The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin' (252 page)
Authors: Wally Lamb
“Okay. Oh, and Annie? You weren’t thinking of asking Andrew to give you away, were you? Because he said he wouldn’t feel comfortable.”
“No, no. I’m just so glad he decided to come. I can’t wait to see the three of them. . . . You know, Orion, I’d love to see you, too, if you decide at the last minute that you want to change your mind. You could just come out to dinner with us tonight if you don’t want to go to the ceremony. Of course, you’d be welcome to come to that, too, if you felt like it.
More
than welcome.”
“No, I don’t think so. But thanks. Hope it’s a great day for you two.”
“Thank you, Orion. And thank you for giving me those three kids of ours. I love you for that. I’ll always love you.”
Loves me but didn’t want to stay married to me. Loves her kids but went after one of them with a mallet. “Yeah. Thanks. See ya.”
I get up, start the vacuum. The front foyer sure needs it; it’s picking up a ton of sand. Then why am I stopping? Turning the damn thing off and yanking the plug? I go back to the living room, sit on the sofa, and close my eyes.
Not even a mile down the road yet and I miss them already
. . . .
I wish you were going, Dad. It would be easier for me if you were there
. . . .
We could hang out together Sunday until Andrew and I have to get back to the airport.
But no. It’s too late to change the game plan at this point. And anyway, I’m getting together with Tracy tonight. . . . Still, if I did go down there, stay at the house with her and the kids tonight, it could be a kind of closure. The five of us reconvening there one last time before a buyer comes along. A kind of good-bye to our old life. And Marissa’s phone over there: I could bring it to her. I get up, pace. You know what? Fuck it. Maybe I
will
go down there. I’ll call Tracy and cancel out on tonight. She’ll understand. . . .
Except she’s not answering and her voice mail’s full. If I’m going to the dinner tonight but not the wedding, do I need to bring a gift? Yeah, probably. But what do you get a couple who has everything? I suppose I could go upstairs and grab one of those paintings I brought up here—one of the small ones. Viveca would sure as hell like that. But no, she’d want to know where it came from, and I don’t want to open up
that
can of worms. . . . I could drive up to P’town and find them something there. When the kids and I went up there yesterday, we stopped in front of that shop window and looked at those framed butterflies. They were beautiful—vivid blues and greens, oranges and yellows.
Real
butterflies. Reminded me of those shadow box collages she used to make. And she’s always liked butterflies. I doubt Viveca’s much of a nature girl, but so what? Annie would like a gift like that. I grab my car keys and go.
Three quarters of an hour later, I’m back with the butterflies. Thank god that place did gift-wrapping. I’ll leave it in the car, pack a few things, and start out. I can call them from the road to tell them I’m coming. I’ve got to try Tracy again, too. And Marissa’s phone: I’ve got to remember to grab that.
After I’m packed, I head downstairs. There’s the vacuum cleaner. Well, it’ll wait. I’ll just leave it out, do the floors when I get back. No one’s going to be walking around on that sand while I’m gone. I lock up. Get in the car and back down the driveway. It’s a little after one. I should be back in Three Rivers by four, four thirty at the latest.
Out on Route 6, I pass the familiar sights. Rookie’s Pizza, Paine’s Campground, the Wellfleet Drive-In. I’m excited to get there, but I’d better cool it or I’ll get pulled over. They patrol this road pretty regularly.
I’m entering the Orleans roundabout when it dawns on me that I’ve forgotten Marissa’s cell phone. Shit! Should I keep going? No, I’d better go back for it. What’s it going to add? Another thirty minutes maybe? I’ll still get there in plenty of time for that dinner.
Here they all are again: the drive-in, the campground, Rookie’s. Eyes on the road, I reach for my phone. Try Tracy. No answer. She really needs to clear some of those old messages. I take a right at the Truro Center exit. Another right and then a left puts me onto Pamet Road. From here, I’m another five minutes from that cell phone. In and out and I’ll be on my way again.
Driving onto the dirt road that leads to Viveca’s, I spot it up ahead through the trees: their truck. Those cleaners. Jesus Christ, I
told
them to call ahead instead of just showing up. And anyway, they were just here three days ago. Do they think I’m
that
much of a slob? Or are they trying to screw the owners by billing them for unnecessary services? Well, too bad if I’ve kept them waiting. It’s their own damned fault.
Except the truck’s empty. What’s going on? I get out of the car, house key in hand. When I stick it in the lock, the door swings open before I can even turn the knob. There’s stuff stacked in the foyer: the Mapplethorpes, some of the sculptures, the Jones paintings I’d put upstairs. What the . . . ? Jesus Christ, they’re robbing the place!
