The Book of Why

by Nicholas Montemarano

  “There’s a bologna heel in the fridge,” Evelyn says.

  Ralph follows Gloria into the kitchen.

  “Smell it first,” Evelyn says.

  From behind me comes music, the end of the movie.

  “I shouldn’t blame her,” Evelyn says. “I used to do the same when I was little. Never liked to sleep alone. Probably why I married so young.”

  She pulls a cigarette from a pack on the coffee table.

  “Has Gloria ever spoken?”

  “She talks in her sleep,” Evelyn says. “Some nights we hear her, and we go in to listen. We even recorded her a few times.”

  She finds a book of matches in the pocket of a coat draped over a chair. “One left,” she says. “Fingers crossed it works.” She strikes the match and it catches, but it dies as she touches it to her cigarette; she puffs furiously, but only part of the cigarette lights. “Probably a sign I should quit,” she says. She looks through the coat pockets again, then tries the jackets in the closet. “Bingo,” she says when she finds a lighter. “I’ll quit when I’m forty,” she says. “They say every cell in your body’s new every seven years.”

  Gloria signs to her mother.

  “Sorry,” Evelyn says. “Back to bed.”

  Gloria runs upstairs, and Ralph follows her.

  Evelyn taps her cigarette over her palm; she holds out her hand as if offering me the ashes. “Here I am again,” she says. “Just like when I was a kid—up late with the boob tube. I don’t even care what’s on.”

  The screen goes dark, and with it the room. “Batteries must be dead,” she says. “Surprised they worked at all—we haven’t used that TV in years.” She stands, groans like an old woman even though she’s in her twenties. “I think we have some batteries in the kitchen drawer,” she says.

  I wait to see if she’ll find any. “Shit,” she says. “I would’ve sworn we had some in here.”

  “I can help look.”

  She sighs. “Soon it’ll be morning,” she says.

  I leave her in the dark, flicking the lighter.

  I find Sam sitting on the windowsill, one leg outside, the moon low above the cemetery. I stand in the doorway, not wanting to frighten her, watching her foot to make sure it doesn’t lose contact with the floor.

  She moves suddenly, and I take a step toward her.

  She pulls her leg back into the room. “Don’t worry,” she says. “I wasn’t going to jump.”

  “I wasn’t sure what you were doing.”

  “There was a couple fighting,” she says. “The guy said, ‘You always have to have the last word!’ And she said, ‘No, I don’t.’ And he said, ‘Right there—you’re doing it again.’ And she said, ‘No, I’m not.’ I thought he was going to hit her.”

  She closes the window. “Weird, but it reminded me of my brother.”

  “What about him?”

  “We had a joke when we were kids,” she says. “My father would have these mood swings. He’d call us in this voice, and we just knew. He’d put us in chairs, back to back, and he’d circle us for hours, screaming about whatever, pitting us against each other—you know, which one of us was going to get the belt. The joke, if you want to call it that, was that whenever we heard his voice change, whenever we knew it was coming, one of us would say to the other, ‘Any last words?’ and we’d crack up. But, in the end, there weren’t any last words—no note, nothing.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “Actually, I can do better than that. How’s this? Sometimes life really, really sucks, and it isn’t fair, and I’m sorry.”

  “Thanks,” she says. “That is much better than I’m sorry.”

  “I can’t take credit for that one,” I say. “I was jogging one morning, years ago, and I ran past a police officer trying to help this woman. She was in her forties, a big woman. She was wearing a white nightgown and one slipper, and she was having a nervous breakdown right there on the street. She was shaking and crying and she was just—I mean, she was in pain, you could see it. She was leaning against a brick building with that one slipper hanging off her foot, and people were watching, and there I was running my five miles, and just as I passed I heard the officer say, ‘Listen, I know. Sometimes life really, really sucks. But…’ and I didn’t hear what came after but.”

  “Sometimes,” Sam says, “I feel like that woman.”

  I lie on my mattress, wince when I turn on my side. “My ribs feel like that woman.”

