seventeen

The phone rings and I hope someone will answer it.

I hope no one answers it.

I’m parked on Preston Street, alone in the car. Somewhere in Charleston, a phone rings in the Anglers’ office.

“Hello.” The voice is soft, trained to answer the phone.

My finger hovers over the end button. She tries again. “You’ve reached the Anglers. How may I help you?”

I close my eyes. “Yes, may I please speak to Harvey Bern?”

“May I tell him who is calling?”

“Yes, this is Eve Morrison, from Southern Tastes magazine.”

“One moment, please.”

I’ve practiced this conversation, how I’ll pretend to be the publisher’s dutiful wife, asking if a client is happy with his advertising. But my mouth is dry when he comes on the line.

“This is Harvey.”

“Hi, Mr. Bern. This is Eve Morrison, Cooper’s wife. I’m making some follow-up calls for Southern Tastes and want to make sure you’re happy with your advertising campaign after your meeting at the Bohemian.”

The deceit. I feel nauseous.

“Well, Mrs. Morrison, I’m glad for your call, but we haven’t decided on our campaign yet. Southern Tastes is one of our favorite online magazines, but we haven’t made a decision. And you must have us mixed up with another meeting.”

“Another meeting?” I ask.

“We’ve never met with Cooper in Savannah. Only in Charleston.”

“Well, please do forgive me.” I throw out my best southern accent.

He laughs, and I imagine an older gentleman with white hair and smile crinkles around his eyes. “No need to forgive. Thanks for following up. I should be back with Cooper soon.”

“Thanks for your consideration, and have a lovely day.”

“You, too, ma’am.”

And there it is. One more lie to add to the equation.

*   *   *

The car outside Willa’s cottage is beat-up and dusty, a faded blue Corolla missing its bumper. A tuft of Spanish moss sticks out from under the tire on the passenger side, as if the car came straight through the yard instead of the traditional driveway route.

The lights are on inside the cottage, even though the midday sun flares directly toward the windows. I stand at the door for more than a minute before knocking. Somewhere in the back of the house comes Willa’s laugh, the same one she’s had her entire life, full and throaty, a laugh that could never be called quiet or mysterious. I hear voices, too; their conversation is clear behind the door.

“How many times have you had to visit the morgue?” Willa asks.

A male voice, strong and sounding of cigarettes, replies, “Shit, more than I can count. It’s part of the job.”

“I don’t know if I could do that. I’d like writing the stories, but I don’t think I could see … that. You know, see death all the time.”

Willa opens the door wide and I see a man—tall and rugged, as if he’s just driven in from out west and needed to stop for water. His dark hair pokes from all angles and his beard is cut clean and sharp to the edges of his angular face. He holds out his hand. “Hello, Mrs. Morrison. I’m Noah from the Savannah News. We spoke on the phone.”

“Nice to meet you.”

Willa closes the door as I enter. “He was just telling me some stories about our city that we’d never know.… It’s fascinating and terrible.”

Fascinating and terrible. That’s the last thing I’m in the mood for.

Willa motions me toward the kitchen but continues talking about Noah, awe in her voice. “Noah has seen murders and overdoses; he’s met gang leaders and drug dealers. And here we are, just reading about it in the paper, like it exists somewhere else.” She pauses and then hands me a thick manila envelope.

“What’s this?” I ask.

“Photos of the man who died on Preston.”

“What?” I yank my hand away. “I don’t want to see this.”

“Neither did I. But it’s real.”

Noah rubs his hand across the stubble on his cheek. “You should see it. Everyone should. That’s why I’m writing this piece. People need to know what’s going on in this city aside from fancy horse-drawn carriages and beautiful old buildings.”

I hold my hands behind my back, as if handcuffed. “I don’t need to see it to know it’s true: There’s a dead man.”

Willa pushes the envelope toward me again. “Sometimes we have to look at it. Really look to understand. It wasn’t as real to me until … I saw it.”

“It’s real to me, and seeing it won’t change that. Have you found out anything new? I mean, do we know how he died?”

Willa glances at Noah, but then answers me. “Not much, really. The man has been cremated by now and numbered.”

“Numbered?”

“Yes, numbered. The guy has a number, Eve, not a name.” Willa cringes. “A freaking number. It’s too awful to imagine. How do you get so alone that you’re only a number?” She closes her eyes against the thought. “Anyway, the photos and autopsy they did showed he died of blunt trauma to the abdomen, where he then bled out internally. I thought maybe if I saw his face, I’d … I don’t know, maybe recognize him? But there was blunt trauma to his face also.”

“Blunt trauma,” I repeat.

Noah shuffles his feet as if to move or leave, but he remains in the same spot. “I’ll let you two be. I wanted to know if Willa remembered seeing this man that night, but she doesn’t. So … I’ll be getting on.”

Willa walks him to the door as I sit at the kitchen table with the unopened envelope in my hand. Do I want to look? Or know? Or see? Without answers, I am still sitting there as Willa returns to the kitchen. “Listen, Willa, I know you want answers. I know you do. So do I. But we have to let this rest. We can’t make up a story by piecing together all these dream images. We can’t.”

