by Steven Gould
I could hear the receiver brush her cheek as she shook her head. “You never answered my letters... I must have hurt you terribly.”
“I never got your letters. How many letters?” I had the old sensation in the pit of the stomach, like when Dad was going to hit me, or when I faced up to Mark, Millie’s old boyfriend.
“God damn your father! I only sent a couple of long letters from the hospital, but I sent one once a month the year after I got out. Then, when I didn’t get answers, I tapered off to four or five a year. The last few years, I just sent presents on your birthday. Did you get those?”
“No.”
“That bastard! And I left you with him...”
I shifted on the couch, uncomfortable. I wanted her to stop talking about him, to stop reminding me. I wanted to throw up, run away, hang up the phone, or jump. Jump away to Stillwater, jump away to the Brooklyn Bridge. Jump away to Long Island and walk on the sand while the Atlantic rolled storm breakers at the beach.
“It’s okay, Mom,” but my voice convinced neither of us.
She paused, then said carefully, with a catch in her voice, “Did he hurt you, Davy?”
Don’t tell her. Why make her feel worse? But part of me wanted her to feel worse, wanted to make her feel bad, wanted her to feel some of the pain that a twelve-year-old boy felt. “Sometimes. He used to hit me with his belt, with the rodeo buckle. I missed a few days of school.” My voice was matter-of-fact.
She broke then, her voice dissolving into sobs, uncontrollable, and I regretted saying anything. I felt overwhelming guilt.
“I’m sorry,” she said between the sobs. “I’m sorry” and “Please forgive me.” Over and over again until the words blended with the sobs, like cries of pain and grief themselves, a litany that seemed never ending.
“Shhhh. It’s okay, Mom. It’s okay.” I don’t know why, but I’d stopped feeling like crying. A melancholy sadness, almost sweet in its intensity, filled me, and I thought about Millie holding me while I cried. “Shhhh. I forgive you. It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault. Shhhh.”
Finally, she ran down and I heard her blow her nose. “I have a lot of guilt about leaving you. I thought I’d worked through it with my therapist years ago. I hate the way my nose runs when I cry!”
“It must be hereditary.”
“You too? Do you cry much?”
“I don’t know, Mom. I guess some lately. I’m not very good at it. I guess I haven’t practiced enough.”
“Is that a joke?”
“Sort of.”
“What do you do, Davy? To make ends meet?”
I’m a bank robber. “Oh, I have banking interests. I do okay—I get to travel a lot.” Lies. More guilt and self-contempt. “What do you do?”
“I’m a travel agent. I get to travel, too. It’s very different from being a housewife.”
“Travel is a good escape, isn’t it?” I said. As one runaway to another. Do you teleport, too? I wanted to ask but if she didn’t she’d think I was mad.
“Yes. Sometimes escape is what we all need. I’ve missed you, Davy.”
Ah, there were my tears again, just when I thought they’d gone away. “I missed you, Mom.” I held the mouthpiece away, but she heard my sobs. I quelled them, though, quickly.
The distress in her voice was palpable. “I’m sorry, baby. So sorry.”
“It’s okay. I just get like this sometimes. And you’re right. I hate the way my nose runs.”
A nervous laugh. “You still try to cheer me up, Davy. My own court jester. You’re very special.”
More special than you can imagine.
I wanted to ask something, but I was still scared, terrified, of rejection. Then she asked it and I didn’t have to.
“Can I see you, Davy?”
“I wanted to ask that. I can fly out there this week.”
“Don’t you have to work?”
“No.”
“Well, maybe next time, but I’m going to Europe in a week on a tour, but we fly out of New York and I could take an extra day and lay over.”
I laughed.
“What’s so funny?”
“Nothing. Well... a friend of mine said if you got back in my life, we couldn’t step back into our old relationship, but would have to redefine it.”
“He sounds very wise.”
“She is. But the instant you said you could come here, I started worrying about cleaning up my room.”
