CHAPTER SIXTEEN

1958

I wanted to get somewhere, leave Nebraska, hide all our footprints under snow, but Charlie said he had a mind to double back to Lincoln since everyone was looking for us everyplace else. They were hunting a Ford, but by this time we were already driving a Chevy. Soon it was going to be something else, something better. You had to play games with the lawmen. But the games were easy, like the demolition derby. It was all about not bowing down and thinking one step ahead till it was metal and engines sparking and steel ripping up the road.

“It’s gonna be them who break down first?” I asked, hoping he’d sound sure when he answered back.

“Well, we got this far.”

“Where did we get to?”

“We’re together, ain’t we?”

“I guess,” I said. But I thought we were headed someplace else.

We had spent the night in the car on the corner of Van Dorn and some other street. I can’t remember which. I didn’t know this part of town. It was cold, and I could not sleep for remembering what Charlie did to the dead girl. He had done in the old man before that, but it wasn’t like this one. Every time my eyes closed and my head fell over to one side, Charlie moved and I thought he was trying to leave me. I could not stop thinking how easy he could leave me with nothing else at all, not even him.

I did not like the way Charlie had put down the gun and then raised it up again, like he wasn’t sure about killing her. He was so sure about the other ones. Not that I wanted him to kill her. I did not want him to kill any of them. It had all just started and I couldn’t get it to stop.

“Please,” she had said shivering, creasing up her forehead, as I held the flashlight on her face. She put out her hands, begging, and he fired and I tell you that by the time I heard this shot any thrill was gone. She dropped soft to the floor and crawled in the corner. Just curled up in a ball like a hit deer that runs away to die on the side of the road. Charlie went outside to get the boy.

Her name was Carol, same as me, just spelled different. I saw it in her math book, but I did not feel right about calling her by it. The girl was laying on her side. I put my palm up to her nose, and there wasn’t any breath. The cellar was dark and smelled of straw and the earth. I felt like I was buried beside her.

She was a girl who did not get left back and probably never missed a day of school in her whole life. I thought of the teen angel song, because the girl looked like she was one. A checked hairband slipped down over her forehead, and a locket pooled in a gold pile by her half-opened mouth, like her heart had slipped out when it stopped beating and then froze up small like something in a story. The heart said Daddy’s Girl, and there was a picture inside to prove it. There was also a diamond on her finger to say she was somebody else’s girl, too. I folded her finger under so Charlie wouldn’t think to take the ring and give it to me. He would do that, give me things and talk like it was just the thing for me even though it was someone else’s and he hadn’t even picked it out.

The cellar door clanged open and Charlie pushed the boy through and drug him down the steps. I turned out the flashlight. “What’d you do that for?” Charlie said.

“I don’t want to see.”

“Well, turn it back on.”

“I don’t want to see anymore.”

“Come on, ain’t you gonna help?”

“What am I supposed to do?”

“Go outside and cover the blood.”

“With what?”

“I don’t know, you think, Caril. I’m tired of thinking for the both of us.”

“OK,” I said, but I did not feel OK. I turned on the flashlight, and went outside, and crouched down on the snow, and got to turning it over, making it white again. It was hard work, with being so icy and no gloves. I gave up and went back down.

At first I didn’t see him, only the boy laid out, then a little flash of silver: Charlie’s eyeglasses catching the light. The boy was hunched in the corner beside the killed girl. Her stockings were half off, dress pulled up over her face. Charlie had his hand on her leg.

My heart went spinning like a wheel in a ditch. “Chuck. Leave her be. Pull up my dress.”

He sat up and squinted his eye like he had just woke up in the middle of the night. “Come here,” he said. “It ain’t what you think.”

But I didn’t. I didn’t feel that I had feet anymore to follow him, but just a heart that was broke and in the dark. I went outside. The stars squinted down. A cloud was over the moon, but I could still see dark spots where the boy had coughed out blood in the snow. I did not hug myself for the cold but hung my arms dead at my sides and let the wind take me, because nothing else ever would.

