Save Yourself (19 page)

Dressed, boots on, he lay back down next to her and kissed her neck. “I’m taking your car so Patrick can finish the garage. You work dinner tonight?”

I don’t want to get married because the idea of not being able to leave scares me. Because schizophrenia might be genetic and I don’t want to do to any other kid what was done to me
. “Mm-hmm.”

“Can you get a ride with Darcy? I might be too late to take you.”

Also, I slept with your brother, and I don’t know why, and I can’t stop thinking about it
. “Mm-hmm.”

“I have to go to the mall,” he said, and kissed her again. “To the jewelry store. Have a good day.”

Right, hey. No fucking problem.

After she was sure he was gone, she got up, put on some shorts and a T-shirt, and made coffee. Patrick’s bedroom was silent and that was good because Caro loathed herself. She couldn’t even think about Mike’s trip to the jewelry store without starting to feel anxious, so instead of thinking and feeling she went into the garage. Patrick hadn’t finished sorting the old man’s stuff and she and Mike hadn’t done much to advance proceedings, but alone, she thought she could probably get the job done before she had to go to work. It was way easier to deal with somebody else’s garbage than her own.

Most of what was in the boxes was junk like worn-out clothes and old magazines. No more porn, for which she was grateful. She worked quickly and steadily, making one box of things she thought the brothers might want to keep—like pictures or important-looking documents or the old pocket watch she found—and putting the rest into piles: clothes, papers, other. So they could just take a quick look, and make a decision. She tried not to think about the man whose
possessions she was sorting, about the stench and the girlie magazines and the cooler in the living room. About his son, who saw nothing wrong with any of it, and who drank too much, and who wanted to marry her.

She was reading an article about Baja California in an ancient fishing magazine when she heard a noise behind her and Patrick said, “You shouldn’t do that. It’s not your mess.”

Give it ten years, it might be. “I don’t mind,” she said.

There were a few moments of awkward silence during which Caro found herself inexplicably wanting to cry. She went back to her article but it was hard to read with him standing there. She didn’t care that much about Baja California to begin with.

“I’m going for a run,” he finally said, and she said, “Yeah, sure.”

She finished the last of the boxes, filled three of the empties with the piles that she’d made, and put everything else into the back of the truck. The woman from 149 Div came home again while she was working; today her scrubs had rainbows on them. Caro lifted a hand but the woman just marched into her house, eyes straight ahead. The door slammed. The dog barked. The curtain flicked.

Caro looked at Patrick’s car, parked in front of their house. The windshield was covered with some kind of grime—dust, pollen, who knew—and the tires were sinking into nests of dead leaves. Mike and Patrick could scoff all they wanted, but Caro knew the kind of trouble neighbors could cause when they took exception to the way you lived. She found Patrick’s keys on the table next to the front door, buried under several layers of sedimentary junk. Unlocking his car felt weird, like she was looking through his drawers. But he’d said the cops could tow the car, he’d said he didn’t care. And he’d managed to drive it home, bad alignment or no. She could drive it twenty feet into the garage.

The inside of the car was almost unbreathably hot. She rolled down the window and it got a little better, but not much. Patrick
was not a tidy-car person. One cup holder held an ancient Zoney’s fountain cup with a mangled, chewed-up straw—she could see the imprints of his teeth on the soft plastic—and an overdue phone bill sat on the passenger seat. Sliding the key into the ignition felt oddly intimate. The engine turned over without even a hiccup and instantly the car shook with pounding music. Caro smiled despite herself; Patrick’s taste in music was hideous. She had nothing against metal but there was a time and a place for Megadeth, and the time was 1987 and the place was tenth-grade study hall.

Then again, revisiting high school seemed to be Patrick’s thing these days. She shifted the car into gear and pulled forward, turned and backed up a few feet, then turned again and pulled into the garage.

There was nothing wrong with the alignment. The alignment was fine.

She closed the garage door from the outside and went back into the house through the front door. In the kitchen, the back door stood open, and when she looked out she saw Patrick lying on his back in the grass with his knees bent and one arm over his eyes. His face was an alarming shade of red and his chest was moving fast. His MP3 player lay in the grass next to him. One earbud was draped across his chest, the other had disappeared into the tall grass.

