Blood Relations (11 page)

“Oh,” she said. “You’re awake. Feeling all right?”

I nodded, and a smile broke out. “I feel pretty great.”

“Amazing.”

“I have to ask, Evelyn. Did we... you know, did we
do
stuff?”

She stared at the ceiling and rubbed her forehead, as if she had my hangover.

“Well,
I
didn’t, but you, you did lots of stuff. You drooled. You snored. And one time you fell out of the bed.”

“Oh,” I said, disappointed.

Evelyn sat down on the one chair under the one window in the tiny room. There was just enough space for it and the bed, with the bamboo pattern wallpaper making the walls seem even closer. She began putting on her sneakers.

“Look, Mick, I wanted to help you out here; don’t let your imagination run wild.”

Her big eyes were softer now, the puffiness of sleep still there. My insides were getting all confused, with all that had happened, and I knew I was attaching too much to Evelyn. I was stung with the sudden sinking feeling, of how temporary this all was. The feeling sped up, and pulled me along. Was it a joke? Was she just going to dump me here and vanish? I would, if I were her. What was I going to be left with after this?

Now I didn’t trust
Evelyn
.

“What’s the deal?” I asked. “Why are you doing this?”

“Toy asked me to,” she said evenly. “I respect Toy.”

“That’s not enough.”

“You remind me of my dad.”

“
Now
we’re getting somewhere,” I said.

“He was a loser too. He’s dead now, though.”

I quit there. I wasn’t up to hearing any more of that, so I didn’t ask for any more.

After she’d finished tying her laces, Evelyn came over and sat on the bed.

“It seemed to me you could use a friend. Toy had to bring the bike back, he didn’t really want to leave you here alone. And I figured after that horrible phone call that maybe you’re not so much a loser as you are unlucky.”

I looked at her silently. She shrugged, and smiled.

“Okay?” she offered.

“Okay,” I accepted.

We spent the day killing time until Toy came back to get us. We ate breakfast in the bar on the first floor of the motel, then went for a long walk on the deserted beach. We carried our shoes and walked the water’s edge where the waves came flattening out around our feet and the sand was cold and hard and pounded smooth as a tabletop. We spun and walked backward for a long ways, just to do it, because we could. Walked for ten minutes without bumping into anyone. I stared down the beach northways and couldn’t see anything. I flipped back around and the whole south was ours alone too. Out to the east, over the water, there was one lone bump of a lobster boat on the horizon but otherwise, there seemed to be nothing between us and England. It occurred to me that this may have been the first thing that Evelyn and I both appreciated, this solitude. We walked in silence for a mile in each direction.

We finally left the beach for the boulevard in the afternoon when we started getting hungry. We ate pizza, drank Cokes, slipped into the arcade to play a few games. We acted like kids, and pretended for as long as we could that all the other stuff wasn’t out there.

“You thinking about where you’re going to go?” Evelyn finally asked as the afternoon wound down.

I waved her on out of the arcade so we could start back down the boulevard to the motel. “No,” I said. “I mean, no, I don’t
think
I’m thinking about it, like, I don’t hear words in my head the way I usually do when I’m thinking about something.”

“No, I didn’t see your lips moving either.”

I didn’t mind anymore that she was making fun of me. But I didn’t laugh.

“Well, I don’t hear the words, haven’t heard any actually since we got here. But I’m
feeling
stuff, you know? And so, ya, I think somewhere in there I’m thinking about where I’m going but I’m not telling myself.” I waited a few seconds, slowed my walk to almost nothing, then said, “Y’know?” the way you say it when you’re sure nobody knows.

I was afraid to look at her face, and when she didn’t say anything I got all embarrassed, started walking fast again. “Never mind,” I said. “Don’t listen to me. I’m a dope.”

We bought pineapple-banana whips and fat oily fried doughs, the powdered sugar soaking up the oil and making little balls on the top. We took them back to the motel and sat on the swing eating them, waiting for Toy. It was getting cloudy and misty, the wind from the ocean bearing in and leaving us coated in cold salty spray.

“I should probably go check out,” I said. “You want to wait here?”

She nodded, staring off into the rough, incoming tide.

