Ask Again, Yes

by Mary Beth Keane

  “It’s Peter, right? You know me? My grandson is in your class? Listen. Your mom wasn’t feeling well in the store. Nothing to worry about but they’re going to take her over to the hospital. Can I give you a lift home? I’m glad I spotted you.”

  Peter blinked at Mr. Smith for a moment, and then he got out of the car so fast that he left the keys in the ignition. “What happened?” he asked, looking now at the crowd at the front of the store in a different light. He began jogging through the parking lot. When he saw that someone was being carried out on a stretcher, he began to run.

  “Mom?” he called from the back of the crowd that had gathered. She bucked when she heard his voice, and one of the EMTs stumbled. “Peter!” she shouted, her voice thin with urgency, and Peter felt every face in the crowd turn to look at him. They stepped back so that he could make his way. “Quickly!” she shouted to him, but he didn’t know what she meant. He noticed that a third EMT was carrying her shoes and her scarf. The tips of her fingers looked bluish and cold, and her hair was parted differently than it had been when she walked away from the car. He wondered if they’d forced her onto the stretcher, and if she’d fought them. Her coat was draped over her like a blanket. “Quickly!” she shouted again, her eyes wild and locked on his, but he froze in place, having no idea what to do. The same faces that had turned to look at him now turned away. The coat shifted and he saw that her hands were strapped down. Her ankles, too. He began to shiver. They lifted her into the back of the ambulance and a police officer waved everyone back, including Peter.

  “Peter! Quickly!” she shrieked.

  Peter looked at the officer blocking his way. “That’s me,” he whispered. “I’m Peter. Can’t I go in there with her?”

  “Peter,” Mr. Smith said, coming up beside him. “Why don’t I take you home and you can call your dad from my house. Mrs. Smith will make you a sandwich.” But he lived with Chris, Peter remembered, and then Chris would know, and then their whole class would know. His shoulders were quaking so violently now that he knew everyone must be noticing. Mr. Smith put an arm around him, but that only made it worse.

  The police officer asked, “You’re her son?” He introduced himself as Officer Dulley.

  “Yes,” he said.

  Officer Dulley asked him for his full name and address, and when he didn’t answer, Mr. Smith gave the officer Peter’s full name and told him he was pretty sure the Stanhopes lived on Jefferson. That, yes, Peter lived with his mother. Yes, his father was in the picture. They were talking about his dad now. Officer Dulley disappeared inside the ambulance for a few minutes and then came back. No one seemed in any rush to get anywhere.

  “Did she have a heart attack?” Peter asked when he returned.

  “No,” Officer Dulley said, without indicating if whatever did happen was better or worse.

  “What precinct is your dad in?” Officer Dulley asked, but Peter couldn’t remember. It was right there in his brain but he couldn’t come up with it.

  “He’s on the job, right?”

  Peter nodded.

  It was decided that he would hang out at the Smiths’ house until they got in touch with his father.

  “Wait,” Peter said, stepping away from Mr. Smith’s hand on his shoulder and watching as the ambulance doors closed. “I want to go with her.” But they were already pulling away from the curb.

  “She’s fine, Peter. She’ll be fine.”

  “Well, then can’t you just drop me off at home?” The ambulance paused at the intersection at Middletown Road and whooped the siren twice to let the other cars know it was going to drive through. “My dad will be home pretty soon.”

  “Are you sure that’s what you want?”

  “I’m sure.”

  On the short drive Mr. Smith said it was a tiring time of year, really, when a person thought about it. It was a happy time of year, sure, with all the family and the celebrating but overwhelming, too, for some people. For a start, look at all the money being spent. “Plus it’s different for women,” he added, “they always feel like everything has to be just so with the dinners and the entertaining. You need this bowl to match this bowl. You need this spoon. Used to be people made gingerbread cookies and got maybe one present, but these days things are different.” Then he looked at Peter like that explained everything. Peter felt like telling him that he and his father had put up their tree. He alone had baked cookies when the day came for the class bake sale. He’d just followed the directions on the package and they’d turned out delicious, then he’d put them in a shoebox like he’d seen the other kids’ moms do. When his mother came home, she snapped at him that he’d forgotten to line the box with foil or wax paper. Who would want a cookie from a box shoes had been sliding around in? She made it sound as if he’d stored the cookies inside a public toilet. All those ingredients wasted. He’d used the last of the butter. She slammed the fridge. The last of the brown sugar. She slammed the cabinet door. But then, when she saw the baking sheet and bowls washed and drying on the counter, she stopped ranting, and it was as if an invisible hand had been clapped over her mouth. She ran her fingers along the table and found they came up clean. She stood before the shoebox and selected a cookie from the top of the pile. He waited. He watched. Finally, she said quietly that they were so good it would be a shame anyway to sell them for only twenty-five cents apiece. They were extraordinary.

