Of Two Minds

by Vicki Addesso

            I rode to the wake with my sister, Paige. There was no way I could spend another second around my mother. I’d been listening to her cry between each rendition of reasons why Charlie couldn’t possibly have done what he did. “That son-of-a-bitch! He wouldn’t do that to us,” she’d say, as if she could make the facts of his death disappear.

Charlie was Mom’s uncle, her father’s younger brother. He was only ten years older than her, more like a big brother than an uncle. Other than my father, my sister, and me, Mom had no family left. She’d complain about Charlie all the time. That he came to our house unannounced and hung out for hours. That he borrowed money. That he gambled. She said his drinking was the worst. “A lush. A real drunk,” she called him. Yeah, but guess what? Mom was the first one to crack open a beer the second the clock struck noon. “You’re not an alcoholic until you start drinking in the morning,” she’d say. So, Mom and Charlie were drinking buddies, those two.

Charlie had never married; I don’t think he ever had a girlfriend. He lived two blocks away and worked down in the subways of Manhattan, sitting in a booth selling tokens. My mother worked part-time at a deli in town, the early shift on weekdays. She was in a bowling league with a few friends and went over to their houses once in a while to play cards. My dad worked two jobs, and when he was home he was up in bed, watching TV or sleeping. Not a people person, my father. So Charlie and Mom would talk and drink, sometimes after work, but mostly on the weekends. And the talking turned to yelling, arguing, as the cans piled up. About the money he kept borrowing and never paid back, or the fact that he always showed up at our house empty-handed but left full of beer. Her beer.

            It was five days ago when Paige called me at my latest job, receptionist for a realty company. I’d stepped away from my desk to grab a cup of coffee in the kitchen just outside my office. I ran back, picking up the phone on the fourth ring.

“Wright Real Estate. Beth speaking,” I said.

“Beth, it’s me.”

“Hey, Paige. What’s wrong?” I could tell she was crying. I thought maybe her son was sick. He had just turned a year. I looked at the photo I had of him, pinned to the bulletin board next to my desk — chubby round face, big brown eyes, smiling.

“Uncle Charlie is dead. He killed himself,” she said.

I laughed.

“Really. He’s dead. He jumped off the roof of his apartment building.”

“I’m sorry,” I told her. “I believe you. It’s just that…of course Charlie did that.”

She was quiet.

“Paige? He was miserable.”

“I know. But how could he do that?”

I didn’t say what I was thinking: How could he not?

            Paige’s old Toyota Corolla was a mess. I was sitting in the passenger seat, empty baby bottles with chunks of sour milk stuck to their plastic insides, pacifiers, crumpled McDonald’s bags at my feet. A smashed half-empty box of Kleenex. A brightly colored toy had squeaked as I’d stepped on it getting in the car. Her son Bobby’s car seat was in the back behind me, and there were stuffed animals, a carton of diapers, blankets piled up around it, and Cheerios splattered everywhere.

“You really need to clean out this car,” I said.

“Fuck you. You don’t even have a car,” she said. “Never mind a baby to take care of! How’s work, by the way?”

“It sucks.”

“You’re never happy.”

“I’m going to have to quit.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” she said, slamming on the brakes at a red light.

“Whoa, slow down! And don’t judge me. You sit home all day watching game shows and soap operas while Greg is out working. Must be nice. You have no idea what it’s like to get up every day and spend eight hours feeling like you’re dying.”

“And you have no idea what it’s like taking care of another person. Two people, and one’s a baby!”

Paige thought I was a loser. I was two years older than she was, still living at home, single, childless. I was only twenty-five, but she acted like I was an old maid. Blonde and beautiful, a real dumb blonde in my book, Paige barely made it out of high school. I was the mousy-brown-haired, nerdy big sister who kept her nose in her books and slinked through high school unnoticed. Paige had her clique of cool friends and a parade of guys falling in love with her. Senior year she hooked up with Greg, who managed the Mobil in town. He was twenty-one when they met. On her nineteenth birthday, they got married.

