For Mardi, whose parents sold her to a child molester before she even had the defense of language, the war between mother and son must have seemed like happiness.
“What about Shelly?” I asked.
“She’s spent most of her time trying to calm Mrs. McGill down.”
“Really? What kinda miracle is that?”
Mardi smiled. She never spoke unless she had something to say — a rare quality among Americans of any age.
I headed for the dining room as Mardi made her way back toward the ruckus my eldest child was making.
I stopped at the doorway and listened before entering.
Old habits die hard.
“That bitch has stolen my son’s soul,” Katrina wailed.
“Don’t say that, Mom,” Shelly, ever the middle child, said. “D’s twenty-three years old. It’s time for him to move out.”
“My whole life is shit. Dimitri is, and you are too. Sluts and bastards, is all you are.”
“Mom,” Shelly pleaded. “You just had too much to drink, that’s all. Dimitri loves you. I do too.”
I never thought I’d hear Michelle say those words to her mother again. When Katrina left me for an Austrian/Argentinian banker Shelly wrote her off. Things had to be really bad for her to find forgiveness now.
“Bullshit,” Katrina was saying. “Bullshit. You’re just like your father. He sent that monster to help so nobody could stop my baby from leaving.”
“Twill called Mr. Arnold, not Daddy.”
Arnold was not Hush’s real name but one of his many aliases. What’s in a name anyway?
“He’s a piece-of-shit killer, and your father is too.”
“Daddy didn’t do anything, Mom.”
I walked in then. Regardless of the rancor between Katrina and me I didn’t want to see Shelly punished over accusations that were closer to the truth than a loving daughter could ever believe.
Katrina was sitting at the large hickory dining table, my private crystal decanter of fifty-year-old cognac unstoppered before her. I didn’t see a glass.
My wife of twenty-four years had passed the half-century mark but maintained a good deal of the beauty of her Scandinavian youth. That beauty was marred by the sour sneer on her face. Her hair was the blond of a young girl and her eyes blue like the North Sea. It was no wonder that Katrina had so many young lovers.
Shelly was dark-skinned in the way people from Southeast Asia are. Her eyes were Asian also but modified by her mother’s bloodline. Her father had been killed in a natural disaster before Katrina got the chance to leave me for him.
My daughter was on her knees next to her mother.
“What’s going on in here?” I said in a strong voice.
Both women looked up, startled by a genetic memory.
Shelly smiled and stood up.
Katrina’s left nostril lifted. “Fuck you,” she said.
“Mo-om,” Shelly complained.
“Why don’t you go help your brother, baby,” I said to my daughter. “I’ll take over here.”
“Yes, you little slut. Move out with him. See if I care.”
Near tears, my little girl ran from the room. The fever flashed back and I clenched my hands into fists.
“Are you going to hit me?” Katrina asked, putting her hands up in false fright.
She was surprised when I took two steps forward and grabbed her by both wrists.
“Wha?” she cried.
“Calm down now, Katrina. You know I’m not happy with D movin’ out and dropping out of school. But he’s a man now and there’s no way to stop him.”
“As if you cared,” she said, a little cowed by my speed, strength, and uncommon willingness to use them.
I let her go and pulled a chair up next to her. I then offered my hands for her to hold. She didn’t take up the offer, but at least her belligerence ebbed a bit.
“What’s wrong, baby?” I asked.
After decades of marriage it took only a few words for a sermon’s worth of communication. I never called Katrina baby. The fact that I did meant I was ready to do whatever I could to assuage her pain.
But she was still angry.
“What do you want me to say?” she spat. “That not one dream I ever had came true? That my children are all disappointments and you were never there when I needed you? And after all that even my own body betrays me and there’s nothing left, no one left.”
“D’s only movin’ six blocks from here,” I said. “And Shelly’s a good girl.”
“Huh,” Katrina grunted. “Ask Seldon Arvinil about that.”
“Who?”
At that moment the dam broke and she reached out for my proffered hands.
“Oh, Leonid.”
I leaned over and picked her up, lifting her into my lap.
She put her arms around my head and squeezed.
“I’ve lost everything,” she whispered, “everything.”
“Not me. You still got your bad penny.”
She patted my bald head and hummed. I could smell the brandy on her breath — it was good stuff.
She put her cheek against mine and exhaled in the way I knew foretold sleep.
“Your skin is hot,” she said and then nodded off.
8
“... That bitch is always tellin’ me that she wants me to be happy and she wants me to be a man, but the first thing I do on my own and she’s actin’ like the world’s comin’ to an end and, and, and...”
These words came from Dimitri through the closed door of his room.
I was carrying his mother down the hall to our bedroom.
Negotiating the doorway without banging her head, I put her down on the bed as gently as possible. We have a big bed, custom-made, one hundred inches square. I considered undressing her, but that might prove a problem if she woke up and came running down the hall to yell some more.
So instead I put a pillow under her head and sat next to her a while, trying to understand how I came to that moment, that place.
As I considered, Katrina’s breathing deepened.
She was a beautiful woman, and brilliant in her own way. For many years she searched for a man who would take her and Dimitri away from me and the other kids. It wasn’t that she didn’t love Twill and Shelly but that they loved me too much.
We didn’t love each other, at least not like man and wife, but we were tied together by a knot of blood, children, and history.
When she began snoring I knew that Kat would be unconscious for hours. I shifted her so that she was sleeping on her stomach, to make sure she didn’t drown in her drunken repose. After that I headed out the bedroom door and back down the hall.
“... I mean, what have I ever done to her?” Dimitri was saying as I walked in. He looked at me, hesitated, and then went on. “Taty has only tried to be nice with her. And Mama won’t even say a word if she’s in the room. She just stands there with that look on her face.”
Dimitri had a child’s baseball mitt in his hand. I wondered if he intended to take it to the new apartment. Tatyana, the svelte former prostitute, was on her knees, rolling socks, while Mardi and Twill picked around in the mass of detritus that filled D’s deep closet.
Shelly was sweeping the floor.
“Why you doin’ that?” Dimitri asked his sister.
“I’m cleaning up so Mom doesn’t have to after you’re gone.”
“Why? You don’t even like her.”
“She’s our moms, Bulldog,” Twill said. “Only mother you ever gonna have.”
“I wish she was dead,” Dimitri said.
“D!” Shelly cried.
Tatyana kept rolling socks.
“That bitch just wants to—”