The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin'

by Lamb, Wally

  Janis and I were doing three or four miles together, first thing in the morning. We’d get back at about the time Moze drove in from night baking, and the three of us would have breakfast together. The four of us, actually, on the days when Princess Velvet managed to drag herself out of bed and saunter downstairs. I’d agreed to let Velvet move in with the Micks—temporarily, I’d stipulated. I wasn’t crazy about the idea, but I figured it would keep her out of harm’s way for a while. I’d also said yes as a favor to Janis. Velvet was helping Moze set up his sculpture business, and that freed Janis to work on all the stuff she’d discovered in those old filing cabinets. Caelum! You’re not going to believe this! I found Lizzy’s Civil War letters! And old photographs, too—a whole big envelope of them! Jesus, she’d acted like a kid on Christmas morning.

  “You’re smiling, Mr. Quirk,” Dr. Patel noted.

  “Hmm?”

  “Your face just broke into a lovely smile. A penny for your thoughts.”

  I shook my head. “I’d be overcharging you.”

  Her eyes moved from my face to my tapping left foot, then back. “And so you are running again. And teaching your new course: The Quest in Literature, as I recall. Are you enjoying that?”

  I nodded. “Students are a little resistant, though. They keep wanting to know what all these classical Greek myths we’re reading have to do with them. Community college students tend to be pragmatists, you know? Can’t blame them. A lot of them are balancing school, work, kids.”

  “Multitaskers,” Dr. Patel observed. “And when they ask you what the ancient stories have to do with them, how do you respond?”

  “Last week, I threw the question back at them. Told them each to pick a myth and write a personal essay about its relevance to their lives.”

  “Ah, that’s an interesting assignment, and a useful one, too, I should think. The archetypal stories address human needs and longings so marvelously. Which is why they have lasted since antiquity, yes?” I nodded. “And did your assignment yield good results?”

  “Don’t know yet,” I said. “Papers are due next Tuesday.”

  “Well, Mr. Quirk, your resistant students are fortunate to have you as their teacher. Now tell me, please. How is Maureen?”

  “Mo?” I looked away from her for a second. Looked back. “Doing okay for the most part. She’s got a cellmate she’s compatible with now, so that helps. Gambling addict. In there for embezzlement.” I pulled at an unraveling thread on my sweatshirt sleeve. “She seesaws from visit to visit. Mo, I mean. Some days she’s up, some days she’s down.”

  “And how often are you able to see her?”

  “How often?” I shifted in my chair, folded my arms in front of me. “It goes by the last digit of their inmate numbers. Odds can have visits one day, evens the next. So, theoretically, I can go every other day.”

  Dr. P’s head tilted slightly. “Theoretically?”

  I took a sip of tea. Over the rim of my cup, I watched her watch me. “No, it’s just … I was getting there every other day at first. Because that’s what she needed, you know? She was so intimidated by everything. And everybody.”

  “Well, that’s understandable.”

  “Yeah. It is. All the loud noises really freaked her out at first, you know? Doors banging, people screaming and swearing at each other. This one little darling on her tier realized that noise bothered her, so she’d rile her up on purpose. Sneak up behind her and clap in her ears, go ‘Boo!’”

  Dr. Patel shook her head. “Assimilation to such a harsh environment would be difficult for anyone, but particularly so for someone with PTSD.”

  “But she’s better now. Like you said, assimilating. Other day I was down there and she said she heard ‘on the down-low’ that there was going to be a shakedown that weekend. A shakedown’s where the goons herd them over to the gym and strip-search them while another bunch pulls their cells apart, looking for contraband. Drugs, weapons. That kind of thing.” I shook my head. “On the down-low: like she grew up on the streets or something. Part of her assimilation, I guess. Learning the lingo. Next thing I know, she’ll be getting a jailhouse tattoo.”

  I sat there, waiting for her to say something. Watching her wait.

