by John Searles
A final white blur of heat and motion, and I was back where I started. Where it ended for my mother. I could see her body splayed on the floor beneath me. A slim silver probe snaked inside her. A river, a lake, an ocean of blood. Roget stood. He promised. He lied.
Be right back.
Be right back.
Be right back.
Nothing but her breath and blood after he left. She was a woman—like so many women—whose choices narrowed still more. A tunnel ahead of her grew smaller and smaller. Darker and darker. Then, after what seemed like too long for her to find any sort of strength, her hand moved toward the phone. Again I heard the clack and clatter of Marnie’s number being dialed. Again I heard my mother’s voice like a long, lonely wind cutting across the driest desert.
He said he would be right back.
But I know he’s gone for good.
How quickly can you come?
After those words something in me burst. I felt dropped back down into the world of the here and now. Into the motel room, where my choices were narrowing, too. My soul felt gutted and hollowed. A carved pumpkin scraped of its stringy orange insides and filled with the hot, burning light of a white wax candle. That flame was anger, rage, resentment. The only thing left in the fast decay of my life. I saw a time lapse of two unlashed eyes collapsing in on themselves. A mouth rotted into a disfigured smile. A decomposed orange head tossed into the woods and forgotten.
Me.
My life.
And that’s when I heard something deep inside me—not my head or my heart speaking, but some deeper part of myself that I decided was my soul—echoing these words:
After all of your mother’s suffering, the only son she raised will be locked up. The man who left her alone to die will put him there, then walk away scot-free. One more sad fact of her life, her legacy, that you couldn’t stop.
That feeling or message or premonition or whatever it was stoked the flame inside me, and my resolve flickered, burned hot and bright, then swept over me like a raging fire.
You have their attention.
Use it to prove Roget’s guilt somehow.
For your mother’s sake.
“Is my baby okay?” Edie was asking, her voice losing its flatness, turning wobbly, uneven. “Please tell me she’s okay.”
“The baby is fine,” I heard myself say to her. Now I was the one who sounded flat, even. I could hear Edie crying on the other end of the line. Relief. Panic. Anger. All of it breaking her down. I let her weakness feed my flames, making me stronger, more steadfast in what I had to do. Jeanny was watching me with wide-open eyes as she cradled Sophie in her arms. I turned my back to her. “Where are you?” I asked.
“Down in the office. Dominick, please just come out.”
Questions. There were so many I wanted answered, and they spewed from my mouth helter-skelter: “Who were those men in your apartment in New York? Why did you leave Holedo? Who is Sophie’s father?”
Edie sniffled, took a breath. “What are you talking about? Your father is Sophie’s father. I told you that.”
“Why did you leave?” I asked, not letting up until I got the information I wanted.
“Your father kept threatening me. More than I ever told you.” Edie’s voice had grown exasperated, impatient, hysterical. I imagined her face flushed with anxiety, her hand tugging her hair, clutching, pulling as she spoke. “He beat the shit out of me once, and I was afraid of him. Of what else he might do to me. It wasn’t fair to get you any more involved than you already were. So I couldn’t tell you where I was going. I had to just leave you the money and get out.”
My mind filled with the image of Edie’s beaten face that day last fall. A puff of purple skin under her eye like smeared makeup. I remembered the way my father had clocked his fist in the air above me before I left home. The way he had growled, then punched the wall of my bedroom. Boom. Boom. Boom. I wasn’t afraid of him, but Edie had been. Enough for her to leave town without telling me where she was going because she didn’t want me to get hurt, too.
“I apologized in the letter I left you,” Edie said. “But I don’t understand why you’ve done all this. Why would you take my baby? Why? Why?”
The answer to that question was lodged inside me, tangled up like a wet ball of hair in the pink mouth of a cat. I could never get it out. The words to explain what I had done would only sound knotted and confused. The dots I had connected over the last month of my life wouldn’t draw a picture clear enough for her to see. In my head I heard Leon’s voice reading Edie’s letter to me that day I had called him from my uncle’s apartment.
