A Hole in the Universe (19 page)

“What about you? How are you doing?”

“I’m fine. I’m okay. Busy, I’ve been really busy.”
That’s really why she called,
he thought. Surely her sister knew more about Mrs. Jukas’s condition than he did.

“Karen said you were so nice to the poor old woman.”

“She was having a lot of pain. I think she was scared more than anything.”

“That must be so awful, getting a call like that in the middle of the night.”

“She was pretty upset.”

“Poor thing. Especially being all alone like that. My neighbor upstairs, she’s eighty-six. Sometimes I’ll think, Oh jeez, now when was the last time I saw Edna, and then I’ll go running up. And usually she’s in—”

“Um, excuse me. I’m sorry, Delores, but I can’t talk. I have to go. I have to do something.”

She apologized. She hadn’t meant to bother him, she said, but if he ever felt like going somewhere, or if he needed a ride, anything, he should feel free to call her. Anytime. Oh, and that was the other reason she’d called, to tell him her boss was closing down the Collerton store, which meant she’d be in the Dearborn store soon, so she’d give him that number in case he—

“Delores! I’m sorry. I can’t talk anymore. I’m really in a rush here.”

 

 

He arrived at the district courthouse fifteen minutes early. His trial had been held around the corner in superior court. But they looked the same, smelled of the same old wood and papery dust. He felt big again, bigger than anyone else, as he came down the corridor. He started into the crowded elevator, then changed his mind with all the irritated faces staring back. He hurried up the stairs to the parole office on the second floor, where eleven men sat in the waiting room. He settled into a corner seat. The men were all younger. He was the only one wearing a suit and tie. An hour later, Mr. Mazzorio called him into the office.

“So, how’re things going?” Mazzorio wore a red golf shirt. He was fumbling through stacks of files on the floor by his desk.

“Very well, thank you.” Gordon folded his arms. Afraid that might seem threatening or arrogant, he clasped his hands in his lap.

“Any problems?” Mazzorio’s voice rose from the far side of the desk.

“No. None that I can think of.” Other than Neil, but if he said his boss was acting strange, Mazzorio might think he had done something to cause it. Which maybe he had. He was beginning to wonder.

“Jesus Christ,” Mazzorio muttered. “I can’t find anything in this mess. Here we go!” He popped up with a file. “Okay,” he murmured, flipping pages. “Okay. Okay. Let’s see now.” He ran his finger down one page, continued on the next. “Okay. All right, so we got no sex crimes, no rape, molestation, nothing with kids, right? Just the one homicide, which was, what—here we go—twenty-five years ago, so you don’t have to register as an SO.”

“No.” An SO was a sex offender. They’d covered all this in the first visit.

He looked at Gordon. “So you know the drill, then? All you gotta do is keep it clean, live straight, show up here on time, and you’re home free.” He scribbled on a smudged form, then pushed it across the desk. Gordon signed, handed it back. Mazzorio said he would be notified by mail when his next appointment would be.

“So will that be it?”

“Far as I’m concerned. Unless you got a problem.” Mazzorio peered over his glasses, looking at him for the first time.

“No, no problem. I just wanted to make sure, that’s all.” A missed appointment, an unreturned document, an anonymous complaint, the merest hint of suspicion, anything might send him back.

As he came up Essex Street, a gust blew from a narrow alley, and his stomach turned with the stone-deep stench of urine and the memories it brought back of Fortley. He hurried on ahead, past a pizza shop that had once been Coco’s Photography Studio. He’d had his senior yearbook picture taken there. His mother hated the picture. She insisted he have it retaken. By the time she got done convincing him how thick-faced the picture made him look, how dull-eyed and lethargic, he wasn’t about to let a camera betray him again. Rather than argue, he said he would, but never did. It became the wire services’ official schoolboy-killer shot.

