by Wally Lamb
“Who else knows about it?” she asked.
“No one else. Just you.”
She reached over. Stroked my hair, my cheek. “After my parents split up?” she said. “When I used to spend weekends with my father? He’d come into my room some nights, sit in the chair across from my bed and…”
“What?”
“Masturbate.” My mind ricocheted. She anticipated the question I wanted and didn’t want to ask. “That was as far as it ever went. He never…you know.”
“Did he think you were asleep?”
“No. He used to watch me watching him. Neither of us ever said anything. He’d just do it, finish up, and leave. And in the morning, he’d be Daddy again. Take me out and buy me chocolate chip pancakes for breakfast.”
“That’s sick,” I said. “How many times did it happen?”
“Two or three, maybe. Then he started seeing the Barracuda, and it stopped.” The Barracuda was Evelyn, her stepmother, a high-stakes real estate broker. From the start, Evelyn and Mo had kept their distance.
“You tell your mother?”
“No. You’re the first person I’ve ever told…. It was pretty confusing. I was only eleven. I mean, most of the time he was so distant. So unavailable. Then he’d…I knew it was wrong to watch him. Dirty or whatever, but…”
“But what?”
“It was this thing we shared. This secret. It messed me up, though. I slept around a lot in high school.”
I put my arm around her. Squeezed her tight, then tighter.
“Caelum? Do you think you could trust me again? I know I’ve given you good reason not to, but…I mean, if you’re going to be all Sherlock Holmes every time I go out…”
I told her I wanted to be able to trust her—that working on it was the best I could promise.
“Okay,” she said. “That’s fair.”
On our next date, she told me I could come back home if I wanted to. There was one condition, though: couples counseling.
Our therapist, the sari-wearing, no-nonsense Dr. Beena Patel, was a dead ringer for Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. I’d assumed Mo was going to be the one to take the heat, since she was the one who’d cheated, but within the first fifteen minutes of session one, I realized that Dr. Patel was going to be an equal-opportunity nutcracker. Besides, Dr. Patel said, she thought it would be more profitable for us to focus on the future than the past. And speaking of profitable, her fee was a hundred and fifteen a pop.
Dr. Patel assigned homework. She made Mo and me design a series of nonverbal requests we could use when asking directly for something made either one of us feel too vulnerable. Universally recognizable signals weren’t permitted. No raised middle finger in response to a cutting remark, for instance; no ass-grabbing if, walking into the kitchen and seeing her in those cutoffs of hers, I suddenly got in the mood. “The creation of signs exclusive to you as a couple is as much a part of the therapy as the employment of them,” Dr. P explained. “And, of course, with that, the careful honoring of each other’s reasonable requests.” So, a tug of the earlobe came to mean: Please listen to me. A hand over the heart: What you just said hurts. A lit candle: Come upstairs. Be with me. Love me. And I did love Maureen. I do. Ask any of us cynical bastards to lift up our shirt, and we’ll show you where we got shot in the heart.
“You can’t just say you forgive her, Mr. Quirk,” Dr. Patel used to insist during the solo sessions she requested because, at our regular appointments, Maureen was averaging 75 percent of the talking. “If you truly want to live inside this marriage, then you must shed your carapace of bitterness and embrace forgiveness.”
“My carapace?” I said. “What am I? An insect?”
Dr. Patel didn’t smile. “Or else, my friend, move on.”
But rather than move on, we’d moved. Maureen’s mom was dead; her father and the Barracuda had a grown daughter and a grandchild. They had nothing more than a birthday-and Christmas-card relationship with Mo, and even then, the good wishes were always in Evelyn’s handwriting. But Mo had this fantasy that she and her dad might become closer if she was back in Colorado. I couldn’t see why she wanted that, frankly. I mean, by rights, the guy should have been registered as a sex offender. But I never said that, and Maureen had never wanted to talk about Daddy with Dr. Patel. And as for me, the thought of standing in front of classes of high school kids who hadn’t heard about my arrest—as opposed to kids who had—well, that had a certain appeal. So we made umpteen phone calls. My Connecticut teaching license was transferable, and Maureen had never let her Colorado nursing credentials lapse. We flew out there in late June, interviewed, found a house we liked in Cherry Knolls. By mid-July, we had jobs at the same high school—me as an English teacher and Maureen as a backup school nurse. And so we hired movers, closed our bank accounts, sedated the dogs for the trip west, and went.