Paige turned into the parking lot at the funeral home. I saw my parents’ car. That was it. Maybe some of Uncle Charlie’s friends from work and the bar would show up later. Then I wondered, did he even have friends? Maybe, like me, he just had acquaintances. And this fucked-up family.

I walked ahead of Paige. The wind was biting. This February had been nothing but snow and ice. Inside, I was hit by the sickening sweet smell of lilies. I’d been to three other wakes. Both my grandfathers’ (my grandmothers died before I was born) and my friend Frank’s. I began to feel nauseous, yet somehow comforted. I did have friends; or at least I’d had a friend. Frank was my friend.

I went straight to the casket, avoiding my parents, who were sitting off to the side. The first thing I noticed as I looked at Charlie lying there was his right ear. The skin around it was wrinkled in big lumpy folds, and it was not where it should have been. It was too far back from its original spot, as if it were slipping away.

This was not Charlie. Where was the long, fleshy nose I knew so well, the pockmarked cheeks, the small blue eyes with golden feathers for lashes? This face was slathered in make-up and powder. Did they actually put mascara on him? That ear, his right ear, looked too small. I wanted to see those two great big pretzel twists stuck to the sides of his head. I wanted to rub my hand over his crew-cut hair that had turned from dark blonde to gray with the years. That was something I did lately, when I’d come home from work and find him sitting with Mom at the kitchen table. His hair felt like velvet, and he would say, “Oh, come back, that feels nice,” as I walked away, up the stairs to my bedroom. But I couldn’t do that now because this was not Charlie. Were the three pink moles on the back of his neck that turned red in summertime still there? I almost reached in to lift his head, to look, to prove to myself that this was not him and this was not real. Instead, I made the sign of the cross and pretended to say a prayer.

            My grandfathers had died years ago, and my parents hadn’t let my sister or me go up to the casket. I’d heard my mother tell my father, “They are too young to see death.” So we sat in the back of the room on a sofa, with our baby dolls, watching the adults chatting and laughing while Grandpa, and then a year later, Pop-pop, lay still in a big box up front.

The casket was closed at my friend Frank’s wake. Mom had come with me, as she knew Frank’s mother. Actually, my mother made me go. How do you make someone do something they don’t want to do, can’t do? How did she get me there? I was seventeen. My face covered in acne, like Uncle Charlie’s must have been when he was young. Paige, with her spotless skin, called me pizza face. But was that it, being seventeen, hating my skin, being so shy, being afraid? I told my mother I didn’t want to go, I couldn’t go. “Tell them I’m sick,” I said. But she would not leave me alone. I begged, I cried. She pulled me off my bed. She said, “You will never be able to live with yourself if you don’t show up.” Then she slapped me across the face, and something in me split apart. I shoved pieces of my mind into a dark corner. I got dressed and went to the wake.

            I’d known Frank Nunez since kindergarten. He was an only child, lived four houses away from us. Thick curly black hair, eyes the color of coal, and a slight overbite that curled his full lips into a permanent smile. He was shy, awkward, odd, like me. We seemed to recognize something in each other. I didn’t have a name for it. I still don’t. We sat together in the cafeteria, my fair, freckled arm next to his spotless olive one. When all the other children were laughing and playing during recess, we stood quietly and watched. At least we weren’t alone. He was never a boyfriend, but the other kids teased us with that old sing-song jingle: Frank and Beth, sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g… As we got older we would watch movies together, go shopping together, and spend hours sitting and reading together. And sometimes, late at night, when I felt like I needed to hear my own voice and then hear someone else’s voice responding, I’d call him on the phone. He’d pick up on the first ring so his parents wouldn’t wake up.

My mother walked to Frank’s casket, a closed casket, and knelt, made the sign of the cross, as I stood behind her. I stared at the polished oak, at the spray of red roses lying across the top, and I wondered what was inside. I imagined Frank at home, in his room, reading or writing. I’d go see him later. I’d talk him out of it. I’d stay with him to make sure he didn’t go.

