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

  “This the one?” Hector asks me. I tell him it is, and he takes the exit.

  We pass over the bridge and into downtown Three Rivers. It all looks the same: cars lined up at the Dunkin’ Donuts drive-thru, people standing at the window of the Dairy Queen where Ariane worked one summer. I’m struck with how much fatter people here are than the ones in weight-conscious Manhattan.

  The farther up Main Street we ride, the more I see that things have changed. The sporting goods store where we used to buy the kids’ sneakers has gone out of business and become a secondhand furniture store. Rosenblatt’s is still here, I see, with the same family of chipped-nose mannequins in the window looking out with their vacant eyes. The Fart family, Andrew nicknamed them one afternoon, to the giggling delight of his younger sister. A number of small ethnic food places have opened along the main drag now: Rosa’s Tacos, Little Saigon, Jamaican Meat Patties Made Fresh Daily! Probably a result of all the immigrants who work entry-level jobs down at the casino. And for the unemployed, here’s a pawnshop. . . . An everything-for-a-dollar store where Blockbuster used to be . . . A check-cashing place that promises WELFARE CLIENTS WELCOME.

  At a traffic stop, a haggard man of undeterminable age holds up a cardboard sign: OUT OF WORK. PLEASE HELP ME FEED MY FAMILY. When I reach into my wallet and pull out a ten-dollar bill, he approaches, takes it, and god-blesses me. “At least the bums in Connecticut don’t got squeegies,” Hector says. Another man hurries across the road in front of us. I recognize him: that guy from the newspaper—the one who owns the place on Bride Lake Road where they found those mummified babies. Remembering that bizarre story, I cringe. The light turns green. We move forward.

  After the Stop & Shop, Main Street becomes North Main, and then Sachem Plains Road. Single-family houses give way to farmsteads and wooded lots for sale. It’s early still, but some of the leaves have already started turning. Several of the trees look blighted. Approaching our road, we pass the dairy farm where we used to take the kids for hayrides and Halloween pumpkins. Africa grabs his mother’s arm. “Look at them giant cows!” he says, pointing to a cluster of Holsteins grazing in the field.

  “Giant?” Minnie says. “What you talking about, dummy? They just regular size.”

  “They bite?”

  “Oh, no,” I assure him. “Cows are very gentle animals. Would you like Hector to stop so you can get out and get a better look?”

  “No!” It’s sad that a boy his age has never seen cows before, except maybe in picture books. I guess to a kid who’s probably never been out of inner-city Newark before, they must seem more frightening than gunshots or junkies in the streets. Minnie’s told me that Africa was with her that time an addict knocked her to the sidewalk and ran off with her purse.

  “Take the next right,” I tell Hector, and when he does, the car begins its climb up Jailhouse Hill. The Halvorsens have painted their house a different color. It used to be blue and now it’s putty gray. The Blackwells have put on an addition. A little boy rides his Big Wheel in old Mrs. Fiondella’s driveway. Orion mentioned that she’d died last year, and that a young family had moved in. I smile, recalling the gifts Mrs. Fiondella would leave on our front steps every August: canned tomatoes and peaches; zucchinis the size of caveman clubs; bouquets of basil, the stems wrapped tightly in wet paper towels and aluminum foil. She took a shine to Andrew, especially; after he had shoveled her walkway or raked her leaves, she’d come over and want to pay him. “No, that’s okay,” he’d tell her, and she’d follow him until she’d cornered him, waving away his protests and stuffing dollar bills into the pocket of his shirt. With the exception of crabby old Mr. Genovese across the street, there was a sense of community here back then; it was a nice neighborhood for the kids to grow up in. At our place in New York, the guy in the apartment next door barely manages a hello when we step into the elevator together. “The driveway coming up on the left,” I tell Hector. “You can pull right in.” It’s strange to see a Realtor’s sign on our front lawn. There’s no other car. Andrew and the girls must not have gotten here yet. Maybe they stopped along the way for lunch.

  “Where we at?” Africa wants to know. I tell him this was where I used to live. “Who live here now?”

  “Just my ex-husband.” Minnie tells him to stop being a busybody.

  Hector takes out the luggage. Walking up the front steps, I reach into my purse. Finger, at the bottom, the house key which, for some reason, I’ve never mailed back to Orion. He was surprised when I told him I didn’t need the combination to the Realtor’s lockbox. “Come on in,” I say, swinging open the front door. The three of them enter, wide-eyed and shy.