If, for Maureen, Colorado was coming home, I was a stranger in a strange land. “Welcome to God’s country,” people kept saying, usually with a nod to those ubiquitous goddamn mountains. “Drink water, or the altitude’ll do a number on you.” And it did, too. I’d get nosebleeds out of nowhere for the first month or so.
It was the small things I missed: the family farm in October, Aunt Lolly’s chuckle, my old jogging route, Fenway Park. I’d held on to those same Red Sox seats (section 18, row double-N, seats 5 and 6) since my BU days. I’d sat with Rocco Buzzi in the early years, and later with his brother, Alphonse. I mean, I’d go to a Rockies game, but it wasn’t the same. They’re home-run-happy out there, for one thing; someone dings one, and the altitude takes care of the rest. Maureen would go with me to Coors Field sometimes in the beginning, but she’d usually bring a book, or drag me to some LoDo art gallery afterwards. “How many points do we have now?” she’d ask, and I’d have to remind her it was runs, not points. I don’t know. It’s just different out there. You know what you can get on a pizza in metro Denver? Mesquite-flavored tilapia, with or without goat cheese. Jesus God.
Hey, in my own defense? I was respectful of those signals of ours for a while. I’d see her hand on her heart and comfort her. I’d act on a lit candle. Light one myself from time to time. And it worked; it was better. I’ll give counseling that much. But over time, I got careless. Got bitter again, gummed up in the flypaper of what I was supposed to be beyond: the fact that those Monday and Thursday nights when she was supposed to be taking tai chi, she’d been opening her legs and taking Paul Hay inside her instead. I don’t know. Maybe that stuff with her father had messed her up. I mean, it had to have, right? But after that tell-me-a-secret night, we never went near the subject again—not even with Dr. Patel.
I tell you one thing, though: Mo’s moving back to Colorado didn’t get her what she wanted, father-wise. She went over to their house three or four times at the beginning. She’d get all dressed up, buy them gifts. I chose not to go with her. The thing was, I didn’t trust myself. Figured seeing Daddy Dearest might trigger something, and I’d go off on the guy. Coldcock him or something. It’s not like I didn’t have a history. Maureen would always come back from those visits saying she’d had a good time, or that their house was beautiful, or that their granddaughter, Amber, was so adorable. She’d be down, though—in a slump for the next few days. Sometimes, I’d eavesdrop when she called them. Maureen would small-talk with Evelyn for a while and then ask to speak to her father. He’d oblige her—come to the phone maybe half the time. And when he did, it made me sad to hear Mo doing most of the talking. He never called her. Neither did Evelyn. Or Cheryl, the half-sister. Somewhere during our second year out there, Maureen stopped calling, too. It was hard for her, as it had been hard for me. I knew a thing or two about abdicating fathers.
BUT ANYWAY, THAT FRIDAY NIGHT? In our Colorado living room? Homicide ended on its usual note of moral ambiguity, Van Morrison’s “Slim Slow Slider” faded to silence, and the news came on. There was relative calm in the world that night. Nothing you’d stay glued to your recliner over. No
sign of the trouble those two rage-filled little motherfuckers were planning. Channel Nine had a convenience-store stickup in Lakewood, an environmental protest in Fort Collins. There was the usual numbing news from Kosovo. Get up, I kept telling myself. Go to her. Instead, I’d stuck around for the Sox and Celtics scores, checked in with the Weather Channel for the national temperatures. We’d been out there for four years by then, and I was still keeping tabs on Connecticut weather.
Still, I meant to go up to her. I was going to. But the news led into Letterman, and since James Brown was the musical guest, I decided to open a beer and catch that soulful old reprobate, too. Should I add the Godfather of Soul to my masterworks list, I wondered. And if so, who should I bump?…
My eyes cracked open some time after three. I looked around until I recognized the room. Got up, got the dogs taken care of and the downstairs locked up. Went up there.
Our bedroom was lit by dying candlelight and aromatic with ginger. Wax had dribbled down the front of the bureau and cooled. Carapaced the carpet. Maureen was scowling in her sleep. She’d drunk both of the wines.
