Where You Live

by Andrew Roe

  Later it was Alexis, an assistant something to somebody in Payroll, who caused Ramona’s stomach to tighten an additional knot, it being news that there were any knots left. She, Alexis, with her Mrs. Brady hair and stuffed animals and framed pictures of her airbrushed, store-bought kids all over her cube, blew her, Ramona, some attitude because she had replaced the toner in the printer too early: “That one, dear, was still good for another fifty, sixty pages; you just need to take it out and give it a little bitty shake is all,” Alexis sermoned, as if speaking to a potty-mouthed preschooler.

  And then someone else, probably the office ho Yolanda from Human Resources/Internal Development, spoiled her lunch by pinching her fruit-on-the-bottom yogurt (boysenberry, nonfat) from the fridge, a successful heist even though Ramona had strategically positioned the plastic cup behind several Chinese takeout cartons and a Styrofoam container that had been abandoned for weeks. It was a setback that forced her to deal with the notoriously unreliable vending machine, and sure enough, seventy-five cents later she was left with nothing but a dangling SnackWells Crème Sandwich that despite her emphatic shoves and improvised karate kicks could not be dislodged from its B5 slot.

  And then finally—finally after a relatively uneventful afternoon (computer crashing, a chatty customer who didn’t mind sharing her numerous ailments and details about her ungrateful daughters) and just as she was about to leave for the day, having endured another shift and avoided any further contact with her boss, Victor spotted her passing the supply room. He had this totally clichéd and pathetic puppy dog look, as though there was a sappy heavy rotation lite-rock love song playing in his head, which there probably was. Eye contact had been made, so she couldn’t ignore him. Ramona waved, trying to make sure the gesture would be interpreted as neutral, not too encouraging, just part of the common human experience: waving good-bye to a coworker at the end of another long day. But Victor was beyond the time-space continuum thing. He beamed.

  So it wasn’t all that surprising, really, that her patience and overall capacity to absorb life’s little unforeseen twists and turns already had diminished significantly by the time she was on the freeway headed home, the evening ahead beholding nothing but the promise of dishes, Home Improvement reruns, and the obligatory weekly phone call to her born-again sister in St. Louis. The commute was a crawl. All the way thinking, worrying: Something was coming. She could feel it, feel it deeply, like an ache in her bones, a whisper that becomes a roar. It could happen today or tomorrow or next week. It could be a car swerving into her lane or the boys getting into trouble at school. It could be health related: carpal tunnel or, worse, a terminal disease that nobody has ever heard of because it lacks a celebrity spokesperson. Or maybe one of the mystery illnesses the chatty customer had described, the one where different parts of your body go numb and they don’t know why and there’s nothing you can do about it. Whatever the specifics of the calamity, it would somehow find her. It was approaching, gathering momentum. It was only a matter of time, of circumstances once again conspiring against her. This was her life. This was the way the world worked.

  Like always, Ramona parked her car in her assigned space, 143, a number that marked her and saddened her on a nightly basis; and like always, she took her time—why hurry?—traversing the large, potholed apartment building parking lot, which also happened to be the view from her second-floor bedroom window, the noise depriving her of countless hours of cherished sleep and the proximity providing her with an intimate knowledge of the comings and goings of the complex’s anonymous teenagers who went there to urinate and take drugs and the like. Inside she was immediately greeted by the familiar howl of the TV, but the living room was suspiciously empty. She shed her keys and purse and the mail she wouldn’t open. Then she heard the commotion. Smelled something.

  “What’s going on in there? What’s burning?” she mildly yelled toward the kitchen, thinking Jiffy Pop, cookies, microwaved Play-Doh, boys will be boys, etc.

  When she got no response, she went into the kitchen to investigate. And there he was, Sean Casey, her six year old, burning. Well not so much burning as emitting tiny puffs of smoke. The boy writhed and cried and rolled on the tiled kitchen floor as his older brother Kyle and Kyle’s satanic friend Cole laughed like fairy tale trolls. They were trying to pin down the squirming Sean Casey, trying to light him again with an uncooperative Bic.

