Like Son

by Felicia Luna Lemus

  There I was, broken body, drained soul, doing my fucking best to tend to things properly, but, sure enough, not much more than a crumbled brick of my once beautiful life remained.

  No matter how exhausted I was, there was no way I was going to fall asleep. Giving in, I got up from bed and walked over to the window. Screen pushed up, I climbed out to the fire escape. Leaning against the freezing metal railing, I looked east toward Avenue B.

  I wanted dirt under my nails. And splinters in my fingertips. I needed another tree to plant.

  A shrill ring suddenly resonated from inside the apartment. The phone. Zoned out, I only sort of heard three more rings. And then, mobilizing burst of reality, I stumbled back in through the window and rushed to the phone. I answered just as the machine picked up.

  “Hello?”

  Feedback screeched in my ear. I turned off the machine.

  “Nat?”

  A robot voice responded, “One minute remains. To add credit, please hang up and call the toll-free number listed on the back of your card.” And then Nat said: “Frank? Meet me in the park on Ash Wednesday?”

  “Huh?” That reply was all my suddenly stunted motor skills allowed.

  “Have you been drinking?”

  “No.”

  “Please meet me on March 5th?”

  “That’s more than two weeks from now.”

  “I can’t come home before then.”

  “So much shit has happened, Nat …”

  “I know, sweetheart. And I want to talk to you about it. I just need some time. I’m so sorry about all of this and—”

  “No, Nat, I mean …”

  My mouth stalled and my lungs burned. Damnit. Johnny’s rotting body was probably still there downstairs. My arm was broken. The train wreck. I had so much to say, but not enough composure or oxygen to say it. But it didn’t matter. Nathalie allowed only a momentary silence before she continued.

  “Frank? March 5th. Please?”

  “Nat, you can’t just fucking leave and then call and—”

  “To add credit, please hang up and call the toll-free number listed on the back of your card.”

  “Tompkins Square Park,” she said in a rush. “On the 5th. At the fountain, I’ll be—”

  “Your time has expired.”

  The robot operator disconnected us.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  4 March 2003.

  Ioverdosed on pills. I hadn’t really intended for it to happen. The bottle said to take two, and so that’s what I did. At first. But those two weren’t working. So I took two more. And then, a few hours later, two more. At one point I opened the child-proof bottle with my teeth and shook out five, maybe six, of the capsules into my good hand. I slugged them back with a glass of water and forced myself horizontal. Half an hour later, I could smell the pills on my cold sweat. And still I wanted more. I was so goddamned hungry for a good night’s sleep.

  In the two weeks since Nathalie’s call, I’d worked endless days at the shop, desperate to make up for lost time and money. All told, I hadn’t slept more than an hour or two each night. The clock had taken to laughing at me all night long. And so there I was, eyes dry and unfocused, staring at the walls. Remembering a stupid mind-over-matter trick I’d read in a magazine once, I tried to induce guru relaxation by forcing deep breaths and imagining that I was floating in a pool of Jell-O. Still, my heart raced and every cell of my body jittered. I could have sworn spiders crawled under my skin, and I was sure After-School Special angel-dust-overdose jump-out-the-window tragedies were on their way.

  Following a few more hours of twitching on my bed with a parched tongue and a stomach that wouldn’t stop knotting and unknotting and doing really fucking clumsy summersaults up into my rib cage, I ended up on my knees in front of the toilet. Drenched in sweat and stripped down to my boxers and undershirt, I tried not to look into the toilet bowl as the pills, now a brown and earth-stinky liquid, shot up my throat and out my mouth and nostrils in burning swells.

  Valerian root. From Nathalie’s post-apocalypse stash. There weren’t any of my old pink pills left in the apartment, and I learned super quick that the hippie alternative did not make for peaceful sleep as advertised. Even after I’d barfed up the overload, those little brown powder bombs of poison gave me heartburn. Puff the Magic Dragon, I burped up smoke clouds of nasty fungus for hours. I thought about how Nathalie had once said she thought ass tasted like dirty cabbage. Well, valerian root tasted like dirty ass.

