Love & Darts (9781937316075) (17 page)

Roni’d been cleaning, breastfeeding her son, and wiping dog
slobber off the floor for the better part of the day. When her son
vomited breast milk all over both himself and her, she was already
running late to pick up her husband’s college friend from the South
Shore. Roni changed the baby’s clothes, put him in his swing,
jumped in and out of the shower for thirty seconds, threw on her
husband’s old FBI SWAT training t-shirt, put her five-month-old son
into his carrier, and grabbed her keys. “Jesus Christ,” she said
under her breath but didn’t stumble on the guitar that her dog must
have knocked down again with his big wagging tail.

She pulled her wet hair up, picked up her son in his
bulky, crash-test-rated car seat, dragged it through three rooms,
shoved her feet into some old wedge flip-flops, and rushed through
the laundry room toward the garage.

She tried to think about what she’d say to Brandon’s
friend. She couldn’t remember if this was the guy that ended up
going to the police academy at the same time as Brandon or if this
guy worked with her husband at the stromboli place for five years.
She should know. So she couldn’t ask. Maybe she could ask him
whether he had any good stories on Brandon from when they first
met. She definitely wanted to clarify which guy this was before she
got back to the house to make their dinner.

Either way she was about to miss his train if she
didn’t hurry. Hopefully she could catch mostly green lights on the
way there and be at the front of the line of cars picking up
commuters. She hurried to the garage steps as best she could while
lugging the awkward baby carrier because she hated being in the
back of that Kiss & Ride line more than she hated being in a
rush to leave the house. But at the foot of the garage stairs she
just stopped.

Her navy sedan was backlit with blinding light off
the cement. The garage door gaped.

She gripped the handle of the baby carrier but
didn’t look down at her son. All the motion and momentum that had
gathered in the past ten minutes dissipated to nothing. It wasn’t
even worth hesitating. She took the first step and stood on the
second step of the garage stairs overwhelmed by both knowledge and
disbelief. It took brute force to move up one more step and stand
immobilized on the third shocked but not surprised. She stared into
the backseat of her car.

She didn’t hope. She didn’t pray. She just said to
herself, “I really don’t need this right now.” She climbed the last
step and stood on the garage floor. Her son kicked his feet in the
carrier. She shifted the thing from one side of her body to the
other.

Brandon’s friend’s train was due
to arrive in ten minutes. But it didn’t matter. What choice did she
have? She had to deal with this bullshit again. She set her son’s
carrier down on top of a fifty-pound bucket of dog food and sent a
text to her mom:
What
happened?

Then she walked around to the other side of the car
to be sure.

Her husband’s motorcycle lay tipped over on the pile
of recycling.

Yep.

God damn it.

The driver’s side passenger door was standing wide
open and her father lay passed out in the backseat.

Roni felt nothing. She just wanted her dad out of
her car. She wanted him not there at all. Inert like the mountain
bikes, the garden hose, the lawn seed spreader, the broken fire
pit, the black shelving, the bag of bulb fertilizer, the snow
shovel, the weed whacker, the new wagon, and the crib box, she just
blinked. She didn’t cry. She didn’t scream. She didn’t throw
anything. She didn’t abandon her son. She didn’t kick the aging,
tyrannic bastard.

She said, “Dad. Wake up. Get out of my car. I need
to go. I need to be somewhere.”

He didn’t move.

She pushed her dad’s knee gently but firmly by
shutting the car door against his shins. He didn’t notice. She
picked up each of his legs and let them drop. They were deadweight.
She poked him in the chest. He was nearly lifeless—didn’t respond
to any stimulus. She tried to drag him out of the car but he was
too big. She had trouble enough lugging her son around. There was
no way she could move her father. It was an exercise in futility to
even push isometrically against the accumulated weight, resistance,
and friction of their intolerant years. She tried to shove her dad
into the car but his clothes against the upholstery of her car seat
created too much drag for her to overcome.

Her son started to cry.

She looked over at him, balanced there in a plastic
safety device on the dog food. What was she even trying to protect
him from? She hadn’t noticed any of the dog food scattered across
the concrete floor, or that raccoons had likely been in her garage.
Her recycling was chewed up and torn. There were scat pellets. So
then she did feel something. Not disappointment, rage, or
aggression having anything to do with her father’s being so
exhaustingly who he was. No. She was infuriated that the garage
door had been open all night and that wild animals got into her
dog’s food.

She walked around the car to the big bucket of dog
food and started rocking her son. He fell asleep fairly easily. She
moved him off the dog food container and put him in the middle of
the hood of her car. She got a blue-handled broom and dustpan to
clean up what she could. She sprayed urine remover in all the
places she found scat.

Her mother texted her back about what had happened
with her father last night.

Roni read her mother’s explanation but did not
respond. Instead, she texted her husband to say that she was going
to miss his friend’s train. She gave no explanation to her husband,
just told him to text his friend and let him know.

Her husband was livid and responded right away. He
said, no, he wasn’t going to text his friend, that she just needed
to go and pick him up, that there was no reason for her to be late,
she was just sitting around all day, and that it’s not like his
friend can just call a taxi—it’d cost a fortune if any ghetto cab
even did show up. Her husband’s follow-up text said that he never
should have given her any responsibility and that he knew she
didn’t like his even having friends but that she had no right to
leave the poor guy hanging.

She did not cry. She did not call
her husband at work to scream at him about her father’s lying
passed out drunk in the backseat of her car. What would be the
point? He’d already worked a double. So she did not throw her phone
down and stamp on it. She did not call her friend to get the name
of that divorce lawyer.

