I Know This Much Is True

by Wally Lamb

  “Joy?” I got off the bed, opened the door. “Joy?”

  The message machine was blinking. Once, twice. I hit the button.

  “Mr. Birdsey? This is Ruth Rood again. I—” I reached over and fast-forwarded. Let up my finger in the middle of Sheffer’s voice.

  “Okay, then. End of sermon. See you tomorrow. Get some sleep.”

  I went back in the bedroom, flopped back on the bed, my face to the ceiling.

  “They rape me, Dominick. They come in at night and rape me!”

  “This is Dr. Batteson’s office calling for Joy Hanks.”

  I let the tears drip down the sides of my face. Let my sobbing shake the bed.

  Somewhere during the night, I dreamt that Dessa was doing me, slipping my cock in and out of her mouth. She hadn’t left me, then? We were still together? Then, the sweet rush of release. I woke up, coming.

  Saw Joy’s head move away. Saw Joy reach up and tuck her bangs behind her ear.

  I lay there, catching my breath, letting the spasms die away.

  Joy pulled tissues from the box on her nightstand. Started cleaning us up.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Hey,” she whispered back. “Did that feel nice? I wanted to make you feel nice.”

  I reached over for her, but she took my hand and led it away from her. Parked it back on the mattress. Sometimes, with Joy, sex wasn’t so much something we shared together, but a service she performed. She turned on the table lamp. Traced and retraced the line of my eyebrow with her finger.

  “I saw him this afternoon,” I said.

  “Saw who?”

  “My brother.”

  “You did? So the security thing came through? . . . How is he?”

  Same as he always is, I told her. Sick. Crazy.

  “Dominick?” she said. “I have something to tell you. Something big. I didn’t want to say anything until I was sure, and now I am sure. . . . God, the last thing I wanted tonight was for us to get into a fight.”

  I let time go by—half a minute or more. She was leaving me, right? She was leaving me for the baby’s father. What was the hum job for? Going-away present? Something to remember her by?

  “What is it?” I said.

  “I’m pregnant.” She took my hand. “We made a baby, Dominick. You and me.”

  She talked about her symptoms, the home pregnancy test, what they’d told her at the doctor’s. She talked and talked. At first, she didn’t think she wanted it, she said, but now she did. She said she thought we’d make good parents. That maybe we could start looking at houses. . . .

  I reached over and turned off the light. In those few seconds of absolute darkness—before my eyes adjusted—it felt like we were in some place more open and wide than our bedroom. Like we were falling together, somewhere in space.

  “Well?” she said. “What do you think? Say something.”

  27

  The thump outside woke me up. Raccoons, I thought. Rolled over. If she’d just put the damn garbage lids on tight. . . .

  We made a baby, Dominick. You and me.

  They rape me!

  Don’t think about it now, I told myself. Don’t think. Take deep breaths. Sleep!

  1:07 A.M., according to the clock radio. Well, it was finally here: D-Day. The day of his hearing.

  Joy rolled onto her side. She’d been cheating on me and now she was lying through her teeth. Hey, it wasn’t like I hadn’t been warned ahead of time. Miss Shoplifter. Miss Screw Her Own Uncle. Get through the hearing and then deal with it, I told myself. Watch her. Give her enough rope to hang herself. Hell of a way to be thinking about the woman you slept next to. . . . Come on, Dominick. Sleep.

  I flashed on the Duchess earlier that night in our kitchen—him and his toasted pumpkin seeds. I bet that little flit knew who she’d been screwing behind my back. Whose baby it was. Joy told the Duchess everything.

  Outside, another thump. Footsteps. . . . Footsteps?

  I got out of bed and padded across the bedroom floor. The notes on Thomas’s hearing that I’d flung earlier rustled under my feet. Outside, a voice. By the time I got to the stairs, I was running.

  I threw open the front door. “Hey!”

  One of them grunted as they took off. Kids. I took off after them in my bare feet and skivvies—chased those bobbing baseball caps through two or three front lawns.

  Stopped. Winded. . . .

  Five years ago, I’d have had one or both of them down on the ground—would have had them wishing they hadn’t messed with my house. I stood there, my heart pounding like a jackhammer. Forty, man. Shit.

