The Slide: A Novel (29 page)

I couldn’t say it.
Help.

Back in the elevator, I leaned forward on the edge of my plastic so my elbows rested on my thighs. As promised, the descent went faster than the climb.

It was all fraud. Once the day’s deliveries were complete, I stood in the warehouse among the great racks of bottles. I moved slowly down the aisles, passing from the walls of turquoise caps into a corridor of red-capped Purifieds. I turned a corner and was flanked by walls of deep-blue caps, the Premiums. The nature of the business all but guaranteed fraud. Water, but not
just water
. This was special water, wink nudge wink, trust us.

I left the racks and moved to the bottling machine. The conveyors were still, the whole thing silent and charged with potential. At the end of the belt were three boxes, each open, containing rubberized caps. I sunk my hand into the red caps and heard the voices of drivers in the break room, grumbling over paperwork.

A big part of this enterprise was psychological. The sweaty man at the door with a bottle on his shoulder. The service, the acts, delivery and removal, the peace of mind. The extra charge for Premium over Natural Spring, the mollifying of some basic yearning to have the best. The Summer Special, three bottles of your choice.
Choice.

I opened the door to the break room and stood against the wall. Various sorts of bullshit flew about the room, equal parts blame and excuse. As soon as Dennis noticed me he began ignoring me, laughing at something, then topping it with his own tale or joke.

“It’s all the same water.”

A few of them turned to look at me, but only for the splittest of seconds. Dennis glanced in my direction and I took a couple steps toward him, though I’m not sure what I had in mind.

“Right?”

I hadn’t planned on yelling. More heads turned. Fine. The problem here wasn’t about the water lie but that we all pretended it wasn’t a lie. Why not just admit the whole thing? Instead of lying to them, lying to ourselves; meanwhile, Freddy watching everything, spotting my lies from above. I saw Dennis get up from his chair. My voice came out loud and shrill.

“No reason to pretend, is there? I’m not wearing a wire. I’m one of you. But let’s just toss it onto the table and look at it. The truth, I mean. The water’s all the same.”

“Alright. You’re done,” Dennis said, standing.

His hand latched on to my arm and dragged me from the break room into the main office, which by now was deserted. I realized for the first time that I could be in some danger. He kept pushing until we were at the office door, which he unlatched and opened before shoving me through. He followed me outside. I prepared to defend myself, then saw nothing but dull ambivalence in his face.

“You’re fired, don’t come back, get the hell home and explain this to your daddy. I bet you he’s surprised you made it this long.”

He walked back into the office and latched the door behind him. What he’d gotten totally wrong was that
this was hardly
a blip on the radar of shit that would surprise my father
. I looked to the sun overhead, burning through haze. Christ, but I was thirsty.

My mother didn’t ask why I wasn’t at work. After breakfast, I stayed at the counter and read the entire local newspaper from front to back, something I’d never done. My mother moved about the house with a sense of purpose I envied terribly. I went to sit in the rarely used sunroom and found several pieces of luggage on the floor. I nudged one with my foot and it was heavy and full. I could hear Carla moving about the house, going from the kitchen to the basement, then to sit in Richard’s office. I moved to the kitchen and tried to listen to her phone conversation but couldn’t make it out. By the time I thought to sit on the living-room couch, she had finished talking and begun watering the houseplants. When she was finished with that, she came and stood between me and television.

“How are you for clothing, son?”

“I could probably use some socks.”

She handed me the keys and I backed us out of the driveway. I concentrated on traffic, braked early, and accelerated gradually. We parked in a huge concrete structure and took a colored flyer on our way to remind us which level. The walking bridge set us at roughly the midsection on the Galleria’s top floor, next to Brookstone. Above us, latticework of glass and painted steel gave the false impression of natural lighting. My mother and I began walking.

Even now, years since this place had been the center of my social universe, a residual unease plagued this visit with my mother, a violation of its adolescent sanctity. It felt crowded for a weekday afternoon, full of laughing families and pods of cool teenagers. The marble floor was polished to a sheen only slightly less vibrant than the store windows. I sped to walk at my mother’s side, proving to us both that I wasn’t ashamed to be with her. We passed Eddie Bauer, then the Gap, and she asked if I needed any sweaters. She stopped walking before I could answer.

“One hundred degrees outside and I’m asking about sweaters. How completely silly.”

When we made it to the mall’s end, an escalator took us down a level. On the ground floor now, we walked in silence, pace determined. There was a lot of mall to cover. We walked among pairs of women pushing baby strollers, wearing colorful shoes and form-fitting workout fabric.

“How come no outreach to the poor and elderly today?”

“The program directors ask us not to volunteer more than twice a week. They have concerns about people getting too attached.”

“Them attached or you attached?”

“Oh. I think it works both ways,” she said. “Doesn’t it?”

Soon we saw the atrium, a great yawning chasm. The escalators were here to help, to make clear the appropriate movement. We rode down to the food court.

“Are you hungry?” she asked.

“Not really. But should we eat? I feel like we’re here for a reason. Maybe you’re hungry?”

“I could use a coffee.”

We checked what movies were playing, then took another escalator back to the first floor. Falling back a step, I saw something in my mother’s shoulders. There, in the way her arms pinned the purse to her side. I had up until now thought of it as weariness, lack of full satisfaction. But this was more active than that, real
sadness
. Blocking out what I could of the consumer chatter around us, I focused on her feet and heard it in each shuffle and pat of her steps. Sadness; my mother besotted by sadness. And yet moving nonetheless, lugging her body like some burden, her burden like some natural part of her body. She had adapted to the sadness and made a series of adjustments to accommodate its presence. Over time. Her movement through the house was quick and purposeful; it was difficult to detect sadness among scurry.

