The Invaders (10 page)

“You've been really off lately,” Jeffrey said, like an accusation.

“Something terrible happened today,” I started.

“I wish that you could possibly understand what kind of day I had. I can't listen to your outrage about vagrants right now,” he said.

Right then, I realized I couldn't tell him anything. He was not going to be compassionate. He was the you-left-yourself-open kind of blamer.

“I hope you remember we're going to Elaine's house tonight,” he said.

“I think I have to call her and tell her I don't feel well,” I said.

“It was your idea and she's your friend. It's too late to cancel.”

“Where were you all day, anyway? I called you more than once,” I said.

He looked at me as he walked up the stairs and didn't say a word, like he didn't need to answer to me. I overheard him telling Teddy that he had gotten him a spot in Richard Shepard's office. He would have to interview, but it was just a formality. Teddy said something like he
wasn't sure he wanted to work there and Jeffrey got loud.

I went to the window and saw the police cars driving off. The fisherman was gone and the area where they had thrown him down was just dirt and stray gravel from the Magrees' house.

“Do I have to go, too?” Teddy asked behind me, his voice like a small child's.

I stared out the window and mouthed a low “No.”

•  •  •

Jeffrey still wouldn't answer my question about where he had been all afternoon as we walked to Elaine's. I was carrying a Tupperware container of cookies that I had found in the pantry. Keebler or whatever. Jeffrey wouldn't let me take the Danish ones. He said they were his favorite. I would hide the cookies behind everyone else's food and if anyone asked I would deny I had brought them.

“Something terrible happened,” I said once more.

“I'm sure we'll hear all about it at Elaine's.”

“Was a woman attacked?” I pressed.

“They said a teenager was attacked. A kid.”

A kid! A kid! Steven was no kid. I felt ashamed for being excited about his lingering look. He was a predator. An uncircumcised predator. Jeffrey looked at me as I worked to catch up with him.

“Why are you limping?” he asked.

“I hurt my foot earlier.”

He asked me where and I almost said the nature trail. I caught myself just in time. Instead, I said, “On the rocks, by our house. I'll be fine tomorrow.”

“Look,” Jeffrey said.

I looked. Steven was standing hunched over with his mother farther up the street. His face was bandaged.
I did that,
I thought.

“Who knows if he just got in a fight with someone and doesn't want to tell the truth?” I said.

“We should go talk to them. See what happened.”

“Don't revel in someone else's misery,” I said.

“You know that's not what I'm doing.”

I felt Steven watching us. I could hear him saying “You want it” over and over again.

“Maybe he was asking for it,” I said.

“He's a victim, Cheryl.” Jeffrey tugged at my arm and leaned in, breathing hot on my neck. “Get it together,” he said.

I looked up and Steven had disappeared with Fran into their house. I still felt his presence, though. And him watching me. I looked into all the windows of the houses we passed as we walked the rest of the way to Elaine's house.

The living room was filled with people and they were already drinking cocktails. Elaine was wandering through the room in a caftan with a big turquoise flower in her hair, and I thought,
Oh no, it was going to be one of those parties.
The ones where she hoped everyone would drink too much and stay too late and it would be like old times. Key-party times in the early 1980s when everyone was still youthful and supple-skinned. When their children were young and could be tucked away quietly. When cocaine flowed freely. Later, when their marriages started fraying, they all started trying to behave, or tried to keep better secrets. I looked at them, some in their midsixties now, and tried to imagine just how wild they had been. I thought about the things that had happened in this room and how it was haunted with other people's regrets. When I reached out for Jeffrey, he was already gone, working the room. I went up to the built-in bar, from when Harold was still alive, and the bottles were all still intact, the top ones dusty and with faded labels. I scanned the wall and wondered if alcohol got old, then grabbed for a bottle of vodka, slightly warm. I ignored the laughter around me and concentrated on slicing a lime wedge, and when someone brushed up against me, I pretended not to be alarmed, but I was. Everything
was making me feel nervous and I hoped I didn't still smell like bleach.

