The Art of Crash Landing (19 page)

I start to stand, but Karleen gestures for me to stay. “I know my way out.”

She's at the kitchen door when I stop her again, “Hey, about Romeo and Juliet . . .”

Again, she turns back. “Yeah?”

“Have you read it?”

“Your mother went to college, not me.”

“It doesn't end well,” I say.

“One of them dies, right?”

“They're both dead by the end.”

She gives me a sad smile. “That sounds about right.”

A few steps and she's out of my sight, a few more seconds and I hear the front door open and close. She's gone.

I
'm tired, but before I head upstairs to bed I go back outside and prop the gate open wide in case the dogs come back. Then I put fresh water and food in their bowls. I walk through the downstairs and double-check that the doors and windows are all locked and then go upstairs. It's only ten thirty, but it feels like the day has been going on forever.

My cell phone rings. It's Nick, so I ignore the call. Then I dial Queeg's number.

My stepfather answers with a cough.

“Are you asleep?” I ask.

“Not anymore.”

“Sorry.”

“It's okay,” he says. It's what he always says. “So, how is everything?”

My throat squeezes tight. “I'm fucking everything up as usual.”

“What happened, sweetheart?”

“I picked up some random dude at the grocery store, then he
gets too drunk to drive me home so a friend of Mom's does, but when we got here the dogs were gone, and we looked and looked but couldn't find them anywhere.”

It's quiet on his end as he tries to select the best response. I was betting he'd hone in on the
random dude
part or at least ask me if I'd been drinking, too. Instead he chooses, “You have dogs?”

“Not anymore.”

He doesn't reply, and I can picture him lying in bed, trying to figure out what I'm talking about. If I wait long enough he's going to ask me to explain, and right now I can't bear to talk about the Winstons.

“Do you remember that snow globe of Mom's?” I ask. “With the lighthouse and the birds?”

There's another pause while he follows the subject change. “Of course,” he finally says.

“Did she ever tell you why she liked it so much?”

“Her father gave it to her.”

“She told me that, too, but it's total bullshit.” I go to the open window and lean down to put my face against the screen. The cool air smells wonderful. “Her father died before she was even born,” I tell him. “She never met him at all. Plus, I found out that he and my grandmother were never married.”

While I wait for Queeg's reply, I survey the jumbled mess that Karleen left of the bed. The musty-sheet smell is stronger now, so I decide to change the bedding.

“Are you still there?” I gather up the strips of negatives and put them back inside the Crown Royal bag on the dresser.

“I'm not going anywhere,” he says. How I wish that were true.

“Well then?”

“What do you want me to say?” he asks.

I pull one sheet and then the next off the bed. “She was a liar.”

“I loved her,” he says.

My mother's mattress pad is soft and stained with faded, nickel-size brown spots in the center. I can hear Queeg breathing. He's waiting for me to say that I loved her too. I ought to be able to give him that much.

“Mattie?” he finally says when he's waited long enough. “Next time you call, can you please call earlier?”

I gather the dirty sheets in my arms and carry them to the hamper in the hallway. I'm suddenly missing Queeg with a sharp pain in my chest. “I'm so sorry.”

“It's not
that
big a deal, Matt. Call if you need to, but I'm usually in bed before ten—”

“No, for the snow globe. For breaking it.”

“I know,” he replies.

“And for everything that happened after.”

I hear him sigh. “Oh, sweetheart, none of that was your fault. There's nothing you could have done to stop her.”

He's wrong, but I don't tell him that. Instead, I just close my eyes and let his kindness break my fucking heart all over again.

My voice is only a whisper when I ask him, “What time is your biopsy tomorrow?”

“Nine. I should be home by late afternoon.”

“I'll call.”

“I know,” he replies and then adds, “I love you.” I start to repeat the words back to him, but I wait just a second too long. There's a click and he's gone.

I
t's not until I've put fresh linens on the bed, brushed my teeth, and have my hand on the light switch, that I realize what had been nagging me earlier about this room. My mother's camera bag is gone. And so is Nick's guitar strap.

