Authors: Steven Gould
I jumped to their landing and began pounding on the door, hard, rapidly. "Stop it! Stop it!" I shouted.
Her screams stopped and I heard heavy steps cross to the door. It opened and he stood there, red-faced, eyes narrowed, teeth bared. "What the fuck do you want?" One hand was closed in a fist and his right hand was behind the door.
I'd seen him before, on the steps, leaving or coming in. He was taller than me, and heavy in the middle. He was barefoot in dark slacks and a white tank-top undershirt. He brought the other hand out from behind the door. There was a gun in it.
I froze.
He asked again. "What do you want?"
In the background I heard his wife moaning. A familiar smell came to my nose, the smell of scotch. My stomach hurt.
I jumped behind him, grabbed his waist and heaved. He was heavy, very heavy, and the second he felt my arms around him, he threw himself back. I lost my balance and started to fall, all of his weight coming down on me. Before we landed, I jumped to Central Park, at the playground near 100th on the West Side.
We went down in the sand pit, next to the concrete hill with all the tunnels. Washburn's body drove all the air out of my lungs and he twisted, quick as a snake, to grab at me, to point his gun at me.
I jumped away, reflexively, then gasped for breath in the Stanville Public Library.
God, he was heavy.
After five minutes I could breathe without stabbing pain.
I jumped back to the Brooklyn apartment and looked in the Washburns' front door, still standing open. There was a sound from their front bedroom and I called out, "Hello? Are you all right?"
Great. You know she's not all right. Idiot!
I walked in hesitantly. She was lying on the floor by the bed, trying to pull herself up. I forgot about trespassing and went to her. "Don't try to move. I'll call an ambulance."
"No. No ambulance." She was still trying to pull herself up, trying to get onto the bed. I gave up and helped her onto it, but she wouldn't lie down. She wanted to sit.
"Where is he?"
"Manhattan."
"How long?"
"Huh?"
"How long has he been gone?"
"Oh. He just left."
Her face was swollen. Both her eyes had been blacked, but the way the color spread, I figured they'd been done the day before. She was bleeding from her mouth and there was a cut on her forehead that also seeped blood.
"My purse."
"Ma'am?"
"Please. Get me my purse. I think it's in the kitchen."
I looked at her dubiously. For all I knew she was about to have a brain hemorrhage from the beating she took. She should be in a hospital.
"Please... it's got the address of the shelter. The shelter for battered women."
I went and found her purse, came back, and dug through it at her request. The address was written on a small piece of lavender stationery. There were hearts and flowers at the top.
Jesus.
I called a taxi and helped her pack some things—some clothes, some money stashed away in a book, and an album of old photographs. Then I eased her down the stairs to meet the cab.
She was moving better by the time we got downstairs and I was beginning to believe she just
looked
like death. I paid the cabbie—overpaid him—in advance and made sure he knew the address. I also told him that if she got worse to go straight to the nearest emergency room.
The cab pulled away and drove down the street, getting smaller and smaller and smaller. I hoped she'd make it, but to help, I'd put two thousand dollars in her purse while I helping her pack.
I was scared to stay in the apartment Thursday and Friday, scared I'd mess it up and scared of Washburn.
On impulse, I jumped to the Delta terminal at Dallas—Fort Worth International Airport and hopped a flight to Albuquerque, where I played tourist for most of the day, including taking the aerial tramway to the top of the Sandia Mountains. I wore myself out enough to sleep after I jumped home.
The alarm went off at 10 P.M. and I called Millie.
"What did you do today?"
I hesitated. "I piddled around, played tourist, played with some computers." I smiled to myself. "I was trying not to think about Mom's visit."
"Nervous."
I exhaled. "Very." The weight of my anticipation was heavy, like an undone chore with no time to do it before my dad got home. It didn't feel like eagerness at all. It felt like dread.
"Well, I can understand that. You have every right to be nervous."
"What? You think it's going to go bad?"
She took a quick breath. "No, sweet. I think it will be fine, but it's been so long since you've seen her, you don't know what to expect. You've had a lot of bad things happen since she left—it doesn't surprise me that you don't know what to expect. That would make anybody nervous."