  “They got this thing down there called ‘five on the floor,’ okay? Which means that once an hour, the CO at the control desk pops their cell doors. Everything’s controlled electronically, okay? So the CO pops their doors and they get a whopping five minutes to go out to this common area where there’s phones, and a TV, and a pot of hot water so they can make themselves instant coffee or tea or whatever. That’s when she can call me, okay? During ‘five on the floor.’ Except after we get through the rigmarole of me accepting the phone company charges and the State of Connecticut surcharge and all that yadda yadda, we’ve got maybe two, three minutes to talk. And, you know, all the time we’re trying to have a conversation, the TV’s blaring and everyone’s yapping away in the background with their volume jacked up. And so, half of our conversation is me repeating two or three times what I already said because she can’t hear me over the racket. Gotta stick her finger in her ear the whole time, she says, and even then…. Plus, there’s this intermittent beep-beeping coming through the receiver to remind you that Big Brother may be eavesdropping.”

  Dr. P shook her head. “Face-to-face visits are preferable, then. Yes?”

  “Yeah. Somewhat…. But it gets hard, you know? I mean, I’m teaching, conferencing with students, going to these bullshit committee meetings that drag on forever. You know academics: love to hear themselves talk. All that plus I’ve got a forty-minute commute twice a day…. And now? With the civil suit coming up? The lawyer I hired says he needs all the documentation from the criminal trial, plus all the information about our assets. Takes time to gather all that stuff, you know? She doesn’t realize that I can’t just put the brakes on everything from three to four thirty every other day and get over to see her.”

  “So this is an issue between the two of you?”

  “An issue? No, not really. Not a big issue.”

  In the dead air that followed my bogus denial, her eyes moved from my eyes down to my crazily tapping foot, then back again.

  “Hey, I can understand it from her perspective, you know? I mean, what’s she doing all day while I’m running from one thing to another? Sitting in her cell, waiting for three o’clock. So when they don’t call her down…. I mean, I get that, but … She’s applied for a job, though. That should help. She’d like to get assigned to the infirmary—use her skills, you know? But her unit manager told her he doesn’t think it’ll happen because of her drug history. Says she’ll probably get food prep or janitorial or something. Which would be okay, too, I guess. Anything to eat up some of her day. Make the time go by quicker.”

  “Indeed,” Dr. Patel said. “Well, I hope—”

  “Trouble is, whenever they apply for something at that place, the paperwork takes forever. I swear, the entire system’s being run by inefficiency experts. It’s ridiculous.”

  “And so it goes with large institutions, I’m afraid.”

  “And then? When I do bust my butt—drive back from school like a bat outa hell and rush over there? It’s hurry-up-and-wait. They’ve got this rule: inmates have to be seated in the visiting room before they let us enter. And Mo says a lot of the guards take their sweet time calling them from their units. Or they hold them up at the walk gate—hassle them for the simple reason that they can get away with it. Make themselves feel like big shots.”

  “An abuse of their authority,” Dr. P noted.

  “Right. Exactly. And meanwhile, I’m parked in the bullpen with all the other visitors, thinking about all the things that aren’t getting done while I’m just sitting there…. Sometimes? You wait there for half, three-quarters of an hour, and then they come strolling out and tell you visits have been canceled for the day. No explanations, no apologies for anyone’s wasted time. It’s like, see ya, don’t let the door hit you in t
he ass on your way out.”

  “That must be very frustrating, Mr. Quirk.”

  “Hey, it’s not even that big a deal for me. I live right up the road. You know who I feel sorry for? The grandmothers. These poor, exhausted-looking women who are stuck raising the daughter’s kids while she’s doing time. They drive an hour, hour and a half from Bridgeport or Stamford, some of them, in these rusted-out old gas guzzlers that look like they might not make the trip back. Got the toddlers strapped into their car seats in back. Haven’t even had time to change out of their work clothes, a lot of them—they’re still wearing their nursing-home smocks or whatever. Then they get there and the goon at the gate goes, ‘Sorry. No visits today.’ … Sucks for those little kids, you know? And for the grandmothers.”

  Dr. Patel nodded sadly. “As it sucks for the prisoner who has anticipated seeing her loved ones.” She stopped, cocked her head to the side. “Something is humorous, Mr. Quirk?”

  “No, I just … You usually speak the Queen’s English. Struck me funny to hear you say something ‘sucked.’ Another occupational hazard, eh, Doc? Assimilating the slang you have to listen to all day long from us boneheads?”