Charlie’s feet stomped up the stairs. “Come on,” he said. “Don’t be sore. You know I still love you.” I walked away from the cellar mouth. Charlie’s feet crunched after me.

I looked out at the road, but there was nothing else I could see anywhere, not a ripple of a hill or a bush. I felt like I was standing on the tip of the world, looking out over the edge into emptiness. It was the thickest black I had ever seen. Then the world swirled around and the moon broke free, and the ground was washed in a million stars. I could see the boy’s car resting by the side of the road, and frost on the windshield like somebody breathing. But nobody was breathing. An owl hooted, and there was Charlie.

“I never was with another girl but you. I only wanted a look.”

“Why?”

“Because I never was with another girl. I wanted to see another girl before I died.”

“What about Peg?” She was his girl before me.

“It’s just something you say. I never did. There’s just you. Nobody loves like me and you.”

“How do you know?”

“I just know. Like I know this whole thing ain’t gonna pan out for me.”

*   *   *

Now we were driving real slow through the rich part of town, with the big old trees and the gardens and the black cars, and at one end of the neighborhood was the club where people who had money smoked cigars and jiggled around in little white carts. Charlie told me we weren’t going to kill any of them. We were just going to pick out a house big enough for us to get lost in and hide out for a day, eating the food and rolling around in the beds, bigger than anything we ever laid in before. I didn’t want to roll around. I just wanted to sleep and wake up in another place and time.

“You pick the place,” Charlie said. “Pick a house you like.”

“I like every one.”

“Pick your favorite.”

“I don’t have a favorite.”

“Come on.”

We drove around and around the same streets, and everything washed in a blur. People pulled cars out of driveways on their way to work and fixed their ties behind windshields, thinking nothing bad could ever happen, not to them. Not you, no, not you. The houses were gray and white with brick ones breaking them up every so often. Branches swished and fences rolled out like long white ropes.

Charlie bumped me on the shoulder. “What’s it gonna be?” he said.

“What’ll we do with the people?” I said.

“They better not cause any trouble, is all.” Charlie looked over at me. I put my forehead against the window’s cold and closed my eyes. I tried to think what trouble the boy and girl in Bennet had caused. They had only stopped to give us a lift. Somehow it had turned into trouble, only I couldn’t figure out when.

“How can you pick when you’re sleeping,” Charlie said.

I opened my eyes. “I’m not,” I said.

It was a brick house painted white, with a big old tree in the middle of a circle drive out front and another drive that disappeared down the side of the house. I told Charlie I picked it for the fenced flower garden with a white gate, and for the screened-in porch, because I have always wanted to eat in a screened-in porch on a summer night. But really I just chose it on account of being made to choose, which is not really a choice no matter how you see it.

Charlie waited at a stop sign for a milk truck to go on, then turned into the drive real slow, without a signal. “This is it,” said Charlie. “Our dream house.” But his face wasn’t smiling. He rolled down the window to listen for sounds. He didn’t want any surprises. The air gusted. The branches swung with a heaviness. There was gravel under the tires and ice chunks from half-melted puddles. A stone popped the fender and a pine tree creaked. Charlie parked the car alongside the garage and got out real slow, holding the gun in one hand and barely tapping the door shut with the other, so as not to make a sound. He put his hand out to motion I should stay behind.

Charlie tucked the gun in the back of his blue jeans. He patted his hair and disappeared around the side of the garage. Watching him from the back, he did not look like a person who wanted to cause trouble, but a little boy with bowed legs you could trip easy and send to the ground. It was his face that told you different. There wasn’t anybody going to knock him down.

I listened hard, but I could not hear a sound for the wind. Everything was gray, and soon it started to snow. Big fat flakes that cried down the windshield. Charlie stuck his head around the side of the house and waved his hand for me to come along. Then he was gone again. There was nothing left for me to hope, so I got out of the car. I thought about running. But I did not have anything anymore to run back to. I went up the back steps and opened the screen.

