Fire & Water (3 page)

Every muscle in my dad’s face went slack, and if I hadn’t known better, I’d have thought he’d had a stroke. He wiped his lips. I could hear his tight swallow. “Katie, we never meant to—”

The scientist in me wanted to pummel him with questions, probe for details of my mother’s death. How did she do it? Why? And I wanted to know about the lie—the conspiracy of lies that had taken place my whole life—that wove a tapestry of myth around all I knew about my mother. But something else took over, overpowering my body, clouding my mind. All I could think of in that instant was escaping. “Let me out of here. I can’t breathe,” I said, trying to push my way out of the booth.

My dad reached to grab my arm. “Sit down. Let’s talk this out.”

I jerked my arm away. “You lied to me! Twenty years you lied.” The words felt like bullets shooting from my mouth.

Without looking back, I rammed my way through the front door, leaving it swinging in my wake. A cold wind pressed me down as I pounded up the hill, my breaths becoming foggy gusts in front of me. Before I was a block away, Mary K was beside me, her short legs keeping stride with mine. Saying nothing, she walked with me until we reached the front porch of our apartment building twelve blocks up the hill. A friendly bark came from inside, followed by the shrill ringing of the telephone.

Mary K pulled her keys from her pocket and opened the door. I stood on the street below our steps, feeling like a statue—lifeless and stiff. Icy wind whipped my hair around my face and I realized for the first time that I’d left without my coat. My stomach clenched with each ring of the telephone.

“I’m not answering that,” I growled.

“Nobody says you have to.”

I stared down the hill at the street I’d walked my whole life. Lights glowed from the windows of familiar houses. The N-Judah streetcar snaked its way up Irving Street. But none of it appeared as it usually did. I looked up at Mary K. “Nothing. We’re saying nothing about this outside this house.”

“Sure, Murphy. Whatever you say.”

I felt I was no longer solid, but porous and permeable to the wind. I looked up from the street to Mary K and then down at my watch.

Mary K lifted her hand, Girl Scout-style. “Let’s go inside. I’m freezing my ass off here on the stoop and I kind of like my ass the way it is. I’ve got a beautiful sociology student coming over, and she likes it there, too.” Mary K jerked her head in the direction of the door.

I looked down at my watch. “I’m meeting Nigel for drinks,” I lied.

“Thought you weren’t drinking. Double shift tomorrow?”

I glared up at her. Hot anger was beginning to thaw me. “Just go worry about your coed. I’m a big girl.”

“It’s your hangover,” she said, stepping into the door. She pulled a bulky jacket from the hook just inside and tossed it down. The phone resumed its relentless shrill. I turned and walked toward the streetcar, not sure where I’d let it take me.

Anatomical Distractions

By the time I rose and moved toward the kitchen, Mary K was sitting on the back deck smoking a cigarette. She was not yet wearing her contacts, and the lenses of her glasses were so thick that it seemed impossible that her turned-up nose could support them. The words on her favorite sleeping shirt had faded but remained legible: I
T’S A
B
LACK
T
HANG.
Y
OU JUST WOULDN’T UNDERSTAND.

Watching her, I recalled the first time we met. Dad, Alice, and Tully had just left me alone after I’d insisted I didn’t need them to set up my dorm room. I sat in the middle of the room surrounded by boxes, trying it all on, grateful for my fresh start. I wouldn’t be little Katie Murphy, the dutiful daughter everybody knew from Murphy’s Pub. I was a Stanford pre-med student, a future physician, on a full academic scholarship. I’d be seen as just myself, not narrowed by people seeing me as little Katie Murphy.

I set my boxes in the middle of the dorm room, figuring I should probably wait for my roommate so we could discuss our preferences.

Her sandaled foot entered first, kicking the dorm room door open. A box covered her face and she wore an army surplus rucksack that probably outweighed her. The door flew open too hard and swung back, trapping her freckled, clean-shaven calf. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” she ranted. I instantly calculated six dollars for the cussing jar.

