Boy Still Missing (6 page)

No more pot, I thought. “I’m ready,” I said.

Slowly she lifted her shirt. Her skin was creamy and white beneath. Her stomach fatter than I had imagined. I thought of the hard belly my father had made in the kitchen a few hours ago. Now the gesture seemed funny after all, and I laughed. Edie ignored the sound and kept pulling the material up, stopping before her breasts. “Why are you stopping?” I asked.

“What do you mean?” she said. “This is what I wanted to show you.”

“Your stomach,” I said, trying to sound appreciative. “It’s beautiful.”

“Dominick,” she said and pulled my hand toward her. Sparks ran between us. She pressed my palm and fingers against her belly. “I’m pregnant.”

The sponge in my brain squeezed itself out and left me suddenly sober. My hand yanked back on its own. That
SHARON TATE MURDERED
headline popped into my head for a split second, then vanished. “Pregnant?” I said.

“Pregnant,” she repeated.

All at once it came to me in one of those “boy meets girl” kind of stories. Only mine went like this: Woman has affair with man and gets knocked up. Man already has a wife, and a kid to boot. Man beats the shit out of her. Woman picks herself up and contacts man’s kid. Here the story fell apart. Woman wants kid to…to what exactly?

“Why are you telling me this?” I asked, not caring how my voice came out. Shallow and quivering. Young and confused. Fucked up all the way.

“I told you. I don’t have anyone else.”

“So get a shrink,” I said.

Edie rolled the shirt back over her belly. Five months, I guessed. Maybe a hundred. I had no fucking clue when it came to this baby shit. “Why don’t you get rid of it?” I said.

“I’m keeping the baby,” she told me. “People in this town think I’m a whore anyway. So now they’ll have their proof. But I’ll have my child.”

I snuffed the joint out in the fish’s mouth. I thought the sucker looked happy. “So why do you need me?”

“Forget it,” Edie said. Her eyes were moist and mapped with tiny red veins. The smoke. Or maybe tears.

I let out a huff. “This just isn’t what I expected.”

“I understand,” Edie said, rubbing her stomach.

But I don’t think she truly did. She had no idea I wanted to kiss her again. Maybe even more. There was no use bringing that up now. My father had won after all. “So what can I do for you?”

“I need you to talk to your father for me,” she said.

“And tell him what?”

“Tell him I need his help,” she said. “Financial support.”

I laughed. “If you remember, he quit his job working for you. He doesn’t have a dime. And you’ve got this big house. Your business.”

“The business is dead,” she said. “He helped piss away every last penny.”

I thought of those bills the color of baby clothes.
FINAL NOTICE. FINAL NOTICE. FINAL NOTICE
. “You’ve got your house,” I said.

“I can’t pay the mortgage anymore, and my ex-husband refuses to lend me money. Listen, if you could just talk to him. Explain my situation. I need some help getting back on my feet. Believe me, I’d rather get a bank loan than beg from that bastard. But the bank would laugh me right out of the building.”

I thought of my mother’s money, hidden somewhere in case of an emergency. No doubt she would keep her fifties and hundreds at the bottom of one of her music boxes—a plastic ballerina twirling every time my mother made her deposit. I thought of the half brother I already had living on Bleecker Street. If I helped Edie, I would know this brother or sister. I wouldn’t have to wonder. My mind flip-flopped like that fish come to life on dry land: I could lend her some dough for a bit and she could pay me back down the road without my mother knowing.

No, I couldn’t.

Yes, I could.

I couldn’t. I could.

I couldn’t.

Just then Edie reached her hand up and touched the dried slit of her wound. She rubbed gently with her pinkie and naked ring finger. I pictured all five of my father’s fingers curled into a tight fist, swinging into her soft face. I hated him for doing that to her.

“I could—” I blurted as the “couldn’t” faded to black.

“Talk to your dad?” Edie said.

“No. I could lend you some money.”

“Dominick,” she said. “That’s very sweet. But I need real help. A lot of money.”

I wondered how much I could get away with. After all, my mother would never really use it. “Listen,” I said, figuring the math would come later. “We both know my father won’t give you anything. So let me loan you some cash for a while. You’ll be surprised at what I can come up with.”

The phone rang—sharp and unfamiliar. Leon. Suddenly our plan seemed as crazy as one of my mother’s. I didn’t want him to know about this part of my life anymore. Edie wasn’t a
Penthouse
girl or
Hustler
whore. She was choiceless and sad, like so many other real-life women seemed to be. I wanted to let the phone ring and ring. But Edie went to the kitchen where I could see her and answered. “Dominick Pindle?” she said like a question, eyeing me from the doorway. Her free hand pressed to her cheek.