*   *   *

A lady stood in the kitchen doorway with a little black dog hiding behind her feet. A fine lady with sad soft eyes and money in the bank. Charlie had the gun on her. She had her hand on her heart, thinking who was I, coming in, and I closed the door soft, trying not to scare anyone. The little dog got to yapping and snarling from behind her shoes. She picked it up and said, “No, Queenie,” and the thing went quiet. Her fancy ring twinkled, a pearl surrounded by diamonds. It looked so big it could break her finger. There was the bracelet, too, like a gold rope with little stones sliding down her arm.

A girl was off to one side with her white apron on, moving her lips around like she was trying to spit something out. I could smell the coffee she must have been getting ready on the stove. Cream and sugar laid out on the table like it was for a king. A house full of party smells, so warm inside. Who would have expected people like us? On the cover of the paper on the table was a picture taken of me and Charlie sitting on the couch, ten thousand years back before this all got going.

The fine lady looked from the paper back to Charlie.

“You got it,” he said.

The lady petted the dog’s head over and over.

“Do as I say and nobody gets hurt,” Charlie said.

“What would you like us to do?” she said.

Charlie waved the gun at the apron girl. “Make us something to eat.” The girl didn’t move.

“You have any directions now, you give them to me,” the lady said. “She can’t hear. It doesn’t mean she isn’t minding what you say. You have to talk so she can see your lips or she won’t understand.”

Charlie frowned. “What happened to her?”

“She’s deaf.”

“Yeah?” He shook his head, and flopped down in the chair. “All the money in the world and you hire a girl can’t take orders. Man, oh, man.” He laughed. “How much you pay her?”

The lady did not let on she was afraid. “Moira’s a good girl,” she said.

“I bet.”

I gave him a look. There wasn’t any reason to be wise. We were the ones putting her out.

“You hungry?” he said to me.

“I guess.” I couldn’t tell if I was or not. I just wanted to fall asleep somewhere.

“How about pancakes?”

I shrugged.

“They’re her favorite,” he told the lady, like she should care. Charlie waved the .22 at the maid. “Make us pancakes,” he said.

The maid didn’t get the idea. She was in a panic with her hand on her forehead and I could see she was breathing deep on account of her shoulders going up and down. The lady put the dog on the floor, real slow, and went over to the stove and talked in the maid’s face. “Moira, you go finish the dusting. There’s nothing to be scared of. They say they aren’t going to hurt us.”

“Just so you know, that ain’t definite.” Charlie leaned back in the chair and threw his feet up on the table. “She better stick to the dusting, is all.” He shaked open the paper and held it up in front of his face, then peeked over the edge at me. “Look.”

I didn’t want to look.

“We’re famous.”

“I already saw,” I said. The lady opened a cupboard and got out a bowl and went to the icebox. The dog skittered in circles.

“Come here, doggy,” I said. “Come to Caril.”

“That ain’t any dog,” Charlie laughed. “It’s a fly on shit.”

The lady closed the icebox and cracked two eggs in the bowl. “She’s a poodle.”

“Nobody asked.”

The lady got to stirring up the bowl. The pancakes were from a mix. “My grandma has a poodle,” I said.

Charlie gave me a look back fast. He knew my grandma had no such thing. “Go make sure that maid ain’t up to anything funny,” he said, handing me his knife. Then he went back to staring at the paper. I had no idea what I would do if I did find her trying something. I knew what Charlie would want me to do: stick the knife in her back. It would all be quiet. It wouldn’t make a sound.

But the maid was not up to anything funny after all. She was in the very next room, polishing a long dark dinner table with a lemony wax. She looked so calm making those big circles, like she was in another scene altogether. So far off, someplace I wouldn’t have minding being. Her back was to me, and she did not turn around on account of being deaf. There was a pitcher of red flowers in the middle of the table, and I went around the other side from her, to take one out. When I did this, the maid jumped clear out of her skin and made a noise like gagging. Her black curls shaked on account of her whole body shaking. Her skin was very white. I put the flower to my nose, but it did not smell like anything. It was winter. I held it out across the table. “Here,” I said, but she wouldn’t take it. She stood dumb with the rag in her hand, like the flower was a gun and I had it pointed. I hid the knife behind my back to show I would never use it.

