And Give You Peace

by Jessica Treadway

  A white gauze bandage was wrapped around Justine’s left arm, below the elbow. The next day she would tell the doctor it had been an accident, cutting herself with the stone, and he would release her. “Wake up, Justine,” I told her, pinching her cheeks before Frank could stop me. “Wake up. Come on. Wake up.” The idea that I didn’t have access to her, at that moment, seemed the worst of all things to bear.

  But then the doctor came in, and he pulled me gently away from Justine. “Let me give you something,” he suggested, putting a needle in, and I spent the rest of that night sleeping beside my sister. It wasn’t until morning that we saw our mother; she had been sedated, too, and we woke up before her.

  Our mother had a bruise on her forehead. She told us that when the Delphi police came to tell her what had happened, she’d collapsed, and they hadn’t caught her before she hit her face on the door.

  But Frank told me, later, that this was a lie. (That wasn’t the word he used, but it’s what it came down to.) He’d talked to the Delphi officer, who said that when my mother understood what he had come to tell her—that Meggy was dead—she took hold of the edge of the doorway and banged her head hard against the wall. That was when she collapsed, the officer told Frank. I decided not to ask my mother about it, or even to tell Justine. In fact, I managed to forget this detail myself, until just now.

  The rest of that day and the next is unclear to me, except for a conversation I had with my friend Ruthie after the funeral. Our mother and Justine were watching TV with the Waxmans, and Ruthie and I spoke in low tones at the kitchen table. She was wearing a long T-shirt that said Take Me Drunk, I’m Home, and she had her feet up on the rung of the chair I sat in.

  “But Ana,” she kept saying, “why did this happen?” At the time I thought she was being inexplicably cruel by forcing the issue, but now, looking back, it seems more likely that she was just trying to make me focus. I think it scared her, my being so soupy. That’s the word she used. “Look at me,” she’d say, but I couldn’t; I didn’t want to recognize her or anything else.

  Much more vivid in my memory is the following night, Saturday, when Frank came to see us at the Hudson Motor Inn. My mother and Justine and I had been staying there since the deaths. Kay Lonergan had offered to put us all up, but it was hard enough going to the Waxmans’ house for the reception. We wanted to be as far away from Pearl Street as we could, until things were wrapped up and we were free to go back to my mother’s condo in Delphi. There was an inquest scheduled for Monday, and when that was over, Frank told us, they wouldn’t need us to stay in town, as long as we were—to use his word—“reachable.”

  The motel, which was located at a juncture of highways just outside town, was cheap and what Justine called cheesy: two double beds and an imitation-wood bureau with a TV bolted to one end. Our room was at the end of the first-floor row, next to the parking lot and the pool, and Justine had to turn the volume up loud to drown out the noise of kids calling, “Marco!” “Polo!” on the other side of the drapes.

  The first night we spent there, my mother asked if either of us wanted to sleep with her.

  “What?” Justine said, looking away from the bureau mirror, where she was experimenting with parting her hair on different sides of her head.

  “I mean, does anybody want to share my bed?” Mom made a what-do-you-think-I-mean gesture, putting both hands out to the side. “Somebody has to double up.”

  “We’ll take this one,” Justine said, patting the spread on the other bed. My mother said “Fine,” and I could tell she was hurt, but I was glad Justine had declared the arrangement. It was what I wanted, too.

  We’d spent the afternoon picking out headstones and what we wanted engraved on them. We ordered takeout from the motel restaurant, but only Justine ate; the rest of it went into the basket beneath the TV. Frank Garhart knocked at about eight o’clock. Standing in the doorway of the motel room, he told us what to expect. With his blond hair in a buzz cut—he’d probably been to the barber’s on his lunch hour; there were nicks on his neck—he looked like a freshly shorn von Trapp brother. And there was some of that—von-Trappness—in the way he spoke, a slightly formal lilt to his voice that I hadn’t detected before, as if afraid he might be corrected at any moment for the wrong grammar or faulty choice of words. “The coroner will ask some questions, mainly the ground we’ve already covered,” he said. “It’s pretty routine.” He held his officer’s hat in his hands, turning it over and over in the room’s sour light. My mother, supporting herself by pillows against the headboard of the near bed, looked up from her crossword puzzle and blinked. On the other bed Justine lay prone, watching a movie on HBO.

