Lying with the Dead Read online

  “I suppose he’s more capable than he seems.”

  “I’m getting a crick in my neck.” Mom pats the carpet on the other side of her. “Move around here.”

  Again I do as I’m told, and together we lean against the cedar chest. “What do you remember about your grandparents?” she asks. “I mean my parents.”

  “Not much.” The truth is nothing at all.

  “By the time you were born, my father was on his last legs from kidney failure. The doctor ordered him to pee in a bottle for them to test it. But Daddy said the hell with that and peed wherever he pleased. He’d do his business right out in the front yard. He was a maverick. I guess I inherited his orneriness.”

  “You? Ornery?” I josh her.

  Lost in reverie, she gazes at the ceiling, where light reflected from the windshield of the derelict car in her driveway shimmers and dances. This hopscotching through family history is part of the flow that used to bind us together. There was, there still is, a powerful current between us as her words surge forward and, at the same time, eddy into whirlpools of the past. Whatever her faults as a mother, she’s always had a voice that echoed in me like a blood fable.

  “The night my father died,” she goes on, “I stayed at my parents’ house and ironed the suit he was supposed to be buried in. I hung it on a hook in the room where I slept. Only thing is, I never dozed off. I stared at that suit so long, it looked like he was in it, and his arms and legs were moving. I had to climb out of bed and touch it to prove to myself it was empty. After he was in the grave, we gave his clothes to Goodwill and I never much thought about him again. My mother now, she was a different matter.”

  “How’s that?” I obediently hit my mark.

  “I dream about her all the time. Do you dream?”

  “Very little,” I lie.

  “Maybe you have to be old. Or maybe you have to have had a mother like mine. She lied about everything. Even now I don’t know the whole truth. She told me she sailed over from Ireland as a young woman, met your grandfather, and married him. It wasn’t till she died and I went through her papers that I found out she changed her name, first and last, the minute she set foot in the USA.”

  “She wasn’t the only immigrant to do that.”

  “I have a hunch she was running from something. A husband or the law back in County Cork. Maybe she was mixed up with the IRA. On top of changing her name, she knocked a decade off her age. Claimed she was twenty-five when she was pushing thirty-five. She didn’t have me until she was past forty. Nearly as old as I was when I had you. It’s a miracle it didn’t kill her considering medical care back then.”

  “What woman doesn’t like to pass for younger?” I say.

  “Well, it makes you wonder what else she lied about,” Mom says. “Learning she had a different name and a different age, I started to rethink everything about my mother. But after she was dead, it was too late to ask. I decided I couldn’t really blame her for doing what she had to do to get to America and get a man.”

  “Right.” Clasping a hand to the nape of her neck, I knead the stringy tendons. “Otherwise, you wouldn’t have been born. And if you weren’t born, where would I be?”

  “That’s my point. Sometimes people do things that start off wrong, then end up okay. So while you might regret what you did, you can’t completely wish it never happened.”

  She stubs out her cigarette and drops it in the ashtray. Suddenly a tremor seizes her. I feel the shaking in my hand. She’s crying.

  “What’s the matter?” I ask.

  “You’re going to hate me when you hear the truth.”

  “Did you hate your mother when you found out her real name and age?”

  “Yes, a little.”

  “But you got over it.” I continue to try to soothe her with my hand.

  “What she did wasn’t as bad. I lied about something far worse.”

  “How bad can it be?” I ask, thinking, Here we are down on the dirty floor surrounded by family dregs—pictures of a dead father, a girl in a wheelchair, a boy in prison, legal briefs, and psychiatric reports. What could conceivably be worse than what’s already gone wrong? As the possibilities pour through me, I fear I might start shaking too.

  “I won’t ask you to promise not to hate me,” Mom says. “But I want you to hear me out to the end.”

  Without lighting another cigarette, she inhales, and there’s a rasping noise of old smoke ravaging her lungs. “You were born left-handed. I noticed that straightaway when you were a teeny baby and I tied a sock over your hand.”

