“Look at her blush,” Francis said. “Don’t buy it. She’s a wicked thing.”
I giggled through the rest of the evening. At home, I drifted in my bed and directed little movies in my mind: Gale walking me home and taking my hand; Gale telling me that he knew there was a difference in our ages, but he had never met a girl like me; Gale kissing me; Gale touching me. “Gale and Maggie Paulson.” Maybe Gale could introduce Francis to one of his cousins and Francis would fall in love and we could have a double wedding. We’d all live together in a big house and we’d paint the walls all kinds of crazy colors. Every night would be sure and simple and the same and we would never want it to change.
I ASKED MY friend Rhonda how old you had to be to have sex with a guy over twenty-one. We sat on the school grass at lunch hour. Rhonda had had sex twice. She’d done it with a guy our age and a twenty-two-year-old. “If you haven’t lost it yet,” she said, “then you definitely want to get yourself an older guy. These twinks don’t know what the hell they’re doing.”
I told her about Gale. “He totally sounds optimum,” she said.
“I don’t want him to get in trouble. What’s the age where no one could say a thing about it?”
“Seventeen,” Rhonda said. “Once you’re seventeen, you can do whatever you want with whoever you want and anyone who doesn’t like it can get bent.” She advised me to go on the pill.
Seventeen was only a few months away. Gale knew that. He was waiting. I could feel my face heat up as I thought about it. My stomach clenched. And then clenched again. Harder.
“Ouch. Fuck.” It wasn’t my stomach, more like my pelvis. I put my sandwich down.
“Cramps?”
“Yeah. My period started this morning, but—”
“You want a Tylenol?”
“Okay, yeah. Oh shit, oh no.” I felt a sploosh as if a small dam had just burst.
“What!” Rhonda looked from my face to the clenched fist in my lap.
“I think I just sprang a leak.” My face crumpled. We both looked down at my pale blue jeans.
“You want to stand up and I’ll check?”
“Okay.” I looked around to see that no one was paying attention. Another stabbing pain and I gasped and doubled over. “Holy shit. It feels like someone shoved a sword up my crotch.”
Rhonda stared. “You didn’t already fuck this guy, did you? I mean this couldn’t be a miscar—”
“No! Stupid!” I kept my back to the tree and got up on my knees. “Just look, okay.”
Rhonda leaned back to assess my backside. “Oh shit. You look like you just got shot in the ass.”
“Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. Oh! It hurts.”
Rhonda took out a blister pack with four painkillers. “Here. Do you have more tampons?”
“I think I have to go home.”
It was about one thirty in the afternoon when I came into our building. My sweatshirt was tied around my waist. I’d taken two of Rhonda’s Tylenol but they hadn’t done much. When I got to our door, it was clear that Francis was home. His Peter Gabriel album was on the stereo. “In Your Eyes” played as I opened the door. Closing it quietly, I tiptoed inside, hoping to get changed before he saw me.
A crash from the kitchen. Then laughter. I tugged my sweatshirt over my butt and crept to the entrance.
There was Francis: against the counter, head tilted back, his eyes closed. Gale stood against him, one leg wedged between my brother’s thighs. He pushed his hands into my brother’s hair and kissed his neck.
I gasped, and another cramp dragged through the core of me like an old rope.
The song ended. The music turned to the ominous strains of “Mercy Street.” Francis opened his eyes to me in the doorway.
“What are you doing?” I said. It came out as a squeal. Like screaming tires.
I ran.
In my bedroom, I covered my face with my hands as Gabriel’s rough-throated lullaby came through my door. Dreaming of Mercy Street . . . In your daddy’s arms again.
Outside my door, I heard murmurs. The front door opened and closed. Click. Just like that: Goodbye, Gale.
Back against the wall, I slid to the floor. Just a bloody, foul girl.
SEVEN
Ben
Why don’t we talk about yesterday’s group session?” Dr. Lambert says. “What sort of feelings came up for you?”
Gut feelings, sinking feelings, hooked on a feeling. Everyone is squirming on the end of a hook because nobody wants to meet the mouth. But it’s coming. No one’s getting out of this world alive.
