by Jamie Mason
As sure as lies in church, baby girl. None of her adages purred out quite like that one. She reveled in announcing a certainty. Whether it was good news or bad, it was the starting gun to getting things done. And my mother was all about the getting done of things.
So it wasn’t exactly surprise that burned through me as I read the text. It’s hard to claim astonishment when you are forever poised for the jolt.
Who is this? I responded.
Rather talk in person. Meet me?
Last chance before I block this number, I typed with trembling fingers.
The trouble with pervasive, nonspecific alarm is that I never knew what or whom I was waiting for. Could be a winning sweepstakes notification, or it could be Dr. No.
As it happened, it was a woman named Angela.
• • •
My mother was not a dramatist even though dramatic things occasionally happened. Anything accomplished in preparation—for ant bites or apocalypse—was considered worthy. But in me, the call to readiness cultivated a certain yearning for the worst, if only to justify the constant fighting stance that quivered just under my skin.
This wasn’t the worst.
I’d have guessed it would have hurt more. But instead, I was mortified, not devastated, to hear what she had to say. Hot tides of loathing pulled me back and forth while she yammered into my ear. But it was the wrong brand of reaction. I wanted not to know that my husband had been making ridiculous promises with his head buried in a stripper’s cleavage more than I wanted for it not to have happened.
Angela kept me on the phone for forty-five minutes until I made myself burst into the tears she wasn’t going to hang up without. She was furious with Patrick. I endured her biting, rambling rant and found, against a good percentage of my will, the tawdry little story tucked away in there between the lines.
He’d flirted when she served him lunch, outright hit on her when she brought the check, then called her up when she’d left her number on the receipt. He’d gone to see her at her other job—the less dressed and more lucrative one. He’d monopolized her time and teased extra attention out of her with big talk of bigger tips to be had in some vague, flush future. She’d stoked his bluff with nearly naked grind.
It must have been a spontaneous dare he’d made to himself. Patrick wasn’t that brand of bold, and then he’d gone and underestimated a woman who was. She wasn’t the sort of person you wind up, then brush aside. I couldn’t imagine how he’d misevaluated Angela, because I could tell just by listening to her on the telephone that she was a semiprofessional pain in the ass.
If wallowing in drama is someone’s favorite pastime, it’s nearly impossible to disguise it. I didn’t understand how he could not have seen that. But in a certain mood, these rocket-propelled people can be invigorating. When that frame of mind meets an unguarded opportunity, just the mere whiff of you-only-live-once whets a craving that’s hard to resist.
Poor Patrick. He had certainly been towing a dark cloud over his head for a long while. He’d run right past the invigorating return of a good mood, straight past giddy, and headlong into insanity. Then, predictably, he’d come to his senses.
I wanted to stop her. More than that, I wanted to call her names. Not for being a stripper. A decent body and a bossy wiggle can be for sale and I’d have nothing to say about it. But she was low and stupid to bring me into this, to weigh me down with the details—as if she had the right to make a triangle out of the painful part of her job. I could feel my cheeks glowing, scalding with humiliation for having to hear Angela complaining to me of all people. Still, in the embarrassment I felt for Patrick, I burned with an extra dose of heat. Some strange shame brought me low for pitying Patrick in this moment.
He had called her after he stopped showing up as promised, wedging in some distance from the boasts he’d made, as she put it, “blowing smoke up my ass,” but then he had switched off completely, soon afterward, pouring regret into her ear during a final good-bye on the telephone, saying he wouldn’t be visiting the club again.
She’d spent money on his beery forecasting, too much money, and now found herself in the red. By her math, she’d sold him the inspiration for fantasies on credit. And the bill was due. Angela warned him against ignoring her over a barrage of unanswered calls and texts. Ferreting out my number and drawing me into the soap opera was her punishment for his disregard. But my sympathies didn’t exactly nestle down where she’d expected them to.
“I just thought you should know, Mrs. Aldrich,” she said, making Mrs. sound underlined and bold-typed.
