Lying with the Dead

by Michael Mewshaw

  After another day and a night, the rain in Maryland turns to sleet, then snow. That makes me happy. By the time the bus slides into the station, Mom and Dad are waiting for me. Mom’s hair is cut in bangs above her eyebrows, and Dad has his head shaved. This is strange not just because Dad’s alive and I know he’s dead, but because he’s younger than me. The two of them flash big smiles, like I’m the father, home at last to make everything better. It’s not until I notice Mom has a skinny leg that I recognize it’s Candy, and that Dad’s Quinn. I hope my smile’s as big as theirs. And I hope they don’t hug me.

  Candy

  Waiting for Maury, we sit on the icy parking lot at the bus station in Quinn’s rental car, a metallic Chrysler with a chrome grill like a shark’s mouth. Because of my leg—or is it because he’s a scofflaw?—he hogs a handicapped slot.

  “I guess you couldn’t get a bigger, more expensive car,” I tease him.

  “I asked for something sleeker. But the agency only had Detroit pig iron.”

  “What do you drive in London?”

  “I don’t drive. I take taxis or the tube.”

  “Oh yes, the tyube.” I try a British accent.

  “You’ll never guess who was on the plane,” he says, then doesn’t give me a chance to guess. “Michael Jackson.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “It’s true. I cleared customs right behind him. He wore a mask. Homeland Security didn’t ask him to lift it to let them look at what’s left of his face. They were too busy searching everyone else’s body cavities.”

  “I don’t believe you,” I say again.

  Joking around like this allows us to reconnect after yesterday’s bad start. I guess we were shocked to see each other. Quinn complimented me on how nice I look, and I said the same about him. But he’s aged and has his hair cropped real short.

  Still, it’s more than the changes over time that caught me off guard. As it hit me how much my hopes depend on him, and how even when he was a kid I regarded him as a rescuer, he hurt me by insisting he’d stay at the Hilton, not at my place. Then soon as he checked in, he announced he was ready to wrap things up today and fly back to London tomorrow.

  I had to remind him that Mom doesn’t play by anybody else’s rules or schedule. Foggy from her meds, she crawls into bed right after dark and doesn’t resurface until late morning. Then she’s in no mood to deal with anything or anybody until the afternoon. Today when I phoned to tell her Quinn had landed, she declared that she couldn’t cope. Not now. Maybe later.

  I didn’t dare let on to Quinn that I had spoken to Mom. I said we’d postpone visiting her until after Maury arrived and the three of us had a chance to talk things over.

  Obviously put out, Quinn lifted his chin. Nobody in the family has been favored with such a regal jaw. It must come from his real father. He didn’t even ask why Maury caught a bus after he paid for a plane ticket. All he wanted to know was what Mom had on her mind. I claimed I had no idea.

  Now as we wait, he keeps the engine running, the heat on full blast, and the radio tuned to NPR. To hell with the environment and the price of gas.

  If I were alone, I’d wait in the bus station despite the winos and welfare mothers, the smell of buttered popcorn and poopy diapers. But in his black leather gloves, navy blue cashmere overcoat, and tasseled loafers, Quinn wouldn’t fit in with the Greyhound crowd. He’s such a, I don’t know, a dude, some belligerent kid in butt-crack blue jeans would be sure to smart off, and since Quinn can’t bear to let anybody else have the last word, there’d be trouble.

  NPR broadcasts a report about electronic spying on American citizens. The wiretappers are based a few miles up the road at Fort Meade, and while some maintain it’s illegal, I don’t mind that the government might be eavesdropping. Nobody else listens to me.

  A cold steel claw seems to scoop into my guts. It’s a sensation I associate with childhood Sundays when Maury and I were stranded at church, never knowing when Dad would pick us up. He and Mom frequently skipped Mass, but never let us miss. She lolled at home reading the morning newspapers. He dropped us at Mt. Calvary, then holed up at a tavern where he played poker and drank. Sometimes we had to cool our heels for hours, and I fretted that Maury might trip into one of his moaning spells. I also worried what shape Dad would be in when he showed up.

  Then a lot depended on whether he hightailed it straight home or drove back to the tavern with us in tow. When I warned him Mom would be furious, he called me Little Miss Muffet and told me to mind my own business.

