Tell Me More

by Janet Mullany

  “Who the fuck are you, man?” Harris seemed to notice him for the first time.

  “Daddy!” Yolanda wailed as Liz grabbed her. She struggled in Liz’s arms.

  “You give her back, bitch.”

  “Leave them alone!” Patrick ordered as Harris headed for Liz and Yolanda.

  I heard the sound of sirens and willed the police to hurry. Liz, Yolanda in her arms and screaming, turned and ran toward the building, slowed by the child’s attempts to escape.

  Harris’s head turned; he’d heard the sirens, too.

  “Fuck you!” he shouted and swung one powerful arm. Patrick fell onto the surface of the parking lot and lay motionless as Harris and his companion leaped back into their car and drove off, tires squealing.

  “He’s hit someone! They’re driving off!” I snapped my phone closed and ran toward Patrick, who struggled to sit up, his face covered in blood.

  “Fuck,” he said, swiping at the blood.

  “Are you okay?” I said, surely one of the more stupid questions of my life.

  The sirens grew louder and a police cruiser and an ambulance drew up. Another police car, sirens blaring, shot past the park, presumably in pursuit of Harris. Paramedics pushed me aside and started firing questions at Patrick, who got to his feet, refusing to get onto the gurney they’d unloaded.

  Liz emerged from the building. “I need to take the kids back,” she said. “Is Patrick okay?”

  I glanced at him, sitting on the step of the ambulance, a cold pack pressed to his face, surrounded by paramedics. “He was walking just now. I guess so.”

  “I’m so sorry, Jo. We’ll get together another time, okay?”

  I hugged her and reassured her there was nothing to apologize for. Yolanda stood at Liz’s side, clinging to her, her thumb jammed into her mouth.

  Liz talked briefly to the police officer and gave him her card. Then she and Sharon and the children, many of whom were crying, trooped out to get back into their minivan.

  Someone tugged at my arm. I searched for a name— Maurice, that was it, the kid who’d wanted to hang upside down. “The bad man gave Patrick an owie.”

  “Yeah. But he’ll be fine.”

  “Will his momma look after him?”

  “I think his momma lives a long way off. But I’m his friend. I’ll make sure he’s okay.”

  Maurice seemed reassured and ran to join the other kids.

  I retrieved Patrick’s backpack from the bench and went over to where he was talking to some paramedics.

  “Shit, no. My nose isn’t broken, I wasn’t unconscious. I’m fine, and I’m not going to the hospital. My premiums will go sky-high.”

  “You may have a concussion, sir. That’s quite a bump you have on the back of your head and you shouldn’t drive yourself home.”

  I laid my hand on his arm. “I’ll drive you home, Patrick, but I think you should go to the hospital.”

  “No way.”

  I left him arguing with them and retreated into the community center, where I made and signed a statement, kicking myself that I hadn’t had the foresight to get the car’s license plate number.

  “We caught them six blocks away, ma’am,” the cop told me. “We know Harris. We can put him away for violating the terms of his restraining order, but he’ll be out and making trouble again soon and there’s nothing much we can do.”

  I thanked him and went outside again. Patrick now held a cold pack to the back of his head while signing a clipboard. He looked up at me. “I’m releasing them of all responsibility,” he said. “So if I drop dead, no one will sue them.”

  “Great, I’ll get to keep your rental deposit. Are you ready to go? I have your backpack.”

  He nodded and stood. I grasped his elbow. The paramedic handed me his copy of the release statement, on which was written a list of frightening symptoms that might indicate a concussion. “Keep an eye on your boyfriend for the next twenty-four hours, ma’am. He’ll probably be fine, but we like to be cautious when it’s a head injury.”

  “Sure. Thanks.” To Patrick I said, “Wait here. I’ll drive the car over.”

  He looked at me and blinked. “Are you kidding? It’s ten yards away. I need to walk.”

  He shook my arm off, and reached into his pocket for his eyeglasses.

  The significance of him taking off his eyeglasses now became clear. I unlocked the car door. “You knew he was going to hit you.”

