Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine 09/01/12 (7 page)

 
One day I opened the wrong door at the
wrong time, and saw a pair of feet. Familiar feet in off-pink ballet pumps. They
were at about eye-level, which looked rather strange, and swayed softly from side to
side, as if they were performing a little dance, though they did not move or
point.

Then a bulky body intervened. Pinching fingers grasped my shoulders; I
was hurled away.

“Go back,” my father hissed. “Go back, for God’s sake, you
silly boy.”

Later he told me about my mother. She had hung herself with one of
those soft threads used to tie back the drawing-room curtains. I was a bit confused
and asked if there would be any baby now. He said no, there wouldn’t be, that it had
disappeared away. That it was all for the best.

It didn’t really make any
sense to me, why she had done it. She was annoying, but I still didn’t want her to
go away like that. For some reason I thought it had something to do with the ice
cream.

 
Why does Dearbhla come? I want to ask her that every time I see
her sit down and smile at me, curving the gloved fingers around her cigarette, still
wincing with the difficulty of it, even though her maiming happened fifteen years
ago last week.

In one afternoon I took everything from her, but still she
comes, sometimes with CDs, sometimes with a book by someone like Milan Kundera or
Charles Bukowski, or sometimes just by herself.

“Why?” I finally
say.

Dearbhla takes off her gloves and puts her exposed, ruined hands against
the glass. The fingertips whiten as she presses them close.

“I come here,”
Dearbhla says, “because I have nowhere else to go. I have no one else to speak to
who can understand what I have lost. Except you.”

I lift my own hands to touch
the panel on the other side. But once my palm is raised, I pull back. The watching
guard calls time; Dearbhla takes up her handbag and turns away towards the rush hour
outside.

 
My father married her, of course, when a suitable period of
time had elapsed. There was the funeral and the period of mourning to be observed.
But somehow that all faded away pretty fast. Mother belonged to half-memories, a
childhood buried beyond retrieval. The odd flashes of reminiscence would come, but
they were less frequent. Dearbhla’s was the domain of reality, homework monitoring,
meal preparation, discipline. Thinking back, I saw that it was a role for which she
had probably been ill prepared. But, Dearbhla being Dearbhla, she threw herself into
it with all the energy she could. Nor did she stop playing. The one row she and my
father always had was the one where she wanted to go away on extended concert trips
and my father was unwilling to let her.

The truth was, he had never known how
to talk to me and was afraid of our being left alone. Dearbhla made most of the
effort. She even tried to teach me the piano: For my tenth birthday I received the
gift of a Hanon exercise book, endless streams of notes going up and down the C
scale. I got to a point where I rather enjoyed them. I could bash them out without
paying the slightest attention to what I was doing. Besides, there was a certain
pleasure in playing Dearbhla’s Yamaha upright in itself. The shiny ebony lid had to
be lifted, the red cloth respectfully removed, a light puff to take the dust off the
keys, then the final touch of finger on ivory. Inevitably, after a half-hour of me
foostering about the keys, Dearbhla would succumb to the temptation to play herself
and entertain me for hours.

It could have gone on forever. Thinking back, we
were happy. Or at least I thought I was, which is surely the same thing. After I
grew older and went to college in the city, I could have gone back at weekends to
visit Dearbhla and my father, loafing about in the study. You can live a perfectly
satisfying life and never need to disturb the past.

Then Dearbhla spoiled
everything.

 
The judge at my trial told me, in front of the assembled
jury, lawyers, and public gallery (my case had attracted considerable interest),
that my crime had been a dreadful one. What had possessed me to inflict such
horrific punishment on the man who had brought me up, fed, clothed, educated, and
cherished me? And then what I visited on my father’s wife, a talented musician who
would never play again. What had driven me to it? I had indeed taken everything from
her.

Bright-eyed court reporters were scribbling it all down. Ryder kept them
stoked with a steady supply of melodrama.

