Before He Finds Her

by Michael Kardos

  “The police came,” Ramsey said.

  “They came because some nosy neighbor felt he had to get involved.” His father found one of Ramsey’s feet under the covers and began rubbing it in both of his hands. “But it’s true, your mother and I are no good at keeping our mouths shut. We’re going to try fixing that.”

  Ever since Ramsey could remember, his father’s coarse thumb on the soles of his feet calmed him. It never tickled. “I don’t like it when you fight,” Ramsey said.

  “Of course you don’t. I don’t like it, either. That’s why your mother and I are going to fix it.”

  “You promise?” In daylight he never would have dared ask his father to promise anything. But the dark bedroom made it hard to see his father’s face and therefore easier to push.

  The rubbing stopped. “Listen to me, son. You don’t know yet what it’s like to be in love. How sometimes it makes you crazy.”

  “You’re in love with Mom?”

  His father laughed. “Indeed, I am. Most of the time, anyway.”

  He’d never tell his father this, but Ramsey was in love, too. With Rachel Beaner. But there was no possibility that what he felt, looking over at Rachel in the next row of desks, had anything in common with what his father might have felt, looking at his mother. And besides, Ramsey knew that if he and Rachel ever married, he’d love her all of the time. And he’d never raise his voice to her, not ever.

  “Then why won’t you promise?”

  “Jesus, Ram...” From the kitchen came sounds of dishes being rinsed, then clanking together as they were placed in the drying rack. More than once, his father and mother had fought over not owning a dishwasher. Ramsey couldn’t remember, now, which side either of them was on. Or maybe they’d switched sides. “Yeah, okay, kid,” his father said. “I promise.”

  They shook on it in the dark. And for six days, his father kept his promise. His mother maintained her own civility, too, despite not having promised anything. And on the seventh night, a Sunday, the night before Ramsey’s birthday, his father and mother went out for a drive, and only his father came home.

  The rain had fallen steadily that day—not violently, but nice—and Ramsey’s mother and father had sat together on the sofa, reading parts of the paper aloud, something they hadn’t done for some time. His mother’s feet were up on his father’s lap. Ramsey lay on the rust-colored carpet reading the comics and listening to the rain on the roof.

  After supper, his parents went out on a few errands, his father’s wink—so fast, Ramsey had nearly missed it—leading Ramsey to believe that birthday presents were involved. They left him at home in front of the TV with a glass of soda and a bowl of pretzels. His mother said something to the effect of “We’ll be back in an hour”—but who knew, exactly? By then, Ramsey was fully engrossed in Lassie. When the rain began to fall heavier on the roof, he got off the sofa and turned up the volume. Sunday was a good night for TV. He watched Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color, then Branded. By then he should’ve been in bed. Bonanza was on next and when no one returned by the end, he watched Candid Camera and then What’s My Line?, which his parents sometimes talked about but never let him stay up for. By then he knew something was wrong, and when the building’s superintendent led in two policemen, and Ben Cramer’s father went over to the TV and shut it off, Ramsey—whose arms by now were shaking and legs were shaking and mouth was dry despite all the soda—looked up and, not knowing what to say, said, “Hey, I was watching that!”

  “Tell me,” Ramsey said.

  Outside. Recess. The day after the funeral.

  “You sure you want to hear this?” Larry Ackerman’s father was a cop, which meant that Larry heard the sort of rumors that could be trusted. His parents had no clue that the air-conditioning vent in their bedroom broadcasted all their conversations.

  “Tell me.”

  Larry glanced over at Ben Cramer as if he were Ramsey’s keeper. Maybe for the moment, he was. Ramsey had stayed with Ben’s family in the days leading up to the funeral, and had only returned to the apartment yesterday. Today was his first day back at school, and Ben’s parents must have asked him to stick close—that, or Ben was as loyal a friend as a nine-year-old could ever hope to have.

  Ben nodded.

