The Voices in Our Heads (5 page)

“Pop-pop, now this is our TV time. After dinner you can help Jenna with her puppet project as long as Jordie doesn’t mind monitoring.”

He turned his head slightly, eyebrows forking a bit.

“It’s my birthday.”

Now she was looking. So was Jordan. Aldo met their stares one at a time.

“It’s my birthday,” he said, “and I want ice cream. Mint chocolate chip with syrup. And a cupcake with a candle in it.”

Ann Marie put down the magazine and ran her thumb and index finger down along the corners of her lips. It was a battle preparation Jordan was well used to, and he cut her off before she could scold Aldo for giving her orders.

“Babe, I got this.” He kicked down the footrest on the Lazy-Boy, walked over, and took his father by the elbow. “Let’s see what we can rustle up in here, Dad.” He guided him into the kitchen, sat him down, and made him settle for vanilla bean. He even sang “Happy Birthday,” and the overly hearty sound of his off-key voice ringing and then dying on the walls kicked off an anger in him that seemed to come from a thousand places at once. Why wasn’t Ann Marie in here with him, celebrating this red-letter moment, this sign that the doctors were wrong, that you could reverse this thing, that Dad had made a clothing choice and voiced a sober demand, that he’d come leaps and bounds in a matter of days? Hello? And why hadn’t Jenna set the table yet? And why hadn’t he gotten anything at work but cost of living in three years? And why the fuck did the end of his father’s time here have to be marked and measured by random outbursts and fake-me-out birthdays?

Ann Marie was in the archway watching. She did get it, Jordan could see it in her expression, and his anger dissipated. The bride had always had that power over him, so pretty in her own no-nonsense neighborhood-girl kind of way, long ponytail tossed over a shoulder, big brown eyes, smoky campfire voice. Over the years Jordan had come to the conclusion that guys were angry on some level most of the time, and they often didn’t even know the rhyme or reason for it. It took a good woman to redirect that energy. He walked over and kissed her. She responded and their mouths opened. Aldo sat and ate his ice cream, and this was the way it was supposed to be. No scary nurses. No bumbling wanderers opening up all the drawers.

Dinner was OK, at least for a hot minute or so. Jenna moaned in dramatic agony when she realized she hadn’t gotten ice cream before dinner like Pop-pop, but brightened considerably when she was promised two Klondike cookie bars after she finished her spaghetti. Jordan needled Ann Marie about having to fall asleep every night with the TV on, and she countered by claiming he had shirked cleaning the bathroom for so long that the sink had demanded an apology note. Then, in the middle of Jenna’s rather scattered story about a girl at school who had thrown up in a trash can at recess, Aldo finished his glass of milk, sucking hard on the straw, causing that throaty, funneling, whooping sound.

From nowhere, Jenna burst into tears. Ann Marie was there immediately, scooping her up, switching places with her in the chair, rubbing her back saying, “There, there.” Jordan looked at his hands and studied the nails, the cuticles. So much for a quiet dinner at the Colella’s. Jenna had been complaining of depression, well, not in so many words, but for the last couple of weeks she’d been waking up with tears on her cheeks. If Jordan asked what was bothering her, she’d pout. If he pressed, she’d cry herself into the hiccups, blubber bubbles on her lips. Both Jordan and Ann Marie were mystified, especially since she was always fine after her shower and breakfast, ankles curled around the kitchen chair legs, coloring with the tip of her tongue poked out the side of her mouth, animated annoyance when asked to perform the slightest task, skipping in the halls, spinning in the living room until she fell down, the usual.

But morning depression? In an eight-year-old? And now the same shit kicked off by the sound of milk being sucked through a straw? Jordan just didn’t get it. Maybe he was just cold or something, but being “sad” just wasn’t quite tangible for him. Scared? Yeah, sure. Get mugged, fired, or pulled over, and you’d be scared plenty. Worn down? Yes, sir. Working in the trades twenty years running would make anyone more than familiar. Desperate? You betcha. Just lay down a grand on the Eagles to cover and you’d cringe like the rest of us. But “melancholy”? Sounded just a bit too much like the excuse of some lit-geek. It wasn’t that Jordan was insensitive to his daughter’s pain; he just didn’t know the remedy.

“Hey, honey,” Ann Marie said, bouncing Jenna a bit. “What’s wrong, baby, tell me.”

