At a quarter to ten the next morning the sound of a lawn mower woke me. Sunlight shined soft and warm through the shades and a single dust mote caught the light and glimmered in the air like a tiny daytime star. The smell of frying breakfast sausage made its way from the kitchen into my room.
The nightmares had never come. My sleep had been hard and dreamless and the morning felt calm, a time in which to forget the storms of the previous evening. But when I moved to get up, pain stabbed me above the ribs and I fell back to the mattress, sweating. I probed the bruise where Melchiori had kicked me. No ribs seemed to be broken so I tried again, slowly rocking myself on to my feet and straightening my back. I shuffled to the bathroom and faced the mirror.
The bruise extended from the middle of my belly to below my left nipple, cloudy as the Milky Way, darkening where Melchiori’s heel had struck me. But my forehead looked good. No bruise – just a half-inch-long scab where the skin had split. The spot on my cheek where Terrence had hit me two days ago was only a scratch. I sucked in a deep breath and lifted my arms cautiously above my shoulders and then above my head. My face paled but my legs remained steady. So I showered, letting the hot water sting the skin on my back, and dressed in jeans and a loose cotton T-shirt.
Downstairs, Susan was eating breakfast at the kitchen table. She offered me her cheek and I kissed it and smelled soap and shampoo.
‘Good morning,’ she said and looked into my eyes with a warmth that seemed to me borne of our having survived a hard night.
‘Did you sleep?’ I asked.
‘A little. You?’
I nodded. ‘Surprisingly.’
I sat with her and ate and she handed me the sections of the morning paper that she’d finished reading but I left them on the table and watched her. She gave me a mild look and I knew better than to tell her again that we could live differently, so I asked, ‘What are you doing today?’
‘Showing a house on Old St Augustine.’
‘Want to have dinner out tonight?’
‘With Thomas?’
‘If he’ll come,’ I said.
Again she smiled. ‘OK.’
‘He still sleeping?’ I asked.
She nodded. ‘He stayed up until dawn drawing a new comic book. It was a rough night for all of us.’
I heard something to hope for in the word us.
When Susan left I read the paper. The front-page headline said Fourth Woman Killed. The article described Daniel Turner’s discovery of Brianna Sumner’s body in her bedroom after a neighbor called about suspicious activity. A police spokesman said that all four killings involved sexual assault and asphyxiation and without naming specifics added that details in this killing resembled those in the earlier three. The article said the suspicious activity that the neighbor observed involved two men who the police had decided weren’t responsible for Brianna’s Sumner’s death, though anyone with information concerning these men was encouraged to contact a citizens’ hotline. The reporter had interviewed the neighbor, a man named Bruce Serikos. Brianna Sumner and Ashley Littleton had been quiet and friendly, he’d said, and sometimes when they were out of town he’d taken care of their dog. He mentioned nothing about prostitution, nothing about drug addictions.
The article included photographs of the four victims along with short biographies. Tonya Richmond had wanted to be a model. Ashley Littleton, who was the daughter of a well-liked captain of a Mayport shrimp trawler, had completed a certificate program in accounting, loved dogs and had gotten married and divorced before she was twenty. Both had records for drug possession and prostitution. Brianna Sumner had worked as a dancer and bartender and she had a two-year-old son who lived with his father. Belinda had been born in Milwaukee, moved to Jacksonville as a teenager, left for Chicago – where she’d gone to college, worked as a community organizer and gotten married – and then moved back south. The newspaper said that Belinda’s husband had been a real-estate developer but said nothing about his conviction for drug trafficking or about Terrence.
By the time I finished reading, my calm was gone.
I looked at the Metro section. A headline at the top of the front page said City Councilman Shot in Home Invasion. According to the police, Don Melchiori had awakened and confronted two robbers at eleven-thirty the previous night. They’d struggled and the robbers had beaten the councilman and shot him in the shoulder before leaving empty handed. Melchiori was finishing his second term on the city council and was known for his work on the historical preservation of neighborhoods. He was in fair condition at University Hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.
I cleaned the dishes, leaving a plate of sausages for Thomas, got my keys and went into the living room. Charles and I had talked about going to see Terrence Mabry today. My son – an idea I couldn’t get my mind around. I also wanted to see Bobby Mabry and ask him about the burns on his hands. If Charles came with me when I talked to him, Bobby probably would refuse to tell me who’d hurt him. I looked out the living-room window. Glinting in the morning sun a police car was parked against the curb two houses away. Daniel had followed through on his promise to post an officer on me.
