The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin' (59 page)

“Did you read it?” she asked me the evening she got back. She’d come down to the kitchen and found me leaning against the counter, eating canned ravioli out of the saucepan. In the week she’d been away, I’d both missed Janis and been relieved she was gone.

“Started it,” I said. “Great job. Lizzy was quite a gal, huh?”

She asked how far I’d gotten.

“Uh, well … Seneca Falls. The suffragists wearing pantaloons.” Watching her smile turn from anticipation to disappointment, I changed the subject. “So did you hear about the big feline smack-down?”

In the month or so since the Micks’ cat had arrived from New Orleans, there had been no love lost between him and Nancy Tucker. Fat Harry and little Nancy had had several howling, arched-back face-offs. But while Janis was away, the fur had finally flown. Nancy had come out of it with a torn ear and a bald spot on her back. Harry, sporting a rakish gash over his eye, had been banished to the barn.

“Moses says he loves it out there,” Janis said. “He left him a dead bat as a thank-you present yesterday.”

“Is he sure that wasn’t Velvet?” I quipped. “She’s kind of got that Vampira thing going on.”

Janis smiled, said I was awful. “So when do you think you’ll be able to read the rest of my paper? Because I’d really love to hear what you think.”

“Hey, don’t worry about what
I
think. It’s your doctoral committee you’ve got to impress. Not me.”

“This isn’t about impressing you, Caelum,” she said. “This is about your having given me the gift of access to your ancestor’s archives and my giving you a gift in return.”

“Yeah? What am I getting—an iPod?”

But I couldn’t back her off with sarcasm. “You’re the blood of Lizzy’s blood, Caelum,” she said. “You exist because she married Charlie after everyone had written her off as a spinster, and because they had babies together: Eddie, Levi, and then your great-great grandfather, Willie—Lydia’s father.” Damned if I could hold her gaze when she started that blood-of-her-blood stuff, which I probably
wasn’t.
I dumped the rest of the ravioli in the garbage. Started washing the pan and whatever else was in the sink. Problem was, Janis grabbed a dishtowel and came up beside me. “Willie was an entertainer—a star on the minstrel circuit. Did you know that?”

“Nope.”

“You know what everyone at the conference was talking about after I presented my paper? The incredible ironies in your family history.”

“The ironies?” I glanced at her for a second, then looked away again.

She nodded. “In 1863—the middle of the war? Willie was performing on the New York stage, entertaining audiences with these hideous parodies of black women. And meanwhile his sixty-year-old mother was down in Washington, nursing the wounded and defying the terms of the Emancipation Proclamation—sending slaves from the border states off to safe havens before their masters could catch them. And then there’s the irony that—”

“Hey, not to interrupt,” I said. “But what does Moze think?”

That stopped her short. “About what?”

“Your paper. He’s read it, right?”

Now it was she who was struggling to keep eye contact. “I haven’t asked him to, Caelum. Moses doesn’t really value my scholarly work.”

“Oh,” I said. “Well …” I promised her I’d read the rest of it as soon as I could—probably that weekend.

But two weeks later, Lizzy Popper was still stuck on that train coming back from Seneca Falls. When Janis asked again if I’d finished, I told her I’d been crazy busy. School stuff, plus a situation over at the prison—something I hadn’t anticipated.

“Is everything okay with your wife?” she asked.

“It is now,” I said. “But it took some doing to get it fixed.”

“Get what fixed?”

I told her I didn’t have the energy to go into it. “I
do
want to read your thing, though. It’s not that I don’t.”

What had happened was: Mo’s former cellmate, Camille, had filed that complaint about Officer Carol Moorhead, the CO who’d sexually assaulted her during that cavity search for the missing pepper shaker. There’d been an investigation, and Maureen, the only witness, had been questioned by two of Moorhead’s supervisors. The surprise was that they’d taken Mo’s word over their officer’s. Moorhead got a letter of reprimand and a transfer to the juvenile detention center in Hartford. That had been good for Camille but bad for Maureen, because Moorhead’s fellow officer and paramour, Officer Tom Tonelli, had targeted her for some payback.

