“She was drunk. You said so yourself.”
I pause, trying to think exactly what I want to say. How to not only end this conversation but also let it begin. “In vino veritas.” My mother is not a heavy drinker. Tonight it was wine that shook the truth free.
Daniel makes a squawk like a Canada goose. His Latin is not very good, but I know he can understand that.
“What is that screech for?”
“Latin? You’re quoting me something in Latin? Seriously?” Daniel yanks some of the covers away from me to pile on top of himself. “Sometimes it’s hard to know who in your family is the most dramatic.”
And now I laugh for real. Because employing a common Latin phrase and lying about your youngest child’s paternity are equal crimes. And then Daniel starts laughing, and our laughter twists together like the twin backbones of the double helix of a DNA molecule: It actually feels, in this one moment, like the basis for life. I’m afraid for it to end. Afraid for the hollowness that will open in this room like a sinkhole once our laughter crescendos and starts its slow fade to silence.
I lick Daniel’s earlobe, which surprises even me. He swats me away. “The thing of it is, I think she’s telling the truth.”
“Oh, come on. She couldn’t possibly.”
“She hardly shares anything about herself; why would she go out of her way to share something made up? It doesn’t make any sense.”
“She’s mad at you still. She’s trying to prove something to you, that you don’t know her as well as you think you do, that you got it wrong in the book . . .”
“She didn’t read the book.”
“Doesn’t matter. To her, you’re publishing a lie. She wants to see you humiliated, to feel shame like she apparently has. And she’s using this fabrication to do it.”
I shake my head no while taking back my share of the covers. “It’s in the book,” I say, and then I say it again, as if it’s really just sinking in. “It’s in the goddamned book. Sometimes he would look at me and wonder how I could be his son.”
Daniel doesn’t bite. “You should have seen the way my dad looked at me when I told him I wanted to play the French horn.”
I smile, mad at Daniel the whole time for making me do so.
“You’re just being paranoid,” he continues.
“There were times I hated my dad.”
“There were times I hated mine.”
“I should probably welcome this news.”
“It’s not news. It’s made-up.”
“And yet, lying here, I want it not to be true.”
“Well, it can’t be.”
We’re almost having parallel conversations. “We baked a cake once. Did I ever tell you? Well, my mother baked the cake. My father and I decorated it. Got second place.”
“Second place in what?”
I stuff the pillow farther into its case to prop myself up. “I don’t really remember. A competition? It was a lighthouse, the cake. He said . . . He said we were stuck with each other.”
“He probably meant in the task.”
It’s impossible to know what he meant.
I try to focus on ridiculous topics, put my brain to work on other things so maybe I can sleep. What is the object of the sport lacrosse? Do we own a copy of the Periodic Table of elements? How do thumbs work? Yet my stubborn mind always drifts back to Daniel’s words. You’re just being paranoid.
My mother is a woman always in control of who she is and what she says. There’s a reason why this came to the surface tonight. Jackie was right: Every mother has a story. And it was time for this story to be told.
◆ TWENTY-ONE ◆
I wake up confused and hungover, not from the wine (clearly, I had not done the lion’s share of the drinking) but from exhaustion; I have no idea what time it is or how long I’ve been asleep. The last number I recall seeing on the clock was 3:15 a.m.—a time I remember from reading The Amityville Horror as a teenager that particularly haunted George Lutz. He would wake every night with a start to see that time on the clock, and he eventually determined that’s when the son of the house’s previous owners murdered his family with a shotgun. Shots fired, shots fired: my last thoughts before falling asleep. He was not your father. Shots fired, indeed.
Darkness hangs over the room, but underneath the shade I can make out the first pink light of dawn—there will be a new day. I look over at Daniel. He’s on his back, head facing the wall, and I watch for the familiar rise and fall of his chest. Recently I’ve watched him sleep a lot, many late nights when I’ve been wide awake, impossibly caffeinated, trying to work through the frayed edges around the book’s central narrative to derive the perfect ending, jealous perhaps that his work, the odd jobs he takes between directing gigs, never seems to keep him from rest. The faintest whiff of brewing coffee wafts under the door; it’s not the loud, Handelian wake-up my mother used in the past to rouse us (and for that, hallelujah), but it’s effective. I slip out from beneath the covers, careful not to rest my weight on the creaky edge of the bed. Daniel doesn’t stir. I’m wearing a surprising amount of clothes; I can’t recall if that is by design to stay warm or if I never really bothered to get undressed before going to bed. Perhaps, like a minuteman, I thought I would need to be ready to fight the moment a battle resumed.
I look down the hall and notice my old bedroom door is closed—Naomi and Aaron are still asleep. That leaves one culprit, and when I look across at my mother’s door, sure enough, it is cracked open. I stand frozen in the hallway, cold and motionless. Peering halfway down the stairs, something strikes me as different. The wall above the landing is conspicuously empty. There used to hang a framed needlepoint of flowers from A–Z, something my father’s mother had made. A is for amaryllis. B is for buttercup. C is for chrysanthemum. As a kid I had the whole thing memorized, sitting as I would for long periods on the stairs, not knowing whether to go up them or down, waiting for life to begin. I wait here now, motionless, as if I myself might disappear if I make any sudden moves. I study the stairs, uncertain whether to advance or retreat, and then run my fingers along the wall, looking for the hole where the nail used to hang. When I find it, it anchors me firmly in a past that I remember. It’s not all made-up, my childhood, the construct of an imagination gone haywire. I was young once, smaller, uncertain, afraid. And now I am grown, bigger, certain, brave.
