Lying with the Dead Page 20

  “She oughta hide a key under the doormat,” the man says. “Case of an emergency.”

  “Thanks for your help,” Quinn says.

  I take Mom’s hand—it’s like ice—and lead her to the kitchen. She can’t stop shivering. Or maybe shaking with rage. “Goddamn Maury,” she fumes. “He gets a bug up his ass and there’s no reasoning with him.” Then she spots the bottle of pinot noir, and that steams her more. “Are you two drinking in the middle of the day?”

  “It’s evening,” says Quinn, joining us. “Have a glass. It’ll thaw you out.”

  “Damned if I will. I had to deal with your father drunk at all hours. Now it’s my kids.” She removes her foggy glasses and polishes them on the pillowcase.

  “What’s the pillow for?” Quinn asks.

  “I grabbed it when I went after Maury. I was going to slap him silly.”

  He chuckles. “That’s not your style—a powder puff. Where’s the hairbrush or that stick you used on me?”

  “You’re lucky I don’t have it now,” she snaps, but without her glasses her eyes are watery and mild.

  “What were you and Maury fighting about?” I ask.

  “It wasn’t a fight. More a disagreement. I asked him to do me a favor. He turned me down flat and slammed out of the house.”

  “Did you say something mean?”

  “I said, ‘Do me a favor.’ That’s what I said.”

  “What favor?”

  “That’s between him and me.” She thrusts the glasses back on and looks her normal belligerent self.

  “Where did he go?”

  “Into the woods. Damned if I’d chase him there and twist an ankle in a snake hole.”

  “I’d better look for him,” Quinn says.

  “No, I’ll do it,” I say. “I’ve got a key to Mom’s house. You two stay here where it’s warm.”

  “Don’t believe a word he tells you,” Mom calls after me. “And bring my cigarettes when you come back.”

  “Anything else, Your Highness?”

  “You two are crocked. How many glasses have you had?”

  As I limp out to the car, my leg aches, my heart hammers off-key, my breath comes quick and shallow. The state I’m in, it’s a miracle I don’t swerve off the highway and into the homebound lane of traffic. Still, I’m glad I’m the one looking for Maury—and not just because Quinn’s drunk and shouldn’t drive. I’m afraid of what Mom said to Maury. I’m afraid the favor she asked of him is the one she’s hinted at with me.

  On Mom’s street the other houses look lived in—lights in the windows, jungle gyms and sliding boards out front, new cars in the driveway. But hers has that zombie stillness of a “silent neighbor,” one of those pretend houses where the power company stores its meters and equipment. All that’s missing is a Keep Out sign with the red stick figure of an electrocuted man.

  I pray Maury will be waiting, shamefaced, on the front porch. He’s not. I check the broken-down Chevy Nova in case he climbed into it to escape the freezing wind. He’s not there either. I leave the sidewalk and cross the lawn. The ground plays tricks on me, and I stub my boots on tufted grass.

  I hesitate at the edge of the backyard thicket of blackberry and honeysuckle vines where Maury burrowed caves as a kid. In this season the dead vines drape like spiderwebs from the trees. I don’t relish stumbling around in there any more than Mom did. So I stand at the edge and shout, “Maury, it’s me. Everything’s okay. You don’t need to be scared.”

  I’m the one that sounds scared. Scared of the shadows in this creepy place. Scared Maury may have hurt himself. Scared of what Mom asked him to do.

  “No one’s mad at you,” I yell. “Come on out now.”

  I’m put in mind of many occasions when Maury hid from Mom and Dad in the woods, his feelings bruised by something they said, or more likely, the seat of his pants warm from a whipping. After they calmed down, they’d send me to tell Maury the coast was clear. He never believed me at first, and I’d have to plead with him. Half the time, I wondered why he’d ever leave his burrow. Better to live in those caves of vines than in the house.

  “Mom’s at my place with Quinn,” I call to him. “She’s not mad at you. She didn’t mean it,” I add, even though I fear that she did.

  I holler and wheedle until a back porch light blinks on at a neighbor’s house and a woman cranes her neck around the door and glares at me. “I’ll be inside, Maury. I’ll wait for you there.”

