by Lori Lansens
“He wasn’t Pip then. He was Patrick, and I did have a date with him but my parents didn’t know. They didn’t allow dating.”
“What happened with Laura?” I asked.
“I was walking home and I could hear my mother shouting from half a block away. Then I heard my father’s voice. He was supposed to be at work.” Nola took a deep breath. “They were speaking Hungarian so it took a while for me to piece together that Mr. Dorrie had just fired my father and was going to lay criminal charges against him because two boxes of frozen New York strip loins belonging to the restaurant had been found hidden under a coat in his bicycle carriage.”
Vonn and Bridget murmured their sympathy.
“My mother didn’t think for one moment that my father was stealing strip loins from the restaurant, because we hadn’t eaten a decent cut of beef in years. It was obvious that my poor gentle father was being framed. He said it was because of his accent. My mother was wailing, ‘Who would do such a thing? Why?’ ”
“Laura Dorrie?” Vonn blurted.
Nola nodded. “Laura Dorrie. My poor father had been wrongly accused and humiliated and fired, all because of me.”
“So what’d you do?”
“The laundry was sitting there in the basket on the table with the bottle of bleach and all I wanted to do was grab the thing and start gulping it down. I was that close to the edge.”
I swallowed hard because I knew the feeling.
“But I couldn’t stand there one more second listening to my father crying in the other room, so I took the bottle of bleach and ran out of the house without my parents ever knowing I’d come home.”
“What were you going to do with the bleach?”
“I didn’t know. I walked around the block a few times. I sat in the park for a bit. I’d lost the nerve to drink it. Then I had an idea and headed for Dorrie’s Steak House.
“The street was more crowded than usual. I went around the back but it was busy behind the restaurant too, people going in and out of the back door. So I hid in the alley beside the restaurant, waiting until some cars drove off, then I stepped out onto the sidewalk. The steak house had this fancy red carpet out front.”
“You poured bleach on the red carpet? That was your revenge?” Vonn asked.
“That’s your big confession?” Bridget said. “I knew it.”
“I had the cap off the bleach and I was all set to pour when I heard Laura’s voice coming from the apartment overtop the restaurant. I’d heard the girls at school talking about how the Dorries’ place was like a palace and how Laura had a closet as big as most girls’ bedrooms, so when I saw there was a set of stairs that would take me straight up to the open window where these gorgeous white curtains were blowing, I put the cap back on the bottle of bleach and snuck up to take a peek.
“When I got up there, Laura wasn’t in the room. I just stood there at the open window. She had this huge canopy bed and silk curtains, and I could see that the door to her closet was open.” Nola took a moment to catch her breath. “You would have thought she was a Hollywood starlet—all the clothes in there. Then I remembered the bleach was still in my hands.”
“Ah!” Vonn cried.
Bridget inhaled. “Her clothes?”
“I waited a minute then leaned in through the window to make sure she was really gone. She was, but I noticed that there was a package of cigarettes and a lighter on the windowsill and cigarette butts all over the landing. I figured she must smoke quite a lot and I got worried she was gonna need a nicotine fix any minute, then I heard a noise in the hall, then my bracelet snagged on the window ledge and broke again and fell off.”
“Oh no,” Vonn said.
“It was dark by then. I couldn’t see very well so I grabbed the lighter from the windowsill. It took me a hundred tries to light it but finally I did. I held it so that I could see the landing, but I couldn’t see the bracelet. Then I got thinking maybe the bracelet was caught on the windowsill.” Here Nola stopped for a very long beat. “After that, it all happened so fast.”
“What?” I asked.
“I raised the lighter. The curtains. They went up—just … boosh!” Nola said, gesturing with her good arm.
“I ran down the stairs and grabbed this man walking on the sidewalk and showed him where the fire was shooting out of Laura’s bedroom window and he ran into the restaurant to call the fire department. No one was hurt.” Nola paused. “Well, that’s not exactly true.”
“That’s a terrible story, Mim,” Bridget said.
