Phantom Effect

by Michael Aronovitz

  “I’m not,” she said finally.

  “Do you want to come home?”

  She shrugged.

  “Well, think it over,” he said. “Offer’s on the table.”

  She eyed him directly. That was a firm proposition, no baloney. He must have made Mother agree or he wouldn’t put it out there like that. Clearly he’d been working on multiple projects last night and this morning.

  “I decided last night that I’d ask you,” she said, “but in the light of day in my old barren room it didn’t seem so realistic. I mean, what if it didn’t work out? What if it turned into a thing where Mother could just string together one lecture after another about how I’m supposed to make something of myself, and break out on my own, and reach self-actualization and all that?”

  Daddy smiled back mostly with his eyes, and then let his glance fall to the table in front of him.

  “I remember when you first asked me if Santa really existed,” he said.

  Marissa put her cup down.

  “I thought it was Mother who shattered that particular dream.”

  He pursed his lips for a moment and shook his head.

  “No, actually that was my unexpected responsibility. It was during the PECO shutdown and we were all working overtime, putting in crazy hours, trying to manage an abundance of geopolitical and economic concerns that had us seeing double.” His face had gone flat with the memory. “We thought we might lose the company.” He took a drink and rested the cup back on the table. “Anyway, I come home from a particularly hard day at work, and Mother is in the kitchen making stir fry, my comfort food. I barely have my coat off and you jump into my arms and make me go to the picture window and watch the snow that started falling about an hour ago. So we go to our special place on the sofa, knees pressing into the cushions, and you say, ‘Daddy, is there really a Santa?’ Of course, I have no idea what to say except the God’s honest truth, so I reply, ‘Marissa, Santa is more like a feeling than a real person.’ Now your eyebrows are up in those questioning arches, and you say, ‘So you’re the one who brings the presents?’ I sigh and say, ‘Yes, but listen, this is important. You can’t go telling all your friends there’s no Santa. I mean, some kids wait for him all year.’ So you take it all in, nod, and reach up to touch my sideburn like you always used to do. Then you say, ‘Why do they tell us there’s a Santa if there isn’t one?’ At that point I’m stalling because I’m preoccupied with the mortgage and the job and a whole universe of issues you’d never understand, and I say, ‘They tell us there’s a Santa so there’s something to hang on to. It’s nice to believe in something. I guess we make stuff up for the people that need it the most. Kind of like the Eagles, you know? We always believe they can win a Super Bowl even though they never do.’”

  He paused for emphasis.

  “So I come home the next afternoon from another particularly difficult day at the office, and there’s something waiting for me on the coffee table. See, it’s this green clay paperweight shaped like a football—uneven laces, misshapen edges, a hairline crack starting to cut its way through the middle. There are letters and numbers colored like candy canes affixed to the top ridge with Elmer’s glue, and they spell out ‘2001 CHAMPS.’ And the card underneath reads clearly in my five-and-a-halfyear-old daughter’s clumsy printing, ‘Merry early Christmas. Love Santa.’”

  He looked up at Marissa and his eyes had gone moist.

  “Yes, you could already read and write at that tender young age, and no, you hadn’t developed the patchwork just yet.” He folded his hands and spoke back down at them. “Some things aren’t about lessons and lectures, honey. Sometimes it’s just about family.”

  “Sorry to spoil the Kodak moment,” Mother said. She was dressed and carrying Rusty under one arm. There was a silk scarf on her head and it worked for her, making her classic and pretty. “I’m going to walk the dog. With the three of us living under the same roof again, someone is going to have to do all the work around here.” She winked, and Marissa breathed a sigh of relief. That was as close as she was going to get to a coming-home party, and everything was going to be just fine. In a strange kind of way this beast, whoever he was, had opened up possibilities for Marissa Madison, and she couldn’t wait until her handicap was remedied so she could finish this thing. Start anew. Grow into who she was going to be at a pace she could handle.

  Mother took Rusty to the front door to put on the leash and body harness, and Marissa shuffled behind, peering into the den and looking at her trigger-killer sitting there in its charger, little red light staring back at her stubbornly. The heater kicked on in the basement, and Marissa was standing in the spot where you could actually feel a slight vibration accompanying the muffled knock and clatter. It was like an old song that was part of the soundtrack of your life, and it grounded her, comforted her, and let her know she was finally home.

  PHONE

  TAG

  Oh yes, asshole. It was all about home being where the heart was, about abandoned construction sites, quarter-inch pilot holes, nylon tarpaulin barrier tents, and clattering heaters. It was about rivers and crankshafts and concrete and gulches and a bunch of other things no one ever bothered to think about until the toilet backed up or the stoplights went dark or the computers froze or the subways stopped running.

  The boss tried calling my cell a couple of times that morning, thinking I’d be stupid enough to pick up.

  By then I had long started getting into the dirty work.

  CHAPTER

  FOURTEEN

  There was a buzz Marissa felt in her back pocket, and a thrill ran up her spine. There weren’t too many people ringing her cell phone on a regular basis, since she had so few friends and confidants calling just to bullshit and talk about all the “drama.” Her patchwork had weeded out that field a long time ago, and it was pretty much limited to her parents, the bursar’s office, Verizon, and her advisor.

