"Hello, Mute," she said with a vague smirk compounded of guilt and grievance. Before I could protest, she took me by the shoulders and gave my forehead a peck.
I think it was the first time she had ever kissed me.
"I wished I could've seen your face when you met Todd," she said.
The letters, I thought. And then: Hey, she's as tall as me....
My conspiracy-heavy portfolio took a big hit when Jeremy, who up to this moment had sat frozen next to Yvonne, jumped up from the couch and dashed across the room.
"Mom!" he cried as he buried her in his arms. He had tears in his eyes—real ones, I think.
"I wondered when you were going to give me some sugar." Mom managed to cinch the fingers of both hands behind Jeremy in a loving hug that I found nauseatingly syrupy but also a bit sinister. It was like the grasp of a drowning swimmer resigned to taking her would-be rescuer with her to the bottom. It was the kind of reunion my aversion to treacle would have prevented if Mom had shown any inclination to spatter me with parental goo.
"Remember, Mom, when you used to sing me to sleep with alibis?"
I didn't correct him because he might have been right.
"Lullabies, dumb ass," said Todd when I didn't step in.
Jeremy must have sensed the tentacles closing on him, because he made an effort to pull away. He was a bit alarmed by Mom's reluctance to let go and toggled in her arms before breaking free. She was over fifteen years a stranger, and had abandoned him as well as Barbara and me, so she couldn't exactly be overflowing with affection.
Mom acknowledged Jeremy's hesitation to participate in a Crazy Glue moment with a sad shrug. But it was not only rejection that caused her to drop back with slow consideration into the nearest chair. She had only been thirty—or maybe her late twenties—when she disappeared from our lives. While close-to-fifty wasn't ancient, her joints were obviously stiffer. I doubted she was bowed by woes or guilt. Maybe she had a touch of arthritis.
"Don't take it so hard," Mom said. "I lost two husbands on the same day, at the same time."
This drew a plaintive cry from Killer Marvin. "Gee, Mrs. Skunk, it really wasn't my fault."
"And you know I've already forgiven you," she said with languid despair that was so phony the ice under her Avon stayed frozen. "And don't whine to me. I'm not your mother."
This appeared to give Jeremy and me—and Todd, I guess—license to whine to our hearts' content. In fact, Todd looked ready to screak his guts out. Everything indicated that he had been living with Mom all these years, so I guess he had had plenty of practice. But when he glanced at me all stoic in the center of the room (actually, it was four-dimensional ignorance), he swallowed his whine like a good boy.
"If this is all about the Brinks money..." I began.
"You're sitting on the principle" said Jeremy like a sour accountant. "We didn't know. We were stewing in that cesspit while Mom sank it all in this..." He seemed to have second thoughts about calling it a palace. So much for sugar.
"Okay," I said, "that's what I figured before. Then why all the games? The letters? We got shot at, and now there's Carl and Dog, dead—so you know how dangerous it is. You said 'principle', right? Where's the interest?"
"Carl?" Mom said, bemused. "And did you say...'Dog'? Who in the world are you talking about?" She looked at Uncle Marvin.
"You may have seen something on the news," he said, placating her with a weak wave of his hand. "They're no one of consequence."
"Not anymore," I snapped. Mom might not be buying into the sniper attack, but there was no denying the festival of corpses on my second floor. If she had seen it on television, the names of the deceased would have pended notification of next of kin. But there had been camera crews all over Pine Street and she would certainly have recognized the house.
Suddenly, irresponsibly, I thought about Monique—who, come to think of it, was now perfectly unattached, my foremost competitors having been perfectly dispatched. But wait...there was still Todd. Monique had not been able to tell us apart. Not at first. So sharing her with him would sort of be like sharing her with myself. No threesomes, though. God forbid.