I dropped my clothes beside our bed and got in next to her. She rolled onto her side, away. Moondance, I thought. No, Astral Weeks. And in the midst of my indecision, I suddenly saw the long view of my inconsequential life: Mouseketeer, farm kid, failed husband, mediocre teacher. Forty-fucking-eight years old, and what had I accomplished? What had I come to know?
IN THE AFTERMATH, I’D LEARN that he lied to me on two counts that afternoon at Blackjack Pizza. First, he hadn’t been as anti-prom as he let on; he’d asked a couple of girls and been refused. As was his habit when one of his peers displeased or slighted him, he’d gone home, grabbed a marking pen, and X-ed out their faces in his yearbook. Second, he was not headed for the Marines. The Rocky Mountain News would report that the antidepressant he was taking for obsessive-compulsive disorder had disqualified him. The recruiter had dropped by his home and delivered the news on Thursday, the night before I’d bought that pizza. His buddy had made plans to go to the University of Arizona, though; he and his dad had driven there a few weeks earlier and chosen his dorm room. Had that been part of the deceit? Had he been playing both fantasy baseball and fantasy future? Playing his parents along with everyone else? His computer offered no clues; they confiscated it within the first few hours, but he’d erased the hard drive the night before.
Over and over, for years now, I have returned to that Friday night: when I can’t sleep, when I can, when the steel door slides open and I walk toward her, Maureen looking sad-eyed and straggly-haired, in her maroon T-shirt and pocketless jeans. Mo’s one of the victims you’ve never read about in the Columbine coverage, or seen interviewed on the Today show or Good Morning America. One of the collaterally damaged.
I just wish to Christ I’d gotten up the stairs that night. Made love to her. Held her in my arms and made her feel safe. Because time was almost up. They’d bought their guns, taped their farewell videos, finalized their plans. They’d worked their last shift together at Blackjack—had made and sold me that pizza that, piece by piece, Mo and I had lifted out of the box and eaten. Chaos was coming, and it would drive us both so deeply into the maze that we’d wander among the corpses, lost to each other for years. Yet there Maureen was on that long-ago night, up in our bed, waiting for me.
Get up those stairs! I want to scream to my clueless April-seventeenth-of-nineteen-ninety-nine self. Hold her! Make her feel safe! Because time was running out. Their first shots were eighty hours away.
chapter two
ON SATURDAY MORNING, I AWOKE to the sound of whimpering. Eyes closed, I groped. Felt, on my left, Maureen’s hipbone. On my right, fur. I’d swum up from sleep on my back, the sheet knotted around my ankles, a hard-on tent-poling the front of my boxers. I cracked open my eyes and looked into the eyes of the perp. The whimperer: Sophie. Her muzzle rested against the mattress. Her face was a foot from mine. I blinked; she blinked. I sighed; she sighed. The plea in her eyes was readable: Get up. Feed me. Love me the most.
Sophie was the needier of our two mutts—mother and son golden retrievers we’d brought with us from Connecticut. Soph had gotten neurotic as she aged—whiny, fixated on food, and, out of nowhere, possessive of me. I’d grab Maureen by the kitchen sink or in the bathroom, give her a smooch, and Sophie would appear at our feet, head-butting her away. It was funny but creepy, too, like living with a canine version of what’s-her-name in Fatal Attraction. Not Meryl Streep. The other one. Cruella De Vil.
Maureen’s arm swung back. “Mmph,” she said. Her hand found me, her fingertips skidding across my throat. I rolled toward her and hitched my chin over her shoulder. Placed my stiffness against her. “Hey, toots,” I whispered.
“Bad breath,” she mumbled back, stuffing her pillow between us. Sophie’s whimper became a guttural grunt. Yoo hoo. Remember me?
The clock radio said 7:06. The wineglasses on the wicker tray by the window said I’d failed Maureen the night before. Sophie’s wet nose poked my wrist. “Yeah, yeah, wait a minute,” I muttered. Swung my feet to the floor and padded toward the bathroom, Sophie following. Chet groaned and stretched, wagged his tail, and joined the pissing party. You almost never saw that dog without a grin on his face.