  Early on, I accepted my fate as the responsible daughter—the one who told the truth and nobody paid attention to. In grade school, soon after I learned to add and subtract, I drew up a budget and proved how if Mom and Dad quit smoking and cut down on drinking, they’d save enough money to buy a new car. In another family this kind of practical good advice would have been admired. But my reward was a slap from Mom that set my ears ringing.

  During those awful Sundays at the tavern, there was an arcade game that Maury and I played called the claw machine. You paid a quarter, and a three-pronged scoop popped open, twitching like a fiend’s hand in a sci-fi film. It was supposed to grab the goodies from a tray below it. But the watch or tube of lipstick you reached for always slipped through the metal fingers. A trinket as light as a key chain was too heavy to lift, and the hundred-dollar bill wrapped around a golf ball might as well have been an anvil.

  Still, I was as mesmerized by the game as Maury was by fans and air conditioners. I kept playing it until it felt like the pronged talon was eating my guts. I stayed at it hoping if I won just once the pain would stop.

  When I described those days to Quinn, he said they sounded like a scene from Tennessee Williams. They captured, according to him, “all the nickel-plated promise, wistful yearning, and crushing disappointment of childhood.” But this wasn’t a stage play; it was my childhood we were discussing.

  As for my life now, I’d like to believe that nothing worse can go wrong. The family situation has bottomed out. But every time I assume it’s as bad as it’s going to get, Mom throws a screwball like she did yesterday. Why couldn’t she carry her secret to the grave?

  More to myself than to Quinn, I mumble, “They tell you everything happens for a purpose.”

  “Who tells you?”

  “Priests. Nuns. I’m not positive about God’s purpose, but I know Mom. She always has a plan. Look at us.”

  “What about us?” Quinn asks.

  “She had each one of us for a reason.”

  “I view us more as accidents, sports of nature.”

  “No. She had Maury to kill Dad. Me to look after her. And you to become famous and rich and support her.”

  “Candy, I’m gobsmacked.”

  “You’re what?”

  “I’m shocked. You sound as cynical as people accuse me of being.”

  I can’t help grinning. It’s not often I hold my own with Quinn, much less surprise him. “In this family, Maury’s the only innocent one, the only one without an agenda.”

  “What’s yours?” he asks.

  “Square Mom away and move to North Carolina. Did she tell you about Lawrence?”

  “She did, and I’m happy for you. If you love him, look after him and yourself and let Mom do whatever she wants. Bottom line, that’s what she’ll do anyway.”

  Though we haven’t spoken face to face for years, I have watched Quinn in movies, and I find myself studying him now, uncertain what’s real and what’s a role he’s played before. He kills the engine, then the radio and removes his gloves. I remember a film where he tugged off his gloves like this before informing his wife that he was divorcing her for a younger woman.

  “We all make choices,” he says. “Mom made hers. You’re a kind, generous, and loving daughter and you chose to live near her. Maury and I chose to get as far away as possible.”

  Wait a damn minute, I want to shout. I didn’t choose. I never decided. It was one damn thing after a
nother until I was trapped. “You talk about choices,” I tell Quinn. “Do you really think Mom chose to do what she did alone?”

  He unbuttons his overcoat. It’s stuffy in the Chrysler. On the roof, there’s the ping of sleet. “She wasn’t alone,” he says. “You stayed with her. So did I for twenty-one years. We all went through a hell of a lot.”

  He’s skating close to a line that I’m reluctant to cross—the final reckoning of the damage. What Maury did stole Dad’s life and destroyed his own. The degree to which it robbed the rest of us is something I don’t like to dwell on. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have regrets. “Sometimes I wish I was the one that grew up in prison,” I tell Quinn, “and got chased out of the nest to California.”

  “I understand,” he says, and even though he can’t possibly, it feels good to have him reach over and rub my neck. “You’re pretty enough to have gone to Hollywood.”

  “Fat chance. Honestly, I don’t envy Maury. I’ll be punished for saying that.”

  “Not by me you won’t,” Quinn says.

  Reassured by his manicured hand, I recall when he was a baby how lovely it was to cradle him in my arms. Then there came the lovelier time when he was old enough to hug back, and his chubby arms tightened around my neck.