  “All right,” Larry said, softly, and sat down on the freshly mown grass. The other two sat so they made a tight circle. They were at the edge of school property, fifty yards from the playground and all the other kids and lunch monitors. I have information you’ll want to hear, Larry had said, first thing that morning in the hallway. But they were in different classes in the fourth grade, and Ramsey had to wait for three long hours.

  Sitting here now, near the chain-link fence separating school property from a narrow creek that ran through much of town, Ramsey knew that to Larry this was all a game, like trading ghost stories. But if Larry knew the truth, then Ramsey wanted to hear it. All he knew for a fact was that his mother was dead. Yesterday he’d stood over her casket and looked at her face. Everyone had said, You don’t have to, but he did have to. Neither his father nor anyone else had said one word to explain what had happened, other than car accident. Ramsey knew not to ask his father for details—like how his mother could have been killed when his father didn’t seem to have a scratch on him.

  “Your father and mother were fighting,” Larry said now.

  “He didn’t kill her.” Ramsey had considered and rejected the possibility so many times in the last week that the words came automatically. Anyway, if that was what had happened, then his father would be in jail right now, not back at the apartment.

  “Let me finish,” Larry said. His voice softened again to ghost-story decibels. “They were fighting in the car, and your father got really mad and made your mom get out.”

  “Out where?”

  “Out of the car. He kicked her out in the rain and drove away. And then—” Larry looked back toward the school. A handful of kids were playing kickball, and he watched as a girl kicked a slow roller toward the pitcher and ran to first base. The pitcher threw the ball at the girl but missed, and she was safe.

  “And then what?” Ramsey asked.

  For the first time, it must have occurred to Larry that this wasn’t a ghost story he was repeating. He watched the kickball field a moment longer before looking down at the grass. “She got hit.”

  “What do you mean?” Ben asked.

  “It was dark and raining,” Larry said. “The truck driver didn’t see her.”

  “A truck?” Ramsey said. He knew he’d never be able to stop imagining the thud of his mother’s body against the truck, the sight of her in the air, turning, the sound of her hitting the ground. His mother.

  “A pickup,” Larry said. “The driver was going around a curve, and it was really dark and the rain was heavy. He wasn’t speeding or nothing.” The next thing he said, he must have overheard word-for-word through the air vent. “A damn tragedy, is what it is.” Even his register dropped so he sounded like his father. He looked up at Ramsey and reverted to his own voice. “She’s in heaven now.”

  “That’s true,” Ben added.

  Ramsey tried so hard to believe them that tears came to his eyes, but he knew his friends were fools. He had long observed how other kids spoke about their dead grandparents and great-grandparents as if being dead meant dancing with angels and eating supper with God. But the truth was, when you’re dead, you’re dead. His father had said so a long time ago, after a stray dog they’d kept for a couple of weeks had died of distemper. It wasn’t pretty, but it made sense. When a dog was dead, it was dead, and the same was true for people.

  “Why do you suppose your father did that?” Ben asked. “Why would he kick her out like that?”

  “I don’t know,” Ramsey said, looking out past the fence and the creek and into the thicket of woods. Who knew why anyone did anything? But then the answer came to him. “I think he was trying to keep a promise.”

  A week after the funeral
, his father returned to work at the Shark Fin boatyard. That Saturday, Ramsey went along. It could have been any other Saturday, except that when the workday was done and they stood at the end of the dock, Ramsey felt the urge to talk about his mother. He wasn’t sure what he wanted either of them to say. He would have liked his father to say something comforting for Ramsey’s sake even if neither of them believed it. Like how his mother was in heaven. At least a dozen times, Ramsey almost asked the question—is Mom in heaven now?—and each time he caught himself. When he finally got a sound to leave his lips, it was more of a squeak than a word.

  “How’s that?” his father asked.

  “So is your mind set on a forty-two-foot Sea Ray?” Ramsey asked.

  His father shook his head. “No, son. It sure isn’t.”

