The Little Sleep (13 page)

I say, “I went out last night, treated myself to a meal and a few drinks at Amrheins, and found the place like this when I came home. I was a little tipsy and fell asleep on the couch before I could call you or the police. For what it’s worth, the police weren’t too happy that I didn’t call them earlier either.”

“You should’ve called as soon as you woke up.” She stands in the doorway with her arms folded across her chest.

“I’m sorry, Ellen. Really, I am.” This is getting to be a little too much for me. The edges are blurring again. I put my head in my hands and let slip: “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

She says, “About what? Are you in some kind of trouble?” She hikes over the rubble of my existence. There’s no path and she has to climb. She makes it, though, sits next to me on the couch, and puts an arm around my shoulder.

I breathe loudly. She waits for me to stop. I say, “No, I’m fine. You know, just how am I going to clean up and get everything going again?”

She says, “We have insurance. I’ll get an adjuster here within the hour. We’ll get everything fixed up.”

We let silence do its thing for a bit. Then I tell her what was stolen. She pulls out a cigarette for both of us. Time passes, whether I want it to or not.

Ellen gets up and says, “I’ll call the insurance company, and I’ll get somebody to clean this up. You go pack a bag while I make a few phone calls.”

I say, “Bag? I’m not going anywhere.”

Ellen knows I don’t mean it. She says, “You’ll stay with me while the place is fixed up. Just a couple of days, right?”

Living at home again for a couple of days. Yeah, Ellen owns this building but it’s still my apartment, my place. I promised myself after the accident I’d never live in Osterville, not for day one, because Thomas Wolfe had the whole you-can’t-go-home-again thing right.

“Nah, I can stay in a hotel or something.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Mark.”

I want to say: Look at this place. Look at me. I am ridiculous.

I say, “Couple of days. Okay. Thanks, Ellen. I owe you.”

Ellen shakes her head and says, “You don’t owe me anything.” Her voice is real quiet, not a whisper, but the words have lost all conviction and they are empty.

I get up real slow, then groan and grumble my way to the kitchen. Ellen already has someone on her cell phone. She’s a hummingbird of chatter.

Now that I’m up and semimoving, I realize a trip back to the Cape won’t be all bad. Not at all. A couple of days out of Southie might turn down the heat. Maybe I can make another trip to the
Sullivan house via the Osterville library. Maybe I’ll be safer down there too. Regardless of the maybe goons sighting I had down there, at least I’ll be out of the DA’s jurisdiction.

Instead of packing a bag, I try to be real quiet while filling the sink with hot water and prying the mop out from under my banana tree, spice rack, and wooden cutlery block. Discreet and mopping up piss generally aren’t partners, but I give it my best shot. The job doesn’t take long. The puke can be someone else’s gig.

Ellen is still on the phone. I go into my bedroom and pack the proverbial bag. When I come out of the room, she’s off the phone. I say, “Who were you calling?”

She tells me. Ellen has already rallied the local restaurateurs and some fellow members of the Lithuania Club to set up a nightly neighborhood watch, just like that. Her buddy Sean is going to print T-shirts and window stickers.

I tell her I feel safer already.

She says, “I just have to run to the bank and check in with Millie before we go south, okay?”

I hold out a be-my-guest hand and say, “That’s fine. No rush.” I’m so magnanimous.

Ellen studies me. I’m the lesson that never gets learned. She says, “Who do you think did this?”

“Terrorists.” I adjust the duffel bag on my shoulder, but it’s for show. There isn’t much in it.

She lights another cigarette but doesn’t offer me one. That means I’m in trouble. She says, “When I first came in here I assumed it was local punks. Vandalism and grab-the-new-TV-and-computer
type of thing. I know it happens all the time. There was a break-in like this a couple of weeks ago on Gold Street, remember?”

I say, “Yeah,” even though I don’t.

Ellen walks toward the apartment door but doesn’t take her eyes off me.

I say, “I told the police I thought it was vandals.”

She says, “Did you?”

“Yeah, Ellen. I did.”

