by Dianne Dixon
“What are you talking about?” She was crying now. Because she was hurt. And because she was ragingly angry.
“I’m talking about you,” Robert told her. “I’m talking about how you’ve turned your life into a soap opera, about how you’ve spent thirty years moping and mooning around and making me pay for a crime you committed.”
“I hope I have made you pay. I hope I’ve made your life a living hell. And I hope I keep on making you pay until the day you die. Because you’re the one who’s guilty, Robert. I made a mistake, I slept with someone who wasn’t my husband. But what you did to Justin, that was the crime.”
“I did the kid a favor. At least he probably landed in a home with a functioning mother in it.”
Caroline’s rage flared and she threw herself at Robert, ready to hit him. “How dare you even think of accusing me of being a bad mother?”
Robert calmly pushed her away. “I’m not accusing you of anything. I’m stating a fact. You were a bad mother. I was there, I saw it all.”
“That’s not true.” She was screaming again. “I stayed with you, all those years, even after you stole my son from me, so that Lissa and Julie would have a home, and a father. Everything I did was because I was trying to do the best I could for my children … so they would have safe places to grow up. I was a good mother.”
“Good mothers don’t screw around and get knocked up and try to pass their bastard kid off to their husband as one of the family.”
“I made a mistake. One stupid mistake. And you didn’t just punish me for it, you abused me, in the most evil way you could think of. And I hope you burn in hell because of it.” Caroline was crying uncontrollably. Her belief that she’d been a good and sacrificing mother had always been the one shred of righteousness she was able to claim for herself, and now Robert was threatening to take it away.
“You weren’t just a bad mother, Caroline,” he was saying. “You were a rotten one.”
“You’re a liar! You’re a liar, Robert!” Caroline was on the verge of hysteria. “I sacrificed everything for my children. My God, Robert, I stayed with you … after everything you did to me, and I only stayed for one reason, to do for my girls what nobody ever did for me. To give them a good home with two parents in it. They couldn’t have asked for a mother who would have loved them more.”
Robert’s reply was swift and wicked. “But they could’ve asked for a mother who didn’t lie around bombed on tranquilizers for over a year, couldn’t they?”
“That wasn’t my fault!” Caroline’s screaming shout was laced with tears.
“Those pills didn’t fly down your throat on their own,” Robert bellowed. “You took them. By the fistful.”
“I had lost a child!”
“Oh, here we go with the soap opera again.” His voice was lower now and had a mocking quality to it. “Poor Caroline lost her bastard baby. Tragic, tragic story. And, man, did you know how to milk it. How many years was it that you spent what you used to call ‘leaking’? Wandering around. Crying at nothing.”
“I detest you.” Her voice was hoarse. She was drawing ragged, gulping breaths.
“You know what?” Now, Robert was seething. “I don’t care. This feels good, to finally tell you the truth. You were a lousy parent, Caroline. Your daughters spent the better part of a decade with a mother who was either stoned out of her skull or crying or staring out a window. They were in high school before you even tried to snap out of it.”
“How was I supposed to ‘snap out’ of having a child torn away from me?” she asked. “He was stolen from me and given to people on the other side of the country. People I’d never even seen. You’re not being fair, Robert.” Her voice was filled with anguish.
“Don’t talk to me about what’s unfair, Caroline. Unfair was what landed me in Sierra Madre selling insurance. And it started with you. With us getting married way before we should have. And it just kept coming, with my father’s heart attack, and my brother arranging a life sentence on Lima Street for me so that he could stay put in Hawaii and nail college girls. And then, of course, there was you again … spreading your legs for somebody else and bringing the little bundle home to me. You want to know about injustice? I’m the guy to ask. I’ve spent my life being rolled in other people’s shit.”
Caroline’s fury at Robert was now complete. And it had taken on a killing coldness. “No, Robert,” she said calmly. “You’ve been rolling in your own shit. It’s been pouring out of you since the day you were born. Because you’ve always been timid and scared. Too scared to do anything but stay stuck in your pathetic, second-rate, hand-me-down life.”