Rob Girardi was smiling like we hadn't just seen each other the day before on the greens, like he hadn't yelled at me from his cart to get moving because I was holding up the men.

“Where's your better half?” he asked.

I waved toward the crowd of people. All couples—the Picards (always hoping), Mary Ann and her husband, Larry. Christine was there, too, with her doctor husband keeping her in check. Tuck was nimbly peeling away the skin of the figs on the paper plate in front of him, trying to make eye contact so that he could start a conversation with someone. His wife sat next to him, laughing and full of light. She was luminous with her silken blond hair and straight white teeth that positively glowed against her tan, freckled skin. Everyone looked at her happiness and wanted to absorb it. She must have been pregnant again. They were all sitting in pairs. Except for Debbie Picard, who was sitting on the arm of the three-seater sofa, too close to Larry.

“Somewhere in there,” I said, and Rob laughed.

“Heard he squared off with the town police today,” he said.

“The fishermen,” I added quietly.

“It's bigger than those people,” he said.

He leaned in close. “Didn't you hear?” he whispered, like he really wanted to warn me.

“No,” I whispered back. “What?”

“There was an attack.”

He nodded his head and clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “Attempted murder, they're calling it.”

“That's absurd. I saw him walking. Just now,” I said.

“He was really messed up, wasn't he?” Rob said, still clucking. “Irreversible damage.”

I almost said, It was probably just a few broken teeth, a cut above his eye.
I could have done worse.
But I kept my mouth shut.

Rob put his hand on my shoulder to steady me, to show his support.

“The family is beside themselves. Our whole community, naturally.”

He said things like “our community,” “how could this happen,” “used to be safe,” and “what was happening,” but all I could do was scan the room and look for Jeffrey. Rob made me sound like a monster, not someone trying to defend herself.

“It's so terrible. It's an unsafe world for everyone,” I said. “Did he say who did it?”

Rob didn't say anything for a long while. He just looked at me and I felt flush again, dizzy, like I had said the wrong thing, the thing that was going to get me in trouble and get me caught, because I said it before I asked if little Steven was okay. Rob gripped my shoulder like he wanted to feel my pain and soothe it and then he told me that they had a suspect but weren't sure, were still looking, and were sure it was someone from somewhere else.

He had hairy knuckles and he rubbed my shoulder with his hand. He told me it was probably a pervert who did it. He leaned in close and said, “The kid was half undressed.”

When he leaned in, I could smell the scotch on his breath. He told me the family didn't want that part getting out, but that he knew he could “trust me.”

He looked me in the eyes long and hard until I pulled my face away from his. I felt a slap on my back and it was Elaine in her caftan, laughing.

“I'm going to have to pull the plug on you two soon,” she said, a little too forcefully. She thought she had a claim to all the men who were only tenuously linked with their wives.

Her lips were rimmed with a frosty lilac lipstick. She bought it at the Walgreen's in bulk. It was called Amethyst Smoke. I knew because I always saw her pulling it out at the pool when we were tanning and she needed to reapply it. For moisture, she said. She had tubes of it loose everywhere.

“We're just talking,” I said.

She snorted. “Almost had his mouth on yours,” she said.

Rob rolled his eyes and said, “I've got one at home.” He walked away, letting his hand stay on my shoulder for as long as he could, stretching his arm out long. No one wanted to deal with a drunk Elaine.

“Watch that one; he's about to be in the middle of a nasty divorce,” Elaine said.

“Who isn't?” I said.

“Not many right now, actually. Everyone's trying to keep their shit together,” she said. “The economy is bringing back cohabitation.”

“I'm glad it's for all the right reasons,” I said.

“There's love, too. Of course.”

I stared down at my glass and Elaine asked what I was drinking.

“Vodka with a lime wedge,” I said.

“You'll be drunk in minutes.”

I swirled the lime in the middle of the glass. Maybe that was just what I needed. Elaine took it away from me and hurried to the bar and dripped in pomegranate juice, the new cranberry.