“I’m not making up a story out of dreams.” Willa speaks in a whisper but forced, like air is being pushed through a furnace full blast. “That man is dead, and that’s not a dream. That woman, Mary Jo, and her voice are real.”

“Just because they’re real doesn’t mean they are part of that night.”

“I wouldn’t believe me, either.”

“Willa.” I say her name as if it’s a quiet offering.

“That reporter wasn’t here to involve me. Or Cooper, for that matter. He only wants to know if we saw anything.”

“And you believe that?”

“You don’t?”

“I don’t know what to believe. Nothing is adding up.”

“How so?”

I spill it, all of it. I tell her about the money being moved and the cards that have arrived at the studio. I tell her about Harvey Bern and how he denied meeting with Cooper. Words fall out and nothing adds up to a coherent story.

She sits quietly for a long time, and I wonder if she’s understood me, if she’s absorbed anything I said.

“Something isn’t right,” she says.

“You think?”

Our laughter comes full force. We’re sisters hiding under the bed once more. “Whatever it is,” she says, “it will be all right. It will. Whatever happened that night, whatever the hell really happened, isn’t just about me, or my injuries. Now it’s about you and your marriage. Your life.”

“What?”

“All this time, I haven’t wanted to bother you with finding out the truth of that night because it was all about me and what I did or didn’t do. Now it’s about us. It’s about Gwen. It’s about the truth.”

“Yes,” I say, because it is all that is left to say.

*   *   *

An hour later and I’m back at work. Only, I’m not really back, because my mind is wandering through the halls of a morgue with a man with no name, and through the halls of a bank with that obsequious manager, and then the bar where my husband claimed to be with clients who weren’t there.

I look across the table, which is strewn with design ideas, and see Max working on a rough charcoal sketch for Larry Ford’s big party—and I do a 180. My mind is made up. I’m going to do it. I’m going to bring it up—the Kiss. I’m going to make sure Max understands it wasn’t what it seemed, but even so, that it was a one off and won’t ever happen again. But that’s not what comes out.

“Gwen got a tattoo,” I say.

“Of what?” he asks.

I drop the chart onto the table. “A feather.”

“Where?” He leans back in his chair. His neck cracks and he readjusts to stare at me. Those damn blue-ringed eyes.

“The back of her neck, right under her hairline. You can’t see it unless she pulls her hair up.”

“Are you going to kill her? And how? I mean, how are you going to get away with this murder?”

“Do you take anything seriously?” I smile at him.

“You could just send her to a convent.”

“Or to my in-laws, since they seem to know how to do everything so perfectly.”

“Problem solved.” He smiles. “Sorry. I just don’t know what to say. I’m not sure what I’d do, and I don’t have kids, so I don’t want to offer advice.”

“Please don’t offer advice. I have more than enough of that.” I turn my chair to face him. “Do you remember when we were at Soapbox and we worked all night on that city project?”

“And we ended up lying flat on the floor, drinking vodka and talking about why we wanted to spend our days and hours with type.”

Time was slippery then. It was more than twenty years ago and we were exhausted and lying on a linoleum floor, half-drunk on our way to full drunk. “You said that you liked the way letters looked next to each other, the way they changed and made something new. It wasn’t just the words, but the way you could make the words look.”

“And you said it was so we could all get “good mail” in our boxes and not just bills. And here we are talking about your daughter. It all moved so … quickly.”

I take in a breath. “I’m doing that thing you don’t like.”

“What thing?”

“When I talk about something besides work. Sorry.” I rub my eyes. “I’m tired. I said too much.”

“I never said I didn’t like it. I said you never do it. It’s the other way around—I love talking to you, Eve. About everything and anything and all things.”

I don’t know what to say to such kindness.

“I think Gwen is doing the same thing you did when you made these commandments. She’s trying to make sense of things.”

“Well then, damn, can’t she just hide in a fort and make some new commandments?”

“You know what I think? I think that these new commandments you made were a bigger rebellion than a feather under a hairline. I have a feeling that there is a reason this isn’t finished.” He taps at the empty number ten. “You are an extraordinary woman. Do you know that? Don’t get too mad at Gwen for the tattoo, okay?”

“Thought you weren’t going to give me advice.”

“I changed my mind.” He grins, and it almost turns into a smile before he stands and shoves the chair backward. “I gotta teach that class tomorrow morning. Some sleep in between would be great.”

“Thanks for all the help with this.” I point to the cards. “We’re almost there.”

“Almost.” He grabs his bag to leave and then hesitates, as if there is something he knows he’s forgotten but can’t remember what.

“Max.”

He does stop and looks over his shoulder. “Yes?”

“About that night…”

He holds up his hand. “I know. You didn’t mean it. You’re sorry. You don’t have to tell me again.”

“Okay.”

With a few steps and the slide of a door, he’s gone and I’m alone, Regina Spektor singing that line from “How”—“How could I forget your love?”—over the iPod speakers.

I pick up the pen and write the last commandment; the last of the Ten Good Ideas; the first thing I want: Love.

That’s all. Just that.