He starts hanging around the kitchen when Linda’s in the house, and the more they talk, the younger she seems. Twenty-four, it turns out, with a three-year-old and a one-year-old and an ex-husband stationed in Manila. Although he hasn’t seen Roxanne or Paul since Christmastime, he’s made sure they know where he is, and Tilly’s phone number, and his plans to leave for college a year early, so Liz can find him. Whenever the phone rings, a bubble rises in his heart.
Linda rinses out glasses and organizes pills; she washes sheets and towels and Tilly’s flannel nightgowns, with no-nonsense efficiency. She’s staying late tonight because Tilly has a bladder infection and she’s waiting until her fever drops. Usually her conversations with Cole are clipped, but he gets her talking about her two years at UConn, her daughters, her saint of a mother, who works in a bakery from seven a.m. till four; Linda works five to eleven. “I barely see her,” she says. “I miss her.” She twists the dial on the dryer and wet laundry starts to tumble. “Sorry about your mother.” She looks at him, hands on her hips, already thinking about her next task. “Truly sorry.”
“It’s a bummer,” he says, knowing he’s hit a false note after the frank tenderness with which she’s described her family. “It’s really beat,” he adds. Even worse. He never knows what to say about it, how to act. Either he sounds like he feels sorry for himself, or like he’s consumed by mourning, or just brushing it all off. He doesn’t know how to fold the story of his mother’s murder into his own story. In his dreams Liz’s face and his mother’s sometimes switch.
He passes by Tilly’s room—she’s snoring over the sound of the TV—and goes upstairs for his chemistry book. When he comes back down Linda isn’t in the kitchen and he immediately feels a pang of disappointment that she’s gone, of loneliness—and then he smells it through the kitchen window. He startles her out behind the garage, where she’s smoking a joint. “Shit,” she says. “Keep this between us. Cool?”
“Yeah, yeah, don’t worry,” and he stands there for a moment before she hands it to him. He takes a deep hit, then another. It’s been weeks since he’s smoked, and the effervescent rush—a million tiny bubbles scattering through his body, down his arms and legs to his fingers and toes—feels familiar as home.
He tells her it’s excellent dope. She says it’s good enough for everyday weed, weed she can count pills on. The solicitousness has fallen away from her voice, a frank and world-wise practicality taking its place. She’s seven years older than he is, and he recognizes that she was dancing at the fair he missed. A veteran of the sixties. Watching her put the joint to her lips, he thinks Janis or Grace Slick. What does she think, looking at him? Keith Partridge? Greg Brady? God almighty.
After a few minutes they’re laughing. She tells him a funny story about finding handfuls of dandelions her older daughter had stuffed down the front of her diaper, and one time three and a half Oreos. He tells her about the cops catching him and Liz drinking Southern Comfort in the cemetery, sitting in the grass and leaning back against the headstone of seventeen-year-old Isaac Owen, who died “with bravery & might” in the Revolutionary War.
She looks at her watch, says “Fuck,” and hurries through the breezeway into the house. Cole follows, then stands at the open refrigerator, hanging on the door, and seriously considers drinking a strawberry Ensure, but then spots maraschino cherries in the back. He fishes all six out of the narrow jar, eats three, saving the others to offer Linda when she comes back through, then sucks on his cold sweet fingers. A few minutes pass and he leaves hers in the lid on the counter, then drinks the red syrup from the jar.
Pausing at Tilly’s room—she’s still snoring, the TV turned lower—he thinks Linda will raise her head and say goodnight, but she’s taking Tilly’s pulse and notes it on her chart, then reaches in her mouth to pull out the dentures.
Cole goes up to his desk and stares at the textbook pages, watching a swirl of H2O and CO2 and Fe and Mg and Nt before realizing his only hope is to go to bed and get up extra-early to study for his test.
