Of course she couldn’t. And wasn’t there some tiny part of her that still wanted something from this life? To cast these fragments of herself to the winds, to see if they could take root somewhere?
“So what did Detective Ludden say, when you called him?”
“You mean, last night, or this morning?”
All right, Doctor, now you see where we’re at, do you not?
A pause. “Either one.”
“He said that the detectives in Florida were working hard on the case. That’s what he always says, ‘They’re working hard, ma’am,’ so polite, you know. And I know he thinks I’m crazy. All of them do.”
“Who is ‘all of them’?”
“Everybody. You think I’m paranoid? I’m not paranoid. Every time I run into people, they give me this look, even now, it’s subtle but I see it, as if they’re surprised, as if—”
“As if what?”
“As if something’s wrong with me, and I shouldn’t still be walking around, I should be—”
“Yes?”
“Dead. Because Tommy’s dead.”
It was the first time she’d said it and she wanted immediately to take it back. The words had fallen out of her mouth like marbles, rolling this way and that across the floor, irretrievable.
And people were right, she thought. Why should she keep breathing? All these years she’d kept it together not only for Charlie but also for Tommy: so that she would be intact when he came back to her.
But she couldn’t pretend any longer: Tommy was dead and she was a—what? Not a widow, not an orphan. There was no word for what she was.
“I see,” Dr. Ferguson said. He slid the tissue box closer to her across the side table.
They looked at each other. He was waiting, she realized, for her to cry. The square box gazed at her expectantly, its cardboard skin swimming with absurd pink and green bubbles, one tissue protruding obscenely from its slit, calling out for her tears, for her—what did the books call it?—catharsis. He wanted to see her break at last. Well, damned if he was going to get her to do that. What did it get you, catharsis? You still had to pick yourself up and go on with your life, your life that was a pile of shit. She stood.
“Where are you going?”
“Look. Are you going to give me the prescription or not?”
“It’s not advisable—”
“Yes or no? ’Cause I’ll go elsewhere.… You know someone else will give it to me if you don’t.”
He hesitated, but he gave her the slip of paper. “Come back soon, all right? Next week?”
* * *
You still had to pick yourself up and walk out that door and face the glare of the afternoon sun on the windshields of the cars in the parking lot.
You still had to find your car and put your key in the ignition and hear its full-throated cry as it came to life. You had to steer it onto the road with all the other living, moving things, all headed somewhere or other as if the rotation of the world depended on their trips to the dry cleaner’s or the mall. You had to pull off the road into the parking lot of the CVS and get out of the car and stand waiting at the counter with all the other people seeking the potions that would buy them another hour or another day, whether they wanted it or not, and you had to put half a pill in your mouth, just half, and swallow it, hard and dry, feeling it scrape down your throat. And then, since you had no food in the house and you had a human being besides yourself to look after, you had to walk down the sidewalk to the Stop & Shop. You had to stand there inside blinking under those bright, bright lights, all those rows and colors leaping out at you, tomatoes so red they hurt your eyes, fiery orange bags of Doritos, neon green six-packs of 7-Up, everything chirping out to the living: Pick me! Pick me! Pick me!
And you couldn’t stand there forever, as if you’d never seen a supermarket before. You needed, even then, especially then, when your momentum began to flag, to keep moving. You filled your cart with what your family needed. You put a dead, skinned chicken in there and a big box of cornflakes and a gallon of milk. You put broccoli in there for Charlie, the only vegetable he’d eat, and some Vidalia onions for Henry in case he came over someday and you also put in a bag of grape tomatoes. You knew that Charlie wouldn’t eat them and you yourself preferred beefsteak but you grabbed them anyway, didn’t you, their smooth red skins peeking out at you through the mesh of the bag, grabbed them because Tommy liked them, liked to hold them in his teeth and squirt them across the room, and you wanted to show yourself that you still remembered what Tommy liked, even if it did blast a hole in your heart.
