by Jamie Mason
The thing about the truth is that if it is any way complicated, it’s slow. It gets weighed down with reasons and other people’s agendas. I could smell Paul’s brimstone wafting through my life. He wanted something from me, or maybe from Patrick. Poor Patrick. Paul would eat his lunch. It made sense. He had turned so nasty, so quickly. No wonder he was all wound up. If Paul knew what I knew about Patrick’s finances and misbehavior, he’d have put Patrick on strings, pulled my husband any way Paul wanted him pulled.
The decision to use a lie as a shovel was easy enough. If Paul’s people were nosing around my home in blue cars, buzzing my commute, and staging burglaries for a chance to paw through my purse when they weren’t chatting up my husband right under my nose, Paul would never tell me anyway. No matter how hard I strained at the cleverness to drag a little information from him, I’d never get anywhere by asking him directly. Paul Rowland was more than a bit beyond me when I was armed with nothing but suspicion and a sliver of truth. I’d just have to go at it sideways.
Confronting Patrick would be unnecessarily stressful for the both of us, and if I was wrong about the whole thing, it would be pointlessly embarrassing, too. We certainly didn’t need any setbacks in our timid dance over the floor of eggshells.
I followed the bouncing ball: Paul gave us some access to a reasonably large amount of money, and within two weeks I didn’t recognize my own stream of consciousness. My hands tingled in the afterglow of paranoid blooms of adrenaline. And I knew everything had got away from me when I poured the sugar on the saucer and tossed its paper packet into my afternoon coffee out of pure distraction. The sight of the white paper twisting through the spoon-swirled wake in my cup pushed my resolve into the passing lane in my mind. Enough. No more cruising along behind this nonsense.
The money was probably the button to press that would summon either the blue sedan or the man who took my mother away from me on that night so long ago. What I’d do with either of those things once I’d got one of them on my hook was a guess best made on the spot.
So, to rattle loose a clue, I transferred $10,000 of the available balance of my mother’s fund into Patrick’s and my regular checking account at the bank, and after the form was signed and the keyboard was tapped, I made a detailed conversation with the manager, for the benefit of anyone possibly listening, out of what it would take, penalty-and-timeline-wise, to liquidate the entire account.
Then I had some lunch.
As the cherry on top of my performance, I treated myself to what every woman who is readying herself to bolt into the anonymous wild needs. I’d been wanting new luggage anyway, so there was no need for a lie, but the drive to the nearest department store later in the day didn’t draw a blue sedan or any other obvious tail. I didn’t note anyone overly interested in my show of struggling to load the new bags into the car either.
Back in my office, feeling somehow both foolish and disappointed, I thought I’d welcome the distraction of a phone call. That was until, of course, the phone rang.
“Dee, why did you move ten thousand dollars?”
“Oh, hey! Patrick, you’re going to spoil my surprise.” The revving lie leapt out of my mouth with a speed that startled me. I hadn’t intended to leave the money out of the savings for longer than it took the withdrawal to play the dangling carrot to anyone who might be watching the account or my activity. And I certainly wasn’t planning on leaving it out for long enough to have Patrick worry about it. I had thought I had plenty of time to decide how to explain it away as an accident or an oversight. The day-to-day finances were nearly a hobby of his, but I figured I should have had at least until the statement arrived.
“I just thought we could pay off a few bills,” I said—no stammer, all dexterity. Two points for me. “And then treat ourselves—clear our heads, you know, to kind of blow out the blues and start fresh. We need it. We could relax and celebrate that we’ve finally got a little breathing room. Like a getaway. I was thinking a spa weekend? I mean, that’s what I had in mind. But, if you’d like to do something else . . .”
“You know what I’d like?” I braced for the answer I could hear he had cocked and ready. “I’d like for you to let me know when you get the urge to play around with five-figure sums before I hear about it on the automated teller. That’s what I’d like.”
“Come on. Don’t be like that. There’s really no reason for you to get all pissed off about this.”
