Wrong answer! I pulled him out of bed so sharply, I heard his T-shirt tear. “You’re giving them to me, and you’re giving them to me now!” I never muscled other kids to get what I want, but right now I was willing to use every muscle in my body to get this.
Behind me I heard Kjersten call my name, I heard their mother scream, and that pushed me all the more to push him. I slammed Gunnar hard against the wall. “Give them to me!”
Then something hit me. Mrs. Ümlaut had attacked me. She was armed, and swinging, wailing as she did. I felt the weapon connect with my back, the blow softened slightly by my jacket, but still it hurt. She swung it again, and this time I saw what it was. It was a meat tenderizer. A stainless-steel, square little mallet. She swung the kitchen utensil like the hammer of Thor and it connected with my shoulder right through my coat.
“Ow!”
“You stop this!” she screamed. “You stop this now!”
But I didn’t stop. I didn’t stop until Kjersten entered the battle, and with a single blow that bore the force of the dozen or so other Norse gods, her fist connected with my face and I went down.
You don’t know this kind of pain—and if you do, I’m sorry.
Had it been my nose, she would have broken it. Had it been my chin, my jaw would have to be wired together for months. But it was my eye.
All those muscles that were, just an instant ago, ready to tear Gunnar limb from limb suddenly decided it was time to call it a night, and they all went limp. I didn’t quite pass out, but I did find myself on the ground, with just enough strength to bring my hands to my eye, and cry out in pain.
My left eye was swollen shut in seconds, and in the kind of humiliation beyond which there is only darkness, I allowed Kjersten to guide me downstairs and into the kitchen. I had just been beaten to a pulp by my girlfriend in a single blow. Social lives did not get any bleaker than this.
“I had to do it,” she said as she prepared a bag of ice for me. “If I didn’t, my mother would have taken that meat tenderizer to your head, and knocked you silly.”
“Silly works,” I mumbled. “Better than where I was.”
She seemed to understand, even without me telling her—after all, she was right there in the front row when my dad had the heart attack. I told her where things stood with my father, and she went out into the living room, explaining everything to her mother. She spoke in Swedish, which, I guess was the language of love in this family. I could see Mrs. Ümlaut glance at me as they spoke. At first she looked highly suspicious, but her distrust eventually faded, and her motherly instincts returned.
Gunnar joined me in the kitchen. It kind of surprised me on account of we now had a perp/victim relationship. He seemed unfazed by my unprovoked attack. Maybe because there were plenty of other things to faze him.
“I don’t think we’re going to be a National Blue Ribbon school,” he said, and he explained to me the madness that ensued after my family and I had left the rally.
“I couldn’t give anyone back their months,” he said. “You can’t have them either. Because last week my dad found them, and burned them all in the fireplace.”
And there they went, all my hopes of redemption up in smoke. Without those time contracts, I could not undo what I had done. But I had already regained enough of my senses to realize getting those pages would not help my father.
Gunnar went on to tell me how his dad had officially left the minute his mom came home.
“They’re splitting up,” he told me.
I almost started to say how that wasn’t such a big deal, considering—but realized that I would sound just like Aunt Mona. Trauma? You don’t know from trauma until your father’s had a heart attack. And they’re much worse in Chicago.
I wouldn’t invalidate his pain. Every problem is massive until something more massive comes along.
In a few moments Mrs. Ümlaut came in with Kjersten. Mercifully she did not have the meat tenderizer. Mrs. Ümlaut sat beside me, far more sympathetic than when I pushed through the front door.
“Your father?” she asked.
“They’re still working on him,” I said. “At least they were when I left.”
She nodded. Then she took my both my hands in hers, looked into my one useful eye, and then Mrs. Ümlaut said something to me that I know I will remember for the rest of my life.
“Either he will live, or he will die.”
