Know Your Beholder: A Novel (15 page)

“I’ll be coming back north soon enough.”

I told him that he’d like it.

“It’s just not so easy being in the house. Your mother…,” he said.

His voice went faint.

He hadn’t cried at her memorial service. He’d mostly smiled and looked stunned. For some reason he handed out individually wrapped butterscotch candies to everyone, a random, out-of-nowhere gesture that had nothing to do with my mother, either side of the family, or anyone’s purported love of butterscotch.

Cornelia’s service was held at an Elks lodge banquet hall in Skokie, just north of Chicago. There was a polka band and plum brandy, and the Wyrwas contingent was in full effect. Lyman pulled his hamstring dancing with Cornelia’s beautiful young cousin, Aldona. I had to help him to the car.

Sheila Anne drove the whole way back to Pollard, where we had moved into my boyhood room during my mother’s last weeks. Prior to that we’d been living in a two-bedroom apartment on the other side of town. Morris had been staying in our spare room, and we were still writing music in the basement studio space at the house, below Cornelia’s hospice room. Although the studio was well soundproofed, we kept things quiet, on the acoustic side, using mostly guitars and a weighted digital keyboard that sounded like an authentic upright piano. The music we wrote was dirgelike—dreamy figments of sadness. This collection of songs—perhaps a dozen—was haunted, chorusless, and bridgeless. Drifty junk ballads that were as close to the concept of slowcore as anything we’d ever done. We felt this music deeply but I think it was ultimately too sad to share with anyone. We started to drown in it and I think this is one of the reasons why Morris ultimately left our apartment and Pollard altogether. The music started to digest us. There was no release in it, only a heavy, arterial thickening.

On the way home from Skokie, Sheila Anne and I were quiet as Lyman snored drunkenly into the passenger’s side window, clutching his bad leg. Though I’d been too sad to dance, there was something incredibly life-affirming about the way the Polish side of the family celebrated, even in death. It was bitter cold that night, the middle of January, and the Lake Michigan wind we experienced walking the short distance from the banquet hall to the car is hard to describe, even in retrospect. The brutal indifference of novocaine thaw. Or an orchestrated attack of the nervous system that is both inside and outside you.

Into the phone I said, “Dad?”

“I miss her,” he said, his voice cut in half.

“Me too,” I said.

Only the sounds from the cocktail party. Hearing-aid chatter. Emphysemic laughter. Frank Sinatra and his big swinging band.

I was shocked. Hovering in that dead digital airspace was the closest I’d felt to my father in years.

Lyman cleared his throat and said, “I gotta go, son.” His voice was a little ragged. He cleared his throat again. “Some former PGA golfer with ridiculous slacks and a bad dye job is makin’ the moves on Sissy. I’ll track down that key for you.”

A few days passed. I couldn’t wait for Mansard to politely ask the Bunches for some item of Bethany’s for his dogs to sniff. I waited for Mary Bunch to leave the house, and when the coast was clear, in my bathrobe and wool slippers, I padded down to the first floor and tried to key into their apartment.

But they’d changed the locks!

They’d changed the fucking locks, which is an egregious infraction of their lease!

I went upstairs and retrieved a hammer from under my sink and broke a window and let myself in. It was one of the two small rectangular frosted windows inset in the mullions of their back door. The window broke cleanly in half and made surprisingly little noise. After I reached through the opening and turned their new deadbolt, I eased into their apartment, closing the door behind me.

I just sort of stood there for a moment. There was a sad, still-life quality to their furnishings. A weak, doleful light leaked through the slit in the living room curtains, grazing a lampshade, the top of an armchair, and their dull, pilling carpeting.

Their phone rang.

Which was so alarming that I almost released all matter that had been brewing in my rectum. I squeezed my ass cheeks together as hard as I could, thrusting my pelvis forward absurdly.

Their message machine beeped and an elderly woman began speaking. “Mary,” she said, “it’s Mom. Just callin’ to see how you guys are doin’.” Her voice was faint, dry as tissue paper. “I sent you some of those ginger cookies you like so much. Did you get ’em? Just wanted to let you know that everyone here is prayin’ for you and Todd and little Bethany. We love you very much. Call us back when you can. Your father says hi.”

The machine beeped.

Mary’s mom had a Southwestern lilt to her voice. I imagined her to be much older than she probably was, arthritic and shuffling, blind, losing her memory, swiping at invisible flies.

