“Some things never go away, do they?” She wasn’t sure what she meant. She had to be careful. She had drunk almost the entire bottle of wine herself. This time she had vowed there wouldn’t be even the suggestion of intimacy, no touching or sitting too close. First there had to be an emotional connection. “It must have been so hard. I mean, I can’t imagine it, being so young and then suddenly it’s all gone, everything you’ve ever known or wanted. Your future, I mean, what does that do to a kid?” His implacable stare seemed too high a wall to surmount. She waved her hand weakly. “How do you live without . . .” What was the word he’d used? “Without possibility? How do you do that?” she asked, voice and heart quavering with the message in his cold, unblinking eyes that she had gone too far again, not with the bulk of her flesh this time, but with her own pain—when it was his pain she was feeling, his wounds she would help heal.
“That’s just the way it was, that’s all.” He looked at his watch.
“But you had to be so strong. I mean, when you knew—”
“I had to be realistic.”
“But Jerry Cox lied. You know he did. He went back there after. He went back by himself.” She felt herself stumbling toward him now but couldn’t stop because she had read all his testimony on microfiche and needed to help, needed him to know that if no one else on the face of the earth believed him, she did. He may have left the woman unconscious under the pillow, but he had left her alive, not strangled to death the way they said.
“I’m not going to talk about that.” His face blurred over the long blue flame. “If you don’t mind,” he added quietly.
“I’m sorry.” She stood up. “I’ll get your dessert. It’ll only take a minute.” She patted his shoulder and he looked at her with an expression of such anguish, such loss, that from now on, whatever this poor man wanted, she would do it. Anything. Anything at all, her eyes told him.
“I have to leave in a half hour. I’m being picked up.”
“What do you mean?” She turned dizzily. “Who? Who’s picking you up?”
“A real estate agent. Jilly Cross. That was the appointment. Remember? When I called—so I changed it. I changed the time.” Clearly nervous, he checked his watch again. “You don’t have to slice them, you know. I mean, they’re just as good whole.” He swallowed hard. “And maybe even better that way.”
“You have an appointment with a real estate agent?” He hadn’t said date, but then, under the circumstances, would he?
“To see some condos. She had new ones she wants to show me.”
“Condos? You’re going to sell the house?”
“No! No, I like it there. It’s Dennis. It’s like a favor for him. I mean, he wants me to move, but I’m not. The favor, I guess, is to give Jilly Cross some business.” He smiled.
“Well, if you’re not going to buy anything, it sounds more to me like you’re just, you know, wasting her time. Stringing her along.”
Wasting his own time,
she thought, irritated by Dennis’s influence. He hadn’t even wanted his brother back here.
“I know, but I told her.” Gordon followed her into the kitchen with his soiled plate. He dropped his knife and fork into the sink with an unnerving clatter. “She knows I don’t want to move.” He put a strawberry into his mouth. “I don’t know, maybe she thinks she’s going to change my mind or something.” He grinned and a thin red trickle ran down his chin. He wiped it away with his cuff.
In her rush she cut herself, so now she was trying to slice the strawberries with a paper napkin wrapped around her thumb. Bits of tissue kept sticking to the fruit. She tore it off, only vaguely concerned that her blood might be mixing with these raggedly sliced berries. She carried his bowl to the table. A dull ache had started at the base of her skull. Her period. What a waste that was.
The monthly reminder of emptiness. The soon-to-be-ebbing tide of . . . of possibility,
she thought, standing over him now with the chilled can, shaking and shaking and shaking it, then giving a long, vicious spurt of curled cream onto the strawberries
he shouldn’t have brought here without asking
, she thought as flecks of cream sputtered onto the tablecloth, angering her even more.
Now, everything is ruined, and he doesn’t even know.
“Thank you,” he said, chewing. “Oh, this is so good.”
Suddenly, she was glad he was leaving. She would have the rest of the night to herself, to do whatever she wanted. She wasn’t a young woman anymore. This constant solicitude was draining, bewildering to never have it returned. She sat down, but he didn’t look up. She sucked at the tip of her finger and watched him tilt the bowl for the last spoonful of juice.
