Mystery

Tom’s stomach clenched—his body from his lungs to his gut felt like a closed fist. He bent down and punched the power button. “—LILY-LIVERED, FAINT-HEARTED COWARDS WHO CAN’T ACCEPT—” Tom twisted the volume control and shut off the sound.

“A policeman got murdered today.”

“Cops accept that risk. Believe me, they make up for it.” Victor edged into the room, looking shamefaced. “Uh, Tom, I said some stuff.…” He shook his head. “It isn’t … I don’t want you to think.…”

“Nobody wants me to think,” Tom said.

“Yeah, but, I mean it’s good you didn’t tell Glen anything about … you didn’t, huh?”

“I noticed something about Grand-Dad,” Tom said. “He likes to tell you interesting things, but he never wants to hear them himself.”

“Okay. Okay. Good.” Victor edged around Tom to get to his recliner. “You want to go up and see your mom now? Turn the sound up on that thing?”

Tom twisted the volume knob until Joe Ruddler was screaming. “SO SHOOT ME! THAT’S WHAT I THINK!” His father peeked at him. He left the room and went upstairs.

Gloria was lying on top of her bed in a wrinkled pair of men’s pajamas, with a pillow bunched up behind her and the covers rumpled over a bunch of magazines. The shutters had been closed. A lamp covered by a scarf burned on top of her dressing table. The other lamp, which usually stood beside the bed, lay in two pieces, a thick stand and a long thin neck, on the floor beside the bed. Next to where the lamp should have been stood a brown plastic bottle with a typed prescription label. A few cloudy bits of glass glinted up from the blue carpet. Tom started picked pieces of broken glass out of the carpet. “You’ll cut yourself,” he said.

“I felt so tired all day I could hardly get out of bed, and then I thought I heard you and Victor shouting at each other, and …”

He looked up over the edge of the bed. She had covered her face with her hands. He snatched up as much of the broken glass as he could see, dropped it on the heap of white tissues in the wastebasket beside the bed, and sat down beside his mother. “We had a fight, but it’s over now.” He put his arms around his mother. She felt boneless and stiff at once. “It was just something that happened.” For a moment she leaned her head against his shoulder, and then jerked away. “Don’t touch me. I don’t like that.”

He instantly dropped his arms. She gave him a cloudy look and yanked at the pajama top and tugged it around until it satisfied her.

“Do you want me to leave?”

“Not really. But I hate fights—I get so scared when I hear people fighting.”

“I hate hearing you scream,” he said. “That makes me feel terrible. I don’t think I can do anything for you—”

“Do you think I like it? It just happens. This little thing inside me goes pop, and then I hardly know where I am. I used to think—it was like the real me went away somewhere and I had to hide inside myself until she came back. Then later I realized that this was the real me—this thing like a dead person.”

“You’re not always like this,” he said.

“Will you turn off the record player? Please?”

He had not noticed the record spinning on the turntable of the portable record player atop a dresser. He turned around and pushed the reject button, and the tone arm lifted from the end grooves and returned to its post. Tom watched the label stop spinning until he could read the words on the label. Blue Rose, by Glenroy Breakstone and the Targets. He took the record from the turntable and searched for the sleeve in the row of records propped on the floor against the dresser, then saw it half-hidden under the bed. The split seams on its top and bottom had been repaired with yellowing transparent tape. Tom slid the record into the sleeve.

“What’s he doing now? Watching television?”

Tom nodded.

“How does that make him so superior to me? I stay up here and listen to music, and he watches the stupid television downstairs and drinks.”

“You’re feeling better,” Tom said.

“If I really felt better, I’d hardly know how to act.” She moved sideways, and levered herself up so that she could pull down her covers and slide her legs beneath them. Some of the magazines slithered onto the floor. Gloria drew the covers up over her body and leaned against the pillows.

It was like being in the bedroom of a teenage girl, Tom suddenly thought: the little record player on the dresser, the men’s pajamas, the mess of magazines, the darkness, the single bed. There should have been posters and pennants on the walls, but the walls were bare.

“Do you want me to go?” he asked.

“You can stay a little while.” She closed her eyes. “He looked ashamed of himself, didn’t he?”

“I guess.”