“That shit’s for suckers.”
“They fired your ass.”
“You wanna hear this or not? Oxy’s huge, man—hillbilly heroin! It’s bigger than meth, coke, everything. There’s places down south where all anyone does is score oxy. So, check this: Buddy sells to me for ten bucks a tab, and then I move it at fifty, sixty a tab. I’d be sitting on forty grand now.” His eyes flit across the restaurant. “I borrowed the money and fronted the guy eight grand. Now I can’t find him.”
“You fronted him the money? This is a whole new level of stupid.”
“No way, man. We were going to be partners—he had the connection for the stuff and I had a connection for the money. This guy is solid. He must’ve got busted.”
“How long since you saw him?”
“Two weeks. S’okay, I got another plan.”
“To prey on a bunch of addicts?”
Cola laughs. “Hypocrite. Just ’cause you never had the balls to think big.”
Ben nods at the table. “You’re right—I’m the asshole,” he mutters. “Barely pay my rent. Can’t look after Maggie.”
“Maggie? Why you gotta look after her? Not like she needs—” Cola stops. He looks at Ben. “I mean she’s alone. It’s not like—”
Ben’s jaw works as he pulls out his wallet. “I gotta go.” He slides out a ten-dollar bill. “Oh wait, you’re broke, right?” Cola is silent. Ben shoves the ten back and chucks a twenty on the table.
“Come on, don’t get all pissed. I got a plan. This time next week, we’ll be cool. Hey, what’d the old man say tonight? Did he tell you he keeps puking? He told me not to tell you. And his stomach’s sticking out like there’s a football in there. That cough syrup shit, man, he’d be better off with booze. I’m starting to think we should put him in a home or something.”
“They should put me in a home.” Ben stands. “I got to get the car back.”
“All right. Get some sleep, brother. Seriously.”
“Get a job.” Ben heads for the door.
“Hey, Ben! Don’t tell the old man, okay? About the eight grand. Okay?”
THREE
Maggie
Francis taps on my bedroom door at ten in the morning. “Are you awake?”
“Entrez.”
He opens the door and stands there lit from behind. “Did I wake you?”
“Nope.” I’ve actually been awake a half hour or so, staring into the dark of my windowless bedroom.
“It kills me in here,” he says with a laugh. “That tiny little bed—it’s like a monk’s cell.”
I turn on the lamp, prop myself up on my elbows, and look at him in his royal blue pajamas with the white piping. He’s wearing cotton espadrilles and his hair is combed into place.
“What?” he says. “What are you looking at?”
“Drunk Priest Propositions Cops.”
“Oh. That.”
“Yeah, that. Imagine my surprise to see my dear brother, the YouTube sensation, chained to the wall of a drunk tank, saying, I’ll give you the Sermon on the Mount. Your Sermon on the Mount is this: Get these fucking cuffs off me, cuz they’re giving me a rash!”
Francis groans. He takes two steps in and sits on my bed.
“You left a bit out when you were filling me in,” I say.
“Yeah, but, Maggie, they make it sound like I’d been partying all night. I was with a couple of friends. I had one lousy drink.”
“Really?” I reach over the side of my bed and pick up my laptop.
“Don’t.”
I click play and there’s Francis wearing chocolate-colored trousers, a tartan vest, and bright orange socks. He tugs at the handcuff attached to a bolt in the white wall of the cell, sways in the direction of the camera, and demands to be released. Then he tries begging. “Please. I’m not an animal. Let me go. I’ll do whatever you want. Want me to suck you off? Is that what you—”
Francis slaps my laptop closed. “I didn’t proposition them.”
“I know. I watched the short ’n’ sneaky edit first. Then I watched the uncut version where you refuse to be a sexual slave. I like the part where you sing ‘Freedom.’ You actually do a pretty good George Michael.”
“Shut it, okay.” He picks at a cigarette burn on his otherwise dapper pajama pants.
“Me shut it? You shut it. You blew three times the legal limit!”
“I did not. I don’t know where they’re getting their—”
“Right, cuz you don’t look shitfaced at all. It was a setup.”
