The days are like leaves, waiting to fall.
The past lies in the shadows of our lives. It is endlessly patient, secure in the knowledge that all we have done, and all that we have failed to do, must surely return to haunt us in the end. When I was young, I cast each day aside unthinkingly, like dandelion seeds committed to the wind, floating harmlessly from the hands of a boy and vanishing over his shoulder as he moved onward along the path toward the sunset, and home. Nothing was to be regretted, for there were more days to come. Slights and injuries would be forgotten, hurts would be forgiven, and there was radiance enough in the world to light the days that followed.
Now, as I look back over my shoulder at the path that I have taken, I can see that it has become tangled and obscured by undergrowth, where the seeds of past actions and half-acknowledged sins have taken root. Another shadows me along the path. She has no name, but she looks like Susan, my dead wife; and Jennifer, my first daughter, who was killed beside her in our little house in New York, walks with her.
For a time I wished that I had died with them. Sometimes that regret returns.
I move more slowly through life now, and the growth is catching up with me. There are briars around my ankles, weeds brush my fingertips as I walk, and the ground beneath my feet crackles with the fallen leaves of half-dead days.
The past is waiting for me, a monster of my own creation.
The past is waiting for us all.
∗ ∗ ∗
I awoke to darkness, with dawn impending. Beside me, Rachel slept, unknowing. In a small room next to ours, our infant daughter rested. We had made this place together. It was supposed to be a safe haven, but what I saw around me was no longer our home. It was some composite, a collision of remembered places. This was the bed that Rachel and I chose, yet it stood now not in a bedroom overlooking the Scarborough marshes but in an urban landscape. I could hear street voices raised, and sirens crying in the distance. There was a dresser from my parents’ house, and on it lay my dead wife’s cosmetics. I could see a brush on the cabinet to my left, over Rachel’s sleeping head. Her hair was red. The hairs caught in the brush were blond.
I rose. I entered a hallway in Maine, and descended stairs in New York. In the living room, she waited. Beyond the window, the marshes shone with silver, incandescent with moonlight. Shadows moved across the waters, although there was a cloudless night sky above. The shapes drifted endlessly east, until at last they were swallowed up by the waiting ocean beyond. There was no traffic now, and no sounds of the city broke the fragile quiet of the night. All was stillness, but for the shadows on the marsh.
Susan sat by the window, her back to me, her hair tied with an aquamarine bow. She stared through the glass at a little girl who skipped on the lawn. Her hair was like her mother’s. Her head was down as she counted her steps.
And then my dead wife spoke.
You have forgotten us.
No, I have not forgotten.
Then who is that who sleeps beside you now, in the place where I once slept? Who is it that holds you in the night? Who is it that has borne you a child? How can you say that you have not forgotten, when the scent of her is upon you?
I am here. You are here. I cannot forget.
You cannot love two women with all of your heart. One of us must be lost to you. Is it not true that you no longer think of us in the silences between every heartbeat? Are there not times when we are absent from your thoughts while you twine yourself in her arms?
She spit the words, and the power of her anger sprayed blood upon the glass. Outside, the child stopped her skipping and stared at me through the pane. The darkness obscured her face, and I was grateful.
She was your child.
She will always be my child. In this world or the next, she will always be mine.
We will not go away. We will not disappear. We refuse to leave you. You will remember us. You will not forget.
And she turned, and once again I saw her ruined face, and the empty sockets of her eyes, and the memory of the agonies that she endured in my name were brought back to me with such force that I spasmed, my limbs extending, my back arching with such force that I heard the vertebrae crack. I woke suddenly with my arms curled around my chest, hands upon my skin and hair, my mouth open in agony, and Rachel was holding me and whispering—“Hush, hush”—and my new daughter was crying in the voice of the old, and the world was a place that the dead chose not to leave, for to leave was to be forgotten, and they would not be forgotten.
Rachel stroked my hair, calming me, then went to attend to our child. I listened to her cooing to the infant, walking with her in her arms until the tears ceased. She so rarely cried, this little girl, our Samantha. She was so quiet. She was not like the one that was lost, and yet I sometimes saw a little of Jennifer in her face, even in her first months. Sometimes, too, I thought I caught the ghost of Susan in her features, but that could not be.
I closed my eyes. I would not forget. Their names were written upon my heart, along with those of so many others: those who once were lost, and those whom I had failed to find; those who trusted me, and those who stood against me; those who died at my hand, and those who died at the hands of others. Each name was written, carved with a blade upon my flesh, name upon name, tangled one unto another, yet each clearly legible, each subtly engraved upon this great palimpsest of the heart.
I would not forget.
They would not let me forget.
∗ ∗ ∗
The visiting priest at Saint Maximilian Kolbe Catholic Church struggled to articulate his dismay at what he was seeing.
“What . . . What is he wearing?”
The object of his dismay was a diminutive ex-burglar, dressed in a suit that appeared to be made from some form of NASA-endorsed synthetic material. To say that it shimmered as its wearer moved was to underestimate its capacity for distorting light. This suit shone like a bright new star, embracing every available color in the spectrum, and a couple more that the Creator Himself had presumably passed over on the grounds of good taste. If the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz had opted for a makeover at a car-valeting service, he would have emerged looking something like Angel.
“It seems to be made of some kind of metal,” said the priest. He was squinting slightly.
“It’s also reflective,” I added.
