He thought of Johnnie Carter. Only this time it wasn’t in the single-minded obsessive sense. It was with another slight sense of loss and regret that her image crossed his mind. Even though he still hoped to meet her and learn more, of late he’d had an ulterior motive to find her sooner than later, and that hope had actually prompted his launch as the Angel Tracker.
Even Margie was unaware that Marg Senior’s diagnosis of Alzheimer’s had intensified his desire to find this angel, this “unlikely savior,” as he now knew her. He had privately hoped to access her power to heal Marg Senior.
He reflected on that thought…Hope that was. Hope which had been. It was past tense now, and moot.
What was it Margie had told him? “…sometimes hope can just set you up…” And he, in near admonishment, had told her it would set you up for fulfillment. He just shook his head in his hands now, hair drawn tight between his fingers.
How could he have been so smug? He’d left her alone to deal with the reality of her mother’s deterioration while he gallivanted around the country to find a needle in a haystack. Even though he still believed in the potential of that needle, was the search justification for deserting his wife? Apparently, it was not.
If possible, the pain, so dark and deep, expanded and invaded even his lungs; his breath shortened into simple, quiet sobs. He jumped when he felt the arms encircle him from behind. He hadn’t heard Margie come down the stairs or approach with bare feet. He looked up to see her face framed with wet hair. She was wearing the same robe he’d worn this morning and he knew that now it would hold her clean scent mixed with his own. Her eyes were no longer empty, but filled with pain, love and understanding. And brimmed with the first of her tears.
With Margie perched on Byron’s lap in the dark space of Marg Senior’s kitchen, the two held each other and quietly wept, comforting one another, finding and taking small steps into their next way of being.
After an indulgent breakfast via room service, Johnnie reluctantly gathered her things knowing she couldn’t put Mary off much longer. Her mother had already called twice, conveniently while Johnnie was in the shower, more than likely to see when her wayward daughter would be “home.” She had not, of course, left a voice mail.
Mary possessed a deep conviction that no mother should be reduced to that form of communication with her own children. Johnnie actually believed the real reason Mary didn’t leave voice mail is that the techno-phobe older woman secretly thought it required some sort of expertise to do so, or that she thought all messages were bugged. Either way, Johnnie and James were privately grateful that the woman did not exercise an option that would surely result in countless and expansive guilt-ridden messages to her ever-neglectful children.
James texted her to say he was in his office in Manhattan all day and to let him know when she was through at Mary’s…or when Mary was through with her (he was even hip enough to throw in an “LMAO” after the last comment). Impressed, she responded, thanking him for the marvelous accommodations and flight, but wouldn’t know till later if what he’d done for her was sufficient for what he’d done to her. He apparently understood what she’d suspected; these amenities had, indeed, been consolation prizes for his rushing her to a showdown with Mary. He replied with an unsympathetic “ :-D“.
The cab ride to Brooklyn was shorter, and even more exciting than the excursion with Francois the night before, but Johnnie was too deep in thought to notice; or perhaps “dread” would be a more apt description of her disposition. Although her watch told her the trip had taken fifteen minutes, she would swear it had only been five and she had completely overlooked the trip across the Brooklyn Bridge.
One would think she’d curse the three flights of stairs while weighed down with a duffle bag and suitcase, but Johnnie was grateful for the extra minutes required to conquer the steps.
She was almost to the third floor landing when an apartment door flew open and all that was Mary Carter stepped out. The loud floral pattern of the fifties-style cotton dress may have been center of the scene if the slim lady’s over-sized wig hadn’t reigned dominant. Johnnie wasn’t sure if her mom’s narrow belted waist was more overpowered by the natural size of the woman’s shoulders or the ridiculous circumference of the hair piece. The “do” looked more like clumps of hair recently released from curlers than an actual style, but her mother, ever caught in the sixties was what she was. It had always intrigued Johnnie that Mary, born in 1950, could so emulate eras in which she’d never actually lived as an adult. Considering she looked like a cross between Anne Bancroft and Bette Davis, albeit her resemblance was of how they looked when in their actual sixties as opposed to how they looked in the nineteen-sixties, Johnnie figured Mary had nailed it.
