The War for Gloria

by Atticus Lish

  “Is everything okay after that? Is my job okay?”

  “As far as I know.”

  “Do you have any questions?”

  “Questions?”

  “Is there anything I should tell you about?”

  Ian shook his head as if he’d never heard anything more absurd.

  * * *

  —

  “Your timing’s good. I was about to call you.”

  Corey said, “We need to get in touch with the police or the DA or somebody and tell them everything.”

  “Well, that’s not going to happen,” replied his attorney.

  “That’s exactly what should happen.”

  “That’s why you don’t have a law degree.”

  “I’ve got information they should know.”

  “What information do you have, Corey?”

  “I think my father is trying to frame me.”

  “That’s unfortunate.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to defend me? Why wouldn’t you be interested in what I’m saying?”

  “It surprises a lot of clients when they find out that their lawyer doesn’t do everything they say. I have to explain this to people sometimes. It’s the lawyer’s job to keep you out of jail. You might think it’s my job to do what you want. If I did that, I wouldn’t have a practice. Now, listen, Corey, here’s what I want you to do. We’re going to have you see a psychological counselor.”

  “What for?”

  “So you can show the court that you’re trying to resolve your issues and get some help.”

  “This doesn’t seem right. I don’t think I’m crazy.”

  “Nobody’s calling you crazy. It’s at the office of probation. You see a psychologist. He interviews you and prepares something called a presentencing report.”

  “Why would I want a presentencing report when I haven’t even been sentenced, because I haven’t even been found guilty, because I haven’t had a trial yet, because no one’s even heard my side of what’s going on here—including you?”

  “Call them and make an appointment please.”

  Corey hung up. A minute later, he called his attorney back and said, “I’m not doing this.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  “I think it’s time I fired you.”

  The attorney laughed and sent him a bill for $2,000.

  31

  Route 2

  He skipped work and called Joan for the first time since before his mother’s death and told her, “My father’s trying to frame me with the cops.”

  He had reached her at work, where she was vacuuming a car. “What do you mean?”

  “He’s telling the cops I did something I didn’t do. A friend of mine got murdered. Maybe you heard. Remember Tom? His daughter got killed.”

  “You didn’t do it, did you?”

  “No.”

  “Just checking.”

  “I didn’t have anything to do with it, but Leonard’s saying I did. And what’s worse, I think he did.”

  “Wasn’t it some kid from MIT?”

  “Yeah, but I think Leonard knew him.”

  “Are you sure you didn’t know him?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Didn’t you tell me about your weird friend at MIT?”

  “I wasn’t friends with him,” Corey said. The truth was too much to admit.

  “I thought you were.”

  “The person who killed Molly? I wasn’t friends with him. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”

  “I must’ve heard you wrong. I guess there must be a lot of weird guys at MIT.”

  “I think Leonard was behind this thing for real.”

  “How do you know?”

  “The things he’s saying to the cops. He knows way too much about this thing. I think he’s a murderer.”

  “That’s devious and evil.”

  “He has no limits.”

  “I’d say I’m shocked, but I’m not. It’s in character for him.”

  “If you look at how he treated my mother.”

  “This was bound to happen sooner or later. I always thought I’d hear about him on the news.”

  “There’s nothing he won’t do.”

  “The signs were always there. Your mother used to talk about how he was always driving.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “That’s how some guys look for victims.”

  “Oh. You think he’s killed other people?”

  “I’ll tell you one thing: There was a guy in Malden who killed his girlfriend back in ninety-three. He lived right across the street and Leonard was his friend. He talked about him all the time.”

  “Really?”

  “Like he idolized him or something.”

  “I can’t believe this guy’s my father. Why did my mother have anything to do with him? What is it? You’re not saying anything. What are you thinking?”

  “Did you know about his trailer?”

  “His what?”

  “He’s got a trailer out in Ayer. At least he did.”

  “I had no idea.”

  “You were there once. Do you remember?”

  “No. I don’t think so.”

  “He took you and your mother for the weekend. You were four. Something happened—some kind of problem. Your mother called and asked me to come get her. I could barely find the place. It was way off in the woods.”

  “But what happened?”

  “I beeped my horn and your dad came out and I told him I’m not going without you and your mom. It was a bad scene.”

  “Bad how? What was going on?”

  “I don’t know. They weren’t getting along, I guess. Your mother never told me.”

  He wanted to see the trailer—he had to see it with his own eyes—he insisted—there was nothing so important.

  * * *

  —

  Joan didn’t know if she could find it again but agreed to meet him after work. He went to Dorchester to wait. He took Freeport Avenue along a strip of fenced-off beach and came to the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers local in a brick building with a flag. The dead-end streets ended in graffitied walls and trees. Joan lived in one of the cottages. Since he was early, he went through an underpass. There was a shady spot under tall trees growing in front of Saint Ambrose Catholic Church. He saw a statue of a woman in a robe, her head covered, her hands out, open, her countenance a mirror of stillness. Further up the avenue, past wrought-iron lampposts, red fireboxes, the odd Irish bar in dark green clapboard, a Vietnamese bait shop, he found the road chockablock with cars: speeding, stopped, parked, double-parked, honking. Across from 7-Eleven and a dentist and jeweler in a black granite storefront was the community health center where his mother had worked. Corey stopped and looked. A couple women in black tights, red-and-white sneakers and multicolored do-rags were outside smoking under a sign that said We Keep You Well. It had mint-green railings.

