by Jeanne Ray
We were heading for what Arthur referred to as the Down Side of Town. There were no railroad tracks, but if there had been we would now be on the other side. Pawnshops and check-cashing centers sat in the shadow of billboards that advertised the services of bail bondsmen. Miller was punching something up on his iPhone. “Thirty-three forty-three,” he said, and with that Nick pulled into the Bleeding Heart Tattoo Parlor.
I was sitting in the back of the Honda Accord thinking about Nick’s first day of kindergarten. After I had handed him over to the teacher, all smiles, Nick waving goodbye to me as if it were the most natural thing in the world, I ran around to the back of the building, Evie on one hip, and peered through the window to watch him. I was the one who was crying. Nick was working the room like a tiny politician, going to see what all the other kids were doing, checking out their books and toys. He was so beautiful! The most beautiful child in the room. He was blond in those days, with big dark eyes, his ivory skin still unmarred, not a single tattoo on that boy. He turned off the car and in a split second I thought to grab his phone out of the side of his pack just before he reached for it. The next thing I knew they were walking inside. I have never punched out numbers so fast in my life.
“Nick?” Gilda said, sounding surprised when she answered. “Everything okay?”
“It’s me,” I said. “And nothing is okay. I took Nick’s phone. Get a pencil. I’m at the Bleeding Heart Tattoo Parlor, 3343 Thompson Lane.”
“How can an invisible person get a tattoo?” she said. “That’s insanity.”
“Insanity, yes, but not my insanity. Nick and Miller are in there now. I’m in the car but I’m getting ready to go in and stall things until you can get here and bust it up.”
“Miller’s getting a tattoo!” Gilda said. “I’ll kill him first. Whose idea was this?”
“I have no idea. All I know is that it wasn’t mine. I ran into them at the coffee shop and was eavesdropping. When they said what they were doing I followed them here. I mean I got into Nick’s car.”
“Oh, Clover,” Gilda said. “Thank God you’re invisible. Seriously, I don’t know what we’re going to do when you come back again.”
Through the plate-glass window I could see the boys talking to a large, tattoo-covered man who looked like he had recently escaped from prison by way of the circus. “Listen, I’ve got to go,” I said. “Just get here fast.”
I got out of the car and tried to close the door quietly, then I stood outside the glass door of the shop looking in. It looked like a barber shop but with only two chairs. The interior was both plain and spare, a yellowed linoleum floor, a half wall of mirrors, pictures of possible tattoos secured with tacks—a flaming dagger, a twisting snake, an overwrought Celtic cross that looked like a pattern stamped out by a fancy waffle iron. It appeared that midday traffic was low, only the two boys and the tattoo man discussing the menu options. The tattoo man was wearing a gray sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off. One arm seemed to be where he or his brother tattooers had come to practice: two interlocking chain links, a very simple flag, a couple of names in script too elaborate to read, a bosomy girl balanced inside a martini glass. The other arm, however, was something of a masterpiece—a tree whose roots ran to his fingernails and whose trunk went up to his elbow, with a flourish of branches and leaves and a nest of birds on his upper arm, spreading into the darkness beneath his shirt. I saw the top leaves climbing up the side of his neck. Maybe a few of the birds had flown up into his beard. Impressive as it was, it was not the kind of thing I wanted for my son.
There were no other customers in the parking lot who I might have been able to slip in behind. People don’t think about the ways that being invisible can be tricky. If you don’t want to call attention to yourself it’s better not to open a door. Still, I wasn’t going to stand on principle and watch these children get inked. I went inside.
A bell jingled and all three of them turned their heads to look at nothing. They shivered in the sudden burst of cold air. “That’s strange. That never happens.” The big man almost walked right into me as he went over to open and close the door himself. “Must be one hell of a wind.” He shrugged and came back. “So just the one word?” he said.
“That’s it.” Nick tapped his shoulder. “On the deltoid.”
