The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin'

by Lamb, Wally

  Mother fucker. “Motherfucker,” I said. In the dark, out loud.

  Faced, for the first time, why I had not been able to bring myself to finish Domenico’s story.

  Because I was afraid, that was why.

  Afraid that, by the end, he might have spoken the truth. Spelled it out in black and white. . . . Was that why she’d never been able to tell us? Had he taken advantage of his harelipped daughter’s weakness, her innocence? . . . Was our father not the dashing stenographer but our own grandfather?

  I lay there at the entrance of the black hole, feeling its pull. . . . Was that it, Ma? Had you been too weak to say no to him? Had Thomas and I been conceived in evil?

  Sometime later on that night—after the shaking had subsided, after I was able to move voluntarily again—I rolled over in the dark. I heard a soft crinkling under me and reached over, turned on the light. Fished inside my shirt pocket. . . .

  I squinted at her—Tyffanie Rose. Little Miss Monkey Face. I brought the picture to my lips and kissed it.

  I put it over on my nightstand for safekeeping and turned the light off again. Lay there smiling, for some reason, in the dark.

  The following morning, I drove to the post office and mailed those cards. Drove down to the beach and stood there, watching the waves, the seagulls. On my way home again, I drove right past the exit for Three Rivers. Drove all the way up to Hartford and pulled, spur of the moment, into that Cinema 1-through-500 place off of I-84. Sat there, in the dark, watching Bruce Willis and his testosterone save the free world. Again. Balls to the walls, man. Might made right. . . . Bomb those Iraqis. Hog-tie the black man, beat him with billy clubs. Make a fist and show your wife who’s the boss. . . .

  I drove home again. Faced the phone.

  Beep. “Dominick? It’s Leo. Hey, I was wondering if you were ready to let me beat your ass in some racquetball yet? Or are you still pussying around about that foot of yours? That excuse is getting old, Birdsey. Let me know.”

  Beep. “This is your old man calling. You home yet? Give me a jingle, will ya?” Will do, Ray. Mind if I wait until hell freezes over first?

  Beep. “Hey, Dominick. This is Lisa Sheffer. Just wanted to let you know I’ve been thinking about you. . . . Just wondering, basically, how you’re doing. So call me. Okay?”

  Beep. “Ray Birdsey. Four-fifteen P.M. You home yet?”

  I’m canceling our Friday appointment, Dominick. Call me after you’ve accomplished the things on your list. . . .

  Jankowski’s wife told me she’d ask him, but she doubted he was still interested. He’d bought a power washer on Monday from some outfit in Cumberland, Rhode Island.

  The third woman they referred me to at the State Department of Education was able to answer my questions about reinstatement. I’d need to take a refresher course, she said, and then take a test, and then have three classroom observations by a state-trained evaluator.

  Forget about it, I told myself. The writing’s on the wall. You’re a housepainter.

  Domenico’s manuscript stayed under the bed.

  I’d call Ray the next day, I told myself. I’d already accomplished plenty. I turned the TV on, turned it off again. Reached over for the Rolodex.

  Shea, Sherwin-Williams, Sheffer . . .

  She’d been thinking about me a lot, she said. I had been such a good brother. She just wanted to make sure I wasn’t beating myself up about things.

  I thanked her—told her I hadn’t KO’d myself just yet. I decided to skip the counterargument I could have given her about what a good brother I’d been.

  She wanted to know what else was new—what I’d been up to.

  Not much, I said. I was trying to decide whether or not to sell my business.

  “Really?” she said. “You don’t feel like painting houses anymore?”

  “I don’t feel like falling off roofs anymore.”

  Somewhere during the conversation, I figured out something: Sheffer felt guilty. She’d been beating herself up. It had been her idea to put Thomas in Hope House, the place he’d wandered away from that night. When they’d sprung him so unexpectedly from Hatch, Sheffer had made an issue of how the group home would be a much safer temporary environment for him than my place.

  “Look, Lisa,” I said. “I want you to know something, okay? Nobody’s blaming you for anything. You did everything you could for him and then some—up to and including getting whacked in the face at that hearing. We’d all be a bunch of geniuses if we had hindsight ahead of time.”

