That was his first clue that something was wrong. The second was the silence.
Marko had two younger brothers, one of whom was five, the other three. They should have been home from preschool by now, he knew. But when the boys were home, they made noise, and lots of it; noise that was easy to hear, even from the street, because the Saveljics’ narrow row house had thin walls and drafty windows. Marko looked all the way down Coventry Avenue, to the gas station on the corner. He could just make out his dad, fueling up a Plymouth Volaré station wagon at one of the pumps.
That much, at least, was normal.
Maybe the mail had just come late today, he thought, as he pulled a Sears catalogue and an electric bill out of the mailbox. But when he looked at the neighbors’ mailboxes — all the way down the row of connected houses, he saw that the mail had already been taken in. So it couldn’t have come that late.
Marko opened the front door and stepped into the cramped living room.
“Hello?”
No one answered. As he studied the room, he didn’t like what he saw.
On a mahogany table to his left was the phone. An answering machine connected to the phone was blinking rapidly, indicating that several messages were waiting to be listened to.
The door to the basement was open. At that moment, he knew.
“Hello?” called Marko. “Mom?”
The house sounded empty. It felt empty. He wanted to be wrong.
He looked at the basement door again, then turned away.
The long lace curtains in the living room were drawn. The dark maroon walls had been rendered darker still by a sickly film of cigarette smoke residue. A staircase with chunky oak balusters led to the second floor. Pictures of Marko, his younger brothers, and his older sister lined the wall that led to the second floor. There were school photos, baptism photos, a few from the Jersey shore… Marko recalled that his mother had personally framed and hung every one of them.
No, he thought. He had to be wrong. But he couldn’t block out the memory of the fighting from the night before. His mother in tears, accusing his father.
Opposite the staircase, on the other side of the living room, his father’s prized icons — Eastern Orthodox religious paintings — decorated the walls. Two-dimensional and stiff, they made Marko think of the Dark Ages. Jesus with his halo, John the Baptist holding a tri-bar cross… His father’s parents had brought the paintings with them when they had emigrated from Serbia. The paintings had been passed on to Marko’s father when they’d died.
The open door to the basement beckoned him. He took a step toward it. The light in the basement was on.
“Mom!”
The steps creaked as Marko descended them.
Laundry lines, sagging with the weight of wet clothes, crisscrossed the basement, and Marko detected the pleasant smell of detergent and bleach. Recognizing many of his own clothes, he wondered whether that had been intentional — whether she’d made a point of doing one last thing for him.
She’d hung the jury-rigged noose from a floor joist right in front of the staircase. The chair she’d stood on lay kicked to the side. Her bare feet dangled inches from the floor, her tongue was—
Marko turned away.
What she hadn’t intended was that he would be the one to find her. Of that he was certain. His father was supposed to have been the one to walk down these steps. On his lunch break.
He considered cutting her down and calling for an ambulance. Maybe she wasn’t really dead yet.
He forced himself to take another look. No, she was long past saving.
Unable to think, speak, or cry, he fell back onto the steps. All he wanted to do was run. But he couldn’t even force himself to do that. Eventually his thoughts turned to his brothers. And that’s when he understood what the blinking light on the answering machine was all about.
He stood, walked back up the stairs, and pushed play on the machine. As he expected, it was the secretary from the local preschool. No one had come to pick up his brothers. The boys were at the office, but the office would be closing soon. Someone needed to come get them.
Marko considered picking up his brothers himself. But would the school even release them to him? He was only seventeen, a brother not a parent… and if they did, where would he bring them? Not here, that much was certain.
He should call the cops.
No. His father could deal with that.
He felt for his wallet in his back pocket. It was still there. Inside was his brand-new driver’s license and twelve dollars. That would have to do.
The walk down to his father’s gas station on the corner only took a couple of minutes. It was a dismal place. The neon sign on the corner said SAVE-A-LOT, only the L was dark. The pumps were all at least twenty years old. His dad still owed the previous owner lots of money, which meant money was tight in the Saveljic household. Too tight. That had been part of the problem.
As Marko approached, he saw that his father was cleaning the windshield of an orange Dodge Duster, behind the wheel of which sat an old biddy of a woman. A clock on top of one of the pumps read 3:44. Marko was supposed to have shown up for work four minutes ago. For years now, pumping gas at his father’s station had been his sole after-school activity.
“You’re late.” His father had broad shoulders, deep-set eyes, a hard jaw, and hair that was cut tight to his scalp. His voice was menacing and accusing. Tiny holes riddled his grease-stained work pants, a result of battery acid splatter.
“Why didn’t you go home for lunch today?” Marko asked.
Marko’s father finished cleaning the windshield and put his squeegee back into a bucket next to the gas pump. “How do you know I didn’t?”
“I just know.”
Marko’s father looked puzzled. “One of the pumps broke. Had to wait for a part from Romano’s. Why don’t you have your coveralls on? You show up late and you’re not even dressed for work?”
He positioned himself so that the old lady in the Duster couldn’t see him and gave Marko an unfriendly push on the shoulder.
He’d smothered her, thought Marko. He’d kept her in that dark cave of a home and had done little over the years but criticize the few friends she’d dared to make, criticize her hair, her weight, her mothering abilities, what he perceived to be her lack of faith…
Marko’s mother had come to the United States from Soviet Georgia when she was five. English had been her second language, and her timidity with the new tongue had spilled over into the rest of her life. His father had taken advantage of that timidity. He’d taken a gentle, kind, beautiful woman and turned her into a lost soul, starved for love.
And then he’d cheated on her. Marko had gleaned that much from their argument the night before. It seemed that his father had been having an affair with a woman from the Orthodox church, a young widow he’d supposedly been counseling.