Home Again

Gerlaine shook his head and shuffled wordlessly to the door. He turned, gave Angel a long, worried look, then left the room. The door clicked shut behind him.

Quiet descended, settled uncomfortably onto the blank walls and speckled linoleum. The monitor blipped on and on and on.

Angel stared at the closed door, feeling the blood hurtling through his body, pounding at his temples, catching and releasing on the tired old valves of his heart. His fingers were cold, so cold, and he couldn’t draw a decent breath.

A transplant.

He wanted to laugh it all off, to tell himself that he was in some backwater, low-rent hospital getting bad advice, and part of him even believed it. But not all of him, not deep, deep inside of him where the fear had always lived, the dark spot in his soul where even the booze and drugs couldn’t reach.

Transplant.

The word circled back on itself and returned.

Transplanttransplanttransplant.

They wanted to cut his heart out.

Drugs swirled soothingly through Angel’s body. He couldn’t keep his eyes open, and his body felt weighted and tingly. Consciousness came and went with the ticking of the wall clock.

Home. They were sending him home.

He tried not to think about it, but the memories were persistent. He didn’t have the pills and the booze and the women to keep them away this time, and without his narcotic armor, he was so damned vulnerable. He closed his eyes, and slowly, slowly, the antiseptic smell of the hospital was blown away by a rain-sweet breeze. He no longer heard the monitor, but the growl of an engine….

He was seventeen again … riding his motorcycle, the Harley-Davidson that had cost him his soul. The engine throbbed and purred beneath him. He drove and drove, not knowing where he was going until he reached the stoplight. The sign hovered above him at a cockeyed angle: Wagonwheel Estates Trailer Park.

He urged the bike forward, inching past one trailer, then another and another. Each mobile home huddled on a thin strip of asphalt, living rooms shored up with piles of concrete blocks, backyards a six-by-six square of gravel.

Finally he came to his boyhood home.

The trailer, once butter yellow, now and grayed by time, sat in a weed-infested patch of meadow grass. Trash cans heaped with garbage lined the chain-link fence that separated the DeMarco “estate” from the Wachtels’ domain next door. A dilapidated Ford Impala was parked at a suspicious angle in the driveway.

He pulled up alongside the chain-link fence and cut the engine. He sat there a second, uncertain, then very slowly he set the kickstand and got off. He walked along the fence and up the split asphalt driveway, across the necklace of aggregate gravel stepping-stones that led to the front door.

As he passed it, Angel glanced at the garbage can, saw the crushed paper bags and bent pop cans that peeked over the rim. It was his job, never Francis’s, to carefully construct the rubbish facade. The real garbage—the weekly allotment of gin and vodka bottles—had to be hidden at all costs.

As if the neighbors didn’t know. For years they’d heard the raucous, drunken fights that emanated from the piss-colored trailer, had heard the slamming doors and breaking glass every Saturday night.

The music of Angel’s youth.

He climbed the creaking metal steps and stopped at the top, staring at the dirty door. For a second he didn’t want to go in. It was crazy, he knew, to be seventeen years old and afraid to enter your own home, but it had been that way for as long as he could remember.

There was a rustle of movement from within. The trailer shifted and whined on its blocks as footsteps thudded toward the door. Suddenly the knob twisted, the door arced open.

His mother stood in the doorway, a cigarette in one hand, a glass of gin in the other. Her skin had a sick yellow-gray tinge, the mark of chain-smoking, and accordion-pleated wrinkles creased her cheeks. Black hair—a color too severe to be found in nature—lay in frizzled disarray around her pudgy face. Puffy purplish bags underscored her bloodshot brown eyes.

Eyeing him, she took a long drink of her gin, draining the glass and tossing it back onto the brown shag carpet. “Where you been?”

“What do you care?”

She burped, wiped the moisture from her mouth. “Don’t you sass me, boy.”

Angel sighed. Why was he here? What had he hoped for? A smile, a welcome, a come-on-in? When would he stop wanting something from his mother? “I got a problem, Ma.”

One bushy gray eyebrow shot upward. “You’re in trouble.” She said it without a hint of emotion, just a flat statement of fact.

“Yeah.”

She took a deep drag off her cigarette, then blew the smoke in his face. “Whaddaya want from me?”