There is a mattress store that, twenty some years ago, was not that. In that time long past it was a candy store, with an old woman pulling sweet confections in the window. A sight impossible for any passing child to not fix on. A sight my sister gazed at, big brother at her side, trying to pull her on.
I see a toy store, now a nail salon. A burger joint where one now would find souvlaki and hummus on the menu instead of the giant fries served in a box, the mound of salty golden potatoes a treat our parents often treated Katie and me to on our way home from our aunt and uncle’s house.
It is not a trip down memory lane I have steered myself. The sights and recollections are by happenstance only. There is no way to avoid them on this route.
This route which is taking me home.
Chapter Seven
What Is Real
Smoke is curling from the chimney as I pull into the driveway. A thin grey ribbon twisting toward the morning sky. I step from my car and look at the house, hardly different from those to the left or the right. Two simple stories wrapped in white clapboard. Beds of flowers muted for the season. A garage set back from the street. And beyond it, just visible in the back yard, a snippet of my childhood. Of our childhood.
I walk away from my car. But I do not go to the front door, just a few steps distant past the slumbering geraniums. Instead I move up the driveway and stop between the house and the single-car garage, my gaze playing over the object which has drawn me here. A collection of metal that has been bent and bolted into a structure from which strips of two old tires are suspended on chains. It is a swing set not bought in a box and assembled from instructions, but one built by my father’s hand for his two children when they were too young to understand how this weekend project was typical of his devotion to them.
How many hours did I swing on it? How many summer days did Katie and I race out the back door to see who could go the fastest, the highest? Each of us leaning back on the downswing, my sister stretched out so far that her hair would often drag across the trampled grass where ground and swing were closest. I can still see her pumping furiously to beat me in our contest, the winner of which was always the first whose feet could brush the lowest branches of the maple tree just beyond.
It sits silent now, the makeshift seats only moving when a breeze rushes through the back yard. The once pristine frame, striped white and red by my father every spring when the weather edged from bluster to balmy, is now smudged with gritty patches of rust, its colors fading with the passing of each year. He has not put paintbrush to the play structure since Katie died, though it is not an act of omission due to grief. For years after either my sister or I even put our bottoms to those old tire swing seats, my father kept the metal lovingly colored. This he did at my mother’s insistence so that the object that had brought Katie and me so much joy would exist without change when she brought grandchildren to my parents’ house for summer barbecues, or Easter egg hunts, or simply because they wanted to see their grandparents.
But there would be no grandchildren after the ninth day of May five years ago.
As much as my parents were pleased with my decision to enter the seminary on my way to becoming a priest, I think my mother would have been an iota more joyful had I chosen a more conventional life. One where I would have brought children into this world to be loved and doted upon by my parents.
‘You love your children because you have to,’ my mother would observe when learning that a friend had been blessed with a new grandchild. ‘You love their children because you
get
to
.
’
On the face of it her statement would seem to trivialize what she felt for my sister and me. Would seem to brand it an obligation. But I knew what she meant. It was her way of expressing how innate, how natural the love of one’s own child is. And how wonderful it would be to add upon that the adoration of the next generation. Love doubled on itself.
“Michael.” It is my father’s voice. Calling softly out to me from the back stoop. For a moment I say nothing, just watch as he comes down the few steps and walks toward me, slight and stoic, the sweep and scope of his life aptly tagged by the same words I have chosen to describe him.
Gus Jerome. Wary of want. Satisfied with those things in life that fill needs, not desires. A police officer for thirty-five years, he never rose in the ranks, though he easily could have. Never traded his beat on Chicago’s north side for street clothes and a detective’s shield. My mother’s brother Calvin had pressed him once at a Thanksgiving gathering at our house as to why he wasn’t taking the sergeant’s exam. Why he was not making
any
attempt to advance in the department. I was only nine at the time of that exchange, but I can still recall in detail my father’s quiet, simple reply after hardly a moment’s consideration. His gesture to the modest living room in which he stood, its walls adorned with photos of his family. ‘What more could I want?’ he told my uncle, and from that moment on I understood my father. His embrace of contentment.