She walked over to Robert and backhanded him. The edge of her wedding ring opened a gash on the side of his neck.
When he spoke, his voice was so quiet that she could clearly hear the threat of violence it. “You’d better leave now, Caroline. Before I hit you back.”
Moments later, Caroline stumbled out into the frigid air of the San Francisco night. She had left the room upstairs without a coat, wearing only the sheer cream-colored lace dress. She noticed that people walking past her were glancing at her. As she stepped onto the sidewalk, she understood why—she wasn’t wearing shoes.
Grit from the sidewalk was pressing against the soles of her feet as she walked away from the hotel and down the steep, hilly street that was in front of it. She was shivering with cold. Among the crowds of people who were moving up the hill toward her was a group of men in Halloween costumes. Most of them were dressed in fantastic and outrageous drag, but one was outfitted as a vampire. And seeing him made Caroline remember another Halloween, thirty-plus years ago. When someone dressed as a vampire had blocked her way when she was trying to go home. At the end of that strange, enchanted afternoon in which she’d been in the company of two men whom she had cared about deeply.
A sense of desperation rose in Caroline. She was realizing that she had unwittingly written her life into a language of secrets, into an indecipherable code riddled with questions.
There were so many things she wanted to know, and that she would never know. She wanted to know if her life had accomplished any good: if she’d been a hero for her children, or if she had been a villain. She wanted to know how time had escaped from her so quickly; how she had, in the blink of an eye, gone from the pretty girl at the center of all the photographs to the older woman at their edges, wedged in behind children and grandchildren.
She thought about a photograph she’d tossed into a kitchen drawer in the house on Lima Street when she and Robert had first moved in. She’d always intended to take it out and to frame it, but now she realized it must still be in that same drawer, buried under a lifetime’s accumulation of discarded rubber bands and unsharpened pencils. In the photograph, she was on the beach in Santa Barbara, flanked by Barton and Robert, and glancing down at Mitch. He was lying at her feet, looking up at her and laughing.
In thinking of Mitch, she realized she’d always wanted to know why he had kept his word: why he’d never contacted her after he’d come to the house on Lima Street to console her when Justin had been lost. She wondered if Mitch had stayed away out of a sense of chivalry or if he had simply forgotten her because, after a while, she hadn’t been important enough to remember.
But there was a new, much more pressing issue with Mitch now. It was the issue of what had been said between him and Robert at the airport. Had Robert told Mitch about Justin’s having been conceived in that single indiscretion on that long-ago Halloween? And had he told him the truth about what had happened to Justin?
She went to the curb and steadied herself against a parking meter. Her mind was racing with questions. If Robert had told Mitch the date of Justin’s conception and the truth about what had become of him, then there was a chance that Justin’s parentage had been exposed. A chance that the man who was Justin’s father might discover Caroline had borne him a son and let that son become lost from him forever.
The thought of Justin’s father k
nowing these things made Caroline frantic. It made her turn and begin to run, blindly and without direction. It sent her rushing toward the street.
Then there was the sudden clanging of a cable car’s bell. And shouts from people on the sidewalk.
The moment Caroline stepped off the curb, she had seen that the cable car was rushing down the hill toward her. She knew that what she needed to do was to lift her foot and take a few steps back. But she also knew she was tired. Tired of asking questions that had no answers and tired of waiting for miracles that had refused to come. She knew that when Justin went away, she had sent pictures in a notebook and Justin’s birth certificate, hoping they would someday bring him back to Lima Street. She knew she had waited for almost thirty years; and he had never come. She had stopped believing he ever would. And it had made her tired.
And now it was Halloween again, and Caroline was in a cream-colored dress again. She had been a young woman and an older woman. She had passionately loved and ultimately lost each of her daughters, and had married one man, and desired another, and adored a third. She had cooked ten thousand meals, and grown one perfect rose, and had drunk good wine with good friends. She had betrayed her son and the man who had given him to her. And now she was tired. Far too tired to lift her dirty bare foot. To step back onto the curb, and into her life.
