Invisible Girl

Bobby looked at her. “You’re serious about this.”

“Look, please just do what I ask and I swear I’ll tell you everything later.”

He hesitated, then finally stood and walked past her and Danny. Maggie heard Bobby rummaging through closets and the medicine cabinet, slamming doors, spilling things onto the floor, hurrying. He returned with most of what she asked for and then went to boil water in her small kitchen.

Maggie looked down at Danny, who was unconscious. She wondered if kitchen-table stitches were anything like riding a bicycle, that once you learned how to do them, you never forgot. It wasn’t all that different from sewing cloth. And the Malone men were never ones to worry about leaving a scar. She told herself it would all come back to her.

She was fourteen, and after Jimmy Malone had locked up the bar, he called upstairs to their apartment. She answered on the first ring.

“Mags?”

“Yeah, Daddy?”

“I need you to come down to the bar. Danny’s doing some things for me…won’t be home until late.”

Things. Maggie knew that could mean anything from driving out with Uncle Con to New Jersey to bury something, to hiding money in a hole in the wall behind the toilet where there was a loose tile. It also meant not asking questions.

“Be right down.”

The Twilight bar was in Hell’s Kitchen, which itself was bound by the Hudson River. Eventually, if you walked west, you’d hit the water, as black and ugly and foul-smelling as it was. When she was very little, she’d imagined the Hudson River as the sea, mystical and grand, carrying the scent of fresh water and the sounds of sails whipping into the wind. But she was older now and realized it was just the dirty, brown Hudson. Hell’s Kitchen’s other border, depending on who you asked, was Eighth. Either way, it was a haven for the Westies and addicts, and the streets were harsh. But Maggie had never felt unsafe. She knew everyone in a thirty-block radius was aware of her father’s power in the small jungle of their neighborhood. He’d fought two tours in Vietnam, and some people said he’d flown for the CIA in Laos. Or maybe it wasn’t for the CIA, but for some shadowy arm of the government that had condoned paying him $10,000 cash each month back in 1973. Maybe he’d flown for Air America. That was the rumor, at least, and she had no reason to doubt it, collecting small clues like a hungry bird snatched up bread crumbs. She stored the information away in her mind, hoping to one day understand all that her father was. After he’d come back from Laos, some of the money—from whoever had paid it to him—had gone to buying the bar.

Maggie’s teeth chattered. Her father’s mysteries always made her nervous. He was the antithesis of what she remembered of her mother. Where she embodied the rituals of incense and quiet and candles, her father and Uncle Con immersed themselves in the never-spoken threat of violence—not against her or Danny or her mother when she’d been alive, but against anyone who dared to even breathe on them. Maggie pulled a sweatshirt over her head and looked around her bedroom. The far wall was lined with shelves on which perched at least a hundred Buddhas, maybe more. Some had been her mother’s, some her father had bought her in Chinatown. And some, she knew, came from faraway places in Asia from before she was born. On the opposite wall was a crucifix, a pretty wooden one with a pewter Jesus. On her dresser were the spilled secrets of a teenage girl—hair clips, lip gloss she had just been allowed to start wearing, earrings and rings and fortune-cookie promises of good luck and prosperity, movie stubs and cutout pictures of movie stars she planned to stick on her bulletin board.

She took a deep breath to settle her nerves and left her bedroom and then the apartment, locking the door behind herself. She descended the metal staircase to the back entrance of the bar, the scent of beer as familiar to her as her own name, as her reflection in the mirror.

Maggie walked through the back of the bar and then made her way to the cluttered office, where she assumed her father would be waiting for her. He was, though he was slumped over his desk. He looked up, with effort, as she came in the door.

“What’s the matter?” she asked, even as she saw the wet crimson stain on the back of his shirt.

“Nothin’,” he said, winking at her, his face sweaty and ashen. “I just need you to do me a favor, baby girl, and dig this stupid thing out of my shoulder, out of my back.”

“What stupid thing?”

“A bullet. I’d do it myself if I could reach, but I can’t.”

Maggie felt queasy, not because he’d been shot, but from the idea of sticking a knife, tweezers, anything, into a hole in someone’s flesh, let alone her father’s.

“Daddy…” she said in a whisper, laden with the question, there in the way she spoke his name, do I have to?