Slowly, I head down the stairs. The stillness combines with the sound of someone puttering in the kitchen and the rat-a-tat-tat in my eardrums to make it feel like Christmas morning, but there are no gifts waiting for me, no stockings hung with care. To the right of the bottom step is the half-open door to my father’s old office. It radiates calm. Although it faces east, and it should be among the first rooms in the house to get light, it seems excruciatingly dark and cold; my mother keeps the shades drawn. I turn the other way, to the dining room. There’s light in the kitchen. The coffee smells stronger down here and it pulls me, sings to me, beckoning like a siren toward danger, toward jagged rocks, toward doom. Sure enough, my mother is standing at the kitchen sink, her back to me, looking out the window at the meadow, at the cold frost of a November dawn.
“Coffee’s almost ready,” she says, but doesn’t turn around. I pull a stool up to the counter. The day’s newspaper is already thumbed through; it’s fat with sales flyers for Black Friday.
We stay silent, waiting for the coffee to finish. When it gurgles the last of its brew and emits a quiet hiss, my mother pours two mugs and slides one my way. I stare at it, like it might be a trap, something explosive, a grenade. But I need the caffeine, I need to feel warmth. I hold the mug for a moment, cupped in my hands, before it gets too hot and I have to set it down. After some silence and some careful study of a RadioShack flyer, when I think the coffee has cooled, I take a long sip, letting it burn my throat with its bitter heat. I don’t usually drink it black, but I don’t dare reach
for the cream and the sugar. I’m in the presence of a bee; so long as I stay relatively still, there’s a good chance I won’t get stung.
My mother pulls a loaf of raisin bread out of the bread box and sets it on the counter halfway between us. It just sits there in no-man’s-land, in some sort of demilitarized zone.
“His name was Frank,” she says.
“Nan’s needlepoint at the top of the stairs. The flowers. A amaryllis to Z zinnia. It’s missing.” It comes out of my mouth somewhere between a statement of fact and the sounding of an alarm. “In fact, a lot of things are missing.” This is now verging on accusation. “Photographs. Memorabilia. Books. Have you noticed this?”
My mother looks around the room, confused, from the window, to the hood over the stove, to the door to the mudroom, to the table, to the counter, as if noticing not only this, but the house that she lives in, for the very first time. If we were living inside a movie trailer, this is where the Talking Heads song would fade in.
And you may tell yourself, this is not my beautiful house.
“It’s like you’ve been robbed.”
My mother considers this. “I moved some things around.”
“You moved some things around?”
“James, please.”
I reach for the raisin bread and grab it by the twist tie that holds the bag closed. I twist and I twist and I twist, but its grip on the bag only tightens, so I twist the other way until the paper comes off the tie and I’m left with only the wire and I rip the plastic bag open, exposing the whole loaf of bread to air. “I’m not really hungry.”
My mother grabs a cutting board and sets out half the loaf, but it’s a new cutting board with indistinguishable characteristics, barely a groove from a serrated knife, and not the deeply notched one from my youth that my father had made. I suddenly have this desire for the house to be a museum dedicated to the way things were. That there be stanchions with a crimson velvet rope blocking off access to the things that were most distinguishably ours as a nuclear unit. We veered off course somewhere, and I suddenly, desperately, want to go back and course correct. To do that, everything must be exactly as it was.
“You need to let me say this.”
“Jesus.” I mean it to be profane. I also mean it as prayer. God, help me understand: Why is it we always hold on to an idealized version of the past?
My mother takes a deep breath, wrapping the torn plastic bag around the other half of the bread loaf like she’s diapering an infant for the first time, unsure how to really go about it and aiming instead for maximum coverage. “His name was Frank.”
“Stop it.” I keep my eyes focused on the bread and make a fist so tight that I can feel my fingernails dig into my palm.
“His name was Frank,” she says, now for the third time. “Frank Latimer.” As soon as this name sinks in, I recall my lifelong distaste for the guttural sound made by the n–k consonant cluster. Bank. Tank. Chunk. Dank. Kerplunk.
Hoodwink.
“Frank was a teacher, you might like to know. High school English.”
I scream silently in my head. When I stop, something awful occurs to me. “Oh, God, did we have him?”
“No. No. He taught a few districts over.”
There is a long silence, as the engine driving this particular reveal sputters, then dies altogether. When I can hear the house actually settling deeper into the earth, and when my stomach rumbles from hunger but not for food, I turn the engine over until it restarts. “What else?”
“He was older than I was, by several years, not many. A veteran. He fought in World War Two, but only at the end. When he joined the service, the Battle of . . . famous battle . . .”