“That’s why I never told you,” Nola said.
We were quiet for some time. “What about Pip?” Vonn asked.
“When I made it to the playground in the park where we said we’d meet, Patrick was already there, worried because of all the sirens. I can’t say what possessed me but I told him what I’d just done.”
“What did he say? What did you do?”
“He took me to his church. It was quiet and dark and smelled like candles. We just sat there in the front pew for an hour, could have been longer, holding hands. Didn’t say a word. All I knew was that I didn’t want to drink bleach anymore and the warm feeling I got in that place made me feel like I’d come home.”
“Didn’t your family go to church?” I asked.
“My mother’d been married before. She said they weren’t welcome.”
“Pip never talked about God,” Vonn said. “I wouldn’t have believed he ever set foot inside a church.”
“He turned off church at some point after we got married. He wouldn’t tell me why. Close as we were he would never tell me why. He didn’t want to ruin it for me I guess. That community has brought me a lot of comfort.”
“Pip brought you to the church and then stopped going himself. You don’t think that’s weird?”
Nola shook her head. “He used to say, ‘I’m a glow-er not a show-er.’ ”
“He did,” Bridget remembered.
“He liked to be on the golf course Sunday mornings. Maybe it was that as much as anything.”
“Did you ever confess to anyone else that you started the fire?” Vonn asked.
“After being in the church I decided to go to the police and tell them about the accident with the lighter. Patrick said he would come with me. But when we got to the police station there was chaos. The fire had been contained but not before it damaged a big garage out back where Mr. Dorrie was hiding thousands and thousands of dollars in stolen goods. Apparently he was the gate for some operation.”
“Fence?”
“Fence. Yes. Anyway, the police weren’t interested in my confession. They shoved us out of the way.”
“So you never told?”
“I never told.”
“But it was an accident,” Vonn said. “You were a kid. They wouldn’t have prosecuted you. It wouldn’t have turned out differently if you told. It’s terrible that you’ve regretted that your whole life.”
“Regrets serve their purpose,” Nola said. “You’ll see.”
Bridget had fallen asleep and was snoring loudly.
“Deviated septum,” Nola said.
Vonn leaned past me, gently took her mother’s head in her hands and changed the tilt of her jaw. It was the first intimate gesture I’d seen between the two women. The snoring stopped, but the wind roared in again.
“It’s like an animal. Or a demon,” Nola said.
“Her snoring?”
“The wind. The howling,” Nola said.
“How’s your wrist?”
“It’s throbbing more now,” Nola allowed. “It’s Bridge I’m worried about.”
“She’ll be fine, Mim. She’s always fine,” Vonn said.
“You think she’s fine, but she’s not.”
We listened to the wind a little longer.
“Pip used to say, ‘She’s going to surprise all of us one day.’ ”
“She surprises me every day,” Vonn said.
“She’s only human. Just like you. Just like m
e.”
“Was all that about Laura Dorrie true, Mim? The fire? Or did you just say it to make Bridget feel better?”
Nola checked once more to make sure Bridget was asleep before she said, “There’s more to the story than what I told. I didn’t get to the worst part.”
“It gets worse?” Vonn said.
Bridget’s snoring filled the cave once more. Vonn adjusted her mother’s head again and the snoring stopped.
“The next morning, crack of dawn, I heard a noise in the yard and I saw my father out there unlocking the tool shed in the alley,” Nola said. “I went out to the backyard, and I squinted through the broken slats of the shed to see that he was loading up my old wagon with bins of sugar and flour and some tinned foods and the frosted carrot cakes Mr. Dorrie’s restaurant was famous for. Then he opened this old humming freezer and took out a big box of frozen pork loins and four boxes of New York strips. It was true. He was a thief.
“He piled it all up in the old wagon and dragged it all the way down the alley to the back of an electronics repair store where a bunch of men were waiting with cash. He sold them everything he brought.”
“Wow.”
“After that I followed him straight to my violin teacher’s apartment.”
“Oh.”
“So you see.”
