“Amy …”
“Are you a horrible person, too? Are we both horrible? Let’s walk into the ocean and drown ourselves. Will you do that with me, Duck?”
“You need to talk to a doctor. You’re in the hospital…let them help you.”
“Help, shmelp…” she said. “All they care about is the insurance and the co-pay. Yes, Big Nurse, I’ll take my pill. That was her name in the book…did you ever read it, Duck? The movie is so much better…I want to watch the damn World Series! God, I hate baseball. Mark called me a crazy bitch before he left. I’m not a bitch, am I?”
“You’re wonderful,” I said—instinctively—and from that moment on, I knew I was going home.
Voices from the Town: Jean K., Holman Beach Mini-Golf, April 20XX
“You know how teenagers always travel in packs? They were never like that. It was just the two of them, like they were some old married couple at age 13. Everyone knew him from the pizzeria and that weird thing he did with falling asleep all the time, and she had this smart mouth on her …but they were good kids, you know? They looked after that Sarah Carpenter like she was their own. I still get choked up thinking about it. No wonder he moved to California. Would you stick around if you were responsible for a little girl’s death?”
-2-
“Well, it’s complicated,” I said. “I’m not sure where to begin. Amy and I have known each other since we were five.”
“Was she the first girl you ever kissed?”
“Yes.”
“The first boy I ever kissed is in prison now,” Kelly said. “Securities fraud. See? You’re not the only one with a colorful past.”
She smiled, as if her admission had been scandalous, and I wanted to kiss her pretty knuckles and say, Sweetie, that’s not even close.
We were on a plane, thirty thousand miles off the ground, where only God and radar could see us, as good a place as any for a man to unravel.
“If you’re not ready…” Kelly said.
Yes, exactly! I’m not ready! I thought—but I was trying to be better than that. It was time to man up, a phrase I hated, mostly because I rarely did it.
“Amy and I used to babysit for this girl named Sarah Carpenter,” I said. “She was four years old, really smart…absolutely adorable. Her mother was a single parent who had some issues. That’s a kind description: Laura Carpenter was a fuck-up. Not a bad fuck-up; just overwhelmed. She was twenty-five, not much older than us really, and had to work three jobs just to make rent. The father, whoever he was, was long gone; it’s possible Laura didn’t even know who he was—monogamy wasn’t her thing. She was supposed to pay Amy three bucks an hour to look after Sarah but most weeks she was too broke to settle up, and after a while Amy watched Sarah for free. Since Amy and I were always together back then, we became a team. What were we going to do? Leave a four-year-old on her own?”
All true, of course, but not quite true enough. What was missing was the love. Amy and I weren’t just “babysitters.” In the months before Sarah’s disappearance, we were practically raising her, buying her clothes, fixing her dinner, taking her to doctor appointments. I earned decent money working at my Uncle’s pizzeria, and whenever Laura fell short, which was nearly every month, I’d make up the difference, whether it was buying groceries, paying the cable bill, or making the co-pay for one of those doctor visits. People wondered if maybe I was Sarah’s father. Why else would a seventeen-year-old spend his money on a little kid? It might have seemed strange, but I was trying to be a good person, and I knew that Sarah’s childhood could easily have been my own.
Like Sarah, I had no idea who my birth father was.
. . . . .
All I knew was that my mother had dropped out of high school her senior year and moved to New York to become famous. According to Uncle Dan, letters home would arrive sporadically with brief, sometimes cryptic notes about her life. One such letter included a clipping from the Sunday circular for Sears, my seventeen-year-old mother posed in her underwear along with three other girls in a half-page spread, the other half featuring blow-out deals on lawn mowers and barbecue grills.
Eventually the letters stopped coming, her final one nothing but the hand-written lyrics to Elton John’s “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” scrawled on the back on a strip club napkin. The most Uncle Dan ever told me about her childhood—his childhood, too—was that they’d grown up in an “unhappy” home. My grandparents died when I was three and I had no recollection of them, only a single photograph of the three of us taken beside an artificial Christmas tree, the string of lights dim, a star perched crookedly on the top branch. In the photo, I’m lodged in my grandfather’s hairy arms, my grandmother looking away from the camera, a bulky black pocketbook resting on her lap, her arms folded as if she were waiting for a bus. Everyone appears pissed, even me, my clenched baby-face fighting back tears.
Maybe Mom had a good reason for running away.
Eventually she wound up in the punk world in New York City when the scene was at its peak. My birth father could have been any number of punks or speed freaks who had hung out at CBGB or Max’s Kansas City. Lucky for me my mother was clean when she got knocked up and managed to stay that way until I was born. For two months, she tried to raise me in a squatter’s loft deep in the Bowery, but when some drummer invited her to join him on his band’s Midwest tour, my mother
