Ask Again, Yes

by Mary Beth Keane

  “Why don’t you?” Dr. Oliver asked.

  Because it would be one more thing, she wanted to shout. One more goddamn thing! All this weekly talking and it was as if he’d never heard a single word she said.

  “I miss Dr. Abbasi,” she said instead of answering his question, hoping to stir some professional jealousy.

  * * *

  In mid-October of that year, the doorsteps of Saratoga County made festive with pots of mums and jack-o’-lanterns, Anne stopped at the same gas station she always used, but on this day, hanging in the window of the small storefront catty-corner to where she was standing, was a sign: “Private Detective, Discretion Guaranteed.” At different times that same storefront had housed a psychic, a therapist, a tax preparer. Now this. She jogged across the road while her car was filling and just walked by, at first, taking one quick glance at what was within. She turned and passed again. By her third pass a man had opened the door. He barely came up to her nose and had a paper napkin tucked into the collar of his shirt. She just wanted to know, was all. She wasn’t ready to hire anyone or anything. How much did it cost, anyway? Just an address would be fine, she said, in case there were different prices for different levels of information. If she were handy with the internet like the young nurses at the home, this might be something she could find herself. One of these days Anne planned on asking the nice one, the fat one named Christine, how to open an email account.

  Anne told the little man everything except the reason she didn’t know where her son was. She wrote him a check for one hundred dollars because it seemed safe enough; the balance wouldn’t be due until he got her the information she wanted, but almost as soon as she was back in her car, driving off to work, she began to feel like a prize idiot. He’d probably collect one hundred dollars from one hundred idiot women that week, and then he’d pack it in and take off for a new location. But she didn’t call the bank to stop payment on the check.

  It took him only two days to get back to her, and the price was far cheaper than she’d braced herself for. He told her that if there was anything else she needed, anything else she wanted to know, to just be in touch. But what she wanted to know was whether he was doing okay, whether he was happy. If he wasn’t happy, if he wasn’t doing okay, what would she be able to do about it? Take him back to her three-hundred-square-foot apartment to live with her? These were things the man couldn’t answer. He handed over a manila folder, and she took it home and left it in the middle of her bed and avoided looking at it as she heated soup for dinner.

  Finally, when there was nothing left to do, she opened it. On top, a typed address. Info about the building, how much his apartment cost to rent. The name and phone number of the management company.

  After that, a photo of the building.

  After that, a photo of him, walking. Something in his hand. A backpack on one shoulder. The photo showed Peter from a distance of maybe fifty feet. Zoomed from an even greater distance. Anne brought her nose to the photo, tried to see him more closely, tried to breathe him in, this young man who was the baby she’d pushed out nearly twenty-two years ago. He was silent, too, at first, like his brother, and after one second of silence, two seconds, three seconds—the nurses huddled over him, their faces screwed tight as they handled him with alarming bluntness—four seconds, five seconds, six seconds—she let her head drop back to the pillow and accepted what she felt sure they were going to tell her, that this one would end like the last, only more cruelly because last time they’d been warned, at least, had time to prepare.

  But then he’d arched his back and cried, his face purpling with the strength of his howls, and they placed him on her chest, pale from whatever viscous material was inside her, whatever he’d lived on those forty long weeks. When she touched him, his body tensed against her hand.

  “You see that?” the delivery nurse said. “He’s already trying to lift his head.”

  “A strong baby,” Anne said, and realized the vibrations she was feeling weren’t coming through the bed but from her own body, which was sobbing, heaving. She gritted her teeth to stop from shivering.

  “A very strong baby,” the nurse said.

  * * *

  She thought she’d be able to make it until that Friday, when she had off, but just an hour into her shift she knew there was no way she could wait that long, so instead she started feigning illness. It was a plan that took shape as she was making it happen. She coughed into her fist a few times. Third and fourth graders from local schools had been trickling in all morning to make small Halloween parades for the residents. They answered questions about their costumes and held out their bags for candy, which they realized quickly came from the nurses’ station and not from any of the ailing souls who seemed perplexed by the small ghosts and skeletons, the witches and vampires. Anne put her palm to her own forehead when she felt sure people were looking. Eventually, she got noticed, and the charge nurse sent her home. She raced to the apartment to change, to brush her hair, and then she made straight for the thruway. It took three and a half hours to get there, Amsterdam at 103rd Street. A yellow brick building. Six steps up to the door. A broken light outside.

  What did she expect to see? Him, she supposed, more clearly than in the photo, perhaps sitting on the stoop just as she pulled up. Perhaps he’d come walking down the street at the perfect moment, from the perfect angle, and she’d know by the set of his shoulders how he was. When he was a boy—nine, ten—that age when boys are dying to be older than they are, he suddenly stopped crying when he was upset and instead would set his shoulders like he was pushing them apart to make them seem broader than they were. He’d put one foot after another in a way that scared her, that determination to keep going, that determination to not cry, no matter what. And while she knew his intention was to seem older, he always, always, seemed younger instead. It should have been enough to draw her out of herself, seeing the extraordinary effort a boy made to be okay, but it wasn’t enough. Some days she could put her hands on those small shoulders and steer him around to look at her, to make him understand that she was his mother and she loved him, even if she didn’t always say the words. But other times, times when he’d all but press his face against hers to get her attention, times when he’d kneel on the floor beside her bed and hold his grubby finger beneath her nose to check for breathing, it was impossible for her to even so much as open her eyes. But the worst times of all were when she punctured his strength on purpose just so she could see whether it was possible for those shoulders to wilt, to see if there was a limit to what he could handle.

