“He was very polite. He even had a cup of tea.”
“So you didn’t call them.”
“I did,” her mother says. “I thought you’d want me to.”
“Good.”
“I don’t know what you think they’re going to do.”
“I don’t know either,” Annie says, “but I’m glad you called them.”
Barb says she can stay at her place tonight if she doesn’t mind sharing a bed. It’s a joke; in a way they already have. Thank God for Barb.
Work sucks. Annie gets a cracked busbox and the oil from the Caesar salad leaves a line on her shoulder. The special tonight is Maine lobster; she hates the juice and roe, the red carcasses, the scratchy legs. Mark the dishwasher feeds them into the Insinkerator, covers the hole with a plate so bits of shell don’t fly out like shrapnel. They serve dessert, and while their customers linger over Irish coffees, take a ten-minute break.
Annie and Barb go down to the loading dock for a cigarette. It’s so cold they can’t smell the dumpster, and clear, the snow on the fairway starlit. The spotlight stripes the interiors of parked cars with shadows. Even in January they’ve seen people doing it in backseats. They search a stack of milk crates for clean ones, turn two over and sit.
“Why don’t you move in with me?” Barb says, continuing a day-old conversation.
“That’s nice,” Annie says. “I don’t think I’m ready to leave the house yet. It’s weird.”
“No, it’s not.” She blows a smoke ring, pokes it with her Marlboro. “I don’t know; I think your mom’s right, you’d be safer.”
“Yeah,” Annie says, but not in agreement, more as a signal that she doesn’t want to talk about it.
A truck glides down the road, the sound of its engine trailing behind a second. It turns between the lamp-tipped pillars of the club entrance and crosses the causeway beside ten’s water hazard.
“He wouldn’t come here,” Annie says, but stands. They’re both protected by the shadow of the doorway.
Barb touches her arm. “Maybe he won’t see us. It’s probably not even him.”
“It’s him.”
The headlights reach the black edge of the clubhouse and disappear.
“Would he know to come back here?” Barb asks. She’s standing now.
“My car’s right there.”
“Let’s go inside.”
“No,” Annie says. “I’m sick of this shit.”
“I’ll go call the cops.”
“No, stay here with me. I want you to be a witness.”
The truck reappears at the far end of the lot, creeping along. It’s his. Annie steps to the rubberized edge of the dock, into the light. He brakes at her car, then keeps going. Maybe he’s seen her. If he has a gun, she’s dead. Fuck him.
“Hey!” she shouts, waving her arms over her head as if to flag down a train. “Fuck you!”
The truck turns the corner and faces them, the headlights blinding. She can see the shaggy outline of Bomber in the passenger seat. The truck stops short of the dock, sits there chugging. White exhaust pours up behind the bed.
“This is stupid,” Barb says.
The door opens and Glenn steps out. He’s carrying a package, probably the pictures her mother was talking about. “Annie.”
“You’re not supposed to be here,” she says. “Legally you’re not allowed within a hundred yards of me.”
“I’ve brought you some pictures of Tara. Your mother said you’d like them.” He walks toward the dock with the package out in front of him, gingerly, as if she’s holding a gun on him.
“I don’t want them,” Annie says.
“They’re pictures of Tara.”
“I said I don’t want them.”
“I’ll just leave them here.” He reaches the dock and lays the package at her feet, starts to back away.
“Why don’t you listen to me?” Annie says. “I don’t want them. I don’t want anything from you.” She picks the package up—it’s heavier than she thought—and flings it at him. It lands with a crunch.
Glenn stops walking backwards and looks at her.
“Let’s go inside,” Barb says, and grabs her arm.
“That is our daughter,” Glenn says, pointing to Annie. “That is our blood you’re throwing on the ground.” He turns and walks toward the truck.
Annie runs down the stairs of the loading dock, scoops up the package and charges after Glenn. He’s halfway in when she catches him. She throws the package at him and follows it with her fists, screaming, “You fucker!” The horn goes off. Glenn pushes her away, but she’s on him again, digging her nails into his face. Bomber is pulling at Glenn’s arm, growling, Glenn shouting for him to get off. Behind her, Barb is screaming, and then Annie’s head is suddenly numb and she’s flying backwards out of the cab and falling hard in the snow. He has shot her, she thinks, unsure. Heat swarms to her face, fills and overflows.
Glenn is standing over her. “I’m sorry,” he keeps saying, holding a hand to his head and turning around as if looking for help.
“You better get your ass out of here,” Barb threatens from the loading dock. “You better just leave right the fuck now.”
“Are you all right?” Glenn asks Annie.
She can’t feel her nose or her teeth, only a runniness. Something’s broken. She tries her arms and finds they still work, sits herself up. There’s blood on her uniform.
“You’re going to jail,” Annie says.
Barb calls Annie’s mother and takes her to the emergency room. Her nose isn’t broken, only some stitches in her mouth, a loose tooth. She’ll have to stick to a soft diet for a while.
“You say your ex-husband did this?” the nurse says.
“Husband,” Annie says, and has to go through another form with a policeman. Yes, she wants to file charges; no, she’s not sure where his residence is.
