vivid detail tripping and losing my grip on the stroller and watching helplessly as it careened into oncoming traffic, or botching the fastening on the front carrier and being unable to catch her as she fell from it. In other words, I was a basket case most of the time.
“Every new mother has these kinds of feelings,” my shrink would tell me. “It’s a normal response to the massive and unfamiliar responsibilities in your life. Victory relies on you totally for her survival. That’s an awesome realization. Then, of course, there’s your lack of a good role model. Though obviously your mother didn’t do everything wrong. You survived, after all.”
“Just barely,” I said. I always felt this childish wash of anger with anything less than his total indictment of my mother. Especially in conversations that centered on Victory.
“Well,” he said, with a deferential nod, “yes. But consider this: Just because your mother didn’t love you enough doesn’t mean you start with a deficit of love for Victory.”
I didn’t follow, and my expression must have communicated that.
“I’m saying that you don’t need to make up for what your mother didn’t give her little girl-you-by overcompensating with Victory. That doesn’t make you a better mother. A child needs a whole and healthy mother, someone separated from her to a certain degree. Otherwise, when she naturally starts to move away, she will feel as though she’s taking something from you. She’ll feel that you need her too much. It will cause her pain, guilt, impede her emotional development. Does that make sense to you?”
I made the appropriate affirming noises, but I didn’t see how a mother could love her child too much. Seemed like only a man could imply such a thing.
That afternoon, after the detective’s visit, while Victory is still in school and Gray has gone off to do whatever it is he does in a crisis situation, I move my stash to a locker at the bus station in the downtown area.
It’s a small and seedy place about a block away from the police department. A homeless man drinks from something wrapped in brown paper and watches me from the bench where he reclines. I feel his eyes on the back of my neck as I shove my bag into the locker and take the small, orange-capped key. Feeling conspicuous and a bit silly, I wonder what well-intentioned or aboveboard reason someone might have for stowing belongings in a bus- station locker. As I walk back to my car, the homeless guy’s still looking at me. He’s wiry, dirty in a red-and-white checked shirt and jeans, beat-up old sneakers.
I don’t judge him. Once, I woke up to find myself lying on a public bench, unwashed, disoriented; I wonder if this man, like me, is mentally ill. But he doesn’t seem afraid or unstable. If anything, he seems comfortable, resigned. I wonder what he’s thinking about me and my obviously guilty errand as I drive off. But I don’t suppose he’s in any position to judge me, either.
I stop at the gas station on the way back to the house. The only thing more depressing or suspect than a public locker is a gas-station pay phone. Maybe because they remind me of all the miserable calls I made to my father from just such a phone. They make me think of teenage runaways huddled against the rain, succumbing finally to desperation and fear, calling their parents and begging to come home. Or adulterers sneaking off to call their lovers. Only under such bad conditions would one find it necessary or desirable to huddle in the little metal shell, press her mouth and ear against the filthy receiver.
Paying with cash, I buy a calling card from the clerk and then walk over to the phone. I call the number I have memorized.
“Leave a message,” answers a low male voice. “No names. No numbers. If I don’t know who you are, you shouldn’t be calling me.”
His voice brings back memories of a sunny common room, the smell of institutionally prepared food in the air, the jangling and cheering of a television game show, the volume down low. We played Go Fish in our pajamas every day for a month, drawn to each other I suppose because we were the only patients connected to reality at all. Everyone around us drooled and stared, issued the occasional scream, or called out a name.
His name was Oscar, or so he told me. He was depressed, he claimed, suicidal. He’d thought about taking a leap off the Verrazano, but he thought about it too long and the cops came and pulled him back over the railing. “You make enough people disappear and the world doesn’t even seem real anymore. Nothing
“What do you mean, disappear?” I asked, not sure I really wanted to know.
He cleared his throat, glanced around. He reminded me oddly of that stock image of Albert Einstein, though much younger, with crazy hair everywhere, thick and spiky like pipe cleaners, and bright, clear eyes.
“You’d be amazed how many people want or need to walk away from their lives.”
Like me, I thought, looking at the cards in my hand. “Really?” I said.
“I’m the one they call,” he whispered, leaning in close. He tapped his chest. “I arrange the details.”
“I see,” I said politely.
“Oh,” he said, suddenly indignant. He let his cards tip, and I saw his hand. “You don’t believe me. Because we’re in here.” He swept his arm around the room, at the zombies in repose.
“Well, let me tell you something,” he went on when I didn’t answer. “You got to be someone or know someone to be in this place. They don’t let just
I stayed silent, remembering how Gray had told me his father knew the doctor who ran this posh and privately funded hospital, that favors were called in. This is a place mainly for former military personnel, lots of Special Forces guys, Gray had said. Guys suffering posttraumatic stress disorder and the like.
“Which leads me to ask, little miss,” said Oscar. “Just who the fuck are you?”
“I’m no one,” I answered.
He gave a soft grunt. “Aren’t we all?”
“Queen of hearts,” I challenged.
“Go fish.” I’d seen the card when he inadvertently revealed his hand earlier. But I drew from the pile between us, anyway. I figured the fact that we were both cheating made us even.
I just say the one-word code Oscar gave me, years ago now, on the night he checked out of the hospital. “Maybe you never need it,” he said. “Maybe you and me never see each other again. But hey, just in case.”
“Vanish,” I say, and hang up.
It seems improbable that he’ll remember me, but I don’t have any choice other than to follow the instructions he gave me back then. Or maybe he was crazy, as crazy as I am, and this call will come to nothing. In any case, as I drive away, I feel light-headed, sick to my stomach that I’ve even taken things this far. I have a kind of vertigo as I lean over the edge of my life and look down. I will just tip over and be gone.
17
Everything that happened next happened so fast that I remember it like a landscape passing outside the window of a moving train. Believe it or not, my mother succeeded in getting Frank a new trial. The young death-row appeals lawyer she found was hot to make a name for himself; a high-profile case like Frank’s was exactly what he needed. After a few phone calls back and forth, and my mother scurrying off to the post office with newspaper clippings and the research compiled by the private investigator, he agreed to bring Frank’s case before a judge.
Between the dirty arresting officer and new testimony from the deceased eyewitness’s ophthalmologist, who claimed that the old woman’s vision was so poor she wouldn’t have been able to see much of anything at night, this lawyer was able to convince a judge that Frank deserved a new trial.
I came home one day to find my mother on the steps of our trailer surrounded by reporters. They flitted around her like moths to light, asking their questions. She looked beautiful and regal; no one would have guessed she was a waitress with a ninth-grade education. She spoke with the authority of someone who’d done her research on the legal system, mimicking all the right phrases, certain of her convictions. I stood in the back of the crowd and listened to my mother crow about her crusade, her faith, her belief in Frank Geary’s innocence. I felt dizzy as I determined from their questions that a new trial would begin in a month.
I pushed my way through the crowd and past my mother, shaking her off as she tried to introduce me to