Then you had to stand in line ignoring Mrs. Manzinotti staring at you from the dairy section, so you paged through the magazines filled with celebrities falling apart or falling in love or both, noticing that Mrs. Manzinotti was walking in your direction now and hoping that she still ignored you as she did the first few years, avoiding eye contact, flinching when you passed her in the market or downtown. But here she was, filled with determined good cheer, barreling toward you, as if all that was over with and we must go on as before, mustn’t we? It doesn’t matter if you’re ready; you got ready, fast. So you talked about how nice it was that it was finally feeling like spring today (as if you had even noticed) and you asked after Mr. Manzinotti and Ethan and Carol Ann and when she said, ‘And how’s Charlie doing?’ you said, ‘We’re just fine, thank you,’ as if your own story were an article in a magazine someone could flip through and put back in the rack, as if your sweet boy wasn’t (say it) somewhere in pieces under the dirt.
And while you paid the cashier, at that moment it occurs to you that there’s a man in Florida stopping at a gas station somewhere right this minute. You can see him clear as day buying a big bag of Doritos and beef jerky and a Red Bull, then leaving the bag there on the counter with the clerk as he heads to the toilet to pee before he gets back on the road. And the eyes of that man standing there, those unrepentant eyes staring in the bathroom mirror, they were the last eyes Tommy ever saw before—
No.
No, because: Tommy was alive.
Alive on this earth right now in all his Tommyness: his love of tomatoes and marshmallows and butterscotch, his inexplicable hatred of strawberries, the way he’d grab her hand as she was leaving his bedside at night, asking her to stay for a few more minutes (Oh, why had she loosened herself from his grip and kissed him good night? Why hadn’t she stayed for the few minutes he had craved?), the dimple in his cheek that came out when he gave that foolish and duplicitous grin after some piece of naughtiness, like that time he popped his brother’s balloon on the way home from the carnival and pretended it was an accident.
Tommy was alive on this earth and no one could tell her otherwise.
Tommy was alive on this earth, and someday they would see each other again.
It happened sometimes. That girl out in Utah, for instance. The one with the friendly, open face and the yellow hair, who looked like she had stepped out of the goat stall at the 4-H instead of crawling on her hands and knees up from purgatory. There she was on the cover of the magazine, Denise still had that copy in the drawer of her bedside table, she knew it by heart: the girl had disappeared from her bedroom one night and then five years later she was home again and the monster who did it was going to jail for forever and a day. There were the pictures of her with her family, sitting on the couch with her mother’s arm wrapped around her, her father’s hand resting on her shoulder as naturally as you please. She was starting up school again, that’s what the article said. Playing piano. A shy smile on her face, blue ribbons in her hair. The girl was intact. More or less. It could happen. Things happened. It wasn’t any more or less unlikely than a child going for a bike ride to his best friend’s house down the road one Saturday morning and falling off the edge of the earth.
But these thoughts, like the magazine’s pages, were almost worn through from too much use. Which made her go back to the other thought. Which made her think again that she couldn’t do it any
more.
I can’t hold on to hope and I can’t hold on without it, either, she thought.
She pulled out of the parking lot. When she reached the intersection, instead of heading right toward home she took a left and found herself driving out toward Dayton. She drove for a while past the even green fields, unsure as yet as to where she was going, until she saw the sign for the new Staples out beyond the mall. It was shining its big neon smile at her, as if it had been waiting for her, as if she was one of the devout who had found her way back home.
She felt a dim thrill when no one looked at her twice as she walked in the door. They kept doing what they were doing, a whole lot of nothing as far as she could tell. A girl with horrible fraying braids was paging through a magazine. A white boy with a knit cap on his head (why did they wear that indoors? unless they were bald, which this boy wasn’t) was ringing something up. She heard his nervous scales of laughter echoing through the store. She wandered for a while down the long aisles filled with dangling supplies, each with its own clear sense of purpose, soaking in the chilled air. In aisle 10 she picked up a new gleaming staple gun and walked to the back where the copy center was, feeling its heft in her hand.