  “Get me out of here,” I said to Frank in a low voice, though I doubted my mother and sister were conscious enough to care. I followed him out to the parking lot, looking for a police cruiser. “Where’s your car?” He gestured at a beat-up Impala with a bicycle rack on the back. “Wait—you’re not on duty?” I asked, and he blushed and shook his head.

  “Just got off. I told them I’d stop over and see you folks on my way home.” He blushed again on the word “folks,” and he rubbed the back of his head, as if he thought it might be possible to mess up the neat nap of his hair. “Is there someplace in particular you want to go?” He looked as if he wasn’t sure he should be offering, but when I reached for the passenger-side door he beat me to the handle and held it open.

  I said, “Can we just drive?” From the corner of my eye, I saw that he was watching me as I tucked myself into the seat. We kept the windows down as we circled the town, and then he began taking the short roads toward its center. We traded childhood stories about the places we passed—the time I fell asleep reading Helter Skelter in one of the library’s bean-bag chairs and woke up with a shriek, thinking it was Charles Manson and not the librarian tapping my shoulder; the time he got his tongue stuck in the end of a garden hose at the Lawn Ranger. Both of us had stolen from Woolworth’s (I took a tube of Chap Stick; he managed to smuggle out an entire twelve-pack of Upper Deck baseball cards), which was a Crate&Barrel now.

  “I bet you don’t have a record, either, though,” I said to Frank, after he confessed his technique of wearing his father’s old army fatigue jacket on his shoplifting missions, the better to stash the loot. “You must have been good.”

  “Actually, they did catch me one time.” A shadow crossed his eyes and I could see that the memory pained him. “The last time. They called my father in; I guess they knew he was a cop. He asked the security guard to leave us alone in the room. The guy said, ‘Okay, but just for a minute. No rough stuff, right?’ He must have thought my dad wanted to beat me up.” Frank paused and gripped the steering wheel. We were stopped at a light.

  “Did he?”

  “Oh, God no. My father wasn’t the beating-up type. He just sat across from me in this little room and said, ‘Son, I’m disappointed.’” Frank lowered his eyes briefly and snorted a laugh without the mirth. “I wish he had hit me.”

  Something in his voice made me ask, “Is your dad still living?”

  He shook his head. “He was killed in a car crash chasing a scumbag, excuse the expression, seven years ago.”

  “Oh, yeah. God, I remember. Monica was out of school for a long time.” I thought of the first day I’d seen Monica Garhart back in the hallways, after that. She was stooped and stunned, bumping into people, and I remember thinking, This is what you look like when one of your parents dies.

  “That must have been hard,” I said after a moment. “The scumbag lived, right?”

  “Yeah.” Frank’s features hardened as he pressed the accelerator. “They got him off on a technicality. Nothing ever happened to him.”

  I looked out the window at the teenagers gathered in front of the Toll Gate Ice Cream Shoppe, where just before closing you could get two cones for the price of one. A girl in a ponytail screamed in pleasure as her boyfriend drew a streak of his soft-serve swirl down her neck, then leaned closer to lick
it off. I felt Frank’s eyes focusing on the side of my face. “But at least that was an accident,” he said. “My father. I can’t imagine what it must be like—”

  “That’s okay,” I interrupted, sticking my head out the window to get more air. It made my eyes sting and I closed them, blind in the night’s mild breeze. We drove like that for what seemed a long time, though when I finally pulled my head back in and opened my eyes to look at the clock, I saw it had been only a few minutes. My hands trembled on top of my knees.

  He pulled into a dark gas station and stopped the car. “Should I take you back?” He reached across the gap between us, his one hand fitting over both of mine, and—though I expected the opposite—I felt the shaking stop.

  I thought of the room at the motor inn where my mother and Justine would be silent as they waited to fall asleep. “Please, not yet,” I told him.