I admit I harmed the woman when I
slammed that old rosewood lid down on her knuckles, once, sharply. I believe I
managed to sever her tendons as well as shattering her fingers. And never did I
claim insanity: I knew exactly what I was doing. It gave me a blood rush to see her
scream, her face growing ever more foreign to me until I saw the face of one younger
than she, hair in a ponytail, smiling beatifically through the agonised mask. And
then, by chance, my father turned up.

His reaction to the tableau before him
was rather comical. His face contracted into an
n
shape at first, then he
turned upon me a look of murderous anger. In that brief second, I realised that
despite his learning he was as stupid as he was unforgiving. His reaction was not
one of shock, but dumb, animal rage at this assault on his little kingdom. I saw he
was capable of nothing more than that, and I hated him for it. I could see hatred in
his eyes too. He was making for me; he would kill me without remorse, I could tell.
I had to defend myself.

And so, instinct-driven, I flung the top piano lid
open, my hand searching for and finding the taut metal wires that Dearbhla’s playing
had sounded out so recently. I set my fist around them. They were almost intractable
but with a supreme effort, I wrenched them out. The strings beside them groaned in
sympathy as I roared. Oh God, the pain. I nearly tore the skin off my fingers. I’ve
never felt anything like it since.

A fistful of bass notes, like wiry flowers.
I did not dishonour her memory by missing a single one. The D, the E, perhaps even
the A. Not a single one missed, Judge, on my honour.

But then, Mr. Justice
Ryder thundered,
then
the defendant made for the victim, Dr. David Lukeman,
and wrapped the piano wire around the said Dr. Lukeman’s neck, pulling so tightly
that his vocal cords were severed on the first tug. But wait! Even with my
stepmother watching, I did not stop there, indeed when I had finished with Dr.
Lukeman, the victim’s neck was severed half the way through—the man was virtually
decapitated. At the word
decapitated,
the reporters all bent to their
notebooks as one, like a well-conducted choir.

The jury would be well advised
to consider the nature of the killing, the judge added, before returning their
verdict.
Et voilà,
here I am.

 
It is the hour before the
evening meal, where prisoners are allowed to visit each other, wander in and out of
each other’s cells or gather downstairs to watch TV and smoke, which they all do. I
think about Dearbhla’s last visit, when she made a special request. The panel
between us was removed and I was held in her clasp, my head lost in the blanket
folds of her expensive cloak. When it was time for her to leave, she kissed me on
the cheek and held me for a long time, not letting me go even when I tried to
withdraw. They had to part us. The perfume was the same as the one she wore the
first day we met, that stuff that managed to smell fresh, yet overpowering. I
remember the smell, but cannot put a name to it.

The letter is in my hands,
the thread of the envelope soft as a blanket, wherein will be contained a message on
plain white paper which I can read cross-legged in my bed. My brief, weekly oasis in
the midst of hell.

But I am interrupted by a tapping at my door. “Hey, Wirey,”
a guard calls out to me. Wirey is short for Piano Wire, a nickname bestowed on me at
the beginning of my sentence, which has degraded over the years to Wirey. (It is by
no means an insult: My crime still elicits certain awe among some of my fellow
prisoners.)

“Yes?”

“Peterson wants you in his office.”

Peterson is
the screw I tolerate best. Thanks to him, I got a room to myself after two years,
even if it did have the wall view. He is a confident, heavyset man, but in his small
cubicle, he looks oversized and awkward.

“I’ve some bad news for you.” His
fingers wiggle on the desk, beating out a little Hanon of their own. “That lady who
comes to visit you—Dearbhla McKernan—she was found last night.”

She was
found.
I know what he means. Immediately my body responds: the coldness,
the sweat prickling under the skin.

“Started the car in the garage and just
sat in it, apparently. She looked perfectly peaceful.”

I nod.

“So
obviously you won’t be seeing her tomorrow.”

Although on the surface it seems
a stupid thing to say, I can tell that Peterson is trying to get through to me, past
the fog of shock, get me to accept the truth in installments. He is being kind,
kinder to me than my father had ever been.

“Thank you,” I say.

His
beating fingers stop their rhythm, spreading flat on the table. “I’m very
sorry.”