“I’m not the one to be scared of,” I said. “But I can talk to Charlie. He listens to me.” She looked at me, blank as a chalkboard. I wanted to tell her how there hadn’t been any choice for me, but there was no explaining to a deaf girl.

I dropped the flower and smashed it around with the heel of my boot. The petals spread like a fan of cards in a trick, and in the middle was the heart, smeared out over the rug in a gold dust.

I motioned for the maid to pull down the shades, and she got to doing it right away—yank, yank—like I was the new lady of the house and she might get fired. Dark red curtains blocked the gray world. But I did not want to be the lady of this house even though I had chose it, and there were all the things I would ever want inside. Eight chairs for all the guests. A crystal chandelier with little places for candles left over from times gone by. A bowl of perfect-colored fruit made out of glass. It all looked right, but suddenly it was not on account of me and Charlie. He said he didn’t want things to turn out bloody this time. I tried to believe him. But something always sent him ape.

The maid went into the hall and got to cleaning the glass over a painting of a girl in a blue dress with her hand on the back of a chair. Everything in the painting was very dark, except for the hair; that was blond. It was straight hair like me but heavier and thicker, and all over prettier, though Charlie used to say I was the prettiest thing he ever saw. I did not feel that way anymore. I felt ugly, and there was a hole in my stomach the size of the moon.

My feet walked over to the big piano. The lid of the piano was held open, so you could see all the hammers inside that jumped when you hit the keys. I thought of the girl in a coffin with the lid open that way, and all the people coming from miles around to say How pretty she is or What a pity it had to end up this way. I was not sure Charlie had pulled her dress back down. If he didn’t, then everyone would know how I wasn’t enough for him. Nothing was, of course.

I laid on the couch and tried not to think. I put the knife on the table beside a row of cards left over from Christmas, even though Christmas was already a month past. I picked one up. On the outside was a picture of a big man dressed like Santa on the steps of a fancy house, and four heads poking out behind him. There was the mother, and three little boys wearing pointy green hats. Each person was smiling hard to say there was no happier family in all the world.

Dear Arthur, Jeanette, and Lowell—

Season’s Greetings from all of us at the North Pole,

Jim, Bonnie, Jonny, Gavin, and Tommy Reynolds. Can’t wait to see you this summer at the lake!!!! Santa says he ordered Lowe a new water ski.

It was the ones with names that would not leave me. I would imagine them to be babies wrapped in blankets handed to mothers who were choosing names. You are Bobby, or August, or Grace, or Betty Sue.

When Mother had the baby, she was closed in the room forever and no one would let me see. “It’s too ugly,” Barbara had said, “and you’re not old enough.” But she had no idea what ugly things I would see.

I had caught a peek of Mother on the bed with her head pushing up from the pillows—pushing and pushing, with the veins in her neck standing out in wires, and groans that split her clear in two. This was in the old house on Belmont with no place else to go, so I had sat down at the table across from Roe and slitted my eyes at him.

“Ouch,” I said. “See what you did?”

“Well, it ain’t like you came out of nowhere,” Roe said. “Don’t forget. There was somebody had to do this for you.” As if he had no idea who it was.

*   *   *

Charlie came up behind and leaned his arms on the back of the couch. “What’s that?” he said.

I closed the card. “They go to a lake.”

“Who?”

“The people that live here.”

“There ain’t any lake around.”

“Maybe they take an airplane.”

Charlie shaked his head and flopped down beside me. He put the gun on the table. “Now, why do you take an airplane to a lake when you can take an airplane to the ocean?”

“I don’t know, Chuck. Maybe they like the lake.”

“Who likes lakes?”

“Me.”

“Come on, Caril Ann, you never even been to a lake.”

“How do you know?”

“I know every bit of you.” Then Charlie kissed me on the forehead like it was a cute thing that I never went anywhere and now never would. He kissed me on the mouth, but I didn’t kiss back.

“Chuck,” I said. “Did you fix her dress?”

“Huh?”

“Did you pull up the stockings?”

“Forget it. It ain’t like she’s gonna catch cold.”