There was a line of people, clutching their papers. Selling cars, maybe, or looking for piano students. She stood on line, another person with the need to multiply her longing exponentially, holding in her other hand the flyer she kept in the glove compartment for this very reason. She waited her turn and then she handed her flyer to a boy in his early twenties, a boy with deep brown skin and a smooth, amiable, bored face.
Maybe Tommy will look like that someday, she thought. Maybe Tommy will get a job at Staples. He could do worse for himself. She was letting herself think it. She knew that. It was as if her conscious mind was still back in the parking lot of the Stop & Shop and she was letting this other part of herself take over again.
“Two hundred, please.”
He took the paper from her and didn’t look at it. Bless you, she thought. Bless you for not looking. The people in the stationery store in town had gotten used to her by now; the pity in their eyes was no longer fresh but had congealed over the years into something familiar, automatic, as if Denise were a stray mutt that wandered in every now and then for a crust of bread or a pat.
But Denise didn’t need a pat, or any rewarmed pity. She needed her two hundred copies.
“Would you like that in different colors, ma’am? Or on white paper?”
“The face will be legible in different colors?”
“Sure. We can do that.”
“Then maybe different colors, this time.”
“All right. Which colors would you like?”
“You choose.”
“I’ll do yellow and green and red. How’s that?”
“Great.”
She smiled at him. She stood behind the counter, feeling its hard, sharp edge with her fingers. The feel of the pill gliding through her system. The staple gun heavy in her other hand. Henry had gotten rid of the other one. Twenty-nine dollars it had cost her and he’d thrown it right in the trash.
You’ve got to stop with the flyers, he had said.
The words flowed through her mind as coolly as the frigid air, as if they were words she was overhearing, spoken between strangers.
What right do you have to show up here and tell me what to do?
Charlie told me. That’s what. Our son. He says you aren’t even there for dinner half the time.
The boy eats. Look at him. He’s not starving.
That’s not the point. You are wearing yourself down and Charlie, too. And me, too.
What do you care?
You have to stop. Please.
I can’t. What if—
Call the doctor then. Get some help.
What if it makes a difference, Henry? What if someone sees one of them and—
For god’s sakes, Denise—
The boy was back. “Actually, the red’s a little dark for a face. How about blue? The blue’s real light.”
“That’d be fine.”
She waited. She had only to wait, her hands fingering the sharp edge of the countertop, Tommy’s face multiplying in green and blue and yellow. She let her mind linger on each of the faces as they poured out of the machine, thinking, maybe this one. Maybe this will be the one that makes all the difference.
Twenty-Three
Charlie Crawford rode his bike home slowly from Harrison Johnson’s house, his head percolating with riffs, his whole body pulsating with the thrill of victory and the first-class weed Harrison always had on hand from his brother’s friend who worked at the pizza place.
Ba DA DA ba DA DA DA DA. The way he’d extended that last beat, rolling it and then holding it so it had resonated around the garage, he’d known right away: he hadn’t fucked it up. He could see it in the way Harrison and Carson really stopped and listened for fucking once, in the grudging nods they aimed in his direction as he headed out the door at the end of rehearsal. He knew they’d been wanting to ditch him for that Mike kid at the community college, they never thought he was good enough, he’d always been the kid with a drum kit who lived nearby and could kinda sorta hold a beat. But today: he’d shown them but good. He’d killed that fucker, left it lying DEAD in the road.
