Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride

by Sweany, Brian;

  I knock on Mom’s door.

  “Come in.”

  “Housekeeping.” I force out a laugh that doesn’t quite get there.

  “Hank, just the man I wanted to see.” Mom opens her arms. “Give your mom a kiss.”

  I walk over to my mother’s bed and kiss her on the forehead. She’s been looking better the last month or so, all things considered. Her face is a little fuller; her skin is a little less pale. “Love you, Mom.”

  “I love you, too. Jack at Nancy’s house?”

  “Yeah, I dropped him off after soccer.”

  “How’d he do?”

  “Leading scorer.”

  “For both teams?”

  “Like always.”

  “That’s my boy.”

  “Yeah, whatever. What the hell are you doing in here?”

  “I want to talk to you about my behavior, Hank.”

  “That’d be good.”

  “And I’m not talking about today, about me being here. This whole thing is just the hospital taking precautions. I want to talk about me and you, about our relationship.”

  “Mom, we’ve been down this road already. I was out of line with you about Tom, and I’m sorry. You can see whoever you want. I have no right to judge you.”

  “You have every right to judge me. You lost your father and both of your grandfathers in the span of twelve months. Meanwhile, your mother—”

  “Jumps in the sack with her high school sweetheart in between chasing antidepressants, painkillers, and sleeping pills with vodka gimlets?

  “You don’t have to be such a jerk, Hank. I realize I’m failing you now, just as I failed you when you were a kid. Today more than ever, I realize this.” Mom appears to sink into the bed, as if a giant weight is bearing down on her.

  “Uh, come again?”

  “You heard me. I’m not in this hospital by accident. I had one too many gimlets after your aunt Ophelia called me this morning.”

  “She called you? About what?”

  “You remember how Uncle Mitch moved back, right?”

  “I try not to remember.”

  “Well, he got hired on at Empire Ridge Middle School.”

  “No!” I yell, almost manic in my reaction.

  “Well, yes, Hank.”

  The moment is here. It’s now. Tell her. Tell her! “But, Mom. Y-you don’t understand.”

  “I understand plenty, Hank. There’s no easy way to say this, so I’ll just come right out and tell you. Uncle Mitch turned himself into the police late last night. He’s been sexually abusing young boys, his own middle school students. He’s been charged with four counts of child molestation. He’s confessed to at least three others beyond what he’s charged with, but he can’t be prosecuted for any of these because they exceed the statute of limitations.”

  “What?” I don’t even know why I react. Her next words have been waiting to be said for the last twenty years. And I’m not going to get to say them.

  “The three other people Uncle Mitch confessed to molesting were his two nephews and his only godson.”

  I let the word godson hang in the air, trying to give the revelation some sort of proportionality to the amount of time I’ve kept it buried and festering inside me. But in a weird way, I feel ripped off. I feel like I’m being outed. This was a horrible secret, but it was my horrible secret. Uncle Mitch the gay adulterer was, in its own weird way, palatable. Uncle Mitch the pedophile was my cross to bear. Fuck you, Simon of Cyrene. Let me face Calvary on my own terms.

  “Sounds about right, Mom.”

  “Sounds about right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Dear God, Hank. Is that all you have to say? Were you just going keep this to yourself forever?”

  “I had planned on it.”

  The plan didn’t start out a conscious one, but it sure ended up that way. I protected everybody along the way. Aunt Ophelia, Dad, Mom. Even Uncle Mitch. Too bad nobody stepped up to protect me.

  “But when did it start?” Mom says. “When did it end? How did we not know?”

  “You don’t want to know all that.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  It was the Fourth of July, 1976. I was five years old.

  This was when it started, or my earliest approximation of when it started. There are some auditory and visual cues. “The Hustle” by Van McCoy & the Soul City Symphony was playing on the radio. I know it was 1976 because I remember Dad’s red-white-and-blue bicentennial sunglasses propped on top of his head when he and Uncle Mitch were out on our back porch laughing about a Saturday Night Live skit while Dad grilled some burgers and brats.

  Mom, Dad, Uncle Mitch, and Aunt Ophelia were playing cards at the kitchen table—euchre I think, although it might have been bridge. Mom had just sent me to my room for fighting with Jeanine.

  Our house was small and cozy. A white bookcase went all the way to the ceiling in between the kitchen and the living room. A twenty-nine gallon aquarium of tropical fish sat in the middle of the bookcase. The tank was filled with swordtails, mollies, and platies—Uncle Mitch’s favorites. He and I went to Animal World and picked out the very first fish for the aquarium. The fish was a large, fiery-orange male swordtail. The pet store clerk told us to get two females to go with the one male. She said male swordtails were too “horny” for one female to handle. It was the first time I heard that word used in its proper context—that is, other than the time young Arliss traded in his “horny toad” and a home-cooked meal for Old Yeller. Uncle Mitch smiled at the clerk’s comment.

  Of course he fucking smiled at the clerk’s comment.

  I heard through the bookcase Uncle Mitch telling Mom to take it easy on me. Mom said back to Uncle Mitch that he was a big softie. Everyone laughed. A chair scraped the floor. I heard footsteps.