  “I regret having a child,” she said to him once, for no reason at all, as he was doing his homework. “Greatest regret of my life.” It was quiet in the kitchen, just the two of them, Brian on an overnight tour. There were two potatoes baking in the oven, the house full with the earthy scent of roasting skins. Peter was about ten at the time, maybe eleven, and still, a decade later, she could see the way the white oval of his face had snapped up in surprise. He’d looked right back down at his homework page as if it hadn’t happened, but she could see in his posture that she’d thrown him, that where before he was concentrating in earnest, now he was just pretending. The tips of his fingers were white where he was gripping the pencil. The lead point hovered above the page.

  It had taken her a long time to tell Dr. Abbasi about that moment, her absolute worst, worse even than the times she smacked him, worse than shooting Francis Gleeson in the face.

  And whenever she glimpsed that moment—it came to her at any time, without warning, and always felt like a punch in the mouth—she wondered if it was possible that she had none of these things the doctors said she had, paranoid personality disorder, schizophrenia, schizoid personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, bipolar disorder, the diagnosis changed and morphed every year, new names for the same symptoms, but whether, in fact, she’d tricked them all, in a way, by going along, by taking the meds, by going to the sessions, tricked them the way Bria
n used to say she’d tricked him into getting married, into having a second baby, having Peter, when he’d never gotten over losing the first. She wondered if she was simply very, very mean.

  * * *

  “I’ll clean up,” Peter said that long, terrible night, May 1991, looking around at the mess she’d made of the house. He was fourteen already. Who could have predicted how that night would turn out? Five more minutes and she would have been too deeply asleep to hear the racket of Lena Gleeson pounding on the back door. She’d taken a sleeping pill, a half dose. She’d cracked the pill in two by pressing it hard into the palm of her hand. It would have been Brian’s problem to deal with and they probably wouldn’t have even told her about it. But when she walked to the window and looked down, there was Francis and Lena Gleeson and their daughter standing in the light of the Stanhopes’ back step. There was Brian’s long arm, holding the screen door open. By the time she got downstairs the Gleesons were gone, and Brian was telling Peter that he shouldn’t have snuck out like that, but he was so half-hearted about it, so damn soft about it like he always was, and so Anne had walked up and belted Peter across the face.

  “That’s for hanging around with that brazen girl in the first place,” she said. “And that’s for sneaking out.” She tried hitting him a second time but he dodged her, held his cheek, half turned to the wall like a child sent to the corner for punishment.

  And then she caught a look on Brian’s face. Disgust, yes, but also a confirmation of the thing he’d announced already, but was maybe still unsure about. So although her head was splitting and she felt so unbelievably tired, she turned to him and started up once again with the argument they’d been having for weeks. He wanted to take a break. He wanted to do some thinking, alone. She thought of the morning she told him that the baby was dead. She hadn’t seen the doctor yet. She just knew. No movement at all for more than twenty-four hours. A dull ache across her back. She knew in the shower. She knew as she sipped her tea. She knew as the wind stirred the odors of the sidewalk below their first floor window—they were still in the city then—and blew them into the room where they were standing, getting ready to head out to work. So she told him what she knew, told him how she knew it. But Brian poured cereal into a bowl, told her she didn’t really know, no, not really, only the doctor could tell them. And then, a few hours later, when the doctor did tell them, Brian had looked at her like he was looking at her now, like she’d done it, she’d made it happen, by just saying the words out loud.

  The night she shot Francis Gleeson, she hadn’t been feeling well for a long time, but she only realized that later. For months, conversations were drowned out by static, and she found herself having to speak louder, listen harder. She lost track of what people were saying. She lost track of what she was saying and sometimes heard herself speaking as if from across a room. Physical movements were becoming more and more difficult, like trying to swim through a vat of wet cement. But these were symptoms she only noticed after the static quieted, after the cement drained away.

  “It’s mostly like that for everyone,” Dr. Abbasi said. Everyone like her, he meant. It was impossible to have sufficient detachment at the most dangerous times. This was his way of saying she had to forgive herself.

  But there were other times, rare times, but still, they happened, when the fact that she didn’t feel well settled in her thoughts easily, clearly, like a sentence typed on a piece of paper, slipped under her door.

  “Brian,” she’d said one morning, not long before everything happened. It was a typed-sentence morning, perfect clarity. She could see herself in vivid color, high definition. They were still in bed. It was raining hard outside, and every time a car passed on Jefferson she could hear the water whipping under its wheels. What was she going to say? That she knew she made things hard? That she’d try that doctor again, the one who’d given her the prescription after she went into Food King with a gun? But before she could say anything, she saw him wince. She put her hand on his arm, she said his name, and he winced, kept his eyes closed even though she knew he was awake. Kept his eyes closed even though he was terrible at pretending, and as she watched his eyelids flutter, she had to fight the strong desire to poke him hard in each one, to blind him.

