More Than Enough (16 page)

“I hope your mom's okay,” he said. “I guess that stuff happens in those places.” He actually put some popcorn in his mouth and began eating it. “So when will you be home?”

“She's not okay,” I said. “Nothing is okay.”

“What's that mean?” he said through a mouthful of popcorn.

“You don't know?” I asked. I still couldn't tell him, and I hoped that Mom had left a note or a phone message or something that might have given him an idea of the situation, that might have put her notion in his head so that I didn't have to be the one to say it.

“Know what?”

“I thought Mom might have hinted at it or something earlier.”

“Hinted at it?” His voice was worried.

“Or something,” I said.

“Something? Something what? Hey, Steven. Earth to Steven. This is ground control. You out there?”

This was an old game we used to play when I was younger because I had been—and still was, really—such a space-cadet kid, always zoning out and daydreaming and reading sci-fi novels and comic books. “Yeah,” I said. “I'm here.”

“What's it like up there? You see the moon? You see any stars?”

“Nope,” I said. “I just see space. It's dark.”

“Oh,” he said. He could tell I didn't want to play that game. “So what's going on, Steven? What's happening? Where the hell are you?”

“How's Noir?” I asked, because I knew that my dog must have been lonely tied up in his little backyard. I knew he was waiting for me to come home and was probably confused about my not being there.

“Steven,” my father asked, “what's going on?”

“I'll tell you if you tell me how Noir is.” I knew that from where he sat in front of the TV he could just turn around and see Noir through the sliding-glass door.

“I guess he's okay,” my father said. “He's tangled up in his chain again, of course.”

I didn't like the thought of Noir out there wrapped up in his chain. “Would you please go untangle him?”

“He doesn't care, Steven,” my father said. “If I go out there and untangle him, he'll just walk around for a few minutes until he ties himself up again.”

“Please,” I said. “Then I'll tell you.”

“All right,” my father said. While he was gone, I turned around and faced Jenny, who was still pretty tense and holding on to her chair handles with both hands.

“Somebody's going to catch you,” she said.

“I've got to tell him.”

“What if they catch you?”

“Let them catch me.”

“There,” my father said. “He's untangled.”

“Thank you.” I meant it. I was glad that Noir wasn't trapped and hunkered down in that stupid chain anymore.

“So what the hell is happening?”

“Okay,” I said, “I'm going to tell you.”

“You're making this sound bad.”

“It is sort of bad,” I said. “Mom really got upset when Colonel Warner died on her.”

“Please tell me, for Christ's sake.” So I did. I told him how Colonel Warner fell dead on her while she was washing him and that now Mom was leaving us. He paused and took in a few breaths and said, “She's always leaving us. You know that.”

“I think this might be different.”

He took in another deep breath and let it out slowly. I heard the TV click off. “She doesn't have anywhere to go,” he said. “She doesn't know anyone in this city.” I didn't know what to say. “Say something,” he said.

“She might have found someone to know.”

“Who?” he asked.

“I'm not sure, though. Maybe she hasn't found anyone. I don't know.”

“Who?” he asked again.

“Another man,” I said. “Maybe.”

“Oh,” he said. “Oh.” For a long time we didn't say anything, and I just stood there in these blue hospital pajamas with my red winter coat on looking at Jenny, who was holding on to her, chair with all her life, as if she were sitting over a cliff or something, as she very slowly moved her head back and forth the way you do when you tell somebody
no. No, no, no
, her head kept saying.

“I'm sorry,” I said.

“Don't say that. There is nothing to be sorry about. Nothing is going to happen, all right? We are going to take care of everything. Okay?” When I didn't say anything, he said again, “Okay?”

“Okay,” I said. “What are we going to do?”

He was quiet. “Jesus,” he finally said. “Jesus shit Jesus. Who? What guy?”

“I don't know yet.” I lied. “Just a guy. He lives somewhere in the Avenues.” He made some sort of noise, and I imagined him pulling on his hair, digging into it with his hands. “Maybe you should come over here and talk to her. We're at Oak Groves. Maybe you can change her mind.”