  Four in the morning, even more tired than the night before, I finally gave up and kicked myself upright. I was uncomfortably aware of a crazy vivid dream in which a giggling baby Ángel, alive and dressed in an intricate little mariachi outfit, sat in a saddle atop a howling coyote. As I’d approached him, Ángel had tapped the coyote with his spurred boots, and the two had galloped up a fluorescent-bright silver pyramid that reached high into the skies. I never did catch Ángel, but, lucky me, I must have scraped my cast against the sides of that damned pyramid over and over as I climbed it because when I woke my arm fucking ached worse than it had in the entire two weeks it’d been in a cast. Inflammation traveled from the tips of my left fingers, up my arm, past my shoulder, and, I swear, all the way to the edge of my jaw. Additional fun: The cast felt too tight and its lining snagged the hairs on my arm. I was a total whining mess.

  The heating unit pinged, and a new gust of dry and overheated air invaded the apartment. Heatwaves were visibly emanating from my skin. Lingering whiffs of the vaguely still-detectable death-and-industrial-cleaner stench from the apartment downstairs filtered in. And still, for all its complications, I wished I could stay right there forever. With one catch. I wanted Nathalie shifting and settling into pictureperfect loveliness on my side of the bed. Fuck the fresh-air world outside, I would have happily watched Nathalie sleep in our bed all day if she were there.

  I reached over to the nightstand and picked up the postcard I’d left next to the framed retablo the night before. Nathalie hadn’t called again, but she’d sent a card. It was a 1970s tourist postcard—all orange-tinted photograph and clunky woodcut font—of Death Valley. God knows where she’d gotten the thing, but she’d written in her pretty cursive:

  3 a.m. Ash Wednesday. Temperance.

  xoxo,

  N.

  I flipped the card over and looked at the Death Valley photo. A lumpy sparkling landscape of salt. The Devil’s Golf Course. My father had taken his wife there to fall apart. Had I ever told Nathalie that story? I wasn’t sure. No, I must have. But if I had, why would she have sent that postcard? Wasn’t it sort of fucked up? I read the back again. 3 a.m. Ash Wednesday. Tomorrow morning. Temperance. The fountain in Tompkins Square Park. Tomorrow. Ash Wednesday. Morning. 3 a.m. Nathalie would be back. I reread the message yet again.

  Eyes sore and puffy, if I had looked in the mirror I would have seen lines etched deeply in my brow and creasing vertically at the sides of my mouth. My empty stomach churned and growled. Its acidic sloshing was identical to the sound of digested food emptying into my dad’s colostomy bag.

  I put the postcard back on the nightstand and picked up the retablo of Nahui. That melancholy pout. Those silver eyes. I willed her to reach out and hold me like she’d done when my father died. Nothing. Looking at her sullen expression just made me feel worse. Things clearly weren’t working the way they should have been. Something major had to change, but what? Retablo still in hand, it occurred to me I might have a solution.

  I looked at the alarm clock on the nightstand. 4:15 a.m. I calculated a tentative timeline for my plan as quickly as my sluggish brain could, and I determined that, yes, if Nathalie really would be at the park at three in the morning, just under twenty-four hours away, I did have time to do what I needed to do. Not with any to spare, but with just enough—if I got my ass in gear, quick.

  So I pushed myself up off the bed, brushed my teeth, took the quickest bath known to man, and got dressed in my most trusted skater rags. Gathering what I
needed from the apartment, I packed the following into a brown paper grocery bag:

  1. wallet and apartment keys

  2. toothpaste and toothbrush

  3. blind man dark glasses and walking stick

  4. two safe deposit keys

  5. honey-hued worry stone

  6. Nahui’s book and the framed retablo

  5 a.m., I locked the apartment door behind me. On the way down the stairs, I stopped at the second-floor landing. A week before, someone had covered Johnny’s entire front door with a thick black tarp which was attached to the surrounding wall with heavy-duty duct tape. They’d also put a small bucket of coal at the base of the door. To absorb odors, I think. The coal wasn’t working.

