She was often tired and nauseous in the mornings. I knew what a hangover was, though I didn’t exactly know what it was called back then. I’d had a doozy of one the year before at Thanksgiving when, after the rest of the family left the dinner table to go watch football, I finished off the wine left behind in everyone’s abandoned glasses. It wasn’t much, but at seven I was a lightweight, and it got me drunk enough to pass out in my grandparents’ guest bed. Everyone thought it was hilarious, except my grandpa. He was the sort of guy who never laughed at another person. Later, my head pounded and I felt sick as we walked in silence out of Grandma and Grampa’s house to the car. It never occurred to me that the reason my mother seemed so ill in the mornings was from a similar cause. All I knew was that making breakfast served two purposes: it relieved her of the burden of doing it—which she remembered only some mornings anyway—and it ensured time at the table with her. I made a meal, and she made time—a bargain in my mind, with me coming out ahead on the trade. A lot of kids took that time with their parents for granted, but not me. I was often reminded that I was a burden, though I tried to be less of one.
After breakfast, she’d finish her cigarette, unravel the towel from her head, and go back into the bathroom to get ready for work. I’d linger near her as long as I could, smelling the heat coils in her blow-dryer, the chemical perfume of her hair spray and the sweet scent of an eyeliner pencil as she softened the tip with a lighter. I loved those smells. I used to hold my breath to see if I could make them last. When she went into her room to get dressed, I’d rush back into the kitchen to make myself a bologna sandwich. I didn’t have money to buy lunch at school; the cafeteria didn’t accept our food stamps, and Mom didn’t fill out the paperwork for “free lunch,” so I ate a lot of bologna. She had to leave for work before it was time for me to catch the bus, so I usually got a hug and a kiss on her way out the door and a reminder not to miss the bus again. I made sure the house was locked up tight when I finally left for school. Once, I’d forgotten, and one of her ex-boyfriends had let himself in. He’d waited until I went to school and came in and trashed the place. He tipped over the shelves and smashed her records. He slashed open her pillows and then stopped in the middle of everything—or maybe he did this first—to make a pot of coffee which he poured on all of her clothes and her bed. He left my room alone. It was already a mess and it looked kind of like the rest of the house, so the police thought he’d vandalized that too. But he hadn’t touched a thing of mine. I knew he hadn’t wanted to hurt me. Still, he did, and I never forgot to lock the front door again.
I locked up every night too, not just out of fear, but also because the sound of her two a.m. fumbling at the lock usually woke me up and I could squeeze in an extra minute’s attention in between shuffling out into the hallway and her ushering me back to bed. If I was lucky, she was alone, and she’d come in to tuck me under the covers and give me a whiskey and cigarette-scented kiss on the forehead. Nights she returned by herself were better than ones in which she brought someone home. If she had company, I would get a quick hug, and she’d say, “Go back to bed.” I’d ask who she was with, and she’d tell me it was a “friend,” while he looked away at the records on the shelves or down the hall into her bedroom. She’d turn me by my shoulders and nudge me away. I’d walk back slowly while they went in her room, and I’d listen for the click of the doorknob push lock echoing in the hallway that let me know she was home, but I was still alone. Still, those nights a man followed her into her room were better than the ones where she slept somewhere else. Mornings I woke up to find her bedroom door open and bed still made were a taste of the kind of total loneliness I feared so badly, it just being the two of us. I’d run to the front window and look for her car in the driveway and when it wasn’t there, I imagined the worst—a robbery gone wrong, a car accident . . . the end of that movie she’d told me I was too young to watch.