  “How many rooms in this place?” Hector asks.

  “Nine.”

  “Nine rooms for just hisself?” Minnie asks, amazed. She’s probably wondering why I’d give up this house to live in a New York apartment, even one as spacious and elegantly appointed as Viveca’s.

  They follow me into the kitchen. Hector takes out his cell phone to call his sister. He’s left his kids with her this weekend and wants to make sure they’re behaving, he says. Africa’s head swivels back and forth between the den and the counter where the little television is. “That guy who live here got two TVs?” he says. “Wow, he rich.” I smile, neither confirming nor denying. I open the door to the built-in that holds the ironing board and flop it down. Take out the flat iron and plug it in.

  I make a plan. Minnie will iron Hector’s wedding clothes while I go downstairs and throw Africa’s and her soiled clothes in the washing machine. Minnie says I don’t have to do it; she can wash them out in the sink at their motel. But I insist. “They ought to be out of the dryer in, oh, an hour and a half. Hector can stop by later and pick them up.” I open the fridge. There’s a six-pack of ginger ale in there, a bottle of tonic water. “Who’s thirsty?” I ask.

  “Me!” Africa says. Hector looks up and shakes his head.

  “Minnie? How about you?

  “No, ma’am. Thass a good idea, though. Hidin’ the ironing board out of sight like that. I ain’t ever seen nothin’ like that.” When I hand Africa his can of soda, he gulps it down. His mother frowns at him. “Where your manners at?”

  “Thank you,” Africa says.

  “You’re welcome, sweetheart. Would you like to watch TV?”

  He nods, reaches for the remote. “You got Spike?”

  I shrug. What’s Spike?

  “Never mind no Spike until you go in, use the toilet. That okay, Miz Anna?” Of course, I tell her. Africa says he doesn’t have to go. “You do so have to. I know what it mean when you grabbin’ yo’self like that. Scoot!”

  “He knows better than that,” Hector says into the phone. “Is he there? Put him on.” Phone in hand, he wanders into the living room.

  Minnie licks her finger and touches it to the iron. Picks up the shirt that Hector’s brought and places it on the board. It’s black, red, yellow, and white—the style that Tony Soprano always wore. “This shirt is louder than a po-leese siren,” Minnie says. Amused by her own joke, she grins, then covers her mouth with her hand. She’s so self-conscious about those missing front teeth. It’s one of the few times I’ve ever seen her smile. Maybe after Viveca and I get back from Greece, I can give her the money for some new ones.

  Africa emerges, the toilet still in midflush. “Get back in there and wash them hands!” Minnie says. He says he washed them. “Don’t you be tellin’ me no stories. And leave the door open so I can see you doin’ it.” After he’s complied, he comes back into the kitchen and picks up the remote. Whizzes past a dizzying number of stations until he finds what he’s looking for. I head down to the basement with the vomity clothes.

  A few minutes later, nearing the top of the stairs again, I overhear the tail end of a conversation between her and Hector. “Me neither, but I can’t say no to no thousand dollars. When we get back, I’m gon’ fire that babysitter’s ass. Backing out on me like that at the last minute. Hmph.”

  Bli
nking back tears, I hear Viveca’s reproof: They don’t want to be your friends, Anna. They just want to come to work, do their job, and go home. Thinking about Viveca reminds me: the Josephus Jones painting I’m supposed to bring over there. I turn around and tiptoe back down the stairs to get it.

  But where is that painting? Did Orion leave it upstairs after we showed it to her that day? Stash it back up in the attic where we found it? Maybe he’s put it in one of these storage cartons.

  I look through the boxes without finding it, but in the last one, I find, instead, the old family scrapbook my brother gave me—the one our mother kept. Donald had the photos copied for himself and let me have the originals. I sit, open the album. I haven’t looked at it in years.

