I sent my notes flying across the bedroom, papers fluttering to the floor. Stood up. Should I tell her I’d seen her little pregnancy test?
Have our little showdown right then and there? I was tempted—still buzzed enough from those beers out at the Falls to start something.
But I needed to save my energy for the hearing. Get into this at a later date. I walked past her. Went into the bathroom to take a leak. When I came back in the bedroom, she hadn’t moved.
“I’m sick of it,” she said. “I’m sick of you being this big martyr all the time.”
“Look,” I said. “I know you couldn’t give a flying fuck about whether he stays down there at that place and rots. I
know
that. I
accept
that. But I got an
obligation,
okay? Now, I need to go over these papers—prepare for tomorrow. Then I need to eat something. Some real food, I mean, not
toasted pumpkin seeds.
Then I need to get some sleep. So just get your little boyfriend or girlfriend or whatever he is out of here.”
She stood there, hands on her hips, chin jutting out. “If you have so much to prepare, why have you been drinking?” she said. “You smell like a brewery. Is drinking beer part of your ‘preparation’?”
“Get him out of here,” I repeated.
“How about what
I
need? Do you ever think about what
I
need, Dominick?”
“I mean it, Joy. Get him out before I go out there and fucking
throw
him out.”
She stood up, glaring at me. Walked to the door and slammed it behind her. Out in the kitchen, there was mumbling between them.
Then the TV went dead. Then, in this order, I heard: back door, car doors, ignition.
“Joy?” I got off the bed, opened the door. “Joy?”
The message machine was blinking. Once, twice. I hit the button.
“Mr. Birdsey? This is Ruth Rood again. I—” I reached over and I Know[340-525] 7/24/02 12:56 PM Page 446
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fast-forwarded. Let up my finger in the middle of Sheffer’s voice.
“Okay, then. End of sermon. See you tomorrow. Get some sleep.”
I went back in the bedroom, flopped back on the bed, my face to the ceiling.
“
They rape me, Dominick. They come in at night and rape me!
”
“
This is Dr. Batteson’s office calling for Joy Hanks.
”
I let the tears drip down the sides of my face. Let my sobbing shake the bed.
Somewhere during the night, I dreamt that Dessa was doing me, slipping my cock in and out of her mouth. She
hadn’t
left me, then?
We were still together? Then, the sweet rush of release. I woke up, coming.
Saw Joy’s head move away. Saw Joy reach up and tuck her bangs behind her ear.
I lay there, catching my breath, letting the spasms die away.
Joy pulled tissues from the box on her nightstand. Started cleaning us up.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey,” she whispered back. “Did that feel nice? I wanted to make you feel nice.”
I reached over for her, but she took my hand and led it away from her. Parked it back on the mattress. Sometimes, with Joy, sex wasn’t so much something we shared together, but a service she performed. She turned on the table lamp. Traced and retraced the line of my eyebrow with her finger.
“I saw him this afternoon,” I said.
“Saw who?”
“My brother.”
“You did? So the security thing came through? . . . How is he?”
Same as he always is, I told her. Sick. Crazy.
“Dominick?” she said. “I have something to tell you. Something big. I didn’t want to say anything until I was sure, and now I
am
sure. . . . God, the last thing I wanted tonight was for us to get into a fight.”
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I let time go by—half a minute or more. She was leaving me, right? She was leaving me for the baby’s father. What was the hum job for? Going-away present? Something to remember her by?
“What is it?” I said.
“I’m pregnant.” She took my hand. “We made a baby, Dominick.
You and me.”
She talked about her symptoms, the home pregnancy test, what they’d told her at the doctor’s. She talked and talked. At first, she didn’t think she wanted it, she said, but now she did. She said she thought we’d make good parents. That maybe we could start looking at houses. . . .
I reached over and turned off the light. In those few seconds of absolute darkness—before my eyes adjusted—it felt like we were in some place more open and wide than our bedroom. Like we were falling together, somewhere in space.
“Well?” she said. “What do you think?
Say
something.”
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27
f
The thump outside woke me up. Raccoons, I thought. Rolled over.
If she’d just put the damn garbage lids on tight. . . .
We made a baby, Dominick. You and me.
They rape me!
Don’t think about it now, I told myself. Don’t think. Take deep breaths.
Sleep!
1:07 A.M., according to the clock radio. Well, it was finally here: D-Day. The day of his hearing.
Joy rolled onto her side. She’d been cheating on me and now she was lying through her teeth. Hey, it wasn’t like I hadn’t been warned ahead of time. Miss Shoplifter. Miss Screw Her Own Uncle. Get through the hearing and
then
deal with it, I told myself.
Watch her. Give her enough rope to hang herself. Hell of a way to be thinking about the woman you slept next to. . . . Come on, Dominick.
Sleep.
I flashed on the Duchess earlier that night in our kitchen—him and his toasted pumpkin seeds. I bet that little flit knew who she’d
448
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been screwing behind my back. Whose baby it was. Joy told the Duchess everything.
Outside, another thump. Footsteps. . . . Footsteps?
I got out of bed and padded across the bedroom floor. The notes on Thomas’s hearing that I’d flung earlier rustled under my feet.
Outside, a voice. By the time I got to the stairs, I was running.
I threw open the front door. “Hey!”
One of them grunted as they took off. Kids. I took off after them in my bare feet and skivvies—chased those bobbing baseball caps through two or three front lawns.
Stopped. Winded. . . .
Five years ago, I’d have had one or both of them down on the ground—would have had them wishing they hadn’t messed with
my
house. I stood there, my heart pounding like a jackhammer. Forty, man. Shit.
They’d wished the neighborhood Happy Halloween by egging car windows, snapping radio antennas. That jack-o’-lantern the Duchess and Joy had put out lay on our front walk in chunks, its broken mouth smiling up at the moon.
