The Day My Mother Died: Chapter 1

Chapter 1

You’d think the day your mother died would be seared into your memory like the etching on a freshly pressed coin, and certain parts of that day, the baseball game with Dillon and my father, our arrival home and the aftermath, I remember clearly. But the afternoon before the game, those last hours alone with my mother, I only remember bits and pieces.

Walking home from school with Dillon. Barren brown trees turning green. Dillon ducking his face as a gust of wind came off the ocean, brown hair falling across his forehead. 

Walking up the white stone driveway to my house. Stopping to turn and wave as Harry Doyle, our neighbor, tooted the horn of his oversized gray pickup, a weathered Yankees cap perched on his head. 

Opening the front door. Seeing the redness of my mother’s eyes, as if she’d been crying. I must have asked her what was wrong; I remember she was crying, but I don’t remember what she said. I don’t even remember asking. She would have told me not to worry, but I always did when it came to her, worry.

Following my mother as she went from room to room. Her picking up a black-and-white picture of her mother standing next to a tree. Her wiping the dust off the table before carefully placing the picture at the center. Me turning the picture so it was off kilter. Her rolling her eyes, reaching over, ruffling and re-straightening my hair. 

Running my finger along a chest-high glass box perched on top of four stainless steel legs. Inside, two shelves. On the bottom shelf, a black-and-white picture of my father’s parents sitting in the front seat of a convertible. Besides that, a picture of my mother holding me on the day that I was born. The top shelf, a Reggie Jackson autographed baseball and a picture of my father standing outside a courthouse. 

I’ve tried to dig deeper into that last afternoon, find some hint of what was to come, but the memories get further away and cloudier and cloudier, then an image will appear, me and my father leaving for the game, him leaning over to kiss her goodbye. Her offering a cheek instead of her lips. A brief look of confusion on his face as my mother stepped back into the foyer. The tension between parents that every child could sense but rarely understood. The missed hint in the run up to tragedy. Then again, it might not have even happened, a construction of my memory, the psyche trying to impose meaning on the chaos of life. None of it matters though.

We went to the game.

My mother died.

That’s what happened.

My father was a tall man who wore his raven black hair slicked back in the style of his clients, men with long last names full of vowels who called him from jails and prisons all over New Jersey. That night at the baseball game, he was wearing jeans with a sky-blue button-down shirt and Italian leather shoes. Around his neck, a thick gold chain that matched a gold bracelet on his wrist. Next to the bracelet, a Rolex gleamed in the stadium light. A diamond pinkie ring glittered as he lifted his beer to drink. 

My father introduced himself to the two men sitting next to us, Walter and Anthony. They smiled, nodded their heads. They were heavyset men with beards. The kind of men who chain-smoked and bought cups of beer two at a time. The kind of men who woke up early and trudged through the dark morning streets of New York on their way to hours of back breaking construction work. The kind of men who spent most of their time at the bar bragging about their kids or talking about high school football games from twenty years ago. Men very different from my father.

“Come to a lot of games?” my father asked.

“About twenty or thirty games a year. Always hit up O’Malley’s on the way home for a few beers afterward,” Anthony said.

“Yankees tradition, win or lose, we go by O’Malley’s,” Walter said.

My father smiled and nodded, but he was already looking away.

“How about you?” Walter said.

“I live down the shore.”

“Down the shore, huh? We got us royalty in the cheap seats tonight,” Walter said.

My father bought Walter and Anthony a round of beers and then another. They offered to buy him one, but he said that he had to drive us home. If he didn’t get us home safe and sound, my mother would kill him.

 “Got you a big house down there, kid?” Walter was looking right at me, but I didn’t know what to say, so I just nodded.

“Right near the water too. Must be nice,” Walter said. “Anthony’s wife is packing on the pounds, but I bet your mom is quite the looker, huh? Got a pool?”

“A pool?” Dillon said. “Why would they have a pool? The ocean is across the street.”

