"You have to get dressed," he said.
"I know." I stared down at my knees, which suddenly seemed as marbleized as my mother's skin. I saw my joints, fat sheared off at a rendering plant. Scarsdale patties made of my thighs and arms and stored in a meat freezer, waiting to be broiled or pan seared.
"It will be okay," he said. "Cops are always freaky, but they'll just ask you things about your mother's routines and such. It happened when my landlady died."
I thought about nodding my head, for a moment I even thought I was nodding my head, but my brain seemed to have broken itself in two. I looked at Tanner.
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"I'm not crying," I said.
"No, Helen, you're not."
"It's over," I said.
Tanner did not know the details of my life. But drunkenly, I had mentioned how I felt my mother was sucking the life out of me day by day, year by year. I wondered if he could possibly know what "it's over" meant, or if he, despite his anarchist habits, was still moved by the sentimentalist portraits of mothers that were created all over the world.
"Let me help you," he said. "Is this your sweater?"
He reached over to the hutch and pulled out my sweater, along with my bra, which I had tucked inside. Hurriedly he snatched the bra off the dirty floor.
"Sorry," he said.
Though Tanner had seen me nude week after week for years now, as I peeled back the top of the hospital gown and let it fall around me on the chair, I felt as if I had never really undressed in front of him. He held out my bra as if it were a dress for me to slip into. Seeing his attempt to dress me, I realized that no matter how hard it was, I would have to wrest control of myself and perform.
I took the bra from him and held it in my lap. I managed a small smile. "Thank you, Tanner," I said. "I'll take it from here."
He held out his left hand, and I put my free hand in his. When I was standing, he very gently leaned over and kissed me on the head.
"I'll see you Monday morning at ten a.m.?"
This time, I nodded my head.
I was zipping up my jeans when Natalie came in.
"Are you back there?"
"Yes."
She came around the partition in her Diane von Furstenberg
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and a cloud of newly applied perfume. Her face was splotchy.
Tears had recently moistened her cheeks.
"They came in Room Two Thirty looking for you. I dressed as fast as I could. Can I hug you?" she asked. Always, even now, I radiated that permission had to be granted.
Her warmth made me melt into her, want her in the way I had always wanted a mother. But inside my animal brain, I thought how dangerous this was. The very things that would comfort me could make the necessary coil unwind.
I wanted to claw at her. At her ample breasts and what we recently had read was called a "menopot." I wanted to take her ridiculous dyed hair and pull it out at the roots. I wanted these things because I could not have what I wanted most—to crawl inside her and disappear.
I let her move her hand through the short bristle of my hair and down the back of my neck. I let her rub me across my bony shoulder blades. And I cried, just a little bit, unable to know whether it was because I should, given the circumstances, or because Natalie's comfort was painful to me.
"Where's Jake?" she asked. She pulled herself away from me and held my shoulders in her hands. I looked at her. I was happy to have tears at the corners of my eyes. Would this make me more sympathetic? Could I manage it again when necessary?
I remembered our backstory. "I don't know. He's supposed to pick me up. He was going to hook up with a former student who works at Tyler now."
"So he'll be here soon? He can go with us."
"With us?"
"To the police station," Natalie said.
"What?"
"Your mother was killed, Helen."
I sat down with force.
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"Didn't the police tell you? I thought you knew."
I tried not to wince. "By who?"
"I thought they told you, sweetie. I'm sorry. Listen, get your shoes on. They'll tell you everything they know."
"Do they have a suspect?"
"I don't know. I was talking to one of them, and then another guy, in a sport jacket, cut him off."
"Detective Broumas," I said. My voice enunciated each syllable in a monotone. I thought of Jake and of our wedding vows: Do you promise to take this man in marriage, as long as you both shall live, in sickness and in health, in murderous extravagance?
"Shoes," Natalie said, and pushed them toward my chair with her foot.
The door opened, and I heard Jake's voice in the hallway.
