Follow Me Down

by Sherri Smith

  I looked around her room, taking in her jars of cracking paint and cups of pencils. I searched for vanilla-scented lotion but couldn’t find any. I leaned over my sleeping mother and checked the window. There was nothing to use to climb, no ledge to scale or hefty drain spout she could use to slide in and out. The nurse was right, it was a straight drop down.

  I flipped through one of Mimi’s sketch pads. More flowers, more gnarled trees, more grassy fields and watery sunsets. And then there were several sketches of Lucas. Lucas in a suit, Lucas walking in an open field, Lucas sitting on a chair, legs crossed. Hanging on the wall were the perfected watercolor versions of the drawings in Mimi’s sketchbook. Haunting and beautiful, they surrounded her bed like a colorful explosion.

  I sat down in a rocking chair next to the bed. I found myself doing it again, examining Mimi’s face. Looking for myself in her tangle of crow’s-feet, the delicate curve of her nose and smoker’s lips that always looked like an invisible finger was holding up one side, as if she was smirking even while she slept. There was nothing. The first time I ever heard that every woman eventually turned into her mother, I was nine, and I spent the week wallowing in my bedroom. Then I did everything I could to be as unlike her as possible.

  But with the chalky bitter-pill taste in my mouth, the fact that I had put my own mother there, and managed to have sex in the few days I’d been there, I had to say I was all-around unsuccessful.

  Mimi’s eyes switched open like a doll’s. I said hello; she blinked.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked, groggy voiced.

  “I wanted to visit you.” I didn’t know if she’d remember I had turned her in the other day and if she’d still be angry with me. I’d moved the rocking chair out of her reach just in case.

  “Oh.” She pulled the threadbare afghan off her, sat up. “Well, hello.” Her head drooped forward like a sleepy toddler. She rubbed her eyes with crinkly fists.

  “I like your paintings.” I already felt tired at the effort it was going to take having a full conversation with her. “They’re all very pretty.”

  “My work sells out at the art shows.”

  “My work” was very adult sounding.

  “I’ve heard. That’s wonderful.” I gave her my warmest smile, and she nodded. “I would like to buy one, if you have any for sale right now?”

  She looked at me sideways, deciding something. A tight smile passed over her lips. “Well, that one’s for sale.” She seemed to point randomly at a coated wall.

  “Oh, which one?” Her finger wavered around the room. “This one?”

  “Cold! You’re cold.”

  Ah, the hot and cold game, OK. I touched the painting next to it, and Mimi screamed “cold” again, then lit a cigarette. “Shut the door. We’re not supposed to smoke inside.” She stood up on her bed and slid open the window, then flopped down on her belly and pulled out an old water bottle with an inch or two of brown-yellow water at the bottom. The orange filtered butts circled like a school of bloated goldfish. “Keep going, keep going.” She clapped.

  So I did. Touched one after the other, finger just grazing the canvasses because I was afraid I’d scratch the paint. Eventually my finger pressed into one of Lucas. “I really like this one.” I knew I couldn’t be too obvious in wanting to know anything or she’d clam up. Dangle the information just out of reach like she always did.

  “Cold, so cold.” Mimi was starting to look a little pissed off.

  “It’s a very good picture of Lucas, though. Looks a lot like him in real life.”

  “That’s not Lucas!” She let out a snort of laughter.

  “No? I think it looks a lot like him.” I stood, took a closer look, wanting this to be over. The face seemed to tilt ever so slightly, into someone else. The eyes were wrong. That’s what it was. The shape, color, were more like my eyes. “Who is it, then?” My throat had gone dry.

  “You know who it is, silly billy.” Mimi leapt up from her bed, she was tugging at the front of her pink nightie like she had to pee.

  And then I did. Just like that, it was Mr. Hideaway. Flashes of Mimi telling us to stay in our rooms, her guest would be there any second. Earlier she’d pulled out the hide-a-bed from the living room couch. Put fresh sheets on, plumped the pillows. She’d traded out the bottle of hard liquor she’d been drinking for a bottle of red wine, the ashtray emptied and wiped clean. She only ever wiped the ashtray clean for Mr. Hideaway. We called him that because he slept on the hide-a-bed (something about a sore back and Mimi’s bed being too soft) and we had to hide away from him, and well, I guess, because Mr. Pullout just didn’t sound right. Eventually one of us would need to use the bathroom or get a drink of water, and Mimi would call to us, and we’d go over and talk to Mr. Hideaway. Who now in my mind looked so much like Lucas, but that couldn’t be right because Mimi had said I was the one who got our father’s looks.

