“If you come back I’ll hate you, Justin. Please. Don’t make me hate you.”
38.
Nick’s absence and the many delayed jobs resulted in a drop-off of business at Out of the Hole. A full day might yield three or four small external engine jobs and a handful of oil changes. Rod even suggested that we park our cars in the upper lot just to look open.
Half asleep one morning I was only vaguely aware of Rod walking around the bays with a tall man wearing an argyle sweater over a shirt and tie. He was in the lobby when I went out for a cup of the road-tar coffee Rod brewed.
“This guy wouldn’t be a bad tech,” Rod was saying, and in the silence that followed I realized he was talking about me. When I looked up, the sweatered man came forward with his hand out and said his name was Tom Greene. I gave him the mechanic salute—holding up my hand to show him that he wouldn’t want to touch it. “How do you feel about repair work?” he said as he lowered his hand.
“How do I feel about it?”
“Pretty much about not doing it anymore,” Rod said. “Strictly external jobs. Tune-ups, sensors, fuel injection cleaning. You’re looking at the guy who just bought the place from Mary Ann.”
Greene cleared his throat as if Rod had said something deeply flattering. “I own shops in the Precision Tune franchise,” he said. “One in New Britain, one in Meriden. We specialize in the new generation of engines.”
“What’s the point of getting buried in a fifteen-hundred-dollar overhaul,” Rod said, “when you can mash out four grand in little jobs.”
“And a significant decline in rechecks,” Greene said. “Even the dealerships are moving to a model of replacing engines rather than spending man hours repairing them. The future is customer service.”
I couldn’t say anything, so I just walked away. “I guess I stand corrected,” I heard Rod say as the door was easing closed on its piston behind me.
Half an hour later an old gray-primered panel van backed up to the bays and Bobby got out. He looked terrible, gaunt and unshaven, his hair wild even under a backwards NASCAR cap.
He walked by the lobby window holding his middle finger up to Rod as he passed. He went over to his toolbox and started pushing it toward the van. It was a tall Mac box with loose casters that kept swiveling around, and I went over and pulled the front of it while he pushed.
“That guy out there bought the shop, I guess,” I said. “He’s going to turn it into a tune-up-only place. Precision Tune.”
We got the toolbox outside and Bobby opened the back doors of the van. We pushed it right up against the bumper and then he took out a cigarette and turned around. He folded his arms and looked at the shop. “If I could I’d blow this place up right now,” he said. “You ever seen a Precision Tune? They’re bright yellow. You staying?”
I shook my head. I didn’t know anything else, but of that I was certain.
“Rod?”
“Yeah, sounds like it.”
He looked in through the lobby windows where Rod was talking animatedly to the new owner. “They make a good-looking couple,” Bobby said. He shook his head and sniffed. “You been back to see Nick?”
“Mary Ann doesn’t want me to.”
“Me either. I guess she don’t want him remembering.”
I nodded. Rod had told me the same thing.
“I never told you,” he said. “I went out to Chase Street. The Mustang was gone. He must’ve got rid of it.”
I couldn’t look at him. I started to open one of the drawers but Bobby pushed it closed. “Don’t bother,” he said, taking the long steel socket extension off the magnetic bar on the front of the box and setting it by the wheel well. Then he put the cigarette in his lips and started pushing at the top of the box until it tipped, the bumper serving as a fulcrum, and when the weight of the tools inside shifted back it slammed down into the van with the sound of a hundred windows breaking. He pushed at the bottom to slide it in and swore. “Now you can help me,” he said, and we shoved it back with everything we had until it was in just past the lip. Bobby straightened, a little out of breath. He looked past me into the parking lot, then back at the lobby. He grabbed the steel extension and strode across the lot to Rod’s Duster.