"Ah. Well, I was wondering if I wasn't weirding out...."
"No more than the circumstances dictate." She was quiet for a moment and then said, "You surprise me, Davy, sometimes, at how well you do handle these things, given all that's happened to you."
I swallowed. "You don't feel it from this side, Millie. I don't know if I can stand it, sometimes. It
hurts."
"Most people in your circumstances wouldn't even know it hurt, Davy. They would have built a wall of unfeeling so thick that they wouldn't know when they were sad or in pain or even happy. The pain would be so great and so close that they could only hide from it and all feelings.
"To know that it hurts is the only way to get past it, to heal."
"Humph. If you say so. Sounds like those other people have the right idea. To not hurt sounds like a good idea."
"You listen to me, David Rice! You go that route and you won't feel joy or love, either. What happened between us would never have happened. Is that what you want?"
"No, never that," I said quietly, hastily. "I do love you. That hurts sometimes, too."
"Well good. It's supposed to." She took a ragged breath. "At least it hurts me sometimes, too. I think it's worth it. I hope you
feel
that way too?"
"Yeah. I do."
"Are you coming a week from tomorrow?" she asked.
"I could come on Thursday again."
"Oh... I've got a test on Friday. I've got to study for it—but you can stay until Tuesday if you like."
I smiled a small, satisfied smile. "Okay. I will."
Later, I jumped to Stillwater and watched Millie's bedroom window for a while. Then I jumped to the Albuquerque airport, let my ears equalize, jumped to the parking lot at the base of the tramway, let the ears equalize again, and jumped to the observation deck atop the mountain. This time there was some pain, but the ears cleared after a second.
I have to find someplace halfway between, somewhere around 7800 feet, as another stepping stage.
The city was scattered below, like stars fallen to earth, grids of streets and parking lots, punctuated by pillars of building lights. It was two hours earlier than New York, so there was still a slight glow on the far western horizon that shaded from light blue to black, with stars directly above almost as dense as the city lights below.
There was a light wind, but the air was very cold, making the light from above and below somehow distant, remote, and not at all warm. Looking at them, beautiful as they were, made me feel cold within. They weren't the sort of things one should watch alone, because the scale of them, the vast numbers, made one feel diminished. They made me feel very small.
I held my nose and jumped home in stages.
I met Mom at the airport with roses and a limousine.
There was a large crowd waiting outside the security gate at La Guardia. The airport is so crowded that they don't let anybody but passengers into the actual gates. Naturally, this didn't stop me. I just jumped past security to a spot I could see down the long corridor, well past the metal detectors and carry-on luggage scanners.
Her connection from Chicago was twenty minutes late, increasing my anxiety. I thought about plane crashes, mixed signals, missed planes. It would really be something if she turned out not to be on the plane. I smelled the roses for the twentieth time—the scent had gone from a light perfume to a cloying scent, almost rancid. I knew it wasn't the flowers, only my anxiety.
Stop smelling them, then!
I paced from one end of the gate's waiting area to the other, occasionally sniffing the flowers.
When the flight did arrive she was among the last off, walking slowly, a briefcase in her hand.
She'd changed. I don't know why this surprised me. Before she left, Mom had black, shiny hair, long and thick. She'd also been plump, talking endlessly about dieting, but never turning down a dessert. She'd also had a nose one might call aquiline if one was kind, or beaklike if one wanted to be nasty. I shared that nose with her and with her father, so I knew well enough what people could say about it.
Her hair was short now, cut close around her face, shorter than Millie's, and it was white, as were her eyebrows. She'd lost at least fifty pounds and was wearing a narrow-waisted dress. I saw at least two businessmen turn to watch as she walked past. And her face had changed. Certainly not beyond recognition, but it took me a minute to realize what it was. Her nose was smaller, slightly turned up, and I felt a moment's sharp grief, a feeling that I'd lost another connection to her. For a paranoid moment I wondered if I'd made up the shared features, that I really wasn't related to her—alien. Perhaps
really
alien.