A faraway voice in my head said,
He’s not here. He is riding his bike in the parking lot behind the Doghouse. He is home eating canned tomato soup in front of the tube with his mother.
I looked at Edie and shook my head no. I slid my index and middle fingers across my throat in the way that means “cut.” It looked like I was slashing the skin there, the breathing tube beneath. Again and again I slashed. Shook my head no.

“You must have the wrong number,” Edie said. “There’s no one here by that name.”

When she hung up, I looked at her—bruises, belly, and all. “If I get you the money,” I told her, my voice angled and serious, “it’s just between you and me.”

T
he radiator broke in our apartment, and my mother took to wearing her coat all day and night—sometimes even to bed. Walking around the kitchen, covered up in an ankle-length black wool number, she looked like the angel of death. Chalky white face. Hard, chapped lips that peeled and shed layers like two miniature snakes. The soles of her white socks gone gray because she’d been wearing
them so long. “You’re giving me the creeps,” I told her as she steadied a teakettle over her mug and poured. Water funneled down in a great steamy release. I thought of that kids’ rhyme:

This is my handle.

This is my spout.

Tip me over and pour me out.

I wondered if someday soon I would sing that song to Edie’s baby.

“It’s freezing in here,” my mother said. “I need to cover up.”

She was right about the cold. Outside our kitchen window, crooked fingers of ice reflected the blue light of the moon, frozen right down to the sill like igloo prison bars. I made an O with my mouth and forced a burst of air from my lungs. My breath was a tissuey cloud before me, and then it vanished. As dishonest as I had been since I made the money deal with Edie two months ago, I half expected to breathe fire. Horns and a pitchfork—that was me. “Why don’t you call the landlord for once, instead of Marnie?”

“I did call,” she said quietly. “He’s coming next Monday.”

“He told you that weeks ago.”

“Dominick,” my mother said, gathering her mug and plate of jelly-covered Ritz crackers. “I’ll get it fixed.”

I decided to lay off for a while, since she seemed on the brink of a nervous breakdown. My father’s new job shipping Christmas trees south had kept him away from home all through the holidays. Now that it was January, he claimed to be delivering the nonsalables to a lumberyard outside Chicago. You’d think my mother would’ve been happy for the break. I was. But his long absence had practically totaled her. Watery-eyed and runny-nosed, she moved around the frigid, metallic air of our apartment almost looking for a reason to cry. The brown scabs of grease that couldn’t be scoured from the stovetop. The clogged toilet that gasped and burped as she plunged away. Instead of surrendering the scouring pad or plunger, my mother absently carried
her failed weapons around the apartment after her battles. Her eyes poured tears down her face until eventually she fled to her room to call Marnie.

“We should move to Acapulco or someplace warm,” I said into the frozen air, hoping it would ease things between us. After all, I needed to make nice if I hoped to get into her bedroom tonight and pull off one of my financial transactions before sneaking over to Edie’s.

“Funny you should mention faraway places,” my mother told me. “Because I’m thinking about taking a little trip.”

That same old she’s-going-to-leave-you feeling blistered inside me and spread like poison. Here I was taking care of her while she went to pieces over my father, and she was secretly planning a trip without me. I had my own secret, I reminded myself. I had Edie. “Good for you,” I said. “Are you going to visit Truman?”

My mother shook her head no at his name. “Somewhere different this time. If your father can disappear, why can’t I take off for a week or two?”

I felt a last bit of blistering but fought it off. Her words were bold, but the way she spoke—tight-lipped, gazing at me through the genie-smoke of steam that rose from her mug—left me feeling like she wanted my approval. “Let me guess,” I said. “New Mexico?”

“Nothing’s definite. But I’ve already talked to Marnie about moving in while I’m gone.”

No. Fucking. Way. I wasn’t going to blow this vacation eating Kraft Macaroni and Cheese and watching monster movies every night the way Marnie liked to do. Whenever any of her pets died—which was often because she lived near Route 67 but couldn’t stand the thought of keeping an animal trapped inside or tied to a chain—Marnie holed up at our place, since her apartment felt lonely after the loss. Last year she was dealt what she called a “double blow” when a truck hit her two dogs, Fred and Ginger. She spent a whole week on our couch, hogging the television and eating cheese noodles to ease her pain. The year before that, her cat Milky had been nailed on the highway, too, and we had to go through the same pathetic routine.