She laughed. “Ah. Well, maybe some things stay the same.”
We talked for an hour more. I learned about a man she was seeing, some college courses she’d taken, and the beauty of the upper California coast. In turn I talked about Millie, my apartment, Millie, New York, and Millie.
“She sounds wonderful,” Mom said. “I’ll call you when I’ve got my flight information. Are you sure you have room? I’ve heard about New York apartments and I can afford a hotel.”
“Those are Manhattan apartments you heard about. I’ve got lots of room.” And I’ll buy a new bed, I thought. “If I’m not here, leave the information on the answering machine.”
“Okay, Davy. I was really glad to hear from you.”
“Me, too, Mom. Good night. I love you.”
She started crying again and I hung up.
Chapter 9
I had a bonded cleaning service come in on Wednesday. It had been so long since I’d opened the door to the apartment that it stuck and I had to get them to lean on it from outside before it would open. There was a funny expression on their faces when the door finally came open.
“Jesus!” I said. “What’s that smell?”
The first of the three women pointed over her shoulder in answer to my question. I looked around her.
Someone had built a nest in the hallway outside my door with newspapers and old couch cushions. There was a coffee can buzzing with flies beside it. By the smell, it was a makeshift toilet, well used.
“Oh, wow,” I said, embarrassed. “I don’t come in this way.”
“No wonder,” said the woman. She was a tall black woman with wide shoulders and a streak of gray that went back over her right ear. “I’m Wynoah Johnson, from Helping Hands. Are you Mr. Reece?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. I understand you want the deluxe treatment. You want us to start with the stairwell? That’ll be extra since it’s not in the apartment. It’s also what we call ‘excessive filth.’ “
I felt ashamed for some reason. “Uh, I guess so. I don’t care what it costs. I really didn’t know about it.”
She shrugged. “Okay. You really ought to talk to your landlord. This building got a super?”
I shook my head.
“Charlene,” said Wynoah, “get this shit out to the trash.”
“Ahhhhhh,” said one of the other women, a young Hispanic, “why do I always get stuck with the pee-pee?” She put down her bucket and broom and went downstairs, holding the coffee can at arm’s length.
Wynoah was sizing up my living room. I pointed at the outside hall and asked her, “You see that sort of mess often?”
“Too often. When an apartment is empty for a while in some of these buildings where the doors don’t shut right, you get squatters and they can’t get the water turned on because they don’t have a lease. They get chased out and we get called to clean up.” She was nodding at the room with its video and stereo equipment, couch, recliner, and bookshelves. “Hell, the way the hall looked, I thought this was gonna be one of those nasty jobs. This ain’t nothin’. Let’s see the rest.”
I showed her the spare room, with the computer desk and the bookshelves and the brand-new futon couch I’d bought the day before as a spare bed. My bedroom with a futon platform bed, bookshelves, and a padded antique rocker I bought in Soho. The bathroom and kitchen were both tiny.
“Well, it looks like a lot of dust to me, but nothing too bad. Books collect dust,” she informed me in a tone that implied distaste.
It occurred to me that t
hey were the first humans in my apartment other than myself. Even when I’d viewed the apartment, before renting it eleven months before, the broker just sent me over with the keys, not bothering to come herself.
Of course, part of it was paranoia. I still had three-quarters of a million dollars in my money closet. I didn’t want people to wonder about that empty space between the kitchen and the bedroom. But another part of it was that it was much easier to bring a book home than a person. A book or a video or a sandwich from the deli... all of these things were comfortable, undemanding things. But they didn’t make the place alive, not like people did.
I visited the Hamilton Insurance Company that afternoon, after the cleaning service left. Hamilton Insurance used recorded automated telephone ads, the one that started, “Have you ever considered the security of life insurance?” I stuck my head in their reception area, acquired a jump site, and left without speaking to anyone.
