Francie's Got a Gun, page 15
—
It was quiet under here with the soft pine needles cushioning Francie’s body, shushing branches low and heavy overhead. Francie laid her cheek against the tree’s trunk like she was touching skin. She pulled the backpack onto her shoulders, and Francie began to climb.
There was only one way to go. It was a relief.
Up.
TWELVE
Race Day
When Marietta climbed into the cab of Mikey’s pickup truck, it was like a choir of angels started singing. “Whoa, you’ve got a real shiner,” she said. She gave him a hug.
He said, “Where do you want to go?”
Just drive around, she told him. She played with the radio, found a station playing eighties pop, not his personal favourite, but when she closed her eyes and started singing along to Tiffany, the remnants of yesterday’s headache flew out the window.
“I need to go see Luce,” Marietta said.
Right, Luce. That guy.
Mikey took them through a drive-through, ordered Marietta a fish fillet with fries and a Diet Coke, and she said, “God, I haven’t had this since high school.” She didn’t seem to twig to the fact that, after all this time, Mikey remembered her order. Maybe that was for the best? He got himself the same, even though he didn’t like fish. He didn’t want to think too hard on why, or what he was doing, what this all meant.
I’m going for a drive with Marietta.
Marietta licked her fingers. She said, “You know Irene? Luce’s mom? She went down to the hospital this morning. She’s there now. I don’t know why. It’s none of her business.”
Mikey didn’t reply. He didn’t necessarily agree, but agreement was inconsequential. It wasn’t a prerequisite to friendship for Mikey, never had been.
Marietta wanted to talk. The more she talked, the more Mikey realized she didn’t know the whole story—he thought back over what he’d told her when he called yesterday. Luce had been in a car accident, he’d been taken to the hospital with injuries, the police said he’d be charged, he was driving under the influence.
So she didn’t know about the fight.
She didn’t know that Mikey had called Luce to arrange a meeting—about the gun, about getting rid of the gun, like you’d asked me to, Marietta—and that Luce had misunderstood (or, as accurately, Mikey had muddled it up), that they’d fought.
Long story short, she didn’t know Mikey had precipitated it all. Maybe she’d never find out?
Mikey’d told the new hire not to call the cops; the man wasn’t happy about it, kept saying how that guy was a total psycho; but he’d volunteered to drive Mikey to the nearest clinic in the town nearby, waited with him, nice guy, good hire, and everything had checked out. The doctor shone a little beam of light into Mikey’s pupils and he was good to go. Take it easy tomorrow, the doctor had said. And she’d given him an ice pack for the eye. Mikey was back at the site to pick up his truck, home by dinnertime.
With that call from the cops about Luce in between. Followed by his own call to Marietta. He’d pulled over on the side of the road before dialing her number, hands shaking, squinting through his swollen eyelid.
And he’d confessed nothing. Didn’t say he’d so much as seen Luce that afternoon. Never would, if he could help it.
“Luce, he’s not an easy person to live with,” said Marietta. “But I knew that when I chose him, you know?”
Mikey turned up the radio. Belinda Carlisle.
“Do you like this song?” Marietta asked him.
“Sure,” said Mikey. Mostly he just didn’t want to hear more about Luce.
“I think I went roller-skating to this song?” Marietta said.
“Yeah?” Mikey laughed. You could say it was a song about heaven, but it wasn’t, was it? It was a song about love, like all the songs on the radio. Watch it, Mikey.
Marietta said, “Remember that roller rink out by where the police station is now? Shit, I have to find out what’s going to happen to Luce once they let him out of the hospital. Do you know?”
“Not my area of expertise.”
“Where’d you get that black eye, by the way?” She shook the ice in her cup of soda. For a second he thought—she knows.
“Walked into a wall,” he said.
“What? I don’t believe you.”
“Construction sites are dangerous places,” he said, and stopped abruptly. Like she needed to be reminded.
They were both silent. Then she asked him, “What really happened last summer?” She was shaking her ice, looking out the window. He was driving them into the countryside, he didn’t know where, exactly, they were going. Maybe he wanted to show her the palace he was building. Look what I can do, without Luce.
