Boy Still Missing (14 page)

I shrugged. Across the room a line was forming, and I kept my eyes on the crowd in hopes that my father would look away, too, and not say anything else to me. One by one, people began filing past my mother’s casket, doing a kneel-and-pray routine before moving on to my father, then me, then Marnie. Before I knew it, I was caught up in a blur of faces and whispered apologies.

“I’m so sorry…”

“If there’s anything I can do…”

“Please call if you need help…”

Marnie got right down to wailing and carrying on. But I stayed stone-faced with each and every handshake. I told myself that I didn’t deserve their condolences, seeing as I was the one who had put my mother in that casket. I had led her straight to death’s door with all my lying and underhanded schemes, so I was the one who should have been saying how sorry I felt.

As I sat, blank and stiff, letting their words slide right off me, my father sponged up every last bit of their attention. He kept saying the same thing over and over: “I loved that woman…God, how I loved that woman.”

If you loved her so much, I thought, then why didn’t you bother to come home for the last month of her life? And why were you in Edie Kramer’s bed last June? That’s what got this doomsday ball rolling in the first place. But I didn’t bother saying anything, because I had a funny way of showing love to my mother as well. I just let him play his part and kept nodding and looking down at the red rug of the funeral home with each passing person.

No tears, I promised myself.

When I looked up, Leon was kneeling before me. Hair grown almost down to his shoulders. New sand-colored cords and a blue button-down
shirt with metal snaps left unsnapped over his chest. A guy from school named Ed Dreary stood behind him. I hadn’t hung out with Ed since the fifth grade. He was so dopey and pathetic, with his dandruff-flecked hair, rhino nose, and Nixon cheeks, that guys in school had started calling him Special Ed a few years back, and the name stuck. Weird that he and Leon were together.

“Hey,” Leon said.

“Hey,” Special Ed said, too.

“Hey,” I said back to both of them.

“You okay?” Leon asked.

I nodded yes. I was fine. I wasn’t crying, was I?

“About that letter,” Leon said. He stopped and glanced at my father, who was busy professing his undying love for my mother to a stubby woman with windshields for glasses. Leon lowered his voice still more and said, “From your friend.”

I cocked my head at him, confused. Sniffled because my nose was running. Must have been that library odor. All those roses that looked like animal hearts.

“Edie Kramer,” he whispered, close enough that I could smell the last cigarette on his breath.

I felt that fishhook shift and dislodge itself in my throat, choking me as I tried to speak. “I don’t ever want to talk about her again. Ever!”

My first full sentence in days, and it came out louder than I had expected. The woman with the Bozo glasses looked over, then turned back toward my father. “I loved her more than anything,” he told her.

Leon cleared his throat and stood, let his hands fall near his crotch the way he always did. Like he was pointing to his package, or something perverted. “Okay,” he said. “Sure thing. Forget about it. I’m sorry.”

I wanted to say something more to make sure he got the point, but I was afraid I might start bawling, so I held back. Leon and Special Ed walked off, and I let myself get swept up in the sea of long faces and condolences. The woman with the glasses was gone, but a pack of Marnie’s friends made their way over.

Jeanette. Lois. Ruth. Carol.

“I’m so sorry for you…”

“I lost my mother recently, and I know it’s hard…”

“All we can do is pray for her soul now…”

“She’s looking down on you…”

After they blew off, I sat there kicking at my seat and wondering how long this torture would last. I couldn’t stand people feeling sorry for me when I was the reason we were all here. I was the reason my mother was gone. “Hey, kid,” someone said, and I looked up.

Uncle Donald. He had trimmed his beard back so it was just a thin shadow around the edges of his fat jaw, a dark line over his lip. He could have penciled the thing on. I had been so busy missing my mother and blaming myself that I hadn’t even planned on seeing him here today. I scanned the room in search of my brother, anyone who looked remotely like that boy at Laguna del Perro in 1955. Nothing. I stared back at my uncle, his large brown eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses. He wore a wrinkled black suit with a white shirt and a long thin tie. A folded yellow envelope stuck out of his pocket. This is my mother’s brother, I thought. If he’s alive, then how can she be dead?

“How you doing?” he asked me.

