Ask Again, Yes (26 page)

The night she shot Francis Gleeson, she hadn’t been feeling well for a long time, but she only realized that later. For months, conversations were drowned out by static, and she found herself having to speak louder, listen harder. She lost track of what people were saying. She lost track of what she was saying and sometimes heard herself speaking as if from across a room. Physical movements were becoming more and more
difficult, like trying to swim through a vat of wet cement. But these were symptoms she only noticed after the static quieted, after the cement drained away.

“It’s mostly like that for everyone,” Dr. Abbasi said. Everyone like her, he meant. It was impossible to have sufficient detachment at the most dangerous times. This was his way of saying she had to forgive herself.

But there were other times, rare times, but still, they happened, when the fact that she didn’t feel well settled in her thoughts easily, clearly, like a sentence typed on a piece of paper, slipped under her door.

“Brian,” she’d said one morning, not long before everything happened. It was a typed-sentence morning, perfect clarity. She could see herself in vivid color, high definition. They were still in bed. It was raining hard outside, and every time a car passed on Jefferson she could hear the water whipping under its wheels. What was she going to say? That she knew she made things hard? That she’d try that doctor again, the one who’d given her the prescription after she went into Food King with a gun? But before she could say anything, she saw him wince. She put her hand on his arm, she said his name, and he winced, kept his eyes closed even though she knew he was awake. Kept his eyes closed even though he was terrible at pretending, and as she watched his eyelids flutter, she had to fight the strong desire to poke him hard in each one, to blind him.

Peter wanted to take care of everything, all the time. That terrible night, as she and Brian argued, Peter bent to pick up the lamp she’d knocked over. He crawled around on his hands and knees picking up magazines and mail and the little wicker basket that had held them and the figurines that had been lined up on the mantel before she flung them. The lights were on at the Gleesons’. The lights were on at the Maldonados’. She imagined all of Jefferson Street crouched outside in the dark, listening. She called Brian every name she could think of, and then she turned to Peter and used all the names again. She used words she couldn’t stand to hear other people say. Faggot. Fairy. Cunt. Why? She didn’t know. Still, no matter what name she called him, Peter kept
that blank expression plastered to his face. Why was he so sure she didn’t mean it?

It was hazy then, what happened next. Even in the privacy of her own mind, not remembering felt cheap, easy, and she tried to look closer, look more deeply, to discover whether she was being totally honest with herself and with the other people for whom it mattered. She did remember some things, but those memories were of a poor quality, like someone had smeared Vaseline on the lens. She remembered pressing the heels of her hands to her mouth and biting down. She remembered tasting blood on the tender inner part of her lower lip. The police said there was a kitchen chair pushed up to the fridge, no doubt so she could step up and reach the cabinet above. She couldn’t remember pushing a chair across the room. She couldn’t remember climbing on top. But she was the one who’d ended up with the gun, so it must have been her.

“What
do
you remember?” The district attorney and another lawyer had asked her, their faces full of skepticism. She remembered the girlish giggle she used to feel rising up in her whenever Brian disappeared into the kitchen after his tours. As if she didn’t know exactly where his new spot was almost as soon as he picked it. He always emerged from the kitchen with a beer, as if that’s what he’d been in there doing, finding and opening a beer. As if that would ever take him more than two seconds.

“What
do
you remember, Anne?” they asked her, two men, both in brown suits; it was impossible to keep track of them except that one was a little less ugly than the other.

She remembered what Brian did. She remembered so well that she could play the scene, stop it, rewind it, play it again like a video. She had the gun centered on the flat of her palm, like on a plate or a tray. In her memory it looked like someone else’s hand, but she could feel the weight of the gun there when she really thought about it, so she knew it was her own. She wasn’t pointing it. She was simply holding it, observing it. It was dead, inanimate, but firing it would make it come alive. Peter put
his hands to his hair when he saw it, and she wondered if that movement was written into his genetic code or whether he’d learned the gesture from being around Brian his whole life.

