by Sherri Smith
“Sit.”
I couldn’t move. “Sit,” he said again. He was wearing a robe, silky red, his legs crossed at the knees; a Crocs sandal dangled from his left foot. Long, stick-thin legs, sparsely haired, nodded back and forth. He took a mouthful of water from a plastic covered mug, like an adult sippy cup. His hands shook. I noticed he had absurdly long eyelashes, just like my own.
“COPD, stage 3. Don’t ever smoke—you don’t smoke, do you?” He had an accent. I was usually terrible at discerning accents, but this was definitely Italian.
“No.” I’d recently been popping several pills a day, though. My liver probably looked like a puffer fish.
“Good, good for you. Gotta be on this twenty hours a day, my leash.” He motioned to an oxygen tank by his foot. There was an awkward silence.
“You knew my mother, Mimi Haas.” I thought I should start there, ease into it. Like a gentle reminder that tells men to get their prostate checked.
“You’re my daughter. I know.” He said this with an annoyed resignation, took a few deep breaths from his oxygen mask, and I wanted to slap it off his face.
“My brother—” I started. He snapped the mask off again.
“Killed my granddaughter.” He finished my sentence.
“No, he didn’t.”
He shook his head back and forth, a little too wildly, like he didn’t want to look at something and I was forcing him to. “The police are looking for him.”
“Have you talked to the police? Did you tell them that you—that we’re related?”
He shook his head again. “No. What good would that do? To tell the world my illegitimate son seduced and murdered my granddaughter? Would it change the investigation? This revelation of incest? No. My daughter would never forgive me. I’ll be gone soon, and she’d have to live with it. It would follow her everywhere. Ruin the Harold’s brand, and how does that honor Joanna’s memory? My poor Joanna.” He said this, breathless, then when he had enough air, he added with wheezy indignation, “You two had both moved away,” like it was Lucas’s fault for returning to Wayoata, like he’d brought the plague back with him.
So Kathy didn’t know, unless Lucas had also tried talking to her. I hadn’t thought of that.
“There was no affair. Lucas was only talking to Joanna to find out more about you. He contacted you. I know he did.”
“My other granddaughter, Madison. She saw them together at school, in his car. Touching. She told me herself.” I doubted this was true. He was looking to justify keeping secret children.
“Did Lucas come here to see you?”
Peter shook his head no. “He called me, I know he did. A few times, but Alice, my wife, didn’t”—his lungs whistled, a deep rattle churned in his chest—“didn’t tell me. Once I picked up and listened.” He nodded in the direction of an antique-looking phone with a gold-trimmed rotary dial on a nightstand. “He was angry. He thought we should pay for your mother’s care, that we should make back payments of child support to both of you. He threatened to sue me. He sounded like Mimi. Lucas, I believe, took it out on Joanna to get to me. He had access to her—”
“Why didn’t you talk to him, call him back?”
“It would have upset my wife.”
“So it’s your wife’s fault, then, that you couldn’t be bothered to acknowledge your own children’s existence? Those are some really great family values.”
“I’m not well,” he said, his mask full of white condensation. For a second I wanted to laugh. Lucas was obsessed with Star Wars, and now I had some asshole sitting here with a mask on his face saying, I am your father.
“What’s your excuse for the other thirty years of our existence?”
He lifted up his mask again. “As much as you might not want to hear this, it was Mimi’s choice. She said it would be worse for you to know and see me around town with my other children. Mimi wanted all or nothing. That was how she was, most of the time. It wasn’t even a long affair, just over eighteen months. That was it. When she got to drinking, she changed her mind from time to time. She’d show up on my doorstep at all hours of the night, demanding money, demanding that I take you both.”
“She was a functioning alcoholic. She needed professional help.” I couldn’t believe I was standing up for Mimi, but at least she’d tried to take care of us. The functioning part might’ve been too kind but she did have a job, she bought groceries, she kept us alive (weren’t these the benchmarks for functioning?) At least she’d acknowledged us.