  That meant that Jerome might be returning her call, and she was thankful she had switched it off ringtone as a precaution last night. She and Mother were reorganizing the linen closet in the hallway between bedrooms on the landing, and Marissa was the one on the floor. Mother was up on the chair, and if it had been the other way around the woman might have heard or felt the vibration, making Marissa thank goodness, as odd as that particular personification seemed at the moment. They had pretty much cleared out the disaster on the bottom shelf they normally treated like a throw-away area with the family packs of Charmin and tissue boxes crammed atop three plastic tubs spilling over with bags of cotton balls, Q-tips, light bulbs, old makeup cases, rubber stops for Mother and Daddy’s bed that kept rolling away from the wall, combs and brushes, and a million carry bags from the dentist with extra toothbrushes and floss. Marissa jumped to her feet, reached around, and grabbed from the second shelf some contour sheets that had been in the household since before she was born. In her haste yanking them out she almost knocked Mother off her chair.

  “Honey! Careful!” she said.

  “Sorry,” Marissa said. “These old things should be in the basement. Groundcloths for painting or something. They’re an eyesore up here.”

  Mother put her hands on her hips.

  “You’re starting to sound just like me. Go ahead, dear, put them in the basement.”

  Marissa almost tripped rushing them down the stairs to the living room. She didn’t even steal a glance over toward the den to check on her trigger-killer, because she’d peeked in there five times in the last hour and she’d promised herself she wouldn’t “watch the pot trying to make it boil” anymore, at least until noon. She moved through the kitchen and had that awkward, silly moment where she actually couldn’t find the doorknob for the basement because the pile of sheets in her arms came up past her chin blocking the view, and she felt around for the damned thing like a blind woman.

  It was a trick getting the lights on, closing the door, and finding the first step without going ass over teakettle, and in the process of do
ing all this Marissa scolded herself for taking so long trying to save a second as we so often did when it was best just to slow down and restructure the stage blocking. Finally, she settled for tossing the rumple of sheets over the railing, and she took the rest of the stairs two at a time.

  It smelled faintly of rust or something down here, and she had it in the back of her mind to suggest that they next straighten the mess under the stairs and sweep behind all the cabinets, a full makeover and a triple dose of Febreze. OMG, she was starting to sound just like Mother! She got out her cell phone, holding her breath like a child.

  There was a message, and she recognized the number. She hit her voicemail and put the phone to her ear.

  “Hey,” his voice said. “Call me.”

  This was it. Marissa hit call-back and peered cautiously back up the stairway. Could Mother hear her through the closed door, up two floors in the middle of the house? Probably not. Though Marissa spent more time down here than did her mother, she couldn’t recall ever being able to hear anything even from the living room or the den coming from this area except the rattling heater. Just in case Mother had followed her to the door, however, Marissa moved to the middle of the room, cradling her cell and crouching over slightly, cupping her hands around the whole deal to deaden the audible.

  He picked up, and her heart raced.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “It’s me, Marissa.”

  “I know,” he replied. “Why are you talking so low-toned and funny?”

  “Why are you doing the same?”

  “I’m in the library.”

  She straightened her posture. Even without context this thrilled her. She also knew that sticking contour sheets in the basement wouldn’t take too long, and she had to hurry.

  “I’m . . . not going to be a nurse,” she stammered. “I never wanted to be. I’m moving back home and possibly quitting college, at least temporarily.”

  “Then I wish you good fortune with these new endeavors,” he said, and she almost laughed aloud, knowing that if she let it slip it would be a double whammy, possibly alerting Mother and at the same time making Jerome uncomfortable with his improved vocabulary. Her response was, “So what’s up with you?” and right after saying it she closed her eyes tight with embarrassment. Could she be any more simplistic?

  “Can’t you tell what’s going on in my life from your psychic connections?” he said.

  That was a good one, actually.

  “It’s shorted out,” she said. “I can’t read the patchwork at the moment.”

  There was a pause, but it didn’t seem to be one of indecision. It felt like timing.

  “Stay that way,” he said finally. “If you do, there’s an ‘us.’ Think it over. Call me.”

  The line went dead.

  Marissa let her arm drop to her side. Numbed and listless, she treaded back to the stairs. Like father like daughter now, she was faced with one of those paradoxes he so enjoyed with that calendar project he was never going to finish. But this was no difficult pleasure. It was the lesser of two evils, lose-lose, pick your poison.

  She closed the basement door behind and made her way to the kitchen. Her chest was tight and her throat hurt and she opened the fridge absently, closed it, and walked through to the living room to take the step-down into the den. There, so delicate and complicated, was her trigger-killer, angled back in its charger, bare and coated wires curly-cueing out of it and winding back to other small contact points in a complicated, organized tangle. Its tiny light at the bottom right was straight red, ready to go winking at any moment now on a countdown to green.

  If it went live, she and Jerome would never be. If she pulled the plug right here and now they had a chance. The problem was that her premonition of winning this thing seemed contingent on the patchwork mapping her a route, and there was no indication she could survive it without her best stuff.