  A barely audible “Oh my God” was all she could muster before pushing the boys away and pulling down some kitchen towels, wetting them, and then smothering her youngest son. She cradled him in her arms, crying herself now. She was afraid to look at him, but when she did she saw that it wasn’t that bad. She’d made it just in time. The flames hadn’t been able to take root. There was no visible damage to his skin or face. Just some redness and maybe a little irritation. He had several blackened marks on his T-shirt and pants, both unsalvageable, but that’s all. Thank Jesus or Allah or whoever. She was relieved, sprawled out there on the floor with Sean Casey breathing heavily in her arms, but it didn’t last for long.

  These were her boys, her babies. She had used to sing to them at night, bewitch them to sleep. Freight train, freight train, going so fast. An old folk song that was their favorite. They had climbed into bed with her in the mornings and sometimes she let them stay. How had they gotten so far away from that? She wasn’t ever in the present moment, it seemed, couldn’t just be with her kids and not worry about what was next, what needed to be done, what pressing bullshit thing required fixing. Her mind, her thoughts forever racing forward. She turned out to be an even worse parent than she imagined. Nine times out of ten she would be patient, patient, patient, but then that tenth time she would slip, explode, release. The power struggles were constant: refusing to brush their teeth, tie their shoes, put their dishes away. Defiance was their default state. They both had hit her, hard, punched her in the stomach more than once, right where the scar from her C-section was. She grew angrier at them because they were in control and they knew it and she knew it and she wasn’t able to do anything to change the situation. This fundamental failing as an adult, as a parent.

  The anger now came quick, in one breaking burst. It was all so typical. Always some surprise, some epic mischief that seemed created just for her. To piss her off. To make her question everything.

  “Why are you always doing this?” she said. “Why are you always doing this to me? What the hell is wrong with you two?”

  Life is a cabernet. That was the message of a license plate holder that she’d seen recently, and that had prompted Ramona to seriously consider ramming the shit out of the Secret Service-black Lexus that sported it. But life was no cabernet for her. It wasn’t even a bottle of Boone’s Farm, what with the kids, the bad jobs, the bad men, the bad decisions. The whole predictable profile, she often sighed (dramatically, to herself), but real, true, nonetheless. Perhaps part of the problem, which had been suggested more than once by friends, coworkers, ex-boyfriends, and know-it-all cousins in various states of intoxication, was self-esteem. As in: she didn’t have much. Nor did she ever have any grand ambitions—no dreams of becoming a doctor or lawyer or certified computer technician, like you’re supposed to—and the idea of being someone or doing something for a living never really occurred to her until she’d had kids. And by then it was too late. Now, at the unsettling age of thirty-four she was both too old and too young, a caged in-between, and she realized there were certain things she would never become, places she’d never go. Too much time had passed. The trajectory was set. She had kids. This was it. This was her life. Locked in. And her life, out of necessity, had been simplified, reduced.

  In some ways, though, this made matters easier, this narrowing down to kids and work, kids and work. Nothing else except those two constants. But her schedule allowed for no deviations whatsoever. Financially it was touch and go, paycheck to paycheck, the smoke and mirrors of credit, post-dated checks, playing it dumb and saying she hadn’t received a second payment no
tice let alone a first. Last month it became all too clear that she no longer could afford childcare every day. So on Tuesdays and Thursdays her friend Connie picked up Kyle and Sean Casey at school in the afternoon, and then brought both boys to the apartment, where they had two hours by themselves before Ramona arrived home. Kyle had just turned ten, certainly not old enough—and needless to say not mature enough—to care for his little brother, but Ramona figured, hoped, it was only temporary, a couple of months or so until she got ahead a little.

  She told the evil Cole kid to go home (“You cussed! You cussed! I heard you cuss!”), Kyle to get another shirt for his brother. Sean Casey appeared all right, yet she figured she better not be one of those negligent parents you read about or see weeping on TV after the fact. How easy, how natural it is to judge and condemn from afar. But people never know the details, thought Ramona. They never know what’s behind everything. Better to take him to the hospital just to be sure.

  Then she was back on the dreaded 605. The evening traffic had subsided somewhat, now a steady, streaming pulse of cars. She drove slowly, cautiously, as if transporting hazardous material. And it seemed important that she should obey the speed limit and navigate the geriatric Corolla with great care. The other cars zoomed by, oblivious, like always. Sean Casey’s face was still red and puffy from all the crying. But he was over it, even laughing now, making elaborate fart noises with his hands, a newly acquired talent he’d learned from Kyle, who pawed around in the backseat and felt compelled to read out loud (very loud) every billboard or sign or evidence of language they passed. See: even a simple drive was not a simple drive. They had an agenda to keep up with, after all.

