* * *
I had forgotten about the smoking lady until my mother started to resemble her. This was the third week without my brother. Three weeks of my dad and me walking around like zombies. We no longer talked to each other. We chewed our food, he read the paper, and at the end of the day we silently nodded good night. A reality was sneaking up on us. A story I never wanted told.
I grew used to the quiet. When my dad was gone during the day and I had no desire to be outside with worthless birds chirping and the mocking sun, I lay on the couch. I crossed my arms like I was in a casket and stared at the ceiling, at nothing. I slept, and when I wasn’t asleep, I thought of the worst things. And if I wasn’t at peace I was at something like it, only sadder. There was the numbness of calm, but it came with a shadow. Lurking over me on the couch, saying, Don’t get too comfortable.
So it was a shock when my mother came out of the basement during the middle of that third week. The middle of the day, even. I must’ve screamed when I saw her standing in the doorway. She startled and put her hand to her heart, wrapped herself tightly in the pink bathrobe she’d been wearing for weeks.
“Is your dad here?”
I shook my head, too mesmerized by her strange appearance to speak. She was new. She was once again transformed, but this time the change was bad. Her big yellow hair was limp, flat, matted to her head with sweat and grease. Purple circles hung under her eyes, puffed out from her bony, pale face. She looked like she was dying, or was already dead. Her hands would not stop fidgeting, a tic she must’ve picked up from the smoking lady.
“Did you have any breakfast?”
“No,” I said. It was well past noon.
She slowly made her way to the kitchen and poured a glass of orange juice. She sat down and drank the glass with one long tilt, wiped her mouth with the back of her arm, and went downstairs, back into the basement. I did not see her the rest of the day.
* * *
One day my mother spent an entire morning upstairs, sipping her orange juice and staring out the back porch window. She didn’t say anything to me and I didn’t say anything to her. When my dad came home from an all-night shift and saw her sitting upstairs, he looked confused, like he came to the wrong home.
My dad sat down with my mom. She didn’t seem to notice him at first, or if she did, she still didn’t look in his direction. The two of them stared out the window, and although I knew neither would allow themselves to feel the smallest bit of happiness, for that fleeting second, the duplex lost a little of its gloom.
“She had a son,” my dad said. “Your neighbor.” My mother glanced up from her glass. “Not biological. The kid of the man she was with. But she raised him. He lifeguarded at the city pool.”
“So,” my mother said. “So what?”
She stared at my dad, her face desperately trying to make meaning of his words, trying not to jump to any conclusions. Finally her mouth opened, whispered, What? What is it?
“It seems he was fired,” my dad said. “Nothing was ever proven, but there were charges … rumors that he”—he glanced cautiously at me—“hurt one of the kids.”
“What do you mean?” my mother said. But then she seemed to realize something. The meaning behind my dad’s words, his tone, the helplessness in his eyes, became clear.
My mother stood up. She looked at my dad hard, and left the kitchen, not wanting to hear any more. She was halfway down the basement stairs before she stopped and called back up to us.
“Do you know where she is?” she said. “Does this tell you where he might be?”
It didn’t.
“Then don’t,” she said. “Don’t you say it. Until you bring him back, don’t you dare say what might’ve happened.”
The last few stairs moaned under her feet. My mother didn’t come up the rest of the week.
sixteen
MY DAD STILL did his job. He no longer spoke of a promotion, or seemed to hope or care about such a thing anymore, but he didn’t miss a day. Unlike my mother, who never returned to the golf course, who never called Rick to let him know what was going on, my dad put on his uniform and went to work. He came home, changed and ate, went back out. Not to the bar, like before. Not to rent stupid movies. He went out looking for my brother, again and again. He never took me, and if I asked where he went and what he found, he wouldn’t say, but I could see it all over him. I knew.
When it had been over a month, my dad got a call about the Stranger. Until then, it seemed the rest of the city had forgotten about the escape. For them, the threat had never become real. It became a waste of their time. There were no murders over the summer, nothing to satisfy the fears that buzzed the thick air. A prisoner had escaped. Yes. A dangerous man made himself free, but he never went after their family. He did what my mother promised she would do, if she ever got half the chance. He left. He fled this city of prisons and little else, and he never looked back.
My dad hung up the phone and sat at the kitchen table. He didn’t know I was in the living room, lying on the couch, in the dark. He opened his police pad, thumbed some pages, and shut the pad with a look of disgust. I imagined what he saw there, in his notes, the scribbles that told the story of this terrible summer. A few jots about the Stranger, yes. But most of the notes came from my dad spying. They were about my mother, with Rick, then without. If you read the pages closely, they showed what my dad really wanted.
My dad put on his gun and his badge.
“It’s not him,” I said, startling him from the darkness. “It can’t be.”
My dad came into the living room, saw me on the couch, my arms pulled into my shirt for warmth. “Sleeping here tonight?”
I nodded. I waited for him to shake his head, to say boys sleep in beds. But he pulled a blanket from the closet and draped it over me. He tucked me in and kissed me on the head.
“I love you, son. You know that.”
I closed my eyes, unsure if his last words were a statement or a question. I told him I loved him, too, and listened to his footsteps move to the door, out into the night.
* * *
I woke at a painful hour. Too dark to be up, too light to go back to sleep. For a while I stared at the TV, blank and black. I tried to remember what day it was, what had happened the night before and if any of it mattered. My dad had not come home. He was out chasing the Stranger lead, following the claim to its dead end. I tried to imagine what my dad would find when he arrived wherever the tip took him. An empty shack, perhaps. A stack of dirty dishes. In the sink an insulting note: Sorry I missed you. I pictured the disappointment on my dad’s face, his hand crumpling the note or tearing it into a million pieces.
I poured a bowl of cereal before discovering the milk carton was empty. I went into the basement to tell my mother, as if this little tragedy would finally rouse her. I knelt by her side and listened to her light breathing. She wasn’t asleep.
“What do you want?” she said, and I told her about the milk. “Be quiet,” she said. “Come here.” She moved over and pulled me onto the bed, wrapped me in both arms. She had taken on a certain smell these last couple of weeks, from rarely bathing, wearing the same robe day after day. She breathed into my neck. “Big spoon, little spoon,” she said, and weaved a leg around me like a giant spider, squeezing me tight. “You know, when you were a baby this was the only way you would sleep. Just like this. Someone always had to be hugging you. Otherwise, you’d cry your head off.”