by Dodds, Colin
Fin had a goofy haircut, too big on top and too close on the sides. He looked at me a moment with wide eyes, then smiled and shook his head. Among all the yahoos from when we ran wild, I always liked Fin. He wasn’t stupid and he genuinely meant well. But mental illness had hit him in his early twenties, and precluded a great many things.
“Jim Fucking Monaghan. I thought I’d never see you again. Man, how about this shit?” he said, his eyes widening further, as if to physically take in Joe’s death.
We repeated that it was unbelievable, back and forth, like criminals getting their story straight.
“I know. I mean, I always thought it was like Joe had this weird assurance on high that this wouldn’t happen. That’s why he was always so fearless, so …”
“So fucking stupid,” I offered, surprising myself.
“Yeah. It’s just like you got used to him being a nut and getting away with it.”
“It’s like some kind of law was broken. Slanche,” I said, raising my glass.
We threw back our glasses of bourbon too fast, and took a second to unscrew our faces.
“Man. That is strong. I’m not supposed to drink with the medication I’m on. But I’ve been doing good lately. Or I was,” Fin said. Once a ladies’ man, he had put on a lot of weight.
“Yeah, how are you doing with all of that?”
“It’s fuckin’ manic depression. So it’s unbelievably great then it’s a fuckin’ endless nightmare. Either that, or I’m on the pills and I’m a zombie who can’t get a boner. I’ve been seeing a lot of your buddy Jeff, lately. We go to the same club.”
“Yeah, I just talked to him the other day. Well, I guess I’m not supposed to offer. But I’m having another.”
“What else can you do at times like these?”
I gave the goateed Irish guy my credit card and told him to keep a tab open. Over fresh bourbons, Fin gave his recap. He was living with Tony Howard, a guy I knew from a long time back. Tony was fresh out of prison and crazy. He woke Fin up the day before by putting a revolver against his forehead. It didn’t take much wisdom or much love for me to advise Fin to move out. But he acted as if it did.
After a few more drinks, Marissa and Kyle showed up. And our part of the bar filled with people who knew Joe, everyone drinking into the shock, because that’s what people do.
“So what was going on when you got out there? When did the guy pull out his gun?” asked a tall black guy with glasses. He also had the sunken cheeks and slack jaw.
“Well, after the crackhead guy ran off with the girl’s purse, Joe and the other guy ran after him …” Kyle said, and told the story right up to the part where he was arrested. His voice dropped at the end. He wagged his head and came up with a drink.
“Did the guy say he was a cop?” Marissa asked.
“I’m not sure. There was a lot of yelling back and forth before I got back. He might have,” Kyle said.
“Well, what was it? You either heard him say it or you didn’t.”
“I don’t remember. I just saw the gun and thought I should get some help. I only remember what they said after Jim and I got back to them.”
“Kyle, he either said it and you heard it, or he didn’t say it and you didn’t hear it. Which is it?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think he said it,” Kyle said.
Marissa looked at me for more information. But I wasn’t ready to mine that memory. I shrugged and drank. It took about three hours to learn that drinking doesn’t help much with grief. The sensation that something was careening between my Adam’s apple and navel kept me sober in the worst way. So I defied my Irish heritage and said good night before I was honest-to-God drunk. I walked through the darkened lot to Dad’s SUV, feeling very alone. I did what anyone would do in that situation. I called my mom. I could tell from the sound of her voice that I woke her.
“Mom, it’s me, Jim. Can I stay over tonight?”
Worcester to Framingham is a forty-five-minute drive on Route 9. I drove like I do when I’m half drunk—as if my personal freedom is on the line. The effort saved me from thinking. All around me, the woods and shopping plazas teemed with threats far worse than a sobriety checkpoint. The roads seemed wobbly, the lakes looked hungry, the parking lots rippled like quicksand and the sky threatened to suck up everything. I breathed and breathed again, because that’s what people do. Making it past a suspicious guard at the apartment’s front gate, I found parking a quarter mile from the door to Mom’s yellow-brick building. She buzzed me in and I walked the hallway to the elevator.
Fumbling with my car keys, I dropped them on the high-traffic carpet in the hallway. On the door by my keys, someone had taped up their kid’s artwork. It was a crude drawing of little people, big people, unidentifiable animals and scattered shapes. Above it all was scrawled “I AM SPECIUL.” The door was one of about a dozen in the low-ceilinged, red-brick hallway. It struck me that this nondescript apartment building would be impossibly special to that kid. It would be his entire world for what seemed like forever. And one day, after years away, he would wonder what exactly that all-encompassing time and place in his life had been about. And he would return and see how peculiar and specific his world had been.
Bent, drunk and lost in thought, I almost fell over. I picked up my keys and found the elevator. Mom was bleary and disheveled when she let me in. Her age showed in her thick gray nightgown and her uncombed, thinning hair. She gave me a long hug befitting my fucked-up state, informed me of the meager options in the fridge. She had questions, and offered to listen. But I said I just wanted to sleep.
58.
Monday, January 19
Mom was surprised to see me up so early. We talked for a minute before I realized I wasn’t up for talking. I cleaned up, put the Patriots shirt back on and folded up the bed. Mom offered to make breakfast, but I said we should go out, and said I’d drive. Just past the mall, she asked how I was doing.