Tonelli began harassing Mo in quiet ways: shadowing her when she walked to and from the chow hall, making inaudible remarks under his breath, chuckling at nothing. One afternoon, he gestured to Mo when she was on her way to her NA meeting. She approached tentatively and asked if he wanted something. “Nah,” he told her. “My trigger finger’s just a little itchy today.”

Tonelli upped the ante when he did a third-shift rotation. They do hourly head counts over there—daytime, nighttime, twenty-four/seven. At night, when the women are sleeping, most of the COs just enter their cells quietly and shine a light on them. Try not to wake them up. But if a CO wants to be a prick, he’ll throw on the overhead light, make noise. Maureen’s roommate, Irina, was sleeping through all these intrusions, but Tonelli would wake up Mo three, four times a shift. Then one night, she opens her eyes and there’s Tonelli, his face about six inches away from her face. “Boo!” He whispers it, okay? Laughs under his breath and leaves. I mean, come on. After what she lived through at Columbine, and everything after that. And she’s got
to put up with some vindictive low-rung state employee who’s trying to screw with her sanity?

The trouble was, I didn’t
know
this was going on. She and I had had that argument, see? That day in the visiting room, when she told me to just get up and leave. And so I’d left. Walked out of that room, and stayed away for maybe the next six or seven visits. And when I finally
did
go back there, I was like, Oh shit, because I could see it immediately on her face: the PTSD, the hypervigi-lance. It was like she’d spiraled back to Littleton. And when she told me why—told me about what that asshole was doing to her—well, I went a little ballistic. But this time, instead of picking up a pipe wrench, I picked up the phone. Called and complained to everyone I could think of: the warden, the deputy warden, the Corrections commissioner, my legislators. I
kept
calling the ones who wouldn’t speak to me directly until they finally got on the line. I wrote letters, e-mails. Contacted Dodd’s and Lieberman’s offices, the governor’s. I was goddamned if I was going to let her get “Columbined” again.

And guess what? It worked. Tonelli got transferred. Maureen got to see the jailhouse shrink without waiting the usual three or four weeks for an appointment. She got new meds—an antidepressant and an antianxiety drug. And once those kicked in, she was better. Much better. She began to come out of herself a little, and then a little more. So it was better for me, too. Because I tell you, it’s a hell of a lot easier to walk across that visiting room floor toward a smile than toward a face that’s suffering. “Thank you,” she said, two or three visits in a row, and I told her she didn’t have to thank me—that I’d done it because I loved her. “I love you, too,” she said, and God, I don’t think we’d told each other that for three or four months.

I was grading papers at the kitchen table when Janis came downstairs to make herself some tea. I asked her how the revisions were going. She had finished them, she said; she had e-mailed them off to
her adviser and was waiting for a response. She asked me again if I’d read Lizzy’s story.

I shook my head. Grabbed a bunch of student papers and held them up to her as evidence. “I really want to, though,” I said. “Because from what I’ve read so far? Wow.”

“Do me a favor,” she said. “Don’t patronize me.”

“I’m
not.
I’m
going
to read it. But I can’t just drop everything and—”

I stopped mid-sentence because that’s exactly what I was doing: patronizing her, bullshitting her. I’d been doing it for weeks.

The kettle whistled. She poured her tea and started to leave. But at the doorway, cup in hand, she stopped. Turned and faced me. “Caelum, the thing that happened between us while Moses was away? It just happened, that’s all. We were both feeling a little vulnerable that night, a little sorry for ourselves. We’d both had too much wine.”

Nodding in agreement, I began to gather my stuff together so I could work someplace else.

“We made a mistake. It doesn’t have to be a wedge between us.”

“A wedge?”

“Oh, come on, Caelum. You know what I mean. We don’t run together anymore. You don’t share meals with us like you used to. Half the time when I talk to you, you won’t even look at me. And this refusal of yours to read my work: it’s passive-aggressive. And it
hurt.”

“Being busy makes me passive-aggressive?”

“You couldn’t read sixty pages in six weeks? About your own ancestor? No one’s
that
busy, Caelum. Look, we didn’t plan for it to happen. It just—”

“I
planned for it to happen, okay? I kept pouring you that wine
hoping
it would happen.”

That stopped her, momentarily. “And I kept drinking it,” she finally said. “So maybe I was hoping it would happen, too.”

“Does he know?”

