Bloodroot (19 page)

The only time I’d seen the cracks in my father was the night she stood out in the backyard, as if it were twenty years ago, calling Danny and me in for dinner. He said nothing, sitting in his chair, trembling every time her voice called out our names. I begged him to bring her inside, to throw her over his shoulder if he had to. He finally spoke when I threatened to do it myself, accusing him again of passing off selfish denial as strength in the face of anguish.

“She’s calling for her boys,” he said, his voice a thick, quiet rasp. “It’s what a mother does.” He glared at me, baring his teeth, showing me the fearsome countenance of a wise man losing his patience with a fool. “I deny nothing. That doesn’t mean I have to deny your mother her freedom, or her nature.”

That night, for the first time, I wondered what hurt him more: that she was going away or that he couldn’t follow. If a way to stay with her existed, he would have found it. My father’s loyalty was without mercy.

 

 

 

MY FATHER MET ME
at the front door, barefoot, wearing sweatpants and a white strap T-shirt that desperately needed a wash. He looked drawn and pale in the porch light, his thin, gray hair greasy and matted. Instead of letting me into the house, he stepped outside, pulling the door closed behind him.

“Is she okay?” I asked.

“She had a bad morning,” he said, “and afternoon.”

“Where is she now?”

“Asleep. I got her to take something.”

I wiped my hand down my mouth, looking away from my father, desperate for a cigarette, suddenly aware that I’d brought a pack. But I didn’t go for them; I didn’t want the old man knowing I’d started again. I should’ve let my folks alone for the night. I felt foolish for the panic that had brought me there.

“Come on in, anyway,” my father said, opening the door. “You came all this way. Let’s at least have a drink.”

My mother wasn’t in bed when we walked in. She was at the dining room table, setting out a plate of cookies and three glasses of milk. My father and I said nothing, sitting on either side of her, facing each other. She’d cut her hair; it was all but gone, short as a boy’s. It was shocking but cute, stripping years off her face.

“Kevin, I wish you’d call,” she said, sitting, “if you’re going to be this late. I’m always happy to see you, no matter the time, but you missed dinner.”

“The boy can feed himself, Eileen,” my father said. “Don’t you worry about it.”

He gave a slight shake of the head, telling me that there hadn’t been any dinner to miss. He sat hunched over, but electricity crackled in his eyes; he was on his guard, protecting my mother or me or both of us from something. I decided not to ask my mom about her day.

“I’ll call next time,” I said, reaching for a cookie. Oreos. Danny’s favorite. “Your hair looks great. I like the new look. Pretty radical, Dad, don’t you think?”

My mother said nothing. She moved her hand to touch her head but her fingers hovered in the air, a slight tremble in them. Suddenly sheepish, her eyes darted from the tabletop to my father’s face and back again. He took her hand and gently lowered it to the table where he laced his fingers with hers.

My father shot a glare across the table that could’ve peeled the paint off the wall. I didn’t get it. I’d gone for harmless conversation. That was the cue, right? Plus, not only was what I said complimentary, it was true.

Then my mother stood at her seat, reaching for the cookie plate, her head coming into the hanging lamp’s full light. Patches of color, multiple colors, stood out against her dark hair. Neon colors, muted but distinct in the direct light: blue, pink, purple. Stupidly, I thought of the Day-Glo-splattered walls of the Red Spot. I stared at her and she felt it.

“I’m sorry, Kevin. I’m tired,” Mom said, holding the cookie plate in both hands at her waist, her face masked in politeness as if I were a salesman at the door. The colors stained her fingertips. “We thought you weren’t coming so I took a pill, to sleep, not long before you got here. I think it’s working. I have to go to bed.”

“Sure, Ma,” I said. “No problem.”

I wanted to apologize, for noticing, for staring, for even being born. I wanted to convince her I didn’t need or even want to know what happened to her hair. I needed her to know she was my mother and I just wanted some time with her but she had already disappeared into the dark kitchen. I got up from my chair, intending to follow her.

