Lying with the Dead (10 page)

“Please, don’t feel you need to do that with me. I’m fine.”

“You may be fine. I’m a wreck. Half of the time I don’t know who I am. I look in the mirror and can’t figure it out.”

“We all have those days.”

“The doctor calls them panic attacks. I don’t see what I have to be panicked about. Just life, I guess. These spells last for days unless I pop one of my pills.”

“What pills?”

“I have a whole bunch. Xanax is the best.”

“You take Xanax?” Pictures of druggie old stars in decline or young ones plagued by stage fright come to mind. “Did a doctor prescribe it?”

“What do you think? I bought it on the street?”

“What else do you take?”

She recites a list—Atenolol, Senequan, Celexa, Synthroid, Restoril—as if reading labels off the vials on her end table.

“Sounds like you might be overmedicated.”

“That’s what Candy says. But without medicine, I can’t sleep and I can’t wake up. I have terrible dreams.”

Much as I empathize, I have no desire to compare nightmares with Mom.

“And every day I have to get up and dress and hurry downstairs,” she says, “because if I stay in bed, Candy blames it on my being depressed. That gives her another excuse to bring up assisted living. She claims I’ll be happier there. But she just wants me out of the way.”

“No, she loves you and has your best interests at heart.”

“She loves somebody else now. Bet you didn’t know that. He wants her to move to North Carolina.”

“Good for Candy. She deserves some happiness.”

“How much happiness do you suppose this Leonard Lawrence or Lawrence Leonard gives her? He’s a dentist, almost retirement age.”

“I’m glad she has someone who loves her.”

“I tell her, I say, do you know the definition of a sixty-five-year-old man that’s good in bed? It’s one that stays on his side and doesn’t snore.”

With my fist wrapped around the whiskey, I believe I catch sight of fox eyes in the garden.

“Candy, all kids,” Mom goes on, “think their parents have no clue about sex. They don’t accept that their mother’s made of flesh and blood, and that at a certain age the flesh was weak and the blood was hot. Dad and I, we fought a lot. Mostly my fault. I had a filthy temper and I’d smack him around to get a rise out of him and remind him I was alive. But after the worst fights, we had the best loving.”

Alternately an Irish Catholic prude and an outspoken bawd, Mom has always had this cringe-making habit of sharing more information than anybody, especially her children, care to hear.

“Want to know something funny?” she says. “I’ve started thinking about Jack. For a long time I didn’t, but now I do. I remember he was the one that locked the doors at night before he switched off the lights and came to bed. I haven’t felt safe since he died.”

“I didn’t know that,” I say for want of something better.

“There’s lots you don’t know.”

“Well, one thing I don’t know—and it worries me—are you eating? Candy says you canceled Meals on Wheels.”

“I drink Ensure every day.”

“What about meat and vegetables? What about a hot meal?”

“To hell with cooking! Men retire. Why not women? I can’t be bothered fixing food.”

“You don’t have to. Let me pay somebody to do it for you.”

She draws a weary breath. “Eating bores me. The doctor says I have that disease where you lose interest in everything.”

“What disease is that?”

“He wrote the name down on a slip of paper, but I lost it. It’s one word.”

“Anhedonia,” I suggest.

“That sounds like more than one word.”

“If you’d let somebody clean and cook and keep you company, you’d feel better.”

“How good am I supposed to feel at eighty? I don’t want strangers nosing around, ordering me to do this, do that in my own house. The women in that line of work, they can’t even carry on a conversation. Most of them—now don’t accuse me of being a racist. I’ve lived on the same street with them for decades—most of them are black and they have a chip on their shoulder. They grump and gripe and do as they damn well please. ‘Don’t you like your job?’ I ask them. ‘You deserve a better one, like singing or dancing. Something to cheer you up.’ I say, ‘I’m sorry about slavery and segregation and all that. But I didn’t have anything to do with it. My people sailed over on a boat from County Cork and worked for a living.’”

“Please, promise me you don’t say that, Mom.”

“Why not? They don’t care what they say to me. Last summer when Candy went to the shore with Leonard, she hired a nurse to babysit me. First thing she said, this nurse, she says, ‘Lemme see you sit on the toilet and get up off it. We don’t want any dribble accidents.’ I told her, ‘Damned if I will. You go directly to hell. I may be old, but I haven’t lost my dignity.’”

Hoping Hollywood wisdom will soothe her, I observe, “Bette Davis said getting old ain’t for sissies.”

