The Death of Wendell Mackey (9 page)

“But just to get out,” he said, “just to
try
. Disappear, and never have to worry…”

He stood up, but something caught his eye as he turned for the front door. He was surprised he hadn’t seen it before. It was a picture frame on the wall behind the TV table covered with his mother’s literature. A frame, holding a photograph.

It was Wendell, as a child. 

If not for its low hanging—three or four feet from the floor, which was oddly low—it would have been obvious. Still, he never remembered it from previous visits, certainly not his last. The television had disappeared long ago, so it wasn’t a matter of the frame hiding behind it. Wendell approached for a closer look.

It was an odd centerpiece for a naked wall. It was, in fact, the only thing hanging on any of the walls in the apartment. The simple wooden frame contained a small boy, at most five or six, standing like the only tree on a brown patch of grass, a baseball bat leaning on his shoulder. Wendell saw the dull brown hair, pushed over to one side, and a pained solemnity on his face that revealed more than five or six years. Childhood had been abrupt, an autumn cut short by October snow. But the picture—and he in it—showed the passage of too much time, as if the process of snapping it had been drawn out, over years.

“Dad…”

His father’s absence from the photo brought his presence to mind. Wendell supposed he had been waiting for his father as it was taken. Always waiting for him, it seemed.

“Keep that right elbow up,” his father would say, often too late in the day for it to matter, “weight on the balls of your feet.” He would use his umbrella as a bat, and go through the swinging motion. “Just make contact, Wendell.” He would smile. And then it was a late bite to eat, a later beer, and a pat on Wendell’s head as the boy shuffled off to bed.

Their old house, a beautiful yellow colonial, sat on a small parcel of land, but the lawn in the back, hedged in by trees and a low line of shrubs on its east side, was a hidden personal world for a young boy, one that he so often inhabited alone. He was a boy with his imagination, turning stumps into trolls and a copse of trees into a pirate ship.

“She never went out there,” Wendell said to himself, his mind’s eye seeing his mother behind the kitchen window, watching him with a sponge in one hand and a plate in the other, her yellow rubber gloves covering up to her elbows. “But
he
did.” When he could, that is. When he wasn’t working. He would burst out the back door, still wearing his suit and tie, or his uniform and nametag, whatever costume for whatever job was being done that week. Those moments always seemed few and far between. But they were pure joy when they did happen, just the boy and his father, smiles all. The bat, a ball, and two gloves. Watching the goldfinches feed. Sandwiches under the beech tree. He would put his hand on Wendell’s shoulder, and for that moment, the sun shone only on them. But multiple jobs, new jobs, job searches, swing shifts, all conspired to rob the child of his father.

“He wasn’t a bad man,” Wendell said. His father had tried, but struggled.

And so Wendell would wait, and the passage of time eventually made the disappointments memories. Still, childhood had its moments, things worth remembering, worth desiring. But like all things worth desiring, it was ephemeral, gone as quickly as his father’s numerous jobs. At first Wendell’s father had sold printer parts, then vacuum cleaners. And then it was a comfortable desk job at an auto parts store. And while the little Wendell enjoyed his father’s variegated employment—which brought with it curious stories of coworkers and customers—he couldn’t comprehend how a transient worker often made for a credit risk, which threatened the house and the life in the suburbs. Wendell remembered trying to crane his neck to see into the back yard one last time as the old colonial receded from view in the car’s rear window.

And he remembered seeing the apartment building for the first time, chipped brick, almost weary like the elderly tenants milling about on the sidewalk out front, like it had been there first and the rest of the city had crept up around it.

“Home,” his father had said, smiling.

Wendell turned to his mother.

“Home,” said his mother. Her neck was rigid.

Wendell’s bed was placed beneath a brown water stain in the ceiling. Even after being fixed by the landlord, it eventually returned. But as long as his father was there, there was a sense of warmth, even though his mother never once smiled in the apartment. At least his father had tried. But it wasn’t enough. Almost immediately, Wendell’s mother insisted that Wendell wasn’t coping.

“If you can’t see it, then you’re not looking,” she had said.

“He’s fine,” said his father. “We’re all coping. Nothing wrong with him.”

But she had worn him down, and within a week Wendell was in therapy. Dr. Harbison, a kind, grandfatherly man, had an office on the edge of the city.

“You’ve got yourself a creative little boy,” Harbison said to his mother and father, after the third or fourth visit, when they came in for an update from the doctor.

Wendell had been sitting outside of the doctor’s office, a teddy bear and blue toy truck with a gimpy wheel unceremoniously dropped in his lap by the secretary to keep him occupied. The door had been left open a few inches, and Doctor Harbison’s voice, a thick baritone emanating from his barrel chest, easily flowed out. When the secretary had escorted Wendell out, Harbison was behind his desk, leaning back in his leather chair with his hands resting on his girth, while Wendell’s parents sat in chairs across from him.

“Imaginative,” Harbison continued. “He tests well. And there’s nothing at all wrong with a child his age being a little reserved.”

“Reserved?” said Diane. “That’s what you call it?”

“Diane…”

“No, don’t
do
that,” she said. “The boy’s off. Ever since the move.”