  “I thought it likely. Eyeglasses are expensive.” He settled into the seat. “Your windscreen is dirty.”

  “I know.” I held up a hand. “How many fingers am I holding up?”

  “Seven. For God’s sake, woman, drive.”

  I giggled at his sudden lapse into Irishness. “I think I have some frozen peas in the freezer.”

  He blinked at me. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “For a cold pack.”

  “Oh. Okay. Thanks.”

  We rode in silence until I drew up at the house a few minutes later. “I can light a fire. Do you want to lie down on the sofa? I have a whole bunch of DVDs and—”

  “Are you planning on playing Florence Nightingale?”

  “I don’t remember telling them you were my boyfriend, but someone did.”

  “Right.” He touched the back of his head and grimaced. “Yes, well, they would have insisted on taking me in unless I had someone with me, so I told a bit of a fib.”

  “A bit of a fib.” I opened the door. “Why didn’t you just ask me?”

  He got out and stretched as though sitting in the car for a few minutes had stiffened his muscles. “Spur-of-the-moment. Sorry. It was all I could think of.”

  I felt ungracious then. “No, it’s fine. I would have offered anyway, but I was planning on going out tonight…. I can cancel it.”

  “No, don’t change your plans on my account. I need a shower.” He grabbed his backpack and headed up the outside stairs.

  “Will you… Do you think it’s safe?”

  He stopped. “You’re welcome to come scrub my back, but I’ll be okay. And the fireplace and movies sound great. Thanks for the offer.”

  He came back downstairs later, in clean sweats and a flannel shirt, and I settled him on the sofa with a quilt, two packs of frozen peas and my DVD and video collection. He seemed subdued, as far as I could tell, for someone who was fairly quiet anyway.

  In the kitchen I rummaged in the freezer for the batch of soup I’d made a few weeks ago and a loaf of raisin bread. I didn’t intend to spend all night seeing whether his pupils looked abnormally large, but the least I could do was feed him.

  As I carried the tray into the living room, familiar tinkling piano music met my ears.

  He looked up, one hand on Brady, whose purr I could hear across the room. “You don’t mind, do you?” He motioned to the television. Of all the options he had, he’d gone for an old home video.

  I shook my head and unloaded soup bowls, bread and butter onto the table. I tried not to watch the screen, but even as I sat my feet itched to turn out, point, move. My fingers moved, marking the steps.

  “First-year recital,” I said. And then, “Why didn’t you hit him?”

  He sat up, pushing cat and quilt away, fists clenched. “Because even if your dad is a jerk and an asshole and drunk as a skunk, you don’t want to see him bleeding on the ground.”

  I’d opened a can of worms here obviously. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to push a button.”

  He slumped back on the sofa and Brady settled on his knee, kneading his pants legs and purring. He stroked him and the purrs increased in volume.

  “Chicken noodle soup.” I handed him a bowl.

  He smiled. “Great. You’re all set up for bad-tempered invalids, I can tell. Sorry. I didn’t mean to bite your head off. And yeah, it pushed a button, but you weren’t to know.” He hit the pause button on the remote. The small figure on the screen stilled into a blur of interrupted movement. “So, you want to hear the story?”

 
12

  HE’D KNOWN SHE WOULD ASK, BUT LULLED INTO comfort and serenaded by the cat’s purr, she’d taken him by surprise. Where to start, that was the problem, because how the story began was important; it colored the rest of it, and it definitely meant the ending might change. He wasn’t even sure if there was an end, because things went on and you did what you could, and hoped you wouldn’t screw anything or anyone else up.

  He prodded at a piece of chicken in his bowl. “Good soup.”

  “Thanks.”

  “So, it’s not Angela’s Ashes or anything. Nice middle-class family near Dublin, we lived in a Georgian house, all decaying elegance with a ghost in the attic, and so on, with a bit of land. My sisters had ponies. My da’s a fellow at Trinity, mum’s a doctor, both smart, educated people. My da’s a great guy except when he drinks and then he’s a jerk. A violent jerk. And for all her fancy education my mother was like one of the women at the shelter, poor cows—she rationalized what he did and accepted it. I learned to fight so he wouldn’t take it out on me when he was drunk. And that was a mistake.”

