Any Bitter Thing (30 page)

I stood in the grimy hallway, digesting this. Though she was holding the bags and the keys and had her coat on, I didn’t get the impression she was in a hurry. “Did you reconcile?” I asked.

“Reconcile?”

“With your father. I was told you hadn’t spoken in years.”

“He loves that story.” Her eyes lingered over my creased eyebrow, and the remaining speckles of road rash that still marred one cheek. “Oh my God, you’re the one from the accident.”

I didn’t say anything.

“According to him, you died and came back.” “I’m fine now.”

“All’s well that ends well, huh? Have you really been coming here to visit him?”

I nodded, reassessing my impression of her as a creampuff.

“I’ll be damned,” she said. “He was telling the truth for once in his life.” She chuckled softly, a staccato muttering. “He leaves you for dead and now you’re bosom buddies. I don’t know what it is about the guy. Women are so desperate.”

“I’m not desperate,” I said, though I suppose I was.

“Sorry,” she said, “long day. Look, you want to sit for a second? You don’t look so good.”

I waited as she fumbled again with the keys and opened the door. I followed her in. The place looked ransacked: empty liquor bottles lining the sticky windowsills, the new tweed rocker grotesquely stained on the seat, broken glass scattered like spilled ice cubes, the funk of unwashed body and softening fruit emanating from the pores of the place.

“I thought this only happened in movies,” I said. Even Ray Blanchard had never left this kind of trail.

“The movie of my life,” she said. “You want water? I might be able to find a glass that doesn’t have fur growing on it.”

“I’m fine. Really.” I glanced around. “Looks like he really tied one on” I had a flash of sympathy for Andrea Harmon; it was a wonder she ever made it to school at all.

“In the old days I would’ve cleaned up,” Elaine said. “I’m down to the bare minimum now. It’s like my own personal twelve-step program. Two more steps, maybe, and I can stop picking up the phone.”

There was nowhere clean to sit. “So, what’d he do,” she said, “give you the old sorry-deah?”

I didn’t know what to say. “How’s your baby?” I asked her, hoping to change the subject quickly and then get the hell out of there.

“Beautiful,” she said. “Thank you for asking.”

“When did he, when did he tell you about me?”

“Let’s see . . . July, I guess. He was fresh out of rehab after the mother of all benders, not counting this one. The booze barn usually fills him with the fear of God after twenty-eight days of trust-in-a-higher-power bullshit. He goes all soft and religious. But this time, instead of true confessions, which I definitely do
not
want to hear, he’s got a doozy of a story about snatching some poor girl from the jaws of death and asking nothing in return.”

“It’s not a story,” I said.

She blinked at me a few times. “You’re saying what? That he actually saved your life?”

“You could look at it that way.”

Her eyes widened, and remained flung open.
“You
could, maybe. My father’s managed to keep his pathetic life cobbled together by the misguided graces of people who think like you.”

I said nothing, feeling small and silly, resenting her for being so much better versed in the methods of certain men.

“I can’t believe he just left you there,” she said, her voice softer now. “Correction. I
can
believe he just left you there. That’s
what he does. I bet he swore he wasn’t drinking. “When I didn’t answer, she added, “Well, you’re entitled to believe what you want. Obviously you’re new at this.”

“He did call an ambulance,” I said, feeling defensive—on my own behalf or Harry’s, I wasn’t sure. “He moved me off the road.”

“Oh, yes, I know, the passing motorist,” she said. “That’s my father, all right. The passing motorist.”

“He didn’t have to stop,” I said. “The kid who hit me certainly didn’t.”

“Let me tell you something about my father.” She touched me briefly on the arm. “If he’d been the one who hit you? He wouldn’t have stopped.”

“That’s a terrible thing to say about a person.”

“The voice of experience, believe me.” She rested her eyes on me and I felt judged. “My father doesn’t give a dime about anyone. He can’t remember my daughter’s name for more than a couple of days at a time.”

For a few minutes we breathed the fetid air of Harry’s apartment.

“What
is
your daughter’s name?” I asked her.

Her face changed utterly. “Anna Kate. Isn’t that gorgeous?”

“It is” I agreed. “He was on his way to see you that night. You knew that, right?”