  The first photos are black-and-white Polaroids of Mama and Daddy during what must have been their courtship. In the one where they’re kissing, Mama’s wearing his big, clunky class ring on a chain around her neck—the ring I’d sometimes finger when I’d sneak into their bedroom and look through their bureau drawers. Did it get thrown out? I wonder. Does Donald have it? It weighed a ton, I remember. . . . In another picture, they’re at some kind of carnival or fair. It’s summertime. Daddy’s in cuffed jeans and a striped T-shirt, the sleeves tight against his biceps. Mama’s wearing pedal pushers and a blouse with puffy sleeves and she’s carrying a stuffed animal he must have won for her. On the next page there’s a color picture, professionally taken. OLAN MILLS, it says in the lower corner. They’re at some kind of dress-up affair, posed beneath a trellis decorated with crepe paper and fake-looking flowers. Daddy’s in his uniform—his dress whites, so he’s already out of high school and in the navy. Mama’s wearing a pastel pink semiformal: spaghetti straps, a full skirt. Her heels and wrist corsage match the color of her dress. I lift the picture away from its red corners and look on the back. Mama’s handwriting: Me and Chick at my senior prom, May 25, 1947. The night we got engaged! Their wedding invitation is on the opposite page. Mr. and Mrs. Patrick Sullivan request the honour of your presence at the marriage of their daughter, Myrna Cathleen to Mr. Charles O’Day. . . .

  Pictures of their wedding reception, their honeymoon. They both look so young, barely out of their teens. . . . Here’s one of Daddy on the deck of a ship, his arms around two other sailors. . . . Mama in a maternity top, Donald as a baby, and then a toddler cross-legged on the floor beneath a sad-looking Christmas tree . . . Daddy standing in front of the barber shop where he used to work with Uncle Brendan . . . Here’s me in my christening gown. Me as a two- or three-year-old in a bulky snowsuit . . . Donald and me dressed for Sunday church—Easter, maybe. I swallow hard, studying the one of me sitting on our old living room sofa, holding baby Grace.

  I should close the book now. I remember what comes next. The final picture before all the empty pages—the last photo she put in before she and Gracie died. . . .

  It’s us at Fort Nipmuck—in the picnic area next to the old Indian monument. I remember that day. First we took a hike to Wolf Rock. Then Daddy lit a charcoal fire in one of the little fireplaces and roasted hot dogs. In the picture, we’re wearing coats and jackets. The trees are mostly bare, the ground carpeted with leaves. Late October, maybe? Mama’s seated at the picnic table holding Gracie on her knee. I’m leaning against her other leg, squint-smiling at the camera the way my own kids used to do. Daddy must have taken this picture because he’s not in it. But Donald and Kent are. Don sits on the tabletop to the left of Mama, his high-top canvas sneakers on the bench seat. Kent stands on the other side of her, next to me. His coloring and Andrew’s are different, but their eyes, their jawlines: they’re the same. It unnerves me to see, once again, how much my son resembles Kent.

  If it’s October, then Gracie is about two months old. She has five more months to live. Mama, too, although from her peaceful smile, you’d never know it. . . . I force myself to look at him again. Kent, who at the time I adored. I was four when that picture was taken, and now I’m fifty-two. Old, just like Africa said. But I’m my little girl self, too, feeling him pull me out of the freezing water and onto that roof. Pulling me closer to him when we’re on the tree limb. I can hear it again: the roar of that rushing black water. . . . But it’s all turned out all right, I remind myself again.

  Has it? You sure of that?

  Go to hell, Kent! Leave me alone!

  I slam the scrapbook shut. Get up and shove it back into the box. Kick the box. Kent is just an old picture in a photo album stuck back inside a cardboard box in a home where I no longer even live. For all I know, he may be dead by now. And if he is, then I’m the only secret-keeper. What happened will die when I die, and no one else will ever have to know. . . .

  I wrap my arms around myself, pace. I don’t know how much time has passed when, suddenly, I’m aware of the noises upstairs. Footsteps, voices . . .

  The kids are here! They’re home!

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Kent Kelly

  Tuesday, March 5, 1963: I try not to think about that night, but sometimes I can’t help it. A nightmare will take me back there, or something during the day will trigger the memory. The other morning when I got out of work, the van driving me back to the group home passed by some public works guys. They were out early, flushing hydrants, and bam! The sight and sound of that gushing water brought me right back to my aunt and uncle’s downstairs apartment on that March night—the worst night of my life. . . .

  Aunt Sunny had just given the baby a bottle and gotten her to sleep. “Finally,” she said, when she walked out of Annie and Gracie’s room. “She’s been cranky all day.” She went over to the window and looked out at the rain. It had been coming down for two days straight. Walking home from school that afternoon, I’d gotten soaked to the skin.

