me if you like.” She’s serious. “I’d like to feel something other than this… this decay.”
The look of pity on my face infuriates her. She thrusts my hand away and wraps her cardigan tightly around her chest. She won’t look at me.
“I need to ask you a few questions.”
“Forget it! I don’t need any of your buck-up-now speeches. I’m not in denial and I’ve stopped making bargains with God…”
“I’m here about Bobby.”
“What about him?”
I haven’t planned what I’m going to ask her. I’m not even sure what I’m looking for.
“When was the last time you saw him?”
“Six, maybe seven years ago. He was always in trouble. Wouldn’t listen to anyone. Not me, anyway. Give a kid the best years of your life and he’ll always be ungrateful.” Her sentences are ragged and short. “So what has he done now?”
“He’s been convicted of a serious assault. He kicked a woman unconscious.”
“A girlfriend?”
“No, a stranger.”
Her features soften. “You’ve talked to him. How is he?”
“He’s angry.”
She sighs. “I used to think they gave me the wrong baby at the hospital. It didn’t feel like mine. He looked like his father, which was a shame. I couldn’t see any of me in him, except his eyes. He had two left feet and a round loaf of a face. He could never keep anything clean. He had to put his hands into things, open them up, find out how they worked. He once ruined a perfectly good radio and leaked battery acid all over my best rug. Just like his father…”
She doesn’t finish the statement, but starts again. “I never felt what a mother is supposed to feel. I guess I’m not maternal, but that doesn’t make me cold, does it? I didn’t want to get pregnant and I didn’t want to inherit a stepson. I was only twenty-one for Christ’s sake!”
She arches a pencil-thin eyebrow. “You’re itching to get inside my head, aren’t you? Not many people are interested in what someone else is thinking or what they have to say. Sometimes people act like they’re listening, when really they’re waiting for their turn, or getting ready to jump in. What are you waiting to say, Mr. Freud?”
“I’m trying to understand.”
“Lenny was like that: Always asking questions, wanting to know where I was going and when I was coming home.” She mimics his pleading voice. “‘Who are you with, petal? Please, come home. I’ll wait up for you.’ It was so pathetic! No wonder I got to thinking is this the best I can do. I wasn’t going to lie next to his sweaty back for the rest of my life.”
“He committed suicide.”
“I didn’t think he had it in him.”
“Do you know why?”
She doesn’t seem to hear me. Instead she stares at the curtains. The window must look directly over the ocean.
“You don’t like the view?”
She shrugs. “There’s a rumor going around that they don’t bother burying us. They throw us off the cliff instead.”
“What about your husband?”
She doesn’t look at me. “He called himself an inventor. What a joke! Do you know that if he made any money— fat chance of that— he was going to give it away? ‘To enrich the world,’ he said. That’s what he was like, always rambling on about empowering the workers and the proletariat revolution, making speeches and moralizing. Communists don’t believe in heaven or hell. Where do you think he is?”
“I’m not a religious person.”
“But do you think he might have gone somewhere?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
Her armor of indifference shows a weakness. “Maybe we’re all in hell and we just don’t realize it.” She pauses and half closes her eyes. “I wanted a divorce. He said no. I told him to get himself a girlfriend. He wouldn’t let me go. People say I’m cold, but I
“You accused your husband of sexually abusing Bobby.”
She shrugs. “I just loaded the gun. I didn’t fire it. People like you did that. Doctors, social workers, schoolteachers, lawyers, do-gooders…”
“Did we get it wrong?”
“The judge didn’t think so.”
“What do you think?”
“I think that sometimes you can forget what the truth is if you hear a lie often enough.” She reaches up and pushes the buzzer above her head.
I can’t leave yet. “Why does your son hate you?”
“We all end up hating our parents.”
“You feel guilty.”
She clenches her fists and laughs hoarsely. A chrome stand holding a morphine drip swings back and forth. “I’m forty-three years old and I’m dying. I’m paying the price for anything I’ve done. Can you say the same?”
The nurse arrives looking pissed off at being summoned. One of the monitor leads has come loose. Bridget holds up her arm to have it reconnected. In the same motion she dismissively waves her hand. The conversation is over.
It has grown dark outside. I follow the path lights between the trees until I reach the car park. Taking the thermos from the bag, I swig from it greedily. The whiskey tastes fiery and warm. I want to keep drinking until I can’t feel the cold or notice my arm trembling.
4
Melinda Cossimo answers the door reluctantly. Visitors this late on a Sunday night are rarely good news for a social worker. I don’t give her time to speak. “The police are looking for me. I need your help.”
She blinks at me wide-eyed, but looks almost calm. Her hair is swept up and pinned high on her head with a large tortoise-shell clip. Wispy strands have escaped to stroke her cheeks and neck. As the door closes, she motions me onward, telling me to march straight up the stairs to the bathroom. She waits outside the door while I pass her my clothes.
I protest about not having the time, but she doesn’t react to the urgency in my voice. It won’t take long to wash a few things, she says.
I stare at the naked stranger in the mirror. He has lost weight. That can happen when you don’t eat. I know what Julianne would say: “Why can’t I lose weight that easily?” The stranger in the mirror smiles at me.
I come downstairs wearing a robe and hear Mel hang up the phone. By the time I reach the kitchen she has opened a bottle of wine and is filling two glasses.
“Who did you call?”
“Nobody important.”
She curls up in a large armchair, with the stem of her wineglass slotted between the first and second fingers of her outspread hand. Her other hand rests on the back of an open book, lying facedown across the armrest. The reading lamp above her casts a shadow beneath her eyes and gives her mouth a harsh downward curve.
This has always been a house I associate with laughter and good times, but now it seems too quiet. One of Boyd’s paintings hangs above the mantelpiece and another on the opposite wall. There is a photograph of him and his motorbike at the Isle of Man TT track.
