Six Figures (Harvest Book), page 18
He was sitting on the sofa comparing mortgage rates when the phone rang. It was past ten o’clock. Megan was in her pajamas, and she looked at him quizzically. He had a feeling, he just had a feeling.
“Hello?” he said, unable to hide the dread.
“Warner?” It was his brother. “It’s Ronald. I’m afraid—”
“Oh no.” He shut his eyes and tried to see his father, see him smiling, see him glaring, see him walking to the refrigerator, standing over the sink with a piece of fruit in his hand. One summer he’d carved Warner an amulet out of soapstone. He still had that amulet.
“It’s”—Ronald was crying, gulping into the phone—“it was a heart attack.”
Warner nodded, knowing. What else could it have been?
“She died quickly. No pain—”
“She?”
“It’s Mom, it’s Mom, it’s Mom.” He was sobbing. “I can’t talk right now. I’ll call you back.”
“What is it?” Megan was saying, as he stood in the blank kitchen still holding the phone. “What is it?”
He shook his head and tried to speak. Something like a growl emerged. He tried again, feeling the sides of his face begin to crumble, his mouth numb. Oh god, his brother was right. You couldn’t speak, you could only nod and feel the way your head moved on your neck. The way the floor moved underfoot, moved you back from the kitchen to the oatmeal sofa, the indifferent white walls of the living-dining-bed room. They hadn’t spoken since January. His own mother.
“My mother.” He swallowed, looking uncertainly at Megan as if just saying the words would take the floor out from under him.
“Your mom?” Megan’s eyes huge, her hand moving to her mouth, she sitting with him on the sofa. “Your mom?” she said again.
“My mom,” he said, his face wet and crumpled. “Oh my mom.”
He slept but didn’t sleep. He woke but didn’t wake. At first light he began packing. He couldn’t wear the old gray suit that had gotten him through the arraignment, but all he had otherwise were sport coats. His best shoes were his wedding shoes. She leafed through her dresses soundlessly, stole into Sophie’s room and gathered clothes and books and toys. They loaded the dozing kids into the car, and he drove them through Charlotte and up the spine of North Carolina. Sophie woke past Statesville, and he let Megan tell her. By nine they reached Virginia, and Daniel was crying continuously. Warner didn’t want to stop. At a Dunkin’ Donuts still in the hills Megan toileted the children and changed them and bribed them with something sweet while he stood in the men’s room cupping water to his face. His own mother. How he had failed her. How she had clung to her lap desk, her files, her monthlies and quarterlies, as if they could prolong her life, as if by never letting them go they would never let her go. How they had failed her. How everything had failed her. He remembered how she had stood on the living-room steps at her sixtieth birthday party and announced to everyone by way of a toast that they all knew she considered her life a failure and her children were her only reward. She had said that. He’d been blushing furiously at her side, thinking, Don’t do this, Don’t do this. She’d done it anyway. He remembered how she’d slapped him around, how he’d slapped her just that once. How her kisses felt, how her face felt against his when they hugged. How her back felt, her arms, her hands. How once when he was seven or eight he’d seen a couple neck on television and he’d strode into the kitchen and tried it on his mother and she’d laughed “Warner!” and wiped it away with the back of her hand. All the crap. How his father was alone. How big and empty and full of junk the house that he’d grown up in was.
“Warner?” Megan had discreetly pushed open the door of the men’s room and was looking at him as she held on to Daniel and Sophie peered around her hip. “We’re ready, honey. We should probably go.”
He just wanted to get there, to see and hear and understand that it was true, to be released into the world of grief so that he could just stop moving and allow whatever was going to happen to happen.
