One Hit Wonder

by Charlie Carillo

  Lynn never got in touch with anybody in the family. While the Captain was breathing, it just could not happen. She was living outside Boston when she read about the death of the Burning Angel in a local newspaper.

  At long last, it was time to come home. And by the time she got there, her mother had suffered a debilitating stroke.

  No wonder that old prick never wanted me around. No wonder poor old Ruth never had a relaxed moment in her life. No wonder every fucking thing in the whole wide world.

  By the end of the tale the whiskey bottle is empty.

  “Some story, huh, Mick?”

  I’m shivering. My teeth are actually chattering.

  “Forgiveness!” Lynn cries to the sky. “Remember how he told you he forgave me, that time you pushed him up the ramp? Wonder if he meant for running away, or shoving him down the stairs.”

  “He didn’t say.”

  “The hell with him, either way.” Her eyes narrow. “I’m having my mother cremated. She’s not lying next to that bastard through eternity.”

  The fog I’ve lived in for all these years has burned away at last, and now I have to ask myself how I like the light, because what it reveals is the only woman I’ve ever loved, curled hard upon herself on that stoop, like one of those armored bugs that rolls up into a ball when you touch it. Lynn’s forehead touches her knees and she’s hugging her legs, like a child about to do a cannonball off a diving board.

  “You did the right thing, Lynn,” I say. “You did the only thing you could do.”

  “No, I didn’t. I meant to kill him. It would have worked out a lot better if I’d killed him. I didn’t mean to trap my mother behind his wheelchair for nineteen years.”

  “Did she know what you did?”

  “Only you know, Mickey. Only you will ever know.”

  I try to swallow, but my throat is dry. “At least he never…you know…”

  “Mickey, it’s not about penetration. It’s about my own father wanting me that way. My daddy…”

  Now, at last, I know everything about the woman I love, and suddenly the words of a woman I never loved leap to my mind. It’s advice from Rosalind Pomer, who told me just what to do in the situation I find myself in now.

  Love her like a man, not a boy.

  What would a man do? He’d fight to make things right. I’m ready to try.

  “Lynn. You are not destroyed.”

  I’m not sure she even hears me. I slide over and wrap my arms around her. She allows it but continues to hug herself, and now she’s shivering, too, a violent shiver. It’s like she’s being electrocuted.

  “I tried to kill my father.”

  “He deserved it.”

  “But I messed up. Instead I destroyed what was left of my mother’s life, and my own.”

  “You are not destroyed! I won’t allow it. You hear me? I will not allow it!”

  She lifts her head to look at me as if I’m on a lifeboat she hasn’t got the strength to climb aboard. Her eyes are wide, wide open, hiding nothing, as they were the very first time I ever saw her, when she opened the front door to pay the nervous newspaper boy.

  “You should have kids, Mickey,” she whispers. “You’d be a good father, just like Eddie. I can’t give you that.”

  “Well, it’s funny you should say that, Lynn. Very funny.”

  The time has come. I show her the photo of Aaron. In the light of the outdoor porch lamp she studies it in wonder. I tell her all about him, and his mother, and my wild, crazy plan for the three of us. Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it’s not such a wild, crazy thing to do. Maybe it’s the only thing to do.

  Lynn takes in the whole story, and by the time I finish I see that there’s a spark in her eye. She’s coming back to life. She’s going to be okay. We are going to be okay.

  “Lynn? You with me, baby?”

  “Are you sure you want me to be…you know…”

  “His mother? Of course I do.”

  She stares at the photo for what seems like weeks. Then she shakes her head.

  “Know what’s funny, Mickey?”

  “What’s that?”

  She swallows, chokes back a sob. “He has my eyes.”

  She collapses in my arms exhausted, relieved, spent. There are no more secrets to carry, no more mysteries. Despite all that’s happened, it’s going to be all right. I believe it. She believes it.

  And anybody with a reason not to believe it is dead.

  We go back into the house. The living room is really chilly now, with a night wind blowing straight through from window to window. The stink of gasoline is gone. Lynn shivers with the cold.

