Over a telephone line Minnie says, “I drove by the Tower of David today. All that mirrored glass reflecting the scabs down below, and I thought of your father. Too much?”
“Never enough,” I say.
“What you run to, what you escape from, never ends up as good as you want it to be,” Minnie says.
I’ve graduated from My Little Pony, Glo Worms, and Strawberry Shortcake to nineties teen melodramas. Cakes decorated with scrunchies and Baja shirts remind me of 90210, of R.E.M. and Paradise Cove. Banana cream pies in the shape of a swan are a nod to Swans Crossing, the ill-fated morning soap that starred a young and cunning Sarah Michelle Gellar. I hide the cakes in my kitchen and take small, measured bites before I leave in the morning.
It’s like heroin, only cheaper.
But I let Jonah in, and watch as his hands rove the photos on the walls and the books in the bookcases. He listens to me. From sundown to sunrise, I tell him stories. That, for a time, it was just me and my mother, and I wanted to hold on to that happiness for as long as I possibly could, but Ellie was always distracted. Always looking beyond me, she was determined to see what was on the other side. I tell Jonah that James taught me to bake. How I tended to my cakes as if they were children, exercising patience, restraint, and a love that was missing from our cold and very beautiful home. Baking gave me a family, and for years I remained like that, a woman alone, living with machinery.
I regard the windowsill as if it’s a place where tears could be deposited.
Jonah gestures at the barren walls and bookcases, places where framed photos would reveal the history that is one’s life. He says, “There are no photos. Anywhere. Do you have a family?”
“We’re not exactly the pose-for-pictures kind.” I remember a time when the local paper wanted to take our picture. I had a minor part in a play and we closed on a good run. An old man with a camera signaled for all of us to huddle, get closer, closer. Ellie walked out of the frame, James trailed her, and I stood alone, staring at the ground. The old man snapped the picture anyway but it never made the paper. Weeks later, we received the stills in the mail, and there’s me, tormented, and a boy about my age—his face all blurred out—resting his hand on my shoulder. “And the ones I did have are gone.”
“My father . . .” Jonah says, and falls quiet—his father will always be a sentence he struggles to complete. “He loved my sister, completely, and she didn’t even know it. Gillian threw it away because she felt entitled to a love that’s easy, and never got the simple fact that love is something you earn.”
“Do you love her?” I ask.
“That’s an interesting question,” Jonah says.
“A simple one.”
“There was a time I’d do anything to protect her, but she makes it difficult for me. I noticed all these people around her get hurt, but she’s the one who survives, and it occurred to me that she didn’t need my help. If anything, I needed her. I suppose, in some way, I’ll always need her.”
“Need isn’t the same as love.”
Jonah stares at me in a way that feels like I’ve intruded in his private space, trespassed where I’m not supposed to go. “My sister makes it impossible for me to love her.”
I wonder aloud about work, how it’s possible that Jonah is ensconced in my home in the middle of the day. Jonah was an artist once, but now just lives off a bit of money put away. Now he takes pleasure in watching other people go to work.
“You don’t have a job?” I say.
“I have a kind of work,” he says.
“I don’t understand.”
“I have projects that occupy my time.”
The phone rings. It’s Minnie and she’s breathless. “I’m with some Colombians,” she says. “A singer and an exporter who tell me I’m the perfect cover.”
“Where are you?” I shout.
“Cartagena. I had to dump the caftans. I got me some Jackie O sunglasses and boleros. The girl sings me to sleep, Spanish lullabies. The man is always on the phone. Mostly they ball in the other room while I watch TV. We’re about to take down a score.”
“Speak English, Minnie. You’re not making any sense.”
A rustling of paper, a radio turned up high. “I’ll call you when it’s safe.”
When I hang up the phone, I fail to notice the tremors.
“What’s wrong?” Jonah says.
“I don’t know when it’ll be safe.”