“It is,” said the priest. He sounded almost impressed, in a confused way. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like it before. Is he, er, a friend of yours?”
I tried to keep the vague sense of embarrassment out of my voice.
“He’s one of the godparents.”
There was a noticeable pause. The visiting priest was a missionary home on leave from Southeast Asia. He had probably seen a great deal in his time. It was flattering, in a way, to think that it had taken a baptism in southern Maine to render him speechless.
“Perhaps we should keep him away from naked flames,” said the priest, once he had given the implications some thought.
“That might be wise.”
“He will have to hold a candle, of course, but I’ll ask him to keep it outstretched. That should be all right. And the godmother?”
Now it was my turn to pause before continuing.
“That’s where things get complicated. See the gentleman standing close by him?”
Beside Angel, and towering at least a foot above him, was his partner, Louis. One might have described Louis as a Log Cabin Republican, except that any self-respecting Log Cabin Republican would have bolted the doors, pulled the shutters, and waited for the cavalry to arrive rather than admit this man to his company. He was wearing a dark blue suit and sunglasses, but even with the shades on he seemed to be trying hard not to look directly at his significant other. In fact, he was doing a pretty good impression of a man without a significant other at all, hampered only by the fact that Angel insisted on following him around and talking to him occasionally.
“The tall gentleman? He seems a little out of place.”
It was an astute observation. Louis was fastidiously turned out, as always, and apart from his height and his color there was little about his physical appearance that would seem to invite such a comment. Yet somehow he radiated difference, and a vague sense of potential threat.
“Well, I guess he would be a godfather too.”
“Two godfathers?”
“And a godmother: my partner’s sister. She’s outside somewhere.”
The priest did a little soft-shoe shuffle to emphasize his discomfort.
“It’s most unusual.”
“I know,” I said, “but then, they’re unusual people.”
∗ ∗ ∗
It was late January, and there was still snow on sheltered ground. Two days earlier, I had driven down to New Hampshire to buy cheap booze in the state liquor store in preparation for the celebrations after the christening. When I was done, I walked for a time by the Piscataqua River, the ice still a foot thick by the shore but webbed by cracks. The center was free of encumbrance, though, and the water flowed slowly and steadily toward the sea. I walked against the current, following a wooded berm, thick with fir, that the river had created over time, cutting off a patch of bog land where early-budding blueberry and blackberry, and gray-black winterberry and tan winter maleberry, coexisted with spruce and larch and rhodora. At last I came to the floating area of the bog, all green and purple where the sphagnum moss was interwoven with cranberry vines. I plucked a berry, sweetened by the frost, and placed it between my teeth. When I bit down, the taste of the juice filled my mouth. I found a tree trunk, long fallen and now gray and rotted, and sat upon it. Spring was coming, and with it the long, slow thaw. There would be new leaves, and new life.
But I have always been a winter person. Now, more than ever before, I desired to remain frozen amid snow and ice, cocooned and unchanging. I thought of Rachel and my daughter, Sam, and those others who had gone before them. Life slows in winter, but now I wanted it to cease its forward momentum entirely, except for us three. If I could hold us here, wrapped all in white, then perhaps everything would be fine. If the days advanced only for us, then no ill could come. No strangers would arrive at our door, and no demands would be made upon us other than those elemental things that we required from one another, and that we freely gave in return.
Yet even here, amid the silence of the winter woods and the moss-covered water, life went on, a hidden, teeming existence masked by snow and ice. The stillness was a ruse, an illusion, fooling only those who were unwilling or unable to look closer and see what lay beneath. Time and life moved inexorably forward. Already, it was growing dark around me. Soon it would be night, and they would come again.
They were visiting more frequently, the little girl who was almost my daughter, and her mother who was not quite my wife. Their voices were growing more insistent, the memory of them in this life becoming increasingly polluted by the forms that they had taken in the next. In the beginning, when first they came, I could not tell what they were. I thought them phantasms of grief, a product of my troubled, guilty mind, but gradually they assumed a kind of reality. I did not grow used to their presence, but I learned to accept it. Whether real or imagined, they still symbolized a love that I once felt, and continued to feel. But now they were becoming something different, and their love was whispered through bared teeth.
We will not be forgotten.
All was coming apart around me, and I did not know what to do, so I sat instead among snow and ice on a rotted tree trunk, and willed clocks to stop.
∗ ∗ ∗
It was warmer than it had been in many days. Rachel was standing outside the church, holding Sam in her arms. Her mother, Joan, was beside her. Our daughter was wrapped in white, her eyes tightly closed, as though she were troubled in her sleep. The sky was clear blue, and the winter sunlight shone coldly upon Black Point. Our friends and neighbors were scattered before us, some talking, smoking. Most had dressed up for the occasion, happy for an excuse to break out some colorful clothes in winter. I nodded greetings to a few people, then joined Rachel and Joan.
