Chapter fifteen

I was two. I was beat. The bruises and cuts from our dive in the alley were beginning to ache and sting. I had a twisted ankle. Susannah had a slash on her arm. I had a black eye. Susannah’s knee was bleeding.

I came out of the shower limping. I collapsed, naked, into the beanbag, my head thrown back, my eyes closed.

“I need a drink,” I said.

She called to me: “Stay off your foot. I’D get it.”

I stayed off my foot. I drifted in and out of a doze that was like music, or like the waves of the sea, or like the music the waves make when they sing. She slipped the drink into my hand. I felt the glass sweat cold against my hot palm.

“It doesn’t make sense,” I said.

“Oh sweetie, Jesus, let’s stop tonight.”

She was at my feet. I cracked my lids and saw her there. She was sitting naked on the floor, cross-legged. She was surrounded by all the first-aid stuff she had found in the bathroom. She shook some hydrogen peroxide out on a cotton swab. She swabbed her knee and then her arm. She leaned forward, kneeling, and did the scratches on my leg and my side.

I lifted my drink and sipped it. It went down me in a fiery little spiral. I gasped at the ceiling.

I said: “Why should he want to hurt us after all this time?”

“Be quiet,” she whispered. “Drink your drink.”

I drank my drink. “Susie?” My voice was thick and amber. I felt the soft cotton soothe a pain in my shoulder.

“Susie.”

“Hm?”

“When were you adopted?”

“I don’t know,” she murmured. “I was little. Maybe two.”

“Do you know why?”

“Well … I was an orphan. My parents were dead.”

“How did they die?”

“I don’t know. My father said they never told him.”

“Who?”

“The agency.”

“Which agency? Where?”

“Michael, I don’t know.” She breathed it, exasperated. “I never asked.”

“At all?”

“No.”

“But Susie—”

“Michael …” She sat back on her heels. She was looking down at the bottles and boxes of gauze around her. Her hair, wet and dark with it, hung limply down her brow and temple. My eyes followed the ivory lines of her, curling in along her spine, out along her hips.

She raised her face to me. “I loved them,” she said. “They were the parents I had. I loved them. I never asked for the details. Okay?”

I nodded. “Okay.”

She brushed her hair back. She smiled at me. Her eyes glistened.

“Okay?” she said again.

I nodded.

She gathered the first-aid stuff into her arms and got to her feet. I watched her carry it into the bathroom.

Then I stood up. It took some doing, but I got there. My ankle was tender. My mind was warm with sleep and liquor. I shook my head to clear it.

As quickly as I could, I hobbled into the other room. My bedroom. That was about all there was room for too: a bed, a closet, a window on a brick wall.

I got my bathrobe out of the closet and put it on. Then I knelt down and reached into the back past my sneakers and my Diplomacy game. I pulled out a shoe box. I’d forgotten how heavy it was. I opened it and took out the .38. McGill had made me get a license for it. I’d fired it a few times. I’d carried it once. I didn’t like it much.

I fumbled with the wheel to get it open. I fumbled with the bullets to stuff them into their chambers. I snapped it shut and slipped it quickly into my bathrobe pocket. I stuffed the shoe box back into the closet and closed the door.

I stood and turned and she was in the doorway. She was wearing my shirt. It hung down around her thighs. She was holding her shoulders as if she were cold.

“You have to get some sleep,” was all she said.

“I’ll sleep when Charlie comes,” I told her. “You get in bed now, I’ll sit beside you.”

She pulled the covers down and climbed in under them. She was blinking hard. I sat down next to her. I kept one hand in my pocket around the gun butt. With the other hand, I stroked her forehead.

“My parents died in a fire,” I said.

She reached up, curled her fingers around my wrist. “Poor Michael,” she said.

“It was different for me. I could never get anyone to tell me more than that. I’d ask, but that’s all they’d say: They died in a fire. They made it sound like something shameful.”

“They were vomitaceous doofs,” she whispered. She could barely keep her eyes open.

“They were. No question,” I said. “But … Doesn’t this have to do with him … with something?”

Susannah rolled over on her side. She lay her head in my lap, her eyes closed.

“I keep having this feeling that I’m blocking it out,” I said. “That I know but I won’t let myself in on it.”

“Mm-hm.”

“It all seemed so much clearer when I was talking to Charlie.…”

I tried to recapture the clarity. I had an image in my head for a moment of Charlie at the controls, of Fred Lamarr on the phone, of the big reel rolling and the voice coming over the speaker.

I lifted my hand and pressed it against my brow. “Oh man,” I said. “Oh man.”

I had to stand up, to pace it off. I moved Susannah’s head gently, but she opened her eyes. As I stood, she propped herself on one elbow and watched me. I walked the length of the bed, turned and returned to the head and turned again. She yawned.

“An execution, that’s what it was,” I said. “He was reading about an execution as we came up on the train.”

“Who was?”

“Your father.”

She flopped over onto her back, sighing at the ceiling.

“That’s what put it in my head,” I said. “That’s where I got the idea for the story. The scarred man and the execution go together somehow.”

Susannah sat up. She snapped at me, “Michael, if you think my father could lie to me about something like—”

“You don’t understand.…”

“You don’t understand my father if you—”

“Susie, a man came to the office today. He left a message for your father.”

“I don’t care.”

“He said to tell him that the Turner case was over, the killer was going to be executed in ten days.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“You don’t understand—”

She yelled at me: “You don’t understand!”

“Susie!”

She stopped. I ran my hand up through my hair. I was afraid, but I didn’t know why. Even then, my mind refused to make sense of it. All I knew was that I felt like I’d swallowed a chunk of ice.

Susannah sulked at me. I lifted my hands. “Susie,” I said again, more softly now. “Susie, my parents. Turner. That was their name.”