  Ramsey knew he was right not to ask if his mother was in heaven. He kept looking out at the boats and the gulls and the water. At one point he felt the gentle weight of his father’s hand on the back of his neck, and he told himself that this was enough.

  Maybe his father was thinking about yachts, redemption, or nothing at all—but he wasn’t thinking about his work, given the injuries he started sustaining. First there came the minor accidents—mashed fingers, concussion, twisted ankle—and then the major one. A sailboat boom swung around and walloped his father in the back, throwing him off the dry-docked boat and down onto the concrete.

  This was less than six months after Ramsey’s mother died, and it seemed to be the injury his old man had been waiting for. Now he spent his days kicked back in the recliner, watching TV, the remote control resting on his ever-expending belly. At some point in the afternoon he would replace the remote with a vodka on the rocks. A woman named Gina, who rang the register at the 7-Eleven where his father bought his smokes, started coming over to the apartment. She came with snacks from work and sometimes went grocery shopping for them. Ramsey couldn’t understand where the money came from, with his old man not working. He didn’t know about disability payments. All he knew was that when Gina worked the morning shift, she’d come over at 2:30 and she and Ramsey’s father would start their drinking and their shouting, a return to the fighting his parents used to engage in. If Gina worked the evening shift, it all started earlier.

  Twelve years old. He came home from school to an apartment that had been either burglarized or tornado-ravaged from the inside.

  “Dad?”

  Drawers pulled from shelves and overturned, cabinets emptied, stacks of unopened mail swept off the kitchen table. Books littered the floor. Every object in the house, it seemed, was strewn and tossed and disregarded.

  “Dad?” He considered running to the phone to dial 911 or banging on a neighbor’s door for help. But then his father emerged from the bedroom, limping as always from his bad back, muttering to himself, a look of anger and horror on his flushed face. His eyes glassy. Drunk, drunk, drunk.

  “What’s going on?” Ramsey asked.

  “Have you seen my wedding ring?” his father asked.

  He hadn’t.

  “It’s got to be here.” His father knelt down on the floor in front of the sofa, an action that resulted in his cursing at whatever pain flared or sliced through him. He rummaged through a desk drawer that’d already been rummaged through.

  “Where’s Gina?” Ramsey asked, because he knew that something was making his father act this way.

  His father looked up from the carpet. “Gina has left us, son! She is, and I quote, moving on and improving herself.” He ran his hands under the sofa, then under the cushions. All he found were crumbs. He turned around so that his back was against the sofa. “Fucking whore,” he muttered, burying his face in his hands.

  Ramsey had no idea what to do, so he just sat there and watched his old man come apart. After a minute or so, his father moved his hands away from his face. His eyes were redder than ever. “I loved your mother,” he pled to his son. “I loved her so much.”

  Ramsey nodded. “Okay.”

  “You don’t understand. You’re only a kid. There’s no way I can explain it to you. I just loved her.”

  “What did she look like?” Ramsey asked.

  “What?” his father said. “What are you talking about?”

  “Mom—what did she look like?”

  “Don’t ask me a question like that,” his father said. “You remember.”

  “I don’t,” Ramsey said. “I want to, but I don’t. What did she look like?”

  “I said don’t ask me that.”

  “Sorry.”

  His father tried to take a deep breath, but it caught somewhere in his gut and became a whimper. He looked around at the trashed apartment. “What the hell am I gonna do?” he said. “Will you just answer me that?”

  “I...”

  “Shut up before you embarrass yourself, Ramsey,” his father said.

  The black oak looked dead for months, its remaining leaves brown and crusty, before some guys got around to taking a chain saw to it. One late October morning, when the leaves of all the other trees were in full color, a cherry picker raised one of the men up, and he started chain-sawing through the lower, thicker limbs, then the higher, thinner ones, all of Ramsey’s hiding spots dropping to the ground one after another. Though he couldn’t remember the last time he’d hidden in the tree, he still thought of it as his. He sat on a chair in the kitchen and watched through the window as the men shed layers of clothes over the long morning, calling out to one another, working the cherry picker, branches falling every minute or two, until only the trunk was left standing like a totem pole that someone had forgotten to carve. Then they cut that down, too. By noon the men had chopped the branches into pieces, fed them into a wood chipper, sectioned the trunks and loaded the pieces on to their truck, and were gone, leaving only a low stump and the cherry picker’s muddy tracks mashed into the grass.

