by Averil Dean
“What are you drinking?”
It takes me a second to remember.
“Seven and seven.”
“You want a refill?”
“No, I’m—”
“Looking for your friends. I know.” He winks and retreats into the crowd, weaving a little. I’m glad he’s gone, and go back to searching the floor below for Ray Burbank.
Not for the first time, it occurs to me that there’s nothing to be learned from following him here. What am I hoping to discover? What can possibly be gained by a further accumulation of knowledge? This reconnaissance is a stall tactic and nothing more. I can almost hear Nana scolding me.
“Lovey,” she would say, “sometimes the medicine is too bitter, and all the sugar in the bowl is not going to sweeten it. You’ve got to hold your nose and drink it up.”
I drain my glass and push back from the rail. My head aches, and my eyelids are dry and scratchy. Even in the darkness, tonight I think I could sleep.
Halfway down the stairs, I encounter the man with the mustache, on his way up with a drink in each hand.
“Where are you going?” he says.
“Home.”
“But I just bought you a drink.” He holds up the glass as evidence.
I’m confused, swimming through a haze of weed and alcohol. I don’t remember asking for a drink.
“Sorry,” I say, since he’s looking wounded.
“Stay for a while. Just to talk.”
“I can’t, my friend texted me and she’s ready to go.”
“Text her back, tell her to wait.”
“No, I can’t, she’s—”
“This drink cost me ten bucks,” he says. “And you won’t even have a fucking conversation with me?”
Now I’m annoyed and increasingly certain that I never asked for a drink in the first place.
“Drink it yourself,” I tell him. “I’m going home.”
He shakes his head. “Fucking bitch.”
As I pass him on the stairs, he throws a shoulder into my path, which catches me midstep and knocks me off-balance and down the last three steps. I land hard on my knee and then, as I turn, flat on my ass. He tosses the drink out on top of me. Ice-cold liquor splashes all over my neck and arms. Now I’m sticky-wet, sore and thoroughly pissed off. I leap up and spring for him. But before I go a step, a hand catches me by the collar of my jacket, hauls me sideways and hustles me through the crowd toward the front of the club.
“Hey,” I’m yelling, over and over. “Hey!”
We reach the front door, and I am deposited on the front step. Right behind me is the guy with the mustache, who fires a couple more insults at me, then weaves into the parking lot, followed by another guy yelling at his back, “What happened?”
I turn around to protest—because though I’m leaving, anyway, the unfairness of it rankles. But even as I turn, the words stall on my lips. I know who I will see.
For the first time in a dozen years, I’m looking into the face of Ray Burbank—the man I am going to kill.
CHAPTER TWENTY
For a moment I am ten years old, looking up this mountain of a man, up his T-shirted chest to the eyes of the man my mother loved. His face is more deeply lined, coarse, but aside from that unchanged. Same close-set eyes, same snub nose, chipped tooth. Small gold cross in his ear, folds of skin under the lobe. His eyelids are fleshy, the lashes almost invisible.
He’s talking, something about how I need to go home. He’s waiting for an answer.
“Do you?” he asks.
I blink. “Do I what?”
“Need a cab.” His tone is impatient, professional and slightly bored.
I shake my head.
“You need to leave,” he says.
I stare at him, and feel the numbness retreat dangerously, like the waves on a beach, and behind them a tsunami of laughter. The sound breaks loose from my chest—ha ha ha ha ha—and within seconds I’m consumed by it. You need to go home, you need to go home. It’s the funniest thing I’ve ever heard, considering the source.
I’m sure he’s perplexed, I do feel the absurdity of my reaction, the inappropriateness, but the laughter has claimed me.
Go home go home go home—
“Okay,” he says, “come inside. I’m gonna call you a ride.”
He pulls me back into the bar. The noise and lights and the ridiculous neon pinkness of the place add fuel to my hysteria—go home, go home, go home, ha ha ha—and for the moment it’s all I can do to hold myself upright and let him lead me through the crowd. We pass the dance floor and the restrooms, and he puts a key in the lock and opens the door to a small office. He motions to a chair and I drop into it, hiccuping, wiping my eyes while he makes the phone call.
By the time he hangs up I am quiet. The night has taken on the quality of a dream, and I am dizzy and off-kilter, trying to remember how I came to be in the back room of a bar with the man I’ve been plotting to kill since I was ten years old.
“Better?” he says.
I nod, take a steadying breath.
He’s looking me squarely in the face now, under flat fluorescent lights, and his expression holds no hint of recognition. Though my mother and I lived with him for almost a year, though I’ve thought of little else but the destruction of this man, he doesn’t know me. I feel as I did with Amanda at the park, as though I’ve successfully combined the ingredients for a bomb but the fuse keeps going out.
“You don’t remember me.” It’s not an accusation. My voice is flat, wondering.
“Should I? It’s a busy place.”
I nod, and keep nodding.
