Cole Perriman's Terminal Games (20 page)

There was a short pause.

“Okay,” Lieutenant Grobowski said. “Marianne it is.”

Marianne hung up the phone.

God, what am I getting myself into? Stephen’s simply going to freak.

But it was best not to tell him, she decided. It wasn’t like she was going to implicate herself or anything. How could she? She was innocent. She was just going to help out. It was the least she could do for Renee. It was the least she could do for herself.

She looked around her darkened living room, gazing at its dark contours, into its empty shadows. It actually felt good. It felt very good.

Odd, how comforting the dark can be.

01110
EDGE

Sitting in the rented car’s cold interior, Marianne quickly read the map the desk clerk had marked, showing her the way to Lakin—a mere thirty miles outside of Des Moines. Then she turned the ignition key. The car started easily enough, and the heater began to soften the chill, but she remained aware of the cold hovering on the other side of the thin glass windows. At least the streets were clear, although they were edged by threatening piles of darkened snow. As she drove, the city soon gave way to a slightly rolling countryside.

The farms along the way consisted of small clumps of houses and barns huddled together, surrounded by vast stretches of farmland. She had seen them when she flew in, a checkerboard pattern of lonely homes, each separated from its nearest neighbor by acres of dead, frozen land.

At last she reached Lakin, which was really just a cluster of houses and small businesses. At a gas station, she got specific directions to the Lutheran church. It was a brick box with a cupola, located on the outskirts of town. Marianne parked in the church lot and got out of the car, recoiling at the desolate, icy blast of Midwestern wind. The cold seemed deliberately menacing as it snatched warmth from her body, even though she was wearing her heaviest coat and the sun was shining brightly. The handful of bundled people she could see moving toward the building appeared resigned, as though they had come to terms with the fact that nature was methodically trying to freeze them to death.

The church was spare inside except for the flowers, a temporary garden brightening an area around the coffin. Marianne was early, and few people had arrived yet. She slipped into a pew near the back of the church and waited.

The narrow side windows were tinted glass, a marbleized caramel shade. The walls were bare, and the pews were old and dark. Racks on the pew backs held hymn books and prayer books. The air in the church was heavy and warm and seemed almost to echo with hymns sung Sunday after Sunday.

More people began to arrive, slowly at first, then in an increasing stream. Like the flowers she had sent, now merged anonymously with all the others, Marianne began to feel herself disappear among the faces. People pushed closer and closer together in the pews, making room for those from other local congregations or from other towns—and even for those who, like Marianne, ordinarily attended no church at all.

Marianne could see that the people’s faces had a certain sameness. The women, with their standard permanents and standard makeup, might have gone to considerable trouble to look as much alike as possible. The general impression was of a certain heaviness, a sturdiness. Their faces tended to be broad, and their hair tended toward a brownish cast.

Renee’s stock? How can this be?

For the first time, it occurred to Marianne that Renee’s reddish hair color was probably not natural. It had been a good job.

The men were a different matter. They came in all shapes, sizes, and dispositions. In an odd way, the pudgy and obese males looked healthier than the trim and fit ones. The fat ones wore their lifestyles on their sleeves—cigarettes, no exercise, and far too much beer and liquor. Sure, they were killing themselves, but not with denial.

But the thin ones showed the strain of trying to compensate for all their vices and excesses with rigor and discipline—too many end-of-the day trips to the gym in town to make up for the pint of whiskey concealed in the company desk.

The sanctuary filled more and more rapidly. Some of the people were crying. Marianne slid over to the center of her pew so that the people entering from either of the adjoining aisles would not have to step over her, although she would have preferred to sit near the edge so she could slip away more easily at the end of the service. Gradually, people filled in on each side of Marianne, in the row in front of her and in the two rows behind. The front row of the sanctuary remained empty as all the other rows filled up.

The church was now hot and stuffy. Marianne was suddenly aware of being surrounded by a continent stretching in all directions, a continent full of people with no ocean in sight.

And land. Acres and acres of harsh, frozen land.

For the first time she realized why she lived in California—lived near an edge.

Imagine coming all this way to learn something like that.

Other people were walking to the front of the sanctuary and looking in the coffin. They all reacted in distinct ways. Some gasped slightly at the sight of the body, some wept, and some scarcely reacted at all. Marianne tried to focus her eyes elsewhere. She had no intention of viewing the body.
She knew it would be just like the morgue.