  “Mickey. We have to make a fire.”

  My heart sinks. “Lynn. Please. We can’t torch this house.”

  “No, no. We’re going to sell this house, and use the money for the things we’re going to do.” She swallows, shudders with a final fear.

  “But we’ve got to burn that ramp. Can we do that? Can we burn it all up tonight, and forget about it forever?”

  We can sure as hell try.

  I go back outside and start pulling it apart. The ancient nails have dissolved into rust lines and the rotted planks break easily over my knee. Back in the house Lynn crumples up sheets of newspaper and lines the bottom of the fireplace with it, and piece by piece we burn up that lousy ramp.

  It doesn’t take long. The stuff ignites like kindling. It’s a loud, fierce blaze, and every crackle is like the cry of a dying ghost. Soon the last of it is in the fireplace, burning away. There’s just one more thing to do.

  “Go ahead, Mickey.”

  I don’t need to be told what to do next. I lift the Captain’s photo off the mantel and set it flat on the blaze, back side down. The flames curl around the edges of the frame and then the glass cracks, and the image of that monster burns up like an autumn leaf. Then I do the same thing with the Burning Angel photograph.

  At last the fire stops roaring, calms down into a red-glowing pile of embers that’ll die out by dawn. I put the screen in front of the fireplace and turn to Lynn, who’s actually fallen asleep on the couch. It’s been one hell of an exhausting exorcism.

  I lift her in my arms and head for the stairs. I think I’m going to like being a man.

  She opens her eyes, surprised but not startled to see that she is being carried.

  “I love you, Mickey.”

  The words I’d been dying to hear…for a moment they make me weak at the knees. I have to pause and gather my strength before continuing the trip upstairs.

  “Well,” I say, “it’s about time.”

  “But, baby, I don’t think I’m ready to express it just yet.”

  “Good. Neither am I. Let’s just fall asleep. That’s what old married couples do.”

  She giggles. “Is that what we are?”

  “That’s exactly what we are. We’ve been married since we first set eyes on each other. There’s just been this twenty-year delay to the honeymoon.”

  “Can we take your boy to Italy some day?”

  “Sure we can.”

  “I want to see his face when he sees the Sistine Chapel.”

  “I want to see your face when you see it.”

  We strip down and cuddle like children, back to back. She falls asleep first, and then it’s my turn. But sometime in the middle of the night she reaches for me, or maybe I reach for her, or maybe we reach for each other.

  Anyway, it happens. It finally happens the way it’s supposed to happen, as naturally as a tide coming in.

  And just like that, I understand why I always got lousy grades in math, right from the first grade. The teacher always used to insist that one plus one is two, but I knew better. If you’re one of the lucky ones, one plus one is One.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  The next day I called Belachek the private eye. He grabbed the phone on the first ring, and when he realized it was me he laughed out loud.

  “Hey, good news, kid! You’re off the hook.”

 
My stomach began churning. “I don’t understand.”

  “The envelope, please! The results are in, and…the child is not yours! You can breathe easy, my friend.”

  I could barely breathe at all. “Wait, wait…what are you saying?”

  “I’m saying you are not the boy’s daddy. And I apologize for any distress this matter may have caused you.”

  My tongue tasted salty. I had to swallow before I could speak. “Who’s the father?”

  Belachek chuckled. “God only knows. And I got a feeling that God’s the only one who’ll ever know.”

  It was the second-worst news of my life, next to Lynn Mahoney running away from home. It was unacceptable news. I could not accept it. I would not accept it.

  “Could the test be wrong?”

  “The test?”

  “Yeah, I mean…Sharon said I was the father, right?”

  “Well, she was wrong. Wishful thinking on her part, is my best guess. You know.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Figure it out. This Benny clown dumps her, she goes a little crazy. Sleeps around for a while, has a few flings…kinda thing that’s out of character for a woman like her, you know? Compared to the other candidates, your genetic matter must’ve looked pretty good to her. So when she had to pick a father, she picked you.”