Dominick,
I don’t know why you left without saying good-bye last night. But I want you to know that I’m sorry if what’s about to happen will hurt you. I needed a friend during this lonely time, and you were an angel. Someday I hope you’ll forgive me. Someday I hope you’ll understand.
Love, Edie
Had Leon given me the cash, I might have forgiven her someday. I might have been able to understand just as she had written.
It was his fault.
It was her fault.
It was my fault.
“What about that phone call I overheard—” I started to ask, but Edie interrupted.
“Enough, Dominick! If you don’t come outside in the next minute,” she shouted, tired of our Q&A, launching threats, “I’m not going to be able to stop the police from coming in there after you.”
I ignored her, kept digging. “I heard you on the phone that last night at your house. I heard you say that you would find a way to get rid of me.”
“For Christ’s sake, Dominick! Why are you bringing up all this bullshit? I’m telling you that the police are going to come in there!”
“Why did you say it?” I asked her.
Edie was quiet a moment, then she sighed, surrendered to my question. “You were my boyfriend’s son. I was in a bad situation, and I counted on you more than I should have. My friend kept telling me I had to stop it. I don’t know what else you want to hear.”
“Is your friend one of those guys who was at your apartment in Hell’s Kitchen? Is one of them your boyfriend?”
“Hardly,” she said. “They’re each other’s boyfriend. They helped me leave Holedo. I was supposed to stay at a hotel in the Village, but I went into labor on the drive down. They found me that apartment when I got out of the hospital. Christ. Why am I even fucking telling you any of this? I want my kid.” Edie stopped herself, took a deep breath, tried one last time to reason with me. “Sophie’s middle name is Dominick. Do you know that? I gave her your name because of all you did for me. Doesn’t that prove anything?”
“I did a lot for you, Edie. But it cost me. It cost me my mother’s life. I took that money from her. She needed it to go away and get an abortion. But it was gone. She died in this room because that money was missing. Because of what I did to help you.”
Edie was quiet again. “Dominick. I am sorry. I am so, so sorry.”
“Me, too,” I said, holding back my tears.
“But there’s been enough tragedies. Please end this and come outside.”
“You have to understand,” I told her, feeling the heat of my resolve burning inside me. “I did something for you. Now you have to do something for me. Me and my mother.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You’ll see,” I told her and put down the phone.
It started ringing again almost instantly. Out in the parking lot car doors slammed. I slid the dresser in front of the door and walked through the closets into the next room. Jeanny kept calling to me, but I didn’t answer her. The TV volume was doing a steady rise and fall, and I could hear bits and pieces of that anchorman recounting the brutal details of those Manson murders. A house in California. . . A summer night. . . Sharon Tate. . . The last thing anyone ever expected. . .
My next moves were mechanical:
Open the drawer by the bed.
Open the Bible
.
Pull out the pistol.
The bullets, too.
“Dominick, what are you doing?” Jeanny stood in the doorway of the closet, holding Sophie. The blanket she had draped around her naked body was coming undone. Mine, too. “I thought you got rid of that thing.”
“I kept it just in case,” I told her over the blare of the television. “And I’m glad I did, because I’m not giving up. They’re going to put me in jail. So I might as well right some of the wrongs of my mother’s life while I’m at it.” I pushed the cylinder open and slid a bullet into each of the holes the way my father had taught me so many years ago. I walked to the window as Jeanny stared at me, her mouth dropped in disbelief.
“Dominick, don’t!” she yelled. “Stop it! Don’t do this!”
The television eased down to normal volume again, and I could hear Penny Hatfield talking in a regretful voice about low-pressure zones, plowed roads, predictions of when we’d see the sun again. Outside, two troopers walked toward the stairs as the rest of the officers waited by their cars, backing them up.
Now or never, I told myself.
I reached my hand up to the window, pushed it open. Into the cold, hushed air of the storm, I screamed, “I’ve got a gun!” My voice didn’t come out loud enough to be threatening, so I shouted again, “I’ve got a gun, and I will use it if you don’t give me what I want!”