  “It’s Mr. Hideaway.” I said it out loud. Mimi laughed some crazed chortle.

  “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy.” Mimi’s voice reverberated off the walls. All the drawings and paintings seemed to curl at their edges, peel away from their sheer weight.

  “Please, Mimi, tell me his name.”

  “Guess.”

  “I don’t want to guess. I want you tell me.”

  She crossed her arms, shook her head no. “At least go through the alphabet.”

  “Alphabet, what are you talking about?”

  “Say the alphabet, and I’ll nod at the letters that spell his name.”

  “OK fine. ABCDE…” A blast of frustration pulsed through me. Of course she was making me do this. I started rushing. FGHIJ came out as a single rushed syllable. She was dangling the answer to who our father was, like she always did, and I couldn’t trust that once I said the right letter she’d tell me. She’ll probably say NO to all the letters I list, that’ll be her fun. I skipped right to the letters I wanted. “W”? “R”?

  “No, no, no. You’re not playing it right.” She lit another cigarette. “Start from the beginning again.”

  I stood there for a second, eyes stinging. Even before the injury, Mimi had always been the child, never the parent. She was sitting in the middle of the bed again, ears perked like a terrier’s. I could sense a shift in her mood. I always could read her, anticipate the next emotion that would take over before she even felt it herself, while she knew nothing at all about me.

  I didn’t think I had it in me to ride this out with her, whatever was coming. “Fine. A, B, C…” When I got to “O,” Mimi interrupted.

  “I’m hungry. I have an idea. Let’s go to a restaurant.” She stood up and started opening the drawers on her dresser.

  “No, Mimi.” I pressed my hand over the next drawer she tried to open. “Tell me Mr. Hideaway’s real name.”

  She started tugging harder on the drawer, arm muscles forming peaks under baggy skin. “Stop it. You’re mean.”

  “Not until you tell me who my father is.” My hand stayed firm on the drawer. My armpits were getting damp, my cheeks burned.

  Mimi kept pulling, grunted. “I’ll never tell you now. Move.” She tried dropping to her knees and got the drawer to slide out an inch. Her hand slipped in quickly, just as I shoved it back in, accidentally catching her fingers. Mimi howled.

  “Sorry, sorry, sorry, I didn’t mean to do that.” I just kept hurting her.

  She leaned into me, and for a second I thought she was going to kiss me, but instead her teeth went for my shoulder. I held her at bay by her forehead until she scrambled up and ran down the hall calling for a nurse and then for Lucas.

  23

  In the car, still outside the yellow house, I dug through my bag, only to come up with an empty pill bottle. There was always something extra hiding at the bottom of my bag. I dumped it out, thought I saw a little white pill roll between the seats. I clawed around but couldn’t find it, and then I wasn’t even sure there was a pill at all. Suddenly it didn’t matter because all the frustration and sadne
ss and confusion descended upon me at once. The floodgates opened, and I released a primitive-sounding cry. Something savage, an angry war howl. Fucking Mimi.

  Mr. Hideaway was our father. Mr. Hideaway was a Wilkes, or really a Russo, or someone who was good enough friends with the Wilkes/Russo clan to have taken us to their lake house when we were children. Lucas had read Joanna’s journal, recognized the lake house, and what? Thought he’d seduce a potential relative? I knew he wouldn’t have killed Joanna, but now I knew it even more. Joanna, who could very well be his, our, niece or cousin. Was half sister possible? If Lucas really was sleeping with her, if that had happened, could he have in some enormous fit of revulsion struck out at her? Or had it always been about getting to know her? There had never been an affair, just Lucas probing to see if he could find anything out about the identity of our father.

  The test at GenTech. Maybe it wasn’t a paternity test after all, but to see if Lucas was related to whoever he suspected was our father. How did that work? Was he using Joanna’s hair as a sample? It would explain why Lucas came to have it. But there was so much. Why not just spit on a Q-tip?

