I Know This Much Is True (32 page)

Rewritten history.

In my
fantasy
version of what happened next, I stood and con-

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fronted Mr. LoPresto—avenged all of the losers and nonstarters that he and his sarcasm had shat all over. Threw the motherfucker up against the wall in the name of justice and followed Ralph out of there. But in reality, I sat there. Said nothing. Wrote down whatever he said so that I could puke it back to him at test time.

Years and years later, when my marriage to Dessa was still intact but in trouble, the evening manager at Benny’s hardware store called me one rainy spring night and asked me to please come and get my brother. Thomas had taken a bus from the hospital into town—he’d earned the privilege—and then had caused a disturbance, screaming and flinging items off shelves in the electrical department because everywhere he looked, he saw surveillance equipment. The store manager knew who we were—we had all gone to school together—and said he thought I’d have wanted him to call me instead of the police.

When I got there, I convinced Thomas to lower his voice and to remove from his head the coat hanger hat he’d fashioned for himself.

(It scrambled enemy frequencies, he told me; Soviet operatives were in pursuit.) I thanked the manager and coaxed Thomas into my truck.

On the way back to the hospital, neither of us said much, letting the windshield wipers do the talking instead. And when we got back to Settle and the night nurse was escorting Thomas to his room, he turned back unexpectedly and said, “That’s the trouble with survival of the fittest, isn’t it, Dominick? The corpse at your feet.
That
little inconvenience.” His voice, I remember, was cool and rational. To this day, what he said was a mystery to me. To this day, I can’t decide if it was his craziness or his sanity talking.

After his showdown with Mr. LoPresto, Ralph Drinkwater came to history class less and less frequently, and when he did attend, it was always with a cool, indelible half-smile on his face. By second semester, he stopped coming to school altogether. In May, he quit officially.

“Left: Ralph T. Drinkwater,” was the succinct way the absentee sheet put it. At the end of that same school day, as my classmates and I streamed out of the building and hustled toward our buses, I saw Ralph reeling and staggering on the sidewalk across the street. “Get I Know[169-263] 7/24/02 12:37 PM Page 209

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fucked!” I remember him screaming drunkenly, his middle finger stabbing the air. “Hey,
you
! Hey,
white boy
! Get
fucked
!”

I boarded the school bus, telling myself he hadn’t been shouting it directly at me—that his condemnation was random and miscellaneous.

That he was just plastered.

Wasted.

Smashed.

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14

f

Dr. Patel had warned me she might be running late. If I saw a blue Volvo with Delaware plates in the parking lot, I could come right up. If I didn’t, I’d have to wait until she got there. There was no receptionist, she said; hers was a part-time private practice.

A week and a half had passed since Thomas’s transfer to Hatch.

Barred from visiting my brother until the security clearance came through, I had settled for daily telephone updates from Lisa Sheffer and several over-the-phone conversations with Dr. Patel, Thomas’s new psychologist. Both Sheffer and Dr. Patel had assured me my brother was holding his own. An infection at the site of his skin graft had been successfully treated with a more powerful antibiotic; his vitals were fine.

Although he was generally uncommunicative with the other patients of Unit Two and troubled by the surveillance cameras that were everywhere, he was eating and sleeping satisfactorily. He had developed a rapport with Sheffer, whom he seemed to trust. And now that he’d been back on Haldol for several days, the medication was beginning to reduce his agitation. All in all, Thomas’s treatment had been proceeding on course.

210

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But that afternoon, while I was high up near the eaves at the Roods’ house, Joy had left a message which Ruth Rood shouted up to me from the ground below. Dr. Patel wanted to see me. There’d been an incident involving my brother. Could we get together later in the day?

