I don’t think I did anything wrong for the next three years. Nothing of note until that day when I got into the man’s car. And now I was expecting the biggest punishment of all. I couldn’t wait any longer. I rapped the door lightly. Nothing. I knocked again, this time louder. Still nothing. So I turned the knob ever so gently and pushed open the door.
I can’t describe what I saw without going through it all over. I don’t mind as much now. It used to be that even thinking about opening the door, cheap cedar-stained mahogany, would send me retching into the nearest toilet.
It was him, my beloved father, on the bed. The sheets were a tweedy brown, so the blood was merely a dark stain. My mother’s reading light was on and illuminated the room just enough. Later I would learn that there were slashes in other places, but I only saw the knife in his throat. I knew exactly which knife it was. She used it on bread and meat. In wealthy houses in the future, I’d learn there were knives for bread and knives for meat and knives for fruit. All different kinds of knives. My mother would have considered that spoiled. She used one knife for everything, her good knife. She had one good knife in each house, one in New Jersey and one in the Poconos. It had a wooden handle and its blade was smooth and thick. My father’s beautiful blue eyes were open, staring.
Daddy! Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!
I used to call his name every night. There was a tradition, a routine. I waited near the window in the formal living room we never used, with the antique furniture and the fireplace maned in stucco. I watched through the drapes for his headlights. If they were nine minutes past six, I thought for sure my life would be over. At the same time, I couldn’t conceive of the worst thing in the world—to lose my father. I’d make my way to the garage and begin clapping and calling his name, high-pitched, one clap for Da, one for Dee. Then he would get out of the car with his briefcase and the smell of hospitals and his eyes would flash at me and he would smile the happiest, kindest smile. He would take me into his arms, no matter what he was already carrying.
What I saw then was impossible. But that’s what happened that night. I learned that the impossible was possible. In a way, there can be nothing more liberating.
I ran to the bed and tried to lift his body. Of course he was too heavy. The knife was in very deep. Do you believe that I pulled it out? I would have done anything for him. I’ll never forget that feeling. I believe he came alive for a second when the knife came out. His blood was all over my Rainbow Brite pajamas. I thought my mother would be angry about the mess on me, and that was the first time I thought of her. So I screamed for her. Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!
The bathroom door was open and I didn’t want to leave my father but I did. I ran with the knife in my hand to the bathroom and there was my mother, in the bathtub, with her wrists slit, but she wasn’t dead. She was only almost dead. Her eyes blinked, her mouth moved. And I don’t know, I think about this every day, never less than once a day, though sometimes up to a hundred times a day, I think, If I had called for help right away, she might have been saved. But I didn’t call right away. It wasn’t on purpose. I just didn’t think of it yet. My mother was still alive and she was my authority, she was my god. Her nipples and her hair floated above the line of the rosy water. She didn’t like to get her hair wet. She only washed it every three days or so. She never went into a pool above her shoulders. The ocean, the lake, forget it.
I knelt beside her face, which was blooming with death, barely seeing, but there was something tender in her eyes, holy Jesus, it made me weep in some sort of gratitude. The weeping was coming from so many places that I can’t tell how much of it was gratitude, but yes, I think some of it was. I shrank down below the lip of the tub and took one of her soggy, queenly hands and placed it on the top of my head. And then I rose my head up into the basket of her hand so that it felt like she was grasping me, loving me back; in fact, I’m sure that she was. And I wept and said, Oh, Mommy, oh, Mommy, oh, Mommy, oh, Mommy, until eventually she was gone.
* * *
IT WASN’T UNTIL AN HOUR after I found them that I dialed 911 from the cream phone on my mother’s nightstand. I waited so long, I think, because I could still sense their life forces in the air. As long as I could feel them, I didn’t want to call up the external world. My parents and I had been a unit, a capsule; inviting the outside in was forbidden. That was for families who didn’t know where their children were after ten p.m. It wasn’t until after their deaths that I saw how foolish I was. I had thought I was the one most likely to breach the security of our capsule when in fact the walls were permeable; for years my parents had been waltzing in and out recklessly.
The officers who came thought I did it. For a moment, at least. I was carrying the knife when they showed up. It made me feel closer to my father. They asked me who my next of kin was, who they should call. The sun was rising. Daylight made it real. I didn’t have Gosia’s number memorized. I didn’t know any numbers except my house and my father’s office. The only number I had written down was Wilt’s, inside Tropic of Cancer, so I went and got it because I was ashamed not to have anybody else. I read it aloud to the officer who was not dealing with the bodies. It was six a.m. by that time and I could hear a man’s sleepy voice on the other end of the line and the officer introduced himself as Bushkill police and the man said they had the wrong number. I told them I thought it was my uncle, but I guessed it was the wrong number.
Eventually they got ahold of Gosia. She arrived, perfumed and puffy, by ten a.m. That was when it hit me, how alone I was. Gosia, of course, would become my savior, but that morning there was just a black Mercedes, glinting and foreign in our gravel drive. A tall half-stranger emerged, wearing diamonds, face still rouged from the night before. She smelled like sour flowers. My brown wool life was all gone.
* * *
SHE TOLD ME EVERYTHING RIGHT away. She took me out of the house and to the Caesars Pocono Resort. Now it’s renamed something seamier, Palace Stream or Lovers’ Delight, but it was always one of those honeymoon fuck forts with the champagne glass bathtubs and the fruit salad breakfasts. I’ve always wondered who is turned on by that, who wants to fuck in heart-shaped tubs. Men with blond beards, women who love baby’s breath in their bouquets of red roses.
Gosia took me there because it was the first place she saw on the road that was open. My lips were blue and she worried I was dying of shock. The frizzy-haired woman at the front desk said, It’s couples only. Gosia pulled what I imagined was an impressive credit card from her wallet and slapped it on the counter. We walked into a purple dining room with gold tables and casino carpets. She ordered herself a tea and me a coffee. She didn’t try to make me eat. She began to tell me everything. It seemed she knew more than anyone in the world.
The night before, when my father had left to see his raped mother, there had been someone else to see. The woman he’d been fucking. The woman had called his doctor’s answering service all weekend long. She had him paged several times, up in the mountains. He’d been lamentably ignoring her for days and then his mother was raped. He drove to New Jersey, examined his mother, bandaged and consoled her. Gosia was there with my uncle. She saw the whole thing. My father said he’d be back. Everyone thought he was going to go after the rapist. Just be a crazy man in the streets. But he went to his lover’s apartment. An Italian woman living above the restaurant for which she cooked. She was more than the woman he’d been fucking. Gosia told me he loved her. I remember she said this and I felt she was saying it to try to hurt me, to put me in my place. As a second wife herself, she wanted the first wives and first daughters to know they were replaceable. It wasn’t until much later that I realized she had a more noble motive.