I walk into the living room. Scan the bare walls. “Hey!” I yell. She walks into view. I hear footsteps upstairs. Leave, I tell myself. My phone’s in the car. I’ll block the driveway, call the cops. No, too dangerous. I can drive back down to the Pamet Road and call 9-1-1 from there. Halfway to the front door, I hear him flying down the stairs. Go! Don’t look back! But the sudden pain at the small of my back drops me to my knees. What just happened? I look around and see him standing there, gripping the upright vac like it’s a baseball bat. See him lifting it over his shoulder. It’s coming down toward me. He’s aiming for my head. “No!” I scream. And then—
Y
ou think I want to be this way? That it’s a choice? You think I want to be working the kinds of minimum wage jobs that are available to guys with a record like mine? Midnight floor buffer down at the mall, insert-stuffer for the Sunday papers. And even these dead-end jobs had to be negotiated by the employment counselor at the group home I’m in. Now I’m a night shift CNA at Eldredge Eldercare—got my training during my last prison bid. The pay’s better: seventy-five cents above minimum wage. In return for my weekly paycheck, half of which I have to fork over for room and board, I empty bedpans, dispose of colostomy bags and other hazardous waste, shine flashlights on the faces of sleeping residents to make sure they’re still drawing breath. A few weeks back, the nurse at the desk told me and Raj, another aide, to go down to room seven and clean up Mr. Rasmusson, change his sheets because he’d shit the bed. And after we were done, I looked over at his roommate, Mr. Cavoli—he’s a nice old guy, one of my favorite patients—and he was lying there, wide awake. “How you doing, Angelo,” I asked him.
“Eh, not so good. I can’t sleep.”
“Again, huh? You want me to ask the nurse to give you something?”
“Nah, that stuff makes me goofy afterward. If you’re not too busy, maybe we can just talk.” I told him I was never too busy for him. So I pulled up a chair and listened—let him take me on a tour of the downtown where he’d grown up, the way it was back when he was a boy. It’s a funny thing about those eighty- or ninety-year-old brains: they can’t remember what happened ten minutes ago, but they have amazing recall of the distant past. “Let’s see. There was Ames’s butter and cheese store, and then the Chinese restaurant where my mother used to take me for chicken chow mein. Next to that was the Strand Theater, where they gave away free dishes at the Saturday matinees. I was kind of sweet on one of the usherettes that worked there, Elga Swenson. I asked her for a date once, but she said no, her father didn’t want her dating roughnecks. I fixed his wagon, though. He’d pick her up after work and sometimes get there early, go in and watch the picture. Still makes me laugh when I think about the way his car was bucking and stalling after I put sugar in his gas tank.”
I listened to Mr. Cavoli that night until he began to doze off—until, maybe, he drifted into a dream where he was young again and his whole life was still ahead of him. They’re lonely, these old people. Most of their friends have died off, and some of them have families that hardly ever visit. I get pretty close to some of them. Granted, they don’t know that my rap sheet says “pedophile,” but maybe it wouldn’t matter if they
did
know. Maybe they’d just treat me like they find me. Because I’m not a monster. Hey, I’ve got my flaws. Plenty of them. But I’m more than just a name on the sex offender registry—someone you’ve got to keep little girls away from. I’ve got my good points, too. Like I said, I’m not a monster.
Eldredge Eldercare is owned by some company out of Boston. Corporate’s careful not to let any of us ex-offenders work days when some visiting family member might see us. Recognize us. Days is when the A Team’s on duty: the chatty Spanish moms, the community college kids who work here first shift and take classes at night. Third shift is when us convicted felons report for duty: Shondell (ex-junkie prostitute), Bryan (DUI fatality), Tricia (embezzler, coke addict), Raj (second-degree assault), and me (risk of injury to a minor, kiddie porn). Nadja and Zahra work our shift, too, although their only “crime” is that they’re head scarf–wearing Muslims. The rest of us live in halfway houses, report to parole officers. The vampire shift, we call it. When the sun goes down, we rise from our crypts, put on our scrubs, and report for duty. When the moon fades away at daybreak, we punch out, get picked up by our respective group home vans, grab breakfast, and hit the sack.