In bed he closes his eyes to see elements and compounds zinging around like asteroids, and he thinks of the stars and moon chiseled into Isaac Owen’s headstone—“staring at the Face of the Fight”—and he doesn’t even know she’s there until the sheet lifts away from his body and she crawls on top of him, her bra cool and smooth on his chest, the ankh swinging against his chin. Her hard and purposeful plunges shake the bed, and she licks her fingers, reaches down, and quickly comes in a hot rush; then her rhythm slows and he comes, too. All of her weight collapses on him and she’s instantly asleep. He inhales the smell of her scalp, feels the moist skin at the small of her back.
After a time he pulls the sheet over them, his feet sticking out the bottom, and drifts in and out of sleep, and when he opens his eyes, in the yellow-blue swath of moonlight shining in the window, there’s Tilly. She hasn’t been upstairs in a year, but now she’s standing in her nightgown at his door, her cheeks and lips hollowed without dentures, peering into the darkness at his bed. He doesn’t move. Linda’s breathing is silent, and it’s possible the corner is so dark she can’t see anything, but through his half-open eyes the moonlight seems to get even brighter, spotlighting Tilly and her bluish hair and nightgown falling straight and empty like it’s dangling from a wire hanger with her head on top. She’s floating.
She backs into the hallway and he awakens some time later. Tilly’s TV is turned up loud. Linda is gone from his bed. The moon must’ve set. The thrum and whir of being high has left him. Had any of this happened? He squints into the darkness at his door, recalling the triangular beam of light on Tilly.
That Friday, Cole gets home from school and sees a strange car in the driveway and a strange woman pulling a thermometer from Tilly’s mouth. She’s finally over the bladder infection.
Later that night, when he comes in smelling of ham and spicy Italian salami, Tilly’s already at the kitchen table with the bottle. He pulls his mug from the cupboard and joins her. “That kind of thing,” she says from the corner of her mouth, and taps the rim of her glass. “It’ll drag a bright future right under.”
17
Cole’s got the shirt unbuttoned, but his father keeps slipping away as he tries to pull it off of him. “C’mon, it’s all down your back and in your hair.”
“It’s fine,” he says. “I just took a shower.”
He remembers laughing with Nikki over Daniel’s blowout poops that shot up the back of his onesie and out the top, then says, “Do you really want to sleep with mouse shit in your hair?”
“I shook it all out. It’s fine.”
And it’s more than just mouse shit. Cole came down to refill their waters this afternoon—left him alone two minutes!—and while he was gone Phil ripped down a section of ceiling plaster, “for a light fixture,” he explained. “There’s not gonna be a light fixture!” Chunks of plaster dumped down on him along with mouse shit and a shower of vermiculite insulation—pea-sized, gray and silver-gold with shiny specks of mica and asbestos fibers, poured between the attic joists before Cole was born. Only as long as their work doesn’t touch the vermiculite, they can leave it and legally sell the house.
He collars his father and tugs the shirt down his back.
“Get your hands off me! You can’t touch me!”
“Dad—”
“Stop calling me that! Who are you?”
“I’m your son. I’m here to take care of you.”
His eyes narrow and he pokes Cole in the chest. “I know who you are. You’re the one who’s just like me.”
“No, I’m not!” Cole shouts, and yanks the filthy shirt, tearing it below the collar.
That day in Portland when he got back to the house with the chef’s knife, he told Nikki, “I was just trying to protect you. It seems like a violent impulse, but it’s for the right reasons. I’m not my father, it’s the opposite of that
.” And Nikki said, “I know you’re not your father, not at all. But how can I love a man who defines himself by all the horrible things he isn’t?”
“…trying to steal my house. I can see your legal maneuvering, but you can’t trick me.”
“I’m helping—”
“Helping me? What do you want out of it?”
“I don’t want anything. I’m just here to…I just want…” He simply wants to do the right thing for his father and for his son.
“Looks like I stumped you. Ha! Your ruse is exposed.”
“Dad—” That’s why he’s here: because it’s the right thing to do.
“I’m warning you.” He clenches his bent fingers into a fist. “Don’t call me that again.”
“Listen to me. You’re my father.”
“Okay, wiseass. If that’s true, who’s your mother?”
“She was your wife.”