I was finding Jeremy's ignorance of Mom's existence difficult to swallow, a skepticism reinforced by his denial of the sniper. There were crosscurrents of intrigue at work here, and it was hard to say who held all the threads. I scanned each face and sensed a gaping hole in every one of them—until I came back to Mom. There was a euphemistic hole there, too (her brow had put in a twitch or two when I mentioned the ambush), but not quite as large as the others. I tried to visually lift the hood of disguise. And I wasn't the only one annoyed by her reticence. The collective gaze was shifting away from me to my mother. And about time, too.
"Even before this evening, your mother realized things have gone too far," Uncle Vern said, leaning forward in his chair like a trucker shifting gears. "Putting aside monetary concerns for the moment, you need know this situation goes back long before Brinks—"
"Vern, even a clam knows when to keep its trap shut," my mother snapped. Wow. She had never talked like that when Skunk was alive, and Vern was no Skunk. None of us were, not even Jeremy, although he had inherited enough genetic junk to stink on hot days.
"Who gets hurt most if you talk?" Mom continued, her face and tone taking on all the sharp angles of her culture-free upbringing. I was beginning to feel relieved that she had left home. What had she put Todd through all these years?
"None of us comes up 24-Karat," said Vern.
"You least of all." Mom felt all the stares waffling around her and drew herself up. "What are you looking at? I don't have the answer. He does."
All those flailing eyes turned back on me.
"Hey," I said, my common sense ducking for cover.
"You know, even if you don't know you know."
We all know a lot of things we don't know, because we never bother thinking about them. As a rule, that usually means that's because they aren't worth thinking about. My audience seemed convinced I knew something, one way or another.
"So again, what is it I'm supposed to know?"
"You should know."
`"Uh—"
"After all, you were Skunk's favorite."
If I had opened a tuna can and found a live shark I couldn't have been more surprised. In fact, I couldn't have been more surprised if my mother had shown up alive after all these years.
"That's dumb," I said stupidly. "That's stupid," I added dumbly.
"He told me himself," my mother answered. "You were the only one willing to clip his toenails. He really appreciated that."
"But we all took turns," I said. "I remember..."
Yeah, I remembered the man who had the gumption and energy to commit strong-arm robberies but was too lazy to bend over and use those same arms to trim his toes. I also thought I remembered Barbara and Jeremy doing their fair share, alternating over Skunk's scaly feet and yellow toenails and breaking a sweat as they pressed both hands on the clipper. But now it dawned on me that what I recalled was their saying they had taken their turn. I had been hoodwinked, again. Not only mute, but as dense as a cinderblock. All those times I had rolled off the skunk socks, trying to hold my breath as I hovered between gassing and asphyxiation, a chore all the more onerous in memory because my siblings had conspired to foist the job on me, alone. I turned to Jeremy, who mugged a gag.
"Asshole," I said.
"Don't forget the assette," he said—his chickenshit way of halving his share of complicity. Besides, I had already halfway forgiven Sweet Tooth. Clipping Skunk's toenails was no task for a girl.
Then I saw Jeremy looking in Mom's direction. He wasn't talking about Barbara. Agreed, it would have been nice of our mother to partake in the cuticle ritual, but that she didn't was not evidence of moral turpitude. The way those fragments of nail flew up from the clipper, she was as vulnerable as the rest of us to shrapnel wounds. I remembered that, at the time, I was glad she didn't insist we clip her nails, to
o.
Yvonne was probing Jeremy with a wary eye. After his great welcoming of a mother he had thought dead by her own hand, Doubletalk had too-readily dispensed with his affection for her. I didn't know if Yvonne put much stock in her relationship with my lousy brother. If her fling with me in my bedroom was any indication, it couldn't be much. Still, if she was counting on some kind of moral fidelity from Jeremy, it was shot down at that moment. He was dissing Mother—his very own mother! The same woman he had wept over not five minutes ago. How much easier it would be to dismiss a slob of a girlfriend.
"You say I was Skunk's favorite—for whatever reason," I said, dodging the toenails. "You think he told me something about something, probably money, but not the Brinks money. Sorry, but you're not giving me enough clues."
