The Dwelling: A Novel (48 page)

On those mornings when the kids woke up, they would find their father on the sofa, their mother in her room, all remnants of the night before erased, his mother sometimes waking up in the middle of the night to clean up whatever mess his father had made in the last extremities of drunkenness: vomit on the bathroom floor, urine stains on the kitchen chair, spilled whiskey/bourbon/beer on the table; if nothing else, there were the telltale ghostly rings on the table from overflowing glasses of good cheer.
Salud.

I am not my father.

For a while he had taken all of that, the misdirected anger at his mother, the clearly directed anger at his father, and focused it elsewhere. The energy that he did not (for a while) expend in destruction he had put into the building of something. He wrote.

Harder to lose were the secrets. The going to school and sitting in class, the ringing of his mother’s hysterical voice in his head, and pretending they were like everyone else. The “did you watch blah-blah last night?” questions from peers, when his mother had, months earlier, thrown a full bottle of whiskey through the front of the television, teeth bared like a frenzied animal, face red, veins on her forehead near to popping, a vicious, accurate arc of her arm in full swing, aimed not at the television at all but at their father, sitting passively in the chair in front of it, his eyes glassed over, body slumped—a viciously accurate throw with a vital force that would, in all likelihood, have killed him. I don’t watch TV, he would tell them.

His mother came to school events when necessary. She wore her hat, her gloves, her hair in place, her dress a little behind the times, but worn with dignity, like an eccentric who had found her style and elected to keep it, rather than because the old man had lost his job and money was tight. Richie didn’t participate in school things after a while, but his little brothers did. His mother went to those. No one asked about his father, and information was never volunteered.

The secrets were hardest. No talking about his family. No talking about what went on in the darkened living room.

No one asked. That made Richie skittish. How could there not be questions when he came to school so tired from waking up in the middle of the night to something smashing against the outside wall of his bedroom? How could no one ask when none of the Bramley kids brought lunch, or went home for lunch? He always thought it was because they knew, as though the dysfunction of his family was somewhere written on him, a telling expression or way of walking. All the Bramley boys and no one talked.

After a certain age, no one went home any longer either. They went to friends’ houses, to the arena, to hang out in front of the 7-Eleven.

For years it was like that, and then it stopped, very suddenly.

He came home from school the year he was fifteen and his mother was sitting at the kitchen table with her sister. She looked drawn. The night before had been a long one. He noticed nothing. (Except for the fact that his auntie Elsie was there at the table: a new face around the Bramley household was rare enough, but hers was a familiar enough face for it to escape the immediate attention of a fifteen-year-old.)

His mother stood up when he walked in. She cleared her throat, began to sit down, then stopped. Richie was just about to say
where’s Da—
when she cut him off.

“Your father has died,” she said flatly. She stood there, her arms snaking out just a few inches in front of her as though she knew there was something she was supposed to do right then but couldn’t quite remember what it was, it being something she was not entirely motivated to do.

Richie stared without hearing for the longest time. The house got quiet enough in that blank space waiting for the next thing to be said, and he heard his aunt sob. Upstairs he thought he heard one of the boys (probably Robbie, he was the youngest) cry out.

His face started to squeeze in, feeling tight, and he felt like he couldn’t move. He tried to think of what to ask, but amid the dozens of questions was the absence of any order in which to put them. He settled eventually on “What?” The universal question.

His mother strode toward him then, remembering suddenly what it was she was supposed to do, and she reached out for him, her face tear-stained (how had he not seen that? it was a state of being for her, tear-stains) and contorted into an expression of pain.
Not for him,
he thought.
Not for Dad.
He instinctively stepped back from her, anger taking him up.

“What happened?
What happened to him?
Did you kill him?”

Elsie gasped, and his mother wept, covering her face with her own outstretched arms.

“Richie…”
she started, without energy.

Then Jimmy and Robbie came downstairs, Robbie standing on the bottom landing, his eyes red from crying, and Jimmy jumped down the last two, his expression pure unadulterated anger, hands bunched into fists, and he got right in Richie’s face, his whole body tensed and leaning into his brother, and he screeched, in a perfect imitation of his mother’s posture and inflection, “Don’t you
dare
say anything to my mother! He killed himself!
Dad killed himself!”
And his mother shrieked in horror and pain and reached out then to Jimmy—
Jimmy don’t
—grabbing him and trying to turn him into her body and not Richie’s, and Jimmy took a vague swing—not at her or at Richie, just a swing in general—and it clipped the edge of the broken TV and suddenly Robbie was screaming and crying and Elsie was saying something no one was listening to and the four of them gathered into a rough circle and cried together. The sounds were primal and complex, a perfect chaos of unspent, unspoken, undirected emotions, most of which were a backlog that only then found expression.

Richie fell into the moment of remembering with perfect clarity everything about the rest of that day. The silence broken only by sounds that were mostly unfamiliar. The quiet click of pots on counter as Elsie fixed them supper, his mother drained of energy, but also of the anger that usually began around then
(salud),
no matter how good the day. The sob cries of Robbie, so little still, he seemed, sitting on Dad’s side of the couch, curled up like a kitten, just staring into the air and crying quietly once in a while. Richie had felt for him; but he had not gone to him. His mother would get up and wander around the house, as though at a loss for something to do (something to be angry about) but she wandered anyway, like an out-patient, eyes taking in her children, going to them, touching heads, then, as if forgetting what she was supposed to be doing and suddenly remembering, going to the phone, where the boys would hear her uncharacteristically soft voice explaining what had happened to someone at the other end of the line.

