The Spark and the Drive

by Wayne Harrison

“That’s fine,” she said.

  “Wait. Come on,” I said. “Maybe they’re at a restaurant or somewhere.”

  “Call it whatever would get her back,” Mom said.

  “She’d never hurt April,” I said.

  Mom turned fiercely and said, “You shut up. Don’t say things you don’t know.” Her eyes seemed to pulse for a moment before she looked at Costa again. “Think the worst thing,” she said. “I’ll apologize later if I have to.”

  “I can get it out on the radio,” Costa said.

  “Can’t you just do a ‘be on the lookout’?” I said. “Do you have to say why?”

  Mom let out a sound that must have stripped the skin of her throat raw. She stabbed the phone at me—“Here”—and when I took it she walked around the side of the house into the backyard.

  Costa and I watched where she had gone, but she came right back and asked him for his flashlight. “What are you looking for?” he said.

  “Forget it. I’ll get my own.” She started for the stairs, but Costa handed out his long black Maglite. “Take it,” he said. “I just meant could I help.”

  “I’m fine,” she said, and with the flashlight she started again toward the backyard.

  “She’s still bitter,” he said when she was gone. I recalled what his attention used to mean to me. Around town he had a rapport with the badasses at Northwest: “Uh-oh, here comes trouble. How come they let you off your leash?” There was also talk that you could bribe your way out of a ticket with a case of Black Label beer, a rumor that persisted regardless of its unlikelihood—fifteen dollars’ worth of beer he could’ve bought for himself. But the stories gave him stature, and what I tried to remember now was how it felt when he’d swing into Arco with a squeal of his tires and park his cruiser at the pump opposite mine to talk to me through his open window.

  But now he grinned as if the whole situation was suspect. “Where’d you get the new wheels?” he said.

  “In the paper.”

  “No shit,” he said. “I need to get me a subscription to that paper.”

  I focused on having no expression at all.

  “She know you been going out to Wickersham’s?” he said.

  I assumed he’d told her about the races out there, or that he was willing to tell her. “Yeah, she does.”

  “Are you going to feel like telling me the truth anytime tonight?” he said. “I guess I can find out.”

  “Don’t, okay? She doesn’t know.”

  “Well all right, then. Wise-ass. Next time answer me straight.”

  She didn’t have the bottle with her when she came back, but the cigarette she was smoking didn’t cover the smell of it on her breath.

  “What kind of car am I looking for?” he said.

  “It’s my old car,” I said. “Seventy-four black Nova.” I gave him the plate number.

  His mouth hung open as he wrote on his pad. “So, you ended up selling this gal your car?”

  “They’re dating,” Mom said.

  “Well, hell. That kind of puts a spin on it.” He looked at me. “You two have a spat?”

  “Can you just call it in now?” Mom said. “She might be driving by a policeman somewhere.”

  “I will, Carol, if you just calm down.”

  “We didn’t have a fight,” I said. “It’s probably she ran out of gas, or they’re having dinner.”

  Costa pushed the light on his digital watch. “Late dinner for Juney, ain’t it?”

  “Just don’t talk, Justin,” Mom said, her arms wrapped around herself as if trying to still the jerky twisting of her waist, and she looked at Costa. “Her baby died and she’s still grieving. She’s … disturbed. That’s too much to deal with.”

  “Well, goddamn, Carol. This thing keeps taking twists and turns—”

  “She’s not disturbed,” I said.

  Mom glared at me. “How do you know, Justin? How the hell do you know? You have no idea what she needs. You think you can date somebody like that?”

  “She’s been through more than you ever have,” I said. “And she’s still trying. She’s not getting lit all the time.”

  “Hang on, boy,” Costa said. “You just turn down the volume. Everybody calm the hell down.” With his hands on his waist, his chest bulged out, he looked back and forth between Mom and me until he was satisfied. “Now Justin, I understand you got no father to teach you, I get it. But you show your own mother some respect. Be a man.”

