High Crime Area (5 page)

By which Dad meant
rubbish
. But I would not correct him.

Now that months have passed there is not much likelihood of a formal inquiry into the death of Sister Mary Alphonsus aka “Dorothy Milgrum.” The Oybwa County medical examiner has never contacted us. Dr. Godai has left Eau Claire to return to Minneapolis, it has been announced. (Many, including me, were disappointed to hear that Dr. Godai is leaving us so soon though it isn't surprising that a vigorous young doctor like Dr. Godai would prefer to live and work in Minneapolis, and not Eau Claire.) Yet, I have prepared my statement for the medical examiner. I have not written out this statement, for such a statement might seem incriminating if written out, but I have memorized the opening.

Early shift is 6:30
A
.
M
.
which was when I arrived at the elder care facility at Eau Claire where I have been an orderly for two years. Maybe thirty minutes after that, when the elderly nun's body was discovered in her bed.

How much, she was asking.

For she knew: she was being exploited.

Her age. Her naïveté. Her uneasiness. Her good tasteful expensive clothes. Her
hat
.

Over her shimmering silver hair, a black cloche cashmere
hat.

And it was the wrong part of town. For a woman like her.

How much she asked, and when she was told she understood that yes, she was being exploited. No other customers on this rainy weekday night in the vicinity of the boarded-up train depot would pay so much. She was being laughed-at. She was being eyed. She was being assessed. It was being gauged of her—
Could we take all her money, could we take her car keys and her car, would she dare to report us? Rich bitch
.

She knew. She suspected. She was very frightened but she was very excited. She thought
I am the person who is here, this must be me. I can do this.

She paid. Never any doubt but that the silver-haired lady would pay.

And politely she said, for it was her nature to speak in such a way, after any transaction,
Thank you so much!

Self-medicating, you might call it.

Though she hated the weakness implied in such a term—
medicating
!

She wasn't desperate. She wasn't a careless, reckless, or stupid woman. If she had a weakness it was
hope.

I need to save myself. I don't want to die.

Her hair! Her hair had turned, not overnight, but over a period of several distraught months, a luminous silver that, falling to her shoulders, parted in the center of her head, caused strangers to stare after her.

Ever more beautiful she was becoming. Elegant, ethereal.

After his death she'd lost more than twenty pounds.

His death
she carried with her. For it was precious to her. Yet awkward like an oversized package in her arms, she dared not set down anywhere.

Almost, you could see it—the bulky thing in her arms.

Almost, you wanted to flee from her—the bulky thing in her arms was a terrible sight.

I will do this
, she said.
I will begin.

She'd never been “high” in her life. She'd never smoked marijuana—which her classmates had called “pot,” “grass,” “dope.” She'd been a good girl. She'd been a cautious girl. She'd been a reliable girl. In school she'd had many friends—the safe sort of friends. They hadn't been careless, reckless, or stupid, and they'd impressed their influential elders. They'd never gotten
high
and they had passed into adulthood successfully and now it was their time to begin
passing away.

She thought
I will get high now. It will save me.

The first time, she hadn't needed to leave her house. Her sister's younger daughter Kelsey came over with another girl and an older boy of about twenty, bony-faced, named Triste—(Agnes thought this was the name: “Triste”)—who'd provided the marijuana.

Like this, they said. Hold the joint like this, inhale slowly, don't exhale too fast,
keep it in
.

They were edgy, loud-laughing. She had to suppose they were laughing at her.

But not mean-laughing. She didn't think so.

Just, the situation was
funny.
Kids their age, kids who smoked dope, weren't in school and weren't obsessing about the future, to them the lives of their elders just naturally seemed
funny.

Kelsey wasn't Agnes's favorite niece. But the others—nieces, nephews—were away at college, or working.

Kelsey was the one who hadn't gone to college. Kelsey was the one who'd been in rehab for something much stronger than marijuana—OxyContin, maybe. And the girl's friends who'd been arrested for drug possession. Her sister had said
Kelsey has broken my heart. But I can't let her know
.

Agnes wasn't thinking of this. Agnes was thinking
I am a widow, my heart has been broken. But I am still alive
.

Whatever the transaction was, how much the dope had actually cost, Agnes was paying, handing over bills to Triste who grunted shoving them into his pocket. Agnes was feeling grateful, generous. Thinking how long had it been since young people had been in her house, how long even before her husband had died, how long since voices had been raised like this, and she'd heard laughter.

They'd seemed already high, entering her house. And soon there came another, older boy, in his mid-twenties perhaps, with a quasi-beard on his jutting jaws, in black T-shirt, much-laundered jeans, biker boots, forearms covered in lurid tattoos.

“Hi there Aggie. How's it goin!”

Agnes
she explained. Her name was
Agnes.

The boy stared at her. Not a boy but a man in his early thirties, in the costume of a boy. Slowly he smiled as if she'd said something witty. He'd pulled into her driveway in a rattly pickup.

“
Ag-nez.
Cool.”

They'd told him about her, maybe. They felt sorry for her and were protective of her.

Her shoulder-length silvery hair, her soft-spoken manner. The expensive house, like something in a glossy magazine. That she was Kelsey's actual aunt, and a
widow
.

The acquisition of a “controlled substance”—other than prescription drugs—was a mystery to Agnes, though she understood that countless individuals, of all ages but primarily young, acquired these substances easily: marijuana, cocaine, amphetamines, OxyContin, Vicodin, even heroin and “meth.”
Self-medicating
had become nearly as common as aspirin.
Recreational drugs
began in middle school.

She was a university professor. She understood, if not in precise detail, the undergraduate culture of alcohol, drugs.

These were not university students, however. Though her niece Kelsey was enrolled in a community college.

Like this, Aunt Agnes.