I did.
“Even if my father had been able to get another job right away I couldn’t keep playing. Look what it cost him. His dignity. His soul. I couldn’t imagine going on with my violin. Plus, after what I’d done? The fire? I didn’t deserve it.”
No one said a word for a very long time. For my part, I was wishing that my own penance was as clear to me as Nola’s had been to her.
“If I close my eyes,” Nola said. “I can still imagine playing my favourite piece.”
We could make out Nola’s form in the darkness as she raised her left hand and bent her head toward an imagined chin rest. Straining she raised her injured right hand, holding a pretend bow, and demonstrated “Spiccato. Legato. Marcato. Pizzicato. Detache. Maretele.”
“Air violin,” I said, impressed.
Bridget startled in her sleep. Nola reached over to stroke her daughter’s cheek. “Shush now. Poor Bridge. Must be so tired. She’s been training for a triathlon.”
“She told me,” I said. “On the tram.” Nola cradled her injured wrist. “Stupid osteoporosis. Drink your milk, Vonn. Doesn’t this all feel like a dream?”
No one answered. I don’t know why.
“How long will it take us in the morning, Wolf? If you’re right and we can climb back up and find our way to the Mountain Station?” Nola asked.
“How long? An hour and a half, give or take,” I answered, underestimating. My stomach was churning. “You two need to get some sleep,” I said. “I’ll keep watch.”
Nola yawned. “I don’t know how much this wrist is going to let me sleep anyway.”
“I’m wide awake. I won’t be sleeping at all. Not a wink,” Vonn promised. Four minutes later she was snoring in harmony with Bridget. Nola followed a short time afterward, adding the occasional moan of pain to the chorus.
I could only imagine what those Devine women were dreaming about that first night. Laura Dorrie? Tattooed bikers? Deadly falls? Dead husbands? Rolling fields of mountain phlox?
Me? I played my life in rewind, my mind ablaze with scenes from my past.
That first night in Santa Sophia, after we left Byrd at the gas station, I remember feeling sick in the stinking Gremlin, bilious from guzzling those grape pops, focused on the brightest stars I’d ever seen in the inkiest of nights. (Bilious was a Byrd word, one of those unfashionable words he was hoping to resurrect. Egads! No one else I knew talked like Byrd.)
I have some vague recollection of being hauled out of the car and stumbling up some stairs and passing through a squeaky broken door. Hours later I was awakened by a horrible stench, and found myself sweating in a threadbare sleeping bag on a ragged linoleum floor with a two-year-old boy defecating beside me.
A woman’s voice rattled down the hall, startling the squatting child, who disappeared, leaving his coil of waste steaming on the floor.
When I sat up I looked around the tiny room, counting two forms in each of the two single beds, adults, or almost adults, like me. There were smaller bodies in sleeping bags on mattresses on the floor, most of them young children. Eight in all. The tiny window was open, heat blasting through it like a radiator. The clock read 5:03.
It was my habit, even then, to be prepared for the worst, but I could see that I’d fallen short in priming myself for life in the three-bedroom trailer with Aunt Kriket and her brood. The home’s odour, a vintage blend of cigarettes, stale booze and bacon, was dismally familiar. I could hear my father hacking up a lung in the kitchen. I used to worry quite a lot that he’d get cancer and I’d be alone.
Frankie’d been evasive regarding his sister because he didn’t know the answers to any of my questions. Kriket moved to California as teenaged single mother and had been tossed senseless ever since by the tempest of crying babies and gone-away men. When we lived in Mercury, Frankie’d get drunk and call her once in a while. I’d hear him crying in his room. I hated her for that. I never wondered until this moment if she’d been crying too.
My father’s parents, as Frankie’s story went, argued constantly, mostly about whose genetics were to blame for their children’s shortcomings; his mother was convinced that Frankie’d got the “lyin’-cheatin’-stealin’ gene” from the Trulinos, and his father insistent that Kriket inherited the “puta’s scratchy snatch” from the French-Canadian side.