  Of course I didn’t see it then, in the moment’s red flash, that he was doing the right thing, putting me back in line. My only thought was that he would be the one now. He was going to make me a man in his own image. It hadn’t fully sunk in until that moment that he was back in our lives again.

  I’d never been in a real fight before, and it was here, it was just throw the punch, any of the thousands I’d thrown at the Everlast bag downstairs, throw it, do it, and I did. When I swung he stepped to the side and with a lightning undercut laid me right out. Part of it was my own mistake, I’d decide later, breathing in instead of out when I threw the punch, so that my stomach was soft when his fist shoved up and in between the ribs. Then I was on the grass suffocating, gasping at a plum-colored sky full of sweet air I couldn’t have.

  Mom screamed. Then her cool hand on my forehead, pushing the hair back. It seemed from very far away that I heard his voice: “You saw. I ought to put the cuffs on him right now, goddamn it.”

  * * *

  I sat on the front stoop feeling strangely invigorated, a tenderness in my stomach reminding me of each life-giving breath I pulled. I looked up to see Mom standing in the grass covering her mouth, Costa slouched beside her with his arms folded, looking misunderstood, both watching the road, where a yellow blinking light was reflected in the wild bushes in front of the Madden place, and Mary Ann turned into the driveway.

  “Oh, thank you,” Mom said. “Thank you.” I joined her on the edge of the pavement as Mary Ann parked, already apologizing through her opened window. “We lost track of time. I wanted to call, but I didn’t have change.”

  Mom went around to the passenger door, which Mary Ann leaned over to and unlocked. April was asleep in her car seat and Mom lifted her out. I walked with her as she came around the hood, trying to get a look at April in the dim light. Mary Ann had gotten out of the car and was standing by the fender. “It’s late, I know,” she said. “I’m so sorry. We missed our train.”

  “Train?” Mom said. She looked down at April in her arms and started to cry.

  “I took her to New York. I’d been promising her.” Mary Ann looked at me. “It was a special trip.”

  “Oh, my God,” Mom said. She pulled April closer and April began to move with a breath. “Do you know what you did to me? Do you know what kind of things—what awful things. For eight hours? You don’t know what you did to us.”

  “What do you want me to do?” Costa said.

  April stretched her arm out. “Mom?” she said. Mom kissed her forehead. “Did you eat, honey? Are you hungry?”

  April shook her head and rubbed an eye furiously as Mom walked toward the house.

  “Wait,” Mary Ann said. She started toward them with plastic shopping bags, but she stopped on the sidewalk when it was clear that Mom wanted nothing to do with her.

  To Costa, Mom said, “If she comes onto this property again, I’ll say it was kidnapping.”

  “Carol,” Mary Ann said, and then, pleading, “Really?”

  “Can I come in?” Costa said.

  “No, you can’t.”

  “He came at me. You saw it.”

  Mom wrenched opened the screen door, went in, and kicked the front door closed behind her in what seemed to be one unbroken movement.

  Costa pushed his hand through his hair. He tore off the notebook pages and threw them on the lawn. He didn’t look at me or Mary Ann as he went to the cruiser. I saw him talking on the radio for a few moments before he started the car and swung it back to within a few inches of Ma
ry Ann’s bumper. Then he pulled out of the driveway with a chirp of his tires.

  In the silence that followed, Mary Ann and I looked around at the too-still darkness as if a spaceship had just taken off.

  “We went to FAO Schwarz,” Mary Ann said softly. “I meant for us to be back before dinner. I took her to the bathroom. We missed the train, and the next one wasn’t express. I didn’t have enough change to call long-distance.”

  I breathed to settle myself, to become acclimated to the end of the danger. I lit a cigarette and smoked the whole thing without moving more than my arm and hand. Mary Ann was still there when I flicked the butt away and looked at her, and through my rising anger I was distantly aware of the promises I’d made to God that I’d forgive her everything if only April came back safe. It bothered me that Mary Ann didn’t seem more damaged. I realized that since she’d turned in the driveway, I’d been half inside a daydream in which she was driven crazy by her suffering, by distortion, seeing her little Joey in our April, and it would all be clear, palpable, and I would be there for her at the bottom.

