Authors: Bill Loehfelm
Fresh Kills (23 page)
There in the dark, my conversations with Jimmy swirled in my head, and I found myself clinging to pieces of them. I couldn’t shrug off anymore that things were getting to me. I’d pretty much lost my shit in the street four times in one day. Every time I gathered my trash back to me, in the parking lot, in the yard, in Joyce’s, it seemed, I spilled it back out again. I reached into my pocket and pulled out the tape. I wound it around my fist.
Molly, Virginia, Julia, I couldn’t chase them out of my head right now any more than I could get them out of my life. And now, Jimmy had worked his way in. I studied my fist. Even with the lights out, I could see half the word “caution” stretched in black letters across my knuckles. I had tried so hard the last few times I saw my father alive not to cower from him, to meet him on his own terms. I had grown so sick of running from him.
But what had I been doing for two days
but
running from him, from who he’d been, whatever that was? Wasn’t I cowering from what had happened to him, no matter what I told Jimmy, or myself? I felt sick, embarrassed for myself. For how easily he’d made me a frightened child again. For my complicity in the transformation. But what, I asked myself, was I going to do about it now?
but
running from him, from who he’d been, whatever that was? Wasn’t I cowering from what had happened to him, no matter what I told Jimmy, or myself? I felt sick, embarrassed for myself. For how easily he’d made me a frightened child again. For my complicity in the transformation. But what, I asked myself, was I going to do about it now?
That was what my father had always wanted to know. The bigger kids at school were picking on me. What was I gonna do about it? My locker had been broken into, I’d failed a test, the train had made me late for school. What was I gonna do about it? Molly had left me for a college kid who took her out in Manhattan every weekend, instead of to the same movie theater and the Mall. I had told myself I was running after the killer, but now I thought maybe I was just running away from my father. So what was I gonna do about it?
I put my feet up on the coffee table, cradling my beer to my belly. When I shifted my feet, to press myself deeper into the couch, I knocked something off the table. My head spun for a moment when I bent down to look. Julia’s pictures. I held my beer between my knees and collected the photos back into the box, glad I’d left the lights off. I set the box back on the table, but it just fell again, dumping its cargo again and this time taking a notebook with it. Cursing, I turned on the light and gathered up the photos. I picked up the cloth-covered notebook in my hands. It was obviously my sister’s. The spine cracked as I opened it; it was new, maybe another purchase from the Mall. I was reading what she’d written before I realized I shouldn’t be.
The first two pages were just Cindy’s name, and my mother’s and my father’s, drawn over and over again in large letters. In some places names blotted out parts of other names, in others the letters connected. Pages of neat, detailed notes followed the names, notes on what Julia had eaten every day and how she felt before and after each meal. She’d marked each meal she’d thrown up. There’d been two, the two she’d forced down after I’d gone out for the night. My heart stopped. I set the book on my knees and covered my face with my hands. I remembered Jimmy asking me why I wasn’t home, instead of at the bar. I wanted to crawl in a hole. What was I going to do about this? Could I force a grown woman to eat? Babysit her until she digested it? I would if I had to. I’d find a way.
I looked back at the book and my heart started up. Shame washed through me again. Julia had written out all her meals for the rest of the week, each one a little more substantial than the one before it. She’d drawn a smiley face next to each meal. She’d covered the pages with encouraging stickers, the kind a grade-school teacher puts atop a perfect spelling test. The kind our mother used to hide in our school lunches. At the top of each page were phone numbers—home, office, and cell—for her therapist. I didn’t need to do a damn thing for my sister, except maybe not make an already difficult week harder. She was doing all right on her own. Not perfect, but all right. Better than me.