  “We’ll keep these for ourselves,” she said. “Tomorrow I’ll get some from the bakery for you to sell at school.”

  “What happened in the store?” he asked Mr. Smith as they rounded the corner onto Jefferson. “Did someone say something to her? Was someone rude?”

  “I don’t know,” Mr. Smith said. “I really don’t.”

  “She’s just sensitive,” Peter said.

  As they drove down Jefferson, Mr. Gleeson was outside pulling a garbage can to the curb. He looked up at Mr. Smith’s car and watched it slow to a stop at Peter’s driveway. “Is that Francis Gleeson?” Mr. Smith asked, leaning over the steering wheel. He sounded relieved.

  The two men spoke at the end of the driveway while Peter retrieved the key from under the rock and went into his house. They were still talking even after Peter poured himself a glass of water and went up to his bedroom. He chugged the water with his back to the window and counted to forty. When he turned around they were still there, except they’d turned their backs to his house, as if they knew he might try to read their lips and figure out what they were saying.

  * * *

  She had a gun in her handbag. She hadn’t taken it out, she hadn’t even mentioned it, but they found it in the ambulance when they were going through her things. All she wanted was the secret weight of it hanging off her shoulder, cold and solid when she rummaged through her bag for her wallet. She hadn’t planned on using it. She couldn’t even imagine using it. It was just a thing to have. A thing that would surprise people, if it came to it, a thing that surprised her when she remembered it was there and what it was made to do. But the EMT who spotted it handed her whole bag over to the cop like it was on fire. “Your husband, he’s on the job?” the cop asked, holding Brian’s little off-duty five-shot away from himself like it was contaminated. “Local or city?” He popped open the cylinder. “Jesus Christ,” he said, and tilted the gun so that five bullets slid neatly into his palm. Anne Stanhope refused to answer. Once she’d stopped howling in the store, she was unable to speak. She had no interest in speaking. Speaking was a habit she’d gotten into years ago, in the distant past, and now that she’d stopped she felt no desire to start again. It was pointless anyway—all the blah-blah-blabbing and, still, no one understood each other. The EMT came at her with a small plastic cup at the bottom of which a large yellow and white pill rolled around. He lifted her head to place a pill on her tongue, and she spit it back at him.

  “Why’d you have this in your bag today, Anne?” They were idiots, she thought. Each one more idiotic than the last. They had no brains for nuance. They
had no conception of a way of thinking that was different than their own. “Your husband. He left this at home?” They assumed Brian was at work, but Brian wasn’t at work. He was at the garage not a mile away from Food King, hoping the mechanic there could squeeze six more months of life out of his Chevy. He’d left the gun where he always left it when he was off duty—on top of the bookcase in the family room. Yes, he was supposed to be wearing it but he couldn’t be bothered. He was in Gillam. Why would he need it? Anne would have had it back on the bookcase without him ever realizing it was gone.

  * * *

  In the fluorescent light of the hospital corridor, in full view of any person who might happen down the hall, they unstrapped her from the gurney and lifted her onto a hospital bed. Someone rolled her over and someone else tugged down her pants until she could feel her bare behind was exposed for the world to see. She began laughing. They told her to be still so she wagged her behind a little to show them she didn’t care. Someone pushed a needle into her and she noticed she was sobbing. She didn’t remember that she’d stopped laughing. She turned her face to the mattress so they wouldn’t see. Now the sheet under her face was damp and would stay damp until they changed the bedding or moved her again. Someone put thick socks on her bare feet.

