by Lily King
I do our dishes. There’s a TV in the corner and I would turn it on but I’m scared Deena will reappear and want to talk to me again, so I go back to Garvey’s room, read more about the man who is a breast, and go to sleep.
I forget to go to the bathroom, so I wake up in the middle of the night. As I quietly open the door and cross the sticky hallway, I keep hearing my brother imitating my father. You kids have got to keep an eye on him! I can see that twenty-five-dollar mutt and his prickly hair and long ugly face. You kids. You kids. And he isn’t talking to me or my brother anymore.
I don’t flush or wash my hands for fear of waking someone, but as I cross back I look down the hallway and see that someone else is up. Garvey. I can see the narrow outline of his back. He’s moving, stretching or scratching, tilting his head to one side. I want to go back to bed, but I have a feeling he needs me, wants some company.
“Hey,” I whisper as I move closer, but he doesn’t hear.
A few more steps and the whole scene changes, from Garvey alone itching his back to something else altogether. The hand on his back is not his own and it’s not a hand but a foot and a shin. There are two of them, locked together, moving together, kissing, twisting, all in complete silence. And then they turn, Garvey carrying her in a frontwards piggyback, his legs buckling slightly as he moves toward the couch, her legs wrapped around him, both of them naked, scraping against each other, and then falling into the cushions, her enormous breasts flopping to the sides and Garvey scooping them and shoving them into his mouth, all the while his bum moving up and down and her hands down between their legs, and her face, Deena’s face, in a silent scream.
4
On Monday my mother picks me up and we drive straight to Ashing. It feels like I have been gone many years. We pass the Christmas tree farm, the inn at the corner of Baker Street, the Citgo station, and then my mother, instead of driving through the middle of town and up the hill to Myrtle Street, turns right onto Water Street and then left into a parking lot. It looks like a miniature motel, beige with white trim, with six apartments, three up and three down. My mother pats my leg. “We’re home.”
Our apartment is on the bottom in the middle. There’s a large 2 on the door, which she opens with a key she’s already hidden in the little lantern above the doorbell.
“I don’t think either of us want to bother with carrying a key,” she says. We never, as far as I know, had a key to our old house. I don’t even remember there being locks on the doors.
All the furniture has been moved in, chairs and couches and beds that used to be on Myrtle Street. I sit on the sofa with yellow flowers that used to be in the den. Is my father sitting on the floor now?
“Come see your room.”
I follow her down a long hallway. My room is small and dark. The one window looks out at our car in its spot. But my old beds are in there, with the same white bedspreads, and all my stuffed animals are on top. I forgot to pack any of my stuffed animals in June, and now they seem strange to me, stupid, with their puffed-up bellies and sewn-on smiles.
“Well?”
“I like it.” I hate it. “Can I see yours?”
Hers is at the end of the hallway, as large as the living room, with French doors that go out to a deck, and the canopy bed she took from the guest room. All my life I’ve been asking to have that bed in my room.
“We need to hang things on the walls, buy some plants, but it has potential,” she says. “And it’s convenient, being downtown. You can meet your friends whenever you want.”
I nod.
“Does Dad know we’re back?”
“I have no idea,” she says.
“Can I go up there?”
“Now?” She looks at her watch. It’s only two-thirty.
I get my bike out of the car and put the wheels back on it.
It’s Labor Day, and Ashing is clogged with cars and pedestrians streaming off the train from Boston, making the trek to the beach. Some kids my age are hanging out on the steps of Bruce’s Variety. I recognize a couple of them, but I don’t know anyone’s name. I’ve gone to the same private school all my life and only know the kids from Ashing who go there too.
“Reggie,” one of them says as I pedal by. I’ve heard this word before. I think it’s a blend of rich and preppie. I don’t know, when they say things like that, if they know me specifically, or just that I don’t go to school with them.
I live in Water Street Apartments now, I want to call out. My mother doesn’t have a job and she’s worried my father won’t pay the child support.
