by Samuel Ligon
“You don’t know how I feel,” I say. “And I don’t care.”
“Alina,” she says, standing over me, and I say, “No,” and she says, “Kyle would care,” and I say, “Don’t even say that.”
“It’s true,” she says.
As if I don’t know that.
“I want to tell you something,” she says.
She touches the back of my neck, under my hair, but I can’t look at her.
“I didn’t want you to go at first,” she says. “I know that sounds selfish, and it was selfish, I guess. But I wanted a few more years with you here at home. With me.”
I count the cars in front of our house and up and down the street. I count the clouds and vapor trails above us. I didn’t want to go at first, either. It was never really what I wanted, except that Kyle wanted it for me, and then it was fine by me, except I didn’t want to be away from home.
“Kyle convinced me,” she says, “of how important it was to cultivate your talent, to put it in a place where it could grow and develop—”
“Just don’t,” I say, and she says, “Listen, Alina. I’m trying to give you the chance we talked about. What Kyle talked about.”
“Don’t say his name,” I tell her. “Don’t ever say his name again.”
“Get in the house,” she says.
She snaps her fingers, points at the door.
I’ve never seen her like this.
“Right now!” she says, pointing and snapping and shaking.
I stand and carry my book inside, her pathetic little slave.
“Don’t even think about slamming that door.”
I close my door silently, hating her, deaf to her, completely and forever separate from her, then open it and slam it as hard as I can.
Nikki
The hatred in Alina’s eyes sends a panic through me, the same hatred I felt for my mother, and even if my mother was so manipulative and cruel, I regret now that I couldn’t have been a bigger person when I was nineteen. I could have at least let her seen Alina before she died alone up in Manchester, or even gone and taken care of her. But I’d been taking care of her since I was nine years old, watching her hatred for everything living grow with her dying, and I wasn’t strong enough to forgive her then. The thought of Alina carrying such hatred makes me frantic. I should just load her in the car and bolt, tell her something about my mother, how I realized too late how sick she was, how she wasn’t always horrible, didn’t mean to be horrible, though I couldn’t understand that as a girl, couldn’t recognize any good in her for so long because it was all killed by her sickness. Like Alina, I never met my father, but was frequently told what a great man he was, something I believed when I was very young and later knew had to be a lie. And then I hardly thought of him again. For so long I wanted nothing more than to get away from where I came from, but I never wanted that for Alina, always dreaded it—that she’d run from me the way I’d run from my mother. She slams her door and stays in her room and I wander the house, feeling my mother everywhere, her sickness and my smallness filling the air.
17
Mark
I walked to the bodega for cigarettes and beer and chips and dip, then stopped at the liquor store for vodka and whiskey. It was over a hundred degrees out, all this weather I had to wade through. I couldn’t stop hearing my voice on her machine, echoing in my skull, “I . . . I . . . I . . . Cynthia.” Back in her building, I couldn’t breathe after the glare and stink and noise outside. I had to walk upstairs and unpack these bags in her kitchen. I had to hold on by pretending not to hold on, my skin itchy over its entire surface.
“Make a sandwich or something,” Cynthia would have said. “Jesus.”
The sandwich was a good idea. I ran up the stairs to her apartment.
“Don’t be so uptight,” she would have said.
I had to stop my aimless movement and concentrate on what was in front of me.
“Anyway,” she would have said. “The weather’s fantastic.”
I ignored her.
“Really beautiful.”
“Where’s that?” I said, and she said, “Paris,” and I said, “Really?”
“Maybe,” she said. “What do you care?”
I concentrated on the sandwich, on bread and cheese and mustard and one tomato that wasn’t rotten, chewing and swallowing, feeding, keeping everything away from Cynthia’s prying eyes and ears. Keeping everything shut down tight. After lunch, I mopped the kitchen, then took a bottle of vodka up on the roof and started drinking.