I didn’t used to work crap jobs. I made decent money selling life insurance. It was a family-run agency, and although I wasn’t a member of the tribe, I was their top dog, saleswise. Sold rings around the owner’s sons and sons-in-law. See, I figured out the con almost immediately. Used my looks and my charisma to seal those deals. What I’d do was befriend the husband first—kid with him a little, talk sports if that’s what he was into. Baseball, football: I didn’t give a shit about either, but I read the sports page every morning so I could talk the talk, become a Giants or a Patriots fan, dis the Red Sox or the Yankees as the situation called for. And while the man of the house was looking over the policy, I’d look over at the wife and smile. Hold her gaze for maybe two or three seconds more than another salesman might have. And if she held my gaze in return, I knew that I’d pretty much made the sale—that if her hubby was still on the fence, she’d convince him to buy the policy. The flirtatious glances, the body I took pains to keep in shape: it sold more insurance than whatever deal I was offering them on their premium.
Those sales skills? They were transferable. Single moms with little girls: that’s the ideal situation. The one useful thing I got from my father was his good genes—an athlete’s build, cobalt blue eyes, and a full head of hair. I’m in my fifties now, but my hair’s still as thick as it was when I was in my twenties. I dye the top and leave the temples gray. Three hundred sit-ups and push-ups twice a day, plus watching what I eat, keep my chest and abs tight. I’ve got the same thirty-three-inch waist I’ve had all my adult life.
Wooing those mothers and their daughters is a process. I’ll get behind them in the checkout line at the grocery store and start chatting them up. Then, out in the parking lot, I’ll offer to change the tire I punctured after I watched them walk into the store. Next thing you know, I’m eating supper over at their place, taking them out for ice cream. I’m cultivating them both, see? Playing board games and watching videos with the daughter, then sticking around, having a glass of wine or two with the mom—sympathizing with her about how her ex screwed her over. Then I go home, get in bed with a bottle of lotion, and think about the girl: the sprinkling of freckles across her nose, her cute little butt, what her bare chest and her little cherry must look like. . . .
Sometimes I’ll take my Polaroids and magazines out of their hiding place and get off that way. At the house I’m in now, my roommate, Daryl, and I have a deal: he doesn’t say anything about the stuff I’ve got stashed up inside our suspended ceiling and I don’t say anything about the weed he’s got up there. As a matter of fact, I supply Daryl with his weed. He gives me the money and I buy it from Raj down at work. The staff? They’re no problem. When you’re a veteran of these places, you can pretty much figure out inside of a week who the naïve do-gooders are, who’s dumb as rocks, and who’s going to be open to bribery.
“Predator,” “pedophile,” “child molester”: yeah, you could call me any of those things. But don’t forget “victim” because that was what came first. You think I was born this way? I wasn’t. I got fucked up—“emotionally disregulated” as the shrinks put it—the year I was nine. This one therapist-in-training who interviewed me last month—a grad student who was gathering data for some study she was doing about how pedophilia gets kick-started in childhood—she quizzed me for a couple of hours about how I became who I became. “Please be as candid and thorough as you can,” she said. I told her some of it: the abridged version, let’s say. You can never fully trust shrinks, no matter how sincere they seem. So you withhold, bullshit them, manipulate them a little for your own amusement. But those questions she kept lobbing at me brought it all back, so vividly that it was like I was reliving it. . . .
The trouble started after my father left my mother and me so that he could shack up with his girlfriend and
her
son, puny little Peter Clegg, who was in my class at school. It was confusing, you know? My dad was a mailman and Peter’s mother was the postmaster’s secretary. That was how their little “romance” started. But at the time, I didn’t get any of that. I just assumed that he had left because he liked Peter better than he liked me. What I couldn’t figure out was why.
Dad left us high and dry. I was in Cub Scouts, okay? One week Mom was a housewife and our den mother, and the next week she was a grocery clerk down at the First National. That was when I had to start taking the bus over to this woman Irma’s house after school.
Irma Cake: she was a foster mother, but she babysat other kids, too. Us after-school kids had to play down in the basement so we wouldn’t wake the babies up from their naps or bother her while she was watching her stories on TV. Those babies all must have been heavy sleepers, I guess, because she’d have the volume up so loud that you could hear the television through the fucking floorboards.
Time now for . . . The Edge of Night.
We were only allowed upstairs at snack time, or if we had to use the toilet. And if you needed to tell Irma something while you were up there, you had to wait for a commercial.
Irma’s daughter, Tawny, was in charge downstairs. To this day, I fantasize about running into Tawny Cake on the street somewhere and making her pay for the things she did. One time when I was in prison, I woke up smiling from a dream where I’d just plunged a shiv into her heart.
