Dane stared down and saw his hands were scuffed and bleeding, the knees of his pants dirty. He must've fallen a couple of times in the hospital parking lot, but he couldn't remember. His scars were singing.
Grandma Lucia's house, which for years had suffered the presence of the dying woman, now expressed relief. The place looked like it was waiting for loud Italian music, parties. The wide hardwood floors where his parents had danced Christmas mornings when he was a child appeared freshly polished.
The photos on the shelves above the TV shifted at the edge of his vision. Those faces darkening with intent. The names he couldn't pronounce had a power over him, already inside his veins. The face of his mother, once out in front, now hid behind other angry women. Blurred and growing more clouded even as he watched.
Dane went to his room, and when he looked up, his dead father was walking across the floor. He sat on the bed.
There were times you wanted to talk to ghosts and times you didn't. Dane wasn't sure what he wanted now. He waited for his dad to speak. Maybe the death of Dane's mother had somehow called the man up, brought him home.
A cold knot of tension throbbed in Dane's belly. Part anxiety but mostly expectation, thinking that perhaps it was finally time to learn the lessons of his father. Answers might be revealed, if his old man could be handled properly. His father might set him on a course he could understand.
A dying breeze clawed at the window over the desk. Leaves clung to the battered screen and skittered across the broken bricks outside. Odd to feel himself tugged in this fashion, knowing his father was buried even while the man sat on the mattress behind him.
You could survive almost any injury so long as you left one version of yourself behind and allowed a different one to continue.
Dane started a slow turning he would never completely finish.
His father had been dead for a little less than six months. Dane had found him down the block, parked in front of the Gothic gates at the mouth of the cemetery with his brains blown out, the gun still in his hand.
The papers gave ambiguous hints about corruption, making it seem like he had to go on the take to cover rising health-care costs for his terminally ill wife. Once he'd been caught, he'd killed himself out of shame. It sounded believable and almost romantic. Tragic without any of the usual saccharine.
The man's photo was on the news every night, not looking tough at all. Sort of soft actually, smiling a bit self- consciously.
Anywhere else in the country it might've been true, but not in Brooklyn. This was the town that had perfected
Brooklyn cops never ate their pistols over something like possible corruption. It would be like a bus driver drowning himself because he didn't like making left turns.
As Dane shifted in his seat he saw his old man still seated in the center of the bed, waiting for something no one with a heartbeat could name. Dane couldn't see the gunshot wound in the man's temple from this angle, but it would be there. It had to be. It was as sharp in his imagination as if he'd been shot in the head himself.
“Is she there yet?” Dane asked. “Where are you? Is that purgatory? Is there anything I can do to help?”
For some reason, it felt as if it would take time for his mother and father to find each other. Both of them so gloomy and always staring at walls.
Dad didn't answer.
“Who did it to you?”
An enduring silence broken only by the breeze skirting past outside, the soft scrabbling clatter of pigeons on the roof.
Angling his chin, Dane was unable to meet the man's eyes, which were passionate and alive. His father appeared to be searching for something to say. He opened his mouth and closed it again. He held his hands up in a helpless gesture, like a baby trying to reach for an object beyond his grasp.
His father gave a sickly grin and lay back on the bed. It had been the bed he'd slept in as a boy.
“At least try to talk, Dad. Make an effort. Can't you even do that?”
The window frame vibrated in the staccato breeze. It felt like a ploy to get Dane to turn away from his father for an instant, giving the dead enough time to slip away unseen. He wouldn't fall for it. He touched the back of his head and his scars writhed, the metal plates hot to the touch. When he pulled his hand away his fingers were covered with blood.
He stared at his father lying there, the man looking up at the ceiling as if remembering what it had once been like to be alive in this room, not so different from Dane himself.
Sweat dripped through his hair and soaked into his shirt collar. Surrounded by death and connected to the dead, but not quite there yet. Feeling the weight of murder in the dirt and concrete of the neighborhood. Embarrassed by his own excitement, at this moment, of being alive.
“Find Mom, if you can. And next time, try harder to talk to me.”
Dane allowed himself to look away, and when he glanced back, Dad was gone.
There were important words waiting for him. Solutions that his father was unable or unwilling to give to him. Maybe only for the time being or maybe forever.
Dane was certain he would find his father's murderer eventually, in the angry years laid out before him like the rutted paths that threaded through Headstone City. There was time.
Grandma Lucia walked in, her pocketbook chiming, a plastic container full of pennies rattling, and said, “
THIRTEEN
Glory Bishop didn't tell him the movie was premiering in Bridgehampton, or that she expected him to drive the limo. He walked into Olympic ready to ask for the day off, and there it was on the sheet. Her address.
Fran's voice held a sharpness that he'd never even heard in the can. “She says you can wear that same suit again, but you need a better tie.” Really letting her disdain rule her face, but throwing her whole body into it. Hips thrusting, her chin right in his face. She seemed to have more muscles in her top lip than anybody he'd ever met before. No matter how much a guy hated you, he couldn't let you know about it as well as a woman could. “She picked one out for you. She thinks burgundy is your color.”
You did what you could to hide what you were thinking, but sometimes it still slipped out. “Shit.”
“So, Miss Super Titties has got herself a new pet to play with. If you're lucky, maybe she'll pick you out a nice diamond-studded collar. I guess the stink of prison on you must remind her of her husband.”
“Maybe she just likes my eyes.”
“Yeah? But not enough so she lets you ride in back with her though, eh?”
Dane killed a few hours driving his patterns around Brooklyn, down Rockaway Parkway and around the circle to a broad cobblestone pier sticking into Jamaica Bay. The cold wind came off the water and made him think of Maria Monticelli when they were teenagers, and how he'd come down here with a couple of six-packs and pine for her. She'd talk about how she wanted to act on the New York stage and eventually make it to Hollywood. He'd listen and imagine her on the screen, that face sixty feet high and looming over him, a smile so much larger than himself he could waft away on her lips.
Your thoughts could break off one of your own ribs and jam it into your heart. He went home, changed into his suit, but didn't bother with a tie.
Dane took the 59th Street Bridge into Manhattan again, but drove a little faster than usual, like he might actually be on a date. If he thought about it too much, the slow surging anxiety would start tightening his belly, so he let it go.
This time he pulled up in front of her building and parked in front. The doorman mashed his lips but must've
