Ask Again, Yes

by Mary Beth Keane

  There had been a period of months when he hadn’t been able to see his mother at all. His father saw her a few times when she was being held in the hospital in the Bronx, but both the lawyers and the doctors thought Peter shouldn’t see her yet, not until things were settled. Seeing Peter, his father said, would upset what little balance she had, and they didn’t want to risk that. They framed it as their decision, all the men involved in her fate, and Peter worried about what she’d think about him not coming to see her. One night, not long after the trial was settled and she was transferred to the state hospital in Westchester, when his father finally got back to Queens, he put his hand on top of Peter’s head and told him she’d come around soon.

  Then he said, “I mean—”

  “You mean it’s her who doesn’t want to see me?”

  “She doesn’t know what she wants, Peter. Honestly. I only meant . . . I don’t know what I meant.”

  Peter mulled this over. It was as if he’d been looking out at the world from one window, and now he walked across the room to look at the same world from a different window. “If I show up there, she’ll see me. I know she will.”

  “Okay, bud,” his father said. “Next time. Let’s give it a try.”

  And Peter was right. She didn’t turn away when she saw him waiting there in the family room next to his dad. She was wearing a loose dress with bright flowers printed on the fabric, a black cardigan, slippers. She looked tired. She’d put on a lot of weight. She smelled like soup.

  “That’s the medicine,” his father told him later. “Puffs her right up. Changes her coloring, even. That’s one reason she hates it. It’s hard-core stuff. They have to take her blood every other day to make sure it doesn’t poison her.” She didn’t ask Peter any questions about himself, so he just began talking. He told her about his new school. He told her about Sunnyside. She stared blankly past him for a few minutes and then she held up a finger and shushed him. His father looked at his watch, used his smiling voice to say they’d better hit the road, there’d probably be traffic. He smiled harder to smooth their way out the door. “Go to that workshop Dr. Evans was talking about last week,” he said to his wife. “You’ll enjoy it! Anne, isn’t it great Peter came? He wanted to see you so bad.”

  “Get out of here,” Anne said. “I regret the day I met you.” Then she wrapped her cardigan tight around her body, and something in the regal sweep of the gesture soothed Peter, confirmed that the mother he knew was still in there, somewhere.

  Brian smiled like she didn’t mean it, smiled for Peter, and for himself, and then for the nurse who was sitting not six feet away.

  “But you,” she said to Peter, and her eyes welled up. She held her breath. “You.” She pressed hard on his shoulders and then withdrew her hands. “Don’t come here again,” she said.

  “Time to go,” the nurse said, coming up behind her and steering her down the hall. “That’s all for today.”

  “Another idiot,” Anne said.

  * * *

  Brian went to the hospital less and less. He said he had to work. He claimed to have gone to see her while Peter was at school. He was the one who told Peter it would be a cinch to take the train if he wanted to go on his own. George didn’t drink like he used to—he allowed himself two beers during Mets games, and so as not to tempt himself, he bought Budweiser singles from the bodega—and he asked Brian to head up to the Banner if he wanted a whiskey. Peter knew this because his father told him. “He fucked it all up, you know,” Brian said to Peter a few weeks after they moved in. “Brenda.” He wanted to warn Peter, he said, of what could happen if you lose control over your drink. What happens is your wife ends up leaving and you end up too scared to go to Shea, or to even watch a game at the same pub you were raised in.

  “I feel sorry for him,” Brian added.

  And where did you end up? Peter wanted to ask. If George was such a loser, what did that say about the older brother sleeping on his pullout? Now, instead of driving Peter to the hospital on Sundays, he went up to the Banner and made small talk with the bartender.

  The hospital staff didn’t like when Peter, a minor, showed up alone, but after conferring by the Xerox machine behind reception, they let him in anyway. The same nurses were always there on Sundays, so he got to know some of them by name, and they got to know him. A few times, he was only allowed to glimpse her through a glass panel in the door. On those occasions she was usually seated on the floor of a padded room. The first time he saw her like that, the nurse seemed to realize what she’d done, seemed to worry all of a sudden that she shouldn’t have let him see, and offered Peter a soda from the nurses’ fridge, which was normally off-limits to visitors. “You’re so tall,” she said to him. “What are you, a senior?” she asked. When he told her he was a freshman, she went pale. Once, his mother had an abrasion on her forehead, and though he normally tried to make himself as inconspicuous as possible, he couldn’t stop worrying about how she’d gotten it. Shaking, he’d walked up to the desk and asked what had happened, why her family hadn’t been called. He felt very grown up. “I’m sure someone spoke to your dad,” the nurse called Sal said. And then, leaning forward with a conspiratorial expression: “Peter, she probably did it to herself.”

  One time he arrived to find they’d cut her hair. Another time she refused to come out of her room, so he walked the two miles back to the train station wishing he’d left her a note to say it was okay, he’d see her next week. Sometimes she shuffled down the hall and sat with him but refused to speak.