“Mom,” Peter said, calmly, bravely, and looked to his father for help. But Brian said not one single word. Instead, he turned around and walked upstairs. That’s the part she could play for herself, for a lawyer, for a doctor, at any hour of the day or night, no matter what medication she was taking, no matter what sort of week she was having, if only they could hook up a cord to her brain and see it for themselves. Anne knew what he was hoping for, she knew exactly what he was hoping for, and he didn’t even have the basic decency to take Peter upstairs with him. So Peter went charging out the door to the Gleesons’, to get help.

After two hours of waiting in the chilly dusk, she could no longer deny that she had to use the bathroom. There was a Dunkin’ Donuts on the corner. Murphy’s Law was that he’d pass by just as she closed the restroom door, but she had to go and it couldn’t be helped. After her long vigil she was stiff getting out of the car, but she walked briskly to the corner, entered the store, bought a small black coffee just so the woman behind the counter would hand over the key, which was attached to a Ping-Pong paddle.

The small place filled in just the short length of time Anne was in the bathroom. At the counter was an NYPD patrolman with his back to her, and next to him, a young woman dressed like a schoolboy of some kind—a dark wig cut short under a red beret, glasses with thick black frames. Behind them was a person dressed as a cookie, and just after that person, milk. Bacon and eggs. Wonder Woman. Bill and Hillary Clinton. The falling evening had an edge to it, the temperature dropping quickly. Outside on the sidewalk Pippi Longstocking walked hand in hand with the Cat in the Hat.

The girl schoolboy had one tendril of dark blond hair dangling from the back of the wig, and when she and the patrolman turned, Anne stepped back to let them pass in the tight space. The young woman passed Anne first, and then the patrolman, and as they passed, the coarse fabric of the young man’s uniform jacket brushed Anne’s hand, and she felt a shiver. She held the Ping-Pong paddle before her, like a shield.

At the door, the girl dressed as a boy turned around to say something to the cop, and as she was speaking she looked at Anne, briefly, without really seeing. But then she turned slowly back. The cop was holding the door for her, but still, she stopped, took off her costume glasses, and held Anne’s gaze across a room full of people, the leaves skittering along the pavement outside. Kate Gleeson, Anne thought, the syllables of the girl’s name banging around inside her head like a gong. “Jesus Christ,” she said aloud, and then she looked hard at the patrolman next to Kate. It was like looking at Brian Stanhope in the year 1973.

“You okay, lady?” Bill Clinton asked, tugging up the bottom half of his mask. “You good?”

Anne nodded, stepped around him so that she wouldn’t lose track of Kate and Peter. This wasn’t what she’d pictured. Maybe they only ran into each other an hour earlier. Maybe it was all one great coincidence. Maybe there was a St. Bart’s reunion in the city and they’d included Peter. But behind these thin possibilities, she felt a great turbine moving. Anne waited for him to turn and see her, too, and when he did and despite Kate, she’d make herself say what she wanted to say and he could take it or leave it, but the point was to have come and if he wanted to see her again or not was totally up to him, but she hoped he’d want to, that was the point, after all, not just to check on him but to talk with him, to be in his life again, no matter what, she was so much better now, and they had time to make up, yes, but it wasn’t impossible, nothing was impossible. If she had to she’d apologize to the girl, too, for hurting her father like that. It was an accident. He’d accidentally come to their door at the worst possible time.

But when Kate turned her gaze away she didn’t signal Peter, like Anne expected her to. She just stepped through the door behind him and together they walked off into the falling night.

Two hours later, going eighty miles per hour, almost back in Saratoga after having made a series of blind turns and somehow finding the highway, she realized two things: first, that Peter’s costume might not have been a costume, and second, that she was clutching between her thighs a filthy Ping-Pong paddle, a bathroom key.

thirteen

H
ERE WAS THE THING
he couldn’t say to Lena but that he knew was true, that thing leading men say to their long-suffering women while the audience sits in a dark theater, thinking, This asshole, don’t you fall for that bullshit, honey. You’re too good for him.