  In his smarmy way, Belachek was calling her a slut. I couldn’t have that. This was the child’s mother he was talking about, my child’s mother.

  “You’re way off base, man. She wasn’t like that.”

  “You’re defending her?”

  “She’s not around to defend herself, you shithead!”

  I was taking it out on the wrong guy. Belachek was just doing his stinking job, and I wasn’t doing much to keep his friendship.

  He was quiet for a moment, gathering himself.

  “Hey. Mr. DeFalco. What’s goin’ on here? You should be dancin’ in the street!”

  “Who else knows about this?”

  “I got the results five minutes ago. You’re the first to know. By law, I gotta tell you first.”

  I shut my eyes, said a fast prayer to whoever might have been listening.

  “Mr. Belachek,” I all but whispered, “please don’t tell anyone else. I want that child.”

  There was absolute silence on the phone for what seemed like hours. I thought maybe we’d been disconnected, but then Belachek’s voice came through, soft and clear.

  “This,” he said, “is too fuckin’ weird.”

  Suddenly he wasn’t a private eye, he was a parish priest, and I was confessing everything to him. I told him about Lynn, how she was my real-life inspiration for “Sweet Days,” the most amazing human being I’d ever known.

  I told him how she’d broken my heart and run away and now I had her back at last, but we couldn’t have kids of our own.

  Belachek listened, sighed, and chuckled once again, a very different kind of chuckle from the first one.

  “This is a new one,” he said. “Tell you the truth, I don’t know what the hell to do now.”

  But I knew what to do, absolutely and positively, for maybe the first time in my ridiculous life.

  “Look. Your job was to find me, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Which you did. The DNA test was for my sake, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Does anybody else even know about the DNA test?”

  “Just you and me.”

  “It never happened.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I never agreed to it. You never took my cheek cells. Tear up those test results. Burn down the lab, if you have to. Do what you gotta do.”

  I was rolling, now, like a manhole cover down a steep hill. Nobody and nothing could stop me….

  “You found me, and you told me I was Aaron’s father, and I believed you. No reason not to believe you. I had unprotected sex with Sharon on the boat, and she got pregnant. End of story. Now I’m ready to assume full responsibility for my child.”

  I laughed out loud with a surge of gleeful hope. “It’s in the stars, man! And Lynn…Jesus, man, Lynn will be the best mother any kid could have. I swear it on my soul, if I even have a soul anymore….”

  I ran out of words. My sales pitch was done. It would work, or it wouldn’t. I could hear Belachek breathe, each breath a little less jagged than the previous one, until at last his breathing evened out. He’d come to a decision. I got down on my knees, shut my eyes, and squeezed the phone to my ear until my cheek throbbed.

  “You’re rewriting history, you realize,” Belachek said.

  “Yeah, well, these particular pages of history could use a little polish. I can live with it if you can.”

  Belachek was quiet, long enough for a drumroll that was actually the hammering of my heart.

  “Mickey,” he whispered, “we both gotta go to our graves with this, you hear what I’m sayin’?”

  Victory. I started to cry, fought to control my voice. “I hear you, Mr. Belachek. Right to the grave.”

  “I mean, you can’t even tell your wife.”

  “She’s not my wife yet, but that won’t be a problem. After I hang up this phone, I won’t even tell myself what we both know.”

  I got to my feet, knees throbbing. It was all settled. Belachek chuckled for the last time.

  “Man, this is a first in my business,” he said. “A guy in the middle of a paternity rap who actually wants to raise a stranger’s child. Who’da believed it?”

  “Hey, Mr. Belachek. Don’t you get it? Everybody’s a stranger’s child. Nobody really knows anybody in this fucked-up world. But God damn it to hell, there sure is nobility in the attempt, isn’t there?”

  It took him a moment to reply. I think he was stunned by what I’d said.

  “Yeah,” he agreed at last, “yeah, I guess you’re right about that, kid.”

  “Stop calling me ‘kid.’ I’m a father now.”

  I had to go back on my word to Belachek. Lynn and I couldn’t have secrets anymore. Lousy secrets had kept us apart for twenty years. I waited until we were packing up her stuff.

