I throw him against the ambulance door, jerk him back again by the belt.
“Take care of him now, you jerkoff. Right now.”
He could flatten me in seconds, but I must look rabid enough to alarm them both, convince them to take the easy way. Wade nods, spits, mumbles something about legalities. They hit Opatowski with something from an ampule and take him inside. I ought to stay with him, but really, I can’t.
The sun is high and the road is flat and black as a griddle. I walk over to Boot Hill and subside into a brown booth. Two other thirstys in the place, Virg from the gas station, and the owner’s crooked boy. We don’t say hi. I have a shot and a beer, then two more.
Then come stinging tears, concentrated, as though I’ve been holding them a long, long time.
It was cherry blossom time in our nation’s capital. The Washington correspondents, who were always fighting for air time, searched out bosky spots to film their opens and closes. Ratings for the Evening News had never been better; I thought of asking for a raise.
It was daffodil time in Lake Success, and they were burying my mother in a memorial park spruce as a tournament golf course. The headstone was white marble. The casket was polished copper, a plush capsule that could have been boostered into space.
Three rows of folding wooden chairs had been set out, but it was still SRO. Aunt Rita, who’d been pinned under a horse, arrived in an electric wheelchair, a slit-eyed chauffeur in attendance. Sonia Brooks, whose Christmas cards had been returned unopened, was there without her husband. My mother commanded loyalty, at least that day — her tennis teacher came, her hair stylist, and a housekeeper she’d fired for drinking. And there was the English character actress she’d toured with one summer, who wept and trembled uncontrollably: On her way to the service in an open convertible, she’d crossed the Verrazano Bridge and a rat had dropped from a girder onto the seat beside her.
My father read some Swinburne and a Unitarian minister mused about “interdependence.” A circuit court judge, who, as far as I knew, had never met her, described my mother as a bright clear light. Union workers lowered my mother into ground that belonged to white grubs and blind moles. Flowers were tossed in with her. Strangers embraced me. I felt sick to my stomach but my eyes were dry.
Carla was next to me, silent and still, but her eyes overflowed. She had driven down from Maine, from the cabin she’d fled Boston for, three days earlier, and had barely slept since. Her bloodless face was seraphic, frozen white above a mourning costume improvised from closet depths: black velvet minidress, black tights, pointy shoes with functionless buckles. Back at the house, I spent a long time in the shower.
Gordo said we oughtn’t to sink too deep in sorrow, how she would have been the first to say so. He wanted to take us to the Princeton Club for drinks and dinner. We had soup and toast instead and took turns answering the phone.
“Anything at all we can do,” offered curious townsfolk.
“There are no words,” said bar dwellers from the country club, prefacing advice.
We were dazed, wary of each other, and the sentences we found to speak were museum specimens. Gordo roamed between kitchen and living room, knocking things over. He seemed to be regressing, melting into himself. He played with toast crumbs and told us how proud we made him. The longer he held back the more horrific it would be. Carla, whom he’d always frightened the most, turned stricken eyes to me when he tottered over to ruffle her hair like some stickpinned bachelor. (“You seem like nice kids. Here’s a dollar for each of you.”) But soon he wandered off, decanter in hand, to their room, their bed.
Not that it was any easier for the two of us. Every surface held her imprint, every object was infected with her presence. We sat on the floor and smoked. Carla drank coffee like it was medicine and talked about Maine, the cold clear nights and the piney air.
“Sometimes I forget to eat for a while and I see things.” Her voice was hoarse.
“Things?”
Carla did not elaborate. The house had grown suitably cold and she wrapped up in a blanket, teeth clicking on the rim of her cup. I felt angry and protective and uneasy. It was a sleet storm of impulse and recollection through which there was no visibility. I heard my mother laughing, scolding. She pulled me from a pile of dead leaves and swung me toward the sun.
“If you could hold me for a minute.”
Carla opened the raveled wings of the blanket and I crawled inside, smelling her exhaustion. She felt hard and shell-like at first as I held her tightly. Then as I loosened, so did she, her face turning into my neck. Each tear was discrete on my skin, an emission squeezed out of her with the pain and effort of birth. That my mother could have caused such misery seemed unforgivable just then. I had no sympathy to spare for her. Carla’s mouth opened against me and I disappeared inside the jagged cadence of her breathing. For an immeasurable time then she ceased to be a sister or a woman, became simply a fellow creature, and I glided up and up a sparking wire, ecstatic with purity of feeling.
A momentous crash overhead, deep bellowing. The widower had snapped his tethers. Carla’s hands were like suction cups against my ribs.
“Let him alone. Please.”
I pulled free, got to my feet. The velvet dress had ridden up past her hips and her eyes were those of a doe under the gun.
“I live here too,” I said. “I don’t want him tearing the place up.”
My sister curled on the floor, palms over her ears. I turned from her and went up the stairs, toward the sound of breaking glass. There was a dreadful awareness of error, as in the elongated second or two before the car hits the stanchion. It was sheer expedience that placed me in the house and I really didn’t care if the old man raved until the very roof spun away across identical lawns and into the night.
“Feckless child! Parasite!”
I had reached the open doorway: Gordo in pajama tops amid a swale of destruction. He’d opened his hand on something; blood globs dropped from his fingers like candies.
“She died in shame…looking in a broken mirror. Shame!”
I had left a chance below, an opening.
“Worthless worthless world.”
It could have been a kiss alone, a few gasped words, or something far more reckless. It would have been a recognition, a barrier irrevocably passed after so long and contorted a wait. But not now.
Gordo advanced, babbling. Blood had dribbled onto his gray penis, which swayed like a toxic undersea plant.
“Bedtime for you,” I said.
“How much did you know about, eh, yardbird?”
I heard behind me the slap-slap of Carla’s running feet, the thundercrack of her slamming door. Not now. Not ever.
I weighed my fist, rocked back, and drove it into the bulge of my father’s jaw. He flipped backward onto a mound of clothing flung from the walk-in closet, and I left him there to come to or not. Either way.
The cigarettes I smoked downstairs tasted like jet exhaust, which was fine with me. I had one of those infected objects, a circular paperweight enclosing milky glass flowers, and I turned it and turned it in my hand until it was warm, remembering the day she’d bought it. A balmy October, mother and son driving out to check the foliage. We stopped in a little model-railroad town for refreshments, lemonade for her and a maple walnut cone for me. The junk store didn’t interest me, so I waited in the car. But through the crowded display window I could see her expressions flash, the motion of her arms as she haggled. Bouncing into the car, she sparkled breathlessly like a swimmer fresh from the pool. The glass ball rolled out of tissue paper and into my hand.
“Did I do good?” she asked.
It was misty outside, halfway to dawn. I walked to the end of the street where woods began, flung the paperweight high and far, heard it crash into the safety of some dirty thicket. I walked back as slowly as I could. I wanted to hang myself from an ornamental tree with a pair of black tights, but my eyes were dry.