Upstairs I pulled the chair to the window, and sat staring out with my chin on my hands. I saw those waves way off again but coming closer, and still loud through the closed window. The delicious salt wind rattling the old loose sash. I could see why refugee types would come to this town. Twenty-four hours or so had sure made me feel I was in the right place. I wondered if this was where Toy came on all those field trips.

The peace was shattered, though, when I felt the rumble of the engine through the crash of the waves. I grabbed the bags and left reluctantly. Downstairs I paid the front desk lady with bills from the bag I’d stolen from my brother.

Toy was on the swing with Evelyn when I stepped out onto the porch.

“I don’t ever want to leave here,” I said. “I’m never going to leave here.” I looked past him, up and down the silent boulevard, loving it, meaning what I was saying. The thought that this perfect windswept world and that vile little place I’d bolted existed so close together and that I could choose to be in either one of those worlds... well, that thought was too big for me. It steam-rolled me.

“Yes you are, Mick, you’re going back,” he said. “Come Memorial Day, you couldn’t afford a week here. And I hope you’ve thought about this: You can’t stay here, and you sure can’t go back home. So where you gonna go?”

“Maybe I could go to your house? For a while?”

“Maybe you can’t,” Toy answered, not mean, but firm anyway.

“How come? Your mother did—”

“Because my life is my life. And while we’re on the subject, stop sniffing around my mother.”

I turned to Evelyn. Hopefully.

She smiled sympathetically. “Maybe we better count that bag of money and see what you can afford.”

I had no place.

Toy fired up the Harley.

The ride home down the wide open of route 95 seemed to take no time at all. Sixty-five miles to go, said the sign. Then, suddenly, twenty-five. At every mile marker my stomach tightened a little more, fear and a thumping anger hitting me from sights unseen and unexpected until, by the time we were in the city, I was pumping my jaw like there was a wad of gum in my mouth.

Toy looked at me for the answer to the question he hadn’t asked.

I pointed. A left here, a left there, a right here, all the way to the end, then another left. I still hadn’t thought it out, still hadn’t heard the words in my head, but I suppose I just already knew. Toy pulled in front of the house and I got out. I couldn’t say anything, couldn’t even say thanks. But it didn’t seem to bother either of them. I waved. They waved.

My decision after all was no decision at all. Where did I always go? When Terry cooked frozen eggrolls at three
A.M.,
nodded off, and the firemen came because of the smoke, where did I go? When my mother was away and my father forgot to come home from the O’Asis and the lights went out all over the block, and I was only nine, where did I go? When they had given my bed away to yet another late guest and I couldn’t bear to sleep on the couch because sleeping out in the open spooked me, where did I go? When I was older and I couldn’t sleep because it was New Year’s Eve and my parents’ friends couldn’t stop screaming over and over the only five words they knew from “Auld Lang Syne,” where did I go?

I didn’t even have to whistle or ring the bell. The motorcycle noise brought Sully to the door. He stared at me hard.

“S’pose you heard things,” I said.

“S’pose I did,” he answered.

“So, will you take me?”

I never had to ask before, just walked in when the door opened.

He didn’t stop looking at me hard.

“No.” He slammed the door in my face.

I had no idea in the world where I was walking to when I turned away from that door. There was no bottom for me now.

The door flew back open.

“Get in, asshole,” he said.

He just left the door open and walked away from it, back into the house. A combination invitation-slap. Inside he continued on, through the hall and up the stairs toward his room. I followed at a distance, looking this way and that for anybody else, his parents, or Honey. The place was empty.

Upstairs, Sully walked to the door that led to the attic, right next to his own bedroom door, and threw it open the same unfriendly way he did the front door. Then he went into his room.

I took the hint. Instead of messing with Sully yet, I took my bag up the second flight of stairs to the attic. To the guest room. To my old room. Sully’s parents actually own their house, and a long time ago fixed up the attic for guests. It even has its own bathroom except that they never quite finished it so the toilet is still just the drain pipe opening up out of the floor. It works fine, though, as long as you don’t get too sloppy. The bedroom part of the attic is a little cramped with the slope ceilings and the two single beds tucked into the eaves at either end, but it is comfortable. There’s a thick brown carpet, night tables next to each bed, and pictures of the Kennedys looking like backlit angels on the wall. And a couple of those fifties floor lamps, spring rods that are pressed between the floor and the ceiling, with four cone-shaped lights pointing in every which direction. There’s only one tiny radiator, and the place is drafty as hell, but with the thick rug, with the calico down comforter on the bed, with a couple of those lamps trained just right throwing that yellow light, there was a lot more warm about it than cold. I remembered that from every time I stayed there before. It was doubly true this time.

