Prodigal Sons

by Mike Miner

  “Terrible.”

  She nodded and closed her eyes, breathed a long, blue sigh, then stood and walked out. He followed. The policeman behind the counter kept an expressionless eye on them.

  She had a bottle of water and a sandwich ready in her car, a tan Lexus SUV. Matthew nearly wept as she handed them to him. He drank half the bottle in one gulp. She grimaced and nodded, which he resented, but what could he say? The sandwich, pastrami on rye from Jerry’s Famous Deli, was the best sandwich he’d ever eaten. After he finished it in four bites, it sat like lead in his stomach.

  It was a long drive from Beverly Hills to their house in Santa Clarita. She took the scenic route. From Rexford to Coldwater she spoke not a word. Lu was a talker even in the worst of times, so this silence was bad news. It meant she was thinking. Out the window, perfectly landscaped yards unrolled from front doors to squeaky-clean sidewalks and the shade of perfectly spaced trees.

  Beverly Hills reminded him a bit of Chestnut Hill, where he had gone to Boston College—both places seemed to think that if good fences made good neighbors, then huge, ivy-covered stone walls made even better ones. Of course, Chestnut Hill was old money, centuries old. The mansions of Beverly Hills and Bel-Air were a shuffled deck of homes from all over the planet. They were what you built when you had too much money.

  Matthew would have killed even for the sound of the radio but knew better than to jar his wife out of her thoughts. He didn’t know which was worse, the silence or the scathing lecture lurking behind it. He decided to stick with the devil he knew and not disturb the quiet.

  They crossed Mulholland and the San Fernando Valley appeared in all its sunny glory, mocking him. As they started downhill into Studio City, Matthew began to feel queasy. He started to sweat, and each sharp turn of the twisting canyon road caused him to wince and swallow. He had serious doubts about making it to the bottom of the hill. He rolled down his window. The air helped but not enough.

  “Please pull over.” He tried to keep his voice as calm as possible.

  She pulled into a turnaround. Trying for nonchalance, he opened his door and touched the street with his feet. His stomach emptied. Long after the water and sandwich hit the ground, he retched. Behind him she said not a word and it was getting to him. He fought an urge to get out, slam his door and run screaming into the woods until he couldn’t run anymore. After he was sure the waves had stopped, he pulled his legs back into the car and wiped his mouth.

  “Did you ever think it would be this great, baby?”

  She put the car in gear and drove down Coldwater.

  “In your wildest dreams, when you said ‘I do’ five years ago, could you picture the glamour and adventure your life would become?”

  An arrested smile came to her lips but she wouldn’t let it bloom. He wanted a real smile; she had a perfect one. Right now a smile could make it all better, but he couldn’t think of anything to make her smile. “No, I didn’t think so.”

  They’d first moved to Los Angeles five years before on the Fourth of July—straight from their honeymoon in the Caribbean to Los Angeles. He remembered the taxi ride from the airport, up the 405 to Sherman Oaks. It was night and fireworks followed them the whole way up, like the city was celebrating their arrival.

  Twenty-five silent minutes later she pulled into their driveway and stopped the car. She went to check the mail and he went inside.

  Two suitcases stood in the middle of the front hallway. He stopped and stared. The luggage had been a wedding present from her parents. They’d used them on their honeymoon, the morning after they were married. It was ominous that Lu was using this luggage. She came in sorting envelopes like it was any other day. She put a few in her purse and the rest on the kitchen counter. Blood pounded in his ears. She looked him in the face. The sadness was still there, every bit of it, but there was also a resolve that truly frightened him. “Sit down,” she said, indicating the couch.

  He sat. She did too, in the chair next to him.

  “I want to tell you a story.” She closed her eyes. When she opened them her expression turned wistful. “Maybe I signed up for this,” was how it started.

  It was a sad story they both knew but didn’t talk about. He liked it better that way. But she kept on. Slow and serious.

  Was he any different than when she’d met him? A force of nature, this wild Irish writer with tipsy eyes who wrote her poems, and loved to dance, the last to leave a party.

