by Billy Taylor
I walked into the O’Neil Pavilion and gave my name to the woman at the desk. She made a call and said it would take a few minutes for someone to “fetch” my mother. I tried not to think about where she was being fetched from and leaned against the wall to inspect my mother’s new home.
The most surprising thing about the common area at the O’Neil Pavilion was how much it resembled a student lounge at Wheaton. All you needed was a couple of bowls of microwave popcorn and a few million dollars in trust funds, and you wouldn’t have been able to tell the two apart.
A skinny patient with bad posture and a scraggly beard looked up from the game show he was watching and stared in my direction. I turned away, but it was too late. He stood up and walked toward me with that slow, zombie-like gait I had seen on all the patients there. Normally, guys like him weren’t a problem for me, but getting kidnapped by Uncle Wonderful had thrown me off my game. I pretended to be engrossed in a brochure celebrating the benefits of hand washing, and a moment later he was standing beside me. His eyes were glazed over and bloodshot, and I half-expected him to grab my arm and take a bite out of it. I smiled, and he smiled back, revealing a mouth filled with the most disgusting yellow teeth I had ever seen.
“Hi, cuz,” he said in a slow Southern drawl.
“Uh, hi,” I said, trying not to stare at his teeth.
“Gotta smoke?”
“Sorry, I don’t smoke.”
“Then what are those for?” He pointed toward my waist.
I looked down and saw the carton of Camel Lights in my hands.
“Oh yeah, I forgot.”
I tried to open the carton, but my fingers were suddenly slippery. I glanced up and Yellow Teeth was staring at me like I was a moron. Out of frustration, I tore the carton in half and a couple of packs fell to the floor. I picked them up and tried to open one, but I couldn’t do that either.
“Just one?” Yellow Teeth asked. There were streaks of brown mixed with the yellow, and I could feel my forehead blossoming sweat. “Gotta whole carton there, cuz. One pack won’t make a diff.”
At this point, I would have handed over a kidney to make him go away. I held out a pack, and he grabbed it out of my hands in a flash. He opened the wrapper with a diamond cutter’s precision and pulled out a cigarette.
“Light?”
“Uh . . . no.”
Yellow Teeth shuffled over to the desk, and without lifting her eyes from the paperback in her hands, the nurse raised a disposable lighter on a chain and lit his cigarette. He took a long drag, blew the smoke at a No Smoking Past This Point sign, and sauntered back to his game show like I no longer existed.
Anger shot up my spine, and I glared at the nurse with such intense hatred I thought I might burst into flames. Didn’t she see that a dangerous psychopath had just forced me to hand over an entire pack of my mother’s cigarettes? Why hadn’t she tried to stop him? I turned back toward the lounge and was surprised to see that Yellow Teeth was at least two inches shorter than me. It didn’t make sense. Seconds earlier, he had seemed like an evil giant. I felt lame and embarrassed and in no condition to see the woman I’d run away from almost four years earlier. Needless to say, this was the precise moment an orderly brought my mother through the door.
The first thing I noticed was how much weight she had lost. Fifty pounds at least. It looked like she’d been hit by a bus. Grooming and fashion were never my mother’s top priorities, but she looked worse than I thought possible. Her hair was gray and slumped to one side, her fingernails were bitten to nothing, and her eyes were glazed over and red. But what really freaked me out was the way she moved. For as long as I could remember my mother bounded into every room with complete confidence, but now, as she shuffled toward me, it was like she was afraid the floor was going to collapse beneath her feet. What had happened to her?
“Sonny,” she slurred. “C’meeeere and give your mother a hug.”
I did as I was told, and it was like hugging an ashtray. Then she tickled my ear like she did when I was a little boy, and my defenses broke down and I felt terrible in a hundred different ways, but mostly because I had doubted she was ill. From the moment Uncle Wonderful appeared in my room, I’d been waiting for the scam to present itself. Except this was no scam. It was my mother, and she was sick.
She broke our hug and stepped back to take a look at me.
“Goodness, Sonny, you’re all grown up. And look at that hair.”
I ran a hand through my sloppy locks. “You like it?” I asked.
“I like everything about you. Want to go outside?”
“Sure.”
“Okay, but you have to sign me out first.”
We went to the desk, and my mother introduced me to Valerie, the evil nurse who’d allowed Yellow Teeth to steal my cigarettes. It turned out Valerie was actually quite nice and seemed to care for my mother a lot. So much for first impressions. She asked if I had any matches, and when I said that I didn’t, she offered me a book if I promised not to let my mother keep them when I left.
“It’s not like I don’t trust her,” she assured me. “But it’s a rule, and I don’t want anyone getting in trouble.”
“I understand.”
As we walked toward the exit my mother whispered, “Valerie’s in the middle of a nasty divorce, and her soon-to-be-ex-husband is a total piece of dog doo. He’s got this hotsy-totsy girlfriend and is always late with her child support payments. I told her to get a post office box and have all his mail delivered there. She’s already taken out two lines of credit and applied for three credit cards in his name. Just watch, we’ll have that SOB bankrupt in no time.”