  By way of an answer, she gave me a noncommittal smile.

  Her smile faded. She glanced at her clock. “I’m afraid we’ll have to end in a few minutes, Mr. Quirk. But tell me something, please, before we do. Maureen’s failure to understand how busy you are: Would you say your frustration about that stems more from anger or from fear?”

  “Neither, really. It’s just …” I shrugged. “It is what it is.”

  “That’s a circumlocution, Mr. Quirk—the kind of time-wasting response which, I imagine, you would not accept from your students. Suppose I were to insist you choose one or the other. Which would it be? Anger? Or fear?”

  As if she wasn’t insisting. “I don’t know. Anger, I guess.”

  “And what would be the source of that anger?”

  We held each other’s gaze for several seconds.

  “This lawsuit we’re facing? I’m facing. Hey, I’m the one who had to go out, get a lawyer, get all this stuff ready while she’s sitting down there at the human warehouse…. I keep going back to this Sunday night several years back when my aunt called me. My aunt Lolly—the one I inherited the farm from. This was back in ninety-seven, ninety-eight—after she and I reconciled and we moved out to Colorado. So my aunt calls me, okay? Says she’s having her will done. Asks me, do I want her to put the farm in just my name, or in both our names. Maureen’s and mine. ‘Both,’ I said. Hey, we’d moved out there to save our marriage, right? Clean slate, new beginnings. And it was working pretty well. Things were better. So I said, without really thinking about it, ‘Put it in both our names.’ As an act of faith, or whatever. So that’s what she did. But now … because of that …”

  “Yes? Go on.”

  “If they win the civil case … Look, it’s not like I’m unsympathetic toward that woman. She lost her son, you know? And from what I heard, that kid was a great kid. Had his problems, but … But I wasn’t the one at the wheel that morning. I didn’t kill him. How’s taking what’s mine going to make things any better? It’s not like it’s going to bring him back from the dead, is it? Pulling my life out from under me? … I mean, I’ve already lost her, you know? For five years, anyway. And after that? It’s not like she’s going to bounce out of that place unchanged. ‘There’s going to be a shakedown. I heard it on the down-low.’ … And now, on top of that, I might have to lose my house? My farm? That farm’s been in my family for years. Generations. But because of what she did, and because, on the night my aunt called, I said, ‘Put it in both our names.’ … You know how old I was when I lost my father? Fourteen. I mean, I’d lost him to alcohol long before that, but that’s when he got killed—when I was fourteen. Freshman in high school, and my aunt shows up outside my algebra class…. Lost my mother when I was thirty. Kept a vigil by her bedside, and you know who she wanted in her dying hours? Not her son, her only kid. She wanted Jesus, with his big brown eyes and his honey-colored hair…. I have no kids, no siblings. No cousins, even. Well, technically, I’ve got cousins on my mother’s side, but I don’t really know any of them. Haven’t seen any of them since I was a kid. Aunt Lolly was the only relative left who I cared about, and then she died. And so the farm…. That farm’s all I’ve got left.”

  She handed me the box of tissues. Waited.

  “And the thing is, I really tried, you know? After the shootings? When I saw how scared to death she was of everything? How traumatized? Jesus, I tried everything I could think of to help her get past it. Get back to the person she’d been. It’s fucked up, you know? Three wives, three marriages, and it wasn’t until after Columbine that I finally figured out how to be a halfway decent husband…. Only it wasn’t enough. No matter what I tried, no matter what I did. It was almost as if … as if …”

  “Say it, Mr. Quirk.”

  “It’s like she died inside that cabinet. Said her prayers, wrote me a good-bye note, and then the SWAT team got there and this other, damaged stranger crawled out instead. And Maureen was dead.”

  She was the one who broke the silence. “I am thinking, Mr. Quirk, that perhaps the flashbacklike episode you experienced may have been some subconscious attempt to be a good husband to Maureen. To bear a little of her terrible burden for her.”