This time my words were unmistakable, sure and steady, as if I did this sort of thing all the time. The two troopers stopped, stared back toward the crowd of other officers, waiting for a sign as to whether or not they should proceed.
I decided to give them that sign.
I stuck the blunt nose of the pistol through the window. Aimed into the snowy gray sky above the woods across the street. The same woods where Roget had chased after me, scooped me up, and carried me back to his car as my leg bled. I pressed my finger to the trigger, and my hand shook. Then I heard my father say, Just hold her steady. Don’t be afraid of her.
And I wasn’t afraid anymore.
The shaking stopped. I fired.
The sound was a hundred balloons popping all at once, ringing in my ears.
Jeanny had carried Sophie into the other room, and I could hear them both crying in there. Other than that, in the moments after I shot the gun, the police in the parking lot were silent. I watched them stare up at the place in the red glow of their cop-car lights. Only their radios chirped out a staticky voice that said, “We have a ten-fifty-five at the Holedo Motel. We have a ten-fifty-five at the Holedo Motel.”
Finally Roget said, “The kid’s got a gun,” loud enough for me to hear the dismay in his voice.
Something in the air changed after that. I believed it was because they realized that I was in control of this situation. Not them. Edie emerged from the office and walked across the parking lot, an officer’s arm draped over her shoulders. She was crying, and despite everything, I felt torn apart by all the misunderstandings that the collision of our lives had caused. But I told myself that she would get her baby soon enough, and the tears would stop.
With the police held back for the time being, I shut the window and slid the dresser in front of the door in this room, too. I turned off the TV and went into 5B, where Jeanny was crouched on the floor, crying. She had managed to put her clothes back on, and her hair was still tucked inside her sweater. In her hand she squeezed her father’s silver cigarette case. Sophie was wailing away next to her in the makeshift bed. I set the gun down on the dresser and threw on some clothes as fast as I could. Sat next to Jeanny, put my arms around her. “It’s going to be okay,” I told her. “Trust me.”
“No it’s not!” she screamed, pushing me away. “You’ve gone crazy! You’ve got to stop all this! You’re going to hurt someone.”
“I won’t hurt anyone,” I said. “I would never hurt anyone.”
Jeanny just put her head in her hands and cried. “I was wrong about you,” she croaked into her palms. “So wrong about you.”
I tried to hold her again, but she shrugged me off, kept crying.
“You weren’t wrong,” I told her.
“Oh, yes I was!” she shouted, thrashing her head up to face me. “I thought you were good. I thought you made some bad decisions because of what happened to you. I thought I could help you put things right again. But you are fucked, Dominick Pindle! Look what you’re doing! You are sealing your fate!”
“Listen to me,” I said. “I know you think I’m crazy. But I need to do this for my mother. For her sake, I want Roget to be held accountable for leaving her here to die.”
“How is any of this going to help you prove his guilt?”
The path to answering that question came not from me but from a police officer whose voice crackled through a speaker atop one of those cars in the parking lot. “What do you want?” his amplified, electric voice asked.
I didn’t walk to the window right away, because I needed Jeanny to understand what I was doing. “Look. I’m going to jail anyway. If I surrender now, then I’ll never have any power to get Roget or to do anything for my mother again. Think of this as a protest. I’m protesting Roget’s claim of innocence. I’m protesting my mother’s death. I’m protesting for all the women who’ve died the way she did.”
I thought that last part would make Jeanny truly understand, but she just sat there crying. Out in the parking lot that speaker crackled again. The officer’s voice repeated, this time stopping between words so the question sounded mixed up and broken: “What? Do you? Want?”
“If you want to leave, then go now,” I told Jeanny. “I’ll move the dresser, and you can walk right out the door. I understand.”
Still she sat there. “What about Sophie?” she said after a while.
“The baby stays with me. But if you want to go, go. It’s your choice.”
