The Spark and the Drive (22 page)

“You know the times you thought he was staying late at the shop? He was racing the Corvette for money. He didn’t want you to know. He lied and said I had to lie.” I stopped myself as the venom of having betrayed Nick yet again spread through me, but I didn’t take my eyes off her. She stared ahead, the sunset flattering her face almost more than I could bear.

I’d stunned her, and now I wanted to keep stunning her with the truth. Showing patience hadn’t worked, and if I was going to lose her I was going to tell the whole truth first.

“He used to race in Oregon,” she said. “I’d go with him, sometimes.” And she seemed almost relieved. Perhaps she’d thought I was going to say that he’d been out with another woman.

I took a moment to breathe, to swallow. “He told me what happened that night. Before your sister came.”

She turned and watched me. “We had dinner. I took a bath … what? You tell me, if you know everything.”

“He told me, Mary Ann. In bed, when you didn’t want to. He told me.”

She closed her eyes and breathed. Nothing happened for a second or two, and then she reached for the door handle. “Goodnight, Justin.”

I started out my door, but then I looked back in the car because she was frozen there holding the handle, her door still closed. A tiny choking sound came from her throat, and she lunged forward. When I leaned back in and touched her she jerked away, mashing herself up against the door before she found the handle and got out.

She didn’t close the door. The music outside seemed to be louder now. She walked around the Nova, hugging herself in the last of the sunlight. I didn’t know what was happening, and when I got out she went to the front of the Malibu and started kicking at the grille.

“Don’t go back to him, Mary Ann,” I said. “You can stay with us.”

She kicked out a headlight that burst with a firework pop just as I was getting to her. “I’m so sick of these fucking cars,” she said, kicking wildly. She stomped her heel through the grille, and plastic pierced the radiator, hot antifreeze spraying onto her pant leg. She swatted at the liquid as if it were a swarm of bees. I pulled her away, and when she was clear of the car she turned and pushed me off. “Who do you think you are? My God,” she yelled. She charged into the park.

I caught up with her, but she was holding her head and didn’t know I was there.

“Aw, shit,” called a silhouette moving near the fire. “She fucked that shit
up
.”

I looked back at the cars. My passenger door was still open, and I jogged back, got the keys, shut the door, and then saw that her keys were still in the ignition. I got them and locked the Malibu, and when I turned back she was gone.

I called her name, and the voice from before called back, “Watching you, home.” The light was draining, and a few of them might have been coming toward me. I took out the two ten-dollar bills I had in my wallet and jogged over to them. “Could you keep an eye on her car? I’ll be right back.”

In the Nova I zigzagged along every narrow street around the park. They were neighborhoods of tar-shingled cape houses with rusted-out beaters at the curb. Dusk hung like silt in the air, so I had to pull up close to people—one shirtless psycho in camo pants hollered, “I got what you want!” and chased me off the street. Down at the river where she jogged, I scanned every foot of sidewalk my headlights touched, and then I turned around and started the route again, but she was nowhere.

It was full dark when I pulled in to the Cumberland Farms on Cooke Street, two blocks from Nick and Mary Ann’s house. I parked away from where the cashier could see and cut through the park so that it was just a climb over chain-link into their side yard. I crept around Nick’s El Camino on the edge of lamplight thrown from the living room window. I darted in behind a half-dead rhododendron with my back against the house and caught my breath.

I was standing under the window that looked out at the park. I inched up toward the glass, my stubble raking the aluminum siding with the sound of a wire brush on a cymbal, and I rested at the bottom corner to close my eyes and listen.

A woman on TV said, “Calgon, take me away,” and I crept higher until I had an eye barely over the sill. Nick was crammed back into the corner of the futon, with his hand over his mouth, staring at the TV. He could have been engrossed in the commercial or he could have been deranged. I wondered if Mary Ann had let him know that she’d be late tonight. If he was capable of regret, I would say he was suffering from it profusely. I had an impulse to go around to the door and just tell him what had happened. Be ready, Nick. You shouldn’t have let this go.

And then incredibly Mary Ann came out of the bedroom. She was dressed in a T-shirt and pajama pants. She must’ve jogged part of the way to have been there long enough to change clothes. She carried a pillow and the comforter from the bed.

