“Your mother likes it when I clean up after her. She’s always making a mess—in the kitchen and out of it.”
“I don’t understand,” I say.
“Father,” my mother urges. Her face is a dam breaking, and this is her drowning.
When my mother leaves, I turn to my grandfather and ask, “What happened to Delilah Martin?”
“You mean the woman they found by the Pavilion with the Bible in her mouth?”
“The other Martin.”
“You mean that troubled girl in the window?” We pass a few moments in excruciating quiet. Grandfather lays his pipe down on the table and taps his chin. This isn’t the kind of silence where a story needs to be quickly crafted or a conversation requires diverting, rather this is a deliberate quiet. The kind of quiet where one anticipates the impact of the words that follow, how one should pay strict attention to them. These words are the air we’re determined to breathe.
Time passes. Grandfather says, “I’m not sure you’d like the answer to that particular question. No, I don’t think you’d like it at all. So let’s leave it at this: Sometimes a man needs to do whatever it takes to protect his name. Especially when his daughter is hell-bent on ruining it.”
My mother swans about the house and talks about dinner: How it’s ready. How we need to eat before it gets cold. We use forks and knives because we’re safe now. There’s no more Ingrid. “We’ve closed that chapter,” Grandfather says.
What we have almost resembles a family. We have the taste of it (the tender lamb, the hot butter pooling in the potatoes), the smell of it (my mother’s hyacinths and my grandfather’s aftershave), the feel of it (my face all sore from my grandfather’s shadow, and the skin that nearly comes off when he kisses me). Finally, we have the sound of it: my mother’s hands clapping.
“I brought you a sandwich,” Tim offers after band class, months later. Ham and cheese with a smear of his mother’s homemade mayo.
“Why don’t you just quit band? Everyone knows you can’t play,” I say. “Everyone knows you’re no good at it.”
Shrugging his shoulders, Tim says, “Because it makes my mother happy. If she’s going to spend all this time making homemade mayo for my lunch, I owe her a night away from punching tickets at the Pavilion. You don’t know what it’s like working two shifts and having to come home and make your family sandwiches. She deserves a night where she can get dressed up and watch me perform. Music is music; it doesn’t matter if I’m not the one actually playing it.”
“But you don’t even like mayonnaise,” I say, confused. His words are a riddle I don’t understand.
Darkness stretches across Tim’s face, and he regards me with the same look Grandfather did all those months ago when I asked about Delilah Martin. “I would think you of all people would understand the kind of people we come from and who we are as a result,” he says, snatching the sandwich away.
There is no Delilah. There is no girl in the window, only the memory of it. While my grandfather remains in our house, we have normal feeding times. We open the curtains to let the light in, and wave to our neighbors when they pass by. We have something that resembles a family, a house that takes on the appearance of a home. Except in this house the basement is locked and only Grandfather has the key.
Sometimes, when they think I can’t hear or see them, they grieve. Sometimes, I walk on tiptoe to opposite sides of the house to hear my mother’s cries and my grandfather thrashing in his sleep.
FOLLOW ME INTO THE DARK
1958–1968
CAN I TOUCH you? Can I trace the archipelago of bruises on your face? Can I lay my hand on your heart and feel it beat? I want to put my mouth on yours and exhale so you can breathe. You’re purple and blue and there’s blood on your face from the men down the river who like to pick on boys who play instruments. My grandfather padlocked my mother’s door just in case she gets the urge to play warden and executioner. Night after night she cooks rare meat but doesn’t eat it.
I want to be normal. What’s normal? What we see on television is normal: dinners at six, ankle socks, cheering from the field and stomping in the bleachers, gossip on Mr. O’Hara, who can’t stop talking about the Cold War and the bomb that never dropped, Can you please pass the potatoes? I want this normal; I want to be afraid of the men on the radio, not what’s behind my front door. As long as my grandfather is alive, I’m safe. In five years’ time my mother will grow weak and her hands will involuntarily shake, and in ten years she will no longer remember her own name. I will find myself crawling my way back to her, and later I will become her. I’ll drag my daughter Kate underwater in hopes that the mermaids will sing her a song.
