Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [158]
“How did you know it was my mother?” Melinda asked, between shivers.
“I was eight years old. Maybe nine. Everyone knew about your mother. Everyone. I had been warned. You knew that. Everyone knew that. But she had a nice face.”
“Where did she say she wanted to take you away to?”
“She had this look in her eyes, I still remember it,” Augenblick said. “You have it, too. She wanted to disappear and to take someone along with her. That night, it was going to be me. Your mother was famous in this neighborhood. But everybody thought she was harmless.”
“Well, she was a success,” Melinda said, the shivers taking her over, so that she had to clutch a guardrail. “In disappearing.” She leaned toward him and kissed him on the cheek, a show of bravery. “Death is such a cliché,” she said. “She disappeared into a cliché.”
“Is it?” He wasn’t looking at her. “That’s news to me. She grabbed me by the hand and she took me for a walk and then she tried to get me into the car, but I broke her hold on me and I ran back to my house.”
“Yeah,” she said, dreamily. “Death. It’s so retro. It’s for kids and old people. It’s an adolescent thing. You can do better than dying. You’re tired. But everyone’s tired. But no one is tired enough,” she quoted from somewhere. “Anyway, she disappeared, and so what?” It occurred to her at that moment that Augenblick might have leapt off the bridge to his death but that he had, just then, changed his mind, because she had said that death was a cliché. That was it: he looked like a failed suicide. He was one of those.
“She gave me the scare of my life,” he said. “Your harmless mother. She scared everybody until she was gone. Shall we go back now?” he asked. “Should we go somewhere?”
“No,” she said. “Not again. Not this time.” She waited. “We’re going to stay right here for a while.”
He eventually dropped her off at the front door of her father’s house, thanked her, and drove off in his car, which, he had explained, was a Sterling, a nonsense car. She guessed that the license plates on the car had been stolen so that he could not be traced. Whoever he was—Augenblick! what a name!—he would not return. She wondered for a moment or two what his name actually had been, where he had worked, and whether any of it, that is, the actual, mattered, now or ever.
She paid the babysitter and then went upstairs to check on Eric.
The ghosts of the house, she imagined, were gathered around her son. The couples who had lived here from one generation to the next, the solitaries, the happy and unhappy, the gay and the straight and the young and the old: she felt them grouped behind her as a community corralled in the room, touching her questioningly as she bent over the crib and watched her boy, her perfection, breathe in and out, his Catalan-American breaths.
She tiptoed into her father’s room. He was still sitting up, carefully studying the wallpaper.
“Hey, Daddy,” she said.
“Hey, sugar,” he replied, tilting his head in his characteristically odd way. “How did it go? Your date with this Augenblick?”
“Oh, fine,” she said, shunning the narrative of what had happened, how she had fought off his information with a little kiss. Her father wouldn’t be interested—especially about her mother.
“I didn’t like him. He wasn’t out of the top drawer.”
“More like the middle drawer. But that’s all right,” Melinda said. “I won’t see him again.”
“Good,” her father said. “I thought he was a fortune-hunter, after your millions.” He laughed hoarsely. “Heh heh. He looked very unsuccessful, I must say, with that dyed hair.” He tilted his head the other way. “I went to the Gates of Heaven today,” he said, “on the bus. The number eight bus.”
“How did it look?” she asked. “The gates?”
“Tarnished,” he said. “They could use a shine. No one ever seems to do maintenance anymore. The bus was empty. Even though I was the thing riding on it.” He tilted his head the other way. “Completely empty, with me at a window seat. That was how I knew I was almost gone. Honey, you should have more friends, better friends.