“That’s for damn sure. I’m not scared of dying. I’m scared of living on and on, wasting Candy’s time, wasting your money and winding up in a hospital with tubes stuck in every hole of my body. Promise me that won’t happen, Quinn.”

“Be sure you write a living will.”

“I don’t need to put it down on paper for you to know what to do.”

I resist a third glass of whiskey. My vision is already shaky. The fluorescent fox eyes I thought I saw in the garden turn out to be my eyes mirrored in the conservatory door.

“I’d pull the plug on myself,” she says. “But then they wouldn’t pay off my insurance policy, and I’d go to hell.”

“Don’t say that. Don’t even think it.”

“That’s what Candy tells me. But she’s got her lover boy, and I’m all alone. Yesterday, I found a snapshot of you as a little kid and I felt … I don’t know. Like I told Candy, ‘Who are you? Where did you come from?’”

“You told Candy you didn’t know where she came from?”

“No, I was saying where’d you come from?”

“Well, if you don’t know, Mom …” I laugh uncomfortably. “… who does? Did you find me under a rock?”

“I mean, you’ve gone so far and done so much, it’s hard to believe you belong to me. After we looked at the pictures,” she says, “Candy went off to meet Leonard, and I stayed there and finished my cigarette.”

“You still smoke?”

“Why not? You afraid it’s bad for my health?”

“You could fall asleep and burn the house down.”

“So what? Maybe if I burn here, I won’t burn in the other place.” She dredges in a ragged breath. “Anyway, Candy left, and I rested my eyes. Don’t worry, I stubbed out the cigarette first. Next thing I knew, it was night and I couldn’t figure out where I was. Then I couldn’t stand up.”

“Oh God,” I groan.

“That’s what I said. ‘Oh God, don’t let me be paralyzed.’ I shimmied around on my butt to stir my circulation. Then I grabbed onto the cedar chest, but I didn’t have the strength to pry myself off the floor. I felt legless.”

“Why didn’t you call Candy or the rescue squad? You should keep a phone in every room.”

“I don’t like having one near my bedroom, ruining the little sleep I get. I decided to sleep right there on the floor beside the cedar chest. I was warm enough in my housecoat, and by daybreak I counted on the blood coming back to my feet.

“I laid my face against the carpet, and it was like bedding down on fur. Which reminded me of all the cats and dogs I’ve owned in my life. Every last one dead now. I miss them, but I wouldn’t buy another pet. It’d just be underfoot, tripping me, and I couldn’t bear having it die before I do. Or worse, live on with nobody to look after it. Normally I pray myself to sleep. But last night I kept remembering animals and fur until I had to pee.”

Willpower weakening, I pour a third whiskey. But it doesn’t dull my senses. I remain preternaturally alert as Mom plugs into my brainstem, like one computer uploading its files onto another. This unbroken flow between us calls to mind nights in my childhood when she perched on my bed—
pace
Dr. Rokoko, sometimes she stretched out beside me—and released a stream of consciousness that rivaled Molly Bloom’s riverine soliloquy. I listened then, and do now, with a combination of curiosity and skin-crawling qualms.

“I headed for the bathroom on my hands and knees,” she says. “Then I got tired and slithered along on my belly. In the dark I didn’t have any idea where I was going. I bumped into a wall. Then I hit the door frame. Then this awful burning started and I thought I’d wet myself and was afraid Candy would find me in a puddle, like a sick cat. That’d be the last straw. Straight into assisted living!

“Then I saw crabs in my mind, and pictured how I used to boil them, and they’d scrape and scratch to climb out of the pot. They never made it. Not a one of them. They pulled each other down, like drowning people do, until they turned bright red and died. That’s how I felt, like I was boiling alive.”

“Jesus Christ, Mom!”

“Lying there on fire, it hit me that I was having a foretaste of hell and this is what I’ll suffer for eternity unless you fly home and forgive me.”

“Of course I’ll fly home. You know I will. Just tell me how you are now.”

“Not even a blister,” she says. “Turns out I collapsed on a heating grate. The furnace kicked off before it did me any damage. I keep the thermostat on sixty to save money. In the morning my feet were fine. Now when can I count on your coming here?”

The next day I wake to dismal light. The damp roof tiles of Hampstead are as slickly layered as the scales of a snake. I think of Mom on the heating grate, and rather than pity, I feel I’ve been had again; she’s conned me into flying to the States. Still, I book a ticket on BA and cancel the cleaning lady and my appointment with Dr. Rokoko. I leave a message on Tamzin’s cell phone that I’m making an emergency visit to my mother. The entire time I have the impression that I’ve seen this film before. It has the formulaic shape of a trite made-for-TV movie. Failing parent urgently summons children. Together they revisit ancient history, heal old wounds, and achieve the contemporary equivalent of catharsis—closure! Soft music. Slow fade.