“I can’t ask Danny. He’s doing something for me. And I can’t get Uncle Con on the phone. Please, I’m asking you. I’m starting to run a fever, and I’ve got to get it out of me. I’ll talk you through it. Piece of cake. You’re a Malone.”

Maggie nodded. “Are you going to be okay?”

“I promise. And you know I never promise unless I can deliver the goods. Please, baby.”

She breathed deeply, not sure if she would pass out or not. “I’m going to get me a drink.”

“Sure. Get me one, too.”

Maggie went out to the bar and pulled down a bottle of scotch. She took two fat water tumblers and set them on the bar. She hated scotch. Although her father had let her and Danny drink beer since they were small, she never drank anything uglier than peppermint schnapps. But she wanted something powerful and nasty. She poured two generous scotches as if she were pouring water. She took one and downed it in a few gulps, fighting the retching feeling in her throat and gut, emitting an audible gag. She put the tumbler on the bar and literally shook her shoulders and head, trying to keep the vile liquid inside her. Then she refilled her glass and brought it along with her father’s drink into the office.

A first-aid kit was open and his shirt was off. The kit looked like an army-issue one, and she imagined it had come home from Vietnam with him, long before she had even been born.

“Thanks, darlin’,” he said, taking the scotch from her and downing it without shivering or even making a face.

Maggie stood behind him, staring at the bullet wound. Its edges were clean, and it looked deep. She could only see dark red blood, but she knew that in the hole, layers of skin gave way to muscle and below that bone. Steadying herself, she peered into the hole of flesh and blood, smelling the bitterness of burned skin, again feeling a violent convulsion in her stomach.

On her father’s desk was a scalpel. A real scalpel, not a knife. She didn’t ask where he’d gotten it or why he had it. She never asked about anything. Not about the loaded gun that always sat on his nightstand, or about the occasional 2:00 a. m. visitor, men with whispered secrets and file folders and photographs. Next to the scalpel was a pair of very long tweezers with pointed ends.

“Okay, Maggie,” he said as he handed the scalpel to her. “Now, the scalpel is really sharp, so don’t cut yourself. Just poke this into the hole and dig out the bullet a little. Use the tweezers when you can finally see it. Get all of it. Make sure of that. If it’s hit bone, you’ll have to dig more.”

She gritted her teeth, hands shaking. Gingerly, she entered the back of his shoulder with just the very tip of the scalpel, feeling as if she were going to throw up.

“Honey, don’t be afraid to hurt me. I’ve taken way worse.” He laughed. “Ain’t nothin’ to an old soldier like me.”

By now, the scotch was having its effect. Feeling as though she were in a dream, watching someone else stick a scalpel into the wound, she dug deeper, blood oozing from the hole and dripping in small rivulets mixed with sweat down his back. She finally saw the bullet’s gray-black color. She switched tools, and Maggie’s tweezers emerged minutes later with the bullet, which she scooped into her hand and then placed on the desk. Her father visibly relaxed, his back tense from effort of steeling himself against the pain.

“Now the stitches.”

He talked Maggie through cleaning the wound with peroxide, which sizzled and bubbled. Then she sewed the edges of the wound, packing gauze into it, and then covered it with a large square piece of gauze, and finally she taped all around it.

When she was done, her father turned around. He had the solid jaw of a soldier. His eyes were a peculiar blue-green, nothing like his children’s. His hair was a dark shade of brown, speckled with a little gray. Freckles scattered across his nose and deep lines surrounded his eyes, from squinting, he’d told her once, as he’d marched in the sun. His body was still as taut as when he’d been in the service, with rock-like biceps covered in tattoos, and then the old scar from the war. She had pictures upstairs of him in the grassy fields of Vietnam, a youthful soldier, but still something about him, an air of toughness, that came through even in the grainy photographs. He looked nothing like Danny and her. They would always look, to strangers, like adopted children, their features so much their mother’s.

“I’m sure you left a pretty scar.” He winked at her. “A new one that I’ll always know you fixed up.”

“Are you going to tell me what happened, Daddy?”

“Nope. I’ll tell you what, though…Did I ever explain why I named this place the Twilight?”

“About a hundred times.”

“I know. I just like that story.”

“I still like hearing it.”

