—TipsFromTeddi.com
The tapes are in the safe I had installed after the last time Rio borrowed Dana’s keys to “get something of his out of the basement.” The fact that he was looking for old Polaroids of me from back in the day when Polaroids were synonymous with private, which meant porny, which rhymed with horny and meant trouble in River City…
Thinking of Rio and his plan to sell dirty pictures of me obviously scrambles my brains.
At any rate, after the kids are all asleep, I wedge a chair against my bedroom door, take the tapes from the safe and fire up the old VCR. I slide in the tape labeled “billards,” and no, I’m not the one who spelled it wrong. He could have just written “pool tables,” but he was showing off.
It occurs to me that there shouldn’t be a tape labeled “billiards” at all. I mean, according to Rio, there wasn’t any “billiards” tape. That’s why he was in the bowling alley at 2:00 a.m. Supposedly.
According to my TV screen, there surely is a tape and Rio must be eating his heart out that not only didn’t he get to make this particular tape, he didn’t even get to watch it.
I see Steve hitting a few shots around on the table. The way the taping works, it only shoots every four seconds, or something like that. At least, that’s what Rio says accounts for the herky-jerky quality of the picture. It’s almost like watching one of those old movies or a kinescope.
I see Steve set up the balls for a combination shot, then a miss. He glances up toward the camera and then a moment later he is pushing the ball into the pocket.
I fast forward to the “good stuff.”
Wow. The camera really does add ten pounds. But only on me. Drew looks as good on the screen as he does in person. There’s nothing jerky about him.
I make a solemn vow never to eat again. Tomorrow I start on that starvation diet that’s supposed to make you live forever. Though really, without chocolate, do I want to?
Boy, but I look good with my hair spread out against the table. Maybe I should wear green more often. Actually, that would be ever.
Oh! And Drew should never wear anything. Oh…my…God….
“Mommy?” the door I’ve closed so tightly gives way a little and I jump up, hit every button on the TV until the screen goes dark and run to the door on rubbery legs.
“Alyssa? Honey, what are you doing up?” I ask, struggling to get the chair out of the way and my mind back in gear.
“How come there’s a chair in front of your door?” she asks.
A valid question.
I tell her I was trying to kill a bug over the doorway. I’m nothing if not a quick thinker when it comes to my children. Okay, I’m a liar and a quick thinker.
Eventually—it seems like it takes hours—I get the chair out of the way and let Lys in. I ask if she had a bad dream.
“Dana’s mad at me,” she says. “She said she hates me and that I’m going to hell and everyone else in the family will be in heaven and I’ll never see anybody again. Except maybe Daddy.”
I tell her that was a terrible, horrible, no-good dream. We should take that dream and flush it down the toilet. And I start to lead her to the bathroom for our occasional ritual when she says that it wasn’t a dream.
I assure her it was, but she is adamant. And her feet aren’t moving toward the bathroom.
“You want to sleep with me tonight?” I ask, breaking my cardinal rule.
Hey, what are rules for, anyway?
“Am I going to go to hell?”
“There is no such place,” I tell her. “And no, little girls don’t get sent there anyway.” I know it doesn’t make sense, but it’s nearly 1:00 a.m. and there’s a tape in my machine that could get me sent to hell if the wrong people got hold of it.
“Even if they do something really, really bad?” she asks.
I ask what she could have done that was so bad, expecting a cookie theft confession or some such thing.
“I told on Dana,” she says.
I ask if she means in her dream. When she says no, I tell her that she didn’t tell on Dana because I would know, wouldn’t I?
I mean, who else would she tell?
“I told Daddy.”
I ask again if she’s sure this isn’t a dream and she shakes her head seriously.
“And what did you tell Daddy about Dana?” I ask her.
“About how when you were at work that boy came over and they were kissing.” She climbs up on my bed, pushing Maggie over and then cuddling the dog against her chest like she’s a stuffed animal.
“Dana and what boy?” I ask.
“The big one,” she says. Her words are getting slurred as she heads back for dreamland. “The one with the black car.”
“Dana was kissing a boy with a car?” I ask, my voice a few octaves higher than usual.
Lys’s head nods against the pillow.
“And she touched him where you’re not supposed to let people touch you.”
I DON’T REALLY FEEL MUCH LIKE watching my descent into slutdom captured on tape after I’ve carried Lys back into her room. I have my proof that the camera works and I erase the tape despite how much I know Drew would have enjoyed watching it. I don’t want it around.
Besides, I looked fat.
But I can’t sleep. I can hardly breathe. So I decide to check the tapes from the other three cameras because, face it, I’m not going to be sleeping tonight, am I?
The first one I pick up is labeled “back door.” I replace the “billards” tape with it and press play. And, sure enough, there is the back door. A man is standing there, biting his nails. As I reach for the eject button, I see the back door open. My daughter steps outside. He holds her at arm’s length and indicates that she turn around. She pirouettes and he nods at her and says something which makes the corners of her mouth turn up.
And my stomach turn.