Nick didn’t look up as she walked by him, but just as she was at the stairs he said, “You don’t have to tell me, okay? I just can’t figure out if you’re hurt. Are you hurt?”

She paused, looking up the staircase at Joey’s door, and I could see only her back, but I saw the shudder, and against it she hugged the pillow. When I thought she was over it, that she would go up without a word, was exactly when she dropped everything on the stairs and swung around—I dropped out of sight.

“This is your world! You did this. Your bullshit silent world. Live in it!”

I don’t know how it would’ve felt to have seen her face. It was terrifying, of course, but also thrilling to think of her yelling like that at me—to be hated and loved enough to inspire that kind of outrage.

I stayed at the window for a long while after she went upstairs. I watched Nick go in the kitchen and come back with an ashtray and a glass of milk. He stared at the TV as he lit a cigarette. I prepared myself to jump back should he come to open the window, but he seemed too distracted to notice the room filling with cigarette smoke.

He took out a card from his wallet, picked up the phone receiver from the end table, and dialed. “Is Justin there?” he said, and then he dropped his forehead into his open hand. “Can you ask him to give Nick a call?” He gave Mom his number and thanked her.

Later he disappeared through the door to their room and brought out a pillow and a sleeping bag. I kept spying on him, feeling low about it at first, then rationalizing that I didn’t deserve any more surprises.

It was after ten when I got back up to Holy Land. There were no cars anywhere and only a wide swath of pebbled safety glass shimmering in my headlights where, instead of jimmying the lock to the Malibu, they must’ve smashed a window and brushed out the glass.

29.

Don was making an effort to be my father again. He called once a week, and if I didn’t feel like talking he’d catch on after a lull or two and say he had to let me go.

“What was it like telling people?” I asked one night, sitting on my bed with the door closed.

“Remember the time you and Alan Tate stole the newspapers?”

“It was like sneaking around?”

“No, I mean after. When Mom made you go house to house to apologize. It was like I’d misbehaved, but they were going to be generous and forgive me. It was relying on the kindness of strangers, except they weren’t supposed to be strangers.”

“Mr. Percy?”

“Sure, the Percys, the Vanns. All the dinners and parties and house-sitting for eight years. Did you know that Tom told me to stay away from his kids?”

“I never liked that guy,” I said. “They act like they’re such great Christians.”

“But they’re grown-ups. They can understand nuances like you or I can. If a book turns you into a zombie, close the goddamn book.”

Zombie, I thought. That’s just what I’d been at Northwest. There was a transfer kid with a lisp who got called Fag Bag, and he didn’t last a month. No way could I let it get out that my father was gay.

“But do you ever feel like you’re acting?” I said.

“How do you mean?”

“Like when you talk to somebody, all you’re thinking about is how they might take it. If they’re still going to like you.”

“Isn’t that the definition of in the closet?” he said. “Sure, I’ve done that. I still go out of my way not to mention my personal life. Once in a while I’ll pretend I’m straight.”

“You do that?”

There was a short silence. “I was in a cab in the upper eighties, and the driver saw a young lady in the crosswalk. He said he’d donate his right one to science after a night with her. He said…” He laughed voicelessly. “He told me he’d eat twenty yards of her shit just to see where it came from.”

“Classy. What’d you say?”

“I said, ‘Me too.’”

“Come on.”

“I mean, what could I say?”

I laughed and could see his smiling face in the quiet afterward. Before I could stop myself, I was telling him about Mary Ann. Everything, more or less, came out, except the word “rape,” which I described as a bad situation. “But it’s like she doesn’t remember.”

“It’s possible she doesn’t,” Don said. “Repression, you’ve read about it. Sometimes it’s called motivated forgetting. Psychogenic amnesia. It’s a defense mechanism.”

“I don’t think that’s it. More like she taught herself how to forget.”

“Would you want to say what kind of situation it was?”

“Something right after she lost her baby,” I said.

“That’s terrible,” he said. “That poor woman.” He sighed and then said my name in a sober voice. “I’m not sure how to ask this.”