  Since I raised him I always expected to love him like a mother. But my emotions about Quinn are all over the map. I’m like one of those girls that gets pregnant in her teens and gives her baby up for adoption. Then decades later they reunite, and the mother doesn’t know how to feel. Sure, there’s love. But he’s a grown man and there’s something else close to sexual guilt. But what do I know? I never had a baby of my own. Maybe this jumble of love and guilt is normal. Maybe it’s what Mom craves—a grown child’s caress. She’s had damn little affection from me or anyone else lately.

  “Let’s go look for Maury,” Quinn says.

  Passengers have started streaming out of the bus station. The two of us struggle against the tide, me limping through the slush in my boots, Quinn tiptoeing in his tasseled loafers. When Maury spots us, his jaw drops like he doesn’t believe we’re here, even though I promised him we would be.

  He’s in blue jeans and white tennis shoes with Velcro tabs and a Windbreaker too flimsy for a Maryland winter. Suntanned and powerfully built, he has calm gray eyes that give the impression there’s very little going on in his head. It breaks my heart that he carries a canvas gym bag, like a kid at a Little League game, not a fifty-three-year-old man on a cross-country trip. His other hand clutches a map, a couple of travel brochures, and a toy bus.

  The three of us hang back grinning. Maury actually appears to be grimacing. “What’s wrong with your hair?”

  I assume he’s speaking to me and touch my forehead, afraid my bangs have blown haywire. Quinn guesses Maury means him and makes a motion like he’s running shears over his scalp. Maury pats his own head with the hand that holds the map, the brochures, and the toy bus. To passersby we must look like deaf-mutes signing.

  On the ride to my place, Maury sits in back with his bag on his lap. Quinn offers to open the trunk and stow it there, but Maury wants to keep it where he can see it. Quinn and I ask: How was the bus ride? Is he hungry? Is he sleepy?

  His reply, “I’ll sleep a long time when I’m dead,” drains the air out of the conversation. Maury’s never been comfortable with questions one right after the other. So Quinn and I let him set his own pace, talking if he cares to, staying quiet if not. On Ritchie Highway, we’re behind a tractor trailer that throws a rooster tail of ice when Maury pipes up, “And Mom?”

  “She’s at home,” I tell him. “She doesn’t go out in this type weather. She’s afraid of falling.”

  “Do I sleep there?”

  “No, my place,” I say. “We’ll visit her tomorrow.”

  In the rearview mirror I notice that he’s nodding at the news. “And my boat?” he asks.

  He’s lost me. But Quinn has no trouble following. “I’ll bet it’s still up in the attic.”

  Maury continues his nodding, timing it to a musical beat even though the radio carries a stock market report, not a song. Over the years it’s slipped my mind how nerve-racking it is to be around him. I’m scared Mom’ll soon get her fill and send him packing again.

  I own a townhouse. As Lawrence jokes, there’s no town and hardly a house, just a one-story, two-bedroom condo abutted on both sides by identical units. When I moved away from Mom, this was all I could afford. But it’s served me as well as a mansion. Still, I’m queasy to have Quinn here. It’s not London and how I picture his home. Maybe it’s better he’s staying at the Hilton. Suddenly I feel defensive about Maryland and everything in it. I know people consider it an uninteresting stretch on the interstate, just a sliver of nothing much. But I’ll miss it when Lawrence and I move.

  Maury drops his bag in the spare bedroom and returns with the toy bus bulging in his pants pocket. He looks like he’s wearing a truss. “And Quinn?” he asks.

  “Present and accounted for,” Quinn calls from the kitchen.

  “Where’s he sleep?” Maury says.

  “At a hotel. He’s jet-lagged. He’ll be drowsy when we’re wide awake.”

  “Is there anything to drink?” Quinn shouts.

  “Nothing alcoholic, if that’s what you mean.”

  “That’s spot-on what I mean.” He strikes a pose in the kitchen doorway, still in his cashmere coat, like he won’t be here long. “When are we supposed to meet Lawrence at the restaurant?”

  “The reservation’s for six-thirty.”

  “Why don’t we go there early?”