“It’s not that.”

“Well, what?”

“Everybody’ll go around saying you don’t love me.”

“I told you I was only looking,” Charlie said. “There ain’t a person in this goddamn world gonna make a mistake about the way I feel. Everyone knows.” Charlie put his hands around the back of my neck and kissed it. “Look what all I did to show it,” he whispered. “I love you.”

*   *   *

The lady served us pancakes in the library ’cause that’s where Charlie said he wanted to eat. She brought the food and her hands were shaking. It was the maid who set everything else on the red cloth in front of us. When she was done, Charlie took her by the apron and shoved her into the closet. It happened fast, in one wink, and when the girl tried to scream nothing came out, and for a split second I thought I had went and lost my hearing too. The lady swallowed hard and fluttered her fingers along the bracelet, twisting it around and around. The shiny stones twinkled.

“What did you do that for?” I said.

“I want someone can hear what I say. I don’t trust her.” Charlie took a bite and looked at me. “Ain’t you gonna eat something? I had these made special for you.”

“I need syrup,” I said, but to tell the truth I did not feel like eating. The books on the shelves gave off a funny old smell and out the window there was not a thing but miles of white. The whole world looked to be floating in the middle of a cloud. The furniture tilted. If you fell out the window you’d fall and fall and keep on falling till your cheek smacked the ground somewhere and everything went black.

There were little sounds from the closet. The maid was crying. Charlie rolled his eyes and puffed out his cheeks and cut through his pancakes sharp and straight, like a man who always knew just what he was doing.

The lady reached me the syrup and put it beside my plate, her gold bracelet shining in the lamp. She caught me looking and took it off, showed me where to hook it. There was perfume on her neck I could smell, not from a drugstore but a place downtown like Miller and Paine with different counters and pretty girls who stood behind them wearing name tags. The lady’s fingers shaked, and the bracelet slid to the red cloth. She did not take her eyes off Charlie. “You can keep it,” she said, like she really did not care.

“Thank you,” I said, real polite. It was the prettiest thing I ever put on.

I poured the syrup but could not get down the bites. The bracelet tickled my arm. The clock ticked on the bookshelf. The maid made a noise like somebody was trying to shove a pillow down her throat, and Charlie put his elbows on the table and covered his ears. She kicked her feet on the door. Charlie shook his head. “What’s she trying to pull?”

This was how it started. I could feel it all coming apart. I emptied my mouth into the napkin.

“How come she can’t shut up?”

“She can’t hear herself,” the lady said. “She’s afraid of the dark.” I tried to imagine what it was to be her, locked in a place with no sound and no light.

“She ain’t ever gonna shut up.”

“Really, she will if you let her out,” the lady said.

“What are you saying?”

“We’ll do what you want.”

“What do you think?” Charlie said, looking at me. “What should I want?” but I could tell he didn’t care what I thought. He had already made up his mind.

“I don’t know. Let her out,” I said.

Charlie picked up the knife. “Oh, I’ll let her out.” He got up and pulled the maid out of the closet. Her head jerked. “No, no,” it seemed like she was trying to say. She put her hands over her face and tried to pull away, but it was no good. Charlie drug her out of the room.

The lady put her knuckle up to her teeth and stood there with her face all pale, her fingers shaking. The clock ticked. I looked down at the pancakes but still did not feel like eating. I fiddled the bracelet around my wrist, and went to the window and peeked out from the edge of the curtain, but there was nothing anywhere worth looking at. I pulled the curtain closed. The lady breathed. The clock ticked. I didn’t want to hear it anymore.

“Where’s the lake?” I said.

“In Minnesota.”

“How do you get there?”

“We drive.”

“How come you don’t take an airplane?”

“It’s not that far—and we do it as a family. It’s nice,” she said, and bit her lip. I knew what she was thinking: Would she ever see the lake again? I didn’t think so.

She started cleaning up the dishes, stacking plates on the tray and glasses. She piled up the knives and forks and napkins like there was nothing else worth doing in all the world but this. The whole time I was watching her rings, the pearl on her finger and the wedding band. I always thought I would like to have a ring like this when I got married, not just gold but with tiny diamonds to light it up.

