Authors: Lisa Howorth
Their front yard hill seemed smaller, too. It had seemed so steep when they sledded on it, and her mother had had to descend the walkway steps so carefully when she was pregnant, which she’d always seemed to be. Mary Byrd remembered how gingerly, as if in slow motion, the ambulance guys had carried Pop down the steps after his first heart attack that summer. And somewhere, maybe in her old scrapbook, there was a Polaroid, spotty and faded, of Mary Byrd holding on to the lamp pole with one hand, leaning away Twiggy-style, the other hand on her hip and her ankles crossed in a pose that she must have seen in
Seventeen
or
Tiger Beat
. The dress had been her favorite: a mod, navy blue voile shift with a round collar and flared cuffs trimmed in cream tatting. Under that dress there would have been a slip—your mother would never let you out of the house without one then, and you wouldn’t have considered wearing see-through—and a stupid damn garter belt holding up her pale patterned stockings. In the background, unbeknownst to her, Stevie and Nick had leapt into the photo, looking like the dirty, shirtless, knuckleheaded brats they were, ruining her glamour shot. She had been so pissed. Her mother must have taken the picture. It might be the last photo they had of Stevie.
There had been some happiness in this house worth remembering, she realized, in spite of Pop’s drinking and how problematic all their relationships were, and how shockingly their life in this house had ended. Pop had tried with her, before Stevie died, bringing home “Ferry Cross the Mersey,” for no particular reason. Mary Byrd felt an unexpected rush of nostalgia for those few years, the last of childhood. She thought of the summer afternoons she’d spent in the backyard, lying on the chaise longue, roasting, basted with baby oil and iodine, trying to pick up Barry Richards on WUST out of Washington on her transistor, reading the Jalna books or watching the babies and Stevie play in the sandbox and wading pool, the divine scent of her mother’s Crimson Glory roses mixing with “Unchained Melody” or “Tracks of My Tears”
in the steamy summer air. Here’s where her first boyfriends had started coming around. Where they’d all watched the Beatles on Ed Sullivan (“a bunch of nellies,” Pop had called them), and the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald right before their eyes, in their own living room—where they’d all had Christmas and Thanksgiving and the babies’ first birthdays. Where she’d lain in her bed wondering why losing one’s virginity seemed like such a big deal before and such a letdown after. It had been in this house, after all, that she and Nick and Stevie had been part of a real family. A sort of slapped-together family, yes, but still, for Mary Byrd and Nick, their mother and real father having divorced when they were so young, for a while they’d had the traditional deal: a mother and a father and a bunch of kids all under the same roof. With a shitload of dysfunction, but still. A lot of it had felt good. Secure. Normal. It only lasted, what? Five years. And then, overnight,
literally overnight,
it had turned into a haunted house, scarier to them than the smelly Laff-in-the-Dark ride at the amusement park. Nick and the babies huddled in one bedroom, Stevie’s room emptied, the door closed for good. Even little James and Baby Pete wouldn’t go near it. That whole summer before they moved, Pop had never again gone upstairs, claiming that climbing the stairs was “too hard on his heart.” Mary Byrd’s own heart clenched at these memories. It was a wonder that they all
hadn’t had heart attacks that summer.
A man came and stood in the living room window and looked out at her standing down on the street. She wondered what the people living in the house were like. Could be anybody now: a gay couple, a single father with kids, a group of graduate students, an unmarried lawyer couple. Thirty years earlier, with the exception of Mr. Tuttle and Big Nana next door who were widowers, Cherry Glen Lane had been a street of traditional families, most with children. Her mother had heard that after Stevie was killed and the murderer was never caught and signs pointed to Ned Tuttle living right on their street, other families had moved away, too. The man in the window continued to stare at her and she realized that she probably looked suspicious carrying luggage and staring back. Maybe the fear still lingered in the neighborhood? Probably Stevie’s death had become folklore: a lurid cautionary tale that still kept families with kids from buying homes in the neighborhood, and those that did always a little on-guard. If there were any kids around, they talked about a little boy’s ghost, or maybe dared each other to run up and ring the Tuttles’ doorbell, like Jem in
To Kill a Mockingbird
. That’s what she and Nick and Stevie would have done, like they used to do to Big Nana. Big Nana surely died years ago. Or had he? He’d seemed old then but was probably in his fifties. They must have made his life miserable.
