Absolute Brightness (17 page)

“Phoebe!” he said when he saw me just sitting there at the table, sipping my Coke. “Wow! This is a surprise. What's the occasion?”

“The pope shit in the woods,” I said to him, which was the punch line of a totally lame joke that Dad used to tell years ago when he wanted to make me laugh.

He laughed out loud. Chrissie didn't.

“I'm gonna get ready for work.” She went into the bathroom and closed the door behind her.

“So what's up?” Dad asked me.

I thought I would understand everything just by looking at him, I thought I would be able to tell him what Mom said and he would deny it and shrug it off like it was all to be expected, but that's not what happened. I found that I couldn't say anything about it. I was suddenly terrified that it could be true. And then what? All I really could be sure of as I stood facing him was that he was him and I was me and we were standing in the middle of a room, trying to figure out what was going on by looking at each other's faces.

“Nothing,” I told him. “Just stopped by. That's all.”

“Does your mother know you're here?”

“It's a spur-of-the-moment kinda thing. I'll call her. We got cell phones. Leonard's still missing. He was always trying to get us to call him Leo. I never did, though. I refused. I don't know why. I'm going to call him Leo from now on. I mean it. When he comes back, I really am. What do you think?”

He stood up quickly and said, “I'm going to call your mother.”

“Really?” I replied. And then just for good measure, I added, “Actually, I don't think she'd want to know I'm here.”

He spun around and squinted at me like I had suddenly gone all blurry on him. But he didn't put down the phone.

“Why not?”

“She thinks I'm sleeping over at Electra's house. We had a fight.”

“What about?”

He was asking a lot of questions.
Wait
, I thought.
This is backward. I should be the one asking questions. Not him.

“Oh,” I said, making myself sound bored with the whole business, “she's stressed. Leonard and all. It's getting to her, I guess. All the not knowing.” And then in an attempt to sound sarcastic and grown-up, I added, “She's on Zoloft now, too. That's fun.”

“Still,” he said, offering me the receiver of the phone, “I think she'd want to know where you are.”

Chrissie came out of the bathroom transformed. She was wearing a short black skirt, black Reeboks, and a red, off-the-shoulder top with south-of-the-border frill. I couldn't help noticing that she had rearranged her hair. It was all bunched up on the top of her head, spilling over like a fountain and held together with a bright-red scrunchie.

“I'm going,” she said to us. “There's cold cuts in the fridge, bean salad, some coleslaw. And if you feel like boiling water, I got corn on the cob. There's enough for you, too, Phoebe. If you want some.”

She leaned over and kissed Dad on the lips and arranged his hair as if he were one of her knickknacks that she was putting back into place. She probably did this every day—kissed him, touched his hair, said good-bye—but somehow I felt that she was doing it for my benefit, to prove her point; and her point was that she had a power over Dad that I didn't. I hated her. Then she was gone.

So much of what I remember about my dad is accidental, just stuff that happened on the fly, but when it was happening I never stopped to think, “This. This I'm going to remember.” Memory isn't like that; it isn't that selective. Anyone who has anything worth remembering will tell you that memory has a mind of its own; things we tend to remember are often not even real memories, but rather the memory of memories that just happen to stick in the mind.

Like this one memory—I was about seven or eight, and I went along with Dad on one of his after-dinner runs to Avon-by-the-Sea. Even though Dad was the big cheese in charge of the entire parts department for a Ford dealership in Asbury Park, he sometimes made after-hours deliveries to garages and auto-body joints all over the county. If one of his customers needed a carburetor or a tail pipe or a fuel line pump, Dad pulled the thing from his inventory and drove it home, and then as soon as dinner was finished, he was back in his car and on his way to deliver it. Once he even drove as far as Newark. The fact that he was willing to literally go the extra mile for his customers made him a hero up and down the Jersey coast. I sometimes went along to keep him company. I told myself that I just wanted to get out of the house for a while, but looking back on it, I see now that there was more than just a desire to move
away
from something. At the time, I was hoping to move
toward
something as well—him.