“Luce didn’t follow the rules and he got hurt,” Mikey said. “Simple as that.”
“He said you owed him. He said it was your fault.”
“I don’t think that’s true,” Mikey said, “but everyone’s entitled to believe what they want to. We don’t have to agree all the time.”
Marietta was quiet. She breathed deeply. She drew her feet in thin canvas shoes up onto the seat, pulling her knees into her chest, she was wearing a plain dress of some sort, Mikey didn’t know much about fashion, black, and the skirt was narrow, it came to mid-thigh when she sat like that. He could see how skinny her legs were, how they were nothing but muscle and bone, and her arms too, wrapped around her shins, swishing the waxed paper cup, twirling the ice, her chin resting on her knees.
He double-checked she was wearing her seat belt.
What if it had all been different? What if this was his life, what if she were riding in his truck not because she needed to escape but because they were going somewhere together? It was strange how the same arrangement of two people, inside a place or a space, could mean entirely different things, depending on the past that led up to a particular moment in time. They could have been brother and sister, for example. Or she could have been a hitchhiker. Or his girlfriend, or his wife, or his lover.
But no matter how he tried, he couldn’t even pretend. Because she wasn’t in on it too. She saw him how she saw him, how she’d always seen him, and that wasn’t going to change.
“I need to go see Luce. When we get back to town, can you drop me at the hospital?”
“For sure,” said Mikey. He turned down a road that would take them away from the palace, this wasn’t the moment, there never would be a moment.
Stay away from Mari.
His bowels felt a bit watery, the headache was returning. He wanted to help Marietta, he wanted to be a good friend, but only if Luce never found out.
She left her cup in the cupholder when she got out of his truck. He wondered how long he’d keep it, ice cubes melted, sloshing around, to remind him of what wasn’t there. “Thanks for the ride.”
* * *
—
When Marietta called later on, Mikey let it ring through.
He didn’t listen to the message till around 3 a.m. She was talking very fast. She said that she didn’t get to see Luce at the hospital, he’d been admitted to the psych ward on a Form 1 for talking some crazy shit, but they wouldn’t keep him long, he’d be released soon, he’d be home in a couple of days, and he’d have a court date in, like, six weeks or so? “I guess he broke his arm? But they’ve set it, they won’t keep him in for that. They’re going to try him on some medication? I can’t find the gun, Mikey, so I think he got rid of it? But I don’t know, and he’s coming home, and—” She said she needed his help, she’d had a fight with her mother-in-law, she was in tough, could Mikey please please babysit the kids tomorrow, she had to work a double shift starting early in the morning, to cover for the co-worker who’d covered for her. She was stuck for a few days till Luce got out, and what about after that, couldn’t he help?
“You’re not answering your phone. Please call back.”
Mikey lay awake looking at the clock, tossing his body back and forth, the whole bed rocking as he tried to find a comfortable spot. He was too warm, he kicked the blankets off, he was too cold. His headache was back. He got up for a glass of water and some Tylenol.
At around four thirty in the morning, Mikey worked up his courage to dial her number. He figured she’d be asleep, and wouldn’t pick up, but she did. She sounded hyper-awake.
“I’m sorry, I was going to leave a message,” Mikey said.
“I don’t have voice mail.”
Oh.
“The thing is, the thing is, Marietta, I can’t…I’m sorry I can’t…”
“Really? You can’t. Okay, whatever.”
“Listen, Marietta, you probably shouldn’t call me again. I mean, especially once Luce gets released. I’m sorry, maybe things will blow over, maybe things will change.”
And she hung up on him somewhere in the middle of that speech. Which was exactly what he deserved, Mikey figured.
* * *
When the phone rings before 5 a.m., you know it’s not good news—unless it happens to be the Nobel Committee calling from—wherever they call from! Norway? Helsinki?
