by Una Mannion
When we left Ireland that last time, my grandmother had sobbed in the doorway of the house as we walked down to the road where the car was parked. Even then it had gripped me that she didn’t know the truth about her son’s life in America. That he didn’t live with us, that he lived alone, that he pretended everything was fine for her.
He arrived in Ireland for her funeral during the heaviest snowfall they’d had in thirty years and was stranded in Dublin waiting for the trains to run again. He’d told me that when he was ten, the same age I was then, his mother’s father had died. She hadn’t been able to go to his funeral because of her duties on the farm. He and his brother got on their bikes and cycled up the country forty miles to be there for her. The morning my grandmother Bridget Fox was buried I went into the woods and made a snow angel, then lay there and listened.
Now, I folded the birth certificate and slipped it back into the rubber band. I skipped the petition for divorce: 1973. My mother the petitioner. My father the respondent. I opened his certificate of death, dated 1980. Country of origin: Ireland. Under Education, there was a place to tick the highest grade completed. My father had never been to school beyond elementary; “5th” was ticked. The names of his mother and father appeared again on the certificate of death. Under Marital Status, “Divorced” was ticked, but in the next section it said “Surviving spouse (if wife give maiden name),” and my mother’s name was there: Faye Royston. If she was no longer his spouse, I wondered why her name was on the certificate, how this had been allowed. Our names weren’t on it. There is no space for the deceased’s children on a death certificate, even though I knew he would have said this was the most important detail of his life. I looked down to the end of the certificate, the parts filled out by the certifying physician and coroner.
Death was caused by:
immediate cause: cardiopulmonary arrest
due to or as a consequence of septic shock
due to or as a consequence of sepsis
And in the column to the right of each of these the time frame was indicated: “Approximate time between onset and death.” The arrest was listed as “sudden.” The shock, the time during which he was semiconscious, his organs failing, struggling to breathe and alone in his efficiency apartment, was listed as “day(s).” He was presumed to have had sepsis for five days between onset and death. The sepsis was a result of an injury working on a building site for his idiot cousin, who brought him to a questionable doctor who, my mother said, probably gave him the infection while stitching him.
It was the five days that I couldn’t get over, what I couldn’t accept. For several days my father lay sick, and for the last of those days so sick he was dying. He always called us on a Saturday morning from a pay phone after he moved, but he hadn’t called then. “He was so proud,” Marie had said the first time we looked at the certificate. “Too proud to even ask anyone for a small bit of help.” She was furious with him. I blamed everyone else. His cousin, America, my mother, us, me—because he shouldn’t have died alone in a room on a treeless street in a city where he had no one.
15
For the rest of the week I was in charge of Ellen and Beatrice. I hadn’t told anyone that Barbie Man had been here, that Thomas had spoken to him. I wanted Ellen in my sight, and I didn’t want to have to tell her why. By Thursday afternoon I was half out of my mind with worry and I decided we would take the bus to the King of Prussia mall the next day: me, Ellen, and Beatrice. I needed sneakers, and I wanted us to get off the mountain. Beatrice had never been by bus, and she was bursting with excitement and questions. I gave her the coins for the fare the night before, to put in her pocketbook.
“What if I put them in the wrong slot?”
“I’ll put my money in first, and you do what I do.”
“Are you sure the bus is definitely coming at nine thirty?”
“Yes, it comes that time every day. And every two hours. There’s a seven thirty before it and an eleven thirty after.”
“What if I get lost, and I don’t know where to catch the bus home?”
“You won’t get lost.”
We set off down the trail toward the stop just after nine. Ellen was wearing a white short-sleeved top that Sage had given to me. “Broderie anglaise,” she’d said, a fabric Charlotte loved, with cut-out patterns and eyelets. It was the first time Ellen had shown her arms since that night. There were still raw spots, flat pink areas of new skin, but she had healed. Beatrice was wearing a pair of Ellen’s shorts and a striped T-shirt. Her hair was pulled back in a braid, and her pocketbook had a strap that went over her shoulder and across her chest. She held it with both hands anyway. As we walked down the trail, Beatrice chatted about the Fourth of July parade that was coming up and how she wanted to decorate her bike. Ellen was quiet while Beatrice talked about getting crêpe paper and streamers.