She nodded. “I figured he was drinking, or else his car broke down. Or both. When he finally called again, the body in the road sounded like another one of his ridiculous excuses. But I checked the papers. Lo and behold. Of course, in his version he drove you to the hospital.”

“You don’t seem much like him,” I said, though in fact they possessed the same jittery energy.

She coughed up an unhappy splat of laughter. “Thank you very, very, very much. I’m like my mother, thank God, who
was pretty much perfect if you don’t count her one obvious mistake. If she’d lived long enough to marry again, I wouldn’t have to be here at all.” She snapped her eyes away. “Look,” she said, “I’ve got to go. I left my baby with a sitter.”

“Is your husband—” I began, hoping to find him downstairs in a parked car. I wanted to lay eyes on the sort of man this sort of woman had finally settled upon.

“Hubby flew the coop,” she said. “I don’t do so great with men, big surprise.” She rattled the keys and led me out the door. “I bet I’m the only woman on Earth who doesn’t enjoy falling in love. The feeling doesn’t suit me.” She paused. “Except with my daughter. I’m mad about her.”

“I don’t understand what you’re doing here.”

She yanked on the doorknob and turned the key. “He checked himself in, but no clothes. They give you one phone call, like in jail.”

“I meant
why
are you here? If you hate him so much, if he can’t even remember your baby’s name, what are you doing here?” I really wanted to know.

“I never said I hated him.” Her face changed again, her large eyes welling. “Every single time, I swear to myself, This is it. The end. But it never is.”

I walked her downstairs. She let me help her put the bags in the trunk, a deflated plaid shirtsleeve dangling out of one, a folded pair of pants topping the other. “Good luck,” I said.

She was harder to read now, for the light was vanishing in that quick way of late fall. “He told me you’re looking for your father,” she said.

“It’s a long story.”

“Save yourself the heartache.” She got into the car. “You know why my father’s so keen on you? You’re the only woman he ever touched who ended up better off.” She looked at me for another moment, then pulled her seatbelt across her chest.

I suppose I should have been angry at Harry Griggs for seducing my sympathies with his accent, his shabby coat, his Fig Newtons and Gatorade, his fatherly pantomime. But watching his daughter drive off with a sackful of clothes, I could only wonder at the human animal’s insistence on stitching one life to another’s with the flimsiest of thread. My uncle had been torn from me once, and now it seemed a repair was possible. Stitching had been my first skill, and I believed I could do it again. Crimp, thread, pull.

TWENTY-FOUR

Father Mike once lost Boo for a single frantic week in which we scoured the house, the cellar, the yard and the river, calling and calling, bereft and hopeless, thinking
drowned, shot, grabbed by coyotes.
Finally the choir director discovered Boo, alive, trapped in the church-hall basement.
He was there the whole time
, Father Mike muttered for days, inconsolable.
He was there the whole time
, which I took to mean that finding Boo swiftly dead of natural causes would have brought Father Mike less pain.

Now he himself was by all indications alive somewhere; not eight months ago I had opened my eyes and beheld him.
He was there the whole time.
But it was my aunt, not my uncle, on whom I dropped the tonnage of my accreting anger. Celie Barrett had looked into a child’s face and told her a heartwrecking lie.
He was there the whole time.
Toward Father Mike himself I could muster nothing but fresh grief. As I drove home, I kept one hand on the file next to me, and the ride became a rite of sorts—the humming car, the unfolding road, the two of us together again.

Drew met me at the door. “Well?” he asked. “Did you get to see the bishop?”

“Chancellor. He’s alive.”

“The chancellor?” Drew said, bewildered.

Mariette and Charlie materialized behind him, Paulie jumping in place and hollering “Surprise! Surprise! Surprise! Surprise!” But it was only noise; I rifled through my address book, located the number, and seized the living-room phone. She picked up on the sixth ring.

“Where is he?” I demanded.

“What?” my aunt said thickly. I’d woken her from a nap. Once a year I called her on her birthday, which fell in February, a day after mine. A few awkward minutes, pause, thank you, good-bye. She’d managed a single visit after my accident, but I’d scared her with my ghost story.

“It’s me, Celie. Where is he?”

I heard a rustling. Probably she was putting in her teeth. “What time is it?”

“High time. That’s what time it is.”