"Is she almost ready in there?" an unfamiliar voice asked.
"We're coming " Natalie trilled. "Just one more minute."
"Her husband's here."
"He can come in."
"The detective is asking him a few questions."
Natalie and I looked at each other. My shoes were on, and for all intents and purposes I was as ready as I'd ever be.
I grabbed my bag, for a moment confusedly thinking my mother's braid was still inside. Jake had known. Without him it would still be on the bed, curled like a snake.
"Lipstick?" Natalie said.
"Kiss me," I said. Without hesitation, she did. I rubbed my lips together, spreading out the gloss.
"Ready?"
"Let's go."
"It's horrible, what's happened," Natalie said as we approached the door. "But Jake is here. The Lord works in mysterious ways."
I could not tell my friend it had nothing to do with the Lord
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but everything to do with a chain of events that my own hands had set in motion less than twenty-four hours ago. Pushing down on the towels, the blankets wrapped around her broken body, her rose-petal-pink slip wedged between the hutch and the wall, traces of the silver braid clinging to my toilet bowl. All of them, like the phone call to Avery that had alerted Jake, had come from the hands that now held my purse, now reached for the door as it swung open, now shook the meaty palm of Detective Broumas.
I saw Jake sitting on the teacher's desk in the classroom opposite.
He made a move to stand up, but a hand on his shoulder stopped him.
"Your husband is answering a few simple questions for us,"
Detective Broumas said. "I'd like you to do the same."
I focused on his shoulders. Flecks of dandruff were scattered over the midnight-blue wool. His eyes, a deep hazel surrounded by long lashes, reminded me of a therapist I'd gone to five years after my father's death. "Probe, probe, probe," I had said to this doctor. "Is that all you ever do?"
A student, late for class, headphones blaring, walked by, turning her head like an automated camera, then passed on.
"We're ready to leave," Natalie said.
"Leave?"
"Yes, Detective," she said. "I would like to accompany her to the station."
The detective smiled. "Nothing so fancy," he said. "We'll just find an empty classroom and make the best of it."
I was watching Jake. His feet dangled over the edge of the desk. For all his height and maturity, he seemed to me, in that moment, a child. By coming to help me, by climbing through that window, he would be inextricably linked to whatever happened to me. I remembered our story. He had tried to fix my mother's window, doing me a favor for old times' sake.
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"Shall we go in here?"
"Here?" I said, pointing to the door Natalie and I had just stepped out of.
"That is, if you don't mind."
Natalie was asked to wait outside. Detective Broumas called for one of the uniformed officers, and the three of us went into the classroom.
"It was a very confusing morning for the neighborhood,"
Detective Broumas said.
Surveying the room and seeing few places to sit, he pointed toward the platform.
"There's a chair there, I guess. Does that suit you?"
"Sure. There's another chair behind the partition," I said.
"Will you get that, Charlie? We can move them over here."
"Actually," I said, "Professor Haku would prefer that you didn't move that one chair. He has it set up so the pose can continue on Monday."
Detective Broumas smiled. He removed his navy blazer and hung it off the back of one of the easels in the first row. "We were talking to your husband in there. An artist. Is that how you got into this line of work?"
"Yes," I said.
The policeman named Charlie brought the chair I'd just been sitting on and put it in front of Detective Broumas.
"Put it up there with the other one," he said. "Shall we?"
As I stepped up on the platform and took the seat that was meant to substitute for a tub in Woman Washing in Her Bath, Detective Broumas turned to retrieve a notebook from the pocket of his blazer.
I remembered finding a small notebook that must have fallen from Jake's jacket pocket. Inside he kept a sort of journal of his time outside in the cold.
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Dripped icicles for forty minutes in snow. Used tree as cover.
Can I break up ice and solder it together by melting it with my hands?
Leaves as thin as parchment. How to embellish what is already perfect?
