Piper (20 page)

With her eyes closed, she found my hands and placed them on her bosom and I was afraid to move. Then she whispered something as tender as anything I could have imagined. “I'm glad your mother will finally be vindicated, Piper.”

It was in answer to nothing we'd talked about at the airport. We hadn't even mentioned my mom, but with those words my fingers moved again and I traced the soft furrow where the edge of her bra met skin. Her arms lay open, palms heavenward at her side, and she made no effort to stop me.

As I devoured her chest with my eyes, I dreamed of Rozene and me in the Mile High Club, reading Anais Nin out loud to each other as Nick soared above the clouds in swoops as long and graceful as an eagle's. We'd take turns rubbing almond oil into each other's skin, and I'd straddle her the way Mom straddled me, and as the plane climbed out of a dive I'd press against her as hard as I could until she could feel us disappearing as one into the featherbed. And when we were tired, we'd ask Nick to take the long way home while we wrapped ourselves in the comforter like two larvae in a cocoon waiting to become butterflies.

It would have been the perfect afternoon, except for the fact of Dad sticking his head in my door.

“Excuse me,” he said. It was dark so I didn't know how much he saw, but I pulled my hands out of Rozene's shirt.

“He must have noticed the car,” Rozene said, after he closed the door.

Later that night, Dad and I nearly collided in the hallway on my way to bed. “I haven't seen the Raymond girl for a while,” he said. It was an invitation for an explanation.

I felt myself blushing and stepped back to make sure I was out of the light coming from the kitchen. “She gave me a ride home.”

“The greatest human organ is free will, you know. It runs everything else.” I knew I was being reproached.

“I'm not gay, Dad, if that's what you're implying. I don't even like the word.”

There was a stern look on his face and I wanted to say something about seeing him necking under the Carlisle Bridge, but I wasn't sure enough of myself to force him into any comparisons.

13

Willard had the bright idea of bathing the dogs in the basement shower stall to get them ready for Christmas. He didn't really ask me to help, but when I saw how hard the pug was fighting him I knew he'd have no chance with the bigger dogs. Besides, I needed something to ground me.

I was bouncing between coal-black guilt and a giddiness so light it threatened to vaporize me. I could hardly wait to see Rozene again. I was composing letters to her in my journal. I was practicing out loud what to say in the lunchroom or passing in the hall. I made a list of Christmas presents for her. I separated the clothes in my closet, shoving to the right side of the bar everything I thought she'd consider dull. An hour later, I was afraid to see her again. I was in a spiraling free-fall into the darkness Catholics recognized as original sin, unwashed man and woman. From portholes in the darkness, I caught glimpses of Mom and Dad staring aghast as I spun past them.

I held Paddy with one hand on his collar and the other one under his belly while Willard washed, the soap suds building on his forearms like sheared fleece. With my head in the stall, I could smell the musty aroma of the mold-speckled tile.

“They're like cars,” Willard said. “If I don't baby them, they're going to break down on me.” Willard still blamed himself for not catching the cancer or whatever it was that had eaten away Freeway's insides like battery acid.

“I don't think a bath's going to make any difference. Look at the animals living in the wild.”

He stopped scrubbing and looked over at me like I was a zoological dunce. “They don't have parents.”

“Of course, they have parents. You mean they don't have masters.”

He ignored me and resumed his work around Paddy's hindquarters, scrubbing the inside and outside of his legs, his penis, his tail, inside his ears, and between the toes. No body part was off limits. Although Paddy looked betrayed, he made no attempt to bite or bark. He just eyeballed me, wondering if this shivering humiliation would ever end. When Willard was satisfied that he'd babied him enough, he filled the mop bucket with warm water and dumped it over Paddy. Hair filaments swirled around in the bottom of the stall and washed down the drain.

Willard let me wash Billy, the cross-breed with the lively eyes. “She's a girl,” he said, “and besides her hair is shorter.” In other words, easy enough even for someone unfamiliar with the ways of the canine species.

As I sudsed up her underside with long, firm strokes, I kept thinking of Rozene and it made me woozy. I'd awakened with a headache as hard as an anvil realizing that not only had I given free reign to my concupiscence, I'd betrayed Dirk.

“Keep it away from her face,” Willard said.

I kept scrubbing and my thoughts drifted. “Willard, do you think Mom liked being a mother?”