Coming in past the airport he thought Pittsburgh was smaller and meaner than he remembered or expected, as if it were clenching itself at his arrival. The route in took him alongside one of the rivers, across from the buildings that at night would be outlined by strings of lights but now, on a June afternoon at four o’clock, seemed only dusty and bland. The exit ramp off and down and under the overpass and the road up over the hill and the stoplight shushing him and the turn left, the turn right. The driveway filled with his brother’s and sisters’ colorful shining cars, the house shut and blunt against the heat. He stopped the car. It had been over a year since he’d been here. Home. Six, seven months since anyone had spoken to him. The kids pushing and climbing from the backseat, Megan herding them toward the porch, the front door. The door unlocked, Daniel and Sophie squeaking it open. The house inside, the dark blue and red paisley wallpaper, the cold air-conditioning, the colonial-style shaded lamps emblazened with open-winged black eagles, the house that was never any good at letting the light in, the dark-wood floor. The kitchen. Voices. There was Ronald, there was Ronald’s wife, there were Molly and her husband, Helen’s husband. From the den came the song of a children’s television show. “Dad’s asleep,” someone said. The children tearing off for the television. Everyone hugging. Half-nibbled food on platters lining the counter. Helen coming in, wiping her face. “I’m closing in on a casket,” she said, looking at everybody but Warner, “we’ll need to go see it.” A few volunteers moving toward the door. Warner climbed the stairs to stand outside his father’s bedroom, smiling tearfully at the resilient peacefulness of his snoring. He went into his own room, his old room, now stripped bare, an office with a computer and a filing cabinet and a stack of monthlies and last year’s bound reports. The bed gone, a foldout sofa in its place. The old desk gone. The toy chest gone. He was gone, he was somewhere else. Megan’s voice floated up, negotiating with one of his brothers-in-law where everyone could sleep. The house frantic, dead, confounded.
“Hello.”
He reeled, turning. “Dad.”
“I didn’t know I told anyone to call you.”
Warner shook his head, his lip trembling. “Ronald,” he said.
“I guess some people always have to do the right thing.”
“I guess so.” He looked at the floor. He felt eight again. How he hated coming home.
“Your mother.” He took a step into the room, stopped, seemed to try to shrug off the rippling in his creased face. “You hurt…your mother…very much.” He refused to cover his face, glowering and teary.
Warner nodded, still trying to find something to say, if he could say anything.
“She,” his father’s voice caving to an animal, throaty rawness, “she…loved you…so much.” He had made it across the room, and now it looked as if he might pull back his white fist with whatever he had left and deliver something final and crushing.
“Go ahead,” Warner heard himself, nearly beginning to shriek. “Go ahead! As if that will solve anything.” Again he was an eleven-year-old standing in this room, his mother’s face pushing at him, pushing, pushing, saying Go ahead hit me, Go ahead hit me tears running down her cheeks, her eyes puffy and brimming and him pulling back and opening his hand and swinging just the once, just the once, with enough force to stain her skin from her face to her neck. “As if that’s all you all think I’m capable of.” He was screaming, the sound of his voice stunning and propelling him, as if he couldn’t get the words out fast enough. “As if I really did park the car in the lot with the children asleep and leave them in the car like that. As if I really did sneak into that gallery and tiptoe up behind her and grab that hammer just lying there on the floor like some kind of invitation and whack her whack her whack her as hard as I fucking could and leave her in her blood on the carpet and tiptoe back out of there and drive the fuck away with the kids still asleep in the car. As if that were really possible. As if I really could fucking do what you all think I’m capable of doing. Well fuck you, just fuck you.” He was shrieking. “Just fuck all of you. Fuck this whole family. And fuck me fucking too.”
“Honey.” It was Megan, Daniel clinging to her knees, her clinging to him. “Honey, it’s me. Look at me, honey.” She took him in her arms, and the baby seemed to take him too, take him and hold him. “It’s all right. It’s all right.”
“Everyone just take it easy. Just take it easy.” That was Ronald, lawyerly, who hadn’t after all gone to help pick out the casket. He stood beside his father, now slumped on the arm of an overstuffed chair, and patted his shoulder.
