ON THE EVE OF THANKSGIVING DAY, I HUNTED BY CAR FOR CLYDE. Well past midnight, Stevie Wonder on the airwaves, I spotted my brother hopping from one foot to the other, looking gray with cold, on the corner of Fourteenth Street and Seventh Avenue. Socks bundled into two tattered shopping bags, cardboard-box-cum-display-table neatly collapsed and propped against a lamppost.
When he saw my car roll up at the curb, his face lit up. I leaned across and opened the passenger door. The radio spilled Wonder into the frigid thin air: I was born in Li’l Rock, had a childhood sweetheart.
“Come on, I’ll spot you a burger.”
“Naw, thanks, but I’m waiting for Jimmy. If I’m not here for the pickup, he gets a little pissed off.” He craned his head to peer down Fourteenth. “He’s running late.”
“Well, at least climb in and wait. You’re half frozen. And where’s your hair.”
He slid in and ran his hand over his newly shorn head. The top was bristly; he’d kept the truncated muttonchops on the sides. “Francie’s idea. She said the long stuff was dragging my whole look down.”
“So she’s still around?”
“Oh, sure. We’re in love.”
“What about Flor?”
“She dumped me. For Jimmy.” He rubbed his hands together in front of the heater vents.
“I see,” I said.
“Jimmy’s wife, Agata, she’s a big lady with arms like George Foreman’s. I wouldn’t mess with her. She stays out in Forest Hills with the kids, though. Six-car garage out there. So I hear.”
“I want to take you out for Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow.” I hesitated. “Francie could come, too.”
“Aw, that’s nice, Frank, but we have plans.”
“Plans? What plans could you possibly have?”
“St. Joseph’s Shelter puts on a spread—turkey, stuffing, a shitload of sides. And guess who’s baking twenty-five pumpkin pies?” He turned to face me and beamed proudly. “Yours truly. Francie is helping roll out the crusts.”
“Oh.” I must have looked really crestfallen, because he tilted his head sympathetically and said, “Maybe next year?”
“Look, Clyde. I have news.” Heat exhaling around us in the car, familiar old pop tunes lending profundity and encouragement, I laid out the whole outlandish scenario. My bold plan for the next chapter of my life. I told him I wanted his help, his and Jimmy’s. I said I needed to meet with his boss, that he should tell Jimmy I would pay for his help. I didn’t want to trust the man, but I couldn’t pull it off alone. I just hoped Clyde was lucid enough to understand the stakes.
Then the boss himself pulled up alongside us in a grimy, muffler-deprived white van, chubby faced and beetle browed, looking angry. Behind him, a bobbing cargo of wild-haired people and Mylar balloons. Clyde jumped from my car, leaned down to the open door. “I’ll talk to him, Frank. I don’t know if he’ll go for it, he’s got headaches out in Brooklyn, you know. The Russians. That’s been making him super touchy. But I’ll talk to him. For you.”
A hitch in his voice then startled me. I realized that his eyes had gone sad. “Happy Thanksgiving, Frank,” he said, and quickly turned away. He picked up his box and his bags of socks and dashed around to the waiting van.
I watched it go, threw the car into gear, headed downtown. Before I knew it, I was driving south through Jersey on the turnpike, my seventies station ebbing into static, my gas needle hovering just above empty. I pulled into a rest stop, filled up, then found a pay phone.
“Dad,” I said. “Will you tell Irma to set a place for me?”
I followed the brilliant vein of the interstate through the night, down through the slumbering mid-Atlantic muddle, toll booths, oil tanks, random brackish rivers. Over the Delaware bridge, the moon made a guest appearance, a narrow crescent far, far above, a dimple in a face of stars.
I thought mostly of M, of course, as I drove. I pictured us living away somewhere, hidden, under assumed names, assumed identities. A room with a view of a strange city. A table, a pair of chairs. Morning sunlight, a bed. M lies asleep in the bed. I’m at the table, drinking coffee from a small cup and saucer, reading a book, glancing at her now and then when she stirs in her dreams.
She wakes and smiles at me. I replay it again: she wakes and smiles at me. She says my name. She says it and smiles.
It could happen. It was a possible outcome. She could utter my name with love. Even with desire.