That put the hard brakes on my conjured tears. I sniffed once and cleared my throat. “Really? Except that if he had come back like you told him to, then you wouldn’t have called me because then I shouldn’t know?”
“What?”
“I’m just trying to follow the conversation here. You’re mad that he didn’t do as you ordered him to do, so you called me and tried to blow up his life. What would you have done if he had obeyed you?”
“Excuse me?” Angela’s scorn resparked brightly.
“It just seems like this whole call is a lot less about you thinking I should know what my husband is up to, than it is about you burning Patrick because you feel that he’s crossed you.”
“Don’t you put this on me. Your sack-of-shit husband is the one you need to be talking to.”
“Right.”
“So what are you gonna do?” she demanded.
I sighed. “I don’t know. Get tested for crabs?”
Inarticulate fury wrung a few strangled clucks down the line.
“Look, Angela, I don’t know what you want me to say. Presumably you’re not waiting for a ‘Thank you.’ If you want to know that I’m upset, I can at least offer you that. I’m upset, okay?”
“But what are you gonna do?” she shouted.
“I don’t know!” I howled back, and stabbed the button, killing the call.
I hurled my phone into the sofa cushions and knelt on the floor. I rocked onto my heels. I’d been entirely frank with Angela. I had no idea what to do with this.
He’d been angry with me, and rightly so, but the ramp up from teasing and flirting with the young barista at the supermarket to pawing a pole dancer into a rage put Patrick too far from what I’d known of him. I didn’t recognize the husband-shaped blur so far afield of our little life. It scared me hot and cold all over. My scalp tingled in waves of chills.
Part of my fear was in acknowledging my own hand in the distance between us. I had long since sworn only ever to lie out loud. Within myself, in my mind, I was always honest to the point of discomfort. Patrick’s wandering eye and kindled daring had a certain justice. I knew it and acknowledged it, even if he didn’t know I did.
But he’d pulled back from this alley. He hadn’t taken it all Angela’s willing way. And every bit of the sincerity I could wrestle in my head wouldn’t tally up an answer for that one. Why hadn’t he gone all the way? Was it my worth or Angela’s that had brought him back from the brink? Or was it something else entirely? Was this the end of his restlessness or the just the start?
Perhaps that was the price I would pay—ending up all alone with the facts and no sum to make of them.
12
Patrick found me cross-legged on the floor of the office, walled in by photo albums and boxes of books and papers. My mother’s things. I’d spent all that afternoon avoiding him and busying myself away from the treadmill replay of Angela’s phone call. She hadn’t contacted me again, and every hour of distance from our chat was working that strange thing that is only the privilege of time to do—the rewriting of history. In this case, time managed its trick by sketching down the memory of my moderate reaction from what it had been into something abstract, a concept of a reaction instead of the reality of what I’d said to Angela.
With two days of real life for a buffer, what embarrassment there had been, and the odd wallow of sympathy I’d felt for Patrick, was faded more to water
color than photograph. Now the surges of insult were so scalding I’d have to revisit the conversation, word for word, just to remember what I’d said to bring back even a shade of my measured calm.
But guilt had me thinking I had to make amends by being forgiving of a comparably weighted offense. The trouble is, betrayal is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. However bad it looks, there are no scales to measure a pair of loyalties against each other. I couldn’t tell which one of us was worse.
I wanted off the carousel, even for just a while. What I really wanted was to talk to my mother. Killing time rifling through the cartons of her things and remembering the stories behind the flotsam was a second-rate substitute for her electric presence and artful guidance, but it wasn’t third-rate, and it wasn’t nothing. I took up the task of scanning her photos and letters into the computer for safekeeping.
The ongoing project had been meant as a layman’s reach for permanence, a way to thumb my nose at fire and flood and tornadoes until electromagnetic pulse do us part. But in the drudge work of sorting all the snapshots, I’d swung into distraction at intervals and bent to the call of the laptop, and listless Internet searches for more information. I typed in variations of her maiden and married names with addresses or snippets of person, place, or thing that I recalled from my troll through her papers. Secret money, secret job. I knew the drill. I always had. But now more than ever, so much less stays secret. I looked for her in the immortal mountain of ones and zeros available to my every clickable whim.