I look around . . . I know they were setting in the corner by
the bookshelf, but there's nothing there now. I lift the bedskirt and look under the bed, then in the closet, then under the desk . . . nothing. I walk through the rest of the house with a critical eye. Everything looks okay, the jewelry box is right where I'd put it, back on my grandmother's dresser, the television is in the living room, along with the DVD player.

My phone rings again, and again it's Nick. This time I answer.

“Hi Nick.”

At first he doesn't respond. Probably he's so surprised I actually took the call that he's momentarily forgotten what he wants to say.

“Mattie, it's me,” he finally says.

“I know.”

“I want my strap back.”

I answer with complete honesty. “I don't have it, Nick. I swear to God I don't know where it is.”

There's background noise on his side of the call, but over that I hear him sigh. “Fuckin' Rico. If it wasn't you, it has to be him.”

Rico was Nick's roommate before I moved in. Last I heard he was in jail, but apparently that's old news. I shouldn't be surprised. Nick knows my opinion of Rico and rarely mentions him.

“Well, you can't trust a junkie,” I say, which is true enough, even if not exactly applicable to this particular theft.

“Yeah, I know.”

We listen to each other breathe for a few seconds, and I realize that I recognize the background noise I've been hearing. He's in a bar.

“You coming home soon?” he asks.

“Maybe,” I say. “I was wondering . . .”

“What?”

“Do you ever want kids?”

He laughs. “Hell, no. And neither do you, remember?”

“I know,” I reply.

The noise behind him swells; I'm guessing that some team scored a home run, or a bar favorite walked in the door. I can't really hear how Nick ends the call, but I think he says, “I miss you.”

I could be wrong.

T
he breeze from the window billows the curtains and sways the hanging plant ever so slightly. In fact, the plant looks better than it did this morning. On a hunch I go stick my finger into its pot. The soil is wet, extremely wet. As in, just-watered wet.

I open my mother's closet, but nothing looks amiss, her dresser, the same . . . or do the contents look a little stirred up? I go through the rest of the dresser and then the desk, opening drawer after drawer. It takes me a minute to realize what's wrong—all the negatives are gone. The loose ones, the ones in envelopes—all missing. The only photo negatives left are the ones Karleen pulled out from the box springs an hour ago. Quickly, I slide the mattress off the box springs, tuck the Crown Royal bag full of remaining negatives back into its hiding place, and then push the mattress back onto the bed.

Who would steal a shabby camera bag, a guitar strap, and a bunch of thirty-five-year-old negatives, but leave everything else? Not to mention watering the plants and locking back up before leaving.

A gust of wind puffs the curtains and again brings with it the sound of faint music, a piano playing something slow and melancholy. I turn off the light and walk to the window, the moody soundtrack playing as I push aside the curtains and look out at the night. There are no cars on the street, no people, no dogs. I look over at JJ's backyard. Although I stand and watch for several minutes, I see no ember—only darkness. I'm on my own tonight.

E
verything is familiar, but at the same time slightly off, the way dreams often are. For instance I'm back at the Pig Pen wiping down a greasy table with an equally greasy rag, yet there's classical music coming from the jukebox, and I can promise you that never really happened.

Still, the dimly lit room glows red from the “Exit” light above the door, just like it used to. Robby has turned off the beer signs on either side of the door, but he's left on the big neon “Bass” sign over the bar. The “B” burned out a couple of weeks ago, and now it's just a big red triangle with “ass” written across it so he won't turn it off for anything. I watch him shake glasses dry, giving them a quick smear with a bar towel before stacking them on the shelves, and I wonder if he realizes that having the word
ass
floating directly over his head every night is, in fact, an excellent example of truth in advertising.

He has a beer waiting for me when I slip onto my usual stool. Slick is here, too; the three of us always used to close on Friday nights, and when we did, we usually stayed an extra hour to
complain about our lives and lower the levels on the beer kegs a little. Slick is in the middle of some story about his ex-wife when I sense someone on the bar stool next to me. Surprised, because up until that moment Robbie, Slick, and I were alone, I turn and see my mother sitting there. It's not the woman my mother was when I was nineteen and working at the Pig Pen, it's my mother the way she was years later, during the worst of the chemo. She's bald and wearing a faded snap-front housedress, the kind she wore when her steroid-bloated belly could no longer fit into anything else. Her arms are too thin; drapes of extra skin weave their way from under her sleeve to her elbow that rests on the bar.

