The Spark and the Drive (26 page)

I was thrown for a moment, clutching at the time before my fight with Mary Ann. I couldn’t remember what had happened with my mother.

“What do you want to hear?” she said. “I know I’m a bad person. I know I put her in danger.”

“I’m sorry, Mom. Can we just let it be over?”

“I’m sorry, too,” she said. “I’m sorry my life isn’t shitty enough for you. I’m sorry getting abandoned with a four-year-old doesn’t meet your criteria for having a drink.”

I breathed and picked my words carefully. “Do you know everything that happened tonight—standing around outside and Costa—if we just did nothing, it would have ended exactly the same? Do you realize that? April would still be asleep in her bed right now.”

“I wish I was a strong person,” she said.

“I can help her,” I said. “Why can’t I help her? You don’t know. Why can’t she be happy with me?” I was yelling at this point, and it seemed to stun her only for a moment. She turned and shot her cigarette into the yard. “I’m sorry I’m weak,” she said. “And you couldn’t have a normal family.” She picked up her pack of cigarettes and swept away from me, and I said, “Mom,” just as she yanked open the door. But there was no hesitation at all as she heaved herself through the garage landing and into the white light of the kitchen.

I turned back to the yard, and behind me the kitchen light went off—two window squares on the back lawn vanished to black. Above me a cloud glowed like a ghost with the moon behind it, and I had a few blinking stars and nothing for sound except the tiny static of my smoking and the creak of the deck rail when I leaned on it. I punished myself, trying to imagine the worst that could’ve happened, but even in insanity there is some sanity that remembers our essential selves, and I couldn’t see Mary Ann ever hurting April. But she could have taken April from us in the hopes of giving them both a better life. When I thought of this, I saw them in a motel room, Mary Ann braiding April’s hair with such trembling enthusiasm it made April cry.

I went inside, and at the foot of the stairs I waited a long time until the line of light under Mom’s door went out. Softly as I could I crept up the steps. In her bedroom, in the fanned-out cast of her nightlight, April looked as if she had been frozen by a spell, her arms over her head and her chin high, her mouth open slightly, her breath making a tiny whistle on the inhale.

I sat on the floor beside her bed and tried to open my senses to the surreal idea that I could tell what she’d been through by watching her sleep. What was happening in her dreams? I realized for the first time that she had a smell that was more than No More Tears and fabric softener, her smell, April smell, that was the smell of her hugging me goodnight and her sitting on my lap at breakfast, and I explored the coldness in my chest of letting myself imagine her gone from my life. I laid my head on her pillow so that her hair was in my eyes and whispered that she was a good girl. Not until the tears were running off my jaw did I realize I was crying. I almost never cried, and when I did it was for many reasons at once. It was for the hours she was unsafe. For my not being able to find or help her. And when I said that she was a good girl, it was that she hadn’t thought there might be danger—that, in her goodness, she couldn’t imagine danger—that was so unspeakably sad.

Gradually I found peace in her deep steady breathing. It gave me confirmation that there had been no trauma today. Mary Ann hadn’t lost her mind, but she was sensitive enough to possibly lose her mind, and wasn’t that very quality something about her I loved? When she told lies, as she had to the nurse about Joey, it wasn’t for the usual reasons—to save face or to take an advantage. She lied like a child does, to make the world friendlier. To pretend. Isn’t that the idea behind prayer and chants and meditation, say it enough and it is? Say it until you believe it?

I didn’t go to bed that night. After I left April I went in the basement and made a fire in the woodstove. I curled and bench-pressed and threw darts. I didn’t even yawn.

I saw myself in my old life, without Mary Ann or Out of the Hole, and my stomach wrenched and burned. Around dawn the plan came to me and quickly took shape, and when I went out to smoke in the damp grass I was on the top rail of a ferry (Point Judith? Block Island?) with Mary Ann after she’d stopped missing Nick and had realized the long life she still had to live. We’d tell each other everything we’d once felt for Nick and then be free of him.

34.

While Bobby was taking apart an alternator, I went out the side door and tore ass down to the Dungeon. By the light of a match, I searched along the flagstone foundation for the loose mortar behind which Bobby had hidden the key, along with the model and address of the car.