The wake had been crowded. Frank’s parents had relatives, big families. Neighbors and teachers from school, accompanied by reluctant classmates, came and went. As my mother mingled, I headed to the back of the room where I had sat for my grandfathers’ wakes. No sister or doll to keep me company. I scanned the faces of the mothers and fathers of sons and daughters who were normal and happy. I saw expressions of relief mixed with shame. Their children, our classmates, were alive. Years of school with these people, and yet I knew they knew nothing about Frank and me. We had long ago ceased to interest them. Except for there, then, at the wake. It was as if a spotlight had been turned on me. Eyes caught mine, briefly, and then shifted away. I had to have known something, they must have been whispering. Frank’s parents stayed seated in front, staring at the closed casket. I looked at the back of their heads.

Frank had jumped in front of a speeding train on a Friday night in early June. It was the Friday night he and I had talked about all that week. I was watching my small black-and-white TV in my bedroom.  At 9:06 I heard the whistle of the express train. Soon after I heard the sound of sirens. It was like the howling of wild animals, a call of longing. I remember reaching for the blanket at the bottom of my bed even though it was a warm evening. I knew but pretended to myself that I did not. How does one fall asleep under the weight of such knowing?

The next morning, when I came downstairs and into the kitchen, I heard Mom talking with my father, telling him what she’d heard from one of the neighbors. That the rescue workers had to pick up the body pieces. Arms and legs. My father shushed her when he saw me.

I kept looking at the casket. Had they put him back together?

            “He looks good, doesn’t he?” my mother said as she walked up behind me and put her arm around my shoulders.

I flinched. I didn’t need to tell her this was not Charlie.

“They did a good job,” she said.

I sat on a chair toward the back of the room. My parents and Paige sat up front, and as a few visitors trickled in they greeted them with handshakes or hugs. Small talk. A few embarrassed chuckles.

An hour passed. How long would I have to stay here? Then I heard her voice. Raspy, husky, so discordant for her slight build. The remnants of a Portuguese accent, from a childhood lived across the Atlantic. Frank’s mother, Mrs. Nunez, had come to Uncle Charlie’s wake. Alone. I knew she and my mother talked whenever they saw each other, out on the block, in the grocery store, at the deli when Mom was working. Mrs. Nunez would stop in to grab a cup of coffee before heading off to her job. My mother was obsessed with telling me how well Frank’s mother seemed to be doing, as if I needed to know that Frank hadn’t destroyed her. Why was she here? She had barely known Uncle Charlie. How could she come here, to this place, this room?

After Frank’s death, Mrs. Nunez would call my mother, asking if I had said anything, if I had told her anything about what Frank had done. I hadn’t. I refused to speak about Frank. And for years now I had managed to avoid any contact with his parents, who lived on the same street as mine. You would think it would be impossible not to run into each other at some point. But I was careful. I’d look out the window, and then out the front door, up and down the road, to be sure neither of them was around. I never walked past their house. I made sure to check for their cars in parking lots at stores. Sometimes, when I was home alone, I would be overcome with a fear that one or both of them would knock on the door. They would have seen that my parents’ cars were gone, known they were at work or shopping, and come to confront me.

As Mrs. Nunez rose from the kneeler at the casket and turned to walk to my parents, I got up, grabbed my coat, and left.

The frigid air slapped me in the face as soon as I stepped outside. The steel blue sky was streaked with flimsy, pink, windswept clouds. In moments, even though it was still early — it could not have been past five o’clock — evening would fall. The sky would turn black, and I would disappear. I loved walking at night. I felt protected by the darkness. It was a fifteen-minute trek to home. I stepped carefully over patches of frozen snow at the curbs. I pulled my coat tight around me, cursing myself for not having a hat, scarf, or gloves.

