Chapter TWENTY-TWO
Marcy had promised to stay awake and keep Nick company while he drove, but she had finally given in to her exhaustion and was breathing deeply, evenly. Every now and then she’d let out a small sound, a high-pitched yip of some sort. Was she dreaming about April? Was it the sound of relief? Or rejection? He wasn’t a betting man, but at this hour—with the I-80 traffic backed up and creeping alongside the endless miles of predawn construction—Nick supposed he’d put his money on the latter. He’d never thought of himself as a pessimist, but Marcy’s understandable inability to keep her promise had left him alone to deal—unsuccessfully thus far—with the self-lacerating thoughts that assailed him with each beam of light from the traffic zipping past in the opposite direction. For a while it seemed that each flash illuminated Peggy and her migraine in a sleek black dress.
Was something similar in store for Marcy, for all of them? The thought of yet another defeat—this one at the hands of his own father—was so unsettling that he now seriously entertained the idea of chartering a plane in Chicago to ensure they’d make it to Arnolds Park in time, before the old bastard had a chance to make a fool of Marcy the way Peggy Gallagher had of him.
He’d thought being a gentleman was what women wanted. No pressure. A nice guy. Fool. How painful would it be if he were to drive into the nearest bridge abutment?
Maybe Mike had made the right decision to make himself as scarce as possible. Everyone has to find their own way of dealing, of coping. But in avoiding his father so completely, Mike seemed to have decided for whatever reason that it was necessary to cut himself off from the rest of his family, too. It was an arrangement Nick could never quite understand—and the reason now that he was skeptical of his brother’s assurances that he would be at the park to meet them, the old man included.
And if the old man pulled another bait and switch on them, Nick vowed, he’d call the cops right there.
There wasn’t much to remember about Arnolds Park itself from the family vacation all those years ago, so little time did they spend at the place. There was a lake nearby and a dock with the water that had once lapped his own puke up against the wood. The deadly combination of cotton candy and the Rotor had sent him out to the dock to hurl a second time—the first being, to his dismay, on the ride itself. Nick remembered specifically looking at the floor dropping beneath him, the yellow line that a few moments earlier had been touching his toes. He’d started feeling light-headed and was wishing the spinning would end when a collective groan arose. Thanks to the circular motion of the ride, Nick’s vomit splatter covered a generous area. The attendant gave him a dirty look when the rotating stopped, and one of the riders, about Nick’s age, gave him a push as they made their way down the exit ramp. Mike sucker punched the kid and grabbed Nick, and the two of them ran into the crowd toward the lake. It was right after this that something happened to Marcy on the roller coaster and they all rushed to the hospital for what turned out to be a butterfly bandage and an ice pack, but the whys and wherefores of that escaped him. That their father was summoning his daughter to the site of what was most likely one of her most traumatic memories struck him as both characteristic and appalling.
Why not have them gather at a place where he’d actually gotten it right? Such as the summer that just he and Mike and their father went on a camping trip to Presque Isle in Pennsylvania. Marcy was too young to go, and their mother didn’t like camping, so it was just “us guys,” as their dad said when he announced the trip. They had never been camping before, and Nick didn’t know what to expect. He was amazed at the speed and ease with which his father erected a four-man tent, complete with bunk bed-style cots. There were other surprises. His father started a fire—a big one—without paper or lighter fluid. He handled fishing rods and bait as if he went fishing every weekend. He even showed them how to gut the fish they caught, filet them, and fry them over the fire. At night he let them catch lightning bugs while he had a beer and stared into the fire and got the tent ready for the night. In their sleeping bags, they’d beg him for a story. His father wasn’t a storyteller, but it didn’t matter much. They were so exhausted from swimming and fishing and playing in the woods that they fell asleep almost immediately. On the ride home, Nick asked his father where he’d learned all that outdoors stuff. His father grunted and told him that he’d learned it the hard way, the right way: in the marines.
The marines. The word had fascinated Nick. He’d associated it with his favorite color from his box of crayons: aquamarine. He imagined his father in a light blue uniform, standing in the snow. As he grew older, he started reading about the marines. His admiration for his father grew. The descriptions of boot camp were incredible, and they frightened him. He tried to imagine himself standing at attention with a drill sergeant screaming in his face; crawling under barbed wire; running an obstacle course; climbing walls and hauling himself up ropes. He knew he’d never make it. And somehow he knew, although he tried to dismiss it, that his father didn’t think he would have been able to make it, either.
He’d make it in other ways, then. He forced himself to play sports and tried to convince himself that he enjoyed it. But he hated the cut-throat competition among both the kids and the parents, the pranks in the locker room, the ridiculousness of jockstraps and the humiliation of having your mother launder them. He was a fixture on the bench. He’d stand by the coach, hoping the coach would put him in, hoping that he wouldn’t. He usually got game time only when his team was too far ahead to lose. One time, the coach actually pushed him aside, saying, “Come on, Warrington. You’re in my way. Sit down, willya?”