  She said Dr. Patel had told her basically the same thing. She’d started seeing Dr. Patel, by the way. Professionally. Not to be nosy, but was I still seeing her?

  “Uh, yeah,” I said. “Off and on.” So much for confidentiality.

  Sheffer advised me to discuss my decision about the painting business with Dr. Patel—that she might be able to help me “objectify” my options. Social worker talk.

  “I have talked about it with her,” I said.

  “And?”

  “She thinks I should pack it in. Go back to teaching.” Sheffer said she could picture me in front of a high school class.

  I could, too—that was the problem: I kept seeing those two little tough cookies I’d stood behind at Subway. Kept remembering those students’ faces that day I’d cried in front of them. That day I’d left my classroom and never gone back. Diana Montague, Randy Cleveland, Josie Tarbox. Those kids must all be in their midtwenties by now. Out of college, into adult lives. Kids of their own, now, some of them. “Yeah, well,” I told Sheffer. “I may sell the business, I may not. I’m still weighing my options. But anyway, I’m grateful for everything you did for my brother. I mean it, Lisa. Thanks.”

  “Hey, you know what?” she said. “Would you like to get together sometime? Come over for dinner? I can make you my Jewish-Italian specialty: spaghetti and matzoh balls?” I started stammering something about appreciating the invitation but—

  “I’m not asking you out,” she said. “If that’s what you think. I’m asking you over.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Well. . . .”

  “I’m not hitting on you, paisano. Honest. I’m gay, Dominick.”

  “Oh. Right. I didn’t think . . . I mean, I don’t have a problem with . . . You are?”

  She suggested we start over. “Hello, Dominick? This is Lisa Sheffer. You want to come over some night for supper? Meet my daughter and my partner, Monica?”

  I didn’t know what else to say, so I said okay. Asked her what I could bring.

  “Bottle of chianti and a bottle of Mogen David,” she said. “We’ll mix ’em.”

  “They were so much alike,” I said. “In some ways, they were more like identical twins than he and I were.”

  “Thomas and your mother? Yes? Explain, please.”

  Over the phone, I’d told her what I had and hadn’t acomplished on my list. She’d given me bonus points for having made dinner plans with Sheffer—for having “engaged outwardly” instead of continuing my “love affair with inertia.” Her Majesty had granted me a two o’clock appointment.

  “I don’t know. They were both so gentle. So defenseless. . . . Every year she’d go to parent-teacher conferences and come back and we’d be like, ‘What did she say? What did the teacher say?’ And every year, one teacher after the next, it’d be the same thing: how smart I was, how sweet he was. That was always the word they used: Thomas was so ‘sweet.’ And he was, too. He just was. But . . .”

  “Yes? Go on.”

  “He was weak. Just like she was. . . . I had to take care of both of them. And I think . . .”

  She waited several seconds. “You think what, Dominick?”

  “I think . . . oh, man, this is hard . . . I think that was why she loved him more. Because both of them were so goddamned powerless. . . . It was like they were soul mates or something.”

  Dr. Patel sipped her tea. Waited.

  “Do you think . . . ?” I stopped, stymied by how to put it. My hands started t
o shake.

  “What is it, Dominick? Ask me.”

  “No, I was just thinking yesterday that maybe that’s how she got pregnant. . . . I mean, it would explain a lot. Wouldn’t it?”

  Doc Patel said she wasn’t following me.

  “She was always so scared to death of everything. So powerless. So I was thinking: maybe she got raped.”

  “Raped by . . . ?”

  “I don’t know. By some stranger. Maybe our father was just some miscellaneous son of a bitch who grabbed her, pulled her into a dark alley someplace, and . . .”

  I stood up, went over by the window. Rocked back and forth on my heels.

  “It’s not like she would have fought back or anything. I know she wouldn’t have. She probably didn’t even know what sex was until . . . She probably wouldn’t even have known what he was doing.”

  “No? You think not?”

  I looked out the window. The river was moving fast. The trees were budding. In another week or two, those unfolding leaves would obscure Doc Patel’s view of the water. I turned back and faced her. “This one time? We were pretty young, Thomas and me—seven or eight, maybe. And we were on the city bus: the three of us.”