Jeanny didn’t move. She looked down at Sophie, then around at the room where my mother had died, where we had fallen in love. Two things so opposite, oddly connected. I put my hand out to her then, and she let me touch her, stroke her arm. I reached over and pulled her hair out from her sweater so that it spilled down her back like something set free. We sat there awhile as Jeanny looked from Sophie to the door, then back to Sophie again. And that policeman’s voice kept prodding, repeating his question. When I couldn’t wait any longer, I gave up on her and went to the window. I knew that asking for money or freedom would do me no good. Once they got the baby, they’d throw me in jail, and that would be that. It was clear I needed to ask for something they couldn’t take away. And I knew exactly what that something was.
“Officer Roget left my mother here to die, and I want him investigated for his connection to her death!” I called through the window. No sooner were those words out when I thought of one last wish for my mother. A fairy-tale ending that she never got when she was alive. “And I want you to contact my uncle in New York City. Donald Biadogiano. Tell him to find a way to bring me Randolph Burdan. I will give the baby to him and only him.”
Once again the air was silent outside.
I knew that meeting my brother shouldn’t have mattered anymore. It wasn’t going to change anything after all. But if my life was speeding toward the hard, gray nothingness of a concrete-wall dead end, I might as well take this last chance to get whatever I could for my mother.
When I turned away from the window, Jeanny was talking on the telephone. I listened to her tell whoever was on the other end of the line that she was at the Holedo Motel with me and the baby. That the state and local police were outside. I kept my eyes on her as she repeated the details of our situation. Jeanny spelled my name, emphasizing each letter so there could be no misunderstanding. “D as in dog. O as in octopus. M as in man. . . ” She did the same with my mother’s name. Roget’s, Edie’s, and her own, too.
“Who was that?” I asked when she finally hung up.
“Channel Six. Eyewitness News out of Boston.”
“How did you get their number?”
“In the phone book,” Jeanny told me, pointing to the Yellow Pages on the nightstand. “If we’re going to have a protest, we need to get people’s attention. We do it all the time in New York.”
She was going to stay. I pulled her to me and kissed her. I thought it seemed strange that anyone from a TV station would care about what was happening to us in the Holedo Motel. Then I remembered Joshua Fuller’s voice saying, You’re news, kid. I saw that swirl of headlines about my mother in all those newspaper clippings. Maybe they would be interested. When we broke apart, I asked, “Now what do we do?”
“I guess we wait,” Jeanny said.
And that’s exactly what we did. Jeanny carried Sophie in her case to the back corner of the room and got her settled in for sleep. I piled pillows on the floor by the window, fixed the curtains just enough for us to see. She sat next to me, and we watched the police out there for over an hour. All of them with their waists strapped with so much stuff—guns, walkie-talkies, handcuffs, clubs—that they looked like carpenters wearing tool belts. Different officers kept trying to talk me down—but never Roget. They took turns at the radio, telling me I should give this whole thing up and come outside. But I didn’t respond. They knew what I wanted, and until they started taking me seriously, I wasn’t leaving. The whole while the storm kept flip-flopping from snow to rain, rain to snow. The officers clustered around one another. Random squad cars came and went. A few of the men looked restless and bored, glancing at their watches as the minutes ticked by. A trooper in tall black boots and a cowboy-style hat kept trying to comfort Edie. Offering her coffee, urging her to take a seat in the back of his car.
But she wouldn’t budge.
She just kept staring up at the motel.
The bewildered expression on her face didn’t quite hold the fear I had heard in her voice during our phone conversation. I wondered—hoped was more like it—if somehow she was beginning to understand what I was up to now that she had heard my demands.
At the other end of the lot Roget stood by his car with the door open. One arm resting on the roof, one hand fingering his mustache. He looked about ready to make a break for it, but something kept him anchored here. The scales in his mind must have weighed down on the side of confidence that he could pull out of this situation unscathed. He could still be the town hero with his shiny gold badge. After all, he was an officer with a clean record and an alibi for the night my mother died. I was a runaway. A juvenile delinquent holed up in a motel room with a gun and a baby.