“Oh?” she always asks, not taking her eyes off the TV. “Where to?”
I wish I could tell her that I’m meeting my friends down at the corner bar for a drink, or that we’re all heading out bowling, but she knows I don’t have girlfriends, that ever since I got in trouble I dropped the few I had in exchange for a life of restitution and solitude. It wasn’t a huge sacrifice; the friendships I’d made after moving out of Ma’s, including my roommate, Jenny, were shallow and tenuous, nothing to speak of. I’m also not permitted to set foot inside a bar, since one of my probation stipulations forbids me to “enter or frequent any establishment whose primary income is derived from the sale of alcoholic beverages.” But when I get antsy, I’m usually not looking to tie one on anyway. Mostly, I just walk.
Just a few months ago, after putting Angus to bed, I went out and bought a package of cigarettes—even though I hadn’t had one since I found out I was pregnant—and walked to the playground over on Cedar Avenue. Just a few blocks away from our house, it had, for a while at least, been one of Dad’s and my “places,” a tiny section of the world reserved only for us. When I was little, he would take me down for an hour before dinner and swing me on the rubber bucket swings or ride the seesaw with me as the sun began to drop low in the sky. As I got older, though, we would find ourselves drifting over to the wooden benches underneath the maple trees on the other side of the playground to talk. Teachers, middle school boys, the scab on my knee, nothing was off-limits.
“Do you love Ma?” I asked him once. I’d heard them arguing that morning while I was brushing my teeth, had felt my hand tighten around my toothbrush as I heard Ma call him an imbecile. “Even when she’s mean to you?”
I expected him to look at me sharply; Dad was Ma’s greatest defender, her stalwart companion even in the worst of situations. There was always an explanation for the sharp things she said to him: the words had come out of her perpetual state of exhaustion; she was Irish and had a fuse like a spark plug; she had always possessed, for as long as he’d known her, a naturally defensive personality. But he only sighed this time, linking his hands behind his head, and looked up at the light sifting through the leafy canopy above us. “Yes,” he said. “I love her even when she’s mean to me.”
“How?” I pressed, wanting to understand. “How can you still love her when she says such awful things? I mean, she can just be so rude.”
He nodded, not disagreeing. “She can be tough. But your mother loves us both very much. Her anger comes from places that have nothing to do with me. Or you.”
I considered this, picking at my big toenail. At twelve years old, I already knew that Ma had had a life before us, and that with a father who had walked out on the family when she was eight years old and a mother who drank herself unconscious every night, it hadn’t been all sunshine and roses. Still, it hardly seemed like a valid enough excuse to call her husband names, especially when he was so empathetic toward her past—and her present behavior. “You always make excuses for her,” I said.
“Do I?” He put his hand on my knee.
I looked up, searching his face for some sign of condescension, but he only looked tired. “Yes. You do.”
“Well.” He shrugged. “Maybe that’s just part of how things work. She makes you mad sometimes, doesn’t she?”
I rolled my eyes. “That’s the understatement of the year.”
“Well.” He squeezed my knee. “You still love her, don’t you?”
“I guess.” I looked down, aggravated by how simplistic he made it seem. Deep down, I knew there was nothing simple about it at all; Ma and I were as opposite from one another as two people could get. But the truth was, I spent so much time feeling angry at her that I’d never even stopped to think about whether or not I still loved her. Did I? I wasn’t entirely sure.
“Of course you do.” He hooked a finger around mine. “Even if you don’t feel it. It’s there, Bird. It’s always there.”