“How ’bout I put it in a bleeding heart? We’ve got a sale on bleeding hearts now, buy one, get one free.”
“That might be good,” Miller said.
“Then get one on each arm,” Nick said. “I just want the word.”
“Anything else on sale?” Miller asked.
“ ‘Mother,’ ” the man said solemnly. “ ‘Mother’ is always half price.”
“How’s that?” Miller asked.
“Because it’s respectful,” the man said. “People should respect their mothers.”
I had an awful lot to say on that subject but I managed to keep my mouth shut.
“Look through the books,” the man said, and pushed over two enormous books of the sort from which a person might chose a wedding invitation. “If you stick to just wanting one word, then you’re going to have to pick your lettering.”
Nick opened the book, glanced at two pages, and tapped on a row of type. “That’s the one.”
“You should be sure,” the man said, looking down at his arbitrary choice. “These things last.”
“It’s fine.”
Miller was perusing all his options. He was looking at a page of frogs wearing tiny crowns. But Nick was all business. Gilda might very well arrive in time to save her own son but she was going to be too late to save mine. Frantically I looked around for a distraction. I saw what appeared to be the workbench.
The big man turned the pages in Nick’s book. “These are your color options.”
“Black,” Nick said without looking.
The man picked up Nick’s wrist between his thumb and forefinger and turned it from side to side in the fluorescent light. “I’d suggest a dark navy. With your coloring the black is going to be too harsh. The letters just wind up looking like a bunch of bugs.”
“You’re the boss,” Nick said. It was a stupid thing to say to a tattoo artist, but Nick was listless, as if he couldn’t care less. Miller, on the other hand, was tapping on a little Aztec god. “This is pretty cool.”
Nick looked over. “If you’re an Aztec,” he said. “But we’re not Aztecs. We’re unemployed.”
There on the table was a boxful of small white paper packets. Using as much stealth as I possessed, I moved one to the table and silently tore it open. It was a needle sitting in a plastic bit with a clear plastic cap. How very sanitary of them. I had thought it would be a good idea to bend the needles but I could see now that it was a job that would take me most of the afternoon. Everything was so sterilized, so disposable. The ink was in tiny, individual pots. There were boxes of rubber gloves. I could throw the drill itself on the floor and step on it but I didn’t imagine that that would go down well with the tattoo man and I still had my child’s safety to think of. I kept looking out the window into the parking lot. Gilda, Gilda, Gilda.
“Take your shirt off,” the big man said, and Nick obliged, unbuttoning his plaid flannel shirt and then pulling his T-shirt over his head. It was more than I could bear, seeing his slender white back in this cold room. I thought of those half-dressed boys sitting on Arthur’s examining table, Arthur telling them to breathe in and breathe out as he listened with his stethoscope. Then the man handed Nick a piece of paper. “You better write it down,” he said. “I never was great at spelling.”
Nick printed out the word and handed the paper back to him. I leaned forward to look. Unemployed, it said.
“All right.” I grabbed the paper and crushed it into a ball. “That’s enough. Nick, Miller, the show’s over. Put your clothes back on, get in the car, and go home.” I had meant to be quiet, to wait for Gilda, but the words poured forth like marching soldiers that could not be stopped.
Nick stood up,
as did the hairs on the back of his neck. “Mom?”
“That’s right—Mom. You’re finished. This is over.”
All three of them were turning in slow circles, their chins pointed up to the humming strips of light. It was like a moment from The Nutcracker. It was the dance of the snowflakes.
“Your mom’s here?” the tattoo man asked, scanning the empty room.
“Speakerphone?” Miller said, looking at the ceiling.
Nick patted down his pockets. “I don’t have my phone,” he whispered.
“Just go,” I said. “And not to another tattoo parlor. You can forget about that, mister. I’ll be there, too.”
Suddenly Nicky’s eyes welled with tears. “I’ve been smelling her all afternoon,” he said in a low voice. “Miller, remember? We smelled her in the coffee shop and then in the car.”