She absorbed what she could and did nothing.

After twenty-nine years of listening to all her
mother’s excuses she was not about to explain anything about this
to her husband. She was too sick of all the reasons why. She did
not respond to her husband at all. She just looked at her son on
the hood of the car to be sure he’d be okay there for another
minute and disappeared into the house. She returned with a plastic
cup of water, walked around to the rear passenger door, and threw
the water in her father’s face.

He blinked. He spit. She was patient and maybe a
little afraid when she told her dad to just pull his feet into the
car because they had to go to the train station. He reluctantly did
it.

Roni took her son off the hood of
the car and put his car seat into the carrier base in the backseat
next to her father. She didn’t want her son so close to her father
right at that moment but she had no other choice. She was just glad
that her child was encased in plastic, that her father was not
quite conscious, and that she’d be picking up her husband’s friend
in a minute. She might not remember exactly how he and Brandon met
but she knew he was a big guy trained for mortal combat.

Knowing that helped her breathe.

She got into the driver’s seat and adjusted her
mirrors. Her father only momentarily met her gaze in the rearview
mirror before he tilted his head back and put his hands on his
forehead.

Roni said nothing.

She put the key in the ignition and turned it.

Nothing happened.

The car wouldn’t start: the battery had run down
with the dome light shining all night.

She texted her mom to ask if she could go get her
husband’s friend at the train station. Her mom immediately
responded to say she couldn’t because she was almost at work
already and plus she didn’t understand why her daughter was always
so unfeeling about everything that happened and never cared what
her mother was going through. Roni should really not give her any
more stress right when she was so emotional after the events of the
previous evening, and even if she might have maybe considered doing
a favor for Roni, even if she were perhaps available for another
twenty minutes, she wouldn’t do anything right then because she was
so mad at Roni for not even responding to her explanation in the
other text.

Roni deleted the text message from her mother and
got her son and his carrier out of the car. She left her dad
rolling around in the backseat and walked to the house next door.
She wished she had grabbed the diaper bag or at least a blanket.
She wanted to be more prepared. But it was too late. She rang the
doorbell.

Her neighbor answered. Roni extended her son’s
carrier and said, “Can I borrow your car for a half-hour? I’ll fill
up your tank.” Her neighbor didn’t say a word. She reached for the
baby carrier, dug into her pocket, and handed Roni the keys.

Suicide’s unthinkable but around six thirty on a winter night
in 1994 the redheaded woman stood against a low building covered
with dingy white siding. She had on the suit she’d worn to a job
interview she’d never gotten a call back about and smoked her
cigarette behind a holly bush because she didn’t want to be hit by
the door that swung open periodically. Her discount heels sank down
into the slushy bark mulch. Her head tilted back against a black
oval sign that read
Devalle Funeral Home
in tasteful gold
script. The sign was lit by a solar-powered fluorescent landscaping
light full of dead bugs from the summer.

The winter sun must not have fully charged
the power cell during the day so its flickering bluish light
illuminated her hair. She was tired but not too tired to notice the
sign behind her head, to remember the building’s purpose, and to
realize people were staring at her. She took two steps forward. Her
shadow grew tall and black against the siding. She was conscious of
the eyes upon her but not of the enormous shadow shifting and
flickering behind her. The mourners turned away, afraid of the
towering, swaying silhouette. The redhead couldn’t understand why
they refused to acknowledge her. She knew every one of them. So she
summoned a defensive pride and smiled at each of the people she
thought judged her for smoking, or for standing in the bushes, or
for sinking into the mulch, or for leaning her head against the
fancy sign, or for not going inside right away to pay her respects,
or whatever their reasons were. She had no reason to be guilty. She
was waiting for her friend. So with spiteful clenched lips she
nodded to those who refused to look at her as if to say, “And what
makes my life your business?”

It's hard to feel absolutely comfortable in
a small town.

There’s not a large degree of discomfort.
After living there for a lifetime a person might not notice any
uneasy feeling at all but there is a small amount of tension, like
the constant hum in an electric wire or the inescapable buzzing of
a ceiling fan that needs repair. It's a uniform, predictable,
smooth tension. It must come from the nature of the people.
Different figures carved from the same stone, all trying to discern
themselves from each other, like kitchen magnets that won't stick
together.

And the red-haired woman felt that tension
acutely while she waited for her friend. Her hands were bony and
freezing in the wind, and even though her heels sank into the muck
that February had made of the summer landscaping she didn’t want to
wait on the sidewalk amidst the influx of mourners. People wearing
dark coats passed her. Each one went ahead, stamped his or her feet
on the Astroturf step, and held the glass door for the next
person.

She was unconscious of the shadow, but it
kept happening that as the mourners approached the funeral home
they saw the enigmatic figure as a presence to be reckoned with.
They passed her without looking. They gripped their children's
shoulders. Unconsciously the men placed themselves between her and
their loved ones: protective, afraid. The shadow stretched up the
building and wrapped itself around the gutter. It was a reminder of
the size of death and the reason they had come. They bowed their
heads in reverence for the unknown. Her shadow swayed back and
forth in the cold, smoking and waiting for a friend. To the
passersby the motion signified an impatience with life and a cool
expectation of their similar fate. Consciousness is exhausted by
February. They did not think all of these things, but the woman's
tracing brought tears to their eyes as they passed. The redheaded
woman stood aloof, smoking her cigarette, and waiting for someone
of these supposed friends to at least say hello. Her “Hello,
Irene,” crashed useless against the sidewalk.