But it was true, Francis thought now. Whatever happened between him and Joan had nothing to do with Lena, and it meant nothing to him. He’d started it, he knew, if he was really being honest. There’d been that morning after Kate’s party, holding her sandals like a teenager, a moment like a live wire he’d touched and then couldn’t let go. He thought about it for weeks after, almost nonstop, the surprise of it coming then of all times in his life, after the wreck of his face, the certainty of what had been exchanged between them without either of them saying a word. But he didn’t see her for months and months and months, and there was no harm in thinking about a thing as long as he didn’t act.

Once, around Halloween that same year, Joan’s name was listed along with several others as one of the women who’d collected signatures for a new candidate running for county executive, and seeing her name had given him a charge like she was standing in the room.

And then he saw her at the Christmas carnival. Lena was working a baked goods booth to raise money for St. Bart’s and had asked him twice if he was okay to wander, if he was okay with a late supper since she’d probably need to help pack up the booth at the end, if he was okay without his walking stick. He’d spotted his stick leaning by the door when they left the house, but he hadn’t had any dizzy spells in several months so he ignored it. He knew she was dying to suggest he take it, just in case, dark would come quickly, after all, and the leaves on the ground were slick, but she was sensitive to everything he felt and knew he didn’t like using it, didn’t even like when she suggested he needed it. Once Lena was settled in her booth, he walked up the road and watched for a few minutes as the Dance Academy students filed out of the studio to do a routine on the street, the little ones with tummies pushing out their leotards, their baby skin goosefleshed in the cold, and he thought they should have jackets on. He sampled four Dixie cups of chili and then wrote his vote on an index card and dropped it in a box. He stopped by one of the contractor booths, chatted with a retired cop who sold and installed vinyl siding now and was there trying to drum up new business. Francis got caught up on every shared acquaintance from the Four-One, the Two-Six.

“You don’t see anybody?” the other cop asked Francis tentatively. “I thought, with everything, wasn’t there a group from the Four-One who visited regular?”

There were three guys who came to the hospital a few times, and then a few times after he came home. Lena had set him up on the couch for these visits because he didn’t want them in his bedroom. They stood around in their sport coats having no idea what to do or say.

“Yeah, they do, of course, they’re great about that. Everyone’s busy, you know?”

The other man told a long story about his kids, varsity baseball, a controversy about who got picked to start. “You have girls!” the other man concluded. “You’re lucky you don’t have to deal with this stuff.”

Francis agreed because it was easy, but thought: My Kate is a better athlete than all of your boys combined.

Close to the firehouse, where Santa was giving out coloring books on fire safety, he saw her. She was sipping a drink she was holding between mittened hands. She saw him just a second later and glanced over her shoulder as if looking for a place to hide.

When he got closer, instead of saying hello, she just began talking. “Right now, you’re thinking, there’s a woman who should not be drinking.”

“I’m not!” he said, hearing once again that thing in his voice that had made him self-conscious at Kate’s party. Warm. Full of fun. He wasn’t always.

He blew into his cupped hands, said it was good to see her, and then could think of absolutely nothing else to say, so he blew into his hands again.

“You’re freezing,” she said. “You want to go in?” They were in front of a new bar, two bartenders outside ladling mulled wine out of a Crock-Pot and selling it for three dollars per Styrofoam cup.

Inside, no one took notice of Francis Gleeson taking a barstool with a woman who was not his wife because that was the sort of day it was, and people knew him, they knew Joan, if there were anything amiss, they wouldn’t be having a drink in the middle of town with Lena Gleeson just a hundred yards up the road. It was very crowded inside thanks to the unexpected cold of the day, but there were two barstools near the back, as if waiting for them.

Later, Francis thought of all the things that would have stopped him, would have been too much. If he’d seen Oscar Maldonado, who mentioned several days later that he’d seen him there, asked what he thought of the place. Or, if Joan had told him that her ex-husband had finally signed the divorce papers earlier that week, that the warmed wine she’d been sipping outside was the first chance she’d had to celebrate. But she didn’t tell him that until later. If Lena had told him before they parted ways that she didn’t feel great, thought she might have a low-grade fever,
had taken an aspirin before walking with him into town, that it just didn’t seem to be working. It was unlike Lena to not feel well and had he known before the festival instead of after, he probably would have stayed with her at her booth, to help.