Now I was
wide
awake. Now I was up for the long haul.
Back in the house, I flopped onto the sofa, aimed the remote.
Better to troll than think. Letterman was dropping dollar bills out a window. The Monkees—middle-aged, now—were hawking oldies.
I surfed past CNN, the Catholic station, a couple of those 1-900
bimbos who wanted to share their “secret fantasies.” . . . She manipulated me with sex—used it whenever she wanted something. She’d done that right from the beginning. . . .
The Business
Beat
, Rhoda Morgenstern, VH-1. Shit, man. I had to get some
sleep
.
“Dominick?” She was up at the top of the stairs. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.”
“Are you crying?”
“No. Go back to sleep.”
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around for my wallet and keys. “Where are you going?” her voice said. I’d figured she would have fallen back to sleep.
“Nowhere. Out.”
“Why were you crying down there? Is it about your brother?” I finished lacing my work boots and started out of there. “Dominick?
Are you upset about the baby?”
While I was backing the truck out the driveway, the porch light went on. The front door opened. She stood outside on the stoop, arms crossed, those muscular legs of hers visible beneath her nightgown. Don’t talk to me, I thought. Don’t call my name.
Those asshole punks had egged my windshield. By rights, I should have gotten out and cleaned it off. Or turned off the goddamned motor and gotten back in bed with Joy—hung on for dear life, no matter what she’d done—no matter what she was trying to pull. Instead, I flicked on the wipers. They smeared a layer of shell and egg slime between me and my visibility and I remembered too late that the fluid well was dry. Fuck it, I thought. Threw her into gear anyway. Who the fuck else was out at this time of night?
I drove through downtown, up River Avenue, to Cider Mill and Route 162. My eyes burned, my stomach hurt, from sleeplessness.
Everywhere I drove, smashed pumpkins were in the road. It hadn’t even been a
conscious
decision, really—me driving out there, past that shabby farmhouse of theirs. If she’d have just held on, I would have come around. Gotten over the baby. I know I would have. . . .
I pulled over. Turned the lights off but kept her idling. Walked past their jazzy mailbox, up their gravel driveway. I’d never come this far before.
The house was dark, their van parked in front of the barn.
Good
Earth Potters
. I leaned against the side of it and looked up at the house. She’s gone for good, I told myself. You screwed up and she cut you off, same as he cut off his hand. She amputated you. You’re dead meat, Birdsey. Go home to the woman you don’t love.
Except I didn’t go home. I got back in the truck and hung a U at the next fork. Took a left onto the parkway. It was a relief to drive
past
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and light it seemed to hang suspended in the air around the streetlamps. I flicked on the wipers—pushed around the egg slime a little.
Driving through New London, I hung a left onto Montauk and headed for the beach. Parked, walked across the boardwalk and down into the sinking sand. At the water’s edge, little waves lapped in and phosphorescence bounced and winked at the toes of my work boots.
Phosphorescence, man. Pixie dust. What was there about water?
When I came off the beach again, I saw a cruiser parked next to my truck. Engine and lights off. Waiting. Just him and me in that empty thousand-car parking lot.
A window whirred as I approached. “Evening,” the cop said. In the dark, he was a voice, nothing else.
“Evening.”
“Out for a stroll?”
“Yup.” It was like speaking to nothing. Like speaking to the goddamned mist. He started his engine when I started mine. Tailed me all the way back through town until I turned back onto I-95.
Driving over the Gold Star Bridge, I looked across the river at the halogen glow: Electric Boat, third shift. At EB, they were still building submarines around the clock—even now, with the Cold War on the respirator.
Nautilus, Polaris, Trident, Seawolf
: war and Connecticut had always had a romance going, a kind of vampire’s dance. “It puts food on the table, too, doesn’t it, wiseguy?” I heard Ray’s voice say.
“You
ate
every night while you were growing up, didn’t you?”
Was that what Joy expected me to do? Be like Ray: be a father to someone else’s kid and hate the kid for it? Do a number on some poor little bastard his whole life? For a second or two, I could taste the bile that must have sat in Ray’s gut all those years: catch a fleeting glimpse of life from Ray’s perspective.
I exited in Easterly and drove up Route 22, out by the Wequonnoc reservation. As close as I can figure, that’s when I must have started dozing. . . .
In the dream, I’m my younger self, slipping and sliding on a frozen-over
river. A tree’s growing out of the water—a cedar, I think it is. Beneath
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my shoes, babies are floating by. Dozens of them. They’re alive—trapped
under the ice. They’re those babies the nuns told us about in Sunday
school—the ones that died before they were baptized and had to stay stuck
in limbo on a technicality until the end of the world. I worry about those
babies—wonder about them, about God. If He made the whole universe,
why can’t he just relax his own rule? Accept those blameless babies into
Heaven? . . .
And then Ma’s in the dream. Alive again, up in the cedar tree, holding a baby . . .
A movement beneath the ice distracts me and when I look down, I see
my grandmother, alive, under the ice. Ignazia. . . . I recognize her from
the brown-tinted photograph in my mother’s album. Her wedding portrait—the only picture of her I’ve ever seen. We make eye contact, she and
I. Her eyes beg me for something I can’t understand. I run after her, slipping and sliding across the ice. “What do you want?” I shout down.
“What do you want?”
When I look up again, the cedar tree’s in flames. . . .
I awoke to a car horn’s blare. Jesus! Jesus!
A rock ledge rushed past, headlights crisscrossed in front of me.
I veered to the right and drove over an embankment, unsure how far I’d fall.
There was an ugly scraping sound beneath me, I remember—the wail of my own
Oh, no! Oh, no!
My head bounced against the roof. Barreling toward that tree, I held out my hand to stop the collision. . . .