Lambert shifts in his chair. “Which would suggest you see yourself as some kind of bait.”
What could you catch with that kind of bait? Catch hell, catch your death. Fish or cut bait. Before you know it, you’re swallowed whole, in the belly of the whale.
Lambert breathes. He folds his hands on his notes. Lambert’s a waiter. He can wait all goddamn day.
A shout from outside the door cuts the quiet, down the hall, down the ward, down, down into the void. Anywhere but here. Or there. Find a way to nowhere. That’s all Ben ever wanted. A road to nowhere.
There used to be a church bus that came through the old neighborhood, picking up kids for Sunday school. When the old man heard about it, he sent Ben and Cola curbside, so he could have his hangover to himself.
Know the story of Jonah and the Whale? Ben and Cola learned that one early on. They sat in a church basement and colored a whale and two Jonahs. They slit the whale’s mouth so the paper Jonah doll could fit inside. The nuns gave them play-along story instructions: Stick the scared Jonah in the whale’s mouth when he’s being swallowed, and have the happy Jonah come out of his mouth when the whale spits him out.
Truth is: A happy Jonah is a gone Jonah. All Jonah wanted to get was gone. He wanted to get the hell away from God. That’s the story.
The only place to truly get gone is the belly of the whale. Straight down the blowhole. The black hole. Away, away in the whale, that’s all anyone wants. Until you get there. It’s the stench that opens your eyes: the tin cans, the sardines, the old pizza boxes.
A full minute goes by before Lambert says, “I guess it was up to you to clean your father’s apartment.”
It had to be you, wonderful you. Ben’s a doer. That’s his job: to clean up the old man’s mess. Everyone’s mess. Everyone’s except his own.
The old man was still shipwrecked, thrashing around like a fish full of feeling.
They slit his belly open and he fought. They pinned him to the bed and still he fought. Strangely agile, the nurses said, for a guy who’d just been gutted.
He kept fighting and he kept bleeding. He bled so hard they shipped him to intensive care. Intense. Intents. For all intents and porpoises. That’s where he lay, incised and dissected, eyes coasting across the ceiling as if he were searching the horizon for a way out.
A bag of blood dripped into his arm and all around him, tubes and monitors beeped and groaned, pissed and moaned because dear old Dad’s own blood kept flowing like a river out to sea.
There you go, old man. This bed’s for you. You made it; lie in it.
In intensive care every bed’s got its own nurse. The name tag on the old man’s nurse said ABBY C.
“He was wild about thirty minutes ago,” Abby C said. “I had to give him Seroquel. It’s an antipsychotic.” Abby C had butterflies on her scrubs and a face like granite.
Cola stared at Ben, like Ben should bust her, show her who’s boss. Forget it, kid. If Abby wants him, she can have him. Let the games begin.
Cola pulled the curtain around the cubicle to block out the world. He went bedside and gripped the side rails. “Hey, Dad.” The old man’s eyes rolled toward him, little black balls of fear, just like Cola’s.
Cola took his hand. He said to Ben, “They’re killing him. He’s not even there.”
True. The old man wasn’t there. Maybe he went on a whaling expedition. Maybe he was haunting the doorway to limbo. Get in
there, old man, it’s your last hope.
“What if this is the new normal? What if he can’t go back home?” Cola said. “Maybe we really do have to put him in a facility. Like Vera said.”
Ben looked away. “Maybe he’ll do us all a favor and die.”
AT THE OLD man’s apartment, an eviction notice was taped to the door. Imagine, kicking someone out of his own ruin, just like that.
Ben snatched the notice and opened the door.
The stench-everlasting, as if everything they ripped from the old man’s guts was waiting right here, rotting and rejoicing.
For chrissake, open the sliding glass door. Open the window.
Cola rolled the balcony door open to the mountain of trash bags while Ben dialed the number on the eviction notice.
“It’s protocol,” said Maria, the manager. “If he pays his rent, he can toss the notice.”
Ben said thank you like he meant it. “We’ll clean. He needs a new carpet.”