As I approached, Sam woke and waved her arms. She yawned, looked blearily about, then decided there was nothing important enough to keep her from another nap. Joan tucked the white shawl under Sam’s chin to keep out the cold. She was a small, stout woman who wore minimal makeup and kept her silver hair cut short against her skull. After meeting her for the first time that morning, Louis had suggested that she was trying to get in touch with her inner lesbian. I advised him to keep those opinions to himself, or else Joan Wolfe would try to get in touch with Louis’s inner gay man by reaching into his chest and tearing his heart out. She and I got on okay, most of the time, but I knew that she worried about the safety of her daughter and her new grandchild, and this translated into a distance between us. For me it was like being within sight of a warm, friendly place that could be reached only by traversing a frozen lake. I accepted that Joan had cause to feel concerned because of things that had happened in the past, but that didn’t make her implicit disapproval of me any easier to bear. Still, compared to my relations with Rachel’s father, Joan and I were bosom buddies. Frank Wolfe, once he had a couple of drinks inside him, felt compelled to end most of our encounters with the words “You know, if anything ever happens to my daughter . . .”
Rachel was wearing a light blue dress, plain and unadorned. There were wrinkles on the back of the dress, and a thread hung loose from the seam. She looked tired and distracted.
“I can take her, if you like,” I said.
“No, she’s fine.”
The words came out too quickly. I felt like I’d been pushed hard in the chest and forced to take a step back. I looked at Joan. After a couple of seconds, she moved away and went to join Rachel’s younger sister, Pam, who was smoking a cigarette and flirting with a group of admiring locals.
“I know she is,” I said quietly. “It’s you I’m concerned about.”
Rachel leaned against me for a moment, then, almost as if she were counting the seconds until she could put space between us once more, broke the contact.
“I just want this to be done,” she said. “I want all of these people to be gone.”
We hadn’t invited very many people to the christening. Angel and Louis were present, of course, and Walter and Lee Cole had come up from New York. Apart from them, the bulk of the little group was made up of Rachel’s immediate family and some of our friends from Portland and Scarborough. All told, there were twenty-five or thirty people present, no more, and most would come back to our house after the ceremony. Usually, Rachel would have reveled in such company, but since Sam’s birth she had grown increasingly insular, withdrawing even from me. I tried to recall the early days of Jennifer’s life, before she and her mother were taken from me, and although Jennifer had been as raucous as Sam was quiet, I could not remember encountering the kind of difficulties that now troubled Rachel and me. True, it was natural that Sam should be the focus of Rachel’s energy and attention. I tried to help her in every way that I could, and had cut back on my work so that I could take on some of the burden of caring for her and give Rachel a little time to herself, if she chose. Instead, she seemed almost to resent my presence, and with the arrival of Angel and Louis that morning it appeared that the tension between us had increased exponentially.
“I can tell them you’re feeling ill,” I said. “You could just take Sam upstairs to our room later and get away from everyone. They’ll understand.”
She shook her head. “It’s not that. I want them gone. Do you understand?”
And in truth, I did not, not then.
∗ ∗ ∗
The woman arrived at the auto shop early that morning. It stood on the verge of an area that, if it was not quite gentrified, then at least was no longer mugging the gentry. She had taken the subway to Queens and been forced to change trains twice, having mistaken the number of the subway line. The streets were quieter today, although she still could see little beauty in this place. There was bruising to her face, and her left eye hurt every time she blinked.
After the young man had struck her, she had taken a moment to recover her composure against the wall of an alleyway. It was not the first time that a man had raised his hand to her, but never before had she endured a blow from a stranger, and one half her age. The experience left her humiliated and angry, and in the minutes that followed she wished, perhaps for the first time ever, that Louis were near at that moment, that she could reach out and tell him what had occurred and watch as he humiliated the pimp in turn. In the darkness of the alleyway, she placed her hands on her knees and lowered her head. She felt like she was about to vomit. Her hands were shaking, and there was a sheen of sweat upon her face. She closed her eyes and began to pray until the feelings of rage went away, and as they departed her hands grew still, and her skin became cool once again.
She heard a woman moan close by, and a man spoke harsh words to her. She looked to her right and saw shapes moving rhythmically beside some discarded trash bags. Cars drifted slowly by, their windows lowered, the drivers’ faces rendered cruel and hungry by streetlights and headlamps. A tall white girl teetered on pink heels, her body barely concealed by white lingerie. Beside her, a black woman leaned against the hood of a car, her hands splayed upon the metal, her buttocks raised to attract the attention of passing men. Close by, the rhythmic thrusting grew faster, and the woman’s moans increased in pitch, false and empty, before finally fading entirely. Seconds later, she heard footsteps. The man emerged from the shadows first. He was young and white, and well dressed. His tie was askew, and he was running his hands through his hair to tidy it after his exertions. She smelled alcohol and a trace of cheap perfume. He barely glanced at the woman against the wall as he turned onto the street.
He was followed, after a time, by a little white girl. She looked barely old enough to drive a car, yet here she was, dressed in a black miniskirt and a cutoff top, her heels adding two inches to her diminutive stature, her dark hair cut in a bob, and her delicate features obscured by crudely applied cosmetics. She seemed to be having trouble walking, as though she were in some pain. She had almost passed the black woman by when a hand reached out, not touching her, merely imploring her to stop.
“Excuse me, miss,” she said.
The young girl paused. Her eyes were very large and blue, but already the older woman could see the light dying inside. “I can’t give you money,” she said.
“I don’t want money. I have a picture. I’d like you to take a look at it, maybe tell me if you know the girl.”
She reached into her bag and removed the photograph of her daughter. After some hesitation, the girl took it. She looked at it for a time, then handed it back.
“She’s gone,” she said.
The older woman stepped slowly forward. She didn’t want to alarm the girl. “You know her?”
“Not really. I saw her around some, but she went away a day or two after I started. I heard her street name was LaShan, but I don’t think that was her real name.”
