“Then when Lorraine would walk through the door, what would my mother do? Would she yell at her, tell her she’d better smarten up? No. She’d hug her and cry when she saw she was safe, she wasn’t lying in a ditch somewhere. Did Lorraine care? No. She only ever came home to pick up some clothes, grab some food, steal some money or something she could sell to get money. She’d be home maybe a couple of days, sometimes just a couple of hours. Then she would pick a fight with my mother”—my mother, not our mother—“and off she’d go again. She didn’t care. She was fifteen, sixteen years old and she just flat out didn’t give a damn about anyone.”
Dooley wasn’t sure he wanted to hear this, but: “You said she killed your mother.”
Dooley’s uncle was sitting right there in the kitchen with Dooley, but he was staring at something that had happened a long time ago. Something he still felt. Something that was sharp enough that it still hurt.
“Lorraine hadn’t been home in weeks. We had no idea where she was. Then she calls my mother, crying. She’s sick, she’s broke, she’s sorry; she wants to come home. My mother asks her, where are you? Turns out she’s up on some guy’s farm north of the city and she’s got no way to get back. My dad’s not home. I’m working. So my mother takes the car and goes to get her. Lorraine’s standing out on the side of the road waiting for her. They start back home. It’s late. My mother is tired. She wasn’t well, your grandmother. She had heart problems. She tired easily. She wanted to pull over for a few minutes, but Lorraine told her, no, she wanted to get back to the city; she said she would drive and my mother could rest. By then she had her license—one of the things my mother tried to get her to settle down. Let her get her driver’s license, promise her if she’s good we’ll buy her a car. I don’t need to tell you that never happened. Anyway, my mother let her drive and she closed her eyes to take a nap. Next thing you know, the car crossed the center line and hit another car head-on. Lorraine walked away with a couple of scratches. The other driver suffered non-life-threatening injuries. My mother died on the way to the hospital.”
Jesus.
“It was an accident, right?” Dooley said.
“Both the cops and the ambulance attendants thought there was something not right about the way Lorraine was acting. They had her tested. She was high.” He looked directly at Dooley. “She was high and she was driving. If she hadn’t been high or she hadn’t been driving, if she’d had even a sliver of common sense, it never would have happened.” His uncle looked over at the cupboard where he kept the booze, but he didn’t get up. Instead, he fiddled with his glass of soda water.
“You never told me,” Dooley said. Not, to be honest, that his uncle had spent a lot of time talking about family. Lorraine hadn’t told him, either. No wonder.
“It didn’t seem relevant,” his uncle said.
Right.
“Why do you think Randall showed me that picture?”
His uncle shrugged. “Like I said, they’re treating Lorraine’s death as suspicious. They think someone killed her, so they’re starting with her nearest and dearest. That’s where they always start because that’s where it usually ends.”
“You mean me?” Dooley said, startled.
“I mean me,” his uncle said. He drank down the soda water in a couple of big gulps. “I’m going back to bed. You should get some sleep.”
Dooley sat at the kitchen table for a few minutes, thinking about the picture and about what his uncle—his uncle— had told him, especially that last part. He looked at the fridge and thought about the beer that was inside and about the cupboard near the phone where the scotch and vodka were. It had been a long time—a very long time—but he still felt the pull. It was like the most beautiful girl in the world was beckoning him and she would do anything for him if only he fell into her arms.
He stood up and left the kitchen.
Dooley was lying in bed, thinking again about the beer in the fridge and the scotch and vodka in the cupboard near the phone and wondered whether his uncle would hear him if he snuck back downstairs, when his cell phone, charging on his bed-side table, rang. He checked the readout but didn’t recognize the number. He answered and heard a familiar, whiny female voice. “Dooley?”
“Teresa?” He glanced at the clock on his bedside table. It was nearly two in the morning.
“Did he say anything to you?” she said. “When he saw you, I mean?”
“Say anything? What are you talking about, Teresa?”