“Did you see him do it?” Annie asks Barb in the car.
“Not really. You just kind of dropped all of a sudden.”
“Then he only hit me once.”
“Once was enough,” Barb says.
“We should have gone inside.”
“Shit,” Barb says, “I wasn’t going to say anything.”
The next morning she wakes up and her lips are crusted. Barb is asleep on the couch downstairs. It hurts to chew the banana she has for breakfast. It hurts to drink anything. Smoking’s okay; it stings a little inhaling.
“I always thought he was an asshole,” Barb says.
“He wasn’t then,” Annie says. “He turned into one. I don’t know what happened.”
“You’re being generous when there’s no reason to be.”
They’re watching “Let’s Make a Deal” when Annie remembers all of his shit in boxes in the basement. She and Barb lug them upstairs and outside, pile them neatly in the snow at the end of the drive. She calls Glenn’s father.
“Are you all right?” he asks. “The police told us what happened. They can’t find him.”
“Then you don’t know where he is.”
“Rafe said he took off sometime last night.”
“Well, I’ve got a bunch of his stuff I can’t keep anymore, and it’s going to get snowed on if somebody doesn’t come pick it up.”
“I can come over,” his father says. “I’m very sorry about everything, we both are.”
“I know you are,” Annie says.
When he does arrive, she watches him from the window. He opens the trunk and the back doors and slowly fills the big Plymouth, from time to time glancing at the house. He seems older since she last saw him, resting a heavy box on the bumper before jerking it up and into the trunk. Halfway through the stack he’s red-faced and puffing. She’s sorry; it’s not his fault. She’d like to help him. She hopes Frank understands that she can’t.
NINE
DR. BRADY’S OFFICE was downtown, above the Hot Dog Shoppe. You had to enter the restaurant and take a left through another door, where there were mailbo
xes at the bottom of a steep and darkly shellacked staircase. The linoleum was old and bumpy underfoot. Around the rail at the top stood six closed doors, numbered plainly, as in a dream. The building was old, and as Dr. Brady brought up and I downplayed my problems, we could hear rising from the heating grate the mingled conversations and clashing dishes of the Shoppe’s patrons. From working at the Burger Hut I had learned not to trust food prepared by anyone other than myself, but the smell of grilling onions that leaked up through the floorboards tempted me, and after our session I would rumble down the stairs and scarf two chili dogs with onions and cheese.
The divorce was uncontested, legal a week after it was filed by my mother. My father was not living with another woman, but told me he was seeing one. He wanted to be honest with me, and between driving figure eights in reverse and parallel parking, he said my mother knew about her. He seemed solemn and apologetic, yet proud, as if he half resented asking my blessing.
“Has she told you anything?” he asked.
“No,” I said, not really wanting to know.
“Her name is Marcia Dolan and she works at the new Mellon Bank downtown. She has two girls, both a good deal younger than you.” He paused as if he wanted an answer from me, as if I knew who this woman was or had any opinion of her.
“Okay,” I said.
“Maybe we could have dinner sometime, the three of us.”
“Sure.”
Dr. Brady was interested in why I said yes.
“I said ‘sure,’ ” I corrected him. “It’s different.”
“Then what exactly were you communicating to your father there?”
He didn’t have to tell me I was unhappy with the situation. Everyone involved knew that. My mother’s hope was that he could tell her why finding the girl didn’t seem to bother me. Halfway through the session, his questions turned to the search, and I had to go over it step by step, substituting a cigarette for the roach.
“And when you saw her,” he asked, “how did that make you feel?”
“Afraid,” I said.
“Why?”
“She was dead,” I explained patiently.
I had to gobble the two dogs before my mother came to get me, and riding home in the Country Squire, felt them bubbling in my gut.
“Did you have a good session?” she asked.
“I guess,” I said.
“What did you talk about today?”
“The same stuff as always.”
My mother sighed, tired of my indifference. “I know you don’t like to go, but I think you need to. I can’t get you to talk with me about these things.”
“Like what,” I said, “Dad’s girlfriend?”
“Like why you’re high all the time and don’t seem to care about anyone but yourself.”
“Fuck that,” I said—just a sullen mumble—and she hit me. She flung a backhand across the front seat and caught me on the forehead.
“You don’t talk to me like that.”
I turned to the window, defiant, viciously proud that I wasn’t crying.
“I’m sorry,” she said sternly, not apologizing, and started using how bad her day had been as an excuse.
I sat there pretending not to listen. Outside, drifted snowfences protected the white fields. I was going to win this one, and knowing that let me forgive her. I really shouldn’t have said it. I could have said worse things. I could have asked about her lover. (“And why didn’t you?” Dr. Brady would say.) It was a pretty good shot, I thought. She hadn’t even looked, just lashed her arm out and whacked me.
That night Astrid called. When I got on she asked if everything was all right.
“What do you mean ‘everything’?” I asked. We hadn’t talked since I had found the girl.
“I mean you. Are you all right?”
“Yes,” I said, mindful of my mother on the couch.
“Mom says she hit you in the face.”
“Yeah.”
“She’s really upset about it.”
“Right,” I answered, as if waiting for her point.