“Look at that, oceanfront living,” Walter said. 

“Put a sock in it,” Anthony said.

“I’m just saying, a tall, good-looking guy with a big house by the ocean. Probably got a swimsuit model for a wife. Least he could do is show us a picture or something,” Walter said.

My father forced a thin smile and checked the time on his Rolex, but his anger was building.       

I don’t remember the inning. Maybe the sixth or the seventh. I just remember that it was late in the game, and the score was tied. Dillon was eating an oversized pretzel plastered in salt. He looked at me over it and smiled. My father told us he’d be right back and headed off for the bathroom.

Dillon nudged me with his elbow. “This guy’s so big he can’t fit into a hatchback.”

The batter was Mo Vaughn, a massive left-handed first baseman.

I looked over my shoulder towards the entrance where my father had gone. The sharp crack of bat hitting ball spun me around, and the crowd rose, necks craned, turning toward our section. Dillon was standing, glove outstretched, and I saw the white ball flashing in the stadium lights, hovering like a hummingbird, then descending towards us with sudden ferocity. 

Dillon stood there waiting for the ball’s arrival, glove open and ready, but at the last second, Walter reached out to snag the ball with his bare hand. The ball skimmed off his heel, clipped the webbing of Dillon’s glove, and smacked into the meat of my shoulder, and caromed off into the seats behind me. Sparks clouded my vision, and a sharp pain ran up my shoulder to the base of my skull. The crowd roared as the impact replayed on the scoreboard. I tried to hold back the tears, but they were already starting to gather around the edges of my eyes and leak down the sides of my face. Shortly afterward, my father returned, and I buried my face into his chest. 

“What happened?” my father asked.

“He got hit by a ball,” Anthony said.

“It was that guy’s fault. He knocked it out of my glove,” Dillon said.

“Imagine how much the little one would have been crying if he’d a caught that ball. Kid would have had to put his palm in a bucket of ice water,” Walter said.

We waited for another inning and then left. Anthony and Walter asked why we were leaving before the end of a tight game, and my father said something about beating the traffic. But we didn’t go home. My father parked the car on a street I had never seen. Three door fronts up and across the street a bar with a big green and white sign that read O’Malley’s. 

Maybe a half hour later, around the corner came Anthony and Walter. They were making their way to the bar, talking, laughing, stumbling against each other. Anthony’s Yankees hat fell off of his head, and he braced himself against a street sign to bend over and pick it up.

My father got out of the car, removed something from the trunk, and walked along the passenger side. 

“What’s going on?” Dillon asked.

As my father passed through the pool of light cast by a streetlamp, I saw the black tire iron in his right hand. 

The street was dark and quiet, and Walter stopped to light a cigarette, his attention on his hands where he was cupping a match. Anthony turned to face him. His hands were waving in the air telling some story. He had his back to us. Neither of them saw my father cross the street in a quick jog, black tire iron raised above his head.

My father hit Anthony first, once hard behind the ear. As Anthony collapsed into Walter, my father stepped sideways and hit Walter in almost the exact same spot. I doubt that Walter ever saw who it was that hit him. My father hit them a few more times while they were lying on the ground, but the first two strikes were more than enough. 

My father jogged back to the car, Italian leather shoes scraping against the asphalt, black tire iron in his right hand, and as he passed back through the streetlamp’s glow, I saw on his face a lopsided smile, almost like he was trying not to laugh, almost like he couldn’t wait to tell someone about what he had done. 

Before returning to our house, my father stopped along the banks of the Navesink River and placed his shirt and the tire iron in a black plastic bag, wound the bag tightly, and pitched all of it into the darkness of the river. 

At Dillon’s house, my father stopped the car and turned to look at the two of us in the backseat. He told Dillon he shouldn’t say anything about whatever happened after the baseball game. Some things parents don’t need to know. Dillon nodded and opened the door and ran up the walk to his house. His baseball mitt forgotten on the seat beside me. 