Mother did not have so much as a band to say she was married, but I supposed it never mattered. She just stayed around the house all day, with Betty Sue hanging off her hip, looking old on account of loving Roe and having no money to buy fancy skin creams. Before Roe, I sat around, painting my toes red to match the Chinese writing on my kimono, and if I wanted to look at a magazine in the middle of dinner, that was A-OK with Mother. She’d sit down beside me and stare at it too, and she’d go on about how the stories weren’t real life and I shouldn’t think so.

The lady finished loading the tray, and then picked it up, but the whole thing fell through her hands and I thought she was just going to break down in tears. Dishes clattered. I jumped clear out of my skin. The dog skittered. Pancakes, plates, glasses, spoons: It all went rolling. There was syrup on her skirt and she kneeled down in the mess of it and put her hands on her knees like she couldn’t think what piece to pick up first. There was the dog snacking on the butter stick, and the old clock ticking, and the maid’s heart beating in Charlie’s hands.

I could see the knuckles holding her knees, touching bone, thinking, This is soft, this is me, this is hard, this is real. What if this is all there is? Her ring sparkled shiny on the dark blue sky of her dress. I felt sick. There wasn’t any air. I went over and cracked the window. Here I was, a girl with no mother to speak of, standing at the window of a house she had chose. I thought of the wind ripping Mother’s hair, and how I would never know where to find her ever again. There she was running, and there was the shot. There was the bullet singing into her dream. The lady reached over and picked up a piece of a broken glass and put it on the tray. She closed her eyes and leaned her hands on the floor. “What’s he doing to Moira?”

I couldn’t say.

*   *   *

In a little while, the telephone rang and both of us jumped. The lady looked at me to ask what she should do. I didn’t know. Then Charlie was there to answer for me. “I thought you said there wasn’t anyone going to call.”

Ring.

“How should she know?” I said.

Ring.

“Whose side are you on?”

Ring.

“Yours, Chuck.”

Ring.

The lady stood up. Charlie cocked the gun. “Get it, like always,” he said. “And nothing funny. I can kill you if I want. If you say one word.” The lady picked up the telephone. “Hello,” she said, and listened for what seemed like too long of a space. “Yes—I’d forgotten.” She looked at Charlie. He nodded at her to keep on going. His wrist was shaking. He was in a panic. “A headache,” she said. “… No, it’s fine. I was just resting.” She rubbed the ring with her thumb. It twirled around and around. Bright diamonds went to smooth silver back to diamonds. “Another time … Goodbye.” She hung up the phone and sat down in a chair. Charlie breathed deep and lowered the gun. “Who was it?”

“A friend.”

“Did she think anything?”

The lady shook her head. “I’m sorry,” she said.

Charlie seemed to believe her. “Where’s the TV at?” he said.

“In the den off the foyer.”

“Where’s that?”

“Off the front hall with the staircase.” She looked down at her dress and touched the syrup and rubbed the stick between her fingers. “May I go upstairs and change my clothes?”

Charlie thought about it. “Well, don’t try anything funny. Don’t forget who’s boss.” His voice broke on the words. He did not sound like the boss, but a boy out back with a boomerang trying to shoot a squirrel down out of a tree. I wanted to put my head against him and ask if it would be all right to cut the losses at the maid, maybe lift a little money, and head on home to eat peanut butter out of the jar and hear about how much he loved me. But I was never going back home. I knew that much. Home was over for Caril Ann Fugate by then.

*   *   *

The lady did not change her clothes. She did not so much as take off her shoes. She sat down on the edge of the bed, with the sheets all twisted and dents still in the pillow from two people sleeping. She had the dog in her lap and petted its head over and over. I had the knife in my hand, but I did not know how I would ever use it. The lady laid on her side, curled up her legs, and put her hands together under her head. “What clothes do you want to put on?” I said.

She didn’t answer. She just laid there, still as stone, like she wasn’t even breathing.