I shrugged. “Okay,” I told him. My voice cracked, but I didn’t feel that fishhook in my throat any longer.

“Come here,” he said and wrapped his bear arms around me.

Caught off guard by his hug, I felt myself begin to slip. The tears started even as I tried to hold them back. My mouth opened and let out a shapeless sound I had never heard myself make before. I don’t know why it took him to break the dam inside me, but it did. I cried, and I couldn’t stop. Everyone was probably staring at me, thinking what a pathetic mess I was or feeling sorry for me without realizing that it was all my fault. But I couldn’t help it. I missed my mother and wanted her back. I was never going to see her again.

“It’s going to be okay, kid,” Donald said. “Let it out. You loved her and it hurts, I know. Just let yourself cry.”

The more he said those things, the more I bawled. My nose was running all over the place, and whenever I tried to gulp in more air, I let out that shapeless sound that embarrassed me. I must have carried on like that for five minutes. Ten. Finally I loosened my grip on Donald and caught my breath. The funeral line was backed up like a traffic jam on Route 67. The crowd must have taken my cue, because most of the room had their waterworks going full blast. Even the priest was shedding a few tears, and he probably did a funeral or two a week.

I looked at my uncle, opened my mouth, and said, “Truman.”

His face was expressionless. He blinked, took a breath, blinked again.

“My brother should be at our mother’s funeral,” I said.

My uncle was quiet a moment. He rested his hand on mine. “I’m sorry.”

I started to say something else, but Marnie stood and pulled Donald away. She led him over to the priest and made the introductions. The father launched into his spiel about God’s great plan, and I resumed my staring contest with the rug.

Where was my brother?

If this event didn’t drag him out of the woodwork, nothing would. I decided that maybe he was dead, too. He had drowned that day at Laguna del Perro in 1955 after the picture was taken. My mother had been one of those women who couldn’t accept the loss of her child, so she still fantasized that her son was alive, simply living with her brother in Manhattan.

“Dominick,” a woman said, “it’s me, Mrs. Tanenbaum. I’m so sorry.”

It was the woman with the too-big glasses who had been listening to my father’s sob story a few minutes ago. I shook her hand and nodded, letting the name Tanenbaum bounce around my brain in hopes of recognition. I came up empty until she finished what she was saying and walked away. From behind I recognized her squat body and chunky rear from seeing her up at the chalkboard. Mrs. T. My kindergarten art teacher. Something about the sight of her—remembering the pasty smell of her skin as she had helped me make macaroni montages and cut
scraps of construction paper into refrigerator art for my mother—caused my stomach to bend and coil. An invisible hand pushed on my chest and made it hard for me to breathe. I bolted for the glowing red
EXIT
sign, left the I’m-so-sorry parade behind.

Outside, I retched by the Dumpster. I’m not sure what my body was churning up, because I hadn’t really eaten since the bus ride two days before. But out it came, all soft and yellow whatever it was. When I couldn’t heave anymore, I stood there leaning against the cold blue metal of the Dumpster, wondering why a funeral home needed such a big garbage-disposal system. What could they possibly have to throw away? Dead flowers. Body parts.

When I turned around, I noticed Leon and Special Ed standing across the lot. They were dragging on cigarettes and flipping pages of
The Discount Car News,
circling ads. Leon raised his chin up at me as a way of saying hello. He had seen me puke my guts out plenty of times on our Holedo Hell-Raiser drinking nights, but this was different. “Sorry,” I said, feeling pathetic.

“It’s cool,” Leon said. “Do what you need to do.”

Special Ed nodded, and something about that nod—like he knew what the fuck I was feeling, like he knew what it was like to be responsible for your mother’s death—made me want to rail him. But I just turned and walked away. Special fucking Ed. What the hell did he know?

I stayed numb for the rest of the service and for the whole trip out to the cemetery, where Thumbless gave a speech about death being the beginning or some such line of bull. In my head I listened to the entire
Tommy
album to block it all out.

What about the boy?

What about the boy?

What about the boy?

He saw it all.

When the priest finished, Marnie promptly collapsed by the pile of flowers that covered the ground where my mother would be buried
come spring. Jeanette, Ruth, Lois, and Carol fussed over her like a stew they were taste-testing.