“Doesn’t ring a bell.”
“Remember your wife? The woman you married?”
“Nothing comes to mind.”
“The mother of your three children. The woman you played the Brahms with. Piano for four hands.”
He’s disarmed, looking at a spot on the ceiling, and Cole seizes the moment to rip off his shirt. “She came home from Ensign-Bickford with the smell of gunpowder in—”
“Not your mother.”
He unbuckles the belt.
“She met Martin Luther King. Of course he wasn’t famous back then, just one of the southern teenagers who came up to Simsbury to pick tobacco during the war.”
“Your wife.” Jesus, he’s heard this story a hundred times.
“She said he was polite and shy. But after he was famous, someone used to tell her, ‘You met one of the greatest men of the century and all you can say is he was polite and shy?’ ”
He pulls down his father’s underwear. “Who said that?”
“Somebody. I don’t remember who.”
“Mom said it. Your wife.”
“In any case, Mother would laugh and say, ‘He was just a kid shoveling in food at a church supper.’ ”
This recollection has softened his father, so Cole tests the water temp and guides him under the spray. Deciding it’s futile to try to stay dry, he strips off his own clothes, squeezes into the tight shower stall, and turns the water warmer. “Close your eyes,” he says, and moves his father’s head under the stream. Shampooing him, he massages his fingertips into his scalp, a deep, slow pressure that eases his fidgety body and soothes his confusion and belligerence. When he rinses out the suds, tiny pellets of mouse shit skim down his father’s back. “Arms up,” he says, and washes him from his hands to his pits, then the curls of his ears and the loose skin around his neck. “Tell me more about your mother,” he says.
Phil burbles his lips in the water streaming down his face. “She loved root-beer floats. I think she loved them more than I did.”
Cole scrubs his back, working his thumbs into the tight scapula muscles around the big scar. He lathers up his hands with more soap, and washes the soft folds of flesh at his father’s belly, crotch, and thighs, their bodies pressed together. He’s never been this close to another naked man. He squats down to wash between his toes.
“I’d fill a little plastic bag with ice cubes,” Phil says, “while she poured root beer and scooped in ice cream. We kept the lights off in the kitchen. The two of us sipping through straws at the table, whispering in the dark while she held the ice to her cheek.”
Cole’s heart misses a beat. Of all the stories he’s heard a hundred times, this is a first. As he stands he rubs his father’s quads and hips, then rubs his lower back and shoulders.
Yes, he’s stayed on at the house because it’s the right thing to do. But there’s more. All his life he’s wondered if forgiveness was possible, if he even knew what it meant. As he kneads the muscles around the scar, their bodies pressed into the shower stall, he comes to realize that forgiveness doesn’t happen in an instant—it’s not a simple decision, but an accumulation of generous acts, of kindness and taking care. He’s stayed on because this summer is what forgiveness looks like.
18
“Do I have to do everything myself?” she says, and then does it: while Cole and Ian and their father are pulling the old iron baseboard radiators out of the front room, she calls the antique dealer in Hartford. The boys keep their heads down. Their father’s on his knees detaching each section, then they carry them out, heavy as manhole covers, and stack them in the borning room. Hunched over on the floor, he purses his lips and forces a stuck bolt with a crescent wrench too puny for the job. The wrench slips and he grunts as blood seeps from his knuckles.
“Fifty dollars your little adventure cost us,” she announces.
He lifts his head from the baseboard, furious and mute.
“The delivery fee all over again, plus you surely didn’t think he’d give you as much back as you paid for it, did you? Oh, he saw you coming a mile away. Another highboy, when Ian needs braces and we’re still paying last winter’s oil bill.”
She’s won, Cole thinks. The highboy’s going back, and she’d like him to acknowledge that buying it was a mistake. She wants him to say something. Anything. But they all know he won’t.
“Ludicrous!” she yelps. “I have to work myself into a tailspin just to keep you from bankrupting us. Fifty dollars down the drain. Now you see it, now you don’t!”