  What had changed? Her, maybe?

  When was the last time she’d gone with him? Who was he dancing with now? Was he still writing poetry? “Are you writing anything?”

  In the old days, he used to spend all day at his desk, writing. And after she’d gotten a job teaching, hadn’t he written all day? She’d come home and find him typing, a beer, a glass of wine, a gin and tonic, a martini on his desk.

  And what about that first screenplay? The meetings, the agent, the phone calls. The relieved calls home. The big break, that was a good name for it. Then the big nothing, no deal, no agent, no phone calls. Just him at his desk at the end of the day waiting for her to get home. “Remember?”

  He remembered. Just do it again, he told himself. Do it again only better. Something a little more commercial, his almost-agent suggested. And his muses had fled him like cheap whores from a penniless bum.

  She stopped asking him how it was going when he started answering with shrugs, with grimaces. He’d given her a lot of those lately.

  Then he got a job, a good job. More relieved phone calls home. Now they could afford to go out, and afford his drinking. Like a race, a contest, but with whom? The devil? He seemed proud of his ability, his capacity. Punishing amounts. Last call was like the end of a sad movie, it choked him up. Then the ride home, he insisted on driving, unaware of her white knuckles on the armrest as he wound through the canyons out of Hollywood. Then to bed, if he could make it that far, and oblivion.

  A wind blew inside him, his heart a bellows for his fury. It burned. He stood, she talked in a solemn, measured pace. A low percussion, the blood pounding in his ears made it difficult to hear her. He walked past her into the kitchen. Opened the fridge.

  She didn’t turn to watch him; stared straight ahead. Continued the story. About him waking up, often in his piss, long before he eased back into the world.

  She’d stopped joining him. It was like being too close to a fire. “Be careful. Behave,” she would say to him. Praying he would, knowing he wouldn’t.

  She admitted that she used to think she brought out the best in him but maybe she just brought out the worst.

  He’d come home, unless the police stopped him, he’d always make it home, full of guilty love, overcompensating for things he’d done. Things she didn’t want to know, but did.

  But wasn’t he the same young man with the boyish charm who’d swept her off her feet? Sometimes when he was happily drunk, his old grin would return, his eyes casting sparks, and she would rush to bed with him, almost leaping into the arms of the boy she loved, the first moments delicious, but his heavy breathing too sweet, like medicine, his thrusting had no rhythm, finally rattling to a halt, an engine out of gas. And they would separate.

  “Sorry,” he would say, his chest rising and falling.

  For what, she must have wondered.

  He told himself it was rage that shook his hand as he grabbed the beer.

  “No, I didn’t sign up for this. This isn’t fun anymore.”

  “When’s the last time you had any fun?” He took a healthy pull from the bottle of Amstel Light in his hand, trying to put out those fires.

  “Is that what you were doing last night? Having fun?”

  The beer soothed him, dulled the pains inside him.

  “I called every hospital between Hollywood and here last night. Then I drove from here to the Sunset Room looking for your car. It’s been a while since I had any fun.”

  That’s why she hadn’t answered his phone call.

  She shook he
r head. She breathed, rubbed a tear away and looked at him again. Another tear replaced it.

  He wanted to throw the beer through a window, grab her, hold her until she promised to stay. His fist tightened around the neck of the bottle.

  “I’d ask you to help…” She motioned to the suitcases, “but your hands are full.” She reached for one. “I’ll be at my parents’ house.”

  That took the air out of him. It made the situation real, like the twin thumbprints at the police station. Her parents would never forget what their only daughter would tell them, and he wondered if they could forgive him. Would it be the story she had just told?

  “How long?” The question admitted defeat.

  “As long as it takes.”

  A paper with flight numbers scribbled on it stuck out of her purse. She grabbed a suitcase and lugged it outside to the car, put it down twice to get a better grip. When he picked up the other one and followed her, he noticed that the bag was heavy enough for a long trip. “I love you, Lu.” A phrase he should have used an hour ago, he realized. “Prove it.”

  “How?”

