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

  He nodded. “I tried to talk to him about it last weekend, but he got pissed. Told me I should run my own life and he’d run his. . . . Annie should have woken me up. I could have—”

  “She said she tried to, but you wouldn’t wake up either.”

  That sold it. He suddenly looked guilty “I was up reading until after midnight. We’re doing this book 1984 in honors English and I’m way behind. If she gives us a pop quiz before the weekend, I’m fucked.”

  I nodded sympathetically. Told him Annie’s having gotten me up was no problem. “I’m a light sleeper. And anyways, my English teacher shows movies half the time, so I can always grab a nap in class.”

  He reached up and started rubbing the side of his head. “The thing is, Kent, I can forget about getting a scholarship next year if I don’t keep my grades up. My guidance counselor told me colleges look real closely at your grades from junior year. . . . Annie say what her bad dream was about?”

  I felt like a louse saying it, but it was him or me. “The flood,” I said. “About your mother and Gracie drowning.” He winced. Said maybe he’d better talk to her about it. I realized I’d made a tactical error. If he started asking her about a dream she hadn’t really had, he might get suspicious all over again. “I wouldn’t if I were you, Donny,” I said. “She’s okay. Why bring it up again?”

  He looked relieved. “Yeah, you’re right. Look, man, I gotta pee something wicked.” And with that, he walked past me and headed down the hall to the bathroom, scratching his ass.

  Back in our room, I took a bunch of deep breaths to stop myself from shaking. Then I punched myself in the chest five or six times, hard as I could, for being so goddamned careless.

  Later, at breakfast, Donald told Annie he would read to her that night at bedtime. “Okay?” She looked back and forth between the two of us and nodded. He was good for his word. He read to her the next night, too. But after that, it was business as usual again. He wasn’t around, and neither was his old man. But yeah, that was the only time I ever came close to getting caught. After that, once I’d gotten what I’d gone into Annie’s room for, I always got right up, made sure the coast was clear, and left.

  I don’t know. Maybe if Irma Cake had told my mother the real reason why she wasn’t going to babysit me anymore, I wouldn’t have had to spend the rest of my life cruising little girls. Or maybe if I had gotten caught messing around with Annie—gotten the shit beaten out of me and been kicked out—that might have stopped it. It didn’t stop, though, partly because I got so good at not getting caught, and partly because, along the way, I figured out how to use Annie’s and my secret to insure her silence. I began threatening her that if she told on me, I’d have to tell everyone about how Gracie had really died. “The cops left me alone because I saved everyone else, but that wouldn’t help you any if they knew the truth,” I assured her. “They’d throw you in jail with bad people and it would be really, really scary.” And so what we were doing went on for the next two years. I was a senior by then, and Donald was away at college on a scholar-athlete scholarship. Annie was seven.

  The funny thing is, when Protective Services finally did pull her out of the house and place her with a foster family, it wasn’t because of me. It was because by then her father had turned himself into a hopeless lush. There was a DUI arrest, a disorderly conduct incident down at the Silver Rail. And when Chick started showing up for work drunk first thing in the morning, there were problems at the barbershop, too. He cut a customer so bad while he was shaving him that the guy had to get stitches. Word got out and the shop began to lose business. Another guy got up from the chair in the middle of his haircut because he smelled booze on Chick’s breath, and Chick followed him out of the shop and into the street, cursing him out. The last straw was when he took Uncle Brendan’s mynah bird out of his cage and, thinking it was funny, opened the door and let him loose. He kept insisting the bird would go off on a little toot and then come right back. He didn’t. Uncle Brendan fired him, and when Chick kept showing up for work anyway, good and soused, the cops got called. A few days later, they showed up at the house. Mrs. Dugas next door had called the station after she’d seen Annie walking hand in hand down the street with her father, Chick reeling from one side of the sidewalk to the other. He couldn’t even manage to sober up for the authorities’ interview, and I guess that was the nail in the coffin.