  When they moved away from her, she figured she had two or three minutes. Maybe less. It all depended on what they’d given her. The cop was hovering around the nurses’ station, the attending physician was with another patient—so she summoned all her strength and stood from the bed. It felt as if they’d attached lead weights to her wrists and ankles. She had a lead anchor strapped to her chest. She moved down the hall and had the same feeling she’d had as a kid trying to run in water. Right. Left. One. Two. Working hard but not getting anywhere. She’d grown up swimming at Killiney Beach, the stones in the water there rattling around inside the waves like bones in a bag. Diving under, you risked getting pummeled. Her mouth was hanging open and her lips were dry. One foot in front of the other she made it to the end of the hall and slipped out through the swinging doors. They still had her shoes, her coat, her bag, but at home she had more shoes, she had another coat. When she reached the lobby, she put her hand on the reception desk for a moment to catch her breath, and the attendant didn’t even notice she was there. When she stepped outside there was a cab waiting, and she had just enough strength left to open the door and collapse onto the smooth bench seat, the most comfortable seat she’d ever sat upon. It was warm in the cab, and the driver caught her eye in the rearview as if he’d been waiting for her. She knew then that everything had turned around since the supermarket, and now the world was falling over itself to win back her favor.

  “Gillam,” she said. “One-se-ven-one-one Jeff-er-son Street.” She said it slowly, as if speaking to a child. She knew she wouldn’t be able to repeat it. She closed her eyes and slept.

  * * *

  It was Francis Gleeson’s face she saw next. His stubbled jaw was different from Brian’s. He had a nice face, really. Not as handsome as Brian’s but nice enough. Dependable. A big Irish head like a cabbage. He was holding her tight. She wanted to ask him about the sound of the waves in Galway, if it was the same bag of bones as in Dublin. He’d tried to talk to her about Ireland once. Early, early, early on. Lena Gleeson was spilling over in those years between the breasts and the belly and the wet-mouthed babies hanging from her. But now Anne wished she’d been kinder. He was carrying her easily, and just as if he entered her house any day of his life, he continued past the threshold, all the way upstairs, and laid her on her bed. She decided if he tried to rape her she’d just let him and deal with it later because she didn’t have the strength to fight. She tried to tell him there was money for the cab in her wallet, but her mouth didn’t work. And she had no wallet. Her feet were so cold.

  * * *

  Peter thought he and his mother might be able to keep the whole thing from his father if they thought it out and worked together. She hadn’t told him what to do, but he figured they had time; he knew his father wouldn’t find it unusual to come home to her asleep upstairs. But then, after carrying his mother up the stairs, Mr. Gleeson didn’t go home like Peter expected him to. “Your mother’s resting,” he said, and asked if Peter would like to go over to his house for a while. Kate wasn’t home but Peter could watch a movie with Natalie and Sara. When Peter refused, Mr. Gleeson just sat down on the Stanhopes’ porch step and waited. Peter couldn’t remember if he’d turned off the car ignition or if it was still up there idling in the Food King parking lot, still ticking off the top one hundred hits of 1990. Then the police officer who’d been asking Peter all those questions at Food King showed up; he’d headed straight to 1711 Jefferson Street as soon as Anne was discovered missing from the hospital. Mr. Maldonado was outside taking down his Christmas lights even though it was after dusk by then, and Peter watched him look over at Officer Dulley in his navy uniform.

  Officer Dulley and Mr. Gleeson talked on the lawn, and when Brian finally came home, Peter watched from the window as they spoke to him, and then stepped aside as he rushed into the house and swept his hand back and forth, back and forth across the top of the bookcase. Mr. Smith phoned to make sure Peter was okay. As soon as he’d gotten home and told his wife everything that had happened, his wife had reprimanded him for dropping Peter off, for leaving him alone when it would be dark soon, what a thing for a boy to cope with by himself. “Slow down,” Brian Stanhope said, stretching the phone cord as far away from Mr. Gleeson and Officer Dulley as possible. “Now say all that again, would you?”