Farther up the hill, St. Theresa’s white steeple pierced the treetops. His family had attended Mass there in the small wooden church. Next door was the parish grammar school, a one-story building of brick and glass blocks that with its gated school yard had been his first prison. The buzz of an electric bell cut through the stillness, and there he was again, stepping into formation, shuffling from the safety of his cell into clamor and constant watchfulness. Lines of children streamed through the opening doors into the playground. Some things were still the same, the girls’ plaid uniforms and white blouses, the boys’ dark pants, white shirts, and plaid clip-on ties. Teachers led the march to the chain-link gate. It would be opened by the student of the week. She was a tall, skinny girl with red hair down to her waist. There seemed to be only one nun. Instead of a bulky habit she wore a blouse, skirt, and short pale-blue veil. At her nod the gate was unlatched and the children surged onto the sidewalk. Cars stopped as a stout woman in black pants stood in the road with her arms out against the traffic while the children crossed. He smiled as they ran past.

“Excuse me, sir,” the woman said when the last child was on the sidewalk. “Can I help you?”

“No. No, I’m just watching the children, that’s all.” He smiled at her.

“Why? Are you waiting for someone?” She came toward him.

“No, I was just going by. It brought back memories, that’s all, seeing all the children.” He could see it in her probing eyes. Something was wrong here. She could tell. There was something odd about him. Too nervous. Too furtive. The twitchy smile. His flat voice. “Well, anyway. I guess I better get going.”

“Do you live around here?”

“A few blocks away. Not too far.”

“Do I know you? You look awfully familiar.”

“I work at the Market. The Nash Street Market? Maybe that’s it.”

“No, you look like someone I used to know. A long time ago. When I was a kid. I’m Cecilia Reardon.”

“I’m Gordon . . . Loomis.”

“Oh. Yes,” she said quietly. “I was a little girl. You were a couple years older than I was.” She could control her voice, but not the mind-racing shock on her face. The little girl’s bogeyman had come home.

“Yes, well, it’s been very nice meeting you.” He nodded, then hurried down the street, wanting to run, hide, disappear. Anything was better than being out here alone. Had she run into the school yard to tell all the teachers? Or was she on the phone calling the police:
Guess who I just stopped, standing there, staring at innocent children?
This must have been his family’s humiliation all those years. Running into neighbors, old friends, strangers who knew everything there was to know about them. The shame, the terrible shame he had brought upon them. Turning the corner, he realized Delores’s store was somewhere near here.

 

 

The pitcher of iced tea and Albert’s favorite butterscotch squares sat on his desk as he delivered his dismal accounting of the Collerton store’s sales in the last six months. His eyes were rimmed red, as if he’d been up all night. Everything she wanted to say dissolved when she saw his agitation and fatigue. She couldn’t bear to be angry with him. None of her calls had been returned other than a terse notice of this meeting, and that had been left on her answering machine at home when he knew she’d be here. There was an edge to his voice, as if it were somehow all her fault: the neighborhood’s steady decline, his old customers’ reluctance to come here, their preference for the safer, tree-lined streets of bucolic downtown Dearborn. “This is so hard.” He sighed. “I’ve been dreading this moment.”

“I know. All right, so the store’s closing, Albert. You don’t have to keep telling me why. I know why! So let’s just get on with it. I can handle it. What do you think, this place is my whole life? That I can’t function anywhere else? You think I can’t handle working in the Dearborn store? For God’s sake, Albert, you know me better than that. God, I’m probably the most flexible person you know.” She sat down so that he could be the taller one. She was trying to make this as easy for him as possible, but he wouldn’t even look at her. He was always too hard on himself.

“I don’t think you understand. I mean, I know what you’ve done here, how hard you’ve worked, and not just that, but your loyalty to me. I mean, all that we’ve . . . the thing is, I don’t need you in the Dearborn store. Katie’s the manager there.”

“That’s okay!” Her voice trembled, but she forced a smile. “I’d just as soon be a salesgirl anyway. Do me good, just to show up every day and not have to worry about inventory and—”

“No, Delores. That won’t work! And besides, there aren’t any openings. There’s no place for you. Everything’s taken.”

She couldn’t speak. She was as shocked by his indifference as by her own blindness. Beads of sweat frosted the pitcher. This was the second batch of squares. She’d thrown out the first; the bottoms had baked too dark. She picked one up.