I pass the yarn shop. No orange Pinto. I look for Neal in every face I pass. When I get to Dad’s I’ll call Patrick and find out everything about the summer. Mallory’s at her aunt’s on the Cape until Wednesday.
I ride straight up the hill and then take a right at the blinking light to the stucco house on Myrtle Street with the halfmoon driveway. I stop there, like a tourist. The front of the house is a facade no one but the mailman uses, with pretty white stones instead of regular gravel, and slate steps that wind up through the rhododendrons to a wide terrace. Through the windows is my father’s den but he wouldn’t be in there during the day unless it was raining. Once, when I was in second grade, I was dropped off here after a birthday party by a parent who didn’t know any better. I climbed up all the steps and was greeted at the top by a stray dog who was lapping up rainwater that had collected in the wide saucer of a planter. He attacked immediately, knocking me over, ripping open the skin on my arms and left ear. I screamed and screamed but no one heard. I remembered the goody bag full of jelly beans in my coat pocket and tossed it down the steps. The dog leaped after it and I got myself inside. I still have faint lines on my arms from that attack. The front of this house is fake; all the activity is in the back. I can hear shouting coming from the pool.
I keep going down Myrtle Street and ride up the back driveway, through the small patch of woods where sometimes in winter rain will gather and freeze and you can skate all around the trees, to the poolhouse and the hum of its machines. Home. Finally I am home.
Mrs. Tabor, water sluicing off the bottom of her bikini, is just stepping out of the shallow end of the pool.
Patrick’s clipping the grass around the little toadstool lights. He’s the first to see me. He drops the shears.
“Daley,” he says.
“Daley?” His mother laughs, as if he’s making an old joke. And then she sees me and says, “Oh my God.”
It’s a little bit like coming back from the dead, a little bit like Huck and Tom when they show up at their own funeral. Only Frank, Patrick’s older brother, ignores me, launching himself off in a swan dive and gliding along the bottom of the pool like a stingray.
“Sweetie pie, when did you get back?” Mrs. Tabor says, quickly putting her head through a terry-cloth dress before coming over to me.
“Today.”
She hugs me. She’s cold from the pool and water from her hair drips down my neck. Her black hair is no straighter wet than dry and hits the small of her back in a straight line. She is normally pale but now her skin is like copper. She must have spent a lot of time beside my pool this summer.
“Well,” she says, looking down the driveway, then at the house. I wait for her to start asking me questions—she was always so full of questions for me when I went over to Patrick’s house. “Your dad will be sorry he missed you.”
“Where is he?”
“Radio Shack. Isn’t that where he went?” she asks Patrick, who nods. “Can you come back later?”
There’s something strange about the way she’s standing, I feel like if I try to take a step closer to the house, she will tackle me. I glance at the garage to see if my father’s car is gone; it is.
“Hey.” Patrick hits me on the arm. “I gotta show you what we got for the pool.”
His mother starts to say something and stops herself. I follow Patrick into the poolhouse. It’s mostly the same, except for some of the towels hangin
g on the hooks. Patrick leads me to a new little cabinet next to the bar and tells me to open it. Inside is a stereo with a turntable, an eight-track, and a radio. He pushes ON and music blasts inside and out. He points to some yellow speakers in the trees beside the pool. “They’re waterproof,” he says. “For rain. Oh, and I gotta show you something else, too. It’s so cool.”
“Stay out in the sunshine. Don’t go indoors,” Mrs. Tabor calls as we pass her chaise on the way to the house. “Patrick, are you listening to me?” But Patrick keeps on moving, and by the time we reach the back steps she’s lain back down again.
The kitchen table is gone. The only furniture in the kitchen now is a red leather armchair I’ve never seen before. They’ve moved the table into the pantry and covered it with an orange and brown tablecloth that’s not ours. In the living room there are two new lamps (my mother took the blue and white Chinese ones) that have shiny black bases and silver shades with a kind of veiny green mold design. In the den, where the yellow flowered couch and chairs used to be, are two baby blue recliners. On the mantelpiece is a photograph in Lucite of two old people I don’t know.