The body in the coffin would be another imposter, a teenage parody of Renee fabricated by people who hadn’t known her during her entire adulthood. And what might she be wearing, this fraudulent Renee? Her Camp Fire uniform, her cheerleading outfit, her prom dress? Not the flamboyant California garb, surely—not the red-and-purple tunic and rust-colored slacks Marianne had last seen Renee alive in. Not the wild peasant clothes she had worn in happier bohemian days. And the face in the coffin would be that of a frozen girl who had never really left home. This new mocked-up Renee would only strengthen the feeling Marianne just couldn’t shake—that Renee was a missing person, not a dead one.

No coffins, no bodies.

Marianne would seek finality instead among this crush of mourners. By sharing their grief, she would become convinced of the unalterable finality of Renee’s passing.

The front row filled with Renee’s relatives—no doubt her father, her mother, a sprinkling of aunts and uncles. There were also a few in their twenties and thirties—brothers and sisters or cousins? Marianne struggled to remember anything Renee had ever told her about the people in her family. She could not remember much.

A preacher stepped up into a pulpit above and to the left of the coffin. He began to speak, but Marianne couldn’t take in his words. She wanted to mourn with these people in quiet—no hymns, no sermons. What business did this man have making sermons?

She wanted to ask the preacher, “Are you speaking from the spirit?” She wanted to say, “Can’t you see the rest of us are trying to mourn?”

But the preacher kept on talking, and when he finished, a woman got up to sing. Marianne didn’t know the hymn. There had been no singing in the Quaker meeting house during her childhood. She wondered if this hymn had once been a favorite of Renee’s.

A favorite hymn? Renee?

No, the very idea was absurd. All this singing and talking was absurd. Marianne shut out the sound and closed her eyes. Tears stung behind Marianne’s eyes as she rushed back over the years …

His heart, they said.

I never knew there was anything wrong with his heart.

But Daddy was gone. And Mama was crying. And Mama kept saying over and over and over again …

“He not dead. He can’t be dead.”

In the coffin, he looked as if he were sleeping, all dressed in his best suit, his face peaceful. The service was quiet except for a few friends giving brief and poignant ministries. The mourners respected the deceased too much to talk unless God made them talk. Marianne had to keep an arm around Mama the whole time for fear that Mama might collapse beside her.

“He’s not dead. He can’t be dead.”

Mama’s tumor was found too late, and she didn’t last long because she didn’t want to, and to the very end she sang the same litany …

“He’s not dead. He can’t be dead.”

Two years.

Two years between Daddy’s death and Mama’s.

A long time for Mama to deny the truth.

A lot of time for Marianne to deny it, too.

But Marianne had denied the truth of both their deaths even after Mama’s death.

Marianne had been numb.

Marianne had felt nothing.

Marianne had been a teenager with the world on her shoulders.

What was Marianne supposed to feel?

Then one day she was packing away a family portrait and the floodgates opened and she wept—she really wept. After that weeping, they were really dead. After that weeping, she stopped reaching for the phone to call them. After that weeping, she stopped remembering their birthdays, their anniversaries.

You have to cry to let go.

And now, sitting here in a church in Iowa, Marianne felt the tears coming. They filled her eyes and trickled down her cheeks. She shifted uncomfortably on the solid wood pew. The woman next to her crossed her legs the other way, apparently to give Marianne more room. The solo had ended and the preacher had been talking for some time now.

“… loss ... loss …”

Marianne had no more than half-heard anything he had said, but she was aware that he had been saying those words again and again, in nearly every sentence.

“… loss ... loss …”

“Loss of what?”
Marianne wanted to cry out.
“Does the spirit really move you to keep talking about loss?”

But grief—her own and everybody else’s—overcame her, whelmed over her in spite of the preacher’s endless harangue. Marianne leaned forward and put both hands on the back of the pew in front of her. She braced her body against a wail, a howl she could feel rising toward her throat. She issued a long, low, almost inaudible gasp ...

“Ahhhhhh …”

The tears coursed down her cheeks. The woman sitting next to her reached out and touched her arm. Marianne held her breath and struggled to stop the flow before it broke loose and carried her away.

*

“The edge.”

Marianne murmured the words in pleased anticipation as she drove down the hillside from her house and twisted her way through street after street of pale houses with red tile roofs, on her way to East Cabrillo Boulevard. At last, she parked her car in the public lot across from the Sheraton Hotel and stared down the wide beach toward the ocean.

There it is. The edge.