“Jeffie,” she said, her voice shrill. Dooley imagined her with a cigarette in one hand, pacing while she talked. Teresa was one of those wire-thin chicks you’d make for a meth-head the way she was in perpetual motion. Really, she was just high-strung, nervous, always worried about something. Right now, it seemed, she was worried about Jeffie. “He told me he was going to meet you. He hasn’t been home since. He hasn’t called. He doesn’t answer his phone. It’s not like him. I’m worried. Did he say anything to you? Did he seem okay?”
“He was supposed to meet me, but he never showed up,” Dooley said. “But that was three days ago, Teresa. You mean you haven’t seen him since then?”
“I went to the cops, I was that worried,” she said.
“And?”
“They ran him.”
Dooley could picture their reaction. A guy with Jeffie’s record goes missing, you figure he screwed up again and is hiding out somewhere. Or you figure he’s screwing someone else. Or he’s getting screwed. But you don’t worry about him. You don’t allocate manpower to finding him. You don’t do anything, unless, of course, you catch him dead-to-rights committing a crime, either that or just plain dead.
“I’m sure he’s fine,” Dooley said. The most likely scenario—Jeffie was tired of being pressured into marriage. He was nervous, maybe even resentful, about Teresa’s getting pregnant. Maybe he’d scored the money he was after and had done what he’d mentioned to Dooley—maybe he’d gone back home. Maybe he’d found someone else who didn’t want as much from him as Teresa did. Or maybe he was just lying low for a while, trying to decide what he wanted.
“I’m sure he’ll turn up.”
“If you see him or hear from him, tell him to call me, okay, Dooley? Tell him I’m worried about him.”
Dooley said he would.
Seven
Saturday morning, if he wasn’t working, what Dooley liked to do was sleep in, until noon if he could get away with it, which, usually, he couldn’t because it seemed to irritate his uncle if Dooley was still in bed while his uncle was up and pumped, usually from a ten kilometer run, and was cleaning the house or working in the yard or whatever.
But this Saturday, Dooley swung his legs out of bed as soon as he heard his uncle go out the back door for his run. He wasn’t getting up early so much as he was carrying through the sleepless night that he’d spent thinking about Lorraine after not thinking about her at all for years. Okay, so maybe that wasn’t quite true. Every now and then, her face would pop into his mind and he would wonder where she had got to. Wherever it was, he always hoped she was miserable. And now here she was, dead and in his head again. Dead and maybe murdered, and the thing was, if it turned out that was really what had happened, he wouldn’t be surprised. He could imagine Lorraine out there partying—she loved to party. And, boy, the kind of people she hung out with—not that he was in a position to criticize. So, yeah, he could see her maybe shaking her ass and teasing some guy or maybe opening her mouth and saying something smart and pissing off some guy and, boom, she’s dead.
Or maybe she’d been out there trying to amuse herself—Lorraine was always restless unless she was with people, unless something was happening, like she couldn’t stand to be alone with herself, maybe couldn’t stand herself, and Dooley could see why, no problem. So maybe she was out there and maybe—he’d give her the benefit of the doubt on this one—maybe she was trying to keep herself straight (Dooley knew what that was all about, how hard that was), but she was with some of her old fri
ends who didn’t respect that, hell, who didn’t like the fact that she wasn’t one of them anymore. He knew what that was about, too.
He could picture them saying, Come on, Lorraine, just one drink, or just one hit, come on, you want to feel good, don’t you? People like that, sometimes they get mad when you say no. Sometimes they take it the wrong way that you’re clean. Sometimes they think that you think that you’re all of a sudden better than they are, which, of course, you aren’t. But that’s how they see it, mostly because they know they’re messed up, even if they don’t want to admit it. So first they tease you. Then they wheedle. Then, you can count on it, they force the issue. And when you still say no, maybe you sound self-righteous. Dooley could imagine Lorraine coming across that way; she always was extreme. Then these old friends of yours decide to make it their business to see to it that you have fun. They need you to have fun. They need to drag you down. They need you to drink up or smoke up or shoot up. They’ll even help you, whether you want them to or not. And maybe that’s how Lorraine ended up dead with a needle in her arm.