At the front door I realized I didn’t have keys. I went to the garage and pulled the door up, turned on the light. I found the spare key that Mom had hidden under the toolbox on the floor in the corner. As soon as I got into the house I went to the kitchen, opened the drawer by the sink, and found the keys to Charlie’s apartment. I put them and our house key in my coat pocket and went back out into the darkness.

Only two blocks. Our small town was a bedroom community, just a twenty-minute train ride from Manhattan. It was rush hour and the streets were busy. I walked with my head down, not wanting to see the faces of other people anxious to get home, to get warm. I heard laughter, the laughter of two young women, one of them saying she needed a beer. Then I heard the train whistle. The express was flying past our town, screaming out its warning. I began to cry. The tears were hot on my cheeks.

The lobby of Charlie’s building was filled with people coming home from work or school, chatting by the mailboxes, waiting for the elevator. His place was on the tenth floor, the top floor. I watched from the sidewalk, glancing sideways through the glass doors. I waited until no one was inside.

The elevator creaked, smelled of perfume and cigarette smoke. I wiped my nose and cheeks with my coat sleeve. The tenth-floor hallway was empty, but I could hear sounds, voices, from the other apartments. Once I got into Uncle Charlie’s place, I walked to a small lamp by the sofa and turned it on. Just one large room, a studio, with a kitchenette, small table with two chairs, and the convertible sofa facing the television. The curtains were pulled closed. On the table next to the sofa, lying in the lamplight, was a small spiral notebook with a pen clipped to the cover, and a paperback. A murder mystery. A bookmark was holding his place near the end of the story. Hadn’t he wanted to finish it, find out who did it?

I took off my coat, picked up the book, and sat on the sofa. I would finish it for him. Before I began to read, though, I thought about Frank. He would laugh his ass off to see me reading a book like this, some dime-store pulp fiction paperback. Waste-time reading, he would call it.

In fifth grade Frank began dragging me to the library weekly. While he browsed the shelves in the adult section, I would grab my books off the YA shelf. At twelve, at his insistence, I finally left Nancy Drew and The Happy Hollisters behind. He told me I must read Kurt Vonnegut. He gave me Slaughterhouse Five and Cat’s Cradle. Then it was time for a shift — Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Frank also devoured poetry, and he would read aloud to me — Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Dylan Thomas.

Two years before he died, Frank began to write his own stories. One after the other, and he would ask me to read them and then ask what I thought. They were good, well-written, long and intricate. He built alternate universes with such clarity that I would get lost for hours. He filled marble notebooks with his horrid handwriting. I kept those notebooks in my closet; Frank didn’t want them in his house. I’d asked him why, but he just said I wouldn’t understand. The stories were frightening, full of evil monsters and vengeful villains, and the violence was detailed and disturbing. But the endings were always happy, with a hero, or heroine, destroying the enemies and restoring hope. Somehow that disappointed me, that simplistic way he had of bringing it all to a sunny conclusion. But I always told him they were wonderful. His smile would spread wide.

Once, a few months before he died, we rode the bus to the mall to shop at the bookstore. I bought my first book ever — Sylvia Plath’s Ariel. Frank and I had recently watched the movie of her book The Bell Jar. We went back to his house and up to his room, where he read it aloud to me from cover to cover. I left it with him that night, and he copied every poem into a new marble notebook. And for all the weeks after that, Frank would talk about Sylvia. Sylvia and what she had done. He would say it was inevitable. Necessary to her greatness. I asked him, wouldn’t her poetry still be amazing if she were alive? He was emphatic. No. No one would have remembered her.

            Sitting in Uncle Charlie’s apartment, his paperback in my hand, remembering Frank, I heard a knock at the door. Mrs. Nunez? Did she follow me here? I knew that was ridiculous.

I opened the door slowly. A woman I did not know, with short gray hair and squinty, blue eyes, stood with her hands folded in front of her belly. She was shorter than me and wore a floral housedress.

“Hi. Are you Charlie’s niece?”

“Great-niece.”

“I’m Evelyn. I live down the hall. Can you come with me?”