  “Did you check their medicine cabinet?”

  “Didn’t see one.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Nothing above the sink, not even a mirror.”

  “My husband was afraid of mirrors.” Sam sits on her mattress, hugs her knees. “At home, in clothing stores, he’d avoid them. The rearview mirror in our car—he’d turn it so that it faced out. Not the safest way to drive. His own reflection was the only thing in the world he was afraid of.”

  “He was probably afraid of many things.”

  “He wasn’t even afraid of my father,” she says. “I think my father was afraid of him, and I was like, Okay, this is the guy—he’ll keep me safe.”

  She lies back on her mattress and turns away from me. “He was much worse than my father.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “Don’t know,” she says. “Don’t care.”

  A few minutes later she says, “I’m pretty sure he was gay.”

  “Your husband?”

  “My brother,” she says. “I think that’s why my father was so hard on him. My father knew, even though my brother never came out. He died when he was sixteen. I don’t think he ever had a boyfriend.”

  Before I can say anything: “He used a gun,” she says. “It was my father’s, so maybe that was my brother’s last word, his final fuck you. My father found him and made me look. He dragged me into the bathroom and said, ‘Look what he did to me,’ as if he was the victim. But I didn’t want that in my mind for the rest of my life. When my father turned my head, I closed my eyes. He dragged me out of the bathroom, and that’s when I realized someone would clean it up, would take my brother away, so I broke free from my father and looked. Just for a second, and I was much calmer then. But I had to look again, to be sure. He was facedown, but it was really him.”

  I move my mattress closer to hers and put my hand on her back. “If I knew what came after but,” I tell her, “I’d say it now.”

  I WALK RALPH in the cemetery, letting her off leash even though a sign tells me not to. When she was younger she would have bounded alongside these graves, would have chased squirrels and woodchucks, would have tried in vain to eat bees and butterflies, would have found sticks and played keep-away with me and Cary, but at twelve she stays by my side, sniffs flowers and trees. Cary used to say dogs were made by God so God could slow down and smell the grass. Ralph reminds me time and again that life can be just this—a blade of grass. Then this—a single footprint drying in mud beside a gravestone. But the human asks questions: Whose footprint, why barefoot, why only one? Better to be a dog: the entire universe is one flower, then the entire universe is the next flower—the ever-present present, nothing more. This overturned gravestone, for example, or this one, forced prostrate by the wind, facedown as if to imprint the names of the dead into the earth.

  Back at the house, Jay tells Evelyn that he needs to pick up wood from a friend; the storm ripped off the roof of the shed in the backyard. Evelyn tells him to take Gloria for the ride.

  I offer to go with him, help load his truck.

  “I’ll be fine,” he says.

  “I’d like to show some gratitude.”

  “Unnecessary,” he says.

  “It’ll make me feel useful,” I tell him, and he says okay.

  We drive along roads bordered by farms. The smell of manure wafts in the air and into the open car windows. Cows chew grass and swat flies with their involuntary tails while two horses lie side by side, the water trough only a few feet away. We turn onto another, smalle
r road, where Amish children bike uphill against the wind, trying to steer while holding on to their hats.

  Gloria sits between me and Jay, clicking her seat belt.

  Jay says, “Hey, leave that alone.”

  She clicks it once more, then buckles the belt.

  Jay swerves the car to avoid a tree limb in the road. My seat belt has too much give, and my side slams into the door. “Sorry about that,” Jay says. He has a calm demeanor, someone you’d want in charge during a tornado, but he has subtle nervous habits—rubbing his shaved head, straightening his thick eyebrows. I can see now, when I look at him closely, that he really is no more than twenty-three or twenty-four, though already much older—worry lines on his face, dirt beneath his fingernails, in the cracks in his palms. He and Evelyn must have had Gloria when they were teenagers.