MY ANXIETY LEVEL soars as traffic on Market Street, which is the only street that leads to Angus’s school, becomes more and more dense. The clock on the dashboard reads 4:56. I have four minutes before the overtime clock starts ticking. Just when I decide that there is some sort of external force deliberately working against me, I see the red-and-blue glare of the siren lights cutting through the sky, the faint sound of a megaphone up ahead. People are getting out of their cars; police are checking the backseats, opening up the trunks. My heart speeds up, a rapid knocking behind my ribs, like one of those rubber pink paddle balls. It’s got to be because of James. Which means they haven’t found him yet. Which also means he could still be up there in the loft. I think about cutting out of line, swerving the car over to the far left lane, but that would just look suspicious. I don’t have anything to hide—except my conscience, which I’m pretty sure no one has found a way to tap into yet. I dial Angus’s school number on my cell phone, listen as it rings loudly in my ear.
“Little People After Care,” a voice says after four rings.
“Oh, hi, this is Bird. Angus’s mom? Is this Molly?”
“Yes! Hi! Are you on your way?” With her reddish-purple hair and thin silver ring clipped in the middle of her nose, I would guess Molly to be only about eighteen or nineteen years old. On any given day, there is an innate frantic quality about her, as if she’s just slugged four or five espressos, but right now she sounds borderline manic.
“Yes, I’m on my way, but I just wanted to tell you that I might be a few minutes late.”
“You know we’re on lockdown, don’t you, Mrs. Connolly?” Molly never fails to call me “missus,” no matter how many times I have told her that I am not married.
“Excuse me?”
“We’re on lockdown,” Molly repeats. “Mayor’s orders. There’s some maniac out there who escaped from a cop car this morning with a gun and—”
“Wait, what?” I interrupt.
“I’m telling you,” Molly says. “There’s some psycho out there—”
“I got that part.” The edges of my face feel warm. “But why is the day care on lockdown? Have they seen the guy around there?”
“Well, no. They haven’t seen him anywhere.” Molly pauses dramatically. “But the escape took place right here. At the red light on the corner of South and Market. Which means that he could be anywhere.”
I inhale slowly, pulling at the skin on my neck, and then exhale again. “Well, I’m stuck in traffic right now, because the police are checking everyone’s cars on Market Street. I just wanted you to know that I’ll get there as soon as I can.”
“The police are checking everyone’s cars?” Without waiting for an answer, Molly leans away from the phone and yells, “Hey, Carol! The police are checking everyone’s cars now!” Then she’s back. “Okay, Mrs. Connolly. Well, get here when you can, I guess. Thanks for calling.”
“Will you tell Angus—” I start, but there’s only a dial tone. I click the phone shut, move the car toward an officer who is beckoning me forward.
“Hi, Officer.” I roll down the window, rest an elbow casually on the edge of the door. “What’s going on?”
He puts a hand on my door and leans in, glancing first at the front of the car, and then the back. Small wiry hairs jut out from inside his nose, and his breath smells like sour coffee. “We have to check your car, ma’am.”
I put the car in park. “For what?”
“We had a prisoner escape this morning.” His voice is brusque and tired; he’s already answered this question a hundred times. “Pop your trunk, please, and step out of the vehicle.”
I get out and step to the side as the policeman opens the backseat, and leans in, swiping a hand carelessly under both seats. Behind my car, another police officer is doing the same thing to a Ford Taurus pickup truck, the back of which is covered with an enormous black tarp. The woman who has stepped out of the Taurus is wearing denim overalls and a Yankees baseball hat. She looks like she’s about to kill someone. “It’s fertil
izer,” she says, rolling up the sleeves of her blue-and-green checkered shirt as if getting ready to take a swing. “For my garden. And no, there’s no one hiding in it. Have you ever tried to hide in a pile of fertilizer? You’d smell like shit for about six months straight, for one thing. And you wouldn’t be able to breathe.”
“Sorry, ma’am. We got orders.” The police officer walks away from her, rips off the tarp, and then heaves himself up to one side of the truck.
“Well, hey,” the woman says, watching as the cop plunges an arm into the dry mixture. “Go right ahead, then. Knock yourself out.” The cop turns his face as a smell like raw sewage drifts out from the truck, but keeps digging.
I look back over as the cop slams down the hood of my car. “Okay,” he says, giving the trunk a few taps. “You’re good.”