She opened the screen door, took a step outside. He looked even worse close-up, drenched in sweat with gray patches under his eyes. “Are you okay?”

He nodded. His eyes stayed closed and his throat moved convulsively. “Ran too hard.”

The way he forced the words out, he didn’t sound good. “You want water?” she asked, and he nodded again, so she went back into the house and got him a glass of water and a dishcloth she’d held under the faucet. She put the water down in the grass next to him and lay the dishcloth on his forehead. She was careful not to touch him.

He already looked better, but she sat down anyway. “I finished the garage,” she said.

He nodded, but didn’t speak. The grass beneath her was cool, the soil damp. Next door, the dog was barking. A soft breeze blew, tugging gently at her hair and her clothes and carrying away the smell of the neighbor’s dog shit. Patrick had pulled his T-shirt up to cool himself off. He was too thin, she thought. Almost bony, compared to Mike. All that walking and running. Mike was a big guy, anyway, his high school muscle softened after ten years of too little exercise and too much beer, but still. Mike’s bigness had always made her feel safe. Patrick was rangy. His stomach was flat, almost concave. His skin was so smooth that in the dark it seemed unreal, as your fingers ran over it searching for a mole or a scar or anything, like—

His eyes were open. Watching her. The manic color in his cheeks had faded, the heaving in his chest eased; the hazel eyes behind his long lashes were the color of deep water.

“Come upstairs with me,” he said.

She wanted to. Her palms pressed against the grass behind her, to push herself up. She dug her fingers into the dirt. “Mike wants me to marry him.”

Patrick stared at her for a moment and then looked up at the sky. He didn’t say anything.

“Your car’s fine, isn’t it?” She didn’t know she was going to say it until she did. “You’re not driving anymore because you hit that deer.”

His shoulders moved, a faint rolling motion she took to be a shrug. “Doesn’t matter.”

Her fingers curled in frustration. She felt the dirt jammed under her fingernails. “Yes,” she said. “It matters. It matters that you can’t keep enough of your shit together to drive a car and hold down a job and pay your goddamned phone bill. And then you ask me—you want—”

She stopped. She didn’t know how to say it, how to tell him that he couldn’t just hit a deer and give up driving. That he couldn’t just
give up. She could say the words but the words were no good, the words weren’t enough and now she knew why she hadn’t been able to talk to Mike the night before, because those words weren’t enough, either. Next door, the dog barked. Those people, they complained about a parking space they didn’t even use, and their damn dog barked around the clock. Not that you could keep a dog from barking if it wanted to bark but you could keep from leaving it in a crate all day, you could avoid getting a dog if you had the kind of life that would make a dog miserable. If anyone had a right to complain it was them, it was her, it was the dog. Patrick stared up at the clouds. Looking into his face she saw nothing. She wanted him to say something, anything; she wanted him to come alive, to ignite the way he had in her arms on the night of the Great Apocalyptic Mistake. She wanted him to ask her upstairs again. If he asked her again, she would go.

But he didn’t ask. His face was cool and inert as a block of iron. He stood up and went inside and left her sitting alone in the grass under the clear blue sky, and the dog barked.

SIX

When Patrick rolled open the garage door for the first time since the police had taken the old man’s car, it was another beautiful day, clear and mild with just a hint of breeze. The last time he’d seen the interior of the garage had been from inside, and what he’d seen that time was the bloody-fendered Buick. This time, all he saw was the garage. Dingy walls smeared with grease, a fluid stain on the concrete floor. His old bike. Three garbage bags full of empty beer cans. Those had belonged to the old man, who’d insisted that the city recycling program was some kind of racket, specifically designed to steal his four cents a pound or whatever he got paid at the recycling plant. On the far side of the garage were one two three four five six seven eight cardboard boxes, scattered around the basement door where Mike and Caro had dropped them. Not even Mike had been willing to step any farther into the space than absolutely necessary. For a moment, Patrick seriously considered just loading the boxes into Mike’s truck and driving them to the dump, except that he’d have to actually drive the truck to get it there. Also, they’d talked about that last night, and Mike didn’t want to do it.