That was it. That was all. Yet suddenly everything came into clear focus. Either he will live, or he will die. Simple as that. All the drama, all the craziness, all the panic, didn’t mean a thing. This was a gamble—a roll of the dice. I don’t know why, but I took comfort from that. There were, after all, only two outcomes. I could not predict them, I could not control them. It was not in my hands. I had been afraid to say the word “die,” but now that it had been said, and with such strength and compassion, it held no power over me.
For the first time all night, I found myself crying like there was no tomorrow—although I knew there would be a tomorrow. It might not be the tomorrow I wanted, but it would still be there.
I could feel Kjersten’s hand on my shoulder, and I let comfort come from all sides. Then, when my tears had gone dry, Mrs. Ümlaut said, “Come, I’ll take you to the hospital.”
When I got to the hospital, there were more familiar faces in the waiting area. Relatives we didn’t get to see this holiday season, Barry from the restaurant, a couple of family friends—and in the middle of it all were Lexie and her grandfather. I went straight to Lexie. Moxie got up when he saw me, and so Lexie knew, even before someone called my name, that I was there.
“We came as soon as we heard,” she said. “Where have you been?”
“Long story. Is there any news?”
“Not yet.”
I looked around. Mona had come back, and Christina was asleep in her arms. I wondered if they had made up. Mona didn’t look at me.
Crawley, who never came out of his apartment unless he was kidnapped or pried out with a crowbar, came up to me. “All expenses shall be covered,” he said. “Either way.”
For a second I felt like getting angry at that, but I had had enough anger for one evening. “That’s okay,” I told him. “We don’t want your money.”
“But you’ll take it,” he said, and then added with more emotion than I’d ever seen in him before, “because that’s what I have to give.”
I nodded a quiet acceptance.
“Your mother’s up in the chapel,” Lexie said.
I gave a quick greeting to relatives and friends, then went to find her.
The place wasn’t much of a chapel—there were only four rows, and the pews seemed too comfortable to be effective. There was a small stained-glass panel, backlit with fluorescent lights. There was no cross on account of it was a spiritual multipurpose room, that had to be used by people of all religious symbols. The chapel’s best feature was a huge bookshelf stocked with Bibles and holy books of all shapes and sizes, so nobody got left out. Old Testament, New Testament, red testament, blue testament. This one has a little star—see how many faiths there are. (This is the moment I realized how exhausted I really was.)
Mom was alone in the room, kneeling in the second row. It was so like her to take the second row even when she was alone in the room.
“Did you fall asleep in the car?” Mom asked, without turning around to see me.
“How did you know it was me?”
“I can always tell when you need a shower,” she told me. Between her and Lexie, who needed sight? At least if she didn’t look at me too closely, she wouldn’t see my swollen eye.
“Come pray with me, Anthony.”
And so I did. I knelt beside her, joining her—and as I did, maybe for the first time in my life, I understood it. Not so much the words as the whole idea of prayer itself.
I’ll never really know if prayer changes the outcome of things. Lots of people believe it does. I know I’d like to believe it, but there’s no gu
arantee. Some people pray and their prayers are rewarded—they walk away convinced that their prayers were answered. Others pray and they get refused. Sometimes they lose their faith, all because they lost the roll of the dice.
That night, as I prayed, I wasn’t praying for my own wants and needs. I prayed for my father, and for my mother, I prayed for my whole family. Not because I was supposed to—not because I was afraid of what would happen if I didn’t. I was doing it because I truly wanted to do it with all my heart, and believe it or not, for the first time ever, I didn’t want it to end.
That’s when I realized—
—and excuse me for having a whole immaculate Sunday-school moment here, but I gotta milk it since they don’t come that often—
—that’s when I realized that prayer isn’t for God. After all, He doesn’t need it. He’s out there, or in there, or sitting up there in His firmament, whatever that is, all-knowing and all-powerful, right? He doesn’t need us repeating words week after week in His face. If He’s there, sure, I’ll bet He’s listening, but it doesn’t change Him, one way or the other.