I drive the rest of the way feeling suspended somehow, as if my body is outside of myself. It is such an odd feeling that I reach up and slap myself across the face—anything to snap me out of it. But it doesn’t help. Something is making me think about that day, niggling around the edges, forcing me to remember.
I MADE IT a point to stay away from James after the kiss on the back step, telling myself that I didn’t want to turn into one of those people who cheated because I didn’t have the guts to break up with my boyfriend. The truth was more complicated. James was shy and kind and quite possibly the most fascinating person I had ever met. He was almost ethereal, I sometimes thought, as if he’d been dropped down from another galaxy, and he possessed an inexplicable, innate knowledge about the world around us, including me. The secret tendril of feeling I harbored for him kept me awake some nights, poking insistently like some distant tapping underground. But it worried me, too, and I was not exactly sure why. Maybe it was because I sensed a goodness about him that did not match my own, an integrity that I had long since disposed of myself. Plus, he was so intellectually curious, his knowledge of things so captivating. I was nothing like that. I would never be able to catch up, to sustain his interest the way he did mine. If I let myself fall for him, something would go inevitably, irretrievably wrong, and it would be my fault. No, it was better to keep my distance, to not take that chance.
But things were starting to go undeniably sour with Charlie. In fact, unless he was trying to get me into bed, he barely talked to me at all. The roses stopped, we hadn’t been to the movies in months, and even the talk about his future restaurant plans—at least with me—had come to a halt. And I’d begun to notice that his temper, which he had never directed toward me, began to sneak out around the edges. One day after I stuck my head into his office and asked him how things were going, Charlie reached over, grabbed the stapler off the desk, and flung it across the room. “Like that, okay?” he said, as if the thud of the instrument against the wall was enough of an explanation. “Now leave me alone and get back to work.”
He didn’t take the breakup well. We were in his office when I told him I didn’t want to see him anymore, and after a few sputtering requests to reconsider, he threatened to fire me. When I told him to go ahead, that the answer was still no, he came out from behind his desk and grabbed me around the jaw. With his face centimeters away from mine, I wondered briefly how I had never noticed the constellation of blackheads scattered across his nose, or the way the celery-green color inside his eyes went flat when he got angry.
“You listen to me, you little shit,” he said softly. His fingers were squeezing the bones behind my cheeks so hard that I thought they might crack. “People like you don’t get to say no to people like me. Do you understand?”
There was a sound in the doorway and then the movement of a shadow across the floor. Charlie let go of my face and took a step back as James walked into the room. “What the hell do you want?”
“Don’t you ever touch her like that again.” James’s face was flushed from standing over the grill, but I could see a muscle pulsing in his jaw.
“Who the fuck do you think you are?” Charlie was sputtering now, apoplectic. “Get the hell out of my office! Now!” He glared at me. “And you, too! Before I fire both of you!”
I slipped out, ducking my head as I passed James, ashamed that he had seen me in such a compromising situation and felt the need to come to my rescue. I didn’t need his help. If he hadn’t come in when he had, I would have shoved Charlie’s hand away from my face and stalked out on my own.
I know I would have.
EVENTUALLY I MAKE it to the day care, park the car along the curb with the same precision that I usually use, and remember to turn the engine off. The lights, too.
My heart is still hammering away inside my rib cage and there is a rushing sound in my ears. But when I open the door to the after-care room and see Angus, everything falls away, the way it always does.
“Mom!” he yells, hurtling full speed across the room. I catch him under the arms, lift him up, hold him close.
Sometimes, like today, I can’t hold him close enough.
Chapter 12
Once, a few days after Angus and I moved in with Ma, I woke up early and came down to the kitchen. Ma was sitting at the table, drinking a cup of coffee and reading the newspaper. It was spread out flat in front of her, her palms pressed down on either side, as if it might fly away otherwise. Her green bathrobe—the same one she’s had for the last fifteen years—was double knotted around her waist, and tufts of her plaid nightgown peeked out from the opening around her throat. The ceramic cow-shaped salt and pepper shakers that Dad had given her for Christmas one year were in their usual place, just in front of the blue plastic napkin holder, and outside the window, behind her, I could see the aluminum siding of the old shed Dad had used to store his tools.
