The Good Luck of Right Now

by Matthew Quick

  I’ve tried to speak with Wendy, or her curled-up blanket-covered body on the couch. At first I said I was sorry about what happened. I asked if we should report Adam to the police and offered to go with her, to hold her hand the whole time while she reported the violence her man had committed—I even told her how hard it was for me to be alone when I had to talk to the hospital people and social workers about the squid cancer that was eating Mom’s brain, how I wish I had had someone to hold my hand and stay by my side—but Wendy did not respond; she didn’t even make eye contact with me. Then I asked her if she wanted to counsel me about having a beer with a woman at the bar, thinking that maybe returning to our original roles would help her feel better and more normal. But Wendy didn’t even pick up her head. Next I tried to talk to her about the weather and current events, which I had read about on the Internet at the library, but she didn’t respond. She kept her head buried in the cushions of the couch. So I just listened to the tough (or lazy) birds outside the kitchen window, and I thought about how those little winged creatures sing on and on regardless of who dies or who gets beaten or who feels like a miserable failure.

  The birds are steady as the sun.

  Last night, I wanted to watch a movie, because I was feeling the need for some “movie magic,” as Mom used to say, because she and I always watched a movie when one of us was down or when something bad happened in the world. “Movie magic is just the thing,” Mom would say as she held up a VCR tape and shook it like a tambourine. So I picked out one of her favorite VCR tapes—An Officer and a Gentleman—shook it and said, “Movie magic!” as if those words and the shaking could heal Wendy, trying very hard to believe in the power of believing. Wendy was still stretched out with her head buried under throw pillows, her usual position, so I sat on the floor with my back up against the bottom of the couch, like I used to do when I was a teenager and Mom was lying down.

  When Father McNamee heard the opening sequence of the movie, where you—as Zach Mayo—tell your drunk father that you want to join the navy and fly jets, my ex-priest began popping popcorn in the microwave, which surprised me, because he had been praying at the kitchen table for almost seven hours, so I thought he was deep in an effort to converse with Jesus.

  Watching you on the TV screen after all of our many conversations was a bit surreal—especially because this was the first time I’d watched one of your movies since Mom died, and I had never watched any of your movies without her. I thought I would be sad, that I would miss her, but watching you this time around made me proud to know you, if that makes any sense. I had seen An Officer and a Gentleman a million times before, but this was the first time I watched it as your friend. It was an entirely different experience, which made me wonder if you, Richard Gere, can ever just watch a movie, as you probably know every actor in Hollywood by now, so every time you see a film, you aren’t seeing strangers pretending, but people with whom you’ve worked and therefore have had conversations with and probably even drinks at the bar.

  Father McNamee sat down on the floor next to me and placed a large bowl of popcorn between us. He was drinking his whiskey from a coffee cup, and I said, “No, thank you,” when he offered me a swig, because I wanted to experience the movie fully conscious and whiskey sometimes makes me sleepy.

  A few pieces of popcorn were perched in his beard.

  We watched you train to become a pilot, Richard Gere, saw you make love, saw you make friends, saw you ride your motorcycle, saw you dance, saw you pretend to be a troubled, disturbed man. But when you were caught hiding extra shoes and belt buckles in the drop ceiling, and angry Louis Gossett Jr. tried to get you to quit the program—by making you do so many push-ups, squirting you in the face with a hose, and insulting you in numerous highly humiliating ways, while everyone else goes on leave—you’ll remember that Mr. Angry Gossett Jr. says this to you: “Deep down inside you know that all these boys and girls are better than you. Isn’t that right, Mayo?”

  I sort of felt you and I were a lot alike at that point.

  The little angry man in my stomach kicked and punched and yelled, Fool! You are nothing like movie star Richard Gere, nor are you like the character he is playing in the film, which is an entirely different (and fictional!) entity! And you are just a stupid man who pretends he is unable to tell the difference because he has done nothing with his life, nor will he ever, and therefore favors fiction over reality. Here is your reality: everyone is better than you! Everyone! You couldn’t even keep your mother alive, retard! and as the little tiny man in my stomach kicked and punched and yelled, I started to think of him as a miniature Louis Gossett Jr. of my own.

  In the movie, you screamed, “No, sir! No, sir!” as you well remember, and I realized that I had screamed that right along with you in real life, in Mom’s living room, when Father McNamee looked at me and said, “You okay?”

  I nodded. A few tears spilled down my cheek before I could wipe them away, and then we watched as angry Louis Gossett Jr. tried to get you to quit, made you do sit-ups, and finally got you to scream, “I got nowhere else to go! I got nothing else!”

  I remember Mom always cried when you said those lines, and maybe it was because she’d had nothing but her house and me for so many years. She always wanted more. She wanted the fairy tale, but got brain cancer instead, even though she was a good woman who never did anything wrong, nor did she harm anyone, ever.

  Father McNamee and I sat there until the film was over—only I just stared at the screen without allowing the pictures and sounds to enter into my mind.

  I sort of retreated deep within some dark shadow inside my skull, hid in the dusty seldom-accessed attic of my mind, and I thought about Mom. How she is no longer here with me. Where she might be—what heaven might really be like.