At the central fountain, children tossed coins into reflective water, then held greedy little palms out to parents for more. I followed my mother to the fountain’s edge. Watching her sit, I was reluctant to stop moving, fearful of the sheer massiveness of this place overtaking us.

“Sit for a minute, son. I’m beat.”

I did. She reached into her purse and pulled out a small bundle of bills.

“Take this, please.”

“Five hundred dollars is bit much to throw in a fountain.”

“I wish I could give you more,” she said. “I’m not sure how much money I have. It’s the strangest thing, to walk through the house and wonder what belongs to me. It’s like a totally new set of things. Some of the furniture I had to talk him into buying. But so much is his. The computer. I mean, if we’re being literal here, everything is his. Money. I’ve never thought so much about ownership before. What can I say is mine? My car? The washer and dryer? The garden is mine, of course, but you can’t move that. The sunroom. Your father never wanted the sunroom. Potter, take the money.”

“I really don’t want any more money right now.”

I watched her fold and unfold the bills, creasing and then rolling them and unrolling and folding the bills into halves. Not even close enough to pay off Edsel.

“Please. Take it from me.”

I did. I could hold on to it and use it for an emergency motel room in some distant but drivable location, some Floridian beachfront peach stucco demilitarized zone. I looked at my mother’s profile, the bone of her nose. She blinked but was untroubled by the attention I was paying her.

“When did you know? Was it a moment after an event? Some night you woke up and knew? Or was it more like a slow rolling wave?”

“I can’t say, son.”

“Start with a time. Please, serious. This is a reasonable and fair question. When did you know you were unhappy and that the only way to change any of it was to leave?”

I waited.

I said, “Alright, then. But can you describe the other side? For all the years? Something made you stay. A force. What was the force? Describe the force. Start with an adjective.”

“Okay, Potter. Okay.”

My mother stared at the floor and I put the money into my pocket. She reached one hand into the fountain and cupped some water she brought back to her lap. She rubbed her hands clean while drops fell onto her thighs and the marble floor beneath.

“There are some things, and I believe this, that are too big to understand. I don’t mean God or the universe or those. But things that happen here on earth. And Potter, what’s mind-boggling, truly miraculous if you stop and consider, is that these things, these trials, are happening all the time, every day all day long they’re happening to
normal people,
and they talk about them, we get together and talk and cry, thank God there are people who listen, and slowly, gradually, they get better. The trials turn into memories. And we make progress and go forward. But nothing ever, ever goes away completely.” She turned to face me. “Do you remember what I used to sing?
No-thing goes, a-way all
the way
.”

I looked away. A group of teenage girls passed in front of us, wearing tiny little clothes and squealing into their cell phones.

“The other day when you mentioned Freddy, it made me realize how long it’s been since we talked about him. He was a wonderful, caring little boy, and sometimes I think how unfair it is that you never got to know him. He would kiss your head. He loved you. He’d kiss you and sing to you. We sang together. Your father couldn’t believe how much Freddy loved you. We weren’t sure how he was going to react to a little brother. You worry about that. And after the accident, Potter, in a lot of ways your father and I grew closer. My God, how much we doted on you and loved you. How badly we wanted you to have a brother or sister. Do you know that we tried? We did for a while.”

Again she paused, and the din of the mall carried on with one fewer instrument. I shut my eyes and waited.

“How long ago? When? I could say six months or I could say twenty years. How much easier it would all be, yes, I want this, I wish I could point and say
here.
Your father is honest, and he is fair, and kind, and he loves you so much that still to this day he’ll tell me, he’ll turn to me in bed and say how much he loves you. Like something new he just discovered. We laugh about it. All these years. He is a good man, Potter.”

I kept my eyes closed and let her voice come and go.

“We got through it, we did. Jesus, I remember, we cried all the time, we spent entire nights crying together. Your father grew that awful beard, and we fought and cried. He sang to you all the time, your father. He filled in for me and Freddy. And one night I remember standing there changing you, and we were both perfectly quiet. You were watching me. And I remember your father saying something behind me, and I hadn’t known he was in the room. I asked him to repeat it. And he said it again and I started crying and thanked him. He came over and we hugged, and I swear, Potter, you started laughing, you laughed at us there on your back. And a month later we were out of the apartment and into our house, and we were healing, and you were babbling your little sounds.”

“What did he say?”

Somewhere to our right a child was crying.

“That he forgave me,” she said. “But why in the world would he have to say that, Potter? And why ever would I thank him for it?”

We couldn’t risk sitting anymore. I stood and she must have understood, because she stood too, and picked up her purse, and smiled a tiny smile and began walking.

She moved quickly. We reached the end of the first floor and took an escalator back up, where we waded through another stream of people traveling in both directions, clutching handled paper bags that hung to their knees. I struggled to remain at her side. Then we were standing outside Brookstone, the store where I’d bought every Father’s Day gift I could remember, back where we’d begun.

“I’m going to get that coffee,” she said.

“You should. If you want coffee, then definitely.”

“I think I will.”

She moved forward slowly with the line. Sandwiched between more teenage girls and two large men. Was this how she looked when I didn’t see her? This was my
mother,
Carla Mays who was once Carla Gingerich, just a child herself who’d grown to a mother and wife whose doubt had eventually crystallized into something absolute, something fist-sized and beyond. She was
sad
. But what could I offer? I was her son. I could surround her with my forearms and callused hands. Her grown son. The physical act of embrace as some base therapy, wordless and meaningful, the absolute least I could give.