  “Quit.”

  He thought he’d been ready for this the whole way up, but now he didn’t know what to say. Nothing she wanted to hear would have been true. She held his gaze for as long as she could stand it, then turned and got into her car. If he lay down in the road in front of her, he wondered, would she stop? But she was already onto the street and driving away, and he watched the empty street, he didn’t know how long. Afterward, inside, he threw up, then stared at the ceiling until he fell asleep on the bathroom floor.

  It was dark when he woke up, feeling like a picked scab, and he was about to call for Lu but her name got stuck in his throat when he remembered that she was about a thousand miles away by now. For an instant, he wondered if he would ever see her again. The chance that the answer was ‘no’ made his legs buckle as he pushed himself up off the floor. He took his shivers with him upstairs. The sun was down and the house had grown cold. His reflection in the bathroom mirror was a pathetic sight. Maybe a shower would help. He went downstairs to the fridge and pulled out a bottle of beer. Sobriety is overrated, he thought, and took a long pull. Back upstairs, he took off his clothes and eased into the shower, placed the ice cold beer in the corner and put his face into the water. The phone rang. He waited, listened. After the fourth ring, Lu’s voice on the answering machine. “You have reached Matthew and Lucinda. We can’t come to the phone right now so please leave a message after the beep.”

  You have reached Matthew and Lucinda. Not anymore.

  After the beep, he heard the voice of his mother. “Hi, guys. Hadn’t talked to you in a while. You’re probably off gallivanting.”

  Her spider sense must have been tingling, he thought. Her intuition was a powerful thing. “Hope all’s well and I’ll talk to you soon.”

  Matthew poured some beer over his head, then into his mouth. His laughter filled the empty house.

  MARK 1

  The Flanagan family’s grocery store was located in a plaza in a small valley surrounded by farmland. Nathan Hale, Connecticut, stood almost exactly in the center of the state on Route 44, between Hartford and the University of Connecticut. It had been their store for about twenty five years, since the previous store, Lombardi’s, had burned down—Jewish lightning, everyone said. Mark Flanagan often wondered where his father would have wound up if Mr. Lombardi had been able to pay his gambling debts.

  Mark looked across the street at Mrs. Glenny’s house. It was the oldest house in town and she was probably its oldest resident. When Lombardi’s had burned down, the heat from the blaze had woken her up. In the twilight, Mark saw a dim reflection of himself looking out the large windows in front of the registers. He saw the dinosaur skeleton of a crane that seemed to grow taller by the day. The ordinance allowing the CVS to be built had passed only a month ago and already the walls were up; today they had installed the roof joists. He squinted at his unwelcome neighbor.

  As he walked out the back of the store, he heard the nagging voice of a red-winged blackbird from the woods getting something off its chest. Up the hill, a forest of matchstick trees on the horizon was silhouetted by the setting sun. Between the trees and him was a field of snow without a single human footprint. He walked through slush stained the color of coffee to his truck parked in the back lot. It had been weeks since he’d left the store before the sun had set. Lately, he had been in no rush to get home.

  Home. Mark thought about the word. His new house was being built. He and his wife, Peggy, were living with his parents. That was his ‘home’ at the moment. Not that his parents were terrible. Hell, he loved them, but was pretty sure if he spent much longer there, one or both of them might have to be killed. Normally, a tall Newcastle or Bass Ale would keep him company during the all too brief drive home in order to deal with another dinner at the dining room table that his mother insisted on and his wife seemed not to mind. Tonight, he had taken one of each.

  Naturally, they talked about the store. He said this, she said that, and on and on, a rehashing of the day’s events. Things at the store were fine. The CVS would take a bite, but they’d survive. What they needed to do, he thought, was put in a pizza oven and expand their prepared food section—but his father was reluctant to go to the bank. Debt was Mr. Flanagan’s least favorite four-letter word.

  Tonight, Mrs. Flanagan had summoned him home early without explaining why. “It’s too much to go into over the phone.” It was his father’s day off so he hadn’t been able to pump him for information.