  Ramsey was fourteen. He wore his hair longish and shaggy and had developed a habit of squinting even in shade. He was a short, lean kid with a voice pitched too high for menace. When the men left, he went outside to where the tree had stood only a few hours earlier. The stump was covered in sawdust. He brushed the dust away to reveal the tree’s age: so many rings, so much survival. He looked around, hoping to see a new hiding place in case he ever needed one. The roof? The storage garage? Or maybe the tree coming down was a sign. He considered this possibility all afternoon and tested it that night. When his old man came into the kitchen for a refill, Ramsey headed him off, removing a beer can from the refrigerator and opening it. He began to pour the contents down the sink.

  “Hey, stop that!” his father shouted. “What the hell you doing?”

  Ramsey considered calling his father by his first name—I’ll do whatever I want, Frank, or This ain’t your concern, Frank—but decided it was better, older, not to pay his father any notice at all. When the last trickle was in the drain, Ramsey dropped the empty can into the trash and calmly explained to his father that he would no longer allow alcohol in their home.

  “You got to be joking,” his father said.

  “Do I look like I’m joking?”

  “You look like a kid who’s upset because your fucking tree came down.” He whistled once. “God almighty, what a baby.”

  “Hey—”

  “Don’t hey me. You should be thanking me for getting the rental office off their asses before that tree crushed us in our sleep.”

  His father, hands on hips, met Ramsey’s gaze, and Ramsey felt the tears well up. “You should’ve asked me first.” He meant to sound tough, but he heard the quaver in his own voice.

  “Oh, yeah?” His father stared him down. “And who the hell are you?”

  His father was a master at mutating a fight so that the fight itself became the issue. He’d had years to perfect the art, but Ramsey was only an amateur and no words came.

  “I think you’d better answer me, son.”

  “You shut up!” Ramsey finally shouted, and socked his father in the nose.<
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  In the past, his father had occasionally shoved Ramsey into the wall or the refrigerator but never struck him with a fist. And Ramsey had never done anything remotely like this to his old man or anyone else. The punch connected because it contained the element of surprise: It surprised them both. And all the blood was another surprise, which made up for the fact that what he’d said to his father was so damn stupid. You shut up? He knew he’d have to change the story when he told it later to Ben. That was where he decided to go, Ben’s house, until things cooled down.

  He knew better than to take time to pack a change of clothes, a toothbrush, or a coat. He left the house with his father standing in the kitchen, dripping blood onto the linoleum.

  Who the hell am I? Ramsey said aloud, walking through neighborhoods and past shops that were closed for the night. I’m your goddamn son, that’s who.

  He wanted to hate his father but wasn’t up to it. It was sad, seeing him there in the kitchen, looking hurt in every way, without even Gina there to help. Still, Ramsey felt himself waking up on that walk across town, and was glad for it. That punch had opened something in him that he didn’t think he’d be closing any time soon. He imagined and reimagined the scene back at the apartment—his father’s insolence, the blood. He shivered from the cold and the excitement. Cars whooshed by on Second Avenue in both directions, but otherwise it was a cool, quiet night with the smell in the air of burning leaves. Ramsey’s left hand, his punching hand, tingled but didn’t hurt at all. Just the opposite. It felt warm and ready. It practically glowed in the dark. He made a fist, unclenched it, and made it again, having absolutely no inkling that his solo walk across town on this night, so crisp and shimmering with promise, was to be the highlight of his next ten years.

  I’m the one who settles the score, he said in a movie star’s deep drawl.