Invisible Boy (27 page)

“Actually,” said Sue, “this is her roommate, but she’s right here next to me on the sofa.”

I looked at her, mouthing, “Who?”

Dean plucked the Pepsi cup out of my armpit so Sue could hand me the phone.

“What’s-her-name,” she said. “The cop.”

I raised the receiver to my ear, straining its piglet-tail of cord.

“Skwarecki?”

“The one and only. How’s that shiner?”

“I’m avoiding mirrors, like a vampire.”

“Excellent plan.”

“Hey,” I said, “thank you for taking such good care of me today. I owe your ass, big-time.”

“Fuck that noise. Least I could do—I mean, if I’d shown up when I was supposed to…?”

“Not your fault,” I said.

She sighed. “At least I’m gonna end your day on a better note.”

I glanced at my blackened fingers, now swollen to the point of being shiny. “That wouldn’t be hard, but do tell.”

“I got it, Madeline.”

“Got what?”

“The fucking shoe,” she said. “Right here in front of me on my fucking desk—ALF’s face on it and everything.”

I felt light-headed. “The rest of today was worth it, then.”

“I may have something about that, too,” she said.

“What?”

“Partial plate number, and a description of the car. I can’t promise you anything, but my guys’re trying to narrow it down,
okay?”

I gave the coffee table another tap for luck. “God love you,

Skwarecki—tits and all.”

Dean coaxed half the burger down me before I started drifting from shore on a riptide of sleep.

I woke up in the dark when a sanitation crew rolled east up Sixteenth Street, slamming each building’s metal cans empty against
the lip of their truck’s hopper.

The stereo’s green LEDs read 4:02. I still couldn’t open my left eye, and my bones hurt like I was getting crushed and compacted
right along with the garbage.

Two notes of sharp whistle from below and the driver eased off the clutch, lumbering on toward Sixth Avenue. In the streetlight’s
orange glow I saw that someone had left me more painkillers laid out on the table beside a coffee mug.

I fumbled for the pills, so stiff and sore I had to rest the cup on my chest and tip it toward me without lifting my head.
Lukewarm rivulets of tap water coursed down both sides of my neck, soaking the back of my collar before I got enough in my
mouth for a decent swallow.

The streetlight snapped off and the brick buildings across from us looked gray in the predawn quiet. The pills were starting
to kick in by the time Dean padded out into the living room, around four thirty.

He yawned, glancing at the empty coffee mug. “You found that smack I left out for you?”

“Right after the garbage truck woke me up. Thank you—much needed.”

“Think you can get to Saint Vincent’s by yourself today?”

“Saint Vinnie’s? For what?”

“To get your real cast on,” he said. “Sue got the doctor from yesterday to switch your appointment, save you a trip to Queens.”

“Cool,” I said, grateful for her foresight. St. Vincent’s was just a few blocks down Seventh Avenue.

He sat down on the sofa’s edge just below my hip. “I have to pick up Christoph this morning, early. Will you really be okay
on your own?”

“It’s fine,” I said. “Don’t worry.”

“Bunny, are you sure this doesn’t have anything to do with the

cemetery?”

“Yes,” I lied. “Absolutely.”

Dean reached for my good hand, weaving his fingers with mine.

“Bullshit,” he said, giving my digits a squeeze.

I squeezed back. “You making coffee or what?”

They’d wanted more X-rays at St. Vincent’s.

I’d spent most of the morning drifting in and out of sleep on the sofa, then hauled myself up an hour before my two o’clock
appointment, not sure how I was going to get dressed. In the end I’d stuck with Skwarecki’s sweats and found an old T-shirt
of Dean’s. I drew one sleeve carefully up over my damaged arm before trying to get my head in through the neckhole, but the
effort made me so dizzy I had to feel for the edge of our bed and sit down for a minute, the gray cotton still wrapped around
my face like a bank robber’s stocking mask.