“Don’t you remember the time she just dumped you off at our house? It was about one o’clock in the morning. Late fall. Neither of you even had jackets on. I took you both out to the lake house with me before my own kids woke up. She didn’t come back for you for a week. It got to be too much. Whenever she took up with some other fellow, it would seem like we could just all get along, but it never lasted.”
“I remember you as Mr. Hideaway. You’d sleep on our living room pullout couch.”
“She’d lure me back, here and there.” He wrung his hands, as if he were the victim of some Venus flytrap vagina that kept snapping shut on him whenever he got too close. I started thinking about Mimi’s accident. “You lived on Southland Drive?” I said it like a question, but I already knew. Everyone knew that big house where Harold Lambert’s daughter lived. It suddenly mattered to me where Mimi was going that night.
His eyes flitted back and forth. He held the mask over his mouth and nose. Deep breaths. Took it off again. “Oh, I think you know the answer to that.”
“Mimi went to see you the night of her accident, didn’t she?” Peter didn’t say anything, but I was able to hold the silence. I just sat there. Waiting. Thinking, What if. Thinking, Maybe, just maybe …
Peter’s eyes wagged back and forth as I stared at him. I could hear his watch ticking. The housekeeper started a vacuum. Finally he broke.
“What if she did? I couldn’t control when she decided to drop by. She’d show up at all hours of the night, drunk as usual. It was upsetting for my wife. When our kids still lived at home, she’d wake everyone up, and my wife would have to try to keep the kids upstairs so they didn’t know what was happening. Later it would be the grandchildren if we had any staying over. Your mother, when she was in a certain hateful mood, was always trying to cause an upheaval.”
“That must have been so hard for you.” I was being sarcastic, but he nodded as if I were really sympathizing. “What was she doing at your house the night of her accident?”
“The usual.”
“What’s the usual?”
He eyeballed me, contemplated. “As I said, disturbing the peace. That was always Mimi’s point. It happened less as the years went on, but when it did, it was almost more shocking because we’d convinced ourselves the last time was the last time.”
“You left your black glove in her car.” I went with the assumptive close. Why not make him think I already knew most of what had happened? Something happened.
He closed his eyes, drew a few sharp breaths. “Yeah, well, that was a difficult night.”
“For you or my mother who now lives in a care home?”
His shook his head again, like I just wasn’t getting it. “What happened was her own bloody fault.” He whined under his wheeze. “Like I said, Alice would usually shut herself up somewhere in the house, wait for it to be over. That night, Mimi was especially aggressive. She kept ringing the doorbell, even after I opened the door, to try to draw Alice out. She was calling out her name. I don’t know if she was hankering for a catfight or what, but she was going on about how Alice was living in her house, living her life. How she deserved better, deserved more money from me. Alice was plain sick and tired of it. She came down and confronted Mimi on the front steps. She told her to go home to her children and get sober. Earlier that day there had been one of those rare winter rains, and then the temperature just dropped. The stairs were slick with ice. I’d planned to salt them after dinner, but I guess I just didn�
�t get to it. Now, Alice didn’t touch her in any way, I want to be clear on that, but your mother, as drunk as she was, didn’t need much more than for someone to blow on her to get her to fall over.”
It was true that sometimes Mimi could fall over like a bag of bricks. Just bang—like a narcoleptic, but it was from the booze. She’d get all sorts of bruises. When she told her concerned co-workers at the bank, Oh, I just smacked into the doorframe is all, they’d think some guy was knocking her around, but it really was just the doorframe, or the kitchen cupboard or whatever.
“Mimi tried to take a swing at me and lost her footing, slipped backward, and hit her head. I couldn’t rouse her. She was out. I would have called an ambulance, but I knew how it looked.”
