by Various
On Mr. Malcolm’s balcony next to ours, a shadowed man stepped to the rail, staring out over the city lights just as I was. He wore a hooded jacket; it was chilly.
“Hey, little one,” he said, his voice warm and kind. “What’s the matter?”
I tried to talk, my words coming out between the sobs and choking breaths. “Mom says I’m fat and ugly.” I wanted to say a lot more, but I knew better than to burden a stranger on a balcony at night. People didn’t care what happened so long I showed up for school, so long as there were no marks on me, and so long as Mom wasn’t a threat to herself or anyone else. This guy shouldn’t be any different.
He wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “Mmm.” The man climbed over the metal railing and sat on the handrail, dangling his feet below. He stared at me, long and contemplative, but I couldn’t make out his face. Our light burned out a month ago and Mom never replaced the bulb. “I guess she must be blind,” he said.
With that, he leaned forward and fell.
I screamed.
Mom shouted at me, “Shut the fuck up!”
Racing inside, I blubbered on about the man. “He fell! He jumped!” I pointed at the sliding glass door and screeched out, “He fell from Mr. Malcolm’s balcony!”
Mom tossed aside her candy bar and stood. Brushing herself off, she glared at me. “What the hell are you talking about?” I knew her look. If whatever I said was a bunch of bull, she’d slap me. She passed me and went outside.
Soon, she returned and scowled. “Mr. Malcolm left his back door open,” she whispered to herself. “That damn dog, poor damn dog.”
We weren’t allowed to have pets at the apartment, but our neighbor kept a shih tzu. She never barked and was ancient, much like her owner.
Mom left our apartment, and I heard her banging on Mr. Malcolm’s door. “You get your crotchety ass out here!” she shouted. “Don’t know what you’re doing in there, Alfred, but your dog’s lookin’ real messed up on your balcony. You better get over here and open this door before I call the police and report you!”
Dog? What’s Mom talking about? I wondered. I went back out and peered over the railing. Near the open door, Precious lay in a moplike bundle on the cement, her white hair bloodied. I stumbled backward, my heart pounding.
The police came about a half hour after Mom called them. They forced open the door on Mr. Malcolm’s apartment since the landlord wasn’t in this late. They searched and bumped around next door. I sat in my bedroom, hugging my pillow with my ear pressed to the wall. Their voices came across too low and muffled for me to understand, but by morning, as I left to go to school, I knew Mr. Malcolm had killed his dog before he killed himself. No one told me the details, and no one asked me about the man I’d seen. A body wasn’t found on the pavement five stories down, so I never reminded Mom about the guy who’d climbed over the railing. To be honest, I began to think I imagined it all.
After that day, I always felt I was not alone on that balcony. I imagined someone was there, listening, comforting me with patient, understanding silence. I decided to stop eating so much. The stranger, even if he had killed the dog and my neighbor, had said my mom was blind. He didn’t think I was ugly. That meant something.
It took a few months for someone to move in next to us. I never saw who it was, but I often wondered. No one ever opened the front door when I walked by, and the blotchy bloodstain left by Precious stayed there untouched. I guess the new people didn’t care that someone had died in their home. It bothered me some, but Mom kept saying Alfred was real old and crazy. She said people do that sometimes when they’ve had enough of life, and maybe when she was sick of dealing with me, she might off herself too.
I never knew what to say when she told me stuff like that. I kept quiet and hoped she wouldn’t slap me for not talking. I don’t think she cared one way or another about me, much less herself.
My senior year in high school I got a job at the local corner store in the evenings. They let me stock the shelves, change the soda lines, and clean up. I worked as much as they’d allow me, anything to keep from going home. There were no ballet classes for me, and certainly no one to pay for them. I saved all my money and decided being a ballerina wasn’t in the stars for me. Mom was right. It was silly.
My body had thinned out by then. I wasn’t skinny, but I wasn’t a pudgy little girl anymore. Mom fussed over my breasts and told me to wear low-cut shirts so I could get myself a man and get out of her apartment. She was restless lately, eating a lot of chocolates and watching a lot of reruns late at night. Sometimes she cried in front of the TV, but I never let on I saw her.