  Then on his way back, he noticed the strangest thing. Out front of the church, there was a sign with his father’s name on it: Leonard Street. He imagined his mother would have passed it every day.

  * * *

  —

  An hour later, Joan picked him up and they drove out of the city together. Soon they were on Route 2 in Cambridge driving west to Concord. They went uphill as if they were going into the sky. The road was beautiful. The sky was blue, the great tall trees were green, it was hot and bright in the afternoon. She drove fast, talking, playing the radio, the CD player, checking his seatbelt, checking him over now that his mother was gone and he was on his own. She was his and his mother’s ally once again against his father, the way she always had been.

  They sped west, Joan too tough, too urban, to be fazed by other drivers—forever
at ease in the world in her armor of courage. The traffic was fast and impatient—intolerant of indecision. They passed Concord, the prison, Acton, Maynard, Littleton, kept west towards Harvard, Mass. The route grew countrified and wild. In Ayer, they passed a disintegrating gas station. Corey glimpsed a tiny road going into the woods marked Poverty Lane.

  At a stoplight in the town center where there were a number of different roads she stopped and thought about what to do for a minute. Then she turned the wheel hard to the left and took them out of town—speeding on a country road, going long and straight in one direction. They passed a field. Joan started slowing down. She took a turn that he had missed. Through the trees he saw a pond as she steered along an unpaved lane into the woods. The pine boughs closed like fingers around the car. Surrounded by the forest she drove slowly onward. They stopped.

  In the trees ahead there was a mobile home.

  They approached. There were pine needles on the welcome mat. On the siding, there was a faded bumper sticker, barely legible, that said “Kiss Me! I’m Italian!” Joan knocked on the door. No one answered. Corey tried the knob, but it was locked. Joan peered in the window.

  “Is this it?”

  “I think so.”

  They looked around the side. Behind the dwelling, they saw an ancient, rusted GMC Vandura Starcraft that had once been white. Its license plates had been removed. The quarter panel was rusted through. A front wheel was missing, the chassis was canted over, and an axle rested on the ground. They circled, looking through the Soft-Ray, Safety AS-1, Flo-Lite, laminated Guardian windshield, taking in the decals on the glass: the noncommercial registration sticker, the East Boston inspection sticker, expired.

  Joan opened the door, grinding on its rusted hinge, and looked inside the vehicle. There were bags of what appeared to be household trash stuffed between the seats, as well as lumber—boards, nails, rope, detritus in the cargo hold.

  Out of the eight black leather seats, only one had been broken in—the driver’s. It had been crushed by what must have been thousands of hours of solitary driving.

  She checked the glove box but couldn’t tell to whom the vehicle was registered.

  “I think it’s his,” she said. “Want to try and break in his trailer? I’ve got a screwdriver in my car.”

  He put her on his shoulders and she jimmied the window. Then she crawled inside headfirst and let him in the door.

  Inside, the dwelling smelled like a rotting mattress, like cotton turning to black dust after it had gone through the digestive systems of mites and had been expelled as powder. A wispy fungus was lifting off from the carpet, one of nature’s strangely beautiful ways of spreading spores. Trash was strewn around—newspapers and magazines, the paper damp and mold-blackened. A ring of dried dirt in the sink. Leaves in the drain. A pinecone on the countertop. In the living room area, there was a ring of built-in couches, like the seats in a theater, and all the lines of sight shot from there, down the length of the floor, to the king-sized bed at the other end, with no barriers in between. The bulkhead dividers, which could have separated the different segments of the house, as in a bug’s body, were folded back inside the walls. A series of plastic bubble skylights evenly spaced down the central axis of the domicile had been blacked out with layers of newspapers and aluminum foil and 3M packing tape. The arrangement channeled one’s eye towards the dark end of the trailer where the bed awaited, like a raised stage at the bottom of a mine shaft.

  Corey turned on the flashlight on his phone and played the light around the boudoir. He saw a closet with stained pine walls and a locking door. There were other closets and compartments. The refrigerator wasn’t running. There were dead flies on the tray-shelves. He looked inside the bathroom, the shower curtain throwing a capelike shadow up to the ceiling when his phone-light struck it in the tight, rubber-floored space.

  Joan went outside to wait in case anyone had seen them and called the cops.

  Going through papers stuffed in drawers and cardboard boxes, he picked up a pile of junk mail and a stack of photographs fell out. The top picture was a blurry image of the woods taken on a gray day when the leaves were not in bloom. The one below it was a woman. Her face leaped out at him with lurid force. She stared unhappily at the camera. She was blonde. She had a narrow body. She was wearing pegged pants with room in the hips she didn’t need. In her hand she held a can of Sprite. Corey matched the background to his surroundings. It had been taken here.