Her eating disorder developed late for that kind of problem, when Julia was already in her early twenties, not long before Mom died. It got worse after the death, but Julia bounced back quick and conquered it, or so I’d thought. She’d called me with regular updates, putting almost all her weight back on, slowly but steadily. Cindy’s departure, I guessed, had brought the problem back. And now this with our father. But instead of letting it get worse, she was fixing it again. Again with no help from me. For the first time, I thought about the burden of something as basic, as essential, as normal as eating, being so difficult. I could barely imagine it, facing those demons, all the time. I set my beer on the end table and walked upstairs. I stood for a while outside Julia’s bedroom door, leaning close to it, listening for her breathing.
She slept, as she had the night before, in her old room. She’d kept the door closed since she’d been back at the house, but I imagined the room looked much like it did when she moved out to go to graduate school. Tall bookshelves, splashed and spotted with paint, a tiny bed, old newspapers and garage sale rugs covering the floor. Her desk from when she was younger, white with gold around the edges. No mirrors. An easel propped against one wall, where she sat and painted with her back to the lone window. I couldn’t imagine my father had done a thing with that room; it contained two things he feared—artists’ tools and girl stuff. I’m sure he had no use for it, anyway, just like most of the house.
Beside Julia’s bedroom was my old room. The door was half-open but I couldn’t see anything inside. Not that I needed to. I already knew most of what there’d been of me in there was gone. Julia had told me all about it. With a new bed, new carpet, paint, and curtains, my parents had declared it the guest room, though we hadn’t had overnight guests, as best as I could recall, ever. I moved away from Julia’s door toward mine. I opened the door the rest of the way and turned on the light.
My bookshelves remained, still stocked with my books, unopened for years. I walked over, running my finger along the creased, dusty spines. Dozens of boy-and-his-horse and boy-and-his-dog adventures from junior high.
Lord of the Rings. Chronicles of Narnia.
All the required reading from high school I pretended I never read. Chandler, Hammett, and Poe I’d stolen from Waldenbooks at the Mall. A Bible. My desk was still there, too. I pushed the blotter aside, revealing the deep, angry scars and scratches I’d cut into the wood.
Lord of the Rings. Chronicles of Narnia.
All the required reading from high school I pretended I never read. Chandler, Hammett, and Poe I’d stolen from Waldenbooks at the Mall. A Bible. My desk was still there, too. I pushed the blotter aside, revealing the deep, angry scars and scratches I’d cut into the wood.
I sat down at the desk, ran my hand over the cuts. My mother discovered them while dusting one day, as I probably knew she would when I did it. But she never said a word. That surprised me. My father never let us forget how much those shelves and desk had cost. My mother had been so proud of that furniture when it was delivered. Her penchant for polishing it made hiding Molly’s letters a serious challenge. I only knew she’d found the cuts when I came home from school one day and found an expansive blotter placed over the gouges. I kept carving, but always under the cardboard and plastic bandage my mother had laid down. I finally stopped when she threatened to take my typewriter away. The typewriter was gone now. I slid the blotter back into place and pushed up out of the chair.
I looked around the room, wondering what would happen to this stuff now. Julia would probably pack up the books and donate them to some orphanage or school somewhere. The other stuff was bound for the Dump, I figured. I’d never come back for any of it, never even thought about it. It couldn’t mean that much to me. I certainly had no room for it in my apartment. I sat down on the bed. Julia had made it up with fresh sheets. What was the harm? Why spend another night on the couch while a perfectly useful bed went empty? It was just a bed.
I lay down on my side and spied a dusty paperback on the nightstand. Curious, I picked it up:
The Black Stallion
, by Walter Farley. I smiled. I’d read it a dozen times. The pages were yellowed at the edges. When I flipped through them, a slip of paper fluttered out, landing on my chest. The print was faded, but I could still read it. A receipt from the grocery store, dated the year my mother died.
The Black Stallion
, by Walter Farley. I smiled. I’d read it a dozen times. The pages were yellowed at the edges. When I flipped through them, a slip of paper fluttered out, landing on my chest. The print was faded, but I could still read it. A receipt from the grocery store, dated the year my mother died.