  Immense anticlimax fizzles through me. Is this what she’s been tediously circling?

  “In those days,” she adds, “lots of mothers believed it was bad to raise a southpaw in a right-handed world.”

  “Well, it’s not exactly a tragedy.”

  “I asked you not to interrupt,” she barks. “Your real father was left-handed, and I didn’t want you to be like him.”

  A master of double and triple takes, I’m able to project a reaction for the benefit of spectators in the last row. But at the moment I’m frozen in wooden-faced disbelief. “My real father?”

  “You’re not Maury’s and Candy’s full brother. You have different fathers.”

  Along with incredulity, with absolute shock, a curious exhilaration, very close to giddiness, wells up inside me. Absurdly, I feel free. I feel I’ve been reborn. Yet while this news seems the answer to everything, I insist, “You need to tell me the rest.”

  “You know how babies are made.” Her nostrils flare in warning.

  “Look, I’m the one who should be upset. Not you. I’d like some background.”

  “About what?”

  “Who’s my father?”

  “What’s the difference? You never met him and you never will. His name wouldn’t mean a damn thing to you.”

  “Yes, it would. It’d mean I know my name.”

  “Your name’s Quinn Mitchell. Leave it at that.”

  “Didn’t it dawn on you that I might like to meet him?”

  Her eyes go frantic. “He has to be dead by now. He was older than me. He’d be near a hundred. Promise you won’t look for him or his family.”

  “How can I when you won’t tell me his name?”

  “Tom Trythall. There! Satisfied?”

  “No.” She’s so quick to confess, I question how much trust to place in the name. The previous configuration of the family, painful and convoluted as it was, may be preferable to the facts I’m dragging out of her. Still, I insist, “You have to explain. I want to know everything.”

  She removes her glasses, and the asymmetry of her eyes diminishes. “Your father … Jack, he’d go off on benders that lasted days. When a woman sits at home and the man is gone, the loneliness is terrible. Rumors spread. Then I met Tom and he was sweet to me. It started off innocent enough, just talking over coffee. But we got to like each other, and I figured since people were already gossiping … well, what the hell, why not?”

  “Did you love him?”

  “I thought I did at the time.”

  “Did you tell him you were pregnant?”

  “Yeah. But there was no future for us. He had a wife and family. And me being Catholic, I didn’t relish a divorce and living the rest of my life in sin. I didn’t see any solution except to play the hand I was dealt.”

  “Did Dad … did Jack know?”

  “Put it this way, he suspected. Now next thing you’ll ask is whether that’s what we were fighting about the day he died.”

  “It hadn’t crossed my mind. But since you brought it up …”

  “Look, Jack and I argued at the drop of a hat. This was just one more thing.” She thrusts her glasses back on and glares at me.

  “What became of Tom Trythall?”

  “After the murder, he pleaded to get back together. That’s a man for you. Raring to go like nothing had happened. But I was finished. I had no time and no more interest in that type of love. Even if I’d want
ed to be with him, which I didn’t, there was always a mob around—cops, lawyers, nosy neighbors. And I had to think about you kids.”

  “You never had any more contact with him?”

  “A couple phone calls. I don’t know whether I should tell you this”—which naturally ensures that she will—“but he hounded me to get rid of the baby. Get rid of you. I told him to go to hell, and not just because it’s a mortal sin. I couldn’t bear not to have you. I was sick the whole nine months. It was like a snake had curled up inside me and was eating its way out. But I never considered an abortion.” She clamps a hand to my arm. “Was I mistaken, sweetheart? Would you rather not have been born?”

  The question demands a prompt, emphatic answer. I should sing out, Of course not, you did the right thing. But after my euphoria, the giddiness is giving way to an inner earthquake, a great seismic shift as of continental plates grinding into new alignment.

  “Do you hate me?” she breaks the silence. “Why don’t you say something?”

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “You at a loss for words!”

  “I need time to think.”

  “At least say you forgive me.”

  Having served since childhood as her sounding board and more often as her whipping boy, I’m now expected to grant absolution. I do so, yet ask, “Why are you telling me this now?”