“Normandy?” Why am I doing any heavy lifting here?
“That sounds right. It was already under way by the time he got there. When he returned, he finished out his service at Fort Drum and then went to the teacher’s college over in Herkimer County.”
My brain actually hurts. I press on my eyeballs with the palms of my hands. “What else.”
It takes her a moment to continue. “He was married. I know that. His wife was . . . religious.”
“You’re religious.”
“Newly religious—some kind of religious that interfered with their . . . marriage. She was younger and naïve, his word, not mine. Their child—their only child—was stillborn.”
I press harder on my eyes until I see shooting stars. “I guess that accounted for the religion.”
“It was all so long ago. I haven’t thought of any of this in years.”
“These details are . . .” I start, but I can’t think of a single appropriate adjective to assign here. “How did you meet?”
“On a campaign.”
Inconsequential is the word I was looking for.
“A campaign for what?”
“On a campaign to elect a Democrat to Congress.”
I can’t think of anything to ask other than “Why?”
“Why? The man who previously held the seat had been appointed to the New York Supreme Court, so there was an election.”
As answers go, it’s clear, concise—impenetrable, even. But it makes my head spin more. “You worked on a campaign?”
“Your father said I should get out of the house.”
I’ll bet he regrets saying that.
“After a month we started skipping the campaign meetings. We would take long drives instead and just talk.”
“About what?”
“Nothing. Our daily lives. I liked the way he drove: fast, but not too fast—different from your father. It made me feel like someone else.”
“So help me God if this is a euphemism.”
“I’m talking about driving a car, that’s all.”
The next part is a jumbled mess and it’s hard to know how much I’ll retain. She would tell Frank stories about her daily routine as a stay-at-home mother, careful not to make it sound glamourous (if that were even possible), sensitive the whole time to the hand he was dealt, to his having missed out on his chance at fatherhood. When they would find a scenic overlook he would stop the car; he told her surprising things, stories about the war and the little action he saw, stories that seemed unimaginable. (When the war in Europe had ended he was in a foxhole in Germany in some town with a name like Ulm, and there was an announcement over a loudspeaker—The war is over, the war is over!—and he couldn’t make out the words over the static and he had to turn to a buddy next to him to ask, “What are they saying? Warm apple turnover?”)
“It was at one of these overlooks he told me his wife had been seeing the ghost of their dead child.”
“Ghost.” I’m certain my ears are deceiving me. “G-h-o-s-t. This story has a ghost.” I’m living my own Amityville Horror.
My mother motions for me to keep quiet. “At first it was confined to the crib in the nursery they couldn’t bring themselves to take down. And then later it appeared outside the home. On bus benches. The laundromat floor. His wife would stop and talk with the baby that no one else saw, and it scared other people. It was sad, this woman’s predicament, but I was excited by it then. These sightings. These stories. It’s perverse, I know. That poor woman.”
If you are to take my mother at her word, the drives were innocent enough at first—they were, after all, just talking—but eventually the relationship became sexual when they ran out of things to say, when their time together started to resemble the time they spent with their spouses, repeated stories bookended by long silences. When she became pregnant, he asked her to leave my father but she didn’t think she could. And when she came around on the idea—when she thought that maybe, perhaps—he wasn’t so sure he could leave his wife. What would the town say? They would have to leave their homes, start over someplace new. My mother didn’t feel she could do this, not to my father, who hadn’t done anything w
rong, certainly not to Kenny and Naomi, and not to herself, as it took so much of her being and her soul to establish roots where she was.
“Did you discuss . . . abortion?” I have clear feelings about a woman’s right to choose but stumble on the word when the fetus in question was me.
“We discussed it.”
“And?” I’m on the edge of my seat, as if I don’t know the outcome.
“That wasn’t an option for me.”
“So you kept it.” Kept me.
“There was no right answer. We were both sad and felt powerless to stop the sadness. He was trapped, and things with your father . . .”
My stomach flips. Which one?
Her eyes fill with water and tears fall down her face, but she continues with her voice barely quivering. “Soon I began to dread our time together more than the thought of staying at home. I rekindled things with your father to explain the pregnancy, and he seemed pleased when I told him about your impending arrival and things got better for a while.”
“Did he suspect?”
Silence. I maybe hear someone upstairs, or it could just be the heater. “You came along eight months later. If he questioned the math, he never did so out loud.”
We’re stuck with each other.
We both stay motionless, unsure of what to do or say next. My coffee’s gone cold, but I don’t dare reheat it. Eventually I get up, cross to the fridge, and open the door. I stare inside, taking inventory of the contents, pushing aside Thanksgiving leftovers hastily crammed in Tupperware to explore what there is behind them.
“You’re out of milk,” I say. “The kid will want Corn Flakes.”
“There’s plenty of fruit and bread for toast.”
“He will want cereal.” I close the door and turn back to my mother. “So, do I get to meet this guy?”
My mother is taken aback. “Frank?” As if I could possibly be talking about anyone else. “You met him once. Or he met you. You were just a baby. He wanted to see you. I didn’t know if it was a good idea, but he insisted and I didn’t want a scene.”
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