I jumped and held the door.

“Fuck me sideways, that hurt,” she said, swooping a strand of strawberry blonde hair behind her ear. Her hair was sleek and shiny—Breck Girl hair. Her eyes were robin’s egg blue: one pure color, without flecks or shadows.

“Hey,” she said. “I’m Mary K—not like the fucking cosmetics lady with the pink Cadillacs. K is for Kowalski. I guess we’re roommates.” She looked around the room and stared at my stack of liquor boxes, poised exactly dead center in the room. A knowing grin crossed her face. After dropping the box and letting the rucksack slide to the floor, she extended a hand toward me. I’d never shaken hands with someone my own age, so I froze. She thrust her hand a little closer. “Mary K—and you are?”

“Katie. I mean, Kate Murphy.”

“Murphy.” She delivered a hearty handshake. Her eyes were rimmed with thick but nearly transparent eyelashes that gave her pretty face an otherworldly look. She wore no makeup, and every visible portion of her was splattered with constellations of golden freckles. She stood not quite five feet and her body swam in oversized overalls, the cuffs rolled up to her calves.

“So,” she said, “we’ve got to get one thing straight before we unpack. I’m going to ask you a question, and depending on the answer, one of us might have to go to the RA for a room change.”

Did she already dislike me? How could she know already that I was such a foreigner to this life? That I’d never flown in an airplane or seen a rock concert. That I was too nerdy and peculiar to have friends in school, that I’d never eaten at a restaurant with linen tablecloths until Dr. Schwartz took me to Alioto’s on Fisherman’s Wharf for a graduation present. That I’d never kissed a guy.

Her stare was cool steel. “Pre-med or pre-law?” She tapped her foot with impatience.

“Uh, pre-med.”

“Thank
God
,” she said, her body softening. Mary K spoke with flattened vowels. The toughness of New York had stomped hard on all of her a’s and o’s. She unzipped her rucksack, pulled out a pack of Marlboros, shook the pack, and held it toward me, retracting it with my decline. She hoisted her petite frame up and sat on the windowsill, her feet resting on what would become her desk. She twisted her lips to the side and blew smoke toward the open window.

Without my willing them to, my eyes found their way to the A
BSOLUTELY
N
O
S
MOKING IN THE
D
ORMS
sign on the back of the door.

A sly grin crossed Mary K’s lips. “No way I could bunk with the enemy. Christ, in New York you can’t swing a fucking dead cat without hitting a lawyer in the ass. Didn’t come three thousand miles to share a room with a lawyer fetus.”

As I hung my clothes, I tried to sound casual as I tried to get to know her. “Do you come from a big family?”

She talked about her four brothers, her dad, a garbageman, and her mom, a housewife.

“Are you close?” I asked.

Mary K’s head tilted as she selected her words. “I was not exactly a good match for Lila and Henry Kowalski of Queens. Queer doesn’t play so well in a Polish Catholic family. They got the priest to try and fix me. I didn’t fix so easy, I guess. They pretty much don’t want to know anything about me or my life. Unless I come to my senses and decide to love dick.”

Her candor both intrigued and unnerved me.

“Babies should be conceived in petri dishes and raised under laboratory conditions until they’re eighteen. Then parents and kids would have a mutual say in who they’ll share holidays with for the rest of their lives. It’d put shrinks out of business.”

“And eliminate stretch marks,” I said.

Mary K let out the first bark of the raspy laugh I would come to love. She blew a smoke ring, then pierced it with a stream of straight-blown smoke. “Murphy, you and I will get along just fine.”

From the only box she brought, Mary K unpacked a Mets pennant, a transistor radio, a large black ashtray that read T
HE
B
UTTS
S
TOP
H
ERE,
A
TLANTIC
C
ITY,
and one framed picture. She planted a kiss onto the glass of the picture. “The man in my life,” she said, and then turned it so I could see the photo of a salt-and-pepper-furred dog with legs so long they could have been transplanted from a donor moose onto a dog’s body. “Ben Casey,” she said, “Some crazy cross between a mastiff and a wolfhound. Shits bigger than you do. Smarter than any dog I’ve ever known, which is saying a lot. More devoted than any human I know, which doesn’t say much at all. You got a dog?”

