Chapter Fifteen
Chapter
Fifteen
“This you?” a gruff voice called from the driver’s seat, jerking Danny awake.
“Huh?” Danny slurred, his brain slowly connecting the dots: back of a cab; dollar bills in your lap; in the dark, the graffiti tags almost visible on your front door outside.
“Uh, yeah. Sorry.”
“Sixty-five bucks.”
“Sixty-five bucks?!”
The cabbie rapped a calloused knuckle against the meter where the fare was displayed in red glowing digits.
Danny counted out and handed him the wad of cash, rolled out of the cab, and jiggled the lock in the front door, which was still jammed despite his mom’s weekly calls to the super.
He tiptoed up the stairs, stuffing his pig nose into the back pocket of his jeans.
As he got to the landing of his uncle’s apartment, his heart dropped, looking down at the white line of light, glowing from the crack at the bottom of the door.
Shit.
He twisted open the doorknob and peeked inside to see his mother sitting at the kitchen table, hazed in a billow of smoke, a nearby ashtray overflowing with stubbed-out butts.
“Hey, Ma,” Danny croaked, freezing like a camper who’d happened upon a grizzly rifling through his tent.
His mother raised a thin cigarette to her mouth and took a long, excruciating drag.
“You didn’t have to wait up for me,” Danny said, his voice breaking slightly. “Sorry, the ferry was all screwed up. I waited for hours and eventually just had to catch a cab home. I hope you weren’t worried.”
His mom tapped the ash into the ceramic dish.
“But hey, Cats was great,” Danny soldiered on. “You woulda loved it. I kept thinking the whole time, Ma would totally love this. And they even had people out front who would paint your face, although mine kinda got smeared. Ha! Wow, you woulda had such a great time.”
His mother’s eyes bore into him like two searing pokers.
“Ma,” he said. “Please.”
Her manicured nails rapped the wood of the kitchen table, a snare drum signaling an approaching army.
“Ma!”
Her fingers stubbed out the half-smoked cigarette and laid it beside its lifeless companions in the ashtray. Her lips, dry from chain-smoking, parted to utter two terrifying words.
“What’s next?”
“What?” This felt like a test, somehow. Next?
“This,” she said, pulling the wrinkled Next Magazine from the pocket of her robe and sliding it across the table.
Danny’s stomach dropped like a penny flicked off the observation deck at the Empire State Building, plummeting all 102 stories. “Where…Where did you find that?”
“I was cleaning your room,” she said, her voice calm and controlled in a way that Danny knew meant she was moments away from being anything but. “I borrowed the steam cleaner from work today. Thought I might surprise my son by finally getting rid of that cat smell.”
Danny’s heart was a rabid dog trapped in his chest, clawing at his ribs, trying to escape.
“And when I moved your mattress, what should I find but this stuffed under your bed.”
Danny’s thoughts darted through his head, searching for an answer.
“It’s…it’s nothing,” Danny gasped. “It’s not even mine. Look, I was just holding it for a friend.”
Even by Danny’s standards, it was weak.
“A friend?” his mother said, leaning forward on the table, suddenly the bad cop in a windowless interrogation room. “What friend?”
“Just my friend Christian,” Danny lied. “He put it in my backpack because he didn’t have his and I guess I just forgot about it.”
“Was this Christian person with you at the show tonight?” his mother said, her voice growing simultaneously quieter and icier.
“Yeah—I mean, so were a lot of my friends.”
“Well, you’re never hanging out with those friends again, so help me God,” she said, her chair scraping back across the linoleum.
“Ma—”
“Christ,” she said. “I knew taking you out of St. Pete’s was a mistake—that it was putting you on a bad path. And now look, you’re hanging out with fags and sneaking home at all hours of the night! God, I knew I was failing as a mother, but I didn’t realize just how bad.”
“Ma, it’s not like that! You’re not failing,” Danny pleaded. “And I’m not like that, Ma. I promise.”
The second the words left his mouth, Danny knew they were going to be hard to take back. But those things that had happened with Christian, maybe they weren’t what he’d thought they were. Maybe it was just the music and the drinks and the crowd.
“My friends,” Danny said. “They’re not bad people.”
“NOT BAD PEOPLE?” his mother shouted, shattering the quiet so loudly that the neighbors across the breezeway flicked on their bedroom light.
“They’re giving you smut, and don’t think I can’t smell the booze on you, Daniel Anthony Francis, you smell like a frat house toilet.
Christ knows what else you’ve gotten up to tonight. ”
His mother paced around the room, hands trembling as she struggled to spark her Bic lighter, trying again and again to light the cigarette chewed between her lips.
“You wanna end up like your uncle?” she said, almost to herself, pulling the smoke from her mouth.
“What?” Danny breathed.
“AIDS, Danny,” she said in a furious whisper. “Sick and dying alone in this rat’s nest and no one finding his body for weeks.”
Danny froze. The warm and woozy coat of alcohol that had been hanging from his shoulders dropped abruptly to the floor.
“Yeah,” his mother said, wiping an angry tear from her eye with the hand that still held the unlit cigarette.
“No church willing to host his funeral. No cemetery willing to bury him. Why do you think we had to have his service in our basement? Why do you think we had him cremated? Why do you think your father refused to even come downstairs?”
“I didn’t…”
“Of course you didn’t,” Ma said, sounding furious and devastated in equal measure.
Danny felt like he was running through a dark tunnel with no light at the end.
His mind kept flashing with images of the evening—his friends giving money to the man in the park with the clipboard; Christian dancing onstage in a woman’s wig; Danny’s hands on Christian’s body, his lips exploring his lips.
“You’re grounded for the rest of the year,” his mother said.
“You finish your play practice and you come straight home. You don’t talk on the phone.
You don’t go to the City on weekends, and so help me God, if I find out you’re hanging out with this Christian boy, or any of those so-called friends of yours, I will pull you out of that school and you can go and live with your father. ”
His mother crossed the kitchen floor to her bedroom, not quite making it to her doorway before a cry escaped from her lips and her hands reached up to cover her mouth.
“I lost my only brother,” she said, her voice breaking only once she’d turned her back to him. “I’m not gonna lose my only son, too.”
She slammed the door shut. The sound of the twisting lock echoed again and again and again in Danny’s chest. The North Shore neighborhood, usually a cacophony of sirens and screeching tires and glass breaking and dogs barking and distant thumping of music from passing cars, was silent that night, like they’d reached the end of their cassette spools.
Danny looked around the empty apartment.
Where was the clang of a pipe or ghostly flicker of a lightbulb or mechanical whirring of the stereo, breaking into a song that would offer some kind of meaning for why he was feeling so fucking horrible? So fucking alone?
“What now?” Danny said aloud, to himself, and to a spirit that he so desperately needed right now to exist. “What now?”
But all he got was silence. Uncle Richie didn’t say a thing.