We’d set up the appointment for five o’clock. At Dr. Patel’s suggestion, I’d agreed to meet her not at Hatch but at her office in that two-story strip mall on Division Street where she shared space with a Blockbuster Video, a Chinese takeout restaurant, a locksmith, and Miss Patti’s Academy of World Dance. For ten minutes, I had sat in the truck, watching people go in and out of the video store with their blue plastic boxes and catching glimpses of the little girls in leotards who leapt and tippy-toed, arms raised, past Miss Patti’s upstairs window. Six- and seven-year-olds, maybe. About the age Angela would have been, if she had lived. I picked out a dark-haired kid in a yellow leotard. Made her Angela.

I still did that sometimes: snatched back my daughter’s life from the children of strangers. Made
them
the parents of a dead child instead of Dessa and me. In this particular fantasy, Dessa and I were still together and Angela’s drawings and school papers were stuck to our refrigerator door and her dance recital was coming up. Our lives were happy and matter-of-fact.

She died in May of 1983, three weeks and three days after her birth. I was the one who found her. Hard as it was, I’ve always been grateful for that much, at least: grateful that I’d spared Dessa that little bit. I’d been up past midnight the night before, correcting term papers for my students because I’d promised to get them back before the weekend. Then, in the morning, I’d turned off the alarm in my sleep and overslept. I was halfway out the door that morning when I decided, hey, screw it if I’m a little late, I’ll sneak back and kiss the baby. Dessa had been up twice with her in the middle of the night.

She’d mumbled the morning report while I was dressing. Said she was seizing the moment, sleeping in.

My plan was to
really
get to know Angela once school was out for the summer. Once my schedule let up. I was assistant coach in I Know[169-263] 7/24/02 12:37 PM Page 212

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track that spring and a member of the negotiating committee for the union. And there were always my brother’s needs to factor in—visits every Sunday afternoon at the bare minimum. I was planning to slow down after school let out, though. Take some time, take stock. After all, I was a father now. I’d have all of July and August to hang out with my new family. Two months of playtime with my wife and baby daughter.

Her arms were raised up stiff over the edge of the bassinet: that was the first thing I saw. Her fists were clenched. There was pink foam at her nostrils and the corners of her mouth. Her small bald head looked gray. I stood there, shaking my head, telling myself,
Uh-uh, no, this wasn’t happening
. Not to
our
baby. Not to Angela.

But I knew. I knew even before I picked her up and held her against me, trying to get Dessa’s name out. Trying to scream for Dessa.

In the seven years since, I have tried on sleepless nights to unsee the EMTs, the doctors, the priest my in-laws called in from the Greek church, the hospital social worker—all of them performing their useless rituals. On the worst anniversaries—Angela’s birthday, or her death day, or sometimes around the holidays—I still see Dessa, doubled over and wailing as the ambulance pulled out of our driveway. Or later on that morning, at the hospital, shrunken inside her clothes.

Those two milk stains on the front of her shirt. . . . She didn’t want to take anything to dry up, I remember; she could have, but she didn’t want to. It was a kind of denial, I guess—a rejection of life’s ability to be
this
bad. Later on—in the middle of the next night—I’d woken with a start and gone all over the house looking for her. Finally found her in the downstairs bathroom, standing dazed and topless in front of the medicine cabinet mirror, the milk dripping from her nipples like tears.

In those first days afterward, Dessa was a zombie and I was Management Central—the one who dealt with the coroner and the cops and all those casseroles people kept bringing to the door. The covered-dish brigade. Most of that stuff just sat in our refrigerator and went bad; we couldn’t eat. A week or so later, I threw everything out, washed everyone’s dishes, and went driving around town returning I Know[169-263] 7/24/02 12:37 PM Page 213

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them. I forced myself to do it. I usually just left the stuff at the door and drove away without ringing the bell. I didn’t want to talk to anyone. Hear over and over and over those empty if-there’s-anything-I-can-do’s.

Dessa couldn’t handle going to the funeral home to make the arrangements, so her mother and my mother went with me instead.

Big Gene drove us over there, in one of those luxury demonstration models from the dealership instead of his own car. One of those big showboat Chryslers. As if riding in style to the funeral parlor was going to be some kind of comfort. As if anything was. Gene stayed out in the car, I remember. He wouldn’t or couldn’t go in.