He swung the extension with both hands and hit the back window horizontally, so that when the safety glass popped and turned to pebbles, there was a level slit almost perfectly halfway up. He slammed the extension into the trunk and went to smashing out the driver’s window as Rod came running out. He knew to stop, though, which was fortunate for him, and from ten feet away he stood with his hands on his hips watching Bobby destroy his car. Tom Greene stood outside the lobby holding his head. When Bobby was finished he came back around to the van, threw the extension inside, slammed the back doors, and without a word of good-bye to me drove off, baking one of the tires up Wolcott Avenue.
That evening I, too, packed up my tools, and though my box was only half as tall as Bobby’s, I drove home with a bungee cord holding down the trunk lid. I could’ve watched April, but Mom put her back in day care with the implication that I couldn’t be completely trusted anymore. I tried to spend my days out of the house, driving around in the ’Cuda when the weather was nice, catching a matinee at the Watertown Cinema when it wasn’t.
One afternoon as I was driving north on Route 6, a green Cutlass swerved at me. There was no question but that he’d done it on purpose—in my side mirror I saw him flip me off over his roof. And then I was getting gas one day at Arco when someone passing yelled out, “Whose car you driving, punk?”
39.
On the first of December I leased a studio apartment for three hundred dollars a month in the West Rock neighborhood of New Haven, not far from Southern Connecticut State University. I just made the enrollment date for the spring semester. I sold the ’Cuda for my asking price of fifteen thousand to a middle-aged man who matched the engine and transmission numbers with a book, and I bought a ten-speed bike as my sole transportation. It was a kind of exile, making the sixty-mile trip to see Mary Ann all but impossible. Sometimes I’d go to the great gothic campus downtown and look at the Gutenberg Bible, one of only forty-eight in existence, or Van Gogh’s Night Café, which he gave his landlord in lieu of rent, now worth upwards of fifty million, according to the catalog.
But the high points were brief in the expanses of my depression. I was disconnected from people and unsure of how to act in the world. Alone in my apartment I let myself cry, thinking of everything I was responsible for, staring, as all felons must in their cold cells, at the maddening impossibility of going back and changing anything.
I had weekly appointments at the psychology department for a few months, but it wasn’t the right time for therapy. I had no friends, and I wanted the psychologist—an older man with kind, dark eyes and the considerate habit of pressing two fingers to his lips as he listened—to like me. I told him half-truths at best and left his softly lit office pretending to have my feet set firmly on the path of self-forgiveness.
* * *
On a foggy morning during spring break, while Mom was working and April was at daycare, I rode my bike to the bus stop in downtown Woodbury and took the Eastline out to Waterbury. They had bike racks at the back of the bus, and I got off and pedaled around the city under a cold sun. From across the street I saw Rod hooking up a car to one of the new oscilloscopes. The building was painted yellow, as Bobby had said it would be. I rode by Hog Wild and looked for Bobby’s car, but it wasn’t there. And then I rode out to Fulton Park, where I locked up my bike and walked down Cooke Street. My old Nova was in the driveway, along with a car I didn’t recognize. I saw people in the house moving past the windows, but I didn’t get close enough to make out their faces.
I had tried often to re-create that last night in their house. Would she have wanted him to come back after he’d pushed her off? That was the question in its entirety. In my mind, much of the night had distilled to only a few moments: when she asked why he wouldn’t tou
ch her, and the dying sounds she made afterward. That was all I’d had for hope, that she wouldn’t want him back. That he’d gone too far this time and the pain couldn’t be healed.
But another moment that night was on her bed when she took my hand, thinking it was his.
No, there was no doubt she would have taken him back. The questions I was left with were these: Would he have been able to change, to let go of their past and start over? And if not, how much more heartbreak could she have endured?
Not much, I knew. Not much. In my heart I saw the truth. He wouldn’t have trusted the new baby not to die. He would have left her. She would have come back to me. That pristine life for us was mine now to mourn, though I couldn’t hold this in my mind for very long, a minute or so was all before the thoughts shattered, destroyed by a survival instinct like the one that keeps us from stepping too close to the edge of a cliff, though we want so badly to see. I had betrayed him in a way that is unexplained by love, that I knew couldn’t be forgiven or redeemed.