She taps the broken front door gently with her foot. The door doesn’t move. It’s dead. “Is there anything going on that I need to know about, Mark?”

“I got absolutely nothing for you, Ellen.” I say it with conviction.

Ellen has been in my apartment twice a week every week for the past eight years, but I don’t remember the last time I set foot in the old family bungalow. Was it at Christmas two years ago maybe? No, she had me down for a cookout last summer, I think. I helped her set up her new grill. Isn’t that right?

Doesn’t matter, the place is the same. It’s stuck in time, like me.

There’re only five rooms: living room, dining room, kitchen, and two bedrooms with a shared bathroom. There isn’t a lot of furniture, and none of it is permanent. Everything is an antique that’s in rotation with other unsold antiques from Ellen’s store. The rotation usually lasts about six months. Right now, in the dining room there’s
a waist-high hutch and a wooden table with only two chairs, both pushed in tight, afraid to lose track of the table. A rocking chair sits in the living room with a white wicker couch, its cushion faded and flat. Everything is too hard to sit on, nothing just right.

The most notable aspect of chez Genevich is the army of old black-and-white photos that cover the walls and sit on the hutch and the windowsills and almost anything above the floor with a flat, stable surface. There are photos of buildings in Southie and landscapes from Osterville. There are photos of obscure relatives and friends, or relatives and friends who’ve become obscure. Those are photos that belonged to Ellen’s mother or that Ellen took herself, and mixed in—and likely more than half now—are photos of complete strangers. Ellen continually adds to her photo collection by snatching up random black-and-whites from yard sales and antiques shops.

Whenever I’m here, Ellen gives me a tour of the photos, telling me all their names, or stories if they have no names, and if no stories then where she bought them. I don’t remember any of it.

None of the pictures are labeled. I don’t know how she remembers who are our relatives and who are the strangers. Everyone has similar mustaches or hairstyles and they wear the same hats and jackets, T-shirts and skirts. Maybe Ellen forgets everyone and just makes up the stories on the spot, giving them all new secret histories.

I think she moves and switches the pictures around too, just like the rotating furniture. I think the picture of my apartment building was in the kitchen the last time I was here. Now it’s in the living room.

Me? I’m in the kitchen. So is Ellen. It’s late but not late enough.
I smoke. She sits and thinks. We drink tea, and we’re surrounded by those old photos and old faces, everyone anonymous to me, everyone probably dead, maybe like Brendan Sullivan.

Ellen stirs her tea with a finger. She’s quite the charming hostess. She says, “Feeling okay?”

“I’m peachy.” I’m not peachy. I’m not feeling any fruit in particular. The narcoleptic me is taking over more often. The symptoms are getting worse. Dr. Heal-Thyself thinks it’s the case and the face-to-faces with the Times clan, the stress of confrontation, that’s setting me off. Before the photos landed on my desk like some terrorizing band of Cossacks, I had a hypnogogic hallucination maybe once a month. Now it’s daily. I can’t go on like this much longer. I need a vacation from the case I don’t have.

Ellen adds more honey to her tea and stirs counterclockwise, as if she could reset the tea to its beginning. She licks her finger, and it sounds downright messy.

“Ever hear of a spoon, Ellen? Newest gadget going. Not too expensive, user-friendly too.” I shoot smoke at her.

She wipes her hand on a napkin and says, “You don’t sound peachy. You seem a little extra frazzled.”

“Other than my home and office being put in a blender and set to puree, I’m just fine.”

I’m growing more desperate. I’m actually contemplating telling Ellen everything. I’ll tell her to avoid the DA and large men with cell phones in their ears. Maybe she could inspect my photos. She’s the expert. She’d be able to tease and wiggle something out of the pictures, something I’m not seeing, or at least tell me when the photos were shot, how old they are.

She gets up from the kitchen table. Her chair’s legs argue with the hardwood floors. “There’s a picture I want to show you.”

“Anyone who had the under on five-minutes-before-the-picture-tour is a winner,” I say.