A lot of the funeral’s a blank. I remember the pink tea roses that blanketed Angela’s silver casket. Remember Dessa and her sister huddled together, propping each other up. It was brutal receiving condolences from my high school students—inarticulate enough to begin with, they were nearly tongue-tied by their teacher’s baby’s death. (In the weeks prior, I’d been entertaining my classes with comical stories of diaper-changing and car-seat straps and baby vomit—had turned fatherhood into a comedy routine. My world history class had organized a lottery around the baby’s weight and height and birth date; the winner, Nina Frechette, came to the wake and sobbed inconsolably.)

And then there was Thomas. I clench still when I remember my brother, down in the basement of the Greek Orthodox church after the burial, eating a powdered doughnut and telling Larry Penn, a guy I used to teach with, that there was a strong possibility Angela’s death had been arranged by his enemies as a warning to
him.
I forget whether it was the Colombian drug cartel or the Ayatollah who was pursuing Thomas that month, but I could have grabbed him and slammed him against the fucking wall when I overheard him say that—making our daughter’s death about
him.
I remember Larry holding me back and Leo rushing over. “What’s the matter, Dominick? What can I get you?”

“Just get him the fuck out of here,” I said, jabbing a finger in Thomas’s face, then storming into the men’s room. When I came I Know[169-263] 7/24/02 12:37 PM Page 214

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out again, hoarse and red-eyed and with a sore foot from kicking the shit out of the cinder-block wall, Leo was standing guard outside the door and everyone was carefully not looking at me. Ma came toward me and clasped my hand. Thomas had disappeared with Ray.

For a month or more, Dessa didn’t want to see anybody except her mother and sister—didn’t even want to get out of bed and get dressed half the time. So I ran interference. Answered the phone and the door, did the shopping, handled the insurance and the hospital bills. My mother-in-law and Angie stayed with Dessa during the day while I was at school. Sometimes Big Gene would show up, too, in the evening. He and I would sit out in the kitchen together, talking about some new construction going up someplace in town or how the import market was killing U.S. car sales or
any
other subject, really, as long as it wasn’t dead babies. When we ran out of stuff to say, we’d sit there watching TV—
Jeopardy!
or
Lifestyles of the Rich
and Famous
or some baseball game. I was struck suddenly by the idiocy of sports: the importance people placed on a bunch of guys chasing a ball. But we watched, Gene and me, grateful because neither of us knew how to talk about it and both of us were afraid, I think, of the silence a turned-off TV made. The one time Gene said anything directly about Angela’s death was the day it happened. We

“two kids” would get over our loss, he assured me, as soon as we had another baby. We should start as soon as possible. He and Thula had lost a baby between Dessa and Angie, he said; Thula had miscarried in her second month. As if
that
was the same thing as having her—seeing and holding and changing her and
then
losing her. A lot of people did that: prescribed pregnancy as the answer to our grief. People assumed the feel and sound and smell of her was disposable. Replaceable. As if all Dessa and I had to do was erase over our daughter like videotape.

Dessa took an indefinite leave of absence from Kids, Unlimited!

She resigned from the board of directors at the Child Advocacy Center where she volunteered. “I just can’t
do
kids right now,” she told me.

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She started taking long walks with the dog. Old Sadie. Goofus.

They’d be gone for hours—whole afternoons sometimes—and then Dessa would come back with bits of dead leaves in her hair, burrs and vines in her sneaker laces. Come back in a fog, most of the time.

She never wanted company, other than Sadie. Never wanted me.

Never said where she was going. I followed them once—trailed them down to the river, out past the Indian graveyard and up to the Falls. Dessa just sat there for over an hour, watching the water tumble over the gorge. I was worried: it’s pretty desolate out there.

Pretty isolated. I bought her a can of pepper spray in case some creep bothered her. Sadie
looked
more ornery than she was. If push came to shove, I didn’t want to chance that damn dog turning tail.