“I don’t need her to change my diapers,” I said. “Just tell the old gal to stop by once in a while to make sure I haven’t frozen to death.”

My mother stared at me with that vacant, dam-about-to-burst look she sported all the time since my father had hit the road. Her lips pinched and twisted up tight, like the knot of a balloon. I made a rigor mortis face, tightening the skin on my neck and making giant moons out of my eyes, trying to get her to laugh. No such luck.

“We’ll talk about it later,” she said, her bruise-colored jelly wiggling atop her crackers. “I’m going to my room to call Marnie.”

“Wait.” This was my last chance. I hopped up from the chair where I sat at the table. “Your room is the coldest one in the whole apartment. Why don’t you call from the kitchen?”

“Don’t you want the kitchen?” she asked.

“I’m going to hang out in my room, then head down to Leon’s to warm up later.”

My mother considered the plan a moment, picked up the phone, and settled in at the table. “It sure is drafty in there,” she said, dialing.

On my way down the hall I listened to the steady click-click-click of the rotary wheeling its way back to zero. I wondered how anyone could possibly have that much to say to Marnie and why it was always so urgent. That’s what bothered me most about my mother: Marnie and my father always came first. “I’m bleeding to death,” I might say. And my mother would tell me, “Hold on until I call Marnie.” Or “That’s how I feel whenever your father disappears.” I let those scenarios bounce around my brain until a pissed-off feeling took hold. A fat dose of anger always made these cash withdrawals easier. Even though I knew Edie was going to pay me back, I felt guilty sometimes. But the way I saw it, Edie had been fucked over by my father even worse than my mother had been.

I waited around the corner for the right moment, listening to scraps of her conversation.

“I told Dominick I’m going away,” she said. “I’ve got to call about the ticket and make this final.”

Her voice was firm and serious, not the anticipating squeal of someone leaving for vacation. It made me wonder if Truman was involved in
this after all. I told myself to forget it. To think of Edie instead. She wasn’t going anywhere. With a stretch of my neck I could see my mother at the kitchen table. She chewed an orange cracker and wrapped the phone wire around her shoulders and arms.

Tighter and tighter.

“You tried your best,” my mother told Marnie after a long silence.

I was about to walk across the hall when she turned my way. I stepped back and waited.

“It’s a hospital,” she said. “Trust me. People have asked that question before.”

I peeked again. This time she was facing the kitchen window.

All those icicles.

Figuring she was deep into another segment of Marnie’s bingo hell, I made my move. The door opened in a quiet hush, and I closed it right behind me.

“She’s not going to tell anyone. Don’t worry,” my mother said, carrying on.

A thin sliver of light from a streetlamp outside made its way through a crack in the shade, casting a dark shadow on the wall. The red-flowered sheets on her bed were twisted and tangled, her pillows were two dead lumps in the middle of her mattress. A draft of cold air rushed through the room, practically numbing my skin. Proof it really was cold in here, something I hadn’t been quite sure of when I said it.

I peeled back the rug where I had been skimming money for the last two months. Ever since the radiator broke, most of the usual smells of our apartment—canned food, cooked beef, furniture polish—had been muted. But beneath the rug the musty earth scent was as strong as ever. I grabbed three stiff hundred-dollar bills and shoved them into the pocket of my sweatshirt. “Just a few Bennies,” I said under my breath, thinking it sounded cool.

Here’s how it worked: I always left the top bills in the stack untouched. In place of what I took, I stuck one-dollar bills or clipped coupons—an outlaw trick I had seen on
Adam-12.
I kept track of how much I had taken but never counted what was left. Knowing how close I
was to zero would have been a total brain fuck. Besides, Edie had caught up on most of her bills and was making money stuffing envelopes and selling off her old furniture. She promised to start paying back the whole shebang in a few more weeks.

My mother would never even know it was gone.

I let the rug flap back into place like a lip pulled and let go. Even though I should have snuck out right away, I couldn’t help reaching under the bed and taking out that picture of the man I knew was Truman’s father. I didn’t know what I expected to see there in the shot I had looked at a thousand times before. I stared down at the dark eyes, the tuft of black hair hanging over his forehead. I wondered if he looked anything like Truman. Someday soon, I kept telling myself, I was going to meet my brother. For the time being, I tucked the picture back into the box beneath my mother’s bed and hightailed it out of there.

In the kitchen my mother had absently twisted the cord up to her neck. “I’ll be at Leon’s,” I said, throwing on my bulky winter coat.