  “I don’t want to die with it on my conscience.”

  “Haven’t you confessed it to a priest?”

  “More than once. He told me it wasn’t fair for you not to know.”

  “Fair?” I’m at a loss as to how the term applies in this case. Then it occurs to me that Candy may have known all along. Does this account for her bristliness at what she perceives as my princely advantages? Does she imagine that because of my lack of Mitchell blood, I started off on a pedestal and from that launching pad I winged upward to success?

  “What are you thinking?” Mom asks.

  “I’m thinking how awful it must have been for you to keep this secret for so many years.”

  “Sometimes I worry Tom’s family will squirm out of the woodwork,” she says, “and hit you up for money or embarrass you.”

  “I’m not that easy to embarrass.”

  She dries her eyes on a cuff of her housecoat. “So you don’t hate me? If my mother did this to me, I’d kill her.”

  I nudge her shoulder with mine. “I’d never tangle with you.”

  “Who are you kidding? You’re a tough customer. Always have been. When you were little, you were so defiant, you wouldn’t even cry when I whipped you. Candy, she’d start bawling soon as she saw the stick. But you wouldn’t give me the satisfaction.”

  “What did you do then?”

  “What do you think I did? I beat you harder and harder until you gave in and wailed.”

  “I rest my case. You’re the heavyweight champ.” Downstairs, there are three knocks at the door. The signal. The code. Candy and Maury are home. Mom presses a nicotine-stained fingertip to my lips. “Don’t mention a word about this. Neither of them knows. Go down and tell them I’m taking a nap.”

  Candy

  As Maury advanced through the system at Patuxent, he eventually lived on an open tier. “Open” meaning he had privileges and spent most of the day out of his cell, mixing with the prison population. The Sunday before Christmas, as a special treat, inmates of his status threw a party for their families. Instead of herding into those cramped stalls of bulletproof glass, we huddled in an echoey hallway on furniture that was bolted to the floor. There we snacked on food the cons had pitched in to buy, and washed it down with Kool-Aid. As I sipped mine from a paper cup, I was always reminded of those religious nuts who poisoned themselves in the jungle and I had to swallow quick to keep from gagging.

  Recorded carols played over a loudspeaker, and some couples paired off and smooched, petted and felt each other up. Mom claimed to be scandalized. But they were the lucky ones. For the rest of us, it’d be hard to say who looked more sad-sack, the inmates stuck with unhappy wives and squabbling kids, or the ones that didn’t have families and stayed to themselves, glassy-eyed from the jailhouse hooch they secretly brewed.

  Like a college boy giving a tour of his dorm, Maury showed us his cell. There, too, the furniture had been bolted to the floor, and the toilet was made of brushed aluminum and didn’t have a seat. It stood right next to the head of his bunk. How he had to have hated that!

  From those Christmas parties I remember that Maury had a friend, an older guy, big and rawboned and not bad looking, with dishwater blond hair. Nobody visited him, and he hung out with us, shooting the breeze about how well Maury was doing in group therapy. He almost seemed like a caseworker, not a con.

  That has to have been Cole. But when I ask Maury on the drive home, he doesn’t care to talk. Heaving his broad shoulders one last time, he quits crying and just sits there. I’m so upset, I feel like crying myself. The day has turned topsy-turvy, and as usual I don’t have a clue how to reach anybody in this family.

  The moment Quinn opens the door at Mom’s, Maury makes a beeline for the kitchen. Pipes groan as he splashes water from the spigot over his reddened face. Quinn glances at me, baffled either by Maury’s behavior or by what Mom has told him.

  “You okay?” I ask.

  “Tip-top. Mom’s taking a nap. You and Maury have a good time?”

  “He visited a friend at Patuxent. I stayed in the car.”

  He arches his eyebrows, an expression that’s exaggerated by his high forehead. I can’t guess whether he’s surprised or sympathetic. Maybe he doesn’t know himself. Maury blunders out of the kitchen half-blinded by the paper towel he’s dabbing at his eyes.

