A yellow cab filled the picture window overlooking Wisconsin Avenue. Nelson gave Ben a bro-hug. Before he turned to go, he slapped me on my back, knocking me a step forward. In my ear he whispered, “Later, bobcat.”
When the cab drove away, Ben tried to make Nelson’s excuses. Apparently, Nelson was brokenhearted over Alexa’s imminent departure. She was determined to find work in South Florida, which was home for her, and had gotten serious inquiries from several stations, including our Miami affiliate. Nelson thought it was only a matter of Alexa’s deciding which station offered the best deal, and if Nelson could persuade her to take him.
“Everyone who’s got a place to go is going,” Ben said. “Hell, I’ve thought of going home.”
“You’d go back to Montana?” It was like another country, a place beyond comprehension, and he was thinking about it. With Ben, thinking meant he was already halfway there. “Good god, Ben. What market is that?”
“If I went, it wouldn’t be for television. I’ve got years of hay baling to catch up on.” He took a long sip of beer, savoring it, and in his eyes there was a faraway look, all softness and yearning, where he wandered a bit before slowly coming back. “But I can’t leave just yet.”
My back sagged with relief. “Good, I still have some use for you,” I said, smiling, and made a silly attempt at mimicking his deep voice: “I’ve got you broken in the way I like you—”
“Yeah?”
I laughed. “No.”
We picked up our drinks at the same time and drank simultaneously, and for some reason, Ben found this funny. I started laughing again, too. Maybe the intense feeling of happiness came from that last burst of energy at the end of a draining day or maybe from that perfect balance of vodka in my blood, but I had to figure it came mostly from Ben. He made you believe the illusion you weren’t alone any longer.
His warm eyes crinkled at me. “You know what happens to a man on a fast approach to forty?” he said. “He gets this idea he wants to talk to a woman. What’s worse? He decides he wants a woman who can talk to him, too.”
“I should warn you. That’s called a conversation.”
“Now don’t think he wants talking more than he wants other things, being what he is, but enough that when he comes up for air, it’s not to put on his hiking boots. Young and dumb doesn’t cut it anymore. He wants to know a woman, and he needs a woman smart enough to know him, too.”
He gave me a tender look that had my heart racing, even as huge warning sounds started going off. “Ben, wait—”
“I’ve waited long enough,” he said. “The woman I want to know is you. Maybe you’ve been thinking about it, too?”
There was a punch of heat to my chest, unbelievably pleasurable or painful. I couldn’t tell which. I couldn’t tell much of anything. I think I was in shock.
“You want to know a woman—to know me.” I was feeling all kinds of thick-tongued drunkenness now. “You’re talking sex, right? That’s what you mean?”
He exhaled equal parts laughter and relief. “Christ, you take all the romance out of it.”
The overhead lights flickered. It was past last call and the bartender was polishing the wood of the mostly empty bar. There was a crash of ice, a busboy scooping out a bin.
I breathed Ben’s name like an apology.
His eyes narrowed. “I’m asking for a simple answer here. Yes or no.”
“I—no.”
He nodded once. “Okay,” he said, and lifted his hand for the check.
“Wait. Don’t go.” And then I stopped, having no idea what else to say.
The bartender dropped the bill onto the bar. Ben rolled onto one hip and pulled out his wallet.
“Do me a favor, though,” he said, looking down at the wad of cash he dropped onto the bar. “From now on, be more careful. You ambush any more suspects in Evelyn Carney’s disappearance, don’t go alone. Take Nelson or Isaiah or whoever.”
But not him, I noticed.
“Ben, please—”
“It’s okay,” he repeated, still not looking at me. “See you Monday.”
He grabbed his jacket from a hook beneath the bar and tossed it over his shoulder before climbing the stairs. I watched helplessly as he went out the door and passed the big picture window in a long-legged stride, and then he was beyond the frame, disappeared on the dark street, gone.
