods were there. I know them by those ghosty blue eyes of theirs. All waiting for their big comeuppance. Even if you coulda got there, you would never . . .”
He opened the cabinet to take out a jelly jar, then turned on the spigot, drowning the words he didn’t say. His daily ritual. When we were first married, it had been whiskey like his father drank. A single shot, never more than that. Just a little something to draw a line between the work day and the life we claimed for ourselves. But once he saw what the smell of it did to me, he’d given it up for good. Men will do those sorts of things in the beginning.
“All’s I can say is if you take to your bed this time, you can stay there,” he said when he came back in. “I won’t be calling you back again. I ain’t got it in me, Dahlia.”
“Right about now, Louie, I don’t much care what you got in you and what you don’t. The only thing on my mind is my son.” Then an afterthought—as I suppose they’d been all along. “Where are the girls?”
“Agnes is where she always is. At the pool. Every day, the girl swims further and further away from us. Best thing we can do is let her go, too. And Zaidie—I s’pose she’s with that fancy boyfriend. Her way of swimming off to something better. A year or two, they’ll both be gone and there’ll be no point—”
“The fancy boyfriend has a name,” I interrupted. Anything to stop him from finishing that sentence.
Louie headed back to the kitchen. Apparently, this was a two-shot night.
LATER, WHEN BOTH girls had come home and went—no, fled—to their rooms, neither of them hungry for supper, Louie and me found ourselves in the parlor without a word to say. Not that we usually talked much, but when he put the TV on and I settled in with my puzzle, there was something between us you could feel. Something I didn’t much notice till it was gone.
“Isn’t there something you usually put on on Wednesdays?” I finally asked, more desperate for noise than I dared to admit.
In answer, he heaved himself off the chair and started up the stairs. “I ain’t got it in me . . .” he repeated, though this time it was less clear what he was talking about. To sit with me in the parlor? Turn the TV switch? I didn’t dare to ask. It was just past eight.
I got up and followed him to the bottom of the staircase. “Now who’s taking to his bed?”
He slammed the door to the room.
That night, I stayed in the parlor extra long, waiting for him to call me up the way he usually did. Sometime past midnight I gave up. Though Louie was turned away from me in bed, I could feel his wakefulness. We probably lay there for an hour or more like that, unmoving and sleepless, before either of us spoke.
“What the hell have we been doing all these years, Dahlia?” he finally said, addressing the wall. “Can you answer me that?”
“The best we could, I suppose,” I told the ceiling. “Just like Joe O’Connor says.”
“Don’t start with that crap, all right? Not tonight. Joe’s a decent enough fella, don’t get me wrong. Been in the courtroom every day, too. But none of that bullshit of his stopped Jimmy from going out that night and . . .” He paused, still unable to pronounce the crime. “Hell, he couldn’t even help his own son.”
“Joe Jr. does all right. Fine, if you ask me. And Joe never claimed he could save anyone. That’s the point.”
He grunted as he rolled onto his back. “You think so much of old Joe, maybe you should move in over there. Get some of those books from the library that were supposed to fix everything wrong with our kids, and see what you can do for Junior. The two of you together? Now that would be a pair.”
Then he got up, switched on the harsh light, and put on the bathrobe I bought one of our first Christmases together. It was a sad-looking thing now, all its clear blue color faded to something dusty.
“Do you remember the day he first come?” he asked, still not looking at me.
As if I could have forgotten. “When I called to tell you, you closed up the garage and came straight home. Only time in history that ever happened.”
“You had lunch ready on the table—peanut butter and fluff like we were all kids. Afterward, we took him out in the backyard.”
“Best afternoon of my life,” I said. “I can still see the boy running up and down the yard, showing off everything he could do.”
We called them back and forth to each other the way we had so many times over the years. Always in the same order.
“Somersaults. Or his best effort at them.” At that, we chuckled. “Even at two, he had an arm on him when he threw a ball to me.”
“You made him believe he did, Lou. Sometimes I think that’s why he loved baseball so much. Because of the fuss you made.”
“He wanted us to see how high he could jump—though he only got a couple inches off the ground. Right in that spot out there.” He pointed toward the window. “And after everything he did, he stopped and laughed at us. Like he couldn’t believe we were still there, watching.”
“You looked at him like everything he did was a wonder.”
“The wonder of a lifetime, Dahlia. That was how I saw that boy from the first day.”
“He showed us the thing no one could take away, didn’t he? The happiness we never believed we had a right to,” I said, deviating from our script as I thought of how Jimmy had looked in the mirror the last night he went out. Sometimes we were so alike it was hard to believe we weren’t blood.
