Close Your Eyes (17 page)

That night Merilee told us we could no longer mourn our mother. She stood in front of the television and spoke in her important voice, her hands on her hips. Alex and I poked each other in the ribs as Merilee explained that the stone setting was all about closure. We were not to move back, we were to
go forward
. “The stone is now set,” she said grandly, and then she went to wash the supper dishes.

Alex whispered to me about our father getting out of jail, even on the day of our mother’s funeral. Our father would “come to claim us,” Alex told me—he would “take us away from all this,” Alex said, waggling his fingers at our grandparents’ matching furniture, the sound of Gramma crying softly in the kitchen. Alex and I had already started down different paths—while he thought our days in Houston were temporary, I knew we were never going back to Ocean Avenue. I wanted to believe his promises, but even at age eight, I was pragmatic, logical—and without hope.

After saying goodbye to Rabbi Goldman, I drove to Cypress Grove Retirement Village. I found my grandmother in the hallway, looking at a purple orchid. “Hi, Gramma,” I said. She glanced up, her eyes clear, but she did not speak. “So, Alex might be dead,” I said.

“Alex might be dead?” said Gramma, finally turning to me. “It was Izaan,” she said, nodding.

“No,” I said. “It was an Iraqi suicide bomber. It was two Iraqi suicide bombers, actually.”

She shook her head. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“I hear you,” I said.

“He killed my girl,” she said. “He killed my baby.”

“Gramma,” I said, leaning in so close that I could smell her baby powder, “how do you know?”

Merilee shook her head, the prim certainty in her features softening in befuddlement. “I don’t know.”

I felt very cold. “What do you mean?”

“He’s a bad man,” she said. But all I saw on her face was uncertainty.

I stood up, dizzy. Gramma was senile, but was it possible she had never been sure what had happened on the night of my mother’s murder? If my father hadn’t killed my mother, then there was no explanation for her death, no lesson, no story. If this—my one truth—was not constant, then there was no ground underneath me.

2

Alex’s landlord called and told me it was time to clean out his apartment. His lease ran only through the end of the month, she said, and if he wasn’t going to renew, she would have to find a new tenant. Gerry looked at our finances and said we could try to pay Alex’s rent for a few months if I was willing to eat cornflakes for breakfast and noodles for dinner. (We could forage the neighborhood park for berries and wild mushrooms, he noted.) But when I called Alex’s landlord back, she said she had already found someone who would pay more and move in ASAP. The deal was done—signed, sealed, delivered. This struck me as brutally unkind.

When I refused Gerry’s offer to help me take Alex’s things to storage, he sighed and said, “Lauren, I need to talk with you. A serious talk.”

“Oh, really?” I said. “A serious talk? Because what I need is a client looking to pay too much for a duplex. And another drink.”

“I know you’re going through hell,” said Gerry. “But you need to stop drinking, and I want you to go back to your therapist.”

“I told you what I need,” I said. “Are you pouring, or are you not?”

“I’m not,” said Gerry. He folded his arms over his broad chest. “This is not an ultimatum, but I can’t watch you … sink. I’m here, Lauren, but I’m not going down with you.”

I was in pin-striped pajamas, though it was a workday, around noon. I got back in bed and pulled the covers over my head. The pills I had taken let me fall asleep in the middle of anything. “I don’t need
help
,” I said from under the covers. “I need a snack.”

When I woke up, there was a plate with a sliced apple on the bedside table, and a little bowl filled with peanut butter.

The next day I went to clean out Alex’s apartment. Alex had been a meticulous filer. His apartment had two bedrooms, and one (“the office”) was lined with three enormous cabinets. I opened a drawer at random—it was Alex’s papers, grades one through nine. I am not joking—he’d saved it all: progress reports, watercolor paintings, essays (“Abraham Lincoln: An American Hero,” “What Democracy Means to Me,” “A Visit to My Father”). I pulled out the last and scanned it. Alex hadn’t gotten over our mother’s murder, to be sure, but he had learned how to mine the situation for good personal-essay material. I knew he’d written about visiting Izaan in jail to gain entrance to Exeter and later, Harvard. Unwilling to pimp our family tragedy, I’d written about releasing turtles on South Padre Island (“Holding a Warm Shell at the Edge of the Sea”) and had been rejected by both institutions and a long list of others.

I closed that drawer, then poked through a few more. There were his physical fitness certificates, graduation photographs, tax records, and med school diplomas. There was a thick file about possible vacations, organized under
alone, with L
, or
wife
. My stack was fairly dull: cheese tasting in Vermont, honky-tonk motel in Port Aransas. By himself, Alex had wanted to hit India and climb mountains in Tanzania. With his imaginary wife, the destinations had been quieter: a bed-and-breakfast in Wimberley, “romantic
gites
in the French countryside.”

Surrounded by photographs of faraway locales, I felt a wave of sadness. I went into the kitchen and got a Hefty bag from under the sink. Then I went back into the spare bedroom and began shoving brochures into the bag. “I don’t want to go cheese tasting!” I cried out, crumpling the image of a farmer milking a placid cow. “Why the fuck would you think I wanted to go cheese tasting?” I yelled. “And look at this stupid run-down shack!” I tossed the
wife
file, the
alone
file, the drawers documenting Alex’s academic tribulations. “Arrogant asshole,” I said.

I left the tax info, because who knew. But I emptied all the rest until I stood shaking in the middle of the room. Then I hauled the Hefty bag to the trash can and dumped it in, wheeled the can to the front of the house for pickup, and kicked it for good measure.