But the script for my family has never been that saccharine and our past can’t be so tidily summed up. We’re more like brooding, brawling characters invented by Euripides. My last call from Heathrow reaches Mal, who maintains he has BBC on another line. “We’re close,” he swears. “Very close.”

“I’m not sure I’m still interested,” I lie through my teeth.

“Don’t throw in the towel,” he says, and leaps from boxing to sex. “Before we get into bed on this deal, we just need to find out who’s screwing who.”

Maury

Mom promised me a plane ticket to Maryland. It comes in the mail in an envelope with Candy’s return address and a letter from her saying Quinn paid for it and I should be thankful to him. I am thankful and I look forward to flying. But then Nicky tells me to fork over the ticket. She cashes it in and buys me a seat on a bus. The money left over, she says, barely covers what I owe her.

I tell Nicky if it’s a question of squaring accounts, I’ll hitchhike east and she can keep all the money. But she claims my hitching days are done. At my age, either people won’t pick me up or they’ll pick me up and kill me. That’s how it is, everybody just roaming around and ready to steal.

The day Nicky drives me to Needles to the Greyhound station, she goes over it again. The schedule. The cities where I change buses. The state lines where the time changes and I lose an hour and have to fix my watch. She hands me a map out of the glove compartment and shows me the roads that go to Maryland. Some are blue, some red, all zigzagging and crooked as the veins on the back of my hands. They have numbers so you can keep them straight, and I store them in a drawer in my head.

Nicky goes on talking it to death. How I need to keep track of my bag. How I have to eat. How I shouldn’t stare at people except when I’m talking to them, and then I should look them in the eye, but not too long and not too hard. How I’d be smart not to stand too near anybody in the bathroom.

The way she talks, the trip sounds like prison. But that’s okay. I know prison. To get along you go along and follow the rules.

She drops me in front of the station, says, “Bye-bye. Bring home the bacon,” and speeds off. I wait there in the sun, holding my bag, my feet in the pool of my shadow that’s like a circle of oil on a slab after a trailer leaves. I have this feeling I might sink in it over my head. So I step into the shade where my shadow doesn’t follow.

A gizmo with a clear plastic window, like the oven in Nicky’s house, has a stack of newspapers inside it. On the front page there’s a prison riot. The inmates are stripped and hooded and have their hands cuffed behind their backs. Dogs on leashes bare their teeth, ready to bite. A dozen naked guys are piled together. Maybe hurt, maybe dead. They’re stacked up like wood and their arms and legs jut out.

The guards, some of them women, laugh and point at the privates on these prisoners. You can’t really see them because the newsprint is smeared between their legs. Still, you know what’s under the eraser marks. I don’t look too long because it gives me that feeling of sinking in an oil pool to see parts of their bodies rubbed out.

A little boy and his mother leave the station. She’s pulling a suitcase on wheels. He’s carrying a toy bus no bigger than a cigarette pack. I don’t stare. I don’t stand too close. But I ask where they bought the toy bus. Without stopping or looking my way, the mother says, “The souvenir shop.” Then they hurry on, and I haul my bag inside.

The shop has maps and cigarettes and gum and cold drinks. There are free color foldouts of towns along the road and I take a few. There are toy buses too and I buy one that’s silver.

I hold it up to my eye. Through the windshield I see the little bus has seats and luggage racks and a button-size steering wheel. It even has a door in back for the bathroom. There’s no driver or passengers, and it’s no trouble to memorize the layout. In case of a fire or a rollover I’d escape through a window. Whenever I go light in the head, then light in my whole body till I’m scared I’ll float away, I usually stretch out and grab the floor until the feeling stops. But now I can grab the toy bus instead.

As I count the coins to the cashier, I repeat the numbers to myself, not out loud, and I don’t stare too hard. When Mom worked at Safeway, she hated people who made her wait. I go fast. But there’s a bad moment when the cashier makes change and tries to put it in my hand. I ask her to put it on the counter and let me pick it up. She shoots me a look. She seems to be a nice girl, so I tell her I don’t like to be touched.