  “Shall we wait here until she wakes up?” I ask.

  “She’s finished for the day.” Quinn collects his coat from the chair and drapes it over his shoulders like a shawl. “Let’s go to your house.”

  I had hoped to spend the afternoon with Lawrence. But I appreciate that Quinn might need to discuss what Mom said. We set out in separate cars, and once again he leads in his big, blunt-nosed Chrysler.

  The patio in back of my townhouse has been a mess since last summer. I spend so much time at Lawrence’s, I’ve neglected the place. Lawn chairs are stacked haphazardly, dead leaves clutter the grill, and a garden hose snakes across the fieldstones. In the shade beside the fence chunks of rust-colored ice lie scattered like iron filings at a pit mine. Quinn doesn’t need to see this. He’s had more than enough bad housekeeping at Mom’s. I shut the curtains.

  “I’m tired,” Maury announces, and vanishes into the guest room and closes the door so that we barely hear him moaning.

  Quinn wanders into the kitchen. I don’t know why there rather than the living room that I’ve tried to make cozy with throw pillows and crocheted blankets. He shrugs off his coat and flops on a chair at the Formica-topped table.

  “Coffee?” I suggest.

  “You’re positive you’re not hiding any alcohol?”

  “Not unless you’re up for vanilla extract.”

  “It may come to that. I’ll have coffee if it’s not too much trouble.”

  “No trouble. It’s instant. I bet you drink latte or cappuccino.”

  “I drink Irish whiskey.”

  “You’re outta luck.”

  I spoon up the Maxwell House, microwave the water, and fetch half-and-half from the fridge and sugar from the cupboard where I stash it away from the ants. The entire time, Quinn stares at the tabletop like it’s a mirror. I don’t know what he sees, but I see a man who’s had a lousy day.

  Plunking the cup in front of him, I lower myself onto a chair and ease my leg out straight. He grins at some private joke. “‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad.’”

  “You’ll hear no argument from me,” I say.

  “‘They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had and add some extra, just for you.’”

  From the rhyme, I gather he’s
reciting a poem. Does he always have to depend on a script? His memory bank is chock-full of quotes, but they don’t tell me anything more personal than Maury’s strangled silences do.

  “Say hello to your left-handed half-brother,” he wisecracks. “I assume you’re up to date on the revised family genealogy.”

  “I have a pretty good hunch.”

  “And it never dawned on you that I might have been grateful for a heads-up?”

  “There’s only so much of Mom’s dirty work I’m willing to do. She begged me to call and blindside you with the news—like it wasn’t her responsibility and this was something I could deal with long distance. I told her to count me out.”

  He samples the black instant coffee and grimaces. Spooning in sugar, he says, “So I had to fly all the way from London to learn I’m a bastard.”

  “And to visit Mom and help me decide what to do with her.”

  “At this moment, I don’t think you want to hear what I’d like to do with her.”

  “I don’t blame you. I’d be mad too.”

  “It might interest you to know that I’m under the court-mandated care of a shrink for anger issues.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I had some public outbursts this winter. Fights that made the newspapers.”

  “That’s terrible, Quinn. I never thought you were the type. Has counseling helped?”

  “Hard to say. The analyst is of the opinion that my rage is misplaced. But what am I supposed to do? Slug Mom?”

  With no cream or sugar, my coffee tastes as bitter as bile. “You did shove her once.”

  He shakes his head; he doesn’t recall.

  “She was hitting me,” I prompt him. “Who knows why? You were a teenager. I must have been about thirty. She was slapping me in the face and you pushed her away and held her back. You were my hero.”

  “What did she do then?”

  “Kicked you in the shins.”

  “What the hell’s wrong with her? She’d probably claim the poem has it ass-backward, and it’s kids that fuck up Mom and Dad.”

  “Not that it helps, Quinn, but I was damned upset when she told me you had a different father. No daughter likes to learn that her mother has round heels. But honestly, you can’t blame her for wanting some love after all that Dad dragged her through. He could be a real bastard.”