“Surprise!” Paulie was shouting. “Surprise! Surprise! Surprise!” Mariette was shushing him, trying to listen.

“We never went to a funeral,” I said to my aunt. “His death was something
told
to me. It was nothing but
words.”

“Is this about all that foolishness at the hospital? Are you still on that?”

“I’m still on that. The nerve of me.”

“Why on Earth would I take you to that man’s funeral?”

“Are you listening to me, Celie?” I said, louder now. “I’ve just seen the church records. I have them in my hand.” I expected capitulation, confession, maybe even apology, and got nothing but silence.

“Where is he, Celie?”

Where is he where is he where is he where is he where is he?

Nothing.

I imagined her sitting on the side of her bed, pitiful and
curled-in and old, and I would have been happy to smite her on the spot if such a thing were possible.

Her voice returned, disarmingly gentle. “You think it was easy to take in a child who’d been—disgraced—the way you were? I could have done better by you. But I had five boys, Lizzy. They were
boys.
Boys, they get ideas. And you pining over that man morning noon and night. Listen to me. For once, please, just listen. You grew up saying white was black and black was white. You’re well out of it now. He’s gone. Let him be.”

“Where did he
go
, Celie?”

“How should I know? I haven’t the faintest idea.”

My anger fully ignited then, a crimson, blistering rage. “If you don’t tell me, Celie, I’ll come down there and
make
you.”

Charlie and Mariette were murmuring to each other, a worried hum.

“Come on,” Drew was saying, “Lizzy. Hey.”

Celie tried to wait me out, but I was better at waiting.

“They made a
law,”
she said finally. “People like that aren’t allowed near children. They’re coming out of the woodwork these days, every day another one in the paper. All these children misused by sick, sick men. If I ever had a shred of doubt, which I
didn’t
, then I certainly don’t have one now.”

“Where is he?”

“Dead, I hope!” she shouted back, giving as good as she got. “Dead of shame! And if he’s alive, you ask yourself, you
ask
yourself, young lady, if he had nothing to hide, if he was so innocent, why didn’t he ever come back?”

From time to time since the accident I got a painful jolt that I attributed to a minuscule shift in hardware, a screw rubbing lightly against tissue, a minor discomposure in the way I’d been put back together. At this moment, violently and without warning, all the hardware in my body seemed to convulse. “Shut up!” I shrieked at her, clobbered by physical pain. “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!”

“Lizzy, stop,” Drew said, “that’s enough.” But I didn’t stop. I kept shouting until Drew finally wrested the phone from my hands. Paulie had run to his mother and tunneled into her midsection. Charlie spirited him to the kitchen where I could hear him howling, afraid. of me.

I leaned against the wall, panting. Drew took the phone and talked to my aunt. Charlie reemerged with Paulie, who was smashing the remains of an Oreo into his red bow mouth.

It was then I saw it, sidling out from behind the couch. A cat. I had to look twice, a cartoon double-take. A cat in my house, beelining toward me as full of purpose as if we were wounded soldiers who had followed separate, perilous paths to the same destination. The rest of the room appeared to me then in surreal stages, a picture developing in the chemical bath of my own head. Chair. Window. Husband on phone. Friends mute and staring. Cat trotting toward me.

Stacked on the floor were feline accoutrements better suited to a cheetah than a housecat: a drum of cat litter, a stuffed mouse the size of a breadbox, a bushel or two of dry cat food and several towers of canned.

“What is this?” I asked, stupidly.

“Drew got him at the shelter,” Mariette said. “Lizzy, is this really—? He’s alive?”

“Surprise! Surprise! Surprise!” Paulie shouted, tiny teeth bared in ecstasy, both feet smashing hard on the carpet. “Surprise, Auntie!”

It was not a very pretty cat, a faded, patchwork creature reminiscent of a much-washed dishtowel that had been left too long in the spin cycle. Paulie was now beside himself, cheeks aflame. “Hahahahaha!” he shouted, lobbing himself into my legs and haha-ing wetly into my knees. Then he pitched back into the room, kidnapped the stuffed mouse, and tossed it over his head. The cat just sat there.

Drew hung up the phone, his expression cemented into the grim square that since the accident had more or less become the permanent shape of his face. “God,” he said, crossing the room toward us. He cupped my face, drawing his fingers over the tender side, then folded me into a hug.