Invisible Boy (49 page)
I didn’t answer.
“You okay?” she asked.
I started to cry again.
“That poor little kid,” she said. “Jesus Christ.”
I couldn’t answer her.
“Kyle said yesterday that the only way we can stomach it is if we ask the universe to protect his new sister,” she said.
“Like she has a chance in hell.”
“Maybe she does.”
You don’t believe it either.
Pagan spread her arms and looked up at the white Maine sky, a plume of breath rising from her mouth.
“Come on,” she said, kicking me in the ankle with the rubber edge of her duck boot. “We need to do this.”
We joined our hands, then bowed our heads.
“Dear Universe,” she said. “It’s really important that you take care of that little kid. Because she’s going to need it so
damn much.”
And Astrid. And Teddy.
If there’s anything out there resembling a lifeboat, they both deserve seats.
“Thank you, Universe,” said Pagan. “You’re totally the best.”
We stood for a while in silence, then stomped through the snow back to the church doors.
“Why are we even here?” I asked.
“At the wedding?”
“On the
planet
.”
“To seek enlightenment, I guess,” said Pagan.
“Which is what?”
My sister thought about that for a moment.
“Enlightenment,” she said at last, “is not being an asshole.”
And she opened the door.
Carmel, California
… From different throats intone one language.
So I believe if we were strong enough to listen without
Divisions of desire and terror
To the storm of the sick nations, the rage of the hunger-smitten cities
These voices also would be found
Clean as a child’s….
—“Natural Music,” Robinson Jeffers
Surely this bond of common faith, this bond of common goal, can begin to teach us something. Surely we can learn, at least,
to look at those around us as fellow men and surely we can begin to work a little harder to bind up the wounds among us and
to become in our hearts brothers and countrymen once again.
—Robert F. Kennedy
Cleveland City Club
Cleveland, Ohio
April 5, 1968
M
om was at the wheel of our Pacer and we’d just crested the big hill after Odello’s artichoke fields, headed south out of Carmel
on Highway One. The white shoulders of Monastery Beach sloped away toward Point Lobos on our right. Above the monastery to
our left, black cows dotted honeyed pastures across Stuyvesant Fish’s mountain.
I heard the throaty buzz of a motorcycle swooping downhill in our wake. It had been a week since the carving-knife debacle
in Fassett’s kitchen.
“I’ve always thought Stuyvie should invite me to lunch up there,” said Mom. “We’d have spinach salad and a cheese soufflé.”
“Linen napkins,” I said.
“Decent flat silver.”
The monastery itself looked vaguely Tuscan: pale clotted-cream walls and a single tower rising from a stand of celadon eucalyptus,
capped in roof tiles the deep brick-orange of Mom’s favored tanning unguent, Bain de Soleil.
There was a car in front of us, a rusty yellow hatchback. It slowed with a flash of brake lights just before the creek bridge,
turn signal on for the monks’ long gravel driveway.
The motorcycle couldn’t see why we were slowing down and so swung around us to pass, doing a solid fifty. There were two shirtless
young guys on it, long hair streaming.
Their bike T-boned into the yellow car with an explosive crack of metal and glass and I watched its rear wheel shimmy up in
slow motion, pitching both riders into flight. The driver soared thirty feet, smacking headfirst into a WPA-steel bridge railing.
His passenger caught a boot on the car roof and bounced once, high, before plummeting earthward to skid down the asphalt on
his bare chest.
And then everything speeded up again and Mom and I were running toward them, the Pacer astride both lanes behind us with its
doors winged open.
The guy who’d hit the bridge had a bloody half-softball lump swelling on the side of his forehead. He was trying to sit up
but I put my hand on his shoulder. “Don’t move, okay? You’ve hit your head.”
He looked up at me, eyes out of sync. His left pupil was huge and black, drifting wide of its mate.
“It hurts,” he said.
“The other car’s going fast to the monastery. They’ll get an ambulance.”
He closed his eyes. “Okay.”
I heard Mom say, “Madeline?” and turned toward her.
The guy who’d skidded along the road was standing up. She had her arms around him, trying to get him back on the ground again.
“You have to lie down now,” she said.
I touched my guy’s shoulder. “Don’t move.”
I ran to Mom and put my hand on her charge’s bare back. “She’s right. Just lie down for a minute until the ambulance comes.”
I helped her lower him to the ground. He curled up on his side and started crying. Mom sat down next to him, Indian-style,
one hand gentle on his pale shoulder.
“It’s okay… it’s okay…” she said, stretching out each “oh” long and melodic, the way she always had when we were little and
sick, her cool hand testing our foreheads for fever, holding our hair back while we threw up.
Mom’s white shirt was sopping crimson with the guy’s blood now. There were bits of gravel stuck in its lacy weave.
He shivered, and then the force of a sob made his mouth go wide.
“Shhhhh,” she crooned. “It’s okay.”
I looked up and realized we were surrounded by people, their trail of emptied cars stopped behind ours on the highway.
First an ambulance and then a fire truck came wailing over the top of the hill, lights flashing, and then I couldn’t see them
above the wall of bystanders.
The crowd parted for a pair of gurneys, and then they had both guys in neck-braces and everyone melted away until it was just
Mom and me, standing by the side of the road all pale and shaking.
There was a bank of fog paused off the coast—sun low enough now to tip it with apricot and lavender.
