ON APRIL 24, VINCE DROVE JACK to a rented house about two miles from the colonial he had shared with Beth.
In spite of the memories, Jack wanted to return to Carleton because he liked the town and because it was close to the Lahey Clinic where he had his physical therapy. He also wanted to be near Yesterdays, where Vince talked him into being host now that he was back on his feet. Two weeks ago he had renewed his driver’s license and would get around in rentals until he could afford a car of his own. “Maybe I’ll check the Yellow Pages for Rent-a-Wife,” he told Vince.
The place was a neat six-room Cape painted dark green, making it look like a giant Monopoly piece. Low trimmed bushes formed a border around the front, which sat on Old Mystic Road, near the Mystic Lakes and the town line of Medford, where he could buy beer since Carleton was steadfast in the virtues of its Puritan ancestors—holding dry and proud of it. The house came furnished, which was fine, since Jack harbored no sentimental attachment to what he and Beth had shared. Nor did he want to be reminded.
He and Vince spent a few hours putting things away from boxes stacked in the different rooms. And when most of it was done, Jack walked Vince to his car. “‘Thanks’ doesn’t come close.”
“It’ll do.” Vince gave him a hug. “You need anything, you call.” He got into his car, a 1992 green Mitsubishi 3000 VR4 twin turbo. Jack tapped the rear spoiler. “Does this do anything?”
“Keeps me out of the trees.” Vince started the car. “You take it easy and work on your Charlie Charm.”
Jack started hosting at the restaurant in three nights. “No reservations, fuck off! Next.”
“Perfect,” Vince said and pulled away.
As he turned on his cane, Jack noticed a black SUV with tinted windows roll down the street. He wouldn’t have noticed it except that it rolled by slowly, then sped away as Jack looked up.
A moment later, Jack forgot about the car, thinking how one of his own would be a good way to jump-start the rest of his life.
BEFORE SHE MOVED TO TEXAS, Beth had placed all of Jack’s belongings in a warehouse to be stored for five years, after which they would be donated to Goodwill were Jack still in a coma. For the next two days Jack put stuff away in bureaus, closets, and bookshelves. But several cartons of old stuff still sat in the cellar—stuff he’d long forgotten about.
A stairway through a kitchen door led to the cellar. For more than an hour he went through the boxes, which Vince had arranged in neat stacks along wall shelves. In black marker they were labeled: “Jack’s Stuff. College Notes. Books. Photos.” Beth’s printing. He ran his finger over the neat block letters, thinking that when the ink was wet Beth was his wife, he was still Jack.
Yeah, and your marriage was on the rocks.
He slit open a box. Inside was a pile of photo albums. Beth had spent days arranging the snaps chronologically in the plastic sheets. He thumbed through them—shots of him and Beth, of Vince and other college friends. One album contained pictures of trips they had taken to Jamaica on their honeymoon, to Yosemite a couple years later, visits to friends in Chattanooga and California. Also in the box was their wedding album—a padded white faux leather folder with calligraphic gold script on the cover: “Our Wedding.” He did not open it.
Another album contained some foggy and cracked pictures of his aunt Nancy and uncle Kirk before they were married. And at the very end were black-and-whites of his biological mother and father, including a wedding portrait of them from 1966. His mother, Rose, was a slender, attractive woman with a simpatico face. His father, Leo, looked like a foreign dignitary with black eyes, a long sharp nose, and a baronial mustache. He stood just a few inches taller than Rose. According to Jack’s aunt, Leo was born in the Armenian sector of Beirut, Lebanon, where he studied languages and was fluent in several. In the old-world custom of marriage arrangements, he married Rose, thereby securing American citizenship. Jack knew nothing about their marriage—whether it was a good one or not—and little else about Leo, except that his plane went down just short of the runway on his way to visiting relatives in Chicago.
Because Jack was only six months old when his father died and about two years old when his mother disappeared, he did not remember his parents,
just these few photos of them. But imagination had a way of conspiring with memory, creating a reality of its own—a kind of kinescopic synthesis of stories his aunt told with these old photos.
Another shot of Rose showed her beaming at the camera with an infant swaddled in her arms. Himself. She was in the kitchen of their five-room flat in Worcester’s Armenian neighborhood just off Chandler Street. She was wearing a pullover with some lettering that he could not make out. Leo probably took the photo. As strange as it was, Jack had convinced himself that he remembered that apartment and his mother as she appeared. Which wasn’t possible. Human memory couldn’t reach back that far, he was sure, no matter what that repairman said.
Jack studied the photographs.
Who were these people whose twisty genetic stuff was filed away in his cells? What had they looked like? sounded like? smelled like? Had they spoken with accents? What stories had they told? What dreams did they dream?
For some reason, he felt a stronger affinity to his mother, whose dark almond eyes seemed to talk to him. Relatives had said that he had inherited her strong will and her bunions. She was clever and spunky, a little scooter of a woman on whom nothing in the natural world was lost. According to his aunt, she had an almost religious appreciation for the sea and would spend hours walking beaches looking for crabs, worms, and mollusks. She had a collection of shells from all over the world, some she had picked up herself, others from friends. So it was not surprising that she had studied marine biology, having won a scholarship to Tufts University, then moving into the doctoral program at Harvard. And here she was, this remarkable woman whose blood gurgled through his veins, who gave him life and dandled him on her knees—and he never knew her.
The only other photo showed her posing with other people in front of an auto parts store. They looked like colleagues since she and two others were wearing what resembled lab coats.
