Heft (23 page)

Blankets.

I walk upstairs, still holding the bag of chips. At the top of them I know what I will see and I don’t shine the flashlight on it. I feel around for it with my hands—the note that my mother taped to her bedroom door. It’s burned into my brain.
Do not come in. Call police.

She said:
Love, Mom.
That’s what she wrote.

I tear the note off the door. I crumple it into a ball and throw it down the stairs.

I don’t go into her bedroom. I can’t yet. I pull her door shut.

When I go into my room I shine the flashlight around it and it’s just as I left it, and I feel that it should have changed somehow, from a boy’s room into a man’s. The best memories I have of her are in here: when she would rescue me from whatever I’d imagined, when she’d come running for me in the night when I cried out. I woke up in this room once, six years old, running a fever, seeing or hallucinating frightening things in the dark. She came running for me in her red plaid robe, saying What is it, what is it, Kelly?

It was nuns. Black and diamond-shaped nuns, who floated by me one after another, faster and faster until they became a blur that I could not separate from the general dark of the room. I couldn’t speak from fear. When my mother came in she was my hero and she sat on my bed. I feared for her ankles. I tried to tell her about the anklebiter that lived under the bed and I couldn’t.

Be careful, I finally whispered, and she said, Of what?

Down below.

She looked under the bed, she got down on her knees and peered into the empty space under the bed, and she told me that there was nothing there.

Still—she crawled into the bed beside me and curled her arm beneath my head. I was six years old. Back then it did not matter to me about her bathrobe or her terrible old-fashioned hairstyle or her physical closeness to me. What mattered was that she was protecting us both from harm. And that she did not have friends—this too I didn’t mind, this too seemed right and fine to me. She was my mother.

She cooked for me when I was small.

She made cookies. Chocolate chip cookies and sometimes, many times, spaghetti for dinner. It was my favorite thing to eat. It was only when I started buying groceries for us that I realized the lifesaving cheapness of spaghetti and tomato sauce for dinner.

I’m starving suddenly. I stuff some more potato chips in my mouth. They’re stale—too flexible. No chomp to them. I drop the bag on the floor.

I take two blankets off my bed and wrap them tightly around myself.

Then—I don’t know what compels me, but I get down onto the floor and I pull myself slowly under the bed. I used to do this when I was young, when I needed the smallness of the space. I needed the protection. It’s so dusty that I almost choke.

From my little hideout I shine the flashlight around the room and notice things about it that have not been touched since I was small: a jack-in-the-box that popped up for the last time ten years ago, hanging sadly forward, its cloth arms dangling and its crown lopsided. A coin collector full-up with coins. You put the coin in the little dog’s mouth and it jumps forward and plop goes the coin into the barrel. A framed picture of a boy with a baseball bat. And many cut-out pictures of Mike Piazza, John Olerud, Al Leiter. Other Mets players, everyone who led the team from 1998 until about 2008, when I stopped putting pictures of any kind on the wall. When I stopped coming home to her.

Over everything there is a layer of dust, thin near the floor and thick at the top of things, at the top of my bookshelf, where the books are gray with it. An old spiderweb sways in the corner nearby, abandoned years ago by the spider that made it. It feels as if I’ve been on a very long trip, as if this is my first time at home again after some journey, and if I close my eyes and try very hard I can go calm in the face, I can imagine that everything is still normal. That my mother is in her bedroom, or my mother is downstairs watching TV, and I am five or six or seven or eight and do not know what is in store for me.

I fall asleep this way. Under the bed, wrapped in blankets, the flashlight pointing its steady beam toward a blank spot on the wall.

• • •

T
his evening I was sitting on my couch watching Dr Phil
when a little light knock came at my door.

O who could it be at this hour, I thought. Perhaps it was FedEx with one of the treats that I often get for myself: a book or a DVD or a shirt or, if I am feeling sorry for myself, a cheese basket from Harry and David. But it was almost seven at night.