Mid-leak, Maureen came in, a wineglass stem in each fist. She dumped the dregs with so much determination that wine spattered on the wall.
“Hey,” I said. “What do you say I give the dogs a quick run, then we go someplace for breakfast?”
She rinsed the glasses, kept me waiting. “Can’t,” she finally said.
“You can’t, or you’d rather not eat eggs with a shithead like me?”
No forgiving smile. No look in my direction. She grabbed a washcloth, wiped the glasses so hard they squeaked. “I’m taking Velvet to breakfast.”
I stood there, nodding. Touché.
In that system of signals Mo and I had worked out with Dr. Patel, there was no shorthand for “I’m sorry.” You were obliged to speak those two words. But the mention of Maureen’s breakfast buddy short-circuited any contrition I’d been generating.
Mo’s field was gerontology, but after we moved out West and she took the school nurse’s job, she found she enjoyed working with the high school kids. She liked the needy ones, particularly. “Just give them an aspirin and send them back to class,” I kept advising her. Instead, she’d help them with their math, counsel them on their love lives, give them rides and lunch money. I’d warned Mo to observe boundaries with Velvet, especially. Velvet Hoon was like a Cape Cod undertow: if you weren’t careful, she’d pull you in deeper than you meant to go. I spoke from experience.
I pulled on my sweats, laced up my running shoes. If she wanted to spend her weekend morning with a dysfunctional sixteen-year-old instead of with her husband, then fine. Fuck it. Maybe I’d leave the dogs home, do a long run—the eight-miler out to Bear Creek Lake and back. I was halfway out the door when she said something about a rain check.
I stopped. Our eyes met for a nanosecond. “Yeah, whatever,” I said. Bounding past me down the stairs, the dogs almost sent me tumbling.
Outside, it was see-your-breath cold. Flurries possible tomorrow, they said. Goddamn thin Colorado air. It was different back in Connecticut. By mid-April, the sea breezes began to cut you some slack. Aunt Lolly had probably gotten her garden rototilled by now, I figured. She may have even put her peas in the ground. When she called on Sunday, I’d be sure to get the weekly farm and weather reports, along with a complaint or two about her hired man, Ulysses—“Useless,” she called him—and an update on the latest shenanigans being pulled by “those goddamned toy soldiers down the road.” Lolly had it in for the paramilitary regime that now ran the maximum-security version of what she still stubbornly referred to as “Grandma’s prison.” Like her paternal grandmother, who had served as superintendent of the Bride Lake State Farm for Women from 1913 to 1943, Aunt Lolly, too, had been a Bride Lake long-timer, albeit a rank-and-filer.
For forty of her sixty-eight years, she’d been a second-shift custody officer—a CO. “Of course, that was back when they let us treat the gals like human beings instead of cockroaches,” she’d say. “Nowadays they’ve got all those captains and majors and lieutenants strutting around like it’s May Day in Moscow, and they don’t know shit from Shinola about how to run a ladies’ jail.”
Out in the backyard, I was doing my stretches and deliberating about whether or not to go back in for a cap and gloves when I heard leaves crackling in the woods behind our place. The dogs heard it, too. They stood rigid, staring at the clearing, Chet emitting a low, throaty growl. Deer, I figured. Too heavy-footed for squirrels. “Easy, boy,” I told Chet, and the three of us stood there, listening to the silence. A few seconds later, the crackling recommenced and she emerged from the woods in all her chaotic glory: Velvet Hoon.
Remembering that our dogs freaked her out, I grabbed them by their collars. “Got ’em!” I called. The phrase “all bark, no bite” could have been coined for our mutts; couple of wimps, those two. But to tell you the truth, it was a relief to see Velvet afraid of something. Eyeing my hold, she entered the yard in full freak regalia: halter top, exposed flab, hacked-off tuxedo pants, and those Bozo-sized men’s workboots of hers, spray-painted silver. Her shaved head had grown out in the months I hadn’t seen her. Now she was sporting a butch cut, dyed bread-mold blue. Watching her make a beeline for the picnic table, I couldn’t help but crack a smile. Short and squat, she moved like R2-D2. She climbed from the bench to the tabletop and fumbled for a cigarette. Having secured higher ground and sucked in a little nicotine, her cocky stance returned.