I wonder what my mother would have done, had she not had the cancer, had she not stopped caring. I’d like to think that Ellie would have reverted back to a semblance of her former self. She’d meet Gillian head on, interrupt the fucking, and say, “Do you really think he’ll ever leave me?” While my mother may have taken James Kelleher’s last name, that man belonged to her; James was her property, and no way was she going to allow some red-haired, boarding-school whore of a woman trespass to her life.
BEFORE THE SICKNESS, before my mother’s body was burned, she was slick with baby oil. I was thirteen and we went to the beach to celebrate her birthday. She was a woman who always had to be near water. Hair pulled back tight, Ellie’s skin was fragile, the color of parchment, but she never feared the sun. She didn’t cower from the inevitable burning; rather, she sought it out, took it like sacrament. The years were an overcoat she was desperate to shed, and now all she wanted was to feel something. Later, I would spend an hour slathering Noxzema on my mother’s back (you feel this?), but now, right now, my mother smoked Virginia Slims down to the filter and dove into the water. Left her clothes, and her thirteen-year-old daughter, behind. The fathers gawked through their sunglasses, wiping froth from above their lips, while the mothers held their children close, pulled their skirts over their knees, as far down as they could go.
The sky was cloudless. The waves advanced.
The ticker tape of wet sand divided me from the water. That summer, I watched all the bodies emerging from the surf, and they looked as if they’d returned from war or a night cruising the strip: hair all webbed and matted, eyes red, the cold snaking their limbs with bumps. Why would I crawl, so willingly, into a coffin? But Ellie was at home in the water, setting up shop, ready to do business. Sometimes, when she didn’t think I could hear her, she pretended to be talking to someone named Cassidy. Telling Cassidy to cool it with the black beauties. Those pills will kill you.
Hours later, the sun settled into the waves that had turned black. The fathers took swigs from beers with tears raining down the bottle while the mothers folded everything into squares. Where are you? I wondered, scanning the shoreline.
A man slept behind the rocks. Curled up against the moss, the flies arranged themselves around his body in the shape of a halo. The rocks were a muted gray, drilled with holes that gave the appearance of eyes, from which ants traveled in and out. I wanted to lean in and check for signs of life, but my mother had warned me about the men. Always sleeping. Always jerking off. Don’t get too close.
It’s not like I hadn’t seen a dead body before.
“Let’s go,” my mother said. “Now.” I threw my books, towels, and beach pail into my book bag while my mother made a break for the boardwalk. Our footfalls caused a pigeon riot; they scattered and abandoned the remains of half-eaten hot dogs and tepid cheese fries.
On the boardwalk, I heard a familiar voice call out my mother’s name. “You’re going to ignore me now? Is that any way to treat me after all that I’ve done? The thing with Delilah, the thing about your grandfather, I mean, how could I tell you? I thought you already knew. Don’t you turn your back to me!” The seagulls came like swallows.
Under her breath I heard Ellie whisper, “You knew for years. You knew everything and didn’t tell me.” To me she said, “Come the fuck on.”
How is it that she’d managed to light a cigarette and smoke it?
In the car my mother said, “That was close.” We were stone on the ride home. In the driveway she said, “Don’t tell James. Our secret, okay?”
&nbs
p; “That was my real father, wasn’t it? Tim. How could you just run away?”
“What do you mean, real? You act as if James were imaginary. Real is what’s in front of you, not what you’ve left behind. Promise me you won’t say anything. Promise me you won’t ruin this.”
“I barely remember what he looks like. Do you know what it’s like to forget your father’s face?”
Ellie sat quiet, covered her mouth with her hand as if she could catch the words coming out of her mouth and prevent my hearing them. “I do know what it’s like. I never knew my father; he died when I was three. Actually, to be specific, he got killed right in front of me, in a car accident, although I can’t remember any of it. Sometimes I wake at night and see glass and a camera and that’s it, that’s all I have of him—a few broken objects. Do you see me crying? Do you see me whimpering for Daddy like a fucking baby who’s shit her diaper? Consider yourself lucky that you had this time with Tim because this is life, and we bear it. We take our losses, and we don’t act like children stomping our feet when we don’t get what we want.”
