The One I Left Behind (3 page)

Now Reggie was speechless, trying to digest one insane piece of news after the next. It all felt like a cruel trick. Your mother’s alive. But she’s dying.

She sank down onto the floor, sitting in spilled coffee.

“I want you to drive down to Massachusetts and get her, Regina. I want you to bring her back to Monique’s Wish.”

“Me?”

“I don’t drive much these days. Cataracts.”

“But I—” Reggie stammered.

“I need you to do this,” Lorraine said. Then as if sensing Reggie’s hesitation, she added, “Your mother needs you.”

Reggie pushed her hair back, fingers finding the scars. “Okay,” she said.

Home. She was going back home.

Chapter 2

1976

Brighton Falls, Connecticut

R
EGGIE’S EARLIEST MEMORY OF
her mother began with her mother balancing an egg on its end and ended with Reggie losing her left ear.

She was five years old and her mother had taken her to a bar on Airport Road. Reggie spun herself on a red vinyl stool, pleased to be working her own trick while Vera performed hers for some newcomer who’d promised to buy her a drink if she could pull it off. Reggie pushed herself round and round, banging her legs gently against her mother’s with each pass, carefully avoiding eye contact with the fellow to her left, with whom her mother had made the bet. He was a swarthy man with bulging eyes who wore oil in his hair and a thin leather jacket that didn’t quite button. His nose had a bump, a slight twist to it, as if it had been broken one too many times.
The Boxer,
Reggie named him, not saying the words out loud, but in her head.

The Boxer called Reggie “Champ” and winked one of his froggy eyes at the girl behind her mother’s back while Vera was busy sprinkling salt on the bar.

The key to the trick was to give the egg something to cling to, to rest in.

R
EGGIE’S MOTHER
, V
ERA
D
UFRANE
, who had perfected the egg trick, bore a striking resemblance to Jayne Mansfield—full busted with a head of thick platinum blond hair spilling over graceful shoulders. She had been homecoming queen and had gone off to New York City after high school in 1969 to pursue a career in acting. To help pay the bills while she got bit parts in off-Broadway plays, she took up modeling. Almost immediately, she became the Aphrodite Cold Cream girl. Her picture was in magazines and department stores across the country.
Treat Yourself Like a Goddess,
the tagline said. Her sudden fame brought more acting work, including her first leading role since her days as star of the Brighton Falls High Drama Club.

But just when her career was getting off the ground, Vera abruptly returned to Brighton Falls in the early spring of 1971, moving back into her large and strange childhood home, Monique’s Wish, with her sister, Lorraine (six years her senior), and their father, Andre Dufrane. Andre had been diagnosed with ALS while Vera was in New York, and by the time she moved back into the house, he was in a state of steady decline. Her first night home, she made a surprise announcement at the dinner table.

“I’m pregnant. The baby’s due at the end of July.”

Her father and sister only stared, too shocked to speak.

“Could you please pass the rolls?” Vera asked.

“Who’s the father?” Andre demanded, pushing his untouched plate of food away.

“He’s nobody,” Vera said.

Andre gave a shaky nod. “Hell of a way to bring a child into the world. Being Nobody Junior.”

Andre had built Monique’s Wish for his wife, who had always wanted to live in a castle. The house took him ten years to complete, as he did most of the work himself and was not a stonemason or carpenter. Andre repaired shoes. A cobbler during the day, a castle-builder at night. Monique herself died before the house was completed, from complications after giving birth to Vera.

Vera, as a teenager and adult, would often say Monique’s Wish sounded more like the name of a racehorse than a home.

“A real long shot,” she’d say. “Lousy odds.”

Other than being made of stone, the house bore little resemblance to a castle. There was no moat, no turret or battlements. It had a sprawling, confused layout, spread over two stories, and was topped by a gable roof covered with slates. The uninsulated stone walls did a lousy job holding heat, and the house was dark and cold most of the year. Vera shivered through her pregnancy as she’d shivered through much of her childhood.

