Lying with the Dead (20 page)

Wind buffets my Honda as I park at the bus station where Quinn and I picked up Maury a couple of days ago. I felt safe and inconspicuous then. But now I cross the lot conscious of my bad leg and white skin. Black boys in ball caps bop around in their drooping blue jeans. Unfazed by the freezing night, Asian and Hispanic girls strut and preen, their tummies bare, jewels winking in their navels.

In the waiting room the plastic chairs are full of passengers—or are they homeless bums?—and piled belongings. Maury couldn’t bear the noise and the crowd. Still, I clomp up one aisle and down the next, searching.

Outside the men’s room I pause, thinking he might be in there. The smells, the fizzing lights, the shouts, the faces, the tattoos and scars—suddenly I feel that I’ve been through all this before. When it hits me where, I bolt from the bus station, convinced that Maury has hitchhiked to Patuxent to visit his friend.

Plunked in the middle of a treeless field, the prison is lit like an airport. Spotlights crisscross the big flat yard and glint on the barbed wire. In the gatehouse, behind the thick glass door, uniformed guards glide with the slow motion of underwater swimmers. They notice me, but because it’s not visiting hours they pay no heed to my knocking. I shout that I have a question, a single question, nothing more. They pretend not to hear me, and when I act out a pantomime of begging, pressing my hands together in prayer, they go on ignoring me.

With its bright lights inside, the gatehouse door looks like it’d be hot. But when I lean my forehead against it, the glass is cold as a glacier. Mom would break it down or bloody her knuckles in the effort. More easily defeated, I trudge back to the car.

It’s then I notice my brother at the far edge of the asphalt, hands jammed in his pockets, hair whipping around his face. “Maury,” I call. “Come get warm.”

I flick on the Honda’s heater full blast. He slouches around to the passenger’s side with the defeated look of one of those men at an intersection holding a sign saying, “Will work for food.” For a minute we sit in near silence. There’s only the chattering of our teeth and the whir of the heater.

“Why are you here?” I ask.

“I don’t know.”

“Is it to visit your friend?”

“My friend’s dead.”

“How do you know? Did the guards say so?”

“They didn’t talk to me. I just know.”

“We’ll find out this Sunday.”

“I won’t be here.”

“Well, not if you don’t want to be,” I say. “Look, Mom’s locked out of her house. A neighbor drove her to my place.”

Maury warms his face at a heat vent, his hair blowing flat on his head.

“She says you two argued.”

He leans away from the vent. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Okay. But we better get back.”

“Where?”

“To drive Mom home.”

“I don’t want to see her.” For Maury, who rarely speaks with much emotion, this sounds close to anguish. “I’ll stay at Quinn’s hotel.”

“He’s not there.” I swing around on the parking lot, and when the wind catches us broadside, it rocks the car. “He’s with Mom.”

“I’ll wait for him outside.”

“It’s too cold.”

“I’ll wait in a chair in the lobby.” Maury clamps his hands between his knees and stares into the high beams of onrushing cars. “I planned to catch a bus home. But I don’t have any money on me.”

“Home?”

“Slab City. Nicky’s.”

“You weren’t going to say good-bye to us? Look, you don’t have to leave. We’ll work this out.”

“I don’t want to see Mom,” he says again.

I take him at his word and drive to the Hilton. The swarming headlights that seem to hypnotize Maury unnerve me. When I phone Quinn from the lobby, I’m jangled and my voice sounds wrong. So does his. “Has Mom said anything about Maury and what happened?”

“She’s on the couch,” Quinn says. “Resting. Sleeping.”

“Is she all right?”

“Has she ever been all right?”

“You sound as frazzled as Maury.”

“I’ll tell the front desk to let you into my room. Stay there with Maury. We’ll sort out things tomorrow.”

“You’re not making sense. What did Mom say?”

“Can’t talk now. It’ll wake her up.” He cuts the line.

I debate whether to call back and warn him. I owe Quinn that much. He deserves to know. But know what? I’m not positive what Mom asked Maury.

I collect a swipe card at the reception desk and reassure Maury that it’s all right to use Quinn’s room. In the elevator, he rivets his eyes on the rising floor numbers and whispers, “The rope is made of steel.”

The spread on one bed has been turned down and a chocolate gleams on the pillow. Maury says it’s candy and offers it to me. When I shake my head no, he slips it into his already bulging pocket.

“Are you hungry?” I ask.

“My stomach hurts.” He sags onto the couch, zipped up in his Windbreaker.

