False Memory

Sabrina loved her sole child with a crazy intensity that would have made Martie a hopeless neurotic by the age of eleven, if she had not been so determinedly independent almost from the day that she took her first steps. But this world harbored worse things than crazy love. Crazy hate. Oh, lots of that. And just plain crazy, in abundance.

Sabrina loved Smilin’ Bob no less than she loved her daughter. The loss of him, when he was only fifty-three, had made her more protective of Martie than ever. The probability of her husband and her daughter both dying young, of separate causes, might be as low as the chances of the earth being destroyed by an asteroid impact before morning, but cold statistics and insurance-company actuarial tables offered no consolation to a wounded and wary heart.

Martie, therefore, wasn’t going to say a word to her mother about mind control, haiku, the Leaf Man, the priest with the spike through his head, severed ears, or the trip to Santa Fe. Given this overload of weird news, Sabrina’s anxiety would explode into hysteria.

She wasn’t going to tell her mother about Susan Jagger, either, partly because she didn’t trust herself to talk about the loss of her friend without breaking down, but also because Sabrina had loved Susan almost like a daughter. This was news that she had to deliver in person, holding her mother’s hand, both to give emotional support and to receive it.

To explain her failure to return her mother’s calls on a timely basis, Martie told her all about Skeet’s attempted suicide and his voluntary commitment to New Life Clinic. Of course, these events had all occurred the previous morning, Tuesday, which didn’t explain Martie’s behavior on Wednesday, but she fudged the story to make it sound as if Skeet had taken the plunge from the Sorensons’ roof one day and entered the clinic the next, implying two days of turmoil.

Sabrina’s reaction was only partly what Martie had expected — and surprisingly emotional. She didn’t know Skeet all that well; and she had never expressed a desire to know him better. To Martie’s mother, poor Skeet was no less dangerous than any machine-gun-toting member of Columbia’s Medellin drug cartel, a violent and evil figure who wanted to pin down children on school playgrounds and forcibly inject heroin into their veins. Yet here, now, tears and sobs, worried questions about his injuries, his prospects, and more tears.

“This is what I’ve been afraid of, this is what eats at me all the time,” Sabrina said. “I knew this was coming, it was bound to happen, and now here it is, and the next time it might not turn out so well. The next time Dusty might go off the roof, break his neck and be paralyzed for life, or die. And then what? I begged you not to marry a housepainter, to find a man with more ambition, someone who will have a nice office, who will sit at a desk, who won’t fall off roofs all the time, won’t even have a chance to fall off roofs.”

“Mom—”

“I lived with this worry all my life, with your father. Your father and fire. Always fire and burning buildings and things blowing up and things maybe collapsing on him. All my married life I dreaded him going to work, panicked when I heard a fire siren, couldn’t look at the news on TV because when they showed some breaking news story about a big fire, I’d think maybe he was there. And he was hurt, time and again. And maybe his cancer had something to do with breathing so much smoke at fires. All those toxins in the air at a big fire. And now you’ve got a husband with roofs like I had one with fires. Roofs and ladders, always falling, and you’ll never know any peace.”

This worried, heartfelt speech left Martie stunned and wordless.

On the other end of the line, Sabrina was crying.

Apparently sensing a mother-daughter moment of unusual import and assuming that it must have negative consequences for him, Dusty glanced away from the traffic ahead and whispered, “Now what?”

Finally Martie said, “Mom, you’ve never said a word about this before. You—”

“A fireman’s wife doesn’t talk about it, doesn’t nag him about it or worry aloud,” Sabrina said. “Never, not ever, my God, because if you talk about it, that’s when it happens. A fireman’s wife has to be strong, has to be positive, has to give him support, swallow her fear, and smile. But it’s always in her heart, this dread, and now you go and marry a man who’s on ladders all the time and running around roofs and falling off, when you could have found someone who worked at a desk and couldn’t fall off worse than a chair.”

“The thing is, I love him, Mom.”

“I know you do, dear,” her mother sobbed. “It’s just terrible.”

“This is why you’ve been on my case about Dusty since forever?”

“I haven’t been on your case, dear. I’ve been on your team.”

“It felt like my case. Mom…can I infer from this you might actually sort of, kind of, at least a little bit like Dusty?”

Dusty was so startled to hear this question that his hands slipped on the steering wheel and the Saturn almost swerved out of its lane in traffic.

“He’s a sweet boy,” Sabrina said, as if Martie were still in junior high and dating adolescents. “He’s very sweet and smart and polite, and I know why you love him. But he’s going to fall off a roof and kill himself one day, and that’s going to ruin your whole life. You’ll never get over it. Your heart will die with him.”

“Why didn’t you just say this long ago, instead of all the sniping about everything he did?”

“I wasn’t sniping, dear. I was trying to express my concern. I couldn’t talk about him falling off a roof, not directly. Never, my God, when you talk about it, that’s when it happens. And here we are, talking about it! Now he’s going to fall off a roof, and it’ll be my fault.”

“Mom, that’s irrational. It won’t happen.”

“It’s already happened,” Sabrina said. “And now it’ll happen again. Firemen and fires. Painters and roofs.”

Holding the phone between herself and Dusty, so that her mother could hear both of them, Martie said, “How many housepainters have you known, people who work for you, others in the trade who haven’t?”

“Fifty? Sixty? I don’t know. At least that.”

“And how many have fallen off roofs?”

“Aside from me and Skeet?”

“Aside from you and Skeet.”

“One that I know of. He broke a leg.”

Putting the phone to her ear again, Martie said, “You hear that, Mom? One. Broke his leg.”

“One that he knows of,” Sabrina said. “One, and now he’s next.”

“He already fell off a roof. Chances of any one painter falling off a roof twice in his lifetime must be millions to one.”

“His first fall didn’t count,” Sabrina said. “He was trying to save his brother. It wasn’t an accident. The accident is still waiting to happen.”

“Mom, I love you tons, but you’re a little nuts.”

“I know, dear. All those years of worrying. And you’re going to end up a little nuts, too.”

“We’ll be busy the next couple days, Mom. Don’t pass a kidney stone if I fail to return one of your calls right away, okay? We’re not going to fall off any roofs.”

“Let me talk to Dusty.”

Martie passed the phone to him.

He looked wary, but he accepted it. “Hi, Sabrina. Yeah. Well, you know. Uh-huh. Sure. No, I won’t. No, I won’t. No, I promise I won’t. That’s true, isn’t it? Huh? Oh, no, I never did take it seriously. Don’t beat up on yourself. Well, I love you too, Sabrina. Huh? Sure. Mom. I love you, too, Mom.”

He passed the phone back to Martie, and she pressed end.

They were both silent, and then Martie said, “Who would have thought — a mother-and-child reunion in the midst of all this crap.”

Funny, how hope raises its lovely head when least expected, a flower in a wasteland.

Dusty said, “You lied to her, babe.”

She knew he wasn’t referring to her reconstruction of the time frame of Skeet’s leap and hospitalization, nor to her leaving out the news about Susan and the rest of the mess they were in.

Nodding, she said, “Yeah, I told her we weren’t going to fall off any roofs — and, hell, every one of us falls off