I tried to peek out through the window behind me but whoever it was had pressed himself up to my door and I could not see.

I thought for a moment about not answering it but my curiosity prevailed and I trudged over to the door & I opened it.

There, on the other side, was Yolanda. A little suitcase was in her hand.

I almost shut the door again out of embarrassment—for in the time that she has been gone I have let things get very bad.

This was the state of my house:

The remains of several feasts had stacked themselves up in piles on the big table in my room, & I had begun a project to organize the photographs in my parents’ albums that I had then abandoned, & I had not taken the garbage out in nearly four weeks, & I had gone on an online ordering spree and ordered many things I did not need such as a couple of pieces of large-ish workout equipment and some posters, & I had recently begun writing out lists of my possessions, a lonely morbid self-pitying act. So I had reams of paper on the table as well, lists and lists of things I haven’t held or seen in years.

I closed the door partway to prevent her seeing, and I said, “Oh!”

“Hi,” said little Yolanda. Her belly was swallowed up by her coat but her face looked softer, her cheeks fuller.

“I’ve been worried about you,” I said.

“Sorry,” said Yolanda. She was just standing there.

It was black outside, that winter blackness. The wind was gusting down from the park & the whole front of me got cold just from opening the door. On the street it was quiet. It felt like snow but it was not snowing.

She said nothing else. She was shivering so I put aside my pride & asked her if she wouldn’t come in for a bit.

She put her little suitcase down just inside the door.

I squeezed my eyes shut tight and then opened them again. I didn’t know what to say about the state of things. Every excuse I had sounded limp & contrived. So I said nothing at all.

She looked as if she were trying to comfort herself—she had her arms wrapped around her, and she was rubbing her arms vigorously.

She would not say a thing.

Then I realized quite suddenly that I was angry with her. For her to just
disappear.
For her to befriend me and then
vanish.

But I could not say as much so I told her she should sit down & asked her if she wanted something to eat or drink.

“No thanks,” she said, but I wanted to feed her so I went into the kitchen and brought back with me some nice cheese, a Jarlsberg I’ve been ordering once weekly, and nice rosemary crackers.

“Look,” I said, but before I could say anything more Yolanda said “I had an idea.”

I did not want to hear it and I did. I thought, in my anger, that it was going to be something that was meant to take advantage of me. I could tell she was going to ask me for something that I would be wise to say no to—something with money, I thought—but I knew that I would not be able to. All of my life has been like this. I cannot say no. When I am fond of someone I can’t say no to her.

“Where have you been?” I asked, to stall her.

But she would not tell me. She has a habit of going quiet when I ask her things about her life—I do not do this frequently, but when I do . . . she folds her hands and looks at them and looks up at me eventually with a tight little smile. Or she tucks her hair behind her ear and shakes her head slightly from side to side.

“I had an idea,” she repeated.

“What is it?” I asked finally. I cannot move her. I cannot make her do what she won’t, or talk to her as if she were a friend. & this is what brings out the worst in me—the part of me that thinks she is only humoring me and does not hold me in any kind of esteem.

“I was gonna ask if you still needed help,” said Yolanda, & here she looked about the room as if to prove her point. “And if you do, I was gonna see if you needed, like, someone to live here, and I could do that, I could cook for you and stuff, and clean, and I could do it for free. Or for, like, not much money.”

I stared at her. What she was suggesting sounded at once so appealing and so horrifying that I could not find my words.

“You can think about it,” Yolanda said quickly. “Obviously.”

I was doing just that. I was thinking rapidly about everything that would be wonderful about Yolanda living with me her young laughter, her company, the feeling that I have when she is in the house—one of possibility and some sort of a future for myself beyond a slow steady dying. But I was also thinking about what else her presence would mean . . . & how I would eat, & what would happen if I needed her to leave. & what would happen if I committed some embarrassment in front of her, the type that I used to save for when she was not in the house. & where she would sleep, & what would happen when she . . .

“When are you due?” I asked her.

“Three months,” she said.