————
During the darkest part of the night I woke with a start in a pitch-black bedroom. The darkness itself had a heartbeat, and then I realized no, the sound came from my own heart loud in my ears. I sat dizzily, gulping air, my fists curled around the edge of the tangled sheet until my eyes focused and the shapes took form and I put names to them—bed, lamp, table—and by naming them, got a sliver of control.
I’d been thinking of my father. Not a dream, but the kind of remembering that comes like a dream in your half sleep. It had been as if I was really there again, hiding in the wings of my mother’s faded chair, my first grown-up novel, Gone with the Wind, heavy on my lap, and upstairs, my father was yelling and Mama crying. Then there was a new sound—thump, thump—of duffel bags dropping at the top of the stairs. The steps creaked under the weight of my father as he descended, then the screen door thwacked and moments later, a muscular engine roared to life. I heard the old Firebird as it bottomed out at the end of the driveway one last time.
On that day, I learned the sounds of betrayal, and I learned, too, that you always had a choice. I ran after my father as fast as my skinny legs allowed, until there was a cramp in my gut and I couldn’t run anymore and couldn’t call out for lack of breath. Not that it would have mattered. The old Firebird had already pulled up to the intersection, its turn signal winking at me. Across its rear window, there was a flash of sunlight, and in that flash everything became suddenly clear and hard and blindingly bright.
My father had turned.
I uncurled my hands from the sheets, lowered my feet flat to the floor, and put my head between my knees, letting the blood rush back. When my breathing calmed, I got out of bed and belted my long, soft robe and went downstairs, flipping on the hallway light as well as the kitchen light and every other switch I encountered. My whole house lit up.
The kitchen was strewn with white papers from Evelyn’s file glowing beneath the spotlight. I gulped a glass of water, cooling my throat, and poured myself another. I carried it to the table and logged onto my laptop.
The Amtrak website listed a ten o’clock Acela Express from Union Station to Wilmington, Delaware, only an hour-twenty ride. This was no time to travel. I was in the middle of an important story. Not to mention the serious mop-up operation I had to do with Ben. Except that I had no idea how to mop that up. I’d never known how to deal with Ben, not in that way.
My hands hovered over the keyboard. My heart punched once, twice, before I booked it. I printed out the train ticket and laid it on my satchel and climbed the stairs wearily to bed. The rest of the night, sleep came in fits and starts. The old nightmares had come back.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
TEN O’CLOCK SATURDAY morning. It was a short trip and the Acela is a comfortable ride; that’s really all there is to say. The view from train journeys along the northeast corridor are all the same anyway, the same industrial parks and suffering waterways and graffiti-scarred bridges; the same trash along the tracks. But I wasn’t looking at the landscape. I was looking back, trying to remember my mother’s face. I could get parts of it: the splash of freckles across her nose, the high arch of her eyebrows, her skin that was pale, except in the summer when it burned a coppery tan.
Her voice was equally difficult to remember, except that it was soft and it drawled and she’d called me Ginny and sweetie, except when I disappointed her. Then I was Virginia.
From my satchel I pulled out my reporter pad and flipped pages until I found some blank space. With a felt-tip pen, I wrote a list of childhood resentments: our furniture hauled out, the yard gone to bush, the pantry bare excep
t for the line of Campbell soup cans—I liked tomato, she liked chicken noodle—the boxes of herbal tea that’d settle her stomach, the days-old stale bread. The nighttime when she thought I was asleep, her fingernails tapping calculator keys and the machine humming out white tape with red ink that curled across the table and dropped to the floor, and the sound that bothered me most of all, her strange whispers in her empty bedroom.
Those words, the way she’d whisper his name, calling out for him when she was dying, I didn’t know if I could bring all of that up. But the rest I’d throw in his face I could always see so clearly—his ruddy-cheeked good health, his thick-legged, strongly built body, powerful enough to carry any load. And clearest of all memories: his green eyes looking through me as he’d made his way to the door.