He leans against the battered desk, arms crossed in front of him. I remember that, and the way he rubs his nose, a nervous tic that reminds me he still has a problem with coke. I think of Jack—and Rosemary, wherever she is—and feel the anger begin to reassert itself.
“That’s a giveaway,” I tell him, jerking my chin.
“What?”
I imitate his gesture, that pinch around his nostrils, and point at his nose.
“Yeah?” he says. “And your eyes are bloodshot because you had a long day.”
“Actually, I have.”
“Well, join the crowd, sweetheart.”
The blood races up my neck, suffuses my face. That’s exactly the way he used to talk to my mom.
I am up, heading for the door. I don’t want to have a conversation with this stupid fuck, I want him dead.
You need to go home.
“I’ll wait outside,” I tell him.
And the crowd sucks me back in and spits me out, through the open doors to the dark, wet parking lot. I don’t stop, though. I keep going through the rain to the far corner where my car is parked. Ray is behind me, calling out.
“Hey.”
I turn back, my hand on the car door.
“Hey, I know you. I remember your walk,” he says. “You’re Annie’s kid.”
Annie’s kid. Well, what else would I be?
“Very good.”
“Why didn’t you tell me that in the first place?”
His tone is bewildered—and honest. Again I have this strong sense of something being wrong. Why is he not afraid? Or at least uncomfortable. I don’t understand.
“You don’t remember the last time I saw you? It was the night my mother died.”
“Yeah, I’m—Jesus, yeah—”
“The night you killed her.”
He backs up a step, but although I’ve shot my arrow, his expression is still completely baffled.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“You let her die. You had a fight, you threw out her inhaler and you let her die. I heard it all. I was there.”
; “Jesus, you were nine years old—”
“Ten.”
“Okay, ten. You were a little kid.”
My lip curls into a sneer.
“Big enough to call 9-1-1 while you were passed out on the couch, though. Big enough for that.”
His face collapses and his shoulders roll forward as though I have suddenly placed a heavy weight on his back. I carry on more confidently, gloating, reassured that my hatred is not misplaced.
“You were horrible to her. Out drinking every night, pissed off, always yelling. I heard you. I heard all of it. You threw her medicine out the window and you let my mother die.”
“Now wait a minute—”
“And me, you don’t even remember. Did you give a single thought to what my life became after that? You murdered my mother, and you wrecked me. You fucking wrecked me.”
I splutter to a halt. My hair is soaked and my eyes are burning hot.
“Look,” he says, pinching his nose. “I don’t know what you think you saw or heard. But I didn’t throw any medicine out. Christ, she probably did that herself. Your mother was a fucking lunatic. Totally batshit.”
My head is full now, flooded and coursing with rage. I open my purse and find the cold hard handle of the gun, pull it out and flip the safety. I hold it in front of me, level it at his chest. The trigger is solid under my finger—one tiny door to break through, one little squeeze, and all of this will be over.
His eyes and mouth spring open, his whole face round with fear. “Wait,” he says, hands stretched out in front of him, palms out like he’s trying to calm a fractious young horse. “Wait—”
“Say that again, about my mother. Go on. I fucking dare you.”
“Wait,” he says again. “Just—”
I cup the gun with both hands. It feels so heavy. The hammer resists as I cock it.
“Wait, I didn’t mean that.” His voice has gone up an octave, skittering fast. “I meant, you know, she was sick. Ill, I mean. She was—”
“Sick! Yes. And you threw away her medicine.”
“No, not the asthma. I meant the bipolar thing. She was sick.”
I feel the blood drain from my face. I must have heard him wrong.
Ray seems to sense this. “You didn’t know?”
“I know what I saw! I found her inhalers in the bushes the day after she died. After you wished she was dead. You threw them away and left her to die. I know what I saw!”
“But you didn’t see me throw anything away. You were a kid, just a little kid, you—”
“Shut up, just shut up.”
I raise the gun until I’m looking down my arm, down the hard steel of the barrel, into his face. I swipe the rain out of my eyes. The gun is shaking like a fish on the end of a line.
Pull the trigger, lovey, your mother is dead because of him.
My mother is dead, and Nana is dead, and they are both so long gone.
You were a little kid.
All at once I want my mother, so desperately it feels like a kick in the chest. He took her from me. This stupid, hateful man. He robbed me of my mother and sent me into this hellish existence, this un-life. Unloved, unwanted—
Unwanted.
The word makes me think of Jack. How many times, in how many ways, have I been wanted by him. Love is not mine; it isn’t an emotion I’d engender. But need and desire—that’s something else. He does want me, has wanted me all along.
Homeless, then.
But I’ve made myself a home. I’ve built a life of sorts, on my own. A lonely life, until Jack.
I blink hard, licking the rain from my lips.
“You don’t need to do this,” Ray says. “Go home, sleep it off.”
I don’t need to do this. I can go home, to my home, to my bed and my lover and my life.
I am very tired. My arm aches. The gun is too heavy to hold.
“Go back inside,” I tell him.
He backs away, slowly at first, then quicker, finally turning his back on me as he shouts to the other bouncer.
