And right there the impossible happens—I feel a stab of tenderness for lip-licking Gordon Penny, or at least the little boy he used to be. I tell him that I’m sorry, and then I try one last time. “Is there anything I can say that will convince you to just let all that go and come help me?”
He hesitates, and for a second I think he’s considering it. Then he says, “Sorry, Ms. Wallace. You can’t unring a bell.”
As if I didn’t already know that.
I hear a sound behind me, and I turn to see Trip’s door opening.
“You’re still here?”
“I still need a ride.”
He steps out on the porch. “Who was that on the phone?”
“Gordon Penny.”
“Flesh?”
I wince.
“Why were you talking to him?”
“I have his number. He has a car. I need a ride.”
Trip looks away, shifting his weight back and forth. He seems to be making a decision. I hold my breath.
“You said you had something to show me?” he asks.
“Wait right here.”
I run through the rain back to my grandmother’s house, in the front door and up the stairs, muddy water staining the carpet. Up in the darkroom, I yank the prints off the wire, shove them into a plastic trash bag and then hurry back through the storm.
His porch lights are on now, and he’s standing by the door, waiting, his white T-shirt glowing an unnatural yellow under the bug lights. Breathing hard, I thump up the four stairs and thrust the bag into his hand.
“What’s this?” he says.
“Here.” I reach out and dry my hands on the edge of his shirt, which gets me another scowl, and then I open the bag and hand him the first photo.
“Here’s my mom. You guys were out camping I think.” It’s the picture of her laughing, surrounded by trees.
“She kept all those?” He looks a little worried. I think he’s remembering his moment of beefcake glory.
“I only found a few,” I tell him, keeping my face neutral. I don’t need to piss him off any more than I already have.
He nods, apparently satisfied that his modesty has been preserved.
I hand him the picture of Tilda. “See how much I look like my grandmother when she was young?”
He looks at it and then at me. “So?”
“When I talked to your dad today, he thought—”
“You went out to see my father?” Uh oh. He’s looking angry again.
“Fritter took me to visit him,” I say, which is truthy enough to pass in the middle of the night in a rainstorm when I need a ride.
“Anyway, when I went to see him, he kept apologizing to me over and over. I’ve never met him before in my life.”
Trip looks again at the photo in his hand and then back at me. “He thought you were Tilda.”
“He said, I never knew until I saw her.”
“I still don’t understand what you’re getting at.”
I hand him the photo of himself, young and serious, staring at the camera, his wet hair slicked back.
“Take a look,” I tell him.
He glances at it. “So what? It’s me.”
“Now this one.” I hand him the one of my mother in a similar pose, looking at the camera, her hair darkened from the water and pulled away from her face.
“Hold them side by side,” I say.
He studies the photos for a long time before lifting his gaze to meet mine. His face seems to have paled, although it’s hard to judge with the jaundiced lighting.
“Eugene Wallace wasn’t my grandfather,” I say.
He shakes his head. “But . . .”
“Eugene was gay—”
“Gay?”
“Very gay. As in Tilda-walked-in-on-him-and-another-dude-going-at-it gay. So then Tilda got all upset, and your dad gave her a ride, pardon the pun.”
“How could you possibly know all this?”
“I got it straight from Eugene’s lover. He told me that Tilda caught them together at a party, and that your dad gave Tilda a ride home. I don’t know if she and your dad did anything on that particular night—maybe they hooked up some other time. But look at the pictures—”
“That still doesn’t mean that Eugene and Tilda never—”
“I know, but think about it—”
“This is impossible—”
“Is it? Tilda was freaked out about you dating my mother, right?”
He nods.
“I thought you looked familiar from the very first time I saw you. I still can’t believe I didn’t see it until now.”
“Damn it, there’s no way—”
“Did you look at the pictures? You’re tall, and my mom was petite. You had short auburn hair and hers was big and blond. But she bleached her hair; in fact, Tilda practically forced my mother to keep it bleached blond. My mom had red hair, Trip. She had green eyes and you have . . .” I lean forward but the light is too dim for me to make out his eye color. “I don’t know. But just look at those black-and-white pictures. With her hair dark from the water and slicked back, and the differences in your sizes taken away, the resemblance is unmistakable.”