He raised a shoulder to wipe some suds off his chin. “It was all brussel sprouts to her.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean she knew it was good for her, but she had to work at it.” He cackled to himself. “When she was little, she had more dolls than you could shake a stick at. Long, floppy ragdolls. Little bitty stiff ones. She made 'em beds out of cereal boxes, fed 'em, sang songs to 'em, even married them off. I told Carol, ‘Our Kitty's going to have a dozen kids some day.'” Then he stopped talking, at least externally; there could well have been another conversation still going on between him and Grandma Carol.

“So what happened?”

“What do you mean, what happened? Carol died.”

We'd disconnected again and I looked at him to make sure he wasn't just pulling my leg. “I mean why didn't Mom have more kids?” I had always harbored the notion that life would have been easier if there were more of us in the boat. If I'd had a brother, maybe I would have learned normal responses to boys.

“Why do some folks dance?” he finally said. “Why is your dad Irish? Why did I live longer than the wife? God only knows.” I knew that wasn't true. This puzzle had a solution.

“I must have been a disappointment.” My guess.

He gave me another one of those unblinking stares, his eyes soap bubbles waiting to burst. “You do her ears?” Sometimes I swore his back wheels weren't following his front ones.

I lifted one of Billy's ear flaps and spoke directly into the drum. “Tell your master he didn't answer my question.” The vibration of my voice must have tickled Billy because she shook, spraying soapy water all over the bathroom, and rocking Willard back on his heels laughing.

I didn't push Willard for more history. I wasn't sure exactly what I wanted him to say anyway. If I was brussels sprouts, I could live with that. I wasn't trying to make Mom and me into the Madonna and child. I was drawn to struggle, the salmon who swam upstream to spawn, the loggerhead songbird who impaled its prey on thorns, the wasp who paralyzed the attacking tarantula, laid eggs on him, and covered him with dirt. I didn't need sweet. The world gorged on sweet and regretted it afterward. A woman had to look out for herself to survive. Mustard was my built-in protection against the casual cannibal.

“Willard, were you ever attracted to someone you weren't supposed to?”

He folded his legs under himself on the floor. “You mean like Carol?”

“Some
femme fatale
you knew you should stay away from?”

“A what?”

“Someone so attractive you wanted to be owned by her.”

A knowing smile broke out from under the specks of soapsuds on his face. “Someone has a boyfriend.”

I played along. “What if you were different nationalities or something?”

“That's what they told me about Carol, you know.” He reached over and petted Billy. “Her parents said I was the wrong kind. Shoot, even a dog knows the difference between being kicked and being stumbled over. It just made me more determined to prove 'em wrong.”

With the towel, I dabbed the suds off Willard's face, wishing I really were a crazy Cooper like he was. I wanted his ability to shut out the rest of the world, to listen to the aberrant beat of my own heart.

Working at his desk, Dad had gotten into the habit of playing with his hair, twirling it around his finger until he had a wrap and then pulling on it until he had a thatch that stuck out of his noggin like a hair tit. It put him in a kind of reverie I hated to interrupt. On the other hand, I knew the best time to ask him anything important was the moment after I'd set a freshly edited page of the paper on his desk, so that's what I did.

“How's your investigation of the Carlisle charges going?” I thought this would be a way to segue into what I'd learned from Dirk.

The skin was dark around his eyes like he hadn't been sleeping. Not bothering to look up, he said, “Working on it.” It was a fence without a gate.

The way he was spending so much time away from the paper during the day, I'd figured he was working on the investigation. I'd seen his car in front of stores and homes that had no connection with the stories I was editing for the paper. I saw him sitting on the porch with Mrs. Norman, the nosy lady who lived across the street from us. I saw him walking with Carmela Castillo carrying her grocery bags. I even saw him go into the Comet with Seth Armstrong, the prosecuting attorney. The employees in the doghouse had noticed it too.

“My sister-in-law saw him eating alone at the Hush of the Lark the other day,” Louise Mead said. The Hush of the Lark was an upscale bed and breakfast place out on Skylar Road on the way to Machias that included a restaurant dripping with ferns and planter baskets like Hammurabi's garden. People from Seattle went there to celebrate anniversaries or job promotions. Single mothers from Stampede without high school diplomas and women like Rozene's mom changed the sheets and swished out the toilet bowls with bristle brushes and Dutch cleanser. It wasn't Dad's kind of place, not when you could get a rib steak, fries, and a green salad at Marge's for five-ninety-five plus a tip.

He made up for time lost during the day by working later at night. I'd clocked him in at twelve-forty-five, twelve-thirty, and one a.m. the last three nights. Dad had the nasty habit of letting the storm door on the side of the house clatter shut—the pressure had gone out of the door closer—but I didn't bother to mention it because it was such an easy way to keep track of him. Maybe; he wasn't investigating at all. Maybe he'd taken up with the whale woman, Nadine.