Then I remembered the hospital stay, and the surgery to repair her face after she'd left us.
She was scanning the crowd at the gate, all of them, except me, waiting to board the continuation of her flight to D.C. Her eyes crossed over me, a young man wearing a (new) expensive suit, then looked quickly back, a tentative smile on her face.
I advanced, the flowers held before me, almost like a shield. "Welcome to New York," I said.
She looked from my face to the flowers and back to my face. She set the briefcase down, took the flowers from me, and opened her arms wide. Tears were streaming down her face... and mine. I stepped into her arms and squeezed her nearly as hard as she held me.
It felt wrong. She was shorter than me and the ample plushness of her hugs that I remembered from my childhood was also gone. It felt uncomfortably like holding Millie. I let go after a minute and stepped back, profoundly disturbed, confused. Who was this person?
"God you've grown," she said, and it was all right again.
That voice was there, the voice of my past, the voice that said,
Oh, not much. How was school?
The voice that said,
Your father can't help it, dear, he's sick, sick.
The voice hadn't changed.
"Well, I suppose I have. It's been six years."
I picked up her briefcase and swore at myself.
She knows how long it's been. Why'd you say that?
"You look really good, Mom. I like your hair and you lost a lot of weight." I didn't mention her face because I didn't want to talk about the events that caused her operations, that drove her away in the first place.
She just nodded and walked along beside me, sniffing occasionally at the roses. She held then in both her arms, cradled, as if they were an infant.
I used a pay phone in the baggage area to call the limo's cellular phone. The limo was waiting up on Ninety-fourth Street, just on the other side of the Grand Central Parkway from the airport. By the time we'd claimed Mom's luggage and got out on the sidewalk, it was sitting at the curb. The driver, a small black man in a black suit, was leaning against the hood.
I'd met him at the limo agency the day before, so he recognized us right off, coming forward and saying, "I'll carry that, ma'am."
Mom looked at me, surprised, and perhaps a little frightened.
"It's okay," I said. "This is Mr. Adams, our driver."
She relaxed and handed him the case. "A limo? A limousine?" she said, looking at me.
"Well, yes. I think that's what they're called."
Mr. Adams held the rear door for her, his body tilted forward solicitously, a hand ready to help her in. After Mom was in, he continued to hold the door, looking at me.
"Oh." I put the suitcase I was still holding down beside the other cases and climbed in. Mr. Adams shut the door and put the cases in the trunk.
"A limousine?"
"You keep saying that, Mom. Would you like something to drink?" I opened the small refrigerator. "There's a split of champagne in here." I'd make her open it if that's what she wanted—I wasn't going to open any more champagne bottles without practicing first in private.
She settled on mineral water. I took ginger ale. We used the champagne flutes anyway. Mr. Adams took the Van Wyck to the Belt-Parkway. The Saturday-afternoon traffic was light, so it was only thirty minutes before the limo pulled up before my brownstone. "This is the right address, sir?" He sounded doubtful.
"Yes," I said, blushing. I was seeing my neighborhood through his eyes—the trash and graffiti and groups of sullen Hispanic and black men who stood on corners. I never saw this side because I always jumped straight to my apartment. If I wanted to go for a walk, I'd jump to the Village or the south end of Central Park or downtown Stanville, Ohio. Places that weren't so nervous-making.
Still, it was
my
building I was really worried about. I hoped we wouldn't run into Washburn. We didn't.
Mr. Adams made sure the limo was locked and its alarm activated before he carried the bags up to my apartment. Once he'd put the bags down in the spare room, Mom tried to tip him.
"Oh, no ma'am. I've already been paid a more than adequate gratuity for the weekend."
"The weekend?"
"Mr. Adams will be driving for us during your visit. It can be hard to get cabs out here sometimes."
She blinked. "Oh."
Mr. Adams tipped his hat. "I'd best be getting back to the car. May I suggest, sir, that I move it until you need me? You have a lot of nice things here in your apartment—it might be best if the limousine wasn't downstairs to draw the wrong sort of attention to it. You could reach me on the car phone."