“Have some, it's good for you,” she said, handing it to me.

I gulped it down and looked for somewhere to sit.

“You don't have to drink it like a shooter,” she said. And then she told me I looked pale.

“I'm fine. Just tired.”

“A lot of shit happening around here,” she said. “It's like Juarez all of a sudden.”

“Like you've been,” I said, suddenly feeling bold.

“Of course not. They kill you there, Cheryl. Kidnap you and kill you just for being American. Didn't you see those water-skiers on
Dateline
?”

“I didn't see that one.”

“It was chilling,” she said. “Hacked to death.”

“You're so dark,” I said.

“That's life. Look at poor Steven. Now that's
dark
.”

Everyone started talking about Steven then. Fran Cronin's boy, poor Fran Cronin's boy. Plastic surgery was going to be needed. He was undressed. They lingered on that fact, as if he was the victim. He was turning into some kind of misunderstood hometown hero. I looked around the room at the men, and at the newly reappeared Jeffrey, now sitting near Debbie Picard, who laughed and laughed, nearly in his lap. He looked positively bored with her and I was glad.

I looked at all the men and stared at them as they leaned back in the sofa cushions, smiling and saying,
undressed
, as if Fran Cronin's son had suffered some kind of rite of passage. And I saw all of them with their pants down, holding their penises out and stroking them.

I grabbed on to Elaine's arm and clutched it so violently that she yelped.

“You're hurting me,” she said.

“Do you see them?” I asked. “Do you see what they're doing?”

The men were all looking at me, the women, too. And Jeffrey looked at me the worst of all, embarrassed.

“This drink is too strong,” I said.

I sat down on her wicker chair and nestled my drink in between my fingers, cooling my hands down long enough to be able to run them along my forehead, trying to calm myself down. The couples were still sitting around, talking and laughing. Ignoring me now. No one had their penis out; there was no energetic sound of stroking.

“Honey, maybe you should go upstairs and lie down,” Elaine said.

I went up the stairs, clutching the railing, and into her room, then checked the window to see if anyone was on the street. It was summer-evening desolate.

I lay down on her bed, a beachy room with a knitted blanket and sheets and shams with a Ralph Lauren hydrangea print. I tugged at the blanket. It looked as if Elaine knitted it herself, but I knew that
she hadn't. She had probably gotten it from Knitters Korner in town. Probably for around five hundred dollars, which was a shame because it was clearly a synthetic yarn.

I leaned back on the pillows and hoped that nothing lurid had happened on them, You could never know with Elaine. She was very vocal about never wanting to sleep alone.

Someone stepped into the bathroom and I heard a strong stream of urine. The walls were so thin. I rolled over, trying to cover each ear. It had to be a man. Bad prostate or something. I heard the toilet flush and footsteps and prayed they weren't headed to the bedroom.

“You okay?”

I turned over, unsure of whose voice it was. Tuck was standing there, smiling and looking around the room.

“Too much going on down there,” I said.

Downstairs, when I'd had my vision, his penis had been small and squat. I stared at his crotch, unable to look away. I didn't see a bulge, so I thought I had been right on the money. Here was me wanting it, everywhere.

“I conceived my first kid in this room,” he said.

I glanced at his face and he wasn't looking at me at all; he was staring at the walls, remembering and smiling. I tried to stay silent and not intrude on his memory.

“That was one hell of a party. Elaine's parties have gotten tamer over the years, if you hadn't noticed.” He said it in such a melancholy way that I wanted to hug him suddenly, wish that night back for him.

“The room didn't look like this then,” he said. “And I didn't look like this.” He looked down at himself, at his creased shorts and faded green polo shirt. He chuckled and patted his small belly.

“You still look fine,” I said.

“You think so?” He was so alert just then, so searching.

He pulled out Elaine's vanity stool and it was much too small for
him. He looked like he was about to share something with me and I wasn't really sure I was up for it. I leaned my head against the pillows and closed my eyes.