Instead, we’re the ones who are changed by it.
I don’t know whether that’s true, or whether I was just delirious from lack of sleep . . . but if it is true, what an amazing gift that is!
I let my mother decide when it was time to stop. Like I said, I could have just gone on and on. I think she knew that. I think she liked that. Then I think she started to worry that I might become a priest. This wasn’t a worry of mine.
It was still the middle of the night. Three-thirty, and no word. Mom looked at me, and seemed to notice my swollen face for the first time, but chose not to ask. Instead she said, “I think you were right. Maybe I should call Frankie now.”
She took out her phone and called. When it connected, the sheer look of horror on my mother’s face even before she said a word got me scared, too.
“What? What is it?”
But in a moment her terror resolved into something else I couldn’t quite read. “Here,” she said. “Listen to the message.”
I took the phone just as the message started to repeat.
“Hello. You’ve reached the Kings County Morgue. Our offices are closed now, but if this is a morgue-related emergency, please dial zero. Otherwise please call back during normal business hours.”
I looked at her, gaping and shaking my head. This was my doing. Just like I said, I had programmed the morgue into her speed dial as a joke, and I must have programmed it over Frankie’s number. What stinking, lousy timing.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m so, so, sorry.”
My eyes started to well up, because right here, right now, it almost seemed like a bad omen, and she was getting all choked up, too. She turned away. Then I heard her give a little hiccup, and then another, and when she turned back, I could see that in the middle of tears, she had started laughing.
“You rotten, rotten kid.”
And then I was laughing, too. I put my arms around her and held her, and both of us stood there laughing, and crying, laughing and crying like a couple of nutjobs, until the doctor came in, and cleared his throat to get our attention. Maybe he understood what we were feeling, maybe he didn’t. Maybe he’d seen everything. He started to speak before we had the chance to brace ourselves.
“He made it through the operation,” he said, “but the next twenty-four hours are crucial.”
We relaxed just the slightest bit, and Mom finally got to call Frankie instead of the morgue.
19 I Love You, You’re an Idiot, Now Let’s All Go Home
My father almost died again the next day, but he didn’t. Instead he started to get better. By Friday, they moved him out of intensive care, and by Saturday, he was bored. He tried to squeeze news out of my mom about the restaurant, but all she would say was, “It’s there,” and she forbade anyone else to talk about it, for fear that talking business would send my father back into cardiac arrest.
With my dad on the mend, and more than enough people doting on him, my thoughts drifted to Kjersten and Gunnar. I went to visit on Sunday morning, to see how they were handling their own hardships, and give whatever support I could. The Christmas wreath was gone from their door, and the foreclosure notice glared out for the whole world to see.
“Good riddance,” I heard one beer-bellied neighbor say to another as I walked down the block toward their house. “After what they did to our yards, let ’em go back where they came from. Freakin’ foreigners.”
I turned to the man. “No, actually I was the one who did that to your yards, and I ain’t going nowhere. You gonna do something about it?”
He puffed on a cigarette. “Why don’t you just move along,” he said from behind the safety of his little waist-high wrought-iron fence.
“Lucky you got that fence between us,” I said. “Otherwise I might have to go samurai on your ass.” I have to say there’s nothing more satisfying than lip delivered to those who deserve it.
Mrs. Ümlaut answered the door, and pulled me in like she was pulling me out of a blizzard instead of a clear winter day. She barely allowed Kjersten to hug me before she dragged me into the kitchen, practically buried me in French toast, and had me tell her all about my dad’s condition. Now that I had fought various members of the Ümlaut household and had been struck repeatedly by a blunt object, I guess that made me like family.
I went upstairs to find Gunnar in his room, watching a black-and-white foreign film called The Seventh Seal.
“It’s by Ingmar Bergman, patron saint of all things Swedish,” he said. “It’s about a chess game with death.”