When the cable car hit, Caroline felt the pain. It seemed to last only as long as it had taken her to go from her beginnings in Santa Barbara to this street in San Francisco. Only a moment.
Justin
MIDDLETOWN, CONNECTICUT, JULY 2006
*
The door was opened by a woman wearing red sandals and a girlish full-skirted summer dress. She was short and plump. Her hair was a drab ash blond. Her face was weathered, her eyes sparkling blue. Justin recognized her immediately. It was Suzy Zelinski.
She seemed confused for a moment. Then her face lit up and she said, “Well, I’ll be … After you left for Boston, we never heard another word … It was like you’d dropped off the face of the earth. I always wondered what had become of you, TJ.”
At the sound of the name, Justin felt a twinge of discomfort, as if it was an alias belonging to someone who had once befriended him. Someone he guiltily wished he’d never known.
“Come have some lunch with us.” Suzy was ushering him into the house, and he was surprised by how modest and cluttered and low-ceilinged it was. When he had been brought here as a little boy, as TJ, it had seemed magnificent.
As Justin moved across the living room, toward the hallway and the entrance to the kitchen, he was checking to see if Stan’s recliner was still in place. And when he saw that it was facing the TV, exactly where it had always been, he experienced a sensation of lightness, as if he’d received a hoped-for but unexpected gift.
It was information about Stan Zelinski that had compelled Justin to make this trip.
When he had told Ari that he intended to come here, Ari had done his best to talk him out of it. He had tried to convince him to let Gabriel Gonzales handle this final detail. But Justin needed to discover for himself what had happened to Stan—after TJ had left him in the dark in the breezeway of this house, slammed against the iron tines of a garden rake.
Justin needed to know if, at the age of seventeen, TJ had killed someone.
When he had told Amy that he was planning to return to the Zelinski house, she had been frightened, and then she had been exasperated. It terrified her that Justin’s connection to TJ might be a connection to murder. And the idea of Justin voluntarily making himself vulnerable to criminal charges, and possible jail time, infuriated her.
In the minutes just before they had talked about it, they were contented and sleepy, in the mist of lovemaking that had been as languorous and sweet as a river of slowly melting ice cream.
Then, abruptly, Amy was sitting up, glancing at the caller ID on the ringing phone, and saying: “It’s Daddy.”
The minute she said it, the mood in the room was infused with an anxious sense of waiting. Justin lay perfectly still. Amy held on to the phone as it continued to ring.
Finally, she tossed it aside. “Hey, that’s why God made voice mail, right?”
She snuggled against Justin and whispered, “Anyway, I know why he’s calling. I talked to my mother. Big news. Daddy’s decided he’s speaking to me again. He wants us to come for dinner next week.”
“No,” Justin said. “Not next week.”
“Not a problem. Under the ‘new rules,’ Daddy’s agreed to work around our schedule, so maybe—”
“Not next week, because I’m going to be out of town.” Justin was deliberately interrupting her. This was the time to tell Amy about the outrageous thing he planned to do; otherwise, he might lose the courage to go through with it. “I’m going to Connecticut,” he said. “To Middletown.”
“Why?” Amy’s gaze was full of apprehension.
“I need to find out if Stan Zelinski is dead, because if he is, when I was TJ, I might have killed him.”
Amy’s eyes went wide.
“I caught him molesting a little girl.” Justin was having difficulty getting the words out. “I hit him. He ended up slammed against a wall. I don’t know what happened after that. I ran away.”
Amy sat up in bed and looked around the room as if she was searching for something that would help make sense of what Justin was saying. “But if it was a fight, it would’ve been an accident, right? Why go back? Why dig it up after all these years?”
Justin moved to Amy’s side of the bed. He put his arms around her and said, “Because I need to know if I’m responsible for killing a man. Even if I didn’t mean to kill him. I need to know that I have the balls to tell the truth and take the consequences.”