  I was lying on my bed, crying. I was embarrassed, which was how I always got after Mom yelled at me. The television was on in the other room. It was one of the Planet of the Apes movies. Those movies gave me nightmares because I kept hearing on the news about the “gorilla” warfare in the Middle East, and as I lived in the Midwest, I assumed these gorillas were running around Pennsylvania.

  Uncle Mitch popped his head around the corner of my bedroom door. I smiled a little. Uncle Mitch slid behind me on the bed. He tickled me until I laughed, too. He nuzzled his scratchy, five o’clock shadow into the back of my neck.

  My neck started to sweat beneath the heat of Uncle Mitch’s three-packs-a-day breath. He always forgot to take his pack of cigarettes out of his front pocket. I heard the plastic wrap on the cigarettes crunching, again and again, as he rubbed his erection into my backside. Uncle Mitch reached his right arm around to the front of my underwear, putting his hand down my pants. His hands were clammy.

  “Can you get us a clean one please?” I hand the bedpan to the nurse. It’s filled with a mixture of my mother’s tears and vomit.

  Mom stops yelling, but I don’t know if it’s from exhaustion or if she’s just run out of ways to describe the act of human castration. When it comes to protecting her firstborn, it’s fair to say my mother’s level of creativity—hell, outright sadism—is both inspiring and disturbing.

  “I just don’t see how any of this is possible,” Mom says. “If your father wasn’t dead, this would have killed him.”

  “Come on, Mom. You’re a high school guidance counselor. You see this all the time.”

  “Those are my students, Hank. You’re my son. I tell my students what the manuals tell me to tell them. When it involves my flesh and blood, fuck the manuals. We should’ve been there, your father and I, we should have done something.”

  “You’re being way too hard on yourself. Uncle Mitch is a sick man, but he’s also calculating and deceitful. He snowed everybody. And a guy like Dad was the perfect foil.”

  “Always belie
ved in the good in everybody. Always assumed everything would work out for the best.”

  “Exactly. Dad was incapable of seeing a guy like Uncle Mitch for who or what he was. Dad was just never wired that way. And Uncle Mitch took advantage of him just like he took advantage of me.”

  “Who else knows?”

  “Well, Uncle Mitch and I have known about it for a while.”

  “Besides us, I mean. Have you ever opened up to anyone about this?”

  “Not really,” I say. “What’s done is done, Mom.”

  “But don’t you want to talk to somebody? This would explain a lot about your behavior when you were younger, the situation you got in with Laura, your promiscuity.”

  “My promiscuity?” I exaggerate her words. “So you’re saying that maybe my sexual activity as a young man was just a defense mechanism, a way of acting out Uncle Mitch’s abuse, and that as a boy I was just never given the proper tools to be a man, and that my Catholic faith with its patriarchy and its feigned more-patronizing-than-sincere adoration of women exacerbated my skewed views of masculine and feminine archetypes?”

  “Now you’re just mocking me.”

  “You bet your ass I’m mocking you. I’m not going to sit here and concoct a bunch of bullshit armchair psychology to justify being just your average horny teenager.”

  “Your hormones were anything but average. And you can’t dismiss Uncle Mitch’s abuse as never happening.”

  “I’m not dismissing the fucking abuse. What happened to me as a boy, I’ve just chosen to forget as a man. I’m done surviving my life. I’m going to try living it now.”

  “That’s a good line, Hank.”

  “That’s a great fucking line.”

  “But you don’t just forget stuff like that.”

  “You don’t?”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “Then I guess you can tell me what you did, who you saw, what you were wearing on October 1, 1992?”

  “That’s not fair. You know I blacked out.”

  “So, let me get this straight. Just ten months after the fact, there are large chunks of the day Dad died that you can’t recall. And yet you want me to sit here and psychoanalyze something that happened to me fifteen years ago?”

  “I’ve leaned on tons of people this last year. For most of your life you’ve been carrying this secret inside you, alone. Nobody can go through what you went through without some scars.”

  “My scars are fine.” I pat myself on the heart. “I somehow managed to survive my promiscuity, even the situation I got in with—”

  I stop myself short.

  “Hank?” Mom asks.

  “…”

  “Hank?” she asks again.

  “Yes, Debbie.”

  “You okay?”

  “I’ll be okay after you answer me one question.”

  “Ask away, honey.”

  “What situation would that be?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You said earlier, ‘This would explain a lot about your behavior when you were younger, the situation you got in with Laura, your promiscuity.’ What situation?”

  “You know what I mean,” Mom says. “I’m talking about your first love, your first broken heart, your first overdose…”

  “My first abortion?”

  Mom bites her bottom lip, exhaling. “Well, yes. That, too.”

  “How the hell did you find out?”

  “Laura told me,” Mom says.

  “When? Why?”

  “Please, calm down, Hank. Laura and I talk.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since forever. Look, these questions can all be answered in good time. Laura is here.”

  “She’s what?”

  “She’s in town visiting, and she called me right before you got here. Uncle Mitch is all over the news. She tried to call you at home. Nancy answered the phone, said I was in the hospital and you were here with me. Laura is coming right now.”