It was cooler up there than on the street, and you could see Queens and Manhattan, the concrete and glass and steel rising toy-like off the island, tinker toys or sticks or blocks poking at the sky “in the gloaming,” as Cynthia used to say, the sun making its way down the backs of the towers, Jersey on the other side of the rivers and Queens up there and the rest of Long Island behind us choked with traffic and exhaust and sprawl, the night falling and the city lights sparkling through the heat and humidity, the blinking red and white lights of planes rising and falling, planes over the city like insects waiting to land on the gigantic earth elephant. I wanted to call Nikki, but thought better of it. She knew nothing of what I knew now. I’d known for a while that Cynthia wanted children—it was woven into every word she’d said the last few months—but I never would have guessed she’d start having them without me, or that she’d get pregnant without telling me. If she had told me, she knew and I knew I never would have supported it—not the way we were before she died, disintegrating. Maybe now, drunk on her roof and hating her for going to Kyle when I wouldn’t breed with her, when I wouldn’t procreate or reproduce or whatever the fucking fuck—now, sure, now I’d go along with it, now that I could travel back in time and know that she’d breed with Kyle. But even as drunk as I was, I knew maybe the baby was mine. It was mine or it was Kyle’s, but even if it were alive, it would really only belong to Cynthia and itself, such stupid thinking. I kept drinking, watching the lights of the city, filling myself, emptying myself, somehow managing to get back downstairs to Cynthia’s bed without killing myself.
Nikki
I sit up after Alina goes to bed, listening to last year’s P.J. Harvey album, playing that song “Horses in My Dreams” over and over, almost crying with the repeated line she sings, “I have pulled myself clear,” because I have pulled myself clear so many times and just have to do it this one more time. But I don’t know how. I’m over-thinking it instead of just acting, responding, reacting like I always do, and so worn out from what I told Alina.
I asked her to help me cook and she stood in the kitchen pouting, peeling garlic, cutting an onion, an eggplant, but I didn’t try to draw her out and we didn’t talk, until I told her I understood her feelings and that she didn’t have to go back to Interlochen. I opened a bottle of wine and poured her a glass, and at dinner I told her about my mother, her grandmother, how some animosity between an adolescent girl and her mother is normal, helps the child separate, but that what I’d felt was deeper, and I regretted a lot of those feelings now all these years after she died. And then Alina wanted to know what my mother had done that made me run
I sat for a long minute trying to find an answer, or the first words that would lead to an answer. But I couldn’t find any words. The animosity felt impenetrable, even though it’s softened over the years, maybe more lately, and I had to push at it for what felt like a long time to find a way through it.
“She was so sick,” I finally told her. “That’s what’s always been wrong about my feelings. She was so sick, and I just left her—like she could have helped it. Like she wanted to be that way. I was nine years old and scared to death.”
I told Alina how her hair had fallen out, how Aunt Patty was there to help at first, but my mother made her go away because she only wanted me with her through those long months of chemo sickness, and I wanted
to be near her, but she would have me do all these chores, shopping, cooking, cleaning her body, and it was always wrong, the food inedible, the room never clean enough, making her sicker, she said. She let me know her reaction to the treatment, her wasting, was my fault, but she didn’t blame me. She understood I was trying. She just needed me close to her in bed, where she’d hold me and baby me. She helped me knit a sweater for a doll part of me felt too old for already. Another part of me wanted that doll. She’d tell me she knew I didn’t mean to hurt her, that it was her fault for breastfeeding me in the first place. She told me her breast had been filled with poison, and that the poison had gone into me as a baby, my bones and body already filled with it, and probably breaking down because of it, which scared me to death, as did the wound itself, the scar where her breast had been, which she wanted me to study.
“Do you see how sick she was?” I asked Alina. “How crazy?
Then there was radiation, after the chemo, and she wasn’t throwing up anymore, but still wanted me near her all the time. She was drinking again, on the verge of losing her job at Velcro, and she’d hold me in bed, telling me I was the only thing keeping her alive, and as she held me, I could almost feel—I don’t know—it felt like she was absorbing me, taking all of me from the inside out.
