Twelve Rooms with a View (21 page)

He picked up the paper napkin next to his coffee cup and wiped his fingers. He looked at me hard, and his eyebrows went up just a little, like
you think I’m going to let you avoid that one?
I never did think that. I’m just not sure why everyone thinks you’ll get what you want or need by saying the true thing that’s in your heart.

“I can’t,” I finally admitted.

“Can’t what?”

“There’s no place for me. Lucy won’t let me stay with her, and Alison and Daniel don’t want me. So. It’s like that.”

He waited, like that wasn’t good enough, and I was going to have to give him all of it.

“They think I’m a loser,” I said. My voice was getting steadier. It didn’t sound so bad, honestly, when I just said it. “They don’t want me. I’m not allowed to stay in their apartments. And I don’t, I don’t have any money and I don’t have friends here, I don’t live here. Seriously. I have no place to go. So why should I call Lucy and let her come down to the precinct and make a big deal about it, like she’s doing me some huge favor?
Then, when she gets me out, she’ll act like her shitty couch is too good for me. Why give them the opportunity to let me know I’m some huge hideous problem that they always have to deal with? Why not just stay in jail?”

“You ever been in jail? I mean, I can see you’ve been arrested, but have you ever actually spent a night somewhere other than a lockup?”

“You mean like jail jail?”

“Yeah, ‘jail jail,’ Miss Smartypants. You ever actually spend any time there? Your so-called record says three arrests but no actual jail time, is there something I’m missing here?”

“No.”

“Okay, then stop acting like it’s an option.”

“You want me to call Lucy?”

“I’m not going to tell you what to do.” I couldn’t tell if he was bothered by my lack of self-regard or disgusted with the lot of us. He finished wiping his fingers and set down the crumpled napkin, then checked his nails, as if it had just occurred to him that they might be filthy, which in fact they were not. He leaned back into the vinyl of the booth and seemed to be thinking about what I had just said, but at the same time I could see that his eyes were scanning for where the waitress was, so he could ask her for more bad coffee or the check. I decided he must be a pretty good detective, because even though I kept mouthing off and acting like I was running the show, he had found out everything he wanted to know, and I hadn’t found out anything at all.

“Did you ever meet my dad?” he finally asked. Over my head he caught the waitress’s eye and tipped his chin a little bit. He reached for a toothpick, even though he hadn’t eaten anything other than sugar, pie, coffee, and salt while I pigged out. Good-looking, mean, and he doesn’t eat; maybe he’s a vampire, I thought.

“Hey, are you with us?” he asked.

“What was the question—did I ever meet your dad? No, I never did. Did you ever meet my mom?”

“A couple times.”

“You did? You met her?” This seemed like really great news, that
he had seen my mother after she went away from me and into that other world up in the beautiful strange apartment with that crazy old drunk. “What was, what—wow. I didn’t know you met her.”

“Before they got married, when she was cleaning house for him, I met her a few times.”

“She was cleaning
house
for him?”

“You didn’t know that?”

Why was the news that my mother had been cleaning houses the worst news I could get, when in fact it was exactly what I had been doing? I had let her go so far away for so long that I thought the guilt of such distance had burned itself out. But she had still lived in the world, and she found herself cleaning houses. And this sad-eyed detective had seen her with buckets and rags, on her hands and knees, and I had not.

He wasn’t volunteering any more information. I hated the way I had to pry facts out of this bonehead. “Did you see her often?” I asked.

“Just a couple times.”

“How did she look?”

“I didn’t pay much attention until he married her.”

“Were you at the wedding?”

“No, I was not invited. My brother and I were not consulted about the marriage, we were told about it after the fact.”

“So what happened then?”

“You know as much as I do about that part.”

“I
don’t
know as much as you; I don’t know anything, I think
that’s
pretty obvious. Which is why I’m asking. I only saw her the one time, which you already know about from Mrs. What’s-Her-Name who I wasn’t spying on, she was spying on them, and we weren’t allowed, your dad—we didn’t—oh fuck it.” I moved almost instantaneously through losing my cool to picking up a phony version of it as it occurred to me that I had to keep my mouth closed about how Bill was shutting us out of their life. Lucy had warned me not to let the Drinans know that Bill didn’t want us around, that it would hurt our chances of getting the apartment. I remembered the rules and managed to stop myself from giving up any more information. But I still wanted to know what he knew. “Did they, did they have a wedding dinner?” I asked.