“Is your mother dead, man?” the tattoo guy said.
“Mom?” Nick said. “Are you—” He didn’t say the word.
“I’m fine. No tattoos. That’s it. Go, go, go.” I held open the door and the two boys walked through.
“Right there,” Miller said, stopping right in front of me. “I smell her there.”
“Go!” I shouted in his ear, and then their speed increased. They were out the door and in the car and out of the parking lot in seconds flat.
The tattoo man came and stood beside me at the door. He gave his beard a scratch. “Just as well,” he said, watching them go. “That was just about the most depressing tattoo anyone’s ever asked me for, except the ones that are some dead guy’s name. They didn’t need it.”
“Who needs it?” I said.
He shrugged. “Drunk boys, sailors, people who just fell in love, people who just lost their mother.” He turned in my direction. “You’re sure you’re not dead?”
“Not the last time I checked.”
“Well, that’s good.”
I saw Gilda pull into the parking lot doing about eighty-five. Her tires squealed as she spun toward the curb. “That’s my ride,” I said.
“I figured as much. You have a nice day,” he said. He was very gallant for a man who had lost his only customers. He held open the door.
eleven
“I need you to take me back to my car,” I said. “It’s at the library.”
“Are you going to tell me what happened?” Gilda said. It was clear she was trying not to scream.
“I blew it, that’s what happened. I yelled at them. I told them to go. I was trying to wait for you to come and get them out of there but then Nick took off his shirt and the tattoo man was all but firing up the drill. I couldn’t wait anymore.”
“So they know you’re invisible. Who cares? Sooner or later they were going to figure it out. All that matters is that you stopped them.”
“You’re right. I know you’re right. It’s just that now I wish I’d told him before. I wish I could have sat down at the kitchen table and told him like a nice mother would.” Like Vlad’s mother did, that’s what I was thinking. It made me incredibly sad. “I shouldn’t have sprung it on him.”
“You should have sprung it on him if it kept him from getting a tattoo! You had to play your card, Clover. You didn’t have any choice.”
“Promise me you won’t light into Miller about it, at least not until I’ve had the chance to talk to Nick.”
“You mean you want me to go home and not kill him?”
“I think it’s best for now. Nothing actually happened. He might not try to figure out what my role in all this was.” I was not being particularly forthcoming. I didn’t want Miller to know I was invisible because then Benny would know I was invisible, and if Benny knew it might be his invitation to start smoking pot again. Given the circumstances, I wasn’t about to drop all of that on Gilda.
“What were they thinking about going to get tattoos in the first place, that’s what I want to know. Were they drunk?”
“Not drunk,” I said. “I think they were depressed. Or I think Nick was depressed. Miller may have been going along for the ride.”
“What are they depressed about?” Gilda ran a stop sign. There was no one else at the intersection, but still.
I put my hand on her arm. “Listen, don’t kill us, okay? That’s not going to help anything.” I was wearing my seat belt. Even I found the sight of a seat belt on my naked, invisible self to be slightly disquieting. “I think they’re depressed about not having jobs.”
“Is that what they said?”
“No.”
“Then why do you think that?”
I sighed. I wanted to tell her they had decided to get the bleeding heart special with the word “Mother” written inside. “They were getting tattoos that said ‘unemployed.’ ”
With that piece of news Gilda swung her car over to the side of the road. She took a deep breath and then dropped her head to the wheel. “I can’t stand this,” she said.
“I know,” I said. “Neither can I.”
It had been my intention to go home to face Nick, but once Gilda had dropped me off I didn’t feel ready. I pulled on a shirt and a hat and drove over to Arthur’s office instead. I decided the jig was up. It was time for me to pull him into his office and tell him everything. A very clear lesson had been presented to me today and for once I was going to act on what I’d learned. It’s time for us to all come clean, I was going to say. I know you’re sitting alone in your office at night looking at bikes and boats and planes, and Nicky is going to a tattoo parlor because he can’t find a job, and Evie, well, Evie is a total mystery so let’s skip her, and I’m invisible. We have to start pulling together as a family instead of everybody dealing with their own problems individually. I need your help if I’m going to get through this, that’s what I was going to say. I want us all to help one another.
