“Go on, damn you,” Dane whispered. “Do it, if you have to.”
The boy with the twisted head crept into bed with Dane's mother.
He held her tightly and began to weep, whining and mewling. In time his sobs became a single word, repeated over and over but never growing any louder. “Mama, mama.” His tears rolled off her bony chest each time the machines drove her to take in another breath. “Mama.” He cried for almost an hour until finally, exhausted, he slept.
Dane sat there watching as her body functions grew even slower, and though it felt as if they would never stop, eventually they did. It really hadn't taken that long, he realized, checking his watch. His hand was free to move again.
The respirator still forced her lungs to heave, although Dane knew she was dead. The boy with the sick brain grinned in his sleep. His eyelids fluttered as he dreamed. The flaps of his head barely held together, the meat of his mind throbbing, flesh trying to pull open.
For an instant, Dane saw a black, indistinct shape in there waiting to be born into existence. Perhaps it was the boy's soul. Or Mom's. Or his own.
Scar tissue could be more alive than the rest of your skin. Itching, dead, but full of answers. Cut it open and it reproduces. Not alive, but giving birth.
He left before he was certain. There were some questions that should never be answered.
That leering doctor met him in the doorway again and bared his teeth. Dane looked at him and said, “I ought to kill you, you crazy grinning fuck.” The guy still didn't drop his smile, but he vanished quickly down the hall.
As Dane drove home from the hospital, it felt as if the neighborhood were slowly growing aware of the death of his mother. As if the streets were learning of it mile by mile, as he made his way to the house.
Dane stared down and saw his hands were scuffed and bleeding, the knees of his pants dirty. He must've fallen a couple of times in the hospital parking lot, but he couldn't remember. His scars were singing.
Grandma Lucia's house, which for years had suffered the presence of the dying woman, now expressed relief. The place looked like it was waiting for loud Italian music, parties. The wide hardwood floors where his parents had danced Christmas mornings when he was a child appeared freshly polished.
The photos on the shelves above the TV shifted at the edge of his vision. Those faces darkening with intent. The names he couldn't pronounce had a power over him, already inside his veins. The face of his mother, once out in front, now hid behind other angry women. Blurred and growing more clouded even as he watched.
Dane went to his room, and when he looked up, his dead father was walking across the floor. He sat on the bed.
There were times you wanted to talk to ghosts and times you didn't. Dane wasn't sure what he wanted now. He waited for his dad to speak. Maybe the death of Dane's mother had somehow called the man up, brought him home.
A cold knot of tension throbbed in Dane's belly. Part anxiety but mostly expectation, thinking that perhaps it was finally time to learn the lessons of his father. Answers might be revealed, if his old man could be handled properly. His father might set him on a course he could understand.
A dying breeze clawed at the window over the desk. Leaves clung to the battered screen and skittered across the broken bricks outside. Odd to feel himself tugged in this fashion, knowing his father was buried even while the man sat on the mattress behind him.
You could survive almost any injury so long as you left one version of yourself behind and allowed a different one to continue.
Dane started a slow turning he would never completely finish.
His father had been dead for a little less than six months. Dane had found him down the block, parked in front of the Gothic gates at the mouth of the cemetery with his brains blown out, the gun still in his hand.
The papers gave ambiguous hints about corruption, making it seem like he had to go on the take to cover rising health-care costs for his terminally ill wife. Once he'd been caught, he'd killed himself out of shame. It sounded believable and almost romantic. Tragic without any of the usual saccharine.
The man's photo was on the news every night, not looking tough at all. Sort of soft actually, smiling a bit self-consciously.
Anywhere else in the country it might've been true, but not in Brooklyn. This was the town that had perfected the Bounce. Five cops bringing in sixty keys of heroin, a squad room of police officers surrounding the evidence, and somehow it disappears in front of everybody's eyes. Nobody worried about exposure in Brooklyn. Graft went with the territory. Phil Guerra had once been caught with an underage hooker, the two of them trading a crack pipe, and all the brass did was throw him into rehab for three months and make him go to Sex Addicts Anonymous.
Brooklyn cops never ate their pistols over something like possible corruption. It would be like a bus driver drowning himself because he didn't like making left turns.
As Dane shifted in his seat he saw his old man still seated in the center of the bed, waiting for something no one with a heartbeat could name. Dane couldn't see the gunshot wound in the man's temple from this angle, but it would be there. It had to be. It was as sharp in his imagination as if he'd been shot in the head himself.
“Is she there yet?” Dane asked. “Where are you? Is that purgatory? Is there anything I can do to help?”
For some reason, it felt as if it would take time for his mother and father to find each other. Both of them so gloomy and always staring at walls.
Dad didn't answer.
“Who did it to you?”
An enduring silence broken only by the breeze skirting past outside, the soft scrabbling clatter of pigeons on the roof.
Angling his chin, Dane was unable to meet the man's eyes, which were passionate and alive. His father appeared to be searching for something to say. He opened his mouth and closed it again. He held his hands up in a helpless gesture, like a baby trying to reach for an object beyond his grasp.
His father gave a sickly grin and lay back on the bed. It had been the bed he'd slept in as a boy.
“At least try to talk, Dad. Make an effort. Can't you even do that?”
The window frame vibrated in the staccato breeze. It felt like a ploy to get Dane to turn away from his father for an instant, giving the dead enough time to slip away unseen. He wouldn't fall for it. He touched the back of his head and his scars writhed, the metal plates hot to the touch. When he pulled his hand away his fingers were covered with blood.
He stared at his father lying there, the man looking up at the ceiling as if remembering what it had once been like to be alive in this room, not so different from Dane himself.
Sweat dripped through his hair and soaked into his shirt collar. Surrounded by death and connected to the dead, but not quite there yet. Feeling the weight of murder in the dirt and concrete of the neighborhood. Embarrassed by his own excitement, at this moment, of being alive.
“Find Mom, if you can. And next time, try harder to talk to me.”
Dane allowed himself to look away, and when he glanced back, Dad was gone.
There were important words waiting for him. Solutions that his father was unable or unwilling to give to him. Maybe only for the time being or maybe forever.
Dane was certain he would find his father's murderer eventually, in the angry years laid out before him like the rutted paths that threaded through Headstone City. There was time.
Grandma Lucia walked in, her pocketbook chiming, a plastic container full of pennies rattling, and said, “Madonna mia, what the hell's that smell? You buy a bad salami? Something die in here?”
THIRTEEN
Glory Bishop didn't tell him the movie was premiering in Bridgehampton, or that she expected him to drive the limo. He walked into Olympic ready to ask for the day off, and there it was on the sheet. Her address.