  Maybe he picked the front door lock. They learn that in prison, don’t they? But when I let myself in, there’s no sign of my brother. I shout his name and search the ground floor—living room, dining room alcove, and closet. When I flick on the kitchen light, roaches scatter, then regroup. Mom makes so little use of the place the roaches have lost their fear. They’re just shocked to see a human being. I haven’t set foot in here for years and I don’t linger now. This is the last spot Maury’s likely to hide.

  I have a brainstorm and head for the attic. It’s hard for me to climb the ladder, and I nearly fall as I push open the rusty-hinged trapdoor. Then I teeter and have to catch myself a second time when I see his boat’s there but not him. The dry-rotted boards are as pale as skeleton bones.

  Decades of summer heat and winter cold have turned everything to sawdust. A single spark and the attic would burst into flames. Something else for me to lose sleep over. Another problem for Mom to ignore. I back down the ladder, and the hatch bangs shut behind me.

  Off-limits in recent years, Mom’s bedroom is where I go last and stay longest. I glance under her bed. No Maury. Nothing but balled Kleenexes and carpet fuzz. I check the bathroom, but he’s not in his old refuge. The tub’s empty except for a scampering silverfish.

  Back in the bedroom, every object is recognizable from my childhood. Rosary beads and holy cards on the night table. The windup clock, its numbers nearly invisible with age. A tarnished silver mirror whose backing has flaked off in a salt-and-pepper pattern.

  One thing’s different, though. There’s a battery-powered tape machine, the type they don’t manufacture now that everything’s gone digital. Beside it is a stack of tapes—Dick Haymes, Tommy Dorsey, Frank Sinatra, and the Maguire sisters.

  Sadness shoots through me at the thought of Mom lying here alone at night listening to songs from the forties, tunes that she and Dad danced to. In self-defense I whisper the line she’s often lashed me with: It’s your own damn fault.

  But her fault for what? For being lonely? For growing old and nostalgic? For preferring to live in the past and in her own head? How would assisted living change that? Only dying will.

  I limp downstairs and sob on the phone to Lawrence.

  “Would you like me to drive over and wait with you?” he asks.

  “I can’t sit around. Maury’s not in the woods. He’d have heard me. He’s not in the house. I’ve got to go look for him.”

  “We’ll look together.”

  “I don’t know where to start.”

  “Try places he’s been in the past few days,” he says. “Church. The bus station. That restaurant on the river.”

  Lawrence’s steadiness is a balm to my soul. But I tell him I’d rather search for Maury on my own.

  “Let me help you, honey,” he says.

  “It’ll be quicker this way.” I need to keep Maury to myself until I find out what went wrong between Mom and him.

  • • •

  Since the church is close by and Maury could have reached it easily on foot, I drive there first. But if he counted on sanctuary, he’s out of luck. The soaring A-frame is locked, and except for votive candles not a single light is on inside. I circle the building on foot to make sure he isn’t crouching next to it out of the wind. I don’t bother ringing the rectory doorbell. Maury would never ask strangers for help and I don’t care to find myself face to face with a priest, trying to explain the situation.

  Wind buffets my Honda as I park at the bus station where Quinn and I picked up Maury a couple o
f days ago. I felt safe and inconspicuous then. But now I cross the lot conscious of my bad leg and white skin. Black boys in ball caps bop around in their drooping blue jeans. Unfazed by the freezing night, Asian and Hispanic girls strut and preen, their tummies bare, jewels winking in their navels.

  In the waiting room the plastic chairs are full of passengers—or are they homeless bums?—and piled belongings. Maury couldn’t bear the noise and the crowd. Still, I clomp up one aisle and down the next, searching.

  Outside the men’s room I pause, thinking he might be in there. The smells, the fizzing lights, the shouts, the faces, the tattoos and scars—suddenly I feel that I’ve been through all this before. When it hits me where, I bolt from the bus station, convinced that Maury has hitchhiked to Patuxent to visit his friend.

