She soon returned with coffees in hand-painted porcelain cups on hand-painted porcelain saucers, spiked for the girls, virgin for Brian and Mr. McCall, who were planning on staying up all night guarding the various entry points of the house.
“To help you sleep,” Mrs. McCall said as she served mine.
At some point during dinner, a striking clock had chimed in the house. Seven times. I did the math. Denise had been dead for sixteen hours, and still I had not told my mother. I gulped down the stiff coffee with the ease of someone drinking a beer on a hot day.
“Could I use the phone?” I asked, and Mrs. McCall got up and led the way to the informal parlor, a more comfortable place to conduct my business than the formal one, she assured me.
* * *
I was, at that point, aching to speak to my parents and weighted with despair at the thought of picking up the phone and trying again. If they did not answer a third time, I was sure I would disintegrate into thin air. It did not matter that they were in New Jersey and had no way of knowing what had happened—the news wouldn’t hit the Tallahassee Democrat until Monday morning—what mattered was that people who really loved their children were acutely attuned to their distress signals, and I would have to accept that my parents’ antennae would never arc in my direction.
And yet if they did pick up, what a rush it would be to regale them with what I’d survived. Sometimes, while crossing a busy intersection or standing at the top of a stairwell, I wondered how they might react if I were struck by a car or lost my footing. I pictured myself in a hospital room, my mother kneeling at my bedside sobbing and begging me for forgiveness. She should have been there. She should have been paying attention. I was deeply ashamed to admit that this is what I yearned for in my most private moments. I thought it pointed to something about me that was innately invisible.
“You finished with the phone?” It was Brian, hunching in the recessed doorway to the parlor. My tiny coffee cup was empty, my breaths slow and shallow. No telling how long I’d been sitting there, staring at all of Mrs. McCall’s various degrees. She was a mathematician who had worked as a government statistician for many years, assigning numerical value to local trends so that public officials could decide how to best allocate funds, the only woman in the Capitol Building whose phone had a direct line to the governor.
“Not yet.”
“I wanted you to talk to my dad,” Brian said, ducking to enter the room; he was one of those tall guys who had learned to do so in old Southern mansions like this, with their vaulted foyers and sloping doorways. Brian had grown up in Orlando but was descended from serious Birmingham stock, where his family still belonged to the shooting club his great-grandparents helped found. He had been courteous to an obsequious degree all night after seeing the way Mr. and Mrs. McCall had eyed his long hair, his bare feet in peeling leather thongs. I’m a good ole boy in a hitchhiker’s clothing, he was saying every time he stood when a woman got up from the table.
“Your dad?” I looked at him like he’d suggested I get in touch with John Lennon.
“There’s something called a crime victims’ assistance program. I guess Florida has one of the best in the country? It just started here a few years ago. But you can apply and request compensation for any damages done to the house.”
I nodded. Yeah, sure. That seemed like something I should do. On the downswing of my chin, my whole world fell apart again. There was a long black hair snaked in the weave of my sweater. I was a blonde.
“Are you worried about how your mom might take it?” Brian asked in a gentler voice. He’d met my mother once. He thought she was beautiful; she called him Byron, then Brad.
“Something like that,” I whispered, tears blurring that last piece of Denise stuck to my sweater.
“I know y’all aren’t close,” Brian said harmlessly.
That set me straight. No one could ever know how little interest my parents had in me. It was not even something I discussed with Denise. “We’re playing phone tag,” I said with an edge.
In truth, I had been sitting in there wondering if I should wait until Monday, when the news hit the papers. When my parents had some sense of the enormity of the tragedy and would be waiting by the phone for my call. Maybe they would even pick up on the second ring, like Denise’s mother had. But I couldn’t stand the pitying way Brian was looking at me, like he knew something I’d worked so hard to conceal. I reached for the phone.
* * *
My father was a small, smiling man with a shiny red face like Santa Claus’s. I’d seen him angry maybe twice in my life, both times at inanimate objects. The corner of a bureau where he repeatedly stubbed his toe had taken some abuse.