“I can’t sing very well,” I told him.
His mouth worked slightly, and his head sort of shook and nodded a little bit at the same time. “Well, I liked those songs, the ones where you were singing.”
“Thanks, Dad,” I said.
The sarcasm hit him like a whip, and there was a brief instant where I saw something flicker in his eyes. Then it died away, and he looked like he had before, sad and lost, like I’d just kicked a three-legged puppy.
“I just . . .” He took a breath, started again. “I’ve never forgiven myself for what I did to you, or your brother, or most of all, to your mother. I don’t drink anymore, I don’t take drugs anymore. I don’t do those things that I used to do anymore. I know you’re a grown-up woman, now, and I know you’re famous and I know you’re successful. But you’re also my girl, and I want you to know that I’ll try to be your father again, if you’ll give me the chance to do that.”
“You’re not my father,” I said. “My father’s name is Steven Beckerman, and he died three months ago. He was a musician and he was a singer, and he died from aggressive cancer of the throat. He died unable to do the one thing that made him totally happy. My father taught me how to sing and he taught me how to read and write music. My father taught me how to play guitar, and I still have the first one he ever gave me, and when I play it, I hear him, and that’s his legacy, that’s what he taught me.
“All you ever taught me was how to drink.”
He was silent for several seconds. “I can teach you how to stop.”
“Why the fuck are you even here, Tommy?” I demanded. “Did you really figure you could show up and I’d say it was great to see you, all is forgiven? You killed her. You fucking killed her. Mikel may believe your bullshit, but I didn’t then, and I sure don’t now.”
“It was an accident.”
“I want you to leave.”
He had more he wanted to say, it was all over his face. But whatever he saw in mine kept him from trying again, and he got up from the table. I walked after him to the front door.
“You know, I barely remember that day,” Tommy said. “I was so drunk I barely remember anything that day until I was in the emergency room, looking at Diana as they pulled a sheet over her face.”
“Shut up.”
“What I’m saying is that you may be right.”
“Just shut up, Tommy.”
“Miriam, what I’m saying is that for fifteen years, I’ve thought every day about you and Mikel and that accident.” He was blinking rapidly, as if there was grit in his eyes. The strain was making his voice climb little by little. “I don’t want you to forgive me. I can’t even forgive myself.”
“Then what the hell do you want? Is it money? Is that why you’re here?”
He looked horrified. “What? No—”
“I’ll tell you what, Tommy. I’ll go and write you a check right now, this very moment, if you can look me in the eye and stop lying long enough to say that it was murder, that it wasn’t accidental. None of this,
“Miriam—”
“What do you say? Thirty grand, would that do it? Just pulling a number from the air. I can go higher.”
He stared at me.
“Fifty,” I said. “Fifty grand, right now, you tell me you murdered her, you fucker.”
Tommy reached for the door, headed out. The sunlight was bright, and made me wince. He started across the porch.
I stuck with him, feeling the cold of my porch on my bare feet. “Sixty,” I said.
At the end of the walk, he made a right, heading down the block. There was an old gray Chevy parked at the curb, and I thought it was his, but he kept going past it. He’d shoved his hands in his pockets, lowered his head. A wind had risen, tearing leaves from branches up and down the street.
“Eighty, Tommy!” I shouted after him. “Eighty, all you have to do is say it!”
He kept walking away from me.
“I can go as high as a hundred,” I said, but it was more to myself than to him.
My father disappeared around the corner. He hadn’t looked back.
CHAPTER 10
An ambulance came and took my mother and cops came and took Tommy, and our neighbor, Mrs. Ralleigh, came and took Mikel and me. In her living room across the street, she tried to get me to stop crying, tried to get Mikel to say something, anything. She was an elderly African-American woman who lived alone and would bring us fresh squash and green beans from her garden every fall, and her home smelled strange to me, both antiseptic and greasy all at once.
I kept trying to get up and run back outside, and Mrs. Ralleigh had to keep blocking me from the door, finally wrapping me in her arms and holding me on her couch until I stopped struggling and surrendered to sobs alone.
More cops arrived, and we watched them from the window, Mikel and I, working in the rain. There was one not in uniform, and he crossed over to us after a few minutes, knocking on the door. Mrs. Ralleigh went to answer it, and then they came back together.
“This is Detective Wagner,” Mrs. Ralleigh told us.
Detective Wagner sat down opposite us, balancing a notepad on his thigh. He was using a chewed pencil to write with, and I could see he’d made drawings, too, what I know now were diagrams, trying to place positions, but then, I thought they were just doodles. I couldn’t tell how old he was; he was ages younger than Mrs. Ralleigh, who I’d always thought was over a hundred, easy.
“Alice says that your name is Mikel,” Detective Wagner said. “And that your name is Miriam, but that everyone calls you Mim.”
Mikel didn’t respond, just kept staring toward the window. I nodded, tried to wipe my eyes. I still had tears coming, and they weren’t stopping. When I followed Mikel’s gaze, I could see a man taking pictures of my father’s truck, of the driveway, of the stainless steel bowl.
“I need to ask you both some questions. Will you let me ask you some questions about what happened?”
Nothing from Mikel, and again I nodded, and the detective came and sat next to me, gave me a pat on the arm, and started to write in his notepad everything I told him. His handwriting was very bad and I couldn’t read anything on the paper. Mikel never said a word, and I was rambling, talking about trucks and jack-o’-lanterns and pumpkin seeds and yelling. It didn’t matter. Wagner knew what had happened, he’d known it from the moment he entered Mrs. Ralleigh’s home, maybe before.
Just like he knew that even as Mikel remained silent and I couldn’t shut up, my father was already under arrest for the murder he’d committed.
Mrs. Ralleigh walked him to the door, leaving us in her front room. She and Detective Wagner talked before he left, and I caught bits of it, not trying to overhear, unable to avoid it. Words like “testify” and “trial” were used.
It wasn’t until then that Mrs. Ralleigh asked if my mother was dead. The question made me angry, the answer so obvious. When Wagner confirmed that she had died on the way to the hospital, that my father had been arrested in the emergency room, I heard Mrs. Ralleigh say a prayer.
Then she asked, “What do I do with them?”
“We’re trying to determine if there’s family,” Detective Wagner said.
“No, no, there’s no one. Diana, she told me that last year, around Thanksgiving. It was just the four of