He’d hanged himself, anchoring the rope to the upstairs railing, then using the landing as his jumping-off point. It was more than a week before Richie had thought to ask, and years later he would wonder if finding that out was what made a writer of him, truly. He hadn’t thought about the
how.
It hadn’t occurred to him that the old man hadn’t just somehow
willed
himself to die that day. Finding out the
how
gave him a whole new perspective on his dad. To hang himself in that way would have required a certain amount of planning. It wasn’t immediately obvious. It would take Richie years to realize that fact. There were moments growing up after that when he just assumed that it was the sort of thing adults knew by some kind of osmosis, like the fact that you had to file taxes before April 15, or the mechanics of sex, or how to pick a good steak.

Richie took it so much further than just that one fact. Further than just knowing
how
he did it. For a while he became nearly obsessed with it, imagining it in detail. The way the rope was tied, how it held his weight. The drop, straight down, from the upstairs railing was a height of about twelve feet, and his body would have swung wildly, away from the stairs and then back again. At the last moment, had his dad grappled with the closeness of the stairs? Did his legs scramble and pump in a last-minute effort to gain purchase?

Every day for the previous week? month? year? did he walk down those stairs and think,
There, that’s where I’m going to tie it; there, that’s where I’ll be when she finds me.
Did it make him sad to think it? Had he tested the integrity of the railing before he tied the rope?

There, that’s where I’ll be when she finds me.

His mother had come home from work and found him hanging. The front door, through which she came, opened directly onto the stairwell. His feet, dangling (maybe still moving), were what she would have seen, his body still swaying with its weight and the force of the act. What she had thought or seen remained her memory alone. Richie had never tried to get her to talk about it, and she had never volunteered anything. He didn’t even know if the old man had been drunk at the time.

What he had asked her was
why.

“Your father was a troubled man who
drank,”
had been her curt and final answer. A troubled man.

Richie had tried, in the days that came after, to find a hook to hang the whole thing on. He could remember nothing. The old man had been drunk, his mother angry. There was nothing that stood out as a final straw. No shouted ultimatums that had not been shouted before. No penetrating threats. No unusual violence. When Richie had left for school that morning, his dad had been sleeping on the couch, on his back. The living room had smelled of booze and cigarettes. His mother had already left for work. The house was quiet and dark in the way it always was in the early morning. Breakfast bowls were left on the kitchen table, half-filled with milk, cereal floating desultorily and forgotten, sharing space with a nearly empty bottle of whiskey. Richie had left that morning, his mind on other things, lost to him now. He hadn’t said good-bye to the old man, partly because he was sleeping and partly because he never did. The funeral was a closed-casket affair.

A troubled man and a drunk.

Richie digested the memory and let it go. He read the last line he’d written on the computer, in all its ragged, meaningless glory:
Porter stood up from the desk and wandered out of the room.
Richie didn’t even have a room to send him to. He sighed deeply and closed the document, shutting down his computer for the night. It had been a long one, and he was dead on his feet, in spite of the nap.

Were you drinking?
His cheeks reddened and stung him. He and Janis had never, ever discussed drinking, his or anyone’s, as far as he remembered. What did it mean, that she had asked him that?

The image of his mother, her face when looking at his father while he sat at the kitchen table in the drinks that were between affable and drunk. Her face curled up into a sneer when she thought one of the kids was looking. Bramley family secrets.

Richie closed the lid on his computer after it went unflinchingly dark and realized, for the first time that night, how quiet it was in the attic, in the house. It was an odd, full sort of quiet, where it seemed there were voices held in stasis, tongues bitten, breaths held. He gazed into the dark. He stared that way until he felt uneasy and then he climbed down the ladder, leaving the little light on beside the computer. He closed the hatchway, all the way, remembering that first day, when RJ had liked the motion so much. Bad hangover.

He wanted a drink, of course. Something to take the edge off.

He crawled naked into bed, wanting the drink, and thinking about not having it. Not having one for the rest of his life. A lifetime of sobriety. All the sharp edges of life staying in the same crisp focus that they were in at that moment, with nothing ever there to take the sting out of a day. The thought of never having another drink overwhelmed him.

Fear, plain and simple, a basic fear, overtook him.
Never.
And another thing came into focus, flippantly.

Maybe that’s why Dad killed himself,
he began to think,
ha ha,
trying to lighten the moment, but as soon as the thought was present, it took hold and he had to abandon it.

It seemed, in that moment, like the truth.

Richie fell into a troubled sleep. His dreams were filled with young men, RJ running up and down a set of stairs, his brother Jimmy, not as the man he was now but as a boy, standing in the kitchen of the new house, a drink in his hand, explaining to the half-circle of faceless men around him that he never said
salud
before downing another one. It was bad juju. Then he said
bottoms up
and finished the drink in his hand. In the dream Richie kept trying to play a drinking game, the one where you knock a bottle cap off a bottle of beer, but he never got to shoot because RJ kept calling him, running up and down the stairs,
I’m going to be an engineer commeer Dad!
He kept going back and forth between RJ and the game, wanting only to taste the beer that was sitting on the table, so cold that droplets had formed on the outside of the bottle. It would taste sweet and cold. Someone spilled a drink and it dripped with agonizing slowness off the edge of a table—

He woke up, hearing the dripping. He opened his eyes in his room, not very dark with the moon shining in through the window. At first he assumed he was still in the throes of the dream. It had been a good dream. Richie turned over onto his side and closed his eyes again and wiggled down into the bed, under the covers, the new placement on the sheets cool and fresh-feeling—

And, from somewhere, water dripped.

This time he raised his head a little, listening. Distinctly, there was the unmistakable
plink
of water into a tub, high-pitched and resonant. A tap dripping, but not leaking because the
plinks
were far apart. He wriggled in once more and tried to ignore it.

Plink.

He could almost see the ripples the little drop would send across the body of water it fell into. He got up. Through the half-closed bathroom door came a crack of bright light as though he’d left it on. He pushed the door open.