I stood, tossing the book on the nightstand. Wiping my hands on my T-shirt, I looked back at the bed then around the room. Suddenly, everything seemed foreign. Like I’d fallen asleep in my room and awoken in someone else’s. Things I hadn’t noticed just moments ago jumped out at me. The soft, feminine colors of the drapes and the carpet. Prints of flowers on the walls. The flowered comforter. After I’d left, had this become my mother’s room? Maybe she’d finally carved out a space of her own in the house. A shelter from my father’s relentless snoring? Maybe, I thought, a shelter from something else? Something worse. I shoved my hands in my pockets, afraid to touch anything. I wished I’d found a way to move out at ten and give my mother that many more hours of peace. When had she taken them? When he was at work? Late in the night, when he was asleep? Should I even be in here?
I could picture her, curled up at the top of the bed, dressed in stretch pants and a sweatshirt, holding the book under the lamplight. Holding it in one hand, her nail polish chipped and worn. Her other hand tucked under her chin. Her reading glasses on, her blond hair crushed under a bandanna. The steady frown she always wore when she read, bags under her eyes, her bottom lip pushed out. I studied the nightstand, searching for the telltale rings of a beer glass or a coffee mug. Of course I didn’t find any. She would’ve always used a coaster, still protecting the furniture.
What would she have thought about my father’s murder? When she died, Julia and I agreed it was best she had gone first. As cruel as he was, my mother was devoted to my father. His death alone, never mind his murder, would’ve destroyed her. Her heartbreak would’ve been unbearable—for all of us. But I couldn’t help wishing that she had outlived him. Maybe she would’ve found a way through it. She’d survived all those years of marriage with him. At least she would’ve had a shot at some time, maybe a lot of time, free of him, much more time than she’d stolen in this little room. But she’d never have thought of it that way. For her, his absence would’ve been a prison, not a liberation. I could almost see her in the room with me, looking up at me from the paperback, her eyes bright but sad, agreeing with me with a silent nod of her head.
I rubbed my eyes, wondering at the time. I stared down at the empty bed before me. I pulled the covers up, tucked them neatly under the pillows, smoothed the comforter with my hands. Julia turned over in bed, talking to someone in her sleep. I slipped the receipt back in the book and returned it to its place on the shelf. There was nobody left in the house with time for schoolboy adventure stories. I turned out the light, closing the door behind me as I left the room.
TEN
“COFFINS,” JULIA SAID, SHOVING THE BROCHURES INTO MY HANDS.
I set my coffee on the kitchen table and slid into the booth. “They make brochures for coffins?” It was way too early in the morning for this. I turned them over in my hands. “Sick.”
“Necessary,” she said, sitting across the table from me, wrapping her hands around her mug of tea. “I went to Scalia’s this morning. We gotta get moving on this. There’s only so much more I can take.”
I thought of her notebook, if there was a check mark beside her breakfast. “I understand.”
As weird, and unprepared, as I felt, I wanted to give her a serious answer about the coffin. I frowned at the brochures, trying to look like I was wrestling with a decision. I had no idea what I was doing. What should I be looking for? Style? Durability? Comfort? I checked out every brochure, hoping she had circled or starred a couple of samples to give me some guidance. Nothing. Finally, frustrated, I tossed them on the table.
“Something simple,” I said. “White’s out. Gray, too. Glossy black seems too flashy.” I squeezed my forehead in my hand. I sounded like I was picking a limo for the prom. “A deep hardwood. Basic but classy?”
Julia snatched up a brochure from the pile, opening to a specific selection. She tapped her finger on a photo, but I couldn’t see which one. “Exactly what I was thinking,” she said. I felt like I’d just won fifty grand on
Jeopardy!
Jeopardy!
“So that’s done,” she said, tucking the brochure into a bag at her feet. She pulled out a newspaper, slid it across the table toward me. I didn’t pick it up. “The obit ran in today’s paper,” she said. “I did it over the phone with Joe Jr. yesterday. We stuck to the basics. He was very sweet about it. The wake is tomorrow night from seven-thirty to nine-thirty. The funeral is Thursday morning.”
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