He looks at the photos again and then back up at me. There are tears in his eyes.
“Why wouldn’t she just tell me?”
“What would she have said? ‘Hey, guess what? You knocked up your half-sister?’”
“Dear God.” With shaking hands, he thrusts the photos at me and then walks to the far edge of the porch. With his back turned, he leans over the railing, his shoulders shaking. Crying? Retching? I can’t tell. I glance at my phone to check the time. Shit. This is taking too long.
Finally he straightens, and walks back over, his gray hair wet with rain, sparkling in the harsh light.
“I want you to leave,” he says.
“I think when my mom saw these pictures, she confronted her mother, and Tilda told her the truth.”
“Go. Now.”
“This means I’m your niece.”
His eyes narrow and he gives me a look of such rage that I have to fight an urge to flinch.
“You heard me,” he says. “Get out of here.”
“But I really need that ride—”
“I don’t think so.”
“Just let me borrow your truck—”
“No way.”
“But I told Karleen—”
“That’s no business of mine.”
“She’s at the church right now, but if somebody doesn’t stop her, she’s going to go back home to Orten, and one of them is going to end up dead tonight.”
For a few seconds he considers what I just said, but as I watch, I see his face close back down. “Call the cops,” he says, and then he turns and walks to his front door.
“You used to date her. Surely you don’t want her dead, or in jail for killing Orten.”
“Good night.”
“But I promised her I’d come.”
“Well, I guess letting people down runs in your family.” His hand is on the doorknob.
“Wait, please!”
He pauses.
“I really think my mom thought that leaving was the right thing to do.”
“I never got married,” he says. “I never had any kids.” Shaking his head, he opens the door and then turns back to me. “I spent my whole life believing that love couldn’t be trusted.”
“If it makes you feel any better, I think my mother did, too.”
He steps inside and turns off the porch light. As he’s closing the door he looks at me and sighs. “That doesn’t make me feel any better at all,” he says. And then he’s gone.
I wait a few seconds, hoping he’ll reappear, but the porch stays dark and there’s no noise except the sound of the rain and the gusting wind. The wood beneath my feet trembles with the thunder’s roar. Standing here on Trip’s porch, shivering in my wet clothes, I am as tired and discouraged as I can ever remember feeling. My muscles ache with exhaus
tion, my eyes burn with unshed tears.
I carefully tuck the photos back into the plastic bag, and then slide the bundle under his doormat. My uncle’s doormat. That secret is his burden now. I don’t want it. I’ve got enough of my own.
CHAPTER 50
It wasn’t as if I hadn’t been preparing myself for my mother’s death. She’d been sick for the better part of a year, and more often than not when her doctors talked about what time she had left, they described their goals in terms of quality, not quantity. But this was different, not the slow fade I’d been rehearsing, but a sudden darkness. One morning she was standing in front of me, the next she was gone. Her absence felt as sharp as her presence had been—the pain of a phantom limb.
Queeg and I were quiet on the way to the police station that Saturday morning. We were in and out of the property management building in fifteen minutes carrying my mother’s purse. We were then directed to go around to the impound lot to see about the car. I didn’t want to go; they could have the damn jeep for all I cared, but Queeg insisted. We needed to get the insurance paperwork, he said. I argued that we could do it another day, but he maintained that we had to do it that morning. At the time I was irritated at his refusal to understand how difficult this was for me. In hindsight I think I understand. He had respected my preference not to view her body, but he needed to see something to convince himself that she was really gone.
There wasn’t much blood immediately visible, just a broad smear on the cracked windshield and a darker spot on the black upholstery. And there were flies, fat, black flies swarming the seat and the carpet. The front of the car was crushed, the back a jumble of the Christmas gifts I’d bought and left there. The driver’s-side door was mangled and hanging ajar, obviously having been pried open to get my mother’s body out.
