The Good Luck of Right Now (22 page)

When I caught up to Elizabeth, I could tell she was still upset, so I walked next to her for seven or so city blocks, catching my breath and allowing her to walk off her bad energy, like I had done before with Father McNamee.

I decided to wait until she spoke first, before saying anything.

When we reached the Saint Lawrence River, Elizabeth stopped and said, “Max wanted me to make sure you have your tektite crystal on at all times.”

“Yes,” I said, patting it with my glove. “I haven’t taken it off since he gave it to me.”

She pulled another leather necklace out of her coat pocket and said, “Max says put this one on too. You’ve worked up to it, wearing the first for more than twenty-four hours now, and my brother’s research suggests that alien abductions increase near rivers. So you will benefit from extra protection, according to Max.”

I took the extra tektite crystal and dutifully put it around my neck. It was hard to do with winter gloves on, but I managed.

We stood there silently for a time.

Then Elizabeth said, “You probably think I’m insane, acting the way I did back there.”

“No,” I said.

“Yes.” She peered up at me from under her beautiful eyebrows, through her wispy curtain of brown hair that was now hanging down from within a homemade-looking purple knit hat.

I bit my bottom lip and shook my head.

We looked out over the river for what seemed like a half hour.

Finally, she said, “You may think this is a stupid sentimental explanation, but I used to keep rabbits when I was a little girl. My mom bought them to breed and sell, but the guy who sold them to us lied and we soon found out both of our rabbits were male. Mom quickly lost interest, like she always did, or was too lazy to find a female. She ignored them, began to pretend they didn’t exist, probably because her pride kept her embarrassed about being duped. So I made the neglected rabbits into pets and loved them. Adored them. Talked to them. Even stole food for them from a nearby farm. Told them my secrets, whispering into their long, velvety ears for hours and hours.”

I didn’t know what to say, even though this obviously explained why she threw up.

It made me feel so sad.

“Max never loved them as much as I did,” she said, and began to walk along the river.

I nodded and followed.

“Are you ever going to talk?” Elizabeth said.

“Yes.”

“Say something.”

“Something.”

“Not funny.”

I wasn’t trying to be funny, so I felt ashamed. And then I could feel the little man in my stomach laughing at me, rolling around in my belly, crying tears of merriment even, because I was failing so horrifically.

We walked on for a block or so.

Then she said, “My rabbits’ names were Pooky and Moo Moo. They loved lettuce more than carrots. You’d think rabbits would love carrots best, but not these two. Maybe they were strange rabbits.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“Max, he loves cats,” she said.

Somehow I found my voice and said, “Yes, he does. Was Alice a good cat?”

“She was a doll. But she was
Max
’s cat, not mine. Pooky and Moo Moo were mine. There will never be another Pooky or another Moo Moo.”

“Mom was mine,” I said before I could really think about what I meant. “There will never be another Mom for me either. She was one of a kind.”

“You really loved your mother?”

“Yes. Did you love yours?”

“I hated her. I used to fantasize about killing her in her sleep. Slitting her throat with a steak knife—sometimes I’d imagine dragging the blade across her entire neck, making a huge red smile. And other times I’d just stab her jugular repeatedly. Sorry. I know that’s pretty sick. But, oh, how I wanted to kill my mother when I was a little girl!”

“Why?”

“A million reasons.
Infinite reasons.
”

We walked for a few more blocks, gloved hands in pockets.

“My mother killed Pooky and Moo Moo and fed them to me when I was just a child.”

I didn’t know what to say to that.

“She told me what I was eating only after I had finished. Like she was delivering the punch line to a joke, she told me with a grin on her face. You cannot imagine the guilt. I felt Pooky and Moo Moo inside me, trying to hop out of my stomach, for months. She made keychains out of the feet and gave me one as a present the following Christmas. I screamed when I opened it and began to cry. She called me peculiar and ungrateful and spoiled and weak and silly. Then she laughed at me and told Max his sister was sentimental. She actually used that word.
Sentimental.
As if it were a character flaw. Like it was horrible to feel. To admit that you missed things. To care. To love even.”