The train slowed and the stop for Wilmington was announced. I stepped onto the platform and walked down the steps and into the station, which had a surprisingly clean and lovely interior, having been renovated since I’d been through last. I went out and stood under the same gray sky with that low ceiling I associated with my childhood. After a deep inhale, I tasted the sweet polluted air and coughed. I was home.
Several taxis were queued. As I lifted my hand, the first taxi pulled forward and I jumped in. On the way to the hospital, I tried very hard not to anticipate. Above all, not to prepare any speeches. Just walk in, take a look, hand him your list, and walk out, you leaving him this time.
At the entrance to the hospital I lost my nerve. The automatic doors whooshed open every so often for the sick people and their visitors and some deliverymen. I’d take a step forward and the doors would open again. I’d step back and watch them close.
I left the hospital and wandered down the road, actually a split-lane highway dotted with the kind of megastores seen everywhere. There was a huge bookstore with a café, where I ordered a chai tea and carried it to a puffy green chair next to a table of sale books. The tea grew cold as I paged through books, unable to concentrate on the words. After a while of chastising myself for my great stupidity and even greater cowardice, I walked back to the hospital.
The young woman at the information desk gave me his room number on the eighth floor. I was surprised and a little worried he was on the eighth floor, not that I cared about him being in any particular place, of course, but only because it was a bad floor. That was the floor my mother had been on. I clipped the visitor tag to the lapel of my jacket and reminded myself no speeches, and crossed the spine of the hospital to its bank of elevators. The numbers ascended on the panel and then the eight lit up and the doors opened.
The old game I played when my mother lay dying here came back to me. In it, I’d walk through the hallway holding my breath, and when my breath ran out, I’d gulp quickly, pinching my nose, and then I’d hold my breath again for as long as I could. It was pretty childish even as a kid and ridiculous now, but I couldn’t quite help it. It wasn’t the cancer that was contagious, it was the fear. You could smell it over the stink of chemical cleaners and hothouse flowers, and in this ward, it smelled infinitely worse.
The cul-de-sac had a nurse’s station in the center, which I circled to the farthest room where his number was displayed. I went in. It was small and cramped with beeping equipment. In the bed, an old man had an oxygen mask over his face. That was not my father. A middle-aged woman sat beside him, caressing his wrist, and when she looked at me, she put a hand to her mouth. I walked past them to a dividing curtain.
On the other side, a young black man reclined in a bed beside the window. His hand cupped the back of his head and his other held a television remote. He glanced from the TV to me. “Hel-lo pretty lady,” he said. “You here to visit me?”
I backed out of his portion of the room, murmuring my apologies, thinking the damn hospital can’t even get a room number right, when the beep of the heart monitor sped up in the room behind me. I turned slowly. The old man was pulling off his mask.
“Ginny,” he said.
But this guy was not my father. First, he was the wrong color. My father had been a big red-faced man with strong cheeks and full lips and thick black hair and eyebrows that grew in a straight line. This guy had gray skin and thin hair combed over his head, shiny beneath the fluorescent light. This guy is someone else, I thought, and then I noticed his hand picking restlessly at the sheet. He wore a gold ring with a black onyx, the same my father had always worn, only now it was on his thumb.
The woman rushed at me. Her chubby arms crushed me to her ample chest in an awkward embrace. “Oh bless you, sweet girl,” she kept saying. “I knew you’d come.”
“Leave the girl be, Doris,” he said, whistling the s in her name.
The afternoon light was coming through the blinds, projecting a shadow like a huge ladder on the wall, each line a rung. There were fourteen rungs. Beyond the shadow was the door, which I eyed greedily.
“You look like your mama,” he said.
Yes, like Mama.
I thought of the list of his transgressions. I should pull it from the top of my satchel and throw it in his sick gray face on my way out the door. I was good at leaving, too. Me, the queen of all departures, the one thing I learned from my father. My mouth formed the words but my mind tumbled and my hands refused to grab the list. And anyway, those transgressions filling two pages of reporter pad, none of them seemed applicable to this frail old man staring up from his bed.
