Mary and O'Neil by Justin Cronin
“I’m sorry, O’Neil. I thought it was probably time you saw this.”
“God Almighty.” He put the letter down, though at once he picked it up again. “How did you find it?”
“It wasn’t hidden, if that’s what you’re thinking. It was just sitting there in the top drawer of his desk. I found it just a couple of days after the accident when I was looking for the lease on his office. I guess I shouldn’t have opened it, but there was no address, and I thought it might be important.”
O’Neil read the letter again, its one taut sentence of yearning. Dora Auclaire: He searched his memory for this woman, but came up with nothing. “Jesus Christ, Kay.”
“I know, honey. It’s not good news.”
O’Neil sighed, uncertain what to say or think. “Any idea who she was?”
“He did some legal work for her, I do know that. A will, some real estate stuff.” Kay shrugged. “It wasn’t really my business to look.”
“I can’t believe Dad was screwing around.” O’Neil shook his head; he was suddenly cold. “I mean, they went to a motel.”
Kay took his hand. “He never mailed it, O’Neil. And the letter doesn’t prove anything. There’s a lot we’ll never know about them.”
O’Neil looked at the floor. “Can’t know, you mean.”
“Don’t, can’t. It’s all the same.” She paused; he felt her eyes on his face. “They were just people, O’Neil.”
“How can you say that?” He pulled his hand away, though he was instantly sorry for doing this. “They were our parents.”
Kay rose and lit the stove for tea. When her back was turned he closed his eyes, and tried to remember them, his parents. For some time he had longed to hear their voices again. But he could not imagine his father saying these words.
Kay returned to the table and pulled her chair close to O’Neil’s. “Honey, I’m sorry. Really, I am. But I think it’s time we talk about you doing something with yourself.”
“I thought I was.”
Kay frowned. “Painting houses for this con man?”
“Oh, Joe’s not so bad.”
“Joe’s a liar, and a thief. What about law school? You’ve talked about law school.”
“I think that was just something to say.”
“Okay. No law school.” Kay sighed maternally. “How about teaching? You’re good with kids.”
“Have you ever even seen me with kids? I don’t think I even know any.”
For a while they sat in silence. The kettle whistled, and Kay left the table to pour the tea, which smelled like lemon and roses. She placed a cup on the table in front of O’Neil, then leaned over to put her arms around his shoulders and kiss the top of his head.
“They had their lives, O’Neil. Go have yours. That’s what I’m saying to you.”
“You’re kicking me out.”
“I love you, boyo.” She pulled away to fix him with an even gaze. “And, yes. When the leg’s better, off you go into your life. And off I go into mine.”
When Kay left him, O’Neil sat alone at the table, drinking his tea. No one had called him by that name in many, many years. He remembered the day he had graduated from college and the moment, stepping from the dais with his diploma in his fist, when he had lifted his eyes to search for Kay. A sea of sunlit faces, and then he had found her, waving to him. Of all the people in the crowd, Kay was the one who belonged to him, and he had never loved her so much as he did at that moment, the way a drowning man would love a life ring. What would he do without her now, in the life she was sending him to? The letter still lay on the kitchen table, beside the salt and pepper shakers; he read it once more. Dear Dora. Love, Art. What did you do with something like that? It was a riddle, as the motel bill had been a riddle, and he knew he had no hope of solving either one; that was the point that Kay was making. It was not beyond imagining that she had saved the letter for a day such as this one, believing it would do the trick. O’Neil finished his tea, knowing what he was about to do but still taking the time to envision it, so that later he would know if the image he had made in his mind was the correct one. It was. He rose on his crutches, took the letter to the stove, and when he dipped it into the blue flame of the burner, the paper caught so quickly he was still holding it when it disappeared.
There was one thing left to do. The next afternoon O’Neil dressed in clean shorts and a polo shirt and hitchhiked the five miles to Patrice’s house. The crew kit still sat in the driveway with a tarp over it, and the yard was quiet under the mild shade of the willows. O’Neil had tried to page Joe for a couple of days, but he’d heard no reply, and it seemed likely that he was already back in the Canada he loved.
Patrice let him in and led him to the kitchen, where she sat at the table to resume spooning cereal into Henry’s mouth. Grains were caught in the little boy’s hair and eyebrows. “How’s the leg?”
“Not so bad,” O’Neil said. “I’m afraid I have some news. I don’t think anybody’s going to be painting your house.”
Henry picked up his cup and began to bang it on the tray of his high chair. Patrice scooped more cereal from the nearly empty bowl, and as she brought the spoon to the little boy’s mouth, O’Neil saw her pause to wipe a tear from her eyes with the back of her hand.
“I’m truly sorry,” O’Neil said.
“I have to say I shouldn’t be surprised.” She lifted her tired face toward him. “I’m not very good at reading the signals. Any chance of finding him?”
“None at all. I’d say we’ve both been had.” O’Neil shifted on his crutches. “How much did you pay him?”