  “Why?” I ask.

  “Come on, Candy, don’t make me spell it out like I’m on methadone maintenance. I need to clear my sinuses with some firewater.”

  Minutes later we’re back in his rented Chrysler, caught in rush-hour traffic, which in this neck of the woods lasts from late afternoon until long after nightfall. Quinn has tuned in NPR again, a program of Latin folk music whose hypnotic beat strangely puts a stop to Maury’s head bobbing. He balances the bus on his knee and steadies it so it doesn’t roll down his leg to the floor.

  Why did I ever dream that having the boys home together was the answer to my troubles? The notion that we’d make common cause and convince Mom to go to assisted living, that they’d like Lawrence and he’d like them, now strikes me as insane. I debate whether I dare ask Maury to leave the toy bus in the car, not in his pocket or, God forbid, on the table. And would Quinn be insulted if I begged him to be kind to me by being kind to Lawrence because I love the man and don’t want to lose him?

  Propped on stilts over the South River, the restaurant is a popular summer hangout, specializing in crabs. It’s been here since we were kids. It has a swimming area and a diving board fenced off from sea nettles and speedboats. On each rotting fence post there’s a sign streaked with seagull droppings that warns that the water is polluted.

  On this wintry night the restaurant is dank and almost empty. Waitresses wearing sweaters over their nylon uniforms lounge at the bar with the cook and the bartender, and watch a poker tournament on ESPN. I asked Lawrence to reserve a table with a view of the river. We have our pick of a dozen, each one topped with souvenir placemats, rolls of paper towels instead of napkins, and wire baskets full of condiments. There’s not much to see outside except pellets of ice sizzling into water as black as a skillet.

  Next to our table stands a fish tank that contains no fish, just snails, slimy seaweed, and a miniature man in a diving suit. Right off the bat, Maury rivets his eyes on the diver, maybe imagining that it’d make the perfect addition to the toy bus, which I’m disappointed to see him set in the condiment basket.

  When Quinn excuses himself to go to the bathroom, Maury delivers a line that cracks me up. “Don’t stand too close to anybody.” Quinn and I laugh, but Maury is startled and stares off at the chain of bubbles that links the diver to the surface. He begins to gurgle in his throat, imitating the sound of the bub
bles.

  “You look good,” I tell him.

  “You and Quinn look old.”

  Leave it to Maury to lay it out straight. He’s inherited Mom’s brutal frankness. Maybe they’re both Ass Burgers. “Well, none of us is getting any younger,” I say.

  “Mom must really look old.”

  “Please don’t tell her that. It’ll hurt her feelings.”

  On his return from the men’s room, Quinn pauses at the bar, shooting the breeze with the waitresses, charming the cook and the bartender. They may not recognize him or know him by name, but they sense he’s somebody. Under his cashmere coat he’s wearing a black shirt, buttoned at the collar, and no tie. Although in all honesty he’s not as handsome as Maury, he has striking looks and just two speeds—off and on. With strangers or an audience, he’s always on.

  He brings a bottle of white wine and three plastic glasses to our table. “It’s a passably good pinot grigio—as long as you don’t mind drinking it out of plastic.”

  I let him pour me a bit. Maury asks for a Coke, and it comes in a giant frosted root beer mug. At Quinn’s instigation we lift our drinks and click them together. “What shall we toast?” he asks.

  “It’s about us tonight,” I suggest.

  “To the three of us then,” Quinn says.

  Maury’s eyes swing between us like he’s following a tennis match. To the waitresses across the room he may resemble a good-looking cowboy in a cigarette ad. But up close, he seems perplexed and a fraction slow. In the past—in the present for all I know—women were attracted to him. But I’ve always assumed that he’s asexual. A-everything.

  Eager to involve Maury, words pour out of me like bubbles from the tiny diver’s mouth. Ever since childhood, there’s been a safe that I’d love to unlock inside my brother. What’s he thinking? How does he feel? That’s what TV reporters ask the plane crash survivor, the dead soldier’s wife, the condemned inmate. What’s it like to be in your skin, in your skull? Did Dad’s murder and twelve years in jail numb him out? Or was it the numbness that allowed him to do what he did in the first place? But of course I say none of this.