by Dodds, Colin
“So Jim, I have to ask, what the hell happened to your face?” Dan asked at halftime.
“I was at a party with some old friends and a fight broke out.”
“No kidding, where was it?”
“It was in Worcester.”
“Ohh, Wistah. You gotta watch out in Wistah,” Dan said, exaggerating his own accent.
“How about you Dan, where do you live?” I asked.
“I just moved from Newton to Natick—South Natick, actually.”
“Is that the part by the mall?”
“You mean the Natick Collection? No, it’s actually the old part of town, by the Charles River.”
“Oh, that sounds nice,” I said, wondering to myself how the hell I had gotten into a pissing match with this guy.
The second game was less fun than the first. Dad slept through it and Dan Wong stuck around. I left before it was done.
33.
The guard was watching the playoff game on a little TV at Mom’s apartment complex when I pulled up. He let me through without asking any questions.
“Oh my God, what happened?” Mom asked fast upon the hello.
“I was at a party in Worcester and there was a fight. It’s no big deal. Just a bruise.”
“It looks bad. Did you go to the hospital?”
“No. It’s nothing, just a bruise. It just happens to be on my face. I got plenty of these growing up.”
“Can you see out of it?”
“Yeah. It’s fine,” I said, booming my voice a little.
“Do you want some ice?”
“It’s too late for ice. Don’t worry about it.”
Her low-ceilinged apartment was bright, like there were one too many lamps on. She was wearing a baggy red-and-green sweater with a pattern of abstract wreaths. It had been more than a week since Christmas and I felt guilty. But then I thought of all the shit I had to do because she left Dad. That balanced out my guilt. It was a great feeling, just take my word for it.
“Well, what do you feel like doing?” I asked.
“I’m okay with anything, we could eat in, eat out. Whatever you want.”
We went back and forth like this some more. She and Dad used to do it too. It’s supposed to be a polite, pliant, generous gesture. But it seemed more like they had both just run out of appealing options. Indifference is a type of politeness, but not the best one. I finally said we should stay in, that I was beat. More than I wanted to admit, I just wanted to sit down in front of the television. I wanted nothing more than to be obliterated by its boundless reservoir of dinosaurs, convicted murderers and others worse off than me. It was the thing I’d hated most when I hated the suburbs—the way my parents and so many other people I’d needed in some way would get lost in self-abnegation before the flickering box. But, can of Diet Coke in hand, I succumbed just the same. No one gets converted to this way of living, I thought, they just get tired. And I was that. Someone on the TV swabbed a belt buckle and it turned bright blue in the dark. That was important to finding the killer, the TV said.
The TV was loud as hell. I turned it down. But Mom reminded me her hearing was bad and I turned it back up, just a hair past what the TV’s speakers could gracefully deliver.
“We can get whatever you want. I’m going to have one of my diet meals I think,” Mom said.
She had been on a diet since about nine months before she left Dad.
“Okay, maybe just some Chinese.”
Mom lit a cigarette, then got up for a fresh soda. A heavyset, grayish man on TV talked about the DNA content of saliva. Mom sat down and watched with me. A ruddy man in sun glasses enumerated the difficulties of surrounding a house like the one the killer lived in. Mom tried to make conversation while I focused on the TV, playing the role of Dad’s ghost.
“So when was this party?”
“Last night.”
“Was Joe there?”
“Yep.”
“Did he get in the fight too?”
“Yep.”
“He didn’t get hurt, did he?”
“Just bruises.”
I don’t know why, but it was like a Chinese finger trap—the more questions she asked, the less I wanted to answer them. I couldn’t make my answers much more curt, so I just took longer to deliver them—who else was there? why did the fight start? was anyone else hurt? was the place where the party was held damaged? did the hosts own or rent? and so on. Finally the show started up again. It isn’t walls that separate us, but TVs.
“Did Joe know the ones who started the fight?”
“Can we wait for the next commercial for the rest of it?” I asked. I should be more even-handed about all that comes with being an adult of divorce, but it doesn’t come easy. The killer almost escaped, was caught and arraigned. A commercial came on.
“So, did he know them?” Mom asked, not missing a beat.
“I don’t think so ...”
After more parrying, Mom left to pick up the Chinese food. I ate it, and she picked at something from a rounded cardboard tray that approximated food. By then, we’d changed the subject.
“I swear, he’s got to be the only dumb Jew I’ve ever met,” she said about a man she worked with, and we laughed a bit.
Mom paused as if to say something important. I held my breath and hoped it wasn’t a boyfriend. I wondered what it would be like to punch a man twice my age. But it was a false alarm.
“How is your father?”
“He’s recovering. He woke up today. He’ll be fine.”
Then Mom looked at me as if to invite me to say more. But I just shrugged, looked down and ate. There could be no possible benefit in passing information from one of them to the other.
“How are you doing?” Mom asked, indicating the whole situation by how she said the words.
Mom had her bouts with depression. The latest one directly preceded her leaving Dad, and she was attuned to it. I appreciated her asking, though she might not have known it.
“I’m fine. Just doing what I have to.”