"I told you all he wouldn't tell," said Marvin, whose two cents fell unappreciated.
"We all knew he wouldn't tell," Jeremy elaborated, additional pennies that went uncollected.
Mom leaned forward. "Tell your ol' mother, dear: where is the money? We know you haven't spent it, or you would have moved out of that dump a long time ago."
You may have noticed by now that, among my other literary violations, I have a marked tendency to break the narrative flow. The next line should naturally be "What money?" Instead, I'm going to take this opportunity to remark on another failing: none of my characters are very likable. It is a rule in storytelling that even the baddest of bad guys has to have some redeeming features. Either they're handsome, or smart, or uxorious, or neurotic (hey, these days that's considered redeeming), or all-powerful, or all-weak and, above all else, have a semi-sympathetic motive for their misbehavior. Hell, you could drop a tear for Grendel. And yet, after all this labor and spilled ink, it's suddenly dawned on me that none of these options apply to this cast of characters—myself included. That's reality for you. You look for the silver lining and find another cloud. We were all losers, and the thimble of sympathy we deserved was the sympathy we got. We'd be lucky if weeds grew on our graves.
So back to the money. It was beginning to seem that, somehow, Skunk had absconded with the interest that had accumulated from his ill-gotten and apparently well-invested booty. I was feeling twisted in every way. Everywhere I looked I saw only creeps, and they were sliming me with their creepiness. There was really only one answer to Mom's question. I looked straight into her Medusa eyes and said:
"I'm not telling."
With that, I sought out an empty chair and dropped into it, feeling pleasantly mortal.
CHAPTER 27
It usually goes this way: I think, therefore I am. It should actually read: I think, therefore I am.... Because it's really a question. Am what?
Among my family and assorted guests, there was no doubt about it. They let me know what they thought I was via groans, curses, oaths and—above all—threats. You see, while they had been stringing me along (some from the beginning, some only recently), hoping I would betray my hand, they had not been absolutely positive that I had known that Skunk had a stash apart from the Brinks haul. The irony was that they had created their own uncertainty. If I hadn't been in the dark about Mom, my twin brother, the house on Ferncrest and all the things I hoped or semi-hoped to learn about this evening, I might have submitted to their greed. But I hadn't known, I didn't know, and I wouldn't know, unless this woman—who I was beginning to think of as Mr. Big instead of as my mother—began to shed some light on all those dark corners. My tendency to draw stories from their source placed Mom at the forefront. She was the only one who could explain the mysterious comments Skunk made the month before his death.
For the first time in my life I stopped the babble of an irate mob with an upraised hand. If I had had this talent as a kid, I might not have been so screwed up today.
Of course, they only obeyed because they thought something reasonable and profitable would come out of my mouth.
"Is it too much to ask..." I began, stopping when I realized I hadn't formulated my questions. Hell, where to begin?
"You want someone to blame," said my mother flatly.
"That would be a start. But blame for what? I understand the game you played over the last two weeks. You were hoping I would get worried over the money. That I would think the cash at the farm and in the water plant was part of the loot and you would follow me when I went to check the hiding place. All that computer business was you..." I turned to Marvin. "You set up the messages, and when you found out I didn't know the first thing about computers, you sent Jeremy to act as my jockey."
Marvin gave me a long, flat stare. "What do you mean, you don't understand computers? Everybody understands computers."
"Meet the Neanderthal," I bowed.
"But I've heard you use the library computer."
"With massive assistance from a very patient lady at the reference desk," I said. "Who's your source?"
Marvin turned his skeptical gaze on Jeremy. "So you're the one who accessed treasure447?"
"The whatcha-what?" said my more oafish brother.
"Yeah," I added. "At Starbucks. The laptop, remember? Or has that gone the way of the sniper on Route 6?" I mimicked a conical object entering one side of his skull and exiting the other side with remarkable ease.