I get into my car and rest my head against the glass.
I’m tired.
* * *
Under a streetlamp in front of a long white building, I open my umbrella and take a two-year-old magazine article out of my pocket, unfold it and try to smooth the paper flat.
On the page is a photo of a painter and his canvas. From the article it’s clear the man is a famous artist, but his name is unfamiliar to me and my attention as always is riveted on the painting itself and the girl beside him who inspired it. A colorless, eyeless girl, painted in a red shawl, with her hands at her braid and an enigmatic tilt of the head. A strange, singular light skims across the canvas, and she is turned toward it, her lips half-parted, as if the light itself is an interruption to her train of thought.
I went to the artist’s gallery after the article came out, and found myself standing before the painting with my jaw aching in suppressed fury, grinding my foot against the bottom of my shoe. It seemed to me that something had been misunderstood. I couldn’t reconcile the girl in the painting with the voice screaming from inside the tunnel of trees, or later from her room at the mental health ward. This artist, this handsome, successful man, couldn’t know shit about Molly’s life. At the Window, he’d titled his painting. Either he had missed the point altogether, or was using her to make a point of his own. But Molly couldn’t see the portrait for herself and so had no means to argue. The injustice of this infuriated me.
I fold up the paper now and tuck it back in my pocket. The front of the building is mostly dark but there is a light in the entryway and another at the end of the building. I walk up the sidewalk and close my umbrella under the portico. The door is unlocked so I go inside.
At the front desk is a young man in scrubs with his feet up, playing video games on his phone. He looks up, surprised, and asks if he can help me.
“No,” I say, and keep walking. I hear him calling after me as I pass through the double doors and head down the corridor. There are rooms right and left, each with personalized name tags and braille markers below them. I turn right at the end of the hall, pass a small rec room and stop at the door next to it: M Jinks.
I knock on the door. “Yes,” she calls, and I go inside.
She’s sitting in the corner, knitting. The room is dark except for the flickering light of the TV beside her, but her silvery hair makes a mothlike outline against the wall. She turns her head when I close the door behind me, and I see the two puckered sockets in her pale skin. She lowers her needles and the yarn piles softly in her lap.
I shrug out of my jacket, come around the end of the bed and sit down across from her.
Her snub nose twitches.
“Well,” she says. “Hello, Alice. It’s been a while.”
“I know. I met someone....” I kick off my shoes and push them under the bed, out of her way. “How’ve you been?”
She gestures around the tiny room. “Never better.”
A commercial comes on, and the TV flashes with the image of a woman who’s explaining how she’s been transformed: I lost fifty-five pounds and got my life back, and so can you. The secret is— I slap the power button and the screen goes dark.
Molly raises her eyebrows. “Make yourself at home.”
“I’m sorry. I know this is...” I light a cigarette and take a long drag. She holds her hand out, and I put the cigarette between her fingers. The light from the cherry warms her skin, rakes across the scars on her cheeks and the crumpled, empty eyelids.
“Look, I need to ask you something.”
“Boy trouble?” She waves the cigarette. “You’ve come to the right place.”
I lower my gaze from her mangled face and tap out another cigarette for myself. On every previous
visit, she’s had an ashtray near to hand. This time, nothing. I get up and search the kitchenette for a saucer, bring it back and set it on the table beside her.
“I just need—” I hear myself, my own voice saying to this poor freakish wreck of a girl: I need. I clear my throat and start again. “Back when we first met at the Center. Before—before what happened with Lyle. You were stealing things.”
“Yeah, well, every kid needs a hobby.”
“Right. But I think you did more than that.” I take her cigarette, flick off the ash and hand it back to her. “You had a copy of your file from Drummond’s office. You had all the pages folded up and taped to the back of a drawer, remember?”
“Sure.”
I take a deep breath. “I need to know. Did you ever pull my file?”
Her mouth curves upward, and I remember the sly little girl in straggling braids, with her greasy paper bag of treasures and her childish arrogance. I remember the feather pillow, all the grubby trinkets she brought me in a spirit of collusive friendship. She and I understood each other then; we understand each other now.
“You want to know about your mother,” she says.
“Yes.”
“What do you remember?”
I think of my mother’s face. It’s almost lost to me now. It’s a collection of watery images, a glide-by memory. An impression of her is all I have left. A constellation of freckles across her nose, a tumble of blond hair. It occurs to me that my physical memories of her are never from eye level, but from a child’s height, looking up. I remember her breast against my cheek and the smell of her cotton sweater, a golden dragonfly charm at her throat. Her hand on my cheek once when I was sick, her voice crooning, Poor baby! How fiercely I clung to those words.
She belonged to me then. I was her baby, but she belonged to me.
I try to describe these things to Molly.
“She had this really loud laugh, kind of goofy, you know? You’d want to keep being funny to keep her laughing.”
She nods.
“I always think of her as being really young. Even to me, she seemed young. Struggling. Overwhelmed, maybe.”
“She sleep a lot?”