  And now he had news that would upset her. He wouldn’t blurt it out. He’d wait until she asked for him. But that Sunday, twenty-four hours after his father left for a condo in South Carolina or North, she was waiting for Peter to arrive. Her hair was combed nicely. She looked neat and clean, somehow less swollen than she’d been.

  “So he left,” she said. He hadn’t even sat down.

  “Yeah, I guess so,” Peter said. “How’d you know?”

  “He came by here and I couldn’t tell what he was going on about at first and then I put it together. And you’re still with George?” She was lucid. Crystal clear. Like some series of adjustments had been made and here was his real mother, back again.

  “Yeah.”

  “And going to school? Your grades are good?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good. Okay, Peter, listen. It’ll be fine. What’s going to happen is I’m going to get out of here. They’re going to let me go soon. I was thinking we could start a shop, you and me. Not in New York. Maybe in Chicago. Or London. A specialty shop. A place people can buy things that are hard to find. We’ll have to live in public housing for a while and then we’ll get our own flat. We’ll meet loads of people going in and out and they’ll be a high-quality people. If George is good to you—is he good to you?—we’ll let him come on as an investor.”

  Peter didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing. The seconds ticked by. She went and stood by a bookcase that was stacked with board games.

  “I don’t think you’re getting out soon, though, Mom,” he said finally. It was his job to tell her the truth now. Better tell her that truth than to say that her plan worried him, that it didn’t seem sound, that he had no interest in getting involved in a specialty shop, that he didn’t know what that even meant. Nurses and people on the administrative staff passed back and forth through the family meeting room, which was arranged with fake intimacy, a set of love seats and armchairs like they might pretend they were sitting in their own living room at home.

  Anne hugged herself and squinted up at a corner of the ceiling like she’d spotted a cobweb there.

  “Have you talked to that girl?” she asked after a while.

  “What girl?” Peter asked, though he knew. And then, “No.”

  “And her father? Good as new?”

  “I don’t know, Mom. I know he’s at home because I heard Dad and George talking about it once. I don’t think he works anymore. I don’t know.”


  His mother was quiet for a long time.

  “I knew girls like that. My sister was one. It’s witchcraft or something, the way they operate. But you’re strong, Peter, and you’re smart. Use your head. Picture her. She’s average in every way. You see that now, don’t you? A plain Jane. A nothing.”

  Peter told himself it was not cowardice that kept him from sticking up for Kate. What would be the point? Just then he remembered the way Kate used to fix her eyes on him when she knew something was troubling him. He thought of the way she’d tuck and retuck her hair behind her ears when she was excited about something. She probably hated him now.

  “I didn’t know you had a sister.”

  “Are you paying attention? Say it. Say, ‘I’m strong.’ Say, ‘I’m smart.’ ”

  “Where’s your sister now? What’s her name?” He knew his mother came from Ireland, that she’d had a family there, but she’d never, ever spoken of it.

  “Are you listening to me?” she asked sharply. One of the nurses glanced up, began walking over.

  “I’m strong. I’m smart,” he whispered. She seemed satisfied. She sent him over to the refreshment corner to get a cup of water and a stale cookie with a gummy piece of candied cherry in the middle.

  “Now,” she said when he returned. “Tell me about the race yesterday.” The nurse who had walked over returned to the sidelines.

  He didn’t know she kept track of his races, that she even remembered from visit to visit that he was on a team. He had a flashback of himself throwing his arm around the trunk of a tree after dropping out, Jim Bertolini’s thin blue-white legs passing by so closely that Peter could see the gooseflesh on his thighs. Dutch Kills had ended up placing third. They’d been favored to win.

  “It was good. It was fine. I did well.”

  “You see?” she said. “You’re strong. You’re smart. I told you.”

  * * *

  Back in Queens that afternoon, Peter opened the door to the apartment to find it had been totally rearranged, George standing in the middle of the room like he was surveying his kingdom. There was a small, unfinished table with two dining chairs facing each other. The couch was on the opposite wall, the TV moved to the corner. The recliner was gone. The enormous stereo was gone. The room looked twice as big. The plastic bins Peter had been using as a dresser were gone, and in their place stood a small wicker chest of drawers. A pan of meat sauce sputtered on the stove.

  Peter felt his whole heart well up and he was afraid to say anything. He dropped his backpack, curled his hands into tight fists, and held his breath.

  “It’s good, right? Looks awesome, huh?” George stepped toward him, and when he saw that Peter was struggling, he bear-hugged him, lifted him clear off the ground, swung him around a bit until Peter laughed.

  “Jesus,” George said, handing him a napkin. “Look, I bought napkins.”

  When dinner was ready George bustled around and eventually set down two plates of pasta, two ginger ales. They sat at the table, which was so small their knees touched. They angled the chairs a little. George prattled on about the Mets, about the construction on the FDR, about a girl he met years ago that he wished he’d dated back then, about whether it would be a cold winter or a mild one. Peter hoped he’d never stop talking.

  “So, you didn’t say anything,” George said when they’d finished eating and it was time to clean up. “You didn’t notice.”

  “What?” Peter asked, alarmed.