“How old were you?”

“Seven.”

“Why did she kill your rabbits?”

“We were poor. Had no food. We couldn’t really afford to feed them. My mother was a psychopath. I am prone to horrific luck. All of those things.”

“Father McNamee didn’t know that—”

“How could he?”

“I’m so sorry,” I said.

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Elizabeth said.

I felt as though I had failed horribly in the romance department, as all we had managed to talk about were Elizabeth’s childhood traumas and her adolescent thoughts of matricide.

Hardly romantic banter.

“Tell me something nice,” she said. Elizabeth stopped walking, faced me, and looked up into my eyes with frightening desperation. “Please! Anything. Tell me one nice thing. Something that makes me feel as though the world is not a terrible place. I’m at the end, Bartholomew. I don’t care anymore. Tell me something that will make me care. Come on. Just tell me something good. One good and true thing. If you can do that, then maybe, just maybe . . .”

She didn’t finish her sentence, but sighed, and I wondered what she was going to say.

Elizabeth kept searching my eyes, but I didn’t have a clue as to what I was supposed to say here in response, and I hoped that you, Richard Gere, would show up to help me, because you always know what to say to women in these situations, in all of your movies, but you didn’t materialize.

“Like what?” I said, stalling for time.

“Something nice about your mother maybe.” She was choking up here, her eyes brimming with tears. “Something that will make me forget I just ate rabbit—that I have no place to live. That my life has been a cruel, sadistic joke—that everything is going to end shortly.”

“
End?
” I said.

I hated to see her so sad, but wasn’t sure what to do.

“Tell me something about your mother. Something nice,” Elizabeth said, ignoring my question. “Really sweet. You seem like a sweet sort of man, Bartholomew. So please, please, please. Something sweet.”

I thought about it—there were a million nice things to choose from when it came to memories of Mom.

“The first sweet thing that pops up in your head,” she said. “Don’t think about it. Just talk.
Please
. You must have nice memories of your mother if you love her so much. It should be easy for you! I need to hear something sweet—something
sentimental
even.”

Suddenly I was talking without thinking—the words were flowing out of me like air—and I was utterly surprised to be saying so much. It was like she had found my hot and cold knobs and now words were suddenly gushing out of my spigot.

“When I was a little boy, my mother told me that if I wrote a letter to the mayor of Philadelphia—Mayor Frank Rizzo at first, and then it was Mayor William Green—asking for special permission to go to the top of City Hall, he might let me look out over Philadelphia from under the high dome atop of which William Penn stands. So I’d write a letter, and I’d take days to think up a persuasive argument justifying why I should be admitted. I’d write about how hard I was trying in school, what a good son I was, always completing all of my chores on time, doing what Mom told me to do, how I promised to vote in all of the elections when I was old enough—a promise I have religiously kept, as Mom taught me it was my patriotic duty as an American—and how I went to Mass every week and tried to be a good Catholic.

“Then I would write out the letter over and over until my penmanship was good enough to be read by a real officially elected mayor. Mom would read it, and as we dropped the letter into the neighborhood mailbox, we’d both cross our fingers and hope the mayor was moved enough to let us visit City Hall—that I had been a good enough boy.

“I’d always receive a personalized handwritten response a week or so later, saying I was a good boy and was allowed to visit City Hall. Mom and I would walk down Broad Street hand in hand, watching City Hall grow up from the street taller and taller, and we’d take the elevator up to the top of City Hall—which, incidentally, once was one of the tallest buildings in the world and was the tallest in Philadelphia until 1987—and we’d look out over the City of Brotherly Love, seeing how Philadelphia is mapped out in right angles, like a big grid constructed by the most anal of city planners determined to make sure no one would ever get lost, and I’d be so proud to be high in the sky looking down, knowing I’d earned it by being an exemplary boy.”

I could see excitement in Elizabeth’s eyes, and I hoped I was doing well here, because my heart was pounding and my gloves were soaked through with sweat.