The woman who lived next door was sitting on her front porch in a lavender bathrobe, sipping a Lone Star. She regarded me without emotion. I went back inside Alex’s apartment and into the spare bedroom. It looked the same—there was little evidence of all my hard work. The clock on Alex’s desk read 3:02. The desk had been our father’s; Alex had driven all the way to New York with a U-Haul to get it out of storage. I remembered sitting on my father’s lap while he wrote longhand, the smell of his tobacco. My father had kept scraps of ideas for poems in the desk:
Lauren’s hair
or
ocean at morning
.

On impulse, I went to the drawer. I reached out and touched the metal pull. I yanked, but it would not open. There was a keyhole, but I had never known the drawer could be locked. Certainly, my father had never locked it—who would want to steal his ephemera?

I peered around the room, looking for a key. Though I had ten days to clean out the apartment, I felt frantic. What was in the damn drawer? Probably naked pictures of some old lover of Alex’s or
Playboy
magazines. Something racy, something private. I tugged at the drawer again, but it was shut tight. Then I ran into Alex’s bedroom (that sweaty smell of him—I loved him so much) and looked in his bedside table, his closet. I opened his underwear drawer, pulling out socks, boxers, a strip of condoms, some smooth stones. And then I saw it glinting at the back: a brass key.

I knew I had to get out of Alex’s apartment. I was freaking out, this was clear. But first: the drawer. Leaving Alex’s belongings all over the bedroom floor (what the hell did it matter now?), I rushed into the office and inserted the key. I felt dizzy and could hear my heartbeat in my ears. The lock turned; I slid the drawer open.

Inside, there was an accordion folder packed with papers and photos. It was labeled simply, horrifyingly,
MOM
. I picked up the mess of papers and shoved it into my bag. Then I drove home, walked to The Studio, and handed the folder to Gerry.

“From Alex’s desk,” I said.

He took the papers and regarded me soberly. He turned off his webcam and gestured to the beanbags in the corner of the shed where he’d told me he could “take meetings.”

I sat down in the blue beanbag, rested my elbows on my knees. He sank into the red beanbag as I said, “I don’t want to know the details. Can you just look through this file and see if there’s anything important?”

“I can,” said Gerry. He was well trained in this regard, having thrown away letters from Izaan for years. I wasn’t sure he agreed with the way I had cut my father out of my life, but he knew it was complicated, and he respected me enough to let it be.

“I’m sure it can wait until tomorrow,” I said. “If he’s dead, there’s no real hurry.”

Gerry bit his lip and did not speak. For this, I loved him.

The next morning I got up and drank coffee, took a shower and went to work. “Well, well,” said Jonesey when he saw me sitting at my desk, checking the new listings. “What have we here?”

“It’s me,” I said.

He touched the top of my head. “I’m so glad.”

At lunch, I went to the New World Deli, where I had a tuna melt, a Diet Coke, and only one Advil. I spent the afternoon visiting houses, taking notes, almost even enjoying my walks through others’ empty rooms and abandoned gardens.

That evening I felt something in me unwind as I parked in the driveway of my home. Two large trees flanked the house: a Texas ash and a Mexican plum. In February the plum tree would explode in fragrant white flowers. I had made a special cocktail the night the first bud had appeared—I’d called it the Texas Blizzard after adding a bit of Baileys Irish cream to a vanilla milk shake.

I paused on the pathway, trying to decide where I could plant geraniums come spring, and Handsome stood on the front porch and barked, happy beyond reason at my return.

Prompted by Handsome’s bark, Gerry came to the door. “Welcome home,” he said. I smiled and walked to him, pulling him close. Gerry had made a pitcher of sun tea, and as I sat on a folding chair, he poured me a glass. “Thanks,” I said.

“For dinner, paella,” said Gerry.

“Whoa,” I said. I could smell garlic from the porch.

“I laid it all out in my office,” said Gerry. “Let me know when you want to see.”

I sighed and sipped the sweet drink. I wanted to add some whiskey, but I decided not to. “So?” I asked.

“Shhh,” said Gerry, sitting in the chair next to me, tucking my hair behind my ear.

I breathed in the warm Texas night. The cicadas were out full force, and the air smelled like a river, though we were miles from the Colorado. “Okay,” I said.

“Okay, time to make out?”

I laughed and kissed him. We went inside our house, not turning to go toward the shed. We ate the spicy seafood, and then bowls of coconut ice cream.

I climbed into Gerry’s lap, and he kissed my forehead, then my neck. He unbuttoned my blouse and kissed my breasts. I started to cry, and he carried me into the bedroom. He undressed me, and his lips were soft on my stomach and my thighs. I stopped crying, swept up by the feel of Gerry’s tongue, his lips. My brain shut off and I was only skin. Gerry entered me and I was wet and hot, liquid. I felt like I was about to drown. I let go, I went under. When the waves receded, I was lying next to my boyfriend in our bed, looking out the window at the evening light on the leaves.

“I love you,” I said. But Gerry was asleep.

I got out of bed, put his T-shirt on, and went into the shed. I turned on the overhead light. Moths and mosquitoes filled the room—Gerry needed a screen door.

He had marked a place in the folder with a pink Post-it note. I turned there and found lined sheets with Alex’s notes scrawled across them:

6/16
NY V
ISIT

—Meeting with Detective Brendan Crosby (Holt police).

—Doors and windows yielded no useful fingerprints due to rain.

—One set of handprints found on Glenfiddich bottle—DID
NOT match family or neighbors.

—“Household items” found at crime scene, did not lead to any suspects.

—Crosby will find items in storage.

6/18

—Called Brendan Crosby, left message.

6/20

—Visit with Dad. Dad says he did not serve any hard liquor at party, just wine and beer. But someone could have come inside and poured a glass; he wasn’t paying attention.