The phone beeped.

“You mean is she okay to watch April?” I said.

“Well, her frame of mind. I can’t imagine losing a baby.”

The phone beeped again. “Hang on.”

I pushed the switch hook and was caught off guard by Nick’s voice on the other end. “Feel like taking the car out?”

“Not tonight,” I said. “You go if you want. They know you now.”

“Not without you,” he said. “Wickersham’s is your place.”

“Would Mary Ann even let you go?”

“Maybe. I don’t know.” He sounded weak, distant. “She’s out getting some kind of herbs for my stomach. It smells like the Far East over here. Listen, don’t ever get an ulcer. You lay there trying to sleep, but it feels like you drank hot coffee too fast.”

It was strange hearing him talk about his problems. I thought of how suddenly and resolutely life changes—how grateful I would’ve been only weeks ago to have him confide in me.

I listened to his quiet as he must’ve been listening to mine. I still couldn’t predict Mary Ann’s reaction if I finally told Nick about us. The odds that she would love me seemed about even with the odds that she would hate me, now that he was sick.

“I feel like I’m keeping some kind of secret,” he said after a moment.

“Then tell her the truth.”

“I don’t know what that is anymore.”

“What happened to Joey wasn’t your fault,” I said. “What you did was.”

I could hear him breathing. “Keep talking,” he said. “Please.”

“She’s the one you should talk to. She’s your wife.”

“I can’t.”

“What do you want from me, Nick?”

“I don’t know who my friends are.”

“Everybody’s your friend.”

“Because they don’t know,” he said. “You’re the only one who knows.”

My pulse was suddenly throbbing in my temples, my chest tight, and before I could speak again I hung up the phone. When it started to ring with Don on the other line I yanked the cord out of the wall.

30.

“The guy shouldn’t of quit the payments,” Bobby said. He was driving my Nova through the Hopeville neighborhood at night. “That’s on him, not me. And not like I give a rat’s ass about a bunch of executive fucks, but they get more off the insurance than repoing it and selling it used. Pam told me that.” He glanced around at the dim triple-decker houses in lamplight. “Listen, all we’re doing is stepping in when the car’s between owners. Same as finding a buck on the sidewalk. It’s nobody’s until we find it, and then it belongs to us.”

Mary Ann was supposed to come over to babysit that night. She couldn’t, she’d said on the phone, and in her voice I heard that she couldn’t forever. Now I was trying to take comfort in asking what the hell I had to lose. But my legs were shaking so bad I had to hold my thighs together with my hands. It’s safe, I tried to think. It’s worth it. I’d been wanting an apartment in Waterbury, and this car alone would be first month’s rent.

With his thumb hooked on the bottom of the wheel, Bobby glanced at me and said, “Adrenaline. Just means you’re alert.” He was driving my car this first time. He’d visited the scene a few nights before and knew where the Taurus would be parked. Instead of following Baldwin the whole way, we took the parallel street and then cut over toward the eight-hundred block. He eased us down to the intersection.

Baldwin was one of the streets that enforced alternate-day parking, and cars were bumper-to-bumper on the north curb. He shifted to neutral and killed the engine, and then he coasted through the intersection, coming to rest gently against the curb under the stop sign. “Better than being the only car on that side,” he said as he shut off the headlights. The day before he’d installed a toggle switch under my dashboard that turned off everything in back—taillights, brake lights, license plate light—and now he reached under and flipped it. “Don’t forget to turn that back on later,” he said. “After we’re a few blocks away.” A click at a time he pushed down the emergency brake pedal, then let out a long breath.

Looking around, I felt a little easier. The block of Baldwin was lamplit on each corner, and only two people were on the sidewalk. It was just after nine at night. Bobby thought it was a good idea to operate during TV prime time rather than later; people tend to look out the window when a car starts at midnight.

We watched the window where Bobby had determined the car’s owner lived. There was blue flickering TV light. I kept thinking I saw someone, but then the light would brighten and the window would be empty.

“Want to call it off?” he said.

“Seriously?” We hadn’t done anything yet except park under a stop sign, and the trembling moved up into my jaw. It suddenly took everything I had not to giggle.