What Strange Creatures (15 page)

“I don’t know, Theresa. I’ve been asking myself that. I mean, I’m unemployed, for God’s sake. I could’ve helped. It would’ve made my day to have something to do, and she probably knew it. I could’ve helped her with the—” He stopped.

“What?” I said.

“You could ask Nathan, maybe. He might know more than I do. Probably does.”

“Nathan the bartender? Nathan the python guy?”

“Yeah.”

“Was Kim paying him to help her or something? Or were they such good friends he was willing to help her for free?”

“I don’t know. The time he helped her with the Wayne footage, I know she bought him a six-pack in exchange. So they weren’t close enough that she didn’t feel she owed him
something.
”

“Kim mentioned that all three of you hung out once. Does that mean you were sort of his friend, too?”

“No. It was kind of weird, actually. I mean, his snake was there and everything.”

“Okay, but aside from that. Was he . . . reasonable? If I went into the restaurant and asked him about it, do you think he’d be forthcoming?”

“I don’t
know.
It depends on whether he thinks I did something to Kim. If he knows who you are, he might not want to help you.”

“But maybe if he has any material or contacts, he could be convinced to give it to the . . .”

I almost said police. But that led me to wonder how they’d respond to an avenue of investigation that involved the state attorney general. Reading those articles about what had happened to Andrew Abbott didn’t give me a great deal of faith in the system my brother had just entered.

“You need to tell your lawyer everything,” I said.

“I have. There’s not a lot to tell.”

“Is there anything else you wanted to tell
me
?”

Jeff laid his hands flat on the table before us and pressed his fingers outward, as if carefully folding an imaginary piece of origami paper.

“I wanted to tell you to please not let Mom lose her mind over this.”

“I can’t promise that. You know that.”

“Then I wanted to tell you to try to make sure Dad doesn’t come blasting in here asking me questions about the showers.”

I couldn’t promise this any more than I could the one about our mother, but the words startled me nearly speechless. I imagined my father here at this very table, saying to Jeff,
Well, we’re Battles. . . .

Fucking hell.

“I’ll see what I can do,” I whispered.

My mother didn’t need a ride from the airport. She’d arranged her own rental car and driven it straight to the detention facility. Then, after she got to see Jeff, she carted herself over to my place. I put on a strong pot of coffee when I saw her car, then watched her march up my driveway.

She gripped a white pastry bag and pulled her purple fleece tight around her chest. As she walked closer, I could see she had on a thin pineapple-printed dress and pantyhose. You’d think she had never lived in New England. Her hair was in her usual full-bodied bob, however—sprayed into an immovable brown helmet. I wondered if she’d even once rested her head on the flight.

I greeted her at the door and gave her a hug.

“Hey, honey.” She steered me inside. “When’d it get so damn cold around here?”

“A couple of days ago, the weather kind of turned,” I told her.

“I called Springer, Norris, and Rice before my flight.” My mother handed me the white bag as we entered my kitchen. “Set up an appointment for Jeff with Gary Norris. He’ll be visiting Jeff this evening. He thinks Jeff has a good chance at bail. He said it might be high, but that the D.A. is being ridiculous thinking she’s going to have him held.”

I peered into the wax bag. Glazed doughnuts from Donut Dip, my mother’s favorite townie establishment. Thompson grad students went there only ironically. The jelly doughnut is the most ironic of all doughnuts.

“They wouldn’t let me bring those in to Jeff,” she explained.

I nodded and poured us each a mug of coffee. “Is he good, this Norris?”

“One of the best defense attorneys in the state, my research tells me.”

“Expensive?” I said.

“Ned’s helping,” my mother answered. “He’s got a lot of money squirreled away.”

I’d always figured as much, not that it was any of my business. But I’d been to their house in Key West once and knew that my mother couldn’t have paid a fraction of the mortgage on her school-secretary pension.

“I can help,” I told her.

“That’s sweet of you. But I think your father and I can spare it more than you, don’t you agree?”

I wasn’t so sure that was true. If I had kids, it would be different.

“I don’t have a lot of extra expenses,” I reminded her.

My mother ignored me, biting into one of Jeff’s doughnuts. “When the hell is your father getting home?”

