by John Searles
“I was at her funeral, Leon. You could have tried to tell me another time.”
“Okay, but then you were gone, and that money was just sitting in my drawer staring at me.”
“I was only gone for a month.”
“But I didn’t know that. Christ, the way the paper made it sound, you were dead in a ditch or something. When you showed up at the bus station and I brought you here, I realized I fucked up. Why do you think I’ve been coming around like Santa Claus every friggin’ day?” Leon stopped and touched his lip again. That piece of torn tissue. He sighed. “I’ll drive you to New York in the morning. Then I’ll sell the car. I’ll pay you back every last dime.”
“Just be here at seven,” I said again, not ready to forgive him or to strike a deal.
After he was gone, Jeanny looked at the back of my head. “Are you all right?” she asked.
“Yeah, I’m fine.”
“Dominick, no, you’re not. You’re bleeding.” She took one of Sophie’s diapers and pressed it to my head, then held it in front of my face. The thing had a spot of blood in the center as red as that fish in the pond. “It’s actually not too big of a cut,” she said once the blood was wiped away. She took one of those cold cans of Dr Pepper and pressed it to my head to stop the swelling.
“Some birthday party,” I said and flopped back on the bed, feeling the weight of my head. A serious migraine coming on.
As I stared up at the eleven remaining balloons—the survivors, as Jeanny had called them—my mind filled with a picture of that day Edie left Holedo. I saw the scene unfold in my mind as if I were watching it like one of those balloons watching me. The way I imagined it, Edie pulled up in front of my apartment in her white Cadillac, that man I didn’t know at the wheel, the trunk stuffed and heavy with her belongings. She looked around, nervous, checking to make sure my father’s truck was nowhere in sight. When she felt sure he wasn’t there, she got out of the car. The man who was with her offered to go up to my door for her, but she refused.
“I’ll be right back,” she said to him.
She walked up the stairs with her hands holding her swelled stomach and knocked. As she waited, she bit at her broken, once-beautiful nails. Kept watching to make sure my father didn’t show. No one answered, of course. I was in New York. My mother was off with Roget. My father wasn’t home yet from his extended trip. Edie knocked and knocked, then finally turned back toward the car. That’s when she spotted Leon somewhere. Maybe right there at the bottom of the stairs.
“Hey, there,” she said, piecing together who he was from the few things I’d told her about him. “You must be Dominick’s friend Leon. Right?”
“That’s me,” Leon said, taking note of her pregnant stomach and wondering what in the world Edie Kramer was doing rapping at my door.
She walked down the stairs, one hand on the railing, the other on her belly again. At that very moment Sophie was probably preparing to be born. Kicking and squirming. Shifting into position. Edie may have even felt a cramp just then, before she said, “Can I ask you a huge favor?” uncertain of what else to do.
Leon shrugged. “Sure.”
“It’s very important that I get this envelope to Dominick. But he’s not home, and I have to run. If I leave it with you, do you promise to give it to him the moment he comes home?”
“Okay,” Leon said, already planning to rip open the envelope the second she left, for no other reason than to bust my balls. Only he had no idea what he was about to find. That envelope was like a prize from Bob Barker himself. A washer and dryer. A shiny blue car behind a shimmering gold curtain. The price was right.
I saw Edie’s hand put the envelope in his. She squeezed his fingers closed around it, and Leon loved her touch, the way I had, even if she was pregnant. “Make sure,” Edie said before walking off. “It’s very important.”
As my mind blurred around the image of Edie driving away toward New York City, I removed that can of Dr Pepper from the back of my head. The bleeding seemed to have stopped.
Jeanny had put Sophie to bed, and she stretched out next to me. It was our last night together. I didn’t want to think about Edie or Leon anymore. As difficult as it was, I mustered up all my energy and forced myself to put that bullshit out of my mind so I could concentrate on her. The most important person in my life at the moment. When I turned toward Jeanny, though, her eyes looked heavy, weighed down by sadness.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
“What?” I said.
“I guess as much as I’m glad that you’ve decided to take Sophie back, I’m also going to miss our time here.”
I pulled her close to me and felt my body responding the way it always did next to hers. That heat. That tightening in my chest. I didn’t kiss her, but my lips were close enough to hers that I could have. “Me, too,” I told her.
We lay there looking into each other’s eyes. My hand traced the curve of her hip up past her tickle of ribs to the soft skin of her neck. The feel of her body made the ache in my head fade away just enough for me to feel comfortable again. I thought back to that first night with Jeanny in the motel and remembered how uncertain I’d been about being ready for more with her. But I knew now that I was. And something told me she felt the same.
This was all I said: “Do you want to?”
Shy for once, Jeanny simply nodded.
Yes.
I took her hand, and we stood, walked through those closets into the next room. Any leftover shock that might have remained in the air from our unwanted visitors had gone, and it felt like our place again.
Nobody else’s.
To be safe, I locked the front door before lying out on the bed beside Jeanny. We stayed there for a long while, just being with each other. Then I lifted Jeanny’s hair and kissed the back of her neck. Made an invisible necklace of kisses all the way around her. Put my tongue against her ear and licked at the curves, down into the darkness of her, tasting her salty skin. In a way I felt grateful to Edie for that night she had let me kiss her, because I realized I had to keep control, not to let go before I could enjoy this and Jeanny could, too.