“No,” he said, laughing a little at the very idea.

“Well, when did he tell you? That they got married?”

“A couple days later.”

“Did you see them?”

“Yeah, we did. We were over at the apartment, and we saw them and they told us.”

“And they were happy?”

“You know, it’s hard to tell about people and happiness, Tina. That’s one thing you learn in police school.” He looked down, and I could see that he had pulled a small wad of neatly folded bills out of his pocket and was rifling through them swiftly, counting to himself like a little kid.

“What does that mean?” I asked, trying not to get mad. He wasn’t objecting to my asking questions, so I didn’t want to piss him off with my famously bad attitude, but my nerves were running on fumes by this point. “I mean, did you see them, what did they—wow. Okay, okay,” I stumbled. “When was the last time you saw them?”

He looked up from his counting, caught by the question, like he couldn’t immediately remember the answer. “A long time,” he admitted with some shade of sorrow or reluctance. “I don’t know. A couple years maybe.”

“A couple years, like two years?” I asked.

“Yeah, like two years.”

“Like when they got married, that’s when you stopped seeing him?”

“Yes, that’s when I stopped seeing him.”

“So he married my mom, and he told you, and you guys had a fight and that was the end of it for you, like how could he have married my
mom
, and so then you just—stopped even talking to him. Was it that horrible for you and your brother? You just cut yourself off from him because he married her? Is that what happened?”

“Something like that.”

He looked down, still trying to count those bills, a task that was mysteriously beyond his ability all of a sudden. “Look, she was cleaning his
house,”
he said, and he sounded truly pained that he was the one
who had to tell me this. “And then he married her? What were we supposed to think?”

“Just whatever you thought, I guess. How do I know?”

“Exactly.”

“Look,” I said. “She was a really nice person.” Somehow I thought this would make a difference. It didn’t. Detective Bonehead raised an eyebrow as if he was pondering my loyal burst of sentimentality. Then he went back to asking questions.

“So how come you abandoned her?” he said.

“I didn’t,” I said. “I didn’t. I didn’t.”

My assertion that my mother was a nice person did not get through to this guy, but the idiotic desperation behind those three denials apparently did. He shrugged. There was a mournful pause as we both considered how pathetic I sounded. “Well,” he said, with a truly hopeless edge to his voice, “I didn’t abandon them either.”

“No, I get it,” I said. “I do. Here, let me count out the money, you’re like retarded all of a sudden.” Before he could argue, I reached over and took the ones out of his hand and started counting. “How much is it?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted, looking around helplessly. We had been abandoned by the waitress.

“We just had a burger and a Coke and pie and some coffee, it can’t be that hard to figure out,” I noted, counting out about twelve bucks. Somehow everything had shifted, and now we were just two people talking about our fucked-up families. And it was late.

Drinan sucked in his breath and then blew it out slowly, as if someone had taught him that in the one yoga class some hippie girlfriend had gotten him to take before he became a cop. But he still remembered the breathing, so he did it as he sat in that booth, like that one good yoga breath was going to put him back in control of his whole messy life. His face looked like four in the morning. “Yeah,” he said. “Let’s go.”

“Oh, wait, hang on,” I said, remembering my situation. My heart started pounding way too hard. “Jesus, wait, hang on.” Reality was setting in; I wasn’t going to be spending the next three days sitting in a booth in a shitty diner; I was going to jail. I suddenly felt as old and tired as he looked.

“Relax, Tina,” said Detective Bonehead. He stood and dusted the crumbs of salt off his jacket. “I’ll take you home.”

So we went back to the precinct and picked up my stuff, and then he drove me back to the Edge in his old blue Buick. I sat in his car for a long minute, trying to figure out what to say.

“Are you going to get out of the car?” he said finally.