Being slightly younger, you may not remember Looking for Mr. Goodbar. I shouldn’t remember it either, but you can imagine that was an inescapably appealing title for a naïve boy who loved reading Roald Dahl and wanted to see a spiritual sibling to the tale of a boy who wins everything he ever dreamed of. I dreamed of candy that never lost its flavor and winning a life where Mom never had to work again. One night, the movie title appeared on our stolen cable channel along with the words COMING UP NEXT, so I stayed up to watch while I waited for her to come home. Goodbar wasn’t what I’d expected and, while boring and mostly beyond my comprehension, I watched the whole thing. It seemed like a peek behind the curtain of my mother’s secret night life. The one where she met her girlfriends for drinks and sometimes brought other friends home to spend some of the night . . . but not all of it. And though I only half-understood the ending, it terrified me in a way watching the violence in midnight showings of Alien on HBO didn’t. Drooling silver-toothed monsters weren’t real, but the singles bar “friends” were. And now there was the possibility in my mind one might stab her to death. Nights she didn’t come home, that final scene strobe-flashed behind my eyes, the clicking and Diane Keaton’s screaming echoing in my ears and I imagined my mother lying still, red and ripped apart in some stranger’s bed, and cried myself to sleep.
You’ll be relieved to know, that never happened. I’m sorry if this letter upsets you. I’ll understand if you feel the need to skip to the end. Although, I hope you’ll bear with me. It’s taken me a long time to work up the nerve to write this letter, and all I ask is your indulgence a little while longer.
The night I want to tell you about, I remember waking to the insistent sounds of my mother’s long-suffering bedsprings. They pierced through the hollow wall separating my room from hers. Like I mentioned above, most nights I awoke to the sounds of car doors slamming and my mother fumbling to get the door unlocked while her beau pulled and pawed at her. But not that night. That night, they were extra quiet and I’d missed her passage through the apartment entirely. I missed the headlights in the windows, the sounds of the car doors slamming, the scrape of her key, and the hiss of the draft guard dragging across the tile. I missed the hushed urgency of her telling the man who’d brought her home to be quiet and not wake her son, and his inevitably slurred, “You have a kid?” while she encouraged him not to worry about it. But I didn’t miss the bedsprings. That was impossible. They were like far away shrieks, though they were just on the other side of the wall, and I hated them so much—even though they meant, at the very least, that she had come home, and we’d have the morning together. I hated what I knew they meant.
I remember stepping out of bed, my foot slipping on the litter of dirty clothes on the floor. I got my balance and tiptoed across the mess toward the door. Stopping to listen at the wall for a moment, the shrieking springs were familiar, but underneath was something new. Something more insistent. My bladder ached with fullness. I crept to the bathroom and lifted the toilet lid with too much urgency, banging it against the tank. I heard a man say, “What’s that?” She replied that it was nothing, just her son. Me. He asked how old, and she said I wasn’t a problem. Just a baby. That upset me. I was eight years old, not a baby. I would have protested, but I heard more whispering, and I forgot the slight. My mother’s voice raised slightly, and I heard her say, “No,” followed by the crack of a palm on skin, and a yelp.
I let go of the elastic on my underwear and ran to the bedroom door pulling up my pajamas. “Mom?” I said. I knocked softly. “Mom?” There was a pause while everything went silent and she asked me through the door what I wanted. She was out of breath, and I felt terror cramping in my belly. I asked if she was okay. I said, “I thought I heard something.”
“I’m fine, Jude,” she said. “Go back to bed.” I heard the man whisper something, but I couldn’t understand him. His tone was forceful. She was silent. Normally, she and her friends laughed. They giggled quietly and they whispered to each other things that sounded like encouragement. “Like that,” they’d say. “Right there.” Not that night. That
night they were quiet, and then the springs started and I heard her breathing. Hard and fast like she was afraid.
“Mom?”
The sounds stopped again, and she shouted, “Get to bed, Bradley Julian!” She had used my full name. Scared, I ran into my bedroom. I slipped on a shirt and fell, bouncing my head off the floor. I lay still and listened to the silence. My head ached and I wept. And then the sounds. Harder, more insistent, her sobbing, “No. Stop.” And then another hit—this time, the meatier thud of bone on bone. And sobbing.