A possible outcome indeed, but by no means guaranteed. And Towl and Crighton were no help to me here. My emotions overwhelmed any attempt at a rational assessment of probability.
It was too late for probability, anyhow. My life was becoming determinate, laserlike, directed toward M. All I could do for the others was say good-bye.
YOU NEVER SEE PICTURES OF WASHINGTON IN NOVEMBER. NO, ON the postcards it’s always a hypersaturated spring, the trees all a-popping with cherry blossoms and chorus lines of red tulips ranked around the white monuments. And a blank blue American sky. I always hated this Washington. The tourist version. Jason DeMarea and Anthony Li and I used to go downtown and make fun of sightseers. We’d give them the wrong directions, and yell things like “Go home, hillbillies!” as they trundled by in those little open-air trollies that carried them up and down the mall. Anyone wearing socks with sandals got squirted by Jason’s purple water pistol.
No, the Washington we lived in was not the Kodak version, especially when it was bleak November and the lawns were browned and hardened. The alabaster blended into the overcast, no one went up the lonely Washington Monument, and the workaday world of government was what counted. We had kids in our school whose dads were being held hostage in Iran. We knew moms who shopped for missile hardware and teens who spent their summers answering phones at the IRS. We didn’t know the fat cats, the billionaire senators, the country-club cabinet members. We had the midlevel bureaucrats and the two-bit congressmen, or two-bit former congressmen.
My dad still lived in the split-level ranch in which I’d grown up, and in which Clyde had grown up, too, tacked to a slope just behind the high school. Tiny pink clouds like the footprints of some celestial toddler dawdled across the blanched sky as I drove into the street at dawn. The low-slung Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson vintage homes were mostly dark, just a few yellow windows here and there where some early-rising cook might be rolling out dough for dinner rolls or poking fretfully at a half-defrosted turkey. I turned into the driveway. The shrubs needed pruning. They obscured the front windows. Colleen would have seen to that. Three years she’d been gone. Long enough for the yews to grow unkempt.
We called my mother by her first name. Clyde started doing this when he was about four, and it tickled her. So I started doing it, too—I was eighteen and thought it sounded urbane. It made her smile. She had that open, magnetic smile, fine-boned face framed with soft tendrils the color of milk chocolate, tender blue eyes. Tall like me, like Clyde. A looker, Erskine liked to say, she had to beat ’em off with a stick. She played the piano and sang Dylan tunes at parties, but actually, like me, she was quite shy.
She left us so suddenly. She was buried on a brutally hot July day. The service was held in the parking lot of the cemetery, despite the heat, to make it handicapped accessible. For years, she had volunteered at a home for the disabled; thirty-eight men and women in wheelchairs came to bid her farewell. Fanning out across the sun-stroked parking lot, they made a profound statement: this was a human who did good. Who had a life of true impact.
I sat in the car for a while, conjuring her. Since she died things had gone a bit haywire. Clyde, me.
It was 6:43 A.M. when I entered the house. The kitchen was lit brightly, the pink dish towels Irma crocheted glowing like fallen scraps of sunrise. My father poured me coffee. Frail, he looked, in his terry-cloth bathrobe and his peeling leather scuff slippers. He told me he’d been up all night.
“I just got so excited when you called. No way to get back to sleep. Sat up playing Solitaire and I saw a fine documentar
y on snakes. And Irma was up till two making that cheesy rice ring.”
“She didn’t have to do that.”
“Well, you boys always did love that cheesy rice ring. And Irma’s just so glad she’s got somebody else to do for, you know.”
After we’d finished the coffee, Dad said he might catch a few winks. I wandered into the living room. Nothing had changed there—same brown-and-orange carpet, same Quasar TV, same pilled plaid sofa from my school days. Propped on a bookshelf was a curling, yellowed snapshot of me, braces on my teeth and hair in my eyes, holding baby Clyde, giving him his bottle, Colleen smiling down at us from over my shoulder.
Behind that photo, in the bookshelf, a row of yearbooks. The dull foil-edged pages stuck together slightly as I leafed through the one from my freshman year. The girl’s JV track team page. A team photo, and down in the corner, a solo shot of a girl running across a finish line. I tore out the page and folded it into a small square and slipped it into my shirt pocket. Then I pocketed the snapshot of Colleen and her boys, too.