“No, her name is Alice.”
“Are you her mother?”
“Yes.”
“She is.”
“She had a friend. Her name was Sereta.”
“Do you know where I can find her friend?”
The girl shook her head.
“She left too. I wish I could tell you more, but I can’t. I got to go.”
Before the woman could stop her, she had stepped out into the stream and was taken up by the flow. She followed her, watching her go. She saw the girl cross the street and hand some money over to the young black man who had hit her, then take up position once again with the other women lining the street.
Where were the police? she wondered. How could they let this continue on their doorsteps, this exploitation, this suffering? How could they allow a little girl like that to be used, to be killed slowly from the inside out? And if they could permit this to happen, how much could they care about a lost black girl who had fallen into this river of human misery and was dragged down by its currents?
She was a fool to believe that she could come to this strange city and find her daughter alone. She had called the police first, of course, before she had even decided to come north, and had given them what details she could over the phone. They had advised her to file a report in person once she came to the city, and she had done so the previous day. She had watched the policeman’s expression alter slightly as she spoke to him of her child’s circumstances. To him, her daughter was another addict drifting through a dangerous life. Perhaps he meant what he said when he told her he would do his best for her, but she knew that the disappearance of her little girl was not as important as a missing white girl, maybe one with money or influence, or simply one without puncture holes in the flesh between her fingers and toes. She had considered returning to the police that morning and describing the man who had struck her and the young prostitute with whom she had spoken, but she believed that it would make little difference if she did. The time for the police was gone now. She needed someone for whom her daughter would be a priority, not merely another name on an ever-growing list of the disappeared.
Although it was Sunday, the main door to the auto shop was half-raised, and music was playing inside. The woman crouched down and edged her way into the dimly lit interior. A thin man in coveralls was bent over the interior of a big foreign car. His name was Arno. Beside him, Tony Bennett’s voice came from the cheap speakers of a small, battered radio.
“Hello?” said the woman.
Arno turned his head, although his hands remained hidden in the workings of the engine.
“I’m sorry, lady, we’re closed,” he said.
He knew he should have pulled the shutter down fully, but he liked to let a little air in, and anyway he didn’t expect to be here for too long. The Audi was due to be picked up first thing Monday morning, and another hour or two would see it done.
“I’m looking for someone,” she said.
“The boss ain’t around.”
As the woman approached, he saw the swelling on her face. He wiped his hands on a rag and abandoned the car for the time being.
“Hey, you okay? What happened to your face?”
The woman was close to him now. She was hiding her distress and her fear, but the mechanic could see it in her eyes, like a scared child peering out of twin windows.
“I’m looking for someone,” she repeated. “He gave me this.”
She removed her wallet from her bag and carefully extracted a card from its folds. The card was slightly yellowed at the edges, but apart from this natural ageing it was in pristine condition. The mechanic reckoned that it had been kept safe for a long time, just in case it was ever needed.
Arno took the card. There was no name upon it, only an illustration. It depicted a serpent being trampled beneath the feet of an armored angel. The angel had a lance in his right hand, and its point had pierced the reptile. Dark blood flowed from the wound. On the back of the card was the number of a discreet answering service. Beside it was a single letter L, written in black ink, along with the handwritten address of the auto shop in which they now stood.
Few people had such cards in their possession, and the mechanic had never seen a card with the address of the shop added by hand. The letter L was the clincher. In effect, this was an “access all areas” pass, a request—no, an order—to extend any and all help to the person who possessed it.
“Did you call the number?” he asked.
“I don’t want to talk to him through no service. I want to see him.”
“He’s not here. He’s out of town.”
“Where?”
The mechanic hesitated before answering.
“Maine.”
“I’d be grateful to you if you’d give me the address of where he’s at.”
Arno walked to the cluttered office that stood to the left of the main work area. He flicked through the address book until he came to the entry he needed, then took a piece of paper and transferred the relevant details to it. He folded the paper and gave it to the woman.
“You want me to call him for you, let him know you’re on your way?”
“Thank you, but no.”
“You got a car?”
She shook her head.
“I took the subway out here.”
“You know how you’re going to get up to Maine?”
“Not yet. Bus, I guess.”
Arno put on his jacket and removed a set of keys from his pocket.
“I’ll give you a ride to Port Authority, see you safely onto the bus.”
For the first time, the woman smiled.
“Thank you, I’d appreciate that.”
Arno looked at her. Gently, he touched her face, examining the bruise.
“I got something for that, if it’s hurting you.”
“I’ll be fine,” she said.
He nodded.
The man who did this to you is in a lot of trouble. The man who did this to you won’t live out the week.
“Let’s go, then. We got time, I’ll buy you a cup of coffee and a muffin for the trip.”
Dead man. He’s a dead man.
∗ ∗ ∗
We were gathered around the font in a small group, the other guests standing in the pews a little distance away. The priest had made his introductions, and now we were approaching the meat of the ceremony.
“Do you reject Satan, and all his empty promises?” asked the priest.
He waited. There was no reply. Rachel coughed discreetly. Angel appeared to have found something interesting to look at down on the floor. Louis remained impassive. He had removed his shades and was focused on a point just above my left shoulder.
“You’re speaking for Sam,” I whispered to Angel. “He doesn’t mean you.”
Realization dawned like morning light on an arid desert.