The unseen presence I sensed on the balcony was the only comfort I had in my crappy life, that and the boy I’d set my sights on at school. I was in love with Tommy Davis. He sat next to me in World History. When the lights went out and the films about the Holocaust blazed on the screen, I turned away from the horror to stare at his face. I wondered if he would ever notice me. Gazing at him, I would daydream. After graduation, we would marry, move to a nice suburban house in Brighton, and have two children, twin girls. The girls’ names would be Annette and Marie, and we would have a dog. I always wanted a dog. But pets weren’t allowed in the apartment unless, like Mr. Malcolm, you snuck them in and they were real quiet.
Just then, with the movie flickering across his handsome face, Tommy turned to me and smiled. “Hey,” he whispered.
I smiled back.
“You want to go listen to a band tonight?”
His suggestion probably wasn’t a date, probably meant nothing at all. But I nodded. “Who is it?” I whispered back.
“My brother’s band. Kinda rockish, but maybe after we can go, um, see a movie or something.”
My heart stopped. I couldn’t breathe. Tommy Davis just noticed me. I wondered how long he’d known I sat there and gawked at him like a lovelorn idiot. I nodded.
“Cool,” he said and went back to watching people die on the screen.
After class, he fumbled with his books before grabbing my hand. “Can I have your number?”
My face flooded with heat. I thanked the Lord my skin was too dark for him to see me blush. “Um, we don’t have a phone.”
“Oh.” He frowned. A dimple creased his forehead. “Well, can I walk you to your next class?”
I brightened after that. “Sure.” No one ever walked me to anything. He chaperoned me all the way to the 400 building even though his next class was in the 100. He stood outside my art class and gave me the best hug I’d ever had. He held me like he meant it. I wanted to melt.
“Meet me after class by the gym,” he said. “We’ll figure out how to get there tonight.”
“Okay,” I muttered.
I watched his backside as he walked away. Tommy Davis the football player. Big, strong, with pretty blue eyes and a body I wanted to hold onto. He’d noticed me. He’d asked me out. I felt tingly all over and hopeful for the first time.
He picked me up on the corner of Broadstreet and Third, seven blocks from my apartment. I didn’t want him to meet my mom, ever. My life embarrassed me. I wanted to start a new one with him. It was six in the evening. The air smelled bad from all the traffic, but we walked side by side, holding hands and talking as if we were somewhere beautiful. I guess we were, at least I was.
It was a long walk to the garage where his brother’s band played. We stood a ways back, listening and cringing when they’d hit a note wrong or the microphone eked out feedback. Tommy slipped his arm around my waist and kept me close through it all. Afterward, he kissed my cheek and thanked me.
“That was awful,” he said when we left, hoofing it to the old Mann Theatre on Ninth. “Thanks for not copping out on me. It means a lot for him to see me out there.”
“It wasn’t that bad,” I offered. “Just loud is all.”
He laughed and bought the tickets at the box office. “Thanks. I’ll tell him you loved it and you want to come by every Friday to listen.”
“I wo
uldn’t go that far.”
He laughed some more. I liked to listen to him. He had an easy way about him, and Tommy seemed real nice. Not a lazy-ass son of a bitch like Mom said all guys were. We went in and found seats in the back row. I wasn’t paying any attention to the movie. I sat by Tommy and held his hand, watching the colors dance across his face. He leaned in and kissed me when the movie ended, a long, soft kiss with his mouth open a little. He tasted like cola and Junior Mints. I tried to kiss back as best I could, but I didn’t really know how to do it right.
We had a few more dates before he invited me to dinner at his parents’ house. Standing outside the door, I had goose bumps. I’d taken the bus to his neighborhood. He lived in a house, a real house with grass in the front yard and everything. I checked the number to be sure and knocked.