“Yeah, I’m getting out. Sorry. Yes, sorry, I’m just trying to figure out what this all means. Does this mean I can stay in the apartment?”

“It means you can stay tonight.”

“What about after tonight?”

“After tonight is tomorrow.”

“And after that?”

“You know what, Tina?” He tilted his head quickly left and right, like he was working a bad kink out of his neck. “I’m not going to try and tell you what happens the day after tomorrow. Nobody knows what’s going to happen. If you think you do, you’re wrong.”

I was looking down the street past a couple of drunks staggering up the sidewalk toward us. The sky was starting to turn that strange dark purple that meant the night was on its last legs. “Well,” I said. “The sun’s coming up, I know that much.”

“That’s just an educated guess,” Drinan said. “Listen. If anyone tries to arrest you again? You might want to mention that you got roughed up the first time. That sergeant at the desk, his name is Bohrman. Randy Bohrman. You think you can remember that?”

“I think so,” I said.

“They’re not going to bother you. That’s just in case.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“I’ll see you in court.” He was gripping the steering wheel, but he didn’t seem angry; it was more like he was trying to stay awake.

“Look,” I said. “You want to come up?”

He tilted his head away, like that kink in his neck was not going to let him alone. Then he glanced back at me with a weary, coplike regret. “That won’t be necessary,” he said. I turned red yet again.

“I didn’t mean that,” I said. “I just meant, since you haven’t seen it. In so long. Just that one time. And you were drunk that night, and
I thought … Do you want to come see it? Just see it. Oh, whatever. Whatever!” I think I yelled it as I started to get out of his stupid loser car. “That is just classic, and you know what? I’m too tired to even be embarrassed by you thinking I’m trying to come on to you right now. Like I’m so tired I’m not even awake enough to think, ‘What did he say? This moron thinks I want to sleep with him even though he tried to have me arrested? He thinks I want to have sex twenty minutes after eating a pound of hamburger and six dozen French fries?’ Men are such geniuses. I’m so tired I can’t even articulate any sarcastic bullshit for you, Detective. So when you want to see the apartment you grew up in—when you want to see your old room and what’s left of your mom’s crazy paint job—you’ll let me know.”

I was almost up to the door of the building when he yelled after me. “What did you say?”

“Oh, man,” I said. “I’m not kidding. I’m done. I’m going to bed.”

“About my mom’s paint job.”

“What about it?”

“How’d you know it’s my mom’s?”

I couldn’t remember. I couldn’t even remember what I said about his mom, and I had said it like seconds ago. “Come on, man. It’s four in the morning.”

“Yeah yeah yeah, okay.” He looked down at his hands on the steering wheel, and he sat there for a second like he wanted to ask me about something else. Before he could ask, I went inside. I went into the apartment and lay down and didn’t get up until Lucy appeared and told me to get out of bed.

I
T TOOK ME A SECOND TO CATCH UP
. S
HE WAS WATCHING ME FROM
the doorway, impatient, while I groggily fumbled around with the covers. My little adopted bedroom had two windows overlooking an exhaust shaft, so there was not much light even when the old pull-down shades were up, which they were not at this time. So it truly was dark.

“What time is it?” I asked.

“It’s three-thirty in the afternoon. What is the matter with you?” Lucy asserted, stalking in on her low sensible heels and yanking the shades up. “Are you hungover?”

“No, I’m not hungover.”

“Right,” she replied, all pissy as usual.

“I don’t have a hangover, Lucy,” I said. “I was ar
rest
ed yesterday afternoon, and I spent the night in lockup, thank you very much, because someone forgot to
inform
me that there is a fucking
injunction
on this place.”

That did get her attention, although she was completely unapologetic. “You were arrested?” she asked, with more than a shred of disbelief.

“Don’t give me that,” I said, disgusted. “You knew all about it. And don’t even bother lying to me about it—”

“I am not—”

“You forgot to in
form
me. You and that lawyer, although my bet is he told you and you told him that you would tell me, but then you didn’t even
bother
to tell me.”

“I am not sure what you’re accusing me of here, Tina. But if you
were
arrested—”

“What do you mean, ‘if’? Do you think I’d make up something like that?”