  * * *

  I called GenTech. A woman with a cartoonish, high-pitched voice answered, said that all client information was private and there was no way I could access this information. Never, ever. She said it exactly like that—“never, ever”—like I was making some kind of audacious fairy-tale wish.

  I had a picture at least of our father. Or Mimi’s rendition of him. I had peeled one from the wall before fleeing her room. I found a pen and made his hair dark with black ink.

  * * *

  I pulled into the first bar I saw. It was in the “artsy” section of town, which meant it was between an antique store and Becca’s Scrapbooking Emporium. Inside, the lounge was nice and shadowy, lit mostly by a single forest-green halogen lamp. It was on the main floor of the HI-Way Hotel (Wayoata’s only official hotel), which advertised on its sign NEW ROOMS and the best sentence fragment ever, STATE OF THE ART. What exactly was state-of-the-art here, the HI-Way Hotel felt was self-evident enough to never specify.

  I ordered a stacked cheeseburger from a bartender who eyed my bruises, sipped a beer while I waited, then carried my beer and burger to the remotest booth in the place. I took my phone out and started to tap research on its tiny, cracked screen.

  Even the Wayoata Sun archives had been digitized (how adorable!). Once, when I was in middle school, we had to shadow someone in a career that interested us. At the time, I wanted to be journalist. It was the most boring day of my life. I followed around a gigantic woman named Maureen who had overlapping teeth and traveled via scooter; her ass hanging off the edges like an awning. She was working a story about a bin full of dead hogs left out to rot that could be seen from the highway coming into Wayoata. To be clear, the story wasn’t about the horrors of factory farming or even the dangers of improper carcass disposal, no, it was because these dead hogs were accidentally on display at the start of the fall corn festival. It was not good for tourism (which was a joke in and of itself). At the end of the day, with a dimpled frown, she turned on me. “I can tell you don’t care an iota for Wayoata, but let me tell you, these things are important. Taking pride in where you come from is important. It means you take pride in yourself.”

  A one-time fee of twenty-five dollars would get me an account and access to the Sun’s archives. For some irrational reason, I pictured Maureen on the other end, taking payment. Nodding her jowly head as if to say, Told you so.

  I looked up everything I could on the Wilkeses, the Russos, and Harold Lambert, founder of Harold’s Grocers. It took me less than fifteen minutes to find a photograph of my father. It was a shot of a Harold’s Grocers grand opening in Fargo. Now that I knew what to look for, he was easy to spot. He stood out against the gingery redheads that were the Lamberts, even in black-and-white. He had a smarmy, car salesman look about him.

  Peter Russo. Peter Russo was Mr. Hideaway. I looked his name up in notices. Peter Russo had married Alice Lambert, daughter of Harold Lambert, on July 15, 1964. Which would make Joanna and Madison my nieces and Kathy my half sister. Which would make us one big happy, murderous family.

  Alice had Joanna’s corkscrew hair. Here’s how it must have gone down: Peter married rich, then he met Mimi, probably at one of the four grand openings in Omaha. She likely got pregnant on purpose. I couldn’t see her missing an opportunity for regular payments from someone who could make child support—never anticipating that it just might not be worth it—and she followed her golden ticket back to Wayoata. Or maybe she thought he’d get divorced and marry her. Maybe it really had been love. For Mimi it would only have been love if Peter didn’t want her back. She never wanted the men who wanted her back, who actually liked her children.

  A section of the social pages announced that Peter and Alice Russo had moved to Fayetteville, Arkansas, “where the climate will be kinder to my husband’s lungs,” Alice was quoted as saying. That was ten years ago. A few months after Mimi’s accident. I called a few P. Russos in Fayetteville. On my fifth call, a woman answered with a thin, reedy voice. I hoped the background escalating argument between two drunken pool players in the lounge wouldn’t be picked up.

  “Is Peter Russo available?”

  “What’s this about please?”

  “I am calling about his granddaughter Joanna Wilkes.”

  “You reporters.” She hissed, clicked her tongue, and hung the phone up.

  At least I had an address.