The door opened and his brother, Richard, smiled down at me. His long, dyed-black hair obscured half his face, and it looked like he’d been putting eye-liner on. “Oh, hey, Angela,” he said. “Tommy’s out back. Hang on.” He stepped aside and yelled. “Mom! She’s here!”
I wanted to shrink and be invisible.
Richard took hold of my arm and dragged me inside. “Come on,” he said. “She made pot roast. It’s good. You’ll like it. After dinner, come sit in my room and I’ll tell you all the dirt on my little brother.”
The door slapped shut. We skirted a leather couch, and I gaped at the huge TV on the wall. The house smelled so clean. There were knick knacks and books, like a real house should have, not like my mom’s shabby apartment. I felt so out of place. Surely someone would realize I didn’t belong here and kick me out at any moment.
Tommy’s mom stood over the stove, mashing potatoes in a pot. She was tall and had neat, blonde hair cut short around her face. I shivered and thought of old Leave it to Beaver reruns. This place was too good to be true.
“She’s here,” Richard announced.
Mrs. Davis raised her head and stared at me, her small painted lips parted. “Oh my.”
I thought she’d throw her pot of food at me, maybe beat me with the masher or scream at the top of her lungs. Instead, she stopped what she was doing and hurried over to me. “Nice to meet you, Angela. Tommy talks about you all the time.”
I bit my bottom lip.
She hugged me. No mom had ever hugged me. I felt like I’d come home after a long time away, home to a place with love and real dinners not out of a box and nuked. Home to a place where people ate at the dinner table and didn’t curse or yell at each other.
Tommy’s dad came in and smiled at me. “You must be Angela from World History,” he said, chuckling. He was an older version of Tommy, tall and bearing those same blue eyes. “Glad you finally came over.”
We ate and joked, Tommy’s hand in mine under the table. I still felt out of place, a dark thing pulled out of a cave and set into someone else’s TV show, but loving it nonetheless. No one called me a mean name or said anything about me being there. I felt welcome, and later, listening to Richard try to embarrass my boyfriend, I realized just how screwed up my childhood had been.
When it came time for me to leave, Tommy insisted on taking the bus with me. His dad offered to give me a ride, but I didn’t want him to know about Mom. When the bus edged around the corner to my street and the patchy painted brick building where I lived, I confessed. “There’s something you need to know about me,” I told Tommy. “I live with my mom, like I said, but we don’t have any money. Our apartment is a rat’s nest. I’d be ashamed for you to see it.”
A little crinkle developed between his eyebrows. “I don’t care about that,” he said. “And hey, if you want to come over to my house more, Mom said that was fine any time.”
I believed him, not enough to take him upstairs, but I saw the sincerity in his face. Tommy liked me just the way I was, and he was the first person who ever did that.
Chapter Two
Dad
On my eighteenth birthday, I walked home from the library late that evening, daydreaming about Tommy and dreading the coming confrontation with my mother. It was football practice night and I had a big test in biology, so I didn’t get my boyfriend fix that night. Mom and I had fought for a week already. My father—a fat, ugly, good-for-nothing-but-sending-child-support-checks man who was married to someone else when I was conceived—had sent Mom a letter informing her that he would no longer be mailing any support checks. I never met my father. All I knew was his name—Robert Stimple—and that his signature had a left slant and he wrote tiny, perfect letters that were so intricate they seemed typed. None of that mattered to my mother. What mattered was that his signature and the funding accompanying it was no longer going to arrive as scheduled.
I turned the key in our peeling green door and waited for her scalding voice. When it didn’t come, I peered around the empty living room. The TV was all static and turned low. The couch was empty, her candy wrappers strewn over the floor beside it.
“Mom,” I said halfheartedly. “I’m home.”
No answer. She must have gone out. I tossed my books on the floor. The faucet dripped in the bathroom. I went to turn it off and found my mother there, face down in a tubful of pink bathwater. I sat on the toilet beside the tub and flipped her over gently. Blood seeped from her neck where a neat gash had been made. Her eyes were closed, and her face seemed incredibly peaceful.
