I go back to the office and eye the book from the doorway. Should I take it to the police? Have it fingerprinted? That glossy cover would be a perfect flytrap for prints. But my instinct tells me whoever did this wore gloves. Meticulous. Careful. Just like the handwriting on the envelope.
I won’t deny I want to look at it, crack its spine and see what horrors wait inside. But I also know that whatever is on the pages in this book, once I look, it can never be unseen. Whatever is inside will forever be in my mind. And since I constantly struggle against triggers of panic attacks in my daily, routine life, I can only imagine what will happen when I read this book.
I should toss this thing directly in the waste, but I don’t. I shouldn’t look inside, but I know I will. But I won’t look at it alone. I shove the book into my purse.
It’s been two weeks since I’ve seen my mother and Thomas. They’re less than an hour away, but it feels like worlds separate us. Despite all the things wrong with my family, they know my history. I will look at this book with them.
I grab my purse, tell Brenda I won’t be in the rest of the day, and walk home. As I climb into my Jeep, I look up in the sky and see the gathering white-and-gray clouds to the west. The forecasters were right.
There’s something coming, and it’ll be here soon.
Eight
I slow my car as I turn onto Webcowet Road in Arlington, the small Boston suburb just northwest of the city. There is a quiet here that seems unnatural, as if a glass cake cover has been lowered over this suburban neighborhood. Sometimes when I come here, this quiet is embracing and comforting. Other times, it’s oppressive and suffocating. There is no middle ground here. This is where my mother and brother live.
Gone is the cramped flat in which I spent my high school years, replaced with an oversize, four-bedroom home purchased with my father’s insurance money. Though he cursed my mother for taking his children from him, my father still carried over two million pounds in life insurance, and after Thomas got sick and couldn’t be trusted to care for himself, my father included her as a beneficiary.
Thomas and I also received proceeds from my father’s estate—Mister Tender money, ironically—and I used my share to purchase the Stone Rose. My mother manages all of Thomas’s money, since he has little interest in doing anything but sitting in his room, playing video games all day.
I pull into the driveway and get out of the car. The air seems heavier here, and sometimes I think that’s due to the few thousand bodies buried in my mother’s backyard. From her patio, I could throw a rock over the fence and hit a grave in Mount Pleasant Cemetery, and on occasion, I have done just that. Some people think a cemetery is peaceful and a good place to go for a spell to think. I never have. I don’t need my thoughts surrounded by ghosts any more than I need knives in my kitchen drawers.
I walk the steps to the porch and hear the shouting. Mostly muffled behind the old house walls, but it’s definitely her. She’s shouting at Thomas, which, while not unusual, tightens my skin every time I hear it. I hear snippets of her tirade, chunks of anger like You can’t do anything! and If it wasn’t for me…
Normally I walk right in, but I don’t want to walk into this. I tend to allow her these episodes, and by allow I mean stand by and simmer inside as she vents all her anger on my twenty-four-year-old brother, who seems perpetually on the cusp of being able to care for himself but somehow never makes that final leap. If he were fully mentally disabled and completely dependent on her, I wouldn’t stand for any of her verbal abuse. But Thomas is more like a fourteen-year-old trapped in a man’s body. So when she unleashes on him, it’s like she’s yelling at a sullen teen, and somehow that becomes acceptable to me.
Or perhaps I’m a coward. After all, I’m the one who finally moved out so I wouldn’t have to hear it all the time.
There’s a cease-fire in the shouting, so I take a long, meditative breath and open the door.
“Hello? Mom?” When I was a child in England, I called her Mum. I have since dropped that and many other terms.
I stand in the entryway and listen. It’s coffin-quiet in the house.
A little louder. “Mom? Thomas?”
Footsteps. A door opening upstairs.
“Alice, dear, is that you?”
I want to ask her what other woman would be shouting out Mom to her, but I simply call out, “Yes.”
Seconds later, she races down the stairs. Well, more like lumbers. My mother is not a small woman. She’s enlarged since moving to America, as if taking advantage of the greater land mass here.
She comes to the door, gives me a smothering hug, then pulls back and studies my face.
“Darling, is everything all right? What’s wrong? Why are you here?”
“Everything’s fine,” I say. “I just wanted to see you.”
She holds my face as if I’m a child, then tugs down beneath my right eye with her thumb. “You’re not using, are you? Please tell me you’re not on that awful poison again! My heart couldn’t bear it.”
“No, Mom, I’m not. Really.” She asks this from time to time, usually in those rare moments when I feel the need for her emotional support. “I just…needed to see you. How are you?” I nod upstairs to where the shots were fired just moments ago.
She exhales so loudly, it seems as if it’s her last breath ever.
“I’m just tired, Alice. Thomas has been so spotty today and won’t let me do anything. I was just upstairs trying to get him to take his medication, and he just sits there like a zombie in front of his Xbox, killing things. It’s not right, Alice. It’s not right. Bloody games.”
I read the barely concealed subtext here. Since you’ve moved out, I have to deal with him alone.