“Well, then. It was because in Vietnam, twilight was beautiful. I mean, we were in a shit hole of mosquitoes and humidity, but that sky turning orange and pink sometimes, it was…humbling. And off in the distance, it’s like you’d hear fireworks. Of course, it wasn’t fireworks. It was war. I used to watch the burst of flames rising up from the treetops.

“For pilots, twilight can be dangerous. Sort of that world between night and day. Between heaven and hell. I didn’t think I could feel that aware, every muscle twitching. And one twilight, we’d landed near this village. It seemed okay. Peaceful. I waded through the swamp, and me and my guys, we walked toward some huts, and I saw a girl carrying a basket. She was the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen in my whole life. And in that second, in that minute, my whole world changed. Vietnam went from being a place I hated to being the place where the person I loved was from. When I finally got back to America, I bought this place and named it after my alive time, when I realized I never wanted to live so much as when I saw her. Twilight. When the sky was pink.”

“I wish I knew you then,” Maggie whispered. She wished she knew him now. He was her father, but he was a stranger.

“I remember the day you came home from the hospital. I was alive then.” He shrugged his shoulder a bit, moving it around. “This is gonna be a bitch tomorrow.”

“Sure is.” She grew silent for a minute. They both did. “Okay then,” she said softly. “I’m going back upstairs.”

“Thanks, kiddo. You really came through for me. I love you, bright eyes.”

“Love you, too.”

She left the office and grabbed the bottle of scotch off of the bar, taking it with her to their apartment. As soon as she got up there, she ran to the bathroom and threw up, the scotch burning her throat a second time as it seared her on its way out. She leaned her elbows on the toilet seat and felt her lids fill with tears, but she refused to cry. She stood and washed her face in the sink. The hole in her father’s shoulder kept coming into her mind. She left the bathroom, took the bottle of scotch and put it on the dining-room table. She fetched a mug from the kitchen and began drinking, forcing herself to keep it down, drinking the hole of flesh away. That night was the first time Maggie ever drank herself into a blackout.

“You’re making me nervous,” Maggie snapped at Bobby, who leaned over her and was staring at her handiwork, occasionally offering advice.

“How did you learn to do that?”

“It’s like riding a bicycle.”

“Sure it is. Only you would use that analogy.”

Danny’s face now vaguely resembled Dr. Frankenstein’s monster. Black thread wove crookedly through loose skin, but she had closed up the slice in his cheek, cleaned off the blood and sewn up the cut above his eye—it was deep and ran through the eyebrow. She bandaged his arm, hoping perhaps it wasn’t a break, but setting it as best she could. She had tried to jam the dislocated shoulder back into place the way she’d seen her uncle Con do once for her father.

She applied a warm washcloth over and over again to Danny’s face, slowly easing off the caked blood. She cleaned along his hairline and wiped his hair. He looked better than when she’d first seen him. Swollen, turning an eggplant-purple, but with some of Danny’s “luck o’ the Irish and blessings of Buddha,” as their mother used to say, he’d still have a semi-beautiful face when it was all healed.

Maggie mashed some Tylenol No. 3 into the applesauce and roused her brother enough to feed him three tablets. Then, with Bobby’s help, she got him onto the mattress they’d taken from her pull-out couch and had placed on the floor.

“Now we watch him,” she whispered, getting up from her makeshift operating room.

“Your hands are shaking.”

“The first time I did this, I had half a bottle of scotch in me. Actually, the second and third time I did this, I had scotch in me.”

“Drinking wouldn’t have made this night any easier.”

“Easy for you to say.”

“Look, Maggie, I just watched you stitch up a man on your living-room floor like you work in a fucking MASH unit. I’m part of this whether you like it or not.”

She sat down on the love seat, and Bobby took the chair opposite her.

“I’m sorry, Bobby.”

“Don’t be sorry. How about telling me the truth? Let’s start with that.”

“Truth depends on who you talk to. But I know I owe you as much.”

Maggie looked down at her hands and tried to decide where to begin.

Chapter Three

“Courageous and crazy. It’s a volatile cocktail. That’s my father. That’s my brother. My father was drafted during Vietnam. He became a pilot. He tested so high, they’d never seen scores like that. He’s smart, with nerves of steel. Courageous and crazy, both of them.”

“I know a few cops like that.”