It struck me that she had been beautiful once. She had a narrow face and large, dark lips. I didn’t see her smile often, but when she did, it was easy to see why my dad might have fallen for her.
“Shit, Mom,” I mumbled.
I figured it was suicide. Had to be. I wiped a stray tear away and went to knock on the neighbor’s door to use the phone. I needed to call 911, needed to figure out what I should do next. Mom was mean, but she’d always been there. I didn’t know what would happen to me now. A bleak feeling of sorrow closed in. My one hope was Tommy. Maybe I could get an apartment of my own. Maybe we could keep seeing each other and things would turn out okay.
I knocked on the neighbor’s door and waited, thinking I’d finally get to meet the kook who didn’t care if dog blood was splashed on his or her balcony. The door cracked open.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” I said. “But I need to use your phone.”
The door opened wider. A cold, unsettling wave gripped me when the man spoke. “Hello, Angela.” He stepped aside, a thin, white man with auburn hair in a ponytail. He didn’t look, well, he didn’t look right, if you know what I mean. His skin glowed like the moonlight almost as if he was an albino, but he wasn’t. He had dark green eyes and smiled like he knew me.
“Um, nice to meet you,” I muttered, wondering if he’d had a run-in with Mom. Probably had. She pissed off a lot of people in the apartment building.
He waved a hand to the side, indicating his phone across the room by the couch. There wasn’t a TV in sight. In fact, his place seemed sparse. I glanced around as I lifted the receiver. Table for two, a bookshelf, not much else.
“Nine-one-one, what is your emergency?” came the operator’s voice.
“Um, yeah. My mom killed herself,” I blurted. The man stood by the doorway, staring at me. He gave me the creeps.
“What is your location?”
I gave her my address and everything else she asked for. When I hung up, the man had crossed the living room and stood before me.
“Are you all right?” he asked, a slight smirk on his thin lips.
His eyes held me still, mesmerizing. I blinked, trying to shake the feeling that he could hear my thoughts and see straight into me. The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. It felt like I knew him from somewhere.
“No,” I answered. “No, I’m not.”
His hands settled upon my shoulders. I felt faint, weak. My neighbor eased me onto his couch and settled in beside me. He pulled me to him and embraced me. It was awkward, but I didn’t pull back. I wasn’t afraid, only stunned by him, by my mother’s death. I didn’t know wh
at to do.
“She’s dead,” I whispered.
“You’re not alone,” he said. “I’ll wait with you until they get here.”
“Yes,” I blubbered. His offer sounded kind. Some neighbor I’d never met before holding me, comforting me and waiting with me for the paramedics or whomever they sent when someone killed herself. How thoughtful.
He rubbed one hand up and down my back. I cried into his black rayon shirt, wetting it with tears. I bawled and sobbed, and my neighbor, whose name I didn’t even know, sat there and said nothing. He smelled like incense, the same spicy smell in Richard’s room after he’d smoked and tried to hide it with cinnamon-scented cones. He stroked my hair.
The paramedics came first. I sat on my neighbor’s leather couch, and he went out to meet them. They took his information, asked him a thousand questions, and then they moved on to me. I answered as best I could. Yes, Mom had a problem with depression. Yes, she’d been taking her meds. No, I didn’t think anyone had killed her. Yes, I think she did it to herself. Yes, she’d said she would one day.
They found a note. I read it over and nodded. “Yeah, that’s her writing.”
Numb and dumbfounded, I watched them carry her body away on a stretcher, covered with a body bag. It didn’t hide enough. I could see the lumpy outline of her in there. My neighbor curled his arm over my shoulder. “You can stay here if you want. I have a spare room. A bed. I’ll help you clean up tomorrow. Take you anywhere you need to make the arrangements.
“Arrangements,” I repeated.
I wanted to call Tommy then. I needed to hear his voice, the one stable thing in my life. I made to get up, but my neighbor pushed me back down. The last police officer left, shutting the door behind her.