“I don't have the car,” he said.

“You could take a cab.”

“Jesus,” he said. “I don't have any cash on me.”

I wasn't used to my father acting like this—so helpless—and it made me impatient. “You can take a cab anyway.”

“All right,” he said. “I'll do that.”

“You'd better hurry. We won't be here much longer.” Then I said, maybe because I wanted to warn him, “She's different. She's not herself, really.”

“I'll hurry,” he said. And we hung up.

*   *   *

When I sat back down, Jenny wanted to talk about God again. “Janet Spencer says,” she said, looking at me with groggy eyes, “that if you don't live by the Ten Commandments, you won't inherit the Glory.”

She just said that out of nowhere, and I had to admit it sounded nice—inheriting the Glory—even if I had no idea what the Glory was and even if I didn't appreciate the sort of brainwashing my little sister was being subjected to. “That's pure BS,” I said. “Anyway, what is the Glory, and who really wants to inherit it?”

“I don't know yet,” Jenny said. “It's just something you get from God after you die.”

I didn't know why it sounded so good to me—the Glory—but it did. Maybe because I had spent what seemed like hours—I think it had only been one hour at the most—in a place that had taught me that there was no Glory, that, at the most, there was just an endless darkness or an unbearable light and no soft, in-between spaces and no spaces above or beyond those two things. I was tired and maybe wanted to believe something, if only for a few minutes. Outside a soft drizzle still came down and a swollen sliver of red winter sun bled over the mountains and colored the air this strange, hurt, twilight color that didn't seem to belong to any hour of the day. I was cold. I felt weak and exposed in those stupid pajamas. When I looked down at the white doubled-up garbage bag, I wondered if I couldn't smell the stink of myself sealed away in there, if some of that stink wasn't leaking out. Then I smelled it faintly, though I think it was the thought of that stink and nothing else that I was smelling. And that's when I had this vision, though it was more of a feeling than something I saw, of what the Glory was. The Glory was hardly an eternity. It was the opposite of eternity. It was a single moment in which I noticed all the red evening light in the room and felt Jenny leaning against me, felt her every breath, and heard a few mindless bird chirps—a black string of Glory sound—coming from some place outside—a treetop, a rain gutter—that I would never see. It wasn't that you were going to die and go on living for an eternity after death. It wasn't that at all. The Glory was the way Jenny held on to my arm with her hand. It was the way I felt the softness of her touch through the fabric of my coat. It was the way our shadows stretched across the room in that red light. It was the way it no longer mattered, if only for an instant, that you would live or die. Even though you knew something terrible was about to happen, you didn't give a damn about it, didn't give it a single thought, if only for a second or two. That was the Glory and, for that instant, I knew it. Then everything came back to me, and it was gone. I remembered that nothing about that day was right, that my father needed to arrive very soon, and that he probably wouldn't make it on time, that you could count on him, among other things, for not making it on time. Jesus, could you count on him for that. “There is no Glory,” I told Jenny because I thought she had better get used to that fact. “There is no after you die. When you die, you die forever. You're just gone.”

“That's not what I know in my heart,” she said, nudging her forehead into my arm and seeming to position herself more deeply, more securely into the comforting world that she believed in. “Besides,” she said, “a lot of people believe in God.”

“A lot of people do a lot of things. Stupid things,” I added.

She sat up and looked at me. “It's not stupid. The Spencers are nice people. A lot of Mormons are nice people.”

“This is not about the Spencers,” I said. “This is about believing in a lie, in an illusion.”

“You're just acting like Dad,” she said. I couldn't argue with her. I did sound like our father. “The Spencers are nice. Janet's parents never yell at each other. They really don't.”

“What does that have to do with anything? That's not even what we're talking about,” I said.

“I don't know,” she said. “I don't know what it has to do with. It's just that they're not always arguing.”

“Jesus,” I said. “They just believe in whatever will make them feel better. That's all they do, Jenny. That's not nice. That's just stupid.”