It was sweet, they called her Aunt Agnes, following Kelsey's lead.

She liked being an
aunt
. She had not been a
mother.

They passed the joint to her. With shaky fingers she held the stubby cigarette to her lips—drew the acrid smoke into her lungs—held her breath for as long as she could before coughing.

She'd never smoked tobacco. She'd been careful of her health. Her husband, too, had been careful of his health: he'd exercised, ate moderately, drank infrequently. He'd smoked, long ago—not for thirty years. But then, he'd been diagnosed with lung cancer and rapidly the cancer had metastasized and within a few months he was gone.

Gone
was Agnes's way of explanation.
Dead
she could not force herself to think, let alone speak.

Kelsey was a good girl, Agnes was thinking. She'd had some trouble in high school but essentially, she was a good girl. After rehab she'd begun to take courses at the community college—computer science, communication skills. Agnes's sister had said that Kelsey was the smartest of her children, and yet—Silver piercings in her face glittered like mica. Her mouth was dark purple like mashed grapes. It was distracting to Agnes, how her niece's young breasts hung loose in a low-slung soft-jersey top thin as a camisole.

She brought the joint to her lips, that felt dry. Her mouth filled with smoke—her lungs.

He'd died of lung cancer. So unfair, he had not smoked in more than thirty years.

Yet, individuals who'd never smoked could get lung cancer, and could die of lung cancer. In this matter of life-and-death, the notion of
fair, unfair
was futile.

“Hey Auntie Agnes! How're you feelin?”

She said she was feeling a little strange. She said it was like wine—except different. She didn't feel
drunk.

Auntie
they were calling her. Affectionately, she wanted to think—not mockingly.

So strange, these young people in her house! And her husband didn't seem to be here.

Strange, every day that he wasn't here. That fact she could contemplate for long hours like staring at an enormous boulder that will never move.

Strange too, she remained.
She
had not died—had she?

There was her niece Kelsey and there was Kelsey's friend Randi, and bony-faced Triste, and—was it Mallory, with the tattoos? She wasn't sure. She was feeling warm, a suffusion of warmth in the region of her heart. She was laughing now, and coughing. Tears stung her eyes. Yet she was
not sad
. These were tears of happiness not sadness. She felt—expansive? elated? excited? Like walking across a narrow plank over an abyss.

If the plank were flat on the ground, you would not hesitate. You would smile, this crossing is so easy.

But if the plank is over an abyss, you feel panic. You can't stop yourself from looking down, into the abyss.

Don't look. Don't look. Don't look.

Her young friends were watching her, and laughing with her. A silvery-haired woman of some unfathomable age beyond sixty in elegant clothes, rings on her fingers, sucking at a joint like a middle school kid.
Funny!

Or maybe, as they might say,
weird.

How long the young people stayed in her house Agnes wouldn't know. They were playing music—they'd turned on Agnes's radio, and tuned it to an AM-rock station. The volume so high, Agnes felt the air vibrate. She had to resist the impulse to press her hands over her ears. Her young friends were laughing, rowdy. Kelsey was holding her hand and calling her
Auntie
. It was a TV comedy—brightly lit, and no shadows. Except she'd become sleepy suddenly. Barely able to walk, to climb the stairs, Kelsey and another girl had helped her. Someone's arm around her waist so hard it hurt.

“Hey Aunt Agnes, are you OK? Just lay down, you'll feel better.”

Kelsey was embarrassed for her widow-aunt. Or maybe—Kelsey was amused.

She was crying now. Or, no—not crying so they could see.

She'd learned another kind of crying that was
inward, secret.

Kelsey helped her lie on her bed, removed her shoes. Kelsey and the other girl were laughing together. A glimpse of Kelsey holding a filmy negligee against her front, cavorting before a mirror. The other girl, opening a closet door. Then, she was alone.

She was awake and yet, strange things were happening in her head. Strange noises, voices, laughter, static. Her husband was knocking at the door which inadvertently she'd locked. She had not meant to lock him out. He was baffled and panicked by the loud music in his house. Yet, she was paralyzed and could not rise from her bed to open the door.
Forgive me! Don't go away, I love you.

After a while it was quiet downstairs.

In the morning she woke to discover the lights still on downstairs and the rooms ransacked.

Ransacked
was the word her husband would use.
Ransacked
was the appropriate word, for the thievery had been random and careless, as children might do.

Missing were silver candlestick holders, silverware and crystal bowls, her husband's laptop from his study. Drawers in her husband's desk had been yanked open, someone had rummaged through his files and papers but carelessly, letting everything fall to the floor.

A small clock, encased in crystal, rimmed in gold, which had been awarded to her husband for one of his history books, and had been kept on the windowsill in front of her husband's desk, was missing.

A rear door was ajar. The house was permeated with cold. In a state of shock Agnes walked through the rooms. She found herself in the same room, repeatedly. As in a troubled dream, she was being made to identify what had been taken from her.

Yet, what the eye does not
see,
the brain can't register.

The effort of remembering was exhausting.

Her head was pounding. Her eyes ached. Her throat was dry and acrid and the inside of her mouth tasted of ashes.

They hadn't ransacked the upstairs. They hadn't found her purse, her wallet and credit cards. They'd respected the privacy of her bedroom...

She had no reason to think that her niece had been involved.

Maybe, Kelsey had tried to stop them. But Triste and Mallory had threatened her.

Agnes would never know. She could never ask. She tried to tell herself
It doesn't mean anything
—that she do
esn't love me. It means only that they were desperate for money.

Yet she called her sister to ask for Kelsey. Coolly her sister said that Kelsey didn't live with them any longer, Agnes must know this.

Where did Kelsey live? So far as anyone knew, Kelsey lived with “friends.”

Kelsey was no longer attending the community college. Agnes must know this.