After that it took me half an hour to shuffle a mere three blocks down Seventh Avenue.

I’d been waiting two hours since getting my arm irradiated, cooling my heels on a plastic hallway chair.

A young Indian guy walked toward me, folder in hand, white coat hanging loose over his green scrubs. He looked exhausted.

“Miss Dare? Can you come with me?”

I stood up and followed him down the hall to a small examining room.

“This is quite a bad break,” he said when I’d scooted up onto the vinyl-upholstered exam table.

“Are there good ones?”

He held up an X-ray. “I’m just saying it could have been cleaner.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“Well, we’ll get you into a cast today. The swelling’s gone down enough for that. And they did as good a job of setting the
bones yesterday as possible. But I’ll want you back here in a week for another look to see if everything’s knitting up properly.
Then get those stitches out of your scalp.”

He checked the X-ray again. I wouldn’t describe him as looking pleased with it.

“What if it’s not?” I asked.

“Hm?”

“What happens if everything doesn’t knit properly?”

“Oh,” he said. “Well, then we just have to break the bones again and reset them. Maybe throw a pin in there.”

Just
?

“Let’s get that cast on, then, shall we?” he said.

M
om came down again from Maine the following Tuesday, alone this time. Larry was off at some reunion through the weekend—

college or nuclear, I didn’t quite catch which.

I’d gone downstairs to the street after she buzzed from the lobby, okay enough to help schlep a load of stuff from the back
of her double-parked car despite my cast.

It was getting cold out. Mid-October and the leaves on our street’s little trees were turning colors and falling into the
gutters.

I stepped outside, over the milk crate of rummage-sale oddments Mom had used to jam the lobby door open.

She bustled across the courtyard toward me with two brimming brown-paper grocery bags.

“Can you take this one, you think?” she asked. “It’s just noodles and a bottle of lemon juice.”

“Sure.”

“It goes in the kitchen,” she said. “I’m making dinner tonight.”

She dropped the other bag on the floor and went back out to her car.

Picking my way blind back over the milk-crate doorstop, I tried to gain some purchase underneath the bag. There was a rip
starting down the side.

A ball of iceberg lettuce sat on top of everything else and I tried to hold it in place with my chin, but it got away from
me and bounced across the dirty floor, smack into the door of the elevator.

I waddled over and gave the lettuce a sharp side kick, hoping it would ricochet into the baby strollers behind the stairs
so we wouldn’t be forced to eat it.

Some people employ a five-second rule to gauge the edibility of food that’s touched floor. Mom prefers more flexibility, like
“November.”

The errant globe of iceberg banked off the bottom step’s outer corner and rolled right back to the center of the room, just
to mock me.

I heard the click of my mother’s shoes against tile as she entered the lobby.

Though laden with a trio of canvas ice bags, she swooped to recapture the battered lettuce with a graceful curtsy.

“Can you press the elevator button for me?” I asked.

“Of course,” she said.

I waited for the doors to open while she bounded up the stairs like a freaking gazelle.

I mashed my cast into the floor buttons, not knowing whether I’d managed to press “Two” in there somewhere until the conveyance
wheezed to a halt at our level.

The doors opened and I stepped into the hallway just in time for the grocery bag to blow out.

A ReaLemon bottle smashed into acidic green shards at my feet, closely followed by a hard rain of pasta boxes, one of which
tripped down the stairs, back toward the lobby.

“This broom is a piece of shit,” said Mom. “You should throw it away.”

She squatted down and began sweeping broken glass and lemon juice into our dustpan with the edge of her hand.

“
Stop,
” I said. “Jesus Christ.”

She ignored me.

I stepped into the puddle. “Do you not recall the time you stuck your hand underwater in the kitchen sink to grab the broken
wineglass?”

Mom looked up. “That was
years
ago, Madeline.”

“Nineteen sixty-seven,” I said, “in Jericho.”

“How do you even
remember
this shit?” she asked.