Not yet, not yet.
In two days, Tim, your mother will lose both of her legs in an accident at the Pavilion. Weeks later, in a moment of weakness she’ll make her mayonnaise, pack you a week’s worth of lunches, and after she sees you to bed she’ll pay a man to pour a bottle of pills down her throat so she can sleep full-time. You will both fall asleep at the same hour but she’ll never wake. You will run down a half-deserted street shouting her name until the police pin you down and toss a sheet over your mother’s cooled body. The police will tell their wives—Can you please pass the salt?—how you stretched out on the floor beside her, how you wept and prayed to the same God who couldn’t save Delilah Martin—What’s Jesus ever done for me? You will feel guilty for the accident and for her legs sawed off at the knees, for all of it. Your aunt will tell her friends that you sleep with the sandwiches wrapped in plastic under your pillow, as if this act of contrition will bring her back. I am Lazarus, come from the dead / Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all. But we don’t know any of this yet.
ELLIE LEFT A garden and walked into a cathedral, sat in the pew, tore a page from the Bible, and ate it. Outside, a man aimed his camera at the sky and photographed white. When they left, Norah shielded her daughter’s body as they approached the crosswalk. Norah waved at the photographer, who couldn’t see her because of all the light in his eyes. Temporarily blinded, the photographer walked into the street and got hit by a car. Ellie clutched the side of her mother’s skirt. Norah screamed. The camera shattered the car window and struck the driver. The photographer was dead. The photographer was Ellie’s father.
TIM WAKES WITH a start. Something’s wrong. Something’s not right. It’s too quiet in the house in which they sleep. His mother never rests; she’s always poised with one foot off the bed, ready to run. She takes naps standing up, but never does she allow herself to settle, to drift calmly to sleep. Rather his mother is a metronome, a body that oscillates from one part of the house to another. Now that body is missing a quarter of its total, confined to a wheelchair. Now that body needs a bottle of pills to keep it straight. Tim slips downstairs and sees a week’s worth of sandwiches arranged in one long row on the counter. They’re individually wrapped but he can still see the oil stain of the mayonnaise through the plastic. He smiles because although his mother takes pleasure in laying a wire hanger or a wrench on the small of his back on occasion, he knows she loves him in her own way. He opens the back door to see the sky painted black, pricked with stars. A man runs down the block. Even surrounded by all this beauty and quiet, something gnaws at him. Calling his mother’s name, his voice is soft at first, and then it crescendos to a shout. His feet take inventory of the handful of rooms, until he runs into the bedroom and finds her there. He closes her eyes with the pads of his fingertips.
Tim kisses his mother good morning and goodnight before he calls the police. When they come he’s in the kitchen, standing over the row of sandwiches.
There’s a platoon of officers on Tim’s street. He sits on his porch with a blanket draped over his shoulders while a woman leans in, talking, but he’s not listening. Instead he stares out into the street, at me, as I sit on my bike and wave. What happened? Why all the gruesome blue? From then on I will forever hate the color blue. A policeman tells me to go on home, there’s noth
ing to see. Tim pulls up his blanket and covers his head with it. Cradles his head between his knees. Ever set fire to an anthill and watch as the colony scatter and cover the ground only to inch their way back once the smoke clears, once the flames have gone out? All I can hear is a buzz, a whisper of that poor boy, that poor woman. I overhear something about legs all tangled up in a machine, and then I see an insurance adjustor and his notebook. He’s just here to get the preliminaries, take some pictures, and file a report because there’s always a claim, always an estimate and adjustment. I ride on home and later someone will tell me that the distance between Tim’s mother’s stumps and the ground were like a whole other country. I saw her in a wheelchair only once.
