the corner, surrounded by incense holders and ashtrays. A console TV—a hand-me-down, chipped in places. My mom was sitting on a hand-me-down couch. I remembered climbing on that couch until the frame threatened to break under my weight.
My mom was shaking. No—
There was a baby bassinet across the room. It shook a little, too. I couldn’t see myself, but I heard my unrelenting cries. I was either hungry, or I’d befouled myself. Didn’t matter. I needed some sort of attention.
Come on, Mom. What are you waiting for? Pick me up! Where’s my dad? Why won’t he pick me up?
Then I remembered. I’d been born on a Tuesday; this would be Friday. Gig night. My dad and his band would be out on a job.
My crying just wouldn’t stop. I felt my hands tremble. Why won’t she pick me up? Was she already tired of me?
Before I knew what I was doing, my right hand was up. I made a fist and started pounding on the window.
IV
My Father’s Killer
My mother looked up. Her face was bright red. God, she was young. So, so young.
“Someone there?” she asked, her voice muffled by the glass.
I panicked and darted to the left of the window.
“Hello?
After a few seconds I saw her face appear in the window, nervously peering outside from behind the parted curtains. I stopped breathing for a moment. She was only eighteen years old when I was born, but that age is an abstract concept. She’s always been my mother, always been eighteen years older than me. Except now.
Now I was a ghost standing on the porch of my childhood home, I was thirty-seven years old, and I was looking at the face of the woman who gave birth to me—suddenly two decades younger. And she’s been crying. Her cheeks were still damp with tears, her eyes tender and red. She looked lost. Alone. Scared. Freaked out. Everything.
And her husband was out in a bar somewhere in Frankford—or maybe nearby Kensington. She probably told him she’d be fine handling the baby alone, but what choice did she have? They needed the money.
They had a new mouth to feed.
After a while she moved away from the window and started talking to the baby, me, in a robotic monotone.
I started feeling light-headed and dizzy again. I didn’t know if I’d wake up in the same place where I’d fallen asleep, but I didn’t want to chance waking up on Darrah Street in the middle of the night.
On the way back upstairs I ran into the red-haired kid again. He was sitting near the top of the first staircase, knees spread and hands curled into tight little fists. His green eyes, full of fury, bored right into mine. I wondered what I’d done wrong.
“You can still see me, huh?” I asked.
“Why do you keep asking me that? Of course I can see you. You’re there, aren’t you?”
“Where’s your mom?”
He paused, looked down at his feet, then said:
“Out.”
“You should tell your mom to stay home with you tonight instead of drinking in bars.”
“Yeah?
Then he stood, raced up the few steps to the second floor and slammed his door shut behind him. The noise echoed in the stairwell like a gunshot.
I waited a few moments, then made my way up to the third floor as silently as possible. I jiggled the knob on the door to 3-A. Still locked. I guess DeMeo had gone home for the night.
And then the door opened suddenly. The knob slipped out of my hand. DeMeo popped out from the doorway holding a small silver gun, which looked like a toy in his meaty fist.
He still couldn’t see me—thank God. The barrel of the gun swung past my face a couple of times as he squinted out into the darkened hallway.
“Who’s there?”
I took a few slow steps backward.
“I heard you rattling the knob! I know you’re out there!”
I pressed my back against the opposite wall.
“There are no drugs here. No money. No nothing! Come back again and I’ll blow your brains out.”
I tried not to breathe. I prayed I suddenly didn’t turn visible.
“Goddamn hippie junkies.”
DeMeo gave the hallway a final up and down before ducking back inside.
I slid down until I was sitting on the hallway floor.
I don’t know how long I stayed there, staring at nothing in the dark. At some point I heard the downstairs door open with a loud bang, high heels clicking on the tile floor of the foyer, a female voice muttering to herself. Cursing. There was the jangle of keys. I had a good idea I knew who it was.
“Go home to your kid,” I said, then repeated it a little louder. “
I wished I could go to Brady’s right now, confront my father, tell him:
The name Anthony Wade probably means nothing to you. But for a brief moment there, it could have.
The way my grandmom Ellie tells it, there was an exciting couple of weeks in early 1971 when my father’s band, which was called Flick, was up in New York for a recording session that was supposed to lead to a recording deal with one of the major labels. They kind of sounded like Chicago—the early Chicago. The