He made his way down to the kitchen, noting on the way that his uncle’s bedroom door was open, which meant that Jeannie was gone, which meant that she must have slipped out early, maybe in the middle of the night because Dooley hadn’t heard her. Dooley wondered why. Usually when Jeannie ended up in his uncle’s bed, she stayed there until morning, and usually his uncle brought her a cup of coffee to start her engines before she got up.
What went on between his uncle and Jeannie was none of his business, but Dooley liked Jeannie. He liked the way she never acted awkward about staying over. He liked the way she turned up in the kitchen in the morning wearing a silky robe and skimpy little slippers that let her toes, bright red with nail polish, stick out. He liked the way she wore lipstick to breakfast, and he liked the red lip marks her lipstick left on her coffee cup. He liked the little cloud of perfume that hung in the air wherever she’d been. And he liked her pancakes, especially when she threw a handful of blueberries into the batter. But she wasn’t here this morning, so Dooley set up the coffeemaker and switched it on and got out a bowl and a box of cereal—the sweet kind that he had to buy himself and that his uncle glowered at every time he opened the cupboard and saw it and always made some crack about why didn’t Dooley just fill his bowl with sugar and spoon that down, he’d get the same amount of nutrition, which was nil, and the same sugar shock, which was astronomical. He got the milk from the fridge. He was working on his second helping between swallows of his second cup of coffee when the phone rang. All Dooley managed to get out was, “Hello,” before the caller—a man—launched into a rapid-fire delivery.
“Mr. McCormack, sorry to bother you so early in the A.M., but I wanted to catch you before you left the house.”
“I’m not—” Dooley began, trying to head the guy off, tell him he wasn’t Mr. McCormack. But the man raced on before he could get any further.
“It’s about your sister’s things—and, by the way, my condolences. You may be aware, Mr. McCormack, that the rental market is pretty tight, this end of it anyway, and I’ve already had some interest in the apartment. The police were here a couple of times, wouldn’t even let me in the place, but they’ve released it now. I hate to rush you, Mr. McCormack, but if you wouldn’t mind … er … that is to say, all of her things are still in the apartment and I’d really appreciate it if you could, you know, take care of them. Or, if you want, I could box everything up for you and you could pick it up. The furniture, well, I could take that off your hands, unless of course you’d like to look after that yourself …”
Lorraine’s things.
Dooley couldn’t even begin to imagine what they might consist of. Clothes, for sure. Lorraine liked to look good—at least, she did when she wasn’t so high she didn’t give a shit about anything. She liked to be the one all the guys turned to look at when she walked into the bar or the party or whatever it was. Okay, so she was getting up there. She’d turned thirty-five the day Dooley came to live with his uncle, but from what he’d seen, she didn’t look bad, all things considered. Besides clothes, Dooley figured she just had regular household stuff—dishes and furniture and a whole bunch of other crap he had no use for. He wanted to pound his head against the wall and keep on pounding it until he’d driven her out of his head once and for all. She’d been so fucked up.
He was going to say, “I’ll tell Mr. McCormack you called.” He was going to let his uncle deal with it. His uncle, who didn’t like her any more than he did, but who had gone to the morgue to look at her. Who had arranged the funeral. Who had shouldered it while probably choking on his feelings. His uncle, who wasn’t even related to her—unlike Dooley.
“Okay,” he said instead. “I’ll come over. I’ll take care of it.”
He finished his breakfast and looked at the clock on the stove. It was still early, but he tried Beth’s cell phone anyway.
And got her voice mail.
She hadn’t returned any of his calls, even the ones when he didn’t leave a message, but he still knew that she knew it was him. She could tell by looking at her missed calls.
“It’s me,” he said. “It’s Saturday morning. Call me.”
He wrote a note for his uncle—Out. Back soon—and left the house.
When Dooley got to the building where Lorraine used to live, he scanned the tenant directory for the super’s name and buzzed his apartment.
“I’m here about Lorraine McCormack’s apartment,” he said in response to the super’s raspy, “Yeah?”