The dog paced back and forth on the edge of the bed with his tail flipping like a rabbit foot, trying to muster a jump to the floor.

I did not know what I should say or do to make her move. There was a picture on top of the dresser, of the lady with her husband’s arm around her and what looked to be their boy between them, happy as you please. I put down the knife and picked the picture up. The boy grinned with sleepy eyes and heavy lashes and held the poodle under the front legs so its stomach peeked out at the camera. The boy had the husband’s brown hair without the gray sides, and the little dent in the chin, but there was something familiar, something he got from the lady in his face. I turned the picture over and went to the window. A pine tree squeaked in the wind with a little old voice, crying tears against the window. Down below, I saw gray puddles in white pockets of snow. The dog collar tinkled, and paws swished the rug.

“Can you bring me that picture?” the lady said.

I went over to the bed and put the frame in her hands. Her eyes did not look at me. Her lips worked around. “He killed Moira, didn’t he?” she said.

“Oh, he probably just tied her up,” I said.

“He killed her.”

“How do you know?”

She didn’t answer. She closed her eyes and then opened them again and let out a sigh. “I’m not waking up,” she said. “I’m not dreaming. Will you touch my arm?”

“Why?” I said.

“Because God forgives.”

“But I didn’t do anything bad for God to forgive.”

“I believe you.”

“I didn’t have so much as a choice.”

“I believe you,” she said.

“I never did a thing wrong.”

“You just loved him.”

“I love him, and he loves me. He loves me so much, it makes him crazy.”

“If he loved you, he wouldn’t do this.”

“Charlie loves me,” I said.

“Your mother loves you.”

“She’s dead. She can’t love me,” I said.

“Maybe she loves you from Heaven.”

“Maybe,” I said, even though I knew there wasn’t a chance. I reached out and touched the lady. Her sleeve was soft and warm and alive. The bracelet shivered down my arm.

“I’m Jeanette,” the lady said. She moved the picture up closer to her face. “That’s my husband, Arthur, and that’s Lowell. He’s your age.”

“Where is he?”

“Away.”

“Did you send him to the lake?”

“We sent him to school—he’s my baby.”

I did not want to hear about any babies, or all the work that went into having them. It seemed an awful lot of effort for things to turn out this way. You gave somebody life and a name, always risking it might go bad.

“I thought I could never love a person more than Arthur,” the lady said. “Then I had our son, and I held him for the first time and he yawned, and I knew. This is Lowell, this is love.” Her voice was coming out fast from nowhere, and her words fell over each other one on top of the other—bam bam bam—like she’d been thinking about saying this her whole life long. “There isn’t any love like that. No matter what he does, or who he becomes, I will always love him.” She took a breath. “Like your mother. She loves you.”

“I don’t have a mother.”

She put her face in her hands. “Save me.”

Her hairdo was crooked, dented in. I felt sick. I wanted her to stop. The hole in my stomach kept growing till it swallowed me up and burned in my throat. The syrup was rising. I picked up the knife to make her be quiet, but I could tell in her face she knew I never would use it.

“Make him stop,” she said, and pleaded her eyes at me.

“I can’t,” I said. “I don’t have a choice.”

“There’s always a choice.” The lady was kidding herself.

“It’s too late for a choice.” I turned my back.

“Jesus says it’s never too late.”

But as far as I could tell, Jesus was not talking anymore. Jesus was dead, nailed up on the cross, and that was a pretty bad way to go itself. I thought about taking the bracelet off. It made me sorry to think of her giving me something, when there wasn’t a thing in the world I could give back. I didn’t want her whispers left behind like all the other voices I have heard. But I couldn’t take it off. You had to take good things when they came along. It was too pretty, and I had never owned something so pretty. “You’re supposed to change your clothes,” I said.

The lady got up and went to the bureau, and opened a drawer. I could see her whole body was shaking, but her eyes weren’t crying. She watched me in the mirror. “If you’re not going to help me, then at least let me try to help myself,” she said.

“How can I help you?”

“Don’t kill his father. Don’t kill my husband.”