My body relaxed into the moment, and I held on.
I tugged Jeanny’s shirt over her shoulders and unsnapped those baggy jeans she was wearing. Stood at the foot of the bed. Slid them off her. Started to undress myself, but she wanted to do it for me.
Slowly.
Carefully.
Unlike the way I felt with Edie, I wasn’t embarrassed about my body. An easiness filled me as I stood there in front of Jeanny. And when I was completely naked, she kissed my bare chest, and my mouth went dry.
I let my body decide what to do next.
Gently my hands pushed Jeanny back onto the bed as she stared up at me. My knees knelt on the edge of the mattress. My palms pressed against her breasts. My mouth moved between them, kissing the hard bones of her chest. Jeanny arched herself, lifting her smooth stomach so that I could run my hands along the front of her, down past her belly button. My fingers slipped inside her. I found myself short of breath and wanting more air. The look on Jeanny’s face was sweet and daring, her eyes glued to mine the whole while I touched her. Until finally I pulled my fingers away and put my lips and tongue between her legs. Kissed her there. Tasted her. I stopped to look at her face, and her eyes were still watching me, wanting more, so I kept going, and she made the slightest of sounds.
A breathy exhalation that sounded like relief.
A sudden high-pitched crinkle of her voice that came every few seconds.
I loved every moment of this, and I wanted Jeanny to love it, too.
Her hands stroked my hair, staying clear of that cut from the dresser, until I pulled my mouth away and moved up next to her on the pillow again. I whispered these words: “I think I’m in love with you.”
Jeanny pressed her mouth to my ear and said, “I think I’m in love with you.”
After a while of staying just like t
hat, I told her about the pack of Trojans Ed had given me courtesy of Leon that first night. “So I have some in the other room,” I said, a bit nervous about it still. “But I don’t want you to think I’ve been planning this whole thing from the start.”
“I know about them,” Jeanny told me and smiled just a little. “I don’t think I’ll forget the look on your face when he put them in your hand.”
“You knew?” I said.
She nodded yes. “I pretended to be busy with the baby to spare us both.”
We laughed, and I kissed her. Kissed her again.
I went into the next room, those balloon ribbons brushing my shoulders as I walked. Knelt by the bed and dug out the box from underneath. Came back through the closets. It took me a minute, but I got the package open and managed to get one of them on me without too much fumbling. We kissed some more, and I lay on top of Jeanny. She helped me to put myself inside her.
“Are you okay?” I asked as she looked up at me.
“Yes,” Jeanny said. “Are you?”
“Yeah.” Since we were both new at this, our bodies took a while to find a rhythm. But soon it felt good. And once I got used to the sensation and the motion, it felt even better. It felt great. I tried my best to keep control as we moved. But it became more and more difficult. Jeanny’s mouth was on my ear. Her hands were on my back. My tongue moved against the skin of her neck. And finally my body let go, and we both collapsed—sweaty and breathless on the bed.
A moment of nothing but our breathing.
Sweating.
One more kiss, and then Sophie started fussing in the next room as if she had been politely waiting for us to finish up in here.
“That baby has the world’s worst timing,” I said.
“If you’ll excuse me,” Jeanny said, nudging out from under me. “I can calm her down a lot faster than you. No offense.”
“None taken,” I said before rolling off her. “But you better come right back.”
I hated the interruption, but I felt grateful for the chance to watch Jeanny’s body from behind as she walked into the next room. Her hair was pulled around one shoulder. And the skin on her back was eggshell white with a dark mole down by her waist. Her legs were longer than I had realized before. She seemed so different to me from that girl I first spotted at the police station.
She was beautiful, I thought.
She was the girl I loved.
When Jeanny came back into the room with Sophie wearing only a diaper, she suggested we turn on the TV to catch the weather report for our morning mission. “Not to break the mood,” she said. “But we better start thinking about tomorrow.”
I knew she was right, so I turned on the TV and found the six o’clock news. We climbed under the covers with Sophie between us and held her tiny hands as we watched. The TV in this room had a serious sound problem. It shot up in volume, then down at random moments. One minute the anchorman sounded as if he were shouting his report about Nixon. And the next we could barely hear him. Kind of annoying, but Jeanny and I had gotten used to it.
As we lay there together—the three of us skin to skin, like some sort of natural-born creation, a family—I found myself thinking of that first night in the room again, the way I had been so nervous with Jeanny. I remembered all we had talked about, and one unanswered question came to mind. “So do you believe it was fate that we met?” I asked over the rise and fall of the anchorman’s knowing voice.
Jeanny looked at me with those sugary-brown eyes of hers. “I’ve thought about it, and I believe that—” She stopped, looked through the tunnel of open closets into the next room. “Dominick. What’s that?”