  We park in a dirt lot filled with dozens of vehicles, mostly pickup trucks. Beyond the lot are tables and booths set up in rows—an outdoor flea market. I feel pulled back into an old self, or perhaps an old self is pulled back into me—the young man who wanted to save everything, who couldn’t walk past a stoop sale without bringing home cards, photos, glasses without lenses, any objects that called out to me, and who couldn’t help but look for signs in these objects, and who made them into junk sculptures, sold them as art for a few years after college, before I wrote my first book.

  I stop to look through old photo albums: the long-ago dead walking along a beach, black-and-white wedding photos, the adult eyes of children at the beginning of the twentieth century. Stacks of postcards, many with notes written on the back. I close my eyes, count to ten, then randomly select a postcard. An old game. A photograph of St. Pancras Church in Rome—the same name as my parish in Queens. Coincidence, I tell myself, and even if not, even if it is a sign, what to do with the sign, how to know what it means? Perhaps there are signs everywhere, but in the end they add up to nothing—a scavenger hunt with no prize. Thirty years later, I remember the facts we were made to memorize in grade school. Pancras, whose name in Greek means “the one who holds everything,” was a Christian convert martyred—beheaded at fourteen. An orphan, he’s the patron saint of children. The note on the back of the postcard reads, “Having a nice time but missing you. Nice seeing you recently. Love, GDN.” I can’t make out the name of the addressee, but my father’s initials are enough to make me buy the postcard.

  Years ago, when I told my shrink about the signs I would find in objects, he said, “Eric, what’s the story you’re telling yourself?”

  “That nothing is random,” I told him. “That there’s an order to the universe, a reason for everything.”

  “And if that were true?”

  “Then I could make sure—”

  “Make sure what?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “What would it mean,” he said, “if your story weren’t true—if there’s no reason for the things that happen?”

  “I’d probably—I don’t know what I’d do,” I said.

  “Breathe,” he said, and I tried.

  “Eric,” he said, “I want you to know, it doesn’t matter to me what you believe. But here’s what I’d like us to figure out—the difference between what you believe and what you really want to believe.”

  Jay is holding a revolver. On the table behind him are carbines and muskets and rifles with bayonets. They don’t look to my amateur eye like the kinds of guns people would use today to shoot deer or ducks or each other; they invoke duels more than anything. Jay points the revolver at his own head. He says, “Any last words?” Then he puts his other hand on his chin and looks up to the sky as if deep in thought, but just as he opens his mouth to speak, he makes a sound meant to be a gun firing, and this makes Gloria laugh. She signs something, and Jay says, “Too late. You only get one shot at last words.”

  He puts down the gun and picks up Gloria, holds her upside down by her feet. She’s screaming, but I get the sense they’ve played this game before. The last thing she wants is to be put down. “Any last words?” he says, and her screams become laughter, and he asks again, “Any last words?” and now she’s gasping, and he lifts her higher and asks again, he pretends to drop her but stops before she hits the ground. He flips her right side up, her hair wild and face red. She signs something, and her father says, “No more—that’s enough.”

  We keep walking. I can’t not stop to look: rows of lamps in the shape of Greek gods; bins filled with brass doorknobs; baseball mitts flat as pancakes; cast-iron pans people fried eggs in a hundred years ago; old chocolate tins and cigar boxes and castor oil bottles; scalpels and specula, lancets and forceps and curettes; handcuffs and straitjackets and horse bits; stocks and pillories; daggers and swords and military helmets; stacks of Superman comics; dolls dressed in wedding gowns, their eyes rattling in their skulls; mannequin heads in a bathtub; wigs blowing along the ground like skittish animals.

  Jay stops to speak with a leather-faced man selling old Life magazines and used books. Gloria is looking through boxes of Beatles records. The man brings Jay eight long pieces of wood. They speak in shorthand, the way some men do. Wife is fine, kids are fine, house is fine, business is slow, no need to thank him for the wood, and then we’re leaving, four pieces of wood each, and I wonder if I’ve missed a sign, some clue as to why I’m here, what I’m supposed to say or do next.