One night when Frankie’s father was at the local bar he received a frantic call from Kriket and raced home to find his wife of twenty-five years sprawled out on the kitchen floor, dead from an apparent heart attack. Frankie claims that his old man quietly swept up the fragments of the serving platter that had shattered when his mother fell, then stretched out on the speckled linoleum beside her and had himself a fatal stroke.
The family debt doomed the siblings. Kriket moved thousands of miles away to California with her first child’s father, but Frankie, four years younger, was taken into Mercury Public Care. “Whatever happens, Wolf,” Frankie’d warn me at random moments, “do not let them take you into care.”
Gagging from the odour of the toddler’s mess on the bedroom floor, I got to my feet and went to find my father in the unfamiliar trailer. When I appeared in the entrance to the kitchen area, before I could even make out who she was, my aunt Kriket unleashed her animus upon me, pushing greasy bangs from her mingy eyes, saying, “He looks exactly like Dad.”
I could say that’s why she hated me. But it can’t be that simple.
“Don’t stare, Wilfred,” she said.
I took in her sneering, bloated face and slick, dirty hair. “A baby shit on the floor,” I said instead of good morning.
My aunt grabbed a roll of paper towels and chucked it at me, demanding, “Austin?”
“Wolf.”
“No, genius, was it Austin who no-no-ed?”
“No-no-ed? I don’t know.”
“Was his front tooth chipped?”
“I didn’t see his tooth.”
“If his tooth was chipped it’s Austin. Dodge is the chub. Them two are toilet training.” She poked me in the chest. “Got it?”
I tried to catch Frankie’s eye, my cheeks burning.
“Don’t let ’em shit on the floor.”
This woman was blaming me.
“You smack their butt and slap ’em down on the potty.” She pointed to a child’s plastic toilet in the corner of the kitchen, which at least one of the toddlers had used successfully.
“I’m not smacking any babies,” I stated.
“That’s how they learn.”
“Don’t they have diapers or something?”
“You can’t train them in diapers, genius.”
“Okay.”
“Besides, you want to
buy the diapers, moneybags?”
“Not really.”
“Didn’t think so.”
“So they just run around naked?” I asked. That could not be right. “Shitting and pissing on the floor?”
“That’s why you gotta smack ’em, Wilfred.”
Back in that bedroom I had evil thoughts about my aunt as I dropped to my knees to clean the stinking mess. In the dim light I counted nine bodies, one more than before—the toddler who’d dumped on the floor was now pretending to be asleep on a mattress beside a blond boy with a broken tooth who was groaning like he knew he stood wrongly accused. Austin. Woe is him.
One of the sleeping boys opened his eyes and saw me on my knees with the paper towel full of shit. He threw a pillow at my head, yelling, “You pig!”
“Seriously?” I said.
The boy, around seven years old, sat up, demanding, “Who are you?”
“I’m Wolf. Your cousin Wolf. Are you Yago?” Yago’s name was the only one I knew.
“You don’t know Yago?” The boy was incredulous.
I shook my head, looking at the sleeping bodies. There was a resemblance between me and a number of my cousins, even though they’d been fathered by many and sundry. “My father saw a picture of Yago once. He said I look like him.”
“If you were thirty,” the boy said with a laugh. “And a badass cholo.”
“What’s your name?”
“Jag off,” said the seven-year-old.
Later I found the bathroom, and after tightening the broken shower head, climbed into the crusty tub and let the water wash over me. I couldn’t find any shampoo so I scraped the dry splinters from the soap holder and rubbed them into my hair. The rusty water, playing chicken with me, alternated from too hot to too cold and I had to bob and weave so as not to get shocked or burned.
There was no towel, so I just stood there to air dry, watching the coppery rivulets soak into the grout, listening to a cartoon blaring on the television in the living room. The bathroom mirror was broken with the top half missing entirely and I could see only the fogged reflection of my rigid torso and the coarse dark hairs that I’d cultivated near my belly button in the months before we left Mercury.