Wendell ran the toy truck with the awkward wheel back and forth over his palm and up his forearm. He was only six, but still perceptive enough to see the obvious: due to what he had done, or hadn’t done, or what was assumed he should have been doing by his parents, this parent/doctor meeting was convened. “It’s about your feelings,” Dr. Harbison had said after their initial meeting, weeks earlier, in his office, “about what’s inside of you.” No sneezing, or stomach aches, or fever, but still something was evidently wrong with him, deep within and imperceptible to all but his parents—or his
mother
—and the good doctor. Even with his warm smile, and the feeble but honest attempts to relate to his young patient—with the awkward “Do you enjoy the video games?” and “Which one’s tougher, Spiderman or Batman?” take-the-edge-off questions—Wendell felt himself sitting but wanting to stand, uncomfortable at any angle. The office felt both too large and too old, with Wendell’s own presence anachronistic among the antique end tables, vintage maps and Rembrandt prints. Doctor Harbison would ask questions, and Wendell would hem and haw before answering and then would offer up more questions of his own, to which Harbison would lean back, stare at the ceiling and speak in his slow baritone syllables. After a few meetings, Dr. Harbison told him that he wanted to meet with his parents after their next session. Still unsure of all the reasons why he was there, Wendell assented, and the meeting was called.

“Your boy is not off,” responded Harbison, “just a little different, perhaps.”

“He’s always in his head,” said Diane, “always…quiet, thinking to himself.”

“Like that’s a problem,” Wendell heard his father say.

“But it’s not normal.”

“It’s not bad,” said Harbison.

“But not
normal
.”

“He’s special,” said his father.

“You mean retarded special?”

“Come on, Diane. Special. To me. He’s my boy. So I don’t care—”

“You’re making me the bad guy here. I’m not the bad guy. I’m not—”

“But all of this was your idea. This whole therapy thing.”

“—just wanting our son, just wanting
us
, to adapt,” she said, sounding like she had been carrying on a conversation with someone other than her husband or the doctor, “to take our situation, this ruinous fortune of ours—”

“Now I’m the bad guy, right Diane?”

“—and actually do more than just survive. That’s not asking too much, is it Doctor?”

A long pause. This usually indicated a triumph for his mother, whose notion of argumentative victory was a rhetorical snipe that left his father holding the noose that would hang his family. Victimhood suited her, however false it was, with her autobiography being one long funeral dirge, and every word her epitaph. But covering it all was a mantle of superiority, impossible to hide as she foisted all responsibility for their situation onto her husband with ridiculous enthusiasm. So she grabbed for her ashes and sackcloth, lustfully, and prepared to devour any critics—be they familial or not—as a lioness would her prey.

“Do you think your boy is disturbed?” Harbison asked her.

“Well, no. Or… I mean, I think that he isn’t acting in the way—”

“Imaginative, quiet, keeping to himself, these aren’t signs of a sick boy, but one who—”

“An hour a week, Doctor, and not a cheap one at that, but an
hour a week
. And you think you know him? Better than me?”

“Diane, take it easy.”

“And what about you?” Another pause. Wendell knew she was staring holes into his father. “I see. It’s me, isn’t it? You’re both looking at me like it’s me. You want to know what I think the problem is? You want to know why I brought Wendell here?” She cleared her throat, and in his mind Wendell saw her straightening her jacket, flattening out wrinkles that weren’t there, whetting her lips and folding her hands into one large angry fist. And then—

The door closed. Wendell looked up to see the secretary above him, her hand on the door.

“I wasn’t listening.”

“We both were,” she said. “Couldn’t help it.” She attempted an air of compassion, softening her face. “Sometimes adults say things that…don’t come out right.”

Wendell stared at her.

She leaned down, bringing her face closer to Wendell’s. “You seem like a normal little boy to me.” Her lips stretched up at the corners, a smile on a face not used to revealing one.

“Thanks for the truck,” Wendell whispered. The secretary moved towards her desk, and Wendell squeezed the teddy bear in the crook of his arm.

The therapy had continued—at times off and on when paying for the sessions became difficult—for almost eighteen months. Finally, it ended when it had all ended, when things came crashing down. The last session was on Wendell’s eighth birthday.His father was dead four hours after Wendell’s birthday cake was served. When the city had fallen asleep, and the street lights cast the shadows that hid the skulking street life, three men entered their apartment through a window and beat his father to death with a metal pipe. A struggle, a shriek, and a series of muffled thumps. Then Wendell heard only traffic. His mother had been in her bedroom, cowering with him, and he remembered her narrow fingers wrapped around the bed post, white like her bloodless face. The blinds had been open, and the moonlight streamed in, a bone white light, making her face a kabuki mask, expressionless and rigid. She should have been crying, or biting her hand to stifle a cry, or whispering to the cops on the phone, but there was nothing. She was bathed in moonlight, her face oddly smooth. And for a moment, Wendell remembered wondering if it was his mother, or someone else entirely, crouching next to him. He heard the men walking around outside of the bedroom, and then exit through the window.

Nothing was touched. Nothing was out of place. There was no motive, and no real leads for the police to follow. Three men, in and out like mist. Wendell liked to think that they were there to steal something.
Anything
. Life couldn’t be that senseless.

Every night after that was cold. Days became weeks, and months strung into years.

“And that’s how I left it,” he said.
Next thing I remember,
he thought,
I was paying rent and looking for work.

He had to turn from the photograph. If he continued to stare, too much would flood back. He would step into the frame, and back into childhood. It would consume him. He was having enough trouble enduring the present. But memories were aphids, ready to reproduce and suck him dry of energy, spreading the damage of the past. His eyes focused on the picture of the little boy, then went fuzzy, as the boy floated in his vision, and the memories scrambled to make connections in his mind.

The blare of a car horn brought him back.

Food.

The photograph was still there, hanging low on the wall. Wendell stood up straight, feeling his back crack.

I gotta eat…

Immediately after the murder, Wendell’s mother had made the apartment her cell, nailing windows closed and refusing trips to the laundromat. Squalor soon followed. Family members would come by from time to time to clean and help out, but it never lasted. Wendell could still see his mother’s dirty hair hanging limp and dead like the peeling wallpaper in her bedroom. The boy grew into a man, yet somehow Wendell held on to that child.