  Ramona did her best to pretend she was a mother worthy of Hallmark card couplets and not lose it. She stuck to the far right lane, checking her speedometer frequently. What the hell—burning a kid, your very own brother. Had it come to this? Would it only continue to get worse and worse the older they got? Outside the moon loomed low and heavy in the sky like a large clenched fist. It was late November in Southern California (they lived in Norwalk, she worked in Alhambra), and because of the recent rains, the air looked and smelled almost natural and not completely compromised and polluted, which was nice for a change. The inside of the car, however, reeked of bleach, as it had for weeks, ever since Kyle thought it would be funny to pour out half the bottle on the way home from the market. One of his raids on her authority and patience, part of a long, evolving history of advances and retreats. Kyle always the instigator, Sean Casey following along, the younger brother falling under the spell of the older brother, Ramona’s influence over Sean Casey diminishing further with each passing day.

  As she drove, scanning for the hospital exit, squinting into the eternal rush of headlights and brake lights, she told herself to ignore the boys as well as the sound erupting periodically from the engine—a symphonic rattling that had surfaced a few days before and was getting progressively louder and that she’d been hoping would just go away but hadn’t and there was also the fact that the spare tire had been on for like the last month or so. Please don’t break down now, she begged, not on the freeway with my kids in the car and no Triple-A and it’s dark and I have a date next week with Victor Nance and we’re on our way to the hospital because my one kid tried to burn my other one.

  She just about tore off Kyle’s head when he asked if she could turn on the radio.

  “Nature of the injury?” asked the nurse in the emergency room. She was a big woman, blues singer big, with the booming voice to match. She stood behind a circular counter amid stacks and stacks of color-coded file folders, filling out the proper forms without glancing up at Ramona. She had just finished with a shirtless teenager—sixteen, maybe seventeen, lurching his way toward adulthood—who now sat down in the only empty chair, pressing a towel to his bleeding head with one hand, holding a copy of Us Weekly with the other. The waiting room was packed. People were listening like this was TV.

  “Accident,” Ramona admitted.

  “You’re going to have to be more specific than that, you want any kind of help.”

  Ramona paused. The nurse had power, authority. You could tell she knew how to manage and control and not be tragic, or pitied, or easily overwhelmed. And people were listening, every word.

  “Household accident,” Ramona added, hoping that would be enough.

  But it wasn’t. Her answer caused the nurse to stop writing and actually look at Ramona, her eyes about as sunken as eyes can get, up and then back down to the paperwork.

  “I’m not doing this for my health you know. This here’s a j-o-b. And now you got folks waiting behind you, big surprise.”

  Ramona glanced over her shoulder, and there was an old man and an old woman, the man hooked up to one of those portable oxygen tanks on wheels.

  “Okay, look,” she said, her stomach grinding toward a higher gear. There were medicines she could take but she never did.

  “This is the situation,” she conceded. “It’s this: My son, he tried to set my other son, my younger son here, Sean Casey, on fire. There. That’s why we’re here. That’s the story. I want to make sure that he’s all right.”

  The nurse didn’t even flinch, continued writing. It was, after all, an emergency room. They heard about this kind of stuff all the time. And worse. Much worse. The kind of everyday deviant behavior and violence and brain-scratching mayhem that doesn’t even make the news, that begs the question: why do people do the things they do?

  “Have a seat and we’ll call you,” the nurse said finally.

  But there were no seats. Ramona took Sean Casey by the hand and walked him over to some available wall space near the bathrooms. The bleeding teenager nodded. Kyle was gone, disappeared. Probably off vandalizing million-dollar machinery or giving hotfoots to dying cancer patients. This was a boy with severe attachment and abandonment issues, who also had difficulty regulating his emotions. That’s what the bearded school psychologist had said when he handed her a detailed fifteen-page report about her screwed-up son.