On the floor of the driver’s side there was a crumpled receipt, yellow where the folds were above the floor, a deep reddish brown where it rested on the carpet. Next to it was a gray plastic film canister and a small white . . . something . . . a tiny shell, I thought. Or a rock, maybe. I leaned down, waving the flies away, and carefully lifted the receipt, the film canister, and the little rock from the sticky carpet. I remember that it seemed important that I understand the meaning of those objects that had been at my mother’s feet, but I don’t remember why. The receipt was from the bookstore: The Caine Mutiny, $17.95. The film canister felt empty, and I mindlessly tucked it in my pocket. Then I turned my attention to what was lying in my palm, the small white pebble that was not a pebble. And it was not a shell. It was a tooth.
I hadn’t told Queeg what the police had told me, that my mother had been drinking. I’d hoped to spare him that. But the whole car smelled of blood and whiskey. When Queeg leaned down to look in the window and saw the two empty bottles on the floor of the passenger’s side, he gave a quiet grunt, as if he’d just taken a punch to the belly. With some effort he opened the passenger-side door. Holding up one of the empties, he looked at me wordlessly, shaking his head.
I glanced at the label on the bottle—Maker’s Mark—and then back down at my mother’s tooth, at the tiny smear of blood it left in the palm of my hand. I didn’t speak and neither did Queeg. I’m pretty sure that he attributed the shock and dismay he saw on my face to the fact that my mother had been drinking, but he was wrong. I already knew that she’d fallen off the wagon. But I hadn’t known until that very moment that I’d pushed her off.
Queeg pulled paperwork from the glove box and then opened the hatch, telling me to take whatever I wanted. I looked at the mess, the cigar box, the knit hat, The Caine Mutiny, the empty bag that had once held those damn bottles of Maker’s Mark. In the middle of the disorganized pile was my mother’s camera bag, with her camera, a lens, some film canisters spilling out of the top. I took a minute to tuck her gear back inside the bag, and then I lifted it into my arms.
“This is all,” I told him.
He nodded and frowned. It was only when he pointed at my hand that I realized that all this time I’d been packing things using one hand. The other was still clenched in a fist.
“What have you got there?” he asked.
With a shudder, I relaxed my hand, letting my mother’s bloody tooth fall into the oyster-shell gravel between us. I kept my voice casual when I replied, “Nothing.”
Once we settled back in his car, Queeg cracked his window and lit a cigarette to steady his shaking hands. “She promised me,” he said. “She promised me no more gin.” He took a long drag and then switched his cigarette to his other hand so he could hold it near the window. “And what does she do? She goes out and buys bourbon.”
I should have explained. I should’ve told him that she hadn’t gone out and bought anything. I’d bought them. I’d put those bottles in the jeep with my own two hands. I remember wondering, as I sat watching the smoke curl up and out his window, how my mother had known the bottles were back there. Did she get curious and look to see what was in all the sacks? Could she have, like a little child, been hoping to find her own gift? Or maybe she’d braked suddenly and heard the bottles knocking against each other. She would have recognized the sound.
“So,” Queeg said, crushing out his cigarette in the already full ashtray. “I’m guessing that she got bad news at the doctor’s yesterday.”
I glanced over at him, but he wasn’t looking at me. He was staring at the jeep. “I talked to her early yesterday morning and she told me she’d moved her appointment to that afternoon,” he said. “She promised she’d call and let me know what the doctor told her, but she never called. And I didn’t call her. I should have.”
Was it possible that she’d gone to the doctor’s office alone? When I’d asked her at the funeral to move her appointment back to Monday, she hadn’t actually agreed to do so.
Queeg wiped at his eyes and then started the car. “So, what did the doctor say?”
I stayed silent, staring out the window, while my stepfather completed a slow, overly complicated twenty-point turn. By the time we were facing the right direction, I’d made up my mind. My heart was broken, but I had a chance to save Queeg’s.