“No, just a series of stray cats my dad adopts.”

“I favor dogs, but cats are cool, too. Any creature that doesn’t have the capacity for speech.”

I opened my small box of framed pictures. Staring at me from the stack was my mother’s shining face and body swollen in late pregnancy—a picture I’d always loved. Alice had also framed a photo that had been taken at high school graduation: Dad with his arm around me, Alice, Tully, and Dr. Schwartz circling us, pride beaming from all of their faces. My childhood collection of birds’ eggs took its place on my shelf.

“Hey, Murphy, feel like getting around town a little? It’s my first night in California and all I’ve seen is the San Jose Airport. I’ll split the cab fare with you.”

“Sure,” I said, “but I’ve got a car.” Cussing jar money had bought me a ’66 Volkswagen Bug. Tully had painted it baby blue for me, and Alice had sewn slipcovers for the tattered front seats.

“Lucky me, a roommate with wheels. You cart my ass, I’ll spring for gas.” Mary K sat on her windowsill and reached into her knapsack. She unbuckled her overalls and slipped the bib down, then tugged the loose waistline down just below her hip, revealing a small patch of the unfreckled flesh of her thigh below her plaid boys’ boxer shorts. I averted my eyes, trying to pay attention to making my bed, but at the edge of my vision I could see the syringe Mary K had pulled from her bag.

“Don’t worry. I’m not chipping. It’s only insulin.”

“You’re diabetic?”

“You’re going to be top of the class, Murphy.”

I tried to resist watching Mary K inject herself from the small vial she pulled from a thermos in her pack. I waited for a wince of pain as the needle entered her soft flesh. Her expression unchanged, she took a deeper drag off of her cigarette as she pressed the plunger. She exhaled a smoke stream and reattached her overall bib. “Say, Murphy, I’d appreciate it if this could be between us,” she said, jutting her jaw toward the thermos. “It’s not really the impression I want to give to the profs around here. People get weird about it. Maybe we could establish some, I don’t know, roommate code of silence or something. I’m not much of a blabber, so your secrets are safe with me.”

I shrugged, wishing I had a secret for Mary K to keep. “Sure. I understand. We all get a fresh start here, right?”

“True enough.”

* * *

Mary K came back into our kitchen after snuffing her cigarette on the porch rail. The breakfast table that had for so long been cluttered with textbooks and medical journals was now clean but for
The
New York Times
sports pages, a dish of jellied toast, and an ashtray full of cigarette butts.

“You look like hell. Not like you to be out so late on a school night, Murphy.”

“Thanks. You’re gorgeous, too,” I said. I twisted my unruly swarm of hair into a knot. I perused the limited but orderly contents of our fridge. In the door compartment, insulin bottles, and in a clear jar of isopropyl alcohol floated several hypodermic needles.

One semester in the dorms trying to manage her sugar levels on the carbohydrate-laden cafeteria food was enough for Mary K. We found off-campus housing by the second semester. Over that first Christmas break, we retrieved Ben Casey from her sister’s third-floor walk-up in New York and drove him to California in my Bug.

“Your folks called about a hundred times.”

I focused on my fridge search.

From under the kitchen table, the now elderly Ben Casey huffed as he rose from beneath Mary K’s feet to greet me. I rubbed his slack old jowls. “How are those hips today, huh, buddy?” He let out a little whimper. “Did you inject him yet? He looks pretty stiff this morning.”

“We’re both rigged up,” Mary K said. “He got me up early with the wet-tongue alarm. Had a pretty rugged night.” Ben’s cold nose found the gap between my pajama waistband and my undershirt. The sound of a sweet soprano voice rang from the shower down the hall, singing “Crocodile Rock.”