I pictured my mother with a serious dent in her skull, blood gushing out of her ears like a tap had been turned on inside her head, running all over Peter’s front steps. A mess to be cleaned up. But not my mess. My mother had never lost consciousness when I pushed her into the countertop. It hadn’t been my fault. I didn’t cause her injury. Something uncorked inside of me, and a whole range of high-pressured, raw emotion geysered. Relief, guilt for feeling relief, anger for having spent the last ten years believing I’d caused it, anger at myself for such enthusiastic self-hatred, for the pills. For the nights and days I’d spent alone with the curtains drawn, all itchy and hopped-up on an upper or drained-out on a downer, feeling nothing as the sun motored across the sky. Wanting, badly, to feel punished because I got away with it. A sadness for my mother that everywhere she had turned that night, someone was turning away from her.
“We didn’t want the police there. Alice was worried they might arrest her, because no one would believe she didn’t push her husband’s mistress. There’d be press, and our kids would find out about my indiscretion, about their half siblings. Alice, my kids, my grandchildren still didn’t deserve to pay for my mistakes. She went down on her own. She was trying to hit me; all I did was put her somewhere else. It was an accident, plain and simple. Mimi did it to herself. I figured she’d wake up in a few hours. She was used to tumbles like that. I knew someone would find her, get her help.”
This guy was such an asshole. “So you just abandoned her?”
“I didn’t put her on some deserted back road.”
“But how do you know that she couldn’t have made a full recovery if only she’d gotten help sooner?” It was a slightly hypocritical accusation, because maybe we had both contributed to her head injury. It wasn’t like I’d called the police to stop her from driving off. The difference was Peter had put her limp body in the car. He had to have known the severity, whereas all I saw was a smear of blood on Mimi’s temple.
“I don’t. I have had to live with that.”
“You’ve had to live with that?” I’d been living with it for the last ten years. “You? Not her two kids who are paying for her care? Then what? You just left Wayoata? In case Mimi woke up and remembered that she’d been at your house?”
“Nothing like that. It was just time for a new beginning. My kids were adults. They had their own lives, and I was getting sicker. I breathe easier here.”
“I bet you do,” I snapped. “You didn’t think we might need help after our mother was turned into a near vegetable?”
Peter shrugged. “You were old enough to take care of yourselves. What could I have done?”
“We were seventeen!”
“Well, maybe I should have done things differently. Don’t you think I’ve regretted that decision every day since? Because I have. And now, look, I guess I’ve had my comeuppance.” He fidgeted with the oxygen tank’s hose.
I didn’t know what decision he was referring to: not calling an ambulance, ditching her car, ever meeting Mimi in the first place, regretting not acknowledging us.
“Your comeuppance?”
“Joanna, my sweet, sweet Joanna.”
His dead granddaughter was his punishment. Her murder had happened to him. It was pretty obvious why Mimi and Peter didn’t work. The universe rotated around each of them. How was it possible that Lucas and I were conceived by two of the most narcissistic people living in Wayoata? Seriously, what were the odds of that?
Peter started coughing and wheezing; his eyes went shiny. He slipped the oxygen mask over his mouth and nose, breathed in deep. I waited a full minute, but Peter wasn’t going to take the mask off again. He’d wimped out and was now busying himself with the curtains behind him. I had a violent urge to bend the oxygen hose in half, enjoy a few brief moments of depriving this man of air, as he had deprived us. Of tormenting him, the way his absence and, finally, rejection had tormented my brother. There were a hundred different things I could have said, but I knew the odds were they’d be so inflected with rage that whatever I said would come out as an incoherent string of obscenities, and I didn’t want to be mad at myself later for being so inarticulate. He wasn’t worth the time or effort or the future replay.
Before I left, I asked the housekeeper if I could use the bathroom. I perused the medicine cabinet. Guilty conscience abated, I knew this was the moment I should ditch the pills, give them up completely, just toss them out the car window as I drove back to Wayoata, let them spray like a mini Pfizer hailstorm against the car windshield behind me. But this was not a good time to go through withdrawal. I managed to swipe a near-full bottle of Percocet, which was a score because I’d just run out.