“He told her that the chemo didn’t work,” I said, and it could have been true. “She didn’t have much time left, and it was going to be bad.” I took a shaky breath and continued. “In the end, maybe this was for the best.”
He glanced at me, nodded briefly, and then put the car in drive. I saw Queeg look at the jeep in the rearview mirror as we pulled away. I didn’t look back.
The seat belt was pushing against the empty film canister in my pocket, so I took out the little plastic tube and opened my mother’s camera bag to toss it inside. But I heard something, a faint rattle from inside the canister. I pried off the lid and carefully poured the contents out into my hand.
Queeg pulled out of the impound lot and merged onto the street. Reaching over to pat me on the knee, he said, “Everything is going to be okay.”
He didn’t seem to expect a reply from me; he just switched on the radio and turned his attention to negotiating the traffic. A Phil Collins song was playing, of that I’m sure, but I’m not certain which one. When I think back on it, my memory starts playing “Against All Odds,” but maybe that’s because it’s my favorite Phil Collins song, or maybe it’s because the song is so fucking sad.
What I do remember, though, is how the rain started back up right then, the fat drops popping against the windshield, the old wipers squawking and smearing the rain rather than clearing it. And I remember the way Queeg hunched over the wheel, concentrating as he drove, and how the music filled the car, and how I twisted in my seat, angling myself away from Queeg so he couldn’t see me cry. And so that he wouldn’t notice the two tiny white birds resting on my palm.
CHAPTER 51
And so here I am, sitting on the floor in my mother’s room, in her mother’s house, mystery solved and nothing has changed. She’s still dead. I’m still here.
Karleen’s problems aren’t my problem
s. It’s time to dry off and go to bed. Tomorrow I can pay Trip, collect my car, and go back to Tallahassee, to Nick, to a clinic for an abortion. By next weekend I’ll be at the bar, buying everybody a round of drinks, making this past week into a funny story. It’ll be great. It’s what I’m good at. It’s what I do. It’s what my mom would do.
I pull the camera bag into my lap, unzip the inside pocket and pull out the film canister. Again, I pop off the gray lid and dump the contents into my hand. The two delicate white pieces of plastic weigh nothing. When I close my eyes I can’t even tell they’re there.
Queeg has always told me that the adage Opportunity only knocks once is bullshit. “It knocks all the time,” he likes to say. “All you have to do is listen for it and open the damn door.” What Queeg didn’t tell me was that sometimes you can’t bring yourself to put your hand on the knob; you’re too proud, or too angry. Or too ashamed. Instead you press your ear to the door and hold your breath, listening for the sound of it passing you by. Next time, you tell yourself, next time I’ll open it. But even as you say it you know you’re lying, that there’s never going to be a next time.
Well, fuck that shit.
I stand, tugging at the knees of my wet jeans. Luke didn’t need to tell me that it’s too late to save my mother; I knew that the day I held her bloody tooth in my hand. And as far as it never being too late to save myself . . . well, the jury’s still out on that one. But I do know one thing for sure: he was dead wrong when he told me the only person I could ever save was myself.
Because tonight, I have a chance to save somebody else.
I consider the tiny plastic birds in my hand, and then I tuck them deep into my pocket and run down the stairs. When I open the back door, a wet gust of wind hits me in the face.
Shit.
“This had better get me some good fucking karma,” I shout into the night sky. And then I jog out to the garage to get the bike.
It doesn’t take me long to realize that this was a terrible idea. It’s dark and slick and even with the streetlights, the potholes and gravel aren’t visible, so I’m bouncing and sliding all over the place. If I pick up any speed at all, the rain in my eyes makes it nearly impossible to see. Once I get to the park, the trail is smooth, thank God, although the going is still tricky since the park trail isn’t lit. Luckily, there’s enough vague ambient light to make the black asphalt shine in the darkness. It’s slow going, but I keep pedaling. I hope Karleen didn’t check her watch after fifteen minutes and leave, because with all the time I wasted trying to get a ride it’s already been more than thirty, and I’ve probably got at least another ten minutes before I’ll be there.
The Art of Crash Landing Page 30