She kept talking to Marnie but waved good-bye.

Outside, it was practically tundra weather. One of those cold, cold nights that made my shoulders automatically scrunch to my neck in a way that would leave me stiff and sore later. “Colder than a witch’s tit,” my father would say. Whatever that meant. The ride to Edie’s would be a bitch on my bicycle, but I kicked back the kickstand anyway. I was about to break into a fast pedal onto Dwight Avenue when I spotted Leon’s mother across the parking lot. She fidgeted with her cigarette lighter and car keys at the same time—back and forth, not getting her cigarette lit or the door to her flinty Datsun unlocked.

“Hey, Leila,” I called out over the wind. She liked it when people referred to her by her first name. Even Leon.

“How you doing, Dominick?” she said, finally getting her cigarette to burn. The red eye flashed at me when she puffed. “Where you off to?”

“Cumby’s Mart to pick up food,” I said. “Then to a friend’s.”

“You’ll freeze on that shitty little bike. Get in the car and I’ll drop you.”

It turned out Leila was headed to the store anyway—and probably
then to the packy, though she didn’t mention that part. Riding in the car alongside her, glancing at her big-jawed face and don’t-fuck-with-me stare, made me think of Leon. I hadn’t been down to see him in at least a month. Ever since I had been hanging out with Edie, Leon’s stories seemed predictable. A girl who blew him at the quarry. Some lady’s bush he spied through a window. The cashier at Svelletski’s who wanted him to lick her crotch clean. Who needed to listen to that crap when I had Edie all to myself? Maybe she wasn’t my girlfriend, but the way I took care of her made me feel like we had something.

The first time I went to Edie’s house with the money, I was smothered by my own nervousness. It felt like a date, or not a date exactly but like something official and adult was happening between us. Edie made dinner—two chicken pot pies from a box because she said she had no clue how to cook anything real. I loved the burning-hot crusts and mushy insides, so her lack of culinary talent was fine with me. As we sat in the silence of her house, I tried my best to make real conversation, like something you might hear on a TV date. I asked her where she was born and she told me, “Santa Monica, California.” I asked her what she did for fun and she said, “I have dinner with you.” Finally, when I asked what her sign was, Edie reached across the table and stroked my forearm. My sweatshirt sleeves were pulled up and my arms were the one place on my body where I had a lot of hair besides my head, so I didn’t feel shy. “Dominick,” she said, “you don’t have to be so formal. It’s me, remember. I feel like we’ve been through a whole lifetime together already.” Technically it was only our third time together, but I knew exactly what she meant. Our history already seemed to add up to something solid: the night we met, the kiss in her basement, her letter in my mailbox, the hug she gave me when we saw each other again, her bruised face, the baby, the money. The details of our relationship left me feeling like our lives had always been webbed together. So I stopped asking my TV-date questions and settled into normal conversation.

We talked about a lot of things, but what I remembered most was this: She told me that for as long as she could remember, she had been a lonely person. She was an only child, but her mother had miscarried a
baby boy the year before Edie was born. Sometimes she thought that if that boy was alive, if he weren’t missing from her life, she wouldn’t feel so alone. I opened my mouth to tell her about Truman, about the way I felt when my mother talked about starting a new life, but something made me stop. I decided not to work my parents into the discussion, since that could lead down roads I wasn’t interested in traveling. I told Edie I understood how she felt, since I was an only child, too. We both stayed silent for a moment after that, and I wondered if she was thinking what I was: We had each other now.

After dinner Edie walked me to the door, stroked my hair with her hand, and wrapped her arms around me. A part of me wanted to turn my lips to her, to kiss her again, but her swelled belly and the baby inside came between us. “Thank you for the money,” she said. “Will you be back next week?”

“Yes,” I told her. “I will.”

And I came back until we were up to a three-night-a-week routine. I lent her the cash in dribs and drabs so I had a reason to keep visiting. Edie didn’t seem to mind the setup. On my way over I’d stop and pick up a bag of groceries that I pedaled on my bike. Eggos. Frozen dinners. Fish sticks. After a while we skipped the dinner table and shared our meals on her pillowy peach bed, watching
Marcus Welby
or
The Flip Wilson Show
. During commercials she told me about her doctor’s visits, her plan to sell Stanley’s dusty furniture and maybe rent out some of the rooms in the place when she was back on her feet. Leon had his dog-in-heat life, my mother had Marnie and her mystery vacation, and my father no doubt had a new girlfriend somewhere, but I had my nights with Edie.