“Carpet?” Maria sounded pissed. She sounded like the old man was so close to gone she could taste it. “I need a mask in that place!”
Ben looked down at the bits of sea life and scraps stuck to the floor. “He’s in the hospital.” Ben’s voice was flat as an afterthought when he added, “He’s had surgery and he’s hemorrhaging.”
For a few seconds there was calm, like surf lapping the shore. “I’m the one who found him,” Maria said. “I called the ambulance. He said he didn’t have family.”
Would that it were so, Maria.
You can’t say that, though. You can’t say, Smooth move, Maria, why didn’t you mind your own business? Ben had to swallow it. Had to swallow all the sardine cans and broken bottles, and throw around some gratitude. “Thank you. I don’t know why he’d say that.”
Her pause sounded like You’re-Not-Welcome. She’d request the carpet, she said. “And paint. I hope your father will be okay.”
Ave Maria. Pray for us sinners, now and in the hour of our death. Ben spit up another thank-you and put the phone down.
He closed his eyes for a second and it felt something like peace. When he opened them he saw nothing but the same bottomless pit. On the balcony, flies buzzed from one trash bag to the next. They rubbed their hands together, ricocheted off the balcony into the room.
He slapped one from his temple as if it had teeth. “Let’s get it in gear. I got to be at work in a couple hours.”
IN THE ELEVATOR, one stinking bag in each hand, Ben watched the numbers light as the car creaked down the shaft.
There was a clatter on the floor as a lone pill bottle rolled between Cola’s feet. “Shit,” he said. “Bag’s ripped.”
The car stopped in the bowels of the building and the doors opened. Ben stepped out and Cola straggled, dropped one bag, and scrambled for the pill bottle.
“Leave it,” Ben said.
Cola looked up from the floor. He pocketed the bottle as he stared at Ben in fluorescent light. “Have you looked in a mirror lately? Seriously, dude, you’re turning green. You’re going to drop dead if you keep going like this.”
Cola doesn’t know how hard it is to drop dead.
They threw the bags in the Dumpster and headed back for more.
Inside the elevator, Ben leaned, closed his eyes, and asked, “You pay back that money yet?”
“I called the guy. He knows I’m on it.”
“Bet he loved that.”
“He just wants his money,” Cola said. “I’d bust heads too if someone owed me ten grand.”
“It’s ten now? Interest. Right.” The doors opened and Ben’s eyelids opened with them. “Don’t be an asshole, Cola. Just go to the cops.”
Cola followed Ben down the hall and through their father’s door. “Then what? I’d be nobody. No one’d work with me again.”
Ben stood in the middle of the apartment. He stared at the flies as they circled and landed, circled and landed. “You’re already nobody.”
Cola shoved past him onto the balcony, dug through the flies, and hauled four bags inside.
Ben watched him drag the bags, two in each hand, across the carpet. “They’re going to rip, Cola, and then we’ll be—”
“Fuck you, Ben.”
Ben grabbed four bags and followed.
As the elevator dropped, Ben looked at Cola. I’d bust heads too—like he could sympathize. Cola thinks like a fly: Just keep moving and cling to the stink. “Does Vera know what’s going on?”
“It’s my business.” Cola kicked his way out of the elevator and dragged his four bags across the cement, leaving a trail of slime and debris.
IT WAS SIX o’clock in the evening by the time they got the last bag out. Ben’s eyes kept sliding shut and his evening had not yet begun. Still had to drive a limo full of drunks on a downtown club crawl.
He went into his old man’s cupboard and found a jar of Nescafé. Rinsing out a chipped teacup, he dumped in three tablespoons of instant coffee and turned on the hot water tap.
Cola leaned in the entrance to the kitchen. “Are we going to pay Dad’s rent or what?”
Ben stirred the tarry sludge and then downed it. He tossed the cup in the sink, where it busted in two. Hand on his stomach, he looked into the sink and watched caffeine bleed off the jagged edges. Felt like an omen, like something was busted inside him too. Maybe it was just sardine cans and broken bottles rattling around in the bottom of his belly. His for life now.
“Are we going to pay it or not?” Cola said. Loud.