“Sit,” my father said, and I did. “It ain’t her job to stop you from feeling stupid. So sit there and feel stupid.” He slouched in his chair, crumbling his cookie in his hand, the corners of his mouth twitching. “Boy, couldn’t you cook your own damn dinner for one night?”

“Dad, you can’t pick up the damn phone?”

I stood and this time didn’t sit when told. I walked out the front door.

But I only got as far as the front yard, where I stood wishing I’d left my mother to my father’s capable hands where she belonged. I tried to remember the distance to the nearest train station, bereft now of even the nerve to go back inside and call a cab.

“Give us a smoke,” my father said, stepping outside.

“I quit, Dad, a while ago,” I said, staring down at the brick patio. “You know that.”

“You got the Devil’s own stink on ya, son,” my father said. “Quit dickin’ around. Your brother’s the only decent liar in this family.”

“I guess that’s a good thing,” I said, equally relieved at being discovered and at being able to smoke. I lit a cigarette for each of us.

Dad took a long drag and breathed out a billowing cloud of smoke, scattering the moths and mosquitoes hovering around the porch light over his head. He tapped his ashes in the weedy, overgrown flower boxes beside the front door. He’d built them from old railroad ties when I was six. I’d helped, handing him the nails as he worked. Where had Danny been? We always both helped Dad with his projects. I couldn’t remember.

“I’m having a hell of a time keeping up,” Dad said, tilting his chin at the weeds. “Though she don’t notice so much anymore.” He stared down at the cigarette between his thick pink knuckles. “First one in thirty years.”

“Don’t be too hard on yourself, Dad. These are difficult times.”

“Girl across the street?” my father said. “The pretty blonde? The one your mother wanted you to date?”

“I remember. Sasha something-or-other.”

“Right, her,” my father said. “The Russian. Anyway, the other day she comes home from work or wherever with her hair dyed bright pink.” My father chuckled. “Looks fucking great. Who’d a thunk it, right? Freakin’ pink hair. Since I find this remarkable, I ask your mother if she can believe that pink hair can look decent on a person, never mind good. I’m just makin’ conversation, small talk, like we do every day. Just shit around the neighborhood. She just kinda shrugs at me, you know, like it’s nothin’.

“Well, today I gotta go down the union office, right? Pension and insurance bullshit, for the doctor bills. I come home and your mother’s in the bathroom bawlin’, going at her head with the scissors. Her hair is like six different colors and she’s desperately tryin’ to chop it all off before I see it. It’s everywhere, in the sink, on the floor, in the bathtub. Blood on the scissors, in her hair. The bathroom walls still look like someone puked Magic Marker all over the place. I don’t even know where she got the shit. Seems Sasha gave your mother an inspiration, but she couldn’t decide on a color.”

My father stared for a long time at his cigarette, watching the ash accumulate as the ember burned, a thin trail of smoke spiraling toward the porch light. His face sagged again, as if child’s fingers pinched his cheeks, pulling them down toward his jaw. His slate eyes danced, an old argument renewed behind them. “Maybe it wasn’t Sasha, maybe it was something I said.”

He brought the cigarette to his lips, the long ash falling on his T-shirt. “Who knows, right?” He laughed, though it came out as a raspy croak. “You shoulda seen me with the phone book, trying to find a goddamn hairdresser that does emergency work. Then tryin’ to get her into the car . . . I’d just got her settled when you showed up.”

He glanced at me, then looked over at the flower boxes. I said nothing. Trying to talk him out of his guilt was pointless. In that way we were alike. He’d never gotten far trying to talk me out of mine over Danny. Besides, he wasn’t asking for my counsel, just that I listen. My mother had her trips to Atlantic City. I realized for the first time that since the onset of my mother’s illness, my dad had become the shut-in. I wondered how I could get him out of that dim little house for a ball game or maybe just coffee or a cocktail. Why hadn’t I thought of this before? After today, getting him out of the house would only be that much harder.

When my mother opened the front door, busting the both of us cold with our cigarettes at our lips, I don’t know who jumped higher, me or my father. We tucked our smokes behind our backs, wispy evidence in the air all around us.