Sliding her scuffed Dearfoam slippers across the landing, Mary jutted her arms out,
“Johnna Marie Carter!! My soldier is home from the wars!” Johnnie resisted the overwhelming urge to roll her eyes, yet felt a surprising lurch of love for this crazy broad. In spite of her misgivings, she dropped her bags and walked into the hug, artfully avoiding the burning cigarette which extended from the back of Mary’s hand.
“Airman, not soldier.” She muffled into the wads of synthetic hair. “Hi, Mom.”
Mary tried to drag Johnnie into her apartment before she noticed the discarded duffle and suitcase. She dragged the case while her daughter slung the duffle bag over her shoulder.
“I’m surprised you don’t put your back out with that thing.” She scolded, sounding very much the Noo-Yawka now… It appeared that her mother had misplaced her “r’s” and that her words ran through her chin before exiting her lips. Mary could be Robert De Niro’s long lost twin. With a girl-wig.
“I’m fine, Mom.” She looked around the cluttered apartment, trying to convince herself she was a G.I. “coming home.” But the place held no sentiment for her and she acknowledged that she just wasn’t feeling it. She turned back to Mary who, hands on hips, was staring at her daughter as if attempting to scan her, diagnose her…seeking every ailment in her daughter that no one other than a mother could possibly pinpoint.
Johnnie stepped forward and grasped Mary’s broad boney shoulders.
“Let me save you the effort, Mom…I’m eating right, I don’t have a cold, I have a bowel movement every day, if I ever had sex, it would be safe sex … and I promise I wear a jacket if it’s under 50 degrees out. I am fine.”
Mary stared at her for just a moment, then wiped the concern from her face with a drag of her waning Camel. She waved her hand in the air dismissively, as she backed out of her daughter’s grip and turned to find an ashtray. As she tapped her ashes, she retorted,
“Thanks for that. God forbid a mother worry about her only daughter.” Johnnie worked to adjust her brain past the gawd fabid a muthah wahrry about huh only dawdah. Mary’s Brooklyn-ese had faded considerably during their years of travel, but it was back with a vengeance.
“Sit.” Mary had turned, lighting a new cigarette with the old, gesturing toward the couch with her elbow. Blowing the smoke toward the ceiling, but fixing her dark eyes firmly on Johnnie, she was suddenly serious.
“You are certainly not exactly fine, Missy, or you wouldn’t be out of the service and home so fast. I knew it was true when you didn’t even argue with me about coming home. But I know it’s not your body health we need to talk about, eh? Tell me when it started again and what’s happened.”
Johnnie had sat obediently on the couch, but wasn’t quite ready to follow her mother’s orchestration of this landmark mother-daughter talk. Although she’d so dreaded this moment, she had not prepared what she might say and it suddenly poured out, impromptu. And not without emotion.
“First of all, this is not home. WE didn’t have a home, ever. Let’s not forget that. Second, YOU should sit too, and I think you owe me a lot more answers than I owe you.” Mary sat on an overstuffed chair with a stubborn expression as Johnnie continued.
“Yeah, things have happened. They
just started happening less than two months ago. But I have the distinct feeling that you and James, although I’ve not discussed this with either of you, know what’s going on and know why.” Mary opened her mouth and stuck a finger out, but Johnnie held up a hand and stopped her mother before she could interrupt.
“I’ve forgotten a lot, Mom. I used to think it was because, you know, we moved so much… and that maybe there was more to the thing about Dad than you told me. I thought it was always something else that made us move. NOW, all this shit starts happening and it is completely out of my control just like our lives were out of control back then. And then you guys summon me like you’ve been lording over my destiny and I don’t even know what my destiny is. I don’t even know what I am…”
“You’re a Godamned savior, that’s what you are, Johnnie.” As soon as Mary said it, she suddenly blanched and crossed herself, looking imploringly at the dingy popcorn finish on the ceiling, “Forgive me, Lord, for using your name in vain.”