She leans against the door, the man’s arms on either side of her head. He leans in to kiss her. I don’t know if he does before she ducks under his arm and scoots out of range on the camera.
Nothing. Maybe an arm, a shoulder. A shadow moves. A fist.
I fast forward. I have no idea how much time goes by as the picture of the back door doesn’t change.
Forward…
Forward…
And then the man is fully back in the frame. I slow it down to normal speed. The man touches the side of his mouth with the back of his hand. It’s bleeding.
Dana is in her bed, I tell myself. Dana is safe, here, in bed.
I see another man’s back, pushing the bleeding man aside and opening the door, ushering Dana in. She is tugging at the hem of her skirt.
She goes in the door and the man turns and raises a warning finger at Dana’s lover.
I freeze the frame and nearly press my nose to the screen. I stare at the man holding his hand up in warning. His knuckles are bloody. His expression is deadly.
And his face…I blink twice to make sure I’m seeing what I’m seeing.
It’s Rio.
ALL NIGHT I TOSS AND TURN, putting pieces together. So, Rio was coming to the bowling alley with a blank tape, all right, but I’m guessing it wasn’t to put into the pool table system. It was for the back door.
How could he not tell me about this?
What is he thinking? Am I any better? What have I been thinking about? A murder that’s probably all in my mind?
Keep calm, I tell myself. Keep cool.
Who am I maddest at? Dana, for hanging out with a grown man instead of some pimply-faced kid? Rio, for not telling me this was going on?
Or me. Me, who is too busy with her own sex life, her business, all the other things in her life, to be keeping a close enough eye on her oldest child.
We all know the answer to that one, so by morning my psyche is deservedly black and blue.
“We need to talk,” is all I tell Dana as she gathers up her books and gets ready to walk out the door to catch the school bus. “I’ll be here when you get home.”
“I have rehearsal,” she tells me. Do I even know what she’s rehearsing for?
One more lash against my soul. Unless, of course, she’s just using that as an excuse to see her not-so-little friend.
Not trusting your own child. How many lashes does that earn you?
“Skip it,” I say.
“I can’t just skip it,” she says. There’s more panic in her eyes than missing a rehearsal merits. “I have to be there. Everyone is counting on me.”
I offer to pick her up at the school auditorium. More panic. I offer to call the teacher in charge of the play—not that I even know it’s a play—to tell her that Dana has an appointment she can’t miss.
“I’ll do it,” she says, shooting darts from her eyes. “But I don’t see why it can’t wait until after.”
I think about what Lys told her father—and not me. Another person to be angry at, even if she is only seven. And I think that it can’t wait until “after” because “after” could be too late.
It could already be too late.
THERE’S NO SIGN of Rio’s truck in the parking lot of L.I. Lanes. Rio probably figures that by now I’ve seen the tape and so he’s laying low.
Inside, I find Mark standing over the pool table, staring at it. Because Rio showed up last night, I don’t think Drew and I actually checked the table for…evidence.
“Problem?” I ask, trying to make it sound off-handed as I come up next to him.
“Doesn’t the felt look kind of gouged there?” Mark asks, running his hand over just the spot my belt might have been at some point in last night’s exploits. What belt was I wearing yesterday?
Sadly, the one with the rivets on it.
I must turn six shades of red. I don’t think Mark misses even one of them.
“Well, I guess it could be worse,” he says, an understatement if I ever heard one. “I don’t know how that screw driver fell out of my pocket.”
“Screwdriver?”
“Yeah,” he says. He looks up at the light fixture which hangs above the table. “I was, uh, screwing over the table and somehow I just lost it. You know how that is, right?”
If crawling under the table was a possibility, I’d do it. “Don’t worry about it,” I say as breezily as I can manage. “It could happen to anyone.”
“Yeah. Probably could,” he says, and he takes a deep breath and shakes his head. “Although, if someone was actually concerned with getting this job done in time and that someone was actually working when that someone was supposed to…”
“I am very worried about this job getting done in time,” I say. Of course, my actions last night say otherwise.
“Yeah. Putting your heart and soul into it, aren’t you?” He clenches his jaw like he’d like to say more but doesn’t dare.
I don’t bother answering.
“Putting anything else into it, are we?” he asks, pulling something out of his back pocket. “I take it you and the good detective patched things up, huh?”
“Sort of,” I say, trying to figure out what he’s got in his hand.
“Uh-huh,” he says, handing it to me. “Whatever. You might want to put this away.”
In my hand are Drew’s shorts. At least I suspect they’re Drew’s.
I could claim I don’t know what this is about, but frankly, I just don’t have the energy.
“Thanks,” I say. “It was—”
“Irresistible,” he says with a shrug, like there’s nothing to be done about it.
“The fantasy?” I say, gesturing toward the table.
“You,” he says, picking up his hammer and getting back to work. “I knew our detective would come around. Just a matter of time.”
I TRY TO BE OF USE, but I just can’t seem to be. I’ve got ten thumbs, and all of them seem to be full of WD-40. I fight with Bobbie because she’s got to take Kristen to the therapist despite being the one who insisted she get help for Kristen in the first place. I yell at the pool-table salesman because the remaining tables aren’t arriving for three more days.