“I’m not the one to ask. I never killed anyone,” I said. I couldn’t look at her anymore. I already knew how it was going to turn out.

I walked into the boy’s room, with the Big Red posters and the trophy of a gold boy in a funny hat swinging a stick at a ball, and a case of tin soldiers trapped on the wall. There was some piece of stone that looked all chipped up from a long-ago place. I wondered why he would want to keep it. I laid down on his bed, closed my eyes, and tried to sleep. The pillow was covered with dog smell, but I didn’t care. It was a beautiful room of someone alive who was happy to be that way. Inside my head there were stars I could see, blue shapes in my lids, mouths opening and closing, tongues curled up, and Charlie’s hands feeling every part of me, skin to blood to bone, to all the tiny dreams that run through my veins. My head swirled down, down, in the slow part of a storm. The rain ripped up Betty Sue’s newspaper hat. The wind took Mother’s hair.

Then there were Charlie’s steps coming up, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, and her steps going back—till he canceled them out. The dog yelped. Later I would know it was a lamp that fell. Somebody’s foot tripped the cord, a whole body tumbled, the air drained out fast. I could hear the dog crying on account of its neck, and shush, shush, shush—Roe on the roof sanding red paint.

*   *   *

When he found me sleeping in the boy’s room, Charlie just about cried. His eyes pinched up and his face went red. He said the lady had tried to kill him on account of me going to sleep. I did not say I had only been trying to sleep. “How’d she try to kill you?” I said, but Charlie couldn’t answer. He didn’t want to talk.

“I didn’t want to kill her, but she made me do it.”

“You always had a mind to kill her.”

“No, Caril. It didn’t start out like that. I didn’t start out with a mind to kill anyone. Everyone just treated me bad.”

“OK, Chuck, I believe you,” I said. “I don’t treat you bad.”

“I don’t know.” He looked at me funny and went downstairs to look at the newspapers again. He just kept picking them up.

*   *   *

Black was coming on, cracking trees with cold, and they were looking for us everywhere, but we were frozen in the quietest place. The house was dark. Nothing breathed. The whole world felt to be covered in ice. It was my job to wait for the man. He would be coming home from work. Charlie had a mind to set off in the family’s car. It would be a nice car, he said, nicer than any I’d ever been in before.

I sat on the couch arm with my back up straight so I couldn’t go to sleep, but I got too tired. It was late. I didn’t think he was coming after all. I went back upstairs and tried to get the dog out from under the bed in the boy’s room. I waved the box of chocolates I had found in the cupboard around on the floor because a box of chocolates is what I would need to get me out from under a bed. “Come here, doggy,” I said. “Come to Caril, it’s OK.” But it was not OK and he would not come out. He was hunkered up against the wall, mewling in pain, so I sat there in the middle of the rug eating all the chocolates myself, staying near, watching him like a secret, leaving one behind in case he changed his mind.

I felt sick and started to cry for not being any use to her. I wanted her boy to have something to come back to. I thought about Nig with no one to love him. I put the leftover chocolate under the edge of the bed and reached up to turn off the light. And then there were the headlights I could see coming down the drive to say that her husband was home now, two more bright scared eyes.

I tiptoed down the hall. “Chuck,” I said, but he already knew. He was waiting by the door in the dark. I leaned back up against the wall by the fallen-over lamp and sat down in the crunch of it. My arms were around my knees, my eyes shut, though there was nothing to see.

It is black. It is only black. There is a breath stuck in my chest. The door throws open—“Jeanette?”—and the shadow of the light flicks on, and Charlie’s waiting. There is a silence. A surprise of motion. There is the shot. Going in and coming out the other side. The sound of something glass exploding. There is the smoke. And Charlie’s footsteps. And static in my eyes from where I rub too hard, making shapes like bruises—a dog—a tree—a hand—a brain. There isn’t any sound. I peek down over the railing, and there is a man. There is a pool of blood becoming the carpet. There are his hands. They are at his throat. His tie is loose. His eyes are closed. His lips are moving. I creep downstairs to hear the secret: “Jeanette … Jean.” He is whispering her name.