Choke (8 page)

“Yeah, Eva,” I say. “I boned you.” And I yawn. “Yup. Every chance I got, I stuck it in you and humped out a load.”

They call this psychodrama. You could call it just another kind of granny dumping.

Her twisted little finger wilts, and she settles back between the arms of her wheelchair. “So you finally admit it,” she says.

“Hell yes,” I say. “You’re a great piece of ass, baby sis.”

She looks off at a blank spot on the linoleum floor and says, “After all these years, he admits it.”

This is role-playing therapy, only Eva doesn’t know it’s not for real.

Her head still loops in little circles, but her eyes come back to me. “And you’re not sorry?” she says.

Well, I guess if Jesus could die for my sins, I suppose I can soak up a few for other people. We all get our chance to play scapegoat. Take the blame.

The martyrdom of Saint Me.

The sins of every man in history landing square on my back.

“Eva,” I say. “Baby, sweetheart, little sister, love of my life, of course I’m sorry. I was a pig,” I say and look at my watch. “You were just such a hot tamale that I was out of control.”

Like I need this shit to deal with. Eva just stares at me with her big hyperthyroid eyes until a big tear splurts out of one eye and cuts through the powder on her wrinkled cheek.

I roll my eyes at the ceiling and say, “Okay, I hurt your little woo-woo, but that was eighty frigging years ago, so get over it. Move on with your life.”

Then her horrible hands come up, wasted and veined as tree roots or old carrots, and they cover her face. “Oh, Colin,” she says behind them. “Oh, Colin.”

She takes her hands away, and her face is hosed with eye juice. “Oh, Colin,” she whispers, “I forgive you.” And her face nods toward her chest, bobbing with short breaths and sniffs, and her terrible hands bring the edge of her bib up to wipe at her eyes.

We just sit there. Jeez, I wish I had some chewing gum. My watch says twelve thirty-five.

She wipes her eyes and sniffs and looks up a little. “Colin,” she says. “Do you still love me?”

These frigging old people. Jesus H.

And just in case you’re wondering, I’m not a monster.

Just like something in a frigging book, for real I say, “Yeah, Eva.” I say, “Yeah, for sure, I guess I can probably still love you.”

Eva sobs now, her face hanging over her lap, her whole body rocking. “I’m so glad,” she says, her tears dropping straight, gray stuff from her nose dripping right into her empty hands.

She says, “I’m so glad,” and she’s still crying, and you can smell the chewed-up Salisbury steak squirreled away in her shoe, the chewed mushroom chicken in the pocket of her smock. That, and the damn nurse is never going to get my mom back from her shower, and I have to be back at work in the eighteenth century by one o’clock.

It’s hard enough remembering my own past so I can do my fourth step. Now it’s mixed up with the past of these other people. Which defense attorney I am, today, I can’t remember. I look at my fingernails. I ask Eva, “Is Dr. Marshall here, do you think?” I ask, “Do you know if she’s married?”

The truth about myself, who I really am, my father and everything, if my mom knows then she’s too freaked out with guilt to tell.

I ask Eva, “Could you maybe cry somewhere else?”

Then it’s too late. The Blue Jay starts singing.

And Eva, she still won’t shut up, crying and rocking, her bib pressed to her face, the plastic bracelet trembling around one wrist, she’s saying, “I forgive you, Colin. I forgive you. I forgive you. Oh, Colin, I forgive … ”

It was one afternoon when our stupid little boy and his foster
mother were in a shopping mall that they heard the announcement. This was summer, and they were shopping for back to school, the year he was going to be in fifth grade. The year you had to wear shirts with stripes to really fit in. This was years and years ago. This was only his first foster mother.

Up-and-down stripes, he was telling her when they heard it.

The announcement:

“Would Dr. Paul Ward,” the voice told everybody, “please meet your wife in the cosmetics department of Woolworth’s.”

This was the first time the Mommy came back to claim him.

“Dr. Ward, please meet your wife in the cosmetics department of Woolworth’s.”

That was the secret signal.

So the kid lied and said he needed to find the bathroom and instead he went to Woolworth’s, and there, opening boxes of hair color, was the Mommy. She had a big yellow wig that made her face look too small and smelled like cigarettes. With her fingernails, she opened each box and took out the dark brown bottle of dye inside. She’d open another box and take out the other bottle. She put the one bottle in the other box and put it back on the shelf. She opened another box.

“This one’s pretty,” the Mommy said, looking at the picture of a woman smiling on the box. She switched the bottle inside with another bottle. All the bottles the same dark brown glass.

Opening another box, she said, “Do you think she’s pretty?”

And the kid’s so stupid he says, “Who?”

“You know who,” the Mommy said. “She’s young, too. I just saw the two of you looking at clothes. You were holding her hand, so don’t lie.”

And the kid was so stupid he didn’t know to just run away. He couldn’t begin to even think about the very definite terms of her parole or the restraining order or why she’d been in jail for the past three months.

And switching bottles of blond into boxes for redheads and bottles of black into boxes for blondes, the Mommy said, “So do you like her?”

“You mean Mrs. Jenkins?” the boy said.