Amy shoved him away. “How can you even talk about going off and doing something like this, Justin? What about me? What about the stuff that I’m having a hard time with? I blew up my relationship with my father for you. I’ll never have him back, close, the way I used to. I did that for you. And I want the same. I want you focused here. On me. And on Zack.”
Before Justin could interrupt, Amy cut him off. “Justin, listen to me,” she insisted. “You caught this guy molesting a little girl and you’re saying you’re the one who has consequences to pay? What is going on with you?”
“Zack’s what’s going on with me,” Justin said. “Amy, if Stan did die after I ran off that night, I can’t look the other way and keep quiet about it. I can’t show Zack what a man’s supposed to be if I’m a coward who cuts and runs and doesn’t take responsibility for the fact that I may have caused somebody to die.”
The look Amy gave Justin was cold and determined. “All you have to do is leave it alone,” she said. “If you do that, then there’ll never be any reason for Zack to know about it.”
Justin was fighting tears. “I can’t,” he said. “I can’t live with any more secrets. I’ve spent my life buried in them.”
He rested his head on Amy’s shoulder. “If Stan’s dead, Ames, there’s no way to know what’ll happen … Maybe me doing some jail time, I don’t know. But I want my life to be a clean slate. And I need to know I was the one who had the courage to clean it off.”
Amy got out of bed and walked away. “This is insane.”
“No, it isn’t.” Justin was calm and resolute. “It’s the right thing to do. For Zack.”
He raised his voice a little. He needed her to hear, and to understand, every word he was saying. “I want to be the guy for Zack, the father I never had. And I can’t do that unless I’m whole. No blank spaces, no riddles. I want to be solid when I put him on my shoulders and let him ride around up there. I never knew the feeling of that … riding on my dad’s shoulders … seeing the world from where he saw it. From up in the air. Like a king, or a giant.” Justin stopped for a moment.
Amy’s face was expressionless as Justin said: “I want to be a good man, Ames. I want my head clear, free of all the dark stuff. I want to think about thing
s like teaching my son how to play baseball. And telling him everything I know about cars. I want to give him everything that’s in me. I want him to know things like how much a guy can love his wife. How he can think about having sex with every good-looking woman he sees but still only want to make love to one, the one who really sees him.” Justin paused. He was waiting for Amy to say something. “Ames, please,” he said. “Please understand.”
Amy got back into bed. As she lay down and pulled the sheet around her, she said, “I do understand. But what you want isn’t possible. Nobody has a clean slate, Justin. Everybody’s got secrets and whatever damage your parents did to you because of theirs is done.” She flipped the sheet back on Justin’s side, opening a space for him, waiting for him.
“Amy,” he said, “can’t you see why I have to go to Connecticut?”
“No, I can’t. But go … if that’s what you feel you have to do. Find out what happened. Then lay it, and TJ, to rest.” Her words were clipped, and final. “This weirdness started a year ago, when we went to Lima Street, and I refuse to let you squander one more day of our lives on it. You need to close the door on that place. You need to decide to come home, Justin. Otherwise, this is where it ends.”
Amy had switched off the light, and the next morning—this morning—Justin had gone to the airport and flown to Connecticut. Now he was walking into the hallway of the Zelinski house, following Suzy toward the kitchen as she was saying: “If I remember right, TJ, you were a big fan of my peach pies. And I made one this morning. I must’ve known that you were coming.”
Justin glanced toward an open bedroom door midway down the hall. “Do you know what happened to Cassie Jackson?” he asked.
Suzy laughed and said, “Little black Cassie? Funny you should mention her. She was in the paper a few months ago, big write-up about how she bounced around, lived with her grandmother for a time, then lived on the streets but still found a way to keep going to school. She got herself through college, and got a law degree, on scholarships. Apparently, she’s going to work for the government and they gave her a big send-off at one of the Negro churches. They even gave her a brand-new car to drive down to D.C. in.”