I knelt beside her face, which was blooming with death, barely seeing, but there was something tender in her eyes, holy Jesus, it made me weep in some sort of gratitude. The weeping was coming from so many places that I can’t tell how much of it was gratitude, but yes, I think some of it was. I shrank down below the lip of the tub and took one of her soggy, queenly hands and placed it on the top of my head. And then I rose my head up into the basket of her hand so that it felt like she was grasping me, loving me back; in fact, I’m sure that she was. And I wept and said, Oh, Mommy, oh, Mommy, oh, Mommy, oh, Mommy, until eventually she was gone.
IT WASN’T UNTIL AN HOUR after I found them that I dialed 911 from the cream phone on my mother’s nightstand. I waited so long, I think, because I could still sense their life forces in the air. As long as I could feel them, I didn’t want to call up the external world. My parents and I had been a unit, a capsule; inviting the outside in was forbidden. That was for families who didn’t know where their children were after ten p.m. It wasn’t until after their deaths that I saw how foolish I was. I had thought I was the one most likely to breach the security of our capsule when in fact the walls were permeable; for years my parents had been waltzing in and out recklessly.
The officers who came thought I did it. For a moment, at least. I was carrying the knife when they showed up. It made me feel closer to my father. They asked me who my next of kin was, who they should call. The sun was rising. Daylight made it real. I didn’t have Gosia’s number memorized. I didn’t know any numbers except my house and my father’s office. The only number I had written down was Wilt’s, inside Tropic of Cancer, so I went and got it because I was ashamed not to have anybody else. I read it aloud to the officer who was not dealing with the bodies. It was six a.m. by that time and I could hear a man’s sleepy voice on the other end of the line and the officer introduced himself as Bushkill police and the man said they had the wrong number. I told them I thought it was my uncle, but I guessed it was the wrong number.
Eventually they got ahold of Gosia. She arrived, perfumed and puffy, by ten a.m. That was when it hit me, how alone I was. Gosia, of course, would become my savior, but that morning there was just a black Mercedes, glinting and foreign in our gravel drive. A tall half-stranger emerged, wearing diamonds, face still rouged from the night before. She smelled like sour flowers. My brown wool life was all gone.
SHE TOLD ME EVERYTHING RIGHT away. She took me out of the house and to the Caesars Pocono Resort. Now it’s renamed something seamier, Palace Stream or Lovers’ Delight, but it was always one of those honeymoon fuck forts with the champagne glass bathtubs and the fruit salad breakfasts. I’ve always wondered who is turned on by that, who wants to fuck in heart-shaped tubs. Men with blond beards, women who love baby’s breath in their bouquets of red roses.
Gosia took me there because it was the first place she saw on the road that was open. My lips were blue and she worried I was dying of shock. The frizzy-haired woman at the front desk said, It’s couples only. Gosia pulled what I imagined was an impressive credit card from her wallet and slapped it on the counter. We walked into a purple dining room with gold tables and casino carpets. She ordered herself a tea and me a coffee. She didn’t try to make me eat. She began to tell me everything. It seemed she knew more than anyone in the world.
The night before, when my father had left to see his raped mother, there had been someone else to see. The woman he’d been fucking. The woman had called his doctor’s answering service all weekend long. She had him paged several times, up in the mountains. He’d been lamentably ignoring her for days and then his mother was raped. He drove to New Jersey, examined his mother, bandaged and consoled her. Gosia was there with my uncle. She saw the whole thing. My father said he’d be back. Everyone thought he was going to go after the rapist. Just be a crazy man in the streets. But he went to his lover’s apartment. An Italian woman living above the restaurant for which she cooked. She was more than the woman he’d been fucking. Gosia told me he loved her. I remember she said this and I felt she was saying it to try to hurt me, to put me in my place. As a second wife herself, she wanted the first wives and first daughters to know they were replaceable. It wasn’t until much later that I realized she had a more noble motive.
This other woman was a beauty, even more beautiful than your mother. Black hair, blue eyes, blood-red lips, metronome breasts. And much younger. He drove to her apartment in the middle of the night. This young beauty had something to tell him. She was pregnant. She said her child would not be a bastard, living above an oven.