“You don't have to act like that,” she said. She'd heard the meanness in my voice, and she was angry with me again. “Janet Spencer would never have done what you did to Mrs. Smith.”

“Stop talking about the Spencers,” I said. “That's not even what we're talking about.” Her face went chilly with the look she gave me whenever she was about to subject me to the silent treatment. I hated the silent treatment. I'd rather have been hit or yelled at than been entirely ignored with the precise chilliness that Jenny had perfected. “I don't mean to yell,” I said. “I just wish you wouldn't believe in everything everybody tells you.” She was doing something with her hands, twiddling her thumbs. “Jenny,” I said. She looked up at the ceiling, crossed her knees, and kicked one leg lightly as if she were having a relaxing time sitting alone somewhere. “Don't act like a baby,” I said. She turned away from me and gazed out the window while I just sat with her and felt invisible. I waited, hoping that she would relent. But she didn't. “I bet the Spencers yell at each other,” I said. “I bet they do it when nobody's looking. I bet they argue a lot.” She didn't even turn her head. She just kept kicking her one leg lightly and gazing out the window at nothing.

*   *   *

A few minutes later, our mother came out into the reception area followed by Nurse Brown, who handed her an envelope and said, “All right, then,” to which our mother said the same thing.

She turned around and looked at me. I stood up, holding the white garbage bag in my good hand. She had changed out of her nursing clothes, though she had forgotten to take off her little white hat. That was still there as a reminder of what she had been, and I thought it was funny that Nurse Brown hadn't said anything. I wondered if that was her way of laughing at my mother, and I didn't mind if it was. “What happened to him?” she asked.

“An accident,” Nurse Brown said.

My mother sighed. She didn't know what sort of accident Nurse Brown meant, and she didn't seem to want to find out. She just wanted out of that place. “He's always getting into accidents,” my mother said.

When she went for the door, I said, “We can't go yet.”

“What's the matter with your brother, Jenny?” my mother asked.

“I don't know,” Jenny said. Then they walked through the door, and because I was not about to be left behind in that place, I followed them, thinking of my father, who always came too late.

Five

“YOU FORGOT TO TAKE
the hat off,” Jenny said in the car.

“Jesus,” she said, pulling it off and throwing it into the backseat as if it were diseased. “I can't believe I did that. I can't believe I ever worked that job.”

You wouldn't have known she'd ever been a nurse by the way she was dressed now. She wore a crisp, knee-length khaki skirt that hugged her hips and emphasized the tight thinness of her middle. I'd never seen the pink blouse she wore, bright and new looking. It made me think again of how men could desire her, how they could want my mother not because her blouse was tight or suggestive, but because it was elegantly thin—you could make out the straps and lattice of her bra through the fabric—and because the brief handles of her clavicles showed in the slightly open V of her collar. She'd never looked this good around the house, and she'd never worn this particular outfit there, either. “You look beautiful,” Jenny said with too much enthusiasm.

“Yes,” I said in what I hoped was an accusatory tone, “you do.”

“Thank you, Steven,” she said.

When we pulled out of Oak Groves and onto Seventh East, I looked everywhere for a sign of my father in a cab, but saw nothing. “What's wrong with you, Steven?” my mother asked.

“I don't know,” I said.

“Sit still,” she said. She was looking into a little round makeup mirror and applying her lipstick as she drove. We were headed toward the Avenues, and something peculiar was happening with the weather. It was still drizzling, but the sun seemed to be rising and not setting. It had to do, I knew, with the descending edges of the mountains to the west so that as the sun dipped below them it seemed to ascend. It was an illusion. Still, I hadn't expected to see this giant red sun light up half the sky so that bright curtains of rain seemed to hover in the air. It was like a spring shower, only it was still February. I rolled down the window and breathed in the green, damp smell of a season that had not yet come, and wondered where the hell winter had gone. We were supposed to be hunkered down beneath blankets at home, waiting it out together, staying warm, shoveling snow, eating soup, building log fires—though we didn't have a fireplace, of course—doing whatever we needed to do to defend one another from the cold out there. It wasn't right.