The album still in hand, Jack moved toward the basement window for better light. But a spike of pain shot up his left leg, throwing him off balance so that he stumbled into a shelf of laundry detergents and sent a bottle of Clorox onto the floor, the bleach draining into a puddle. Fortunately, the bottle was only partly full, so he was able to soak it up with a sponge mop, squeezing the stuff down the drain of a small sink. Yet the fumes filled his head, and he had to steady himself against the table to get the noxious odors out of his lungs.
An odd sensation rippled across his brain. It was not unpleasant, nor did it seem to affect him in any way but for a moment’s dizziness. Maybe the fast turn on his feet, he told himself. But as he started to move, he felt himself shut down for a second—a miniblackout. He braced himself against a support pole and looked around, gauging his awareness.
He knew where he was—in the basement of the Mystic Street rental, between a utility table and the washer and dryer. He was also aware of the cool cellar air, the heft of the album in his hand, the slight throbbing of his left leg, the discomfort in his shoulder and other joints—all the orthopedic white noise. He laid the photo album on a table and took a few steps.
Again that odd fugue—as if he had passed through a blank in the time-space continuum. He rested against the table and closed his eyes. He could hear himself breathing. He could hear the distant sounds of traffic. He could also hear something else: A woman’s voice. Faint, feathery faint, high, but clear enough to make out singing.
“You are my sunshine, my only sunshine …”
A shard of ice passed through Jack’s heart. He snapped around, half-expecting to lay eyes on some strange female gawking at him from the shadows.
Nothing.
Boxes, storage trunks, lamps, old armoire, furnace, oil tank, small workbench, Christmas decorations, washing machine, and dryer. No demon woman. The room was empty of any other presence.
Christ, now it’s phantom voices in the daytime.
All the shit you’re on, man—all conspiring to scramble your squeeze box.
He got the photo album and shuffled over to a pile of boxes and sat down. His head felt slow, as if operating on a sluggish strobe. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath to steady himself.
Just a little misfiring that’ll pass,
he told himself. He opened his eyes and began thumbing through the photo album again.
Then from behind him he heard the voice again:
“You are my sunshine, my only sunshine.”
Jack bolted straight up, the album tumbling to the floor. For a moment he stood perfectly still, his body throbbing to the fright in his blood. He took a deep breath and slowly turned to get a fix on the voice, certain that it came from the shadows by the furnace. He crossed the floor by the workbench. Who the hell would be down here, and why hide in the shadows and sing?
I’m going crazy. I can’t tell if it’s external sound or it’s inside my head.
He removed a ball-peen hammer from the pegboard. His heart took a huge surge of blood as he crossed the stairs and looked up to the light of the kitchen.
“You are my sunshine, my only sunshine.”
Jack let out a shuddering gasp. “Who-who’s there?”
This time he was dead certain. A woman’s voice, and not just in his head but in his ears. Real sound that still registered vibratory stimulation. Real sound: A clear, thin female voice singing. But not from the kitchen.
Someone’s down here with me.
He moved into the cellar, his fingers in a tight, cold grip on the hammer. Jack didn’t know the people who owned the house, nor did he know anything about them. The arrangements had been made by Vince, who said that personal problems had forced the couple to move out of state with their daughter. But it crossed Jack’s mind that those personal problems could mean that said woman of the house was psycho and had sneaked back home and was hanging somewhere in the shadows.
Jack moved toward some tall furniture against the far wall. “Okay, game’s up.”
“You are my sunshine, my only sunshine …”
An involuntary cry fluttered up Jack’s windpipe. The woman’s voice was right on top of him. He snapped around, his hand fused to the hammer, but he could not get a direction. He dipped his head into the black gaps between the furnace and the armoire. He wished he had a flashlight. “I know you’re there. I can hear you breathing.”
Nothing.
He tapped the doors of the armoire with the hammer. “Come out, goddamn it.”
Nothing.
He raised the hammer and snapped open the door. The armoire was lined with shoe boxes, but nothing else. He walked toward the rear of the cellar. “All right, I’m calling the police.”
Nothing.
He circled back toward the laundry table.
“You are my sunshine, my only sunshine …”
Jack froze. Movement. He saw movement. He was standing before the opening to a small recess that decades ago had served as a storage room for coal.
“You are my sunshine, my only sunshine …”
“I see you, goddamn it,” he said to the shadows, the hammer in his fist ready to swing if some lunatic woman rushed him. “Get out here!” His heart pounded so hard he had trouble putting breath in his words.
In the coal room hung an old wooden framed mirror, resting at a tipsy angle, the glass cracked and smoky. But he could see himself clearly, his pale face, his eyes like holes in his skull, the solid-bodied silver hammer in his hand.
As he stood there contemplating his image, he heard the thin falsetto. But this time she wasn’t singing.
“Ahmahn seerem anoosheeg …”
Jack let out a shudder.
The voice was coming from him.
In the reflection he saw his mouth form the syllables, their sounds piercing his ears like slivers of glass. His voice. His voice. He could still feel the muscle sensations in this throat. He could hear the vibrations in his ears.
God Almighty!
A black rush of horror passed through him. He had spoken—or someone or something had spoken through him, as if from another brain. Or worse: He really
was
losing his mind.
What made him all the more horrified was the realization that the words he had uttered were not words he comprehended. They were a foreign language. But he was certain that the words were those of his long dead relatives and ancestors. That he had spoken Armenian.
Disbelief flooded his mind because Armenian was a language he did not know, had never learned, had never spoken. Yes, he recognized phonemes and sound patterns picked up from friends of his aunt and uncle when he was a kid. But he was no more conversant in Armenian than he was in Danish or Inuit. But he would bet his life that the words he had uttered were Armenian.