Lorraine set up a nursery in the back of Monique’s Wish and did her best to prepare Vera for motherhood. She cooked her liver, forced vitamin pills upon her, and threw out countless packs of cigarettes. Lorraine did all this while caring for Andre, who was soon unable to go up and down stairs without help and began spending most of his days in the master bedroom, just across the hall from Vera, where he took to watching soap operas on a small black-and-white TV. Vera sat with him in the afternoons, lighting his cigarettes and jumping up to lock the door when she heard Lorraine coming. Vera would call out, “No admittance to the Infirmary until visiting hours! Come back at five! Don’t forget the dinner trays!” and Lorraine would fume as she smelled the cigarette smoke and heard her father and sister giggling like children behind the carved wooden door.

Reggie would hear about all of this much later, from her mother.

She’d also hear about how Lorraine, in an effort to counteract Andre’s insistence that “the poor bastard child” didn’t stand much of a chance, said Vera’s unborn child would be a lucky baby, to be raised by a mother and auntie, and that this was how elephants in the wild raised their young. Vera, amused, began referring to Reggie’s father as
The Elephant
. Over the years, this nickname morphed into Tusks, which was the only name Reggie ever had for her father.

Reggie would grow up imagining her father with the body of a man and the head of an elephant, and later when, at age eight, she came upon a picture of the Hindu god Ganesh, she tore it from the book and kept it in a shoe box under her bed that held her other prized possessions: the skull of a bird, an Indian-head penny, two dozen
Star Wars
trading cards, matchbooks from various bars her mother frequented, and an ad cut from a magazine she found in the attic showing her mother holding a jar of Aphrodite Cold Cream in her perfectly manicured right hand. Vera wore a white dress that revealed bare shoulders, showing off glowing, flawless skin. She smiled slyly, like she was letting you in on a secret.

Sometimes Reggie would take the two pictures out and lay them side by side: Ganesh and the cold cream goddess. An unlikely pair.

R
EGGIE WATCHED HER BEAUTIFUL
mother sprinkle salt on the bar like it was the holiest of acts. The bartender brought her an egg from the kitchen, and carefully, with her long, graceful fingers, Vera stood the egg on its end.

“Voilà,” she said.

The Boxer clapped, his thick hands banging together clumsily, rattling Reggie’s eardrums. The knobby-kneed girl spun on her stool, smiling, knowing her mother had performed a miracle. Understanding even then that her mother, the Aphrodite Cold Cream girl, was touched by something greater than herself, something that gave her the power to stand an egg on its end like a tiny, out-of-shape planet, send it carefully into orbit along with the Boxer and Reggie and everything else in the dingy bar down to the heavy glass ashtrays, all of them revolving gently, helplessly, around her.

“Did anyone ever tell you you’re a dead ringer for Marlon Brando?” Vera asked the Boxer.

“No,” he said, laughing, showing stained teeth.

“You look just like him. When he played Terry Malloy in
On the Waterfront
. Did you see that one?”

“No, honey. Can’t say I did.”

“Brando is a god,” Vera said, lighting a cigarette, watching the smoke drift up.

Behind them, two scruffy men played pool on a table that had one leg shimmed with a phone book. The balls clacked together violently, stripes and solids battling it out. Other than calling each shot, the men were silent, chalking their cues, taking aim.

Vera had another drink, checked her makeup in the mirror of her compact. The Boxer bought Reggie a cheeseburger and said he’d give her a dollar if she could finish it. Reggie lost the bet and ended up with a horrible stomachache. Then they were all three in the Boxer’s car, a big old boat of a thing with cracked leather seats that smelled of menthol and hair oil.

The Boxer’s apartment was close by in a brick building, up four flights of narrow wooden stairs. He had a dog in a back room that barked so loud and hard it rattled the walls. He made drinks in a plastic blender that overheated, making the small kitchen smell like burned rubber. He called them grasshoppers, green from crème de menthe, and gave Reggie her own in a small jelly jar, thinking five was plenty old enough.

“It’s like a milk shake,” the Boxer told her. “Like one of them Shamrock Shakes you get on St. Paddy’s Day.”