But I didn’t come here to let her guilt-trip me.
“Mom, you need help. I always tell you that, but you never do anything. Even when I lived here, you barely let me help.”
She scoffs at this. “The last few years you were here, you weren’t ever around. You were always with Jimmy.”
She pronounces it Jeh-may.
“Mom, you can leave Thomas alone for a while. He’s perfectly capable of taking care of himself.”
“He needs me, Alice. And he needs his medication. If I’m not here, he won’t take it.”
“And you need your sanity. Why don’t I stay here today? Go see a movie. Go shopping.”
I’m actually excited by the idea. I’d rather look at the book alone with Thomas anyway.
“No, dear. I’ve got too much to do. Maybe another time. You should really ring first before you come over.”
I want to pound logic into my mother with a sledgehammer, yet I remain silent. I want to tell her she doesn’t have to be a martyr. But the truth is, she was born to play that role, and if she didn’t have Thomas to take care of, she’d find something else. Self-induced stress is her fuel.
“You just…” I don’t quite know how to say this, so it comes out exactly as it formed in my head. “You don’t seem happy with life.”
“What?”
“We all struggle, Mom. But there should be room for happiness, right?”
I mean these words as an honest reflection, but the way her eyes narrow tells me she’s taken this as an insult.
“I used up my allotment of happiness a long time ago,” she says.
“God, that’s depressing.”
“My role in life is as a caregiver, not a frivolous harlot bouncing around from one party to the next.”
“Who’s talking about parties? I’m just saying you could use a break.”
“Idle hands are the devil’s workshop.”
I’ve touched on something here.
“Are you saying you don’t trust yourself to be happy?”
She inches closer and assesses me. “We’re not all that different, you and I,” she says, which I think is me
ant as a barb. “We don’t do well without focus and direction. When you became aimless, you ended up addicted to heroin, now didn’t you?”
“I wasn’t aimless. I was damaged.”
“We are all damaged, Alice. Just in different ways.” She wipes her hands on her hips. “Now let’s stop talking about me needing a break when there’s work to be done.”
“I’m just trying to help, Mom. You should let me.”
She smiles at me, and her eyes almost disappear into her fleshy face. “You’ve enough going on with your little coffee shop and all. You’re not working today?”
The conversation has now shifted, and suddenly I’m aware of the purse over my shoulder. I reach in and hand her the book.
“This came in the post for me. From London.”
She looks at the cover.
“Oh my God,” she says. “Who sent this to you?”
“I have no idea. There wasn’t a note. Have you ever seen it before?”
She doesn’t answer. She doesn’t even open the book. She’s transfixed by the bartender staring directly into her eyes.
Then, another voice. It comes from Thomas, who looks down on us from the second floor.
“I have.”
Nine
When Thomas’s medical problems began at the age of fourteen, we all thought he had the flu, a heavy malaise that kept him in bed for several days. To be honest, I didn’t think too much of it at the time, or bother to wonder why the flu was going around in the summer. I had turned eighteen, just finished high school, and was three months from moving to San Diego. I was going to be on my own, far away from the small, dark Arlington flat that always smelled vaguely of decay.
On the fifth day, we took him to urgent care. The doctors noticed the red welt on the side of his thigh and quickly confirmed Lyme disease, most likely from the woods nearby. Not uncommon, they told us. Should be better with a potent course of antibiotics, they said. Only Thomas never really got better.
He seemed all right for a while, but in the final month before I was due to go to California, he took ill again. The malaise returned, followed by horrible digestion issues, compounded by night terrors. My mother took him back to the doctor, who said it could be side effects from the Lyme disease and ordered another round of antibiotics. After that round, Thomas physically rebounded, but he was never the same person again. He grew sullen, and not just in a teenager way. Distant, brooding, prone to intense focus on one thing (like video games) while shutting out the world around him. He slept twelve to fourteen hours a day, barely ate, lost weight he couldn’t afford to lose.
My father came out to see him, a painful experience for all of us. My mother barred him from the house, and Thomas barely expressed interest in his presence, so I was the only one who spent time with him. He stayed in a nearby hotel for three days, and we had dinner each night. I had visited with my father often since moving to the States, and this was the first time I struggled to find things to talk about with him. We had both changed. I remember my father brooding during his stay, angered at being so close to his family but unable to be a part of it. He cursed my mother, just once, but that was once more than I had ever heard before.
I remember that moment so clearly. He took me out to dinner, and after ordering, he looked up from the table and said to me, “Alice, you’ve suffered more than anyone ever should, but I hope you never know what it’s like to have your children ripped from your chest by the fucking devil.” His eyes had such sadness in them, and he said nothing more on the subject. We ate that night in a thick and dreary silence, with one notable exception.
“I wish I could live now,” he said, tossing his napkin onto his empty plate.
“What do you mean?”
“Now. Right now. Not in the past. Not thinking about anything else. Just here. You. This.” A considered pause. “Forever.”