“We’ll do something better than that,” Ellen said eventually. “Let’s try to make something completely different. Something good.”
There was still a week to go, enough time to pull an idea together. Beatrice was our last chance. By next year even she wouldn’t want to do it. Every Fourth of July, a fire engine led a procession of kids on decorated bikes around the mountain. There was a competition for best bike. Last year a girl dressed in a sequined red, white, and blue leotard, nude stockings, and white cowgirl boots on a bike with training wheels had won. Every few hundred yards she’d hopped off her bike, smiled and spun her baton and done cartwheels. Marie had said it was disturbing for a group of middle-aged men to award highest points to a little girl made up and dressed like she was in a Junior Miss beauty pageant in Texas or some place and call her “cute.”
Along the trail the early sun broke through in flecked light, the saplings, weeds, and wildflowers luminous green and almost as tall as us. The trail narrowed as we neared the bottling factory, and even from the ridge, high above the gorge, I could smell the locust.
As we came back out of the woods and started down the hill to the main road, a motorcycle passed. Wilson. And behind him a passenger holding a pair of white waitressing shoes in her right hand, blond hair blowing from beneath the helmet. Ellen was waving absurdly and started running after them. I shouted at her to stop.
“What?” she said.
“We have to stay with Beatrice. I don’t want her to run down the hill—there’s gravel everywhere.”
“But it’s Sage and Wilson.” Ellen looked at me.
“Just slow down!”
She must have heard something in my tone. “Are you fighting?” she asked.
“No,” I lied. “Not really.”
“What happened?”
“I’ll tell you later,” I said. Beatrice was walking in front of us, clutching her pocketbook and checking her wristwatch. I wanted to slow us down so we didn’t have to wait with Sage, and possibly Wilson, at the bus stop. I needed to think. Why was Sage with Wilson? It was dangerous, and I had to warn her. I knew I should chase after them and tell Wilson about the guy being on the mountain. But I didn’t.
“Beatrice, do you want to get a soda when we get to the ARCO?”
“Will we have time?”
“Yeah.”
We went straight into the gas station, and I gave Beatrice the money to drop into the machine. She got a Coke for herself and Ellen, and we walked to the bus stop about a hundred yards up Route 23. The bus with its black windows was coming toward us, and Sage and a few others waiting stepped forward.
“Sage!” Beatrice ran ahead and hugged her. “Libby’s taking us to the mall.”
“Hello, Miss Beatrix Potter. Are you writing more stories?”
The bus stopped, and the door fanned open.
“You first,” I said to Sage.
Beatrice had her coins ready in her hand. Ellen followed Sage up the steps. I told Beatrice to follow Ellen and do what she did. She dropped her coins in carefully and waited until the driver nodded to her to go ahead and take a seat. She walked down the aisle, past E
llen, and sat in the empty seat next to Sage. I sat next to Ellen and listened as Beatrice told Sage how Ellen was going to design her bike decorations and costume for the parade, how I was getting sneakers and she was going to get Marie a gift for her new apartment. When the bus pulled in at the mall, I told Ellen we’d get off at the first stop, by the Wanamaker’s entrance. I knew Sage would get off at the next one, by J. C. Penney’s. I wanted to tell her, but I didn’t know how.
“Have a great day, Beatrice,” Sage said when we stood to get off. “If you come to my diner, I’ll give you a complimentary ice cream. You too, Ellen.”
A fountain trickled over a plastic waterfall, and spotlights lit the pool below from underneath. At the top of the fake falls, plastic foliage was clumped in bunches to suggest something lush and verdant. Muzak played over invisible speakers, and the air was cool. Lighting in the mall always seemed dimmed, maybe to keep the temperature down, but any time I entered it, I felt as if I had stepped out of the brightest sunlight into shadow, and I had to readjust. Marie said malls were designed to disorient you. That’s why, like casinos, they never had clocks or windows. They wanted you to enter this fake world and lose track of time and reality.