He and Pam had a system worked out. The first time, giving us the key for the Taurus, she came in for a tune-up on her Cavalier. With this second car and with all cars thereafter, she’d come in complaining of a rough idle or bad mileage. It was Bobby’s idea, to keep them from being seen together. From her glove box he’d get the key and address, and rather than take them home he’d stash them downstairs in case she got busted and turned on him, which had suddenly become a possibility.

Bobby was paranoid. At times I thought he might be on something like crank. He’d lost some weight—his arms were harder and veinier, his cheeks thinner, his eyes glassy—though that didn’t have to mean anything between the hydrocarbons in the air and the changing seasons, which had been gusting wood smoke through the bays.

I took a Mercury for a test drive to Kmart, where they copied the key while I waited. This was the nerve-wracking part, playing the odds that Bobby wouldn’t go down to check the key while I was gone. The odds were well in my favor—we weren’t supposed to take the car until Wednesday night—but I started getting diarrhea cramps right in the store. Bobby was where I’d left him when I got back, on a stool at the bench nearest the radio, and I went downstairs, copied the address, and stuffed everything back into the wall.

I couldn’t focus that day. I needed more caffeine, but I didn’t want to go out to the lobby and face Mary Ann, who had come in so that Nick and Rod could meet with a salesman about a new Sun Scope that interfaced with onboard computers.

I did a lot of staring from a distance, mostly at Bobby. He would take out tools and lay them on a fender mat, light a cigarette, and then go back to his tool drawer and say things like, “Where’d you go, you little cocksucker” for a minute or two, and then find that he’d already set the thing he wanted on the fender mat. Once, he dug his grimy fingers in his mouth, retrieved a wad of Bit-O-Honey and said to it, “You sure are a chewy motherfucker.” He was always moving except when he was looking at the scope, and then it seemed to take a long time to interpret what he was seeing.

My head was killing me that morning. I couldn’t quit yawning. I thought maybe I could take about a quarter of whatever Bobby was taking and see what it did.

I never would’ve asked, but I figured the shop was going to close down soon because Nick would be in jail. I couldn’t say for sure if I’d ever see Bobby again. Fuck it, I went up to him and said, “You got anything I can stay awake with?”

“Get the fuck out of here.”

“No, really, Bobby. Just give me one. I’ll pay you.”

He stepped closer and slapped me. “How’s that?” He did it again, and I fell back against the air filter shelving, out of his reach. “There’s your fucking wake-up,” he said. “Quit being a punk.”

“Asshole,” I said.

“All right. I’m an asshole then.”

I ended up running across the street for some NoDoz and a large Brazilian Bold from 7-Eleven.

I took a Firebird out to the address Pam had written down. By chance the three hundreds were only a few blocks from the west entrance to Fulton Park. Chase was a big double-lined street, residential on one side, commercial on the other—Dunkin’ Donuts, a repair shop, a locksmith. The houses on the west side were all little capes with low stone walls and tiny elevated yards. Their cracked driveways carved into the rises of yellow lawns, and the single-car garages were pushed in like drawers under the front windows. I found the house, and there was the hunter green LX Mustang parked in front of it. My throat closed.

I only meant to scope the car, but all at once it became clear that now was the time if I was going to steal it.

My plan had been to come at night and then stash it in a parking lot, hoping no one found it before I came back the next morning, when Nick and Mary Ann were working. But wasn’t that too risky? What if the car was found? What if Mary Ann stayed home tomorrow?

I swung into the lot of a Food Mart and parked out of sight of the register. It had to happen now. I heard my breathing, and it had to happen now. Go. Take the keys. Leave the Firebird here and come back across the park for it. Three o’clock. Plenty of time.

I left the car and then I left my body. This is the way it happens. I saw how people committed the highest and lowest acts of humanity—the most virtuous and wicked and vile and noble acts—by imagining the extreme, by staring at it in your mind and finally dragging it out of the abstract. Then it is simply a matter of obeying, of keeping it going. I had never been this far inside a moment—even making love to Mary Ann hadn’t put me in this far.