Why I followed I cannot say. I made sure the key to the apartment was in my pocket. When we entered her place I saw a man at the table in the dining room. He sat hunched over a mug of what I assumed was coffee, wearing thick glasses, a strip of curly white hair circling the shiny bald top of his head.

“This is my husband, Sid.”

I nodded. He nodded back.

“We were sitting here, just sat down to breakfast. We weren’t looking out the window, but out of the corner of my eye I saw something, something big, fly by, and at the same time I heard a scratching sound.” 

She led me to the window. The screen had three long, thin tears.

“Look,” she said. “He must have done this.  He must have reached out to grab something.”

I looked at the screen and then down. It was dark, but the parking lot below was brightly lit. I saw the snow-covered tops of cars and a man shoveling the walkway. When did it start snowing? I saw where Charlie must have landed.

“I’m sorry,” I told Evelyn and her husband, then I left.

            I stood in Charlie’s apartment, by the table with the lamp, looking at the small spiral notebook and pen, noticing the dust. Dust gathers so quickly.

The police had found a note in Charlie’s pocket, addressed to my mother.

“Ann, I can’t take much more. I don’t know what else to tell you. I have nothing. I need more. I’m sorry. Charlie.”

Mom had shown me a photocopy of the note. The police officer had told her the original had to be held as evidence. So strange, I thought then, as if there’d been a crime.

Now I see my uncle here, in his apartment, picking up the pen and tearing a piece of paper from the notebook. He writes quickly and stuffs the note into his pocket.  He walks to the door and puts on his jacket and hat. When he leaves the apartment, he closes the door very quietly.

He climbs the stairs to the roof. He steps outside. It is cold and clear, and he can hear the morning traffic. He looks around, realizing he has to climb over the chain-link fence that surrounds him. He forgot his gloves and his fingers are cold, but he makes it over. He’s standing on the wall of the roof now. He takes his time. He sits down. He checks his pocket. The note is there. He leans to one side, onto his elbow, and rolls off.  He reaches out, fast and hard, and tears a window screen as he falls.

No crime. With Frank, too. They just wanted to be gone. The crime was ours. The crime was mine. I had let him go.

            I put on my coat, grabbed the book, and left Charlie’s apartment, slamming the door behind me. I walked and walked.

It’s Monday night, eight years ago. I’m in Frank’s room. He hands me another marble notebook and tells me to keep it safe. He tells me his parents think he is crazy. “They think I’m sick,” he says. “Do you?” he asks me.

You don’t sleep anymore; you tell me your stories are real, that the monsters talk to you. You are changing. I want to scream at him to stop. Instead, all I say is, “No. I think you’re okay.”

Then he tells me his plan. I tell myself it is just another one of his stories.

            I walked past the grocery store, the post office, the elementary school. I was headed to the train station. I can’t take much more, I thought. Of a job I hated. Of being lonely. Of being angry. Of feeling guilty. Of being afraid.

My mind told me to jump off a roof. Jump in front of a speeding train.

Change your mind.

Turn around. Go home. Go to your room. Read the book. Finish it for Charlie. Fall asleep. In the morning, sit on your bed with a pen and a notebook and write. Write it all down. And then go to your closet and pack up the marble notebooks. Mrs. Nunez needs them. Maybe she will forgive you.

BIO

Vicki Addesso has worked in various fields over the years, and in between family life and paying the bills, she works at writing.

She is co-author of the collaborative memoir Still Here Thinking of You~A Second Chance With Our Mothers (Big Table Publishing, 2013). Her work has appeared in such publications as The Writing Disorder, Gravel Magazine, Barren Magazine, The Writer, The Bluebird Word, Sleet Magazine, Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, The Feminine Collective, and Tweetspeak Poetry. Her short story, Cinnamon and Me (Sleet Magazine), was nominated for a 2023 Pushcart Prize. She has a personal essay included in the anthology My Body My Words, edited by Loren Kleinman and Amye Archer.