Later, after all of the company’s employees had left, I returned and located their automated telemarketing equipment set up in a corner office. I found an employee roster with home phone numbers in the reception area.
An hour later, the equipment was calling the company’s employees and playing the ad for them. Over and over and over again.
I went home, to bed, a smile on my face.
At 11 P.M. Mr. Washburn began beating his wife again. There was very little escalation, just two angry sentences and then she started screaming again and I could hear his fists hitting her, wet, meaty sounds.
I jumped to their landing and began pounding on the door, hard, rapidly. “Stop it! Stop it!” I shouted.
Her screams stopped and I heard heavy steps cross to the door. It opened and he stood there, red-faced, eyes narrowed, teeth bared. “What the fuck do you want?” One hand was closed in a fist and his right hand was behind the door.
I’d seen him before, on the steps, leaving or coming in. He was taller than me, and heavy in the middle. He was barefoot in dark slacks and a white tank-top undershirt. He brought the other hand out from behind the door. There was a gun in it.
I froze.
He asked again. “What do you want?”
In the background I heard his wife moaning. A familiar smell came to my nose, the smell of scotch. My stomach hurt.
I jumped behind him, grabbed his waist and heaved. He was heavy, very heavy, and the second he felt my arms around him, he threw himself back. I lost my balance and started to fall, all of his weight coming down on me. Before we landed, I jumped to Central Park, at the playground near 100th on the West Side.
We went down in the sand pit, next to the concrete hill with all the tunnels. Washburn’s body drove all the air out of my lungs and he twisted, quick as a snake, to grab at me, to point his gun at me.
I jumped away, reflexively, then gasped for breath in the Stanville Public Library. God, he was heavy. After five minutes I could breathe without stabbing pain.
I jumped back to the Brooklyn apartment and looked in the Washburns’ front door, still standing open. There was a sound from their front bedroom and I called out, “Hello? Are you all right?”
Great. You know she’s not all right. Idiot!
I walked in hesitantly. She was lying on the floor by the bed, trying to pull herself up. I forgot about trespassing and went to her. “Don’t try to move. I’ll call an ambulance.”
“No. No ambulance.” She was still trying to pull herself up, trying to get onto the bed. I gave up and helped her onto it, but she wouldn’t lie down. She wanted to sit.
“Where is he?”
“Manhattan.”
“How long?”
“Huh?”
“How long has he been gone?”
“Oh. He just left.”
Her face was swollen. Both her eyes had been blacked, but the way the color spread, I figured they’d been done the day before. She was bleeding from her mouth and there was a cut on her forehead that also seeped blood.
“My purse.”
“Ma’am?”
“Please. Get me my purse. I think it’s in the kitchen.”
I looked at her dubiously. For all I knew she was about to have a brain hemorrhage from the beating she took. She should be in a hospital.
“Please... it’s got the address of the shelter. The shelter for battered women.”
I went and found her purse, came back, and dug through it at her request. The address was written on a small piece of lavender stationery. There were hearts and flowers at the top.
Jesus.
I called a taxi and helped her pack some things—some clothes, some money stashed away in a book, and an album of old photographs. Then I eased her down the stairs to meet the cab.
She was moving better by the time we got downstairs and I was beginning to believe she just looked like death. I paid the cabbie—overpaid him—in advance and made sure he knew the address. I also told him that if she got worse to go straight to the nearest emergency room.
The cab pulled away and drove down the street, getting smaller and smaller and smaller. I hoped she’d make it, but to help, I’d put two thousand dollars in her purse while I helping her pack.
I was scared to stay in the apartment Thursday and Friday, scared I’d mess it up and scared of Washburn.
On impulse, I jumped to the Delta terminal at Dallas—Fort Worth International Airport and hopped a flight to Albuquerque, where I played tourist for most of the day, including taking the aerial tramway to the top of the Sandia Mountains. I wore myself out enough to sleep after I jumped home.
The alarm went off at 10 P.M. and I called Millie.