  I went to school one morning and cut out at lunchtime. When I got home, there was a car I didn’t recognize parked in front of the house. Two people were in it, a guy behind the wheel and a woman in the passenger’s seat. Uncle Chick was out on the front step, crying his eyes out.

  “What’s going on?” I said. “Where’s Annie?”

  Uncle Chick pointed toward the street. That car was pulling away from the curb. As I ran out into the street, I saw Annie at the back window, her face contorted with pain and fear as a woman seated back there with her tried to make her turn around. I chased the car down the road until it disappeared around the corner. A few minutes later, we went back inside, Chick and me. He pulled out a bottle of rotgut, took a swig, and handed it to me. He kept blubbering, repeating the same thing over and over. “I failed her, Kent. I loved her so much, but I failed her.” After a while, I realized that he didn’t mean Annie. He meant Aunt Sunny. I felt bad for him but worse for myself. She was gone. I’d lost her. We both got shit-faced that afternoon.

  “Kent honey, why didn’t you tell me how bad he had gotten?” my mother asked me the night I moved back home.

  “Yeah, I guess I should have,” I mumbled. The reason I hadn’t told her was because if she butted in, I figured, it might mess up what I had going with Annie. But now I’d lost her anyway. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I guess I was in mourning. It was as if she’d died, and I had the same half-sad, half-angry feeling I’d had after Aunt Sunny and Gracie drowned.

  Despite Mom’s bugging me about going back to my old school to finish senior year, I refused. Got my G.E.D. instead. “Same thing,” I told her.

  “No it’s not, Kent,” she said. “You’re my only child. I had my heart set on going to your high school graduation.”

  “Yeah, well, you’ll get over it.”

  Worried about her brother, Mom called him two or three times a week. He was usually smashed. He said the people who’d placed Annie in foster care wouldn’t tell him where she was. The deal was, he had to get help with his drinking and prove that he had maintained sobriety for a year before they’d let him see her. When Mom called them to get an address, they wouldn’t tell her either. Annie was doing fine, was all they’d say; she was adjusting to her new family and her new school. She had joined the Brownies.

  Mom wrote to Donald at college every once in a while. She’d put five or ten bucks in the envelope to help him out. Whenever she left the letters on the counter for me to mail, I’d open them, swipe the cash, and glue the envelope shut again. Whenever I’d ask her for money, she’d say no, that I should go look for a job instead of moping around the house all day. The only time Donald ever wrote her back, he said that he hadn’t had any contact with his sister either. Later on, we found out that that was a lie. The authorities had determined that Goody Two-shoes was a positive influence in Annie’s life. That pissed me off royally. Who’d taken care of her for two years while he was off every night doing his thing? Me, that’s who. But as usual, I didn’t count.

  Mom and I drove over to Three Rivers three or four times to see Uncle Chick, but those visits got to be too hard on her. Either he wasn’t around after he said he would be, or else he was home, drunk as a skunk. He told her he couldn’t get sober—that he needed booze to get through his day, given everything and everybody he’d lost. I understood what he meant. For the first couple of months after I moved back, I hardly ever left the house. I just sat around, thinking about what Annie’s face had looked like at that back window as they were driving her away.

  I finally did get a job, as a fry cook at KFC. I hated it. H
ated my boss, Millie. Hated that, no matter how many showers I took, I could never quite get rid of the fried chicken stink on me. The only one of my coworkers I got along with was this woman in her twenties named Karin. She was married, but her husband was a sailor who was out to sea half the time. Karin started flirting with me, but I thought that was all it was until she showed me otherwise. It was during the midafternoon slowdown. Millie had gone to the bank to make a deposit, and both of our coworkers had gone outside to grab a smoke. Karin took me by the hand and led me into the employees’ bathroom. Then she locked the door, got down on her knees, and blew me. Ten minutes later, I was back at my station flouring chicken legs.