“The kitchen wallpaper was gray, with orange windmills. And you bled all over the fucking place and had to get five stitches.”

“Four,” she said.

“Use the dustpan. It’s not like I’m in any shape to apply a tourniquet.”

“Now I don’t know how I’m going to make dinner,” said Mom.

We were in the kitchen, with everything stowed away except the remaining ingredients for her meal.

“What were you planning to cook?” I asked.

“Angel hair with parsley and smoked mussels and soy sauce and lemon juice, but of course I no longer have lemon juice.”

Despite my abhorrence of all mushy bivalves residing in flat oblong tins, I resisted the urge to suggest that we order a couple
of pizzas.

“We just happen to have a few of these fancy new citrus things,” I said, gesturing with my cast toward a bowl of fruit next
to the dish strainer. “I’m told they’re called lemons.”

“Wonderful,” said Mom.

She pulled a quart Mason jar of straw-yellow liquid out of her purse and unscrewed its lid. “Would you like a glass of wine?”

“Thanks, Mom, but I’m still on antibiotics.”

“Everybody think like me, everybody want my squaw,” she said, filling a glass with ice cubes before pouring the vino in.

Mom lifted her drink in my direction. “To the revolution, wherever it may be.”

“Sure,” I said. “Why the hell not.”

“Oh! I almost forgot!” She put down her glass on the counter.

Reaching into her bag again, she produced a pair of flat wooden implements and handed them to me.

The things were squarish with tapered handles, made of unfinished blond wood and grooved on one side, tied together with a
jaunty bow.

They resembled ill-conceived salad tongs, or possibly something with which Aztecs might once have played Ping-Pong.

“Um, wow,” I said. “Thank you.”

“They’re butter paddles,” she said.

“In case your dairy products, like, misbehave?”

“To make butter balls with. For dinner parties.”

“Butter balls,” I said.

“You take hunks of butter and roll them around between these, then put them in a bowl of ice water. The grooves make a pattern.”

She seemed so disappointed by my lack of enthusiasm that I said, “You’re very thoughtful to have brought them. Why don’t we
try them out tonight?”

She
was
thoughtful, not just for bringing them, but for driving down to look after me in the first place.

It was just that she had a sort of archaeological fondness for the culinary implements of her youth: potato ricers and sturdy
meat grinders that clamped to the edges of tables, rust-speckled eggbeaters with red-painted wooden handles, matte-black picnic
Thermoses lined in spidery silver glass and stoppered with actual corks under their dented tin cups.

She’d find them at rummage sales and church bazaars and then give them to us for Christmas and birthdays, or just present
them excitedly when she came to visit. Despite the general inutility of these items, not to mention the microscopic dimensions
of our urban galley kitchen, we never had the heart to dispose of her artifacts.

That Mom had most often seen such objects wielded by her family’s cook perhaps deepened the perfume of nostalgia they held
for her, but I still found it touching that she wanted so powerfully to outfit us with all the modern conveniences of the
World War Two gourmet.

If nothing else, it served as a reminder that I was not the sole person in our bloodline to be plagued by memory.

I laid down the paddles on the counter and opened the icebox door. “We’re out of butter. I can call Pagan and ask her to pick
some up on the way home from work.”

“We don’t have to use them tonight. I just thought you’d find them amusing.”

“I do. I think they’re wonderful.”

Mom filled a large stockpot with water and lifted it onto the stove to cook the pasta in. “Dean’s out of town?”

“Louisiana, until Saturday.”

“So just the four of us for dinner. When do Sue and Pagan get home?”

I looked up at the Elvis clock nailed above the doorway. “Another hour, probably.”

Here the two of us were again, in a tiny kitchen, me by the sink and Mom at the stove.

I watched her put the lid on the pot and crank up the rear burner’s flame beneath it.

“Are you lonely when Dean goes away, or do you like having a little space?” she asked.