  I miss her.

  I really miss her.

  And even though I realize it’s selfish, I wished she were with me watching the movie, scratching the top of my head even, instead of Wendy and Father McNamee. I wished nothing had changed. I wished life were fair. These thoughts made the angry man in my stomach dizzy and nauseated.

  “Bartholomew?” Father McNamee said and nudged my arm.

  I looked at him; he looked concerned.

  “Are you okay?”

  I nodded.

  I glanced over my shoulder at Wendy, and her head was still buried under the pillows.

  “I’m tired,” I said.

  “Maybe you should go to bed?”

  I wanted to ask Father McNamee if we should be doing something more to help Wendy, if it was wrong to wish my mother were still here with me and not in heaven, what we were going to do next, and how I was going to move on with the rest of my life, but I knew he would say it would all be revealed in God’s time and not our time—that we should simply wait for God to speak to me, for me to start hearing His voice, that we had to be patient. Or worse yet, he’d say he was no longer a priest and God no longer spoke to him. Since I already knew the gist of what my spiritual adviser would say either way, I decided that asking the questions was pointless.

  So I went up to my room, turned off the lights, let go of consciousness, and drifted off quickly into the other world.

  I dreamed about my mother again, and she came to sit on the edge of my bed.

  “Mom!” I said in my dream, and immediately tried to hug her, but she was ghostlike and my arms went right through her body.

  “Can we talk?”

  She smiled and nodded.

  Mom looked as she had at the end, although she had hair and no surgery scars.

  She was herself—as she was before the squid cancer altered her.

  “What should I do with the rest of my life?”

  Mom shrugged.

  “I don’t even know what I want. I’ve never known. Let alone how to get it. I don’t know anything at all, really!”

  We looked at each other for a few moments.

  When it was clear she wouldn’t answer, I said, “I liked living wi
th you, Mom. A lot. I miss you. I’m so lost.”

  But then she started to fade.

  “Where are you going?” I yelled. “Don’t leave me!”

  She smiled once more before she blinked out of existence, and I woke up, sweating, to someone making a shhhhhh sound in my ear.

  My heart began to pound, because I thought maybe Mom had come back for real, or that I had dreamed her death by cancer and was now waking up to live in the time before she died, but I couldn’t see anything because the lights were out and the shades were drawn.

  “Who’s there?” I said finally.

  “I don’t have anywhere else to go,” a woman said through the darkness, paraphrasing your most memorable line in An Officer and a Gentleman, one of Mom’s absolute favorites. But it wasn’t Mom, I could tell by the woman’s smell—just a hint of apricot, lemon, and ginger wafting from her clothes.

  After a few moments, I said, “Wendy?”

  I could hear her breathing in the darkness.

  “Do you think I’m a failure?” she said.

  I tried to make out Wendy’s face, but my eyes wouldn’t focus. Finally, I said, “What?”

  “Do—you—think—I—am—a—failure?”

  “No.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “Why would I?”

  “Because I’m supposed to help people live healthy lives, and yet I let a man physically and psychologically abuse me because he has money, power, and influence.”

  “You were just trying to find your flock maybe,” I said, remembering how much she liked talking about that. “Maybe you just fell in with a bad bird.”

  “A bad bird,” she repeated, and then laughed. “Why did I do that—even accidentally—Bartholomew? Think about it.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe because he’s handsome and rich and persuasive? Maybe you were pretending, hiding things from yourself?”

  She laughed in this very tiny way through the darkness—which made me feel uneasy.

  “I’d have to drop out of school if I left Adam. That’s the hard simple truth. And if I dropped out of school, my future would dim dramatically. It’s statistically proven.”

  “Why would you have to drop out of school?”

  “He pays my tuition. And provides food and a home and . . . everything I need.”

  “Maybe someone else will provide?” I said.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You could get a job.”

  She laughed again in a way that made me feel I was simultaneously right and wrong.

  “We don’t want you to be abused by him,” I said.

  “You don’t want anyone to be abused, do you?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “And yet people will go on being abused forever and ever. Abuse has always existed since the beginning of time—and it always will exist, whether you care or not. You stay locked up in your mother’s house and the library, so you won’t have to care about everyone or anyone. You don’t even play the game. It must be so easy for you.”

  Wendy’s voice was cold now.

  “I try to help everyone I know,” I said. “I can’t know everyone. You’re right. I have limitations. But I know you. And I want to help you. I really do.”

  There was a long silence.

  “Why?” Wendy said.

  “Why what?”

  “Why do you care about me? Why do you want to help me? Seriously. I want to know. Is it some religious thing?”

  “Because you’re a really nice person. You tried to—”

  “I’m not a nice person.”

  “Sure you are.”

  Wendy laughed, and it felt like being hit in the face with an ice ball. “I lied to you about not doing well in school just to get you to see Arnie. I actually have a four-point-oh average. I’m top of my class. It was my plan to transition you to Arnie so I wouldn’t have to work with you anymore.”

  Ha! I told you! Moron of the century! the little angry man yelled, and I began to feel sick.

  “You lied to me. Why?” I said to Wendy.

  “Because I’m not a very nice person.”