Ellie and Norah wore all black. Ellie didn’t understand death, she only knew her father had taken a long trip from which he’d never return. Would he send postcards? she wondered, feeling blue. Would he write? Ellie clapped all the way to the funeral: Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack. All dressed in black, black, black. With silver buttons, buttons, buttons. All down her back, back, back . . . Norah remembered a holiday she and her husband had taken, before their child, before the glass that splintered his face, where they’d stood behind giant rocks in front of the ocean. Norah couldn’t swim and he could, and he’d pulled her into the water, and she’d said, No, I’m scared. Of what? he’d asked. Of everything. So that day he carried her into the water, kneeled down, and held her as she dug her heels into the wet sand. I will always carry you, he’d said. It broke her now, as she rode in a black car, that she couldn’t carry him home. That’s men’s work, carrying a coffin on your shoulders while the women sat in chairs with linen napkins and quietly grieved. But she didn’t want to fucking grieve; she wanted the weight of her husband on her back. She wanted her daughter to shut the fuck up.
“You are not what I wanted,” Norah said.
A WEEK AFTER Tim’s mother’s death, I call him. Winding a telephone cord around my finger I say, “You don’t have to talk. We can just sit here, breathing. But if you want to talk, we can do that, too.”
“Why are you calling me?” Tim says.
“I don’t know. I wanted to,” I say. “I guess I’m sorry.”
“For what? Did you push her under that machine or shovel pills down her throat?”
“I guess I’m sorry you lost her. I’m sorry for your loss.”
Tim laughs, so loud I have to pull the receiver away from my ear. “Lost her,” he says. “You make it sound like she’s a mitten. I didn’t lose my mother, Ellie. She was here, in my house, in her room. I didn’t lose her; she didn’t run away. She killed herself. So there’s no way you can be sorry about that unless you were standing over her bed handing her pill after pill.”
“I know your mother’s not a mitten,” I say. My mother stands in the doorway and tells me we’re having beef stroganoff for dinner. Mashed potatoes, peas—the whole lot.
“Maybe what you can be sorry for is the way your family won’t take responsibility for my mother’s accident. Your grandfather sent a man out here with his forms and big words, talking to me as if I couldn’t read, but I can read, and the words on the claim form said free of culpability, which is just a fancy way of saying we get away with murder. Think about that when you’re eating your beef stroganoff with mashed potatoes and peas.”
Before Tim hangs up, I hear the sound of paper ripping.
At dinner, my mother inquires as to why I haven’t touched the food on my plate.
“Is it true?” I ask my grandfather. “We won’t pay Tim’s family what we owe them.”
“What is it that you think we owe them, Ellie?” Grandfather says, wiping sauce off his chin.
“His mother is dead,” I say.
“Have you ever seen the inside of a hospital? Have you ever had to pay a bill? The Pavilion—”
“Our family,” I interrupt.
“The Pavilion paid for all of her medical bills and aftercare. We hired a nurse and made sure she received a monthly allowance so that she could survive. Considering that woman did more drinking on the job than actual work, I’d say that we were more than generous. So if she’s going to get it in her head that she wants to swallow a bottle of painkillers because the going got a little tough . . . well, I don’t see how we can be responsible for that.”
I feel like Tim now. I feel like laughing. “She lost her legs and we gave her nothing.”
“No,” my grandfather interrupts. “You’re just not satisfied with what we gave.”
“I think we can do with a little pie,” my mother says. For a moment I wonder how badly she wants to lock me in the basement again. How deeply she longs for the return of Ingrid.
“We gave?”
“I don’t know why you insist on asking questions you already know the answers to. It seems to me that I’ve given you a lot,” my grandfather says.
“I think apple,” my mother says, laying a plate before me.
WILDFLOWERS GREW IN the field where the husband was buried. Norah picked them and pulled a ribbon out of her daughter’s hair. She bound the flowers together before laying them down on the grave. Norah couldn’t bury him alongside those other people and their crumbling headstones, arranged lilies, and relatives with their perfunctory grief. No, the husband belonged here, in front of the water; he belonged where her eye could see. There was a moment in the space between her inhales and exhales when Norah considered following the husband into the dark, but then Ellie sang and she was reminded that this child was what her husband had wanted. Sometimes she thought it was all he had wanted, and he would never forgive Norah if she abandoned her child. This made Norah resentful of a daughter who trampled gardenias and sang nursery rhymes, and every day that Norah was separated from the husband, every day she couldn’t smell his sour breath or feel the worms that stuck like pearls on his withering skin, she would remind her child of the dark. The depth of it, the ache of it, the pain of it.