  I shrugged. Sat there looking at her. “I went to the convenience store the other day? For a coffee? I go, ‘Medium black, no sugar,’ and the kid at the counter—must have been all of eighteen or nineteen—she gets me my coffee, goes over to the register, and she says, ‘Do you get the senior citizen discount? ’ And I go, ‘Oh, no, God, no. Not yet, ha ha ha.’ … But you know something? By the time she gets out of there? I won’t be too far from their friggin’ senior discount. Still teaching, still chipping away at our mountain of legal debt on my shitty thirty-five, thirty-six thousand a year—and that’s if they give me tenure. Living in some crappy little apartment because we lost the house. My house. My family’s farm. So yeah, I guess I feel angry.”

  “And what is it that you feel beneath your anger?”

  Several seconds passed. I held her gaze.

  “I’m afraid.”

  “Of what, Mr. Quirk? Can you tell me?”

  “Of ending up with nothing. With no one.”

  I WROTE HER A CHECK. Rubbed the belly of her elephant-head statue for good luck. Promised to call her if I had another flashback, or if I just wanted to talk some more. I knew I wouldn’t, though. All I wanted to do was get home, put a couple of drinks into me, and see Janis. Hold her and lie naked with her. But that was never going to happen. After we’d come back from our runs and Moze got home from the bakery? They’d touch each other, tease each other, pass food while I sat there and watched.

  At the door, Dr. Patel wished me good luck with my students. “It’s a curious thing about quests, isn’t it, Mr. Quirk?” she said. “The seeker embarks on a journey to find what he wants and discovers, along the way, what he needs.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Yup.” If I thought she’d have gotten it, I would have started singing her that old Stones song: You can’t always get what you want. But I was pretty sure Mick and the boys weren’t on Doc Patel’s iPod.

  We’d gone over our allotted time, so her next patient was sitting in the waiting room—Dominick Birdsey, a guy I’d known since grade school. It was a little weird for both of us. “Hey, how’s it going?”

  “Good. Great. You?”

  “Going okay. Good to see you, man.”

  “Yeah, you, too.”

  Passing what had to have been his black BMW on the way to my car—ours were the only two in the lot—I smiled, shook my head. If we were both doing so goddamned great, why were we both seeing a shrink? Guess life wasn’t happily-ever-after even when you were a casino millionaire. Well, I’ll be a son of a bitch….

  Back home, Moze’s truck was gone and all the upstairs lights were off. Velvet mu
st have gone out, too.

  I fed the cat, poured myself a drink. I would have preferred scotch but I was drinking vodka now—the low-end stuff. Junior was billing me seventy-five bucks an hour so that I could keep what was already mine.

  I re-microwaved the rest of the pizza I’d microwaved the night before.

  Washed my supper plate.

  Poured myself another couple of inches of rot-gut and sat down at the computer. I Googled “vicarious traumatization.” It said pretty much what Doc Patel had said. Should have saved myself the money I’d handed over to her. Googled “Ganesha.” The son of Parvati the Destroyer and Shiva the Restorer…. His big belly is “a pitcher of properity.” ” … He is propitiated at the commencement of important work. I backed out of Google and checked my e-mail.

  From: janis.mick@tulane.edu

  To: caelumq@aol.com

  Sent: Saturday, October 28, 2006

  Subject: Great News!

  Caelum,

  I got the most exciting news today! A few days ago, I emailed Amanda, my adviser from Tulane, to tell her about your family’s archives. She called me this afternoon and we talked for over an hour. She’s invited me to submit a proposal for a paper at a huge Women’s Studies conference in San Francisco next February. (Luckily for me, she’s on the selection committee!) Amanda thinks I should focus on Lizzy Popper. She thinks Lizzy would be a great subject for a thesis project, and that it could maybe even be enough for a book! It will be a TON of work for me to pull it all together by February, but I am SO EXCITED. Moze is taking me out to dinner to celebrate and we’ve invited Velvet, too. We wanted you to come, but we didn’t know where you were. If you get back in time, come join us (Asian Bistro, 6:30 reservation). Caelum, none of this would have happened if it wasn’t for your generosity. I can’t say enough how grateful I am to you. Tell you more tomorrow. Are we running in the morning? If so, see you then.

  From: studlysicilian@snet.net

  To: caelumq@aol.com

  Sent: Saturday, October 28, 2006