“She needs air.”

“She needs water.”

“She needs to walk around.”

More salt, I thought. Less pepper. Let her boil down.

“Let’s walk her to the car,” they all concurred and escorted her to the Dart. Her meltdown would give me an excuse to keep riding with her instead of my father, who was side-saddling with the priest. As people plucked roses from the pile for keepsakes, I ran those Who lyrics in my head to keep from crying again. When I couldn’t stand it anymore, I switched to those lines from my mother’s sad songs.
“I looked at my life today. I wish I was happy living this way.”
That brought me closer to the brink, so I turned off the DJ in my head and started thinking about those fairy tales. That mother who gave her son the last of her money and he blew it on some beans. A giant stalk.

When it was all over, I got back into Marnie’s car and let out a sigh. My plan: to head straight home, lock my bedroom door, and cry alone. After that my life was as black as a blank chalkboard to me.

Once we were on the road I realized the whole gang was following us to the apartment for a reception. “Is this a bon voyage party?” I asked Marnie. “Enough is enough.”

“Dominick,” she said, her voice still shaky, on the edge of tears, “there are always receptions after funerals. It gives people a chance to reminisce about the person who’s left us. Besides, everyone needs to eat.”

“That’s right,” I said. “Now that we’ve all worked up an appetite standing around my mother’s grave, let’s go back and rustle up some grub. I bet my kindergarten art teacher and Mrs. Diesel will have a grand old time discussing their millions of memories of my mother. We can all talk about her affair with the sheriff. Or about her plans for an abortion. Or about her son who didn’t show at his mother’s funeral!”

Without realizing it, I had seriously raised the volume and was out-and-out screaming. Marnie looked at me with an open-mouthed,
Halloween-horror expression on her face. She seemed to me like someone with no bones inside her anymore. Flimsy. Collapsible. We pulled to the side of the road, and she stretched her wobbly arms toward me to give me a hug. I knew that would only lead to one of her crying jags, and I’d end up having to console her, straighten her back up.

No thank you.

“I don’t want a hug!” I screamed, pushing her weak arms away.

“I’m sorry,” she said, recoiling. “It’s all my fault. I should have talked your mother out of it. Should have gone with her or something. I understand why you’re blaming me.”

If I traced back the blame, it landed on one person: yours truly. Sure, I could hang some of it on my father for meeting Edie in the first place, my mother for carrying on with Roget and getting pregnant, and Edie for fucking me over. But the biggest onus fell on me. If that money had been there, none of this would have happened.

“I’m not blaming you, Marnie,” I said, calmer than before. “You were the only real friend she had. Believe me, it wasn’t your fault.” I saw myself as a black-robed judge, slamming down his gavel. Marnie Garboni is found not guilty by reason of insanity.

Marnie pulled that same clump of stiff blue tissues from her pocket and blew her nose. “I was?”

“Yes,” I said and meant it. “Out of all the people at that service who told me how much they would miss my mother, I know you’re the one who will miss her the most. You talked to her more than I did. Listened to all her worries.” To myself I added, And you never lied to her like my father and me.

“Thank you for saying that, Dominick. It means so much to me.”

Even without the hug, I had wound up consoling her again. But there didn’t seem to be any other way out of this. I wanted to get back on the road, get through the dog-and-pony show at my house, then get rid of the whole clan so I could be alone. “She loved you so much,” I said.

A moment later we were moving again. We stayed quiet the rest of the ride home, where the party was already hopping. Jeanette, Ruth,
Lois, and Carol were carrying on like they entertained here all the time. They had pulled back the sheer curtains my mother always kept over the closed windows, and the sun poured into our apartment, sprinkling shafts of light in unfamiliar places. Someone had clicked on the radio, and a flute was tittering in the background. On the kitchen table they had set out platters of food. Eggs with yolks whipped fluffy, sprinkled with a blood-colored spice. Lunch meats curled into finger-size slices, fleshy and damp. Hard squares of cheese, orange as the sun. Mrs. Ramillo brewed a vat of coffee, and everyone was getting tanked up on caffeine. She shoved a foam cup in my hand, filled to the rim. Holding that cup made me think of sitting in the back of Roget’s car, sipping from his thermos.