I storm out when Steve reminds me that I’ve only got another couple of weeks to get the place ready for the grand opening he’s been advertising (like that’s my fault?), or I won’t get paid.
I’m home half an hour before the bus. I decide that I will just show Dana the tape and then let her explain herself to me. I go up and open the safe, take out the top tape and put it in the recorder.
Only it turns out to be the front of the bowling alley instead of the back. And there are two men having a heated argument. One turns his back to the camera and I see he’s got a Spare Slices shirt on. I’m pretty sure the second one is Max.
He keeps flailing his arms while the other man keeps poking him in the chest. It is clear they are furious, but with no sound it’s impossible to tell what they are fighting about.
Max looks to his left, points something out to the second man. Immediately, their demeanor changes. Max takes out his wallet and shows something to the other man, who pats him on the back. A third man joins them and they show the wallet to him. He studies it for a while, smiles and claps Max on the back.
Grandchild’s picture? Motorcycle license? I’ll have to ask Max, though I certainly can’t tell him I was spying on him. The three move out of the camera’s range, into the alley, I suppose.
I rewind and watch the argument again, trying to decipher what it could be about. I think if it was a DVD and I could enlarge it on the computer, I could maybe read Max’s lips.
I pick up the phone to call Drew and ask if someone in the department can transfer videotapes to DVDs when Dana comes in. I can’t believe I’d almost forgotten why I came home.
“Upstairs,” I yell when I hear the front door close. “In my room.”
A tearful Dana appears at my bedroom door.
Why do I have the feeling I’m going to be consoling her instead of chastising her? Taking her for ice cream instead of taking her to task?
“Come on in,” I say, reaching for the “back door” tape as I indicate she should take a seat on my bed.
“So who told you?” She wants to know.
I tell her she did, in part because I don’t want her taking it out on Alyssa and because I feel she should know that it was her own actions that are the problem, not someone else’s “betrayal.”
I slip in the tape and press play. Instead of being furious, Dana dissolves into tears.
“Freeze it!” she screams at me. “Freeze it!”
Stunned, I do, and watch her get up from the bed and lay her hand gently on the TV screen, tracing the image of the man on the screen.
“Dana, who is this creep?” I ask. Okay, yeah, I could have been more diplomatic, since she’s clearly taken with the creep. Uh…man.
She naturally tells me he’s not a creep, he’s wonderful, the most wonderful boy she’s ever met, the only one she’ll ever love, yadda, yadda, yadda.
“Do you know how old this boy is?” I put quotes in the air around the word boy.
“Almost nineteen,” she tells me.
“He’s almost nineteen and he thinks there’s nothing wrong with going out with a thirteen-year-old girl? In my book, honey, that makes him a man, not a boy, and a creepy man at that.”
Dana doesn’t answer. Lightbulbs go off in my head.
“He’s not a creep because he doesn’t know you’re only thirteen, right?” I wait for her to confirm my suspicions. “Or he didn’t know until yesterday.”
She sobs, falling at my feet. “You have to let me see him. Daddy scared him away, but if I could just talk to him, tell him how sorry I am…And tell him not to be mad at Daddy.”
I hand her the phone. “Call him. Right here, in front of me. Tell him he has my permission to call you again in five years.” And I’m hoping against hope she won’t take the phone.
“He changed his number,” she shrieks. “I tried to call him ten times today. They say it’s not a working number.”
I sink to the floo
r beside her. “Honey,” I say, brushing the bangs out of her eyes. “A year from now you won’t even remember this guy’s name. You’ll have had six boyfriends in the interim and—”
She swears she will never forget him, and the look she gives me is scary.
“Just how far did you and—” I realize I still don’t know the boy’s name.
She shakes her head.
“So you didn’t—” This is so much harder than I thought. And I didn’t think I’d be having this conversation so soon. No wonder they’re putting sex ed in kindergarten. Not that I think parents shouldn’t take the responsibility themselves.
“I’m still a virgin,” she says, and I release the breath I didn’t realize I was holding. “But—”
So much for drawing an easy breath.
“Only because he stopped us.”
Whether this is true or she is saying this because she wants me not to hate the boy, I don’t know.
She takes a ragged breath. “He wanted it to be special.”
What am I supposed to say to that? That’s nice?
“And Daddy…” sniff, sob, sniff “…he just wouldn’t listen to Jared. He hit him and he hit him…” more sobs than sniffs here.
“Your father was only trying to protect you,” I say. It isn’t often I defend Rio, but I think, had I been there, I’d have kicked old Jared right in the…soprano maker.
“Jared’s gonna get him for this,” Dana says.
I reassure her that she doesn’t have to worry about her father. That he can take care of himself.
In response she laughs a bitter laugh. “I’m not worried about him. I hope Jared hurts him really bad. Like he hurt Jared.
“And me.”
I say the same thing every mother says in this situation. “You don’t mean that.”
Whose Number Is Up, Anyway? Page 10