"Are you ready?" Detective Broumas asked. He sat across from me. The uniformed policeman had taken up his post near the door. I noticed, as I glanced at him, a certain boredom, as if this were a day like any other.
"My friend says my mother was killed," I said.
"Somebody had a hand in it, yes."
"Who?"
"We aren't sure yet," he said. "She was found in the basement by a neighbor of hers."
"Mrs. Castle," I said. "She has a key." Answering, for myself, my own open question.
"Actually, she doesn't. She found a window open in back that had been jimmied and asked a young lady to help her."
Detective Broumas referred to his notebook. It was a small leather-bound book with a red ribbon to mark his place.
"Madeline Fletcher. Her father lives next door."
For a moment I thought of the tattooed wonder snaking into my mother's house, how it would have upset her.
"Yes," I said, "that's the window my husband tried to fix yesterday."
"It was wide open," Detective Broumas said.
"It shouldn't have been."
"Mrs. Castle also said that you were there last night. That she saw your car as late as seven p.m. outside the house."
"That's right."
"What were you doing there?"
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"She's my mother, Detective."
"Just go through what you did and how you left her, if you can.
Was she sleeping? Up? What was she wearing? Did you get any phone calls? Hear any strange noises? Had your mother been frightened of anyone or anything?"
"My mother has been declining for some time," I heard myself say. I used the passive vernacular I so hated in reference to the elderly. "She had a grim bout with colon cancer a few years ago and never really recovered. Her doctor says that if people live long enough, cancer of the bowels gets them in the end. It's his little joke."
Detective Broumas cleared his throat. "Yes, well, that sounds difficult. We've talked to Mrs. Castle, and I know she assisted her a great deal. Was there anyone else who frequented the house?"
I looked down at my hands. I had stopped wearing jewelry of any kind. I didn't like the weight of it on my body, and whenever I found myself out at a restaurant, by the end of the meal I would have piled everything, from rings to earrings to watch, to the left of my place mat. I was unable to talk with it on.
"Not recently," I said.
"Mrs. Castle mentioned an incident in the house not too long ago," he prodded.
I looked back up at him.
"I found a condom in my old room."
"And?"
"We all assumed it had to be the boy who ran errands for my mother and sometimes did things around the house that she couldn't manage herself."
He referred to his notebook. "Manny Zavros?"
"Correct."
"Fifteen twenty-five Watson Road?"
"That's his mother's house," I said. "He disappeared after Mrs.
Castle put the congregation on him."
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"Disappeared?"
"Do you think it was him?"
"We're following every lead."
"I don't want to get Manny in trouble, but..."
"Yes?"
"There's something else that I didn't share with anyone."
"I'm the person to share things with," he said.
I knew this was the moment to plant the seed. As I spoke, I felt my face flush.
"Around the same time, the contents of my mother's jewelry box went missing."
"You didn't report it to the police?"
"I didn't notice it for a few weeks, and by that time Manny was gone and I'd had the locks changed. Anyway, I didn't want to upset my mother. She hadn't worn most of the jewelry for years."
"I see. By the way, your mother isn't the only one who died in the neighborhood in the past twenty-four hours."
I knew what he was going to tell me and tried quickly to hide any expression that might indicate this.
"It wasn't Mr. Forrest, was it?"
"Why do you ask about him?"
"Because I'm very fond of him," I said. "I've known him since I was small."
"And Mrs. Leverton?"
I drew a quick inhalation of breath and covered my mouth with my hand. The action—too calculated—made me immediately self-conscious.
"She was found in her bedroom this morning by a cleaning woman."
Though I knew what I had seen—Mrs. Leverton alive and leaving in an ambulance—I couldn't help thinking that at least I'd been present when my mother died.
"How did they die, exactly?" I asked. I felt a light layer of
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perspiration spread beneath my sweater. My hands grew clammy.
Why hadn't I asked this at the start?
"Very differently. Mrs. Leverton was unconscious but breathing when the maid found her. She died in the back of the ambulance on the way to the hospital."