  I continued toward the F train at First and Houston.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Ithought for sure I must have acquired a special glow. Seriously, deep down I was certain people around me would know I was on the brink of radical transformation. I wouldn’t have been surprised if someone had come up to me, patted me on the shoulder, and said, Go get ’em, tiger. And why shouldn’t they have? My story was precisely the redemption song people adored most. Like ancient myths and DC Comics combined, the fates had dumped me in a vat of toxic waste and I’d clawed my way out. Best part was, the poison hadn’t turned me evil—instead, it’d given me the superhuman powers I needed to set my world right.

  Thing was, I didn’t actually glow. I was just some random dude standing at a JFK airline counter too early in the morning, trying to buy a ticket for the next flight to Los Angeles. Nobody cheered me on.

  “We have a flight departing at twelve noon and arriving at LAX at 2 p.m. local time,” the flight attendant in her blue polyester uniform said.

  “Is that the first flight?”

  “There’s one at 6:45 a.m., but it goes to Long Beach.”

  “Perfect.”

  “And for your return?”

  “I need to be back in New York by two.”

  “Today?”

  “No, tomorrow morning.”

  I could tell the flight attendant wanted to give me the Annoying Customer of the Month Award. For whatever reason, she seemed entirely convinced I was a worthy recipient of such an honor. Attitude plus some, she tapped her long nails against the keyboard and came up with this compromise: “We have a flight leaving at 5 p.m. local time. Out of Los Angeles International.”

  “Arrive in Long Beach and leave from LAX?”

  “You would get back in New York at 1:45 a.m.”

  “Nothing earlier?”

  “No.”

  Couldn’t she see I had no time for such delightful flirtation? Bitch.

  “I’ll take it.”

  “How would you like to pay?”

  I took my wallet from my pocket to get my trusty plastic. And that was when I noticed that the photograph of the flapper girl, the one I’d found at the estate sale in Bushwick, was missing. If this disappearance strikes you as rather unremarkable, allow me to clarify that my wallet was designed in a way that would have absolutely disallowed the possibility of that photo sliding out accidentally. And neither the sturdy canvas of the wallet nor the plastic photo-display-pocket were torn. It just didn’t make sense for the flapper to be missing unless someone had intentionally opened my wallet and taken the photo out. Evening television news exposés of thieving hospital orderlies came to mind. Was that why Sally the nurse had been so friendly? Was it a front? But why would anyone go through my wallet, take the photo, and then leave all the cash and credit cards? Besides, I’d seen the photo plenty of times in the two weeks since I’d gotten back from D.C. Or at least I thought I had. Regardless, the photo was no longer there.

  And then I understood: The flapper Nahui-wannabe going missing from the sweetheart display in my wallet was just the beginning of everything coming together perfectly.

  I handed the flight attendant my credit card.

  I was on my way.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  One quick look out the airplane window as we descended into Long Beach and I remembered how much I hated Southern California. Concrete glittered under the sun for miles and miles where desert tumbleweeds should have been, buildings sprawled squat and too scared to reach high into the sky, pickled people ran around in tank tops and shorts with sunglasses and cell phones as permanent appendages. Gag me with a spoon. Like, totally.

  The only thing that kept me from lashing out and hitting people over the head with my cast was the fact that traveling light was one of the most pure intoxications the world has to offer. Carrying only a single grocery-store paper bag, I pitied everyone else as they schlepped their overstuffed carry-on luggage down the cramped aisle and to the airport’s one baggage claim area—to the jammed conveyor belt where they then huddled around and retrieved even heavier bags. If they’d known what was good for them, they would have insisted their suitcases be lost.

  All other arriving passengers busy jockeying for prime positions at the luggage conveyor belt, I walked right up to the airport’s car rental kiosk. Standing there, I thought of my Thanksgiving Day drive in the woods with Nathalie and the pretty little tree I’d hauled to our rented station wagon; I thought of how I’d planted the tree for her and hung a love letter from its scraggly branch. I’d been so stupid to think I could ground her with the roots of that clunky romantic gesture.

  My self-annoyed reminiscing was interrupted when the car rental employee sang out cheerily, “Reservation number, please?”

  Reservation number? Wasn’t Southern California the land of endless cars?