Jeremy gaped idiotically. "Aw, you guys."
He looked and sounded so convincing that everyone else immediately put me on the chopping block. I was a liar. So were they. We were all liars, without a single gram of truth between us. It made for a sour atmosphere. Marvin had a constipated expression, as though he wanted to yell at me to stop playing games, but knew too well I could come back on him verbatim. And then another odd thing happened. He began to speak, then dropped his vowels and consonants. He gaped at his uncle, who was gritting his teeth.
My mother had not said a word for several minutes. She wore the same startled look as when I mentioned the sniper. Whatever was plucking her nerves seemed centered on Jeremy. To catch her attention, I asked:
"Are you really my mother?"
I won't say I was expecting subtlety from her, but it was obvious there was more to Mom than met the eye, and I thought that might include the kind of calm slyness that was de rigueur among highly placed criminals.
"What kind of dumb-ass question is that?" she said.
Okay, she wasn't Rhonda Fleming. But then, abruptly, she cranked her stiff bones out of the chair and walked over to Todd.
"Don't you see the resemblance?" Placing a finger under his chin, she tilted his head. Todd stood like a dumb muffin as Mom used him as a stand-in for me, highlighting his jaw with a stroke of her thumb, tugging at his hair and giving his earlobe a rather vicious fillip. "You don't favor Skunk, you know. Everything you've got is me."
Macho aspirations aside, it's a rare boy indeed who is pleased to learn he resembles his mother more than his father. In this case, that would mean Todd and I also favored Barbara, our a-go-go slut of a sister. But I wasn't about to check my bra size. I gave my arms a good flex, an Amazonian gut check. Still, there was no denying the wussness of my position. Even Mom had dodged the onerous and somewhat hazardous chore of clipping Skunk's nails. I was the chump. The addle-pated geek. And a nutless geek, too, without an ounce of cybersense.
But suddenly I had balls, and they weren't going down so well, so to speak. I knew where the money was and had been hurled to the front rank of influence. I could stick it out right here—in fact I already had, for one of those present—and no one would dare laugh. That was my hope, at least. The deaths of Carl and Dog had at least removed the penalty of torture, or so I hoped. Then I remembered Jeremy and thought...oops.
"Maybe you think you know the whole story," said Mom, flattening the air with her hand, then brushing back an imaginary horde that was intent on tearing me limb from limb. As of yet, no one had taken a step in my direction. "Maybe you think you know more than we do. But just because you know one thing we don't, that doesn't mean you know much."
I spent a moment sorting this out. H
er overestimation of what I knew must be biological, I thought. Maybe she thought that, because she had breast-fed me (had she?), the old psychic bond still existed. The thought gave me kind of an ugh feeling. I could think of no link between us beyond the cans of pork and beans and tuna that she cracked open for dinner. Really, that was my strongest memory. In these days of post-Oprah grievances, bland food and bland emotions are pretty tame. Mom had ignored me, I had ignored her. It worked out well enough.
"You're the reason we're in this predicament," said my mother.
Wow. 'Predicament'. No wonder my lexicon is so extensive.
"'We'?" I said.
"Your brothers and sister, my associates." She emphasized 'ass-', which I supposed meant not all was hunky-dory within the ass-ociation. I also supposed she was talking about Marvin and Uncle Vern. Did Carl and Dog also belong in that little group?
"I can't imagine what I did that was so awful," I said casually, but sounded guilty as hell.
"You were born," Mom said flatly.
I took this at face value, as a sarcastic prelude to a litany of my shortcomings, until she added, with a nod at Todd:
"And him."
"What did I do?" my lesser half protested, forgetting the plural pronoun.
"I already told you."
I mulled this over. "You mean that we were born twins?"
"Do you remember a bearded man who used to come snooping around the house when you were a boy?" Mom asked.
"I don't remember anyone shaving much," I said, involuntarily noticing the shady patch above her lip.
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