“That’s really kind of you, Ma, helping out a poor divorcee like that.”
“We girls have to stick together.”
I reached for the door, and the automatic lock buzzed before my hand even touched the handle. I nodded thanks to Valerie, and out of the corner of my eye spotted Yellow Teeth clutching his pilfered pack of Camel Lights.
“Just a second,” I said, and strolled back to the lounge. I held up a half carton of cigarettes and said, “Hey, buddy, you want these?”
Yellow Teeth’s eyes grew wide and he stood up. “Sure thing, cuz.”
I held out the carton with one hand, and when he reached for it I grabbed the pack of cigarettes from his fingers with the other.
“Hey,” he shouted. “Those were mine!”
“No, they weren’t,” I said with a smile. “You only borrowed them.”
6
UNCLE WONDERFUL PICKED ME UP AN HOUR LATER. I DIDN’T bother asking where he’d been because he would have lied about it.
“She looked good,” I said as we drove down a suburban street.
“She looks like crap.”
“I mean, yeah, but still . . .”
“But still what?”
“I don’t know. I’m still trying to process it all.”
“What’s to process? You broke her heart, and she tried to kill herself. End of story.”
“You can’t blame that on me,” I said. “It’s been almost four years since I left. There’s no way it’s my fault.”
“You think so, huh? Well, think again.”
We pulled up to a small gray house with a dried-up hydrangea bush in the front yard, and Uncle Wonderful turned off the engine.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“Go inside and see for yourself. The key’s under the mat.”
“No way,” I said. “I’m not breaking into somebody’s house for you. I’m through with all that.”
“It’s not somebody’s house. It’s your house.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked. “I don’t own a house.”
“Technically it belongs to your mother, but she bought it for you.”
I turned to take a closer look. The house had brown shutt
ers, white window shades, and a green mailbox with the name O’Rourke spelled out in gold press-on letters. It looked real. It looked like a home.
“I don’t believe you,” I said. “My mother’s never owned a house in her life.”
“You’ve been away for a long time, Skip.”
Uncle Wonderful was right about that, and now things were happening way too fast. One second I was at Wheaton watching Claire drive into the sunset, and the next I was back on Long Island staring at a house with my name on the mailbox. I needed time to catch my breath.
“The code for the alarm is nine-eight-eight-nine,” he said. “And there’s a car in the garage with the keys in the ignition. It’s all legit. Or at least legit enough to pass inspection. You know how to get back to Shady Oaks from here, right?”
“Sure,” I replied, unable to take my eyes off the house.
“Visiting hours are nine to eleven in the morning and five to nine at night. I’ve got things to do tomorrow morning, but I’ll drop by around six and I expect to see you there.”
I climbed out of the car and walked toward the house. My house.
“Oh, and Skipper.”
“Yeah?”
“Welcome home.”
• • •
The key was under the mat just like he said it would be, and the code for the alarm really was 9889. If it wasn’t my house, at least Uncle Wonderful’s information was accurate. Then I turned on the lights and couldn’t believe what I saw. The room was like a mash up of every apartment where my mother and I had lived. On the right was the couch from the Dover Hills apartments where I used to watch SpongeBob SquarePants, and next to that was the end table from the Carlton Arms where I used to do my math homework. It didn’t seem possible, so I got down on my hands and knees and inspected the underside of the table. Sure enough, there was the picture of a mad scientist I’d drawn with a purple crayon back when I was eight years old.
“Where did all this stuff come from?” I asked aloud as I climbed back to my feet. With the exception of a nineteen-inch SONY Trinitron we stole from a Circuit City in Patchogue (watch the loading dock long enough and someone’s bound to get sloppy) my mother and I never took anything substantial with us when we moved. Some clothes, my books, and the Trinitron, and that was pretty much it. Yet, here was all this stuff I knew like the back of my hand. It felt like some crazy dream.
Except it wasn’t a dream. It was my life.
I was thirsty and more than a little freaked out, so I went into the kitchen for something to drink. I was about to open the refrigerator when my arm froze. The entire appliance was covered, top to bottom, with artwork from my childhood. Finger paintings, connect the dots, silhouettes—it was all there. Even the little sculpture I’d made from seashells and rocks in Miss Shanley’s third grade art class. My throat felt funny, and I didn’t know whether to laugh, cry, or run.
I left the kitchen and walked to the bedroom where it got even worse. Every badge, ribbon, and award I’d ever won was hanging on the wall. They were all for second and third place because I didn’t want to stand out, but they were all mine. As was the shelf of textbooks I’d stolen from the dozens of schools I’d attended. The rest of my stuff was there, too—Game Boys, LEGOs, Transformers, even my Tony Hawk skateboard with the personally autographed deck. Out of curiosity, I pulled back the bedspread and, sure enough, my Star Wars sheets were on the bed. It made no sense.
And yet it made perfect sense. Uncle Wonderful had obviously gone back to the apartments where my mother and I had lived and cleaned them out after we had left. My family had a vast collection of storage lockers all over Long Island filled with things they had stolen, and the stuff that I was now looking at—the memories, relics, and achievements of my childhood—was simply garbage they couldn’t sell.