She sighed miserably. “Oh, four thousand dollars.” Patrice put her palms to her eyes, then opened them like doors to look at Henry. “What a goddamn idiot your mother is. Say, hello, idiot.”
Standing at the counter, O’Neil wrote the check. He would have gladly written it for more, but fifteen hundred dollars was all he had. In any event, it would probably cover the repairs to the roof. He had wondered all morning if he would write the check when the time came, but the moment it did, he found it was easy, and made him feel lighter than anything had in a long time.
Patrice stored the check in a drawer. “I won’t cash this, you know,” she said.
“It’s my hope that you will.”
They kissed, then, for the first time—a kiss that O’Neil realized he had been imagining for weeks, a kiss of tender longing. He touched her face, still damp with tears; he tasted these as he kissed her, their salty essence, and when they parted O’Neil saw that Henry had fallen asleep in his high chair. Patrice freed the little boy from the belt that held him in place and led O’Neil back through her empty house, waiting at the top of the stairs with Henry in her arms while O’Neil hobbled up on his crutches. He stood at the door to Henry’s nursery, waiting for the cascade of tears that would bring everything to a crashing halt, but this never came; a moment later Patrice crept from the room, holding one finger over her lips, and took O’Neil down the carpeted hall to a large room with nothing in it but drapes, a mattress, and an alarm clock on the bare floor beside it. The clock, O’Neil saw, was blinking 12:00 A.M.—not the correct hour at all. O’Neil lay on his back while Patrice helped him remove his shorts over the bulky cast, and this fact, which might have seemed strange, did not. With everything else—the kiss in the kitchen, Henry’s plunge into sleep, the blinking alarm clock, and the sunshine enfolded in the curtains—it seemed to belong to several periods of his life at once, as if they had stepped together outside the flow of time. She removed her skirt and blouse and placed them, folded, in a bureau drawer. The light was behind her, where she stood. She folded O’Neil’s shorts and put these aside as well. Then she returned to where he lay and all thought left him.
When the sun had moved from the windows Henry called from his crib, and they dressed and fed him juice and slices of apple in the kitchen before taking him out to the hammock in the yard. It was afternoon, an afternoon in July. Together they lay and rock
“Would you like to hold him?” Patrice asked.
O’Neil did, so much it surprised him. Patrice helped him lift the little boy from the space between them and onto O’Neil’s stomach. Henry was clutching a stuffed cube with bells inside and handles on the corners, and O’Neil pulled on these, to make the chimes ring. Henry frowned, but did not cry. O’Neil watched the boy bob up and down on his chest, listening to the bells, a sound that seemed to come from under them and all around.
“I forgot to tell you,” Patrice said. “I like what you did with your hair.”
“My sister cut it for me.”
Patrice took a strand of it in her fingers, narrowing her dark eyes to examine it. “Well, she did a good job. I cut hair for a while, and this isn’t at all bad.”
He knew nothing about her: the jobs she’d had, the places she’d lived, why she was alone. Henry’s body was warm and damp, and his breath had the dry, pasty smell of papier-mâché. O’Neil wondered what the little boy might make of him, this man with them in the hammock. He understood then that Henry’s father was dead, or gone so far away that it was all the same. There was no knowing, or need to know.
“I think I like the house this way,” Patrice said. With one bare toe on the ground she moved the hammock to and fro. “I think I’ll leave it half painted to remember you by.”
“This is just the one time, then,” O’Neil said sadly.
Patrice took his hand in hers.
“For the record,” O’Neil said, “I wish it weren’t.”
Patrice nodded thoughtfully. “You will find her,” she declared.
“Her.”
“Her. Yes.” Her voice was pale; she seemed to have left him behind, in memory. And yet she was smiling at him. “The one you are meant for.”
O’Neil said nothing. There was no reason to think it; and yet it seemed so. A few minutes passed, and Patrice squeezed his hand again. “You will.”
O’Neil rose. “I believe you,” he said. Then he kissed each of them good-bye, and swung on his crutches toward home.
LIGHTNESS
March 1985
SHE THOUGHT OF IT AS the lightness; that was the name she gave it. The first time it happened, Mary was a little girl, alone. This took place in her bedroom in the apartment on Naomi Street in North Minneapolis, in a time before her sister, Cheryl, was born. Mary remembered nothing else about this place, for they lived there less than a year; the building was owned by a relative, and her father managed it, collecting rents and maintaining the apartments and grounds, while going to college at night. This was a difficult period for her parents, a time of small children and no money, and, as Mary later learned, her parents had nearly divorced. Her father would tell her about this on a trip they would take together to San Francisco, the year before Mary herself was married. Though the tale was meant to be cautionary—marriage is a long haul, he told her, like carrying a sofa up a flight of stairs and trying to wedge it through a narrow doorway—Mary also understood that the story was a happy one: her parents had, after all, stayed together, and by the end of that year her mother was pregnant again. She told him then about the hummingbird, her only memory of that year. They were standing together on the fantail of a ferryboat, crossing the choppy bay. A hummingbird, her father said, laughing and shaking his head in the wind. All that arguing, and what you remember is a hummingbird. My God, we thought we’d scarred you for life.