She turns to me and says, “A normal heart is the size of a fist.” She holds up her hand, to demonstrate, I suppose, but her expression is angry, and I flinch as she waves her fist between us.

She drops her hand back to the bar. “I don't feel so good,” she tells me. “Can you help me to the bathroom?”

I stand and put my arm around her waist and feel hers wrap around mine. A few shuffling steps and we're to the bathrooms, stopping in front of the door labeled “Sows.” I push the door open, and my mother goes inside, but I don't follow her in. Instead I take a few more steps and open the door marked “Boars.”

The bathroom smells of sour urinal cakes and shit. Nick stands just inside the door, smiling his crooked smile, running his fingers through his hair. Although in reality I didn't meet Nick until years after I quit my job at the Pig Pen, in the dream it makes sense, somehow, that he would be here. He grabs my wrist and pulls me to him, reaching around behind me to lock the door.

A few sweaty, gasping moments later I'm facing the mirror, my pants at my knees, Nick behind me. The whole time this is happening, part of me knows that I'm dreaming because although I see Nick in the mirror, standing behind me, thrusting, I'm not feeling anything except the cold of the porcelain sink I'm leaning
on. There's a crumpled-up yellow receipt on the floor and a gray plastic film canister, and next to it a small white something . . . a rock? A shell?

The tile is grimy white and the grout cracked and gray, but as I watch, one fat, black fly and then another appears, crawling across the floor. A dark liquid begins to ooze from the wall and run along the grout line. It soaks into the yellow receipt, which I now know is from a bookstore, and if I were to pick it up it would say that
The Caine Mutiny
was purchased for $17.95. The dark puddle surrounds the film canister, pooling around the small white object that cannot be a rock or a shell, because it's a tooth. The fluid is black, but I know that it's blood.

I straighten and push Nick away. He shouts something, but there's such an echo I can't understand the words. All I know is that my mother is in the bathroom next door, and the blood is hers and it's all my fault for letting her go in there alone. I start to cry and tug my pants back up to my waist. I'm having trouble fastening the buttons, and as I'm fumbling, Nick turns me around and pulls me to him, pressing his lips against mine. I push against his chest and twist my head, my mouth filled with a metallic salty taste.

I get to the door and try to twist the knob but my hand slips on the metal and I realize that there's blood on the doorknob and on my hand.
It's my fault
, I keep thinking. I'm sobbing and my heart is pounding so hard that I almost don't hear Nick when he quietly calls my name. I turn to him to ask him for help. He's smiling. There's blood on his chin and between his teeth.

W
hen I startle awake in bed, I'm still weeping. My heart gallops in my chest and the nauseating metallic taste remains in my mouth. Stumbling in the dark, I find my way to the bathroom and heave my stomach contents into the toilet.

After a few minutes resting my forehead on the side of the cool tub, my heart has slowed to an almost normal pace and I've stopped crying. When I stand and switch on the light, I'm relieved to have an explanation for why the taste of blood followed me out of my dream. In my reflection I see a red smear on my upper lip and a fresh rivulet starting down from my left nostril. It's just a nosebleed.

I go back to the bedroom, strip the bloody pillowcase and pull a clean one over the pillow and its fresh browning stain. Tucked back in bed with the pillow balled up under my neck, my head leaning back, I try to relax. Although there's only a faint light outside, morning noises are starting up, a few early birds, the occasional car somewhere in the distance. Someone's unhappy cat is crying. It sounds just like a baby.

I close my eyes and slow my breathing to try to catch another hour or two of sleep. But my mind won't leave me alone; it pokes and prods at the past like a tongue that has discovered a chipped tooth. All my mistakes—things done, things left undone—they're here with me tonight. The Winstons, the unwanted child in my belly, Queeg's biopsy, my mother. A parade of regrets marches past, and I am helpless to do anything other than relive them all as I lie here with my chin pointing at the ceiling, my nose stuffed with toilet paper, my ears filling slowly with tears.