“What are you doing?” Patrick asked, sitting down on the far side of my fortress of memorabilia.
“I don’t know. Making some progress on our scanning project, I guess.” Patrick and I had stacks piled up, intended for the electronic archive, but it had turned out to be somewhat of a one-mountain-forward, two-mountains-back endeavor. “With Paul coming around again and us getting the money in and just—you know, all the stuff that’s going on. . . . Anyway, it made me think of her. I thought I only wanted to look at her pictures, then I thought I’d go ahead and get some of it scanned in. Next thing you know, I’m in here all day.” I pulled out a postcard from the stack of pictures. “Hey, see this one?” The postcard was a once-glossy photo of a golden-rayed sunset on a beach, with a raw and wild jungle backdrop, nothing but green and shadow just past the umbrellas and lounge chairs of the resort. Safe and relaxing so close to wild and not safe at all, the picture was mesmerizing. The edges of the card had frayed to white fuzz, and the message space on the back had been left blank except for a smudged postmark from Thailand.
“This was the spider-catching card,” I said. “My mother never crushed a spider. She always caught them with a glass and this postcard and then put them outside.”
Patrick laughed. “You would think she could’ve just stared down even a tarantula and told it to scram and it would have gone straight for the door all by itself.”
“You’d think.”
“You okay?”
“Yeah,” I said without conviction. The back of my throat tickled with tears. I hated crying and hated myself when I did it. I dared my eyes to water up, teeth hooked into the meat of my cheek, pinching what had been a vague sadness into a smoldering anger—at a show of weakness, at Patrick, at myself.
Patrick lifted a small stack of old-style, orangey, square photos off the pile and rotated through them without really looking. “It’s not surprising, I don’t think—the money, I mean. I wondered about that when the estate settled out. I always thought she would have had more.”
“You always thought that, huh? Bold much?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing. It was just a weird way for you to put it is all. Like she owed us or something.”
“I didn’t mean anything by it, Dee. God.” Patrick lurched up from the floor. “Nice little sucker punch, though.”
“Pat, I’m sorry.” A thrill of dread bloomed between my lungs and squeezed my heart to fluttering. If I picked a fight now, it would come out. I wasn’t ready to talk about Angela, and in no small part because I hadn’t decided how upset I might or might not be over it. The lay of our land was strewn with hidden traps, and not just mine.
“I should have known better,” he said. “You’re so touchy whenever your mother comes up.”
“I know I am. I’m sorry.”
“Never mind. It’s fine.” Patrick kissed the top of my head with a loud, mocking smack and walked away.
• • •
My mother’s games kept time in me like a second heart, the lessons thrumming away in the background, unnoticed, just like a pulse. I sensed the world the way she had taught me to without feeling the mechanism of it.
Something startled the galloping of blood and alertness through my veins. I felt eyes on me, but whoever owned the gaze had dropped it back into the crowded bustle of the mall’s wide hallway before I was able to pin down the watcher.
My mother had grafted us, Simon and me, to a braided lifeline of intuition, tricks, and her stock of truisms. There is nothing supernatural, she’d say. There are only the things in this world that we understand, the things that we don’t understand, and made-up crap. The last part of that saying was always the best bit. Pray at the altar of each of these things, my darlings. She would be smirking by then. They all work in their own way.
Why, exactly, we should go through our days harnessed to a lifeline at all, she never quite explained.
I scanned the bustling food court for the source of my ruined appetite. The trouble with top-of-the-line keenness (that my mother would never let us call paranoia) is that out of context, a pointed look could mean that I was being groomed as some sort of a target or merely that my sweater reminded the beholder that his wife’s birthday was this weekend and that he’d best get a gift right quick before he forgot again.
I scanned the room and didn’t see anything or anyone worth evaluating.