“So will you tell her you’re okay? She’s flipping out. This is new to her. She never hit either of us before. Dad never hit us.”
“I know.”
“So tell her you’re okay, all right? Christ, every time I call it’s something new. She thinks you’re flipping out about Annie’s girl.”
“Not me,” I said.
“Is that right or are you just saying that? That’s what she’s worried about.”
“I’m fine.”
“If you are, then fine; if you’re not, pretend you are and make her believe it.”
“I am,” I said, a little hard, and my mother glanced over.
“Because if you can just hang on I will be back there in four months, but if this shit keeps up I’m going to have to take hardship leave, and I do not want to do that.”
“I wouldn’t want you to have to do that,” I taunted.
“All right,” Astrid said, “okay. Now how was Thanksgiving?”
In music and at practice after school, Warren and I bore the ridicule of our bandmates with studied apathy. The Mud Brothers, they called us, but only until the next game, when one of the smaller girl clarinetists went down spectacularly, breaking her wrist. Mr. Chervenick was psyching us up for the final home game in two weeks. It was scheduled, he kept reminding us, the day after Beethoven’s birthday, and we were working on the opening of the Fifth Symphony. Dit-dit-dit-daaa. From there we would segue into “Fanfare for the Common Man,” a favorite with both the brass and the percussion. Since the summer the band had improved musically, Mr. Chervenick said, but the tornado was a joke. He was like a coach dressing us down after a sloppy game.
“Just once before I die,” he said from his little podium, “I would like to see it done right. I don’t think you are the group that is going to do it. I would be very surprised if you were. I think you’re capable of it. Anyone is capable of it. Any one hundred and twenty-two students from this school are capable of making the tornado, but you have to want to do it. You have to want it with everything inside you. Every single one of you has to say to yourself, ‘I am going to make this happen. Me.’ Nobody else is going to do this for you. I know, I know, the football team lost its chance, but we still have ours. So are we going to be like them and blow it?”
“No!” everyone yelled. I decided I liked him when he got himself worked up.
“Or are we going to be the ones who finally do it right?”
“Yes!”
“Do we have what it takes inside?”
Warren tapped me. “What the hell is he talking about?”
I shrugged and bellowed, “Yes!”
Between practice and seeing Dr. Brady I only rode home with Lila once a week. I had seen her without her glasses. We were walking uphill in the cold when she stopped and took them off to wipe the fog from her lenses. She did not suddenly become beautiful, only more vulnerable, squinting like someone who’s just woken up. I daydreamed of inviting her over Friday night when my mother was out drinking with her friends: we would get stoned and watch TV with the lights out like all those couples in the commercials, except no one would interrupt us. Mornings, when we met at the bottom of the hill, we greeted each other formally, saying, “Lila,” “Arthur,” and alone in bed I’d hear her voice saying my name and imagine the two of us in the living room under my mother’s afghan, our clothes strewn over the floor.
I did not tell Dr. Brady any of this.
I shouldn’t have told Warren.
“She’s a mess,” he said. “I don’t know what you’re thinking, man.”
“I’m not thinking,” I said. “This isn’t something you can think about.”
“Hey, don’t jump all over me. Ask her out or something.”
“I will.”
“Yeah right,” he said.
Two days later, Lila was waiting for me at the bottom of our stairs, alone.
“Hi,” I said, startled.
&
nbsp; “Hey,” she said.
Lily was sick with the flu.
“Which means I’m going to get it next,” Lila said.
We walked along the road and into the woods. The drive had been spread with cinders and we crunched as we headed uphill. A pickup came up behind us and I followed Lila off to the left, stood on the crumbling edge of the road while the truck passed. Trudging up the hump again, neither of us said a thing, as if we needed Lily to speak to each other.
Finally I stopped. We were halfway up, in the middle of the woods. Lila went on a few steps and stopped, looking back at me.
“Want to split a cigarette?” I asked.
“Okay.” She came back warily.
I handed it to her after the first hit, careful not to lip it. I put my hands in my pockets and blew out a cloud.
“What do you say we blow off school today?” I said.
“And do what?”
“I don’t know, hang around.”
“Where?”
“Here.”
“I’ve got things I’ve got to do,” Lila said. “You know I don’t get stoned.”
“We don’t have to get stoned,” I said, but defensively; the moment had passed.
“You’ve got practice you can’t miss.” She pointed the cigarette at my case as if it were incriminating.
“Yeah. It was a dumb idea.”
She didn’t contradict me, just passed the cigarette back.
“You know what I’d like to see,” Lila said, as if we’d been discussing movies. “The Godfather, Part Two.”
“Yeah,” I said bitterly, disconsolate, “it’s downtown.”
“It’s supposed to be really good but really violent.”
“That’s what the paper said.”
“Your friend Warren said you might want to see it with me.”
I thought, simultaneously, that it was none of his business and that I could never repay him enough.
“He did,” I said, reeling. “Yes, I would. If you want to. It’s supposed to be really good.”
“I’d like to.” Lila took the cigarette from my hand, took a last drag and flicked it high out over the snow. She turned and started walking again. I thought I should have tried to kiss her, and rushed to catch up.
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