He paced back and forth. He’d be glad to write reference letters, however many she’d need. With the economy so good right now, there were an awful lot of jobs out there. In the meantime she should apply for unemployment compensation. Stretch it out as long as she could. Enjoy the summer. All he wanted was for her to be all right.

Her thumb flattened the doughy mass.
The baby would have been a teenager now. Thank God it had been spared such a pathetic mother.
She couldn’t even get mad. Here it was, that same emptiness again and again, the same weak smile with his hand on her shoulder, assuring her that all things work out for the best in the end, “down the road when we look back,” he was saying, when she should be doing something, anything rather than suffocating in his slimy sympathy. If she had a gun right now or a knife . . .
that pitcher, just pick it up and throw it
. At least she’d be doing something, instead of sitting here with her thighs stuck together, just taking it and taking it, once again letting all the life and love be sucked right out of her. Papers rustled. He was reading order forms.
Problem solved. It was over, gone, but what was it? No one knew. Or if they did, they never said.
And she would not ask. How could she? The secret would be her only possession of it. She did not deserve such knowledge when she had no regard for its existence. How could she have done that? And now this? To be so empty again. At least pain kept her among the living. But this was unbearable. This was worse than death.

“Hello? Delores?” a man called from out in the store.

Albert’s head shot up. “Shh. Someone’s out front,” he whispered, horrified to see her crying.

“I don’t care,” she sobbed. “I don’t care who’s out there. I don’t care about anything anymore.”

“Stop it, Delores! There’s someone out there. A customer!”

“Good! Well, they’ll just have to help themselves, then, because I can’t. Take what you need!” she called between teary gasps. “Whatever you want! Take it all, I don’t care! Because Albert Smick is a liar! He doesn’t care who he hurts.”

“My God, Delores, what if—”

“And now he’s got little Katie in her crunchy-granola jumper, so he doesn’t need me anymore! Oh, God,” she bawled.

Albert Smick could stand no more. He fled from the back room, through the store, and out to his car.

“Delores?” Gordon Loomis peeked through the doorway. “Are you all right?”

She closed her eyes and shook her head.

“I just stopped in. I was so abrupt on the phone. I’m sorry. I was going to leave, but then I was afraid maybe something was wrong.”

“That was Albert. My boss.”

“Oh.”

“He just fired me.”

“Well, I don’t blame you for being upset, then,” he said so somberly that she almost laughed.

“People always say that, don’t they? As if you shouldn’t be upset unless you have a really good reason,” she said with a sob. “Well, you want to know something? I never do. I never get mad at anyone. Even when I should. I don’t, and that’s my whole trouble. I always try and figure out why people do things. Why they’re so mean or thoughtless or selfish. So I can understand. So I can try and help them and forgive them. Oh, I’m sorry, Gordon, I’m so sorry,” she wept, feeling even worse to see him look so troubled. “You’ve just caught me at a bad time. Oh, God, listen to me—a bad time. A terrible time, that’s what this is. A horrible time.”

“Should I leave? Would that be better?”

She nodded.

“All right. I will, then,” he said, backing away. “And if there’s anything I can do, just . . . please, let me know.”

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” she said as the door closed. She covered her face with her hands. Now she’d done it. In one fell swoop she’d driven both men from her life.

 

 

“Yo!” Ronnie Feaster called from Mrs. Jukas’s porch. He sat tilted back in the aluminum chair along with Polie and Thurman, who wore a tank top. A tattooed snake curled up the boy’s forearm. His wary grin faded with Gordon’s approach.

“You shouldn’t be up there. That’s Mrs. Jukas’s property,” Gordon said from her walk.

“I know that,” Feaster said. “That’s why I’m here. I’m taking care of it for the old lady.”

“She doesn’t want you up there. You know she doesn’t.”

“We’re not doing anything. We’re just here,” Feaster explained, glancing at the beeper on his belt. “We’re establishing a presence. You know, like cops do. A little time here, a little time there, and that way everything’s cool, people know.”