She lost her job and I started spending nights in my own bed, which was a relief, but also lonely—this is how pathological the situation was—until the cancer came back in her other breast, this when I’m twelve and trying to make my way in school, starting to think about boys, and it’s right back to her wanting me in her bed, cleaning up after her because she was so sick from the treatment and drinking on top of it and throwing up the liquor. She’d hold on to me or make me take off my top so she could examine my breasts, and she’d say, “See what they’ll do, Nikki? Look at me. Do you see?” Or, she’d say, “You’re such a good girl, Nikki, the only one who cares.” She’d wrap me in her arms and I’d have this horrible thought that she was trying to absorb me, take the life from me—but she was my mother, and I loved her, even as I pulled away, which I knew was wrong, pulling away, but I was so stuck—I wasn’t strong enough—and what else could I do?
“It’s okay, Alina,” I said, because she was crying, because I’d scared her with the story, so lost in telling it, doing what I’d always promised myself never to do, to scare her with these awful stories. She came into my arms, crying.
“I don’t ever want you to feel like you owe me anything,” I told her. “That story’s so old anyway. So far away and buried. I’m sorry I told you that.”
My whole body was vibrating with it.
“But I want to know,” she said, and I said, “I’ll tell you more another time,” and she said, “When?” and I said, “Tomorrow or another time.”
I held her for a long time as she sniffled against me.
“Can I sleep in your bed?” she said, and I said, “You don’t think that’ll feel funny after the story I just told?”
She shook her head against me and I finally got her settled into bed and listened to P.J. Harvey singing that she’s pulled herself clear. I still don’t have any idea what I’m going to do with her. I need to get her somewhere safe while I deal with Burke. I wonder again if Mark can help, just the look I saw on his face at lunch, when he was surrounded by the money people and wanted nothing to do with them. He looked as lost as I feel now, all those people kissing his ring, and also—he just seemed, even with the rich people swarming him, entirely alone, which, except for Alina, is exactly how I feel.
Alina
I feel so guilty I can’t sleep, twisting in her bed, and she’s snoring and twitching and kicking, probably because she drank wine. I’ve known bits and pieces of her life, I’ve asked her to talk about it many times, and I knew there was some bad stuff, but I never realized how alone she must have felt, and that makes me think I’ve always only taken her for granted, and what if something happened to her? I just feel so guilty about Kyle. It didn’t mean anything. But I did like him. I did love him. I do love him. And the other stuff was just thinking, just images and feelings that came to me. I probably should have told her he was coming to Interlochen, which feels like a dirty secret now, this thing I’ve been holding onto, but there isn’t any reason to tell her now, because it might just make her mad or hurt, or it might make her think there’s something really wrong with me, and I don’t want to worry her like that. She hasn’t even said anything about school, just that I don’t have to go back to Michigan. Does that mean Long Beach High School? It’s so late and I can’t sleep and she won’t stop moving and it was just a dream really, that’s all—especially now—just a dream.
Burke
I try to find my way back to that place in my mind where I kept the Goat and all that past, but I can’t get to it, because it’s used up and rotted, and I ain’t supposed to need that anymore anyway, being on the outside free, but I can’t sleep or rest at all. I felt so good seeing her on her porch I could hardly contain myself, but then Cinnamon wasn’t around and wouldn’t answer my calls, even though I scored another eight ball and sat on my patio deck as the day wore itself out, drinking vodka and doing lines off my hotel desk, the traffic like a river on Sunrise Highway and getting Cinnamon’s goddamn machine every time I called from the payphone down by the ice machine. Back at Huntsville, Carl talked about the whore of Babylon getting stoned to death for washing Jesus’s feet, but I can’t remember if it was Him that saved her or Him that ordered her killed for touching His feet, or if maybe touching His feet was a good thing. I thumb through them goddamn pictures and wonder how I could have been so happy to see her, when now it feels like it took something out of me, everything, her on her porch so young and unchanged, as if life never touched her. Whores come and go by the pool while I drink, but none of them’s Cinnamon or Nikki. I keep trying to make my patio deck the place I escape to, but I can’t remember what Carl said about the place you escape to being the place you’re already at, because the Goat’s rotted behind me, Nikki so young and sweet like Cinnamon on her porch down in Long Beach, not in the Goat with me in the past, but on her porch in the Goat on my patio deck. I pray to the hand and Cash, Nikki all sweet and young and unchanged, Nikki and Cinnamon and Carl down in Huntsville, and me in the Goat on Cinnamon’s porch—Nikki and Cash and my mother and me, and Nikki just the kid she was when her and Cash was me and Cinnamon, and I’m praying to the hand, like Jesus and the whore of Babylon, praying to the hand and not knowing if I’m supposed to save her or stone her, under the weight of all them wasted years, under vodka and coke, praying to the hand to show me.