Once I was in the parking garage I took my clothes off again and went upstairs. For some reason I figured that if I was going to tell Arthur I was invisible I might as well be completely full-frontal invisible when I did it. At the end of the hall I saw my husband rush by and I followed him. I meant to put my hand on his sleeve but there were too many people all over the place, nurses and children and mothers and drug reps and Lonnie who brought around the files. Arthur was moving quickly into a room and I slipped in behind him just before Mary closed the door. There was a mother in there waiting, a pretty girl with round blue eyes and heavy brown hair that hung straight down to her shoulders and was pushed back behind her ears. She was having her own bad day, and she was crying. Arthur took her baby from her arms and after a minute of stroking his head and saying how pretty he was, he put him down on a blanket on the table. He was maybe six months old. He cried a little but it was a tired cry and soon he stopped. Arthur listened to his heart and then touched his head again. He crouched down to look into the baby’s ears. And when he bent forward I bent forward too and touched my forehead very lightly to his back. I breathed in the starch of his lab coat and let myself be comforted by the warmth he was putting out. I wasn’t going to ask him for anything else. I wasn’t going to ask him to finally notice what had happened to me, at least not now. This baby was sick. Even I could see that.
I opened the door. It didn’t matter. People opened doors every ten seconds in that place. I went back to my car, got dressed, and went home.
I found Nick at the kitchen table. He was never one to hide. “Thin Man’s pooch,” he said when I walked in the door.
“Don’t be ridiculous. You know that. Asta.”
“I do know that,” Nick said, filling in the letters, “but it’s the one I was on.”
For a second I thought I was off the hook, that he wasn’t going to bring it up. Then he decided to continue.
“I’ve been able to come up with two options,” he said, keeping his eyes on the crossword puzzle. “The first option, very disturbing, is that I am losing my mind. The thing that keeps me from being sure this is the case is that it would mean Miller is also losing his mind at the exact same mom
ent in the exact same way, and this seems unlikely. I like Miller but we don’t have that much in common. That brings me to option two, that somehow, in some way I cannot figure out, you’re spying on me, following me around to coffee shops and tattoo parlors to find out what I do during the day. If that’s the case, I ask you to not deny it, because if you deny it that leaves me with option one and that’s not a great option.”
Was it possible he still didn’t know, didn’t wonder, after all this? Granted I had dressed again in order to drive home but it really didn’t amount to much of a disguise. “Okay,” I said. “Option two. Do I get to defend myself?”
He glanced up, then he looked back at his puzzle. “No,” he said. “I don’t think you do.”
“Well, I’m going to anyway. You told me I had to tell you the truth and now you have to listen to it.” I threw my keys on the table and sat down. Red came barreling into the kitchen and leapt onto my lap, where he proceeded to lick my invisible face even though his breath smelled like fish. “I was not following you, not at first. I happened to go to the French Press for a cup of coffee. I didn’t know you were there.”
“I don’t believe that. I’m always there.”
“That may be, but at that moment I wasn’t thinking about you. I was at the library and I was sleepy and I wanted a cup of coffee, that was it. But then I saw you and Miller and I heard you talking.” I shook my head and started again. “Okay, I want you to imagine this: let’s say you had never wanted a tattoo in your life but while you were out you overheard me and Gilda talking. You heard us say we were going out to get tattoos. Wouldn’t you be a little worried? Wouldn’t you maybe follow us to make sure we were okay?”
Nick closed his eyes. “I would not have been sneaking around trying to listen to your conversation in the first place.”
“I wasn’t sneaking. I mean not any more than I’m always sneaking. I was right there.”
“I didn’t see you.”
“But you knew I was there because you smelled me.”