  “Then where?”

  “Do you live around here?”

  “Not far. By the post office.”

  “Can we go there?” I imagined a rented room strewn with bachelor clutter. A place where it would be easy to lose something, if you needed to.

  “You want to see where I live?” Frank took his hand away and put it back on the wheel.

  “Well. Unless you had plans.”

  “No. I just—well, yeah. Okay. We could have a beer or something, I guess.”

  Neither of us spoke again until he pulled up in front of a one-story brick house on Salisbury Avenue, cut the engine, and turned off the lights. “You live here?” I said. It was a real neighborhood, with trees and swing sets, backyard decks and roll-around grills.

  “Why not?” He got out of the car and came around to my door, but I already had it open.

  “I don’t know. It’s just so grown-up.”

  “Well. I’m a grown-up,” he said. “Don’t tell.” Although it was silly and didn’t really mean anything, I laughed. When I let it ring longer than I meant to, he lifted a finger to his lips and whispered, “Ssh—screens.”

  I nodded, feeling distant from myself and a little out of control, as if a wire had lost track of its circuit inside my brain. He’d left a light on for himself, and the door opened easily under his key. “Have a seat,” he said, switching on a lamp in the living room. There was a couch along the wall and two chairs behind the coffee table, and I chose one of the chairs. “Just let me hit the men’s room a minute,” he said, then blushed at what he’d called it. “I’ll be right back.”

  While he was gone I looked at the photographs on his mantel—there was one of him and Monica as children, laughing on a raft—and then I caught sight of an Ashmont High yearbook propping open a window on the other side of the room. I pulled the book out and let the window down, and I was looking at Frank’s senior picture when he returned clutching pilsner glasses, two opened bottles of Budweiser, and a bowl of chips. “Oh, God,” he said, when he saw what I was doing, but he smiled. In the photograph he looked smart and serious, like a young man with a plan. But there was also a drawn, gray expression around his mouth that made me see he had suffered.

  “I can’t believe you’re actually named after Frank Zappa,” I told him, setting the book on the table between us.

  He smirked a little. “Actually, that’s one of those family lies. It was really Frankie Valli. You know—’Big Girls Don’t Cry’? But by the time Zappa came on the scene, my mom was eating and sleeping rock and roll.” He poured the beers and watched the heads settle. “One of my earliest memories is of being locked accidentally in the bathroom, banging on the door, and her not being able to hear me over Sergeant Pepper. I remember crying so hard my nose bled into one of her yellow towels.” He took a sip of beer so small that he might have been tasting wine before telling the waiter to go ahead and pour. “Anyway, she started telling people she’d named me after Zappa. It made her seem younger than she was.”

  “How old was she when she had you?”

  “I think nineteen. She was a little wild back then.” He paused, considering whether to continue, or maybe just trying to imagine his mother that long ago. “She was pregnant when she met my father.”

  “What do you mean? You mean—” I stopped myself, not sure I should finish.

  Frank nodded. “My father wasn’t really my father. Oh, of course he was, just not biologically. He never knew I knew, though. I overheard my mother and my aunt talking about it when I was twelve, and my mother begged me not to tell my father I’d found out. She said it would kill him.” He lifted his beer and gave the hollow laugh again, into his glass. “In fact, she didn’t just beg me—she bought me a drum set, to keep me quiet. She didn’t have to do that.” His lips lingered at the rim and he stared beyond me, though I was sure he wasn’t aware of it. “The last thing I ever wanted to do was tell my father what I knew. Not just for his sake. Because if I didn’t tell him, and we didn’t ever say it out loud, then it might not really be true. You know what I mean?” He shook himself free of his reverie to meet my eyes, and I nodded. “God, sorry,” he said. “I’m rambling.” He held out the bowl of chips and though I wasn’t hungry, I took some.

  “No. It’s interesting,” I said. “I’m trying to think what it would be like to think all along that someone was your father, and then one day, bam, he’s not.”