  In the parking lot, we load wood onto the truck. Gloria is humming your song again. I ask how she knows the song, did she write it. She shrugs. I hear my shrink’s voice from twenty years ago: “The mind can be quite powerful,” he said, “when we’re desperate to believe something.”

  During the drive home, alongside horses dreaming their thirsty dreams, cows tail-swatting the same persistent flies, an Amish woman hanging wash, Gloria starts humming your song again.

  That night, after dinner, Sam says, “Good news. We’ll have a rental car in the morning.”

  Gloria signs something to her mother.

  “No,” Evelyn says. “Ralph can’t stay.”

  Gloria signs something else.

  “She’s not your dog,” Evelyn says.

  “I told you,” Jay says to Evelyn. “We need to get her a dog.”

  We’re sitting on the porch. Through the screen I can hear the evening news. Something about the war—a war I know very little about except whatever my mother can’t help sharing when I see her.

  Gloria stares at me for a long while. She moves closer. She smiles, points to her own face, then holds out her arms.

  “It’s a game,” Evelyn says. “She wants you to laugh big.”

  “At what?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Jay says.

  I give Gloria a fake laugh.

  She puts her index fingers on her cheeks, below her eyes, and pulls her fingers down.

  “Cry small,” Jay says, and I pout my lips and sniffle and put my hands over my face and make the quiet sounds of crying.

  She pulls my hands away from my face.

  I stop crying; she looks into my eyes to make sure.

  She makes another sign, and Jay says, “Cry big,” and I cry louder, my shoulders shaking. She pulls my hands away from my face again.

  In the morning, as we’re about to leave, I tell Sam to wait. “Forgot my keys,” I say.

  I go upstairs to Gloria’s room, where she’s sleeping on her back, one arm stretched over the side of the bed, the other covering her eyes as if she’s trying not to see whatever she’s dreaming about.

  I want to touch her face, cover her with a blanket. I want to ask, of course, if you’re in there—if it’s really you. I want to say something, leave a note under her pillow, but I have no idea what the note would say.

  This book, I suppose, is that note.

  For a few minutes I watch her breathe and imagine her older, a young woman. I see different versions of her life play out in my mind’s eye. In some versions an older man who looks like me is telling her a story. We’re sitting on a park bench, or in my ho
use in Chilmark, or in the cemetery behind the house in Queens, but always I’m telling her this story. I keep asking her to tell me how it ends.

  AS WE BRING her bag up the stairs to her apartment—she lives a few blocks from the Flatiron—Sam says she has a bad feeling.

  She’d said that in the car, too. She was afraid to go home, and so was I—to Chilmark, I mean—so I told her she could bring me to New York. No need to drive me all the way to the ferry. I’d see my mother—that would make her happy.

  “Sometimes,” she’d said in the car, “I just know things.”

  She hesitates now before walking up the final flight to the fourth floor. Ralph is already up there, waiting for us.

  I walk past her. “What’s the apartment number?”

  “Four twelve,” she says. “Second one on the left.”

  It’s evident right away that she’s been robbed: knob broken, doorjamb split.

  I walk into the apartment without fear, which is not to say that bravery is involved. There’s a difference between bravery, which has to do with courage, and fearlessness, which has to do—at least in my case—with believing you have nothing more to lose.

  An efficiency efficiently divided, rooms within a room. A kitchenette just big enough for two to stand back to back—one person can wash while the other dries, chop while the other cooks. There’s a messy order to the place: books alphabetized by author on built-in shelves; three paint-splattered wooden chairs around a small table. Atop a large wood desk: piles of papers, coffee mug, laptop. Hanging on the walls are a few paintings and two blown-up photos: a man who could be her father, another who could be her brother. Same red hair, same shape to the lips. An unmade pull-out couch-bed, two armchairs, a small TV. An empty picture frame on top of the TV and another on a small end table. A bare wall with two hooks. Below each hook is the ghosting stain—a dark square—of whatever used to hang there. All of this, door to fire escape, in twelve steps. No other signs of a break-in: nothing on the floor, no drawers open.