“I don’t understand,” I say.
But I did understand. He wanted a life without a past—something I’d been chasing since I was fourteen. I remember thinking, All these broken little people wishing for their bits to be glued back together.
There was little else spoken between my father and me. At the end of his stay, he gave me money and told me to get Thomas properly diagnosed.
I handed the money to my mother and relayed his wishes, to which she simply said, “He doesn’t know the first thing about protecting his children.” But my mother did take Thomas to a specialist, who claimed his symptoms were likely a mixture of his hormones and mild neurological side effects that sometimes accompany Lyme disease. The symptoms should subside.
So we were told.
Thomas was no longer the little brother I knew. He’d turned into a different person, an angry boy who didn’t want to be cared for or to care for himself. He seemed unmanageable, and my mother was unwilling to seek any extra help. She pleaded with me to stay, just for a little while. Maybe a year, she said. That’s all, until we get things straightened out with Thomas. San Diego won’t be sinking into the ocean anytime soon.
I reluctantly agreed, and that one year turned into many more, and I eventually traded the idea of San Diego State for Bunker Hill Community College.
Now, Thomas stares down at me from the second-floor balcony, the look on his face a smug knowingness.
“I’ve seen it before,” he repeats. His British accent is more faded than even mine.
“What is it?” I ask.
“Hello to you, too, Alice.”
“Thomas. Hello. Now, what is this?”
He shuffles down the stairs, his hair an unruly mess of tangles and clumps. He wears a T-shirt of some death-metal band I’m grateful not to know, and sweatpants cling lightly to his bony hips. In the last three years, he’s been officially diagnosed as having bipolar schizoaffective disorder, which, without his meds, can result in delusions, hallucinations, manic and depressive episodes, and potentially suicidal behavior. I look at him as he ghosts closer to me, wondering which, if any, of these things he might be experiencing in this moment.
Thomas takes the book from my mother’s hands.
“It’s the final book,” he says. “I don’t think he ever completed it.”
“There was no other book,” I say. “He stopped drawing.”
Thomas shakes his head. “That’s what he told you. What he told everyone. But I saw it right before we moved.” He looks over at my mother and tilts his head. “Remember that fun period of time?” he asks her. “I was eleven, and you told me my father tried to kill my sister, and we had to leave. Not just leave him… We had to leave the fucking country. Remember that, Mom?”
“You watch your insolent mouth, Thomas,” she says. “I never claimed he tried to do any such thing. But he did create…this.” She points at the book like a prosecutor spotlighting the defendant. “He created the story that nearly killed her. He was not a fit father.”
Thomas laughs and runs his hands though his hair. “Jesus Christ. How is it that I’m the least crazy person in this room?”
“Thomas—”
He suddenly screams, his lips gnarled in rage. “He didn’t stab her! She was attacked by two psychopathic teenage girls—her friends—as some kind of tribute to a work of fiction! And you yanked us away from him because you had to blame someone else after the girls went to prison!” His expression falls flat, as if he’s an actor breaking character. “Well, he’s dead now. So I suppose it all worked out in the end. You have nearly all his money, and he’s six feet under. You have officially won.”
She turns to me. “Do you see what I have to live with? Every day. I give every ounce of my soul to my sick boy, and he turns on me like a rabid dog every bloody chance he gets.”
“Why do you hate him so much?” I ask.
“What? Don’t be mad. I don’t hate your brother.”
“No. Dad. You always hated him so much.”
“No,” I say. “Even before that. I remember all the times the two of you fought, ever since I was little. You were never happy together. Why did you even stay married?”
Maybe my system is jolted from everything that’s happened, but I shock myself with my own question. I’ve never asked about this before. But I truly want to know, and though my words are soft and earnest, she tenses as if cornered by a pack of wild dogs.
“Don’t tell me I was never happy. You don’t know what my marriage was like.”
“Because you never talk about it. You both just seemed miserable all the time.”
She takes a deep breath, bracing herself against a growing anger. “There were happy times,” she says, her words clipped and brittle. “In the beginning. But we…grew apart quickly.”
Her previous words ring back to me. I used up my allotment of happiness a long time ago. I’ve almost forgotten about the book. I truly want to know the answer to this question: “So what happened?”
Her eyes narrow and her face relaxes, and I sense she has a very specific and truthful answer to my question. But then her expression suddenly reverts to her default cloak of haughty defiance, as if deciding I don’t deserve the truth.
“We had a family,” she says. “That’s what happened. We had you, and that meant responsibility. I could handle all that responsibility, but your father couldn’t. I had to do everything.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Thomas says. “What a load of horseshit. He was a great dad.”
She turns to him, her face so red, I think the top of her head may explode open with spewing lava. But she doesn’t yell. Her voice is a shaking whisper, which makes her all the more frightening. “Thomas, you will not use those words in this house, and you will treat your mother with respect. You’re a wicked, ignorant boy, and you wouldn’t even be alive if it weren’t for me.”
Mister Tender's Girl Page 3