After dinner, I could have stayed at Mom’s. But I said I had to do laundry back in Westborough.
“So are you going to have time this week? Maybe we could get dinner,” Mom said.
It sort of drove a knife into my heart. I said yeah, said I’d have to see what was happening at the hospital and so on.
It’s hard to love your parents enough. It’s just how they sit in you. No gesture or gift ever seems to communicate or exhaust it.
But, driving past the reservoir and the apartment complex that faced it, a terrible feeling, even beyond that, a sense of immense waste hit me. Traffic snagged while a pair of drivers sorted out a fender bender by the stop light. I idled with everyone else by the eastern shore of the reservoir, looking at the old dam and its granite church-like building, wondering, what did I waste? What was I wasting? Bright, white lights shone down from the apartment complex above me. Past that glared a black and yellow sign for a sushi restaurant. The landscape gave no indication anywhere of exactly what had gone wrong, only that something had.
Back at the Fountainhead, I called Serena and got her voicemail, which was a relief. I tried to sound sweet on the message. The effort counts almost as much as the real thing. It wasn’t even eleven, but I was exhausted.
On the inflatable bed, I closed my eyes and adjusted the too-small blanket. I thought of how scary it must have been for Mom to leave Dad after thirty-seven years, of how unhappy she must have been to leave. It was her overmatched fight against the 10,000 varieties of death. It made getting to sleep hard. Lying there, I was pursued by the feeling that something irreplaceable was being wasted. It vibrated in my gut.
I got out of bed and found my wallet with Ira Volpe’s card in it. I figured there’s no bad time to call a police station, and called his office line. His line rang a half-dozen times before I was transferred to an old woman with a reedy voice and little patience. She told me Detective Volpe wasn’t in and I should talk to one of the detectives
who was. Before she could transfer me, I asked when he would be in. She said he’d be in at five, five-thirty that evening, then clicked me over to a sleepy sounding man who I hung up on.
By then, my gut had calmed to a basic sort of dread. I could sleep on that.
34.
Sunday, January 4
They’d moved Dad from the ICU to a regular room in another wing of the hospital. It was bigger and less futuristic, with curtains and fewer machines. Dad even had a roommate on the other side of a curtain. It was an older man in worse shape than him. The guy’s wife was holding his hand. They whispered occasionally—a real, live ghost at the feast. I’d brought a bag full of boneless chicken parts for the game. I tried to find a place for my coat and reached for a chair that was actually a toilet with a removable bottom. The days ahead flashed, coming toward me as unstoppably as kickoff.
“You want some chicken?” I asked.
Dad scrunched up his face to indicate no, and we watched the game. It was competitive and physical from the get go. Dad was nervous and engrossed, struggling through his pain and lingering chemical torpor to harrumph at the TV. It wasn’t until halftime, with the Patriots holding the lead, that we talked.
“You barely made it. I was getting worried.”
“I overslept. I was up late.”
“Were you out in Worcester?”
“No, I was just watching TV.”
“Did you see your mother?”
“Yeah.”
“How’s she?”
“Fine.”
It still hurt him to speak. So I kept my own questions to ones with yes and no answers. You could guess everything going on with Dad just by looking at him—the pain, the drugs and so on. The people on the other side of the curtain whispered some more.
The Pats held the Colts to a field goal in the second half and had the game wrapped up with five minutes left. The win was an irrational glimmer of optimism for us. We’d hacked the ice off the aluminum bleachers at the old stadium with our drivers’ licenses. We’d watched when fans carrying off a goalpost were half-electrocuted by a power line outside the stadium. We’d had football to talk about and watch together during that first rapprochement after a bitterly contentious adolescence. And the Patriots started winning when things began changing with us. That’s what it meant, coincidence or no. After the game, I gave Dad a hug, gently. His own hands were light and trembling to reach my shoulders. The hug was awkward for me and painful for him. I sat back down to bask in the triumph reflected in the tiny hospital TV’s recap.
“These chicken things are good. I’m going to get some soda. You want anything?”
Dad said no, looking more alert and less pained than I’d seen him since the surgery. In the long, windowless corridors of the hospital, I wondered if it was dark yet. The hospital was neither day nor night. I had a Diet Coke can in each hand and was leaving the cafeteria when I ran into Olive.
“Well, if it isn’t the invisible man. Do you have a minute?” she asked.
Her voice showed aggravation, but she looked good. Olive was wearing a tight black and white dress from a thrift shop with an even tighter black sweater over it that opened to offer up her pale cleavage. She had on dark red lipstick, a lot of eye makeup and smelled of cigarettes. It all turned me on. I could tell she had something rehearsed, a speech that started with how I said I’d call, carried on into an ultimatum, and concluded with a proclamation that she didn’t care what I did. But my black eye turned the tide. It hurt less, but a dark purple and yellowish outline was setting in, making it look worse.
“My God, what happened to your face?”
“I was out with some friends in Worcester and I got into a fight. It’s no big deal.”
“Does it hurt?”
I shrugged to indicate that though it did hurt, I certainly wasn’t about to say so. It was a cheap ploy, but I wasn’t above it. We went back to my usual table, where I could watch Whiskeynose locked in his booth with his tiny television.