  Of course she could unplug the damned thing and get right back on her cell phone, this time dialing 911. Then of course, the wedding bells she might hope for would be forever tinged with the trailing screams of the girls from here on in who’d fallen off the radar.

  Marissa stared at the little red light.

  And couldn’t decide for the life of her.

  A hand closed on her shoulder and Marissa almost screamed, turning sharply, both hands up at her mouth.

  “Couch,” Mother said. “Now.”

  From the expression Marissa saw in her eyes this was going to be a planning session, tough love, heart to heart, and this time Mother wasn’t going to throw in the towel, walking away damaged and bruised just because her daughter threw back a potshot or two. Marissa hesitantly padded into the living room and settled down on the sectional where she could keep her eye on that trigger-killer.

  Mother sat across from her and folded her legs up and under.

  “You know,” she said, “in every family, every relationship, there is someone who comes to the plate and gets things done even when it’s unattractive to do so. I think of it as a custodial function, and while I don’t like to think of myself or my own daughter as janitors, we sometimes have to clean things up.”

  “We . . .”

  “Did I stutter?”

  A silence played out between them, and Marissa’s eyes were the first to drop.

  “So I’m a custodian.”

  “No, dear, look at me. You are more of an internal decorator, and with that patchwork going you’re one step ahead of the owners, architects, and groundkeepers, that’s all.” She took a moment for repositioning, slipping her feet to the carpet and webbing her hands around her knees. “When it comes to Jerome Anthony Franklin,” she said finally, “you have to understand that you didn’t just fill his heart with first love. You rearranged the furniture of his entire life and put him in a place of extreme public scrutiny.”

  At first Marissa thought that Mother had actually been on the other side of that basement door, and she panicked, thinking that in her “best interests,” the woman would try to ground her for life now, take her cell phone, monitor all the computers, buy a chastity belt on eBay. But just in case it was a lucky guess at the right time, Marissa responded as if the last time she’d spoken to Jerome was months ago.

  “Thanks, Mother. You know just how to make a girl feel good about herself.”

  “It wasn’t your fault.”

  “We’ve said these things already.”

  “But you don’t believe it even after working it through. You blame yourself for that poor young man falling on his face out there, when all you did was lead him to drink from the well of his own potential. The patchwork wasn’t given to you so that you could sing for people and write music for people, and eat, drink, and sleep for them.”

  “Then why am I cursed with it?” Marissa said, a bit louder than she’d intended. “What good did it ever do me or anyone else?”

  “There are a lot of businesses and townspeople around here that could make you a list, dear, but none of us ever felt you needed that kind of verification. Do you? Is that what this is about?”

  “No.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “I’m still in love with him.”

  “You’re not, baby, not really.”

  Marissa stood up.

  “Please don’t tell me how I feel, Mother.”

  “Then you tell me,” she said, standing herself. “How could you possibly be in love with a young man you hardly even know anymore? You’re obsessed with an image you erected from his skill set, not his past, his family, his heart, and his soul.”

  “So now you know whether or not I feel love? God, Mother, you are annoying sometimes!”

  “No, Marissa. Like you, I’m just a custodian, trying to avoid another spill around here.”

  “I thought you understood . . .”

  “I do, only too well. I know that love is intensive, something women oftentimes feel on a deeper level than men, and I’ve mostly kept silent because as the kids say nowa
days, ‘I feel you.’ But there’s nothing there but misery, darling. When it comes to your livelihood, it’s your choice, not mine. College is the best way to go, but your father and I will support you either way. In terms of Jerome Anthony Franklin, take my advice and don’t call him. Let it go. Please.”

  Marissa sat back down and pulled up her knees and hugged them, looking off to the den, trying not to cry in front of her mother. In a way she was relieved in that the woman would have given a different sort of dissertation if she’d actually heard her calling Jerome in the basement. This was precautionary, and a small part of her wanted to laugh at how close Mother was to reading what was actually going on here. You didn’t need patchwork to possess a certain uncanny Madison sonar, and she hated her mother for it and at the same time despised herself for agreeing with her, at least in the part of her mind still governed by common sense. She walked out of the room and made for her bedroom. She was going to curl up in a ball under the covers and think about things. Take a nap. Wake up with a new perspective.

  But when Marissa awoke she was no better off than when she’d shut her eyes with the quilt pulled over her head. She loved Jerome Anthony Franklin more than anything she had ever known. It was like falling, like dying. But she just couldn’t bring herself to unplug that trigger-killer. If she did she was dead, and if she dialed in a distress call to the boys in blue there would be another girl soon taking her place. Then another and another.

  Her digital said 11:43 and it freaked her, since it was almost that time when she’d laid down for a nap and it was clearly not Friday morning anymore. The darkness in here painted a thick, strange picture. She’d slept through the entire day and into the night, and while it wasn’t so surprising that her parents had let her hunker down with this Jerome thing and sleep it off, her digital had, of course, read exactly 11:43 last night when she’d woken up disoriented, mistaking tumbling trash cans for serial killers. The coincidence was weird and it made her feel that this echo was a precursor to something huge and terrible.