“Thinner than your mama,” he said. “I’m not one to talk.” He smiled at his joke. At least I think it was a smile. It was hard to tell. He had no teeth. “You ever eat?”
“Yes. Of course.”
“Oh you’re so sweet,” Doris gushed, clutching at my jacket. “Couldn’t I take this for you, you look overly warm, your pretty face all red, you sweet girl—”
“Doris,” he said. “Stop it.”
A nurse came in. She was a big woman wearing a baggy, flowery shirt, and her dyed auburn hair was cut short and gelled up all over, burned looking at the ends. “How are ya, handsome?” she said as she bustled about the room, moving in an off-balanced way, and then I noticed she had only one breast.
“He’s doing very well,” Doris said. “He has a visitor. You see his visitor?”
The nurse glanced up at me over her black-rimmed glasses, taking me in and dismissing me in that one glance. She leaned back over her patient. “She the prodigal daughter?”
“This isn’t my home,” I said a little stupidly. “I live in DC.”
“Aren’t these kids too much?” she said to no one in particular, stretching to the wheeled tray and grabbing a tissue she handed to Doris. She did all that without taking her eyes from him. “All right, tough guy. Let’s get to business. I’ve got good meds.”
“No meds now.”
“On a scale of one to ten?” she said.
“It’s manageable.”
“I need a number for the chart, handsome. You know the drill.”
“What’s manageable?”
The nurse rolled her eyes. “How about an eight? It wouldn’t surprise me if you felt an eight.”
“Seven’s good.” He whistled his seven.
“You’re such a toughie.” Her thick, clumsy hands touched him gently, and for all of her gruffness, she seemed like a gentle woman. “There’s no reason to suffer more than you have to.”
“I have to talk.” He looked right at me.
“All right, toughie,” she said, “but you get tired of talking, push this button here.” She gave me a quick glance that held a warning before she left.
“Come closer,” he said. “My eyesight is shot.”
Doris went to his side, whispering in his ear, all the while smoothing his ugly blue gown. When she straightened, she tugged at the gown snaps covering his shoulder, and then she leaned over and kissed those snaps.
When we were alone, I said: “This is not what I anticipated. I shouldn’t have come.”
“Closer,” he said. “Please.”
I stepped away
from the curtain to the foot of the bed. Beneath the blanket, he was so much smaller than I’d remembered. I felt big and awkward. In all my imagined confrontations over all the years, I’d never considered this. I wouldn’t have wished this on my greatest enemy, which I suppose had always been him.
“Will you tell me about yourself?”
“No.”
“Are you married?”
“Is this an interview, by chance?”
“I wondered if I had any grandchildren.”
“Maybe from someone else,” I said. “Not by me.”
“But you have family.”
“No.”
“Someone you love?”
I shifted from foot to foot. There was only one chair in the room, but it was next to his bed. I was thinking about the futility of this, glancing again at the door, when he closed his eyes. I thought he’d fallen asleep, but he opened his eyes again. They were wet looking but focused. “Will you tell me your story?”
“I don’t have one,” I said, and realized it was true. I chased other people’s stories and ignored my own. I had work and all the stuff that work had gotten me—a house, a car, a wardrobe, and shoes—but stuff never constituted a story. I thought about bragging about all that stuff, but it seemed such an effort, as all lies were.
“You hate me.”
“No.” Hate is such a clean, precise word. I no longer had the clarity of hate.
“I’m sorry. Can I say that?”
“You can say whatever you want,” I said slowly, trying to find my way through this idea. “And then I’d accept it, because that’s what people do. But what can it matter? It was long ago. We’re totally different people now.”
“It matters to me.”
It matters to me.
“You needed me,” he said. “I let you down.”
You let me down. “No, wait, that’s inaccurate,” I told him. “I never needed you and I got out just fine.”
“You were so young. Thirteen.”
Twelve years and two months, a couple of days.
“Will you tell me about after I left?”
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