I bring him a Coke from the minibar. But when I hand it to him, his shoulders start shuddering and his face is wet. “What’s wrong?” I sit close, but not touching him.

“Mom,” he blubbers.

All our lives that one word has been enough. Neither of us ever needed to say more. Yet Maury goes on, “She called me a retard and a killer.”

“Oh, that’s terrible. That’s cruel.” But by Mom’s standards not out of the ordinary.

“She wants to die.” He clamps his hands between his knees like he did in the car. “She told me to hold a pillow over her face.”

I jerk to my feet so quick, Maury jumps too. “She’s not in her right mind,” I say. “She’s sicker than we thought. Stay here. I’ll straighten this out. If you get hungry, call room service.”

“Do they have pictures?”

“Of what?”

“The food.”

“I don’t know, Maury. Order a hamburger and fries. You know what they look like.”

He rubs the heel of his hand at his tears. “Don’t tell Mom what I told you.”

Quinn

The moment Candy drives off to look for Maury, Mom’s attitude changes. Her tone, her tune, the set of her sloped shoulders all pick up, as if her daughter’s presence had constrained her natural sprightliness. “It’s been ages since I’ve tasted wine.” She grins conspiratorily and sips Candy’s glass. “How bad can it be for me?”

“Red is good for your heart.”

“My heart, like the rest of me, is a mess.”

“You’re not a mess,” I protest, presuming that’s what she wants to hear.

“Oh yes, I am. Physically, emotionally, spiritually—any way you look at it, I’m a wreck.”

“You look fine.”

“Don’t BS me, Quinn. You and I have always been honest with each other,” she blithely unburdens herself of a whopping lie. I long ago lost track of the numerous untruths that mine the ground between us. “That darkie who drove me here talked to me like I’m senile. But don’t you do it.”

She downs some pinot noir, then pats at her hair, which the wind has beaten into spiky wires. “I was worried being out in the cold might bring on one of my panic spells.”

“Funny. I can’t picture you panicked. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you scared.”

She chuckles. “That’s because you were too scared to notice. As a kid, every time you passed me you ducked.”

“Yeah, that’s one of my golden childhood memories.” Following her lead, I keep it light, playful. “You always kept me guessing when you’d take a swing.”

“The truth is—” Her face abruptly darkens, her voice drops an octave. “—I’ve been terrified my entire life.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Trust me.” She cants her head in a challenging cyclopean fashion, favoring the big brown eye. The wine—or is it the dispute with Maury and her brush with spending the night outdoors?—hasn’t just made her feisty. It’s put her in a ruminative frame of mind. But unlike those oldsters who dwell on an idealized past, she dredges up a litany of woes, of crippling accidents in her family and premature deaths of friends from diseases now cured with a single shot or pill. “People forget what it was like in those terrible days,” she says.

Lament follows lament. Yet I’m strangely lulled by the anecdotes. As usual, as long as she’s talking, I feel safe; the flow of words feels almost like love.

“What scared me most as a little girl,” Mom scrolls further back in time, “was lugging the garbage pail down to the cellar after dinner. We kept the trash cans between the furnace and the coal bin, and it was dark in that corner. I’d hear rats skittering around.

“When it got to where I couldn’t stand it anymore,” she says, “I stopped halfway to the trash can and emptied the pail in the coal bin and buried the slop under chunks of coal. It was winter, so the smell didn’t reach upstairs to the rest of the house. Long as I was the one to stoke the furnace, nobody noticed a thing.”

Pausing, she sips the wine, her timing as impeccable as that of a seasoned actress. “But the first warm spell in spring cooked my goose. You couldn’t miss the stink. My mother bustled down to the cellar and straightaway huffed back up the steps. ‘Wait till your father gets home,’ she said. And I had all day to fret over what he’d do.”

In another theatrical gesture, she lifts the glass and sniffs its bouquet. Duly prompted, I ask, “What did he do?”

“He called me into his bedroom, took off his belt, and told me to pull down my drawers. I was eleven, old enough that this was humiliating. I pleaded and cried and explained that I was scared of the dark and the rats. He said, ‘I’ll teach you to be scared.’ Then he beat my butt red.

“I suppose he meant to teach me to be scared of him, not the dark. But I learned a different lesson. I learned if you’re scared you better not show it.”

While there’s much to admire from a professional angle, Mom’s Hallmark card performance grates a little. The script’s too neat, the message aimed too blatantly at the heartstrings. When I offer neither praise nor encouragement, she says, “I’ve been doing that ever since. Hiding my feelings. Hiding my fears.”