  Mark shivered as a sudden blast of wind tried to knock him down.

  When a particularly nasty streak of weather hit, he always thought of his older brother, Matthew. It seemed that just days after Matthew had mentioned his future wife’s name they had married and moved to LA just as Matthew had always imagined. And there, as near as Mark could tell, they were living happily ever after. The one thing Matthew had on him, he thought, as his boots trudged through the slush to his truck, was the weather. It had to be easier living happily ever after with palm trees in your yard and eighty-degree weather every day.

  He took the long way to his parents’ house. The house he’d grown up in, the house his father had grown up in. His grandparents had moved to Florida about ten years earlier. Eastern Connecticut was a land of forests and farms and fields. In summer it was lush green. But now, white prevailed, stark and quiet. The mysteries of the forests he passed were revealed between the bony fingers of the naked elms and birches and oaks reaching out of the ground like skeleton hands. Only the stubborn pines in their Christmas green uniforms kept secrets. Two huge Douglas-firs towered above the Flanagan house like sentries. Mark had shoveled off the stone path between them leading from the driveway to the front door.

  Until he was five, his parents, Matthew, and Mark had lived next door to Papa Flanagan in a small, brown, ranch-style house. Papa kept a dog, a mutt named Brutus on a long chain attached to the garage most of the time. The boys were not allowed to play with Brutus, who was mean and given to snapping at children, but they were fascinated by the creature. They knew exactly how far Brutus’s chain reached and, when Papa was out, they would sneak next door and observe the slobbering monster, dared each other to get as close as possible.

  One day, Papa gave Brutus a new chain. When Mark waited, with tongue extended, for Brutus to be choked by his collar—Brutus kept charging and knocked him onto his back. He could still feel in his spine the deep vibration of Brutus’s growl. But then the dog bit his head and the growls were drowned by his screams.

  He didn’t really know how Matthew got Brutus off him. Mark could only remember it was fast—a sudden jerk—and then Brutus had Matthew pinned to the ground and appeared, to Mark’s five-year-old mind, to be feasting on Matthew’s eyes. Matthew butted Brutus in the nose. Brutus barked and his growls multiplied as if two dogs were chewing on Matthew, or Brutus had grown another head.

  Mark was frozen i
n place—turned to stone by the spectacle of what he was sure was the death of his brother. His heart pulverized his insides and he couldn’t hear his own screams, which eventually brought their mother with a broom to beat Brutus off his brother, who emerged bleeding, but alive.

  Mark vaguely remembered some heated words between his mom and her father-in-law. Two days later all that remained of Brutus was an empty chain on the ground and some nice scars on Matthew’s face. Scars, he was proud to inform the curious, he had earned saving his brother’s life. All Mark had to show for the incident was a vitriolic gratitude for his brother’s bravery. When tested, he thought, Matthew had passed, and he had failed. When action had been called for, Mark had turned into a statue.

  A car Mark didn’t recognize loitered in his parents’ driveway. It had an Avis rental plate. He wondered if Matthew was making a surprise visit. You never knew when his brother might turn up or when he might leave.

  Lucy, Peggy, and his parents barely registered his entrance.

  Lucy’s face had the look of a beaten puppy. The hair on the back of Mark’s neck went as stiff as nails. Her eyes were puffy and red from crying and she looked as tired as a person could look and still be awake. Somehow she still managed to look beautiful. Her beauty and her sadness made her look like the heroine of some old movie, like she was waiting for Humphrey Bogart to walk in the door and say, ‘Here’s looking at you, kid.’ Mark had never seen someone look like her in real life before.

  He was sure someone was dead until he turned to Peggy who looked like she’d been told a joke that offended her. Her eyes found Mark’s and rolled.

  Sharing the couch with Lucy, his mother stopped wringing her hands and smiled at him. Mrs. Flanagan was tall and thin. With each birth, her four boys had taken more flesh from her bones. A high-pitched voice fluttered when she talked, always quick to turn into laughter or tears. She sneezed when she was upset. Mark blessed her as one escaped her now.