My father drove up to the beach and stopped the car. Told me to climb into the front seat. It was cold, and the night was quiet. No cars driving by us nor people walking on the boardwalk. All the shops had long since closed.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have done that in front of you like that.”

“You think?” I said.

“Don’t be a wiseass.”

I rolled my eyes. Looked out the window. Saw dune grass waving in the moonlight.

“It’s just that work has been really stressful lately, so I’m already short tempered, and when I got back and heard them laughing about you getting hit with the ball as if it wasn’t bad enough listening to them talk about your mother, I just lost it.”

“Still, the other guy didn’t do anything,” I said.

“Sometimes you get screwed by who you choose to be friends with,” he said. The light from the street lamps spilled in enough to show his hands clutching the steering wheel and his bare forearms, but his face was a sea of shadows.

“When you came back to the car, you were smiling.” 

“I wasn’t smiling. It’s a figment of your imagination,” he said, but we both knew he was lying. 

My father put the car in gear, and we headed home. He told me maybe we shouldn’t tell mom about this one. “Mothers, they don’t need to know everything,” he said. 

My mother opened the front door before we even got out of the car. She pulled my face up to look into it. Searched it for some injury. She looked at my father. Told him she had just gotten off the phone with Dillon’s mother. She looked back down at me. Told me to go get ready for bed.

I climbed the stairs and headed for the shower. Turned on the faucet, let the water run, and switched it to the shower head. I walked to the doorway and cracked it open. Put my ear to it. 

Heard murmurs. 

Footsteps. 

I returned to the shower and got in. Let the water run down my face. Adjusted the temperature and stood there. Felt the warmth of it. Wondered what my mother was saying. 

I closed my eyes and saw my father running back to the car as he passed the streetlight, the tire iron in his hand, the grin on his face. Where did that come from? That grin? 

Then the yelling started. 

I got out of the shower and toweled off. Went to the door and opened it. I listened to her call him names: liar, cheat, thug. Heard my father’s defense, at first cautious and plaintive, but as they argued, I heard the danger gathering in his tone. I had spent my youth playing on the edge of “too far” with my father, and I heard the rage build in the diction, the undertone, the clipped answers. I knew I should go down. Intervene. Put myself in between them.

But I didn’t go.

My mother’s voice, high pitched, angrier than I had ever heard. Asking him what type of man not only cheats on his wife but also makes his son wait in the car while he attacks someone in the middle of the night. Telling my father he wasn’t a real man. A poor excuse. A well-dressed piece of shit.

My father screaming at her to shut up, to not move, to not turn her back on him goddamnit. 

Tussling and panting.

A loud smack.

Ripping fabric. 

The cracking of glass. 

A thud. 

“Mary?” my father said. “Mary?”

I stood there waiting for my mother to reply. For my father to say anything other than her name. Maybe I stood there for a minute. Maybe five. I don’t know. I just know that I didn’t go down soon enough. But I did go down, eventually.

The first thing I saw was my mother on the floor. My father’s trophy case spilled across her body, a piece of glass sticking out of her arm, another larger piece in her neck. Blood everywhere. On the floor. On the case. Dripping off of her semi-clenched fingers. 

By my foot, a silver locket, the chain broken, a Christmas gift from me to my mother.

My father was perched on the arm of the living room sofa. He was looking around. Periodically shaking his head. Going back to surveying the room. I’d seen that look on him before when he was preparing for a trial. Case file in front of him. Sitting at the dining room table. Red wine glass in hand. Staring at the wall, lips moving soundlessly. He was figuring out a defense.

“What did you do?” I asked.

He looked over at me standing there in the towel, water still dripping down my chest.

“For Christ’s sake, put some clothes on,” he said.

He stood up and walked across the room, avoiding the blood pooling on the floor. In the dining room, I heard a rustling like he was gathering some papers.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Go upstairs and put on some clothes, damnit.” 