“You come for that door?” he asks as he reaches me, eyeing me with a hint of queer wonder.
The storm door. For the lake house. A week ago he had asked me to install it on my next trip up. It is not why I have come, but then how would I explain why I am here? I know no more why I have come to my parents’ house than why I ventured to the place where Katie rests. Am I seeking something tangible, or just nearness as I stumble through an unsought reality?
“No,” I say, and he puzzles at me. I can no more tell him of what I learned last night than I could another. His closeness to me, to what happened to Katie, grants him no special privilege. But he can not be fully divested of the events which transpired. “Luke Benz was shot last night.”
My father steps fully out onto the stoop, the storm door creaking shut behind.
“He’s going to be okay,” I explain. “It looked worse than it was.”
He absorbs that and nods, quietly grateful. “I’ll give Dave a call later. He’s probably out of his—”
“They got the guy,” I say, cutting my father off. He puzzles at my abruptness. My gaze fixes hard on him, all that I am within seeming to wish that what I am truly speaking of would magically be made clear to him. I am not talking of Luke’s assailant—I am talking of Katie’s killer. I am saying everything, and I am saying nothing. There is no way he comprehends this. It is only revelation to me.
“You look tired,” he says, and comes off the back stoop, standing close to me. I nod at his observation, but say no more. I am at that line, and I will not cross it. I cannot.
My father glances down the driveway at my car. “While you’re here do you want me throw that door in?”
“Sure,” I say, the expression, that single word, seeming to breach whatever wall has been damming my exhaustion. I am suddenly spent. Physically, emotionally, spiritually.
My father notices. He puts a hand to my arm. It is firm and gentle. Reassuring. In my childhood that simple touch was enough to allay any fear or soothe any uncertainty. It is a wondrous connection with my father, but I am not a child anymore, and the fear that I have is the reality I know—he cannot fix what roils within me now.
“Why don’t you go in and sit with your mother,” he suggests, and pats me lightly once on the arm before withdrawing his hand. I nod and he moves past me toward the garage.
* * *
The house is little changed from my last visit some weeks ago. It is little changed from the time I spent romping through its narrow halls and bounding down its wooden stairs to beat my sister to the dining room table for dinner. The furniture, crafted in a time when the only warranty was one that implied a lifetime of use if cared for correctly, is mostly the same. A chair has been reupholstered. A table refinished. But down to the wallpaper and rugs over hardwood, this is the home of my youth.
I move through the dining room to the entry hall. The living room is straight ahead, and I suspect that I will find my mother in there, settled into her favorite rocker, looking toward the window with her camera on her lap.
But I do not enter. Memory stops me for a moment as I look up the stairs, gazing back through the years so that I see Katie. Sitting alone at the top. Her tiny toddler’s feet barely touching the step below. She holds a slinky between them and tips it gently over the edge so that it begins a slow, awkward descent. A grin builds on her face as she watches the toy walk itself down the stairs. Then the grin swells to smile, and she raises her delicate little hands and claps, celebrating what she’s done.
I don’t know why it is this recollection which strikes me, but it does, and I would be blissfully willing to let myself live it, and breathe it for hours on end, but a
click
to my left ends my sampling of the past. I turn toward the sound and see a camera coming slowly down, finger on the shutter release, a slightly puzzled face behind it.
My mother. Alicia Jerome.
“Are you the plumber?” she asks with guileless sincerity. “The tub’s been draining slow.”
Whatever has brought me here, all reasons be they grand or selfish, I instantly refocus myself. I am no longer here because of Katie, or for myself. At this moment it is my mother who receives my full attention.
“No, I’m Michael,” I tell her, in the way which I have become accustomed. Casually introducing myself as a visitor might. “Gus said I should come in. He’s doing a little work outside.”
