“I’m not not allowed. I’m just strongly discouraged from coming here alone. And besides, you’re here. Now step this way, please, to the gallery.” He backed away, palms up and fingers waggling like a tour guide, to a corner of the loft where he’d put his tack collection to good use attaching a crazy quilt of postcards to the studs. He took a magnifying glass from a hook on the wall by the exhibit and handed it to me. “Use this,” he said, “to savor the details.”
So I did. Had to, almost. There were so many details in every four-by-six-inch card that it was hard to appreciate the whole of any of them. There was a sidewalk mosaic of the Mona Lisa which, when magnified, proved constructed entirely of buttons. A tower built of every crazy, broken-down material delight a city dump offers—bicycle parts and rusted bedsprings, discarded water tanks and twisted pipes, limbless dolls and worn-out brooms. There was a multilevel tree house constructed of scrap lumber and lengths of firewood, with windows of bottle butts and crystal punch bowls and a door made from a metal highway sign that read REST AREA, THIS EXIT. NEXT EXIT 47 MILES. I moved from postcard to postcard, increasingly boggled by the too-much muchness of it all. At last I lowered the magnifying glass and stepped away from the wall. “What a trip! I want to meet your Xander.”
“No you don’t,” Frank said. “He’ll only disappoint you.”
“How would he disappoint me? I don’t even know him.”
He shrugged. “That’s what my mother says about Xander. Also, that he’s too good at too many things to ever succeed at anything.”
I was going to press him for details, but he held a finger up. “Shhh.”
After a moment or two of intense listening, I said, “I don’t hear anything.”
“She’s stopped typing,” he said, and was through the trapdoor, down the ladder, and out the door like a shot. I hurried after him and cleared the garage door just in time to hear Frank shout “Mama!” with all the joy and intensity and sweet, pure love that makes a woman’s womb ache if she doesn’t have children of her own. Mimi had just stepped outside the sliding glass door. She smiled at Frank as he hurtled across the yard. Frank launched himself into her arms.
It’s kind of unimaginable the carnage caused by the locomotive force of one slight nine-year-old boy traveling at the speed of light, colliding with his tiny mother, midfifties, a little off balance because she was twisting around to close the door behind herself. He hit her with enough velocity to explode that antique sheet of cracked glass into about a million lacerating diamonds.
I’ve seen a lot of blood in my day, but never quite that much.
( 7 )
FRANK AND I had been in the emergency room for a couple of minutes, listening to the symphony of shushes, clicks, and beeps coming from all the monitoring equipment hooked up to Mimi and other unseen patients sequestered in curtained-off cubbies. I’d told the expedient fib that I was Mimi’s daughter and Frank was my brother so they would let us come see her together. I was more than a little nervous about Frank blowing our cover.
“Is she asleep?” Frank asked, not in a whisper.
“Shhh. Looks that way.”
An emergency room nurse whisked past us. “Don’t worry. She’s okay. Just tired.”
Mimi didn’t exactly look okay—one of her eyebrows had been shaved off and the skin seamed back together there, and her head was wrapped in a wimple of bandages. Frank put his goggles on and gripped my hand like it was the only thing tethering him to this earth.
“You all right?” I asked.
“Mama,” he said with all the urgency that odd, flat voice of his could summon. Mimi’s eyes popped open and I held his hand more tightly, just in case he was thinking of rushing her again. “What’s that thing you’re wearing?”
“They gave me this nice clean gown to put on when I got here,” Mimi said. “My other clothes were dirty.”
“You call that a gown? I’d better check you for brain damage.”
“What?” The emergency room nurse had reappeared by then.
“One of the EMS guys taught Frank how to check for brain damage,” I said.
“He gave me his special little flashlight, see?” Frank said, pulling a penlight from his pocket and holding it forth on his flattened palm for all to admire. “He said I was a natural. He also likes my coat.” He was still wearing his white cotton duster, now smeared with Mimi’s blood.
“That’s nice,” Mimi said. She sounded so calm that I suspected the tube taped to her left forearm contained morphine rather than saline. “Please do check me for brain damage, Monkey. The doctors might have missed something.”
Frank handed his goggles to me, moved the visitor’s chair to the head of Mimi’s bed, and climbed up so he’d be tall enough to shine his light down into her pupils. “Nurse,” he said. “Come closer. Let me show you how this is done.”