“Why? Because it’s your money and you can do with it whatever you damned well please?”
“Good God, Pat! That’s not what I meant. Where did that come from?”
“You make decisions about our lives without me, Dee. You do it like I don’t even get a vote. It’s like I don’t even exist. I hope you don’t insult me by pretending you can’t think of any reason I might feel this way.”
I left it quiet, poised between a guilty angel at one ear and a devil tap dancing for attention on the other shoulder, squeezing a handful of hateful truths to justify a nasty argument.
Patrick’s anger rolled through the gap in the conversation. “Don’t you dare act like I’m coming out of nowhere with this.”
“I didn’t say anything, Pat.”
“Well, you need to say something. Or would you like me to cite a recent example of why I might be just a little touchy on the topic of you doing stuff behind my back?”
“First of all, I didn’t do anything behind your—”
“No? I don’t remember talking about us dipping into that money to pay off a few bills. I dunno, maybe your head was under the bathroom sink when you mentioned it.”
“Stop it. What are you doing? We’ve talked about this. And things have been good. I thought we’d made some progress after the whole Angel—”
“I swear to God, Dee, do not go there. No matter how hard you try to make it so, this is not a balance sheet where one mistake on my part—one mistake that I stopped on my own, I’d like to point out—makes up for a years-long scam you pulled on me until you got caught. You can’t say you forgive me if you’re going to keep trotting this out, because that doesn’t feel like forgiveness. It feels like leverage, kinda like it did from the start.”
“Keep trotting it out? First of all, I don’t keep trotting it out, and second, that works both ways, Pat. And I’ve apologized a hundred times.” I checked my tone, not that I wasn’t furious, but because I wanted to be able to end the call with something other than his hanging up on me. “I thought we were getting past it.”
“I thought we were getting past it, too, until you pulled this stunt.”
“It wasn’t a stunt.” Not in the sense Patrick meant it, anyway. “I’ll put the money back.”
“No. Don’t bother. Go ahead and pay off the bills. But I don’t want to go anywhere this weekend.”
“Okay.”
A graceless exit would put us out of speaking terms for at least the rest of the day. I ransacked the script in my head for the best and the kindest parting line and hated myself for the bad habit. I didn’t get there fast enough.
“Look, don’t worry about it.” Patrick sighed into the phone, a disgusted, exhausted sound that rolled into my ear with a hard thud that promised to leave me with a headache later. I shoved down the urge to hang up the call and skip the fizzling end of this pitiful conversation.
“Sorry I snapped,” he said. “I’m just tired. I’m stressed-out. It’ll be fine. It is fine. I’ll see you at home.”
“Pat, I’m—”
“I might be a little late, so go ahead and eat. See you later, okay?” And he was gone.
15
Once upon a time . . .
I texted my brother in our shorthand. Our mother had started all of her adventure stories like that, but over the years once upon a time had come to mean a summons to the pub over on Carver Street. When the phrase was hers, she would toss it into a lull in the conversation at the dinner table by way of encouragement for us to tell her about what sort of day we’d had. For Simon
and me, though, our tales had always been tamer than hers by a mile. He had kept the little intro alive more than I had, made it his own, and once upon a time between us was now just an invitation to buy each other an equal number of drinks instead of simply splitting the check down the middle as would make better sense.
I can be there by 6, he wrote back.
I’ll save you a seat, I typed.
Simon tugged my hair twice, and I looked up from the newsfeed I’d been scrolling through on my phone, checking the headlines and looking at the pictures, but not reading the articles.
“Hey,” he said as he took the barstool next to mine.
“Hey, yourself.”
“Everything okay?”
“Yeah. I’m just on my own for dinner and I didn’t feel like being all by myself.”
“It doesn’t look like you feel like having dinner, either. That’s just french fries.”
“And they’re really good.” I nudged the plate toward him.
The conversation slid through the slots and chutes of what was new in only the most surface of ways: what books we’d read, and what movies we’d seen, who was an asshole at work.
