“Tim,” said Pierce.
But my mother cried. “I’m sorry,” she said simply, and of course it should have been me crying, me apologizing, but it wasn’t.
* * *
The doctor at the nursing home told us that our mother had a problem with the artery in her neck that was preventing blood from reaching her brain in the usual amounts. As a result she forgot things. Maybe they could have operated if it were a few years before, he told us, but she was far too frail now, far too deep in senile dementia caused by “environmental factors,” which of course meant, in this doctor’s opinion, that she drank herself to it. This, anyway, was the unspoken subtext to our conversation, which occurred by chance in the hallway outside her room. It was clear the doctor, a droopy oaf with a dirty shirt collar, considered my mother’s problems her own damn fault, and was sympathetic in only a professional sense.
Pierce and I didn’t say much on the way home. The doctor was right, of course, about her drinking, and it was my fault as much as anybody’s. I sporadically came home for the holidays, just like everyone else but Rose; I noticed her frequent trips to the kitchen to check on food that had already been served and eaten, the insults flung at my father as the rest of us slipped out the door to see a movie. I noticed the empty liquor bottles, stacked with heartbreaking care in the clear glass recycling bin in the garage (and certainly whatever gene coded for this kind of behavior explained Bobby’s as well).
But most of all, I noticed, as Bitty did, as Bobby and his wife and, later, his daughter did, that whatever grit had gotten into the gears of their marriage and necessitated such gross overcompensation involved Pierce. I could remember my father spitting on him over a dessert, my mother throwing back her chair with such force that it gouged a chalkwhite divot in the dining room wall. And there was a time, early on in the drinking, when Pierce banged on the bathroom door, behind which she had locked herself, pleading for her to open it, that he felt terribly afraid, that he thought we might all try to kill him, and hearing her reply, “Oh, God, Baby, not you. I can talk to anybody but you right now.” And of course we decided that, in her drunkenness, she had mistaken Pierce for Dad, and spent the rest of the night talking Pierce out of his paranoia, not entirely successfully. And there was the matter of Pierce’s absence from the strip, which none of us ever questioned, because after all Pierce didn’t belong there. He was obviously a little crazy, wasn’t he? What place did he have in America’s favorite family cartoon?
Of course, we should have just gone and asked Rose what was going on. There had to be a reason she didn’t come back. But we decided to see Rose as a quitter, as the primary aggressor in the breakup of the family, and for a long time that made things a little easier.
eighteen
I ran around FunnyFest in a fever, looking for Susan. It wasn’t that I had anything in particular to say to her, but at the moment she was the only person I knew in town who didn’t know things I didn’t want to know, or forgotten things I did want to know. I had developed a sudden and highly specific fear on the way back from the nursing home: that my brother and I would live in the house together as eternal bachelors, Pierce growing gradually less crazy and me crazier until we met in a highly eccentric middle ground, where we would remain until we had both reached an age too advanced to measure. At that point nobody would be able to tell us apart, and would have no reason to. I was one hundred percent sure this would happen.
Susan was not to be found. I saw a lot of familiar-looking people — high school acquaintances or their parents and siblings, I guessed — and they made me feel more than a little bit amnesiac, as if I had once had a real family and a sprawling group of loyal pals and had scorned them all without realizing it.
I had just passed a rickety-looking espresso-and-chai stand in front of the roller coaster when a young girl jumped up from a bench and called out my name. I recognized her, after a moment’s confusion, as the girl who had been wearing the Tim costume, the one I’d talked with behind the bushes. She flounced up to me, her face absurdly serious, like an undercover agent’s. She was wearing a colorful striped tank-top and, beyond all reason, given the heat, a pair of dark blue jeans with flaring cuffs. A cigarette — clove, by the smell — dangled with studied perilousness from her right hand, and she switched it to the left to shake my hand. “Hey,” she said. “Gillian Millstone.”
“Tim Mix.”
“Sorry about my buds yesterday. Those guys are all dorks.” She shook her head gravely. “I wanted to talk to you, man.”
“About what?”
She studied my face a second, then turned suddenly coquettish, twisting her body half-away from me and producing a wry smile. “You look like your brother,” she said.
“Which one?”
“Piercey.”
“I see. And you’re…”
“Yeah, his girlfriend, sort of, I guess.” She straightened, flicking the cigarette aside and dropping the coy flirtation like a dusty rug snapped in the wind. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”
I shook my head. “I don’t think I want to know about that,” I said. “I’m looking for somebody, really.” And I started edging away.
“The chubbette? Is she your girlfriend?” She was following me.
“No, my editor.”
“Oh, a business relationship.”
“You could say that.”
We were walking freely now, fast, with her close behind me. “It’s not our love I want to discuss with you, Tim. It’s just I’m worried about him. He’s a little obsessed lately.”
I came to a stop before the entrance to the Centrifuge of Death. There was a large wooden cutout of me, the cartoon me, holding its hand out at head level. The voice bubble above me read, “You must be this high to ride!!”
“Lately?” I said. “He’s always obsessed. It’s chronic.”
“It’s aggravated by stress,” she said seriously. “Hey, my dad was a shrink before he croaked. I know nuts.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Which part?”
“Your dad being dead.”
“Yeah, well. So’s my mom.” She shrugged. “What are you gonna do?” She tilted her head toward the ride, a massive black cylinder the approximate shape of a tin of Christmas cookies, which had spun to a stop and was letting off nauseated-looking passengers. “Come on, I’ll fill in the blanks on the ride.”
I laughed. “That? Forget it.”
“Don’t be a wimp, Mix.”
“I don’t have tickets.”
She dug into her jeans pocket and pulled out a wad of crumpled tickets big as a fist. “We stole a bunch from the booth. The goober who runs it hides the key under a rock.”
I sighed. I didn’t want to talk to this girl, nor go on this ride, yet the combination seemed so ludicrous as to be, on this day, inevitable. She winked at me. “Come on. Everybody’s doin’ it.”
This was demonstrably false. The stragglers coming off looked like the remains of an army battalion decimated by friendly fire, and we were the last two people in a line of seven. I shook my head no, no, but there I was, climbing up the steel stairs, clomping across a metal platform, approaching the curved black door. The twin iron doors of the crematorium occurred to me and I froze at the threshold, but Gillian Millstone pushed me in.
Unlike, say, a coffin, the Centrifuge of Death was almost completely unadorned on the inside, save for a series of thin steel dividers that marked rider compartments and the wide safety belts that dangled between them. Gillian grabbed my hand and dragged me clunking across the floor, pushed me into a compartment and wrapped the seat belt around my waist. I half-expected to be injected with some sort of truth serum, but instead she gently punched my gut. “You two have the same bod, except you’ve got a little more meat on you.”