  They’d wished the neighborhood Happy Halloween by egging car windows, snapping radio antennas. That jack-o’-lantern the Duchess and Joy had put out lay on our front walk in chunks, its broken mouth smiling up at the moon.

  Now I was wide awake. Now I was up for the long haul.

  Back in the house, I flopped onto the sofa, aimed the remote. Better to troll than think. Letterman was dropping dollar bills out a window. The Monkees—middle-aged, now—were hawking oldies. I surfed past CNN, the Catholic station, a couple of those 1-900 bimbos who wanted to share their “secret fantasies.” . . . She manipulated me with sex—used it whenever she wanted something. She’d done that right from the beginning. . . . The Business Beat, Rhoda Morgenstern, VH-1. Shit, man. I had to get some sleep.

  “Dominick?” She was up at the top of the stairs. “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Are you crying?”

  “No. Go back to sleep.”

  Later, back in our bedroom, I stumbled into my pants, groped around for my wallet and keys. “Where are you going?” her voice said. I’d figured she would have fallen back to sleep.

  “Nowhere. Out.”

  “Why were you crying down there? Is it about your brother?” I finished lacing my work boots and started out of there. “Dominick? Are you upset about the baby?”

  While I was backing the truck out the driveway, the porch light went on. The front door opened. She stood outside on the stoop, arms crossed, those muscular legs of hers visible beneath her nightgown. Don’t talk to me, I thought. Don’t call my name.

  Those asshole punks had egged my windshield. By rights, I should have gotten out and cleaned it off. Or turned off the goddamned motor and gotten back in bed with Joy—hung on for dear life, no matter what she’d done—no matter what she was trying to pull. Instead, I flicked on the wipers. They smeared a layer of shell and egg slime between me and my visibility and I remembered too late that the fluid well was dry. Fuck it, I thought. Threw her into gear anyway. Who the fuck else was out at this time of night?

  I drove through downtown, up River Avenue, to Cider Mill and Route 162. My eyes burned, my stomach hurt, from sleeplessness. Everywhere I drove, smashed pumpkins were in the road. It hadn’t even been a conscious decision, really—me driving out there, past that shabby farmhouse of theirs. If she’d have just held on, I would have come around. Gotten over the baby. I know I would have. . . .

  I pulled over. Turned the lights off but kept her idling. Walked past their jazzy mailbox, up their gravel driveway. I’d never come this far before.

  The house was dark, their van parked in front of the barn. Good Earth Potters. I leaned against the side of it and looked up at the house. She’s gone for good, I told myself. You screwed up and she cut you off, same as he cut off his hand. She amputated you. You’re dead meat, Birdsey. Go home to the woman you don’t love.

  Except I didn’t go home. I got back in the truck and hung a U at the next fork. Took a left onto the parkway. It was a relief to drive past the state hospital for once. The roads were slick from a mist so soft and light it seemed to hang suspended in the air around the streetlamps. I flicked on the wipers—pushed around the egg slime a little.

  Driving through New London, I hung a left onto Montauk and headed for the beach. Parked, walked across the boardwalk and down into the sinking sand. At the water’s edge, littl
e waves lapped in and phosphorescence bounced and winked at the toes of my work boots. Phosphorescence, man. Pixie dust. What was there about water?

  When I came off the beach again, I saw a cruiser parked next to my truck. Engine and lights off. Waiting. Just him and me in that empty thousand-car parking lot.

  A window whirred as I approached. “Evening,” the cop said. In the dark, he was a voice, nothing else.

  “Evening.”

  “Out for a stroll?”

  “Yup.” It was like speaking to nothing. Like speaking to the goddamned mist. He started his engine when I started mine. Tailed me all the way back through town until I turned back onto I-95.

  Driving over the Gold Star Bridge, I looked across the river at the halogen glow: Electric Boat, third shift. At EB, they were still building submarines around the clock—even now, with the Cold War on the respirator. Nautilus, Polaris, Trident, Seawolf: war and Connecticut had always had a romance going, a kind of vampire’s dance. “It puts food on the table, too, doesn’t it, wiseguy?” I heard Ray’s voice say. “You ate every night while you were growing up, didn’t you?”