I must have fallen asleep on the sofa after that. When I awoke, I heard a distant thumping. My heart? I stared at the dust-fuzzed brass hanging lamp. The window buzzed to the beat, vibrating just a bit to the rhythm. Bomp. Bomp. Bump-bump Bomp.
Go. Bears. Go Blue Bears. The annual Thanksgiving Day football face-off, Lincoln Blue Bears versus their eternal rivals, the Bulldogs of Winston Churchill, under way just down the hill. The marching band, their drums booming up through the fir trees.
Of course, we had to go, Dad and I, for old time’s sake. Irma, who had cooked and cleaned for us for decades, packed us off with her native Finnish breakfast rolls in our pockets, Dad in his tweed hat and parka, me in my too-thin jacket.
We bushwhacked down across the overgrown backyard, through a thicket of saplings and bittersweet vines, just as I had every morning of my high school life. Cut across the parking lot, and I realized: here is the place where M first entered my life. And there in my mind is her little maroon-brownish Toyota, it’s the start of the school day, and here she is climbing out of this begrimed compact car, her hair freshly brushed and arrayed luxuriantly across the shoulders of her white denim jacket, her just-glossed lips gleaming with sticky, watery brilliance in the morning sun, her jeans patched adorably with scraps of calico. A fringed suede shoulder bag dancing as she walks. The soft planes of her face, the expression carefully aloof but so alive to everything around. So intelligent, so deep. And the double-pierced ear, daring, just a bit on the edge. And there I am, gawking, unable to muster up even a “nice day, huh?” Just watching her walk on by.
She always just walked on by, that girl. And now? We had climbed into a barrel together, and we were about to go over the falls.
Dad and I climbed the bleachers, rising through the throb of the marching band playing from their seats in the lower ranks, up through the mist of popcorn and hot-dog vapors. And this funny thing happened: I felt a great sore lump growing in my throat.
This kind of all-American normalcy, this scene from our hometown, would be forever out of reach for us, for M and me. These whooping pom-pom girls, these pimpled boys and backslapping dads, were drowned deep in the moment. Truly concerned about the game, truly swept up in the pageantry. They abided by the laws of this nation. They loved this nation.
But so do I. So did I.
I just loved M more, that’s all.
And that meant good-bye to all this. Good-bye.
It was already nearly halftime, and the Bears were ahead, thirteen to seven. “This QB this year is supposed to be crackerjack,” my dad said. “Maybe as good as that kid your year. Bushmiller. You know he retired from the pros?”
Cheerleaders flipped, flashing round, stockinged thighs.
“Dad,” I said. “I wish I could have made you more proud.”
He turned to me. His hat shaded his eyes under their unruly white brows. “You’ve made me plenty proud. Even as a child, look how well you did, the test. And since then, of course. I’ve always been proud of you.”
“I wish I could have been a better therapist. The Fehler case—”
“Could’ve happened to anybody, Frank.”
“It never happened to you.” An emphatic buzz ended the half. The hotshot quarterback tossed the ball to a ref.
“I never got out of the lab. That’s why. I just stayed in the lab.” My dad tapped his knuckles on my knee. “You’re out in the world.”
The marching band surged into center field, tuba swinging this way and that, a high-hatted boy plucking an electric bass, trailed by a kid pushing the amp in a wheelbarrow. All of them together made an astonishing noise, a blurting and blaring so loud it might’ve been heard clear across the Potomac, like a Civil War bombardment. We sat side by side, pummeled by it.
The lab did consume him, those long years before Clyde was born. I’d been an only child back then, and the truth is, most of my memories of my father from that time revolve around departures. Him leaving in the morning, tousling my hair. Buying me gum at the airport when we’d go to see him off. Dad driving the station wagon, dropping me and my friends at the Rockville Pike roller rink while he headed back to the lab on a Sunday afternoon. Of course, we spent hours together when he tested me and perfected the Lundquist, but sadly, I was so tiny, I don’t recall those hours at all.
