Start Reading #3
None of the pieces fit together. So I go back to my task of organizing the mess in his office, looking for the thing that makes the other things make sense—the (maybe) poison, the (mysterious) redhead, the (not quite) missing (but in an unexplainable place) phone.
Honestly, it’s too much. I’m browning out.
I order a pizza and settle down to watch reruns of Law I watch as she props up her phone and puts on her lipstick in the bathroom mirror. She’s a beauty—her father’s delicate features, my dark coloring. She lines her eyes with black pencil.
“Is it weird that I don’t really remember him?
” She looks at the camera now. And it’s funny—she’s still a baby, my baby, even though to anyone else she’s a stunning young woman heading out for the evening.
Sometimes I look at her body—wasp waist, full breasts, and valentine bottom—and I wish I could put her in a nun’s habit.
No one except her father and me should be allowed to look upon her beauty.
“No,” I say. “It’s not weird. He wasn’t there.”
“Why wasn’t he?” She’s back to looking in the mirror. That black crop top. Isn’t she going to be cold?
I stuff a piece of pizza into my mouth, unable to resist the aroma any longer. “Some people just can’t be, you know?”
Generation Z is very savvy about human psychology. She nods sagely. “So maybe he wanted to be closer to us. But, like, he had trauma or something.”
If he had trauma, I doubt he’d have told me, or anyone. His generation didn’t do “trauma” or therapy, or even acknowledge feelings. Or maybe that was just him. He was a man with secrets.
“Yeah,” I say. “Maybe.”
I think again about the idea that he was poisoned. Naturally, I don’t say anything to Amelia.
“How did he die?” she asks. Just like your kid to read your mind.
“Congestive heart failure,” I say, citing the death certificate.
“Oh,” she says. “Wow.”
Which is what she says when she doesn’t know what to say.
“Mom. Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m okay,” I say.
That’s when I hear it: a ringing phone.
Where is that coming from? Not a cell phone; it’s the old-school jangling of a landline.
“I think I’m going to break up with Zander.” Gotta love the myopia of youth.
The ringing stops.
“Oh?”
Amelia is the “love ’em and leave ’em” type.
Which I admire about her. She is not defined by her relationship to any boy.
She is all herself, the complete package—beauty, brains, and guts.
I’m in awe, honestly. I was a mess at her age.
I’m not sure I’ve met Zander. Some dark, floppy-haired kid with tattoos, I’m sure.
That’s her type. Emo. Alt. Sometimes she brings them home, sometimes not.
“He’s so clingy,” she explains.
“Hmm.”
I’m walking around the house looking for the phone, looking for the phone that had been ringing. Nothing in the bedroom, the office, the spare room, the loft.
“Mom, are you sure you don’t want me to come? I don’t have any classes tomorrow. I can just hop on the train in the morning.”
It’s tempting; I’d like her with me. I want to show her this place.
But I’m not going to be the type of mother who leans on her daughter for support.
I’m just not. It’s one advantage to being poorly parented: you learn to rely on yourself only.
Which Rick always says is one of my biggest flaws.
Rae, you don’t have to do everything alone.
Sometimes when you ask for help, it makes people feel close to you.
Also: poison. What if I’m breathing it right now?
Logic dictates that I should go back to the city.
But there are too many questions here.
And I’m the type of person who needs answers.
“No, kiddo. Live your life. Have fun. I’ll be back in the city in a couple of days. We’ll have dinner next week and talk about it all.”
She nods uncertainly. “Okay.”
I hear voices, a gaggle of laughing girls. “Amelia! Let’s go!”
“Go,” I tell her. “I love you. Be smart. Be safe.”
“Love you, Mom.”
I hang up, and that distant ringing starts again.
Where is it? Far away, muffled. But absolutely a ringing phone, somewhere in this house.
When I come to the door to the basement, the ringing abruptly stops again. I stand there a moment before I turn the knob and head down the steps.
Holy shit. Time warp.
The space is dark paneled, with the same thrift-store plaid couch and mounted television. There’s a shelf of paperback books, creased bindings faded with age. A dim, flickering ceiling light. A stack of Time magazines tilting in the corner. Another of The Economist.
There’s the old pool table and the bar lined with bottles of alcohol that my parents always trusted us not to drink.
We never did drink it, much preferring weed procured from Shift, the local drug dealer whose dad and uncles were also drug dealers and who got a tattoo of a skull on his arm when he was fourteen.
I’m not sure why everyone called him Shift.
Surely that wasn’t his actual name, but I honestly cannot remember what it was.
Shift comes back to me now. How he used to hang around the school parking lot after the last bell rang. Tall and lanky, cheap cologne, a kind of giggling laugh. And how we thought he was cool, even though he was far from it.
And then I remember that he used to live out in that area of isolated properties with his dad and his uncles, all of them in and out of jail. At the time, they were responsible for all the drugs in the area, and all of us kids knew that.
But what does any of that then have to do with my father now?
“Dad,” I say out loud. “What were you up to?”
On the coffee table in front of the couch, there’s an ashtray with a few cigarette butts.
There, perched on the edge, ash dangling, placed there, then apparently burned out and forgotten, a cigarette butt.
Its filter bears the impression of bright-red lipstick.
Hmm. The redhead? I bend down to look at it.
The lip impression is a very orange red, bright and tacky—not wine, or burgundy. Red.
My sinuses tingle—mold, trapped cigarette smoke, and weed.
There’s no phone down here, not that I can see, walking the perimeter of the room. There never was, as far as I remember.
The ringing starts again.
It’s still muffled, but I’m definitely closer.
I keep walking around, peering behind furniture until I come to the storage closet door.
It’s coming from inside. When I open the door, though, I see there’s no phone, only a broom and dustpan, a bucket of cleaning supplies, a decrepit old vacuum. The ringing abruptly stops.
Am I losing my mind?
Maybe this is grief and exhaustion taking a toll. The pizza is getting cold upstairs. I have reruns of Law I turn the knob and push inside.
A memory of sneaking into my father’s bedroom at night comes back to me as I move into the darkness.
He and my mother were already sleeping in separate rooms by the time I was old enough to notice these things.
In fact, I don’t remember them ever sleeping in the same bed, exchanging a single kiss or kind word.
In the dark I would pad down the long hallway and very quietly climb up onto his bed.
Then I would lie as still as possible beside him and try to match my breath to his so that we were breathing the same air at the same time.
I would look at all his things. His glasses, the book he was reading.
He had a soapstone statue of Saint Michael, though he was a confirmed atheist.
I knew better than to try to curl up next to him, hoping he would take me into his arms. The most I ever got from him was a cheek thrust out for me to kiss, a firm hand on my shoulder, or a quick bony hug. That’s what passed for warmth.
Maybe I’ve always been searching for him. There was a feeling I had on those nights, when I’d had a bad dream, or there was a storm. It was a kind of connected loneliness, the feeling of being in close proximity to someone you could never quite reach, who would always remain unknowable.
I’m thinking that as I feel around for a light switch and finally find one.