Patrick heads up the stairs possessively and into my parents’ room. Same bed, missing dresser, new chair with ottoman. Weird geometric sheets on the unmade bed. He sits on my father’s side of the bed and opens the thin drawer of the bedside table. He lifts up a black plastic thing shaped like a small egg with the top cut off and a bright red button there instead. A cord runs out of the other end.
“If you push this, the police will come.”
“What?”
“It’s called a panic button. Gardiner—I mean, your dad—wired the whole house. Downstairs there’s a box and when you go out you turn it on and if anyone crosses any threshhold anywhere in the house a signal goes off downtown at the police station and they have to come in two minutes or they get fired. Isn’t that so cool?” He’s sitting on a gold velour robe.
In the drawer with the panic button are several old watches, receipts, white golf tees, one cuff link, and a silver fountain pen my mother gave him for his fortieth birthday. I used to play in this drawer on weekend afternoons while my father napped and a ballgame flashed on the TV at the foot of the bed. He slept so deeply I could thread the golf tees through the circles of hair on his chest and he wouldn’t wake up. Sometimes I fell asleep beside him. The drawer, this whole side of the room, holds the smell of him, which is humid and spicy.
In the drawer are two new things: a tube of something called KY Jelly and the note my mother left on the kitchen table on the morning of June 25th. It’s crumpled and in the back but I know what it is. If I were alone I’d pull it out and read it, but I don’t want Patrick to know it’s there, though he probably already does.
I get up and go down the hallway to my room. The door is shut. Patrick whispers something to me, but he’s too far away to hear and I really don’t want to listen to him anymore. I open the door. My beds have been replaced by a double bed I don’t recognize, and in the bed is a little girl. I’m not sure how I forgot that Patrick had a little sister, but I did. She lies on her side in a deep sleep, a short pigtail sticking up above her ear, two hands curled under her chin.
“Mom will kill me if she wakes up,” Patrick says behind me, so I shut the door.
It is afternoon in somebody else’s house. I don’t know what to do now.
“We’re not living here,” he says. “I mean, not really.”
We just stand there in the dark hallway.
“We thought you were coming back next week. School doesn’t start until a week from Wednesday, you know. Why are you shaking?”
I hold my hand out flat. I’m shaking like I have a disease. “I don’t know.”
“Let’s get out in the sun.”
We go down the back stairs and out onto the porch.
“He’s back,” Patrick says, pointing.
My father is in his chair at the pool in his bathing trunks. He’s sitting sideways to us, talking to Mrs. Tabor. She glances over but he doesn’t. I walk all the way across the grass to the concrete squares around the pool before he looks up. He fakes surprise. “Well, hello there!” He fakes friendliness. I know it’s fake because I’ve heard that voice when he talks to the neighbors he hates. He hates Mr. Seeley for building his garage so close to our property line, and he hates the Fitzpatricks for having so many children. He hates the old Vance sisters down the hill for feeding our dogs and Mr. Pratt across the street for playing taps at sunset. He grumbles about them, swears about them, and makes fun of the way they walk or talk or laugh. But whenever he sees one of them, at the post office or the gas station, he always says, “Well, hello there!” in that same fake friendly voice.
I hug him tight but his arms are loose around me.
“You come up for a swim? The pool’s nice today.” He reaches for his drink and I notice his hand is shaking like mine.
“No, I didn’t bring a suit. I just—”
“Why not? The pool’s nice today,” he says again, just before sipping.
“I don’t know. I haven’t unpacked yet,” I say, then regret mentioning anything about being away. At the same time I want him to know that I came up here first thing. “We just got back an hour ago.” I realize this isn’t true. It’s been more like three hours by now.
“Oh, really? I thought I saw the convertible downtown this morning.”
Now he’s lying. We drove in well past noon. I shake my head, but I don’t have it in me to fight.