“He’s not dead,” Mike had said. Caro wasn’t there, which made it easier to have this conversation. After the fight they’d had on the porch her mere presence made Patrick feel like a surly teenager. “He might want some of that stuff someday.”

Patrick had thought about the old man’s collection of truck stop T-shirts
(Mustache rides five cents!)
but said nothing. If Mike wanted to believe the prison sentence was just a temporary setback, Patrick wasn’t going to disabuse him of the notion. Now, standing in the garage, he pulled a box cutter out of his pocket, walked over to the first box—ignoring the shrill mental voice that cried,
Right here! This was where the fender was!
—and slashed it open. A fog of smell wafted up: mildew, beer, sweat, cigarette smoke. It smelled like the old man, like sitting next to him on the couch listening to him cry,
Holy god, I really did it now
. It smelled like court dates and neckties and endless messages left with the public defender’s office, with only the occasional call back. Then there’d been the sentencing, and after that a long stretch of nothingness, a dead silence like the middle of a blizzard. Patrick remembered that being at work had started to feel—frightening. He remembered standing by the time clock, unable to catch his breath; he remembered looking down the long aisles in the warehouse and feeling like they would collapse if he tried to drive his jack down them. He remembered Frank DiCriscio joking that nobody was safe with a Cusimano behind the wheel and he remembered quitting, knowing that it was stupid and also knowing that he had no choice, that if he tried to spend another minute in that building it would kill him.

He’d actually thought the building wanted to kill him.

Fucking crazy.

He steeled himself, and reached into the box. Flannel shirt. He tossed it on the floor and reached again. Dirty athletic sock, worn at the cuff and dirty brown at the sole. He reached again. Underwear.

The first box, all clothes, went quickly, but the second box took longer. He spent almost an hour sorting through a stack of papers
that contained, among other things, the old man’s birth certificate and Patrick’s own vaccination records. The long column of his mother’s faded signatures brought a brief and intense flash of longing for her. The third box was mostly clothes, again, but at the bottom he found a battered shoe box full of photographs, discolored and sticking together. He didn’t know who any of the people in the pictures were. If these people were important to the old man, where had they been during the trial? If they were important to Patrick’s mom, where had they been while she was dying?

No point thinking about it now. He put the box in the keep pile and kept working, vaguely aware of the ebb and flow of engine noise as cars drove down Division Street. He was arm-deep in the fourth box (from the closet: ancient neckties, baseball caps, jackets with pockets holding half-empty packs of powdery cigarettes and lottery tickets and—Jesus—condoms) when one of the engines grew loud and close and didn’t fade. He could hear bass pounding deep in his eardrums.

His heart was pounding, too. The noise cut off. He grabbed something out of the box, hardly aware of what it was but listening keenly for the sound of her boots on the concrete. When it came he glanced up, nonchalant, as if he wasn’t rattled at all. “Doing another drive-by?” he said.

“I was in the neighborhood.” Layla’s black jeans looked like they’d been painted on and a crimson bra strap peeked out of the wide collar of her shirt, which was also not exactly what you’d call loose. He hadn’t seen her since she’d dropped him off on Monday night. They hadn’t had sex in reality but he’d had uncomfortable dreams that night where they’d done it in dozens of (usually public) places, like the high school bio lab and the food court in the mall. On Tuesday morning he’d woken up feeling like a creep. He’d been trying not to think of her ever since. Now that she was here, in the disturbingly apparent flesh, the creepy feeling was back and stronger than ever, and it brought along a nervousness that felt suspiciously like excitement.

“You should be in school,” he said.

“My demoralization and indoctrination quotas have been met for the day, thanks.” Her nose wrinkled. “What’s that smell?”

“My life. What time is it?”

“Around one.” She sat down next to him. “Updating your wardrobe?”

He looked at the thing he held, an ugly teal sport jacket. When the hell had his father ever needed a sport jacket? Into the Goodwill pile it went. “Clearing some space. The neighbors are complaining about us having cars, and parking them places.”