I pissed in my pajamas.
I’m sorry if this is a lot to take in. I’m almost done. It’ll all make sense in a minute.
Cold and wet, I rolled over and started searching the floor for a dry pair of underwear. The creaking rhythm of the bedsprings increased and I heard my mother start to vocalize louder. I abandoned my search and crept back to the door, wet pants clinging to my legs. I needed to hear what she was saying. “No . . . no . . . no . . . no” punctuated by his grunting.
“Mom,” I whispered from my bedroom doorway.
“No.”
“Mom?”
“No!”
His voice. “Shut up!” He was commanding her, not me. They couldn’t hear me and my little boy’s voice, high pitched and timid. She did as she was told and shut up and I began to cry. I crawled to her door and knocked lightly. The creaking and breathing continued. I squeaked out another “Mom?” Everything stopped.
“What, baby?” she asked, out of breath.
“Are you okay? I . . . I heard . . . something.” Silence. I repeated my question. “Are you okay? Why are you saying ‘no’?”
I heard urgent whispering from the man in my mother’s bed, and she added, “Go back to bed, Jude.”
“What’s happening?” I asked. She told me that she had gotten a call from her friend, Ross, but she dropped the phone and the cord got tangled up and she was telling him “no” so he wouldn’t hang up. “Now go in your room and shut the door!” The man whispered something and she added, “Don’t come out again, okay? Promise?”
I didn’t know what to say. “I can’t sleep with all the noise,” I explained truthfully, hoping that the man might listen to me, if he wouldn’t to her. Another beat. A sob.
“That’s all over, baby. We’ll be quiet.” I did as I was told and crawled back to my room. She lied. The noise resumed, louder and more insistent than before. I sat with my back to our shared wall. I sobbed and wished that it was a dream. I didn’t know what was happening, but I knew this was unlike any other night that had come before. And I knew there wasn’t a damn thing in the world I could do to stop it. I had no idea then what it was—not until a few years later—but I knew it was wrong and that I was perfectly hopeless in the face of it. Afraid and weak, wet with pissed-in pants like a baby, I was the opposite of every boy in every book I’d ever read. I couldn’t save myself or my family. No one was coming to whisk me away to adventure and freedom. There was no such thing as candy that never lost its sweetness. And there never would be.
Eventually, the sounds slowly wound down to silence. Nothing dramatic, no crescendo, just a growing, sad quiet that felt like all the gravity in the universe. A terrible few minutes passed before I heard the lock on her door pop open. I scurried on my hands and knees to my own door to peek out and watch my mother head into the bathroom with her robe pulled around her like always. Except she didn’t emerge. He did. I watched him walk away from me down the hallway into the living room, stopping in the moonlight shining through the front windows to dig in his pockets. He was backlit and I remember thinking of him as a big piece of darkness that had come apart from the night. He couldn’t be real. And then he found his keys and let himself out our front door, looking at me over his shoulder as he pulled it closed behind him. Not a phantom; just a man with a long mustache and cruel eyes.
I sprinted to the door and threw the chain and the deadbolt. I twisted the knob lock and pressed my back up against it, holding it closed. With my back to the door I saw my mother standing in the doorway to her room, also watching him go—head down, eyes up, hugging herself. His car engine sounded like a monster. The headlamps blasted into the apartment, lighting up my mother in the hallway. Illuminating her split lip. I put my hand up to shield my eyes from the light filling the room, but she didn’t. She watched him drive away. When the lights faded and the rumble of his engine grew softer as he peeled out around the corner, she stumbled into the bathroom and shut the door, locking it. I walked up to the door and knocked lightly. “Mom?” I whispered. “Mom?” She didn’t reply. I could hear her crying behind the door.
I gave up, and started back to bed. Just inside her room I noticed a small, dense spot, darker than the rest of the floor. I picked up that little piece of darkness the man had left in our house and took it.