Beatrice wanted to throw a penny into the fountain to make a wish. A group of teenagers had taken all the benches in front of it and were setting up their boom box. Mall rats. Marie had once asked Thomas what the collective noun was for rats. “A plague or a swarm,” he said. A plague of mall rats described them perfectly, Marie had said. Cassette tape in, the boom box blared AC/DC’s “Back in Black” while a girl around my age played air guitar with a cigarette between her lips. She looked like she couldn’t lift her eyelids up enough to see. It was only ten o’clock in the morning; the mall was just opening.
“Stop staring,” Ellen said to Beatrice.
“C’mon, Beatrice,” I said, taking her by the arm. “Throw it in, make your wish, and let’s get what we came for.”
I bought white Converse high-tops. Ellen and Beatrice spent nearly an hour in the craft and hobby shop discussing Beatrice’s bike decorations and finally selected crêpe paper, pinwheels, big sheets of blue poster board, masking tape, and face paints. In the fabric store, Ellen bought cheap yards of red and blue cotton, needles, and thread. Beatrice chose Philadelphia-themed dish towels for Marie’s new apartment in Wanamaker’s home goods section. We passed the Space Port arcade and stood at the door, looking in. The whole interior was painted black, even the floor. At the far end, they had ultraviolet lights that lit up psychedelic swirls on textured surfaces. Beatrice wanted to play a racing video game where you drove a car. I told her it was a waste of time, that it just stole your money, but I agreed to go in. “Just pretend you’re driving.” I leaned against her car door while she spun the wheel and crashed. Beside us, a full row of boys faced Space Invaders machines. I could only see their backs as they leaned, first one way and then another, ducking as Space Invaders, white blobs that looked like marshmallows, fell to earth. Amid all the noise I could hear the bass beat of the Space Invaders sound, like a fast heartbeat, underneath the staccato of players shooting and player death explosions. I looked over at Ellen, who was standing there watching the Space Invaders, and got a fright. Her white shirt was completely illuminated, and she glowed purple in the UV light, even her white training bra underneath.
J. C. Penney’s was at the far end of the mall, and Beatrice wanted to take Sage up on her offer of an ice cream so that she could watch her take orders and put her slips on the line and serve food. I suggested a compromise. I would take them to Friendly’s for ice cream sundaes, much better than the metal bowl of vanilla, chocolate, or strawberry that you’d get in Sage’s diner. Beatrice agreed.
The Friendly’s waitress seated us in a booth that looked out onto the parking lot, the only place in the mall I knew of where you could see the outside world. Beatrice sat beside me, and Ellen opposite, and we ordered our ice creams. I started to ask Ellen what the plan was for the bike, but she was looking at something behind me, over toward the bathrooms, her face frozen. She shrank in the booth, head down.
“He’s here,” she whispered. I knew without turning.
I stayed very still, expecting to be struck from behind. I didn’t turn my head but waited for the blow as a shape passed me, then stopped and turned. I didn’t move. I could smell him, a smell like patchouli. Marie had used it once or twice in her Grateful Dead phase but had stopped because it was overwhelming us all in the car to school every morning. He slid into the booth behind Ellen, where another man was already seated. He was facing me, but I was too terrified to look up. Ellen lowered herself farther in the booth, leaning over the table.
“The booth behind you,” I whispered. “He didn’t see you.”
“What?” asked Beatrice.
“Nothing,” I said, and right then the waitress arrived with our ice creams, which came in tall glass sundae dishes with long spoons. Beatrice started on hers straightaway. Ellen and I just stared at ours. Ellen picked up the spoon, but her hand was trembling and she put it back down. I didn’t know what to do. Beatrice was oblivious. Ellen and I were looking at each other. Tears welled and fell from the bottom of her eyelids in plops on the Formica.