It’s more than reserve. Or caution, even. No. He’s missing something. Something inside. Or maybe it’s me. Maybe there’s nothing in me for a man to love or hold on to.
“As it turned out, there’s only one we can see,” Jilly Cross said stiffly as they drove down the street. Her voice sounded different tonight, strained.
He was afraid he was annoying her with his struggle to get his seat belt buckled. Eight o’clock was too late for the people on State Line Road, which left only the Meadowville condo, she said, but that was vacant, so it would be better to go when he could see it by daylight.
“That’s all right. I can see it tonight,” he said quickly. He didn’t want to be taken home. He pressed the seat belt against his hip so it looked buckled. It was these small ineptitudes that made him feel most out of step with everyone else.
“There’s another one that just came in, but the woman has cats so she has to be there when it’s shown. Or something like that, I don’t know.” She seemed distracted.
“Why, do they bite or something?”
“No, they’re house cats. She’s afraid someone’ll leave a door open and they’ll get out.”
“How can they be house cats if they live in a condo? They must be condo cats,” he said with a broad grin. He wanted to make her laugh. He almost felt giddy as they drove toward the fast-rising moon, tangerine in the blue-black sky. The evening air was sweet.
“That’s right.” Her nose and cheeks were red, as if she’d gotten sunburned. Her lips were a soft coral, the same shade of the scarf knotted around her neck.
“I like cats,” he said. “We never had our own pet cat, but they were always around. My mother was always feeding stray ones. My father didn’t like them too much. He said all the milk bowls and cat food on the back steps used to attract every kind of animal for miles around. Stray dogs and raccoons and skunks. And the squirrels! Oh, my Lord, he hated squirrels most of all. Rats with bushy tails, he used to call them. I forgot about that.” He sighed and shook his head. “It’s funny the things you forget.”
They were coming off the highway now. It felt good just to be able to talk. About nothing, really, and yet something wonderful was happening. He felt so much looser and more open. He could be himself. He didn’t have to watch every word the way he did with most people, especially back there with Delores. He kept trying to think of something clever to say. Jilly drove slower, maybe, like him, wanting the trip to last.
At the security gate she showed her Realtor’s pass. Meadowville was an enormous complex with at least ten five-story buildings. She parked in the visitors’ lot and left the motor running. The headlights shone onto a rock garden of white flowers. In the center a fountain dribbled water from a sculpted fish’s gaping mouth.
“Gordon . . . Oh, I don’t know what to say. You see, I didn’t realize . . . I mean . . . well, I knew you’d been away for a long time, but Dennis never said why.”
“Oh.” He turned, forgetting to hold on to the seat belt. She gave a start as it snapped back. “I’m sorry. I thought you knew.” He shifted his feet. His knees jammed into the dashboard.
“No, he just told me. Right before I picked you up, as a matter of fact.” She touched her flushed cheek, then her throat.
“Well, I’m sorry.” He took a deep breath. “I don’t know what to say.” Ahead, the wet stony gills seemed to pulsate in and out.
“I was telling him we could only see one, the empty one, because of how late it was, and I said how that’s something I never do unless I really know the client, but of course with you being his brother and everything.” She sighed.
“We don’t have to go in. I understand.”
Her mouth kept opening and closing, then she blurted, “He said it was a murder. A woman, the same age as me.”
He nodded.
“He said it was an accident. That you were trying to keep her from seeing you, but the pillow smothered her.”
He rubbed his eyes.
“I mean, how can that be an accident?” She shivered and folded her arms.
“I know,” he said dully. The air had turned heavy, the moon paler.
“An accident’s something you don’t mean to do. But you broke into her house, right?”
“We didn’t think anyone was home.” It hurt to speak.
“And that’s when she woke up?”
He nodded.
“Why didn’t you run?”
He glanced at her beautiful face, then had to look away from such innocence. How many times had he asked himself that very question?
“Why didn’t you just leave?”