That night, Cole is sure it will come. Fan off, light on, no music, door unlatched. “Why does every decision have to be a fight?” he hears her plead through the walls. He tiptoes from his closet to the spare bed, piling up his camping gear. They’ll just hike up the Metacomet Trail and camp on the ridgeline above Old Newgate Prison. They’ll have to keep—“Think about the family…Our marriage, for Pete’s sake…I’m up to my ears in chickens and geese and rabbits!”—keep their campfire low and—“Asinine!”
The bruises on Liz’s arms were worse than ever. “No damn goat, either!” She promises him she’s got it under control, but that can’t be true if it’s getting worse. He wants to take her away from here. Maybe Ian and Liz have exactly the right idea: instead of camping for a night a mile away—“If you leave me, I’m keeping the money, because I need money”—they should just take off. He’s heard about cannery boats shipping out from Seattle to Alaska. Factories at sea. You work a few months, then find a cheap place to live until your money runs out. Great dope, and everybody gets high while they’re packing salmon into cans. He’d save Liz from Kirk, and get himself out of this fucking house. And maybe save his mother, too. His leaving could shock his parents into changing. “Can’t afford a vacation? Don’t start lecturing me about money.”
By midnight it’s been quiet for fifteen minutes or more, and he decides he can let himself fall asleep. He leaves the fan off. It’s all a desperate game: if he turns it on, he’ll be cooler and can sleep more easily, but he’ll be listening through the whir, which will keep him awake. And he’s gotten worked up. On the edge of sleep he sees Liz’s wrists again, ringed with bruises. His eyes shoot open, his heart thumps. He listens to the silence.
Down in the kitchen, he runs the tap until it’s cool and drinks a glass of water. He tiptoes back up to his room, sits by the window, and packs the one-hit bowl with his thumb, flicks the lighter, draws slow bubbles through the water, then sucks the smoke up the tube quick as a gasp. Back downstairs he grabs the bottle they keep for Tilly, unscrews the cap, and puts it to his lips for a shot that fires up his face.
He gets back in bed, spinning a little now. He’s dulled the sharpness, blurred the hyperalertness, but he’s no closer to sleep. He tries to jerk off, but the strings from his brain to his cock won’t tighten.
A noise jolts him out of bed. He takes one stride and another, but then halts. It’s a goose, startled by a raccoon or possum that’s galu
mphing through the fallen pears.
He rolls a joint and goes back downstairs. He’s got to sleep. If only there were a switch he could flick off. He takes his water glass from the sink and pours in a few more swallows of Scotch and sips it on the back porch, looking out at the moonshine, white and bright on the tobacco nets.
From the couch he snags a throw pillow, sticks it under his arm and, with his glass of Scotch in one hand and the fresh joint between his fingers, walks outside wearing nothing but underpants and crosses the yard to the tractor road. The nets are beautiful in the hot night. Though there’s no perceptible wind, they shift and billow, tugging on the bailing wire, which tugs on the cedar posts—an old wooden creak to accompany the crickets.
Walking through the deep corridor of nets, each bent a room, a bedchamber, a bed curtained and canopied, dirt between his toes, sweet smoke in his lungs and hot on his tongue, smoothed over by the Scotch—what gold would taste like?—he sucks at the roach till it’s smaller than a pill, then squeezes it between his fingers and swallows it down with the last golden slug.
He sets the glass on the ground beside a post and keeps moving but after a time realizes he’s stumbling and then he’s down on his knees in the dirt. He lifts the edge of the net and crawls along the row—the fourth priming, stalks stripped up three feet with a green canopy of leaves overhead. He crawls through to the second bent, and the third, then puts the pillow down and stretches out on the cool, soft ground.
* * *
—
Cold shower, Sunday morning, scrubbing the dirt off his knees and shins and the palms of his hands. He’s dulled, yes, though not exhausted, not hungover. He slept under the nets as soundly as he’s slept in years, no idea if the fight turned violent last night.
But now they’re late for church. They’re always late for church. No bruises on his mother’s face.
Old Newgate Road Page 25