Tawny was older than the rest of us—fourteen or fifteen, maybe. She was a big bruiser and unpredictable as hell. Nice to you one day and a bully the next. On my first day at Irma’s, Tawny gave me a handful of Hershey’s Kisses. On the second day, I called her Scrawny Tawny, thinking she’d think it was funny. Instead of laughing, she smacked me so hard across the mouth that I cut the inside of my lip on my bottom teeth. She wouldn’t let me go upstairs so Irma could look at it, so I just sat there cross-legged on the floor, swallowing back my tears and snot and blood. I never knew from day to day, sometimes from hour to hour, which Tawny I was dealing with.
My mother didn’t work on weekends. Sometimes we’d get in the car and go places on Saturday: Wequonnoc Park to look at the animals and swing on the swings, or down to Ocean Beach if it was summer. Once a month or so, we’d drive the forty-five minutes to my cousins’ house, the O’Days. Uncle Chick and my mom were brother and sister, and my cousin Donald and I were almost the same age. I liked Donald okay back then, but it bugged me that he was bigger than me, and ten months older, and that
his
father hadn’t left
him
. But anyway, whatever Mom and I did on Saturday, by Sunday afternoon I’d start worrying about the next day when I’d have to go back over to Irma’s. When I told my mother I didn’t want to go there anymore, she said I
had
to go. “These changes are hard for me, too, you know,” she said. “Do you think I want to be over at the First National all day, ringing up people’s groceries while they watch me like hawks, thinking that I’m out to cheat them? But this is the way things are now, Kent, and we both have to just accept it. And if you don’t like it, then call up your father and tell
him
because he’s the one who made this mess.” When I
did
call Dad, my classmate Peter Clegg was the one who answered. “Who
is
this?” he kept saying. “If you’re not going to say anything, then I’m hanging up.” And he did, three times in a row. The fourth time, the phone just kept ringing and ringing.
Mornings at school were okay, but once lunch was over, I’d start staring at the wall clock, dreading what was coming. And when the bus driver yanked the door open in front of Irma’s, I’d get off as slowly as I could. Irma would appear at the door, holding a baby or a toddler in her arms and calling to me to hurry on in. “How was school today, Kent?” she’d ask.
“Good.”
“Okay, down you go then. The girls and Tawny are waiting for you.”
The girls, Sandra and Nadine, were both in my grade, but they went to a different school. I didn’t like either of them. And I hated Tawny.
There was stuff to play with in the basement, but it was shabby: puzzles with missing pieces, books with all the pictures scribbled on, plastic cowboys and Indians that Irma’s dog had chewed before it got run over by a car. The only good thing down there was this can of Lincoln Logs. I’d make a beeline for them, then sit on the cold, damp cement floor and build stuff so I wouldn’t have to play dolls with the girls, or get in trouble with Tawny. But I’d be in the middle of making a fort or something when she’d yank me up off the floor and tell me I had to play some stupid game she’d invented. “Twirling” was one. No matter how dizzy you got, we had to keep spinning around in circles until she said we could stop. “Halt!” she’d yell. Then she’d laugh as we staggered like drunks, falling onto the floor or crashing into chairs or walls. If you stopped before she said you could, you had to go through the spanking machine. When Sandra and Nadine spanked you, it didn’t hurt, but as you passed under Tawny’s legs, she’d whack your butt hard enough to make it sting. After a while, Sandra stopped coming, so it was just Nadine and me. That was when Tawny started making us play “House.”
In “House,” Nadine was the wife and I had to be the husband. “Hug her,” Tawny would order me. “Now call her darling and kiss her.” If I cooperated, she’d peel back a roll of Life Savers and let me take two. If I refused, she’d pin me against the floor and tickle me until, unable to breathe, I’d give in. But one day when Tawny told us we had to play “House” again, I dug my heels in. “You do what I say, or else!” she threatened.
“Or else what?” Or else she’d tickle me again, I thought.
“You’ll see.” When I shook my head, she went upstairs and came back down with an electrical cord and threatened to whip me with it.
“Go ahead,” I said. “See if I care.” This was a bluff; I was petrified. She chased me around the basement until she had me cornered. Then she yanked down my pants and underpants and lashed my bare butt while Nadine stood there, wide-eyed. “Does that hurt?”
“No, it tickles.”
“Yeah? Then how about this?” Several blows later, she had me crying and begging her to stop.
The door at the top of the stairs banged open. “Tawny! What the hell’s going on down there?” Irma shouted.