“Everything isn’t always how it looks.” He pulls a pack of smokes from his pocket.
“It isn’t? Well, that’s a relief because it looked like you were wearing neon orange socks. Were you out rabbit hunting that day, Father Fudd?”
He snorts, closes his eyes tight, and opens them. “Maybe this could be my audition reel for Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew: me and Janice Dickinson.” He pulls out a cigarette and flicks his lighter, then pauses and looks at me. “May I?”
“I’d tell you to piss off, but I’m brimming with sympathy this morning.”
He takes a long drag, and slaps his lighter and cigarette package down on the bed.
I rest my head against the wall and watch him smoke for a few moments. “Have you got a lawyer?”
Francis nods, opens his mouth, and the thick cloud of smoke released seems to circle his head like a halo. “He called this morning. He thinks he’s going to have to double his fee.”
“That’s what he called to tell you? He’s doubling his fee?”
“Yup. Because the video’s gone viral. He says it’s done terrible damage to me and therefore he’s in a better position to do some damage to the police. It’s a bigger case than he thought, and much more complicated. Asshole.”
I watch the ash build on the end of his cigarette and hand him an empty mug from my nightstand. “What’s going on with you?”
“I told you. They’ve put me on leave. Rehab starts in a week. Hopefully.”
I stare at him.
He taps ash into the mug and lies back across the bottom of my narrow bed, head and shoulders against the wall. “I don’t know.”
I nudge him with my foot. “Yeah, you do. Your third DUI?”
He takes another long drag, blows it to the ceiling, and blinks at the drifting smoke. “I like it here. The phone doesn’t ring.” He turns his head to me.
“I know what you mean.” I pluck the cigarette out of his hand and take a puff. My first since I found out I was pregnant with Frankie.
“Lately,” he says, “it’s like I feel all this anxiety when I have to be around people. When I go out anywhere—even at the church.” He takes his cigarette back and examines it a moment. “Especially at the church. It’s gotten so bad I’m scared to go downstairs after the liturgy. We always have a little snack and coffee after the service. But these days I run into the rectory and hide. I’m scared when the phone rings; email makes me feel as if someone is in my room.”
“You went through something like this when you first went into the seminary. They said you were agoraphobic.”
He does an imitation of me. “Does that mean you’re afraid to wear fuzzy sweaters?”
“Sorry. Maybe you’re just not—maybe the church isn’t the right place for you.”
“Here we go.” Francis sits up. “You think you’re helping when you start this, but you’re not.” He gets up off the bed, and holding his cigarette over the mug, he drifts out to the living room.
“Yeah, here we go again,” I call through the door. “I hit a nerve and you fuck off. You know, I’m only—” My cell phone buzzes. I pick it up off the nightstand. The number’s familiar. Answer it? Don’t answer it? “Hello?”
“Have I reached Maggie? It’s Lucy McVeigh from the other day. Yesterday.”
My chest seizes. Here we go, here we go, wherever you go, it’s here we go.
“Oh, yes. Hi, Lucy. Ah, I’m very sorry for how our meeting ended yesterday. I’m
, I guess I—”
“Me too. I’ve been thinking about you and it seems to me that it would be a good thing for us to do a trial run.”
My brother stands in the middle of the living room, smoking and peering in at me. “Who is it?” he mouths.
“You seem like a good person,” Lucy says. “I think we should try each other out.”
Repeating her words in my head, I search for my own. “Are you, ah, I’m not sure if I’ve—”
“Your ad said you have a driver’s license. I’ve got a car, but I’ve got macular degeneration, so I can’t see so hot.”
The way my heart is pounding, you’d think someone was trying to break through the front door. My brother watches with questioning bug-eyes. Maybe there is something genetically wrong with Francis and me.
My mouth has gone dry. “When would you need me?”
“Tonight. Could you be here at six thirty? I’ll pay you for four hours.”
Tonight? I can’t go somewhere tonight. What am I going to say to this woman for four hours? It feels like I’m going to cry again.
“Twenty bucks an hour,” she says. “Yes or no?”