If that was difficult to read, I suppose it’s no consolation to know how difficult it was to write. Please be patient just a little while longer. I’m almost done, and then I have a single favor to ask of you.
As you can imagine, things changed. She cried a lot at first. We stopped having breakfast together; she had trouble sleeping and got out of bed late, rushing out of the apartment without eating to get to work on time. I thought she’d stop going out to the bars, and she did at first, but that only lasted a couple of weeks. Her friends came over and insisted she “get back on the horse” and not “let one bad apple spoil the bunch,” as if the man had merely stood her up on a date. I suspect she wasn’t open with her friends about what happened. I don’t know what she had told them, only that one of them offered to get her own boyfriend to cut off his balls if she ever saw him come around the club again. Afterward, she started going out again. She did stop bringing home boyfriends. Instead, she brought all her friends home. They’d stay up late listening to records and smoking out of tin foil—smoke that didn’t smell like Virginia Slims—and they sniffled a lot, like they all had colds. They were loud and laughed the way my uncle laughed the time I got drunk on Thanksgiving wine and passed out. At me. I stayed in my room. I stole a slide lock from a hardware store to install on my door.
In the mornings, I stepped around their bodies, made myself a quick breakfast and sneaked out early to go wait for the school bus. I was never late for school again.
A few months later, I came home to find my mother slumped over on the sofa, a needle dangling out of her arm and her skin pale as moonlight. I called 9-1-1 and they whisked her away as quickly as I was taken into “protective custody.” My grandparents couldn’t take me and my uncle wouldn’t, so for a few years, I bounced through a series of foster homes with varying ability to deal with a child possessed with as deeply entrenched “anger issues” as I had. I’ll spare you the details, other than to say that when they allowed me into the apartment to collect my clothes and a few things—“not too much; we can’t take it all”—I took that little piece of darkness and kept it with me always.
His wallet.
I took it hoping that someday, someone would ask me for it. Ask for the story and what happened. They’d come and take it, relieving me of the burden of holding on to what was inside. No one ever did, though, and I’ve been carrying it my whole life. Discarding a little bit at a time, here and there as I grew older and realized that I didn’t need the actual wallet or the canceled CITGO card or a picture of an unsmiling girl posing in a halter top and short shorts against a red ’68 Mustang—although that last, I carried for a very long time, only throwing it away after I was married. Once I got divorced, I missed it a little, but it was gone, and you can’t get back what you throw away.
Which brings me to the favor I want to ask of you.
Along with this letter, I have enclosed your father’s driver’s license. I’ve held on to it for the better part of forty years and when I saw his obituary, I realized it was time to let go of this last little piece of darkness. My hope is that you will bury it with him, but the choice to keep it is yours.
Always,
Bradley “Jude” MacLean
REMINISCE
Marc’s corner wasn’t the best, but it was his and he didn’t have to defend it. All the major intersections in town were taken by groups of panhandlers who banded together to secure their spots and look out for one another. They covered all four directions of traffic—one at each crosswalk—hitting the WALK button every time a light turned green and two of them had to retreat back to the safety of the median or the sidewalk. Marc didn’t have a team of friends to rely upon. Not since Kandahar. No one to look out for meant no grieving families to explain your failures to.
Instead, he found the stop light near the underpass. There was no crosswalk button and traffic wasn’t heavy, but it was steady in the morning and evening and it provided cover from both the sunlight and rain when he needed it. Press Street above was much busier, but his road wound around to the same place—the mall—so it was a popular cut-through for shoppers when travel on Press got too hairy. Stand-still traffic was a nightmare for a guy asking for change. No one wanted to get stuck for minutes staring awkwardly at the same sad sack with a cardboard sign. Similarly, once he either got a buck or a snub from a motorist, that relationship was over. He relied on a steady stream of people who hadn’t already read his sign and made the choice whether or not to “donate.”
13 Views of the Suicide Woods Page 22