  After that little encounter, Karin started inviting me over to her house to listen to music and shit. There was always beer in her fridge, and her husband had a pretty cool stereo. I’d play stink finger with her until she got off. Then I’d fuck her. It was weird, I guess; any other guy would have kept a situation like that going for as long as he could, but I wasn’t any other guy. I was me. Karin was way more into it than I was, and after a while I started telling her I was too busy to go over there. I was more interested in some of the little girls who’d come in with their parents to pick up their chicken dinners than I was in Karin. Nothing ever happened on that front, though. After I’d been working there for six months or so, I quit.

  I tried community college for a while. That was where I met Rosemary, a single mom who had a young daughter named Serena. Rosemary had a night class Tuesdays and Thursdays, which was when I’d babysit. Serena was my first little girl since Annie. I was twenty-one; she was nine. She cooperated at first, but then she started balking. Said she was going to tell her mother. Figuring I’d better beat feet before the cops got involved, I raided the envelope where my mom was stashing her Christmas Club money. I threw some of my things together and got on the first bus that pulled into the depot. Got off at Worcester, Mass.

  In Worcester, I bunked at the Y and got a job as a janitor there. It was a pretty sweet setup, actually. When the little kids—the Guppies or whatever—were in the locker room with their moms, I’d invent excuses for why I had to go in there and get something or check on something. They caught on, though, and I got fired. From there, I rented a room at a flophouse downtown and picked up a job at Ace Hardware. They assigned me to the warehouse at first, and that sorta sucked, but then they taught me how to use the key-making machine. I’d be out back shelving Sheetrock or lugging bags of sodium crystals, and it would come over the loudspeaker. “Kent to keys, please. Kent Kelly to keys.” I’d go inside the store, warm up a little, give my muscles a rest while I was cutting someone a key. One afternoon I made myself a pass key that got me into other tenants’ rooms over at the flophouse where I was living now. It was just petty theft: cigarettes, spare change, half-bottles of booze. Nobody at that place had much worth stealing. I was one of the ones they questioned after the manager started getting complaints, but I thought fast and told them I’d seen this junkie down the hall coming out of rooms where she didn’t belong. Daisy, her name was. She was a pain in the ass, always knocking on guys’ doors to bum smokes or offer sex for money, as if you’d want to pay to put your dipstick into that skanky snatch. They must have believed me that she was the thief because they kicked her out. The way I figured it, I was doing the place a public service.

  It was depressing living there, though. Lonely. Sundays, when the hardware store was closed, were the worst. I’d lie on my bed and start wondering about how Mom was doing. I’d think about my father who, after he moved to Cincinnati, had called me a grand total of twice. Then I’d think about when I was living with the O’Days, helping Aunt Sunny in the kitchen, hanging out with Uncle Chick. And about the night of the flood. I’d start wondering about Annie—how she was doing now, whether some guy at her foster home might be messing with her. I’d fantasize about finding out who he was and beating him to an inch of his life. Rescuing her. It was fucked-up, I guess: me feeling protective of her, considering some of the shit I’d done. . . .

  One Sunday, I went downstairs to the pay phone and called my mother to let her know that I was still alive. She cried at first. Then she started bugging me about where I was. “Please, Kent. What if I got sick and needed to get ahold of you?”

  “I’d find out,” I assured her, although I didn’t know how I would.

  “Well, where am I supposed to send your mail then? You’ve got two or three things from the college and—”

  “Just throw it out. I’m not going back there.”

  “Are you sure, Kent? Maybe you should think about it some more.’’

  “Throw it out,” I repeated.

  “Well, okay, honey, but there’s other mail, too. There’s something here from the Motor Vehicle. It may be your license renewal.”

  I told her to throw that away, too—that where I was I got around by bus. To change the subject, I asked her how Uncle Chick was doing. Not good, she said. He’d gone from bad to worse. “So they haven’t let him see Annie yet?” No, she said. And they still hadn’t given her any information either, other than to say she was doing fine. I looked down at my ragged, bloody finger. Until then, I hadn’t realized that I’d been tearing at the skin around the cuticle. “Well, take care, Mom. I gotta go.” When she started in about whether or not I was coming home for Thanksgiving, I pretended I was the operator cutting in to say time was up.

  “Stop it, Kent. That’s you,” she said.

