The molecules of air popped into light. On his bed, lying on his back, he watched as darkness moved like silt, draining from the ceiling, trailing silver across the room, the blue morning light drifting in from the window. This shifting of the earth and sun was the only mechanism in life that seemed to click into place. It made sense—like the wristwatch his father gave him for his bar mitzvah, the hands still circling after sixty-three years. He sat up on the double bed. Dazed. The foam mattress on a hard wooden platform felt good on his back and aching hips, the small night table with its convenient drawer and a reading lamp on top with a torn pink shade orienting him.
He thought back to day one when he had walked around the three rooms with Ivan. The bed looked primitive to him, but he deemed it sufficient. What did a single man need? Running water. A stove. Ivan unpacked the groceries, filling the refrigerator as Rose had instructed. Coffee. Milk. Cheese. Bread. Eggs. Hungarian sausage, cold cuts. The basics.
“Thank you. Thank you. I’m all set now. Take this.”
Edward put an American twenty in Ivan’s hand.
“But that is too much,” the boy had said.
“Take it. I’ll see you in two days. I appreciate the help.”
Then he had called Nan.
“I’m here. Getting settled in,” he told her on the phone.
“Give me the lay of the land,” she said to him. “All the details. Did you check the stove? Is the refrigerator working?”
“I’ve got all I need.” Except for truth and justice, he thought.
“I’ll call you tomorrow,” she said.
“Good. Okay. Thank you.”
“Dad?”
“What.”
“You don’t have to thank me. I’m not a stranger.”
THIS MORNING, EDWARD thought he smelled rain in the air. He stood, felt himself keeling, and found the wall for balance, pulling back the shade to peek at the dull gray sky. Patience. It was tricky. Hold on to something. This was the moment every day since Deborah’s death when the enormous tide of his battered life returned to him—a turgid river carrying the weight of all that went wrong. He would find the sleazeball who had killed his daughter. Lord knows he had stopped believing in anything after Deborah died, after Sylvia died. Except what was right. No one wanted to talk about a murdered child. His friends, the ones still living, the ones who had retired to condos in Florida, patted him on the shoulder, called him a few times a month. Come down for the winter, Ed. Spend a few weeks in the sun. It will do you good.
Waiting.
They waited for him to come around. Nan waited. But he had no intention of giving up.
In the tiny bathroom, he uncapped his vial of heart pills. They were supposed to help his arrhythmia, but they made him sluggish, too. Jesus Christ. He’d survived a war. But this—he fumbled with the tiny bottle, pitched two capsules into the back of his throat, then swallowed and went to the night table drawer for his cell phone. The gun lay there, too, at the back of the drawer. Resting.
GETTING TO THE doctor who prescribed his pills, Dr. Zoltan Igor—last name first in this backward country—was a royal pain in the ass: a bus ride up those steep Buda hills to the stop on the corner in front of the doctor’s mother’s house, a one-story stucco building, neat and clean, with trimmed hedges on either side of a pathway, an examining room in back of the house.
Zoltan checked him out the week he arrived, wrote prescriptions. Next visit, if he needed it, Edward would take a cab. He was through with buses. The last visit put him out of commission for days. No. He shook his head at himself. Too angry to die—that’s what I am. God’s little comedy. Making him work for his death like it was something he wanted but couldn’t have.
A WEEK AFTER shooting holes through a can of chicken soup that he had placed on a tree stump in his backyard, Sylvia told him to stop. What was he doing with a gun? she wanted to know. Who was he? She didn’t know her own husband anymore.
“Sylvia, I’m still the man you married, but if that bastard shows up at my house again, I’ll shoot him in the neck.”
“And what will that do for us, Edward? Get her back? You’ll end up in jail.”
Edward lumbered across the living room and headed for the kitchen to make coffee. He knew he was mentally in the danger zone now, careening down those highways of thought that drove him across bleak, empty plains, deserts of nothingness.
After the funeral, that shit of a husband held his hand out to Edward, his eyes looking like soggy pools of gray-green mud. This, in their kitchen in Newton. Too many people crowding the rooms. Edward ignored Howard’s hand.
“I’m shattered,” Howard said. “I don’t know what to do. She was my life.” He bent over and started crying, sobbing.
“Sit,” Sylvia told him, pointing to the kitchen chair.
“I’m sorry,” Howard said. “I can’t believe this.”
Edward heard the words, but his skin still itched. Something didn’t add up. This stranger who was ten years younger than his daughter. Deborah hardly knew him, and within months she was married to him. No wedding ceremony. No announcement. Just married. A phone call one day telling them.
“Married? You’re married?” Sylvia said over and over.
But, then, that was part of the problem: Deborah’s adult life was a secret. She’d had so many boyfriends, they’d stopped counting. How many fights had he had with her over this? Why can’t you settle down? What’s the matter with you? Then came the weakness in her limbs that turned into multiple sclerosis. After that, the medications and prescriptions. Expensive, too much money for her. But it seemed to sober her up. She called more often, asked him to come visit. He sent her a check once a month to help out. He put aside money. She took a new job at an insurance company downtown, one with benefits, paid vacation time. They didn’t mind her wheelchair, she said. They let her work at home sometimes.
She said.
Edward crossed the living room again, past the couch and the fans and into the bedroom, the shades pulled to the sill, the light still coming through, unstoppable.
He sat on the bed and took the compact gun out of the drawer. Good and light, made for personal protection, easy to conceal. That’s what anyone would think of an old man alone in the world, a man who had been robbed of his daughter. He told Sylvia he’d gotten the gun because he didn’t trust Howard, but she didn’t believe him. Ach. He put it back in the drawer. He’d shot a round in the backyard, into the woods behind his house where Sylvia never liked to go. Shooting came back to him like riding a bike. Easy. Automatic. The army had trained him well. Those twelve weeks in Alabama. Started off fat as an overripe pear when he left home, took the train from Boston and headed south. Three months later, his clothes fit another man twice as big. He was lean. All muscle.
Edward got up again and went back to the kitchen; scoops of coffee grounds had spilled onto the countertop. Christ. What a mess. He was a mess. He looked down at himself. Soft. Gangly legs. A belly, from bread and years of overeating: deli sandwiches, Chinese food, butter. He sponged the black specks of coffee into the sink, poured himself a glass of water. Always, the water.
In the living room, he shuffled to the window and tilted his easel, pulling up the shade for a full view of the redbrick building opposite his and of the wedge of sky above a break in the trees and, farther down, a glance at gray, pitted buildings, a memory of what was once grand like everything else around here. Memories of disaster, loss, stunted dreams. Even the boy, Ivan, only sixteen, looked old and serious.
He turned to his half-finished painting of a landscape, the thin handle of the brush smooth, easy to maneuver, the stiff bristles jabbing grays and blues, creating his version of the sky and then the dark hills, adding a dip of cream into the mix and merging the edges, because nothing was sharp. The sky shaped itself into a silken surface—fuzzy and distant, the smell of oil paint rising, taking him away.