On the ceiling of the station, there’s a speaker calling the names of cities and the numbers of buses. I trace the towns on Nicky’s map, and when the voice calls my bus, it’s not hard to find outside at the curb. The problem starts when the driver says I have to stick my bag into a space behind an aluminum flap underneath the bus. I argue that the bag has to be where I can see it.

“You carry it on board, you’ll block the aisle,” he says.

“No, it’ll fit over my seat.” I show him inside my toy bus where the luggage rack is.

“Whoa, man!” He ducks his head. “Don’t blind me with the damn thing.”

I move it away from his face.

“If the bag fits overhead, fine,” he says. “If it don’t, it’s gotta go here.”

I slip sideways up the aisle, my map, my foldouts, and the toy bus in one hand, my bag in the other. Pressing it flat, I stuff the bag onto the rack. Once I’m in my seat, I can’t see it except by looking up, but that’s better than having it in the hole.

The bus is just another box, but a big one. Not like a cell, more like a holding pen crowded with sweating cons. Some passengers are fat, and the skinny ones wear belts with a sack hanging in front like a stomach. Nicky has one she calls her fanny pack. But with that name shouldn’t it hang down in back?

Everybody settles and the door shuts with a squeak that I could imitate but don’t. Then the bus eases through Needles the way I inched up the aisle, sucking in my belly, careful not to rub against anybody. It rounds corners real slow, like the tall iron gate at Patuxent slamming shut. People have to jump out of the way quick. God help them if they don’t. It’d squash you like a bug.

Outside the city, on the interstate, the land flattens under the beating sun. It reminds me of the Mexican table in Nicky’s house, the one with hammer marks on the copper and crimps at the edges. Light hits it and flashes over my face.

Faster and faster, the exit ramp numbers slide back in the corner of my eye and fall into the same drawer with the road numbers in my head. You can try to remember, Cole always said, but it’s dumb to try and forget. The harder you work at it, the more it sticks in your mind.

I had twelve years with Cole at Patuxent and I go to him now whenever I’m lonely. I remember his smell—he had straw-colored hair and he smelled like straw—and how strong he was and how he held me. His hands were so big, he was like one of those black guys on the basketball court that can palm a ball.

At first I asked him not to touch me. I told him it was like an electric shock. He warned the other guys on our tier, and they didn’t touch me either. At fourteen, small and weak, I’d have been turned out as somebody’s punk if Cole hadn’t spread the word. No one went against him. He was the toughest con at Patuxent. He had killed a cop and there was no way he’d ever get paroled, so he had nothing to lose.

On the tier, there was so much noise I couldn’t sleep. I heard what sounded like rats gnawing my skull, scrambling around in the box, drawer to drawer. I didn’t know whether they were scratching to dig out or dig in. I told Cole, and he said it was just guys sharpening tin and plastic on the cement floor, making shanks. I still couldn’t sleep.

Every day I cleaned my cell and lined things up by size and shape. That’s what I did as a kid when Mom dragged me to Safeway during her shift and let me play in the aisles. I’d start at one end and straighten out the stock. I didn’t bother about labels or prices or products. I fixed on shapes and sizes and sometimes colors. I’d stack the cans and bags, then mix them up and make a new design. Before Mom punched out at the end of the day, I had to switch everything back where it belonged.

Since there wasn’t enough in my cell to keep me busy, I’d scrub the floor, then snap my fingers five times. I’d flush the toilet five times. I’d flick the light switch five times. Then the number changed and I had to snap and flush and flick seven times or four times or nine.

Still, nothing stopped the noise and let me sleep. It wasn’t one sound after another, but lots of different sounds at the same time, like riding on this bus and hearing a radio, hearing music from somebody’s earphones, hearing people talk, the horns of passing cars, and the hum of tires on the highway and the hum in my mouth. Or like when I was little and Dad screamed and Mom screamed and I found myself screaming too. You wouldn’t think a single ear could hold so much. But then my head holds that box that holds the jumble of drawers that hold my whole life.

When it got to where in prison I began to hear chainsaws and burglar alarms and vacuum cleaners nonstop, I dropped to the floor and rocked back and forth. I didn’t quit even after the guards threw me in the hole. The doctors asked me why I did it, and what could I say except that too many noises bring too many ideas, and the heaviness in my head gets like balancing on a cliff, scared I’ll tip over.

When I was a baby, I had a blue blanket with silk edges that I slept with. I’d rub the silk and suck my thumb and doze off in no time. I knew not to expect a blue blanket at Patuxent. They’d never let me have one, and if they did, people would poke fun. So Cole suggested I rub his hair, and it was smooth as silk.