  Lucas’s ATM card had last been used in Arkansas. Nightmare images ground in my head. I could picture him driving there through the night, hands white-knuckling the steering wheel. He was finally, after all these years, going to see his father. Give him a piece of his mind. Red taillights flashing across his angry face, his lips a pencil-thin line. Not noticing Ben Wilkes’s splotchy face bobbing up in the backseat.

  * * *

  Fayetteville was almost a thirteen-hour drive from Wayoata. I had three uppers left at the apartment. It would have to last me. Before getting on the highway, I stopped again at Home Depot and bought duct tape and a roll of clear plastic; and couldn’t decide if I was getting dirty looks because I was a Haas purchasing half a murder kit or because I looked so strung out. Probably both. In the parking lot, I covered up the back window on the PT with the tape and plastic. I wished, wished, wished I had taken out the extra insurance. I drove through the night hunched over the steering wheel, feverish, my eyes bugged out, seeing things on the side of the road that weren’t there.

  I stopped only for bathroom breaks and a box of gummy cereal bars.

  When I got there, I tried to freshen up a little bit at a Denny’s. I really should have planned it better. Packed an alternative outfit to my now-crumby blouse and creased jeans.

  I practiced smiling, and then smiling and saying “fuck you” at the same time.

  24

  DAY 10

  FRIDAY

  The house looked almost like a girl’s private school, with its gray brick facade, stony turret, and huge oak doors finished off with a lion’s head knocker. I rang the bell. A woman, midfifties, clearly the housekeeper, in a rubbery apron with a dish towel dangling over her wrist, answered the door.

  I asked for Peter Russo.

  “Alice isn’t home just now. Is she expecting you?”

  “It’s Peter I’m looking for.” I doubted she’d misheard me. Maybe Alice kept her husband on a short leash after his very reproductive affair. Or maybe affairs, plural. Maybe I had several half siblings. “I talked to Alice last night. She knew I was coming.”

  “She’s not here right now. Could you come back in an hour?”

  “I wish I could, but I’m just passing through town and it’d be such a shame not to see him, with everything that’s happened. I wanted to pass on my condolences.” It was a gross way to get inside. I did know that.

  The housekeeper looked positively torn up about what to do, and so I took it
as an opportunity to push myself inside. I chattered away, about how nice it would be to see Peter again, that I knew he wasn’t well, how pretty Fayetteville was, and then she was leading me past a living room overdecorated with antique-looking couches and pillars topped with urnlike vases, and up a wide, curved staircase.

  She knocked on the door as she opened it. “Mr. Russo? You sleeping?” I followed her into a master bedroom about the size of my apartment in Chicago. It smelled like reheated gravy and vegetable soup, mixed with the smell of sickness. The bedroom had a king-sized poster bed with a shimmery bedspread and a mountain of pillows perfectly arranged against the headboard. The bed annoyed me.

  Peter Russo was sitting up in a wingback chair, looking out the window. An oxygen mask elasticized over the back of his head, still thick with gray hair. His eyes widened when he saw me, fear or shock. So there he was, dear old Dad, the abandoner in the flesh.

  I’d been going over things in the car, how I’d introduce myself. Hi, I’m your daughter was what I’d planned, but now that I was there, so close to this waxy man who was my father, nothing seemed to come out of my mouth. I stood staring at him, like a baby. Knees shaking. I morphed back into that little girl from before I’d decided not to give a shit, when I still really, really wanted a dad. A dad who liked to give us rides on his back and called me his little princess and jokingly forbade me from dating until I was thirty. A dad who would teach me how to drive. A dad who somehow satisfied Mimi so she wasn’t so fucking unhappy.

  * * *

  “Someone’s here to see you, Peter.” The housekeeper’s voice had that ghoulish cheeriness that nurses put on when conversing with the dying. She turned back toward me. “What’d you say your name was?”

  “Mia,” I whispered my name, without meaning to. I hated that I sounded so awed.

  Peter lifted the mask off his face—a bloody line slashed his cheeks where the elastic had been—and shooed the housekeeper out of the room with a crooked finger. He croaked out a hello and nodded at the other wingback chair angled toward him, where I imagined he and Alice must have had their most heated discussions about Peter’s other children. Or maybe we were never discussed.