  “Your mother, Thomas, and you?”

  I nodded. “We’d gone to the movies, I remember, and then over to the five-and-ten for sodas. And we were on our way back home, okay? On the bus. And . . . and this crazy guy gets on. Walks down the aisle and sits across from us. . . . Across from Thomas and me. He pushes in right next to my mother.”

  “Go on, please, Dominick. You’re safe here. Let it go.”

  “And he starts . . . feeling her. Touching her. Sniffing at her.”

  “Be yourself on the bus for a moment. Are you afraid?”

  “Yes.”

  “Angry?”

  “Yes!”

  “What does your mother do, Dominick? The man is touching her and she—”

  “Nothing! That’s what she does: nothing! She just sits there because she’s so . . . so weak and . . . “

  Dr. Patel handed me the Kleenex box. “She doesn’t scream? She doesn’t get up and tell the bus driver?”

  “No! And I hated that! . . . She was always so afraid.”

  “On the bus. At home with Ray.”

  “It wasn’t fair! I was just a kid!”

  “What wasn’t fair, Dominick?”

  “I had to defend all three of us. Myself, and him, and her. And even then . . . even when I did . . .” I was sobbing now; I couldn’t help it.

  “And even then, although you protected her and your brother—fought both of their battles for them—even then, she loved your brother more than you?”

  My head jerked up and down, up and down. I couldn’t speak. Couldn’t stop wailing at the truth.

  The boys have the muscles! The coaches have the brains!

  The girls have the sexy legs so let’s play the game!

  Sheffer’s daughter, Jesse, shook her pom-poms like she meant it. She’d befriended me even before I’d gotten both feet in the door. Within the first half-hour of my visit, I’d been brought down to the basement to see her gerbils, up to her room to see her Barbies. Now I was out on the driveway so I could see her Midget Football cheerleader moves. Sheffer and Monica stood flanking me while Jesse turned cartwheels. “My theory is that Olivia Newton-John went into labor the same day and they mixed up our babies in the nursery,” Sheffer said, under her breath. “There’s just no other explanation.”

  Monica was a rugged six-footer from Kittery. She and another woman ran a small home-repair business. Womyn’s Work, they called themselves.

  “So how’s business?” I asked her, my chin pointing toward her pickup, parked in the driveway. Jesse had fallen, midcheer, and scraped her knee. She and her mom had gone inside for a Band-Aid. Monica held her arm out and gave a thumbs-down.

  “Couple of years ago? When we started up? We figured that in this economy, everyone’s just holding on to what they’ve got—fixing things up instead of building new. But it’s been leaner than we figured it’d be. My partner and I are good—we’re damn good—but you’ve got to get past people’s biases.”

  “Like what?” I said.

  “Like, that you need a penis in order to swing a hammer or knock down a wall.” She laughed. “No offense, there, hombre. Lisa says you’re a housepainter?”

  “Technically,” I said. “Maybe not much longer.”

  “That’s what Lisa said.” She and her business partner were trying to diversify a little, she told me—pick up some landscaping work, maybe some painting jobs. They were going to decide at the end of the season whether or not they could keep the boat afloat. “If not, I can always go back to my paying job,” she said. “Systems analyst. Bor-ing.”

  After dinner, Jesse had to give me two goodnight hugs before Monica piggybacked her up to bed, Sheffer trailing behind them with a stack of laundry. Monica came back down first.

  “Jesse’s a cutie,” I said. “Miss Cheerleader, huh?”

  “Miss Pain in the Butt, usually,” Monica said. “But she’s a good kid. Throws a baseball like a girl, though.”

  I smiled. Asked her how she and Lisa had met.

  At the women’s shelter over in Easterly, she said. She’d done some pro bono carpentry work for them the year before and ended up on their Board of Directors.

  “Yeah? Is Lisa on the board, too?” I said.

  Monica averted her eyes. “Nope. Hey, you want a beer?”