Trombones in my ears. I had a hundred minds. My feet had minds, my legs, arms, eyes. React. Keep it going. I saw myself from above.

Last night in the basement I’d made a fire and with the stove door half opened, so I could exhale my cigarettes inside, I came to understand, the way you understand the truth of everything staring into fire, that Mary Ann would spend the last of herself on Nick, not knowing that he wasn’t even able to accept, much less return, her love. She would try too hard with him and afterward be too broken. She’d be gone beyond my ability to help her. I saw her eyes charred and dim with Mom’s evening stare, not knowing how to make herself happy again. With that image, all other thoughts fell away.

I would give Mary Ann a different afterward. When Nick was in custody, I’d tell her that he’d wanted me to lie and say he was working late at the shop if she’d asked. I assumed he’d been racing the Corvette, Mary Ann, but my God. This is what he’d really been up to. The rechecks had been costing him too much business, and even the racing money wasn’t enough … My God.

And who knows? Maybe he’d believe he’d really done it. Maybe it would finally be the escape I was certain he’d been longing for.

To not be seen from the house, I went south to the deli and crossed the street there. A paper Frankenstein, three weeks early for Halloween, hung on the front door of the house. I blocked out the idea that these were good people who decorated, who brought some festivity to the dismal neighborhood. I wasn’t hurting them, not really. If it wasn’t me now, the real repo guy would come soon. This was just speeding up the inevitable. The blinds were down on the windows directly over the garage, and the Mustang was parked there a few feet from the cinder-block retaining wall.

I got in the car but didn’t want to close the door in case it didn’t start and someone came out and I had to run. But it was only a year old, and of course it started on the first crank. The seat was so far back I was barely on it as I dropped the floor shift into reverse. I backed up and the open door scraped along the retaining wall, bending back with a sickening creak, and in the seconds it took to realize the door would come off if I didn’t pull forward, I saw him come out of the house, and I pulled my cap over my eyes, jumped it forward until I could pull the door closed, but it wouldn’t close all the way—something was bent—and I slammed it into reverse again and swung around in the street as the big, bearded man came down the steps, his arms swinging wildly. I held down the horn, which jolted him, and he fell on his ass on the sidewalk, and in the road an oncoming car swerved around me, blaring its own horn. I saw the big man in my rearview mirror cutting over the grass and then finally stopping at the end of his little yard and watching bent over with his hands on his hips, heaving for air.

I turned down different streets in case I was being watched or followed. I needed to get off the road before I passed a cop, who would be able to see that I was only holding the door closed with my hand.

*   *   *

I eased off Cooke into Nick’s driveway, where I pulled right up to the garage and shut it off. One second became another second, and then I was out and running full speed over the cement to the side door. I found the key under the brick, opened the door, ran around shoving toolboxes against the walls, heaving milk crates and chains and a folding chair out of the way, then looped around back to the garage door, twisted the handle to unlock it. The door was heavy with disuse, the rollers squealing and scraping until I had it as high as my chin, which was plenty, and I ran under, got in the car, fired it up, and pulled it in. I yanked the door back down, and then I was able to breathe.

I found a rag and started wiping down everything I had touched. I was amazed by how fierce and streamlined my thoughts were, how acute my senses. As I was coming around to shut off the light, I saw two of Nick’s wrenches covered in black fingerprints, and the idea came to me fully mature, as if someone else had spoken it. With electric tape I lifted prints off a wrench and stuck them on the door handle, around the steering wheel and shifter. I couldn’t tell if they had transferred, but why wouldn’t they? And what else would the cops need? How could Nick talk his way out of it now? And how could Mary Ann believe any scenario other than the obvious one?

From Nick’s I ran across the park and back to the Firebird. I unplugged the mass air flow sensor to set a trouble code, and I was back at the shop less than an hour after I’d left. Rod came up to me as soon as I stepped into the bays.

“What’d you do, go take a nap?”

“It kept cutting out,” I said. “I had to let it cool off.”

“Any codes?”

“Fifteen.”

“Mass air flow,” he said. “Tell him he needs a tune-up on top, and you got yourself a pretty righteous ticket.”