I wandered back into the living room and noticed a bag from the Gap on a chair. I yanked it open and saw it was filled with shirts, jeans, and socks. This must have been Uncle Wonderful’s contribution to my homecoming. The “guy” he went to see while I was at Shady Oaks was the Gap. I couldn’t figure out how he knew my sizes until I remembered he’d been in my dorm room back at school. Luckily, the only stuff I cared about were the pictures of Claire on my laptop and my favorites were backed up on the school’s server. I had a momentary flash of panic when I thought of Uncle Wonderful getting on to my computer, but then I remembered he was so technically inept he needed a forty-page instruction manual just to change a lightbulb.
Thinking of my dorm room made me think of Claire. So much had happened since I’d last seen her, and I wanted to tell her everything. Except I couldn’t. Cam Smith—the boy she knew, loved, and occasionally threw snowballs at—was still at Wheaton. Or at least I hoped he was still at Wheaton. I’d been gone only a few hours, but I could already feel my family’s icy fingers slipping into my brain as they tried to drag me back into their world.
I pulled out my phone to call Claire, but when I went to dial there was a No Service icon flashing. Weird. I looked around for a landline, but there wasn’t one, and I walked outside to get better cell service.
Still nothing.
It was too late to visit a Verizon store, so I went back in the house and pretended not to be too freaked out by the surroundings. There was some bologna and Sunny D in the fridge, and I was about to make myself a sandwich when someone pounded on the front door.
“Open up!” they shouted. “It’s the police!”
My weasel muscle memory clicked into high gear, and I looked around for an escape route. My first thought was to race out the back door and not stop running until I reached Wheaton. It was only a few hundred miles away, and if I took breaks for just food and water I could make it by the end of vacation. I dove on the floor and crawled across the living room rug. The police usually posted an officer at the back door during a raid, but maybe I’d get lucky.
I didn’t see anyone outside and was about to make a run for it when the person at the front door shouted, “C’mon, Skip, we know you’re in there. Stop screwing around and open up.”
“Oh, for crying out loud,” I said, climbing to my feet. I went to the front door and opened it to reveal my cousin, Roy, and his sidekick, Vinny.
“Busted!” Roy said, barging into the house. “I knew you were in here playing Hungry Hungry Hippos.”
“I would have been, but I was too busy trying to escape from the police.”
“I can’t believe you fell for that,” Roy said. “What are you? Six years old?”
“I’m just out of practice.”
“That’s right. Dad said he found you living the good life in some fancy school upstate. I hear rich girls are crazy wild.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
Roy punched my arm and even though he had the physique of a stalk of celery it still hurt like hell. “That’s right,” he said. “You always were an altar boy. Yo, Vinny, remember the time Saint Skip over here found that twenty-dollar bill outside Hero Palace and gave it to the guy behind the counter in case somebody came back looking for it?”
“Like it was yesterday, bro.”
“So, what are you ladies up to?” I asked.
“We’re celebrating,” Roy replied.
“Celebrating what?”
“My disability came through,” Vinny said with a grin.
“You don’t look disabled,” I said.
Vinny put a finger to his lips and smiled. “Ssh, don’t tell anyone.”
7
A FEW MINUTES LATER I WAS SLUMPED IN THE BACK OF Vinny’s Hummer H2 as Roy cranked up some hip-hop, and Vinny pretended to be a tank commander. The music obliterated all possibility of conversation, which was fine by me considering how awkward it felt hanging out with my cousin again. Roy was only a few years older than me, but he was like a brother and father all rolled up in one larcenous package. It was Roy who had taught me how to fight, how to d
rive, and how to throw a football. We hung out together at family functions and broke into houses together as kids. We were thick as thieves because that’s exactly what we were. And then we weren’t, but Roy didn’t seem to notice. He was as loyal as a puppy, and when I ran away I probably broke his heart as much as my mother’s.
“This thing drives like a truck,” Roy shouted.
“That’s because it’s a freaking military assault vehicle,” Vinny said, lowering the music. “All you need is a little body armor and an AK-47 and you could drive this bad boy straight through Baghdad.”
Roy laughed and ran a hand through his thick black hair. “And that really means something coming from a guy who’s never left the tristate area.”
“Eat me. Just because you snuck into Canada once for an Oilers game doesn’t make you an international man of mystery.”
“I’m the most mysterious person in this vehicle, that’s for damn sure.”
“Oh yeah? What about our friend in the backseat?” Vinny turned to face me. “So, Skip, why’d you take off? Your boys back on the South Shore not good enough for you?”
“No,” I said. “That wasn’t it.”
“Then what was it?” Roy asked. “What was so important that you had to dump your friends and family like a bucket of dead fish?”
I didn’t know what to say. Of all the people in the world Roy should have known the answer to that question. Except he didn’t. Because unlike me, Roy had never grown a conscience. From the moment he was born, my cousin was happy to steal anything and everything he could carry. He was the son my mother never had.
“It’s complicated,” I said, trying to explain it in a way Roy would understand. “I guess I wanted to feel like a regular person for a while.”
“And how did that work out for you?”
“Okay, I guess.”