“Of course it is,” I said. “What else would you be watching?” I sat down at his desk chair. There was dust on his desk, as if he hadn’t done homework for weeks.
“What’s that thing the Grim Reaper holds, anyway?” I asked.
“It’s called a scythe,” Gunnar said. “It’s what people used to use to harvest grain.”
“So does modern death drive a combine?”
Gunnar chuckled, but only slightly.
We watched the film for a few minutes. It was a scene where the main character was looking out of a high window, supposedly facing the horizon of his own mortality, and it got me thinking about the guy who fell from the Roadkyll Raccoon balloon on Thanksgiving. I wondered if he, like the guy in the film, saw the Grim Reaper waiting for him.
No one likes the Grim Reaper. He’s like that tax auditor who came to our house a couple of years ago. He’s just doing his job, but everyone hates his guts on principle. If there really is such a guy and he comes for me someday, I promised myself I’d offer him cookies and milk, like little kids do for Santa Claus. Then maybe at least he’ll put in a good word for me. Bribing Death never hurts.
“It’s good that you’re reconnecting with your roots,” I told him. “I should watch more Italian films.”
He turned off the TV. “I don’t need to watch this,” he said. “I know the ending. Death wins.”
I shrugged. “Doesn’t mean you gotta go carving tombstones.”
Gunnar tossed the remote on his desk. “I’m done with that.” He flexed his fingers. “I think maybe it gave me carpal tunnel.”
He looked at his hand for a while, and although his gaze never left his fingers, I know his thoughts went far away.
“My father’s at the casino again,” Gunnar said. “He hasn’t found a place to live yet, so I guess that’s where he’s staying until he does. Maybe he’ll just set up a cot underneath one of the roulette wheels. I really don’t care.”
That, I knew, was a lie. Keep in mind that I had almost lost my father a few days before, so I knew what Gunnar was going through. It was in a different way, but the concept was basically the same. Reapers come in all shapes and sizes. And they don’t always clear-cut the field with their scythes—sometimes they just leave crop circles.
I really don’t care, Gunnar had said—and all at once I realized that Gunnar was finally, fina
lly in denial. For him this was the best thing that could happen, and it gave me an idea.
“I know they’re taking away your house,” I said to him, “but do you think you guys can squeeze out enough money to fill your mom’s car with gas?”
Even if the answer was no, I knew that I had enough money if they didn’t.
When someone’s addicted, they have these things called interventions. I know about them because my parents had to intervene for one of my dad’s high school buddies who got addicted to some designer drug. Like drugs ain’t bad enough, they got designers involved now. Basically everyone the guy knew sat him down in a room, told him they loved him and that he was a freakin’ moron. Love and humiliation—it’s a powerful combination—and it probably saved his life.
That’s what I thought we’d have with Mr. Ümlaut—a feel-good, huggy-feely intervention. But it didn’t quite turn out that way.
The Anawana Tribal Hotel and Casino was located deep in the Catskill Mountains, on the grounds of an old summer camp, proving that times changed. Old crumbling cabins, yellow and brown, could still be seen from the parking structure. The place boasted a riverboat that, for a few dollars more, would tool around Anawana Lake while you gambled.
The hotel’s main casino was patrolled by security, but I guess Kjersten, Gunnar, and I looked old enough to pass for gambling age—or at least old enough to be ignored for a while, because they didn’t stop us from going into the casino. Kjersten was quiet, steeling herself for the ambush, which is pretty much what this would be.
“Do you really think this will make a difference?” she asked me.
I had no idea, but the fact that she asked at all meant that she still had hope. She held my hand firmly, and it occurred to me that I was no longer her gateway to a younger, simpler time. In spite of our age difference, she’d never see me as “younger” again. And yet still, she was holding my hand.
We found Mr. Ümlaut playing craps. Even before he saw us, I could tell by the look on his face, and the circles under his eyes, that this was not going to be a heartwarming Hallmark moment.