So it wasn’t such a hard place to kill some time even though it was eerie quiet and the two dwarf doors that opened to the crawl spaces were spooking me. I couldn’t do that forever, though. I had to go down and see him.

I stood in his doorway. He lay flat on his bed, his eyes closed.

“Um, thanks,” I said.

“Don’t,” he said, nasty.

“You want me to leave?”

“Up to you.”

“Why’d you let me in?”

“Why’d you come?”

“’Cause this is where I come. You know that.”

“This is where you
used
to come.”

“Then why did I come?”

“Then why did you come?”

“Then why’d you let me in?”

“’Cause I’m a dope, I guess.”

“You are, but that don’t answer the question.”

“Then I don’t know the answer.”

“Yes you do.”

“Shut up, I said I don’t.”

“Well I do. I know why you let me in.”

“Oh that’s right. You know every damn thing now, dontcha?”

“Not every damn thing, but some.”

“So?”

“So, you let me in because...” I felt it building, didn’t want it to, but couldn’t stop it. “You let me in because you love me, Sul.”

Without opening his eyes, he reached back over his head and grabbed a tall green Tupperware cup full of water off the night table and winged it at me. “Get outta my goddamn house,” he yelled as the cup bounced and splattered off the door and I ran.

But I didn’t run out of the house. I ran upstairs to my room. Because I knew he didn’t mean it.

I flopped down on my bed and was asleep before I could even kick my shoes off. I don’t know how long I slept, only that I could have slept a lot longer if the light hadn’t woken me. When I heard the click and saw the lamp glowing pink through my eyelids, I opened them to see Sully’s father, John J. Sullivan II, hulking over me. I was startled, but I didn’t jump or yell or gasp. My startle muscles didn’t seem to work anymore.

Besides, I liked Mr. Sullivan. Mostly because he had basically no use for anybody at all. He looked like the actor Sean Connery, big, about six-three, half bald, with a thick gray mustache and hands like catcher’s mitts with fingers added on.

Mr. Sullivan had only turned on one of the lights, and aimed it right at me. So he was kind of lurking in the shadow behind it.

“Hey, Mr. Sullivan.”

“Hey, Mick.”

I could see him smiling a know-everything grin.

“Y’ain’t been to stay with us in a long time. Nice ta see ya.”

“Nice ta be back,” I said.

“Your old man called. Ya know I can’t stand your old man, dontcha, Mick?”

“Ya, I know.”

“But I listened to him anyway. He asked was you here and I told him ya, you was. So he says, okay.”

“Okay? Okay what? Does he want me to come right home? Does he want me to call?”

Mr. Sullivan shrugged the big beefy shoulders. “Okay, he says.”

I nodded, thought about getting up, standing, sitting,
something
that required action. But then I couldn’t think of a reason, so I didn’t move.

“There’s a little refrigerator in the basement,” he said, walking away. “I’ll bring it up.” He disappeared down the stairs, then suddenly reappeared, walking backward up the same stairs. “But Mick, if I find any beer in it I’ll throw your ass out on the street. Right?”

I gulped. “Right.”

In a few minutes he was back, carrying the small square refrigerator in front of him like it was a shoebox. He set it down in the corner, plugged it in. “Now this doesn’t mean you can’t come down and eat with us if you want sometimes. It’s just... well, you don’t have to if you don’t want to, is all.”

He really doesn’t like people very much.

As soon as Mr. Sullivan was back down the stairs, I heard Sully coming up. His footsteps were a lot lighter. He stood near the top of the stairs for a few seconds, his thin face peering through the bannister.

“Comin’ in?” I asked.

He did. He walked to the other bed, the one across the room from me, flicking on the light closest to it. He spread out on his bed on his side, just like me on mine. We lay there, each floating in our narrow cone of light.