“Hey, now I’m going to get nosy,” I said. “Are you thinking about quitting? I mean, doing something else, now that there’s a little money in the bank?”
“Nah. For all the bitching I do, I actually like my job. I help people. Don’t make that face. I do! I like it. Besides, it’s really not that much money, is it?” Simon looked to the ceiling toward a heaven that our mother had never believed in. “Not that I don’t appreciate it, Ma! It’s great! And thanks. Amen.”
“Mmmmm. I’d do it, I think. Quit my job, I mean. I could go for finding something else to do. Not that information logistics isn’t riveting . . . I would do it, except that it would give Patrick a stroke.”
“He’d stroke out if you spent your own money?” Simon had a special cranky tone reserved just for the topic of Patrick’s shortcomings. I both courted it and resented it at turns.
“Don’t say that! What are you, the devil? It’s not only my money. Good Lord. I just had this conversation. It didn’t go well. I’m treading very carefully these days.”
“If you say so. I obviously know so much about being married. There. I said it before you could.”
“Ha ha.” I stuck my tongue out at him. “Seriously though, he’s been really hypersensitive lately.”
“My guess? He’s still way pissed about the pill thing.”
“Among other things, that would be a good guess.”
“It was a pretty boneheaded thing to do, Dee.”
“Whose side are you on?”
“Yours—always and obviously.” Simon double-dipped into the ketchup. “And still it was a pretty boneheaded thing to do.”
“I don’t know how else to say I’m sorry about it. I’ve apologized to Patrick a hundred times. I’ve even apologized to you, just because you had to know about it. I’ve said it and said it. I just wasn’t ready to have a baby. I know I went about it the wrong way, but then I can’t do anything right. I’ve given him a hell of a wide margin of error, because I know he’s upset. And he even gets mad about that. I tiptoe around all the time and make special dinners . . .”
“Do you ever think that maybe it’s ruined?”
“Can’t you just ever be that friend who thinks Patrick is great when I think he’s great and calls him a rat bastard when I don’t?”
“No.”
Simon stared into my scowl until it unraveled and we both laughed.
“So what are you saying? My marriage is ruined?” I continued my new trend of not telling Simon everything. I couldn’t yet face his reaction to the Angela episode.
“Yeah. Maybe.” Simon shrugged.
“Really? You’re just going to blurt it out? Just like that?”
“What’s the point of not saying it? Things get ruined. It happens. You guys were always kind of a weird match. And I wasn’t even all that surprised about the baby stuff. I remember how you played with dolls—giving them Mohawks and seeing if you could make parachutes out of garbage bags. Very maternal.”
“You’re horrible.” I pulled the plate of my french fries out of his reach.
“Hey, I’m not the one throwing babies over railings.” He reached across me and slid the plate back between us. “But seriously, if it is screwed up that bad, there’s no point in taking forever to admit it. It’s not the end of the world. It’s not even the end of you, you know?”
“You just have it all worked out, don’t you? A marriage is a process, Simon. Not a fixed thing that never changes. And it’s not about ‘matching.’ People are too complicated to expect anyone else to be like them. It’s more about . . . I think it’s a decision, and then the handling and care of the life you want to have. Bottom line, it’s not like I haven’t forgiven him for things over the years.”
“Yeah, I don’t know if all that is actually ‘forgiveness.’ I think it might be part of the same problem: you not handling things head-on. Look, I’m not being hard on you. You’re awesome. You know I think you’re awesome. But I know you have this picture in your mind of what things are supposed to look like . . .” Simon let the conclusion drift in on its own. “I mean, what do you think Mom would say about all this?”
“I know what she would say. She knew.”