“What did you do today?”
I hesitated. “I piddled around, played tourist, played with some computers.” I smiled to myself. “I was trying not to think about Mom’s visit.”
“Nervous.”
I exhaled. “Very.” The weight of my anticipation was heavy, like an undone chore with no time to do it before my dad got home. It didn’t feel like eagerness at all. It felt like dread.
“Well, I can understand that. You have every right to be nervous.”
“What? You think it’s going to go bad?”
She took a quick breath. “No, sweet. I think it will be fine, but it’s been so long since you’ve seen her, you don’t know what to expect. You’ve had a lot of bad things happen since she left—it doesn’t surprise me that you don’t know what to expect. That would make anybody nervous.”
“Ah. Well, I was wondering if I wasn’t weirding out....”
“No more than the circumstances dictate.” She was quiet for a moment and then said, “You surprise me, Davy, sometimes, at how well you do handle these things, given all that’s happened to you.”
I swallowed. “You don’t feel it from this side, Millie. I don’t know if I can stand it, sometimes. It hurts.”
“Most people in your circumstances wouldn’t even know it hurt, Davy. They would have built a wall of unfeeling so thick that they wouldn’t know when they were sad or in pain or even happy. The pain would be so great and so close that they could only hide from it and all feelings.
“To know that it hurts is the only way to get past it, to heal.”
“Humph. If you say so. Sounds like those other people have the right idea. To not hurt sounds like a good idea.”
“You listen to me, David Rice! You go that route and you won’t feel joy or love, either. What happened between us would never have happened. Is that what you want?”
“No, never that,” I said quietly, hastily. “I do love you. That hurts sometimes, too.”
“Well good. It’s supposed to.” She took a ragged breath. “At least it hurts me sometimes, too. I think it’s worth it. I hope you feel that way too?”
“Yeah. I do.”
“Are you coming a week from tomorrow?” she asked.
“I could come on Thursday again.”
“Oh... I’ve got a test on Friday. I’ve got to study for it—but you can stay until Tue
sday if you like.”
I smiled a small, satisfied smile. “Okay. I will.”
Later, I jumped to Stillwater and watched Millie’s bedroom window for a while. Then I jumped to the Albuquerque airport, let my ears equalize, jumped to the parking lot at the base of the tramway, let the ears equalize again, and jumped to the observation deck atop the mountain. This time there was some pain, but the ears cleared after a second.
I have to find someplace halfway between, somewhere around 7800 feet, as another stepping stage.
The city was scattered below, like stars fallen to earth, grids of streets and parking lots, punctuated by pillars of building lights. It was two hours earlier than New York, so there was still a slight glow on the far western horizon that shaded from light blue to black, with stars directly above almost as dense as the city lights below.
There was a light wind, but the air was very cold, making the light from above and below somehow distant, remote, and not at all warm. Looking at them, beautiful as they were, made me feel cold within. They weren’t the sort of things one should watch alone, because the scale of them, the vast numbers, made one feel diminished. They made me feel very small.
I held my nose and jumped home in stages.
I met Mom at the airport with roses and a limousine.
There was a large crowd waiting outside the security gate at La Guardia. The airport is so crowded that they don’t let anybody but passengers into the actual gates. Naturally, this didn’t stop me. I just jumped past security to a spot I could see down the long corridor, well past the metal detectors and carry-on luggage scanners.
Her connection from Chicago was twenty minutes late, increasing my anxiety. I thought about plane crashes, mixed signals, missed planes. It would really be something if she turned out not to be on the plane. I smelled the roses for the twentieth time—the scent had gone from a light perfume to a cloying scent, almost rancid. I knew it wasn’t the flowers, only my anxiety.
Stop smelling them, then!
I paced from one end of the gate’s waiting area to the other, occasionally sniffing the flowers.
When the flight did arrive she was among the last off, walking slowly, a briefcase in her hand.