  I hung up. Went outside and walked around for a couple of hours, past all the vacant storefronts, all the shifty-eyed spooks sitting on benches and leaning against the decaying buildings of beautiful downtown Worcester.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Annie Oh

  I’m getting ready for bed when Viveca calls, wanting to discuss the evening we’ve just had—our “rehearsal dinner” without a rehearsal. For Viveca, this is typical. Whenever we come back from an evening out and get into bed, she likes to spoon with the lights out and do a postmortem. But tonight I’m here and she’s over there at Bella Linda—in the bridal suite by herself per Orion’s wishes.

  “Well, they’re just wonderful, Anna,” she says. “All three of them. And so different from one another—three unique and interesting individuals. You must have been a marvelous mother.”

  Far from it, I think. But my kids have turned out okay in spite of me.

  “And now I’m going to be part of your family, too. Oh, you know what would be lovely? If we could convince the three of them to spend the holidays with us. Their father, too, if he was game. We could take them to the Met, to Rockefeller Center to see the tree. Radio City, even. That Christmas show they do there is tacky, but so what? It would be part of the fun.”

  “Well, we’ll see. They might have plans of their own.”

  “Yes, of course. It’s just that we’d have to make a reservation for Christmas dinner someplace before too long. The best restaurants get booked months in advance for the holidays. I can have Carolyn work on it. Make a reservation for the six of us. We can always adjust the number if we have to.”

  “Okay, but first things first. Let’s get through tomorrow before we start planning for something three months from now.”

  “No, no, you’re right. I’m getting ahead of myself. But I just love the idea of celebrating the holidays as a family. And, of course, the Christmas after this one, there’ll be your daughter’s little one to share it with.” It jolts me back to Ariane’s news. When she told us this afternoon, I just stood there, staring at her for several seconds, too stunned to react. “Won’t that be fun, sweetheart?”

  “Yes, sure. But . . .” Inseminated by a man she’s never even seen? It seems so strange.

  “But what?”

  “No, it’s just that Ariane usually stays out there for Christmas. They do a big holiday meal at the place she runs, everything from soup to nuts, and she says the turnout is double what it is on a normal day.”

  “Well, Anna, her priorities may
change after her baby is born. She’s such a lovely girl. So earnest and socially conscious. Very Berkeley, that’s for sure.” My hand grips the phone a little tighter. Was that a put-down? “Tell me. How do you feel about becoming a grandmother?”

  “I don’t really know yet,” I tell her. “With everything that’s going on, I haven’t had time to process it. But I guess I’m a little nervous about the way it’s happened. Ari says she researched the prospective donors, but still. It’s kind of like spinning a roulette wheel.”

  “Well, you’ve always said how grounded and levelheaded she is. I’m sure it will all be fine. And anyway, it’s a different world these days. Women Ariane’s age have a lot more options than we did. Well, no. I take that back. Look at us. Tomorrow at this time we’ll be legally married. Happy?”

  “Yes, of course.” And I am. But it’s been a long day and I’m exhausted. The clock on the bureau says twelve forty-five. I’ve got to get some sleep. Hector’s dropping Minnie back here at eight in the morning so that she can help out—cook breakfast, give our wedding clothes a pressing. I could do all of it myself, but I’ve hired her, after all. If I didn’t give her things to do, it would be like I was paying her a thousand dollars to attend our wedding.

  “And how about that son of yours?” Viveca says. “He’s even more handsome in person than he is in pictures. Poor Lorenzo couldn’t keep his eyes off of him. I just hope it didn’t make Andrew uncomfortable. Has he always been that reserved and serious?”

  “More so than he used to be. It’s probably his military training. And the kind of work he does—dealing with all those wounded soldiers coming back from the war.”

  “Yes, I suppose. That must be terribly grim sometimes.” I’m relieved that she hasn’t seemed to pick up on the possibility that meeting her—seeing us as a couple—is what he may have been reserved and tense about. When Lorenzo made that toast and we kissed, I saw Andrew lock his jaw and look away. Saw Ariane reach over and touch the top of his hand.