  Plunked in the middle of a treeless field, the prison is lit like an airport. Spotlights crisscross the big flat yard and glint on the barbed wire. In the gatehouse, behind the thick glass door, uniformed guards glide with the slow motion of underwater swimmers. They notice me, but because it’s not visiting hours they pay no heed to my knocking. I shout that I have a question, a single question, nothing more. They pretend not to hear me, and when I act out a pantomime of begging, pressing my hands together in prayer, they go on ignoring me.

  With its bright lights inside, the gatehouse door looks like it’d be hot. But when I lean my forehead against it, the glass is cold as a glacier. Mom would break it down or bloody her knuckles in the effort. More easily defeated, I trudge back to the car.

  It’s then I notice my brother at the far edge of the asphalt, hands jammed in his pockets, hair whipping around his face. “Maury,” I call. “Come get warm.”

  I flick on the Honda’s heater full blast. He slouches around to the passenger’s side with the defeated look of one of those men at an intersection holding a sign saying, “Will work for food.” For a minute we sit in near silence. There’s only the chattering of our teeth and the whir of the heater.

  “Why are you here?” I ask.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is it to visit your friend?”

  “My friend’s dead.”

  “How do you know? Did the guards say so?”

  “They didn’t talk to me. I just know.”

  “We’ll find out this Sunday.”

  “I won’t be here.”

  “Well, not if you don’t want to be,” I say. “Look, Mom’s locked out of her house. A neighbor drove her to my place.”

  Maury warms his face at a heat vent, his hair blowing flat on his head.

  “She says you two argued.”

  He leans away from the vent. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Okay. But we better get back.”

  “Where?”

  “To drive Mom home.”

  “I don’t want to see her.” For Maury, who rarely speaks with much emotion, this sounds close to anguish. “I’ll stay at Quinn’s hotel.”

  “He’s not there.” I swing around on the parking lot, and when the wind catches us broadside, it rocks the car. “He’s with Mom.”

  “I’ll wait for him outside.”

  “It’s too cold.”

  “I’ll wait in a chair in the lobby.” Maury clamps his hands between his knees and stares into the high beams of onrushing cars. “I planned to catch a bus home. But I don’t have any money on me.”

  “Home?”

  “Slab City. Nicky’s.”

  “You weren’t going to say good-bye to us? Look, you don’t have to leave. We’ll work this out.”

  “I don’t want to see Mom,” he says again.

  I take him at his word and drive to the Hilton. The swarming headlights that seem to hypnotize Maury unnerve me. When I phone Quinn from the lobby, I’m jangled and my voice sounds wrong. So does his. “Has Mom said anything about Maury and what happened?”

  “She’s on the couch,” Quinn says. “Resting. Sleeping.”

  “Is she all right?”

  “Has she ever been all right?”

  “You sound as frazzled as Maury.”

  “I’ll tell the front desk to let you into my room. Stay there with Maury. We’ll sort out things tomorrow.”

  “You’re not making sense. What did Mom say?”

  “Can’t talk now. It’ll wake her up.” He cuts the line.

  I debate whether to call back and warn him. I owe Quinn that much. He deserves to know. But know what? I’m not positive what Mom asked Maury.

  I collect a swipe card at the reception desk and reassure Maury that it’s all right to use Quinn’s room. In the elevator, he rivets his eyes on the rising floor numbers and whispers, “The rope is made of steel.”

  The spread on one bed has been turned down and a chocolate gleams on the pillow. Maury says it’s candy and offers it to me. When I shake my head no, he slips it into his already bulging pocket.

  “Are you hungry?” I ask.

  “My stomach hurts.” He sags onto the couch, zipped up in his Windbreaker.

  I bring him a Coke from the minibar. But when I hand it to him, his shoulders start shuddering and his face is wet. “What’s wrong?” I sit close, but not touching him.

  “Mom,” he blubbers.

  All our lives that one word has been enough. Neither of us ever needed to say more. Yet Maury goes on, “She called me a retard and a killer.”

  “Oh, that’s terrible. That’s cruel.” But by Mom’s standards not out of the ordinary.

  “She wants to die.” He clamps his hands between his knees like he did in the car. “She told me to hold a pillow over her face.”