On Wednesday, I heard him tell Pamela Palmer he was going to a dinner meeting in Seattle and to lock the door when she left.

Around quarter to five, when people were starting to put their coats on and switch off the lights in their cubicles, I moseyed down the hallway to the print room, closed the door behind me, and slid under the behemoth printing press. There was no one else in the room. George Pester, the printer, always took the day off after a new issue and, unless someone went in there to cop a plug of chewing tobacco from the can he kept next to the shutoff switch, I figured I was safe. There was a patch of dust where the broom didn't reach that was a shadow as wide as the undergirding. The steel plate six inches above my nose could have been the pan of an automobile engine except the smell was electrical, ozone rather than petroleum. I listened to people wish each other good night, their voices fading like bird chatter down the hallway. On the first day after a print, nobody worked overtime other than Dad, and even he slacked off, as he did tonight in taking a meeting in Seattle.

I ran my fingers along the bottom of the printer, which was ice cold and slightly abrasive like the metal on the strongbox Willard kept under his bed for stocks and bonds. That's also where he kept his and Grandma Carol's birth certificates—he was born in Yakima seven years before her—and when I asked him why he'd bothered to keep them he said, “To prove my eligibility.” That was all he said, his
eligibility
, and I thought at his age for what else would he need to prove his eligibility.

I kept count of the voices outside, which were now down to Pamela, the receptionist, and Gerry Alexander, the photographer. The print room was growing dark. I put both hands on the underside of the printer and, for the heck of it, pushed up to see if I could make it budge. Nothing. It was like my dad, I thought, immovable, but when it spoke, accurate. Finally, there were no more voices and the elongated field of artificial light that had been projected onto the cement floor next to me disappeared. I waited a few minutes to make sure Pamela hadn't forgotten something and come back for it. Hearing nothing, I grabbed the edge of the printer pan and scooted myself out. There was dust all over the back of my pants and shirt and I did my best to spank it clean. The only way to really get it would have been to take off my clothes and shake them, which I wasn't about to do.

I tiptoed up the hallway and as soon as I entered Dad's office my heart started beating like a Geiger counter. I snapped on the desk lamp, one of those halogens on an extension arm, and pushed it down closer to the desk so that it didn't illuminate the whole room. Even though his office couldn't be seen from the street, I didn't want to take any chances. I gripped the desk, closed my eyes, and took a deep breath to settle myself. What I was doing had to be some kind of sin, but for the life of me I was unable to name it. Hadn't Dad told me you didn't have to tell a good reporter to swipe the victim's picture off the mantel? Of course, he'd also told me you had to return it when you were done.

I was still trembling as I pulled the handle on the top drawer of the file cabinet, the one that was usually open when he was working at his desk. Each file tab was labeled in typed script—Kiwanis, Sports Schedules, City Council, Bond Issues—mostly dross, except for a handwritten one that said “Project Carlisle.” This must be the one for the sale of the paper, I thought. Why not find out exactly how much this little sweat shop was worth? Instead of financial statements though, I found photographs, receipts, and xerox copies of Dad's weekly calendars. The first photo triggered a gag reflex: it was Mom in a cocktail dress dancing cheek to cheek with John Carlisle. His fingers were spread across the bare skin in the saddle of her back where the dress plunged, touching as much of her as possible,. There were other people, unrecognizable, dancing in the background. On the back it was dated with an inscription that read “Party.” It must have been taken at one of the staff parties at the Eagles Lodge. There were more pictures of the party, people sitting at tables with their wine glasses raised in self-conscious recognition of the camera, more shots with Mom and John Carlisle, and then a blurred one of them coming out of Marge's Cafe that had a note on the back in a hand I didn't recognize, “Tom, here's the picture I mentioned.” The invoices were mostly MasterCard slips for the account of “Kathryn C. Scanlon.” She'd purchased jeans and shirts at the Gap in Seattle, art supplies from Daniel Smith, and meals at various restaurants. The only restaurant I recognized was a meal for “$56.89” including tax and gratuity from the Hush of the Lark. On the xeroxed calendar pages, he'd penned in entries for such things as “Kate in Seattle,” “Kate at art class,” “Kate and JC at Hush.” I checked the date of the “Hush” entry against the MasterCard slip and they matched. I drew a ragged breath. My God! This must be part of Dad's investigation. But why Mom?