He’s glaring at Mrs. Tabor. I know that look, too. It means, Can you believe this little shit? Sweat has popped out on his nose.
“I missed you,” I say.
“Oh yeah?”
“Gardiner,” Mrs. Tabor says.
“I missed you, too.”
Our eyes catch briefly. His are a yellowy green. My throat aches from not crying.
“Why don’t you go help your dad finish unloading the car?” Mrs. Tabor says.
We walk across the stiff healthy grass together. He lights a cigarette with his lighter, a heavy silver rectangle that makes a wonderful shlink when he flips it closed. The familiarity of that sound, of everything about him, hurts. The driveway is hot, the way-back of the station wagon hotter. I have to get on my knees inside to reach the last two bags. The smell of the dogs reminds me that I haven’t seen the puppy.
“Where’s the puppy?”
“What?” my father says over his shoulder. I hurry to catch up.
“Scratch. Where is he?”
“Ran away.”
“Ran away?”
“Summer for running away.”
“Have you looked for him?”
“I know where he is.”
“Where?”
“He’s with the old biddies. They’ve been trying to steal my dogs for years. I decided to let them have this one. You didn’t want it.”
“I couldn’t take him. I asked, but I couldn’t.”
He flicks a look of raw disgust at me. He’s putting it together, my refusal of the Newfoundland, my secret with my mother. “Ugliest goddamned dog I ever saw.”
I help him put away the batteries and the rest of his purchases. He leaves a pack of lightbulbs out, saying there are some that need replacing, and when he leaves the room to do that I follow him. I have the idea that if I stay with him long enough he’ll remember me, like an amnesiac who needs time for the memories to filter back in. We change a bulb in the den, then one in the upstairs hallway. He doesn’t comment on any of the missing furniture or the strange new items or the fact that Elyse Tabor is sleeping behind the closed door of my room. We move around the house in silence, with only the sound of his breath squeaking loudly through his hairy nostrils.
When we’re done, he says, “Lemme show you something.”
I figure he means the panic button or some other new gadget, but he takes me into the laundry room. He opens the cabinet that holds the safe, a heavy lead-colored box with a combination lock.
&
nbsp; “Open it.”
We all know the combination: 8-29-31, my father’s birthday. As a special treat my mother will sometimes let me bring the silk bags of jewels to her room and lay out every piece on the bedspread. It feels strange to be opening the safe without her in the bedroom.
It is empty.
“Did you know?”
I shake my head
“She took it all. She just took it and ran.” He slams the heavy safe door, but it bounces back and swings hard against the cabinet, making a dent in the wood. He points to the dark empty inside of the box. “She took it all, all of my mother’s and grandmother’s jewelry.” His voice cracks and his face is purple. He pounds his fist on the top of the washing machine and shouts, “Bitch bitch bitch!” His voice is high, like a small boy’s. Then he stoops over and little wordless gasps came out of his mouth.
He straightens up and looks at me. “Come here.”
I do and he hugs me, hard this time, my ear pressed into the coarse hair on his chest, and says, “But you’re mine. You’re mine. Aren’t you?”
“Yes,” I whisper to his chest hair.
When we come downstairs, Mrs. Tabor is making dinner, and Patrick and Elyse are playing cards on the floor where the kitchen table used to be.
“Can Daley stay for dinner?” Patrick asks.
Mrs. Tabor looks at my father, who nods.
“I’ll have to call.”
“Stay the night,” my father says.
“All right. I’ll just go to the bathroom, then call.” I don’t want to use the kitchen phone—I don’t want to be in the same room with both my parents’ voices.
There is a little telephone room off the den, next to the bathroom. I sit down on the swivel stool. One of my mother’s pads with the thick white paper and the words DON’T FORGET in red at the top is on the phone table. It makes me miss her and I’m glad to hear her voice when she picks up.
“I’m at Dad’s still.”
“Oh, good. It’s going well then.”
“Mostly. They want me to stay for dinner and the night.”