He said something else as he passed Reggie the glass, but she couldn’t hear him over the barking dog. The Boxer tipped her another grotesque wink. Reggie smiled even though she noticed the glass she’d been given was dirty, coated with an oily residue, thick, she imagined, with the germs her aunt Lorraine always warned her about. She took a sip and was pleased to discover it was what she’d expected a Shamrock Shake might taste like, green and cool, although she’d never had one—Aunt Lorraine didn’t believe in fast food. The Boxer cuffed Reggie on the head gently, playfully, because they were drinking buddies now. Then he showed Reggie how the kitchen door opened out onto a small cement porch with two sagging lawn chairs, a transistor radio, and a large potted tree that had died long ago. The pot had become an ashtray and dumping ground for bottle caps and cigarette foil. The porch had low cinder block walls that Reggie could just about peek over.

“You play out here,” her mother told her. “You’ll be okay?”

Sometimes she said things that sounded like questions, but Reggie could tell they weren’t meant to be answered with more than a nod.

“You like music?” the Boxer asked, already fiddling with the crackling radio, tuning into the first station he could get. It was lively music, heavy on the horns, sung in Spanish. Reggie didn’t mind.

They left her out there, keeping the door to the kitchen slightly ajar. Reggie sipped her burning peppermint drink, held the crushed ice in her mouth until her milk teeth ached. The radio announcer spoke Spanish, and Reggie imagined the words were fast, brightly colored balls popping through the air. She remembered the clack of pool balls, the egg on the bar, the Boxer’s crooked nose. And soon, she had finished her small green drink named for an insect that Reggie knew was not green at all, but brown.

Her head spun like she’d taken one too many trips around on the barstool, and she was thinking she’d better sit down when her eye was drawn to a shimmering sparkle coming from the corner of the porch.

She saw that there, amid the litter at the base of the dead potted tree, was a small ring with a red stone.

This wasn’t some plastic gumball machine ring; it was the real thing, the cut jewel winking like an eye from a delicate band of gold.

Reggie was reaching for it—imagining her mother’s delight when she slipped her surprise present onto her finger—feeling queasy and lucky all at once, when the dog came at her.

It moved too fast for Reggie to say for sure what kind of dog it was, or that it was even a dog at all. It could have been a bear, a wolverine, the Tasmanian devil. It was all mouth, teeth bared, drool spraying onto Reggie’s face as it knocked her down flat and pinned her there, pressing its full weight into the two huge paws on Reggie’s chest.

The cement was cool. Gritty. Tiny cracks ran through it like fault lines, like there had been a thousand small earthquakes up on this porch, all caused by this dog slamming little girls to the floor. Time stretched and slowed (a Silly Putty moment, she’d call it later) and Reggie was able to pick out the smallest details of her situation. She was resigned to the fact that the dog would kill her but she didn’t know what death might be like, only that it was proceeded by this: this little window of time when things moved in slow motion and her senses were on overdrive, picking up everything, because, no doubt, it was her last chance to experience life on earth, right down to the rough, cracked cement.

Instinctively, she twisted her face away as the teeth came down. It felt as though the dog had torn a hole in the side of her head—there was searing pain and sticky heat along with a wash of hot, rotten-meat breath on her face.

She closed her eyes—surely for just an instant—and prayed to God, which is what she knew you were supposed to do when you were in such dire straits, her aunt Lorraine had taught her this. But in order for God to come through, Lorraine explained, you had to believe, and Reggie, up to this point, hadn’t given God much thought. But she tried nonetheless, picturing a white-bearded man floating off in the clouds. The God she imagined looked an awful lot like the photo of her grandfather that hung in the upstairs hall: a stern-looking man in a flannel shirt and fishing waders.

When Reggie opened her eyes, she found her savior not in the form of a skinny, golden-robed grandfather-like God, but rather of her mother, her hands dug into the thick black fur of the dog’s neck, screaming, BAASSTAARD! Vera was wearing only silk panties and a pointed bra, looking to Reggie like a blond, large-breasted Wonder Woman. The dog turned from Reggie and sunk his yellow teeth into Vera’s pale hand. She let out a guttural cry and punched him in the nose with her left hand. His jaw relaxed from pure surprise, and she yanked her torn right hand free with a terrible wet sound and took hold once more. This time she lifted the dog, this great bear of a thing—seventy pounds of snarling cur—and spun him like they were dancing, then let go. The dog flew out, over the low concrete wall of the porch and finished his life with one last yelp, four stories down.