  “Coming where?”

  “Here, to the hospital.”

  “Are you out of your fucking mind?”

  “There are things we need to get out in the open.”

  “No, we don’t.

  “Yes, Hank, we do,” says a voice from behind me.

  Laura is standing just inside the room, her left hand on the door. I notice the engagement ring.

  Chapter forty-eight

  “Holy Christ,” I say. “How long have you been standing there?”

  “Long enough.”

  “Nice fucking rock. I take it the world’s perfect couple is back together again?”

  “That’s not why I came here,” Laura says. “I saw the story about your uncle on the news, and I had to find you.” She looks over my shoulder and waves. “Hi, Mrs. Fitzpatrick.”

  ­Mom waves back. “Good to see you, Laura. Your parents doing well?”

  “Yes, thanks. They send their regards.”

  “Tell them I—”

  “Can we cut the crap?” I interject. “They’re fine, you’re fine, Ian’s fine, we’re all fucking fine. Laura, why the hell are you here? And since when did you and my mom get so chummy?”

  “Since forever,” Laura says.

  “Perfect,” I say.

  “Laura,” Mom says. “It’s time.”

  “I know it is, Debbie.”

  “Time for what?” I ask.

  Laura pulls up a chair, offering it to me. “Hank, with all due respect, I’m going to need you to sit down and shut up for a few minutes.”

  I sit down. My hold on the shut up part of the equation is precarious at best.

  “You remember the day I told you I had decided to get an abortion?”

  “How could I not? You said that—”

  “It was a rhetorical question. Please, let me talk.”

  I grind my teeth, nodding.

  Laura continues. “You said, in no uncertain terms, that you were opposed to the abortion. I never felt so alone. My parents would’ve disowned me if they found out. I turned to the one person who I knew would listen to me with an open mind and an open heart.”

  “You didn’t,” I say, running my fingers through my hair and pulling it straight up in two big horns. Debbie and Laura conspiring to just cook a fucking omelet scares me. This level of collusion and subterfuge is beyond comprehension.

  “I did.” Laura looks at my mother. “I called my high school guidance counselor.”

  “What the fuck?”

  Mom reaches over and touches my knee. “Let her talk, Hank.”

  “Your Mom and I met for lunch,” Laura says. “It was the day after you left for Hoosier Boys State. We talked for three hours. We talked about everything—you, me, us, motherhood, fatherhood, life. Debbie talked about her struggles to get pregnant, about her miscarriages, about her hopes for your future. As we talked, I saw in Debbie someone whose desperation to be a mother was matched by my desperation to not be one. It affirmed all the reasons I didn’t want to have this baby, and your mom agreed to help me out with my situation.”

  I stand up, shaking my head. I turn in a half-sprint toward the door.

  Mom’s voice chases me down. “Henry David, where do you think you’re going?”

  “I’m leaving.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  I turn to face the room again. “What are you going to do if I leave, Mom? Abort another one of my kids behind my back?”

  “Son, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I don’t?”

  “No, you don’t. I didn’t pay for any abortion. I paid to help Laura carry the baby to term.”

  “Excuse me?” I say.

  “It’s true,” Laura says. “I never got the abortion.”

  I turn
from my mother to Laura. This isn’t a fair fight. “So you lied to me?”

  “Your mother talked me out of it. When I got to Bucknell, she set up a checking account that helped me pay for some of my medical expenses, for which I’ve since paid her back plus interest. Between Debbie’s help and an assistantship Ian got me, I managed to keep my head above water until the baby was born in February.”

  “When in February?”

  “The fourteenth, on Valentine’s Day.”

  “So the baby was born a year after we told each other we loved—”

  “Yes.” Laura brushes the memory under the rug like an unsightly pile of dust.

  The puzzle pieces start coming together. “Ian was there for the birth.”

  “Yes,” Laura says.

  “And that’s how you two became so close?”

  “Obviously.”

  “Laura, nothing is fucking obvious with you.”

  “You had to have suspected, Hank. What about all those photos I sent you? I wasn’t exactly wasting away. I didn’t even wear padding when I dressed up as Santa Claus.”

  “I just thought you were eating a lot of turkey Manhattan.”

  “Turkey Manhattan?”

  “You know, starchy foods, the freshman fifteen. Oh fuck it, never mind.” I pull on my hair again. I clasp my hands behind my head, bending my elbows toward my face. “So let me see if I got this all straight. My mother, my girlfriend, and my girlfriend’s future husband conspired to fake an abortion, hide my pregnant girlfriend in Pennsylvania, and give my child up for adoption without telling me about it. Is that about it in a nutshell?”

  Laura shakes her head. “There’s more.”

  “What?”

  She looks at my mother. “Debbie?”

  Mom nods. “I’ll take it from here.”

  “Holy crap, Mom,” I say. “Who knows what’s going to come out of your mouth. Are you comfortable? Can I get you some narcotics?”

  “Just listen, son. Just listen.”

  “Oh, I’m all ears.”

  “You remember what happened after my second miscarriage?”

  “I remember it being better than your first one.”

  “Better? How so?”