  They waited for over three hours, got a seat after two. Phones rang and no one answered them. Another nurse replaced the one who had checked them in. The bleeding teenager plowed through four more magazines before someone at last called his name. The fluorescent lights hummed relentlessly. The man with the oxygen tank said, “I could die and nobody would even notice.” Strange, terrible aromas drifted in and out of the area—bodies? blood? puss? fluids? dried skin, if that even had a smell? Every now and then a moan reverberated from somewhere down the hall, somewhere unseen. Since they hadn’t eaten dinner, she gave the boys money for the vending machines. They gorged on Mars bars and Hawaiian Crisp potato chips. Sean Casey asked if they could have candy bars and chips for dinner every night. There was a word carved into the arm of her chair. The word was POOP.

  She picked up an old issue of National Geographic and tried reading an article about the majestic lions of Africa who, turns out, sometimes eat their young. But she didn’t get past the third paragraph. She couldn’t read. She couldn’t talk to the kids. She couldn’t sleep. She couldn’t do anything but just sit there. The walls were painted a glaring, oppressive white, not very conducive to contemplation. It was dead time, pure waiting. A sign said: If you think you are PREGNANT tell the ER staff.

  After examining Sean Casey for less than a minute, the doctor (baby-faced, frat boyish, a slight stutter when he started in with the medical jargon) said her son was fine, there’d been no permanent injury, no trauma, no scarring, here’s some ointment to be applied so-and-so times a day, etc., but she was right in coming in because you never know. Which was true—you never do know, that phrase sticking with her like a toothache—but the visit would probably cost like a couple grand because she was still under a probationary period at work and didn’t have health benefits yet. The coverage wouldn’t kick in until next month, that is if they decided to keep her on, and now that it looked as if she would have to spurn her boss’s romantic adva
nces, her future employment prospects with DataCorp appeared pretty bleak indeed. Then it would be back to temping and odd jobs and even more creative financial maneuvering until she could find something permanent. Any unexpected catastrophe could crush her and the boys. And plus that damn noise the car was making. Was it really getting louder or was that just her own paranoia? Taking it in might have to be put off. But what if something were to happen before that? She didn’t want to die on a freeway, a single mother in heavy debt, with way too many credit cards and receding gums and an un-aerobicized ass. Lately she’d gotten into the habit of saying a little nondenominational prayer every time she slipped behind the wheel (it couldn’t hurt), something like please God just one more time just get me where I’m going this one last time and I’ll promise to take the car in soon and to be a better person and be a better mother and do your will whatever that may be I’m open to suggestions and ashes to ashes and dust to dust and amen.

  The exit to the parking lot was next to the gift shop. People were buying flowers, liqueured truffles, balloons in the shape of a heart. Ramona stood in the long line (what time was it anyway?) and bought some gum for Sean Casey. He always had to have gum, or at least know that it was readily available, or the world lost its meaning. Ramona was annoyed with the boy’s compulsion yet also sympathized with his raw need for such a balm, his desire for solace, no matter how meager, wherever he could find it. Once the glass exit doors had swished open, the boys bolted in the direction of the car and Sean Casey tripped twice (almost getting clipped by an SUV backing out of a parking space) and Kyle got there first and proceeded to jump on the Corolla’s weathered hood to celebrate his victory.

  She didn’t know what she wanted to do but she certainly didn’t want to go home, not back to the apartment and the faulty appliances, the water-stained ceilings, the old-lady wallpaper, the windows they’d never been able to open, the mysterious odor she’d never been able to get rid of (the gloomy reek of other lives, other renters, the people who lived there before you and had conversations and cooked meals and fucked and fought and made up in the same rooms where you’re doing the exact same things, she’d decided after unsuccessfully employing countless air fresheners and probably Alzheimer’s-causing sprays). There was that familiar slow burning inside her, that nameless smoldering signifying something just beyond her comprehension, the intensity of which varied depending on her mood, and her mood at the moment was not good, not good at all, but the question of what to do about it, the burning, remained just that, a question, and so she just wanted to drive—to drive somewhere. Anywhere. To be young and stupid and light again. No more of this constant heaviness. Had there ever been a time when that wasn’t the case? Was thirty-four really that old? And then an idea began to insinuate itself, one that, truth be told, had crossed her mind on more than one occasion, usually after a couple of Long Island Iced Teas with her friend Larissa at the two-for-one happy hour at Shenanigan’s. The idea being: gather the boys, drive somewhere far, far away, come to a stop, look around, open the door, listen to the wind, admire the consuming black of the sky, sit back, breathe, let go, let it come…Simple as that. Everything changes. Abandonment equals freedom.