I climbed the stairs and went into my parents’ bedroom. I picked up the phone on the nightstand and dialed 911. Told the operator what had happened. I was still there in his room holding the phone when my father came upstairs, a manila envelope in his hand.

“Did you call 911?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

He told me that was fine, but he wanted me to go to my room and get dressed. I walked past him, but as I left, I stopped and peeked around the corner and watched him slide open the nightstand and put the manila envelope in the top drawer.

From the window, I watched Officer Peay pull up in his police car. He stepped out, saw me in the upstairs window, waved. Then he focused his attention on the doorway, where my father was waiting for him. I went to the top of the stairs and listened to my father tell Officer Peay that my mother had attacked him. How they had been arguing over an accusation of infidelity and it had escalated into something bigger and how my father had just been defending himself and how my mother had come at him with a knife and in the process of trying to get away, of trying to defend himself, he had shoved my mother who had fallen into the trophy case. 

“A terrible accident but also self-defense,” he said.

“Did your son see any of this?” Officer Peay asked.

“He was upstairs in the shower,” my father said.

Office Peay started to ask another question, but my father cut him off, said, “Listen, why don’t you wait outside for the crime scene unit? They should be here soon and give me a couple minutes with my son.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Officer Peay said.

“Seriously, Bobby, just a couple of minutes,” my father said.

I had heard enough. I knew my father was going to get away with it. He knew the law. He had constructed his argument while I was upstairs calling 911. I didn’t need to go all the way back downstairs to know that there would be a knife near where my mother’s body had been. Her fingerprints on the handle.

I went back into my parents’ room and tried the drawer on his nightstand. I wanted to see what was in that envelope, but it was locked. Under their massive fourposter bed, I pulled out my father’s gun case. The gun was black and large, and my father always kept it loaded. Not a month previously, he had taken me to a range and taught me how to shoot. Had told me I had to protect the house when he wasn’t there. 

I walked back to the stairs with the gun in both hands. My father was closing the door. He turned toward the stairs. His hand was on the railing, and he just stood there shaking his head and talking under his breath like he was planning on coming up but was working out what to say first.

“You lied,” I said.

He looked up. Saw me with the gun.

For a moment, regret, indecision, fear flashed across my father’s face, but that wasn’t who he was. My father was a fighter, a brutally aggressive man. It had made him wildly successful, and the thing that makes us who we are doesn’t disappear, no matter how difficult the circumstances. If anything, it comes out even more. 

My father came up the stairs, two steps at a time. 

This is the moment that I remember perfectly. The stairway light was on, and my father’s solid blue button-down shirt was unbuttoned halfway down his chest, a white t-shirt peeking out from underneath. Pinpricks of blood dotted the white t-shirt, but the dress shirt was clean and pressed, put on after my mother’s death. More blood stains ran down the legs of his pants to his left knee, which was soaked, a blackness, like he had kneeled in mud. He didn’t grab the railing, but for a brief second one hand pushed off of the wall, kept him going forward, towards me. His eyes focused on the gun, and his mouth, open, yelling something.

I don’t remember pulling the trigger.

It’s a moment I’ve come back to, again and again. 

Did I mean to do it?

Was I shaking and fearful? 

Was I confident and vengeful? 

 I’ve convinced myself at different times of various things, that it was an accident, that it was intentional, that it was right or that it was wrong. But in reality, I don’t remember. I’m not sure it matters. The images that we paint of ourselves rarely seem to capture the reality.

The bullet entered his face just below his left eye, a small hole, and then behind him blood sprayed against the walls, and his knees buckled. He fell face first into the stairs, and I stood there, pointing the gun at him, half expecting him to get up, to keep coming at me, half wishing he would. When I think back to it, I doubt I wanted to kill him. It just happened so fast. But it doesn’t matter what I think now or even what I thought then. 

I did kill him. 

Officer Peay kicked in the door. Came in, gun drawn. Pointed it up the stairs at me.

“He was lying,” I said. “He was lying and was going to get away with it.”