I can’t. I can’t do anything for four hours. What is wrong with you? It’s four hours, not four days. What do you want to do, go live in a cave? Move to the psych ward with Ben? “Okay. Ah, I will be there. Six thirty. Can I ask where we’ll be going—do I need to be concerned with attire?”
“Wear whatever you’d wear to church.”
Great.
FOUR
Ben
Ben drives around the city till the sun comes up before he brings the limo back. At six thirty in the morning, he idles in front of Maggie’s place, a big old Victorian manor, chopped into bite-size pieces. He goes into his pocket, takes his paycheck out of its envelope, and stuffs in the hedge funders’ two hundred. He prints “Maggie” on the envelope. He stares at her name. What else is there to say? “I thought you could use this.” No. He turns the envelope over. “I hope you are okay.” Ben? Love, Ben? He used to write “Your Ben” with X’s and O’s. Plain Ben is all there is now.
Out of the car, he heads for the mailboxes grouped near the walkway. He finds Maggie’s name, her Suite 5 slot. He smooths the envelope, folds it, and jams it through the opening. He picks off the bits of paper that tear free and cling to the thin metal mouth. Then he glances at the big old house and dashes back to the limo as if the front door might open. As if there might be consequences.
They say you can’t go home again, but the truth is, you have to. You have to sit still in your godforsaken living room and watch gold sunlight coming through the blinds. You have to hear the tweeting birds and the coughing crows and face the fact that no one else is coming through the front door.
He gave up on the bedroom weeks ago—too little sleep and too many dreams of Maggie breathing next to him. He could feel the weight of her there, the dip in the mattress, and then he’d open his eyes to nothing but nothingness. Now he stays on the couch where he knows what’s what. Here there is only room for Ben. Sometimes he even drifts off for an hour or so. This morning it might have been two hours that he was lost in dark limbo before his phone buzzed him awake.
It’s Cola calling from Vera’s place. “Hey, man, did I wake you?”
Ben squints at his watch. Ten o’clock. “What do you want?”
“I talked to the old man after I saw you. He sounded really fucked-up.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m serious. I started thinking if he went to sleep, he might not wake up. Like, maybe I should call an ambulance. But then I thought, if he’s okay, he’ll be really pissed with me calling an ambulance. I phoned him back and it was busy.”
“He’s probably sleeping it off.”
“I called again this morning and it’s still busy.”
“What do you want?”
“Maybe we should—I don’t know. Vera says—”
“What the fuck, Cola? What are you so inside out about? He does this. He trips over the phone and doesn’t hang it up.”
Cola mumbles and mutters. In the background, his girlfriend, Vera, suggests and proposes.
“I’ll talk to you later,” Ben says and puts the phone down. He sits up and checks his calls. Nothing else since last night: just Cola and dear old Dad.
What day is today? Did she check her mailbox yet? Maybe Ben should call and let her know. He picks up his cell phone, finds her number, and hovers his thumb over the keypad. Don’t do it. She doesn’t want to talk to you.
He lies back on the couch, stares at the ceiling until his eyes sting. He closes them, and then he’s hit with a wave of claustrophobia so bad he’s got to sit up to breathe.
In the kitchen, he puts coffee on and leans against the counter. Cola’s hand-wringing words loiter in his head: “Don’t tell the old man, okay? About the eight grand. Okay?” Juxtapose that with “He calls me every day.”
The old man calls Cola every day, and phones Ben every few weeks.
Could be worse, could be the other way around.
Ben picks up his phone, dials his father. Busy. He tries again. Busy. He looks at his watch. Sticking his phone in his back pocket, he goes into the fridge, grabs the bread and the package of smoked ham beside it.
He stands over the sink, eats a dry slice with a slab of meat, and thinks about whether there’s any point in going over there. Cola talks to him every day, but thinks it’s Ben who should drop by and make sure everything’s copacetic.
He takes a swig of bitter coffee.
His ass vibrates and Ben takes the phone out of his pocket: Cola again, calling from his cell this time. Ben stuffs that last bit of food in his mouth and guzzles the rest of his coffee. “Yup.”