“Guten Morgen?” Sally was breathless from throwing off the bedsheets and hurtling into the kitchen in the dark, in her linen pyjamas. Just in case it was the Nobel Committee. Calling from…Germany? Would the Nobel Committee spokesperson be crying (for joy, presumably) while notifying David Sosa that he’d been awarded his well-deserved Nobel Prize in Mathematics? “Who is this, please?” Sally reverted to English, because she knew—not the Nobel Committee.
But perhaps almost as exciting, a call for help, with Sally to the rescue again.
“Don’t you dare apologize,” Sally said, “I’m thrilled to take your kids for the day—and overnight too? of course!—they’ll just muck in with us, it’s David’s first half-marathon of the season, and we’re all going along to cheer him on, I’m sure your kids won’t mind, oh! but we’re leaving around seven, yes, 7 a.m., can I come pick them up? It’s no trouble at all! Don’t even mention it, Marietta, this is what I’m here for!”
That’s not how the Nobel Prize works, David told her, when Sally related her version of the conversational arc to him. They give out prizes in the fall, not the spring. And the Nobel Committee is in Stockholm. That’s in Sweden, David told her. Not Germany. Also, you know I’m never going to win one, right?
“I’m an assistant professor of mathematical physics, I teach first-years, I haven’t published in a decade.”
Sally waved one hand. “Yes, yes. So I said we could take Francie and the baby with us to your race,” Sally finished her story. She flung on the overhead light and began digging through the closet for extra sun hats.
“What?” David lay on his back, arm over eyes. “What are you looking for?”
“I said we’d bring the Fultz kids to your race. I explained it was a big day around here, but I don’t think Marietta would have cared if I’d said we were going to the moon. She must be desperate.”
“I don’t need to get up for another half an hour.” David squinted as he put on then took off his glasses.
“She said Luce is in the hospital on a Form 1, and when he’s released, he’ll just come home, and his court date will be in about six weeks.”
David sat up. He looked interested, for a change. “What’s a Form 1?”
“I don’t know! It sounded bad. She was crying.”
“Marietta was crying?”
Sally turned from a bin of winter accessories and examined her husband. Too interested? And he’d remembered the woman’s name. “I’ll let you sleep,” Sally said, switching off the light, abandoning the sun hat search.
At least the dog was thrilled to see her. Sally released Diego from his crate under the table, and he bowed and scuttled and pranced. She made herself a cup of camomile tea while he wolfed down a bowl of the leftovers she’d put away for him: chicken and rice. He was practically human, her closest confidant, if a bit of a fool. “Shall we go for our walkies?” Outside, it was getting light, wonderfully early, as it did at this time of the year, and the lovely tall grass in the backyard sloughed wet and heavy against her flowing pyjama trousers. The smells were at once earthy and heavenly. No one in the alley. Her Birkenstocks slapped, her breasts free under the sleeveless pyjama top, an old grey sweater of David’s unzipped and flapping as Diego pulled, pulled, pulled. Such a sensitive animal, reading her mind, leading them not on their regular route to the park but in the opposite direction, along well-canopied, quiet streets to the busy four-lane roadway bisecting their neighbourhood. A road designed for commuters, not people. Barren of trees, littered with power lines, street light poles, bus stops.
“We’re going to be early, Diego!”
But she couldn’t wait either. If David had seemed unusually interested in that woman, Marietta, Sally understood, because she felt it herself, something magnetic drawing her curiosity, unexpected, coming from this exhausted scrap of a woman. Even the way Marietta asked for Sally’s help—never before, and then twice in one week!—seemed cool, detached, calculating. Like she was protecting herself, hiding secrets. Sally was more than eager to roll up and examine Marietta for scarring.
A crooked little house.
Something was off in there, Sally was sure, something unhealthy that resisted Sally’s interference. An inscrutable family living their dangerous lives, attached to Sally’s own through her daughter Alice, who couldn’t go a day without seeing Marietta’s daughter Francie, no matter Sally’s attempts at disruption.