* * *
I found a cheap motel three hours out of Fayetteville. It smelled like sweat, loamy sex, and stale cigarette smoke. The bedspread was an irritating polyester quilt, with a brown and orange geometric pattern. The fixtures, the doorknobs, the remote control were all coated with a stickiness.
I didn’t really believe what Peter had told me. Or at least he had glossed over certain details. I think Alice very well could have snapped (the way I’d snapped earlier), and in her desperation to make Mimi leave, she pushed her down their tall, opulent front steps. Let gravity have its way with her. I knew from experience how easily she would have gone down.
I thought about calling Garrett. This would change everything, wouldn’t it? Really bring things back to Kathy, her motives to pin Joanna’s death on my brother. She could have known. I could see Lucas in their kitchen, hand over Kathy’s, gently revealing the true nature of his relationship with Joanna. I’m her uncle, see? Your half brother. I could never have been sleeping with her. Now let’s figure out where she is. Ben coming up behind him with a frying pan. Kathy refusing to divide up the Harold’s Grocers fortune to include two more illegitimate siblings. Ian Wilkes’s glare-filled glasses as he watched, holding Kathy’s hand, while Big Ben beat my brother to death. And here the hypothetical goriness gripped like a seizure. Blood running down the walls from my brother’s split head. His eyes popping out with surprise from the first hit, and then getting dimmer with each dent put in his skull. His blond hair, streaked bloodred (and here Kathy glimpses that with red hair, Lucas does look a little like her dead daughter and she instructs Ben to hit harder.) My twin’s last words would be a dumbfounded gasp of oh no or ouch. Something so simple and human. Kathy praising Ben with a good job, son, as my brother twitched away the last seconds of his life.
My body clenched. The room started to swim. I had to shut my mind down. Force these sad, violent images to fade to black. Skim, I told myself, skim like a Jesus lizard rather than sink into an abyss of grief and terror of life without my twin. Do not drown in this sadness. Not yet. Not until—and here I ground my teeth—not until I get some kind of vengeance. Not until the Wilkeses pay.
I drifted again, to all those nighttime talks with Lucas about who our father could be. Shared fantasies of having some Daddy Warbucks out there (a pro athlete for Lucas; me, I liked all the men in aftershave ads who I pictured boarding private jets right after they smacked their cheeks up with stinging cologne), and here he was. Rich. And it was gut-wrenchingly sad that Lucas and I hadn’t discovered him together, that we couldn’t right now pick Peter
Russo apart and vent all our disappointment.
The only thing that sat askew inside my gut was why Lucas had never told the police about it (or I should say the only other thing because it was pretty fucking inexplicable why he hadn’t called me to tell me he’d found out who our father was). Why not say, Whoa, that girl was my niece. Of course I wasn’t sleeping with her. Toss the chunk of Joanna’s hair at them and say, Test that.
I could think of only two reasons why he wouldn’t have: One, he was sleeping with Joanna and it wasn’t until later he figured out that she was his niece. Two, if Lucas went missing the same day Joanna’s body was discovered, then maybe he thought she just ran away from the humiliating pictures, from her control-freak unstable mother. He didn’t help the police in any way because he believed Joanna was alive and well. Better off than she had been in Wayoata. Lucas knew what it was like to live with an unstable mother. He would have been in Joanna’s corner all the way, especially if he knew she was our niece.
Or maybe there was a third reason—a much simpler, more straightforward answer. He’d planned to tell all in the interview, but something had happened.
Again I thought about calling Garrett, but I had the feeling I would just slur through the conversation and my credibility would be further shot. I had taken a Percocet (which, by the way, belonged to Alice, not my father. It gave me some pleasure to think that teetotaler Alice, the woman who pushed my drunken mom down icy steps, was a hypocrite). Just to sleep. To process.
25
DAY 11
SATURDAY
The water tower appeared on the horizon first. It was like some force field existed around Wayoata, and I kept getting boomeranged back there, into this alternate universe where its residents thought my twin brother was a killer on the loose. And then the Terrace came into view. It jutted out from the other low-slung town architecture like the creepy spire on a haunted house.