The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin' (205 page)

I took a deep breath, exhaled slowly. “No.”

“Well, then, we’re making progress.”

“Are we?”

“Oh, I think so, yes. I’ve been watching your hands as we’ve talked. Three times, now, I’ve observed one hand undo the opposite fist. Are you aware of that, Dominick—that you’ve been prying your fists apart? It’s a healthy sign, I think. Come, sit down.”

In ancient myths, she said—in stories from cultures as far-flung as the Eskimos and the ancient Greeks—orphaned sons leave home in search of their fathers. In search of the self-truths that will allow them to return home restored, completed. “In these stories, knowledge eludes the lost child,” she said. “And fate throws trial and tribulation onto his path—hurls at him conundrums he must solve, hardships he must conquer. But if the orphan endures, then finally, at long last, he stumbles from the wilderness into the light, holding the precious elixir of truth. And we rejoice! At last, he has
earned
his parentage, Dominick—his place in the world. And for his trouble, he has gained understanding and peace. Has earned his father’s kingdom, if you will. The universe is his!”

“And everyone lives happily ever after,” I said.

“Sometimes,” she said. “Sometimes not. I mention it because it is one way to interpret the recent turn of events: perhaps in order to find your father, you had to earn the right to him.”

I sat there, hands in my pockets, my right hand fingering the oval rock.

“Now,” she said. “Our time is up. We should both go home before this tempest that’s descending blows the two of us away.”

This tempest
, I thought. Tempesta, Drinkwater, Birdsey . . . I started home and then changed my mind. Drove over to Rivercrest, instead. I wanted to check in on Ray.

He was pissed that I’d come. “Jesus, get the hell home, will you? What’s the matter with you, driving around with a hurricane coming? I’m okay. I’m fine. Go home.”

On my way out, I stopped in the front foyer to zip up my slicker, watch the deluge I was getting ready to run out into. The sentries were all at their stations—Daphne, Warren, and the rest of them. They were all hopped up about the hurricane; it was the liveliest I’d ever seen
them. That’s when it dawned on me: she was missing. The oldest of these oldies but goodies. Princess Evil Eye.

“Where’s the Queen Mother today?” I asked Warren.

“Huh?”

“Your other buddy, there. The old gal.”

“You mean Prosperine? They took her to the hospital early this morning. Pneumonia.”

Prosperine?

“Probably on her way out, if you ask me. She wouldn’t eat or drink anything, they said. Getting ready, I guess.”

I sat slumped in the living room, glancing back and forth from the window to the TV. I’d filled the bathtub, put out candles and flashlights, taped the windows. It was hard: facing a hurricane alone.

I flipped the remote back and forth, back and forth, from the Weather Channel to CNN: live feeds of Hurricane Bob, file footage of Gorbachev. He was under house arrest in the Crimea, they said. Details were sketchy. Tanks had started rolling into Moscow to answer the swelling resistance. . . .

How could she
possibly
be alive? I wondered. There had to be other Prosperines in the world, right? The world didn’t work this way.

I got up and looked out the window. A tree branch flew past, someone’s rain gutter clattered end over end down the street. . . . She wasn’t even
coherent,
for Christ’s sake. She’d just sat there in that foyer every day like a diapered vegetable. How could she
possibly
have recognized me?

Then it dawned on me. She
hadn’t
recognized me. She’d recognized my grandfather.

The coup leaders invoked a news blackout. The wind moaned. The power flickered and died. Hurricane Bob had just about arrived—had turned daytime as dark as night.

That’s it, I thought. She’s dying over there. She might not live past the storm. I put on my slicker, pulled up the hood. Stepped into the wind and pelting rain. In the fifteen steps from the house to the
car, I got soaking wet.
Stay home, stay home,
every TV reporter and news anchor had warned. I started the car.

The streets were empty, the windshield wipers almost useless, even at manic speed. Sirens screamed in the distance. I negotiated around fallen limbs, past flying shingles. A couple times, I thought my car would blow right off the road.

