The Heart is a Poor Judge Ch. 01

So, the day had finally arrived. He was officially accused. She hadn't said the word itself, but her message had been clear. Lately, his mother was so prone to these impassioned non sequiturs that, at first, he had been unmoved upon hearing it. But then she had brought up his father. It was too much to handle. It was unthinkable.

And yet, he tried. How could his father ever have known? And why would he have believed such a thing about his son without any evidence? His mother would not make up a lie about his father, so the suspicion must have been real. Had he been ashamed of Gabe? Gabe had done little to bring his father pride. All he had ever really achieved was to read book after book after book, romances, thrillers, historical fiction, and it had gotten him nowhere. Dismal performance in school, no interest in a trade or career path or even social activities—by themselves, these were traits that would disappoint any parent. But added to that other thing... Suddenly Gabe wished for sand to quicken and pull him under, where his body would slowly dissolve, encased in the earth.

He watched as a disinterested gull bobbed up over the hump of a forming wave. The few people who were close by seemed to keep their distance, as if the dark fog surrounding him was not just in his head. For the rest of his life, he would never know what his father really believed, how he actually felt. Gabe experienced a sharp, grieving anger toward him for the first time in months. Their relationship had not been a distant one, and they had been honest with one another...or so Gabe had wanted to believe.

How could you leave me with all this? The question had harnessed itself at the front of his mind and he could not see around it. He could no longer stand, so he lay down in half a foot of water and wept. He had thought that anguish of this magnitude was over, had been limited to the weeks and months after his father died. A short wave came and slammed hard against his body, rolling him onto his stomach. Maybe he was no better off than his mother.

Gabe stayed hunched in the pushing and tugging shallows of the seawater for a long time. Slowly, he began crawling up onto the dry, hot shore. He had wandered to an unpopular, stony area of the beach, so he stripped down to his underwear, wrung out his clothing, checked the contents of his wallet and laid everything out to dry. He studied his mother's list, relieved that its items were still legible (though most he could have recalled from memory): bread, fish sauce, Clearly Canadian (glass bottles), lemongrass, coriander, beef, eggs, rice noodles.

He sat unhappily in the sun with his elbows resting on his knees and his face in his hands. He laid a small twig in the sand, marking the very edge of the shadow cast by his knee, and when the shadow had moved satisfactorily beyond it, he moved the twig once again to the edge, until he had covered many inches over the tiny dunes in this way. A sense of calm gradually settled in.

He rose up, put on his clothes and placed the warm, crispy bills (which he had pinned beneath smooth stones) back into his wallet. As he walked north along the swell's foamy reaches, he became lost again in the soothing anonymity of the crowd. He did his grocery shopping in damp clothing, then trudged up the stairwell of his building, arms shackled with plastic bags.

Gabe heard the moaning come through the bathroom window when he was still one floor down. He started, climbed two and three steps at a time, threw open the front door and dropped the groceries in the entryway. He came to the doorway of the bathroom and saw her there on the floor, lying halfway out of the shower in only her underwear. The water beat down on her brown legs.

"I can't move," she slurred. "The water hurts. It's too hot."

He shut off the water and knelt down, lifting at her underarms, staggering and crying out as he brought both of them back to their feet. She could not stand on her own and clung to him as he wrapped a towel around her and brought her toward the bed. Her shoulder thudded against the doorframe as they entered the room.

"Careful," he told her.

"You're a piece of trash," she growled as he helped her lie down.

Once her body had sunk into the cool mattress, her head into the pillow, she began to cry in long, exhausted sobs. Gabe brought her a glass of water and noticed a deep red welt in her side from the metal lip of the shower stall. He removed the towel and covered her with the sheet. Then he left her, still sobbing, to put away the groceries.

A short time later, no more noise issued from the bedroom. He peeked through the gap and confirmed that she was asleep. He made a sandwich, extended a rusty, tattered sunshade out from the edge of the balcony and set himself in the heat to read. He passed most of the afternoon and early-evening like this, sweat dripping from his face and spider-webbing into the spongy fibers of the page.


His mother called for him a short time before six o'clock. When he went to her bedside she said, "What is wrong with you? I told you not to stay away for long."

"I'm so sorry," he said. "I was at the beach. I lost track of time."

"You are garbage. You are nothing but shit for a son."

"I'm sorry," said Gabe. "I'm very, very sorry." He left her alone, and half an hour passed before she emerged.

He cooked the beef and the noodles and they ate mostly in silence. He trailed her into the living room after dinner, where she froze momentarily, grabbed up an open bottle of El Jimador from the coffee table and replaced the cap. He looked away. She passed by him and left for her bedroom, where he could hear her secret it away for later.

When she came back, she fell into the recliner across from him. Gabe had propped himself against the arm of the couch and resumed reading.

"You were gone a long time, so I got very lonely and felt a little scared and decided I should take a shower to cool myself down."

He glanced up from his book.

"Then I was just so sad and lonely that I wanted to be in bed."

"I brought you to bed, Ma. I found you in the shower, remember?"

"Oh."

His focus returned to his book, but within a few minutes she was crying softly to herself.

Gabe dropped the book into his lap. "What's wrong?"

She quieted herself down, covered her eyes with her hand and said, "Nothing is wrong." She turned on the television.

Around ten, she announced that she was getting ready for bed, and after all light had disappeared from the sky, called him to her room.

He paused in the doorway. "What is it?"

She sat up against the headboard with the covers pulled up to her neck. "Gabriel, you do a good job taking care of yourself. And taking care of me."

"Thank you, Ma."

"You're okay with taking care of yourself, aren't you?"

He sat down at the end of the bed, facing away from her. "Yeah, Ma."

"That's a good thing. That makes me feel very relieved."

"Okay, Ma."

In five minutes, he was alone out on the balcony. Between high-rises, glimmering in the light of the moon, lay that scrap of ocean he could bring home with him. Perhaps the night had lent some of its clarity to his thoughts, because suddenly he could see: He had been repeating the same two words over and over in his mind for months, broadcasting them out toward every acre of his life. They formed on his lips for the first time: "Not yet."

He said them whenever he longed to parse the absurdity of toiling for an industry that contributed to the vices—and the deaths—of so many. He said them whenever that nagging voice inside him whispered that it was okay. Okay to accept the thing he was.

Gabe turned back and peered through the glass into the darkened interior of the condo. It was not a pleasant place, and it contained a growing sadness that he knew he would soon be unable to bear. He could see now that with each passing day, he had been repeating those same two words to the tormented ghost of his mother.