“So what’s new with you? How’s your Dad?” I asked.
“Dad’s going to have to do this again, it turns out. Maybe next year, but they’re talking about doing it while he’s still here. They don’t like the look of another one of his valves. So the whole clan is going to get to do another stint in the hospital—hooray.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
“Do you want to just, like, run off to San Francisco with me? Maybe we can change our names.”
She said it like a joke that required only that I not laugh for it to come true. In that moment, she wasn’t my regret.
“It’s the best idea I’ve heard today. But I can’t,” I said, gesturing all around me to explain it.
“Yeah, that’s right. I forgot. You can’t even call me.”
“I’m sorry about that. I have Dad, then Mom, then my friends back in Worcester. And things are crazy there. I want to tell you about what happened to my face, about all of it. I really do. And I do think of you. You’re the bright spot for me here. There. I said it.”
“Said what?”
“What you wanted me to say when you came on all sour a few minutes ago.”
“I just wanted to know why you didn’t call.”
“What are you doing tomorrow night?”
“I’m not just coming over. That was just that time.”
“Okay, we’ll go someplace. You know your way around. You pick.”
“I’ll think about it,” she said.
He dark lips pressed against each other to stifle a smile. I touched her hand and it opened to the touch.
“I’ll call this time.”
Exhilarated and wondering what the hell I was doing, I made it back to Dad’s room.
“Jesus, you go to Atlanta for the sodas? You missed the kickoff. Dallas is about to score,” Dad rasped, his impatience trumping the pain.
“Sorry, I got turned around in the other wing. Then I got a phone call.”
“It’s okay. I had the nurse help me to the bathroom when you were gone.”
“Oh shit, and I missed all the excitement.”
I opened Dad a soda and we settled down to watch the game. There was a lot of scoring for a playoff game. Between the first and second quarter was a plug for the late night news. Below the eager weather man, the time flashed—after five thirty. I took a breath and excused myself. I went outside to make the call. It was warming up, almost to the freezing point. Snow was on the way.
“Ira Volpe,” he answered, and the background noise filled in behind him.
“Ira, it’s Jim, Jim Monaghan. We talked the other day.”
“Yeah, Jim, what’s up?”
“Well, it’s just that this situation—the one from the other night—it has me a little worried. I wanted to sit down and talk to you about it, get your take, see what I can do. Do you have time?”
“I could do later tonight. I’m on until one tonight, unless someone gets shot. But uh, it’s cold out and the Pats won, so I should be free.”
“How’s nine sound?”
“Sure, you know where headquarters is, right?”
Worcester police headquarters was an impregnable cement block with no windows until the fifth story. In the middle of downtown, it stood as a monument of hostility towards the city’s residents.
“Can we meet somewhere else?”
“Where?”
“How about the Boulevard Diner, on Shrewsbury Street?”
“The old dining car?”
“Yeah. Eggs and coffee are on me.”
“See you at nine.”
Back in Dad’s room, the elderly roommate slept. His wife watched. Dad stared at his dinner—a covered plastic bowl of broth with a big spoon.
“What took you so long? I even farted while you were gone.”
“Farting, hospital food—why do I always miss the good parts?”
Dad started to laugh, but that invited a near cataclysm of pain. He smiled instead.
“I guess you just have shit
luck.”
Halftime was ending. The game carried on, one heroic sack, one heroic long bomb at a time until heroism lost all meaning. It was 42–38 by the time Dad fell asleep with five minutes left. I pulled up his blanket as a way of saying good-bye. It was snowing when I gave Whiskeynose my ticket and my money.
35.
The snow fell through the streetlights, renewing the landscape. I drove slowly after Dad’s SUV lost its grip on the road by a half-built, Tyvek-skinned car dealership. I got to the diner early, and ordered sausage, eggs and a coffee. The place was a onetime dining car parked for good on Shrewsbury Street, down the hill from the tracks of the Worcester-Boston railroad. The place was so small that everyone had to make a solid effort to ignore each other. A woman and her daughter bickering in and out of whispers, assassinating each others’ characters between the clatter of plates, were the main event that we ignored. Ira was also early, showing up before the food. He pointed to his left eye and shook his head as he made his way over to the booth I was in.
“I told you to stay out of it,” he said, seeming disappointed. Somehow he seemed a lot older than me.
“It’s just a black eye.”
“I know. But it could have been worse. There’s one thing I learned it’s that there’s really no limit to how bad these things can get.”
“What things?”
“The fights that break out over nothing. They usually end worse than the ones we can make sense of. Really Jim, you should know better. You’re not one of them. And you’re what? Thirty almost? I mean, you’re too old for this nonsense.”
In high school, Ira had been a big kid, big because fat and then big after years in the weight room. He’d slimmed down and gotten old in the intervening years. Lines radiated from the corners of his eyes and creases connected his broad nose and the sides of his mouth. He had an old man’s slow-moving eyes.
“You’re right. I didn’t know what I was dealing with. I went with Joe to a party. He said it was a friend of his invited him. But it was a set up. They were waiting for him. Things could have gone very badly.”
