“At last,” I say. “God.” I shake my head, feigning sadness. “What a mess that ended up being.”
“Or,” Beth says, “as Phil would say, ‘What a vicious triangle.’”
The champagne chokes me with tartness and bubbles.
“God,” Beth says, swallowing. “What a dolt he was.”
“What I liked,” Mickey says, “was the look he got on his face when he was rubbing a couple Big Ideas together,” and she makes the look—a stern, fatherly frown.
“Not a guy with a fancy interior, that’s for sure.” Beth smirks.
“Here’s to Phil,” Mickey toasts. “May he never again loaf in vain.”
“May he never love in Spain.” Beth raises her glass, too.
My palm is flat against my chest, gasping with laughter, eyes watering, thinking of Phil—how he wore his sleeve on his heart. I remember reaching under him, between his legs, while we fucked, touching his balls. In my hands, they felt loose, and invertebrate, and at my mercy, and I’d thought of a marble Madonna I’d seen once at the Toledo Art Museum. She was holding the world in the palm of her hand, and seemed pleased. There was a thin, mysterious smile on her lips, as if she knew how much power she had.
But then I remember the look on Phil’s face as he shrugged his father’s coat on, how much taller than me he seemed, how that expression was smug, as though we’d just finished playing a game—a dangerous game, a game played with pieces of broken glass and aluminum bats—and he’d won.
I drink. I say, “But there was a parting shot.”
“I hope it wasn’t a shock in the dark,” Beth says.
“Or a shark in the pot,” Mickey says.
I’m laughing again. I feel better. Finally, I say, “He told me he thinks my father is keeping my mother up his sleeve.”
Mickey nods at Beth, then at me, in mock reflection. “Sounds reasonable,” she says.
“A bird up the sleeve is worth two bushes at least,” Beth says. “Or so they say.”
We laugh harder, and for a long time. Then, when the laughter’s faded, I lower my voice. I say, “No, really, you guys, he says my father knows where my mother is.”
“Hmmm.” Mickey strikes a match and lights another cigarette, and her tone changes. “Does that surprise you?” she asks, looking at the tip of her cigarette to see if it’s lit. She drags on it, then says, “Personally, I’ve always wondered about that.”
Beth nods, looking at me seriously.
“Really?” I stand up quickly with the unopened bottle of champagne in my hand. “Why haven’t you ever said anything?”
Beth looks at Mickey, who looks at Beth, and then at me. She says, “I think I did. Once. Right after she left, Kat. But you didn’t seem to want to hear it.” She continues, “I remember asking you if you thought maybe your dad had something to hide, if maybe he knew something you didn’t and wasn’t saying, and you just blew it off. You said he was too transparent to hide anything. You said he’d taken a lie detector test, and they’d decided your father lacked the ability to lie.”
I stand there with the bottle, and they look up at me uneasily in the silence. Finally, Mickey pours herself some more champagne. She says, “I’ve been drinking all week. I just hate Garden Heights.”
“Maybe I should put this bottle in the freezer,” I say.
I feel groggy, and confused, as if I’ve just hit my head hard on something soft. I hold the champagne bottle like a skinned chicken, by the neck, and go into the unfinished part of the basement, and flip the light switch.
One bare bulb blazes from the ceiling, a terrible brightness.
I feel tired, blinded by it, as if I’ve been sleepwalking and have just woken up with a searchlight in my face. I can hear Mickey and Beth laughing in the other room, my father and May talking in a muffled singsong upstairs, but I can also hear myself breathing, and the breath sounds as palpable as wings, or water, in my lungs.
I head for the back of the basement, past the washer and dryer, across the drain hole, into the shadows, to the freezer. I can hear it purring, a contented vibration that hums through the whole white length of it, humming into the cement floor, into the earth under that. My father’s piles of old newspapers, bundled, are tied up tightly, efficiently, with twine on top of them. Years’ and years’ worth of old news. He must have planned to take them to the Board of Education’s annual paper drive one of these years, and forgot, and keeps forgetting, as the piles grow higher.
I set the bottle of champagne on the floor.
The bundles are heavy, and yellowed, and the twine cuts into my fingers when I start heaving them off of the freezer. They make a lifeless whoomf as they hit the cement, and the headlines seem strange, hopelessly innocent and outdated, even a little insane, staring up at me.
U.S. DOWNS TWO LIBYAN FIGHTERS. SURROGATE MOTHER MARY BETH WHITEHEAD SOBS IN COURT. Ronald Reagan’s colon cancer. George Bush looking weary, jogging in Kennebunkport in the rain. And, at the very bottom, a bundle that must have been there since the year my mother disappeared. A photograph of the Challenger making its last, crazy zigzag through the sky as it loses its challenge with space.
When all the bundles are off, I put the palm of my hand on top of the freezer, and feel the warm motor of it running. It must get hot, working so hard to keep the things inside it cold. I haven’t opened it since before my mother left, and when I try to lift the lid, I can’t. It’s as though something’s holding it closed from inside, or as if a huge, invisible weight is resting on it.
I try harder, my fingers under the white rubber lip, straining. I can feel the frost on my knuckles, but I can’t lift it, and I quit trying. I pick the bottle of champagne up, start back to the other room, turn the light off as I leave.
“The freezer won’t open,” I say, still holding the bottle by the neck.
“Forget it,” Mickey says. She lifts her empty glass for more champagne. “Let’s just crack it now.”
I sit back down on the floor, handing it over to Mickey, who struggles with the cork as Beth and I look on, holding our breath, waiting for the bright, foaming shot that doesn’t come. Instead, I hear my father at the top of the stairs. “What’s going on?” he shouts down to us. “What are you doing down there?”
Mickey puts the bottle between her knees and grinds out her clove cigarette in the ashtray, looking surprised.
“Drinking champagne, Dad. We’re just talking and drinking champagne,” I call up to him. “Why?”
“I want those girls to go home,” he says. His voice sounds strained. “Right now.”
Beth frowns at me, puzzled. I shrug. I stand up and head toward the stairs to ask him what’s wrong, but when I get to the foot of them, he’s already gone. I hear him stomp across the kitchen, through the living room, where I hear him say something in an angry tone to May, and she replies, also unintelligibly, in a high, apologetic whine. Then I hear them head together up the stairs.
“Jeez,” Mickey says, slipping her leather coat back on. “What do you suppose that was all about?”
LYING IN BED, I THINK OF MRS. HILLMAN WANDERING through her house in the perpetual dark, arms outstretched, feeling her way to the bathroom, the sink, the sofa, the refrigerator.
Born blind, what if, one morning, she opened her eyes and could see?
I imagine Phil finding Mrs. Hillman in her bed that morning when she doesn’t get up, doesn’t shuffle down to the kitchen for breakfast. Phil finding his mother lying on her back in her own bed, eyes bulged out of her head, mouth a gaping hole of surprise—
She’d seen it all too fast, for the first time, and had died.
Maybe, I think, when you’ve waited a long time to see something, you need to find your way to it in glimpses.