  The tiny man in my stomach pulled a fold of my innards into his mouth and began to gnaw with his sharp teeth as he dug his clawlike toenails into my intestines.

  “Why don’t you want to work with me? Why? I have to know the answer. I want to hear it straight from you.”

  Wendy didn’t say anything in response, but the little man in my stomach paused his chewing to say, Because you are an idiot. The lowest of the low. A man only loved by his mother, who is dead. A retard! A collection of atoms that should be recycled into the universe. A fat pile of shit!

  I felt her lean in toward me, was warmed by her breath for a fraction of a second, and then her lips were on my left cheek and her hand was on my right.

  “You’re a better person than me,” she whispered into my ear. “And I hate you for it.”

  She left my room, and I felt the warmth of her hand and lips on my face—her words burned in my ears for hours as I lay on my back and looked up into the darkness.

  For some reason, it reminded me of the time when Tara Wilson tricked me and then rescued me from the high school basement, but never talked to me again after that morning. She pretended to be an evil and uninterested stranger whenever we passed in the hallway. Somehow I knew the same thing was going to happen with Wendy. History was repeating itself. There were indeed patterns to the universe.

  When the sun came up, I went downstairs, and Wendy was gone.

  She had left a note:

  I’m going to work things out with Adam. Please

  don’t get involved. I hereby resign as Bartholomew’s

  grief counselor. Arnie will treat him for free if

  Bartholomew wishes to continue with his therapy,

  because Arnie has funding and Bartholomew is the

  right sort of test subject. I don’t want to see either of

  you ever again. Please respect my wishes.

  Wendy

  Father McNamee read the note and stormed out of the house, not bothering to button up his coat. I followed him; it was hard to keep up, because he was moving so quickly.

  I kept wondering what Wendy had meant by “test subject” and why I was the right sort. I didn’t like the way that sounded, but I knew it wasn’t a good time to ask Father McNamee, because his face was flushed and he was breathing heavily, like he does whenever he is extremely agitated.

  We stopped at Wendy’s mother’s house, but Wendy hadn’t been there. Father McNamee explained the situation—that we were trying to help Wendy, but she left us in the middle of the night—and Edna began to cry.

  “I was never a good mother,” she said.

  “Pray,” Father McNamee said. “Pray. Believe. Have faith.”

  Then Father McNamee bowed his head and said a silent prayer before he made the sign of the cross and turned to leave.

  (I wondered if he was doing this instinctively, faking it, or if he had patched things up with Jesus.)

  “Father?” the woman called as he walked away. “Father, wait! Please! I don’t know what to do!”

  I stood there on the sidewalk, wanting to comfort the woman, but not knowing how.

  “What should I do?” the woman screamed.

  It was obvious that Father McNamee wasn’t coming back, so I caught up to him by jogging.

  “Edna’s really upset,” I said.

  He didn’t answer.

  After a few blocks, I realized we were headed for Adam’s trinity. I did my best to keep up with Father McNamee, who was sweating profusely and breathing quite audibly.

  When we arrived, Father banged his fist against the door, pressed the intercom button, and yelled, “Open up!”

  “Wendy doesn’t want to speak with you,” Adam said through the intercom.

  “She’s just a girl, you bastard!” Father McNamee yelled into the gray speaker-looking square. “She’s half your age!”

  “You ne
ed to leave. She wants to be with me. Wendy’s made her choice. And I’m calling the police if you don’t vacate the premises immediately.”

  “Wendy!” Father McNamee yelled into the intercom, with a force that scared me. “He’s not worth it! Run from this brute while you can, before he beats the best part of you dead and—”

  “I’m calling the police now,” Adam said. “If you’re here when they arrive, I’ll be reporting the bruises that Wendy returned with after being in your care.”

  “Wendy!” Father McNamee screamed like a madman.

  People on the street had stopped to stare, and I could feel their eyes on us. One man had begun to film with the camera on his phone. I wondered if he would post Father McNamee’s rage on the Internet.

  Everything was happening too quickly.

  The police were coming.

  The little man was ice-picking his way through my intestines.

  Adam was much more believable than Father McNamee and me. You could tell this just by looking at him. And he was a doctor too. Wendy would corroborate his story because she needed him to pay for her schooling. The cops would definitely believe him over us. I knew this. And the truth terrified me.

  “We have to leave,” I said to Father McNamee. “We have to go now.”

  He looked at me, and his eyes were no longer whirlpools sucking in everything around us—the pupils were smaller than two tiny black snowflakes. It looked like he was going blind.

  His finger slipped off the intercom button.

  I looked up and saw Wendy in the window above. We locked eyes before she turned away. She looked just as scared as I was.

  “This isn’t the way it’s supposed to be,” Father McNamee said, but it was like he was speaking to himself—like he was looking through me. “What’s happening?”

  “We have to go,” I said, and then led him away by the arm.

  Father allowed me to lead him—it was like he had become a scared little boy and I had become the father.

  It all started to feel like déjà vu, for some reason—like I had done this before.

  When we were six or seven blocks gone, he pulled out his flask and downed the whole thing, right there on the corner, until thin golden rivers spilled from the corners of his mouth.