“He’s always been like that. My dad has two brothers. One was murdered after a stint in prison, and was supposedly as violent as they come. The other is the dean of Manchester University in Boston. He has two PhDs. They were like the twin sides of my father. Brilliance and violence. And secrets.”

“Secrets?”

She looked at Danny. “It’s as if there was a different life before the war. And then there’s this brick wall of Vietnam. He ended up volunteering for another tour. We know he met my mother there, and that he somehow got her out. Danny and I think he was recruited into the CIA.”

“What do you mean you ‘think’? You never asked him?”

“We don’t ask a lot of questions in our family. But even if we did, he wouldn’t talk to us. The CIA was involved in Laos after the war, during the war. My father flew planes for them—for someone. Someone with a lot of cash. You know, the CIA isn’t the only secret branch of the U. S. government. It could have been them, it could have been another shadow organization. It could have been Air America. All I know, which is nothing, just street knowledge from this neighborhood, is that he was pulling in a lot of untraceable cash from some government organization that wanted missions flown in Laos. And they were willing to pay a crazy-courageous man a lot of money to risk his life over and over and over again.”

“He made it out alive.”

“Yeah. But I’m not sure that he ever made it out,” she said softly, her eyes darting to Danny, almost involuntarily.

“What do you mean?”

“My whole life, my father has been a phantom. I don’t know whether he works for the good guys or the bad guys, or if he plays both sides, or whether he just works for himself. When my brother got to be, I don’t know, seventeen, eighteen, he started getting in deeper with my father. But I was always invisible, always on the outside of whatever it was that they did, whatever it is that they do.”

Bobby leaned back in his chair and ran his hands over his face, giving a weary sigh. “So what happened to your brother tonight, Maggie?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know who did this to him. I don’t even know if he started it or not.”

“Have you ever told your brother not to come to you when he’s in trouble, not to drag you into whatever crazy shit he’s involved with? For all you know, it’s drugs or murder for hire. You don’t know anything, Maggie. You could be in danger. Whatever he and your father are into, they shouldn’t be putting you in the middle of it.”

“I know, but they’re all I’ve got.”

“You have me.”

“I know,” her voice relaxed. “But growing up, this apartment was a place where only good things happened. It was like us against the evil spirits my mother was always talking about. This was a place just for the four of us, and I knew that my father would kill anyone who tried to mess with us, with our sanctuary. After my mother committed suicide, my father went crazy for a while. He never got over it. None of us did. But it only made us closer. I don’t know what my father does. Maybe because I don’t really want to know.”

“That’s pretty severe denial.”

“You’re not my shrink.”

“No,” he said as he leaned forward and looked her in the eyes. “Do I really have to be to see that there’s something very seriously fucked up going on here? You stitched up your brother. And you don’t want to file a police report or take him to the hospital?”

“You don’t know what happened, Bobby.”

“Maggie, don’t play me. Even if Danny didn’t commit a crime tonight, the fact that you apparently have done this for him and your father more than once…that’s not normal.”

She curled her legs underneath herself. “I’m tired, Bobby. Can we just talk about this after I’m sure he’s going to be okay?”

“You’re putting this off again, Maggie. I’ve been with you for two years now, and I feel like I know next to nothing about you. I’ve never met your brother until now. I’ve never met your father. It’s like I’m living with a phantom of my own.”

Maggie looked away. “I’ve lived a lifetime of secrets. It’s like lifting up a rock in the woods and watching all those creepy-crawlers scatter when the light hits them.”

“Fine. You go get some sleep. I’ll watch your brother.”

“No. You sleep. Please. I wouldn’t be able to anyway.”

Bobby nodded. “I’ll be right in the next room. You call me if you need me. And look…we don’t know how much blood he’s lost or what’s up with that arm. If he doesn’t seem like he’s going to pull through all right in the next couple of hours, we’re taking him to the hospital.” He was silent for a minute. “I’ll try to pull some favors, see if we can’t keep it under the radar.”

“Thanks.” Maggie smiled wanly. Bobby walked over and leaned down, tilting her chin to kiss her.

“I wish I knew what went on behind those eyes of yours.”

“So do I sometimes. Good night, Bobby.” She kissed him back and watched him go to the bedroom. He was the first good man she’d ever dated. She’d known that the first time she’d met him, as surely as she knew one day his world would come colliding with hers with a fury like nuclear fusion.