  “Well, it wasn’t really like that. He was my father—the way I felt about him didn’t change.” Frank crunched deeply, leaving a piece of chip at the side of his mouth. “In fact, if you want the truth, I made myself think that my mother was lying about the whole thing, for some reason. We never talked about it again.” His tongue felt around for the errant crumb. “Of course, that makes no sense, and I know she wasn’t lying. But it was what I wanted to believe.”

  “It’s weird what people will tell themselves,” I said. He looked at me and I could tell he expected more, but I picked up my glass and drained the beer in a series of swallows. I hadn’t had anything to drink in a long time—not since graduation weekend—and right away I could feel it seep into my senses.

  “Hey, hold on.” Frank raised his eyebrows and leaned forward to take my empty glass, as if I might be planning something dangerous with it. “Take it easy, there.”

  I shrugged off the warning and picked up the yearbook again. “Was that picture taken before your father died, or after?”

  “After.” He put his own beer down carefully, using Sports Illustrated for a coaster. “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I would have guessed it, though. It’s like you look older, or something, than most people. Like you’ve been through more.” I squinted to make out his senior quote. Where others on the page had chosen Free at last or Party on! as their final words of wisdom before graduating, Frank’s selection was from Desiderata: “No doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.”

  “Do you really believe that?” I asked.

  He shifted in his seat. “Yeah. I know it sounds corny, but I guess I have to. If I didn’t think there was a reason for some of the stuff that goes on, I’d blow my brains out. Oh, God.” Immediately he leaned forward to slap his glass down, and beer spilled over. “God, Ana. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” I told him, though his words had caused beer to come back up in my throat. For a moment I was afraid I’d spew it out, but I managed to force it back down. “Let’s see,” I said, trying to make him feel better, “you were three years ahead of us, right? That means Monica and I should be back here somewhere.” I flipped through the yearbook until I came to the photographs of underclassmen, arranged alphabetically by homeroom. First I found Monica, laughing between Tammy Hummel and Erica Grenier. “She was always so popular,” I said to Frank, “your sister.”

  “I bet you were popular,” he said, but we both knew he was just trying to be nice.

  I asked for another beer, but instead Frank poured the rest of his bottle into my glass. “Take it easy,” he said again, and when I put the glass down and took hold of his fingers, like an infant grasping, he started to pull bac
k, then let me squeeze the fingers, tight, until the tips turned red. When I saw what I was doing, and that it hurt him, I loosened my grip, drew his fingers up to my lips, and kissed them with a suction sound.

  “Ana.” Frank’s voice was gentle. “I should take you home now. I mean, back to the motel.”

  “No.” Although my thoughts darted through my mind before I could catch them, I could tell that I sounded petulant as a child. This time I found his mouth and kissed him—it was more of a pressing together of closed lips, really—to keep my own mouth from shaking.

  He pulled back and took hold of my shoulders. “Ana—”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “We can’t do this.”

  “Why not?” Almost without realizing what I was doing, I joined him in his chair and was half-sitting on his lap. As I reached for the belt of his uniform pants I felt again that strange surge of electricity crinkling the folds of my skull. “Hey,” I said, touching his hip where a holster would be, “what happened to your gun?”

  He had been holding his breath, and now he let it out as he answered. “I put it in my car trunk before I went to the motel. I didn’t want to—remind you guys of anything.”

  “Like what?” I said, then laughed. Frank sat completely still, like a child afraid to make any movement in front of a growling dog.

  “That’s so sweet. That is so sweet,” I added, drawing the words out until they sounded as if they made no sense, and this must have startled Frank, because he flinched. Seeing this, I felt tears collect in a hot rush behind my eyes.

  “Oh,” Frank said. “I’m bad with crying. Please don’t cry, okay?”

  “I can’t help it,” I told him. The sobs came in shivers; it was the first time I’d cried since he told me, four days earlier, that my father and sister had died. I almost fell off the chair and he drew me closer, balancing my weight across his knees. Finally, when I couldn’t control the convulsions, the spastic movements of my body against his, he lifted me to a stand and pressed me close to him, the way you thaw something frozen by hugging it to your warmth.