Sally saw it all so clearly: Francie was a sly creature leeching off Alice’s shy charm, devoted to Alice, yes, but like a junkyard dog, fierce and jealous and chasing everyone else away. It was too late to nip that friendship in the bud; but nothing in this world was fixed, all was fluid.
Diego sat down on the sidewalk. The slabs were littered with cigarette butts. He and Sally considered the little house that squatted on top of the steep, grassy incline.
Francie’s house.
Marietta’s house.
Luce’s house, too. Infamous man. Not currently on the premises. Sally associated his presence with his car—the first time their paths had crossed, he was sitting behind the wheel, he was climbing out, he was leaning on the hood waiting for Francie to come out of Sally’s house. Oh my, who’s that? That’s my dad. Oh! The kind of man you’d look at twice. Tall, plenty of hair, glittering eyes, muscular but not thick, his hand shaking hers, calloused and rough. And now: arrested, and according to Marietta, he’d totalled that flashy car of his. Did this add to the attraction? Only in Sally’s fantasy world. But Sally’s fantasy world was impulsive, it was insistent, it could almost replace the real one, or lie overtop of it, opaque and veined, pulsing like the real thing.
Sally knocked.
It was as if the inside of the house were broadcasting to her ears like a radio, and the radio had fallen suddenly silent.
Sally knocked, again. She tried the handle. Not locked. She pushed and the door opened with a metallic grating as it shifted and twisted off its hinges. There was a crash—a chair fell to the ground?
“Hello?” Sally stepped inside.
“Oh. My. God. We don’t use this door.” Marietta was wound up, keyed up, Sally saw, feeling mild perturbation as the smaller woman began throwing her body against the door, grunting with her efforts. The woman’s energy was like a tap opened full blast. “We don’t use this door! It’s broken!”
“Maybe you should put up a sign,” Sally suggested.
“No one ever comes here!” said Marietta.
“Let me help.” Sally dropped Diego’s leash and heaved her shoulder against the wood. It gave way beneath her heft, it pressed into the frame like a sandwich sliding into an undersized lunch container. But there wasn’t time to appreciate the effect, a child was screaming. Marietta flashed furiously past Sally, who followed, sandals tracking blades of wet grass onto a thin carpet that had been bunched up and thrown out of order.
Sally had a feeling Diego was the cause.
Oh dear. Marietta’s scream sounded angrier than Francie’s. A healthy, open-throated roar.
The hallway was short, and Diego bounded from a bedroom to greet Sally, as if to say: I found them for you!
“Thank you, Diego, yes, here we are—Francie and the baby, I’m sorry, I’ve completely forgotten his name! What a doll! Hello, Francie, are you ready to go?”
Diego made a second foray into Francie’s bed, depositing fresh paw prints, while Sally reached for his leash. “He’s thrilled to see you, Francie! Look, he knows who you are!” But Francie curled dramatically into a protective ball, legs drawn into her stomach, arms wrapped around shins, knees tucked under a long t-shirt, stretching out the fabric. “He’s harmless, he’s friendly,” Sally insisted, while Marietta lifted the baby from the crib jammed right next to Francie’s bed. Sally noticed several white plastic laundry baskets stacked on the floor, filled with folded clothes. The room was cramped, no space for a dresser.
The baby’s nighttime diaper sagged.
“I’ll dress the baby while you shower.” Sally reached out her arms. Babies loved her. Sally never passed up a chance to cuddle and snuggle one. But Marietta held the baby out of reach, her skin sallow, sunken and dark beneath her eyes.
“I already showered,” she said.
“Diego can always sense tension in the air,” said Sally, as the dog grabbed a pair of socks from one of the baskets and ran out of the room.
Marietta’s posture was of someone preparing to engage in hand-to-hand combat. “Those are Francie’s favourite socks.”
Francie cried: “My rainbow socks?”
Sally said: “He’ll give them back. He always does. He’s a very good listener.”
Francie hopped off the bed and followed Sally, and they found Diego in the kitchen looking contrite and wise. “Drop them!” Sally pointed. He obliged, and Francie darted in and snatched the socks off the linoleum.