“I am a child,” I said. “And it’s not wrong to want your father.”
“How many times do I have to explain this to you? You have a father,” Ellie said, exasperated. She cut the engine, opened the car door, and walked into the house.
Later that night I heard the familiar creak of my mother’s bed. Ellie was sobbing through the sex, and afterward, James promised her that he’d rub it all away.
“Why didn’t you tell me you saw him?” James said.
“What was I going to say? The man who beat my head in and fucked my daughter found me? Things have been so quiet. Now Tim’s back and it won’t take him long to find us. We have to go, James. We have to sell the house.”
“No, we have to call the police,” James said, firmly. “We don’t have to run from that monster; we’ll have his ass in jail.”
“You know we can’t do that,” Ellie said.
Monster? Beat my head in? Fucked my daughter? What was she talking about? My father wasn’t a monster. He wasn’t the one who strapped me into a car in the middle of the night and drove for two days until we arrived at the house owned by a man she met in the personals. He wasn’t the one who put a lock on the phone so I couldn’t dial out. He wasn’t the one who told my guidance counselor, My daughter is troubled, prone to telling lies, and can you call me if my daughter exhibits any unusual behavior?
If anyone was the monster it was Ellie.
I STRAIN TO recall the Tim who called out to Ellie on the beach all those years ago. All I can see are his aviators. But I remember the hurt on his face, how it washed his cheeks salty and white, and the heartbreak in his voice. When my mother used to talk about sacrifice, I wondered why money and comfort were what you earned when you traded in love.
In the mirror I notice my eyes. Were they always this blue? I seem to remember them being green. I have to put on some clothes—and that is the moment when I realize it’s over. My mother has been reduced to a pile of bone matter and fragments, gray sand that I can collect and hold in my palm, while my real father is forever waving from a boardwalk.
NO ONE EVER talks about what you do with a dead person’s things. Somehow we’re led to believe that after a funeral we’ll come home to boxes stacked neatly, a whole of someone’s life packed up and ready for the next place. We tell ourselves we do the right thing by donating the clothes where the scent of her soap lingers the most, and the library books she neglected to return (Spring Snow was the last book she read). We are not selfish; we keep only that which is necessary—a handful of things that bring us closer to the dead.
Ellie owned nothing personal. She had everything you’d expect a woman to have and nothing more, nothing that would allow you to lift up the folds of her skin and peer inside her beating heart—rather she was shut down, a closed-up cavity. Her life was a wiped-down crime scene: impeccable (and baffling) in the way that she left no fingerprints or impressions in the carpet. My mother wrote no letters, played no records, returned books to the library after she had read them (except for that last book, curiously), bathed with Ivory soap and water, and refused to have candid photographs taken. A life lived in perpetual reconstruction, Ellie torched all remnants of her history before James, before this home in which I now ghost, and this unremarkable life they once lived; so I end up taking a toothbrush rinsed clean and a hairbrush with strands of hair already discarded.
“Why couldn’t you leave me anything that would remind me of you?” I say, out loud, in the middle of the street, to no one in particular. I mourn my mother by brushing my hair, my teeth.
“You’re not alone in this,” Jonah says. He’s in my house now, eating a blueberry muffin. He’s in my house. How did he get in my house? I don’t remember letting him in. Did I let him in? These headaches; I keep getting these headaches. I’ve been having these dreams where a woman with red hair sprints past me. Her movements are so sharp and swift I feel her cut into my skin. Sometimes I wake and there are marks on my body.
“How did you get in here?” I say, reaching for the phone on the wall, but he intervenes.
“Call the cops? Now why do you want to go and do a thing like that?”
