His shoulders quivered as he choked back the emotion, the girls awkwardly avoiding his eyes.
“We’re sorry,” Jill said, because what could you say?
Suddenly Nancy rose from the booth and waddled over, heading for her brother.
“Danny,” she mumbled, her one and only arm laying across his shoulder as she pulled him close, rubbing her chin against his cheek and cooing in his ear.
“Hush, baby, it’s okay…hush…” she whispered, embracing him, and an icepick chill shot through my body. I was two months old again wrapped in my mother’s arms, a police siren wailing outside the window of a third-story rat-hole. Maybe I was imagining it—I didn’t give much credence to repressed memories—yet suddenly I felt like a child again, a baby cradled against his mother’s breast—and now, in a booth at the Jaybird, I was that child. I burst out crying, bawling like an infant even as I told myself you can’t cry over this, not here, not now. A professor at NYU once told me that characters should never cry. It was melodramatic, weak and lazy, but maybe if she’d ever watched her uncle and her mother hugging in the middle of a pizzeria, she might have amended that rule. Or maybe I was just melodramatic, weak, and lazy, because I stopped fighting and let go—I cried like a man who’d spent thirty-eight years waiting for his mother, like a man who suddenly realizes that maybe he’s found her.
Uncle Dan saw me wailing and broke away from Nancy, who stared at me, blank-faced and confused.
“What the hell’s wrong with him?” Uncle Dan asked.
“We just came here to order twenty pizzas, for tonight,” Jill said.
“He needs a tissue,” Maddie added.
“I’m okay,” I said, a middle-aged infant looking up at his Mommy. I grabbed a paper napkin and blew my nose. “I’m okay.”
“Hush,” Nancy whispered, her palm now on my shoulder, heavy and warm. Uncle Dan wiped his face with his sleeve and stepped back.
“Too much,” he mumbled. “Who wants a slice of pizza?”
Jill and Maddie raised their hands, and Uncle Dan, his game-face reapplied, gave them each a high-five. “Two slices, coming right up. And tonight, go occupy that beach and tell anyone who tries to stop you to go fuck himself.”
He stormed behind the counter and went to work, pans clanging, dough flying, oven doors slamming shut, the Jaybird as it should be, the imperative to make pizza its strong, steady heart. While the girls grabbed for the comfort of their phones, grateful for a screen to stare at instead of blubbering old me, I looked up at Nancy, her eyes distant now, even glazed, yet her hand still on my shoulder as I touched her one arm and whispered, “Thanks, Mom.”
-19-
The music grabbed me the moment I hit the driveway, waves of sound blaring through the open windows—Amy’s house like a giant Marshall Amp jacked past ten. The song was an old favorite of hers: “Fake Plastic Trees” by Radiohead, the melody gloomy and ethereal, the ghost keyboards and Thom Yorke’s desperate, high-pitched vocals leaving you numb, like you were floating blindfolded inside a cloud the moment before it rained.
And it wears you out, Yorke sings, the chords quiet and resigned, the guitars strumming sadly. And it wears you out.
In the days after Sarah Carpenter’s disappearance, Amy had listened to that song endlessly, the surreal, abstract lyrics all about death and reincarnation. And now she was playing it again, blasting it call-the-cops full volume, the vocals and the haunting chorus a chrysalis of heartbreak and surrender. It wasn’t a good sign.
Jill’s comments had me worried, so after I left the Jaybird I decided to drive over. Even if she told me to screw off and slammed the door in my face, at least I’d know she was okay.
The front door was locked, so I knocked, loudly, hitting the doorbell three times. That .22 still lurked somewhere in the house, and I didn’t want her opening the door with it pointed at my face. After a minute, I punched the bell twice more and she shouted, “Hold on,” her voice finding the quiet pocket before the song’s final lyrics.
And it wears you out.
The door pulled back and Amy waved me inside, the music still ear-bleeding loud as the song started playing again. Her stereo, an old Bose I’d given her for Christmas one year, sat on a wine table in the front hallway. I found the dial and lowered the volume.
“Hey, I’m listening to that,” she said.
“So was half of New Jersey. Your ears must be screaming.”
“They’re entitled to their opinion.”
Like Jill had warned, she was still in her pajamas, the top at least, red and white stripes, a candy cane of cotton-polyester; the discarded bottoms hung over the sofa arm, the legs dangling toward the floor. She wore a single white sock, the toes of her bare foot an iridescent pink, her hair matted in bed-headed tufts, yet her lips were marvelous moxie, and with the top two buttons of her pink-striped PJ’s teasingly undone, she was as desirable to me as ever, and I kept my eyes floating as I followed her into the kitchen, the smooth cream of her thighs endearingly close—too much the trigger for questions I wasn’t sure how to answer.
“Are you okay?”
“You bet,’ she said, scooping up a half-filled goblet of red wine and chugging it empty. “But I shouldn’t operate heavy machinery anytime soon. You didn’t bring your crane, did you?” She refilled the goblet and offered me the bottle. “Drink up, Donnie. Today it’s just you and me. Jill is …I don’t know, somewhere.”
“The occupation?”
“Is that what they’re calling it? Whatever …it won’t last long. I love my daughter, but mass struggle isn’t her thing. Three mosquito bites and she’ll call it quits.”
I recorked the bottle and set it on the table. Blue paint speckled her shins and several loose strands of her hair,