  Uncle Chick and I were parked on the couch, watching The Untouchables. Turning to face her husband, Sunny said she was worried about Donald. His indoor track team had had an away meet at Hartford Public, but she’d expected he’d be home long before this. Uncle Chick told her to relax—that the bus driver was probably just taking it slow because of the wet roads. “You look beat, Sun,” he said. “Go to bed. I’ll stay up and wait for him.”

  She nodded, kissed him. Bent down and gave me a peck on the cheek. Usually it was Uncle Chick who went to bed first; Aunt Sunny was a night owl like me. Leaving the living room, she was stopped by a blast of tommy-gun fire. On the TV, Eliot Ness’s men were riddling Mad Dog Coll’s thugs with bullets. Sunny said she didn’t know why we wanted to watch this stuff.

  “What can we say?” Uncle Chick said. “We’re guys.”

  “Good night, you two,” she said, shaking her head.

  Uncle Chick was drinking beer, which he usually did at night when he watched TV. There were two empties on the coffee table and he was working on his third. When a commercial came on, he got up to go to the bathroom. As soon as he was out of sight, I picked up his beer, snuck a few quick swigs, and placed it back where the wet ring was. Put my feet up on the coffee table, my hands behind my head. Donald could stay away all night as far as I was concerned. When he came back, Uncle Chick said, “Hey, Numb Nuts. How many times have I told you not to put your shoes up on the furniture?”

  “About as many times as Aunt Sunny’s told you to use a coaster.”

  He picked up a pillow and beaned me off the head with it. I was just about to fire it back at him when something caught my eye—a light of some kind moving past the front window. Then there was a pounding at the front door. “What the hell?” Uncle Chick said. He jumped up and ran to the door.

  Whoever was out there was talking loud and excited, but I could only make out part of it: “dam,” “flood.” “Leave now!” Uncle Chick ran past me on the way to his and Aunt Sunny’s room. “Get Annie!” he ordered me. “Wrap a blanket around her and get in the car.”

  As I ran into Annie’s and Gracie’s room, I heard Aunt Sunny’s panicked voice. “Is it Donald? Did something happen to Donald?”

  When I picked he
r up, Annie started whimpering, still half-asleep. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” I kept saying. Leaving her room, I almost collided with Uncle Chick, who was hurrying in to get Gracie. “What did I tell you, Kent! Get her in the goddamned car!”

  “Okay, okay,” I said. “Jesus.”

  When I got outside, the wind was blowing and the rain was hitting me in the face. Old Mr. and Mrs. Dugas, the next-door neighbors, were hurrying toward their Studebaker. The water rushing through the street was up to my ankles. Annie wanted to know where her mommy was, and I said she was coming, she’d be right out. From the backseat, I watched them running toward us. Uncle Chick was holding the baby, wrapped up in a blanket like Annie. Aunt Sunny was behind him, struggling to put on her winter coat. The neighbor across the street called to Chick from his upstairs porch to ask what was going on. “Dam broke up at Wequonnoc Park!” he shouted. “The water’s coming this way!”

  Uncle Chick started the Merc, hunched forward, and began gunning it down the hill. Aunt Sunny was up front, next to him, clutching the baby. When we caught up to the Dugases’ car, Uncle Chick laid on the horn. “Come on! Move it!” he shouted. Instead, their brake light went on. He drove up onto the sidewalk and tried to pass them, but there wasn’t enough room. “Get going or get the hell out of the way!” he shouted. Gave the horn another couple of blasts.

  “Chick, I’m scared!” Aunt Sunny said. Annie was crying now. The baby, too. Uncle Chick ordered Aunt Sunny and me to open our windows because the front windshield was fogging up. Then the Merc stalled, and while Uncle Chick was starting it up again, the Dugases’ car disappeared around the curve. The engine caught and the Mercury shot forward again, but just as we reached the curve, we were hit from the back by a wall of water. The tires lost contact with the road and the car started bobbing around, moving every which way instead of straight ahead no matter which way Uncle Chick turned the wheel. When I looked out the window, a big gray chunk of something whizzed past us. I saw a tree topple over. I remember feeling scared but excited, too—like we were on some thrilling, out-of-control carnival ride. Then something smashed into the back of the car, sending Annie and me flying to the floor and propelling the Merc into a crazy spin. As I scrambled to get us back up onto our seats, Aunt Sunny screamed. I looked out the front windshield and recognized the drop-off we were heading toward—a retaining wall a good fifteen feet high.