“Oh, okay then,” said Angel enthusiastically. “Sure. Absolutely. Rejected.”
“Amen,” said Louis.
The priest looked confused.
“That would be a yes,” I told him.
“Right,” he said, as if to reassure himself. “Good.”
Rachel shot daggers at Angel.
“What?” he asked. He raised his hands in a “What did I do?” gesture. Some wax from the candle dripped onto the sleeve of his jacket. A faintly acrid smell arose.
“Awwww,” said Angel. “First time I’ve worn it, too.”
Rachel moved from daggers to swords.
“You open your mouth again, and you’ll be buried in that suit,” she said.
Angel went quiet. All things considered, it was the smartest move.
The woman was seated by a window on the right side of the bus. In one day, she was passing through more states than she had previously visited in her entire life. The bus pulled into South Station in Boston. Now, with thirty minutes to spare, she wandered down to the Amtrak concourse and bought herself a cup of coffee and a Danish. Both were expensive, and she looked with dismay at the little wad of bills in her purse, adorned by a smattering of change, but she was hungry, even after the muffin the man from the garage had so kindly bought for her. She took a seat and watched the people go by, the businessmen in their suits, the harried mothers with their children. She watched the arrivals and departures change, the names clicking rapidly across the big board above her head. The trains on the platform were silver and sleek. A young black woman took a seat beside her and opened a newspaper. Her suit was neatly tailored, and her hair was cut very short. A brown leather attaché case stood at her feet, and she wore a small matching purse upon her shoulder. A diamond engagement ring gleamed upon her left hand.
I have a daughter your age, thought the old woman, but she will never be like you. She will never wear a tailored suit, or read what you read, and no man will ever give her a ring like the one that you wear. She is a lost soul, a troubled soul, but I love her, and she is mine. The man who had her upon me is gone now. He is dead, and he is no loss to the world. They would call what he did to me rape, I suppose, for I surrendered to him out of fear. We were all afraid of him, and of what he could do. We believed that he had killed my older sister, for she went away with him and did not return home alive, and when he came back to us he took me in her place.
But he died for what he did, and he died badly. They asked us if we wanted them to rebuild his face, if we wanted to have the casket open for a viewing. We told them to leave him as he was found, and to bury him in a pine box with ropes for handles. They marked his grave with a wooden cross, but on the night he was buried I went to the place where he lay and I took the cross away, and I burned it in the hope that he would be forgotten. But I gave birth to his child, and I loved her even though there was something of him in her. Perhaps she never had a chance, cursed with a father like that. He tainted her, polluting her from the moment she was born, the seed of her own destruction contained within his own. She was always a sad child, an angry child, yet how could she leave us for that other life? How could she find peace in such a city, among men who would use her for money, who would feed her drugs and alcohol to keep her pliant? How could we have let that happen to her?
And the boy—no, the man, for that is what he is now—tried to look out for her, but he gave up on her, and now she is gone. My daughter is gone, and nobody yet cares enough about her to seek her out, nobody except me. But I will make them care. She is mine, and I will bring her back. He will help me, for she is blood to him, and he owes her a blood debt.
He killed her father. Now he will bring her back to this life, and to me.
∗ ∗ ∗
The guests were scattered through the living room and the kitchen. Some had found their way outside and were sitting beneath the bare trees in our yard, wearing their coats and enjoying the open air as they drank beer and wine and ate hot food from paper plates. Angel and Louis, as always, were slightly apart from the rest, occupying a stone bench that looked out over the marshes. Our Lab retriever, Walter, lay at their feet, Angel’s fingers gently stroking his head. I went over to join them, checking as I went that nobody lacked for food and drink.
“You want to hear a joke?” said Angel. “There’s this duck on a pond, and he’s getting really pissed at this other duck who’s coming on to his girl, so he decides to hire an assassin duck to bump him off.”
Louis breathed out loudly through his nose with a sound like gas leaking under near-unendurable pressure. Angel ignored him.
“So the assassin arrives, and the duck meets him in some reeds. The assassin tells him that it will cost five pieces of bread to kill the target, payable after the deed is done. The duck tells him that’s fine, and the assassin says, ‘So, do you want me to send you the body?’ And the duck says, ‘No, just send me the bill.’ ”
There was silence.
“Bill,” said Angel again. “You know, it’s—”
“I got a joke,” said Louis.
We both looked at him in surprise.
“You hear the one about the dead irritating guy in the cheap suit?”
We waited.
“That’s it,” said Louis.
“That’s not funny,” said Angel.
“Makes me laugh,” said Louis.
A man touched me on the arm, and I found Walter Cole standing beside me. He was retired now, but he had taught me much of what I knew when I was a cop. Our bad days were behind us, and he had come to an accommodation with what I was and with what I was capable of doing. I left Angel and Louis to bicker, and walked back to the house with Walter.
“About that dog,” he said.
“He’s a good dog,” I said. “Not smart, but loyal.”
“I’m not looking to give him a job. You called him Walter.”
“I like the name.”
“You named your dog after me?”
“I thought you’d be flattered. Anyway, nobody needs to know. It’s not as if he looks like you. He has more hair, for a start.”
“Oh, that’s very funny. Even the dog is funnier than you.”