I sighed and forced down two more rounds of spicy tuna roll before tipping the rest of it into the garbage. The soft tingle of being watched tracked through my hair again, and I whirled to its call faster this time, half expecting to find a bristling woman with ANGELA tattooed across her forehead spotlighted somewhere in the crowd. But instead, my glance was tugged by the shoulder of a man turning away from me—tall with dark, wavy hair, and a jacket almost too nicely cut to be paired, as it was, over jeans. I looked back over the rest of the midday melee—munching, chatting, texting. None of them pulled crosshairs over my eyes the way Mr. Walking-Away did.
He didn’t see me look again, but I double-checked to note whether his retreating stride still matched up with the humming compass in my brain. The doors to the parking levels turned him back in my direction, not full on, but even through two layers of insulated glass and nearly twenty years of time, I recognized his face.
• • •
I remember once drifting into my mother’s office to find her studying the photograph of a man: blond, with nearly invisible eyebrows. He was clean-shaven and had a dent in his chin deep enough to look as if it might have had an ax buried in it at some point. The man’s two-pronged jaw would have been interesting enough, but my mother’s absorption was too intense, the whole scene unreal, as if maybe I were asleep in my bed and walking around only in my dreams.
She was motionless, staring at the picture, but with the image turned upside down.
“What are you doing?” I was little, maybe eight years old, and the only thing to make sense of it was to think of how I liked to watch my brother, just barely out of being a baby, talking upside down. We’d take turns dangling over the arm of the sofa, reciting rhymes to each other face-to-upside-down-face. It was good fun until the giggling made it all nonsense and somebody got spit in their eye. And even when it was fun, it was still a little creepy—the smile that was clearly a smile but all wrong with the big teeth bared below and the tongue tapping down instead of up. The fascinating deformity made the words look out of sync, as if th
ey should sound wrong. But they didn’t sound wrong. The singsong verses would play in Simon’s clear little-boy ring. He always laughed first.
My mother looked up from her work, scanned me, and tallied up the sum of my discomfort with a speed and ease that, even then, I knew was disconcerting. But her smile put me one level closer to fine.
“It’s a trick.” My mother pulled me close and righted the photo. The room snapped back into plain old Saturday morning. “Your brain is amazing, Plucky. You can make it do fancy things that it doesn’t normally do. Like if you study a person’s face, like this guy’s face for instance, upside down”—she inverted the photo again, much less disconcerting with her warm arm around me—“then it doesn’t matter what he does to change the way he looks. I’ll remember him if I ever see him again. He could change his hair color and it wouldn’t matter. He could cover his eyes with glasses. He could wear a hat or grow a beard or get old and I would still be able to recognize him right away.”
“Why would anyone change their face?”
“Now that’s a conversation for an older and wiser day.”
She often steered away from certain kinds of questions with that little word-rudder, sometimes to be revisited and sometimes not. If this one had ever come back around, I couldn’t remember it, and I don’t know if my mother ever crossed paths, or swords, with the blond man.
But, watching the glass door to the parking garage sweep closed, this particular day achieved instantly older and wiser status. I recognized Special Agent Brian Menary in the ridiculous food court of the equally ridiculous local shopping mall, and I’d only ever studied his face upside down once, almost two decades earlier on the night my mother left me twice—first by sending me into a lashing rain with my bawling little brother in tow, then later, in the foyer of our house on the worst night of my life.
• • •
The night my mother left us for so long, something in a storm had woken me. A sound had been running under the thunder as I slept, a sound I wasn’t sure I had actually heard until I played back the end of my last dream. In it, my track coach had been talking to me about double-knotting my laces and the importance of pressing the balls of my feet against the starting blocks. He was sitting in a pile of autumn leaves raked up into a high hill in the corner of the gymnasium where we would run practice drills whenever the weather was too lousy to train outside. Then, to match the ambient noise of the house’s waking reality, Coach Wells inexplicably slammed a door to nowhere that hadn’t been there a second before.