She smiles and nods, and for a moment she looks deeply at me. I wonder if, in these instances, there might be the most tenuous strand of memory linking what she now is with what those she once knew. If there is, it is enough to give her pause, I suspect, but too fragile to allow any connection. Any recognition.
After a few seconds, where I see the struggle in her eyes, she looks away, seeming on the edge of agitation, like some penned soul. She might wander past me to the window, which has been sealed with a complicated child lock. Or she might make her way to the front door and find a trio of keyed latches making any exit, for her, impossible. Maddening for her, I am certain, but necessary measures that my father put in place some three years back after a few frightening disappearances. Incidents which ended, thankfully, with my mother being escorted home by a neighbor, or the proprietor of a once favorite shop she had just wanted to ‘stop off at’. Or, most difficult for my father, brought home in the back of a police cruiser by colleagues who had spotted her in her nightgown on a near freezing night strolling the shore of Lake Michigan, shivering and beaming. The grandest smile upon her face, one of them had described to my father.
It makes sense, I had thought, if sense could be made of such an affliction, that these forays were my mother escaping what she could, the physical constraints of house and yard and block that surrounded her, in some attempt to break from the inescapable prison that her mind was becoming. A deeper, darker confinement that, though known only to her, must rival the worst confinement one person could bestow upon another.
Locks contained her now, but she is never left alone. On the rare occasions that my father ventures out, one of a few trusted neighbors or my mother’s sister in law, Sheila, will sit with her. Such instances are rare because my father chooses such, I am certain. Not that he would not want to be out more. Have a beer at a Bears game. Spend weekends at the lake house as he once did. But these things, simple though they are, he savored because they were shared. Hot dogs and cheering and, often, disappointment at Soldier Field with my mother at his side, her own voice exhorting their favorite team with vigor even surpassing my father’s. Watching from the small porch as sun set over Arrow Lake, mosquitoes buzzing and their children romping in the water. These things were of the past, now. Six years ago or twenty five, these and many other simple pleasures were lost to my father, and sadder still, forgotten by my mother. What had connected them has been severed, but what binds them, at least, survives.
He loves her. Enough for both of them.
The gaze that has drifted, to place or time or desire which I can only surmise, seems to find its bearing once more, and my mother turns from me and retreats into the living room. I follow, watching her go to her rocker and settle into it, the aging Nikon resting upon her lap. She sits without moving for a moment, the rocker’s curved runners still as her eyes play over the room. Move across a wall of pictures next to her. I track her gaze as it samples the images of our family, each and every one taken by my mother. Images of me which her mind somehow discards as a connection with the person standing a few feet from her. Glimpses of a forgotten past.
Mostly.
“Have you met my daughter?” she says, reaching to a framed photo of Katie resting on a table next to her. My sister is nineteen or twenty in the picture, sitting on a rock partly submerged by the waters of Arrow Lake. It was taken the last time we were all together at the lake house. In the spring of Katie’s junior year in college. I was a year out of the seminary. After that trip there was never a time when schedules aligned again for such a family gathering. Over that weekend we did not run along the shore as we had as children, kicking splashes at each other from the wind waves lapping on the pebbly beach. We strolled, and we talked, and we reminisced. Both of us, Katie and I, were on the cusp of establishing our own lives, with so much ahead of us we could have talked endlessly about what was to come. But we didn’t. We relived the times we had shared at Arrow Lake with our parents. We reveled in what was, in ways now alien to the woman who gave us life. The woman holding the picture of Katie.
Have you met my daughter?
I take a seat on the couch facing my mother before responding in the way I have come to accept. My reply will begin an exchange. A scripted interplay my mother’s ravaged mind allows. It gives her joy, I suspect, and in a way it gives me peace. A reassurance that, no matter how distant I am from her in the realm of memory, I can share a few words with her and bring a smile to her face. And it all begins with a lie.