  “Sorry, I didn’t know I needed a reservation.”

  “It’s your lucky day,” the car rental guy said with studied customer-service enthusiasm as he typed something into his computer. “We have a Cadillac Escalade available. Fully loaded.”

  Like I needed a vehicle that could seat seven and suck the planet dry of all its oil? There was no reason the guy should have known, but my solo drive would total a quick hundred miles, tops. There were no foreseeable dirt roads en route, and therefore I most definitely didn’t need four-wheel drive, let alone a carriage and tires so tall that driver-side stepladders were common accessories. Added displeasure, I was certain an Escalade could jam up a train track even better than the Jeep Cherokee had back in Newark. I really, really didn’t want to drive an SUV.

  The rental desk kid mistook my hesitance, looked at my cast, on my left arm mind you, and added: “No worries, the Escalade’s automatic.”

  Sweet but dim—it’s the weather; they can’t help it.

  “Do you have any compacts?”

  He typed more into his computer. “The only other car available today without a reservation is a Hyundai Accent.”

  “I’ll take the Hyundai.”

  Maybe I didn’t understand English? “I can give you a nice deal on the Escalade,” he said, very slowly.

  “The Hyundai is perfect.”

  Shaking his head slightly, he clicked the request into his computer. “I’m sorry, it seems the air conditioner is broken.”

  It was early March in Southern California.

  “That’s all right, thank you.”

  It seemed to occur to the guy that I might be a terrorist. I mean, who else would want a Hyundai compact with broken air over a fully loaded Escalade on discount? Our transaction was nonetheless completed with deft efficiency, and next thing I knew, I was driving on the 405 southbound. It’s truly bizarre how you can so completely leave a place for over seven years and then seamlessly reenter its veins. The freeways and roads knew me. I arrived at my destination in no time at all. Car parked and paper grocery bag in hand, I walked to the front door, took a deep breath, and made my entrance.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  You could have kidnapped and blindfolded me, dropped me in that lobby, and I would have known exactly where I was. From olfactory clues alone. The City of Orange’s Old Towne Wells Fargo Bank had a subtle but very specific wax floor polish and dirty money smell to
it. That stink of manual labor and market economy collided into an unpleasant bouquet and greeted me as I walked across a long expanse of tiled floors to a carpeted area. The bank manager continued talking on the telephone as I stood at her desk. She put her hand over the receiver. Personal call.

  “Yes?” she asked me.

  “I need to access my safe deposit box, please.” I held out my driver’s license and keys.

  A finger pointed skyward to indicate I should give her a minute, she shot me an insincere smile and slowly wrapped up her conversation with the “sugar” on the line. Eventually, she took my keys and driver’s license. She was clearly thrown by the name on my license, which was still the one I was born with.

  “It’s me in the photo, right?” I said impatiently.

  Fake smile now gone, she nodded but studied the cast on my arm as if it might correspond with identifying characteristics listed on an FBI criminal profile.

  “I’ll need your Social Security number,” she said.

  I hated Orange County.

  I gave her my Social Security number, and she punched it into her computer along with information from my driver’s license. Eyebrows raised and lips pursed, she stood, made a failed attempt to tug the wrinkled jacket of her ill-fitting suit down over her ample ass, and then led me to a safe deposit cubicle. Keys and driver’s license in her possession, she walked away. What felt like at least ten minutes later, she returned with the small rectangular box, my ID, and keys. She placed these items on the viewing room’s narrow shelf, stepped into the hall, and closed the door behind her. Once I could no longer hear her high heels clicking down the hallway, I took Nahui’s book and the framed retablo from the grocery bag I’d brought with me.

  Maybe it was only a trick of refracted light in that entirely varnished-wood room, but I swear Nahui’s eyes suddenly took on an extra gleam. Once upon a time that glow would have given me shivers. For years, the raw angst Weston captured in Nahui’s portrait had thrilled me. Looking into her eyes had dared me onward. But, whereas before I’d found radical inspiration in Nahui’s stare, I now saw the deep suffering and loneliness written upon her features. And to be honest, I worried I’d begun to let her pain be mine.