“I just got a hold of him early this morning. He’s going to get off the ship when they stop in Sicily, but it might take him a couple of days to arrange the flights home.”

“Sicily,” my mother muttered, then snorted her disdain.

Boober came sniffing into the kitchen.

“There’s my little granddog,” she said, leaning over to pet Boober. “Did you miss me, honey?”

Boober gobbled down the doughnut chunk she offered him.

“You know your brother loves your critters as much as you do.” I could hear that my mother’s voice was almost breaking.

“I know,” I said. “With the possible exception of Sylvestress.”

“We both know your brother wouldn’t hurt a fly.” Her lip trembled for a moment, but then she steadied it, took a breath, and licked a bit of frosting off her doughnut. “But I’ve never thought he’s had instincts about dangerous people, dangerous situations. He’ll trust anyone. I think he didn’t realize what kind of people Kim was involved with.”

I wasn’t sure where my mother was going with this.

“What kind of people do you think Kim was involved with, Mom?”

“Theresa . . . the sort that would do something like this. To her and to Jeff.”

I didn’t meet my mother’s gaze. Had Jeff suggested the same thing to her, about the police possibly planting evidence? It seemed not. But it sounded like she’d already begun to form her own equally implausible explanation in her head.

“Do you think Kim did some drugs?” she asked me.

“Some drugs? Like what kind of drugs, Mom?”

She shrugged and flicked doughnut glaze out of her pinkie fingertip. “Well, I don’t know. Does it matter?”

“No, Mom. Jeff wouldn’t go out with someone into serious drugs.”

“That’s what I’m saying, hon. He wouldn’t
knowingly.
”

“Usually you can tell when someone’s into something serious.”

“But your brother—”

“Jeff would be able to tell. And if, for the sake of argument, he couldn’t . . .
I
would.”

“How many times did you meet her?”

“About . . . four, I think.”

My mother shook her head, closing her eyes for a moment. “He didn’t want to talk much when I went to see him this morning.”

“Can you blame him?” I said before realizing how nasty it sounded.

“He doesn’t know anyone in there, doesn’t get to see anyone much all day, and then someone comes to visit him and he doesn’t want to talk? If I were in there, I’d sure as hell want to be able to
talk.
”

I managed not to say,
I know you would.

“It may be difficult for him to talk about what’s happening.”

“Well, of course I know that. I mean, I know that rationally. But I would feel better if he’d say more.”

“He had American chop suey yesterday,” I offered.

“Well, isn’t that a fucking relief,” my mother snapped.

She stood up and stared out the window. After a moment I heard her begin to sniffle. Surely she would start to cry at any moment if I didn’t do something to stop it.

I quietly lit a Morning Glory votive on my kitchen table, then said, “You know, there was this brief period in Marge’s life—twelve days—when she was plagued by visions of penises.”

“Penises?” My mother turned around to frown at me. “Theresa, why do you tell me these things?”

“Men of all kinds—laymen and priests, whatever—coming straight at her from all directions, showing her their privates.”

“Uh-huh?” My mother picked up her coffee and rolled her eyes.

“And she prayed to God and asked him to make it stop. But he made her endure it for twelve days. An angel came to her and explained that the visions were a result of her doubt. She had doubted that God had really spoken to her in the past. She had wondered if it was actually the devil. And now God was going to make her suffer through this so she would appreciate, when it was over, her usual beautiful messages from him.”

“Uh-huh,” my mother repeated. “And this relates to your brother how?”

I took a long sip of coffee, racking my brain for an answer. “These past few days I haven’t felt as if this was really happening. I feel like it’s fate deceiving us all somehow.”

“Fate? Or God, Theresa?” My mother returned to the table, eyeing me warily.

One of her worst fears for me is that I’ll take this Marge stuff too seriously and become a holy roller someday. Mom’s never been much for religion. When Jeff and I were growing up, my father would pack us into the cab of his Ford pickup every Sunday for Mass at St. Margaret’s. Whenever we asked why my mother didn’t join us, we were told that there wasn’t room in the truck. Several times Jeff and I volunteered to ride in the back to accommodate her. In fact, that was a particular childhood dream of mine for a while—arriving at Mass in the back of that truck, hair flapping in the wind, waving to a jealous Tish as she got out of her parents’ station wagon.