We entered the kitchen, and Walter retrieved a bottle of Sebago ale from the fridge. I didn’t offer him a glass. I knew that he preferred to drink it by the neck when he could, which meant anytime he was out of his wife’s sight. Outside, I saw Rachel talking with Pam. Her sister was smaller than Rachel, and spikier, which was saying something. Whenever I hugged her, I expected to be pierced by spines. Sam was asleep in an upstairs room. Rachel’s mother was keeping an eye on her.
Walter saw me follow Rachel’s progress through the garden.
“How are you two doing?” asked Walter.
“Three of us,” I reminded him. “We’re doing okay, I guess.”
“It’s hard, when there’s a new baby in a house.”
“I know. I remember.”
Walter’s hand rose slightly. He seemed on the verge of touching my shoulder, until his hand slowly fell away.
“I’m sorry,” he said, instead. “It’s not that I forget them. I don’t know what it is exactly. Sometimes it seems like another life, another time. Does that make sense?”
“Yes,” I said. “I know just what you mean.”
There was a breeze blowing, and it caused the rope swing on the oak tree to move in a slow arc, as though an unseen child were playing upon it. I could see the channels shining in the marshes beyond, intersecting in places as they carved their paths through the reeds, the waters of one intermingling with those of another, each changed irrevocably by the meeting. Lives were like that: when their paths crossed, they emerged altered forever by the encounter, sometimes in small, almost invisible ways, and other times so profoundly that nothing that followed could ever be the same again. The residue of other lives infects us, and we in turn pass it on to those whom we later meet.
“I think she worries,” I said.
“About what?”
“About us. About me. She’s risked so much, and she’s been hurt for it. She doesn’t want to be scared anymore, but she is. She’s afraid for us, and she’s afraid for Sam.”
“You’ve talked about it?”
“No, not really.”
“Maybe it’s time, before things get worse.”
Right then, I found it hard to imagine how much worse circumstances could get. I hated these unspoken tensions between Rachel and me. I loved her, and I needed her, but I was angry too. The burden of blame slipped too easily onto my shoulders these days. I was tired of carrying it.
“Doing much work?” asked Walter, changing the subject.
“Some,” I said.
“Anything interesting?”
“I don’t think so. You never can tell, but I’ve tried to be selective. It’s pretty straightforward stuff. I’ve been offered more . . . complicated matters, but I’ve turned them down. I won’t bring harm upon them, but . . .”
I stopped. Walter waited.
“Go on.”
I shook my head. Lee, Walter’s wife, entered the kitchen. She scowled as she saw him drinking from the bottle.
“I turn my back for five minutes, and you abandon all civilized behavior,” she said, but she was smiling as she spoke. “You’ll be drinking out of the toilet bowl next.”
Walter hugged her to him.
“You know,” she said, “they named the dog after you. Maybe that’s why. Anyway, lots of people want to meet you because of it. The dog wants to meet you.”
Walter scowled as she grabbed him by the hand and pulled him toward the garden.
“Are you coming outside?” she asked me.
“In a moment,” I said.
I watched them cross the lawn. Rachel waved to them, and they went to join her. Her eyes met mine, and she gave me a small smile. I raised my hand, then touched it to the glass, my fingers dwarfing her face.
I won’t bring harm upon you and our daughter, not by my choosing, yet still it comes. That’s what I’m afraid of. It has found me before, and it will find me again. I am a danger to you, and to our child, and I think you know that.
We are coming apart.
I love you, but we are coming apart.
∗ ∗ ∗
The day drew on. People left, and others, who were unable to make the ceremony, took their places. As the light faded, Angel and Louis were no longer speaking, and were more obviously maintaining their distance from all that was taking place around them than before. Both kept their eyes fixed on the road that wound from Route 1 to the coast. Between them lay a cell phone. Arno had called them earlier that day, as soon as he had seen the woman safely onto the Greyhound bus from New York.
“She didn’t leave a name,” he told Louis, his voice crackling slightly over the connection.
“I know who she is,” said Louis. “You did right to call.”
Now there were lights on the road. I joined them where they sat, leaning slightly on the back of the bench. Together we watched the cab cross the bridge over the marsh, the sunlight gleaming on the waters, the car’s progress reflected in their depths. There was a tugging at my stomach, and my head felt as though hands were pressed hard against my temples. I could see Rachel standing unmoving among the guests. She too was watching the approaching car. Louis rose as it turned into the driveway of the house.
“This isn’t about you,” he said. “You got no reason to be concerned.”
And I wondered at what he had brought to my house.
I followed them through the open gate at the end of the yard. Angel stayed back as Louis walked to the cab and opened the door. A woman emerged, a large, multicolored bag clasped in her hands. She was smaller than Louis by perhaps eighteen inches, and probably no more than a decade or so older than he, although her face bore the marks of a difficult life, and she wore her worries like a veil across her features. I imagined that she had been beautiful when she was younger. There was little of that physical beauty left now, but there was an inner strength to her that shone brightly from her eyes. I could see some bruising to her face. It looked very recent.
She stood close to Louis and gazed up at him with something almost like love, then slapped him hard across the left cheek with her right hand.
“She’s gone,” she said. “You were supposed to look out for her, but now she’s gone.”
And she began to cry as he took her in his arms, and his body shook with the force of her sobs.
∗ ∗ ∗
This is the story of Alice, who fell down a rabbit hole and never came back.