“We’re at his door. He’s not answering. My key doesn’t work. You got a key, too, right? What if he’s in a coma? Vera thinks we should bust in.”
“Chrissake,” Ben says.
Twenty minutes later, Ben’s key is opening the door to the old man’s apartment, Cola and his girl at his shoulder.
As the door opens, the stench hits. Ben reaches inside and flips the light switch. Nothing.
“Dad?” He steps into the room. That’s all it is, a one-room studio with too much furniture. Ben squints in the darkness. Shots of light sneak through tears in the blackout drapes: overturned chairs, busted mirror, busted radio, busted glasses. Scattered pills and cassette tapes, half-eaten tins of tuna and sardines.
Ben runs the obstacle course around the corner of the L-shaped room to the bed. Nothing but a rumple of stinking sheets and blankets. “He’s not here.”
“What?” Cola comes up behind Ben. “He never goes anywhere.”
Ben yanks open the tattered blackout drapes. The balcony is piled high with stuffed green trash bags. He slides open the door to let in some air.
Now he can see the filthy walls, the slice of pizza ground into the rug, tortilla chips, brown splotches on the sheets dappled with sticky green, a couple of empty cough syrup bottles on the nightstand, more trash bags against the walls.
“This is a health hazard,” Vera says. “Your dad should be in a facility.”
Cola’s new girlfriend, Vera, is a veterinary technician. Small and wiry and insistent: Ben sees a Jack Russell terrier whenever he looks at her.
Stepping backward, Ben stumbles: A sardine tin tips onto his shoe, fish and oil dripping. Jesus Christ. He kicks it off.
From the bathroom, Vera says, “Oh my fucking God,” and flushes the toilet.
“Last night he said some guy down the hall had some apples for him,” Cola says. “There’s demented people in here, man. It’s a seniors building!”
“We should go door-to-door,” Vera says and scurries out into the hall. Cola chases after her and stands behind her as she raps on the first door. No answer.
Ben takes out his phone, searches for the nearest hospital, and dials.
Vera rushes to the next apartment. The door opens and she barks the old man’s name, de
mands to know his whereabouts.
“Who are you?” a small voice answers.
Ben sticks a finger in his ear as he is put through to Emergency. They’ve got him. The old man was brought in by ambulance. Ben asks if he overdosed.
“We can’t give that information over the phone. Are you family?”
“I just told you, I’m his son,” Ben says. “Are you a nurse? Can I talk to someone who knows something?” Again she says they can’t give out any more information over the phone.
Ben hangs up and shouts, “He’s in the emergency room!”
Cola and Vera stand in the door. Cola’s pupils are large and black and darting.
“The people in this building are very rude,” Vera says.
BEN WALKS INTO Emergency, Cola and Vera trailing. He stops beside the nurse’s station and turns around, looking bed to bed, wherever curtains are open. His eyes pause over a scrawny old man, legs almost hairless, his thin flesh sagging off the bone. His forehead seems bulbous over his tiny pointed chin and it makes him look more creature than human.
An involuntary shudder quakes through Ben as recognition sets in. He walks closer. His old man couldn’t weigh more than a hundred and twenty pounds. When did he last see him? Two months ago? Three?
Lying on his side, kicking at the sheets, pawing the air, he looks as if he’s trying to climb the hospital bed, up the wall to escape. His gown is open at the back. He’s wearing a thick white diaper.
The bedside machine sounds off with loud fast beeps until someone in green scrubs moves in. “Lie back, Mr. Brody.” The nurse picks the heart sensor off the bed and reattaches it to the old man’s finger. “Mr. Brody, lie down—you’re going to pull out your IV.”
“Dad?”
The old man blinks for a moment, lips sunken against his gums. No dentures. “Hey, you’re here. Look at that, my sons.” He smiles gappily. His focus floats around the room.
Cola goes to the foot of the bed. “Hey, Dad.”
Ben turns to the guy in scrubs. “What’s going on?”
Turns out, there’s a twist in his old man’s colon. He’s going to need a section removed once they get his platelets up. The nurse asks if he’s on any blood thinners.
The Crooked Heart of Mercy Page 4