But I made it. I got there.

The lights were dimmer than usual; walking down the corridor, I could hear and feel the backup generators cranking. Room 414A, the security guard told me. I took the stairs. Climbed the first flight, the second. I passed three, and then stopped. Stood there between the third and fourth floors. I thought for a minute. Turned and went back down to three. The floor where Dessa worked. The kids’ hospice.

It was quiet there. Just a skeleton crew: the kids, three or four of the parents. Dessa wasn’t there.

An aide stared at me as I emptied board games out of a cardboard box. “I, uh . . . I’m a friend of Dessa’s. Dessa Constantine? I just . . . I just need to borrow these guys for a few minutes.” I opened the cage, pulled out those two rabbits, one at a time, and put them into the box.

“You can’t just take them,” she said. “They belong to the hospice.”

“Uh huh,” I nodded. “I know. I’m just borrowing them. I’ll bring them right back. This is kind of . . . kind of an emergency.”

I kept backing up, backing out of there. A rabbit emergency: she must have thought I was nuts. Hurricane blowing outside, rabbit-napper on the floor. I don’t know what that woman thought.

albrizio, prosperine. do not resuscitate. Prosperine Albrizio? Prosperine Tucci? It didn’t really matter who she was. What mattered was that I got to her in time.

I entered the room. Placed the box I was holding on the floor. I stood before her.

“I need . . . I need you to forgive me,” I said. Her breathing was wheezy; her filmy eyes were slits. She betrayed no sign of consciousness.
Did she even know anyone was in the room with her?

“Can you forgive me?” I asked. “Make me whole again?”

I reached down. Grabbed the two rabbits by the scruffs of their necks and held them up—held them before the dying woman. One of them kicked the air and then was still. Back and forth, back and forth, they rocked before the Monkey.

She moaned softly. Closed her eyes. Wind and rain beat against the building.

I dropped one of the rabbits back into the box. Held the other one, still, before her. And when she opened her eyes again, the two rabbits had become one.

She watched it swing, pendulum-like, before her—watched the reversal of the dark magic she had witnessed long, long ago. “Forgive me,” I whispered.

Her shaking, ancient hand came out from beneath the sheet. Reached out, caressed the rabbit’s fur. I watched the hand move back—touch, first, her forehead, then her heart, her left shoulder, her right.

Her eyes closed again. I dropped the rabbit back into the box. Picked it up and left.

I did not look back.

There’s more, of course. The coiled umbilical cord never really begins or ends.

Hurricane Bob blew through Three Rivers and out to sea. In Moscow, the coup leaders faltered, Gorbachev was freed, and the neck of Soviet Communism was snapped.
Duck and cover!
they had taught us back in grade school.
The Communists may blow us to smithereens!
And we Cold War children had maintained the position until the day we saw Yeltsin climb to the top of a tank and face down oppression. Until we heard a hundred thousand resisters roar.

Prosperine Albrizio had been in the third-to-last wave of psychiatric patients disgorged from the Settle Building before it closed its doors in March of 1992. No records survived, or existed, of a Prosperine Tucci. Nor did I find any evidence that Prosperine Albrizio and my brother Thomas had ever known each other in their long stays at Settle—that Thomas had, perhaps, drawn her a cup of coffee from his cart or that the old woman had hobbled past him one day in the dining hall, imagining herself in the presence of her nemesis, our
grandfather, who had imprisoned her. If it even
was
Prosperine Albrizio whom Domenico had imprisoned. If Prosperine Albrizio had been Prosperine Tucci. . . .

In February of 1994, at the conclusion of a three-month trial, Dr. Richard Hume and four other physician-administrators were cleared of charges of negligence related to the spread of AIDS and HIV at Hatch Forensic Institute. Hatch’s 127 remaining inmates were transferred to Middletown, and the forensic hospital—the last operating facility of Three Rivers State Hospital—ceased to exist. Oddly enough, the abandoned state hospital grounds, once part of the sacred hunting and fishing lands of the Wequonnoc Nation, may again revert to the tribe, annexed for the purpose of expansion. Tribal officials and the Governor of Connecticut are deep in negotiations.