“We thought that if we just kept our eyes on him the way we had that day in the yard, we could make it all go right. Whatever he’d been through those first coupla years, whoever he come from, we could wipe it all clean. All we had to do was keep beamin’ on him.”
“Not just what he’d been through, Lou.” I could almost feel those yellow leaves falling on me, the trials of our early marriage.
“Coupla damn fools is what we were.”
Again, he shook his head before he got up and walked to the window where he lifted the shade, as if it was possible to recapture the sunlight of that long-ago afternoon, as if he half expected to see that two-year-old boy running across the yard, falling, giddy, when he turned back and found we were still there. Or maybe it was us he thought he might see. Us when we still dared to hope. But the yard was full of nothing but night. He snapped the shade shut. Then he tightened the belt of his bathrobe and headed for the stairs.
“I thought you had a busy day tomorrow,” I called as I followed him into the hall. “Where are you going?”
By then he was in the foyer, lacing up his work boots. “Out for a walk,” he yelled up to me. “Go to bed, Dahlia.”
“In your pajamas? You can’t—”
He snorted. “Oh, I can’t? So Joe Jr. can walk around the neighborhood yellin’ anything he damn pleases, and his father can open a market with a foolish name like that; hell, my own son can go out to pick up his sister at swim practice and turn the whole goddamn world upside down, but when it comes to me, you’re tellin’ me I can’t? Well, those days are over, Dahlia. If I feel like walkin’ down Main Street buck naked, I’ll do it. And if a cop comes along, hey, I’ll just tell him nothin’s perfect. Ain’t that the idea?”
The door slammed behind him.
IT WAS NEAR morning when he came home. Instead of explaining where he’d been all night or even coming up to talk to me, he changed directly into the uniform he’d hung on a hook in the bathroom the night before. Four forty-five a.m. and he headed for work. Didn’t even ask for coffee like usual.
And that night when he come home with a brown paper bag, I didn’t have to ask what was in it. It was the end of Louie trying to please me. He went into the kitchen and poured himself a shot. After a mostly silent supper, Zaida headed upstairs to the attic where she did whatever she did, and Agnes followed her. A little while later, Louie also went up.
“Taking to your bed again?” I taunted him, not wanting to say how desperate the quiet felt.
“It’s Jimmy’s bed I’m taking to, if you want to know,” he said. And then he paused on the landing, sounding tired more than anything. “I’m sorry, Dahlia, but I just don’t have it in me.”
When I heard the door to Jimmy’s room close, it felt like the whole world was shut tight against me.
IT WAS A week before he had it in him to talk to me about it. A week before he sat in his chair while I worked on a puzzle of Van Gogh’s Starry Night. Instead of turning on the TV, he told me about the walk he took that night.
“First place I went was over to Buskit’s. I figured it was one place where a man could sit around in his bathrobe and boots like he didn’t know whether he was headed to work or to bed without attracting much notice. I stayed there for a good long time, too, staring into that so-called river. Never seen so many empty booze bottles, so much broken stuff. Place smells like rotten eggs, too—like someone’s been dumpin’ chemicals in it. Was this the place where it had all gone wrong? I asked myself. When I didn’t get an answer, I got up and headed for the high school, where them college types looked down on him. Seemed like that was when the trouble started.”
“They were just kids like Zaidie and her friends. He thought they looked down on him is all.”
“Same thing, ain’t it? Anyways, after that, I walked by the garage, where he first got spooked by that bum—Richard whatever his name was. By then, it was startin’ to get light, and I heard a car slow down, someone callin’ my name—‘You okay, Louie?’ I guess the poor bastard never saw anyone tromping through town in the middle of the night in a bathrobe and a pair of Sears and Roebuck’s Wear-masters.”
Louie chuckled a little himself, but there was bitterness in the dregs of it. “I shoulda pointed the son of a bitch in the direction of Joe’s store, he was so damn curious. Told him to take a good look at the sign.”
“Did you know who it was?”
“Didn’t even look back. Just kept walking, searching like someone or something was lost and I couldn’t go home till I found it. Like one of your damn puzzle pieces that always go missing under the couch. Was it in that shack in the woods? Or did it happen even before that sunny day we took him out in the yard and watched him run? Was it in some house we never even seen? Some place I never knew the address to and never will?”
“You could walk the city for twenty years, Lou. You’ll never get an answer to that one.”
“Not for him—and not for us either, Dahlia,” he said softly. “Could be some things are just wrong from the start.”
And then he got up and went back to Jimmy’s room.