  We went out to the kitchen. Shot the shit about the highs and lows of owning your own business. “Hey,” I said. “If I do decide to sell my painting equipment, would you be interested?” Monica said it depended on what it was, what kind of condition it was in, and how I felt about the installment plan. If they did start a painting sideline, they damn sure weren’t going to be able to afford new equipment.

  I liked her. Liked being there that night. I had a much better time than I’d figured I would. It was after eleven by the time I even looked at my watch.

  Sheffer walked me out to my car. She told me that when she was thirteen, her oldest brother had died of leukemia. “He was eight years older than me,” she said. “My hero, in a lot of ways. But, god, I can’t even imagine what it would be like to lose your twin.”

  “It’s like . . . it’s like losing part of who you are. I don’t know. In a lot of ways, we were pretty different. Which was fine with me. Just the way I wanted it. But all my life, I’ve been . . . I’ve been half of something, you know? Something special—something kind of unique—even with all the complications. Wow, look. Twins. . . . And now, that specialness—that wholeness—it just doesn’t exist anymore. So it’s weird. Takes some getting used to. . . . Not that it was ever easy: being his brother. Even before he got sick. Doc Patel says I’m grieving for him—for Thomas—and for that, too. That wholeness.”

  Sheffer reached over and took my hand.

  “She says I’ve got to get used to my new status. Survivor. Solitary twin.”

  I asked Sheffer if she remembered the day they released him from Hatch. How she had tried to warn me not to let my arrogance get in the way of my brother’s safety.

  “Oh, Dominick,” she said. “Sometimes I run my mouth when I have no—”

  “No, you were right,” I said. “I was arrogant. You think I didn’t get off on that little power arrangement we’d always had? Being the strong one? The twin who didn’t get the disease? . . . That’s something else Doc and I are working on—what to do with all this arrogance I’ve got left over. All this righteous indignation. It’s just sort of sitting there, parked and not doing anything. Like me, I guess.”

  Sheffer took me in her arms and held me. Rocked me back and forth a little. It felt good to be held like that—held by someone who’d turned into my friend.

  “I’ll be all right,” I said. “Hey, by the way, I like your girlfriend. She may be buying my compressor.”

  I was whipped when I got home. Left the kitchen lights o
ff and headed straight to bed. Went out—bam!—like that.

  But somewhere in the middle of the night, I woke up thirsty. Fumbled my way out to the kitchen for a glass of juice. The answering machine light was blinking red against the shiny surfaces of the toaster, the door of the microwave. Blink, blink, pause. Blink, blink, pause. I hadn’t noticed it before. I hit “play” and stood there.

  The first caller was Joy. Had I gotten her note a while back? The picture she’d sent of Tyffanie? Was I at all interested in seeing the baby in person? If I was, I should give her a call. Maybe we could each drive halfway or something. She said her number slowly, then said it again.

  The second message was from a Dr. Azzi. “Your father’s surgeon,” he said.

  The operation had gone well; no surprises. He’d amputated just a little above the knee, which was what he’d figured. He was sorry he had missed me at the hospital but would be in touch the next morning. When he’d left the hospital at eight that evening, my father was still groggy but resting comfortably.

  Above the knee? Amputated? What the hell was he talking about?

  Dr. Azzi’s answering service told me he wasn’t to be called unless it was a medical emergency but that he sometimes called in for his messages before he retired for the evening. The woman said she’d tell him I had called.

  Was that why Ray had kept calling me? Was that what that limp had been about?

  Amputated. . . .

  And maybe I’d have known what was going on if I’d just had the decency to call him back.

  He’d planted tulips at Angela’s grave.

  Bullied my brother and me our whole lives.

  I had humiliated him that day of Thomas’s funeral.

  He’d busted my mother’s arm. . . .

  Somewhere in the middle of the night, I went into the bedroom. Flopped onto the bed and reached under there.

  Pulled out Domenico’s manuscript.

  I sat up. Opened it.

  I would finish it, this time, no matter what the fuck it revealed. No matter who it told me I was. . . .

  45

  17 August 1949

  And so, by digging that poor bastardo of a stained-glass painter out of his grave, I got what I wanted. I had my wife back and I had rid myself of that crazy goddamned Monkey. I had shown both of them the folly of fucking with Tempesta.