“I think we’re in shock,” I said.
“Hm?” Mom’s eyes were unfocused, shiny in the soft light.
“We should go home.”
“Yes,” she said, peeling the blood-tacky shirt slowly from the flesh of her belly. “Of course.”
It was ebbing twilight by the time we pulled into our driveway:
l’heure bleu
.
Our house was old for the West Coast, and Spanish—a humbler version of the monastery, embraced by Brothers Grimm cypress trees,
green fading to black.
Mom’s hands trembled, keys jingling in her lap long after she’d pulled them from the Pacer’s ignition.
The fog sidled in, wicking up darkness like ink-thirsty cotton wool.
The car stank of blood so I opened my door, but Mom and I both just sat there, quiet, our seat belts still fastened.
“We need a drink,” she said.
“Wine?” I grimaced, knowing the raw-but-sweet whites she favored. At fifteen I already had a taste for the stuff—just not
that
stuff.
Mom shrugged. “There’s Scotch. Or maybe it’s bourbon.”
That dusty half-gallon of Old Crow, another spot of flotsam bobbing abandoned in the S.S.
Pierce Capwell
’s sloppy wake.
Sucks ahoy.
“I suppose that’s what they’d call medicinal,” I said.
She climbed out of the Pacer and I followed, each of our steps making the driveway’s gravel crunch underfoot like breakfast
cereal.
Mom lifted the garden-gate latch. The stout portal swung outward, sighing on its hinges, and we picked our way single file
across the moss-slick bricks beyond.
I hooked a left once we were inside, shouldering open the kitchen door and sliding my hand up the wall until I’d flipped the
light switch.
Mom stepped in behind me, squinting at the glare.
She didn’t say a word, just grabbed her fouled shirt at the waist to yank it up and over her head. She tossed it in the sink
and turned on the cold-water tap, then turned back toward me.
Mom’s shoulders were slack and the overhead light made her eye sockets blackly hollow. Brown flecks tattooed her bra and the
skin of her belly in a faint floral pattern—blood stenciled through lace.
I wet a fistful of paper towels and pressed them into her hand. She closed her fingers around the sodden mass but didn’t move
again.
I opened the dishwasher, picking out a pair of glasses. “Where’s that bourbon?”
“Top of the broom closet,” she said.
The Old Crow bottle was half-empty, furred with dust. I pulled it down by its seamed jug-handle and filled our glasses about
a third of the way up.
I handed one to Mom and raised my own. The brown liquor gave off fumes: kerosene cut with nail-polish remover.
“Just swallow it fast,” said Mom. So I did.
The stuff made my gag-reflex stand at parade attention, and I suddenly understood why Jack Nicholson made all those Road Runner–esque
“neet-neet-neet
swamp
” noises whenever he took a nip off his pint of rotgut in
Easy Rider
.
“Jesus,” I said, wincing at the burn in my throat. “They should call it Old
Festering
Crow.”
Mom tipped her glass back and swallowed a bit herself, then coughed.
“People really drink this shit on purpose?” I asked.
“The first sip is the hardest.”
“I should fucking well hope so,” I said.
We tipped our glasses back once more.
“It’s still putrid,” I said.
Mom swirled the bourbon in her glass, smiling at me. “Don’t be a chickenshit.”
I finished mine off with a third swallow, not wanting to face the prospect of another mouthful after that.
“Old Festering Crow in Mold-Riddled Sneakers,” I said when I could breathe again.
Mom took two more sips to finish her own glass, then giggled.
“Yeah, okay,” I said. “The aftereffects are decent.”
I’d been hooked up to a nice BenGay IV—the burgeoning glow in my belly seeped into every sore muscle and made it go slack.
The world was a cozy old place, our kitchen was my spiritual homeland, and the motorcycle guys were going to be okay.
Mom was still holding the wet paper towels. They were probably cold by now, so I took them out of her hand and tossed them
in the kitchen garbage.
“I think maybe you need to take a bath,” I said.
She shook her head. “I’m tired. I want to lie down now.”
I pointed at her bloody stomach.
Mom cleaned herself up with a sponge and some dish soap, standing at the sink. She tossed her bra on top of the shirt already
in its deep basin and pulled the tap across to run cold water over them for a moment, then threw away the sponge.
The ship’s clock out in our living room chimed eight bells, marking the end of some distant deck-crew’s watch.
Mom wandered off to her bedroom.
I watched the dregs of blood-rusty water meandering across white sink porcelain and down the drain, then headed down the unlit
kitchen stairs to my own bed, sloppy and loose on bourbon-wrought sea legs.
I lay on top of the covers for maybe half an hour, listening to pop tunes on my clock radio—something new from the Eagles
and then Boz Scaggs, Elton John, and Fleetwood Mac—all interspersed with the deejay’s chipper patter about mattress sales
and the occasional warm flicker of a passing car’s headlights across my ceiling.
My bourbon swoon was sneaking away like a soft tide, and then I was just hungry. I stood and started back upstairs, wondering
whether Mom would want to eat, too, if I could find anything to make in the kitchen cabinets.
I navigated back through the unlit kitchen and across the dining room, sure of my way even in the dark.
In the hallway outside Mom’s bedroom, I raised my hand to knock—softly, in case she’d drifted off to sleep—but I heard soft
laughter just before my knuckles touched wood.
“I miss you too,” she was saying, and then there was a phone-