  “Do you think you can give her these?” Mary Ann said, holding the bags out to me.

  “It’s probably not a good time.”

  “She was safe, Justin.”

  “You could have asked my mom first.”

  “I thought she’d say no.” She went to the Nova and put the bags in the backseat, and thinking she would leave I came around and got in the passenger side. We both sat on the bench seat and closed our doors, looking at the house. After a minute or two Mom crossed in front of the living room windows, stopping to look out with the phone to her ear. It wouldn’t have been Costa she was talking to so soon. He was probably still on duty, parked somewhere with his radar gun, cursing us all. No, it wasn’t him. I hoped that it might be her AA sponsor talking her out of going out behind the fence again.

  “I guess I thought you’d have more to say,” I said to Mary Ann. “It’s nine o’clock.”

  “And then at the parking lot I spent twenty minutes looking for my old car. I just forgot what I was driving. It was dark. I guess I thought you’d trust me.”

  I cracked my window and took out my cigarettes.

  “Don’t smoke in here,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “I quit.”

  “Since when?”

  She watched me for a moment, then sighed and looked back at the house.

  “You called the police on me?”

  “She did.”

  “What did you think happened?”

  I stuffed the cigarette pack in my jacket pocket.

  “Justin,” she said, “was there ever a single time … why would you think she wasn’t safe with me?”

  “It happened. It’s over.”

  “I told you I wanted to take her on a trip. It was important to me.”

  “Why? So you could say good-bye?” I couldn’t look at her now, because I didn’t want her to just nod and have it easy. She was going to have to say it. And then I couldn’t stand to hear it, and I said, “I know what you did to the Z-28. You didn’t know I was there. I saw you.”

  Mary Ann started the car. “Get out,” she said. “Oh, my God.”

  “It’s not that hard to imagine you could take her. I mean, if you’d do that to Nick.”

  “Get out of this car, Justin.”

  “You want the shop to close so he’ll take you back to Oregon, right? I’m right.”

  She was gripping the steering wheel, my old steering wheel, with white fists.

  “I get it. Life was good out there and you hate it out here, I get it. But how am I supposed to know what to think? You smash up your car. You disappear with April. And now you love the guy that raped you?”

  “It wasn’t that. Fuck you, Justin. Were you there? How do you know what it was?”

  “Then what was it?”

  I don’t know if it was accidental, but she mashed the throttle—the tach needle shot up to redline before she let off. “Get out of this car,” she said. “I’m crazy, I’m psycho. Get out before I fucking hit you.”

  I thought I could do something with this. She’d made her point, and I was ready to apologize a little, but then she turned the key, and with the engine already running the starter pinion ground against the flywheel teeth with a horrific sound. “Okay,” I said, and she did it again. I opened my door and got out.

  As Mary Ann pulled out of the driveway I thought about following her, but my keys weren’t in my pocket, and at that moment I had no idea where they were. I went in through the garage, and Mom was on the deck smoking under the spotlight that shone over the yard.

  I came up beside her on the rail. “I don’t think I’m going to sleep tonight,” I said.

  She didn’t turn when she said, “Why are you talking to me now?”

  I was thrown for a moment, clutching at the time before my fight with Mary Ann. I couldn’t remember what had happened with my mother.

  “What do you want to hear?” she said. “I know I’m a bad person. I know I put her in danger.”

  “I’m sorry, Mom. Can we just let it be over?”

  “I’m sorry, too,” she said. “I’m sorry my life isn’t shitty enough for you. I’m sorry getting abandoned with a four-year-old doesn’t meet your criteria for having a drink.”

  I breathed and picked my words carefully. “Do you know everything that happened tonight—standing around outside and Costa—if we just did nothing, it would have ended exactly the same? Do you realize that? April would still be asleep in her bed right now.”

  “I wish I was a strong person,” she said.

