Chapter Four
Chapter
Four
So much of Danny’s life had been lived through a keyhole.
So many nights spent crouched in his bedroom, watching his father come home drunk from work.
His father, who would come home and kick the dog, until the old dog died and his foot started aching for something bigger.
One January night, his father kicked so hard that the trees shook and the rivers froze and the snow fell so hard that it forgot how to stop.
Danny watched through the keyhole as his father kicked his Ma, then wiped his forehead and teeter-tottered back out the front door and into the storm.
And Danny prayed to St. Michael, St. Joseph, and St. Christopher that his dad’s patrol car would skate off the interstate and crash into Gravesend Bay.
“A real man takes charge, Danny boy.”
It was like his father had been secretly leaving him instructions all along, breadcrumbs pointing him to a heroic escape. So Danny manned up and pushed open his bedroom door and brought his mom a glass of water, three aspirin, and the keys to the Pontiac.
The car radio crackled warnings to stay off the roads, to watch out for black ice, but remained silent about fathers with cold fists.
With nothing but a hastily packed bag of clothes and their winter coats, Danny and his Ma made their great escape, following taillights and tire tracks through the snow all the way up to the North Shore to his uncle’s apartment, praying it hadn’t been sold back to the bank yet.
“Shit!” his mom cried out, jiggling the door handle of his uncle’s apartment. “Of course it’s locked. Shit! Shit! Shit!” she whispered desperately, slapping her palm against the paint-chipped metal.
Danny watched helplessly as she crumpled to the floor, her hands covering her face as sobs wracked her body.
He scrunched his eyes shut, listening for the voice in his head, praying that it would give him a hint about what to do next.
But the only thing he could hear was his mother’s gasping, the muffled shouting of a distant argument two floors below, the clanging of old pipes, and the buzzing of a bulb flickering at the end of the hall.
Danny stuffed his hands into coat pockets, and that was when his fingers touched something cold, something jagged, something that hadn’t been there before.
“Ma,” Danny said shakily, pulling the key out of his coat pocket.
“Wh-what’s that to?” she asked, looking up at him through her swollen eyes.
“I…,” he stammered. “I don’t know. I’ve never seen it before.”
And it made no sense, but Danny could feel his hand being pulled by an invisible lasso, the key being guided smoothly into the dead bolt, the tumblers aligning with a satisfying click, and his wrist turning with ease, opening the door to their next chapter as mother and son.
His Uncle Richie’s apartment was a far cry from their place on the South Shore.
Peeling walls, damp mildewy smell, floorboards that creaked in protest when anyone walked on them.
But the lights still turned on, and the toilet still flushed, and if Danny breathed only through his mouth, it sort of felt like he was at sleepaway camp.
He helped his mom into her dead brother’s bed and sat on the couch in his snow boots and winter coat, watching heavy snowflakes turn to gold in the glow of the streetlamps.
The next morning, the snow hadn’t stopped and the plows hadn’t come, and when he tried the doorknob to his mother’s bedroom door, it was locked.
But when he pressed his ear to the door, he could hear her soft whimpers, indecipherable but clear in their meaning: Leave me alone.
He scavenged through his uncle’s cupboards until he found a jar of peanut butter and a pack of instant oatmeal, waterfalling the latter into his mouth like chips at the bottom of a bag.
And when night came again and the snow still hadn’t stopped and the bedroom doorknob still wouldn’t turn, he put his ear to the door and heard the soft, exhausted sound of his mother’s breath.
Rise and fall. Rise and fall. Rise and fall.
On the second day, Danny got to work, washing crusted dishes and pouring chunky milk down the drain and emptying ashtrays and wiping grease from the kitchen walls and smushing roaches with his heel, but then he got to the room with the lime-green carpet.
He peeked through the door at a room not much bigger than a closet.
Every inch was covered in a thick blanket of cat hair.
An alkaline urine smell curled his nose hairs.
Danny yanked the knob. Some doors were better left shut.
On the third day, Danny awoke to the rumble of plows slowly pushing their way through the drifts outside.
The snow had stopped falling and the wind had stopped whistling and the whole island was white, white, white.
And when Danny tried his mother’s doorknob, this time it opened, bed unmade and empty.
“Ma,” he called, checking the bathroom and the kitchen.
