I don’t know who she was. Not Shelly’s daughter. Someone she’d looked after when she was younger, a first nannying job? That steep stone staircase didn’t look like Cupertino; San Francisco maybe.
I can’t be sure how the girl with the bear connected Shelly and the Phoenician—I’ve said there’s a lot I don’t understand—but I have my ideas. I think the Phoenician was trying to erase himself. That he was visiting people who knew him, or might have known him, before he was the Phoenician. I think every photo album in his car belonged to someone who might’ve remembered the man or boy he’d been before his body became a profane manuscript in a tongue that has been perhaps rightfully forgotten. As to why he needed to scrub that former version of himself from living memory, I will not hazard a guess.
The last pages of Shelly’s memory album were the hardest to look at. You know what was in them.
There I was, sitting on a concrete step, placidly allowing Shelly to tie my shoes with worn, age-freckled hands that were so much older than the hands that appeared in the Paddington Bear photos. I sat in her lap while she read me Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. A plump seven-year-old version of me, with hopeful eyes underneath tousled bangs, held up a green-and-golden frog no bigger than a quarter, for her inspection and approval.
It should’ve been my mother’s arms around me and my father reading to me, but it wasn’t. It was Shelly. Again and again it was Shelly Beukes, loving—cherishing—a lonely fat boy who desperately needed someone to notice him. My mother didn’t want the job, and my father didn’t really know how to do it, so it fell to Shelly. And she adored me with all the enthusiasm of a woman who’s just won a new car on The Price Is Right. Like she was the lucky one—to have me, to have the good fortune to bake me cookies, and fold my underwear, and endure my grade-school tantrums, and kiss my boo-boos. When really I was the lucky one and never knew it.
12
IN THE YEAR AND A half that followed, Shelly had two kinds of days: bad and worse. Mr. Beukes and I tried to look after her. She forgot how to use a knife, and we had to cut her food for her. She forgot how to use the toilet, and we changed her diapers. She forgot who Larry was and was sometimes frightened of him when he walked into the room. She was never frightened of me, but she often didn’t know who I was. Although maybe there was a little tickle of a memory back there somewhere, because often when I walked into the house, she would shout, “Daddy! The repairman is here to fix the TV!”
Sometimes when Larry wasn’t around, I sat with her and looked at the Phoenician’s album of stolen memories, trying to get her interested in those thoughtographs with their muddy colors and bad lighting. But usually she would sulk and turn her head away so she didn’t have to see them and say something like, “Why are you showing me this? Go fix the TV. Mickey Mouse Club is on next. I don’t want to miss anything good.”
Only once did I see her respond to an image in the photo album. One afternoon she looked at the picture of the dead girl at the bottom of the steps with sudden, childlike fascination.
She pressed her thumb to the photograph and said, “Pushed.”
“Yes, Shelly? Was she? Did you see who did it?”
“Disappeared,” she said, and sprayed her fingers out in a theatrical poof gesture. “Like a ghost. Are you going to fix the TV?”
“You bet,” I promised. “Mickey Mouse Club, coming up.”
In the fall of my sophomore year in high school, Larry Beukes dozed off in front of the TV and Shelly wandered out of the house. She was not found until four o’clock the next morning. Two cops discovered her three miles away, looking for something to eat in a dumpster behind the Dairy Queen. Her feet were black with filth, ragged and bloody, and her fingernails were broken, her fingers raw, as if she’d fallen into a gully and had to claw her way out. Someone had helped himself to her wedding and engagement rings. She didn’t know Larry when he came to get her. She didn’t respond to her own name. She couldn’t say where she’d been and didn’t care where she was going as long as there was TV.
I came by to see her the next afternoon, and Larry answered the door in a baggy MEXICO! T-shirt and his boxers, his silver hair standing up on one side of his head. When I asked if I could help with Shelly, his face shriveled and his chin began to quake.
“Hector took her away! He took her while I was asleep!”
“Dad!” shouted a voice from somewhere behind him. “Dad, who are you talking to?”
Larry ignored him and came down the step, into the light. “What must you thingg of me? I let Hector take her away. I signed all the papers. I did as I was tolt because I was tired and she was too much trouble. Do you believe she would’ve ever given me up?” And he took me in his arms and began to sob.
“Dad!” Hector shouted again, coming to the door.
There he was: the bodybuilder and navy boy, proud owner of a mint ’82 Trans Am straight out of Knight Rider, the son I only sometimes remembered that Shelly and Larry had. The kid who made a party trick of picking up a chair one-handed while his mother sat in it.
He had put on a spare tire of fat, and the ink on his Sailor Jerry tattoo had begun to blur and fade. His fashion sense hadn’t matured in the years he’d been away and might best be described as Richard Simmons chic. He wore a bright red sweatband to hold his frizzy hair out of his eyes and a tank top with a pirate on it. He looked embarrassed.
“Jesus, Dad. Come on. You’re gonna make the kid feel awful. It isn’t like you sent her to the pound. You can see her every day. We both can! It was best for her. You’re putting yourself inna early grave chasing after her. You think that’s what she’d want? Come on. C’mon now.” He put an enormous arm over his dad’s shoulder and gently peeled Larry off me. As he turned his father back into the house, he flashed a chagrined smile and said, “Come on in, bucko. I just made date cookies.” When he called me “bucko,” I shivered.