  “I can help her,” I said. “Why can’t I help her? You don’t know. Why can’t she be happy with me?” I was yelling at this point, and it seemed to stun her only for a moment. She turned and shot her cigarette into the yard. “I’m sorry I’m weak,” she said. “And you couldn’t have a normal family.” She picked up her pack of cigarettes and swept away from me, and I said, “Mom,” just as she yanked open the door. But there was no hesitation at all as she heaved herself through the garage landing and into the white light of the kitchen.

  I turned back to the yard, and behind me the kitchen light went off—two window squares on the back lawn vanished to black. Above me a cloud glowed like a ghost with the moon behind it, and I had a few blinking stars and nothing for sound except the tiny static of my smoking and the creak of the deck rail when I leaned on it. I punished myself, trying to imagine the worst that could’ve happened, but even in insanity there is some sanity that remembers our essential selves, and I couldn’t see Mary Ann ever hurting April. But she could have taken April from us in the hopes of giving them both a better life. When I thought of this, I saw them in a motel room, Mary Ann braiding April’s hair with such trembling enthusiasm it made April cry.

  I went inside, and at the foot of the stairs I waited a long time until the line of light under Mom’s door went out. Softly as I could I crept up the steps. In her bedroom, in the fanned-out cast of her nightlight, April looked as if she had been frozen by a spell, her arms over her head and her chin high, her mouth open slightly, her breath making a tiny whistle on the inhale.

  I sat on the floor beside her bed and tried to open my senses to the surreal idea that I could tell what she’d been through by watching her sleep. What was happening in her dreams? I realized for the first time that she had a smell that was more than No More Tears and fabric softener, her smell, April smell, that was the smell of her hugging me goodnight and her sitting on my lap at breakfast, and I explored the coldness in my chest of letting myself imagine her gone from my life. I laid my head on her pillow so that her hair was in my eyes and whispered that she was a good girl. Not until the tears were running off my jaw did I realize I was crying. I almost never cried, and when I did it was for many reasons at once. It was for the hours she was unsafe. For my not being able to find or help her. And when I said that she was a good girl, it was that she hadn’t thought there
might be danger—that, in her goodness, she couldn’t imagine danger—that was so unspeakably sad.

  Gradually I found peace in her deep steady breathing. It gave me confirmation that there had been no trauma today. Mary Ann hadn’t lost her mind, but she was sensitive enough to possibly lose her mind, and wasn’t that very quality something about her I loved? When she told lies, as she had to the nurse about Joey, it wasn’t for the usual reasons—to save face or to take an advantage. She lied like a child does, to make the world friendlier. To pretend. Isn’t that the idea behind prayer and chants and meditation, say it enough and it is? Say it until you believe it?

  I didn’t go to bed that night. After I left April I went in the basement and made a fire in the woodstove. I curled and bench-pressed and threw darts. I didn’t even yawn.

  I saw myself in my old life, without Mary Ann or Out of the Hole, and my stomach wrenched and burned. Around dawn the plan came to me and quickly took shape, and when I went out to smoke in the damp grass I was on the top rail of a ferry (Point Judith? Block Island?) with Mary Ann after she’d stopped missing Nick and had realized the long life she still had to live. We’d tell each other everything we’d once felt for Nick and then be free of him.

  34.

  While Bobby was taking apart an alternator, I went out the side door and tore ass down to the Dungeon. By the light of a match, I searched along the flagstone foundation for the loose mortar behind which Bobby had hidden the key, along with the model and address of the car.

  He and Pam had a system worked out. The first time, giving us the key for the Taurus, she came in for a tune-up on her Cavalier. With this second car and with all cars thereafter, she’d come in complaining of a rough idle or bad mileage. It was Bobby’s idea, to keep them from being seen together. From her glove box he’d get the key and address, and rather than take them home he’d stash them downstairs in case she got busted and turned on him, which had suddenly become a possibility.

  Bobby was paranoid. At times I thought he might be on something like crank. He’d lost some weight—his arms were harder and veinier, his cheeks thinner, his eyes glassy—though that didn’t have to mean anything between the hydrocarbons in the air and the changing seasons, which had been gusting wood smoke through the bays.