  “Lynn, listen. It turns out I’m not the baby’s father.”

  She set down an armload of clothes, sat down on the bed as if the bones in her legs had dissolved.

  “Oh, God. Well. I guess this changes everything.”

  “No. Everything’s the same. We still get the baby, because nobody knows who the biological father is.”

  I explained the logistics of what I’d gone through with Belachek, and the deal we’d cut. She looked at me in disbelief. She was either thinking I was crazy, or wonderful, or maybe both.

  “Mickey. Are you sure this is all right with you?”

  “It’s better than all right.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “It’s a perfect balance now. The baby’s not mine, and he’s not yours. He’s ours.”

  She looked at me as if she believed it, got to her feet, and fell into my arms as if she had no plans of ever letting go.

  Listen to me when I tell you that I am a man who has certainly known sweet days.

  Once the wife of a Beverly Hills record producer gave me a diamond-studded watch, just for singing my song at her teenage daughter’s Sweet Sixteen party. A few days later I went on tour and carelessly left the watch in some hotel room.

  What was it worth? Ten, maybe fifteen grand? Didn’t matter. Whatever its value, I couldn’t be bothered to backtrack and search for it under seat cushions. I didn’t even phone the hotel to ask about it. Whoever found it could keep it, as far as I was concerned.

  And why? I’ve thought about that. Close as I can figure, it was because backtracking would have been like returning to the past, and that’s where Lynn lived, and that was too painful a place to visit.

  So I lunged forward, ever forward, even as the sweet days grew sour and I wound up a homeless man on a beach. I’d hit rock bottom.

  One good thing about hitting bottom�
�if you’ve still got any heart left, you can push off and swim back to the top.

  It’s my last day in Little Neck, our last day in Little Neck. We’re off to a town in the Berkshire mountains, where Lynn lived just before coming home to take care of her mother. There’s a stream in the woods where she wants to dump Ruth’s ashes. We’ll find an apartment, and for the first few months I’m going to look after the baby while Lynn gets her old job back at a local bank.

  Just two days earlier I’d gotten a letter, the one and only piece of mail that came to me during my weeks in Little Neck. The return address was a law firm on West Forty-third Street. I opened it reluctantly, because letters from lawyers rarely spelled good news for me, but this one was different.

  Dear Mickey,

  You told me not to get involved in this matter, but an obedient lawyer is a useless lawyer, as far as I’m concerned. I’ve done a little digging and it seems to me that the contract you signed when you sold the rights to “Sweet Days” has a couple of holes in it. I’m going to see if I can make those holes bigger. No charge, my friend. Give me a call in a month or two. I should know something by then. Hope it worked out with that woman. You never did tell me her name, did you?

  Sincerely,

  Rosalind Pomer, Attorney at Law

  It’s Lynn, Rosalind. Lynn Ann Mahoney.

  Lynn’s mother had a rusty red Dodge Dart that nobody had driven in years. Steady Eddie DeFalco has given it a real thorough once-over—points, plugs, the works—and a set of new tires, to boot. That’s his going-away present. It should make it all the way to that town in Massachusetts where little Aaron is waiting to be picked up by his parents.

  On moving day the car is loaded with two suitcases (her stuff), one green duffel bag (my stuff), and her mother’s ashes, in a plain gray can.

  “Let’s get the hell out of here, Mickey.”

  “Got to stop and say good-bye to my parents.”

  “Of course.”

  I drive to Glenwood Street. The car rides well. Steady Eddie knows his stuff. It’s Saturday, not yet eight in the morning, but I know I won’t be waking anybody as I pull up at the house and beep the horn.

  My parents come outside to say good-bye. They are going to deal with Eileen Kavanagh and the sale of the Mahoney house, which is going on the market as a “fixer-upper” and a “handyman special.” They promise to come and visit their grandson. As far as they know, he is their biological grandson. As far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t matter who his father is. Lynn and I are his parents. That’s all there is to it, and it’s as much of a truth as there is in this world.