My mother had known of the pill game from its first days. In the early weeks after she came to live with Patrick and me, there had been a scare, a missed cycle, and I’d run straight for the doctor. Except that my doctor was out of town and it wasn’t the sort of worry I was willing to wait more than a week to unknot. I didn’t trust the drugstore tests. I wanted blood drawn and an expert telling me to my face that I wasn’t pregnant. I landed at the family planning clinic, waiting hours with a brain blanked by dread. When they called me back to speak with the doctor, my wool skirt was picked clean of fuzz and a small mountain of frayed lint was the only proof I had that I hadn’t sat motionless the whole time. I would have sworn on a stack of holy books that I hadn’t moved.
Once they’d reassured me I wasn’t pregnant this time, they offered me birth control.
I actually soothed myself for quite some time with the deflection that it hadn’t been my idea. They offered. I accepted. Simple. Unplanned and undevious.
That night, having not said a thing to Patrick about the worry or its solution, I imagined I could still feel the dry, little pill on the back of my throat. I checked in on my mother before I went to bed. She was, as she almost always was in those months, propped on a mountain of pillows, book in hand, nerd glasses somehow invisible under her eagle brows that arched over the frames. But she was smiling, too. I was stabbed straight through in that moment, washed in a preview of how much I would miss her looking up from her reading, distracted at my interruption, but warming up instantly to become all the way mine whenever I walked through the door. I often went through those days in a fog of sleepiness for how often our “good-night” turned into hours of talking. But I didn’t mind.
I confessed the whole day to my mother—the bargaining with God, the frenzy, the pills, the secret. The whole time she was with us, my mother was sharpest at night. She was often foggy during the days, warm and sweet and subtly soft around the edges, but as she was dying, her glinting clarity rose with the moon. Are you allergic to babies or just Patrick’s babies? We talked it through in hushed voices late into the night, behind the closed door, and only managed to clean and polish the obvious: my little, off-white lie wasn’t a sturdy barge pole to push off with. It wasn’t going to get me very far from my concerns.
“So did you give her a ration of shit like you’re giving me?” Simon asked.
“To be fair, she was a lot smoother than you are.” I stirred my drink.
“She always was.”
Which, of course, steered us onto the rocks of our mother as a topic of conversation, her life and times, and what secrets she took to the grave.
“
What’s really bothering you, Dee?”
“What do you mean? I don’t have an agenda. I just wonder, that’s all.”
“No. No, you don’t. That’s not all. You never wonder about her work, not out loud anyway, unless something else is bothering you. What is it? What’s going on? Whenever you itch, you scratch it with that. Why?”
“I don’t know that I do that,” I said, fluttering the sweetener packets in their white china holder.
“Do I have eyes? Do I have ears?”
“Do you have a big, obnoxious mouth?” I hit him on the shoulder and shut him down with a burst of horseplay until his beer got knocked over.
Our two identical checks came and went. I hugged my brother hard, then went home to a stiffly apologetic husband and an hour’s stint at the computer with Google and my mother’s name, and Paul Rowland’s, and now Brian Menary’s.
16
The corner of your eye is the watchdog of the brain. My mother was big on what we might or might not catch in the arc of our peripheral vision. She made games of the lessons that sharpened the farthest reaches of our sight. She’d write things, sometimes quite small, on a piece of paper, and if we could read it, off to one side or the other, without moving our heads or eyes, we scored points. But she was tricky. I got caught out on to be or not to be because she’d actually written to be or not do he. Of course, my brain had taken the shortcut and my overall score had taken the hit. Never trust a shortcut, she’d say. Use one if you have to, but sacrifice a goat in thanks if it didn’t land you on your ass.
I remember seething with envy over Simon’s points bonanza for translating Your chores are (B), but you (Ar) to (Fe) your shirts anyway. He’d been studying the periodic table of elements for an upcoming exam, so our mother took out two birds with Your chores are boron (B), but you argon (Ar) to iron (Fe) your shirts anyway.
The unreliability of the watchdog was also a way for our mother to teach us to take our own mental temperature. If a sharp pull from the corner of the eye resulted in anything useful, well, there you go. And if it didn’t spotlight anything important or even anything interesting for more than a few times in a row, then it meant you had been working too hard and probably needed to power down and read a comic book or something.