“I’m okay. Sleeping is hard. This—it’s not like being depressed. It’s a physical thing, nausea, then exhaustion, then laughing for a second and then crying. You probably remember it from when Grandpa died.”
He’d died before I was born. But she’d told me about it more than once. I was starting to understand why.
“After your grandfather died, I remember feeling like I’d been skinned. It was like I had no protection against anything, even the little things. I remember being glad when the weekends were over, because I could go back to work. And that meant I could stop crying. Oh Jim, I’m so sorry you have to go through this.”
“How long did it last?” I asked.
“The mourning?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I don’t think I was really myself until after a year, a year and a half.”
“What changed?”
“I think it was time. Time changes all of this. But there was something. I had a dream not too long after he died where your grandfather told me to go to Montreal. I didn’t know what he meant, but I remembered my mother had talked about a shrine in Montreal. So, well, your father was a lot more understanding in those days, and we flew up there, just for the day. We got off the plane, and we didn’t speak French and didn’t know where to go. But we eventually found the church. It was on a big hill. When I went inside, I felt the most overwhelming sensation of peace, like everything was okay.”
Mom directed me through downtown Natick. It was quiet and safe. I had no memories of Joe there. We found a little diner near Town Line Liquors, where all the denizens of dry Wellesley went for booze. The diner was plain, essentially a room with tables inside. But the menu described twenty ways to make eggs. Mom ordered the French toast and I ordered coffee and the house omelet, which incorporated every ingredient the place had. The waitress was middle-aged, with a bird’s nest of curly blonde-gray hair and a face rosy with winter-broken capillaries.
“I know you’re upset. But this will pass. Don’t do anything risky.”
“Like what?”
I shrugged and sipped my coffee.
“Are they going to bury him?” Mom asked, sitting down across from me.
“I don’t know. I guess so. I remember Justine saying she liked cremation, though.”
“I always liked the idea of a grave. I just think for the first generation or two after, it’s good to have somewhere to go, somewhere to visit.”
“I guess so. Like I said, I don’t know what they’re going to do with him.”
“It’s strange, how death affects you. I remember, when I was young, going to a wake for the father of a friend of mine. This was back when they held the wake in the family’s house. They had an open casket. That night, I had a dream where her father sat up in his coffin and pointed at me and asked ‘Have you seen Gomorrah?’ I was a nervous wreck for the next week.”
Mom seemed as if she was still wounded by the man’s death and unnerved by his question. Like everyone else, she was helpless before what was happening. But at least she was awake to it. She made me feel less alone.
My omelet tasted like everything. But my appetite wasn’t working. After breakfast, Mom and I went to a big bookstore in one of the massive shopping plazas on Route 9. We walked the aisles, lost and then found each other by the register. She’d found two books and I’d found none. That appetite was dead as well. We went into the attached cafe. Mom bought me a coffee and herself a chai-tea milkshake. I slumped at an earth-toned table. The café’s music selection coated the room in middle-class agreeability. It was also safe from memories. I looked out the window and supposed that all the wrong people had survived.
“This place is crowded for a Monday. Doesn’t anybody work anymore?” I scowled.
“It’s Martin Luther King Day.”
“Oh.”
Mom asked how Joe died. I told her the story as I knew it, adding the details I’d heard from Kyle the night before.
“How terrible,” she said.
“It’s terrible. It’s a lot of things. It’s a fucking waste is what it is. I keep trying not to feel this way, but I’m fucking pissed off. I mean, people fucking cared about the guy. People loved him. And he just pissed it away. He just spat in our eyes. He just told that fucking moron to shoot him.”
“Anger is part of it,” Mom said, looking around at the people I had roused by raising my voice in rage and obscenity. She stared away their stares.
I drank my boiling coffee and hung my head. I never wanted to say any of that. I never wanted to believe that we don’t belong to just ourselves. I never wanted to acknowledge that we belong to everyone who loves us, and should take better care. I’d always hated that point of view—its worry, and its inhibition on personal freedom. But the truth of it was sticking into me like a spear.
We finished our drinks and I drove Mom home. We hugged an awkward good-bye in the car. Alone in the car, my thoughts broke into half-coherent fragments. I raced back to the Fountainhead and was asleep as soon as I hit the inflatable mattress. When wakefulness returned, it rattled me. I wandered the apartment. I plugged in my cell phone and saw that I had about a dozen messages. I called a few people back, Olive, Serena, Jeff and Emily. Those phone calls all run together in my mind. I gave out the facts and they responded with numb apologies, requests for details, rote platitudes and vague offers that I should ask them for anything they can do to help. Not that I’d have much else to offer in their shoes.
Serena said she’d come up if I needed her to, even though work was crazy that week. And I said I’d be okay. She apologized, and offered anything else she could do to help. I hung up, feeling bitter and hurt. It’s infantile as hell, but I wanted her to insist. It’s something worse than infantile, but that phone call ultimately decided things between us.