My father would take Jeff and me to Cumberland Farms after church—assuming that our behavior was good, which it usually was—to pick out a bag of candy or chips.

How nice,
my mother would remark when we arrived home.
Cheetos for Christ.

“I said fate,” I insisted now. “I didn’t say God.”

“I’ve probably asked this before, honey, but don’t you ever think that Margery woman was a lesbian?”

“No, she was just . . . medieval.”

“A lot of nuns are lesbians, you know. Did you know that?”

“She wasn’t a nun. I’ve told you that about a hundred times.”

“Who gives a shit, Theresa? The more you tell me about her, the more I wish someone
did
burn her at the stake. There. I’ve finally said it.”

My mother actually said it every couple of months.

“I mean, if you’re so interested in eccentric middle-aged women, why don’t you call
me
more often? How about that?”

“You’re not really that eccentric.”

“I hope you’re not getting woo-woo on us. I really hope not.”

“Why do you hope that, Mom? Woo-woo people are
happy.
And what’s wrong with that?”

“They only
think
they’re happy.”

“If you think you’re happy, you
are
happy.”

“Theresa, I’m going to stop you right there.”

“Yeah?”

“I’d appreciate if I didn’t have to hear about your friend Margery. Not today. Not tomorrow. Not till after your brother’s gotten out on bail, and probably not after that either.”

I’d actually brought up Marge on purpose, because it was less painful to see my mother angry than to see her cry.

“I’ll try,” I said, and reached for a doughnut.

After we had Chinese takeout, my mother left in the early evening. She was going to try to sleep, she said, because she hadn’t slept since I’d called her with the news of Jeff’s arrest.

We’d run out of things to say, so I was eager for her to leave. Once she was gone, though, I desperately wanted her to come back. Still, I resisted calling her. If she really thought she could sleep, I didn’t want to get in her way.

I turned on the television and looked for the most mindless show possible. I settled on a cooking reality show, but I couldn’t absorb it. Then I tried cleaning and laundry and harassing my pets.

Two days till Jeff’s bail hearing. And after that—what next?

I choked down half a smoothie, washed the cat and dog dishes, and folded a pair of underwear. After all that I found myself on my bed, crying and reciting some words from Margery Kempe and wondering desperately what I could do for Jeff at this hour.

The idea came to me suddenly. I’d go find Nathan the bartender and see what I could get out of him. It was after ten, but he was probably still on duty.

Nathan was serving a group of boisterous undergrads when I arrived at Wiley’s.

Watching him from my barstool, I realized something about him that I hadn’t fully registered the time I was with Kim. With his tight jeans, silly earring, and five-o’clock shadow, he resembled the late-eighties George Michael. Back then, when I was in elementary school, he was one of my earliest, most primitive experiences of sexiness. I’d found him mostly irresistible but slightly, inexplicably gross. Did I have the same notion of sexy all these years later? I wasn’t sure. I never thought I’d have an opportunity to test it.

While I waited for Nathan’s attention, I took out my phone and tried the mystery number from Jeff’s phone again.

“This mailbox is full and cannot accept any messages at this time. Good-bye.”

“Whore,” I muttered as I closed the phone. I put my head in my hands and rubbed my temples.

“Tough day?” someone asked. I looked up. It was Nathan.

“Sort of,” I admitted.

Damn. This wasn’t how I’d intended to start with him—by looking depressed. Men don’t generally dig that.

“Yeah?” Nathan said.

He’s into, like, spiritual stuff,
I remembered Kim saying.
I bet he’d really be interested in that nun lady you’re doing your thesis on.

“Yeah. I . . . um, met with my dissertation adviser.”

“Dissertation? You’re a Ph.D. student?”

“Yup.”

“What’s it on, can I ask? Your dissertation?”

“It’s on a medieval text. By a woman named Margery Kempe. Heard of her?”

Nathan shook his head. “I feel like I’ve maybe heard that name before, but I can’t say I know anything about her. Was she a mystic?”