My mother shook her head. “You two. Can’t you at least do that around the corner, where your father won’t see you?”

She gave us the same sad, benevolent smile Danny and I used to get when caught with our hands in the Oreos, literally or figuratively. The same smile Danny had lately taken to giving me. “Come in and brush your teeth when you’re done.”

“Okay, Ma,” I said. “Sorry.”

She closed the door. My father had turned away from me. He walked the length of the brick path that split the lawn and like an old pro flicked his cigarette halfway across the street, the burning ember and the dead filter arcing through the air in opposite directions.

“You see now,” he said when he got back to me, “why I’m so careful about your brother. One dumb comment about some girl’s haircut and she falls apart. There’s no telling these days. Who knows what fireworks will go off in her head if she sees him?” He set his hands on his hips, shaking his head at the front door of his home. “I wouldn’t want to be us, though, if she finds out he’s around and we didn’t tell her.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll take care of it.” The confidence in my voice surprised me. It made no impression on my dad.

He opened the door. There was no sound from inside the house. “I’ll call you a cab. I’d give you ride, but . . .” He pulled some cash from his pocket.

“I understand,” I said, closing his hand over the wrinkled bills. “I’m okay, money-wise.”

“That’s a first.” My father held out his hand. “Gimme a couple more a those coffin nails then, High-Roller. I might want ’em with my evening whiskey, long as your mother stays in bed.”

I passed my dad the smokes. He nodded as he shut the door, locking the dead bolt and turning off the porch light while I stood there. I walked to the curb to wait for my ride, wondering if trying to get Danny back into the family was even worth it. We’d have to tell a lot of lies.

It’d be a lot more difficult watching Danny lie about his living than it had been watching him lie about breaking into the liquor cabinet. And that was if I got Danny and my father back on speaking terms. If I remained a go-between, I’d end up lying, too, about Danny’s life, the same as when Danny was a junkie. Only it wasn’t just Danny anymore with things to hide.

It probably wasn’t yet ten, but the homes on my parents’ block sat dark behind their post-and-rail fences and manicured lawns. Low-slung, brick ranch houses just like the one I grew up in formed two neat lines like train tracks or the double-yellow of the highway. The flickering blue glow of televisions misted through living room curtains. There wasn’t a sound: no insects, no traffic, no dogs barking or kids crying. The whole block had shut down for the night, everything and everyone put away, turned off, and locked up.

I had a hard time believing that the crazy drama my father had described could happen on a street like this. The one I lived on now? That was a different story. Chaos played out on my street every other day, only with more profanity and less privacy.

But then again, this quiet block had hatched my brother, the junkie. And his other brother, the teacher. Both of them now doing things no one would believe. That kid Tommy, the block we left him on three years ago could’ve been this one. So could the block where Al used to live. Tommy could’ve been any one of the kids Danny and I had grown up with.

People like Tommy, like the dealers, thieves, and miscreants who haunted my neighborhood, people like my crazy neighbors Tony and Maria, like Al, they didn’t necessarily start life in the world they ended up living in, or dying in. Who from history had? Hitler had started out as a painter, bin Laden a rich man’s son with every advantage in the world. There wasn’t a garden growing the lost and the criminal in one flower box and the quiet and the good in another, the Fates overseeing the whole project with seeds in one hand and a scythe in the other. Considering how I’d spent the past few days, the world felt more like a weed-choked, garbage-strewn lot. Instead of beautiful women at a spinning wheel, deaf, dumb, and blind luck decided who got rained on and who got pissed on, who flowered and who seeped poison and who withered in the dark.

My brother and I sprang from the same ground, from the same set of roots but how differently we’d grown and how strangely we’d re-entwined. Would we ever be disentangled? Would one of us have to be cut down for the other to finally flourish? Even if I had a choice, what did I want?

My cab slid to a stop at the curb. Climbing in, taking a last look around the block, I felt grotesque. Like I was black-winged and leaving brimstone fumes floating above the asphalt, mingling with the cab’s exhaust.

Once upon a time, I was the good son.