A pickup truck from Harry’s Donuts drove onto the field, as two boys, chosen for their donut-hurling prowess, whizzed cinnamon pastries into the stands. “Hey, look,” said my father. “They’re still doing the bear claw toss!”
A donut flew toward us. “Grab it!” someone shouted.
“I don’t know when I’m going to see you again,” I said.
He glanced at me quickly. “What? Why?” Then he lunged for another bear claw, coming his way. He stretched to make the catch, then lost his balance. He started to tip, stumbling over the steep stairs of the aisle.
Too late, I reached for him. A few folks had already clustered around him. I could hear a low wheezing moan.
“He’s my father,” I yelped. “Let me see him.”
Dad’s face was twisted with pain. “Where are you going?” he whispered to me. “Are you going away?” Far off, down on the field, the band began to play “Luck Be a Lady Tonight.” A teenage girl tapped me on the shoulder and pressed something into my hand. “Here’s my Startac,” she said. “Call 911.”
16
November 1999
April Toni Nicholson was the dearest friend Miranda had ever had. A connection stronger, deeper, closer than hers with Gillian in New York, or with any of the girls she’d met in school. To be a friend in the poisoned realm of corrections—to be a true friend there—called for a profound level of fellowship, a mighty flexing of love and grace. And April gave that to Miranda, and Miranda gathered it up gratefully.
They shared more, backgroundwise, than one would have thought. As they talked away their days, when Miranda first appeared on the unit and April first befriended her, they discovered that they both came of age in worlds that demanded a household’s public image be as groomed as its front lawn: April’s father an enlisted man striving to climb the rungs of rank in the navy, Miranda’s a politician shouldering his way into office. Both women’s downfalls had been public-relations disasters for their families, but with a crucial distinction: April’s father had not forgiven his daughter; Miranda’s had, because he understood a thing or two about transgression.
In time, April grew to love Miranda like a sibling. “I only ever had three brothers, so you are my one-and-only sister,” she’d say in her plush Pensacola lilt. Miranda loved April like that, too. As a second sister. At least as much as she dared.
Holidays, April and Miranda tended to cling together; they saved up new magazines and a few nice things to eat, to make the day pass easier. For Thanksgiving, along with the risotto Miranda had at last managed to pull together, April secured a can of cranberry sauce and a box of Lorna Doone cookies. Neither of them cared for turk
ey. They agreed it was all about the cranberries.
Which made it even stranger that April didn’t live to see the day. Strange that she would succumb on the eve of the feast. Strange that she would ingest so much crystallized cocaine so fast that the drug convulsed her heart. Wrenched that small vital pouch inside out.
Thanksgiving dawn, she was cold and hardening in her cell. The prison went into lockdown. The COs’ turkey buffet was canceled.
Miranda saw them roll April away in a black rubber body bag, NY STATE DOCS stenciled on the side, a fat silver zipper slithered up its center like a rivulet of mercury.
She lay huddled in bed for the better part of the next three days, thinking of the Elavil hidden in a hollow plastic hanger. That last overdose had scrambled her soul, and though she’d accepted the pills from Frank Lundquist, she’d not yet accepted his plan. She hadn’t yet been able to swallow this idea, the second suicide. But now she felt herself wavering. To gulp them down, to sleep. Forget the unhinged talk of escape. In the end, perhaps, wouldn’t it be so much simpler to dream this place away. Forever.
BUT INSTEAD, SHE HEARD HER NAME BEING BARKED OVER THE PA system. “Greene to unit exit 3.”
She sat up, stepped into her sneakers, heard Carmona’s shuffling footsteps, then her blocky form damming up the light. “We’re locked down, but they say to let you out. Are you pulling strings on me, Missy, or what?” The dead bolts thunked and Carmona swung the door open. “Don’t you think I’ve got enough to do with the dead girls around here?”
Miranda flinched, Carmona saw this. She lowered her voice. “I know she was your friend. We’ll find out who’s bringing that shit in. Get down to visiting. It must be someone, hauling you out of lock.”
For a hallucinatory moment, Miranda thought it might be the governor, maybe even the president, come to pardon her. She hurried down the unit, clutching her ID in a damp hand. Carmona buzzed her out.
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