Not closing the boxes just perfect, the Mommy was putting
them back on the shelf a little messed up, a little faster, and she said, “Do you like her?”

And like this is going to help, our little stooge said, “She’s just a foster mom.”

And not looking at the kid, still looking at the woman smiling on the box in her hand, the Mommy said, “I asked you if you liked her.”

A shopping cart rattled up next to them in the aisle and a blond lady reached past to take a bottle with a blond picture but a bottle of some other color inside it. This lady put the box in her cart and got away.

“She thinks of herself as a blonde,” the Mommy said. “What we have to do is mess with people’s little identity paradigms.”

What the Mommy used to call “Beauty Industry Terrorism.”

The little boy looked after the lady until she was too far away to help.

“You already have me,” the Mommy said. “So what do you call this foster one?”

Mrs. Jenkins.

“And do you like her?” the Mommy said, and turned to look at him for the first time.

And the little boy pretended to make up his mind and said, “No?”

“Do you love her?”

“No.”

“Do you hate her?”

And this spineless little worm said, “Yes?”

And the Mommy said, “You got that right.” She leaned down to look him in the eyes and said, “How much do you hate Mrs. Jenkins?”

And the little cooz said, “Lots and lots?”

“And lots and lots and lots,” the Mommy said. She put her
hand for him to take and said, “We have to be fast. We have a train to catch.”

Then leading him through the aisles, tugging his boneless little arm toward daylight outside the glass doors, the Mommy said, “You are mine. Mine. Now and forever, and don’t you ever forget it.”

And pulling him through the doors, she said, “And just in case the police or anybody asks you later on, I’m going to tell you all the dirty, filthy things this so-called foster mother did to you every time she could get you alone.”

Where I live now, in my mom’s old house, I sort through my mom’s
papers, her college report cards, her deeds, statements, accounts. Court transcripts. Her diary, still locked. Her entire life.

The next week, I’m Mr. Benning, who defended her on the little charge of kidnapping after the school bus incident. The week after, I’m public defender Thomas Welton, who plea-bargained her sentence down to six months after she was charged with assaulting the animals in the zoo. After him, I’m the American civil liberties attorney who went to bat with her on the
malicious mischief charge stemming from the disturbance at the ballet.

There’s an opposite to déjà vu. They call it jamais vu. It’s when you meet the same people or visit places, again and again, but each time is the first. Everybody is always a stranger. Nothing is ever familiar.

“How is Victor doing?” my mom asks me on my next visit.

Whoever I am. Whatever public defender du jour.

Victor
who?
I want to ask.

“You don’t want to know,” I say. It would break your heart. I ask her, “What was Victor like as a little boy? What did he want from the world? Did he have any big goal he dreamed about?”

At this point, how my life starts to feel is like I’m acting in a soap opera being watched by people on a soap opera being watched by people on a soap opera being watched by real people, somewhere. Every time I visit, I watch the halls for another chance to talk with the doctor with her little black brain of hair, her ears and glasses.

Dr. Paige Marshall with her clipboard and attitude. Her scary dreams about helping my mom live another ten or twenty years.

Dr. Paige Marshall, another potential dose of sexual anesthetic.

See also: Nico.

See also: Tanya.

See also: Leeza.

More and more, it feels like I’m doing a really bad impersonation of myself.

My life makes about as much sense as a Zen koan.

A House Wren sings, but whether it’s a real bird or it’s four o’clock I’m not sure.

“My memory isn’t any good,” my mom says. She’s rubbing her temples with the thumb and index finger of one hand, and
says, “I worry that I should tell Victor the truth about himself.” Propped on her stack of pillows, she says, “Before it’s too late, I wonder if Victor has a right to know who he really is.”

“So just tell him,” I say. I bring food, a bowl of chocolate pudding, and try to sneak the spoon into her mouth. “I can go call,” I say, “and Victor can be here in a couple minutes.”

The pudding is lighter brown and smelly under a cold dark brown skin.

“Oh, but I can’t,” she says. “The guilt is so bad, I can’t even face him. I don’t even know how he’ll react.”

She says, “Maybe it’s better Victor never finds out.”

“So tell me,” I say. “Get it off your chest,” I say, and I promise not to tell Victor, not unless she says it’s okay.

She squints at me, her old skin all cinching tight around her eyes. With chocolate pudding smeared in the wrinkles around her mouth, she says, “But how do I know I can trust you? I’m not even sure who you are.”

I smile and say, “Of course you can trust me.”

And I stick the spoon in her mouth. The black pudding just sits on her tongue. It’s better than a stomach tube. Okay, it’s cheaper.

I take the remote control out of her reach and tell her, “Swallow.”

I tell her, “You have to listen to me. You have to trust me.”

I say, “I’m him. I’m Victor’s father.”

And her milky eyes swell at me while the rest of her face, her wrinkles and skin, seem to slide into the collar of her nightgown. With one terrible yellow hand, she makes the sign of the cross and her mouth hangs open to her chest. “Oh, you’re him, and you’ve come back,” she says. “Oh, blessed Father. Holy Father,” she says. “Oh, please forgive me.”