“The fact that you broke into my house in the middle of the night to eat a muffin. That’s not even my muffin. Where did you get that muffin?” I say.
“I didn’t break in, Kate. You let me in. Five minutes ago. Don’t you remember?”
“No, I don’t remember.”
“It’s the headaches, right? They’re always worse at night.”
How did he . . . ?
Jonah’s holding up the muffin for inspection, plucking out blueberries. “With you there are always surprises.”
“We barely know each other,” I say, and the headache, the rush of it, hurtles back, and for a moment I see a pair of tweezers falling to the ground. Tweezers, a boy with a bloody blue eye, a car hitting a tree, a hospital—the images come in waves, but they come swiftly, careening in front of me, and for a moment I feel suffocated by pictures moving.
“When I was five, my father told me that a dog in the neighborhood had mange. The kind of disease where mites burrow under the skin, and the poor dog had to claw at something he couldn’t get to, but how could he know that? The dog was a skinny thing with crusts up and down his flank. So my father shows me a pup that was part of the litter, and tells me that the pup’s got the sickness. We drive home, and later that night I get out of bed. I leave the house through the front door. I find a rock. I find the dog. I hit him with it. So hard that the puppy squeals and a man runs out of his house and kicks the shit out of me because his dog is fine. Turns out, he didn’t have mange. No dog in our neighborhood did. That’s just a story my father liked to tell,” Jonah says. “My father isn’t as innocent as he makes himself out to be. He has motives.”
Jonah lowers his eyes, chuckles, as if conjuring a scene from memory, one that he’d give anything to project onto a screen, onto the sky.
I reach for the muffin. Jonah tears off a piece. We chew.
“I killed because my father told me to. The knowledge of that does things to you, changes you.”
“Your father didn’t tell you to hurt that dog. That was a decision you made on your own. Why didn’t you take it to a shelter or a vet? You’re acting as if death was the solution when it was only an option. I’m not saying your father’s not a dick, but you had a choice. You do see that, don’t you? You chose to kill that animal instead of seeing if it could survive.”
Jonah laughs; bitterness gives it edge. “Where did you learn that from?”
“Learn what?”
“Compassion, empathy.”
“You don’t learn it. You have it. Everyone has it. So I have it.”
“You think children have the luxury of choice.”
“We’re not children, Jonah.”
“You can’t afford to be this blind, Kate. Not now.” Jonah sighs. He looks impatient, like
a clock’s ticking in his hand and time’s running out. He paces the room, asks, “Where the fuck is Lionel when you need him?” (How convenient for Lionel to take a pass on this, to finally let Jonah do the dirty work.)
Who is Lionel, and why is Jonah acting as if he’s a person who should be in the room with them?
“Why are you telling me this?” I say.
“Consider it a motivational speech. You’re not going to let them get away with your mother’s death, are you?”
“What I did was wrong.”
“What you did was incomplete,” Jonah corrects. “Because in this story, right now, you’ve got the dog with mange. Now it’s up to you to put it out of its misery.”
“This is your sister you’re talking about. The woman I took from her home and tried to burn alive in a hotel room. The woman who could’ve had me arrested and in jail right now, but didn’t. This is the same woman, right? I’m not crazy, right? Because all I want to do now is go back to normal. Back to my life.”
“Tell me about this life. Where you get up every morning to walk to a job you’re about to lose. Where you come home every night and sit in silence, thinking of new ways to make yourself more like your mother. How is this a life? I want you to think back to that day, how you saw what you were about to do as a way out, because it was. So finish this.”
“Have you been watching me all this time?” I rise.
“Kind of like how you’ve been stalking my sister and your father fucking for months? Like that? The guilt must be killing you.”
“That was different. What I did was in self-defense.”
“Is that a fact? I think your mother was pretty resourceful. It wasn’t like she didn’t know; it was more like she didn’t care. But for some reason, you do. You cared enough to make up for how much your mother didn’t.”
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