I threw my keys on to the couch. Daniel had said the officer would protect Susan, Thomas and me, but I knew better. Daniel wanted to know how deeply I’d involved myself in Belinda’s death.
So I went out the back door, across the patio and past the glassy surface of the pool. I walked down to the quarry pond and the drying mound of dirt where I’d buried Fela, then along the bank of the pond, through the neighbors’ yards and up to the street. I could call Charles and ask him to pick me up but I didn’t. I continued up the street and walked another quarter mile to the east until I reached the railroad tracks.
I went north on the railroad toward the water purification plant and the stretch of tracks where Belinda and I had lain on the gravel as a train bore down upon us. In the past two decades companies had built offices and cinderblock warehouses against the fence that separated the tracks from private land, and the railroad had replaced the creosote-stained wooden ties with reinforced concrete. Near the water plant, a radio station had erected a tower that looked like the steel framework for a huge church steeple. But the gravel rail bed remained the same, as did the smell of diesel and the ragged odor of flowering weeds. Memories of the days and evenings when I’d come to the tracks with Belinda flooded me. I thought about the words Christopher had spoken when I’d visited him at the house he shared with his new wife and her daughter. Belinda grew up. That’s what most of us do. I wondered what that meant. If it meant forgetting the past, I wanted none of it.
Near the spot on the tracks where Belinda and I had sex, the chain-link fence had been bent to the ground, forming a bridge to the parking lot behind a factory that made disposable plastic plates and cups. Next to the bent fence a man was sitting on a stack of the wooden ties that the railroad had removed. He was tan and skinny, in his late twenties or early thirties, wearing brown denim overalls cut off at the knees, and no T-shirt. A dirty blond ponytail hung down his back. He drank from a sixteen-ounce can of Budweiser.
I stooped between the rails and looked northward into the heat-bent air. What was I looking for? Tens of thousands of trains had passed over the spot where Belinda and I had lain. Men like the one on the railroad ties had drunk their beer and pissed on it. Tens of thousands of rains and winds had washed the gravel clean of our presence. What was I looking for? The heat was dizzying. What did I expect to find?
‘Next train don’t come for twenty-five minutes,’ said the man on the ties.
I didn’t reply.
‘You going to kill yourself?’
I said nothing.
‘I wouldn’t come here no more if you did.’
I walked over to him. ‘I used to come to this spot.’
‘Yeah, you and everyone else.’
I looked at him close. He was drunk or crazy or both. ‘You come here a lot?’
He nodded the slow, lazy nod of a man who had nowhere else to be.
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘Why the hell not?’ He laughed.
‘But why here?’
He drank from the can, squinted and said, ‘Fuck off.’
‘All right,’ I said and turned away.
But as I walked back the way I’d come he yelled after me, ‘You have choices!’
You have choices. My mother’s words when I cut her lover’s face in the apartment above the dry-cleaners.
Then, my mother held me down as the sweaty man put his hands on me. Blood on his face, blood on his chest, blood on the bath towel that lay discarded on the floor like bleached roadkill.
Did she have choices? Did he?
Something happened. Something amid the broken pieces of clay bowls in the apartment above the dry-cleaners, in the chemical and sweat stink of a summer afternoon. Something. I preferred not to talk about it or to think about it even. Would not, most of the time.
Did I have choices? Maybe some of the time.
What if I put my hands on Lee Anne while Susan slept alone in our sunroom? Did choice make a difference? The result was the same. Susan didn’t have to like it. I didn’t have to like it.
What if I chased Belinda’s killer like a blind man? Did choice make a difference then?
Later on the day that I visited my mother, my father had dragged me from our house to the car, a gleaming new burgundy Monte Carlo that he’d bought only weeks earlier. He’d put me in the front passenger seat and slammed the door. He’d disappeared into the house again. The sky over the dashboard was an endless blue. My skin felt as if it would burst in the heat of the car. My father came outside again with his Ruger .22. I didn’t ask where we were going. I knew, and I took a secret, childish pleasure in the violence that must come.
We drove the half mile to my mother’s apartment and parked at the curb. My father didn’t look at me. He checked the magazine of the Ruger, said, ‘Wait here,’ and climbed out of the car.