Martha was Louis’s aunt. A man named Deeber, now dead, had fathered a child upon her, a girl. They called her Alice, and they loved her, but she was never a happy child. She rebelled against the company of women and turned instead to men. They told her that she was beautiful, for she was, but she was young and angry. Something gnawed deep inside her, its hunger exacerbated by the actions of the women who had loved her and cared for her. They had told her that her father was dead, but it was only through others that she learned of the kind of man he was, and the manner in which he had left this world. Nobody knew who was responsible for his death, but there were rumors, hints that the neatly dressed black women in the house with the pretty garden had colluded in his killing along with her cousin, the boy called Louis.
Alice rebelled against them and all that they represented: love, security, the bonds of family. She was drawn to a bad crowd, and left the safety of her mother’s home. She drank, smoked some dope, became a casual user of harder drugs, then an addict. She drifted from the places that she knew, and went to live in a tin-roofed shack at the edge of a dark forest, where men paid to take turns with her. She was paid in narcotics, although their value was far less than what the johns had paid to sleep with her, and so the bonds around her tightened. Slowly she began to lose herself, the combination of sex and drugs acting like a cancer, eating away at all that she truly was, so that she became at last their creature even as she tried to convince herself that this was only a temporary aberration, a fleeting thing to help her deal with the sense of hurt and betrayal that she felt.
It was early one Sunday morning, and she was lying on a bare cot, naked but for a pair of cheap plastic shoes. She stank of men, and the hunger was upon her. Her head hurt, and the bones in her arms and legs ached. Two other women slept nearby, the doorways to their quarters blocked by blankets hung over ropes. A small window allowed the morning light to seep into her room, sullied by the dirt upon its pane and the cobwebs, freckled with leaves and dead bugs, that hung at its corners. She pulled the blanket aside, and saw that the door of the hut was open. Lowe stood in its frame, his giant shoulders almost brushing either side of the doorway. He was shirtless, his feet bare, and sweat glistened upon his shaved head and trickled slowly down between his shoulder blades. His back was pale and hairy. He had a cigarette in his right hand, and was talking to another man, who stood outside. Alice figured it was Wallace, the little “high yellow” man who ran his hookers and his small-time narcotics trade from out of this hut in the woods, with a little illicit whiskey for those of more conservative tastes. A laugh came, and then she saw Wallace as he moved across the large window at the front of the hut, zipping up his fly and rubbing his fingers upon his jeans. His shirt was open and hung loose upon his pigeon chest and his little belly. He was an ugly man, and rarely bathed. Sometimes he asked her to do things for him, and it was all that she could manage not to choke on the taste of him. But she needed him now. She needed what he had, even if it meant adding to her debt, a debt that would never be paid.
She put on a T-shirt and skirt to cover her nakedness, then lit a cigarette and prepared to pull the blanket fully across. Sundays were quiet. Some of the men who used this place would already be preparing for church, and they would sit in the pews and pretend to listen to the sermon, even as they thought of her. There were others who had not darkened a church door in many years, but even for them Sundays were different. If she could work up the energy, she might go to the mall, pick up some new clothes with the little money that she had, maybe some cosmetics too. She had been meaning to do it for a couple of weeks, but there were other distractions here. Still, even Wallace had recently commented on the state of her dresses and her underwear, although the men who came here weren’t too particular. Some even liked the squalor of it, for it added a certain spice to their sense of transgression, but Wallace generally preferred to pretend that his women were clean even if their surroundings were not. If she went out early, she could get her business done, then come back and relax for the afternoon. There might be some work for her in the evening, but it would not be as demanding as the night before, not by any means. Fridays and Saturdays were always the worst, with the threat of alcohol-fueled violence ever present. True, Lowe and Wallace protected the women, but they couldn’t stay with them behind that curtain while the men were being serviced, and it didn’t take more than a split second for a man’s fist to reach a woman’s face.
There came the sound of a car approaching. She could see it through the doorway as it turned. Unlike most of the cars that came to this place, this one was new. It looked like one of those German cars, and the chrome on its wheels was spotless. The engine growled briefly as it came to a stop. She saw doors opening, front and back. Wallace said something that she could not hear, and Lowe tossed his cigarette on the ground, his other hand already reaching behind his back to where the butt of the big Colt emerged from his jeans. Before he could grasp it, his shoulders exploded in a red cloud that billowed briefly in the sunlight, then fell wetly to the floor. Somehow he remained standing, and she saw his hands clutch at the doorframe, holding himself upright. Footsteps crunched on the gravel outside, then the second shot came, and part of Lowe’s head disappeared. His hands relinquished their grip, and he fell to the ground.
Alice stood frozen, rooted to the spot. Outside, she could hear Wallace pleading for his life. He was backing toward the hut, and she could see his body grow larger and larger as he neared the window. There were more shots, and the glass shattered into hundreds of pieces, the remaining shards in the frames edged with blood. Now she could hear the other girls responding. To her right, Rowlene was screaming repeatedly. She was a big girl, and Alice could almost picture her on her bed, her sheet pulled up to her chest, her eyes drowsy and flecked with red as she tried to make herself small in the corner of her bunk. To her left, she could hear Pria, who was half-Asian, strike the wall as she struggled to clear her head and find her clothes. Pria had partied with two johns the night before, and they had shared some of their buy with her. She was probably still high.