There was one glorious moment, and it had happened way back in Little League. One day, he wasn’t sure why, the coach put him in at center field. He spent the half-inning punching his mitt and praying that the batter wouldn’t hit a high pop to him. In the bottom of the inning he came up to bat. With two called strikes, the catcher was hollering, “He’s a looker, he’s a looker, he’s not gonna swing. Easy out, easy out.” On the next pitch, Nick closed his eyes and swung. He felt something hit his bat; at first, he thought he’d hit the catcher’s head. He opened his eyes and there was activity out beyond second base. The second baseman was running, the center fielder moving to his right, and all of a sudden people were screaming at him to run. He ran to first base, his legs moving furiously, as if in a dream. But unlike a dream, he was actually moving. The first base coach, one of his teammates, was windmilling his arm, the signal to go for second. When Nick neared second he heard people screaming at him to hold up, hold up and he stopped. He made sure his foot was on the bag and the relay came in and the second baseman tagged him even though he was safe by a mile and the ump yelled, “Safe!” and there was another crescendo of cheering. Nick looked over to the dugout and saw that everyone was standing and cheering, including the coach. And then Nick looked over at the bleachers and he saw his father standing and clapping and whistling. He saw his mother looking up at his father, and then out at him, smiling. She understood him. Thinking about it now, Nick had the strange sensation that even back then, as his mother smiled out at her son standing on second base, she knew that someday he’d be driving along, thinking about nothing and everything, and this moment would be relived.
Nick’s eyes welled. They usually did when he thought about his mother—even more, perhaps, than they did when he thought of Marilyn. They all had idealized the woman, and though he was aware of the rose-tinted perspective brought about by her dying young—faults and idiosyncrasies forgotten in favor of more saintly reminiscences—Nick was hard-pressed to recall any flaws or even weaknesses. The only one he could think of—and it would be grossly unfair to call it a weakness—was her uncharacteristic complaining during her final days. But what could she do? Bone cancer, he’d read, was an extremely painful type of cancer. If she didn’t have the right to complain, who did?
One night he was in his room, recording songs from the radio with a tape recorder he’d gotten as a Christmas present. He would spend hours taping the songs and keeping meticulous notes of the titles and artists. He used the machine’s numerical counter to locate whatever he wanted to hear, but on this night, while recording “Stairway to Heaven,” he heard his mother cry out. His bedroom was across the hall from his parents’ bedroom. His parents were having an argument of some sort. Nick was furious with his father for arguing. Now, armed with something to document this transgression, he might have proof of his father’s cruelty. He turned the radio down and let the recorder run until he heard the door to his parents’ bedroom open and close and his father’s footsteps recede as he walked down the stairs.
Nick punched rewind, then stop, and, putting in an earbud, listened to his parents’ distant, muffled voices. His mother was sobbing as he’d never heard before. It’s too much, Bill. The kids will only remember this. I never ask you for anything. But I’m asking you to do this. He also heard more crying. But it wasn’t his mother. He ejected the tape and put it in the top drawer of his desk. He sat for a long time, trying to figure out what they had been arguing about.
After the funeral, he took the tape down to his father’s workbench in the basement. He grabbed a hammer and, before he could change his mind, smashed the cassette. He grabbed some grass hand-clippers and cut the tape into tiny pieces, then put the whole mess into the garbage. He never mentioned the recording—or its contents—to Mike or Marcy.
“We’re not going to be there in time, are we?” Marcy asked. The sun was rising and they were still in Illinois.
“How long have you been awake?” Nick asked, caught off guard, as if his sister had been listening in on his thoughts.
“Don’t dodge the question,” Marcy said. “We’re not going to make it in time, are we, Nick?”
“Sure we will,” Nick said, not at all sure.
An hour later, they stopped for a bathroom- and-coffee break. While he was waiting for Marcy, his cell phone rang. It was Mike.
“Not sure where you two are, but you may as well turn around,” his brother said.
Nick almost laughed. Mike wasn’t one for small talk. Since they’d talked just yesterday and exchanged cell phone numbers, Mike probably figured they were up to speed—or at least as up to speed as Mike wanted to be.
“We missed them?” Nick asked. “I thought he said noon.”
“He did,” Mike said. “My flight last night got canceled. I was rebooked on the first one out this morning. I decided to call April to make sure they would be there. She didn’t have any idea what I was talking about.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just what I said. I think the old man is keeping her in the dark.”
Nick tried to digest all this while thinking about how he would break it to Marcy. “I don’t get it. Where the heck are they?”
“I’m not exactly sure,” Mike said. “But it sounds like they’re almost through Nebraska.”