Two years earlier, she had quit drinking, cold turkey, on her own, white-knuckling it. For three days, she’d ridden out the shakes and the endless clenching and unclenching of her jaw by eating Valium she’d taken from her brother’s stash of drugs in the medicine chest. They all hoarded pills from years of “home repair,” as their father called their questionable medical skills.

By day three, the Valium had done its trick. She had slept until she ached, and she was through the worst of it. She sat in her apartment in the dark, staring at the emergency bottle of scotch. She had brought scotch up from the Twilight, an old habit. She hated scotch and had figured that if all she had was something she truly despised, she’d be less inclined to break the seal. She had brought it upstairs with the idea that if quitting got truly unbearable, she’d change tactics and wean herself slowly, decreasing her intake of alcohol day by day until she was clean.

Now, she had gone without alcohol for three days. Three whole days. Not great days, glorious days, or even halfway decent days. Three of the most god-awful, soul-sucking days of her life.

A thought came into her mind: AA. She’d never been to a meeting, not even out of curiosity. She knew a regular or two at the Twilight who were in and out of AA, on the wagon for months at a time, falling off when life just got too damn hard. Teddy, a good guy, a plumber, had a son die about five years past. He walked a wobbly line, not unlike the straight line cops made people walk to see if they were drunk. Some days, Teddy walked it well. Others, he just plain toppled off to the side and lost his balance completely.

Maggie sat in her apartment and, for reasons she didn’t understand, she felt tears come. They weren’t like her occasional drunken tears. These came with a racking ache. So she picked up the phone, called information and, the next thing she knew, she was at a meeting in a church basement not eleven blocks from her apartment. The first person who said hello to her was Bobby Gonzalez.

“New to the rooms?”

She never liked admitting being new at anything to anyone. “No. First time here, though.”

“Bobby.” He stuck out his hand and smiled. He was about six foot two, and dressed in a black sweater and jeans. She took his hand, looking into his eyes, searching for something. Later, she realized it was the elusive serenity they talked about in the rooms and basements of AA meetings. Did he have what she was looking for? The secret to peace of mind?

“Maggie.”

“Hi, Maggie.” He seemed so gentle. He directed her to the coffee urn and poured her a foam cup of the worst coffee she’d ever tasted in her life. He chatted about the program. She didn’t really remember much of what he said because she still felt like she was under water, foggy. Then he guided her to a metal folding chair. Bobby took a seat at a table at the front of the room, next to an older man. The older man, who said his name was Gus, started the meeting off, and Bobby was the speaker.

“Hi, my name’s Bobby,” he began softly, “and I’m an alcoholic.”

“Hi, Bobby,” came a chorus of a voices.

Maggie listened as he spoke.

“Most of you know me from the rooms. I’ve been coming here about ten years, sober for eight straight. I’m a cop, a detective. I used to think it was my job that made me drink. Now I realize I drank because. Just because. Because I’m an alcoholic.

“I started drinking when I was maybe eleven, copying my older brother and his friends. But they were typical teens looking to be cool, to rebel a little. I wasn’t. I couldn’t stop drinking once I started. I had my first blackout at fourteen. Smoked a lot of pot. I was a mess through high school. By the time I was twenty, I knew something was seriously wrong. I became a cop, met a lot of alcoholic cops. Man, if you’re looking for validation for your drinking, law enforcement is one profession you’ll find it. Everyone needs a drink to settle down after a tough night, a tough call, a tough tour. You see the worst, the dregs. You see wife beaters and child abusers and rape victims. I needed a drink to shut my brain off at night.

“So why did I get sober? I hit bottom. I got lucky. I didn’t think I was lucky then, but I was. Everybody has their bottom—DUI, jail, divorce, whatever. Mine was waking up with a prostitute and having no memory, none, of what happened the night before. I felt such a sense of shame that I went to my first meeting that day, and then that night, and then the next day. I screwed up a couple of times early in the program, but then I got it. It’s one day at a time. I get that now. That and the promises of AA. If you get sober, life gets better. I went back to school, made detective…. I have so much more now than I ever did before. I’m not going to mess up. Thanks for listening, and now we’ll go around the room and share.”