After her trip to Iowa, Marianne was aware it was not the sun or water that drew her to the beach. It was the need to look out into a vast, unpeopled space. If one could ignore the oil rigs embedded in the water, such powerful icons of wealth that the locals did not consider them eyesores, the ocean seemed wonderfully empty.

The weather was Southern California’s very best—a warm and sunny winter day without smog or other signs of industrial tarnish, and a welcome contrast to yesterday’s malevolent Midwestern cold. Sitting in the car, Marianne took off her shoes and rolled up her slacks, then walked out onto the beach. She passed near a bevy of firm bodies engaged in an energetic game of volleyball and another handful of people clustered at a food concession. All the bodies looked incredibly well-toned.

Youthful. Of course, age is a malleable thing.

It was also a relative thing—just like space and time. One could remain youthful in direct proportion to the size of one’s income, one’s ability to pay for the requisite tuck or nip or mud bath.

As she walked past the young people, Marianne noticed that the women all seemed to have been cast from the current cultural model—very thin women with large, high breasts. It was a combination not often produced by nature but demanded nevertheless by the culture’s image setters.

Then she heard a familiar phrase in her mind, as though someone had yelled it out as she walked by: “Nice outfit. But you ain’t got nothin’ in there.”

Marianne laughed to find that old line still haunting her. “Nice outfit. But you ain’t got nothin’ in there,” the boys had taunted her when she modeled in a high school fashion show. She had felt crushed. Later, she and Renee and their crowd had laughed at women who spent all their time worrying about appearance. Now the teasing phrase had taken on a slightly different meaning for Marianne. She took one last glance at the beautiful bodies. “You ain’t got nothin’ in there,” she muttered, both amused and aghast at her own
censoriousness.

Marianne walked out toward the water, detouring around two men with paddles batting a ball back and forth. Southern California’s beaches were seldom empty. They were more crowded on weekends and during the tourist season, but at any time of the year, at any time of the day, people found the free time to go to the beach for one reason or another. Here in Santa Barbara, it was indicative of wealth and leisure. In Los Angeles, it was just as likely to mean joblessness and despair.

Marianne sat down, pressed her hands into the grainy sand, and stared at the ocean. A single seagull soared overhead, facing the horizon, suspended almost motionless for a moment by a strong, steady breeze. Then, with a swift and determined flapping of wings, the bird hurtled itself away from the shore, across the waves …

Over the edge.

She was sitting on the brink of the continent, the threshold of the culture, with the great, mad crush of humanity behind her. The office, the assignments, the clients, Stephen—they were all clustered at her back, flattened into a foreshortened landscape, packed into a gigantic cage through which she moved about as well as she could.

A cage with a great view of the water.

The detective, Lieutenant Grobowski, was also in that cage, perhaps a threat to Marianne, perhaps a friend. Tomorrow, she would drive to Los Angeles to meet with him again. And packed somewhere else in the same cage was the person—could it really be a person?—who had killed Renee. Marianne knew she would encounter that killer someday, too—knew it with a calm assurance. The thought of this entire continent of reluctant cellmates did not disturb her this morning. She could contend with just about anything, as long as she had this edge to come to when she needed to be alone.

Marianne breathed deeply. She felt rested. She wondered how she could possibly feel so rested. She had slept long and hard last night after she got back from Iowa, but it was more than that, more than just a matter of having caught up on her sleep after an agonizing interval of wakefulness.

Something has changed.

The funeral had actually raised more questions than it had resolved. Even after grieving, even after shedding painful tears, Marianne could muster no real sense that Renee was gone forever.

Why?

She studied the ocean’s rolling surface, searching and listening for some kind of answer. But like any good psychotherapist, the ocean was determined to tell Marianne as little as possible, to let her work out her own answers. It replied to all queries with a soft and steadily undulating drone of pure white noise.

As she stared at the horizon, her eyes drifted out of focus, and the ocean seemed to freeze into a kind of stillness. It reminded her of the ice lake and that lonely, burdened traveler. As time passed, she felt more and more certain that her traveler was headed toward the shore. But how long would the rest of the journey be? How dangerous? And what reward awaited at the end?

Marianne shivered a little, feeling chilly in spite of the sun. She got up and walked toward the parking lot, past all the sculptured bodies with their carefully-hidden seams and scars. She returned to her car and drove out of the parking lot, past the impressive hotel. She could feel some new motion in her life—tentative now, but gaining momentum.