It was muffled, because Jenna’s face was buried in her mother’s shoulder, but it sounded as if she said that something was “stealing her happy.” Of course, Jordan knew he’d been out of circulation for a good while by now, but you’d have to be living under a rock not to recognize the punch line from the Carrie Underwood single. So modern music represented the fall of Western civilization after all. Would he next be consulting some therapist who’d claim his daughter was internalizing harmful pop lyrics and experiencing mood swings because she couldn’t handle the more adult themes bombarding her from so many media outlets or some such lame shit? Was he supposed to take her clock radio? Give her earmuffs?

“Cheer up,” Ann Marie said. “Tomorrow night’s Dong Night, and all your friends will be over.”

Jenna pulled away a bit.

“Really?”

“M-hmm.”

“Yay!” she shouted, sliding out of the embrace and down to the floor, then grabbing the table with both hands and jumping up and down. “I’m gonna go first, and I get the Justin Bieber song, and I want cheese popcorn, not just the plain Orville Reddenbacker, and after, you promised next time we could make banana splits, and I don’t want Margie Valelly to come over because last week she started calling me names!”

Jordan shook his head and smiled. Dong Night, women and their rituals, hell, he had better understood Frankie’s klepto phase, his desire to play mud football, and the sleepovers where all the boys would sneak in Red Bull to chug down, because if you were the first one passed out you woke up with oatmeal in your shorts. But this girl stuff was really just out of his league; best to just play along (which he had learned to do quite well, by the way).

“Dong Night” had become a monthly tradition with the Gregorios, the Johnsons, the Valellys, and the Pastalones, with all of whom they’d struck up friendships through Girl Scouts and church. It was just plain idiocy for the sake of it. All the girls borrowed their mothers’ makeup and hair spray and did themselves up like circus freaks: crazy multicolored applications of blush, eye shadow, and lipstick, big Scrunchie hair clips pointing out in all directions, and then braids all done up and tied to stand straight off the head. Then they would videotape themselves singing and crazy-dancing to their favorite pop songs, one at a time for a competition, and then all together for an all-out dance party free-for-all. The parents stood around drinking heavily and applauding heartily. A night for no-minds. Just what the girl needed.

Aldo coughed, and it sounded as if phlegm came up from his chest. He rolled it around, bit through it a few times, swallowed lustily, and smacked his lips.

“Tastes good,” he said. Jordan looked at the floor. Yeah. Baby steps. Ann Marie turned away and started cleaning up. Jenna helped. Jordan ambled off to the living room to catch the tail end of Comcast Daily News Live, and Jenna eventually took her grandfather over in the corner to try and teach him Monopoly. She was patient with him, praised him, didn’t scold him for mixing the Community Chest cards with the Chance cards or trying to eat the player’s piece shaped like a top hat. Baby steps. Things were OK.

Until the next morning.

Jordan was always the first one up, and before he even made his way out of bed he sensed something. He’d dreamed badly and couldn’t remember. The air conditioner was making noise like an airplane, then a smooth hum; had to get that freakin’ thing fixed. He was cold and sweating. He swung his feet to the floor, rubbed his face, and got up. His Achilles tendons hurt as they always did, and he made his way to the bathroom.

One step in, he skidded and grabbed the doorjamb.

Something was stuck to his feet. He reached down and brushed at his heel. The bottom of his foot was covered with dots, pills, and for a second he thought that maybe Ann Marie had hit the Bolla too hard last night, gaining the common sense to down a few Bayers before sleep, then inadvertently knocking over the bottle. He looked closer at the floor and sucked his breath between his teeth.

It wasn’t just the Bayer aspirin, and it was anything but a random spill. The entire medicine cabinet had been emptied, the CVS Rapid Reliefs, the Ambien, the Naproxen, the Sudafed, and a shitload of others Ann Marie had hoarded over the years, those that Jordan never really bothered looking at, let alone pronouncing, all rearranged meticulously atop the black, gray, and white floor tiles, gel caps in the darker squares, tablets in the latter, all the oblongs in the L patterns, all the circulars in the squares. The heaviest concentration was by the toilet, and they spread to the outskirts of the room like planets and stars, as if some strange camera had caught the universe exploding. Jordan squinted and bent closer. Yes. Some of the flatter pills were stacked on top of each other four or five high, and the oval-shaped capsules were all placed in uniform diagonals toward the window. It was strange, exacting work that must have taken hours.

Jordan smelled something. From the living room.