  Was that what Joy expected me to do? Be like Ray: be a father to someone else’s kid and hate the kid for it? Do a number on some poor little bastard his whole life? For a second or two, I could taste the bile that must have sat in Ray’s gut all those years: catch a fleeting glimpse of life from Ray’s perspective.

  I exited in Easterly and drove up Route 22, out by the Wequonnoc reservation. As close as I can figure, that’s when I must have started dozing. . . .

  In the dream, I’m my younger self, slipping and sliding on a frozen-over river. A tree’s growing out of the water—a cedar, I think it is. Beneath my shoes, babies are floating by. Dozens of them. They’re alive—trapped under the ice. They’re those babies the nuns told us about in Sunday school—the ones that died before they were baptized and had to stay stuck in limbo on a technicality until the end of the world. I worry about those babies—wonder about them, about God. If He made the whole universe, why can’t he just relax his own rule? Accept those blameless babies into Heaven? . . .

  And then Ma’s in the dream. Alive again, up in the cedar tree, holding a baby . . .

  A movement beneath the ice distracts me and when I look down, I see my grandmother, alive, under the ice. Ignazia. . . . I recognize her from the brown-tinted photograph in my mother’s album. Her wedding portrait—the only picture of her I’ve ever seen. We make eye contact, she and I. Her eyes beg me for something I can’t understand. I run after her, slipping and sliding across the ice. “What do you want?” I shout down. “What do you want?”

  When I look up again, the cedar tree’s in flames. . . .

  I awoke to a car horn’s blare. Jesus! Jesus!

  A rock ledge rushed past, headlights crisscrossed in front of me. I veered to the right and drove over an embankment, unsure how far I’d fall.

  There was an ugly scraping sound beneath me, I remember— the wail of my own Oh, no! Oh, no! My head bounced against the roof. Barreling toward that tree, I held out my hand to stop the collision. . . .

  I was out for a little while, I guess. I must have been. I remember pulling my hand back inside the busted windshield. Remember the pain, the pulsing blood.

  That same cedar tree grew in a pasture, not the river. A half dozen Holsteins stood staring at me, griping from the far end they’d run to when I’d come flying over their bank. Disturbed their peace. I grabbed a paint rag, pulled the tourniquet tight with my good hand and my teeth. I got out of the truck. Sat down in that frost-dead field.

  The mist had stopped—had made way for a bright, hard-edged moon. Crumbs of windshield glass glittered in the hair on my arm. In the moonlight, my blood looked black.

  Up on Route 22, I saw a vision: the steady flow of gamblers in cars, driving to the Wequonnocs’ casino. “What do you want?” I had yelled through the frozen river to my dead grandmother. “What do you want?”

  28

  GOD BLESS AMERICA! the five-foot-tall letters proclaimed across Constantine Motors’ showroom window. Translation: Prove your patriotism with your down payment. Buy a car and stick it to Saddam.

  I was seated across from Leo’s desk, waiting for the insurance guy to show. I’d gone right from the hospital to the phone—had kept hitting Redial Redial Redial until someone at Mutual of America finally answered. They’d tried to put me off—to give me an appointment with the claims adjuster the following week. “Look, lady,” I’d said. “I make my living with that truck. One way or the other, someone’s looking at that vehicle today!” So there I sat, twiddling my thumbs at Constantine Chrysler Dodge Isuzu instead of pulling those shutters over at the Roods’ like I’d promised. I should have been running point by point through my arguments to the Security Board a couple more times instead of just sitting there. Me and my seventeen stitches, my Tylox high.

  Omar the ex-athlete was seated at the sales desk across from Leo’s, talking on the phone. “Uh-huh. Uh-huh. I understand that, Carl. But you’re talking about some car in the abstract and I’m talking about this cobalt blue Dakota that I’m looking at right out there on the lot.” He was wearing a shirt, a tie, and a red, white, and blue baseball cap. “Plus, if you act now, you’ve got the added savings of our God Bless America promotion.”

  God bless America!

  I cut it off to heal the nations! . . .