Johnnie went from sixty to zero upon hearing her mother’s words. Her attempted desensitization to savior-references may have helped if that specific word hadn’t now come from her own mother’s lips. She was driven further into silence by Mary’s making the sign of the cross and asking for forgiveness for her words. For God’s sake…she and James had both grown up thinking curse words were part of the English-speaking “food group.” They’d had to learn on their own that swearing was not a socially acceptable form of communication.
Dumbfounded, Johnnie stared at her mother, who stared indignantly in return.
Flipping her palm up, causing ashes to flutter downward, the older woman said, “I’ve learned the sins of my ways and, while I did what I thought was best back then to protect you, I’ve learned the best way to protect you from afar is to put my fears in God’s hands. And Godamnit, it was workin’ fine till, what, six weeks ago?” Realizing she’d done it again, she rolled her eyes and crossed herself again, smoke trailing the hand motion.
The mother-daughter reunion “moment” was over and Johnnie had no patience for her mother’s dramatic flair, particularly this hypocritical display.
“Why did you call me that?” She sharply leaned forward, almost as if she was making an accusation.
Ever cool, Mary leaned back, holding one elbow while her cigarette was poised next to her face.
“I surmise you know the answer by now.”
“You owe me an explanation…in fact, I think you owe me a lot of explanations…” Johnnie shot back.
Mary’s calm demeanor disappeared as she leapt up and pointed an accusing finger at Johnnie, “I’ll tell you what I owe you, Missy. I owe you nothing! I saved you from your fate… from the life that would have come with your…your gift! For God’s sake, didn’t you ever see that movie Jesus Christ Superstar? Didn’t you see how everyone wanted something from Jesus and it almost did him in? Do you think I would ever let that happen to my daughter?!”
That little piece of overcharged absurdity took the wind out of Johnnie’s attack. She leaned back on the hard couch and regrouped. Her mother had just compared her to Jesus …in the context of a rock opera motion picture. James owed her waaaay more than a stinking plane ticket and hotel stay for this little piece of heaven.
Mary took Johnnie’s temporary silence as a victory and smoothed her rumpled dress before sitting back down.
“OK, Mom. I’m sorry. This has been a bit of a shock the past several weeks…it’s only ruined my life. I might have known to apologize to you and James if only someone had told me what I’d done, which, by the way, I still don’t know. I remember moving all the time, and it seems like I was always asleep when it was time to move; I just assumed we always left in the middle of the night…but lately... well, things have happened that make me think my sleeping had more to do with us leaving than what time it was.”
The words alone made Johnnie feel just as crazy as her throw-back mother looked, and realized that her statement probably made perfect sense to the haughty woman on the couch.
“Of course it did! Look, Johnnie, here’s the thing. We didn’t ever want you to feel the burden, you know? And since it all just stopped after your fall when you were sixteen, well, we just didn’t bring it up any more.” Johnnie started to question her mother’s statement, and realized if she wanted to get out of here sometime this millennium, she needed to let the lady speak and sort it out later. She did have to ask one question,
“You say, ‘we’ – do mean like you and Dad?”
“What? Get outta here! That son of a bitch would have caused you nothing but heartache…hell, he would have used you in a freak show if he thought he could turn a buck…”
Freak show. Johnnie felt her blood rise thinking defensively of her friends at Bachweister, but bit her tongue.
“He left just about the time you started doing your thing…he wasn’t around enough to know anything except you were different, so I just told him you were a schizo…I knew he wouldn’t want anything to do with that kind of responsibility…”
Johnnie was pretty sure her face was on fire. Just when she thought it couldn’t get any better…
“You told Dad I was schizophrenic…”
“Oh yeah, and he was just stupid enough to believe it…” Mary obviously felt perfectly understood and justified at the moment. If only she could read her daughter’s mind, she’d know she was way off.