The super buzzed him into the lobby even though Dooley could easily have gotten in on his own. He’d tried the security door. The lock was broken. He waited inside on a grayish carpet that he suspected had once upon a time been a different color, although he couldn’t begin to imagine which one, until the super, a stout man in work pants and a work shirt, appeared. He looked around, as if he were expecting to see someone else. But there wasn’t anyone else. There was just Dooley.
“You’re her brother?” the super said.
“Her son.”
The super looked even more surprised, but Dooley couldn’t tell why.
“She’s up on seven,” the super said. Then he caught himself. “That is to say, she was.”
They rode the elevator together, both of them watching the numbers above the door light up one by one. When they got to Lorraine’s floor, the super exited first and fumbled for a key on a ring that was so dense with keys that they stuck straight out like spokes on a wheel.
“She was okay, your mother,” the super said as he opened the door to 713. “She mostly paid her rent on time.
Never gave me a hard time about repairs. A lot of the tenants, they have no respect. It’s not theirs, so they don’t take care of it. They break stuff and then they scream at me to fix it.” He sounded like every other super in every other rat-hole building Dooley had ever lived in.
The super pushed the door open so that Dooley could go in first. He wasn’t surprised to see that the place was a mess—the super had said that the cops had been there. They had gone through the place. Dooley could see, too, that they had dusted for prints. But he was surprised at how much stuff she had.
“She didn’t travel light, did she?” he said, mostly to himself.
“You know women,” the super said. “They love to shop. Love to buy shit. Am I right?”
Dooley stared at him.
The super looked down at the ground. “Sorry,” he mumbled. “Nearly three years she lived here, she never once mentioned a kid. So, what do you want to do?”
Dooley turned around slowly to take in the combination living room and dining room, the galley kitchen, one end opening onto a dinette set, the other end facing the apartment door. Off the living room, a hallway with two doors in it, one on either side, a bedroom and a bathroom, Dooley guessed.
“I’ll take a look around, see if there’s anything I want to keep, you know, for sentimental reasons.” Like that
was going to happen. “Anything that’s left after that, it’s yours.”
The super scanned the apartment with an assayer’s eye. “Yeah?” he said.
“Keep it. Burn it. Sell it. Give it away. I don’t care,” Dooley said. “Just give me some time to look around, okay?”
The super’s eyes narrowed. “How do I know you’re really her son?”
Well, finally, Dooley thought.
“As opposed to what?” Dooley said. “A burglar?” He crossed to a bookshelf that was filled with knickknacks, but that also contained—surprise!—books, and grabbed a framed photograph, which he thrust at the super: Lorraine, approximate age twenty-nine—Dooley remembered her bitching and whining about her next birthday being the big one—and Dooley, approximate age eleven, both of them glassy-eyed.
The super examined it and then examined Dooley. “You can’t be too careful,” he said.
Boy, he had that right. He handed the photo back to Dooley.
“The cops,” Dooley said. “Did they take anything?”
“Fingerprints,” the super said. “Some of her stuff—her address book, a few other things. They made a list and gave me a copy. You want it?”
Dooley shook his head.
“Close the door on your way out,” the super said.
The minute Dooley was alone, he dropped the framed photograph into the nearest wastepaper basket. He went over to the bookshelf and examined the contents. Jesus, all those books. What was up with that? They were real books, too, not just chick lit and romances and Stephen King, the crap he remembered her reading sometimes when she was in a new relationship and wasn’t completely fucked up. There was a book on psychology, a couple on home décor—home décor!—another one on the history of salt, of all things. And what were those? Perfect. Self-help books. Twelve-step books. He pulled one off the shelf and flipped through it. It was well thumbed and highlighted throughout in yellow and gave off a scent that reminded him of Lorraine. He flipped to the front and checked the date. It had been published only last year, so whatever lame-ass attempt she had made to get herself right, it had been recent. Maybe it was really true. Maybe she had been trying. Maybe she’d even been ahead of the game. He didn’t want to believe it—he was surprised at how bitter he felt—he didn’t want to give her any credit, even though he knew anything was possible because, hey, look where he was now.
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