“Ma!”
He checked the basement and the room with the boiler.
“MA!”
He looked out the window and saw that the Pontiac was gone, a set of footprints and tire tracks left in the snow like a ransom note.
Danny paced the apartment, raking his fingers through his hair as the musty air weighed heavy on his chest.
She’s left, the voice bellowed in his head. She’s left you and she’s gone and done something stupid.
The idea gnawed at him, like one of the mice that had taken up residence in his uncle’s pantry.
Danny frantically dug through the couch cushions until he found a quarter to use at the pay phone down the block.
There was only one person he could think of to call, the person who cleaned up messes even when he was the one who’d made them, whose boozy smiles and hey, Danny boys made you wonder if there’d even been a mess at all, the person who knew how to find missing people, the person who’d sent them packing with a swift kick to the ribs.
But just as Danny’s hand brushed against the cold metal of the doorknob, the scratchy sound of a distant recording filled the room, freezing him in his tracks.
A woman’s voice sang out in a bubbly alto, accompanied by a clarinet and the soft brush of cymbals.
“They’d never believe it if my friends could see me now!”
Danny followed the woman’s voice through the living room toward the closet with the lime-green carpet. He took a deep breath and opened the door to the stench of cat piss and the lively bounce of a stereo playing an unnervingly cheery tune.
“The hell?” Danny said quietly, peering down at a dust-covered tape deck where the Play button had somehow been pressed.
He looked around the room, but found it empty, save for the boxes and the half-empty bags of kitty litter.
He crouched down and hit the Stop button, the woman’s husky voice cutting out with a dull snap.
His eyes settled on something in the corner that he’d missed the first time he’d peered into the foul-smelling room.
A tall metal tower filled with cassette tapes, all brightly colored and bearing strange names that he’d never read before, names of people and places far away from a dead man’s home.
“Danny?” The front door scraped open and the soft jingle of keys signaled his mother’s return.
He ducked out of the closet to find his Ma wearing a big, wide smile, her ears pink from the cold and her hair dusted with powdered-sugar snow, holding a bag of groceries.
“Who’s hungry?” She beamed. “I was thinking maybe pancakes.”
Danny could smell his mother’s gravy even before reaching the door in Port Richmond.
The smell meant she was having one of her green days.
Oregano and caramelized onions and deglazed red wine wrapped around him like an old jersey, and he knew he’d find her smiling at the stove and asking him to taste.
Sometimes it was a yellow day and he was greeted by the smell of powdered mac and cheese.
Sometimes it was a red day and there was no smell at all.
But today was definitely green, and he knew whatever worries, whatever stupid mistakes he’d made in Manhattan, would be wiped clean the second he stepped through the door.
Danny kicked off his shoes and beelined to the kitchen, where he found his mother standing proudly over a big steel pot, posed on the black-and-white checkerboard tiles like a chess piece, her hair a crown of raven curls and a spoon for a scepter.
“Danny!” she sang, looking up from the sauce, her face dewy from the steam.
“How was your day, my love? Taste this,” she said, thrusting a spoonful of spicy tomatoes to his lips.
“More salt,” Danny said after giving it a taste.
“Really? More salt?”
“Definitely.”
“I’ve tried it so many times, I feel like my tongue is playing tricks. How was school?”
School. Danny felt the jar of lightning bugs twist open in his chest.
“School was great.”
“Great, even?”
“Uh-huh,” Danny said hesitantly. “Yeah, it was.”
“Ah, come onnn,” Ma nagged. “Gimme more. You learn anything fun? Make any friends?”
“Yeah,” Danny muttered. “Yeah, I mighta made a friend, but don’t get too excited.”
Not quite accurate, but not a complete lie.
“Danny!” his mom cried, blooming with such excitement that even the flowers on the tobacco-stained wallpaper momentarily unfurled. “I knew you were gonna! You’ve been doing what we talked about, right? Just going up and complimenting them, ’stead of waiting for people to say hi to you?”
“Mm-hmm.” Danny nodded, looking down at the chipped tiles.
“Oh, I’m so proud of you!” she said, going in for a tight hug.
Danny jerked back, away from her touch, banging into the counter and causing the glasses in the cabinet to tink.
“Sorry,” he mumbled, tugging down on his polo. “I’m—”