“Don’t be a jerk. Come on. It’s in the living room.”

We walk through the dining room, past the collection of little bits of history, someone else’s lost moments. All those forgotten eyes are staring at me, a houseful of Mona Lisas giving me the eye. Christ, I’m a mess. I need some sleep. Some real sleep.

Living room. We walk to one of the front windows. She plucks a photo from the windowsill. She says, “It’s the only one I could find with both of them in it,” and hands it to me.

Three preteen kids sit on the front stoop of an apartment building, presumably from the Harbor Point projects. It’s summer in Southie. The boys have buzz cuts and gaps in their smiles and skinned knees. They all wear white socks and dark-colored sneakers, shoelaces with floppy loops.

The kid in the middle is the biggest, and he has his arms wrapped roughly around the necks of the other two boys. The kid on the right has his head craned away, trying to break out of the hug turned headlock. The kid on the left has his rabbit ears out but didn’t get his hand up over his friend quick enough. The one trying to break away is my father, Tim.

I say, “I’ve probably seen this a hundred times but never really looked at it. That’s Tim there, right?”

“That’s him. He was a cutie.” Ellen is talking about Tim. A Halley’s Comet rare occurrence. “You looked just like him when you were a kid.”

That’s not true. I looked more like Ellen. Now I look like nobody.

Tim has dark brown hair, almost black. The other two kids have much lighter whiffle stubble and skin. I say, “So that’s DA Times in the middle, right?”

“Yup.”

Smack in the middle. The ringleader. The hierarchy of neighborhood authority is clear. The other two boys might as well have deputy badges on their T-shirts. Even back then he had his two goons.

The Tim in the picture, the kid so obviously owned by Times, does not jibe with the Tim of my dreams. Tim is a large, confident man in my dreams who can take care of himself and everyone else, especially the kid me, maybe even the narcoleptic me.

I’m embarrassed for this Tim. This is like seeing him with his pants down. This is like finding him sitting and crying in a room by himself. I don’t want any part of this Tim, the Tim that DA Times obviously still remembers, given his strong-arm tactics with me.

I say, “Who’s the third kid?”

Ellen says, “Brendan Sullivan. For a while there, those boys were never apart. They were practically brothers.”

My stomach fills with mutant-sized butterflies. Their wings cut and slash my stomach. Neurons and synapses sputter and fire, and I can actually feel the electricity my body generates amping too high, pumping out too much wattage too soon, and the circuit breaker flips, shutting me off and down. Not a blackout, though. This is worse. I’ll be awake and I’ll know what’s going on. This is cataplexy.

I crumble toward the floor, my head pitching forward and into Ellen’s legs. She falls back into the window and sits on the sill, knocking pictures to the floor. I’m going to join them. Nothing works except my thoughts. I can’t move or speak. My bulk slides down her legs and I land facedown, my nose pinned against the frame of a picture.

Ellen isn’t panicking; she’s seen this before. She says, “Are you all right, Mark?” repeatedly, a mantra, something to help her through my attack.

I’m not all right. I’m paralyzed. Maybe this time I won’t recover. I’ll be stuck like this forever, lying in Ellen’s bungalow, facedown, on a photo.

She lifts my head and shoulders off the ground. One of the pictures below my face is of an old guy in a bait-and-tackle shop. I have no idea who it is or if I’m supposed to know. He’s likely someone she picked up antiquing. He’s been collected by Ellen. He wears a dark-colored winter hat, a turtleneck stretched tight across his chest, suspenders, and hip waders. Maybe he’s going clamming, or he already went. He’s looking at the camera, looking at me, and holding up something, some bit of unidentifiable fishing gear. It’s pointed toward his temple, and from my prone vantage point it looks like a gun. The other picture is the one of my father, DA Times, and Brendan Sullivan, and I can’t look at it without new, cresting waves of panic crashing. I’m in big trouble.

Ellen kicks the pictures away and rolls me onto my back. She feels my cheeks and snaps her fingers in front of my eyes. I see them and hear them, but I can’t do anything about them.