“Who is your doctor?” I asked her.

She shrugged. “I went to one when I first found out,” she said. “He looked at the baby and said it seemed healthy.”

Now I do not know much about babies but this sounded very wrong to me, & from the shows I watch I know it is important to go more often than that.

“Do you—know if it’s a boy or a girl?” I asked.

“A girl,” she said.

“You wanted to find out?” I said, because I have always thought that I would not want to.

“No,” she said. “Nobody told me. I just know.”

She had her hands on her belly. It was bigger than she was. She had on a dress that was too tight.

I wished that I could light a fire in the fireplace for her, for outside it was finally starting to snow. I could see it through my picture window and it turned my picture window into a scrim. She had come to me, I thought, like Mole & Ratty came to Badger in
The Wind in the Willows.
Which was read to me as a child. She had come to me very lost & the outside of the house was the Wild Wood, & the inside was Badger’s very cozy & messy home.

“Now what will we do when the baby comes?” I asked her.

“I’ll go to the hospital,” she said.

“And after that?”

She shrugged. She had her brow all furrowed up, and I worried for a moment that she was going to cry, but she didn’t . . .

“But will your parents worry?” I asked, and she shook her head. No, no.

“Well,” I said, “you’d better stay here tonight, and in the morning we can talk about this.” I thought a moment, and then added, “And in the morning you’d better go see a doctor.”

It pained me not to be able to make her a bed. I didn’t even know where the linens were for the upstairs rooms, but as it turned out, she did—and had washed them herself when she did my clothes. (I never let her wash my real clothes, but props that I had outgrown and kept.)

I walked her as far as the base of the stairs, and then I eyed her suitcase helplessly.

“Can I . . .” I asked her, and she said “No, I got it,” as she grabbed her suitcase and dragged it up the stairs behind her, leading with her belly.

I have never felt worse.

“Good night, Yolanda,” I said, when she had reached the top of the stairs.

“Night, Mr Arthur,” said the girl.

I stood at the base of the stairs with one hand on the banister for quite some time. I was just thinking. My first thought was to go into the kitchen & fix myself a great big meal, but something in me felt too tired. The effort it would take outweighed the pleasure it would bring.

So instead I sat down hard in my easy chair & put my feet up on the coffee table, looking with disgust at the several Chinese food containers that had begun their descent into rot.

I closed my eyes right there & drifted off, dreaming . . .

And suddenly she was before me, in her slippers and a pair of pajamas with rainbows on them, in a pink fluffy robe she had put about herself tightly.

I was nervous that I had been snoring.

“What time is it?” I asked her.

“Like midnight,” said the girl. “Can’t sleep.”

“Well,” I said.

She sat down on the sofa, her chin in her palm. Across from us the clock ticked softly. She looked up at me and raised her eyebrows.

“Glass of milk?” I asked her.

She declined by shaking her head without unpropping it.

Then she asked me something that she has never asked me before, & no one has since Marty died, & I think it was meant to change the subject, or perhaps it was something she had always wondered & she simply found the courage.

“Where’s your family?” asked the girl.

It came at me very hard. It knocked the breath out of me. I did not speak.

“Your mom and dad,” said Yolanda, as if to clarify.

“Dead,” I said. Though only half of this was true.

“How’d they die?”

I shook my head.

“It’s sad,” said Yolanda. “I feel really bad for you. Sad to lose your parents.”

I nodded.

“You never had kids,” said Yolanda, & again I shook my head.

“Wow,” she said matter-of-factly. “All alone.”

“No brothers or sisters?” she asked me.

“None,” I said, which was easier than explaining to her about William. I was feeling very sorry for myself.

“So I guess he’s not your nephew,” she said, pointing to the picture on the shelf, & I had to admit that in fact she was correct.

“You remember your parents?” she asked me.

“Yes,” I said.

“What were they like?”

But it was too much for me, & I felt a great mass of sadness welling up inside me, & so I told her that I would tell her about them another time.