The answering machine somehow rattled my nervous system, and rather than begin my search for a “Bethany” item, I became obsessed with how to cover up my forced entry. I was suddenly sprinting upstairs to the attic. I put on a pair of old work gloves, pulled a brick from my bookcase, returned to the Bunches’ unit, and threw the brick through the already broken window—chucked it with real reenactment accuracy—so it would look like a breaking and entering.

Then I absconded with their DVD player. Detaching it made my hands feel huge and blocky and it took way too long. I ran it upstairs and wrapped it in an old towel and pushed it under my bed. And then I sprinted back down to the Bunches’ apartment because I had forgotten the hammer!

At this point my lungs were burning, as were my thighs. Somehow the hammer was on their kitchen counter practically with a spotlight trained on it. I couldn’t place when or how I’d managed to put it there. What else had I done without realizing it? I seized the hammer with both gloved hands and started for the back door, but stopped yet again because out of the corner of my eye I could see that ONE OF MY SLIPPERS WAS JUST SITTING THERE, right in the little parabolic path between the kitchen and the living room, resting there like a felled bird of extraordinary evidence, so I spun, grabbed that as well, and hightailed it out of there.

Back in the attic I removed my work gloves and lay on the floor, my knees tented, my lungs chapped, my nostrils dilating like some oxygen-starved water buffalo. The whole event had probably taken less than five minutes but it felt like the heavy slow-mo physiological thickening of nightmares. I had officially committed my first felony. I burgled my family home.

Sure, Francis Carl Falbo had done his fair share of petty adolescent shoplifting. As a preteen Donkey Kong junkie he’d stolen money out of his mother’s purse and even dined-and-ditched a few times in college, but that was lightweight stuff compared to what he’d just done in the Bunches’ unit. I was enlivened and embarrassed and exhausted and I think I had a fever.

After I caught my breath I called Mansard, and instead of reporting the brick toss, I asked him if he thought I was a good person.

“I’m a detective, Francis, not a friggin’ guidance counselor.”

I had no reply.

“Do
you
think you’re a good person?” he said.

“Yes,” I heard myself reply.

“Then you’re a goddamn good person!”

I apologized. Undoubtedly Mansard was starting to tire of me.

He accepted my apology and told me to take it easy.

I waited on the front porch for Mary Bunch to get home and told her the news there. “Someone broke into your place,” I said. “Through the back door.”

She had just gone for a jog. Her cheeks were red, her eyes tearing from the cold. She marched past me. I followed her around the porch to her back door, which she touched as if it were boiling hot.

“I was going to call the police,” I said, “but I figured I’d wait for you or Todd to come back.”

But Mary refused to call the police.

I followed her inside, where she immediately clocked the missing DVD player.

I told her my best guess was that it was someone looking to make a quick buck. “Pawning electronics is always a safe bet,” I added. “Probably some random drug addict. Otherwise he would’ve taken more stuff.”

She ran her hand across the surface of the shelf where the DVD player used to be. There was a small potted cactus I hadn’t noticed before. Miraculously, in my panic to unhook and steal the DVD player, I had avoided getting punctured.

“When we moved in,” Mary said, “you assured us this neighborhood was safe.”

I told her this was the first incident in as long as I could remember, adding, “Pollard’s not exactly the burglary capital of the Midwest.” As much as I wanted to bring up the lease infraction of the Bunches changing their locks, I decided against it.

She asked me if I would accompany her as she looked in on the other rooms. “I’d feel safer,” she added.

I followed her into their bedroom. The queen-sized bed was unmade, the sheets rumpled and twisted, the mattress ticking visible in places. The room had a smell of liniment and something sweet and gamy. The odor was oddly mannish, what I imagine a penitentiary to smell like. Clothes were scattered about. Athletic socks and T-shirts and sweaters. Boxer shorts. A black sports bra hung off the headboard. The source of the gamy smell was part of a Quarter Pounder with Cheese, still in its opened container. There was a sense that this was the room’s constant state, that things were half-eaten and forgotten, that the Bunches never even thought to crack a window. There were no books or magazines, no TV. Only these strewn clothes, a dresser with two drawers half-opened, and a messy bed.

Mary asked me if I would open the closet.

I feigned vigilance, sneaking up on it and opening it quickly, in a move that probably resembled a suburban white man’s version of kung fu. Inside the closet was a sad wardrobe that seemed to include mostly hand-me-downs from the early eighties. Cowl-neck sweaters and thick corduroy pants balding at the knees. Polyester dresses with explosive floral patterns. Paisley blouses. A few cheap men’s suits in dry-cleaning plastic.