Dad never said much as we drove the back streets and highways from here to wherever, but that wasn't so unusual. He had always been a guy of few words. Mostly we just listened to news on 1010 WINS or some rock station that played oldies from the seventies and eighties. Sometimes he sang along as if he knew the words. Me too. But this one night the news was on and the reporter was quoting something that someone said, and he actually used the words “quote” and “unquote” before and after the thing that was said.

“What's that mean?” I asked Dad. “Quote, unquote.”

“It's those two little marks they make in a book when someone says something,” he explained. “Y'know, the actual words.”

Then he mimed the quote sign with two of his fingers.

Why should this be something I remember? All those nights sitting together in the front seat of his Country Squire station wagon, all those places we stopped, all those grease monkeys and trucker types I got introduced to (“This is my younger—Phoebe”) and yet my most outstanding memory is “quote, unquote.” Makes no sense.

And now years later, sitting with him, this time in the little apartment he shared with his girlfriend, all I could think of was “quote, unquote.” Perhaps what I always wanted from Dad was for him to fill the quotation marks with some truth about himself or about life or about how two people who have lived their whole lives together could end up sitting opposite each other at a turquoise table on a Monday evening with nothing to say. Had it always been that way? I wondered. I couldn't tell.
But this
, I thought as I sat there with him,
this I will remember
.

He made a bed for me out of old quilts and extra pillows and then placed the whole arrangement as far from his own bed as he could manage in a space so small. He insisted that I call Mom and tell her where I was, so I pretended to call her on my cell and got all chatty with no one on the other end about how totally cute the place was and how Chrissie had made us a delicious dinner and how cozy my little made-up bed was. I pretended that Mom was pleased with the idea of my staying over. Dad was suspicious, but he didn't push it. He just said, “Jesus. The pope really
did
shit in the woods.”

Because there was nothing to hold our interest on TV, we flipped channels between an animated feature about dinosaurs and a retrospective of Cher's entire career. After a while, I got so sleepy I couldn't tell the difference between the two.

It was after midnight when a terrible noise woke me up. Someone was leaning hard on the downstairs buzzer. Dad bolted out of bed like a shot and said, “Who is it?” into the intercom.

“Is she there?” I heard Deirdre say. “Is Phoebe there?”

Dad didn't even bother to answer. He just buzzed her in. I'm guessing that she skipped the elevator and sprinted up the stairs two at a time, because she was pounding on the door before Dad could even get his pants on. He fumbled with the locks as quickly as he could, but it wasn't fast enough for Deirdre. When the door swung open, she just came striding in, sailed passed him, no hello. She only stopped short when she saw me lying there, a cocoon in my covers. Her eyes were wildly looking around the room. Her face had gone pale, and her features were indistinct as though her whole self had been stretched thin to the point of dissolving.

“Get up,” she said to me. “Come on. You're going home.”

“But…”

“
Now!
” she shouted, sounding more like my mother than my mother ever did. And then, as if to make her point, she gathered up my clothes. My hand was reaching up toward her in protest, but she simply grabbed hold of my arm and yanked me to my feet. I was not even standing properly when I realized I was headed toward the front door.

“Deirdre,” Dad pleaded as he stepped forward to block our way. “Now hold on. Let's just wait a second here and…”

But she didn't wait a second. She sidestepped him and kept moving without looking at him. Not a word either. Nothing. She was all forward motion, taking me along with her until we were out the door, down the stairs, and out into the cool, soft air of the parking lot.

I was seriously out of breath by the time we got to Mom's car. I couldn't speak. But who cared? Deirdre was in a white-hot rage, and that said it all. Whatever else needed to be expressed was taken care of by the sound of screeching tires hitting the night-slicked streets as Deirdre and I took off toward home.

Somewhere in my brain a time line began to shift and click into focus. Once in their proper place, events and episodes that had no particular chronology or explanation took on new meaning. Suddenly it all lined up, and everything made sense. Mom and Dad hadn't split because of Chrissie; they had split because of what had happened between Dad and Deirdre. Chrissie came after. Deirdre had changed not because Dad left home; she'd changed because … I couldn't even finish the thought.