  He shuffled to the next photo. It showed her sitting as before, legs crossed, drinking from the soda, staring disconsolately away. In the next, she was talking to the camera; in the next, drinking from the can again; in the next, not talking: lying down. In the next, her eyes were closed. And also in the next. Corey shuffled through the stack. He counted nearly thirty pictures of her sleeping on the trailer’s black-sheeted waterbed.

  In one image, she was lying by a boy of kindergarten age, who, like her, was blond. The date was stamped in glowing orange digits: 1999. It had been developed at CVS. Corey saw a glint between the boy’s eyelids as if he had been watching the photographer while pretending to be asleep.

  * * *

  —

  Joan said the woman was his mother and the little boy was him. The photographer must have been his father.

  Corey was outraged. He wanted answers.

  “What was going on? She’s sleeping. Did he put her to sleep? What did he do to her?”

  Joan said, “We don’t have to go there.”

  She went into what was wrong with Leonard. (1) He was an asshole. (2) He had a small penis. (3) He was jealous that Gloria had loved her son and not him.

  “He’s not gonna get away with this. He’s gotten away with it my whole life. It stops dead-shit today!” This was an expression Joan had used. She was given to tirades and Corey had studied her. He put on a Joan-style tirade against his father: He was going to fix him with the police! He was going to fix him on his own—in the streets!

  He and Joan were standing on a corner in Dorchester by now, the summer sun about to set. Concrete blocks, three-family houses, golden sun.

  “I’m gonna hurt him up. If he thinks he can do this to me, he’s a—and I’m gonna—” and so on.

  Joan lit a cigarette. “Do me a favor. Don’t fit this guy for some concrete shoes without talking to me first.”

  “Bet I can make him read my Nikes. Bet I can stick him somewhere they’ll never find him: the swamp behind my house.”

  “I know you’re mad, but if you go away for twenty-five-to-life, you might get to be my age behind bars and think it wasn’t worth it.”

  “Oh, I know, no doubt…”

  He squirted saliva on the sidewalk from between his teeth, the pictures in his pocket, Joan nodding, flicking ash from her cigarette, saying hi to people she knew, leaning on her car.

  He went on punking and motherfuckering and punk-motherfuckering his father.

  Joan nodded along. “So, what are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to give them to the police. I don’t need to go to jail.”

  “What do you think’s going to happen?”

  “He’s gonna be up shit’s creek.”

  “But it’s not like he hurt her that I can see.”

  “He can’t do this to somebody!”

  “I’m not saying he can do it. I’m saying, I don’t see what they’re gonna do.”

  “They ought to put his ass in jail.”

  “For what?”

  “I don’t care for what. They need to just throw him in a cell. I don’t care what you want to call it—child abuse, woman abuse, drugging somebody…”

  “Hey, I understand you’re angry. I’d be angry too if it was my mother.”

  “Yeah, I’m angry!”

  “I’m just saying the pictures don’t show anything.”

  “Mayb
e something was happening that they don’t show.”

  “That’s just the problem.”

  “But someone should see them. The sheer fact that he would take them.”

  “Why is a cop gonna care about that?”

  “You could come to the cops with me and say you remember that night he had us there.”

  “I don’t think so, Corey.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I said so. Because your mom’s dead, Corey. She passed away, and there’s nothing they can do about it.”

  “So, I’m not supposed to show them to a detective, say I think my father took them, I think he knocked my mother out with—it looks like he doped her with something in that soda can? I’m not supposed to do that?”

  “You can do whatever you want. I don’t see how it’s going to help.”

  “You don’t see that someone could look at these and draw the conclusion that whoever took them has something wrong with them?”

  “I didn’t say that. Hey, Corey, don’t raise your voice at me. I’m trying to help you. I took you out there, and I’m getting tired of you getting lippy with me just because I’m not gonna do what you want. I don’t know what the cops’ll say. Maybe I feel guilty that I didn’t do more to help your mother. But she wouldn’t let me help her. I couldn’t keep her away from Leonard. She made her own decisions, so maybe I’m not as worked up as you at this late date. She didn’t have to get in the van with him, but she did. So maybe if she fell asleep, she was taking a nap and it had nothing to do with him.”

  Corey shook his head.

  “And just ’cause you’re upset, don’t think you can scream at me.”

  “I’m not screaming.”

  “I drove you out there.”

  “Thank you.”

  “If it was my mother, I’d want revenge, so I don’t blame you. But you’re not the only one with a temper.”

  “All right.”

  * * *

  —

  He lay awake all night long in Quincy. Finally, he turned on the light. The first thing he saw were the photographs on his desk. He put them in a drawer so he couldn’t see them and went out to the kitchen and sat in the dark. It was a hot night. Dawn was coming. He sat in the dark in a dreamy state.