The waitress was passing. “Everything okay, hon? You don’t like your sundaes?”
“Oh no, it’s good,” I said. Ellen and I immediately started to spoon into the ice cream.
I felt like I couldn’t swallow, as if my throat had started to close. I kept my hand at my forehead, elbow on table, and tried to steal a look at him. He was exactly as Ellen had described: hair almost white-blond, with a sheen, as if he had ironed it flat and then added something to make it shine. He was wearing a blue bandanna from the top of his head down over his forehead, hiding his hairline. I felt a sickening thud in my stomach. He was covering up where Wilson had scalped him. There was bruising along his cheekbone, and one eye was black and blue, with streaks of pooled red blood. His eyelashes and eyebrows must be so blond that he looked like he had none. They were nearly done their food. I tried not to stare.
“What’s wrong?” Beatrice asked, looking at us both.
“Shut up,” Ellen said under her breath.
Beatrice looked at me and put her spoon down on the table. “What? What did I do?”
“Bea, eat your ice cream.” I was never stern with Beatrice, and she heard it in my voice and did what I said. Sage and I had measured Valley Forge to Pottstown on the map. It was about twenty miles, not a hundred like Marie had said. The mall was under six miles from the ARCO station. Was twenty-six miles a bit far to go for a mall? Why was he here?
The waitress was talking to Barbie Man and the guy with him. She was writing their check. “You look like you’ve been through the wringer,” she said.
“Yeah, his plastic surgeon’s on vacation.” Barbie Man said it, pretending she’d spoken to the other guy. His voice rasped, a gravelly sound, as if he smoked four packs a day. They all laughed like he was funny.
The waitress put the check on the table. “I’ll come back when you’re ready.”
Ellen was listening, too. I knew she was trying to understand what was being discussed. She must have seen the bruises. We didn’t move in our booth.
I watched them each put money on the table and stand up, and I felt vomit rise in my throat. He was a giant. At least as tall as Evi van der Graff’s dad, and he was supposed to be six-five. He had on a black leather vest over a white T-shirt, a thick black belt, blue jeans, and black boots. A sling was draped over one shoulder, holding his left arm in a cast. They’d broken his arm. I felt a quick surge of panic. The other man looked ordinary and middle-aged, a bit like Mr. Walker. We stayed sitting in our booth. I watched them leave while Beatrice ate her ice cream, and Ellen looked at the table. We sat until the waitress came with our check. I left the money and a tip. Neither Ellen nor I had finished.
“We’re going to use the bathroom now,” I said.
“I don’t have
to go,” said Beatrice.
“The rule is we go together.” We went to the back of the restaurant, and I stayed outside by the phones, where I could keep an eye on the restroom door. “Go inside,” I said. “I’ll be right there.”
I dropped in coins and dialed.
“Hello. Directory services.”
“Can I have the number for Rage Records on Third in Philadelphia? It’s a record store.”
“Would you like to be connected?” asked the operator.
“Yes, please.”
I waited. The phone rang twice, and Marie picked up and practically sang, “Rage Records on Third.” When I heard her voice, I started to cry.
“He’s here, Marie.”
“Libby? Is that you? Who’s there?”
“Barbie Man.”
“Where? At the house?”
“No, here. The mall.”
I told her we had seen the man, how he’d been in the booth next to us, how Thomas had met him on the mountain the day after she left; how he was looking for Craig Kowalski, that I didn’t know what to do.
“Did he see Ellen?” she asked.
“I don’t think so.”
“Libby, calm down. There’s a bus at two. Go through the mall to the bus stop. Don’t go outside into the parking lot. I’m going to call Wilson and see if he’s home and get him to meet you at the ARCO.”
“No. Not Wilson. Please, Marie. That’s who he’s looking for. We have to stay away from him.”
“Well, get off the bus and go straight to the trail. Don’t hang around on Twenty-Three.”
“Okay.”
“Calm down. He didn’t see her. And it’s Wilson he wants.”
I nodded and tried to stop crying. “Marie, I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“How I was when you were leaving.”