I hung up, and without thinking, called Volpe’s cell phone. In some part of my mind, I imagined that he had the power, as a member of the Worcester Police Department, to recall the bullet that had killed Joe. I recognized how irrational the idea was just as his voicemail picked up, and didn’t bother leaving a message. There isn’t much you can say after your rescue fantasy has disintegrated.
Marissa called with the address of the wake—a funeral parlor over by Institute Park in Worcester. She said that her, Fin and Kyle were considering an encore to the last night’s binge. I said maybe, and called Dad to let him know I wasn’t coming by. Outside the window, the sun was sliding down, past Springfield and Amherst. I watched it, but watching, even staring, didn’t stop it.
“Yeah, of course. Do whatever you have to do tonight. Just remember tomorrow.”
“What about tomorrow?”
“It’s when I’m coming home from this place. You have to pick me up.”
“What time?”
“I think around noon.”
“Oh shit. Joe’s wake starts at eleven. Can I pick you up early—like eight or nine?”
“I don’t know. I’ll ask.”
“Okay. Try to be insistent, though.”
Hanging up, I cursed the fresh difficulty. I started putting on my shoes to go see Marissa, Kyle and Fin. Near the hot center of the pain, if not with Justine, then with Joe’s friends, in his old, trashed apartment seemed like the only place to go. But I lost my way looking for my jacket and decided that I was in no state to go anywhere. The two hours of phone calls had drained me. I called Marissa.
“Monaghan, you coming over?”
“Nah, I have to get Dad out of his physical therapy place at the break of dawn if I’m going to make it to the wake on time. And I’m beat, anyway.”
“Yeah, we’ve all been going in and out of naps. We were out all night. It was madness.”
“Sounds like a good time.”
“It was alright for a while. Then Fin almost got us into a fight with the whole bar when he yelled out that the Patriots were dog shit. So they threw us out of Ralph’s. Fucking Fin, what a nut. It was probably smart—you leaving early. I’m starting to think that drinking doesn’t help with this at all.”
“It didn’t seem to be helping when I left.”
“Then Claire called this morning to bitch me out because of what I said to the guy from the Telegram.”
“Oh yeah, that reminds me, she told me to tell you and everyone not to talk to reporters.”
“Fuck that. She isn’t the boss over all of this. I gave the reporter your number. Did he call you?”
“Maybe. My phone ran out of juice. I still have a bunch of messages I didn’t listen to.”
We made plans to meet for coffee before the wake and hung up. Taking a breath, I took off my shoes, smiled and shook my head. I was glad to have tomorrow’s packed schedule to distract me. I was glad for the wake, for the chance to be at the hot center of the pain.
I grabbed some Tylenol PM from the bathroom. Lying back on the air-mattress, I hoped for more than five hours of sleep.
Lying there, I remembered a night in our sophomore year of high school, when I got high with Joe for the first time. He was excited to show me off his gravity bong, a carved up two-liter soda bottle. The drugs worked for him back then, when almost nothing did. He was still young enough to have a Wade Boggs poster in his room, but old enough to have moved down to his mom’s basement. I remembered Joe’s excitement, remembered stealing Doritos from under his stoned nose. I remembered waking up that morning on the mildew-smelling floor of his room, with nothing still working, and full of dread at having to tell Dad that I was quitting the football team.
And with all else failing me on the inflatable mattress, the drugs did work. They put me down, pushed me deep and kept me there for a long time.
59.
Tuesday, January 20
The thoughts came in before the sunlight. Facing the prospect of hours to kill, I cleaned the apartment. Any task was welcome, compared to wandering the unmapped regions of grief. I moved my bed inflatable back into the spare room. Two hours later, the place looked more or less like it did when
I showed up four weeks ago.
Parking at the rehab center in the still-early morning, I thought: “Look at me, doing the things I’m supposed to do, as if nothing was wrong.” That poke at the dragon sleeping in my guts was enough to conjure a crying jag that kept me in the car for five minutes. With my puffy, red face wiped and serious, I went inside and told the orderly at the front desk that I was there to check Dad out. He said that check-out didn’t start until eleven. I informed him that circumstances required that I get him today. He said that wasn’t the facility’s procedure. He argued his case out of laziness, and I argued with wild fervor. He tried to keep me calm. I tried to break his will. He went to get his supervisor. It took ten minutes of fury on my part before the supervisor, a sleepy-looking man with white hair, started the process of springing Dad. He refused to look at me as Dad filled out the paperwork in his wheelchair. Then he hurried us out, as if he was ejecting us from a bar.
On the drive back to the Fountainhead, the home nurse called to say that she was standing outside the apartment in the freezing cold and would leave if no one let her in. I told her I was on the way. The nurse was just about as pleasant when we met her at the entrance to the apartment building. She picked up too keenly on my having forgotten her name when I introduced them.
“It’s Joyce,” she said, arching an eyebrow in disappointment.
With Dad working his four-footed cane on the icy ground, it took forever to get out of the cold.
“I see you’ve cleaned since I was here,” Joyce offered, once we got to the apartment. “Or at least picked up.”
“Joyce, I would love to talk more with you today about cleaning and so on. But I have to go to the wake of my best friend from childhood. So please just do your job today,” I replied.