Mark
It was so black in Cynthia’s room when I woke it was hard to tell what was a dream and what was just black bedroom, and she said, “How darling,” in a dream or not a dream, and later, in sleep or right after sleep, “It’s your baby, if that’s what you want to know,” and later still, in another dream or not a dream, “It’s his baby, if that’s what you think will make a difference.” There was no green aura indicating the presence of an apparition. I looked and listened and couldn’t see or hear anything.
Dizziness and my skull shrinking over my brain waited until I opened the bedroom door, then hit all at once. I made it to the bathroom and closed the door on the day behind me, and after the tub filled, I sank into the hot water, imagining myself melting from my bones, shivering from the heat of it, my bones exposed, and then my rubbery skin regenerating over my skeleton. I rose from the water and dripped through the living room, dripped through the kitchen, the floors a mess, covered with dirt from the broken plant and the contents of emptied drawers. The place would never be the same, but I washed the walls and vacuumed the carpets, mopped the kitchen floor and put everything where I thought it belonged.
I took some of Cynthia’s books and headed back to Garden City, the construction on the LIE by LeFrak City stopping traffic dead. I sat stuck in it a long time. My phone rang, but
I didn’t answer. It was Liz again, my ex-girlfriend. She left another message, asking me to call back. Traffic didn’t move. I called work, even though I had the week off. Work was getting along fine without me. I was told to take another week, as much time as I needed. I didn’t think there was that much. I sat in traffic, watching heat and exhaust shimmer off the asphalt in waves, distorting everything.
18
Liz
The problem was he became a moralist, or just delusional, pretending he could walk away from the business of power and politics untouched, as though he hadn’t been an alderman’s staffer when we met and fell so hard for each other. He was plugged into the Cook County machine and I worked for a state senator, David Lambert, who was eying a congressional seat on the north shore, a safe seat the three of us talked about constantly, practically dreaming that race into existence, until Lambert hired Mark for research and polling and officially launched the campaign. People thought we were crazy to go after a popular incumbent like we did, and maybe we were crazy—we certainly didn’t lack for confidence—but we also knew how strong Lambert was on the stump. He lit up every room he walked into. We knew how he polled with women, especially regarding his positions on the lake and public schools and corruption in Springfield and Washington. He made people believe change was possible, and he swung a lot of votes. But it was Mark who clinched the thing, uncovering dirt in the incumbent’s payroll, kickbacks and ghost employees and other sleaze, then dribbling it out with no fingerprints to an increasingly rabid press. This is what I mean about the babe in the woods routine that came up later. We were pragmatists, for Christ’s sake, bound by a tough political fight.
Lambert won with a quarter point margin, two years before Gore’s debacle in Florida. We’d never seen the drama of a close election and we were drunk with it. After two recounts, I went to DC as Chief of Staff, while Mark handled constituent services back in Winnetka. This should have been our happiest time—we’d won against long odds, had established ourselves as potent, fresh blood—and we were happy. But once we discovered Lambert’s little problem, everything between us started to crumble.