A place of origin doesn’t exist. It’s just beyond our sacrifice.
TIM BLOWS INTO his saxophone as if it’s the first time he’s played it. His chest is flooded with air, and he heaves like he wants to storm everyone in his wake. Mr. Harmon sits down on his conductor’s chair and places his wand on the music stand. There’s so much anger in this room—it hovers over us as we play sonatas and fidget in our seats. But there’s also sadness, and we feel that too. Words exist that can pull Tim out of the darkness and into the light; we know they exist, we’re sure of it, only we don’t know the arrangement. We only know the music. So we do what we know how to do: we play off-key until the bell rings. Clutching his instrument to his chest, Tim doesn’t move. Even as the guys lay hands on Tim’s shoulder as they file out, even as the girls smile and carefully tiptoe over his feet. There are no words, only the silences in the beats between them.
“I’m sorry I’m related to greedy assholes,” I say.
Tim shrugs. “At least they’re still alive.”
Outside the window a girl in a cream sweater conceals her face with her hands while five other girls dressed in matching cobalt blue form a human pyramid. Tim and I watch the smallest one flip off two shoulders—back arched, chest to the sky—to the ground. A group of boys sporting letter jackets toss around a football even though they’re not really good at it—our team hasn’t won all year—but they don’t care. They cackle and snort over every fumble and talk about the big plans they have for the summer. This will be the summer they score. I think of Delilah and her belief that the whole world was her private television.
“I think my mother had something to do with Delilah’s disappearance. I came home from school one day, sick from what I don’t remember, and I heard them in my bedroom. In my fucking bedroom—how weird is that? Delilah and my mother were sitting on my bed, and I watched my mother take Delilah’s hair in her hands, saying, ‘This could be yours if you want it. Do you want it?’ And Delilah said, ‘Yes, but what do I have to do to get it?’ I hid in the closet and then my grandfather came in
and I still get the chills when I remember how he howled, ‘Get the fuck out of my house!’ My mother had to have known it wasn’t possible, right? She had to have known that you just don’t bring strangers into our house. But maybe she hoped that she could, and that was enough to make her stand up to her father, who cared only about our name and preserving it. And now Delilah’s gone. The only question is, who got what they wanted? So when you tell me that my family’s still alive, I have to disagree. I have to tell you they’re not. I live among the remains of people.”
“I miss the sandwiches,” he says, laying his instrument beside him. He stares out the window, stares through it. “I can’t bring myself to eat the ones she’s made, but I can’t throw them away. It just feels wrong, you know?”
“You’re playing,” I say, pointing to the saxophone.
“Everyone knew about your father and Farah Martin. About the affair. But no one knows about your mother.”
“She performs on cue.” We sit for a time and the sky folds into dusk. “I heard you’re moving.”
“California. My aunt’s moving here until the end of term and then I’m gone.”
“I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“That I didn’t try to know you more.”
Who are you again? I’m Lazarus. I’ve come back to see you.
SOMEONE TOLD NORAH that she needed to consider the possibility that she would never be reunited with her husband. This time, this earth, are all we may ever have, so why not use it to watch the daughter grow, everyone told her. As if Ellie were a geranium that required tending to (watering, repotting, small words of whispered encouragement). After a respectable mourning period, perhaps Norah should consider remarriage? Norah considered killing all of her friends, but decided against it because her husband would be furious that she would abandon their daughter as a result. Years ago the husband had built all of the furniture in the house with his hands, and Norah remembered the smell of pine and how she’d laid her naked body on the kitchen table to feel the raw, unfinished wood against her skin. She’d endured the splinters because that meant a piece of him would always remain in her. If she stood still, she could almost feel him again, swimming. Then Ellie, fucking Ellie, ran in with her arms extended, begging to be held, asking to be loved.
Follow Me into the Dark Page 10