“Don’t you think it’s strange,” I whisper loudly, “that Dennis never took any interest in us for 12 years and now, suddenly, he can’t get enough?” If he’s on the other side of the door, I hope he hears me.
Mae doesn’t open her eyes but I can tell she’s awake. Anyway, I already know what she thinks. She doesn’t think it’s strange at all. When I brought it up before she defended him. She was only two when he left, so what does she know. I was four. I actually remember it. I remember missing him, waiting for him by the front window every day like a dog. He never called, not on birthdays or Christmas. He never sent letters or postcards. He’s this famous writer, or whatever, and I have no idea what his handwriting even looks like. And then there’s also what Mom told us. Even when we were little she’d talk very openly with us, since we were all she had. She’d tell us how he’d taken advantage of her, of her youth, and how he’d been jealous and rageful, and slept with all her friends, not even because he wanted to, or was particularly attracted to any of them, but because he didn’t want her to have friends. And she didn’t have friends, not really. She had Doreen and she had us and we hadn’t been enough.
“This isn’t gonna last,” I whisper. I don’t want her to get her hopes up only to have them crushed. “As soon as we go back home we’ll never hear from him again.”
Mae is so bad at pretending to be asleep. She holds her breath, that’s what gives her away. I don’t say anything else and soon the sound of traffic fills the room until it feels like I’m floating on it. I drift off. I’m back home, in my own room. Mom is fine. I hear her in the shower, singing. See, she’s fine. I knew she’d be fine. Her singing turns shrill. Sirens wake me up.
Mae is by the window. The lights from an ambulance seven stories below are making her face a blue then red mask.
“Mae,” I whisper, but she doesn’t budge. She goes into trances sometimes, that’s why the kids at school called her Spooks.
“Mae,” I say again, and put my hands on her shoulders. We both watch someone on the street below get strapped into a stretcher.
There was a torrential rainstorm the day I found Mom in the kitchen. The EMTs and firemen left puddles all over the carpet when they carried her out. It was like God made me and Markus get into a fight, so that I’d come home early from his lake house and find her. Mae says that she doesn’t believe in God, but how else would you explain my being there in time? Just five minutes later and she would have died. I can’t imagine her dead. It’s like an eclipse, where if you look directly at it you’d go blind.
She hadn’t really wanted to die. I know this for a fact. You know how I know? Because she’d put the hot water on and set the percolator up to make coffee. The whole wall was wet with condensation and the kettle was still whistling when I found her. I don’t know how Mae hadn’t heard anything. She must’ve been in one of her trances.
I walk Mae back to the bottom bunk and tuck her in. She reaches over and strokes my face.
“Don’t cry,” she says and closes her eyes.
I hadn’t realized I was crying. Tears have been leaking out of me since we got here, like my face is incontinent. “I’m not,” I say and wipe them with her hair.
“Don’t you wish it could go back to how it was?” I ask. Before this happened, before Mom got depressed. She wasn’t always sad. Sometimes she was happier than anybody I’ve ever seen. She would laugh, doubled over, unable to stop, and we would laugh too, even if we didn’t get what was so funny. And then there were other times, when she wasn’t happy or angry or sad. When she was just Mom, when she would take us to the park or to the parades, and when she’d stay up late, sewing us elaborate Mardi Gras costumes.
Mae doesn’t answer me, turns to face the wall. Finally, when I’m almost asleep I hear her say: “Sometimes it feels like you and I grew up in different houses.”
MAE
The first couple of weeks Dad didn’t let us out of his sight. He’d take us on epic walks, trying to cram in as much as he could to make up for lost time. We covered hundreds of blocks on foot. He said that when he moved back to New York he missed us so much that it felt like his internal organs were crawling with fire ants and walking was what brought him back to sanity.
It wouldn’t have occurred to us to walk in Metairie. There was nowhere to go and you couldn’t get very far without eventually ending up where you started or hitting the interstate. There were the terrifying night walks through swamps and woods with Mom, but that was its own thing. In New York, we walked like pilgrims and when our shoes wore down, Dad bought us fancy sneakers, designed to mimic the strut of a Maasai warrior. We’d wear them as we walked from the Cloisters to the southernmost tip of Battery Park, stepping around junkies nodding out on the sidewalks of the Lower East Side, sampling dumplings in Chinatown and pizza in Little Italy, fingering the bolts of fabric in the Fashion District and buying bouquets in the Flower District that wilted by the time we got home.
We’d walk through neighborhoods right as schools were getting out. Girls would pour into the street, wearing similar uniforms to what we had at St. Ursula’s—gray-and-green plaid skirts and button-down white shirts—though, of course, these girls made them look a lot more sophisticated. We’d see them standing in long lines outside bakeries in Greenwich Village, rummaging around in their big, fancy purses.
Dad would try to steer us away from those girls because seeing them would inevitably put Edie in a foul mood.
“You’ve basically kidnapped us!” she would scream at him, and some of the girls would turn and watch us uncertainly, not knowing whether to take her accusation seriously. Once she took off her new sneakers and threw them at him. Dad looked so befuddled and surprised that it only made Edie angrier.
“When are we going home?” she screamed, and the only way to calm her was to invoke the doctors and Mom’s health. Then she begrudgingly settled down, and after several blocks put her shoes back on.
My favorite was when Dad would take us on ghost tours of all the places from his childhood that had been effaced, places where he had lived and gone to the movies and drank malts and played pinball. I liked seeing another layer of the city under the immediately visible one. Metairie was a static swamp. Nothing there felt like it could ever change.
One time he took us to Morningside Park to look at the caves he’d camped in to protest attempts to segregate the park. Columbia had wanted to build a gym there with two separate entrances for “Whites” and “Coloreds.” Anytime he talked about the Civil Rights Movement, Edie would forget she was supposed to be angry and would listen to him with her mouth hanging open.
LETTER FROM DENNIS LOMACK TO MARIANNE LOUISE MCLEAN
April 24, 1968
Dear M—
I sat down with the intention of working on a novel but everything I write turns into a letter to you. I’m under your spell, girl. Why fight it?
Fred and I are in Morningside Park. The Pigs are patrolling the park’s perimeter but they won’t do anything. Even the Mayor knows we’re right. We’re drunk and singing, celebrating Columbia’s capitulation. Goodbye, Gym Crow.
Fred spilled our water bucket over the wood, so it wouldn’t light (poor Fred, no depth perception). I had to climb down and look for more wood. From below the view is very satisfying: caves pockmark the side of the cliff, each one with a campfire burning in it. The side of the cliff is thus transformed into: a primordial skyscraper. A CAVEMAN SKYSCRAPER (this phrase came to me in your father’s voice). Oh, how I wish you could both see it! It’s better than a sit-in, it’s a camp-in! It’s a CAVE-IN! This isn’t Mississippi! Not on our watch! etc. etc.
How