“No one’s in here,” I said, making a quick scan of anything that might have been Bethany’s. But there didn’t appear to be anything.

I checked under the bed and sneaked up on the curtains in the same way I had the closet. I think Mary found me to be brave and noble, really sticking my chin into possible danger, ready to go toe-to-toe with a drug-addicted, nunchuck-wielding intruder.

Next we went into the bathroom, where I crept up on the shower curtain, pulled it aside, and, literally, put my dukes up. They used generic dandruff shampoo, Dove soap. A contorted washcloth, dry, clung to the spout of the bathtub like a palsied hand.

“It creeps me out to think that anyone was in here,” Mary said.

Next was Bethany’s room. Just as we were about to enter, Mary said, “I’d rather you not come in here.”

I asked her if she was sure, if she felt safe enough.

“It’s our daughter’s room,” she said.

I nodded, hugely disappointed.

She opened and closed the door so quickly I couldn’t steal even the slightest glimpse.

The short hallway was dark. I kept expecting to be reminded of something, of the old version of the house. A smell like my father’s aftershave or some abstract water stain that in my youth I mythologized as an extraterrestrial presence, but I had done such a thorough job with the renovation that all imperfections had been wiped, spackled, and painted clean. I’d inadvertently denied myself the sentimental pleasure of archaeology in my boyhood home.

At the end of the hall there was a phone book splayed in the corner, as if it had been thrown. I tried to turn the hallway overhead on, but the bulb had burned out.

The Bunches didn’t have much, and their few possessions were uncared-for. Things seemed to have lost their purpose—for example, the phone book flung and left for naught, the dead lightbulb unchanged. I wondered if this translated to their daughter, if the reason they’d lost track of Bethany in the Target was that she had become just another faulty object to them, like a cracked dinner plate or a chair with a wobbly leg that gets relegated to the garage.

Mary came out holding a ceiling mobile of Muppet characters: Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear, Gonzo, etc. “This fell onto her bed,” she said. “It keeps falling.”

“I can fix it if you want,” I offered.

“No,” she said, pulling it close. “Thank you, though.”

“Was anything missing?” I asked, not aware until I said it of how insensitive the question must have sounded.

Mary shook her head, opened the door, dropped the mobile on the other side, then closed it.

I really wanted to go into Bethany’s room, but I knew I shouldn’t push my luck. I was already improbably beating the odds. “You really should report this to the police, Mary.”

“No police,” she said again. “We’re through with them. Please just fix the door.”

“Of course.”

“Maybe get us a solid one. Without glass in it.”

I told her that this made perfect sense.

Then she asked me if I wouldn’t mind sticking around until Todd got home.

I told her I’d be happy to.

She turned away, produced a cell phone, and went into the kitchen, leaving me at the threshold of their living room, staring at the vacant shelf where their DVD player used to be. The small cactus suddenly seemed like it possessed a human intelligence. After I left, it would tell Mary everything. I wanted to seize it and throw it out the window.

In the kitchen Mary was bringing Todd up to speed on the situation and insisted that they not report the burglary. She told him that I was there with her and that I’d promised to stay until he got home. Then she started whispering.

I found myself inching backward, toward Bethany’s room. My hand found the doorknob. I turned it slowly and opened the door. The Muppet mobile was blocking the entrance, and I didn’t want to step over it, out of fear that Mary had somehow strategically placed it. I didn’t even cross the threshold.

There was a child-sized twin bed, immaculately made, a small white pillow, no headboard, a baby-blue cotton comforter crisply tucked into the mattress. There was also a canary-yellow ruffle around the box spring. Beside the bed, a stand with a Big Bird lamp on it, also yellow. The stand looked weirdly “country” and out of place, like it was something used for showcasing knickknacks at a Cracker Barrel gift shop. Opposite the bed was a short chest of drawers, mahogany. Everything that used to be contained inside them had obviously been sent to the Dumpster in that Hefty bag and was now long gone. The curtains, neatly drawn, were also yellow, but a sadder, flatter yellow than the box spring ruffle and Big Bird lamp. It seemed as if the winter sun were somehow avoiding them. This was my mother’s hospice room, where she often groaned out in the night. Where there were screams for morphine and Dilaudid. Where she would often speak Polish, drifting in and out of narcosis.