He shook his head and had to close his eyes. Even with Jerry screaming at him to cover her face he had wanted to run, knew he should, could have still run and saved his life and hers, instead of grabbing the pillow next to hers, the one on which her husband’s head would have, should have been but for her swollen ankle sprained earlier in the day so that she could not travel with him, so that when the intoxicated, giddy intruders blundered into her bedroom, she was lying there alone.
Fresh for the kill,
the prosecutor had whispered to the jury.
Unable to move, Janine Walters and her unborn son lying there, waiting with only minutes left to live.
“It must be so awful to think someone’s . . . I mean, it’s like . . . like there you were and there she was . . . I don’t know.” She shivered again. “Dennis said it was the worst thing that ever happened to him. The whole family. He said after that everything changed.”
Gordon’s stomach rumbled with the ferment of cream and strawberries rising sourly into his throat. Dennis was right, he never should have come back. People did not know how to deal with such a thing. And why should they be expected to? It was an aberration so beyond the boundaries of normal life that at first even he had not been able to comprehend its enormity and impact. Though his own tearful confession had been derided, when he did run from her bedroom, crashing into tables, lamps, the telephone, and then stumbled down the dark stairs out into the soft night rain, he had known she was still alive.
All he could do was sob as they ran through alleys and backyards while Jerry kept asking if she’d seen him. Was he sure she hadn’t? What was it she kept saying? “Please don’t,” was all he’d heard. And then just grunting sounds.
“Is she dead? You think she’s dead?” Jerry demanded, grabbing the back of his shirt to make him stop running.
“No!” he insisted. Of course not.
“But she wasn’t moving. She was so still.”
“Yes. But she was making sounds.”
“What kind of sounds?”
“Moaning. Like soft moaning.”
“Jesus Christ, then we gotta go back!”
“No!”
“We have to, you fat, stupid fuck!”
“No, I can’t! I can’t!” he kept panting as he ran, arriving home in time for the popcorn his mother had just made and insisted he share with them, huddled in the dark little living room, staring at the television, while his mother, father, and Dennis watched the Red Sox, hating himself, sickened by his cowardice for hurting the poor woman and then for not going back with Jerry to help her. Please be all right. Please, please, please be alive, he was still imploring batters, pitchers, umpires, and screaming fans, who all seemed to be leering at him, when the phone rang in the kitchen. It was for him, his mother said.
“She’s dead,” Jerry whispered.
“No!” he said so loudly that they all looked up at him.
“Shut up! Nobody’s gonna know we were even there—so shut up! Just shut the fuck up! About everything—you hear what I’m saying?”
Then his mother was next to him, demanding to know who that was, then, with a gasp, held up his hands to look at the gouges down both arms. It was the bushes, he said. The rosebushes had scratched him when he came through the side yard. She called in his father, who said his rosebushes could not have made cuts as deep as those, enunciating each word as if he knew there was evil among them and would not have his roses in any way tainted by it. Then he said it was a fight. He’d been in a fight. With who? A girl? Dennis jeered.
“And look!” his mother said. “You lost your ring, didn’t you? His brand-new class ring,” she told his father, who had defied her by allowing Gordon to order the most expensive one.
“He’ll get it back,” his father said. “His name’s inside. I told him to have it engraved and that way he’d always get it back.”
The next morning a policeman was banging on the front door. Holding up a clear plastic bag, the officer asked if that was her son’s ring.
“You found it! Thank you.Thank you so much,” his mother said, joining the disembodied chorus, their voices chanting the warrant’s directive of names, dates, places, his right as to what to say or not to say, to speak, to be represented by counsel of his choice, and if not, the court would provide one.
Jilly drove him home. They would see the condo another day in better light. That was fine. He didn’t care about condos. All he cared about was not frightening her. She parked in front of his house. Across the street, two younger boys watched Jada Fossum reel out a yoyo then snap it back until it wobbled crazily on the taut string. Two dark figures stood in the porch shadows above her. A phone rang and one of the men paced back and forth as he talked on his cell phone.