“Don’t we all.”

“Some of us a hell of a lot more than others. Am I boring you, Quinn?”

“Not a bit. I was trying to picture you as an innocent young girl.”

“This wine’s gone straight to my head. Why’d you let me drink it?” Bracing her palms on the table, she pushes herself to her feet. “I better lie down.”

Cradling the pillow, she wobbles into the living room. I’m free to join her. Or be a bastard and stay here. Reluctantly, I leave the bottle and trail after Mom.

She’s lying on the couch with the pillow under her head. She might be a patient composing herself for a session with a shrink. Her arms are rigid at her sides, her legs crossed at the ankle. I deposit myself in a chair beyond her sightline. The resemblance to my appointments with Dr. Rokoko would be complete were it not for her ratty housecoat and the copies of
Modern Maturity
and
Consumer Reports
on the coffee table.

“Move around where I can see you,” Mom orders.

I do as she demands, perching uncomfortably on a corner of the coffee table.

“I guess you’re wondering why Maury and I argued.”

“You made it clear that’s between you and him.”

“He’s probably already blabbed to Candy. You deserve to hear it too.”

“We’re beyond that, aren’t we, Mom? Worrying what we do or don’t deserve?”

She stretches out a hand and clamps onto my knee, destroying any illusion of therapeutic boundaries. “He’s shook up because I asked him to kill me.”

“Jesus, Mom!”

She grips my knee tighter. The veins on her wrist engorge in high relief. “Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain.”

“I hope it’s not in vain. I’m praying you didn’t do that.”

“Well, save your prayers. I did.”

“How could you?”

“Who the hell else am I supposed to ask? Candy has her head in the clouds these days. She doesn’t care about anything or anybody except Lawrence. And you’re not the type to get his hands dirty.” She speaks as if she were asking for no more than gardening help. “You’re so concerned about Maury’s tender feelings, ever stop to consider mine? You know I’m fed up with life. You know I can’t look after myself. You know I hate the idea of wasting my savings on assisted living.”

“I told you I’d pay for everything.”

“I don’t want everything. I want one thing. I want to die before it’s too late.”

“You’re a Catholic. You should believe it’s never too late. It’s up to God when you die.”

“Don’t lecture me about Catholicism.” Her eyes blaze behind her lopsided glasses. “You don’t even go to Communion.”

“I’m not the one who wants to die.”

“You will. Mark my words, one day you will. And I hope to Christ your kids don’t abandon you like mine have.”

“Nobody’s abandoning you. We’re all still waiting on you hand and foot. What more do you want?”

She yanks the pillow from under her head and pushes it at me. “Smother me.”

I shove it right back at her, and she hugs it to her chest like a baby and breaks into great gulping sobs. “Wait until you’re old,” she says.

“I don’t have long to wait.”

“Wait until you’re alone.”

“You’re not alone. You’re cut off. That’s your choice, not mine.” My impatience has given way to piercing anger. “You’re the one that abandoned us. God forbid that we might need you. It’s hard enough getting you to answer the phone or the front door.”

She wilts and for once seems to be weighing what I’ve said. “You’re right. I’m an awful mother. Please put me out of my misery. I’d do it myself, but that’d condemn my soul to hell.”

“What about my soul?”

“You can go to confession afterward. You have all the time in the world to repent.”

“What about my sanity? Having murder on my conscience?”

“A guilty conscience might bring you back to the sacraments.”

“So this is all for my sake?”

“Don’t be such a smart aleck. Sooner or later, you have to make peace with the Lord.”

“I’d rather make peace with you,” I say.

“We’re not at war. We’ve had our differences, our disagreements. Nothing we can’t patch up.” Her voice turns treacly. “Come here on the couch beside me.”

As much as I might complain about her detachment and the distance between us, I’m more fearful of being close to her. I never know what she’ll do. I’m never sure what she’ll ask of me and what my answer should be. Still, I move over to the sofa.

“Lie down,” she says.

“There’s no room.”

“Sure there is. I’m skinny as a minute and don’t take up any space.”

I lie back, precariously balanced, half on the couch, half off it. Her body radiates no heat, and the hand she latches onto mine feels dry and fragile.

“Remember how we did this when you couldn’t sleep?” she says. “I’d stretch out beside you and we’d talk. Even when you were a little boy we had wonderful conversations. You always understood me.”

“Since we’re on the same wavelength, Mom, tell me something. What is it about me that makes you believe I’ll do what Candy and Maury won’t do?”

“You’re different.”