“So, is it safe to assume he wasn’t violent with you and we weren’t running from him all those years, but running because of whatever I was doing, which, by the way, you still haven’t told me…” Johnnie was incredulous, and frankly, beyond angry.
“Oh, Hon, it was no great loss. He’s a useless son of a bitch and, besides, like I mentioned, he would have exploited your talent.” Mary had put out her cigarette and patted her lumpy curls, then pulled at the edges of the wig to ensure she hadn’t displaced it in the excitement.
Johnnie was about to light up one of those Camels herself, but a quick glance at her mother’s yellowed fingernails made her think twice. Make the woman focus, she told herself, or you will be in the papers for a whole different reason than what that Angel Tracker dude had in mind. Matricide didn’t fare well in the media… But she still needed to wrap up this rather critical point.
“You told my father I was mentally ill so he wouldn’t believe I was some kind of…healer.” She was really getting sick of that “s” word.
“Savior, Johnnie. And so, what I did was worse than what happened to Jesus?”
Johnnie chose to ignore the ludicrous question, refusing to compare herself, ever, to Jesus Christ. No part of her brain could go there, although apparently, she was alone in that thought, even in the presence of her sign-of-the-cross mother.
“And Dad was not chasing us across the country?”
“No, Dear. You were, well, obviously not chasing us…but saving us out of house and home.’” Mary suddenly had a self-satisfied look on her face, apparently pleased with her choice of words. Smiling, she reached for the crumpled pack, “Never put it like that before. But that’s kind of how it worked.”
So her impression shifted in her mind. A sleaze ball, perhaps, but not a wife beater. She’d try to find something good in that realization…at a later date.
“Mom, quid pro quo.” Johnnie was ready to play her best hand to wrench information out of this little weasel in a wig; she looked her mom square in the eye. She’d tell her mother whatever she wanted to know, but her mom had to go first.
Mary looked alarmed, and touched her throat defensively,
“Excuse me? Don’t you speak to your mother like that!”
Johnnie covered her face and deeply inhaled. Spreading her fingers to look at her mother’s face through her hands, she said with strained patience,
“Mother, it’s Latin for… well, ‘you tell me something then I’ll tell you something.’”
Mary fanned herself in mock relief, “Well that’s good to know! I didn’t realize
you were multi-lingual…although I guess speaking in tongues would…”
“Mom! Please!”
Mary swallowed and pulled on a more serious look. She condensed the initial essence of how it all “began.”
“Johnnie, I don’t know if I can remember them all. But basically, from the time you were very small, things happened around you…and people or things just got better. Only not just a little bit, but a LOT. Sick people got well…poor people found their fortune… and I only started putting it together when other people did, because I was never there when anything happened. And so when it had first, well, happened about four or five times, we lived in Jersey, people started talking and I knew we’d have to leave so I could protect you. That’s about the same time your father went on his way.” She stopped to smoke and think. Johnnie had so many questions, but held back since Mary finally appeared to keep with a single line of thought.
“At first even I thought it was all a coincidence or just something people wanted to believe, but that’s when I noticed that you had always been with the people when, well, things happened, and that you never remembered it and after, you would sleep very hard-- sometimes for hours.” Mary’s dramatic disposition had faded and she suddenly looked very old and vulnerable.
“You have no idea how frightened I was; no matter what else you were, you were my baby. I was selfish in not wanting you to help others, I know, but what it did to you, and what they might want from you… it scared me. It scared me for you. I wanted you to have a childhood. Even though I knew from the start that was not going to be easy. Which it wasn’t…but what got me through was I believed it would be worth the trouble.”
Her voice had become increasingly strained and her nose had turned red. She stopped talking and stood. “How about I get us a soda?”
Against her will, Johnnie felt a touch of pity for the typically fiery woman; she plopped back against the sofa and nodded.
The Unlikely Savior (The Unlikely Savior Trilogy) Page 24