  “Take it easy, kiddo,” George said softly. “I only meant you didn’t notice these.”

  He opened a cabinet to reveal a stack of six white porcelain plates sitting there, gleaming.

  seven

  THE DOCTORS RELEASED FRANCIS to home care once he could manage a full lap of the fourth floor corridor without stopping. He’d come to think of his brain as a delicate jewel set within a hard crown. It had to be protected because it controlled everything. He knew it before but now he really knew it. Thoughts, feelings, all those things people spoke of as coming from the heart, the gut, they were all physical processes, no more abstract than a bone or a tendon. One of the consulting neurosurgeons told him that he’d once put his finger in the place thoughts are made, and Francis wondered how a person empties the dishwasher after that, how he balances his checkbook and does his laundry. Francis’s own brain was damaged, but the good news was that the bullet had not crossed hemispheres. He and Lena learned quickly that the good news was always called good news. The bad news was called something else.

  The bullet had entered somewhere behind the left side of his jaw and exited through his left eye, destroying the medial wall and most of the lateral wall of orbit. He could now diagram the anatomy of an eye socket and brow ridge as easily as he could draw directions to Food King from his house. The doctors explained to him the next steps in photos and 3-D models, and he’d gotten into the habit of letting his fingers play across his face to make sense of what they were saying, and of the new topography there. There were days when the pain drew a map all on its own, sharp lines stretching from his nose to his ear, like red-hot razor blades moving under his skin.

  The therapists told him to break everything he did into a series of small movements. Bend right knee, lean forward, step. Swing left arm. And rest. Walking, turning in bed, raising the phone to his ear—any movement at all sent waves of electric shocks through the fragile architecture of his face. They’d taken skin from other parts and stretched it across his cheek, where it would never grow a five-o’clock shadow. He could only compare their explanations to construction work he’d done around the house—repairing drywall with wire mesh, spackle, sandpaper, paint. When he got a staph infection in his new cheekbone, they had to take it apart and do it again. The left side of his body didn’t need any coaching and most days his right side mimicked the left, but on days when his gait was too out of whack to make it very far, he imagined a little drawbridge that connected the two halves of his brain had been lifted, and no cars were allowed to pass. Sometimes, when he was in bed, he might glance toward the yellow den of light the nurses stepped through when they came to tend to him, and see shapes and patterns slide by, tumbling over one another as if afraid to be seen. Almost every afternoon, for a period of minutes, the shape of a currach hung on the wall across from his bed, but when he looked away and turned back to it slowly, it was never there. Occasionally, human figures stood outside the window, no matter that his room was on the fourth floor. They wore dark hats and mostly kept their backs to him. He thought they might be playing cards. Once, feeling good, he bent over to tug up one of his slipper socks that had fallen down around his ankle, and the blood rushed straight to the seams of his face and he passed out from the pain. When he came to he was on the cold linoleum floor and one nurse was telling the other that smelling salts wouldn’t work because his olfactory nerve had been so damaged. No one had said that to him yet. It explained why the heavy gravy-laden dinners they served most nights tasted like nothing, and the only difference between each meal was the texture of the food inside his mouth, but sometimes the smell of a campfire wafted into his room without cause or explanation.

  He told the doctors and Lena only a portion of what he experienced, what he noticed. He’d lost his left eye and the right had gone rogue, seeing things that weren’t there. They knew that. Why go into the details of what it meant? They told him he was lucky. The bullet had missed the high-value real estate of his brain stem and thalamus. That he could speak so soon after they took him off the vent meant that his language and verbal cognition were unharmed. They’d removed a section of his skull in the beginning, and replaced it when the swelling went down, but then removed it again when he got an infection, and replaced it again when it healed. Things that would have once struck him as horrifying now seemed matter-of-fact. The girls used to pull dandelions from the grass and sing, “Mama had a baby and its head popped off.” Then they’d use their little thumbs to pop the flower off the stem.

  He would
n’t be ready for a prosthetic eye until he’d done more healing, so they fitted him for a pressure patch and told him that was so his right eye would get stronger, start doing the job for both eyes, but once he saw his face, he wondered if it was also to be merciful to his family and his friends, who had to look at him.

  There was no mirror in the bathroom of his room. At night, with the light on, he could look to the window and see himself, but the reflection was too bright at the top because of the fluorescent overhead light. When he actually saw his face—Lena sat next to him on the bed and drew out a hand mirror from her bag—it reminded him of a clay model of a head that was handled too roughly before it had set. The top of his forehead to his jaw was a shallow concave bowl, like a dented fender. It was discolored, full of blues and yellows and grays. They’d been repairing him bit by bit, and he understood that what he was seeing had once been a lot worse, that he’d already come a long way toward looking like a normal person again. Lena said softly, “Not that bad, right? Nothing that can’t be fixed.” He hadn’t seen her cry almost at all since everything happened, but she cried that day. “Say something,” she said, but he didn’t know what. It wasn’t that he’d ever considered himself handsome. It wasn’t as if he’d ever taken much notice of that sort of thing. But when he’d last looked in a mirror, he recognized himself.