Mary Byrd moved off toward the shopping center and Doc’s, where she could call a cab. The guy in the window had lightish, crew-cut hair. Like Stevie’s. Stevie, had he lived, would be about that guy’s age, forty or fifty. Or about Pop’s age when he’d died. Weird. Life was just fucking weird.
She moved on, circling back to Patterson and continuing past the Horseshoe Apartments, where the scary poor people lived. Big, reeking garbage bins had stood in the parking lot in front of, not behind, the apartments, with broken glass strewn across the pavement. The few residents who took the
Times-Dispatch
in those days often wouldn’t—or couldn’t—pay Nick when he tried to collect on his paper route, and sometimes they yelled, so their mom had gone with him when he did his collecting. Police cars were often breaking up fights and parties. Kids didn’t need to be told to stay away from the Horseshoe and loved to imagine the things that went on there. When Stevie died, that was one of the first rumors, of course: someone in the Horseshoe did it, although they were no doubt as terrified as anybody about the murder. In reality, the ’Shoe was just an enclave of poor young whites, many of them transient construction workers in from West Virginia and little Virginia hill and piedmont and tidewater towns, always working on their cars, raising hell on payday, and trying to get by. As far as Mary Byrd could see, not much had changed in the ’Shoe except the garbage bins were gone, replaced by Dumpsters; some trees had been planted; and some of the people she saw in the darkening winter light looked Hispanic.
At the Libbie Shopping Center, Doc’s was Doc’s no longer, but a chain store, and the fountain with its cool granite counter was gone, she was sad but not surprised to see. So was the comic book rack; and the magazine rack, which before had held only the
Times-Dispatch
and a few things like
Life, True Confessions,
and
Mad,
now was a brilliant grandstand of slick publications. For ten cents—the price of a Baby Ruth and a cherry Coke in a paper cone, kids had been able to waste an entire afternoon reading comics, depending on who was working the counter. Sal would let you read the comics without buying them, but Estelle and Lloyd wouldn’t. She loved
Archie
and
Betty and Veronica
because they were about teenagers and love and had fashion pages, although the clothes were tacky. She preferred girly reality to the Justice League comics that Nick loved. Stevie loved them, too, but he wasn’t allowed to cross the big streets to Doc’s. Sometimes she looked at
Soldier of Fortune
, poring over stories about torture in World War Two prison camps. The Japs had put a glass tube in a guy’s penis and smashed it. Another had a story with “real” photographs of Fidel Castro zipping up after raping somebody. She hadn’t been sure what constituted rape, but she’d had bad dreams about it after. For the amount of change she was now having to put in the pay phone she could have had a week’s worth of comic books, Cokes, and candy bars. She tried calling Charles first to tell him she’d made it, but there was no answer.
Leaning against the pharmacy’s front door, Mary Byrd waited for a cab and tried to pinpoint what she was feeling, as she might examine her arms and legs for cuts and bruises after a fall. She didn’t know what she’d expected to feel. Probably exactly what she
was
feeling: a dull, sweet sorrow, and a sharp desire to hit rewind and stave off what had happened. She wouldn’t have gone parking with her boyfriend. She would have gotten Nick and Stevie to help her make a Mother’s Day cake so that Stevie wouldn’t have wandered off. He loved projects, and cake. She could have taken him and Nick to the old Westhampton Theater to see the Sunday matinee of
The Sound of Music
.