  “Why?” She paused, spoon halfway to her mouth.

  “If he’d hit one of us kids, she might have left him sooner.”

  “You really believe that?”

  “I knocked him down one time and she flew at me screaming like a crazy woman.” He spread butter on a piece of bread. “She left him, and I came to the States. I’d met Elise the year before and we decided to marry. I thought I was making a clean break of it, but there’s never a clean break with your family.”

  “I’m very sorry.” It was a conventional response but he felt a deep kindness behind the words.

  “Thanks.”

  “So that’s why you do volunteer work for the shelter,” she said.

  “Yeah, atoning for my da’s sins. And I like the little kids. I’m missing my nieces and nephews growing up. There are eight of them. We’re a prolific lot.”

  “And it’s why you don’t drink.”

  “Right. Not a smart thing to do with my genes.” He put his empty bowl on the table.

  “You know, there are support groups for adult children of alcoholics—”

  “No. Absolutely not.” He jabbed a finger at her. “Jo, I tried it and there was only one other guy there, and half the women came on to me.”

  She giggled. “Oh, come on.”

  “I thought it was obscene. And adult children— God, I hate that term.” He saw an expression he couldn’t quite figure out pass over her face. “Sometime in your life you just have to suck it up and get over yourself. Everyone’s screwed up one way or another.” He replaced the bag of peas on the back of his neck. The cat investigated his soup bowl until Jo swatted him away, and then climbed onto Patrick’s chest, warm and heavy and purring.

  “Push him off if you like. More soup? In a clean bowl,” she added. “How about some tea? I have Irish Breakfast.”

  He accepted the tea, not sure what he was getting into. Elise always accused him of being a tea snob, which he wasn’t. One time she’d taken him to a place that had exotic teas from all over the world and he figured that the more the teas smelled like a damp basement, the more they cost. He liked the sort of tea he’d drunk all his life, strong enough to put hair on your chest, with a scant dribble of milk to give it opacity, what his grandmother called “a nice cup of tea.”

  Amazingly, she got it right, serving it to him with a graceful bob into a cross-legged position on the rug. The girl must have great quads.

  “Ah, the Irish tea ceremony,” she said as he sipped.

  “Great. Thanks. Now tell me about your lurid past.”

  She grinned. “I believe in having a lurid present.”

  “No. That.” He gestured at the television screen, which had long since reverted to a regular channel and now provided a little background noise. “Tell me about being a dancer.”

  “Ah. What makes you think it’s part of my lurid past?”

  “The expression on your face when you came into the room. The way you tensed up. And honest to God, I wasn’t being nosy. I thought I was going to watch Casablanca.”

  She stood and took the remote from the arm of the sofa. “Shit. I wonder where Casablanca is.” She clicked the recording back into life. The blurry figure on the screen came to life, twirled, leaped, stretched.

  “You were good,” he said.

  “Not good enough for New York and that’s what counts, but I was good enough to study here. The university has one of the better teachers outside of New York.” She mimicked the figure on the screen with scaled-down movements, precise and graceful. “Dance memory. Sometimes I think it’s written into my bones. I didn’t have the right sort of body.”

  Your body looks absolutely fine to me. If he’d said that aloud, would she have been offended or thought he had a concussion?

  “I’m too long-waisted. My turnout was always crap.” She arranged her feet, heels together, toes out in a dancer’s one-hundred-and-eighty-degree position. “And I was overweight.”

  “You were?” He looked at her and then at the figure on the screen.

  “By about five pounds. Always. And that’s why I stopped.” She flowed across the room, arms arched, turned and snapped the player off. “I’d worked hard but I’d never been in this sort of community before, with girls who were so driven. All they did was dance and puke and their definition of a serious conversation was talking about toe-shoe maintenance or what brand of laxative was best. And the day after this recital I found myself looking at a bar of Swiss chocolate and thinking that if I ate it I could puke it up after.”

  “Did you?”