Electric Boat, manufacturer of nuclear submarines—and for the second half of the twentieth century, the economic backbone of the region—has, in the post–Cold War era, laid off workers to a small fraction of its former payroll. “The ghost yard,” people now call the once-booming shipyard where my brother and I long ago witnessed the launching of the
Nautilus
and posed for a picture with the First Lady of the United States of America. But if the defense industry has dwindled here in eastern Connecticut, the gaming industry has thrived. The Wequonnoc Moon Casino and Resort opened in September of ’92 and has exceeded by far even the most optimistic predictions about its impact on economic revival. In the six years of Wequonnoc Moon’s existence, expansion has never stopped and the complex of casinos and hotels rises, now, like an emerald Oz out of the sleeping woods off Route 22. The resort, which has both its champions and its detractors, employs seventy-five thousand. Cars
and buses stream there night and day, nonstop, and the planning committee is looking into the feasibility of ferrying gamblers up the Sachem River from New York and delivering them from Boston by way of a high-speed, state-of-the-art private railroad. We 415 members of the Wequonnoc Nation are millionaires.

Dessa and I began dating again in the fall of 1993, although we’d
been seeing each other regularly at the children’s hospice. She called me one afternoon, out of the blue. “I have an extra ticket for tonight’s UConn women’s game,” she said. “Angie and I usually go together, but she’s busy.”

“
Women’s
basketball?” I said, disdainfully. But of course, I accepted. Sat there, for the first several minutes, like a male chauvinist pain-in-the-ass. “When are they gonna start slam-dunking? . . . Who’s the coach—Frankie Avalon?”

“Oh, shut up, Dominick,” Dessa said, elbowing me. “
Go, Jamelle!
”

By the end of that season, I knew all the players’ names and positions and could give lectures on the strengths and weaknesses of each women’s team in the Big East. In ’95, Dessa and I traveled out to Minneapolis together to watch Lobo and Company win the national championship.

I proposed to Dessa later that spring. We were up at the Cape—Truro—walking Long Nook Beach. Mid-May, it was: bright sun, blue sky—a picture-book kind of day. I hadn’t planned it out—didn’t have a ring in my pocket or anything. I just put my arms around her, kissed her forehead, and asked her if she’d be willing to take another chance.

She didn’t smile. She looked kind of scared, actually, and I thought,
You’re an idiot, Birdsey. You promised her right from the beginning that you wouldn’t pressure her.

She said she was pretty sure it wasn’t a good idea. She’d come to like living by herself. She’d think about it, though.

I told her I could withdraw the offer altogether if she wanted. No, she said. She asked for a week.

We left the beach, went back to the hotel, had some wine. Went out to dinner. Neither of us mentioned what I’d asked her back on the beach, but it sat there between us, as big as a Buick in the living room. Me and Dessa and this Buick of a remarriage proposal I’d probably just screwed up everything by making. I’d just laid it on her without any preliminaries, any planning: do you want to sign on again? Take your chances again with the guy who almost suffocated you? Hey, if I was her,
I
would have said no. . . .

After dinner, we ended up at this arcade place. Dessa beat my butt at Skee-ball; I beat hers at mini-golf. It was a nice night, it had been a nice weekend, but we were both quiet. Distracted. I kept wishing I’d just kept my mouth shut.

We got back to the hotel. Got into our separate Rob and Laura Petrie beds. After the news, we started watching this old black-and-white Italian movie called
The Bicycle Thief
. Dessa said she couldn’t believe I’d never heard of it—that it was probably the saddest movie she’d ever seen. “Yeah?” I said. “Wow.” I fell asleep ten minutes into the thing.

It was her crying that woke me up, her shaking my bed—which she was sitting on. “Hey?” I said. Squinted over at the TV, the rolling credits. “What is it? The movie?”

She shook her head. Put the table lamp on. Our slit-eyes adjusted to the light.