  I jerk to my feet so quick, Maury jumps too. “She’s not in her right mind,” I say. “She’s sicker than we thought. Stay here. I’ll straighten this out. If you get hungry, call room service.”

  “Do they have pictures?”

  “Of what?”

  “The food.”

  “I don’t know, Maury. Order a hamburger and fries. You know what they look like.”

  He rubs the heel of his hand at his tears. “Don’t tell Mom what I told you.”

  Quinn

  The moment Candy drives off to look for Maury, Mom’s attitude changes. Her tone, her tune, the set of her sloped shoulders all pick up, as if her daughter’s presence had constrained her natural sprightliness. “It’s been ages since I’ve tasted wine.” She grins conspiratorily and sips Candy’s glass. “How bad can it be for me?”

  “Red is good for your heart.”

  “My heart, like the rest of me, is a mess.”

  “You’re not a mess,” I protest, presuming that’s what she wants to hear.

  “Oh yes, I am. Physically, emotionally, spiritually—any way you look at it, I’m a wreck.”

  “You look fine.”

  “Don’t BS me, Quinn. You and I have always been honest with each other,” she blithely unburdens herself of a whopping lie. I long ago lost track of the numerous untruths that mine the ground between us. “That darkie who drove me here talked to me like I’m senile. But don’t you do it.”

  She downs some pinot noir, then pats at her hair, which the wind has beaten into spiky wires. “I was worried being out in the cold might bring on one of my panic spells.”

  “Funny. I can’t picture you panicked. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you scared.”

  She chuckles. “That’s because you were too scared to notice. As a kid, every time you passed me you ducked.”

  “Yeah, that’s one of my golden childhood memories.” Following her lead, I keep it light, playful. “You always kept me guessing when you’d take a swing.”

  “The truth is—” Her face abruptly darkens, her voice drops an octave. “—I’ve been terrified my entire life.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Trust me.” She cants her head in a challenging cyclopean fashion, favoring the big brown eye. The wine—or is it the dispute with Maury and her brush with spending the night outdoors?—hasn’t just made her feis
ty. It’s put her in a ruminative frame of mind. But unlike those oldsters who dwell on an idealized past, she dredges up a litany of woes, of crippling accidents in her family and premature deaths of friends from diseases now cured with a single shot or pill. “People forget what it was like in those terrible days,” she says.

  Lament follows lament. Yet I’m strangely lulled by the anecdotes. As usual, as long as she’s talking, I feel safe; the flow of words feels almost like love.

  “What scared me most as a little girl,” Mom scrolls further back in time, “was lugging the garbage pail down to the cellar after dinner. We kept the trash cans between the furnace and the coal bin, and it was dark in that corner. I’d hear rats skittering around.

  “When it got to where I couldn’t stand it anymore,” she says, “I stopped halfway to the trash can and emptied the pail in the coal bin and buried the slop under chunks of coal. It was winter, so the smell didn’t reach upstairs to the rest of the house. Long as I was the one to stoke the furnace, nobody noticed a thing.”

  Pausing, she sips the wine, her timing as impeccable as that of a seasoned actress. “But the first warm spell in spring cooked my goose. You couldn’t miss the stink. My mother bustled down to the cellar and straightaway huffed back up the steps. ‘Wait till your father gets home,’ she said. And I had all day to fret over what he’d do.”

  In another theatrical gesture, she lifts the glass and sniffs its bouquet. Duly prompted, I ask, “What did he do?”

  “He called me into his bedroom, took off his belt, and told me to pull down my drawers. I was eleven, old enough that this was humiliating. I pleaded and cried and explained that I was scared of the dark and the rats. He said, ‘I’ll teach you to be scared.’ Then he beat my butt red.

  “I suppose he meant to teach me to be scared of him, not the dark. But I learned a different lesson. I learned if you’re scared you better not show it.”

  While there’s much to admire from a professional angle, Mom’s Hallmark card performance grates a little. The script’s too neat, the message aimed too blatantly at the heartstrings. When I offer neither praise nor encouragement, she says, “I’ve been doing that ever since. Hiding my feelings. Hiding my fears.”