“We’re okay,” Megan said so slowly, so softly, that everyone couldn’t help but hear her, “we’ll be okay.”
“Of course we’ll be okay,” Ronald said. “Everything will be fine.”
“Yes,” she was saying to Warner. She touched him, touched the collar of his shirt, just touched him. “Yes.” Her head melted into his chest. How long had it been? Months and months. “We’re going to be fine.” The baby tight against his knees. His old room tight with all the people. His chest tight with all of them.
She held one of his hands and turned it over, looked at the fingers, how pale and impractical they were. She swallowed whatever it was that she thought she could think of saying.
On the foldout sofa in his old room they listened to Daniel in his port-a-crib squirming beside them. Sometimes he gave little yelps. It was one o’clock, two o’clock, two-thirty.
“I wish he’d just wake up and we could get it over with,” Megan murmured into Warner’s ear. He nodded. “You could go sleep downstairs if you wanted.” A sofa was free in the living room. He shook his head. One summer night when he was fifteen he’d slept on that sofa because the upstairs had been hot, and in the morning his mother had told him that it wasn’t good for the good furniture to be slept on. The den had people and all the rooms upstairs had people and he didn’t want to go sit in the kitchen. He didn’t mind lying there listening to the baby try to sleep. He liked how the short yelps made holes in the dark. For the first time in a long time he liked being in his room, maybe because it wasn’t his room anymore. He liked being awake, hovering above sleep, her hovering beside him, Sophie with two of her cousins next door in Helen’s old bedroom. The big empty house so filled. Sometimes he hoped that his father would sell it and sometimes he hoped that he wouldn’t, the way that you could have years of debate in just an hour or two of sleeplessness.
“What are you thinking about?” she whispered. It was clear that she was trying to wake the baby and get it over with.
“Nothing,” he barely said.
“I was thinking,” she whispered. “I was thinking that the hammer wasn’t on the floor.”
“Well how the fuck should I know where it was?” he said aloud, startling them both.
“Huck,” Daniel said. Then squealed and rolled and flattened himself again in the crib. They waited. He appeared to sleep.
“It was on the table,” she whispered. “You didn’t do it.”
“Of course I didn’t do it. Can we just fucking forget about it?”
“You didn’t do it,” she whispered again.
He made himself roll away from her even though he didn’t want to. They could live in guilt or they could live in suspicion or they could live another way. He wanted the other way.
“I love you,” she said softly.
“Me, too,” he said.
For a long time she stared at his back, then shut her eyes against the rustle of the baby. In a week no one could know that their Crape Myrtle Hill living room had also served as a dining room and master bedroom, that their nursery was also the study and the dressing room, that they had pushed and jammed themselves into every available foot of space, and still they hadn’t fit.
Aftermath
The Munchie Mouse at the Arboretum strip mall had four birthdays going at once, and Warner was obligated to stand with the other fathers beside the checker at the door and welcome whoever came for Sophie’s party. They’d invited the entire Full Day Family except for the teachers, but only half of the kids’ parents had RSVP’d. Megan had called and gotten a host of answering machines and uncertain voices. They had no idea how many people to expect.
He counted less than a dozen, their parents giving him the once-over as they dropped them at the entrance. “Hello,” he kept saying, “hello. Sophie’s party is right this way.” The children eyed him warily as they passed, as if they’d been warned. But it was Munchie Mouse, and you couldn’t take a kid home unless your wrist tags matched. They were safe.
The party itself was in a yellow room with an orange-curtained stage beyond the pinball-duckpin-junglerama area. Megan had arranged a bag of favors at each setting, and easily she sat the kids at their places and had them give the waiter their drink orders. Three large pizzas arrived, and Warner divided them onto paper plates and handed them around and dutifully the children began to eat. In five minutes they were done and they raced en masse to the games with rolls of tokens clutched in their hands. Daniel stumbled after them.