Okay, okay, so maybe it wasn’t the best drum solo ever of all time, maybe he wasn’t, like, Lars Ulrich, but in his life this is what amounted to a major fucking victory and he was going to take that baby and ride it all the way home, the AMAZE-ing Harrison’s brother’s friend’s weed flowing through him making everything all right, making everything so very, very all right that he did an extra loop around the block, down past the neighbor’s vicious dog to the edge of the cornfields and back again, and didn’t even particularly dread sailing back into his own driveway, where Thanks be to God his mother’s car was out. Could it get any better? He could grab a carton of ice cream and go upstairs to his room and text Gretchen. Or—even better—think about Gretchen without having the stress of actually texting her, lying there on his bed while the high was still in him, thinking about Gretchen’s breasts jiggling to the beat of his killing drum solo, her knees swaying open and shut in that jeans miniskirt she’d worn to school day before yesterday—or wait—even better—skip Gretchen entirely, too much work, and get right to it on the Internet, ready set go! Now that was a pleasant way to spend an afternoon.
He swung back down the block again, tingling with anticipation, his dreads flying like wings above his ears, then decided he’d better get on with it before the high faded. He never risked bringing any pot home—for one thing, his mom was all up in his ass about that shit and for all he knew would ship him out to a military academy if she found so much as a bud in his pocket, which was hard, actually, to keep on top of, to keep one’s head in the game like that about every stray bud when you got stoned as often as he did. So far, though, she’d merely sniffed at him a few times after he came home, as though he were a rancid meat loaf in the fridge. She probably didn’t know what the stuff smelled like, thought he had some funky-ass sweat. Luckily no one messed with his locker at school. He could have a drugstore in that thing and no one would be the wiser.
He dropped his bike in the yard and ran to the door. But there were people walking around the house, looking around. White people. A man and a woman, and a little kid, too. Uh-oh. Maybe some Jehovah’s Witnesses, though most of the Jehovah’s he’d seen around there had been black. He didn’t even know there were white Jehovah’s. Did Mormons come this far out? Got to hand it to them, bringing the kid along, that was a nice touch. Hard to slam a door on a kid.
Funny little kid, too. He was hopping up and down like he was pretending to be a kangaroo, yelling, “This is it, this is it, this is it!” He kept patting the aluminum siding as if the whole house were a big red dog.
“Can I help you?” Charlie said. Summoning up his best this-fine-young-man-was-raised-right grin, which he could beam right through his stoner’
s haze. His specialty, actually. He could be sitting in the office of Principal Ranzetta herself right now and she’d have nary a clue. And had done so, in point of fact.
The three of them gaped at him.
The woman spoke up at last. “Is Mr. or Mrs. Crawford at home?”
Boy, they sure did their homework, these evangelical types.
“Mom isn’t here right now. Maybe come back another time?” He looked up at them hopefully.
The lady and the old guy glanced at each other. They looked like they were having a disagreement without saying anything. Like the woman had an agenda and the old guy wanted out of there.
Were they from the school? He didn’t recognize them, but the old guy did have a school superintendent-y kind of vibe and the woman could be an administrator or maybe even a cop, she had that wired-up look. Maybe they’d found the pot in his locker and she was going to lock him up or throw him out or send him to rehab like that lame-ass in social studies who got caught with a bottle of peppermint schnapps in his desk. I mean, schnapps? That’s what you get busted for? In your desk? Schnapps?
But why’d they bring a kid, though, if they were there to bust him? He couldn’t wrap his head around that. The kid kind of creeped him out, too. He was staring up at Charlie with these weird, shiny eyes.
“So. What’d you want my mama for?” Charlie dropped the fine-young-man bit and stood squinting at the three of them.
“That’s between us, I’m afraid,” the woman said. She seemed tense.
Uh-oh.
He had a thought. It glowed with possibility in his brain, so he said it.
“Are you with the TV?”
“What?”
“You know, like America’s Most Wanted, something like that?”
“No, we’re not. Sorry.”
“Oh.” His mom was always talking about going on a show like that, keeping the word out there. They didn’t do missing black kids, though, as far as he could tell. Only pretty white girls.
The Forgetting Time: A Novel Page 19