On the floor in there I could see the red shimmering light I had dreamed of. A rounded triangle. As big or as little as Sophie herself. We watched it for a moment, and then it began to spread, just like in my dream. I stood and wrapped a blanket around my waist. Jeanny did, too, carrying Sophie. We walked through the closets, and when we were inside the room, Jeanny said, “It’s coming from the window.”
I followed the glow and she was right. Leon had left the curtains open, and red shone in from outside. One step ahead of me, Jeanny went to the window. If her face had been stricken a few hours earlier when she looked out and saw Roget’s car, now it was pure terror. “Oh, my God,” she whispered in shock.
I walked to the window and looked outside.
Down in the parking lot were more cop cars than I could count. More than the night my mother died. Not a single siren, but all the racks on their roofs flashed red. The light bathed the room, drowning Jeanny, Sophie, and me in the glow the way I had dreamed.
That dream had been a sign, too.
The baby may be in danger here with you.
“What are we going to do?” Jeanny asked me, Sophie still quiet in her arms.
Desperate and numb, I walked to the bathroom and looked in the mirror for my mother. One final sign.
Not there.
Behind me I saw two of the survivor balloons. Yellow. Another red one. Their faceless faces looming over my shoulder. I looked away from the mirror, away from them, and stepped into the bedroom again. In the next room I could hear that anchorman still, his voice shooting up in volume. “After these brief messages,” he said too loud into the emptiness, “we’ll return with a look back on the Manson murders. Plus Penny Hatfield will fill us in on what to expect from the winter storm that’s blanketing New England.”
I put my arms around Jeanny and Sophie. Felt every part of me shaking. “It can’t end this way,” I found myself saying over and over. “It can’t end this way. It can’t end this way. It can’t end this way.”
The phone rang, and the two of us jumped.
“They’re calling us,” I said. “Don’t answer it.”
“Dominick,” Jeanny said, her voice taut with nerves, “we have to give up and hand Sophie over. If you explain why you took her, they might not be too hard on you.”
“They’re going to put me in jail,” I said, and my voice cracked the way it had when it finally changed last summer. I could feel tears rolling down my cheeks as I said those words again: “They’re going to put me in jail.”
“The police are out there anyway. If we don’t answer this call, they’ll just come knocking,” she said over the phone, which rang and rang and rang. “Do we agree that we should answer it?”
I nodded yes, and my eyes poured out more tears.
“I love you,” Jeanny said, crying, too. “Somehow this is going to be okay.”
She walked across the room and picked up the phone. “Hello.”
She waited, then said, “The baby is fine. Yes. Hold on.”
Jeanny held the receiver out to me. “Dominick. It’s for you. But it’s not the police.”
“Who is it?” I asked.
“Take it,” she said. “You’ll see.”
I took the phone. Held it to my ear. Whispered, “Hello.”
“Dominick,” I heard a voice say, flat and cold. “It’s Edie. And I want my baby.”
TEN
My mother and Marnie always used to talk about thinking with their hearts versus thinking with their heads. But neither of them ever mentioned being led by their souls. That’s what guided me the night that caravan of Holedo police officers and Massachusetts state troopers surrounded the motel. As I gripped the heavy black phone receiver, and snow spit fast and frantic from the sky outside the window, and the crimson cop-car lights splashed the walls of our room, I made a life-altering decision to try one final time to fix things for my mother so that her spirit could be set free.
But first the coming years of my life spilled before me. A messy gray puddle that reflected nothing but the most dismal future. I would be arrested, I would go to court, I would be sentenced and thrown into a juvenile prison for years. The strange thing was, once my mind settled on that scenario and released itself of the initial shock—handcuffs, court, prison—none of it sounded as unfair or even as scary as I had first thought. In
my heart I felt certain that I deserved to be punished for ruining so many lives.
But that was my head and heart thinking.
Here’s what happened in my soul.
I stood there, not speaking, as Edie rushed on, “Dominick? Dominick? I know you hear me. I asked the police to give you this chance to come out on your own. Just hang up the phone and step outside the door. Give me my baby back. . . ” That’s when the pitiful tragedy of my mother’s life filled me up like the helium in one of those balloons above my head. A strange, invisible something that sent me floating over it all. My consciousness, my soul, blew backward through time, then back more, then forward, forward again. I heard a clacking sound and realized it was my mother fumbling with the phone so many nights before. Dialing Marnie in the storm. I could hear her voice, which was almost all breath. A rush of air and wind. Terror beneath.
Something’s wrong, she said.
I’m bleeding, she said.
Then came an electric white flash like the fuzz of television static between channels, and I could see her standing in the lobby of a fancy New York building. A brittle, breakable expression on her face. A shiny silver present in her hands. Dozens of green plastic toy soldiers jumbled around in that box. Hard, pointy bodies with weapons forever attached to their skin. Pushed together in the darkness. Ready and waiting for war. Only those men would have to wait in there without air for too long. Unopened.
Again a blaze of white light and static, and I could feel myself being pushed down the long tunnel between her legs into the harsh brightness of the world. The gooey dew of new life on my skin. The tinny, metal sound of hospital instruments close by. My mother held my small body to her breast and cried. I was her hope, her fresh start. I was everything new to her. Look at him, she said to the nurses and doctors. Oh, just look at him.