This was how she remembered it: yellow sunlight and the high, purple smell of the lilacs; her own tiny body, and the feel of a hummingbird’s wings beating inside her. Their apartment was on the ground floor; beneath Mary’s bedroom window was a lilac bush. On a summer afternoon, Mary was kneeling on her bed to look out the window when the bird appeared, darting between the blossoms on a blur of wings. Never had she seen such a bird. It seemed not to fly but to float—its long beak and inexplicable aeronautics made her think it might be a kind of insect—and yet whenever it moved, it seemed to disappear, reemerging at some adjacent spot of air as if it had not traveled through space but around it. Pure pleasure filled her, watching this wonderful new thing at her window, when suddenly she wasn’t watching: they were one and the same, Mary and the hummingbird and the lilac bush, and all the dense bright heat of the summer afternoon. She felt herself suspended; she seemed, like the hummingbird, to be both in one place and also everywhere, her consciousness joined to another, far larger than her own. The sensation was new to her—she had no words for it—and yet it did not frighten her; she wanted to close her eyes to make it last. She did, and thought: Who’s there? Who’s there? But when she opened her eyes she found no one; even the bird was gone.
The second time she was at a friend’s birthday party; Mary was nine, or ten. Hats, balloons, games that seemed childish but were still fun: The girl whose party it was, Simone, had invited no boys, or else they simply had not come. It was February, a Saturday afternoon in Minnesota, and the house, a rambler in the same subdivision where Mary lived, was a modest variation of her own. The party was held in the basement, a low-ceilinged room with brown paneling and shag carpet the color of moss. Mary’s mother kept a bag of presents in the coat closet for birthday parties, and Mary had selected Spirograph, which now embarrassed her: all the other presents were better, more grown-up. Bonnie Bell Lip Smacker, a bottle of Love’s Baby Soft, a poster of David Cassidy, a neon-purple Hula Hoop—the last a child’s toy but also something older girls did, girls who had hips and waists and could keep the thing spinning for hours. What could she have been thinking with the Spirograph? Still Simone had thanked her, pausing dutifully to open the package and insert the pen into the gears, drawing a single fleur-de-lis before putting it to the side. Spirograph, Simone said, smiling. Cool. I haven’t used this for years.
They sang “Happy Birthday” and ate the pink-frosted cake, and when Simone’s mother had left them in the basement, one of the girls, Simone’s older cousin Rose, showed them how to practice kissing with a pillow. They taped the poster of David Cassidy on the wall, and took turns kissing this as well, tilting their faces as they knew they were supposed to; you had to be careful, Rose instructed, not to go straight in, or you would bump noses. When this was done Rose took one of the empty pop-bottles and placed it, on its side, on the coffee table. The girls all sat around the table while Rose explained the rules and gave the bottle a lazy spin.
Mary watched as the bottle turned on the wood—it seemed to go around forever—and then it came to rest, pointing at Mary like a finger. All the girls laughed, though Mary knew this wasn’t personal: they were simply relieved that the bottle had pointed at someone else.
Mary curled her hair behind her ears. “Sure,” she heard herself say, “I’ll kiss you.”
“Remember what I said about the noses,” Rose warned.
It happened so quickly it was nothing. Mary had never been kissed on the lips before—her parents did not do this—and she leaned across the table, letting her eyes fall closed and trying to think of David Cassidy, and kissed Rose. So this is kissing, she thought. A pause fell over the room—Mary felt this silence, as she was also aware of the taste of pink cake-frosting and watermelon Lip Smackers—and when their faces parted Mary realized that with this kiss the game had ended. The bottle was a dare, meant to be accepted only once; because Mary had done this, the others were absolved.
“When you kiss a boy,” Rose said confidently, “you’ll want to use your tongue.”
Mary said nothing; this did not seem true. Use it how? Around them the girls laughed again; they had no idea either.
“You’ll see,” Rose said.
It was later, on the car ride home, that she felt it. Darkness was falling; the snow, in great piles beside the roadway and the houses, had turned a pale and lifeless gray. At her waist Mary was holding the small party favor that each of the girls had gotten, a jewelry-making kit wrapped in cellophane, and her father was smoking, tapping the ashes
“Honey-bunny?” Her father was looking at her. “The garage?”
The transmitter sat on the seat beside her. Opening the door was a badge of honor, the desideratum of a thousand squabbles between Mary and her older brother, Mark, and sister, Cheryl. Usually Mark was the victor—like all boys he had a way of getting what he wanted. Now, alone with her father, the privilege was Mary’s, uncontested, and yet it no longer interested her. Opening the garage door: so what? She pressed the button with her thumb; the door hauled itself open, washing the snowy yard with light.