  Peter wanted to take care of everything, all the time. That terrible night, as she and Brian argued, Peter bent to pick up the lamp she’d knocked over. He crawled around on his hands and knees picking up magazines and mail and the little wicker basket that had held them and the figurines that had been lined up on the mantel before she flung them. The lights were on at the Gleesons’. The lights were on at the Maldonados’. She imagined all of Jefferson Street crouched outside in the dark, listening. She called Brian every name she could think of, and then she turned to Peter and used all the names again. She used words she couldn’t stand to hear other people say. Faggot. Fairy. Cunt. Why? She didn’t know. Still, no matter what name she called him, Peter kept that blank expression plastered to his face. Why was he so sure she didn’t mean it?

  It was hazy then, what happened next. Even in the privacy of her own mind, not remembering felt cheap, easy, and she tried to look closer, look more deeply, to discover whether she was being totally honest with herself and with the other people for whom it mattered. She did remember some things, but those memories were of a poor quality, like someone had smeared Vaseline on the lens. She remembered pressing the heels of her hands to her mouth and biting down. She remembered tasting blood on the tender inner part of her lower lip. The police said there was a kitchen chair pushed up to the fridge, no doubt so she could step up and reach the cabinet above. She couldn’t remember pushing a chair across the room. She couldn’t remember climbing on top. But she was the one who’d ended up with the gun, so it must have been her.

  “What do you remember?” The district attorney and another lawyer had asked her, their faces full of skepticism. She remembered the girlish giggle she used to feel rising up in her whenever Brian disappeared into the kitchen after his tours. As if she didn’t know exactly where his new spot was almost as soon as he picked it. He always emerged from the kitchen with a beer, as if that’s what he’d been in there doing, finding and opening a beer. As if that would ever take him more than two seconds.

  “What do you remember, Anne?” they asked her, two men, both in brown suits; it was impossible to keep track of them except that one was a little less ugly than the other.

  She remembered what Brian did. She remembered so well that she could play the scene, stop it, rewind it, play it again like a video. She had the gun centered on the flat of her palm, like on a plate or a tray. In her memory it looked like someone else’s hand, but she could feel the weight of the gun there when she really thought about it, so she knew it was her own. She wasn’t pointing it. She was simply holding it, observing it. It was dead, inanimate, but firing it would make it come alive. Peter put his hands to his hair when he saw it, and she wondered if that movement was written into his genetic code or whether he’d learned the gesture from being around Brian his whole life.

  “Mom,” Peter said, calmly, bravely, and looked to his father for help. But Brian said not one single word. Instead, he turned around and walked upstairs. That’s the part she could play for herself, for a lawyer, for a doctor, at any hour of the day or night, no matter what medication she was taking, no matter what sort of week she was having, if only they could hook up a cord to her brain and see it for themselves. Anne knew what he was hoping for, she knew exactly what he was hoping for, and he didn’t even have the basic decency to take Peter upstairs with him. So Peter went charging out the door to the Gleesons’, to get help.

  * * *

  After two hours of waiting in the chilly dusk, she could no longer deny that she had to use the bathroom. There was a Dunkin’ Donuts on the corner. Murphy’s Law was that he’d pass by just as she closed the restroom door, but she had to go and it couldn’t be helped. After her long vigil she was stiff getting out of the car, but she w
alked briskly to the corner, entered the store, bought a small black coffee just so the woman behind the counter would hand over the key, which was attached to a Ping-Pong paddle.

  The small place filled in just the short length of time Anne was in the bathroom. At the counter was an NYPD patrolman with his back to her, and next to him, a young woman dressed like a schoolboy of some kind—a dark wig cut short under a red beret, glasses with thick black frames. Behind them was a person dressed as a cookie, and just after that person, milk. Bacon and eggs. Wonder Woman. Bill and Hillary Clinton. The falling evening had an edge to it, the temperature dropping quickly. Outside on the sidewalk Pippi Longstocking walked hand in hand with the Cat in the Hat.

  The girl schoolboy had one tendril of dark blond hair dangling from the back of the wig, and when she and the patrolman turned, Anne stepped back to let them pass in the tight space. The young woman passed Anne first, and then the patrolman, and as they passed, the coarse fabric of the young man’s uniform jacket brushed Anne’s hand, and she felt a shiver. She held the Ping-Pong paddle before her, like a shield.

  At the door, the girl dressed as a boy turned around to say something to the cop, and as she was speaking she looked at Anne, briefly, without really seeing. But then she turned slowly back. The cop was holding the door for her, but still, she stopped, took off her costume glasses, and held Anne’s gaze across a room full of people, the leaves skittering along the pavement outside. Kate Gleeson, Anne thought, the syllables of the girl’s name banging around inside her head like a gong. “Jesus Christ,” she said aloud, and then she looked hard at the patrolman next to Kate. It was like looking at Brian Stanhope in the year 1973.