Deirdre pulled into our driveway and cut the motor. She grabbed the rearview mirror, examining her reflection to make sure that her tears weren't streaking her cheeks.

“Not a word about this,” she said. “Not to Mom. Not to anyone. Got it?”

I nodded.

“I went to pick you up at Electra's house. End of story,” she said, dabbing her eyelids with a crumpled tissue she had found crammed into the front-seat cushions. “If anyone asks, you were at Electra's. You understand?”

I nodded again. I understood all too well. But the part I didn't understand was why she had never told me. Why hadn't she confided in me about what happened between her and Dad?

I started to cry a little.

“Don't,” she barked back at me. “Just don't. Okay?”

“Why didn't you ever tell me?”

“What was I supposed to say? You were way too young to understand. Jeez, I was too young. Just … let's not … I picked you up at Electra's house. Got it?”

I nodded for the umpteenth time. Deirdre squeezed my shoulder and said, “Fix your face.”

Then she bolted. She was already striding across the lawn toward the house when I got out of the car. All the house lights were on, inside and out. If I hadn't known better, I would've thought that a party was going on in there. But once inside, I saw that it was just Mom and Chuck sitting in the living room, staring at one of Leonard's platform sneakers. It had been placed in the center of the coffee table, and it just sat there like a trophy commemorating some kind of humiliating defeat by the home team. Mom had been crying; her eyes were rimmed with red and her skin had gone papery thin. Chuck just looked worried and kind of blank. I stared at the sneaker, then at Mom, then at Chuck, then at Deirdre. When nobody spoke, I did the drill again—sneaker, Mom, Chuck, Deirdre. Mom tried to open her mouth to speak, but she could only manage a little breath without sound. Unable to offer anything else to the room, she slowly lowered her head onto her knees and let it rest there.

 

twelve

WHEN THE REPORTER
from the
Asbury Park Press
telephoned to discuss the case of the missing Leonard, I had an opportunity to speak with her. She asked me a lot of questions, but I kept interrupting her to say, “I feel I ought to mention the platform sneakers again. Okay?” I then offered to draw a picture and send it to her so that she could publish it in the paper. I heard her smile through the receiver as she assured me that just a mention would do the trick.

“Fine,” I said into the phone, “just don't forget. It's very important.”

As it turned out, I was right. Without the mention of the sneakers in the local paper, it would never have been found, been fished out of the lake, and then ended up sitting on our coffee table.

The good news was that we finally had a clue. The bad news, as Chuck put it, “looks not so good.” He had already arranged for a crew and had gone to the trouble of hiring two professional divers from Atlantic City to explore the murky depths of the lake where the sneaker had been found.

Once upon a time Shark River was the reason people settled in this area. Its beauty was a big draw not only to day-trippers and summer renters, but also, starting in the 1940s and '50s, to folks who were looking for a place to settle down and make a home. People came from all over to see what Neptune had to offer, and many of them discovered all-season houses at affordable prices sprouting up all over the place. For a while, Neptune actually became known as the “Crossroads of the Jersey Shore,” and I suppose back then the fact that Routes 18, 33, 35, 66, and the Garden State Parkway all converged here convinced people that this might turn into a real hot spot someday.

No one has ever been able to tell me exactly why the lake was named after a shark. Some people thought maybe an actual shark found its way from the ocean into the freshwater lake. Others said that it used to be called Shirk River, because years ago everyone in the area was pretty lazy and shirked their jobs on a regular basis. Either way, it sounded fishy to me, no pun intended.

I had been out to the area a couple of times as a kid, once with my Brownie troop to collect pinecones to decorate with glitter; and another time with Mom, Dad, and Deirdre to watch a pretty dull fireworks display on a drizzly Fourth of July. Though it is technically called Shark River, it looks more like a lake with homes along its wooded shores and sandy inlets where folks can sunbathe. I sort of knew the way to Shark River, but I had no idea where to find the woman who had rescued the sneaker.