“Moses? Oh, God, no. I would never—”

“Good,” I said. “Great. Because you know something? I’ve
been
the husband who got cheated on. And you know what? It sucks when you find out. It hurts like hell.”

She blinked back tears. “Caelum, why are you so
mad
at me?”

“I’m not. I’m mad at …” At who? I wondered. The uptight mother who wasn’t really my mother? The mother who was screwing two guys that summer? My straight-talking aunt who had kept it from me, too?”Never mind,” I said. “I can’t go into it.”

“Can’t?” she said. “Or won’t?”

I had to pull the plug on this going-nowhere conversation, so without answering her, I stuffed my students’ papers inside my grade book and stood.
Let
her think that my not reading that damn thing was about what we did that night.
Let
her flatter herself that that’s all that was on my plate…. And besides, it
had
hurt like hell—getting that phone call out of the blue that night from Hay’s wife’s meddlesome friend.
We just wanted you to know, in case you don’t know, that your wife is having an affair.
That phone call had lit a fire in my head, and it had spread as fast and wild as the one that killed all those people at the Cocoanut Grove that night, Ethel Dank included…. If things hadn’t gone the way they did—if that pipe wrench had crushed Paul Hay’s skull like I’d meant for it to do—then it might have been
me
sitting in prison for having killed someone….

Janis? Yeah, I still wanted her. But she was someone else’s wife, and telling her the truth about
why
I couldn’t bring myself to read her paper would have been another kind of intimacy between us. No. Uh-uh. If I was going to get into my paternity problem with anyone, it wasn’t going to be Janis.

“BUT IT DOESN’T MAKE SENSE,
Cae,” Maureen said. “Why would some town clerk affix her seal to a phony birth date?” I had just confessed my confusion about who I was and wasn’t in, of all
places, the ugly gray-walled visitors’ room, under the gaze of surveillance cameras and a scowling CO with a buzz cut and a bulked-up torso.

“I don’t know. Money, maybe?” “From who?”

“From whoever wanted my birth hushed up. The married beer executive, maybe. Or the ballplayer. I Googled him. He was married, too.”

“But Cae, hold on a minute. If you’re not a Quirk, then why do you look like your father?”

“I
don’t
look like him. There’s no resemblance between him and me. It’s just that Lolly used to say it so often, everyone took it as the truth.”

Mo shook her head. “You know those family photos Lolly used to have up in her bedroom?” she said. “One time, she put your high school yearbook picture next to your father’s. I
saw
the resemblance, Cae. It wasn’t just Lolly telling me.”

“That’s what pisses me off the most,” I said. “The fact that she was just as big a liar as the rest of them. Lies and secrets: that’s what the Quirks were all about. And Lolly was as much a part of the big cover-up as any of them.”

Mo said she hadn’t known any of the others, so she couldn’t vouch for them. “But I knew Lolly, Cae. She loved you. And in spite of how confusing this must be for you right now, you should try to remember that. Lolly never would have done anything to hurt you intentionally.”

“Well, she
did
hurt me. Never used to shut up about Quirk this, Lydia that. But she couldn’t let me know who my
mother
was? That hurts like hell.”

“I understand that. And it
was
wrong for her to withhold it from you. You had a right to know. But Lolly must have been torn about it: whether to tell you the truth or protect you from it. She was very protective of you, Cae.”

“Protective? Really? Jesus, my neck still hurts from some of those headlocks she used to put me in.”

Maureen smiled. “I’m serious, though, Cae. You know what Lolly told me once? That before Hennie, she’d been involved with another woman. Someone named Maggie, who she was crazy about. There’d been a plan in the works. Lolly was going to ‘get out of Dodge,’ as she put it. Get out from under her father’s yoke and move down to Florida with Maggie. They had it all figured out; there was this trailer park they were going to move into—a lesbian community that sort of flew under the radar, I guess. But in the end, she broke it off and stayed put. And do you know why? Because she couldn’t leave
you,
she said. Her brother wasn’t reliable, and she felt that your mother had her limitations: her temper, her resentment about the way your father—”

“Rosemary
wasn’t
my mother,” I said. “I was just tricked into believing she was…. When was this, anyway? Because Hennie was around for as far back as I can remember.”