  “No, but it was scary. I ate it to prove I could, and then I called home and told my family I was changing my major. I saw my advisor the next day and changed to a major in history with a minor in communications. And then—” she grinned “—I ate chocolate and bread, and my God, what a sensual experience that was after all those years of denying myself. I’m ten pounds heavier now.”

  “You look great to me.” That came out right, not too leering.

  “Thanks.” She sat down again. “I responded to peer pressure, and that can be a scary thing. So we both have addiction in common. Isn’t that special.”

  “Very.”

  She giggled again. “Maybe a group hug would be appropriate.”

  His dick woke up with a vengeance. He hastily rearranged the quilt on his lap and waited to see what she’d do next. Christ, why did he feel like a teenager around this woman?

  The phone rang. She listened for a while. “Oh, hi. No, he’s here, with me.” She said to Patrick, “It’s Liz. She was worried because she didn’t get through on your cell or your landline.”

  “Tell her hi and that I’m fine.”

  “Sure.” Another pause. “She says she and Fred can come over with pizza if you’re up for it, and check out the size of your pupils.”

  “Great.” Although he enjoyed the company of Liz and her husband he was slightly disappointed that he was not to enter into a group hug, or anything else, with Jo.

  “And we can watch Pride and Prejudice,” Jo continued. “That okay, Patrick?”

  He nodded his assent and wished he hadn’t as both sides of his head ached.

  She replaced the phone on the receiver. “That’s okay, isn’t it? Or were you hoping for Casablanca?”

  “No, that’s fine. I like Jane Austen. Movies, at any rate.”

  “Wow. A guy who likes Austen.” She gave one of her sudden huge grins.

  “So, do you miss it?”

  “Miss what?” She bent to pick up his tea mug. She gazed into his eyes and he hoped it wasn’t purely to check out the size of his pupils. “Dance? It was the greatest loss of my life, up to that point. I cried for months after, and it was the damnedest thing—I actually lost those five pounds for a while. But like you say, you suck it up and you move on.”

  Liz and Fred arrived shortly after, full of concern for him and for a moment it reminded
him of being with his sisters and their families, a real girly evening, what with the Pride and Prejudice marathon ahead, but he didn’t mind.

  “Don’t change your plans, Jo!” Liz cried. “If you have a date, go out. Have fun. We’ll stay here with Patrick.”

  “Look, you don’t have to—” he said, embarrassed, and then remembered the one thing he’d got out of that awful support group meeting: that he shouldn’t be afraid to ask for help. By extension, he shouldn’t turn help down; asking for it might be some way off.

  Jo picked at a piece of pizza and caught him watching her. “I don’t want to reek of garlic,” she said with a slightly defensive air as though she regretted telling him of her flirtation with bulimia.

  “So who is it, Jo? You didn’t tell me you were seeing anyone,” Liz said.

  She shrugged. “Just some friends. Nothing special.”

  Shortly after she left the room and he heard the sound of water roaring in the pipes and tried not to imagine her having a shower. He yawned, feeling unaccountably tired. He supposed it was the aftereffect of shock, after having so much adrenaline run through him.

  “You okay, Patrick?” Liz said, patting his hand.

  “I’m fine. I’m not lapsing into a coma or anything. Just wondering whether I should press charges against Yolanda’s dad. The cops wanted me to.”

  “You should.”

  “The poor bastard’s in a shitload of trouble without me adding to it. If Yolanda was my kid I’d probably go berserk, too.”

  “You probably wouldn’t be high or violent.” Liz returned her attention to the screen. “Oh, I love this bit, when Mr. Collins gets into the cart.”

  Jo came downstairs, wearing jeans and a black T-shirt and sparkly earrings that probably weren’t diamonds. For some reason he was reminded of Cinderella, the early versions where she was given jewelry by the fairy godmother, a pair of bracelets. The earrings seemed incongruous with the rest of the outfit, but what was a mere guy to know.

  Her cell phone rang—some musical phrase that he didn’t recognize—and she waved goodbye to them and left.

  “Well, well.” Fred peeked out through the blinds on the front window. “A stretch limo.”