“You mean I’m the heartless type who’d murder his own mother.”

“I mean you’re strong, decisive, merciful. Candy’s scared of her own shadow. Maury’s afraid too. I told him I’m leaving him money in my will. So he’s worried the cops’ll suspect he had a motive.”

“And I don’t have a motive?”

“Correct. I’m not leaving you a cent. And if the cops ever questioned you, you’d have them eating out of your hand. Maury, he’d fall to pieces, just like last time.”

“Yeah, last time,” I say, then go silent. It assumes a shape, a palpable weight, this silence. It slowly presses things to a single sharp point.

Mom stirs beside me. “I suppose you read the papers in the cedar chest. I left them there for you.”

“I guessed that. What I haven’t figured out is why.”

“You get to be my age, close to the end, you like to put your affairs in order. Fill in all the blanks.”

“There are still plenty left. I didn’t notice your statement. Didn’t you give one?”

“The cops asked some questions.”

“So what did you tell them? Did it happen the way Maury described?”

She springs to a sitting position, like a puppet from a box. “What’s that got to do with what we’re discussing? You think I enjoy going over it again and again?”

“You’ve
never
been over it with me. The one time I asked, you cracked my head against a wall.”

“I was a couple of years younger, that’s what I’d do now.”

“I bet you would. You ask an awful lot for somebody who never gives.”

“Never gives? I gave you life. I gave you love. I gave you opportunities. A damn sight more than your brother and sister ever got. Why are you torturing me?”

“I’m not torturing you. I’m saying you’re one-sided. You ask for a final favor. And such a small one! But you won’t even talk to me about Dad’s death.”

“Shit on this.” She tries to stand up; I pull her back onto the couch. “Get your hands off me!” she screams. “I’m not bargaining with you.”

“Of course you are. That’s what this is. That’s why you left Maury’s papers for me to see. It was your opening bid.”

“What kind of monster, what kind of doubting Thomas, have you turned into?” She’s straining to break free.

“The kind whose mother taught him never to trust anybody.”

“I feel like I raised a snake. Why are you doing this to me?” She stops struggling and rolls onto her side, pulling her knees to her chest. The slippers drop from her pitiful, swollen feet.

“I sacrificed everything for you three kids,” she wails. “I loved you and didn’t want to lose you. Now look how it turns out. You hate me and I’ve lost everything.”

“I don’t hate you, and it’s up to you how things turn out.” Then I wait, and the solid block of silence resettles.

Turtling her neck, Mom slowly raises her head. “If I tell you, will you do what I asked?”

“Let me hear what you have to say. I’m not making any promises.”

When she buries her face in the upholstery, I fear I’ve lost her. But in a muffled voice she says, “Hope you’re not squeamish. This is more than any child should know about his parents. Jack and I never had a peaceful marriage, but the sexual part was strong. We went at it most nights. When I was pregnant with you, though, he calculated you couldn’t be his. He kept track of his bets on the calendar and he figured he’d been on a bender for days around the time I got knocked up. He wanted me to have an abortion. But I said hell, no.”

“I thought that was Tom Trythall.”

“They both pressured me.” With her face against the upholstery, her words sound slurred, as if coming from an old radio speaker. “That’s what Jack and I were fighting about that day—whether you’d be born or not. Candy had gone off to a movie, but Maury was home, listening to the blow-by-blow.”

“Dad was hitting you?”

“No. I smacked him. It wasn’t a love tap either. He just grinned to make me madder. He had this trashy habit of staggering home half-crocked and washing up in the kitchen sink. So he didn’t have a shirt on. I went on yelling at him and he went on sponging himself. Afterward he was as likely to kiss me and carry me off to bed as he was to grab and shake the daylights out of me.”

There’s a catch in her voice. “The thing of it is,” she says, “I was holding the butcher knife. To get his attention. I’d done it before—waved a knife around and threatened to chase him out of the house unless he changed his ways. Normally he’d sweet-talk me. But this time … I don’t know.”

She starts to rock, like Maury. “I don’t remember stabbing him. I honestly don’t. In my mind’s eye, he bellies up to the butcher knife and it just slides into him. Like times when we were drunk and dancing naked in the dark and suddenly he slipped inside me. Simple as that. He groaned and his eyes got real wide. Then they shut. I pulled out the knife and the blood started gushing like water from a fountain. It splashed all over me. I screamed, and Maury ran into the kitchen and started screaming too. He grabbed the butcher knife, and I grabbed it back. He grabbed it a second time, and I went to call the ambulance.