The boys hadn’t been allowed to go alone and they’d been dying to see it again because the evil Nazis looked like tools. But what had happened had happened. Randomness seemed to be the only order to the universe. If they’d made a cake they might have blown up the kitchen, or they might have gotten run over going to the movie. The only thing to be done now was to offer her two cents in the hope that it might keep what had happened to her family from happening to someone else’s. And it
had
happened to her entire family. Each one of them had been molested and some part of them killed off, or maimed for life. If it hadn’t happened, they’d all be different people. She heaved a big sigh, startling a woman leaving the pharmacy. “Sorry. Excuse me,” Mary Byrd said. The woman didn’t speak. Okay. She was through. She’d had her little scab-picking tour and she would now face everybody’s most real reality:
mom
.
Charles rummaged in the refrigerator, which was dead from the storm, looking for something to feed the children, disregarding the Tupperware tub of chili marked
eat me
. It was probably something old. Hadn’t they had chili a week ago? There were hot dogs, but he only saw hamburger buns. He knew Mary Byrd had told him what to have, but he’d forgotten. Oh well. He could put perishable stuff in a cooler outside. There were seven boxes of macaroni and cheese on the pantry shelf, so he knew they wouldn’t starve. Plenty of OJ and milk and cereal, plenty of cat food and dog food, of course. She’d never let the
animals
go without. Luckily there were some jugs of water; the water and toilets had quit just after the electricity. The phone had been last to go. At least they had the gas. It would be a boring Saturday night with no TV, no ESPN.
He wondered how Mary Byrd was doing. Riding in Mann’s semi seemed so batty, but it was true that she wouldn’t have gotten out of the Memphis airport if she’d tried to fly; everything was shut down. Worrying about her was pointless; she was going to do what she needed to do. This mess with her family was so awful, he felt a little bad that she was having to do it by herself. But even if he could have taken her, his being around her mother and brothers would only have made things weirder. There might be fighting, and yelling, and if he tried to intervene, somehow he’d get blamed for intervening. Mary Byrd could take care of herself, though, and she was tough, something he credited himself with helping her be.
He’d learned that if he let her lean on him in situations about which he could do nothing, she’d lean too much and not figure out how to deal with things herself. But he knew that she knew he was going to be there, no matter what craziness came down the road. He didn’t want to be her damned father, though.
Hearing activity in the kitchen, the cats came around and rubbed against his legs. Irene said, “Ow?”
“Oh yeah,
now
you guys love me, right?” The cats paid little attention to him unless Mary Byrd was gone. As he was trying to put some cat kibble into their bowls, Iggy bumped his big fat head against Charles’s hand, scattering kibble across the floor. “Iggy, you big dumbass,” he said. He didn’t pick the stuff up; whatever the cats didn’t eat the dogs would take care of.
The dogs. How could they be walked with all the ice and deadly branches crashing down? He saw William’s neon green Ninja Turtle bike helmet hanging on a peg by the kitchen door. He put on his overcoat and the helmet, took down the leashes, and whistled loudly. The Pounder and Puppy Sal trotted in hopefully, looking sideways at the munching cats and spilled kibble.
To the dogs he said, “Forget about it, you two. Y’all can clean up when we get back. I just fed you an hour ago, remember?”
Charles hooked them to their leashes and the three of them went out the door, stopping to take in the icy scene, their breaths three white clouds in the dark cold. It was part winter wonderland, part tornado aftermath, and the man and dogs, recognizing an unusual adventure, went forth in wary excitement.
“Okay, dudes, let’s have some fun!” Charles hoped that he wouldn’t slip and bust his ass. He wished William and Eliza were with him, it was all so amazing, but taking them out in the storm would probably be
reckless endangerment
or something. Mary Byrd would think so. He had a shitload of work to do, but the light table wouldn’t be working to view Wiggs’ photos, and anyway, he wanted to spend some time with the children. He wished he hadn’t let William sleep over with Other William; they’d better be playing board games like they said, and not be out in this shit. When he got back from walking the dogs,
if
he got back and wasn’t clobbered by a falling limb, he’d get Eliza to play some Scrabble if she was still awake. They hadn’t played in a long time, since the time Eliza had spelled “yoni” and he’d challenged her, only to be horrified when he looked up the word and saw the definition. That was the problem with kids today; they knew too much. Where, oh where, was the goddamn innocence anymore?