Bowlegged, he hopped down the stairs two and three at a time, hair sticking up in the back, and when he reached the bottom he stopped. To the left, he could see there was trouble in and around the fireplace area, and to the right, the open-frame coat closet at the far edge of the living room had become a junkyard. There, right beneath the neat row of fall and winter coats, were their two rusty propane tanks stacked and stuffed amongst a hoard of other junk from the back yard shed, all weather-spotted and floating with dust veils. He walked closer, not believing but believing it, his mud-spattered half-moon edger angled across the Scotts Speedy two-wheeled fertilizer dispenser. There was a Toro mower bag wearing its dark green beard of grass residue, and underneath it a gallon of rock salt, a slew of paint varnish cans, the Christmas front lawn gingerbread men, and the weed whacker. An old length of kinked-up garden hose was tied and screw-coiled around a Rubbermaid trash cover wedged in on a slant, and the 39-gallon recycling drum was stuffed in butt first, open maw crawling with water spiders.

Jordan turned toward the fireplace. In front of it, the kitchen trash can lay on its side, the pokers propped across it on angles pointing back in toward the hearth. Inside, there was garbage, wet garbage from the can and the fridge. Up front sat a number of corner-cut chicken quesadillas that Ann Marie had tried baking instead of grilling, on whole wheat tortilla wrappers no less, and Jenna had bitched and moaned, and Annie had chucked them. Two days ago. Jordan got to his knees and bent in for a real look-see. Yep. The whole can had been emptied and rearranged in here. There was the deli roast beef from a week ago that had gone a bit greasy with age, now laid out strip by strip across the back edge of the dark space, along with empty Totinos pizza boxes and Weight Watchers cartons stacked atop one another in pyramids. There was half a ham sandwich settled into a whitened puddle of bacon fat next to half an old cheese steak Jordan picked up at a lunch truck three days ago, and scoops of guacamole, browned now, placed like decorator foliage at the front corners, smiley faces impressed into the surfaces by someone’s delicate artistic touch. There were rumpled, damp paper towels placed at the edges like border flowers, and old, rank spaghetti snaked through it all in S-shapes and figure eights.

Jordan angled in and looked up, first one side, then the other.

Oh, boy.

He didn’t.

Oh, but he had.

Somehow, Aldo had gotten the caulking gun, fitted it with a tube of the brick adhesive, and glued all the exterior refrigerator stuff to the inner walls of the hearth. There was the photo of Ann Marie’s autistic nephew, and the gorgeous print Jordan took last year of Jenna, hair in pigtails, sitting and reading a book on the iron bench outside Penn Wynn Elementary. The family portrait magnets that they got taken at Wendy Schulman’s bat mitzvah last year were pasted in there, just like the poem Jenna did for homework a month ago, last year’s Mother’s Day poster with hearts on it, an archery award from the day camp, and a mini-raft made out of popsicle sticks with Jenna’s handprint in the center. Making up the rest of the three-sided mural was the stuff that rode the fridge sidesaddle, much of it old crap that he and Ann Marie had stuffed in a big mesh magnet basket for hasty convenience. There was an old Phillies schedule there and pages from an obsolete pocket calendar with Norman Rockwell prints on them. There was a Weight Watchers points slide, menus for pizza and Chinese delivery places, a Terminex contract, old receipts, a cable manual, and a voucher with Sears for a year’s worth of free service on the gas range, all this amongst a litter of magnets from Kids First Pediatrician’s, Blockbuster Video, SuperCuts, Lower Merion Tee Ball, and four or five real estate agencies. And it was all placed meticulously, it was all so . . .
Aldo
for lack of a better word
.
Near the base he had set the larger, rectangular paraphernalia like bricks, the given layout course below its alternate, five rows in a neat horizontal stagger, and then as his fridge materials got smaller, more varied in size and shape, he adjusted his patterning to a strange mix of modular pin-wheeling and hopscotch modified, the lot of it interlocking like some madman’s calico puzzle on top of the fire bricks beneath, a full “wallpapering” that covered almost every square inch of space running three or four feet up the flue.

Ann Marie hit the roof and took a day off from the hospital (they could find someone else to answer phones in the pulmonary lab for a shift, goddamn it). She put all the shit back into the shed herself, took all the coats out for dry cleaning, and called Stanley Steamer to come scrub out the hearth, scour that closet, and shampoo the rugs. She paid one of them extra to chip the “mural” off the fire brick, and some of the bits and corners and pieces just wouldn’t come loose. Aldo slept all day, snoring up there in his room, and he was still sawing wood when Jordan got home from the warehouse.