Ben turned a pair of dead eyes on his baby brother. Cola kept going: “He could pay you back when he’s out. He’s got money.” But it all sounded like so many seagulls trailing him, screaming in the wind, waiting for him to fall and break open, all that muck and stench laid bare and inviting.
He shoved past Cola and riffled through old envelopes and bills strewn on the table until he found the old man’s checkbook.
Ben sat down and wrote the date on the first check.
“What are you doing?” Cola said. Like another goddamn demand. It cracked Ben’s skull, like lightning cracks a ship.
Ben printed the name of the company that owned his father’s building on the payee line. He printed Four hundred and twenty dollars and xx/100, and then put himself in his old man’s shoes, set pen to signature line, and scrawled like a sonuvabitch.
Cola hovered. “Can you do that? What if—”
What if, what if. What if the old man gave a shit? Ben ripped out a second check, made it out to Cola. One thousand dollars and xx/100. “Here, go buy yourself some time before they break your legs.”
SEVEN
Maggie
I came across your name on the Internet,” Lucy says. “In the news, I mean.” She fidgets with her paper napkin. “I guess I went looking for it.”
I nod and poke a fork at my Numero Cinco: Chicken enchilada.
We’re sitting in a booth at Las Margaritas, a Mexican place near Lucy’s apartment. She called early this afternoon and asked if I would take her car in for an oil change before I brought it back. She called again as I sat in the Jiffy Lube waiting room. She was feeling cooped up—“How about we get dinner together?” She called a third time to let me know that entrees are two-for-one if you order before 5:30 P.M.
The fourth call was to ask if I would be free for a game of Scrabble afterward.
“Awful thing to lose a child that way. Two and a half years old?” She shakes her head in sympathy. “It said that he, ah, your little boy got himself out of bed at night, and climbed up on the windowsill.” She ducks her head, trying to catch my eye. “You don’t blame yourself, do you?”
I don’t want to talk about this with her.
“Well, you shouldn’t. They’re quick as lightning at that age. And another thing you shouldn’t forget: Death is just a transition. Souls choose when to leave and I firmly believe—”
“How is your chicken flauta?”
Lucy looks at her plate. “Good.” She clears her throat and the
n pounds her palm against her chest to clear her windpipes further. “Excuse me.” After looking at me for a moment, she says, “I’m going to be eighty-one years old soon; I have learned a few things. Lloyd always said that I was more than just beautiful. I don’t get to hear that very much, these days. Except last week, at the supermarket. I had asked a young fella for help reading a label. I told him I had trouble with my eyes and he said, ‘You have gorgeous eyes!’ I said, ‘Me?’ And I had to get right up close to him because up close I can see perfectly and I said, ‘Wow, you’re pretty cute yourself,’ and he said, ‘Stand back, honey! I know that old trick.’ Ha-ha!”
“That sounds fun,” I tell her and take a bite of my enchilada.
“I came home and looked in the mirror and thought, Look at me! I have gorgeous eyes!” Lucy grins across the table. She glances at a middle-aged man in a suit, one table over. He appears very focused on what his dinner companion is saying.
“I love that tie!” Lucy shouts and leans out toward him. “I can’t see. Is it paisley?”
Mouth full of food, he glances at his lady friend and back at Lucy. His friend looks vaguely annoyed at the interruption. “Yes,” she says, then her face softens and she smiles at the tie. “I picked it out.”
“Good taste!” Lucy crows. “I always tell people if something about them looks nice, because if you don’t, the compliment goes to waste.”
“True,” says the woman with a laugh.
“How are you enjoying your meals, ladies?” Our server. She’s got a worried round face. Her long, shaggy bangs don’t quite cover the creases between her brows. I wonder if my eyes look as sad to her as hers do to me.
“Good,” Lucy says. She pauses to watch the waitress head back to the service station. “She’s got a big backside on her, doesn’t she?”
Jesus, what’s with the comments! And Lucy doesn’t lower her voice when she makes them either. I put a hand over my mouth in hopes she might get the hint.
The Crooked Heart of Mercy Page 9