  My stitched-up hand was starting to hurt again. My neck now, too. The doctor over in the emergency room had tried to order me one of those collar things, but I’d refused. I’d said yes to the pain pills, though—three of them in a little brown envelope and a prescription for a dozen more. I considered popping another one now but decided against it. If that claims adjuster was going to give me a hassle, I didn’t want to sit there smiling at him like Goofy.

  My truck, man. My livelihood. . . .

  I looked over at Omar in time to catch his eyes jump away from the sight of me. Banged up, bandaged up, slumped in the chair: I must have looked about as pathetic as my truck. “Where do you want this thing towed to?” the state cop had asked me out at the accident. “Constantine Motors,” I’d said—a knee-jerk response.

  A wave of nausea passed through my gut. My hands started trembling, my legs. Last thing I needed right about then was to lose it in front of Omar. I cleared my throat, stood up. “Tell . . . uh . . . tell Leo I went to the can,” I said.

  Omar looked over like he hadn’t been aware of my existence. “Huh? Yeah, sure thing.” I got up and headed for the men’s room.

  I locked the door, looked at my face in the mirror. Night of the Living Dead looked back. Another wave of queasiness came and went; I broke out in a clammy sweat. I rested my head against the wall and listed all the things I was supposed to be able to fix: my truck, my brother’s placement, the Roods’ house.

  We made a baby, Dominick. You and me. . . .

  I saw, again, the way Joy had looked when she got to the emergency room that morning: no makeup, her hair all crazy. “Hold me,” she’d said. Broke down right in front of everyone. Cried against me. In almost two years together, it was maybe the second or third time I’d seen Joy cry. Those tears meant there was something between us, right? That she felt something, whether she’d been screwing someone else or not. Right?

  When the shaking subsided, I got up and doused my face with cold water, purposely avoiding the mirror. I walked back out into that gleaming showroom.

  That’s when I noticed the patriotic balloons bobbing from the business manager’s platform desk: bouquets of them. Looked like a goddamned altar, that desk. In the name of the father, and the son, and the dollar bill. Leo was strolling toward me from the opposite direction with our two coffees. He was wearing that fancy Armani suit of his and one of those God Bless America! caps like Omar’s. Every employee at the freaking dealership was wearing one of those caps, even Uncle Costas and the secretaries. They had a major theme going on, courtesy of Kuwait.

 
“Here you go, Birdsey,” Leo said, handing me the coffee. “What time did that guy say he’d be here?”

  “Ten-thirty.” I squinted up at the wall clock for the umpteenth time. Ten fifty-five.

  Leo sat down, put his feet up on the desk, his hands behind his head. “And your brother’s thing is when?”

  “Four this afternoon.”

  “What do you think? You gonna be able to spring him?”

  I shrugged. Needed to change the subject. “What’s with the doofy-looking hats?”

  He reached up and took off his cap, tossing it onto the filing cabinet next to his desk. “It’s the old man’s idea. He ordered a gross for giveaways. We’re having a Desert Shield rally this Saturday. Tent, hot dog roast, zero-percent down.”

  I rolled my eyes. “You got hat head,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Hat head.” I pointed at the ridge the cheap hat had made in his forty-dollar haircut. That’s what he told me once that he pays his “stylist”: forty bucks a throw.

  He took a little mirror out of his desk and tried tousling away the damage. That was Leo’s biggest problem: hat head. “Hey, if Big Gene thought it’d move cars off the lot, he’d dig up Patton and stick him in the window.” He leaned forward, whispering. “With the economy this sucky and the Boat talking about more layoffs, nobody’s buying nothing. September was our worst month since the gas crisis.”

  I’ll cry for ’em later on, I thought. Checked the clock again. 11:03. Where was that insurance fuck?

  I watched Leo’s eyes follow his coworker Lorna across the sales floor. “Hey, you know what I found out yesterday?” he whispered. “About the she-bitch over there?” He drew a pen out of his desk set, plunged it in and out, in and out of the holder. “She and Omar. One of the mechanics caught ’em doin’ the big nasty after hours in the back of a Caravan. The old man’d go ballistic if he found out. You know how he hates that black-on-white stuff.”

  Get a life, Leo, I thought. I tried swiveling my neck from side to side; it hurt more when I turned to the right than the left. It was stupid of me not to have gotten that collar.