He wasn’t gone long. I looked up through the passenger window to the sill where my mother had displayed my bowls. With the bowls gone, the apartment looked empty from outside, as if no one had ever lived there. I watched a woman in a green dress, carrying shirts on hangers, come out of the dry-cleaners. She smiled at me and I didn’t smile back. I watched a single black bird cross the sky over the building and wondered whether its nest was near.
A gunshot, sharp and without echo, discharged inside the building and suddenly I felt a damp heat soaking through my underwear on to my legs.
Then my father came out of the street door and climbed into the car. He tossed his gun on to the backseat. He was sweating and panting. A sprinkle of blood covered the bottom of his work shirt. He looked at me with fierce eyes. ‘You don’t ever have to let anyone hurt you,’ he said. ‘You’ve got choices.’
‘Did you shoot her?’ I asked, uncertain whether I wanted my mother dead or alive.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I didn’t shoot her.’ He pulled the car from the curb and drove us home.
I didn’t know what my mother did with her lover’s dead body. I didn’t even know that he really was dead. But I’d assumed it for all these years. I never saw the man again. The police never came to our house to question my father. My mother left, alone, for Arizona less than a month later.
Thomas was eating breakfast at the counter when I came in through the back door. He wore khaki shorts and the same black T-shirt he’d had on the previous night. His hair was matted from sleep. The newspaper was spread out next to his plate and he was reading about Brianna Sumner.
‘That’s a sad story,’ I said, poured myself a cup of coffee and watched him read.
He looked up. ‘It doesn’t mention you.’
‘It shouldn’t. This isn’t about me,’ I said. He looked unconvinced, so I added, ‘I knew one of the women twenty-five years ago. I shouldn’t even be involved.’
‘That’s what everyone keeps telling you.’
‘Yes.’
He looked at the pictures of Belinda, Tonya Richmond, Ashley Littleton and Brianna Sumner and read the biographies. He said, ‘I want to help.’
That rocked me on my heels. ‘What?’
‘I want to help you … do what you’re doing.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I just want to.’
A laugh erupted from my gut, a short, hard laugh that made my ribs hurt, a laugh of surprise, not derision. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Definitely not.’
Thomas looked hurt.
‘But I’ve never been prouder of you,’ I said. ‘Never.’
‘Fuck you, Dad.’
I looked at him long and perplexed. ‘Don’t ever say that. It’s an ugly thing to say.’
He said, ‘You treat Mom and me like we’re children.’
‘You are a child.’
‘I’m almost sixteen.’
‘Which makes you a child. Technically.’
‘I’m almost as big as you.’
‘Physically.’
He squared his eyes on mine in a way that nearly made me shrink from him. ‘Not just physically.’
I shook my head. ‘I’m sorry, Thomas.’ I sipped from my coffee and went into the living room.
He called after me, ‘I want to help.’
I went to the window and looked out. The police car hadn’t moved. It idled in the sunshine, heat rising from its hood, like a slow beast that might rise and move when it finished warming its cold blood. The leaves on the trees were still. The sky was hot and cloudless.
Thomas came into the room and stood beside me. He was almost as tall as I was.
‘Your mother would kill me if I let you.’
‘She’ll probably kill you anyway.’
I laughed. ‘When did you grow up?’
‘In May.’
‘Yeah? What happened in May?’
‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘I made that up.’
I put my hand on his shoulder. He tensed but didn’t pull away. I nodded out the window and said, ‘If you go out the back and walk to the driveway through the gate, you can get to my car without the man in the cruiser seeing you. Then you can back out of the driveway and pull away in the other direction. Let him follow but try not to let him see you clearly. Take him on a slow tour of the city.’
Thomas cocked his head to the side. ‘I only have a driver’s permit. You or Mom should be in the car when I’m driving.’
‘I know.’
‘You want me to drive around by myself with a police car behind me?’
‘Yes.’
He thought about it and said, ‘Cool.’
‘Don’t get carried away.’
‘Anything else?’
‘Yes, you can have dinner with your mother and me at Sorrento’s.’
That excited him less but he agreed to eat with us.
‘Take your phone,’ I said and gave him my car key.
He headed to the back door with a grin, the first I’d seen on his face in weeks. He said, ‘This is totally irresponsible.’
I watched from the front as Thomas backed my Lexus out of the driveway, shifted and hit the gas. Faster than I would’ve liked but it did the trick. The police cruiser pulled from the curb and followed.
Then I went to the kitchen and called Charles. ‘Can you pick me up?’ I asked.
‘Twenty minutes,’ he said and hung up.