For a split second, I felt the familiar thrum of our lives humming around me as if it had never left; Dad was right upstairs again, tuning his little transistor radio to the morning news station as he got ready for the shower, and I was running around, rummaging through the laundry hamper, looking for a matching sock. Any moment now, Ma would get up and take the eggs out of the refrigerator, grab the bag of bread out of the bread box, and drop two slices into the toaster. Dad liked his eggs over easy; I needed them scrambled and superdry. We all had toast, lots of it, and as the kitchen filled with the scents of Dad’s Old Spice cologne and melted butter, he would reach over and poke me in the arm. “You wanna walk today or you want a ride with me?”
And I’d say the same thing I always did: “Ride with you.”
The moment was so real that when it left again, and I found myself standing in the doorway, staring at Ma—and no one else—I couldn’t speak, as if the memory itself had taken my voice along with it.
TONIGHT, THE HOUSE smells like meat loaf. Angus runs into the living room and turns on cartoons, while I walk into the kitchen and drape my coat over the back of a chair. Ma’s at the stove, stirring something in a pot. She turns, wiping her hands on the edge of her apron. “Were you able to get my sweater?”
“Hello to you, too, Ma.”
I head to the refrigerator, still distracted by Angus’s response on the way home when I asked him about Something Special Day. He’d looked out the window, said, “It was okay,” which meant obviously that it did not go well at all. Angus is the type of kid who cannot hide his happiness. It bursts out of him in an explosion, like the river of candy pouring out of a split piñata. If things had been wonderful, if the kids had leapt up and screamed and clapped the way I was picturing they might have, he would have said so. Loudly, while jumping up and down. His barely audible response made my heart sink.
“How about the coin trick?” I’d asked, pulling into the driveway. “Did the kids like that one?”
He shrugged again, opened the door. “It was all right.”
Fucking Jeremy. He said something. I could feel it in my bones. But I left it alone, the way Dad used to do with me. It’d come out eventually. It always did with Angus, just as it had with me. And when it did, when he was ready, I’d handle it then.
“Hello, hello.” Ma nudges me gently with the handle of her spoon. “Were you able to get my sweater?”
“Yes, I got your sweater. It’s still in the car, though. I’ll go out in a minute and get it.”
She rakes a handful of fingers through her hair and turns back to the stove. “Did you see Father Delaney?”
“Uh-huh.” I open the fridge, stare inside. Milk. Orange juice. A bag of green apples. Twelve plastic sleeves of neon-orange cheese squares. Strawberry Danimal yogurts for Angus, and six containers of plain vanilla yogurt, which is what Ma eats. What am I doing? I’m not even hungry.
“You’re not thinking of eating, are you?” Ma asks. “I have a meat loaf and baked potatoes in the oven. They’ll be ready in about twenty minutes. And I’m making a green bean casserole, too.”
I grab one of the vanilla yogurts and take a teaspoon out of the drawer. “You know I don’t eat meat loaf, Ma.”
She sits down across from me, folds her hands neatly in front of her. “What did Father Delaney say when he saw you, Bernadette? I bet he was shocked, wasn’t he? I mean, you’re so much older now.” She raises her eyebrows, giggles a little.
It’s the occasional moment like this—with Ma so obviously delighted with herself—when I sometimes think I catch a glimpse of who she really is. Or was, before the rest of the world got in there and mucked it all up. Her eyes get very bright, as if she’s managed to retain a secret right up until the very last minute, and her whole face softens like a child’s. There is no sign of the hardness in her jaw, and her pinched lips, usually set and pursed like a dried plum, ease again. If there is any part of my mother that I am aware of loving, it is this one.
The Odds of You and Me Page 10