I hadn’t let him touch me yet. But one day when my mind started tipping over and I fell off the cliff, he found me on the floor. Times like that my ideas are loud as words and I figure people hear them and pretend not to. They stare at me, and I know I ought to shut up but I can’t.

I didn’t need to explain to Cole. He understood and cupped his hand on my head. There was no electric shock, just that calmness that came over me when the doctors made me swallow a pill.

Cole lifted me onto my bunk, and his hand went from my head to my neck and he hugged me the way Candy tried to do when we were little. I loved her, but it hurt to have her touch me. I liked to be near her, just not too close. The best was when she was in her wheelchair and I was behind it, pushing. She squealed for me to go fast, and I’d grab the plastic grips like the handlebars on my bike and start running. It was as hard as pumping a bike uphill. Then we’d zoom downhill, with Candy laughing and me careful not to step on cracks in the sidewalk. Mom called us a hell on wheels. But it was heaven to me, with Candy’s hair blowing against my face, soft, real soft, in a touch that tingled and didn’t hurt.

That’s how it was with Cole. It tingled, it didn’t hurt. If I didn’t like what he did, he stopped. He never yelled or got rough. He fought other guys, punched them till they bled, but never me. He taught me how to stay alive in prison. We lifted weights together, spotting each other on the bench press. I needed muscles, he said, to protect me when he wasn’t around. It was like I was the son and he was the father. Not Dad, but how I wish Dad had been.

Cole laughed when I told him this. “Hope to hell your daddy and you never did what we do.”

“Never,” I said. “We didn’t talk. He didn’t teach me things. He chopped the head off a turtle.”

People on the outside don’t believe it, but you get to feel at home in prison, even get to like it. I didn’t tell that to Mom and Candy. They shuffled in every Sunday, and we sat in that box in the visiting room and talked over the telephone. Most times, they talked and I listened. Or didn’t listen and just looked at what inmates had scratched with their fingernails on the glass. It didn’t seem possible that it could stop a bullet if you could make a mark on it, a little picture, with your fingernail.

When Mom had Quinn in her belly, it grew bigger by the week. Candy was excited that she’d have a sister or a brother and said you could feel it somersaulting in Mom’s stomach. She wished I could feel the baby kick. But I was just as glad not to.

At the end of the hour, they pressed their palms on one side of the glass and told me to lay mine on the other, so we were touching, yet not touching. Mom always cried and Candy did too, both of them believing I was sad to be locked up and aching to go home with them. But all I ever wanted was to get back to Cole.

Some nights we stayed awake while the sky in my cell window turned from black to gray. “Don’t you ever sleep?” I asked, and Cole said, “I’m going to be dead a long, long time. I’ll sleep then.”

He told me he had been in the army and fought a war. I don’t know which one. Not the war they have now. An earlier one. He had traveled the country, worked different jobs, had a wife and kids. “Then I fucked it all away,” he said, “drinking and doing drugs. Wasn’t anything I didn’t smoke, swallow, or shoot up.”

“Is that how you killed the cop? By mistake when you were high?”

He found that funny. “’Less you’re crazy, which I’m not, you don’t shoot a cop by mistake. I caught the son of a bitch in bed with my wife. I told him to climb off her before I killed him. I was carrying a .357 and didn’t want a slug to go through him and hit the wife too. With me doing life, the kids figured to have it hard enough without being orphans in the bargain.”

His wife and kids never visited. What was the point? he said. Smarter for them to start over in a new place with somebody else. He didn’t say if he had other family alive. They didn’t visit either. On Sundays he’d buy a pill from a black guy and nod off.

He didn’t hound me, like the doctors, to describe what I did to Dad. He told me he’d listen if I wanted to talk about it. But there was nothing to say. That drawer in the box in my brain was nailed shut.

“You must’ve blacked out,” Cole said.

“I don’t remember any color except red. There was blood everyplace.”

“Yeah, sounds like you blacked out.”

While Mom kept on pushing for my parole, I was planning to commit an offense that would bury my case at the bottom of the pile. But Cole warned me not to. Years down the road, there’d be younger, tougher cons on the tier, he said, and he’d be too old to chase them off me. Then where would I be? He told me to go while I had the chance.

Afterward, I visited him regular, just like Mom and Candy, and later on Quinn did me. We talked on the fake telephone. We touched hands on the bulletproof glass when we said good-bye. I was ready to keep coming back. I had nothing better to do. Cole’s the one that broke it off. “Look,” he said, “it’s time you found yourself a woman.”