“It wasn’t until I was an adult that I figured out anyone and everyone is allowed to go to the top—regardless of whether they have been good or not—and that Mom had written the letters from the mayor, pretending.

“And so I visited the top of City Hall again as a man, took the same tour, but of course it wasn’t as special anymore, because anyone could do it—I hadn’t earned it. The building didn’t rise as majestically from the asphalt when I walked down Broad Street, the elevator ride up didn’t make my heart pound, the view wasn’t as spectacular, the right angles of the city blocks didn’t look as crisp, and I didn’t even want to stay up there for very long, not without Mom.”

“She sounds wonderful,” Elizabeth said, and smiled.

“She was.”

“You miss her.”

“Very much.”

“I’m sorry for your loss.”

“I’m sorry you had to eat your pet rabbits and were abducted by aliens.”

She sat down on a bench, and I sat next to her.

We watched the snow dance its way down from the sky and onto the river.

I thought Elizabeth would look up into the night, trying to spot UFOs, but she never lifted her chin even once.

She wasn’t interested in UFOs that night—nor was she interested in talking about aliens.

From watching movies, I knew that this was the time to put my arm around Elizabeth, and my heart was about to explode, just thinking about the possibility of having my arm around another human being, our ribs touching through our coats.

But I didn’t put my arm around her.

We just lingered next to each other on the bench until our hats were covered in white snow and our noses were red.

When she stood, I stood.

We walked back to the hotel in silence, leaving two sets of footprints that would shortly be covered by new accumulating snow and then shoveled away, erasing all evidence of our walk through Old Montreal together, and I thought about just how many millions of people had had significant small, quiet moments in the city of Montreal—moments that were so important to the people having them, but insignificant to everyone else who had ever lived.

Elizabeth opened her hotel room door with the plastic key card and then said, “Good night, Bartholomew.”

“Good night,” I said, standing in the hallway.

She looked up into my eyes for a long time, with her hand on the doorknob and the door slightly ajar.

Then she reached into her pocket and pulled out another tektite necklace.

When Elizabeth held up the leather loop, I lowered my head; she placed the necklace around my neck and nodded.

I nodded back.

“Max wanted you to have that, once you worked up to it. You have,” she said and then went into her room.

It was funny because two tektite rocks didn’t really feel like anything, but I noticed the weight of three.

Three wasn’t too heavy, but palpable.

It was a tipping point.

I stood in the hallway for a time, wondering why—after spending the entire day with three people—I felt so much lonelier than I had ever before in my entire life, and yet I didn’t want to go into the room with Father McNamee.

I wanted to be with Elizabeth—just to sit next to her silently for another five minutes would have been divine.

I also wanted to be by myself too, which was confusing.

Somehow I ended up all alone on the roof of the hotel, next to the steamy pool that was now lit, glowing blue and wondrous.

I looked out over the city and wondered if my biological father was really out there, somewhere in Montreal.

I looked up and wondered where Mom was.

I sat down on a chair and felt the cold on my face as I watched the snowflakes evaporate instantly, the moment they hit the warm, blue, chlorinated pool water—and I wondered if what I was witnessing could be a metaphor for our lives somehow, like we were all just little bits falling toward an inevitable dissolve, if that makes any sense at all.

I rested there by myself for what felt like hours, feeling like a snowflake the second it hits a heated pool—wondering if that could really be our whole life summed up in the grand scheme of the universe.

Even though she hadn’t appeared to me, I talked to Mom for a time, telling her everything that had happened—asking her if my father could still possibly be alive—but the only answer I got was the noise of street traffic rising up from far, far below.

When I keyed into our hotel room, Father McNamee wasn’t snoring, but sleeping peacefully, so I tried to be extra quiet and didn’t turn on the light. The room reeked of whiskey, which meant Father McNamee would be hung over again in the morning.

I lay down in my bed and thought about how I was in Canada—how strange that seemed—as I stared at the ceiling.

Canada, eh?