I rise to leave and he stretches his hand toward my shoulder. For a
moment I fear he will embrace me—his sweat is rancid in my nostrils—but he thinks
better of it and moves back. I am brought to my cell once more, where all is
undisturbed. The letter is still lying on the bed for me to pick up. For a moment I
hold it still, then I tear it open, ripping both envelope and paper in my
frenzy.

My dear child (for you still stay that way for me)

Forgive me my cowardice. I thought that I could live out my karma in this life
with acceptance but I could not. I broke up a family to be with David because I
loved him with a passion beyond anything I had ever experienced before. I
thought that this passion was enough to sustain me through any loss, any
punishment. When you damaged my hands, in a strange way I accepted it. I always
knew that my love for David would carry a price and I resolved to have the
courage to pay that price and not surrender to despair. I just wanted him to
love me. That was all, and that was granted to me. He gave me as much as he
could possibly give and I could not ask for more.
Ah but it gets so hard.
The music never leaves me, the memory of fingering stays with me every day, yet
half of my fingers can’t move and the rest of them are crippled in pain. My
colleagues I have not seen for a long time. They are afraid of me because I
remind them of what they stand to lose. I cannot love, since I lost David, nor
can I play, since I lost the use of my fingers. But the thing is, you may stop
being a musician in your hands, but you never stop being a musician in your
mind, and the one consolation I might have had for losing love has been denied
me.
But my child, please don’t feel guilty. You did what you did because
you were on to me that day. I was the one who suggested playing Lily’s old
rosewood piano again, not your father. I framed it as a surprise for you when
you came back that evening. And yes, I even chose the Gymnopédie. Why did I do
it? Jealousy, pure and simple. Even after thirteen years of marriage I was never
sure that I could take Lily’s place in your father’s heart. I was desperately
jealous of the one unassailable place she held there, those first years in which
I played no part. I sought to eradicate it completely by restaging her actions.
I did not see what was wrong until I looked up and that terrible, terrible anger
was on your face. After all, I was so much her superior musically. (How I missed
the point!)
I destroyed your mother’s lize—I’ve always carried the
guilt—and she, in her own way, has returned to destroy mine. Did I tell you I
saw someone who looked like her on the street the other day? I am haunted by her
image, time after time. Lily, Lily, Lily—I cannot get her name out of my mind,
it repeats like a mantra. I have nothing left now to distract me and as the
years progress her call becomes louder rather than otherwise. You may understand
me. We both betrayed her, didn’t we, for love?
I am gabbling now so I must
draw to a close. Please know that I tried to love you and I believe I achieved
something close. And I loved your father beyond all reason and to this day I
regret none of it, except for hurting you.

Your loving stepmother
Dearbhla McKernan

 
I fold up the letter and put it away. Now grief should arrive—I have
nobody in the world left to care for me—but it will not come, even though I repeat
out loud: She’s gone, Dearbhla’s gone. Yes, I am still full of what passes for
normal thought here: Is cabbage on for dinner again tonight? Should I go out for
exercise tomorrow? It does not hit me, this new reality.

All the pieces
Dearbhla played for me were beautiful: nocturnes, mazurkas, the Moonlight Sonata, a
waltz called “Adieu” which Chopin wrote when he was dying of tuberculosis. But force
myself as I may, I cannot recall any of them. Another piece intercedes, yes, that
broken piece again, the Gymnopédie, replete with mistakes and laughter and sunset on
the pedals. Dearbhla is overshadowed, just as she feared. She should never have
played that piece, not even once.

Haven’t we both betrayed her for
love?
My mother plays on, her eyes shut and a little smile on her face.
Nothing complex, nothing overwhelming. No cross-signatures or bombast. Just her
playing, done for love. All of it done for love.

People like my father have it
easy. They get rid of people the way balloons lose ballast, slowly chucking each one
out until they can float free. They are never without somebody to want and need
them—but are never truly happy until solitary and rid of all encumbrances. We had
all given him so much, even I who killed him. I freed him from life’s
inconveniences, from people’s needs. He would never have been content had he
lived.