The next time I came to the house, there was a big dual-wheel U-Haul backed in the driveway. Mary Ann came out and walked past the truck toward the street. She had aged considerably, her hair, cut short now and permed, showed gray, and her face was longer and sunken—but then I realized it wasn’t her but her sister. She came up to the end of the driveway and took the mail out of the box, and there was an air of kindness in her easy movements and soft expressions that caused me to come out of hiding and hop the chain-link fence. When I saw her again she was frozen, watching me as I walked up the sidewalk.
From ten feet away I introduced myself and said that I had worked for Nick.
She smiled. “They’re inside.” She turned toward the house and walked slowly until I had caught up with her. “Justin?” she said, and she held her hand to me. “I’m Susan. The oldest sister.”
“From Washington,” I said.
On the walk, she told me that she and her husband were helping Nick and Mary Ann move back to Oregon. The news, hearing it in words—I’d assumed as much when I’d seen the truck—stunned me only for a second, and then I felt relief because there were times even now, in my new life in New Haven, when I could imagine myself losing control and taking a bus or a train out to see Mary Ann and the baby even after she had warned me not to.
Mary Ann was standing at the kitchen counter with her back to us when I followed Susan inside. “You’ve got a visitor,” Susan said, and Mary Ann, closing a box, said, “I saw through the window.”
Susan dropped the mail on the kitchen table and went off into the living room.
Mary Ann had her hair tied up pirate fashion in a bandanna. I smelled spruce and frankincense. Strength, I thought. Energy. She ran a tape gun over the box three times.
“Rod told me what you did with the engine,” she said. “Thank you. We needed the money.”
“Do you need more? I sold my car.”
“We’re okay,” she said, her back to me still. “We’re moving in with my parents for a while. They’ve got the room.” She was wearing an enormous burnt orange sweater that had elastic sewn in where it came down mid-thigh like the mouth of a sack on her dark blue leggings. She turned finally, and the effect on me was this: a great fist to the gut, and then a stopping of time that allowed me to examine her as if she were a picture. Her face was rounder and lovelier—from the effort of packing and lifting or just from the fact of being late in her pregnancy, there was a blush in her cheeks and forehead—and her breasts were someone else’s, and of course the gravity that pulled my eyes down was her belly, and it was true, it was never true until I saw her, and now that it was true, she was carrying a baby that was half my baby, I fell back against the door. I tried to swallow just as all moisture was vacuumed away from my shriveling tongue.
“Are you okay?” she said, walking slowly toward me.
I found my voice again. “You look really good, Mary Ann.” It was invigorating to say her name, and I breathed deeply.
She smiled, touched my sleeve for only a second before she stepped back and glanced around. “I can’t believe what you accumulate in five years. Not even five years.”
Outside I heard Susan talking to a guy, probably her husband, and the shallow thump as they walked up the aluminum ramp of the moving truck. Slowly, against a fading dizziness, I pushed away from the door. Mary Ann looked up and into my face in an intimate way, touching my arm again, and just as I thought we would kiss she pulled back and went to where she’d been at the counter, and I realized that she’d only been checking that I was well.
She wrote KITCHEN on the box with a black Sharpie, and I came up and took the box off the counter. “Just set it by the door,” she said.
She was standing at the doorway to the living room when I turned back around. “Come say hi to Nick,” she said, and I followed her out of the kitchen.
The futon and the recliner and TV were gone from the living room, and a girl of seven or eight was sitting on the floor, listening to music on a Walkman and writing in a Mad Libs book. She didn’t look up, and we weren’t introduced. I followed Mary Ann down the hallway to their bedroom. This room had been left alone, and it sickened me when I saw the bed in my peripheral vision as I came up to the wheelchair. Nick was wearing a knit cap, under which I could see that his hair was cut short, just longer than a crew cut, it seemed. His head was tilted back so that he was looking at the picture of himself with Buddy Baker in front of Buddy’s famous Superbird.
Mary Ann wheeled the chair around. “Somebody came to see you, honey,” she said. “This is Justin. He’s your friend.”