“This is,” Megan said, as she and Warner brought up the rear along a path of brown carpet littered with wrappers and crusts, “the tackiest thing I have ever done.”
“It’s what she wanted,” he said.
“Like the cat. You never asked me, Warner.”
“It was in the heat of the moment,” he said.
The children tangled with all the other kids from all the other parties while he and Megan tried to keep track of and placate Daniel who was alternately being coddled and bullied by Sophie’s friends. His little pockets bulged with tokens that kept dribbling out, and he wasn’t tall enough to reach most of the coin slots. Soon he was sitting on the floor with his legs sprawled out in front, bawling. Warner took him to the junior game room, but all he wanted was to be with sisser and her buddies in the big room.
“Sophie Lutz’s party,” Megan announced, over the gongs and hoots and whistles and pops and musical jangle of the video battles and game-room sound track. “Cake and present time.”
They swept and dragged the kids back to their table.
“Cake time,” Megan told the waiter.
Under his orange and yellow Munchie Mouse hat he nodded sagely and blew a whistle with three short blasts. Five other wait staff came running, the orange curtain opened, and a six-foot mouse in a sweater vest strolled to the center of the stage and started to croon into a cordless microphone a personalized rock-and-roll “Happy Birthday” while the wait staff clapped to the beat and the mouse descended the stairs to stand beside Sophie, her eyes bright with ecstacy. On the last note the mouse opened his furry arms and Sophie rushed into them and buried her face in his belly. The mouse waved to the rest of the children, his hand flat up to ensure they kept their distance, paused for a few photographs from Megan, extricated himself from the birthday hug, and with an unexpected dignity returned up the stairs and was swallowed by the closing orange curtain. The children clapped and whistled and danced and blew on their party horns.
There were still the presents and another hour of gaming to get through, and then they had to rush home and incorporate all the loot into the final frantic packing. But Sophie was happy, her friends were happy, Daniel hopped with glee, and when Megan and Warner turned to each other, they shared a look of stunned recognition. He could not tell whether they were seeing something about themselves or Charlotte, or whether it was simply because soon they would escape.
She cut the cake, and he passed the slices around, and the children nibbled while they watched as Sophie began to open her presents, awaiting their release to the game room.
“Say thank you,” Warner quietly prompted at every unwrapping. “Say thank you.”
There were three Barbies and a few craft sets and a board game that he had also played as a kid, where you took a pair of metal-tipped tweezers and tried to remove various organs and bones from their rigged wells in an electric body and if you stumbled or misstepped the red bulb of the nose flashed and the game board buzzed.
“I used to love that game,” he told all the kids.
“It’s too easy,” one of the bigger boys said. “I win that game all the time.”
Soon the presents were done, and they followed the kids back to the game room. Within a miniature jalopy Sophie had her picture taken one by one with all the girls from her class. None of the boys would do it. The pictures cranked out from a slot in the machine and were on thermal paper and instantly curled. Warner collected them and folded them carefully into his pocket. The girls who wanted Sophie’s picture then had her join them on the jalopy. Megan and Daniel were lost somewhere in the junglerama. A few of the boys ran out of tokens, and Warner bought them more. Eventually the parents returned, and called for their children from the entrance. Sophie said her good-byes as the parents waited at a distance. While Megan paid the bill Daniel slept on Warner’s shoulder.
On the way to the car, pushing a shopping cart filled with the presents, Megan elbowed Warner and pointed and laughed. Even through the oppressive heat of the tarry parking lot he could see what she meant. In the road grime on the undented side of the Honda someone had written, “Good Luck.”
After the movers had emptied their truck and left them in their own home, they stood in the kitchen, sweaty and smiling. It wasn’t yet noon; they’d survived the drive the day before, the night at the cheap hotel, the early morning with the sellers and the lawyers in the old stuffy office off the square of their new town. Everything had come back to them. Nothing had gone astray in the five hundred miles. They were moved.
