“Yes, but your mother’s fine.”
“Then why didn’t she call me?”
“Well, she’s fine now, and since she’s not going home tonight, this was the only way she could speak to you. She said the only way of getting hold of you was if I called. She’s quite an insistent woman, your mother,” he says, without any humor.
“What was wrong with her?”
“I’ll let you talk to her.”
The line goes quiet as the phone changes hands. A mumbling of voices and then, “Joe?”
“Mom?”
“This is your mother.”
“What’s wrong? Why are you in the hospital?”
“I chipped a tooth.”
I sit there gripping the phone, pretty sure she’s told me she just chipped a tooth, but knowing that’s not what she said because. . well. . “A tooth? You chipped a tooth and you’re at the hospital?” I shake my head, trying to make her words make sense. If she chipped a tooth, then wouldn’t she be. . “At the dentist. Why aren’t you at a dentist?”
“I’ve been to the dentist, Joe.”
She says nothing then. My mother, a woman who probably won’t even stop talking when she’s dead, offers me no explanation. A couple of weeks ago she was happy to tell me she was shitting water. So I have to ask. “Why are you at the hospital?”
“It’s Walt.”
“He’s sick?” I ask, perhaps a little too hopefully.
“He broke his hip.”
“Broke his hip? How?”
“He slipped in the shower.”
“What?”
“He was having a shower, and he fell. Broke his hip. I had to call an ambulance. It was scary, Joe, yet exciting too, because I’ve never been in an ambulance. The sirens were loud. Of course, Walt kept on crying. I felt so bad for him, but he was so strong. The ambulance driver had a mustache.”
Uh huh. Uh huh. “You were at his house when he was showering?”
“Don’t be silly, Joe. I was at home.”
“Why did he call you?”
“He didn’t need to call me. I was already at home. It was me who called the ambulance.”
“Yeah, but why didn’t Walt call?” I ask, somewhat confused-perhaps not as confused as I’d like to be, because there is a scenario being built here.
“Because he was in the shower,” Mom says.
“Then how did he call you?”
“I was already there, Joe. What are you getting at?”
“I’m not sure,” I answer, happy to let it go.
“We were getting ready to go out, so we decided. .” She pauses, but I’ve already heard her mistake. “He decided to take a shower.”
“He was at your house? You had a shower with him?”
“Don’t be so rude, Joe. Of course I didn’t.”
Images start going through my mind. I squeeze my eyes shut. I’d tear them out if it’d help. The images don’t budge. I’m sweating like a pig. I push my fingers at my closed eyes and thousands of colors appear-like in the chandelier downstairs-and I try to follow the colors with my eyes as they float across my mind. I’m happy to believe they didn’t take a shower together. If she says so, then I’m happy to believe it. Happy to forget she said we instead of he. Happy to forget this entire conversation. She just has to tell me that. .
“So, Mom, how did you chip your tooth?”
“It happened when Walt fell over.”
“What?”
“It happened when-”
“I heard you, Mom,” I say, trying to squeeze my eyes closed even tighter. “But I thought you said you weren’t taking a shower together.”
“Well, Joe, we’re adults. Just because we were taking a shower together doesn’t mean anything of a sexual nature was happening. Just because in this day and age young people can’t keep their hands off each other doesn’t mean we were acting just as immorally. We’re pensioners, Joe. We can’t afford to leave hot water running all day. So we took a shower together. Now don’t you go making a big deal out of nothing.”
“So how did you chip your tooth? He knocked you over?”
I open my eyes, because if they’re open, I see this lovely hotel room wall and not my mother taking a shower with some old guy. I don’t want to question her. She has explained things in enough detail for me, yet the question has left my mouth before I could stop it. I didn’t want to ask-God knows I didn’t. Eyes open, I see a couple of chairs, some paintings, and I can see the hotel room door. Maybe I should run for it.
“No, no, he kicked me in the mouth. His foot slipped out from beneath him, and the heel of his foot kicked me in the mouth.”
Don’t ask, Joe. Just don’t ask. “But how did his foot reach so high?”
“Oh, I wasn’t standing. I was kneeling. I was. . um. . well, it just happened, Joe, okay? He kicked me in the mouth.”
It just happened. What just happened? Oh God, please don’t show me. .
Only my mind does show me. My entire shirt is wet. I become so scared that she might confirm exactly what she was doing that the moment she starts talking again I put the phone down and run to the bathroom, reaching the bowl only just in time.
A hiccup, a convulsion of my stomach, the taste of bile. Vomit explodes from me in a roar and splashes into the water, while drops of water and puke flick onto my face and roll down onto my chin. I keep coughing it up until I have no more to cough, but I keep coughing anyway, watching it form a yellowish soup in the bottom of the toilet. As my body shudders, all I can picture is my mother in the shower. My throat quickly becomes raw, and my stomach shrinks into a small ball of pain. I can taste blood as it drips off my lips and plinks into the syrup below. There is something floating in there that looks like one of my dead goldfish.
My mind is spinning and I feel light-headed. I reach out and slap the lever and the mess that surely couldn’t have come out of me, but did anyway, is flushed away.
It hasn’t stopped flushing before I kneel back over the bowl, trying to throw up once again. Now I’m only gagging. Blood clots land in the water and spread out into rose petal shapes. I flush, but the toilet hasn’t regained pressure, so the petals don’t disappear. They just swirl around the edges of the bowl. Strands of drool hang from my bottom lip. They stick to the rim of the bowl, and they stretch when I lean back, eventually breaking. The tops of the strands swing down onto the black linoleum. Thinking about the thousands of people who have sat here and pissed and shat is better than thinking about Mom and her broken tooth.
When I was in the faggot’s house, I tried thinking of other things to take my mind away from what was going on, and in the process I thought about Dad and what he would say. Bending over the toilet, I start to remember something I saw. Something Dad was doing. I wasn’t supposed to be home. I can’t remember why, but what I can remember is coming home early and finding. .
Oh God.
I start to gag, but I have nothing left to cough up except blood. I keep my eyes closed so I don’t have to see the red water below, but behind my eyes the memory is playing. Images of Mom and Walt in the shower fade in and out, replaced slowly with images of Dad in the shower. Only he’s in there with somebody else. Who? And why in the hell did I walk into the bathroom when I heard the damn shower going in the first place?
That somebody else was another man.
Oh Christ. I open my eyes. My lungs hurt and my stomach is hot. My throat feels as though it’s closed over. I try my best to shake the images away. Dad’s trying to calm me as the naked guy dresses and leaves, and Mom isn’t there to hear it because she is playing bridge at the local bingo hall. It was the last time she ever played.
I think back to the policeman and his boyfriend pounding the bedroom wall, and this helps to take away the memory, this false memory, because surely that never happened.
Of course! I’m remembering a dream. Dad wasn’t gay. Of course he wasn’t. And I never killed him. I loved him. Dad was as straight as they came, and why he decided to take his own life, I’ll never know. And maybe I don’t want to know.