His head seemed to be stretched longer, though it could have been the effect of the snug-fitting cap. One of his eyes wandered as if some of its cords had been severed, and there was a dent in his forehead. He’d lost so much weight I could see his jawbones, where the skin went up like the top of a parachute behind his chin, and his lips were very chapped, flecks of yellow skin peeled up like dried wax. I wondered if he’d lost the part of his brain that reminds us to moisten them.
“Hi, Nick,” I said. He smiled gigantically, creasing his face in places that had never been creased before. But I saw through the smile the heavy blanket of the lie. He didn’t recognize me. He had been rewarded for recognizing people in the past, and that’s all this was. A conditioned response, a knee jerk. He panted out two breaths and then looked down at his hand, and the word I thought he was saying was “ate” until his hand started coming up off the blanket on his lap, and I understood he was saying “shake.” And I held his hand, whose strength seemed to be short-circuited, painfully firm between thumb and forefinger and lifeless near the pinkie, the skin as soft and tacky as mine had become. His eyes were dim in the moment before they started darting away.
And where does it go? I had a professor Monday and Wednesday mornings who said that energy cannot be destroyed, so where in the universe does a mind go, a brilliant mind, and can a baby in the womb somehow sponge it up?
Mary Ann walked me out toward Cooke Street.
“We’re leaving tomorrow,” she said. “Nick and I are flying. He couldn’t do a cross-country drive, I don’t think. Susan and Jessie are taking my car, and Frank is driving the truck.”
“I wish I could help,” I said.
She smiled, looking ahead as she slowly walked. “It’s going to be a good life,” she said. She drew her open hands up to the sides of her belly. “We’re just going home.”
“I’m in school,” I said. “Computer science.”
“That’s good. That’s where you belong.”
“Could you send me a picture?” I said. “After he’s born? Him or her.”
Ten feet before the end of the driveway, Mary Ann stopped and turned to me abruptly. “This is his baby,” she said. There was a moment of tightness in her face before she breathed and lifted her thick brows, entering a calmer place. She clasped her hands in front of her belly. “He’s suffered enough for this baby.”
“I’m
sorry,” I said, and I hoped she understood that I meant it for everything.
“Good-bye, Justin,” she said. “Be well.”
“God, it hurts,” I said, the words just suddenly there. She closed her eyes, resisting a moment before she sighed and looked at me again. Then she opened her arms and I stepped into them. I felt the mound of her stomach, both soft and firm somehow, and eased back as if it were the result of an injury, as if it were tender. But she pulled me against it, and I thought I felt something. “Tell us good-bye,” she said, and just for a second I died. Crushing every self-protective impulse, I found my voice and told them.
40.
On the first Sunday of summer break Mom pulled up in front of my apartment, and I loaded in my bike and a week’s worth of clothes while April talked nonstop in her car seat. At home she showed me pictures she’d hung in my room and helped me put away my clothes. “I like your room a lot,” she said. Her face had lost its roundness and she was starting to look like Mom in the nose and eyes. But the dramatic changes were on the inside. She had dry humor and sarcasm now. She was at the stage of planting expressions in every sentence: “No doy.” “Gross me out.” “To the max.” Five years old, she was trying on personalities to see which one fit, much the same as I was. But I had to work at keeping the sense of loss I felt to myself. I wanted, as I imagined parents did, as Mary Ann would one day want for our son, for her to stay uncomplicated and to never be burdened with wanting opposite things at the same time.
I picked up one of her air-filled bouncy balls in the corner. Then we lay side by side on my old bed, and I tossed it up in an easy loop with some back spin. She caught it and threw it too far forward, and I retrieved it, and pretty soon we had a regular back-and-forth, the ball looping a few feet over our bodies as if we were the sing-along words to a song.
“You know what Dad said we could do in the winter?” she said. With my tiny bead of side vision I saw how big her eyes were. “Maybe go skiing in Vermont.”
The Spark and the Drive Page 24