The figure of a man appeared in the doorframe. Alice briefly glimpsed his face as he entered, and the sight gave her the impetus she needed. She allowed the blanket to fall gently, then climbed on her bunk and pushed at the window. At first it would not move, even as she heard the man moving through the hut, coming closer to the whores’ quarters. She hit the frame with the base of her palm, and it swung out with barely a sound. Alice pulled herself up and squeezed herself through the gap, even as the next shot came from the stall beside her own and splinters burst from the wall. Rowena was gone. She would be next. Behind her, a hand grasped the blanket and pulled it to the floor as gravity took hold and Alice tumbled to the ground. She felt something snap in her hand as she fell awkwardly, then she was running for the cover of the trees, fallen branches snapping beneath her feet as she ducked and weaved into the forest. The shotgun roared again, and an alder disintegrated barely inches from her right foot.
She kept running, even though her feet were cut by stones and her clothing torn by briars and thorns. She did not stop until the pain in her side was so great that she felt as though she were being ripped in half. She lay against a tree and thought that she heard, distantly, the sounds of men. She knew the face of the man at the door. He was one of those who had taken Pria the night before. She did not know why he had returned, or what had led him to do what he did. All that she knew was that she had to get away from this place, for they knew who she was. They had seen her, and they would find her. Alice called her mother from a phone at a gas station, the pumps locked and the station closed, for it was still early on Sunday morning. Her mother came with clothing, and what money she had, and Alice left that afternoon and did not ever return to the state in which she was born. She called in the years that followed, mostly with requests for money. She called twice each week, and sometimes more often than that. It was Alice’s one unfailing concession to her mother, and even at her lowest she always tried to keep the older woman from worrying more than she already did. There were other small kindnesses too: birthday gifts that arrived early, or more often late, but arrived nonetheless; cards at Christmas, a little cash included in the early years, but later only a signature and a scrawled greeting; and, very occasionally, a letter, the quality of the script and the color of the ink varying in accordance with the lengthy process of the missive’s completion. Her mother cherished them all, but mostly she was grateful for the calls. They let her know that her daughter was still alive.
Then the calls ceased.
∗ ∗ ∗
Martha sat on the couch in my office, Louis standing to one side of her, Angel seated quietly in my chair. I was by the fireplace. Rachel had looked in on us briefly, then left.
“You should have looked out for her,” Martha again told Louis.
“I tried,” he said. He looked old and tired. “She didn’t want help, not the kind I could offer her.”
Martha’s eyes ignited.
“How can you say that? She was lost. She was a lost soul. She needed someone to bring her back. That should have been you.”
This time, Louis said nothing.
“You went to Hunts Point?” I asked.
“Last time we spoke, she said that was where she was at, so that was where I went.”
“Is that where you got hurt?”
She lowered her head.
“A man hit me.”
“What was his name?” asked Louis.
“Why?” she said. “You gonna do for him like you done for others? You think that will find your cousin? You just want to feel like a big man, now it’s too late to do what a good man would have done. Well, that don’t wash with me.”
I intervened. The recriminations would get us nowhere.
“Why did you go to him?”
“Because Alice done told me she was working for him now. The other one, the one she was with before, he died. She said this new one was gonna take care of her, that he was going to find wealthy men for her. Wealthy men! What man would want her after all she’d done? What man . . . ?”
She started to cry again.
I went to her and handed her a clean tissue, then slowly knelt before her.
“We’ll need his name if we’re to start looking for her,” I said quietly.
“G-Mack,” she said at last. “He calls himself G-Mack. There was a young white girl too. She said she remembered Alice, but she was calling herself LaShan on the street. She didn’t know where she’d gone to.”
“G-Mack,” said Louis.
“Ring any bells?”
“No. Last I heard she was with a pimp called Free Billy.”
“Looks like things changed.”
Louis stood and helped Martha from her chair.
“We need to get you something to eat. You need to rest up now.”
She took his hand and gripped it tightly in her own.
“You find her for me. She’s in trouble. I can feel it. You find her, and bring her back to me”
∗ ∗ ∗
The fat man stood at the lip of the bathtub. His name was Bright-well, and he was very, very old, far older than he seemed. Sometimes he acted like a man who had recently woken from a deep sleep, but the Mexican, whose name was Garcia, knew better than to question him about his origins. He recognized only that Brightwell was a thing to be obeyed, and to be feared. He had seen what the man had done to the woman, had watched through the glass as Brightwell’s mouth closed on hers. It had seemed to him that some grave knowledge had shown itself in the woman’s eyes at that moment, even as she weakened and died, as though she realized what was about to occur as her body failed her at last. How many others had he taken in this way? Garcia wondered, his lips against theirs as he waited for their essence to pass from them. And even if what Garcia suspected of Brightwell was not true, what kind of man would believe such a thing of himself?
The stench was terrible as the chemicals worked on the remains, but Brightwell made no attempt to cover his face. The Mexican stood behind him, the lower half of his face concealed by a white mask.
“What will you do now?” said Garcia.
Brightwell spit into the tub, then turned his back on the disintegrating body. “I will find the other one, and I will kill her.”
“Before she died, this one spoke of a man. She thought he might come for her.”
“I know. I heard her call his name.”
“She was supposed to be alone. Nobody cared.”
“We were misinformed, but perhaps nobody cares anyway.”
Brightwell swept by him, leaving him with the decaying body of the girl. Garcia did not follow him. Brightwell was wrong, but Garcia did not have the courage to confront him further on the issue. No woman, as death approached, would cry out over and over again a name that meant nothing to her.
Someone did care.