  For the next few hours there were dealings at the adult level that Peter couldn’t quite follow. His father noticed him sitting on the staircase in the dark, listening, and sent him to his room, but he returned not two minutes later and listened more. Mr. Gleeson and his father were in the same precinct again, Peter gathered, like they’d been for a few years when they were rookies, but now their precinct was in Manhattan, the Two-Six, near Columbia University. He remembered now. Mr. Gleeson had a brogue that was different from his mother’s but they both said “Brian” like “Brine”—blending the syllables into one.

  “Brian,” Mr. Gleeson said, “no one wants you to get jammed up.” Officer Dulley’s expression confirmed this was true. His father raised his voice, “I was at home! I was off duty!” Mr. Gleeson pointed out that, in fact, Brian had not been at home. In fact, he was at the auto shop on Sentinel and now he was up a fucking creek. Mr. Gleeson sounded both angry and disgusted, and for the first time Peter wondered if Kate’s dad was his dad’s boss. He tried to remember how the ranks went. His dad was a patrolman. Mr. Gleeson was a lieutenant.

  “Get organized, Brian,” Mr. Gleeson said. “You have to think,” he said, jabbing the side of his own head as he said it. Peter tried to peer around the banister to see his father’s face where the weak light from the corner lamp found it.

  Once, when Mrs. Duvin told Peter he had to get his act together in front of all the other kids, he felt his face burn and was afraid he would cry. He prayed his father wasn’t crying, but he couldn’t see his face, only his knee, the leg of his pants. They were quiet in there for a long time. Then, without warning, they seemed to decide something. Officer Dulley handed his father a gun that Peter realized was his father’s own gun. His father shoved it into the waistband of his jeans.

  His mother slept and slept.

  * * *

  Nineteen ninety-one arrived, winter break ended, and Peter went back to school. On that first school day of the new year he made himself a good breakfast. He packed his lunch. He brushed his teeth. His mother came downstairs as he was rinsing his cereal bowl but she didn’t speak to him at first. Instead, she opened the window over the sink and closed her eyes to meet the blast of cold air that rushed in. “You’re exactly like him,” she said after a minute, still with her eyes closed.

  “Like who? Like Dad?” Peter said. He knew she didn’t mean it as a compliment.

  “Like Dad?”
she mimicked, exaggerating his expression without looking at him, making her face dopey and stupid, like she was performing for an audience she hoped to make laugh. “Like Daaaad? Like Daaaaaaaaaaaaaad?” He calmly took his backpack from the peg by the door and fitted it over his shoulders. He felt lonely all of a sudden. Everything in their house was lonely: the dark china cabinet filled with fragile things no one ever touched, the fake plant sitting next to the sofa, the crooked window shade, a silence so violent he wanted to clap his hands over his ears. The bus honked outside.

  “Bye,” he said.

  She made a wave in the air like she was swatting a fly.

  “Did something happen to your mom?” Kate asked when they’d taken their seats on the bus.

  “No,” Peter said.

  “I thought I heard my parents talking.” At school, none of the kids said anything, not even Chris Smith. Peter could tell Kate, he knew, but he didn’t know what he’d even say. His mom took pills now. That was new. He could tell Kate that they’d shown up by the kitchen sink on New Year’s Day. That there were two big amber bottles and she took one pill from each with a huge glass of water. Then she sort of leaned over the sink for a minute and groaned. Sometimes his father picked up the bottles and held them up to the light, shifted the contents a bit like he was counting how many were inside. “Is Mom sick?” Peter had asked one evening.

  “Who? Mom?” his father said. And didn’t answer.

  * * *

  She returned to work the same week Peter returned to school. She’d taken her leftover vacation days at Christmas, and everything that happened fit neatly into that two-week frame. No one mentioned Food King, or the ambulance, or Mr. Gleeson carrying her inside. But after a few weeks, Peter could feel something new stirring, a shift in air pressure, a tilt in a direction he had to reorient himself toward. Breakfast, school, homework, playing—the days and weeks looked mostly the same as they always had. After Mass on Sundays they still slipped out the side door while the other families stood around and talked out front. Now they bought their groceries at the more expensive store two towns away and whenever they left, his mother would stand by their car for a minute to study the receipt with a downturned mouth. But that wasn’t it. Ever since the New Year, it was as if what they were saying to each other—he and his mother and his father—was not really what they were saying to each other.